the lie is out there

chapter one

looking everywhere but here

We start not with the heavens at all, but with the ground beneath our feet, because the first thing to understand about mankind’s restless reach toward the sky is that it is, at heart, a turning away from the very place God actually gave us. To see that clearly is to understand half of the whole phenomenon at once.

Consider where God set us and what He told us to do. He placed man upon this earth, in a garden, and gave him dominion over it, a stewardship, a charge to tend and keep and cultivate the world beneath his feet. This earth is our assignment, our post, the place He appointed for us, and it is no small or mean place; it is a world of staggering richness and beauty, packed so full of wonders that after all these centuries we are still discovering new ones every year, still unlocking, with the very minds and capacities God gave us, the secrets He folded into His creation. There is more genuine wonder in a single tide pool or a single cell than a man could exhaust in a lifetime. God gave us a feast of a world and the ability to keep marveling at it.

And where does fallen man most want to look? Anywhere but here. Outward, upward, away, to the far reaches of space, to whatever might be out there, to anyplace at all but the place he was actually given. Now ask yourself why that should be, and you will find it is the oldest pattern there is. It is the fallen nature, which wants by sheer reflex the very opposite of whatever God has ordained. God said stay and tend the garden; man’s heart says go, climb, reach past the bounds. For the enemy is the spirit of opposition to everything God says, and the fallen heart has caught that same contrary bent, so that the one place God assigns is the one place the restless heart cannot bear to remain.

The reach to the stars is the old tower in a new shape.

We have seen this before on the plain of Shinar, where men gathered to build a tower whose top would reach unto heaven, to make themselves a name, to climb past the place and the limits God had given them. The reach to the stars is the old tower in a new shape, the same refusal to be content with the post we were given, the same itch to be anywhere and anything but what God appointed. I do not say it is wicked to wonder at the heavens; we shall see there is a holy way to do exactly that. I say only that much of this modern straining outward is the fallen heart doing what it has always done, preferring to look to the ends of the universe rather than be still and faithful in the garden where God has placed it.

chapter two

fear not

Here is the heart of the matter, and I will speak it as plainly and as dogmatically as I know how, because there is no room whatever for hedging. The Christian has no reason, none at all, to live in fear of any of this. Not of aliens, not of the unknown, not of whatever may or may not be out among the stars. Zero reason. And I want you to see why the fear itself is the tell, and whose tool it has always been.

Fear is the enemy’s oldest trade. Consider how often, and how tenderly, the Word of God commands us out of it; fear not is among the most repeated commandments in all of Scripture, spoken again and again and again, because fallen man is a creature riddled through with fear, and our God knows it and keeps calling us up out of it. And where did that fear first enter? In the garden, the moment after the first sin.

There it is, the first fear, born the very instant sin entered, driving the man to hide. For to hide from a thing is to fear it, and ever since that day the fallen heart has been hiding and fearing. Fear is not original to us as God made us; it is a child of the fall, and the enemy has been its great cultivator ever since, for a frightened soul is a soul he can drive and master. So when the world quakes over what might be out there in the dark of space, understand exactly what you are seeing: the old fear, doing its old work, and behind it the old enemy, delighted to have one more thing to make you afraid of.

And I must pause here to clear away one confusion, lest it trip you, for the Scripture also speaks much of the fear of the Lord, and calls it the beginning of wisdom. Is that not fear? It is not, not in the sense we have been speaking of. The Hebrew word there is yirah, and it, along with the reverence the New Testament commends, carries the sense of awe, of reverent wonder, of standing rightly small before the greatness and the holiness of God. It is not the cringing dread that drives a soul to hide; it is the lifted-up, worshipping awe of a child who knows his Father is great and good. The fear of the Lord draws you toward God; the fear the enemy peddles drives you to hide from everything. Do not confuse the two. We are to be full of the one and free of the other.¹

The dread the world feels is not a signal to take the thing more seriously. It is a fingerprint of the one who traffics in fear.

So hear it settled: the believer need not fear the heavens or anything in them, and the dread the world feels is not a signal to take the thing more seriously but a fingerprint of the one who traffics in fear. We do not pick it up. We were told, more times than we can count, to fear not, and that gentle command covers the stars as surely as it covers everything else under them.

chapter three

god holds the stars

But on what ground does that fearlessness actually rest? Not on a brave face, and not on pretending the universe is small or simple, but on something solid: on who God is and on what He holds. And so we must say plainly where our confidence comes from, and then we can speak honestly about the question everyone wants answered, which is whether there is anyone out there at all.

