Coincidental Confluence

My wife and I often remark sarcastically about the little “coincidences” God orchestrates in our lives. One dictionary defines coincidence as, “a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.” As a synonym the dictionary offers “providence.” This strikes nearer the truth I am getting at. Because I believe in a sovereign God, there really is nothing that happens by coincidence, at least not in the sense the term is usually applied. Divine “Providence” is always behind every “coincidence.”

By way of illustration, let me describe a coincidence that happened today. I was reading an article in Christianity Today by Russel Moore in which he recommends the writings of Frederick Buechner (Pronounced Beek-ner), a twentieth century theologian/essayist/novelist. Moore, being a staunch conservative is quick to say that Buechner is not typically read by such as he, but that he finds much to recommend, if with careful discernment. Moore suggests that an overriding theme in Buechner is that every life has a plot, meaning that if we want to understand ourselves and get some meaning from life, we should notice the everyday trivialities that form the warp and woof of living.

Coinciding with this thought from Moore/Buechner, I happened to read Charles Spurgeon’s devotional thought for this morning. Spurgeon drew his ideas from Colossians 1 where Paul explains his calling to the Gentiles by saying, “To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.” That we will one day be “mature in Christ” is the happy reminder Spurgeon leaves with his readers.

In the confluence of these coincidental readings I find the assurance that all the things that happen to believers, the good, the bad, and the ugly, “work together for our good,” as Paul said elsewhere. The end result of this working together according to Paul is, “to be conformed to the image of his Son.” In other words, the plot of every believer’s life is the working out of sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful incidents that piece by piece write the story of our being made in Christ’s image.

Finally, the backdrop in my life story into which this confluence falls is this: a very dear friend of mine made his way from this life into Glory last week. He was a young man, not that age matters, who had spent the last dozen years in a wheelchair. A fanatic hunter, he had fallen from a tree stand and become paralyzed from the waist down. We all watched as he saw his twin girls grow into teens, and his wife spend herself in his care. To those of us in the little body of Christ where they worshiped, it was a story of struggle and commitment where no one seemed to lose faith in God’s “providence.”

Then the plot thickened: he got cancer; it was terminal. He died. One could scream how unfair this all seems. His wife and daughters must now soldier on with this plot twist as part of their stories. Someone once said that the trials of life either make us better or bitter. I have lost a niece, a sister and my father in unfortunate circumstances, but none compare to what these three young women now face. They have no chance to erase the painful past; they have a choice to make something of it in their future. Bitter or better; broken or stronger.

A few years ago, I wrote a poem that these coincidences have brought to mind. I share it in closing:

Life is a symphony played on your heart

Memories are instruments set to a tone

Harsh ones and gentle ones all have a part

Each keeping time with a voice of its own.

Sometimes the string section brings you to tears

Mellow and soft, yet humming with pain

Notes that repeat themselves years into years

Drumming like drops in a seven-day rain.

Sometimes the piccolo sparkles with laughter

Giggling gayly on some sunny shore

Sparkling notes leave you smiling long after

Wistfully sighing and wishing for more.

The brass will play marches that strut through your mind

Recalling the flags and the uniformed bands

Honor and duty and pride all unwind

In an uplifted cheer and a clap of the hands.

And so it will go with you day after day

Music will come to you bidden or not

Make good of the moment for soon it will play

And the music you’re writing is all that you’ve got.

Understanding the Book of Job: The Heiser Effect

Some time ago I wrote a blog titled: “Understanding the Book of Job – Finally”. While I suggested that I may have found the lesson of Job, I admitted that there were still mysteries. In that blog I said, “The book opens with an unexplained gathering in some heavenly dimension. Verse six says, ‘Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord.’ Everybody pretty much agrees that “sons of God” are angels. The interesting thing to me is that on a specific day they, ‘came to present themselves.’ Was this a head count to see if more had joined the enemy? Was it some sort of performance review?” Thanks to Michael S. Heiser’s book, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, I think I may have at least a partial answer to those questions.

Heiser is an impeccably qualified scholar of the Hebrew language. His point is that the Jews who wrote and read the Old Testament had a more complete understanding of some aspects of the “unseen realm” than moderns do. He proposes that over the centuries, filters have been placed over our view of the Old Testament which have clouded our interpretation of what it actually says about God and His creation. We generally speak as if we understand God’s material creation: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” No problem.

What we seldom consider is that before “in the beginning,” God created a spiritual host of beings in a realm that can only be called “unseen” because we know so little about it. Heiser thinks the Jews grasped some of the nuances of the unseen realm better than we because of their closer tie to the language the Bible uses to describe it. His theory sheds light on the curious passage in Job among many others.

Briefly, Heiser suggests that the word frequently used of God in the Old Testament Hebrew, Elohim, is not a name, but a class distinction. By that he means that the elohim are a class of beings who live in a realm associated with but distinct from our material universe, ie. a spiritual realm. Taking that view, as supported by the Hebrew language, it becomes acceptable to believe in multiple elohim. This explains why it is so often used in the plural, elohim, but also appears as singular, el. The God who rules the elohim is designated El Elyon or God Most High. Therefore, when “elohim” is used, it often makes sense of otherwise difficult passages if we think of it as meaning “spirit beings” rather than “gods.”

