Christmas Day is upon us again, and it’s time to reflect on the year that has been. Apart from the normal commitments of work, family, and so on, this year—perhaps more than any other—is one in which I’ve started to see the underlying logic in Biblical theology. The atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross, the incarnation of Christ as a human being, and all the way back to the Garden of Eden and the Creation … they all fit in with each other in a way I just hadn’t quite appreciated before.
I’m guessing that most people reading this will not be able to make good sense of what I’ve just written, even if it might be understandable at a superficial level. Let me try to use an analogy.
Most people that I know, including me, do not have a particular love for mathematics. It’s probably fair to say that many people in our society have an aversion (or worse) to mathematics. But a strange thing happened when I studied mathematics at university for a couple of years: the underlying logic was explained to me in a way that had never been put to me before; many of the things I took for granted were, in essence, deconstructed and then built back up from basic principles. Suddenly, I saw the whole subject in a new light.
As just one example, consider counting in decimal (base 10), which is what we normally do: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and so on. In this case, the number 10 actually represents 1 x 10^1 + 0 x 10^0 (i.e., 1 multiplied by 10 to the power of 1, plus 0 multiplied by 10 to the power of 0). The same principle applies to 12: it’s 1 x 10^1 + 2 x 10^0.
This seems a pedantic way to think about counting, until we start considering counting in other bases. For example, in binary (base 2), the actual digits used will never exceed 1, because 2 (in base 10) will be represented by “10” (i.e., 1 x 2^1 + 0 x 2^0). In binary, we’d count: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, and so on. (In binary, 100 indicates 1 x 2^2 + 0 x 2^1 + 0 x 2^0, which in base 10 denotes 4.)
If you’ve never come across the notion of counting in different bases before, you’re probably feeling either amazed (at the mathematical principle) or perplexed (at the seemingly needless complexity) just now. Not being a qualified mathematician (but with a few friends who are), I should probably make clear that my little example above is from personal recollection—and therefore open to correction if I’ve made any mistakes in the telling.
The point of this analogy using mathematics is just to point out that something that seems uninteresting can actually become interesting, even exciting, when we start to look at the underlying principles. Something that seems pointless can become important to us. (Consider the importance of correctly transforming your pay between binary and decimal in the inner workings of your employer’s computer system … something we all take for granted, because someone else has already done the hard work of ensuring that the formulae and programs are logically and mathematically sound.)
To come back to Biblical theology, there are basic principles underlying the superficial knowledge that most of us know; principles that God has set in place. Jesus was born on Earth as a human being. Yes, but why? Was it actually necessary for that to happen? These are some of the questions we’ve been considering at Emmanuel Reformed Baptist Church recently, and they relate, of course, to something of eternal significance.