The Shack

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A brief review by Rick Booye

 The theological novel, The Shack, by William (Paul) Young, is still making the rounds and causing sometimes heated discussion for a simple reason—it imagines God’s personal identity in a way nobody would guess by studying the Bible.  This means that despite disclaimers, Paul Young is saying something theological to his readers.  A novel in which people talk to God, who is personified in the plot as an actual player in the story, is saying something about who God is.  That is theology and it carries an implicit claim to authority, a challenge if you will, whether the author admits it or not.  In other words, it’s not just a story.

 In The Shack, Young essentially “incarnates” the Father and the Spirit, not to mention the mysterious “Sophia” figure (all as women as it turns out) as they interact with a grieving man (Mack).  The God/gender thing bothers people.  It is true that God has no gender in the human sense of that term.  In order to have gender one must have a human body, whereas God is pure spirit.  So both feminine and masculine traits are present in God.  He created male and female both in His image and together they represent his life.  On the other hand, we need to be careful to represent him in the way he represents himself in Scripture or we run the risk of violating something very important—the second commandment—which forbids us to create anything physical to visually represent him.  In Scripture the Lord uses masculine imagery and pronouns to describe himself and we should, too.  But he specifically tells us not to imagine or make any image of him.  The reason is that God was intending to become human in one man—Christ—who would be the one and only “image” of God that we should focus on (John 1:1-18; 14:6-11; Heb.1:1-3).  So, when we “imagine” God, we should do so by thinking of Jesus Christ.  By portraying the Father (‘Papa’ he/she is called in The Shack) as a great, jolly black Mom and the Holy Spirit as a diminutive Asian woman, Young deliberately tweaks the biblical revelation of who God is.  The “tweaking” is not simply about gender, however.  It is about the “incarnational” issue. 

 The problem is not that we should not imagine God as a woman; it is that we should not imagine him as a human.  In our efforts to think of the Lord in “more” personal terms we need to stop “re-imagining” God the Father and the Holy Spirit as humans.  The same problem presents when Morgan Freeman appears as God in the movie Bruce Almighty, (Universal Pictures, 2003) or George Burns portrays the cigar smoking deity in Oh God! (Warner Brothers Pictures 1977).  Even Michelangelo’s imagery on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel makes God look like an old man (albeit a pretty buff old man). Yes, these stories and images try to get us to relate to God personally, but they are completely wrongheaded (not least because many of them have nothing to do with the gospel or Christ).  God is a Person with a Name and has become a human in Christ.  These fictional portrayals of God imply that people can relate to him without Christ, which is the opposite of the gospel. (None of the “God” movies include Jesus as the incarnation of God, the only way to relate to God on a personal level; and even in The Shack Mack meets Christ after he meets “Papa.”) 

 Something else that bothers me about The Shack is the fact that the gospel is not highlighted (it is sort of footnoted) and Jesus isn’t the main figure, the cosmic, sacrificial, world-changing hero, as the New Testament presents him.  In the Bible the gospel is the astounding good news that God became human in Jesus Christ, who is the real star of the show.  He is the divine/human Lord of the universe, the one and only material image of God, who died and rose and will return, and who right now rules the entire cosmos, offering in His name the forgiveness of sins and membership in His Kingdom.  He is also the coming Judge of humanity who will renovate the universe and rule it personally and graciously forever (a theme conspicuous by its absence in The Shack, but very obvious in the New Testament). In the gospel the Lord Jesus introduces us to God the Father, not the other way around.  In The Shack these things are blurry and seem almost inverted, which means that the gospel in The Shack is at best obscure, and at worst absent.  After reading The Shack, a person might have a warm feeling about God in general and even a sense of the “three-ness” of God, but one would not exclaim with Thomas, about Jesus,  “My Lord and My God.” (John 20:27-29).  One would not be awestruck with who Christ is, what He did to bring us into his eternal love, and how we didn’t deserve it.  In fact, one might not want to become “a Christian” at all according to Jesus himself in the story (speaking of hypocritical Christianity I guess, but that is not evident in the dialogue).  Many people who like this book treat it as a form of good news (gospel) about God, yet the gospel itself (the one presented in four long documents and many smaller letters in the New Testament) is only faintly present.

 On a positive note, though, one of the main aspects of the gospel of Christ is highlighted in The Shack. This is the story’s strongest point.  It shows God personally overriding human evil and pain in this world in a very graphic way, while gently and compassionately rebuking Mack for not grasping how loving and powerful the Lord is.  I think this aspect of the book is challenging, comforting and insightful.  Among scholars this is called theodicy, defending God’s love and power in light of the agonizing sorrow in this age, explaining how evil can temporarily exist in his world and how the Lord can and will turn it around for eternal good.  The Shack is a theodicy of sorts.  Young dramatizes how God could use even terribly violent and sorrowful things to bring long-term blessing to his people (which is precisely what the Bible says he does through the gospel, the cross/resurrection itself being the main paradigm).  Along the way, Young emphasizes the love, joy, wisdom, compassion, personality, and active involvement that God offers to us.  This is good, too.  Folks who find comfort in The Shack usually find it here, and I do not intend to deny that comfort for a minute.  Young is right to remind us poignantly how sovereign, providential, good and loving the Lord is in spite of how evil our age is.

