We need some freakin monsters on our side!

God's stories being spoken out orally is not enough. That is great that live humans are telling Bible stories.

But it needs to be bathed in suicidal unconditional surrender, in desperate, groaning prayer, in broken-hearted fasting and in crazy chance-taking to do signs and wonders.

Bible stories are just squiggles of carbon on dried out tree pulp. Just inanimate records of once live, embodied revelation. The original embodied and lived event is the real revelation. Bible stories whether oral or written are just abstract representations, fossils. What God wants His Word in the Church to do is to bring these fossils back to life in the here and now. Like Jurassic Park. We need some freaking monsters on our side! The stories are just computer code. We are the massive, slumbering Transformers that run on that code!

The Biblical events need to be re:incarnated, revealed in our flesh afresh, anew in current contextualized embodied, acted revelation. The stories of Jesus and apostles performing signs and wonders like casting out demons and healing the sick and prophesying what they could not possibly know naturally, are not picturesque parables to teach some sublime spiritual truths: they are models and patterns for how we are supposed to replicate their ministry NOW, once again being filled with His empowering Presence to heal, to point out our need for God and reconcile the masses to God, only as His awesome Presence moves, only by the agency of His unique incarnation, Jesus.

Godless Ghosts (cont'd)

Recently I wrote on Pascal's wager, which goes like this: “If there is no God and you live for Him, then when you die (and all consciousness and memory of whatever you did in your life vanishes, so whether you sin or serve all is forgotten as if it never happened), you have lost nothing. If there is a God however and you reject Him, then you will have lost everything”

Problem is of course Pascal was thinking in a totally Christian environment, so the god in his wager he assumed to be the Christian God. But Pascal's wager could work with a variety of god's without telling you which one was the right god, so you could live your life for god, but the wrong god, and you lose anyway.

And now of course it is very common for people to believe in ghosts, an afterlife, extra sensory perception and miracles with NO god. With multiple universes and dimensions with multiple conflicting laws of nature possible, they like to think anything is possible and nothing is explainable, or that everything miraculous is attributable to unknown, yet-to-be-discovered natural laws.

And that's exactly the kind of atheist I was. No arguments or rationale convinced me that there is a God and that Jesus is the only way to truly know God. I was not convinced by argumentation about fossils and floods. No, I was convinced by a spiritual revelation of God's loving presence channeled through a Christian explaining and qualifying it as in and through the name of Jesus alone. This is the kind of evidence the world needs now. They need to experience God and the gifts of His spirit directly through Christian agents who verbally qualify it as in and through the name of Jesus alone. And that is why we need revival with signs and wonders accompanying.

Hit and Run

In the city of Tual, Maluku, Indonesia I got on a minivan bus at the side of the road when there's this loud bang and clattering right by the minivan and I look out and there is an old man of about my age laying face down in the middle of the street obviously just knocked down by this motorbike which is also laying down beside him and the driver as well crawling out from underneath the bike! Then some people rush up and help the old pedestrian to his feet as the motorbike rider also stands up staring in shock and dread at the old guy. Then our minvan driver slowly pulls away from the curb into the night and some random guy out of the crowd runs up to the scene and punches the side of the minivan cause he thinks the minivan was involved! Suddenly I am aware of a possible nasty scene developing with a mob gathering accusing the bus driver of involvement, and with us in the middle of it all as easy marks to blame it all on and pay everybody compensation!  But before these thoughts could even solidify in my mind or say anything the driver had already eased away wisely getting us out of there. Now I understand why people do that here!

Imagine No Religion

Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, Greece and the Balkans and all North Africa and the Mediterranean were Catholic and Orthodox lands up till the 600's. (See map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Justinian555AD.png)

About the beginning of the 600's the Muslims started conquering and subjugating these Christian lands, forcing conversions. The Muslim empire continued conquering and expanding into Christian lands for 500 years, that is from the 600's through the 700's, the 800's, the 900's and the 1000's. Finally in 1096, after 500 years of losses to Muslim expansion, the Catholic nobility of Europe decided to fight back and try to liberate the Catholic and Orthodox lands now occupied by Islamic forces.

