Hold onto your hats cause this will probably get weird and off track. But you can thank my friend, fellow US-2, and (current) Detroiter, Brandon for providing me with the inspiration to actually write this blog but not necessarily for the weird stuff. Don't blame him for that. You can check his blog out by clicking his name over there -->
That being said my only inspiration isn't Brandon. You can also credit the good and funny people at Cracked.com for helping to inspire this. In fact one of their most recent articles The 6 most accidentally creepy movie romances serves as part of this inspiration as well as their article How Doctor Who Became My Religion. Perhaps you've already gone and read Brandon's blog or the articles I posted, if you haven't then don't do it yet you'll spoil my whole build up and that just wouldn't be any fun. Now to begin.
I titled this post "Knowing God". While walking to work one day I thought about the word "know". I'd rank it as one of the worst words in existence. I use it all the time and I don't hate the way it sounds but it really does an awful job at what it's supposed to do. Know sounds like No which means something totally different and has a past tense Knew which sounds like New which also means something totally different. In fact Knew and New are near opposites. Knew is something older and understood and New is fresh and unknown. It's really just very, very poor. but that's the past tense. Let's get back to Know. What makes Know so bad, and even worse than Knew, is that it's not relegated to one tense. Know is both present and future. You can only tell which tense it's being used in by reading words around it. "Do you know the sky is blue?" vs "Will you know tomorrow?" So which Know am I using in the title? Take a second and actually thing about it.
Now maybe the answer was real obvious to you because how could it be the other one... Well here's how. Present: Knowing God Now. Future: Knowing God tomorrow. These could be worded significantly better but they both technically work. The answer to my question is, of course, both. I love Doctor Who. It is a fantastic television show. And one of the cool things about the show is that it deals with wibbly-wobbly timey-whimey stuff. Know is just like that stuff. The bible helps us know God in the past, we know God right now, and we continue to know God in the future. Do you see what I just did there. I just made know work in the past as well... It now covers all three tenses. But I digress.
I also use Know loosely here. And that is the point of the cracked articles. In the Movie Romance article the author argues that in the movie "Groundhog Day" the character Rita falls in love with the demi-god Phil. Phil (Bill Murray) has to be at least a few hundred years old by the end of the movie. It's quite possible that he is thousands of years old. In fact the script calls for Phil to spend 10,000 years in the time loop. He is over 10,000 years old according to the original script by the end. Even in the final film where it's left up in the air he is still an expert in many fields and to become an expert in a field you need to devote over a years worth of time being trained by another expert. That means it would take him at least a few years to learn each subject that he's an expert in since nobody is teaching him non-stop and he certainly isn't being taught by any experts. So he's at least a few hundred years old when all is said and done. He has knowledge that nobody else can reach, not just in their studies, but in the fact that he has lived multiple lifetimes worth of time. Thousands and thousands of lifetimes worth of time according to the original script. Jesus lived 2000 years ago. Bill Murray might have been over 10,000 years old in the end. He could've been older than Human civilization itself. Could you imagine trying to relate to him after that? How could you. He knows everything at that point. He has lived longer than any city or group of people. Imagine how different our world is from 4000 years ago, around the time of Abraham. Phil was over twice that age. We would be like ants to him at that point.
Now to Doctor Who. I'm going to quote straight from the article from the third to last paragraph. "Lastly, and maybe this is especially true for me as a new viewer, but often the Doctor behaves in ways I don't fully appreciate because he's lived for over 900 years (50 on TV) and there is so much I haven't seen. So many episodes I've missed. And that's just with a TV show. Imagine, for a moment that there is a real God. How many of His storylines have we not been exposed to? That god must have been broadcasting on channels we don't get for millennia. It would take a lifetime longer than the Doctor's to fully understand such a god."
