by Aaron Davis
As we prayed for him, I watched him close his eyes and bow his head, occasionally nodding in seeming agreement with our prayer, but probably expecting very little if anything miraculous to transpire.
At the end of our prayer, he looked up, opened his eyes, and his face went pale. He began blinking and rubbing his eyes emphatically and saying over and over again, “Oh my God. Oh my God!” Then he took off running to the bathroom. I later found out that he didn’t want to lose control of his emotions publicly so he ran to the bathroom weeping. When he came back, he explained that for weeks, touching his eye, even blinking, left him feeling like a hot knife was stabbing his eye.
He looked at us and said, “I don’t believe it. The pain’s gone! God really does still heal people!”
So why do I share these stories at the beginning of a book called Quantum Christianity? A lifetime of unexplainable situations like the ones outlined above, and one more specifically that happened to me on a summer night not long ago, completely dumbfounded me and was the catalyst for me exploring a deeper understanding of quantum physics. I was led through an abstract sequence of seemingly unrelated events, involving what I would term quantum aspects of God and the Bible.
THROUGH THE WORMHOLE
Have you ever had an event take place in your life that made absolutely no sense? I’m a very logically driven and analytical person. Typically those kinds of stories from other people leave me rolling my eyes and thinking, Yeah, right.
Until that night.
Job 38:1–7, 31, 33 (NLT)
Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorant words? Brace yourself like a man, because I have some questions for you, and you must answer them. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much. Who determined its dimensions and stretched out the surveying line? What supports its foundations, and who laid its cornerstone as the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? Can you direct the movement of the stars—binding the cluster of the Pleiades or loosening the cords of Orion? Do you know the laws of the universe? Can you use them to regulate the earth?
It was a warm Nashville midsummer’s night. As is my near-nightly custom, I went out on my back deck to look at the stars. There is just something awe-inspiring to me about the stars and their relationship with the overall universe.
In my studies, I’ve come to understand that on the clearest of nights in the darkest, most remote areas of earth, there are only about 6,500 stars visible to the naked eye. What is astounding to me is that, for a great majority of those stars, the light that I will view tonight actually left their source traveling at 186,282 miles per second anywhere from five years to over 4,000 years ago, and those are just the ones limited to the visibility of our naked eye.
The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away, visible to the naked eye only as a group containing over one trillion stars. It is theorized that there are over 100 billion other galaxies in the observable universe, containing 300 sextillion to a septillion stars, each star with their own groupings of planets and each planet with its own groupings of moons.
These numbers are astronomical, and for me, mind-boggling. And understanding what I do about the universe, every time I look into the night sky and view the fewer than 6,500 stars that I can see, I’m blown away by what they represent as it pertains to the whole of what I cannot see. What these few visible stars reveal to me is how awesome that a Creator must be to have created something so wondrous, so immense!
And what is equally inspiring to me is how God’s creation is as small as it is big when you consider the smallest of atoms, of which, as I understand it in laymen’s terms, 10 million stacked side by side would span the full stop (period) at the end of this sentence. And to take it even a step further in understanding, 99.9 percent of an atom is void space surrounding the energy and life of its nucleus that fills the .1 percent of that atom. To put it another way, a common quotation in the teaching of physics is, “If you could take all of the void space out of an atom, all of mankind would fit inside of a sugar cube!”6 What must this astronomically immense and minutely acute creation represent about the Creator if not how incredibly complex and unfathomable He must be?
These are the types of thought patterns that are typical in my nightly stargazing experience, and on this night, it was much the same, as I found myself connecting with God both in prayer and admiration for His creation.
After pacing for a few minutes on my deck in an attempt to see every visible star within my 360 degrees of observation and checking my stargazer app to see which of those celestial bodies were visible planets and which were stars, I decided to lie down on a lawn chair on the deck, and by chance, just happened to check the time. It was exactly 2:00 a.m. I looked up at one particular star and in a joking manner I voiced something that I had never said before: “God, if you want to take me there tonight, I’d love to go.” I closed my eyes, and before I realized what was going on, I jerked awake. Apparently, I had fallen asleep on my back deck. I quickly looked at my watch, not knowing how long I had been asleep, and I saw it was 2:20 a.m. I thought to myself, Whoa, man, I’ve got to go to bed, and I got up and walked into the house after my twenty-minute catnap.
As I walked in, I happened to notice that the clock in my kitchen read 2:05, and I thought to myself, Someone messed up the time on the stove. But then I looked at the microwave above the stove, and it also read 2:05. Confused, I turned to the coffeemaker. It read 2:05. I looked at my phone on the counter. It read 2:05. I looked again at my watch, thinking I must have misread it, but it read 2:20.
