From the Sola Panel:
The UK government has launched a review into occupational Health & Safety laws (OH&S). It seems to be a very popular move. Health is good. Safety is good. But the multiplication of rules purportedly designed to enforce it often leads to madness.
Most of us are aware of safety rules that seem to be either over the top or incomprehensible. We received a note from our school a few months ago, informing us that the last day of the term would be a non-uniform day, but instructing us that the children were not to wear any hats—“for health and safety reasons“. A short while later, the school sent home another note, asking us to send our children to school in hats to protect them from the sun. It’s a great school, and the teachers are wonderful people who provide the kids with an excellent education. But this shows that even with the best intentions and among the best of people, rules can easily take over from common sense.
I used to work for a company that made solar panels. We dealt with quite a number of extremely toxic gases and chemicals. Very early on in the company’s life, we had to introduce OH&S policies. I can still remember my exceedingly wise manager, who had a consistent strategy whenever we had a seminar or meeting about health and safety. If anybody ever began a meeting or seminar talking about rules, legislation or fines, then he would stop them in their tracks. He would insist that we had to begin with health and safety itself. We had to be firm on the idea that a healthy and safe workplace was good for everybody and the idea that there were real risks that we had to work together to avoid. Our aim was not to keep rules or avoid fines; our aim was to be healthy and safe, and whatever rules we put into place were only there to serve that ultimate goal. Needless to say, it was a great place to work.
There’s a parallel here with Jesus’ attitude to the Old Testament law. Jesus came into a situation where there was a lot of rule-keeping going on. People were trying to keep God’s rules. Extra rules had even been added to ensure that God’s own original rules were kept. But in many places, the point of the rule-keeping had been lost: there were rules that were over the top (Mark 2:23-24), rules that were tragically inconsistent and heartless (Luke 13:14-16) and rules that ultimately contradicted God’s own law (Mark 7:9-13). Jesus brought clarity to this situation by insisting that the rules only work when we realize that there is something more fundamental than keeping the rules: we need to know the God who gave these rules, and we need to love what God loves. That’s why the Sermon on the Mount, which talks a lot about God’s law, begins with those sayings about blessedness (Matt 5:3-10). Blessed, for example, are the peacemakers, “for they shall be called sons of God” (Matt 5:9).
As we read more of the Sermon on the Mount, we learn that if we merely live our lives doing what God wants without knowing him as Father or loving what he loves, then, in the end, we will not even enter the kingdom of heaven. But if we know God as Father and love what he loves, then the things he commands (and even more than what he explicitly commands) will be our desires too.
Our relationship with God is not defined ultimately by doing his commandments; it is defined by knowing God as Father, and it is lived through loving what God loves. If we know him as Father, we will do what he commands. If we don’t know him as Father, then no amount of rule-keeping will save us.
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On the Sola Panel:
Once I got to church on time, but God arrived 20 minutes late. On the other hand, occasionally I’ve been to church and God didn’t manage to turn up at all. At least, that’s the impression you’d form if you judged by expectations.
The times I remember when nobody expected God to show up at church involved some friendly, relaxed informal gatherings. Don’t get me wrong; I personally like friendly, relaxed informal gatherings. But every so often, I think we may have been so keen on being friendly, relaxed and informal that nobody seems to be expecting the creator and judge of the universe to do anything in particular. We all had a great time of enjoyable fellowship and good coffee, and we talked afterwards about the latest TV shows, and then we went home.
At another church I visited, God did turn up quite spectacularly, but he was 20 minutes late. Church started at 7 pm with a series of slow, reflective songs. The band was excellent; the choir on the stage was full of young, smiling faces; the lighting was comfortably moody. Slowly, imperceptibly, the music started to get more intense. At 7:20 pm, it reached a crescendo, the choir started swaying back and forth, and the lights suddenly became intensely bright. At that point, the bloke on the stage with the microphone said, “Wow. I reckon God’s really here now!“ I kid you not.
