Past My Own Heart

I pray past my own heart. I do it all the time.

I hope I can continue to keep concealed from you what gets inside my heart. I experience envy. The dislike of people who seem to have things easier than I do rises within my heart, and I resent them for—I don’t know—just existing where I can see them.

I also delight in the misfortune of others. I feel relief when misfortune befalls someone—a sort of happiness, somehow—because when that particular spell of bad news entered the world, it didn’t land on me.

These things are in my heart. Selfishness, fear. They are pruned down sometimes, but the root still remains. You would not believe what is in my heart, what ugly things routinely blossom there. But then, that’s a lie, because I am hoping you would believe it. I am hoping that the hints I have heard are true—that everyone else has infected hearts, too.

I pray past my own heart because I know I am to pray for others—not just the ones I feel fondly about, but also enemies (Matthew 5:44), and also ones about whom no particular feeling rises.

I know I am to do this, because I believe. In addition to envy, anger, selfishness, and fear, I also have allowed belief into my heart. I have given my heart to belief—even though it is a broken heart over which weeds still flourish. The belief to which I’ve given it is very specific. In my heart, there is no single secret that better explains the universe and my own place within it than the resurrection of Christ. And there is no document that better explains Christ than the anthology of scriptures we call the Bible.

So I try as best as I am able to feed upon the Bible’s teachings. And some of the Bible’s teachings prove to be personal prophecies that I see fulfilled—as I watch the fruits of faith ripen in my own life, the fruits that come of finally surrendering to God’s easy and loving will instead of continuing to be hard on myself.

I also pray. And in prayer, I feel how much of my heart is still blackened, is still stone or ash. I feel it most of all in my attitudes toward other people. So as I am praying for one or another of these people, I sometimes must say: “Lord, ignore what my heart is saying about this person right now. Ignore it. I pray that you will comfort him and give him blessings, and that he will hear the voice of your love in his life and he will draw closer to you.”

Who Is This “Son” We Worship?

All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was
made. —John 1:3

Who is this Son we worship?

Thinking people naturally wrestle with the notion of an all-knowing God having “hopes” for human beings, and giving us free will. After all, the all-knowing God already knows all! He knows how his hopes will be realized. He knows what choices we will make.

Yet the identification of the Son in the verse above as the one through whom “all things were made” actually speaks to this apparent contradiction. The Son-God as the creative agent of the Father-God provides us with a precious insight—a picture, or perhaps just a glimpse, into the way that our God is simultaneously omnipotent and engaged.

The Son, also called the “Word,” was with the Father in the beginning. The start of John’s gospel says this (John 1:1-2), but the very beginning of the Bible says this as well. In Genesis, in the first three verses, all three members of the Trinity are present.

The Father is in Genesis 1:1. The Spirit is mentioned in 1:2. Then, in Genesis 1:3, God says “Let there be light” before any material sources of light have been created. The sun hasn’t been invented yet. Instead of the sun, this light is the Son. John’s gospel actually confirms this identity—calling the Son “the Light” just before repeating the essential point that the world was made through him (John 1:9-10).

Therefore, what we see in Genesis 1:3 is God sending in the Son—the one who is charged with making every part of the world according to the Father’s will. The Father is the author or designer of the world, while the Son is the craftsman. The Son is, if you will, the carpenter.

This is the one who gave us the Commandments. He identified himself to us in both the Old and New Testaments as “I AM.” Old Testament scripture refers to him as “Lord,” with New Testament scripture making the distinction that God is the Father while the Lord is Christ (I Thessalonians 1:1, for example). In other words, this “Son” has been active and near since well before Jesus. When the Son became human in order to return us to God, he simply embodied in the flesh the very same role he plays through every moment and molecule of the universe. In the flesh or beyond it, the Son is the loving link between God and his creation.

As scripture also puts it, the Son is the vine by which the fruit grows, while the Father is the keeper of the vineyard (John 15:1).

Of course, both are also God. Both are also one God—the same God. “Father” and “Son” are human terms that help humans hold onto these senses of the different ways that God is. Father-God and Son-God are simultaneously the same and separate, simultaneously integral and different.

What are the differences? One of them might be time.

The Father exists outside of time. Necessarily so. He created the linear phenomenon we think of as “time,” and he could not create anything to which he himself is subject. But the Son—while he, too, transcends time—somehow also descends into time to carry out his role. After all, we see the Son working in seasons and following plans that unfold in steps. The Son also pursues and communicates with beings who do live in time, such as you and me.

