Kingdom Windows
Play School is a children’s television show
started by the British broadcasting Corporation around 1964. The Australian
Broadcasting Corporation started doing an Australianised version around 1966
that has been running ever since. Can’t say I remember any episodes. However, I
was reading a short article to do with the psychology of which of the three
‘magic windows’ that the show invited its viewers to go through to go on an
adventure. Round, square, and arched. Apparently, the arched window was used
least on account of the theme of the story related to the shape of the window,
e.g., through the round window for a story about balloons or wheels and other
circular things. A story featuring boxes, bricks or building blocks or whatever
would be seen by going through the square window. The arched? It was hardly
used, but maybe on the rare occasion it was, there might be something about
waterfalls and water fountains or maybe castle doors or something? Stories
featuring round and square things were far easier than arched things.
It has often been said that a square peg
can be made to fit into a round hole, but the result is ugly. Kids learn this
kind of thing by trial and error. This fits into that and that doesn’t fit into
this. Whether child or grownup, we all love it when things begin to fit
together. When we had our two bathrooms renovated, I chose a square showerhead
for my shower and my wife chose a round showerhead for hers. (Yes, we have two
shower rooms!) One of my sons-in-law said that men always choose square and women
round. Huh? Does the square have something to do with spatial symmetry and the
round a lack thereof? Let’s not go there lest we start a fight! (I joke, of
course.)
Let’s take a short trip through the square
window to see what we can find. Then we’ll go through the round window.
What we’re seeing is common grace. Therefore, we’re viewing things in general.
One of the things that I loved about living in Toronto and then Winnipeg was
their grid systems. Especially in Toronto, their main roads ran north and
south, east and west. Lake Ontario was always south. Therefore, it was always
easy to get your bearings when driving around town. Brisbane? Apart from a
little sort of grid system around the centre of town, (streets with boy’s names
run north and south, girl’s names run east and west), there seems to be no
rhyme or reason (as they say) to their roads. Satnav is a wonderful invention!
In the army we learned how to read maps
according to a grid system, yes, little square boxes on big maps. Grid
coordinates on maps help us to locate ships lost as sea. Time zones sort of
follow grid systems. It’s a square world (and let’s not get sidetracked
discussing the 1960-64 BBC zany television show of the same name!).
General revelation or common grace has been
divided up into intersecting lines forming squares so to speak. Animals,
plants, fungi, protists, prokaryotes are listed as the five kingdoms of
biology. All these belong to Christ and, therefore, as King, are aspects of His
Kingdom. Indeed, all of creation is His as is everything therein. The earth,
the sea, and the sky are His. Every planet and star are His. All of the laws
that operate in all of these grids of reference are His. However, looking
through the ‘square window’ means that we are looking at things that tend to
come in squarish shapes. This is the area of broad-brush strokes, the general,
big picture stuff. This isn’t the sector for viewing particulars. All that is
seen by going through the round window.
Take God, for instance. In this take on
things, God is one. We would need a very big hammer to force the roundness of
God’s three-ness into this square hole and vice versa. This is where equal
ultimacy comes in. The one does not lord it over the three or the one the
three. We let God be God. Banging a hammer may help relieve stress but the
tension of the three in one and one in three remains.
Today’s Jews and Muslims are monotheistic.
Their God is one but is certainly not three. Therefore, they worship a
different God to Christians. Like the so-called Jehovah’s Witnesses, they all
deny that Jesus is God because they deny God’s triuneness. They live in a
square world. They cannot square the circle of the Trinity. So they deny the
very existence of the living and true God. They have locked themselves in the
general by forming false idols, gods of their own imaginations, gods who will
fit into their square world. Yes, and so do all who deny the name of God, i.e.,
that which Christians are baptised into, “the name of the Father and of the
Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mat. 28:19b).
