Week 2 Sunday
Week 2 Sunday
Our Pegs Come Down
Job 31:24-28; Isaiah 36:6-7; 1 Peter 1:24-25
We saw last week that if God goes, then everything worthwhile goes too. Everything lacks basis, permanence, and ultimate meaning. The whole situation is summed up in these words: “And then—so the Lord of hosts declares—the peg driven in so firmly shall be wrenched out and give way, till everything that hung upon it shall come down” (Isa. 22:25 Moffatt). When the peg of material civilization upon which we have hung everything is wrenched out by economic dislocation and gives way, then everything we have hung on it—our plans, our hopes, our futures—gives way with it and goes down in a crash. We have hung everything on the wrong peg, the insecure peg of money. That peg should have been God; for, as God holds amid the stress of things, everything holds.
One of the richest men of a midwestern city thought of what he could give his daughter as a heritage. He began with financial securities, went on down the list, but rejected all material legacies as too insecure. He finally fastened on religion as the only secure inheritance he could give his child—an interesting conclusion, for he himself was not religious. But there was a difficulty with that decision; the child could not take religion as a heritage. For religion to become really hers, she had to choose it.
It is not easy to choose a faith now, for the intellectual climate has changed from traditional to scientific. In the traditional climate, you simply took what was passed on from generation to generation without question; but in a scientific climate everything has to be verified, for science believes in verified knowledge. Can the knowledge in the schoolrooms be verified knowledge, and the knowledge in the churches be unverified hypothesis? This is an impossible dualism, and it makes religion impossible for modern humanity.
The pegs on which we have hung our modern civilization are coming down. We are at the end of what sociologist Pitirim Sorokin calls a “sensate society.” It has exhausted itself against the facts of life. It is becoming bankrupt. When we take a new center—God—will that center be capable of verification? Will God verify the divine self to us as self-authenticating?
O God, if I find you at all, I want to find you with my whole being, for I know that a faith that does not hold my intellect will soon not hold my heart. I would have both held by you. Help me. Amen.
Week 2 Monday
Science and Religion
John 7:17; Philippians 4:8; 1 Thessalonians 5:21
If possible, we must work our way through this scientific climate to God. We now see a little more clearly the relationship between science and religion. Science has reference to that which can be weighed and measured, and religion to that which can be evaluated; the one has reference to the quantitative aspects of life, and the other to the qualitative.
Science comes to a mother’s tear and defines it in terms of its physical structure: so much water, so much mucus, so much salt. But is that an adequate definition of a mother’s tear? Hardly, says religion, for there are ideas, emotions, values, meanings using the physical structure of the tear. Religion would evaluate those imponderables. Thus it would take the answer of both science and religion to give an adequate definition of a mother’s tear.
True. But the snag is this: You can verify that which can be weighed and measured; can you verify values? Why not? You can put values into life to see what life will do with them. You can test them by experiment. If the values are real, life will approve them and back them; but if they are not real, they will wither, and not be able to stand up to life; the universe will not approve them. When you live by them, you will fight a losing battle; they will let you down.
As I was about to leave a broadcasting station, an announcer followed me to the elevator, saying, “I am supposed to be hardened by hearing speeches all day long, but you got me. And the reason is that my life has broken down at the center. The central thing upon which I have leaned has gone out from under me. I face inner ruin and a broken home. My life hypothesis hasn’t worked. Yours seems to be working. Tell me about it.” I could tell him that life to me, since I have committed myself completely to God, is one long verification of my central life hypothesis—everything corroborates it. My world of values holds up under the strain of life. This way works.
O God, I want to test your way. If you exist, you will show yourself to me, for all other ways let me down; all their joys give me a hangover. I want something that remains permanent amid change, which has sweetness amid sorrow and light amid darkness. Give this to me. Amen.
Week 2 Tuesday
The Five Steps of Science
Romans 1:19-20; 14:10; Galatians 6:7-8
Can we take the same steps in verifying our knowledge of God that science takes in verifying its knowledge of things that can be weighed and measured? There are five steps in the scientific method: (1) state the problem; (2) pick out the most likely hypothesis that will meet that problem; (3) experiment with that hypothesis; (4) verify the hypothesis on a wide scale; (5) simply and humbly share verified results.
