The Divine Conspiracy: Chapter Three

~ Chapter Three ~

What Jesus Knew: Our God-Bathed World

The Great Joy of God

“Jesus’ good news about the kingdom can be an effective guide for our lives only if we share his view of the world in which we live. To his eyes this is a God-bathed and God-permeated world. It is a world filled with a glorious reality, where every component is within the range of God’s direct knowledge and control—though he obviously permits some of it, for good reasons, to be for a while otherwise than he wishes. It is a world that is inconceivably beautiful and good because of God and because God is always in it. It is a world in which God is continually at play and over which he constantly rejoices. Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us.” [71]

“We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continually experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness… Jesus himself was and is a joyous, creative person. He does not allow us to continue thinking of our Father who fills and overflows space as a morose and miserable monarch, a frustrated and petty parent, or a policeman on the prowl. One cannot think of God in such ways while confronting Jesus’ declaration ‘He that has seen me has seen the Father.’ One of the most outstanding features of Jesus’ personality was precisely an abundance of joy. This he left as an inheritance to his students, ‘that their joy might be full’ (John 15:11). And they did not say, ‘Pass the aspirin,’ for he was well known to those around him as a happy man. It is deeply illuminating of kingdom living to understand that his steady happiness was not ruled out by his experience of sorrow and even grief.” [72, 73-74]

“[We] must understand that God does not ‘love’ us without liking us—through gritted teeth—as ‘Christian’ love is sometimes thought to do. Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being, the heavenly Father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it.” [74]

The Immediacy of the Heavens – the Here and Now

On ‘Heaven’. “[God’s] presence is precisely what the word heaven or, more accurately, the heavens in plural, conveys in the biblical record as well as through much of Christian history. The Old Testament experience of God is one of the direct presence of God’s person, knowledge, and power to those who trust and serve him. Nothing—no human being or institution, no time, no space, no spiritual being, no event—stands between God and those who trust him. The ‘heavens’ are always there with you no matter what, and the ‘first heaven,’ in biblical terms, is precisely the atmosphere or air that surrounds your body… [It] is precisely from the space immediately around us that God watches and God acts. When Paul on Mars Hill told his Greek inquisitors that in God we ‘live and move and exist,’ he was expressing in the most literal way possible the fact learned from the experience of God’s covenant people, the Jews. He was not speaking metaphorically or abstractly.” [77-78]

On Being ‘Born Again.’ “[The] birth ‘from above’ [is] the receiving of a superhuman kind of life from the God who is literally with us in surrounding space. To be born ‘from above,’ in New Testament language, means to be interactively joined with a dynamic, unseen system of divine reality in the midst of which all of humanity moves about—whether it knows it or not. And that, of course, is ‘The Kingdom Among Us.’” [78]

“The damage done to our practical faith in Christ and in his government-at-hand by confusing heaven with a place in distant or outer space, or even beyond space [or just ‘in our hearts], is incalculable. Of course God is there too. But instead of heaven and God being always present with us, as Jesus shows them to be, we invariably take them to be located far away and, most likely, at a much later time—not here and not now.” [82]

God Wants to be Seen

“God is, without special theophanies, seen everywhere by those who long have lived for him. No doubt God wants us to see him. That is a part of his nature as outpouring love. Love always wants to be known. Thus he seeks for those who could safely and rightly worship him… [In the words of Julian of Norwich,] ‘God wishes to be seen, and he wishes to be sought, and he wishes to be expected, and he wishes to be trusted.’” [88]

“Persons rarely become present where they are not heartily wanted. Certainly that is true for you and me. We prefer to be wanted, warmly wanted, before we reveal our souls—or even come to a party. The ability to see and the practice of seeing God and God’s world comes through a process of seeking and growing in intimacy with him. But as we can expect to make progress in the seeing of any subject matter, so it is with God. Toward the end of his life Brother Lawrence remarked, ‘I must, in a little time, go to God. What comforts me in this life is that I now see Him by faith; and I see Him in such a manner as might make me say sometimes, I believe no more, but I see.’ The heavens progressively open to us as our character and understanding are increasingly attuned to the realities of God’s rule from the heavens.” [88]

“[Mere] space travel is not the way to discover the divine richness that fills all creation. That discovery comes through personal seeking and spiritual reorientation, as well as God’s responsive act of making himself present to those ready to receive.” [90]

Humans as Spiritual Beings

The Necessity of Spirituality. “Because we are spiritual beings… it is for our good, individually and collectively, to live our lives in interactive dependence upon God and under his kingdom rule. Every kind of life, from the cabbage to the water buffalo, lives from a certain world that is suited to it. It is called to that world by what it is. There alone is where its well-being lies. Cut off from its special world it languishes and eventually dies. This is how the call to spirituality comes to us. We ought to be spiritual in every aspect of our lives because our world is the spiritual one. It is what we are suited to. Thus Paul, from his profound grasp of human existence, counsels us, ‘To fill your mind with the visible, the ‘flesh,’ is death, but to fill your mind with the spirit is life and peace’ (Rom. 8:6).” [93-94]

