"What God Says Is The Law"

One of the books I am currently reading is James Jordan's Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World. The book is fascinating and illuminating and serves as a sort of corrective to us moderns who too often approach the world, first, from a modernistic standpoint, and second, with a Biblical one. Jordan aims to prove how this can never work and instead encourages his readers to adopt a thoroughly Biblical view of the world and to no longer try to squeeze the Bible through our modern strainers of scientism.

The following quote is actually from Vern Poythress's book Symphonic Theology: The Validity of Multiple Perspectives in Theology which Jordan quotes in Through New Eyes to show the differences between how the Bible describes the "Scientific Laws" and how a modernist would describe them:

The Bible shows us a personalistic world, not impersonal law. What we call scientific law is an approximate human description of just how faithfully and consistently God acts in ruling the world by speaking. There is no mathematical, physical, or theoretical “cosmic machinery” behind what we see and know, holding everything in place. Rather, God rules, and rules consistently. A miracle, then, is not a violation of a “law of nature,” and not even something alongside laws of nature, but is the operation of the only law that there is – the Word of God. What God says is the law (see Psalm 33:6). (pg. 108)

We too often accept a modernistic explanation for worldly phenomena when the Bible's explanation runs headlong against it. The Bible teaches that everything, in all places and at all times, happens due to the powerfully working Word of God (Hebrews 1:3; Colossians 1:17). A great mental exercise that I have employed in the past is to simply think about how anything works in the universe (eg. gravity, combustion engine, pollination, welding, etc). Of course you can get modern, scientific answers, and to a very great extent these answer are helpful and true. You can think about the phenomena of gravity and you can go ask a physicist about it and they can help explain to you what is happening. However, at the very core of what gravity is, it is a complete mystery. If you were to ask a physicist why gravity actually happens he would not be able to tell you. He is simply able to look at the smaller aspects of how God's word is governing the world but he has no idea why those smaller aspects are doing what they are doing.

Food for thought.

Michael