Tag Archives: God

Cows and Cardboard Boxes

May 6, 2014 Leave a comment

I once heard a Preacher share a very funny story about a community he had visited in a very remote place located in one of the poorest parts of the world.  The Preacher had struck a conversation with one of the men in that village and asked him what he most desired in life.  The poor man responded, “ I would like to own a cow”.  In the context of our own world outside of our church in New York City, filled with a diversity of earthly treasures that are the pursuits of men’s hearts ranging from Broadway glory to Wall Street windfalls , it was amusing that one man’s life long desire was simply to own an animal.  However, the story of this man has remained firmly stuck in my mind ever since as I have slowly come to realize that in the context of what God offers us, all of our earthly pursuits are not far off from that man’s desire to own one cow.  In that man’s remote village which represented his entire world, the only people considered rich and powerful and therefore significant were those who owned cattle.  No one owned anything more valuable than that.  Therefore in his world, owning a cow was the highest attainable goal there was.   Likewise, our desires and pursuits are moulded by what we think others around us possess and what our society labels as valuable.  According to the Bible, all of man’s pursuits are simply due to the envy of his neighbor:

Then I observed that most people are motivated to success because they envy their neighbors… Ecclesiastes 4:4 (NLT).

One of my favourite things to do during my many trips on airplanes is to look out the window in great detail at the world below as the plane takes off from any major city.  I marvel at how quickly houses considered to be worth millions look like nothing more than a cardboard box just a few hundred feet into the air.  Seconds after take off, even the most expensive cars on the road look like plastic toys and our most impressive architectural works are quickly dwarfed by surrounding trees, oceans and mountains.  Our many “treasures” look miniscule when seen in the context of God’s surrounding creation .  Yet we spend our entire lives pursuing life in the best cardboard box, driving the coolest toy, discarding one fashion item for the next or maybe simply idolising those who seem to have these things.  Like the man who desired owning a cow, we long to possess that which seems valuable to us in the context of all that we know and that our society holds to be valuable.  Yet, from God’s perspective, our earthly pursuits amount to no more than the value of cattle in light of all He has to offer us.  We are oblivious to the eternal treasures that God has prepared for us here and in the life to come. The angels must marvel at a creation that chooses to settle for so much less than it has been given access to.  CS Lewis once said we are like children who have been invited to a luxurious holiday by the sea  but who insist on playing in the mud instead.

You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.

Revelation 3:17 (NIV)

God has so much more for us than our cows and cardboard boxes and in Christ, He is constantly inviting us to give Him our rags in exchange for His true riches.  In His infinite mercy, He does not deny us the pursuits of our heart but as the Creator of the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, He longs to transform and enrich us in ways that our finite minds cannot even begin to comprehend.  If we would only draw near to Him and put our lives, our dreams and all of our pursuits in His loving hands.

Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for those who love Him I Corinthians 2:9 (NKJV)

 

The Weight of a Human Soul

December 27, 2013 Comments: 2

I love people.  I love to meet and get to know all kinds of people from all walks of life.  I have found this to be one of the most rewarding aspects of life itself.  The unending opportunity to engage other people from various backgrounds on an individual level.  Each person carries a soul print that is unique to them – their life experiences, talents and ties as well as hopes and dreams.  Every once in a while, I am challenged to enter into and partake of another person’s pain or sorrow.  It is during these times that I have come to realize how much one human soul weighs.  One human soul with all its joys, pain, disappointments, expectations and aspirations weighs far more than any one person is able to bear.  This is why no human relationship is fully able to sustain the weight of another person’s soul.  This inability is the source of disappointment and much heart ache in marriages, friendships and families.

We only have to engage intensively with another fellow human being once to quickly realize we are limited in our ability to fulfill their every need.  We can help alleviate another person’s suffering, bring comfort to them and share their burdens and this we must do but we are unable to mend a heart that’s been torn apart or heal a broken soul.  Even as we extend ourself to another, we ourselves must face our own internal battles of unmet needs, unfulfilled desires and unexplained loneliness.

I was extremely fortunate to have been brought up by loving parents who strived to give me the best of what they had to give.  But I found that even my own wonderful parents together with their very best intentions still had shortcomings.  Like me in my many relationships with others, they also found themselves falling short sometimes.  None of their shortcomings mattered in the end because they had taken care to do the one most important thing which was to point me and my siblings to a Heavenly Father who could never fail.  In other words, they ensured our souls were anchored so that no matter how strong the storms of life were, we would remain secure.