Another difference between Father and Son might relate to information or perspective. God the Father knows all. God the Son can know all, because the Father would deny him nothing. However, we see hints that the Son knowingly works with less than complete knowledge, leaving ultimate knowledge with the Father. (Mark 13:32 is significant.)

To be sure, the Son knows vastly more than we ever could. From our perspective, the Son is practically omniscient. From his perspective, though, there is one who knows more. Between “practically omniscient” and fully omniscient there lies a distance that, as far as we know, might be great indeed—as great as the distance between the vine and vine keeper. This is the distance before which the Son worshipfully bows to his Father.

The picture that develops from these glimpses shows us something so contrary to our expectations that we still have difficulty imagining it. Namely, ours is a humble god. The Son is as vast as the universe, but at the same time he is so close that we can barely conceive of his intimacy. Rather than standing above us as master, he wishes to stand beside us as friend (John 15:15). What we thought we saw as logical contradictions about the nature of God thus become resonant notes in Christ—harmonizing to voice the very song of his nature. The Son-God fulfills these two separate but complementary roles:

He is the king of all of the cosmos.

Yet he is also the workman, the reverential servant, the maker of creation. He is the one who is faithfully fulfilling every detail of his Father’s perfect plan.

Photo: Detail of MCC chapel courtesy of John Cowell.

The Way of the Scissors

“The teachings of Jesus are what matter. The rest was all made up.”

I heard that statement recently from a friend—someone I respect and admire. His belief that the divinity, miracles, and resurrection of Jesus were all fabrications places him in some distinguished company.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, held the same belief. He cut up a set of bibles, clipping out gospel passages and rearranging them to create a bible more to his liking.

H. G. Wells thought the same thing. The writer known for fiction also produced a wonderful, comprehensive work of historical non-fiction—The Outline of History. Jesus is treated admiringly in this book, but he is also held at arm’s length. Wells, too, insists that the account of the resurrection could only have been a fabrication that was added to the gospel account after Jesus’ life.

These were intelligent men. However, they were also religious men—in the specific sense that they insisted upon a particular religious understanding of the world. One of the precepts of this religion is that God is irrelevant if he exists at all, because any “God” is aloofly uninvolved in the human world. Thus, Jesus could not possibly have been God living as man, and there could not have been any resurrection. This is the default religion of most who claim to have no religion today. For Jefferson and Wells, trying to reconcile this religious outlook with the surviving documents and the surviving facts of the early church required feats of illogic. The “way of the scissors” as exemplified by Jefferson—that is, the scripture of convenience that insists that “only the teachings are true”—poses at least two great and striking logical problems.

One is that Jesus’ teachings actually include references to his own divinity. In perhaps the most wonderfully ungrammatical statement ever made, Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58). His audience certainly got the reference—“I AM” is the way God identified himself in the burning-bush encounter with Moses. Jesus identified himself the same way.

Jefferson chose to leave this quote out of his scissors-bible, along with various other quotes to the same effect. In other words, in trying to focus on “just the teachings,” Jefferson went so far as to exclude many of those teachings. Presumably, he could “just tell” which gospel quotes were really from Jesus and which were not.

The other logical problem is this: From a historical standpoint, it would actually be easier to defend the statement, “The resurrection of Jesus is what matters, and the teachings were all made up.”

For the early believers, there was little more than the resurrection. They did not yet have the teachings. The news of the resurrection was what ignited the spiritual movement in the lands surrounding Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and this spiritual movement lacks an explanation if the resurrection is dismissed.

Paul wrote a letter before any of the gospels were written that records the creed he heard when he first encountered other believers. This statement of shared belief spoke of several things. It spoke of Jesus dying for our sins, rising from the dead, and appearing in the resurrected flesh various times to various witnesses (I Corinthians 15:3-8). Yet it did not say anything about the beauty of Jesus’ wise teachings. Those teachings would not be circulated until years later, after the gospel writers compiled them.

Still, both of these logical arguments are, in a way, beside the point. The way of Jesus Christ extends into areas of our lives and souls that lie deeper than logic. That is why the very idea of “the teachings are all that matter” is in fact the precise opposite of what Jesus taught.

