The Transfiguration

The Transfiguration

J. Michael Strawn

The Transfiguration of Jesus is a remarkable incident in many regards. The account of it is found in detail in the three synoptic Gospels, and most people believe that John’s statement, “We have seen His glory,” refers to the event that happened on top of an unnamed mountain and which has been the subject of much discussion for 2000 years. Some say that it is a remarkable miracle because it is the only miracle that happened to Jesus while He lived on earth before the Resurrection.

The event has enormous implication for the proof of the deity of Jesus. But one aspect of this momentous account is that it is a foundational place to begin to think about the true nature of reality. On that mountain, a fact became very clear: There are two worlds, the eternal and the temporal, and they are both proximate and permeable.

Luke 9:28-36.

28 About eight days after Jesus said this, he took Peter, John and James with him and went up onto a mountain to pray. 29 As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. 30 Two men, Moses and Elijah, appeared in glorious splendor, talking with Jesus. 31 They spoke about his departure,[a] which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem. 32 Peter and his companions were very sleepy, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. 33 As the men were leaving Jesus, Peter said to him, “Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” (He did not know what he was saying.)

 34 While he was speaking, a cloud appeared and covered them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. 35 A voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.” 36 When the voice had spoken, they found that Jesus was alone. The disciples kept this to themselves and did not tell anyone at that time what they had seen.

Representative of the seen or temporal world were Peter, James and John, here portrayed all their humanity – such that in a crucial moment, they fell asleep. Representative of the eternal world were two figures who came to encourage Jesus, Moses and Elijah.  There must have been some urgency that would necessitate their appearance there on the mountain. From a temporal point of view, if Jesus did not go through with the plan to save mankind, they like all others would end up in hell.  And of course the other representative of the unseen powers was God Himself, speaking.  Jesus, both fully God and fully man, stood joining those two worlds.

Two worlds came together on that mountain, or more properly stated, became visible on that mountain. But it wasn’t the first time that the two worlds were seen by human beings. For instance, when Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego make a decision to honor the unseen realities of God when the king told them to bow down, they were joined by a heavenly Being inside the fiery furnace, and others saw it too.  And it happened after Jesus ascended, too: When Stephen, the first Christian martyr died, he saw Jesus roused from His heavenly throne in alarm.

For each Christian, we must begin all our thinking about reality with the acknowledgment that there are two worlds, two aspects of reality. It is the decision the teenager has to make about whether to have sex with his girlfriend or show that he will act on the reality of two worlds and not just the sensation-filled one before him. It is the decision of the businesswoman who must turn down the opportunity to advance in her job if she knows it cannot be reconciled with what she knows about the God who reigns from another unseen world.

A Christian can only integrate the reality of those two worlds through one mechanism: The phenomenon of obedience.

In this phenomenon, Jesus Himself was the example. On the Mount, God’s thunderous voice declared, “This is my Son, Whom I have chosen. Listen to Him.” He could stand in the position of uniting two worlds because He Himself had been obedient to His Father.  Peter, James and John entered the cloud there on the Mount and it was there, in the union of two worlds, that they could hear God speaking.

It can be demonstrated this way by thinking of a large circle that is the eternal, and a smaller circle (the temporal)  that is brought into its boundaries via obedience.

All religions claim to be able to join the two worlds of the eternal and the temporal. But the joining of the two is impossible without supernatural terms, conditions that created by God.

The heart of the Transfiguration is obedience. We call it a phenomenon, because like all phenomena, it 1) takes place in the real world 2) can be observed  3) can be measured and assessed, and 4) its consequences can be known.

Though we cannot see the things we are called to believe in, we can see obedience. Jesus served as a symbol of perfect obedience. We, too, can be symbols, not just because Jesus preceded us as the perfect example of obedience, but also because He is the chief Symbol of all symbols. Because of Him, we as human beings can bring the two worlds together on the basis of supernatural terms, that is, what God has supernaturally revealed; but we can ourselves serve as symbols of that.

Why do we refer to the commandments of God as supernatural terms? Because they were delivered to us by God.  He pointed us to Jesus when He said, “Listen to Him.”  The commandments of God, revealed throughout the Bible, are unique. You can’t just reason your way to them. They are a means by which God fits two worlds together.  The actual process of putting those two worlds together in a human life we could call “transaction.”

Transaction is interaction between two or more things. In this case, the world we live in has to be transacted into the eternal one in such a way that our existence is subsumed by the eternal.

This is not something that can be accomplished just through human effort. It needs a mechanism, a transaction to take place, and it can only happen with supernatural terms.

When we talk about situations or conditions that we are in, we must always see them as situations or conditions that must be transacted into fitting into a greater reality, one superintended by God, His will, His Word.

In the case of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, these three young men transacted their situation without knowing what the outcome would be. We may die, they acknowledged. But they knew their situation must be transacted into a greater reality. They knew they must be obedient to supernatural terms – they knew the Ten Commandments, and they transacted the danger of what they faced until it became all one piece with eternal reality.

Later their friend Daniel faced the loss of his life in the lions’ den. He transacted that hopeless situation into fitting into the larger circle, the larger and more powerful part of reality.

We, like Peter, James and John in the cloud on the Mount of Transfiguration; we like the young men facing the furnace and their friend facing ravenous lions; we stand between two worlds. We acknowledge with them that survival is not the point, transaction is the point.

If you look at Scripture, you will see that every faithful person recorded in God’s Word transacted his or her trouble into eternal reality.

This is a skill that children can be taught, which they must be taught. In most church situations, we tell young people stories of faithful people in the Bible and give them doctrinal teaching but we never come out and say what they simply must hear: Each of them must become a symbol of unity between the two worlds.

We have shied away from any sorts of rules or standards, thinking that they are impositions upon our children.  But remember that obedience is a phenomenon and like all phenomena it has four characteristics: 1) takes place in the real world 2) can be observed  3) can be measured and assessed, and 4) its consequences can be known.

We have bought into the world’s lie that children have such inherent goodness in them that if we tell them stories of faith, they will rise to be faithful. But for most children the desire to be accepted by their peers is stronger than other things. Current teaching emphasizes relationships above almost everything. Most children don’t naturally want to be symbols that go against the world. And even if they want to be symbols, they won’t have the ability to do that and stay strong unless we teach them the truth about reality: It has two parts, the part you can see and the part you cannot see, and we must transact that seen side into the unseen.

Jesus was committed even in His own life to transacting His circumstances into eternal reality. He was committed to obedience, even obedient to the point of death on the cross. He showed people like Stephen, and his cousin John the Baptist, and all the early Christians, that this could be done, and that it was worth it.

In Acts, we read of the Herod arresting Peter and putting him into jail. How did the church react? They prayed. They knew that being obedient to God first put them in the position of being able to transact their circumstances into a greater reality. They knew they were symbols, that people were watching them. They knew they stood between two worlds. They waited and prayed.

Undoubtedly they were remembering a previous time when Peter and John were threatened by the Jewish leaders. How did they respond?

Then they called them in again and commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. 19 But Peter and John replied, “Which is right in God’s eyes: to listen to you, or to him? You be the judges! 20 As for us, we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.”

 21 After further threats they let them go. They could not decide how to punish them, because all the people were praising God for what had happened. 22 For the man who was miraculously healed was over forty years old.

 23 On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. 24 When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. 25 You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:

   “‘Why do the nations rage  and the peoples plot in vain? 
26 The kings of the earth rise up 
   and the rulers band together 
against the Lord  and against his anointed one.

 27 Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. 28 They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. 29 Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. 30 Stretch out your hand to heal and perform signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.”

 31 After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.

What they were saying was, “Help us O Lord, we’re between two worlds. Help us to be able to transact our circumstances into the unseen world where Your power is.”

Here’s something else that was remarkable. The following verse says that all the believers were of one heart and one mind. That’s because transaction into the eternal world gives people around you courage.  It builds community not by emphasizing how to form relationships, but by showing how to live in this world but not of it.

This is something you must approach deliberately. You must talk about it, identifying what elements of your circumstances don’t “want” to be subsumed by the unseen. These are the elements that must be deliberately tackled and downed.

Will such a teaching be popular? Will people from the world flock to a church that is populated by people committed to transacting their circumstances into eternal reality? It will look like lack of action. It will look like escapism. It will always look impractical.

It may drive away comfortable Christians, who have made their understanding of the eternal fit into their own circumstances. The eternal must take priority in the way we think, the way we speak and the way we behave. It will create smaller, harder churches instead of bloated, fat, useless ones. Like all phenomena, the phenomenon of obedience will have not only discernable characteristics, it will have discernible consequences.