Can we take this fivefold method and apply it to the realm of value? First, state the problem. The problem is how to live in a universe of this kind, and to live well. It is a moral universe, and it seems to take sides on moral questions. In this moral universe we are free to choose, but not free to choose the results of our choosing; they are in hands other than ours. This moral universe is not something that we create out of our taboos and rules; it is something we discover; it is a “given.”
A father was explaining Newton’s law of gravity and how it held things to earth, but his son asked, “Well, Dad, what held things together before they passed this law?” Just as Newton did not pass the law of gravity, but discovered it, so we do not pass the moral laws written in the constitution of things, we discover them. And we must come to terms with these moral laws, just as we must come to terms with the law of gravity. If not, we shall be broken. We do not break these moral laws; they break us. If we run afoul of them, they will throw us back bleeding, broken, blighted things. These laws are color-blind. Whatever color we are, we are broken when we break these laws. And they are religion-blind. If the Christians or agnostics break them, they will be broken. As Sophocles puts it:
The unwritten laws of God that know not change,
They are not of today nor yesterday,
But live forever, nor can man assign
When first they sprang to being.*
O God, I see I am free only to obey. I must come to terms with your laws written in me and in the constitution of things. Help me this day to begin to find my freedom in obedience to you. Show me how to begin. Amen.
* Sophocles, Antigone (442 BCE), Antigone to Creon.
Week 2 Wednesday
The Kingdom of God Is within You
Luke 17:20-21; Romans 14:17; Revelation 8:10
The central theme of my book Is the Kingdom of God Realism?* is the statement of Jesus: “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21 KJV). He said this not to his disciples, but to the Pharisees, the unchanged people. Is the kingdom of God then in us all, changed and unchanged? Yes.
Of course, it is true that those who have been spiritually changed see, submit to, enter, and inherit the kingdom of God in a way the unchanged do not. The changed have related to the laws of the kingdom and to the God of the kingdom, and therefore receive the resources of the kingdom; the sum total of that kingdom works with them and not against them. Those who are unchanged find the kingdom is within them, but they are at cross-purposes with it. In the changed person, the kingdom works as self-realization, and in the other as self-frustration. But in both it is there.
The laws of our being are not other than the laws of God; they are the laws of God. These laws are not something imposed on the situation, but are written into the very structure of our being, into our tissues, our nerve cells, our bloodstream, into the total organization of our life. They are the way we are made to live.
An engineer building an engine stamps within it a way to work, and if it obeys that way it works well and harmoniously. Just so, God has stamped within the structure of our being God’s kingdom. The Old Testament calls this stamp creating “man in his own image.” If we live according to it, we live. If we don’t, we don’t. A railway engine is made to run on tracks, and if it remains on the tracks it finds its freedom, pulls its loads, and gets to its destinations. But if, in order to gain its freedom, it jumps the tracks, the result is not freedom, but ruin to itself and everybody concerned.
There is a track to freedom, to efficiency, to full living, built into your being and mine. It is the kingdom of God; it is within you.
O God, I have looked for you to rend the heavens and come down, and here I find your footsteps within my own being. You have traced your ways in my makeup. You have been so near; I have run afoul of you and thought I was only running afoul of law. Forgive me. Amen.
* New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1940.
Week 2 Thursday
Working with or against the Kingdom
John 3:13; Acts 9:5; Romans 6:20-23
We saw yesterday that the laws of our being are the laws of God, the will of God wrought out in terms of nerves, tissues, and total structural being. We must then come to this breathtaking conclusion: We cannot revolt against God without revolting against ourselves. I say it reverently: God has us hooked! We cannot run away from God without running away from ourselves. The sum total of the result of the modern revolt against God is this: We who decided we would not live with God find that we cannot live with ourselves. A sinner is one who is literally a problem to himself. The hell that modern humanity banished from the universe by politely putting it out at the door has now come back through the window in the form of neuroses, fears, inhibitions, inner conflicts, and guilts. It has moved into the center of human being. So the counterpart of “The kingdom of God is within you” is “The kingdom of hell is within you too.” Obey the kingdom of God within you and you have heaven; disobey it, and you have hell—have it right now as a condition, a state of mind.
Hell and heaven are not something God sovereignly gives you at the end of your earthly life. They are things you choose here and now. When you obey the kingdom of God, you find heaven here and now, for its other name is “the kingdom of heaven.” On the one hand, if you take out heaven with you at the end of this life, you will get heaven, for you will have brought it with you, in you. On the other hand, if you take hell out with you, you will get it, for you will have brought it with you; in you.
