In the original Star Wars movie, Luke Skywalker is trying to convince Han Solo to help Princess Leia, by telling him that she’s rich and the reward he’d get would be worth it. When Han asks how big a reward, Luke replies: “Well, more wealth than you can imagine!”. And Han Solo’s reply is classic: “I don’t know, I can imagine quite a bit.”
Imagination is a good thing. God gave us that capacity: to imagine what could be, to extrapolate from the known to the unknown. I think it is an integral part of Hope. But sometimes imagination gets a bad rap, it gets cast as wishful thinking. And there are plenty of people out there that would be glad to tell us so; to tell us that we need to buckle up and face the realities of the world.
That is a mistake because the ability to imagine is the key to creativity and invention. If all we did was face reality, the reality of our problems, and we decided to accept the adequacy or our present solutions, we would never find a new way to do anything.
But that’s not the way we are, is it?
Anyone living today, having witnessed the astounding technological leaps that have transpired over the last century and that occur routinely during our lifetime, would have to laugh at the suggestion that the status quo is cast in stone.
I am a physicist; I know that there are fundamental laws of Nature that cannot be violated. So, yes, I know no one is ever going to invent a way to violate the law of conservation of energy or defy the mathematics of Shannon’s Theorem and Information Theory, or for that matter be able to travel backwards in time (as much fun as those ideas might be for writing speculative fiction). But as long as you don’t try to violate one of those fundamental principles, far be it from me to tell you that you cannot invent a new way to do “X”.
In fact, it would be the height of arrogance for me to do that because it presupposes that I know all that can be known about the other laws governing this world… that I know better than you… that “if it could be done, someone would have done it already.”
The height of arrogance…
But that is precisely what radical atheists exhibit when they dismiss and lambast the people who believe in God.
I remember reading Richard Dawkins’, The God delusion, a while back, and writing on the margin of several pages how some comment he made showed a singular lack of imagination. Most of his arguments against religion were simply different ways of saying “no reasonable person could think this”. Which should make all of us wonder how Dr. Dawkins, with a degree in Zoology, is qualified to know every possible philosophical system held by everybody in the world or for that matter be qualified to understand the subtleties of the physics and mathematics that govern the laws of the universe. He certainly was not trained as a Physicist or Engineer. Yet, over and over, he makes unqualified statements about what he claims to be the true realities of the universe.
Dawkins’ fundamental error (and that of the typical atheist you see on social media trying to tell believers that they are all gullible or stupid) is that they make the assumption – a priori – that the God of the Bible does not exist. Therefore, they are free to invent a straw man that they claim is this God, but which is nothing else than their chosen understanding of God; and then they prove how it is self-contradictory.
No surprise there! If you invent a false god, or craft a false god out of your biased understanding of what the real God said, it is bound to be flawed, inconsistent, and self-contradictory.
You would think that, upon reaching a conclusion that easily confirms your initial assumption, you might want to pause and wonder if perhaps you are guilty of circular reasoning. But to do so would require having enough imagination to consider that you might have been wrong in the first place.
The fundamental error of atheism is the assumption that the only reality that exists is our material reality. But that is not what the God of the Bible says. It is not what Jesus said.
Jesus clearly stated that there are two kingdoms opposed to each other: the kingdom of the world and the Kingdom of God. Therefore, any assumed “model” of the God of the Bible, used to craft any logical discussions about the meaning of truth and reality, must take Him at His word and consider the existence of that spiritual reality. If you ignore that possibility you are not talking about the Lord.
But, as a rule, the champions of the anti-religion movement assign to their model of God only those concepts, thoughts, and feelings that they themselves can conceive of…. concepts, thoughts, and feelings derived from the kingdom of the world.
In other words, they assume that God can be contained within the boundaries of His creation. That is a self-contradiction. For God to be the God that He claims to be in the Bible, He must Transcend His creation. He is beyond this universe, beyond matter, beyond space, even beyond time… otherwise He could not have created this reality. At least that is what He claims in His Word.
