I
was overjoyed and relieved to find my gold ring. Bill rejoiced with me, in part
because I didn’t ask him to put on rubber gloves and become a Crime Scene
Investigator to help me go through the trash piece by piece.
Bill
lamented his experience with losing things in his 20 X 30 woodworking shop. “I
know it’s in there; I just set it down in the wrong place, or else I’m looking
right over the top of it.”
It
strikes me that with the missing ring, the coin and Bill’s tools, none are totally
lost — they each were somewhere in the house or the shop. We all have family and
friends whom we suspect are spiritually lost, yet we can take a measure of comfort
in the fact that the Lord always knows exactly where they are. “I have strayed
like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commands” (Psalm
119:176 NIV).
1 comment:
Gail;
-----Our analogy of “lost” is worth only so much. For as Bill intimated, something definitely is where it is, and as you have intimated, God knows where that is. The parable of the lost coin draws on this spatial aspect of lost not so much to enlighten that God searches for what is His, but that He and His friends the angels rejoice greatly when His are found. We so relate to things spatially that it is easy to think right on past the significance of how something is lost to God.
-----You and Bill put together well for us that things are not lost to God spatially. I relate to Bill’s perspective. He knows the item is in his shop, and he’s patient enough to wait it out. But God knows the whereabouts of everything. Nor is anything lost to God philosophically. He knows every thought and feeling of every person. There is no thinking anyone has done that God does not know to its very least validity and fallacy, from its most elemental particularity to its broadest generality. No thinking, feeling, or any other aspect of the soul escapes God. So how on earth are people lost to Him?
-----They are lost relationally. From decades of studying the Scriptures I’ve come to perceive relationship as one of the most fundamental of God’s characteristics. He not only knows every last hair on your head, right down to the last one to fall out, but He also knows why and how and when every one fell out that did fall out and how every one that managed to hold tight did that and for how long it will continue to do that. He’s named every star. Things are only named out of a sense of relationship. It would not surprise me in the least if we eventually find out that He has named also every molecule, every atom, every proton, electron, and quark, or whatever that smallest unit of matter might show itself to be (I call the idea of it a Qu, signifying the greatest attachment of all of what God is to each most least unit of our existence, His faithfulness expressed to a point!) More over, at any particular moment He knows the exact position of every last Qu and all of them together, and the effectual relationship the eastern most one in the universe has to the western most one; it's slighter than gravity physics assures you, but more significant than physics itself. For their relationships all together make not only the physical universe we perceive, but also they pattern the information of the Christ who is our finding. It is a giant story of truth written in the heavens and the Word and upon every heart that is found. And to read that story and relate to that truth about the Creator and the enormously intimate relationship He desires with specifically you is to be found.
-----God is not a particular of time as we are. He is beholding each of us who are found an eternity from now as much as He is beholding us at this moment. Our oown perception is alone constrained by space and time. So we must use our mind to total up the facts truly given by God and notice that “lost” is having no relationship, no meaning, no substance, position, or any effect, affect, or slightest twinkle of an inkling to God’s mind once He commands the final parting of the ways of unrighteousness from righteousness. As God now experiences our relationships also an eternity from now, He is experiencing nothing of the lost an eternity from now. It is less than His not having a thought, feeling, or inkling of the lost. It is less than their not existing in His presence. There will simply be no relationship whatsoever to bear any meaning to Him at all, or to anyone else with Him. That is lost.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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