Faith in God, the transcendent, ultimate Reality
That despite all the chaos, evil, suffering, and pain observed, the ultimate nature of existence, God, is essentially Love—relational, giving, kind, good, patient, forgiving, humble, truthful, trusting, hopeful, meek, generous, peaceful, faithful, protecting, rejoicing, unselfish, honorful, courteous, enduring…
Jesus, the Chosen One, came to proclaim the Realm/Reign/Way of God and when rejected, endured the cross of excruciating pain and suffering for the joy set before him, in order for humans to see/experience how much God loves all of us, every last one of us, and loves his creation. (The pronoun is used in the generic sense and is not asserting God is male. For God created Human, male and female he created them in his image.)
*I suppose in a starkly objective sense this view of ultimate reality is an impossible dream--to think Love is essential, is ultimately true, when millions of years of natural and human historical fact claim/show the contrary, and often the major religions deny by theory or their contrary behavior.
But great minds from Plato to Whitehead, from Paul to Henri Nouwen/Martin Luther King Jr. have looked at the brute facts and still rationally averred that ultimate truth is greater than cruel fact, love greater than hate, creativity greater than destruction, good greater than evil, mercy greater than judgment, eternity greater than temporality.
Existence, the Cosmos, nature, the visible world is in creative process. God is wooing the visible to become the eternal in a relational dance of love. Evil, chaos, suffering, and pain...are the demonic, the Satan (Hebrew: “adversary”) over/through which Goodness and Truth and Love must suffer to vanquish.
To live the Good News, to participate in the “Kingdom of God” is to long for, to change, to create toward becoming…eventually to perfection. This is a cosmically long process, not understood in depth by the NT writers who thought Christ would return within their life-times, how the writer of Hebrews understood prophetic truth that the “end of the ages” had come then. “But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” Hebrews 9:26 ESV
Yet 2,000 years later we seem only a little bit closer (and sometimes not when one sees the horrific world news). But we don’t look to this present age, not at its tragic evil. No matter how many thousands or millions of years last, we look to the future, to God’s realm “..we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18 ASV
In the Light,
Daniel Wilcox
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