That is true. We are finite and limited in our ability to comprehend the One who has created everything. Even the ancient writers in our Bible understood that our ability to fathom God was limited. Recall these words of scripture: ‘My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts.’

But know something of God we do. There is limited knowledge provided by considering the inestimable wonders of creation itself. We can go further considering what those wonders reveal. As Calvin points out, such reflection shows God to be majestic and wonderful and worth knowing. “His power has created such a great system and now sustains it; his wisdom has composed with such a distinct order a great complex of beings and things; his goodness is the reason all these things exist… his mercy which endures our iniquities with great kindness in order to call us to amendment… all this should abundantly teach us of a God that is necessary to know.”

But our sinfulness keeps us from recognizing all this in the world around us. We tend to focus on the ways that creation is not how we would have designed it. Or see “bad things” happening and wonder where that reveals this loving God. We overestimate own wisdom looking for other explanations for how this all came to exist. And we find other reasons for our behavior besides the “sin that clings so close.”

Calvin encourages us to overcome this “perversity” in viewpoint by turning to the scriptures. These become spectacles by which we see more clearly the God who is revealed to us. And he is right. In the scriptures we have a special revelation of God. Not just the revelation that comes from marveling at the beauty of the Earth, but a revelation that says among other things: “I am the LORD there is no other!”

What we should know about God is that the One, True, Living God is a God who speaks, who reveals; and all that we can know about God we can only know because God tells us. We learn who God is by what God tells us.

The ultimate revelation and telling of this God to us is the person of Jesus Christ. In his life and teachings we are shown the very nature of God. This is the point of what Christians call the Incarnation. In Christ Jesus we see who God is more clearly than we can ever see it on our own. Not only that, but in Christ we also have a mirror by which we can see the reflection of God. When on our own we develop a concept of God, if that concept does not correspond with the image of God we find in Christ, then our concept is flawed.

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” Colossians 1:15

What does it mean for you that in Jesus the One True, Living God is revealed?

Ben Franklin is reported to have said to Thomas Paine once in an argument about the nature of humanity, “If man is this way with religion imagine what he would be like without it?”

There is a lot of wisdom in that statement even if the underlying assumption, that religion is a human created experience, is somewhat troublesome. Still, Ben Franklin seems to at least hold an appropriately cynical attitude about humanity’s ability to get things right. Historically this conversation happens right at the dawn of the Enlightenment. The later thinkers of the Enlightenment would accept the idea of the “inherent perfectability of human beings.” They believed that we could improve ourselves into perfection. This runs counter to the Christian idea that there is no perfection for people outside of the grace of God.

But I digress.

Calvin wrote that everyone agrees that without religion people are not much better than brutish animals. This is no longer true. Today there are many people who feel that everyone would be better off without religion and there are some who even question the value of faith. We will stick with Calvin’s point. Even though many people agree that religion is good for people, “there is a great difference in the way of declaring one’s religion.” In short, people demonstrate their love for God in different ways and the practice of their faith in different ways, too.

Some folks live as best they can to ensure that if God is real they will have a sufficient number of “gold stars” on their chart to make sure they still qualify for eternal life. This manner of devotion is less than full devotion because it isn’t motivated by love of God or relationship with God so much as a selfish desire to get by with just enough “goodness” to keep God off their back.

Those who approach God with the “earning their gold stars” approach really exhibit a great deal of courage in their own estimation of who God is and what it takes to make God happy. Calvin would say that they are really just worshipping a God that they have estimated on their own. They don’t respond to the revealed God but to a God that they can feel comfortable worshipping. Bottom line they are motivated out of fear to meet at least the minimum expectations to avoid God’s wrath.

True devotion is different. The person who really “gets” who God is doesn’t fear God’s judgment as a motivation to escape it, but rather fears God’s judgments because of the certainty that escape is impossible. The Apostle Paul puts it well in Romans: “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

Once we recognize that we are “sinners” and in need of grace and mercy we are prepared to devote ourselves to God with a pure motivation and zeal. We are then sinners who have experienced forgiveness and can love God because of the restraint and mercy shown to us and to others without our even having earned it. As though we could do such a thing at all!

