Year: 2013

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

For most of us, there is nothing more intimidating than a chalkboard covered with math equations. But what looks to most of us like an unfathomable jumble of signs and symbols can be to a mathematician a thing of great beauty. For those who understand, a well-crafted equation has the elegance and symmetry of a classic poem or a great work of music.

Numbers can indeed be fascinating. Let me show you what I mean by looking at the one mathematical symbol that we probably all recognize—the Greek letter ∏. We learned in elementary school to call this symbol Pi.

Pi is used to represent the relationship between the circumference and diameter of a circle. It’s the answer to the question: What is the size/ratio of the circumference of a circle to the length of its diameter? Pi is an irrational number, which means that it cannot be expressed exactly as a simple fraction. In fact, it can’t be expressed exactly at all—it is what is known as a non-repeating decimal.

For centuries, mathematicians have tried to calculate a more precise value of Pi. Here it is to 100 decimal places: 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679. Though mathematicians have calculated Pi to 10 trillion places, they have found no discernible, repeating patterns. Because of this anomaly, contained in Pi are all of the number series sequences found in all of life. In Pi you will find your telephone number, your social security number, your birth-date, your marriage date and the date of your death and more! However, this anomaly does not make Pi unusable—expressing it as the imprecise fraction 22/7 is still good enough for most practical purposes.

Even if the field of higher mathematics is alien territory for most of us, I think we can see why those who have studied it find a beauty, and even spiritual inspiration there. Astronomer Johannes Kepler said, “Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God. That share in it accorded to men is one of the reasons that man is the image of God.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said, “The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.”

Sir Isaac Newton said, “God created everything by number, weight and measure.” Euclid observed how, “the laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.” Galileo Galilei noted that, “mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe.” And Einstein said, “God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.” Like particle physicists working on the cutting edges of discovery, mathematicians are finding it necessary to express their conclusions in language sounding more metaphysical than strictly scientific. The distinguished mathematician Paul Albert Gordan (1837–1912) anticipated this when he wrote, “This [axiomatic math] is no longer mathematics, it is theology.”

Of course, God is the greatest mathematician. He can count the birds that fall from the sky, the number of hairs on our heads and even remember the number of tears we have shed. Paul reminds us how we can understand something about God from looking at his creation. And of course, the best look that we have at what God is like is in the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus came to be one of us and revealed the Father and the Holy Spirit. From this, the church formulated the doctrine of God’s Trinitarian nature. Understanding God as a Trinity does not exhaustively explain everything, but it does encapsulate essentially what we need to know and possibly can know. You could say that the doctrine of the Trinity “explains” God like 22/7 expresses Pi as a fraction. We can’t get to the last decimal of Pi and we can’t explain everything about the truth, reality and being of God. But knowing God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is complete and accurate enough to allow us to grasp the true nature of God in our everyday lives and to join in a full relationship with him. A real relationship with God, when lived through Jesus Christ, does not require, first, a comprehensive understanding. Our understanding follows our being in a reconciled relationship to God through Jesus Christ—who does have a comprehensive understanding of God and shares with us all of what we can fathom.

It would be foolish and arrogant for mere mortals to claim we can ever thoroughly explain everything there is to know about God. He is so much greater than we are, having thoughts that are not our thoughts and ways that are so much higher than ours (see Isaiah 55:8). His unreserved compassion, endless mercy and unconditional love make no sense to our human ways of reasoning. As Paul wrote in his epistle to the Romans, “Have you ever come on anything quite like this extravagant generosity of God, this deep, deep wisdom? It’s way over our heads. We’ll never figure it out” (Romans 11:33, The Message).

Moses summed it up well in Deuteronomy 29:29: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.” Because of Jesus, we know so much more than ancient Israel could have known. But let’s always remember that in our understanding we still “see through a glass darkly,” even while we are in fact enjoying a real and right relationship with God through Christ and by the Spirit.

One day, it will all become clear. Until then, I find it fascinating to look over the shoulders of mathematicians and scientists as they probe ever deeper into the mysteries of the cosmos—especially those who have the humility at the end of the day to say, “How great thou art.”

