Seeing Jesus – Part 3 – Fraud Alert

Fraud is in the air. All kinds of fraud. Bank fraud, credit card fraud, contract fraud, mortgage fraud, identity fraud, phone fraud. Fraud is becoming as prevalent as the air we breathe, and we all know we should keep an eye out for it.

Fraud, we know is bad. Scoundrels and scumbags perpetrate fraud, and we are rankled at the very thought that someone out there is trying to pull the wool over our eyes for their own gain. No decent person would stand by and let someone be taken in by fraud.

But not all those who commit fraud are heinous evildoers and ne’er-do-wells. Some are merely innocent participants in schemes of deception. The folks who provide your Internet and phone service, for example. Good folks, no doubt. But they facilitate all kinds of fraud. The merchant who accepts your stolen credit card number, he’s just doing his job. But doing his job can help to defraud you.

I make this point because I want to alert you to the biggest and most destructive fraud you’ve never heard of, while not wanting to condemn all those who facilitate and further this massive program of deceit, since most of them are just doing their job.

I refer, of course, to the modern scientific enterprise.

Now science has produced a great many marvels, wonders, technologies, and assorted benefits to bless the world. I do not dispute this. The vast majority of people who participate in this enterprise consider that they are doing good work. And they are, at least at certain levels.

But they are participants in fraud nonetheless, as are, to some extent, every one of us. As C. S. Lewis noted (Weight of Glory), the bottom line of the scientific enterprise is a great program of deception. Or, as he put it, the burden of the modern scientific enterprise is not to get the facts in, but to get God out.

And this great deception science in all its forms and disciplines has performed masterfully well. Whereas the Scriptures teach that all knowledge and wisdom culminate in Jesus Christ, that God is the Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos and all its operations, that all things and all knowing derive from Christ and must therefore return to Him, and that Jesus upholds the stuff and fabric of the cosmos by His powerful Word, science, with one voice—like some Sportin’ Life in lab coats—says emphatically, “It ain’t necessarily so.”

Science obscures—to the point of exclusion—the role of God and Christ in the protocols and products of its vast scam, insisting instead that “the cosmos is all there is or was or ever will be” (Carl Sagan), that beyond the stuff of the material cosmos nothing else exists, and all that exists can be defined and known by the laws of nature.

Jonathan Edwards knew better. He understood that all of creation depended upon God and thus bore witness to Him and His goodness: “It is by the immediate influence of God upon things according to those constant methods which we call the laws of nature, that they are ever obedient to man’s will, or that he can use them at all” (An Humble Attempt).

It’s only because of God, and especially our Lord Jesus Christ, that science works at all, as the earliest pioneers of science well understood. Thus science—like all the rest of us—should stop trying to make us believe that God doesn’t matter and instead help us, through its many powerful tools and protocols, to see more deeply and appreciate more consistently the wonder, majesty, mystery, beauty, simplicity, orderliness, generosity, wisdom, Presence, and power of Jesus Christ our King.

The heavens declare the glory of God (Ps. 19.1), and all the works of creation reveal something about Him (cf. Pss. 104, 111, 147; Rom. 1.18-20). Whatever we observe in the natural world, throughout the entirety of the creation, is not the random product of chance and time, as science insists. It is the work of Jesus. It is part of His revelation of Himself. It shows us something about Him which, in the light of Scripture, we can discern, acknowledge, and grow by to become more like Him.

See Jesus in the majesty and order of the night sky. Hear Him sing beautifully in the humblest songbird or croaking toad. Let yourself be caught up in His Presence as unseen winds blow through the trees, a parade of colors marches before your eyes, and creatures of every size, shape, and sort present themselves for your consideration.

It’s time to stand up in the face of the greatest fraud, the most all-pervading scam, and the most dangerous lie that enfolds the world today. What may be known of God, as Paul put it, is scattered across and throughout the created order, an unceasing gift and fathomless resource of goodness from our King Who works all things according to the counsel of His will.

Today, contemplate some object of the creation. Note its shape, color, size, place in the world, effect on you, and more. See what you can discover about the One Whose speaking to this object makes it—and you—exist and cohere.