It is becoming increasingly common! I was sitting around chatting with some fellows the other morning over a coffee. One of the chaps mentioned a stroke of good luck that he had experienced that week. He continued by saying that he was thankful to the universe for what had happened. I was about to compliment him for being so religious but someone else interjected before I had the opportunity to speak. The moment passed, so I “let it go through to the keeper”. On Saturday morning I sat down to read the newspaper and there it was again. A fellow called Nick wrote about an experience he had, walking along the beach at some low moment in his life. He saw the appearance of a crab as an omen that everything would be okay. He wrote, “The Universe was telling me to just be patient, and things would work out.” He ended his article by saying that he thanked the cosmos and walked back home a happier man.
For the moment I’ll let it pass that an intelligent man sees in a crab, an omen. I shouldn’t too quickly label that as mere superstition… after all we do learn lessons from our contemplation of the world around us. But what concerned me much more was his investing the universe with personality and the cosmos with intelligence. How can any sane human being possibly believe that this inanimate universe can talk to us and does it really make sense to give thanks to this impersonal cosmos?
The reality is that this is the kind of Eastern mysticism that fits in comfortably with Buddhism but that is totally foreign to Christianity. Maybe at first glance it sounds innocent enough to believe the universe is guiding us or that we should thank the cosmos for blessings received. However, I found it telling that in his article Nick wrote ‘universe’ with a capital ‘U’. He was really attributing to the universe things that should only attributed to the Lord God in heaven. It is Almighty God in heaven who guides our lives and whom we should thank for blessings received.
Allow me to make two additional comments.
I find it rather odd, to say the least, that many folk today have trouble believing that there is personal God in heaven who made this universe and who guides the affairs of life – yet they have no trouble assigning personality to the universe and intelligence to the cosmos. Which makes more sense: to believe in a creator God who controls all things or to believe in this inanimate creation having personality, intelligence and power? Okay, to the purely secular atheist neither probably makes sense. Atheism is opposed to a Christian world and life view, but it is equally opposed to New Age thinking which equates God with the rocks and the trees.
The other point that we need to keep in mind is that the Bible goes to great lengths to differentiate God from His creation. The cosmos is not God and God is not the universe. The whole point of the Genesis story is that we might not make the mistake of giving thanks to the universe or looking to the cosmos for guidance in life. In his letter to the Romans the apostle Paul points out the foolishness of serving and worshipping what is created rather than the Creator. Here we actually have the heart of what the Bible calls sin. Sin is not just murder and robbery; it is not just sexual abuse and violence. It is above all a failure to give God His due. Nick and my coffee-drinking mate need to realise that God is not happy when we thank the universe rather than the God who made the universe.
Perhaps it’s also worth keeping one other thing in mind: Christians worship Jesus Christ. He is God who took on humanity, and that makes him both Creator and creature. He is the one to whom we owe all our worship, praise and thanks because He controls the universe.
John Westendorp