This article is being written during the harshest days of the coronavirus pandemic, when church services are cancelled and pews emptied. But every church I know, even small ones, has for years been using multiple updated professional video cameras and banks of ceiling Klieg lights, prepared to go fully virtual.
Has God gone virtual? God meets us where we are, and virtual is where we’ve gone, fully.
The Biblical word is “spiritual.” Ours is not a virtual God. Rather, He is a spiritual being. Spiritual things are only spiritually discerned. Virtual things are mindlessly blathered.
In the beginning God was anything but virtual. He was the most real thing in the universe, having created it, the Garden of Eden and its new tenants and stewards, Adam and Eve.
God walked in the Garden with Adam and Eve, frequently at eventide. On such an occasion, perhaps several, He Himself had, face to face and speaking softly and more directly than at Mt. Sinai, enjoined them, as a one-time test of their obedience, not to touch, or even go near, much less eat the fruit of, one certain tree, lest all contact with God be cut off, and they die.
Enter Satan. Satan, the original total stranger to reality, the original virtuoso of the virtual, of idols carved from wood and life-size sculptures in cathedral alcoves, and escape from reality by, for starters, drugs, fine wine, spas, doctorates, science, humanities, wealth, position, half truths, and Hooray for Hollywood.
Determined the pair would eat that fruit, Satan speaks as the original ventriloquist, virtually, through a serpent making sarcastic fun of God’s command. Alas, the pair chose the virtual over the direct command of God.
Surely Adam and Eve must die. All communication between them and their creator is severed, the switch thrown.
No, no! Not so! God the Father and God the Son are characterized not only by the power to create galaxies and quarks, but also by limitless love, even more incomprehensible than their creative powers. Therefore, before laying the foundations of this world, they had planned that should man sin, God the Father would sacrifice His own Son who would become a man and sacrifice Himself to pay the full price of man’s sin, which is death. Thus Christ becomes our brother, our Savior, our mediator, and high priest. Christ would reconcile man to God. Christ would be the bridge, represented in vision by Jacob’s ladder, between God and man, re-establishing communication. As EGW so exquisitely puts it, “By His humanity, Christ touched humanity; by His divinity, He lays hold upon the throne of God.” (D.A. 24.3).
“Nope! No way. It’s all a joke.” There he goes again, Satan, speaking as himself for a change. “But seriously, folks,” he goes on, “that law of His, He makes such a big thing of it. You can’t keep that law however you try. I couldn’t. If I can’t you can’t. Don’t bother with it. You have enough to worry about. And His offer to redeem you if you submit yourself as totally to Him as you did to me, it’s just His sweet-sounding way of enslaving you. When you submitted to me, you were liberated, no joke.”
It is true that fallen man cannot through his own strength keep the law, but only a half truth, the only kind Satan knows. The full truth is that Christ offers His strength to us whereby we can keep it, and, in love, covers our deficiencies by His shed blood.
God cannot lie; Satan cannot but lie. Best not to debate Satan. Focus instead on God speaking, as He has at sundry times and diverse manners.
None of us have heard the Father speak audibly. When Christ was on earth, the Father spoke three times, thunderously, to affirm His beloved Son. “Hear ye Him!”
Never man spake as Christ did, always fine-tuned to individual ears. He trod stony roads, becoming hungry, thirsty, exhausted. sweaty, dusty, like us.
Christ now speaks, yes, virtually, shall we say vicariously, through parents, consecrated professors, ordained pastors, chosen prophets, even committees; in courts of law or kings, in meadows or on mountains, roaming the rostrum or at pulpits plastic or mahogany, by TV if not displaced by a performer. Where 2 or 3 are gathered together in sheltered family worship, or multitudes at Pentecost.
Nature is His creation and manifestation, and so He speaks through nature. In sync and sympathy with Him, all nature groans or rejoices, the trees dance and clap their hands (according to Isaiah, my poet laureate of the OT). But He does not speak from nature as per pantheism or panentheism.
To all peoples He has given as His special gift the Bible, its parables and proverbs, recorded foibles and triumphs, allegories and every species of poetry, prophetic beasts, dark speech, or plain talk.
But as the angel announced at the grave Sunday morning, He is not here. He is no longer on earth. He had said that His going back to heaven was “expedient” for us. It was indeed. For He promised that His presence would remain with us, more palpably than ever. He is simultaneously both there in heaven at God’s throne and here among us in virtual church. In a transcendent way Christ is more real than when He walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden and the twelve in the desert.
How that could be is indeed a mystical paradox, an oxymoron, unreality layered upon reality. Moving simultaneously and smoothly through the real, surreal, visible, as well as the unreal, the invisible, the other-worldly, the Father and the Son operate outside our comprehension and beyond metaphysics, outside any meaning of virtual.
God promises that this mystery can be penetrated but only by the eye of faith. But even more critical to our discernment is the Holy Spirit moving upon us invisibly and unperceived. After Christ’s time on earth, the Holy Spirit was, if I may, recommissioned to play a broader roll in the mystery of redemption. EGW says that without the Holy Spirit the sacrifice of Christ would have been to no avail, Desire of Ages 671.2. The natural man, not wrought upon by the Holy Spirit and without faith, and possessed by Satan, cannot receive this. It is unto him foolishness.
Christ’s return to this earth will be unquestionably real, even surreal. As real as Mt. Sinai, which God’s own people could not bear.
Possibly as an overture to worse pestilences to come, the present corona virus, that golf ball covered with artificially colored orange suckers – invisible to us and therefore, need we say, virtual, - has gone viral, catapulting us involuntarily through denial and complacency into the End times, a time of trouble, tribulation, tumult such as never before. There will be escalating, paralyzing, economic collapses and revolts, deprivations of not only property but rights and freedoms, daily disasters, death of whole populations.
But the worst feature will be chaos and confusion befuddling whole nations and individuals, even genders. False prophets, professors, and pundits proclaiming peace, peace when there is no peace, only paranoia.
There will be blundering and fallacy, as when Jacob wrestled for his life with Christ whom he mistook for an enemy. As when Satan, in reality tempting the weakened Christ, appeared as an Angel of light from His Father.
The dead will appear real and issue strange commands. God’s people will be seen as God’s enemies and persecuted and threatened with death, even by fallen Omega Adventists.
Finally, Satan in his culminating act of impersonation, will appear in a glory as the promised returning Christ, deceiving, if it were possible, the very elect.
The very elect, however, are rejoicing. They are looking up and seeing Christ coming in true glory, seeing Him as He actually is, and they shall be like Him, being exalted to brotherhood with Him. The Great Controversy between Christ, the King of Reality and love, and Satan, the Prince of Virtuality and contempt, is ended, cancelled eternally.
Dr. Kime was born in 1929, in Los Angeles, California.
Kime pursued dual careers in art (since childhood) and medicine (physician; specialties in internal medicine and pathology; clinical and academic). He studied the principles of art, chemistry of paint, and the works of master artists as assiduously as medicine. After retiring from pathology at Kettering Medical Center in 1994, Dr. Kime has concentrated on his art, producing portraits, seascapes and figural work mainly in oils, and urbanscapes predominantly in watercolor. Dr. Kime currently lives in Redlands, CA.