This must start at the level of the home. A husband and a wife in a Christian home do not have a symmetrical relationship. The wife must submit to and obey her husband. She becomes a symbol of the phenomenon of obedience to her children and to the world which observes her as she transacts her “rights” into eternal reality. Together, they are able with that strength to transact all the difficult circumstances they face, into eternal reality.

The Bible is full of examples of people who did or did not transact their circumstances and attitudes into eternal reality.  In Exodus 32, Moses stayed a long time up on the mountain with God. Even though the people were right at the cusp of eternal reality (just as Peter James and John had been on another mountain) and could hear the thundering presence of God, they decided that they would assign their history and their fates to only the reality they saw around them. In fact, they even created symbols of that reality: a golden calf they said had led them out of Egypt. They refused to transact their feelings of fear and uncertainty into the eternal reality they were literally within sight of.

Paul on Mars Hill looked around at all the idols people had created there, and chose a symbol that he said could help people begin to transact into eternal reality. “You speak of an unknown god,” he said, “But I’ll show you exactly the way that that god of mystery has actually been active in your lives.”

But he warned them: This true and living God was in a reality they couldn’t connect with through logic or history or through any device of their own minds. Transaction with this God could only be done on the basis of obedience to Him.

People in this world actually understand the idea of transaction if you explain it to them. An athlete will buffet and train – that is, transact– his body not to conform to his present situation but because there’s unseen goal he is working toward. An employee transacts his or her time at work toward something unseen.

As Christians, we live out the terms of our transactions in our everyday lives. We must be conscious of the fact that we are showing ourselves to be symbols – of something – every day. Unfortunately many Christians have bought into the lie that it is our duty to be very good worldly people. We don’t become symbols of the eternal either to people close to us, or to people who simply observe us, because we don’t talk about what makes us different. Christianity isn’t a guessing game for outsiders. We have to say that our obedience is to something with supernatural terms.

One reason people avoid being symbols of the eternal is that they realize there will be unwanted reactions and results. The phenomenon of obedience must create reactions from people who notice it. (If no one in the world notices your obedience, why is that? Could it be that it looks just like them? How can you be a symbol if you don’t create some sort of impression on the mind of an observer?) Some will feel judged by it, as if you are saying by your obedience that you are making a comparison between them and yourself.

But there is a more obvious obstacle that people see to transacting toward eternal reality. There will be consequences. For the three young men in Babylon, the consequence of their transacting was a fiery furnace. For Joseph, sold into slavery in Egypt, there was most of a lifetime as a servant or a convict. For Paul there was beatings and shipwrecks and trials and prison. For Jesus there was humiliation and lonely death.

In many cases in the Bible, people were rescued out of the fiery furnace or the lions’ dens or the prisons. But for many more, there was no such rescue. In Hebrews chapter 11, the author was brutally honest about consequences:

32 And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah, about David and Samuel and the prophets, 33 who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, 34 quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. 35 Women received back their dead, raised to life again. There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. 36 Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. 37 They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— 38 the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground.

 39 These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, 40 since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

We want a reality that we can control, and transacting with the eternal means we lose control of situations sometimes. But when you stand on the Mount of Transfiguration, when you enter the cloud of transacting with the eternal, things look different. Sometimes courage comes from the simple fact of knowing that you are at the juncture of two worlds.

No one of us has the inherent strength to become such symbols. Joshua and Caleb, on the verge of taking the Promised Land, knew this. Numbers 14:

6. Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, of those who had spied out the land, tore their clothes; 7and they spoke to all the congregation of the sons of Israel, saying, “The land which we passed through to spy out is an exceedingly good land. 8“If the LORD is pleased with us, then He will bring us into this land and give it to us—a land which flows with milk and honey. 9“Only do not rebel against the LORD; and do not fear the people of the land, for they will be our prey. Their protection has been removed from them, and the LORD is with us; do not fear them.”

They were telling the people that God was willing to transact with them, to enfold their desert experience into His reality of a rich and plentiful land. They warned the people that this transaction would be on the basis of supernatural terms: If God is pleased with us, don’t rebel against Him.  He was willing to transact every dream of theirs into reality, doing it Himself, by removing the protection of the enemy. God urged them to turn over their fears to Him because He would transact every danger into a blessing.

But we have been speaking of the consequences of such transactions. What happened next to Joshua and Caleb?

10But all the congregation said to stone them with stones. Then the glory of the LORD appeared in the tent of meeting to all the sons of Israel.

The people wanted to try to fit God into their lives on their terms. And God was fed up with them, willing to kill them all if Moses hadn’t interceded.

God calls us to take the bait of His promises. He wants us to make the pledge to become symbols, to stand between two worlds and fit ours into His.

The Lord will hear you when you place yourself into that position.  You might die because of that position. You can live out the terms of the Transfiguration in your flesh every day.

Make the commitment to look at situations only as conditions to be transacted into eternal reality. Look at every situation from the vantage point of the Mount of Transfiguration.

Remember that Peter and James and John were human like us. They were asleep. They almost missed the whole thing!  And the Luke account tells us that when Peter woke up, he was scurrying around, trying to do something, anything. But God put the focus on His Son, on listening to and obeying His Son.

Husbands should always be turning the attention of their wives to the eternal, finding ways to transact their situations into the eternal, to fit their lives into an eternal view. The memories of our children and grandchildren should be of parents and grandparents who were always talking about how to transact situation, how to fit them into the eternal view.

We will fail at this sometimes. The eleven disciples, who had been with Jesus daily, spent three days after His death unable to transact their experience into the eternal. When the women came and told them that Jesus had risen from the dead, they didn’t believe them. They were stuck firmly in their own small circle. The men on the road to Emmaus were crushed and disappointed and told Jesus so, because they were now trying to cram all they’d hoped for about the eternal, into the small circle of their own reality of a dead man.

The world is committed to keeping our attention on what we can see, on their standards of measurement and success, to explain away the supernatural, to despise the supernatural. Perhaps in years past our government and our society were content to let Christians keep their transactions without comment, but now they stand ready to devour those who live on the basis of the unseen.

Transacting is what Christians do. It is our job description. It is our task in small things and large. For every Christian, every day is the Mount of Transfiguration, the intersection of the eternal and the temporal, a place where the Christian’s life becomes transparent, and only the eternal purposes of God shine through.

(For a printed version of this lesson that includes illustrative graphics, click Transfiguration

The Contextual Universe Part Three

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Contextual Universe Part Three

Copyright 2011 J. Michael Strawn

 

Synopsis: This lesson, third in the series, shows how the statements of Joshua and Caleb in Numbers 13 not only contrasted with those of the ten other spies who were unfaithful, these words also reveal steps or strategies for today’s Christian.  Building on the previous two truths (one, The temporal order, our experience, and our situations are not the context for the mind; but there is a singular context, the reality of God; and two, All critical representations are leveraged by Scripture), the third step shows that the ten unfaithful spies’ words teach us that one must consciously avoid the structural elimination of God.

 

Scripture passage: Numbers 13:31-33

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Contextual Universe Part Three revised 6-6-11

The Contextual Universe Part Two

The Contextual Universe

Part Two

© 2011 J. Michael Strawn

This is part two of a series that explores the pan-Scriptural concept that the temporal dimension –and by extension, the universe itself –and our experience of it, have a role in our thinking. However, that role is never as the context for a believer’s thought, speech and behavior. Several steps help a Christian implement the concepts.

 

Step One

Actuate the first truth:

The temporal order, our experience, and our situations are not the context for the mind; but there is a singular context, the reality of God.

(continue reading by clicking the link below)

The Contextual Universe — Part Two with graphics

 

The Contextual Universe, Part One

Click here here for Part One

Contextual Universe Pt 1 Revised and with Graphic

Language: A Human Monopoly, or a Shared Phenomenon?

Language as a Human Monopoly or a Shared Phenomenon?
© J. Michael Strawn

In 1 Samuel chapter 13, we read the account of King Saul who was in a situation in which he ran out of time and decided to take action, even though he had been commanded to wait. While we might say that he was trying to bring about a result that had God in mind, Samuel the prophet condemned Saul, even to the point of telling him his kingship would come to an end because of his actions. By seeing how Saul and others in the Bible handled situations we might call “dilemmas” or even “crises,” we can generalize some rules and strategies we can employ in difficult situations. The most foundational ways we can assess such situations and then take action, however, start at the level of thought and speech, long before we move to action in the situations.

In 1 Samuel, Saul saw his situation, that of delaying and not offering sacrifices after a battle, as a crisis. Instead, he should have seen it as a situation in which he could exercise faith. There are some reasons why he acted that way, and why we tend to act similarly.

First of all, there are at least two components of crisis: a) physical (the elements making up the dilemma) and b) temporal (those elements associated with – and usually exacerbated by—the passage of time). Since a crisis is by definition a situation that seems to swamp an individual, it is axiomatic that we find ourselves helpless to change the situation. However, we do have the power to map representations onto the situation, even if we cannot change it.

