The Mystery of God Revealed

The building of the Tower of Babel goes down in the history of the ancient world as one of the great attempts by mankind to transcend his reality and assure his future apart from God.  It seems that the motivation for building a tower so high – one that would reach into heaven (Genesis 11:4) – comes from the memory of the worldwide flood that had destroyed all of mankind apart from Noah’s family.  That the descendants of this family were now uniting for the purpose of building this edifice was a bad sign because it meant that man had, in such a short time, already forgotten God – who had promised never to flood the earth again (Genesis 9:11) but who had also commanded them to spread out and “fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1). As such in building this tower they were both disobeying Him and declaring that they didn’t trust Him.

This early testimony has served as a cautionary tale of mankind’s folly in his attempt to rid himself of God. Where the citizens of Babel thought a tall enough building would bring them security apart from trusting in the Lord.  It seems they believed that water was their enemy and that the earth was in danger of flooding again.  Should God judge the earth again and the waters start to rise they would be ok, because they could just go into their tower that stretched to the sky.

Reading this now we can obviously see the principles of Romans 1:21 at play.  The people didn’t give thanks to God for saving their ancestors from the flood and didn’t honor His promise to never flood the earth again.  Rather they forgot God and due to this sought to create some kind of insurance policy that would protect them in the case of another deluge.  In their speculations they either attributed the flood as a natural disaster or thought that God was limited in His power and could only destroy them through the use of water. 

This is obviously foolish to us now.  God is God, if they build a tower and He wants to destroy the world again He could do it with an earthquake or a comet strike, but in the logic of their deluded minds they thought a tower would save them.

Naturalism, which is the belief that we can know the history of the Universe by taking the principles of Physics that we know are at play today and tracing them into the distant past, is, in and of itself, a kind of Babel.  And just as God frustrated the plans of the early Babylonians by confusing their languages, so God has frustrated the Naturalistic project by showing that the universe is expanding and that the world is Finely Tuned.  This makes it so that even if one assumes that we both know everything there is to know about the natural world and that nothing supernatural occurred in the world’s origins that we are left with a perfectly planned primordial explosion that was so exact that should it have been the slightest bit different then we would never have been here.  Tacked onto this is that there was an eternity of time before this explosion – that has been coined the “Big Bang” - where the laws of physics wouldn’t have applied and is therefore outside the ability of science to even attempt to understand.

I mused in my prior post about how this is why the speculations of Romans 1:21 are “futile”.  The materialistic project, in its conscious decision to exclude the supernatural from its pursuit to understand the distant past, was an attempt to eliminate the need for God in our explanation of the world.  But these recent discoveries in the field of science show that even if someone rejects that God was involved in the development of the universe then they still must acknowledge that the primordial atom that preceded the Big Bang must have been perfectly planned by Him and is actually a more awe-inspiring act than it would be if He created the world in a process.

To illustrate this consider that the universe is like a beautiful statue, for example Michaelangelo’s David.  That such a statue was carved out in a planned process by Michaelangelo is amazing because the statue is exquisite, and we recognize that it would have taken incredible skill to do this, but should the artist had been a pyrotechnic instead of a sculptor, and should this work of art be the result of a perfectly planned explosion then that would be spectacular beyond words.  As such if one assumes the naturalistic approach, then he is ascribing something even more incredible to God than if He had done it in a process.

One wonders if, when the unbelieving world was coming together to create this approach to the origin of the universe, God looked at His angels and told them with a twinkle in His eye “you just wait and see how this all shakes out.” God has a reputation for foiling the plots of mankind to rid itself of Him and He even seems to take delight (Psalm 2:4) in watching the world’s speculations eventually turn to point to Him.  He knew that the lenses we had discovered and were using in our telescopes would eventually show us that the universe is expanding, making it so that the logical system of naturalistic thought would shift and point to Him.

