The Time of Our Lives

And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years."

—Genesis 1:14

I. ‘I’ve Salvaged 1998!’

In case you need a refresher, the TV series Third Rock from the Sun was about four aliens who landed in the fictional town of Rutherford, Ohio, took on relatively normal-looking bodies, and learned what it was to be human. Their names were Sally, Dick, Harry, and Tommy. They assumed the surname of Solomon. Basically every experience was a new one for them. At one point, Dick’s love interest, Mary Albright, even says to him, “It’s like you’re out of sync with every single person on this planet”—something I’m often told, but in Dick’s case it was literally true.

In the show’s New Year’s episode one year, Dick realizes that New Year’s Eve is nothing more than an arbitrary day chosen to observe the fact that the earth has made a complete circuit around the sun since the last New Year’s Eve. But he’s depressed. He looks around him and sees people who have accomplished something over the past year, and yet he has done nothing of note. So obsessed is he with trying to do something important at the last minute so that he can say the old year was not wasted, he once again wreaks havoc in Mary’s life—this time ruining the fondue party she’d been carefully planning.

The end of the show finds Dick and Mary sitting outside—Dick contrite and Mary angry—while inside a nearby bar, a technical glitch at 11:58 has led revelers to believe that midnight has arrived, so they begin to sing Auld Lang Syne. Hearing the celebration, Dick finds himself fascinated that it’s literally a new year, and says he feels a great weight has been lifted from his shoulders.

“As of midnight I became a new man. Can’t we just shut the door on last year and look ahead?” he asks Mary.

“I thought you said New Years was just a random spot in the earth’s orbit,” she replies.

“That was last year’s Dick; he is so over!” Dick replies.

And so Mary once again forgives Dick.

Inside, partiers have moved from Auld Lang Syne to singing As Time Goes By, and Mary and Dick dance outside in the snow. But as they’re dancing, the clock in a nearby church steeple strikes twelve, and Dick and Mary realize they jumped the gun on celebrating the New Year. But more than that, Dick realizes that closing out the year dancing alone with the woman he loves was indeed a great accomplishment. He had salvaged 1998. [1]

II. With and For Creation

This episode of Third Rock accomplishes two things in my mind. On the one hand, it causes me to think about the arbitrariness of the calendar; while, on the other, it makes me think about the meaningfulness of the passage of time.

Calendars are what human beings do with time. And their arbitrariness is evidenced by the different calendars kept by different cultures and religions. 29 days ago, we celebrated our culture’s New Year. But in the Chinese culture, their celebration of the New Year was less than a week ago. According to the Jewish calendar, Rosh Hashanah (literally, “head of the year”) occurs in early autumn, and the Muslim year is always at least ten days shorter than our year, meaning that every 33 or 34 years, their new year and our new year approximately coïncide.

And though human measurement of time is arbitrary, the existence of time, like the rest of creation, is not a given. One of the most significant aspects of the current acceptance of a so-called big bang theory for the creation of the universe is the obvious implication that time had a beginning. One of the principle reasons that some scientists try to disprove the theory that the universe (and thus time itself) had a beginning is that it is so easy for people like us to insert our belief in God into the notion that there was an actual beginning to all that is, and that, if the heavens and the earth and the seas and all that fills them are part of what we call creation, then time, too, must be a creature of God.

One of the obvious implications of the Judeo-Christian account of creation is that there was a time before time. And today’s reading from Genesis, which told us about the fourth day of creation, places the sun and the moon in the sky in order for us to keep track of the passage of time. This story assumes that the earth is literally the center of the universe, and that the heavenly bodies have been intentionally placed in relation to a flat earth for our benefit. And so it’s almost silly to insist on a literal interpretation of this aspect of this story. But what is not silly is the theology behind it, which insists that “time is a gift given with creation and for creation.” [2]  That is, time isn’t something that has always been, but was itself created: There was a time before time, and there will be a time after time, for it had a beginning, and it will have an end.

