Does a Fish Know He’s Wet?

Acts 17:28a (ESV)
²⁸  for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’….”

When I attended philosophy classes in school, I was presented with questions, earth shaking questions, questions only the greatest trained minds could possibly ponder: Why don’t sheep shrink when it rains, why isn’t phonetics spelled phonetically, and does a fish know he’s wet?

The other day, I was discussing the latter with a friend and wondered if we might be like the fish.  Maybe Acts 17:28 means we’re immersed in God.  His presence is everywhere, right?  He’s all around us, yet most people don’t recognize He’s here because they’ve known nothing else.  Like the fish who has never been anything but wet, we’ve never been anything but immersed in the presence of God.

If we’ve been immersed in His presence since time began how would we understand that to be the case? It would seem to be the “normal” state of affairs.  The terrifying part for the fish is when he is removed from the water, gasps for water to breathe, and eventually suffocates.  He didn’t know he was wet or that there was an alternative state.

We humans are all going along in our happy lives.  Many deny the very God in which we are immersed.  Like the fish, we don’t know God surrounds us because we’ve never known a time when He hasn’t.

With that in mind, we know that God is love (1 John 4:16).  Maybe no love exists without God being present.  We love because we are saturated in the presence of God.  Our love for our friends, our spouses, our siblings, our parents, all may be drawn from the love that surrounds us in God’s presence.

Now let’s consider what sort of world it would be and what sort of lives we would lead without God surrounding us and without His love to draw on.  It would be a lonely unloving, and – since fear is the opposite of love – a terrifying existence.  There might be others around us but without love or any desire to commune together, help one another, or encourage one another, it would be a place of sadness, fear, and pain.  It would be a terrifying place, a very dark and empty existence.  It would be very much like what Jesus describes in Matthew 25:30:

Matthew 25:30 (ESV)
³⁰  And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Life wouldn’t end in that place, but love would.  If standing in the presence of God is light, then being cast away from His presence would be outer darkness.

God will not remove His light from those who reject Him while they are still here.  Surely they can love and have compassion for others because the love of God is still present, still around them filling them and protecting them.  They believe the love they express comes from them alone, not from God.  They have an inner darkness, though, a personal darkness.  The light in them comes only from being made in God’s image.  But, there will be a day when they will be asked to account for the light they were given, for what they have done with it.  If they have refused that light, rejected the love of God which surrounds them, if they refuse to believe they are “wet,” they will be cast into outer darkness, a place where there is no light, no love, no presence of God; only darkness and fear.

What was comfortable and natural for them when they were alive will now be foreign to them.  Now their natural state will be dark, empty, and alone.

The solution to this terrible tragedy is simple.  We are the light of the world.  We are the city on a hill.  We alone know we are immersed in God’s love.  We alone are the fish who know we’re wet.  Our job is to splash a little water around on fish who are drying.