What should we expect of God when it comes to church? The Bible does talk about God or Jesus being especially present when we gather. In Matthew 18:20, Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them“. Paul talks about the “power of our Lord Jesus“ being present when Christians are “assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus“ (1 Cor 5:4). When the “whole church comes together“, Paul says that outsiders should recognize that “God is really among you“ (1 Cor 14:23, 25). We should expect God’s presence in church.
But what should we expect God to actually do when he shows up? Should we expect a buzz of excitement as Jesus electrifies the crowd, rocks our world and transports us to the third heaven? Or should we expect a feeling of awe and holiness in the presence of a semi-tangible divine essence? Perhaps we should expect a sense of inexplicable inner peace, which transcends our busy or humdrum existence and helps us to feel calm and happy.
Well, not exactly. In fact, the Bible verses I just cited are all about people being convicted of their sin. The “two or three“ who are gathered in Matthew 18:20 are two or three witnesses to the sin of a brother (Matt 18:15-16). The power of the Lord Jesus in 1 Corinthians 5:4 is there to judge a sexually immoral church member (1 Cor 5:1, 5). The outsider in 1 Corinthians 14:25 says, “God is really among you“ because he has been convicted and called to account, and has had the secrets of his heart disclosed by the church speaking God’s word (1 Cor 14:24).
What should we expect God to do among us when we gather? In a nutshell, we should expect God to be doing his gospel work. We should expect God to be among us, convicting us of sin (Matt 18:16, 20; 1 Cor 5:4-5; 1 Cor 14:24). We should expect Jesus to be among us, rescuing sinners from God’s judgment (Matt 18:15; 1 Cor 5:5). Or, looking further afield in the Bible, we should expect Jesus to be among us to enable us to do his will and keep his commandments (Heb 13:20-21; John 14:20-21)—especially the command to love one another (John 15:11-12). We should expect Christ to create the hope of glory in us (Col 1:27). Fundamentally, we should be expecting God, our creator, Lord and saviour, to speak to us in church by his creative and powerful and saving word (John 17:20-23; 1 Cor 14:24; Col 1:5-6).
This can happen in all sorts of contexts, can’t it. It’s not ultimately a matter of the formality or informality of the gathering, the leadership (or non-leadership) style, the number of people, the band, the songs or the lighting. What does matter is that God’s word is spoken, heard and taken to heart. When that happens, we should expect great things. That’s because church is always intimately connected to that great heavenly gathering where God, the judge of all, is present and where Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins speaks to us a serious, comforting and awesome message (Heb 12:22-24).
What are you expecting from God when you come to church?
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From the Sola Panel
I was listening the other day to a satirical comedy show on British Radio. The presenter was making a point about human relationships. The bulk of his satirical piece consisted of a reading from Genesis 2:18-25, in full, from the King James Version of the Bible (“And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him …”). He read it slowly and theatrically in a fake American accent. During the reading, the audience laughed uproariously. When the reading was finished, the skit was effectively over; the point was made. The show moved on to the next topic.
What grieved me most about this piece wasn’t the presenter’s viewpoint on the particular issue under discussion. Nor was it even the fact that the Bible was being ridiculed. The saddest part of the skit was the fact that the presenter chose an American accent for his reading of the King James Version of the Bible.
It’s not (I hasten to add) that I’ve got a prejudice against American accents; I myself spoke with a broad Californian twang up to age four. But why did this English presenter choose an American accent for his Bible reading? The King James Version of the Bible is, after all, a very English product. It was commissioned by a King of England, created by English scholars, and influenced, in a large part, by the English martyr William Tyndale. It is generally regarded as one of the greatest crowning achievements of English literature. Some even regard it as the greatest literary work of all time. The presenter could have chosen to read it with a voice sounding like a Shakespearian actor, for example—or an upper-class, holier-than-thou bishop. Then, at least, his ridicule of the Bible would have had some connection with its English heritage. Why on earth did he choose to read it with an American accent?
I can only conclude that, in the view of the presenter and his audience (which consists of a substantial cross-section of well-educated Brits), the Bible is no longer something that belongs in Britain at all. This is the assumption behind the satire, and it’s the reason that an American accent for a Bible reading has instant comedic value. The Bible is not just seen as historical, archaic, sentimental or vaguely quaint; for a substantial proportion of British society, the Bible is seen as something over-the-top, crazy and, above all, foreign. The Bible is no longer at home here; it belongs across the Atlantic. This is, of course, a great testimony to the biblical faithfulness of many of our American brothers and sisters. But for British society, it is a great tragedy.