Therefore, if we seek to understand Him and His purposes we need to listen to His Word with an open mind. And we need to be willing to think beyond the bounds of our physical reality. The good news is that we can because He gave us the power of imagination. After all, He made us in His image.
Imagine a God that can be everywhere and everywhen at once…
… and that loves us.
What would you expect of such a God? For one thing, He is not limited to linear thinking. In fact, to achieve His purposes He must have the ability to arrange things, circumstances in time and space, in such a way that they converge onto His goal… flawlessly.
He will never coerce our free will, but He has an infinite palette of possibilities available to Him with which to direct our paths. This is the God who created everything. This is the God that knew, when He chose to create humanity to Love, that that humanity would reject Him, and therefore He created the Plan of Salvation and put it in the hands of His eternal Son, all before the beginning of time. Such a God is in no way limited by the things that happen in our lives.
Yet, so often, that is precisely how we feel.
When Moses, exasperated by the constant whining of the crowd he was leading through the wilderness, asks God to slay him because the burden is too great, God tells him there is a simple solution:
Numbers 11:16-17 Gather unto me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom thou knowest to be the elders of the people, and their officers; and take them to the tent of meeting, and they shall stand there with thee. And I will come down and talk with thee there; and I will take of the Spirit which is upon thee, and will put it upon them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with thee, and thou shalt not bear it alone.
God’s Spirit has no limit (John 3:34).
And then God addresses the people’s latest complaint. They wanted meat to eat, not manna. So, He tells Moses that He is going to give them meat for a whole month, so much so that they will be sick of it. And Moses says, ‘but we have over 600,000 soldiers (and their families)’ and God replies:
Numbers 11:23 …Hath Jehovah’s hand become short? Now shalt thou see whether my word will come to pass unto thee or not.
The point is that Moses and all those people had seen the mighty power that God had displayed to deliver them from Egypt, even to the parting of the Red Sea, and yet they kept doubting Him. If He can do those miracles, if He did them, why would His power change now? Sure, He might have to do something new that maybe we have never seen before… but so what?
All it takes is a little imagination…
Imagine a God that transcends space and time. This very minute he can be working behind the scenes putting together a sequence of events that will eventually, and perfectly, answer a desperate prayer I will be crying out to him five years from now. He knows what I will need then because He sees it now. And the whole world is at His fingertips.
When it happens, it may seem like a miracle to me, that He suddenly intervened when in fact He had prepared it all already, put it in His calendar, and carried it out. From His standpoint it was all a divine appointment that He made sovereignly, for no other reason than that He loves me.
Can you imagine what it would be like to be privy to God’s calendar? What it would be like to be fully aware of those divine appointments and therefore able to make the right decisions at the right time to carry out His perfect will?
That was Jesus’ life: John 5:19-20 Jesus therefore answered and said to them, Verily, verily, I say to you, The Son can do nothing of himself save whatever he sees the Father doing: for whatever things *he* does, these things also the Son does in like manner. For the Father loves the Son and shews him all things which he himself does; and he will shew him greater works than these, that ye may wonder.
The next set of stories in the gospel of Mark gives us a hint of what such a life was like:
Mark 4:35-41 And on that day, when evening was come, he says to them, Let us go over to the other side: and having sent away the crowd, they take him with [them], as he was, in the ship. But other ships also were with him. And there comes a violent gust of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it already filled. And *he* was in the stern sleeping on the cushion. And they awake him up and say to him, Teacher, dost thou not care that we are perishing?
And awaking up he rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, Silence; be mute. And the wind fell, and there was a great calm. And he said to them, Why are ye [thus] fearful? how [is it] ye have not faith?
And they feared [with] great fear, and said one to another, Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?
Jesus tells His disciples, “We are going to the other side.” This is the same Jesus that they have seen heal lepers, mend withered hands, set lame men walking, blind men seeing, and demons fleeing. They know that the power of God is flowing through Him. And yet, as soon as He goes to sleep and the storm comes, their reaction is, “We are going to die!”
It is no wonder that after Jesus rebukes the storm, He turns to them and says, essentially, ‘What’s wrong with you? Don’t you have any faith? Has God’s hand become too short to deliver?’
