All Things New

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger. Bryan Broome is off celebrating his anniversary today, so he’s not with us.

We are talking about Isaiah 65 and the concept of change and newness in the universe – how the Christian worldview, if you will, accounts for it and allows for it, whereas a purely rationalistic view of the world does not really allow that possibility. But let’s start with Isaiah 65. What’s the gist of this? How does this relate to the concept of change?

In Isaiah 65 we’re nearing the end of Isaiah’s arguments, his sermons. He has consigned God’s apostate people to destruction and judgment. He says, for instance, these things starting in verse 13 –

Therefore, thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, my servants shall eat, but ye shall be hungry. Behold, my servants shall drink, but ye shall be thirsty. Behold, my servants shall rejoice, but ye shall be ashamed. Behold, my servants shall sing for joy of heart, but ye shall cry for sorrow of heart, and shall howl for vexation of spirit.
And ye shall leave your name for a curse unto my chosen, for the Lord GOD shall slay thee, and call his servants by another name, that he who blesseth himself in the earth shall bless himself in the God of truth; and he that sweareth in the earth shall swear by the God of truth; because the former troubles are forgotten, and because they are hid from mine eyes.

For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. But be ye glad and rejoice forever in that which I create, for behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my people, and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying.

And he goes on to describe this new heaven and new earth, but the contrast is not so much between the end of our physical planet and the beginning of eternity. It’s the end of his relationship with Israel and the introduction of the Messianic Age, of the world to come, which although it has its perfection and finality beyond the resurrection, is something that Jesus inaugurated when he came. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things are passed away, all things are become new.”

We talk about the new birth. We talk about being raised to life through the work of the Holy Spirit. We talk about a new covenant. He mentions here a new name, which is Christian.

So God can look at his people and say, “Things have not gone well, have they? Mostly because of your rebellion, so it’s time for that rebellion to end and it’s time for me to do something new – a new thing will the Lord work in the earth.”

That’s interesting in light of what we’ve talked about with dispensationalism, where it’s not Plan B. It’s not that the first thing failed and God is doing something new instead. It’s been his plan all along to do this and to enact a dramatic transformation.

The prophecies have been there from the beginning. The plan was there from before the beginning. We’ll talk more about this as we go along, I should think, but as God’s people 500 or 600 years before Christ are looking at this, they very much sense the need for something new. The Assyrians have come, the Babylonians are on their way, and things are not going well. God’s people are rebellious and perverse. “Where is Messiah? Surely when he comes things will change, but how will they change? What will be the nature of change?”

That’s something we face on a regular basis, particularly every January 1. “I’m going to be a new person. I’m going to make new resolutions. I’m going to make new decisions. I’m going to live my life in a better way. I’m going to drop some pounds, lose an addiction, make some new friends, build some new habits.”

And yet, after a week or two, we generally find out that we haven’t changed much at all, and we’re kind of back in the same groove again. Even when we do manage to, say, drop one addiction, we generally find out we’ve picked up another. There’s something more basic underneath, something basic in human nature that we can’t quite lick, and we don’t understand why.

And here comes the gospel of Jesus Christ and says, “God can do something brand new in your life,” or relatively brand new, because there is that. We come and look at the new covenant in Christ and in some ways it’s brand new because Jesus has just died, he’s just risen, he’s ascended to heaven, he’s poured out the Spirit, and that is historically new. But the idea and the promise have been there from the beginning, from the garden gate when God spoke of the seed of the woman, the seed of the serpent, and how he would rescue the woman and bring her to his side and crush the serpent and make all things new. He would restore what they had lost.

So the Old Testament is the ongoing promise of a new thing, but itself becomes older and older as we go along, in a very literal sense. The tabernacle and the temple wear out and wear away. In Isaiah’s day it would not be long before Babylon would come and smash the temple and reduce it to ruins and destroy Jerusalem, and yet God’s people, and the prophets certainly, realize that the most basic thing wasn’t that they needed a new building to worship in. They needed to be new people.

And here comes Isaiah saying, “Well, a lot of you are not going to be new. God is going to reject you. Your end is in sight, but amongst these people who I call my people in a broad sense there are those who truly are my people, and they’re going to live to see me do something brand new and it’s going to be exciting. It’s going to be full of life and joy. There’s going to be communion with God and communion among men. It is going to be new in the history of the world, although heralded from the beginning.”

