The Unmoved Mover

In the beginning God…Genesis 1:1

I enjoy watches. I have a favorite one that is Swiss made and has a lot of detail in the design.  But one night I dropped it on the tile floor, and it exploded into pieces. As you can imagine I was pretty upset, and so I just left it all there and went to bed in disgust.  The next morning, I awoke and prepared to clean up the mess, when to my amazement the watch had put itself back together over night!  It looked perfect and it worked flawlessly. It was utterly astounding.

No rational person would believe that story. Yet millions upon millions will believe the universe, in all its splendor did basically the same thing. A cosmic explosion just happened and resulted in lands, seas, planets that perfectly rotate around a sun, animals that behave in magical ways, and human bodies that are so elaborate that scientists will never fully understand them.

Whether you believe the Genesis account or the Big Bang theory, both come back to a starting point. Where did the matter that exploded come from? You cannot escape the issue of something pre-existent. I once heard a professor illustrate it this way. When playing pool, one ball is hit into another to move it. That ball was there, because another ball had hit it and moved it there. In turn, the ball that had hit that one had also been hit by a ball which put it in position to then hit the next ball. Every single shot in pool is created by the prior movement of other balls. But if you go back to the beginning of the game there is a ball that was never in place because of another ball.  It was just there. It did not move as the result of any other action, yet it set all other balls in motion. This ball is the unmoved mover.

There is a transcendent Unmoved Mover that set all things in place.  The wonder, majesty and complexity of all creation screams emphatically of God. And what is even more astounding, is that this God loves us more deeply than we can ever comprehend. He crafted each of us with a uniqueness that is breathtaking and personal. And that gives a context to living that no cosmic explosion could ever accomplish.

My watch works because there is a design behind it. The same is true for every single thing that exists – including you!

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. Ps. 19:1-2

Live this week on purpose,
Ron Klopfenstein