Let me give you my own view first, and give it honestly, holding it as my own conviction and not as a thing the Scripture settles for us. I do not myself believe there is other life out there. But notice, and this is the important part, how very little hangs upon whether I am right. For suppose I am wrong. Suppose the universe, vast almost beyond imagining, holds other creatures somewhere in its reaches. What of it? They would be the creation of the same God who made us. He would have made them, He would hold them, He would love them, and whatever their relationship to Him might be, a thing we are simply not told and cannot know, they would be His, under His hand, His concern and never a rival to Him. There is no possible answer to that question, yes or no, that puts the smallest crack in the believer’s confidence, because every possible answer leaves the very same God on the throne over all of it.

He calls them all by their names. The God we serve is not nervously watching the sky for what might emerge from it; He made every point of light in it, named each one, and upholds the whole vast machinery of it by the word of His power. There is nothing out there that He did not make, nothing He does not hold, nothing that could approach His throne as anything but a creature He Himself called into being. So the question that grips and frightens the world, is there something out there, simply cannot frighten us, because whatever the answer turns out to be, it changes nothing at all about the One who holds it. And this is no novel idea of mine. Many faithful Bible teachers across the years have come to rest in exactly this place: that the believer need neither fear the question nor be consumed by it, because the sovereignty and the goodness of God cover every corner of His creation, the seen and the unseen, the near and the unthinkably far. We may hold the open question with a genuinely open hand and an entirely untroubled heart, because we know the One who already knows the answer.

chapter four

a vast and wonderful creation

I would not have you think that because much of the world’s looking-up is fallen, there is therefore something wrong with looking up at all. Far from it. There is a holy way to regard the vastness above us, and it is one of the oldest forms of worship there is, and I would be doing you a real disservice if I left you with only the cautions and none of the wonder. For the heavens were made, among other reasons, to be marveled at, and the marveling, rightly done, drives the soul straight toward God.

Consider what the psalmist is doing there. He looks up at the same vast sky that fills the modern heart with dread or restless longing, and his response is not fear and not a craving for contact with something out there; it is worship. The sheer scale of it, the unfathomable distances, the numberless stars, all of it preaches to him, declaring without a single word the glory and the power and the wisdom of the One who made it. The bigness of the universe is not a threat to the believer; it is a sermon. Every light in that sky is a syllable in a declaration of how great God is.

The bigness of the universe is not a threat to the believer. It is a sermon.

So there is all the difference in the world between two ways of looking up. There is a story told from the early days of the space program, of two men who went up into the heavens, higher and farther than nearly anyone before them, and looked out upon the same vast deep. And one came back and said, in effect, I looked, and I saw no God out there. And the other looked upon that very same immensity and said, why, I saw Him everywhere. Two men, the same stars, the same silence, the same staggering dark; and one found it empty and the other found it full of God. The difference was not in what lay before their eyes. It was in the eyes that looked. It was the mindset, the heart, the whole posture of the soul that came along on the journey.²

For there is the world’s way of looking up, which regards the immensity and feels small and afraid, or else aches with a longing to find something out there to fill the emptiness. And there is the believer’s way, which looks at that same immensity and is moved to awe, and through awe to worship, because he knows Whose handiwork he is looking at. The one kind of looking shrinks the soul into fear or restlessness; the other lifts it up to the throne. When David considered the heavens, the work of God’s fingers, the moon and the stars which He had ordained, it did not terrify him; it humbled him into wonder that such a God should be mindful of man at all. So look up, and look up often, and let the great dark sky full of fire do to you what God meant it to do: not frighten you, not set you longing after something out in it, but lift your heart in worship to the One whose handiwork it is. That is wonder rightly aimed. The same sky that makes the faithless tremble or pine makes the faithful worship, and the difference between them is simply whether you know the One who made it.

chapter five

a substitute for god

I want to look a little deeper into the longing itself, My Friend, the strange and powerful pull the whole subject exerts upon the modern heart, because underneath a great deal of it is something far more poignant than mere curiosity. Much of mankind’s reaching toward the stars is a spiritual hunger that has lost its way, a God-shaped longing aimed at the wrong heaven.