This is where the New Testament begins to explain in these words. A new creation – what does that mean? Let’s read Colossians and Ephesians and Corinthians and Romans and Galatians, even the book of Revelation. Let’s read the gospel of John and see what this newness looks like.

But the thing that I would like to talk about briefly at least today is why it is that Christianity can say, “Here’s a new birth. Here’s a new creation,” when the world keeps clamoring for newness and yet can’t seem to find it in their own backyard, their own pocket?

They keep promising, “Oh, we can do something really new here. We can make a change. We can make a difference.” Whether it’s New Year’s Eve or some great reform movement that’s going to change the world, it always seems to bomb, to crash and burn. We end up with new dictators, new rules that don’t really fix anything. In American history we’ve had the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society, the New Frontier, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few, and each program says, “This is going to be it – 1,000 Points of Light. This will change everything. We’ve found the key this time.”

Strangely enough, it always seems to involve more government spending, more government bureaucracy, and very little positive change. Sometimes the things that they work to change get worse. The War on Poverty actually increased poverty in the United States considerably, so what’s wrong with this?

We can look at it, as we often do, following Dr. Van Til and others, in terms of rationalism and irrationalism. Let’s start with rationalism. Rationalism was born out of a Christian consensus. People had abandoned the pagan gods for a long time. They had done away with most of the pagan rituals, so thinking rationally and logically was kind of becoming the thing you did. But then they deified it and said, “In fact, it’s so right that let’s use this tool that God’s given us and turn it on God. Let’s edit God out of the universe because he’s not rational. He doesn’t make sense to us.

“First of all, your Trinitarian God doesn’t make sense because you yourself say he’s beyond our reason, so that’s got to go. And your Creator God – how do you create out of nothing? That doesn’t make sense.” Notice at this point we are already banishing the possibility of God doing a new thing – that is, creation. “So let’s get rid of that.”

They tried to hold on to some hope for humanity, some new Great Society, some utopia around the corner, something that would enable man to be that new creature. They worked for a New Jerusalem, except on purely secular terms. The power would be in the mind of man as he apprehended the laws of the universe and turned them to human good. “Just give us time and let us work on this. Let us understand the universe. Let us reduce it to rational principles, and then we can extrapolate and use those rational principles to create a perfect world. Just give us time.”

There’s some analogy here to, as you mentioned before, addiction, where the only known cure, I am told, for alcoholism apparently is quite well-known in the psychological literature. The only cure is religious transformation; otherwise, you’re just trying thing after thing after thing. But there’s this constant attempt to reduce it to, “Follow these steps,” whether those are the 12-step program or something else.

There’s this pursuit of, “If you follow these logical steps, follow this chain of rational events, you will achieve this transformation,” when really the transformation doesn’t follow steps.

No, it doesn’t. That’s an excellent analogy because in the late 17th and early 18th century that’s kind of the tact people were on, up through the French Revolution. “Just give us time, give us the money, give us the political power, and out of the goodness of our hearts, because we are fundamentally a good people, we’ll get rid of all the obstacles, all the things that are in the way, all the hindrances, and we will produce this great society that people have talked about and dreamed out, that Christianity has offered but never really produced. It is so logical and so straightforward.”

To read some of the writers of that time is to hear the scoffing in their voices. “You Christians were so stupid. This is really so simple. If we can just get rid of all your superstitions, we would have Paradise tomorrow. We’ve got to stop thinking religiously and depending upon that and just behave like rational logical people, and then everything will be fine.”

Then came the French Revolution and 40,000 people went to the guillotine and the country was splintered, and along comes Napoleon and political tyranny, and it didn’t work. This kind of sent a shock through the whole Rationalistic movement. “But it was supposed to!” Those who weren’t in Europe (like the United States) did not completely abandon the viewpoint, and it has persisted to this day.

We’ve seen it lately in the pandemic. “Just follow the science. It’s all science, baby. Just follow the logic and the reason. We can fix all this. Just trust us. A little more power, a little more interference with your so-called traditional liberties, and we will make everybody healthy and safe, and you will thank us and reelect us many times.”

“And the science is exactly what we, the experts, say it is, with our good funding.”

“Yes, because we’re the scientists and we are smarter than you.”

