Science class in middle school and high school can be fun. You explore the basics of physics and do all sorts of cool experiments. Even backwater schools like the one I went to had a Newton’s cradle with the five balls suspended on strings that bounced back and forth. You could test the idea of conservation of momentum. You might have done an experiment to test the acceleration rate of gravity. There were basic chemistry experiments where if you carefully measured all the ingredients you’d get a predictable reaction; perhaps something would foam up, or precipitate out. (Somehow there were never chemistry experiments about how to make explosives, which would have certainly caught the interest of my classmates and myself.)
Basic chemistry and physics classes in college were the same. They made it appear as if the world worked in precise predictable mechanical ways. Science could describe everything perfectly.
But then there were more advanced science classes. Things didn’t work so predictably. In civil engineering I remember studying different soil types and testing their stability. The results could be erratic. I remember someone asking the professor in a foundations design class how you build a building or bridge on such instability. He replied, “You design with a factor of safety of 5 to 7 and then you just hope it stands!” We didn’t like that answer. Complex science and engineering in the real world gets messy.
And if you truly push science to its limits you eventually get into quantum physics, where none of the rules seem to apply anymore.
The world is an immensely complex place. At every moment there is an immeasurable number of forces at play – more than any computer model can ever factor in completely. We can often usable information from these things for the purposes of engineering, but they are still woefully incomplete.
Many people want proof for God. I certainly get asked that plenty of times as a pastor. It is understandable. God is the ultimate mystery and we want to know more. The problem is that people want scientific proofs for God that fit into the simplicity of middle school science. They want to do a simple experiment that reliably shows some supernatural force is at work, or existent. But the world doesn’t work that way. Many people get frustrated or scared. They just walk away from belief in God because it cannot be proven simply.
It is important to respect all of that. I understand. People say that if there is no scientific proof of God then the whole concept of God is suspect. But they have to realize they are inadvertently expecting God to exist within the same simplicity that they had in middle school. While Newton’s cradle is a simple cool demonstration, the God who created this immeasurably complex universe will never be confined to such simplicity.
The book of Job in the Old Testament does an interesting thing as Job questions God and complains to God about unfairness in the world. In Job 38 God questions Job asking if Job has the power to create or shape the earth, or understand its creatures, or to control the weather. If Job can demonstrate that he has the power and the intellectual complexity then maybe Job can understand God. But Job does not have that power, and thus the full nature of God will forever be beyond the fundamental limitations of Job and all humans.
That is all a lengthy way to get at our passage from Hebrews for this week. Hebrews 6 and 7 talks about Jesus being a high priest after the order of a guy named Melchizedek. Melchizedek is called the King of Salem and a priest forever; and without parents or genealogy.
What Hebrews says about Melchizedek, and the way it relates him to Jesus, stretches our logic. Last week I invited you to watch a YouTube video about all of this and I sent out an email with the link. I suggested that because the reasoning is fascinating, although obscure; and because I didn’t want to spend today’s entire sermon talking about the intricacies of the argument. Biblical scholar Alexander Purdy calls the passage, “thoroughly uncongenial to modern modes of thought.” (Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 11, Pg. 657) Which, is just a fancy way of saying it is confusing. If you didn’t watch the video, I suggest that you do. If you did watch it, then I hope it helped to make our passage from Hebrews something more than “thoroughly uncongenial to modern modes of thought.”
We want to take the passage to its next step, which is what its original readers would have done with it. It is about the trustworthiness of God. In what we read from Hebrews last week we learned that the hearers of the message were having some faith struggles. Some were falling away. Some were questioning. Some had doubts. Why wasn’t faith working in a simple, understandable, straightforward, logical way? Despite the messiness of faith and life, the author of Hebrews wants to get across the absolute trustworthiness of God. God has gone all the way to give that assurance. God has sworn by himself, as the story of Abraham in Genesis states. God could do no more than that, and that is the ultimate ground of confidence in God’s dependability.
But that’s still messy, and it doesn’t actually prove anything about God’s dependability. So what if in an ancient text about Abraham (of questionable historical reliability) God swore an oath to Abraham? Who cares? It doesn’t mean anything for then (or even for today for that matter). All of this can go round and round and round and end up nowhere.
The author of Hebrews knows all of this. He also knows Greek philosophy well. That may help us get our head around these proofs that just go in endless circles. The ancient Greek philosophers not only wanted to understand things, they wanted to know how they understood things. How do you know what you know?
How do you know something? Did someone tell you? Did you read about it? Did you experience it first hand? If you experienced something first hand, how do you know your observation was complete? Was there more than meets the eye? Were there factors at work that you missed or chose to ignore?
The ancient Greeks realized that knowing something -beyond the most basic things- gets pretty complicated too. Just about everything in this world gets complicated when you start to dig into it.
And so, what can you trust? Can you fully trust history? Is history not an interpretation done by someone else? Can you fully trust experience? But experience is limited and there are often many factors in other situations. Can you trust your logic and reason? But logic and reason can easily be warped by ignorance and fear. Can you trust science? Remember, even scientific discoveries are made by people who are funded for their research. And with the funding comes an agenda. Governments, corporations, and universities do not fund science that isn’t going to give some sort of useful return to them.
The author of Hebrews would argue that everything we humans think we know is suspect and prone to error. Therefore no human knowledge is absolutely trustworthy. There must be a surer ground for confidence than what we failure-prone humans can perceive. He argues that surer ground is God. And, if God is to be known, then God must have chosen to reveal himself in that way.
Now, we’ve still gone nowhere in the circles of logic, but Hebrews has made its point. The only sure and certain knowledge that can ever be obtained about anything can only be about God and come from God. Therefore, God is ultimately and always absolutely trustworthy.
That probably still leaves us with more uncertainties than we’d like. That leaves us still wanting more proofs than we currently have, and are likely to ever get.
But remember what we read about God earlier in Hebrews. God’s ultimate revelation, and the most trustworthy way of understanding God, is Jesus. And Jesus was perfected, not by being superior but through suffering. The suffering Jesus is now in God’s presence -in the Holy of Holies- working for us to perfect us; incomplete. Confused, messy as we are.
And so, even as our knowledge of God is as limited and imperfect as it is, and even as our trust in God is apt to waver, and even as we are likely to doubt and question; even in all of these failings, Jesus, the perfect one, is trustworthily laboring on our behalf. That is not our work. That is not our own effort or righteousness, but Jesus’ own righteousness.
These chapters of Hebrews may confuse us. The logic is, at best, weird. But the purpose is for us to have confidence in the midst of our uncertainties and live in trust of the absolute God.
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