Matthew Blewett - Heaven and Earth - Class 1 - Patterns of Purpose

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:00

   Welcome back. This is day one of the 2024 Idyllwild Bible School. Our third period teacher is Brother Matthew Blewett. His general topic is Heaven and Earth. Today’s topic is Patterns of Purpose. Right, good morning everyone. I will try and be loud to keep you awake for this graveyard session. I’m sure as the week goes on, you’ll become more fortified and be able to stay awake for the whole session. We’re going to be doing a series called Heaven and Earth. And this first session is kind of, I guess, a foundational one, one that I have to go through to try and establish a kind of thinking that I think is very helpful for the rest of what we’re going to be talking about during the week. So we might not get into the meat and bones of heaven and Earth.

2. 0:52

   And I’m going to already make an apologies. I think if I ask you to open your Bibles and turn to Genesis one verse one, which you can do, many of you would probably think, well, I don’t need to do that, Matt, Because if there’s one verse in the Bible, I would be prepared to come on the stage and give you a full of our heart repetitions of it is Genesis one verse one. And sure enough, it is probably the most well known verse in all of the Bible.

3. 1:19

   Even I think people that don’t believe that the Bible is the word of God would be able to repeat the first verse of the Bible. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And I have some good news about this series given that it’s in the third session and I’ve got some bad news. The good news is at one level this is going to be the most simple Bible school series you’ve ever attended. Perfect for a third session because we’re only going to talk about one verse and essentially 3 words. And so we could do it all now and it’ll all be done. The bad news is, at the same time, it could be the most complicated that you’re ever going to deal with. And we’re dealing with really this relationship actually between simplicity and complexity, between order and chaos, how it plays out in our lives and how it plays out in the Word of God and in things that are spiritual. And I guess that’s what we’re going to be trying to to deal with in this series.

4. 2:17

   I’m going to be focusing on this verse, Genesis one, verse one. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth for me. It’s only been probably in the last five or six years that the way that I’ve come to understand the holistic and amplified meaning of that opening sentence of the Bible has changed completely.

5. 2:39

   I guess for me and maybe for some of you in this room before I had this change of, of view of Genesis one verse one, the first verse of the Bible was a very powerful opening introduction to the Bible that made it very clear that God existed before all things and then was the one who created all things that we see around us in the real world. A very powerful introduction.

6. 3:07

   I want to put it to you that not only is it a powerful introduction, it is the whole story. It contains within it the purpose and the pattern of reality. And from this verse we have a framework and a lens to understand not only the rest of Scripture, but in fact the real natural world in which we live.

7. 3:31

   And those are some, I hope, quite bold claims. And what I want to try and do during this series of talks is through taking you through what I mean by that, what I mean by the pattern of heaven and earth, to be able to show you that perhaps there is some truth to the claim that I’m making.

8. 3:49

   And that’s not just because I want to be able to make that claim. It’s because I think if you begin to understand the pattern that is being established in Genesis, one verse one, first of all, it will be really helpful as a lens or a framework when you do further Bible reading or Bible study. Because it just provides you with an angle of looking at things that perhaps is a little bit different to the way you may have done it in the past.

9. 4:14

   But even more importantly, well, as importantly, I should rather say it provides a framework for us to view the world in which we live in, the world of our five senses, and how that actually works with the spiritual world. And I think that’s very important, extremely important in the world that we live in today and also perhaps for our community.

10. 4:41

    What do I mean by that? Well, one of the things I want to really leave behind, besides talking and helping you perhaps see a greater perspective on this pattern of heaven and earth, is I want to encourage all of us. And I’m sure there are many who are already practising active disciples, but I want to encourage us towards activated discipleship. And you’ll see as we carry on in the series of talks, exactly what I mean by that.

11. 5:09

    But we live in a world that is becoming more and more passive and we’re going to be faced with that challenge more and more, especially as technology continues to do what it’s doing to us. What do I mean by that? Well, you know what I mean. It’s very easy to spend hours today sitting back and consuming information, consuming entertainment, living essentially in a virtual world.