As Calvin points out those who experience this God and this devotion seek to understand this God more and more and refuse to conceive of God in a way that is counter to the revelation God has given us through Jesus Christ and Holy Scripture.

My hope is that teenagers and young adults both might find these short topics of interest.

#1 People are Hard-Wired for God

Have you ever wondered why there are so many different expressions of spirituality in the world? People attend church, synagogue, and mosque to worship their God.  While some Buddhists are not really believers in a Supreme Being, others follow the teachings of Buddha and meditate with the thought that he is divine.  Hindus worship many expressions of the divine. And even those people who seem to have no God spend time practicing “spirituality” through reflection time, special diets, and yoga.  Even atheists, including the ones who are the fiercest critics of religion and faith, extol a higher governing principle: reason.  People seem almost hard-wired for belief in a “higher power.”  Perhaps it is because people like to make order out of things and having a “higher power” promotes order out of chaos by giving meaning to the world and our lives. 

Some scientists have suggested that it is in very structure of our brains to respond to prayer and meditation and other practices that connect us with the divine; hence the phrase “hard-wired.”

Christians have been saying something similar for many centuries.

1. St. Augustine begins his Confessions by commenting that “our hearts are restless until they find rest in you, God.”

If you open your Bible to Romans 1, you can read the way the Apostle Paul described people and their natural desire to think about God: “that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For ever since the beginning of the world, God’s character though invisible — his great power and even greater nature — have been made visible by looking around us at the things that have been made.”

Put another way, Paul might have said take a look at yourself and the world around you.  Can you be so quick to say there is no God?  John Calvin spend less time speculating about the natural world as proof of God and said that the very fact that there are so many people who consider God a reality that they are proof that there is a God for us all to be thinking about.

 What do we do with this knowledge? Well, here is the first step in a greater faith in God.  Recognizing that there is a God means also accepting that God might have some claim upon you as your creator. Spend some time thinking about what it really means to believe there is a person that created you.  Then you may begin to see this life as less about you and your wants and more about how you and this God can know one another and work together.  Years and years ago, there were a group of Christians who wanted to put together a short series of questions and answers to teach people about the Christian faith.  The very first question / answer that they wrote summarizes this idea that there is a God and we are led naturally to think about God, delight in God, and learn from God.  Here is what they wrote: 

Q:  What is the main purpose of all people? A: To know God and to glorify God forever.

Spend some time thinking about what it could mean for your life to live with this idea in your heart.

The parable of the vineyard is the name that has been given to this story Jesus tells. The story is very straightforward and the if you read the passages that come right before you find that Jesus and the Pharasees are arguing about where he gets the authority to teach and cast out demons and do all those other amazing things that he is doing. This is why the story ends with ”Then they looked for a way to arrest him because they knew he had spoken the parable against them.”

The thing is though, the parable waas not just a cleverly concealed jab at the Pharisees or anybody else in the moment. The parable was also an indictment of all of us collectively. The parable is about the attitude of humanity towards God.

Take another look: “A man planted a vineyard… then he rented the vineyard out to some farmers.” Often times in Jesus parables “a man” equals God. This is not always true, but certainly makes sense in this case. The man in the parable sets up a vineyard (a lush place of life that will bring forth bountiful blessing) and then intrusts it to some hired folks (stewards) while he goes away. Does this sound familiar? If you had flashbacks to the story of the garden in Genesis you are hearing this parable the way I think Jesus intended us to hear it.

The Man sends repeatedly emissaries to bring in a portion of the harvest (Moses, King David, and various prophets come to mind) and all of them are treated mightly shabby. Beaten or killed. Finally the man decides to send his own son to reclaim the garden. ”surely they will respect my son.”

Instead the men decide to kill him. But look at there reasoning: ”This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.”

