Dan Olinger

Mercy on the Mountain, Part 1: Place Is Important

January 24, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

For some reason, I’ve always felt a very keen sense of Place. I’m moved by being in places where important things happened; I recall the power of the moment when, on a lunch break from work at the CVS on Tremont Street in Boston, I walked down Tremont to State Street and, just around the corner, found a simple bronze plaque on the wall of State Street Bank, right next to the drive-through lane. I remember its wording to this day: “D. L. Moody, Christian evangelist, friend of man, founder of the Northfield Schools, was converted to God in a shoe store on this site.”

I’m similarly moved by going back to places where significant things happened to me—places where I lived, went to school, traveled, camped, experienced unusual spiritual growth. And my favorite place in the world, though one I can rarely get to, incites powerful memories and emotions.

In consequence, I find it interesting that even though God is infinite—unbound by space—and existed before there was even such a thing as “location,” he seems to see Place as significant. He tells his people more than once to mark significant places with memorial altars (e.g. Ge 35.1; Jos 4.3). The biblical narrative is rife with place names, and often the narrative seems to be telling us more than just where that town got its name; it’s more than just what critics deride as an “etiological tale.”

An example of this divine focus that I find particularly interesting is a biblical site that was known by the Canaanites as the threshing floor of Araunah (or Ornan) the Jebusite. Multiple threads of the biblical narrative weave themselves around this otherwise unremarkable place.

I’d like to take a few posts to tell that story.

I’m not going to start where the Bible first mentions the place—I’ll get back to that later—but at an incident in the life of King David, toward the end of his life. We find two accounts of the event, in 2Samuel 24 and 1Chronicles 21.

There we read that David ordered a census of his army. Right away we notice two things that seem odd.

First, the Samuel account says that God moved David to order the census, while the one in Chronicles says that Satan did. Critics have made much of this supposed contradiction, but the many thinkers who have responded to them have demonstrated that the allegation of error is not well founded; since God is sovereign, there is a sense in which, by allowing others to act, and especially by using even evil acts to accomplish his purposes—for he is never frustrated—he can be said to “do” anything that happens (cf Gen 50.20; Am 3.6). (And of course he is not the author of sin, but precisely how that all works is beyond me, and it’s beyond you too; if you think you understand the infinite with a brain the size of a small cantaloupe, then you most certainly don’t.)

The second odd thing is that while David’s general Joab, David himself, and God all agreed that the census was sinful, the passage never tells us why—and frankly, it doesn’t seem like all that big a deal to us, especially since God himself had commanded earlier censuses (censi?) (Nu 1.1-2; 26.1-2). Several possibilities have been suggested; the two most common are that it was an act of pride by David, betraying confidence in his armies rather than in God, and that he may have failed to pay the temple tax historically connected to censuses (Ex 30.13; suggested by Josephus).

At any rate, the act is viewed unanimously as sinful. The prophet Gad brings David a message from God, offering a choice of three punishments: famine, war, or plague (which were, incidentally, the promised curses for disobeying the covenant [Dt 28.20ff]). In a cry of deep faith, David commits himself to the hands of God, choosing plague (1Ch 21.13).

What happens next is remarkably counterintuitive.

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 5: Closing Thoughts

January 20, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Omnipotence | Part 3: Omniscience | Part 4: TLC

There are other things we learn about the Creator by observing his creation. I’ve written before about a number of implications from the fact that God is our Creator. Here I’ll mention a couple of related thoughts in closing.

First, we know almost instinctively that when someone makes something, he gets to decide what to do with it. My father was skilled with his hands, and when I was a boy he made a workbench that he intended to use for working on automobile engines. The surface consisted of a long row of 2 x 4 beams turned sideways, so that the tabletop was 4” thick. As it turned out, I don’t remember him ever using it to work on engines; he did other things with it. He’s allowed to do that. It’s his table; he made it.

Similarly, the Creator has the right to govern his creation. We call that sovereignty. What he says goes.

Now, we’ve already established that he is powerful—able to do what he decides to do—and wise—able to determine the most effective uses of what he has created. We’ve also noted that he’s good; he doesn’t abuse any element of his creation, most especially us, but rather cares for us. I’ve written elsewhere about that fact that everything we really need is free.

All this means that his sovereignty over creation is no threat to us—unless we foolishly decide that we know better than he does. And unfortunately, the tendency to do that is part of our fallen nature.

