A Gospel for the Rest of Us

Have you ever wondered how it makes any sense for God to require the killing of something as a pre-condition for His forgiveness?  Does the request by God of Abraham to sacrifice his son seem abusive to you? Does God sometimes seem so authoritarian that you have no room to breath? If the Apostle Paul's gospel paradigm makes no sense to you, you might enjoy reading about my journey to a new perspective.

My aunt once said to me, "Ron, you are just a city kid.  You don't think like the rest of us."

Then, as if to prove her right, my first thought was, "Thank God.  Life would be so boring."

My life journey has caused me to ask some difficult questions.  Some in my church have called me a blasphemer to my face.  Fortunately that isn't a stonable offence these days.

I have never understood the gospel.  As an abused child it always seemed like the Bible was written by abusers for abusers.  Maybe seeing the death of Christ as a sacrifice to appease an angry authority figure makes sense if you are Moses, or Paul, but it doesn't make sense if you are trying to learn assertiveness as a second language.

Recently God has given me some closure to my questions and I want to share the answers. I have had a terrible time of it though.  It seems that whenever I try to share my journey people get so upset by the questions that we never get to the answers.  So, to prove that I am not the ONLY one in the world to have these thoughts and to try to calm your fears so you can get to the end, I want to tell you up front where we are going to end.

Here is the first idea, from Devotional Retreats, Debbonnaire Kovacs pp.78,79

"God is completely sovereign.   He knew that not only could He keep evil in check, but that for those who would let Him, He could actually turn evil into a brighter good than they would have had without darkness. He also knew that after only a few thousand years he would win back all of His dominions. Then, with those of His children who now knew more about good and evil than those who had never fallen, He would form a celestial government that would never be overthrown or even threatened again. (Daniel 7:13, 14, 27)."

That is a great idea, but the second is even better.

We have a saying, that may even more succinctly paraphrases our quote.  "The end justifies the means."

Many Christians comfort themselves with the thought that what happens to them in this life is not all that important because this life isn't the end of the story.  There will be another life in which all dreams will be realized and all wrongs righted.

While the adage, "The end justifies the means."  has some truth in it, most of us cringe a little when we hear it.   We feel a little revulsion, and we feel a little rebellious. Why?  Because we realize that the saying declares only a partial truth, a half lie.  It is dismissive toward what happens in the middle, between the beginning and the end.  We all know that the "means" is important. In the middle is where we live.   What happens there is incredibly important.   What happens in the middle has value and meaning in and of itself, independent of the value of the end.  This is my true message.  That this life you are living here and now, in this sinful world has value.  It is important. It has meaning.  All of it.  Everything that happens to you. Both the good, and the bad, the joys and the tragedies.

So now that we know where we are going, let's start the journey.  I hope you enjoy it.

Trip to Puerto Rico:

I was in third grade when my father accepted a call to go as a missionary to serve as a physical therapist at Bella Vista Hospital in Mayaguez Puerto Rico.

At the airport, my grandma expressed grief about possibly not ever seeing us again, and she prayed that God would protect us on our trip.  I thought, “Wow, what is this about not seeing us again?  We must be doing something important and dangerous, but don’t worry, God will take care of us.”

Grandma must have been prescient, because sure enough we had a terrible flight.  Some times if you didn’t have your seatbelt on you would bounce way up out of your seat and there was the constant flash of lightning and big booms from the thunder.  My father said that when he was looking out the window, he saw lightening hit the wing tip of the airplane wing.  But God protected us and we arrived safely.

Trip to Mona Island:

Several months later, one of my father’s friends invited us and my best friend’s family, Dr. Habenicht to take a trip with him by sailboat to Mona Island.  It was a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico where there was an abandoned military base where we could camp on the beach for a week.  It was a short overnight trip by sailboat, and when we got on the boat in the late afternoon, the sky was sunny and pleasant.  But within a few hours a tropical storm started up and there were huge waves crashing over the bow of the boat.  

They sent me, my sisters, and my mom down into the hull of the boat.  But it was a small boat and not everyone could get into the cabin, so they tied my friend Larry and his sister to the mast to keep them from being washed overboard.  By  morning, we were horribly sick, but again God protected us and we arrived alive, with minor damage to the boat

Dr. Angel:

Then a few months later, Dr. Angel, who had a twin engine airplane, crashed it into a hill not far away.  His wife had a pelvic fracture, but otherwise they were OK.  My dad went back with him to the crash site to salvage the engines, radios, and navigational gear.  I went with them, and you could see how the airplane had sheared off the tops of the small trees and bamboo in a slope all they way to the ground.  Everyone thanked God for protecting Dr. Angel.

The Maintenance Man:

I had just started school in fourth grade when my Dad came home and told us the story of the maintenance man at the hospital.  The hospital was on the hill, and there was a windy little road down the hill to the city.  One night on his way home, the maintenance man had an accident.  This was before the era of cell phones, so it took quite awhile for someone to notify the police.  When the ambulance finally arrived they looked at the man and say, “He is dead”.  The police instructed them to take him to the morgue, but his wife intervened and said, no, please take him to the hospital.  So they did.

