Thursday, October 29, 2020
Shows Us the Way Home
Do You See, the Beginning Place for Life
Starting with an Egg?
Deuteronomy 4:2
You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you.
1 John 2:7
Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word that you have heard.
Words of Grace For Today
God created a wonderful universe, and us in it. We also can be as God created us, wonderful.
As scientists explore, research, and experiment, they come up with formulations of theories, which if they prove to be reliable become known as laws. These are serious, accurate descriptions of how the universe works. Until they are not … not reliable, not serious, not accurate descriptions of how the universe works. Or sort of.
We still call Newtons Laws, laws, even though they fail on so many levels.
Still scientists plug on to describe how what happens around us … and as a result they or others are able to develop amazing technologies.
Computers are one example. Not just the one on many people’s desk or hauled with them in a pack pack. – I remember when the computer at the University of Minnesota which one could book time to run one’s punch cards through and receive answers on punch cards and reels of magnetic tape filled more than one floor of a building that occupied a long, very long block. I got to visit with my dad, a post grad student, in the input room and walk the hall, looking in the windows at the air conditioned rooms that held monstrous rows of tubes and wires and what ever not! I was impressed, sort of as a kid. This was bigger and more powerful than the computer that sent the first men to the moon.
That computer had the power of one of today’s hand held calculators, a simple one.
The computer carried in a back pack today is what? millions and millions times more powerful than that computer at the UofM?
The laws of physics allow technologies that make computers possible. And they are everywhere, in vehicles, in almost everything with a combustible engine or electric engine or even an electric anything.
We know more, and we seem to know less about the universe, than we know and do not know about God and God’s Will for us humans.
God sends us signs, and laws, and prophets, and rituals grow out of all the extra-ordinary experience of God.
Evil people have since the beginning of time used religion, changed it, bent it and perverted it to serve their own purposes of control over others.
So God spoke to Moses and commanded that not one iota could be removed from the law, and not one iota could be added to it. That really did not stop people from trying and seemingly doing just that.
Jesus, God’s Son, came and lived as one of us. God’s Will for us ‘spoke’ to us in his life, death, and resurrection. Jesus is God’s Word.
Many thought that made different laws from God the by word of the day. It’s been done so many times that religion of every kind is full of the results.
Jesus, the Word of God, John wrote to teach us, was at the beginning. This Word created the universe.
There is no ‘new’ Word.
For many there is a new hearing, a new comprehension, a new life for sure.
God’s Word remains the same.
Adding to it, or taking from it does no one any good.
The mystery is grand enough that if we love God with all our heart, mind and strength, and our neighbours (including our enemies) as ourselves (as Jesus loves us – unconditionally) we are in for a life of discovery, research and experimentation, of happiness, grief, despair and profound joy, and of faith, love, and hope.
We do not add or subtract from God’s Will or God’s Word, but there is always more to comprehend, and more sins (ours and others) to forgive, and more life (ours and others) to redeem and set anew.
From the beginning of life to it’s end we have only Grace, which is the old, old story of Jesus and his love.
It’s old, and if you engage with it, it will always surprise you as if it were new … in it’s demands on you and in it’s rewards for you and yours.
Warp drive or not … plot in a course … engage.