Closer Than Close, Part I
Closer Than Close, Part I
Psalm 36: 5, 6
Rev. 5: 13 – 14
January 18, 2026
I find myself increasingly thankful for the book written by Mark Batterson, lead pastor at National Community Church, and author of A Million Little Miracles. In many ways, his writing reminds me of a lesson my father taught me many years ago.
But, before that, Batterson tells of a journal article written in 1879 by Samuel H. Scudder, a student of Dr. Louis Agassiz1. Agassiz was an influential naturalist, Harvad professor, and founder of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Scudder tells the story of being given a specimen jar with a preserved fish inside. Agassiz evidently gave him the specimen and told him to look at it, carefully and thoroughly, and then he – the professor – would ask Scudder – the student – what he noticed.
After 10 minutes, Scudder writes, “I had seen all that could be seen in that fish, and started in search of the professor.” The professor had left for the day. Over the course of 10-hour days, stretching into several weeks, forced by the repeated insistence of the professor, Scudder began to notice and document what he observed. Scudder finished his observation by writing that Scudder’s observations had led to results that astonished him and satisfied the professor.
After the first 10 minutes on that initial day, Scudder had “seen all that could be seen in that fish.” After several weeks of pain-staking observation he captured so much more.
My father, his two brothers, my siblings and cousins all went for a walk one day around a lake in the countryside of New Jersey. We kids, of course, ran along the trail seeing absolutely nothing but the backs of those running in front of us. The kids looped the lake relatively quickly and decided to catch back up to our dads and uncles. I remember my dad being so disappointed in us.
He and his brothers had been from a very poor immigrant family and so had spent much of their childhood in the woods hunting game for the family table. He and his brothers had only walked a couple of hundred yards in the hour that it had taken us kids to run the entire lake and catch back up to them.
My dad then “asked” – and I use that term very loosely – he asked my siblings and I to walk with him the rest of the way. On that walk we were shown flowers that we had just raced past. Our dad showed us incredible spider webs and beautiful trees. Most importantly for my dad, he showed us game trails, deer prints, and evidence of animals that we had never seen. His point was two-fold. First, he was trying to teach us how to track animals in the wild. But more important, our Dad was telling us to slow down and notice the beauty of the natural world around us.
Our dad was a Naval Aviator; he spent his days flying in one of the Navy’s hottest fighter jets capable of flying almost twice the speed of sound. His job was highly technical, and his safety often depended on his ability to handle those technical challenges. But he never lost his love for nature, and it was important to him that we kids observed and appreciated God’s Creation as well.
We have just spent two weeks thinking together about the majesty, the grandeur of God. To loo at some of the pictures of the cosmos from the great telescopes in use is to gain an appreciation for just how great the God who created and holds that Cosmos in his hands is.
We were encouraged to get out of the tents of our own making and look beyond our self-imposed limitations and count the stars. But friends, I fear that in our haste, in our busyness, perhaps even in our arrogance we fail to notice the multitude of miracles, those signposts pointing to God, those life markers of the God who is close to us as well.
Like Scudder in our story, a few moments of observation is deemed to be enough. We think we have seen it all but there is so very, very much that we never see - and in that blindness - I fear we miss the proof of God our Creator, as well as the image of that Creator God that can be found in each of us.
Imagine with me, sitting on the hillside overlooking both Capernaum and the northern section of the Sea of Galilee. To your left, over the Golan Heights is the majestic Mount Hermon – 9200 feet tall and straddling the borders of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel.
To the right is Magdala, the home of Mary Magdalene and today a fruitful supplier of agricultural goods. Bananas and Mango trees sit under netting for acres to protect their fruit.
Down the hill sits Capernaum, an important fishing village during the time of Jesus. Home to roughly 1500 citizens, countless boats left from its shore. It was also the home of 5 of the disciples of Jesus and during the active ministry of Jesus, Capernaum became his home away from home.