 Remember, The Shack is “theological fiction,” a genre that, when you think about it, seems odd in itself.  So, eat the meat and spit out the bones.  For a more serious look at how God reveals himself to broken humanity read the four gospels starting with John.

Love and Reality

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Love: A Meditation on Reality

By Rick Booye

The greatest commandment in the Law is to love God with all you’ve got, and love the people around you the same way you love yourself.  Everything else in the Law hangs on these two ideas.

–Jesus  

I am giving you a new command.  You absolutely must love each other.  I want you to do this in the same way I have loved you.  This is how people will know that you belong to me and are my apprentices, part of my kingdom, my family.  They will know because you love each other.

  –Jesus

If I speak in tongues so impressively that angels listen in on my prayer time, but do not have love—I am nothing but a noise-maker.  If I have all the Holy Spirit gifts and power you can imagine, speaking God’s direct Word, comprehending all mysterious spiritual Truth, possessing so much faith that I can literally move mountains by speaking to them, but do not have love—I am nothing.  If I am the most selfless, giving, sacrificial person you have ever heard of, giving away all my substance to the poor and throwing myself on a grenade for my friends, but do not have love—I gain nothing.

–Saint Paul, apprentice and servant of Jesus

People who claim to know God, yet hate other people, simply don’t get God at all.  God actually is Love in Person.

–Saint John, apprentice and servant of Jesus

If you really get what the Royal Command is, you will love the people around you like you love yourself.

–Saint James, apprentice and servant of Jesus

Since you have cleaned your souls completely by grasping and living in the Ultimate Truth, deciding in that realization to love each other, keep loving each other from your deepest inner being.

–Saint Peter, apprentice and servant of Jesus

 Love is a way of knowing and living that is eternal and foundational to the universe.  To not understand it is to be ignorant of something that is essential, like addition and subtraction or language.  In fact, Paul says that if one does not love, one’s “knowledge” (if you can call it that) is empty, meaningless and useless (1 Cor. 13:1-7).  In philosophical terms, love is its own existential epistemology (sorry for the big words).  That means when we experience love in a relationship, it changes our knowing somehow.  When we love (existential) it adds to or clarifies or in some way alters what and how we know (epistemology).  This is true despite the fact that many people do not grasp it.  When you love someone the love you feel alters how you perceive everything they say and do, which in turn changes your own knowledge structure in various ways.  This then alters your internal life, and you can feel it if you know how.  Have you ever thought a person completely wrong until you got to know them?  Once you came to appreciate them as a person, loving them to some extent, you began to understand what they were saying in a new way, and perhaps you began to change your mind about their point of view and yours.  Or, have you ever been certain that a particular idea or concept was stupid or mistaken, then discovered that someone you love and respect (these go together) believed it?  Didn’t it make you take a second look at the idea? 

It doesn’t always feel this way of course.  We can love a person deeply and disagree with them, even believe they are flat wrong about something.  In fact this is a necessary virtue in our fallen world, the ability to love somebody while disagreeing with them.  But it is not fun or pleasurable to do this.  And in order to make it work we must admit, assume, or pretend (three distinct and different mental processes) that the thing we disagree on is not as important as the love we have for each other—or we must make a huge personal sacrifice to express love to them.  If the thing we disagree on is to us an ultimate thing, more important than our love, the relationship to that extent suffers, sometimes beyond repair (I know of Christian brothers and sisters who loved each other deeply until they discovered that they voted for different presidential candidates, at which time the “Christian love” dissipated completely).  We humans would much rather agree on what is good and right, experiencing love in that context, the context of unity (Eph. 4:1-6).  This is because to be complete love must entail unity at a very deep, truthful, spiritual level, where the foundational convictions of life form the mental and emotional structure of our character.  When this love/unity matrix permeates one’s life and relationships, there is a deep joy, a profound peace.  This is the way God is, and the way we will be someday because of what he has done at the cross. 

All of this is part of the gospel.  It is why, in order for us to love and be loved truly by the Lord, in order for us to know him and be known by him at that deep level, the evil in our nature and actions must be dealt with.  In order for that to happen he had to love us more than we loved him, and die to remove the enmity caused by our sin.  He had to make the supreme sacrifice to heal our broken relationship (2 Cor. 5:21).  It is also why Jesus, the Master of Life, insists that we find our highest value, our supreme Reality, in him and his kingdom (Matt. 6:33) rather than in anything, any relationship, any priority that finds its rootage only in this age.  The priorities of this age cannot unify us and provide the ground of our eternal love for each other.  We will fight over money, prestige, personal fulfillment, politics, sex, ambition and any number of related issues when they become more important to us than the Lord and living his kingdom reality (see Jas.3:13-18).

