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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.