God’s Right to God

I was remembering this morning, when I was a teenager I used to love science fiction. I would read every science fiction story I could get my hands on. And that was a lot because on my way home from school I used to go past 3 libraries and 2 second hand book shops every day. And I stoped at most of them every day too.

One day my mum challenged me on my reading, she said that these books were anti God and that a Christian should not read them. I thought she was crazy. I replied that these books had nothing to do with God, for or against, they did not deny his reality in the real universe, they just described universes where He did not exist. At the time this seemed perfectly reasonable to me. 

 

This morning I realised that to imagine a world where God does not exist is the same as saying that you wish God was dead. It’s what murders do before they go and kill the person who is inconvenient to them. 

 

Then I started thinking about the characters who come closest to a God figure in various sci fi worlds. For example Q in StarTrek. What is the difference between God and Q?

 

They are both all powerful beings, able to create and destroy on whim. But apart from the fact that Q is imaginary and God is real, how are they different? The first thing I thought about is character, God is Good, while Q is at best amoral. God loves and uses His power for the good of all beings in the universe. Q loves himself and uses his power only for his own pleasure and convenience. Yes there is some character development due to his interactions with Picard and others but still at base he is a selfish amoral being.

 

So then I thought, what gives God the right to be God? While Q is just an all powerful being? Why can’t Q be a god too? He has the powers. And as I thought about that what came to the fore is creation. God’s only right to claim our love and worship and honour and reverence is that He created us. If He had just been wandering through whatever exists outside our universe and discovered us in our expanding universal ball (I imagine the universe as a beach ball sitting on some cosmic beach that we are completely unaware of and unaffected by.) He would have had no right to do anything to or with us. The only reason He has a right to be our God is because He made us. The fact that He loves and cares for us is an added bonus. 😸 This realisation made me feel very small and repentant for my younger self and her ignorant ideas.

Not 1 Jot

This morning I was reading this passage, 

“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” Matthew 5:17-18

Then I started thinking about the law, and something I’ve thought for a long long time.

I’ve always thought that the difference between old covenant and new covenant is our view of the law, who keeps it. 

If I see the law as a list of requirements that I must perform then I am indulging in old covenant thinking, and I’m striving towards improving my performance for salvation. 

If I see the law as a list of promises that God performs in me then I am partaking in new covenant thinking, and I’m resting in God’s performance for my sanctification and salvation. 

It’s possible for a person to have both kinds of thinking. Sometimes it is in different periods of life, or surrounding different issues. 

Abraham for example. He had new covenant thinking when he took God’s promise of a land of his own and headed out without knowing where he was going. He trusted God to keep His promise and it was counted to him as righteousness. But then there was the famine and he took his family to Egypt and fell into old covenant thinking. He forgot Gods promise to care for him and tried to save himself by giving up Sarah. And the amazing thing is that even in Abraham’s lack of trust God was still faithful to His promise and rescued Sarah and took them all back to the promised land. 

Then God made a promise of a son and Abraham had old covenant thinking, he tried and tried to produce that son, and failed. He produced a son, but it wasn’t the one God had promised. And again God was faithful. He fulfilled His promise and gave Isaac to Sarah and Abraham. 

Then God asked for the son back, and Abraham did not resist. He immediately took Isaac to the mountain to sacrifice him. That’s new covenant thinking. Abraham recognised that God’s promise was not complete, Isaac didn’t have offspring through which the world would be blessed, and he trusted that promise enough to do what God said, trusting that God could raise Isaac from the dead. 

So how does this relate to this mornings passage?

“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”

Jesus is saying the law will not change, not one tiny bit. 

If I’m an old covenant thinker then I know the law is strict. I must work harder to meet its standard. I must not kill or hate or even think of people as being unsave-able. I must keep the Sabbath perfectly, I must be careful to honour both my parents and God, the list of things I must do is infinite. This view of the law is demoralising. 

If I am a new covenant thinker then I look at this verse as another promise, not even the tiniest bit of God’s promises will be forgotten. He will fulfill everything He has promised in His law. He will give me that new heart that hates sin, that doesn’t want to steal or kill, that loves every one, that thinks everyone can be saved. I can take those promises to the bank because it’s Jesus doing it, not me. And I can rest. 

“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”

“I haven’t come to tell you to disregard the law, I’ve come to keep it perfectly for you, to change you so that you keep it perfectly too, without even trying. If you let me do it my way it will come naturally to you. You have just one job, don’t resist the working of my Holy Spirit in you.”

How Big is God?

I was thinking about biochemistry this week. How our human body operates because of many many many overlapping chemical reactions that are shepherded by enzymes and corralled with feedback mechanisms. Even simply reaction pathways and cycles are barely understood and incredibly complicated. The Krebs Cycle for example that gives us the energy to get up in the morning or to run a marathon is a complicated reaction cycle that requires a bunch of study to understand. Or the female reproductive cycle? It's responsible for the existence every single human being on the planet and we still don't really understand all it's intricacies. Or how about the production of vitamin D? That's a reaction pathway with several steps, one of which requires the action of sunlight as a catalyst on chemicals in the skin, without it we can suffer from depression or insomnia or a number of other problems. Our bodies are made of hundreds of thousands these reactions, all carefully controlled by other chemicals, all coded in the DNA, and capable of interacting with the environment to change that coding.

Imagine the mind that is able to hold and understand all that biochemistry, imagine the being that could design those systems, and then make them adaptable so that every single human is different and yet their systems still work.

Now humanity is just one type of organism. Our world is populated with hundreds of thousands of species, each with their own unique biochemical design. The designer, He keeps all these designs in mind, every single one of them, from the tiny ant in its colony to the giant redwood in its forest, from the human in its self determination to the jellyfish floating on the tides.

But lets step back, look at the bigger picture. All these species live in community, they interact with members of their own species and they also interact with other species, a giant ecosystem, the web of life. That ant, its an efficient little cleaner, collecting and eating dead matter, building its tunnels under the surface of the earth and aerating the soil, when they move on fungi and bacteria grow in the empty tunnels, further breaking down the decomposing material. These actions provide nutrients for that redwood to grow. Then the redwood, it processes carbon dioxide, turning it back to oxygen for us humans and all the other animals to breath. And the jellyfish, even it is a benefit to the world around it, as it moves it stirs up the water, it and the other fish, they are responsible for keeping the ocean moving, yes there are tides, and the wind, but once we go down below the surface we don't have to go far before the effect of the wind and tides is minimal, without jelly fish and all the other sea creatures the oceans would become stale and stagnant, our continually moving oceans, they are full of algae, tiny plants that take carbon dioxide dissolved in the water and turn it into oxygen for the fish to breath through their gills, and then the fish in turn become food for humans.

Imagine the mind that not only designs the biochemistry every species in the world, and codes in in a 4 letter alphabet, but this mind also designs the web of life where all these different species interact and benefit each other.

That's a big mind. A big creator. A big God.