Some of the arguments that I heard during the pandemic – from afar; I tried not get into any of them – were, “Well, who do you believe where science is concerned?” And the interesting thing is that usually the two people on each side of this argument as to who they should believe – neither of them had a degree in science. They’re not qualified, and nor have they seen the total work of the people involved. They are looking at the religious perspectives, the philosophy of the people, and choosing results in terms with that.

“Well, this makes sense to me.”

“Yes, it does, and it may be right. Or it may not be. But I’m pretty sure that you don’t have a Ph.D. in biochemistry, let alone years of research in the medical field,” and yet we become so sure. It’s not that we’re trusting God, is that’s that we’ve erected a new priesthood.

If we say, “I don’t believe science,” then we’re stupid hillbilly pagans, and if we do trust science then we’re naïve and part of the Establishment. We’ve locked ourselves into that, at least in certain sectors.

This is where Rationalism has led us. There are steps and we can follow them, and yet somehow they keep not working, and we scratch our heads and wonder, “Why didn’t it? Well, let’s switch parties. Let’s vote for the other party. Maybe they’ll fix it.”

The other party may be better than the current party, but that’s not the issue. We’re still going to be dealing in externals, in technique, in technology. “What can we rationally do to provide the funding, to set up the rules, to pursue the rational course, to follow the checklist? And when we’re done, because we now understand human nature, human biology, and human psychology, are we going to get the change we want?” and so far every attempt has said, “No, you won’t.”

Since Freud, modern psychology has pretty much given up and said, “You know when we said we’re all naturally good? Yeah, we missed it on that one. There’s this guy named Darwin and he’s taught us that we are the product of evolution, out of a bestial nature that has 100,000 years on us or something. That’s what we are, and we’re not going to be changing that anytime soon, so let us tell you how to accept yourself and live with what you’ve got.”

There’s no possibility for newness here. The overpowering weight of our evolutionary history, and beyond that the material cause and effect of matter and motion, is not something that we have any resources to deal with.

We are the product of our environment. We are the product of the universe. We are the product of cause and effect over billions of years, one atom to another atom, one chemical reaction to another. How do chemical reactions suddenly stop and say, “I reject my past. I’m going to do something brand new.”? Even the thought of such a thing would itself be the result of the previous chemical reactions that brought us to this point.

“I think about newness because that’s been programmed into me by my genes, my DNA, my economic and social environment, by my toilet training, by my parents, by my education. I am what I have been made to be, and if I think of something new, that’s just because all the old stuff is telling me to say that right now.”

It’s a completely closed system.

It is a closed system, yeah. There’s no way out and there’s no way in. First of all, there’s nothing outside that can come in, but even if there were we wouldn’t allow it. This is where Deism failed. The thought was, “Well, we can admit some kind of God to start us up, and maybe to tweak it occasionally.” You can think of Ben Franklin standing in the Constitutional Convention and arguing.

I don’t think he used the word “God,” but he basically was saying, “God intervened for us during the Revolution. Why do we think that we can get anywhere without him now? Shouldn’t we bring in someone to pray?” – Ben Franklin, of all people, and they dismissed it.

The rest of the story is that everyone said, “No, because if we bring in a pastor to pray, then everyone is going to think we’re in trouble and those are bad optics so we’re not going to do that.”

You know you can’t call on God unless…

…unless you have a pastor to do it.

And also unless something has gone really wrong. When things are good you don’t need God.

But here was Ben Franklin, who’s often been called a deist, and the other Founding Fathers who had leanings that way, like Jefferson and Adams. They will speak of God’s intervention because their deism was more like Unitarianism.

They were okay with God intervening now and then maybe, but they rejected the Bible. They rejected Christ. They rejected the miraculous. But they were okay with a God who would poke in a little, but that didn’t last very long. That was a fleeting ephemera in American history because all their buddies very quickly realized, “No, it’s all or nothing. Either you have the God of the Bible, or God is out of the picture. If the closed system is broken even once (you can think of David Hume), if the miraculous is allowed even once, then natural law evaporates and we’ve got nothing.” So in the end they gave up upon a God who does anything. The system must be closed.

You know those little stacks of dominos where you push one and they all fall for millions of years in all directions all across the gym? That’s the universe. Whatever started it – and eventually we came up with this Big Bang thing – once that was set in motion, the universe unfolds itself naturalistically, logically, rationally, by cause and effect, and there’s nothing new.