Yes, looking through the square window
gives us revelation of God in general terms, but only if we keep a lid on the
knowledge of God inherent in us. This suppression of the knowledge of God is
what the Bible calls sin, which has to do with our fallen nature. Little
trinities can be seen everywhere, from shamrocks to earth, sea, and sky to
husband, wife, child to body, soul, and spirit, yes, remember the old
threepenny bit! To be sure, God is Creator and therefore no created thing can
perfectly capture His Oneness and Manyness on a creaturely level. However, for
those who have received particular grace, yes, particular as well as general
revelation, it’s “O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder, Consider all the
worlds Thy Hands have made; I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy
power throughout the universe displayed.”[1]
Like the god of the Deists, without the
spectacles of Scripture, without God’s written moral law, without Christ’s law
and gospel, the people who live in the square world viewed through the square
window will perish in their sins. The triune God is staring at them, but they
avert their gaze and ignore Him. They pretend that He does not exist, and even
if by some small possibility He does, He is in a galaxy far away and cannot be
known personally.
But what about going through the spherical
or round window? Up, Up and Away! This was a 1967 song title by the same
band we mentioned earlier, The 5th Dimension. Apparently,
Jimmy Webb was inspired to write the song after watching a tv commercial about
TWA airlines showing a hot air balloon floating up into the sky. Yeah man,
freedom, travel and adventure! That’s what particular grace does, among other
things, it gives you freedom, travel, and adventure. You get a God’s-eye view
of His creation as you leisurely float around as it were in a hot air balloon.
You see the patchwork quilt fields below, the square world, great herds of
wildebeest migrating across the Serengeti, the swallows flying home for winter
or returning for summer, the humpback whales’ water-spouting in their
migrations up and down the seacoast. Creation has taken on a new look. Its
colours have become more vivid. Now, you thank God, the triune God, for the
beautiful sunsets, family, food and drink, safety and security. Wow! Things are
truly different going through the round window. Life’s sharp edges are mostly
gone.
Then there are three-circle Venn diagrams,
rings that all intersect in the middle, circles that can be used to teach that
the Father is God but is not the Son or the Spirit, that the Son is God but is
not the Father or the Spirit, and that the Spirit is God but is not the Father
or the Son. The triquetra or Celtic knot is also used to teach this. Yes, it
all falls short, and symbols can run the danger of teaching aberrations of the
Trinity such as Modalism, such as when water as liquid, ice, and steam are pressed
too far. Or some sort of subordinationism in the three Persons in the Trinity
may be endorsed if not careful. However, because God has revealed Himself as
three equal but distinct Persons in one Godhead, we must therefore work hard to
understand this to the fullness of our human capacity.
Jesus said to the woman at the well, the
Samaritan woman, “You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22). The Jews had been the keepers of the Scriptures of
which Jesus said to some of the Jews (who were trying to kill Him), “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have
eternal life; and these are they which
testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life” (John 5:39-40). Why were the Jews trying to kill the
Messiah? “But Jesus answered them, “My Father has
been working until now, and I have been working.” Therefore the
Jews sought all the more to kill Him, because He not only broke the
Sabbath, but also said that God was His Father, making Himself equal with
God” (John 5:17-18). These Jews, like the Samaritan woman, worshipped what they did not
know. God the Son, the Son of God, is equal to the Father. Therefore, like the
Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Jews, it matters not whether your god is
monotheistic. If your god is not the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit in
one God, you will perish in your unbelief. This is the God Adam worshipped,
Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, yes, and even Jesus. The
Scriptures that Jesus was talking about, the Scriptures that testify of Him,
are the Old Testament Scriptures (Genesis to Malachi), the Scriptures that He,
His Apostles, including Paul, preached the gospel from in the synagogues. To be
sure, the doctrine of the Trinity is much clearer in the New Testament than the
old, and we today have the benefit of the creeds and confessions which spell it
out for us. However, God has always been a plurality of Persons, Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit.
In common grace or general revelation, we
see the oneness of God revealed in the oneness of creation. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and
the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night
reveals knowledge” (Ps. 19:1-2).
But redeeming grace is needed in order for the circle to be squared. The square
peg fits perfectly in the round whole when the equal ultimacy of the Trinity is
understood.
