The Gospel, God's Great Undoing

By Glenn A Fink and Vladimir Savchuk

God made the universe. We messed it up! What He did to fix it is amazing, but what that did for us is nothing short of shocking. Join me on a journey to find out what God's undoing did for you and me. You will discover:

•          How the universe was created

•  

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Identity Workshop
• Release date: Oct 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737267614

Glenn A Fink

Glenn Fink is a disciple of Jesus, father, researcher, and scientist. His generally insatiably curiosity has led him into many fields including cybersecurity, creation science, artificial intelligence, biblical studies, languages, the science of the spirit, and many more. He considers himself a scientific mystic, with the knowledge that understanding is possible, but only in part. His great goal is to know God and connect others to God. He contributes to a blog for his Hungry Generation Church (https://www.hungrygen.com/blog where he publishes excerpts from his books and other meditations.From a technical perspective, Dr. Glenn A. Fink has specialized in computer security, bio-inspired technologies, visualization, and human-centric computing at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) since 2006. Dr. Fink is the lead inventor of PNNL's Digital Ants technology, which Scientific American cited as one of ten "world-changing ideas" in 2010. His recent work includes research in bio-inspired technologies and artificial intelligence applied to cybersecurity. He has published over 30 scientific papers in the area of cyber security.Dr. Fink received his doctorate in 2006 from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). His dissertation, "Visual Correlation of Network Traffic and Host Processes" fostered an open source software project. Prior to PNNL, Dr. Fink worked for 15 years as a software engineer for the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia, on projects such as the Trident ballistic missile program, a unified ground-control station for unoccupied aerial vehicles, and a virtual operations network for rapid-deployment coalition warfare. Dr. Fink served for 11 years as an Army Reserve officer in the Signal Corps where he attained the rank of Captain and commanded a communications company.

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Foreword

I usually start my message at church with the joyful declaration, God is good, and people would respond, All the time. I would say, All the time, and they would reply, God is good. The gospel is the good news about the good God. God is good. We are invited to taste and see that He is good. It’s His goodness that leads men to re pentance. 

In our world of negativity from the latest headlines and news stories, we need a fresh reminder and revelation of the goodness of God. Maybe when you’re looking at your life, you don’t see any evidence that God is good. Perhaps a doctor’s report makes you doubt that there is any good in your life. Relationship strains cause you to give up on seeing goodness in people. God has hidden His goodness in the gospel, in His story of creation, redemption, and pursuit of us. 

The gospel is more than a story or good news; it’s a reality of God’s passionate pursuit of humanity. It’s out of love, not pity, that He has given us His Son. From the creation of the universe to Christ’s death, and then to your rebirth, The Gospel: God’s Great Undoing will take you on a journey of what the gospel truly is. You will never look at the gospel the same way. As Glenn puts it, The gospel is the story of God Himself becoming undone to undo the evil that had undone us. God owns us three times over: first by creating us, then by redeeming us, and finally by wooing us to fall in love with Him.

Glenn is the vessel that carries the gospel, the goodness of God. He does that not only in a smile, a hug, or an encouraging prophetic word, but also with power and authority. You can’t hang around him without it rubbing off on you. The revelation he is walking in will rub off on you as you read this book. 

As you dive into this book, I believe that the Holy Spirit will guide you into the heart of the gospel, and your life will truly be undone!

— Vladimir Savchuk

Hungry Generation

Preface: What I Hope You Will Receive from This Book

You may not realize it, but we are caught up in a cosmic drama where God’s goodness is on trial. Since the Creation, God has been showing the universe that He is good; yet His goodness has been continually challenged by devils, fallen humans, and even His own people. He could force the issue by all rights, but to do that would make Him a tyrant, and He isn’t. He could just acquiesce and let the universe run wild, but that would make Him an unloving, permissive parent, and He isn’t tha t either.

Instead, He shows all of us His great love by allowing Himself to be undone so that He can undo—with us—the very rebellion that has been our undoing. The gospel is truly God’s great undoing, and I hope to demonstrate this throughout the pages that follow.

You may not realize it, but we are caught up in a cosmic drama where God’s goodness is on trial.

This book is my best attempt to make known the beautiful truths I’ve learned from the Bible through communion with God and from reading His book of nature. This is not a book about doctrine; instead, it is my attempt to study God and know Him intimately and to let you in on some of what I’ve found there.

