Now the appearance of the glory of the LORD was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. And Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain.

Exodux 24:17–18

Sitting on the top of a barren mountain in the dark of early morning, I prayed for wisdom. Many decisions awaited me, and my sixteen years of life were not enough to show me the path ahead. As the first rays of the sun illumined the horizon, I had a sudden sensation that I was being embraced by something unseen. Peace filled my body and eased my youthful mind. In that moment, seated high above the world, I knew that God is Love and that the purpose of my life is to love without ceasing.

Two years later, I enrolled in an evangelical Protestant college with the intention to become a pastor. I was told during the first semester that the path to God is found only in the Christian scriptures. Eager to fulfill the commission I felt within me, I then poured myself into that sacred text. I spent so much time studying that my friends joked that I was trying to read every book in the library! After three years, I realized that an intellectual grasp of the Bible would not lead me into the presence of God. Though I read commentary after commentary, I was hearing only the voices of human opinion—not the voice of the One I sought.

As a result, I shifted my academic pursuits to historical theology, believing that there was still a living knowledge held within the older traditions. I attended the Roman Catholic Mass, visited monasteries, and read the writings of the desert monastics. Eventually, I learned about the Eastern Orthodox tradition and the ancient teaching known as hesychasm, which is the spiritual practice of encountering God within the silence of the heart. I was immediately drawn to that prayerful lifestyle, thinking that, after years of restless searching, I had at last found the path that would lead me back to the top of the mountain.

Later that year, I began working as a hospital chaplain, spending my days alongside people who were sick and dying. As I paced the sterile halls and prayed with those who felt fully the fragility of this earthly life, I was overcome with a sense of impotence and confusion. Though my prayers were earnest, I could not make sense of how a loving and intimate God could be so seemingly uninvolved with the devastation that unfolded daily before me.

One Saturday afternoon, I watched a man suffocate to death because his heart could no longer function. As he struggled for his final breaths, I stood as far away from him as I could, limply leaning against the cold frame of the metal door. The moment his heart ceased to beat, his wife looked up at me with disgust in her eyes and said, “How can you watch this every day?” I could not answer her. The unabated horror I beheld in that place of healing had become too much for me. When I returned home that night, I placed my Bible, my education, and my faith upon the shelf—and I turned away from Christianity.

Death and New Birth

The years that followed were not happy ones for me. I enrolled in a doctoral program for clinical psychology, hoping to express my longing to love in the context of psychotherapy. I thought that, as a counselor, I could rely on an intricate knowledge of human emotion and relationships to guide others out of pain and into a sustained experience of the peace I once felt. Despite the outward appearance of success, I continued to wrestle with an inward sense of emptiness. After listening to heart-wrenching stories on a daily basis and attempting to hold the endless sufferings of those who came to me for help, I began to lose hope that what I felt on that mountain years before was anything more than a delusion of naivety.

While so much was dying within me, I learned that my grandfather’s life was coming to an end. I returned to my childhood home for one last visit with him before he died. My grandfather was a hard and disciplined man who was masterful in his work, though not necessarily in his words. As I approached him to say goodbye, he looked at me with piercing eyes and said, “Listen, Josh. Every morning I talk with God, and God talks to me. He tells me what to do every day.” My grandfather had never spoken with me about his faith. His simple yet intimate disclosure, delivered at such a defining moment, left me speechless. In the heavy silence that followed, as he intently held my gaze, I could not help but wonder if he was mistaking his own musings for the voice of the Divine.

He saw right through me. “You don’t believe me,” he said with a smile.

His sudden unveiling of my doubt woke me from a dream I didn’t know I was having. Something shifted inside me. After years of disappointment, I knew—deep within me—that I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that the God who met me on the mountain was real, and that this same God would one day meet me again. “I do believe you,” I said as I broke his gaze, “I just don’t understand.” He turned toward the workshop that he built with his own hands many decades before, the place that sustained his lifetime of labor—and he said to me, “You’re young. You will, someday.”

When my grandfather died, I started to pray again. After telling myself that God was nothing more than an intellectual construction formed out of my own psychological longings, I did not know what prayer even meant. In a state of renewed innocence, without words or rituals, I opened wide my heart to receive whatever would be given.

As I did so, day after day, month after month, something unexpected began to change within me. I started to see things that I had never seen before. At first, they seemed like shadows or fleeting glimpses of light—and yet, as the images grew clearer with time, I discovered that I was seeing the spiritual world.

This awakening of spiritual perception felt empowering. In my counseling practice, I was able to observe the spiritual state of my clients before they entered my office. I could see inner exhaustion and untapped resiliency. I could see the brokenness of despair and the brilliance of expanding love. I could see suffocating shame and the soul’s light that somehow still remained under that heavy shroud. These new insights significantly enriched the quality of my work, and my clients were healing.

On an interpersonal level, though, I did not know how to handle my new level of awareness. In daily interactions with neighbors and acquaintances, I became increasingly uncomfortable, uncertain, and withdrawn. I even started to distance myself from some of my closest friends, afraid they would ask me questions I did not yet know how to answer. I felt like a toddler, simultaneously in awe of and overwhelmed by a world that was so much larger than I.

During this tumultuous transition, I once awoke in the middle of the night and hiked to the top of a nearby mountain. With the stars stretched across the sky above me, I again opened my heart to the heavens and prayed for wisdom.

In that moment, two angels appeared beside me. Without speaking, they took hold of my arms and lifted me up into a stream of golden light. As they carried me, I saw many others join our procession. Moving together as one, we continued onward until we reached a towering city of gold. The gates that guarded the way swung open before us, and the angels carried me to the center of that great city, where there sat a pile of shimmering gold bars.

“Eat,” one of the angels commanded. He began to feed me the bars, placing them directly into my mouth. Swallowing one after another, I ingested the gold that was given to me—and I felt again the warmth and peace I had known so many years before.

After a time that seemed never-ending, I heard a voice proclaim, “Feed my people the gold.” Turning around, I beheld thousands of men and women, all waiting to receive the heavenly food.

The next moment, I stood once again on the soil of the Appalachian mountain, looking out in all directions. Before me, the lights of the city began to compete with the brilliance of the morning sun. Behind me, the mountains were awash with sunlight. I stood for a long time, watching the world wake up around me. The day was chasing away the night, and my life would never be the same.

Within three months, I quit my job and moved my family to a secluded place to focus on the meaning of that vision. Since then I have spent thousands of hours, not reading or studying, but simply standing in my heart. From that sacred place within me, the Mount Sinai in my chest, I “entered the cloud” of God’s Word.

The Idolatry of Abstraction

After Moses led the ancient Jewish people out of captivity and into the wilderness, he brought them to meet God on the mountain. With the sound of unseen trumpets, God appeared as fire and smoke, causing the Earth to tremble and shake. Terrified, the people drew back and pleaded with Moses, saying, “You speak to us, and we will hear; but let not God speak to us, lest we die.”1 According to their own admission, they valued their earthly lives more than having a direct encounter with God’s Word.

Moses was different. He walked into the fire on the mountain and entered the “thick darkness”2 of God’s presence. For forty days and forty nights, Moses abided within the Word of God.

The men and women below grew impatient from waiting. Still too afraid to approach God directly, some of them chose to make a new god of their own. They fashioned a calf of gold and declared to the people, “There are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!”3

I, too, had replaced God with a golden calf of my own making. Throughout my years of academic and religious strivings, although I wanted intimate and direct knowledge of God, I instead sought intellectual and theoretical knowledge about God. In a desperate effort to make the Creator of the cosmos into something I could easily comprehend, systematically describe, and rationally control, I unwittingly crafted a new god out of abstraction.

An abstraction is a concept that is based on imagination or speculation, separate from any reality that can be observed. The natural world does not contain abstractions. God has never made an abstraction. It is we who make abstractions with our minds.

For years I had talked about God and Jesus, faith and grace, sin and salvation. But where did I acquire my knowledge about such topics? Did I learn about God through direct encounters with the Word? Did I preach about God’s Love because Love was a spiritual reality that abided within my soul? Or was I merely wielding the tools of cognitive speculation and analysis of historical texts in order to forge ideas that resembled reality but were lifeless within? Like the Israelites of long ago, I had embraced concepts as comfortable substitutes for a direct encounter with the living God.

I was not alone in this sin of idolatry. A long history of crafting golden abstractions has resulted in the Christian religion becoming little more than a valley of dry bones. Now I know, though, that only when the Word abounds within us are we set free from the deceptions that spread like cancer within our churches, and we become able to love in a manner that breathes eternal Life into all that is.

A Gift to be Shared

Like a child receiving a gift for which he hardly allowed himself to hope, I cannot put into words the joy I feel when I enter the sanctuary of my soul and encounter God waiting to receive me with unbounded Love. After years of grief and empty strivings, I have begun to feast at God’s great banquet, and I write to share this nourishment with those who will receive it.

All that I have experienced is a gift. In offering to you what I have “seen with my eyes” and “touched with my hands,” my hope is that you will join me on the path up the mountain—so that as we reach the summit together, on that day of all days, “our joy will be complete.”4

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That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.

1 John 1:1

Throughout the history of biblical interpretation, the opening chapter in Genesis has been a continual source of controversy. I remember how disappointing it was to me during my academic training that, while studying the very first words of the Christian scriptures, I encountered a cacophony of confusion rather than an open doorway to God. Following years of reading one opinion after another, I eventually gave up seeking clarity about the creation story, concluding that its true meaning had been lost behind the veil of antiquity, and all that remained was manufactured speculation.

But now, as I sought to know the One who was before the beginning, Genesis was exactly where I chose to begin. I entered the stillness of my heart and waited until the spiritual reality of God’s creation unfolded before me. From the sanctuary of my soul, I beheld a vision so grand that all the academic arguments about a literal history or sophisticated allegory simply faded into irrelevance. I encountered indescribable glory, where the Creator spoke with the might of a conqueror, the wisdom of a sage, and the precision of a master poet.

A Vision of the Beginning

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and the darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.1

At the very beginning of creation, before the first day had dawned, I beheld an endless black sea. The dark waters churned restlessly beneath me. While I stared into this primordial “Deep,” a tall black wave rose out of the sea like a serpent and lunged toward me. A flash of fear coursed through my body, and I quickly pulled back.

Above the black, I beheld a brilliant white sky that seemed to continually expand outward. I turned toward the whiteness, longing to know it more intimately. Entering into the brilliance, I felt suspended by the light that shone all around me. I held my breath, completely awe-struck. This is God, I thought to myself.

