Whose Reality Will You See Through?

Let’s start at the beginning, in the Garden of Eden.  A perfect setting of lushness, of peace, of complete vulnerability between man and woman and between humans and God.  From stage left enter this odd creature that slithers on its belly (or was that only after the Fall?).  Any how, he enters and the hairs on the back of your neck go up.  You know him, you know he is not good, you know his MO…but you also know that Eve and Adam fall for it even though we are yelling at them the entire time.

Before Satan enters, A&E are living in the only reality there is – God’s reality.  This means that they look at themselves and at each other with no filters, with no glasses….only with the light of God.  They know that they are dearly loved and cared for.  They know that they are responsible for the Garden, for their relationship with each other and for their relationship with God.  They see clearly, with unobstructed and unaltered eyes.

Yet, when Satan enters the scene…he holds out a set of 3D glasses to A&E, telling them how good the view will be with this set!  This set will help them see what they were really meant to see, better than just the plain old “2D” that they have been seeing in.  He entices A&E to put on these new, finagled glasses with those infamous words, “Did God really say that?  Are you sure?  Maybe you didn’t hear him right… for if you just put these on, you will see that you will not surely die if…”

if you eat of the fruit,

           if you believe that you are all that and then some,

                    if you hold tightly to your childish dreams and ways and never grow up,

if you simply realize there is a different Reality out there,

      if you simply put on a different set of glasses to look at yourself and your world thru.

Deception…that is what the glasses that Satan holds out to us are really about.  Deception that we allow ourselves to believe we are all that we think we are…and that God is not all that He says He is.  For more than 2000 years humanity struggles with trying to fix their “new” glasses that they have been given by Satan.  They try to take them off, shine them up, repair them with the right tools…but to no avail, they still fall for believing the old lie of Satan, “You will not surely die….”

There He is!  Do you see Him, walking with the multitudes around Him?

He comes onto the scene and starts to blow those stained, broken, fuzzy glasses off people left and right.  He gives them a new way, a brighter, more clearer way to look at their lives, their relationships, the creation once more.  It is what the law was trying to do…to point us to a need that we are looking through the wrong set of glasses and that we need another set – the “Originals”.

These “Originals” do not change the people and the world we are looking at, they simply change the way in which we look at them.  Instead of seeing it through the thoughts and lies of Satan, we now have a way of seeing it through the TRUTH, the WAY and the LIFE that Christ’s set of glasses meant for us.  It’s like when Dorothy lands in Oz and everything becomes Technicolor…this is what Christ does for us.

The whole time we thought we were seeing reality with our old glasses – but we were not…we were seeing a lie, Satan’s lie.  The picture of us and the world he wants us to believe in.  If we want to know what Reality really is, we have to go to the Man who made the “Originals”…to the man who created Reality and everything there is in it.  “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

This truth, the fact is that Jesus isn’t some roadway map for me to take to get straight into heaven…but actually something bigger.  All this first became clear with the following story in my own life:

Until recently I got really hung up on the verse that says, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has gone and the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Specifically the 2nd sentence of this text I clung to in my early years as a Christian.  I thought it meant that I got to forget my past and all that had happened to me, that I got to focus on the fact I was a new creation, a new person in Christ.

So imagine my surprise when my childhood all the sudden started resurfacing in my adult years.  When I realized that, in many ways, I had recreated my childhood and was trying to rectify the errors in it as an adult.  Imagine the struggle I had in my Life Skills class when I learned that 95% of my adult arguments were actually complicated by my childhood wounds that needed healing.  This verse that I had desperately clung to no longer made sense to me.

Then, I started to see that Jesus didn’t only come to make me clean, what some would say as new, before God…but to also give me a new set of glasses to look at myself through.  That is when this verse started to come back to life for me.  How I see this verse now is that my old life, my past is still my past and always will be my past.  It is part of who I am and I cannot change this, shake it, bury it or burn it.  The only thing that is different in this picture is that the old things I thought about myself – that I was not popular enough, not funny enough, not pretty enough, not skinny enough; that I was too tall, too clumsy, too inadequate, too this or too that; that I was a loser, a fake, not worthy, not accepted but rejected – these things were the things I saw when I had Satan’s pair of glasses on.

But now, now I see with the right set of glasses…I see the same harried, chaotic, troubled past…but with the Truth of who God says I am – that while bad stuff happened to me done to me by others and by myself – that I am not bad because of this.  I might do bad things (which leads to guilt), but I am not a bad person (which leads to shame). That I am lovable and worthy and honored and accepted just as I am by a God who sees me – just as I am, naked as can be.  That I am in fact worth dying for…

It is so tempting to pick up those old set of glasses every so often…like a worn pair of jeans they fit just right.  But then I remember how awful they make me feel, how desperate and floundering I am groping for some stability – grabbing on to anyone that I think I can use to right myself – and I realize that nope.  I am actually much more comfortable with my new set of glasses…the ones that tell me exactly who I am, that let me see the flaws I have as mere learning opportunities instead of failures, that let me see that I can stand on my own without the need to use anyone else.  The “Originals”allow me to integrate all of my experiences into my personhood – into my embodied soul – feeling more like myself than I have ever felt.

Jesus does not just invite us to have a 2nd birth so that we can get into heaven, doesn’t just invite us to find truth…no His invitation is so, so much bigger than this.   His invitation is to find a new reality.  He offers us a new set of glasses to look at our world thru…

So I am left asking you and me this question: