Predestination and Gnosis

Image by Sten

"All the days ordained for me 

were written in your book 

before one of them came to be."

~Psalm 139:16

Predestination, the belief that some people were predestined by God to be his people while some people were predestined not to be, and that this was decided before any of them were born or had done anything good or bad. It is a very difficult belief for human beings to like. It's a very thorny and seemingly unpleasant belief. It seems to strike at our views of fairness, and our hope that all people can be brought to the light in the end.

It also strikes at our ideas of freedom and autonomy, that we are free to make of our lives what we wish. Of course any freedom we could have would be very limited by our opportunities in life and by our knowledge. But we like to believe we have such freedom and such autonomy, however limited it must be. Even according to common sense, it must be quite limited.

Such an idea also is offensive to evangelism. Evangelism is based on the idea that you can convince people of God, that God is somehow the sensible choice that they are missing out on. It is like your friend was about to buy an air filter for his car, and you knew that he could get a better air filter for the same price. You simply explain the merits of the other filter in a rational manner and of course he will see that you are right. If God chooses people directly, your evangelism is totally pointless. Also, if godly knowledge is unworldly as John says, your evangelism is futile because you are trying to sell someone on the virtues of something they cannot sense for themselves. It is like you were saying to the guy buying an air filter, "this air filter has more charm and dandiness, and less kerfluffle." They would think you had lost your mind.

However, both the Old Testament and New seem to firmly back predestination, that everything, even your personality and will, are according to the intention of God. If anything, the New Testament seems to back it more emphatically than the Old, but both lend ample support to the idea. If you want some quotes, Romans 9:19-22, John 15:16-19, John 10:3, John 6:65 and there are many more. Romans 9 contains perhaps the most hard-edged, most unsentimental statement of that position. But in many ways it is most eloquently stated in John.

"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 

If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. 

As it is, you do not belong to the world, 

but I have chosen you out of the world. 

That is why the world hates you."

~John 15:18-19

On at least one level though, predestination is almost certainly true, and I will explain why.

Most people in the world are worldly people. They think about matters of the world, their hearts are set on matters of the world. This is because this is what makes sense according to our physical senses. We must understand this: being worldly makes sense. Being unworldly does not make sense according to the world we can see and taste and touch. Some things give us pleasure and we want those things, other things give us pain and we avoid these things. And so we occupy ourselves with what is necessary to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Knowledge of God is not one of the things that our senses can ever give us.

In fact, consciousness of God is completely unworldly - the Gnostics called this "gnosis," knowledge that our spirit gives us instead of knowledge that our senses give us. This knowledge comes from one source and can only be received from one source, God. That means that only God can give it to us, and He decides when or if that happens. Not me, not you, nobody else. The Gnostics however believed that this knowledge is intrinsic to human beings, or at least some of us. It isn't. It is intrinsic to God, it is his knowledge, that He shares or not.

Now, many claim knowledge of God who do not have it. They claim this for reasons of the cultural background they have or social milieu or personal ambition. Jesus usually points out the pharisees as being this sort of person, someone who is outwardly religious but whose heart is not actually set on God. Religious leaders almost invariably don't have it, because religious leaders have some degree of worldly power or influence and John tells us that the world will hate us and that the world rejects knowledge that comes from God. If people like what you say, you are probably saying the wrong things. If you are saying the right things, you will either be ignored or hated depending on how forcefully and publicly you are saying them. Because, from the point of view of the world and worldly minds, you are not making sense. Worldliness makes sense. Carnality makes sense, and the only question is how to manage it, not how to resist it.

What about fairness? Is it fair that God shows some of his secrets to some people and not others? We cannot ultimately know the plans of God or why He has done things one way and not another, but generally worldly people get their recompense in this world and do not seek and would not understand other recompense. Its like how some foods humans eat are poisonous to dogs: to humans peanuts and chocolate are food, to dogs they are deadly poison. To a deer, ivy is food, but toxic to humans. Humans in their natural state don't want this holy knowledge, the world is enough for them. If the world was not enough for them, then their condition would be abnormal. Perhaps they are ill, or perhaps they are set apart by God, but abnormal either way.

