Doth Not Nature Teach You, Part 5

“And God Made the Stars Also”

January 7, 2011

By Ron, David, and Michael Schwartz

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Imagine for a moment that you had foreknowledge that your baby was going to be kidnapped. You knew all of his clothes, books, and toys would be taken with him. You also knew that when it happened, you wouldn’t be able to find him. You agonize over this for days wondering what to do.

Then, at last, you have an idea: if you couldn’t find him, you could make it possible for him to find you. So you stitch clues into his clothes, you underline certain words in his books, and you draw simple designs and patterns on his toys. Even the type of toys and color of clothes that fill his room are clues. These clues, words, patterns, and designs are all clues as to who you are and where you live. Your idea may be a long shot, but it’s your only chance to save him.

Now imagine that God knew all along that after He created man, mankind would be lost to His enemy. So God determined to craft within the universe around mankind a map that in could help mankind find his way back to his God. This is what the series “Doth Not Nature Teach You” is all about: discovering in nature the lessons that God, as a good parent and teacher, created for us. Everywhere we look, we find the design God crafted into nature like a giant textbook teaching us about the God we long to know.

Understanding God’s Time: The First Time Piece

Genesis 1:14-16

14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

The first time piece ever created was not made of metal, nor was it made from wood or stone. The first clock was not even formed by the hands of man. The first time piece was fashioned by the hands of God and set in the heavens. For millennia, mankind used the sun to determine the time of day (i.e. sundials), the moon to understand the day of the month, and the summer and winter solstice to recognize the time of year.

Like a clock with two hands, the earth also actually has two rotations. It rotates every 24 hours giving us the metrics of days and hours, but it also counts away years as it revolves around the sun. In the same way, we have two times in our lives: that of the physical aspect of the world around, and that of the invisible realm of the supernatural. Our physical lives are governed by time—when we determine what we want or need, we count the time until that thing is obtained. But in the spiritual world, there is no time. So when (or, the time in which) we receive something is immaterial because if we receive it at all is as if we always had it.

When we consider the way in which the nature of our universe is balanced, it becomes evident that time is very important to God. How ironic it is that time would be important to a God in which the concept of time is meaningless – to a God who is timeless. The scripture tells us that God “inhabits eternity.” God doesn’t only span the universe, He also spans all of time – being in both the past and the future at the same time. Consequently, there is no such thing as time to God. Mankind, unlike God, exists in a linear universe. Our lives are predicated by time. Therefore, as we proceed from Monday, to Tuesday, to Wednesday, etc., we find a God who is already there. God knows the end from the beginning because He in the past as well as the future. Knowing this, there should be no question that God knows what’s best for us, and that He has a master plan that is going on and, from God’s vantage point in the future, is already done.

God’s master plan for our lives can be likened to a pinball machine. The idea of this game is to find the right way to shoot a ball to the top of the machine so that as the ball falls, it hits a number of targets to achieve the highest score. Imagine for a moment that our lives are the ball and God is the person in control of the machine. To us whose linear existence as the ball dictates that we must actually experience every bump and bounce as our lives are thrown from one extreme to the other, there doesn’t seem to be any plan. But God, who knows the eventual outcome, is able to see the value of every bounce and every combination of moves which the ball can take to achieve the highest possible score. He’s timeless. He can see the end from the beginning. We may sometimes question God as to why we are thrown around like a ship at sea, but God knows that our tribulation is necessary if we are to achieve our highest potential.

Another example is the type of game where you drop a marble from the top. As the ball falls, it bounces off random plastic pegs and bounces either right or left where it hits more and then more. It eventually falls into a one of several slots at the bottom, each slot having its own value. See, God knows the eventual outcome of every decision we’ll ever make. It’s as if He’s already tried every possible combination of moves that each of our decisions could lead us. Consequently, He stirs us to go in direction and through pain that we sometime question.

Because of God’s foreknowledge of our lives’ turns, He can sometimes appear unsympathetic to our plights by not seeming to answer us. We may cry to God for mercy and deliverance and then become angry with Him when He seems not to respond. However, God does respond… when the time is right and the ball of your life has reached its maximum potential. And because God is timeless, it’s as if He responds the very moment we call, even though to us years may have passed.

John 11

A man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. This was the same Mary who massaged the Lord’s feet with aromatic oils and then wiped them with her hair. It was her brother Lazarus who was sick. So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Master, the one you love so very much is sick.”

…Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, but oddly, when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed on where he was for two more days. After the two days, he said to his disciples, “Let’s go back to Judea…” …When Jesus finally got there, he found Lazarus already four days dead …Martha said, “Master, if you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now, I know that whatever you ask God he will give you.”

Jesus said, “Your brother will be raised up.” Martha replied, “I know that he will be raised up in the resurrection at the end of time.”

