As Christians, we believe this world to be one of
choices, situated somewhere between God’s presence and His absence. After our choices have been made, they are
crystallized, hardened like dried cement.
At some point in time, it was infected with sin and evil, bringing with
it the grotesqueness of rebellion such as temporality, confusion, death,
suffering and the reduction of our perceptual (and possibly sensual)
capacities. Unfortunately, we frequently
view these challenges as obstacles to our faith. And in a sense they are, but not in the sense
that we sometimes characterize them as. For
sin attaches it’s self first to the unseen, that part of our selves that is not
visible to this world, and only then is it expressed in the world that we can
see. So, what appear to be obstacles are
really the agents of perfection that work their way into our lives to compel us
to choose God’s way and not our own.
Temporality is really the shadow of eternity, suffering is really the
shadow of what we desire, death is really the shadow of life, and confusion the
shadow of reason.
First, this thing we call Evil, Sin, turns out to be
not some positive reality or entity that infects what God has created, it is
rather the floor of creation where we were meant to walk upon not stick our
faces down towards. The one that first
chose this relationship with what God created was Lucifer. He exchanged
Godly praise for selfish aggrandizement.
There was no creation of sin, but a choice to misappropriate the uses of
what was created, and this act was
sin itself. Acts are sinful, not what is
there to embrace.
We all know the rest of the story. Not only did one-third of the angels share in
this act, but we too are responsible for engaging it. This world is a testimony to it. But what exactly does this mean? If we are all depraved then what hope has
this left us with? If we live in this
shadow of what God has created, by our own choices, then how is it we were
saved from it in the first place?
Remember, the earth is God’s footstool.
If someone can reach down to scratch their foot when it itches, I
suppose it wouldn’t be a problem for them to pull us away from that footstool where
we are trapped. Of course, the price was
far more than we will ever know.
And yet, though we were saved, it seems even more
difficult to explain to someone how it is they need to be saved. How can one share with a shadow why it is
they need to be more than one? Pinocchio
knew he wasn’t a real boy because the world around him was a constant reminder
that all other boys are made of flesh and blood. But where is this reminder in our world? When all you see are shadows, how can one
distinguish between what is casting it and what is cast upon the ground? This is best illustrated by a story I heard
in a sermon by Ravi Zacharias. In it,
there was a man that was convinced he was dead.
No matter what someone told him, he maintained that he was
deceased. But on one occasion, a
physician managed to get the man to admit that ‘only living people bleed.’ Afterwards, the physician, using some
instrument, cut the man and demonstrated to him that he bled as well, which
should have established the fact that he was alive. But, this only led the man to alter his
concession to, ‘I suppose dead people bleed too.’
This is the dilemma we are faced with when examining
how it is one comes to the knowledge of God’s desire for them to be saved from,
and through, the shadow world. We, like
the man that by dwelling on the faulty doctrine of death was convinced he was
dead himself, have lost our consciousnesses to the shadows that we see
everyday. The real you and I have transferred our conscious experiences from the
world of light and three dimensional extension to the land of shadow, where
exists the two dimensional by-products of who we really are. And as such, our efforts must appeal to the
non-conscious bodies casting the shadows: We must shake and jar these lifeless
statues of nonbelievers until they catch a glimpse of who they should be and
either accept it or not.
And we too, sometimes, get caught up in this world of
shadows where we dwell and yet are not residents of. That is why we must remember that we are
limited in our experiences of what really is.
We see the rind and the ring, but not the road. We see the roots but not the tree. We see the man, but not the invisible
one. We see the physical and the
temporal, but not the mental and the eternal.
We see and speak about a world, but not the world. We are conscious shadows that have been
awakened to our selves and the world around us, but still we must sleep a
little longer, until others in our dreams are presented with that truth. It is funny that the soul is usually viewed
as some ethereal, misty cloud that resides in the pores of the body. If anything, it is the reverse. Our physical bodies are the shadows of truth
that reside in the corpus of the spirit, with which seeing God our savior is
the only possible medium of sensation.
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