In general the Catholics lost and the Muslims won. (See map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_Mediterranean_1450_.svg)

While parts of the Balkans were regained along with Spain eventually, yet descendants of the Muslim invaders still occupy parts of the Balkans to this day, and the eastern part of Orthodox Greece and part of Cyprus is still occupied by Muslim invaders. The Chirstian majorities of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Arabia and Egypt and all North Africa were mostly forced to convert to Islam. Islamic traders, missionaries and armies were then free to expand from country to country further and further afield;  West all across North Africa to Morocco and across to crush all of Christian Spain, ever East along the coasts of Asia as far as China and on into the Pacific, and South along Africa's East coast deep into the Southern hemisphere as far as Madagascar.

The mainly Catholic response to Muslim imperialism, now popularly called The Crusades, lasted around 200 years. This belated Catholic resistance to 500 years of Muslim expansion into and conquest of Christian lands, and the Muslim response that crushed the Crusades, resulted in between 200,000 and 1.5 million deaths on both sides over 200 years.

But squabbles between the world's great religions really has nothing over the record of modern athiest states. Just as Europe's Catholic nobility finally fought back after 400 years of Muslim invasions of Christian lands, so also when atheist Nazi Germany attacked and occupied Catholic Poland in 1939, the Poles and their allies fought back, immediately drawing Christian England, Canada and Australia into the 2nd WW.

For the record:

Soviet revolution:               killed 9 million
Soviet forced starvation:    killed 4 million 1921-23
Stalinist Russia:                 killed 20 million
Nazi Germany:              
   in death camps                killed 12 million
   outside camps                 killed 54 million
Communist China:             killed 60 million

Total Deaths Attributable
to Athiest states:                 156 million killed

John Lennon sang “Imagine no religion.” We don't need to. It is too clear where athiesm leads.

Sources: http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#RCW

http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/china/deaths2.html

Street People Receive Knighthood

Avoiding things that can harm you is perfectly natural. Perfectly.

Ancient Hebrew tradition has a proverb warning young Israelite men to avoid loose women. But Jesus did the opposite. He chatted with a woman of bad reputation and in the process transformed her into a saint.

Ancient Hebrew tradition commanded avoiding lepers. But Jesus did the opposite, instead reaching out His hand and touching a leper and in the process healing him. 

If you believe that Jesus is God's unique incarnation and that there is restoration with God through no other name, then you have the right and ability to bask inside and incarnate God's powerful Presence, the same Presence that raised up Jesus to life from the dead. But you must be willing to go against conventional wisdom.

Whom did you avoid last week?
Seriously. Think about it.
An annoying relative? A bore? A street person scrounging for bottles? Someone who hurt you?

Don't trust in the approval of the beautiful, the influential, the talented and strong. 

Trust rather in God's approval. He wants you to go love the poor and the weak.

Go against society. Cross the room. Walk away from the cool, the smart and the rich and rather go spend time with the marginalized. And God's loving Presence through you will transform them before your eyes into angels, your royal siblings.

Godless Ghosts

Yesterday I posted on Pascals wager.  I knew that it was flawed even before I posted it.  Problem is,  that kind of logic might have worked with a lot of Westerners 50 years ago, but now many people believe in an afterlife WITHOUT God.  I myself was one of these.

If one meets someone interested in this kind of discussion, one might tighten the focus and talk about the unique and exclusive claims of Jesus.  All other world-class faiths allow other ways.  If you are a good Christian, you can still reach nirvana, according to the Hindu faith.  The same goes for Islam and Buddhism and countless folk beliefs.

Jesus said however that there is no other way to be happy in the after life except in submission to and trust in himself alone.

So if Jesus is wrong, and you follow him, it doesn't matter whether you follow Christianity or some other faith or even a religion, because the particular tenets are not important to the other faiths but what is important to them is that you are a good person. (Bad people need not apply).

But if Jesus is  right that he alone is God in the flesh and that trusting him is the only way, then it would be stupid to say he was wrong and go off and follow some other faith.

So to update Pascal's wager, if Jesus is wrong and you live a good life, then it wouldn't matter what faith you follow.  And if there were no God it wouldn't matter how you had lived.  But if Jesus' claims are true then it is imperative for your eternal welfare that you allow him to love and forgive you, adopt you as his child into his big family, and surrender to his loving help to live his way.

