Anti-Newtonian Fluid

Long before Bill Nye the science guy there was Mr. Conn, my freshman year teacher in high school.  He mastered the art of ‘borderline insanity’ as a teaching method before anyone else… and it worked.  Before every class period he could be heard throughout the campus screaming at the top of his lungs, “FREE Education!!!  Come get your FREE education!!!!”  Most of the students bemusedly entered the door of his classroom as he stood by with his dress shirt partially untucked, untrimmed beard, and wild glancing eyes.  Most of us pretended not to be entertained when he unfailingly returned every greeting with his favorite line, “Hao, Kimo Sabe Son”.  One day Mr. Conn brought out a large and shallow metal pan filled with a nasty looking murky gray substance.  Walking down the aisles between the desks he urged us to “Touch it!!”, and you could hear students squealing “Eeewwoooo!!” as the globular fluid plopped from their fingers back into the pan.

“HaHaHaaa….” Mr. Conn expressed like a diabolical megalomaniac as he raced with the pan to the front of the room and placed it on the floor.  He then positioned a chair in front of the pan and mounted it.  Standing in a diving position above the pan we all wondered, “Is he really going to… no way…”, when he leapt off the chair.  All of us shielded ourselves for a spray of nasty sludge throughout the classroom as Mr. Conn landed in the pan… but there was nothing!!  Not even a single drop of the substance had left the pan!  In fact, the entire surface of the material hardened on Mr. Conn’s impact so that it behaved as if it wasn’t a fluid at all.  It wasn’t intuitive that there could be any kind of fluid that would actually harden on the force of an impact.  But that was what the day’s lesson was all about, anti-Newtonian fluids, which Mr. Conn had so effectively demonstrated for us.

In many ways, God is like an anti-Newtonian fluid.  Just like our understanding of fluids, every culture around the world has an intuitive understanding of God – that’s wrong!  Just like that murky fluid Mr. Conn presented to us, God is also mysterious and can’t be comprehended through human intuition.  In fact, He is so unlike us that our natural inclination is to be repelled and avoid Him all together.  The only time in history that God audibly spoke from the dark clouds over Sinai to mankind, man’s response was not one of gratitude but of sheer terror.  Instead of drawing near to God, the people stood far away and asked Moses to go up and speak to Him instead.  Moses describes the scene in Deuteronomy 4:11, “And you came near and stood under the mountain; and the mountain burned with fire unto the midst of heaven, with darkness, clouds, and thick darkness.”

If all of the fire, smoke, and darkness didn’t send a clear enough message to the people about God, the boundaries around the mountain God instructed Moses to set up did!  Anyone who dared break through the boundaries to run up the mountain would surely die.  But in spite of what God has told us about Himself, we choose instead to trust our own intuition about Him.  We feel that the best way to approach God is by force – breaking through the barrier through our own goodness, discipline, and works.  But just like that anti-Newtonian fluid, our approach is actually preventing us from drawing near to Him.  After all God is Holy, Righteous, and Pure, and who are we to approach a God like that based on our own goodness?  If we wouldn’t dare to presumptuously approach a monarch based on our own self-worth, why do we with God?  There is a way to approach God, but it doesn’t come intuitively to us.

Scripture tells us in Habakkuk 2:4, “Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright within him: but the just shall live by his faith.”  When we approach God, we are not meant to gain access based on any quality of ourselves, but based on a quality of Himself – which is mercy.  This is something that Israel, and most every culture and religion has failed to understand about God.  Paul wrote to the Romans about this saying, “But Israel, which followed after the law of righteousness, has not attained to the law of righteousness.  Why? Because they sought it not by faith, but as it were the works of the law.” –Romans 9:31-32 The moment we make our relationship with God more about our qualities than His qualities, is the moment we will no longer be able to access Him.  God has made a way for us to draw near to Him, to know the Beauty beyond the darkness – and that way is Christ.  Christ is the Living expression of God’s Mercy to all who will place their trust in Him.