On arrival to the emergency room, the E.R. doctor looked at him and said, “he is dead.  There isn’t anything we can do for him.”  Again his wife intervened and said, “No, there is a hospital on the hill.  They have a good reputation, please take him up there to see if they can do anything for him.”  So, amazingly, they did.

They brought him back up the hill to the Adventist Hospital where an Adventist doctor looked at him and AGAIN said, “I’m sorry, he is dead, there isn’t anything we can do for him.”  And AGAIN, his wife intervened and said, “ Well, if he is dead, I want to do know what he died of.  Will you please do an autopsy?”

Amazingly, the doctors agreed.  They didn't have had a morgue at the hospital, so they took him to the surgery room and cut open his chest for the autopsy.  And low and behold, when the surgeon pricked the pericardium with his knife to open it up and look at the heart, the heart started beating!  And the blood started flowing, and so quickly they stitched him back up and took him up the ICU, and before too long he was back at work.  Amazingly without noticeable brain damage.  When I went back to visit Puerto Rico for the hospital's 50th anniversary celebration there he was.  He had just retired.

My Father:

Then, a few weeks later, first my father, then my mother both got terribly sick with what at the time we thought was the flu.  Dr. Habenicht later told me that he thought it was probably Dengue fever.  After a couple of weeks they got better and my Dad went back to work.  Later that morning Dr. Habenicht came to my school, called me out of the room, told me that my father had had an accident and he took me home.  They then told me that he had fallen from the roof of the house.  He had a neck injury and a skull fracture and he was in surgery.  

At the hospital reunion I met a lady that told me that my father had been treating her.  She was very depressed at the time, and had mentioned that she liked avocadoes.  So he had stopped to pick some avocados for her on his lunch hour.

We were in the process of moving into a house next to the hospital that had a huge avocado tree next to it.  It wasn’t like the little Hass Avocado trees you see in California.  This had a huge trunk and stood very tall.  It stood on a bank next to the house such that the base of the tree was about roof height.  The house was concrete with a flat roof, so you could just hop across from the bank to the roof.  My father had gotten a long bamboo pole and tied a tin can on the end so he could pick avocados way up into the tree.  We don’t know for certain what happened, but since it was noon in the tropics and he had just eaten lunch on his first day back to work after the flu, we think he probably fainted and fell off the roof.

Anyway, I prayed for God to heal him and then I went out to play.  I didn’t worry about it because that is what God does.  He protects us and takes care of us.  If He has to, he can even raise people from the dead, like the maintenance man, Elisha, Lazareth, and Jesus.  

When they came in and told us that they couldn’t save him, that he was dead, I was devastated.  I couldn’t understand why.  Why would God answer other peoples prayers and not mine?  Why would he take care of everyone else but not my father?  If He wouldn’t take care of the dearest and most important things in my life, how could I hope that He would take care of anything else?

God’s Silence:

In Hebrews 13:5 God said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.”  

But that was not my experience.  For the next 7 years, it seemed like God had vanished.  The heavens were “as bronze” Deut 28:23.  In my search for God, I tried everything I knew to try to make a connection.  I thought maybe if I got baptized. . . . Nothing.  

I was told that God had promised to be as a father to the widows and orphans, and I got to thinking, “Well, maybe that is some kind of consolation.  I wonder what kind of father, God would be?”  So I asked my grandmother for a Bible and she got me a copy of the Good News Bible and I started reading it to find out what kind of a father God might be.  Oh my!

Adam and Eve:

I opened the Bible and started at the beginning.  

Chapter one was OK, but chapters two and three told a story that reminded me an awful lot like something that happened to me back before kindergarten.  

My father got a copy of the testimonies and read about how eating (a piece of fruit)  between meals (from the tree-of-knowledge-of-good and evil) could affect your health, and that can affect your spirituality, and that could affect whether you are saved or lost (which would result in your death.)  My parents understood that a five year old can't go all day without food, and eat only two meals a day, but I was cautioned NOT to eat (from the tree-of-knowledge-of-good and evil) between meals.

So, some time later I was out in the front yard playing with my friends when my father came home from work, and my mom called out and gave me a warning that dinner would be ready soon.  About that time, another friend, (the snake), came over.  He was eating a candy bar (a piece of fruit from the tree-of-knowledge-of-good and evil.)  He offered all my friends a candy bar.  I told him that my father (god), had told me I shouldn't eat a candy bar (from the tree-of-knowledge-of-good and evil) or I would die.   He broke a piece off his candy bar and offered it to me.  I looked at it,  then everyone else eating their candy.  I wanted to have friends and be part of the group.  I was hungry and it was a candy I had never had before.  I was curious as to how it would taste.  Plus, I rationalized, Mom had already called me in for dinner, it wasn't like I was eating between meals, I was really eating it at the start of my meal.  I was really hungry so I was pretty sure that even if I tasted a small bite of candy, I would still be able to eat dinner.  So I didn't think it would spoil my dinner.  So I took it and ate.  