What I am is what the universe has made me to be, and that’s why I can’t drop 10 pounds at the gym. That’s why I can’t give up my alcohol addiction. That’s why I can’t be nice to my wife, because (as lots of men have said to their wives), “Hey, honey, that’s just who I am.” Unfortunately, the whole psychological/sociological world of humanism has to say, “Yeah, you know, he’s kind of right.”

So we’re left with the bullies, the slouches, and the incompetents being justified because they can’t change. “Why are you expecting them to? We all need to learn to accept everyone just as they are.” The question they don’t answer is, “Why?”

“How about kill them all? That would make it easier.”

“That’s immoral!”

“Why? Who told you that? Where did that information come from? Why is it wrong for one bunch of chemicals to attack another bunch of chemicals?”

But right now, all of us chemical entities have in our chemical processes the idea that eliminating chemical processes under certain circumstances is something we ought not to do. Presumably we’ll move beyond that someday in one direction or another.

So does new happen? Only in the sense that it’s the unfolding of the old. You plant the seed and it grows into a tree. “The tree is new!”

“The tree was in the seed.”

A baby comes into the world. “We all know where babies come from. It’s natural and hundreds of thousands of years old and it’s just the way the world works. The brand new, the truly new, is an impossibility.” So that’s a rationalistic and materialistic approach to the universe.

The other is the irrational approach. The irrational approach is kind of nifty in that it can give you all kinds of new things. It can give you Big Foot and UFOs and poltergeists and vampires and alternate dimensions. It can give you warm fuzzies in your heart, whatever your heart is.

It may not make sense.

Not only it may not make sense, but it doesn’t make sense because it is truly irrational. It’s letting in that little worm of irrationalism and, as the early rationalists thought, you do that and you’re going to lose it all because it’s going to start nibbling away and things are going to start unraveling.

What happens when you admit that say in the Lawrence Livermore laboratories, they actually have evidence of a ghost? What are you going to do with that? Rationalistically you have to say, “Well, it’s not a ghost,” and we try to put it in rationalistic categories. We try to define it, name it, label it, reduce it to electromagnetic phenomena manifesting itself across dimensional barriers blah blah blah, until it’s no longer a ghost. We let the rationalism eat up the irrationalism because if we don’t, we’ve got a ghost and what’s next? Ghostbusters?

What happens when the really truly irrational is real? We no longer have a rational universe. We have the brand new, but the brand new doesn’t fit in rational categories. It is just the weird, the strange, the spooky. To find this, just go online and Google anything pretty much and push it far enough, whether it’s aliens or cryptozoology or conspiracies or the occult.

You’re going to find that lots and lots and lots of people – not just a few kooks, but lots of ordinary people that you do business with every day – sincerely believe that we never went to the moon, that the earth is flat, that Big Foot does roam the forest of the Trinity Alps, that there were multiple sunken continents under the oceans that fell because our multiple moons fell upon them, that one race is spiritually better than other races, having come from one of said continents, that there are aliens living in the Pleiades who have visited us and communicate with us through telepathy, and it keeps going and going and going.

You would be amazed at how many people hang onto something irrational, something that doesn’t make sense, that’s beyond any kind of rational proof, and then try to build a worldview around that. It’s frightening.

Can you connect the dots for us a little bit more on this? How does admitting mystery into the universe make it fundamentally irrational? Why can’t it just be a corner of a rational universe that is currently shrouded in things we don’t understand?

That would be wonderful and fine. Unfortunately, it’s never what happens. I don’t know if it’s a function of human nature, just the way we are, but we like to pull on threads until they unravel things. For instance, this is a random fact, but there was a particular time in the late 1800s when kangaroos were reported in numerous states of the United States. They just were there – different places, different cities, different states. People said, “Kangaroos!” so what do you do?

Well, you do the rational thing. You see if there have been circuses or zoos. Did a zoo lose a kangaroo? Did a traveling circus lose one, and maybe they’re breeding out in the bush someplace? It starts very rationally. As long as it looks rational, you ask the questions.

But then when the answers come back, “No, there are absolutely no kangaroos that have escaped captivity of any sort, and we’ve looked and we’ve asked and all kangaroos are accounted for,” then why are people seeing kangaroos and why are there so many of them and why are they in so many different places, and then why did it stop? Something weird is going on.

