The Culture of Hope Founded on Faith
Perspective
Do you know anyone who has had the exact same experiences as yourself throughout your life? I don’t believe that is possible. Like fingerprints, each one’s set of life experiences is unique to each individual. Just as God created us unique human beings to begin with, our paths through life are also unique. The way we view life, God, even Jesus, is determined by a complex set of variants such as personality, physical characteristics, settings, and relationships. I’ll save the discussion of those variants until another time. Today’s focus is on how our uniqueness forms our perspective of God.
Scripture, all the written information we have about God the Father, His Son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit in the Bible, was communicated to us by inspiration of God (2 Tim. 3:16). Even though we all read the same Bible, however, we don’t all understand it in the same way because of perspective.
For instance, the idea of God as Father is a difficult concept for some people to grasp because of their experiences with their own fathers: some have come from families in which multiple divorces have left them with the impression that fathers depart and don’t come back, others had fathers who abused them giving them the conviction that fathers do bad things, and still others had fathers whose priorities surrounded business success giving their offspring the idea that fathers are disconnected from their children. While the model of even the best of earthly fathers is flawed, the idea of adoption, paternal nurture, discipline, and protection is what adheres to the biblical model of God as Father.
We cannot possibly be objective in our understanding of Scripture because we see it’s precepts through the lenses of experience, of emotion, and of perception limited by temporal and physical constraints. When I was a child I read the old Indian fable about six blind men who tried to describe an elephant at their first encounter with one. One thought it was like a wall because all he could feel was the elephant’s side; the second felt a tusk and proclaimed it to be like a spear; the third thought it like a snake when he handled the trunk; the fourth pronounced it to be like a tree because he had felt the knee; the fifth said it was like a fan based on his experience with the ear; and the sixth understood it to be like a rope based on the swinging tail. We are like those blind men because we cannot see past the physical realm into the spiritual realm in which our lives are hidden in Christ. That is why the Holy Spirit directs us in our understanding and application of Scripture (2 Thess. 2:13, 2 Pet. 1:20-22, 1 John 4:13) according to God’s truth.
When we come into God’s family, by faith we walk through the wall of spiritual death into spiritual life and Jesus meets us there, right where we are. He takes all our baggage and tosses it away where we are no longer in bondage to it. The hold of all that has gone before is left behind that wall (2 Cor. 5:17). What lies on the other side of the wall, stays on the other side of the wall and no longer has power to hurt us. If we continue to dabble in bondage to that baggage, it is our choice and is contrary to God’s will for us.
God changes us at the point of salvation and we are given spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 12:4-7) which correlate to the function of each of us in His body, The Church. We are shaped by all that baggage and God uses the product of those hard things to increase His Kingdom. The past becomes a tool in God’s hands as God uses each of us, shaped by our past, to reach people that no one else can reach – people who can relate to the common elements of experience from our own past as we speak the hope of the gospel message to them in terms they can understand.