On Thursday, the UK will elect a new parliament, and the results are very hard to predict. Please pray for the election and the resulting government. From all reports, all three major parties are trying to distance themselves from the Bible to one extent or another. There are particular ethical stances that are causing concern to many Christians here. Above all, please pray that the Bible itself—the word of God that brings eternal life, hope and peace through Jesus Christ—is not lost to the hearts and minds of this nation.
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From the Sola Panel
This is the fifth instalment of a five-part series (Read parts 1, 2, 3 and 4)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2, and have discovered that Jesus provides the solution to the puzzle of Psalm 8.
Where do we see Jesus? We see him in the Gospels, those records and witnesses to Jesus’ life, death on the cross and resurrection from the dead. The Gospels form the first four books of our New Testaments. And as we look at this man Jesus Christ in those Gospels, we see something very significant: we actually see (if we look at this testimony closely) that God himself became human: Jesus, the Son of God.
This is the reason that we are important to God. It’s because God actually became one of us. God, the creator and designer—the one who is far above and beyond even the 70 sextillion stars—the one whose hands hold the universe—the one for whom and by whom this same universe exists—became human. He became one of us—one of the specks of dust—one of the small, pitiful creatures. He became a baby and grew. And he did it “because of the suffering of death” (Heb 2:9b).
Just as our very existence and value in this universe is a real problem, so too is the fact that suffering and death is also a problem. The Bible doesn’t give us final and neat reasons for suffering and death—especially when it comes to individual cases. But it does tell us that suffering and death are all finally bound up with our rejection of God himself. The fact that we have abandoned our responsibility and ceased to live as God desires means that we are subject to death.
Death is not the way the world should be. It’s wrong. You will know this if you have ever experienced the death of a loved one, relative or friend, as well as thought about your own impending death. But the Bible says that death is all bound up with this terrible reality—the reality that we, as individuals and as a race, have taken our importance for granted and have used it to pretend that we are God, choosing to define our own lives. Death is, in the end, God’s judgement against our rejection of him—our abandonment of who we are, our ignoring of him and our playing God ourselves. Death now; death forever.
But what has Jesus done about death? Again, take a look at the same verse: “so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb 2:9c). God’s Son became one of us because of God’s grace—his lavish, undeserved love for us. The reason you matter to the God who made the countless stars and supernovas is not because you’re big or good or important to the running of the universe; it’s simply because he decided to love you. And he showed his love in an incredible way: Jesus, in becoming one of us, tasted death for us. Although he was God himself, the perfect human being, he also suffered. He died. He died, in fact, an agonizing death on a Roman cross. And he did it for us, in our place.
What does that mean for us? “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering” (Heb 2:10). Jesus died to bring us back to God. Because Jesus has suffered the consequences of God’s judgement, we don’t need to face God’s final judgement against us. Because Jesus died, he has made us ‘sons’, which means heirs—children of God. Those who trust Jesus—those who belong to Jesus—will have ‘salvation’, which means escape from God’s judgement—escape, in the end, from death itself.
Jesus died to bring us to glory—to finally ‘crown us with glory and honour’, as the song goes (Ps 8:5). This means everlasting life in a new creation that God will make—a place where there is no suffering or death, where there is no judgement from him, where we live rightly as God’s children and where we will know him finally and perfectly.
Jesus, who has suffered and been made perfect, has risen from the dead and is now alive. He himself is crowned with glory and honour. One day those who trust in him and know him will see him as he is.
What is your response to this? Do you know Jesus? Do you trust Jesus? Do you believe that the riddle of our existence is actually found, not in yourself, but in him?
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From the Sola Panel
This is the fourth instalment of a five-part series (Read parts 1, 2 and 3.)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8, and we’ve seen the puzzle it presents us with. On the one hand, we are nothing compared to the majestic God who created the universe. On the other hand, God tells us that we are important—that we are created for a purpose in this world.
