Metaphor 22 - Immersion

In 2001 a common domesticated cow named Bessie gave birth to a animal of a different species, that of a wild ox known as the Asian gaur, which was and is in danger of becoming extinct. How did that happen? Well, researchers of Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts took genetic material from the skin cells of a male gaur, which had died eight years previously, and fused it with the emptied egg cell of a common cow and transferred the resulting embryo into Bessie.

In 2000, computer game publisher Electronic Arts released a computer simulation game called, "The Sims." In an earlier genre of this kind of game, a player could create a simulated world of his own inside the computer, full of little computer generated people and little computer generated things, and little things for these computer generated people to do. Now, with "The Sims," the game player creates a little computer "person" that represents him or her in that simulated world, so that he or she can interact with the other inhabitants of that simulated world and engage in various activities of that world, such as finding and holding a job, cleaning up the house, making friends, dating, etc. etc. This game has recently gotten even more interesting with the introduction of an interface that allows a player to use a photograph of him or herself as part of the appearance of his or her representative in the simulation world.

Both of the above occurrences are immersions. An immersion of one species into another. An immersion of one’s self into a created world of one’s own. An immersion is when one thing is placed into another thing without it losing its identity. What is this a metaphor of? The Incarnation.

In the Godhead, the Second "Person," The Son, the express image of the essentially unknowable Father, was selected to be incarnated into the creation as a member of the human race.

The ancient Israelites had a physical metaphor for someone being selected by God. The metaphor was to anoint the head of the person so selected with oil. The word "anointed one" in Hebrew is "Messiah." The Greek word for such a one is "Christos." With the incarnation, the eternal Son entered time for a time, taking on human form, human flesh, and dwelt among us.

All the time He was here on earth, He was fully the Second "Person" of the Godhead, as well as fully human. And being fully human, He had a human body, as well as the human inner-world I’ve characterized with the metaphor of Chicagoland. But His Chicagoland, if I may so speak of it, was different in that it was indwelt by the Third "Person", the Holy Spirit of God, as well has the inner-world of the human spirit.

The question then becomes, which version of Chicagoland was He "running?" Was it Version 1.0 as given by God, or the faulty Version 1.1 that the first people changed the original into?

Well, the Record shows that the Third "Person" of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit of God, drove the Son into a wilderness to be, in spirit and in body, tested to the uttermost as Son of Man and Son of God. And He emerged victorious, showing that as the Son of Man, His inner world was from Chicagoland Version 1.0, that He was everything the First Man was supposed to be and failed to be before God. "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased" reads the Record.

It is for this reason that the writers of the New Testament refer to Him as the Second Man or the Second Adam. "Adam" in Hebrew means "man." In the Chain of Being, the Second Man, the Son, now has first, well, "rank" if you will. His inner-world of Chicagoland displaced the First Man’s as the skeleton program of all humanity. At His incarnation, He became the Head of the human race. The significance of this will become apparent in a moment.

So, The Son was incarnated. Did He, from the get go, go around telling everyone He was the Son of God? Actually the Record shows that the admission had to be almost pried out of Him, and that almost towards the end. When He did reveal Himself as Son of God, it was when he was showing, making manifest, what the essentially unknowable Father was truly like. He did this by giving the blind sight, making the lame to walk, cleansing the leper, giving hearing to the deaf and on occasion, raising the dead. (Note that list well: the blind, the deaf, the dead, and the unclean and the incapable as well. Miracles can serve as metaphors.) His life and work were of such a kind that it was not a caricature to think of Him as being God.

But His favorite expression for Himself was to call Himself the Son of Man. Which is to say, the Human Being. And why did He do that? Because He knew His visit to earth was for the purpose of completing a specific mission from His Father. From time to time, He dropped mysterious hints about what that mission was. Hints like:

"Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill."

and

"the Son of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."

At the time that the law was given as a metaphor of God’s synesthesia and perfect pitch, a system of sacrifice and atonement (which means literally "to cover") was given as well.

This system had a single strong element of physical metaphor in it: blood. Most of the elements in this system required a blood sacrifice of an animal of some kind. And this was especially pronounced in the atonement aspect of the system. When transgressions of the law occurred - when sins against God’s synesthesia and perfect pitch were committed - animal blood had to be shed as a covering, as atonement.