Predestination also comes into play in an attitude spoken of by some mystics: the idea that whatever happens to you, however bad it may seem, was meant for you personally by God for your betterment. That in other words all the experiences in your life, good or bad, were intended by God for you. This is a radical theology and the mind rebels against it as much as it does against predestination. How could God want someone to get cancer, much less His child?! But according to this point of view, everything, EVERYTHING that happens to a child of God has been dictated to happen directly by God, for his or her betterment. This is a hard saying. What about things you do to yourself? If they are bad, then yeah, you needed to learn not to do that. What if it was a terrible cruel thing that happened to you because of things beyond your power? According to this point of view, it wouldn't be happening to you unless God willed it, because God is not going to give over his Children to random pointless events. This is a very hard saying, hard to accept. I do accept it however.

The works I do in my Father’s name testify about me,

but you do not believe because you are not my sheep.

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.

I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish;

no one will snatch them out of my hand.

My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all ;

no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.

I and the Father are one.

~John 10:25-30

Now, you see me quoting the New Testament despite the fact that I am not technically a Christian. What does it mean to be a Christian in the modern understanding? To be a Christian, you have to believe in a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and I do not believe that. I do not believe that Jesus the man was the same as God. I don't think he believed that.

The word "one" can have two meanings. It has two meanings in the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith:

"Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One."

"Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is Unity."

Unity, not Trinity. So I interpret what Jesus was saying as that he had no will of his own. There was no separation between his will and God's will and that because of this, whatever he said was according to what God wanted him to say. Not that a man was God or ever could be, but that the man in fact had left the stage and the One God was speaking through him.

Because of the corruptions that took place to Christianity, I had tended to want to ignore the New Testament altogether and regard Jesus himself as suspect. While I still hold that no man could be God and that there is no Trinity and that the whole Jewish idea of a messiah is a mistake, the New Testament is still a treasure trove of knowledge. I don't think what happened to Christianity was ever Jesus' will, except in that his words would not have been carried down through the ages without an outer wrapper of worldly religion. Christianity the religion was the sugar coating, the pill casing that allowed the World to propagate the unworldly to those in the future who would be able to piece together what the real message was. If Jesus died on the cross for anything, he died for that. Maybe he knew that, maybe he didn't, but either way that was the real functional purpose of it.

I believe that Christianity was the pill casing as it were to allow unworldly knowledge to be propagated in a worldly world. Christianity itself then is to some degree a worldly vehicle: the knowledge concealed within is not.

The worldly vehicle burned people at the stake and killed and invaded and repressed people and so forth, and produced crazy televangelists who enriched themselves from widows and the poor and elderly. I am saying that this is not a bug of Christianity, it is a feature. Christianity exists for one purpose: to carry the information hidden in plain sight within it to be conveyed across the world. It is a worldly chariot for unworldly information that its own practitioners may be unaware of. It is like a virus carrying its DNA across the body, a container for propagating in the world texts whose real meaning is unworldly and not the same as they believe it to be. What Jesus died for, in actual fact, is this: that his words and that the Old Testament too would be propagated throughout the world, so that those who need it would find it. The vessel is not divine, but it is the only vessel that could achieve the purpose in a worldly world.

Mysticism

It is often stated that the goal of mysticism is "unity with God." This is a somewhat misleading description as it seems to express a state or condition that a human being has, a positive attribute belonging to a person. Moreover, and this has been one argument applied by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages in their persecutions of mystics, it seems to imply that the person has become God, as if such a thing were possible.

Rather I would argue that mysticism is more a matter of the removal of that which is not God, that which interferes with the will of God. It is more a process of self-erasure, but not a self-erasure into nonexistence but a self-erasure into real existence, of which the self-interested Self and the world is but a shadow. Mystics of various religions do speak of such things as "nothingness" and "emptiness," but this is more a negation of the illusory world of concepts than a negation of reality. The mystic in fact embraces real reality and real truth in this "emptiness," and it is human concepts about reality that are in fact empty of reality.

