Paul’s writings are, if taken seriously, some of the hardest things in the Bible to understand. Ironically, there’s not much we have to do regarding the things we don’t understand. Like being seated in the heavenlies with Christ. No problem, I’ll still take a bath now.
The Bible is hard to understand because the part of us that we use to understand things is the part that the Bible says needs changed.
So we do what all churches, isms, and preachers are forced to do. We cherry-pick. Which is fine for starting the journey, but at some point we need to be on the main highway of our lives. Churches, isms, preachers, and doctrines are all side-roads.
One of the funniest (to the angels, anyway) things we do with all our questions about God is leave God out of them. We talk about him, read his scriptures, pray fervently to him, all to find out what we need to understand or do or get, and what he might or might not do about it. What about his side of the coin?
Say we need a place to live, and pray to God all week; collective time of our prayers being about an hour and a half. He also is looking at all the options, including all the options that those options will produce, and the changes those options will make, and what will be opened by thathappening. And not just him. The Spirit is translating our prayers into what really needed to be said, Christ is searching our hearts in concert with knowing the mind of the Spirit, our guardian angels are checking into all the external details and internal worries, the principalities are being informed (by courier angel) of what might happen and the principalities send back their opinions, spiritual deals are arranged, spiritual battles are waged, and the tentative results which might repeat the whole process are given to the spiritual entities that will open or close possibilities for us as to where to stay.
Total invested request time on our part: 1.5 hours. Total of invested spiritual time on God’s part: 1.5 years. And we imagine that since he’s all-powerful and all-everything else, that this doesn’t cost him anything? Like one second of his time doesn’t cost him more than ten years of ours? The toys in Santa’s bag have to come from somewhere; they don’t magically appear; which is why he has elves. There is no ‘magic’ in the spiritual world.
So when we suffer from something, we forget that God is suffering more. When we have to wait for something, God has to wait more. And he has arranged the balance between our world and the spiritual world such that no one on either side gets a free ride. Because being All-Everything does not mean that he ever takes a free ride either. It’s us and him. Together. Suffering. Enjoying.
So we go back to the Beatitudes to understand some of the path; the Main Highway for our lives. And it’s deep and involved. But it’s there nested in with the context of the whole Bible. Can we imagine God successfully weaving together 6 billion Main Highways that change every day? And must be correlated with all of past and future history? In both worlds? The fact that this creation is a balance between these two worlds is mentioned in the very first verse of the Bible.
The angst we experience when we don’t get what we want can be pretty sharp. God is not willing that any should perish. Yet his word tells us that people (a lot of them) will perish. Now that’s angst.
Is there a conclusion to all this? Absolutely not. But let’s consider what God’s side of our suffering is. Santa Clause can magically come down the chimney. God has to wait for us to open the door. And he’s knocking.
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