Love is intuitive, but not less factual for that.  Love in fact, is a fact.  John Frame has written that there comes a point in all knowledge where mystery reveals its presence in our thinking and must be accepted as mystery rather than justified or explained.  At that point, when asked why we “know” something, we must respond simply with the intuition—I just do.[1]  The chain of justification cannot go on infinitely.  When we ask why we know something, we may offer some evidence or some authority, who in turn offers some evidence.  But ultimately we simply know and trust at a deep intuitive level.  When God in Christ is in us at that deep level his love permeates us.  This is the main thesis of St. John’s first letter.

Love is part of the actual structure of the universe, the “is-ness” of Reality, the ontology of the cosmos (the “being-ness” of all that is).  It is deeper in the universe than physics because it existed in the Trinity in eternity past, before there was what we call matter, space or time.  The reasoning that leads us here is theological rather than philosophical or “scientific.”  God is the Creator and sustainer of the universe (Gen.1:1; Heb. 1:1-3), and he is love (1 John 4:7-8).  As the Three in One, he has always loved in unity and perfection.  Augustine pointed out that even if we knew nothing of the Trinity (the tri-personality of God) we would need to postulate some sort of multi-personality in him based on John’s statement that God is Love.  For love to exist at all there must be more than one person.  This being the case, we should  understand the cosmos as a relational matrix before we consider it as a material reality, which is why love and loyalty are intuitively more important to us than quantum physics and general relativity.  On your death bed you will not regret failing to plumb the depths of superstring theory (a current idea in physics about how the universe works).  But you may regret not spending time with your family.  Why?  Because in some way we cannot measure the universe runs on love and loyalty, not just molecules and motion.  And that love and loyalty begins with a reconciled relationship with the One from whose Mind the entire universe came and who sustains it all at all times.

The gospel is the news that the ultimate relationship we need with the Author of all Reality has been healed by God himself in Christ, the king of loving Reality (2 Cor. 5:16-21).  The love he has for us (even while we were enemies) is the standard power and the very life force of our never-ending experience with him and each other.  This is why in this age loving is a command (John 13:34), forgiveness is not an option (Matt. 6:14-15; 18:35), God’s deep eternal affection for us flows in and through Christ (Rom. 8:38), and the greatest of all eternal, cosmic, mysterious forces is … Love (1 Cor. 13:8-13).

All of this sounds a bit odd to our ears, doesn’t it?  Perhaps this is because we don’t think of love as a hard science, a serious discipline like say, microbiology or astrophysics, or plumbing.  Neither do we consider it an acquired skill worth the effort to learn, like sewing, art, accounting, counseling, first aid, firefighting, or cooking.  Our culture does not consider love a crucial, serious, factual, practical peace of knowledge about reality.  To us it is a fleeting feeling, something we fall into (and out of), a gentle, desirable, uncontrollable sentiment rather than a firm fact of practical life.  When our kids ask about how the world works, we do not think of sitting them down for a sobering chat about the Facts of Love.  There are no college courses devoted solely to it, even in Christian institutions.  In our culture it is a value rather than a fact, which is to say it is good in a way, but not necessary to progress, wisdom, knowledge, culture, art, or success in life.  If it were, there would be courses, seminars, whole departments devoted to its development.  You could get a Master’s degree in it, or a Ph.D.  It would have cash value. 

This is not to say that we ignore love.  Far from it.  We write songs about it, which are mostly sentimental (not to say sappy), and put it into most movies, where it usually takes the shape of romance.  And (oddly) we honor the willingness to kill and/or die for it at times.  These intuitions we all seem to share about the importance of love force their way to the surface in our prayers, tears, anger, struggles, and relational traumas.   We sense how crucial love is to life at one level.  But when we need to discuss facts, figures, or the elements of “hard reality,” which become practical wisdom, how to get ahead, make a living, deal with the world, we send love into the other room while the grownups talk, right? 

This is especially the case among men, who can appreciate love, especially when it is coming their way in the form of romance or home life, but who would not usually put love at the top of their list of manly traits, things they work hard at and sacrifice for, like muscle, power, intellect, or wealth.  There are no cable shows on how men love, like there are for instance on how they fight.  FX doesn’t have any movies that make men want to become more sacrificial, team up to exercise selflessness under stress, or win great spirit victories by letting themselves be victimized for others (a very Jesus idea).  For many men love is something valuable to protect, by violence if necessary (?).  But unless it is defined as sexual prowess (the opposite of real love), it is not something they long to be really good at.

