Big
My word of the week is “Big” – and not just Macmillan’s Biggest Coffee Morning! It started with a testimony given in Sunday’s service. The events being described were considered too big to be contained in one witness – more healing was anticipated. The use of the word big reminded me of reading “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams in which he describes space as “big, really big, vastly huge mind bogglingly big”. After that everything I came across this week seemed to be described as big. It may be that I was sensitised to the word and noticed it more than usual, in the same way that you do not realise how many blue cars there are on the road until you buy a blue car yourself, or more likely, the Lord was trying to tell me something.
One of the things that are too big for my human brain to comprehend is God’s great scheme. I live in three dimensions with linear time, I just about understand how that works but I cannot work out how it would feel to have more dimensions and be in all time at the same time. I know that I have the Bible to tell me this is the case with God and the faith to believe it. I also know that this faith comes from the Holy Spirit, it is He who strengthens and teaches me, but I just have to accept that God’s plans and ways of carrying them out are beyond me. There is no way of proving anything, just the clues we get from studying the Bible and discussing it with other Christians. Frustratingly for me, who loves experimenting with language, there are also no words to describe the concepts that are beyond human knowledge.
This leaflet has been one with which I have struggled for that very reason. I know what I want to say, the point I wish to make, but I cannot find the right words. When we speak of the beginning of everything (as we know it) we call the Lord the Word, and we say He brought everything into existence with a word but we ourselves are limited by lack of words. English has many (despite the fact that the younger generation only use “cool”) but not as many as ancient Greek, therefore when the Bible is translated words get more than one meaning or several are needed to explain one in the original. Take for instance love, we have just the one word, the original writers had a least four for the different nuances of love.
It is the same when we try to unravel the complexities of the events and prophecies of the Bible. We try to find comparisons and analogies with familiar scenarios in our own lives but they are limited, as they do not have that supernatural God directed component. We cannot explain what we think because nothing on earth exactly duplicates heaven. As a person who works with science and likes to understand things, it is disconcerting to find inexplicable events – how are some people healed without conventional medicine, why do some natural events defy the so-called laws of nature? This is where the grace of God is so wonderful, the Holy Spirit gives us the faith to grow in that grace and accept in our hearts what is right without the need for our brains to analyse it. Some people are given insights and revelations, generally different aspects are given to several so we need to discuss things to get a more complete picture, but ultimately it is all too big for us to know at present.
