The Everlasting Man

The Ancient of Days

God has been a human since the beginning of Time.

Probably, even before that.

My impression is that most people think, prior to around 4 B.C. in Bethlehem, God was just a spirit. A kind of vague, undefinable presence permeating the universe like the Force in Star Wars. Without realizing it, they have, effectively, made God in their minds into something less real than their friends and their families. Regulated him to a quasi-existence, something on par with, perhaps, the existence of ideas in the mind. Protest all they want, nobody actually regards the invisible as more real than the visible. It might very well be… but nobody feels it that way. The God in most people’s heads, that gaseous aether somewhere far above the clouds which is somehow indeterminately good…

That is the God of the philosophers. Of Plato and Socrates.

That’s not the God of the Bible.

Hardly.

Mapping out the history of how the Platonic God got pasted over the Abrahamic one in Christian thought is a complex and messy affair. One that leaves me, I must confess, with a high degree of sympathy for those sects and heretics of the past who said the Church ought never have mingled itself with Hellenic thought. I don’t suppose though that that was ever really avoidable. Greek philosophy at the time served the role that Science does for us today. It was the means by which people explained things. Physical phenomena, biological classification, mathematics, the proto-chemistry of alchemy, the difference between the sexes, even what makes something humorous… In the time of the early Church Hellenistic philosophy was simply the method by which all those things were explained. Paul himself had to do battle with the Epicureans and in some ways perhaps that was a battle he lost. For rapidly, very rapidly in the early Church, Hellenistic philosophy was canonized in all manner of theology. The desert mystic, the wild eyed prophet in tattered clothes of the Semitic peoples, he gave way quickly to the Stoic and to those who styled themselves after the manner of Pyrrho. To say this was all bad would be inaccurate, for the gifts of the Greeks were many.

But. In my opinion anyway.

Something else was lost.

God has been a human since the beginning of Time.

When you read the book of Genesis, try, if it is possible, to read it like a man from prehistory would. Not even a man from the Bronze age. Before that. Thousands of years before that. Of course, few such men would have actually read the book. They would have heard the stories in it spoken to them, recited, a priest high above them, speaking to a crowd. In the story of the Garden, of Eden, what do you imagine such a man pictured as he listened? A vague, gaseous type God walking with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day? Or do you think, rather… he pictured a Man?

And fortunately, for all the Platonic window dressing that has gone on since Calvary, at the core of the Church such a notion has not been lost. People will seldom tell you about it, and indeed many of your pastors may not even know it exists, but if you dig, if you look, you will find a thread within the Church that says something very very radical.

It says that when you read that God made man out of the dust of the ground… You’re supposed to take that literally.

You’re supposed to imagine, Jesus, Christ himself, forming a doll out of the primordial clay. A doll he worked and shaped with his fingers, just as he wrote in the dirt before the Pharisees, just as he spit on the earth to make clay and heal the blind mind’s eyes. Do you see that he was here, almost like a toy maker… adding new parts? One of his dolls, one of those who are dust and to dust shall return… was broken, and he, Jesus, made a new piece to fix him with. Just as he had done in the beginning. With Adam. With a puppet made of clay. Lifeless on the ground until the Everlasting Man stooped over and with real, physical lips blew actual tangible air into the nostrils. And Adam coughed and sputtered. Adam sat up and was alive.

God has been a human since the beginning of Time.

As I’ve said before, in my opinion the primary ailment of today’s Christianity is that everything has been spiritualized. Made metaphor, or into allegory. For lack of faith, because the actual text of the Bible seems too fantastical to be believed, we have turned it all into one of Aesop’s fables. Nice stories maybe, stories that may hold within them a moral lesson, but stories which are still, at the end of the day, fictitious. Fake. Fairy tales. And then we console ourselves in our unbelief by pretending that this allegorization of the text means we are actually grasping at higher realities. “No, no, you see, I’m getting at the true message. The deeper message. You… you uneducated fool, you are only looking at the surface reading. I know that these texts are but images. Images pointing to realities beyond our senses, graspable only by the mind.”

Horseshit.

No. Being made in the image of God from the dust of the ground means exactly what it sounds like. It means that God, The Ancient of Days, a deity from before the formation of the cosmos… made an image.

An image of himself.

A replica.

Like a child at play making itself a toy and with all the fun and curiosity of the same, Jesus fashioned Adam with his own two human hands and ten very human fingers.

Literally.

Like, there was mud under his fingernails.

You’re the shape you are, the actual physical shape… because that’s just what God looks like. That’s God’s shape. You’re his image. His replica. You have two arms because he does. You have ten toes because he does. You have eyes and hair and a stomach and a set of teeth…

Because he does.

And he has forever.

Even before the world was made.

God is not a numinous gas.

He’s an actual Man with teeth.

And God has been a human since the beginning of Time.

In Genesis we read that Adam and Eve, after they had sinned, heard God walking toward them in the Garden and, because they were ashamed of their newfound nakedness, they hid themselves amongst the foliage.

I wonder often how it escapes so many what this means!?

For how do you hear a spirit? How does an all-pervasive Force walk with you in a beneath the trees? What good is it to hide behind a bush unless your God has a set of real physical eyes?

Jesus was walking in the Garden.

Do you see?

It was the footfall of none other that the Nazarene that alerted Adam and Eve to the fact that they would soon be found out. It was the voice of Christ, the real physical sound of air rushing over actual flesh and blood vocal chords which called out, asking Adam where he was. It was the veins on the forehead of the Good Shepherd which stood in frustration when he’d seen they’d eaten the fruit, and it was the actual, physical hands of a carpenter which caught real physical animals and skinned them to make clothes.

