I recently watched a video explaining how humans can’t really understand how space and time are really the same thing. Part of the video showed how hypothetical friends (let’s call them Bob and John) in a one dimensional space have an argument and decide to each walk opposite directions. Since there’s only one dimension, there are only two directions to go and no way to “slip past” each other. Bob, who is on the right, heads off to the right, and John goes left.
One day Bob and John encounter each other again. This time Bob is on the left, John on the right. How is that possible? They’re one-dimensional beings. They can’t switch places. John is always on the left, so how did John get on the right?
Steve, though, is a two-dimensional person and had made the one-dimensional space of Bob and John into a circle. The two friends, however, could not understand what a circle was. There’s only left and right, so how can that make a circle?
Now let’s put Lisa and Martha in a two-dimensional space. They have a fight, and decide to part company. Lisa says, “Let’s walk away from each other, turn ninety degrees, and walk parallel paths. We’ll never run into each other again.” Except they do.
Angie, a three-dimensional person, is seeing their two-dimensional space as a sphere. They’d walked away from each other East and West, then both turned straight North. Their paths would inevitably cross at the North Pole. But they couldn’t see that, being only two dimensional. Angie, however, knew and predicted the outcome.
Many times in life God tells us to do something that seems counter-intuitive. There’s a similar story, which I’m sure is made up, about a man who is climbing down a rope in the middle of the night. He comes to the bottom of the rope, hangs there, and screams for help. There’s nothing but yawning darkness beneath him.
God says, “Let go of the rope.”
“Are you crazy? I’ll fall!”
“Yes, you will.”
You’ve probably already guessed the ending. The sun rises and the climber sees the ground about two inches beneath his feet. He spent a long, panicky night when if he’d just let go of the rope like God said, he’d have been able to sleep soundly on the ground instead of worrying for hours dangling on the rope.
Are you like Bob and John, seeing only the “left and right” options? Have you and Lisa both hiked North, on parallel paths that aren’t really parallel? Are you at the end of your rope?
Have you actually checked to see what is in the Bible? The video I watched described how things make no sense unless you see a higher dimension. The Bible teaches a higher purpose to life than just accumulating more toys. But like understanding how time and space are really the same thing takes study. So does the Bible.
If you’re just reading the words printed on the page you’ll be wasting your time. I did a lot of that in college. Once I admitted I didn’t have all the answers about the Bible I started studying it. There are depths there I’d never guessed. There are people who study it all their lives and admit they haven’t even gotten a sliver of what’s there.
For those who haven’t even bothered to look inside, why do you imagine you know the first thing about what’s there?
Turn North. You never know who you’ll meet.
