The Most Fundamental Fact of the Universe

I heard a radio program recently that included a conversation between a man well-known for his faith and a woman whose cherished friend had died at a young age. If God is real, the grieving woman wanted to know, then why did this happen?

The man’s response was earnest and tender, but it was built from elements that would best make sense to a Christian. He spoke of sin resulting in a fallen world. The woman was neither satisfied nor comforted. The host of the radio program—himself sharing the woman’s lack of faith in God—observed that the difficulty in communication between people with and without this faith is that the two groups seem to hold such profoundly different premises.

That difference in premises seems crystallized in the list of exhortations toward the end of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. One of the items on that list says, “In everything give thanks [emphasis mine], for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” A person of faith interpreting this might say that, in God’s plan, everything ultimately makes sense—so we are to find a way within our hearts to give thanks for what occurs. My understanding of this verse used to stop there. But the grieving woman would likely respond, “No way! My friend died. Everyone who knew her and everyone who might have known her has suffered a loss. I won’t give thanks for that!” And the woman would be right.

The preposition is important. We are to give thanks “in” everything, not “for” everything. Awful things do happen. Jesus never promised happiness, and he did say there would be trouble (John 16:33). We do not have to be thankful for the awful things. But in the midst of them, we can give thanks for the God who is in control of everything and does have a plan that is fuller, more glorious, and more elaborate than what we can understand. Over the sweep of sufficient time and from the vantage of sufficient perspective, what seemed to be bad or evil—indeed, what was bad or evil—can also be seen to flower, by God’s love and grace, so that it becomes integral to the wholeness of a vastly greater good. This was the truth that the Joseph of the Old Testament glimpsed in the face of the brothers who had treated him cruelly. See Genesis 50:20. This, indeed, was truth of the execution of Jesus Christ.

To the grieving woman, this is not necessarily satisfying either. But the grieving woman’s question is phrased in a way that it cannot be satisfied. Perhaps the most fundamental fact of the universe is this: God is God. He announced this fact just before he gave the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2), and he gave his name to Moses as “I Am That I Am” (Exodus 3:14). When we say to God, if you are real then why do you allow X, we place ourselves higher than God. That is, we set ourselves up as the judge of God’s plan. To do this is not only spiritually rebellious, but also illogical. He is the Creator and I am not. I might find myself in pain because of trouble I find in this world. Even so, nothing true can proceed from the false premise that he must explain himself to me.

The freedom comes in finding that we can give up constantly trying to be God. When Jesus promises that his way is freer and easier than what we are accustomed to (Matthew 11:30), I think part of what he is saying is that we don’t have to respond to what happens in our lives anymore as if we were little gods and goddesses. We don’t have to try to carry everything on our own. God is real, and his reality becomes increasingly apparent as we turn our hearts to him. With or without Jesus, we will have trouble, but with Jesus the burden is lighter because he shares it. It’s all true.

In the midst of sorrow, it can be hard to give thanks. In a different way, it can also be hard to give thanks in the midst of happiness, because we get so full of what we have. The beginning of all things is God, and in the midst of all things we give thanks—including thanks for the fullness of all he understands, and thanks for what he is going to do that we couldn’t possibly do on our own. That is, he is going to see us all the way through.

Praying Beyond Words

Walking outside, I noticed a weathervane.

I didn’t have a reason to be out. I had just felt a stirring to leave the house for a bit, and I answered as best I could. Not knowing quite what to do, I waited in the air, I drifted up and down the block with my hands in my pockets, and I let everything slow down to as slow as I could get it to go. I leaned for a while, looking at whatever I happened to see. And at some point, I was moved to fully regard and appreciate a weathervane on a nearby roof.

I don’t necessarily have the words for what it means.

Jesus often retreated into silent places to pray (Luke 5:16). I wonder what he said in those prayers. Indeed, I wonder if he “said” much of anything at all.

We are to pray continually, or pray without ceasing—or so says I Thessalonians 5:17. If prayer consists only of speaking to God in word or thought, then we have a problem. We can’t do that continually.

