Nu·mi·nous: “Having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity.”

The marvel of the Judeo-Christian worldview is that the world, the heavens, the universe, and all that is in them, is numinous. It is bright and charged with life, glory, mystery, wonder, meaning, design, and purpose–all from the hand of a mighty, wise, and loving God. Every molecule is full of magic. Every day of creation is designed and purposed by the wisdom of God. Each day part of an eco-system. Each day dependent on other days. Each day integral. Each day charged with life. Each day a note in a divine symphony.

The creation and all its parts are numinous.

Telescopes and microscopes herald the glory of God.

The universe was magic.

If you’d like to see it in writing, read Psalm 104.

Then something happened, and the magic was lost. What was produced was the horror of the 20th century, modernity. Atheism, materialism, atomism, Marxism, Freudianism, Darwinism, secular humanism: all these are ideas erupting from a culture with no God, no Creator, no purpose, no rules, no hope, no answers, a world that is dead and darkened.

Honestly, it’s the stuff of horror movies: nothingness. Man longs for the numinous, however, and is content with nothing less. That is why a Creator, and man in the image of that Creator, Satan, angels and demons, a creation reflecting the divine mind, and a magic nation with an enchanted book telling of history past, present, and future, whose apex came with the most numinous of ideas: the God-man, the Lord Jesus, the Anointed and magic child bringing salvation to a world held in the dark night of a fallen angel, is the most numinous of ideas.

The world of the Bible is charged with magic. Without God, we desperately look for His substitute.

  • Pantheism: All is God. God is all, so nothing is God.
  • Dualism: Good and evil are forces struggling. This is Darth and Luke, the Empire and the Rebel Force.
  • Darwinism as presented by the media: This is "Mother Nature," the "élan vital" (the life force), nature with a capital "N."
  • Politics, where men become involved in determining life's end
  • Greenpeace and Climate Change: "Save the whales!"
  • The false hope of Communism or Cultural Marxism (i.e. Wokeism)
  • Aliens, conspiracies…
  • The New Age: spiritism, witchcraft, seances…
  • The 60s: drugs and Cosmic Consciousness

In his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis wrote of the war going on in his mind as he attempted to reconcile the evidence he saw of God's existence in creation with the Atheism he was taught. He said, “The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast...Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.” When we divorce the creation from the Creator, God, we divorce meaning from the creation.

The point: Man cannot live with the logical conclusions of Atheism. Man refuses to be simply dust in the wind, a Rebel Without a Cause, The Walking Dead, a cosmic orphan.

Man will be someone.