Similarly, this is not a science book. Instead, it is my attempt to show how the truth of the gospel beautifully harmonizes with what we see in nature. No Christian should ever be intimidated by scientists whose opinions are contrary to the gospel. All you have to do is wait a few years, and their controversial theories will shift, change, and be discarded. But the truth of the gospel never changes. It cannot because God cannot change.

So I gladly take responsibility for any misapprehension I have about God, the gospel, or science. The truth always points to itself. But we do not always understand it, nor can we always explain well what we understand. So I choose to take a scientific approach to God and the gospel here. We scientists always know we are wrong, but we hope we are less wrong today than yesterday. Enjoy reading, and we’ll find out!

Introduction: The Science of the Gospel

To write a good book, you must read many books. C.S. Lewis said that rather than reading a new book, it is often better to re-read an old book. And what better old book to read and reread is there than the Bible? The Bible (if it is what it purports to be) has a unique advantage over all other books: It was written by One who lives outside of our time and space, but the Author expressed it through the words and experiences of men and women who lived in our world. This gives it a unique, eternal perspective while remaining completely relatable.

When we believe, the Bible turns out to be much more than we ever thought possible. It is living, powerful, and even scary!

This book has been growing in my heart for some years now, ever since I discovered that the gospel, as I had understood it from my youth, was only a very dim shadow of the reality I have since found in Christ. Sadly, it seems that many—if not most—of those who call themselves the church refuse to believe the gospel in all its power and glory. But when we believe, the Bible turns out to be much more than we ever thought possible. It is living, powerful, and even scary!

God, who gives order and life to the cosmos, chose to allow it free will and watched it burn with rebellion. But He was not silent. He entered into the chaos and swallowed its poison whole. He took on Himself the burden of our lies and evil, allowing Himself to become a mess so He could help us straighten out our own mess—if we’ll allow Him.

As a scientist, people sometimes ask me how I can believe these quaint Bible stories of an immaterial God and still be a good scientist. A lot of unspoken prejudice is tightly packed into questions like that. I actually believe that being a scientist is a great way to get to know the Maker of all we study. Science is only a way to understand reality. Reality reflects its Creator. It just makes sense.

Science is only a way to understand reality. Reality reflects its Creator.

When I wrestle with questions like why God chose to become human and suffer and die, or how such an unthinkable process could possibly fix the problem with the world and restore His children to beauty and order, I think about them scientifically. In fact, I must confess that I came up with the idea for this book while reading my children’s high school chemistry book¹—I’m a scientist; I’m weird that way. Anyway, I was reading about the concept of entropy or disorder, and the book gave the example of a priceless vase sitting on the mantle of your fireplace that your cat or child carelessly causes to fall to the tile floor. It shatters into a million pieces. While the vase was resting on the mantle, it was in a state of low entropy because it was not very disordered. But when it shatters, the vase (or what’s left of it) moves into a state of high entropy because it is now very disordered.

Don’t you wish you could have the reverse process happen: the broken shards of the vase would rise from the floor and self-assemble on the mantle just as it was before? The reason this does not and cannot happen spontaneously is because of a principle we have observed about the universe: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In any closed system, entropy must always increase or remain the same. It can never decrease without outside assistance.

Considering the universe itself as a closed system the Second Law says everything always decays. How depressing.

But as an information scientist, entropy² has always fascinated me because I believe information is the opposite of entropy; information is order. A series of ten digits could mean anything, but if they are the right digits, and if I arrange them just so, you might recognize a meaningful U.S. telephone number. Or what if I went on a hike and found an arrangement of rocks that spelled out, Welcome to the mountains, Glenn Fink! No one who saw it would say it happened by chance. That rock formation would contain information in a form that Michael Behe calls specified complexity (Behe, 2010)—an arrangement of matter in a form that conveys a message. Information is always conveyed as a coded message.

I think of information as in-formation, a formation inside. The rocks themselves may be quite ordinary, but the message in their formation is the matter of interest. Now suppose some vandal comes and distorts the message. This could make the message say less, something misleading, or nothing at all. This distortion is entropy, a corruption of information.

It takes energy to form the rocks into a message, and it takes (usually much less) energy to distort an existing message. But the Second Law guarantees that unless something acts on them, the rocks will never become ordered. The order may decay, but energy and information are required to increase their order or repair a corrupted order.

At this point, you may be thinking that you stumbled into the completely wrong book. What could this possibly have to do with the gospel? Quite a bit, actually.

When God created this universe, He said it was very good. He formed it and ordered it. He in-formed it. God is the source of all information. He copied some of His own information into its design. Misinformation is simply corruption of His order.