After a time that I wished would never end, I saw a luminous mist appear from within the brilliant whiteness of God. Swirling and swaying, as if dancing to some dreamlike sonata, the soft white mist slowly gathered near the blackness below. It settled above the surface of the dark waters like fog on a cool autumn night.

While watching the gathering mist, I beheld a brilliant beam of light burst forth from God. The light was pure gold in color and moved like an arrow, striking the mist and driving it deep into the darkness below. The endless Deep now contained a wound, like a gaping pit in the sea of black, out of which shone a golden radiance.

As I marveled at the golden pit within the Deep, a new and different light suddenly came forth from the whiteness above. Something that looked like a cloud of glittering white light proceeded slowly toward the separation within the Deep, as if it were being carried by a gentle wind. Steadily and unwaveringly, the cloud of white advanced until it touched the golden wound. At that moment, an explosion of light shook my body and momentarily blinded my spiritual eyes.

Following the blast, I could see that where the golden radiance had previously radiated, a sphere sat halfway submerged within the dark waters. The sphere looked completely transparent, like an orb of delicate glass. Beneath the crystal-clear shell, I could see nothing—for it was hollow. Instantly, I knew that this sphere, appearing as a dome (or a “firmament”) rising halfway above the Deep, was what God had called “Heaven.”

The next moment, a luminous mist—exactly like the swirling and swaying mist I had seen “moving over the face of the waters”—came forth from the whiteness and drifted down toward the hollow sphere. Like a dense fog, the soft white mist completely enveloped the sphere. Then, as if entering through an unseen door, the mist poured into the orb of Heaven and spread out, filling the entire expanse. I watched the mist gradually converge in the middle of the sphere and form a luminous ball. Looking upon that luminous sphere within the sphere, I realized that the mist had become the Earth balanced within the center of Heaven.

As the subsequent events of creation unfolded, I saw the same process occur: all vegetation, the fishes of the sea, the birds of the air, and all creatures that moved upon the ground were created by the luminous mist coalescing into form.

Reflecting on the Vision

Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD; awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago. Was it not thou that didst cut Chaos in pieces, that didst pierce the dragon? Was it not thou that didst dry up the sea, the waters of the great deep?2

I spent over two years returning to my vision of God’s creation and reflecting about what it meant. It seemed to me that those images contained inexhaustible wisdom, if only I could interpret them accurately.

The golden light that wounded the blackness was like an arrow “that didst pierce the dragon,” separating the darkness into two. I thought it significant that the golden light did not strike alone, for the soft white mist covered the face of the Deep before the golden light was spoken. I wondered if the mist laid a foundation that allowed the light to penetrate the darkness below, such that without the mist the movement of the light would not be possible. Perhaps, I thought to myself, there is a relationship between the golden light and the luminous mist, such that the joining of the two was essential before the Deep could be separated.

The glittering cloud of pure white displayed a distinct appearance and movement compared with the luminous mist and the golden light, yet there seemed to be a synergistic relationship among the three. The instant the cloud touched the golden radiance that shone from the separation in the Deep, an explosion occurred, and the hollow sphere of Heaven emerged. I wondered if the combination of the mist and the golden light had laid another foundation that prepared the way for the march of the cloud of white.

The glassy sphere of Heaven showed up in a different way than the three lights I had observed. The luminous mist, the golden light, and the cloud of glittering white had mysteriously sprung forth from the expansive whiteness of God, as if they had already existed and were now appearing for some purpose. The sphere, on the other hand, seemed to be something brand new that was fashioned before my eyes. Based on these observations, I concluded that it was the coming together of all three Divine lights that made possible a new creation.

Then the progression of God’s creation seemed to start over again, now within the sphere of Heaven. Mirroring its prior movements, the luminous mist sprang forth from the whiteness and moved toward the Deep, except this time it entered the glassy orb and coalesced into the shape of the Earth and everything therein. Remarkably, the foundation that had previously prepared the way for the golden and brilliant white lights was now being fashioned as our physical Earth.

So I wondered: What are the three lights that emerged out of the expansive whiteness of God? And why was Heaven created out of the combination of all three lights, while the Earth was composed of the mist alone? And what does it mean that the glorious act of creation, which gave birth to everything we can perceive with our physical senses, occurred within the waters of the monstrous Deep? This book is my attempt to answer these questions, and I began with the lights themselves.

The Word of God

The word which you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.3

No language is adequate to describe an encounter with the ineffable God. Yet because the gift of my vision was not given to me for my sake alone, I knew that I must communicate what I saw in a manner that others could comprehend. After months of uncertainty, I elected to borrow the words of another: John, the beloved disciple of Jesus.

In his Gospel and Epistles, John wrote with a simple and straightforward language, absent of abstractions. To read John is to look through an open window into the throne room of God. When I examined this saintly man with my spiritual eyes, I saw that his soul was brighter and larger than any known star. I decided that a man who shines like God must possess wisdom worth emulation.

In his Gospel prologue, John described what appears to be his own direct observations of the acts of God’s creation:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.4

I had sensed a similarity between John’s description of the beginning and what I had seen in my vision, but only when I understood the historical context of the “Word” did the connection become clear.

John was not the first to write about the Word. The spoken Word of God stood as a central tenet of ancient Judaism, for it was how Jewish writers described the manifestation of God. But this expression of the Divine constituted more than mere verbal articulation: God speaking the Word was considered to be an act of great power that could both create and heal.

The most significant way in which God spoke the Word to the Jewish people was in the form of the Mosaic Law. According to Jewish tradition, the Law was “written with the finger of God” upon tablets of stone and given to Moses on Mount Sinai.5 To the ancient Jew, the Law and the Word were synonymous.

According to the historical narrative, God explained to Moses that if the Jewish men and women obeyed the Law (or the “voice” of God), they would be transformed into “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”6 The ancient psalmist gave a hint as to how this transformation could occur:7

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

How can a young man keep his way pure?
By guarding it according to thy word.
With my whole heart I seek thee;
let me not wander from thy commandments!
I have laid up thy word in my heart,
that I might not sin against thee.

God’s Word was “laid up” within the hearts of those who faithfully kept the religious and sacrificial requirements of the Law. Through the Word abiding within them, the Jewish people became God’s people.

As centuries passed, the Word also became associated with the teachings of the Prophets. The defining characteristic of a Jewish Prophet was his or her ability to be a living bridge between God and the people, communicating God’s Word through speech. Thus, in the time before Jesus, the Word of God was laid up in the hearts of the Jewish people both by obedience to the Law and by submission to the teachings of the Prophets.

Although John knew the Jewish interpretation of the Law and Prophets, I am convinced that he did not write the Gospel prologue in order to reiterate what he had been taught regarding that tradition. Rather, his aim was to describe the history of God’s Word, which he had observed through spiritual perception. I believe that John, through the eyes of his radiant soul, beheld the act of creation, the Mosaic Law, and the Prophets—and that he recognized the same living Presence abiding within the hearts of those who obeyed the Law, moving in the words of the Prophets, and spoken by God in the beginning. In each of these instances, John saw the Word. When John wrote, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” he offered firsthand testimony.

Once I realized that John had already given utterance to the phenomenon I had observed in my vision, I was filled with relief. I had seen the Word—the knowable expression of the unknowable God—revealed in the form of a luminous mist, a golden light, and a cloud of glistening white.

The Word is Life

In [the Word] was life, and the life was the light of men.8

And yet, I wondered, if all three of the Divine lights are the singular Word of God, why do they appear and act differently? I realized that I needed to look further. I began by examining the luminous mist more closely—and as I did so, I discovered something remarkable. I realized that the mist was composed of what appeared to be very small, lucent drops of water. In the same way that a physical mist is made of an incalculable number of water droplets, so also did I perceive the mist that came forth from God as a gathering of tiny particles. I concluded that these were the “seeds” of God that John9 (and others10) had described centuries ago.

The seeds that formed the mist displayed a distinct appearance and movement. Their color was similar to water: sometimes soft white and sometimes translucent, depending on the angle from which I saw them. Moving in unison, the seeds constantly shifted and swirled in harmony with the seeds surrounding them. At times, the assemblage of seeds spread out or drew closer together, but never once did a single seed stray from the rhythm of the whole.

After I was able to discern these luminous seeds, I realized that they were everywhere around me. I saw the seeds within plants and trees, birds and beasts, and within the soil itself. In everything alive and growing, I observed these seeds in abundance. Conversely, I witnessed the seeds gradually move away from any dying thing. Everywhere I looked in the natural world, the mist’s seeds were present and active.

As I observed this wonder, I pondered to myself, What do I call these seeds of the Word, which laid the foundation of Creation and which permeate all things on Earth? I looked to John for the answer. In the opening of his Gospel, “life” is the first name he used to describe the Word.

To John, life is something that can “abide” or dwell within us, offering us the nourishment and refreshment needed to walk the spiritual path. And this life that dwells within us has the potential to become “eternal,” having no observable end.

Comparing my observations to the writings of John, I concluded that the luminous mist I saw in my vision of the beginning was that which John called “life.” Life is the expression of God that lays the foundation for all Creation. Without the seeds of Life, nothing can be made that has been made.

The Word is Light

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.11

In my vision, the second expression of God was the beam of golden light proceeding from the Creator on the first day. Moving quickly and precisely, the golden light did not sway and dance like the mist; rather, it shot rapidly in a straight line toward its intended destination. In the presence of this streaking golden arrow, the Deep was pierced and pushed aside, unable to withstand the triumphant light that penetrated its depths. As I examined the golden light more closely, I observed that it was also composed of countless small seeds, acting together as one.

While searching for the language to name these golden seeds, I turned again to John’s Gospel prologue where “light” is the second name he gave the Word. John explained that light and “darkness” have a relationship of continual conflict, where either the one or the other dominates. Light “overcomes” darkness, but darkness can also “overtake” us causing us to “stumble” and become lost. Throughout John’s writing, light and darkness are portrayed as mutually exclusive: where one is, the other cannot be.

In John’s Gospel, though Jesus repeatedly referred to himself as “the light of the world,” he did not claim to be the only one to possess light. He told the Jewish leaders that John the Baptist shone with light, and Jesus informed his followers that they could possess light as well. In addition, John wrote that we may “abide in the light,”12 revealing that light is something that can be both within us and around us. John implied that our relationship with light ought to be so intimate that we actually become what Jesus called “sons of light.”13

In order to make sense of these descriptions of light, I looked to John’s simple yet profound definition: “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.”14 In other words, the light that can abide within us—that overcomes all darkness—is God.

I believe that the seeds of golden light I saw emerge and separate the waters of the great Deep are what John called “light.” The Word of God is both Life and Light. Life is the foundation. Light is the expression of God that builds upon that foundation in order to conquer the Deep. Only by the seeds of Light can darkness be overcome.

