The Ultimate Test

I had a German test on Friday. It's only another couple of days until I find out how terribly I actually did on it. The problem is, teachers never mark tests according to our humanity. They don't say "Keith, there were a few things that need to be worked on but I'm sure you'll have them down by next time." No, they mark us like machines. You are and always will be 7.5 out of 10. This particular quiz mark will never change. There is no next time for this one. You cannot improve. 

It's the same idea as a SIN number; the system gives you one number, and that number is you to them. The name "Keith" is flexible enough to encompass my varying fluctuations and to allow for improvement or decline on my part yet particular and specific enough that when people hear my name they are able to point me out in a crowd. A number, on the other hand, is absolute. In a closed all-encompassing system, a number represents a specific point which will never be different than it is. 

That's one of the reasons I liked home schooling. I never had tests. Upon entering high-school, though, my marks were the best they've ever been. My mom and dad were able to gauge where I was at and what I needed to work on. They didn't need to simplify my progress to a easily-comprehensible integer in order to help my academic achievement. 

God doesn't need to simplify us to be able to fit us into His system, either. Throughout our life we don't receive various report cards from heaven, defining absolutely how much less than perfect we actually are. True importance has never been found in the law; God has always been more concerned with mercy than sacrifices. 

In the same way, our position at a specific point is never written in stone for eternity. In the ministry of redemption, God's Spirit is always at work in our lives to lead us to the Rock that is higher than ourselves. Given, there will come a time when we will stand before our Lord and be called to give an account for everything done in the flesh, but as Christians we are assured that what stands between us and perfection will be burned away as wood, hay, or straw. We will be left with that which is beautiful and that which lasts. 
 
God in a Box 

Strangely, although we know that God deals with us with incomprehensible love and grace, we often try to approach Him systematically in order to put Him within our reach. The Israelites tried to fully understand who God is by making images out of Him. The golden calf incident is one of many such attempts. No wonder the second commandment forbids making an idol in the form of anything, because there is nothing that can make God entirely comprehensible to our senses or intellect. 
  In modernity, we try to reduce God to a series of propositions that we call doctrine in order to try and His entirety in a closed system of reason. Kant made a distinction between what we can know concerning the physical, empirical world and what we believe concerning the metaphysical realm. This is a distinction that is quickly pushed aside by Christians, because it casts doubt on our ability to know anything empirically about God. However, this distinction must be seriously considered by Christian theologians because it has led to the division of Christian thought. On one side are those who try to reduce God to scientific certainty through empirical. On the other side are those who try to exclude God from the realm of reason so that we can comprehend Him by not having to think rationally about Him. With God as a far-removed metaphysical concept, there is no need to let His empirical truth transform our lives. This is closely related to the Absentee-Gardener syndrome, where we push God further and further back into metaphysics until He is no longer a significant part of our physical existence. 
 
Travesties of Presentation 

The problems with the way we present God to ourselves and others don't merely reside within the realm of thought and reason. They concern the relation of reason, body/emotion, and spirit. One blatant example of such a tragedy is when one attempts to override a person’s intellectual blocks to God by an emotional experience. This is why hyped-up religious events yield little lasting fruit. Eventually everyone will calm down enough to hear the intellectual objections they had before. Another travesty is in trying to overcome perceived experiential problems that people have with God by reason. If someone feels that God allowed someone close to them to die for no good reason, preaching abstract doctrines isn’t going to incline their mind towards the truth. Just as Jesus both came in flesh and was a fulfillment of the law and the prophets, so people need to see flesh-and-blood examples of a Christ-filled life as well as hear the life-giving words of the gospel message.  

Underlying each of these travesties, though, is the assumption that by the communication of our own emotion or intellect we may single-handedly introduce a person to Christ. It is only the Spirit of God that can bring someone to the place where they meet Christ. When it comes to spiritual matters, no earthly convincing will cause someone to cross over from death to life. At that time of a person’s journey, the intellect can take no further step. The spiritual is beyond the realm of the intellectual. 

The intellect can choose to believe that either Christ was fully God or Christ was fully man, but it cannot rationally choose to believe that Christ is both God and man apart from brain-death, insincerity, misunderstanding, or truly taking on the mind of Christ which transcends human logic and must be preceded by spiritual renewal. It is no wonder that only those spirits who acknowledge that Jesus has come in the flesh are from God. 

Conversely, while emotion can convince a person to say that they believe in Christ, it cannot actually take the step to belief. Just as the intellect is caught between human logic and divine logic, in being unable to empirically perceive God the sensual soul is caught between the tragedies observed every day and the beauty of God’s creation. Based only on constantly changing empiricism the soul could never absolutely decide that God is a God of love and not hate.  

The Un-markable Test 

Ultimately, the mystery of Christ’s love can only be entered into by taking the nail-pierced hand of Christ Himself as he dies on the cross. It is only by dying in this way in faith that one may come to knowing His resurrection; that one may cross over from death to life and come to know true life in Christ. It is only through meeting God the Absolute in the frailty of the finite through the meekness of his weakness on the cross of Christ that we are able, through God's grace, to become heirs of the eternal and to pass the ultimate test: do you know My Son? Knowing Christ, even then, is not a quantitative fact of the intellect or a qualitative intuition of the heart, but is an experience that transcends all known experience through the mystery of His Spirit.