In our past few studies, we’ve come to understand that we must have space for God. For God to make any sense at all in our lives, there must be a sacred space, where God and man meet. Otherwise, if God isn’t a personal God, a God we can speak with, and who speaks to us, if he exists at all, he is a long way off and has little, if anything, to do with what he’s created. If God isn’t personal, he’s irrelevant! Additionally, we’ve also discovered that, if God is a personal God, then time spent with him must be sacred, as well.
That is, time with God must be set apart, vis-à-vis sacred and different from the rest of the time that marks out our lives. For God to be relevant, time spent with him must be important. Otherwise, God becomes nothing more than an aged figure in the family, whom we love and care for, but who, also, doesn’t really affect what else we do or say. God must become to us, as our parents were to us, while we were growing up. We spent time with them, one-on-one, and that time spent with them affected everything else we did or said in life.
Matter is also sacred, when it comes to our understanding of God and our relationship with him. Matter is our reality. If God is “real,” we need to behave as though that’s true. Is prayer real? Does it change things, as scripture seems to say it does? What happens to reality, if God arrives? Jesus went around Galilee, as he began his ministry, preaching that God was returning and his Kingdom was becoming a reality (Mark 1:15; cp. Malachi 3:1)! What happens when God arrives? Jesus went about Galilee setting things in their proper place, giving sight to the blind, opening the ears of the deaf, giving a voice to the dumb, changing what folks had been taught was reality. According to the new atheists today, miracles don’t happen because they can’t happen. That is not how reality works. However, if God is responsible for creating the universe, it makes sense that creation, itself, would point to his glory and power. It would point to his beauty and his grace, and the mysteries of his nature. In fact, if men held that God is their Reality, it would become necessary to truth, that eventually, “The earth would be filled with the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).
What has happened? All our educational institutions have informed us, molded our thinking, to understand that the material world, vis-à-vis our reality, is controlled by and subject to the laws of physics and chemistry, so “miracles don’t occur, because they can’t!” Thus, our idols aren’t made of stone these days. We’ve become enlightened! We bow before ‘laws of stone’ botany, astronomy, biology and zoology etc. God cannot exist in our reality, because our laws won’t permit it!
Therefore, if God is Real, and if his Reality is to become ours, vis-à-vis if we are to actually meet together, matter must also have a sacred place in our lives. When God arrives, the sick are healed; the dead are raised; the hungry get fed; raging storms are calmed, and by faith, it is possible for men to do the impossible (Matthew 14:25-31). It is natural for us to reject such things, as not true and impossible, because that is the way we have been taught to think, “miracles don’t happen, because they can’t happen.” Nevertheless, we are faced with a choice; do we dare believe the scriptures or do we retain our belief in what the stone laws of physics and chemistry tell us about the existence or non-existence of an irrelevant God?
In Christ, we find a new creation, wherein God has space and time spent with him is sacred. The new creation is also a new ‘reality’ wherein God makes all things good (cp. Genesis 1:31). It is a place, where the raging storms of life are calmed, where the blind see and the deaf hear. It is a place, where God rules sovereign, and where the fantasy of mankind’s sovereignty is exposed for what it is. For, it is he, who isn’t the master of his fate, and **he**could never become the captain of his own soul, and history is it dark testimony to the truth of his failure to be such!
In Christ, we have become new creatures, and, although we live in this present world, all things have for us become new (2Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 6:15). Under the old creation, mankind corrupted itself and was cast out of the Presence of God (Genesis 3:22-24). In Christ God has arrived (John 1:1, 14; cp. Matthew 17:1-8), and we are transformed and changed into an image of him (2Corinthians 3:18; cp. Genesis 1:27). The new creation/creature cannot be conformed to this world’s understanding of reality, but is, instead, transformed into an image of Jesus, through a renovation of our minds, our thinking, our worldview (WWJD; cp. Romans 12:1-2). In Christ is the place, where God and man meet. He is the new creation, and as we live in him, we become his images, and as images we do as he did, speak as he spoke, live as he lived. If God is our Reality, then matter, space and time are new, and sacred and that makes God relevant in our world today.
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