People often ask me how a professor of chemistry reconciles his scientific career with Christian faith. The false premise of the question is that because science seems to make so many predictions contradictory to the Biblical revelation, an intellectually honest person could not be a scientist and a Bible-believing Christian simultaneously. I have been a scientist long enough to realize that science actually confines its predictions to a very tiny slice of reality, the material realm, and under a very controlled set of observational parameters. This realm of matter and energy where science does a superb job of prediction is the lower order of reality. The Bible describes, and one can directly experience by faith, the existence of a higher order of reality, the spirit realm. The spirit realm coexists with the physical realm. It is invisible to the five physical senses. The spirit realm transcends and controls the physical realm, just as lesser authority yields to greater authority. The physical realm is finite in both time and space, is limited in possibilities, and is a dim, shadowy extension of the spirit realm. The spirit realm, on the other hand, is infinite in possibilities and is eternal. God used His faith and spoke the natural universe into existence. As the Bible says in Hebrews 11:3, "The worlds were prepared by the Word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible." The spirit realm is teeming with living spiritual beings, the company of heaven. Jesus of Nazareth is the master and lord of this kingdom, and every knee will ultimately bow to His lordship. Does this all sound strange? As the astronomer Fred Hoyle once said, "This universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine." How arrogant we humans are to think that, with this little sack of protoplasm we call the human brain, we actually have the right equipment to construct a correct mental picture of reality. Without outside revelation, we are like fish trying to imagine what air is like. And if a fish did get caught, saw things in the atmospheric realm, and then got thrown back in, imagine what a flake the others would think he was if he went around trying to describe this other realm.
The really exciting news is that you can actually experience this supernatural realm where all things are possible. Because you have been made in the image of God, you are a spirit being also, just as God is a Spirit. In fact, humans are uniquely constructed by God to simultaneously walk in two realms, the physical realm and the spiritual realm. There is one big problem, however. Because of man's rebellion against God, the effects of which have been transmitted from generation to generation, his spirit died. Because of sin, his spirit became severed from God's Spirit, which was his source of life. Man suffered spiritual death and, unless a regeneration takes place, he is no longer capable of spiritual perceptions. He became confined to live out his shortened days in the futility of his mind, his circuitous logic, believing only his natural sensory input, cut off from the abundant life of God and the spiritual kingdom. Happily, the story does not end there. "But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love...even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ, and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places." (Ephesians 2:4-6)
Eleven years ago I became alive in Christ through faith in what He had done for me through His death and resurrection. I didn't understand how it worked. I just know it worked. As C. S. Lewis once put it, "A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it." Even after that I constantly wrestled with the Bible as I tried to find clever ways of explaining away all the miraculous stuff my scientific mind rejected. Five years later, after reading for weeks about the supernatural encounters with the Holy Spirit that the early Christians experienced, I realized that I desired to walk in that kind of life. One evening, I asked God to fill me with His Holy Spirit. Almost immediately a wave of power, a perceptible current of divine energy swept through me. In a moment of time I experienced first hand the reality of God the Spirit, and knew that all we have believed is true - Jesus is alive, the Gospel is true, and the supernatural world is real. I have never been the same since. I am like a fish out of water. If you have ever been involved in a miracle, an event where you did something with your faith and caused something to apparently violate the natural order, you will never see things the same way again. It becomes a breakthrough in your life and shatters your entire worldview. Narrow, shortsighted folks used to say humans would never fly, because it would be a violation of the law of gravity. Nowadays we fly all the time, but is the law of gravity violated? No! We simply have discovered a higher law, the law of aerodynamic lift. Using that law we don't violate gravity, we simply supersede it. The same thing happens when a Christian prays, using faith in the name of Jesus. He doesn't violate one of God's natural laws, he simply uses a higher law that lifts him out of the natural into the supernatural order of things.
My friends, when a poor wretched sinner who is at the end of his rope gets down on his knees and invites the supernatural Savior Jesus to come into his life, and he gets a transformed heart, capable of having God's kind of love, that is a miracle. The Law of Sin and Death has been superseded by the Law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus. He gains access into the spirit realm. That is supernatural Christianity.
@ copyright 1991 by Scott H. Northrup. All rights reserved.