Simply Christian - Chapter 5

Before going into my review, just a quick note. I've noticed that each chapter I write my review differently. This time, I wrote all of this as I read, so I think it contains more of my actual thoughts while reading than previous posts; at least that's what I was going for. And now, the review.

“Sometimes, when people are asked whether they believe in God, they picture and image… [of] an old man with a long white beard, sitting on a cloud, looking down angrily at the mess we human are making of the world.” This sentence reminds me of the old Disney cartoons, or the Far Side comic strip. When I think of God my mind is blank. Well, I shouldn’t say blank, but there are no images, only memories of experiences, definitions of words, and memories of actions run through my mind.

In Chapter 5 Wright goes about describing God. As I started reading this chapter I thought to myself, “I sort of wish I was a non-Christian reading this book so I could follow better what he is saying. I feel like he’s skipping around the point.” It’s a little confusing for me to be reading this book and think I know the point that he wants to make, but then he doesn’t make it, he says, basically, ‘we’ll get to that later’.

First Wright looks at the question, where is God? Ecclesiastes 5:2 (paraphrased) says, “God is in heaven and you are on earth; so let your words be few.” Basically, Ecclesiastes 5:1-7 is talking about fearing God; however in verse two the writer of this book states that God is in heaven. So where is heaven? Wright answers this question, in a way, a few sentences later when he writes, “’Heaven’ in this later, very common biblical sense is God’s space as opposed to our space, not God’s location within our space-time universe.” I read that and thought to myself, yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking. But honestly, if someone had asked me I would have never been able to verbalize that. Does that mean that I really wasn’t thinking that and I’m just taking Wright’s ideas for my own? Hmmm, something to ponder for awhile.

How do heaven and earth fit together? Option one, the two spaces completely overlap, they are two ways of talking about the same thing. God is everything and everything is God, pantheism. Or there is the slight differentiation, panentheism, which states everything exists within God. Either way there is no outside force, there is no way to be rescued so the only escape is death. Option two is to hold the two spaces away from each other, the two never overlap. This options states that humans are alone in the universe, any divine being will not intervene to help or to harm. Again, there is way to be rescued to the only escape is death. The third option is that the two spaces overlap and interlock in many different ways. “God makes his presence known, seen, and heard within the sphere of earth.” Wright brings up many examples of this, Abraham, Jacob’s ladder, Moses and the Exodus, David, the holiest of holies (which kept the Ark of the Covenant). Wright states, “When pilgrims and worshippers went up to Jerusalem and into the Temple to worship and offer sacrifices, they wouldn’t have said that it was as though they were going into heaven. They would have said that they were going to the place where heaven and earth overlapped and interlocked.” How often do I think this when I worship? It’s not just little ol’ me here on earth, it’s where heaven and earth overlap. “The one true God made a world that was other than himself, because that is what love delights to do. And, having made such a world, he has remained in a close, dynamic, and intimate relationship with it, without in any way being contained within it or having it contained within himself.” I know this is the basis of my faith, relationship, but it still blows me away every time I read it. Christ wants a relationship with me, this selfish, arrogant, prideful, spiteful, lying, sinful person.

The last thing that Wright goes over in this chapter is the name of God. He addresses how the personal name of God was written in ancient Hebrew and how we got from that point to “the LORD”; a very interesting little history lesson. He talked about the three meanings of this phrase, first it could mean ‘the master” or who we’ve promised to obey, second it could mean ‘the true Lord’ (as opposed to Caesar), third it could mean “the LORD” as spoken of in the Old Testament