Worldly wisdom learns primarily from its mistakes, from experiencing the consequences of its willful activities and adapting accordingly.
Spiritual wisdom – knowing God better and better – does, too, but also and often primarily from its misfortunes.
God allowed Job’s tribulations to deepen his spiritual understanding.
My life and my time are spiritual synonyms. Devoting hours to the service of others is self-sacrificial.
What died on the cross, once and forever, was the Son, the element of the eternally preexistent Godhead that personified Its immutability. It was the Son who cried out My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? This was not a cry of confusion, because the Son, in unthinkable eternity, had agreed to the sacrifice; but rather a cry of allusion to the Spirit-inspired prophesy (Psalm 22) of the Godhead’s reconstitution. Jesus was raised from the dead to replace the Son at the Father’s right hand.
And that reveals the second thing abandoned by the Ur-Father through the incarnation: His own moral authority.
For the Father judges no one, but has committed all judgment to the Son…(He) has given him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man.
That which was represented by the Son in the primordial Godhead – in Yahweh – was not a Son of Man.
The wages of sin is death, was Yahweh’s determination, made actual, inflexible and binding, by the Son. When Jesus assumed the place of the Son in the Godhead, human sympathy became determinative in divine judgment.
God’s failures in creation were due to His own divine intractability, we may say, to His own perfection, and that perfection’s incompatibility with sin, with disobedience. Only by sacrificing His own perfection, only by relinquishing His own imperturbable judgment, could He coexist with His creation.
He condescended to our weakness by sacrificing His own nature, and incorporating ours.
Certain things we can say were lost to Yahweh forever, when that which is represented by the Son was lost through becoming incarnate in Jesus –responsibilities which were the Son’s alone, exclusively the Son’s eternal aegis.
The first is Yahweh’s creative power.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
In the beginning was the Word (the Son)… All things were made through Him (the Son), and without Him, nothing was made that was made.
When the Son became incarnate in Jesus, God’s ability to create ex nihilo – to create anew – was sacrificed. There would no longer be anything new under the sun. Henceforth, Jesus could only work through the materials already at hand, under its already established conditions, its laws, its already innate possibilities.
As many have pointed out, the miracles of Jesus are either concentrations or accelerations of phenomena found naturally occurring – healing, multiplication – or else manipulation of natural forces. He commands nature; he doesn’t replace or add to it.
And so when elsewhere he advises his followers that in times to come they will do greater miracles than he has performed, he was simply prophetic of the future opening of nature’s wonders and inner workings, its existent possibilities. The extraction of megatons of power from a few molecules, after all, is simply making potency actual; it’s not creation.
Noah, Babel, Eden itself – these are mythic images of failure and new creation. That is no longer possible; the possibility was sacrificed. God and Jesus must make do with the one that surrounds us.
That’s what the incarnation cost God. That’s why the decision was terrible: it was irrevocable.
Two kingdoms are at war. The ruler of the first kingdom – call it Heaven – is offered the opportunity for an exchange by the ruler of the second kingdom – call it Hell. If Heaven’s king will send his son – his only son – into Hell’s keeping, Hell’s king will in return release the thousand Heavenly citizens he holds in captivity.
This would be a terrible decision for Heaven’s king, knowing that his son would be abused and tortured, and then killed. A thousand saved for one lost, yes, but the one lost is his son! His only son! The king would be forever bereft, his lineage shattered, his heartbreak coexistent with the rest of his life, however long that might be.
But suppose Hell’s terms were more lenient. Suppose the thousand would be released in exchange for only a defined period of the son’s captivity – for three days, say, or three years. The absence would be painful, but at its conclusion, the son would be returned, with no lasting harm. The royal family would again be intact, its lineage preserved.
Still a grave and difficult decision, but no longer a terrible one, a hellish one, at least for a noble king. In the end, the princely son would be restored, forever to be praised, along with his father, by their grateful citizens.
These latter, therefore, cannot have been the terms of the Atonement. The Father gave the Son, He didn’t loan Him. Unlike Abraham, His filial sacrifice was eternal. The Son was lost to the Father forever.