III. My Arrows of Desire

Just as calendars differ according to religion and culture, the passage of time differs greatly from individual to individual. As I grow older, I realize that a lot of this has to do with age. When I was a child, a month seemed like a year. When I was in my twenties, a year seemed like a decade. And now that I’m in my fifties, a decade seems like a year. Obviously, one’s mental state has a lot to do with how we perceive time, as well. When we’re having a good time, time passes quickly. When we’re unhappy or in pain, time passes slowly. This difference in perception actually reflects time itself. Depending on one’s position in the universe, time passes more quickly or more slowly, and what is observed from one location as a minute might be more or less than a minute elsewhere in the universe.

I closed my sermon last week by reading the opening story of Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time. In this book, Hawking talks about The Arrow of Time, and says that there are at least three of these arrows:

First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder and entropy increases. Then, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future. Finally, there is the cosmological arrow of time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting. [3]

Human beings are tied to time. We are historical beings with a beginning and with an end, inhabiting a universe which itself had a beginning and which will someday come to an end. We cannot imagine a time when there is no time, for such a time precludes our very existence. We cannot relate to science or even to our own private thoughts independent of time. Only God, the Creator of all that is—including time—is outside of time. Only God is an eternal being.

Atheists love to claim that God is a creation of the human psyche, and God’s only existence is within the mistaken minds of believers. And yet people of faith insist that, though we believe God’s Spirit sojourns in our hearts, God does not live in us; we live in God. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations, we pray with the psalmist. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. [4]

IV. New Beginnings

We exist within God, and our times are within God’s hands. [5] Time is God’s gift to us, and how we use it is part of our covenant responsibility—perhaps our principle covenant responsibility—toward God and one another.

I spoke earlier about how calendars differ according to culture and religion. In our religious culture, today is the end of the old year. And it’s not just the end for us; it’s the end of the year in many churches in our denomination. Our religious constitution (that is, our church bylaws) requires us to hold a congregational meeting sometime in January. Our cultural heritage (that is, our communal life in a city obsessed with the NFL) insists that we have that meeting on a day when there are no important football games. And so here we are on the Sunday before the Super Bowl getting ready to adopt a budget and elect officers for the upcoming church year. Next Sunday we’ll celebrate that event by renewing our church covenant as a community.

Stephen Hawking refers to “the arrow of time,” so I’ll close today’s sermon with a charge: A charge to think about the nature of time, how we spend it, and the direction our arrow of time is headed. We have many opportunities for new beginnings: A new program year in church, New Year’s Day, our birthday, the beginning of the Lenten season, and the list can go on and on. But in God, not only is each day a new beginning, but so is each moment.

Johan Sebastian Bach composed a cantata that began with the chorus, “God’s time is the best time of all. In him we live and have our being as long as he wills it; in him we die at the right time, when it is his will.” Though it’s a funeral cantata, the tune of this chorus is rather upbeat, for the news that time is God’s gift to us, and that our times are within God’s hands is not bad news; for God’s time is the best time. We’re told of the passage of time by hearing the ticking of a clock, and by observing the phases of the moon and the position of the sun overhead. We experience the seasons and celebrate holidays. We count the wrinkles in our faces, the gray hairs that appear, or the hair that disappears altogether. Both the good times and the bad are God’s gift to us. And no less than the days of our youth, our old age is given to us to enjoy.

We are part of something greater than ourselves. Not just a family. Not just a congregation. Not just a nation. But a planet and a universe. Nothing makes this clearer than the passage of time. Let us pass the time thoughtfully, cherishing the emotions that come with each moment and each season. We are made of the same stuff as the earth and the stars, and our bodies will someday return to the earth and the stars. How our minds experience that transition we cannot know on this side of death. But what we can do is treasure the time we have, for God’s sake, for the sake of our neighbor, and for our own sake.

—©2012 Sam L. Greening, Jr.

1. Happy New Dick, Third Rock from the Sun (NBC, 15 December 1998)
2. Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), p. 357.
3. New York: Bantam, 1984, Chapter 9
4. Psalm 90:1-2
5. See Psalm 31:15

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Creatio Continua

Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. 

