Before the world was made

There is a tension in scripture, and it’s there to produce a tension in us. All that the unbeliever sees when perusing the Bible is contradictions to be pointed out. All that the scholar sees when studying the Bible is textual inconsistencies to be resolved. Whether unbeliever or believer, approaching the scripture simply as a book cuts us off from its purpose and its transforming power. Coming to it with the aim of learning about God reduces it to an abstraction and makes God a thing, an idea.

The scripture tells us more about ourselves than it tells us about God, much, much more. That’s precisely why we drag our heels and avoid it. Yet, only by knowing ourselves can we begin to know God as He really is—the living God, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—because we find irrefutable evidence of His presence, and His work, in us. It’s like finding fire burning within glowing coals, making them bright and hot: yes, coals, that is what we are, yes, fire, that is what He is. He burns, we are transformed.

We sense—even more than sense, we experience—His being and His activity in the tension that scripture both produces and reveals in us by the divine words we read and ingest.

We begin to know for sure that Christ is with us and in us when we find ourselves, like Him, even with Him, suspended between heaven and earth. In the depths of our own small being we reflect and resolve all the tensions that are inherent within the Divine Nature, and we enter into the life of the Holy Triad.

He has been waiting for us, awaiting our arrival within Him, since before the world was made.