The Father/the Son: these are images representing elements of the primordial Godhead, elements of what was once called Yahweh.
The question is: what was lost to the Ur-Father forever, to gain our salvation?
God doesn’t specially honor scholarship: that would be absurd. The treasures we are advised to lay up in heaven must be available to everyone.
But that isn’t to denigrate Christian scholarship. It’s only to say that the esteem God grants it is due to its activity, not its product; to the time spent at it, alone, with Him.
Time alone with God = Diamond
Communion = Gold
Feeding on the word = Silver
Ministry = Pearl
In Christian ministry, death is often imaged as a passageway leading from this world to the next, or a bridge uniting modes of existence, or a gateway through which we step from the mortal to the eternal. These are all perfectly appropriate images, but it’s important to emphasize the continuity they represent, rather than the transformation.
What passes over the bridge is what is essential to who we are. What emerges on the far side of the door is recognizably the same personality as the one who entered from the near side. Far from changing us into saints or angels, death doesn’t even improve us. Death is relocation, not reformation. Who we are here and now is what we will be there and then; what is different is the nature of the world in which we find ourselves.
But what a change that will be!
When God first refused Israel entry into the Promised Land and sent the nation back into the wilderness, it wasn’t to gain time in order to accommodate the Promised Land to them; it was to cultivate a new Israel, an Israel that could flourish in what the Promised Land had to offer.
As we approach Heaven, most of us still have much more in common with the first Israel than with the second.
When someone sins against us, we are morally instructed in Christ to forgive that person. This instruction isn’t directed towards our emotions. How could it be? Emotions are not voluntary, and moral instruction only belongs within a context of willful compliance or rejection. There can be no meaningful instruction to ‘Be less chagrined,’ any more than there can be a meaningful instruction to ‘Feel less pain in your toe.’ Those words can certainly be offered – any words can be offered – but they are meaningless as instruction, and Christ’s words are never meaningless.
So what are we being instructed to do, when we are instructed to forgive? We are being instructed to act towards the other as if the harm had never occurred. For most of us on the Christian walk, this is the most difficult instruction we will ever receive; and that, of course, is why it lies at the very foundation of Christ’s curriculum. It is so fundamental, in fact, that it underpins everything else, almost the way arithmetic underpins the rest of mathematics. But there is this difference. Arithmetic is simpler than everything built upon it, whereas forgiveness is more difficult than the rest.
And this is reflective of the Christian way. Christianity does not begin with the simple; it begins with the impossible, and goes from there.
Jesus did not come to teach about the world and how to succeed here; he came to teach about the ways and means of heaven. Efforts at exegesis that fail to realize that, however well-intentioned and ingenious, are fundamentally misoriented.
Still, there are occasions where what Jesus teaches about heaven finds echoes in what others teach about the world.
One of these is His instruction concerning trust and confidence in the future. Regard the lilies of the field!
Worldly writers do also sometimes encourage an optimistic attitude – The power of positive thinking! – and their evidence is how frequently it leads to worldly success, sometimes far exceeding reasonable expectations.
‘Deeper’ thinkers, though, are often condescending towards such writers; they knowingly point out, with unassailable evidence, how often the world clearly and even tragically disappoints optimism. Expect the worst, and you’ll never be disappointed is their proud slogan. They argue persuasively that optimists are, at best, successful entrepreneurs, advocating a positive attitude as a useful tool in one’s worldly dealings, along with discipline, self-control, energy, and so on. It increases the odds of success.
But to repeat, Jesus is not talking about the world at all, except in the sense that there are elements in the world that mirror – or perhaps retain – elements of heaven.
We are encouraged by our Lord to cultivate in ourselves a positive attitude towards the future, not because it will help us get ahead in life or get the most out of life – although it very well may do both those things, and other good things besides – but because it will make the transition from here to heaven less dramatic. It will not require losing the demonic pleasures of pessimism.
AS FAR AS I CAN SEE 