One obvious answer is that prayer is not just speaking. It’s also listening. The communication is two-way. You know the old saw: We have two ears to hear versus one mouth with which to speak, so respect the ratio. Does that ratio look anything like the way we pray—listening twice as much as we speak? “Listening,” that is, to all that he might be saying into our hearts, our moments, and our lives?

But there is more. When we speak with an omniscient creator who already knows us better than we know ourselves, there is the question of language. Jesus might not always have “said” formal words and sentences when praying because human speech is limited. He was God the Son speaking to God the Father, so they could be expected to wordlessly understand one another. Yet we are the people of God. We who believe have God’s spirit, meaning that we can expect some portion of this same understanding. Indeed, the Bible says that he hears our prayers even when we don’t know precisely what to pray to him (Romans 8:26).

We do pray using the words of our own human language, and we must pray this way. We are created in God’s image, and like God, our word has power. But prayer—communicating with the infinite—must also consist of more than finite language.

There is something musical about this. When we surrender lovingly to an instrumental piece of music, we recognize the order and meaning of the movements and melodies, even though the nature of that meaning is emotional instead of intellectual. We let go of our insistence on our own mood in order to resonate with the mood of the music.

In the same way, our praying involves not just bowing our heads and folding our hands on our own terms, but also submitting ourselves to resonate with the “music” whose meaning is spiritual.

What kind of music is this? Well: one might rightly say ... wind instruments. In both of two very different books of the Bible (John 3:8, Acts 2:2), the Holy Spirit is associated with the wind. Our prayer seeks any and all ways of understanding God, including this one. We do pray to lay specific thanks and specific appeals before him, and we do pray to listen for instruction that we might be able to translate into thought or deed. But then there is this other realm of prayer, perhaps the greatest realm of all. Over and above everything else, our prayer also includes the quiet seeking—in our hearts, in patience and stillness—for a renewed and wordless awareness of which way the wind is blowing.

A To-Do List for the Sanctified

There are all kinds of ways to take the light burden that Jesus promised in Matthew 11:30 and turn this into something heavy.

One of the ways I have found is by searching for the particular and specific will of God in my life.

Turns out, I didn’t have to search. God’s will for me is the same as God’s will for you. In the first letter to the Thessalonians—which is perhaps the earliest document in the New Testament—Paul states it this plainly:

“For this is the will of God, your sanctification”
—I Thessalonians 4:3.

That is, in the same way that certain dwellings, rocks, or spots of ground have been sacred because of the way people encountered God in those places ... now it is people themselves who are sacred. And the way to become a “living temple” in this way is to encounter God in your heart. (I am grateful to a sharp little book that highlights this I Thessalonians verse, Just Do Something by Kevin DeYoung.)

“Fine,” you might say. OK—I am to be sanctified. But what does that mean? “Sanctified” is a state that comes from God’s grace. Meanwhile, I am still here on earth. I have a life to live. What am I supposed to do with it? What am I supposed to do with my energies, resources, attention, and time in order to make sure that I helping carry out God’s plan?

The answer—in a great many of the choices that we make—is that it really does not matter what we do.

That answer might be less than satisfying, but there it is.

In fact, it’s possible to become lost in the preoccupation with what to do. The teachings of Jesus focus on attitudes of the heart. If our heart is with Christ, then we will tend to make choices that further our capacity to bear good fruit (Matthew 7:16). The branches of the vine do not know the precise size, quantity, and color of the fruit they will produce. In the same way, we do not know precisely how our lives are supposed to proceed, but if we make choices day by day that are based upon faith and love, then over time we may see the result of those choices in various forms of fruit that Christ produces through us.

