X2
From the Series—God at the Box Office
March 18, 2004Next week we’ll begin a new series of evotionals titled Creed. This evotional concludes our God @ the Box Office series.
X2
I think movies consciously or unconsciously speak to human longings. We see romantic comedies because falling in love is an innate human longing. We love epic films because it speaks to the heroic longing in each of us. And we go see science fiction movies because we crave the supernatural.
For those who haven’t seen it, X2 is a movie about mutants who possess supernatural powers. Storm controls weather systems. Wolverine has autonomic healing powers. Nightcrawler can teleport short distances. Mystique is a metamorph who can alter her appearance and her voice to emulate anyone. Magneto has magnetic powers. And Professor Xavier is a first-order telepath who can read minds.
Let me make an observation up front. X2 is pure fiction, but I don’t think X2 exaggerates the supernatural. I think it underestimates it. There is an old saying, “Fact is stranger than fiction.” In this instance, it’s true. The mutants in X2 possess some pretty impressive powers, but Jesus actually did what science fiction only dreams about.
In Mark 4, Jesus stopped a hurricane in its tracks with the words, “Be still.” In John 2, He changed the molecular structure of water into wine. In John 9, He hardwired a blind man’s brain. From a neurological perspective, he must have installed synapses between the cerebral cortex and optical nerve. Jesus walked through walls and walked on water. Jesus turned energy into matter—he fed 5,000 with five loaves and two fish. He made the blind see, the deaf hear, the mute talk, and the lame walk. Jesus raised the dead. And Jesus defied gravity and ascended into heaven in Acts 1.
Omnipresence
I think science fiction has an upside and a downside. I think the downside is that it can blur the lines between what is real and what isn’t, what is true and what isn’t. But it also has an upside. It stretches the human imagination. Oliver Wendel Holmes said, “A mind stretched by a new idea never returns to its original shape.”
One of the scenes that stretches the imagination happens inside Cerebro—a device designed by Professor Xavier that helps him locate everyone in the universe—human and mutant. Xavier says, “Through Cerebro I’m connected to them and they to me.” Then he says to Wolverine, “We’re not as alone as you think.”
When I feel lonely or forgotten I love reading Psalm 139. I think it is one of the most intimate passages in Scripture because it talks about how well God knows us and how close He is to each of us.
The Psalmist says, “O Lord, you have searched me and you know everything about me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; every moment you know where I am. You know what I am going to say even before I say it. You hem me in—behind and before. Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there you hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. I look behind me and you’re there, then up ahead and you’re there, too. I can never escape your spirit. I can never get away from your presence.”
Space
It’s almost impossible for us to comprehend the vastness of space. Scientists have discovered galaxies 12.3 billion light years away and we may only be scratching the surface! We are one tiny planet in one tiny galaxy!
Let me try to put 12.3 billion light-years in perspective. The sun, our nearest star, is 93 million miles away. If you were to drive 65 mph twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, it would take 163 years to reach the sun!
But it only takes light, traveling 186,000 miles per second, eight minutes to reach planet earth. Our light is eight minutes old. By comparison, it would take light 12.3 billion years to reach the outer edges of the universe. We can’t even begin to comprehend that distance.
Yet the Psalmist says, “If I go up to the heavens, you are there.”
Psalm 36 says it this way. “His love is meteoric, his loyalty astronomic, His purpose titanic, his verdicts oceanic. Yet in His largeness, nothing gets lost.”
Spacetime
I was at the White House for the Garden Tour a few years ago and I’ll never forget walking by a woman that looked totally overwhelmed. Right behind her was a large group of girls and immediately I knew that she was their chaperone. For whatever reason, she said to me, a complete stranger, “Keeping track of 79 girls is impossible!”
Try six billion!
But that is exactly what God does. He is behind us and ahead of us. He knows everything about us. He knows when we sit down and when we get up. He knows exactly where we are—physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually—every moment.
That is next to impossible for us to comprehend for one simple reason: we were born into four dimensions of spacetime. We’ve never known anything else. So it’s hard for us to comprehend anything or anyone who exists outside those four dimensions. I think one of the greatest mistakes we make is thinking about God in four dimensional terms.
Disclaimer: I know about enough about physics to be dangerous. But let me try to explain as best I can what little I know. In very simplistic terms, a dimension is a way you can move. Mathematicians actually refer to each spacetime dimension as “a degree of freedom.” The number of dimensions determines what is and what is not possible.
I am limited to three space dimensions which means I can only be in one place at one time. And I am limited to one time dimension which means I am stuck in a moment and I can’t get out of it. I cannot travel into the past or the future because in one dimension, time is linear.
But if I could add a time dimension or space dimension, things would get very interesting because every added dimension gives you a heightened ability to maneuver in time and space. K.C. Cole says it this way. “You can leap over a four-dimensional barrier in five-dimensional space; untie an eight-dimensional knot in nine-dimensional space. Magical things are possible by a mere change in the dimensions of space.”