A Wager of Galactic Proportions

A wise man (Blaise Pascal) once said something like this:

If God doesn't exist, then it doesn't matter how we live.  The only meaningful record of our lives, our memories, would be completely obliterated in death.  

Whether we love or hate Him, pretend He doesn't exist, do good or evil;  

Whether you starve to death at age 2 or live in luxury till 90;

Without a God,

All would be erased when the maggots ate our brains.  

All memory of our lives disappears at death, 

All manner of lives lived, 

All becomes meaningless nothing: we might as well have never existed. 

All disappears exactly as if it had never happened.

However, if I obstinately choose my own selfish way, and He does exist, I will have lost everything for eternity.   

Therefore I will choose to love Him, because if in the end all memory of my life is lost, I would have lost nothing. But if He exists, I gain everything. 

A couple weeks ago on Babar island I took my motorbike on the trail to Tela to see how passable the trail was before dragging along Kathy. I came to one narrow log bridge. There was a flat rock filling a pothole smack in the middle of the trail, right at the start of the bridge. I had to drive right over it. But as I gave it a bit of gas, the back wheel slipped sideways on the slippery rock, pointing the bike off to the left. At the same time the rear knobby tire grabbed onto the rough rock on the side and, well, I shot off the edge of the bridge.  The bike fell straight down with a flip 'n twirl somersault and then whumped the stony creek bed, while I was launched 4 or 5 meters and landed on a big boulder.

Slow mo replay: As the bike went left off the bridge, the front wheel dropped off the edge, then the engine hit the edge of the bridge and forward motion abruptly transferred into a somersault, the whole bike pivoting over where the engine was grabbing the edge of the bridge. The bike pivoted in a cartwheel and I was catapulted into space. But my weight and fall trajectory at the same time tipped the bike into a left ward fall so it flipped lengthwise and sideways at the same time. It just happened to be in a laying down position as it slammed into the stony creek bed, the axles pointing at the sky. 

I vaguely remember doing some fancy foot work and hand placements as I myself made contact with the creek bed, intentionally rolling into a somersault to lessen the impacts. You can bet I thanked God I was thrown clear. I only got a few scrapes, wrenched my back, burned my ankle on the muffler and got some pancake-sized bruises on my knee and wrist. 

As I lay on my back in the water writhing and screaming for a second or two, I was at the same time aware that this display was futile and I'd better get my backpack and bike out of the water before they were water-damaged. Whimpering, I immediately struggled to my feet again and limped over to the bike to stand it up. Fortunately no water went up its tail pipe. The stainless steel tail pipe was now all dimpled like from hail damage, from slamming into the stones of the creek bed. 

So now I had the bike nicely standing upright, parked down in the creek bed and no one for miles and no way to get it out because the creek banks were too steep. I climbed up out of the creek, took off my soaking wet shirt and layed it on a bush to dry. The sun was warm and dried me quickly. Calming down I realized I could make a ramp of rocks to walk the bike out. I went back down into the creek and started gathering head sized rocks to build a ramp. But then some other motorcyclers came and stopped to help and so we just lifted the bike straight up onto the edge of the bridge, and my ramp building was abandoned. 

I pressed on to Tela but didn't feel so good for some reason. The back forks were really bent so the rear tire was rubbing on the fender, making a burning rubber smell and a loud growling sound that caused some discussion amongst the gardeners I passed. Having met with the priest to arrange work with the translation team, I wanted to go back home to Tepa. I sawed off some of the chunks of fender using my trusty Gerber multi-tool, and headed home, crossing that bridge again, this time real careful like.

Maximizing Misfits

Who's responsible for misfits?
You are.

Skipping out, dropping out,
acting up and out,
disrupting, rebelling, fleeing,

Challenging!

The misfit gets blamed for missing the fit.

But why do we want the misfit to conform?

Well......maybe we don't.
Maybe its just the managers who want them to conform.

Is someone in your circle "causing problems"?
Why not come alongside them, help them achieve their dreams?

Is someone you know messing up at work or school?
Maybe the system's cramming a square peg into a round hole.

Don't join in breaking their will;

Smash the mould that's killing them.

Testimonies?

