An old friend of mine used to say that if the Devil cannot get at you any other way, he will waste your time. I got a letter recently asking me to do a radio program on the question of the pre-tribulation rapture of the saints.

So, when the mandatory internet search on the phrase rapture theory returned nearly 1.5 million web pages, including exhaustive arguments being raised on all sides, it struck me that a massive amount of time had been wasted on this issue.

Actually, it turns out that there are at least four theories on the rapture, and they have managed to create schism across a wide range of believers. Reason and common sense should say something to us when we encounter something like this. If the Bible were all that clear on the issue, do you suppose we would have this breadth of disagreement?

The third psalm has a striking subheading: A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son. No one is certain as to when the subheadings found in the Psalms were created or whether they are authentic or not. But sometimes, if you know some of the history of the time, you can get very strong clues as to whether they fit or not. The incident in question dates from when David had quite a few wives, and no shortage of sons. They are outlined in 2 Samuel. While he was in Hebron, he had six sons of six different women. One of these sons was Absalom, his mother a princess, daughter of a king of a neighboring city. And being the son of a king and a princess may have contributed to the final outcome of this tragic man's life.

I've been doing some writing recently on the Psalms, and there are some profound lessons that just keep growing on me. I can't help thinking that there's something quite special about this book of the Bible, but it's hard to put my finger on it. It may be the musical style of the psalms; but it's hard to figure how that would quite come through, because they had a different musical scale, their style of poetry was different from ours. The poetry does survive, though, because Hebrew poetry is a poetry of ideas, of thoughts; not so much words and rhymes. Nevertheless, the power of music still hovers over this book.

I know years ago, when I was having some hard times, I took the Bible with me to my place of prayer one day, I opened it up to the first psalm, I laid it out there in front of me, and I began to talk to God about the psalm. It was a change in my approach to prayer. I'm no longer asking God, Give me this, or Give me that, or Heal that person's sickness, and all that type of thing. It's just a talk, a conversation with him. What does this psalm mean and what should it to me? When I finished it, I made a mark there at the end of psalm number one, and the next time I prayed I started where I had left off. I was surprised sometime back, when I was looking at that old Bible, and I saw how many times I had gone through the entire book that way. So it was really a very constant study of mine—part of my daily devotionals—throughout that period of my life.

But that's still not as surprising as the way the Psalms unfold over time. I think the reason for that is that you and I change with the years of our lives. We face different challenges, we learn many lessons, and then we return back to this marvelous work—the Psalms—and find something entirely new. It isn't that we didn't see it before. It's not that, if we read it aloud, we wouldn't have read it before. It's just that now it says something to us that it didn't say before. Take the first Psalm as a case in point...

What kind of people are we coming to be? And What kind of Christians might we be when we no longer govern our lives by the words of Jesus? The road ahead is long and dangerous. And our educational system has given us a generation who are governed by what?

What informs us about right and wrong? Experience? It is a hard teacher, but effective. Philosophy? It is too often wrong, by its own admission. In a way, when we read the Bible, we are learning from the experiences of generations past, so we don’t have to repeat their mistakes.

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.

Science has very little to say about origins. We can theorize about the origins of life, but no one has been able to demonstrate that it’s possible to create life—either purposely or on accident. I don’t mind scientists concluding that God’s existence (or non-existence) is outside their purview. The problem arises when we are told with certainty that nature is all there is, was, and ever shall be. Do they tell us that? Oh, yeah; they tell our children that. That sentence comes straight from a children’s book about nature. American scientist Will Provine said this:

Modern science directly implies that the world is organized strictly in accordance with deterministic principles or chance. There are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature. There are no gods and no designing forces rationally detectable.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, writing in First Things, made an important point on this issue—more than one point, actually, but one that made me lay down the journal and stare into space for a few minutes. Get a grip, because this may seem counter-intuitive at first. Here’s what he said:

Prior to both science and theology is philosophy, the science of common experience. Its role in these crucial matters is indispensable.

Now, let me see if I can explain this science of common experience in terms of theology.