The Cost of Forsaking Spirituality. “Our ‘lives of quiet desperation,’ in the familiar words of Thoreau, are imposed by hopelessness. We find our world to be one where we hardly count at all, where what we do makes little difference, and where what we really love is unattainable, or certainly is not secure. We become frantic or despairing. In his book The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley remarks, ‘Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.’… Huxley was sure that ‘the urge to escape from self-hood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.’ Therefore the need for frequent ‘chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings’ would never change.” [94]

“The mind or the minding of the spirit is life and peace precisely because it locates us in a world adequate to our nature as ceaselessly creative beings under God. The ‘mind of the flesh,’ on the other hand, is a living death. To it the heavens are closed. It sees only ‘That inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die.’ It restricts us to the visible, physical world where what our hearts demand can never be.” [95]

“Human existence understood in the context of this full world of God—‘all things visible and invisible,’ to use the biblical language—can be as good as we naturally hope for it to be and think it ought to be, though perhaps not in the precise terms that would first come to our minds. In far better terms, really, because God is constantly poised to do ‘exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or imagine, in terms of the energy that is working in us’ (Eph. 3:20).” [96]

Death Dismissed

A Carelessness About Death. “Once we have grasped our situation in God’s full world, the startling disregard Jesus and the New Testament writers had for ‘physical death’ suddenly makes sense. Paul bluntly states [that] Jesus abolished death—simply did away with it. Nothing like what is usually understood as death will happen to those who have entered life. To one group of his day, who believed that ‘physical death’ was the cessation of the individual’s existence, Jesus said, ‘God is not the God of the dead but of the living’ (Luke 20:38). His meaning was that those who love and are loved by God are not allowed to cease to exist, because they are God’s treasures. He delights in them and intends to hold onto them. He has even prepared for them an individualized eternal work in his vast universe. At this present time the eternally creative Christ is preparing places for his human sisters and brothers to join him. Some are already there—no doubt busy with him in his great works. We can hardly think that they are mere watchers. On the day he died, he covenanted with another man being killed along with him to meet that very day in a place he called Paradise.” [96-97]

We Shall Not Taste Death. “Jesus made a special point of saying that those who rely on him and have received the kind of life that flows in him and in God will never experience death. Such persons, he said, will never see death, never taste death (John 8:51-52). On another occasion he says simply that ‘everyone living and believing in me shall never die’ (11:26). So as we think of our life and make plans for it, we should not be anticipating going through some terrible event called ‘death,’ to be avoided at all costs even though it can’t be avoided. That is the usual attitude for human beings, no doubt. But, immersed in Christ in action, we may be sure that our life—yes, that familiar one we are each so well acquainted with—will never stop. We should be anticipating what we will be doing three hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years from now in this marvelous universe.” (97-98)

The Great Transition. “Of course something is going to happen [when our physical bodies die]. We will leave our present body at a certain point, and our going and what we leave behind will not seem pleasant to those who care for us. But we are at that point, as Paul says, simply ‘absent from the body and present with the Lord’ (2 Cor. 5:8)…. [At] ‘physical’ death we become conscious and enjoy a richness of experience we have never known before. The American evangelist Dwight Moody remarked toward the end of his life, ‘One day soon you will hear that I am dead. Do not believe it. I will then be alive as never before.’ When the two guards came to take Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the gallows, he briefly took a friend aside to say, ‘This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.” [99]

What Might it Be Like? “Failure to have a way of thinking about it is one of the things that continues to make it dreadful even to those who have every confidence in Jesus. The unimaginable is naturally frightening to us. But there are two pictures that I believe to be accurate as well as helpful. They can help us know what to expect as we leave ‘our tent,’ our body (2 Cor. 5:1-6)

1. “One [is] the picture of a child playing in the evening among her toys. Gradually she grows weary and lays her head down for a moment of rest, lazily continuing to play. The next thing she experiences or ‘tastes’ is the morning light of a new day flooding the bed and the room where her mother or father took her. Interestingly, we never remember falling asleep. We do not ‘see’ it, ‘taste’ it.
2. “Another picture is of one who walks to a doorway between rooms. While still interacting with those in the room she is leaving, she begins to see and converse with people in the room beyond, who may be totally concealed from those left behind. Before the widespread use of heavy sedation, it was quite common for those keeping watch to observe something like this. The one making the transition often begins to speak to those who have gone before. They come to meet us while we are still in touch with those left behind. The curtains part for us briefly before we go through.”

