I have a vision. I’m not dreaming it up, but discovering something that has been standing there all along. It’s not a question of what might be possible, but of entering into something God is already doing, whether any of us help or not.
Divine revelation came because God wanted us out of our fallen existence and back in the Garden of Eden where we belong. This mortal frame doesn’t belong there. You can’t live in the Garden without the Tree of Life, and that’s what it means to be mortal: You aren’t in the Garden, but you are outside of it in a fallen existence God had waiting for those who rejected His ways inherent in the Tree of Life. If you reject His ways, you reject the Tree of Life, and you can’t stay in the Garden.
The whole point is getting back into the Garden. It requires passing through that Flaming Sword, which symbolizes the same thing as the Cross. You have to nail that fleshly nature to the Cross — you have to die to this life and enter the Other Life.
The path for most of us is pretty long. We have to continue living here by the divine revelation before we actually move across the boundary of death. We have to embrace death and live with it for a while before it does its final work to take us Home. The reason God requires that is because of His glory. Nothing benefits us like His glory, and He knows that, so He encourages His own glory in us. Living by His revelation is how we generate His glory in our fallen existence.
The vision I have is restoring divine revelation to human awareness. In my experience, a great deal has been lost over the centuries since His Son walked among us. I’m driven by the notion that we cannot understand the message of His Son without going back to the frame of reference that gave the Cross meaning. Why was He so determined to die that way? What did He know about things? How did He approach His own human existence? It means trading in a whole bunch of stuff that won’t answer those questions, and taking up something else.
It means forsaking everything that conflicts with that vision. It means reclaiming however much of that context as we can. It means having faith that God has preserved the context sufficiently to make use of it. This cannot be a vain quest, or His revelation means nothing at all.
I’ve run into an awful lot of stuff in the current religious system that simply cannot take us back there. Those things are hindrances. Ditching that stuff has meant ditching the system. The people running the system won’t make room for the vision. I don’t write that in anger, but sadness that I have to leave them there. Maybe some of them will catch on later, but I suspect it will be much, much later, if any at all. I’m forced to build something separate in pursuit of the vision.
The vision is a body of ideas, an orientation to faith that restores the promises of God. It strikes me that there are an awful lot of blessings left waiting for us to claim. Not least would be things Jesus and His Disciples did that we aren’t doing any more. It’s not so much the blessings, but what those blessing represent about living in this world by divine revelation. The blessings are an indicator, not the thing itself. We need to restore whatever it is that produces the blessings.
It could be I’m totally lost. Still, this vision and this path are all I have right now. I’m convinced so thoroughly of the rightness of this path that I’m willing to forsake everything to pursue that vision. I’ve encountered so very many miracles along the way that I simply cannot imagine that it’s the wrong way to go. If it blows up in my face, I’ll be completely without any anchor for continuing this human existence. This is all I’ve got that gives any meaning to this life.
And I sure as hell can’t bring myself to want any of the things that seem to have captured so many other souls. Going forward is the only way I can go at all. Feel free to watch what happens, because a part of the vision itself is reporting what I experience.
