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Mysterium Tremendum(Exodus 20:18) Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off.
To be truly in the presence of God is to be in the presence of a terrible majestic mystery, a Mysterium Tremendum. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which God's presence is assumed, ignored or even denied. The deep and profound presence of God that causes one to fall before His majestic Being is a rare experience in our time. Genesis 20 is the first close encounter between God and all Israel. Here at Mount Sinai, God attempts to establish a culture of conscious respect for that experience.
Genesis chapter 20 is also our first introduction to the Ten Commandments. They are spoken aloud by God at the foot of Mount Sinai. I want to begin by focusing on two, the third and the first. I'll start with the third commandment.
(Exodus 20:1 &7) And God spoke all these words, saying… “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.”
We live in a world in which ‘GD’ and ‘OMG’ are immediately recognizable acronyms. These two in particular are so common on television, in movies or in written narratives, that it is impossible to escape them outside of isolation from all media, and all worldly people. While we think of the use of ‘GD’ as a violation of the third commandment, in fact any use of the names of God in any trivial way, or to embellish our conversations is a violation of this principle. Merriam-Webster's definition of ‘vain’ is: “1: having or showing undue or excessive pride in one's appearance or achievements : CONCEITED. 2: marked by futility or ineffectualness : UNSUCCESSFUL, USELESS. 3: having no real value : IDLE, WORTHLESS.” In other words, if the ‘GD’ and ‘OMG’ were removed from the sentence uttered, without significantly altering its meaning, then the reference us useless coloration, or worse, a pretentious show meant to indicate emotional engagement. What is clear, is that God is not being called upon; or to put it another way, the call on God's name is vain.
It may sound as if I am getting picky or legalistic. I bring this up to point out that we live in a world in which God is sidelined until we have a need, and then we put on our ‘God’ hat and begin to talk ‘God’ talk in which every ‘GD’ and ‘OMG’ does become meaningful. My sense of this is that we have lost our relationship with the “mysterium tremendum”, the terrible mystery of God. Relying too heavily on the concept of God as a friend in need can lead to this ‘God on the shelf’ attitude.
The prophets, the apostles, and so many of the saints testify that the deeper relationship with God involves the experience of the “mysterium tremendum”. How many times do we see them prostrate “as though dead” (Rev. 1:17; Ezek. 1:28; Dan. 8:18, Dan. 10:8-9, Dan. 10:17-19; Hab. 3:16; Matt. 17:2-6; John 13:23; John 21:20). I have had intense experiences with God. I have never been knocked to the floor by the experience. Nevertheless, I greatly respect the testimony. I am jealous for that sort of closeness to God. I do believe in the “Fear of the Lord”. “The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear Him, and delivers them. Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” (Ps. 34:7-8).
My friend Richard is a master at engaging strangers in conversation. His favorite ploy is to ask someone if they would rather be a witch or a Christian. Would you believe that the majority say “witch”? This, in many cases, opens conversation on a rather deep and often spiritual level. In many cases, the respondent will tell us that although they answered “witch”, they are in fact practicing Christians; they attend church weekly. We find that this is partly the result of the fantasy world of Harry Potter, Twilight and other shows. We talk to Christians who have all the wands and paraphernalia of Harry Potter. One such Christian was genuinely shocked when I told her that King Saul was put to death, by God, for consulting a witch. Is the fantasy world that much more inspiring than knowing God?
At a recent men's breakfast meeting, I was talking with the pastor of the church. I was discussing the contents of my book A Cult Challenge to the Church and how it boiled down to a need to engage God in a real way. He got up and acknowledged our conversation, and went on to describe the purpose of the proposed men's groups as “accountability” and “transparency”, which sounded laudable. But, like much of contemporary Christianity, his description also sounded a lot like a therapy group or a self-help session. This is not to denigrate therapy groups or self-help, which I believe have their ultimate origin in the Christian ethos. But, these are easily offered by the secular world. Is there something unique about Christian fellowship, or not? This begs the further question: is Christianity still necessary or even relevant?
