Humanity has an affectation that they seem to want to be in control. Of course this is, indeed, a central theme of the Bible about how we want to be God in our own lives, and the Bible is full of a myriad of destructive tales that testify to where human action or inaction has gone very wrong. From incest, to rape, to jealousy, war, or any of the seven deadly sins the troubles of life can too often be traced back to the fallen nature of man and the fact that we don’t know all that we think we know. We are not only not the center of the universe too often we have lost our ability to hear what God is saying or to see what he wants us to see [ see also: God is Not Hiding From Us – ofNaturesGod.com ].
Jesus said, “The eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is clear [spiritually perceptive, focused on God], your whole body also is full of light [benefiting from God’s precepts]. But when it is bad [spiritually blind], your body also is full of darkness [devoid of God’s word].” – Luke 11:34 – Amplified Bible*
Welcome back my friends. I hope that I can bring you to a closer understanding of the Living God and pose questions where you thought things were set and clarify things that you found uncertain. As one instructor said in seminary it is the pastor’s job to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”
When I was young my father would encourage me to walk with him in the woods by our cabin on the lake and wonder at the beauty and interaction of nature. The beauty of the wind whispering through the trees or the grass and the play of light in the shadows cast by sunlight and leaves. He more than once asked me, as a lad, to sit beside him and watch the light playing upon the water as he sat with his fishing pole’s line disappearing beneath the waves. My mom came by once and asked, “what are you using for bait?” She knew that we had not stopped at the bait shop to buy worms or minnows on the way to our cabin that weekend. “Nothing,” my father replied. “I have just found that if I sit here and think ten people assume I am not doing anything and bother me but if I put my line in the water and they think I am fishing then they leave me alone to think and be with God.”
I didn’t realize until I took a class in Jewish Mysticism that my father had lived the life of a mystic…and all my life I just thought he was a simple farmer. But don’t we often tend to underestimate our parents when we are young? But no, my father lived very close to the mysteries of God. He read his Bible every day, but he did not stop his relathionship with God there. He interacted with God and spoke with him (and more importantly he listened more than he talked,) daily. He recognized the mysteries that are around us every day and the gifts of wonder and beauty that God presents to us daily but which we too often pass over as if they are nothing. And, having lived closely with animals on the farm he did not underestimate them either.
The lamp of our eyes has perhaps become jaded through the years, and we no longer see truly. And we want humanity to be the center of the universe.
I remember when I was an agent I would be so focused on my job and investigations that one day I would look around and realize, “Gee, its summer and the trees are full…I don’t remember spring.” Or suddenly it would be sleeting and raining and icy and I had completely missed the beauty of the turning of the leaves in the fall and the call of cicadas that I had always enjoyed as a child. Despite the fact that every night, after work, if I got home when it was still light, I took my son and my dog to the park to play. Perhaps I was not wholly present with them when I did that.
My parents, when I had trouble sleeping as a small child would put my crib under the cottonwood trees in the shade outside of the cabin and the let the whispering leaves of the cottonwoods sing me to sleep. It always worked and I still find the whisper of cottonwood leaves to be particularly soothing and stress reducing. “The Cottonwood will talk to your more than any of the other trees,” my father would say.
I have encountered many who claim to follow the Living God but who seem to be completely cut off from the wonders of the world that He created and I don’t understand why. How can you bury yourself in the Bible, believe God as the creator, and view the world as something we just live on or that is something for us to manipulate and use? That is completely inconsistent with the message of the Old and New Testaments…especially Genesis. But too many Christians have only half a faith. They don’t have the faith of Jesus. They have a New Testament faith and ignore the Old. The completely ignore the fact that Jesus was not a New Testament teacher but an Old Testament teacher. Jesus’ teaching was entirely from the Old Testament. In fact, I call the New Testament “The Old Testament for Dummies” because Jesus had to come because too many people who read the Old Testament had completely missed the message making it all about law and losing the grace. As Jesus said, “the law was made for man, man was not made for the law.”
