OMG: No Wonder

But knowledge puffs up while love builds up. -St. Paul

OMG I remember when I stopped believing in God.

It was right around the time I started to figure God out.

I had been going to seminary for quite a while, and ignoring all my professors’ warnings I began to become more and more prideful about what I knew, and started to look down on all those other stupid people who didn’t quite “get it.”

Christianity became for me a system, the Bible became a textbook, and God became an idea, and my soul became dull.

The Mystery of God

One of the challenges of seminary, or just with growing up with faith in the West is that we focus a lot on being right. That was the main point of the Protestant Reformation and all the different denominations that came out of that. Each group had their own particular slant of doctrine, and each one was certain they were right.

But I’ve learned that if you approach God with the idea that you will figure God out, you will at best fail, and at worse think you succeeded.

I’m not the only one with this story, plenty of preachers and pastors out there have discovered the most difficult time in their life was when they were in a season of learning about God/Bible/Christian History.

And it’s not because we were learning stuff that made us disbelieve in God, I think it’s because we were approaching the mystery of God in the wrong way.

I like the way fellow pastor A.J. Swaboda talks about his time in Seminary:

For the first time, the Bible became a textbook. Writers get writer’s block. Seminarians get reader’s block. After a long time, you sort of forget how to read the Bible like a child and start to think you are a smart person. In a way, seminary ruined the Bible for me. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that he couldn’t read King Lear anymore, “having had the advantage of studying it accurately at school.” What he meant was that there’s a way to study a book though which you lose the point of the book. I began to do that to the Bible…I had to learn how to come back to the Bible as a child. The enemy of wonder, I learned, can be knowledge.

To state that a little differently, I believe the enemy of wonder is always pride.

To Know What We Don’t Know

There’s a time in the Bible, where Moses asks to see the Glory of God. Moses has just led the grumbling, complaining Israelites out of slavery and they are headed to the Promised Land.

But Moses has some questions for God.

Moses wants to know more.

So he asks God to show him God’s glory, and God says to him:

“I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence…But, you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back.”

Think about this. We’re talking about Moses, the legendary leader of Israel, the one who God gave the Torah and the 10 Commandments to, and who would later go on to be a spokesperson for the NRA.

But God tells him, you can only see my back.

Some Rabbi’s point out that the word here isn’t really about the back of God. What God is actually saying to Moses is “I’ll let you see where I just was. I’ll let you see the After-ness of God looks like.”

I think it’s because to know God is in many ways to also know that you cannot fully know God.

And while this might just sound like semantics, I think it’s a fundamentally different way of approaching the Divine, one that can save our soul.

I’ve learned that I can’t approach the Bible or God like a scientist trying to prove something. As if God could be crammed into a test tube.

Even scientists know this is true.

In the words of Albert Einstein:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Einstein isn’t just talking about the best way to live here, he’s talking about realizing the truth!

Masters of the Universe?

Did you know that a staggering 96% of the known universe is dark matter? That means we have no idea how to even study it. I once talked to a University Physics professor and he told me that everything humanity knows about dark matter can be written down on a 3×5 card.

Which means, all the certainty we have about how the universe works and the nature of reality, is all based on the small 4% of the Galaxy that we can even wrap our mind around.

We’re just not the masters of the universe that we’ve thought we are.

During the Middle Ages, one of the things that I appreciate the most was that people were aware that their theories of how the universe works, were in fact, theories.

A theory was valuable because it was helpful, not because it was certainly true. And so their language back then was much more humble. Someone who was trying to describe the universe would say something like “Things appear to be this way.”

For all the grief we give those who have gone before us, I would say at least they knew what they didn’t know.

There is a direct correlation between pride and loss of wonder. Between our certainty in our systems and doctrine and progress we’ve lost the ability to sit humbly with the mystery of what we don’t know.

In the words of A.W. Tozer:

The God of Abraham has withdrawn His conscious Presence from us, and another God whom our fathers knew not is making himself at home among us. This God we have made and because we have made him we can understand him; because we have created him, he can never surprise us, never overwhelm us, nor astonish us, nor transcend us.

We don’t know what we don’t know about the Creation, There’s no way we can ever fully know the Creator.

We want to know God, many of us are proud because we think we do.

But the Back of God is all people ever see in the Bible.

It turns out that’s enough.