Understanding God’s ways makes Creation more predictable. Life in this world is not so random as it appears. God has revealed His ways sufficient to make sense of things you need to know for your individual calling.
It truly does start with embracing His call on your life. It’s one of those things where we say, “God is God. You aren’t Him.” Because of the Fall, we have to approach revelation as a sealed package; you have to accept it all sight unseen before you can open it. The revelation for you comes in layers; you have to deal appropriately with the one you see before you get to see what’s next. It’s that trust and commitment thing. You aren’t digging into something objective; it is unique to you because you are getting to know a Person who treats no two of us alike. That’s because we aren’t alike.
Sure, we have some commonalities, but most people who can read what I’m writing in English will come with a high degree of deceptive conditioning, which makes them believe there is much more in common than what God says. And not just the amount of commonality, we who think in the English language are taught to assume the wrong kind of commonality. Worst of all, we are taught to deny that the rest of reality is alive and personal, and we can’t comprehend the commonalities inherent in our universe.
Let’s review briefly: Even Western science knows that your heart generates a very powerful electromagnetic field reaching out to infinity, but generally detectable by instruments at 10-15 feet (3-4.5m). Further, other living things have a similar electromagnetic field, and there is a measurable resonance between ours and theirs, and with each other. The interaction of these fields produces a reaction, but the scientists have not been able to discern what it does. Furthermore, it appears that the human heart also possesses an independent nervous system of sorts, and that the nodes on this system can act as a brain of sorts, processing in ways that researches can’t understand. In other words, scientists know that the heart is a sensory organ for sure, it may be processing what it senses in ways not obvious to investigation.
But thousands of years of written records in the Ancient Near East (ANE) have quite solemnly proposed that the heart does have its own mind of sorts, and that the heart can know a great deal about reality independently of the normal human senses. If you dig farther into this literature, you’ll understand that the content of such heart-mind operations is not a matter of sensory data, but on an entirely different level. It senses moral truth. The Bible in particular talks about how the heart is the means to discerning a higher level of reality on the spiritual plane. And clearly the ANE people took this quite seriously, though they resorted to figurative language to discuss it.
I take it seriously, too. The longer I strive to get my head to unlearn the Western approach to reality, the easier it gets for me to train my brain to follow my heart. And it gets easier to wade through a lot of Western confusion and deception so that things puzzling to Westerners have a rather obvious answer to me.
That includes scientific stuff that catches my curiosity. I’ll tell you that sometimes it’s a matter of skipping the wrong questions, and asking better ones. I’m not claiming to have the key to human understanding of the universe; I understand as much as I need to obey my calling. For example, I believe I understand what’s commonly referred to in Physics as the Two Slit Experiment. More, I’m not puzzled by the behavior revealed by it. It is entirely unlikely any scientist is going to buy my explanation; my personal experience assures me of that. The international science community rests entirely on the foundation of rejecting the idea that matter is alive, sentient and possessed of individual qualities. All they see is uniform dead matter.
But I could have predicted their observations in a certain sense because of my different epistemology. Individual photons and particles are alive, sentient and individually willful. But because they are not fallen, their will tends to reflect a sense of moral harmony. They obey God’s design, but still act individually. It manifests in the observed resonance of the waves in the experiment. The photons are not uniform, but appear to be moving randomly. Once you introduce attempts to predict their behavior, you are denying their individuality, and they will hide it from you. Creation as a whole tends to give you what you expect, in the sense that if you treat the universe as a composition of inert matter, it will tend to avoid showing you that it lives. You aren’t looking for the truth, so you won’t see the truth.
You have to trust God that His Creation will fulfill His divine purpose. That purpose cannot be quantified and objectified — it’s personal. In order to stay sane, you have to bend your perception to the moral truth the heart knows. You have to give God room to handle things with individual attention to His glory in your life, not simply follow the herd in denying moral reality. So I’m content to appreciate the beauty of the wave pattern in this experiment without trying to nail down why it’s like that. I have no need to attempt controlling it, which is the undeniable intent behind scientific investigation. I know better than to try playing God.
This is not to suggest that God never allows poking around out of curiosity. At the same time, I am confident that there are boundaries that you can predict if you try to live the heart-led way. Another example would be genetic manipulation. I’m utterly certain that crosses the line. I’m also utterly certain that, in the long run, all such genetic dabbling will result in disasters. So far, the results have borne that out. It’s not always apparent in the short term, but so far every genetically modified organism (GMO) has turned out harmful when you wait long enough. No surprise, of course; it’s driven by human moral failures (to wit: fraudulent stewardship of Creation).
There’s also the prophetic element warning us that mankind will eventually push too hard against the moral boundaries and foul this cosmic nest to the point we can’t live. While God is silent about the specifics, He warns that this tendency will play into His decision to finally end this world as we know it. This is why it’s pointless to campaign and try to change human behavior at large. We’ve already been told in many different ways where this is headed, and that it’s not our mission to change that, nor even delay it significantly. How could I know what He has designed another human to pursue, either knowingly serving Him or blindly following a sad destiny? He says that’s His concern, not mine.
Holiness includes embracing you own individual calling; it also includes rejoicing in His provision.