The Word is Love

Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.15

The third and final expression of God appeared to me as a glistening white cloud, moving slowly and steadily toward the golden radiance within the wound of the Deep. This sparkling whiteness was brighter and purer than anything I had ever observed with my physical eyes, and its deliberate movement was more awe-inspiring than the golden brilliance and rapidity of the Light. Upon closer examination, I perceived that the glistening cloud was also composed of very small particles or seeds.

To find a name for these seeds of pure white, I looked again to the writings of John. In his Gospel prologue, John did not identify a second light nor offer any other descriptive words that I thought bore resemblance to what I had observed. But throughout his writings, John used another word that I found particularly intriguing: “love.”

According to John, love is an action that is primarily expressed “in deed and truth.”16 The action of love has an outward orientation entirely focused on offering benefit to another, as exemplified by Jesus’s statement, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”17 To act with love is to fulfill God’s greatest commandment.

However, John depicted love as being something more than human action. He quoted Jesus stating, “abide in my love”—just as Jesus himself abided in the Father’s love.18 Jesus also prayed that his followers would have love abiding “in them.”19 Similar to Light, love is something that can dwell both in and around us. John wrote that love can abide within us so completely that it becomes “perfected.”20

Love is not an intellectual concept, nor an emotional experience, nor is it merely moral behavior. John described love as something tangible, a spiritual reality that he could see and touch. When John wrote about love, he offered an exact description of the God with whom he had intimate “fellowship.”21 Love is the final and most complete expression of God on Earth. Indeed, Love is the Word of God.

From this study of John, I concluded that the glistening white cloud is the expression of God that is known as Love. During the miraculous unfolding of creation, the cloud of Love worked together with both Life and Light in order to complete God’s work. When Love appeared and joined the luminous mist and golden light, the three expressions of God’s Word were transformed into the sphere of Heaven. Through Love, something new was born.

The Word is God

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it.22

For two decades I sought to know God through rigorous academic study and earnest religious adherence, only to be left empty from the heartless repetition of abstract concepts. But now, by the grace of God, I have seen the Word spoken before the eyes of my soul.

In a glorious display of might and majesty, the singular Word was revealed as Life, Light, and Love. I saw firsthand that these three expressions are eternally with God, that they proceed from God, and that they are God. Through the synergistic interweaving of each—Light built upon the foundation of Life, and Love built upon the triumph of Light—God created Heaven. And within Heaven, God fashioned the entire physical world. Indeed, all that we see was not created out of nothing. All was created from the fulness of God’s Word.

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Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be—but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

1 John 3:2

At the climax of the first creation narrative, the author dictated a stunning proclamation from the Creator:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”1

These remarkable words unveiled the essential nature of mankind as being “in [God’s] image, after [God’s] likeness.” As God’s representatives on Earth, we are commissioned by God to be the lords of all Creation, the glorious culmination of all that is. Truly, there is no greater declaration nor higher praise than that which is contained in those ancient words.

To be completely honest, though, I always disliked this passage. First of all, it does not require spiritual perception to see that mankind has, by and large, been a scourge upon the Earth, ravaging the abundance and beauty of this place for the sake of our own selfish endeavors. Additionally, I have been repeatedly frustrated with the lack of clarity regarding how to interpret this essential revelation. What does it mean that I am made “in [God’s] image, after [God’s] likeness”? And how do I make sense of God’s command for us to “multiply,” “subdue,” and “have dominion”? From a twenty-first century perspective, that sounds rather ominous.

When academics attempt to interpret this perplexing passage, they often examine the meaning of the words “image” and “likeness,” delving into their etymology and contextual usage. Most modern scholars claim that there is no significant distinction between them and that the two words are fundamentally interchangeable. The early Christian writers, though, tended to adopt a different stance, explaining that the word “image” describes something inherent within us at conception, while the word “likeness” refers to the result of spiritual progress, a grace achieved through prolonged effort. During my academic studies, I found that both conclusions had their merits, making it very difficult for me to know with confidence whom I ought to believe. Once again, I found myself trapped in the quicksand of opinion, trying desperately to grasp hold of something solid, yet sinking ever deeper into confusion.

Laying aside the burden of my academic training, I returned to the scriptures with the openness of a child. When I did so, resting in the stillness of my soul, I discovered that the key to interpreting the ancient vision of our creation lies within the Garden of Eden. Standing upon the soil of that ancient paradise, I saw firsthand the purpose and potential of our lives on Earth.

The Garden of Eden

Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, but a mist came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.2

Entering the spiritual landscape of Eden, the first thing I saw was a luminous mist, swaying and swirling above barren ground. The mist was Life “water[ing] the whole surface of the ground” and forming the Garden that was to become the home of mankind.

The mist covered everything. Then, only a few yards in front of me, I saw the mist rise up and slowly coalesce into the shape of a man. With arms outstretched and head tilting toward the sky, the man opened his mouth and received the first breath of air. By breathing Life into his lungs and body, God formed the first man as a “living being,” composed of the seeds of Life.

At that moment, the Garden began to change. Out of the luminous mist, I saw a lush landscape emerge. As I studied this terrain of low-growing plants, I noticed that the foliage was swaying rhythmically from side to side. The entire ethereal paradise seemed to be dancing, and everything sparkled like ice-covered branches illumined by the morning sun.

From these observations, I realized that the Garden was formed through the same divine means as was the first man, for everything was an exquisite expression of Life overflowing. There were no shadows that could tarnish the purity of that place. Nor was there anything that could enhance it, such as the seeds of Light or Love. There existed only Life, laying the foundation for that which was to come.

In my curiosity, I wanted to identify the location of this living Garden. Still standing in my soul, I drew upward, so as to view the Garden from above. As I did so, I saw that the luminous paradise was actually a sphere, suspended within the center of the sphere of Heaven. The Garden of Eden was the Earth in its original state, pure and untouched.

Through my vision, I discovered that the Garden of Eden was a vision of infancy. All was Life, yet lacking the fulness of God’s Word. Whereas Heaven was created from the union of Life, Light, and Love, Earth and her first inhabitants were a foundation awaiting completion.

The Tree of Life

Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.3

I beheld in the center of the Garden a thick column of brilliant white light. It rose slowly into the sky, eventually ascending to such a height that I could no longer see its top. Beams of light spread outward from the entire length of the vertical shaft. I was awe-struck by this immense spectacle of sparkling light illuminating the Garden in all directions. As I stood and stared, I suddenly realized that the light was in the shape of a tree. I was observing the Tree of Life.

Eagerly moving closer, I sought to investigate the radiant wonder. The trunk and branches were ablaze with a blinding white light. The leaves were a soft white color, exactly like everything else in the Garden. The fruit, however, looked different. I beheld, dangling from every radiant bough, hundreds of resplendent white pearls. These pearls were the fruit of the Tree of Life—which God gave to the first man, that he might “freely eat”4 of it at all times.

According to Genesis, the fruit contained a remarkable power, such that those who ate it would “live forever.”5 In his vision of the New Jerusalem, John also described the fruit of the Tree of Life:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.6

According to the Prophets of old, the fruit of the Tree of Life is the food that will sustain those who are to reign with God “for ever and ever.”

Day after day, I returned to the Tree of Life, longing to know the spiritual significance of its sacred fruit. Not until I observed the first man consume one of these resplendent pearls did I realize what the fruit actually was. As he ate, I saw the seeds of Life, Light, and Love suddenly appear in his body. By eating the fruit, the fulness of God’s Word began to abide in him. This fruit is a “pearl of great value,”7 the source of God’s Light and Love on Earth. Through the man’s act of freely eating it, the fulness of the Word was being introduced into God’s blossoming Creation.

Sons and Daughters of God

[The Word] was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.8

John was not the first to use the phrase, “children of God,” for all Jewish people viewed themselves as the “sons of the LORD.” And as a Jew, John knew that if he failed to follow the Law given by his Father God, he would forsake his status as God’s child:9

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They have dealt corruptly with [God],
they are no longer his children because of their blemish;
they are a perverse and crooked generation.

In his writings, John expounded on this well-established tenet. First, he declared that we must become a son or daughter of God through a process of spiritual birth, in which we are “born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” Then, in his first epistle, John revealed the mechanism behind the mysterious act of being “born anew”:

No one born of God commits sin; for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God. By this it may be seen who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil.10

Thus, to be born of God means that God’s “seed” is present within us. All who receive the Word are given the “power to become children of God” because the seeds of Life, Light, and Love are laid up in their hearts. This results in an actual spiritual change, by which they are transformed after the likeness of the seeds themselves.

The process of new birth is the phenomenon I observed while watching the first man eat in the Garden. God gave the fruit of the Tree of Life in the beginning—and will give it again in the end—so that by freely eating of this sacred food, the seeds of God’s Word enter into us. And when God’s seeds abide in us, sin loses its stronghold because we are being born of Life, Light, and Love.

Keeping and Cultivating the Garden

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.11

I loved to watch the first man move about the Garden. Once, I saw him kneel and gently pick up a small round stone. As he gazed at the stone, eyes beaming with joy, he breathed upon it, and the three seeds of God’s Word poured from his lips. Life, Light, and Love surrounded and entered the stone, resulting in a sudden burst of white light. Then, to my great surprise, the stone transformed into a living animal.

Another time, I observed the man walk into an expansive meadow where soft white grasses gently swayed. The man paused and surveyed the vast landscape. Stretching out his arms like a priest giving a blessing, he breathed upon all he beheld. As he did so, God’s seeds poured forth from his lips, and the grasses of the prairie suddenly changed into a multitude of exotic plants, each shining with the brightness of a star.

According to Genesis, man was placed in the Garden of Eden for the purpose of keeping and cultivating it. The Hebrew verb translated as “keep” means to act with vigilant protection, like a shepherd keeping watch over his flock. God commissioned the first man to protect the Garden by keeping out those who seek to destroy, in the same way that a good shepherd ensures the safety of his sheep by fending off predators. The Hebrew verb translated as “cultivate” means to labor with the soil. The Creator commissioned the first man to work the soil of the Garden, changing and improving the land through his faithful service.

While reflecting on those Hebrew verbs, I realized that they convey the full purpose of mankind. God placed us here to protect the Garden from forces that seek to do harm, while simultaneously improving the Garden over time. In my vision, when the first man breathed upon the stone and the meadow, he was performing these two tasks. By sowing seeds of Light, he infused the Garden with that which could conquer any encroaching darkness. By sowing seeds of Love, he animated the Garden with that which created it anew. In the Garden of Life, God chose us to be the ones to introduce Light and Love, thereby filling all things with the fulness of God’s Word.

