by Aaron Davis
I’m not emphatically saying this is the case, but I question if it is possible that we see this exemplified in the typical interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer, and if so, do we also see it reiterated in other scriptures in which the same Oranos is used in the original text? I question also if this perception of a distant God somehow influences and determines a reception of Him and could lead to a snowballing or domino effect where it drastically influences entire belief systems about who God is, and furthermore, who man is in relation to Him.
Considering the Bible within this context, I believe it is safe to say that many people of our day no longer have the ability to read the Bible or historic Christian events realistically, as if they really happened as described. If that’s the case, and I believe it is, then the inability to accept the fact that our familiar atmosphere is a heaven in which God dwells and from which He deals with us leads to some curious translations of biblical texts.
In Acts 11:5–9, within a span of five verses, exactly the same phrase, tou ouranou, is translated in three different ways by the New American Standard Version, and by most others. It translated “the sky” in verse 5, “the air” in verse 6, and “heaven” in verse 9.74
Acts 11:5–9 (NASB)
I was in the city of Joppa praying; and in a trance I saw a vision, an object coming down like a great sheet lowered by four corners from the sky; and it came right down to me, and when I had fixed my gaze on it and was observing it saw the four-footed animals of the earth and the wild beasts and the crawling creatures and the birds of the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” But I said, “By no means, Lord, for nothing unholy or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” But a voice from heaven answered a second time, “What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy.”
In this passage of scripture, Peter has a vision of a sheet with all kinds of animals being let down through the atmosphere (tou ouranou).75 Among them are birds of the atmosphere (tou ouranou). And he hears a voice from the atmosphere (tou ouranou) telling him to rise and eat.
Now, in the English language, sky, air, and heaven all paint very different mental images. In translation, the meanings become entangled. For instance, the sky is more of a limit than a place and as a place it is perceived to be farther away than the air. As a result, the common cliché is “The sky is the limit,” not “The air is the limit.” And our perception of heaven is completely out of sight for us—somewhere in the outer reaches of space, such as how Willard explains it below.
A consistent translation of tou ouranou from a biblical context could be the word “air” or “atmosphere” in each occurrence, as I have just exampled, and more clearly convey Peter’s experience. God spoke to Peter from the surrounding “thin air,” where birds fly and from which the sheet came. This conveys quite a different impression than the standard translations, which usually only speak of Heaven in this passage.
Similarly, God spoke to Moses from the midst of the fire on Sinai and from above the “Mercy Seat” in the tabernacle (Num. 7:89). In each case it was from our “air.” But the ideology that dominates our education and thought today makes it hard to accept this straightforward fact.
The damage done to our understanding and implementation of faith in Christ and in the accessibility, proximity and implementation of His Kingdom by confusing Heaven with a place in distant or outer space, or even beyond space, is significant. If we believe that God is “out there somewhere” then it is difficult to process him being close or accessible to us and with the perception of Him being at a distance come actions (even if subconsciously) that correspond with our perception which have the potential to, at the very least, make us feel alone in our struggles or distant from the God who could make a difference in them.76
Willard, in his book, The Divine Conspiracy, describes our perception of heaven, God, and their proximity to us this way:
Matthew, the quintessentially Judaic Gospel, as a matter of course utilizes the phrase the kingdom of the heavens to describe God’s will, or “kingdom.” It captures that rich heritage of the Jewish experience of the nearness of God that is so largely lost to the contemporary mind. This heritage is a primary revelation of the nature of God. Thus it forms the mark of identification of the one we address in the central prayer of Christendom: “Our Father the One in the heavens . . . ” (Matt 6:9).
Accordingly, a difference in terminology that at first seems insignificant in fact reaches deeply into the hearts of Jesus’ message about this world we live in. The phrase kingdom of the heavens occurs thirty-two times in Matthew’s Gospel and never again in the New Testament. By contrast, the phrase kingdom of God occurs only five times in that Gospel but is the usual term used in the remainder of the New Testament. What is the significance of the variation in this terminology?
Generally speaking, scholars have treated the variation as of no significance at all. This is unfortunate for reasons that should now be clear. C.H. Dodd is characteristic with this statement: “The two expressions, ‘The Kingdom of God’ and ‘The Kingdom of Heaven,’ the latter of which is peculiar to the First Gospel, are synonymous, the term ‘heaven’ being common in Jewish usage as a reverential periphrasis for the divine name.77
As for the terminology used in the translated scripture, Willard says,
Now it is certainly true that the word heaven is often used in the Bible to refer to God’s realm—though I think never, strictly speaking, to God himself. But this does not mean that the terms are synonymous. The two phrases in question refer to the same reality in some contexts, but they always refer to it in different ways and communicate importantly different things about it.
