From Star Trek "Into Darkness" to God's Revelation: Into Light

I’m watching a special on the History Channel that’s investigating physics from observations of the latest Star Trek movie. One statement was made that I think relates to understanding God. One of the contributing physicists made the comment that we don’t know why time dilation exists. This isn’t entirely true. He didn’t qualify this comment, but let me investigate it briefly and then turn to what this means for understanding God.

The speed of light is the speed limit of the universe despite theoretical speculations of warp fields and wormholes. The reason why is related to the production of electromagnetic radiation, aka “light”. Light doesn’t have mass. We can say that light transfers energy. More accurately, it is a pattern of energy manifest in multiple spacetime frames of reference. I’ll keep it as simple as possible:

Energy is transferred from particle of matter to particle of matter when those particles come close enough for their respective systems of forces to influence each other significantly. When a photon of light is produced, the particle that produced it approaches the speed f light and suddenly loses energy. That energy is transferred to the object the photon eventually strikes. As the particle that produced the photon approaches the speed of light in the process, the distance between it and the object that will eventually absorb the photon that is produced is diminished infinitely within the frame of reference of the originating particle. This is called distance contraction and is part and parcel of time dilation. So as far as the source particle is concerned, it hits the receiving particle and thus loses energy.

To the outside observer, no distance ever closed in. What happened is that time dilated for the originating particle and distance contracted. Once the energy transfer happened, the distance snapped back to “normal” and its temporal frame of reference became relatively aligned once again with its surrounding objects. But the distance contraction is represented to the outside observer as a photon and the observation of the originating particle hitting the receiving particle is represented as a difference of time related to the distance. This is the speed of light.

The reason we have time dilation is more easily thought about with a simple thought experiment. If Bonnie and Clyde drive by in their automobile and fire a gun down the road, the velocity of the bullet relative to Bonnie and Clyde is roughly the same as if the vehicle were not in motion. To someone standing by the side of the road, the bullet whizzes by at the velocity of the bullet if the vehicle were not in motion plus the velocity of the vehicle.

But light is different. If it were night time and Bonnie and Clyde had their headlights on, the velocity of the photons being emitted from the front of the vehicle would be precisely the speed of light. To the observer on the side of the road, the velocity of the photons would also be precisely the speed of light. So what happened to the speed of the vehicle? That’s where time dilation comes into play. There is a time differential between the vehicle and the observer on the side of the road that accounts for the difference due to the velocity of the car. That’s time dilation.

Now add to this that a vast spectrum of electromagnetic radiation is passing around us constantly in all directions. We perceive a relatively uniform temporal frame of reference. However, it is anything but uniform. On the subatomic level, time is extremely volatile and changing. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be able to perceive anything around us. The chemical processes that make our bodies work couldn’t happen. We wouldn’t be able to see the world around us. There would be no life.

Where to go from here? I could talk about creation and how this applies to developing cosmologies. I could talk about how this isn’t often applied very well when people consider the various speculations regarding the beginnings of the universe. But I want to make another observation regarding God’s revelation of himself.

What I’ve written above in very simple and short order is understood by very few people, including some physicists who are interviewed by TV shows. The reason is that most people find it acceptable to relate to and survive in the world with the mere macroscopic perceptions available to us. Most people couldn’t tell you how a simple radio works, but they know how to use one.

God revealed himself to us in a very practical way. In this way, even many intellectually challenged people can grasp the basics about God. However, the depth of information included is enough to make the brightest among us wrestle with some of the issues he revealed to us. Most people are able to function quite well with the information God has provided although some concepts are difficult and present apparently conflicting concepts.

The fact is, God knows the range of intelligence of the creatures that bear his image and planned on giving us all enough to warrant a knowing faith as well as keep us learning about him for a lifetime. The Great Commission is more than simply leading someone into the Kingdom. The Great Commission is more than simply teaching a new believer the basics. We are all to be disciples until we pass from this world.

What Is Free Will According to the Bible?

The issue of free will is a common topic of thought that influences so much of how we perceive the world. In Christian circles, it delineates how we understand God’s sovereignty. The relationship between God’s sovereignty and man’s will may not be immediately evident if you’ve never thought about it, but when the different views are investigated, it’s not man’s will that is primarily at stake, but God’s sovereignty.

