Time Travel

There's been a discussion in our small group about Pilate's role in Jesus' crucifixion. Each week, the group discusses a couple of questions related to last Sunday's sermon. One of the discussion questions looked at how the Jewish religious leaders convinced a crowd to call for Jesus' execution. How does that interact with submission to church leaders? What do we do when (not if) we disagree with them?

We look back today and think those people should have very clearly known the leaders were wrong. After all, they wanted to kill a guy. But would you support life imprisonment for a repeated child molester? What's the difference? 

We say Jesus was innocent. And according to Roman law, or even our laws today, you would be right. Pilate says as much. Remember that Judaism is legalistic. It's all about the rules. The religious leaders took their power from the rules, or the perceived penalty of violating those rules.

That's why they found Jesus' message so offensive. Jesus taught that the rules weren't enough. You had to follow the rules behind the rules. Unwritten rules that went even farther. This is why Paul says the law could never justify, never restore right standing with God.

Time After Time

Jesus justified - brought us back into relationship with God - through His sacrifice. So what about all those people in the Old Testament who never knew about Jesus? This is the kind of stuff I think about on my walks.

Let me take this from another perspective - can you travel backwards in time? A favorite theme of science fiction, time travel raises questions of changing the past or the immutability of the future. The Terminator movies made an entire franchise off this one question.

I posit that no, you cannot travel back in time any more than you can change the future. Why? Because it already happened. Let's start with an assumption - God exists. If God exists, then we accept that He created the universe, including time. I God created time, then He exists outside of time. In other words, God observes the totality of time.

Moments do not pass. He sees it all as a single, static entity. In the book of Acts, Jesus tells His followers that it is not for us to know the epochs that the Father laid out. In the father's eyes, the story is done and laid out. Our spirit, soul, whatever we call it, simply can't handle that amount of reality.

Did you study infinity in high school? You know, the little side ways "8" symbol. And your teacher, like mine, explained that numbers are infinite because you can always add 1, going on forever. Well, it's even bigger than that. In between the numbers 1 and 2 are an infinite set of numbers. Some of which cannot be represented because they go on forever (Pi). 

Picture that. We have an infinite line representing integers. And at any point on that line you have an infinite number of lines extending off to infinity representing all the decimal numbers between each integer. Does that make your brain hurt like mine?

That's the level that God sees. We can't. We're an image, a reflection, of someone so much more than ourselves.

A Matter of Perspective

Back to the question - what about the people who never knew about Jesus? Imagine you jut won the lottery - $600 million ($600,000,000). The money has been transferred into your bank account. You walk out of the bank and see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. A 5 year old also sees it. Would you scoop up the $20 before the kid, or let them have it?

Probably let them. Maybe even hand it to them and smile. $20 doesn't change your life, does it?

Now imagine that you're homeless, see $20 the same time as this 5 year old. Not so easy now, is it. $20 means food. What changed?

Finally, imagine that the lottery was unbelievably huge - $600 billion ($600,000,000,000). How important is $20? Not important at all, is it. I mean, with investment, you could spend $2 billion a year and still have the same amount of money next year. $20 doesn't mean a whole lot.

In the universe, we're homeless and $600 billion doesn't even come close to God's perspective. Time, cause and effect, mean a lot to us. And it makes no difference for God. When He looks at us and the people who died before Jesus, He doesn't see the difference. His perspective is so large that a few thousand years don't change anything. 

I'm not saying that God is indifferent to our perspective. I'm saying that we're not trusting His perspective. We impose our problems on Him, trying to box Him into someone we can manipulate. And there is absolutely no way I can win that fight. He is so far beyond me, that I can't even comprehend it. And yet it's still so very hard to let go.

Redemption

What should I do when I disagree with church leaders? As someone in the group pointed out, no matter what happens, God wins. He takes the evil we do (intentional or not), and makes His good plans happen. My responsibility is doing what He asks of me, now, in this moment. Sometimes that means vocal argument. Sometimes it means quietly submitting. Every time, it means listening to Him. It always seems to come back to that - relationship.

Right and Wrong

So I sat on the porch this morning, sipping tea, thinking about the difference between seeking righteousness and being righteous (in right standing). Jesus taught that we find right standing through Him. And a characteristic of that is seeking righteousness.

What does it mean to seek righteousness? That sounds too churchy. But I don't have any better phrasing. It means thinking about everything you do and say in terms of right and wrong. Yes, black and white. And life isn't so neat, is it?

I'm not talking about legalism, where the rules make you right or wrong. God makes you right or wrong. He decides. Therefore, determining right and wrong means talking to Him. I'll tell you, I'm very good at rationalizing. And when right or wrong depends on me, well, it's hard to tell. Even doing something good can be selfish.

Seeking righteousness comes down to asking God what He thinks. Ironic, doing the right thing falls back on building a relationship. And that brings me back to Jesus being the one way of finding righteousness. No matter how much I seek, I need that relationship to be right, to even understand what right means. And Jesus makes that relationship possible.