The materialistic approach is so convincingly pointing to God that I’m very tempted to embrace it and be a mouthpiece that declares it everywhere I go, but alas I can’t do this because it is built on faulty premises.  Just like how the Tower of Babel would never really have protected the ancient Babylonians from future disaster, so that Naturalistic approach never really had a chance to say anything definitive about the origins of our world.  It is too much of a stretch to say that we can indubitably discern the distant past by only using the principles of the physical world that we understand today.  We simply do not know if there are other laws of physics that we haven’t discovered¹ that could have been at play in the development of the cosmos.  We also simply do not know if there were supernatural acts involved in the formation of our world. As such I am left to reject the project entirely.

Where then does this leave us?

A far cry from the assurance espoused in museums and textbooks about the distant past, we are instead left to leave natural history a mystery and to instead focus on the things that we can actually know.  We are able to do this by taking a brief moment to quiet our minds and consider the reality that we find ourselves in.  The first observation is that of our own existence. Regardless of whatever mechanisms were used to bring us to this point, we recognize that we are in fact here now - living, thinking and breathing in this world.  A thought we seem to take for granted, but when we consider it deeply is one that has tremendous ramifications.

The Unfathomableness of Our Existence

To really get at the implications of our own existence we should consider that it would be easier to explain if we were never here.  If there never were people and there never was a material world that would be simpler to understand.  If there truly never was anything, if nothing ever existed, then explaining life would be straightforward.  All we would simply have to say is “there is nothing” and that would be all².

But we do exist, and we are here in “the now”, in our present allotment of time.  So, we have to confront an unavoidable - yet incomprehensible - truth of this reality, which is that in order for us to live in this “present time” that something or Someone has to have existed for eternity.  Because if there ever truly was nothing then nothing could ever have existed.

This reality is beyond our ability to fathom.  In fact, the concept behind the word “eternal” is so inscrutable that it can only be defined in a negative sense, which is to say that it can only be referred to by what it isn’t – namely that it isn’t limited in time.  Thus, it is an idea, in and of itself, that transcends our minds.  We are able to understand the passage of time and that things begin and end in time, but that is built upon something that we can’t understand, which is that something or Someone must be self-existent and simply be.

In Exodus 3:14 when Moses asked God His Name, the Lord responded by saying “I am that I am”.  Which is probably the simplest way for man to attempt to understand this mysterious attribute – something or Someone exists and has existed for all eternity and everything that we know in the here and now wouldn’t be possible unless it was undergirded by this existence.

Continuing on we examine ourselves.  I am a free-thinking being who has the ability to make any choice at any given time.  While external influences and pressures make it so that certain decisions are more desirable than others, it is still within my power to make whatever choice I want in every moment.  This autonomy that I possess is what makes me “me” and has been called by cultures throughout the ages as the “soul”.

Our world is made up of people who have souls.  Individuals who have a myriad of thoughts and feelings about life and whose sentiments are their own.  As an autonomous individual myself, as one who possesses a soul, I am aware of a distinct truth - I didn’t create myself.  I am free and able to make whatever choice I want, but my own existence and my own freedom, is not something I was able to will into being.  I am acutely aware of my own beginning.  I have not existed forever.

So, then we have another property that we have to add into the list of things we can’t understand about our reality.  There has to be some kind of Soul-Giver out there.  Something or Someone must have the power to have made me, to have made you and to have made every free-thinking person that exists in the world.  But this is also beyond our ability to understand for how does one go about creating a soul?

A Cloud of Mystery

The recognition that existence itself is incomprehensible due to the fact that it has to be eternal and the reality that my personal existence likewise transcends my ability to comprehend because my soul is the product of forces that I can’t understand leaves us with a giant question mark that looms over existence like a proverbial cloud.