Now I believe that such a God exists. It's hard enough to imagine relating to Phil after he's lived 10,000 years. Now try to imagine relating to God who has always existed. Our Universe is over 14 billion years old. Now I see the rebuttal already "But God is eternal and unchanging". Yes, I would agree. But isn't that even harder to imagine? God is somebody that could go through that much time and not change. Time cannot change God. Phil and the Doctor both change and grow over time. But God is even bigger than that. Bigger than time.
Knowing God? Good luck. People wrestle with parts of the Bible that are difficult to explain. Some have said "God's ways are higher" to explain them and people really don't like that. But really, they are. God is so completely inconceivable to us. He has lived through all of history and hasn't changed. How could we possibly fathom knowing God? We know so very little about the Creator of everything. Here's another article from cracked that shows cool universe stuff. Download the last file in that article if you can. I feel it's necessary to repeat the author... We didn't know that any of that stuff in that picture existed until Hubble took that picture. And I'm going to post a picture of that picture in case you didn't download the file.
Do you know where that image comes from on that photo? That little light on the left hand side of the screen, that's almost directly in the middle of the image. That light is almost too small to even see when you're looking at the whole image at once. That light is a galaxy. And that is just crazy.
And God is bigger than all of that. God created all of that. And God has been active in all of that. Do you know what's even crazier about that picture? That is an incredibly old photo. Billions and billions of years old. Those galaxies don't exist any more. 10,000 galaxies that might have had life but have all died now. Thousands if not millions or billions of civilizations that have been lost. See I'm not one to think that we're God's only project. We live in a very old universe and we're very young. Why would we be the only place God would put life? Why would the universe need to be so big if all God was creating was life in one place? No, I think there are billions, or trillions, or numbers I can't even fathom of civilizations and species in the universe that either currently exist or have existed or will exist. How can we know a God that has created all of that and loves all of that? A parent to trillions and trillions over a time of billions of years. And he loves our world and our people in a way bigger than we can understand.
So we no, we can't know God now, or tomorrow, or ever. We can learn about God and try our best but in the end the amount of God we will know will be infinetly small compared to the reality of God. And I think that's ok. It just means we have so much left to learn. More than discovering 10,000 new galaxies in one photo.
That being said my only inspiration isn't Brandon. You can also credit the good and funny people at Cracked.com for helping to inspire this. In fact one of their most recent articles The 6 most accidentally creepy movie romances serves as part of this inspiration as well as their article How Doctor Who Became My Religion. Perhaps you've already gone and read Brandon's blog or the articles I posted, if you haven't then don't do it yet you'll spoil my whole build up and that just wouldn't be any fun. Now to begin.
I titled this post "Knowing God". While walking to work one day I thought about the word "know". I'd rank it as one of the worst words in existence. I use it all the time and I don't hate the way it sounds but it really does an awful job at what it's supposed to do. Know sounds like No which means something totally different and has a past tense Knew which sounds like New which also means something totally different. In fact Knew and New are near opposites. Knew is something older and understood and New is fresh and unknown. It's really just very, very poor. but that's the past tense. Let's get back to Know. What makes Know so bad, and even worse than Knew, is that it's not relegated to one tense. Know is both present and future. You can only tell which tense it's being used in by reading words around it. "Do you know the sky is blue?" vs "Will you know tomorrow?" So which Know am I using in the title? Take a second and actually thing about it.
Now maybe the answer was real obvious to you because how could it be the other one... Well here's how. Present: Knowing God Now. Future: Knowing God tomorrow. These could be worded significantly better but they both technically work. The answer to my question is, of course, both. I love Doctor Who. It is a fantastic television show. And one of the cool things about the show is that it deals with wibbly-wobbly timey-whimey stuff. Know is just like that stuff. The bible helps us know God in the past, we know God right now, and we continue to know God in the future. Do you see what I just did there. I just made know work in the past as well... It now covers all three tenses. But I digress.
