God’s Grace In Weights and Measures

About God’s Grace In Weights and Measures

Abstract

The title of this paper was inspired by a phrase from Proverbs 16:11, “. . .all the weights in the bag are of his making.” (NIV) The thesis of this paper is that the Lord has an unusual concern for honest measures and correspondingly has provided a generous benevolence of grace to humanity in the form of providential standards of measurement. At the 2017 CEC John Tixier presented a paper titled, “Observations on Things Measured in the Bible,” in which he recounted the Lord’s great interest in honest measures and the Bible’s presumption that the reader will understand the standards of measurement being used [1]. In Biblical times the maintenance of standards of measurement was the responsibility of temple priests, particularly to facilitate taxation [2]. As cultures have developed, the role of keeping standards of measurement has become a governmental function, usually via a bureaucracy of scientists who specialize in metrology. During about the last 150 years there has been a clear historical record of basing definitions on observations of nature that give universal results— natural constants as best we can understand them—artifacts of creation. Recently, in November 2018, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (Conférence Généneral des Poids et Mesures, CGPM) redefined The International System of Units (Le Systèm International d’Unités, SI) in such a way as to define all units of measurement in the SI on defined (rather than measured) natural constants. Most other systems of units refer themselves to the SI, for one example, U.S. Customary units, so the redefinition of the SI by the CGPM has fundamental importance to almost any measurement one could perform. The nature of historical debates about measurements and standards of measurement have been remarkably peaceful. No government, no matter how corrupt or unloved, has tolerated vendors who use “differing weights,” one for buying and one for selling [3]. What debate there has been about standards has been mostly confined to making the standards practical, accurate, and repeatable. Standards of measure have been mostly free from fundamentally rebellious types of conflict. This paper, partially inspired by John Tixier’s paper (ibid), explores Biblical perspectives on metrology throughout history with emphasis on more recent developments and up-to-date attention given to the November 2018 meeting of the CGPM.