A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL WORLD VIEW


 
 

10. IS THERE A SPIRIT DIMENSION?



It is necessary now to shift our focus onto the theological side of the multi-dimensional world-view, and the remaining sections will concentrate on the spirit dimension. For this dimension must be approached from a different direction. The criteria of a dimension can only apply in part to the spirit dimension, for this dimension is transcendent to the knowledge dimension and our characteristics of dimensions are how we know what is a dimension. How can we know something that is beyond knowledge?

For a start there is no way that we can measure spirit. All the other dimensions have some unit of measurement. So we cannot even start to graph what spirit is. Mathematics belongs to the dimension of knowledge. Nevertheless, we will show how spirit does fit with our definition of dimensions.

A God Discovery
As a young student I had become a Christian. I was a hostel student at Massey University where there was a strong movement of the Holy Spirit, and many students became Christians. The University Chaplain was Rev Ray Muller, who is now NZ National Coordinator for the Alpha Programme. On some Friday nights he held a prayer meeting for students in his flat in Palmerston North. One night  I was invited along also. At that prayer meeting there was a message, which I must admit I cannot remember much about - except that it was explaining the Holy Spirit. Then Ray asked if there was anything that anyone would like to receive prayer for.

A girl immediately asked if Ray could pray for her back. She explained to everyone that she had experienced a slipped disc, and had subsequently been to her doctor who had diagnosed the problem and advised her to not do anything too active - such as dancing. That was a  problem to her because there was a dance on the very next night that she had planned to go to. 'Wow', I thought, "This is not just praying general stuff, this is really laying it on the line. What if nothing happens?" Ray laid hands on her head and prayed. Even before he had finished praying he was interrupted by the girl who excitedly said, "I feel something happening in my back." She started twisting from side to side, and proclaimed, "My back is not clicking anymore! There is no more pain! Jesus has healed me!"

Ray then asked if anyone would like to be prayed with to receive the Holy Spirit. I was too hesitant and shy to openly ask for prayer. But because of what I had just seen before my very eyes, I knew in my heart that this was the time I had to ask for the Holy Spirit to come into me. So I simply prayed a silent prayer of asking the Holy Spirit to come into me. Into my mind popped the thought, "Just thank God for the Holy Spirit he has now given you." So I silently thanked God for giving me his Spirit. That was it.

But as the prayer meeting concluded, and everyone started to go home, something strange was happening to me. I started to see a vision of a beautiful scene of fields, hedges and trees. Sunlight was streaming down from the sky, and a voice was speaking from the sky, saying, "I have all authority in heaven and on earth." That vision seemed to stay with me all the way back to my hostel. I knew it was God speaking to me. I knew it was his way of showing me he had given me his Spirit.

Never before had I experienced anything transcendent like that. It was completely unexpected, and filled me with a new conviction of the reality of God. There have been many other experiences of God's Spirit since that time. That experience also started me on a long search to understand more about what this meant. God had awakened me to a new dimension beyond myself. Though I could not normally see it, God's Spirit linked heaven and earth together.

Isaiah of Babylon
In the time of Isaiah of Babylon about 500 years before Jesus, the people were asking questions about creation. The Jews had been captured and taken away as slaves by the great empire of Babylon. In a foreign land they were likely to have been fed a diet of the Babylonian world-view, including their myths of creation. However the Jews had their own writings, and knew that the Babylonian myths were just that – myths - and that they didn’t fit with the teaching that had been handed down to them about God as creator.

So Isaiah had to counter the false beliefs that his people were being taught. A lot of what Isaiah wrote in his prophecy (Isaiah 40 – 66) was about creation, but he also wrote about the future. They needed a Godly world-view to help them to see what was false in the view of the Babylonians.

“Do you not know? Were you not told long ago? Have you not heard how the world began? It was made by the one who sits on his throne above the earth and beyond the sky; the people below look as tiny as ants. He stretched out the sky like a curtain, like a tent to live in.” [Isaiah 40:21-22] Isaiah understood  dimensions. He saw that God lived in dimensions above ours, and used a simple analogy of a throne above the sky to explain it.