12. 5:35

    No longer having to actually go physically to the shop to buy anything. No longer perhaps even having to physically go into a church, a hall, no longer physically having to do most of the things that your parents would have had to do. And we are being virtualised and we are becoming passive. And so a big encouragement on the journey that I’ve been on in understanding the pattern of heaven and earth is understanding how important it is for us to be activated in our discipleship.

13. 6:05

    And I guess, you know, the real clue to it all is that the first time we encounter our God is he is active, He is a creator. You know, we often talk about what do we know about God, His characteristics in Exodus 34. He’s merciful, gracious, long-suffering, abundant and loving kindness and truth.

14. 6:26

    But before we even learn that about God, we learn that he is a creator. He is making things. And this is what we want to encourage through the course of this series. But we’re going to start in this first session by talking about patterns. I’ve made the statement that in Genesis chapter one, verse one, and specifically in the words heaven and earth, we have what I’ve called what I would would would put forward the foundational pattern of all reality and the purpose of all creation in those three words. And when we understand why it’s important to see things and why it is that actually reality is revealed to us in patterns, Hopefully you’ll you’ll see why I’m using that terminology. So for this session, I just want to help us in thinking about patterns.

15. 7:19

    And I think it’s very useful again, from a, a, a, a understanding of how the world works around us. And also from when we reading our Bibles and studying our Bibles. I think often when we study the Bible, when we try and understand elements of the Bible, we, we come with a rules based approach or a linear approach to trying to unravel Scripture and that’s often not helpful. In fact, I think many of the debates and the issues that we have within our community and also that we have with one another are really because we’re trying to oversimplify the beauty of what is presented to us in the Word of God. And what we’re going to see is when we understand that reality is revealed to us in patterns, it’s going to help us to understand that there is neither an oversimplified world or Bible, nor is there a Bible of over complexity and chaos that we cannot come to grips with.

16. 8:15

    The truth is somewhere in between. So let me try and make some more sense out of that. We live in a very complicated world right now. There are so many things going on that could gain your attention. There are millions and millions of data points that could be feeding into you. And quite frankly, some of them are feeding into you and they have nothing to do with me right now.

17. 8:39

    But hopefully for most of you, because I’m the loudest person in the room, you are paying some attention to me and what I’m saying. But how then do we make sense of a world of infinite complexity? Well, the way we make sense of it is we begin to see patterns of meaning, patterns of purpose within that complexity. So that’s just a very simple idea, but that’s actually the way that we navigate our way through the world. We navigate our way through the world through identifying patterns.

18. 9:10

    And the amazing thing is this is that those patterns actually exist. And we’re going to see both in the natural world and in the spiritual world, because there was a designer and a creator. I often say to someone who believes in a materialistic view of the world, who believes that there is no design, who believes that things came by pure random chance. Why is it that we’re not in a chaotic world completely? Why is it that there is some consistency of patterns? And that’s the greatest evidence, isn’t it, that there is a designer.

19. 9:48

    Because once you decide you want to create something for a purpose, for example, I want to create this podium. What do I do next? I want to create a podium that we can use for a speaker to put their notes on and to be able to address an audience. I design something that is going to achieve that purpose, and then the design reveals a pattern of what a podium is, and that is exactly what patterns do. They reveal purpose, They reveal design. And the fact that we find patterns throughout the natural world, in fact, that’s what the scientists do through their research, is to identify patterns from the darkness of the things we don’t know.

20. 10:28

    We reveal things and we learn new patterns is really evidence that behind what may appear to be a chaotic world are very simple rules pointing towards purpose. And that’s in fact, as I say, how we deal with simplicity and complexity. And what you really begin to understand then is that we live in a world where there are some very, very simple ideas. And on the edges, as you can see on that picture, there’s some roughness, there’s some complexity. And the challenge for us sometimes is to be able to live in that space, if you will, between chaos and order, between simplicity and complexity.

21. 11:12

    And we tend to to veer to the one extent or to the other. It’s very, very tempting to try and shoehorn the world into a place of pure order where everything we can work out and make sense of. We do the same with the Bible. And so we we really reduce the pattern to a set of rules.