As it turned out, my father was watching from (heaven through) the livingroom window.  He went to the door and called out, "Adam, Adam, where are you?"  and I was afraid.  He explained how eating the candy bar would result in my death and that to protect me from that he was going to have to beat me, but that it was going to be OK, because the beating would be more painful to my father and to Jesus than it would be to me.

This God who was going to take care of me in place of my earthly father, what was he like?  I was horrified as I read that he did not just give Adam and Eve a beating, but he rejected them, and abandoned them, sending them out of their home, disowning them and condemning not only them, but also their children to exile and death.  Oh my! I thought my dad was severe, but this is just too horrible to imagine!  

I was only ten at the time, and I didn’t know how long it takes to make babies, but I knew it wasn’t long, and the babies didn’t come until after Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden so Adam and Eve couldn’t have been very old.  Living in a perfect environment as they did, how could they possibly have known the meaning of death and the consequences of their actions? I know the angels had tried to explain, but Adam and Eve had never even seen anyone get a spanking, let alone be killed; how could they possibly understand?

They couldn’t of course.  That was part of the dilemma.   God never wanted them to experience evil and death.  He was right to warn them away from the tree, but until someone in the universe sinned and experienced death, no one could ever know.  Wisdom was impossible to attain.

Some time later I found a copy of Patriarchs and Prophets.

I read eagerly, hoping for some explanation. After describing the conversation recorded in the Bible, Mrs. White goes on to describe how Adam and Eve were incapable of comprehending the meaning of death, and in order to help them understand both death, and the plan of salvation, Christ took a nearby lamb and killed it, skinned it, and put the skin around Adam and Eve for clothing, and how Eve wept when the first leaf fell that first fall day.

Cain and Abel:

Then I read about how Cain killed his brother Abel, and while his mother received the death penalty for stealing a piece of fruit, Cain only received banishment with the promise of protection by God.  How could that be?  Does God really think that stealing a piece of fruit is worse than murder?  I am so confused!

Job:

And then there is Job.  Job was faithful, and prayed for God’s forgiveness and protection for his family, and how did God respond?  By bragging to Satan?  Maybe there is some sense in which it is OK for Job to lose all his children, and then live to have more children later, but what about the first set of children?  What kind of father is this God who didn’t even notice their loss? Who would consent to their murder for the sake of bragging?

Abraham:

I read on, to the story of Abraham.  Again the story connected with one of my own.  One night while it was still dark, my father (Abraham) came into my room, woke me up and said to get dressed quickly, we were going to go out to the ocean to go fishing.

How happy and excited I was!  But it was a long trip and I was tired and I fell asleep in the car.  As I read the story of Abraham and Isaac, I imagined my father waking me up, taking me out to the end of the pier (mountaintop) setting up our fishing lines (building the altar), then noticing that we didn't have any bait (a sacrifice).  Imagine my horror and terror, as my father told me that God had told him to kill me for the bait (sacrifice).  The story gave me nightmares.

Even now, as a father, I can not accept Abraham's response to God's request.  To me the proper response is, “NO WAY IN HELL AM I GOING TO KILL MY SON, and if you want to kill him, you will have to kill me first!”  How could Abraham accept a God who would ask such a thing?  And what kind of a God would consider Abraham to be virtuous for accepting such a command?  That just seems so horribly abusive.  How can you love a father like that?

The Children of Israel:

Things didn’t get any better as I continued thru the Old Testament.  They are called the “children of Israel”.  How did God take care of his children on the way to Canaan?  I could see how they over reacted in accusing God of abandoning them when they ran out of water, but still, given God’s track record in the story so far, could you blame them?  He HAD abandoned them to slavery for 480 years .  Here they were in a desert with no water, and no food.  Their children were crying, their livestock were dying.  Could you blame them for being terrified of this God who would sentence Eve to death over a piece of fruit and not even notice the death of Job’s children?  I would be terrified! How could he just wipe them out?  Kill them?  His children?  By the thousands?  My heart was broken, and terrified.  If this is the God who is to be my father, what hope is there?  In spite of this I persisted.

The New Testament:

Eventually, I got to the New Testament.  As I read through the gospels, things got a little better.  Here in Jesus was finally a person that I could relate to.  He loved children and protected them from criticism.  He went out of his way to help  people, many of whom didn’t seem to appreciate it.  He went around healing people, and he never criticized any one, not even women who had multiple husbands or were caught in adultery, or old men who were paralyzed by sexually transmitted diseases.  Unlike the father of the Old Testament, he gave direction and made requests, but he was never dictatorial or demanding, authoritarian, or abusive.  He never did anything that impinged on or circumvented the choice and free will of another person, not even when he dealt with Judas, or the soldiers who came to arrest him, or the authorities that sentenced him to death.  The only time he was agressive was in the Temple when He came to the defense of people who were being abused by others.  I get Jesus.  I think I could love a father like him.  