—Genesis 1:11

I. Two Hymns of Creation

In this morning's reading from the Hebrew scriptures, we heard the account of what God did on the third day of creation. This third-day activity included two very different things. First, God separated the land from the water, calling the water Sea and the land Earth. At the end of the service we'll sing the Navy Hymn, which puts this act of creation in these terms: God “bids the mighty ocean deep its own appointed limits keep.” [1]

And then God did something else: God created plant life. But please notice how that happened. There's slightly different language used here than had been used previously. When God created light, God said, “Let there be light.” This was creatio originalis: original creation, or creation from nothing. But here for the first time we see a different kind of creation: “Let the earth put forth vegetation...” It's as though plants were not so much an original creation (creation from nothing) as they were simply a result of evolution. According to Genesis, God seems to have created a power within the earth to generate life, and rather than speaking plant life into being from nothing, God spoke the power to create into the stuff of the earth.

And so here on the third day, we discover a bit of permission to believe in evolution. Just as our final hymn will talk about the separation of earth and sea, our second hymn beautifully expresses this other aspect of what the Book of Genesis says happened on that third day:

Praise to the living God, from whom all things derive,
whose Spirit formed upon this sphere the first faint seeds of life;
who caused them to evolve… [2]

This kind of creation isn’t creation from nothing, but is what is called creatio continua, or continuing creation. It is the aspect of creation that appears to be self-perpetuating—the aspect of creation that even appears to adapt and evolve. Where some see natural selection that needs no Creator, people of faith see the hand of God at work, continuing to create by sharing the gift of creativity with creation.

II. God’s Hand, and Our Neighbor’s

This is perhaps the aspect of God’s care for us that we are most likely to take for granted, precisely because it’s the aspect of God’s care for us that appears to need no God at all. People in the past attributed all of creation to God, and the miracle of seeds and birth and growth could, in their mind, only be completely explained by attributing those miracles to God—even if they were miracles that seemed to perpetuate themselves and to which human beings could lend a helping hand.

Even as our ancestors were more likely to believe that God had something to do with seedtime and birth, growth and harvest, they were also more likely to believe their neighbor had something to do with it as well. I don’t know if anybody here remembers this (I certainly don’t), but there was a day when people raised their own fruit and vegetables, their own cows for beef and dairy, their own chickens for eggs and poultry. That’s because back in the old days, most people were farmers.

And those that weren’t farmers and lived in towns had a very different experience of how to come by the things they needed to stay alive. If they wanted bread, they went to a bakery: a shop dedicated to selling bread. If they wanted fruits and vegetables, they went to a greengrocer’s: a shop dedicated to selling produce. If they wanted meat, they went to butcher’s shop, and so forth, and so on.

Sometime before I was born (I really don’t know when—it could’ve been the year 1066 or it could’ve been 1959), some sort of a revolution occurred. Farms became factories. They needed fewer workers and more machines, freeing more and more people to move to towns and cities. And as more people moved to urbanized areas, all the little shops that people used to have to visit one-at-a-time to get the stuff they needed to live were consolidated into bigger stores that sold everything. These stores were called supermarkets.

Suddenly people no longer felt connected to God through the rhythms of nature upon which farm life depended. Nor did they feel connected to God through the friendly hand of their baker or butcher. Providing for one’s self and one’s family became a matter strictly of commerce. We found ourselves picking our own pre-packaged groceries from shelves and coolers in enormous shops. The only actual contact with another person involved the exchange of money at the end. That person was not trained to know anything about our food other than how to ring it up on a register and make change for us when we paid for it. Western humanity—or at least American humanity—suddenly imagined itself to be self-sufficient.

Martin Luther once stated that (for townsfolk, at least) God hid behind the masks of the baker and the milkmaid. [3] Living far from farms and having no contact with bakers and milkmaids, it should come as no surprise to us that God is more well-hidden than ever before.

III. Mail-Order Tide

I may not remember when people moved to towns and supermarkets became the way we shop. But I do remember the next step in separating people from the source of their groceries. That’s because it’s happening even as I preach this sermon.

Early last month, I heard a loud knock at my back door one evening. I was just standing in my, so I was at the door within seconds. I figured it was probably a neighbor who needed something (ever since last year’s big power outage, we’ve been much friendlier to each other in my HOA). But there was nobody there.

