4. Material Evidence
Four
Material Evidence
Spiritual things are best understood through what we can see with our eyes, hear with our ears, taste with our tongues, smell with our noses, or hold in our hands. The Lord God, fully aware that our human limitations would keep us from knowing Him in all His glory, gives us all kinds of material evidence to show us what He and His kingdom are like. He knew we mere mortals would need help in order to “get it.” If we pay attention, we can collect the evidence and find out more about Him—His creativity and omniscient omnipresence, His desire to save us from our sin, His ability to make us holy, and His eagerness to draw us to Himself. Such material evidence can be considered a sacrament, a word that means a visible sign of an invisible reality.
The word sacrament connotes mystery. Far from being only a genre of fiction, a mystery means anything beyond the possibility of full explanation. Why does God allow evil in the world? It’s a mystery, something we can only make a stab at explaining. We need help with the mysteries of the Christian faith such as the Annunciation, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension of Christ. These big words direct our attention to infinite and incomprehensible truths. Could any doctor explain the gynecology of the Virgin Birth? But we believe in it—by faith, which is the only way to apprehend such truths.
In the fifth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians we read a very specific example of how an earthly representation helps us understand an invisible reality. Paul writes about how the marriage of a man and a woman represents the mystery of the union between Jesus Christ and the church, a union between God and humankind:
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body.
Ephesians 5:22–30, NIV
We who are married become actors in a mystery play. In the Middle Ages, traveling troupes of actors went from village to village, setting up portable stages in the town squares. The people were illiterate and could not have read the Bible stories even if they had had Bibles (which they did not), so the players acted them out. The visible characters, props, and actions, and the audible dialogue portrayed the invisible truths of the Christian faith.
In the mystery play of marriage, the characters have already been cast, and they are not interchangeable. The husband has been given the role of the head. It is not by his choice (or the wife’s) and it is not by his achievement or by popular vote. The wife has not been given the role of the head any more than the church has been given the position of Christ Himself. It has nothing to do with which partner in the marriage is smarter or more spiritual. (Nor does it have to do with Paul’s personality quirks, by the way). Human marriage represents an eternal reality. It’s sacramental in the fullest sense of the word.
In churches where there is an offertory, another material evidence of self-giving is being presented. When I put my money into the plate or basket, my simple gesture represents a visible sign of the offering of my entire self to God. My purse belongs to Him because the rest of me belongs to Him. He owns me. In a condensed form, my weekly donation to the body of Christ (the church) represents my acknowledgment that every day, every breath, and every hope of heaven come from Him and ought to be returned to Him, with gratitude.
Nature
Jesus, like all good teachers, knew that people would soon forget what He taught them unless He used memorable illustrations. Many of His lessons were taken from nature. To illustrate invisible truths, He used salt, light, wind, wheat, stones, fig trees, sheep, birds, and field flowers, to name a few. Gesturing toward the flock of sheep grazing in the distance, He illustrated His Father’s persistent love.
If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.
Matthew 18:12–14, NIV
And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
Matthew 6:28–30, NIV
The Lord God made it all, and the world shows us His glory. Everything is interconnected. When we sing the words of the hymn, “Great is Thy Faithfulness,” we remind ourselves of this:
Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon, and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.
One example of how nature provides a “manifold witness” of God’s care is the red crabs of Christmas Island, which I learned about from a nature program on television. Christmas Island is about a thousand miles south of Hawaii. There are millions of red crabs living in the inner part of the island. At a certain time of year, the crabs migrate across the island to the shore to mate. The males swarm back home while the females wait a couple of weeks before depositing their eggs in the sea, following after the males to the interior of the island. During these mass migrations back and forth, the surface of the island looks like a moving red rug. The crabs know when to go and exactly what to do, even when they have never been there before. The baby crabs hatch in the ocean, so tiny and transparent that it is hard to see how they can navigate at all. They climb out of the ocean and start moving across the island. Each crab is an exquisite creation, equipped with retractable eyes that come out on stems and go back into eye cups. Lacking eyelids, red crabs have a limb equipped with a tiny brush, so they can stick their eyes out and polish them with the brush. After they retract their eyes, they use the brush to clean the rim of the eye cup. Who thought all that up?
If we have eyes to see, we can figure out a lot about the Creator. Even if I have never heard of a microscope or a telescope or the Discovery Channel, the evidence presented to my own senses tells me that His creative and sustaining abilities are limitless, that He is not only consistent but that He loves variety and the interplay of color, sound, and texture.