22. 11:34

    And of course that leads to a whole bunch of problems because when something in reality turns up that doesn’t fit within our set, within the rules that we’ve established, we end up in real trouble or we go to the other extreme. And because those things have happened in our life and chaos has come in, we think, well, well, this is just a world of infinite chaos. We can no longer identify the patterns of purpose. And so I think just understanding in your mind that the way that we navigate the world and the way that we might navigate Scripture as well through pattern recognition is really important.

23. 12:10

    And the cool thing is this, we from the beginning were designed, God designed us to be good pattern recognisers. I mean, you think about it, this is a cool story. The first task that was ever given to a man was a patent recognition task because Adam had been wandering around all these animals, bumblebees, all sorts of animals, like they’re just there. So God says, hang on a moment, Adam, I can make things a bit simpler for you.

24. 12:35

    I’m going to put you here and I’m going to bring these animals in front of you. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to start to recognise that a whole bunch of them look similar. And then what you can do is you can give them a name, and now you have established a pattern and you’ve put a name and you can link that pattern to a whole bunch of understanding that you have with those animals.

25. 12:58

    So you can imagine Adam is sitting there and an animal comes along and it looks like a, you know, this little mammal with four legs and a tail and a round nose. And he says, I see a lot of those, and they make a sound like Eeyore, Eeyore. And they don’t look particularly intelligent. I’m going to call that donkey.

26. 13:16

    And so he names the pattern. And here’s the interesting thing about patterns. Not all of the donkeys are going to look exactly the same. There’s going to be some big donkeys and smaller donkeys and but they generally are all donkeys. And the interesting thing about pattern recognition is the more resolution we get, then we start to distinguish and we start getting better at understanding that here’s a new pattern that’s emerging.

27. 13:41

    And so while he’s looking at these donkeys, he notices that some of the donkeys actually have straps. You know, like in Africa, we say you get some donkeys that are white with black stripes and some donkeys that are white with black stripes. So yeah, that way around. And he says, yes, these ones are different.

28. 13:56

    And he calls them zebras using the American word. And so he begins to identify these patterns. And that’s the way in which we navigate life by identifying those patterns. The interesting thing is that as we go through life, we actually begin to not just recognise the patterns, but we begin to actually create those same pattern recognitions in our brain.

29. 14:23

    And so although that’s a positive thing because now we can actually make sense of a highly complex world, of course, if we start to recognise the wrong patterns, the patterns that don’t speak towards truth, well, things can actually become quite problematic. You see in Genesis, in Genesis chapter one, we have an interesting way in which the record is recorded for us. It’s almost like God saying, I need you to understand that there is a link between the patterns of heaven and the patterns of earth between, we might say spiritual patterns and natural patterns.

30. 15:00

    And when you read the text, you, you know, we’ve read it so many times. So we, we often don’t see this. We, we’re seeing God reveal creation to us. And there are words that are invisible that we cannot see. Call them ideas, things that you cannot touch or feel or smell with your 5 senses. And those words are called it patterns of spiritual truth, and they give rise to a natural pattern. And so we have, for example, the pattern of let there be light. Those are words invisible.

31. 15:32

    And then there was light. And then there’s the pattern of let the waters divide and then the waters divided. And so the Scripture starts off by saying to us, not only are there patterns out there, in actual fact, the patterns that you’re seeing in the natural world are directly linked to patterns of meaning, to patterns of spiritual truth.

32. 15:56

    And it’s only if you’ve trained yourself to understand what those patterns of spiritual truth are that you’ll truly understand what’s going on around you in the real world, in the world, what not the real world, in the world that you can touch and taste and feel and smell. And so that umbilical chord is something we’re going to be exploring a lot in the series, the link between the earth and the heaven that we’re going to be looking at and the patterns that are paralleled between heaven and earth.

33. 16:30

    But there are some pitfalls, as I was alluding to earlier, because if our mind has been trained not with the right spiritual patterns, then the things that we recognise and the things that we think are true could very well not be true. Because as I’ve said, we’re just matching a pattern and we could recognise the wrong emphasis of the pattern.