Rationalism’s response will be very quickly to say, “Well, obviously the witnesses are unreliable,” which could be the case, except there are so many people who see them. You can apply this to Big Foot or Loch Ness monster and a lot of other things like UFOs. People see them. Now, do we just say that they are all bad witnesses? They were all drunk? They’re all congenital liars?

They’re all a government secret.

The government is breeding kangaroos to use as a terrorist weapon. The more you push the weird explanations, the more weird you get, until you find the only company you’re keeping is with really weird people. That’s how it works because we tend to favor one side or the other. It’s hard to keep the balance.

Outside of Christ, it’s probably impossible to keep any kind of balance here. We either want rational explanations, meaning things that make sense to me and that meet my level of what I think the proper authorities would accept – Harvard, Berkeley, places like that – or “We don’t trust any of that, and anything that I keep hearing a lot of must obviously be true, and if the government denies knowledge, well, you’ve seen the X Files. It’s a government cover-up of something bigger, obviously. And the more you deny, the more obviously you’re lying.”

So there is in the human heart this tendency toward rationalism on the one hand, or X Files handed it to us. Dana Scully is a rationalist, wants explanations, and provides explanations for everything. Fox Mulder says, “I want to believe,” because we want that weirdness. We want that newness, and when we’re hit with something that doesn’t have immediate explanations, things get real weird real fast.

Yes, for some things, eventually somebody may come up with an explanation, and when they do, first there’s that, “Oh, that’s it? Oh, okay, alright. Hmm.” There will still be a hard core though of, “No, this is just another cover-up on top of a cover-up. We really were onto something,” because some people are like that.

You could think of a little girl, say looking at rainbows. “What’s a rainbow? It’s a magical experience. You see all the colors and everything.”

And then it’s like, “Oh, it’s light refracted through raindrops.”

“No, boring. That’s not what a rainbow is.”

Perhaps Lewis was onto something when he said, “That’s what a rainbow is made of, but that’s not what it is.”

Now I suppose is as good a time as any to try to make that jump. The thing that would allow us to say something like that is to say the rainbow, or the star, is the creation of the infinite tripersonal God, who ultimately made it out of nothing for his own glory, for his own purposes. It has vast significance, and on this occasion, he made it just for you, dear, to see because he planned that you would be here looking at that rainbow or at that star and that it would fascinate you, that it would mystify you, and that’s God poking his hand into your experience and saying, “Look, I made this for you. Isn’t it cool?”

Too often Christians don’t think like that, and it even sounds a little weird to some Christians, honestly. Sometimes the worst offenders, I hate to say it, are Calvinists, because we turn the doctrine of predestination into a form of deism. “God planned everything, programmed the computer at the beginning, pushed Go, and now it’s on auto-play,” so there’s nothing very personal about anything.

Right. It’s also, “Who am I to think that God made this for me? Clearly, I’m just a tiny cog in this cosmic machine that he set up. He didn’t do anything for me. It’s all for his own glory in a very abstracted impersonal sense.”

In a very impersonal sense. We think of the infinity of God, and we get it backwards. We think that God is so big that he can’t be concerned with me. No, God is so big that he’s concerned with everything – every point, every moment, every person, every soul.

As Christians oftentimes, as Westerners certainly, and sometimes even as Calvinists, we push God out of the universe and we are content to let things roll along because God has ordered it this way. We fall into the trap of speaking of natural laws, the mechanics of the universe, and we don’t stop as G.K. Chesterton did – of course, he’s a Roman Catholic, so we can’t trust him…

He became a Catholic later in life.

So maybe the sun rises not because it’s on some kind of schedule, but because God says to it every morning, “Do it again. Ah, that’s so great. Do it again! I love that, do it again,” like the young child who perpetually asks his parents, “That was fun, Daddy. Do that again! Ha ha ha, do it again! Do it again!”

The exuberance, the joy of the brand new, even when it’s not new anymore, it’s that the thing itself is valuable. The thing itself is glorious and wonderful, a thing to wonder at. But we look at say, “Eh, stars – balls of fire, big deal.” That’s what it’s made of. That’s not what it is. Read the Psalms and read Isaiah, and you get a very different idea of how God looks at stars, or rainbows.

In theory, we know how the rainbow got there, and sometimes we have enough grit to remind our children, “You know why that’s there? You know what that means?”

“No, mommy.”