Every time the first man ate the fruit of the Tree of Life, he laid up God’s seeds within himself. Continually born anew by the boundless grace of that great tree, he received the power to become a son of God, increasingly capable of doing the work of God within the Creator’s Garden. God gave him unrestricted access to the Word so that he could be like God and sow these seeds into the soil of Earth.

Holding these insights in my heart, I saw clearly that if I—a man created by God—will faithfully sow the seeds of Life, Light, and Love into all that I see and touch, then I too will cultivate God’s glorious Garden. I was created to become a doorway through which the fulness of God’s Word can enter and transform all of Creation. The Garden of Earth is a foundation of Life, eagerly longing for us—the sons and daughters of God—to participate in God’s work of creation by breathing Light and Love into all that is.

Image and Likeness

What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him? Yet, thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor.12

In the beginning, God spoke the seeds of Life, Light, and Love. We, as the image of God on Earth, have the capacity to do the same. When we eat freely of the fruit of the Tree of Life, the Word enters and abides within us in increasing measure. As we lay up God’s seeds in our hearts, and then give them out into the world as freely as we receive them, we become like God.

When God chose to “rest” on the seventh day, the work of creation was still unfinished. Earth was a paradise of Life, innocent and incomplete. God rested because the work that remains is now ours to fulfill. We are the lords of Earth, created to keep watch over the Garden by vanquishing shadows with the seeds of Light and cultivating the Garden so that it blooms with Love. Our great commission is to fill all things with the fulness of God’s Word, thereby completing what God established in the beginning.

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Who is Jesus?

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He who believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And he who sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. If any one hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. He who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge; the word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own authority; the Father who sent me has himself given me commandment what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has bidden me.

John 12:44–50

In the previous chapter, I explained that our commission to fulfill the work of creation requires that we eat freely of the fruit of the Tree of Life. The consumption of God’s seeds makes it possible for us to become sons and daughters of God and thereby bring God’s fulness to all Creation. However, according to Genesis, we lost access to the Tree of Life.

And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.1

If we are unable to approach the fruit of the Tree of Life, then how are we to become like God and accomplish the work for which we were created? The answer lies in Jesus. John beautifully described Jesus when he wrote:

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.2

Jesus was not an earthly king, a religious revolutionary, or merely a moral teacher. Jesus was the fulness of God’s Word united with the flesh of a man. He was the Word incarnate.

Although I have the academic training to rationally comprehend the theological concept of God’s incarnation in Jesus, I—like the apostle Thomas—had to see it firsthand before the idea could become living knowledge within me. When I observed Jesus through the eyes of my soul, I saw one who changed what it means to be a man or woman on Earth.

The Annunciation

And the angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.”3

There were three moments in Jesus’s lifetime when God’s spoken Word was clearly observed and historically documented: his conception, his baptism, and his transfiguration. First among these is his conception, traditionally called the “Annunciation.”

Standing within my heart, I saw before me a woman in a long red dress. Her head was uncovered, and her flowing hair rested upon her shoulders. Clasping her hands over her heart, she knelt on the ground and appeared to pray. As she did so, a luminous mist descended upon her until it completely enveloped her body. Then the mist entered into her abdomen, coalesced inside her womb, and shone outward as a soft white light.

Reflecting on that vision, I concluded that Jesus was conceived by the seeds of Life. That which had “moved over the face of the waters” in the beginning was now moving within the waters of a woman’s womb. That which had fashioned Earth on the third day was now fashioning the child who was born to set Earth free. That which had been breathed into dust to form the first man was now breathed into the dust of Mary to form the Savior of mankind. Untouched by the shadows of the fallen world, Jesus was the incarnation of Life.

The Baptism

And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him; and lo, a voice from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”4

Although Jesus resembled the first man in that he was formed directly by Life, Jesus differed in that he did not have immediate and unlimited access to the fulness of God’s Word. The seeds of Light and Love remained outside of him, hidden within the religious rituals of the Mosaic Law and the ancient words of the Prophets. For three decades, Jesus faithfully labored alongside his fellow men and women, slowly laying up the seeds of Light and Love within his pure foundation of Life. However, that changed on the day Jesus was baptized.

With the eyes of my soul, I beheld Jesus as he emerged from the waters of the Jordan river, spreading out his arms and looking up toward the sky. In that instant, a flash of golden Light appeared from within the sparkling whiteness of God. It penetrated into the sphere of Heaven, struck Jesus on the chest, and continued onward into the depths of the Earth. Just as Light pierced the waters of the Deep on the first day, so too did Light pierce the darkness within the Earth. And just as the original wound within the Deep shone like gold, so too did Jesus shine with a golden radiance that filled the cosmos. On that day, the Light of God incarnated into the flesh of a man.

Immediately after becoming Light, Jesus encountered darkness:

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry. And the tempter came […]5

Just as Light wounded the Deep in the beginning, so too did Jesus push aside that which assailed him. Jesus, “the light of the world,” countered each of the shadowy temptations, and in the end “the devil left,” for the Deep had been overcome.

The Transfiguration

After six days, Jesus took Peter, James, and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone. There he was transfigured before them. His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus. […] Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the cloud: “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!”6

During the years that followed his baptism, Jesus revealed Life and Light to all mankind. As Life, Jesus healed diseases and deformities, raised the dead, and displayed unprecedented power over the physical Earth. As Light, he taught a gospel of repentance with astounding authority, boldly exposed the corruption of the Jewish hierarchy, and illumined the central message of the Mosaic Law so all could comprehend it.

Then a time came when something changed with Jesus. At the end of his second year of ministry, Jesus told his disciples that he would be killed and would rise again.7 About a week later, he took three disciples with him to the top of a high mountain; and as they prayed together, he was suddenly “transfigured” before their eyes.

From the vantage point of my soul, I beheld Jesus, once again, with his arms outstretched and his face to the sky. From above him, a cloud of glistening white slowly descended. As the brilliant whiteness engulfed the summit and those upon it, I saw two men appear, one on each side of Jesus. With heads bowed, the two men reached out and touched Jesus upon the chest. Instantly, a blinding white light swept over me, and, when it passed, I beheld Jesus shining with the glistening white of Love. In an event that paralleled the second day of God’s creation, Jesus became Love made flesh.

According to the Gospels, Jesus came down from the mountain a changed man. Thereafter, he expressed exasperation about his life on Earth and inexplicably “set his face toward Jerusalem.”8 He knew that the Jewish leaders would kill him—and although he had previously sought to avoid such a fate, he now walked directly toward death with unshakable determination. As the incarnation of Love, Jesus was intent upon dying “for the life of the world.”9 Jesus was now the fulness of God’s Word, and “the love of God was made manifest”10 in all that he did.

The Fruit of the Tree of Life

There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are upon the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you of all that I will give you in commandment for the people of Israel.11

When the first man and woman were expelled from the Garden of Eden, God assigned cherubim to separate them from the Tree of Life. Likewise, when God gave Moses the Law, God required that the stone tablets be contained within an ark and gold cherubim be placed on the ark’s cover. Then the ark was set within the Holy of Holies, enclosed by a thick veil upon which an image of cherubim was embroidered. God had returned the fruit of the Tree of Life to Moses in the form of the Law, but it was to remain carefully guarded and separated from the people. Only through the Priests and Prophets could the fulness of God’s Word be given and received. Though the sacred fruit was now accessible to the Jewish people, it could not be eaten freely.

That all changed with Jesus. When Moses and Elijah (the representatives of the Law and Prophets respectively) touched Jesus’s chest, unleashing the blinding white light, I saw something entirely unexpected. To my utter amazement, I beheld within Jesus’s chest a resplendent pearl. When the fulness of God’s Word entered man’s flesh for the first time, the historic mediators of the Word handed over that which had long been held back from mankind’s touch. In the heart of Jesus, the fruit of the Tree of Life was restored.

The Crucifixion

And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook, and the rocks were split; the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.12

What happened, I wondered, when the one who had the fulness of God’s Word woven within his flesh laid down his flesh, voluntarily, for the sake of all? Although I had been taught the traditional theological interpretations of Jesus’s death, my heart yearned to be there, to stand at the foot of the cross and see with my own eyes the one who died for me.

One morning, as I opened my heart to God, I found myself standing upon the ancient hill known as Golgotha. The sky was a mixture of red and black. Before me hung Jesus upon a cross. His body was ravaged, his chin lay upon his chest, and he seemed to be staring at the ground below him. Stillness permeated the air, as if the whole world were holding its breath. Then something happened that has defined my life ever since: Jesus lifted his head and stared directly into my eyes.

The urgency and intensity in his gaze unsettled me. His eyes seemed to penetrate my skull and reach down into my chest. He was searching me. Without moving his lips, he spoke these words within me: Are you able to carry this weight? Can you hold the world within your heart? My body began to tremble. I felt faint and nauseated. Unable to endure his gaze, I wanted to run away. And then, as if knowing my frailty, he breathed upon me.

I suddenly found myself standing on hard dry ground, with no living thing in sight. Somehow, I knew I was in the Garden of Eden. As I looked around, I felt stunned by the devastation of this formerly luminous and lush landscape.

I beheld a man wandering alone in that barren land. As he knelt to the ground, I saw in his hand a single fruit from the Tree of Life. He examined the precious pearl with a look of immense pain and suffering. Closing his eyes, he ripped open the fruit, and a river of glistening white light poured out upon the dust. While I stared at this wonder, everything changed around me, and I found myself once again before Jesus on the cross.

Jesus cried out in anguish and breathed his last. As he did so, a light shot forth from his chest, filling the entire expanse of Heaven with brilliant whiteness. The light moved down into the Earth, slowly penetrating the darkened depths. As it reached the center, the light spread outward again in all directions, setting the Earth aglow with sparkling splendor. All Creation shone like Love.

Just as Love created the sphere of Heaven on the second day, so too did Love create something new on the day that Jesus poured out his blood upon the ground. As I marveled at the brilliant whiteness that emanated from all things, I beheld Jesus’s resplendent pearl as it was multiplied and placed within the hearts of all mankind. Through his silent submission to an excruciating end, Jesus restored our ability to freely eat of the fruit of the the Tree of Life. Implanting the fruit within our hearts as a gateway of pearl, Jesus made it possible for the fulness of God’s Word to enter Creation without limit.

Never before had Jesus’s death meant so much to me. Never before had I felt so overwhelmed with gratitude.

