I rent a small barndominium here in rural Texas. It belongs to my neighbors and sits in the midst of 12 rolling acres of pecan, oak, mesquite, cottonwood, and a few cattle. Yesterday, I was trimming up some low-hanging branches on one of the stately oaks. The field in which this and several other elder oaks and pecans stood is a plowing/planting acreage my neighbor uses for hay. The branches get low enough to where he cannot get his tractor underneath or around the trees.
With the hefty pole saw in one hand, I stood at ground level looking up through the magisterial arms of this tree, trying to figure out which branches I could reach, and there, temporarily blinding me glistened the sun, floating in a sea of azure sky, with its radiant, unapproachable light. Its brilliant hues danced among the leaves as a gentle breeze swept through the branches. The Sun’s light was gentle and beautiful and yet cataclysmically powerful beyond words. Obviously the Sun is deadly if one got too close. And yet here where I stood, its rays gently caressed the leaves, the crickets, and my upturned face. How can such a massive and enormously incomprehensible ball of gas, fire, and plasma just be floating out there 93 million miles away, able to consume anything that comes close to it, enable its light and warmth to graciously give even the smallest creatures a loving, gentle embrace?
I watched two caterpillars racing up and down the blades of grass just below me, darting in and out of the tillage. I looked up at the sun again and was smitten.
My exact mumblings as I turned to look back down at the ground again were something like “Lord, your glory makes me afraid.” Call it a glimpse, a momentary glance. It was like I peeked into the throne room of heaven and saw too much. I should add that ever since I was a child, I’ve had a terrible fear of heights - acrophobia as the doctors call it. So looking up into the branches of trees that tower over me by 40 or 50 feet kind of brings that to the surface, too. Add to that, contemplating the vertigiousness “height” to the sun and I was momentarily stunned.
There is absolutely nothing ordinary about this peculiar arrangement, I thought. It is not only sublimely beautiful, it’s beyond any sort of way to explain in words its incredible goodness. The oak tree, the sunlight, the blue sky, the deepest outer regions of “space”, the crickets and caterpillars at my feet, the birds flying overhead, this planet. The whole wretchedly wondrous symphony of creation was singing and my often deaf ears and blind eyes were momentarily opened to it all. I couldn’t hardly breathe (likely because it was also 95 degrees!)
Lay me out on a psychologist’s couch and they wouldn’t understand it. It’s likely not something they teach in psychology school, though they would, I am sure, try to find some sort of category for it - mystical vision, a waking dream, perhaps an overactive imagination, a sense of insecurity, a manic/euphoric state, perhaps they’d try to ask me about my childhood or about any trauma I may have experienced in the past. Whatever the case, I’m sure they’d try to classify it immediately, get it in a categorical cage, where it’s “safe” to analyze.
Friends, this wasn’t a “safe” experience, let me tell you. For a half second I think I was reminded what the fear of the Lord meant. Sadly, I had to forget about it almost as soon as I realized it, for I was momentarily overwhelmed by it all. If I kept on contemplating the reality of what I was experiencing, I would have just had to fall down on my face for the rest of the day. I was overwhelmed to the point where I simply confessed to the Lord that His glory was scary.
“Science” will give you all the facts about the sun you could possibly want and then some. It’s size, dimension, sun spots, temperature, luminosity, what it’s made of, all of that sort of thing. Ok, fine, but what is it? I mean think beyond its material constituency for just a moment and ask yourself “What in the world is that thing?”
