Tree of Knowledge, Tree of Life

You have wearied the LORD with your words. But you say, How have we wearied him? By saying, Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the LORD, and he delights in them. Or by asking, Where is the God of justice?  -- Malachi 2:17

We have set ourselves up as gods.  Our technology is impressive.  We believe this makes us capable of judging right and wrong.  As humans, we are not called to judge but to discern.  Judging is a function of the soul, which, in the Fall, was exalted over the spirit.  It’s what we would call, in more modern parlance, ego driven.  You will have noticed that those who scream mostly loudly that no one has a right to judge them are the most judgmental, and the intolerant cry loudest for tolerance while the greedy and envious denounce greed and envy.   In order to maintain the illusion of being god-like in our souls, we judge and we condemn those around us.

Most people seem to think this attitude of judging and condemning is restricted to the religious.  In that both religion and resentment are natural to the sons of Adam, this is true.  It is only through Christ, the revelation of the Trinity and the God Who Is Love that we may be delivered from the prison of self-consciousness.  The God who dwelt complete, isolated and alone, who delivered the Law to Moses inscribed on unbending, unyielding stone could not be selfless.  He demanded compliance and submission.  We see him today in the stringent requirements of Islam. 

Moses and the Law could reveal only the Absolute One.  To know grace and truth, we needed God Incarnate, Jesus Christ who showed us the Father, the Son, and, at the end, the Holy Spirit.  He enabled us to know that the Father thought not of Himself but of the Son, that the Son did not His own will but always the will of the Father, and that, through the Spirit poured out when the Son was glorified, we might be as one even as the Godhead is one. 

We are now free to renounce the judgments, resentments, and offenses of the soul with its intellect and emotions.  Right and wrong are plain to the spirit within each of us.  We can perceive the truth and recognize virtue directly by our spirit.  We need live no longer by rule and formula, rationalization and folly.  Now we know that God is love, and the law of Christ is to love Him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and to love my neighbor as myself.  Now we no longer need bear the burden of self-consciousness for on the Cross, it was crucified with Christ.    

What God Knows

And then will I declare to them, I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness. – Matthew 7:23

Reading Origen last night put me on this track.  He sees goodness and existence as being essential to one another – two sides of the same coin.  God knows only what is, and what God knows is.  God does not know evil; therefore, evil is equivalent to non-being.  Not too surprisingly, Satan lied when he said to Eve, You shall not surely die.  When Jesus told the rich young ruler that no one is good but God, He was simply saying what had been told to Moses and the prophets.  I AM THAT I AM.  I am, and there is no other. 

Evil does exist.  People do practice lawlessness.  There are tragedies.  Jesus was incarnated in this world and experienced, as man, the tests and fears and losses.  He wept at the tomb of Lazarus.  God sees evil and is aware of it.  We see dead leaves blowing about in the fall.  We see smoke hanging in the air, fog in the morning stillness, dust thrown up by the wind.  What we are seeing is an effect.  We know the wind is blowing or not blowing, that a fire is burning, that there is cold air above warm ground.  God sees the effects of evil, but the evil-doer, the instrument of evil has nothing in common with God.  There is no connection, no intimacy, and no communion. 

We read that the eyes of God are too pure to look upon evil.  This is offensive to the secular mind.  God is so judgmental, so sanctimonious.  Who does He think He is?  Yes, we really can be that stupid.  For God to know sin would be for everything to cease to exist.  It is not possible.  Nonetheless, as 2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us:  He who knew no sin became sin for us in order that we might become the righteousness of God in Christ.  When we think about this in terms of existence it quickly becomes mind-boggling.  How could the sinless Son of God experience death at all?  How could He, who is God, be separated from the Holy One?  It’s not hard to see how the staggering incomprehensibility of such thoughts could lead to partial and heretical explanations. 

Somehow the Lord took upon Himself the burden and penalty of our sin, identifying so perfectly and fully with us in the Incarnation that He was able to partake of our death and taste non-being as we know it.  Jesus went all the way down into the lowest depths, the deepest darkness, and from there He rose because He is Good.  No one can ever say that God does not understand or that He does not know what we are going through.  Jesus knows better than you or I know.  It is the one who has fully resisted temptation and gone all the way through the trial that knows how hot it gets at its worst.  We say that we cannot stand anymore and give up.

