The Box

For as long as she could remember, her world was 12’x12’x7’.  There was a dresser with no mirror, a nice bed with a colorful comforter and fluffy pillows, a picture of Jesus praying in the garden, a bin full of toys and a toilet and shower.  There were no windows and only one door, locked from the outside.  She knew there was another room, for 3 times a day a lady would enter with food and sometimes clean and change the bedding, brush her hair, and do other necessities.  No words were ever spoken.  She got a glimpse of the other room when the door was opened, and she was afraid of it, for it was only a dark and mysterious hallway.  She was content to stay in her room, for it was much more cheery and interesting than that dark and foreboding hallway outside.  Over the years, the room became smaller.  Her head was closer to the ceiling and the bed was shorter.  The lady who came in also grew much smaller, until she was looking down at her.  One day she was alarmed by a clamor outside the door.  She heard the sounds of many footsteps coming down the hall.  The door opened and she was terrified when 3 beings entered.  They had short hair, and dark blue suits.  They had strange, hard objects strapped to their belts and clothing that wrapped around each leg.  They were much larger than the lady she knew.  Her fear intensified when sounds came out of their mouths, but the sounds were low and soothing, and slowly she realized that they were not going to harm her.  One of them squatted and held out his hand to her with a piece of candy.  She had seen candy and knew how good it was.  The fear was gradually replaced by curiosity, and she reached out to touch the hand.  It was gentle.  Slowly, it wrapped it’s huge fingers around her own delicate hand and she instinctively wrapped her fingers around it.  Ever so slowly the hand tugged on hers.  It was beckoning her in the direction of the dark hallway.  She resisted.  One of the beings stepped outside and she heard a “click”.  Suddenly, the hallway was flooded with light.  She saw that it had bright walls and a shiny hardwood floor with beautiful grain in the wood.  A soothing breeze wafted into the room and the pleasing scent of flowers met her nose.  She took a deep breath.  She wanted to go in the direction of that fragrance.  Surely, something beautiful was there.  She took a tentative step, and then another.  There she was, standing in the hallway.  She was still alive.  On she walked with the beings.  Brighter light was up ahead.  The first window she had ever seen.  Outside she saw the flowers that were producing the bouquet;  roses.  She stopped and stared at them.  Red was a color she had never seen.  Green trees with leaves slowly waving in the breeze.  Blue sky.  She was overcome by the vastness of what she saw out that window, even though she could not see more than 40 yards in any direction.  And sounds.  Sounds of traffic on the street and the laughter of children.  It was all astounding.  She saw things that her mind had never conceived.  Things she thought impossible.

  We shall call her Anne Smith.  We shall say she was 17 when “rescued”.  Under the tutelage of social workers she quickly learned to speak and read.  She had above average intelligence and it was not long before she understood what had transpired.  Her mother was the victim of a rape.  So traumatized was she by the event that she deemed the world an unfit place in which to raise her daughter. 

  Anne soon adapted to the world around her, but never ceased to be amazed at things that she could never have imagined while in the “box”.

 

  The above story is fiction, perhaps.  There may have been actual cases like this;  but I wrote it to illustrate the point of this paper.

 

Ex 33:20  And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live

 

 1 Cor 2:9  But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

 

  Much trouble has been wrought by vanity.  Atheists have been made, and churches split by the simple fact that humans believe that they must be able to scientifically define or draw up a mathematical equation that explains something before they will accept that it exists;  however we are a bit fickle in relegating inexplicable phenomena to the dust bin of non existence.  None would say there is no gravity nor would they refuse to respect it;  though our most astute do not know what causes it.  More hastily do they scrap the idea of a three personal God;  for that God suggests that we may not be our own masters.   Such is the case with the concept that we call the “Trinity” or “Godhead”.  The nature of and relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is impossible for us to explain.  The “Trinitarian Controversy” has caused grave stress on the unity of believers since the 4th century.  I personally know people who have given up the faith because their preconceived notions about the nature of the Godhead made the Bible seem absurd.

  To borrow one of my favorite “billclintonisms”, I feel yo’ pain.  The relationship of what we call the “Trinity” has given me more mental Charlie horses than pondering any other subject, with the possible exception of infinity.  Perhaps that is because the two are related.

 



c s lewis

  I have always felt a strange familiarity with C. S. Lewis, not speaking only of his non fictional writings;  but the man himself.  I bear some resemblance to his physical features.  He lived a short distance from my pre American paternal ancestors.  He died when he was 65.  I am 63 now and if my doctor is to be believed, I have one foot in the grave.  He took care of an alcoholic brother (Just kidding Curt, Wayne.  Were that the case, sorry about your luck.  You’re on your own, bros!)  He cared for his senile and ungrateful Landlady, which hopefully I would do given the chance.  The height of my earthly glory would be to sit in on his “Inklings” literary club 
meetings, as quiet as a mouse.  I will say without doubt that C. S. Lewis has consoled me in these conundrums more than anyone.  Some of what I will say reflects that which he wrote in his book “Mere Christianity”;  particularly in the section “Beyond Personality” chapter 2: "The Three Personal God. 