Getting back to Genesis, it is recorded in 1:26 that God said, “Let us make Adam (Hebrew for humans) in our image.” Every time “God” was used up to that point, it was the Hebrew word, “El,” a singular form. The question arises as to why the plural “us” and “our” were used. It makes perfect sense when we realize that the “sons of god” who were called “elohim” were present at creation (Job 38:7). It may also shed some light on what happened soon after creation: the fall.

Eve was not surprised to be addressed by a “serpent” in the Garden. Heiser suggests this is because the elohim continued their presence in Eden after creation keeping an eye on the human inhabitants. We know that El spent time with them “in the cool of the afternoon.” Heiser also points out that the word translated “serpent” in Genesis 3 can mean “watcher.” So it may be that the being who approached Eve with the temptation was not a creepy snake, but a beautiful, known entity with whom she had regular contact (Ezekiel 28:11–19). This aligns well with other Old Testament references to Lucifer, which means Morning Star, and is thought to be another name for Satan. None of that sounds very reptilian.

When the watcher who had come to be known as “Satan,” meaning “adversary,” came to El Elyon as reported in the book of Job, it was logical for the Most High to ask what his underling had been up to. The watcher’s answer, “Watching your material creation.” Again, Heiser suggests this reflects the “serpent’s” having been condemned to crawling around in the dust. He was no longer a regular inhabitant of the “heavenly” realms; he had been banished to earth.  However, it is not unreasonable that he would still be responsible to his ultimate superior, and that he might appear before Him from time to time.

God’s spirit beings surrounded Him throughout history. They were there at creation, there in Job’s time, and they are present in the time of the book of Revelation. If you read carefully, perhaps like a Jew says Heiser, you find them throughout the Old Testament in all the references to “other gods.” True, the One God emphasizes his uniqueness, commanding loyalty to Him alone, but even in doing so, implies the existence of other gods as options. It was not until Moses that El Elyon revealed that His name is Yahweh, meaning “the self-existent one.” The supreme spiritual being, El Elyon, rules over all the elohim in the spirit realm and over His material creation including humans.

Ever since reading Heiser’s book, I find myself discovering more places where the “unseen realm” becomes briefly visible in the pages of Scripture. It makes so much sense every time it pops up, I know Heiser’s view must be true. A first principle in Bible interpretation is to read a passage as the original audience would have read it. Michael S. Heiser has helped me to read the Old Testament in a way that recovers the supernatural worldview. This is good. After all, God is the ultimate supernatural; His book is supernatural; we need supernatural help to understand it (the Holy Spirit). It is only logical that we should maintain a supernatural view wherever possible.

E=mc2 in Genesis 1

Charles Spurgeon’s Morning Devotion for today was on Genesis 1:4. The context reads like this: “3 And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” (Genesis 1:3-5) This has always been a fascinating passage for me in two ways; one relates to the physics, and the other to the linguistics.

First the physics. You don’t have to be Bill Nye the (atheistic) Science Guy to find this passage a bit puzzling. These verses recount the activity of God on the first creation day. It is not until the fourth day that God created the elements which we think of as the sources of light. The question, even for believers, is how there could be light without a source of light.

As my regular readers know, I am interested in physics in a general way, although the absence of any advanced math skills makes it difficult for me to follow many of the usual explanations for how things work. Case in point: E=mc². According to NOVA, “It's the world's most famous equation, but what does it really mean? ‘Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.’ On the most basic level, the equation says that energy and mass (matter) are interchangeable; they are different forms of the same thing. Under the right conditions, energy can become mass, and vice versa. We humans don't see them that way—how can a beam of light and a walnut, say, be different forms of the same thing?—but Nature does.”

Substitute the word “God” for NOVA’s “Nature,” and the puzzle continues. This may mean that by causing light to come into existence on the first creation day, God introduced the building blocks for everything we call the material universe. We now know that at the most elemental level, at a sub-sub-microscopic level, matter is made up of energy. Every molecule has constituent atoms made of little packages of energy spinning about a central package of energy. At this point in our sub-atomic understanding, physicists haven’t found anything that can be called “matter.” It’s all energy organized into structures that become what we know as matter.

Enough with the nuclear physics. Genesis 1 also has an interesting linguistic element that may actually flow from E=mc². I will not enter the debate about whether the creation day lasted precisely 24 hours; if you want to believe that, the text allows for that interpretation. However, there is something interesting about how the creation days are bounded. “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” Unlike our Western thought, the Hebrews saw evening as the start of a day. The word for evening is rich in meaning, but it primarily refers to the coming of darkness. The first creation day began in darkness into which God spoke light.

Similarly, the Hebrew word for morning used in Genesis 1:5 carries the idea of the coming of light, often indicating the period before the sun rises. So what this verse tells us is that God started with nothing (darkness) and spoke something (light) into existence. Light itself is a mysterious element. (I’m getting back to physics again.) Scientists tell us it is like a beam of particles when observed as matter, but it is a wave of energy when observed as energy. Either way, Genesis says God brought order into disorder.

Skim through the entire Bible and you will find numerous instances where light is equated with all that is good, and darkness is equated with evil. That which is good is that which aligns with God’s order; that which is evil is outside of God’s design. John says that Jesus is the true light coming into the world. The Spurgeon devotional which inspired this piece contains this prayer: “O Lord, since light is so good, give us more of it, and more of thyself, the true light.” A prayer for light is not a bad prayer for a new year – or anytime, for that matter.