I do not know where heaven and hell are as places, but I know where they begin. Sin is hell begun; it is disruption, disintegration, disease. You take the state out of this life with you, and you get the place suitable to that state. Goodness is heaven begun; it is fellowship, harmony, life. You take that out with you, and you get a place suitable to that state.
The kingdom of God will work with you or against you according to whether you obey it or disobey it.
O my God—I can now say, “My God,” for whether I acknowledge you or not, you are my God—I cannot run away from you. Nor do I want to. Can I run away from life? from myself? I fly to you. Take me. Amen.
Week 2 Friday
The Laws of the Kingdom Are Self-acting
Proverbs 28:16; 29:6; Hebrews 1:9, 11, 13
This fact of the kingdom of God within us is so important that it must be pursued. These laws, which are written in us, are self-acting. The action and the result are one. The result is not something imposed by God from without. It is something inherent. Sin and its punishment are one and the same thing. Sin literally is “missing the mark,” the thing for which we are inwardly made; and to miss the mark is, by that very act, to sin against oneself.
That fact has fooled this age. We have been taught that God will punish us for our sins in some extraneous way. But since no thunderclap of punishment followed our sins, we began to think that nothing had happened. A little girl put it this way: “We don’t have grace at our table, or pray in any way, but nothing has happened yet.”
“No, my child, nothing outwardly, but the inner deterioration, the decay that has set in as God has been shut out, that is the punishment.”
“I preach just as well now as I did before I committed adultery,” said a puzzled minister. Perhaps so, but the inner chaos and conflict, the lack of self-respect, the deterioration of character, that was the punishment.
“A grasping nature is its own undoing,” says Proverbs 15:27 (Moffatt). The punishment is inherent in the attitude. Even in ancient times this was seen: “As the old proverb runs, ‘Evil men bring evil on themselves’ ” (1 Sam. 24:13 Moffatt). The evil they brought on themselves was the evil itself. The Old Testament speaks of the forbidden goods, symbol of Achan’s greed (see Josh. 7:1), as that “doomed thing from among you” (v. 12 Moffatt). Evil is doomed, not because God pronounces judgment on it, but because of its own nature; it has the seeds of decay in it.
When you do right, that act is written in the Book of Life. It has the seeds of permanence in it. When you do wrong, that act is written in the Book of Death. It has the seeds of its own ruin and death in it.
O my God, I begin to see. This moral universe begins to close in on me. I must come to terms with it. Or is it an “it”? Is it a “you”? Are you in these very laws? And when I come to terms with them, do I come to terms with you? I want you, for I am not a subject asking for a law, but a child asking for a Lord. Help me. Amen.
Week 2 Saturday
Walking with the Lights
Proverbs 10:2, 9; 20:17; 22:8
The converse of what we are discussing is also true: If the nature of reality guarantees the instability of evil, it also guarantees the stability of good. Evil, by its very nature, is unstable; good, by its very nature, is stable. Evil could not exist unless there was enough good thrown around it to make it float. Hence every evil that persists has enough good in it to keep it going. Were it pure evil, it would collapse. There is “honor among thieves”; if there weren’t, they could not hold together long enough to loot the rest of us. The honor is the cement that temporarily holds them together. The further saying speaks of “when thieves fall out”; for they do sooner or later fall out when the honor decays.
Dr. Richard Cabot of Harvard says, “When you speak the truth, the whole universe is behind you; when you lie, the universe is against you.”* For the universe is not built for the success of a lie. You may try to hold lies together with all the cleverness and scheming possible, but in the end they will break down. Someone put it this way: “You must have a willingness to rely on the moral nature of the universe which guarantees the insecurity of evil.”
This discussion may be summed up in the words of a historian: “There is one fact that history sounds—the moral law is written in everything.” It is “the way” stamped into the nature of things—the way it is made to work; and if it tries to work some other way, it works its own ruin.
A friend of mine was about to walk across a street against the lights when a plainly dressed man stepped up to him and said, “My friend, if you want to live long, walk with the lights; if you don’t, then walk against them.” That is the lesson of life: If you want to live well, walk with the green lights that God has hung in the constitution of things. If you don’t, then walk against God’s red lights and be hurt.
O God, my Light, I looked for you in the sky. You are there, but I see you are here too, in the very nature of things. Help me walk with your green lights. Forgive me that I have walked against your red lights. I thought I was only hurting you. I was hurting myself too. Amen.
* Published source unknown.