God was pleased for a time to allow the sins which are before His face for all eternity to be covered temporarily by the sacrifice of an animal’s blood.

The emblem of this system, the "nutshell" of it, if you will, was the Passover Lamb whose blood, in the inaugurating episode of the system, was painted on the lintel and posts of the door of every Israelite home to ward off a visit from the Messenger of Destruction.

Why blood? Well, the life of creature is in its blood. People in ancient times observed that blood was the only liquid from a creature’s body that could, if leaked enough, cause its soul to leave to its body. The life of a creature is in its blood. And by "showing" the blood of an animal to God, the human being showed God (the author of life) that he understood that his own life was under forfeit to God for transgressions against Him. The human being showed that he understood that he was subject to God’s wrath for transgression against Him. And God took that as a temporary covering for the transgressions that sit before His face for all eternity. He could do that from His perspective in eternity, because He could, at the same "time," see another event taking place at a later time.

And so now we come to John the Baptizer, the last and greatest of the old style prophets to Israel, and a practitioner of an early form of the metaphor of Immersion. (The Greek world for immersion is "baptizo.")

By the time of John, the system of sacrifice and atonement had fallen on hard times, as does any system committed to human hands. Things had been added to the system by mere humans, that either nullified the intent of the law, or shifted its focus. People had for a long time been asking "Who is my neighbor?" People had gotten taken up with deciding whether to sacrifice mint or cumin, and overlooked the weightier matters of the law, like justice and mercy. And in the temple itself, some of the priests were rationalists who denied the possibility of a specific supernatural act of God. And along with those priests, there were also money changers who continually rooked the poor among the worshipers.

John the Baptizer arrived on the scene with a new physical metaphor, the metaphor of immersion. People could come to John the Baptiser, confess their sins, and be immersed in water as a metaphor that there was now a "before" and "after" in their lives. They went into the water to agree that they had indeed done things to bring themselves under the wrath of Almighty God. And they came out of the water, testifying that they had now changed their lives in view of the One John said was soon to be arriving. A One, Who, John said, would immerse them in the Holy Spirit of God as he had immersed them in water.

One day, while John doing his baptizing, a Human Being got into the line, and John noticed and said to his students, "Look! That’s the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" John knew what the Son’s mission from His Father was.

Before the day the Son was incarnated in time and space, His earthly parents were told what He should be named. They were told to give Him the Hebrew name "Joshua." In Hebrew, this name is actually an expression which consists of two other words. The first word is a variation of God’s personal name that was given exclusively to the children of Israel, which means something like "He Who Is," in the sense of "He Who Was, Is, and Ever Shall Be, the Self-Existent One." The second word is "Savior". So the name Joshua means "He Who Is is Saviour." In Greek, the Hebrew name of "Joshua" is rendered "Jesus."

The Son’s earthly parents were told specifically

"thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins."

The mission of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior - the immersion with which He was immersed - was not just to become a Human Being, and not just to show human beings what the Father was truly like, but to come to the night of agony in the garden of Gethsemane and to the crucifixion of Golgotha the next day.

In the garden of Gethsemane, the Son, shedding sweat like great drops of blood, begged the Father that if there was any other way that a particular metaphorical "cup" might pass from Him. The Son of Man on the Cross at Golgotha cried with a loud voice in Aramaic,

"Eli, Eli lama sabachthani?"

which means,

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

The mission of the Son of God was to die as Man for the sins of all men for all time. The "cup" He obediently drank, and the forsaking He strenuously endured, was nothing less than the eternal wrath of God against all sin for all eternity and all time, past, present and future.

And finally, at the end, He said "It is finished," and died. He died "to taste death for every man." An infinite life had just been given for a finite number of finite lives.

The Record says that while this supernatural event was taking place, the course of nature was set on its ear with an unnatural darkness covering the land for up to three hours, followed by an earthquake that rent rocks and other things. And a Roman centurion who witnessed it, a harden executioner, was frightened enough to utter that this was indeed the execution of a divine being.

Something had just occurred in the Godhead that has reconciled us all to God.

But His human death, like His human life, was also an immersion. In an immersion, there is first a going down. For Him, it was a going down from His bliss above into the confines of a merely human life, and then a going down into crucifixion and death. And that is then followed by a coming up.