“And Isaac said to his father Abraham, ’My father!’ And he said ‘Here am I, my son.’ He said, ‘Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for burnt offering?’ Abraham said, God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.’ So they went both of them together.”
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…everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain.””
Do you realize the entire Bible, all 66 books, is a prologue of your life. Each person is a consequence of divine creation and the primary object of the biblical story. It started before the foundation of the world and it is about lambs! We will get to the lambs later.
It is hard to imagine anything before time. Yet in John 1:1 we read “In the beginning”, the advent of time, “was the Word and the Word was God”. In the Greek it reads in the beginning “God was the Word”.
Existing in eternity before the clock of time ticks is paradoxical. A book existed before time? Names of people like you and me in a book before there was sky, a moon or suns and galaxies? This is the Lamb’s Book of Life, before there were lambs. Our personal context for life is a reality before creation. If you are not in Christ it is mystic but, if you are in Christ, it is existential and practical.
Our scriptural perception of God is vital to understanding God correctly. How we think about God matters because we are objects of His love. He desires us to know Him and make Him the object of our love. Our love connection to God provides access to Him and His absolute, eternal nature. It is like breathing eternal air while living in our polluted temporal space.
God knew our personal existence before Adam was created. Rather than an academic abstraction, this goes directly to the character and nature of God. God is love. God in His love gifts us with faith to understand beyond our vocabulary. Faith conveys knowledge to our heart beyond the reach of reason. It is faith that opens the door of our mind to receive things of the Spirit of God. This is how God brings unseen things into us and makes them visible. We are “born again” into eternality, a place outside of time. It was here, before time, our identity came into being. It is here the prologue of our life begins. Through faith we begin to see and know God’s timeless reality. Faith invites God’s reality into our personal, temporal, practical experience.
Faith reaches outside of time to bring eternity into personal living experience. Does that sound mystic, metaphysical or just plan wacky? Well, does raising people from the dead seem a little more than strange? Faith is an exotic place. It is more than a ‘journey”, it is a destination. Faith is a gift allowing us to “journey” from within our destination. The practical side of heaven is being able to bring into natural circumstances absolute truth and the resurrection life of Jesus Christ. He becomes the Perfector of our faith as we absorb the qualities and power of His resurrection life.
Our access to this pre-creation existence is not only scriptural, it is fundamental to who we are in Christ. The message of salvation is about God reaching into time and lifting us out of it while at the same time ministering to us in it.
For someone to be sovereign means to have total authority, control and power to exercise their will. This is who God is. He describes Himself as “I AM”. He is the One who created the laws of physics and the One who makes us objects of His love … and He is the sovereign God!
God is our prologue. His dwelling place is our center. Our existence comes out of Himself. Believers have been created twice. We were created first as children of Adam. If we have been created again, “born again”, then we have been placed in Christ and given His Holy Spirit, 1Corinthians 15:45. The Holy Spirit is constantly wooing us into the things of God and giving us a taste of His life. These are God’s eternal values placed within our grasp by faith.
In the last analysis there are only two groups of people, those who are in Christ and those who are not. Those who choose not to be subject to God’s grace will be subject to His righteous judgment. Either we are hostile to God or we have accepted His grace placing us in His kingdom. In the mean time, our temporal experience tests our eternal metal, growing faith and knowledge of God.
If we are in Christ, we are compelled to blend the eternal into our temporal calling. It is the essence and purpose of grace. It is a divine provision making possible the impossible. We are called to take the provisions of His resurrected life and insert them into our temporal experience. Our created minds cannot contain, nor can our hearts hold love so profound! The last Adam, Jesus Christ, has equipped us with His own resurrected life giving Spirit so that we can replace our life with His resurrected life of absolute truth and αγαπε love. We are called to replace our temporal life with His eternal life.
Our natural, temporal world is full of change. It is often observed that change is the only constant, change doesn’t change. In God’s eternality it is just the opposite. God’s pre-creation state or condition has not changed. God has not changed. His truth is absolute and it is revealed to us in the form of Jesus, God manifested in flesh. The Holy Spirit, our gift in Christ, reveals Christ’s absolute truth to our corrupted heart and mind. This is fundamental to those whose name is written in the Lamb’s book of life.