If the value of Jesus is to be found solely in his wisdom, then that would mean Jesus came to persuade. Salvation is external, in other words. We listen to the wisdom, accept various pieces of it here and there, and in this way we put on the “Jesus lifestyle”—and that’s all.

But this is not what Jesus taught. Salvation is internal. It is a matter of the heart. Read again the well-known verse, John 3:16. Jesus came because Jesus himself is the vehicle by which people can be saved. He is the door through reality that leads to freedom. We give him our hearts and those hearts are transformed, so that we can awaken from the perishing life into the eternal life—an eternal life that begins here and now.

This transformation is the factor that the religion of the world cannot accept. That is why no purely logical argument can save someone from the bondage of a perishing life. No one can be changed as a matter of reasoning alone, because the reasoning mind is not powerful enough. That mind is subject to what the heart believes. Rather, we give our hearts to Jesus—once we recognize that the burning we experience in our hearts (Luke 24:32) is God’s call.

Our minds change when our hearts do. We give our hearts, and we see what we never saw before ... at which point we discover—perhaps slowly, like a new sunrise—that now we truly have become receptive to what Jesus taught.

It Begins With Belief

The person who comes to God must believe that God is, and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. —Hebrews 11:6

The heart continues to be the location of the most profound personal discovery I have made through the walk of faith. The center of my self has changed. Before, I always thought I weighed evidence to get to my conclusions. I always thought that my belief began in my mind. My “heart,” the spiritual locus of who I am—to the extent that I considered such a thing—then followed along accordingly. So I thought.

The truth I discovered is that belief starts with the heart. The reasoning mind is a powerful instrument for reaching conclusions, but the very scope of its possible conclusions are shaped by what the heart reveres—and every heart reveres something. I discovered this only in retrospect. My heart changed and my mind changed with it. I saw what I had never seen before.

Yet God didn’t take that heart by force. He didn’t storm his way in, as of course he could have. We are small—yet somehow we are also significant, and our choices are significant. The hope of God is that we care enough about the existence in which he has invested us that we will peer intently into it, catching a glimmer of what is truly real. His hope is that we care enough about the hearts he has given us to lay them before him voluntarily.

The choice is necessary, because that same heart is where deception flourishes. Our hearts chase after what is corrosive, imprisoning, or poisonous—in each case calling it good. Jeremiah 17:9 expresses this. The deceived heart that shapes what we know is the very heart that must be redeemed. For this to be possible, it must be that a part of us remains unstained—a part that can make this choice. There is a locus of the self even deeper than the darkened heart. It is out of this hidden part of who we are that we still call to God, and it is within this hidden part of ourselves that we still can recognize the One who calls to us. It is the small and still-pure part of the self that declares I do have a heart and I do hear God, so that with these declarations the One can begin to heal the other.

In other words, you lead your own heart. You choose, and perhaps tremblingly, you stand with the choice. You believe—maybe even before your heart does.

We saw this with Saul, who was to become the Apostle Paul. Before his transformation began, he made his own decision to identify the One who met him on the road as Lord (Acts 9:5).

We saw this in a negative way with the other Saul. Saul in the Old Testament was a king chosen by God, but this Saul made the choice to turn away. He held his own pride before men in higher esteem than his humility before God. And God honored the choice—as God honors all our choices. Thus, it was God himself who sent the very darkening of the heart that Saul was seeking (I Samuel 16:14).

All of us have God. He is the One in whom, said Paul, we “live, move, and have our being.” We might lose the touch, feel, and communion with him over the course of a life in which we cage our spirits within cynical or protective shells. But God is still speaking, still calling, still trying to touch us where we are vulnerable, and still daring us to be vulnerable to him—still ready to lead us through the process of breaking those shells so that we can live joyously and free.

We choose.

Our hearts might not even be in it at first—but that’s OK. The important thing, the transformative thing, is what gets into our hearts.

Part 5: The Audacity of Identity

Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?

The fact that I exist is scandalous.

We don’t know what to make of this fact. I think we live our entire earthly lives never quite coming to grips with it. On a daily basis, we set aside our shock over the fact that we exist in order to pretend to be like the other people we see who appear to be getting on with their lives.

But it’s not just that I exist—I have the ability to make my own decisions. I am someone. My own life, will, perspective, and choices are different from those of every other person. It is not just that “I think, therefore I am.” I think in a particular way, so therefore I am a particular person. This is the fact that is scandalous, and this, indeed, is what makes me distinct from God. At the same time that I am someone, I am also not someone else. I am finite. The statement “I am” therefore is truly complete only for God. I need a predicate. That is, “I am Pete,” or “I am a person.” God does not need a predicate, but I do.