Genesis 11:4 “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”
The beginning of civilization, in Shinar, the cradle of civilization, starts with a religious imagination reaching up to heaven to “make a name for ourselves.” This is vanity writ large. The first strong man of history, Nimrod, Shinar's master builder, wants his name in lights. Soon the strong men of early civilization became the representatives of gods, or even gods in their own right. Why? Because the name they were seeking was their own name. Augustine was arguing for Christ, against pagan criticism of Christianity, in his book The City of God. He believed that the ‘gods’ were unclean demons (City of God, 294). But he goes on to suggest that pagan worship began when powerful leaders were revered after their death, until they took on the status of gods (City of God, 276). He even cites historical examples.
God does not leave humankind foundering in our own foolishness. He keeps poking and prodding until he finds someone who hears, and allows Him to lead them in a new direction. And so God dislodged Terah from his home: “Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there” (Gen. 11:31). In the very next chapter of Genesis, God directs Abram, who God renames Abraham, to complete the journey. Four-hundred years later, the children of his grandson Jacob, whom God renames Israel, are a nation in bondage in Egypt. Moses is called upon to lead the people of Israel out of bondage and to make a covenant in the Sinai, not with a man-god, or some god of human imagination, but with the God of all creation.
The covenant at Mount Sinai begins with “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exo. 20:3). This simple commandment breaks any and every sacred bond except one, the “I Am!” The very second command demands that we make no images of God (Exo. 20:4). To access God, we must go to the place shrouded in darkness where the light dwells. This seemingly simple step seems to be an unbridgeable gap to many of us.
Jewish theologian Richard Rubenstein sees in this the seeds of our modern secular world:
“after the covenant had rejected the sacrality of the political institutions of the ancient Near East, it was only a matter of time before all human institutions were denied any intrinsic sacrality… Thus, secularization is, paradoxically, the unintended consequence of a very distinctive kind of religious faith.” (Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 2nd Edition, 146-147).
This may be the case, in a sense, as the pagans in Augustine's time argued. But the reality is that God has been, from the very beginning, trying to get humankind to devote itself to an active relationship with Himself, not with Nimrod, or Pharoh, or Nebuchadnezzar, or whatever political ideology is fashionable at the moment. God Himself is the one sacred bond essential to a world that functions as it is meant to. However, if we break all man-made sacred bonds, but do not reach out for the one saving sacred bond, we become a secular society, a godless society, easily blown about by any whim of political or social fancy. It appears that Rubenstein failed to understand this key component to the covenant. So the question is, how does a theologian become disconnected from the purpose of God at Sinai?
Matthew 23:29-31 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.
The secular rupture begins with religious professionals. When the priests, prophets, theologians and various other ‘men of God’ have not completed the step from the sacred space of paganism to a mature relationship with God Himself, they will inevitably begin to examine the externals of religion. But without the living God that Moses and Elijah and Isaiah knew, they preach a beautiful temple which is nothing but a tomb full of dead men's bones.
Pragmatist philosopher William James identified the issue in a series of lectures delivered in Scotland in 1901, and published under the title The Varieties of Religious Experience. James, though not a Christian, understood very well that there is a huge difference between experiencing religion, that is, experiencing God's presence, and living in a religious system:
“The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they have yet many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The baseness so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology which it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life which are the exclusive object of our study” (James, Varieties…, 269).
When Jesus confronts the scribes and the pharisees, he is not concerned with their religious system. He is concerned that because they have no relationship with God, they defend their system, their religion, against God Himself! Their own religious orthodoxy has replaced God, violating the second commandment against making images, and that must include mental images. In Dostoevsky's book The Karamazov Brothers, this is dramatically illustrated by the tale of the Grand Inquisitor, an official of the Spanish Inquisition, who arrests Jesus, knowing who he is, and condemns him to death again, in order to maintain his religious system, which he believes is superior to Christ himself (Dostoevsky, The Karamazov Brothers, 272-275).
