I don’t call myself a prophet so I can bludgeon people into listening and buying into my religion. I frequently say that I don’t take myself that seriously. I use the label as a way of warning readers I spend a lot of time talking about religion and I take the message seriously. In the end, all I can do is share what I’ve seen and let God convince you to believe or not.
God consistently portrays Himself as an Eastern Potentate. He starts Moses writing in Genesis by explaining His logical sequence for understanding what He has to say about this world. Then He goes on to describe how He came up with humans and their place in the scheme of things. The image is a big and powerful ruler who has a hobby, a garden not too far from his residence. Adam is His slave, tasked with managing the garden. We would probably think of it as a private park, but much more extravagant than what you see anywhere today. He appoints Adam an assistant who is made of the same stuff as Adam: Eve.
They earn their living from the park by taking care of it. They live there and eat what grows there. God meets with them there near the end of the daily cycle. They have some options, but He warns them one choice would be fatal. God doesn’t wall off this garden, but allows visitors. One comes to test the limits of Adam and Eve in their obedience. They fail the test. Part of the failure is a change of awareness — for some strange reason, they suddenly begin to fear the presence of their Master. They can’t face Him any more; they suffer great angst. Of course, God knows what’s going on, and announces punishment for those involved. Adam and Eve lose their sinecure and are thrust out of the park where they have to live by the sweat of the brow. Whatever they were doing to keep the park didn’t require manual labor of that sort, but they lost whatever privilege it was that allowed them to avoid sweating in hard labor. They also lost whatever measure of immortality they might have had, if that’s what it meant to eat of the Tree of Life.
Paul talks about how death entered human existence and now reigns in all humanity. This is not what we were designed for, but it’s where we are now. Paul is also pretty consistent in describing the exit from mortality in the wider sense as typically through death in the literal sense. You gotta die to escape this awful existence outside of Eden. Of course, simply dying isn’t really the cure. If you don’t manage to make amends with God, then Adam’s curse remains on you. Dying doesn’t bring you back to Eden unless you somehow belong there before your human life ends.
The Penitent Thief crucified next to Jesus was promised he would see Eden before that day ended. With what we know of the context, that’s about as literal as anything Jesus ever said in the Gospels. Jesus died first, and the thief died later when the Roman soldiers finished them off to prevent Jewish agitation over having men still suffering a slow death in such proximity to the city during the single holiest day of the year. So we sense the other two men died before sunset and their bodies removed. The Penitent Thief was the first man to see Heaven as a Christian. Whether that was the same thing as what Jesus meant by Lazarus resting in the Bosom of Abraham is subject to debate, but there’s surely some connection. Both died at peace with God. We know Jesus continued alive after death because He rose, then later ascended to His Father’s throne room, whatever that means. So the Penitent Thief got to go with Jesus that evening while their bodies were schlepped off to various graves.
At no point does Scripture explain how someone manages to make that move, to come to the place where they embrace Jesus and the resulting eternity in His company as a friend. All we know for sure is some of the clinical manifestations, and some parabolic language that portrays something beyond human ken. The Bible talks about people being spiritually dead and being made alive or “born from above.” There is a connection, a correlation that certain behavior changes will manifest with that spiritual birth, but we are warned they are not cause and effect. Thus, Paul’s warning in Romans and Ephesians that saving faith does not originate with any human decision. You cannot decide to be born-again. You can decide a lot of other things which seem to go along with it, but it’s hard to ignore Paul’s blunt warning, especially in Romans. You aren’t supposed to understand it intellectually; you’re supposed to obey and live out the implications.
Meanwhile, some level of spiritual awareness is possible. We have the example of Balaam. He comes out of Mesopotamia with enough accurate knowledge to address Jehovah and get an answer that he understood. How did we get all this story about him and his onager talking and pronouncing blessings because the message was not his to choose (Numbers 22-24)? Someone was either there to witness it or interviewed folks who were there. Plus, we get a smattering of mentions in the New Testament, but it seems John in Revelation fills in the most important part of the story not included in Numbers: Balaam knew enough about Jehovah and His ways to instruct Balak how to proceed. Since Balaam couldn’t convince God to place a curse on Israel, he would have to seduce Israel into moving out from under the blessing and into the curse themselves. Obviously it is possible to understand some very critical issues with God’s moral imperatives without being a friend of God. Balaam did not repent and join Israel; he went on to advise Balak further and then went home.
