To be like Christ, we must judge with righteous judgment (John 7:24), which means we must perceive things correctly.
We know God sees all things with complete wisdom and understanding, so believers who grow in Christ will also grow toward that completeness (Hebrews 6:1). While it won’t be perfect (since we’re finite), we can grow to view things through a God-inspired lens as we continue walking with Him.
To save trouble and sorrow from foolishness, it’s in our best interests to gain that perspective as fast as possible. Every day we live in darkness is another day we can accrue consequences of poor decisions.
To be clear, we can’t see God’s entire perspective. That would require us to be eternal or, at the very least, not in a fallen world with a fallen state. However, we can all add a few “lenses” to our perspective to change our views.
Since each of our personalities are different, God will develop our understanding a little differently from each other’s as we submit to Him, but we will all share some general perspectives.
Lens of Spiritual Things
Instead of considering what physical things are happening, consider what’s going on spiritually.
In numerous ways, we see flickers of God’s glory, even when it’s corrupted by sin. Beyond nature itself, God’s tremendous strength shows itself through the entire range of creativity: talented artists, architects, designers, computer programmers, engineers, scientists, musicians, hackers, public speakers, and writers all bring portions of His goodness into existence.
To track spiritual things, watch closely how souls are affected, which isn’t easy or simple. One of the clearest indicators of a soul’s involvement comes through how their feelings are affected.
One of the most unusual aspects of being a Christian is understanding that death itself is never the end, for anyone. Instead of it being the ultimate cessation of existence, it’s the transition to a different type of existence, with God’s promises coming into full fruition during that period.
God Himself never enjoys delivering adverse consequences, either. He would always prefer repentance and growth through our humility (Lamentations 3:33). He desires that evil people become good, not that they suffer or die in their sin (Ezekiel 18:23).
In light of that, all human relationships are of less spiritual significance than each of those souls’ relationships with God. A husband and wife, or children, or any other family is trivial by comparison, and it’s better to lose all of them and gain God than the other way around.
We can’t easily observe others’ feelings unless we’re aware of our own, so the cure to understanding spiritual things in others starts with self-awareness. God designed the Bible as a series of stories to give us more awareness into our state of being, how we understand, how we should understand, and what to observe (2 Timothy 3:16).
Further, beyond a relationship with God, meaningful prayer is an inherently philosophical experience:
- To communicate with others, we think how others may think of something.
- Interacting with the Creator of absolutely everything brings us to a perspective that considers what we imagine He thinks.
- Thus, beyond mysticism alone, we’re required to think philosophically if we want any sort of understanding with Him.
All elements of everyone’s private life are wide-open to God. Someday, it’ll all become public information as of the Great White Throne Judgment (Revelation 20).
Lens of Love
God wrote the Bible for us to understand it from our perspective, not His.
This means He had to go through the trouble of confining Himself to limitations of time, language, and cultural expectations to reason the Bible out, which is at least part of how Jesus sees things.
The reason He even bothers to do it comes strictly out of love.
This love goes far beyond ourselves, extending into all creation. It’s an overwhelming desire for the best interests of all created beings. Love is normally an action, which means He’s the only being that can be love by existing as a Trinity of three Persons.
And, this is where our understanding must end regarding His love. Why God would bother to sacrifice, up to and including the ultimate sacrifice of death, for one of His finite created things is absolutely beyond us, since we don’t even have that sort of love naturally for ourselves.
But, if we fully devote ourselves to Him, learning more about love is probably the easiest and most rewarding one of them all.
Lens of History
We know God sees all things, and that He’s the only being who can see all things at the same time if He wants.
Thus, the more we can internalize the patterns and trends of history from His perspective, the more we understand God’s master plan.
This doesn’t mean memorizing dates, times, geographical locations, and names. Instead, it means connecting with people in past situations who made decisions, then observing those decisions’ consequences, including how others responded to those consequences.
His gentle touch on human civilization has created a slow progression of powerful, good ideas amidst a sea of corrupt political activities:
- The original basis for nearly all good law-making comes from His established Law, first given to the Hebrews.
- The basis for how to love has come from Jesus’ direct example.
- The aspects of how we can thrive come from the future when Jesus finally establishes a political state.
The trends of society always start with one person who had an idea and did something with it. Often, other people had that idea, but that person was the first one to act at the right place and at the right time. Once their lives are recorded, their influence makes them seem nearly meta-human. They either become a one-dimensional hero without imperfections, or a villain to be hated.
