Reality 101 #10

The weed referred to in the story was a plant called a tare (see the last posting). When they first sprout, tares look just like wheat. It is only as the plants mature that the farmer would realize that some of what was growing in his field was in fact garbage. His employees suggested that it might be a god idea to pull the tares up, leaving the wheat with more room to grow. But the farmer understood that this was impossible. The crop had reached the point where the roots of the tares were intertwined with the roots of the wheat. You couldn’t pull up the one without pulling up the other. The only solution would be to wait until the crop matured. Then you could pull up all the plants and separate the good from the bad.

God’s ultimate purpose is to create free-will beings who will choose to live within the embrace of His perfect love and eternal joy. Not everyone will make this choice. We know that some of the angels choose to reject a life lived in perfect harmony and total intimacy with God. We also know that eventually a certain portion of the human race will make that same choice. It’s not that they want to go to hell, it’s that they ultimately will be unwilling to give up their independence.

All of which leads to this question: how can God create a universe where those who will ultimately choose to be with Him will not have to pay some of the consequences of those who will ultimately reject Him. And the answer to the question, apparently, is that it’s just not possible. We are trapped down here in a place that is far less than perfect where all of us are paying a part of the price for sin.

Aging, poverty, illness, loneliness, sadness, war, and anything else you can think of that is less than perfect is a consequence. All of these things are part of our world because of sin. We are all paying the price together. Some of us seem to be paying a little more and some of us seem to be paying a little less, but we are all paying that price together.

Reality 101 #9

All of which brings us back to the three-in-one God, which was where we started. God’s ultimate purpose is to create free-will beings who will choose to live within the embrace of His perfect love and eternal joy. That’s where we are going. That’s the point. And if you don’t keep that firmly in mind, nothing really makes sense.

If it sounds like I’m going all philosophical with you, I’m not. This point that I am making is one that Jesus thought was important. He used a simple story to make the point. Here is that story.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a farmer who planted good seed in his field. But that night as the workers slept, his enemy came and planted weeds among the wheat, then slipped away. When the crop began to grow and produce grain, the weeds also grew. “The farmer’s workers went to him and said, ‘Sir, the field where you planted that good seed is full of weeds! Where did they come from?’ “‘An enemy has done this!’ the farmer exclaimed. “‘Should we pull out the weeds?’ they asked. “‘No,’ he replied, ‘you’ll uproot the wheat if you do. Let both grow together until the harvest. Then I will tell the harvesters to sort out the weeds, tie them into bundles, and burn them, and to put the wheat in the barn.’” (Matthew 12:24-30 NLB)

Reality 101 #8

God is up to something in this universe, but what exactly is He up to? I would suggest that the only way to make sense of things is to keep the ultimate goal firmly in mind.

For instance, I might work up a great deal of sweat digging in the ground looking for a particular kind of rock. Once I found this rock I might take another rock and attempt to pulverize the first rock. Then I would build the hottest fire I could build and attempt to melt the pulverized rock. Once the rock was melted I would attempt to separate part of the liquid and let it cool. Once it cooled I would take it and heat it over and over again as I pounded it and shaped it. All of this sounds like a great deal of very hard work. Why would anyone subject themselves to such a thing?

You would be willing to do this work if you lived in primitive culture and you really wanted something made of iron. You would understand that if you had an iron plow, you could till soil in a way you never could without the iron plow. The end result would be much bigger harvests and greater comfort and security for your family. If all you are thinking about is the process, then it’s dirty, it’s hard, and it doesn’t make any sense. It is only when you understand the final goal that the whole thing seems worthwhile.

Reality, the actual lives that we have to live right now, will never really make any sense unless we understand God’s final goal.

Reality 101 #7

You might conclude that I am restating the whole positive thinking concept, which can be summed up by this famous proverb. “I once felt sorry for myself because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.” This is a good point, and the psychological technique can be very useful. I should always be looking for the blessing in everything and be thanking God for every bit of goodness in my life. And I should try to live without a life free from self pity.

That’s all well and good, but it is not the point I’m trying to make. What we are dealing with here is the fundamental nature of reality. Why are things the way they are? Why am I trapped in a world like this where I need to compare myself with others who have it worse than I do so that I can feel better about my life?

Why isn’t this place already heaven? Why is heaven a place I have to wait to go to? Why am I trapped down here? This is the issue that we are dealing with in this thread that I have titled, “Reality 101.”

Reality 101 #6

It’s almost impossible to understate how much of our satisfaction in life is based on the way we compare our situation with that of those around us. Let’s say that I am stuck in a really hard, dirty job that I hate. The pay is low, so all I can afford is an old mobile home with trashy furniture and an old junky car that barely runs. I would feel pretty dissatisfied with my life as long as I was living in America. But if you gave me those exact same conditions and transferred me to many parts of the world, I would suddenly start to feel pretty good about the ways things were going.