But this is not how Jesus sees things.  Which means it is not how God sees things.  Which means it is not how things really are.  Which means our view is out of phase with the ultimate power in the universe.  No wonder life flounders in our world.  Most of us are pitiably, disastrously wrong in our notions about love.  The same is true, by the way, about faith and hope, the other two divine realities that Paul says are eternal and foundational to understanding life (1 Cor. 13:13).  Faith in our world usually means the absence of and/or rejection of knowledge, understanding, expertise (precisely the opposite of what the Bible means by it).  Hope usually means wishful thinking (again, the opposite of what God means by it).  And Love usually means sensuality, sexuality, or sentimentality (so far out on the fringes of the biblical meaning that it renders the word useless).

So, what is God doing in this age, in his kingdom purpose, in the personal attention he gives to our lives and character as Christians?  He is teaching us to love, truthfully, sacrificially, against the odds, in all our relationships beginning with the most intimate, by using forgiveness as power, patience as skill, and prayer as an antidote for the hate fantasies that dominate our angry minds at times (1 Tim.1:5).  Spiritual warfare focuses on stopping us from loving each other and those around us and thus taking our thoughts captive, away from Jesus, his kingdom, his rightness.  We must grasp ever more tightly the reality of Christ’s lordship in the here and how and dare to live out his primary command (John 13:34) even when it seems dark all around and everything in our minds demands we lash out (Ps.37:8).  The deepest reality in the universe is God himself, in Christ.  And the essence of his person is love.  His love is eternal, alive, and will win the day.  We have much to learn.  John 3:16.

 

[1] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (New Jersey: P&R Publishing) 346.

Good News: Christ Died Our Death

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By Rick Booye

 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

2 Corinthians 5:21

 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us …

Galatians 3:13

 When we read the Bible correctly we discover that it doesn’t just contain the gospel, it is the gospel—the Good News that God is personally and single-handedly redeeming His fallen creation.  Jesus showed this to His friends on the road to Emmaus the day he came back from the dead (Luke 24:25-27).  The Bible all about the Cross. God Himself has permanently entered His fallen and dying material creation for the purpose of redeeming it from its terminal evil and the judgment to come (Jn.3:16; Col 1:14).  He has started by redeeming the first part to fall—the human soul.

According to Webster’s Dictionary the word ‘redeem’ means “to buy something back; to free from what distresses or harms; to free from captivity by payment of a ransom.”  It is the picture of a person paying a price to purchase something (or someone) that previously belonged to him or her, but has fallen into evil hands.

But what is the nature of this redemption?  What sort of payment does justice require to purchase the cosmos back from its bondage to death?  The Bible tells us that since we owe our life to God who created us in goodness, when we turn from Him we become essentially evil and forfeit the right to life.  That’s why all the people who walk with God in the Old Testament make sacrifices.  God told them to take a living animal and make it give up its life on their behalf so that they may enter His presence.  Leviticus 17:11 explains this: “For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.”  Atonement refers to absorbing the punishment for the crime.  The New Testament word for this is “propitiation.”  It means to absorb (propitiate) God’s wrath by offering a sacrifice.  The sacrificial system in the Old Testament is an elaborate clue to this spiritual reality: when a morally responsible creature does evil, that creature forfeits the right to life.  The soul that sins shall die (Ez.18:4).

The problem with the Old Testament sacrifices was that they were only temporary and provisional.  They were repeated indefinitely because they never really “worked” in the ultimate sense.  The animals that died did not themselves have the sort of perfect human life that we lost when we sinned.  So, they could not permanently remove the guilt or punishment (Heb 10:1-4).  Nor could they bestow new life to replace the old.  In fact, these Old Covenant sacrifices were pointers to a greater reality yet to come.

Back to Resurrection Day.  Jesus chats with His friends on the road, holding back his identity until they begin to connect the dots.  At the right moment he opens the scriptures and explains that the cross is the fulfillment of all the Old Covenant pictures.  Jesus Christ Himself is the greater Sacrifice, the perfect human “lamb” who took the blame and the punishment for the sins and evil of the world.  Suddenly Passover, the priesthood, the sacrificial system and the fulfillment of the Old Covenant come into perspective—the perspective of the Cross.  God has planned this all along!

Consider what this means for us.  First, it clearly shows that apart from His grace we are more evil than we ever thought.  If we could achieve real goodness by acting spiritual, obeying a few more rules, or improving our morals this terrible sacrifice would not have been necessary.  God could simply have advised us rather than diving in and rescuing us.  The grim reality is that evil is so pervasive in our natural character that we are helpless to even consistently desire to stop it.  And it has metastasized to virtually every dimension of our lives.  It has ruined our wills, desires, souls, relationships and bodies.

