"And they will trample the holy city for forty-two months. And I will give to my two witnesses even that they will prophesy for twelve hundred and sixty days, dressed in sackcloth." Rev. 11:2, 3.
This morning I went back to school. High school! Yes, I suppose I'm a little old for that (I graduated in 1967). But it involved a higher cause--one called parenting. One of my children was struggling with high school algebra, and when I looked at the textbook I could see why. The only problem was that my young person already knows more algebra than I do. So how do you help a kid who's struggling with a subject when you know less than he or she does about it? You go back to school!
The class was interesting. Adding and multiplying powers. Negative and zero powers. The subject has something incredibly elegant about it, even though it can be hard to learn--at least for some people. But what is mathematics? Is it simply a constructive form of intellectual play? Or is it a window into some deeper reality of the universe that already existed before we discovered it?
John Polkinghome argues that mathematicians are discoverers, not inventors. Through mathematics they explore a reality that already exists. The prime numbers (numbers that can be divided only by themselves and by 1-2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, and so on), for example, have always been "there," even before we noticed their existence. But where have they been? Polkinghome argues that they are part of the fundamental structure of he universe, one existing at a deeper level beyond its physical reality. In other words, the universe involves more than than objects that we can handle and observe. Research provides hints that fundamental principles, such as mathematics, truth, and beauty, have a reality beyond what human beings can observe and label. If the mathematicians are right, why can't there also be a God who transcends everything that science can observe and experiment with?
Polkinghome's insight is fascinating when you realize that God's self-revelation in the Apocalypse is full of numbers, two of them visible in the above text. Forty-two months, 1260 days, five months, 10 days, and a time, times, and half a time represent some strange and unusual ways of describing the passage of time. We observe crowds ranging in size from 144,000 to 200 million (imagine what it would take to estimate the size of such a crowd!). In addition to these numbers we find the repeated use of basic numbers, such as three, four, six, seven, 10, 12, and 24. Rightly understood, the books of revelation and of nature both witness to the same God--a God of order in the midst of chaos, a God of mercy and justice, a God of both love and wrath.
Lord, this math stuff is way over my head. So are many of the numbers in the book of Revelation. Help me find Your order in the midst of my own personal chaos today.
This morning I went back to school. High school! Yes, I suppose I'm a little old for that (I graduated in 1967). But it involved a higher cause--one called parenting. One of my children was struggling with high school algebra, and when I looked at the textbook I could see why. The only problem was that my young person already knows more algebra than I do. So how do you help a kid who's struggling with a subject when you know less than he or she does about it? You go back to school!
The class was interesting. Adding and multiplying powers. Negative and zero powers. The subject has something incredibly elegant about it, even though it can be hard to learn--at least for some people. But what is mathematics? Is it simply a constructive form of intellectual play? Or is it a window into some deeper reality of the universe that already existed before we discovered it?
John Polkinghome argues that mathematicians are discoverers, not inventors. Through mathematics they explore a reality that already exists. The prime numbers (numbers that can be divided only by themselves and by 1-2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, and so on), for example, have always been "there," even before we noticed their existence. But where have they been? Polkinghome argues that they are part of the fundamental structure of he universe, one existing at a deeper level beyond its physical reality. In other words, the universe involves more than than objects that we can handle and observe. Research provides hints that fundamental principles, such as mathematics, truth, and beauty, have a reality beyond what human beings can observe and label. If the mathematicians are right, why can't there also be a God who transcends everything that science can observe and experiment with?
Polkinghome's insight is fascinating when you realize that God's self-revelation in the Apocalypse is full of numbers, two of them visible in the above text. Forty-two months, 1260 days, five months, 10 days, and a time, times, and half a time represent some strange and unusual ways of describing the passage of time. We observe crowds ranging in size from 144,000 to 200 million (imagine what it would take to estimate the size of such a crowd!). In addition to these numbers we find the repeated use of basic numbers, such as three, four, six, seven, 10, 12, and 24. Rightly understood, the books of revelation and of nature both witness to the same God--a God of order in the midst of chaos, a God of mercy and justice, a God of both love and wrath.
Lord, this math stuff is way over my head. So are many of the numbers in the book of Revelation. Help me find Your order in the midst of my own personal chaos today.
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