To live is to be known by God; to be known by God is to live.  Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 6:9 make a little more sense to me now, … as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live.  In my unrighteousness, I was nothing.  It didn’t matter how successful I might have been.  I might have been acclaimed and celebrated by the world, but I was a non-being because I was unknown to the Lord.  The poorest, most worthless, most insignificant soul, from the world’s point of view, who is known by God is worth all the world. 

I was talking about the Pearl of Great Price a few weeks ago.  It occurs to me that there are two sides to that parable.  Certainly from the human side, what we give up to know God and be known of Him is nothing.  It is smoke, dust, vapor, and swirling leaves.  The other side is that God Himself sought such a Pearl.  He, too, gave up everything that He might know it as His own. 

 

God Speed

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. – Isaiah 55:8-9

Traveling faster than the speed of light is one of the classic science fiction devices for which we are willing to suspend disbelief.  We need to get humans out to strange planets for strange new adventures, and, of course, traveling through the fictional medium of hyper-space or warp-space has implications for the adventure as well.  The truth is, though, that FTL travel would thoroughly mess up the real world.  It would require a complete revamping of the whole of physics.  Things that make sense and fit the equations now would make sense no longer.  I’m not saying it’s not possible for us to get around the limitation of the speed of light or that wormholes do not exist or whatever.  My point is that it is one thing to imagine that something might be possible without really understanding all the implications of such a radical change to the way we see things working. 

This is also true in relation to God, morality, good and evil.  There are those – and their numbers are legion, who are convinced they can do a better job of “god-ing” than God.  They would have a world without suffering.  They would have a world without killer tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, etc.  Their world would have no place for evil. 

To me, it’s kind of like gravity.  If I’m falling from a ten-story building, I would like for gravity to ease up, but, most of the time, gravity and I are good friends.  Gravity makes us strong and healthy.  I have a very hard time imagining how you could have anything like a human without gravity.  So, too, we think -- following Lennon, it’s easy to imagine a much better world, though all our imaginings are based only on the world that we know.  Just as we can imagine flying like Superman but can’t quite figure out how that works, we cannot figure out how we have a world at all, let alone one that would be “better” than this one. 

In The Once and Future King, T.H. White has Merlyn relate the story of Elisha and Rabbi Jachanan to Wart.  In the story Elisha and the rabbi are put up graciously and hospitably by a poor man and his wife who have only a cow.  When the men get up to leave in the morning, the cow is dead.  The next night, the two travelers are treated rather poorly by a rich miser and end up sleeping in his barn.  Yet, the following morning, Elisha has a section of the miser’s wall repaired for him.  Rabbi Jachanan is perplexed and questions what has happened.  Elisha explains: 

“In regard to the poor man who received us so hospitably,” replied the prophet, “it was decreed that his wife was to die that night, but in reward for his goodness God took the cow instead of the wife.  I repaired the wall of the rich miser because a chest of gold was concealed near the place, and if the miser had repaired the wall himself he would have discovered the treasure.  Say not therefore to the Lord:  What doest thou?  But say in thy heart:  Must not the Lord of all the earth do right?”

I am rather with Wart who still thought it a shame that the cow died, but it is true that some events and troubles serve a greater good which the Lord alone can see and comprehend.  I do not think there will be pain and suffering and loss in heaven, but I doubt that earth can even exist apart from some negative pole that is an essential part of life on this material plane.  We do not have to choose evil.  We do not have to make the world worse, but, there is, perhaps, a limit not only to how much better we can make it but how we make it better.  Someday we might find a way around the speed of light, but the speed of good will remain unbroken.

When Good Things Happen to Bad People

But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. -- Luke 6:35

This is the verse that precedes some of what I quoted yesterday, and continues the theme of the importance of how we live, act, and even how we think. 