With these visions fresh in my mind, I turned again to John’s Gospel and suddenly found Jesus’s own descriptions of his death to be full of new meaning. As he explained to his disciples that his purpose on Earth was to die, he said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”13 Jesus knew that his death would result in the multiplication of the “grain of wheat”—which, at that moment, resided only within him.

During his final meal, Jesus told his disciples that he was “going to prepare a place” for them where they would be united to him even after his death, saying further, “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”14 Jesus knew that his death would result in a union between God and us, and that this union would occur within us.

Lastly, as I read the following words, I felt a weight I never knew existed suddenly lift from my chest: “Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.”15 Jesus knew that by being crucified on the cross, the stronghold of darkness would be overcome, the barrier between us and our Creator would be “torn in two,” and God would be immediately accessible within the hearts of all mankind.

The Blood of Jesus

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Worthy art thou to take the scroll and to open its seals,
for thou wast slain and by thy blood didst ransom men for God
from every tribe and tongue and people and nation,
and has made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on earth.

For most of my adulthood, I disliked the emphasis on Jesus’s blood, which seemed to me unnecessarily gruesome. I reasoned with myself that it is enough to talk about Jesus’s death in general, without getting too involved with unpleasant details. That changed when I saw his blood firsthand—when, pouring from his body like a river of glistening white, Love watered the barren ground of the Garden of Earth.

According to the heavenly beings that stand forever around the throne of God, Jesus’s “blood didst ransom men for God.”16 The word “ransom” suggests a purchase, as if the payment of Jesus’s blood resulted in a transfer of ownership from one to another. And, indeed, we have been purchased. Through the payment of his blood, Light penetrated the depths of Earth and cast out the darkness that had long held dominion. Through the payment of his blood, Love was poured into the hearts of all mankind, creating the doorway to God that we were always meant to have. Through the payment of his blood, “every tribe and tongue and people and nation” have been given the ability to become “a kingdom and priests to our God,” breathing—from the pearl that lies within us—the fulness of God’s Word into all Creation.

John concluded his Gospel prologue with these words:

And from [Jesus’s] fulness have we all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has made him known.17

Jesus’s unprecedented gesture of perfect love changed what it meant to be a man and woman on Earth. From the fulness of the Word poured out in his blood, we have all received “grace upon grace” in the form of the sacred fruit residing within us. We are now like the first man and woman in the Garden, able to walk with God “in the cool of the day” and do God’s work without ceasing.

Though it is impossible for us to perceive the imperceptible Creator, the good news is that through Jesus, who was the Word spoken from the very heart of God, there is now a way for each of us to intimately know the unknowable God.

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What is Faith?

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And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness to me. His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen. And you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not have faith in him whom he has sent.

John 5:37–38

I will never forget the first time I saw a man’s soul. Not only was that man eloquent, profound, and well-versed in Christian literature, he was also highly respected by many. One morning, while praying for him from my heart, a combination of lights and shadows appeared before my spiritual eyes, and Jesus’s words sounded within me:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.1

Since that day, I have observed hundreds of souls. Though I have seen many variations in appearance, I have concluded that there is a general pattern that is universal to all.

Our souls have the potential to possess up to three different lights, or aspects, paralleling the threefold appearance of the Word. The first is a soft white light that appears as a mist, laying the foundation upon which the rest of the soul is built. The second is a golden light that grows outward from the center of the mist. The third is a brilliant white light, “whiter than anyone in the world could bleach.”2 All three lights initially form the shape of a disc and expand into a sphere as the soul is increasingly perfected.

In order to learn more about the three lights, I decided to conduct a study of my own soul. Over the course of several months, I carefully observed how specific thoughts, words, and deeds affected the three lights of my soul. I wanted to know whether various actions would brighten or dim, and expand or retract, each aspect of my soul. By making myself the subject of spiritual investigation, I developed the following view of the soul’s form and function.

The soul’s three aspects function much like our physical muscles. As we all know, the size of a muscle is directly related to its potential for physical action: the more a muscle grows, the more work it can do. Likewise, the size and radiance of each soul aspect directly relates to the soul’s potential to act consistently and powerfully. Thus, the more we strengthen and build our souls with certain thoughts and behaviors, the more we are able to progress along the path that Jesus revealed.

The luminous mist is the soul aspect that I see most often when I observe those around me. In some, the mist shines with a soft white glow, while in others it is faint or dull. At times, I have witnessed this light to be extremely widespread, extending far beyond the limits of the physical body. For example, the most luminous and expansive soul-mist that I have seen was in the first man in the Garden of Eden and in Jesus at his conception, both of whom possessed only this one light. In others I observed, the mist was quite retracted, barely visible, or even absent altogether.

While studying how my own thoughts, words, and deeds impacted the size and radiance of the foundational soul aspect, I learned that whenever I applied sustained attention or conscious effort to a particular action, the mist would expand and brighten as a result. Conversely, when my thoughts or behaviors were automatic, mindlessly repeating some habit or psychological pattern, the mist would become smaller and duller as a result. After observing this pattern occur consistently over time, I concluded that the soft white light represents my ability to act in freedom.

The second soul aspect is the golden light, which may be radiant and brilliant, or dull and muted, depending on the spiritual maturity of the one I am observing. After Jesus’s baptism, this soul aspect was so expansive within him that it filled the entire sphere of Heaven. In most of the people I studied, the golden light was merely a sparkle in the center of the mist, or else I did not see it at all.

As I examined the second soul aspect in me, I discovered that it responded directly to my inner orientation. When I acted from selfish interests or desires, the golden light diminished in both radiance and size. And when, by conscious effort, I chose to turn away from a self-focused preoccupation, the golden light expanded and became more brilliant.

Jesus called the internal action associated with the second soul aspect “repentance.”

A man had two sons; and he went to the first and said, “Son, go and work in the vineyard today.” And he answered, “I will not”; but afterward, he repented and went.3

The son began with a self-focused orientation: prioritizing his own interests, he refused to go and work. However, when he “repented,” something changed within him, and he went to do what his father commanded. Repentance is the inward shift by which we consciously choose to orient our thoughts and actions away from ourselves.

As I studied the effects of repentance on my soul, I stumbled upon a fascinating discovery. Whenever I engaged in some form of self-focus, not only did the golden light in my soul diminish, but I also struggled to see the souls of those around me. Selfishness blinded me. By choosing to engage the world according to my selfish preoccupations, I assaulted my own spiritual sight. Only by repentance was my vision restored and strengthened.

The third and final soul aspect is the brilliant white light, which varies in size but appears constant in luminosity. Following his transfiguration, Jesus’s soul was a sphere of blinding light the size of Heaven. The soul of John the beloved apostle was also just as bright, though less expansive. Among those I studied, I saw a diversity of sizes, ranging from a mere glimmer of light to a radiance that filled a room. Unfortunately, though, in most people I observed, I did not see this soul aspect at all.

Spatially, the brilliant white light always emerges from the center of the golden light. In the same way that the gold grows out of the center of the luminous mist, the final soul aspect is like a white seed growing out of the soil of the golden light. Each preceding soul aspect lays the foundation for the one that follows.

While investigating the brilliant whiteness in my soul, I quickly realized that it is the spiritual expression of our act of love. When my thoughts, words, or deeds expressed love for another, the light expanded. Conversely, when my actions neglected or used others, the light would fade. This central soul aspect is the ‘spiritual muscle’ associated with our capacity to love.

The observation that to love is the central soul activity is unsurprising, for the early Christian writers consistently emphasized that to love is to fulfill God’s primary commandment. Jesus communicated this clearly when he said,

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.4

By watching my soul change in response to my actions, I discovered that I could not love another until I had laid the foundation of the previous two soul aspects. When I applied sustained attention and conscious effort to my thoughts, words, and deeds, my soul was empowered to act in freedom. Building upon this foundation of freedom, I could choose to turn away from selfishness and “lay down my life.”5 And as I became increasingly liberated from the chains of automatic living and the blindness of self-preoccupation, something changed within me that made the act of loving another possible: I could see.

Jesus stated that the reason the Jewish leaders did not accept him was because they were blinded by the deceptions of the Deep. If we welcome the Word within us, we are set free from dark illusions and can see the world as it truly is. The wisdom that comes from being able to see from our hearts is the spiritual prerequisite of love.

Love is not based on emotions, attractions, or commitments. Moreover, the act of love is not necessarily kind or gentle (though it often is). When we awaken to the world around us, we lovingly reach outward with our hearts. Love is a thought, word, or deed that is chosen for the sole purpose of illuminating and expanding another’s soul. Though it can be expressed in innumerable ways, the act of love is the soul embrace of another that aims to unite the other to God. The more we love one another in this way, reaching out from heart-to-heart, the more our souls begin to shine with the brilliant whiteness of God.

Our Work of Faith

For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.6

Faith is difficult to define. In the Gospel accounts, many seemed to use the word “faith” to refer to intellectual persuasion. In this sense, faith—or belief—is defined as the cognitive acceptance of the accuracy of some claim. For example, John recounted one of Jesus’s conversations with his followers:

Then they said to [Jesus], “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom He has sent.” So they said to him, “Then what sign do you do, that we may see, and believe you?”7

Those around Jesus wanted tangible proof that could persuade them to cognitively accept the truthfulness of his words. That is what they meant by faith. Jesus, however, meant something more.

According to Jesus, faith implies a willingness to trust—to have faith in God is to trust in God. During their final conversation, Jesus said to his closest followers: “Let not your hearts be troubled; have faith in God, have faith also in me.”8 In his final appeal to their souls, Jesus was not telling his disciples to cognitively accept that God exists—instead, he was instructing them to trust.

As his teachings also indicate, Jesus expected trust to be expressed in action. For example, when a woman touched Jesus’s tunic, hoping to be healed, he turned toward her and declared, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well,”9 highlighting not only her inner trust in his healing power, but also her willingness to act out of trust. Without action, there is no faith.

After I had studied the activity of the three soul aspects for several months, I realized that I was observing faith. The trust-filled actions that Jesus required of those who followed him are born out of the soul. Sustained attention and conscious effort lay the foundation of our faith. By the freedom that comes from choosing our own thoughts, words, and deeds, we are able to repent and lay aside selfish-preoccupations. And as we do so, we develop the soul capacity to reach out to another in love, just as Jesus commanded.

To trust in God means that we follow the example of Jesus by laboring toward freedom, denying selfishness, and loving others soul-to-soul. By exercising the three soul aspects every day for the rest of our lives, we choose “faith expressing itself through love.”10

The Victory of Faith

For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith.11

Freedom is the foundation of faith. We were created with the capability and responsibility to be free, consciously directing every action of our lives. And yet, freedom is not automatically given to everyone. It is only through our faithful exercising of the soul that we give birth to freedom.

