First off, a few facts, many of these are estimates based on theories:

Distance to the sun. 8 light minutes
Distance to proxima centauri. 4.2 light years
Distance to the north star. 400 light years
Distance to the Andromeda galaxy. 25,000 light years
Distance to the furthest detectable galaxy 34 billion light years
Distance to the edge of the observable universe. 93 billion l.y.
Distance to the edge of the rest of the universe. 7 trillion l.y.

Speed of a commercial airplane. 500 mph
Speed of a satellite. 10,000 to 25,000 mph
Speed of our solar system around the Milky Way 500,000 mph
Speed of the Milky Way, rel. to cosmic background 1.3 million mph

I’ll start with the distances. I spend a lot of time in a dark sky area looking at the night sky. I see a lot of stars, each of them a ball of burning gas. They are so far away that the light that I see tonight is due to gas that burned some time ago. In fact, most of the light from the stars that I see is from gas that burned before I was born. I see the stars as they were hundreds to trillions of years ago. The cold, hard reality is that I don’t even know if they are still there. There is a star in the constellation Orion named Betelgeuse. Astronomers expect it to explode soon. But, Betelgeuse is 600 light years away. It is entirely possible that it exploded before Columbus sailed. We just haven’t seen the explosion……yet.

On a typical night, I’ll see a few airplanes, a dozen satellites, a meteor or two, maybe a planet, and thousands of stars. The planes, satellites, and meteors are visibly in motion. The stars and planets hardly seem to move. And yet, they are all moving at a blistering pace in every imaginable direction. The night sky looks relatively quiet; but the reality is that it is a seething cauldron of activity. The vast majority of what is going on up there is beyond my vision. Worse yet, I can’t even be sure that what I am seeing is still there. And what I can see, if it even still exists, is already billions of miles away from where it appears to be.

There’s a lot going on up there….. I just can’t see it all.
What I can see isn’t where or what I see today.
Even worse, some of what I can see……is no longer real.

Which brings me to the topic this week.

Reality and what I can sense, measure, analyse……..what I can know………..do not always agree.

What I know falls into several categories:

The things that I can see and touch……..the tangible.
The things that I can’t see or touch, but can infer…..the intuitive.
The things that I simply can’t detect using the tools of the physical world……the spiritual.

The tangible world is pretty straightforward. I’m holding my phone……it’s real.

The intuitive world is a little tougher. It’s 6 am and the sky is getting brighter. I can’t see the sun……but I am confident that it will be up in about an hour. The sun is real.

The spiritual world is where we get into trouble. It is beyond our senses. It is beyond our ability to logically explain. And yet, we sense its reality. Ask 100 Americans if there is life after death. 75 will say yes. There are not many things that 75% of Americans agree on. This, in spite of the fact that there is little hard physical evidence to prove the existence of the spiritual world.

We accept the existence of the spiritual world for three reasons. The first is that, though we hate to admit it, we respect our ignorance. We accept the reality that most of the cosmos is beyond our understanding. What follows from this is that……the fact that we cannot measure, understand, and manipulate something…..does not preclude its existence. The second reason is that we can sense the spiritual realm. It is written on our hearts. We recognize the spiritual for the same reason that we love our children. It is built into our design. It was put there by our creator. It is the very purpose of our existence. We deny or ignore it at our peril. The third reason is miracles. A miracle is an event that defies the rules of the physical world. It is a window into the spiritual world…….a world where science simply does not apply. We encounter these miracles with some regularity. The Bible is full of them. But, they also occur in our everyday life…….if we are tuned in to the spiritual.

The final point is this:

The tangible world will have an end.
The intuitive world will have an end.
The spiritual world, whether you accept it and honor it…..or not, will not end.

The spiritual world is real.

The spiritual world is your destiny.

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.

John 5: 24, ESV

And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

John 17: 3, ESV

We put up a Christmas tree every year in December. It’s a tradition in our house. If you asked me why we do this, I doubt that I could give you a good answer. We begin with a plain tree. Then we start covering it with decorations. Sometimes the decorations follow a theme: a white tree, a gold tree, ornaments that remind us of important moments in our family history. Once we had a tree with the Grinch as a theme. By the time we are finished…….if we do good job…….you can hardly see the tree for the decorations. Then we throw a party and pass out gifts.

