In this series I wish to update the pagan cosmology of Aristotle
which was baptized into Christendom by Thomas Aquinas and declared orthodox by the
Roman Church. But most of us know we do
not live in a three-story universe where heaven is up and far away, hell is
down and full of flames, and earth is caught in the middle with people whose good
or bad behavior determines the destiny of their eternal souls. In this cosmology God is anthropomorphized
into an old man reclining on clouds, powerful, scowling, and reaching out a human-looking
finger to Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Medieval art had no difficulty picturing the
Father and the Son but the Spirit got somewhat short shrift in traditional cosmology.
After all, how do you draw something you can’t see? So, relying on the symbolism of the New Testament,
the Holy Spirit was usually pictured as a dove (John 1:32) or maybe as a bit of
flame resting on the heads of Apostles at Pentecost (Acts 2). In that part of
the Apostle’s Creed dealing with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit is responsible for
the presence of the universal (catholic) Church, the forgiveness of sins, body resurrection,
and the life of the world to come.
The Old Testament word for spirit (ruach) has the same etymology as the New Testament word (pneuma); both originally came from roots
meaning wind. The first mention of spirit in the Scriptures is that the wind of
God hovers over the swirling chaos (waters) of creation (Genesis 1:2). Among
ancient people, the wind was conceived of as an invisible energy. Jesus even
described the Spirit as like the wind in his conversation with Nicodemus
(John 3). The Bible’s teaching on spirit is progressive; that is, it develops
over time. Ephesians 3:5 says that the Apostles were given updated information
by the Holy Spirit that was not previously revealed in the Old Testament. Let’s trace that development. In the first five books of the Bible (Torah),
Spirit is a special gift given to Moses and a few others to speak God’s Word to
Israel. This is the meaning of prophesy (see Numbers 11:25). God puts his Spirit upon or within the human
for a special revelatory work and then the Spirit is withdrawn. David prays that God would renew a right
spirit within him and not take away the Holy Spirit (Psalm 52:10-11). This
idea of the interaction of God’s spirit and the human spirit develops
throughout the Old Testament, inspiring the Prophets to speak and to act out
the Word of God. Ezekiel (11:19) and Joel
(2:11) foretell a time when the Spirit will be out-poured on everyone in the
Covenant family, not just upon a king, a judge, or a solitary holy man. The
Prophets prepare God’s people for the Spirit ministry of their Messiah (Isaiah
42).
Jesus changes everything about what the Jews thought they
knew about the Holy Spirit. The Spirit propels Jesus throughout his ministry
from beginning to end (Matthew 4:1, Luke 4:14, John 14-16). He tells his followers that not only will the
Spirit work in the Old Testament way of providing the persecuted disciples with
words to say in their hour of trial (Mt. 10:17-20), but after the Son returns
to the Father, Jesus will send the Paraclete, literally the "one called
alongside," our spirit defense attorney, the
Holy Spirit, to indwell his people forever (John 14:17). Jesus explains the mystery of Spirit.
The first and I think
the most important thing Jesus does to set right our thinking about Spirit is
encapsulated in what he says to the Samaritan woman in John 4.
"Believe me, dear woman, the time is coming when it will no
longer matter whether you worship the Father on this mountain or in Jerusalem. 22You Samaritans know very little about the one you worship,
while we Jews know all about him, for salvation comes through the Jews. 23But the time is coming—indeed it’s here now—when true
worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is
looking for those who will worship him that way. 24For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in
spirit and in truth.”
Jesus tells us God is
nothing like us. God is not a man (Num. 23:19), but spirit. People may anthropomorphize the Father with
all kinds of human-like features, and the Scriptures are full of this poetry,
but God is not human. God doesn't look
like us. God doesn't have hands any more than He has feathers (Psalm 91:4). Now
some justify such humanizing of God by affirming that humans are created in God’s
image. What we are told in Genesis is
that Adam and Eve were created in God’s
image. There’s a lot more to be said about that in a later lesson. Whatever
that image was, it has been lost in us and recovered in Christ (Col. 1:15,
3:10). God gave the commandment
prohibiting graven images (Exodus 20:4) not because such idols upset God, but
because God simply could not be pictured. The Father is invisible to us, not
because God is less real, but because God is like nothing else we have ever experienced.
