Our Life's Task

In my previous post I layed out the idea of us having pre-existed in the spiritual dimension before we ever came to earth to be born in human form.  I believe there is a lot of evidence that this is a true portrayal.  Now I want to look at another dimension of this idea.

That dimension, mentioned in passing in the previous post, is that we not only pre-existed our earthly incarnation, but that we actively participated in the decision to enter the material world.  I believe that in our prior spiritual state we were part of the discussion about the stage we were in along our spiritual progression, what lessons we needed to learn, and what sorts of experiences we could use to learn those spiritual lessons.  I believe that we then participated in the decision as to where we would be born, at what time, and to whom, in order to give us the best chance possible to go through these tests and experiences and learn from them.

You've heard the saying, "I didn't choose my family, but I sure as shootin' can choose my own friends!"  Well, now I wonder if that is entirely true!  Maybe we did have a hand in choosing our family.  Oh dear!

All of us are at different places in our journey through life.  For many of you, these ideas may seem acceptable and true.  But for others they may seem really "out there".  Ideas like this open up dimensions to the spiritual world around us that we may never have considered.  Living in our scientific, material world, it is often difficult to conceive that there may be a whole other dimension surrounding us.  The writers of the scriptures and other ancient works had no such trouble.  To ancient cultures the spiritual dimension was as natural and real as the physical dimension.

I believe that our last couple centuries of living with a predominantly scientific, material mindset  has radically dimmed our perceptions of the spiritual domain.  As Christians we give lip-service to this domain, but do any of us truly believe that it exists?  Do we wonder about it?  Do we fantasize what it might be like?  Do we seek to explore this dimension?

Well, I offer some observations and conjectures of this dimension, perhaps opening the wee-ist of glimpses into the spiritual world around us.

You may or may not have picked up from previous posts that I believe quite strongly that history is heading pell-mell toward some sort of culmination.  Our time on this planet is limited.  Things cannot and will not continue to go on as they have.  There is coming a shift of some sort, a change in our world, a transition into another way of being.  I don't know what this will consist of.  I do not know what life will be like on the other side of the turning which is coming.  I do not know if this transition will be gradual or sudden, violent or benign.  It might be convulsive, or it might be smooth.

And I believe that we who are alive today have all participated in the decision to come be part of this transition.  I believe we came to earth deliberately to facilitate this shift.  I believe that we live in a tremendously exciting time in Earth's history, and that we have a very important role to play in this time.

There are many among us who are very in tune with God and the spiritual plane.  I mentioned those who have experienced NDE's in my last post.  There are many others who are intuitive, who can hear God's Spirit speak clearly, who receive messages and visions from the spiritual dimension.

Over and over I am reading and hearing that the message from God to us in our day is that we are tremendously privileged to live during this time period.  We are especially gifted and equipped to aid in the coming transition time.  Many of us are highly evolved spiritual beings who have made the decision to come to Earth at this time for very important tasks.

I don't know, dear reader, how you are receiving all of this!  For myself, I feel incredibly encouraged and heartened to contemplate these sorts of things.  When I read these kinds of encouraging messages from beyond I feel excited; bring it on!!

We each have our part to play in the coming events.  Our part may be small; there may be a few of us called to play large parts in whatever is coming.  But I believe that for all of us, we are called to live lives of integrity, love, hope and compassion; we are called to reach out to each other, to depend on each other, to live in community with one another.

By the way, the whole concept of sin, that great bugaboo of the Church which messes up so many minds, is linked to this concept.  The clearest definition of "sin" is:  missing the mark, or falling short.  In this context, "sin" can be seen as missing our life's task, falling short of the goals we came to this Earth to accomplish.  It is so easy to get sidetracked by the agenda of this world we live in.  It is so easy to get sucked into the fear and anxiety which prevail in our culture.

Our Life's Task, number one, is to live without fear, to live in trust!

Our Life

The other day a young man got onto my bus wearing a t-shirt which read:   A Soul is a terrible thing to waste.  I asked him the background for this.  He said it had sounded deep; he liked that. I kind of gathered that he had not thought deeply himself about this saying!  But it did make me think.

A soul is a terrible thing to waste, eh?  Is that the same as saying that a life is a terrible thing to waste?  Quite universal is the sense that our lives carry some sort of meaning, that we are here for a purpose, that we have tasks to do, work that needs accomplishing.

I once heard a friend talk about working on a task, some emotional or spiritual issue.  She kept feeling that maybe she could "cheat" death by not finishing this task too early!  Like, if I complete my work, I will transition to the other side, I will die.  I am not sure this is true, but it shows that we have this sense that we have work to do in our life on earth.

