Meaning: “conveying a significance that is not directly expressed . . .”
Gentle Reader, one important reason to read Scripture, including both Old and New Testament, is that Scripture includes multiple images of God’s restorative work. These images address the deepest yearnings of the human heart for help and hope and powerfully evoke the most meaningful understanding and blessing to come out of the Holy Bible and threaded throughout it—God’s restorative adventure in Christ Jesus.
With the approach of Advent (http://www.crivoice.org/cyadvent.html ), the time of celebration of the babe born in Bethlehem, recognized at the season of Advent as both the coming of God and God’s greatest gift to humankind, Christ Jesus is celebrated with adoring praise by fortunate believers year after year, generation after generation and century after century. To believers, this babe is the fulfillment of their yearning for help and hope (Matthew 1: 21, NKJV).
To ignore or miss this finding would certainly be a great loss for both the individual and humankind and most certainly for me.
Therefore, being that this is the first week of Advent (this Sunday is the 1st Sunday of Advent), there appears to me no finer time to embark upon the subject of what I call the miraculous beyond. You see, having explored the parameters of God’s restorative adventure elaborated in Scripture, I have become certain of yet another great thing—there is a realm of the miraculous beyond in the ordinary, at all times, Gentle Reader!
Life appears ordinary. But it is not.
A table appears stationary and ordinary, but its molecular components are in furious motion.
People live in dependence upon multitudes of simple-seeming gadgets, but technology is not by any means simple.
The world accepts its existence as sun, sea, land, air and sky, but now there is cyberspace to reckon with, too.
Scientists testify to countless dazzling phenomena involved in the ordinary supply of existence.
Christians celebrate the miraculous beyond with the coming of Immanuel, God with Us (Matthew 1:20-23, NKJV).
Meaning beyond the obvious—that’s what I see happening everywhere in life. And it is what Scripture promises is real Gentle Reader.
Amazing, is it not? In everything there is meaning beyond the obvious. It is a profound and established tenet of this life we share. Existence is full of the miraculous. It is full of mystery. It is full of wonder. It is full of adventure—the adventure of relating, exploring and discovery. And God is the Author, Master and Provider of it all.
Advent to me is the call to recognize and remember the miraculous beyond. And, to me, there is no more perfect figure to symbolize and embody this truth than the Son of God the Father—The Lord Jesus Christ, God with us by the power and presence of Holy Spirit.
The concept, the reality of a miraculous beyond is one of God’s finest gifts of understanding, Gentle Reader, given outstanding recognition in the Season of Advent. It is a gift He offers to each of us. Jesus as the embodiment and epitome of the reality of the miraculous beyond is without doubt the finest gift ever freely offered to one and all.
To be continued . . .
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