But, if we can effectively imagine ourselves in their situations, we can understand how we’d have done something similar, or we’d see the necessary qualities that person needed to have done those things. Looking at centuries-old stories often tells us how our future will play out.
We are always a product of our decisions made in the context of the times we live in. God is assembling a society of people out of all the eras of society, and He finds value in each one of us.
Find something you like, maybe a favorite historical period or a particular trend. Follow it through its inspirations and effects. If someone desires wisdom, that understanding helps grow toward God in odd little ways.
Lens of Infinity
Of course, we must also look to the future with the understanding that He sees what you’ve already done, what you haven’t done yet, and all possible consequences that may play out. He also has full control to change any of it at His convenience.
Your entire life, from beginning to end, is barely significant in light of eternity. The Protestant Reformation or Cold War were blips on the radar. The full authoritative reign of the Catholic Church, from founding to now, is just a significant trend inside the Age of Grace.
Any political issues, trials, social unrest or persecution are all insignificantly small from God’s perspective. The closest comparison we can have is how we observe a child losing a balloon and feels the world will end. It only matters because God gives value to people (Matthew 25:31-40).
When we start feeling anxious, we must remember how small we really are, especially in relation to God. That perspective is the foundation of humility, and the beginning of any legitimate faith in God.
The Lens of a Large Trend
The Father sees everything, so His views are a bit alien to us, but Jesus doesn’t (Matthew 24:36). His constraint to see everything chronologically fashions all existence into a broad series of “ages”, which are likely part of a much larger picture He’s working with:
- Pre-Creation – the domain before He made everything and was just Himself, which is very difficult for us to even imagine
- Creation – everything was good the way He made it, with mankind established in a perfect Garden
- Exile – from Adam to Abraham, where He made a promise to fix what humanity broke
- Law – from Abraham to Jesus, where He made a promise to bring a Savior for humanity
- Grace – from Jesus to His return, where He fulfilled that promise, then promised to come back to finish the job (where we presently are)
- Reign – the millennium of Jesus reigning, concluded by a final battle with the Satan and his followers
- Afterward – after He’s finished with this earth, which is also very difficult for us to imagine
If we zoom in on elements 2 through 6, though, it’s a little more granular.
A. Perfection
God designed us in His image. We’re story-based beings, with those stories forming into habits that fed into a subconscious pattern. Depending on how you interpret Jesus’ existence (the “firstborn of all creation” in Colossians 1), we are made from the beginning for God’s pleasure, with Jesus as His personal and intimate implementation for relationship with us.
We were given a simple directive. It’s not really relevant whether it was a literal or figurative tree, but He commanded us to not partake of the Tree of Knowing Morality (Genesis 2:16-17) and promised death. As a tree, it required man to be continually dependent on it.
The severity of God’s command likely comes because our ideas form into trends inside our minds, then spread outward into actions that influence others, which create expectations, which develop into predictions of the future within small groups to create cultures. So, acting on one bad idea will eventually, invariably destroy everything good.
For whatever reason, the stakes were high enough that God required us to make a free choice:
- Moral decisions aren’t much use without the soul having legitimate agency and consequences, so our growth required a legitimate means to choose moral decisions (which is probably why God even permitted this “tree” and the serpent to exist in the first place).
- Plenty of Scripture confirms God wishes to bless us, but nature around us demonstrates He is bound by constraints. One of those constraints is easily the fact that we’re not always able to responsibly handle blessings (e.g., a small child operating an automotive).
All creation was predefined for humanity to discover God and see His handiwork, like an artist slowly unveiling their finest art in a showcase, but with all observers also being partakers and participants in that creative work as well. The entire system we still see today had been configured for our discovery at the pace God wanted, through His correctly timed development of technologies as we became ready to subdue more of creation:
- Discovering everything across the arable land, starting with Eden but eventually moving outward.
- Understanding generally inhospitable domains like mountains and deserts.
- Learning to explore and inhabit the farthest domains of the oceans.
- Discovering what lies under the earth.
- Diving deep below the oceans.
- Breaking above the atmosphere’s cloud layer to see and travel the stars.
- Explore completely oxygen-free environments, such as on other planets.
B. Falling
The decision to take that forbidden knowledge was catastrophic because it signaled that a relationship with God wasn’t as important as our understanding and decisions independently of Him. He most certainly had a time and place to give us that knowledge and empowerment, but we figured (upon provocation by the Enemy) that we could do better on our own without Him.