But I got into trouble again when I read Paul’s writings.  Here I learned that God considered me a sinner, and that He could never love me, or accept, or forgive a sinner without killing something first.  Under the old covenant, it was a lamb, under the new covenant it was Jesus.  

By now I am a father, and I don’t need to kill anything in order to forgive my children.  When my two year old picked up a cookie off the counter, I didn’t drive him out of the house and demand his death!  That whole construct seems so abusive.  I just can’t fathom a father who would think that way.  Am I better than God?  There has to be a better way to understand the story. So how do we get from here to there?

WWII:

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the first piece of the puzzle that eventually brought resolution to my questions came when I was a first year resident at the V.A. Hospital.  I looked to the left as I passed an alcove.  There on a couch and a few chairs was a group of WWII vets talking, joking and laughing.  It caught my attention.  What a wonderful sense of camaraderie! In contrast to the isolation and brokenness of the Vietnam veterans it seemed so wonderful.  So precious.  

Of course, no one would ever consider starting WWII in order to attain such camaraderie,  certainly God was right to warn Adam and Eve against sin; but still, having been through WWII, it would be a shame not value such a precious bond.

I began to wonder, what was WWII about?  Was there anything else good that came out of it?  

It is easy for us to be judgmental, "A good god could never let something like a WWII concentration camp happen".  But I figured that is really a cheap shot on our part because we weren't the victims.  What is the testimony of those who were there?  What do the victims say?

Betsy is dying.  She feels it in her bones, in her weariness.  As she walks out to role call for the last time, she sees the sunrise.  It is so beautiful.  She turns to her sister Corrie and whispers, "You have to stay alive to tell people that God is good and that he is here, even in the death camps."

In another camp a young psychiatrist, Dr. Frankel is separated from his wife.  He doesn't know it yet, but he will never see her again.  Later he will write that if he had known, it probably wouldn't have mattered, because her love was a light that gave a meaning to his existence that could not be extinguished even by death.  He would later go on to write a wonderful book on the meaning of life in a concentration camp and his experience became the foundation for a whole branch of psychiatry that brings healing by helping people connect with what matters, the meaning of their life.

Then there is the world's attitude toward genocide.  From the beginning of the Bible, all the way to WWII genocide was the accepted solution for religious, social and political problems.  Even God commanded it.  Hitler was only unique in his success.  It was WWII that made the world turn from genocide, to decide that it was evil, no matter what God commanded, under any circumstances.  Yes, there are still pockets of people who haven't yet got the message.  I think of Stalin, Cambodia, Darfur.  But if it weren't for WWII, do you think the world would have even noticed Darfur?  If it had, it wouldn't have felt the moral mandate to intervene.  It was WWII that convinced the nations that they had the right, even the duty to intervene.  God warned Satan that man would find a hatred in his heart for evil.  Jesus said he saw the evil one fall as a star from heaven.  Is this what they were talking about?  Is WWII part of the answer?

Hospice:

A hospice worker once told me, "Yes, there is evil in the world, but there is also the overcoming of evil.  There is hope.  There is always hope."

One day as I was making rounds at the hospice house, and an old Swedish farmer asked me, "Do you believe in God?"

"Yes, Why do you ask?"

"When I was a boy I was helping a neighbor build a fence.  He was an angry old cuss.  He told me, 'There can't be a god because there is so much suffering in the world.'"

I asked him, "Well, what do you think?  If there is anybody in the world that can answer that question, it is you.  You are at the end of your life now.  You have seen it all, everything, from beginning to end and everything in between.  If before you were born you could have seen your life and everything that lead up to it.  All the joys, all the heartaches,  all the good, all the evil, everything, even WWII and the holocaust.  If you knew that everything would happen exactly as it did, every heartache, and every triumph, every failure and every success.  How would you advise God? Would you want him to proceed with giving you life?"

The next morning I came in and found his room was empty.  I was wondering . . . when a nurse walked up and said, "I don't know what this is about, but the man who was in room 104 asked me to tell you that there is a god.  He said you would know what it means."

A few days later I met a mom with a congenitally handicapped kid. He was bedridden, had never spoken and had consumed her whole life.  I couldn't help myself.  

"Can I ask you a personal question?  It might be painful, and you don't have to answer if you don't want."

"OK"

"If you knew that your son was going to turn out exactly as he has, would you have still chosen to have him?"

Her eyes brightened, "Oh my yes, he taught me so much about love.  You can't imagine."  Indeed I can't.

Second look at Genesis:

So, I decided to go back to Genesis and look again.

What is a good parent?

Perhaps a god can allow innocent children to make lethal decisions, but a good parent can't.  At least not and retain the attribute we call "good".  So how does that apply to Genesis?

It seemed to me that God could not be a good parent-god if he in fact gave Adam and Eve a simple choice between life and death.  Perhaps if Adam and Eve chose the good , everything would be OK, but if He allowed them to make the lethal choice to become evil and die, then He could not be a good parent-god.  By such an action God would show Himself to be at worst, as evil as Lucifer claimed, or at least negligent in His duty as a parent, or at best, an incompetent teacher. So let's go back and take a look at it again.  What did God actually say?