Was Isaiah also the author/editor of Genesis chapter one? The same Hebrew word 'bara' that is used for 'create' in Isaiah 40-66 is also used in Genesis chapter one. That looks like Isaiah's signature. If so, we can see how Isaiah was given a vision or world-view of creation by a transcendent God. In that vision Isaiah was able to see how he could integrate his experience of the one true God with the world he lived in.

In both Isaiah 40-66 and Genesis one, we see a picture of God who is a God of all of the universe, a God of order and purpose. He is separate from his creation, so that this world is not God. In creation he has provided reality (what we experience is really there), rationality (the universe makes sense), and reliability (we can trust a world that has consistent laws - a good basis for science). He has also given us freedom, ultimately a freedom to choose to follow the God who has created us. That is the challenge of Isaiah to his people, "Don't you know? Haven't you heard? The Lord is the everlasting God; he created all the world...But those who trust in the Lord for help will find their strength renewed. They will rise on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary; they will walk and not grow weak." [Isaiah 40:28, 31]

Our Threefold Nature
One of the strongest pictures of our human nature given in the Bible is our threefold nature as spirit, mind and body. "May the God who gives us peace make you holy in every way and keep your whole being -spirit, soul, and body - free from every fault…" [2 Thessalonians 5:23] These match perfectly with the dimensions of spirit, knowledge and a combination of mass-energy/time/space. The Bible is insistent on the most inclusive understanding of human nature. The same picture is symbolised in the divinely inspired structure of the tabernacle and temple. The three-fold structure consisted of the:

The Most Holy Place represents the place where God was primarily present among his people - but his presence flowed from that place to the whole temple and from there to the world. Ezekiel gives a picture of a temple stream bringing blessing to the whole land in the last days. [Ezekiel 47:1-12] The stream is a symbol of the Spirit of God. The promise is surely that as we open ourselves to the glory of God, he will flow through our mind and bodies to bless also our churches, communities and nations. The Bible says that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. [1 Corinthians 6:19]

At its heart the Bible gives us a beautiful picture of the dimensional nature of the universe.

Dimensions of Love
God is love. It is out of love that the universe has been created - just for us. Paul brings some of the most beautiful words about love to us when he writes, "I pray that you may have your roots and foundation in love, so that you, together with all God's people, may have the power to understand how broad and long, how high and deep, is Christ's love. Yes, may you come to know his love - although it can never be fully known - and so be completely filled with the very nature of God." [Ephesians 3:18-19]

Paul sees how the dimensions of space describe something about the nature of God and love. The three dimensions show the huge and all encompassing nature of love. Paul is also concerned that we can experience more of God. It's OK to ask questions about God, and to find new ways to understand God in relation to us. Even Christians can assume we know enough about God because we have committed our lives to him, when we have only just started. The more we understand him, the more we will appreciate him.  Yet all the time we are conscious that we are reaching out to a dimension beyond ourselves.

Love is about relationships. Philip Yancey in describing the significance of God explains how "we become who we are in large part because of (our) relationships. We do not enter the world as discrete minds dropped magically into waiting bodies. Our experiences, mainly our relationships, form us as persons… Likewise I conceive of the spiritual life as a capacity built into the human person, but one that can only develop in relationship with God." [RFTIG pg 107]

Our Spiritual Nature
For humans to relate we first of all have to recognise ourselves as independent beings who are free to relate. Our expression of love is "I love you." Basic to our being human and our human relationships is our sense of 'myself' and 'yourself'. The same recognition applies to our relationship with God. In response to God's message of love,  we are able to bring words of worship, "I love You."

The spiritual dimension in us is based on our sense of self. In our recognition of ourselves as 'I', we know we are not someone else, even if we know the same things they do. This spiritual dimension in us allows us to experience God and form a relationship with him. It is more than knowledge or consciousness, although it is dependent on these, because it is our sense of self that enables us to be someone who can be conscious or know something.

Our mind is able to perform many functions of reasoning, memory, decision making, feeling, and imagination.  However these are not the total you. You are also a person who has an independent identity who stays who you are throughout your life, however much knowledge you gain or decisions you make. You can't be someone else.

