God Beyond Religions Part I

I consider myself a disciple of Jesus Christ. A disciple is a student. I have studied Jesus and his teachings. I try to take them seriously and apply them to my day to day life. It is not always easy to do, and I am quite certain that at times, I fail miserably. This is not a cause for concern in me because I have learned that Jesus accepts me and loves me for who I am and where I am at. But not just me, it is the same for you and everyone who has ever lived here on planet earth. Jesus is a constant companion with me and is as real as I am. I want to use this as a thought launchpad for “The God Beyond Religions.”

While Jesus is the God beyond religions to me, it is not necessary that he is that for you. What he is more interested in is that you become reconciled in your mind to God because God was in Christ Jesus reconciling you and planned it before creating anything. But let me say more about Jesus. Besides being my personal companion, Jesus was the incarnation of the Logos. Logos, pronounced la-ga-s is the Greek word for Word/Thought. As the Logos, Jesus is the Divine Creative seed that thought and spoke all of the material world into existence, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews writes that he sustains the material world by his word. It is the gospel of John that explains that Jesus was the incarnate Logos.

 

Heraclitus, the Greek Stoic Philosopher wrote about the Logos as the creator five hundred years prior to Christ. Here is a quote from one of the fragments of his writing. “Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it – not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard it for the first time … though all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be quite without any experience of it … My own method is to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves; other men, on the contrary, are as forgetful and heedless in their waking moments of what is going on around and within them as they are during sleep.” (Heraclitus Fragment 1 p19)

 

Not only did Heraclitus write about the Logos but so did Lao-tzu in roughly the same time frame. Since Lao Tzu was Chinese and not familiar with Greek, he did not call it the Logos but rather the Tao pronounced DAO/DOW. It means the way. Here is what he wrote or at least was credited with writing…

“The Tao that can be understood

is not the eternal, cosmic Tao,

just as an idea that can be expressed in words

is not the infinite idea. And yet this ineffable Tao

is the source of all spirit and matter;

expressing itself,

it is the mother of all created things. Not to desire material things

is to know the freedom of spirituality;

and to desire them is to suffer

the limitations of matter. Yet these two things, matter and spirit,

so different in nature, have the same origin. This unity is the mystery of mysteries,

and the gateway to spirituality.”  (~Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching . Ancient Renewal. Kindle Edition.)

Finally, to add perspective, I will include what the Apostle John said about the Logos….

Joh 1:1-5  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  (2)  He was in the beginning with God.  (3)  All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.  (4)  In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.  (5)  And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”

 

(~Gospel of John NKJV chapter 1:1-5.)

 

Certainly, it should be quite clear that the God of the universe is much bigger than the boxes we have tried to house the creative Source in. The Logos is an exceptionally large concept, immense beyond our understanding. And yet, the first century writers of the New Testament explain that we are partakers of this divine nature. For my understanding this means that we are related and connected to the Source. Paul wrote that we humans are actually seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. I believe that heavenly places is metaphorical language to describe the ether or the unified field of conscious energy that creates and sustains the material universe. We participate in that. I have explained how I think that happens in the post on quantum prayer.

This is a topic that I hope to explore in great depth over the next weeks and months.