Willard’s World 3- Our God is that Great?!

The eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is the absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only to himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind.

-Adam Clarke

In addition to containing maybe the longest sentence I’ve ever read, this may be the grandest description of God I’ve ever read. There’s nothing really more to say but I’ll try to highlight a few of Willard’s thoughts on this great God and his interactions with us now.

First of all Willard suggests that God is joyous. I was first introduced to this idea in John Piper’s Desiring God a number of years ago where he says, “…God's saving designs are penultimate, not ultimate. Redemption, salvation, and restoration are not God's ultimate goal. These he performs for the sake of something greater: namely, the enjoyment he has in glorifying himself. The bedrock foundation of Christian Hedonism is not God's allegiance to us, but to himself.” This greatly shifted my view of the world when I first realized it. Instead of God being eternally frustrated at our constant struggles he is eternally joyful in the glory of his kingdom. Willard gives the example of looking at a awe-inspiring beach in South Africa, (we all have our own examples of the beauty of the earth), and realizing that God sees this all the time along with every other beautiful breath catching scene he created. This is the kingdom he created. How could he not be joyous?

Second, Willard presents the idea that Heaven and therefore God is not somewhere beyond space but is near and all around us. He points to Jesus’ chiding Nicodemus in John, “for not understanding the ‘birth from above’—the receiving of a superhuman kind of life from the God who is literally with us in the surrounding space. To be born ‘from above,’ in New Testament language, means to be interactively joined with a dynamic, unseen system of divine reality in the midst of which all humanity moves about—whether it knows it or not. And that, of course is ‘The Kingdom Among Us.” Willard though is careful to clarify that the idea of God being all around us is different from God being all the stuff that’s around us. He uses the analogy of a human body. My body is filled with me just as the earth is filled with God, but just as if someone were to carefully dissect my body to find me they would be unsuccessful trying, attempting to localize God to one bit of his creation would also be futile. This speaks to the Spirit nature of God.

The spirit nature of God as well as us who are created in his image is his third main idea in the chapter. Willard explains that, “the center point of the spiritual in humans as well as in God is self determination, also called freedom and creativity.” He goes on to say that because God is the perfect demonstration of self sufficiency, needing nothing, being the “I Am”, he is the ultimate spiritual being. Humans are then lacking something in our spirit nature because we are limited in our sovereignty. It is when we align our kingdoms with that of God’s that, “our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal.” We can then fulfill our spirit natures.

Lastly Willard concludes with the idea that if all the above is true and our God is really that great Death should be a minor blip in our thinking about the future. He says, “Once we have grasped our situation in God’s full world, the startling disregard Jesus and the New Testament writers had for ‘physical death’ suddenly makes sense.” He continues, “We should be anticipating what we will be doing three hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years from now in this marvelous universe.”

May my view of God be as grand as Adam Clarke’s so that death is no more than a beginning.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,
Than when we first begun

-John Newton, Amazing Grace

Three Thoughts on a Buzz Word

Community has become such a buzz word these days I’m never certain we are on the same page when we use it in dialogue. Do we mean neighbourhood, or a group of friends, or people with similar interests? Are we talking about a location, or an intention? Something realized or becoming?...

Being a community that reflects Jesus means we cross the boundaries between our world and the world of the other, the one who is unlike us. It means like Christ we die to ourselves, albeit gradually, and learn to inhabit places of grace. It is essential for us to remember that our invitation into the Kingdom of God was not a call to elitism or to safety. It was, and is, a call to emptying ourselves, to entering into an embrace of those who are the furthest from us, to emulate Jesus in the way he did life.

-Joyce Herron, Jacob’s Well Newsletter October 2006

And it’s possible to be sleeping alone, and celibate, and to be very sexual. Connected with many.

It’s also possible to be married to somebody and sharing the same bed and be very disconnected.

And so they’re sleeping together but they’re really sleeping alone.

This had huge implications for what it means to be part of a community.

-Rob Bell, Sex God

The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me.

God brought me to [community] to rid me of this deception, to scrub it out of the gray matter of my mind. It was a frustrating and painful experience. I hear addicts talk about the shakes and panic attacks and the highs and lows of resisting their habit, and to some degree I understand them because I have had habits of my own, but no drug it so powerful as the drug of self. No rut in the mind is so deep as the one that says I am the world, the world belongs to me, all people are characters in my play. There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction.

-Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

Willard's World 2 - A Tale of Two Gospels

Gospel 1 -
My story, along with most who grew up in Baptist circles, is heavily influenced by what Willard calls, “The Gospel on the right.” He defines this as the idea that, “Jesus died to pay for our sins, and that if we will only believe he did this we will go to heaven when we die.” Willard tells of seeing a bumper sticker reading, “Christians aren’t perfect – Just forgiven.” He questions whether this forgiveness transaction to clear our debt to god, while being true, is all the Good News entails.