I thought to myself, Man, that’s weird. This watch has never lost time in the five years I’ve had it, so I immediately checked to make sure the adjustment pin had not come loose and been bumped. I’m a scuba diver, and my watch has a screw-down, locking pin for additional waterproofing. To add to my confusion, the pin was still screwed down and locked firmly in place. Then it hit me—my watch hadn’t lost time, it gained time—fifteen minutes to be exact. I stood there shaking my head, eyebrows furrowed, just looking at my watch and trying to make sense of what was going on.
Following deductive reasoning leading to a logical end is my strong suit. I usually have very little emotional attachment to ideas or theories that I’ve not been able to reason out logically. At times, this has even been a point of contention in my marriage, because logic has oftentimes trumped emotion for me, which frustrates my wife. Just ask her. But I point that out because I’m not one who buys in to conspiracy theories or someone else’s ridiculous or illogical testimonials of what I would consider an outrageous or impractical life experience.
This situation placed me in a strange, illogical predicament of my own. The only time I don’t wear a watch is when I’m sleeping. Otherwise, I always have one on, and I’m picky about my watches, which is why, at the time, I’d had the same watch for five years.
So place yourself in my situation. I knew that I had around 43,800 hours of experience with that watch and it had always kept perfect time. Then, on a night when I am considering how complex and awesome God is, and how perplexing it is to me that He even has any idea who I am—on the one and only night I have ever half-jokingly said to this to God: “If you want to take me to that star tonight, I’d love to go,” I fall quickly asleep. When I wake up, my watch* has somehow advanced fifteen minutes ahead of the rest of my clocks in my house.
Wouldn’t your mind spin a little too?
You’d likely experience the same level of disbelief that I experienced in my own scenario as I tried to come up with a logical explanation as to why or how this happened. Suffice it to say, this messed with my logic meter, but it also got me considering the possibility of the most unlikely scenario: What if?
ABBA
The Bible describes God as our heavenly father, at times even referring to Him by the Hebrew title of “Abba,” or more commonly and affectionately understood as “Daddy” by our English vernacular.
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sp; I have to admit I didn’t understand God from an “Abba” perspective until becoming a “daddy” myself. My wife Lisa and I waited eleven years before deciding to have children. Or I should say, I waited. I liked attention and, quite honestly, didn’t want my life dynamic to change by introducing anyone else into it and diverting my wife’s attention. As a result, for more than ten years of our marriage, I selfishly said, “I don’t want to have children. I’m happy with my life the way it is.” But the truth is, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and having my son, Rocky, has revolutionized who I am as a person, a leader, a pastor, a son, a husband, and a friend.
My outlook on God has significantly changed regarding what He means when He says He loves us as a father loves His children. And understanding God from this perspective has influenced every other relationship in my life.
Interestingly enough, for many people, it is this same parental experience that causes them to not be able to identify with God when they consider how much they are loved, how much they love their own children, and how they would respond to their needs as a loving parent, when compared to their feelings of abandonment by God.
DADDY’S HEART
At every opportunity, since Rocky was a baby, I would take him outside with me to look at the stars. It’s fulfilling for me because stargazing is something I love, and I have enjoyed sharing that love with my son who has now taken an interest in it as well. Oftentimes, Rocky will ask me about a certain star or planet and I find myself experiencing joy, as I’m able to share with him what I know about the subject that I’ve been so passionate about for so many years. I can’t explain it other than to say, it’s as if there is a fulfillment in sharing my excitement with my son.
At four years old, Rocky asked me if I would buy him a telescope. As his daddy, I got the biggest smile on my face to hear that my son wanted to know more about something that I valued so highly: the universe and constellations. I told him, “Sure, son. Daddy will buy you a telescope.”
I laughed so hard at his sweet response: “Then maybe I can see Disney World!”
When I quit laughing and was able to complete a sentence, I told him, “Son, you don’t need a telescope to see Disney. Daddy will take you there.” As his father, I have discovered an adventurous side of myself that looks for opportunities to do fun things with him and create great memories with him.
I’m reminded of my own childhood in southeastern Michigan when sometimes my dad would wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me if I wanted to go with him and get some ice cream. The answer was always yes. The two of us would then drive a mile up the street to the twenty-four-hour diner named Pipers in Flat Rock, Michigan, and we would eat a strawberry sundae together. I understand now why Dad did that. It wasn’t because he loved ice cream. It was because he loved me.
Now, more than thirty years later, as a daddy myself, I just want to do good things for my son. Actually, I’m excited do good things for him and I understand now what the Bible means when it says that God has the same Abba desires for us as His children. I find myself even now more deeply questioning if it is possible that God has those same Abba characteristics that my dad and I have for our children, where He is excited to reveal more about what He is passionate about to the child who shares His interests and pursues to know more about them. That sounds possible, doesn’t it?
UNDENIABLE AND ILLOGICAL
Going back to this strange and unexplainable event when my watch gained time, I went to bed totally confused that night and I woke up the next day equally confused. Had this been someone else’s experience, I would have rationalized quite a few reasons to discredit it:
They were mistaken.