You know that you and your actions matter, don’t you? You know that what you do or say, how you treat the world and how you treat other people actually matters, don’t you? You know that some things are right and that some things are wrong, don’t you? You know that you will face death one day, like everyone else, and that there’s something scary and horrible about that. What are you going to do about it?
One possibility is that you could just ignore the whole issue. You could just decide that it’s enough to eat, drink and enjoy life as much as you can, minimizing pain as much as possible and maybe along the way, doing great things, loving, laughing and crying, and then dying. You could buy, read and act on Dave Freeman’s book 100 Things to Do Before You Die—carve out your own meaning, define your existence.
But is that really enough? History is littered with the corpses of individuals who have died and suffered under dictators who decided they wanted to define the meaning of their own existence. Maybe you will never be an evil dictator—maybe you will never try to live in a way that hurt anyone. And yet, if you’re honest—if I’m honest, I know I have hurt people. Deeply. Despite the fact that I want to pretend that I can run my life the way I want without any consequences, I also know the guilt of my failures, the pain I’ve cause by my selfish actions and the evil in my heart. And I know that my existence, no matter how full of food and drink and life and love, is not, in the end, going to matter when I die and dissolve into the dust from which I came. I also know that this matters too, somehow.
Back to the song and the riddle of the song. God is great. His creation is enormous. In all of this, what is man? Who am I? Who are you? Why am I so important?
Fast forward hundreds of years.
The claim of the Bible is that this riddle—this puzzle—does have an answer—a profound and great answer. It’s there in the words of the New Testament—where a Christian (that is, someone who knows Jesus Christ) can read the words of the song that we ourselves have just read and not only sees the problem, but also the answer:
It has been testified somewhere,
“What is man, that you are mindful of him,
or the son of man, that you care for him?
You made him for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned him with glory and honor,
putting everything in subjection under his feet.”
(Heb 2:6-8a)
Here’s that song—that problem—that age-old issue of our importance: “What is man?” And then, just to make sure we’re all on the same page, our Christian author highlights the particular problem he sees: “Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him” (Heb 2:8b)
We might believe that we have a God-given purpose and responsibility to our lives in this world. But we don’t actually see it. When we look up, we still see those majestic and distant heavens. The original Hebrew song speaks of the greatness of stars—the heavenly lights. Here in this letter to the Hebrews, it’s expressed in terms of angels, heavenly superpowers. But in either case, the point is the same: God is above it all, and we don’t and can’t see with our eyes why and how God should care for us.
And then, when we look around, we don’t see human beings living responsibly, caring for God’s world or for each other, or acting rightly as agents of God’s loving rule, do we. We just see ourselves, trying to define our own existence, hurting and being hurt, loving and hating and dying.
But there is something else—somebody else—who we do see, in verse 9: “But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor” (Heb 2:9a). Whom do we actually see? What is the piece of evidence that should make us turn around and take notice? We see Jesus. This is the Bible’s claim; this is the difference and the answer.
To be continued …
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From the Sola Panel:
This is the third instalment of a five-part series (read parts 1 and 2.)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8 and have discovered that stargazing should make us wonder why God the creator should have anything to do with us.
At this point, if you were sceptical about the existence of the creator himself, I could point you to proofs of a designer in the universe. For example, I could use the ‘fine-tuning’ argument for the existence of God—the fact that there are over 20 fundamental physical constants in the universe that all work together to make the universe work as it does, and that can’t be explained as a coincidence—at least, not yet. If any one of these constants had been a tiny bit different, life couldn’t appear. For example, if the force of gravity was even slightly different by a colossally tiny factor (1 part in 1040), no life-supporting stars could exist. Or I could talk about the statistical improbability of life itself emerging—the fact that even a small protein has 1095 possible folding combinations, and the chances of a protein folding by accident into a functional life-conducive shape during the lifetime of the universe is something like 1 in 1065.
