Month: April 2016

 

OK! Now, don’t give up on this just because you don’t understand the title! Hang in with me… Before I am done, you will get it, I promise! Ready to hit the trail again? Let’s go back to Genesis 2:7, “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.” I don’t know how many times I read through that verse over the years and, like Charlie Brown, it was “wah, wah, wah”…in my Imagination I had no spark of understanding. Well, because I can’t possibly take you on my entire trip, I will give you a short cut here. First, God formed man out of the dust of the ground and that made him a being like all other living beings in the earth, eating, drinking, walking, and focusing on life, itself. We were hard wired, plumbed, equipped and tooled to be able to survive in this material world. The image in my brain is that we are a spirit being, and God had just created our “space suit” that enabled our spirit man to navigate in a material existence.

But Man was meant for so much more and so God breathed (n’shamah’ – divine , essence, inspiration and intellect) into his nostrils and man became a living soul, capable of thinking, reasoning and discourse. The Rabbi commentators in the Targum say man became a speaking spirit. Wow! Do you realize that the breath of God is what makes us capable of being in the “likeness” of God? The word “likeness” means we function as God functions. The gray matter between our ears was suddenly full of capability that set us apart from the rest of creation and our IMAGINATIONS became the vehicle that propelled us into the “God realm”. Einstein is so cool to me, he got it! He lived and discovered great things out of his imagination. He said “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world and embraces all there ever will be to understand”. In other words, our imagination is the infinite part of us! That small part of our brain in the back of our head that touches the limitless, immeasurable wisdom and knowledge of God! (I Cor. 2:9-16)

So, what does that have to do with the crazy title of my blog? And why does that matter to us? Turn around and run back to Genesis 1:1… “In the beginning God created…In the Hebrew that word is “bara” It is a unique word that, according to my lexicon, means to form, plan, create by thought or image, ideate, imagine, design. God used his imagination to create the entire universe and all that would happen there from beginning to end. It included every human being that would ever live (Psalm 139:16, Eph. 1:4), and included Jesus who was crucified “before the foundations of the world” (Rev. 13:8, I Peter 1:18-20). In other words it was done in God before He ever said Light be! No wonder He is the beginning and the end! Out of the fullness of his imagining, the fullness of His faith, He began to command all that was in his imagination to become material. Look at verse 7, “And God made…” The word “made” in Hebrew is “Asah”. In the lexicon it means the creativity of God, to work, create, build, plant, and procure. Look at Psalm 33:6 “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made (asah)! Now, connect that to Hebrews 11:3 “Through faith we understand that the worlds were “framed” by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” So… God imagines and then He speaks and it happens. He is a thinking, reasoning, creative speaking spirit!

Now, think about it, we were made to function the way God functions! We imagine and we speak and we produce. On a very elemental level think of something you have made. What did you do first? Yup! You had the idea, you thought about it, imagined it and even imagined how to do it. You probably talked about it or even recorded pictures along the way to strengthen your imagining. Then, you gathered the materials and put it together to replicate what you imagined. Right? What does the word say about how we function? God imagined (bara), then He recorded (Psalm 139), He gathered materials (“Light be..”  He didn’t create light, He IS light!) and then he built, planted, and procured creation!

Let’s look at some negative examples of the power of our imagination, ok? In Genesis 3 we see that Adam didn’t imagine himself to be made like God, even though he was, so he ate the forbidden fruit trying to accomplish something that God had already established, and he lost that intimate connection to hear the voice of God in his spirit. The breath of God was greatly diminished. Men could no longer have dominion over God’s creation. Jump over to Genesis 6: 1-5. God saw, early on, that men were evil and every imagination of their hearts was evil and so He allowed the flood to happen. By chapter 11:1-6 men were at it again. They were building empires that were not ruled by God. He saw that the people were united, they spoke the same language and said the same things. They spoke and acted on a common imagining! God made a profound statement here… “…the people are one, and they have one language and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have IMAGINED to do.” So he confounded their speech and destroyed their unity. Powerful!

Let’s look at a positive word, Deuteronomy 30:14… Paul uses this scripture to explain the spiritual law that brings us into salvation, and it is “bara and asah”. “But the word is very near unto you, in your mouth that you may DO it.” The word do is ASAH!!! The word is in your mouth that you may create, build, plant, procure and operate in it. Paul explains it like this in Romans 10:10, “for with the heart (the imagination) man believes unto righteousness and with the mouth confession is made (to procure) salvation”. Little ferret dance!!!  Woohoo!

