NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has successfully awakened from nearly a year in hibernation, finding itself 5.9 billion miles from Earth. The craft collected data while in hibernation and will now send that information to us, though it will take nearly nine hours for its signal to reach mission controllers.

Launched in January 2006, New Horizons became the first spacecraft to fly past Pluto. It continued into the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune. As it continues its voyage, one scientist remarked, “I have a hunch that we have just scratched the surface of what the entire solar system really looks like.”

Ours is just one of billions of other planetary systems in the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy is just one of an estimated two trillion galaxies in the universe.

And our God says he measures all of that with the palm of his hand (Isaiah 40:12).

“A land on which you had not labored”

Joshua 24 finds the nation’s great leader nearing the end of his life and work. He gathers “all the tribes of Israel” one last time (v. 1), where he reminds them of all God has done to bring them into their promised land. This word from the Lord especially struck me:

I gave you a land on which you had not labored and cities that you had not built, and you dwell in them. You eat the fruit of vineyards and olive orchards that you did not plant (v. 13).

This was, of course, true to the history of Canaan. For generations prior to the conquest by Israel, as the Jewish people were enslaved in Egypt, those who lived in the land settled and developed it. While the Israelites were commanded to destroy some of the cities they encountered, such as Jericho, they were able to inhabit most of them themselves.

However, a skeptic would be right to remind Joshua that the Jewish armies had to fight to conquer the land God intended for them as well. God did not miraculously defeat and destroy the armies that came against the Israelites apart from their agency. Each part of the land had to be taken with military force and resolve.

This juxtaposition of divine provision and human agency illustrates a dilemma that has long plagued me: What part of our work in this world is up to us, and what part is up to God? I often warn that self-sufficiency is spiritual suicide, that we must depend fully on God to do what only God can do. And yet, from Adam’s cultivation of the Garden of Eden to John’s writing of the book of Revelation on Patmos, we find humans doing what humans can do.

The balance is both simple and profound: as we work, God works. When we do what we can do, God does what only God can do. We share the gospel, and the Spirit convicts of sin and saves souls. We meet physical need, and God uses us to meet spiritual need. We give our best, and God does his best.

But there’s more to the story.

A plaque that marked my life

I remember vividly the first time I stepped into the home where my now-wife lived with her family in Houston. We had just started dating in college, and she invited me home to meet her parents. We walked in through the front door, and there to the right was a plaque displayed on the wall where everyone could see it: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

I knew that this was from the Old Testament, but I did not then know the story as I know it now. It comes from the same passage we referenced earlier, as Joshua encourages the Israelites to forsake the worship of their past and the Canaanite gods of their surrounding culture.

After challenging them in this regard, Joshua made the declaration that Janet’s parents posted in their home. As I got to know them, and especially when we became family, I witnessed the reality of this statement in their lives.

I watched them go through great physical challenges, but their faith never wavered. I spoke at my father-in-law’s funeral after he died from cancer, where my mother-in-law remained steadfast in trusting her beloved husband to Jesus. She is now 89 years old, but every time I see her, I see the joy and peace of Jesus in her heart. She has that plaque I saw so long ago in Houston prominently displayed where she lives today. And she lives by it every day.

The highest calling in life

Plato thought of the physical world as the “shadow” of the world of ideas. He pictured us as chained in a cave with a fire to our back and our shadows on the wall before us. Philosophers, in his estimation, exist to break our chains and point us to the ideas that are worthy of our focus and lives.

His pupil, Aristotle, disagreed with his famous mentor, claiming that the “ideas” are in the material, that we discover “tableness” in an actual table.

Whatever we think of this debate, which persists today, we can focus in Aristotelian fashion on the fact that the God who created the universe entered it in his incarnate Son, stepping from the spiritual into the physical to become one of us so we might be one with him. Now we serve him by serving others in his name, working as he works, serving the Lord as he serves us and serves others through us.

To close with an example: some liturgical calendars are remembering today the great abolitionist William Wilberforce, who died on July 29, 1833. Just four days earlier, his bill for the abolition of all slavery in British territories passed a crucial vote. A year later, on July 31, 1834, eight hundred thousand slaves, mainly in the British West Indies, were set free.

As he worked, God worked.

I believe this partnership to be the highest calling in life.

Do you agree?

 

 

Denison Forum