I know, it is true that up to that point they had not yet seen Him command the forces of Nature, but… come on! Hasn’t He been showing that the powers of this world cannot resist Him?
When Jesus tells us we are going to the other side, we are going to the other side.
Who is going to stand in our way?
But the story doesn’t stop there because we haven’t asked yet, why did Jesus want to go to the other side? He was leaving Judea and crossing over to the Decapolis. We find out the reason as soon as the boat hits the beach:
Mark 5:1-20 And they came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gadarenes. And immediately on his going out of the ship there met him out of the tombs a man possessed by an unclean spirit, who had his dwelling in the tombs; and no one was able to bind him, not even with chains; because he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been torn asunder by him, and the fetters were shattered; and no one was able to subdue him. And continually night and day, in the tombs and in the mountains, he was crying and cutting himself with stones.
But seeing Jesus from afar off, he ran and did him homage, and crying with a loud voice he says, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure thee by God, torment me not. For he said to him, Come forth, unclean spirit, out of the man.
And he asked him, What is thy name? And he says to him, Legion is my name, because we are many. And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country. Now there was there just at the mountain a great herd of swine feeding; and they besought him, saying, Send us into the swine that we may enter into them. And Jesus [immediately] allowed them. And the unclean spirits going out entered into the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep slope, into the sea (about two thousand), and were choked in the sea.
And those that were feeding them fled and reported it in the city and in the country. And they went out to see what it was that had taken place. And they come to Jesus, and they see the possessed of demons sitting [and] clothed and sensible, [him] that had had the legion: and they were afraid. And they that had seen [it] related to them how it had happened to the [man] possessed by demons, and concerning the swine. And they began to beg him to depart from their coasts.
And as he went on board ship, the man that had been possessed by demons besought him that he might be with him. And he suffered him not, but says to him, Go to thine home to thine own people, and tell them how great things the Lord has done for thee, and has had mercy on thee.
And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him; and all wondered.
You see, Jesus had a divine appointment on that other shore. God the Father, in His infinite mercy had set a date for that demon possessed man to get his chance at freedom. That is why Jesus went there.
And that man, a Gentile, possessed by demons for years, existing, as it were, in a living hell… so tormented by the demons that he kept cutting himself with stones… that man sees Jesus at the shore and something inside him (the spirit that God gave all of us in His image) recognizes Jesus, and he starts running towards Him.
And just as easily as Jesus cast single demons out of people, He casts a thousand of them out… lets them go into the pigs. And the pigs decide they are having none of that and they all jump into the sea.
Why did Jesus go there? Why did the Father make this divine appointment? All for the sake of that man. But because God can plan things far in advance, this encounter happened in broad daylight, in the middle of the workday of those swineherds, and right in their view, so they too could witness the power of God… and choose.
And choose they did, didn’t they? They came saw the man thoroughly healed, understood the awesome power they had all witnessed and then, rather than let that power transform their lives, they asked Jesus to go away. And Jesus left…
God will never coerce us into believing… BUT… When the healed man asked to go with Jesus, I think Jesus just looked up at that crowd of trembling swineherds and understood the rest of the Father’s Plan. So, He told the man to stay there and proclaim the mercy and goodness of God.
Now, once that appointment was done, there were two more on the schedule. And one of those had been in God’s calendar for 12 years:
Mark 5:21-24 And Jesus having passed over in the ship again to the other side, a great crowd gathered to him; and he was by the sea. And [behold] there comes one of the rulers of the synagogue, by name Jairus, and seeing him, falls down at his feet; and he besought him much, saying, My little daughter is at extremity; [I pray] that thou shouldest come and lay thy hands upon her so that she may be healed, and may live. And he went with him, and a large crowd followed him and pressed on him.
Precisely on the other shore, the one they “happen” to land on, there is a synagogue leader’s home nearby, Jairus by name. And he comes running to Jesus knowing, convinced, that Jesus has the power to save his daughter.