All creation shifted from this point. The mantra of nature itself had been “give and expect God to replenish as needed”, and it became “take for self-preservation”. The disposition of the unknown shifted from hope and faith to raw fear.
Thus, He was forced to exile humanity. The command to subdue the earth was no longer in force, since our lack of wisdom would invariably lead to us raping it.
We had to fend for ourselves, and the trends immediately turned sour: one generation later and the first son ever born killed the second one, strictly due to petty jealousy.
This trend devolved rapidly. Centuries of time permitted people to become terrifyingly effective at evil, likely including technologies we probably are only re-discovering now.
The endless churn became horrifying, with things history has long forgotten and our imaginations and scraps of ancient documentation can somewhat hint at (e.g., transgenics, interbreeding with spiritual beings, computers).
C. Slowing the Corruption
God responded to this decay by deciding to finally destroy humanity (Genesis 6:5-8). He had a “nuclear option” in store for it by opening up all the waters, in all directions.
However, He saw one person who was still faithful to Him, and saw humanity wasn’t entirely irredeemable (Genesis 6:9).
Thus, God separated Noah and saved him, but used a worldwide flood to perform a complete reset of human civilization.
Thereafter, He set a soft limit on humanity of 120 years (Genesis 6:3). It gave enough time for people to demonstrate the essence of their soul through their actions, but not enough time to build out those actions into increasingly terrible versions of evil.
The human reset didn’t fix humanity’s moral state, though, and they stayed rebellious. God commanded everyone to disperse across the world and multiply, with the promise to not destroy humanity again with a flood (Genesis 9:1-17).
But, after they saw God’s stars, they immediately stood together to build the first Babylon, which would both protect them from a flood and empower them to climb to God again (Genesis 11:1-4). He was forced to diversify everyone’s “lingua franca”, just to provoke them to disperse (Genesis 11:5-9).
D. Inserting Change
After a while, God called on someone to follow Him. He possibly had to call multiple generations before Abram finally listened, since the Bible indicates with no further explanation that Abram’s father Terah moved toward Canaan but settled in Haran (Genesis 11:31).
He promised Abram he’d become a great nation that would bless everyone (Genesis 12:1-3), which was His marketing appeal. In reality, Abram may have not responded to a promise of “I will revolutionize society and teach everyone to love through the work I’m starting with you and will complete through one of My Persons“.
From there, God guided and renamed Abram and Sarai, though they were certainly sinners: Abram was a compulsive liar about his wife and God had to remind Abram a couple more times. Then, a few centuries later, He sent Abram’s descendants to Egypt, then drew them out of there to come to the land that Abraham had been promised.
God’s chosen people were very unwieldy. While He was giving them His commands to Moses, they felt fine with cheating on Him with evil gods (the worst offenses including child sacrifices), and He was tempted to destroy them outright and start again (Exodus 32:1-14). Even though He provided everything they needed, they didn’t believe He’d defeat their enemies in Canaan, so He had to exile them for 40 years to wait for another generation to receive His blessing (Numbers 13-14). Their rebellion was so strong that they still tried attacking after God told them He wouldn’t help them (Numbers 14:39-45).
Once they actually got into the Promised Land, He gave one instruction to Joshua: drive everyone else out and stay faithful (Joshua 1:1-9). While Joshua was very faithful to get a good chunk of it done, the rest of the people never finished the job.
E. Complicating Things
After a few generations, the people gave up on God’s command to drive them out, and started enslaving and making agreements with them (Judges 1). This merged their God-granted value systems with the heathen ones around them, which was the precise opposite of the foundations of the loving society He wanted for all of humanity.
For quite a few centuries, starting in Judges, a continuous pattern kept playing out:
- The trends of the Israelite people drift into terrible sins.
- God warns them heavily with a prophet, with promises He’d bring adverse consequences if they don’t listen.
- They don’t listen and God delivers on those promises.
- After quite a bit of suffering, He’d deliver them with a judge (e.g., Samson, Deborah, Ehud).
- The people repent and honor God again for a few generations.
Over time, though, the people became more corrupt. Instead of trusting God and His prophets/judges as their rightful king, they wanted a human king like all the others (1 Samuel 8). The first king became utterly corrupt and overstepped his position (1 Samuel 15), and the second king named David (who, in all fairness, had a good relationship with God) lost sight of the big picture and wanted to build a temple to Him (2 Samuel 7). David also emphasized more formalized worship to God as well, especially with emphasis to music (again, in all fairness, coming from a man who had the right heart in the matter).