I should first speak of the concept of mysticism itself: the concept of mysticism and the state of being a mystic are not the same thing. They bear the same resemblance as a person to their shadow, a meteor to its impact crater, the soul to the personality, or of God to the World. Mysticism is a concept and therefore unreal, but it is possible that by my crude drawing of stick figures in the sand I might convey something of use, so lets go with that.

Secondly, there are two concepts that go along with the first but are not synonymous or in some cases necessary to the first, which are quietism and asceticism. Quietism is really more a group of associated ideas rather than one idea, a grouping of ideas originally formulated by its opponents, the Catholic Church and its Inquisition. They lumped a number of related and (to them) objectionable ideas under one roof and called it Quietism. As often happens, some thus labeled adopted it too. One form of quietism is simply the idea that silent contemplation is of more real spiritual use than ritual and ceremony or specific prayers like the Hail Mary or the Lord's Prayer. While this is part of the dictionary definition of "quietism," that is not in my opinion a more complete understanding of the word, though certainly very compatible with it.

To understand quietism more completely, you have to understand a recurrent idea either implicit or explicit in much of the Old Testament and in some of the New as well, which is that the ego and will of Man does not serve God. Sometimes God is depicted as using human will, desire and ambition, but the human will is almost invariably described as itself evil. The good man is depicted as he who submits to God's will, not his own. The Gnostics and arguably the Gospel of John took this to its logical conclusion: that the world itself and Man in it is evil or under the dominion of evil, which is to say Man in his natural animal state is such. Man's will, desire, and usually his action in the world. Quietism is one logical response to understanding this truth: Quietism in this form is the abandonment of self-will and the abnegation of the self generally. Many mystics like Marguerite Porete took this to its conclusion and spoke of the annihilation of the Self in God.

Asceticism might seem to be a logical companion to Quietism and mysticism, but it is actually quite separable. Even very mainstream Catholics have practiced asceticism, like Pope Paul VI, members of Opus Dei, and even some Protestants like High Anglicans. Asceticism is to some extent implicit in most monastic orders. The purpose of asceticism to mystics is actually quite different. There are two kinds of asceticism: natural asceticism and unnatural or hard asceticism. In natural asceticism there is no desire to harm the body or not provide it what it needs, but rather to reduce the providing for those needs to the barest simplicity and minimalism while still providing the body what it needs and avoiding undue pain. Hard asceticism would be such practices as sleeping on a bed of nails or wearing a hairshirt or cilice under one's clothes, denial of the body's needs, extreme fasting and so on.

For mystics, the avoidance of undue will or desire or excess interference in the natural functioning of the world is the objective, not the mortification of the body itself or the imitation of the sufferings of Jesus or the uses to which it is put in mainstream Catholicism for instance. That being the case, natural asceticism, simplicity and minimalism is the objective. It should also be remembered that food for instance requires the taking of life or at least injury to living things, and doing so in excess of real need would be an unwarranted imposition of human will upon the world. It is actually the human will itself and not the body that is the target of ascetic principles in mysticism.

Concerning the matter of human self-will, it is an interesting question what this human will even is. In the Gospel of John and in other parts of the New Testament and in parts of the Old Testament, it is stated that nothing whatsoever happens apart from the will of God. Nothing, at all, no exceptions. In the Gospel of John, it is stated that it is not at all your individual choice as to whether you will be saved, but it was decided before you were born and before you did anything good or bad in life. In Exodus 33 God says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion (in other words it is not up to us.) In Isaiah 45 it is said:

Woe to those who quarrel with their Maker,
    those who are nothing but potsherds
    among the potsherds on the ground.
Does the clay say to the potter,
    ‘What are you making?’

