Radix Fidem Curriculum: Cosmology

5. Cosmology

Jesus spoke often of the Kingdom of Heaven. Within the context of His ministry, the term refers to what would follow the Cross and the end of the Kingdom of Judah. While Judah was a human political entity, it had no purpose in existing without the Covenant of Moses. And Jewish leadership had abandoned that covenant long ago, so Jesus came with one final chance to restore the people of Israel to the purpose they had since the Call of Abraham: to be God’s unique revelation of His character and His will for fallen mankind. Jesus warned that God was moving forward with this demand that Israel either follow the Law into faith, or they would not be a part of the Messianic Kingdom.

The Jewish leadership saw only the political implications for themselves from a human viewpoint. They were incapable of grasping the meaning of things from the Spirit Realm. This is part of what Jesus was trying to say in His conversation with Nicodemus that night; He seemed to despair of the Jewish people rising beyond their material human existence and the petty concerns of this world. The nation had sunk wholly and completely into the Fall and had embraced this existence as the norm. For them, there could be no Messiah if He didn’t address their worldly concerns and materialistic dreams of hedonistic comfort.

Jesus flatly told Pilate that His Kingdom was not of this world. He tried to tell the Jewish leaders that, but they refused to hear it. They were incapable of hearing it. Their hearts were closed to the truth. It was as if their hearts were dead, buried under the rubble of a mystical heritage crushed by abstract reasoning and the supremacy of human intellect.

This world is not our home. We were never supposed to die. We were not made by God to face mortality, to be trapped within time and space constraints and morally blind. The Spirit Realm is ultimate reality, the place we were meant to live. The Spirit Realm is not another place; it is this same universe in which we live now, but our fleshly nature cannot perceive it directly. Our human intellect has no capability for handling such a thing. It is there, very much like a parallel universe, right there within reach, yet as far away as the other side of the vastness of space. You cannot go there without shedding this mortal flesh.

In the Kingdom of Heaven, death is just a circumstance. It is not a tragedy. We are forbidden to seek death for our personal convenience, but we are also taught to face it with celebration and joy when it comes at the hand of our Lord. Yes, death is frequently painful for those who face it, and pretty hard on those who are left behind. But death itself is no tragedy; death that isn’t justified by Biblical Law is a tragedy. It’s a tragedy because it’s contrary to the Covenant, contrary to God’s design. But the end of our mortal existence is just another phase along the eternal path.

We must get rid of the impression that this life is precious. The end can’t come soon enough. The Western notion that we have some kind of ownership of our remaining years of earthly life is a foul blasphemy. You and I are owned by Christ; we are His children and His divine heritage. Our years on this earth are a prison existence we are eager to escape. The only bright spot is the joys of shalom He grants as just a taste of what’s to come on the other side. But it’s just a taste; it’s not the real thing.

It’s a damnable idolatry to cling to youth and physical vitality. We are granted such things only for the glory of expending them for our Lord. You may well have a long and healthy life if you obey Biblical Law, but only if that is your mission from God. Enjoy it as the glory of the Lord, not something you can claim to own. The joy of living is obedience, not in the living itself.

The New Testament refers to death of the saints as “sleep” — taking a break while waiting for Christ to restore us to Eden and our eternal bodies. Dying is nothing. And if obedience to your convictions includes at times handing out death to others, that is no tragedy and certainly no sin. The only sin is when your convictions condemn you for harming another creature contrary to the Covenant of Biblical Law. Death is merely a fact of this world. Nothing that humans do outside of the Covenant will persist beyond the Day of Judgment. All of it will be burned up and everything restored to what Eden was, to the dominance of the Spirit Realm.

In our minds, we must learn to see this fallen realm for what it is, an ongoing tragedy in itself.

Let us imagine an invisible realm overlapping our world from Heaven. Call it the moral realm; it is the world we could live in if we simply could understand faith and trust in our Creator. Strive to realize that moral realm in this world, though it is invisible to anyone who has no moral awareness. It becomes rather like a separate and higher faculty of awareness, to see and taste the vitality of the natural world around us calling out to our hearts. We can learn to hear the trees of the field clapping their hands, the mountains and hills singing praise to God, the waters telling the story of His love, while the ground echoes back like the bass line on the refrain.

See reality with a heart of faith, for the heart is a superior sensory organ in its own right.