Now, back into the Old Testament to Jeremiah 1:9-10, 14 where God is speaking to Jeremiah explaining how he will be used by the Lord, ”…I have put my words in your mouth…to root out and to pull down and to destroy, and to throw down, to build and to plant”, “…I will hasten (watch over sleeplessly, be alert for, watch for) my word to PERFORM it. The word perform is ASAH!!! And where was God’s word? It was in Jeremiah’s mouth! Bottom line there is power in the words in our mouths because we function the way God functions.

This should be a Woop! Woop! moment, but OMG! It turns out that we are a bunch of very powerful loose cannons firing off faith filled words everywhere, that do NOT line up with the word of God. What a mess we make! To quote Hosea 4:6 “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge”. Uh huh! That pretty much sums it up! Or we could quote Forrest Gump “Stupid is as stupid does”. We are in desperate need of the BARA- ASAH AHA!!!!

The big “elephant” question in the room is what do you THINK on? Dr. Newberg, the guy that started this whole adventure for me, said “the more you focus on something, the more it becomes your reality, the more it is written into the neural connections of the brain”. I would say the more you focus on something, the more vivid it becomes in your imagination! What we imagine to be true will come out of our mouths, for good or evil! The world understands this perfectly. How many signs have you seen that say things like “Never say Never!” or “If you can imagine it, you can accomplish it.”   We just don’t understand that it all goes back to the creative gift in all of us that God intended to use with us and through us to create a wonderful world.

Let’s go to the New Testament to Matthew and check out what Jesus had to say about it! He spends a lot of time warning us about our thought life, what is in our “imaginations” (our heart) and what comes out of our mouths. One key here is the word HEART. In the Greek it is Kardia but it literally means the thoughts, understandings and feelings in the mind. Matt. 14:34-37 “…out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. A good man out of the good treasure of the heart brings forth good things, and an evil man (one with twisted thinking or one who thinks counter, or incorrectly, to the word of God) out of evil treasure brings forth evil things…. every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give an account thereof on the day of judgment. For by your words you will be justified and by your words you shall be condemned.” That’s not good!!! 

I don’t mean to be a downer here! The main point is,  when life stinks, change your “stinkin’ thinkin’” and when God’s Word comes out of your mouth, you can create, plant, procure and operate in that.   That’s why we need to intensely study God’s Word every day, we need to keep it in our thoughts (focus on it), in our imaginations and in our mouths in order to transform our minds and renew them to God’s way of doing and being right, which is to “ASAH” God’s way! When Paul was in a Roman prison he wrote to the Phillipians that, in bad times, we should rejoice (not in the problem but in God’s deliverance.  I Cor. 10:13 – He makes the way out). Think intently on the nature of God to encourage you that He is faithful. And when you believe His word to be true, the Peace of God will guard your heart and mind against what is going on around you in the world. (Phil. 4:4-7) Image what God says about you and your circumstances until it is fully vivid in your imagination, more real than what you see in the world. Then speak that against what the world is saying to you. There is creative (asah) power in that!!!

OK, I need to tie up two loose ends!  When Jesus went to the cross He purchased our total redemption. The first thing he did when he appeared in the upper room was to breathe on the disciples (just as God breathed on His man at creation) and He said, “receive the Holy Spirit”! ( John 20:20-22) The intimate connection was restored and our imaginations came alive and became tender to the voice and thoughts of God. The Breath of God was restored! That renewing in the Holy Spirit wasn’t the end, it was just a taste of more to come. So He told the disciples to wait in Jerusalem for the complete baptism in the Holy Spirit. With that infilling, they were given speech in the form of new tongues. (Paul explains this in I Corinthians chapter 14) Of all the manifestations that God could have given them, why a new and unknown language? And why has that ability been passed on to generation after generation of believers?

Well, God needs a unified body and, now, the Holy Spirit can pray, instrumentally, through believers in total agreement with the mind of God. And how do we know and hear God’s mind when we pray? We use our imaginations, our mind’s eyes and ears! The languages we speak may sound varied and unknown to us in the material world, but they are known to God so that wavering flesh is cut out of the process!  In Romans 8:26-27  Paul is talking about wavering flesh not knowing what to pray and so the Holy Spirit prays “in” us.  The word “in” means instrumentally, so we are the instrument that the Holy spirit used to pray the perfect mind of God in our circumstances.   The confounded languages of Babel were restored in the unifying power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit body of Christ still speaks in God languages in total agreement with what God prays through them. That’s why it is an important blessing to the Body of Christ. To quote God, we speak the same thing, by the same spirit and now, nothing we imagine to do, in agreement with God, will be impossible to us. God bless our IMAGINATIONS!!!

The BARA-ASAH AHAH!!! Woop! Woop! Big ferret dance!!!! OH YEAH!!!