In normal English usage "testimony" refers to a factual recounting of a real event which an eyewitness experienced.  Maybe it is a traffic accident, maybe war crimes.
(Not a "testimonial" which has a commercial connotation associated with an endorsement of a product by its user)

In evangelical/fundamentalist Christian subcultures of Canada "testimony" bears an additional sense of a personal account of how God-in-Christ intervened miraculously or providentially in the speaker's life somehow.  Often it is limited specifically to the process of how a person initially turned from an unbeliever to a believer, or was "saved".  (In many "charismatic" (in the theological sense) churches one may "testify" at many, if not most, religious meetings, and this "testimony" may be about some more recent event in the believer's life which they interpret as being an instance of God's intervention in their personal life and of their (eventual) positively evaluated response to God.) 

I have witnessed middle-aged to elderly people attending a meeting invited to stand and spontaneously give a "testimony".   I remember several times being struck and fascinated by vivid detailed glimpses into of regular people's personal life events situated 30 or 40 years in the past, the minute details still sharp from repeated retellings over the decades.  And I recall thinking "but what has God done in your life recently?"

Now, language and consciousness are indivisible aspects of being human.  Our human awareness and experience of existence is impossible without numerical, lexical, logical and grammatical polarities such as "I/you",  and "body/thing", and "this/that" and "one/two".  On the other hand the very concepts of "body/mind", "language/awareness"  or  "speaking/acting",  while on the one hand help us think and improve our experience and use of these "things" (for love, mercy and justice), at the same time this codification sets up an unreal split or division between them.  I would like to say "Speaking and acting are indivisible" but this statement self-destructs because it is equal to saying "two things are one thing" which is not currently logical in English.

Nevertheless, I believe action speaks and speech acts.  Therefore, the Christian "testimony" consists of more than a story told in words: it is also actions and attitudes.  How we act towards and treat our family, neighbours, acquaintances, school mates, work colleagues, other drivers on the road and people we don't particularly like, speaks volumes.  But we have known this since kindergarten, when we heard it said: "Actions speak louder than words".  So testify to your world about your current love affair with God-in-Christ through your whole life, today.

You and God

The two year old can’t talk, doesn’t have the words, but reaches up her hands to strong young daddy. He reaches down and lifts her up, cradling her in his left arm as she clings to his neck. He pushes open the screen door, strides into the back yard picking up a small plastic toy shovel on the way. Hands it to toddler. He walks into the garden, sets her down in a safe spot and shows her a digging motion with the toy shovel “Dig sweety. Dig like this!” She has no clue what a garden is- what planting, weeding, watering, harvest are. No clue about the fathers plan, about the future, how things work, what to do. She is blissful, ignorant- basking in daddy’s presence. He sets to work with a will and a purpose, turning over the fallow earth. She whacks the ground with the toy shovel feebly, spastically, wobbly gaze immediately towards daddy to see what’s next.

Weeks pass. The season progresses. There they are again, she with her toy watering can, watering stones and babbling to herself. Daddy is watering in earnest, systematically, with a view to the harvest.

Now toddler lounges in the luxuriant shade of a leafy green-bean teepee. Daddy is out in the sun picking luscious juicy plump tomatoes. He picks up toddler on the way to the house to enjoy yummy tomato sandwiches. “You worked hard, sweet-pea” he says lovingly as she rides in his arms with her head on his chest. “Look at what we grew!”

Singapore Airport Freakout

So yeah our ticket back to Indonesia had us fly first from Vancouver BC south to Portland Oregon where we would then transit onto a much bigger trans-pacific flight.

So  we're in portland airport and it is like 10 minutes to boarding time and I approach the check-in desk to see if we can maybe get a better seat with more leg room for the 11 hour flight to Tokyo. The clerk says "These boarding passes you have aren't good enough. I will issue you new ones." Ok I think fine. Who cares?

So then the clerk asks me if I have a return ticket to come back from Indonesia. No, I reply honestly.  "Oh but you have to have a return ticket otherwise we can't let you board" Just great! He confers with a colleague and she comes over and looks intently at the computer monitor hidden from my view. She says to the first guy "No, this rule is for visa on arrival passengers whereas this passenger (me) already has a visa" But they call in some security supervisor ("Red Code") to tell them what to do.

Meanwhile they start boarding!

So this woman comes and reads the rules on the monitor and says "You will have to purchase a return ticket before we let you board".  I am like praying my head off.  "Lord please influence their hearts and minds to interpret and use their discretion to let us on this flight! Please give me the grace to receive whatever the outcome of this is! Please grant me the discernment and creativity to navigate successfully through this!"