“You don’t have to wait for the End. I am, right now, Resurrection and Life. The one who believes in me, even though he or she dies, will live. And everyone who lives believing in me does not ultimately die at all. Do you believe this?”

“Yes, Master. All along I have believed that you are the Messiah, the Son of God who comes into the world.” … Mary came to where Jesus was waiting and fell at his feet, saying, “Master, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her sobbing and the Jews with her sobbing, a deep anger welled up within him. He said, “Where did you put him?”

“Master, come and see,” they said. Now Jesus wept. Then Jesus… arrived at the tomb. It was a simple cave in the hillside with a slab of stone laid against it. Jesus said, “Remove the stone.” The sister of the dead man, Martha, said, “Master, by this time there’s a stench. He’s been dead four days!”

Jesus looked her in the eye. “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”

Then, to the others, “Go ahead, take away the stone.” They removed the stone. Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and prayed… Then he shouted, “Lazarus, come out!” And he came out, a cadaver, wrapped from head to toe, and with a kerchief over his face.

This story illustrates the difference between God’s time and that of us. Jesus heard that His good friend Lazarus was sick, but waited four days to respond. He knew that the value of Lazarus’s life had not yet hit its highest potential and therefore chose to wait. As Mary, Martha, and Lazarus suffered through their linear existence, Jesus knew from the end the beginning.

Sleight of hand

One might say that the Lord was the first magician. His first trick, the stellar time piece, is a bit of an illusion: the way in which it really keeps time is so contrary to how it appears. It appears that the sun, moon, and stars all revolve around the earth when in reality, only the moon does. Completely opposite to physical appearance, the earth actually revolves around the sun, and the stars are not part of any revolution at all. God produced a “false or misleading impression of reality” (illusion) in the very heavens. Like sleight of hand, we follow the movement of the sun across the sky only to find out that the sun is not moving at all.

The complexity of the universe that surrounds us confounds even the cleverest scientist and observer. There are invisible forces all about us—some so powerful that they hold our entire world from spinning endlessly into space—and the vast majority of these are magically unobservable and too wondrous to even imagine. Even a panoramic view of the world that surrounds us would lead us to believe that the world is flat and dish-shaped. These wonders are like a rabbit being pulled from the hat of a great magician: we remain mystified by the clever ways in which God seems to deceive us in His creation.

We learn from this that when it comes to the things of God, not everything is as it appears. Like God’s stellar time piece, if left in God’s hands, our lives tend to work as they should. However, just as it appears that the sun revolves around the earth, we often forget that it is us that should be revolving around God. Our mastery of our own lives leads us to assume that it is God who is revolving around our lives and our decisions, so we move believing He will follow us. But, as His time piece shows us, it is all just an illusion. God is not a genie sitting in our magic lamp awaiting our beck and call. He moves and then we move next.

Consider another example of God’s sleight of hand:

Matthew 2

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem village… a band of scholars arrived in Jerusalem from the East. They asked around, "Where can we find and pay homage to the newborn King of the Jews? We observed a star in the eastern sky that signaled his birth. We're on pilgrimage to worship him."

When word of their inquiry got to Herod, he was terrified… He gathered all the high priests and religion scholars in the city together and asked, "Where is the Messiah supposed to be born?" They told him, "Bethlehem, Judah territory. The prophet Micah wrote it plainly:

 It's you, Bethlehem, in Judah's land, no longer bringing up the rear.
 From you will come the leader who will shepherd-rule my people, my Israel."

Herod then arranged a secret meeting with the scholars from the East. Pretending to be as devout as they were, he got them to tell him exactly when the birth-announcement star appeared. Then he told them the prophecy about Bethlehem, and said, "Go find this child. Leave no stone unturned. As soon as you find him, send word and I'll join you at once in your worship."

Instructed by the king, they set off. Then the star appeared again, the same star they had seen in the eastern skies. It led them on until it hovered over the place of the child… In a dream, they were warned not to report back to Herod. So they worked out another route, left the territory without being seen, and returned to their own country.

After the scholars were gone, God's angel showed up again in Joseph's dream and commanded, "Get up. Take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt. Stay until further notice. Herod is on the hunt for this child, and wants to kill him." Joseph obeyed... They were out of town and well on their way by daylight. They lived in Egypt until Herod's death. This Egyptian exile fulfilled what Hosea had preached: "I called my son out of Egypt." Herod, when he realized that the scholars had tricked him, flew into a rage. He commanded the murder of every little boy two years old and under who lived in Bethlehem and its surrounding hills.

God’s sleight of hand led Herod and Satan to believe something differently from what was His true intentions. Like a marble dropping through a toy and randomly bouncing around, God knew every possible action before it was taken and set in motion the exact event that soon followed. That is how God is able to prophesy with exact precision in what seems like millennia prior to the events unfolding. What may seem like confusion or a marble randomly bouncing off pegs is, in reality, carefully orchestrated events designed with the foreknowledge of God.

