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MONTHLY MAGAZINE OF THE FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND MAY 2020 • £2.00
THE SEARCH FOR A NEW TOMORROW Jesus’ command is the answer to the question the world is asking BY THE EDITOR
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Photo by Peter Kasprzyk on Unsplash
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GRAVITAS RODDIE RANKIN is drawn in by the wonder of gravity.
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begin to accelerate them towards it. After about 20 days they would enter the upper atmosphere, which would begin to resist their fall, generating intense, consuming heat. Don’t try this at home! To illustrate the way gravity sends its fishing nets out across the cosmos, take the example of the Andromeda Galaxy. It is incredibly far away from the Milky Way Galaxy, which is home to our sun and planet. It is 160 billion times further away from the Earth than the sun is. Yet our Milky Way is in its nets, and the force with which it pulls those nets in is equivalent to the force 12,000 planet Earths would exert if placed on your kitchen scales! So now you’re asking why everything doesn’t just get pulled together by gravity into one almighty car crash? Why don’t satellites fall back to Earth? Why doesn’t the moon smash into us, and we into the sun? That’s where God’s fine-tuning of the universe reveals another trick: just about everything is spinning around! The moon is falling, but it is also orbiting. Its motion would take it in a straight tangent line away from Earth, but gravity keeps pulling it down towards Earth. The speed at which its trajectory would take it away from Earth exactly matches the speed at which gravity would pull it towards Earth. So it stays orbiting at the same distance! The same is true for satellites, the planets moving around the sun, and even the whole galaxy rotating around its centre. The whole universe is God’s clock shop, with countless wheels turning in perfect balance and unison to the glory of the great Horologist! Since we’ve mentioned the centre of the Galaxy, let’s take a look there! Lurking in splendid isolation, with 250 billion stars (and our sun) orbiting around it, is a black hole. This nightmarish object is so dense that the gravity it generates prevents anything from ever being able to travel fast enough to escape it — even light itself. This is gravity gone mad: a tyrant appetite devouring anything that comes near to the cavernous maw of its dark lair. Stars and planets disappear without trace down its gaping throat. Record readers should admire at a safe distance!
he record editor made me chuckle! i sent him a few subject options for this article, and asked which he preferred. he chose gravity, ‘but don’t
be bound by that’!
Oh well, it made me smile. If there’s one thing we are all bound by, it is gravity. Whether you see those bindings as shackles or safety harnesses, their presence dominates our lives. As with previous articles, our aim is to see the wonder in this ubiquitous everyday phenomenon, and to give the glory to God. It takes genius to see the extraordinary in the commonplace. What can be more familiar than our experience of gravity? Isaac Newton was that genius who recognised that the fall of an apple from its tree is an event of profound mystery. Why should that apple fall? There are no strings pulling it, yet it always falls straight to the ground. Why are we stuck to the ground, so that even if we jump upwards and escape momentarily we inevitably land again? You answer that it is because of our weight. But what is weight? And why do objects with weight always fall down? The Earth has weight too: does it fall slightly upwards towards the falling apple? Are all weighty objects attracted to one another? If so, why? Wouldn’t we expect them all to just float around free from any effect caused by their neighbours? And then there is Australia! Look at the world as a whole and people ‘down-under’ are standing upsidedown compared to us. Why don’t they fall off? Or since they don’t, why don’t we fall off? Is the Earth actually flat? We’ll not lapse into Christian Flat-Earthism in an attempt to explain what is counter-intuitive. Let us see that the Creator has fashioned a wonder in governing the world and all things by gravity. When I consider the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them?01 God uses gravity to set the moon and stars in place. Gravity is truly a mighty giant before which we tremble in view of our weakness and apparent insignificance. The Bible is full of descriptions of the effects of gravity. Things fall. Crumbs fall from the table.02 The grass withers, the flowers fall.03 Where the tree falls it lies.04 Children, oxen and sheep may fall into wells or pits.05 The sparrow ultimately falls to the ground,06 as does a man felled by the sword.07 Gravity wins. We cannot stand up against it indefinitely. If we don’t keep holding them up with a smile, even our faces will fall!08
GRAVITY ON EARTH Here on Earth gravity is usually more benign. It binds us to the sun and her beneficent warmth. It holds our atmosphere in place, without which there would be no life. Gravity pulls heavier cold air down more forcibly than warm air, creating circulating air currents which dominate our weather. It draws rain from the clouds, rivers down mountains and holds the lakes and seas in their basins. By gravity God decrees this far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt.09 Gravity makes life predictable and stable, keeping everything in its place. Imagine if we did not know from day to day where the sea would be! Even the tides of the oceans, which are determined by the gravitational pull of the moon and the sun, follow exact laws, so I know precisely the few days each year when I can collect clams for dinner!
GRAVITY IN SPACE But its reach extends far beyond the Earth. Everything with mass exerts gravity and sends its pulling power out across the vastness of space. Weighty things call out to other weighty things, across light years, and at light speed. There is no escaping the clutches of gravity. Everything pulls everything else! As a result it is a myth that things are weightless in space. It’s just that in space you’re not standing on anything to resist your fall. So, if an astronaut was released a million kilometres from Earth, the Earth’s gravity would immediately
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The Chosen is the first multi-series TV show based on the biblical accounts of Jesus’ life, told through the eyes of those who knew him, including his disciples and Mary Magdalene. Distributed by VidAngel, the series received a record amount of crowdfunding, raising over $11 million from those who wanted to see the finished product. The Chosen prides itself on its character development and ‘gritty’ feel; while extra dialogue and backstories have been included, the writers emphasise that there is nothing that contradicts what is actually portrayed in Scripture. The series has not been reviewed by major secular publications, but has received excellent reviews from Christian platforms and almost unanimous acclaim from viewers on the wellknown IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes review websites. The Record asked one Christian mum to give us her thoughts on the show.