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God, for the glory of His rich grace, has revealed
in His word a way to save sinners, viz. by faith in Jesus Christ, the eternal
Son of God, by virtue of, and according to the tenor of the Covenant of
Redemption, made and agreed upon between God the Father and God the Son, in the
council of the Trinity, before the world began.[2]
If we were able to
get close enough to do an inspection of the Mona Lisa, we would be able to see
the paint flecks, the brush direction and all kinds of minutiae. However,
because it is secured behind bulletproof glass, we are left with only a big
picture view, an oblong square in a square world. This is not so when we view
God and God’s creation through the lens of Scripture as His subjects of
particular grace. We have already mentioned some of those particulars as we
looked through the round window.
Sphere sovereignty
comes with an accurate knowledge of God. To be sure, Abraham and Moses did not
walk around with the closed canon of Scripture under their arms. Nor did they
have the creeds and confessions that we have so readily available to us. However,
they knew that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit were the one God.
Otherwise, like the Samaritan woman and the Jews that wanted to kill Jesus,
they were worshipping what they did not know.
What are some of
the particulars when we draw near to God? We already know that He is triune, as
explained in and by the doctrine of the Trinity. But what are some of the
particulars that have to do with particular redemption, the redemption of
creation and creatures that was planned by the triune God before the first
moment of the creation by the trinity of the two heavens and the one earth and
all therein? Through the round window we
can view God, creation, and redemption. Let’s focus on redemption for the
moment.
That covenant
between the Father and the Son as witnessed by the Spirit and Scripture is
usually referred to as the covenant of redemption. It is God’s plan for
redeeming His creation after it had fallen and had His curse placed on it. The
covenant of redemption, therefore, is God’s plan to restore, bring to maturity,
and consummate His creation along with all that will populate it. Christ’s
Kingdom is the shorthand way of saying the same thing. The Father promised the
Son the Kingdom of creation should He be willing as a Man to redeem it.
Right, now that we
have stepped through the ‘round window’, let’s now go further and enter through
the window of redemption. What do we see? Three distinct but connected spheres,
the little trinity of justification, sanctification, and glorification. What happens
when we go through the window of justification? We see God’s court of justice.
We see God as Judge and we see Jesus as our Advocate. Wait? Isn’t Jesus God?
That’s the beauty of our redemption. The triune God declares us innocent
because of what Jesus did as a Man as our substitute. How do we know we have
been declared innocent of all our sins? Faith. There’s another particular window
we could go through for closer inspection. Yes, there’re windows all over the
place, round windows, spheres, sovereign spheres within sovereign spheres.
Adoption is another. Because we have been declared innocent on account of Jesus
taking our guilt and punishment for us, we have now been adopted into the
family of God. Yes, Family, that great pillar in the nation, the reflection on
earth of God’s heavenly family, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whose name His
adopted family members wear when baptised. Then there is the window of our
family inheritance, yes, our part of the Kingdom that belongs to the
non-adopted Son, but who shares it with those whom God has adopted, those He
has redeemed. There are windows within windows within windows. It is endless. Ad
infinitum.
What about going
through the sanctification window? Through there it is all Holy Spirit and
grace. It is the Holy Spirit making the Christian what God has declared him or
her to be, i.e., righteous – as per the court’s ruling, and holy, as in set
apart unto God and the good works that He has prepared for us beforehand. We
are holy because we have been declared righteous. The Spirit begins in us His
work of making what was unclean clean. He will continue this until we are
consummated. When we die in this life our bodies lie in their graves as in a
bed awaiting the redemption and full restoration of our bodies. We spend the
interim as disembodied souls in a place referred to as the Intermediate
State. This is what many Christians think heaven is. Well, it sort of is,
but only sort of. It is not the final resting place for the Christian. We are
only there until, with Christ, and with those on the earth that will be changed
in the twinkling of an eye, we meet Him in the air as He returns to unveil His
invisible to the naked eye, Kingdom. So, sanctification has many windows
through which we can look and see many wonderful things from the private
housecleaning by the Holy Spirit to a plethora of works of righteousness.
Butcher, baker, candlestick maker, car mechanic, architects, policemen,
bankers, moviemakers, singers, songwriters, ministers, elders, deacon, civil
magistrate, etc., yes, and artists like Da Vinci. These, and a million more,
are all windows the Christian can go through. And once therein, many more windows
will open up. And it all has to do with your sanctification, “Therefore, whether you eat or drink,
or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).
