A God-Bathed World: Chapter 3

Jesus’ good news about the kingdom can be an effective guide for our lives only if we share his view of the world in which we live. To his eyes this is a God-bathed and God-permeated world.

It’s been said that your view of God will determine your relationship with Him. This is an extension of this point – you can’t understand Jesus’ Father in Heaven unless you see Him the way Jesus describes.

It is a great and important task to come to terms with what we really think when we think about God. Most hindrances to the faith of Christ actually life, I believe, in this part of our minds and souls.

The first step in correcting your view of God is to honestly come to terms with what your view is right now. Break through what you think you’re supposed to believe and examine what you really believe. Then you can begin to make new faith choices.

We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe… He is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right. This is what we must think of when we hear theologians and philosophers speak of him as a perfect being. This is his life.

This view is quite a contrast to the view that God is angry all the time. He certainly can get angry at sin, but it’s not like anything that happens on earth could ruin the day of a perfect being.

Now, Jesus himself was and is a joyous, creative person. He does not allow us to continue thinking of our Father who fills and overflows space as a morose and miserable monarch, a frustrated and petty parent, or a policeman on the prowl. One cannot think of God in such ways while confronting Jesus’ declaration “He that has seen me has seen the Father.” One of the most outstanding features of Jesus’ personality was precisely an abundance of joy. It is deeply illuminating of kingdom living to understand that Jesus’ steady happiness was not ruled out by his experience of sorrow and even grief.

Jesus was joyful in spite of His earthly circumstances. This is such a blessing of being a believer if we will tap into it. Our circumstances do not have to dictate our joy.

We know all about “simulations,” we think. Moreover, we have heard of psychological “projection,” and our heads are full of pseudoscientific views that reject a spiritual world and insist that space is empty and matter the only reality. So we are prepared to treat all of this long historical record [miracles of the Bible] as a matter of “visions” that are “only imagination,” or as outright delusions, not as perceptions of reality.

The reality of the Kingdom is that the spiritual world is more real than the physical. Until this thought is grasped, it is difficult to understand much else in the Kingdom.

The damage done to our practical faith in Christ and in his government-at-hand by confusing heaven with a place in distant or outer space, or even beyond space, is incalculable. Of course God is there too. But instead of heaven and God also being always present with us, as Jesus shows them to be, we invariably take them to be located far away and, most likely, at a much later time – not here and not now. And we should then be surprised to feel ourselves alone?

What an amazing revelation that God is near. He inhabits the entire universe, but still longs to be near His children.

But the response to this mistake has led many to say that God is not in space at all, not that “old man in the sky,” but instead is “in” the human heart. And that sounds nice, but it really does not help. In fact, it makes matters worse. “In my heart” easily becomes “in my imagination”… This ill-advised attempt to make God near by confining him to human hearts robs the idea of his direct involvement in human life of any sense. Ironically it has much the same effort as putting God in outer space or beyond.

Willard notes another good example of how “cute” sayings can backfire. God does not live on in your heart – He is everywhere, but yet chooses to interact with our spirits on the inside as well!

Now, roughly speaking, God relates to space as we do to our body. He occupies and overflows it but cannot be localized in it.

A very simple way to explain where God is – I occupy my body, but you can’t cut me open and find “me”. God is everywhere, but he can’t be pinpointed to a physical spot.

Once we have grasped our situation in God’s full world, the startling disregard Jesus and the New Testament writers had for “physical death,” suddenly makes sense. Paul bluntly states, as we have just seen, that Jesus abolished death – simply did away with it. Nothing like what is usually understood as death will happen to those who have entered his life.

This goes back to the point of the spiritual being the higher reality than the spiritual. Death has been completely conquered in the spirit realm for those in Christ. The physical aspect of our being is but temporary and inconsequential in light of eternity.

When Mickey Mantle was dying of diseases brought on by a life of heavy drinking, he said that he would have taken better care of himself had he only known how long he was going to live. He gives us a profound lesson. How should we “take care of ourselves” when we are never to cease? Jesus shows his apprentices how to live in the light of the fact that they will never stop living. This is what his students are learning from him.

This is the essence of teaching of this book. We are to enter our eternal life right now. This is what Jesus came to show us – how to live in light of the fact that we are eternal spiritual beings.

This structure [the first shall be last and the last first] indicates that humanity is routinely flying upside down, and at the same time it provides a message of hope for everyone who counts on God’s order, no matter his or her circumstance. There are none in the humanly “down” position so low that they cannot be lifted up by entering God’s order, and none in the humanly “up” position so high that they can disregard God’s point of view on their lives.