Let's carry this a step further.  What if we participated in the process of deciding what that work would be that we are to accomplish while incarnated on earth?  Is that so far-fetched?  There does seem to be growing evidence that we are pre-existent souls, that we existed in a spiritual dimension prior to our coming to earth to be born.

First, there is direct evidence this was true of Jesus.  If he is our forerunner, the one we follow,  "the firstborn of many brothers and sisters..." (Rom 8.29), "the author. . . .of our faith" (Heb 12.2), can we not use Jesus' experience as a blueprint for our own?  The scriptures tell us he ". . . emptied himself, . . . being born in the likeness of men." (Phil 2.7)

The second source of evidence that we are pre-existent souls, is from many who have come back from the other side, in the form of NDE's (near-death experiences) who have mentioned experiences similar to Jesus'.  The most vivid experience I have read is probably Betty Eadie's.  She talks in her book, Embraced By The Light, of meeting with her Spirit friends, guides, angels, and being shown what her task had been during her life on earth.  She was then shown that she was not yet done with this task, and was encouraged to return to complete it.

When she returned to earth she went through an "emptying", an erasing from memory of these conversations with her "support group" in heaven.  She returned just like each of us do when we are first born; we carry with us no memory of what our heaven-assigned task is for our lives.  We then spend most or all of our life learning what this might be, and doing what we feel we are "called" to do with our life.

I do not believe it is essential to our well-being (salvation?) that we believe we existed prior to our incarnation.  But, what it does, is to add an entire layer of seriousness to our lives.  So many people wander through life aimlessly with no sense of purpose.  If we believe we came here deliberately, that we chose to come to earth as material beings for a specific purpose, it can profoundly change our outlook.  It can begin to give us direction, a reason to be, something to do.

A popular poster in the nineties read, "We are not so much physical beings having a spiritual experience, but rather spiritual beings having a physical experience."

book review: The End of Days

The End of Days, by Zecharia Sitchin, is a very interesting book!  Sitchin takes knowledge from various sources and puts it together in unique ways.  The results are often astounding, intriguing to be sure, insightful, and seem to make a lot of sense.

The sources of his ideas:  ancient writings, including the Bible; archeology; science, etc.  Sitchin appears quite expert at reading and interpreting ancient pictographic languages.

His core idea:  that extraterrestrial beings who live on a planet named "Nabiru" have come to earth for periods of time in the past, and are actually the objects of many ancient stories of "the gods".  Sitchin names these beings, "Anunnaki".  The Anunnaki have ruled various parts of earth for long periods of ancient history.  They have argued and fought with each other, often using humans as instruments and certainly victims of their wars.  They came and went between Nabiru and Earth via space travel, and used some type of aircraft to travel around on the Earth.

The planet Nabiru is in an elliptical orbit around the Sun.  The apogee of its orbit is way beyond the orbits of the planets we know about, and one orbit takes several thousand Earth-years.  It is when it nears the Sun (perigee) that its orbit comes close to that of Earth, and is the period of time when most of the coming and going of the Anunnaki takes place.

Zecharia Sitchin's ideas throw light on a lot of the unexplained events of ancient history, including the connections between Mayan and Egyptian cultures, a puzzle I have long wondered about.  The Anunnaki are the ones who built the great structures, such as the pyramids.

Sitchin finds a lot of clues to the existence of the Anunnaki in the Bible as well as other Ancient Near East writings.  He often treats these ancient "myths" as real, factually true.  Generally, when scholars come across events that they can't explain, they chalk it up as "myth", pure story or allegory, but certainly not factual.  Sitchin's treatment is quite refreshing.

A bit of literalism which I found really intriguing is from the Hebrew scriptures.  The Hebrew word translated "God" in English, is Elohim.  The im ending in Hebrew denotes plural.  And yet nowhere do you find Elohim translated "gods".  It is always "god".  This is something I have wondered about ever since my own study of the Biblical languages.  It seems so inconsistent.  Every other Hebrew word with an im ending is plural except for that one word.  Why?  

Sitchin treats it as it is written, plural!  And I like that.

The one complaint I had reading this book is that there is way too much information.  In order to make his points, Sitchin takes an absolutely massive amount of information and condenses it down.  I often had to wade through pages of obscure writing to come to some fascinating conclusion.  Obviously the author has done a tremendous amount of research and knows what he is talking about.  But being relatively new to the subject if was often a bit much for me.  But he is convincing!

His conclusion:  that the end of days will be the return of the Anunnaki to Earth.  Sitchin does not agree with the current speculation of this happening in the year 2012.  He points out some inconsistencies with the mathematics of how scholars have arrived at this date.  But he does believe it is coming in the next century or two.

