Hebrew Outlook
On the one hand, we need very much to correct the Western assumptions. Even very scholarly Christians tend to operate from perverted Western notions without giving it much thought. We can call them “perverted” because they are entirely heathen in nature, arising from outside the ancient biblical traditions. On the one hand, Western Civilization owes a great debt to ancient Greece and Rome for a rational organization, but the deeper mythology of what it means to be human comes from the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture that absorbed what was left of Greco-Roman Civilization. Both were at times even anti-Christian, so for the organized Church hierarchy to adopt any part of it was a moral and spiritual compromise. Yet the Church embraced it wholly. Far too much of that heathen background still deeply stains mainstream Western Christianity today.
On the other hand, it would be very easy to get lost in the details. My previous books (see A Course in Biblical Mysticism and Biblical Morality for examples) only introduce the vast ocean of differences between Western Civilization and the Ancient Near Eastern outlook in the Bible. Even then, such studies restrict themselves to what Westerners already know from their own attempts to understand Ancient Near Eastern culture and intellect. It’s not as if we could simply become a part of that ancient way of life, but if we don’t get a feel for the differences, we make no room for the Bible to speak. That the differences are significant is simply too obvious to anyone willing to take a brief look. If you haven’t pursued this before, you may struggle a bit. In this book, I’ll simply ask you to be aware of it until you have time to verify my assertions later.
The Bible authors assumed that the reader was possessed of the Ancient Near Eastern background that dominated their world. Thus, you don’t find Jesus or the Apostles railing directly against Hellenism because virtually no one in their world called it that. Rather, Christ spoke in terms of how things ought to be, which was always consistent with the ancient Hebrew viewpoint. From our standpoint today, we can easily see how Jewish scholars had swallowed an entirely new and different intellectual orientation that Alexander the Great had evangelized during his conquests in that part of the world. We have to take the time to roll back that momentous shift in thinking and recover those ancient biblical assumptions.
In terms of cosmology, Hebrew thought presumes ultimate reality is the Spirit Realm. That realm of existence is entirely separate and different from our existence here in this world. It’s not a difference in location, but a difference in quality. Ours is more like a restricted pocket, almost an artificial construct, within the Spirit Realm. You can in theory touch the Spirit Realm any time because it is the fundamental realm of existence in the first place. However, we are generally separated from it by our fallen nature.
Creation is not limited to our plane of existence, but we could hardly grasp anything outside of our portion. Ours is the lowest, the most “dumbed-down” part of existence. Where we are is rather like the bottom of the well, where it always dark, dank and confined. We experience here the limitations of time and space, but the rest of Creation suffers no such thing.
God’s existence is rooted outside our domain. We are inside of a highly constrained bubble of existence that He holds in His hand. We are forced to use all sorts of metaphors, figures of speech, parables and symbolism to begin addressing what we need to know about things outside this realm, and that includes God. All we can do is characterize Him, and it will always vary with the context, because He is simply outside of all our categories of mental grasp. To imagine that we can make Him consistent with our logical categories is frankly blasphemy. It’s not just false and misleading, but downright sinful.
In broad terms, the Bible indicates that God made our world and placed us in it on far better terms than we experience now. We were the pinnacle of Creation in terms of this world. It would be silly to suggest that the universe exists for us. Rather, the Bible indicates that the universe exists for God’s glory. In terms of our focus on the question, everything exists to draw our attention to His glory. Not merely as passive entertainment, we are supposed to participate in making His glory apparent. Initially, we did that reflexively as stewards of His Creation.
Something changed all of that. The change was not in Creation itself, but in us. Whatever else is meant by the term “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” it symbolizes a decision to make judgments about good and evil apart from God’s revelation. It amounts to usurping God’s authority and making ourselves our own gods.
Why this doesn’t work too well is not immediately apparent. While Western minds can obviously catch onto the arrogance of this choice, there’s much more to it than that. Human faculties are utterly incapable of judging such things. We are taught in Western education that human reason is the highest possible faculty, that intellect holds to key to conquering the universe. If we can just remove all the impediments to our intelligence, there is nothing we can’t do. Such is the essence of the Fall. To imagine that Creation can be brought under the control of human hands is sheer madness.
If God creates anything at all, He weaves His own moral character into everything. That is part of how it glorifies Him. Creation is not merely a passive lump of matter, but He breathes into it His personality. We don’t take seriously enough Paul’s characterization of Creation as a living thing that longs for His glory to become apparent (Romans 8:18ff). It’s not a question of objective fact; you could never prove it on those terms. Rather, in our existence here we should act as if Creation itself desires His glory, because Creation is programmed to respond to His glory shining through us. Paul insists that it makes a difference in how things happen to us, and Jesus surely demonstrated it by His miracles. Whatever potential we might discover in this universe, it rests on understanding God’s character.
But the human mind is not up to the task — not by itself. The Bible repeatedly refers to the heart as the human faculty for understanding God’s character. It’s not enough to know His commandments, but there must be a firm commitment. And it’s not enough to be committed to the discipline of obedience, but God demands personal loyalty. Not just a reasonable loyalty, but a commitment that reaches beyond the grave. Human reason is incapable of justifying such a thing on its own terms. Even if you assert as a given that there is such a thing as the Spirit Realm on a higher level above our plane of existence, the mind does not possess the power to do more than organize or implement things. It requires another level of understanding that is above intellect and above the mind.
In the Ancient Near East, such talk would not have raised any significant questions. They took much of this for granted. It was so deeply enmeshed in their understanding of reality that no one had to explain it. For them, it was merely a question of who the god is that demands their loyalty (Acts 9:5). In our far different time, in a far distant place, we have lost contact with such an instinctive understanding. It requires a little more information to overcome our built in resistance.
