Monday, April 22, 2019
649 - Insensitive Lout
Spirituality
Column #649
April
23, 2019
Common
Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Insensitive Lout
By Bob
Walters
“Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s
temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?
If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple
is sacred, and you are that temple. 1 Corinthians 3:16-17
It is my firm belief that science
does not replace God, but that it reveals God.
The Bible, after all, is very heavy
on “Why” but very light on “How.” The
glory of God the Creator of All Things, human beings created by Him in His
image, Christ the Savior redeeming fallen mankind, the Holy Spirit our
comforter and guide, and the countless virtues, vices, stories, and nuances of
scripture, church tradition, and Christian life reveal little “how” of the
physical world. Yet, inquiring minds
want to know.
Mankind, then, rather than simply
and joyfully appreciating God’s revealed but mysterious love, mercy, splendor,
righteousness, and truth, wants concrete answers. That, I believe, is why God gave us science.
But because it is so human-centric, it has become one of Satan’s favorite
playgrounds: “Prove it!” Satan
insists. Science can do that, so mankind
– rather than marvel at God’s grace and love – replaces the truth of God with
untoward and misplaced faith in the technical answers of self-discovery. We love our discoveries, tout our “evolving”
world, and fail to notice: God doesn’t change.
Neither does Christ, the Holy Spirit,
nor truth change; nature doesn’t change.
Yet man increasingly worships “truth” devised by worldly science, so truth
keeps changing. We have a lot of fun with science; it makes life easier and it
should make us more deeply appreciate the truth of God, the freedom of Christ,
and the light of the Spirit.
That may be true in some corners – I
love how I can instantly look up almost anything theological or scriptural (and
other stuff) on the Internet – but as Satan did in the Garden of Eden, God’s
great gifts of joy and freedom are corrupted by human pride, greed, and
fear. You can blame all that on God if
you want – He did, after all, curse our fallenness – but God doesn’t give up on
us. He constantly regenerates hope and
offers us the stable truth of Jesus Christ if we’ll just have faith and accept
it, which many don’t.
But we are talking about “the temple.” While in the New Testament the temple of
Christ is the human body, the world last week witnessed the dispiriting
near-destruction by fire of the marvelous Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, a
temple of the physical expression from centuries past of a powerful,
spirit-filled faith, love, and fear of God.
The symbolism of that destruction
plays differently in the temple of every heart.
It is a holy church. It is just a
building. It’s a museum. It’s a national symbol. It is man’s physical attempt to express his
love for God. The fire is a metaphor for
scandals in the Catholic Church, or a broader metaphor for Christianity’s (and
Western culture’s) inferred decline. The
Cathedral is a beloved tradition if not a universally beloved icon of a loving
God. The fire is a beacon – not of hope
– but of demonic forces afoot on Earth.
I don’t want to be an insensitive
lout regarding the building’s damage and I do very much care how the fire happened, but it was quite
a show to kick off Holy Week.
To me
it speaks volumes that the Cathedral’s golden cross – science tells us gold
melts about 2,000F degrees and the fire’s estimated heat was 1100F degrees – survived.
My unscientific scientific takeaway
is this: The Cross always survives.
Amen.
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) notes: The cross is about love, not heat; the human heart loving
Jesus is an eternal and true temple, not a temporal façade.
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