Science has no idea. The best it can do is tell you what it’s made of, what they presently think it does, and how they think it came into existence. Bill Nye the Science Guy said in a lecture he gave to the American Humanist Association in 2010 I believe it was, that the sun is an “unremarkable star, just a speck.” And he’s not the only one in the science community who has attempted to downplay the sun as nothing special. The late planetary astronomer Carl Sagan called it “ordinary” and “hum drum.”1 Even NASA has kept the theme of solar mediocrity alive and well in the popular imagination. On one of their websites for children, NASA says,
The Sun is a star, just like the ones you can see in the night sky, but much, much, much closer. In fact, our Sun is a rather ordinary star – it's not particularly big or particularly small, it's not particularly young or particularly old. Just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill star.2
What NASA or Sagan, or Nye can tell us what the sun is made of, they are in the dark about what it actually is. But I believe their attempts at reducing the Sun to a bland ordinariness is something akin to what the Apostle Paul meant by suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. The more I hear secularists proclaim the celestial run-of-the-mill myth, the more I am convinced they all intuitively know the star is much more than ordinary. Their conscience is whispering and they cannot bear it.
I know the feeling.
Also keep in mind that there is absolutely nothing scientific about scientists calling the sun “ordinary.” That is merely the opinion of the scientist, not data they derived from experimentation. Their argument is immediately disproven by the fact that the Sun is the only known star in the entire universe with a planet going around it that contains giraffes, koala bears, and sloths, just to name a few wonders.
He Who Has Ears
One of the most famous paintings in the world is Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night painted in 1889 just shortly before his tragic death from what was likely a suicide attempt.
The painting’s value is inestimable. But what if when someone asked a museum docent what the painting is all about the reply was something like, “Well, you see, the paint is oil based, brushed onto a canvas material.” While it explains what the painting is made of, such an explanation offers no insight into what it all means or what it says about the artist. Imagine the docent further telling the curious onlookers that the museum neither affirms nor denies the existence of actual artists. “We simply display the works without getting in to debates about whether or not there was a real artist or if there were such a thing as artists, who exactly might’ve been responsible for this work.”
I think this is where a lot of the sciences are today. Scrutinizing the works of God’s fingers (Ps. 8) without referent to God Himself; trying to understand the Sun by means of excluding the Son. So the Sun “just is.” It seems like it has a few purposes, but science really isn’t in the business of teleology these days. It can’t tell us if the Sun has a purpose or not. To admit it does would be tantamount to admitting there was something beyond the Sun which imbued it with purpose. Nature sure looks designed, the famed atheist biologist Richard Dawkins has said, but in the end, such design, according to Dawkins, is but an illusion. Nature ultimately has no inherent purposes (but how does science demonstrate this?). It’s mindless of its own processes. It has no end or goal in mind. It just does what it does. Maybe she obeys a few laws, but the laws, like the Sun, are just there. And that’s it.
Perhaps we have all, in a sense, cut off our ears and sent them to the goddess of modernity, in hopes her wanton wrath, red in tooth and claw, will somehow be appeased.
Nature and Poetry
As one who makes podcasts for a living, I get asked on occasion what podcasts I listen to. Honestly, I don’t really listen to podcasts that much, as the two that I produce consume a lot of my time in research, reading, preparation, and production. But whenever I do find some time in the car to tune in to something extraordinary thoughtful and thought-provoking, I listen to The Mars Hill Audio Journal hosted by former NPR staff Ken Meyers since the early 1990s. Ken was podcasting before podcasts were a thing. I subscribed to the journal in its early days when it was produced and distributed on cassette tapes, and then CDs. It’s now all on line, and it’s still as thoughtful and thought-provoking as it has always been. It’s a writer’s and reader’s podcast of podcasts. Nothing fancy, but every guest, every interview, will send your mind into a delightful, non-partisan labyrinth of wonder and thought. I end up buying one or two of the recommended book each time a new journal is released.
Meyers has been my inspiration in podcast production. While I’ve not been able to emulate him perfectly, I do strive to produce episodes that are beyond the flash and bang of pop culture click bait and controversy. Most of the over 400 episodes I’ve produced since 2017 are what I’d call “timeless.” You couldn’t easily tell in what year a particular episode was released (simply based on the topic). Our first episodes are as relevant today as they were when we first produced them.
Ken’s not paying me a single red cent to promote him, by the way. I highly encourage you to check out MHAJ if you haven’t already. It’s one of those providential provisions of God that has served as an intellectual foundation to my faith in Christ.