The two general views I will be discussing loosely be referred to as “synergism” held by “synergists” and “monergism” held by “monergists”. Other terms are often used for either view, but these more closely describe their differences.

1. Synergists hold that God created man with a free will that God has no control at all over. This doesn’t speak to how God has no control over man’s will. Synergists vary widely on their explanations here and I won’t discuss those here. Essentially, for man to be saved, God does his part and man does his part.
2. Monergists hold that God created man with a free will that is limited by God’s will. For man to be saved, God does all of it including giving faith to the man. With the faith that God has given, man therefore freely chooses God.

Systems of Categories

To properly understand the issue, we need to clarify the differences in categories. Because of cultural sensibilities in the West, most people categorize willful actions into two mutually exclusive categories:

a. Things God controls.

b. Things man controls.

This is the basic understanding of synergists.

The question then arises whether this categorical system is understood and employed by the Biblical authors. Paul, writing to Jews and Greeks alike in his letter to the Romans, understands that some may use this system. In chapter 9 he anticipates the question, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But his answer is to imply a different system of categorization: “But who are you, O man, to answer back to God?”

Paul had already discussed this other system of categorization in Romans 6. There he indicates that we are either in bondage to sin or in bondage to righteousness. There is no middle of the road. He indicates that we will either desire sin or desire God’s will when he says in verse 17 that “you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed.” Even still, he recognizes that cultural philosophies will make it difficult for many to understand when he says in verse 19, “I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations.”

He also teaches this to the Corinthians in the second letter we have to them. In chapter 4 Paul writes in verse 7 that “the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.” The verses that follow spell out the nature of what this means. But the previous verse tells us something else about how the will of man and God’s will differ:

‘For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shown in our hearts to give the light of knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’

Some synergists contend that this means that God brings us up to the point where we can choose freely, indicating that we could choose to deny God at this point. I would disagree saying that this is a description of what Paul indicates in Rom 12:3. However, I want to point out something else that both side should agree with in this verse: God’s will is creative and man’s will is reactive. In other words God’s will creates what God desires by the sheer power of God. Man can create nothing. Rather, we make choices that are before us based on factors that are entirely within God’s creative order. God’s will creates. Our will reacts to creation. There is nothing above God that hinders him in any way.

But perhaps our best example is Jesus Christ. Both God and man, he has a will that is both creative and reactive. This is why he told the disciples in John 6 that he came “not to do my own will, but of the will of [the father].” Therefore, we are to use a different system of categorization than the one above:

a. God’s will

b. Man’s will

This is the basic understanding of monergists.

On the surface, this looks like a different way of writing the same categories. However, they indeed are different. In the first set, man controls things that God does not. The set of things that man controls are subject to his decisions. Following God is not in the set of things that God controls. In the second set of categorizations, man can either choose to do God’s will or to do his own will. If it is God’s will that he chooses to do God’s will, then even that is God’s will. Man’s will is anything that does not agree with God’s will. So if we do Man’s will, we are in bondage to sin. If we do God’s will, we are in bondage to righteousness and free from sin.

The mistake in most debates is to conflate these two systems. You can’t impose one system on the other and expect to have a reasonable debate. The reason is because the method of God’s influence is confused. Synergists will incorrectly interpret monergism as indicating that God manipulates his people like puppets. This is an incorrect understanding of the second system. Monergists may incorrectly interpret the first system as indicating that synergists don’t truly believe that God is sovereign. 


The Fundamental Difference

However, Monergists aren’t far off base. What synergists do in order to claim God as sovereign is to modify their definition of sovereignty. Many of them hold definitions that are within the pale of Christian orthodoxy, so they should be well accepted as brothers and sisters in Christ.

What I do note is that synergists actually hold to some limitations on the free will of man. For example, who would say, if asked, that men can make decisions that are not before them to make. Can I decide to buy a blue car if only a green one or a red one is available? No. That decision is not before me. Can I decide to create a new universe that does not exist? No. I don’t have that power. I can perhaps imagine another universe to some small degree, but actually creating one is outside of my will. Can I make a decision that belongs to someone else? To be sure, people try to do this. They influence public opinion with propaganda or try to manipulate the factors that influence a person’s decision. However, none of us has the power to directly make a decision for someone else. We have limits on our will.

