Moral Down Payment

Do you suppose the grass sang when His resurrected feet trod the ground of the garden where He had been buried?

Given the recent months of teaching here, consider again what Paul says about Creation and the Fall:

For the creation eagerly waits for the revelation of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility — not willingly but because of God who subjected it — in hope that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage of decay into the glorious freedom of God’s children. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers together until now. Not only this, but we ourselves also, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8:19-23 NET)

We can argue about precise meaning of Greek wording here, but you have to remember that Paul still thinks in Hebrew. More, it’s a the Ancient Hebrew perspective renewed under the influence of his personal education with the risen Christ. We have only a sketchy idea what Paul experienced during those three years in Arabian seclusion, but how would one describe a direct encounter with the Savior? This was an extended period of daily Presence in which Paul had to reevaluate the whole of his rabbinical education in light of divine glory.

Creation experiences a partial redemption whenever any one of us comes free from Western intellectual influences and experiences God’s divine Presence in the heart. When the heart awakens to its full sensory faculties, we are reconnected to some of what Adam had in the Garden. We cannot hope to understand intellectually what the heart knows about a universe that is actually alive and conscious on some level. Even if this is all just metaphor, we are wholly changed when we embrace whatever ineffable truth is behind that metaphor.

God subjected Creation to the Fall simply because its sole purpose is serving as a nest for our human condition. We are surely unable to fully comprehend why God created a place for us, what is His ultimate purpose in deciding He wanted people. What we do understand is the emphatic assertion that we are the purpose for the universe, so far as we are ever likely to understand anything. We are to treat the universe as our rightful domain on this level of existence. We need only properly understand how to assert that dominion.

It comes by opening up the mind to serve the heart, because the heart is the only human faculty capable of reconnecting to the universe directly. Creation joins in calling out to us all day long to hear with our hearts. A primary symptom of full awakening is that you begin to sense the living world around you directly, but that your mind only gains access second-hand. Instead of silly cathexis, the Devil’s artificial perversion of genuine love, you experience the agape faculty that God designed for us. Cathexis is, at best, just icing on the cake, not the substance of what really matters.

This is what Paul calls the “glorious freedom of God’s children.” Several other places in the New Testament remind us that we have a part of that, a down payment or earnest bond (try Hebrews 6, for instance), during this time on the fallen plane of existence through embracing His Laws in the Person of Christ. That moral awareness is the Presence and character of our Creator — it was there all along, but now we can see it and let it use us.