David Crosby of Crosby, Stills and Nash recently passed away. He made an interesting observation when he turned 80:
"Eighty years old is something you mourn, not celebrate. . . . Now I'm 80 years old, so I'm gonna die fairly soon. That's how that works. And so I’m trying really hard to crank out as much music as I possibly can, as long as it's really good… I have another one already in the can waiting."
Yes, I am only 75, but you are 81, going on 82, so I want to communicate to you the reality of God being "for real" as clearly and severely as possible in the time we have left. What I want to stress is that I believe because of present evidence. I haven't just bought into someone's philosophy, a convincing argument, or a shared cultural assumption; I believe in Jesus Christ (as we call Him) because He DOES things in the here and now. Things change by His hand, now, in the present. I believe real change means He is real, too.
I need to straighten out a misunderstanding. I say, "He does things," and you might--probably--envision a man standing there exerting effort or will to accomplish something. If, when I say 'God' or 'Lord' or 'Jesus', you see in your imagination a human form, you have got the wrong God. "God" is the Consciousness of the Ineffable Being, the No-thing, the (...?). This Consciousness is the universal medium of this dimension, infinite and eternal. God is like a field of energy, but is conscious, and It IMAGINES. Its intelligence has the power to actually, literally become whatever It believes it is, and the Ineffable has believed that It EXISTS in form, that It IS manifest. We are playing catch-up in Its becoming THAT. God IS imagination, but not necessarily ours. Ours is of His.
(I am editing this in: Revelation 11:15 says something very interesting and enlightening: "And the seventh angel blew. And there were voices and thunders that declared* (spoke), 'May it come, the kingdom of the people of our Lord and his Anointed One, and may he rule to [the end of] of the universes of all the universes!'" Note the two people here: "our Lord (God, the Milta, Eashoa [Jesus])" and "his Christ." I could translate it as "the Life-giver and His Messiah." The two are one in Him, and the two are one in us. So there IS a guy. -end edit.)
When you look in Alexander's translation of John from the ancient Aramaic, you see in 1:1 the word Milta (Miltha; it's gender is feminine, by the way). Milta is "the essential connotation of a person or thing." John is saying/observing that Jesus--Eashoa, the Life-Giver in Aramaic--is the essential connotation of the Consciousness of the Ineffable; i.e., that He IS God. Jesus, the essential connotation of the Ineffable that creates the heavens and the earth, is that Milta which said, "Let there be light."
Notice the tense: He creates the heavens and the earth. How, when, where, and why? In and through us. WE create our worlds, which answer the question, "What am I?" "The result of your own self-lordship," is the answer. The unwanted fruit of rebellion: a world without God.
So let me tell you a couple of stories. They are reports, actually. For there is no make-believe or exaggeration in them. They are, or were, concrete, historical, literal, and if I could do them again, empirical. They were experienced as real.
To be continued.
Danny