The story of our born again life is an account of this transformation. It is the story of replacing our temporal, carnal life of change for God’s eternal, absolute life manifested to us through His Son Jesus, the Son of Abraham and the Lamb of God.
God is the author and finisher of our temporal experience regardless of which group we belong. The contradictions in our human experience will disappear like vapor when we bathe in God’s grace. This is faith at work.
Grace is not only available; it reigns because we have been justified by faith, Romans 5. God’s grace pierces time proving the love of our creator by provisioning us with the communicable absolutes of His character, i.e., righteousness, purity, truth, love, joy and peace.
Life starts not in time, it anticipates time. This is extraordinary! Yet, this is what the biblical record declares. We are on a journey. In fact, “journey” is a feeble attempt to describe a reality without buildings or walls. Any word, like journey, describing a place without time, or structures, or barriers, so common in our human way of thinking, falls short of what this reality really is! And yet, we do live in buildings and contend with walls even while we are called into a reality, not virtual, but totally absolute. Traveling from reality rooted in temporal culture into one of absolute righteousness and truth is truly a “journey” like no other!
Feeble is where we are. Contained within the pollution of human authority, power and special interests, we feel compelled to enter the fray to assert our own identity. But this choice yields to our dilemma as being final. It acknowledges our sensual experience as the supreme authority. It denies a higher design and order, not only of our personal physiology, but the grandeur of creation seen both in microscope and telescope. This great deception says, “We are king!” This journey of the natural man is without Jesus but it is also the journey of struggling believers who do not have a scriptural view of God and their personal relationship with Him.
Our journey of faith is described by revelation in the knowledge of Christ, having our hearts enlightened by what the hope He has called us to individually and know the riches of the inheritance in us by experiencing His resurrection power according to His will for us, Ephesians 1:15ff. This is our journey, walking in the Spirit of Him with whom we have to do!
“Journey” is an ok word because it is like a launching pad. While bound by launching pad rules, we are free to “journey” into divine space. Limited by language, we label this “journey” with common temporal references. But the “journey” is about unlocking limitations and barriers of personal culture by God Himself. Anchored to our frailties, because of sin in a world that continues to degrade, we learn to abandoned self in order to thrive “in Christ”. This process itself is a large part of the journey. The mystery of possessing the eternal mind of Jesus while at the same time living with the pollution and hostility of our self dominated natural world is amazing and exciting. Not only amazing, it is extraordinary and incredible all rolled into one! Being in the world but not of the world is a reality, a reality that is absolutely true in Christ.
This kind of “journey” calls us to fight a war that is already won. How can a war exist if the battle is already won? It’s an oxymoron. Remember the story of the shepherd boy, David. His battle was already won before he picked up the five stones. Remember Jericho, the first city the Israelites confronted after crossing the Jordan River into the promise land. Remember Elijah confronting the wicked King Ahab and his wife Jezebel. He called down fire that consumed the sacrifice. The key to these victories was faith. These conflicts were not conflicts at all because they were already won through FAITH. The “journey” is faith. Faith is taking reality outside of time, bringing it to our personal living space.
The battle tests faith so that we can experience God’s power in action personally. His inheritance is in us being tested by conflict and suffering. He glorifies Himself in us so that He is lifted up, while at the same time, we put to death the death residing in our flesh. How is this possible? The cross-made it possible, the blood of the Lamb. This is the “journey” we all travel as believers in Christ.
We start with milk, understanding who we are in Christ, being rooted in the person of Jesus. We are transferred from one kingdom to another, not only by the position of new birth, being in Christ, but also by drinking the water, which is Jesus Himself, and eating His flesh, drinking His blood, living by faith in the grace He Himself supplies. We can live in the law of the Spirit of Life because He has set us free from the law of sin and death. This is the “journey”!
When we see our origin, the prologue to our life, we add context to Romans 5 where the reign of grace in which we stand replaces the reign of sin and death. We can understand why there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, Romans 8.
Scripture defines for us the “boundaries” of our life when it is in Christ. What we find is, it is “boundless” because faith, given to us by the lover of our soul, can remove mountains.