Secondly, (and stunningly) it means that in spite of our personal and corporate evil, there is hope, because God loves us.  He loves us so much, even in our sinning state, that He initiated the self-sacrifice that would secure our redemption.  If a woman throws herself in front of a moving truck to save her child, what does that show about her love?  What is her child worth to her?  Everything.  To know how bad we are, and yet how much the Lord of the universe loves us, brings an amazing combination of humility and courage into our lives.

And finally, we are supremely confident of our rescue because it does not rest on our efforts, but on his. His death in our place has finished our salvation, securing our eternal life now and into eternity.  The great difference between the gospel and human religion is that in religion our work is what brings security; in the gospel his work does it.  Our obedience flows from gratitude, not from fear, the haunting suspicion that we might not be good enough.

 

Buddhism is one of the most influential human spiritualities in our world.  There is much in it that a Christian might agree with regarding the nature of life (such as the fact that it is hard) and the need to discipline ourselves.  But there is no real salvation in any human system.  Buddha’s last words were, “Behold, O monks, this is my last advice to you.  All component things in the world are changeable.  They are not lasting.  Work hard to gain your own salvation.  Do your best.”

 

Compare that with Jesus’ last words – “It Is Finished!”

 

The gospel of Christ, what Paul calls simply “the message of the cross,” is outstandingly good news for us because it means we are free, forgiven, declared good in God’s eyes, and joined to his eternal destiny all by what he did at the cross and in the resurrection of Christ.

 

 

 

 

 

Good News: Jesus Christ Lives a Real Human Life

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By Rick Booye

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,  and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14

 The gospel is astounding.  The God of the universe has become and remains human.  The incarnation is the most earth-shaking event ever to rock our world.  And it is news rather than simply spiritual advice.  It is news of something that God has done in time and space with infinitely far-reaching consequences.  It is not a sentimental myth to help us deal with the harshness of a life we don’t understand.  It really happened.  God has become one of us, entered his own creation and redeemed it.

 Can this be, though?  I mean, really.  Life on earth is so, well, earthy.  It’s one thing to think of God acting human for a while on a Sunday morning when everybody in church has showered and clothed themselves and is presentable for an hour or so.  It is quite another to know that his teenage mother changed his diapers and nursed and bathed him and had him circumcised.  We can well imagine him talking, even as a kid, with the priests in the temple.  But how about needing a rest stop on the long trail to Samaria?  Frankly, we just don’t connect with his total humanity.  Yet it was precisely this that the apostles insisted on.  For instance, in 2 John verse 7 the apostle says, “Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not believe that Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is a deceiver and the antichrist!”  Evidently there were “spiritual teachers” in the first generation of Christians who were already denying Christ’s real humanity.  John would have none of it.  He knew that the Lord’s humanity enables our life today, right now, to be totally spiritual and totally material at the same time, just like His.

Note for instance that being an embodied soul, a material human, is not in itself sinful.  In our unredeemed state all of us except Christ do have sin.  Don’t miss this.  But sin is not innate to humanity’s creation as humanity.  Sin is a disease of the will found in our minds, hearts, souls and bodies, a condition we have inherited and freely chosen.  It is killing us and we are helpless (apart from God’s grace in Christ) to stop it.  But it is not part of the original creation.  We brought it on ourselves.  This means that if a person were to somehow escape the dominion of sin, they could theoretically completely please God and walk with him, in one of these bodies, here and now.  This is exactly what Jesus did.  And He did it for us.

Remember too that materiality is not itself evil as the Greeks believed.  Enjoying physical life is a virtue.  Jesus was not a monk.  In his first miracle he made wine for a hapless groom who hadn’t planned enough refreshments for his guests.  And the Lord made really good wine according to the reception coordinator.  What’s that about?  Hasn’t God got better things to do than bail out a poorly planned party?  One would think so,  if we discount the material world.  But he doesn’t discount the world—he redeems it.  This miracle is about God entering into a feast of physical joy, promising that some day there would be a bigger and better feast in his kingdom, a feast where he will be the groom and we will all share his wine. It is good to be a human in the New Covenant.  The Lord has redeemed all the stress, mess, pain, joy and experience of life on earth.  If God is not embarrassed to be a human, why should we be?

But what about our sin?  We know how graphic our personal evil is.  Again, the Lord’s earthly life is the answer.  His human life and death, lived in complete purity and obedience in this physical world, was credited to our life-account when we trusted Him.  When you became a Christian, the Holy Spirit entered your soul and joined you with God metaphysically.  This real unity with Christ means that all his experiences are now yours and yours are now his.  In him you died on the cross and came back to life. And his tangible human goodness is now yours, too.  The perfect life he lived is your perfect life before God.  That in turn means that in Christ you are secure, loved, justified and destined to share his glory into eternity.

