Divine Plagiarism

Once upon a time, people used to tell time from a device called a sundial. The sun’s rays would strike the timepiece at a certain angles at certain times of day. Judging from the shadow on the sundial, you could tell exactly what hour it was. There was, of course, a slight problem: at night, it is remarkably difficult to find the sun. So we thought of a solution. The planets turn on the wheels of their orbits though the gears of gravity, so we captured of those wheels and gears in a little metal case that we could put on our wrist. While this solved our sunlight dilemma, it created a new problem. Our microcosm of the solar system was not exactly perfect. While the rounding errors were never great from moment to moment, they summed over time into huge discrepancies. Fortunately for us, we found a better answer than buying new watches every week. We could resync our clocks from time to time with a master clock, which was in turn synched to the sun. That way, our watches would never be too far off of the true time, and they would be trustworthy as timepieces.

Compasses have a similar problem. A magnetized needle will always point North, so we attached a card to the top of the needle to tell us what direction we are facing. All of this is well and good if we are planning on walking a couple hundred meters to find a road. It is neither well nor good if we are planning on finding the Azores on our way across the Atlantic. You see, our compass cannot perfectly represent the magnetic fields of the Earth any more than a clock can perfectly represent the Earth’s rotations or revolutions. Changes in magnetic declination, nearby concentrations of metal, and slight imbalances in the compass itself will all conspire to skew our reading from our true heading. Maybe just one degree, but one degree off over three thousand miles is fifty miles of error, more than enough to miss an island port. From one hour to the next the compass will rarely lead you astray, but over two weeks you may become completely lost. So we must resync our compass to our true position in space, just as we resync our clocks to our true position in time.

Imagine you are Cristobal Colon, about to set out in the Nina (or the Pinta, or the Santa Maria. I forget which one was his ship.) Sailing beyond the limits of the known world, you must place a great deal of trust in your navigational instruments. In the modern world, we take precision chronography (telling the time) for granted. Early mariners did not. They needed to know the exact time in order to effectively navigate, as they determined their position from the relative position of certain stars at certain times. (This tradition is carried on with the Naval Observatory‘s atomic clocks.) So before leaving port, you prudently calibrate your instruments. You set your clock according to the master clock, you reference your compass against a known heading. You synch your chronological instrument with a more accurate chronological instrument, and you synch your magnetic instrument with a more accurate magnetic instrument. And here is the point of this whole exercise: you cannot synch up a watch with a compass, nor a compass with a clock. The instruments exist in different spheres, and while those spheres interact, they must be calibrated with something from their own sphere.

When creating man, God saw fit to give him both a heart and a mind. We were made to have the mind of Christ, and made to have a heart in the image of God. We were made to think and feel. So in the garden, we were the sundial, in the forever noon of a never-setting sun. In God’s presence, our minds were constantly calibrated with the mind of Christ. We were a compass in the presence of the strongest of magnets, our hearts forever pointing to Him. And we loved Him with all of our hearts and all of our minds. Well, for a time, at least.

On this side of the fall, we look quite different. We are the wristwatch that hasn’t been wound in ages. The needles still point to numbers, but those numbers have little to do with the true time. Our minds are fallen, corrupt and untrustworthy. They will lead us off into nowhere. We are the compass that has lost its magnetism. We may still move from side to side whenever something rocks our case, but we can no longer tell North from South. As the Scriptures tell us, nothing good comes from the hearts of man. They will lead us off into nowhere.

The clock cannot wind itself, neither can the compass regain its magnetism through its own power. So we are lost at sea. That is, until Christ comes along. He rewinds our mind, He remagnetizes our hearts. He sparks in us the mind of Christ, He ignites in us the burning heart of God. But even a rewound watch needs to be set to the correct time, and even a remagnetized compass needs to be recalibrated to true North.

Paul tells us that we have been given the mind of Christ. In a way, we have been given it back. When we were originally made, our minds were made in His image. Our words reflected The Word, and in that Word, the outpouring of our mind was good and trustworthy. When we forgot The Word, that outpouring became toxic in the darkening of our minds. Since it was the One Word that kept our thoughts true, He gave us the many words of Scripture to keep our minds fixed on Him. Like the watch, we need to constantly recalibrate our mind with His Word. He gives us the Bible in order to reshape our thoughts back into His. The good news is that, like the watch, once properly calibrated our minds are trustworthy again. When our mind is true to His Word, we should listen to it.

Our hearts are no different. Christ gives us back the heart of God. Once, our hearts burned in His presence. We could taste His goodness; not just see it but feel it as well; our desire was for Him and it was good. When we forgot Him, our desires became choked with our own selfishness. Stagnating in our hearts, they became putrid and evil. Since it was our desire for God that kept our thoughts pure, He teaches us to desire Him first. He gives us prayer and fasting, for in prayer we yield all of our desires to Him, and in fasting we allow Him to re-order our desires. In His presence, we recalibrate the compass of our hearts, and our desires become trustworthy again. When our heart is true to His Presence, in the context of Christian authority, we should listen to it as well.

Trustworthy words check with Scripture. Trustworthy feelings burn in His presence, and in the hearts of other believers. This is not to say that the heart and the mind have nothing in common. A compass used in concert with a clock will help a mariner find his destination far better than either used alone. Nonetheless, you must calibrate the magnetic with the magnetic, and the chronographic with the chronographic. Similarly, we must calibrate our words with His Word, allowing the Scriptures to transform our minds. We must calibrate our desires with His desires, yielding our hearts to Him through prayer and fasting. Then, and only then, will our hearts and minds be trustworthy. But if they are trustworthy, then it is cowardice not to follow them. All of us needs to be conformed into His image. It just happens that different parts of us do so in different ways.