What does death mean?

God's statement was "don't eat of the tree or you will die".  Notice that God just leaves it at that?  He doesn't say whether dying is good or bad.  Certainly from our perspective it seems axiomatic.  For me death is a horrible thing, something of ultimate consequence, but what did that word mean to Adam and Eve? Remember, Adam and Eve had never seen death, and according to God's own statement Adam and Eve did not yet know the difference between good and evil.  Anything negative was totally incomprehensible.  What could it mean?

What did death mean to God?  What does death mean to a God that can poof any individual He wants into, and out of existence anytime He wants?  

Is death of such small consequence to God that it is an appropriate punishment for stealing fruit, while banishment is appropropriate for murder?  

Is that why He would allow Job's children to become what amounts to the opening bid in a poker match, tell Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and allow His own son to die on a cross?  

Is it possible that death is of such small consequence that it could be an appropriate means to a greater end?

Consequences:

Let's take a look at the consequences of eating from the tree.

Why didn't God want  Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil?

What did Satan say would happen? Gen. 3:5 "You will be like God, knowing good from evil"

What did God say did happen?  Gen. 3:22 "the man has become like us knowing good from evil."

Now wait a minute! Those sound like the same thing to me.  I was always lead to believe that Satan lied.  Where is the lie?  There are three.

The first lie:  

Death is the natural result of sin, separation from God.

Truth: Death is punishment. Gen 3:22,23  Death is not the natural result of sin.  As long as Man had access to the tree of life he would have continued to live, even as a sinner.  Death was a punishment directly from God.  By force and imperial decree man was driven out of the garden, away from the tree of life.

The second lie:

Death is certain

God: "when you eat from it, you will certainly die"

Serpent: "You will not certainly die."

Now here comes a trick question.  Parse the language carefully.  Strickly speaking, who is telling the truth here?

God said you will certainly die, but there are at least two humans we know of who didn't die.  Enoch and Elijah.

So it can't be said with absolute certainty that you will die.

What's more:

John 11:12,13 Jesus calls death sleep.

1 Thessalonians 4:13.  The saints only sleep.

1 Cor 15:51 Some will not even sleep.

So the answer is complex.  In the short run it looks like Satan lied, Adam & Eve died, or at least fell asleep.  In the longer range perspective, it looks like Satan is telling the truth, that God is over generalizing His threat.  It is not certain that everyone will die.

The third lie:

There is a third lie in the story,  the most important  lie I think, but to see it you must read between the lines.

Notice Genesis 3:8, how Adam and Eve responded when god called.  They hid.

Why would they hide?  They were afraid!

Why were they afraid?  They must have felt they had a reason to fear, but how could you be afraid of someone whom you were convinced always had your best interest at heart?  

Is it even possible to rebel against someone who always has your best interest at heart?  It seems like it would be very frustrating, because every rebellion only wounds yourself.

So here is what I believe is the essential lie. "God does not have your best interest at heart.  There is reason to be afraid."

The greater good:

So we have established that to be a good parent, God could not give Adam and Eve a simple choice between good and evil, life and death and remain a good parent.  How then do we understand what He did?  What other options are there?

C.S. Lewis speaks of a "greater good".  Is it possible that God gave them the choice between what we will call a "Simple Good" and a "Complex Good"?  The simple good is to remain innocent, to never become wise or understand the difference between good and evil.  A complex good includes a "creative destruction".  It requires the tearing down of one good, the simple good, to build something better, the "Complex Good".  So, how on earth could the decision to eat the apple in ANY way be considered good?  What have you been smoking?

Fortunately, Mrs. White and the apostle Peter give us clues.

Jesus told his disciples that it is better that he go away because the Holy Spirit would come.

Mrs. White tells us that through the agency of the Holy Spirit living in our hearts we have a more intimate connection to God than would ever have been possible had we not sinned.  2 Peter  1:4 tells us that we actually become partakers of the divine nature.  Think about it.

Mrs. White also says that until the ten commandments were given, the angels had no concept of a divine law.  In God's dealings with man, attributes of His character are revealed which the universe would never have known were it not for the fall of man and the entrance of sin.  There are some virtues that can manifest in a sinless environment such as, innocence, love, joy, peace.  There are other virtues that can only be seen by way of a response to evil.  They may exist in the character of God, but until evil showed up, no one ever knew.

What about wisdom itself?  As far as I know, Genesis 3 is the only place in the Bible where wisdom is considered to be bad.  Everywhere else it is considered a virtue.  Why is that?  Because God, being a good parent, never wanted his children to experience the pain of evil and you can't have wisdom without knowing evil.  However once evil enters the picture, it is much better to be wise than to be naive.

There are others:

You cannot know courage without a reason to fear.

You cannot have compassion without suffering.

Kindness is a response to hurt feelings.

Generosity requires a need.

Self-sacrifice needs a victim.

Vigilance requires a threat.

