Communion Insights - The Price Paid

A friend's mentor in the faith told him to ask God for a new insight on the Communion every time.  Since my friend told me this, I've done so.

Today, Jesus told me that the bread is the price of my purchase from my master.

Satan wanted Jesus to worship him, and in exchange Jesus would receive a gift: the entire world.  Jesus did not dispute that the world was Satan's to give!  He would rather die than worship Satan.  So instead of giving Satan worship, He allowed His body to be taken away.

A body is strength.  A body has the ability to change the world.  Jesus, adopted son of a house-builder, certainly had a strong body, but that wasn't how He changed the world.  With His muscles, He could probably have been a great warrior, if so trained, but that wasn't how He changed the world.  Instead, He changed the world by allowing His body to be publicly drained of strength and suffocated by fatigue and killed in the place of a murderer and insurrectionist against Israel's submission to Rome.

But the trick is that He died once to free all who chose freedom.

I was born into the slavery of sin.  My heritage was weakness, my lineage was fallibility, and my master was Satan.

The price for me, one body traded for another, was paid by Jesus.  He came into the place I was enslaved, this cruel world, and asked me if I wanted to be free.  I said yes.  The eldest son traded Himself for my slave-price, and I was washed clean by the blood of the Anointed One and adopted as a son of the house of Heaven.

I am ever grateful.

Love

I saw a movie tonight which God used to remind me that He loves me.

His love is so deep that He died for me, personally. I can't express how amazing that is.

I can't express just how revolting to me the mistakes are that people have made in trying to understand Him. He did not die for humanity corporately, but personally for each and every person.

He found a way to save everyone; He stands with outstretched arms, saying, "Come to me, learn to live, to grow and learn forever. Let me be your guide, teaching you from infinite wisdom how to make right decisions, and what things have true value and real meaning."

He started the Church, not to run people's lives, but to give us a place to be at home. He is the King, and His kingdom has free citizenship, no questions asked. Have you been a bad person, a mean and spiteful person? He will forgive you, welcome you with open arms, and help you to change, to become a better person.

He is choice, infinite choice. We are made in His image; we are expressly designed for choosing. From hands that grasp to a voice that speaks, we are built for freely choosing.

His greatest gift is free will. It is this He values about us above all: we can choose. He values choice so much that if someone says, "I don't want to be with you," He lets them. It breaks His heart, but He lets them.

Choose Him, because He has already chosen you, and is waiting.

Omniscience and evolution

God is omniscient. That word means "all-knowing". But what does that really mean?

It means that God is infinitely intelligent. He knows every fact. In fact, if He didn't, He could figure it all out again instantly.

For you computer/math geeks out there, listen up:

Jesus can solve Turing's Halting Problem.

He didn't "need" evolution to create humanity. To believe that He "needed" it is to insult God's intelligence, as well as His omnipotence. (Remember, He can move a single photon from one side of the universe to the other without disturbing a neutrino. Constructing living cells, atom by atom, is no big deal to Him.)

Now that that's out of the way, let's admit something here. God could have used evolution to create the biosphere, or the Big Bang to form the universe.

However, just as we've decided to avoid insulting His intelligence or His abilities, let's not insult His love. After all, omni-benevolence is an often-cited complementary attribute.

Would a loving God create people and animals through a mechanistic and mindless process of killing off the less fit, at some point having tribes of almost-human primates wandering the plains?

Or would He shape them by hand from the warm clay of Eden?

Finitude vs Fallenness

Let's get two things straight here, folks:

• People make mistakes because people are finite.
• People sin because people are fallen.

How do I mean this?

I can state that 2 + 2 = 5 because I don't know better. This is ignorance, not sin.

I can state that 2 + 2 = 5 because I'm lying to someone. This is sin, not ignorance.

I can state that 2 + 2 = 5 for sufficiently large values of 2 because I'm being funny. This is neither ignorant nor sinful. (And if you believe jokes are sinful, I'm not sure you'll enjoy Heaven...)

Sin is mostly choice-based, though the exact boundaries of where mistakes end and sin begins are dependent on whose mistake or sin it is. A teacher has the responsibility to make sure their statements to students are correct; depending on the subject being taught, this might amount to a sin rather than a big mistake.

God is omniscient. This doesn't just mean "all-knowing". It also means He is infinitely intelligent, that He knows what to do with what He knows. He could not make a mistake, because of this quality.

Eternal Weekend

There are three basic types of Christians. Each believes Heaven is like part of the week.

As children, we all believe Heaven is an eternal Saturday, with games, playing, happiness, fun, and casual reading.

I know people who believe Heaven is an eternal Sunday, with worship all the time, forever.

I've heard about Christians who believe there will be work for us to do in Heaven.

That last option intrigues me, and it makes sense intellectually. After all, why go to the trouble of educating us during all our hundred year lives, if we'll never use that for the rest of Eternity?

But I believe that even if there is work, it'll be analogous to a true work week, with fun-and-worship weekends, and every work day will feel like an eternal Friday afternoon, when I'm most productive because I'm looking forward to the weekend.

Of course, I'd love to hang out with God in the Infinite Library for a good ten thousand years or so, catching up on my reading. He'll have me work when He knows I'm ready to work.

And don't get me wrong, I look forward to the purity of worshipping God in His presence; I just don't think he'd waste the other capacities of humanity, the capacities for fun, for learning, and for work that He gave us. After all, He is the God of change, of growth, and of laughter.