Hi Friend,

A young child often learns about life the hard way. When I was about 10 years of age my friend, Don Warden, and I purchased rubber band guns. They were plastic pistols that each held an arsenal of six rubber bands, ingeniously designed to shoot at enemy soldiers. When the excitement of playing Cowboys and Indians lost its thrill, we escalated the game to attack a nest of Yellow Jackets. That was more challenging. We learned an important factor of God’s creation—wasps can fly faster than a 10-year-old can run.

After the initial episode, having received three stings, I should have learned to live in harmony with the way the world was created. I say, I should have, but it was summer, and two boys were always looking for excitement and the rubber band guns were available. It took several incidents before I realized I could not redesign nature to suit my pleasure. Yellow Jackets were created with an innate willingness to defend their home, they are armed with a stinging weapon, and they will always be able to fly faster than I can run.

Living in harmony with the created world is essential to a successful life. Many people who have control of political, educational and economic forces in the world today should be put in a backyard in Western Kentucky on a summer afternoon and shoot wasps nests so they can understand the structure of the world in which we live. The first thing they will learn is that humans are vulnerable to destruction. Lesson One:  it is easier to mutilate your body than UN-mutilate it. Lesson Two:  The original design is better than anything you might think up.

Solomon was known for his great wisdom. National leaders sought him out, paying enormous sums of wealth for a small amount of his time to learn how they could improve the conditions of their own countries. Where did Solomon gain such wisdom? He tells us in his proverbs that he looked at nature. Solomon wrote, “There are three things which are too wonderful for me, yes, four which I do not understand:  The way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, And the way of a man with a virgin.” (Proverbs 30:18-19)

There it is—the source of Solomon’s wisdom was nature. Imagine the wisest man in the world—the king of the wealthiest nation that has ever existed—spending valuable time to observe an eagle catching an upward draft to soar effortlessly above a cliff and then diving silently for 500 feet to snare a meal to feed his family. How did that eagle find the draft of wind? How did he learn to twist his wings to make the turn? That was thousands of years before Orville and Wilbur developed the technique they called “wing-warping” to turn an aircraft—and they learned it by observing birds.

Some parts of nature are unseen, such as the air that lifts an eagle. So it should not surprise us that the Bible speaks of a world of spirit beings around us. Being invisible to us does not mean they do not exist. Although I can’t see carbon monoxide, there was a time I almost died from breathing it. The Apostle Paul tells us that we have entertained angels unawares (Hebrews 13:2), meaning we have interacted with beings from another realm without knowing it.

In reading the stories about Moses and his brother, Aaron we find that God instructed them in how He was to be worshiped. God designed the precise clothes the High Priest wore. Obviously, the type clothing was important to God, but no human could know that, even Moses, if God did not tell him.

The Apostle Paul, too, reveals essential information to Christians—information which the Jews should have known but did not until Paul revealed it to them. He said that the instruments in the earthly tabernacle were copies of those in the heavenly court. (Hebrews 9:23,24)

It is fascinating to know that there was a time when a human could walk into an earthly tabernacle that was an exact replica of a sacred place in the heavenly court. What do we learn from all this?

A spiritual awakening is beginning in the Christian world. Religious leaders who have focused on the New Testament are realizing the value of the Old. In fact, they are learning that it is impossible to understand the teachings of Jesus without knowing the Old Testament. He was a Jew, after all.

God once told the Israelites, “I will send hornets before you…” to fight your enemies. (Exodus 23:28) If a 10-year-old can learn how the physical world is structured from being stung by Yellow Jackets, maybe God is stinging Christians to teach us that there is a structure in the spirit world. Christians can learn much from Moses and Aaron.

Until next time,

Jim O’Brien