But to the same spot God drew someone else, a woman who had been suffering for 12 years from a haemorrhage, a sickness that according to the law made her impure, unclean, almost as unclean as a leper. She wasn’t supposed to touch people or let people touch her. But she had heard about Jesus, and when she saw He arrived, she wrapped herself in her cloak, maybe hoping no one would recognize her, and pushed through the crowd…
Mark 5:25-29 And a certain woman who had had a flux of blood twelve years, and had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent everything she had and had found no advantage from it, but had rather got worse, having heard concerning Jesus, came in the crowd behind and touched his clothes; for she said, If I shall touch but his clothes I shall be healed. And immediately her fountain of blood was dried up, and she knew in her body that she was cured from the scourge.
She didn’t think she was worthy of coming up to Him and asking Him. She did not dare risk touching Him and making Him unclean. But the hem of his garment, already muddied from the dirt of the road and the shore… as unclean visibly as she felt inside, that she could touch… and she knew – she believed – that that would be enough. It was.
How did she know? Maybe other people from other crowds had had that experience and she had heard. Or maybe, it was revealed to her spirit by God’s Spirit. However it was, she had enough faith to do the unthinkable: in an unclean state to reach out and touch the Messiah.
But before she could freak out, God did the miracle so suddenly so thoroughly that she knew it had worked. And then to make sure she would not regret her boldness, and to make sure she understood that this was all God’s plan…
Mark 5:30-34 And immediately Jesus, knowing in himself the power that had gone out of him, turning round in the crowd said, Who has touched my clothes? And his disciples said to him, Thou seest the crowd pressing on thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me? And he looked round about to see her who had done this. But the woman, frightened and trembling, knowing what had taken place in her, came and fell down before him, and told him all the truth. And he said to her, Daughter, thy faith has healed thee; go in peace, and be well of thy scourge.
Because it was God’s plan, and He approved of her actions of faith, she was assured that the healing was permanent. But the story is not over. We just came to the intersection of the two threads:
Mark 5:35-36 While he was yet speaking, they come from the ruler of the synagogue’s [house], saying, Thy daughter has died, why troublest thou the teacher any further? But Jesus [immediately], having heard the word spoken, says to the ruler of the synagogue, Fear not; only believe.
Do you see all the moving parts? God orchestrated all this. The time they left the shore to cross to the other side, the storm that rose up and that surely dragged the ships along a path different from what the disciples had intended but precisely where God wanted them to land; to the place, the shore, where the demon possessed man, who most likely had been seeking shelter in one of those cave tombs, just happened to come out to behold a sudden supernatural calm; just happened to come out just in time to see someone in that beach that his spirit recognized; at the same time that the swineherds taking advantage of the clearing of the sky came out to drive their pigs up on the cliff edge to root and eat; just so they can watch from that relative safety and see what the madman would do to those foolish strangers that just landed on the beach; just close enough to hear a thousand demons screaming at Jesus to spare them; just close enough to hear Jesus’ permission for them to go into the pigs and to see, terrified, the pigs’ reaction.
And then Jesus and His disciples leave from there to the opposite shore, landing right in the neighborhood of Jairus’ house and the house of the woman with the haemorrhage; just in time for her to take that chance…
And Jairus’ heart is sinking because he did all he could; he came running to get Jesus, desperate. This is an emergency, he told Him. But Jesus got distracted, He stopped right there until He could figure out what that woman had done. Is it too late now?
No. And Jesus makes sure Jairus knows: God cannot possibly be late: Fear not; only believe.
Mark 5:37-43 And he suffered no one to accompany him save Peter and James, and John the brother of James. And he comes to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and sees the tumult, and people weeping and wailing greatly. And entering in he says to them, Why do ye make a tumult and weep? the child has not died, but sleeps. And they derided him.
But he, having put [them] all out, takes with [him] the father of the child, and the mother, and those that were with him, and enters in where the child was lying. And having laid hold of the hand of the child, he says to her, Talitha koumi, which is, interpreted, Damsel, I say to thee, Arise. And immediately the damsel arose and walked, for she was twelve years old. And they were astonished with great astonishment. And he charged them much that no one should know this; and he desired that [something] should be given her to eat.