So, synergists should agree that man’s will is limited. Monergists already hold this openly. The difference is merely one of degree.

What is truly different is that monergists place no limit whatsoever on the sovereignty of God. Synergists must. If man is to have things that he controls that God does not, then God must not have control over those things. That’s a limitation on his sovereignty. So the question of free will is really no so much about the will of man, although it is to a degree; it’s really about the sovereignty of God. 


Monergistic Method of Free Will

For the Synergists out there who might chance to read this, you may be wondering how it is that monergists believe that God gives free will, limited as it is, and yet remains completely sovereign over all things. I will explain what it is that monergists generally believe.

There are two areas of influence that God takes with people. Everyone is influenced by his created order. No one makes any decision or choice that isn’t contingent on God’s created order. God doesn’t directly influence decisions, but the free will of man flows out of what is to us an extremely complex set of physical and spiritual factors. Remember that I said that God’s will is creative and man’s will is reactive.

But there’s another factor that only some people have. God himself indwells some people. That doesn’t mean that God is directly making the decisions for the people he indwells. Rather, he guides, like a father, those he indwells. He holds back information until his people are mature enough to handle that information. They can use the information they obtain as they grow in their understanding of God to make decisions. What God creates in them is not a compulsory faith, but a faith of life. Indwelling his children has made them alive so that they are no longer in bondage to sin, but free from sin and in bondage to righteousness. That means that they have a desire for God. What God gives his children in the regenerating life of the Holy Spirit is a desire for God that they absolutely did not have before.

That’s how God influences his children. As such, I will testify that my will is not my own, but my desire, like Christ, is to do the will of my Father in heaven.


To God be the Glory!

Called to Give Up?

I read an article by Dan Phillips, pastor of Copperfield Bible Church in Houston Texas, on his Pyromaniacs site recently that prompted a question:

So I have a question. If you wrote and no one read or you spoke and no one heard, yet you know you had something valuable to offer by way of writing or speaking, would you give up or try to figure out how to be better "heard"? I know of many who have far fewer, if any, readers and listeners than you do who likewise have valuable things to communicate.

Dan replied:

Me personally? I'd probably give up. As long as I could stand it. Then I'd try something else when I couldn't stand it any longer.

Right now, I'm writing to a scant few people. This will automatically post notifications on both my Google+ account and my Facebook page. Normally, I don't see much traffic from these. I don't get much traffic from elsewhere either. The fact is that very few people really care what I have to say - ever.

So perhaps there's another ministry I should try. I took a spiritual gifts assessment recently so I could discover what direction I should go. Now, to be honest I've gone through this exercise more than once in the past. I have plenty of strengths. I have plenty of weaknesses. What I don't have is a ministry niche.

What I do have are scattered and diverse opportunities:

• I sing with a choir made up of older people from around the North Carolina Piedmont a few times a year. We do a pretty good job singing to small crowds in small churches and in nursing homes. Largely it's fun. 
• I occasionally get to provide music or give a talk in a local off-brand Cursillo movement. A few people's lives are changed by the movement and I get to have fun doing it.
•  One church is considering asking me to lead the music at one of their services.
• Another church has asked if I would be their interim pastor if something happens to the retired pastor who is currently serving them.
• I can do a few technical things like run sound and edit videos. No one is looking for a good sound tech, but a few sound techs are looking to pawn off lesser gigs to some chump who isn't doing anything better.
• I'm knowledgeable and extremely gifted in understanding things. But I'm a mediocre teacher at best. When I've tried to teach, few people are interested in my classes - except overseas.
• If I had the means, I would go to the mission field and stay there. However, I'm not qualified by any reputable mission organization's standards.

So where does that leave me?

My greatest weakness is that I lack the ability to administer my own gifts well. I'm weak and in this weakness, should I expect God to glorify himself? I'm planning on it. I can't say he's done it yet.

But perhaps Dan has a point. I've tried and tried and God doesn't have a place for me to serve him where I'm anything but a passerby and fly-by-night. I like occasionally typing up my stray thoughts and submitting them to the few souls who have little better to do than waste their time reading my sorry musings.