When man fell, Adam accepted a lie, and disorder corrupted image of God that had been man. Creation was ruined—undone.

When man fell, Adam accepted a lie, and disorder came into God’s perfect world. Entropy corrupted the perfect copy of divine information, the image of God, that had been man. Creation was ruined—undone. I suppose God could have balled the whole thing up, thrown it away, and started again. But He didn’t. He had purpose in allowing His creation to be corruptible, and He wasn’t about to let it go that easily. In fact, to undo the undoing of His perfect creation, God Himself actually had to become undone. I find this shocking. And this is why I call the gospel God’s great undoing.

[God] has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began. This has now been made evident through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who has abolished death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. (2 Timothy 1:9–10)

Two key concepts from these verses stand out to me: Christ abolished (to deactivate and disconnect) death and brought life and immortality (the destruction of corruption) to light. Jesus undid our undoing, and He did it by becoming undone Himself.

God planned before the foundation of the world that Christ would be undone so that we could be restored to the life and glory He always intended. I believe if there were any other way, His choice for His Son to suffer would have been unimaginably cruel. But in a single act of amazing humility and love, He undid all the damage of the fall of man and all the curses of the law (Gal. 3:13). The gospel is truly God’s great undoing, and I hope to examine that in greater detail in this book by looking at both God’s universe and His revelation in the Bible to show how both shed light on God’s intentions toward mankind and His great plans revealed in the gospel.

Jesus undid our undoing, and He did it by becoming undone Himself.

The gospel is simply the message announcing the reunited kingdom of God. The kingdom was broken in the garden of Eden where the earth and all of nature fell because its ruler, Adam, gave in to satan. The world divorced heaven and embraced hell. The gospel announces God’s ultimate victory in the decisive battle that won the long civil war between God and His fallen children. But although it announces the decisive victory, the gospel does not contain the last battle against evil. Those battles are being fought every day in our lives as we decide how to live in the kingdom. The gospel is not so much something to be studied and understood as it is something to be believed and acted upon.

I love superhero movies. In almost every one there comes a time when the heroes are completely exhausted, bleeding, and beaten. For all their valiant struggle, victory has eluded them. The evil villain has won and the world as we know it is over. At that terrible moment, when hope is completely lost, the unexpected plot twist happens! Perhaps reinforcements arrive, or the villain makes a critical error, but suddenly the enemies who were having their way with the heroes are confounded! All of a sudden, the impossible victory is theirs if they will only turn and fight.

This is the gospel: the announcement that hell’s war against heaven has been lost, God has won, the human hostages are freed, and now all that is left is the cleanup. We must believe this message and act upon it if we want to take part in the victory. But when we hear the message, we find it is strange beyond imagination. Our victorious Captain willingly chose to die at the hands of His enemy, yet this became His greatest victory.

Why did Jesus have to come in a body? Why did He have to die? What does this mean for me? These are questions this book wrestles with. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but we do have the Bible, information that reflects God’s perfect nature and character. And we have Creation, the general revelation of God for all mankind. From these we can extract truths that help us decode the message and become restored through the in-formation of God’s original purpose.

The gospel is the story of God Himself becoming undone to undo the evil that had undone us.

The gospel is the story of God Himself becoming undone to undo the evil that had undone us. God owns us three times over: first by creating us, then by redeeming us, and finally by wooing us to fall in love with Him. The account of creation is critical to the truth of the gospel. It tells us about the awesomeness of God and the world He made. Creation tells us why we should expect the universe to make sense. Without an intelligible universe, science is impossible. If naturalism is correct, we have no reason to believe the universe is orderly enough to study, and natural laws become impossible to rely on. And if the creation story in the Bible is not factually reliable, then neither is the account of the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. Creation as the foundation of the gospel is the subject of Part 1, The Universe Done.

Once we understand what God made the universe and humankind to be, we can begin to understand just how messed up things are now. When Adam and Eve fell, they took the whole universe with them. Our world was a gateway to heaven, but their sin tore it away from God’s domain and tried to set it up as a separate, independent kingdom. Unfortunately, people are not strong enough to rule the world without God. So God’s enemy took advantage of the situation to become the god of this world and to unmake man in his own perverse image. As the unity of earth and heaven was shattered, so the unity of the human heart was torn in two, and we suddenly had a choice between God’s will and ours. This shattered state resulted in a blindness that kept us from seeing ourselves as God saw us. Sadly, despite the mess, we still couldn’t see it. We thought that we were okay, so God gave us the Law to help us see the mess we were in. This is the topic of Part 2, The Universe Undone.