Did you see there where Jesus told them the child was not dead but only asleep? This was not just a euphemism. He knew that to be so, before He stepped in through that door, because this was another divine appointment, and God can never be late.
(In fact, did you notice the age of the girl: 12 years old. I believe that 12 years before that moment, God knowing that that newborn baby girl would need emergency help to survive that illness 12 years in the future, started arranging things: making sure her parents would end up living in the same town as a woman that was just then starting to get sick, and just across the sea from a Gentile man that would be preyed upon by Satan. I don’t know how else God worked in the lives of these people for those twelve years but I am sure He did. Why? Becasue He loved them. For that same reason I am pretty sure it was He that kicked up the storm that triggered the whole sequence of events.)
Not to diminish the importance or the wonder: To me it really is as if God is playing a massive game of multi-dimensional chess, on a board that is way bigger than our world, and he can move the pieces anywhere and anywhen, seamlessly. And He will do that and continue to do that on our behalf because He loves us.
Jesus said it: My Father works to this day.
That is what God’s power is like. He is not limited by the laws of the material universe; He never has been. He operates according to the rules He made for the Kingdom of God. And those rules are not unfathomable to us. On the contrary He has revealed them to us as He has revealed Himself to us through His Word.
Yes, it is way different from the rules of the material reality. We cannot begin to comprehend what He does, how He does it, or why He does it if we try to apply the rules of the kingdom of the world to Him and His purpose. But we don’t need to because He made us in His image and that means that we have all it takes, all the imagination we need – call it Faith – to extrapolate from the world we grew up in, all the way into the Kingdom for which He has destined us.
How hard can it be?
Mark 6:1-3 And he went out thence and came to his own country, and his disciples follow him. And when sabbath was come he began to teach in the synagogue, and many hearing were amazed, saying, Whence [has] this [man] these things? and what [is] the wisdom that is given to him, and such works of power are done by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James, and Joses, and Judas, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended in him.
Jesus returns home to Nazareth… And listen to what the people themselves say: They have heard His wisdom first-hand, and they have also heard, or maybe some of them even seen, the fact that He can do miracles. The evidence that something extraordinary is going on is right there before them. The conclusion ought to have been: ‘This must be the promised Messiah’.
But before they allow themselves to say that, they retreat into their presuppositions… ‘No, that cannot be… because God wouldn’t choose a common carpenter to be His Messiah. And besides we knew him growing up, we know his family… there is nothing special about them. They are just like us. Why would God choose him? Why not me? I am better qualified.’
‘This guy the Messiah? Naaah, no reasonable person would believe that.’
And Mark tells us that they were offended in Him: offended at the idea that God would choose such a person as his Messiah; offended at the idea that Jesus would insist on going around doing all these extraordinary things trying to get people to think he was the Messiah; offended at the fact that they were not asked for their opinion or their permission or their blessing of this plan.
That is all it takes to foil God’s perfect plan for my life.
Like I said before, God can manoeuvre time, space, and circumstance to get my path to intersect His Plan but He will never coerce me. I can reject Him. And the most common reason for that rejection is that we don’t like how He is doing it, we don’t like what He is asking us to accept. We think we know better than He does, that we ought to have things happen our way.
Mark 6:4-6 But Jesus said to them, A prophet is not despised save in his own country, and among [his] kinsmen, and in his own house. And he could not do any work of power there, save that laying his hands on a few infirm persons he healed [them]. And he wondered because of their unbelief. And he went round the villages in a circuit, teaching.
Those people in the synagogue missed their divine appointment because they could not imagine that what was plain to see before their eyes was God’s plan. But what is even sadder is that that offense and unbelief spread out from that synagogue to the whole town so that not only did they derail the plans God had for them, they derailed the plans God had for many other people in that town.
What is God to do?
What he has been doing from the beginning: Continue to try to get through to us: Jesus decides to go again in His teaching circuit… sowing again the seed of the Word of God… hoping that this time around, some of those people will be able to see the Light and choose to become good soil.