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Standing on the Truth
What do baseball, Elon Musk, and aliens have to do with one another? You wouldn't believe it, but the answer is the Bible.
Salvaged by God Deep Dive: 2 Timothy 4:1-5
This passage gets more and more relevant as the days pass by:
"I solemnly exhort you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing in His kingdom: preach the word, be ready in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and exhort with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not tolerate sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires. And they will turn their eyes away from the truth and will turn aside to myths. But as for you, use self-restraint in all things, endure hardship, and do the work of an evangelist. Fulfill your ministry."
The time is coming, and we really think we're here, where sound doctrine simply will not be tolerated. Every book in the New Testament except one warns us about false teachers and false doctrine. That's not a small thing. Part of walking through devotional time at home means you don't get very far without saying, "Look at the false doctrine here. Look at the false teaching here." There's a reason that warning runs through nearly the entire New Testament: because it's needed, and it's needed now more than ever.
Whoever Tells the Stories Changes the World
Plato said it best: "Those who tell the stories change the world." That really happened. When the Holy Spirit came and the gospel started going out and spreading across the world, the people telling that story changed the course of human history. As the gospel reached across the globe, we came out of the dark ages and into what's called the Age of Enlightenment, and just think about the people telling stories during that stretch.
Jane Austen, a professing Christian, wrote Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, classics still being made into movies to this day. G.K. Chesterton, famous for All Creatures Great and Small and the Father Brown series, was greatly influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Charles Dickens gave us A Christmas Carol, one of the most recognized stories there is, along with Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities. Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment. Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina. Dumas gave us The Count of Monte Cristo. Victor Hugo did the same. From Russia all the way around to the United States, these authors were telling great stories that span the globe, stories with a biblical worldview and a redemptive quality, focused on character, forgiveness, and repentance.
There's a lesson worth remembering from author Don Keith, who'd follow an elaborate 25-to-30-minute breakdown of character development, the turn, the climactic finish, and the redemptive payoff with one simple summary: "You get a worthy person, you put them in a tree, you throw rocks at them, you get them out of the tree. That's good storytelling." We've been doing this for centuries.
Fast forward to today, and think about the "iconic" movies now: Psycho, Carrie, Fifty Shades of Gray, garbage, frankly. It's not that bad writing never existed before. It's that writers with a biblical worldview used to tap into something the masses could connect with. Now, storytelling has taken those good stories, put them in the tree, thrown rocks at them, and they just fell out and stayed on the ground. The storytelling now is actually trying to move the culture to an anti-biblical worldview. They have an agenda, basically, sometimes it's subtle, but it's becoming so much more obvious as the days, months, and years go by.
Disclosure Day and the War on Original Sin
Steven Spielberg's latest film, Disclosure Day, takes a severe stab at Christianity. The premise: aliens eventually come to Earth, and because of that, there's a release of government files, everything that's been hidden, and now Christians are going to have to really rethink religion because it doesn't fit into what we "now know."
This is the same playbook as the "billions and millions of years" philosophy of death and suffering before original sin, a philosophy that basically puts Jesus in the ranks of the unemployed. They've been going after young earth creationists, trying to make them feel stupid, trying to make people who look at the Bible literally feel like their brain fell out of their head. You're a "Bible idiot." That's literally why the movie Bible Idiots got made back in 2016.
The attacks keep coming, and the alien angle is just the latest one. If aliens came to Earth 100,000 years ago and planted the seed, then there is no afterlife. There is no need for Christ. And what is that? A counterfeit. That's deception. The demons are going to masquerade as angels of light, Satan himself does that, according to the scriptures. Jesus says don't worry when someone says "the Messiah is here" or "the Messiah is there", don't go, don't believe it, trust the holy word of God, trust in the scriptures. So the attack is always aimed at making Christianity not plausible. It's an attack on your faith, because you need to believe (a) that you're a sinner and (b) that Jesus is the perfect sacrificial lamb of God who took the wrath of God on Himself in your place, and that's what you need for salvation. That's hard cheese in a world that's all about their own feelings, and these aliens are just going to trip up more and more people.
Out to the Ballpark: Pride Night, Caps, and Genesis 9
Three San Francisco Giants players, Landen Roupp, JT, and Ryan Walker, wore caps during Pride Night and wrote Genesis 9:12-16 right next to the rainbow-colored logo:
"And God said, this is the sign of the covenant that I make between Me and you and every living creature that is with you for all future generations. I have set My bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember My covenant that is between Me and you, and every living creature of all flesh, and the water shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When I see the bow in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth."
The hubbub that followed was incredible. Major League Baseball warned the players against future violations, with the threat of punishment, fines and so on, looming over their heads. Roupp explained that he put the scripture verse on his cap because that's what the rainbow actually is, a dearly held part of his faith, a reminder of what it really, really is. That's when comedian Rob Schneider stepped forward and said that if there were any fines leveled against these players, he would pay them. Because that's just ridiculous.