When God made this world, He created the free will that He knew would allow us to choose alternative gods. However, life comes from God alone. Life and love is wrapped up in the eternal Godhead that man had chosen to live apart from. By our own choosing, we had plunged ourselves into eternal death. But God chose to dive into our chaos and disorder to redeem His beautiful, renegade creation. He knew it would cost Him everything, but He was prepared to pay the price. He chose to allow Himself to be torn in half so that His life would pour out and be available to all who would choose Him once again. God was undone, and this great undoing is the heart of the gospel as presented in Part 3, God Undone.

The result for those who choose the life of God over the death that came from our flirtation with independence is life beyond our wildest dreams. There is a duality of now and not yet to this new life, but there is a lot more now than most of us dare to believe. Jesus came not as an example for us, but as the first example of us. He is Humanity 2.0, and in Him, we who believe participate in the new life of God and are rejoined to the Godhead in ways that no one but God truly understands. Our new identity is that of empowered sons and daughters, heirs of the kingdom. We are learning how to operate the family business; we are no longer just employees. The new freedom and power imply new levels of responsibility. We no longer have the excuse that we are powerless because "as He is, so are we in this world. We are now Humanity 2.0, and Part 4, Humanity Redone" briefly deals with what that looks like.

God delivered this message in person, in the flesh. He chose to become like us, to be undone Himself, and through that to reverse all the devil’s machinations and recreate us as sons of God in the image of Jesus!

In Hebrews 2, the author tells how the message of the gospel of Jesus is superior to the old covenant that was given to Moses. He goes on to say that this gospel, the good news, was not entrusted to angels for delivery, as was done with the Law. God delivered this one in person, in the flesh. He chose to become like us, to be undone Himself, and through that to reverse all the devil’s machinations and recreate us as sons of God in the image of Jesus! The gospel is truly God’s great undoing!

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1. Exploring Creation with Chemistry by Jay L. Wile (Apologia Educational Ministries, Incorporated, 2003, Hardcover, Student Edition)

2. In the information sciences, we mean something slightly different when we use the word entropy than the meaning physical scientists are accustomed to. By entropy, an information scientist usually is referring to the potential to be disordered, not the degree of disorder. There are more ways to mess up a long sentence than a short one, so longer sentences have more informational entropy, even though they may currently be highly ordered and information-dense. So entropy in the information sciences means something akin to information-carrying capacity rather than disorder. Similarly, in the physical sciences, more mass implies more entropy simply because physical stuff naturally exists in a highly disordered state. But solids are more ordered than liquids, which in turn have less entropy than gases. So, in some ways, both kinds of scientists actually are talking about the potential for disorder rather than the actual amount of disorder. Information is purer than matter because you can directly measure the information density of a message, but you cannot directly measure the entropy of a chunk of matter.

Part 1: The Universe Done

Chapter 1: The Big Picture

This book is about how the gospel is a cosmic drama where God’s goodness is on trial. God is good and there is no alternative, although His goodness has been continually challenged by devils, fallen humans, and even His own people. This section sets the stage for the cosmic drama by unfolding the creation of the universe and setting all the players in place. At this point in the drama, the only players are God, angels, and man. Fallen angels and demons are not yet on the scene, although we briefly touch on the de vil here.

We’ll start with the big picture of the entire universe and how it was created. To do this, we have to see that the Bible’s story of how things came into being is not just a pretty myth. It is an orderly, rational story that explains exactly what God intended and what He is doing in the gospel. This is why there are several parts here that are scientific. I want you to see God’s rationale behind creation.

But I am holding back here a bit. I would love to tell another story that defends creationism against the onslaught of evolutionism. But that will have to wait for another book. I touch on it briefly here, but I want to make sure we continue to move toward God’s ultimate purpose in the universe. I’ll do my best to make the overtly scientific parts easy to understand, so don’t lose heart if you’re not a scientist. If you are a scientist, please recall that this is a narrative, not a science text. I have played a little loose with the science to make things clear, but I mean no dishonor to our disciplines by doing so.

I want to tell you a story. It’s one you’ve no doubt heard before, but probably never quite in this way. This is my interpretation of the creation and purpose of the universe, and it is what the whole book examines in greater detail.

