31 October 2024
It's very difficult to break out of the western viewpoint. Even I still struggle after fifty years of trying.
The western analytical mind is very dehumanizing. Can you write two different pieces in rather different styles? Of course you can. We've all been taught to pretend we are something we are not. A letter we write to a close friend will have a radically different tone from a college paper. Yet, western analysis of Hebrew writing assumes that minuscule differences in style mean someone else wrote it, not the ostensible author.
Just the same, western analysis denies that God could speak or act outside a certain narrow pattern, and that He's not really that intelligent. There's an inherent western hostility in the whole approach to thinking and talking about what the God of the Bible claims. Having presumed that a western assumption is absolute truth, westerners cannot conceive of God promoting a different set of assumptions.
More to the point, western minds cannot embrace the notion of God existing outside of space-time constraints.
Nowhere does Scripture promote the idea that our human realm of existence was created "ex nihilo". The Hebrew wording says that God "fattened" the world He already had on hand. It seems impossible to western minds that there is such a small difference between a universe God had in mind and one He had in His hands. Since God is unconstrained by time and space, He is not affected by our necessity of looking back over the eons of time through which our universe developed slowly into what it now is.
Get this: Everything that exists now is just a reflection of God's own logic about what should be. This becomes rather visible when you delve into the Hebrew outlook on reality. To the Hebrew mind, detailed instructions for making something is not necessary. Simply tell the craftsman what the materials and use will be, and the details will be obvious to him. The choice of materials and the purpose of the object constrain the outcome, as far as Hebrew minds see it. The Hebrews never needed blueprints or visual guidance; they didn't visualize. Their minds didn't work that way. That's a clue to how God does things.
The development of the universe was not random. It was guided by God's purpose and the materials He chose to use. The results that we see today already existed in God's mind, so that He could simply pull His concept from mental image into reality at any place along the path. It wasn't necessary for reality to evolve over eons to get where it is now. When God decided He needed a reality for some purpose, it was waiting in His mind. The logic of what it had to be was simply a reflection of who He was.
We see a universe today with a massive long history, but that doesn't mean it actually existed and had to pass through that process in reality. It began to exist the moment along the timeline God wanted to use it, and in whatever condition suited His purpose.
The world in which we live, with all its wonders, is not ultimate reality. It's rather odd that, when you examine the history of human thought across the civilizations that left a record, that the notion our universe is all there could be, first appeared in the Greco-Roman roots, and nowhere else. To oversimplify, it was Aristotle alone who first stated that this reality is all there is, all there could be, and that it was impossible for a separate realm (AKA Eternity) to exist. No other civilization produced such a silly notion.
Every other culture in human history assumes the existence of a transcendent realm. The Bible certainly does, and it is the realm of God's existence. He operates from there, not here. Nothing about this reality confines Him; it's the other way around.
Where we are today is not the same "place" as Eden. Eden was quite different; we don't have a Tree of Life here. For humans to live as we do now required leaving Eden. Outside of Eden was essentially the foyer of the Abyss, the prison prepared for the Devil and his allies. The vastness of outer space may be nothing more than an illusion. In practice, it might as well be just decoration. God is portrayed as being quite extravagant. This universe is not the only realm of existence, and this one in particular is just a prison. It has a distinct shelf-life; it will come to an end at some point.
It's bad enough that we have massive hysterical delusions about this very limited reality already, never mind an intentional ignorance of what God has revealed about Eternity.
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