Quantum Sponges

In Acts 28, Paul shook off a poisonous snake that bit him and he suffered no ill effects. The last portion of Mark’s Gospel promised such would characterize those who promoted the teachings of Christ. We have anecdotal evidence of more such events arising from the early church period. That it was possible did not mean it was normative.

Nothing in this was meant to encourage testing God. During the Wilderness Temptation, Jesus pointedly told Satan He would not jump off the pinnacle of the Temple Plaza just to prove He could, because it was wrong to fling a challenge in the face of God. Does this conflict with Elisha’s statement when he crossed back over the Jordan after seeing Elijah? It is typically translated as, “Where now is the God of Elijah?” (See 2 Kings 2.)

Regular readers will recognize the signal failure to integrate all this as Western literalism. Western reasoning excludes a whole set of logical categories understood by almost every other intellectual tradition. It requires the Hebraic quantum reasoning to see that there is no conflict. Context is everything, and context includes far more than Western minds are prepared to recognize. The people who penned the Scripture did not set out to confound us, but we confound ourselves by refusing to think outside our little Western box.

Truth is obscured by the receiver, not the sender nor the medium. That’s not to say we cannot interfere and mess things up, but if we are obedient, the Lord works through us anyway. The receiver comes after the message and is obliged to adapt, not make petulant demands based on some mythical standard that never actually existed until very recent history. Western rationalism is not purely rational, but deeply infected with a barbaric pagan mythology. The Western presumption to a rational approach is but a passing haze of stinking smoke that will eventually blow away on the winds of history.

Thus, we do not hide the message — our world hides itself from the message. Communicating the message sometimes requires that we shock the conscience of those around us. Not as a matter of course, but when the snakes bite, we have to let God discern whether that’s our ticket home or a chance to demonstrate His glory some other way. Obedience to God’s Laws, the full embrace of divine justice, is not meant solely to gain some peculiar advantage over those who cannot see the moral fabric of the universe. It is meant to ensure we stand in the spotlight of God’s fame. It is meant to guarantee that we willfully participate in His agenda, regardless of mundane outcomes.

It is fully consistent with this moral position that we have little use for encryption. Snooping on our traffic by any agency offers no threat, since perhaps the truth could seize them, too. We have no agenda for action other than living in the sacrificial love of Christ and trying to escape entanglement with this world. We engage this life only at the point of revelation. Thus, we struggle most to create opportunities to say even more of what we wish we could say, if only the world around us were ready. Yes, we hesitate at times because not every moment is right for crucifixion, and not every audience is fit for the pearls of God’s wisdom. We first have to establish the value and use of those pearls in the minds of those who receive them. Thus, our message begins with conduct, a conduct that represents in no way anything less than sacrificial love that absorbs the sorrows of this world as powerless to harm us in the ultimate sense.