During the course of my investigations, I saw (more often than I wanted to admit) that I was a “slave,”12 acting merely in accordance with my physiological needs and desires, automatic instincts, and the endless stirrings of my undisciplined mind. Rarely did I steer my thoughts, words, and deeds with focus and effort. To be brutally honest, I was like a machine, mindlessly marching on toward a life of ever-increasing passivity and automation.

Then I saw how freedom could emerge. From the luminous mist in my soul, I began to gradually rise above habitual living and have moments of living consciously. Slowing myself down, I sought to decide which thoughts I wanted to think, which words I wanted to speak, and which behaviors I wanted to perform. I started cultivating freedom where once there was only blind submission.

The more I worked to be free, the more I discovered that this foundational labor of faith requires a tremendous amount of personal responsibility. It is very easy for me to follow the path of least resistance by letting habits and instincts dictate my behavior. However, when I made choosing my actions a priority, I took real ownership of my life. Jesus told his followers, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”13 Jesus did not die upon the cross so I could set my cross down. I alone must carry the burden of my life.

Unsurprisingly, it did not take long for me to feel the true weight of this cross. As the weakness of my untrained mind became increasingly self-evident, I complained to God, saying: If this is the path, who then can be faithful? Jesus, of course, had already answered my question: “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”14

Looking again at the luminous mist in my soul, I saw that whenever I chose my thoughts and actions, seeds of Life suddenly appeared within me. To my astonishment, I repeatedly observed that because I made conscious decisions with sustained focus and effort, Life entered my soul and enlivened my labors of faith. In a remarkable collaboration, when I laid the foundation of faith, God gave the seeds of Life—strengthening me to live the next moment in freedom.

The same was true of the golden light. Every time I consciously turned away from selfishness in thought, word, or deed, seeds of Light appeared. My faithful work of repentance became an open doorway through which Light began to shine within me. As Light illumined the golden aspect of my soul, I saw that the darkness within me, which had made selfishness seem so easy and appealing, started to disappear.

Throughout his Gospel and epistles, John described this spiritual response of darkness when presented with Light as the work of “overcoming.” To overcome means to conquer another completely, such that the other is deemed powerless. The word is often used in the context of war, when an enemy is utterly defeated and victory is achieved. John used “overcome” when he wrote about our approach to the Deep:

This is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already. Little children, you are of God, and have overcome [the spirits of the antichrist]; for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.15

By God dwelling within us, we have the ability to not only stop acting selfishly, but also to conquer the source of selfishness. Herein lies the essential relationship between “repentance” and “overcoming.” Through our faithful labor of repentance, we consciously lay aside all selfish preoccupations; and as we do so, seeds of Light shine within us, conquering the darkness that blinds our spiritual eyes. Because of our repentance, God speaks the Word within our hearts, thereby empowering us to “overcome the evil one.” Our faith is our victory.

And yet, victory over the Deep is not an end in itself: so that I may love, God strengthened my freedom with Life and armed my repentance with Light.

As I stood unshackled within my heart, able to see the heart of another, I reached out. Through the outward gesture of my soul, generously welcoming the other into a spiritual embrace, seeds of Love sprang forth from my heart and held us both in glistening whiteness. Through my act of love, Love was spoken.

Faith in His Name

But to all who received [the Word], who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.16

Throughout the visions recorded in Revelation, John saw a “name” written upon the faithful saints of God. He described these men and women as the “hundred and forty-four thousand who had [the Lamb’s] name and his Father’s name written upon their foreheads.”17 They are “chaste” and “spotless,” conquerors of evil, and they “shall reign for ever and ever” in the new Jerusalem. According to John, the name on their foreheads is a “seal” or mark, placed by an official signet, indicating that they belong to God and are protected by God.

Jesus claimed to have God’s seal upon himself as well:

Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you; for on him has God the Father set his seal.18

Jesus described the nature of his seal by saying that he came not in his own name, but in his Father’s name. Jesus was a representative of the Father, living on Earth to make known the Name of the One who dwelt within him. Jesus, who was the Word made flesh, bore the fulness of the Word within him as the stamp of God’s own signet. By revealing the Name of the Father to the world, he made God’s Word known.

In the same way, we bear God’s Name whenever we act in faith. By choosing freedom, repentance, and love, the Word abounds within us. Through the soul’s faithful labors, we receive the seal of God’s Word and are thereby given the power to become sons and daughters of God.

Ask, Seek, and Knock

Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.19

What is this door if not the gateway of pearl that Jesus established within us? How do we knock upon it except with the action of our souls? What do we find in the open doorway if not God’s very presence spoken as the Word? Therefore, let us ask with unceasing faith, so that we may receive God without limit.

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What is Grace?

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Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.

1 John 3:21–22

Throughout my academic training, I was repeatedly dismayed by the ongoing debate about the relationship between “faith” and “grace,” between our moral obligations and God’s abundant mercy. As I read the scriptures, I wondered whether I am “justified by works”1 or “justified by his grace as a gift.”2 And if redemption is a gift freely offered, then why did Jesus command his followers to lay down their lives and love their neighbors?

One day, my confusion finally dissipated while I watched God’s seeds of Life, Light, and Love move within me. The realization seemed to hit me all at once. “The seeds are God’s grace!” I exclaimed aloud, with the exuberance of a child. When I exercised my soul through works of faith, I was being simultaneously filled with grace. During the days and weeks that followed, I studied the miraculous dynamic between the movements of my soul and the Word flowing within me. I wanted to know, with precision, how my labor of faith and God’s gift of grace danced together.

I began by observing the soul’s luminous mist—where, through sustained attention and conscious effort, we cultivate freedom. Every time I engaged this soul aspect, I saw multiple seeds of Life enter my soul. As they did so, the mist of my soul expanded and became more luminous. In addition, my freely chosen thought or action became infused with these seeds, thereby carrying Life out into the world. Within and around me, my act of faith multiplied the Presence of Life.

Similarly, whenever I freely chose to turn away from selfish preoccupation, the seeds of Life and Light appeared. Coming forth from the pearly gateway, both types of God's seeds entered my soul, expanding and brightening both the mist and the golden light respectively. Next, I saw the seeds continue outward to the shadowy source of my selfishness, weaving together into a single stream of golden Light. Thus transformed, the Light accompanied my faithful action, making it a vehicle of God’s Light.

Finally, I studied the effect of offering love from my heart. As I reached out to another with my soul, I saw the fulness of God’s Word—Life, Light, and Love—flow into my soul, resulting in the expansion and illumination of all three aspects of the soul. Then, God’s seeds interwove with my thought, word, or deed, filling my act of faith with the fulness of God’s Word. As the seeds moved outward into the world, I could no longer distinguish one from another, for the entire mass was a glistening cloud of white that held me and the one I loved in God’s embrace of Love.

Grace is the Word

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. […] And from his fulness have we all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.3

Like faith, grace is a challenging word to define. Luke, the author of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, upheld Stephen as an exemplar of grace. Known as the first Christian martyr, Stephen performed “great wonders and signs among the people.”4 Those who were present at Stephen’s death said “his face was like the face of an angel,”5 and that he was “full of the Holy Spirit.”6 Luke seemed to believe that Stephen’s profound intimacy with God—evidenced by his miraculous abilities, his fearlessness, and his heavenly appearance—revealed God’s grace within him.

Later in the Book of Acts, a story about Peter offers another glimpse into Luke’s definition of grace. Peter was presiding over a council of early Christian leaders who were wondering what to do with converts who had not been circumcised according to the Jewish custom. After much debate, Peter stood up and declared,

Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.7

In this powerful speech, Peter affirmed that submission to the Mosaic Law was a yoke too heavy to bear. However, the grace that comes through Jesus made the path to God accessible to Gentile and Jew alike. Grace is portrayed as an alternative to the Law; it offers the same outcome, but it does so in a universally achievable manner.

James provides another essential piece of the conceptual puzzle of grace:

Unfaithful creatures! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is in vain that the scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit which he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives more grace; therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.8

In this fiery rebuke, James reveals that we who receive God’s grace experience two outcomes: the devil flees when we resist him and God reciprocates when we draw near. James called these outcomes “grace.”

From the three passages given above, we can craft a definition of grace. Stephen was “full of grace” because his words, deeds, and physical appearance were imbued with God. Peter proclaimed that we are “saved through grace” because Jesus made immediate access to the Word available to all mankind. And the extraordinary outcome of faithful action to which James testified is the presence of God moving in and through our souls. Grace is God’s Word.

In his Gospel prologue, John wrote that Jesus was “full of grace and truth,” meaning that Jesus was the fulness of God’s Word made flesh. Because of the Word poured out in Jesus’s blood, “we all received grace upon grace,” for we now have immediate and unlimited access to God within us.

Jesus’s death and resurrection linked faith and grace together in a reciprocal relationship. In a miracle that I simply cannot capture with language, our works of faith form a bridge between Creator and Creation. Whenever we exercise our souls in thought, word, or deed, God’s Presence is multiplied within and around us, and all Creation shares in the glory of God.

Forgiveness of Sins

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. […] If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. […] If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.9

Since the beginning of the Christian religion, forgiveness of sins through Jesus has been proclaimed as a central doctrine. Despite being well-versed in the theology of atonement, I never really knew what forgiveness meant. Listening to many sermons and lectures on the topic, I imagined God as a cosmic Santa Claus, keeping a list of my naughtiness and then, because of the gentle pleadings of Jesus, mercifully crossing out the sins I confessed. Though I knew that was obviously inaccurate, it was not until I spiritually observed the phenomenon of forgiveness that I finally understood its triumphant power.

To explain what I observed, I must first define that which we call “sin.” John offered this short definition: “sin is lawlessness.”10 The word “lawlessness” means, quite literally, “without the Law.” As I explained previously, the Mosaic Law was the Word of God, and Jewish men and women were able to lay up the Word in their hearts by obedience to the Law. On the basis of this connection between Law and Word, we can modify John’s definition to be: sin is Word-lessness, or any action that is absent of the Word.

John expanded on his definition of sin:

No one who abides in [God] sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. […] He who commits sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. […] No one born of God commits sin; for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God. By this it may be seen who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother.11

Sin is the linguistic label used to describe the absence of God’s seeds. When a thought or action welcomes the seeds of God’s Word within us, then that act of faith empowers us toward becoming a child of God. When a thought or action is not accompanied by God’s seeds, then it is called a sin. In contrast to faithful action, sin gradually deforms us into “the children of the devil.” Nothing we do is spiritually neutral: either we are sowing the seeds of the Word or we are sowing the shadows of the Deep. A sin, therefore, is any thought, word, or deed that welcomes the Deep within us.