Great fun.

It occurs to me that our Christmas tree is a metaphor for our life, our faith, and our relationship with our creator. We begin with something that comes from outside of our experience…….something created by an external entity. The tree. It is natural. It is beautiful. It is real. It is true. It is God’s creation. Then we start adding to it. We add things that we like. We add things that we love, maybe things that we want……things that we hope for. And, in the process, we pretty much bury the tree in ornaments, lights, and tinsel. And we stand back and admire it……..our creation. God’s contribution is pretty much lost beneath the glitter that we have applied. God’s creation is obscured by our embellishments.

I’m sitting in my kitchen this morning, looking out the windows as the day happens. I see grass, trees, a dusting of snow, and the occasional deer. All of this is the work of my creator. It is beautiful. It is true. It is perfect. And I am blessed beyond expression.

But, if I look further, I can see radio towers, a factory, cars, planes, and a water tower. All of these are things the we, mankind, have added…….embellishments. I am blessed that, in my back yard, the added embellishments do not overpower and obscure God’s contribution to the view. It’s not hard to go to a place, perhaps a city, and experience a view where human decoration completely obscures God’s creation. It’s not hard to sit down in my family room and spend the evening watching TV and never see a thing that comes from God……..and never see a thing that brings me closer to God.

More and more, the experience of our world is the experience of the human decoration. More and more, God’s contribution to our world is obscured, lost.

And so, I start my day, sitting in my back yard communing with God’s world. I start my day by returning to that part of my world that is closest to God…….closest to the undecorated tree. The power of that experience in shaping my day is immense.

I’m not kidding myself. I have been blessed beyond comprehension. And I am grateful. You may live in a place that is overwhelmed……..with “human decoration”……..or worse. You may have to work harder to find a place where you can experience God minus all of the decoration. But, you can find it. You can find a corner of your world where you can meditate on God……..a place where you can commune with God……free from all of the decoration.

Begin your day in that place. You’ll spend the rest of your day in a better world.

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life.

Jesus, John 14:6, ESV

I live in a part of Kentucky that is defined by Karst geology. This is large sheets of limestone that have been focally dissolved by acidic water. This phenomenon results in three things that define the bluegrass region of my state:

Thoroughbred horses which thrive on the limestone water and the bluegrass

Bourbon whiskey which requires this special water

Caves which are formed when the water dissolves the limestone

On a tour of one of our caves, I was introduced to a species of fish that lives only in the depths of the caves. This species is completely blind. It simply has no eyes. It has no lungs. It has no nose. It has no ears. It lives out its life in a world without air…..without light. This fish understands its world based on the taste and temperature of the water, based on what it touches, and based on vibrations that pass through the water.

Now, imagine that you are that fish. You swim around seeking water that is the temperature, taste, and chemistry that you prefer. You feed yourself by chasing down the source of vibrations nearby. You swallow what tastes good and spit out what tastes bad.

Life is good in your world.

Then, one day, someone describes to you a warm summer evening. The sky is a deep blue. The setting sun is a rich red. It’s a little muggy. Katydids are singing. You can hear a mourning dove. There is a gentle breeze. There is a campfire and there are steaks on a grate. You are tired from the hike up the mountain to your campsite. Soon, the stars will come out. There is going to be a meteor shower tonight.

Life is good in this other world.

The problem is that you cannot conceive of that world. Your experience of life gives you no understanding of the atmosphere, the weather, the sounds of the woods, the feel of the air, the beauty of the sunset, and the glory of the night sky……..not to mention that steak. The fact is that, even if you were exposed to these things, you don’t have the sensory apparatus to detect the data that you would encounter. The facts and rules of your world simply do not apply to this other world. The experience, the science, of your underground world simply cannot handle the information of the aboveground world.

We live our lives in the physical world. All that we know……all that we can conceive is limited by our experience of our world. All that we can understand is limited by the rules of the science of our physical world. And the science of our physical world is limited to what we can sense and measure.

We are blind cave fish living in our physical world.

There is a spiritual world. It operates on a set of rules and realities that are entirely different from our physical world.