The Sea of Galilee stretches out to the south in front of you with the modern city of Tiberias close by on the western shore. To sit on that hillside is a beautiful thing, and those large things – the mountain, the farmland, the excavated city (interestingly, only about 5% of the first century city of Capernaum is currently excavated) – mountains, farmlands, cities, the lake is all gorgeous and it captures your attention.
But there is so much that we don’t typically see and hear. In the spring, those green hillsides are covered with the golden glow of mustard plants. Wood pigeons fly above you, gulls dive bomb into the water to catch fish. If you are lucky, the guide has led you to one of the several natural amphitheaters that exist on that hillside, and you can imagine Jesus offering the Sermon on the Mount to the thousands below him.
But that is only if you have ears and eyes to see beyond the big and spectacular to notice the small and the beautiful. The evidence for God is all around us – if we look for it. Miracles abound, and the origination for these miracles – all of them – have some sort of cosmological starting place.
I like what Batterson writes.2 “I believe in an infinite God who created the heavens and the earth ex nihilo – out of nothing. Does that take faith [Betterson asks]? Absolutely. But it takes no more faith than any other cosmology. ‘Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus,’ said Glen Scrivener. Atheists believe in the virgin birth of the universe. Choose your miracle.’”3
Eugene Peterson, in his unique translation of Psalm 36, wrote:
God’s love is meteoric,
his loyalty astronomic,
His purpose titanic,
his verdicts oceanic.
Yet in his largeness
nothing gets lost;
Not a man, not a mouse,
slips through the cracks.
No one, in God’s creative ability slips through the cracks. The image of God is in each of us. Batterson writes: “We all began as a single cell. That is mind-boggling, is it not? Yet conception is so common that we take it for granted rather than taking it for gratitude.” I would just insert here that I don’t believe the couples who struggled with infertility issues would be guilty of taking conception for granted. But Batterson continues, “Next to creation, there is no miracle [he is speaking of conception] more amazing. A fertilized egg measures 1/10 of a millimeter. How is that even possible?
‘The mere existence of that cell,‘ said Lewis Thomas, ‘should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.’4
At the moment of conception, our genetic makeup is already encoded into our double-helix DNA. At full term, the average baby measures 20 inches and more than 7 pounds. That’s more than 5,000 times the size of that fertilized egg, in nine months no less. If that’s not miraculous, I am not sure what is!”5
Each of us - made in the image of God, created in the divinely designed process of Creation, purposed for loving God and God’s people – if we truly understand just how close God is, and that we are, each of us, God’s walking miracles – then I can’t help but believe that we would see each other differently; regardless of ethnicity, gender, or any other of the differences that we use to treat each other differently.
If we slowed down, and bothered to look – really look – would we not have a higher appreciation for God’s creation and our roll as stewards of that Creation?
If we opened our eyes to see, really see, would we not do more than pick blackberries? Would we not join in that great song that we will all be singing in eternity:
“To the one seated on the throne
and to the Lamb
be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”
And then we would shout, “Amen” and fall down in worship. Friends, let’s not wait for eternity. Our worship, our praise, and our service can begin now! Amen.
Footnotes
1 “Agassiz and the Fish, by a Student” (American Poems, 3rd ed. [Boston: Houghton, Osgood & Co., 1879], pp. 450-54). Captured in “A Million Little Miracles”, by Mark Batterson, pgs. 120-121.
2 Mark Batterson, A Million Little Miracles (Multnomah Press, 2024), pgs. 104-105.
3 Glen Scrivener, quoted in Rebecca McLaughlin, Is Christmas Unbelievable? Four Questions Everyone Should Ask About The World’s Most Famous Story (Charlotte, N.C.: The Good Book Company, 2021) p. 45.
4 Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail: Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Penguin, 1995, pg 156. Contained in Mark Batterson, A Million Little Miracles (Multnomah Press, 2024), p. 77.
5 Mark Batterson, A Million Little Miracles (Multnomah Press, 2024), p. 77.