The Bible is written in simple language so that humans can understand unfamiliar concepts and even gain insight into completely unknowable hyper dimensions. Using concrete expressions to convey abstract ideas is not only a common teaching strategy, it is how we communicate in basic language. “Now I see / understand!” “Dream / imagine” “Conceive / bring into being in your thoughts”
“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a [hu]man be born again, he cannot see / perceive the [spirit] kingdom of God…Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” (John 3:3-6)
Take being born…again. If we’re going to understand what Jesus is saying, we have to scrap the ethereal experience presented in most churches.
The reality of birth, as anyone who has experienced it can tell you, is that it takes blood, sweat and tears – hard labor on the part of the birthers, and trauma on the newborns struggling against being forced out of their comfort zones. It is not easy changing from one world to another.
Both earthly and spiritual births undergo the same process of
- an agent accepting seed by a donor.
- sperm by egg in physical birth
- God’s power to create via his word by heart in spiritual birth,
- the gestation of the tentative new being into a fully formed individual,
- and finally entry into the environment where independent action is required – breathing / inspiration of life, growth and development of productive skills, maturity, reproduction, protection and provision of needs of the individuals in our family.
This is not hard to comprehend if you believe in a Creator who IS, and controls, E=mc2 so can transform energy into material substance and vice versa – material substance into energy / life.
- The incarnation of the first human son of God Adam happened when the Word
- created material DNA transcribing his image,
- placed it into a clay image, and
- placed his energy spirit into it “and man became a living soul“, i.e. connected to God’s spirit therefore having direct access to the power to resist the urge to sin.
- The incarnation of the “last” / i.e. ultimate human Son of God Adam happened when Creator God
- created DNA transcribing his image as a sperm gamete with a Y chromosome exactly has he had created the first Adam with genetics
- placed it into the woman’s egg whose mitochondria carried the life-force down all the generations from the original donation by God,
- with the cooperation of a normal, sinful human.
- The incarnation of any human son of God happens in much the same way.
- Any human who, like Mary did, willingly receives God’s seed, the same mysterious life-bestowing spirit essence that called the universe into being germinates in a receptive human heard
- first gestating, i.e. developing over time as a fetal immature son of God / composite human in the flesh capable of sinning but with God’s spirit capable of not sinning in chosen actions.
- The same individual who was born once into the four-dimensional physical realm is born again into the hyper dimensional / spirit domain after fetal development into the likeness of God.
Jesus himself makes it absolutely clear that in the process of gestation there are many miscarriages, the loss of a potentially viable birth.
- Anyone that hears the word of the kingdom, and understands it not, loses it.
- Anyone that hears the word and joyfully receives it; but when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, he is offended, loses it.
- Anyone that hears the word but is so caught up with this world’s lifestyle and making money loses it.
- But he that hears the word, and understands all that is involved – significance of eternity vs short life on this earth, and value of spiritual vs material, and applies that understanding to his endeavors has much to show for it – beareth / produces fruit / outworking of the Spirit, and re-produces more sons of God, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” (Matt 13:18-23)
No doubt one reason God refers to the transition into spiritual life as “birth” is that it is bloody and entails a risk of death to the one undergoing the birthing process. How many martyrs died, in addition to the Chosen One / Christ, to bring new life into being?
“I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to [blessed] death:
- for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men…
- we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked / vulnerable to weather and assaults, and are buffeted,
- and have no certain dwellingplace;
- And labour, working with our own hands…
- being persecuted, we suffer it…
- we are made as the filth of the world, and are the offscouring of all things unto this day…
as my beloved sons I warn you…for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel.” (I Corinthians 4:9-16)
The cost of identifying with God and his wok of suffering to redeem others is magnificently portrayed in the Stephen Spielberg movie Saving Private Ryan.
The story begins on June 6, 1944 in Normandy at Omaha Beach…The American soldiers are massacred on the Norman beaches. The losses are appalling…
three of the four brothers of the Ryan family died in battle.. A rescue mission is organized to find the last of the four brothers [and send him home to maintain the family lineage]…
Of the 8 men who went in search of Ryan, only 2 would manage to get away… Ryan, for his part, is repatriated home, in the United States, Iowa. He will try to live as best he can to honor the sacrifice of those men who died to save him.