34. 16:51

    And so sometimes there is an ambiguity. So most of you looking at that delightful picture of that are seeing what, what are you seeing a woman? All right. And all the, anybody young here. I was with the youth, of course, 90% of them, and I’m sure many of you have seen this picture said they were seeing a young beautiful lady. All right.

35. 17:12

    And there were 10% which actually were all the teachers at the back or the, the, the, the, the mentors at the back. And of course, they were seeing, like all of you, an old lady, all right? Because what’s happening is the pattern in front of us we’re first seeing. And I know that some of you are just so good.

36. 17:26

    You’re seeing both at the same time. All right? We’re seeing, first of all, one pattern that’s matching the the patterns that have already been sort of designed into our thinking. And here’s another some examples because it’s just fun to do this kind of thing. All right? Of course, that’s not a Penguin, that’s Abraham Lincoln.

37. 17:46

    All right. And then of course, we’ve got a beautiful Roman or whatever Greek pillars, or you might say you’re seeing people. And so we’ve got this idea of what we call pattern instability, where patterns can actually, depending on your perspective, actually be seen differently completely. And really where this is all going to is what we’re going to be trying to make sure we can do both now and as we move throughout the course of our life is how are we going to make sure that the patterns that we start to recognise, and especially as we go deeper and deeper into those patterns are actually the kind of patterns that speak to the spiritual patterns of truth.

38. 18:26

    And Romans, Paul says to us, do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is, his good, pleasing and perfect will. And so it is often the case that we are passively filling our minds so much with the entertainment, with the information of the world, that that’s the pattern that’s been developed in our mind. And so it’s so much easier for us to recognise those patterns rather than the spiritual truth patterns that are primarily recorded in the Word of God.

39. 19:04

    And that’s something we want to be trying to work to intentionally change as best we can. You know, Jesus alluded to this ability to use the patterns of earth to actually understand spiritual patterns when in Matthew 16 He said to them, when it is evening you say it will be fair weather for the sky is red, and in the morning it will be foul weather today for the sky is red and threatening hypocrites. You know how to discern the patterns of the sky and the weather, but you cannot discern the signs of the time. So what He was saying is you, you, you should be able to look out into the world around you and, and when you can see the patterns of the world around you, you should be able to use those to link to the spiritual truth patterns that are going to teach you real significant meaning. And of course, they weren’t able to do that. They weren’t able to make that link that’s put in place in Genesis chapter one.

40. 19:59

    And we want to try and do a lot of that in this session. Now, in actual fact, most of the patterns that we encounter in the real world. And I want to argue, actually, all the patterns that we find in Scripture are what we call fractal in nature. So I’m not sure how many of you have ever come across the term fractals, but I want to spend maybe the last 20 minutes just talking to you about fractals.

41. 20:26

    And this is where the math comes in. So, so far, if that was complicated, that was the simple part. Now for the complicated part, just when you’re falling asleep. All right, So The thing is this. Why do we find things actually being revealed in repeating patterns? Well, again, Genesis provides the answer. The way in which the world has actually, according to God be created is through this idea of forming and filling this idea of iteration, of repetition.

42. 20:57

    And that’s the beautiful language. You see when you’re reading Genesis One. It’s kind of like you, you, you sort of stumble over your words because it’s repeated over and over again. And you know, Genesis One’s got so few words to describe the creation of everything. And yet over and over again it says things like the Earth brought forth graph, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, the tree that yields fruit whose seed is in itself according to its kind.

43. 21:21

    That emphasis is teaching us that the way in which the earth is revealing itself is this idea of a seed that then produces fruit that repeats itself, that replicates itself, that iterates itself. And that’s really something important to observe, because what we then learn to observe is that actually the patterns that we see in life are fractal.

44. 21:45

    They are repeating but at different levels of scale and that’s what we actually mean when we talk about a fractal. So that is what a fractal is. I’m sure you have encountered them, even if you didn’t know that they were called fractals, kaleidoscopes, like I’m sure many of you were given by your mum or your dad or your grandmother at some stage, but probably they are on your computer screensaver now.

