Nearer to reality; nearer to God

There are many stories in the Bible that you could call ‘waking up moments.’

Moses meets God at a burning bush in a part of the wilderness where he’d been tending sheep for 40 years.
Jacob sees a ladder reaching to heaven and exclaims, God was in this place and I was unaware!
Nathanael hears that Jesus had seen him sitting under a tree earlier, and that little fact is enough for him to confess Jesus as the Messiah.
Elisha prays that God would open his servant’s eyes and suddenly he can see the spiritual forces all around them.
Saul gets blinded on his way to Damascus and hears a voice talking to him.

It’s cool that none of them look alike, but that God reaches into the lives, or you could say, the reality of all these different people in their own unique way. In a way, if you step back from the Sunday School type language of them ‘meeting God,’ or ‘getting saved,’ or ‘becoming Christians,’ but we looked at what is actually happening, you could say that ‘they have just encountered reality in a way that is suddenly more fresh, more accurate, and more real than they previously knew or understood it.’

They got a peek behind the curtain.

That’s the idea behind ‘apocalyptic literature.’ An apocalypse, in Greek, simply means a revealing or unveiling. (Hence, Revelation…)

You catch a glimpse of the bigger picture and suddenly things fit together more cohesively than before. Before, you were looking at a few pieces of the puzzle up close, but all at once you step back and see the entire thing together.

And there are different words for this. ‘Epiphany’ may be a common one. Suddenly, everything makes sense and it clicks.

Take Nathanael for instance. His was relatively simple, but profound: He exclaims because suddenly he realizes that the Messiah his people have been waiting for is HERE! It’s a truth, and he has just reliazed it, and perhaps even realized his own place in this larger picture — what will eventually become the New Testament, and being one of the disciples of the Anointed One.

These people in the Bible see things as they truly are, and it happens all at once. And the thing is, you can’t force yourself to have one of these moments, though I think you can work toward them, and you certainly can’t force other people to have them.

I’ve known people who were staunch atheists and suddenly God opens their eyes — they have a revelation. Their eyes are opened, and it’s unique to them. It wasn’t constructed or forced by human means. You can’t force your agnostic neighbor to have an encounter with the Living God, but you can ask God for it to happen.

And we can work toward it for ourselves.

I can point to a handful of moments in my life where I had a distinct and sudden awareness of God’s presence; things clicked together and I saw that God’s picture, or reality, was bigger than the one I’d been living in before. They typically came in seasons where I was looking for God, when I was seeking Him with intention.

Then there have also been terribly long stretches where I feel like there is no God and everything is awful. And coincidentally, it’s when I’m just fooling around, chasing pleasure and dopamine, stuffing my brain with useless entertainment, and not being intentional about anything.

Can God reach into one of these seasons to wake us up? Of course. Could God not gift us with a moment of waking up, despite great efforts to pursue Him? Of course. Like a lightning strike, you can’t force it to happen on your own schedule.

You don’t pencil God in for a revelation.

But there are ways to make space in your life for words to come, for prayer to be two-ways instead of just one.

Plus, you can always ask. bringing yourself nearer to God, and coming into contact with a bigger picture of reality is never a bad thing. It may sting, and you may leave with an injury, like when Jacob limped away from his wrestling match with God, but you’ll be better.

Day 34 of 100 Days of Blog