Romans 9 is essentially a consolidation of quotes from the Old Testament related to this sovereignty of God. Because of this, some Christian mystics believe that everything that happens to one, everything whatsoever good or bad that happens, is directly due to the will of God and is ultimately meant for our improvement. In this context then, what is human will? It is nothing more or less than our disagreement with God, our disagreement with what God has provided us. Sometimes God allows this inner dissent to manifest in action, and sometimes not, but this is much in keeping with a true understanding of what a human being truly has power over. A human being does not have unrestricted power over the world or his circumstances or anything in the world, or even over his own welfare, but he does have unrestricted power over his own internal will, his assent or disagreement, his yea or nay within himself. So for mystics of this bent, the abnegation of the will is merely to always say "yea" to God, which would mean saying "yea" to whatever circumstances you find yourself in since they are always given to you by God. So fundamentally human will would be then nothing more or less than the decision to turn towards or away from God. You may think you are deciding to eat that hamburger or buy that new car, but that is not fundamentally what you are doing.

The Kingdom

Image by Suvendra.nath

They will neither harm nor destroy on
all my holy mountain,

for the earth will be filled with the
knowledge of the Lord

as the waters cover the sea.

~Isaiah 11:9

People consider the idea of the "Kingdom of God" or the "Kingdom of Heaven" as something very esoteric and unearthly and make-believe. In fact in a sense nothing is easier than the Kingdom of God except for one fact: that humans are adamantly and habitually incapable of it. Nothing is more clear than that power corrupts human beings and they lack the wisdom to govern themselves or anything else.

Imagine that there is a cake on a table, and the table is surrounded by a lot of cranky people who are very hungry and they all want all the cake. Soon they take up fighting and cursing and picking sides, and soon the cake is trampled underfoot and they forget all about it in their pursuit of their anger. That's a lot like what this Earth is like.

A lot of religions, and a lot of forms of Christianity, have a very ethereal view of heaven. We are all sitting around with harps on clouds. In fact Christians often leave off the "Kingdom" part and just talk about heaven. Well the Kingdom part is what makes it heaven. How is the Kingdom different from here and now? Well, God is Lord of all that (reborn) Earth and His spirit reaches all of it. And humans will no longer make war on each other or destroy themselves or destroy other living things or lay waste the Earth because God will be manifestly omnipresent there, as Isaiah says. The knowledge of God will fill the Earth like water fills the sea. Many devout Jews say (and I agree) that the Kingdom will be almost exactly like here and now except that God will be enthroned over it. God's presence will not be a soft whisper that we must struggle to hear over the shouts of the World. Everyone who will be alive to rejoice in that Kingdom will hear it clearly.

Imagine a world where all shortcomings are seen clearly and everyone works to resolve them in a spirit of charity. Everyone has enough and everyone is content, nobody is subservient to another but all bow to God. Lands are not despoiled nor rivers polluted, no bombs or wars or crime. A Sabbath peace rests on the land on the seventh day, and people work in a spirit of joy the rest. That could be this world, but it isn't. What exactly is the difference between that world and this one? The kingship of God. Exactly what Isaiah was saying, that everyone would hear and listen to God. Only God is capable of governing the world wisely and to the general joy and uplift of all creatures.

And while this Kingdom cannot come to fullness now until the proper time (after the human-caused destruction of the Earth most likely,) a little piece of the Kingdom can come anywhere where people love and follow God. Every time that you do what God wills, you are bringing a little shard of paradise into existence. It's the same thing, the Kingship of God is the Kingship of God whether it is here or in that future condition of the righteous. Only then, we will be able to live it more perfectly.

Heaven is not an ethereal realm, it is the rule of God. It exists wherever God informs and oversees life.

Jubilee

Image by Robert Dodd

"The land must not be sold forever,

for the land belongs to Me (God).

You are only foreigners and

tenant farmers working for Me."

~Leviticus 25:23

Back when I thought the Old Testament was mostly evil, I though that the Book of Leviticus was pretty well the prime example of that. I have to say that my opinions are much changed since then (though some parts I still find questionable, like not planting two kinds of seed in one field - ever hear of mixed cover crops?) Some parts of Leviticus though are breathtaking in their economic and social justice aspects, and even in their ecological and environmental justice aspects. Unfortunately as regards the Jubilee, the Israelites seem to have abandoned those commandments the minute they arrived in Canaan. There is no evidence that Jubilee was ever observed in anything like the way that God commanded it in Leviticus. While the Sabbath Year was somewhat more likely to have been observed at least some of the time, I am not sure that the observance of this was very consistent either. It required a certain amount of faith to NOT plow or plant one year out of seven. This means you would have not only not had any food production for one year, but you would have had to wait for the second year's harvest to get any new food in your pantry. This in some ways was a re-enactment of the Israelites absolute dependence on God in the Sinai desert during the Exodus.

