The Bible about Christ?s return

 

Additions and elaboration of Bible passages in the book

It is widely believed that Christ’s return is the same as seeing him in physical figure. In the book, the return is depicted in a different way. Not in physical form, but still a physical presence. Because the Bible clearly shows that this possibility exists as it is told in the Acts of the Apostles 9,1-7:

 

On the road to Damascus

Then Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked letters from him to the synagogues of Damascus, so that if he found any who were of the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. As he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly a light shone around him from heaven. Then he fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?”? And he said, “Who are You, Lord?” Then the Lord said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” So, he, trembling and astonished, said, “Lord, what do You want me to do?” Then the Lord said to him, “Arise and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.” And the men who journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice but seeing no one. (Saul took later the name Paul)

Was this a physical phenomenon, was it a spiritual phenomenon or was it both? I consider the latter as likely. We can note that even though Paul does not see a figure, it is still clear who is present, because the voice presents itself as Jesus. That the men who followed him heard the voice suggests that what happened manifested itself in physical reality.

 

The disciples get to see Jesus’ glory

In Matthew 17,5-8. a similar incident is told:

?While he was yet speaking, behold, a bright cloud and shadow over them, and a voice from the cloud, saying, ?This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear him!? When the disciples heard it, they fell on their face to the ground, seized with great fear. But Jesus went and touched them, saying, ?Arise, and be not afraid.? And when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only?.

 

Ascension of Christ

From Acts of the Apostles 1,9-11:

?When he had said this, he was lifted up while they were watching, and a cloud hid him from their sight. As they stood staring up at the sky and looking for him as he pulled away, suddenly two men in white robes stood in front of them and said, ?Galileans, why are you looking up at the sky? This Jesus who was taken up to heaven from you, he will come again in the same way as you have seen him go up to heaven.?

These Bible passages talk of the breakthrough of a heavenly reality. The transitions are unclear. The story of the Ascension can be misunderstood as a purely physical sensory event that the disciples see. But the fact that two men in white clothes are suddenly standing in front of them, breaks with this, indicating that they have glimpsed into a spiritual reality. Jesus? resurrection body is both a physical and a spiritual body. In a vision, the disciples saw that Jesus was lifted up and wrapped in a cloud.

The Gospel of John uses another term for the same thing. Here we are talking about exaltation. There Christ says of himself: ?When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself? (John 12:32). But the disciples are not allowed to see the complete exaltation of Jesus to the Father. He disappears into the cloud. Here the cloud is a picture of an area between heaven and earth. Jesus was exalted to the Father. The last ascent from the cloud to the Father no one saw. But we are promised that Christ will return from the Father to this intermediate area. This is the return of Christ in the cloud. With this, he has come much closer to us. A popular expression reflects this: ?There is more between heaven and earth? we say when faced with something that is difficult to explain, a mystery to us.

 

The cloud as an imagination

In the book, I describe the cloud as something imagined. The light flows out of the sun as the center. It hits the cloud, refracts innumerable times inside the cloud, and becomes a light that surrounds us on all sides. The center becomes the perimeter. We are used to seeing the sacred expressing itself as the center of worship. Jesus was in the center, the disciples represented the center, and the same can be said of all the preachers who followed. Churches, monasteries, and holy places are the centers of God?s presence. Now the sacred seems stronger in the perimeter. The perimeter is no longer a world of ?shadows?, as Plato puts it in the ?Allegory of the Cave?. The perimeter, that which surrounds us, is full of life. Christ will help us and guide us through even everyday things in our environment.

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Time indication

Throughout the ages, Christians have asked themselves: When will Christ come again? Is there a time for Christ?s return? Yes, it exists! At the end of the Gospel of John we are told: ?Jesus said to Peter, ?Follow me!? Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved (i.e., John) followed. It was he who had leaned over to Jesus at the meal and asked, ?Lord, who is it that will betray you?? When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, ?Lord, what will happen to him?? Jesus answered, ?If I want him to live until I come, what does that matter to you? Follow me!?.? Here Jesus marks a separation between Peter and John that will last until he comes. Elsewhere he says: ?I also have other sheep, which do not belong to this flock. I must lead them too. They will hear my voice, and there will be one flock and one shepherd? (John 10:16). The separation between Peter and John was thus to be suspended at Christ?s return. Until then, Peter would not know anything about the way of John.

