#3-Mar. 28, 2016

"Our God is greater ..."

by Dave Jackson

Chris Tomlin’s song declares, “Our God is greater . . . than any other.” And while that is true, I had to come to terms with how much greater God is than any of the boxes I put him in.

I credit (or blame) a physicist friend of mine for giving me this kick in the pants to “rehab my faith” before I could write a book like, RISKING GRACE: Loving Our Gay Family and Friends Like Jesus.

For the last few years my scientist friend has been choking on contradictions between science and what many evangelicals claim the Bible says about our physical universe.

I love science (thought I was going to be a chemistry teacher before I got hooked on writing), and I enjoy listening to my friend explain the “God particle” or the relation between time and the speed of light. But I seldom have attempted to discuss cosmology with him for two reasons: First, my faith is based far more on my relationship with God than on proofs of his existence. Second, I’d put most of my cosmological questions on the shelf way back in Bible school when the supposed “biblical” theories weren’t all that convincing to me either. I’d wait until I got to heaven and ask God how he did it.

But my physicist friend kept teasing around the ragged edges of those questions until I decided I was too old to leave them on the shelf. Furthermore, my relationship with God had been sufficiently tested (see Feb. 24, 2016, “Once I was blind...”) that I was not likely to be shaken by whatever answer emerged.

That’s when I read the book, The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions by Karl W. Giberson and Francis S. Collins. The scientific authors are Christians who don’t feel we have to choose between science and faith even though in every field of science there is vast agreement concerning the age of our universe, and it’s not 10,000 years. It’s more like 13.7 billion years old.

That dispute over young earth versus old earth is not much different than what Galileo faced when convicted by the Inquisition in 1616 for his “vehemently suspect heresy” of his heliocentric model of the universe, explained over seventy years before by Copernicus. The religious authorities claimed these ideas contradicted and reinterpreted the Bible, which clearly says, “the world is established and cannot be moved” (Psalm 93:1) and “The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises” (Ecclesiastes 1:5), along with similar poetic descriptions of what they took as a geocentric universe. Today the facts of celestial movement are so demonstrable, that we easily read the biblical descriptions as figures of speech and commonly use them ourselves in referring to sunrise and sunset.

And no one’s faith is shaken in the least by such a “reinterpretation.” But Galileo was forced to recant and spend the remainder of his life under house arrest. Today we’re so certain of the correctness of his views, that if a group of Christians began telling us he was wrong, we’d suspect them, not Galileo. And that’s what was happening to my physicist friend: “If Christians reject the obvious about the age of the universe, what else is off about their beliefs? Can I believe anything they say about God?”

Regardless of how or when you believe the universe was created, I came to realize that whatever our convictions, “Our God is greater . . .” than the boxes in which we put him—always greater! In fact, he said, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9).

Yet we’re so inclined to bring God down to our size, to something we can get our minds around, like the idea that the universe is only 10,000 years old. It’s not hard to conceive of the number, 10,000. Any of us could count that high. We can imagine that many people in a stadium, or how long it would take to earn that much money. Most of us drive more miles than that in our cars every year.

It’s conceivable. It’s manageable. It’s a number that fits in our brain.

But few if any can truly comprehend 13.7 billion in any detailed way. That’s a God-sized number. Imagine the creation of our universe 13.7 billion years ago as God ignited the “Big Bang” that slung 100 billion galaxies (estimated by Hubble telescope observations), each with perhaps 100 billion stars, across something like 91 billion light-years. (The number is more than double the age of the universe because of space-time dynamics, which I barely can follow, even when my physicist friend explains it.)

Imagine a God so wise as to infuse this creative event with all the laws of nature (laws of God, actually) necessary to form our planet at the correct distance from a particular sun so life would ultimately form, grow, develop, and evolve with many starts and stops into sentient beings able to receive living souls that can know and relate to God. And then he comes to live among us.

Daily we experience our universe operating according to those laws of nature, usually for our good, but sometimes involving natural disasters. Billions of times a year people heal from illnesses and injuries according to God’s plan. But the fact that God established those laws of nature doesn’t imply deism, where he wound up the universe’s clock and has ignored us ever since. And it doesn’t preclude his occasional intervention to—as the Bible records—send rain, part a sea, heal the sick, and even raise the dead. Even today we occasionally experience miracles that seem to defy the laws of nature. So, why couldn’t he have created the whole universe according to those laws, using evolution as the primary mechanism with, perhaps, a few genetic tweaks along the way? Does it diminish God at all that he carried it out over 13.7 billion years just because that’s what the evidence looks like to most scientists?

I don’t think so. In fact, “Our God is greater than . . .” anything I can imagine.

But more importantly, the God I know as revealed in Jesus Christ—God incarnate—is not a deceiver. I doubt he would not have imbedded false information in every observable field of science to make it look 13.7 billion years old if it all happened less than 10,000 years ago.

So what do I do with the biblical genealogies that trace generations back only a few thousand years? What do I do with the creation accounts that can be read to say God did all of his work in six “earth days”? What do I do with biblical language that the theologians of the Middle Ages believed said the sun rotates around the earth? What do I do with passages many of our forbearers thought justified slavery, forbade interracial marriage, prohibited women from speaking in church? Can’t I be humble enough to admit that perhaps we misunderstood some of those things?

As Greg Boyd says in his book, Benefit of Doubt, “There is only one thing I really need to remain confident about, and that is ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2: 2).” If overwhelming evidence suggests I have misunderstood other “truths,” then it is legitimate to revisit the question—and maybe ultimately admit “Our God is greater . . .”

God knew I needed to become far more comfortable with this possibility before he could teach me what I needed to learn concerning how to love my gay daughter like Jesus. Because I didn’t know—and still don’t know—everything. But I’ve learned some things that suggest we have been making some big mistakes that have been driving many gay people away from Jesus. And that’s why I want to share my journey.