From my earliest memory, I knew that God had His hand on my life.
By no means did this indicate I lived a charmed existence. Parts of my childhood passed in homelessness, and poverty was never far away. Further, I had some developmental disabilities that made life generally risky for me in the best of circumstances. Worse, no one recognized those problems until I was an adult. There were several times I should have died, and nearly did, but God spared me.
I share that, not to garner sympathy, but to make the point that God was always present, always looking over my shoulder, and I knew it very early on. Because of bad religious teaching, I always carried a sense of doom, at least in the back of my mind. I was in my 30s when I was finally set free from that.
Being handed a bad start can never justify a failure to get serious when God calls. I never felt special or privileged. Even from the very start of my ministry training, I could not comprehend people ignoring God’s Word. Eventually I discovered the Doctrine of Divine Election. Suddenly it all made sense; there were people around me whom God simply had not touched, nor ever would. That included a lot of people at church who were convinced it was simply a social obligation to be there.
You can imagine how alienating it was to deal with adults — even church leaders — who did not share the sense of inner power from God Almighty. Very seldom did I spend time with mentors who sensed what I was going through. I got a lot of advice that totally missed the point, urging me to take paths that would have been cursed for me.
So, you can imagine how tickled I was to run across someone like Mike Heiser (Unseen Realm) whose broad thesis gave conscious shape to what had driven me from childhood. I knew these things, but could not articulate them very well. I knew in my heart that this world is very nearly meaningless; the only thing that matters here is rooted somewhere else, in Eternity. We are the object of a grand struggle in Heaven, not the subject. The vast majority of what we could do as humans would make no difference in Eternity. Our role is really very small.
If that makes you frustrated and leaves you feeling powerless, then you don’t understand. We are important to God, just not to His staff. The ruckus they have been raising aims at removing us from the picture altogether. The thing they are fussing about is not us, but the implications of God deciding to make us. In our current situation, the best we can hope for is that He wants to include us in His family household for some future purpose. Until the final day comes, we must endure.
The sense of purpose is already ours. That’s what I’ve been struggling to understand. Why did I have this overwhelming sense of calling if my primary mission is to wait for Christ’s return? It’s actually very simple: The only thing we must accomplish is learning to love Christ’s people the same way He does. It turns out that’s a very tall order. It seems it’s a lot more than most of those who call His name can do. They are too busy with all kinds of organizational activities that have nothing to do with sacrificial engagement with their fellow believers.
Instead, they have built this vast system that requires professional degrees and socially safe habits that don’t shake up this world too much.
I don’t believe these things because they make sense to me, or that they tickle any intellectual fancy. I believe because I cannot do otherwise. Election and Heiser’s thesis are the truths of my heart.