A second thought derives naturally from the first. We ought to respect the Creator’s wisdom and follow his direction. Again, I’ve developed this idea elsewhere. You can use a chainsaw any old way you like, but if you reject the engineer’s recommendations for safe and proper use, don’t be surprised if you end up getting hurt.

Some years ago I recall seeing a commercial for Sherwin-Williams paint. The video began with a shot of the space shuttle on the launch pad, with a voiceover saying, “Sherwin Williams designed the paint for the space shuttle.” Then you heard the countdown, and at “Liftoff!” the screen went white as the exhaust from the solid rocket boosters obliterated the view of everything else, and the roar of those engines drowned out the voice. Then the image changed to a different kind of white, and as the camera zoomed out, you realized you were looking at a door. It opened away from you, and you saw a typical residential bathroom. Against the quiet, the voiceover said, “Chances are we can handle your bathroom.”

When I consider God’s heavens, the work of his fingers, I am driven to a simple confidence. He can handle my life: needs, wants, questions, doubts, sins, perplexities, griefs, all of it. I can trust his wisdom, his power, his goodness, for all that lies ahead, just as for all that he has brought me graciously through.

And, by his grace, I will.

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 4: TLC

January 17, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Omnipotence | Part 3: Omniscience

There’s something else we learn by observing creation carefully. Despite its brokenness, it seems to fit our needs just perfectly.

Our planet is in the solar system’s “Goldilocks zone”: like the fabled baby bear’s porridge, it’s “not too hot, not too cold—just right!” Further, the temperature is finely tuned by the planet’s slant on its axis, which gives most of the inhabited areas seasons—whether 4 or 2—and furthers the thriving of plant and animal life. And unlike its sister planet Mars, ours has an atmosphere, an ocean of air, with just the right amount of oxygen to support human and animal life, and just the right amount of nitrogen to keep the oxygen from causing us to burst into flame at inopportune moments. (And from what I’m told, all moments are inopportune for that.)

The balance of the biosphere is a remarkable thing; as we breath oxygen, we exhale carbon dioxide, which the plants use to produce more oxygen. Helpful little critters, no?

And it turns out that the sun that warms us and lights our days is also something of an enemy; it sends out radiation at levels that are harmful to us from even more than 90 million miles away. But invisibly surrounding our planet are streams of charged particles, driven from the sun but held in place around us by the planet’s magnetic field, that serve as a shield to divert the lethal levels of that radiation away from us.

Let’s see; what else?

Well, areas of the planet feel really crowded, and sometimes folks in those areas wish there were more land. I grew up in the West, “big sky country,” where we didn’t feel that pressure so much—and preferred it that way. I note that the planet’s average density of humans per square mile is just over 39—though of course, much of the planet’s land surface is uninhabitable (think Antarctica) or nearly so (think Sahara). But the Creator was being kind to limit the extent of the land mass, because the rest of the surface—ocean—is a gigantic water purification system that collects, distills, and then delivers drinkable water right to our feet.

Now, our environment’s not perfect. I mentioned a few words back that the system is broken. Lions choke wildebeests to death—I’ve seen it happen, up close and personal—without mercy and without apparent regret. Some people are inclined to focus on the brokenness; Jack London made a living writing stories about a nature that was “red in tooth and claw.” I think it’s important to note the brokenness, first, for our own preservation, and second, for evaluating the brokenness that we’re causing and then remedying it. After all, the Creator has made us responsible for the care and preservation of the planet as well as its wise use.

But the obvious brokenness makes creation’s general kindness all the more impressive. We deal everyday with things, creations of fellow humans, that don’t work at all when any little thing goes wrong. That’s why so many people make such good money repairing and maintaining expensive systems.

But creation just keeps doing what it does so well—supporting life. It amazes me how desperately life wants to continue. You can be out in the middle of a lava field, and there’s a little weed growing up through a crack, clinging to a few grains of something resembling dirt, raising its tiny leaves to the sky and soaking up the sun, yearning to grow.

Of course it’s true that by foolish mismanagement we humans can interfere with the Creator’s systems and make life difficult or even impossible (think Chernobyl). But it really is astonishing that a system so complex continues to support life after millennia of inattention or even abuse.

Whoever made all this must really, really like us.

Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator (1P 4.19).