He points to Abraham in Genesis 15:6 where God calls him righteous. This righteousness was not for someday in heaven but rather that, “Abraham’s sins and failures would not cut him off from God in the present moment and in their ongoing relationship in life together.” Forgiveness is involved but it is to mend relationship now not at some time in the future once we are dead. What is sad is that the mending of relationship with God now isn’t required for most because we don’t have a daily communication with God. We don’t miss the proper relationship with him because we have never known it. IN our selfish human nature we figure that reconciliation with God is only needed once we die and are forced to have a conversation with him.

Gospel 2 –
As opposed to those who view the Gospel as a system of merit and demerit leading to heaven someday once we die, are those for whom social justice and correctness have become the Good News. Willard notes that in many instances this view has ceased being a, “theology or a view of God,” but has become, “a social ethic that one could share with people who had no reliance on a present God or a living Christ at all.” Those subscribing to this Gospel have sacrificed the personal, living, interactive natures of God in order to maintain a rigorous scientific understanding of the world.

A leading proponent of this theology, John Robinson, summed the view up by saying, “The Christian is the man who believes in that love [Jesus’ kind] as the last word for his life.” This sounds pretty good to me and I am sure I’ve said very similar things in the last few years. Willard points out though that divorced from the person of Christ alive today this ideal becomes a version of the American dream where desire, opportunity and freedom are sacred.

I remember reading Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in twelfth grade and being so frustrated with the central character Willy. Despite working hard he couldn’t get his life together and succeed. It’s taken me until now to realize what the play screamed so loudly; perhaps it wasn’t the character that was flawed but rather the idea that desire, opportunity and freedom equated success and these values are paramount. The Gospel must be about more than helping people “succeed”.

Good News -
So if the good news is not solely about either my sin / forgiveness transactions with God, or a quest to love everybody, with what are we left? Willard presents the teacher character of God as the solution. He doubts whether subscribers to either of the previous Gospels ever take God seriously as there teacher. He wonders that because we can’t take him seriously as a teacher, how are we to devote time or study to becoming his students? The obvious extrapolation begs the question, how are we to align our kingdom’s with his if we don’t learn from him? Jesus was the bridge between the divine kingdom and our individual ones. If we are to align our kingdoms with God’s, then Christ, the only human to do even a decent job of aligning his kingdom with the heavenly one should be a pretty good teacher to study under. To learn from him though requires that he is alive (he is), and that he cares about my interactions with other kingdoms (he does). Like Martha’s sister Mary, taking Jesus seriously as our interested and living teacher is where our fullness of the Good News is to begin.

Willard's World 1 - The Simple Kingdom

The faith of the majority of educated people of our day was expressed by the word “progress.”
-Leo Tolstoy

My friends and I are constantly striving for progress. Those of us graduating college dream of moving from our parents basements to our very own condo. Those getting married dream of buying a home in the suburbs. Those getting promoted at work dream of the next car they’ll afford. More and better is our goal in the material sense.

I struggle to progress in an intellectual sense too. I want to get smarted, travel further and think deeper than before. These desires are encouraged by nearly everyone around me.

Dr. Willard though presents the idea that all the time we spend pursuing more and better is in some ways wasted. Life is simple. We are invited to make a pilgrimage into the heart and life of God and this life is accessible to a child perhaps even only those who are simple like children.

There’s and old U2 song that goes, “Into the heart of a child, I stay awhile. I can go back, into the heart of a child, I can smile, I can go there.” Maybe this is how we are to approach God. Maybe instead of trying to get into the head of God by reading philosophy we are to seek simply his heart and become so comfortable there we keep returning.

Willard goes on to explain that only once we are comfortable in Gods heart can we live in the Kingdom. This isn’t saying that outside of God’s heart I am unable of occasionally displaying the values of this Kingdom. Willard explains, “Our ‘kingdom’ is simply the range of our effective will. Whatever we genuinely have the say over is in our kingdom. And having the say over something is precisely what places it within our kingdom.” He goes on, “Now God’s own ‘kingdom’ or ‘rule,’ is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature or by choice, is within his kingdom.”

There are only two areas that are outside the range of God’s effective will: The social / political sphere and the individual heart. When we speak of God’s kingdom advancing it is areas of the social / political or individual heart aligning with the will of God. This is the gospel then; the outstanding news that God’s will is accessible to us. God’s plan requires us, as simple humans, to align our mini kingdoms with God’s. It’s simple but we need to know intimately this God we’re to align with.

I'm telling you, once and for all, that unless you return to square one and start over like children, you're not even going to get a look at the kingdom, let alone get in. Whoever becomes simple and elemental again, like this child, will rank high in God's kingdom.
-Jesus (Matthew 18:2-4)