So there are like five passengers left in the line-up boarding and the rest of the boarding lounge is empty and the security supervisor says "No: looks like you are gonna have to buy a return ticket. Let me see your luggage claim tags" Oh no! I think to myself, She is going to pull our luggage off the flight! Then she says "Let me just read the rules again" The 3rd last passenger disappears down the gangway to board.  I feel inspired to stand up with our carry-ons and walk over to the gangway entrance like we are just about to board. I am standing in front of the boarding desk and the security supervisor is standing there staring at the hidden monitor.  She says to the first woman "They are going to have to buy a return ticket" The first woman says nothing.  So I feel inspired to stretch out my hand over the counter and point at the monitor screen that I can't see and say "But this rule only applies to people getting a visa on arrival in Jakarta whereas I already have a visa" At this point the first woman pipes up and says "That's right" The security supervisor then relents and says "oh ok I see. All right then. Off you go" And we are the last ones to board! Crud! Not the kind of excitement I need!

OK. So anyway they also said they couldn't print off boarding passes for the last leg of our journey from Singapore to Jakarta. We didn't know why, but they said we could just get new ones when we went to board in Singapore. Fine.

So we go to the boarding gate in Singapore airport (and it is like at least a kilometre walk way out to the end of this ridiculously long terminal wing) and ask if we can board with the e-tickets we have and they say no we need to get new boarding passes.  So anyway long story short here I am walking and running back and forth the one kilometre plus (so now my leg is killing me) from the boarding gate to this service counter trying to get this stupid boarding pass printed that Delta should have just given me. As it turns out, the Delta staff in Portland (yes, the same ones who didn't want to let us board without a return ticket) had completely changed our registered ticket number when they re-printed our boarding passes so that in Singapore they could find no record of our booking, and again this is 30 minutes before take off!! Argghhh!!!  But a very helpful young woman of a different airline very adroitly helped us by reconstructing our proof of booking from looking at our old boarding pass stubs (which Kathy had saved, precious woman that she is) from our previous journey legs and also from looking at our luggage tags which showed also that we were booked all the way to Jakarta.

Moral: DO NOT FLY WITH DELTA!!!
DO NOT ROUTE THROUGH THE STATES IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO!!!
GOD ANSWERS PRAYER IN TIGHT SITUATIONS!!

What Can I Do?

I was thinking about recent progress in relation to my work in holistic rural development and wondering how much credit I should honestly take.  I want to accurately credit God where it is due and not steal His thunder.

I was tempted to say "I can do nothing: it is all God" but for the fact that he holds us accountable and responsible for our actions, to the point that someday for some he will say "Well done, wise and faithful servant of mine! Come on into the eternal blessings" - which tells me that God gives us credit for our actions.

My conclusion is that God gives us one ability and one alone: to choose to surrender/cling to him. We can cling a lot or we can cling a little.  Only as we cling to him does he incarnate himself through us and do that which has lasting value.

Be a Hero Today

Now just because objectivity is not really that attainable is not to say that subjectivity is bad. There is yet another sense in which "subjectivity" is also good. It is how God created us to be: He created us in His image; is it not fitting we should partner with Him in creating new realities by the power of our word? We say to love "Exist!" and it is so. Because in grammar-speak "subject" also means one who acts, one who initiates and does things- an actor or agent.

Because we don`t know very much, except that we are going to die, we are desperately in need of God`s intervention. All we can do is cling to the loving Presence of God made available uniquely through His incarnation, Jesus. And so He helps us manage our animal instincts and channel His loving Presence. And in this mutual loving indwelling, us in Him and He in us, He delegates to us the authority and choice to re-create the universe, beginning with our personal realities.

Today you can recreate new worlds for those in your life, your home and neighbourhood, your work and school. You can change their realities by loving them as neither they nor you ever dreamed possible. Just acknowledge God`s loving Presence with you now and surrender unconditionally to His will for you regardless of loss, cost or consequence. Just keep clinging to Him and follow Him wherever He goes- into solitude on your knees, into prison to visit the lonely, or skid row to hug the unhuggable, or to leave the popular clique and sit with the losers, or to ask forgiveness of the neighbour you hate or to pay back the money you owe or to turn away from some kind of escapist behaviour to instead- cling to His loving Presence. Then with His loving eyes and heart incarnate in you will see and feel how to be a hero today.

