Stephen
Terry, Director
Seeing
the Invisible
Commentary
for the August 20, 2022, Sabbath School Lesson
"And I will ask the Father,
and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever... the
Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor
knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you." John
14:16-17, NIV
It is a bitter, modern irony
that religion and science often seem to be at odds. The Enlightenment that brought
us to this pass was sown in no small part by a theologian and scientist who was
willing to draw truth from both disciplines in a manner that allowed each to enhance
the other. That man was Sir Isaac Newton. His contributions to mathematics,
optics, and astronomy still influence scientific thought to the present. His
theories on gravity and planetary interactions provided the foundation for
understanding our world and solar system for centuries until displaced by the
next step on the staircase of discovery, Einstein's General Theory of
Relativity.
Less enlightened souls will
challenge the idea of God by asking where is he? Prove he exists! Why doesn't
he show himself? Or even worse, they try to logically prove he does not exist.
They ask questions like, "Could God make a rock so big he couldn't move it?"
They therefore relegate God to an absurdity based on the idea that God is all powerful.
This is all childish semantics, thought brilliant in the schoolyard, but hardly
insightful. Besides, it only works with a literalist, conservative approach to
biblical understanding. That approach was falling away at the same time as Einstein's
Relativity was establishing itself and providing the springboard to Quantum
Mechanics.
It took us a long time to get
there, but we now understand the relative nature of our universe and its
quantum unpredictability. We realize that question about God moving a rock is
just another iteration of Schrödinger's Cat. If that hapless kitty can be both
alive and dead, then certainly God can both be unable and able to move that
rock.
As for God not showing himself,
there have been many things we could not see that we now know exist thanks to
amazing inventions like the electron microscope and the James Webb orbiting
telescope. Both confirm that realms exist beyond our ken, realms that would have
been considered magical fairy lands before we had the tools to observe them.
Given adequate tools, we do not know how far we can go into the subatomic. We
may assume that it is contained in a finite frame, but what if the possibility
existed for infinite magnification? What would we find? Would there be an infinite
progression into finer and finer particles?
When we peer out into the vast
universe, every technological advance allows us to look ever further, yet,
there is still so much more we are unable to see. We can extrapolate based on
what we see, but statistically, based on the idea of an infinite universe, our
sampling, even at our current level is still so small as to be statistically
insignificant. In other words, we have no idea what is out there beyond our
horizon of visibility. Given an infinite number of possibilities, probability
theory tells us that eventually every kind of possibility exists in that
infinite space, no matter how absurd it would seem in our understanding of experiential
reality.
One of the quandaries that makes
God appear invisible or at least indifferent is that of prayer. Why does he seem
to answer some prayers and not others? Why does Schrödinger's Cat appear dead
to some but alive to others? Schrödinger posited that it was the act of
observing that either doomed or saved the cat. Could something about the way we
observe God, our perception, have a role? The person who does or does not
observe the cat has an influence on the cat's state, but what if one is unaware
of the cat's existence? Does he go on in his little box unimpeded by our indifference,
or does he continue to await inevitable discovery in a universe of infinite
possibilities?
Although some seem very sure
that they have opened the box and found God dead, that assurance is challenged
by the crudeness of our ability to create the tools whereby we measure our environment.
We are at best like a caveman banging a couple of rocks together, and when the
rocks break apart to reveal the flecks of mica within, he feels he now
understands the stars above to be flecks of mica in a large rock. History tells
us that such revelations can be defended to the death by those who accept them.
But that same history also reveals that rarely do we have enough data to reveal
the absolute truth. Our extrapolations about our universe can be just as crude
as the ideas of that caveman with his rocks. That means our certainties about
God and his existence can be also.
Ultimately, we are left with the
life of Jesus. He revealed all we could handle in his three and a half years of
ministry. But he didn't reveal everything.[i] He
knew that we did not have the tools to understand. He promised the Holy Spirit
would lead us to greater understanding. He did not explain how that would
happen. He only offered that it would. We determine if it will. If I am a
painter and someone gives me a set of mechanic's tools in preparation for car
trouble that will happen at some point in the future, I may toss them aside as
irrelevant to my chosen field of painting. But eventually, if my car needs
repair, I may see the value of the gift. Even more, I may even discover the
value that would have been found in learning how the tools are used before they
were needed. How often did the disciples wish they had paid closer attention to
what Jesus was teaching before he was taken from them?
Sadly, we do the same. The Bible
is often the dustiest book in the house or may not even be found in a home.
Therefore, we do not have opportunity to understand the words of Jesus. We also
do not pray despite Jesus' instructions to do so. Prayer is a tool for coupling
us to something positive beyond ourselves. It changes our focus and thereby
changes us. If observation has the power to change the state of something, then
that focus can change the state of what we are focusing on. But these tools do
not work without our belief in their efficacy. If I am working on an automobile
engine that requires the bolts be torqued down to an exact amount, and I tell
myself I don't need a torque wrench, I can just do it by what feels right, I am
asking for trouble. A few miles down the road with a blown head gasket and the
water in the engine either escaped as steam or trickled into my oil pan after
my unwillingness to use a tool appropriate for the job, I am faced with the
expense of rebuilding or replacing the engine.
This and other similar experiences
gave us older folks the wisdom we now have. We were young and stupid, but we
learned from those experiences. Fortunately, we survived to benefit from that
knowledge. Those of us who were wiser at a younger age asked those with more
experience how to proceed and avoided the pitfalls others experienced. If we
didn't have someone to ask, we would refer to a Chilton's or Hayne's manual to
parse out how to proceed with automotive repairs. Sometimes those manuals would
get a little sketchy in spots, leaving us scratching our heads about how to
complete the task, but we usually figured out what was needed.
The Bible can be like that.
There are lots of contradictory passages. For instance, we have the post-exilic
prohibitions against marrying foreign women found in the writings of Ezra and
Nehemiah, but in the book of Ruth, Boaz marries a Moabite woman, and that union
was blessed by God to become the line of King David and eventually the Messiah.
In the words of Jesus, we find a clarification of the contradictions. God is
love and when we reflect that in our characters, we understand what is contradictory
to that character and what supports it, even in the Bible. The religious
leaders of Christ's day were incensed with the idea that there were any
problems in their interpretations of scripture. As a result, they portrayed God
as genocidal, racist, and homicidal just like them. Religious leaders still do
this today. Whether it is Patriarch Krill in Moscow urging holy war against the
Ukrainian people, or evangelical leaders in the United States pushing for civil
war, they would doubtless crucify a Christ that stood between them and their victims.
The message of Jesus is simple:
love others as you love yourself,[ii]
even your enemies. Why? Because that is what God does.[iii] Anything
apart from that obscures the image of God in our lives. Everything throughout
the universe proceeds from that simple principle. If we do not live that out in
our lives, we are in contradiction to life as it was meant to be. But if we live
it out, then the character of the invisible God becomes visible in us, and God
becomes real in the world. We are the tool that makes that happen for ourselves
and others.