King Saul assessed the situation at Gilgal as a crisis, and then he acted upon that situation as if it were only a crisis. His words reveal that he thought he had no choice but to make the sacrifice when he saw his army “melting away.” This gave it legitimate crisis status in his eyes, but this was a mistake: It was a point at which he could have brought about lasting results by exercising faith.

After Saul made the sacrifice, Saul went out to greet Samuel. But the king did not even get a chance to speak. Samuel’s greeting was stern: “What have you done?”

Saul could have chosen to represent his dilemma as an opportunity to show faith, not as a crisis. But he was not alone in facing such a crux decision. There are examples throughout Scripture where other people did the same:

• 2 Samuel 24 – David took the military census because he saw it as a potential crisis, and not as a point to exercise faith, even though he was encouraged to do that by his faithful counselor Joab.

• Daniel 3 – The three Hebrew men, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, didn’t treat the situation at the fiery furnace as a crisis, but a point at which to exercise faith. This decision saved them.

• Daniel 6 – Daniel facing “certain death” in the lion’s den did not treat the situation as a crisis, but as a point at which to exercise faith. This saved him.

• 1 Samuel 17: David arrived at the battlefield and everyone there believed the situation had reached crisis status. But David correctly understood the situation as something far beyond its temporal and physical elements.

• 2 Chronicles 20—King Jehosophat looked at the challenge of the enemy army at Engedi not as simply a crisis. We know this because his first response was to call everyone to the temple, to seek God. His response took time and thoughtfulness (and reveals his underlying character and relationship to God.)

• Exodus 14—The Israelites represented the Red Sea situation as a legitimate crisis, but not a faith situation. They were short-sighted in their belief that the God who had brought them to the shores of the Sea could not take them across it.

• Exodus 14 – Again, even though they had been saved from many “crises,” which the Lord and Moses represented as opportunities for great faith, the Israelites at Mara looked at the bitter waters and believed them to be a crisis.

• Exodus 17—The same was true when the Israelites faced an absence of water at Rephidim.

• Genesis 25 – Esau saw his immediate situation as a crisis. For him, it was simply a case of being desperately hungry, not a point at which to exercise faith. In Hebrews 12:16, God said that his decision revealed him to be godless, for he acted as if a crisis created a reality in which God and His interests didn’t matter.

All of these examples teach us that, although any situation or circumstance certainly has temporal and physical elements, those elements alone cannot form a crisis. From the examples above we can see that each situation had overwhelming physical and temporal aspects. But what makes a situation become a crisis in someone’s mind is another aspect—a “designating element.”

A designating element is a representation of the physical and temporal elements: a representation we use to determine or designate it. The terms associated with crisis are all terms relative to the temporal and physical elements. This is nearly universal—when people speak of something as a crisis, they speak of it in terms of its physical and temporal elements.

But the terms associated with the exercise of faith are different! They are not relative to or associated with the temporal and physical elements that make up the situation. They are relative to God, and to the Word of God.

A person cannot do both. We want to do both, but it is not possible. We would like to use common sense, be rationalistic, be pragmatic – and be spiritual. But the Bible teaches that these two mindsets and ways of representing situation cannot be employed at the same time. If we look at how the three Hebrew men facing the fiery furnace represented their situation, they acknowledged the reality of the threats of the king and the potential of their own deaths, but discounted them as compared to the reality of God and their own opportunity to show faith in the situation.

When people use representations of situations that focus on the temporal and physical elements of them, they add complexity to their thinking. They begin to feel swamped and confused by all of the factors involved. In 1 Samuel 13, King Saul wanted to avoid using terms relative to Word of God and the reality of God. Waiting was simple, and he was told to do this. But he thought that waiting was too simple, that it would underestimate the crisis. He as a leader couldn’t do that, he thought. Consequently, using only terms relative to the Word of God and to God Himself, he believed, would have underestimated the situation. However, King Saul’s assessment was actually an underestimation of faith and what it could do.

If a person decides to treat each distressing episode, represented in the thematic as a node on the timeline, as a point at which to exercise faith, the power of the crisis potential of that situation lessens. The decision is this: Do I assess this situation by its crisis potential, or as an opportunity for faith?

A person who assesses a situation as an opportunity for faith would change his or her behavior as a result of a change in language. Such a progress would take the following steps:

1) Begin with a decision to avoid using terms relative to the physical and temporal elements of a situation. If you do that, your mind will assign to their proper and inherently-less-useful status such ideas as common sense, pragmatic terms, experience, and what’s “practical.”
2) In thinking and speaking, exclusively use terms relative to the reality of God and the Word of God. In all the previously-cited examples from Scripture, when people used such terms, this triggered a supernatural element that changed the situation. Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah’s statements of faith actually involved God in their situation in a very literal way, as did the words of Daniel facing the lions’ den. These examples lead to a question: Is there a danger to a Christian when he or she overestimates faith?
3) Because talking about a situation in terms of its physical/temporal qualities is not the same as using terms that represent it as an opportunity for faith, and because the Bible says it’s not possible to do both at once, we must maintain and emphasize the contradiction between the two. Terms relative to God and to the Word of God must be elevated over time and experience.
4) You must use language abstracted from the Word of God, and only from the Word of God. When you use language abstracted in this way—that is, generalizations – you eliminate human wisdom and its supposed power.
5) You must commit to not create a “crisis.” This is a mental posture that requires vigilance. Saul he thought he was being responsible, exercising true leadership, being visionary, wise, and practical; fulfilling his obligation as a king. But what he did was take a situation ripe with opportunity to exercise faith, and racheted it up to crisis status with his action.

Often in a crisis there is a tendency to think that things are intractable without human involvement. Nothing will change until I act, we think. But is that true? Biblically, it is not true. These passages teach us that all things are tractable, changeable, and redeemable if one has true confidence in the reality and the Word of God. When we define something as a crisis, we essentially pronounce it to be intractable without using human experience to “solve” it.

Quite to the contrary, acting in faith triggers two things: first, the direct involvement of God in the situation, and consequently the elimination of human “wisdom.” We see in Daniel 4:37, after Nebuchadnezzar was humbled by God, the king acknowledged that God’s power put an end to anything he would have thought or speculated: Human wisdom was eliminated in the face of God’s power in situations. We must expunge the idea that an situation or circumstance is intractable without human experience.

Someone might say that we must have sympathy on Saul, in the grips of a dilemma, damned if he takes action, and damned if he did not. Similarly, Abraham and Sarah believed they were in a dilemma, waiting for a promise from God to be fulfilled but both of them beyond the biological pale of parenthood. The same was true of Jehosophat in 2 Chronicles 20, under imminent siege by a foreign army, damned if he takes action, damned if he does not and does something as seemingly nonproductive as going to the temple to discuss the matter with God.

But when you use terms only relative to the reality and the Word of God, you don’t deal with something as a dilemma. The concepts of dilemma and crisis are akin to one another, because in both we want to use terms relative to the ingredients of the dilemma.

 

Faith eliminates or bypasses the terms relative to the physical and the temporal – though, of course, it does not eliminate nor bypass the physical and temporal themselves. This is not a small distinction. At Kadesh Barnea in Numbers 13 and 14, for example, the act of faith from Joshua and Caleb was to use their language in such as way as to bypass the terms relative to the physical and temporal aspects of the situation. “We should surely go up!” they said, because of what a very real God had said previously about their eventual success.

However, many of our brethren become angry when we use only terms relative to the reality of God and the Word of God and reject the terms relative to the physical and temporal. In the case of Joshua and Caleb, their “faithful” language made the crowd they addressed homicidal.

Why were people so angry in similar situations in Scripture?

• In Exodus 32, at the foot of the mountain.

• In John 6, when Jesus decided to test Philip—Philip used only terms relative to the physical and temporal regarding the feeding of the five thousand.

• David’s brothers in valley of Elah were angry with his plan to fight Goliath.

• Joshua and Caleb, in their representational explanation, bypassed and eliminated terms of the physical and temporal, and didn’t deny the existence of the situation – and yet they were at the point of being stoned. This is echoed in the reaction of the listeners of Stephen’s address – except they did stone him.

• Why, then, is the use of language that bypasses and eliminates the physical and the temporal a death offense?

We see that only using terms relative to the reality and the Word of God polarizes human will and human experience. Why the anger?

1) It removes human options. Someone facing a health crisis is reluctant to give up medical options in favor of language relative only to the reality and Word of God.

2) It forces reliance on the unseen, and we hate that. It makes us nervous. It scares us. But using terms to link the reality of God to the situation while making us uncomfortable is nonetheless a basic function of faith. It takes focus to bypass, to walk away from and eliminate, all language relative to the physical and temporal elements of a situation.