Listen to what the world actually says when it speaks of these things, and you will hear the language of religion wearing a borrowed coat. A longing to know that we are not alone. A hope that someone out there is older and wiser and more advanced, who might come and share with us the answers we cannot find ourselves, who might even arrive to save us from our wars and our ruin. A yearning for contact with something greater than ourselves, something from beyond, something that would give our existence a meaning the bare facts of the world will not supply. Do you hear it? Strip away the spacecraft and the talk of distant planets, and what is left is the ache of a soul made for God, reaching out into the dark for the very things only God can give: that we are not alone, that there is Someone greater, that meaning and rescue come from beyond ourselves. Simply put, it is a cry for a savior.

For man was made for God, and a man emptied of God does not stop longing; he simply takes the longing somewhere else. The hunger remains even when its true object has been denied, and it goes looking for a substitute, and the heavens are a natural place to point it, vast and mysterious and silent, a great blank screen onto which the orphaned soul can project its hope of a father somewhere out there. The very things the world hopes to find among the stars, a greater intelligence, a rescuer, an end to its cosmic loneliness, are the very things it already has, fully and freely, in the God it has turned away from, the God who came down long ago, and who will come once again.

The world scans the heavens for someone greater to make contact. He already has.

And this is why the booklet carries the title it does. The deepest lie in the whole business is not this or that report of a sighting; it is the quiet suggestion that the answer to the human heart’s longing is somewhere out in the cosmos, waiting to be found, when all along the answer came down to us, was born among us, died for us, and lives. The world scans the heavens for someone greater to make contact. He already has. The longing is real and good and God-given; it has simply been aimed at the empty sky instead of at the One who fills it.

chapter six

our calling is here

If much of the fascination with the stars is the fallen reach away from the place God gave us, then the cure is not merely to stop reaching but to remember what we were actually left here to do. For we were not set down upon this earth to spend our days scanning the skies; we were given a charge, and it is a charge that keeps our eyes and our hands fixed firmly here, among the people right in front of us.

Hear the last great commission the Lord gave before He ascended, and notice carefully where it points us.

All nations, here, upon the face of this earth. That is the work. There are souls all around us, in our own homes and streets and cities, who do not know the Savior who came down, and we have been entrusted with carrying that good news to them. That is a labor large enough and urgent enough to fill every hour we are given, and it is a labor located entirely here, in the very place fallen man is forever trying to escape. The restless heart wants to go to the stars; the obedient heart looks at the neighbor across the fence.

Do you see, then, how the fascination functions as a distraction, even when it seems perfectly harmless? Every hour the heart spends reaching outward in fear or longing toward what might be out there is an hour not spent upon what we were actually commanded to do down here. The enemy is well content to have us gazing up at the empty sky, fascinated and afraid, so long as we are not about our Father’s business among the people He died to save. It need not be a wicked obsession to be an effective one; a harmless-seeming distraction that quietly eats the heart’s attention serves the enemy’s purpose just as well as a gross sin ever could.

So turn your eyes back down to the post God gave you and the people He has set around you. Wonder at the heavens when you look up, yes, and let them drive you to worship. But live your life here, at your station, doing the work you were left to do, making disciples upon the earth, for the heavens are His to hold and the neighbor is ours to love.

chapter seven

what they cannot explain

We must deal honestly with the thing that actually frightens people about all this, for it is rarely the abstract question of distant planets. It is the closer and more unsettling business: the government secrecy, the guarded sites and the men sworn to silence, the earnest people who swear they have seen something in the sky they cannot explain. This is where the fear actually lives, and a booklet that did not face it would be of very little use to you. So let us face it, in two parts, and then bring it home.

First, a word about what those in power tell us. The Christian is never to take the world’s pronouncements as simple fact, least of all on a matter like this, and we do well to receive what we are told with a sober caution. And here is a thing that is not conspiracy but plain, verifiable history: governments and powers in every age and every nation that has ever existed have used fear as an instrument of control, because a frightened people is an easy people to govern. That is not a wild claim; it is one of the most consistent patterns in the whole record of human rule. So when fear around a subject is being stirred and managed and fed, the wise believer holds it at arm’s length, not because he knows the particular scheme, but because he knows the ancient pattern, and refuses to be so easily handled.

