Today’s materialist world fails to see our existence for what it actually is. The reduction of life to mere molecules and atoms is manifestly false and insufficient. And the morals which are derived from that view are not morals at all but a refusal to recognise what we truly need as human beings. In this way of thinking, greed and SELF have been raised to the level of worship and divinity, displacing the spiritual truth that we are creatures created by a Creator.
Where the scientists and the philosophers fail to diagnose and explain the human condition, Jesus Christ succeeds. The entire meaning of life, and how to live this life, and where this life is leading are all explained in the Biblical record of the life, death, resurrection and ministry of Jesus Christ.
Millions hold this to be true. The world itself testifies to a Creator by its sheer complexity and delicate balance. The Bible is an impossible book – 66 separate documents written over centuries by dozens of different authors and brought together by yet other men living at a different time – and yet the whole has just one message: Jesus Christ. All the evidence is there, yet men reject it. And they reject it because they are born in sin – ie with the inborn refusal to believe in God: to trust and obey God.
Only God can set a person free from the blindness which inherited sin causes in every human being. Because the problem is spiritual, the answer must be spiritual. And the thinking and methods of this materialist minded world are totally inappropriate to solve that problem.
We reach the story of the “Transfiguration” in our passage through the Gospel of Mark in chapter 9. There, the 3 closest disciples of Jesus – Peter James and John – go up on a high mountain with Jesus where they see him transfigured: Jesus takes on a completely other world appearance dressed in a transcendent and intense whiteness. With him are seen two of the Jewish nations greatest prophets: Moses and Elijah.
That scene is historically impossible looked at according to the material logic of this world and this life. It only becomes possible if there is a transcendent and superior spiritual dimension to this existence we live. And that is the point. Such a dimension to our existence does exist and is truly the determining dimension of this world and existence.
Philosophers down the ages have made attempts to explain this; they have a notion that this is the case; but they cannot quite pin it down, or see it for what it actually is. Their problem is that they start from their own rational minds and the material evidence before their eyes.
They do not start from the source of all existence, the spiritual dimension. But that is exactly where Jesus explanation of our existence begins. Until you grasp that, you will only see a moral teacher talking in riddles. But accepting that – and the need therefore for God’s help – you will submit to God’s worldview and ask for God’s help to understand it.
Otherwise you will remain in ignorance.
Men who had been dead to this life for centuries by this time – ie Moses and Elijah – such men could only be seen actively conversing with Jesus if this other dimension to our existence is there. Because death as we know it exists only for this present physical world and age. The essence of every human being – ie their spirit and soul – has a spiritual and so eternal existence.
When you “die” in this life, you do not cease to exist. You leave the body and go into the spiritual dimension where “time” as we know it is meaningless. Countless people who have experienced near death – who have actually died momentarily but returned to life – witness that they move in this dimension, seeing their body left behind.
The superior spiritual dimension does exist. And in this dimension our Creator is King. And it is to our Creator King that we will have to give an account of what we have done with the precious gift of life he gave us in the here and now of this present material world.
How will you and I answer him ?
That is the most pressing question any of us have to answer. Think on it and think on the teaching of Jesus Christ in the New Testament of the Bible – the teaching by which we will all be judged: rewarded or condemned for eternity.
Christian Preacher
Christianity 