Gods rather clever. In fact He’s really clever – He’s like ‘the dude’ of cleverness.
God can take things like a lunchbox and multiply it like cells separating to feed 1000s of people.
He can take giant balls of gas millions of miles away and make them look cool
God can see a box of jumbled up jigsaw pieces and go ‘yup’ and have the jigsaw solved without touching it
He can make natural laws not work anymore – so go for walks on water, or kill off a thriving fig tree by getting verbally ticked at it
God can make metaphysical laws do His bidding too. I know we in the logic-analytical-camps don’t like the idea of God making a square circle, but God is the king bee of paradox, and the law of noncontradiction can also be his plaything
God can also make things that don’t fit – fit!
So God can make something that is both soaking wet, and bone dry in the same space n’ time. No He can’t you say? Well why not? Didn’t God set the parameters for wet, dry, space, & time?
This last point isn’t as theoretical as you might think. God is constantly mixing up something very like wet n’ dry – He’s constantly mixing the physical and the spiritual. The physical realm & the spiritual realm have shed loads in common anyway (inhabited by personal beings etc.) so the compatibility has a leg up – but then God kept on breaking through it with spirtual-pressing-on-physical-reality type Stuff: revelation, the law, prophets, the temple, angels, the covenant, Jesus (the ultimate physical-spiritual amalgam!), the Holy Spirit living in people etc. etc.
Then there’s the consummation of reality in God’s final Revelation 21-22 plan of bringing heaven down to earth and totally marrying the physical and the spiritual. Ever wondered why revelation is so totally mixed up with both natural and supernatural imagery? Because the lines between the two will totally disappear. It’s also why the Jesus & His Church have this whole bride / bridegroom thing going on. Marriage is all about the mystery of two being one without ceasing to be two while totally being one entity.
I really do think we make a hash of this reality sometimes.
Some Christians and Christian thinkers make our post-resurrection life’s totally physical. They make the key foci the church community, eliminating earthly suffering, religious habits, prayers answered using the mundane and physical resources etc. All good things.
Some instead make it totally spiritual, and aren’t happy unless something supernatural and non physical is happening. Their foci might be miracles, spiritual formation, inner knowledge, personal relationships etc. Again – good things!
But both ‘realities’ is just reality. God does, is, and uses both.
This came up recently when a group of youth workers I know discussed ‘spiritual gifts’ in 1 Corinthians 12. They took at totally supernatural approach and in doing so mixed up prophecy, message of wisdom, and message of knowledge.
Knowledge and Wisdom have been clearly seen throughout Paul to be a deeper levels of understanding & application of understanding in life. There’s nothing necessarily noetic about them – their just God given gifts of being wise, understanding, processing info, etc. And God can use these gifts in a variety of ways. This is just like administration can be a supernatural gift. It’s a God enhanced physical ability. God can use these gifts to do deeply supernatural things too.
Prophecy is often much more noetic (it reveals truths that could not have been known naturally). Although not always. What we call specific words of wisdom, or words of knowledge in some church circles much better fits the prophecy bill.
The art of being a post-resurrection Christian is twofold. Its seeing the supernatural in the natural, something we’re generally pretty good at discsusing; and harder still – it’s seeing the natural in the supernatural!
Do you think we’re going to freak out in heaven when someone floats off somewhere? No – that will simply ‘be’ the natural and supernatural – physical and spiritual properly mixed.
And we should to some degree be experiencing this evolving reality now. We are earth dwellers, yet we are totally citizens of heaven. You can’t be a citizen without some kind of physical relationship to it in blood/family or location. We are citizens of heaven, because we are born into it through Christ. Thus to some degree we have a physical-dwelling-type relationship to it right now.
So, life is not just about gettin’ your ‘Jesus goggles’ on and seeing the spiritual all around us. Post-resurrection life is about living the ‘well duh!’ reality of natural in the supernatural; and vise-versa. When someone comes up with the 10 bullet points of how to do this – let me know, I’ll pay you!
Discussion
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