Then I looked down and saw a package at my feet—a package from the same online company from which I order most of my books. I didn’t know what it was, but I was excited to see which books had arrived. But when I picked it up, the outside of the package told me what it was. The package contained two good-sized bottles of Tide®. So instead of opening it, I read the address label to see if there’d been some mistake. And indeed there had been: The package was addressed to somebody with a very different name with a completely different house number on a completely different street. The Tide® had been delivered to me by mistake.

But at least I learned something about the world that I didn’t know before. Rather than driving or (God forbid!) walking a couple of blocks south to the nearest grocery store where there are several shelves full Tide®, there were people living near me that were ordering their laundry detergent online. The world was officially moving in a direction that was intended to remove us even farther from the source of our needs. If it was harder to believe in the God of farm machinery and supermarkets, how much more difficult is it going to prove to be to believe in the God of the computer keyboard and the anonymous delivery dumped unceremoniously at our doorsteps?

IV. Turtles All the Way Down

The process that has brought us to this newest retail crossroads was begun on the third day of creation, when God said, “Let the earth grow plant life: plants yielding seeds and fruit trees bearing fruit with seeds inside it, each according to its kind throughout the earth” [Genesis 1:11, CEB]. The God who provides need not provide directly, as happened with the manna in the wilderness. The vast majority of the time, God provides through systems and processes and cycles that God built into creation. And so it’s true: God built into creation all the reason some people need not to believe in God at all. Once we can explain the science behind the seeds, we need not believe that there was a creative hand involved in making and planting the first seed which grew and flourished and put forth more seeds which evolved into what we experience as life.

Yet this clarion call of doubt need not result in atheism. For seeds are not just of the kind that yield physical life. We’ve heard about creatio originalis (creation from nothing), and we’ve heard about creatio continua (continuing creation). There is yet another kind of creation, and that is the creatio nova. This is the new creation, and it is not something that can be explained scientifically. The new creation comes about when God plants a seed in the heart. It might well be a seed of doubt: When we begin to realize that there’s more to what we see around us than pat answers and scientific explanations… or even that standard religious or theological answers are no longer sufficient. Or it might be a seed of faith: When we begin to hope that there is an origin behind or beyond even the best science… or that physical well-being and material wealth are not our purpose.

Just as in times of joy and hope people of faith can find it easy to say along with the psalmist, “This is the day that the Lord has made: Let us rejoice and be glad in it!” let us, as people of faith, share the message that in times of doubt and dejection, we can join that same psalmist in saying that “the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone: This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes!” [Psalm 118:22-24]

Our God is a God of original creation, the Source behind all sources. Our God is a God of continuing creation, the Engineer who set in motion all the systems and laws of nature. And our God is a God of new creation, a loving Parent who sets us free from fear of the unknown, and then invites us back into the Creator’s loving embrace by planting seeds of hope and love.

Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time, begins with the story of a scientist who

once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You're very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it's turtles all the way down!’ [4]

The turtle-lady, of course, is a metaphor for people of faith. But we need not be ashamed that no matter what the universe throws at us, and whatever mystery is uncovered by science, we can with humble faith acknowledge that it’s God all the way back. There is a Mystery behind all discoveries, a Farmer who planted the first seed, a Spark that ignited the big bang, and a Source of love that takes us into realms that are beyond the concerns of science.

On the third day of creation, we learn about one of the ways that creation might perpetuate itself through fruit trees and seeds. May we, the fruit of a new creation, plant seeds of faith, hope, and love, that the church of God may flourish in the midst of a world of doubt.

—©2012 Sam L. Greening, Jr.

1. William Whiting, Eternal Father, Strong to Save (1860), from The Hymnal of the United Church of Christ (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1974), no. 273, stz. 1.

2. Curtis Beach, Praise to the Living God (1966), no. 47, stz. 2.

3. Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), p. 353.

