The Fingers of God - Part 2

O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? [Psalm 8:1-4 AV]

Sanda Island in cloud, Southend, Kintyre

In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: [Daniel 5:5a AV]

The King, Belshazzar, saw the fingers of a man's hand write on the wall* and he was greatly troubled by the message from God - he could not interpret it  - and called on all his astrologers, soothsayers and wise men to find the meaning of the heavenly writing, but they too failed to find the answer. They could not understand what God was pointing at. Only Daniel ('in whom is the spirit of the holy gods') could give the understanding.

It is always the case that only those that have eyes to see and ears to hear will understand the works of God; will see what the finger of God is writing in their hearts. The Hebrew word for 'finger' means to seize or grasp. It is an active word. We cannot grip without fingers - either physical or spiritual ones - and when The Lord wants us to grab hold of something that He is saying to us, He uses the finger of His Holy Spirit to point us in the right direction, be it a verse of scripture, a word spoken by a friend, or a thought placed in our minds.

Now a similar word, but from the same root word as 'finger', means 'diverse colours'; used for Joseph's coat of 'many colours'. Colour has great spiritual significance in Scripture - too much to go into detail here - but for me as a painter in watercolour, I know that my colour is a pigment suspended in water, properly a 'colloid' - a cloud of colour held in place by the action of water molecules on the particles of pigment. In the science class at school, this 'Brownian Motion' could be observed through the use of a thing called a 'Wilson Cloud Chamber'* This device allows us to understand what is happening through the action of light shining through a cloud.

God's fingers bring the light of understanding to His people. He shines the clear pure light of The Holy Spirit through the clouds in our minds, so that we 'see the light' ...

... and when white light is shone through a prism, it splits into many colours - or to turn it around - many colours make up one pure light. To me this speaks of the many attributes of God in one; that He is The great God above all gods.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. 
All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world. [John 1:1-9 NKJV]

  * Note that the fingers wrote over against the candlestick, the source of light.

** Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (1869–1959), a Scottish physicist, is credited with inventing the cloud chamber. Inspired by sightings of the Brocken spectre while working on the summit of Ben Nevis in 1894, he began to develop expansion chambers for studying cloud formation and optical phenomena in moist air. Very rapidly he discovered that ions could act as centres for water droplet formation in such chambers. He pursued the application of this discovery and perfected the first cloud chamber in 1911.
In Wilson's original chamber the air inside the sealed device was saturated with water vapour, then a diaphragm was used to expand the air inside the chamber (adiabatic expansion), cooling the air and starting to condense water vapour. Hence the name expansion cloud chamber is used.
When an ionizing particle passes through the chamber, water vapour condenses on the resulting ions and the trail of the particle is visible in the vapour cloud.
Wilson, along with Arthur Compton, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927 for his work on the cloud chamber. This kind of chamber is also called a pulsed chamber because the conditions for operation are not continuously maintained. Further developments were made by Patrick Blackett who utilised a stiff spring to expand and compress the chamber very rapidly, making the chamber sensitive to particles several times a second. A cine film was used to record the images.

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Keep Walking (in the light of The Lord) - Eva Mae LeFevre

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