So, go through the round window of redemption and you will
see other windows such as justification and sanctification. Up ahead, as we
continue to explore particulars pertaining to redemption, we shall explore the
third aspect of our little trinity, glorification.
But we can see already that sphere sovereignty exists
throughout the entire universe. It is on the highest mountain and the bottom of
the ocean and everywhere in between. It is in inner space at the molecular
level and outer space and everywhere in between. I kind of like what my big
brother Fearghas says of sphere sovereignty, when he was comparing Cornelius
Van Til to Dooyeweerd in relation to Communism,
Dooyeweerd rather is more
taken up with creational structures, i.e. concrete “states of affairs”. So if
we take the communism example, Dooyeweerd would be more likely to point out
that there is an infringement of creational sphere-sovereignty at work (i.e. an
absolutising of the economic aspect or law-sphere) which distortion in effect
(one could almost say “automatically”) gets “avenged” as the other
spheres seek to recalibrate the imbalance. So reality exhibits its own in-built
dynamic of harmony and judicious balance etc. Communism fails because it
doesn’t work, not just because God’s judgement is at work (which of course it
implicitly is). God has set up the cosmic sovereign law-sphere system so that,
like a cut finger “healing itself”, there is an intrinsic reaction to trauma.[3]
So, in terms of sphere sovereignty, even
the universe goes though the process of sanctification!
We cannot leave this section without having
at least a quick look through the ‘arched window’. If we keep in mind that
Christ is King of everywhere, then we will see that He was even in the Masonic
Lodge rescuing me. I was converted while going through the various degrees,
first, the 'square window' of the ‘Blue Lodge’ (i.e., Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, and Master
Mason), and then the 'round window' and 'arched window' of the ‘Red Lodge’, which is an additional branch of
Freemasonry called the ‘Royal Arch’, a.k.a., the 'York Rite', and is not to be confused with that more
esoteric branch called the ‘Scottish Rite’, popularised by Albert Pike
(1809-91).
I studied and taught Freemasonry to my
fellow Masons in the mid-1980s but soon found myself telling them all about the
triune God and Jesus. I could see the Trinity and Christ depicted in how Masons
define Freemasonry, that it is “A beautiful system of morality, veiled in
allegory, and illustrated by symbols.” Solomon’s Temple is at the centre of it
all. The following is a brief quote from a book I wrote called From Mason to
Minister,
I had been taught in the Blue
Lodge that Masonry is synonymous with Geometry. Therefore, when the stone the
builders rejected was referred to as a keystone that holds an archway together
I started studying the shapes of keystones. And Lo! and Behold! Did the Hebrew
letters in the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) when viewed in terms of their numerical
equivalents, not present the shape of a trapezoid otherwise known as a
keystone? Y = Yod, the tenth (10) letter in the Hebrew alphabet; H = Hé, the
fifth (5); W = Vav, the sixth letter (6); and H = again Hé, the fifth (5).
Jesus was the keystone and the keystone was JeHoVaH! Find a piece of paper and
draw lines forming a box shape with the dimensions 10 x 5 x 6 x 5 (use
millimetres or inches) and the shape of a keystone will appear. This was
astounding to me! If you remove the keystone from an arch, the arch falls down.
My personal darkness turned to light when I realized the reality that Jesus
Christ is - in every way - the keystone that holds the entire creation together
(see Col. 1:17). Christ is the “missing link”![4]
I quit Freemasonry
in 1990 when I migrated with my family from Canada to begin a new life in
Australia.
[1] Carl Boberg (1859-1940, “O Store
Gud” which was loosely translated from the original Swedish into English by
Stuart K. Hine around 1949 to become “How Great Thou Art”.
[2] The Confession of Faith,
The Larger and Shorter Catechisms, with the Scripture Proofs at Large: together
with The Sum of saving Knowledge, Free
Presbyterian Publication, Glasgow, Fourth reprint 1985, 324.
[3] Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh, private
email to author dated 26/6/24.
[4] Neil Cullan McKinlay, From Mason to Minister – Through the Lattice, (Nordskog Publishing Inc., Ventura, California, 2011), 93-4.