So we should meditate long on the good news of the Lord’s authentic human life.  It will keep us from the muddy mysticism that rejects the creation, the religious austerity that denies physical enjoyment, and the Pharisaic guilt that relies on our own works to secure our relationship with God.  What a free and good life we can now live!

Good News: God is One of Us

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By Rick Booye

 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

1 Corinthians 1:18

 When Paul says “The Message of the Cross” he is using a shorthand phrase referring to the body of knowledge of reality that starts with understanding just who Jesus Christ is and what He really did.  It is the Gospel.

“Gospel” means “good news.”  It is the news of something that has happened; something that God has done in time and space, in history and geography.  You and I did not do it.  God did.  Single-handedly.  Christ’s entire earthly life and ministry (often referred to simply as “The Cross”) is an objective historical fact that has changed the metaphysical structure and destiny of the universe and everything and everyone in it.  Jesus Christ is now Lord of creation and has changed reality in both the spiritual and material dimensions.  This is a fact whether people understand it or not.  Announcing this news is preaching the gospel.  It is not as simple as it sometimes sounds.  There are five stunning facts that we affirm when we tell people about the gospel.  Time and space here allow us to meditate on only the first if these five. It all starts with the incarnation.

God has become, and remains to this day and forever, a human being.  This is tangible, material incarnation (John 1:1-5, 14; Col 2:8-9; Phil 2:5-11; Heb 1:1-3).  The more we think about this the more astounding it becomes. It is literally stunning—the Creator God entering his own creation, becoming a permanent resident in the material realm!  And Jesus of Nazareth was not just acting or appearing human as the Gnostics believed.  He was real flesh and blood, with a true human soul/ spirit, including all the limitations and weaknesses that are part of life in this age.  After his death and resurrection he retained risen, spiritual/ material human form.  It boggles the mind.  No wonder the church took five hundred years to even describe (They never actually explained it.) what they understood by the dual nature of Christ.  We still wrestle with this mystery.  There is no other message in history that even comes close to this.

The incarnation tells us at least two things:  First, Reality is about God before it is about us.  Which means that materialism (the notion that physical matter is all that really exists) is not true.  Yes, Jesus was born in the natural way, but he was not conceived in the natural way.  It is clear that he pre-existed.  God precedes the material world.  Matter is here because it came from His Mind.  The material universe is the product of the invisible, spirit realm.  This is an arresting assertion in our era.  Society simply does not see it this way.  Most people assume that God is a concept that was born in the mind of humanity.  We inherited this idea from two 19th century thinkers, Ludwig Feuerbach (early 19th century) and Sigmund Freud (late 19th century), both of whom were basically materialists.  Their philosophy is the foundation for almost all of what we learn in public school about origins, religion and ultimate reality.  But Feuerbach and Freud were simply wrong.  They were the products of their age, the modern enlightenment “Age of Reason,” which rejected the non-physical realm entirely.  The truth is that Reality starts with God—not with us.

Second, the incarnation tells us that Redemption has an anchor in time and space. This means that all the neo-spiritualities are mistaken.  Many people in our world consider themselves “spiritual” but adamantly reject any “doctrine” or “organized religion.” They opt instead for one of the many off-brand, homegrown, disorganized paths to enlightenment that present themselves to our world.   Central to the doctrines (for they certainly are doctrines and dogmas) of these groups is that historical data is not important.  What is important is personal, mystical, transcendental enlightenment.  Ancient Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism taught this.  What mattered was “the teaching” or “the mystical apprehension.” Whether anything happened in the material world was, well … immaterial.  One reaches enlightenment by direct contact of some sort, not connected to any historical or geographical reality in the material realm.  These spiritualities essentially deny the physical.

The gospel makes more sense than this.  It interfaces deeply with the material creation, human history and reality as we currently experience it.  God has intervened and is currently at large in our world.  Furthermore, He is renovating the entire material and spiritual universe in Christ.  This gives meaning to all of life, including its joys and griefs.  People who grasp the wisdom of the incarnation will live lives that are so heavenly minded they will be of tremendous earthly good.

Take the time to meditate on the incarnation.  Christians these days tend to emphasize the things they should do rather than what God has done.  But too much emphasis on us – our activity, effectiveness, busyness and productivity – produces Pharisaism.  The church is full of people who sign off on the incarnation, but who believe that physical life is useless and meaningless.  They waste some of their best days in guilt for not being more “spiritual.”  The incarnation anchors God’s grace in our material world in a way that sets us free to live fully in this age while profoundly looking forward to the next.

Speaking of God …

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By Rick Booye

This is eternal life, that they may know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. John 17:3.