45. 22:08

    It is an example of a fractal. A fractal describes a pattern that has repeating self similarity at different levels of Zoom. And I feel like a university lecturer at this point in time giving you a formal definition like that. But it’s going to get better because I just want you to understand a little bit about this concept of practice. Because I think when we obviously go through the rest of the series and we see the level at which the heaven and earth pattern repeats itself throughout Scripture and throughout the reality of the world, we’re going to have to understand this idea of repeating self similarity. It’s interesting that the phrase self similarity is that when we see patterns in a fractal repeat, we’ve been talking about this idea of simplicity and complexity. It’s isn’t that the repetition is always exactly the same. We can pick up that it’s very similar, it’s self similar, but always there’s just a little bit of a change. There’s just a little bit of complexity. And if you think about it, that’s where the beauty of the natural world and the spiritual world lies. It’s never that we get it down and say, well, that’s something we can understand and it just repeats over and over again. But rather that every time there’s just something new, there’s something surprising.

46. 23:26

    I think, I guess at the essence of what we call beauty is that element of surprise. Like we’ve never quite got it. And yet there’s enough familiarity that we can lock into. And that’s what’s being expressed in this idea of fractals. In fact, the concept of fractals is very new. So if you didn’t know about it, you you’ve got every excuse.

47. 23:47

    It probably wasn’t taught you when you were at school, although the word was coined in the 1970s by this very handsome letter over here, Benoit Mandelbrah. And he was a Polish French mathematician. And I’m going to give you the very quick lesson on this chap. And why is it important? Well, because I’m not going to try and explain to you all the detail of what he discovered, but he, he really was looking at the real world and realising that the way in which mathematicians and especially geometry people that were working in Euclidean geometry were trying to measure the natural world wasn’t working.

48. 24:22

    The natural world just appeared too complicated. And the particular conundrum that was facing the mathematicians of the time was really what they called the coastline paradox, which was, you know, if you were to measure the coastline of the beautiful, is that the British Isles or Great Britain? Which one do I call that?

49. 24:44

    Great Britain? Thank you very much, Johnny. So if if we had to try and measure the coastline of Great Britain, you know, you know, how long is it? Is there one answer to that question? Well, Simply put, what Mandelbrough was able to postulate is what it depends on the size of your ruler.

50. 25:03

    Because hey, if you’ve got a big ruler that’s, I guess 100 miles long, well then you’re going to get a certain length. It’s going to be an OK answer. It’s going to be 1 answer that is pretty much correct. This is the size of the circumference of Great Britain. But what if I give you a ruler that is now one mile long? You can see from the outline of the coastline suddenly now you’re going to start going into the the nooks and crannies of that coastline and your measurements going to be longer. And what if I gave you a measurement that was one inch long?

51. 25:36

    And what if I gave you a measurement? You can see where this is going, which is one thousandth of an 1 millionth of an inch. In fact, what mathematicians will tell you, and I won’t try and prove it to you using a formula, that the circumference and the people living in Great Britain are going to be so pleased to hear this of their beautiful island is infinite, the space is finite.

52. 25:55

    That’s an interesting thing just to think about for a while. The the area is finite, but the circumference is infinite. There’s this point at which the infinite and finite are joining are meeting. And So what Bennett was able to do is he said, I wonder if I could create a formula to try and work out like, like, what does this space look like where the finite and the infinite touch?

53. 26:19

    What does it look like? Has it got a shape? Is there a shape to to the meeting of the finite and the infinite? And he got it right. He created this thing called the Mandelbrot set. And you know, this thing could only really be drawn when we actually had the computing power to do the calculations of iteration. And this beautiful diagram that you’re seeing on your screen here, which is the Mandelbrot set, and I’ll explain to you exactly what it’s trying to demonstrate in a moment, is being developed by extremely powerful computing power to actually reveal a very simple mathematical formula. And I say it’s simple, but I’m not going to put it up there for you, but believe you me, take my word for it. It’s a formula representing iteration. And all that Mandelbrot wanted to do was to drive that formula through, to put it onto a, A, a, a, an axis of X&Y, and then draw the set of numbers that you put into the series. And the formula that actually always remained finite, in other words, the answers were always finite. In other words, they never exploded into Infinity. And all the answers of numbers that remain finite are coded black.