Perseverance and endurance come from prolonged resistance.

Protectiveness requires vulnerability.

Faith implies  a reason to doubt.

Hope is a response to despair.

Forgiveness requires a wrong.

Surrender requires weakness.

Victory requires a war.

I could go on, you can too.

Even death is not an unmitigated evil.  As a young person climbing the organizational ladder, what if your boss never retired?  Eve, who wept at the first falling leaf, later found death a merciful release from accumulated heartache and pain.  How often does the death of a loved one catalyse the reunion of an estranged family?  Or the threat of death cause someone to pause and re-invent their life?  What about the death of Christ, was it  the greatest betrayal, or the greatest act of love?  Was it the will of God? Luke 22:42. At some level, it becomes impossible to value Christ's death without legitimizing that which made it possible, death itself.  

The ultimate question: Fear

So where did the fear come from? How do you go from a perfect environment with everybody happy, to being afraid?

Mrs. White describes the fall of Satan in The Spirit of Prophecy Vol. 1, and Patriarchs and Prophets.  At the beginning of the story God is implementing a grand plan.  It is far reaching, glorious, and results in ever greater and higher good for everyone.  The universe is amazed and enthralled with delight as the plan unfolds.  At the center of the activity is Lucifer. He is like the chief of staff to the president.  He collects questions being asked of God,  discusses them with the creator, and directs the work.  I wish Mrs. White had been a little more specific, but at some point Satan started giving orders on his own.  I imagine that after a while, Lucifer got to know God's thinking pretty well.  He began to anticipate the answers he was getting.  A vision formed in his mind of where he thought God was going.  He thought he knew God's plan and what would result in the highest good for everyone.  It was a glorious plan and he was excited about it.

One day, he just answered the question.  On his own, without taking it to God.  Unfortunately, Lucifer's vision was not as grand and far reaching as God's plan was so the answer wasn't exactly right.  What happened the first time?   Did the Son, Michael,  go around quietly fixing things behind the scene?  Lucifer did it some more.  Eventually the angels started to notice the difference.  They were confused.  Which way are we going?  Whose orders do we follow, Lucifer or Michael's?  

Lucifer got frustrated.  He had a plan, a good plan.  It was God's plan that he was trying to implement.  It was grand and glorious and perfect.  It would result in the highest good for everyone.  He knew what God wanted, and Michael kept messing things up.

Eventually God, the "great Creator" had to intervene.  He came down on the side of Michael, declaring him to be the Son, equal with the Father. This was humiliating to Lucifer.  He knew what God wanted was best, and whatever Michael was doing wasn't it.  He began to share first his vision, then his doubts with the other angels.  He convinced them that God didn't really have the most strategic vision.  Michael was implementing an inferior plan.  One that would bring glory to himself, not what was in the best interest of the Angels.  

Now quick forward to the garden.  Do you see it?  Do you hear it?  "For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, you will be like God, knowing good from evil."  God is withholding something from you.  Knowledge.  He doesn't have your highest good at heart.  He doesn't want you to know.

Look at it again, parse the words carefully.  Is there a greater good? Don't we want to become like God?  Yes! Of course we do.  Is knowledge better that ignorance? Yes.  Is courage better than fear?  Yes.  Is it good to have the Holy Spirit in your heart and to be a partaker of the Divine nature? Yes, YES! The trouble is, you can't get there from here.  Not without going through the valley of sin and death.  What parent would want that for their kid?  How could God allow, let alone ask His kids to go through 480 years of slavery and the death camps at Auschwitz?  Is God withholding something from you? Yes, you bet He is, but nobody knows what it is.  No one in the universe has ever experienced evil.  They can't comprehend.  Here is the question before the whole universe.  Does God have your best interest at heart?  Is there a reason to fear?  

Until someone takes the apple and does the experiment the question is unanswerable.  You can remain innocent and have faith, but until you do the experiment you can never know for sure.  How long can this go on?  Who is brave enough or crazy enough to do it?  We all want to know, but do we dare?

It was Eve.  My  mother, Eve.  She did it.  And I am so proud of her.  I for one would much rather know than to not know.

Did it cost her?  Yes.  It cost all of us dearly.  But in the end, it was worth it.   

A New Paradigm:

In this version of the Gospel God is not the harsh, vindictive authoritarian perfectionist who can never forgive a sin without killing his own son that we have grown up fearing.  God is more like the parent of a teenager who wants to drive the car.  Does the parent want the child to drive?  Yes.  Does the parent want the child to grow up and become independent? Yes.  Does the parent want the child to make it's own decisions?  Yes.  But, my God! The dangers.  
What if . . . ?  

So what does Dad do?  He buys the biggest car with the newest tires, the strongest seat belts, and the most airbags he can afford, and  he makes sure that his insurance payment is on time, every time.  Why?  because he knows that almost certainly his child will be in an accident.  He sends his kid to drivers training and tries his best to teach him defensive driving.  He  puts it off as long as he can, but there always comes a day when he can't put it off any longer.  Reluctantly he hands over the keys and watches apprehensively as the car backs out of the driveway.

