LOOK AT LIFE FROM A HIGHER ELEVATION

Let me talk to you about the value of seeing life from an elevated vantage point. The Apollo Space program changed humanity’s view of human life. Humankind had never seen our home planet the way we were able to see it through camera lenses from 384,403 km or 238,857 miles away. There were several images of earth that became the most duplicated images of all time. Our magnificent planet shining like a blue marble in the sea of our galaxy of cold stars. On the way to the moon, we discovered earth. We began to think differently about our planet. The American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote, “brothers who know now they are truly brothers, riding on the Earth together.” Rusty Schweikart, an Apollo astronaut aboard Apollo 9, space walked and spent many minutes looing at our earth from which he had come, and the experience triggered an epiphany for him. He thought of the insanity of humans fighting over borders that were invisible to him from up there. Thousands of people in the Middle East killing each other over an imaginary line that you cannot even see. He wished he could take both sides in a conflict into space to see the whole earth so beautiful, and say, “'Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What's important?'"

I AM - THAT'S A NAME?

To understand what the human is, we must understand who God is and the bible provides that identification. We are required to listen to the bible's declarations about God and God's grace enables us to make the quantum leap to acceptance. God is the only self-existent and eternal being, existing in a way like no other being in the universe. He exists without origin or beginning. God confessed this concerning himself when Moses expressed his concern to God who had called him to lead the Israelites. Moses didn't know how to answer the Israelites if they were to ask him the name of the God whom he represented. God told Moses "I AM who I AM" and God instructed Moses to tell Israelites, "I AM has sent me to you." (Exodus 3:14). This name connotes existence without origin or beginning. God simply is, over and out. It signifies self-existence and eternality. God is the ultimate being, the one prime reality and source of all other reality. God is infinite. God is He, a pronoun which in this case speaks less to gender and more to the meaning that He has personality characterized by self-consciousness as well as self-determination. The essence of God distinguishes three persons who are neither three gods or three parts or modes of God but rather are coequal and coeternal. This trinity of persons that comprises the ultimate being confirms his communal personal nature.

GLORY IS THE GOAL

Defeat of Rebel Angels by Pieter Breugal Sr

At a time before time, a cadre of angels perpetrated a rebellion against God and while it was an unsuccessful coup, the rebel group spun off to infect others. In the broad window of pre-history God determined to create humanity and the world in which humankind would live. The original design and creation was perfectly achieved by the command of eternal God and time began. Humanity bore God's likeness in goodness and innocence. Humanity's participation in God's life and glory was the pre-eternal plan of God. For the briefest of moments there was intimacy between God and the first humans until the supernatural dissidents who had been evicted from God's presence, infected humankind. The faultlessness of the human species was soiled by personal sin that went viral. From that earliest time until now, the disabling effects of sin have dishonored the human story. This was not unforeseen and God did not react to that infiltration of wickedness as if surprised by it. Rather, since pre-eternity is that state of being from which God views all time, past, present and future as the same moment, He simply did what he intended to do. God elected to rescue fallen man through the incarnation and substitutionary atonement by God's Son who came supernaturally and then returned to the glory of his Father’s person. Since sin is viewed as personal liability, only individual faith in Christ's work that leads to salvation will be effective to regenerate a sinful person. Yet that person recreated and lived in by God's own Spirit, the second person of the trio of divine persons, lives with the assurance of entering the glory where God dwells beyond time. Glory is the goal toward which the whole story of redeemed humanity is moving.