Laws, Laws, Laws

After returning to the United States from many years in India I’ve noticed some changes. One was an increase in the number of laws and rules. Recently, a lawyer friend said, “You get new officials elected, and they feel they have to do something. So they make new laws. Then another group comes in, and they make more laws. We’re getting really technical.”

With the passing of each law we lose a little bit of our freedom. We become more “technical.”

By law, in Pennsylvania, I must stop for a pedestrian at a crosswalk. Good law, right? Absolutely.  But for me, I feel stripped of the opportunity to do the right thing. Now there is no virtue in stopping. It’s the law. I’m penalized if I don’t stop. My freedom to choose to do right is now legislated.

I’m not against the law or authority. We need laws. I happily stop at crosswalks. But more laws = less freedom and less personal responsibility. Nearly everything in life is governed by rules, policies, regulations, and conventions. It's the fabric of reality.

There are traffic laws. Mathematical laws. Natural laws. Football and basketball have rules. Mom and dad usually had some do’s and don’t’s. The state tells you what to do. The Federal government has laws. The TSA officials have rules. Nightclubs have rules. Restaurants are regulated and their employees have procedures. Banks have rules. There are patent laws, visa rules, and unspoken social taboos. Prisons have rules. Schools have rules. Universities have rules. Congress has rules. Judges have rules. The military, ditto. Even gangs have rules.

Some sort of “rule of order” seems to be constant.

Why?

Certainly the need for order is part of it. In society with billions of free-willed people, there has to be some agreement on what is acceptable and what is not. Even natural laws like gravity bring security to us. I can count on gravity, the freezing point of water, etc. If you try to break these, they break you. Do laws create security in us?

What’s behind it all? The Bible tells of God initiating a law to Adam and Eve. “… of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat…”[1] That was quite possibly the first law. It forced a response by the first couple. That's what laws do. 

I suggest God is the Basis of law, both moral and natural. He had no source, outside Himself, to refer to in giving the law. His Law is based on His own character. Has he placed that in our being too? Thousands of years later David said, “Thy Law is within my heart”[2]

Can it be that the inevitability of rules demonstrate God's character and our likeness to Him?

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[1] Genesis 2:17

[2] Psalm 40:8

The Song of the Dunes

“There is sufficient evidence in a tree, a pebble, a grain of sand, a fingerprint, to make us glorify God and thank Him.”[1] When I read this last week I thought, “Really? Is there evidence in a grain of sand?” So I did a little research. Not a lot of research. If you want that, you’re on the wrong blog. 

I found out a couple of interesting things. Various professionals don’t all agree on the definition of sand. What is silt, what is sand, what is gravel? There are various measurements.

I liked these practical descriptions. “... sand is anything big enough to feel between the fingers and smaller than a match head.”[2] And this one, “sand is anything small enough to be carried by the wind but big enough that it doesn't stay in the air...”[3] Let's leave the size and definition at that.

I also learned that most sand is quartz, while some is coral fragments or lava. There are dunes, beaches, and cool sand bars called tombolo. (That’s not a sandwich) The facts went on.

“Okay, fine,” I thought, “but this doesn’t make me feel a need to ‘glorify God and thank Him.’”

Then I read something that got my attention: “Sand also makes music.”[4]

In several parts of the world from California to China a phenomenon occurs known as “booming dunes” or “sounding sand.” Evidently Marco Polo reported this in the Gobi Desert in the 1200’s, saying the sands, "at times fill the air with the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments, and also of drums and the clash of arms."[5]

As wind blows on the dunes, the dry, topical sands are blown, sand moves en masse, and the result is sound. The keys of G, E, or F to be exact. It’s music!

Melanie Hunt of the California Institute of Technology says, The sound is remarkable because “it is composed of one dominant audible frequency (70 to 105 Hz) plus several higher harmonics.”[6] Her team compared this to the music of a cello.[7]

How does this inspire me to praise and thank God?

The Bible says “The wilderness and the desert will be glad, and the desert will rejoice … with rejoicing and shout of joy…”[8] The "weeping prophet" Jeremiah wrote, “They have made my pleasant field a desolate wilderness… Desolate, it mourns before me…”[9] Paul told the Romans, “... we know that the whole creation groans … until now.”[10] And Jesus Himself told his disciples it was possible, “... the stones will cry out.”[11] 

Wow.

If the dunes raise a song, then I should praise and thank Him.

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[1] James Montgomery Boice The Sovereign God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, 1978) 31

[2] Andrew Alden, About Sand (Internet: http://geology.about.com/od/sediment_soil/a/aboutsand.htm )

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] Michael Schirber, Singing Sand Dunes: The Mystery of Desert Music, (11 January 2005) (Internet: http://www.livescience.com/3788-singing-sand-dunes-mystery-desert-music.html )

[6] Melanie L Hunt, Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Vice Provost, California Institute of Technology  http://www.hunt.caltech.edu/

[7] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/booming-sands.html

[8] Isaiah 35:1-2 New American Standard Bible

[9] Jeremiah 12:10-11 New American Standard Bible

[10] Romans 8:22 New American Standard Bible

[11] Luke 19:39 New American Standard Bible

Coffee ... a bagel ...and God?

Coffee … a bagel … 

When I wake up, I feel hungry. Today I had a bagel with cheese and a cup of French Roast coffee. 

Later, I got dressed, , putting on a collared, buttoned shirt and khaki slacks.  I felt ready to go  for the day

A half hour later I sat down and talked to a relatively new friend for about 10 minutes. It was nice, I feel the friendship is growing.

I'm thinking about my needs. Hunger. A desire to look presentable. The need for friends. Each has a way of fulfillment. It's the same with sexual desire, the thirst for knowledge, and many others.