I also use Know loosely here. And that is the point of the cracked articles. In the Movie Romance article the author argues that in the movie "Groundhog Day" the character Rita falls in love with the demi-god Phil. Phil (Bill Murray) has to be at least a few hundred years old by the end of the movie. It's quite possible that he is thousands of years old. In fact the script calls for Phil to spend 10,000 years in the time loop. He is over 10,000 years old according to the original script by the end. Even in the final film where it's left up in the air he is still an expert in many fields and to become an expert in a field you need to devote over a years worth of time being trained by another expert. That means it would take him at least a few years to learn each subject that he's an expert in since nobody is teaching him non-stop and he certainly isn't being taught by any experts. So he's at least a few hundred years old when all is said and done. He has knowledge that nobody else can reach, not just in their studies, but in the fact that he has lived multiple lifetimes worth of time. Thousands and thousands of lifetimes worth of time according to the original script. Jesus lived 2000 years ago. Bill Murray might have been over 10,000 years old in the end. He could've been older than Human civilization itself. Could you imagine trying to relate to him after that? How could you. He knows everything at that point. He has lived longer than any city or group of people. Imagine how different our world is from 4000 years ago, around the time of Abraham. Phil was over twice that age. We would be like ants to him at that point.
Now to Doctor Who. I'm going to quote straight from the article from the third to last paragraph. "Lastly, and maybe this is especially true for me as a new viewer, but often the Doctor behaves in ways I don't fully appreciate because he's lived for over 900 years (50 on TV) and there is so much I haven't seen. So many episodes I've missed. And that's just with a TV show. Imagine, for a moment that there is a real God. How many of His storylines have we not been exposed to? That god must have been broadcasting on channels we don't get for millennia. It would take a lifetime longer than the Doctor's to fully understand such a god."
Now I believe that such a God exists. It's hard enough to imagine relating to Phil after he's lived 10,000 years. Now try to imagine relating to God who has always existed. Our Universe is over 14 billion years old. Now I see the rebuttal already "But God is eternal and unchanging". Yes, I would agree. But isn't that even harder to imagine? God is somebody that could go through that much time and not change. Time cannot change God. Phil and the Doctor both change and grow over time. But God is even bigger than that. Bigger than time.
Knowing God? Good luck. People wrestle with parts of the Bible that are difficult to explain. Some have said "God's ways are higher" to explain them and people really don't like that. But really, they are. God is so completely inconceivable to us. He has lived through all of history and hasn't changed. How could we possibly fathom knowing God? We know so very little about the Creator of everything. Here's another article from cracked that shows cool universe stuff. Download the last file in that article if you can. I feel it's necessary to repeat the author... We didn't know that any of that stuff in that picture existed until Hubble took that picture. And I'm going to post a picture of that picture in case you didn't download the file.
Do you know where that image comes from on that photo? That little light on the left hand side of the screen, that's almost directly in the middle of the image. That light is almost too small to even see when you're looking at the whole image at once. That light is a galaxy. And that is just crazy.
And God is bigger than all of that. God created all of that. And God has been active in all of that. Do you know what's even crazier about that picture? That is an incredibly old photo. Billions and billions of years old. Those galaxies don't exist any more. 10,000 galaxies that might have had life but have all died now. Thousands if not millions or billions of civilizations that have been lost. See I'm not one to think that we're God's only project. We live in a very old universe and we're very young. Why would we be the only place God would put life? Why would the universe need to be so big if all God was creating was life in one place? No, I think there are billions, or trillions, or numbers I can't even fathom of civilizations and species in the universe that either currently exist or have existed or will exist. How can we know a God that has created all of that and loves all of that? A parent to trillions and trillions over a time of billions of years. And he loves our world and our people in a way bigger than we can understand.
So we no, we can't know God now, or tomorrow, or ever. We can learn about God and try our best but in the end the amount of God we will know will be infinetly small compared to the reality of God. And I think that's ok. It just means we have so much left to learn. More than discovering 10,000 new galaxies in one photo.
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