Second, and here the world will not follow us, but we know what we know: there is more to reality than the part we can see. Scripture shows, plainly and repeatedly, in both the Old Testament and the New, that the spiritual realm is real and that it can at times be perceived by human beings, that angels and demons can and do make themselves known to people. This was so thousands of years ago and it is no different now, for the unseen world did not change when our technology did. So when a sincere person reports seeing something he genuinely cannot explain, two things are true at once: he may well have seen something real, and it may be nothing whatever like what he takes it to be. A thing that presents itself as a craft from another world may be something else entirely, a manifestation of that unseen realm, dressed to be misread.

The demonic manufactures fear; the faithful angel dispels it. The fear is the fingerprint.

And here is a distinction I can give you without the slightest doubt, drawn straight from the pattern of Scripture. Where a manifestation produces fear, dread, confusion, and doubt, that is the fingerprint of the demonic, for the enemy’s entire trade is fear, and creating it is what that side of the realm exists to do. The holy angels do precisely the opposite. Mark it in every account of them in Scripture: nearly the first thing a true angel of God says to a trembling human being is fear not, because the appearing genuinely terrifies, and God’s messengers come to calm that terror rather than to feed it. The demonic manufactures fear; the faithful angel dispels it. So the very dread surrounding so much of this is itself a clue to its source, when it is spiritual at all.³

Now my own view is that such genuine manifestations are not the bulk of what fills the headlines; most of the fascination is simply the fallen reach and the restless longing we have already named, and honest people can be honestly mistaken about lights in the sky. But the genuine thing does still happen, as it always has, and it is one more reason that a person seeing something does not mean what the world says it means. And it all lands in the very same place: we need fear none of it. Not the guarded secrets, not the earnest testimonies, not the conspiracy programs, and not even the breathless voices, some of them wearing the name of Christ, who make their trade out of stirring this very fear. Let it go in one ear and out the other. There are indeed powers in the unseen world that we cannot see and do not have mastery over, and the wise believer treats them with enough respect to leave them well alone.

My own pastor, Dr. J. Vernon McGee, used to tell of a thing from his years out in California, when there were reports of people going out to a certain place in the desert where, it was said, some craft would descend and take a person up for a ride. Folk he knew urged him to come along and see it for himself. And McGee never went. His reason was as plain and as wise as the man himself: he did not know what it was, he did not want to know what it was, and he had no intention of going out into the desert to climb aboard something and perhaps never come back. There is the whole of it, in one old preacher’s good sense. The things we cannot explain or actually know, we are best to leave alone. Not chase them, not poke at them, not feed our fear upon them, but leave them be and go on about the Lord’s work, unbothered and unafraid.⁴

chapter eight

the explanation that is coming

There is one more thing to set before you, and on this I can speak with real certainty, though it concerns a day none of us who belong to Christ will be here to see. It has to do with why the whole alien idea has been seeded so deeply and for so long into the imagination of the world, and what use that long seeding may one day be put to.

I hold, with a great many faithful teachers across the years, that there is coming a day when the Lord will catch His church up to Himself, and that this will happen before the seven years of tribulation that the Scriptures describe. You may not land where I land on this, and that is a matter upon which good people have differed; I only tell you plainly where I stand. But set the timing aside and consider a simple, practical certainty that follows no matter the details. On that day, in a moment, millions upon millions of people will simply be gone.

Now think soberly about what that means for the world left behind, because almost no one ever does. A world does not absorb the instantaneous disappearance of millions and carry calmly on without an explanation; it would either descend into utter chaos or it would be given a story, and the Scriptures show us that the world does not collapse but continues, and even consolidates, in the days that follow. Which means there will be an explanation. Of that I have no doubt at all. The powers of that hour will produce some account of where all those people went, an account the world will be only too willing to believe, so that life can go on. That there will be such an explanation is certain. The only thing I cannot tell you is what it will be, and that is no small point. If it comes in our present age, the ready-made answer is obvious, for the ground has been prepared for generations; it would likely be said that the aliens took them, or that they passed into some other dimension. If it comes centuries from now, it may be framed in terms we could not begin to imagine. But framed it will be.