54. 27:32

    They are in the Mandelbrot set. And all the numbers that explode to Infinity, you know, like when you’re doing that 8 ^2 and then you square 16. Yeah, Is that right? And then you square 6, you know, it just goes mad quickly, that kind of thing. All those numbers are outside of the set. But here’s the thing, when they started doing this, and you might say, well what are all these lovely other colours over here?

55. 27:54

    And all they’ve done is they’ve said, OK, all the numbers that fit into the finite set will make black. All the numbers that are escaping, some of them escape very quickly. In other words, after three iterations, it’s a number that we can’t even understand. Some take a long time. So what we’ll do is we’ll colour them differently. And in this particular example, you can change your colours. In this example, they’re moving from colours like blue, the blue spectrum of the rainbow all the way to red. And blue means it took a longer time to escape to Infinity all the way to red where it’s escaped quickly. And so they took those simple rules, they give it to a computer and they say let’s see what happens. And the mathematician’s jaws dropped because what they discovered is this is this repeating pattern of self similarity that was repeating in this most beautiful pattern that you’re seeing in front of you.

56. 28:44

    In fact, the words of Mandelbrot were this was a way to see Infinity. Botanist wonders spring from simple rules which are repeated without end. And in a way, what we have up there, whether you believe me or not, is a view into the mind of our Creator, and it is the nature and structure of all patterns, a view of Infinity and Infinity together, underlying order with surprises.

57. 29:13

    Romans 120 says, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seeing, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power. And Godhead, there’s a chap, Oh, here we go. Here’s the Mandelbrot set. Now what we’re going to do is we’re going into zoom zone. I want you to watch that as it’s happening, you’re going to start seeing self similar patterns repeating over and over again. So what’s going on here is we’re just reducing the scale all the time.

58. 29:41

    Imagine you’re on your computer, you’re zooming in, you’re zooming in. But as you’re zooming in, not only is it always interesting and always new and beautiful, but you’re recognising similarity. Can you see the self similarity? That’s the fractal characteristic, self similarity, but at the same time, beauty of detail. There it is again.

59. 29:59

    You’ve seen that bugger before, and there’s the same fractal pattern coming out again and over and over again. We are seeing the same similarity, but slightly different. We’re moving into what we call the Valley of the Sea Horses. That’s the Valley of the Sea horses. And you’ll notice emerging out of that is the original macrocosm that you saw in the very beginning, and it starts to emerge over and over again.

60. 30:26

    Johannes Kepler, who actually was born before we really understood fractals, said something that I always thought is quite amazing. In mathematics, we have the opportunity to think God’s thoughts after Him. Since we astronomers, our priests, are the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God. So why do I think this is important? Well, I want to show you that when you understand the concept of this repeating pattern at different levels of zoom, you will now start seeing it everywhere in the natural world. Well, let me show you what I mean by that. So you’ve seen a Fern.

61. 31:06

    A Fern is a fractal. Can you see that the overall leaf of the Fern has a shape that every one of the sub leaves that’s coming off that Fern has the same shape That every one of the sub sub leaves of that Fern has the same shape. In fact even if you look at the veins on a sub sub leaf it has the same shape. You could go and pick an example but just miss out on those stinging nickels by the Creek.

62. 31:29

    Make sure you’re also accompanied by an adult over the age of 18. And we see this all over in flora. This self similar repeating patterns. Flowers. Look at the flowers, go around, pick up a flower. See the fractal in the sea. Good old octopus. And here’s the thing that really stunned. And This is why a guy like Benoit Mandelbrough, who was trying to actually understand if he could come up with a fractal geometry to try and work out how he could take the complexity of a coastline and be able to, to, to come up with useful formulas so that we could, we could understand it better.

63. 32:08

    Or, or is it just chaos? And as a result of the work that he did, I should have said he’s been able to come up with a new form of geometry called fractal geometry. And that geometry is responsible for so many changes that we take for granted. In fact, the fact that you have mobile phones, those of you that are using them right now, you wouldn’t have them if it wasn’t for fractal geometry.

