The Absentee God
The Absentee God is the one you cry out to and get no reply from. You pray for salvation, and you get none. You face death . . . and die. The surprising thing is that this is God working all things together for good.
God has an entirely different perspective on what is going on here. We want what we want, and God wants us to become him. That is the good he is working everything towards. If we are on the way to becoming him, well and good. If we aren't heading that way, well, uh oh, things are going to go from bad to worse. That is Judas the zealot's job.
Judas is the one who betrays or reveals Jesus Christ to our ignorant selves. He does it by stealing from the purse and by kissing Jesus. Stealing from the purse isn't necessarily financial; it is loss - the loss of whatever. That puts us in the bind of having to find God for salvation. Kissing is promotion. "You want salvation? Here's the Son who loves you and gave himself for you." God in us, the power and wisdom of God called Jesus Christ, is salvation. All we have to do is become him.
Unfortunately, in our ignorance we think that God is separate, that there is distance between him and us. We pray to a place, heaven, where God is supposed to be. But he is absent. Why is he absent? Because there is no such place, no such being. Oh, there is God, to be sure -- a discriminating and distinct, powerful person who can speak to us and act for us -- but he is not someplace else. The Kingdom of God within us . . . is him.
So how do we hook up with God? Jesus Christ, the Kingdom who is God within us, is our imagination. He is 'Heaven'. "Seek ye first the Kingdom" means to seek God's character manifest as our imagination. We need to conform the nature of our imagination to the nature of God who is imagination (not imaginary, but the imaginer who is extending himself by imagining). He wants his imagination itself to have his own character, and that integrity has to be generated and developed.
God doesn't want us to act pious, to follow prescribed laws; he wants our character, our nature, to conform to his nature. His nature IS the Law -- he want us to be him, to do what he does because it is our nature to do so. Our imagination is that of his nature which needs to conform to his character. Praying however desperately and pledging to act however morally to an outside God doesn't necessarily change our character to his likeness. We just get the Absentee God who is a fantasy of our ignorance, who cannot do anything because he doesn't exist.
Judas wants us to kiss the son so that he, Judas, may expire. Kissing is promoting that which is within us. When we take on God's nature, Judas has done his job and is finito. He can't keep bringing us after we are come to Jesus -- he's on a suicide mission. God's nature is his character manifest in imagining goodness and benevolence within himself for the world he has created in his imagination. Engaging this imagination is the "blood" of Jesus Christ, the life-giving force of God's spirit which manifests his desired world.
Don't seek the Absentee God, seek the character and life of God who is become you.
God has an entirely different perspective on what is going on here. We want what we want, and God wants us to become him. That is the good he is working everything towards. If we are on the way to becoming him, well and good. If we aren't heading that way, well, uh oh, things are going to go from bad to worse. That is Judas the zealot's job.
Judas is the one who betrays or reveals Jesus Christ to our ignorant selves. He does it by stealing from the purse and by kissing Jesus. Stealing from the purse isn't necessarily financial; it is loss - the loss of whatever. That puts us in the bind of having to find God for salvation. Kissing is promotion. "You want salvation? Here's the Son who loves you and gave himself for you." God in us, the power and wisdom of God called Jesus Christ, is salvation. All we have to do is become him.
Unfortunately, in our ignorance we think that God is separate, that there is distance between him and us. We pray to a place, heaven, where God is supposed to be. But he is absent. Why is he absent? Because there is no such place, no such being. Oh, there is God, to be sure -- a discriminating and distinct, powerful person who can speak to us and act for us -- but he is not someplace else. The Kingdom of God within us . . . is him.
So how do we hook up with God? Jesus Christ, the Kingdom who is God within us, is our imagination. He is 'Heaven'. "Seek ye first the Kingdom" means to seek God's character manifest as our imagination. We need to conform the nature of our imagination to the nature of God who is imagination (not imaginary, but the imaginer who is extending himself by imagining). He wants his imagination itself to have his own character, and that integrity has to be generated and developed.
God doesn't want us to act pious, to follow prescribed laws; he wants our character, our nature, to conform to his nature. His nature IS the Law -- he want us to be him, to do what he does because it is our nature to do so. Our imagination is that of his nature which needs to conform to his character. Praying however desperately and pledging to act however morally to an outside God doesn't necessarily change our character to his likeness. We just get the Absentee God who is a fantasy of our ignorance, who cannot do anything because he doesn't exist.
Judas wants us to kiss the son so that he, Judas, may expire. Kissing is promoting that which is within us. When we take on God's nature, Judas has done his job and is finito. He can't keep bringing us after we are come to Jesus -- he's on a suicide mission. God's nature is his character manifest in imagining goodness and benevolence within himself for the world he has created in his imagination. Engaging this imagination is the "blood" of Jesus Christ, the life-giving force of God's spirit which manifests his desired world.
Don't seek the Absentee God, seek the character and life of God who is become you.
posted by Daniel C. Branham-Steele at
5:07 AM
2 Comments:
When you write, "we need to conform the nature of our imagination to the nature of God who is imagination" by "the nature of our imagination" do you mean content? WHAT we imagine? Or the way in which we imagine? HOW we imagine?
I keep going back to Neville's "Golden Rule" and "whatsoever is lovely" and I wonder if something I desire does not manifest because God (who is my own human imagination) somehow judges it as unlovely.
Shakespeare wrote that, "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
Let me put it this way: let's say you desire a certain position (job) that some other person currently has. For you to gain that position, logic dictates that the other person would no longer have it. This could be because that person loses that job (bad thing) or gets a promotion or better job (good thing). And actually, the person getting fired could be a could thing too, for this could set off a chain of events in their own life leading to positive outcome. Who knows.
And if it is the universal mind (God) who orchestrates the "how," the bridge of incidence, then how can one know whether or not something is "lovely"? Do you remember that story Neville told in his lecture "If Any Two Agree"? A friend and student of his was asked by someone to imagine on their behalf: "Well, the neighbor wanted to be free of a disturbing element in the neighborhood, which was also a neighbor -- a couple with three children. So she heard him distinctly say that he was free of this disturbance, that they were gone. Her ability to hear distinctly is so keen and wonderful that she heard him affirm what he had affirmed. In a matter of days the parents were killed on the highway, leaving three children: two little ones and a demented boy in his early teens. So she wondered, What did I do?"
By
Anonymous, at 7:03 PM
All of the above. God's nature is love, and our thoughts ought be ruled by love also, along with faith. Interestingly, we are the ones who judge our thoughts. They do not affect others, they affect us. God affects the others, and how he does that is his business. Inasmuch as we all are eternal beings who are him, he is not afraid of death or hard times for us. Everyone is in their own track of discovery, and if ours is going good while our neighbors is going bad, well, it isn't on us.
That does raise a question I entertained a few posts ago: what if we were pro-active in wishing well for everyone. Say, if the lady purposed to hear good news for the man who asked, AND heard good news for the bothersome neighbors. Just something to think about.
By
Daniel C. Branham-Steele, at 12:06 AM
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