For all of these there's probably a right way and a not so good way of fulfillment. For example four bagels with cream cheese would not help me.

The desire for significance is often met by achievement, success, by loving our family, or in other ways.

The desire for knowledge is met by education and practical experience. It's met by reading books.

Interestingly, the things we desire all have a corresponding something to complete them. Whether it’s hunger, or to be a parent, to have justice, or to be liked, -there is provision for each one.

Coffee … a bagel …and God?

So would the same hold true for the desire for spiritual “connection?”

Simple observation tells us every ethnic group on earth is spiritual. 

All but about 8% of the world’s population have some belief about a power beyond what can be seen. Churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, shrines, cathedrals, and stupas dot every nation in the world. Most of us say there is a God although there is no agreement on who God is. The Pew Forum reports that nearly 2.2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people are Christians,[1] making it the largest single belief system in the world. That’s one in three people who believe a Jewish Carpenter who lived 2000 years ago was God. So people definitely have a "spiritual" desire.

Once I took a dear lady to church. She did not normally go to church or practice any religious observance. The choir sang, “The King is Coming.” Tears flowed down her face.  She commented afterwards how touched she had been. What touched her?  Was it a desire to connect with something or someone beyond herself?

While still in Mary's womb, Jesus was prophetically called “Emmanuel” which means “God With Us.” He claimed to be the answer to that "God shaped hole" within us. He said he was the water for our thirst and the food for our hunger.

Doesn’t it make sense that there is a provision for our desire for something transcendent? British Bible translator J.B. Phillips wrote, “Arguing, as we must, from what we know to what we don’t know, we may fairly say that as food is the answer to hunger, water the answer to thirst, and a mate to sexual desire, this universal hunger for Truth is unlikely to be without its answer and fulfillment, however hard it may be to find.”[2]

  

That’s why they called Him “God with us.” He’s there.

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[1]The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life  http://www.pewforum.org/Christian/Global-Christianity-exec.aspx

[2] J.B. Phillips, “Your God Is  Too Small,” p. 71

The Spring on I-90

As a kid, growing up in Northern Idaho, I remember one place along the road where our family would always stop near the summit of Lookout Pass. It was a spring of water. Someone had installed a pipe beside the road, to make it easy to drink the cold, clear water that streamed out of the mountain. On summer days, en route to Montana or back home to Idaho, we would stop and be refreshed by that spring.

Springs are one of the many pictures of spiritual reality that God has sprinkled throughout nature.

The Old Testament relates a story of Moses striking a rock at God’s command. Water came out of the rock and the entire community drank. Referring to this in the New Testament, Paul says, “They all … drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.”1 During his lifetime Jesus said with a loud voice, “‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, … streams of living water will flow from within him.’ By this He meant the Spirit…”2

So we have a spring. Clear water. People parched and in need of refreshment. Christ. The Spirit. Drinking. Refreshment. Life for our entire being.

The fourth century mystic Ephrem the Syrian saw this analogy. He wrote, “A thirsty person is happy when drinking, and not depressed, because the spring is inexhaustible. You can satisfy your thirst without exhausting the spring; then when you thirst again, you can drink from it once more.”3

A simple spring of water beside Interstate 90. Water from the mountain. Year after year. Each time someone passes that place, he may pause to drink. The water is sweet and cold.

Jesus is saying to us with a loud voice, “come to me and drink.”

Are you thirsty?






Drawing of Lookout Pass by Byron Dudley4

1 Corinthians 10:4
2 John 7:37-39
3 Shane Claiborne, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010) 64
4 http://byrondudley.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html

Argument from the Violence of Nature

We hold people to a different standard than we do animals. That’s a no-brainer, right? If a shark attacks a person, we say it is only doing what comes naturally. No personal guilt is attributed to the animal, though it may be destroyed to prevent future attacks. A tiger may be labeled a “man-eater,” and considered dangerous, but it is not considered anything other than being true to its nature. It is not seen as worse than any other tiger. This is the natural food chain.

But if a person attacks and kills his fellow man, we have an elaborate, expensive, and often fallible system to mete out “justice” to the offender. We say that person is wrong. This sense of what man ought to do is one of the human beings unique qualities. It illuminates something invisible that exists, - as CS Lewis would say, an “ought to.”

Manhattan Pastor Timothy Keller speaks of the argument for God from the violence of nature, in his excellent book, The Reason for God. Is nature violent? Isn’t that the core of survival of the fittest? Reality is a contest for survival according to Darwin.

Keller tells of writer Annie Dillard who spent years living by a creek in Virginia to “be inspired and refreshed” by the purity of nature. Evidently, Dillard came to the conclusion that nature is ruled by one overriding principle, “violence of the strong against the weak.”1 Dillard wrote, “There is not a person in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait you say, there is no right or wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept! Precisely! We are moral creatures in an amoral world…”2

Man is judged by a different yardstick than animals. He is held to an invisible code of morality. A “homicidal” praying mantis is just being natural, but a Muammar Kaddafi is considered by right-thinking people to be a monster for his role in the Lockerbie mass murder.

So there is an unseen something, a code of conduct, of what ought to be, that permeates human existence. Something exists, something that we all recognize, beyond what is seen. It’s recognition is unique to man.

In the Bible, Paul says it this way of those who did not accept the Jewish law. “… the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.”3

Yesterday I saw a video that talked of the trillions of stars in the known galaxy. Many are not visible, but no credible scientist would deny their existence. We accept this as fact on the word of scientists. Something invisible, but real.

The violence in nature also tips us to something that is invisible, and yet real.




1- Timothy Keller, The Reason for God, (New York, Riverhead Books, 2008) 161
2- From Chapter Ten, “Fecundity,” in Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek (Harper-Collins, 1974)
3- Romans 2:15 (New International Version)