Books, thoughts, ideas, and sand...

I was just walking through the library at the university which I attend. I like to sit in the quiet study area and do my homework. This area in located in the very back corner of the library, and one has to walk by multiple rows of books to get to the area.

Every time I walk through here, I can't help but think how much I LOVE libraries and the huge bookstores where you can go in and browse (and even have a cup of coffee while you peruse through the treasures discovered while mingling in the aisles). What a beautiful gift from God it is, to be able to read! I look forward to the day when I have no pressing assignments to complete...when I can casually stroll through the aisles and poke my nose into books of my own choosing.

Today, I ran up to the front of the library, where the staff has so graciously set up a coffee/tea/cookie table as a reward for the diligence of students who are studying. On my way back to the study area, I once again walked through the aisles of books, and marveled. I wondered how many books were in the university library...thousands, probably...and then I had this amazing thought: I wonder how many ideas and thoughts were contained in all of the volumes? Think about it - think about any given book. How long would it take you to identify and log each individual thought and idea in any given book? There are main thoughts and ideas, and also supporting thoughts for all of the main thoughts. And, being a university library, these are no "lightweight" thoughts. They are weighty thoughts about heavy-duty ideas. Staggering consideration!

The Holy Spirit - in His amazing ability to relate hard-to-grasp truth to a mortal man - used this moment of wonder to take an intangible truth and contextualize it in a tangible way:

Psalm 139:17-18 - How precious and weighty also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I could count them, they would be more in number than the sand. (Amplified Version)

The Holy Spirit used these books to take something intangible (thoughts) and frame them in a tangible way (printed pages full of thoughts), to put this verse into context for me. (How super-cool is that...and consider the thought that He knew exactly where I was and what I was thinking, in spite of all of the big and important things that are going on in the world...yet He cares enough about me to take the time to show me this wonderful thing...)

How many thoughts are in a book? How many books in a library? How many libraries in the world? How much time would it take to go through each and every one and add up the sum of all of the thoughts? I can't even begin to imagine the time it would take - decades, maybe lifetimes! But it would not be impossible, as long as time did not run out on the earth.

In comparison to creating a catalog of all the thoughts contained in all of the books in all of the libraries across the globe, it would be much harder to count all of the sand in the world! Yet the bible tells me that His thoughts for ME outnumber all of the sand in the world! And Jeremiah further defines these thoughts for us:

Jeremiah 29:11 - For I know the thoughts and plans that I have for you, says the Lord, thoughts and plans for welfare and peace and not for evil, to give you hope in your final outcome. (Amplified Version)

All I could do is stand there and scan all of the books on the shelves I could see (and imagine the ones I couldn't see)...and consider the sum of the wonderful, hopeful thoughts that he has for me!

The next time you go into a library or one of the book superstores, I pray that you remember these words and consider how numerous and wonderful His thoughts are toward you! I'm really hoping that you are stopped dead in your tracks, as I was. I hope you will take a moment to consider all of the books on all of the shelves, and remember that the thoughts He has for you are greater than all of the thoughts in those books, combined!

PS ...To make it even more amazing, consider the fact that there are billions of people on this earth, and He has unique yet equally numerous thoughts for each and every one of us! That blows my mind! But that's another thought for another day, because now I am dreadfully behind in studying for my Psych 3100 test!

Lunchtime ponderings, over a really bad cafeteria burrito...

I was just sitting here thinking about Adam. Adam lived 900 years. That's a loooooong time! I never really thought about why God allowed Adam to live so long. I wonder how old he was when he was banished from the Garden of Eden...or how long he walked with God in the Garden before he fell. (Unfortunately, I don't have time to reference it at the moment...)

Anyway, other than Eve, Adam was the only person during his era who had ever experienced God. Because of his sin, all of the rest of the people were robbed of that opportunity. How sad that must have been. Did you ever think about how Adam felt as he looked into the faces of his descendants, knowing that because of his personal failure the fruit of his own body was robbed of having a personal experience with God? Wow...and he had to live with that reality a loooong time!

Today I read a devotional that spoke of Enoch.The devotional mentioned that Enoch was the seventh generation from Adam; which means that Adam was still alive during Enoch's lifetime. Enoch was amazing - the bible says that Enoch "was taken away so that he did not see death, and was not found, because God had taken him; for before he was taken he had this testimony, that he pleased God." (Hebrews 11:5, New King James Version). I began to wonder how it was that this man, who had no access to God, could be that close to God. I mean, this was in Genesis 5, which is before Genesis 6, in which chapter we are told the story of how the earth was so perverse that God regretted making man, and destroyed the earth with a flood! These were seriously evil times, but yet this man Enoch knew God in an incredibly intimate way. How?

I'm imagining that very likely, Enoch's understanding of God must have come from Adam. At least indirectly, from oral tradition if not personally. All humanity could be traced back to Adam, so Adam was related to everyone alive. Doesn't it stand to reason that given the patriarchal emphasis of the time, Adam would have at least some kind of influence in the earth? Wouldn't most people have at least some awareness of the fact that their forefather, Adam, walked with God in the Garden?

I wonder what kind of preacher Adam was. What kind of questions did he get about the time he walked with God in the cool of the day? Could he even describe it? How candid was he about his personal failure (aka, 'the fall of the human race')? I wonder if people searched him out to hear the stories? Were they all mad at him? What did he have to say about Cain and Abel? I know that Cain was banished, and I wonder if he had his own version of the message to preach about who his father was and who God was, and what he was like. (I digress...)


So I am throwing out an untestable hypothesis that God allowed Adam to live so long for the purpose of preaching his story to his descendants, and teaching them what God was like. There would have been no one else to tell His story. Because God is just, there had to be someone to tell His story. How could He destroy the world because of its perversion, if the world had no clue about Him? Even in the midst of a perverse world, God will have a messenger to perpetuate the truth of Who He is. Even if it means extending a man's life to 900 years, or warning a man of an impending flood and instructing him to build an ark... and the list of His methodology could go on an on.


To me, this is a testament to a couple of things: 1) God will use even those who fall the hardest and leave behind the greatest and most devastating consequences to do an expansive work for the purpose of the Kingdom; and 2) God places an incredible importance on the spreading of the message of the majesty of who He is.

And these are just thoughts from a God-lover's heart...