01/07/2009 Psalms 33:6

01/07/2009

Psalms 33:6 - 9 (HCSB) ⁶The heavens were made by the word of the LORD,
    and all the stars, by the breath of His mouth.
⁷He gathers the waters of the sea into a heap;
    He puts the depths into storehouses.
⁸Let the whole earth tremble before the LORD;
    let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him.
⁹For He spoke, and it came into being;
    He commanded, and it came into existence.
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Imagine time as a deck of cards. Before I break the seal, I can tell you that the first card is the brand card. The next is the big-joker, followed by the ace of spades, the two of spades, and so on to the last card, which is the little-joker. Why do I know this? Because I am outside of the cards. I can conceive of the entire contents and order from end to end.

Kurt Vonnegut in his book “Slaughterhouse 5” tells the story of Billy Pilgrim. In the book, time is described in just this way; that every moment is like a card and all of the cards have been thrown at random on the floor and then gathered back into a stack in their hap-hazard state. Each card is aware that it is one in a sequence and so far as it knows, there is a designated predecessor and successor. Everyone who lives out these moments only sees them in the pre-ordained order that they were created. However, in the story, Billy is allowed to experience the cards – the moments – out of sequence. Billy lives life jumping from one moment to the next, sometimes crossing decades because the cards (moments of time) are not in order.

I don’t know that Kurt Vonnegut was trying to make any theological statement in the story. But when I read the book, I was immediately stricken with an interesting notion of how God sees time. That is, because He created time, he has a unique perspective of what we take for an absolute, unchangeable fact. Just like I could comprehend the entire deck of cards at one moment, God can comprehend all of time – because He is outside of it.

One of the greatest problems people have when considering God is that they cannot get past the fact that things can exist beyond the limits of *our* understanding; that is, of space and time. We struggle to imagine anything - including God - that transcends our physical universe. People like Steven J. Gould and Richard Dawkins suppose that since (in their opinion) nothing can exist beyond our physical universe, then whatever “god” there may be is subject to it. This is an epidemic problem. Even the Mormons teach that matter and time are eternal, but God is not.

It is truly difficult to imagine God above and beyond our universe. That is because God made us with this limitation in our understanding. The leap we make from a god within our universe to a God beyond our universe is what we call “faith.” And that is how God designed it.

One theologian put it this way: God has revealed Himself just enough to show us He is there, but veiled Himself just enough to require faith.

Whenever we try to imagine God outside of our universe, we immediately think of some huge guy holding our universe in his hands like a snow-globe, or perhaps some other similar analogy. And we struggle to paint God in terms that we understand; a physical body, sitting on a throne, subject to time as He observes our goings-on. But the point of faith comes into play when we let all that go and simply acknowledge that He is there, He is over all, and by Him all things were created by the simple breath of His words. He did not pick up something to make something else. He created something from nothing. He created time from timelessness.

For He spoke, and it came into being;
He commanded, and it came into existence.

Do you have the faith to let go of your limitations of God to let Him be who He is?

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