Our Birthday into God’s Full World. “Speaking of the significance of [our] passage into the full world of ‘the heavens reopened,’ John Henry Newman remarks, ‘Those wonderful things of the new world are even now as they shall be then. They are immortal and eternal; and the souls who shall then be made conscious of them will see them in their calmness and their majesty where they have ever been… The life then begun, we know, will last forever; yet surely if memory be to us then what it is now, that will be a day much to be observed unto the Lord through all the ages of eternity.’ It will be our birthday into God’s full world.” [100]

A True Religion

“[We see many of Jesus’ sayings as just] more ‘pretty words… [But] Jesus lived and taught in full view of the heavens opened. This causes multitudes to dismiss his teachings as ‘unrealistic.’ They do not see his world.” [101]

“[Many of those who profess Christ] may then have faith in faith but will have little faith in God. For God and his world are just not ‘real’ to them. They may believe in believing but not be able to rely on God—like many in our current culture who love love but in practice are unable to love real people. They may believe in prayer, think it quite a good thing, but be unable to pray believing and so will rarely, if ever, pray at all. I personally have become convinced that many people who believe in Jesus do not actually believe in God. By saying this I do not mean to condemn anyone but to cast light on why the lives of professed believers go as they do, and often quite contrary even to what they sincerely intend.” [103]

Jesus: The Smartest Man Who Ever Lived

“[Evelyn Waugh’s fictional character Charles Ryder says,] ‘religion was a hobby which some people professed and others not; at the best it was slightly ornamental, at the worst it was the province of ‘complexes’ and ‘inhibitions’—catchwords of the decade—and of the intolerance, hypocrisy, and sheer stupidity attributed to it for centuries’… These words perfectly express the crushing weigh of the secular outlook that permeates or pressures every thought we have today. Sometimes it even forces those who self-identify as Christian teachers to set aside Jesus’ plain statements about the reality and total relevance of the kingdom of God and replace them with philosophical speculations whose only recommendation is their consistency with a ‘modern’ mind-set.” [105]

“[Nothing] fundamental has changed in our knowledge of ultimate reality and the human self since the time of Jesus. Many will be astonished at such a remark, but it at least provides us with a thought—that nothing fundamental has changed from biblical times—that every responsible person needs to consider at least once in his or her lifetime, and the earlier the better. And as for those who find it incredible—I constantly meet such people in my line of work—you only need ask them exactly what has changed, and where it is documented, and they are quickly stumped. Descending to particulars always helps to clear the mind. The multitude of theories, facts, and techniques that have emerged in recent centuries have not the least logical bearing upon the ultimate issues of existence and life. In this respect they only serve to distract and confuse a people already harassed witless by their slogans, scientific advances, ‘labor-saving’ devices, and a blizzard of promises about when and how ‘happiness’ is going to be achieved. Vague references to ‘particles and progress’ do not provide a coherent picture of life.” [106]

“Our commitment to Jesus can stand on no other foundation than a recognition that he is the one who knows the truth about our lives and our universe. It is not possible to trust Jesus, or anyone else, in matters where we do not believe him to be competent. We cannot pray for his help and rely on his collaboration in dealing with real-life matters we suspect might defeat his knowledge or abilities. And can we seriously imagine that Jesus could be Lord if he were not smart? If he were divine, would he be dumb? Or uninformed? Once you stop to think about it, how could he be what we take him to be in all other respects and not be the best-informed and most intelligent person of all, the smartest person who ever lived?” [106-107]

“The biblical and continuing vision of Jesus was of one who made all of created reality and kept it working, literally ‘holding it together’ (Col. 1:17). And today we think people are smart who make light bulbs and computer chips and rockets out of ‘stuff’ already provided! He made ‘the stuff’! Small wonder, then, that the first Christians thought he held within himself ‘all of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Col 2:3). This confidence in his intellectual greatness is the basis of the radicalism of Christ-following in relation to the human order. It sees Jesus now living beyond death as ‘the faithful witness, the first-born of the dead, the ruler of the kings of the earth,… the first and the last, the living One,’ the one who can say ‘I was dead, and behold, I am alive forever more, the master of death and the world of the dead’ (Rev 1:5, 18).” [107]

“At the literally mundane level, Jesus knew how to transform the molecular structure of water to make it wine. That knowledge also allowed him to take a few pieces of bread and some little fish and feed thousands of people. He could create matter from the energy he knew how to access from ‘the heavens,’ right where he was… He knew how to transform the tissues of the human body from sickness to health and from death to life. He knew how to suspend gravity, interrupt weather patterns, and eliminate unfruitful trees without saw or ax. He only needed a word. Surely he must be amused at what Nobel prizes are awarded for today… And one of the greatest testimonies to his intelligence is surely that he knew how to enter physical death, actually to die, and then live on beyond death. He seized death by the throat and defeated it. Forget cryonics! Death was not something others imposed on him. He explained to his followers in the moment of crisis that he could at any time call for 72,000 angels to do whatever he wanted. A mid-sized angel or two would surely have been enough to take care of those who thought they were capturing and killing him. He plainly said, ‘Nobody takes my life! I give it up by choice. I am in position to lay it down, and I am in position to resume it. My father and I have worked all this out’ (John 10:18). All these things show Jesus’ cognitive and practical mastery of every phase of reality: physical, moral, and spiritual. He is Master only because he is Maestro. ‘Jesus is Lord’ can mean little in practice for anyone who has to hesitate before saying, ‘Jesus is smart.’” [107-108]

“[Jesus] is the smartest man who ever lived. He is now supervising the entire course of world history (Rev 1:5) while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it (John 14:2). He always has the best information on everything and certainly also on the things that matter most in human life.” [108]