Today's Scripture Reading (October 11, 2025): Psalm 111 & 112
I believe
that everything that I have belongs to God. Everything that we have originated
from him. He might ask for a tithe (10%) to be given back to him, but he gave
us everything that we have, so everything belongs to him; even the portion I
keep beyond the tithe. I get that we struggle with that thought. However, it is
not just our finances that belong to God; everything we know or think also
belongs to Him. Many of our beliefs are so deeply ingrained that we think this
is the only way to believe, and that what we believe must be what God believes.
As a result, we don’t give these beliefs a second thought.
However, that
is not always true. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) championed the concept of Copernican
Heliocentrism. You want to impress someone, fit that term in your conversation.
Copernican Heliocentrism simply means that Galileo believed the Earth revolves
daily and orbits the Sun. The Catholic Church disagreed. It was obvious. The
Bible said so in several places and one of those places is 1 Chronicles 16:30. “Tremble before him,
all the earth! The world is firmly
established; it cannot be moved” (1 Chronicles 16:30). The Earth cannot be
moved, so it is obvious that it neither spins to produce night and day nor does
it revolve around the Sun resulting in our seasons. When the Bible says the
Earth cannot be moved, God means it cannot be moved. And so, Pope Paul V
ordered an investigation of Galileo. In 1616, Pope Paul V met with Galileo and
ordered him not to teach any form of Copernican Heliocentrism in the future.
And it seemed that once again, faith and science were at odds with each other. Part
of the problem was that the Bible spoke with the level of knowledge of the original
audience, and we can’t read back into it with what we have come to know.
However, the truth is that it appears the world
is firmly established. We know, or perhaps I should say that most of us know,
that the Earth spins on its axis as it orbits around the Sun. Yet, even with
that knowledge, we talk about the Sun rising and setting; we know that isn’t
true and that the Earth is really the one doing the moving. Chinese Philosopher
Lao Tzu argued, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place
it, and I shall move the world” (Lao Tzu), but we understand that this is a bit of hyperbole. It might be true, but we would never
have a lever long enough or a fulcrum in the proper position to move the world.
Both Galileo and Chronicles describe the same world, but approach it from
different directions. And there is no contradiction between one or the other.
Many years ago, during my youth pastor days, I had a
conversation with the mother of one of my teens. Mom didn’t come to church,
even though she had grown up in the church. And so, we were talking, and I
wanted to know why she had left the church behind. She was honest with me. She
said that she believed in evolution, and therefore, she couldn’t believe in
Jesus. And my reaction was “Houston, we have a problem.” And so, I revealed to
her that I have accepted the theory of evolution for decades, and I am a
pastor. I believe that there is actually very little difference between
evolution and creation. I think that evolution is simply the mechanism of
creation, guided by God. Evolution suggests that we originated from the
primordial muck, as amino acids combined to form simple one-celled organisms,
and later, more complex animals. But how would you describe that process to people
who had no idea what an amino acid was, and had never seen a one-celled organism?
The best way that I can think of describing the process of evolution is that
God formed you out of the dust. And placing God into the equation fixes the one
problem that I have always had with evolution. The idea that in evolution, organisms
become increasingly complex. The world that I know tends toward chaos, not
complexity. You don’t tell your kid to forget about cleaning their room because
it will clean itself if they leave it alone. But with God captaining the
process, we can move from simplicity toward complexity.
We hold to our theories so tightly that sometimes we can’t
see anything other than what we have always believed. And someone like me comes
along and says, “Maybe we could see it this way,” and we are shocked. How could
we think that? It was precisely what happened when our ancestors began to
baptize adults. The church was holding onto the concept that the only proper,
God-ordained Baptism was infant baptism. The idea of adult baptism didn’t make
sense. However, we must hold lightly to what we believe and be able to praise
God in all things, because it is all His. Everything we have and everything we
believe is His. It is God that we worship, not our fragile beliefs. And
sometimes God needs our permission to shake us out of even our long-held
beliefs that do not belong to him.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading:
Psalm 113 & 114
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