Christians too often repeat, what I consider to be brainwashing and conditioning that “The Old Testament God was a God of Judgment, and the New Testament God is a God of Grace.” Despite the fact that this is an impossibility for a God who is the same yesterday today and tomorrow. It is plainly wrong and thickheaded, but precisely human.
For instance, if you read through the account of Moses and the people from receiving the Ten Commandments (where the people made a Golden Calf to worship because the wonders that had brought them there were already forgotten,) to the number of times that the Hebrews (that “motley crew” the Bible calls them a “diverse people” but I remember my Hebrew and Old Testament instructor saying the Hebrew might be better translated as “a motley crew,” ) bitched and complained to God while wandering in the desert. God could be nothing but a God of Grace or they would have all been crushed like bugs.
But then there was another instructor who was dedicated to the principle that “God of the Old Testament was a God of Judgment” and that “John Hinge” was who he called “John the Baptist” because he insisted our entire faith turned on him. He said it was like the door was opened to a loving and grace-filled God away from “the God of Judgement in the Old Testament.” We used to have fights in class as I challenged nearly everything he said on those lines “What about Jesus saying “I do not come to change the law” and that “the Old Wine is good.” What if Jesus was saying you need to put new understandings in new skins because the old are so set in their ways that they cannot learn any more. They reject truth because it would cause them to change. But at the same time he was saying the Old Way IS Good, even if some have screwed it up and are leading people today.
At one time my sister, myself, and my wife were all at the same seminary. We were eating in the break room and my sister commented, “I don’t think seminary could take any more of us.” We had been raised to question and analyze and too many instructors seemed to think they were the experts and we were just there to be sponges and “learn from on high.” Even when one seminary professor spouted is liberal theology and I asked “Isn’t that the Arian Heresy that the Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicaea in 325 to put an end to?” That instructor didn’t like me and was one who tried to suspend my graduation.
Too often we put our beliefs of God and our denominations dogma becomes more important to us than God or what God is trying to say. We put our beliefs in our “God box” and reject anything that falls outside of our own understanding. In some ways that protects us from error but it can also protect us from growth in our faith. At that point we may no longer be worshipping the Living God but an idol that we have made of our own beliefs for ourselves that fits comfortably in our “box.” This “box” can become more important to us than our relationship with God Himself. God is mystery! One theologian said “a mystery wrapped in an enigma.” But that makes us uncomfortable.
I once had a very religions friend tell me “God wouldn’t do that.” Well, in my Bible, it says that “God will do what God will do” and it is not our place to limit him.
We need to develop “Eyes to See” what God wants us to see and that all centers around first listening and developing “Ears to hear.” [See Auscula, which means listen, which shares insights I gained from a Benedictine book here: AUSCULA – Listen With The Ears Of Your Heart – ofNaturesGod.com ]
While I believe that religious communities can be essential for our faith, at their heart, religions can become limiting. Although I believe that religions and denominations or groups may start with the best intentions and as ways to show us a clearer path into relationship with our Creator, too often they can become instruments of human control over one another.
This is what turned Jefferson off about religion, in his writings he clearly believes in a Divine Presence but he saw religions, instead of opening our minds to God as closing the minds of people with dogma. Its kind of silly actually when you consider that our finite minds can never fully comprehend the living God or even the mysteries of our own spirit and soul to believe that your religion “has it all.” Rather, as Wesley said, while the Bible has all things necessary for salvation. That is very different to saying “it has all things,” as some who try to use it to answer all questions whatsoever. Indeed, God never told us to assemble the Holy Scriptures into a closed canon in the first place. To me the very idea of a “closed canon” is an assumption that “God has stopped talking.” Or, to put it another way, the God whom the Bible says is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow…changed. [See these for how I see the Bible: Is the Bible the Inspired Word of God? Is it literally true? How so? – ofNaturesGod.com ; DON’T BE DECEIVED! BEWARE OF ONLINE CHRISTIANITY AND YOUTUBE! – ofNaturesGod.com and WHAT DO “REAL” CHRISTIANS BELIEVE? – ofNaturesGod.com ]
If you understand the physics surrounding creation and God, you would know this is impossible because to make Creation God is both outside and within creation. Change is a factor of linear time, but God Himself, although working through time and history, exists also outside of linear time and therefore cannot change.
