Death Is Just a Circumstance

The title is a catchphrase I’ve been using for years.

It’s the kind of thing you say because you know that the words would never really capture the truth in the first place. Instead, you reach for a way to point out the window of eternity and ask folks to gaze through it. Nobody really expects the mind to comprehend, but we can indicate something about Eternity. Not by adding things to your mind, but we do it by removing blockages there. The whole point of parables (and parabolic language) is to break the mind’s habit of trying to command and control.

If you dig into my high volume of blather here on this blog and in my books, you’ll come across the idea that the various Law Covenants in the Bible express something about God’s character, and that His character is the fabric of Creation itself. The ultimate revelation of God’s character was Jesus Christ, His true Son and His Living Law. His Presence in our world was the final revelation, the ultimate expression of God’s character in a human form we can grasp.

He died on the Cross willingly. Among all the things we could say about that, and among the things He Himself said about it, was an assertion that He wasn’t afraid of death. Indeed, He kept trying to say that He had been on that Other Side, that He came from there, so going back was not a problem. Up to that time, folks who shared His cultural and intellectual background as a human never pretended to understand Eternity. They sensed it was beyond words and never pretended to describe it. They sensed it from afar. Jesus said He had come from there, so He had an obvious advantage talking about it as His home. The Cross was simply the doorway back home.

It’s a paradox for us that we must first gain a sense of the utter separation between here and there, but we do so by exploring the continuity between our existence here and our own citizenship there. Attempting to reduce that paradox destroys any hope of making sense of it. It’s not as if we could hope to put it in words, as if our minds could finally grasp it fully and usefully. Rather, our minds are granted just enough to make informed decisions without any hope of grasping the actual thing itself. We have to entertain the paradoxical nature of truth as our normal here.

Western Christian belief includes a ton of unconscious assumptions. First, there is this crazy assumption that the mind is able to formulate a reliable orthodoxy that applies to all. When you touch Eternity in any way, you are absolutely and entirely alone before Christ. The very notion of rational orthodoxy nails Him to the Cross again, tries to hold Him in place where we can dissect Him at the mind’s leisure. He’s not dead, so you can stop pretending to make rational sense of Him. If you can’t grasp Him on some other level, your mind is sure as Hell not going to help you.

And even if we can sit down and blather at length consciously about the various assumptions of Western Christian belief, it’s still just plain wrong. It’s wrong because of that first assumption that it must be forced into some frame of reference that can be confined and explained in detail once and for all so everyone can agree. This is why we have so many theologians making all manner of effort trying to share their reasoning, as if that would somehow make it so obvious no one could argue. Maybe they do have a clear grasp of what God’s character demands of them individually, and can organize it in some useful way in their minds, but it cannot possibly fit your existence in any substantial detail. Westerners only pretend that logic is universal because they buy into the mythology of the Greco-Roman philosophers who said it was. Those philosophers rejected revelation, so what in Hell would they know?

And yes, they are in Hell. Never mind causation, we know the correlation is firmly established: Rejecting the revelation of God means you don’t belong to Him. You might have a limited exposure to revelation, but you cannot reject however much you have of it and expect to join Jesus in Eternity. Historical footnote: Jewish scholars did travel to Athens and other places where philosophers hung out, so those ancient geniuses were exposed to revelation and yet we see nothing of it in their teachings. Instead, everything they say pointedly denies the power of revelation.

If you cannot understand how their teachings are contrary to revelation, you need to spend more time with the academic disciplines of Antiquities, Comparative Civilization and various explorations of Non-Western thought. To embrace Western intellectual traditions is de jure a rejection of revelation. God didn’t just randomly pick the Hebrew folks as His scribes; He created their culture and unique intellectual orientation as the one proper setting for His truth. If you can’t think like an ancient Hebrew, you cannot possibly understand the Bible. The Hebrew Mystical pattern of reasoning is God’s own chosen matrix for His Word. And no, it’s not the same as Judaism today — that’s just a highly corrupted Hellenized version of revelation. It’s documented, yet remains one of the greatest secrets of our time, that the Hebrew people abandoned their ancient Hebrew ways for Greek philosophical nonsense. It was Hellenized Judaism that rejected a very Hebraic Jesus and murdered Him for daring to call them back.

So the net result is that I spend a lot of time writing about how that biblical viewpoint differs from ours today. On the one hand, I emphasize how utterly different is the Eternal plane of existence from ours here. On the other hand, I emphasize the continuity, particularly in the Law Covenants of the Bible. Don’t get hung up on that phrase, “under grace, not under law.” It’s a Hebrew parabolic expression — in Christ we can gain the spiritual birth without having to pass through the Law first, as was required prior to the Cross. The grace of God doesn’t do away with the meaning of the Law Covenants; it fulfills them in their primary intention of making us to see God’s character.

Further, the Law Covenants cover far more of life than mere conduct and ritual. It demands the kind of fundamental intellectual shift that subjects the mind to the higher faculties that awaken when God touches a human soul. It means you suddenly have the ability to commune with all Creation as a living thing. We say such things not as some factual note, but as the best explanation for something beyond words. Whatever it is you should make of the Law when “rightly dividing the Scripture,” it should include a dynamic and living link to all Creation around you. Creation operates on the character of God, and the Law tells you how to live here consistently with His character. It tells you how to emulate His Person in your own body so that your actions and thoughts are far more consistent with the fundamental nature of reality. That’s the meaning of “Christlike.”

Thus, you live daily here in this world with the thrill of communion with all of Creation itself as a living thing, an ally in your service of God. And when this life ends, you face it with the assurance that you already know something of what to expect. You’ve spent your whole life working to drag your fallen nature back to the Cross, back to the Person of Christ, and into a moral communion with God. You strive to conform, not to some collection of static ideas, but to a real Person who lives eternally.

At least two people in the Bible didn’t have to die, because they were already too close to what was beyond death. They had completely shed the influence of the Fall over their human existence, such that they were but a step from the threshold. That’s our model and it’s documented as possible.

Death is just a circumstance of your eternal life.