This is the good news of the Kingdom. Our earthly limitations don’t have to hold us back in God’s Kingdom.

To become a disciple of Jesus is to accept now that inversion of human distinctions that will sooner or later be forced upon everyone by the irresistible reality of his kingdom. How must we think of him to see the inversion from our present viewpoint? We must, simply, accept that he is the best and smartest man who ever lived in this world, that he is even now “the prince of the kings of the earth” (Rev. 1:5). Then we heartily join his cosmic conspiracy to overcome evil with good.

Sooner or later everyone will accept the reality and supremacy of God’s rule – better soon than later. I love that Willard waited 90 pages before he spelled out exactly what the Divine Conspiracy is – God’s plan to overcome evil with good.

The powerful though vague and unsubstantiated presumption is that something has been found out that renders a spiritual understanding of reality in the manner of Jesus simply foolish to those who are “in the know.” But when it comes time to say exactly what it is that has been found out, nothing of substance is forthcoming.

Nothing has been discovered that renders the spiritual world irrelevant. It takes the same faith to believe in nothing beyond a physical reality than it does to accept the spirt realm as a higher reality.

Though this is not the place to discuss it, you can be very sure that nothing fundamental has changed in our knowledge of ultimate reality and human self since the time of Jesus…Many will be astonished at such a remark, but it at least provides us with a thought – that nothing fundamental has changed from biblical times – that every responsible person needs to consider at least once in his or her lifetime, and the earlier the better. And as for those who find it incredible – I constantly meet such people in my line of work – you only need ask them exactly what has changed, and where it is documented, and they are quickly stumped. Descending to particulars always helps to clear the mind.

This is such a great point. In regards to the ultimate questions: what is the meaning of life? Why are we on earth? No new knowledge has been gained since the time of Jesus to adequately answer these questions.

Our commitment to Jesus can stand on no other foundation than a recognition that he is the one who knows the truth about our lives and our universe. It is not possible to trust Jesus, or anyone else, in matters where we do not believe him to be competent…Once you stop to think about it, how could he be what we take him to be in all other respects and not be the best-informed and most intelligent person of all, the smartest person who ever lived?

His teaching about life is not obsolete. The principles in the Bible are still the best way to live our lives.

Turn gravel into gold and pay off the national debt! Do you think he could get elected president of prime minister today?

I’d vote for Him.

He knew how to suspend gravity, interrupt weather patterns, and eliminate unfruitful trees without saw or ax. He only needed a word. Surely he must be amused at what Nobel prizes are awarded for today.

It’s an interesting thought that Jesus didn’t use hocus-pocus to do things. He made the world and literally knew how to do them. Certainly our problems are not too big for Him.

And one of the greatest testimonies to his intelligence is surely that he knew how to enter physical death, actually to die, and then live on beyond. He seized death by the throat and defeated it. Forget cryonics!

Death defeated – is there a greater earthly accomplishment?

“Jesus is Lord” can mean little in practice for anyone who has to hesitate before saying “Jesus is smart.” He is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived. He is now supervising the entire course of world history (Rev. 1:5) while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it (John 14:2). He always has the best information on everything and certainly on the things that matter most in human life. Let us now hear his teachings on who has the good life, on who is among the truly blessed.

Here we have to come to terms with what we believe. If we read the words of Jesus in the Bible and find them irrelevant or obsolete, it ultimately means our confession of Jesus as Lord isn’t worth much. He is more than a nice guy – He is the most brilliant man to ever live! If we find His teaching unhelpful, the problem is on our end. Ignorance is easier to overcome than unbelief. The next chapters will illuminate what Jesus meant in His instructions for our everyday lives.

Gospels of Sin Management: Chapter 2

Well, it certainly needs to be said that Christians are forgiven. And it needs to be said that forgiveness does not depend on being perfect. But is that really what the slogan (Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven) communicates?
Unfortunately, it is not. What the slogan really conveys is that forgiveness alone is what Christianity is all about, what is genuinely essential to it.
It says that you can have a faith in Christ that brings forgiveness, while in every other respect your life is no different from that of others who have no faith in Christ at all.

Dallas continues with his pet peeve of theological bumper stickers. His growing point is that our ideas about our faith are important and will influence our behavior. When I think of that bumper sticker, to me it sounds apologetic or defensive – “just because my life doesn’t look any different than yours doesn’t mean I’m not a Christian.” Whatever your opinion of the slogan, I don’t believe it’s a particularly helpful idea for the aspiring disciple of Christ.

