Wholeness

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“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” John 10:10

Theme: “[1]God says: “I have separated you from all the nations around you in order that you might be mine.” The word holiness is derived from the same root from which a very attractive English word comes. This word is wholeness. So holiness means wholeness, being complete. And if you read wholeness in place of holiness everywhere you find it in the Bible, you will be much closer to what the writers meant. We all know what wholeness is. It is to have together all the parts which were intended to be there, and to have them functioning as they were intended to function.” Ray C . Stedman

Ten days ago a friend of mine send me an e-mail containing an article from the New York Times. The article is called “When humans transcend biology” and is signed by Cathy Young. There, she discusses some of the issues that are starting to creep in about the whole issue of human genetics and genetic engineering. Writing in a recent issue of The Weekly Standard, Wesley J. Smith, discusses a symposium, “Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights”, held at Stanford Law School in May. Some speakers are obsessed with achieving immortality, and others with uplifting animals to a human level of intelligence. Some talk about changing human biology so that women could have babies without any male input and men could become biological mothers by gestating fetuses inside their bodies. Still others speak with praise of a transhumanist pioneer known as ``the Catman," who has undergone cosmetic surgeries to make himself look like a cat.

On Friday, I read an interview to a producer of a TV show called “The Swan”. I don’t have cable, so I never seen it, but it seems that they invest a lot of money in women to make them beautiful and then, whoever is the most beautiful, will compete in a Beauty Contest. The producer says: “These women come to us because they are looking for in a TV show something that life has not given them.” She also goes further and explains that there are three basic human needs: to be rich, to be beautiful and to find true love.

Reading this stories I wonder if what this people is thinking and planning is really aligned with what God intended for us since the beginning.

Jean Vanier writes that “we all have to choose between two ways of being crazy: the foolishness of the Gospel and the non-sense of the values of our world”

In the book of Leviticus we find this verse, which defines everything in our relationship with God: “You shall be holy to me; for I the LORD am holy, and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.” (Leviticus 20:26)

“God is saying to these people of Israel, "I have separated you from all the nations around you in order that you might be mine." When we Christians read this, we must understand that we are the people of God today. What God said to Israel he also says to us, for in the new relationship we have in Jesus Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile; there is but one man, one body in Christ. The promises which appear in picture form in the Old Testament belong also to us who live this side of the cross.” (Ray Stedman, 2005)

Right there, in this passage we find that phrase that many wish it were not there: “You are to be Holy to me” (NIV).

I don’t know what you think about the word “Holy” but, for me, for a long time, it didn’t bring any special consideration and, in fact, it meant something totally different.

I had the image of really arrogant people, coming every Sunday to church to fulfill their task of warming a bench for an hour and then going out again to the world, untouched by what their heard or what they seen. Out to the world to continue an interminable cycle of gossip and anger; of guilt trips and broken lives.

Do you know anybody like that? This kind of people doesn’t make it attractive to be holly.

However, when I went to find the meaning of the word, I found out that the Hebrew word is qodesh; which means “set apart”, a “consecrated thing”. [2]. And there is a verse in Psalm 29 (Psalm 29:2) that in the KJV, translates as “Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name; worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.” The same passage repeats in 1 Chronicles 16:29.

If we have a distorted version of “Holly”, I should ask myself, what is so beautiful about “Holiness”?

Other people may pick up this idea of “Holly” as separated and associate it with strangeness, apartness, as though holy people are weird, peculiar individuals who live out in the desert somewhere, remote from the rest of us. They are "different."

But, in the Bible, this idea of Holly is not the real thing. If you want to get at the meaning of this word, you must go back to its original root. Old English Hãlig, of Germanic origin. The word holy shares its root with another interesting word. This word is wholeness. So holiness means wholeness, being complete. (Stedman, 2005)

And if you read wholeness in place of holiness everywhere you find it in the Bible, you will be much closer to what the writers meant.

We all know what wholeness is. It is to have together all the parts which were intended to be there, and to have them functioning as they were intended to function.

[Genesis 1] ³¹ God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. [Genesis 2] ¹ Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.

God finished a complete and balanced creation. That creation includes us, humans. When we’re not complete and in balance, our life falls apart.

Ask somebody that is going trough divorce or, maybe somebody that lost his/her job and is trying to come up with a solution for all those bills piling up.

They strive to be “whole” again, and move away from a broken state. But a lot of times, it seems impossible. Is an intimidating task.

God is saying to this people, all people, "you shall be whole, because I am whole." Because God is complete; he is perfect. He sees the way we live and what we did with our world and says "You too, shall be whole."

That word wholeness has power to awaken desire within us. We long to be whole people. (Stedman, 2005)

Don't you? Don't you want to be what God made you to be, with all the ingredients of your personality expressed in balance? That is what the book of Leviticus, for example, is all about. In fact, so is the whole Bible.