They were intentionally misleading to make a point.
There was a mechanical error or user error.
They accidentally set the time wrong on their watch and forgot.
They were looking for some weird unexplainable thing to happen to them and were conveniently reading between the lines to see what they wanted to see, instead of reality, so they would have a good story to tell.
Maybe they adjusted their watch in their sleep, like a sleepwalker.
Maybe it was all a dream.
Maybe it was 2:00 a.m.; they just woke up, and they were delusional.
Or the most logical to me—they were crazy!
But because it was my experience and I had ruled out the logical scenarios or possibilities for my own errors (and knowing myself), I had to consider all of the options. I know that I’m not one of those people looking for some weird experience to justify why I’m special or to give me some kind of testimony that will give me some stupid credibility amongst conspiracy theorists. (Trust me, my real-life testimony is enough to give me plenty to talk about.) Still, I found myself perplexed by what had happened and asking myself, as unlikely as it is and as ridiculous as it sounds: What if, in His adventurous Abba (Daddy) characteristic, God decided to take me up on my request to take me to a star or to the far reaches of the universe because I asked and because He can?
Not being able to explain it, having ruled out the logical through a series of events, I had to at least consider the astronomically remote possibility of something exceptional. The willingness to consider what would have been previously inconsiderable on my part was the catalyst for a journey toward a deeper understanding of who God is. From the most abstract experience came a near-daily inquisition of asking if it was possible that I experienced something exceptional with a God who may be more involved in our lives than I previously even imagined.
I immediately began reading, praying, researching, and pursuing answers on God and science, time travel, and theoretical physics in hopes of expanding my understanding of who God is, who we are, and how it all relates to why we were created in the first place.
CHAPTER THREE
The Journey Takes a Twist
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,The Phenomenon of Man
I don’t know what happened that midsummer’s night a few years ago when I expressed to God a desire for Him to take me to another place. I can’t explain why my watch advanced in time. I can’t explain why all of the coincidences took place in a single event. I have no memory or incredible experience that I could cite.
As a matter of fact, I’m not even convinced of anything happening at all myself. But the totality of the circumstances caused me to question what if all of these coincidences were placed there by God to reveal to me that something happened, but I just won’t understand (or remember) what that something is until I get to the other side and things become clear. I can at least say with all surety that God used this single event as a catalyst, leading me through a plethora of thoughts I had never considered. In fact, this caused me to question a formula (that I will reveal in a later chapter) that I had never considered, revealing in the end what I believe is His heart for the church today.
I do wonder if there is not an aspect of who God is to us that is like a lovingly playful father, doing what we would never expect in our finite minds. Kind of like how I wink at my son when something happens that only He and I know what it means, I just wonder if God has that fun-loving, playful side to Himself that I have for my son. And is it possible that God communicates with our spirit intimately in ways that our mind is never aware of?
Does God allow us to sleep and dream so that our soul (mind, will, and emotions) is occupied while our spirit communicates directly with Him? Maybe that communication will never be remembered until our body and soul are perfected in unity with our spirit.
Is it possible that we existed before this physical life in spirit with God in heaven and agreed to come to earth at this time to accomplish His desires? Could we have signed on for every experience we have encountered, but won’t remember or understand the complexity of why until we return to His dimension?
Or is it possible that the God who
lives outside of the laws of time has actually walked side by side with each one of us individually for an entire lifetime at a different time in His history of timeless existence—justifying the concept of how God could be omnipresent in a physical world?
I’m not saying that I have solid substantiation for any of these theories or that I even necessarily believe them myself, but I have found myself pondering these kinds of abstract considerations and wondering, Is it possible? And, What if? I share them with you not to cause confusion or simply present meaningless theories, but to help you get in the mind-set to receive the heart of what is being written as I give you some insight into my out-of-the-box processes in hopes of sparking something similar in you. I believe it will take some “out-of-the-traditional-box” thinking and processing differently than you may have ever been taught or allowed yourself to in order to fully grasp what will be presented in the rest of this book.
We can only understand God on the levels that He has revealed Himself to us through His written Word (Logos, i.e., the Bible) or through His revealed Word directly imparted to us (Rhema), or through personal communication or communication through someone else to us (i.e., prophetically). Understanding that there are aspects of who He is that is revealed through that Logos, I would like to cite a few examples of times when God revealed Himself as the unfathomable and uncontainable God that He is, destroying any logical box that the people of that time tried to put Him inside.
WHEN GOD DEFIED PREVIOUS EXPECTATIONS
The Bible is chock-full of examples of when God does things for His people that were completely unexpected, and in that time, completely unheard of!
In II Kings 6, when Elisha and his servant were surrounded by the king and army of Aram, Elisha calmly reassures his servant that everything was all right because they that be with us are more than they that be with them. At that time, his servant’s spiritual eyes were opened and he saw the angelic army surrounding the army of the opposing king.