Where Has Jesus Been?

Words are things, and magnificent things at that. More than mere sounds, and they are more than mere meanings. Words are ideas made physical. They are thoughts in the flesh.

Words are a bridge, a fulcrum between thought and touch, a crux joining the material and the spiritual. From within us they go out, incarnating the meaning within our minds into the fabric of the material world around us through the marvel of vibration, disturbance, and airflow. As a result, even the obscure lie, the wildest superstition, or a far-flung fantasy, once it has become a string of words, is therefore as real as the sunlight on your skin. This is science. When you speak, creation changes shape. It goes like this.

First, you have a thought. The edges of long strips or proteins and fats running through the grey matter of your brain begin to dance. Salts and acids zip about one another, freeing a charge of electricity to rush along one of millions of corrugated pathways. Imaging of these pulses appears as random lighting strikes flashing within the skull. But this is anything but random. It is phenomenal design. It is a pattern as mappable and trackable as the roads here in Minden. Only it is far more complex than any town or city on earth, not to mention more malleable. New roads are constantly opening. Old roads are ever closing off. Well-used roads rut and grow. Altogether they form a shifting, stabilizing superhighway of biochemical majesty, orchestrated as a living pattern that IS your thoughts.

Some of these thoughts cause you to believe that it is time to open your mouth and speak. Multiple lighting strikes fire and align to rush out the back of your neck and down chains of specialized wiring into the rest of your body Some of it heads for the stomach, some for the lungs, some for the mouth and tongue. Branching out, they also all cohere in an intention so unified that before the eye can blink (and in order for it to do so), the fibrils of your muscles are sparked by thee flashing nerves. The electric current pulls directly on them, contracting and releasing multiple avenues at once to create movement,

In the case of speaking, it is a stunning composite. Throat, mouth, tongue, chest and abdominals all weave together in simulation of those flickering ideas in your mind to mechanize the larynx as just enough wind is pressed over it to flood the mouth with noise that your teeth and lips then use to formulate a string of discernible sounds. At the very speed of thought, the thoughts become noise. Only this is not mere noises. These are words.

They are physical. From the mouth, the noises press out into the created world, as material as the table before you, as physically present as the atoms that make up the table top. There is nothing merely spiritual about them. Their presence is real, and alchemy of energy and mass that we call a wave.

Waves have FORCE, which means that, though they may be invisible to the eye. they have the ability to be touched. If you have ever been by powerful speakers at a concert, or felt a sonic boom, you know what I am talking about. But in those same examples. the most important thing is not that you have the ability to touch the force of a wave. Is is that the force of a wave has the ability to touch you.

A Quantum Ripple

Job 42:3 LEB

‘Who is this darkening counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I uttered, but I did not understand; things too wonderful for me, but I did not know.

Waves are notoriously hyperactive things. Their essence is that they travel — always. Depending on the power behind and in them, they degrade beyond measurable influence, but they exist. The God who created us has plans in mind. He intended that within the limitations of sounds, and in the silence between them, something marvelous and miraculous could take place — communication. Note only can we hear words if we are close enough … we can feel them.

We don’t talk much about, or think much about, feeling sound unless we are at a concert or listening to a pipe organ played loudly. But we need to repair, we hear because to a specialized part of the body hearing is touch. By the power of that second , designed miracle, words are touch that you hear. Thanks to our eardrum, sound becomes movement.

Is this Insane Enough Yet?

Psalm 33:8 LEB

Let all the earth fear Yahweh. Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.

So, thoughts which turn into proteins, and electrical impulses … air which is forced out, manipulated by the shape and movement of our throats and mouths, travel as waves to someones ear. Then moves bones and fluid by creating pressure moves like seaweed in the ocean and as the lengths of the small follicles differ — the pressure differs and the fibers of nerves are moved, and by this point the sound is no longer a wave but what was once energy in my mind has become energy in yours, an electrical impulse that will shortly shoot off lighting in your own brain, whether you like it or not. In the times it takes to blink, through a marvel of physics and chemistry, as that jolt runs into your gray matter, flickering and spinning down the superhighway of your mind, the sounds that I have mumbled are funneled down particular routes that you hold stored up as pens of meaning. My thoughts, become material noise, have now as material noise been recieved within you as your thoughts.

Whoa.

Jesus is Still Here

Psalm 33:22 LEB

Let your loyal love, O Yahweh, be upon us, even as we hope in you.

This means that the things we think of as “words” whenever we speak them or hear them, cannot help but physically alter your state of physical existence. This is true whether we believe them or not. Unequivocally, scientifically, they move us. As sure as E=mc2, words are REAL> energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared

When I speak and you hear, your and I are tangibly connected. When you hear what I say, the unity between us is not only spiritual. It is a physical, fellow-shaping of our minds. How much more true is this when I speak and you BELIEVE it.

Words are not ethereal. They are substance. They are part of the physical created order of our universe. This means that memory too, is more than just memory. Memory is a physical element of the past that remains in the physical present, and actual presence of that tremor in history that first created the thing remembered.

This in turn means that when Jesus, ascending into heaven, said

Matthew 28:20 LEB

teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you all the days until the end of the age.”

He wasn’t kidding.

There is no denying it. Even if we are talking about the purely human element of His words, those truths are chemical, physical things that remain with us today. They are a rebounding of His human, physical mind, bouncing back and forth through the bodies of one human after another all they way down the winding string of history. The accented syllables voiced by Jesus so long ago still carry to you His real, incarnate, human presence today.

When he spoke TAKE EAT DRINK DO … this command and declaration is present real and connected to all who have heard it, said it, eaten drank and done as he said throughout history. This is a true connection. Words physically alter your material existence.

A Voice Like God’s

Psalm 33:9 LEB

For he himself spoke and it came to pass. He himself commanded and it stood firm.

Sounds are they fly through the air are, indeed, only symbols of the truths they contain They are gibberish until they are heard. They are limited in their effect all the more until they are believed. But this doesn’t stop them from communicating meaning once heard.

The trouble in the Church in the West - is contrary to physical facts we have believed that Jesus left us. We moved his words into the realm of fantasy and imagination rather than in the material science of our practical lives. Adopting that belief that His ascension meant that He has gone away — weakens our faith and it is contrary to truth.

You may not remember where this idea was planted to you… where we thought he was gone -or that he did not mean what he said … or that we could ignore it since he wasn’t here… but the church in the west thinks this way and as we have move along that path we have weakened the Godhead of Jesus and his eternal nature.

Wouldn’t you think that just as human words are demonstrably so much more than we assume, the words spoken by God-made-flesh in order to speak them must be at least that powerful? When the human synaptic lightnings and muscles and breath are also God’s synaptic muscles and breath.. should we not, at the very least, consider them to be a touch more substantial than the mere symbols people claim of their own post-modern drivel ?

God never said “Let their be light” and then hoped that His suggestion might inspire understanding. Nor did He sit waiting for someone else to infuse His speaking with their own personal meaning. He said Let there be light and then the words themselves shone into being.

What if all created substance, before it was anything else, is first words? What if, when God is involved, words are more than mere sounds? What if God’s words are the only real thing there ever is, or has been, or will be?