The only person capable of bearing the weight of a human soul is the person who created it.  So when God came to earth as a man in the person of Jesus Christ, that’s just what He intended to do.  He, through much suffering and pain, came to pay the huge cost of reconnecting our souls back to Himself.  The crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ was especially brutal because He carried the weight of not just one but every human soul with all of its brokenness, pain, joy and aspirations.  He was crushed beneath the weight of our souls.  The Book of Isaiah which spoke of the death of Christ 800 years before He came to earth put it this way:

But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.

Isaiah 53:5

One of the most influential and recognizable hymns in the world today is the one penned by Horatio Spafford titled “It is Well with My Soul“.  This hymn written by Spafford in the 1870s and still sung worldwide today was birth from the soul of a man who experienced the many tragedies of life.  Horatio Spafford was a prominent and highly successful lawyer in the city of Chicago.  He and his wife Ann, were very well known in 1860s chicago and were also close friends and supporters of the evangelist DL Moody.  In 1870, tragedy struck when the Spaffords lost their only son to pneumonia at the age of four. The following year much of the city was destroyed in the Chicago fire  and Spafford lost most of his fortune which he had invested in real estate just a few months prior to the fire.  Two years later, the economic downturn of 1873 dealt a further blow to Spafford’s remaining fortunes.  At this time, he sent his wife and four daughters to England on a ship, intending to join them shortly after for a much needed vacation and to listen to his friend DL Moody preach in England.

On November 22, 1873, while Ann Spafford and her four daughters were crossing the Atlantic on the steamship Ville du Havre, their ship was struck by an iron sailing vessel and 226 people lost their lives, including all four Spafford girls – eleven year old Anna, nine year old Margaret Lee, five year old Elizabeth, and two year old Tanetta.  Anna Spafford survived the tragedy and upon arriving in England sent a telegram to her husband beginning “Saved alone.”  Spafford sailed to England, going over the location of his daughters’ deaths and as he did, he wrote the lyrics for his now famous song “It is well with my soul”.   The music to his lyrics was composed by Philip Bliss and named Ville du Havre after the ship on which Spafford’s daughters died.  Philip Bliss himself along with his wife Lucy were among 160 passengers who died in the Ashtabula River Railroad Disaster in December 1876 when a train they were traveling in fell into a ravine and caught fire while crossing a trestle bridge in Ohio.

Horatio and Anna Spafford would have 3 more children after the loss of their four girls.  Once more, in 1880, they would lose their only son Horatio Goertner Spafford, this time to scarlet fever.  in 1881, the Spaffords and their two remaining young daughters moved to Jerusalem where they founded a group called the American Colony which together with Swedish Christians brought much needed relief to the poor and the suffering during World War I.  Horatio Spafford would die of malaria, 4 days before his 60th birthday on October 16, 1888 and the colony which he founded later became the subject of the Nobel prize winning Jerusalem, by Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf.

Horatio Spafford knew what it meant to lose what is most precious in this world yet have his soul, which is the essence of his person, remain fully intact in Christ.  The song that came through his unique soul print continues to bring comfort, healing and hope to the souls of millions of people around the world today over a century after he wrote it in what must have been one of his darkest moments on earth.

 

LYRICS: IT IS WELL WITH MY SOUL

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.

(Refrain:) It is well (it is well),
with my soul (with my soul),
It is well, it is well with my soul.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ hath regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.
(Refrain)

My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to His cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
(Refrain)

For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live:
If Jordan above me shall roll,
No pain shall be mine, for in death as in life
Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.
(Refrain)

And Lord haste the day, when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.
(Refrain)

Video

Why we Live in a Broken World

November 30, 2013 Leave a comment

We live in a broken world because we, its inhabitants are a broken people.  Our brokenness became immediately evident once the first humans willfully chose to follow their own thinking thus separating themselves from God.  The consequences of their choice was immediately observable.   Poverty, suffering and pain instantly became a part of their existence.  Their own son Cain, murdered his older brother in cold bold.  The knowledge of the existence of paradise by Adam and Eve continues to echo in our hearts today so that we struggle to come to terms with the pain, evil and death in our world.  The forbidden fruit they ate was after all from the “Tree of the knowledge of good and evil”.  Thus there is a deep awareness in our heart that a perfect eternity exists and this knowledge makes us restless and causes us distress.  The common question that is often stated as “Why does God allow suffering?”   is really saying, “Why must evil be present when perfect good exists?”, confirming what the Bible tells us that God has put eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11) as well as the knowledge of His existence (Psalm 19:1-4).