I mentioned the journal because it was also just yesterday that Ken featured an older interview with author and professor Daniel Ritchie, about his 2010 book The Fullness of Knowing.
In the book, Ritchie explores the thoughts of postmodernity through the eyes of several individuals from the 18th century, including the troubled English poet and hymn writer William Cowper (d. 1800 - pronounced Cooper). Cowper was a mess, but a brilliant mess. He suffered terribly from bouts of melancholy and madness and in his later years, just before his death, had a nightmare that God had utterly forsaken him. Some biographers have tried to pin Cowper’s madness to his Calvinistic theology, but nothing could be further from the truth. Cowper was mentored through his despair and doubts by his friend and confidant John Newton, himself a former slave ship captain. You might’ve heard of one of his hymns, Amazing Grace.
Cowper was lauded by folks like Jane Austen, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, as well as many other writers and poets of his day. He was considered to be the best English poet of his time.
During Meyers’ interview with Ritchie, I was reintroduced to the wonders of Cowper’s mind. Years ago I’d read The Stricken Deer, the life of Cowper, and was not only utterly captivated by the man and his mind, but by how God sustained Cowper through his most debilitating and difficult times. It was a tremendous encouragement for me. If God could handle poor William, He can handle me too.
Ritchie read a brief excerpt from one of Cowper’s longer, more well-known poems, The Task. In it Cowper describes how the Deists of his day were attempting to alleviate God of having to moment-by-moment continuously uphold the universe. For the Deists, that just seemed like far too much cosmic administrative detail to attend to. The Deists didn’t particularly care for God-the-multitasker theology and instead posited that God created things in the beginning to “run themselves” by means of natural laws.
Here’s the excerpt.
Some say that in the origin of things,
When all creation started into birth,
The infant elements received a law,
From which they swerved not since. That uncertain
force
Of that controlling ordinance they move,
And need not his immediate hand, who first
Prescribed their course, to regulate it now.
Thus they dream they, and contrive to save a God
Th’ encumbrance of his own concerns and spare
The great artificer of all that moves
The stress of a continual act, the pain
Of unremitted vigilance and care,
As too laborious and severe a task.
So man, the moth, is not afraid, it seems
To span omnipotence, and measure might,
That knows no measure, by the scanty rule
And standard of his own, that is to-day,
And is not ere to-morrow’s sun go down.3
In short, the Deists of Cowper’s day could not imagine God having to constantly attend to all the various and sundry administrative details involved in running a universe. The thought of doing everything necessary, moment by moment, to assure the fluidity and regularity of the cosmos and all it contains, for them, appeared exhausting, intimidating, and perhaps some even thought ridiculous. So let us thus instead, build ourselves a tower and postulate a god who sets it all up in the beginning with fixed and immutable “laws” that enable the creation to run itself and give God a break.
Really, they were, according to Cowper, just giving their own minds respite from trying to “span omnipotence.” We simply can’t do it. It’s exhausting. It’s impossible.
But this is by and large where we are today - being told by scientific artificers that there is ultimately no God, that the Sun isn’t the artistic rendition of a God who is a “consuming fire” but rather just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill orb of flammable gas and plasma that used to once be a dense cloud of gas which fell into a mysterious pit of dark matter.
Cowper, Ritchie suggested in the interview with Meyers, saw that Deism would eventually lead to atheism. The “ordinariness” of the Sun is but one facet of this trenchant unbelief of our time. If one removes God from upholding the universe by the word of His power, and instead substitutes impersonal and mechanistic laws and forces, then there is no need of God as even so much as a “hypothesis,” as the chuffed French mathematician Laplace once quipped to Napoleon.
And if God is removed from nature, then it’s no small step to remove God’s providential care from our own lives. God’s just sort of out there (if He’s there at all) largely disinterested, waiting to judge us, as we are more or less on our own in trying to negotiate the perils and wonders of this majestic but frightening universe.