A baby is born with only one organ
that is adult-sized: its eyes. That’s
why the head is so large. At birth, a baby’s eyes work perfectly well, but it doesn't “see” anything – only shapes and blurs. That’s because we see with
the brain, not the eye. The brain requires a frame of reference. It has to
have a pattern against which to compare what the eyes perceive. The first thing
a baby learns to see is its mother’s face, usually at about 2-3 weeks old. Jesus
said God the Father has never been “seen” (John 1:18). What is normally
described as a vision of God is that of a bright light, or what the ancient
Jews called the shekinah, usually translated cloud of glory (Exodus 16:10,
40:35). The presence of Yahweh (probably
the third person of Trinity) appears to people as an amorphous cloud of blazing
light because the brains and language of ancient people simply could not
accommodate such a singularity.
Jesus tells the Samaritan woman
that the Father is looking for those who will worship God “in spirit and in truth.” How does a human being worship in spirit? Does that mean letting go of your inhibitions
in worship? Is it the experience of a warm fuzzy feeling? I don't think so, because such ideas are all purely subjective. What's true for you may be different for me. Jesus says God is looking for the opposite of this kind of human-centered subjective
worship. When Jesus dismisses the traditions that said one must worship on this mountain or
according to that ritual, he is telling us spiritual worship is the opposite of
religious practice. Religion is the human approximation of truth that becomes institutionally corrupt over time by the subjective preferences of people. When Jesus says worship God in spirit and in
truth, I think he means relating to God objectively, not subjectively; “in truth”
means “as God really is.” It’s not merely learning truths about God; it’s the
perception of a reality beyond the mere symbols and shibboleths of human religion.
Religion likes to put mysteries off limits to exploration and discussion by ordinary Bible readers. After extolling some kind of religious agnosticism (we can't know), these crackpots then define faith
as the human ability to accept the irrational without
explanation. The clerics mutter, “We can’t know what spirit is. We must take it
on faith.” They are correct insofar as the
things of God cannot be naturally discerned (1 Cor. 2:14). But the notion that
faith is irrational is dead wrong. There is no such thing as blind faith. Blind faith is superstition. New Testament faith is rooted in real historical events. When the Apostles talk about
the mysteries of God, they are explaining them, not putting them off limits to
investigation and reason. We will
address what the Scriptures mean by faith in another lesson.
Worldlings have known about
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity for over 100 years. It's more than theory now. It's the real thing. The cosmology of science
has moved far beyond that of the 12th century. It’s too bad the church has ignored it in
favor of clinging to medieval myths.
There are objective truths about the universe and how it functions that believers have been
slow to incorporate into their cosmology. Science is not the enemy of faith. Science answers the questions of what and how. Faith looks at the same phenomena and poses questions outside the realm of scientific inquiry questions of why and who. We cannot worship the Father "in
spirit and in truth" without coming to grips with quantum mechanics and the truths of subatomic physics. Our notions of matter, space, and time must be
brought up to date before we can talk about spirit in any truthful way.
We live confined to a
three-dimensional world. Reality for us has height, width, and depth. There is
a two dimensional world where there is only height and length. In 1884 Edwin Abbot wrote a curious story about living in only a two dimensional world called Flatland. Think of a race of people who had only length and height. Living as they would on a completely flat surface, they couldn't fathom the three dimensional space
we inhabit. Everything would appear to them as
lines and points. In our study group we watched a video about explaining the
dimensions. The film depicted an ant
crawling along a newspaper as a kind of representation of a two dimensional
space. It can only move in two dimensions. But if we fold the newspaper in
our 3D world so that one outside edge touches the other outside edge making a kind of cylinder, and the ant were to cross the from one side of the tube to the other, to the Flatlander the ant
would appear to disappear and then reappear someplace completely different. It’s
not unlike the Gospel narratives that tell of Jesus being suddenly appearing
out of nowhere in the upper room or vanishing from sight after breaking bread
on the road to Emmaus. I think it
entirely possible that he is moving in higher dimensions where time and alternative possibilities are more accessible. If we were able to live and move in the fourth dimension,
time, we would perceive our existence from birth to death as slices of a three
dimensional sausage into which we could drop ourselves at any point. In the
fifth and higher dimensions we could jump to many alternative futures (go from bratwurst to liverwurst) that is not only possible to accomplish in three dimensions but seems to defy what we think we already know. To the disciples Jesus “ascension” looked like he was
disappearing into the clouds (Acts 1). But I think he was actually moving further into reality, into higher dimensions of
existence their eyes saw much as did their ancestors on the Exodus as amorphous
clouds of light.
