"What Fools These Mortals Be..." ~ September 8, 2002

I'm having a problem with presuppositions. More to the point, MY presuppositions, you know, those ideas I take for granted on how the world works. This Sunday in church I discovered that there are things that the Bible credits God with authority over that I just take as the normal course of nature. To see what I mean, read over Hannah's prayer in I Samuel. "The LORD brings death and makes alive..." Being a science major, I'm quick to say that life is the natural result of a sperm and an egg meeting and doing what they were designed to do. Death is just when the body finally runs out of gas, so to speak. "The LORD sends wealth and poverty..." Well now that is just a part of a free market economy, or any economy. Things like this would just happen that way whether God did anything or not, right? After all, doesn't He just interfere with the way His world works when He wants to get something out of the ordinary done? Other than that, He could leave it alone to operate on His principles and it would be just, well, normal.

WRONG!!! That view is not at all what the Bible takes of God and His world. According to Hannah, God does it all, and is the primary reason why I can even say that such and such is just a "natural" event. If God was not behind the scenes holding His creation together in the order with which He made it in, I would not be able to depend on gravity to always work the way it does, or the sun to burn at the rate it does, or the economy to function in a manner that I can count on getting paid for work I do. Sometimes we lose sight that just because we know so much more about HOW the world works around us, that doesn't mean we know WHY. Created things are not self-existent, endued with power to work independently of the energy of their Maker. It's like your cd player. It only works when it’s plugged in to a power source.

But I'm not used to thinking like this at all. Why don't I pray more fervently for people to be healed? Because I just assume that given rest, time, and medical treatment, they are just going to get better on their own. Why am I not more caring when a friend has a baby or someone loses a job? Because I forget that God is behind every spark of existence and every possible way in which it works out that life. Why do I think that prayer is ineffectual, that it won't really change anything? Well, that's me assuming that life as I know it is just going to go on the way it has whether I do anything or not. Like the Poet said, "What fools these mortals be..."