Things became more politically complicated shortly after that, mostly because of God’s consequence He delivered in response to David’s most egregious sin. The centralized power structure quickly broke apart into 2 kingdoms, and the people went back into the cycle of sin/warn/ignore/suffer/redemption.
However, after establishing a monarchy and building a formal Temple, the Israelite’s political power was far more defined, which meant God had a harder time drawing out any potential good from the people. Eventually, He decided that Israel’s time as an empire was over.
This time, instead of God destroying everyone (like with Noah), He exiled the Hebrew people by using a second Babylon (2 Chronicles 36:14-23).
This effectively humbled them. While He had already made promises since Adam about a coming Messiah, He made further promises for centuries to the Hebrews in exile for their redemption through that Messiah (Malachi 3) with further promises of the age beyond that (Malachi 4).
F. Presenting Himself, Part 1
All the above was the “softening” to bring about the absolute moral need for redemption from our sins.
God chose to invest His influence into the lowest-yield place possible. He made very precise plans on how to do it that are absolutely stunning:
- Choosing to be born into an unremarkably poor, skilled-trade peasant home (Luke 2:6-7).
- Born in the poor part of Israel (John 1:43-46) in the town of Bethlehem (the equivalent of Detroit, MI).
- Ministered for 3 short years with only a handful of devoted disciples (Luke 6:13-16).
- He intentionally spoke things cryptically (Matthew 13:11-15).
- He didn’t capitalize on his popularity by allying with any of the leadership of the time.
- The only surviving documentation is from His followers, and He likely never wrote anything down himself.
His influence, though, was (and is) stunningly profound:
- He advocated for a gracious and loving way to live (Matthew 5:1-10).
- He spoke out against the Hebrew spiritual leaders of the time for their hypocrisy and overbearing commentary on His text, known as the Talmud (Matthew 23), and those leaders worked tirelessly for a means to get him killed without losing their reputation (John 11:45-57).
- He commanded people to defy the natural self and be faithful, even when it doesn’t make sense or when they can theoretically do it themselves (Matthew 17:20).
All throughout the 3 years, He demonstrated a precise example of the ideal way to live as a person on this planet. It left such a profound impact that every one of His disciples had become absolutely fanatical about following Him, frequently to the point of death.
Sadly, right before His crucifixion and execution, in His most miserable, vulnerable moment in the Garden of Gethsemane, they all dispersed and ran (Luke 22:39-53). Under that complete loneliness and torture, He suffered the eternal torment of the sins of the entire world across all time (Isaiah 53).
From that point, Jesus “hacked” the system He created, and He became the formal King of everything (Matthew 28:18-20), which was the fulfillment of everything beforehand to that point.
G. Propagating Himself
While He technically “owned” everything from this point, the devil and the world still had a de facto control of many aspects of living. Before He left, Jesus commanded His disciples to make disciples of their own among the nations (Mark 16:14-20), and sent His Holy Spirit to help with the process (Acts 2).
From there, the Apostles went out across the world, spreading the new Jewish cult of “Christianity” very rapidly, given the existing channels of technology and sending information.
The ruling authorities, however, generally hated it, and for nearly three centuries the Roman Empire was hostile toward Christianity about 75% of the time. However, He used many varieties of well-placed engineering (i.e., miracles) to protect the Body of Christ from destruction.
His influence kept growing across the individual hearts and minds of individuals. The open secret to His success isn’t difficult to discern:
- Becoming a Christian dramatically improves one’s soul, and it comes with the blessing of a legitimate relationship with God, and other people will naturally see it.
- It’s difficult to steadily persecute someone who expresses love toward you in absolute defiance of human nature.
- The Apostles’ documentation on how to conduct church had a limited scope of tasks compared to many other religions, so Christian church services provided many possibilities for each region to adopt their own cultural traditions.
After a while, Christianity was such a significant minority that sympathizing with them was politically fashionable. It finally boiled over when Emperor Constantine declared Christianity a legitimate faith.
Unfortunately, this mass propagation had some drawbacks. Like all social trends, late-majority adopters don’t join the cause for the same reason as the ones who are aware that it’s unpopular. Within 3–4 generations, Christianity became the only State Religion, and that was the codification of the Catholic Church.
