A Formulaic Tradition: Sterile, Barren
We keep that which bothers us at a comfortable distance. We hold it out in front, just shy of our inner world so that we might familiarize ourselves with it and avoid entanglement, never having to reconcile ourselves with the unknown. Being familiar with a person or event and coming to a deeper revelation of it cannot be the same process. That deeper state of communion is just beyond the precipice, that event horizon of which mortals define as death. We fear death like we fear the idea of a blackhole. Who dares contend with a force that rips us apart upon crossing its threshold and pulls us into a cold emptiness that harbors infinite unknowns?
“For you will not abandon my soul to the realm of the dead, nor will you let your faithful one see decay.”
Psalm 16:10
This Mortal Cloak is Heavy, the Mind Unable to Update
We fear being lost in the dark, not because we fear darkness but because we fear death. We don’t regard ourselves as anything beyond earthen vessels which wrap around us like cloaks, cumbersome and hard to manage. Gravity itself mocks us. Yet Jesus defied gravity more than once, both as a mortal and an immortal. Not even the Olympians had the same power, as they were never human, fragile, or mortal.
They cannot take up their life again because they have no life to take up.
There is power in death. There is yet more power in the raising of the dead, for to be Immortal is one thing, but to be an Immortal Biological is another altogether. We have all the more power through death as a rite of passage, if we are indeed in Christ:
“No one takes My Life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
John 10.18
Was Hesiod Envisioning Merely Fictional Entities?
I’m of the notion that the writings of Hesiod may not have originated in his imagination only. gods of Greek Mythology are not so mythological as they are other worldly angelic beings pulled down with a swipe of a dragon’s tail. In our mortal bodies we are at a great disadvantage to these principalities and powers of the air, angelic hierarchies full of evil and resentment of humans, a murderous regard. For they, being immortals only, have no right to the earth and yet lust for it endlessly, the demonic so aghast in their current state of dry emptiness that they will inhabit even swine to relieve their discomforted souls. The earth is biological, and the gods have no rights to its riches:
But your dead will live, LORD; their bodies will rise— let those who dwell in the dust wake up and shout for joy— your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead.
Isaiah 26.19
Gods and Mortals Dance Along the Event Horizon
This time on earth is of importance to us not because it is short but because we are in the middle of a dawning, a portal from one world to another, a suspended state of which being an integrated part can affect and transform the entire bridge, to a far greater degree than we can possibly imagine as mere mortals.
Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.
Daniel 12.2
Life isn’t about this short time span we understand as mortals here on earth though with all diligence we must burn brightly and accomplish the purpose of heaven while we are here. Our time is about living out a redemptive process both on an individual level and a broader level pointing to the fulness of the redemption of mankind. We think we have big ideas and strain our intelligence to accomplish that which challenges us. Think about the idea God had.
“Let Us make man in Our image”
God’s plan was nearly abandoned twice having repented to Noah and again to Moses that He had created us. But He remained faithful to Himself, faithful to us, and faithful to a plan so challenging it continues today, taking thousands of years to accomplish. Nothing in the millions of years prior to us has been quite so challenging, or so it would seem to me; not the angels, not the immortals, not the Titans or Olympians…nothing. Though God did lament the fall of Lucifer momentarily – He then planned Mankind to show that love indeed can overcome the impossible – because Lucifer couldn’t believe it to be true.
Satan’s tomb is sealed, even as he roams the earth the judgement itself binds him, breathing down his neck and nipping at his feet. Our tomb, however, is wide open, a rite of passage into immortality and love, for Jesus is the Resurrection Life and Love for all eternity to those who choose Him.
“I am the Resurrection and the Life. The one who believes in Me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in Me will never die. Do you believe this?”
John 11.25-26
Elohim could just as easily have declared: Let the dance of Gods and Mortals commence~
Let’s not let our Creator down, and let us prove that dragon wrong in all his rebellious ways: Love does conquer all, even Death.
