Personal Blogs

The Universe Does Not Owe Us Simplicity

The world presents us with great mysteries, and strangely enough, we learn to live with them. Consciousness is one. We experience it every waking moment, yet what consciousness actually is remains profoundly difficult to explain. Time is another. Why does time seem to have a direction, carrying us relentlessly from yesterday into tomorrow? Then there are the quiet mysteries of mathematics. Why is two plus two four? Human beings discovered this truth, but we did not invent the reality behind it. Long before anyone scratched numbers onto stone or paper, two stars added to two stars still made four.

Last year I was sitting in an outdoor café on one of the Scottish islands when I fell into conversation with a physicist. Before long we found ourselves talking about quantum entanglement. It is one of creation’s strangest discoveries. Two particles can become linked in such a way that they have to be described as parts of a single quantum state, even when separated by enormous distances. Measurements reveal correlations between them that cannot be explained by imagining that each particle simply carried a set of hidden instructions from the beginning. Yet this does not allow a usable message to travel instantaneously between them.

There is something wonderfully unsettling about this; "Spooky" said Einstein. At the quantum level, nature refuses to behave according to the common sense we have acquired from living among tables, trees, stones and teacups. Reality is stranger than our everyday intuition tells us it ought to be. The universe does not owe us simplicity.

And this brings me to God.

If God is the creator of this astonishing universe, then all its mysteries ultimately exist within a reality known to him. Yet we human beings continually try to understand God, and there is nothing wrong with that. The desire to understand is one of the beautiful things about us. The difficulty begins when we imagine that God must fit neatly inside the categories our minds have constructed.

Christians themselves have wrestled with this for centuries. Jehovah’s Witnesses distinguish Jehovah from Jesus in a way traditional Trinitarian Christianity does not. Presbyterians, along with most historic Christian traditions, confess Jesus as truly divine, while Christadelphians understand him differently again. These differences are significant, and I am not pretending they do not matter. I am simply saying that a person opening the Bible for the first time need not solve every one of them before being allowed to enjoy the extraordinary story unfolding before them.

Read the Bible first. Let it surprise you.

As you read, you will encounter passages in which God the Father is in heaven while Jesus is walking the dusty roads of Galilee. You will see Jesus praying to the Father, loving the Father and obeying the Father. You will encounter moments in which Jesus speaks of things known by the Father that he himself does not know. Then you will turn another page and find astonishing language applied to Jesus. You will find people worshipping him. You will encounter the mysterious declaration that the Word was with God and that the Word was God, followed by the even more startling claim that this Word became flesh and lived among us.

Then Paul adds another piece to the mystery. He describes Christ as existing in the form of God and yet emptying himself, taking the form of a servant and entering fully into human life. Suddenly the reader is faced with something far larger than a tidy religious formula. God is not becoming easier to put into a box. He is becoming harder.

That need not frighten us. It can be exhilarating.

Think about something much simpler. Can God hear two hundred Christians praying at the same moment? Most believers would answer yes without hesitation. What about two million? What if they are scattered across every continent, praying in hundreds of languages? We do not imagine God frantically switching his attention from London to Lagos, from a hospital room in Glasgow to a kitchen table in Sydney. We instinctively understand that God does not experience presence and attention with the limitations that govern us.

So why should we be astonished when the Bible presents us with a God whose existence exceeds our ordinary categories?

Can God be present in heaven and make himself known on earth? If he created space, why should space imprison him? If he created time, why should time contain him in the way it contains us? If the deepest levels of his creation already overturn our everyday intuitions about distance, matter and relationship, should we expect the Creator himself to be less mysterious than the universe he made?

This is not an attempt to use quantum physics to prove the nature of God. Physics cannot do that. Proton entanglement does not prove the Trinity, nor can a laboratory tell us who Jesus is. The point is simpler and, I think, more beautiful: reality has already taught us some humility. Things can be true without being easy to picture.

We are very small creatures attempting to understand the One who, according to the Bible, called the universe into existence. At times I imagine us like ants living inside a little box in a garden shed. The ants might become remarkably knowledgeable about their box. They could map every corner and examine every grain of dust. Yet beyond the box is the shed, beyond the shed is the garden, beyond the garden are towns and oceans and continents, and above them is a universe whose immensity they could never imagine.