Part 5: Closing Thoughts

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On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 3: Omniscience

January 13, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Omnipotence

The second thing that I notice when I study the cosmos is its complexity. Again, from the macroscopic to the microscopic level the universe is just unbelievably complex.

At the largest scale there are gravitational forces affecting everything—not just galaxies as they rotate, but galaxy clusters, and even the “great wall” macrostructures of galaxy clusters. Astronomers tell us that there isn’t enough visible matter—stars—in a galaxy to account for its rotation, and hence they postulate “dark matter” to account for it. We can see that the system is complex over unfathomable distances (boy, there’s an insufficient adjective if ever there was one), and invisibly so at that.

At the other end of the spectrum, quarks—several kinds of ‘em—and muons and fluons are doing their things at the minutest of scales, while electrons orbit, or populate shells, or something, and the strong nuclear force keeps all those protons in the nuclei from repelling one another, and the motions are frantic—and the elements appear to us to be pretty much standing still.

So is light a particle or a wave? And why not?

And we haven’t even talked about living things yet.

The more we learn about the cell, the more complicated we realize it is. And the DNA and RNA that it contains are equally complex, containing—and writing—instructions for all the characteristics that make one life form different from others, and from other examples of the same life form. Not to mention epigenetics.

(I have no idea what I’m talking about.)

One of my favorite examples of complexity is symbiosis—the mutually beneficial relationships between life forms. And my favorite one of those involves the termite.

As someone who has bought and sold a couple of houses, I’m no fan of termites. Pretty much all they do is eat. And they eat just one thing—wood. They’ll wreak havoc on the joists and other wooden components of your house—which is why you can’t sell a house without a “termite letter” from an inspector, confirming that there is no termite infestation in the house and that any damage from previous infestations has been properly repaired.

Interestingly, though, the termite’s digestive system is unable to digest cellulose—which is what wood is primarily made of. Which means that he could eat like a madman all day long and starve to death—his entire dietary intake would go right through him.

But as it happens, there live in the digestive tract of the termite a bunch of little microorganisms called flagellates. They excrete a substance that renders the cellulose digestible by the termite.

How fortunate.

But there’s more to the story.

The flagellate is anaerobic.

What does that mean?

It means he never exercises.

No. #dadjoke

It means that oxygen is toxic to him. If he’s exposed to the air, he dies.

So the flagellate keeps the termite alive, and the termite keeps the flagellate alive.

Now.

Which one of those little beasties do you suppose evolved first?

And it’s actually more complicated than that.

You see, both the termite and the flagellate reproduce sexually.

Without going into too much detail, that means that there has to be a boy flagellate and a girl flagellate. In the same place. At the same time. And they have to like each other.

Same with the termites.

And, of course, all four of them—actually much more than four—need to be together, because, as you recall, they’re keeping one another alive.

There are lots of other examples of symbiosis, little macrocosms that represent just a small picture of what the cosmos itself is—an infinitely complex system, in perfect balance, running smoothly for thousands of years, and so reliably that we can literally set our watches by it.

Whoever made this place must be really, really smart.

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, [that] the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? [there is] no searching of his understanding (Is 40.28).

Part 4: TLC | Part 5: Closing Thoughts

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On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 2: Omnipotence

January 10, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction

So what do we learn about the Creator by observing what he has created?

I’m not going to be picky about the order here—I suppose different people will notice different things at different times—but the one that jumps out at me first is power.

Whoever made this place must be really, really strong.

Philosophers note that effects have causes—that’s the basis for all science—and that the cause is typically greater—more comprehensive, more powerful, more something—than the effect.

Why do I start with strength? Because the cosmos is so big.

Unimaginably big.

The fastest any human being has ever traveled is just a hair under 25,000 mph. That was the crew of Apollo 10, returning to the earth from the moon. Now, suppose you start at the sun (I know, if you start at the sun you won’t get anywhere, because you’ll be incinerated. Work with me here.) and head outward at that speed.

If my math is right, you’ll reach Mercury in 60 days.
Venus in another 56.
Earth in 39 more.
Mars in 78 more.

By the way, this assumes that the planets are all lined up in a row, which they never are, and ignores Newtonian physics, which encourages rocket scientists to save fuel by using the gravitational forces of planets to accelerate a spacecraft by “slingshotting.” This means that your rockets will have to be firing all the time, and you could never carry that much fuel. But again, work with me.