Jesus wanted his disciples to
know what he had become in his life after three dimensional death. He delighted in proving to them he wasn't a ghost. He
told Thomas to feel his wounded side. He ate fish with his disciples. Disembodied souls can’t do this. Jesus was
just as real after the resurrection as before it. In fact, he was more real. Jesus was showing his friends how we lived in higher dimensions
that are not accessible to us. Jesus wanted us to know about the resurrection
body. The Apostle Paul records how Jesus took him into the seventh dimension (what he called heaven) and explained how our future is not in a carbon and water-based body (what Paul could only conceive of as flesh), but a spirit body. H wrote in 1 Corinthians
15:44 that we die a flesh-body but are raised a spirit body. The text does not say a “spiritual body.”
That is a horrible rendering of what Paul is describing. That makes it sound like we're thoughts or emanations of some cosmic force. Nonsense. In the same way our mud-bodies were made for the three dimensional world, the resurrected body
is empowered by spirit and is able to live and move in dimensions above what we
now perceive “only in part” (1 Cor. 13:9-10).
Scientists speculate there may be as many as 10 dimensions to our reality, but in this existence we are limited to only three. The resurrection was designed primarily to vindicate Jesus
as the God’s Savior “in truth,” but there was also the purpose of revealing what the Spirit will make of people in the future. Here is what I think based on my study of Scripture. Spirit is that substance of living beings fit to live in the higher dimensions of reality.
As the second person of the Trinity, Jesus is unique in his ability to be in
but not of the three dimensional world.
(More about that in another lesson.)
People may be born with big eyes,
but God reveals that our spirit is dead (Col 2:13, Eph. 2:1). Instead of being
filled with the spirit of God, we are filled with the spirit of the world and
self (Ephesians 2:2, 1 John 4:3). I will have much more to say on this when we study the mystery of Adam. But as a result of Adam’s rebellion, we are
all infected with a death-dealing disease where spirit was meant to be. Pascal called it the God-shaped vacuum. All our lives we are in search of that with which to fill this deep-seated need. There is nothing in the human that can know anything of God’s spirit and truth although The Bible says as part of natural revelation the God shaped vacuum created an intuitive awareness that there was a
Creator and He is very powerful (Romans 1:21).
This is the origin of religion in all humans for all time until only the last couple of generations; our intuitive reaching out to
an unknown god made mostly in our own image. But the “in-truth” Spirit put on flesh in
Jesus and communicated with some about the bigger purpose of this Deity and our destiny. God has a plan in which what was lost in Adam will be
regenerated. The Spirit that hovered over creation will come upon and take
possession of individuals and later in-dwell an entire people known to God alone. These individuals through nothing of their
own choosing will receive the down-payment of their future spirit bodies while
still in lumbering mud-bodies. This gift is a substance imperceptible to the three dimensional world, but which is the connection by which
they are empowered to relate to God “in spirit and in truth.” This magnificent spirit molecule (like a
mustard seed) creates faith, the necessity for pleasing God and communing with
him. This particle of spirit substance grows
over time and exposure to God’s truth in a process the Bible calls
sanctification. It persuades us of truths and presence undetected in matter except for one event. When Jesus instituted the Eucharist, he promised to be present and to nurturing of the spirit to those who "remember me." The supper transcends time and space, reaching back almost 4000 years ago to the slave huts of Egypt, passing through the Upper Room where Jesus gathered with his Spirit-filled leaders, and pushing out to the end of time, the Messianic Banquet of the Risen Christ. this is what the word spiritual means: that we stand before something imperceptible, made real in common things, and uniting us in a communion of redeemed people and preparing us to be recreated after the judgement of death to live and move in
a world of imperceptible beauty and possibility that sits right on top of this
three dimensional time-space continuum like a palace built upon a landfill.
