Pondering the Path 03

Scripture promotes one particular image of Christians, still in their fallen fleshly form, as children in the household of God. As any good father, He encourages us to hang around Him when He works. We can scarcely understand much of what He does, but He grants us the privilege of having a child’s part in that work. We are along for the ride, and our presence often hinders and slows the work, but it seems important to Him to include us when we can behave ourselves and observe His guidelines. We get to be there and delight in helping Him do things He could do better without us.

God reveals to us that His primary work now is redemption. A critical element in redemption is vindicating everything He has revealed so far. His revelation says that, in the Garden, we chose to reject His revelation in favor of our own reasoning. We made ourselves our own gods, by elevating our reason to His place. We pretend that reason is Him. The problem is that reason is a chimera; it is not the pure and objective wisdom it claims to be. It is actually motivated entirely by our own internal lusts, so whatever path of logic it takes still brings us to the same sating of lusts that we would pursue without bothering with reason. It’s just that reason provokes a false sense of communion with others who reject revelation. The result is a common agreement to reject revelation, regardless of how the resulting competing “reasonable” agendas create chaos. Reason lies; it cannot possibly discern the fullness of reality. God’s work of redemption is to restore His own place on the throne of the soul, because He is the sole source of reality.

When His children begin to mature, hanging out in His workshop with Him, they realize just how little they can actually do. He alone can breathe life into a dead human spirit. There is nothing anyone else can do. He is not some slot machine waiting for someone to push the right buttons in order to give that gift of life. The whole operation is entirely on His terms, at His discretion. We cannot possibly understand what’s behind it.

That’s because the whole thing is inherently personal. Indeed, if there is one key to understanding God and His Creation, it is that we would invest a living personality into everything in the universe, at all levels. Reality itself must be viewed as a person, sentient and willful. Jesus rebuked the storm, as if it were a being who must obey Him personally. The mental habit of personifying everything is built into the human soul by God, so it takes an act of willful rejection to remove that from our understanding of the universe. Creation is not passive and lifeless; reality is not objective and malleable to human will. You cannot reduce life to biochemistry; there is a vital life force in all matter, and you must account for it to have any hope of understanding things. Ultimate truth is not a thing, but a Person.

This is a critical aspect of Hebrew epistemology.

And that epistemology goes on to say that only through your heart can you communicate with God and His Creation. Not the heart of Western mythology, which is the seat of mere sentiment. In the Bible, your heart is a separate faculty, the seat of commitment and faith. It’s the repository of conviction; the divine imperatives written in your DNA by the finger of God Himself.

Even modern science recognizes that the human physical heart is a sensory organ. The instruments can detect heart-specific electromagnetic activity between ten and fifteen feet out, but it appears that the heart itself can interact with other entities from farther, like a field that weakens but never quite dissipates out to infinity. This symbolizes how the “heart” is usually considered in Scripture. It’s the one part of your human nature where God speaks; He does not address Himself to the fallen human intellect. He requires that we force our minds to kneel to our hearts, from whence He reigns in our lives.

So we can talk to the animals, and trees and birds and rocks, just as Jesus spoke to storms, just like His Father spoke Creation into existence. But they aren’t likely to answer with a voice our human ears can recognize. They respond to us on the wavelength of the heart.

There’s something important to note about God speaking Creation into existence: It wasn’t the power of words. Jesus laid that to rest when he healed the paralytic let down through the roof. He noted to the Pharisees present that anyone can say, “Your sins are forgiven.” The words don’t mean much. And a lot of people have tried to say, “rise up and walk” to no effect. But Jesus used the ritual pronunciation of those words as a focal point for the recipient’s faith, and so that the other people there could witness the moral authority in action.

It’s not that rituals and words have no meaning, but that they have no power of their own. Ritual is an expression of our own need to focus the moral power God invests in His children. We speak to nature audibly and it responds to our hearts. That’s the way God made things. It doesn’t have to make sense to us; it makes sense to Him. This is the work of our God. Ritual and protocol have a critical place in our fallen lives as a part of the path of love and obedience.

Oh, but there’s more.