Within this cloud are 2 transcendent attributes that hover over our reality.  The first of which is that there has to be something or Someone out there that is self-existent and eternal. Second is that there must be some kind of Being who has the power to create souls.  Romans 1:20 talks about this mystery saying,

“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made”

These invisible attributes, eternal power and divine nature, that exist within this mysterious cloud are what have caused men from every tribe, culture and age to look up into the sky and say “God”.  And it is upon this mystery – the mystery of God (Colossians 2:2) – that God has presented Himself to the world.

We see in the Bible that God has been speaking to mankind since the beginning, from Adam to Noah He was there, and then again He made promises to Abraham.  He described Himself as a Self-Existent Being to Moses saying “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14) and used Moses to create a nation that would possess a culture that would be ready for something He planned to do in the future.  That nation produced great lovers of God like King David, Daniel, Isaiah and Jeremiah – men who God showed His future plans to.  These plans culminated in God sending His Son into the earth.  The coming of Jesus Christ – the Son of God – is the most important event in the history of the world.  In it God was stepping outside of the mysterious cloud and saying to the world “Here I am.” Jesus said it Himself in John 8:12 saying,

“I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.”

Anyone who has experienced life and is aware of the power dynamics that are at play in the world and how those who are in power tend not to like someone making grandiose claims about themselves will understand why it didn’t go well for Jesus in this world.  But still that the religious leaders of His day - people who had spent their lives wondering about the mystery of God - were the impetus for the Son of God’s crucifixion, should be a strong warning to all of us about the seductive nature of power and how it has the ability, like Tolkien’s ring, to make someone forsake everything he thought he loved in pursuit of it.

Coming out of the Trench

But even this was a part of God’s plan.  For as important as the Coming of Christ was for mankind in that it was God stepping outside of the cloud of mystery that had previously concealed Him, it was just as important for God in that Jesus had to take care of something for God in order for the breach of relationship between Him and man to be restored.

Man had rejected God.  This happened first with Adam in the Garden, and continued throughout every generation up until that point, and persists still today.  God created man to know Him and to be His friend and in order to do this He gave us a free will, an autonomous soul like I mentioned above, but we have consistently used that to make choices that temporarily gratify us but that go against the way He has designed the world by doing things that He has commanded us not to do.

These actions are called “sin” and while sin is temporarily pleasurable, it ends up destroying our lives because it goes against the immutable design of our world.  We reap the consequences for our sin in broken relationships, finances, bodies and hearts but the biggest problem that our sin causes is that it offends God.

As such one could look at the world at that time – which is still true today – as being similar to the trench warfare that was seen in World War 1.  God created mankind and showed us the way to live in harmony with Himself and with each other, but we purposefully rejected Him and dug trenches for ourselves, deciding that we were going to do what we wanted to do, and that was that. 

When God sent His Son into the world, He sent Him as a kind of peace envoy into this hostile battlefield.  Where Jesus rose from God’s proverbial trench with a message of peace and reconciliation – where man could come and be restored to God – but was met with the wrath of mankind’s machine guns.

But Christ’s unjust and unfair death was all a part of the plan.  The measure of our offense to God, which made redeeming us very costly, could only be paid with the preciousness of the death of His Son.  And as such, in the incredible wisdom of God, the very act of us killing the One who He sent to restore us to Himself became the exchange that we needed to be made right again in His eyes.  As such the invitation that was first given 2000 years ago, and still remains today, is for us to come out of our trenches of self-will and sin and into His loving embrace.

My prayer is that you, dear reader, would know this embrace and be reconciled with the God who loves you and me – us – more than we could ever know.

 

“There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God”

 John 1:9-12

 

 

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¹ Or perhaps that we are unable to discover.  I believe it’s possible that there are laws of the physical world that are only at play in certain conditions.  If those conditions aren’t met, then those laws don’t factor in.  If that’s true then we lack the ability to know if such hidden laws were at play in the conditions of the distant past, particularly if those conditions were different than what are in play today.

²Of course no one would be around to say this, which is why all the thoughts of philosophers, no matter how they are concocted will always, when taken to their ultimate conclusion, point to incomprehensible properties of existence.