H. Complicating Things
The history of Christianity from this point becomes a matter of opinion, depending on which Christian you ask. The historical facts are the same, but the heroes and villains depend heavily on which denomination you learn them from.
The next millennium and a half were a blur of events, with a wide variety of good and bad things done in Jesus’ name:
- Missionaries peacefully converted isolated tribes of people to Christ and connected them with the world at large.
- Conquerors used Jesus’ name to claim worldly ownership of things, including the commoditization of people groups as slaves.
- Nations rose and fell, while a relatively small proportion of priests held a steady political hold on society.
- Many influential and remarkable Christians wrote many documents that expanded how individuals can respond to and walk with God.
- Many faithful believers simply wanted to elucidate God and His works, and many non-believers (and believers) with political goals built on or condemned those works.
Of course, on any specific incident, it’s highly debatable about how much God was present. The Holy Spirit continues to work overtime ever since Jesus, but the scope of what He does ranges dramatically, and is far more individually experienced than when He performed grand, large-scale actions with the Hebrews.
Christianity’s battle became much more inward, and there were endless theological battles, most of them over dumb things. It was all a man-made attempt to build a spiritual “Babel” together on the Apostles’ teachings.
I. Breaking Apart
In the mix of all the above movements, there were divisions about the “right” way to follow God:
- Some people stripped away everything new and decided to honor the traditions passed down from the Church Fathers (i.e., Orthodox).
- Some people broke off from tradition altogether and tried to form a new way of conducting church (i.e., Protestants).
Protestants, in particular, repealed much of the cultural baggage of the centuries, and many of them also departed from a few truths as well:
- It became clearer that God’s grace saves humanity than ever before (Ephesians 2:8-10).
- The sinful state we all live in (“original sin”) was asserted as permanent (rather than the Catholic thought that conversion removes original sin), meaning saints don’t technically exist and purgatory has no place.
- The raw truth of salvation stopped being a lifelong journey (Matthew 24:12-13), and became an initial confession instead (Romans 10:8-10).
Nature itself indicates He loves diversity, and He values the cultural diversity of the Body of Christ in the same way (Revelation 7:9), and many of the schisms retained the spirit of Christ, most of the patterns, and at least some rituals. God permitted this range so that churches could function with an easy burden that adapted to the society He reached out to, and has allowed a vastly broad range of beliefs (Matthew 11:28-30).
The same heresies have arisen each time, but the Holy Spirit has continued subduing them and promoting His truth through the small miraculous “coincidences” where God remains anonymous. Very often, the cross-pollination of various ideologies created new value systems that created even more diversity.
Many nations have risen and fallen, and may more likely will after this. He continues to work in the background in unseen ways, all the way upward from individual decisions, within value systems, through political systems, and often on the fringe of society.
J. Presenting Himself, Part 2
After God is ready, He will let the work of the Enemy arise in its final form, as a third Babylon. It will mislead many, and everyone in society will have many chances to repent. He will finally come back with the power and glory He intentionally omitted the first time (likely to draw everyone to Him through love).
He’ll make a complete, decisive victory, then will promptly establish a new arrangement:
- He will finally claim His throne as king of this earth and will abolish the curse on this world and humanity.
- He will establish a new Kingdom on earth that will physically express what spiritually started millennia before.
- For poetic effect, the remaining believers who were nearly destroyed will become the first government of this New Society (Revelation 20:4-6).
For a millennium, He will run everything, and society will become complete, minus three final tasks (Revelation 20:7-15):
- At the end, God will let the devil out one last time, to deceive the people left over who won’t honor the truth.
- Everyone, from all history, will stand before the largest court hearing ever, to be judged by the Father.
- The ones who had a relationship with Jesus will enter into eternity, and the rest will be cast into eternal hellfire.
At this point, perfection has been fully made complete. And, from that point onward, is where God can actually get to do what He wants to do with us.
Application
We are unimportant little dots on a graph, and God will use us when He needs it. All we should do is trust the Holy Spirit and do our best.
God has a meta-trend for restoring society to His perfect image. This has taken millennia to get to this point, and will possibly take millennia more.
Even death itself is relatively unimportant compared to the impact things have on our souls. The farthest implications of this as a thought experiment mean that it’s better to be murdered than to behave unfairly to someone else. This means we should be more concerned about what we focus on than what we actually do.
Even if we presume God’s will is a dynamically changing thing based on our actions, the things we do don’t really change God’s meta-plan much, so we can rest in the peace that He’s in control.