Here's the thing that bugs us the most: it's always the word Jesus, and it's always anything with the Bible. If someone wanted to praise Allah at the end of a game and have a Quran verse on their hat, Major League Baseball would be too scared to say "boo." But because Christians don't rise up in a violent way, because we have a new nature, we're new creatures in Christ, and blessed are the peacemakers, not the violent, we have to take it on the chin sometimes. That's exactly why it means something when guys like Rob Schneider step up and say what he said.
A minor league game was actually cancelled this year because the players refused to wear the Pride uniform, forcing a forfeit. And the pressure is clearly inconsistent: last year, Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw did the exact same thing, wrote a scripture verse on his cap at Pride Night, and Major League Baseball said nothing. They did nothing. Because that was Clayton Kershaw. There's bias there. Rules for thee, but not for me. No standard.
MLB's own statement defending the threat against the three Giants players said the writing "violates our rules and [is] consistent with normal practice. We have warned players about future violations." Then Pat Courtney, Major League Baseball's chief communications officer, said this: "We respect players' right to free expression. However, writing of any kind with any message is prohibited." So, we respect it, you just can't do it.
Then there's the Texas Rangers, the only Major League Baseball team that doesn't participate in Pride Night at any point in June. Instead of holding any Pride event in 2026, they chose to have a Faith and Family Night instead. Bravo. We love that. And now there are calls to boycott the team, calling what they did "exclusionary and malicious." That's a really funny choice of words, because something exclusionary, by definition, doesn't apply to the vast majority of people. But family? Everybody's part of a family, you might be estranged from them, but everybody has a family. And faith, too. How is that exclusionary? Meanwhile, pride equals good, even though God says He hates pride, and faith and family equals bad, "malicious," supposedly harmful to "the marginalized." We're supposed to swallow all the garbage out of tolerance, but they won't even consider our way of life, which used to be the standard norm in this country, and now they want the standard norm to be perversion.
So how do we speak truth into a perverse and wicked generation like this? We do it without apology. And here's the number one problem with the broader conversation: the LGBT community doesn't allow a seat at the table for the thousands upon thousands of people who've come out of that lifestyle through faith in Jesus Christ. They don't get a say. And that's just dishonesty. Somebody says, "I'm born that way." Well, yeah, you are. So are we. We're all born sinful, our sinful bents are just different, and that doesn't make us better or worse. We're all sinners in need of a Savior, and Jesus, while we were yet sinners, loved us, died for us, and offered us that eternal life.
There is good news on this front: the U.S. Department of Justice has referred Major League Baseball to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, because Pride Night is putting an unfair burden on religious people, and an employer can't legally do that. If that case wins, it will reverberate through the whole country. And this June marks the least amount of rainbow flags showing up on people's Facebook profiles in recent memory, a lot less than in years past, dating all the way back to June of 2009, when Pride was first proclaimed. Maybe people are simply tuning it out. Or maybe a few are still saying no, no, no, we're not going to embrace it, we're not going to accept it, and that fight needs to keep going.
When the Infiltration Reaches the Visible Church
Authentic, Bible-believing, solid churches don't get infiltrated, they're already filled with the Spirit. But it's a temptation for every person, even those who do call themselves Christians. Look at 1 Timothy 4:1 and 4:6:
"But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons."
"In pointing out these things to the brothers and sisters, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus... constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the good doctrine which you have been following."
It's not just the rainbow flag-waivers. One of the biggest issues over the last seven to ten years has been people who believe that when they're speaking in gibberish, they have the Holy Spirit. They don't. They have a spirit, just not the Holy Spirit. The Counselor is the Spirit of truth. What truth do you have when you're babbling and nobody can understand you?
Even though the rest of the neighborhood will hate you for pointing this stuff out, you'll still be a good brother and sister, a good servant of Jesus Christ. This is not how to win friends and have influence. Jesus of the Bible is enough. The scriptures are sufficient. Your job is to be faithful to Jesus, and in that faith you are pleasing the Lord, and He will bless you. What's happening through Major League Baseball, whether people reject it or not, is making groundway, because you've got families sitting down and watching this year after year after year, and it becomes a normal part of life in their psyche. That's the thread running through entertainment, books, movies, and sports: they're making Christians abandon what was traditionally taught by the apostles and rethink Christianity, whether it's dismantling the patriarchy, deconstructionism, or the new mantra "blessed be the ones who doubt." Jesus says have mercy on those who doubt, because they can repent and find their way, but blessed are those who are excited about their salvation as new creatures in Christ. Not exactly a fan of doubters, is He?
