On faith: To know His thoughts

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Albert Einstein, one of the most brilliant minds to walk this earth, published more than 300 scientific papers and over 150 non-scientific works. His famous E = mc2 is considered the world’s most famous equation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921.

Today his very name has become synonymous with the word genius. But Albert Einstein’s brilliant intellect ran him right into the proverbial brick wall. During his personal study of the natural order of the created world, he sensed something marvelous and majestic. His brilliance notwithstanding, he never figured out who or what that was. He wrote: “I see a pattern but my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern. I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are one?”

Like every other man, woman, boy and girl, it appears that Einstein had a deep longing to know his Creator.

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details,” he continued. Ultimately, it seems that Einstein came to an unfortunate conclusion.

“We know nothing about God at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. Possibly we shall know a little more than we do now, but the real nature of things, that we shall never know, never,” he said.

In one sense he was correct. If Albert Einstein had a thousand lifetimes to study the created world, he would still not know the “real nature of things.” This is the powerful teaching of Psalm 19, a psalm that C.S. Lewis once described as “possibly the greatest poem in all of world literature.”

Psalm 19 proclaims the powerful message of the heavens. That message, for all who care to read it, declares that God does exist and He is powerful. “The heavens declare the glory of God.” The passage goes on to describe a familiar heavenly body. God created our solar system’s sun about 93 million miles away from us giving it the power to produce the energy of a billion atomic bombs every second. The Bible declares such a creation of God as merely His “handiwork,” the work of his fingers. What a powerful God!

It is not surprising that ancient religions who did not know the true God worshipped the sun as their god. The ancients understood how important the sun is to life on earth. But their mistake was confusing a created object, powerful though it is, with the One who created it. Psalm 19 teaches us that our observation of the created world should move us toward worship of the Creator Himself.

Observing the daily transit of the sun across the sky is not sufficient for you and me to come to know this God in a personal way, or to “know His thoughts” as Einstein yearned. The answers Einstein sought could not be found in the general revelation of the created universe around us. Nature, as one body of evidence, can only make us aware of God’s existence. The rest of Psalm 19 teaches us that the knowledge of God comes from special revelation, a much more detailed body of evidence known as the Scriptures. Are you searching for God’s thoughts as Einstein did? It doesn’t take genius to open up the Bible and begin reading. Why not start with Psalm 19?

Tags: on faith, opinion