The science artificers today would likely tell me my epiphany of terrible beauty yesterday was nothing but a religiously-induced chimera of my overactive imagination. “Look what religion does to people,” etc. Without religion, no doubt, they would likely say Cowper would not have gone insane or suffered from extreme bouts of melancholy, or been so self-consciously aware of his own sin. Sin isn’t real. God doesn’t exist. The Sun is just a mediocre star. That’s just the way things are.
C.S. Lewis also saw this foul spirit of unbelief encroaching like a shadow over modernity. In his Chronicles of Narnia Series the children, along with Puddleglum, the scarecrow, were held captive underground, in the lair of the Green Witch. Under the bewitching magic of her disquieting fire, the verdant villain proclaimed,
“You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called in the sun. You’ve seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it’s to be called a lion. Well, ‘tis a pretty make-believe though, to say truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world of mine, which is the only world…There is no Narnia, no Overworked, no sky, no sun, no Aslan. And now, to bed all. And let us begin a wiser life tomorrow. But, first, to bed; to sleep; deep sleep, soft pillows, sleep without foolish dreams.”4
Sleep. Sleep under the heavy, intoxicating, scent of the modernist myth that there is no God, all is just atoms and the void. There really aren’t things like the Sun, or lions, or sky. Those are merely illusions of physical particles, your brain playing tricks on you. To insist the Sun is the creation of a holy and righteous God, a poetic and terrifyingly wondrous reminder of His invisible attributes - His holiness, His consuming fire, His radiant glory, and His goodness, has all been reduced to personal, subjective sentimentality. Fine if you wish to believe it, but insist on it being true? Well, good luck.
In the end, seeing the Sun wafting gently through the oak branches was something like the epiphany Moses had at the bush. The oak branches were thoroughly set ablaze by sunlight but were not consumed. The immutable and holy consuming fire of God also comes to us in a human body. But how can the Creator of the cosmos, the very God of very God who made stars with His fingers, fit inside a human body and not consume the body?
I don’t know. But thankfully, I don’t have to know how. This is where science is silenced. There is no technical explanation in the Bible for how the God of the universe could inhabit human form or how a man not yet fifty was old enough to have seen Abraham’s day. We are silenced because we are not God. It is expressly these sort of revelations, for those who have been given ears to hear and eyes to see, which remind us we are not God and that His holiness, His glory, His righteousness, is extremely good and extremely terrifying, too. Terrifying because anyone cognizant of their own sin realizes that they should not have survived an encounter with the living God. Yet here we are.
Why?
Because of Calvary. Because of the Christ, the Sun of righteousness, our Sun and shield, our Bright and Morning Star, whose light illumines our darkness and gives us life. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. He has taken away our sin, burned it up in the furnace of His righteousness in Christ.
But still, it’s quite humbling and not a little scary.
Lord Jesus, help us to have ears to hear and eyes to see the greatness of Your works, Your grace, and Your love and turn to You in repentance. Be gentle when You prune us. Thank You for being the Son on that tree atop Calvary. That’s the only reason my hands could type any of this.
SDG.
Google “Carl Sagan humdrum sun.”
https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/objects/sun1.html#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20our%20Sun%20is,we%20can%20mostly%20easily%20study.
William Cowper, The Poems of William Cowper (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee & Company, 1860), 284-285,
C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia - The Silver Chair (New York: HarperCollins, 1953), 632.
Whenever I read about our 'humdrum' sun, I think about the line from the Dawn Treader. "Even in your world, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of." As a kid, my mind boggled when I read that. I'd been obsessed with astronomy for some time and had been ingesting a star field guide with all kinds of science in it. What is a star, then? I wondered. Years later I read Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, and ever since then I've vaguely wondered how close she was to the truth, with the stars being angelic beings with their own politics.
"I don't know, and I don't have to know"
Great line good sir. That is exactly the sort of thing I have to say to my friends when talking about the Holy Spirit and how He has worked in my life. We simply cannot comprehend the Omnipotence of God, and it's amazing. The fastest way to gain peace about all that, is to surrender it to Him.
This was beautifully written. Well done sir.