However, as long as I don't have anything better to do, I guess I'll keep typing on occasion. Maybe something I write will make sense to someone out there someday and God will be glorified in some small way through me.

Should I expect larger things? I've tried that. It doesn't work.

When Being Wrong is Okay (For the Time Being)

One thing that is often pointed out by non-Christians is how Christians have so many different interpretations of the Bible. First of all, such observations usually lack the recognition that we agree on so much. Second of all, such observations fail to take into account that Christians typically recognize that understanding comes over a period of time for Christians.

The law of noncontradiction is true. That is, something is not what it is not. Regarding beliefs, some people forget this simple law of logic and want to claim that truth values are relative to individuals. The reason is because they want to believe what they want to believe without being scrutinized for it based on some larger discoverable objective truth. But the law of noncontradiction indicates that where we have more than one person who believes mutually exclusive things, only one of them can be right (and possibly none of them are).

The only conclusion is that most of us wrong about something, and are certainly ignorant about many things. The Bible takes this into consideration. There are certain core things we need to get right and we have the testimony of God’s revelation as well as the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to guide us. Because of the guilt of our sin, we cannot bear to understand the truth fully. Knowing this, the Holy Spirit of God guides us gently, revealing things as we are able to handle them.

This is why Paul tells us not to violate the conscience of people who believe that we should not eat meat that has been sacrificed to idols (1 Cor 8). Who is right? Should people be allowed to eat meat sacrificed to idols or should they abstain? Read the passage. I won’t go into it here. But I will make these observations:

1. People abstained from eating meat sacrificed to idols because they worshipped those idols before they understood the truth of Christ and partaking of that meat was a burden to their consciences. However, not everyone had that problem. So, we are allowed to be wrong in ways that benefit us.
2. However, we are still wrong. God doesn’t want to leave us there. He wants us to grow in our understanding. That means putting of childish things as Paul also tells the Corinthians in chapter 13. So this cannot be used as an excuse to believe whatsoever anyone wants.
3. Therefore, we need to be humble to the fact that we need to improve our understanding. We cannot have pride in the belief that we have it all figured out or to deny that there is any understanding that is greater than what we currently understand. If a donkey can inform Balaam, then God can use anyone to enlighten us.

Marriage Isn’t Fair

God isn’t fair. What’s fair is if we each pay for the bad things we do. But God says that the penalty for doing bad things is to be eternally separated from him. Too many find out too late that this is an exceptionally unpleasant state of existence. So God did what was unfair to make it possible for some people to spend eternity with him. Instead of requiring them to pay the penalty for what they’ve done wrong, he took on human flesh and paid for it himself. In this way Jesus Christ, the God-man, who was innocent of any wrongdoing, paid for the wrongdoing of sinners with his death on the cross. That’s not fair.

God calls the Body of Christ to do this. It works like this: we are often self-centered. That is, we often perceive conflict as being unfair to us without seeing how we have been unfair to others. If we acted this way, we would always have gripes and complaints about other people who perceive that not only have we been unfair to them, but that we are unfairly accusing them of being unfair. But if we exhibit the love of Christ, then this balances our misperceptions. If the love of Christ was to give his life for ours, then for us to exhibit the love of Christ to others means that we bear the burden of unfairness, real or perceived, between us and other people. The result is that we nullify the false perception of unfairness in others and build trust between us and them.

This works in marriage. In Ephesians wives are instructed to submit to their husbands as the church submits to Christ and husbands are instructed to love their wives as Christ loved the church. Women often balk at the command to submit to their husbands. It’s simply not fair. Their husbands don’t deserve to be submitted to and women deserve as much as men do to have power in the relationship. Now that would be fair. Men don’t balk at the command to love their wives as Christ loved the church, but I think most simply don’t understand what that entails. That means that husbands are to self-sacrifice for her benefit, even if it means giving up his own life for her. That’s not fair, is it? But God doesn’t call us to be fair.

