When I was in school, I hated math. I despised how cruel and unforgiving it seemed. A misplaced decimal, a forgotten carry-over digit, a wrongly executed operation, and you were done for! No room for creative expression, no place for a personal perspective. It was what it was and success depended upon how quickly one accepted this reality. Give me the language arts any day back then, with all its individual interpretations and various viewpoints. One could say, “I ain’t got no money.” A clear double negative, meaning the exact opposite of the intended thought, but everyone still understood the one speaking was broke. Try a double negative in math and you arrive precisely where a double negative gets you. But today I find common cause with the mathematician. I see now that numbers and mathematics are a lovely primer from the one true God. Let me count the ways for you…
Have you ever considered the fact that you’ve never actually seen a number? We are sloppy in our nomenclature so we often overlook this point. But what we call numbers are actually numerals. Numerals are the physical markings we’ve all agreed upon to represent the notion of invisible numbers. Numbers are concrete concepts that have settled into our heads because we constantly bump into their reality. If I were to place two apples before you, you could describe that fruit in several ways, by their color, texture, size, and in this example, their “twoness.” But there is nothing particularly “twoish” about apples, is there? Those particular apples just happen to fit that description at the moment. Add another one to the pair and they’d no longer be two, right? So “two” has nothing to do with the apples themselves, nor any other physical thing. The number two, as with all other numbers, is an immaterial reality, even when we use apples or numerals to represent them. Make sense?
But numerals are not like letters, merely representing meaningless sounds until they’re placed into patterns that form words. No, the numbers numerals represent are more like sentences or even paragraphs. When we say “seven,” for instance, we are uttering an entire raft of meaning, wrapped up in that single digit. This is where mathematics comes in. The relation and interaction of one number with all the others are as eternal as the numbers themselves. Seven could not exist without the idea of three plus four, or eight minus one, or the addition of seven ones, and so on. We did not create these connections, these sentences that get us all to seven, they simply are. Pythagoras, Newton and Einstein, and all the others like them were not creators, inventing the “language of science” out of whole cloth. They were simply those who had mastery of its grammar and had learned to speak its tongue. They also understood it enough to recognize the poetry in it all.
So, the insistence of a mathematician that such and such a number is the only possible answer to a problem is not the arrogant assertion of a narrow mind, but rather, the declaration of the narrowness he sees outside himself. And it is here I see the likeness of Christians to those analytical number crunchers, and why math is such a powerful witness to our God. The Christian is gripped, not by the fancy of his own imagination, but by the certainty of the Triune God outside himself. This is a truth as sure as two plus two is four. And even though our modern societies are all dominated by anti-exclusive, pluralistic sentiments, those self-same societies are equally bound by the narrowness of numbers for the simple reason that they still want buildings, bridges, and planes, and they find they just can’t have them without the rigidness of math. They reject the “zealot” who insists on One True God, while literally resting all their weight on the engineer’s restrictive calculations, and they fail to see the hypocrisy in this.
In our Savior’s famous Sermon on the Mount, He gave instructions as to how to avoid a destructive end – “Enter by the narrow gate” He said, “for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it.” (Matt. 7:13) Have you ever noticed how vague this directive seems at first? No rich theology, no robust Christology to keep us safe, simply enter the narrow and avoid the broad. But it is the One speaking it who gives these words their clarity. His words, like numbers, are authoritative. neither leaves room for other ways. The “many” don’t miss the way for lack of clarity, but that they don’t like the unambiguous answers that they’re given. Now I’m not saying math will get us into the kingdom, but the objective “straitness” of its answers, the fact that “numbers don’t lie,” is a clue from whence they came. If we refuse to twist the nature of the world around us and embrace the direction of its testimony, it will at least bring us to these binary gates. Nature doesn’t give us the Gospel, but it does confirm the One from whom that Gospel comes. Will we turn from that narrow way, or like Peter, say, “Lord, to whom shall we go, You have the words of eternal life…?”(John 6:68) “Few,” He tells us, will take this path, but it turns out, by His sovereign kindness that these “few” become a “multitude which no man could number” in the end. (Rev. 7:9)
