A Larger View

The following article was submitted by a close HS.com friend, Virginia Davidson. Like us, she loves to talk about God's character to anyone who will listen!  Her gift of articulating His enduring love and friendship encourages the reader to explore deeper and broader themes without pretentious piety or theological mumbo jumbo. Virginia keeps it straightforward and continually focused on what this ministry believes is the last message of mercy  to the world - the revealing of God as witnessed through the life and resurrection of Jesus Christ. She writes:

I grew up in a devout Seventh-day Adventist home—and I'm still a devout Seventh-day Adventist.  I believe in the Triune God and the full, eternal equality of Jesus with the Father; I appreciate the sleep of death, I love the Law and the seventh-day Sabbath, cherish the Inspired writings, look forward to the second coming of Jesus, and all that.  I even believe in a relatively-recent Creation that transpired in six literal days!  I'm very much an Adventist and very interested in life-style reform—but only in doing the right things for the right reasons; anything else isn't real righteousness anyway, and gets too easily skewed into life-style de-form.  I believe also in the final destruction of evil, and the atonement provided for the sinner at the Cross.

Twenty years ago, my dearly-beloved mother-in-law shared with me the original “Conversations About God” from Dr. Graham Maxwell.  The “Larger View” that he presented there made a huge impact on my theology, opening my understanding and shifting my personal paradigm to include the whole universe, rather than restrict salvation issues to our earth.  In this expansion of my thinking, everything I believed took on greater meaning.  Each part intersected with every other part in a way that made sense—like the lead lines in a stained glass window, intersecting and adjoining to provide the framework for the glories of light and color in the glass.

For instance, the eternal equality of Jesus with the Father now has a context—the war in heaven!  It makes sense that if Jesus had been “begotten” somehow at some time in eternity past, if God had conferred “god-hood” to “the Son” and not to Lucifer, the covering cherub, Lucifer would have had just cause for complaint when he began his campaign against God.  But “god-ness” is not something that can be conferred on someone else.  God had made Lucifer as much like Himself as was possible, but a creature by definition can not be without beginning—neither can he have life inherent in himself.  But in Jesus is Life—original, unborrowed, underived.  He wasn’t known as “Jesus” until He was born at Bethlehem, but throughout Eternity past He has been the Eternal Son in the sense that He knew what He would do someday, here.  The Incarnation of Christ has been in the plan since forever-ago.  Not that God intended sin, but He knew it would rise and He planned for the terrible emergency in His universe.  And the methods He has designed to meet the needs of humanity with Salvation, also answer the questions and accusations of the great controversy between God and Satan.  (See “Wide-Angle Lens” at www.heavenlysanctuary.com ).

My concept of Law has also changed.  No longer primarily “The Ten Commandments,” “The Ten” is seen as an expansion of “The Two”: Supreme Love to God, and Unselfish Love to One's Neighbor...which of course mirrors the character of God, which is Love.  That Law—Love—was written on all creation in the beginning.  Everything “took to give” and worked in harmony with everything else.  (Can you imagine the agony God experienced when He had to change His perfect creation on earth to adapt it to the sin situation?!)  The laws spelled out for us are only descriptions of how we can live in harmony with the way the universe was created to operate (see “The Great Spectrum” at www.heavenlysanctuary.com ).

So when God said, “If you sin, you will die,” He was predicting the natural consequence of taking one's self out of harmony—not pronouncing a death sentence on sinners.  That changes the meaning of Calvary—from Jesus’ bearing the brunt of God's holy anger (as it is sometimes portrayed, He said the wages of sin is death, so somebody has to die and we are the ones who sinned so we are the ones who should die, but Jesus loves us so He offered to take our place, and let God kill Him instead <shuddddder!>)—from that horrific picture, to God Himself demonstrating the truth of what happens when the seed of sin comes to fruition.  It is a mystery to us how, but He took on Himself our sin… and it killed Him.  God didn't love the world so much that He sent somebody else, He came Himself…because Jesus is God.

Jesus came to show us what God is like.  He took our humanity so that we could see Him and not die—because we are sinners, and the glory of God’s presence destroys sin…and everyone who cherishes sin.  That’s why it’s so important to take time every day in His presence, now, through reading His Word to us and talking with Him (Bible study and prayer), so that His presence can show us ourselves, little by little, and give us a better choice—and His indwelling Holy Spirit can empower our choices to become like Him.  That same glory, though, is the fire that destroys sin at the end—in the wicked…and them with it.  God is waiting until His people know Him so well, they will not be afraid of Him when He unveils His glory—turns the lights back on in the universe!—and lets that happen.  Because if people are afraid, they can’t love…and real righteousness must be born out of love.  Anything else would have the seeds of rebellion in it, and the war could start all over again.

So God will not use fear or force in His government.  Sometimes He has had to resort to “emergency surgery” or other emergency measures to get people’s attention.  But always, His underlying principle has been love; always He does the right thing for the ultimate good of His people.  There is also an enemy—Satan, the adversary, the former Lucifer—who has confused things here and perverted God’s perfect world.  But even the thorns and diseases, even the apparent rule of tooth and claw and “survival of the fittest,” have served a purpose.  Without them, would we have had a clue that there even is an enemy afoot?  He works, for the most part, in an unseen dimension.  We need the evidence provided in the natural world that something is wrong.

The natural world also gives us a model for what has gone wrong: we’re sick.  We have lost our trust in God, our capacity to love freely without self-interest.  We need the healing that comes from knowing God, seeing Him as He is in Christ, learning to love Him as He has revealed Himself.  Atonement is no longer seen as a ritual, but as the word originated: “at-one¬-ment”!—reconciliation!  It is not merely a skillful way of tweaking the record books in Heaven so God can “forgive” us, it is the healing of our souls so that His righteousness is part of us and we’re friends again!

The Cross shows us that God was telling the truth when He said “Sin kills.”  That He would love us so much to take our sin on Himself, leads us to love Him in return and trust Him as totally trust-worthy.  It demonstrates also the character of the adversary and the lies he has told about God, thus giving us an informed choice between the two.

The Larger View helped me understand what it is that God really wants—loyal cooperation, not mere behavior modification.  Real obedience is heart work!  And real freedom is found in harmony with the way things were designed to work.  When the Law is loved and written in our hearts, we do “do what we want”!—but it's not freedom to “do whatever we want” out of harmony, with no consequences—because every road still has its own destination.  It is a law of the orderly universe that we do harvest what we plant; probationary time is the mercy of God holding off that harvest, giving us another opportunity to have a better harvest—to choose better, and become thoroughly settled into that choice.  What is often termed “justification” is God’s accepting my choice and putting me right with Himself—starting the process of change; staying with the process, “sanctification” is His enabling my choice to become my reality…as I keep choosing.  “Judgment,” then, is God's determining when every choice is fully made, and only then saying “Why wait any longer?!  Let's go bring home the kids!!!”  (That brings me to tears, just thinking about it now as I write...)

This “Larger View,” this Trust/Healing Model, doesn't change my doctrines, but it shifts the paradigm so that they make beautiful sense.  It protects the teachings of Scripture from many human interpretations that have perverted Truth through the centuries.  This understanding of God and what He is doing in the universe is a message with the potential of finishing His people so the end can come.  May it be so!

- Virginia Davidson