So far this seems doable. But as you probably know, the distances start to increase outside Mars’s orbit.

Jupiter is 576 days more. 800 total so far. That’s between 2 and 3 years.
Saturn is another 700 days. Almost 2 additional years.
Uranus another 1500.
Neptune another 1650.

You’ve reached the edge of the solar system, in just 12 years and 9 months. And oh, my friend, you’re just getting started.

The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is another 115,333 years. I hope you brought a book.
The nearest edge of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is another 670.5 million years.
The nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is another 53 billion years.
The edge of our “local” galaxy cluster is another 2.65 trillion years.
The edge of the observed universe is another 131 trillion years.

Now, we’ll see in a bit what the James Webb Space Telescope shows us. If the Lord tarries, I expect we’ll keep developing technology that allows us to see deeper into space, using various frequencies. And I also suspect there will always be more—that we’ll never come to the “edge” of it—whatever that means.

The sheer scope of the cosmos tells us of the power of its Creator.

Consider a different aspect.

The sun, they tell us, is an average-to-mediocre star. Yet it’s an 800,000-mile diameter ball of raging nuclear fusion, with a core temperature of 16 million degrees. (That’s Kelvin, but with these numbers the scale you use doesn’t really matter.) It shoots out flaming geysers of gas 200,000 miles high for hours at a time.

And if you took the most powerful power plant on earth and duplicated it 2.5 billion times, and collected all the power that army of plants generated in a year, it would equal the output of the sun in just 1 second.

Yikes.

There are lots of other evidences of the Creator’s power. I’ve stood on the “hurricane deck” at the foot of Niagara Falls and been nearly knocked to my knees by the power of the falling water—and there’s a bigger waterfall right next door.

I’ve stood at the edge of Victoria Falls (“the smoke that thunders”) in Zambia and placed my finger in the water, knowing that the precipice stretches across the Zambezi River for more than a mile.

Apparently Isaiah gave some thought to this concept:

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, [that] the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? (Is 40.28).

You don’t need a Bible to know that whoever did all this is really, really strong.

Part 3: Omniscience | Part 4: TLC | Part 5: Closing Thoughts

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On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 1: Introduction

January 6, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

The first thing God ever told us is that he’s the Creator. The main verb of the first sentence in the Bible is “created,” and “God” is the subject.

That’s the first thing. Not that he’s holy, not that he’s good, not that he’s infinite—though he is all of those things and much more.

He started by telling us that he’s the Creator (Ge 1.1). And he then continued by stating that everything we see in the cosmos—everything—is from his hand (Ge 1.2-31).

Given where I work, you won’t be surprised that I’m strongly committed to the primary authority of Scripture. My school’s creed starts with the line, “I believe in the inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments.” I spend a lot of time thinking about, and teaching others to think about, what the Bible teaches about this or that. And “this or that” includes a LOT of things—I would say, in fact, that it includes everything we need to know about who God is, how we can know him, and then how we can serve him.

But the same Bible that I hold to be authoritative also says that it’s not the only place where can learn about God—or more precisely, it’s not the only form of divine revelation. The Bible famously says that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19.1) and that “the invisible things of [God] are clearly seen through the things that are made” (Ro 1.20). In other words, you can see what God has to say by just looking around.

Since God made everything, what he has made—like the artwork any artist produces—tells us something about him. You can learn a lot about Picasso by studying his paintings (he did have toxic relationships with women, now, didn’t he?), and no one reading Hemingway will be surprised that one day he walked out into the Idaho woods and ended his own life.

You learn about an artist by studying his art. You learn about the Creator by studying what he’s created.

By looking around.

Of course, what we’re looking around at—what the theologians call “general revelation”—isn’t in the same category as the Scripture, for a simple reason: it’s not exactly what God created. It’s busted.

Since sin entered creation through Adam, all kinds of things about it have changed—most obviously death has come upon us all, and pain of various kinds, and frustration, and who knows what else.

So we have to temper our conclusions about the Creator by deleting from the original design what’s changed since it was executed. If somebody splashes bright pink paint all over a Picasso, you don’t blame Pablo for it.

Although, in this case the bright pink paint might actually be an improvement—but no analogy is perfect, especially when it involves God, who is unlike anyone or anything else.

Anyway.

Even if we have no Bible, even if we’ve never seen one or even heard of one, we can learn about God by just looking around—at the heavens, at the earth, macroscopically or microscopically.