Tell the rest of the story now. “That’s God’s promise to you personally right now, that God has a plan for this world, that he’s not going to destroy it. He puts it there so you personally can see it and know that you’re part of a big plan that’s going on and on until God is ready to blow the whistle.”

“I thought it was just light being refracted and reflected through raindrops.”

“Well, that’s how it works, but that’s not all it is.”

That’s how God does it. Again, Terry Pratchett – “Just because you know how it works doesn’t mean it’s not magic.”

Exactly. Christianity allows us to look at all of the universe and say this is all God’s playground. This is his canvas. This is his theater. He is intimately involved in everything. As Lewis says (I think it’s in Perelandra), “He does all things for each.” It’s not of the dark world, where they say each must live for all, but rather he does all things for each.

This is what it means when it says, “All things work together for good to them who love God.” It doesn’t mean that all things work together toward some end that we eventually reach. He says it elsewhere, “All things are yours, whether life or death, or Paul or Apollos or Cephas. All things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”

The message is that we, by divine appointment, predestination, and providence, have an inheritance in the moment we’re living in, in this particular place, this particular time, the people around us, the air we breathe, the beauties, the glories of the stars overhead, the sun as it sets. All of this God does with each of us in mind.

“Well, you can’t do that. You’re going to do it for one person and then it automatically happens to everybody.”

“Yeah, when you’re God you can,” because God can mean different things in each life. One person sees the star and thinks of the greatness of the universe and the greatness of God. Another is reminded of his childhood when he went out on the hills with his grandma and looked at the stars. Another says, “I’m going to go there someday,” and so it goes. Another says, “Oh, that’s the way home. That’s north.” Each person receives sometimes slightly different but sometimes drastically different things from what God has done, and God planned it all, and he planned it all in relation to one another.

So we have the wonder of the things we haven’t discovered, that when we discover them we will understand to some measure how they fit into a rational universe, but because we’re not God we’re never going to get it all.

Let’s go back – “The stars are light.”

“What’s light?”

“It’s an electromagnetic radiation through the emptiness of…”

“What’s electromagnetic radiation?”

“Well, it’s like these waves are right angles to each other.”

“What are they made of?”

“Light,” and that was the original question.

“So light is made of light?”

“Yeah.”

“In other words, you don’t know what it’s made of.”

“No, it’s…well, kind of.”

There’s still great wonder out there. There are all kinds of things. We’ve looked into the heart of the atom and we still don’t get it. Anybody who’s taken a course in quantum physics knows we don’t know what in the world is going on down there. We know that some of the ideas we had wrong, or at least seem to be wrong. We can’t explain what’s going on.There’s so much about stars and galaxies and quasars and black holes. We’re just scratching the surface.

So are we going to bring these things within the circle of rationality? Yeah, that’s the dominion mandate. Go understand these things. And yet, there’s always going to be a limitation because we’re not God, so there’s always going to be the wonder.

Somebody recently told me the story of a bunch of scientists who come to God and say, “We have done it. We have invented life. You want to see us do it again?”

“Sure,” says God.

“Okay. Well, first we start with these minerals.”

God says, “No no, no no. You get your own dust. That’s mine.”

We don’t know how to create out of nothing. It’s still a mystery. The universe is always going to be mysterious to us, but not to God. We have a God who is infinite. He knows everything. He knows how all the parts fit together. He knows all the mysterious things that work under, through, and between all the molecules and all the heartbeats and all the dreams. He’s got it, and he’s told us what we need to know.

We have this book called the Bible that is a road map for the rational universe and tells us the things we have to know, and he says, “Go find out more and bring it back, and if it squares with what’s in the Bible you might be right, and you might not be, and it may take you 1,000 years to figure that one out.”

The distance from Newton to Einstein is only a few hundred years, and yet we find out that Newton was mostly right, and I suspect that one day we’ll find out that Einstein was mostly right, because we’re not done yet. We’ve got a long way to go.

So why is it then that Christianity offers the possibility of the new? There’s a number of things we can say. We can look at creation, obviously.

“But wait. Wasn’t creation implicit in the mind of God from the beginning?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t real until he said, ‘Let there be light,’ until he created heaven and earth.”

“So it was new and it wasn’t new.”

“Yes, but there’s a difference, and that difference involves the word of God.”

God had the thought from eternity. He had a plan, and here again we’re back into mystery. Before there was time to tick things off, God had – from forever – created a plan.

