Worldview Reality Check #1
by Jane Tawel
January 20, 2018
I decided that periodically, I might do well to post in my blog, words and ideas by authors who are –by about a million light years — well — just more everything than I. I often want to share about something I have read that I believe is critical to understanding how, I humbly submit, life is best lived. To be honest, I think that someday we will all discover either to our horror or amazement, that life is in fact, only truly lived in One Way — all the rest of it will be revealed as lies and death. Yes — I am always a barrel of laughs…
I have written before about this seeming lack of understanding or desire to create within one’s self a coherent worldview. I have been told the word “worldview” itself is hopelessly out of fashion. If that is true for you, read no further.
This week I self-diagnosed myself as an “OWYS”. (Don’t worry, if you haven’t heard of OWYS — I have invented this.) I realized that I am an “Old-World Young Soul” — hopelessly terminal with an old-world worldview but a young soul maturity level. Imagine a little child still playing dress up with Big Ideas, and you get the drift. Explains a lot if you know me.
I am thankful for people still living and those passed on, who can teach me and also help God treat my symptoms. This past week, I have meditated on many of the profound worldview teachings of that great passed on saint, Dr. Martin Luther King. I have played dress up with my words before around the words of Francis Schaeffer and N.T. Wright, the prophet Isaiah, Dallas Willard, and Emily Dickinson, etc. etc. And of course I have gotten out my crayons and pretend dump truck and played with the words of Jesus. God have mercy. Christ have mercy.
Of course for me, whether a person is writing for the Washington Post, the latest Sitcom, or the Pickwick Papers, truth is Truth. All truth must be looked at through the revealed truth of God “sitting on the throne” of everything. Romans 2:14-16: “Even Gentiles, who do not have God’s written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it. They demonstrate that God’s law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right. And this is the message I proclaim—that the day is coming when God, through Christ Jesus, will judge everyone’s secret life.”
What is really going on in our Universe, if you believe in God, is what is really going on in The Everythingness of Everything, and it is also, what is really going on in the tiny, itty -bitty little ant-like life of little old, OWYS Me.
Here is the first in what, God willing, will be some “What’s Really Going on in The Universe Reality Checks” for any one who, like I, needs inspiration from great minds, large hearts, inspired spirits, profound thinkers, warning prophets, and loving, wise human companions on our journey through the Universe.
Reality Worldview Check #1
by A.W. Tozer
If we want to say we believe in “a” God…. this from Tozer’s The Knowledge of The Holy:
Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is. Because He is holy, His attributes are holy; that is whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy.
God is holy and He has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe. Sin’s temporary presence in the world only accents this. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death. The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon halig, hal, meaning, “well, whole.”
Since God’s first concern for His universe is its moral health, that is, its holiness, whatever is contrary to this is necessarily under His eternal displeasure. To preserve His creation God must destroy whatever would destroy it. God’s wrath is His utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. He hates iniquity as a mother hates the polio that take the life of her child.
God is holy with an absolute holiness that knows no degrees, and this He cannot impart to His creatures. But there is a relative and contingent holiness which He shares with angels and seraphim in heaven and with redeemed men on earth as their preparation for heaven. This holiness God can and does impart to His children. He shares it with them by imputation and by impartation, and because He has made it available to them through the blood of the Lamb, He requires it of them. To Israel first and later to His Church God spoke, saying, “Be ye holy’ for I am holy.”… No honest man can say ‘I am holy,” but neither is any honest man willing to ignore the solemn words of the inspired writer, “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.”
Caught in this dilemma, what are we Christians to do? We must like Moses cover ourselves with faith and humility while we steal a quick look at the God whom no man can see and live. The broken and the contrite heart He will not despise. We must hide our unholiness in the wounds of Christ as Moses hid himself in the cleft of the rock while the glory of God passed by. We must take refuge from God in God. Above all we must believe that God sees us perfect in His Son while He disciplines and chastens and purges us that we may be partakers of His holiness.
By faith and obedience, by constant meditation on the holiness of God, by loving righteousness and hating iniquity, by a growing acquaintance with the Spirit of holiness, we can acclimate ourselves to the fellowship of the saints on earth and prepare ourselves for the eternal companionship of God and the saints above. Thus as they say when humble believers meet, we will have a heaven to go to heaven in. (Tozer,105-107) (Emphases are mine)
With fearful awe of God, seeking a heaven on earth as it is in God’s heavens,
Jane
Jane Tawel 