And we just don’t understand. So we do the same thing as the blind cave fish. For the most part, we go about our business. We swim around and eat what we can find. We don’t think about the aboveground world because we can’t. We lack the tools and experience. Maybe we simply deny the possibility of a sunset. After all, it is impossible………in a world without light and air…….in our cave world.

But, the fact that a sunset is not possible in my “blind cave fish” world………does not mean that such a sunset doesn’t exist in that other world. The concept that just because I cannot sense something, measure something, or comprehend something……means that it cannot exist is flawed.

This is a good working definition of hubris:

A blind cave fish………who has it all figured out.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

God, Isaiah 55: 8-9, ESV

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”

Paul, 1 Corinthians, 2:9,ESV

It is odd, that we go through our lives and never study the most important concepts in our world. We just take them for granted and go along our way. Arguably, the most important reality in my world…….your’s too……..is life itself.

So……here it is:

What is the nature of life? More specifically……..what is the nature of my life?

The answer is, at once, both simple and straightforward…….and dauntingly complex.

First, the simple part:

Life is: breath, movement, thought, and much more. This is our physical life. We can see it, touch it, even understand it. We can manipulate our life and the lives of those around us. Our physical strength and our intellect give us the ability to master the physical world around us. Some of us have more power…….some have less. This is heady stuff. It is very easy for us to become proud of our success at running our world. But, all of us are constrained. Our power and understanding are limited to the physical world. The physical world is the realm that we typically think of when we talk about life.

The problem is this:

There is a duality to life. The physical world that we enjoy is a thin veneer covering a much larger reality. That larger reality is the spiritual world.

We are, for the most part, blind to the spiritual world. In a word, we are almost completely ignorant of the nature of the vast majority of our life. We are given brief glimpses of the spiritual side of life……of our life. These glimpses consist of the life of Jesus and the prophecies of the Bible. Occasionally, something happens that violates every rule and law of our physical world. We get a glimpse of the spiritual world. We call these episodes “miracles”. We tend to minimize these events. We try to explain them away using the rules of science. We deny these facts…….because the rules of our world cannot deal with them. The resurrection of Jesus is one of these events. The resurrection is not a lie. It is not a myth. The resurrection is a brief glimpse into the other side, the spiritual side, of our life. It is just as real as the people who surround us.

Scientists talk about a concept called a singularity. A singularity is an event where the entire nature of a system is completely charged. The nature of time, matter, and energy are completely re-arranged. The rules that we call science on this side of the singularity simply do not apply to the new order. The classic example of a singularity is the “big bang”. This is the event that science uses to explain the creation of the universe…….out of nothing……no mass……no energy…….no intelligence……no creator. The rules, time, and structure of the universe prior to the “big bang” are beyond our comprehension. This is because they are completely different from the “science” that governs our physical world. We will never understand what is on the other side of this singularity. We just do not have the tools. The simple fact is that we cannot even measure the “big bang” itself. So, we make something up as best as we can using the rules and structure of our physical life. But, our explanation is doomed to fail……because the rules on this side of the singularity simply do not apply to the other side of the singularity.

And then we die…….and everything changes.

Because death is a singularity too.

No matter what you believe. No matter what you want. No matter your politics. No matter if you lived a good life…….or not. You simply cannot know what is waiting for you on the other side of the singularity that we call death:

Paradise
Hell
Dead black nothing

At our death, we transition from the physical world into the spiritual world. The old rules simply no longer apply. Time, mass, energy, and space as we know it no longer apply. The Bible deals with this using language that is largely symbolic. We call it apocalyptic literature. Try applying the rules of our physical world to the book of Revelation……or Daniel…….or to Biblical prophecy. We just lack the tools to understand it all. We are forced to rely on faith.

So….what do we really know about the spiritual world?

Not much.

What do we understand about the spiritual world?

Even less.

Here is the best I can do:

There is a sovereign creator……..God.

God’s primary characteristic……..is love.

God has expectations……..love him…….love everybody else.

Welcome to the spiritual world. You might as well start getting used to it. It’s going to be around…….forever.

So are you.

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Revelation 21:3-4, ESV

Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end.

Psalm 102: 25-27, ESV

I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality

Paul explaining the “singularity” of death, 1 Corinthians 15: 50-53, ESV