The whole creation, specifically mankind, is a demonstration that God is just as good as He says He is. This should never have been in doubt, but Ephesians 2:6–7 tells us that the grace given to us is a demonstration of God’s grace for all the ages to come. 1 Peter 1:12 tells us that angels would love to understand this mystery of grace revealed. Here’s how it happened.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)

Before there was anything, there was God. And God was perfect and happy, living in harmony with Himself as a society of three perfect, loving persons. Then, for His own reasons that we may never understand, He chose to create a physical universe and tiny creatures to inhabit it.

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. (Genesis 1:2)

I believe that God created a huge, formless mass like liquid water³, enough to make from it all the stars and galaxies and everything that exists. It might have been several lightyears in diameter. Apart from God’s power, as soon as God created gravity, this mass would automatically collapse immediately into a tiny point as a hyper-massive black hole. And perhaps it partially did at first. But...

Then God said, Let there be light, and there was light. (Genesis 1:3)

When God first made the heavens, all the stars and planets and everything else were very close together. All of creation existed in a universe-sized gravity well, and time, if it could pass at all, went by very slowly. Every tick of a clock inside the gravity well of the forming universe would have taken eons of what we consider normal time. This is called gravitational time dilation, and it is a direct conclusion of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

When God began to spread out the heavens, anyone watching from Earth would have only seen powerful light all around. At this point, time began to tick slowly forward on the rim of the universe that was emerging from the gravity well. But, nearest the center, on what would become Earth, time was crawling slowest of all.

God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. There was an evening, and there was a morning: one day. (Genesis 1:4–5)

Now God separates light from darkness, and my only guess here is that He started the proto-earth spinning as the universe expanded so that there were periods of light and darkness from Earth’s perspective. This is the part I really don’t have a great mental picture for, but someday we’ll know. Next, God really began stretching out the heavens.

Then God said, Let there be an expanse between the waters, separating water from water. So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above the expanse. And it was so. God called the expanse sky. Evening came and then morning: the second day. (Genesis 1:6–8)

The upper waters were all the material that did not belong on Earth. This included what became stars, exo-planets, our sun, and the solar system. As God separated out the outer materials from the central gravity well, two things happened: First, they left behind a trail of redshifted light, all the way back to Earth, and second, time began to race forward faster and faster at the rim while in the center, near Earth, time was still advancing slowly. This is one reason why 2 Peter 3:8 can literally say that a day with the Lord is as a thousand years⁴. God is outside the effects of time, and He sees it pass at all rates the same.

I personally believe that stars could very well be the physical manifestations, the hearts, or the power plants of angelic beings.

At this point in my story, I have to make a slight departure and talk about angelic beings. Like C.S. Lewis, I tend to believe that although the stars are made of hot gas and plasma, that is not what they are in essence. I personally believe that stars could very well be the physical manifestations, the hearts, or the power plants of angelic beings. That may sound outrageous, but consider Job 38:7 where God says that during creation, the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

How would great fiery balls of gas sing?

Also consider Ezekiel’s account of the cherubim of God who were accompanied by wheels that moved with them (Ezek. 1:16). The spirit of the cherubim was in the wheels, and the wheels were full of fire. This is a very strange vision, and not something to base our entire lives upon, but I wonder if something that looks like fire could be the lifeblood of the angels? And is that fire contained in separate round objects that look like wheels intersecting wheels (that is, spheres)? In Hebrews, God says His servants, the angels, are fire. Nothing is more fiery than the stars.

So it’s just a conjecture, but work with me on this. I believe God created the angels first. Their physical bodies are living stars, and from the perspective of these star beings, eons passed while they watched God form the earth. On Earth, just six literal days passed, but in the rim of the expanding universe, nearly fourteen billion years passed while the angels watched what appeared to be God’s slow, meticulous work!

We’ll skip over Genesis 1:9–13, which gives the account of God creating land, seas, and plants on the third day. Then we come to the heavens.

Then God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night. They will serve as signs for seasons and for days and years. They will be lights in the expanse of the sky to provide light on the earth. And it was so. God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule over the day and the lesser light to rule over the night—as well as the stars. God placed them in the expanse of the sky to provide light on the earth, to rule the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. Evening came and then morning: the fourth day. (Genesis 1:14–19)

By the time the evening of the fourth day happened on Earth, the universe had expanded to the point where individual stars could be seen. They must have been huge! No wonder it says that the morning stars sang together. You could probably see many of the stars during the day!

Now I want to skip forward over the creation of fish, birds, sea creatures, and land animals and talk about God’s crowning creation, mankind:

Then God said, Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth. So God created man in his own image; he created him