4. New York: Bantam Books, 1988

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The Sheltering Hand of God

And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’

—Genesis 1:6

I. Order & Chaos

I’ve admitted it before in sermons, and I’m afraid I have to revisit one of my more embarrassing hobbies in today’s message: I love fantasy literature. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, fantasy literature is typified by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy—a set of books that I used to read annually as a kid, back before I even knew that there was a whole genre of this type of literature. Fantasy literature is always about worlds with different sets of rules and different assumptions about what makes those worlds tick. Sometimes fantasy literature is set in our world, but our world with some significant differences, such as life after a nuclear holocaust when civilization as we know it is no longer possible, and the kind of life and culture that evolves after such an earth-changing event.

One of the most frequent themes in fantasy literature, therefore, is the creation of order out of chaos… or, conversely, the threat of chaos in an orderly world. It’s an age-old theme that speaks to the deepest level of the human psyche, for we, like the rest of creation, have been placed in a universe full of mysteries. But unlike other creatures (on this planet, at least), we wonder what makes that universe tick.

Of course, we’re at a distinct advantage in our day and age. We know about the solar system and the galaxies and the Big Bang theory. But for every theory that gains acceptance and every mystery solved, new ones come to light which present a whole new field of research and a whole new set of questions.

II. The Glass Ceiling

Our ancestors in the faith, of course, hadn’t made it to where we are. When the Book of Genesis was written down, there was no notion of a globe spinning in space as it revolved around a much larger sun. And there was certainly no knowledge that we were just one of many bodies orbiting that sun, and that each star was itself a sun with other planets. It’s difficult enough for us to remember when we look at the stars that the light that makes them visible to us has taken thousands of years to reach our eyes, and—in some cases at least—that light originated at the very moment our Hebrew forebears were recording their beliefs about the earth and the moon, the sun and the stars.

And those beliefs seem strange to us, indeed. The cosmos described in this morning’s first reading sounds very naïve—perhaps even childlike. We read of a universe that appears to consist of water instead of space. And instead of a sphere, the earth is described as a flat expanse with a dome at the bottom to protect us from the waters that are below the earth, and a dome on top to protect us from the waters that are above the earth.

This second dome—the one on top—is most curious. When we look up, we see the sky, and picture it to be basically limitless and insubstantial. When the ancients—not just the Hebrews, but just about everybody back in those days—looked up, they pictured a solid dome—sort of like a “glass ceiling”—but even more substantial. The Hebrew word for this dome (רקיע) actually came from a verb that meant to beat a piece of metal flat. And when that word was translated into Latin, it became firmamentum—which, in English, we call the firmament. We know that the sky is anything but firm. But the only way our ancestors could imagine life to be possible was if the dome of the sky was something sturdy enough to separate us from the unknown, churning waters of chaos beyond. [1]

When you think about it, there’s a certain amount of common sense to this approach, even if it seems very unscientific. Everybody knew that when rain fell, it fell from above. So it had to come from somewhere. And everybody knew that if you dug deep enough, you reached more water. So that had to come from somewhere, too. There seemed to be a limitless supply of water above the earth, and a limitless supply of water beneath the earth—though human beings weren’t able to control either source: God was the One who created it, and God was in charge of maintaining the domes and regulating what was allowed to escape them.

III. ‘Not a Given, But a Gift’

My favorite quote from last week’s sermon was that “the world is not a given, but a gift.” [2] This means that creation was no accident. And it also means that creation did not come about because God needed to create something. The mysteries of the universe are the work of an all-powerful, all-knowing God. And God’s impulse to create came from God’s gracious and infinite generosity.

This is a lesson we need to learn over and over again. Because we think we know so much, we receive most of what we perceive as a given. We know how it came about and why it happens. And even if we don’t, we’re aware of the fact that some scientist somewhere has figured it out for us.

But in a time and place in which many of the mysteries of the universe are explained by the laws of physics we are unable to accept the world as the gift that it is. Michael Horton put it this way: “It is difficult to acknowledge gifts, much less a transcendent Giver, in a world of supposed givens.” [3] Even among those of us who acknowledge God, it is increasingly difficult to put our faith in a God who provides and surrounds and protects. We know what causes it to rain. We know what causes earthquakes. We need not worry about where our food comes from: We know it comes from Vons. Ours is a watchmaker God, who created the universe, wound it up, and left it to run on its own.