But then you might come back with an answer—the multiverse. Do you know about the multiverse? The multiverse is a philosophical theory, born out of reflection on cosmology and quantum theory. It’s the idea that we are just one out of a gigantic number of different possible universes. The multiverse is a way to solve the problem of the fine-tuning of the universe. Since there’s such a huge or infinite number of possible universes, it’s no problem that our universe just happens to exist by chance—a universe with impossibly fine-tuned life-supporting physical constants, where proteins folded in just the right way. The multiverse is an act of faith; it’s not a scientific hypothesis in the strict sense. There is no scientific evidence for the multiverse; in fact, there’s no experimental test that anyone has conceived that could possibly prove it or disprove it. It’s a philosophy that tries to solve the apparent design of the universe without resorting to a designer. The multiverse theory is complex, physically and philosophically, and it seems to me to be the last resort of the desperate. But if you’re philosophically committed to atheism, that’s what you’ve got at your disposal at the moment.
But actually there’s a bigger problem with my proofs for a designer. You see, even if my arguments for the existence of a cosmic designer were true and irrefutable, and even if you believed them, what does that actually prove? That there is a great designer—a purpose—to the universe doesn’t say anything about you and me.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that there is a great grand design to the existence of the 70 sextillion-plus stars out there. Say there is some grand 13-billion-year-old design to it all, and that God the creator is behind it all. So what? What on earth would that have to do with you, your life, your relationships, your joys, your sorrows, your acts of kindness, your feelings of guilt at those evil things you’ve said and thought and done, your goals, your children, your ethics, your conviction that it’s wrong to hurt and right to love, and your death as you dissolve back into the dust you came from? What is that to God? Why does that matter at all in this gigantic universe?
Yet this is the question of our poet, as the song continues:
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
(Ps 8:5-8)
This is actually a real puzzle—a problem—the crisis of the song—that this God, the one who made the heavens for some reason, deliberately and personally sees you and me as important. You and I are a key part of his creation. We (as the song says) are “crowned … with glory and honor”. We are rulers. We have dominion.
These words ‘rule’ and ‘dominion’ recall the words of Genesis 1-2. They are used to describe the reality that humans are put on the earth by God himself to care for it, not to exploit it for our own ends. It’s a statement of our glory and our responsibility, not a statement of our God-given right to use the world any way we want. Our poet in this biblical song recalls these words to express wonder at the fact that we specks of dust are somehow glorious in God’s eyes. The evidence of the stars suggests that we are nothing, but God himself, the creator of the stars, says we are something. We have been made by God for a purpose in this world: we have responsibility. We have responsibility to God to do what is right—to rule the works of God’s hands. And, as the rest of the Bible points out, we have a responsibility to live rightly in our relationships with each other—to honour God, to care for his world, to care for each other, to live under his loving rule.
But that’s the problem. That’s the puzzle. How is it that such a great creator—such a great and super-powerful supreme being—has given us specks of dust this responsibility?
Verse 9 gives us no answer:
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
The song ends where it began. It hasn’t solved the puzzle; it has just expressed it. God is great in the earth, and somehow, for some reason, we are important to him.
To be continued …
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From the Sola Panel
In the second instalment of a five-part series, I contemplate the extent of our significance in the universe. (Read Part 1.)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8, and we’ve discovered that stargazing helps us to see how insignificant we really are.
Just think about the size of space for a moment. Imagine you could get into the fastest jet on earth (last time I checked, this was the SR-71 Blackbird). Its official speed record is almost 2,500 miles per hour. Now imagine you could speed it up 100 times to 250,000 miles per hour. Then imagine that you could take it on a trip to space. It would take you an hour to get to the moon—that’s pretty reasonable! It would take you eight days to get to Mars, the closest planet to Earth. It would take you four months to get to the planet Saturn (remember, we’re travelling 100 times faster than the fastest jet ever built). It would take you a year and a half to get to the planet Pluto at the edge of our solar system. To get to the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, it would take you 12,000 years. To get to the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy, it would take you 80 million years. To the next closest galaxy, Andromeda, it would take you seven billion years. To get to the edge of the visible universe, it would take you 40 million million years. And they think that the size of the non-visible universe is vastly huger than this: that would take you a million million million million, etc. years.
I’ll quote another modern ‘poet’—this time, the late Douglas Adams, writing The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy:
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.1
The ancient biblical poet was ignorant about billions of parsecs or millisecond pulsars. He just knew that space was big, wonderful, majestic and beyond us. That’s the universe we live in.
