June 10, 2015

Ahead of Me

When I'm in a dilemma I call on the Lord and ask those around me for help, but it never really crosses my mind that someone or something has already been sent out ahead of me. Those someone’s and some things going ahead of us come in various sizes and forms — the Lord, an angel, a star, a messenger, John the Baptist, a servant, the ark of the covenant, a hornet (Jo 24:12). While it is comforting to know the Lord walks with me, I’ve completely missed the point that He walks ahead of me in the present … as well as in eternity. “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2 NIV).

2 comments:

Steve Corey said...

Gail;

-----God existing outside the dimension of time puts Him before us in the past and the future. His being after the creation of the new earth and heavens, after the descent of the New Jerusalem with its pearl gates and angelic gatekeepers. His seeing who came out of our temporal scrum at His invitation to be washed and enter that heavenly city availed Him the opportunity to list their names in the Lamb’s Book of Life before He founded the earth. Such does not make sense to us; we are so bound to the ticking of a clock.
-----A little pondering of God’s revelations produces some rather interesting constructs. We apply a fancy word like “omniscience” to His knowledge, then don’t completely think it through. His knowing everything reaches from the minutest tidbit of information to the most humongous concept, though there probably is no minutest nor most humongous outside the boundaries of this constraining universe. Still, He knows everything between those two notions and everything beyond them. But that’s just a statement about a point in time. He knows everything likewise a moment ago as well as a moment to come and all moments backwards and forward forever. His existence outside the boundaries of time means He knows all of this all at once. And since there is no end to what He can know, He knows all of that extending up to and beyond no end, too. Simply put, God exists in His own category defined by that one trait of boundlessness. He unboundedly knows everything all the time.
-----Everything other than God exists in that one other category defined by boundaries. Even His eternally living angels, though unbounded in eternal future are bounded by a beginning, which was their being created. Even more so are we, who live in this mixture of a beginning for the eternally living and ending for the eternally dead. Yet it’s only our created being that is bounded, because our concepts always exist in all their completeness in God’s unbounded knowledge. Every thought we have thought and will think and every feeling, too, and decision, and action upon decision, and you get the drift, every last thing of us all He’s always known and forever will know, even our own reflections upon ourselves and senses of self He knows from our starting lines throughout our entire eternities. And that’s just the stuff of us. He knows to the same last detail everything about our every situation and movement within and through to the next, every motion of every electron of every molecule of every galaxy of the universe, every movement ever moved or to move He knows, such that we all live and move in a substance we really can call the matrix of His mind and care and love. We really do exist and move in Him. It is we who tick, one movement at a time, through this matrix, who work one deed at a time building the messes and tiny glories He already knows we have and will. It all gives me continuously new feelings about “…Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”

Love you all,
Steve Corey

Steve Corey said...

P.S. It causes me to wonder how He forgets our sin if He exists always at all times. He would always be at the time of every sin. So also He would always be at all times knowing everything of everyone who dies eternally. For He is boundless.
-----So. Is there maybe more to Jesus’ death than that physical thing on the cross? Is He going to give up those parts of the matrix of His mind which are incongruent to His nature, that is, all knowledge of evil? In order to make sin non-existent even to His own mind, will He have to then become bounded to not experiencing what is to Him presently happening in that part of the matrix of His mind which is the when of this temporal scrum?
-----But, like the Guy He is, He probably has a way of eliminating every imperfection into a boundary of its own which is yet not a boundary to Him. He knows. That’s why my heart goes out to Him.