But others were able to do it. In Matthew 4, Jesus was tempted and was in a true crisis situation. However, the temptations of Satan had one aim: to get Jesus to act directly on the physical and temporal elements of His hunger. Instead, Jesus deliberately used terms relative only to the reality of God and the Word of God.

In Genesis 16, Sarah appealed to Abraham on the basis of the physical and temporal aspects of her childlessness. Why did Abraham take her up on what we might call “the Hagar option”? Because he was unwilling to bypass and eliminate the terms that were relative to the physical and temporal elements.

Later, in Genesis 22, when Abraham was able to truly act in faith, he is able to do this by bypassing and eliminating all the physical and temporal terms that otherwise might have been used to characterize the situation.

In the parables of Jesus, we see the distinction between terms that are relative to the reality and Word of God, or to temporal and physical elements. Examples: the fish in the net, the sower and the soils, and others.

It is important to note that the Word of God and His reality put pressure on our language, much as a vise puts pressure on what it constrains. But if we begin with terms relative to the reality and the Word of God, language becomes a shared phenomenon, in which God and the self share the same language faculties. (The same idea is reflected in the Greek word for confession, homologeo, which means “to say the same thing” about a situation.)

Language that is a shared phenomenon with God is quite different from language monopolized by the self. In Numbers 13 and 14, the people were not able to let go of their own language about the situation. But Joshua and Caleb realized that the Word of God and the reality of God required that this monopoly on language be broken. In many churches we still rely on and insist on our own monopoly on language. Even worse, we drag the Text into our own monopolized language use.

Human monopoly on the language faculty is disastrous, both for individuals and on the corporate level. And it is an ancient folly: In Genesis 3, the serpent insisted that he would not share the language faculty with God, but that he would monopolize it and try to persuade Adam and Eve to do the same.

This happened in Exodus 32, at foot of the mountain when Moses delayed his return. The people monopolized language not only about their present situation, but about their past as well. This occurred in the days of Josiah, when the scrolls were lost. There was no shared language faculty with God, because His words were unknown to them.

This is one fault of liberal theology, which wants to monopolize the language about the things of God without sharing it with the Word of God. It is reflected in the writing of commentaries that are unwilling to share representational faculties with God and with His Word.

Here we draw the line. We cannot repeat the error of the Jews with Joshua and Caleb, nor the sin of David taking an unauthorized military census, nor the rage of the ones who stoned Stephen. When our representations are phenomena shared with the Lord, it triggers supernatural involvement. God, who tells us “not by might, not by power, but by My Spirit,” is waiting for us to trigger His involvement.

We conclude that learning from Scripture and growth in faith demand a sharing of the human representational faculty with God. But most are not willing to do it. Many are like the Jews, whom Jesus criticized because they did not know the Word of God, nor His power.

If a person insists on the human monopoly of language in a situation, that situation will become a crisis.

Is He involved or not? What will we say about this?

If we share our language with the Lord, we share the circumstance with the Lord.

 

The Rise of the Spiritual Order of Men and Women–from Galatians

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The Revealed Order of Reality: Hebrews 11 and 12 (with thematic)

A Revealed Order of Reality

© 2011 J. Michael Strawn

The “roll call of the faithful” in Hebrews chapter eleven shows us how real people, in real events, responded in ways that showed their underlying concept of what was real. People decide on what is real and what is simply speculation and show that in their subsequent actions.  For a Christian, this underlying concept can’t be derived from any resources he or she might have. This must be, and has been, revealed by God.

The people in Hebrews 11 considered that what was real, important, and powerful was beyond what they and others could see. The radius of reality was actually larger for them than the visible. Thus they show us that faith is not restricting—to the contrary, it expands one’s world.

If one thinks of one’s own experience as a bubble next to a balloon, what one would have to do would be to drag that bubble into the larger balloon.

What happens to the person who does not base faith on what God has revealed in the Bible? He or she will base it on one or all of the following: what you see, what you experience, your surroundings, what others say, and what comes from within you. How limiting this is, considering God’s knowledge of your situation is eternal, with infinite foreknowledge and view of the future, in place for eternity.

(God has proved that He deserves our trust in His assessment of reality when He raised Jesus from the dead. The Resurrection proves that God is what He’s always says He is, and that He knows everything.)

Everyone has faith in something—even if it is only faith in such “sure things” as the rising of the sun tomorrow morning. But in Hebrews 11 we learn that “without faith it is impossible to please God,” and that is a specific kind of faith. It is the evidence of things unseen and that which is  hoped for, and 2)it is what others learned and how they gained the approval of God.

This approval isn’t from being a good person, nor even from good deeds –even sacrificial deeds—that serve others. God does not grant His blanket approval because a person has and demonstrates genuine love for others, nor through church membership, nor only through Biblical baptism, nor Bible study and prayer. All of these are good things – but faith trumps them all.

How does one have “amazing” faith? In the Bible, Jesus was only amazed – the Greek word ethaumasen—by one thing. It was faith that “wowed” Him – the astonishing faith of the Centurion in Luke 7:9, and the crushing lack of faith He found in His own hometown (Mark 6:4-6.)

In Hebrews chapter 11, we learn in verse 2 that a word – something literally unseen and of no physical substance – actually created all physical matter: What is seen is not made out of what we can see. Thus there is a supernatural basis for every physical object God made, from the rocks and water and plants to the very air.

Indeed, this assertion underlies the whole book of Hebrews.  Even the treasures of the temple that the Old Testament Jews treasured so highly, the writer of Hebrews shows, were just “visual aids” to a higher lesson, and that lesson was that Jesus Christ is God. The gold and silver and even the massive stones of the temple were only temporary, of relatively little value, and often even deceptive when not viewed for their eternal significance, for they were ever and always only copies and shadows of unseen, eternal realities.

The book of Hebrews is about human experience, but not the way most people think about it. It is about how Jesus Christ came from a world beyond human experience to tell you that your life isn’t just about your own experience. He became like humans so that we can rely on His assessments and sympathy, taking on birth, pain, and death. Now He offers to us His experience: power, resurrection, and eternal life.

God wants us to know what He knows to be real, so that we can confidently and joyfully go to jail for it, give up our lives for it if necessary. As we begin looking at each of the personalities listed in Hebrews chapter 11, we will notice that they never thought of “balance,” nor did they try to give equal weight to the seen and the unseen. It was as if their assessments were like a flexible water balloon, and their mental task was to continually squeeze their attentions away from one handful of the balloon – the seen side—over to the unseen side. They did this first and foremost by language use that was asymmetrical and that showed where they put their emphasis. A good example of this is the response by Shadrach, Mesach and Abednego in Daniel 3:16-18. When they were warned that their actions could cause their death, they responded in a way that showed they knew the greater weight of the unseen.

Another way of considering such a reaction is to say that the three young men did what all faithful Christians must do: They can acknowledge the existence of a difficult situation, but must speak of it in “contradiction language,” where they must elevate the promise above its contradiction. A Christian puts his or her situation, his or her contradiction into a revealed order of reality – where greater weight is always placed on the unseen rather than the seen.

(Click here for a larger, printable version)

This image illustrates that revealed order of reality, as exemplified in the lives of the people of Hebrews 11. It shows how each person in Hebrews 11 dragged his or her circumstances into the radius of the revealed order of reality, what was truly real. It begins at the upper right hand corner and proceeds counter clockwise.

Abel’s Faith kept the Revealed Order of Reality (verse 4):

Cain, the murderous brother of Abel, operated on the seen, exclusively. From his assessment, one sacrifice was as good as another. He began with what he had at hand—the fruit, quite literally, of how he spent his time, energy and focus.

If someone were to say, “That’s not fair,” – would not such a person be doing what Cain did, starting from his own experience and not from the words and the nature of God, who is fairness personified? A person regards something as fair or not fair, according to his or her basis for judgment. God told Cain in Genesis 4 that he could do what was right.  But even as we look at the story of Cain, we ourselves are tempted to assess it on what we think, instead of conceding that God told Cain he was capable of doing what was “right”—which means he must have known what it was, and went against it.

Abel, on the other hand, still speaks about this situation through the Bible, even though he is dead. We see that being alive isn’t a requirement for having your present actions bring about good results in the future. Each of us, like Abel, will depart this life. What is left on earth—the record and influence of our present actions, can nonetheless continue to influence people. Think of it—when Abel was alive, he interacted with a very small group of people, but now, thousands of years later, his actions still encourage and instruct millions!

What some people might think is essential for influence – being alive – is no obstacle to a God who will continue to inspire others with the actions of someone long departed. He doesn’t need the equivalent of 1600 hours of wage-earning of a working man to feed a multitude, He can use a little boy’s lunch. He doesn’t need raw materials of any sort to create a universe. He doesn’t need a fertile man and woman to create an Isaac.  And as Abel shows, you don’t have to be alive to speak.

