6.3 Engage with Containing God
© 2015 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
All Christians who have read their New Testaments are aware, maybe more than they realize, of the innumerable statements in the Bible saying that personal deity, whether God or Christ or the Holy Spirit, lives or would live inside of us or inside of some part of us. Yet this awareness has been for most, including ourselves, quite hazy, being mixed with a very definitive picture of a “God” far away from us and far “above” us and a Savior primarily back then, up there, and someday. And always, the definitions of God people hold in their minds, a very specific definition of a high heavenly Being emanating lights and perfections, prevail over any vague reference to this same “God” being inside of us.
Defining God
What is God?
You know, this is a question that few have ever asked. Of course, to define is to measure, to reduce something down to its essence, to separate that thing from all other things. And that’s the problem. We cannot and ought not to define God, even though every one of us holds a very specific definition of “what is God,” though we may never have put it into words, a definition that rules everything.
But God gave us, not a definition of Himself – in fact, if you will look through the Bible, you will realize that God takes great care never to “appear” in any definitive form – but God gives us a description of Himself.
Defining Man
A man. Yes, God gave us one description of Himself: a man of flesh and blood, born of a woman, of our same kind. “He that has seen Me has seen the Father.”
BUT! What, then, is a man? – The image and likeness of God.
So – we cannot know what God is without looking at a man, and we cannot know what a man is without looking at God! It’s crazy, I know, but this is what He has done. However, we must admit that Alexander Pope was telling us the truth. “Presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind is man.”
God Is Invisible
Just after saying to His disciples that they were seeing the Father when they looked at Him, Jesus said something else that also made no sense, something few have pondered. These things I have spoken to you in figurative language, but the time is coming when . . . I will tell you plainly of the Father (John 16:25).
If I knew how, I would convince you of the reality I am about to share, even if the only way I could do so would be to lay down my life for you. Everything in creation including everything “about” God in the Bible is all figurative, that is, a description of God’s attributes, but never God Himself. God is invisible.
God Seen
EXCEPT! – Inside all the realms of heaven and all heavenly glory and wonder, and inside all the realms of the physical throughout the far reaches of space, God is seen visibly, God – as He IS, the Father – plainly, in one time and place. The walk of Jesus through the Atonement, from the beginning of Jesus’ prayer in John 17 to the ascension in Acts 1, is the one and only visible appearance of God in any realm of creation.
This walk of the Atonement is not something Jesus or God “did”; it is not something reflecting certain attributes of God. This walk of the Atonement IS the Heart of God ripped wide open for all to see.
Paul’s Gospel
There is nothing figurative in the Walk of the Atonement, nothing that “represents” God. The Walk of the Atonement is God literal, God made visible, God seen and known and touched.
BUT! We must face Paul’s gospel head on. Paul claimed that, inside this ripping open of God’s heart, the Father made visible, there are you and I. Paul claimed that you and I are inside of God-Revealed, God-Seen, God-Known.
Here am I, I and the children whom You have given Me (Hebrews 2 – the loudest words in the universe).
An Angel or a Man
Your definition of God rules your life and all of your future.
God does not allow us to define “what is God,” even though most Christians have done so. And the awful truth is this: the response of almost all to “what is God” contains, at its core, the words of the serpent in the garden. As incredible as it sounds, most Christians believe that the serpent, the highest of heavenly beings, spoke the truth. But God has appeared as He is through what we can call the description of a story. God appears as a man walking a path.
Here is my description of God, a description that rules how I know Him.
Describing God
– God always reveals Himself through weakness, swallowing up into Himself all that we are including our sin and rebellion, becoming us in our present state, limiting Himself by our weakness. Thus, carrying us inside Himself, stumbling and falling along the way, He arises out of death into life, ascending on high, and we in Him. –
Thus the Man, Christ Jesus, is God revealed.
This God-Revealed, in the movement of time through space inside of heaven/earth, is God AS HE IS in His state of glory. God did not “stoop” from His exalted state to show Himself in this way. This is God’s exalted state; this IS who and what He is.
Definitions
Remember the lesson on word definitions and on using words to communicate.
I have been using a word to convey to you a certain meaning that I hold in my mind. The problem is that you may have a different meaning for that word. – God. You see, this lesson is titled “Engage with Containing God.” Okay – what is inside of you? And how? And why? And where?
I am finding that a big part of the emphasis arising in me as I write about engaging with God is the blowing apart of the false.
False Paradigms
Based upon the theological foundation that the serpent spoke the truth in the garden flows two (among many) false paradigms concerning the how, where, and why of this What inside of you. The first paradigm is that the What commands and you, a completely separate entity from whatever the What is, obey. Inside this paradigm is the ridiculously nonsensical statement: “Get out of the way so that Jesus can be seen and not you.” The second paradigm is that this What wants to do good things for you.
At the heart of all false paradigms is SEPARATION, the tree of the knowledge of GOOD and evil.
Natural Simplicity
Here’s the truth. We have so conjured up a caricature in our minds of “God in heaven,” a caricature that really is nothing other than the greatest of heavenly beings pretending that he is what God “looks like,” that we have been incapable of seeing God even though He appears, visibly, in front of our eyes all the time.
Whatever you do to the least of these My brethren, you ARE doing it to Me. (Jesus was not speaking figuratively here.)
Being filled with all of God, a God filling every particle of who and what we are, and revealing this God as He IS to all, is simply the normal, average, everyday meaning of what it is to be a human.
Blasphemy
Here is our problem. Inside the context of this world, inside a Christianity that uses an angelic appearance to define “God,” inside this stage in which God is proving Himself in all that He speaks, being a normal everyday sort of human is BLASPHEMY.
And they will kill you for it.
And so, as you engage with this God who fills you full with all of Himself, I have one word of counsel for you. BE rooted and grounded in LOVE.
– KNOW the endless extent of the love of Christ filling you full, a LOVE which passes all knowledge.