Peter represents the church and exoteric (exoteric = external) Christianity, a Christianity open and accessible to all. The way of John is, as Jesus himself suggests, a way the church should know nothing about. An esoteric (esoteric = internal) Christianity lived in secret. In addition to the open Christianity that the church administers, there has been a Christianity that has lived in secret since the time of Jesus. Christian fraternities that have provided important impulses to the cultural development of society. The church has mostly been unaware about this. These were secret Christian communities that received a secret insight into the gospels and were not corrupted by the power relations in their surrounding society. An important question to ask then, is this: Is there still such a secret Christianity today?

It is my experience that this distinction has been abolished in our time. There is an inner path that a human being can walk in silence. This is still very important. But the very doctrine of esoteric Christianity is now openly available to all who seek it. Secret societies have therefore lost all legitimacy as stewards of esoteric wisdom. Such companies, which still exist, have become strongholds of evil forces. We live in a time where Peter and John are open to each other. Christianity gathers into one flock, and well it is. (Read more about this in 13. Conversation ? The Way of John).

In?my book I talk of a reality that is at once close to us, while at the same time being distant and incomprehensible to most people. In these modern times, there seems to be no room for this reality. It is just as if we are trapped in a rationality where everything must be understood and explained in a certain way. And if something does not fit this mould, there is a strong tendency to simply ignore, turn away and push the inexplicable out of our mind.

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Human cognitive life: Art, Science and Religion

This is sad, because everything has a cause and exists in a context that is possible to acknowledge. We sometimes need to let go of the word understand and replace it with the word cognize. Understanding is only part of the realization. Other elements are just as important, often more important, even. In ancient times, when people sought wisdom, spiritual life and the pursuit of cognition were seen as the highest form of human activity. Then they thought of cognition as threefold, consisting of art, science, and religion. The science that we place at the forefront, is a path to reliable knowledge of all that is physical and sensory. We often cannot do without science to determine what is true and what is untrue. Therefore, it is easy to fall into the belief that science can give us the whole truth. But it is not so. It will always give us knowledge in the form of partial truth. What we learn through scientific research will always be incomplete. Therefore, many people say that everything is relative and that there is no absolute truth. This form of relativism has tragic consequences for society, especially for the coming generation.

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Christ in the cloud

This is an important topic in the book. We have reached a point where something new has emerged. Something that was not there before, which builds a bridge over the division between spirit and matter, inner and outer reality, the subjective and the objective. I call this?Christ in the cloud. But it is not possible to give a simple and satisfactory explanation of what I mean by this. In the philosophy and religions of the East, there is a tradition that everything that is spiritually significant takes a long time to acquire. Often years of study and exercises. I have lived a contemplative life for decades. Nevertheless, there is something that is immediately understandable, and that is what I am talking about here.

The widespread relativism in Western culture and social life shakes the confidence that absolute truth somehow exists. Young people are taught that nothing is fixed, there is nothing that can provide a secure anchor for their lives. Particularly serious are the consequences for moral aspect of life. This makes it difficult to hold on to the truth and gives precedence to decadence in the cultural development. It is one thing to know what is true and another thing to maintain the truth under pressure. Experiments on peer pressure show how many people fail to stick to even obvious truths once the peer pressure becomes strong enough. Our culture is now going in a direction where confidence in the news is also being broken down. Our culture is drifting away from the firm anchoring Christianity has previously given us.