Not long after I came to understand the intricate subtleties of faith and grace, I felt a pain in my chest that seemed to be saying, “You have some work to do.” For decades, I had carelessly cultivated shadowy selfishness behind the guise of pathetic rationalizations.

I need this...
    But she did that to me...
        Look at what I've been through...
            Oh, it doesn’t really matter if I do…

I had whispered so many lies to myself. Now, with the eyes of my soul opened wide, I felt naked and ashamed. I could see the countless shadows that I had woven within me. It was time to pause my spiritual investigations and actually live what I was learning.

Every afternoon for a week, I looked back through my life—year by year, one relationship after another—and found the many shadows that had long held me captive. From the depths of my heart, I prayed that God would breathe the seeds of Light onto the weeds of darkness I had sown. As I did so, the golden Light encircled each and every shadow, holding them in a sphere of gold until they disappeared, as wax melts before the fire. By the end of that exhausting and victorious week, my eyes were red from weeping, and the shadows were no more.

When I had earlier imagined that forgiveness entailed God crossing items off my heavenly record whenever I prayed the right prayer, I could not have been more wrong. Forgiveness is a baptism of Light, whereby we are clothed with God. As we repent, consciously laying aside our selfish preoccupations, a river of golden water flows from the resplendent pearl within us and washes us clean. God is Light, and when God abides in us, darkness scatters and we are set free.

Love Perfected

Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. […] God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. In this is love perfected with us, that we may have confidence for the day of judgment; because as he is, so are we in this world.12

As it was in the beginning, so it is with us. On the first day of creation, Light separated the waters of the Deep in order to create the golden foundation upon which something new could be made. Likewise, every day within the hearts of the faithful, Light overcomes the shadows of the Deep in preparation for that which ought to come next.

Love is the culmination. On the second day of creation, God spoke Love and created the sphere of Heaven within the waters of the Deep. God longs to speak Love in us as well. When we act with love toward others, reaching out to them with our souls, then Love enters through the doorway in our chests and abides in us. If we love without ceasing, day after day, year after year, then the shadows of the Deep will eventually vanish altogether and only Love will reign within us. Love will be perfected, and we will be “as he is.”

When Jesus told his followers, “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,”13 I don’t think he was exaggerating. The labor of perfecting Love is a command for all who seek to live as Jesus did. However, it is impossible for our love alone to achieve perfection. Because Jesus voluntarily poured out his blood for us, our works of faith are infused with the presence of God. When we live in freedom, Life is breathed within us. When we lay aside selfishness, Light conquers the Deep. And when we love all that surrounds us, every day for the rest of our lives, we will become Love.

Grace For All Creation

My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.14

Grace was never meant to be an individual affair. The Tree of Life was not planted in my heart so that I alone could feast on its fruits. Rather, that fountain of abounding grace, which makes possible both the forgiveness of sins and the perfection of Love, was given to me for the sake of the whole world. From the fulness of the Word within Jesus’s blood, we have received grace upon grace, so that through us the entire Earth and all created beings may shine with the glory of God.

We are the ones created in the image of the Creator. Grace is ours so that we can give it to all men and women, animals and plants, mountains and oceans, and so on. Just as the first man was placed in the Garden to “keep” and to “cultivate,” so too are we to drive out the Deep and fill all Creation with the seeds of Love. And as we do so, we will grow God’s Garden “on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

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What is Salvation?

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I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of [God] who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.

Romans 8:18-21

When I was a young man, I spent two years meeting with a talented psychologist, during which my life changed for the better. When I decided to study psychology academically, my main question was, What made my therapy so transformative? I wanted to know the mechanism that made such a difference.

Several years ago, when I was just beginning to study the inner workings of the soul, a mother asked me to pray for her daughter. The young girl had recently begun experiencing hallucinations and involuntary motor movements. She avoided affection, had become riddled with anxiety, and—as if that were not enough—was also suffering from the symptoms of the flu. I agreed to do what I could, though I was not very optimistic.

Beholding the girl before my heart, I could see that her soul was completely covered with shadows. Moved with pity, I prayed that God would breathe Light through me. As I did so, I saw each of the shadows become surrounded by Light and suddenly disappear. Her soul was then laid bare before me, and I could see the damage the darkness had done. I prayed again that God would breathe Love through me and wrap her wounded soul with the brilliant whiteness of God. I held her in Love for a long time, hoping this would be enough.

Her mother wrote me a few days later: “A couple of hours after seeing you, she was like her old self again, which I hadn’t seen [for four months]. Even the cold symptoms she had went away.” When I communicated with the girl’s mother again, several months later, it was clear that the severe psychological symptoms were gone, and the girl was well once again.

I was dumbfounded. It seemed as though my prayers, which occurred on a purely spiritual level, had produced a profound physical and psychological effect on the girl. As I reflected on this remarkable outcome, my main question was: What made my prayers so transformative? Once again, I wanted to know the mechanism that made such a difference.

Physical and Spiritual

[Jesus] spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle and anointed the man’s eyes with the clay, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Silo′am” (which means Sent). So [the blind man] went and washed and came back seeing.1

Prior to the period of the Renaissance, men and women knew that the physical world was inextricably interwoven with the spiritual world. One’s works of faith were believed to have a significant impact on the physical world, as many stories of heroes and saints affirm. Approximately five hundred years ago, though, this foundational knowledge began to erode. People started searching for insights through the five physical senses alone and set aside the spiritual world as fundamentally separate and uninvolved.

If we accept the conclusion that the physical world is disconnected from the spiritual, we will also believe that physical reality can be accurately observed and comprehended without any acknowledgement of the spiritual at all. Through such a lens, we will view our vast universe as something like a very complex mechanical clock, operating independently of the spiritual forces that originally wound the gears. And if we follow these ideas to their logical conclusion, belief in a distant and separate spiritual world will eventually lead us to atheism—which would result in our denial of the very existence of the spiritual.

Over the past several centuries, many thoughtful men and women have concluded that if the physical world is able to function independently from the spiritual world, and if knowledge of the physical is not dependent upon knowledge of the spiritual, then the spiritual is nothing more than a psychological fabrication. They claim that the old ideas of spiritual forces or beings were simply superstitions of a primitive and unenlightened past.

I have seen firsthand, however, that the claim of a disconnected or absent spiritual world is false. The formation of the physical universe was preceded by the creation of Heaven, which God placed in a very real and influential spiritual presence: the Deep. Within the sphere of Heaven, God breathed the “breath of life,”2 forming Earth and its many inhabitants. By observing the great work of creation, I have seen with the eyes of my soul that physical substance is not mere matter: it is a unique revelation of God’s Word. Without the Word, that which we experience as physical would not exist.

The miracles of Jesus clearly reveal the fact that the physical and spiritual are fundamentally intertwined. Throughout his ministry, the physical world was immediately responsive to his spiritual presence. How was he able to turn water into wine, multiply loaves of bread, and cause a fig tree to instantly wither? How could he calm a raging storm and walk upon the surface of a lake? And how could he cause the blind to see, the lame to walk, and the dead to rise again? None of these actions corresponds to the so-called “laws” that govern our physical world. Yet, according to the Gospel writers, these are all historic events. If Jesus actually accomplished such miracles, then the only explanation for how they could have occurred is that Jesus had the ability to alter physical matter. As the incarnation of the Word, the physical world responded to him.

According to Jesus, we all have the same capability.

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “move hence to yonder place,” and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.3

Many Christians interpret that passage as figurative, which seems to be a reasonable conclusion. However, if we consider the miracles of Jesus to be historic events, then is it unbelievable that a man can move a physical mountain or uproot a tree and throw it into the sea? I believe that Jesus said the above in order to offer his followers insight into the malleable nature of the physical world and its profound responsiveness to those who possess God within them.

Body and Soul

My son, be attentive to my words; incline your ear to my sayings. Let them not escape from your sight; keep them within your heart. For they are life to him who finds them, and healing to all his flesh. Keep your heart with all vigilance; for from it flow the springs of life.4

In our world, the human soul contains the only doorway that connects the spiritual with the physical. Our soul’s first point of contact with the physical world is within our flesh and blood. Using my own body as a laboratory,5 I discovered that the soul, with its three distinct aspects, is physically located within the heart and lungs.

According to my investigations, the luminous mist has its seat in the lungs. I saw that the moment I consciously chose a particular thought, something that appeared to be an electrical or energetic impulse fired in my lungs. The impulse instantly traveled throughout the rest of my body, presumably moving along my nervous system.

The nervous system weaves together all parts of the body with intricate threads. Once nerve impulses are generated and sent along these threads, they arrive almost instantly at various destinations throughout the body in order to stimulate the intended effect. For instance, the sight of an approaching friend can simultaneously generate a feeling of warmth, memories of past interactions, and a smile on the face. All this occurs within a second or less because of the rapid movement of impulses throughout the nervous system. By utilizing the nervous system, the soul is able to impact every physical and psychological action without delay.

Reflecting on how the freedom created through sustained focus and conscious effort is birthed in our physical lungs, I found new significance in my own breath. Breathing is an instinctual act that occurs constantly without our awareness. And yet, through focus and effort, it is possible to regulate the rate, rhythm, and depth of our breathing. That which is automatic can be intentionally guided if one chooses to do so. This is exactly what the first aspect of the soul offers us: if we are willing, we are free to guide everything we do.

The other two aspects of the soul take root in the left side of the heart. In my investigations, the moment I laid aside selfish preoccupation and reached out toward another with love, I saw the same impulses appear in my heart’s left ventricle. These impulses would instantly course through what I assumed to be my nervous system before arriving at different locations in my body. Thus, I concluded that the soul’s decision to repent and love originates in the left ventricle and is then communicated by the nervous system to the rest of the body, where it is translated into physical and psychological action.

While examining these soul-body interactions more closely, I discovered that the impulses generated by my soul appeared to circle my heart before moving elsewhere in the body. As the activation occurred in and around my heart, I suddenly saw the seeds of God’s Word appear within the right side of my heart. They quickly migrated through my lungs and the left side of my heart before moving rapidly throughout the rest of my body. While watching this wondrous phenomenon, I understood that the fruit of the Tree of Life was located within the right ventricle of the heart. Riding along the river of blood, the Word exited the right ventricle, flowed through the three aspects of my soul (in the lungs and left ventricle), and then made its way out to every part of my flesh.