The most recent CT (Christian Today), contains an article on leadership issues in today's Church. The author Mike Cosper refers to the senior pastor of large church with a multi-million dollar budget and numerous books in print, “lamenting the fact that leaders don't have the platform or opportunity to tell their stories anymore” (Cosper, “Don't Make Things Worse”, CT April 2022, 27-29). It would seem that that pastor forgot that, in the end, it is not his story… it is His story. Cosper further tells the story of new missionary, far from home and feeling out of place, when she hears a beautiful song sung by the village women washing clothes in a stream. The lovely song makes her feel much better. She asks a women if it was taught them by the previous missionary, and what was the meaning. The women replied, “Oh yes… It means, ‘If you boil the water, you won't get dysentery.’”
Act 5:34-40 But a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law held in honor by all the people, stood up and gave orders to put the men outside for a little while. And he said to them, “Men of Israel, take care what you are about to do with these men. For before these days Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him. He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him. He too perished, and all who followed him were scattered. So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!” So they took his advice, and when they had called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go.
First century Judaism was not always legalistic. The conflicts between Jesus and the Pharisees may make this appear to be the case, but those who did follow Jesus suggest otherwise. Gamaliel's call for leniency for Peter and the other apostles before the Jewish council also suggests a religious flexibility. Much of Christian theology has tried to force Judaism into a legalistic box. But doesn't much of the world now think of Christianity as a religion of rules and regulations as well? Rabban Gamaliel I, was a leading authority in the Sanhedrin in the early first century. He was the grandson of the great Jewish teacher Hillel the Elder, who taught, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” Gamaliel, confronted by Peter who walked out of a locked prison, where he had been chained between two guards, is unwilling to declare that the apostles are not following God's directions. To say it another way, he is open to the possibility that the apostles are right.
In the same CT magazine cited above, is an article by a Jewish author. She states, “Christian theology often seeks to neatly parse out elements that Jewish theology is quite comfortable leaving in tension” (Jennifer M. Rosner, “Clothed in Life and Death”, CT April 2022, 47). New Testament scholar E.P. Sanders wrote an influential book arguing against a narrow view of Judaism. What struck me was the description of rabbinic thought by Rabbi Max Kadushin, as summarized by Sanders:
“Rabbinic thought is based on human experience, and the interpretation of experience by the organic complex renders the Rabbis indifferent to logical contradictions” (Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 134).
For Kadushin, the organic complex refers to the way rabbinic thoughts fit together. I like this phrase, “indifferent to logical contradictions”. Sanders goes on to quote one of Kadushin's examples:
“At one time, the Rabbis declare that Adam's sin is responsible for the presence of death (not sin) ‘until the end of all generations’, a view determined by the concept of corporate justice; at another, they say that each man dies because of his own sin, a view determined by the concept of individual distributive justice; and at still another time, instead of regarding death as calamity, they state that it is a moral purgative for the world, a view determined by the concept of chastisement” (Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 134).
To my mind, he is referring to a poetic imagination. In the above example, death is used to discuss three different concepts without suggesting that our concept of death should be determined by any one of them alone. The poet is able to connect ideas in meaningful ways; but, ways that may defy logical connection. Think: “There is fire in his eyes.” Without allowing ourselves to hold onto the unimagninable, we will never find a way to sit before the mysterium tremendum. I am currently reading a book by an important, but little known Pentacostal. As one site states, “Without his ministry and influence, perhaps the Charismatic Renewal would not have occurred, or at least not in the 1960s-1970s” (Pneuma Review, Dec. 9,2017). He makes this statement:
“I have found in the free romantic spirit of the poets more of what I am feeling after than I have in the philosophers and the theologians” (Moseley, Manifest Victory, 31).
John 9:1-5 As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
Here we see the disciples trying to get a definitive answer to the problem of suffering. Jesus sidesteps the issue. He doesn't answer as to whether or not this man or his parents have sinned. He wants them to open their thinking up to what does God want to do. Our vision is all too often rooted and grounded in our lives down here, when Jesus is pointing over the horizon. Their mind turns to who is to blame for the blindness, and totally miss the glory that God is ready to do. As Pastor Bo says, “is your focus on the problem, or on the solution?”