1 Corinthians 2:7-16

God's wisdom is something mysterious that goes deep into the interior of his purposes. You don't find it lying around on the surface… God determined as the way to bring out his best in us, long before we ever arrived on the scene. The experts of our day haven't a clue about what this eternal plan is. If they had, they wouldn't have killed the Master of the God-designed life on a cross. That's why we have this Scripture text:

 No one's ever seen or heard anything like this,
 Never so much as imagined anything quite like it—
 What God has arranged for those who love him.

But you've seen and heard it because God by his Spirit has brought it all out into the open before you.

The Spirit, not content to flit around on the surface, dives into the depths of God... Whoever knows what you're thinking and planning except you yourself? The same with God—except that he not only knows what he's thinking, but he lets us in on it… We don't have to rely on the world's guesses and opinions. We didn't learn this by reading books or going to school; we learned it from God...

The unspiritual self, just as it is by nature, can't receive the gifts of God's Spirit. There's no capacity for them. They seem like so much silliness. Spirit can be known only by spirit... Isaiah's question, "Is there anyone around who knows God's Spirit, anyone who knows what he is doing?" has been answered: Christ knows, and we have Christ's Spirit.

While the unrighteous may believe they understand God’s word and will, it is the true servants of God who really do. The unrighteous will read God’s word and bounce to the right when the true servants of God read His word and bounce to the left.

God knew before man fell that mankind would need to know that not everyone who claims to speak for Him really does. That is why God designed in the heavens an illusion: to show His real children who He is while hiding Himself from the frauds.

Therefore, whether we understand it or not, every child of God knows how to hear from God. Whether we call it our intuition, our conscience, or an inner voice, we each have our own exclusive way of hearing and knowing the voice of God. Sometimes, we get so used to hearing God’s voice that we take it for granted and don’t recognize that it is he who is leading us. We must simply trust the fact that we can and do hear the voice of God.   Jesus said…

John 10:2-5

² The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. ³ The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. ⁴ When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.

This is important because there comes a time in each of our lives when our light seems to disappear.  The methods and ways in which we are use to receiving spiritual direction evaporates.  Whether this direction comes from a church, a pastor, or Christian friends, there will come a time when you will find yourself alone, and it is usually at a time of deep personal struggle or tragedy when we desperately need light.   During these times of seemingly utter darkness we must find a “new” way to see in the dark.   It is then that we notice the stars and all their brilliance.

When There Is No Light… There Are Always the Stars

We all know that the primary function of the sun is to shed light during the day and the moon at night. The moon revolves around earth every lunar month (just short of 30 days). Half of the time the moon is on the side of the earth opposite the sun (the nighttime sky) and the other half it’s with the sun (the daytime sky). As a result, there are times every month when there is no “lesser light to rule the night.” Those nights are exceptionally dark. But during these nights of utter darkness, the stars shine more brightly than ever. Apart from any rotation, they remain constant and unchanging, speaking to us in unvarying constancy. Even when the moon has gone away, the stars remain.

In Matthew 24:25-28, Jesus describes a time of such darkness that “men's hearts [will fail] them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth. ... When these things begin to come to pass,” Jesus counsels, “lift up your heads.” Why?  Because in times of utter darkness - when there is no sun and moon – there are always the stars high above.  When we experience times when (it seems like) the sun fails to rise, when we find ourselves in total and utter darkness, when it seems we are abandoned, when we search for answers but none are to be found, and it’s as if our guiding light suddenly and totally went out, we can be as the stars!

Daniel 12:1-3

¹And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.

²And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

³And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever.

Stars are the saints of God whom we know or have read about—great men and women of God who inspire us. In our darkest hours, we need only to look up and remember their lives, their struggles, their tribulation, and how they too must have felt during their hour of tribulation. Did they wonder if they were abandoned? Did they feel like their tears were unnoticed by God? Did they wonder why God refused to answer? Did their hearts bleed as if it were cut into halves? Did they question God’s love? Did they despair and wish for death? We may never completely know about their secret fears, their inner struggles, and their unanswered questions because they found a way to see through the darkness and find God. Overcoming their hurt and despair, they fought past the accusing lies of Satan and found a way to press on. Their constancy in their love for God caused them to shine brilliantly like a star. Their trials and tribulation along with their constancy in serving God through their storm has encouraged others and “turned many to righteousness.” As a result, they will “shine as the brightness of the firmament; and …as the stars forever and ever.”

When darkness falls all around, when despair is at the door, when we feel abandoned and there seems to be no answers, that’s when the stars shine the brightest! The next time you’re enduring the darkness of night remember, it’s now your turn to shine. God wants you to be His star!

God bless you, our friends!

Amen.

ron@ronschwartz.net

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