Another way of saying this is that God is “identityless,” at least insofar as the nature of identity is defining and confining. The fuller name for God that the Bible also gives is “I AM THAT I AM.” This name and statement describes the way that the totality of God is accounted for entirely through the fact of God’s existence. His eternal nature means that no justification is needed or even applicable beyond this fact—a fact that we have recognized to be observable from all that is.

Note also that “I AM” is present tense. When Jesus accounted for his own identity this way, he forced the gospel account to violate the rules of grammar—“Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). This points to another aspect of the nature of God. Part of being eternal is being unchanging, and part of being unchanging is being ever-present.

By contrast, I am not like that. I am finite. I am moving through the world and changing as I go. I am making mistakes. I am getting older, and in some ways seeing my possibilities decline. It is true that “I am”—but it is also true that “I was” different than I am, and “I will be” different still. And one day, I won’t be any longer.

God is real, and I am a part of his creation. I don’t know why I exist, but he does. I have at least this much relationship to him. So what does a person do, any person, once he discovers God? This is the next fundamental question. We search out the impact, the meaning, and the direct personal consequences of our coming to realize that we live, move, and have our being within I AM.

Part 4: Welcome to the Nulliverse

Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?

So what does that tribesman see? We are back to the illiterate tribesman of Part 1 (see link above), who has no need of the Bible to find God. Somehow, wherever he is and whatever faculties he is equipped with, he has enough information to infer that God is real. What is this information?

Again, we are all “without excuse”—meaning the information pointing to God must be so plain that every human being, without exception, could be counted on to face it and experience it, no matter how limited her life, health, senses, or circumstances might be. The evidence for God must be inescapable within our lives.

What are the inescapable realities that every human can experience? We might be able to list several, but the full list includes at least these two:

1. Existence exists. There is something instead of nothing, and we are part of that something.

2. Things change. Everything we experience in the world has a beginning and an end.

These two facts about earthly human life are so basic that we have forgotten there was ever a time that we learned them. They were certainly among the very first truths we learned, long before we even had spoken words with which to define our thoughts. Neither of these truths would necessarily have to be true, given that it is not difficult to at least abstractly conceive of a universe (perhaps “nulliverse” would be a better word for it) in which neither of these facts is true.

Yet these two facts are indeed observable characteristics of our world—pointing to a series of conclusions not only about the nature of our world, but also about the nature of God.

* * *

Existence exists. Everything in the world had a beginning. From these two observations, one of the conclusions is that there must have been a time when the very first thing, or the very first set of things, came into existence.

If this never happened, then there would be non-existence instead of existence, and this is not what we have. Existence must have begun with the first thing in the world that existed. And this in turn points to God, because for something to come into existence, there must be something outside the material world to cause this existence to begin.

After all, it couldn’t have been something inside the material world that caused this first thing, because then this cause would have been the “first thing” instead.

You might still be inclined to say that “chance” caused existence to begin—as in, some wrinkle in the fabric of nothingness that is theoretically possible but so vastly unlikely that the odds against it are something like one in ten quintillion raised to its own power. That is why existence feels so special and unique.

However, what then caused or created this “wrinkle”? Or what created “chance” itself? What created the march of time proceeding in such a way that it allowed enough duration for this vastly unlikely event to occur? All of these things must have their beginnings, too—or else they would be eternal.

You might say instead that creation occurred because of energy leaking in from some other world, some other dimension of reality. But how did the other dimension begin? This hypothesis does nothing except expand the borders of the material world to let them include other dimensions. In fact, for this very reason, we know that the Creator does have to be eternal. If not, then he is simply an extradimensional entity, and we would have to ask what it was that caused the Creator to begin.

Here then is where reason begins to show us the nature of the Creator. Not only is he eternal, but there are other things that we can know about him as well.

* * *

For example, we know that the Creator must be entirely self-contained. He is able to exist independently, without relying on anything else. If this was not true, then something else would have had to exist eternally alongside the Creator, and what would have created this other thing?

We also know by observation that the Creator has the ability to create. Since existence exists, he apparently exercised this ability. Furthermore, the Creator is alive and conscious, and has the ability to choose to create. If this was not so, if the Creator was somehow nonliving or unthinking, then only random chance could be responsible for directing where its creative energies went—and we would be stuck again with asking where this random chance came from.