THE SABBATH YEAR

According to Leviticus, not only human beings were required to observe the Sabbath. The land itself had its own Sabbath, once every seven years. Back in those days, people did not know that letting the land lie fallow restored its fertility, but in retrospect we can see that this was in keeping with what we would call sustainable land practices. In this way the farmers would not wear out the land but would give it a chance to recover naturally from the depredations of farming. During the Sabbath Year, farmers could not plow or sow or participate in any of their normal food-growing activities. If their land produced something anyway, they could not store or sell it but had to eat it right there in the field or let it lie, and any animals or passersby could do the same in your field and you were not to prevent it. It is not clear to me how pastoral people (which were the majority of people in Judah at least) would observe this as they weren't farmers but herders of sheep and cattle and goats and such. I suppose in a sense they were always observing it as they typically would not plow or plant or harvest.

Lets digress a moment to consider what a Sabbath, any kind of Sabbath, is. Genesis said that on the seventh day the Lord rested and so we should, and that clearly applies to the rejuvenating effects of a Sabbath Year on the land itself, but that does not exhaust what a Sabbath means in its entirety. For six days human beings look at what THEY are doing, they are concerned and thinking about what THEY are doing, but on the seventh they observe what GOD is doing and their own action is forbidden. It is also clear that in certain contexts human work was considered unclean and human-worked objects were also considered unclean in certain contexts. This ties in to the iconoclasm of Judaism: no image and nothing like an image of the Lord was allowed, and even human words were kept at a respectful distance. When Moses met God, God simply referred to himself as "I am what I am." God's name is not truly Jehovah, it is referred to as (YHVH) and the true Name is not capable of being spoken by a human mouth. Even the name (YHVH) is circumscribed in ritual and prohibition, you are not truly supposed to ever really say that or any vowel substitution of it. You say "Adonai" which is the majestic plural of "My Lord." Many Jews prefer the name "Hashem" which simply means "The Name." This is an indication that human concepts, words, images, physical works, idols certainly, are considered contaminated as respects God. So the Sabbath Day is not only a day of rest, it is a day set apart to God which human action should not tread upon. The Sabbath Year is the same way.

In modern ecological terms, the Sabbath Year, a year in which the whole land of Israel is allowed to grow wild, is clearly beneficial to the recovery of the native plant and animal species as well as the soil. For human beings though, it is a year in which farmers can make no money and are entirely dependent on stored foodstuffs and what they can gather. It is a test of faith, potentially a very trying test of faith. There is very little doubt that people cheated on this, grew food on the Sabbath Year, and so undermined the whole ultimately beneficial process. So it is quite unlikely that the Sabbath Year was ever observed consistently over the whole of the Holy Land. Yet again the people of Israel, being people, being fickle and selfish as all humans are, forgot all about God once their personal conditions were improved.

THE JUBILEE YEAR

"Jubilee either means 'a trumpet-blast of liberty' or a "shout for joy" depending on the interpretation of the root. Israel's frequent defiance of the Sabbath Year commandments was nothing compared to their defiance of the Jubilee Year. There is no evidence that this was EVER observed once the Hebrews entered Canaan. Nowadays those Jews who still consider this a thing, say that the Jubilee cannot be observed because the Lost Tribes have not returned to Israel so there is no one to return to their ancestral lands. I am not sure where God ever allowed that as an exemption, but there is no doubt that the concept of the Jubilee Year is very drastically hostile to the way humans do business in general. So even if the Lost Tribes return, which will happen about the same time cows jump over the Moon, it ain't happening because people don't want it to.