Elon Musk and the Alien Question
LDS Mormons, along with several other groups, actually teach that to be Christian is to believe Jesus is an ancient alien, that He became a god and then traveled to Earth from outer space. Sounds funny, but they're really teaching that. Pair that with Spielberg's movie, and you've got people saying, "Hey, you've got to rethink Christianity. Look at what your eyes tell you. Look at what your ears tell you. Look at that apple, how good it is for food. You've got to rethink what you think God really says."
There's an old story about an obscure evangelist back before Y2K who said: watch out, right before Jesus returns, ET will show up and claim that he planted the seed and that there's nothing here. Everybody thought he was crazy at the time. Richard Dawkins made very similar claims in the movie Expelled, with Ben Stein, same narrative, coming back around. Sometimes it could be the manifestation of demons or angels, but trust the Creator God. By faith, we have to stand firm.
Enter Elon Musk, no defender of the faith, but an intriguing guy, and not a stupid one either. He's been clear on this: there is absolutely no evidence that aliens have ever visited Earth or our atmosphere. He's got more than 6,000 satellites orbiting the Earth constantly. No sign of nothing. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, has been taking pictures of planets, stars, and galaxies for nearly 40 years, close to 2 million images, and has sent back zero evidence of any space travelers. All claims of witnessing a UFO have been within Earth's atmosphere, never beyond it. Musk attributes the intelligence withheld even from the military to human advancements in weaponry, not aliens. And he's said plainly: if he ever does see evidence of it, you'll be the first to know, because he's going to put it on X.
So, no evidence. And yet these ideas keep growing and growing, demanding we rethink biblical Christianity and what the original apostles and prophets wrote down.
The Eyewitnesses and the Reliability of Scripture
Here's where the rubber hits the road: God's word isn't just a bunch of poetry and fantasy like Spielberg writing things down. These are eyewitnesses to real events. They witnessed Jesus being born. They witnessed His teaching. They witnessed His life, His death, His resurrection, and His ascension, and they wrote it down. He appeared after His resurrection to more than 500 people. His ascension was witnessed for sure by the disciples, and probably up to as many as 120 of His disciples at the time. That's a lot of witnesses, a lot more than what Elon Musk says we have about aliens.
Two things have strengthened this conviction over the years, even back when faith was small. First: the evidence. The reason for being a young earth creationist is the evidence, and it's overwhelming. About seven or eight years ago, researchers found that the DNA code for every human being on Earth could all be traced back to one male and one female. Interesting, isn't it? When you look at what God's word has said, and then look at the evidence of the global flood, you can really believe there's a Creator God we're accountable to, that we didn't just get here by chance. We all have the same evidence. Why do we look at it so differently? Because only a handful are given eyes to see and ears to hear.
Second: the preservation of scripture, the same subject covered in the documentary Bible Idiots. Look at the reliability chart: Plato, Caesar, Aristotle, Homer, and then the New Testament, and the New Testament just blows everything away.
- Homer's Iliad: about 500 years between the original and the earliest copies; 643 copies; about 95% accuracy
- Plato: earliest copy from roughly 900 AD, about 1,200 years after he did his great thinking
- The New Testament: less than 100 years between the originals and the copies; somewhere between 5,600 and 8,000 manuscripts; 99.5% accuracy
That remaining 0.5% inaccuracy is essentially punctuation, leaving an "s" off a word, that kind of thing. It is inherent. It is authoritative. And the Bible claims to be the word of God over a thousand times. So either it is what it says it is, or it's the most deceptive book in all of creation.
When you look at the Bible through that lens, you see what God has told us, that as His creation, He loves us, He saves us. There's a difference between being God's creation and being God's child. That difference is His one and only Son, Jesus Christ, who came and lived the perfect life we couldn't live, died the sacrificial death in our place, and took on the wrath we deserved, you deserve it, we deserve it, and then looks at us as if we're perfect and never sinned, because He's got victory over death, hell, and the grave through the resurrection. When you accept Christ as your Savior and decide to be baptized, that public profession of going down in the water representing Jesus's death, and coming out of the water into new life in Him, there's nothing on the planet better than that. And the big thing is, you'll get eyes to see and ears to hear. You'll still process evidence, absolutely, but you'll see God in those things, and you'll be able to easily reject the falsehoods, because the deceptions are on every single corner right now.
Final Thoughts
That's what all these things have in common, whether you're talking about baseball, entertainment, literature, movies, or these Bible-based cults: the people telling the stories are shaping you and me. What stories are you listening to? Because if you're not listening to the word of God as originally written, preserved, and laid out in our Bibles, you're listening to something that's not accurate, and it's going to start demanding that you change what you've always thought about Christianity. That mantra has been building for thirty to thirty-five years, and it's only increased over time.
Hold fast to God's word, that's the petition for today. Get into God's word, because times, they are changing. Or maybe the more things change, the more things stay the same. Have a great week. Get into the word of God today, and go and serve your King.