THE OCEAN AND GOD

In a few weeks we head for the Ocean, the OBX, Carolina's glorious Outer Banks. 

I love the OCEAN!  Our family budgets big time money (at least for our budget) to spend time at the ocean.  Our favorite spot is the Outerbanks in North Carolina, but we'll take the Jersey shore as a second best stop. 

I recommend a lecture (now a book)  by philosophy professor Peter Kreeft  about our fascination with the sea.  This article is simply an interaction with his insights.  If you have an attraction to the ocean, I think you’ll find Kreeft’s insights thought provoking.  I hail from the Midwest, the land locked state of Indiana.  Yet I find that I have a deep fascination with the Ocean.    Where did this come from and how can I understand it better? 

Good theologians know that God has revealed Himself in two books,  Nature and the  Bible.   We need to read both of them.  If we read nature without Bible we will likely miss the point.   Kreeft points out that we have brains like dogs in this.  If you point to a dog’s food they sniff your hand.  We often fail to trace nature back to nature’s Designer. 

There is  something refreshing in nature that speaks to an  inborn preference for the raw materials of nature rather than what man makes with nature.  We prefer trees to telephone poles, and rocks to buildings.  This is kind of strange given our propensity to change the raw materials into things we make with them.  I once read a definition of art as man’s ordering of nature.  There is an order within the apparent disorder of nature that is more universally appealing than any human art.  God is the ultimate Artist.  Many artists retreat to the ocean for inspiration to create paintings, poems, or stories.  The Creator’s fingerprints are all over the Ocean, and this inspires His image bearers to imitate His creative impulses. 

Philosophers and theologians have pondered the fact that the Sea returns us to the origin of  time.   The  sea’s tides are  linked to the moon’s monthly cycles, and human reproduction is tied to a women’s monthly cycle. In all languages where nouns have gender,  the sea is always feminine.    Is this coordination between the sea and the  moon and the  womb  mere coincidence?  How we organize our time into months is a response to the way the Creator has organized time in His creation.    This innate rhythm is undeniably present in the ocean’s waves and tides, music composed by God Himself. 

The best parts of experiencing the sea are free to all who can travel to it:  Our family’s favorite experiences were:   sitting in the lifeguard chair  at dusk, walking beaches near dawn, observing ghost crabs near midnight on a windy beach,  trudging  up mountainous sand dunes at sunset, catching the waves, embarking in an inflatable boat out past the waves and then surrendering to the sovereign sea to be  carried in by the waves.   The ocean reduces all of us to our proper place before God.  At the ocean we know we are all  really just  little children, made to play in the waves and create sand castles.  At the ocean, the brain surgeon and the bartender, the billionaire tycoon and the fisherman-boater are all on the same level,  equally dwarfed by infinity.  . 

God has written two books, Nature and the Bible.  We need to read them in stereo to get the intended impact.  I hope your life  is full of this kind of stereophonic interaction, letting God’s two books speak to you!   Psalm 19 teaches that “The heavens declare the glory of God”. 

 I found myself reminded of these words from a great hymn: 

“This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
His hand the wonders wrought.”