So the Bible has a question for you: who are you?
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
(Ps 8:4)
What is man? Who am I in comparison to this world? Who are you? You are one of seven billion tiny organisms, living on an infinitesimally small pinprick of a dust ball, who are giving birth, breathing, eating, maybe reproducing and dying.
But that’s the Bible’s question: what is it to be human? What is your existence—your family, your career, your study, your relationships, your life—compared to this immense universe with its big bang, its nebulas and its millisecond pulsars?
But did you notice something? That’s not quite the way the song puts it, isn’t it. It’s not just the universe that’s big; this biblical song makes an even more profound point. It’s a point about God himself: God is big. See verse 1:
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
We’re not just talking here about how small we are compared to the universe; this is a song about our relationship to the majesty of the Lord—the God who created that universe.
Now it’s important to realize that this ‘God’ spoken about in the Bible has nothing to do with superstition and magical religion. The Bible’s view of God is the opposite of superstition. In fact, it’s the biblical view of God that enabled the early Christians to throw astrology away and promote astronomy instead. Astrology is the belief that the stars have something to do with our lives. Astrology happens when people look out at the stars, see how distant and high they are, and decide that somehow, in some magical way, these stars have a direct influence on their own personal lives.
But just listen for a moment to Augustine, a Christian theologian who was writing in about 425 AD—a man whose influence over western thought has been profound and continues to this day. This is what Augustine says about astronomy and astrology, and their relative value:
Astronomy … makes possible systematic predictions about the future, which are not speculative and conjectural but firm and certain; but we should not try to extract something of relevance to our own actions and experiences, like the maniacs who cast horoscopes, but confine our interest to the stars themselves.2
Augustine rejected astrology because he believed in the God of the Bible—the God we meet here in this very song—a God whose glory is above the heavens. See verse 3: this is the God who made the heavens, and set the moon and stars in place. This is the God who is majestic and great, and above and beyond those stars themselves. He is a God of order who set those heavenly bodies where they should be. But he’s done it for his glory, not for magical speculation about how your week is going to pan out.
So the question of verse 4 is a question about our place before this God:
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Why on earth would this God, who created the stars, be interested in you and me? There are more stars in the visible universe than grains of sand in all the beaches on the earth. According to an Australian estimate in 2003, there are 70 sextillion stars. This is 7 x 1022. Who are we in all of this? I can’t resist quoting Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy again:
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.3
Even then, he’s talking about one galaxy amongst quadrillions. And that’s just the visible universe.
There is a God who made it all. So what on earth would he have to do with us? Who are you? What is man?
To be continued …
1 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Del Ray, 2005 (1979), p. 65.
2 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, II.113.
3 Adams, p. 3.
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On the Sola Panel:
In the first instalment of a five-part series, I’m pondering what astronomy has to teach us.
I’m a fan of space. I don’t actually know much about the details of astronomy or cosmology or astrophysics; I just think that the space is really cool.
If there are any real scientists reading this, I want to say thanks. I know that most of your work involves boring and tedious searching, collating and number crunching. Thanks for doing all that stuff so that I can see those fantastic pictures of nebulas on the internet and wonder at it all.
For example, I’m a fan of millisecond pulsars. A gigantic star, millions of light years away, explodes in a huge supernova. It creates a fireball ten million billion billion times bigger than Hiroshima. In its ashes, it leaves behind a neutron star made of dense atomic nuclei, squashed together at a density 10 trillion times greater than steel. A teaspoon full of neutron star weighs about the same as Sydney Harbour. Sometimes this neutron star will steal stuff from a nearby star and start spinning. Some neutron stars spin hundreds of times a second—a whole star rotating as fast as an idling car engine. Many of these super-dense, revving stars send out pulses of electromagnetic radiation, milliseconds apart. And we might be able to use these millisecond pulsars as standard cosmological clocks to help us detect gravitational waves, explore space-time bending, and understand more about the tiniest particles in the universe.
But apart from the wow factor, what’s the point of learning about space?