What issue in marriage is greater than wives giving up their freedom in submission and men loving literally to their own death? Does he leave his dirty clothes on the floor? Does she leave her hair dryer on the sink? Does he spend too much on guns, sports and cars? Does she spend too much on clothes and décor? It’s not fair is it? Instead of complaining, if we serve each other in the extreme way we have each been called to, he will learn that he is being unfair to his wife by leaving his clothes on the floor and she will learn that she is being unfair to her husband by leaving the hair dryer on the sink. He will realize that he is being unfair by spending too much on guns, sports and cars, and she will realize that she is spending too much on clothes and décor. Whatever the issue is, self-sacrifice for each other results in being able to see the world through the others’ eyes. The level of trust will result in an abiding marriage that will withstand any challenge. Ultimately, God will be glorified because people will see a married couple living out the gospel of Christ to each other in their daily lives.

The good news is that Jesus didn’t stay dead. How can you keep the author of life dead? If we live sacrificially as he did, then the promise of God is that we will share in the eternal life of Christ. How does this work in our marriage? I propose that spouses who follow the pattern of Christ that they have been instructed by God to follow will have such life in their marriage as will give joy in bad times as well as good times. As one spouse passes into the other world, the remaining spouse will realize without a doubt that their partner is now with the Lord that they served so well. The testimony of the life of the one who passed from their mortal coil will live on in the words of the spouse who remains, their children and grandchildren.

Therefore live unfairly, giving to your spouse more good than he or she deserves without complaint.

Read the Bible

The reviews of The Bible miniseries by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey have started to come out. And as I type this, I’m watching the second showing on Lifetime (The first was last night on the History Channel). I won’t add to what they say, but I will make one point. It’s easy for Christians to criticize an attempt to convey the overarching message of the Bible in a scant ten hours. But I think Burnett and Downey have a good approach here. See the trailer:


The reviews I’ve read so far are at Stand to Reason and Answers in Genesis. But it’s helpful to hear the idea from the standpoint of the creators. They did an interview with Focus on the Family that you need to listen to. Their goal is not to try and tell every story in the Bible, but to produce a series with high production value that will provide an incentive for people to read the Bible – particularly those who are not Christian.

I was raised with the typical Sunday School lessons of unconnected Bible stories and Aesop’s-fable-style moral lessons. So the idea is that we are supposed to be good people, right? That’s what the stories are all about, or so my Sunday School teachers always taught. That’s what Matthew Boyd wrote about recently. But that kind of teaching doesn’t provide a solid framework for actually teaching the gospel. The goal isn’t to behave well, but to understand what God has done for us through Jesus Christ. It wasn’t until I was an adult and read the Bible in such a way as to see how all the stories were part of a whole meta-narrative that I understood how it all speaks to Christ.

That’s why my church has been breaking into small groups and reading the Bible together using the Community Bible Experience as a tool to do so. So if The Bible miniseries doesn’t have all of our favorite details, don’t fret. It might make more Christians when people pick up a Bible and read it for themselves instead of criticizing it based on what other people have said about it. They might follow in the footsteps of Rosaria Butterfield:


Now that would be a good thing.

The Problem With Knowing There Is No God

Steve Hays posted a link on Triablogue to a book reviewon the Denver Seminary site for James Spiegel’s The Making of an Atheist.

After reading the review, I had an observation and realized that there was an epistemological problem with atheistic naturalism:

I've always said that I don't believe in atheists. I don't think they exist, despite anyone's profession to be one.
In a world where too many Christians are too afraid to point out what the Bible clearly says about disbelief, I appreciate Spiegel's Biblical observation that unbelief is rooted in a desire to self-justify personal sin.
Aside from this, I've just checked around because I've never thought of this before, but it occurred to me that atheism has no positive arguments. A quick web search of "positive arguments for atheism" led to some sites that claim to have positive arguments, but they were anything but positive. All the arguments I see have to with disproving God. That would seem obvious given the label "a-theist" except that if it were possible for this universe to exist without God, there must be an epistemology that someone could verbalize for it that doesn't include a reference to something that doesn't exist.
The best argument I found so far is that naturalism predicts the universe... except that it doesn't. The argument doesn't prove a lack of God. It merely assumes that the universe functions in a predictable way and further assumes that it follows that if the universe is predictable that God could not exist (which is also begging the question of a negative argument and therefore employs two healthy fallacies).
But this only demonstrates that if there is no God we wouldn't be able to know it since our ability to know anything is bound up in what is naturally predictable. If there is a God, then the only way we could know it is if he reveals himself to us in a way that is naturally unpredictable (miraculous) - which he has.