And yet, as Calvin said, it would be “cold and lifeless to represent God as a momentary Creator, who completed his work once for all, and then left it.” [4]  All that we have is a gift from God, and all the knowledge about creation that we possess is also a gift of the Creator. The order that makes our civilization possible is itself a thin veneer, barely masking powers and events beyond our control. This notion of “order” is what the Hebrew Bible is often talking about when it uses the word wisdom. [5] Thinking about the threats to this order doesn’t just inspire some of my favorite fantasy authors to write the books that entertain me. It is also what’s behind what the Book of Genesis says about the Second Day of Creation.

IV. The Hand of God

Day Two, when God created that which supports the earth from beneath and protects it from above, is not very good science. But it is good theology. Attempting to twist the words of Genesis 1:6-8 into some sort of science that is amenable to the givens accepted by modern humanity takes the emphasis off the Bible’s theology and tries to make it into something it was never intended to be, regardless of whether that “something” is science or history.

The creation story, therefore, isn’t a textbook on creation, but rather a revelation about the God of creation. God is a God who created systems which make life possible. But God is also a God who cares about that which God created. Yes, the hand of God wound the watch. But the hand of God continues to hold it and care for it and maintain it and cherish it.

The precarious hold order has on our civilization is sometimes not enough to hold together our own lives. The rest of the world can be moving along just fine, but there are events which can cause our personal world to come to a standstill… or can sometimes even send us reeling. Sickness, accident, death, unemployment, stock market crash, failure, betrayal. Science may have forgotten about the chaos that surrounds our world. But sometimes we are reminded that it’s still there… and that it’s true that we need God in our lives if we would keep our head above water. It is then that we must be reminded of the God whose hand created the sheltering sky and the firm ground on which we stand. And it is often only then that we can understand what it means that we can never fall any deeper than into the hand of God. [6]

V. The Same Boat

In today’s New Testament reading, we heard the familiar story of the storm on the lake. The disciples were sure they were going to die, but Jesus was asleep in the back of the boat. It goes without saying that in that story, we are invited to identify with those frantic disciples. But what Shelley also reminded us of is that we are invited to identify Jesus with God.

I’ve been using God’s hand as the metaphor to talk about God’s strength and care. But in reality, a better metaphor—and the one the Bible uses—is God’s word. God spoke the world into being in Genesis and it was God’s word that created order out of the churching waters of chaos. In the Mark passage we see that it is the word of Jesus which creates peace on the chaotic Sea of Galilee.

If the power of Jesus and the power of God are one in the same, then I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us that Christ can sleep through a storm. But the disciples accuse him of not caring. What we see here is that the storms of life can separate us from God, for we think that God does not care what’s happening to us. And yet God became as one of us, and—in this story at least—is quite literally in the same boat as those who are trying to believe. This reminds us that the storms of life can also divide us not only from God, but also from those around us. Because they are not experiencing what we’re experiencing, we often think that they, too, are uncaring. [7]

In Christ we are assured that the God who created order out of chaos is still a part of our chaotic lives, blessing and protecting, and assuring us that “all things work together for good for those who love God, [and] for those who are called according to [God’s] purpose. [8] And in the body of Christ, the church, we are assured that we are part of a community that cares. We’re all in the same boat, and we’re all looking to the same Lord to speak his word of peace and to help us keep our head above water. If one of us cannot hear that word above the windstorm, we know that somebody among us can. In speaking peace to each other, we are sharing in the creative word of God and helping to spread the good news of God’s love.

—©2012 Sam L. Greening, Jr.

NOTES

1. J. Edward Wright, Heaven, The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 2 (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), p. 766-767.
2. Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), p. 326.
3. Horton, p. 353.
4. Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.16.1
5. In an entry entitled Wisdom in the Ancient Near East, Nancy Declaissé-Walford describes wisdom as “an umbrella term that encompasses humanity’s quest to understand and organize reality, to find answers to basic existential questions, and to pass that information along from one generation to another.” See The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 5 (Nashville: Abingdon, 2009), p. 863.
6. “Du kannst nie tiefer fallen als in Gottes Hand” [Margot Käßmann].
7. Pheme Perkins, The Gospel of Mark, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. VIII (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), p. 581.
8. Romans 8:28

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