“Wait, how do you create a plan if it’s eternal?”

I don’t know, but that’s what’s going on here, because God doesn’t change. He doesn’t learn. He doesn’t grow. The plan’s eternal, and yet it’s his plan. It isn’t something forced upon him anyplace else but within the councils of the Trinity, and they forever have this plan, this story.

There came – and we don’t have words – a moment? A second? An hour? God is beyond time. How do we do that? Somehow when this began, time began. Seconds began to flow and something brand new that was not eternal, that was temporal, that is time itself started ticking.

“How does God do that?”

“By being God.”

We have someone who exists outside the system, and for him there are no surprises. Nothing is new. He knows the end from the beginning, from ancient times, the things not yet done, saying, “I will accomplish all my purposes,” again Isaiah.

“Doesn’t that make it all dull and boring?”

Not to God, because God being infinite has told the infinitely best possible story of all possible stories, and therefore infinitely delights in it. And like those of us who go back to our favorite TV show again and again and again, he can look at the world’s history and its future – which by the way is infinite, because it goes eternally into the future – and he’s decreed it all to the – not the end of it because there’s no end, but he can absolutely delight in it because for the Father it brings all glory to the Son, and for the Son it glorifies the Father, and the Spirit is the instrument between all of those and brings it all together. So together they are absolutely delighted with this thing they’ve done because it’s infinitely perfect. It’s the best story ever, as one young lady once said to me.

It’s a terrific paradox, where we have a God who doesn’t change, and yet change has its source in the mind of God. How does that work? How can there be something that is foreign to God’s nature? And we can’t say that it’s foreign to God’s nature because he made it.

I don’t have all the answers, and I think a good reading of Van Til and pulling out all the relevant pieces might help us, but I can suggest a couple of things. Here we can go back to Augustine and Anselm and some of those who’ve gone before.

Augustine in his Confessions makes a big deal of this. God is the living God. We say that, but it’s easy to turn God into an abstraction. We use our theological formulas and God in the end is often left as an idea who matches these theological stipulations in a textbook.

We say he existed before time, before matter, before space, and so he becomes in our thinking more and more ethereal rather than more and more real. Whatever God is in his essence, he has chosen the word ‘living’ to communicate it. He has life in himself. In that sense he’s not static. The Father eternally begets the Son. The Son and the Spirit eternally breathe the Spirit back and forth to one another. There is joy. Now, how do you have that without the flow of time and without change? We have to say we don’t know.

How do you have dynamism without becoming?

Yeah. How is it that God doesn’t change and become something new? Well, he’s perfect already. He’s infinitely perfect. He doesn’t need, and can’t, because he defines himself. He is who he is, and there is nothing better and there is nothing that could be better.

And yet when he creates, as a created analog of that, the closest thing that even God can make is the flow of time, where things do change. They grow from what they were to what they will be.

We have the faintest hint of this in the Trinity when the Father begets the Son and sees in the Son himself. He’s the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature. He’s the brightness of the Father’s glory, the express image of his person.

To use the language of modern psychology and modern linguistics, something can come from the origin and yet not destroy the origin. The word is not lost once it is spoken. The spring does not dry up once it has given off the fountain. The movie series does not get worse once you get past the first episode – hard to prove from today’s cinema, but you get the idea. It is possible, and herein lies also the roots of biblical eschatology.

Let me approach it in a different way. In all of the ancient religions, the gods’ children always turned on them. Uranus had his Chronos. Chronos had his Zeus. Ra had his Isis, and everyone knows now Odin has his Loki. They create, and the creation always turns against them. The gods fight the giants and die.

But in Christianity, God begets his Son, and the Son delights always to do the Father’s will. He is the pure image of the Father and returns the glory back to the Father, so in coming away we come back and nothing’s lost. There’s the possibility of a happy ending.

You can leave the beginning of the story. You can leave the shire. You can leave earth for Narnia and come back again, and it’s okay. There can be a happy ending. God can create a world, and it can fall, and God can reset it in his grace to be something even better.

This is implicit in who God is, but is it a one-to-one kind of thing? No. We’re creatures. We’re analogs. We don’t map out God exactly, but we’re a created version, and that loses a lot of who and what he is. Within God, there is this, “I have planned. I create.”