Jesus is speaking, and we note that He, somewhat casually, blows apart a concept that most of us accept without too much thought.  God is not good to good people only.  God is good because He is Good.  He is kind – some translations say, gracious, to the ungrateful and to the evil.  To many of us, that does not seem quite the way it ought to be.  It’s not fair.  Good people should be rewarded. and bad people should be punished. 

Of course, they will be.  Both righteousness and evil carry with them their own appropriate rewards, for, as the Lord goes on to say, the seed we plant determines, inevitably, the harvest we receive.  None of us, though, can blame God  – as I must ashamedly confess I have done – for what our thoughts, our attitudes, and our behavior have yielded.  At the same time, we are all in need of God’s grace.  In light of the perfection of God, the utmost efforts of the best of us are hardly worthy of notice, as, next to Mount Everest, all anthills are approximately the same height.     

That part of it and the idea of salvation by grace, most Christians are able to grasp.  We are all condemned apart from the mercy and longsuffering of the Almighty.  Nevertheless, the natural part of us still may stumble over God’s love for those who are wicked.  We may lose patience with His patience and gentleness.  Yet for God to be other than perfect in His love for each individual would turn out all the lights in the universe.  We would be left alone and hopeless in the dark. 

The Lord offers us this truth as He calls upon us to live by the reality of it.  We must put the same graciousness and kindness to work in our own lives – forgiving, loving, doing good, helping with no expectation of any sort of repayment or of those who benefit being kind or grateful in return.  Very often, people may not even remember that we have done them a good turn.  In this way, we transcend the conventions of doing good and begin to be good. 

It can be a hard thing.  When someone forgets all that you or I have done for them or fails to respond appropriately to the grace of God flowing through us, we may feel hurt and wronged.  Instead of dwelling on it and opening a wound or keeping a wound open, we should think of the forgotten good as something done in secret, to the Lord alone.

Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.  But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.  (Matthew 6:2-4)

You Are Here ╬

…For they will see what has not been told them, and they will understand what they have not heard. – Isaiah 52:15

The old joke is that some folks from the city were driving through our part of the country. They became lost and stopped at a farmhouse to ask directions. The travelers explained that they are trying to reach a particular destination. The farmer scratched his head and replied, “You can’t get there from here. You’ll have to go some place else and start over.”

Reason is a lot like that. Where you can get to depends on where you start. Reason cannot validate itself. It can only be used to validate based on some assumptions. Both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries are based on axioms – certain assumptions that form the foundations on which proofs can be built. That there is more than one geometry is the evidence that proofs are dependent upon the initial axioms.

I have a point of view, a starting place. I believe that God is and is good. I believe that God does not merely exist in the sense that the material world exists, but that He is Real, and, that He is real Good.

Because I start from that point my destination will not be the same as the atheist or the pantheist or the animist. I really have some empathy for those groups because there is a certain appeal to a god who is not real. It is quite convenient to float up science or dryads or fairies when one is in a certain frame of mind – especially when one wants someone else to “play by the rules”. It is equally convenient to be able to ignore the unreal god when one finds it to be a hindrance to one’s own desires. Notice I’m not claiming science doesn’t exist. I’m not even claiming nymphs, fauns, and satyrs don’t exist. I am saying that none of those things are real in the way God is real.

The last few verses in Isaiah 52 begin to speak of the Messiah as the Suffering Servant. Here it is, in verse 14, that we read of Christ’s disfigurement. It is said that He does not even look like a human. If you watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion, you can see this depicted in that painful scourging scene. However, I don’t believe it is sufficient to interpret Isaiah’s statements in terms of the Lord’s physical appearance. When Jesus hung on the cross, the Father hid His face from His Son. He did so, not because the flesh of Jesus was torn, but because Christ was spiritually disfigured by bearing all of our sin. As horribly as the Lord’s body was ripped and battered by Roman whips, it is only a metaphor for the maiming of His spirit by the relentless tooth and claw of sin.

Yet from this rending came redemption -- so He will sprinkle many nations. Kings will shut their mouths because of Him, for they will see what had not been told them, and they will understand what they had not heard.

If we want to get where we need to be, we have to start at the right place. Go to the Cross. We can get home from there.