Many others are angry with such a view of being Christian because to them it seems irresponsible. They contemptuously refer to it as “cheap grace” or “fire insurance”… but to be quite frank, grace is cheap from the point of view of those who need it. That is why attacks on “cheap grace” never make much difference. To try to rule out unheroic Christianity by making grace expensive will only add to confusion about matters of vast importance. And if a fire is likely, it would not be a mark of wisdom to forgo insurance that really is available.

This was a beautifully made point. Those that recognize that there needs to be a change in a born again person can still be equally wrong on the other side of the spectrum. Dallas suggests that the problem with Christianity may be more of a systemic one – our view of what the gospel is – rather than an issue of how many hoops someone has to jump through upon accepting it.

No one need worry about our getting the best of God in some bargain with him, or that we might somehow succeed in using him for our purposes. Anyone who thinks this is a problem has seriously underestimated the intelligence and agility of our Father in the heavens. He will not be tricked or cheated. Any arrangement God has estabilished will be right for him and right for us. We can count on it.

It’s funny how we can entertain completely ridiculous thoughts when we don’t examine them. How patronizing must it be to God that we should ever feel the need to protect him from being taken advantage of!

The real question, I think, is whether God would establish a bar code type of arrangement at all. It is we who are in danger: in danger of missing the fullness of life offered to us.

This needs to be clear. If there is more available to being a Christian than going to heaven when you die, it is our loss if we fail to find it.

What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him – trusting only his role as guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and adequate to every thing.

This is also touching at the heart of the issue. When we say we trust God for our salvation, are we really trusting Jesus as the lord of our life or are we just trusting an abstract thought of Him saving us from our sins?

The gospel, or “good news,” on this [the Left] view, was that God himself stood behind liberation, equality, and community; that Jesus died to promote them, or at least for lack of them; and that he “lives on” in all efforts and tendencies favoring them. For the theological left, simply this became the message of Christ.

On the left side of the theological spectrum, we see a strong de-emphasis on the supernatural in favor of the practical. Jesus came to release the prisoner, but I believe He is far more interested in our character development than our earthly comfort (as Pastor noted today). He has compassion for those suffering on earth, but life is but a vapor in light of eternity.

The American dream is that “people can do or be what they want if they just go ahead and do it.” Desire becomes sacred, and whatever thwarts desire is evil or sin. We have from the Christian left, after all, just another gospel of sin management, but one whose substance is provided by Western (American) social and political ideals of human existence in a secular world.

This is one problem when fighting for liberation – it makes an idol out of the desire for freedom, even if what is desired is contrary to the ordinances of God. In the end, the left is also a gospel of sin management.

To reiterate, that irrelevance to life stems from the very content of those “gospels”: from what they state, what they are about. They concern sin guilt or structural evils (social sins) and what to do about them. That is all. That real life goes on without them is a natural consequence of this.

Willard begins to pose the question of whether the results we see in today’s Christianity are not in spite of our efforts, but precisely because of the gospel we are presenting. If you make the gospel just about getting to heaven, or for fighting for equality (without emphasis on a supernatural personal relationship with Jesus), it is simply logical that this gospel will have little effect on our everyday life.

Right at the heart of this alienation lies the absence of Jesus the teacher from our lives. Strangely, we seem prepared to learn how to live from almost anyone but him. [By listening to the voices of the world instead of Jesus] we lose any sense of the difference between information and wisdom, and act accordingly.

If we don’t think Jesus has the best wisdom for how to live, how could we possibly put our trust for our eternal destiny in such a person?

We do not seriously consider Jesus as our teacher on how to live, hence we cannot think of ourselves, in our moment-to-moment existence, as his students or disciples.

This is Willard’s conclusion of the discipleship problem: The gospel that is often shared has little relevance to our everyday life. Therefore, we don’t look to Jesus to be our teacher and so we do not become his disciple.

We are flooded with what I have called “gospels of sin management,” in one form or another, while Jesus’ invitation to eternal life now – right in the midst of work, business, and profession – remains for the most part ignored and unspoken.

There is more to life in Christ than just sin management. We can enter eternal abundant life right now.

A saying among management experts today is “Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.”

Willard summarizes his point again by drawing on a popular saying. The gospel we present is perfectly designed to save the kind of converts we’re receiving.

Study Questions:

What is the gospel to you? Is it that Jesus died so that you can go to heaven? Is it that Jesus came to promote a new equality that we should fight for? Is it the new availability to enter the Kingdom of God?

How does your current view of the gospel compare to what was presented to you growing up?