Look at how God handles choice.

So, picture this….. you’re God the Creator.  You, in immaculate joy, spin off life in infinite variety (plants, animals, every organic thing) and then, ultimately, audaciously, you make two mirror images of yourself.  Now there are two versions of you that exist apart from you, a female and a male person.

The multiverse is festooned with the beauty you made and you have two conscious creatures endowed with all of your talent but without the key ingredient that differentiates God from all creation: choice.  The plants, the animals, the rocks, the atoms all know who you are.  You are God, their master and creator; they love and obey you.  These life forms don’t get choice.  The persons, though, are destined to be your children, your beloved. As your family, these people need what the rest of your creation lacks, choice, so that there can be a complex, satisfying relationship between you. You want to give your children this creation of yours to be their inheritance; you want these creatures to know you and you wish to know them.

The gamble of all eternity occurs.  God surrenders all Its power by handing over the secret ingredient to us. By sacrificing choice, God reveals Its overarching desire for relationship.

God endows the first people with consciousness, with choice.  Shortly into this experiment the predictable flaw reveals itself.  God cannot produce a second God.  God produces an image.  God makes a person, a person that, unlike God, once did not exist, but now does.  God makes a conscious person who, like God, can choose good or evil.  Over a period of time curiosity gets the better of the created person, a bad choice is made, and the anti-God is born.  The anti-God’s existence was always going to be the problem with God’s passionate desire to know and to be known.  And now every human being is encumbered with the agony of the self.

God does not mind the challenge to Its authority. God is now prepared to pay the price for the  gift of choice by providing a solution to the presence of an enemy (an enemy God permitted/foresaw as a consequence of Its desire for a voluntary relationship).

How does God contend with the anti-God that wishes to torment and enslave God’s would-be children?

What follows is what study has taught me about one way that God resolved this problem.  This way of understanding God’s use of choice is entirely based on my lifelong love affair with Christianity.  I am not saying that this is the only path.  It is my path.

Perfection has its flaws if you’re looking for a child – untouchability, impregnability, inaccessibility.  A perfect child cannot engage in a relationship of choice with God as a Perfect Parent.  Therefore God risked the imperfect child – you and I.

How can perfection tolerate imperfection?  How can an absolutely perfect thing accommodate an imperfect thing?  There is, between people and God, a categorically impassable divide.  No amount of human “morality” can address the fundamental flaw of our imperfect condition.  We cannot atone for our mistakes; no matter how small the mistakes, they still create an impossible situation.  The self cannot get to heaven, not an iota of hell can get in, not the most infinitesimal fragment can enter into God’s presence.

So, then, heaven has to get into hell.  God’s second gamble is likely conceived at the moment that the first gamble occurred.  So, at some point in human history God enters this sphere, the realm of good and evil, the spiritual halfway house.  (Some other time, if it’s relevant, we can talk about the birth and all of that.)

The gamble is this, put God’s heir here, encumbered in flesh, faced with all the good and evil of a human life.  For about 3 decades Satan has every opportunity to create a foothold in the heart of this God-man creature Jesus.  All that needs to happen, during this window of hellish opportunity, is for Jesus to make one mistake – a bad choice, an evil thought, one sin, one moment of self.

The pressure on Jesus escalates over time, ending in staggering social attack, utter personal betrayal, public injustice, and then physical torture and death.  Satan’s gamble is that at some moment a single minor error will be made.  Every chance is made for the emergence of self in Jesus: temptations, offers of wealth, of power, intense starvation, emotional torture and a miserably painful death – all of this is permitted by God.

What happens?  Jesus does not make an error leading to spiritual death, but he does submit to physical death.  God’s human heir dies, swallows death.  Satan wins. Hell has Jesus; for a nanosecond of spiritual time, a smug smirk of gratification is on Death’s face, but the instant that smirk begins, it ends.  Wait.  Something is wrong.

In that mortal shell, Jesus’ soul in the mutilated body of a dead man touches down in hell.  Jesus, minus the self that was never created by a single sin, enters hell.  Something whole and good crosses the threshold into the unsubstantial place where there is no hope, no love, no mercy, no justice, no truth, and no God.  At that moment there would have been, for the perfect soul, inconceivable torment, a rape of crystalline proportion.  Is that goodness corruptible?  Can it be compromised?  Oops.

Hell coughs up the now Christ, vomiting up what it is categorically unable to contain.  There is not the tiniest fragment of self to allow for enslavement, yet that goodness has somehow created a little toehold, left a little bruise, a little patch, a weigh station in hell.  Jesus’ spirit, whole, perfect, and good, is released from his human body, and in the worst-case scenario for evil, that spirit is unleashed here on earth without limitation.  Hell allowed this, made the error, in its frenzied lust for power, for control, hell swallowed something it did not have the capacity to contain.

Our secret weapon was born in that moment.  It doesn’t matter whether or not you ever call yourself a Christian.  Just use this gift.  Call it whatever you want, or keep it secret, but choose it anyway – choose to use the Holy Spirit.

The process of using the Holy Spirit is simple.  You need something perfect that can enter into the hell that you carry around inside of yourself.  This good spirit can be inhaled via prayer as often as you like.  Unleash it inside of yourself and ask it to go to work.  I’ll explain this process in detail.  But this is another big piece of recovery and redemption.  The Holy Spirit can bustle all around inside the architecture of you and, piece by piece, it can heal you, create wholeness out of brokenness, order out of chaos.  You don’t know where to look or how to do it, but this spirit is independent of you and can act with your permission.  Choose to give permission and invite this into your heart and it will immediately start contending, with perfect grace, gentleness and precision, with your pain. The Holy Spirit can undo and outmaneuver and overthrow the self that hurts you so.