Some people might say that, in the end, astronomy is a complete waste of time. Sherlock Holmes, that fictional epitome of scientific rationalism, cared nothing for astronomy. When his friend Dr Watson scolded him for being ignorant even of the basic facts of the solar system, he interrupted and said, “What the deuce is it to me? … you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”1
Is Mr Holmes correct? Is stargazing a completely useless exercise?
Well, you could point out that weather and tide and climate predictions need detailed solar, lunar and planetary modelling. You could also point out that car engines need modern mechanics, which is all based on the laws of motion formulated by Isaac Newton, who used the orbits of planets to calculate and build his theories. Or you could point to the humble GPS satellite navigator, which relies on Einstein’s theory of relativity and orbiting satellites. Of course, astronomy is useful; after all, it helps us to work out whether it’s raining, and how to drive quickly to the cricket and back without taking a wrong turn!
But I want to suggest that stargazing is far more important than all this. In fact, the Bible itself gives us a very good reason for considering the stars. There is a song in the Bible about the stars—a song composed thousands of years ago in ancient Israel. This is how the song begins:
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.
(Ps 8:1-2)
You’ll notice that this poet believes in God (just like many of the astronomers down through the ages). In fact, this whole song is a prayer to the creator of the universe. We’ll come back to this shortly. But for the moment, let’s look at his exercise in stargazing. Do you see what he says in the third verse of the song?
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place …
When you think about it, stargazing is something that would have been easier and more natural for an ancient Israelite than for us. Yes, we can use our light, radio and gamma ray telescopes to penetrate vast distances, and we can use our complex mathematical and cosmological theories to make determinations and predictions. Of course, the ancients couldn’t do that. But on the other hand, they had a very big advantage over us: they had a clear, unpolluted sky in their backyards. We have so many lights on earth—especially in our cities—that the lights of the stars and the moons are drowned out. When I go into my backyard on a clear night, all I can see are a few pinpricks. But this biblical songwriter could step into his own backyard and see far more than you or I. He could see the glory of it all—the heavens, the Milky Way, the wandering planets.
We don’t tend to look up very much at all, do we. We don’t use the night time to look at the heavens; we use the night time to look down—to watch TV, to immerse ourselves in virtual worlds online. We know cyberspace very well, but this ancient poet sees real space with his naked eyes. We know the intimate details of the lives of rock stars and football stars, but this song is about the real stars. At this point, this biblical poet is far more in touch with the reality of the universe than we are. And knowing these stars—seeing them there before him—what does this do for the poet? How does it make him feel? Look at verse 4:
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
What does astronomy do for this poet? What is the use of astronomy for all of us? Astronomy is very useful. It does something very negative for us, but it’s still very worthwhile: it reminds us how very very very small and insignificant we really are. In case you’re wondering, the words translated ‘man’ here mean ‘all humanity’. The question “What is man?” is an expression of amazement that human beings have any importance at all in the face of the evidence of the stars.
To be continued …
1 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Study in Scarlet’ in Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Long Stories, John Murray, London, 1929, p. 17.
Comments on the Sola Panel
On the Sola Panel:
Do you know for sure that you are going to be with God in Heaven? If God were to ask you, “Why should I let you into My Heaven?” what would you say?
Have you ever used these questions (or a variation on them) to talk about the impact of the gospel of Jesus Christ with friends or strangers? They are the introductory questions in the well-known gospel explanation associated with Evangelism Explosion (EE). They’ve proved themselves to be a very popular way to start a serious discussion about our relationship with God. We assume that people in our world have given at least some thought to their own death and eternal destiny. These questions help us to show how the gospel, with its strong emphasis on assurance of future salvation through Jesus (e.g. 1 Thess 1:10, Heb 9:27-28, 1 Pet 1:3-5), provides a clear answer to important issues.
But, perhaps, not any more: XEE, the next generation version of Evangelism Explosion, starts with quite a different set of questions:
On a Scale of 1 to 10, how fulfilling would you say your life is?
What makes it an X? Would it change in either direction if God were in your life?