But even if that answer still feels unsatisfying, that’s all right. Paul seemed to anticipate this. We are people of action, after all, and so he closed that same early letter with a list of action items. I hope to explore some of these items in future posts. Here they are—a to-do list for the sanctified:

● Be joyful always
● Pray without ceasing
● In everything give thanks
● (For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you)
● Do not quench the Spirit
● Do not despise prophecies
● Test all things
● Hold fast what is good
● Abstain from every form of evil
—I Thessalonians 5:16-22

Dependence and Independence Are the Same Thing

For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ.
—I Corinthians 12:12

Not one of us is complete. We like to think we are, but we are actually meant to be part of a much larger body that is animated by God. Each of us has needs greater than what we can meet on our own, and each of us has distinct and particular gifts that make sense only alongside the complementary gifts of others. Truly, we are all as specialized as the members of a human body, just as Paul described in the verse above. None of us is complete—even if we tend to live, labor, and worry as if this isn’t so.

Rejecting the notion that we are incomplete is a part of rejecting God, the God who made us this way. That is why, whenever we get suckered into acting fully self-contained in our lives, the space in us that is meant to be filled with God ends up getting at least partly filled with something else. Usually it gets filled with such a proliferation of other things that it isn’t obvious what all we are worshiping. We submit to the wrong authorities and give our obedience to lifeless things. And, to some greater or lesser extent, we also try to be a god on our own. We face our fears and struggle to carry our hopes all by ourselves, seeing nothing that can face those fears or realize those hopes except for our desperate and lonely battling.

It is liberating to watch the curtain drawn open upon a radically different way.

An organ, a cell, a finger, an ear—all of them are pointless without the rest of the body, and all of them have needs they lay upon the rest of the body while proceeding to fully serve that body by carrying out the purpose for which they were made. The body works because of this. The body is elaborately resilient and adaptive because of this, and the body lives because of this.

In the same way, trusting in God means—at least in part—trusting in the material body of God on earth. That is, the body of all of his believers.

To say the least, this can be a challenge. That body includes petty and deficient human beings such as me. But then, I might find every one of the processes and vital organs of my own human body pretty unsightly up close, if I stared at them without appreciation.

The sweep of time shows a different view. The body of believers has given the world institutions of healing and learning that are now so weighty, influential, and solid that we don’t even remember they were founded on faith.

The scope of mercy shows a different picture, too. Throughout the world, it is the body of believers in Christ that is joyfully willing to do the most thankless and unknown work of rescuing the orphaned and poor. Jesus did predict, in John 14:12, that we would do even greater works on the earth than he did.

There is this popular-psychology term “codependent” that gets used broadly, describing an unhealthy emotional addiction. Similar as it might sound to the way of surrender, this is not the way of Christ—and in fact it is nearly the antithesis. In place of trying to sustain an incomplete shard of self, Jesus proposes trusting in Christ to make you a part of his completeness. When you surrender to God, and I surrender, and she surrenders too—God uses every one of us together within a web of life and love to spread the Lord’s gifts throughout creation.

Without the surrender to God, mere dependence is just a way to slavery. Mere independence is a way to the same slavery, because this is the illusion that seduces us into dependence.

God’s way is an abundant interdependence, and to have this, we discover, is to find answers to many of the most gnawing questions about who we are and what will become of us. The greater part of those answers is found in the comfort that we don’t need the answers—not all of them—in order to grow and proceed. We settle naturally and freely into our own various roles as elements of the working of God on earth. We allow others to do the same alongside us. And as we turn our hearts and tune those hearts toward something larger, all of it starts to click together more often than it seemingly should. We are encouraged by the joyful glimpses we sometimes see into the ways that things surprisingly make sense after all.

Christ, Uninterrupted

For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ.
—I Corinthians 12:12

When we say the “body of Christ,” we tend to hear the words in our own ear as if we are saying something figurative, but actually the body of Christ is tangible and real.

The Spirit of God filled the body of Christ when Jesus was on earth, because when Jesus was on earth, the body of Jesus was the body of Christ.

But as he died, he released his spirit. See John 19:30.

That spirit filled and unified the believers. See Acts 2:4.

Thus does Christ continue—practically uninterrupted. The one true Spirit of God still fills the “body” of Christ, a body that now consists of all the followers of Jesus, a body that covers far more earthly territory than Jesus’ own travels ever could. In the way that this body continues, it could truly be said that while Jesus ascended to heaven, Christ remained behind.

Next: Dependence and Independence Are the Same Thing