Even our best efforts cannot completely rid our world of evil and no amount of effort can produce a perfectly good person.  This does not mean we do not try.  The Bible recounts the stories of men and women who through faith overcame evil to establish justice, conquer kingdoms and even bring the dead back to life.  Jesus Christ who is described in the Bible as the visible manifestation of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), came to earth for the precise purpose of overcoming evil and death on our behalf.  He came to do for us what we are incapable of ever doing for ourselves.  He took on the weight of our brokenness allowing Himself to be crushed in the process.  He carried all of our pain and sorrow.  Finally, He went ahead of us to destroy the power of death over our lives so that in Him, our souls will never die.  When we choose to follow Him in the path He has laid for us, we have a concrete assurance that we are reconciled with God and will be re-instated in paradise, our original home, fulfilling the longing in our heart.

In the meantime, with the grace and strength He makes available to us, we must contend with a world that remains broken and work our way through our own brokenness as well as that of others around us.  Most of the pain and disappointment we suffer as people comes from our interactions with one another and our unmet expectations.  Marriages end in divorce simply because the expectation for perfection is not met.  Children become rebellious often because they cannot come to terms with the failures of their own parents.  Our courts are always busy with a backlog of all manner of human brokenness manifested between couples, businesses and even the government or law enforcement versus its own citizens.

We must walk through a broken world to get to the destination Jesus has prepared for us.  He has not promised us that we will be shielded from the pain and sorrow or disappointments from the world that we live in.  Saints and sinners alike experience loss, pain and death and the former are often more likely to suffer persecution.  However we do have many promises from God and that is that through Christ, we shall make it to a prepared destination.  As for the treacherous road ahead He simply reminds us:

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;                                                                                                     and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.                                                                             When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned;                                                                                                    the flames will not set you ablaze. – Isaiah 43:2

The Science of God’s Existence

August 30, 2013 Comments: 2

As a scientist and a believer in Christ, I am often perplexed by the commonly held notion that a belief in God is contrary to the practice of science or vice versa.  I love God and thoroughly enjoy science.  I had a genuine encounter with the Christ of the Bible at a very young age and was introduced to the principles of science shortly thereafter.  I saw no contradiction in the two and have never encountered anything in science that caused me to doubt the existence of God.  Instead, science for me affirmed the magnanimity of exactly who the God of the Bible claims Himself to be.  I believe a conflicting perspective of God and science simply arises from lack of a genuine encounter with Christ.

The Bible openly celebrates science in Proverbs 25:2 which states: “God delights in concealing things; Scientists delight in discovering things” (The Message).  A more ancient translation says: “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter”(NKJV).  God created a magnificent world and has granted us the delightful responsibility of discovering and managing that world.  Like any good parent, He delights in the joys of our self discoveries even though He’s known the answers to our quests all along.  Impertinence and great error would be the result of us deluding ourselves into imagining that our tiny little discoveries obliterates the need for Him or worse, dismisses His very existence.  It would be like arguing against the power that gave you the ability to argue in the first place.  In other words, an enormous exercise in futility.   This is what the silly idea of a competition between the theory of evolution and the creation story of the Bible espouses.

One of the first principles I learnt in my introduction to science as a child growing up in Nigeria is that our best theories can turn out to be dead wrong even in the face of highly supportive “scientific evidence”.  My science teacher never actually said this, I simply observed it in his teaching of how scientists came to discover that the earth is round and not flat as initially believed and supported by “scientific evidence”.  This notion was confirmed to me fifteen years later while studying for a PhD at an ivy league school in the US.  My lab experiments were based on a series of hypothesis formed after I had carried out much study and research of scientific literature.  Sometimes my hypothesis was proven to be wrong and other times correct.  When it came to submitting my research data for publication in reputable scientific journals,  I found that even when my results supported my hypothesis, my conclusion had to be limited to only that which came from my direct observation.  This is because there are potentially other kinds of observations that I was not privy to, the future discovery of which may prove my hypothesis to be dead wrong. This has and always will be the pattern of true scientific study.