Enoch’s Way of Thought, Speech and Behavior (verses 5-6)

Enoch, similarly, teaches us about what he regarded as “real.” He pleased God – what an accomplishment—not just by his behavior and language, but showing that what he thought preceded and formed his speech and behavior. In the end, he was taken up to the part of reality where his mind had been anchored all along.

This account comes directly before the statement that “without faith it is impossible to please God”—which shows that believers must have a deliberate mental ordering of reality. The requirements for faith are 1) to come to Him 2) to believe that He exists and 3) to know, as the Greek of Hebrews 11:6 says, that He will become a rewarder of those who earnestly seek Him. He did this rewarding up against the “reality” of people like sterile Abraham and infertile Sarah, making them the parents of a great nation.

Enoch pleased an invisible God by operating on His invisible realities – and God rewarded him by giving him rewards that have endured long past his lifetime

Noah and the Open Universe

Noah lived in a world that didn’t acknowledge the reality of God. It was a kind of a closed system in which people believed in cause and effect, and thought they knew how the world “worked.”

Into this closed system come the words of God:

Build an ark (according to My words)

Rain will come (even though others couldn’t conceive of such a thing)

Noah saw the universe not as a closed system, but an open one that God could change. Not only that, he believed God could actually predict those changes. As a result of God’s words, the world did change: Every living thing on it died, except those on the ark.

We see from this that faith can condemn, or it can save

Abraham and the Asymmetry of Faith

In verse 9, Abraham is called to go to a place that was, at the time, invisible to him. And even when he got to the land that he owned, he lived as a resident legal alien in it. The tents he carried around and erected to live in were symbols of a lack of permanence. He was continually looking for something else, something he regarded as more real, a city whose foundations were in the invisible, whose architect and builder was an invisible God.

All his life, Abraham lived in the midst of contradictions to the promises of God to him.  He acknowledged what the world “was” when he “faced the fact that  his body was as good as dead.” But the radius of revealed reality reached out and pulled him in to something more real. And the evidence of that is in the fact that now, thousands of years later, his descendants truly are countless as grains of sand.

He knew that the “reality,” the very measurability, of the passage of time cannot affect the radius of revealed reality. Thus when he was miraculously given a son, and understood the significance of that son, he considered that even putting that child to death would not remove him from the radius of revealed reality if God commanded it.  God was bound by His nature to protect what He promised to protect, and in the words of Romans 8:28, to work everything – all of visible reality—together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose (and is not purpose itself an embodiment of revealed reality?)

Isaac and the Pathway through the Time Variable (verse 20)

In verse 20, we see how Isaac considered that the passage of time could not be considered a variable nor a factor in his life. There was a pathway through time, and God would not only reveal it, but accompany Isaac and his descendants through it.

God, who stands outside time, wants His people to consider that how they measure time ultimately cannot affect the purposes of God. That doesn’t mean we don’t struggle with it – as the prophet said, “How long, oh God?” It does affect us, though, and Jesus recognized that by telling us to pray and not give up, like the widow without resources who nonetheless was able to sway the unjust judge who withheld justice from her.

God allowed Isaac to see beyond his own time-span of life, centuries far into the future, to see what would happen to his descendants through Jacob and Esau.  Similarly, we can see the future through the prophecies of the Bible, most especially in the book of Revelation.

Jacob and the Reasons and Outcomes of the Revealed Order of Reality (verse 21)

The patriarch Jacob blessed his grandsons. In fact, the very existence of those grandsons—born to a son, Joseph, whom Jacob believed to be dead – was a symbol of the actions of a God who operated mightily outside the bounds of what Jacob believed to be true and real. For all of the years that his son was in slavery, in jail, or in power in a foreign country, Jacob believed he was in a grave somewhere

Joseph and the Radius of the Revealed Order of Reality (verse 22)

When Joseph, as his father had done, looked into the future to forecast the protection of his people over centuries of slavery, he knew that the passage of time would not dim the promises of God. No matter how people might perceive those promises, they could not weaken with time – they could only grow closer. He knew the radius of that revealed order of reality would stretch long beyond his lifetime, and as a symbol of his faith in those promises and the God who backed them up, Joseph asked that his body be preserved and kept for centuries as a visible symbol to the people of a coming day when Joseph’s body would return along with them to the land God gave them. Rescue was coming, he knew – not from anything he could observe over the 400 years, but because of the  promise of God who dwells outside of time and supervises it.

Moses’ Parents and Social Defiance (verse 23)

Everything about the way that the parents of Moses handled their perilous condition shows great asymmetry: They weighed the commandments of God against the seen, the laws, the danger, the threats, and what they must have seen happen to the male newborns of their neighbors. They trusted in a revealed order of reality, one in which God’s commands and His position outside of time and space meant He could control both time and space. And who would have predicted the outcome? Who, not believing in the powe of God, would have foreseen that a child could take an infant in a basket, push it toward the governmental center that had decreed death for such a child, and that then the mistress of that very household would adopt the child into the family of the man who wanted to kill him?

Moses and the Perspective on Human Existence (verses 24-28)

In these verses we see that Moses refused to perpetuate the seen—he didn’t stay in the household of oppression, and willingly chose unpleasant experiences when he could have lived in ease. He weighed disgrace for his Lord against all the riches of Egypt—and was able to make this assessment because “he was looking forward to his reward” (v.26.) In fact, he made his decisions and then took action because of what was invisible (v. 27); and God gave him the ability to persevere because of that kind of faith.

Not surprisingly, a child born of such asymmetrical thinking, motivated by such asymmetrical thinking, and protected by such asymmetrical thinking would have himself created and participated in symbols of the revealed order of reality. Thus we read that he relayed, put confidence in, and participated in a symbol that the Egyptian world would have considered useless: the mark of blood on doorposts that caused the destroying angel to turn his sword away to the doorways of the Egyptians.

Israel at the Red Sea and Linear Development (verse 29)

Like the people of Noah’s time, the faithless of the time of the Exodus believed in linearity. They believed in straight cause and effect, and that one event triggers another much as dominos fall. But God forced Israel into a straight-forward-only course. In the past, any time a defenseless group of people were hemmed between a big body of water and an overpowering, heavily-armed enemy, the results were inevitable. But at the Red Sea, God demonstrated that His power over history is anything but linear. In fact, a rule of thumb derived from the way God has acted in the past would be this: God always uses weak and powerless people to accomplish His ends, so that He can get the credit for bringing about results in “hopeless” situations.

The Israelites and Rahab, and the Composition of Events (verses 30-31)

People often think that a certain composition of events will lead to success. One must have money, or influence, or other resources to accomplish something. However, consider the following equation:  One prostitute plus one traitorous act plus one lie plus weeks of waiting on a wall that will inevitably fall, plus marching and shouting equals—rescue? That is not the composition of events one would seek for success. But even with this unlikely composition of events, Rahab responded to the revealed order of reality by citing and putting the full weight of her safety and that of her family onto what God had said about the coming conquest of her land.  In fact, she was more responsive to the past miraculous deeds of God than the Israelites who actually personally experienced those deeds!

Gideon and Others: The Singular Explanation (verses 32, 35)

Men like Gideon and some of the other people listed here did all their mighty deeds solely through faith. Though they may have had talent, intelligence, and hard work, none of these was a determining factor in the good results that happened. Only their faith made the crucial difference: This was the singular explanation, and the only “tool” of their success.

The Others: The Singular Explanation (verses 35-38)

Similarly, those who had what we might call unpleasant experiences nonetheless always treated their own personal experiences as of lesser importance than what they were waiting for:  an invisible reward.

The Commendable Faith (verse 39)

The kind of faith that God commends, the kind of faith He respects and cherishes, is a faith that therefore redefines what is a “normal” life. Twenty-first century America cannot ever be used to define what is normal. In fact, our lifestyle when contrasted to that of other times and to other places, would definitely be an aberration, not a standard against which other experiences should be evaluated. Historically Christians have been called to show faith in suffering, faith in disappointment, faith in disillusionment, faith as they faced death. All of these people, with pleasant experiences in life and with unpleasant lives as well, knew that being faithful meant that they must put more weight on the invisible than the visible; and that by so doing, they would participate in a reality that took the shape that God wanted it to take.

The Perfecting of Faith (verses 39-40)

The question  might be asked, Why are these great people only made perfect along with us? One reason is that our learning from their faith can redeem and add value to what must have seemed to them and observers to be a pointless suffering. By acting in faith, their lives and their deaths counted for something. Through them, we can see the whole noble plan. It is as if they are waiting for us to acknowledge the eternal, timeless value of living in the revealed order of reality.

