The cross of Jesus Christ will be our science and our song for all eternity—and that begins here and now, before the trumpet sounds and Jesus comes again. I’m intrigued today with a subtle but significant difference in a five-word phrase we find in Mat. 27:43 in contrast with its OT parallel, Psalm 22:8. It’s the difference between the words “since” and “if.” And I believe that this intensified the terror and torment Jesus felt on the cross.

In Psalm 22, the “Psalm of the Cross,” we find the words, “He trusted in God, let God deliver Him, since He delights in him” (verse 8). This is the Psalm Jesus Himself quoted while hanging on the cross. But note how the religious demoniacs who crucified Him twisted Christ’s words of confidence by throwing them back into His face with taunting doubt: “He trusted in God, let God deliver Him, if He delights in him, for He said, ‘I am the Son of God’” (Mat. 27:43). “If” instead of “since” is the difference between fatal doubt and persevering faith.

“If He delights in him”—what five words could have been more vexing to both Father and Son at that particular moment? Ponder the trauma of that demonic taunting.

For the Father, how much those words must have tempted Him to zip down from heaven and zap the tormentors of His beloved Son, rescuing the One of His eternal delight from that (literally) hellish experience.

For the Son, how much those words must have intensified His fear on the cross of eternal separation from the Father (having “become sin for us,” [2 Cor. 5:19], “a worm and not a man” [Ps. 22:6], cursed while hanging on the tree [Gal. 3:13]). At that crucial moment, picture Jesus hanging there with that terrifying taunt flung in His face in stereo—wicked clerics from below, thieves on either side (Mat. 27:44).

Just ponder how the word “if He delights in Him” (verse 43) perverts the confidence built into the Psalm of the Cross. That this doubt may have afflicted Christ’s soul is suggested three verses later when Jesus cries out in despair, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me” (verse 46)—reciting the same Psalm from which the devil was deriving those five fearful words.

In a real sense, we know that Jesus on the cross was indeed forsaken by the Father, so God could accept us sinners. But Christ’s cry may have reflected even more than that fundamental fact of salvation. It may have conveyed fear that the Father had rejected Him to the point that He (the Father) no longer even desired Him (“if He would have Him”). Had Jesus so fully identified Himself with fallen humanity that He had become too cursed to be redeemed from the tomb at the appointed time Sunday morning.

As Ellen White says in Desire of Ages (p. 753): “Satan with his fierce temptations wrung the heart of Jesus. The Saviour could not see through the portals of the tomb…. He feared that sin was so offensive to God that Their separation was to be eternal.”

So it was that five demonic words comprised a spear that pierced the heart of God at Calvary: “If He would desire Him.” Satan's twisting of that Psalm, I believe, intensified the suffering and thus the sacrifice of both Father and Son while Jesus hung on the cross.

What wondrous love is this, O my soul!

 

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Is Stephen Hawking’s theory of something out of nothing based on science or supposition?

He relates “the tale of how the primordial universe of hydrogen, helium and a little bit of lithium evolved to a universe harboring at least one world with intelligent life like us.”

Let’s use some of that intelligence to evaluate Hawking’s belief that primordial nothingness managed to evolve into material somethingness. Also to ponder: what is it about the nothingness of a “little bit of lithium” that differentiates it from the nothingness of helium and the nothingness of hydrogen?

One need not be a scientist to conclude that three nameable chemical elements, each distinguishable from the other, can’t qualify as mere nothingness.

Another inconvenient question lurks in Hawking’s primordial universe with its threefold nothingness: What action or condition triggered and then coordinated the interaction of those chemical elements? Hawking points to the laws of gravity and quantum theory—but their existence only adds to his difficulties: What (or who) designed these laws to exist in a universe of nothingness?

To resolve skepticism that our exquisitely calibrated, inhabited world is the product of happenstance, Hawking would persuade us about a “multiverse” of parallel universes. The multiverse notion is not merely speculation on steroids, it is demonstrably impossible mathematically—when computing the timeframe (used by scientists themselves) required for random selection to meander its way through the process of materializing Hawking’s imagined multiverse (or even the observable universe, for that matter).

The impossibilities of Hawking’s multiverse evolving from nothingness are compounded by the miracle of DNA—not only its complexity but the fact that it comes frontloaded with coded genetic information. Complex coding, by definition, comes not by undirected happenstance but by intelligent design. How could one argue otherwise from science rather than supposition?

All told, Hawking’s theory of cosmology cannot be demonstrated by the scientific method—nor be explained by logic, which has as a foundational principle: ex nihilo nihil fit: “out of nothing, nothing comes.” So nothing can logically prevent a librarian from classifying Hawking’s “tale of many chapters” as science fiction.

Martin Weber, DMin

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