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The essence of truth

Against this development I chart a single person?s path through life. The main character in the book, Lasse, is a very committed person. He tries to help young people struggling with behavioural problems, drug abuse, and crime. His strong commitment means that the blows of fate he encounters, hit him with full force. It becomes a question of being or not-being. To perish with degraded mental and physical health or finding a new foundation to stand on and a source of new life. What saves him is a revelation of the essence of truth (the Stable Experience). He experiences that the truth is living, the truth is life. This gives him a love of the truth, knowing that there is help to be found on the painful path he has to walk. He is given full certainty when he needs it the most. He is struggling with difficult thoughts, tumbling with the impressions of what he has read and learned, and envisions different courses of action. The surprising thing is that just as this inner life gathers into one thought, something happens in his outer reality. This could be events, something people say, something he happens to read, or something around him in nature ? that matches what he is thinking, in such a way that he becomes sure of how to act.

We are used to dividing reality into two. First, we have subjective reality, that is, what we experience from our own point of view. It is coloured by our views and opinions, what we have experienced before, our desires and motives. Then we have objective reality. Everyone can see it. Things can be measured and weighed. Here we can see the connections between cause and effect. Or is it not a simple as that?

 

The billiard ball example

The philosophers George Berkeley and David Hume lived in the 18th century. As an example of cause and effect, they addressed a simple phenomenon such as a billiard ball (A) colliding with another billiard ball (B), causing it to roll. But they insisted that what we experience is only that A first rolls, that A hits B, and that B then starts rolling. That is all we see. We see no necessary connection or an impression of necessity in addition to this. Our notion that ball A causes ball B to roll, that B necessarily follows A, therefore has no objective validity. We only see that B follows A repeatedly, and expect the same thing to happen the next time A meets B. This way of thinking, which also applies to the laws of nature, is today generally accepted.

This is important, because material reality provides space for something else to happen, namely the miracle. Or to put it another way: the miracle does not break with objective reality but belongs to it.

An acquaintance of mine who had a well-thought-out atheistic outlook on life, told this story: One evening in the spring, many children were out playing, and the adults were tending their gardens. Several saw what happened. His son cycled at full speed down a small hill and out onto a busy road. Too late the boy discovered the truck coming from the left. The front wheel ran over both boy?s legs before stopping. Terrified neighbours arrived, and an ambulance was called. They feared that the boy had been seriously injured. After recovering from the shock, the boy got up. Aside from a few small scratches behind the knees, the boy was perfectly fine! There are many similar stories.

Now we come to my point: The spiritual is not a separate reality apart from material reality. In material reality there is always room for the spiritual to act. In other words, what we call reality has both a material and a spiritual side.

 

The Good Shepherd

During the time Jesus Christ walked among men, he performed many miracles, and he lived through the whole of human existence. He called himself the Son of Man. What did he mean by that? In my experienced, the Son of Man expresses that the mighty God has come down to us. He became a human being among human beings, and fully lived through what it means to be a human being on earth. This makes him the good shepherd. Jesus says: ?I am the good shepherd. I know mine, and mine know me? (John 10:14). Whatever we experience of difficulties, pains, and sufferings, he has already been there, because he knows what it means to be a human being.

It is a problem that the meaning of the imagery of the Bible is becoming lost on the people of our time. A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to experience what the Bible means by the good shepherd. I was vacationing on one of the Greek islands. One evening at sunset, I sat on a rock by the shore and played the flute. Close by I saw a shepherd with a flock of sheep coming out on a headland. The sheep spread out and grazed all over the headland. After a while, I saw the shepherd lift his staff and call to the sheep. They immediately came to him. Then he started walking, with all the sheep following. It was a beautiful sight. From experience I know how difficult it is to move sheep. What a trusting relationship this shepherd had with his sheep!

 

Christ’s return is about help

Jesus told the disciples a parable about how they should always pray and not lose heart: ?In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought.??And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ?Grant me justice?against my adversary.???For some time, he refused. But finally, he said to himself, ?Even though I don?t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won?t eventually come and attack me!??

