Scripture: 1 Kings 8:27
“But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, click even the highest heaven, help cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!”

Thought for the Day: Solomon understood the power of symbolism. He knew his temple wasn’t literally going to be God’s dwelling place, but he also understood that as humans, we need to have ways to connect with the Divine that we are capable of understanding. As finite physical creatures, we have difficulty comprehending the infinite. And in the ancient world, with their lack of scientific knowledge of the cosmos, that task must have been even more difficult. When you don’t know how anything actually works, then everything is an act of God. Solomon knew better.

I have never understood the dissension between people of faith and science, like the argument happening in Texas right now about adding Creationism to school textbooks. Huh? To believe in a God that placed everything in the universe whole cloth, like someone building with Legos, is to deny any sort of progress we’ve made understanding our environment over the last 5000 years. Worse, it puts limits on God by insisting God is some sort of physical creature like us. It contains God in a very small temple.

My vision of God is larger than that archaic view. For me, God is impossible to get away from, because God is our intrinsic nature. God is everything. God is the oxygen, the carbon, the nitrogen, the protons and electrons, and the fundamental strings that create those particles. The universe is vast and speaks to the infinite vastness of God, but the stuff in the universe—the planets, the stars, and us, is made up of very small things, and those very small things are ultimately made from a single, vibrating frequency that is God. God is both larger and smaller than we could possibly imagine, and can never be contained in the small temple of our minds.

Prayer: Glorious and eternal God, help me understand how incredibly infinite you are, yet also how intimate my relationship with you truly is. Amen.