Who is God?  In our day, even asking the question sounds a bit strange to people on the street.  We in the West live in a culture that considers it impolite (politically incorrect) to discuss God as a fact in the public square.  Though, truth be told, almost everybody thinks about God a lot more than they let on.  On the other hand, there seems to be little hesitancy to ridicule the idea of God in public.  A bus in London recently advertized in bold print “THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Note in passing at least three ideas here:

  • First, the word probably.  This is simply a bald assertion, a dogmatic statement of doubt (?).
  • Second, the assumption that pretending there is no God should make us “stop worrying.”  The opposite is true.  If there is no God, life is absurd and cruel.  That should worry us a lot.
  • Third, the assumption that we can enjoy life if we pretend that God does not exist.  What utter foolishness.  That is only true if we plan on “enjoying” things we already know are evil.  Are we admitting our evil on the side panel of a London bus?

The Bible states that the awe of the Lord (the Old Testament phrase for knowing him) is the beginning of knowledge (Pr.1:7).  That means that a person has not even begun to think meaningfully until they have come to know God experientially, personally.  What a stunning thought to the modern mind!  If it is true (and it is) then there are a great many people who are familiar with the world, but have not begun to move into real knowledge, knowledge of ultimate reality.  True thinking begins with God’s thoughts, not ours. In the 17th century, Rene Descartes coined the Latin phrase cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am.  But he was mistaken to begin with our thinking.  He should have said, “God thinks, therefore we are.”

Just stating this in such stark terms shocks us.  That is probably because ever since Descartes humanity has sought to understand itself by thinking about itself.  Long before Descartes, Martin Luther identified humanity as “curved in on itself.”  The result is vast ignorance and moral disorientation.  Real knowledge begins with God, his thoughts, his mind, his will, his perspective.  Moreover, all of God’s thoughts toward us and our wrecked world focus on Jesus Christ (Heb.1:1-3).  We cannot begin to think rightly about ourselves or our world until we let God’s Word, the expression of his mind, open us to true knowledge—knowledge of him and his Son Jesus Christ.  We need the Word made flesh (Christ) to open the Word made text (Scripture) (see Luke 24:26-27, 32, 44-47).

The Importance of the Invisible

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The Importance of the Invisible

Rick Booye

God always deals with the invisible issues before he deals with the visible ones.  The apostle Paul took it for granted that Christians would grasp this.  In 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 Paul specifically directs our attention to “the things which are not seen.”

Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day.  For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.  (NASB)

Paul explains here that while experiencing the fallenness of this age (the outer man wasting away) he is “focusing” on something that obviously transcends our “this age” perceptions.  He says that it is unavailable to our five senses (unseen), but not less real for that.  In fact it is “more real” if for no other reason than because it is not transient, but permanent.  He is plainly and unapologetically talking about invisible reality in a matter-of-fact way, as though we should all “see” and be able to talk clearly about the same things he “saw.”

Furthermore, he speaks of this invisible reality as happening now, not just in the future, though it obviously finds ultimate completion in the future.  Later in this same section (2 Cor. 5:7), Paul pointedly states that we navigate our present material life not only (or even primarily) by what we see physically, but by what we know (see, hear) in virtue of our confidence in what God has revealed in Christ.  This is what he means by “we walk by faith, not by sight.”  It is a new way of perceiving reality.  Seeing the invisible is not only possible, it is crucial.

Believing is Seeing

What does Paul mean when he tells us with a straight face to look at the invisible?  He learned this from Jesus.  As with so much of the Lord’s instruction, this seems at first blush to be at least confusing, at worst nonsense.  In fact that is precisely how many in our era (even some churchgoing people) take such biblical language.  But the apostle Paul was not crazy and he was not misunderstanding Christ.  When Jesus told the theologian Nicodemus that he needed to have “the additional birth” [1] to see the kingdom of God, Nicodemus was incredulous.  What in the world was Jesus talking about?  Well, that is the problem, isn’t it?  What Jesus was talking about was not in fact limited to the world—that is to matter, molecules, motion, and the perceptions that our five senses and our experiences in this age are able to provide.  He was talking about something this world cannot understand or discover on its own.  He was talking about a “sixth sense” so to speak, a fresh, new sort of existential and relational knowledge that cannot be generated or discovered from within ourselves or our material realm.  This new ability to perceive God’s kingdom is so radical and life-changing that Jesus refers to it stunningly as being a new kind of birth, the beginning of an entirely new sort of life within existing human life and stretching infinitely into the tangible future.  As it turns out, this is his own life given to us, his Spirit enlivening and enabling us to perceive his reality.  It is a joining of his mind with ours, with the result that his sort of life is birthed within us and begins to grow.  Yet, this new life, with its accompanying ability to perceive invisible reality, is incomprehensible to those who have not received it by personally trusting Jesus as the Christ.  Jesus implies as much to Nicodemus and Paul spells it out unmistakably in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16.