64. 32:28

    Most of our healthcare systems have been impacted. But here’s the thing, you know, in some ways we can maybe begin to understand that in organic systems, we would have repetition at different scales. But this same repetition happens in natural landscapes. And there’s an example from Bryce Canyon on the screen, and it happens when you look at river systems and natural coastlines and when you look at a snowflake, you see the same thing.

65. 32:56

    Large patterns, smaller patterns, smaller patterns, smaller patterns. Microcosm, microcosm. Lightning in the sky has a fractal pattern. Nature. Cyclonic weather systems have a fractal pattern nature all the way up into the way in which we view the galaxies and the stars with a repeating structured pattern of self similarity. But then it comes all the way back. Here’s here’s the thing to our own bodies, and This is why it’s had such an impact in healthcare. Understanding that most of the organs in our body are designed around a fractal pattern system.

66. 33:34

    Our lungs have a fractal pattern nature. Our blood vessels have a fractal pattern nature. In fact, all of our nervous system has a fractal pattern nature all the way to our brains. And the neural network that I was talking about a bit earlier on has a fractal pattern nature. And when you look at that picture, you begin to understand why this is so significant.

67. 33:59

    Because on the one side we have a picture of the fractal pattern nature of the brain cell, and on the other we have perhaps the highest version that we can see of the whole galaxies being spread out in our universe with a very, very similar fractal pattern nature. So we have this idea of macrocosms and microcosms repeating patterns of self similarity right throughout nature.

68. 34:30

    And I think when we bring this all back to what we want to be looking at throughout the series is a I’m going to be encouraging you to look closer at the world around you and the way in which those patterns are revealed to us. And the lessons as a result that they teach us and the experiences and the way in which they connect us to the spiritual. But at the same time, it is an incredible way to approach the Scripture.

69. 34:55

    I think so often when we come to the word of God and we come with a pure linear approach or a flat line approach, we can lose the the true power of what is on offer when we open up the word of God. And so I just wanted to spend a little time just emphasizing that to finish off with.

70. 35:14

    So the Bible is in fact, I believe a fractal, fractal pattern. It’s laid out in fractal patterns. And that is why often when some people first encounter the Bible, it can appear chaotic. It’s not written out like a textbook. It’s not written out with a bunch of rules and principles that we can just mark off for someone who first encounters the Bible before they can start recognising the patterns.

71. 35:37

    It’s like the coastline of the UK. It just looks chaotic. But as you begin to to recognise the patterns, you begin to see the order and the structure. But here’s the here’s the point. Don’t let that make you become lazy. Don’t let that make you think you’ve discovered it. And they’re not going to be repeating self similarities to the point of Infinity.

72. 35:59

    No, that’s the beauty we all understand. There’s just endless levels of marvel. As we zoom in and we get higher and higher resolution view, we see more and more there’s self similarity, the things that we can link to, but there are new things that are revealed all the time. And so this is a great way to think about approaching our Bible reading our Bible study.

73. 36:22

    And the point is that actually the, the, the whole way in which specifically the Hebrew scriptures are established is actually using a pattern approach. And I, I know that some of you have come across some of these ideas that the literary style, in fact of the Hebrew Bible is very much grounded in pattern recognition.

74. 36:41

    So you would have come across some of you chiasms. I haven’t got time to go into the detail. You could ask me if you want to know more details. But the way in which many texts are actually set up is in a repeating pattern style. Acrostic psalms and acrostic chapters are using a pattern structure.

75. 36:58

    There’s a lot of vocal pattern in the Hebrew language, incredible amount of use. We lose this in the English of assonance and alliteration, which is a a acoustic pattern which is built into the Hebrew text, and of course thematic pattern. So when we look at themes in the Bible, we’re expecting to find those themes repeat, but at different layers and levels. And this is often when we fall over each other because we we find a link of a theme and then somebody else seems to have found something that looks different. But really all it is is something at a different level or scale that’s self similar.

