Musings on Rubber Duckie

Yesterday Nassia (age 3) and I were discussing the fact that Rubber Duckie, Ernie's bathtub pal, has no ears. I exclaimed in distress, "No ears! How can he hear?" Nassia considered the problem for a moment and then said: "It's OK. You just have to talk louder."

Indeed. Many of us who have been without ears for decades have finally been quickened in our hearing by God's megaphone-of pain or of loss or of failure. "Some wandered in desert wastes, finding no way to a city to dwell in . . . their soul fainted within them. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress" (Psalm 107:4-6).

There is an age-old riddle: "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there, does it make a sound?" This expresses the question of whether hearing is to be defined objectively, as the waves emitted from the crashing oak, or whether subjectively, as the experience of sound when those airborne ripples strike the ear receptors.

Similarly, the Bible teaches that the evidence for God is objectively there but rarely subjectively perceived. It has been "clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). And yet we are deaf and blind-"with their ears they can barely hear" (Acts 28:27).

Paul says we "suppress the truth" (Romans 1:18). What an interesting psychological phenomenon-for a person to walk around experiencing that vast canopy of sky with two simultaneous levels of consciousness: a surface level of agnosticism, and an underlying knowledge of the truth. It is equally interesting to me as I search the book of Revelation that in the end, when God judges, no one will object that he didn't hear or see well.

To hear commentaries read by Andrée Seu, click here.