Vanishing Wonder By Lee Shelnutt
“We live in a society of materialists and too often we Christians are practical materialists. Let me give you an example. When we get a headache, we reach for a what? An Advil, a Tylenol, or an Alleve and we don’t do what? We don’t pray, ‘Lord enable this medicine to work and relieve my headache.’ We don’t pray. Why? Because, practically speaking, we don’t believe it is necessary. Thematerial of the medicine will do the material thing in our material body for that’s practically speaking all there is.”
That is my paraphrase of how Pastor Nick answered a question in tonight’s Bible study at Huntersville ARP Church. His answer was highly convicting. Even among the most faithful, Bible-believing, Confessionally Reformed Christians, I wonder if there’s much room left for mystery and wonder. For a fuller, richer, deeper world beyond what we can measure using our materialistic tools – the microscope, the tape measure, the calipers, the scales? We profess to believe in a supernatural, spiritual reality but do we practically live as if we do?
We see what our materialist neighbors do with the mystery of the image of God in man. They deny it and then think that they make themselves masters over the human body. Some seek to fashion it into any identity they want. Others destroy it when found inconvenient in the womb. The former group simultaneously worships the self as ultimate and autonomous and then mutilates their bodies with materialistic zeal. The latter group acts as if the one in the womb is of no worth, no significance, certainly of no wonder, no mystery. Just a clump of cells.
We see what our materialist neighbors are doing with the mystery of the divinely given institution of marriage. When applying the truths of the beginning of his epistle to the Ephesians to husbands and wives, Paul writes:
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
As designed by God, human marriage is patterned to reflect the wonder and profound mystery of Christ and His bride, the Church. It is to be about far more than meets the eye. “This mystery is profound.” But what do more and more of our materialist neighbors do? They certainly have no place for Divine mystery. That is jettisoned. Instead, they form and fashion marriage anyway they choose. Smashing the mystery.
And these materialist neighbors are constantly “catechizing” us. The World is certainly catechizing our children. Is it any wonder that more and more of the children of the church are giving heart approved materialist answers to the materialist catechismquestions? And whether knowingly or not, destroying mystery – severing the deep, profound mysteries which are tied inseparably to the heart of our faith.
At least in part, are we losing our children to the flat and ugly materialist nightmare of a world, because we have no place for wonder and mystery? Because we are practical materialists?
I’m not talking about some mystical cop-out from studying creation and the Scriptures but rather the sort of practical materialism that has no place for wonder. No sense of our mental limitations. Little or no awareness of the effects of sin upon our reasoning.
As we enter a season in which many believers give special consideration to the high, holy, and even mysterious doctrine of the Incarnation, do you ever wish that you still had something of the wonder of a child staring bright-eyed at a Christmas tree at night? It’s so easy to get jaded and dull in the wonder department. But read these words again,
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it….And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace andtruth.
There’s no practical materialism there – but there is the holy mystery of God the Son taking on human flesh for our salvation. Lord, give us wonder!