With love in Christ’s service,

Joseph Tkach

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Author and evangelist Ravi Zacharias tells of being a graduate student when a new edition of Encyclopædia Britannica was released. It was a massive work that had taken 14 years to produce and he remembers being fascinated by the statistics: 200 advisors, 300 editors, 4,000 contributors, over 100,000 entries, 34 million dollars and 43 million words. In the last pages of that work, one of the editors had the audacity to conclude: “Herein contains the entirety of human knowledge.”

It didn’t, of course. It has been estimated that human knowledge doubles at least every five years. So in the 14 years it took to produce the encyclopedia, knowledge would have doubled and redoubled itself several times. So where is the “entirety of human knowledge” contained—Google perhaps? No, even with its amazing knowledge-mining capacity, Google can’t keep up.

The Bible makes no such boast, though it says this about God: “Great is our Lord…his understanding has no limit” (Psalm 147:5).

The Bible contains many stories of people, who in encountering God discovered the depth of their lack of knowledge and understanding. For example, when Jacob dreamed of meeting God at the top of a great ladder, his first words upon waking were: “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it” (Genesis 28:16).

Then there was Sarah’s maidservant Hagar who having fled Sarah’s abuse was amazed when God spoke to her, telling her to return home. Genesis 16:13 gives her reaction: “She gave this name to the LORD who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the one who sees me.’”

We used to say, “the camera doesn’t lie”—but that was before Photoshop. And we used to say, “seeing is believing”—but that was before sophisticated scientific instruments revealed a world beyond the limits of our human senses. No matter how far we probe into the atom or out to the edge of the universe, there is always more. As a result, much of what we now understand to be the nature of physical reality seems so unreal. Therefore, it is pompous to boast that anything we produce contains the entirety of human knowledge. And it is even more ridiculous to claim that we fully understand God, particularly if our knowledge leads in the direction of atheism.

The Christian faith acknowledges and even takes joy in deep mysteries beyond our powers of comprehension. Jesus tells us that “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son…” (Matthew 11:27a). But mystery does not rule out a true knowing of God—an apprehension, if not a comprehension, of who God is. Jesus goes on to say why: “…and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (verse 27b).

The fact that human beings cannot know God on their own power does not mean that God cannot make himself known to his human creatures. The early church had a saying: “Only God knows God, only God reveals God.” The transcendent God of the universe has done just that, personally revealing himself in his incarnate Son. The witness of the Christian church is not that we have found God, but that God has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ.

Karl Barth once wrote: “In our hands even terms suggested to us by Holy Scripture will prove to be incapable of grasping what they are supposed to grasp.” However, as Cyril of Alexandria once said, “when things concerning God are expressed in language used of men, we ought not to think of anything base, but to remember that the wealth of divine Glory is being mirrored in the poverty of human expression.” So we must remember that even the words of the Bible, borrowed from human understanding and experience, refer beyond themselves to divine realities that far exceed the words themselves and the creaturely realities they come from.

Holy Scripture preserves for us a record of God’s acts of revelation, beginning with the prophets of ancient Israel and culminating with the apostles whom Jesus appointed. Those narratives and teachings introduce us to a God who makes known God’s invisible presence, even if now we “see through a glass darkly,” as the apostle Paul described it.

Such revelation does not tell us all that can be known about everything, but it is always profound in what it does proclaim. It is only because of the working of the Holy Spirit in and through Holy Scripture that we are put in actual contact with the living God and can hear this God speak again to our spirits. So, although the Holy Spirit does not speak directly of himself, he nevertheless goes where God wills, to surprise, to comfort and to reveal. Whether in Jacob’s dream or Hagar’s distress, God makes himself known and gathers people who respond to his outgoing love. God told Jeremiah, “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3).

As we mature spiritually, we realize that there is much we do not know. While this makes us want to know more, we also realize that it is a relief to accept that there is much that we do not and cannot know. Our lack of knowledge and understanding keeps us looking to the One who knows it all, who wills to be known and has made himself known in Jesus Christ.

In this coming year, there will be many unknowns. The world economy will continue to cough and sputter along. Wars and rumors of wars remain a fact of 21st-century life. There will be catastrophes and technological advancements. Scientists will make discoveries, some of which will overturn previous understanding.

I pray that Grace Communion International will grow ever more sensitive to God’s leading in our lives. I pray that we respond as he shows us how he wants us to co-minister with Jesus in new and exciting ways that will shine light into the darkness as signs of the promise that God will make all things new.

With love in Christ’s service,

Joseph Tkach