Have you ever been “put down” by someone who, when you shared a thought that sounded ridiculous or you shared an unusual idea that just popped up in the back of your mind, replied “that’s just your imagination”? You may have even said it to yourself. The comment was meant to squelch the imagining as if it was unimportant, as if your imaginings are just fanciful notions with no substance, almost childish in nature. For most of us, when that happens we just put the notion out of our heads and move on. What a mistake!

As a teacher, I always appreciated the imagination in kids and the creativity that it generated within them. I also appreciated the imagination in creative adults, like my husband, a product designer for many years. But I had no deep understanding of its potential and its connection between us and the Kingdom of God. As a ferret, I wasn’t even sniffing at it from curiosity!

Some 15 years ago, I was on one of my many ferret trails, studying brain function in relation to how kids learn, (ho hum!) when I stumbled on a little article about prayer and brain function in a Reader’s Digest that was so stunning and powerful to me that it stopped me dead in my tracks. Somehow, I knew that God had put that article in my hands and that He intended for me to “ferret out” the connections between what was in that article and what God had created within us. It has turned out to be a very long, circuitous and exciting trail that has opened my eyes to the power of the IMAGINATION and brought me to bridges that connect imaginings to FAITH. OMG! What an adventure ensued!

It has actually taken me many years of traveling these trails to grasp what God desired to show me. I am still traveling these trails on occasion. Many of my excursions have crossed through quantum physics and the study of light to the study of the neurology, neurotheology and biology of the brain, into scripture, not only my Bible but the Tanakh and the Targum (ancient Jewish commentaries on the Old Testament) and more. But what I have learned has revolutionized my walk with the Lord. I have often said…”When Science ends up supporting Scripture, it’s a good day for Science.”

Now, on to the article! It was so long ago that, sadly, I don’t remember the title but it was about research being done by Dr. Andrew Newberg on the influence of prayer and meditation on brain function. I still have my notes, but, stupid me, I have lost the article, itself! UGH! Anyway, I will try to give you my best ferret explanation. If you could look at a cut-away of the top view of a brain you would notice the right and left lobes. When the brain is active in conscious thought, there are outside rings (parietal lobes)on each brain half, that look like two halves of a donut that glow hot in reds and oranges in a brain scan. At the back of the brain, a cortex (a membrane) that runs parallel to the ground and stretches toward the center of the brain (shaped a bit like a light bulb), is, as the article referred to it, called the dorsal lateral cortex. This cortex remains cool in rational thought, but when prayer or meditation is active, the front parts of the brain cool and this cortex demonstrates activity by heating up with reds and oranges in the scan. Hum!

My first question was, did God put a room in my brain to be used only for prayer? It was a good question but I was way off base. As I pressed on, I stumbled on some fascinating data: The left and right parietal lobes are fed information from the surrounding material universe by the 5 senses much as a computer receives information from keyboard input. There are approximately 100,000 million nerve endings that run to and from the 5 senses to the parietal lobes. (How Dr. Newberg and his researchers found this out boggles my mind!) But this is the really cool data: There are 10,000 billion nerve endings that run to and from the dorsal lateral cortext which touch the unseen “spaces” in the universe. Now, unseen spaces are a whole other ferret adventure, but suffice it to say that every unseen space in the material universe is filled with light, “electromagnetic energy”. Why is that important? I John 1:5 states: “God IS LIGHT, and in Him there is no darkness at all”. (A little chair dance, here!) The nerve endings in our dorsal lateral cortex are “hard wired” to touch the spirit realm, the things of God. Dr. Newberg confirms this fact in his research, he even used the term “hard wired”. OK, here’s one more cool bit of information to help you get this. When Jesus ministered on earth, He often said “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” There are two really important words here that we need to understand. First “REPENT”, the Greek translation is to change the way you think. Why? Because the Kingdom is “AT HAND”. That phrase, in the Greek, literally means to be superimposed on. The Kingdom of God is superimposed on the material world. Science got it right! Einstein, Niels, Bohr, and Frank are quantum physicists who actually proved that “light” is superimposed (or co-exists in the same space) with the material world, filling every space. And light, being the smallest particle of existent matter( the basic building block of the material world), is also the only particle that is both material and immaterial. Whoa!!! Think about that for a while! Talk about a wild ferret trail… hopefully the Lord will let me share my quantum physics trip, one day.

Can you see it? God created us with a brain that contains the ability to communicate, in a multi-dimensional existence, not only with this material world, but also with the spirit world (the unseen) and we have the ability to process information from multiple dimensions! Paul’s words in II Corinthians 4:18 came to my mind right away. “…we look not at the things which are seen but at the things which are not seen for the things which are seen are temporal but the things which are not seen are eternal.” Not only can we look at the unseen, but we can receive input from God’s realm! Ferret question…so, can we see and hear from God without using our 5 senses?