My conclusion:  the book is certainly worth reading.  Zecharia Sitchin takes seriously the ancient writings.  He in no way discounts the Bible.  Everything he says is consistent with the Biblical writings.  And he does not treat the Bible in a vacuum; he looks at it in the context of other Ancient Near East writings and archeology.  He also does not use the other information to try and "prove" the Bible.  He simply uses the Bible as equally valid stories of events.  His assumption is that what we read in the Bible happened.  It tells a certain story of certain peoples and events in history.  Putting that alongside the stories from other sources of other events and peoples gives us a more full picture of ancient history.

Sitchin has written a whole series of books, and I had the impression several times while reading this one that he has taken information gleaned from a life-time of research and writing and put it together around this one topic, the end of days.  It has certainly made me think and question some of my own interpretations of prophecies and knowledge about the end-times.

Check it out!

scriptures

So if the Bible is not "the Word of God" (see previous post), what is it?

And please, please, please:  DO NOT MISREAD ME!  I am not in any way, shape or form demeaning or undermining the Bible.  I revere the holy writings; I love the scriptures.  I have been a scholar of the Bible all my life.  

I am merely trying to put scripture into its proper perspective.  I believe that two thousand years of Church history has elevated the Bible into a place never intended by God.  As I have said in previous posts, too many Christians have become worshippers of the Bible instead of God himself.  Jesus condemned that in the Bible-worshippers of his time, and I believe has the same attitude to Bible-worshippers of our time as well.

So, some thoughts on the scriptures.  My pastor last Sunday in his sermon held up the Bible, referring to it as the inspired Word of God.  I cringed inside.  You know my position on "the Word of God" from my previous post.

And "inspired"?  2 Timothy 3.16, if I am correct, is the one verse which speaks to the "inspiration" of the writings.  "All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for. . . ."  But think about that, my Christian sisters and brothers.  What was the "all scripture" which the author was referring to?  What "scripture" existed in the time this was written?  The only scripture to which this could possibly apply was the Hebrew scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament.  The Church teaches that this applies to the entire Bible.  But that is not Biblical!  Arguing from the Bible itself, you can only claim inspiration for the Old Testament.  Most of the writings which make up the Christian New Testament had not even been written when this letter to Timothy was penned.

So, I still view the scriptures (including the New Testament) as special writings.  I read them, study them, learn from them, understand God through them, etc. etc., just as I have done all my life.  But I view them a bit more realistically than I have before!

I once heard a respected Biblical scholar say that the Bible is a Church document.  When I first heard this phrase, I was a bit threatened, taken aback.  And that was many years before I came to the understanding of the scriptures I have outlined above.  But I truly think that it was that statement which started me down the road to truth.  After all, I still remember it!  Decades later.  And that is something for a greybeard like me!

Yes, a Church document.  It was the Church who put together the scriptures as we have them today.  This process began around 300-400 AD.  But even in Reformation times (1500's) there was still room to argue for the inclusion or exclusion of certain writings.  The official Roman Catholic Bible contains books that Protestant Bibles do not.  And there are other Hebrew writings which the Jewish people would accept more readily than we Protestants.

In other words, there are writings which were being circulated among churches which were excluded from the official Bible.  Once this decision was made, often those writings were destroyed.  Many of the discarded writings are beginning to come to light in our day.  And the Church is still threatened by them; they seek to keep them under wraps and prevent their wide distribution.  Is God trying to say something by allowing all these "heretical" writings to be rediscovered?

More thoughts on the scriptures:  I believe that God speaks to us through the things which have been written.  But I do not believe that the Bible is the only way God speaks to us.

I believe that God can and does speak today in words which are just as "inspired" as any we find in the Bible.  I don't think God is any different in the present than he was in the past.  He still works in the same way, still speaks in the same ways.

The scriptures, especially the "inspired" ones (the Old Testament), began as oral tradition, not written.  God's Word is alive, active, etc.  Once it was written down it became static, unchanging; not the dynamic, alive thing that the Word is.  Is it coincidence that the Old Testament prophets pretty much disappeared from history around the same time that the Old Testament scriptures were written down?  This happened around 500-400 BCE.

And what does the fact that the scriptures come out of an oral tradition mean?  Does knowing that information and truth was passed on orally change anything for us?  In our current society we emphasize the veracity of written documents; "a man's word" is not worth as much as his signature on a document.

Putting the Bible into its proper perspective also helps with some of the current-day misuses of scripture.  The Bible was never, never, never intended to be either a science text-book, or a history book.  It is a worship document.  It details the story of God's dealings with humans.  When the Bible is used to try and force an artificial view of the beginnings of this planet and life on it, it is a grossly sinful misapplication.

And history:  the Bible records a very specific history: that of his dealings with his people.  It is not intended to be a comprehensive history of the entire world.  It records only a small slice of time and looks at a narrow slice of human society.

