Paradox or Contradiction

Even in some of the most simple and verifiable life contexts we might find we are faced with paradox (seemingly opposite concepts), and/or contradiction (genuinely opposite concepts).  They remind me of some of the joke games young people played decades ago in switching signs so that a left turn sign was substituted for a right turn sign on the street corner, and a left for a right so to confuse drivers.  Drivers were rightly irritated, but the basic fact remained – there was a turn that had to be made.  Life offers numerous signs that need to be interpreted for the direction we need, sometimes rejected but we know they will arise and require some toleration.  We prefer clarity and smooth progress.  Barriers and bumpiness always impede progress, but it need not stop it if we have the will and energy to be seekers.  God who is partly characterized by his nature is a friend of seekers for ethical truth – in anything, but especially related to himself, his Kingdom, and individual persons.  Close to that scenario is his interest in the person in the groupings of persons, in family, communities and nations from which his personal relationships play so large a part in both affirmative and/or negative effect – depending upon the presuppositions we hold and follow.  As noted on other pages this is a part of life’s complexity for us even when all goes well.  We know that much in our lives will not go well.  Some of the issues are of our own making, and many are visited on us from others as individuals and groups.  We are lifted and advanced in some contexts, and depressed even defeated in others.  Self-management in Christian context that includes Scripture, faith, prayer, fellowship with others of like precious faith applied with seeking mind and spirit rewards us.

At the point of death the only thing we likely want (if we are functioning well enough to want anything) is the continuation of our lives, and that in an improved context than we have recently known it.  Most would like to share that new context with the persons they love in nature’s everyday experience.  We tend to believe: That’s what heaven’s for.  There is something in the way we live that impinges on the level of heaven’s pleasure for us.  There will be reconciliation with those we knew related to mutual faith in the earth sojourn, but that will likely fade in the glory projections and progressions related to God.  It is likely that Lazarus, on his emergence from the tomb recognized and was joined to his sisters and to Christ in a fellowship unknown prior to his untimely death.  Once his life was confirmed, and a few special years followed, he must have felt the pull of that which he saw in the heavenly factor.  Scripture does not touch down with Lazarus again after that dramatic miracle, and we wonder how matters went in his restoration to his natural context, and how death visited him later.  The closeness that Jesus had with Lazarus’ family would justify some information about what happened in that family after the most dramatic miracle from Jesus during his earthly sojourn.  Theologians have argued about the most dramatic miracle related to Jesus as his birth miracle without male generation and bearing both human and divine natures; and/or his own resurrection without aid culminating in ascension.  These miracles related to the person of Jesus whereas the Lazarus miracle related to mankind, occurring in the context of nature alone.  Any miracle related to Jesus alone would be of a different genus than his miracles among the masses in natural contexts.

Perhaps most persons find it difficult to evaluate life and evidence of nature and faith so to holding the revelation of God through the course of their lives.  Not open to meaningful assumptions about the existence of God and his interest in the course of lives in individuals and the masses of earth, they pass off the views and experiences of the devout.  To them the business of faith is some kind of psychological magic, perhaps deep superstition, perhaps arrested maturity.  For many intellectuals faith is an alleged approach by which faith persons make up for their weakness in facing reality.  The world for them is populated by the weak and the strong.  The strong face life and death in whatever is visited upon them and that they can make for themselves.  The weak need a god to carry them through and make a context in which the reality of death is something to be passed over as simply transition to something better, for which they have no evidence in nature.  For Christians there is abundant evidence in history, personal experience and the understanding of wisdom in the meaning of the factor we call life. Life includes the mystery of God.