There is currently an apparent culture war (at least in the Western world) about what children should be taught in school regarding the origin of life.  I believe the job of an honest educational system should be to develop a child’s ability for independent analysis and decision making.   Despite what appears to be a celebrated rise in agnosticism or atheism, the majority of the world’s seven billion people believe in God’s existence and it would be disingenuous to pretend this does not matter.  The best teaching I ever got on the subject was in my first year at college in England.  A science professor showed us a video of two scientists trying to discover the origins of life in a laboratory while God watched them with great curiosity from above. The two scientists debated the issue back and forth as they tested their various ideas.  Sometimes God smiled in amusement at their theories, other times He got excited at some idea they came up with and yet at other moments, He simply rolled His eyes in exasperation at the ridiculousness of their limited understanding.  All along, He wanted them to arrive at the truth which seemed to elude them as they vigorously went about their work, oblivious to His presence.

As a scientist, I have had the privilege of being trained in some of the best institutions in multiple countries across various continents and cultures.  I was intrigued by science from a very young age and wanted to study something that I found intellectually challenging.  I was fascinated by the idea of atoms I could not see that led to tangible things that I could see and touch, or being able to make calculations in physics and chemistry that solved real world problems.  The same way I am fascinated by a Creator I cannot see, whose perfect handiwork I see all around me providing overwhelming evidence of His existence and in whose instructions I find solutions to real world problems.

 I marveled at a scientific discovery I stumbled upon one day while working alone, late at night in the lab which led to much excitement at the institution where I studied and became the basis for research into a potentially new drug for heart disease.  I worked alongside celebrated scientists who had spent decades trying to discover how one tiny little thing such as an enzyme (from a family of thousands of other enzymes) functioned and were still nowhere near understanding it at the end of their 30 year career. I discovered that the immensity of God’s creation can be more fully observed in the delightful study of science.  I would later go on to spend years conducting scientific studies to develop drugs for Cancer, then Malaria followed by HIV/AIDS, all the while conscious of and inspired by God’s longing to heal every physical, emotional and spiritual hurt we suffer from living in a broken world.

I believe that when there is an apparent contradiction between what God says in the Bible and what we experience or observe in life, the gap in understanding comes from our end.  If God says He created the world in seven days (actually six), and our finite minds can only decipher that as millions of years, we ought to humbly remember that He defines Himself as the Creator who exists outside of time, and to whom a thousand years is as one day and one day as a thousand years (2 Peter 3:8).  Simply put, He is the inventor of time and can do with it as He pleases.  If He chooses to fit what appears to be a million-year event into one day, guess what?  He is God.  He does not work to human scale as much as we would like for Him to.  Instead, He has filled creation with riddles and hidden surprises for us to figure out and to discover, not so we can dismiss Him but so we can delight ourselves in Him.  All that we are, all that we know, and all that we could ever aspire to become, remains in complete subjection to who He is.

I have found that the resistance of those who say they oppose the God of the Bible in favor of “science” is not rooted in truth.   Once while attending a conference with hundreds of leading scientists from all over the world, I struck up a conversation about God with a colleague as we strolled back to our hotel.   She promptly informed me that she believed the origin of life was evolution.  Then I asked her to explain to me what evolution is and she stared back at me in silence.  She, a scientist of fifteen years, could not quite articulate to me what it was she claimed was the source of her very existence.  Then I realized, it is not so much that people believe in the theory of evolution but that they choose not to believe in (or rather, submit to) God so therefore prefer a vague theory about a vague event from an incomprehensible time which paradoxically, requires a sizeable dose of faith for adherence.

The Bible painfully states that anyone who claims God does not exist is a fool (Psalm 14:1), reminding us that creation itself is God’s undeniable “scientific” evidence presented to every man, woman and child in every age, culture, tribe and language that He exists (Psalm 19:1-3).  We are also duly informed that a refusal to give credence to God leads to a disconnect from Him and ultimately results in our embrace of a false identity (Romans 1).

I am sure of God’s existence not just because of the display of His characteristics in creation, but also because my personal, evidential experience of Him through my own life’s journey across different countries, continents, cultures and socio-economic experiences is in perfect alignment with who He describes Himself to be in the Bible and fully agrees with my personal adventure through the wonderful world of Science.  I enjoy reading books on philosophy, history, religion and literature and gladly welcome a good intellectual discourse anyday, but till this day, nothing thrills my soul as much as opening up the number one bestselling book of all time and reading these words – “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” – Genesis 1:1 (The Bible).

But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you.  Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?  In His hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind – Job 12:7-10 (NIV)