Endothermic God, Part 3--what about us?

Just one more note about our perpetual motion God.

He is endothermic because He allows us to give back to Him.  We praise him, we do good for him, "ascribing honor, glory, and power."  We cannot possibly increase his energy level, but we feed into him anyway.  God admits throughout the bible that His heart is gladdened by his people.  Somehow, we add happiness to him.

Yet that very accepting--the very endothermicness of taking from us--throbs with exothermic action.  As our frigid little bodies draw near to him, giving him the tiny lack of heat that we are, our actions of love warm our own hearts by nearness to him.  "God loves a cheerful giver"--in our giving, we receive love and blessing.  Even God's stooping, bending down to accept our love only comes down to another exothermic giving of himself to us.

And yet through all this giving, he keeps on growing in energy.  Some mystical way, we feed into him, and his blessing moves through us back to him.  "From him" comes blessing, through us, back "to him"--all things work this way.  He blesses himself through us, enriching himself, increasing in energy, and in some mystical way, we commune.  God's exothermic nature spills over into us and we heat the people around us, and they catch on fire and heat towards God, and that nearness heats them, and it becomes an ever growing river of fire, of energy...

And onward into eternity we go.

Hot, Hot, Endothermic Deity 2

(*In case you have forgotten--I have simplified the definitions of endothermic and exothermic here.)

A while ago, I claimed that God is exothermic.  "Oh, no," you say. "The Title said..."  Well, yes, it did.  It said endothermic, even though I wrote an exothermic blog post.  Why?

Well, is God endothermic?  An endothermic reaction ends with more energy than it began with.  It brings heat into itself, from its surroundings, and leaves a highly potent system.  Many synthesis reactions are endothermic.  It often takes energy to push things together.  Because endothermic reactions have to take on energy, we say they are "energetically unfavorable:" They usually don't happen all by themselves unless they cause some extra special increase in disorder.

God is not endothermic in that way.  He does not need outside intervention to make the magic happen.  The Bible calls him a consuming fire, highly reactive, highly heat-giving, highly "energetically favorable," new every morning.  An exotherm.

Yet God does not lose energy like an exotherm.  He draws into himself.  He consistently becomes more and more potent, never burning out, never running out of anything--not uniqueness, not energy, not perfection--but rather improving always.  Can he improve upon perfection?  In the Bible, yes, for God is "perfect in Holiness."  Perfect in "differentness." When he promises that we will become perfect, because He is perfect, he still promises that he will remain different than us.  He will be ever more perfect than we.  He will always increase in energy and creativity, coming up with new ways to bless us, new mercies.  Hebrews even says that Jesus, the already perfect man, was perfected through his death on the cross, though he had no defects before; he did not need to die on the cross to become somehow worthy.  Yet in both Revelation and Isaiah we see that this death makes Christ all the more worthy of praise--even though he was already infinitely worthy before!  Like an endothermic reaction, His internal energy and his bright glory always ends up higher than it began, and He is more powerful, beautiful, helpful, good, and world-changing each moment. 

So God is the only being consistently improving without sucking something from his environment.  He is a consuming fire--he continually consumes, increases, takes into himself--yet he needs nothing to keep his fire going.  He is the exotherm giving heat to his endothermic, increasing-in-energy self, the only perpetual motion machine.  "From him and to him are all things": from that exothermic superstore flows all our heat, all our energy, physical and spiritual, and to the endothermic improvement he grows.

Hot, Hot Endothermic Deity Part 1

Real quick, sorry I forgot to post something last week!  Anyway, today is Chemistry day here at Prometheus Studies, and I want to tell you about the Master of Paradoxes as endothermic and exothermic!

So endothermic and exothermic are chemically opposite phenomena that make beautiful analogies to how God works.  For those of you who don't know, something is endothermic when it absorbs heat and exothermic when it gives off heat--endo for "in" kind of, and exo for "out."  I always remember exo because of exoskeleton, which is the outside part of a bug, but that's probably not the easiest way for you to remember it.  However you remember it, things that are exothermic give off heat, and end up becoming colder than they were.  If you touch them, they feel hot, because the heat they are giving off is being absorbed by your hand.  So when something feels hot, it's exothermic and losing heat (becoming colder) as you take the heat away with your hand.  The opposite is true of endothermic--it absorbs heat, and feels cold because as IT is getting hotter, YOU are getting colder because it's stealing your heat like the mean little temperature vampire that it is mwahahahaha

As you can see I'm a bit on the excited side today. 

Anyway, so God is infinitely exothermic and infinitely endothermic.  He is exothermic because he gives off heat and light and energy, always at his own expense, to support and supply all the rest of us.  To us, he feels hot, sometimes threateningly so, or comfortably warm, because he is a violent and dangerous giver.  An explosion is an exothermic thing--he is like that.  A hand-warmer is another exothermic thing, and he is like that, too.  Whether in violent ways that blow us away, or in gentle every day kindness, God is an exothermic giver. 

But can God really become colder, like exothermic reactions are doing as they lose and give off heat?  As in, while we take what He has, does He experience loss?  Well, I would say yes, because when Jesus was walking around on earth, he was always losing.  He lost comfort, friendship, pleasure, and even life on his exothermic mission to give.  That's in fact the whole mystery of Jesus--that an infinitely warm God could become cold and dead as He poured Himself out for His people. 

This ties back to the whole point of this blog.  Fire, which Prometheus brings to man in the Greek legend, is a result of an exothermic "oxidation reaction" between oxygen and something else (usually an organic polymer like cellulose in wood) burning to create carbon dioxide and water.  It's the giving of heat as heat is taken out of the chemicals themselves.  Prometheus was exothermic just like the reaction--as he gave fire to man, he experienced loss of all the "heat" that makes existence wonderful as he suffered alone, a failure out on a cold mountain top cursed by the gods.  The Abundant Source of Fire finds himself cold, although we feel him as warm and giving, and the Abundant Source of Life finds himself dead.

I really appreciate that my dear Exothermic One did that for me.

All Gen Chem knowledge.  Next week, in Part 2, we'll talk about how God is endothermic.