So, haven't done a post in more than a week, time to get back to it. I was driving home last Friday, thinking about the rain that Biola had recently experienced, and also about C.S. Lewis and G.K Chesterton, and this note is the result of that train of thought.
I love the rain. If I'm walking to class in the rain, I won't put my hood up just because it feels like I'm missing out on the experience of the rain. As I was walking in the rain (and thinking about it later), I realized something- rain is water falling from the sky. Separate this from all scientific explanations and physical causes we've discovered, and try and see rain in the way that we used to see it–water falling from the sky. It's no wonder that in O.T. times, rain was clearly seen as an act of God. We, however, know better; we (by which I mean, people other than myself who know sciency stuff) know that this rain is the natural result of naturally occurring phenomena, like cold fronts and high pressure systems and stuff like that. The question I was thinking about on my way home was this: do these physical causes of an event make it any less an act of God?
This is where C.S. Lewis comes in. In his Screwtape Letters, he says, via the demon Screwtape, that if a prayer (for instance, a prayer about the weather) is answered, the human who prayed will undoubtedly be able to see some of the physical causes which led to this answered prayer, and therefore arrives at the conclusion that "it would have happened anyway." I think that this bears consideration. Do we do this? Do we ever make the mistake of thinking that, merely because we can see what physically caused an event to happen, that the event occurred independently of God? We shouldn't. Lewis says of this particular instance (the weather) that men's prayers today are one of innumerable coordinates by which God harmonizes the weather of tomorrow. Included in his explanation is a bunch of crazy-awesome stuff about eternity and time and the relationship between the two, which isn't really necessary to dwell on for this note.
Back to the point. Isn't that crazy? The point of this, and how it relates back to my original thoughts of rain, is that rain is water falling from the sky, an instance that was easily recognized by O.T. people as a miracle, an act of God. They were right in this recognition. It is we, with all of our knowledge, who are ignorant, and confuse the physical cause with the ultimate cause. Matthew 5:45 tells us that God sends the rain on the righteous and the wicked; the physical causes we have discovered and learned to recognize do not change this. And I thank God for sending the rain to all, because I am most definitely not righteous. And rain is something to be thankful for.
