Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Patrick Miller.

Have you ever noticed that there's thin places in the world?

Let me explain what I mean.

We live downstream from the Enlightenment, and that means that we take for granted

the idea that the world around us is entirely material. Even though you've never seen an atom,

you know that everything we see is constructed by atomic particles. We're made up of stuff. The earth is

made up of stuff. The sun, the stars, the galaxy are all

atomic material. Now, materialism is the belief that stuff is all that there is out there.

It's the belief that reality is totally measurable, quantifiable, observable. And what is not measurable,

quantifiable, or observable is not real. It may be a figment of our

imagination, it may be a misunderstanding of reality, but whatever it is, if it's not those things,

if it's not atomic stuff, it's not real. So there is no immaterial God. There are no immaterial spiritual beings, like angels or demons.

There's just stuff. Despite the fact that Christians deny materialism, we nonetheless live in a world

shaped by it. We don't feel like the world around us is enchanted. We live like practical materialists, who

briefly touched the immaterial and then returned to the normal world of stuff and atoms.

That means that for us, reality is thick. The world is a thick place made of material things.

But if you travel just 500 years into the past, you'd find yourself in a very

different world, a world where people believed that reality is porous, that the material and

immaterial intersect one another. For them, 500 years ago, there was no part of life,

or no part of time, or no part of space that wasn't in some ways spiritual.

...