And how do you as a parent feel when you get that call to come get your kid?  Are you angry?  Do you have to kill something before you go get them?  No, (you are relieved that the call is coming from the side of the road, or the hospital, and not from the morgue.)  Why, because you knew it was going to happen.  You planned for it.  You didn't want it to happen, but when it did you were ready.  Evil is evil.  It costs dearly.  It is not your will, but neither is it outside your plan.  It is Ok.  You bought  the insurance, and nothing has happened that is beyond your capacity to fix.  Do you want your kid to stop driving?  Are you kidding? After we invested all this money and angst to get them ready?  No!  We want them to get back in the car and go again, as soon as the car is fixed.

That's what the cross is about.  That is God paying the price of the bigger car and the insurance. He is getting ready for the inevitable.  He knows there is going to be an accident.  Somewhere, someday, someone in the universe is going to get curious enough and bold enough to do the experiment.  Faith isn't going to be good enough.  They are going to want to know.  This is God, the wise parent and faithful teacher making the playground and the lab safe enough to do the experiment without it being lethal.  To give you a second chance, and another one, and another for as many times as it takes for you to figure it out.  

Do you ever wonder what the right thing to do is?  Do you live on the boundary between what is known and not known?  Are you frustrated because the authoritarian God won't just tell you what to do?  That's OK. God wants you to be an adult and make your own decisions.  He wants to free you to ask the unthinkable questions, to explore, to find out, and to learn.  He wants you to be wise.  Is he going to cringe?  Are there going to be times when He wishes you wouldn't?  Yes, but He is going to be proud of you too.

What does the cross mean?  Perhaps it means lots of things, but it at least means this.

You are always loved.

Your life is an adventure.  Every decision you make is another step in the quest to determine what is good, and what is evil, and to answer the most important question the universe has ever asked.

The sacrifice is worth it.

Your life has meaning.  Not the future life  when everything is perfect again.  This life.  Right now.  The messy and painful one.  The means-to-an-end, the in-between-time, matters.  It is this life that you and your friends are going to sit around reminiscing about throughout eternity.  Make the most of it.  I hope to have one humdinger of a story.  

And thanks Mom.

Why Atheists Don't Believe in God

I discovered Blogger doesn't support footnotes. This post just doesn't work without footnotes, so here is a link to the post on Google Docs. Please comment here. I love it when someone challenges me.

Why Atheists Don't Believe in God.

The Captain Goes Down with the Ship

The Captain doesn’t literally go down and drown, but captainhood is so intimately connected with the ship that when the ship goes down, the captain goes down with the ship, even if the man gets away in a rescue boat.

At Friends of St. Thomas, Jeremy asked an interesting question. Which is higher Christ or science? The question stopped me cold, and I could see by his astonishment at our silence that he must have thought that he had fallen in with a group of anti-Christian heretics. But the answer for me is not simple. I believe that Christ is the creator, and that nature is a direct manifestation of God’s character and personality, of equal authority with the Bible, and that just as reading the Bible is an act of worship, so doing science is an act of worship. For me, doing science in the lab is just as much about a relationship with God the creator, as is the Sabbath worship service. To ask which is higher, or more authoritative, is like asking which is of higher authority, my wife, or my relationship with my wife? My wife does not exist in my consciousness or universe except in relationship with me. A man cannot be a husband without a wife, a captain cannot be a captain without a ship, a god cannot be a creator without a creation, a savior cannot be a savior without a loss. Do you value being a husband? Then you must value both the wife, and the relationship. Do you value being a captain? You must value the ship. You can only value the creator to the extent you value the creation. Do you honor the savior? Then you must affirm the both the fall, and the death as well. Without a sinner, there cannot be a savior, without a death there cannot be a salvation.

One morning when we didn’t have to go to work, Judith rolled over and asked, “Show me cherish”. As I thought about it, I realized that I have heard the word, and the song, but I couldn’t identify an emotion to connect to the word, and I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do to demonstrate the emotion. So I asked her, “What is cherish? What does it feel like?”
She responded, “It is a feeling of quiet, peace, protectiveness and value”. Searching the emotional memory banks I finally asked, “Is it that warm feeling I had holding a sleeping baby?”
When she said yes, I felt like crying. Cherish! What a wonderful thing. It was a new feeling, something that was always there, but never felt.

In the book, My Stroke Of Insight the author, Dr. Taylor, talks about what it is like to live with only the right brain. The left brain is responsible for defining boundaries and meaning. It holds the map that defines the limits of your skin, what is you and what isn’t, what is near and what is far, what is good and what is bad. It measures time and determines what is the past, the now and the not yet. So when the left brain is quiet, she describes feeling liquid, at one with the universe, peaceful and happy without judgment. She had a sense of being part of the universe without beginning or end. Eternal if you will.