I came across this not long ago. There are theologians who make a big point of, “But that’s not a change.” No, it’s not. It can’t be because God doesn’t change, but it sure seems like a change to us because we’re trapped in time, and time is the thing whereby we have to construct things.

God speaks to us in human language because he must, Bavinck says, because we have no way of understanding divine language, if there’s such a thing. How do the persons of the Trinity explain this and communicate this to one another? We can’t know and we can’t say. We can use the language of the Bible.

The Bible speaks of, “before the foundation of the world,” that is, before time. Is there a “before time,” because isn’t that temporal? I don’t know, but it’s the only language we’ve got, so from our point of view we say eternity past, eternity future. We say it without thinking, and yet for God all things are now.

I find it helpful to think if you have a three-dimensional object interacting with a two-dimensional world, how do we inhabitants of the two-dimensional world perceive that three-dimensional object? Only in two dimensions. That’s all they can comprehend. So there’s reality beyond what we know, and that reality is God.

And he is not the less real because we can’t encompass with our minds all of his dimensions, and yet that’s what rationalists would say. “Well, if your God is going to be rational, he has to come down to where we can understand him,” to which God says, “No. Not going to do that one. Not required of me.”

But because we have this infinite God who understands all things and who speaks to us in the Bible, we can have true knowledge because he knows everything. And what he tells us, although it is colored and limited in a sense by who we are, yet he’s infinite enough to make the communication link good.

There’s a bumper sticker I keep mentioning. “God is too great to be encompassed in any one religion.” That’s an attempt to push God out of all religions and out of the universe. It’s thinking backwards. Again, it’s, “Infinite means God’s too big to care or be involved or for us to ever reach him.” No, God is so big that he can communicate with absolute clarity. That’s what it means to be infinite and to be sovereign. The distance between us is incredible, unimaginable to us, and yet he, being infinite, has the ability to bridge it.

So when we read his word, we’re not reading hints and guesses and myths and vague upper-story experiences. We are reading propositional communication from the only person who knows everything, and it is brought to us in a way that is most useful and most clear for us where we are, whether we lived 1,000 years ago or whether we live 1,000 years from now. It’s always relevant and always clear, always perspicuous, always infallible.

This being so then, where is the newness? That sounds like, “Wow, nothing ever changes.” Yeah, but when it contacts a sinful human heart, the Spirit of God can quicken it and we can have what is for that soul something brand new – faith in Jesus Christ, eternal life, communion with the Triune God, becoming an adopted child of God, an heir of heaven, having eternal life, being a citizen of the New Jerusalem, being encompassed with a new covenant.

It is brand new for us. God knew it was coming. He had it planned, and he’s okay with the fact that he knows the end of the story.

Wow, this conversation went very differently than I anticipated, so I’m going to pivot to recommendations and tell you that my recommendation is not what I thought it was going to be when we started this episode.

I thought I was going to recommend Bahnsen’s book on Van Til, Van Til’s Apologetic. Instead, I’m going to recommend The Little Prince, which is a wonderful children’s book by Antoine De Saint-Exupery. I don’t believe he was a believer, but the wonder that we’ve talked about in the world and our experience of wonder is marvelously portrayed in this book, originally written in French. There are several great English translations. He talks about why the stars are beautiful and it’s a delight.

That sounds wonderful. I have something that I actually thought you might be going to recommend. It’s a book that I have and I’ve glanced at but I’ve never read, but Lewis recommends it. It’s called Flatland by A. Square.

It’s the story of a two-dimensional universe of geometrical figures like squares and circles and such, and a description geometrically of how these figures would perceive each other in a two-dimensional universe, and how they would be affected by the presence of something three-dimensional.

I’m looking at the Wikipedia description here –

A satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott, first published in 1884. Written pseudonymously by "A Square", the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture, but the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.

So it is a sort of mathematical book after all, even though it’s social commentary. It’s very thin, not a big thing. You could probably read it in a couple hours, but it totally summed up what you were saying so I thought you were going there. So there you go, Flatland.

I’ll have to read it now to see if I have any comprehension.

This has been a delight. Thank you so much, Greg. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you also to our transcriptionist. I’m told that the way to access our transcripts currently is to subscribe to our Substack. Those emails go out weekly. You can have Halting Toward Zion right there in your inbox, and that is the way to receive our transcripts right now. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can send us an email at [email protected].

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