Yesterday, someone noticed that I didn’t have a full equivalence between the Bible study of Ephesians 1 and Pageau’s discussion of the various levels. Paul’s letter had three levels, but Pageau only gave us two — cosmic and worldwide. The personal level was missing. Until the next two chapters, which we will examine in this…
Tag: above and below
Scales of Balance
An adjunct to the Radix Fidem community Bible lesson this week discussed how Ephesians 1:3-14 views the work of God on three levels. How do we know Christ? Because the Holy Spirit lives in our hearts and glorifies Him as our Lord. How do we know the Father? Because Christ is His Son and our…
Decorate or Die
Pageau’s book gets more and more challenging to comprehend. It shows up in how his writing is sometimes hard to follow. How do you say these things in a language that resists the very existence of Eternity? We discussed how, in Hebrew thinking, time and space are opposites. We’ve established that they must remain in…
Balance and Truce
Pageau’s book is laid out in tiny little short chapters for a very good reason. The material points you to a radical shift in mythology, a completely different worldview. It takes time to absorb that. If you buzzed through it in just a few day, I would suspect you didn’t understand it. His first long…
Nature of Evil
In the Bible, good and evil are inherently contextual. The context is us; it applies to us alone, not the whole universe. In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that the Bible doesn’t use the word “evil” the way we do in English. It is not an absolute quality, but limited to the context. When God says…
Cosmic versus Absolute
Starting around Chapter 44 of Pageau’s The Language of Creation, I believe the author stumbles just a bit. This was not a rational reaction; when I read it, my heart felt a little disturbed. It was not because of what he wrote, but something he left out. Whether it was lack of knowledge or simply…
Absurdity and Purpose
We should keep in mind that the chaos of time and the safety of space in Pageau’s exploration of Hebrew thinking is not as simple as evil versus good. Each has its place; each is appropriate at some time and place as a primal divine operation. So the next pairing is that time is associated…
Pageau and Meta-prophecy
Pageau continues with a couple of specific prophetic passages in Scripture, showing how the symbols explained so far can give meaning to perplexing revelations. In the case of Daniel’s vision of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue dream, we see the confused image of the statue that was not all one material, but a hybrid of various substances. It…
Discretion versus Confusion
In the Hebrew culture, the concept of holiness and purity was mostly a matter of separation. Something or someone was pulled apart from the common, high traffic use and reserved for God alone. This carries forward from the previous lesson on Pageau’s book in which we talked about the mixing of the flood and simplicity…
Formation versus Transformation
In Chapter 36 of The Language of Creation, Pageau says something very important for us to catch. The modern western world is fundamentally utilitarian and materialistic. Our instinct is to inject that into everything we think, do and say. It infests our struggle to understand God’s Word the way He intended. This mental frame of…