What Do I Know or Care?

If nothing else, I read a lot. The Bible, theology, philosophy- and I can't for the life of me say as I know a heck of a lot. I now know I know nothing. And it seems like most thinking people today agree that we don't really know very much. Our theories of ultimate origins, of the structures and ends of the universes, of how many dimensions there are and what they might be like, of how different minds, societies and cultures work- All our theories are highly speculative. With 7000 or so different human cultures on our little planet, all differing in what we value, believe, assume and our reasons for what we do- we have to ask a lot of questions and talk for a long time just to get to know one another and understand each other. That's why thinking people say "all is relative" and "we create our own realities", imprisoned in interconnected labyrinths of imagined worlds. Nietzsche said we are "trapped in a prison house of language".

Well, a lot of religious thinkers and philosophers have being saying similar things for thousands of years. The Bible for example has many stories and statements about how limited human understanding is. But beyond our profound ignorance, the Bible adds that we all helplessly and hopelessly tend to cruelty, injustice, irresponsibility, callousness, escaping "reality", the single-minded pursuit of pleasure at any cost, self-destruction, hatred, bitterness, arrogance, selfishness, thoughtlessness, recklessness, negligence, narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, defying and ignoring God.

So I don't know anything and can't do anything good, trapped in my subjective (mis)interpretations of my social world, and unable to care. How awesomely kind of God to persist in seeking us, breaking in to the prison houses of our minds and filling us with His loving Presence, motivating and guiding us to surrender unconditionally to fulfill His loving will.

The Right to Bear Arms

This is a note for my American friends.

Hi. I don't necessarily endorse the American doctrine of the citizens' right to bear arms, but I just want to point out the anachronistic nature of it.

The doctrine was developed in the age of muskets and canon, before steam power and electricity.  The SPIRIT of the doctrine is that the populace has the same firepower as the state.  The POINT was for the citizenry to be able to defend itself from the tyranny of the state.

Obviously now the balance of arms between state and populace is extremely out of balance, to say the least.

If the SPIRIT of "The right to bear arms" were fulfilled, that would mean ordinary citizens had equal access and control to every means of control and attack that the state has; nuclear, biological, chemical, submarine, aerial, satellites, nanotech and everything in between.  I'm just sayin is all.

So, the NRA and other defender's of private ownership of automatic and semi-automatic small arms are completely delusional about their ability to stop US governments from oppressing and overpowering ordinary Americans.  The only result of liberal small arms ownership is negative: high rates of domestic murder, accidents and crime.

So unless you private American citizens are going to somehow achieve equity with the state in all areas of modern warfare, which as you must admit looks pretty impossible, you should just hand in all your guns now and bring down the crime rate, the domestic murder rate and the number of accidental injuries and deaths from small arms misuse.

Fiery Tornado Still Calls Us To Follow

 The second book of the Bible, Exodus, is the story of the creation of the Hebrew nation 3300 years ago in the ancient Near East. It has an interesting image of the presence of God as a tower of smoke in the daytime and a tower of fire at night.  Wherever the Presence led, the new nation was to pack up there tents and follow.  The Presence of God led His chosen people through scorching desert where there was neither food or water, yet as they followed, He always provided their every need.

God is still on the move today.  He hovers by your place of prayer before dawn, calling you from oblivion to enter His Presence.  There is nothing more rewarding to me than basking in His loving Presence.  Wherever He calls, there I will follow. I love His touch.  I love to feel Him smiling on me.  If His Presence enters a prison, I will follow just to be with Him there. If He shifts to the realty office, I will run, laughing, bringing my deed. If He moves into a hospice, there I will follow.  If He moves to the inner city, there I will live.  I just want to cling to His loving Presence and bask in His beauty, channeling His love to whoever is there.

"God became man that man might become God" -Athanasius

When Christianity was still pure, white hot brilliant in the crucible of Roman persecution, the leading thinkers of the church had a remarkable catch phrase:

“God became man that man might become God”.  They did not mean it literally of course, but were just using exaggeration to convey an important point: God came into humanity in Jesus, but at the same time Jesus brought humanity into God.

