I recently almost "finished" a piece of gear that I have been building for my recording studio for the last 3 years...I say almost because of user error I decided NOT to trust the build documents and I wired it up backwards...a little poof of smoke and I began a painstaking journey to track down a very obsolete transistor among nearly 200 very small, tightly connected parts...oy vey!
When you are trouble-shooting electronic devices you always start at the output of the device and work your way back...its a tried and true method to trace out where the problem is...and you should always trust the build documents...lesson learned...read, believe, and pay attention!
With this lesson in mind I want to suggest some adjustments for how we approach the God of the Old Testament with reference to our future and in particular judgment since that specific element has tremendous capacity to color our perspective of Him.
When believers talk of the future the dialogue almost always carries a hefty amount of ambient noise coming from our understanding of how, who and why God judges...almost everyone is reminded of Noah and flood, and perhaps Sodom and Gomorrah and those history lessons inject a certain amount of uncertainty into our confidence of a loving devoted Father character so we like to distinguish the "new" Father from the "old" angry God...
Never mind verses like Psalms 7:11 where it says God is angry everyday at the wicked...if we are honest, we must find ourselves asking can He be trusted to NOT wipe us out like an ant colony under the magnifying glass of an 8 year old?
Let me offer how I am navigating this...and please bear with me because I have to take a different path for just a moment, and that path relates entirely with how I connect to God in the first place.
To give you a point of reference I am currently reading "From text to Tradition" (Schiffman)/"Back to Sources" (Holtz)/"Healing unplugged" (Johnson&Clark)/"The Book of Enoch" (Noah)/"St. Patricks Confessions" (St. Patrick)...if you can see the dualistic extremes here, consider yourself perceptive...
For those who do not notice the significance of the titles let me bring it into focus...I am currently (and normally do this) cycling through books that are both incredibly academic rooted in known history by scholarly experts and also reading material that quite frankly comes from a very mystical point of reference.
One side of my input is rooted in academia and is quite objective, the other is rooted in "perceptions/visions/charismata/" and is incredibly subjective...this is how I function, I am both a mystic and pragmatic, I believe in prophetic acts like pouring out wine on the land to heal it, AND practical acts like pouring a glass of wine for my friends and neighbors...its not confession vs. community its confession with community...wine on and wine in...
The problem with the piece of gear I was building was I hooked up the electricity wrong...where it was looking for a positive wave, it got a negative one, and where there should have been a negative signal it was positive...a puff of smoke was the result (to quote Revelation "Let the reader understand")
So follow me for just a minute and lets see if we can reverse the polarity of our God image from the past...what if God destroyed the ancient world NOT mainly because of mankind and his sinfulness (remember lamb slain from FOUNDATION)...what if God was actually intervening because of a different dynamic at work...a dynamic you cannot see through the lens of academia but you CAN see through a mystical view?
I would encourage you to look up the primary verses concerning God judging both the ancient world and the future one and see if there is not a mystical element included in the passage somewhere...an element of fallen angels, powers, whatever, even in Revelation we have very mystical demonic influence that God personally deals with...
We always tend to view the past purely from a historical perspective and fail to see it mystically, and vice versa, we like to imagine a mystical future but fail to see it pragmatically...like believing in some mystical rapture but failing to believe the nations are actually physically healed and the last enemy is actually defeated, that science discovers how to cure cancer and death etc...
I am becoming convinced that God destroyed the ancient world to eliminate an "unnatural" influence of fallen angels/powers/etc...and that consistent with His models of justice He sent TWO witnesses into Sodom to gauge the degree of demonic influence and NOT simply human sin (which He has always had a cure for) and when the Bible says "Noah was perfect in his generations" it might possibly be referring to his DNA and not his behavior... because the same Bible that says Noah was perfect also says none are. (The Hebrew word for "generations" allows this perspective).
Because of this adjustment to my "things past" perspective I am adjusting my "things to come" lens...and this slight adjustment allows me to see a consistency that makes God quite predictable and fairly safe, although like Aslan it does not make Him tame...
The unintended consequence for changing the mystical/pragmatic lens for the past requires that I also change it for the future...if I must adjust the amount of "mystical" I inject into history, then I need to be consistent and inject the same amount of "pragmatic" into the future...its the way things work in the natural world any adjustment on one side of the equation must be taken into account on the other side...
Let me simply ask this, what if God is more than willing to take responsibility for things He allowed, but expects us to take responsibility for things we have done...it was Him who cast the devil down to the earth, and it was Jesus who came and defeated that same fallen creature and ALL of the effects, and now that we have been given authority over that metric, we are now expected to use our authority and complete the original mission which was to expand the garden across the entire planet driving out the serpent in the process...
What if the future is incredibly pragmatic since the past is quite mystical? What if we will conquer death as the last enemy and THAT'S what inspires the return of Jesus to receive a Kingdom he can hand up to His Father?
Frankly our current eschatology (which I believe borders on the doctrine of demons since it gives them all the power) has the church cowering and hiding waiting for a rescue rather than a Bride handing her Groom a wedding present of a planet restored to hope and love...
And that's where I will end this future speculation...in the mystical union of pragmatic love...God will never give you someone He does not expect you to love...if we want to see the future we probably should walk into the darkest demonic place we know with love and see if we can drive out serpent influence that has been dealt with from Heavens perspective.
Somewhere I read that He taught us to pray: "Thy Kingdom come on earth AS IT IS in heaven"...this is what He wants us to pray towards a kingdom here that looks like it does there...
So how do we do that both pragmatically and mystically?
Well I am not about to abandon a three year project because of a little puff of smoke and a bunch of distortion...it's my baby, I made it with painstaking love and attention...it can be recovered I just need to start at the output and trace the problem backwards until its fixed, yes some parts might need to be tossed, removed, replaced, but on the whole it still has tremendous value.
Lets start with the output...Heaven looks like love...and just trace it back to the parts that have been burned...rectify them with His victory and push on until the planet is "re-pristinated"
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