And here, just for a moment and no longer, let me say a word about those other dimensions and parallel worlds the age likes to speak of, because the picture Scripture gives is a simpler and a truer one. The Scripture shows us that God created time itself when He created all things, that there was a true beginning and that there will be a true end, and that what lies beyond both is not more time but eternity, which is another thing altogether. We are creatures of time and space and the single world we were given; the speculations of many dimensions and parallel universes are just that, speculations, and not the picture Scripture paints. I will not linger over it, for it is not our subject; I only note that it, too, would serve nicely as a story to explain the unexplainable when that day comes.

But mark the whole point of saying any of this, for it is not to frighten you and it is not to send you chasing the headlines for signs. It is the very opposite. The church will not be here to be deceived by that coming explanation, whatever it turns out to be; we will already be home, gathered to the Lord, by then. We rest entirely unbothered by it. We note only that the long, strange fascination of the world with what is out there may well be, among other things, the slow laying of a foundation for a lie it will need to tell itself one day. And we, who know the truth, are not the least bit afraid of the lie.

chapter nine

the one who holds it all

We have said again and again through these pages that the believer need not fear, and now, at the last, I want to give you the whole ground of it, the bedrock that everything else has been resting upon. For it is not enough to be told to fear not; you must know why you are safe, or the fear will creep back the moment the book is closed. And the why is the simplest and the strongest thing in all the world: God created all things, He created time itself, and He holds and governs every last corner of it, the seen and the unseen, the near and the unthinkably far.

Now do not mistake me. I am not saying the unseen powers are nothing, nor that there is no real force at work in the dark. The enemy is real, and he is called the prince of this world, and he is not to be trifled with. But hear the thing that changes everything: he is on a leash. He has no free rein, none whatever. We see it laid bare in the book of Job, where the adversary could not so much as touch the man, not his goods, not his body, not a single hair of him, without first asking leave, and could go only so far as God permitted and not one inch beyond. There is the whole shape of the spiritual world in a single picture: a real and powerful enemy, and a sovereign God who holds the chain. Whatever may move in the heavens or in the dark, it moves upon a tether held by your Father.⁵

A real and powerful enemy, and a sovereign God who holds the chain.

And that is why the believer’s posture is so peculiar, and so free. We are not reckless; these are genuinely powerful things, and there is a wisdom, as old McGee showed us, in treating what we cannot explain with enough respect to leave it well alone. But neither are we afraid, any more than a child standing beside his father in a place of real danger is ruled by dread, not because the danger is false, but because of whose hand is holding his. We are smart about it; we are respectful enough not to go poking at powers we were never given mastery over; and we are utterly unafraid of them, because of Whose we are and what He has already done.

And let me say plainly what this freedom also means, lest anyone mishear the whole of this booklet as a grim warning to flee the subject altogether. We are perfectly free to enjoy the stories. The film of the lovable little visitor who comes down and befriends a child, the rollicking adventure of humanity standing against invaders from the sky, the whole delightful sweep of alien and extraterrestrial tales the world has dreamed up; the believer may sit down and enjoy these with a clear conscience and a glad heart. There is no contradiction in it whatever. Enjoying a good picture and living in dread of the headlines are two entirely different things. The first is freedom. The second is bondage. We are welcome to the one and called out of the other.

For here is a thing the believer understands that the world has exactly backwards. The world says, trust your eyes, believe what you see, your own perception is the final word. But we know better, because we know what sin did to us, and we know that both the eyes and the mind are easily deceived. The world says the eyes do not lie; the Christian knows that in a fallen and deceiving age the eyes and the very mind behind them can be fooled in a hundred ways. That is precisely why we take all of this in with caution rather than swallowing it whole, why a sincere report of a thing seen does not settle for us what the thing actually was. We are not the credulous ones, ready to believe every sight and every story. We are the careful ones, because we alone understand how deep deception can run.

So let it all rest in the hands that made it. God has control of the heavens and the dark and everything that may or may not move in them. You were not put upon this earth to spend your one life crouched in fear over headlines and reports and the things you cannot explain, while the work He actually called you to goes undone. He is sovereign; you are safe; the enemy is leashed; the unexplained is His to manage and yours to leave alone. Enjoy the stories, take the news with caution, and refuse the fear, for fear was never your assignment. He has already done everything needful, and He holds it all.