Yet some denominations, caught up in linear time and the current theology of our day, ignore other testimonies in the Bible that would minimize their views of “Creation and Salvation History.” Too often our religious institutions reject anything that doesn’t fit neatly into the categories or into the boxes that they have crammed God into. They themselves, and not God, have created these limitations of understanding.
In Jesus day the pharisees were the most respected religious leaders of their day. But they were wrong. They had lost God in all their dogma and rules that they had created and most of them (although a few seemed to listen,) just couldn’t get it anymore. They had created idols instead of a relationship with the Living God.
Maybe Christianity had to be lost to most people so that their children would return and read the scripture with “new eyes” that were not consumed with old prejudices. [ see also: God is Not Hiding From Us – ofNaturesGod.com ]
I remember re-reading the Bible, after my years of being an investigator and scholar and learning to read texts without presupposing what they say before I read the text itself. Our Bible instructors always emphasized that we should read the text, mull it over, and consider it in our own prayerful understanding before we even reach for a commentary or Bible encyclopedia to see what others have said about it. Reading the Bible with “the new eyes” of an analyst and investigator I remember saying “How can anyone call this a God of Judgment? Had I been God I would have been pissed off (he forgave them more than 13 times for their insolence,) and they never would have made it out of the desert, and I would have found a different people who weren’t so dense. There is not a single Jew who would agree with the dubious “Christian” assertion that the God of Torah (the Books of Moses in the Old Testament,) was primarily a “God of Judgment.” They lived very close to God’s love and grace, and it was this grace that carried them through the horrors of the Nazi Concentration camps.
Let those who have eyes to see, let them see.
But we have been taught to read the scriptures and to see the world through the eyes of a prejudice (in other words we pre-judge what is there according to what we have been already told that we will find,) because we have been told by so many what we will find there that it is hard for us to find anything else.
Jesus told them, “Don’t let anyone mislead you, for many will come in My name [misusing it, and appropriating the strength of the name which belongs to Me], saying, ‘I am the Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed),’ and they will mislead many. Matthew 24:5
The worst part is that many who mislead, I believe, have no intention to mislead or they are just repeating what they have been taught by human teachers. They are just passing on their misconceptions and because their faith is written in what they have been told the Bible says and what they have been told to believe they are unable to see anything new or anything that they may have missed in scripture. They, likewise, by relying on written text instead of interacting with the Living God through the Shekinah (the Presence or Holy Spirit of God,) end up with a skeletal faith lacking the living and breathing freshness of life. We need to gain “eyes to see” and “ears to hear” and not just read our books or listen to the preacher.
There is so much we don’t see. So much that we don’t take the time to see. I was the same. It was only after I re-read the Bible with “eyes to see.” That the scriptures were truly opened up to me. I had read the Bible at least twice before them cover to cover but that reading changed everything. It caused a paradigm shift that I had been blind to in previous readings.
Luke 6:42 – How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, allow me to take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite (play actor, pretender), first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye. – Amplified Bible
I turned away from God when I was in the Army, although I didn’t fully know it, and then after the agent’s course when I re-read everything because I realized (after meeting some spirit filled Christians and reflecting on the spirit filled witnesses I had growing up,) that I must have missed something. Therefore I turned to scriptures with “new eyes” to actively find what I missed,
I finally had “eyes to see.”
The mysteries are not to be found only in the depths of space or the ocean, nor even in the depths of jungles where modern man has still not trod. Nor are they all lost in the past. The mysteries are as close as you and me and our daily lives.