The basic physiology of circulation is as follows. Blood moves in a cyclical pattern within our bodies. After entering the right atrium of the heart, the blood halts momentarily before spiraling into the right ventricle, forming a vortex as it goes into the right ventricle. Next, the blood travels from the heart into the lungs (more specifically, into the pulmonary capillaries). Leaving the lungs, the blood enters the left atrium of the heart, where, once again, it pauses momentarily before being drawn into the left ventricle. The movement of the blood into the left ventricle results in another spiraling vortex. Finally, the blood exits the heart and flows to all parts of the body before returning to the right atrium to repeat the cycle.

From a physiological perspective, one role of blood is to carry nourishment throughout the body. Upon leaving the left side of the heart, the blood accomplishes this purpose by moving through miles and miles of arteries, capillaries, and veins before returning again to the right side of the heart. Many scientists believe that blood makes a complete circuit in less than a minute. During this rapid dash, the blood delivers its valuables to every cell in the human body.

From a spiritual perspective, the role of blood is to weave God into our bodies and souls. God’s seeds enter the blood from the resplendent pearl in the right ventricle. After leaving the right ventricle, the blood moves through the lungs and left ventricle, where some of these seeds are released during the spiraling movement of the blood. Life is released into the lungs, which is the seat of the luminous mist; Light and Love are released into the left ventricle, which is the seat of the golden and glistening white lights. After the blood exits the heart, the remaining seeds of God’s Word flow with it into the rest of the body. Just as our blood brings physical nourishment to our cells, so too does our blood carry the seeds from the sacred fruit to every single cell.

The conventional narrative views the cell as a type of factory in which the DNA, housed within the nucleus, acts as a boss who holds the blueprint (that is, the genetic code) for how the cell is to function. The DNA communicates with the RNA, which then takes the message into the cytoplasm (the intercellular gel-like water surrounding the nucleus). There, the message is read by the “ribosomes,” which function as the production floor for the generation of proteins. Proteins are the workforce, executing their orders from the DNA to fulfill the purpose of that cell.

Although that perspective is widely accepted as true, several biologists now assert that the narrative of a mechanical cell ruled by the DNA is incorrect. A new model proposes that the work of the cell begins with the cytoplasm, which receives and holds “information” coming to the cell through both internal sources (such as the blood) and external sources (such as interactions with the outside world). The structure and quality of the cell’s water change as new information is received. Thus the cytoplasm becomes an imprinted memory of the information provided to it and thereby instructs the other parts of the cell to act in accordance.

In the new model of cell function, the DNA responds to the cytoplasm and not the other way around. The DNA shapes itself according to the information contained in the surrounding water. In a process called “epigenetics,” the DNA unfolds, expressing the genetic sequence that matches the structure and quality of the cytoplasm. This new explanation presents a radically different perspective on cell biology: incoming information shapes the cytoplasm, which then shapes the DNA, which then shapes the cell as a whole, which then shapes the tissues, organs, and entire physical body. The most critical factor, therefore, is not fixed DNA (over which we have no control), but rather the information given to the cell (over which we have much control).

This “new biology” of the cell aligns with what I have observed spiritually. During my investigations, I saw the seeds of the Word enter the cells in my body, after which the cells underwent a transformation: they became illuminated with a radiance that matched the spiritual appearance of the seed itself. The radiance began on the outer edge and moved inward (presumably toward the nucleus); and then the center of my cell (presumably the DNA) released a burst of spiritual light. Afterward, my entire cell emitted a spiritual glow that it did not have prior to its interaction with the Word. My cell shone like God.

To summarize, I have concluded that the dance between faith and grace is both spiritual and physical. According to my observations, the soul is physically located in the lungs and left ventricle of the heart. When any of the three soul aspects are exercised, a series of impulses is generated and sent throughout the body, resulting in the work of faith being expressed as a thought, word, or deed. The impulses first go in and around the physical heart. In response to the physical activation of faith, grace occurs: the seeds of the Word suddenly appear within the right ventricle of the heart and attach themselves to the blood contained therein. Now enriched with the Word, the blood moves through the lungs and left ventricle, strengthening the soul for future works of faith, and then travels throughout the body. Each seed of the Word becomes deposited inside a particular cell, thus initiating a transformation of the cell from the outside in. In the end, not only does the act of faith empower the soul to be created anew in God, but—through the incarnation of the Word—the physical body is transformed as well.

Here, then, is the mechanism of a miracle: through faith, that which is spiritual becomes woven into that which is physical, and the Word of God abounds within our flesh.

Love is All

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, [the women] went to the tomb, taking the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb; but when they went in, they did not find the body.6

With the eyes of my soul, I saw Jesus hanging on the cross, his chin against his chest, his body limp. I saw his blood pour out of his flesh and soak into the soil. I saw the triumphant procession of Love march into Earth and vanquish the darkness of that region. I saw Love expand outwards, illuminating the land below our feet with an all-encompassing whiteness. And I saw this same Love—brilliant and white—enter again into the body of Jesus that had been lying lifeless in a cave.

Looking into that dark tomb, I watched Jesus gasp for air as Love filled his body. He rose to his feet. All I could see was a blinding whiteness coming from his resurrected body. Unable to hold back the expansive white light, the stone gave way from the opening of the tomb, and Love burst forth.

I watched the miracle of Easter morning like a passive spectator until, suddenly, the resurrected Jesus turned toward me. As the figure of blinding light approached me, I held my breath, not daring to move. Then he did what I least expected: he stretched out his arms of light and embraced me.

As he held me in that sanctuary of Love, I breathed out and lay my forehead upon his shoulder. I felt Love enter my flesh, as water fills an empty cup. When he loosened his embrace and stepped back, he kept his hands upon my shoulders and stared into my eyes. I did not hear him speak, but he said to me: Love is all that matters. Love is all that is needed.

Completion and Resurrection

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.7

The Sunday evening after Jesus’s death, his disciples were gathered in a closed room when Jesus suddenly appeared among them. The company was terrified, thinking that they saw a “spirit” or ghost.

And [Jesus] said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And while [the disciples] still disbelieved for joy, and wondered, [Jesus] said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.8

The resurrected Jesus still had “flesh and bones,” the ability to consume physical food, and the wounds from his recent crucifixion. His body had the appearance of the same physical body that was slain only days before. And yet, Jesus’s resurrected body was different from physical matter as we experience it.

When the first man received Life in the Garden of Eden, he was given a foundation upon which he needed to build. His physical body was incomplete, and it was only by eating freely of the fruit of the Tree of Life—by weaving Light and Love into his foundation of Life—that his body would be made complete, and he would live forever. However, he never finished the work, and his physical body perished. After that time, men and women were born with incomplete physical bodies that were increasingly burdened by the shadows of the previous generations. The longing to be made complete remained, but the hope of accomplishing this task grew dimmer.

Jesus’s physical body began as a miracle. Within the womb of a young virgin, God breathed Life and for the second time made a man with an immaculate physical foundation. At his baptism, God transformed Jesus’s untarnished Life into Light for the cleansing of all Creation. During the transfiguration, God perfected Jesus’s body with Love. Then, in order for Jesus to fully accomplish the work God had given him to do, he had to love us “to the end.”9 Upon the cross, Jesus performed the greatest act of love the world has ever known: for the sake of all Creation, he gave his body. When that happened, the Life within his physical body became complete—just as God intended for all mankind since the beginning.

According to Jesus, Life that is made complete by the fulness of God’s Word is “eternal life.” He once said, “This is eternal life, that they know thee, the only true God.”10 The resurrected Jesus knew God, meaning that every seed of Life in his body and soul was permanently woven with the perfection of Light and Love. His physical body was elevated to a state of completion and thereby made eternal through oneness with the everlasting Father.

Jesus not only revealed eternal Life to us, he made eternal Life possible for us as well. Because of his blood, we have returned to the Garden of Eden where the Tree of Life is now rooted within each of our chests. By works of faith, we eat freely of the Tree’s sacred fruit, and the Word of God flows within us. As the Word abounds in our flesh through faith, a miracle unfolds: Light becomes woven into Life, and Love becomes woven into Light, thereby empowering us to be born of God. If we remain faithful, our physical bodies will be “filled with all the fulness of God”11 and will shine like the resurrected body of Jesus.

Salvation is the process of our completion, whereby the Life within our bodies and souls is becoming eternal through God abiding within us.

The Salvation of Earth and Heaven

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.12

When Jesus willingly laid down his perfected Life for the sake of everything within the sphere of Heaven, he became a complete man, just as God intended for every man and woman who has ever walked on Earth. I have seen souls that come close to the brilliance and size of the resurrected Jesus, but none is exactly the same. The miraculous progression of Jesus’s life sets him apart from all others. Through Divine intervention at his conception, baptism, and transfiguration, Jesus became God’s “only”13 complete Son.

The main difference between Jesus and us is that though we may achieve perfection in Love, the Life within us will not be made eternal until “the fulness of time,” when “things in heaven and things on Earth” are united in God.14 Unlike Jesus, we will not be complete until all Creation is complete with us.

God intervened in the life of Jesus so that “the world might be saved through him”15—meaning that, through the access to God that Jesus made possible, those who are willing can facilitate the completion of Creation. Salvation is not for mankind alone. Salvation is for the whole world.

Creation is still fundamentally incomplete. Everything in the physical world was created as an expression of Life. By design, everything needs to grow toward completion. As the image of God on Earth, this is our work to fulfill. The doorway connecting the spiritual and the physical, the Creator and the Creation, lies within our chests. Through faithful labor, we keep and cultivate the Garden, gradually saving everything on Earth by sowing the seeds of God’s Word. In this way, we build the “new Earth.” With Light and Love flowing through us, the Life of Earth will one day be made eternal, “having the glory of God.”16

Furthermore, the “new Heaven” is ours to build as well. God placed Heaven within the monstrous waters, knowing full well that the Deep would relentlessly seek to swallow the sphere and all it contained. God is no fool. This precarious placement was full of purpose. On the day that Earth is complete, transfigured like the resurrected body of Jesus, the sphere of Heaven will shine with the sparkling whiteness of God. As the morning sun scatters the shadows of night, Love will strike the Deep and “the sea will be no more.” Heaven will be born again and everything—truly everything—will become unbounded Love. On that day of all days, when the first Heaven and first Earth pass away, Love will reign. Such is the full theological meaning of “salvation.” In the beginning, God spoke the Word so that, in the end, all there will be is the Word.

We have been given the power to become sons and daughters of God, conquering the Deep forever and expanding the glory of our Creator beyond the limits of comprehension. That is why we are here. Therefore, as the kings and queens of God’s Creation, let us breathe in freedom with our lungs, open wide the doorway in our hearts, and cast forth Light and Love without ceasing. For if we are faithful to the end, the work of Creation will be fulfilled and all things will be born anew after the likeness of God.

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