Your neighbors would notice your life and they would be very jealous of you. “You see that guy over there? That house he lives in actually has electricity and running water. He can even afford a car. Boy, has he got it made.”

I suspect that something like this is going to operate even in hell. There will be people in hell who will be saying, boy, this is really bad, but at least I’m not over there. It’s much hotter over there. Compared to them, I’m really not doing so badly.

Reality 101 #5

If I keep my health, have a reasonably decent marriage, live a middle class lifestyle, and die in my sleep when I am 82, people would think that I had a pretty good deal. The reason that they would think this is a good deal is that they know many people who have to live a harder life than this. Maybe they don’t keep their health, their spouse leaves them, and they have to struggle through poverty, loneliness, and pain. Comparatively speaking, my life seems like a good deal, but this is only truth because we are conditioned to have horribly low expectations.

Here is a really good deal. You’re born into a perfect world where you can get everything you need and want without doing any kind of work that you don’t enjoy just as much as you enjoy recreation. No one is ever mean to you; not even once. On the contrary, everyone you meet treats you with tremendous respect and great affection. From your first moments of consciousness your heart is aware of the touch of God’s presence and overflowing with eternal love, joy, and peace. Loneliness, fear, and pain are concepts you can grasp intellectually, but you’ve never experienced anything like that. So you go from day to day feeling perfectly satisfied and perfectly fulfilled and it never ends because your body never gets sick or begins to age. That’s a really good deal.

Reality 101 #4

So we are clear on this: our destination is a perfect place where we will be connected to God and to each other in much the same way that the person’s of the three-in-one God are connected to each other. We’ll never be alone, never need to be alone; we’ll live in perfect harmony with a constant awareness of perfect love being poured out in our hearts.

It that’s my destination, what in the world am I doing in a place like this? In a lot of ways, this place is a sort of an anti-heaven. Compared to heaven, the best that this life has to offer is absolutely horrible. Why am I here? Why do I have to deal with the struggles of this life?

Reality 101 #3

Because God is love, His is eventually going to give you everything that He can give to you and do for you everything that He can do for you. There won’t be one … single … thing … held … back. He can’t hold anything back. He doesn’t want to. He is love.

Your position is going to be one of great glory. You will be exalted. The wonder, the splendor, and the joy of that which is to come is literally beyond our capacity to imagine.

There is just one little catch. You have to choose to go to heaven. You have to choose to live in God. You have to choose to give up your un-connectedness and live in eternal union with Him. And ultimately, that means you have to joyfully submit your will to Him, so that can flow in perfect harmony with Him through all of eternity.

None of this could possibly happen without human free will. None of this could possibly hold any meaning for God is we were robots who were programmed to love Him. It has to be a free choice on our part. You might begin this journey (as I did) by choosing to avoid hell, but at some point you have to come to the place where you realize that God is infinitely beautiful and that you are going to let yourself fall everlastingly in love with Him.

Reality 101 #2

Most of us human beings live in a way that is the exact opposite of the three-in-one God: we are disconnected from God and from each other. That is to say that we are alone inside our own heads (and hearts) and that we don’t feel a constant outpouring of warm, sweet love flowing into our hearts from the hearts of those who love us.

Most of us think of heaven as a perfect place where we will be happy even as we continue our disconnected lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. I suspect that it would never even have occurred to God to create that type of a heaven. God has existed eternally in a state of connectedness; the persons of the Godhead have never been alone and have never lived outside of that warm and perfect flow of mutual love for one another. The only exception to this were those awful hours when the Son of God hung upon the cross bearing our sins.

So what kind of a vision of eternity would you expect the eternally connected three-in-one God to plan? Do you think He plans a heaven where you can decide when you want to visit Him, enter His presence from time to time, and then leave? Absolutely not! God Himself is heaven. Going to heaven means going to dwell in the constant flow of God’s presence and of God’s love. There will never be a time in heaven when you feel like you are alone – or that you feel like you need to be alone. And there will never be a moment when you do not feel the constant flow of God’s love directly into your innermost being.

If you want to sound pious and theological you could say that in heaven we will dwell in a state of perpetual bliss. If you want to put it into the common language, when we get to heaven we are going to shoot up the strong drug of God’s love and stay eternally high in His presence.

Reality 101 #1

God is a triune being, a trinity. If you want to take all of the theology about this an boil it down into the simplest possible language we could say that there are three people living inside one spirit body. These three personalities are perfectly wise, so they always flow in perfect harmony with each other. There can be no difference of opinion when all three persons always come to the same perfect conclusion whenever there is a decision to be made about anything.

As humans we tend to associate great wisdom with calm, relatively emotionless kind of a personality. God isn’t like that. The three persons of the Godhead are passionately in love with each other. Each person is constantly aware of the presence of the other two person and can constantly feel the warm flow of love from those other two persons. Because of this the three-in-one God lives in a state of endless, infinite bliss.

Although they don’t know it, people who take drugs are trying to feel the way God feels all the time.