  Please bear with this long paragraph.  It is leading toward a point.  Lewis explains the Godhead using dimensions as an illustration.  He uses 3 dimensions of space and his point is that a two dimensional being, for instance, could not conceive of a 3 dimensional object;  hence, humans cannot fully conceive God, for God is supra dimensional.  I will recognize the fourth dimension, for it is crucial to my reasoning.  The first 3 are called “space” (height, width, depth);  and the fourth is “time”.  Time is only relevant because all space is defined by time.  The distance of anything must be measured in time as well as inches or miles.  When driving in the city, people do not say that it is a certain number of miles to a place, for there are stop lights, heavy traffic areas, etc.  They say it is so many “minutes”.  You may not think that time matters when considering a small distance, but try to tell that to the cripple when he must go to the bathroom in a hurry.  If any distance at all is under consideration, time is relevant.   Everything you see, you are seeing as it was in the past because light travels 186,000 miles per second.  It may be only a split nanosecond in the past, nevertheless, it is past.  I still have the universal Harley Davidson Tattoo;  a scar on my right calf.  I was wearing shorts, and my calf touched the exhaust as I dismounted.  The burn was more instantaneous than the time it took the feeling to travel up my nervous system and for my brain to interpret it as unpleasant and send a message back to my leg to move.  We can understand by observing lightning.  We see the flash.  It traveled through our optic nerve and was sensed by our brains at 186,000 mps.  The sound of the air condensing back together along the path of the lightning bolt, we call thunder.  That sound is only traveling at about 750 miles per hour.  It may take several seconds for it to reach our brains via our auditory nerves.  We know that we are hearing an event which happened in the past.  Now take a star that is 100 “light years” away.  What we are seeing when we look into the heavens are photons that left that star before we were born.  Were that star to suddenly disappear, we would not be aware of it until 100 years after the fact.  We are actually seeing 100 years back in time.  There is no such thing as the “present” for humans.  The concept is only figurative to us, because we are moving continually through time.

  If you have not gone to sleep yet or moved this to your trash bin, here is my point.  THERE IS NO TIME FOR GOD.  We cannot wrap our minds around this because of our slavery to time!  Our past and future are before God in an infinite present.  He is the only Being who can truly say “I AM”, temporally speaking.  If we are technically precise, we can only say “I was” or “I will be”;  and we cannot say “I will be” with certainty. 

 

  When Jesus left the “ivory palaces” He made Himself subject to time, (although He seems to have exercised executive privilege over those bonds on occasion.)  When He cries out on the cross and asks why His Father has forsaken Him, perhaps it is His divine nature who is willingly suffering those hours of torment, expressing His misery to His divine nature Who has the ability to pass them in an instant.   When He says “Unless I go, the Comforter (Holy Spirit) will not come” perhaps He is saying “My divine nature that has for now been made subject to time must defer to My divine nature that knows no such subjugation.”  These things are mysterious to me.  They are things beyond scientific definition, we must accept them by faith.  After all, who has decreed that scientific method can be successfully applied to define all reality?

  Asking someone to accept something by faith is not a “cop out”.  We accept by faith all the time.  Gravity is beyond scientific definition, and yet we plan our futures on the firm conviction that it will still exist.  My next doctor’s appointment is in two weeks.  I am already dreading it because I know I will first be asked to step on the scales, and gravity will once again send me on my way feeling like dirt.  I have no doubt that it will.  I actually believe the depression and anxiety caused by gravity and scales and the privation of diets will kill me quicker than the weight will.

 

  Sorry.  Back to the matter at hand. We try in vain to explain these concepts with earthy illustrations.  We try in vain because all that is earthy is strapped by time.  I have heard it said that the Trinity is like water.  It can be gas, solid, liquid.  The problem is, it cannot be all these things simultaneously.  At the same time.  I have heard it said a man can be a father, a welder, and a member of the Lion’s Club.  The problem is that I doubt there would be a plausible scenario when he was acting in a 100% capacity as all these things simultaneously.  We can’t even do one thing 100%, let alone 3.  100% is only quixotic when referring to our efforts;  an unattainable goal for us.  Faith, faith, faith!  Some things must be accepted by faith and the nature of and relationship between the Godhead is one.  Don’t let the skeptic call you an airhead.  He has not scientifically verified everything.  He acts on faith a hundred times a day.

 

  When my daughter was very young, she had a high fever that persisted.  The doctor finally told us that we’d better get her to the hospital.  There we stood in the hallway while nurses prepared a bath of ice water, the ice cubes still suspended in it.  I watched as they gently lowered her into it.  I heard her scream like never before nor since.  She was in the hands of strangers and I think she thought we were going to stand idly by while they drowned her.  The worst moment was when she looked over the side of that tub out into the hallway at me and screamed, “Daddy!  Why don’t you help me!”  My eyes still moisten after all these years when I think about it.  How could I explain to her what was going on?  All I could hope for is that she would get old enough that I could explain it to her, and that she would love me for doing the right thing for her, even though I knew it would shake her faith in me.

 

    God transcends our attempts to capture Him fully in a box.  He may let us get bits and pieces of Him.  Moses wanted to see Him.  He had to hide Moses in a rock fissure and cover the opening with His hand; just to let His backside pass by;  and still what Moses saw was only a theophany!  No physical sight that we can see is the essence of God, for He is spirit.  Revealing these mysteries to us is tantamount to revealing calculus to an earthworm.  Bless His holy Name that He would reveal anything at all to me!  He knows what my mind can hold, and He fills it to bursting.  The rest He requires that I accept by faith.  When I do, it pleases Him.  Think outside the box.  We have no option.