Jesus was one with the Father in a significantly different way than are we, in that Jesus was God, while we are not.  We also are one with God, but relationally, not ontologically. We are not God. God is not us. That is the difference between Jesus and ourselves. 

Now Jesus is a model, the first of billions to follow His path. Similar to how God and Jesus were One, the loving Presence of God in the being of Jesus and the being of Jesus in the loving Presence of God, so are we who have been reconciled to Him through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Yet because God is not limited by a physical form He can completely inhabit our entire being like water and wine can intermingle or coinhere in one clay jug.  As we respond to God’s drawing near to us, available only through the advocacy of Jesus, and we draw near to Him and surrender to Him and embrace Him, His loving Presence enters into ours and ours into His, and thus, relationally, we become one in love.  We surrendering all to Him, He delegating all authority to us in loving trust as He thinks His thoughts through us and feels His desires through us to do His loving will.

Is the World the Body of a Slaughtered Deity?

What does the Bible’s first chapter really mean?  Understanding only comes when you first understand the religion of the original audience. 4000 years ago in the ancient Near East most people thought there were many gods, jealously and lustfully feuding and carousing, mirroring human society. People thought there had been numerous bloody wars in the heavens, divine juntas and revolutions between the gods. In the process the gods had slaughtered one godess in battle, butchered her body and made the parts of the cosmos from that. Then the gods got tired of all the work involved in running the world so made humans to be their slaves.

The Bible opens with a markedly different picture.  There are no other gods. There is only the One who has always existed.  There is no gory pantheon, no wasted battlefield from former eons of divine conflict. No. This One simply speaks into being all that is, and it is perfect from the start.  And humans are not a mere after thought, slaves created by the cruel pantheon motivated by laziness.  No. Where the religions of the day thought their wood and bronze sculptures were manifestations of the capricious pantheon, the Bible’s first chapter takes a radically different track: it is HUMANS whom the ONE God has created to be His instrument and representative in the world. Rather than slaving for the gods, dressing and feeding idols of wood, stone and bronze; the Bible instead introduces humanity as the noble representatives of the One, who delegates to them the benevolent care and good governance over all creation.

Spiritual Warfare?

I have a problem with so many people using this term because of the violent, militaristic connotations.  They put on a loud, imperious voice and shout at the devil, waving an imaginary sword.

In one of C.S. Lewis fantasy stories an omnipotent but all-loving lion, Aslan, creates a new world, Narnia. But an imperious being from another world gains access to Narnia and imposes a never ending winter on Narnia, enslaving the beautiful creatures of Aslan and turning any who defy her into stone. 

When 4 children from earth “stumble” into Narnia, one is deceived by the witch, betrays his brother and sisters and ends up also enslaved by the witch.  However, Aslan outwits the witch and her simple magic by allowing her to kill him. His deeper magic is released, He comes back to life and winter in Narnia ends, the creatures whom the witch turned to stone are released and the witch is deposed,  fleeing into obscure exile.  The four children from earth are crowned as kings and queens of Narnia and a long age of peaceful summer ensues.

The Biblical version of Christ’s life by St. Luke portrays Jesus as the powerful creator incarnate, returned to transform the frozen and enslaved earth. From birth through His adult ministry Luke portrays Him in opposition with the evil one.  Jesus is tempted to use His power to help people politically or through charity.  Yet His stated purpose is to suffer and ultimately die.  And it is in His refusal of fame and power and comfort to the point of death that He gains His ultimate victory over the evil one and decisively breaks the back of the curse holding the world in its grip, in His death finally taking away the barrier between us and God, the record of our wrong-doings, and instead reconciling us to God finally so we can enter into God’s loving Presence, and His Presence into us.

The way of Jesus is our model.  Our greatest victory in this “spiritual warfare” is as we “die”.  It is daily.  To walk away from fame, from esteem, from comfort, from intimacy, from physical delights, from entertainment, from freedom, from security, from power, from control, from influence, from everything we rely on for stability and comfort and fulfillment.  But only love can motivate us to do so. And this love is not from within. It is the love of God that inspires and motivates us to surrender all to Him just so we can bask in the glorious, brilliant warmth of His smiling, lover’s gaze. We sacrifice everything just to be close to God, and He brings us back to life on a higher plane, transforming the world by His love incarnate through us.