I used to go to a huge park outside the city I grew up in to meditate and to pray. We had two parks, Wilderness and Pioneer that were somewhat “on the edge.” I grew up riding horses on the riding trails from stables adjacent to Pioneer Park and then riding in Pioneers Park with my baby-sitter who would regularly take me there with her.
Later, when I was older I would walk down the paved trails and leaving them find my way down some dirt trails, then leaving them go down a forgotteen path to a spot above a creek. There I would sit, read a small and thoughtful passage, and then pray and meditate. Once, as I sat there cross-legged with my eyes closed my meditation ended. I listened to the breeze whisper through the trees and move through the grass. (My father used to say “the trees will talk to you, if you learn to listen” which is of course a variation of a Bible verse.) Then, slowly, reverently, I opened my eyes.
There before me were two creatures. Creatures that would normally be deadly enemies sitting there watching me as I had meditated. One was a bird and there was a snake. The snake was not coiled or menacing. It looked curious as if it had been slithering through the grass and came upon me as I meditated. It had raised up its head, not menacingly as if it was to strike, but more in curiousity as if it wanted to see better. They no more than a foot from each other and not much more than a foot from me. There sat the bird and the snake studying me, and I them. Heartbeats after I opened my eyes the bird took flight and the snake zipped off through the grass away from me faster than I had any idea that snakes could even move.
I always wondered…what did these two creatures see? What were they watching so intently as I meditated and why did they flee when they realized I was no longer doing so?
We do know that ancient art always shows religious figures with a light about them, and once again I ask, did they know something that we have forgotten or perhaps taught ourselves not to see? Apparently, as always, the ancients may indeed have known things that we willfully forgot in the arrogance of the enlightenment as we became more “scientifically advanced.” After the choice many enlightenment figures made to reject the “superstitions” of the past and so we had to wait hundreds of years for science to become advanced enough to “rediscover” what the medieval and ancient mystics already knew.
Was I perhaps closer to the Living God as I meditated and they could see God’s light shining through me and in me?
What could they see that a passing person might have been too busy to notice or that they had trained themselves not to see – having been told too often that “its your imagination”? I know that snakes don’t see as we do, but birds see very similar to us – only more acutely. But what were they watching? Surely, a human sitting still and unmoving is not that fascinating. Yet they came so very close to me, when they clearly understood how dangerous humans were to them. But there is more going on in life than any purely materialistic scientific theory could ever answer and our radically materialistic society is blind to it.
The Bible, and many many other scriptures, tell us that we have a Divine Spark within us, could they somehow see this spark activated through my meditation? Saint Paul told us clearly,
“You surely know that your body is a temple where the Holy Spirit lives. The Spirit is in you and is a gift from God. You are no longer your own.” I Corinthians 6:19 Contemporary English Version*
Is our eye today, blind to see what God has placed before our very eyes? Are we unable to hear what God is saying?
Prior to this event with the bird and the serpent I had seen kyrelian photography that measured, recorded, and tracked energy fields and how they changed and flowed as people meditated, employed spiritual disciplnes, or engaged in physical activity or yoga. This is not some pagan or heretical idea, it is an energy field that God created that does something we don’t understand as we pray and meditate or even move.
The Bible says it is in God that we “live, move, and have our being.” But doesn’t exactly tell us what that means.
God made this reality, and it is deeper than the material world, and deeper than the faith most people seem to have. Perhaps that is the failing of the church today. We have lost the mystery and awe of God and everything has become…comfortable. Like the pharisees we no longer have eyes to see or ears to hear. Yet God is still there. Waiting. Waiting for us to listen and see again.
Fear not little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure, to give you the kingdom. – Haweis New Testament
[The Amplified Bible, Contemporary English Version, New International Version, New Revised Standard Version, Haweis New Testament, and the others I use for quotes are all drawn from the versions that I have found to be, in my opinion, the best and most accurate translations of the Bible. For more on that you can see more and have it explained here: WHAT BIBLE SHOULD I STUDY? – ofNaturesGod.com ]
