The Meaning Of Life

https://biblehub.com/nkjv/1_samuel/3.htm

The human brain is a miracle. I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV, but I’m sure there are physiologists who know exactly the different parts of the brain and what they are responsible for. But I doubt anyone knows how the brain does it.

I’m not a mechanic, but I can describe how the motor oil in your oil pan gets to the top of your engine so it filters down through all of the working parts to keep them lubricated so the friction doesn’t overheat the part and it fails. I’m not a doctor, but I can tell you that signals are sent from our sensory nerves through the spinal cord to the brain which processes those signals and sends commands back through the spinal cord where it is appropriate. For example, if you’re like most people, you could take a bite of a Carolina Reaper pepper and you mouth would almost immediately detect heat and pain and send signals to the brain saying, “I don’t want this in my mouth”. The brain would then tell your mouth to open, your eyes to start searching for a trash can to spit the pepper in, and your hands to reach for a glass of water or maybe your legs to run you to the kitchen for a glass of milk. But, how does the brain and the central nervous system do that? I know, electrical signals are sent from the receptors on each of your taste buds in your mouth and are carried through branches of the nervous system…I could go on explaining the technical aspect of the process, but serious, how does the brain do that? It’s not mechanical, so it can’t be explained that way. And yes, while it’s electrical, there are no conductive copper or aluminum wires in our body to carry the current, and likely there is no way to pinpoint which specific nerve carries the signal.

For example, I was sent to an electrocardiologist (I think that is what he was called), because I have A-Fib, which is cause by abnormal electrical activity in the heart. He did a battery of tests, and when he was done, he said, “You have an abnormal heart beat.” I asked, “What is causing it?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Can it be corrected?” He again, shrugged his shoulders. And according to my PCP, this guy was the top heart electrician in the state, and he could not tell me why the electrical activity in my heart, send from my brain through the spinal cord, was out of sync.

So yes, we can tell you which body parts are responsible for what, and we can give an indication of how the body’s processes work, but we can’t tell you how it does it. That is because the body that God designed, especially the brain, is more complex than we will ever discover or comprehend.

This isn’t a message about “evolution vs creationism”. The reason I talk about the human brain, is to ask, “Can you hear God?”

Right now as I am typing this, I have a fan running next to me, humming in my ear. My phone just dinged telling me I have a new email, and I just heard the ice maker drop. I live close to the train tracks so I can hear switch engines droning in the background, and my driveway alarm just chimed as a delivery man walked past the sensor on his way to his truck, which I heard start up and drive away. Even though I am home alone, reading a digital version of my Bible and collecting my thoughts, there are likely dozens of sounds going on in the background, sounds that are constant in my ear but I’ve become accustomed to them, or sounds like rail cars crashing together as they couple that my ears can hear, but when the signal is sent to the brain, the brain says, “Don’t pay any attention to that…happens all the time.”

Our lives are a lot more complex now than they were in the days of Samuel. He didn’t have electrical fans, diesel locomotives, ice makers, delivery trucks, furnaces kicking on, cars driving by outside, cell phones dinging with notifications; he had none of those distractions. And still, when God called his name, he thought it was Eli calling him.

One thing you can learn from this short passage is that the voice of God was inside Samuel’s head. Had it been a literal audible voice, Eli would have heard it to, but he didn’t. And I have to remember this…if I’m sitting here waiting for God to speak to me and I’m waiting for an audible booming voice that shakes the windows in my house saying, “Big John!”, it probably ain’t going to happen.

But my next question is, how do I know the difference between the voice of God inside my head, and my conscience? And I’m sure that some physiologist can point to the part of the human brain that has conscience thoughts, it is really your conscience, or is it God? Maybe when I see an attractive woman walking down the street and my mind starts to go to places it shouldn’t be, is that my conscience that say, “Hey, don’t go there! Think about why the Chiefs are in the middle of their division instead of at the top.” or is it God telling me that? And that is no way a parable, God wouldn’t redirect my thinking towards the Kansas City football team, He would redirect my thought to giving to the poor or recalculating my tithe.

So even Samuel, a Nazarite, the child of a barren mother, dedicated solely to the service of God since a toddler, didn’t recognize the voice of God. Once he recognized it though, his brain now registered, “When I hear this in the future, I’ll know it is the voice of God.”

Is God speaking to us, but we don’t recognize His voice? Is God speaking to us, but we aren’t listening, we are too focused with watching television, or surfing the internet, or deciding what we’re going to eat for supper tonight. I’ve posed this question before…did God choose Abraham to be the father of Israel, or did God speak to many, and Abraham just happened to be the only one that heard him.

I don’t know. I don’t know if God has spoken to me or not. I don’t know if there is a difference between the inner voice of God in my brain and the physical part of my brain that judges right from wrong.

So the next time you find a twenty dollar bill in the parking lot fo Walmart, and you tell someone about it, saying, “I wanted to put that $20 in my wallet and keep it, but my conscience wouldn’t let me do it”, instead, you might say, “I wanted to put that $20 in my wallet and keep it, but God told me not to.”

That might cause the other person to think about what you said, and ponder if God spoke to them as well. And eventually, we could get everyone in the world to recognize that than inner voice might very well be God speaking to us, and how we should listen to His voice.

And right now, that inner voice is my head is reminding me to make sure I end this with…

“God bless you all”.