I have to thank you for this exercise I've elected. "You never learn as much as when you're teaching," and I've been learning a lot.
I once heard a scientist say something to the effect that if he was sitting at a cafe, and the person at the next table suddenly shot up and disappeared into the sky, he would not think that he had just seen a miracle, but that he had just observed a hitherto unknown physical law in action. That is kind of where I am in my faith in God. I SEE things, I know that they are real, but I do not know exactly what they are. There could be a number of explanations, but no explanation could negate what I have seen: e.g., the person DID shoot up into the sky. One of my favorite explanations is that everything is the imagination of "God," the Consciousness of the Ineffable Being, for He is imagining us.
The Milta (Miltha) being the Ineffable's becoming the manifest form of Itself is another associated favorite, the Milta being that imagination.
The rather flat story in the Scripture being just exactly what it says is another possibility, but the language needs a lot more and better translation and a lot of explanation.
Any one of these can account for the "law" that I have seen.
The law, the "Kingdom (powers) of God," has to do with attitudes, and the scriptures seem to be illustrating, explaining that. There is a tension between the symbolic value of the stories and the ontic realities, the forces they illustrate. My point is that the ontic is ontic, i.e., "fer real." And while believing the stories may be enough, there is no reason the forces of the Kingdom could not become the real characters of their story to DO what they said they were going to do. God is big enough to do that. Whether He did or not, I don't know - I wasn't there, but I believe the Milta DID imagine Itself Jesus Christ and literally DID what He said He was going to do through Christ, which was to fulfill God's promises. Those Old Testament promises are the "glad tidings" we are to believe, and our belief seems to be what activates the law.
(Ah, I'm finally getting around to what I wanted to talk about.) I mentioned my friend seminary Janet, who got caught up emotionally to heaven, and was healed of tuberculosis. She entered the pattern of the law's operation, which is to believe God and to humble oneself in submission to God. Taken to the extreme, God responds by killing, as it were, the life or spirit of whatever is wrong with that person. Something had caused my left arm to be stunted. The life of that fault died, and my arm grew out t its proper length. Janet was afflicted with the life of a germ. She ascended to the presence of god, and the life of that germ died, and she was healed. A boy was in epileptic convulsions, his father asked Jesus if He could help. The spirit giving life to epilepsy was cast out--died--and the boy was healed. My back was severely injured in Honolulu. I recovered enough to get back to Walnut, where I asked Vern and Dio to pray for my back. I remember Vern saying, "Lord, let my hands be Your hands." He laid them on my back, and my back was healed.
I am a big fan of T. L. Osborn. He was a failed missionary, and he wanted desperately to find out how to succeed at leading people to Christ. He wanted so desperately that, at six o'clock one morning, Jesus walked into his bedroom. In the air. T. L. saw the concrete person, standing in transparent glory. Do I believe it? Yes, I do, because a) I have known T. L. Osborn. Pretty much the only message he preached for seventy years was: the Jesus then is the same Jesus now. And b) if Jesus could transcendently speak tome physically, why couldn't He physically respond to Osborn's ATTITUDE? The life of whatever failing was in T. L. must have died, because there has never been another missionary like him. Having SEEN Jesus alive, Tommy acted with purpose, driven by what he KNEW, that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and for ever: our resurrected Savior. He is the manifestation of the Law that the Consciousness of the Ineffable is: every thing is set right as the Ineffable in form.
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