In the garden, what posesses Adam and Eve (representative of humanity) to break God’s law in the first place?

“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. ”For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3:4

“And you will be like God. “

“The inheritance will be ours.”

And there it is at the root of our problem. We want to be a law unto ourselves. Although we don’t always realize it, much of what we do is centered on our wanting to have control over our lives and the world around us. We almost subconsciously put ourselves (individually and together) in the place that God alone gets to occupy. This attitude is at the very heart of sinfulness. It is a self-centered outlook that leads to a break down in our relationship with God and with others.

A lot of our personal pain and societal pain can be related to people looking out only for themselves.

God of course shows us a different way. Living for others and (opposite from what we would expect) finding a more abuindant life.

The parable does end with a solid reassurance. The action that the people take backfires in the end because of God. Jesus quotes a psalm reminding people that those things which people intend to thwart God can always be turned by God into something beautiful.

” ‘The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone;
11the Lord has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’?”

It is indeed beautiful in our sight. We who would reject Jesus, including those people then who cruified him, are utlimately made whole by the very action we sought to use against God. In the resurrection Christ Jesus conquers sin and death for us all. The evil unleashed in the garden has its moment of great triumph (the death of God) reversed and robbed of all its power. The new creation has begun. All of its benefits now and in the not yet are ours to experience through faith by the Grace of God in Jesus Christ. The Lord has done this and it is marvelous in our eyes!

Some of you were concerned when I commented on the fact that I didn’t know if the story were “true.”

That’s understandable.  No one wants to hear their pastor imply that the Bible is not trustworthy.

Of course I never said that the Bible couldn’t be trusted.  It can.  I think in future weeks we will talk a little bit about “how” we know what we know.  There are different kinds of knowledge and there are differnt kinds of true.

Quick example.  Your heart is a muscle.  Your heart is also so much more than a muscle.  Both of those statements are true.  When your heart is broken it hurts just the same as a heart attack, maybe worse!  I don’t really know because I have never experienced an actual heart attack, but I have experienced feeling as though someone had ripped my heart from out of my chest and stomped on it. 

Our hearts are more than the literal elements of cardiac muscle, electrical impulse, and blood that the surgeons see when they perform an operation.  They are also the source of strength, courage, and deep love we exhibit towards challenges, enemies, and friends. 

All the stories in Genesis are based in some reality, some true element, no matter how fanciful they may seem. These stories (the Creation, the garden, Cain and Abel, Noah, etc) communicate deeper truths.  

• The One God created all there is and that creation is good.
• We are self-centered and try to be like God.
• We are jealous of one another and that sometimes causes violence to erupt.
• God has chosen to work out redemption and renewal of creation through us, flaws and all.
• All of our efforts to make a great name for ourselves are doomed.

Now all of these truths are true regardless of whether or not ever detail in the stories they correspond with are literally true. 

The point is do not get caught in the trap of thinking it is an all or nothing thing. 

There are Christians who believe every word of the first eleven chapters of Genesis. They are good Christians. They are faithful Christians.

There are Christians who do not believe every word of the first eleven chapters of Genesis.  They are good Christians.  They are faithful Christians.

Too often they do not respect each other’s opinions.  But the reality is that we cannot prove, scientifically or historically any of the stories found at the beginning of our Bible.  Those stories record events and people that go so far back into history that there is no way to verify the details. 

But there is more to it than that. The stories are communicating truths about God and about us.  Some of those truths are listed above. When we worry about the details and whether or not it is literally true, we miss the Truth that the stories are trying to tell us.  We miss the questions that the stories are asking us.

So, if you want to believe that there was a real Babel and that God mixed up our languages there.  Great.  But don’t miss the larger truth about not seeking greatness and meaning from a source outside of God.  If you do not believe that there was a real Babel, rather than discredit the Bible because of it take a moment to really listen to what the story is telling you and asking you.  Above all else, respect the opinion of the person who views the story in a different way from you.  Don’t label them, accuse them of being unfaithful or of being simpleminded, but respect them.  This is part of what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.