Doesn’t that just perfectly reflect the attitude of anyone who wants to honor the sacrifice of YHVH’s Savior in saving his/her soul?
Being a legitimate son of God means you don’t treat him like you’re ashamed to be identified with a notorious social pariah. You take pride in public recognition of your identification as a righteous son of God.
“Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” (Mark 8:38)
Pride in merging one’s identity with another’s is easily recognized in both image and likeness – looks and behaviors – expressing solidarity.
This is particularly evident in national identification requiring documentation of an individual’s entitlement to benefits: citizenship via birth certificates or certification of naturalization, social security card, passport.
There is a reason why we describe the beginning of a new nation as a birth and call the individual who formed the new nation its father. We understand tht the “birth of a nation” more often than not occurs with bloodshed.
Atatürk [Father of the Turk] is regarded as one of the most important political leaders of the 20th century for seizing control of the mixed nationality Anatolian peninsula and establishing it as “Turkey for the Turk.”
As a young man, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was involved with the Young Turks, a revolutionary group…
The infamy of executing this century’s first full scale ethnic cleansing belongs to Turkey’s Young Turk government…
From 1900 to 1923…killed from 3,500,000 to over 4,300,000 Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians, and other Christians.
The Birth of the Republic of Turkey, 1920-1923
The Turks agreed to help Bolshevik Russia destroy the newly independent Caucasus states in exchange for restoration of most of the territory they had lost in the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War. This secured eastern Anatolia and extinguished any chance of independent Armenian or Kurdish states taking root there…
bought off the French by promising to support their rule over Syria in exchange for tacit recognition that all of Anatolia was Turkish territory…
the Greeks would be their only military opposition…
During the war, documented massacres of both Turkish and Greek civilian populations occurred as the two armies occupied territory, with the greatest number of civilians slaughter by Turkey’s ethnic cleansing policy.
- Ismit – 12,000 Greeks massacred and 30 villages destroyed
- Samsun – 21.000 deported with ~10.000 dead in a death march deportation of Greeks.
- Turgutlu – 4,000 Greek inhabitants slaughtered by the Turks when only half of the 8,000 Greek residents were evacuated by the Greek Army.
- Smyrna – up to 125,000 Greeks and Armenians died as a result of the Great Fire of Smyrna set by the Turks when the Greek Army set sail from this ancient Greek city.
Ahh, what a tragedy.
But we Americans can rest on our peerless record of a Christian nation birthed by the honorable George Washington, right?
In 1915, 50 years after the end of the Civil War, D.W. Griffith, released his epic film Birth of a Nation. The greatest blockbuster of the silent era, Birth of a Nation was seen by an estimated 200 million Americans by 1946.
Based on a novel by a Baptist preacher named Thomas Dixon, the film painted Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, as a time when vengeful former slaves, opportunistic white [Southern] scalawags, and corrupt Yankee carpetbaggers plundered and oppressed the former Confederacy…
The film depicted a vindictive northern Congressman, modeled on a Pennsylvania Republican member of Congress, Thaddeus Stevens, and a power-hungry mulatto eager to marry the Congressman’s daughter. The film’s hero is an aristocratic Confederate veteran who joins the Ku Klux Klan and at the film’s climax rescues the woman from armed freedmen. President Woodrow Wilson reportedly described the film as “history written with lightning.
Since the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) first formed in 1865…white supremacist groups––and their extremist ideologies––persist in the United States today. A February 2017 Southern Poverty Law Center report identified 100 active white nationalist and 99 active neo-Nazi groups in the country…
In March 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas declared domestic violent extremism “poses the most lethal and persistent terrorism-related threat to the homeland today…”
Neo-Nazi groups, such as the National Socialist Movement (NSM), generally make no effort to hide their belief that the white race is superior to others…In contrast, groups such as the League of the South and Identity Evropa propagate their radical stances under the…claims that the white identity is under threat from minorities or immigrants that seek to replace its culture.
If we can recognize the fundamental distinction of “us vs them” in human society, can we not recognize the fundamental dichotomy in the spirit dimension?
- One inclusive, willing to accept any human being from any nationality and social level,
- and the opposition.
Kingdom Come 