So it turns out that we can recognize quite a bit about the nature of God from some of the most basic facts about the world. The facts that (1) our world exists, and (2) everything in it has a beginning, together point to all of these conclusions:

A. The world began with the very first thing or set of things.

B. Something outside the world created this first thing.

C. That Creator is eternal.

D. That Creator is independent.

E. The Creator is powerful enough to create the world.

F. The Creator has a will and makes choices.

All of this can be seen and known by the tribesman—not from the words of any person or scripture, but from the implications that are written upon reality.

And there is even more. There is still more that the tribesman can know, thanks to an additional truth that is also apparent in every human life. Points 1 and 2 were among the first truths we learned as self-aware beings, but before these came a “point 0” that was the very first thing that each newborn human being experiences. It was a shock to experience it for the first time, and I am convinced that it continues to be a shock for us in the first subconscious millisecond of each new day when we awaken to it again. The simplest statement of this most fundamental experience is also a name we have already cited, a name the Creator gives for himself. That is: I am.

Next: The Audacity of Identity

Part 3: The End of All Continuums

Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?

What does “better” mean?

The better of two competing entities, objects, or proposals is the one that comes closer to some particular ideal. “Better” implies a “best”—even if the best is something we have never seen and cannot name. To illustrate using an everyday object, a washing machine that meets our capacity requirements is better than one that does not, but one that meets our capacity requirements and features styling we find attractive is better still. All of the movement from good to better to better still implies a “perfect” washing machine toward which this continuum is oriented, even if that ideal can only be approached but not attained.

Living is better than not living along just such a continuum, because one’s sense of what is highest includes the dynamism that comes with life. Truth is also better than falsehood, because the highest-quality thing would be unencumbered by lies. Each reasoning human being has ideals of what is good and right that extrapolate toward “highestness” in this way—that is, toward a model for what is perfect or best. We don’t think about this ideal directly, and we cannot imagine it because we ourselves are imperfect. However, the ideal, or at least our sense of its direction, serves as the yardstick by which we make our determinations.

This is true even of seemingly subjective points such as our favorite color. We might all have different favorite colors and we might each change our favorite colors according to our moods, but each of us nevertheless agrees that certain colors touch us in ways that are better than certain other colors. Measurements such as these could not be made unless there was some standard for comparing life vs. unlife, truth vs. falsehood, or my reaction to one color vs. my reaction to another. There is a model, in our thoughts or in our spirits, that we use in order to judge—in order to favor certain things and avoid or discourage other things.

One might argue that this standard for determination is actually something mundane. We human beings simply seek our own happiness, or our own physical comfort. This is true as far as it goes. However, even if all of human life and human choices were this simple, still these conditions would point toward ideals. There is some “perfect” happiness. There is some “perfect” comfort. It would be impossible to make relative measurements of “better” along these continua as well, unless there was a “best” to use as yardstick. And these “bests” surely exist. We use them, after all. So given that the ideals exist, where do they exist?

The answer is that the ideal, any ideal—an ideal of perfect justice, beauty, truth, or even happiness—must exist outside of the material world. It cannot be found in the material world, because nothing perfect can be found here. Everything we find in the material world could still be better than it is. That is, everything here falls somehow short of an ideal that, as we have already seen, is also real.

So (to build on the arguments in Part 2): Assume that somehow you do think thoughts. Assume, furthermore, that this act of thinking actually is just random, and you are entirely comfortable with the notion that selfhood is an illusion—that in fact we have no autonomy and our thought life is just the result of cascading collisions. If so, these cascading collisions seem to be making evaluations with reference to a standard that does not exist in the material world.

The problem with this should be clear. The material world is all that there is—or so goes the argument. The argument further asserts that all that we see and all that we experience are fully self-created, the result of meaningless random events. So how could random collisions give rise to something immaterial? Specifically, how could colliding particles create referential standards of value that do not exist in the realm of colliding particles?

Plenty of people try to assert that there is no ultimate perfect being. But they undermine their argument through the very premise of arguing. Is the notion of the absence of God a “better” intellectual construct? Atheists would say yes! But if so, then what does “better” mean—and what does that meaning imply? All of us are leaning in the direction of something that is ultimate and perfect during every single instant through which we are aware and making choices in the world.

Next: Welcome to the Nulliverse