The very fact that heaven could be used loosely to refer to God at all is deeply instructive of how God relates to us, once you realize what “the heavens” are. It tells us exactly where God is in relation to the human world. On the other hand, omission of these meanings by speaking only of the kingdom of God creates a vacuum that makes it easy to misunderstand Jesus and his teachings. The problem is made much worse by how we are taught to think of space today.78
Understanding the biblical interpretation versus the original intent of the use of tou ouranou can play a significant role in how we process and relate to God, and how we even view His interaction with us. I think to properly interpret the Bible, this understanding is essential, as the potential to influence our perspectives on other scriptures that we may read can have a domino effect. For instance, if you believe that God exists far away in a distant heaven, then when reading that He is a friend who sticks closer than a brother who will never leave you or forsake you, it leaves a contrasting image in your perception and possibly leads to a subsequent experience.
Willard goes on to say:
Confusing God and his interaction with man with the biblical interpretation of “heaven” (tou ouranou) instead of “air around us” (tou ouranou) may have caused some to think that God is a Wizard of Oz or Sistine Chapel kind of being sitting at a location very remote from us. The universe is then presented as, chiefly, a vast empty space with a humanoid God and a few angels rattling around in it, while several billion human beings crawl through the tiny cosmetic interval of human history on an oversized clod of dirt circling an insignificant star.
Of such “god” we can only say, “Good riddance!” It seems that when many people try to pray they do have such an image of God in their minds. They therefore find praying psychologically impossible or extremely difficult. No wonder.
But the response to this mistake has led many to say that God is not in space at all, not that “old man in the sky,” but instead is “in” the human heart. And that sounds nice, but it really does not help. In fact it just makes matters worse. “In my heart” easily becomes “In my imagination.” And, in any case, the question of God’s relation to space and the physical world remains unresolved. If He is not in space at all, He is not in our human life, which is lived in space. Those vast oceans of “empty space” just s
it there glowering at the human “heart” realm where God has, supposedly, taken refuge from science and the real world.
This ill-advised attempt to make God near by confining him to human hearts robs the idea of his direct involvement in human life of any sense. Ironically it has much the same effect as putting God in outer space or beyond. It gives us a pretty metaphor but leaves us vainly grasping for the reality. We simply cannot solve the problem of spirit’s relation to space by taking spirit out of space either beyond space or “in” the heart.79
PERCEPTION IS OUR REALITY
Perception and the relevance of it are fascinating to me. Even in my own family, these perceptions are evident without a cognizant teaching of it.
Once, when I had family visiting from out of town, my five-year-old son was excited to sing for them a new song he had learned. At the end of the song, my aunt asked him, “Rocky, who is that song about?” Without hesitation, Rocky pointed to the sky (or beyond) with his finger, to where he perceives God to reside. This stood out to me, and I questioned in my mind, Why didn’t he make a reference to immediate time and space instead of pointing to the distant unknown? But the answer was blatantly obvious to me, because from a young age, this is what we are taught and what we come to believe and subscribe to as our reality of God and His proximity to us. I wonder at how great a cost this perception exists.
Furthermore, I question what could be the residual effects of unlearning this perspective. If the distant-God paradigm has caused residual effects in our “perception determines reception” human experience, then what may be the impact of reversing this mindset with the understanding of an intimate, tangible, and accessible God? How might the next generation be different if they were taught and understood God to be as close as the air that they breathe, and when asked who it is they are singing about, they mentioned His proximity to us, not with a finger pointed at the great unknown, but with closed eyes and a deep inhale, expressing the immediate and intimate immersion of His presence always with them?
Could this understanding, instilled at the youngest ages, provide an environment in which what produced proximity-related doubt may be removed and mountain-moving faith could be attained? At what cost has the centuries-long indoctrination of a distant God affected the exercise of our own faith and extension of it? I don’t even know that this question is quantifiable, but I can’t help but wonder if it is not significant.
And what’s more—if we perceive His proximity as distant, might also we assume His love is as well? Certainly we have been told that God loves us, but hearing that someone in another country cares about us is different from receiving the loving embrace of a parent. Couple that reasonable doubt with experiences in which we thought God should have moved and He didn’t, and once again He becomes ever more distant in our perception of Him.
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS
What if what we perceive is not actually what is?
What if there are variables that could completely alter what we have accepted as the truth?
What if external influences, like our perceptions, have indeed been the breeding ground for what we have come to experience, and what if that experience is not the same as what God intended for us or even reflective of what is available to us?
