Life Matters - September 13, 2023
Life on this spinning orb making its daily revolutions as it tracks in its precise yearly orbit around the sun has its joys, its sorrows, its emotional highs and its lows. It is an orbit so precise that it has been discovered to be taking 365 and one-quarter days to fully complete that orbit around the sun, so every four years we have a “leap year,” wherein a day is added to the calendar, giving the month of February 29 days instead of the usual 28. Next to reading, math was close to the subject I liked best in the country school of my fortunate upbringing. Math was predictable. From the simple to the complex, if one did the numbers in their prescribed order the answer was so right it could be proven right by cross referencing, a cross-examination accomplished by doing the problem backwards, ending up at the original starting point.
God is the starting point of all things, both material and terrestrial. I will refrain from commenting on the celestial here except that God is without beginning and without end though the angels are referred to as created beings. (Hebrews 1:5-7) Many are the proofs that God does indeed exist and one of those proofs that I have tended to overlook is mathematics. It is a mathematical impossibility for this precise cosmos to have been formed without an orderly God overseeing it all. God is a mathematical necessity. From the beginning of time as we know it, the sun has been rising in the morning and setting in the evening, the moon has been going through its phases, tides have been rising and falling, days, nights, weeks, and years have been consistent. What mankind didn’t know until this past century is that the universal and consistent precision of the cosmos that this spinning orb is a part of makes space exploration not only a dream, but doable. Because of that very precision it is mathematically possible to determine at what instant a projectile can be blasted from a launch pad on Earth for a rendezvous with the moon, as it tracks in its own orderly orbit. The moon is not always at the same place in the night sky, but traveling in its orbit is so predictable that the natives of this country we are still pleased to dwell in would refer to the full cycle of moon phases as a “moon,” hence terms such as “many moons ago.”
The natives of past centuries did not know much about this globe, the sun, the moon, or the stars. They knew nothing about molecules, atoms, nuclei, atomic bombs, nor any nuclear weapons. They never heard of Google, Wikipedia, Siri, smart phones nor any other of the technology we call digital. The natives of this country, in fact natives across this entire globe, did not have the knowledge we have today about the vast universe that mankind still has not found the end to, a universe so vast that the stronger the telescope, the more there is to see. Mankind has also never found the end to the minute details in life as the stronger the microscope, the more there is to discover.
What most natives of past centuries all across this globe had more of than the present generation, however, is wisdom, for we may know something but not apply that knowledge wisely. We may know that the turnip has more nutritional value than the Twinkie and still choose the Twinkie, our taste buds overcoming all we know about nutrition.
We live in a time of pervasive unbelief, an unbelief continuously bolstered by the foolish idea that millions of years can produce, and have produced, life. The chance of that happening is a mathematical impossibility, as impossible as it had been for Hiroshima and Nagasaki to rebuild themselves, without human intervention, using only their rubble and ashes, millions of years only underscoring that impossibility.
With God, however, all things are possible. (Matthew 19:26) So as this spinning orb continues adding days and years by its orbit, as we gain knowledge about it and uncover more of its heretofore mysterious details, let us not settle for an unhealthy spiritual life, dining on meals of “Twinkie” knowledge, but may all knowledge lead us to a deeper understanding, a deeper relationship with God. Wisdom, after all, magnifies God’s grace to us giving us the “big picture.” As He wills and in His time. Life Matters!