I fall to sleep early because during the week I have to get up early. I keep the same schedule on weekends. This sometimes means I awake around midnight and then return within a few minutes to dreamland. But this morning not so. On the radio—a station out of Boston—was a talk show featuring a hypnotist. That in itself was no big deal but the late night host commented that under hypnosis he revealed two past lives. That’s it! I’m up—for now.
One night sometime ago, the radio had been left on to an XM “Old Time Radio” channel. Around midnight a sat up abruptly in bed to listen to a door creaking on its hinges and I immediately assumed someone was in the house. I was focused with panic as to what my next move should be when my ears found the radio speaker. The program “The Shadow Knows” was being featured in our bedroom in the middle of the night and I nearly went cardiac because of it. But I prefer “The Shadow Knows” to re-incarnation discussions any day—or night.
One more thing. I am scheduled to preach back to back Sundays a few weeks from now; so, I best get my heart and mind in gear, but I am finding this—for now—difficult. I am musing over the mystery of Godliness [I Timothy 3:16] or for that matter: The mystery of God, Colossians 2:2; The mystery of the Gospel, Ephesians 6:19; The mystery of God’s wisdom, I Corinthians 2:7; The mystery of the resurrection, I Corinthians 15:51; or just the total mystery of how God moves and loves His people, Romans 11:25.
And in case you think, you know what this all means, trust me, you don’t—no more than I do. The world is seeking to explore the unknown frontiers of not just the ocean’s depth and outer space but any future life. Beneath the surface of these searches lies one of the greatest and most mysterious frontiers of them all—the human psyche and its relationships with self, others, and yes, God!
Doctors, scientists, scholars of the Faith do have some knowledge but not complete.
Can I go directly to my interest here? Complete knowledge of God or God’s marvelous creation would make God less in the eyes of the genius who figured Him out. To know Him complete is to make Him finite. Modern man outside of religion for decades has been trying to explain God away as a religious phenomenon beyond the scope of true knowledge but without success because one mystery figured out reveals another and another and the course of knowledge is as deep and wide as universal space itself or as eternity.
Consider Ephesians 2:7. The knowledge of God and our relationship with Him, the expressions of His love and grace according to this verse will be ongoing forever. Now, that makes sense to my mind. An eternal God takes forever to love. It is quite unlike all the gifts I have received over the years for Christmas. On them, my interest has waned and dissipated. When a child my presents never made it 12 months to the next Christmas. Everything but God—everything manmade—in my life has been so, so, temporary, not only in terms of its usefulness or its functionality—I broke stuff, often enough or outgrew it—but in terms of its interest. I simply bore easily, I guess.
But not when it comes to God! Not when it comes to His grace. But a question? Is His grace as infinite as it is eternal?
Huh?!
Is there dimensions to Divine grace? A kind of width, depth, length— and breadth? Ephesians 3:18. Four-dimensional grace? Can we be so sure what God will offer us next because He loves? Can we be so sure who He loves and who is excluded? I know the theology. I am familiar with the creed and I own it, too, but I must admit that God’s love far exceeds my microscopic one cell, amoebic, approach to comprehending it.
Re-incarnation? Do you want to relive this life?
Oh God! No! I want the eternal Christmas around Christ, my Savior, that only an eternally loving God can give while He shares whatever He has for me from knowledge to life itself.
Hmm! Think about it.
