The War After This One

More and more lately I keep running across the same strange sermon. It does not come from a pulpit. It comes from a screen, in a calm voice over slow music, and it goes something like this. You are living in a kind of simulation. This world is only one side of reality, and the other side is bigger, and that is where you really live. God is real - but God is not a Person, God is consciousness itself, and you are a little piece of it. You have lived before and you will live again. Everything you do is measured and comes back around. And here is the punchline, always the same punchline. Your name, your face, your family - none of it is really you. When the body dies, almost all of you is forgotten. You are a mirage. Everything is an illusion.

And I want to tell you something about that sermon. It is going to win a lot of people. And it is going to be the great enemy of the faith long after you and I are in the ground.

For about three hundred years the church has been fighting the atheist. We built our whole defense around him. We argued that there is a God and not just atoms, that the universe was designed and not an accident, that mind cannot come from dead matter, that the tomb was really empty. Good arguments, every one of them. But here is the thing. That war is almost over, and the atheist is losing - and he is not losing to us. He is losing to the mystic. Plain old materialism cannot feed a soul, and people are walking away from it in droves. But they are not walking back to the church. They are walking into the fog.

So let's face it. The next great battle will not be over whether there is more than matter. The next enemy already believes that. He will nod along when you say the world is more than molecules. He will nod along when you say consciousness is the deepest thing there is. He agrees! And that is exactly what makes him so dangerous, because the lie he is selling looks, on the surface, like it is standing right next to the truth.

But it is not the truth. It is the oldest lie there is, wearing a brand new coat.

Look at what that calm voice actually takes away from you. It takes away the Person. God is not Someone who knows your name, He is a force, a field, a something with no face. It takes away your body, which it calls a prison and an illusion to escape. It takes away you, dissolving the very self God authored into a mist. And it takes away grace - because in that religion nobody saves you, you save yourself, climbing your way up through lifetime after lifetime, paying off your own account. No Person. No body. No self. No grace. And no Christ. Strip it all down and that is what is left.

And you do not answer a religion like that by dragging a man back to his microscope. You cannot win him back to materialism, and you should not try. You answer a face with a Face.

Because here is what I have, and what the fog does not have. God is not an it. God has a name. God has a face. God has hands, and there are holes in them.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And then - oh, the wonder of it - the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. Not a spark hiding inside everybody. One Man. At one time. In one body, born to one mother, in one little town you can still find on a map. That is the scandal the mystic cannot stomach, and it is the very center of everything I believe. The infinite Mind that thinks the whole world into being did not stay a fog. He became particular.

And look at what this Man came to do, because the work is as offensive to the fog as the Person is. The mystic tells you to wake up and discover the god within. He tells you to climb. But the gospel does not say climb. The gospel says He came down. He was made sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. He did not come to remind you that you are divine. He came to die in the place of people who are not. One Lamb. One sacrifice. One cross. And from that cross, three words that end the whole religion of self-salvation forever - It is finished. Not "keep climbing." Not "try again next life." Finished. That is grace, and grace is the one thing the fog has never had and can never counterfeit.

And then comes the wall the fog can never climb over. He rose. And He did not rise as a ghost or a glow or a higher vibration. He rose in a body. He told them to handle Him and see, that a spirit has not flesh and bones as they saw Him have. He ate a piece of broiled fish on the shore in front of His friends. He kept the scars in His hands and His side, and He has them still. The whole religion of the fog is about shedding the body to melt back into the One. And the risen Christ just stands there - particular, physical, scarred, and a Man forever - and the lie simply cannot digest Him. He is the bone it chokes on. He is the rock in the river that the whole current breaks around.

Now I have to say something hard about the household of faith, and I say it because I love her. Much of the church is going to be terrible at this fight, and it is going to be her own fault. Because much of the church already half-believes the mystic's premise. She preaches a heaven of disembodied clouds and harps and floating souls, an escape from this nasty flesh into pure spirit. She treats the body like the cage and the soul like the prisoner waiting to get out. Brethren, that is not Christianity. That is Plato in a choir robe. And here is the trouble with it - a church that has spent centuries teaching you to despise your body will not have one leg to stand on when the mystic shows up and says, good, now despise it all the way, you were never really here anyway. She will have handed him half of his sermon and called it her own.

This is why I keep insisting on the floor I stand on. Everything that exists is a thought in the mind of God. The world is real - really real - because He is really thinking it. Your body is good because He authored it good and called it good and will raise it good. And the God whose thought you are is not an impersonal it, He is a Person - three Persons - who hold all things together in covenants of love. So when that calm voice says "all is consciousness," I do not flinch and I do not run for the microscope. I say yes - and the Consciousness has a name, and He was born in Bethlehem, and He went to a cross, and He is a Man on a throne this very minute. Tell me your fog can do that.

And let me leave you with one warning to carry forward, because the enemy is not stupid and he rarely knocks on the front door. He will not always come as a new religion with a new name. He will come wearing our words. He will talk about "Christ-consciousness." He will preach a "cosmic Christ" who is a state of mind and not a Man. He will speak of the "divine spark" in every person. Watch the joint, every time. If the Christ they hand you is a feeling, a frequency, a principle hiding inside you, and not a particular Man with a particular name who really died and really rose in a body that ate fish - then it is not Christ. It is the serpent preaching his very first sermon all over again. Ye shall be as gods.That is all it ever was.

So the war after this one will not be won with clever arguments about whether there is more than matter. By then everybody will believe that. It will be won the only way the war was ever won - by Christ, and him crucified. A real Person with a real name. A finished work that no man can add to. An empty tomb, and a body on the shore eating fish in the morning light. Cling to Him. He is not a mirage, and neither are you - He knew you by name before the foundation of the world, and He will know you by name, in the body, forever.

Grace and Peace,
Brandan