That book of revelation is infinite and inexhaustible.

The Scripture helps us by repeatedly referring back to Creation and drawing various theological points from it. Some years ago my colleague Bill Lovegrove suggested surveying the Scripture for all of those references and noting what conclusions the biblical writers themselves draw. I can commend that study to you as well.

What I’d like to do is spend a few posts dipping a toe in the shallow end of that pool.

Next time—so what do we learn by looking around?

Part 2: Omnipotence | Part 3: Omniscience | Part 4: TLC | Part 5: Closing Thoughts

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The Incomparable Christ

January 3, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

We’re all thinking about the best way(s) to start off the New Year, and it occurs to me that for Christians, who are forever in Christ (Ro 8.1, 12.5; 1Co 1.30), it’s only sensible to begin the year with a meditation on him.

There are many biblical passages on which we could choose to meditate. One of my favorites is the opening paragraph of Hebrews. I’ve used it before as an indicator of the way God speaks, but it will serve well for this purpose too.

The point of Hebrews, as you probably know, is to demonstrate that the Hebrew Scriptures are fulfilled in Jesus, who is the climax of all that they anticipate. In just the opening sentence, the author tells us much about the greatness of Christ:

He is the heir to all of the Father’s authority (He 1.2).
He is the creator of all things (He 1.2).
He is the perfect expression of the nature of God (He 1.3).
Like the Father, He holds omnipotence in His very words (He 1.3).
He has cleansed us of all our sin debt (He 1.3).
He has finished His saving work and is now exalted in a position of honor in the heavenly throne room (He 1.3).

In the rest of the book, the author is going to demonstrate that Jesus is superior

in his person—
- greater than the angels (He 1-2)
- or even than Moses (He 3-4)
as well as in his work—
- in the priesthood (He 5-7)
- in the New Covenant (He 8-9)
- and in the offering of himself as the perfect sacrifice (He 10)

The author spends the first chapter listing passages from the Hebrew Scriptures that demonstrate that Jesus is far superior to the angels—

Citing Psalm 2 and the Davidic Covenant in 2Samuel 7, he notes that Jesus is the Son (He 1.5), whereas the angels are commanded to worship him in Deuteronomy 32.43 (He 1.6).*
Angels are referred to as “servants” in Psalm 104.4 (He 1.7, 14), but the Son is described in much more elevated language in Psalm 45.6-7, Psalm 102.25-27, and Psalm 110.1 (He 1.8-13).
- He holds lordship over the universe (He 1.8)—indeed, he holds lordship over the world yet to come (He 2.5-9)
- He is unchanging (He 1.11-12).

In this connection it’s worth noting that while angels often announced God’s redemptive work –

Gabriel announced John the Baptist’s birth to Zacharias (Luke 1:13ff)
Gabriel announced Jesus’ birth to Mary (Luke 1:26ff)
An angel announced Jesus’ birth to Joseph (Matt. 1:20)
An angel announced Jesus’ birth to the shepherds (Luke 2:9ff)
An angel warned Joseph of the danger from Herod (Matt. 2:13)

… they never actually accomplished any of that work. That was all Christ’s—

Perfect obedience to the Law (Ro 5.19; He 4.15)
A perfectly atoning death as the Lamb of God (Ro 8.3)
His own resurrection and the consequent defeat of death (Jn 2.19, 21)**
His intercession for us in the heavenly throne room (He 9.24; Ro 8.34)

The Son, the Messiah, the uniquely Anointed One has proved himself not only sufficient, but superior in all the ways that matter. As we start into a new year, many of us with dread or at least apprehension, we can proceed confidently, knowing that our Forerunner has planned and prepared the way and determined the perfect outcome for his people.

The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven;
his eyes behold, his eyelids try, the children of men (Ps 11.4).

* A textual variant has resulted in the cited material in He 1.6 not appearing in most English translations of Dt 32.43, but it’s there. That’s a really interesting story; maybe a post on it would be worthwhile.

** Of course, because of the unity of the Trinity, the Father (Ac 5.30, 10.40) and the Spirit (Ro 1.4, 8.11) are said to participate in Christ’s resurrection as well.

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Personal Favorite Posts

December 30, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

I’ve noted before that popular posts tend to be ones that incite. There’s a place for pushing people’s buttons if you want to encourage them to change their thinking or behavior, but I don’t think muckraking or demagoguery is healthy for either the writer or the reader, and there’s no shortage of bloggers these days eager to do that sort of thing for the clicks. That’s not me.