Events
It’s not only the natural world that reveals God to us. The events around us, often mundane, sometimes horrific, can speak to us more clearly than any preacher. From them, we understand bedrock truths such as humility (“I am not the center of the universe”), neediness (“I cannot provide for myself. Other people will let me down. God will have to provide for me”), and response (“God is in charge and I will trust Him”). Whether we take a slice of our life—one day or one year—or the whole sweep of it, we can see the evidence that the Lord of Heaven allows just the right things to happen to us to make us steadfast and childlike in our trust.
The joy and sorrow we experience in the circumstances of our lives speak to us about mysteries of God’s sovereignty that are only apprehended by a faith-filled acceptance of every incident. Evelyn Underhill wrote, “Events are the sacraments of the will of God.”
Actions
Then there are the actions of our daily lives. Eating, for instance. The next time you sit down at the table, think about this: “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20, NIV). You may be taking just another bite of meatloaf, but if you will look beyond the morsel on your fork, you will see a God who wants to invite Himself to dinner! He could easily break down your door and barge in on you, but He stands patiently knocking, waiting for you to open the door of your heart and invite Him in.
People
The people around us prove to be sacramental evidence of God’s love as well. Whether they are Christians or not, they are all intricately and wonderfully made. There is no end to the variety: “red and yellow, black and white . . .” They may be good people by human standards, honest, beautiful, and kind; or they may be depraved, ugly, and unscrupulous. Those of us who are Christians are meant to reflect God’s love and light to everyone we meet, becoming ourselves part of His material evidence to the world.
The Bible is a series of stories about people. Each one has been included for a reason. Each vignette, whether it portrays an upstanding, godly person or a Judas, serves as a positive or a negative proof of the ways of God.
The Book of Job is one of the earliest human records we have, and it is the story of a man confronting evil and God Himself. A living proof of a living faith was required, not only for Job’s friends, but for unseen powers in high places. Job’s suffering provided the context for a demonstration of trust. While the patience of Job is often spoken of, he has never impressed me as being particularly patient. I do see that he was particularly faithful, even though he did not have the New Testament to help him understand his plight. With little to go on, Job kept on talking to God. We may take heart from the way he bore his suffering. It was the necessary proof of the reality of his faith—to us, to his contemporaries, and to our enemy Satan.
Has anyone ever counted all the people, named and unnamed, who appear in the pages of the Bible? There are so many, all portrayed “warts and all,” that one is forced to conclude that God wants to reveal Himself through the material evidence provided by human beings and their exploits.
Communion
Without entering into theological quibbles about the number of church-sanctioned sacraments or what to call them, let’s explore the ramifications of one sacrament that we label Communion or the Eucharist, which is used in the churches of most believers. When we participate in Communion, we are looking at material evidence: bread and wine, which were commonplace ingredients in any meal in Jesus’s day. Those visible items contain invisible worlds of significance concerning Jesus’s crucified body and the blood He shed so that we might live eternally.
Depending on where the church is gathered, Communion is administered in a variety of ways, using various forms of bread and various types of wine. Some Christians use a loaf and tear pieces off it for each other, others help themselves to tiny crackers, still others wait for the priest to place thin wafers on their tongues. Some Christians use special wine made only for liturgical purposes, others use Welch’s grape juice. Some use one common cup and others use little individual ones. What makes it a sacrament isn’t the specific items but the meaning behind them.
When I was a missionary in the jungle, there was no such thing as bread or wine. There were no ovens, no wheat, no grapes. The equivalent of bread to the Indians was manioc, which is a starchy tuber that is shaped like a carrot, with a brown skin, white on the inside. It is capable of being cooked in as many ways as potatoes, although it comes out stringy, heavy, rather gluey. It tastes better than it sounds to Westerners. Since it was the staple food of the Indians, manioc was generally what we used for the Lord’s Supper. It was to them what bread is to us, and it was as different from the bread of Jesus’s time as ours is.
Because the Indians had nothing even remotely resembling wine, we used whatever we could find. (I remember one time when the cup actually contained, by an innocent mistake, shellac. It went all the way around the circle with everyone taking a sip from the same cup, grimacing. It didn’t hurt us, and it surely gave new meaning to Christ’s bitter sacrifice!)
The breaking of the communion bread itself, whether done between fingers or teeth or both, is loaded with meaning, the sign of divine, self-giving love. If we take it a step further, we realize that we ourselves, Jesus’s physical representatives here on earth, are meant to be broken bread, lovingly sacrificing our time and energy and substance daily for the sake of others.
“Reading” the material evidence is almost like learning a new language. The important thing is to pay attention to it. Let’s learn to open our eyes and ears, taste the bread and wine, touch our child’s fingertips. Let’s not waste or trivialize such sacramental moments.
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
Romans 1:20, NIV
He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power.
Hebrews 1:3, RSV
But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.
2 Corinthians 3:18, NASB