I do wrong, way more than I want to admit. I need the forgiveness Jesus made possible in order to try and do what's right next time. Because doing right is what builds the relationship I need in order to know what's right. It's this ever growing spiral where each part pushes along the next which circles back for another cycle. Building on and on.

Where does it end? It doesn't. This is God's forever.

Peace

In the midst of stay at home, I had an opportunity to speak with two friends yesterday - my cor-worker and my daughter's roommate. Peace was the overwhelming common thread. I felt this urging to just blurt out peace comes from God. Not sure that would have helped either one. So instead I'm writing this letter to my daughter with all the things that I wanted to say.

The virus, picking it up from work. Money. Food. Toilet paper. Old cars. A job. A dark, empty office. And just plain being separated. All of these things bring stress. All at once brings a lot of stress. I know that it helps to talk. I know that putting numbers on your money relieves some of the pressure. Or a twelve pack of TP. Or telling a friend who listens.

And yet there is really only one person who can give you peace - God Himself. Look, I know church isn't your thing. I'm not talking about church. I'm talking about a person. We've gone over the morning pages before. Sit down and write 3 pages of whatever pops into your head. I would strongly encourage you to do that now.

The purpose is to be yourself. Open up with all honesty. Let go of the lies we tell ourselves trying to hold it all back and put on a brave face. Look at truth in all its brutal and burning light. Tell God everything He's doing wrong. Because like in any conversation, He talks back. That is where you will find peace.

He already knows how this virus goes. Who gets sick. Who dies. He already knows where the toilet paper is, and if we'll run out. He knows how much money you need and when. Where the job is. None of this comes as a surprise. Or in any way hinders what He intends to accomplish. All He asks is that we believe what He accomplishes is good. Trust that He loves us.

When you were little, first learning to walk, I took you outside to run in the driveway. You very quickly made it down to the street. I gave you a stern "no" as you reached the curb. You looked at me. Then looked back at the street. And I watched as one of those little feet slowly extended out. Another stern "no", slightly louder. The foot withdrew, only to make its way back out over the asphalt. When it landed, I swooped down, picked you up, and spanked you right there. Boy did you wail - for about a minute.

The funny thing is, that was less about keeping out of the road as it was about building a relationship of trust. I gave you a moment of pain in a way I could control to spare you much greater pain that was out of my control. Even at our worst point, we were still building a relationship based on trust.

I'm not saying any of this is God's punishment. I'm saying that even when He does discipline, He does it for our good - building a relationship with Him. How much more is He looking out for us when it isn't discipline?

Peace starts with a conversation. A conversation with the one person who can, with all confidence, bring peace. Start there. See where it takes you.

Speed of Darkness

It's an interesting observation that when you turn on the light, the darkness has to leave first. Therefore, the darkness must travel faster than the light. Right?

Yeah, I know. It's a silly spoof on the laws of physics. And every time I hear it, I imagine this light spreading out from the center. Rushing forward in bright rays as the darkness races, frantically, to find a place. And I wonder, what happens when there is no place?

It made me wonder if this is how it works in the next age, when God returns to our universe in all His glory. He pours Himself into Jesus, spreading from Jesus into us, and then out into everything. Where will the darkness go?

I use darkness as a metaphor for evil. Light, of course, being righteousness. When God's righteousness is front and center every place You look, where will evil go? We know that God is true. When we're in His presence, we can't even lie to ourselves. He knows too much. Friends tell me I'm a good person. And I know there's so much that I'm ashamed of. Plus all of the stuff I don't know yet. Imagine having that shame put front and center before you every second of every day. Knowing you could never be good enough, and knowing that it's absolutely true. Soul crushing.

Hell - the place without God - goes hand-in-hand with judgement and punishment. What if it's not? Those words carry an undertone that God chose to hurt us. What if that hurt is a natural consequence of sin? We long to hide from the truth of God's presence. He puts us to shame. Not just with what we did wrong, but our attempts to cover it up too. When God's light fills the universe, where would you hide?

I think of punishment in terms of reconciliation. I punished my children in an attempt to replace a long term pain with short term pain. The purpose being to teach them right and wrong, bringing them back into our family and to God. That's not what will happen here.

In this scenario, the dark is driven out by the light. It's not reconciling, not balancing. The light takes over. Period. It's all light. So what does that mean?

Selfish Altruism

I sat at lunch today listening to a couple of guys talk about stories. When I sat down, one of them was talking about a Ray Bradbury short story. A smart house survives an apocalypse and slowly breaks down. The conversation centered on Bradbury's point that nature left to itself erodes.

Later in the same conversation, they discussed Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. One of these gentlemen noted how Ayn Rand treated religion as a kind of selfish altruism. Religious people do nice things because they expect to be rewarded by God. I'm nice because of what I get out of it.

