Paul Harvey Quote - Timely for Christmas

American radio broadcaster Paul Harvey once told a modern parable about a religious skeptic who worked as a farmer.

“One raw winter night the man heard an irregular thumping sound against the kitchen storm door. He went to a window and watched as tiny, shivering sparrows, attracted to the evident warmth inside, beat in vain against the glass.

Touched, the framer bundled up and trudged through fresh snow to open the barn door for the struggling birds. He turned on the lights and tossed some hay in a corner. But the sparrows, which had scattered in all directions when he emerged from the house, hid in the darkness, afraid.

The man tried various tactics to get them into the barn. He laid down a trail of Saltine cracker crumbs to direct them. He tried circling behind the birds to drive them toward the barn. Nothing worked. He, a huge, alien creature, had terrified them; the birds couldn’t comprehend that he actually desired to help.

The farmer withdrew to his house and watched the doomed sparrows through a window. As he stared, a thought hit him like lightning from a clear blue sky: If only I could become a bird – one of them – just for a moment. Then I wouldn’t frighten them so. I could show them the way to warmth and safety.

At that same moment, another thought dawned on him. He had grasped the reason Jesus was born.”

Fight Like a Man

In Matthew 4, Jesus cites written scripture to defend against Satan's temptations.  It seems natural that, being himself the Word incarnate, Jesus would cite the written law to fend off Satan's attacks.  So, why would Satan even get into a duel with Jesus regarding scripture?  Did he not think Jesus knew it backwards & forwards?

And second, did Satan not know who Jesus was?  Didn't he realize that Jesus already knew he could turn stones to bread?  According to John, all things were created through Jesus.  If Jesus created the stones in the first place, surely he knew He could turn them to bread without Satan pointing it out.  ("Wow, Satan!  I never thought of that.  I've been starving for over a month, and all this time I could've just turned the stones to bread.  You've been a really, really big help.  Thank you so much!")

Of course, Jesus' deity was absolutely known to Satan.  After all, even the demon(s) 'Legion' recognized him on sight.  (Mark 5:9)  But, Satan realized that He was not only God, bu he was now also fully human, and therefore, as vulnerable as He ever would be.  This was Satan’s best chance for victory over God.  Jesus was human.  He was hungry from being in the desert for 40 days.  And, He had the full creative power of God at His disposal. 

I remember times when I was hungry...usually, just before dinner.  On one occasion, I had fasted literally for hours (can you imagine?), and I spied a snack that I knew would ruin my dinner.  But, I justified the snack as being an ‘appetizer’ and ate it, and then regretted it.

That’s a pale comparison to what Jesus suffered.  He was 40 days in the desert, not 4 hours since lunch.  He was tempted by the ultimate tempter, not by a candy bar.  Yet, where I succumbed, he overcame.  He didn’t justify yielding to his temptation.  Instead, he justified his suffering by quoting scripture.

The temptations were fended off not as the Creator of the Universe would fend off temptations.  No lightning strikes.  No powerful winds blowing the Devil into a valley.  No ooh-ah miracles whatsoever.  Instead, Jesus resisted the temptations using the scriptures found in the Bible.  

Maybe this was Jesus’ way of showing us how we should fight Satan's temptations.  Every one of Satan's temptations was thwarted by Jesus' knowledge of scripture.  Not by His deity.  Not by His omnipotence.  Not by His connection to the Father.  It was Jesus the man that fought Satan and won, using the same resource each of us has at our disposal—the Bible.

To put it another way, if Jesus had used his Godly powers to overcome Satan's temptations, then wouldn't man say, "Well, yeah Jesus can do that.  He's God.  We're just men.  We can't stand up to Satan and win."  So instead, Jesus used the tools available to man to defeat Satan's temptations...to show us how to do it.  By his scriptures, by his Word, we have the tools we need to defeat Satan's temptations.  Paul Harvey once said something like, "Jesus lived a good life in a wicked world to show us it could be done."  (He added, "And he died. And he rose again. To show us...we could do that too.")

But, we have to know scripture, and we need to be adept with it.  To own a Bible is a very different thing than to know the Bible.

I have a router table, and it's a pretty good one.  An expert woodworker could probably do amazing things with it.  When I use it though, every once in a while, a work piece explodes in my hands.  I shut down the router, count my fingers, and go looking for the shrapnel and shards that disintegrated in my hands.  It's a good tool.  I'm just not very good at using it.  It's not that I don't have the potential to be good at it.  I do.  But, here's the problem.  I need to work with it more so I can become good with it.  But, it can be hard, and who has the time?  (Yeah, you know it--it's a metaphor.)