After a week of sabbath years, 7x7=49 years, there was supposed to be a sort of super-Sabbath Year which was the Jubilee Year. A Jubilee Year was sort of total reset of everything: every member of every tribe was supposed to go back to the ancestral lands of their tribe, abandoning their land if it was part of the ancestral land of another tribe. Every debt was erased, every Hebrew slave freed. Those who had become huge wealthy landowners since the last Jubilee had to return whatever land belonged to those original landowners. Had this been done, the effects on economic injustice and social cohesion would have been tremendous. Instead of poor people being trapped for generations in unpayable debts, which often happened, they were relieved of their debts on the Jubilee Year. Instead of slaves being slaves forever, they were released. The members of a tribe would have had to get along in order to apportion land fairly that hadn't been home to some of them in their lifetimes. Imagine if in this country (America,) the reset button were hit every 49 years and the whole landmass of the country were fairly apportioned to its millions of households. Structures would have to be bulldozed, suburban sprawl turned to the plow, every household in America suddenly being apportioned an average of 20 acres in places they don't now live. It's incomprehensible.

The concepts of the Jubilee and the Sabbath Year are the ultimate in what we today call sustainability and permaculture (a culture capable of continuing indefinitely without destroying either human beings or the environment):

Socially, because debts are forgiven, slaves are freed, and familial and tribal bonds are renewed.

Politically because they reinforce the sovereignty of God

Ecologically because the fallow land refreshes itself and wild plants and animals and the soil have their chance to recover from human depredations.  

Economically because the poor get to start over and the rich are prevented from concentrating wealth at the expense of the welfare of the majority of people. 

Both the Sabbath Year and the Jubilee Year are based on a fundamental concept: if you live in the Holy Land, it's not YOUR land at all. It's GOD's land, which he is kindly letting you live on. You are a tenant, not an owner. This would be true of the whole planet too, but only the Israelites were talking to God, so they were the only ones to hear that word (which they tended to ignore.) This is a faith and a submission that seems too high for us to live, and was too high for the Israelites too, but is ultimately fundamental to the way the Earth and the human destiny on it should be perceived. What was the Flood but God taking back what is his? What will be the apocalypse if not God taking back what is his? We may think we own it and the devil may think he has dominion over it, but ultimately the landlord is going to throw out the bad tenants. The land is the LORD'S, not ours. And the Lord cares for HIS LAND no less than he cares for HIS people. His, not ours. The land like his servants are belonging to and in submission to Him.

This brings to mind the promise from Revelation:

"The nations were angry, and your wrath has come.
The time has come.. to destroy those who destroy the earth."

~Revelation 11:18

While neither the Israelites nor humans generally do a very good job of observing God's laws, the Sabbath Year and the Jubilee which was intended to express God's rule over the Holy Land is also a foreglimpse of the ultimate Kingdom of God as Isaiah in 2:2-4 and elsewhere shows us. A kingdom not ruled by human kings, but by God alone. But it is not only a vision of a future world, it is a challenge to us today to live as much as possible according to those commands.

Alignment

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?
Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care."

(The Greek literal translation is "apart from your Father.")

~Matthew 10:29

Skeptics often ask, "considering the unimaginable scale of the universe

(the universe is about 46 billion light years across and a single light year refers to a humanly inconceivable span of distance,)

and considering the immensity of Time
 
(the universe has been around for about 12 billion years and it is thought that there will still be some stars around in trillions of years barring the unforeseen,) 

why would God give one whit about what human beings do, or about human behavior? Doesn't God have other more important things to care about?"

This is actually a really great question.

We should not neglect the questions of skeptics because by unfolding the implications of them we can actually broaden our understanding of God. There are actually a number of enlightening ways we can unpack this question, more than I have time for, so I will try to stick to my point.

Human beings are indeed tiny and insignificant creatures, and there may be other worlds whose "sparrows" God is involved in just as much as the sparrows of Earth. There may be intelligent beings on other worlds that God is involved in just as much as he is with humans. Or there may not be such things, but in any case we feeble humans are surrounded by an immensity of space and an immensity of time, and we are brief candles that flicker and are gone so quickly that their existence at all might seem illusory. It is in realizing this reality that nihilism may set in, the idea that nothing really matters. This idea states that since we are tiny and meaningless in ourselves, that what we do and what we do to each other is unimportant.