76. 37:36

    And really that’s the fractal nature of scripture revealing itself. I want to use an example so so that I can try and bring this together to make some sense. So let’s have a look at this. If you’ve got your Bibles open, let’s go to Isaiah 9, verse seven. Isaiah Chapter 9 verse 7 and it says in Isaiah 9 verse seven, one of these passages that you know, if you if you think long and hard about it, it kind of like messes with your mind because it says this talking about the future Kingdom of God.

77. 38:06

    Isaiah 97 says of the increase of his government and peace, there will be no end. Upon the throne of David and over his Kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgement and justice. From that time forward, even forever, the zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this. So we know that passage well. But did you see what that passage says? It has this picture of endless iteration. That’s what’s going on there.

78. 38:34

    Of the increase of his government and peace, there will be no end. It’s like that, Mandelbrot said. Because by the way, I could have left to go in for two hours, just zoom just keeps going and deeper and deeper. There will be no end. And this is this idea that we, we often just can’t get to grips with this idea of Infinity.

79. 38:50

    So the Kingdom is here, but it’s just growing and growing and growing and becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. And that’s the eternity aspect of the Kingdom in Isaiah 9 verse 7. But really that’s a macrocosm growing scale of the fractal that is the Kingdom. So what’s the essence of the pattern? What’s like the what’s the basic structure of the pattern of the Kingdom that we’re seeing increasing in size here in Isaiah 9 verse seven? Well, I want to put it to you that Jesus actually shares with us the essence of the pattern in the Lord’s Prayer. He says in the Lord’s Prayer, we pray your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So the essence of the pattern of Kingdom is the sovereignty of God, God’s will, which is in heaven on earth. So wherever we have the sovereignty of God’s will manifested in earth, and we’ll talk a bit more about what earth can actually represent, we have the pattern of the Kingdom. So that’s why we see the following demonstrated as a fractal in Daniel.

80. 40:00

    So if you will come with me now to Daniel. Chapter 2 We know this passage very well. Daniel’s dream, Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, he’s describing the coming Kingdom, but he uses a microcosm, macrocosm, kind of increasing scale way of describing it. So we have in Daniel 2 verse 34, you watch while a stone was cut without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces.

81. 40:36

    So we have, as it were, I put it to you, a Kingdom, a stone cut without hands. Jesus Christ, a man in whom the sovereignty of heaven dwelt in him who was the first revelation truly of the Kingdom of God is the stone. And that stone comes to the, the image of Nebuchadnezzar, the kingdoms of men, as Daniel describes this.

82. 40:59

    And it begins like that. Boom. Now what’s going to happen is it’s going to iterate. It’s going to increase in scale and size. And so we have the way it’s described. Look at verse 35. Then the iron and the clay and the bronze and the silver and the gold were crushed together and became like chaff from the summing summer threshing floor.

83. 41:18

    The wind carried them away so that no trace of them was found. And the stone that struck the image became a great mountain. So now that Kingdom that was a stone, think of Azayanan, of the increase of his government has now become a mountain. Like it’s Israel. It’s like now a Kingdom the size of a mountain. Oh, OK, cool.

84. 41:37

    So that is that that that Kingdom now is at a bigger level, which is the level of a mountain. And then it says and the great mountain then fold the whole earth. So it says with as if the mountain now has become a range of mountains that’s following the earth. And so we get in this microcosm, macrocosm, super macrocosm, it’s a fractal repeating itself.

85. 42:00

    And just in case you’re not seeing it all now, when we come back to that passage that for so long I think many of us have tried to explain in the wrong way when Jesus turned to them and said, and the Kingdom of God is within you. Absolutely, all the way to the macrocosm of one day, God’s sovereignty fulling all the earth as we have been promised, all the way to the opportunity for right now, the sovereignty of God, the will of heaven to full your heart and your life.

86. 42:36

    And Jesus says the Kingdom of God is within you like a stone, like a seed, it will self replicate, it will become self similar and grow and grow until it fills the whole earth. And that’s just one example of many. But the one fractal foundation we will be talking a lot about and be illustrating over and over again, is that which is captured in the phrase heaven and earth, which we will focus on a bit more tomorrow.