Personal implications if god sustains

[Bob_Crowley]

I’m not sure if this is the right section to paste this in, but lately I’ve been reading a couple of books on “Kabbalah” (Jewish theology) and another book on a Jewish view of suffering (which segment I haven’t got to yet).

But they both place a strong emphasis on the universe as “nothing”. For example in the book “Wrestling with the Divine – A Jewish Response to Suffering” by Shmuel Boteach, he has a chapter “The Nature of Nothingness: The Need for God in Creation”, in which the author writes …

“… The Hebrew term for creation is bara (as in the verse “Bereishit bara…”), which means “to bring into being.” “To bring into being” denotes that prior to the act of creation there was* no *being, there was no existence, there was *nothing. *When God “created” the world He brought into being an existence from something that was non-existent. Creation connotes that God called forth the world’s existence from an absence, an abyss, a total void of darkness and nothingness….

…. But when one takes nothing and gives it character, what is there that can possibly retain the character given to it? What is the it? What is going to maintain the shape that one has created that one has created or the property that one introduces?..

… God started off with nothing and must constantly maintain the world’s existence because it is simply impossible for nothing to become something. *** It must be sustained constantly…” ***

(latest emphasis mine).

So, if the claim is made that God is constantly sustaining the world because it is nothing, do we have any evidence that the universe is nothing?

We have the concept of the “sum zero energy universe” as acknowledged by physicists. I’ve given you one link. You can find others if you want easily enough.

astrosociety.org/pubs/mercury/31_02/nothing.html

So even the physicists admit the universe is “sum zero energy” and therefore adds up to “nothing”. So the ancient writers of the Torah knew a thing or two.

We also have someone like the Christian mystic, Mother Julian of Norwich being given a vision of creation circa 1373 in which Christ put something about the size of a hazelnut in her hand -

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, it seemed, and it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and I thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for I thought it might suddenly fall to nothing for little cause. And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it; and so everything has its beginning by the love of God.’ In this little thing I saw three properties; the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; and the third is that God keeps it.”

So she was being given in mystical form a revelation given to the Jewish writers centuries earlier, and modern physicists in mathematical form millennia later, evidence of the universe’s negligible beginnings, and negligible energy now.

So what’s the personal implication for us?

Well, if God stops maintaining the universe, it and we would simply vanish. That’s implied in Scripture when it is claimed that when it has served its purpose it will vanish.

But it also means that if God is sustaining the universe, He is sustaining us. This means He knows all of us intimately, such that Christ can say –

“Not a sparrow falls without your Father’s permission”.

“The very hairs on your head are counted”.

And more ominously – “On the day of judgement a man will account for every useless word.”

If the universe is nothing, God sustains it. If God sustains it, He sustains us. If He sustains us, He knows us. And He will call us to account for our lives, things we did and things we didn’t do.