Reading for Tuesday, 2nd Week of Lent

Romans 1: 16-25

After writing of his hopeful message of “salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek,” Paul turns around and begins to make clear how much all people, Jew and non-Jew, need salvation. God may have revealed his righteous law only to the Jews. But that is no excuse for the Gentiles. “Ever since the world began his invisible attributes, that is to say his everlasting power and deity, have been visible to the eye of reason, in the things he has made” (Rom 1:20, Revised English Bible).

A few Sundays back, I spoke of experiments in space in which atomic clocks have slowed down when the objects they were travelling in sped up. There is nothing faster than light, which travels 186,000 miles in just 1 second. Physicists also know that matter (the stuff we’re all made of) becomes less and less dense the closer it gets to the speed of light.

Theoretically then, the closer we get to the speed of light, the more time slows down and the less “material” we get. So, if an object actually reached the speed of light, it would completely cease to be material, and with time having stopped, it would become eternal. Sounds a lot like God. (If you’re really brave, you can go here to learn more about the ways in which modern physics points to the God of the Bible. It is dense reading.)

Paul didn’t know any of this of course, but he understood that creation will always provide evidence of its Creator. And the more we examine that creation, the more evidence we will find. That’s why we need not fear science, because science and religion both seek the truth, and those who truly seek shall find (Matt 7:7). God’s truth is like an eternal flower, always unfolding, always revealing another side of itself as its petals open wider and wider. There will always be something new to discover about God’s care for this world. I think that Paul would agree.