But once again, I come back to my "vision".  Even with all my frustration over the gross misuses and misapplications of scriptures in modern-day Church, I still have to trust that God is overseeing all of us in love.  He loves us in our foibles and our feeble attempts to grow in understanding of just who he is and who we are.

The Word of God

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . .And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory. . ." (John 1).

"For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart." (Hebrews 4.12)

"Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse!  He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war.  His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems; and he has a name inscribed which no one knows but himself.  He is clad in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God."  (Revelation 19.11ff)

Please, do me a favour!  If you ever hear me refer to the scriptures as "the Word of God", stop me.  Since seeing the connections in these verses I cannot view "the Word of God" as mere black marks on a page.  "The Word of God" has to be something more than a book.  It is alive, dynamic, active.  Scary, even!

And seeing "the Word of God" this way raises some questions:  Has God's Word been spoken on earth in ways other than that which the church proclaims?

For example, China.  Having a son live in China for five+ years has opened my eyes to this huge group of people, their vast culture, their immensely long history.  Has God just ignored them?  Or is there a possibility that his Word has come to them in ways we are unfamiliar with?  And we could go on and on.  The Americas pre-European invasion.  Africa.  Other parts of Asia.  Etc.

I know that I myself am responsible for responding to the Word of God as it comes to me.  I am not responsible for any others' responses.  But I certainly do like to contemplate the possibilities!

I am coming more and more to believe that the so-called exclusivity that exists in Christianity belongs not to the scriptures themselves, but to the Church.  It is the Church which wants to be the only path to God. I no longer believe that the scripture teaches that.  I think there are allowances for other appearances of "God's Word", in forms other than what I have been taught.

For more on my view of the scriptures, the Bible, see my next blog!

Reflections on The Vision

Well, it has been over two weeks since I posted my vision on this blog. I guess it is high time to satisfy all of you who are sitting on the edges of your seats waiting to find out what the vision is all about, eh?!!!

I offer four reflections, indicated by underlined words.

The overall message to me is that the Church has taken the place that Law/scriptures had for the Jewish people prior to Jesus' coming. As it says in Galatians 3.24: ". . . the Law was our custodian until Christ came . . ." I think in a very similar, parallel way, the Church has been a custodian, a guardian if you will, of God's people. I see this as having begun, of course, in first-century Palestine, with Jesus' followers, in the aftermath of his time on Earth. It has lasted until the present day.

Another strong message in this vision is that the Church is a human institution. Granted, the Law as originally given by God was not, at least not in the same way that the Church is human-made. The Law originated with the commandments given to Moses at Mount Sinai. But, the people had made of it a human institution. The Law had taken on so many extra constructions and provisions, that it needed a specialized body of teachers (the scribes and pharisees of Jesus' day) to understand, interpret, and teach. And I think it was this, the human additions, that Jesus reacted to so strongly during his time on Earth.

In the same way, the Church has taken on much more than certainly Jesus intended while with his disciples. It has taken on a life and character of its own, to be defended, promulgated, expanded, built-upon, etc.

Now this is not all bad. I think the vision I received is saying this. The Church has played a role through history of caring for peoples' lives. And we should not be too quick to jump to judgement over this role. Everyone knows that the Church has not been perfect; there have been many faults in its makeup. Much evil has been done in the name of the Church throughout history. But even so, it has had a role to play in human society.

This role for the Church is time-limited; it will not last forever. In fact, some see the Church's role as all but irrelevant already, perhaps having come to an end mid-twentieth century or thereabouts. And in response many have abandoned ship; they have left the Church and are pursuing spirituality and religion outside of organized Religion. I see nothing wrong with this, and strongly encourage people to seek the Divine, to seek God, in whatever way is meaningful to them.

As I said in an earlier post, I myself continue to be amazed that I am still participating in this fading institution we call Church. I have been very critical of it all my life, and usually outspoken in this criticism! My vision cautions me to be a bit more careful with this criticism. The Church has played an important part in western society throughout history and is not all bad!

But, Church is human. It has never been, and certainly is not now, perfect. It has made many mistakes. It has left many damaged and injured people in its wake.

One other reflection: Since the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the scattering of the people in 70AD, there have been no sacrifices offered in the Temple in Jerusalem. And sacrifices were the center of the Law. It was in the offering of sacrifices that people encountered God. It was in the blood that YHWH spoke to his people. And all of this came to an end in 70AD. We still have the Law written, but it is not fully practiced.

If my interpretation of the vision is accurate that Church plays a parallel role to Law, what does this say? That the Church's time is limited? There is an end-point toward which we are moving? That there will come a day when Church will cease to exist?

I am not sure about all this. I do feel that history is moving toward some sort of culmination, that our time is limited on this planet. Is this part of the message of the vision?