In Matthew 16, Jesus tells the disciples, “Watch and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” The disciples' minds turn to the bread they forgot to bring. They never ever received bread from the Pharisees or the Sadducees. Jesus was using the word “leaven” to try to spark a poetic image in their minds of just how the ideas they have received from the religious elites are shaping their own thoughts. The disciples are trying to fit Jesus into their world, and totally missing his point.
Rubenstein uses the term “dissonance reduction” (After Auschwitz, 84) to refer to the process by which things that don't seem to fit, are made to fit in the mind. In the end, we have a world in which everything seems to fit solidly into place, until the next disruption comes along. Theologically this process is called demythologization and deconstruction. The story, the history, the cosmology, the subjective experiences are removed from the ideas and concepts. The result is an authority, representing God, who has expertise in ideas about God, but does not know God. Good theology starts with a genuine encounter with the living God. But this theology requires constant renewal. To quote another Jewish theologian:
“There is never final theology. It is always theology of defensible structure, but the saving structure of one age is another's Tower of Babel…” (Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum, 107).
Theology helps us to understand. In God's world things are moving too fast and too far beyond our comprehension for us to fix them solidly into a mental box. We should want to have understanding of what is going on. But, if we spend too much time trying to reduce the dissonance, God's world passes us by. We fail to encounter.
I sponsored a religions conference. A professor from Ghana, from the Yoruba tribe in West Africa, described the kings staff as having the carving of a hand holding an egg at the top. The idea being that if the king grips his people too tightly, he breaks the egg. If he holds his people too loosely, they fall from his grasp and break. The idea should fit here too. If we try to hard to make sense of it all, we make nonsense. But if our thoughts are all loosey-goosey, we come up with nonsense as well. Good poetry makes sense only if we remain flexible in our thoughts.
We keep striving for the comfortable feel of the “real”. But, we must recognize that the real world is always changing. You can't stop change, any more than you can stop the river from flowing. Finding our proper place in the flow, means less time spent nailing down the present, and more time talking to the one from whom all things flow. And more than that, there are very real things occurring in the Spirit which defy explantation in the “real world.”
Deuteronomy 4:29 But from there you will seek the LORD your God and you will find him, if you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul.
This verse tells us what to do to get free. It is placed in a passage about the consequences of getting lost in our idolatrous wanderings. Unfortunately, most theology relies heavily on what has been written already. It becomes solid like concrete because it is rooted in solid logic. Wet mud mixed with straw makes rock hard bricks. With those we build our towers of Babel. The mud is hard because the water is baked out. Logic on one side is at war with the logic on the other. Soon, Christians are at war, literally or figuratively, with each other. Is there any greater tragedy in the realm of God's people?
Our Christian life is meant to be a relationship with God Himself. That means our mud is meant to remain wet. In fact, true religion rides on an ocean of interior energy flowing directly from the throne of God. The world set against God is a tempest and a storm. But Jesus, the one who walks on water, tells you to walk on the water, and to tell the storm, “Peace! Be still!” (Mark 4:29; Ps. 107:29).
God is absolute, unchanging and unchangeable. We are not. We change moment by moment. We change individually. Our world changes. Our culture changes. And in our changes we need to know different things at different times. Today, I might need to know that God has everything under control; that all things are planned from the beginning of time. Tomorrow, He may need to tell me to get up and go, to make a choice, that the hands of Christ are my own. Logic wants to argue and say, either everything is determined by God, or I have choice and responsibility. Both can't be true at the same time. But in God's world, and in the Scriptures, both are true. This is the argument between the Calvinists and the Armenians. These brick-makers are frustrated by such talk, but anyone who is alive to this changing world has no issue with it.
Poetry is just the evidence of life.
If your life is burning well,
Poetry is just the ash. (Leonard Cohen)
Two weeks ago, Uyi spoke on taking time for devotion. This is the essential ingredient keeping an experience of God fresh in your life. In our experience of God we gain the ability to distinguish the godly from the ungodly. When a Christian culture falters, turns secular, or in some cases, down-right demonic; it is clear that the experience of God is no longer alive in the center of that culture. An idea of God has taken the place of God Himself. This is why devotional time, particularly time spent leaning into God's presence, so important. Why should we focus on God Himself? Because God is real, and for His reality to affect our reality, He must be given the space to intrude!
