Thursday, July 11, 2024

KINGDOM WINDOWS

 D. Rudi Schwartz and I have been working hard on our second book project together (the first being The Unfaithful Bride & The Faithful Groom). Our new book called The Kingdom: Every Square Inch is nearing completion. We are putting on the finishing touches and it still needs to undergo a fair bit of editing. Though it may yet undergo further tweaking, the following is a wee sample.

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.

Image from Web
With particular grace or special revelation, the particulars of creation can be examined with greater clarity. Take Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. I don’t know if he said to himself, “I’m going to fit that canvas over there into that rectangular frame here after I’ve used a selection of oils to paint an awesome depiction of a woman that will leave people in wonder for centuries.” Jesus talks about planning things beforehand, even counting the cost etc. (See e.eg., Luke 14:28-32). The triune God had a plan in ‘eternity past’ (with the sacrifice of His Son as the supreme cost). The Scriptures reveal this plan, briefly summed up in the following,

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,

The final degree in the Chapter of the Royal Arch refers to a strangely shaped stone supposedly found among the rubble of the destroyed Temple of Solomon.

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.

Friday, July 5, 2024

ANIMALS

                                                                        Animals

Image from Web
‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them’ (Isa. 11:6). The Holy Spirit through Isaiah wrote this some seven hundred years before Christ. It is a picture of future peace on earth, the words of which tend to be condensed into ‘The lion will lie down with the lamb.’ Is this to be taken literally or metaphorically?

God got my attention in the basement of my Manitoba home in late 1988. The closest I had ever come to the lion and the lamb dwelling together was the vague reference to the Bible in the 1974 Genesis song and album of the same name: ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.’ It was upon reading the Bible that I encountered the Lamb of God in His words, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me’ (John 14:6). I remember my total hostility towards the Lamb, thinking that He was so arrogant by being so exclusive. I had been crying out to God and this Jesus had kept on intruding into my thoughts with those ‘No one comes to the Father except through Me' words. ‘Who does Jesus think He is? God?’ If I had been a lion, I would not have lain down with Him. I would have devoured Him! Yet, He gently persevered with me as I sat in my armchair deep in thought. My dilemma was philosophical. It had to do with reality. How could I prove that I wasn’t lying in a coma somewhere dreaming all of this was real. Or worse, that I was not part of someone else’s dream. God, please help me! ‘No one comes to the Father except through Me.’ Jesus brought God to me. How? Because He is God! God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus is the Son of God who has become also human. No wonder He could change water into wine, heal the sick, raise the dead, and forgive sins, my sins. I stopped fighting and embraced Jesus. The Lamb and this lion lay down together. ‘I heard the voice of Jesus say, “Come unto Me and rest; lay down, thou weary one, lay down thy head upon My breast.”’ (Horatius Bonar).

Jesus is the Lion and the Lamb lying down together. He is God and man fully reconciled and at peace. He is fully God and fully Man, the divine nature and the human nature, in one Person forever. ‘Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah’ (Rev. 5:5). ‘Behold the Lamb of God!’ (John 1:36). How can the Good Shepherd be a lion and a lamb at the same time? Sometimes He kicks over tables (Mark 11:15) and other times He blesses little children (Mark 10:16). John Calvin offers this answer, Where is that spirit of meekness and gentleness with which the Scripture elsewhere informs us He shall be endued? I answer, that, as a shepherd is gentle towards his flock, but fierce and formidable towards wolves and thieves; in like manner, Christ is kind and gentle towards those who commit themselves to His care, while they who willfully and obstinately reject His yoke, shall feel with what awful and terrible power He is armed.’ We see the same thing going on here, ‘The Father loves the Son, and has given all things into His hand. He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him’ (John 3:35-36).

The lion lying down with the lamb is certainly metaphorical. However, this is not to say that, as there will be a growing peace among humans with each other and with God, there will not be an expanding peace among animals. For regarding the Prince of Peace, ‘Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end’ (Isa. 9:7a).