On Worshiping He Who Created Nature

I have been reading, slowly I'll admit, Dennis Prager's book The Rational Bible: Genesis. I say slowly because it is a dense tome, and one often has to stop and think deeply about something. Prager's commentary is truly a blessing for those of us who believe that the Bible is indeed the Word of God. I am also anxious to get onto the next in the series: The Rational Bible: Exodus.

The Book of Exodus is the story of how God brought the Israelites out of bondage to the Egyptians and returned them to their Promised Land.  That land is today Israel again.  But, Exodus isn't just a story for the Jews.  Oh, no;  it is a story for everyone, for it describes how God does everything to bring us out of bondage and misery.  It is your story, it is my story.

Some years ago, I found that I had managed to put myself in a box by worshiping not the Creator, and not even creation itself, what Prager calls nature worship, but things that man has made in imitation of God's Creative power.  It was here that I had my low point, changed my mind, which is the actual translation of repent, and came back to worship the true God of creation, the God who reached out to me, because I could not reach out to Him.  The God who has done everything so that I can be with Him.  Who can imagine such Love?

Today, at Townhall.com Dennis Prager has an article that is timely for Christians, but is really a message for more out there who are like I was entitled Maybe Nature Shouldn't Be Worshiped After All. Prager is hopeful that this COVID-19 outbreak may just cause a number of people to see that their survival depends not on government or on themselves, but on a Higher Power.

Maybe the coronavirus will awaken young people, who have been taught by nature-worshipping teachers and raised by nature-worshipping parents, to the idiocy of worshipping nature rather than subduing it. Nature, it turns out, is not our friend, let alone a god. If it were up to nature, we'd all be dead: Animals would eat us; weather would freeze us to death; disease would wipe out the rest of us. If we don't subdue nature, nature will subdue us. It's that simple.

Nature is beautiful and awe-inspiring. It's also brutal and merciless. "Nature, red in tooth and claw," as Alfred Tennyson aptly describes it. Nature follows no moral rules and shows no compassion. The basic law of all biological life is "survival of the fittest," while the basic law of Judaism and Christianity is the opposite: the survival of the weakest with the help of the fittest. Nature wants the weakest eaten by the strongest. Hospitals are as anti-natural an entity as exists.

Only human beings make hospitals. We do so not by worshipping nature but by subduing it.

I would also point out that hospitals did not exist before the Christian era. Coincidence? I think not. We should all be praying to the God who created and loves us, and knew us before we were born, that he would sustain us now. But more than that, I would hope that more of us would have a change of heart and repent from worshiping creation.

I will save my thoughts on the difference between mankind and the rest of the animals for another time, except to say that the environmentalist saying that we are just another species is wrong. Oh, we share the same structure of  DNA with all the rest of life on earth, so in that regard, sure we are another species. But it is the "just" that disturbs me. It seems fairly clear to me that we have abilities far in excess of those needed to survive. Music and the arts come to mind. The ability to understand mathematics and science is another.  To me, these things are evidence of, though not proof (for there can not be proof) of the existence of God.  Whenever we engage in these things, we should look at them as alternate ways of worshiping our God..