And the Lord said, ?Hear what this dishonest judge is saying! Should not God help his chosen ones to their right, those who cry out to him day and night? Is he late to help them? I tell you; he will make sure they get their due soon. But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?? (Luke 18:2?8)

Here several interpretations are possible regarding the phrase: ?But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?? One interpretation is concrete, that he will come again in a physical form. But this does not correspond well with what the Gospel of John tells us. Christ?s work as a human being among men was accomplished on the cross: ?Jesus now knew that all things were accomplished, and that the scripture might be fulfilled, which he said, I thirst. There was a tub there with vinegar. They filled a sponge with it, put the sponge on a hyssop stalk and held it up to his mouth. When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, ?It is finished!? Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit? (John 19:28?30)

But there are several possibilities: We can imagine that Jesus? return means that we will see him in spiritual form as a vision or see him as the disciples saw him after the resurrection. A strange statement contradicts this:

In John 16:10, Jesus says, ?Righteousness is that I go to the Father, and you see me no more.? It is easy to understand, after all the human evil Jesus experienced, that the righteousness was going to the Father. Justice is his exalted position with Father. The Bible says that there will come a day when everyone sees this. Jesus says: ?Then shall the sign of the Son of man appear in heaven; and all the peoples of the earth shall cry out with lamentation, and they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. When the trumpet sounds, he shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather his chosen ones from the four corners of the world, from one end of heaven to the other? (Matt 24).

 

Justice and exaltation

This is not about coming to help us, but for all people to see his power and glory. But what does the phrase ?and you see me no more? have to do with justice?

Being visible means that we can directly experience the goodness and love of Jesus, but it also opens for injustice in the form of debasement and humiliation, as we have seen from his earthly life. The justice is that it is no longer possible to expose him to such things.

The Bible thus talks of two returns. One is when we will see his power and glory on the last day. He gathers his elect. The old Earth and the sky will perish, and a new Earth and sky will appear. The second return, the subject of my book, is different. This is about help and support. Jesus assures his chosen ones that he will always hear their prayers and help them. But when the Son of Man expresses himself in earthly reality, will his chosen ones believe in him? He assures us that he will come to our assistance, but he will come in a way that requires faith, that is, enough faith for us to receive him. For he will not be open to negativity from. The justice is that he is exalted to the Father. But neither can he, to help men, appear with great power and glory. In that case it would be a sight so overwhelming, the origin of all goodness would prove so strong, that all evil would have to give way to it. The freedom to choose between good and evil would then not be possible.

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Like a thief in the night

Therefore, the Son of Man comes in silence, like a thief in the night, as Lasse experienced it. Man knows him on the inside and the help is manifested in the outer objective reality. The Son of Man turns out to be the good shepherd. He leads the way and shows the way here on Earth.?It is not about seeing the figure of Jesus, but about hearing him. As in the aforementioned quote: ?While he was still speaking, a bright cloud came and overshadowed them, and a voice came from the cloud, ?This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear him!??

This help gives certainty, as Lasse got certainty. He received warning signs, such as the ?red moped?, in times of danger. He learned how to survive oppression and humiliation, as in his ?military service.? And how to act powerfully, such as the ?cannon salute?. What is mentioned in the book are just a few of many such incidents. The premise is a belief that Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, can appear in this way on earth. Lasse experienced the truth, first in his heart, but this was associated with uncertainty and doubt. When the truth was also confirmed outwardly, he was assured.

But it is all about love, first and foremost. Love of the truth, love of our fellow human beings, and love of life. Love for Him who says, ?I am the way, the truth, and the life? (John 14:6).

 

About myself

I was born in Oslo in 1947 (in Oscar Street 52, as mentioned in the book).

Life has given me many different experiences. I grew up near the central Oslo, and roamed the busy city streets, the park of the Royal Palace and the piers from the age of 6.

I started a university education and completed the basic course in psychology before I was called up for civilian service, which I served in a clinic for drug addicts. There I met the first wave of young drug addicts who gathered in the park of the Royal Palace in Oslo. This led to a commitment to alternative treatment and a pioneering effort to establish collectives for young people with substance abuse problems, behavioural difficulties, and criminal records. I have lived and worked for 16 years in such collectives. During this time, I also got significant practice in farming and animal husbandry, forestry and timber logging.

Later, I took further education and worked as a teacher at a Waldorf school but had to quit after a few years due to illness. In the last part of my professional life, I worked as an archivist at two cultural institutions.

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?Contact: forlagetveien@gmail.com