As for me, the story has some fanciful elements, but I choose to accept it on faith that it happened. And for now that is enough.

Over the past couple of weeks we have looked at Creation and the Garden of Eden.  In those two weeks we pointed out that creation is a story about limits being placed on Chaos and order being brought to the world.  It is also a story of how God created everything and that the God that we worship in Christ is this same mighty, transcendent God.  When we worship this Lord and ask of this God in prayer we should do so with humility.  

So now, the Flood. Here are a couple of observations on this narrative.  Again, like the story of the Garden and the story of the Creation, the Flood contains elements that we cannot verify scientifically and are somewhat fantastic.  A story like the Flood reminds us to take the story as we have it.  What I mean is we should read these stories with less of a mind to prove whether or not what happened really happened (or happened just as described in the story) but read them with a mind ready to hear the truth the story is trying to tell us.

God saw that the wickedness of humanity was great on the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.”  We have already seen sins of rebellion and disobedience in the Garden and the first murder in Cain and Abel.  If we think about these moments being repeated over and over among several hundreds of thousands of people we can begin to see how it is that God would make such a terrifying summation of who we are.  Think about the evening news.  After just a week of watching the news every night you too might consider that every intent of our hearts was only evil continually.

As I said last night, the most fascinating thing about the Flood narrative to me is that toward the end of the story (8:21) the LORD says “I will never again curse the ground on account of people, for the intent of the human heart is evil from its youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done.”  Nothing about who we are has changed in this story.  God, who has the authority to undo creation, passes judgment on people but ultimately doesn’t change who we are. To put it another way, instead of humanity 2.0, God decides to live with the system as it is.

I think there are two truths (at least) the Flood story is trying to tell us.

1) God is wholly other and God alone has the right to judge us for our misdeeds and indiscretions large and small.   Meaning that as much as we wish to be a law unto ourselves, God is Holy and Sovereign and has every right to judge our hearts and deliver justice towards us (individually and collectively) for the many ways that our thoughts, words, and deeds fail to meet His standards.  As Christians, we talk a lot about God’s mercy (for good reason) and ignore God’s justice.  We paint a picture of a judgmental God who is mean-spirited or haphazard in how justice is done.  When we act as though God should judge us or judges us imperfectly we sin.  We have put ourselves in God’s place again judging between good and evil

“All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” Paul writes.  This includes me and you.

God is just in all ways and we are guilty of sin. 

2. Because we haven’t been updated then free will must really matter to God.  Free will is a theological term for our ability to choose.  In English class you may have talked about “agency” or how much control a character has over the events that unfold in the story.  Free will is similar to agency. While Theologians (remmeber theologians are people who talk about God) disagree about the amount of free-will we have with regards to our salvation, no serious theologian questions whether we have free-will as people.  We have been created to live in freedom.  What we do not expect and is hard to imagine is that we best experience freedom when we surrender some of it to God.  Much of the sinfulness in the world is a misuse of the freedom we have been given.

Like I said, God has the chance to “start over” he doesn’t make humanity 2.0 with improved righteousness.  Instead God casts his lot with the same old version of humanity.  God places a rainbow in the sky as an ongoing symbol of the covenant that is made with Noah and his family, where they represent us, to work through people rather than against people for the culmination of his redemptive purposes.  What I mean is that God will see the world back to the way he intended it when it was first created, but God has decided to get there through the thoughts, words, and deeds of sinful people like you and I.  He must be God, who else would have the patience for that? 

God doesn’t want us to be robots mindlessly following him.  He wants us to live in freedom loving God and our neighbors well.

Finally, the story of Noah and the Flood and God’s decision to “stick it out” with us I think points us toward the Risen Lord Jesus Christ.  There we see the culmination of God’s redemptive action.  A moment in time wherein the mercy of God and the justice of God collide for our benefit.  We cannot live sinless lives, but we can rely upon the mercy of God mediated to us in the person of Jesus Christ, “the judge who is judged in our place.”