That’s an extreme example, but the purpose of the Covenant of Moses was largely to teach Israel that moral awareness as much as they could learn it, but with a new and updated version based on God and Moses discussing what to throw out and what part of the oral background of the Ancient Near East was accurate enough to become Scripture. We have no idea how that did or didn’t connect, in clinical terms, with people in the Old Testament who manifested a very powerful spiritual awareness such that they went on to perform miracles and so forth. We don’t know much about why Elijah and Enoch didn’t have to die, any more than we understand what Paul meant when he spoke of entering the Third Heaven without dying. There is a lot of stuff simply not explained, and some pointed warnings we couldn’t understand it if we tried.
But we do know that after Jesus rose and the Spirit fell at Pentecost, things changed. No longer was it necessary to go through the Law of Moses to start on that path of enlightenment. The spiritual awareness could come spontaneously. The actual change in spiritual reality isn’t pinned down, but it seems the key to change in behavior is the change in awareness, and Scripture talks about how it’s almost always in the context of someone hearing the Word of God.
I grew up deeply tormented. Never mind whom you might blame, I did not develop the normal coping mechanisms. Given my wide reading in psychology, philosophy, etc., I sense the issue is not whether humans are tormented, but that some are simply not aware of it. So in my case the torment was quite severe in the sense of my sensitivity, and I was always on the edge of losing it. Even rather young I toyed with the idea of cutting myself and bleeding to death. Somewhere around age 9, that torment was pushed back just enough to give me breathing space. In mainstream religious lingo, I professed Jesus as my Savior at that time. But the storm of torment wasn’t really gone, just not right on top of me. Despite all the good religious instruction people offered me, there was always something missing. Some part of me knew it. I wasn’t searching for truth, but I was searching for peace with the Lord, before whom I knew I stood naked and still dirty.
Starting in high school, I became acquainted with little threads of truth regarding the intellectual background of the Bible. We actually had a class that introduced the mythology of quite a few different cultures, including Mesopotamian and Egyptian. Something in that pulled at me, oh-so-faintly. I attended a Baptist college where the professors were mostly neo-orthodox or outright liberal, while the student body was overwhelmingly fundamentalist. That conflict still hasn’t settled; the folks paying the bills for the college aren’t always fully aware of what is taught there. Things got pretty ugly while I was there in the late 1970s. In that atmosphere, I was exposed to a huge ocean of Antiquities studies, particularly more of that intellectual background. I learned all about Western Civilization and our religion professors contrasted it with ANE civilizations. I read way more than what was assigned, intellectually plundering that huge library of material pertinent to the question: What’s the difference between the Hebrew outlook and that of our Western folks today?
I didn’t take notes; I absorbed it. I’m struggling now to go back and find any references at all that would help to indicate the path my mind traveled. What I cannot do is show you how I decided what was accurate and what was baloney. Something in my angst, my searching heart, recognized some of it as consistent with that growing peace in my soul. All my writing here is no more than some accounting of what I recognized as useful in my faith. Today, I sit here at this keyboard with an overwhelming sense of peace that I am no longer naked and dirty before my Lord. I figured out how to accept His offer of proper attire and cleansing. Not in some silly human sense of perfection, but of peace that I cannot explain, but that manifests as a sense of determination to tell.
If you can use it; cool. If you tell me you think just like me, I’ll be very worried about you and feel a need to keep you at a distance. Cloning me, or pretending to be a clone is not normal and not what I expect. What I expect and hope is to encourage you on your own search, to provoke a sense of awareness about that angst, which I’m convinced is the default human condition. If I can find that peace, surely you can.