Based upon what I have discovered, I certainly believe that everything I have been taught may not be the summation of truth, and it may very well be possible that there is more than what I have understood experientially.
For the remainder of the book, the question I challenge you with is not “Is it truth?” but as we have asked over and over again up to this point: “Is it possible?”
All I ask is for you to weigh it and be the judge of it for yourself.
Part III
Experiencing More
Living with Quantum Entanglement
“When we don’t fully know who we are and when we cannot see ourselves in the light of the truth, we remain bound to a false image . . . The things I do are vitally connected to my perception of who I am. I am building my reality (true or false) by everything I choose to believe is true—even if it is false. I am influencing my future, either consciously or unconsciously, by the choices I am making. Every choice brings with it another possibility. Every choice affects every outcome.”80
—Dr. Mark Chironna
Entanglement is a term used in quantum theory to describe the way that particles of energy/matter can become correlated to predictably interact with each other regardless of how far apart they are . . . Entanglement is a real phenomenon (Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance”), which has been demonstrated repeatedly through experimentation. The mechanism behind it cannot, as yet, be fully explained by any theory.81
CHAPTER TWELVE
The God-Man Continuum
“Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.”82
—Aldous Huxley
In recent years, a dreadful occurrence transpired in Newtown, Connecticut, where a number of small children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, resulting in international news media attention. Of course, as is the case many times when a tragedy occurs, the subject of God, His will, His plan, omnipotence, and omniscience began to circulate as topics of conversation in media interviews, online forums, and coffeehouse talk around the country. People expressed their views and tried to process how such a travesty could occur and where God fit in the mix of it.
One comment particularly grabbed my attention when a friend of mine said, “I think it is time to bring God up on some murder charges!” His expression initially offended and angered me in ways I cannot even explain here, but after considering the root of what he was expressing, I understood the catalyst for his comment. He was frustrated, confused, and even grieved by hearing and seeing so many inconsistencies between this experience and how religious people in their traditional processing tried make sense of this by simply chalking it up to somehow being God’s will.
I’m sure he was warring with his own belief or disbelief systems, as it pertained to God, and since I know the man, I also know that he has encountered his own forms of disillusionment since his experiences have not lined up with his expectations about God. He ultimately reached a resolve that God cannot be who Christians say He is, if He exists at all. Still, his pain-filled response caused me to search for similar answers within myself.
Later that day, in a moment of my own pain and frustration, I closed my eyes and asked God confusedly and semi-accusingly, Where were you? And to my own disillusionment, for a few seconds, I came up empty.
Frustrated and overwhelmed, with my eyes closed, I fell back onto my bed and asked God why such horrible things happen in the earth to defenseless and innocent children. I believed that God was a God of love, but this kind of stuff didn’t line up with my understanding of what love looks like.
What happened in that next moment was the most significant catalyst for me writing this book (even more so than the watch incident). The watch incident sent me in curious pursuit for answers about what is possible—and it set me up and opened my mind to a way of thinking that would be necessary to process the next few minutes of my life. In an instant, I felt as if God may have revealed something to me that I’d never before considered.
While I lay there trying to process and discern how my perspectives of God fit into this equation, I had what I can only clearly convey as a “dream” while I was completely awake. In much the same way as the unexplainable previous events in my life, like the times when I saw and heard things concerning people, what they were wearing, what the person looked like that they were talking to, and the name of the person they were talking with (whom I did not know), in details that I could not have possibly known, I found myself again, in this moment, experiencing a new event of seeing something. It was as if I were watching a movie in
high definition on the back of my eyelids.
In this “event,” I saw God (or who I interpreted to be God) in an elementary-school classroom, looking on in complete brokenness in the corner of the room, violently weeping as He stood there seemingly restricted but left to observe what I perceived to be this Newtown travesty unfolding before Him. It shook me to the core; not only was I observing an event that was beyond horrific, but also this image of God contradicted my every preconceived notion about Him and admittedly, much of the process of my theology as it pertained to how He functions in this earth. To say I was confused would be an understatement.
Grieved and confused by all of it, I asked God, “Why, if events like this cause you that much pain, do you do nothing?”
E = MC2
E = mc2 is known also as the Mass-Energy Equivalence or Einstein’s Formula for Relativity. Broken down, the equation simply means Energy(E) = Mass(M), times the speed of light in a vacuum(C)2.
In my studies of Quantum Physics, the word relativity has presented itself on many occasions, and as I read up on the subject, I realized that I had a basic understanding of what relativity is by definition as it pertains to daily life, but I really didn’t understand it as it pertained to scientific perspective. So I did a little research, and here are some things I discovered about relativity:83
Relativity:
a: the quality or state of being relative