It is you who makes decisions, and you who falls in love. You can also be struck by the beauty of art, and prefer certain TV programmes above others. You can tell what is true and what is false. You can hate or laugh. You look for a sense of meaning and purpose in life. You develop a world view about the universe you live in. You belong to a family, or culture and nation, so you can say your version of, "I am a kiwi." A computer may have much more knowledge than you, but it has none of these spiritual things you have.

The Bible says we are "made in the image of God" [Genesis 1:27]. In this spiritual nature we share the nature of God. Yet we didn't make our own identity, it was put into us by God. I like the picture of God breathing the breath of his Spirit (ruach) into Adam in order to make him a living being. [Genesis 2:7] We have a unique relationship with God.

Our spirit dimension fulfils the characteristic of being a unique and independent property that distinguishes it from other dimensions. It is also co-dependent in that it could not exist for us without a conscious mind and a body in which to operate. And finally this dimension allows movement or different spaces in the dimension, by allowing many different individuals to have their own identity, in all the variety of ways we express that identity.

God's Nature
God said to Moses, "I am who I am" [Exodus 3:14] God expresses his identity. But his spiritual identity is absolute, rather than generated by anyone or anything else.

It is not a coincidence that Jesus referred to himself by the same kind of terminology. It was clearly a reference to divinity. Seven times Jesus described himself as "I am …" In one of these Jesus claimed, "I am the light of the world" [John 8:12] Jesus claims to bring meaning and purpose to the world, and that purpose was himself.

One of the ways we have described God is by using the prefix 'omni' (all). So we have words like 'omnipresent' (present everywhere), 'omnipotent' (all powerful), 'omniscient' (all knowing). These are able to express how God has greater power and knowledge than us, and just hint at his extra-dimensional nature. But what does 'omni' mean to us? It still begs the question as to how much power and knowledge that means.

The term 'eternal' (all time) is a similar word. Some have interpreted that to mean timeless, outside of time altogether. But that is a kind of nonsense because without any time at all there is no existence. Everlasting time is also a problem because well, how boring!  Eternity would be better described as three time dimensions. Wouldn't it be most exciting, to able to move instantaneously to far away places, and to see the past, present and future together.

We have also described God in terms of 'infinite' wisdom, power, love and holiness. Does infinite have any meaning though? How great is that? If these characteristics are not infinite though, there could possibly be a greater being.

The Bible says, "God is Spirit... [John 4:24]. God belongs to the spirit dimension.  How about we use dimensionality to describe God?

God is Omni-Dimensional
God is omni-dimensional. By nature he is in and encompasses all dimensions. I am sure I have hardly touched on the full meaning of that. The dimensions grow and change, so in one sense they are not themselves God, yet he has brought the dimensions into being as a temple through which he expresses himself and shows his glory to the world.

Omni-dimensionality does not mean an infinity of dimensions, because any realm with at least three dimensions has full freedom in that realm. God's omni-dimensional nature would therefore cover at least three dimensions of each of space, time, mass-energy, knowledge and spirit.

Seeing God as omni-dimensional helps us to re-emphasise the Lordship of God in the universe and in our lives. Instead of seeing a sharp division between the physical and spiritual, we can see that all the dimensions are a series that belong to one truth and purpose.

Does such an omni-dimensional God exist? Is he real? There are numerous ways that people have reasoned that God exists. I believe they are good arguments, and have value in their own right, but somehow they leave people unconvinced. They don’t seem to give the full story. But what happens if we ask that question in the light of multi-dimensions? I propose this simple logical argument.

God is omni-dimensional.
All dimensions exist.
Therefore God exists.

Firstly, claiming that God is omni-dimensional, is really a definition of God himself. If God is not omni-dimensional, then he is not God, and someone or something else that covers all dimensions would be God. By the nature of dimensions there will be a dimension that is the final level of dimension that is transcendent to all others.

Secondly, dimensions describe and define reality. By definition all dimensions exist, including the dimension of spirit. If it is a real dimension, then it exists. The seven dimensions of reality as we know it, all exist in creation, and we have evidence that there are other dimensions that exist also, and that our universe lives within a multi-dimensional reality.

It is simple logic to therefore say that God exists.

The reason why this logical proof works is because we are considering dimensions, which concerns the nature of existence itself.

However, you still may be asking, "Is this omni-dimensional God our Christian God?" []

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