In one sense, Ayn Rand would be right. God does promise reward. And the perfectly natural thing is to seek that reward. And yes, that would be selfish. Ironically, chasing after the reward doesn't get you the reward.

Today's sermon covered Jesus' parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-29). Our pastor pointed out how the last servant, who just buried the money, acted out of laziness, using fear as en excuse. The master in the story praised the two employees who produced something out of what was provided and returned more than what they had when they started. This aligns perfectly with Jesus' analogies of bearing fruit.

Okay, how is all of this related? God asks us to do what is unnatural, or super natural, if you like. The natural thing is to be selfish - look for what I get out of it. Over and over the Bible stresses what the apostle Paul calls dying to the flesh, or doing what isn't natural. Yes, it is possible to the right thing just because it's right. But it's not natural.

Nature breaks down. Nature always destroys itself. In nature, things decay. Why? Because nature was never intended to exist on its own. God designed a kingdom. He is, after all, a King. He created us as His means of flowing into the universe, bringing new life. Restoring, refreshing, and ordering the universe away from the decay. His life flowing through us into everything around us. Think of the champagne glass pyramid. You pour champagne into the top glass until it overflows and fills the level below. Then those overflow and fill the next level down. All the way to the very bottom. God placed us on the top level to overflow and spill out into the world. But we (I) raise an umbrella and let the champagne splatter on the floor.

This is where Jesus stepped in. He became the very top glass. God pours into Him all His love. Jesus pours into us. And so on. That love, the champagne if you will, makes it possible to act super naturally. Or, as Paul describes it, the flesh submits to the spirit. Life instead of death.

Expression

Like most posts here, this began as an imaginary conversation. A friend made an off handed comment that they can't tell how I feel. Two weeks later, a make believe me starts talking about why...

I hide my feelings. On purpose. I have this image of my mother telling me to control my temper. It's set in their bed room. I don't remember much else, like why. And I know there were plenty of other opportunities for her to say that.

I remember crying a lot when my first pet bird died. We buried him out by the side of the house. I remember crying in junior high. It was a pickup basketball game. I'm short, nonathletic, and uncoordinated. I get picked last and never got the ball. For some reason, this one time, it bothered me. I left the game and one of the older guys came over to check on me.

In all of those cases, the advice was stop feeling. Now that's not what those well meaning people were trying to say. At least I assume so. All I know is that I heard that my feelings were bad and expressing them was socially forbidden. Well, expressing them in that manner, which is the only manner I know how. So either I express myself in an unacceptable way or not at all.

Wait, you say, there's a middle ground. No, there isn't. That's what I'm trying to say. You see this middle ground, but I don't. Like a blind spot, it's just not there.

The only way I can function in this world is by keeping tight reins on my emotions. I can't let go, not for a second. It's happened. And the fallout isn't pretty. It takes a very unique and caring person to see past it. Those people are very rare.

I imagine heaven as a place where either I'm fixed, or everyone else has the patience to put up with the insanity. I try to create that kind of place here for Vania. I suspect that she struggles with this too. And I don't want to suppress her emotions. I want her to feel. To find rest in being herself, the person God created her to be.

Give and Take

I watched a science fiction anthology on Amazon. This particular episode raised the question of what makes us human. Being me, I found something else. The story begins with Earth taking some mineral or something from an alien planet. They end up in a fight with the native inhabitants. I marveled at how the author simply considered it human to take.

Isn't that how the world works? Animals take what they want. We call it survival of the fittest. How many times have you heard the advice take what you want? That's the world left to itself. It's the lie the world asks us to accept - that this world is all there is.

Do you believe in spirituality? Then you already accept that there is more than this world. This begs the question of the nature spirit. Have you ever found a generous animal? Generosity, or even giving at all, is a spiritual concept. The world won't give. The world takes.

We were intended, created, to change the world. Remake it in the image of a God who gives. Imagine with me an entire world where every single person gives and never takes. No one trying to cheat you. Instead, they make sure you get everything you need. Imagine generosity as normal instead of the exception.

I don't pretend to understand why, but God intentionally created a universe that expects us to control it. He enters the universe through us. And His will, His character, brings giving and generosity - making the universe work as He intended.

Tired

I love understanding how things work. For the past couple of weeks, I've felt extra tired. It got bad enough to call it exhaustion. I wanted to know why. That kind of tired always has a spiritual effect. I get irritable and obsessive. So I start to wonder, is the cause spiritual or just the effect?

I think the answer is different at different times. This one started with something physical. The doctor suggested vitamin D supplements. I guess it was low on the last blood test. Apparently though, vitamin D can build up in your blood leading to exhaustion. I quit taking the supplements and started feeling better.

This is what sin has done. Instead of the spirit controlling the body, my body affects the spirit. And when I do these things on my own, I end up fighting God's will. He knew exactly what was wrong. But it still took me days of wrestling to listen. There is this inner resistance to His voice. It takes a lot of energy and hard work to overcome it. I don't like the pain.