Most of us have a Bible.  Most of us who have Bibles, don’t read them regularly.  We wait for our preachers to tell us what we need to know about the Bible on Sunday mornings.  We get biblical snippets from social media that make us feel warm and comforted.  And, that feels like enough.

But, that’s not enough.  That’s like practicing karate by owning a gi and nunchucks, and watching Bruce Lee movies on TV.  We could actually get up and practice the strikes, blocks and kicks.  But, it's hard, and who has the time?

We simply must read and study the Bible if we are ever to use scripture as our shield against temptation.  We must become adept with the Word of God so that we can wield it like a sword.  Otherwise, temptation will make our lives explode in our hands like wood on a router table.

Sand

Sand erupts, exploding in all directions, leaving behind a crimson crater.

Another eruption nearby, and another.  

The sounds of laughter and mocking drown out whimpers and sobs and words spoken in agony.

The ground now speckled with wet gore as blood continues to rain down, pooling beneath a man, the Creator of everything and everyone around him, including those that would kill him.

Which drop of blood was shed for me?
Which drop do I deserve?

All of them, and none of them.

Looking at Nothing

In 1996, scientist pointed the Hubble telescope at…nothing—an area of space near the Big Dipper no bigger than a grain of sand held at arm’s length that was believed to contain no stars, planets or galaxies. They watched the emptiness for 10 days.

In 2004, they did it again.  They pointed the Hubble telescope at absolutely nothing. This nothing was near Orion.  They watched it for 11 days.

Scientists wanted to take a close look at these empty pinholes in space to see if there might be a star hiding there.  So, they aimed the most powerful telescope in the world into the blackness, opened the shutter, and waited.  After hundreds of hours of exposure, they closed the shutter and started processing the images.

In this vast void of space, they found not one galaxy, not one star.

Not one, but in fact, more than thirteen thousands galaxies, and hundreds of billions of stars!  Photons had traveled for 13 billion years through empty space from these ancient stars before smashing into the telescope’s CCD, finally reporting with certainty that this empty space was not empty, but full of galaxies that we simply could not see without the Hubble.

In the dark times of our lives, we tend to see emptiness.  We fixate on the void.  We see nothing.  Nothing good, nothing hopeful, nothing bright.  In those times, we must remember to look deeper, to look with better eyes for the galaxies of hope and goodness that have always been there, but that we were just too blind to see.

Ultra Deep Field

The Apostle Sully

“None of that matters now!”

That’s what Sully told Mike in the Disney film, Monsters, Inc. in which Mike and Sully are monsters who work for an energy plant, Monsters, Inc.  The plant is fueled by screams collected from children in the human world, and the energy it produces is distributed throughout the monster world.

Sully was the best scarer at Monsters, Inc., loved by monster children, prized by his monster boss, Mr. Waternoose.  Sully scared more children and collected more screams than any other monster.  He was world class.  He loved his work, and he was good at it, and knew he was doing a good thing for Monstropolis. 

He had no compassion for human children.  They were toxic, after all.  They were not to be touched, and certainly were not allowed into the monster world.  If a human child came in contact with a monster, a special team of security monsters clad in hazmat suits rapidly descended on the monster to ruthlessly and efficiently decontaminate him.  And, there was a long tradition of great scarers that he aspired to surpass.

But, all that changed when Sully met Boo, a human child with big brown eyes and an intoxicating laugh.  She turned out to be neither toxic, nor threatening, nor dangerous.  In fact, she herself needed to be rescued.  And, it seemed that only Sully recognized this.  Sully’s sidekick, Mike, was slow to see that Boo was not dangerous, and was still desperately trying to get Sully to break the all time record for collecting screams from children.  He could not understand why Sully wanted to find and rescue Boo, the very child he had previously feared, oppressed and excluded from his world.  Mike couldn't understand why Sully was giving up on the all-time scaring record just to find Boo.  Mike stammered, “None of it matters?  W-w-wait a second.  None of it matters?”  Mike felt confused, angry and betrayed.

Ultimately, Sully crusades to not only rescue Boo, but break the oppression and prejudice against human children, indicting Monsters, Inc. Chairman of the Board, Mr. Waternoose, in the process.

I see some similarities between James P. “Sully” Sullivan, and the Apostle Paul.  As Saul, the zealous Pharisee, he was prized by his bosses for his unmerciful persecution of the church.  He was world class.  He loved his work, and he was good at it, and knew he was doing a good thing for the people of Israel.

Then, he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, just as Sully had met Boo, and suddenly none of “that” mattered anymore.  Instead of persecuting the church, he protected and promoted it, just as Sully protected and promoted human children, who were no longer ‘untouchables’, but were to be embraced, which is how Paul now saw Christians.

