July 17, 2007

• Hi! We will be taking a short break from the study “Discovering God’s
  Character” as I’ve been watching FKIProfessor’s site closely and have
  taken some interest in the subject matter currently being discussed.
  However, I will not be taking the same approach since what I will be
  presenting will in itself be different yet was prompted by the material
  on his site. It will be presented in two parts. The first part is to
  help us  understand the predicament we are in and in the second part to
  find God’s utterly brilliant solution for it. And indeed we can find
  something to learn about God’s character as well!
  
  
  Creation & Fine Wine:  Part 1- Eternal Gopher Holes

  Picture this scene… you have a pesky gopher in your backyard. You’ve
  twisted your ankle several times in all the new tunnels he’s dug
  underneath your yard and if that isn’t enough, your grass and plants
  are suffering. Now you’ve tried all the gimmicks at the home and garden
  center to run them off and still your unwelcome residents do not leave.
  In fact, the pesky critter seems to know you can’t get rid of him and
  loves to come peek out at you and if he could give you a “raspberry”,
  you know he would. You become sufficiently provoked that you get
  yourself a mallet and go out to teach this obnoxious thing a lesson. So
  you wait for it to pop its head out and down comes the mallet to an
  empty hole. He is much too quick yet you won’t give up that easily. He
  pops out his head again and whack! You miss again. Over and over again,
  you find yourself outmatched by the gopher.

  Regardless of whether you know how to get rid of gophers, it is not
  hard to understand the thrust behind the story and know that it doesn’t
  always have to revolve around “gophers”. Many times, we run into people
  or even ideologies that are the same way.

  When relating this to all sorts of debates, whether scientific or
  religious, or whatever, the matter comes down to our silly story about “gophers”. Take the
  theory of evolution, for instance. Those who claim a “scientific
  stance” earnestly hope that by saying this or that they will get the
  upper hand and silence those pesky “creationists”.  They try and try
  and they don’t go away. They attempt to discredit them and mock them
  and do all sorts of things and nothing works.

  Now let’s look at it from the other end of it.  The “creationists” see
  those pesky “evolutionists” making all these reasons why the world
  could not be created by God and tell us of all these “discoveries” that
  prove the theory of evolution is conclusively true. They take up the argument from God’s point of view yet just like the
  folks above, the “creationists” get out their mallets and go for the
  gopher holes of the evolutionists and they, too, miss every time. We know this because they never seem to go away.

  If that isn’t enough, we’ve got folks who are in the middle on this and
  can’t see why both camps can’t bring the two stories together. They
  usually lean one way or another and would like to really see them
  coalesce into “one story” yet just as the “gopher whackers” above, that
  isn’t going to happen and they get their mallets and go for the gopher
  holes and they, too, miss every time.

  By now, you should have a picture in your mind of three or four camps
  on this debate now, literally a whole crowd of “gopher whackers" with
  their trusty mallets taking their swings. Isn’t the scene ridiculous?
  Not only is it ridiculous but such a debate could last millennia and perhaps an eternity... and they do and they would if it were left to that.

  One good thing about such a scene in real life is that it creates
  either job security for the participants or endless preoccupation on
  the matter for those who just like debate. However, no one's effort will
  ever be decisive because the other “camp” races down their “paradigm tunnel
  deep in the ground” to pop up their next point and are always scurrying
  about but never able to come to the knowledge of what is really true.  Sometimes we'd even wonder if the
  truth were ever found, none of these participants would be happy since
  all the job security and preoccupation would then be gone and they’d
  have to find another matter to whack gophers over.

  Such is life. If one would step back and look at it all, one would
  realize that everything we hold dear is by faith. To take the earlier topic, it is by faith that the evolutionists take
  their stand. They’ve never observed the actual event so they really
  don’t know how it happened and never will. They can only take what they see now and
  extrapolate backward and trust in their numbers and estimates. However,
  the concept that they have of the creation of things is limited to what they want to believe about it. It has nothing to do with facts. Its all about faith. In addition, they cannot go beyond their own “gopher tunnels”
  and cannot see things beyond.  They have faith in their system of
  thinking even with its limitations.

  Similarly, the creationists take their stand on faith as well and to
  that they are probably the most honest about it. They take what the
  Bible literally says and stick to what it says on faith. A most
  commendable thing, yet it is still faith. Yet disturbingly, their
  gopher tunnels have given them the same type of blind spots that the
  evolutionists have. They cannot see things beyond what they believe about it. Its just the way things work.

  Even those who would like to reconcile have a faith of their own that
  the two stories will somehow reconcile. If it weren’t true that these
  folks have their own “gopher tunnels”, one would think these might be
  the most sensible.

  Now let’s not leave out the cynics who toss it all out and don’t want
  to have anything to do with it. That too is by faith. Their faith is in
  their reasoning that everyone is screwed up and they throw it all out
  as rubbish. Now that is a "gopher tunnel" in its own right.

  Yet is this all bad?  In our quest to understand our world where we’ve
  made the mantra that all hypotheses must be proven to become fact, we
  have taken the stand that is totally untenable with reason. Instead, there are
  just some things that cannot be proven with reason simply because we
  won’t have all the information necessary to make the proof and even if
  it could be, the very fact that we are often sequestered in our “gopher
  tunnels”, this limits our perspective and we couldn’t see anything else
  if we tried.

  So let take a look at it from God’s perspective. He knows the truth…
  all of it. He has no “gopher tunnels” to restrict His vision or alter
  His perception. That’s why He knows absolute truth and is the
  embodiment of it. Now we’ve seen from this ridiculous illustration what
  man is like. He sees his own set of “relative truths” as the governing
  aspect of his paradigm (gopher tunnel). The only hope we have is to get some objective input on this and whether we like it or not, the only one that can do this is God because He is not restricted by this at all.

  I hope that in the next
  installment you will see some light at the end of your tunnel on this
  matter and it won’t be the next “pop up hole”. It will be the light of
  truth that shows you that with God “all things are possible.” We will see God's input on the creation event in a most unusual place. And yes,
  you will find out what the importance of fine wine is as well.  Mr.Vee

  • 12:42 am
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