Flat-footed Grace

There is a movement going around called the “Flat earth people.” They believe that despite all the evidence contrary to their belief, the world is flat. Now I recognize many of you probably don’t understand how, in this day and age, where we have satellite imaging, space stations and moon missions which demonstrate conclusively the viewpoint of our planet as a globe, people – well intentioned, educated people – could believe such things, and probably just write these folks off as weirdos, cranks and kooks. But then again, most people have already written off most of the religious crowd for their beliefs.

What?! Did you think I was talking about some other group of people?

Have you ever considered that every believer of the bible, the Word of God, Hebrew and Greek, is a believer of a flat-world narrative? Those writers of all the books never saw our world from space. Their perception was measured from horizon to horizon. Their belief in God was about as flat as the paper, tablet or screen, that you’re reading this from. “Flat-landers” expresses the totality of their experiences in life 24/7/365.

Today, we humans operate in four dimensions: length, width, height and time. I clumped the first three, the realm of form, into one of the flat-landers dimensions with time being the other. Form and time make up my flat-lander world.

Then one day, a multi-dimensional being, Jesus, invades their world. Now being flat-landers, they can only see this person in their 2-D perception. He looks like them, talks kinda like them, does the same things that could form the impression that he was just like them, yet there is a difference, noticeable under certain conditions, that makes him stand apart from the “world.”

Jesus comes on the scene and all will agree that he has a form, and that his birth occurred at a specific time, as did the course of his life, and his death. And honestly, we truly don’t know just how many dimensions this person operated in, but the bible gives it a try at attempting to describe them. During his life, he demonstrated other dimensions by being able to walk upon the water, multiply food, raise people from the dead, heal the sick and lame, even transfigure the appearance of his body while communing with people who had lived centuries before him. These nth-dimension events occurred while he was living!

His death only accentuates the matter of the multitude of dimensions he functioned in. He was raised from the dead; walked through walls and doors; has a physical body that people can touch, and still partakes in the ritual of eating; can appear and disappear at will; and then ascends out of sight.

These events confound us even in how we speak about him. The writer of the fourth gospel declares that Jesus, this nth-dimensional being, functioned outside of time, with the Father in creating the world. So, does he have (present) or did he have (past) these abilities all along? Confusing, right? This writer also claims that Jesus is the definition of grace. A flat-lander, says that a nth-dimensional being is what the 2-d world calls grace!

We don’t have a clue! The best we can come up with is looking at a sheet of paper and say, “Yup, that’s what grace looks like!” Flat-land, flat-footed grace, while still a great thing to ponder and walk in, is…well…flat. It takes an entirely different way of perceiving things, an nth-dimensional perception, to fully comprehend what Jesus means as grace. Fortunately, this comes by having the mind of Christ, which the vast majority of us have thought was his 2-D representation of God’s kingdom. Regrettably, we’ve been left flat-footed in these thoughts. Higher thoughts are not a description of form but of dimension, a different dimension or realm of thought.

All of us need to change our minds, or repent, from this 2-D world we live in. Now before you go and get all up in arms about this injunction, consider that we, all of us, were in Christ before the foundation of the world. In other words, we already were in another dimension before we entered this constrained, limiting one.

The truth of our multi-dimensional nature has been veiled from our minds. This has placed a cap on what we think and believe is possible. Yet, when the writer of 1 John says, “…as he is so are we in this world…” it is not a future event he is speaking of but a present reality. Since Jesus is nth-dimensional right now, we are too. It’s time to come up hither into a greater dimension and see just how flat-lined you’ve lived in grace.