No, the “Sulline Conversion” is not a perfect analogy for the Pauline Conversion.  But, it does make me think that at some point in our lives, we look at the things we’ve been so zealously pursuing, and we realize that “none of that matters now.”  As proof of this, if it came right down to it, what would we not trade for our child’s life?

Here, then, is the challenge:  To adopt a new perspective in which our pursuit of a comfortable lifestyle, our aspirations of career advancement, and our accumulation of precious valuables will no longer matter, but will be replaced by the greater pursuit of Him, the higher aspiration of Heaven, and the more precious accumulation of Believers.  

This new perspective was thrust upon Saul.  Yet, how difficult it is for us to willingly sacrifice a lifetime of pursuits and adopt this new perspective as we are called to do, even knowing that therein lies the greater reward.

Heliophysics

I came across a link on the NASA web site today labeled, Heliophysics.  I mentally parsed the word and reasoned that it must refer to the physics of the sun.  Before clicking that button, I contemplated whether or not the content behind that link would be interesting to me. 

The sun, of course, can be quite exciting to study.  It has hot regions and cold regions (if you can call them that).  It spontaneously ejects jets of plasma into space.  It has things like a solar wind, a sunspot cycle, and electromagnetic events that cause frustrated, oblivious Earthlings to repeatedly poke at the touch screens of their smart phones and curse their carriers. 

So, I sat there staring at the Heliophysics button, considering the reality that there is an ancient, yet perpetual nuclear explosion that is 1.3 million times bigger than the Earth, that is contained only by its own gravity, that is erupting a mere 8 light minutes from me, and from which I am protected only by the Earth’s magnetic core, a thin layer of atmosphere, and a generous slathering of Coppertone™.  I reasoned, therefore, that the study of the sun could, in fact, be quite exciting.

As my mouse pointer drew close to Heliophysics, another thought occurred to me that made me pause.

I have found that, in the study of my Bible, I am often trapped by the study of the written words, extricating ancient, yet perpetual truths from reinterpreted texts written only a few millennia ago.  (As I grow older, a thousand years seems less like ancient history and more like “just before the cowboy days,” which were practically just yesterday.)  This in-depth, eugenical investigation of words and origins can distract me from the Bible’s real meaning.  Each inspired syllable seems to deserve its own investigation, and so I consider the word and cross-reference it and Google it and effectively lose the meaning of the sentence for the sake of the definition of the word. 

It’s as if I've decided to study the forest, and I start with the forest floor and dig deeper and deeper and suddenly realize that I’m studying a hole I've dug for myself, and I no longer see the forest.

I think that in-depth Bible study is vital.  The closer we can get to the original meaning of the written word, the better we can understand the true meaning of the Bible.  But, too often, I find the study begins to supersede the substance.  I will sit for hours untangling a single sentence, and miss the meaning of the chapter in context.  The micro view of the scriptures should support the macro view, not obliterate it.

My pointer still hovered over Heliophysics.  To click, or not to click?  If I were to embark on a study of the physics of the sun, would I lose my love of sunset skies drenched in reds, oranges and purples?  Would my sunrises signal another day of hope and anticipation, or would I wake each morning and log on to find out if a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) had occurred overnight so I could prepare for any cell phone or satellite interruptions I might experience?

What to do?

Yes, of course, I clicked the link!  Ultimately, the awe-inspiring beauty of a sunset cannot be obscured by the physics that generate it any more than the beauty of the message of the Bible can be obscured by the words that describe it.  Even if I find myself wrestling with words in scripture, the stark beauty of the Word will eventually grab my attention, just as a blazing sunset will wrest my eyes from an article on Heliophysics.  The raw beauty of a sunset or scripture simply takes my breath away.  Science inspires the mind to know more, but the effect captivates and feeds the soul, and the two are not mutually exclusive.  I clicked the link, and this evening’s sunset was still amazing.  In this, I know that as I lie down and study my Bible tonight, I will be amazed.

Why He Came

At the Chris Tomlin concert in The Woodlands, Texas, Louie Giglio preached about the parable of the Prodigal Son in a way I'd never heard before.  The parables of the Lost Coin and the Lost Sheep were integral to the sermon, too.  Read them if you want.  Luke 15.

In the end, he said, "Jesus didn't come to earth to make us better people.  He came to earth to take us from death to life."  In sin, we are all dead.  It's not like we can have a little sin so we're only a little dead.  There are no degrees of 'dead'.  We can be either alive or dead.  That's it.  And, because we all sin, we are all dead.

Only by Jesus' cleansing act of sacrifice are we made alive again.