The writer to the Hebrews refers to an aspect of this extra sense when he says, “By faith he [Moses] left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible (emphasis mine).[2]  The word rendered “endured” means to persevere, to press forward against the odds.  The word for “seeing” means to pay attention, to perceive.  How did Moses press forward against the odds, with Pharaoh’s army on his heels and a million or so frightened people around him?  By faith, says the author of Hebrews.  In this context faith means tangible confidence in God and his word, in contrast to bare, material knowledge acquired via skepticism, based solely on the five empirical senses.  God’s word is the expression of his mind, his view of reality, conveyed verbally as what can and will take place in time and space.  Faith is a way of knowing, of perceiving the reality of God and the otherwise invisible realm.  For this reason it invariably leads to action of some sort.[3]  It is therefore a sort of “sight,” though not of the material kind.  This is why Paul insists that we live our lives in Christ not based primarily on the material sight that comes with being human, but on the new ability to evaluate reality from the perspective of the kingdom of God—that is, by faith.

Faith, contrary to almost universal usage, is not the absence of thought or factuality or knowledge, some sort of blind leap into irrationality. Nor is it the presence of a comforting fantasy, conjured by a frightened human mind.  It is a specific sort of perception, a way of knowing and thinking that begins with God and transcends materiality, but also includes and embraces the material.  It is the ability to discern certain facts that others do not grasp, because these facts are not immediately or primarily present to the five physical senses.  This perception puts one in touch with ultimate reality—the mind of God.[4]  So we might say that faith is viewing (seeing) Reality as God says it is, taking his word for it, and perceiving it at a level that does not rely entirely on any other sense that we naturally have.[5]  In 2 Corinthians 4:18 Paul uses the metaphor of “seeing” because he wants to get across the idea that one can perceive clearly and confidently things that God reveals in Christ and the gospel that cannot be perceived in any other way but by this God-given, internal (inner man) awareness.  He is talking about faith as a way of seeing the invisible.  It is not a crystal ball, but a worldview, a way of understanding and interpreting reality—past, present, and future.  It is also a way of living practically that relies on invisible reality, often more than on material sight, which is why Paul says we “walk by faith and not by sight.”

Does this mean that Christian faith does not find a basis in knowledge of real, historical events in which God has demonstrated his existence and his purposes for mankind?  Is it some sort of spiritual fantasy disconnected from material reality?  Not at all.  The Bible says that faith in the real God (the “living God”) is grounded in and grows out of actual historical events, beginning with creation.[6]  These would include such events as the call of Abraham, the miraculous creation and preservation of the tribes of Israel (most of the books of Genesis and Exodus), the divine Word that God sent through Moses and the prophets, and supremely of course, the Divine Word made flesh—Christ: his incarnation, lawful human life, death under the Law, resurrection, and ascension to lordship over the material and immaterial universe.  Faith perceives these occurrences in human history and understands them like a physicist perceives “space” and understands that it is not “empty,” at all, but full of all sorts of dynamics undetectable to the natural human eye.

So, we Christians are to live in a very counterintuitive way, a way shaped not only by what our eyes see, but by what our ears hear from the Lord in his Word, in the Gospel, and in His kingdom.  This will influence us to make different sorts of decisions than the culture around us makes, living with a different system of priorities, confident in a different sort of power.

[1] John 3:1-4.  The phrase “additional birth” is one that Dallas Willard uses.  I like it because it says “born again” in a new vocabulary.

[2] Hebrews 11:27.  NIV.

[3] Dallas Willard defines faith helpfully as, “… a commitment to action, often beyond our natural abilities, based upon knowledge of God and God’s ways.” (Emphasis his). Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 20.

[4] See Paul’s view of this, which he refers to as “wisdom not of this age” in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16.  See also passages like Proverbs 1:7, where we see that one has not begun to think clearly until one has the fear of the Lord.

[5] This is not to say that a faithful person always has a perfect “God’s eye view” of things.  Our perceptions, even in faith, may be far less than perfectly certain in the Cartesian sense.  Yet they may still be based on what God says about life and reality rather than solely on what humanity can perceive of it.  The lack of clarity that sometimes occurs even in faith should be attributed to our “dark glasses.”  1 Cor. 13:12.

[6] Creation itself is a major biblical theme in the definition of faith.  If one does not grasp that the immaterial God voluntarily created the material world, one cannot possibly understand the rest of what the sixth sense of faith has to offer.  This is why the creation issue is first in the Bible, and crucial to knowing God in Christ.  It is also why the sin matrix of Western idolatry rests tenaciously on the myth of evolution.  If spontaneous evolution is not true, creation must be—and that means dealing with what Francis Schaeffer called “The God Who Is There.”  See Gen. 1-3; Rom. 1:19-20; Heb 11:3; 2 Pet. 3:5.