My first deep experience of God's world was before I had even become a Christian. I was meditating as a Buddhist or Yogi would. Suddenly, I felt myself lifted out of my body. I could see myself down below, as if I were above the ceiling looking down. The room seemed to have disappeared into the universe, a living presence of all things. I had stepped into a spiritual realm that both drew me into it, but also thoroughly frightened me. I jumped back into my body and quit meditating. I have since had a similar experience twice in deep prayer as a member of New Wine. Both times I quit immediately. The experience is similar to one that Bobby Conner related. In his case, on the second or third time, God spoke to him directly not to quit, but to allow himself to be taken to a place of heavenly vision.
The more comfortable, even delightful, religious experience is one I have often when I am out in nature. I get a sense that everything in God's world fits perfectly as it is meant to be. I can feel the intentional nature of God's creation. And this is the experience I have when I am in devotional time, quiet time. This is time when I am not asking God for anything other than His nearness. What these experiences have in common is that they bring me into contact with a world that I cannot photograph; it has no material substance. In fact, the sensations are often difficult to adequately describe.
Theologians and psychologists call these experiences “numinous” experiences. Wikipedia has this definition: “Numinous is a term derived from the Latin numen, meaning ‘arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring.’ The term was given its present sense by the German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto in his influential 1917 German book The Idea of the Holy. He also used the phrase mysterium tremendum as another description for the phenomenon. Otto's concept of the numinous influenced thinkers including Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and C. S. Lewis. It has been applied to theology, psychology, religious studies, literary analysis, and descriptions of psychedelic experiences.”
As in my own case, having a numinous experience does not necessarily mean you are a Christian or that you have been converted, although the experience often accompanies conversion. It simply means that you have gotten close enough to the spiritual world to sense the presence of God and God's world.
So how do we know that we have entered into God's fold? This is the transformational work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit that moves mountains.
Montaña
(a song by Salvador)
Si tuvieras fe como grano de mostaza
Eso lo dice el Señor
Tu le dirías a la montaña
Muévete, muévete
Esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá
If you had faith like mustard seed
That's what the Lord says
You would say to the mountain
Move, move
That mountain will move… It'll move, it'll move
(Matthew 17:20) He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”
It was not long after I came to New Wine, that a deliverance session was arranged for me. It involved myself, then Pastor Chris, Bo, our pastor now, and then worship leader Alan in the hall room now used for storage. I assume that Chris felt that someone who had spent seven years in a cult might need the big guns. I remember that when the session began the sky had turned dark. Soon, there was thunder and lightning going crazy outside. The storm cleared as soon as we were finished. Do you know how the air seems cleaner after a storm? I felt cleaner. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what was changed, I just felt different. This was an encounter of an entirely different kind, it was a transformational encounter.
The Holy Spirit moves mountains. Christian living is living with transformational encounters, both for ourselves personally, and for those people whom we are privildged to touch. There is power in Holy Ghost prayer. Transformational encounters, transformational visions, words, healings and deliverance are special gifts from God, telling us that God is working through Jesus and the Holy Spirit to change us and our world. There are prophetic words spoken by non-Christians. There are spiritual works performed by non-Christians. When Richard and I asked the waiter in an Indian restaurant if he would rather be Christian or a witch. His eyes grew big and he backed up. In broken English, he stammered, “Witch, no! Witch, no!” Those who have encountered Jesus, love Jesus. Those who have encountered the devil… don't.
The gospels tell us that Jesus was continually going aside to pray. It hints that he was also fasting on a regular basis.
(Mark 9:28-29) And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”
You may recognize that this is directly following the incident related above, where the disciples could not dislodge a demon from a young man, but Jesus does. You may also note that the King James Version says, “This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting.” Bottom line: if you want the Spirit to move for you, pray. If you want more power, fast and pray. You are looking for the place shrouded in darkness where the light dwells. You can't build a tower to heaven out of what you find there. Heaven is already there. Drink it up!