The key Bible verse for XEE is John 10:10: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly”. The emerging generations, according to XEE, no longer think very much about death or the afterlife; people care more about the now-life. Futility or fulfilment today matters more than fear or hope for tomorrow. And so, if we want people to listen to our explanation of the gospel, we need to start with something that people today actually care about. You can have a fulfilling life, says XEE, by having a relationship with God through Jesus. XEE’s presentation does, of course, say that this “life to the full” is not just about our circumstances, feelings, or quality of life; it also says that it continues beyond the grave. Nevertheless, XEE’s overall emphasis is the fact that Jesus gives us fulfilment in life now.
The creators of XEE have made a serious effort to understand the real concerns of real people whom we want to hear the gospel, and we should applaud them for it. There is an advantage to beginning a gospel presentation by addressing a felt need in your hearer(s). It makes evangelism much easier because it means you can start up a genuine conversation quickly on a topic that matters to them. But I have a question for users of XEE. In fact, I have a question for anyone who has tried to use ‘fulfilment in life’ as a good way to begin a discussion about Jesus. That question is this: how do you deal with the fact that most people’s idea of ‘fulfilment’ is so utterly different to the kind of fulfilment Jesus talks about?
The idea of ‘fulfilment’ in today’s world is incredibly ambiguous. It is usually associated with careers, family, sexual relationships and education. If you ask somebody whether they’d like ‘fulfilment’, that’s the kind of thing they’re most likely to be thinking about initially. However, Jesus’ view of ‘abundant life’, or life ‘to the full’ (John 10:10), is very different. In John’s Gospel, ‘full’ or ‘abundant’ life is eternal life (John 3:15, 4:14, 4:36, 6:40, 6:68). Even though this abundant life is available now through Jesus’ word (John 5:24, 8:31-32, 14:23, 15:3-4) and Spirit (John 4:23, 7:38), it ultimately means life beyond death (John 5:21, 5:25). The ‘full’ life of John 10:10 is about being saved from God’s judgement for our sins (John 3:16-17, 3:36, 5:24, 5:29, 7:24, 10:9). Actually, people who came to Jesus expecting material benefits for their own daily life needed to be corrected (John 4:15, 6:27). Many of them turned away from him because he has disappointed them in this regard (John 6:66). Indeed, in the here and now, Jesus promises his disciples hardship, persecution and hatred by the world (John 15:18, 17:14), not just the benefits of a fulfilling relationship with God.
So if you begin your discussion about Jesus by asking people whether they feel fulfilled in life, and if you imply that the gospel is the answer to this need, you’re going to have a much harder job further down the track. You’ll have to show people that the Bible’s idea of a fulfilled life is completely different from what they first expected when you started talking to them about ‘fulfilment’. How do you avoid the confusion? Talking about ‘fulfilment in life’ might be more instantly accessible to post-Christian generations. And it clearly makes initial conversations easier. But is it, in the long run, going to cause more problems than it solves?
I’m not saying that we should only ever use the ‘classic’ EE questions about getting into heaven either. In fact, these questions have their own pitfalls. Because they begin with human concerns about the afterlife rather than with God himself, they run the risk (if not used properly) of marginalizing Jesus’ demand on our lives and making the gospel sound like a mere ‘free ticket to heaven’. Nevertheless, there are also great advantages to these classic questions. They are clear and direct. They imply that there is a personal God, that this God will judge us, and that there is an afterlife that really matters. This means that they can potentially generate discussion that quickly gets to the heart of some of these central biblical concerns. On the other hand, as the creators of XEE have realized, these questions assume too much in a post-Christian world. Can we really take for granted that our hearers have a clear view of God, judgement and heaven before we start to share the gospel with them?
Perhaps there are alternative questions we could use to start up a conversation—questions that make sense without being confused with promises that Jesus simply doesn’t make. Perhaps we could talk about people’s fear of death in general. (According to Hebrews 2:15, the fear of death itself is a basic feature of human existence, not just a generational thing. The fear of death is certainly a common theme in much contemporary fiction; just look at the Harry Potter series, which is all about the terror of death, from the first book to the last.) Or have you discovered other means to talk quickly and easily about the impact of the gospel in ways that make sense to our current generation?
Comments on the Sola Panel
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