Loving Like God

In a recent weekly conversation focused on the book of Revelation, we enjoyed a number of interesting and diverse perspectives on this rather timely Book. One way or another the world as we have known it seems to be coming to an end.

Our little conversation included believers from a diversity of backgrounds, and that always guarantees a number of popular positions on the meaning of this fascinating Letter. Included in this diversity was a very nice range of ages. And it is this diversity of age that I want to share about here.

By the time we reached Chapter 21, we had quite a struggle between a literal interpretation, (there are a number of those even among the older saints) and a more symbolic interpretation.

Being in many respects a symbolic, even parabolic kind of a guy, I probed to see why it was so difficult for a young woman to get the symbolism in the Letter, and this chapter in particular. Finally, it occurred to me to ask her if she had ever been in love. As I did, the song (which this post is titled after) came immediately to mind, though I hadn’t heard it for many years. At 74, I had to go look up the lyrics:

How little we know
How much to discover
What chemical forces flow
From lover to lover

How little we understand – what touches of that tingle
That sudden explosion – when two tingles intermingle

Who cares to define
What chemistry this is
Who cares with your lips on mine
How ignorant bliss is

So long as you kiss me – (and) the world around us shatters
How little it matters – how little we know

The song was even a better elaboration on the problem we were having than I had remembered. She admitted that she had never been in love.

If you have never been in love, there are some things that are very hard, really impossible to understand.

The problem gets even more difficult when we have been exposed to a lot of religion. But when we peel back all the teachings of men, and look full on into the Bible with our eyes and ears open, (it helps to have our hearts open as well) we find that there is a lot of Bible that is very difficult to understand if we have never been in love, even in the old creation sense.

There are no chemical forces in the old creation, for instance, that can hold a candle to the chemical forces of the Spirit of God. There is no kiss in the old creation that can compare to the kiss that begins Song of Solomon.

And where “the world around us shatters” is concerned, it would be difficult to surpass the message of the Book of Revelation. The eschaton certainly is the shattering of the world as we know it.

Perhaps it is enough to say that for many years the very rocks have been crying out in secular music and lyrics. What we need is to tune our ears and hearts to the Spirit, hearing the love of God extolled in unlikely places, even in the songs of this world.

Love!

P.S. In the past couple of days this blog has been upgraded to include media of various kinds, adding audio messages, songs, and this video interview. Most of the songs came from our stay in Connecticut, while enjoying a month off from my chemo-therapy. One of the things I have found doing karaoke is that I don’t feel any pain when I sing. As for the audience, you will have to be the judge of that. :-)

• By Jay Ferris, originally published October 2012.

“And I saw a great wonder in heaven…a woman…”

In the past day or so it occurred to me that part of what makes this woman a”wonder” in heaven is that she was not always there, like before the foundation of the world when the “Us” of God was thinking about creating something. Because the Creator was hoping for something He could not create, and to have what He was hoping for and needing in a woman, He created a man called Adam who was both male and female, and had a woman hidden in him. God removed the woman, and, in the fullness of time when she had been made “desolate” from living under the law, God married her, so that He could have more than one begotten child. Then, He put her in His Son–just in time for Christ, God’s only Seed, to die and multiply into many seeds so that His Father could get what both of them had been hoping for from before the beginning of the world. So now, there she is, the wonder of heaven, a woman who is male and female because she embodies you and me.

I’m speechless except perhaps to say, “Man! Are we going to have a ball in eternity or WHAT!!” :-)

Love!

• By Jay Ferris, originally posted October 2012.