Repentance, when Truth is a Sphere

The Lord showed me this about a month ago, and I’ve been praying about it ever since.  As God is inscrutable, as humility is unfathomable, as love is voluminous, as much as pride is vexing, and as much as sin is unavoidable, truth is so full of information that none of us can see all of it — only God can.

But we live as if we see it all — just like we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The Lord showed me that when I look at the truth, I see one surface on the sphere, and as far as my vision takes me on the horizons of it.  What I cannot see is the truth on the other side of the sphere.  No matter how hard I try, I cannot see it with my own eyes.  I need others who are positioned with a different viewpoint to tell me what I cannot see.  (This takes humility to ask, to listen, to accept the truth I cannot see — and I’m not always humble!)  Of course, others need to ask me what I can see as well.  And we can have 10 people around the sphere, and all will see something of the truth.  We all need each other.  And we all need to be able to listen.  We need to listen to not only those who tend to agree with us, but also to those who disagree with us, for those who agree with us see very similarly from the similar vantage points, and therefore see similar areas of the sphere — we of like mind do not see what those 180° away see.

Oh yeah, we yell our barbs.  “They have no idea!”  “What fools!”  Only it’s they who see what we cannot who are tempted to say the same thing about us.  From their viewpoint, our viewpoint looks ridiculous.  Hence many of the struggles that happen in all sorts of relationship situations.  He-said-she-said-he-said; all were speaking the truth, yet all had a different story.  At the extremes, it’s war.

Yes, of course there is abuse, and there are many situations where people honour their own truth as well as the other person’s truth — absorbing far too much of the burden of the relationship — and the other person owns nothing of the truth — getting off scot-free every time.  But by and large, as the truth would have it, which is not a very popular message these days, we all tend to be a little (okay, a lot) self-righteous — “I’m right (can’t you see?) and you’re wrong (for I can’t see, and don’t want to see, where you’re right).”

The truth has just as many dimensions as every degree in the three-dimensional phenomena that is the sphere.  How many degrees?  We could say 360° by 360°.  If only we carved the sphere up into little pieces in every plane.  I guess a mathematician could tell us, but I think you see the point.  It’s not physics, it’s a concept.  If I can see about 30% of the surface of the sphere, I cannot see the other 70% of the surface, and I certainly cannot see inside the sphere.

What on earth am I going on about?  If ever we test ourselves when we feel we are most right, we quickly find it’s the shortest route to a desperate sense of frustration.  Nobody ever exercised gratitude through being self-righteous, just a self-righteousness is no way to joy.  Whenever we are camped in our version of the truth, which is definitely part of the truth, but not all the truth because we cannot see it all, we find God’s Kingdom ever elusive.

How many times do we need to read Jesus? — those who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted.  That’s such a stark truth.  So why do we stay in our version of the truth and refuse to be open to seeing another person’s version.  That’s because it crucifies our flesh.  It is the most loathsome feeling.  But the Christian life is about following Jesus — not ourselves.

When we comprehend that truth is a sphere, recognising that only God can see it all, and that we need others to educate us about what we cannot see, we begin to see that the only way forward is through repentance.  We do something remarkable. This thing is the thing that brought us to salvation in the first place.  So why have we gotten out of the habit of doing it?  Because of course we have become blinded to being right, to being deceived, to believing that we see as God sees.  When I put it like that, it’s pretty damning isn’t it?

I don’t expect that this article will be shared very much, liked or commented on.  Our times have bred even more the need to be right than at any other time, and our social media is the perfect platform to say it as it is — us in our rightness.

Trouble is, that’s not where God is.  And builds absolutely no cooperative effort — the very stuff of the Kingdom!  The only way we can be on God’s side is through repentance, returning back, again and again, agreeing that we need very much more than our own viewpoint.  If we lead by always being critical of others — and I’m learning how much of a hypocrite I can be — we are blind guides, no matter what stripe we wear.