Actually, the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, purportedly written by Solomon, contains an extremely emphatic expression of this idea of mortal insignificance:

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
    says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
    Everything is meaningless.”
What do people gain from all their labors
    at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
    but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets,
    and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
    and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
    ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea,
    yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
    there they return again.
All things are wearisome,
    more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
    nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
    “Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
    it was here before our time.
No one remembers the former generations,
    and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
    by those who follow them.

~Ecclesiastes 1:1-11

How then can I say that God does care and is involved in our lives, and cares what we do? That he even cares about the animals and plants that we Humans slaughter and uproot at our pleasure?

The first thing that must be understood is that God wishes that everything come into alignment with his loving will. Great and small, all of existence. Earthworms and humans and sparrows. The second thing that must be understood is that our world is not in alignment with God's loving will - far from it. In fact Jesus said in the book of John that the "prince of this world" is Satan. Satan, who is the archetype, architect and origin of all this non-alignment.*

What does the Bible say about the purpose of human beings? In Genesis 2:15, it says:

"The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden
to work it and take care of it."

You don't necessarily have to believe in a literal Adam and Eve or a literal Garden to understand what is meant here. Man was meant to care for the Earth or rather, to be the expression and implementation of God's care for the Earth. How far we have gone from that purpose! And yet, the way for Man to come into alignment with God's will is to be what he meant for us to be: instruments of this care.

The only possible meaning of human life is in its alignment with God's intent, and in our understanding of God and his intent as best we are able. Of course we of ourselves are meaningless and insignificant!! Of course, life lived by our own designs rather than God's is meaningless and insignificant! How could it be otherwise? And though we persist in not fulfilling our purpose, God does not abandon us to our well-deserved demise but continues to reach to us and ask us to come back to alignment with him. God cares about Man's behavior and actions because God is not willing that any single thing in the universe should abandon its purpose and its connection to him through that purpose. Every single atom of every single galaxy is suffused with the concern of God that this atom return to union with his will. Every random stone is known to God. The microscopic critters crawling in your eyelashes right now are known to God. Man may have been given a special purpose, but he is no more special than anything else. All things which return to God are redeemed, and all things that lie outside of God's will are not redeemed but remain in darkness.

So yes, God does care what humans do. He cares what rabbits do too, though they have less influence over their own behavior than humans. Most importantly for our purposes, he wills that we return to alignment with his will and that we do what he meant for us to be doing: know God better so that we can implement his care on Earth better. Know God to serve God as caretakers and caregivers. The skeptics are quite right in this: life lived for ourselves is of no great significance, and a Mankind that lives for itself is of no great significance. A tiny brief blot of dust. Our only possible significance comes with alignment with God's will.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love."

~John 15:5-10

*[those who don't think there is any such thing as Satan are mistaken, but it is also true that Satan's nature and motives are poorly understood. I don't know exactly what Satan is, only THAT he is, and I am pretty uninterested in getting to know him much better. Suffice to say that since this non-alignment by definition could not arise from God's will {God would not will the negation of his own will,} it must have arisen from the will of a created being.]

True Light

Cherubim guarding the gates of heaven with a flaming sword.

Everything that lives on this planet requires energy. For the vast majority of all life forms on this planet, this energy enters the network of living things through light: the light of the Sun. So when we eat “our daily bread,” in a sense we are eating light. Light did the chemical work that allows our food to exist.

But in truth, all the energy we consume is the light of a dying universe. A universe that was stolen from the true Light, which is God. As the Moon is a false light that reflects light from its true light, the Sun, so all the light in this world is a false light that has been stolen from the true Light. All the creatures of this world steal the light from each other, as the light of this universe winds down. As it must wind down without renewal from the light of God.

The continuation of life in this world is based on violence and theft. Life in this world is based on sin in fact, and sin is the engine of its continuance. Plants receive light from the Sun, but they also crowd each other out as they reach for this light. They fight for the light. Herbivores steal light, or chemical energy that the light made possible, from plants. Carnivores steal this energy from herbivores. And so you see in this universe of false light, all life depends on theft, on violent appropriation of energy from others. This is why I cannot believe as some do that the world is essentially good and that people are essentially good. If the world itself is not essentially good, how can people be? And biological life in this world is based on violence and theft.

