We live in a society that attempts to constantly pit faith against science. God cannot be true because of science claim many skeptics. Only the ignorant and the unintelligent would believe such nonsense they claim.
Even among Christians, the number of those who hold science above the Bible grows every day. Those who believe a literal account of creation grows smaller under the onslaught.
Genesis seems to be one of the biggest hang ups that people have that prevent them from coming and adhering to faith. They feel like they can’t really following God with all their hearts because of what they were taught in school. Due to the claims of evolution or other “definitive evidence” of time passage they believe that this necessarily would limit God’s handiwork.
If you are one of these folks, I would ask you to consider a glass of wine.
No, not to drink and not just any glass of wine. The specific one held in the hand of the master of the feast at the wedding feast of Cana. The one that Jesus filled with wine miraculously made from plain old water. This occurs in the Gospel of John and is referred to as Jesus’ first recorded miracle.
You may recall the account. A feast is going on in Cana for a wedding. Jesus and the whole gang are there. We don’t know who the happy couple is as they are not identified. It is not Jesus and anyone, sorry Mormon friends.
Everything is going great with the wedding until a cultural faux pas occurs. They run out of wine. You might think that this is no big deal. But to a hospitality focused culture like Israel in Jesus’ time this was a huge issue. The embarrassment would have been a black mark on the couple for the years after the marriage. I discussed the feast and miracle here if you are interested in a more in depth look at it.
Jesus responds to the need. He turns regular water they have on hand for washing off into great tasting wine. There does not seem to be any great effort expended by Jesus in doing this conversion. It is an amazing display of power and the change happens in a moment, yet Jesus does not even break a sweat. The servants then take that wine and serve it to everyone at the feast.
And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. 9 When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom 10 and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.”
Pay attention to the master of the feast.
Do you think that the master of the feast had tasted wine before tasting that cup? Did he know what wine looks like, smelled like and felt like going over his tongue? He appears to be very familiar with wine, right?
He is the master of the feast, meaning he is in the food business. He is like a caterer or restaraunt owner. He would know good wine when he tastes it.
You would agree that it is wine that he is drinking, right? Jesus did not just dye some water purple and try to pass it off as wine. Everyone would know the difference. He took water and turned it into wine in an instant.
Have you ever thought about how that should effect your view of science and creation? How it can effect your view of the universe around us?
A glass of wine, really?
Well, yes, wine does not just appear out of nowhere. There is an intricate and time consuming process involved in taking the base materials, grapes and sugar mainly and turning them into wine.
Water by itself never, ever just turns into wine. Withot grapes, you can leave it for a billion years and it will still just be water. You need completely different substances as base materials to get to wine. Proteins and sugars from grapes are required and then bacteria and fermentation needs to take place to make wine.
Then you need time. For simple wine it may be a few weeks or months. For the special wines that people get all excited about it takes years of aging to make the wine complete. The process of wine making had been done thousands of times and observed.
So the master of the feast knew as he was sitting there sipping that it took months to years to make the good wine. The science behind wine making told him so and normally he would be correct.
Yet Jesus turned the water to wine in a moment. He used the wrong materials according to science. He did it in an impossible way and time.
It is impossible to make wine in an instant the scoffers object…but that is the point. Only God could take a simple molecular structure like H2O and change it into something completely different at its deepest level.
He is God, right, so this is the very point. Things that are impossible for man are easy for God. Creating wine is no problem for Him. God can handle a simple water to wine miracle, right? Swapping out molecules doesn’t challenge the King of Kings.
The master of the feast thought that there was nothing supernatural about the wine. He knew that wine took months or years to make. He would have told you so with certainty. He may have been able to diagram out the whole fermentation process.
The rock solid foundational science of the day would have said that instant wine creation without grapes is just silly talk. Looking under a microscope at that wine would have confirmed the master’s belief that he was indeed drinking wine. Wine doesn’t just appear. It must have taken months or years. He may have even mocked anyone who claimed differently – so anti-science.
The master of the feast did not have the full story. He is not wrong in his theory, fact finding or methods. He just cannot account for God. Add God to any equation and the answer always changes.
God is never limited by our experiences or our expectations.
When people look around at the earth around us and make findings about the origin of the world and its formative process they are looking with human eyes. They may make their calculations and theories with good intentions. They may be truly seeking the actual answers to how the earth was formed. They may even make accurate measurements. But they are looking without the whole story.
God created a universe in process. He created an earth that was very much like the fine wine of the wedding. It was perfect and ready to host Adam and Eve with all of the processes in full swing. Primordial volcanic activity would be a severe bummer in the Garden of Eden. No matter how many times we try, we can never take enough measurements or do enough calculations to quantify this fact.
Science can never quite account for a God it cannot place limitations on.
So consider that glass of wine the next time you grapple with things like light speed and stars and how they effect our view of creation. God knew people would believe the wine He created was more than 5 minutes old and made by natural processes. People question God for all sorts of reasons. Yet, He made it anyway. No amount it observations and measurements are going to challenge this fact.
Very interesting! A very important point. Thank you for this post!
Some wine that appears to be aged and refined… can be produced by God, for his purposes, in a moment out of mere water!
A creation that appears to be billions of years old, a universe (and beyond that appears to be timeless) aged and refined… can be produced by God, for his purposes, in a moment, out of thin air.
More reasons to trust in the unseen, and view the visible with much discretion.
Go figure! Who knows the thinking and working of the mind of this God?
The first rule of science should be don’t trust in the rules of science.
A creation that appears to be billions of years old, a universe (and beyond that appears to be timeless) aged and refined… can be produced by God, for his purposes, in a moment, out of thin air.
Exactly – if you are looking at the universe or the glass of wine without God you will never understand the full story. You may think you do, but so did the master of the feast.
Thanks
So true! It cracks me up when we talk about dark matter and worm-holes in space, and time-continuum and parallel universes… like we are somehow gonna be able to understand and harness them, for the “good of mankind!”
We can’t even begin to see the full glory of God! We are blessed even to see the shadow of his passing and the works of his hands.
“No one can measure the depths of His understanding.”