So you don't walk in darkness

Okay, so folks are always saying -- in movies and once a while in life-- "what is the meaning of life?"

Lord knows. Besides that's too complicated to go into. I suspect the nearest we can come to that is to ask, "What is the meaning of my life?" For the religious the question is, "What is it that God made me to do in this life...to help his supreme purpose on earth?" And for the non-religious, it'll probably be something like, "What can I do with this life of mine to make it meaningful to myself, those who live in the same time as I do, and those who will come after me?"

I can't go into that but I'll go into a discussion of the light.

I won't get too cosmic about light and dark. I'll only say two things. The first is that God tells us that we have the word of God is light for our path. John writes, "We know that the whole world lies in darkness." So, okay... there is something we Bible-believing Christians know about life that makes us not stumble as others do who have no light and who are walking in dark.

The question is: what is it about the word that makes it a light for us? And it's not merely hearing the word that makes it a light. Or else, everyone who reads the Bible would have this light. It's believing the word, speaking the word, doing the word, and having God's spirit shed revelation of the word (for without God's spirit giving you revelation the word of God kills).

WORD OF GOD and OTHER RELIGIONS
Supposedly the word of God has power. Supposedly the word of God has life. Now, there are a few things that the world knows as well as Christians. The Bible is the fullest revelation given to man...and even then we need the holy spirit to understand this revelation. But that doesn't mean that revelation can only be found in the Bible. It doesn't mean that other religions don't have revelation. It just means that whatever those religions reveal -- that is TRUE-- is revealed more fully in the Bible. And it means that if some other religion reveals something that is in direct contrast to what God has told us that it's either A) A great revelation or B) a little revelation. If what is revealed in another religious tradition is B -- a little revelation that contrasts with Christian revelation-- then that particular revelation is to be dismissed. It is not true. If what is revealed in another religious tradition is A -- a great revelation-- then that revelation only seemingly contrasts with what is found in the Bible. For instance, my Muslim best friend says that God is unknowable, God is to be obeyed, God is beyond emotion. This is true. But it is a great truth and a great revelation. THE OPPOSITE OF A GREAT REVELATION IS ANOTHER GREAT REVELATION. This means that God is also quite knowable. For a Christian, this means that the Islamic revelation of the obedience and impersonality of God is a great revelation. But it is lesser than the Christian revelation that God is Love, a Personal Being, and is quite especially near to the sinner and to the suffering.

WALKING IN THE LIGHT
There is also the Christian physics connection and the discussion of LIGHT. We are told to walk in the light. John tells us that when we hate our brother we walk in darkness. This is not only true symbolically. It's true spiritually. It's true as a matter of physics. (Actually, whenever folks start taking tings in the Bible as only a symbol, they miss out on the reality of the spiritual truth.) When we hate, we give off darkness. Darkness has a spiritual smell that pulls the demonic to us. Just as our prayers are a sweet perfume to God and a deathly smell to the demonic. So walking in the light means we have to be aware that our thoughts give off some kind of light in the spiritual world. Walking with God brings us into light. Hating, sinning, etc makes our darkness home to the beings of darkness. Physics has taught us many things that the Bible has already taught us. In the beginning God said light. In the beginning God made sound and sound made light. The more one studies physics, the more one realizes that the world is made of light.

WORD MADE FLESH, WORD MADE VISIBLE.
Another example from the book of Hebrews: The worlds were made from the word of God...things which are seen were not made from visible things but from sound, specifically the sound of God's voice. There is a Japanese word: kotodama. This means that words have spirit...and how we say them and how we believe them affects our life. Christians believe the same thing. Many cultures believe in spells and incantations. But the Christian revelation of the power of God's word to change things is a vastly deeper revelation. Even stranger, we Christians have the authority and power to speak a thing in Jesus name and -- if we believe enough and have God's faith (as Jesus told us to have) we can command demons, sickness, etc.

Anyway, this is all prefacing to what I'm gonna dedicate my blog to this year. This year I'll dedicate each week of my blog to the first chapter of a book of the Bible. So this first week of January 2010 I'll be doing maybe a post or two on genesis chapter one. Then next week a coupla posts on Exodus chapter one. And after that Leviticus. We'll see how that works.

Happy New Year to all. God bless and keep you in the light.