And ultimately the theft that started it all was the theft of the universe from God, who is the only true Light. I cannot pretend to know how such a theft was possible, I only know the stories. The stories tell of how an angel, Lucifer, wanted to be a god in his own right. He wanted to be lord over his own realm. As punishment for his sins he got his wish: he was cast out. He was cast here. The Universe was made for him. The fulfillment of his wish, but also a prison.

So he got a universe of his own, but from the minute he was cast into it and it was born, a clock was ticking. Because the only light he was going to have was the light that was put here to begin with, and indeed physics tells us something important along those lines which is that energy in this universe cannot be created or destroyed. It cannot be created here. So all the energy in this universe that ever would be, he brought with him. And we living things have been stealing that same light from each other ever since. Why? Our source from the true Light has been cut off. And so as the Universe itself must eventually wind down and die, so we too are condemned to die. And Satan one day will rail against the heat death of the universe and be alone forever in the ashes of the world. Alone in the absolute cold and the absolute darkness. That is his hell.

This is the Light of true life: God is the true Light.

The true light that gives life is the light from God, not the light of the Sun. True, we cannot live in this world without the latter light, but we cannot live beyond this world without the true light that is from God. The light of God is that which gives true life. We do not need to steal that light from our fellow creatures because God gives it freely to us. And so the life that is based on the Sun is a false life, a shadow of life, and the life that is based on God is true life.

Sabbath

image by J. Samuel Burner, Wikimedia Commons

You, God, are my God,

earnestly I seek you;

I thirst for you,

my whole being longs for you,

in a dry and parched land

where there is no water.

I have seen you in the sanctuary

and beheld your power and your glory.

Because your love is better than life,

my lips will glorify you.

~Psalm 63:1-3

I have taken to observing a Saturday Sabbath (or technically Friday night to Saturday night.) The reason for observing it on a Saturday is that this was the original Sabbath and there was no compelling reason to change it except for the corrupt Church wanting to cater to pagan traditions.

Why observe one at all is a different subject, and I didn't use to observe one at all until very recently. I don't interpret its observance strictly in the sense of not doing any work at all. I still water my plants and cook meals and all of that.

When I was growing up in Texas we had the Blue Laws which regulated what activities were permissible (mainly having to do with purchasing alcohol) on Sunday, and in fact when I was growing up almost everyone (in my limited social circles) had Sunday off. Of course anything that comes into conflict with the real religion of this age, consumerism and business, winds up getting crushed. I don't wish the Blue Laws would come back, mind you, and Sunday isn't my Sabbath anyway. But the idea of a day set aside among a group of believers (not by law or social custom) to worship God is very appealing, and I have derived a lot of joy from my newfound Sabbath observance.

Freed from the desire to consider myself a Christian by any even remotely conventional criteria, I find myself picking up some Jewish ways of doing things almost by instinct. A serious (though non-legalistic) observance of the Sabbath, much less a Saturday Sabbath, was never part of my world of experience before now but it just seemed to flow naturally. While I was chanting the Shema I just felt inside myself that my head should be covered when praying such a holy prayer. I bought a prayer shawl (a Jewish Tallit) and started wearing it when praying. That does not make me a Jew any more than reading the New Testament makes me a Christian. I am something else altogether, but I feel drawn to these things. The Sabbath should be special, set apart, even though I have no interest in a sort of legalistic or technical observance. My understanding of God is mystical, not algorithmic.

Because I have no co-religionists that I know of, not conforming to any tradition, I cannot celebrate the Sabbath with other people. This is a shame, as I can only imagine what a glorious thing that could be. But it is glorious any way I can observe it, in ways that I find hard to explain to other people. If observing the Sabbath alone is glorious, how much more so in a community? But as of now I have none.

The Shekhinah, the presence of God, is with his people who are observing the Sabbath. Not because of their observance of an outward law but because of their obedience to an inward love.