The 4 Gospels were full of accounts of Jesus teaching the people truths that they had never heard. He wanted them to “get it”, not on the level of mental assent, but on a level much deeper within their understanding. Think about it, when Jesus would finish making a point, He would add strange statements like … to him who has ears to hear, let him hear… or… even though they have eyes to see they do not see. Huh??? Everyone he talked to had ears, what was He talking about? They had eyes as well! Answer…their deafness and blindness was not “of this world”, it was a Kingdom of God issue.

So where were these ears and eyes that Jesus was referring to? It had to do with the dorsal lateral cortex, I was certain, but I didn’t know where to look next, so I just put it on hold. (I should have known that God was still in charge of this adventure). LOL!   So I returned to brain study and kids! I was learning how kids take information from the “desk top” of their brain and transfer it to long term memory. Holy Cow! I was back where I started!   Woop! Woop! Ok, let me make the connection! Information that we manipulate with our 5 senses, what we think on, focus on and talk about helps us form IMAGES on the back of our brain.

(In my last adventure we talked about being “image” people) The more detailed the images, the more solid the memory and the stronger we come to rely on the images as fact whether or not they actually are fact. For instance, people imagined the world was flat for so long, it came to be the accepted science of the day. Every parent can tell you that the monster under the bed is real to their distraught children! Amen to that!

OMG! Whoa! The IMAGINATION, then,  is the “audio-visual” center in our brain. It incorporates the Dorsal Lateral Cortex, the vision center and the rest of the area at the back of the brain which includes a movie screen, projector and photo and film storage! (Not exactly scientific, but it works) And here is the first bridge… not only does the imagination take information from the material world through the 5 senses via the frontal lobes of the brain….. BUT…. It takes in information from the unseen world through the dorsal lateral cortex! So, that beautiful little cortex that God created in us actually has eyes to see and ears to hear what the SPIRIT has to say! What we receive into that little cortex goes into our IMAGINATION just like information from the material world. So keep your mind’s eyes and ears opened and when those thoughts pop up in the back of your mind again, don’t take them lightly, pay attention! Paul says it like this “Eye has not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the hearts of man the things which God has prepared for them that love Him. But God has revealed them unto us by His Spirit…Now, we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.” (I Cor. 2:9-12)

Where is the bridge to Faith? We have to dive back into science! The frontal lobes of the brain are wired to receive information from all 5 senses. But there is only one of those senses that touches the dorsal lateral cortex. Are you ready for this??? It is the auditory nerve! “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God!” (Romans 10:17) Woohoo!!! In Joshua 1:8 God tells him to repeat the Word out loud to himself and in Proverbs over and over God says to LISTEN to the Word, incline your ear and Faith comes! Hebrews 11: 1 is the hallmark definition of faith for Christians, but when you look at those verses through the prism of IMAGINATION, it becomes very powerful. “Now faith is the substance (in the Greek it means the spiritual image, blue print, A MIND PHOTO; the title deed) of things hoped for (hoped means confidently expected), the evidence (the proof of things we do not see and the conviction of their reality) of things not seen. [The Amplified Bible says it this way – faith perceiving as real fact what is not revealed to the senses]. So faith has its origin in the Word of God, filtered through our dorsal lateral cortex where the Spirit can give you the mind of God upon it and it is sent to the IMAGINATION where it becomes a faith image, spiritual reality in the face of material appearances.   The best example is in Hebrews 11: 7-19   By faith, Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac; and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son…Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence he also received him in a “figure” (faith vision).   (Whew! That’s a mouthful!)

All of this, to say that our IMAGINATION is alive and well and very important!   It is not a place of foolish dreams or fanciful thoughts, it is a powerful creative gift given to us by God! In Genesis 1 we discover that mankind was made in the image and likeness of God. Image means we look like Him in some way but “likeness” means we function like He functions. The first function we see God perform is the creation of heaven and earth. We see that God is a faith filled, thinking, reasoning, creative being. We have been hard wired to be faith filled, thinking, reasoning, creative beings, as well. God’s plan is to work with us and through us to create and recreate in the earth as He has done in the entire universe.  Think of the music that came to Beethoven or the art that came through the fingers of Michael Angelo. God spoke to them through their imaginations! All creative production starts with a vision in the mind’s eye or the sounds in the mind’s ears that are, then, reproduced in the material realm. Where did the thoughts and ideas come from? They came from the unseen through the dorsal lateral cortex to the imagination and then, through us, to the material world!

IMAGINE THAT!!!! Happy dance… woop,woop!!!! More to come…