Epiphany I: Solids

e·piph·a·ny [ih-pif-uh-nee], n;

a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

I recently had my faith invalidated by someone who didn't know me. The criticism had to do with a lack of passion and a lack of application outside of the classroom. At first glance, all it triggered from me was a smirk. Honestly, I don't really care about uninformed opinions, particularly ones laying judgement on my faith. A few hours later, though, laying on the floor in my room, thinking through my day as I normally do, I remembered the incident and began to wonder about it. I'll admit, it stung a bit. The idea that anyone, no matter how limited their view of me, would see me but not see Christ kind of irks me. My stance on this theoretical issue hasn't ever changed much. It's the message I wrote on in Evangelism: I live for Christ, and if others see Christ through me while I'm doing that, great. The issue is when people "inside the Church" don't see him in me. During the short period of emotional indignation I worked through the day I read what the 'critic' had said, I was determined to laugh off what he'd say due to a total ethos vacuum; but as I thought through the situation, I realized the stupidity of my original failure to read the opinion objectively. The difference is between responding and reacting, as a good friend of mine once said. Though my opinion has changed relatively little since I originally read the 'opinion,' it's certainly healthy never to believe oneself to be beyond the realm of critique and to thoughtfully mull over those critiques that do come.

While these thoughts were brewing, I thought I'd pick up the book the person I'd been talking to was quoting and read all the way through it again, just for the heck of it. The book was Ephesians. I was reading it in The Message translation because I find it a smoother, more enjoyable read, though I always keep my NIV and Greek Interlinear Study Bible handy should I think the looseness of the translation is interfering. What first caught my attention was the sentence at the beginning of Chapter 3 that says, "I got the inside story on this from God himself." Lately, I've had this issue with the divine inspiration of Scripture. I managed to come mostly to terms with it by talking though it with Mr. Kevin Davsion, who is a Christian Studies teacher and (more importantly) the debate team coach at my school. Though relatively simple, it took me a good three hours talking to him to begin to get my mind around the issue: there's internal validation between different books of the Bible as Scripture (for example, the Pauline reference to Luke's writing in 1 Timothy 5:18b and countless NT references to the OT), so either it is all Truth, or the part calling other pieces Scripture is false, meaning any number of other things could also be false (since Truth definitively cannot contain any element of falsity). The question I walked away with was equally simple, equally unoriginal: how and why did God choose to write only THOSE books through THOSE people? Is everything that came out of their mouths holy? Why are THOSE books suddenly made up of the literal words of God, even though they were little more than ordinary people writing ordinary letters?

A chapter or so later, in 4:17, the Message translation reads, "God backs me up on this." I must have read that sentence about ten times. Though it's nearly parenthetical and in translations like NIV it says nothing more than "I insist on it in the Lord," the phrase stood out to me a lot more vividly than it normally would without this itchy context. "Backs me up."

This is the verse that came to mind as I read it (one of the most famous in all of Christendom):

I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.

"I am the truth." God is the truth.

It has been said that all truth is God's Truth; and this is the part I was missing.

Psst- guess what! The Bible is a human document, y'all. It's not like the Holy Spirit filled the room the apostles were writing these books in with some mystical golden glow, it's not like God was moving their pens while they were writing it. Nonetheless, it is Scripture. Truth. God is truth. Whenever truth is written, God is in that truth, he IS that Truth. All pieces of truth outside of the official "Scripture" is just as much God as Scripture. It just so happens that everything in the canon is truth (to prove that would be a whole other discussion), and therefore is God; the essence of him.

I believe that Algebra is divinely inspired. I believe that the statement "Marié Dippenaar was typing when she wrote this sentence" is divinely inspired. I believe a child's trust for his mother is divine, and any time "I love you" is sincere. The difference between these things and "Scripture" is that everything else is debatable and the book itself is set in print, unmoving, unchanging, validated both internally and externally (as a historical document; this is also a whole other discussion) and by hundreds of centuries (I don't mean to pull an ad-populum, here, I hate it when people do; the point is that it hasn't been disregarded yet, despite having been read by half the people on the face of the earth for a millennium. No contradictions crucial enough to deflate Christianity have been exposed yet, as far as I know). The difference is that the book is definitely truth and we can all disagree about whether or not other true things are actually true. That's the difference.

So no, it's not a holy book, per say. Or, what I mean to say is, that it's not one little piece of divine presence in the midst of a vacuum of darkness.

God is truth.
God is everywhere.
Therefore, truth is everywhere.

And that's the solid Truth.