As she was healing, and her left brain was coming back on line, she describes seeing, but she didn’t discern colors. It wasn’t until some said, “That’s red” that she could see red. Then she could see red all around her. When someone said no, that’s green, and then suddenly she could see green. Certainly, she was seeing the colors all along, but until they were named, they didn’t really exist; they weren’t distinguishable from one another.

Suddenly, I knew what she was describing, only for me it was emotion. They talk about “emotional intelligence”. I think I grew up in a very emotionally ignorant family. I never remember anyone in my family talking about emotion. I knew the words of course, but I don’t remember anyone saying, I feel angry, sad, or happy. When I got married, my wife would ask me, why are you angry? And I would respond, “I’m not angry.” “Yes you are.” It was several years before I could identify anger. At first it took several days before I could identify the feeling, and realize, oh, yes, I guess I am angry. Then Judith and I could talk about it. As time went on I got so I could identify the anger quicker, but it took a long time for me to recognize it quick enough for me to deal with it in real time. Even now, I often don’t realize it until the situation is past. As life went on, I was able to identify a few other emotions, like fear, frustration and betrayal. The only good emotions I knew were compassion, that is what makes you want to become a doctor, and love, which for me was basically the same thing as sex. But now, I have another emotion, cherish.

As we lay there talking about, and identifying other emotions, I began to feel something strange. It was like my emotional life was being chopped into pieces. Once an emotion was identified, then there seemed to come a time when the emotion existed and another time when it didn’t exist. Judith told me about a time she felt hurt by something I did. It was also, connected to a time when I felt a strong sense of betrayal. She said something strange, like “I don’t feel hurt any more, I just feel sad, like there was a loss, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.” I thought that was strange, because for me, the sense of betrayal was always there, connected to that event. The memory of the event, and the accompanying emotion were always the same. The emotion never went away. It could be layered with other emotions, but the emotional experience of any person or event, was always the sum total of all the emotions associated with it. If I liked, you, you could do things that made me angry, but the like never went away. Also, the anger never went away, it was just layered with new emotion as the relationship continued. It wasn’t like there were separate emotions, it more like emotional layers of colored glass. As you looked thru the emotional lens, the color of the lens would change as the layers were added, but the emotions that made up the lens were not distinguishable. When Judith started identifying emotions, it was like turning the lens on edge, suddenly you could see emotions of different colors, layered out sequentially, each with a beginning and an end.

I can’t help wondering if this is a good thing. Certainly, it is good to be able to identify an emotion, and tell people how you feel, but I wonder what it does to your history, when the emotions connected with events change, when hurt becomes sadness, betrayal becomes thoughtlessness. Or disdain becomes rejection, and rejection becomes fatigue. What happens to you when you remember an event and it feels different? I suppose it might be helpful to soften the edges of painful events, or even to turn a negative into a positive, but, then, what’s the point? What is reality, if emotions and events are no longer connected? What does anything mean if you can make it mean anything?

In religion, we talk about God being spirit, and spirit being eternal, while the physical is temporal (time bound) and mortal. Man is both spiritual and physical. A partaker of the Eternal divine nature, and yet physical and mortal. I wonder if the difference between eternity and time isn’t something like the difference between the right and left brain experience, or the difference between looking thru the lens, eternity, or looking at the edge of the lens, time. I wonder if eternity and spirituality aren’t something like the emotional life. It is always there and yet it doesn’t exist until it is named. It never goes away, but once it is named it is no longer present. It is always the same, and yet always different. Consequences are both good and bad at the same time. It is what it is now, but later it might be something else. The past determines the present, and still the present can change the past.

Buddhists talk about enlightenment. Meditation is a process of quieting the judging mind, the left, verbal mind, to stop doing, and to be. They describe Nirvana in much the same terms Dr. Taylor uses to describe the experience of the right brain, this oneness with the eternal universe.

For the Buddhist, the process of enlightenment is the letting go of judgment. Is it then possible to become enlightened, to enter eternity without first having left eternity thru judgment?
Was it possible for Christ to leave the undifferentiated eternity of the god head to become “God with us” without first making a judgment? Without first defining a separation between God and creature, a beginning and end, a life and death? Is that why he first became the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, the alpha and the omega, because it is impossible to define a life separate from God without death?

Is it possible that as infants we started out in the un-named, undifferentiated Nirvana, the perfect paradise of Eden where there was no good and no evil? Life, like cherish, has no existence until a judgment is made, until a self can be defined, a separation is made in the eternal. To make the judgment is to define the beginning, life, the definition creates the end, death. Thus in choosing to create, Christ made the first judgment that life is good, that it is worth starting and ending.

Is it possible that Christ the creator who made man in his image, and pronounced the first judgment, that life is good, also gives to man that same power of judgment? Is it possible that our spiritual life starts with our first judgment, when we first leave the garden of innocence, when we first partake of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and decide for the first time that one is good, the other is bad? Christ said that Christians would be judged as they judged. Perhaps as we come to the end of life, the difference between heaven and hell is our own judgment about the value of our own life? What is the meaning of my life? Was it good? Was it bad? As ye judge, so shall ye be judged. As they say, the captain goes down with the ship.