We have the whole story. We can thank them. Someday we will be able to agree with them that it was all worth it. And even now we can show that we can do what they did —live faithfully in difficult circumstances—because of their examples. We are in the joint project of making sure that the gates of hell won’t prevail against the church, because the plan of God won’t work without people. Amy reasonable person can understand this:  All that goes into the building of your faith will only be worth it when you can see that your children and your grandchildren and their descendants will follow you in your faith, that you were not the end of the line of faithful people.

Exact Adversity

Later on, in chapter 12 of Hebrews, all of the faithful ones and we as well are surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses. And all of us have followed Jesus out in front of us, the great Overcomer of all human experience.

Because God knows each of us intimately, He assures us that we will be treated with precisely whatever is necessary to increase each individual’s faith. Just as in exercise we target the weaker muscles, even putting extra stress on them to bring them up to strength, so also adversity in each individual’s life will be exact

In Hebrews 12:2-3, we are told to “consider” Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith, who endured the cross, and despised its shame. Now that suffering One is no longer suffering, but sitting at the right hand of God.

His message rings out:  Don’t grow weary! Don’t lose heart!

The Absolute Law for Thinking — From Matthew 25

The Absolute Law for Thinking

J. Michael Strawn

Matthew 25:1-13

In this passage, we read of a crisis situation: A long-awaited and important event is about to take place, and some people are going to be turned away. Five foolish virgins and five wise ones will illustrate an principle that Jesus represents as crucial: How one mentally and physically prepares for a delay or deferment. Because the foolish ones are not ready for any delay, they brought no extra oil. They thought everything would go according to plan. The five wise ones were prepared to wait—not matter how long, and no matter how unforeseen the circumstances.

Far more than a story about resources, planning ahead, or alertness, this parable shows an important spiritual law that applies to everyone. In the parable, all ten became drowsy, all fell asleep. All were subject to the same kinds of effects. In verse 6, the bridegroom arrives. The five foolish are out of oil, and the five wise refuse to share because they didn’t have enough for all. When all went to the banquet, the five foolish ones were late and were refused entry.

We see a division in their mental scopes that is manifested in their actions and their preparation. But this isn’t just about a social event. Since, therefore, the Lord’s coming will be “like this,” we too should plan for the unexpected.

Everyone who believes in the words of Jesus knows that the clock is clicking toward His return. The parable of the virgins assures us that we must question and challenge all assumptions about the nature of time.

Our thinking about time must be governed by the unknown, not the known — a startling thought. Thus how we think about time must be governed by what we don’t know: the hour of His return.

We must consider two things: time, and how we think about it. In 24:44, we are told that He will come at an hour you don’t expect Him. We are faced with the necessity of recognizing that our perception of time must be governed by something unknown. Both groups assented to the inevitable – His coming—but one group was not prepared.

Jesus gives a thought law and teaches us to obey it in this parable: a law of thought which doesn’t govern time, but rather our behavior in time.

God -> revelation -> law of thought -> mind -> obedience -> behavior results.

In the parable, the behavior was to be prepared with extra oil. But of course the oil represents something of our own resources. In considering this, we are not looking just at doctrines to be obeyed but also thought laws.

It is significant that all ten virgins were invited, and all ten were welcome. The difference was in the laws of thought which predetermined their behavior and led to a predetermined outcome. In other words, once a law of thinking was operational, then it required a certain course of action which led to an expected and inevitable outcome. They were to be ready or not, day or night, not knowing the hour.

The implications are stunning: At any given moment, the laws of thinking that we obey are predetermining our behavior and therefore leading to certain outcomes. Thus it’s important to understand these absolute laws of thinking.

We can study Scripture looking for doctrines and practices that God requires but not see the laws of thought He requires. We can see this in Genesis 3 with the serpent’s discussion with Eve – which she thought was about fruit and her own desires; and at Kadesh Barnea where they people never stopped to consider that how they thought would more surely determine their success than any weapons or stature they had, and elsewhere.

Jesus is not just concerned with a way of thinking but the laws for thinking. They are revealed — and thus are absolute laws. They are not derived, such as through hermeneutics. In a sense, their absolute nature requires that we start with them as we think, even about them.

By logic of extension, which is one way of talking about a generalization, we see that anything that God says, produces a consequential thought law. In pragmatic terms, any situation, circumstance, or state of being we face should cause us to seek the answer to one question: What laws of thought should I obey here?

In this parable, we have two representative ways of doing that.

In the first case, the foolish virgins could be characterized as casual and less disciplined, with thinking that left out – never considered—the roles of the many unknowns (like when does the bridegroom come?) The answer to this and other unknowns are all determined by the intentions and actions of God. For instance, He comes when He wants to. Their thinking didn’t obligate the bridegroom in any way: It only determined their behavior. It did not of course determine reality.

However, the foolish virgins believed and acted on a strategic error: the assumption that their thinking would give them an accurate picture of reality. This was a catastrophic error, in believing that one’s way of thinking reflects reality. They thought the Bridegroom would be coming soon (their assessment of reality) so there was no need for extra oil (their subsequent actions).

We could demonstrate this with a circle representing a reference frame for reality, which is larger than time. A dot in the middle of the circle represents the coming of the bridegroom. Their way of thinking became the reference frame for the dot. We see this in 24:36-41 where their thinking acted as a frame of reference.

The wise virgins obeyed the revealed laws of thinking. They knew what they thought did not frame reality, that their understanding couldn’t be fully comprehensive. The foolish ones thought they were fully comprehensive. Only the wise ones could understand that the bridegroom is an independent mind and intelligence who comes when he wants. Thus the revealed laws are determined by a greater reality– which is God himself.

A differential question that we must each ask is: Am I foolish or wise? The answer is determined by how I think. A foolish person believes his thinking frames reality. In the thematic, a dot is reality, the frame is their thinking. For the wise, though, the circle is eternal reality which frames the dot of their thinking.

If you are disobedient to the law of thought, you make your own frame for reality. But there is an eternal frame for the wise. The differential between the two is easy to see in one’s behavior. For instance, it is evident in the behavior in the days of Noah. When he was preaching, they were eating, drinking, and giving in marriage –carrying on the routine. They knew nothing until the flood came and carried them away.

All of the things that would unfold with the coming of the Lord unfolded in the shadow of a greater reality. Noah’s mind subordinated itself deliberately to the laws of thinking, which are inherent in the Word of God, anytime God speaks.

Seeking the doctrinal only is a mistake. And making assessments from the routine, from “how things are and always have been” is a mistake. The coming of the Lord isn’t routine – it is not statistically significant because it happens only once. Therefore habitual ways of thinking are not applicable.

Imagine a threshold with lines on each side. On the left, an arrow goes across to the other side. The regular, routine, habitual, pragmatic, acts as a threshold to final catastrophe. You cannot get back from it. It is irreversible.

We see this later in in this passage, in 24:40-41, where two are taken, two are left. We see thresholds to catastrophe.

What is being taught in Matthew 24 to 25 shows revealed or absolute ways of thinking which are made manifest by what the frame is. We see that laws of the mind don’t control reality, they don’t even frame reality—they only frame our behavior. The law of the mind governs behavior.

At the wedding feast, all behaviors are relative to the coming of the bridegroom. That event is the great dividing point, where the intentions of people are revealed.

This means that we in the churches can be obedient to doctrines like baptism, the Lord’s Supper, other practices; but still in our minds be lawless. We can obey rules of behavior without the underlying rules of thought (because of social pressure, tradition, comfort, familiarity). We are truly lawless, though, when we do not obey the laws of thought.

In Hebrews 4:12 we learn that the Word of God judges the thoughts of man. In Psalm 94:11, it says that God knows the thoughts of man. 2 Corinthians 10:5 tells us to take every thought captive. Romans 12 speaks of subjugating the thinking processes for transformation. All of these verses show the importance of the way laws for thinking must undergird any subsequent actions.

The implications of this are staggering: If I reject revealed truth in favor of what seems to be “reasonable”– or rational, routine or realistic or common sense or the obvious –Then I am a fool. According to Matthew 25, a fool thinks all things are as they appear. The quantifiable seems to be the frame, and a fool rests on that frame.

The Word of God is not just history, it is the present. We might call it the meso-present, or the linguistic present. What is wise versus foolish shows by what comes out of the mouth, and by behavior.

The differential is seen in that a fool depends on the projections he makes about time. We call those “models” today. But ultimate reality cannot be modeled. A fool thinks he can work with variables and contingency plans. A fool thinks his or her thinking is at least adequate. The world thinks they are wise.

The wise cross a differential gulf – they know that God is not a variable: He is the determinant. The wise one understands we are being tested –our minds and thought –as prederminate of our behavior. We do not live by the world’s rules.