To be Christian is to recognize and declare that Jesus Christ is Lord.  What most Christians mean by this claim is that Jesus is uniquely the son of God and that belief in Jesus is life-changing.  Put another way: being a Christian matters and belief in Jesus makes a difference in a person’s life.

This has very little to do with evolution and everything with an assumption that there is something special about Jesus and in someway we need the truth that Jesus brings to us.

Wait.  Doesn’t the Bible say that God created the Universe and doesn’t evolution say that the world was created through a different process?

Not exactly.  The Bible does say (in several places) that everything that is came into existence by the power of God. Evolution, at least how I understand it, describes a process by which life in all of its form developed on this Earth over many, many thousands of millenia.  It is independent of the existence of God, but is used by many atheists (which literally means non-theist or non-”God oriented”) as an argument against the existence of God. But a person can believe in God (a Theist) and still accept the scientific principles of evolution.

But what about the seven day creation depicted in Genesis?  When we read the story of Creation literally we may have a problem with evolution.  But, that story is not now, nor ever was intended to be, a story about scientific origins.  No where in Genesis 1 does it explain how God creates. Instead, it is a theological (theology means “words about God”) claim.  The claim is that God is the source of everything. 

At the time that Genesis was written this was a big deal.  The cultures and peoples around the ancient Middle East had stories of the world being created because Gods had sex with one another or fought with one another and the world was formed in the violence that resulted. The writer of Genesis shouts out a resounding “NO!”  The world isn’t the offspring of some strange sexual relationship or the result of dramatic violence and death.  The world was created by the one God.  And, the creation is good!

It was and still remains a radical idea.   Those atheists that insist that the world was created from a random set of events starting with the Big Bang and proceeding over millions and billions of years until this moment are also making a claim about the nature of the universe: that it just happened, continues to just happen, and has no other end in sight!  This universe is neither good nor bad, but simply is and it is random at that. 

But the Christian still says, No!  It didn’t just happen.  It isn’t just random.  It is God created and it is good.

This is part of why we listened to the song “Black and Gold.”  Black and Gold by Sam Sparro

In the song, a person considers the possibility that the world exists without God, but finds that there is more to life than what can “be seen.”  In the song the person notes that there is the “weight of something beyond” but doesn’t know where it fits in.  The Song is an excellent discussion about the difficulty of looking at the world only through the eyes of a science (only accepting what can be seen, tasted, touched, smelled, etc. And only believing what can be absolutely proven) when there are some things that are true about life that cannot be seen (“if vision is the only validation then most of my life isn’t real’) or proven.

My favorite part of the song is “if you are not really there then the stars don’t even matter and I am filled to the top with fear that it is all just a bunch of matter.” 

The person in the song and the author of Genesis have something in common.  The world makes more sense and is a better place when we recognize the existence of a God that can “put the world into motion.”

Listen to the song and think about the limits of what we can proven.  Do you feel the weight of something beyond?  Do you sometimes feel the presence of another even when you are alone? If so, it could be the Holy Spirit talking to you.  God maybe trying to get your attention!

If you follow that post and watch the video for Black and Gold on You Tube, there is a comment by someone who has been there before you (that is also what the Bible is… comments from people who have been there before us).  The person writes “I don’t get it.  It’s about God?  But it is like a love song. ”

Yep.  It reminds me of someone else who spent a long time trying to avoid God.  Later on he became a great writer of the Christian faith.  His name was Augustine.  His most famous book is The Confessions.  In it he describes his many sins, his effort to avoid God, and what happened after he gave in to God’s approach.  It is almost like a love affair and he wrote these famous words, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest with You.”

That song, makes me think of that. 

So.  Recap: Evolution is a system of scientific principles to explain the development of life on Earth.  Christians can believe in evolution and take their Bible seriously.  Christians are free to believe in evolution or not.  Our ability to understand the universe is limited when we accept only what we can prove.  Our hearts are restless until they find a deeper relationship with God.  Oh, and Black and Gold is a really cool song.