By Peter Sung, Conference Coach, PacNWC
I feel great hope and joy when physics, psychology, philosophy, and some cultural phenomenon all come together to corroborate a piece of theology. Take, for example, the 2nd Law of thermodynamics which states that within a closed system, over time, entropy (chaos, decay, death) increases. Everything, left to its own devices, gets worse, not better. I have a long homeowner’s list of things that are getting worse, relationships, too. My anxiety is not without reason! But the curse of the 2nd Law, this law of death, can be mitigated and even reversed. The best example of this is the earth and the sun. Our earth, left alone, would immediately succumb to the 2nd Law, but the sun, our constant source of energy, mitigates and reverses this tendency. The sun adds energy from outside the system to perpetuate life here on earth.
This 2nd Law helps illuminate this key theology in the Bible. Genesis 2:17 says: “…for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” This death was the introduction of the law of death, the 2nd law. Revelation 22:3-5 spells it out:
“God’s curse will no longer be on the people of that city. He and the Lamb will be seated there on their thrones, and its people will worship God and will see him face to face. God’s name will be written on the foreheads of the people. Never again will night appear, and no one who lives there will ever need a lamp or the sun. The Lord God will be their light, and they will rule forever.”
It turns out, there will come a day when we won’t have to worry about fighting back the inevitable demise of all things because the 2nd Law itself will be done away with (God’s curse will no longer be on the people of that city.). In fact, we won’t even need the sun anymore because all along, the sun was just a placeholder for God who himself will be our everlasting energy source from outside of the system (holy)! Look at these other verses that repeat this promise:
And the city did not need the sun or the moon. The glory of God was shining on it, and the Lamb was its light.
Revelation 21:33
You won’t need the light of the sun or the moon. I, the Lord your God, will be your eternal light and bring you honor. Your sun will never set or your moon go down. I, the Lord, will be your everlasting light, and your days of sorrow will come to an end.
Isaiah 60:19-20
Jesus said to his followers: “You are the light of the world.” As a follower of Christ, do you add energy? Or do you take it? There is a show on Hulu, a comedy about vampires called, What We Do In The Shadows. My favorite character is the energy vampire, and he feeds, not by drinking blood but by draining peope of their energy. He works at an office and every morning for breakfast, he goes around being long-winded, oversharing details, and in general, being unaware of himself. The people he interacts with are drained of their energy and his eyes glow from the feeding. Are you an energy vampire to those around you? Or, are you the light of the world? Is your church an energy vampire to those around it? Is your church, as a light, set on a hill, visible and adding energy to help mitigate and reverse chaos and decay?
Most fundamentally, to be followers of Christ, means to be light, to be those that add energy rather than drain. Looking around, it’s hard to deny that to be American means to be consumeristic. Whether we show up at church, a store, a school, or to a relationship, we judge by what we get, whether we were entertained, whether we liked it, whether it was agreeable to our particular sensibilities. In what spaces and situations do we appreciate being contradicted and challenged, show up to give rather than to receive? Maybe we’re supposed to be exiles, missionaries, and pilgrims, bringing light — energy — wherever we go, and now individualistic consumeristic vampires.
One more passage and encouragement I leave with you this holiday season. In Philippians 3,, Paul shares about his own journey, from being one seeking to gain energy to one who learned to connect to an everlasting energy source by dying to all that he considered to be gain. He summarizes his testimony in this way: “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ… For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things… in order that I may gain Christ… that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”
I encourage you to add energy wherever you show up. Seek to give, to bless, to encourage, to be the light that you are, even if it means dying to yourself a little bit.