Jesus in the garden. Covered head to toe in blood.

God has been a human since the beginning of Time.

When Abraham bargained with the Lord for the lives of the people of Sodom, he could do so because God was right there. Beside him. Looking with him man-to-man down on the city from the hillside. God was standing there with Abraham. He had weight. Mass. Abraham could hear Jesus breathing as he thought and pondered over the city’s fate. When he walked God left footprints. Another time he sat down with Abraham and literally ate and drank physical food.

Later, years later, that same Jesus also appeared to Jacob. Abraham’s grandson. Jacob was sitting alone in the night by a fire, and Jesus walked up to him from out of the darkness and grabbed hold of him violently, trying to wrestle him to the ground. God physically put Jacob in a headlock. He violently wrenched around his neck. The heart of Jesus pounded with real oxygenated blood behind physical ribs as he struggled with Jacob through the night.

Still later when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were condemned to the flames, it was Jesus himself, physical, who was seen walking with them in the fire.

God has been a human since the beginning of Time.

And now, maybe… you begin to understand.

For how could Jesus take on the sins of the world, and furthermore why would he? What purposes does it serve!? Also, what does that even mean? What the devil is Paul talking about when he says that if we visit prostitutes we are making Christ visit prostitutes. How can Jesus say that if we clothe the naked and feed the hungry then we have somehow clothed and fed him? Why do we say The Church is Christ’s “body” and in what sense are we God’s children and Christ’s brothers? Why are sinners sent to Hell?

None of these questions make sense if you spiritualize the Bible.

The don’t make any sense at all.

But the moment you stop turning everything into an allegory and dare to believe the text means what it says all of it snaps into place.

You see, we are God’s children because we are literally his children. His offspring. His reproductions. This is why Jesus says that we are gods. This is why he claims to be the vine, and we the branches. We are, without metaphor, of the divine family tree.

And just as the Bible treats the offspring of a man as an extension of the man himself, you know, “Israel encamped against the Amorites”, or “Jacob (speaking of the tribe) did evil in the sight of the Lord”… so too does he regard us as extensions of himself. You, literally, right now, in your blood, are a direct descendant of God Most High for God reproduced himself, copied himself in your far far ancestors by fashioning them out of clay and rib and giving them his breath. And all of this is beautiful and glorious and means that you are the sort of being who cannot help but live forever.

But.

It comes with a cost.

It’s not free being God.

For by the same logic which says that we are all of us part of the one Tree, we are then, all of us, part of the same disease. The same brokenness. The same sin. We are not, as the modern world would have us believe, isolated individuals. We are the tip of a very long spear. The youngest and most recent offspring of the line of Adam and the children of Noah. Our roots go back… back into somewhere and somewhen very far away. All the way to God.

In some real sense, when we sin, God sins. Because he tied himself to us. As our Father. He tied himself to us by breath and blood.

That’s part of why he had to die. That’s part of what it means when it says that he who knew no sin became sin on our behalf.

I mean, what did you think Paul was talking about?

“Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh." — Saint Paul

And so now you see why Jesus was able to take on the sins of the world. Because he was the first. The original. The Man from which all other men flow and he is present in all his offspring. That’s why clothing the naked man is clothing the naked Christ.

It’s not a metaphor.

It’s just what’s actually happening.

That’s also why God has to cut you off if you will not be saved. If you refuse to stop carrying the disease what is God supposed to do? Shall the blighted branches remain forever on the vine if they refuse to be healed?

No.

God has been a human since the beginning of Time.

That simple fact makes all the rest of the Bible make sense.

Make no mistake I’m aware of how controversial this is. How spectacular and bold a claim, how even, in the eyes of some, this may seem blasphemous or irreverent, not to mention impossible. And let me reiterate again, as I always do, that I have no authority to tell you what you must believe. I am no one of consequence, and I fully respect any and all disagreement and those who simply cannot get on board with what I have here said. I admit even that I may be wrong, in part or in whole.

But my friends…

I think when Christ said he was the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End…

I think he meant it.

I think the Word was with God, and was God, in the beginning.

I think the text implies a physical form, tromping around, grabbing people by the scruff of the neck and talking to them with a flesh and blood voice that reverberated actual air.

And yes… yes… he shows up as other stuff too. A pillar of cloud, a still small voice, a fire burning in a bush. Yes. But still. He is eternal. He transcends time. The physical creation of his body as a baby in his mother’s womb thousands of years later is no barrier to his existence as an adult in the primordial past. No more than it is to his existence as an adult at the end of time… long after our own bodies would have died.

For make no mistake, at the end of time Jesus will be just as physical as he was in the beginning. Paul goes so far as to promise that one day we will see him face to face.

One day this same God who formed us out of clay will set all to rights, and walk with us again in the garden. And that’s not a metaphor either.

Heaven… Paradise… my friends your ultimate destiny is not in some nebulous existence in the aether. You will not die and be regulated for eternity to unity with one of Plato’s godly gases. No. Like the song says, Heaven is a place on earth. Jesus has promised to put an end to all evil, all sickness, and to put to death Death itself. To restore the Earth to the state it was always meant to be in.

And he promises to walk with us. To stroll with us under the trees.

Face to face.

Breathing real air. Pumping real blood.

As Tolkien said, everything sad is going to come untrue.

Amor Vincit Omnia. Dare you to believe.