Let me try to explain it this way. A comic strip character is a prisoner of two dimensions. They can move horizontally and vertically, but they cannot escape the two-dimensional surface of the paper. They are stuck in those little comic strip boxes. But imagine if that comic strip character could take on a third dimension. They would add a degree of freedom and literally be able to jump off the page. They could escape their two-dimensional world.
That is pretty simplistic, but the same is true of us. If we could add a dimension of time we could move backwards or forwards in time instead of being a prisoner of the present. And if we could add a dimension of space we could walk through walls.
II Peter 3:8 is one of those passages that hint at the extra dimensionality or super dimensionality of God. It says, “You must not forget, dear friends, that a day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day .” That verse makes no sense if God is limited to one time dimension. But it makes perfect sense if we believe that God exists outside time and space.
I heard about a man that had an interesting conversation with God. He said, “God, how long is a million years to you?” God said, “A million years is like a minute.” The man said, “How much is a million dollars to you?” God said, “A million dollars is like a penny.” The man said, “Could you spare a penny?” God said, “Sure, just wait a minute.”
Psalm 145:3 says what I’m trying to say as succinctly as it can possibly be said. “There are no boundaries to His greatness. His greatness no one can fathom.”
Parental Concern
God is everywhere all the time. He is the all-seeing eye. But I don’t want you to read this evotional and think of omnipresence as some abstract or impersonal concept.
Those of you who are parents probably do with your kids what I do with my kids. Sometimes I watch them without them knowing that I’m watching them. I love to watch them playing when they are in the zone. I love to walk by my kid’s classes when they’re in school and just watch them in that environment. And I love coming into their room at night when they’re sound asleep and watching them. Sometimes I watch them because I’m concerned about them. Sometimes I watch them because I’m proud of them. Sometimes I watch them because I know they’re going to do what I told them not to do. And sometimes I watch them because I just love watching them. I can see myself in my children.
Omnipresence is about a Heavenly Father who loves watching his children.
Eyes of Faith
The philosopher and psychologist, Carl Jung, had a Latin saying engraved over the door to his office. It said, “Bidden or not, God is here.” I like the way Richard Rohr says it. “We’re already in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.”
One of my favorite lines in X2 is a dialogue about faith. Nightcrawler says something that is pretty profound. “Most people will never know anything beyond what they see with their own two eyes.”
There is an old aphorism, “You have to see it to believe it.” And I think that is true in some instances. But I think the opposite is true as well. You have to believe it to see it. Faith opens our spiritual eyes and allows us to perceive the invisible spiritual realities around us.
II Corinthians 3 says that a veil covers the eyes of those who don’t believe. But verse 16 promises, “Whenever anyone turns to the Lord then the veil is taken away.” The sequence is significant. Some people can’t see because they don’t believe.
You can think and talk about marriage, but until you cross that threshold you don’t really know what it’s like. You can talk and think about children, but until you cross that threshold and have children your only have theories. You can talk and think about spiritual things, but until you cross the threshold and come into a relationship with Christ there is a veil.
My prayer is Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 1:18. “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints and his incomparably great power for us who believe.”
In A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes is just beginning his career as a detective. He quickly distinguishes himself because of one amazing trait: the ability to notice what other people miss. Holmes says to one policeman, “To a great mind, nothing is little.” He says, “The little things are infinitely the most important.”
In one exchange between Holmes and his faithful assistant, Watson, Watson compliments his genius for minutiae. He says, “You see everything.” Holmes says, “I see no more than you, but I have trained myself to notice what I see.”
Naked Eye
For thousands of years, our perception of the world was limited to the naked eye! That changed in 1600 AD. A Dutchman named Hans Lippershey was in his shop making eyeglasses. Legend says that two children were playing with some of his lenses. They put two lenses together—one convex and the other concave—and when they looked through the lenses the weathervane on the town church was magnified. Hans Lippershey stopped making glasses and started making telescopes.
A few years later, in 1609, Galileo made his own telescope and looked through it for the first time. He was completely unprepared for what he saw. The moon appeared 27,000 times larger. Planets, invisible to the naked eye, were suddenly visible. Galileo probably expected to see 777 stars, meticulously catalogued just a few years earlier by astronomer Johannes Kepler. Instead, he saw thousands of stars—beyond his capacity to count.
A single look through a telescope changed everything! Galileo experienced what Thomas Kuhn would call a “paradigm shift ”
-- a revolutionary new way of looking at the world!
Throughout the course of human history invisible planets were just waiting to be discovered. Unseen stars existed long before Galileo looked through his telescope. All that changed was a heightened ability to see what already existed.
There is so much more to life than what we can see with the naked eye. God has always existed. He is just waiting to be discovered!