How much greater might the distance be between our understanding and the fullness of God?

So if you are new to the Bible, do not be discouraged when you encounter something you cannot immediately reconcile. Do not feel that you must arrive armed with a theological system and force every verse into its proper compartment like some kind of theological bento box. Read. Explore. Ask questions. Notice the tensions. Notice the beauty. Notice how often the Bible refuses to reduce God to something comfortably manageable.

There will be time to investigate doctrines and listen to the arguments Christians have made across the centuries. Some of those questions matter deeply and deserve serious thought. But do not let the arguments steal the wonder before you have even encountered it.

Open the Bible and meet its God.

Walk beside Jesus through Galilee. Listen to his words. Watch the way he treats frightened people, outsiders, children, sinners and the self-righteous. Hear him pray to his Father. Stand with the disciples when the storm becomes still. Sit at the table at the Last Supper. Follow the bewildered women to an empty tomb. Let the questions come naturally instead of being afraid of them.

You do not have to understand the ocean before you are allowed to stand on the shore and be amazed by it. In the same way, you do not have to solve the mystery of God before you begin seeking him.

Sometimes wonder is where understanding begins.

Checking Out of the Dark Place: When God Finds Us 

In view of the interest in the previous blog. Let's follow it up. Augustine of Hippo records in his autobiography a period when his life descended into darkness. He was enslaved by lust, ambition and pride. Although his mother, Monica, had nurtured him in the Christian faith, he repeatedly postponed committing himself to Christ. He knew the truth, yet he could not bring himself to live by it.

The decisive moment came in a garden in Milan around AD 386.

Overwhelmed with despair, Augustine threw himself beneath a fig tree and wept. He cried out to God, asking how long he would continue living as he was. Then he heard what sounded like the voice of a young child—he never knew whether it was a boy or a girl—chanting over and over:

'Take up and read. Take up and read.'

Taking this as God's answer to his prayer, Augustine picked up a copy of Paul's letters that was nearby and opened it. His eyes fell on these words of Romans 13:13–14,

'Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Instead, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.' (BSB).

Augustine later wrote:

'No further would I read; nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.'

That moment changed everything. Augustine abandoned his former life, was later baptised by Ambrose, and went on to become one of the most influential Christian thinkers in history.

I have had a similar experience like that of Augustine’s that I have shared in earlier blogs and I think of Augustine because many people today also leave religion, though for very different reasons. Some are swept along by the atheistic spirit of the age, where belief in God is quietly pushed aside. Others leave because they have escaped a controlling religious environment. They expect freedom, yet discover an unexpected emptiness. Years of fear, guilt and manipulation do not disappear overnight. Manipulative religious groups can leave deep marks on the heart.

Yet the Bible never asks us to place our faith in an organisation.

When some people questioned the Apostle Paul's message, they did not simply accept or reject it. They searched the Scriptures to see whether what he said was true. Far from condemning them, Luke says they were 'more noble' because they examined the evidence for themselves (Acts 17:11). Today we have both the Old and New Testaments to do exactly the same.

There is another moment that has always struck me. After many people stopped following Jesus turned to the Twelve and asked, 'Do you want to go away as well?' Peter answered, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life' (John 6:68).

Notice what Peter did not say, 'Where shall we go?' He asked, 'To whom shall we go?'

That difference matters.

Christianity is, before anything else, a relationship with a Person. Congregations can encourage us, teach us and walk beside us. They are important. But they are not the destination. Jesus is. As he himself said, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life.'

History is filled with people who walked away from God only to discover that he had never stopped pursuing them.

The nanotechnologist James Tour has spoken openly about dismissing Christianity as a young man until someone simply invited him to listen to a passage of Scripture. It changed his life. You can watch him relate the moment this happened in the following link:

Jewish scientist (James Tour) makes the greatest Jewish discovery!!

If you have left a religion or unaware that God is seeking you. Search the Scriptures with an open mind. Ask honest questions. Read the Gospels again. Follow the evidence wherever it leads.

The God who met Augustine beneath a fig tree still meets people today. Sometimes all it takes is the willingness to take up the Book—and read.