THE CHOSEN – REVIEW BY ANGIE MELUGIN
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ur family began watching the chosen series during the stay-at-home order while searching for more things to fill our time.
The actor Jonathan Roumie as Jesus from The Chosen
I have seen many different visual presentations of the life of Christ and it took several recommendations before I decided to give it a try, because they often lack in being able to keep one’s attention. But this series has kept my attention better than the others. The first one or two episodes were a little slow, but other people recommended staying with it, so we did and it has not disappointed us! So far, the series has taken the stories that many are so familiar with and brought life to the characters in a way I’ve never seen. The scriptural accounts appear accurate. And as a friend stated, ‘The character development and side stories are realistic things that could have happened behind the scenes. I loved Jesus’ sense of humour.’ These aspects make the story come to life and help us connect on a more personal level. The characters’ personalities align with things that are recorded in the Bible and it helps me connect more with the way the life of Christ may have intersected with others’ instead of just viewing each event as a single, separate entity. It has also caused me to want to read the Gospels again to determine which details are added to make the story more enjoyable, and which details are in the scriptures. The Chosen brings to light how each Gospel writer highlights different aspects in more detail while others leave them completely out or barely mention them. This continues to remind me that the writers had different lifestyles and characteristics and viewed the same events with different eyes! As the series goes on, I have found more connection and understanding of how amazing it really is that these men would so easily leave all and follow Jesus. I can relate better to how they must have felt in some ways, realizing this was the Messiah they had learned about and longed to see for so long. But I also consider the turmoil of learning what it means to ‘follow Him’ and what their role was to be: protector, provider, student? There were so many unknowns that we often overlook! Each episode has drawn me in a little bit more and I’m hoping the next season continues to bring new life to the biblical account of Christ! For me, it just makes the names on the pages become more alive and relatable. Watchfor free on YouTube or at www.thechosen.tv/app.
Angie Melugin attends First Baptist Church and lives in Brookville, Indiana with her husband and two daughters. They have been blessed to be in church ministries for over twenty years.
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Photo by Edwin Andrarde on Unsplash
BY DAYSPRING MACLEOD
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ow is lockdown treating you ? are you going stir - crazy , or enjoying hobbies you ’ ve never had time for before , or just doing your best to contain half - feral children ?
Like most of you, I’ve had bad days and good days. But I’m often aware of a great blessing in that our greatest worry is lockdown boredom. Occasionally someone in the house will cough or get a low-grade fever (at one point the baby had a temperature for two days — it turned out to be a reaction to his measles vaccine!) and the danger feels very real. Then I welcome the return of noneventfulness. One of the things that has cheered me up during quarantine is the funny cartoons and pictures going around social media with COVID-related captions. A weary-looking photo of Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments reads ‘Pharaoh seeing us all freaking out over just one plague.’ In another photo, a copy of the novel Twilight sits near a loo with a sign saying ‘Emergency toilet paper’. But lately what I’ve seen on Facebook are atheist friends posting angry questions. They want to know the truth: is God powerless to stop coronavirus? Or is he just unwilling? Does he want all these people to die? Generally I don’t engage with these questions on social media, because I don’t think the people really want an answer. They want someone to blame, and once they’ve already criticised the government and the Chinese, they look for someone else. Of course, since they don’t actually believe in God, they’re really blaming Christians for clinging to their faith in a time of trial. These folks want God to stop all suffering in the world, and hold Far from wondering where God him to ransom if he doesn’t is during this crisis, I am deeply — but they are also unwilling to live by the laws that such comforted by this demonstration of a God demands; their sinful his control. actions (like mine) add to the very suffering they condemn. They cannot comprehend that the God we believe in is one who suffers with his people; all they can imagine is a Santa who, failing to bring every outrageous demand on Christmas morning, must be a lie. On the opposite end of the scale are some hardline Christians who attempt to assign meaning to the virus: that this is God’s judgment on the world for homosexuality, or abortion, or transsexuality — or whatever that particular person’s own bugbear happens to be! These sins rarely seem to have any overt connection to the virus itself, so one wonders how they know the mind of God quite so well. More moderate Christians have said that it’s not our responsibility to figure out ‘why’ we have the virus, but to walk with God through it. That’s quite right, of course, and in many ways we will not know the ‘why’ for a long time. But I think we can still trace God’s purposes in it. And I can define, in one word, the ‘strange mercy’ that I see in coronavirus. That word is sabbath. As a former Baptist, sabbath has never been my strong suit in Reformed theology. I didn’t grow up with any particular observation of it; in my youth I understood it to have been mostly a distinctive of the Jewish faith. Yet the sabbath is enormously important to God. It was built into the very foundation of creation itself, keeping it was one of the Ten Commandments, and breaking the sabbath was a desecration (yet works of necessity and mercy, as Jesus showed, had a holiness which preserved the sabbath’s purpose). The sabbath was made for man — it was a mercy given to us — not man for the sabbath.
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