Scripture teaches there is a profound discontinuity: between mind, and body on the other hand; mind and the material context; the mind and human experience. We see this in Genesis 3, and it shows up in Daniel 3 and 6. Each of these latter chapters both the three men and Daniel say that they would not make their decisions according to the needs of the body. At Kadesh , this differential shows up between mind and the material context. We see it when David numbered the troops, as we read in 2 Samuel 24, with a discontinuity between mind and experience.

All of that overlaps with teaching of the virgins. In any situation, one controls the other: either mind or experience.

Another great example is seen in Esau in Hebrews chaper12. He was evil and godless: He didn’t respect the profound discontinuity between mind and materiality. He was foolish — and evil.

A foolish mind respects no such discontinuity. This is seen in modern-day educational systems. A mind educated by them would think it is free, but it is actually a slave to everything that is passing away. The frame of human lived experience – whether couched as history, statistics, or the measuring of time and resources—actually contracts to obscure and in some cases even make inoperative the Word of God.

The mind that is wise is different, and is reined in to the absolute laws of thought; therefore his/her thinking not controlled by the body, “needs,” material context, conditions, nor experience. It is controlled by God. This tells us that such a one is not limited to his cultural universe, not locked into this; because such a mind stands outside time in that way.

What happens to a person who is skeptical of this? The one who is not sure that our thinking can be outside time, outside cultural universe? In the churches we are skeptical of that. We question it— we ask not just can we, but should we stand outside time?

We become skeptical to the point of thinking it is too risky. We think it is not the way the world works, or at best if God did work that way in the past, He doesn’t work that way anymore. Our children are routinely taught to think that we can’t stand outside of time and culture, that we are prisoners of where we are and what we are. They say that the culture we grow up in is determinate. They say that multiculturalism has its own norms. Postmodernity says all are different but all okay. That is a trap. If you say you are prisoner to language groups, time and history, and there is no escape, this is a direct contradiction to what the revelation teaches us.

Therefore don’t trust those laws of thought nor live on them. What happens is that the oil will run out and we will be shut out of the wedding banquet.

The Lord is not interested in new oil, but in behavior and its precondition: how we think. The wise virgins let the greater reality determine their thinking – which led to their behavior.

Am I wise or foolish? “Being right” transits through a change of orders. The first order is that of man in time and experience and human intelligence. Next you move to the eternal order of absolutes. But from the point of view of the Lord, being a part of the order of being right, the order of man—this is wrong.

By revelation, we are right. Faith is right, says Scripture. But are we still right if our experience ends up being unwarranted, unwanted, intolerable? What is “right”?

This is a delimiting issue. What about the believers who won’t be ready when the bridegroom comes—can we shift them from one order to another?

What is “right?” Or better said, the question should be—“Under which order?”

We transit from what was right according to the thoughts of men, when we realize that it is no longer right. We must end up in the absolute.

But what about the unwarranted, unwanted, intolerable? Can we say such unfairness is “right?” We can so say, if we consider that the real issue is God’s will, existence, reality – to which I have to subjugate the demands of my mind and my language, my way of thought.

In this passage, the Lord generalizes the story of the virgins to crisis: “As in the days of Noah….” He says.

It tells a person to pay attention to how to think in trial, catastrophe, crushing loss. Matthew 25 teaches that we must obey the absolute laws of thought.

When we obey the absolute laws of thought, we must start accepting that this will stand in contradiction to experience, intuition, will, dictates of the emotions, cultural influences, and traditions. But the only “wise” course of action is to let the absolute laws for thinking, as revealed by God, so format our minds that our actions follow, and let God determine an outcome in which His will is achieved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Four Direct Relations from Jeremiah Chapter One

The Four Direct Relations

Jeremiah 1:1-19

Copyright J. Michael Strawn, 2011

This passage demonstrates that there is a gulf between the consciences of man and God – one that is only bridged by revelation. It also puts into evidence four direct relations that serve as a frame for Jeremiah’s understanding of his assigned task. By identifying these four essential relations, we can see how Jeremiah was able to do a very difficult task — and how we, similarly, can do what God calls us to do. This passage also shows that the direct relations established by God must not be mediated or diluted by other factors.

In Jeremiah 1, at first Jeremiah was confused by the sudden and direct contact with God. He didn’t understand what he was supposed to do. But God showed him through four specific direct relations that he had both instructions and protection.

1.     The first direct relation is that of the word of God -> the human mind and human behavior. This is what obedience is. “Go wherever I tell you, say what I say,” was the gist of the message. Then God used the image of the almond tree to represent fruit reproduced from the Word of God to the mind and behavior of the prophet and his hearers. God would be watching over this process.

But for Jeremiah and others in the land, the direct relation between the two wasn’t initially helpful, it was problematic: It caused fear and distress, as Jeremiah’s words revealed.  “I am only a child, I don’t know how to speak,” he responded. He was apprehensive, and for good reason.

This relation takes place in the world of men. Imagine a three-sided box as the world with an arrow (revelation)  that points inside. Worldly minds and agendas react to the intrusion of such a direct relation: Even Jeremiah, for instance, didn’t think he could do the job.

But in this scenario we also see the gulf between the Word of God and human consciousness. The consciousness of God is distinct from ours – so much so, that what He asks can seem extreme or radical. We have to determine to pass over this gulf.  It would look like this: the word of God -> via faith -> behavior  = equals obedience.

We can say nothing about God’s consciousness, because it is what it is (though we are responsible for our own representations of it.)  Jeremiah teaches in chapter 1 that there has to be a direct relationship between the mind of God, via faith, to our behavior. That’s because even though we recognize the appropriateness of the gulf between us, we must nevertheless by faith accept the instructions of God and then modify our behavior accordingly.

2.     The second direct relation is that of God  -> Jeremiah the prophet. Far from distressing him, this direct relation actually reinforces Jeremiah and assures him he can complete his mission because God is with him. He learns that his performance in the task isn’t context-dependent, but God-dependent;  for God himself will be with him. It’s not resource dependent, either; nor human dependent (relying on Jeremiah’s skills and talents). His performance will be dependent solely on the direct relation to himself by God.  But Jeremiah, like any of us, has hesitations. When he objects, the Lord agrees that he cannot do it himself –but he can with Him.

3.     The third direct relation is of that of God -> time and history. Verses 12-14 show this. The image of a boiling pot shows that somebody will get “scalded,” so to speak, by the power of God, for He is about to summon the northern kingdoms to exact a judgment on the people. God  shows through this that He governs events, time, and history. This isn’t determined by thinkers like Hegel nor Marx; nor by dialectics and grouping of humans, nor even by local governments. Time and history have parameters put there by God Himself, and Jeremiah, God insists, must believe this.  His faith must rest in the validity of God’s statements made to him.

These 3 direct relations are the underpinnings of his work for the Lord. And, unlike the remaining relation, they originate with God and require only Jeremiah’s belief and acceptance. The fourth relation, however, involves Jeremiah in a more active way.

4.     The fourth direct relation is that between Jeremiah -> the people. This seen in verse 18. God warns Jeremiah that the king of Judah and the priests and officials will fight against him. The evil opposition to the Lord will have access to the life of Jeremiah and will make his life and work difficult. He will pay a price.  However daunting, powers and numbers (verse 19) will not overcome him. Therefore the efficacy of this direct relation will only hold up to a fixed point and beyond that point, the efficacy is meaningless. Like all of us, Jeremiah will have to stand up against opposition and trust God to do what he cannot do when the opposition

Jeremiah is to understand and reason from these four direct relations, and  his life and his service will reify and demonstrate these four direct relations. If this is true, his reasoning and behavior are not to be functions of the facts of experience. They must be derived from another source — the relations.

If we had a graphic of the 4 relations, it might look like a rectangle with God above, and arrows down the four direct relations within the rectangle.

The first would be the direct relation of God to time and history

Then the relation of the word of God to mind and behavior

Then the direct relation between God and Jeremiah

Then the direct relation between  Jeremiah and the various forms of the evil opposition

Part of Jeremiah’s readiness to serve the Lord will require his being conscious of these four direct relations, which must be prominent. As a man facing all the confusion and trial of a turbulent life, he is caught up in all the swirls and eddies created by these four direct relations. We learn from this that we, too, will be affected by these four relations as well.

These relations, when functioning properly, are a source of help and defense against sin. But in Genesis 3 (the temptation of Eve by Satan’s words) and at Kadesh (when the spies were unable to convince the unfaithful people) we see sin depicted as a false direct relation: that of circumstances -> man.  Because man believed he could secure his desires and his well-being that way, it made sense to follow that course of action.. But God told Jeremiah that letting circumstances (or, actually, one’s own godless assessment of circumstances), be the determining factor on the mind, was the undoing of Judah and other peoples. Idolatry is the result of direct relations of just this sort. In the creation of an idol, man directly creates his gods on basis of his relation to his own language. What results, what their hands have made, reflects what they say and think about what they believe they need and should change about their circumstances.

