Posts
When we flew to Kansas City recently for my brother-in-law's wedding, I noticed again how amazing the earth looks from way up there. I love to look down on the farms, seeing the streams and rivers snaking around the topography. The cars look like little bugs. The cemeteries are orderly with small specks lined up in rows. The farms make interesting quilt-like patterns.
Of course when you're down on the ground you can't see those patterns. You're too close. Life is like that, isn't it? We are too close to ourselves and our daily existence to see the quilt God is making out of it all. She is the craftsperson, the artist, who is putting together something beautiful. The pattern is obvious to God; but not to us. That's why the Bible tells us to trust God. She can see what's really going on from the perspective of heaven; we cannot.
What Scripture does is to give us an airplane view of life. It takes us up into the heavenlies where Christ reigns and shows us reality from his point of view. (cf. Eph. 2.6) Then it gently sets us back down on the earth and tells us to remember what we've seen from up there. Paul writes to the Colossian Jesus-followers:
3:1 Therefore, if you have been raised with Christ,
keep seeking the things above,
where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.
3:2 Keep thinking about things above, not things on the earth,
3:3 for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
If the Bible is wrong and there is no way to transcend our earthly viewpoint, then we are limited to a human speculation about the larger meaning of life. The Bible is there to give us to 'higher' viewpoint. Its message rises above our egotistical smallness to show us the largeness of God's purpose.
Perhaps that is why humans have always thought of God (or the gods) as being 'up there.' Because we instinctively know that there must be a loftier perspective on life than just the day to day cycle that ends in worm-eaten extinction.
As we learn and recite the Biblical Story we are able to be lifted up out of the hum-drum of quotidian existence into the Gestalt of eternal life.