But I’ve found the personal discipline of writing 2 posts every week to be good for me—for my thinking processes, for my communication skills, for my character, for my soul. And I’ll confess that there have been some posts along the way that were good for me, and, I hope, good for the readers. Occasionally writers have the delightful experience of writing something that seemed to turn out better than they intended, or even better than they felt capable of.

Here are 10 of mine that I like, for various reasons, in no particular order.

Photo by HENCE THE BOOM on Unsplash

On Christmas

December 23, 2021 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

This Christmas season I’d like to engage in a thought experiment by telling a story that I’m pretty sure never happened.

__________

An angel walks into the Executive Office Wing of heaven and steps up to the receptionist.

“I’d like to see the Son, please.”

The receptionist replies, “I’m sorry, but you can’t see the Son right now.”

Now, this is the first time those words have ever been uttered. The angel is taken aback.

“I can’t?! Why not?!”

“Well, he’s not in.”

“He’s not in?! What do you mean, ‘He’s not in’?! He’s omnipresent; how can he be ‘not in’?!”

“Well, he’s not here.”

The angel sputters.

“OK, you’re not making any sense, but I’ll play your little game. ‘Where’ is he? If you’ll tell me ‘where’ he is, I’ll go ‘there’ and talk to him.”

“Well, I could tell you where he is, but even if you go there, you won’t be able to talk to him.”

“Why not?”

“Well …”

The receptionist pauses for an awkwardly long time.

“Um, he can’t talk.”

The angel is apoplectic.

“He can’t talk?! What kind of nonsense is this?!”

“Well, … he’s a fetus.”

__________

There are several reasons that I’m fairly sure this scene never happened.

For one thing, while I suppose it’s possible that the executive offices of heaven have a receptionist, there don’t seem to be any of the usual reasons why one would be needed, and there’s no biblical indication of such a position.

Second, my story has a logical problem. Why is the angel bamboozled by the concept of “going there” to talk to the Son, if he’s come to the Executive Office Wing to talk to him?

For another, I’m quite doubtful that any unfallen angel was surprised by the incarnation. This event had been predicted in the Garden of Eden—possibly by the Son himself—and angels seem to be the kinds of persons who pay attention.

So it almost certainly never happened.

But it illustrates a few of the complexities that we celebrate at this time of year—complexities that we often gloss over because we’re just so familiar with the whole concept that God became man.

What an incomprehensible thing.

What happened when a member of the Godhead became germinal (pre-embryonic)? Did he, unlike other germinals, know what was happening? If his knowledge was limited in some ways during his season on earth (Mk 13.32), how extensive was that limitation, and did it change over time? If he is fully human, did he have to grow a brain during his embryonic stage? And if so, did he have any human consciousness before his brain developed?

The Bible tells us that the Son is the agent of providence; by him all things hold together (Col 1.17). Was he maintaining the universe and directing the affairs of people and nations while he was a fetus? Or is there some sort of 25^th Amendment in heaven, whereby the Son hands over those responsibilities to the Father or the Spirit while he’s temporarily intellectually incapacitated?

We have no idea what we’re talking about.

He learned, right? How did that work?

Did the 12-month-old Jesus walk the first time he tried, or did he “fall down and go boom” while learning? Did Joseph ever say to him, “Now, Son, if you hold the hammer that way, one of these days you’re going to hurt yourself”? Did Mary ever say the Aramaic equivalent of “No, Jesus, it’s not ‘Can me and Simeon go out and play,’ but ‘Can Simeon and I go out and play’ “?

The Bible doesn’t speak to these things. It does tell us that he developed “in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man” (Lk 2.52). How did he grow in favor with God?!

I’ve studied the Son at a serious level for five decades. And the more I think and read, the more convinced I am that there is more to this person than we will ever know. And there is more to the Incarnation—to Christmas—than we can possibly conceive.

At some point, we simply have to thank the Almighty.

And worship.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Dan Olinger

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Mercy on the Mountain, Part 1: Place Is Important

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 5: Closing Thoughts

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 4: TLC

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 3: Omniscience

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 2: Omnipotence

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 1: Introduction

The Incomparable Christ

Personal Favorite Posts

Top 10 Posts for 2021

On Christmas