Another overt example is that of Exodus 32, the golden calf incident.  Here the people of Judah had severed and forsaken the direct relation of God to the nation. Instead, after assessing their circumstances as hopeless because of the long absence of Moses, they decided to let those circumstances affect them to the extent that they created an idol to justify their own actions and explain their past.

The people of Jeremiah’s time fell into the same mental trap. Our text says in verse 16 that judgments were coming because they forsook God and worshipped what their hands made —  a direct reflection of what they regarded as real and causative in their lives.

A timeline in Chapter 1 of Jeremiah confirms the fundamental fact that the Consciousness of God governs time, whether we know that or not. It might look like this:

On the left is the eternal purpose (verses 4-5.)  Jeremiah had been formed in the womb (verses 4-5). In verse 5, he was set apart before his birth. In verse 5, he was appointed a prophet. All of these precede Jeremiah himself.

You might have at this point two vertical lines intersect this timeline to represent the consciousness of  Jeremiah. What precedes these lines is what happened before he was conscious of it. Now he’s made conscious of it.

Next on timeline:  He demurs (verse 6).

Then God inserts a big “V” in the timeline when He speaks in verse 7.

Then He tells what He, the Lord, will do.

Then on the timeline are verses 11 and 16, the two images of coming power.

Verses 17-19 tell Jeremiah to get ready.

There will be conflict, says the Lord to Jeremiah, but you will prevail. The timeline confirms something fundamental about Himself— God would say, “My consciousness governs all of time, all of your life.” Though this is eternally true, from Jeremiah’s point of view, he is now just becoming conscious of it.

Historially, whenever people forsook the Lord, it was always because they lost consciousness of direct relations, especially those between God-> time/history/events. When that happens, everything then became based on circumstances -> man. All cultures, anything that is man-based or society-based, proves that human consciousness has suffered a reduction. Human consciousness doesn’t grow or increase with the passage of historical time, as many people suppose. It actually shrinks — becomes less–because it is unaware of the four direct relations and what they mean.

This happened to Judah, as now it happens to many churches:  a shrinkage of human consciousness. It is what the serpent in Genesis 3 wanted when he urged Adam and Eve to exclude God and His commandments when they made decisions and took action.

Circumstances -> Man is always a mistake. One reason, as  James says, is that you can die before you reach your goals. Letting your assessment of your circumstances be the cause of your actions and attitudes can fool you. You have no assurance of any future that you predict based on present circumstances.

Here is an axiom: To be free of God and his word is to be captive to the self and to the collectivity of selves. This isn’t just true in theology or church, it is true for everyday life too.

The purpose of Jeremiah as a prophet was to restore the larger consciousness among the people, from kings on down. This is always the purpose of Biblical teaching and preaching, to enlarge the consciousness of people of faith — as well as the consciousness of those who may not be faithful, but but will listen. This is what the book of Jonah demonstrates– the Ninevites were not faithful when he first delivered the  message of warning to them. But they were willing to accept that the power of God could crush their lives if they did not listen — a fatal direct relation — and they were willing to do anything to change the direct relation of God from disaster to relief.

The revelation of God is calculated to make us participants in the larger consciousness of God, to create a participation with him. This participation is one He creates when He bridges that gap.  We can’t do it, it is an act of God alone. We see this in verse 9 when God bridges a gulf by reaching out and touching Jeremiah’s mouth. This isn’t our province, but the work of God.

In such a participation, Jeremiah’s personal reach is being expanded beyond his natural reach because he’s participating in the consciousness of God via His word.  Thus in every conceivable way, he is being expanded.

Part of what God said to Jeremiah acted to restore a part of human consciousness that had been willfully rejected as meaningless.  The timeline shows Jeremiah wasn’t conscious at first, on the first two segments of his timeline. But through speaking to him, God made him aware or conscious.  His consciousness to was made to conform to the consciousness of God, and pulled away from being based on fear or self-interest.

Similarly, our consciousness are  a problem! We think we know how to assess situations. Jeremiah’s consciousness had to be brought into the preexisting purpose of God, and ours must too. There are many things we can never know, but must trust the counsel of God.

On the timeline, we can imagine a big “C” that moves Jeremiah into the consciousness or the mind of God. This is something that should be happening to us, too –in our understanding of Scripture.

This means this timeline wasn’t Jeremiah’s, was the Lord’s. Jeremiah was a merely a participant in God’s timeline. He underwent a preparation of a kind of human consciousness so that he could function faithfully in a timeline that would be a difficult and trying one.

That means there was pre-existing truth outside his consciousness. The language of the text tells us this, that he was to participate in something outside his consciousness in the way he spoke and behaved.  God was telling him, “Go, speak, be fearless, you will be rescued.” There is no way that Jeremiah could have know this without God revealing the truth, and the aid, that only God could provide.

We learn from this something about the mind of God and the mind of man. How marvelous! He invites us to participate in His mind!  Such a thing surely changes the status of man before God.

The converse is true. If what happened in Judah happens here—when God is seen merely as a  participant in the mind of man –the status of God changes in the mind of man. That is the definition of idolatry.

Notice there was a point at which Jeremiah’s consciousness was not a participant in the mind of God. But the intrusion of the Word of God is the means to create participation. However, we can use Scripture in such a way as to not achieve participation.  If you use it just to extract rules or history, what can be lost and aborted is that participation.

Participation of the right sort establishes a link between the primary (God, His mind and Word) and the mind of man. Fear, self interest, and other things reverse the order. In such a reversal, man does his own analysis of the world and mind of God—to see if He fits in, if  and does what we tell him to do. In 2 Timothy 4 we see an example of apostasy. Here is a diminished god who is a participant, and human consciousness is the primary. Apostate thinking always wants God to participate, not rule; and for the visible and experiential to be the primary.

How can I verify my participation?  What is my relation to the Word? Verification is seen in how I speak and in my behavior. Assertion of faithful words is not enough, we have to produce. We in the churches often don’t use the phenomenon of manifestation (proof), but just assertion.

One great evil of idolatry is the use of obstruction /mediation. For example, one might say that the relationship between one’s mind and Scripture must be mediated by common sense, or mediated by historical perspective, or mediated by confidence in human experience and natural law. Sometimes godless opposition is mediated by avoidance. But God said to Jeremiah that he was not to try to avoid such opposition, that he would be protected.

So what can we do to  bridge the gulf between human consciousness and the Word of God?

The answer: Eliminate mediation. We must be in the active reproval of mediation. Numbers 13 and 14 show how we must get rid of mediation. We see it in 2 Samuel 24, numbering the troops. All action that is based on common sense or the thinking of the world, instead of what God says about a situation, mediates and dilutes.

What does mediation do to Biblical faith? It shrinks faith. If we use the language of mediation, we buy into higher criticism and other errors. We are supposed to obey the Lord. Mediation makes the Word of God subordinate to human mind and experience, which the axiomatic starting point. This axiomatic starting point, the reliability of the human mind and its assessment of experience, leads to idolatry.

The question is: Do we start with the consciousness of God, or with the human axiom?

Jeremiah attacked mediation. If you mediate, you end up with a mediated perception of reality. In the churches, we have a reading of Scripture that is essentially the practice of mediation. Mediation is the most effective way to get rid of direct relations. And unfortunately, the Restoration Movement was built on mediation that removes and dilutes an understanding of direct relations.

Ninevah was saved by the comprehension of the Word of God and its effect on mind and behavior. What they concluded, saved them. The Queen of the South, when she came to Solomon, saw the importance of direct relations. Notice, the Ninevites and the Queen didn’t object to direct relations — they saw how essential they are!

When we mediate the Word of God with common sense, historical perspective, natural laws or anything else to avoid suffering, this reduces us. Such mediation is forsaking God, and leads to idolatry.

Culture inevitably mediates our language if it is allowed to run direct relations. But correct direct relations supply to us our language for representation.  The greatest means of mediation between our minds and Scripture is rationalism. It’s malignant; it’s the shrinkage of our consciousness that dictates that the consciousness of God and its strictures aren’t valid.

Jeremiah 1 shows that direct relations are the key to the salvation of Jeremiah and his nation.  Direct relations are the key to our salvation, too.

FINAL EMPHASIS:  THE WORLD SAYS YOU ARE ADVANCING AND AUGMENTING CONSCIOUSNESS BY USING ITS WAYS AND MEANS. BUT GOD SAYS IT IS SHRINKING.

New studies by J. Michael Strawn to be posted soon

Stay tuned….