We know that we are broken. We know how much it hurts to live without God in our lives. But, also, God knows how much we’re suffering and the way we are.

Man has lost his way. He was made in the image of God. When man first came from the hand of God, he was whole. Adam functioned as God intended man to function.

All our knowledge brings us only closer to our ignorance, 
And our ignorance brings us closer to death. 
But closeness to death does not bring us closer to God.

Isn't that the question so many millions are asking today? Where is the life I have lost in trying to live? What on earth am I missing?

The word wholeness has power to awaken desire within us. But there are different types of desire.

St Augustine says, “The whole life of the good Christian is holy desire”. He knew what he was talking about. As a pagan he spend a lot of time and money pursuing good wine, good food, good art and no-so-good women. But he realized that all those desires where God-given; all those scattered desires where part of one central longing for God.

He prayed for God to gather together his “scattered longings” and keep them in their proper place.

“I had my back to the light and my face turned towards the things upon which the light fell” Only by turning his face to the light, he could see Who was the source of the light. ( P. Yancey, 2003)

In front of the place we live now, there is a bush covering part of the house. It’s a nice bush that needs constant care. I just realized, looking from one side, that it has grown crooked. You can’t notice from the street, but its branches had grown tilted toward the front of the house, away from the wall. It has grown toward the fresh air and toward the light. I thought, ”Well, plants know where is the source of life”.

Even the wild animals know who’s God, but not humans. We don’t know or we forget. We ask: “What do we need to be complete?” And we start looking for it in the wrong places, filling up our lives with weird stuff: drugs, cosmetics, toys, gadgets, cruises, bigger TV’s, bigger sound systems.

³³In the synagogue there was a man possessed by a demon, an evilspirit. He cried out at the top of his voice, ³⁴"Ha! What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!"

³⁵"Be quiet!" Jesus said sternly. "Come out of him!" Then the demon threw the man down before them all and came out without injuring him. [Luke 4;33-35 NIV]

I still have friends wondering if God actually is real. In Italy, a guy sued the Catholic Church because they keep saying that Jesus was real and he said that there’s no proof for that.

To be whole again we need to have access to Him who is the only one that can make it happen.

I see a great connection here between what Jesus says in John 10:10. “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” and what is recorded in Leviticus 20:26. We can make a remix saying, “You are to by whole and live a full life”

He says that in the context of a passage where he is talking about sheep and wolves: “⁷Therefore Jesus said again, "I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep. ⁸All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. ⁹I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture.

I must confess that for a long time I had a real issue with being called a sheep. But I read a story that it may clarify what the sheep and the wolves are.

During the WWII, the Nazis took over a little town in Poland called Josefow. Major Wilhelm Trapp received the order of cleaning the town of Jews. Specifically, he was supposed to send the men to a concentration camp and kill the rest: women, children and senior citizen. Confronted with that order he talked to his men and gave them the choice of going ahead with the massacre or not. They could choose not to do it. Only a handful of them choose not to kill these innocent people. The rest spend an entire day shooting.

Stories like that bring up front what it means to be a wolf, and what it means to be a sheep.

I believe that it is better not to use people for my own goals and work toward everyone’s salvation.

Jesus says that He is the good shepherd. The only one. The rest are fake. The rest are wolves.

One of my favorites is Psalm 100:3  “Know that the LORD is God. It is he who made us, and we are his ; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.”

John 15:4 “Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me ⁵ "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing

Jesus came to give us a full life. He says that and I believe it. What it’s hidden behind that phrase is a central issue of Identity.

It is one thing to be forgiven; it is another thing to become more and more and more the person God made you to be.

If we have only a simplistic understanding of salvation, saying basically that our sins are forgiven and we can go to Heaven, then salvation it only becomes a ticket. A ticket to ride. In that sense, eternity is something that kicks in when we die.

But Jesus did not teach this. Jesus said that when we believe, we have crossed over from death to life (John 5:25). God always has been and always will be. And when I enter in a relationship with God through Jesus, I am connected with God now and I will be connected with God forever. For Jesus, salvation is now. (Rob Bell, 2005)

That’s why God spend a lot of time training his people in Leviticus. To have a whole, full life. Now. In the desert, in our way home.

Being a Christian is not cutting yourself off from real life; it is entering into it more fully.

The journey-to-how-things-really-are needs some method, of course. We can’t just go to sleep and then wake up wise the next day. I wrote down some of those elements that can help us to understand who God is and how to get closer to him. I wrote four, but here could be more and this is not the final order:

Psalm 119:7 I will praise you with an upright heart as I learn your righteous laws.

Proverbs 24:32 I applied my heart to what I observed and learned a lesson from what I saw:

Ezekiel 3: 1 He told me, "Son of man, eat what you see. Eat this book. Then go and speak to the family of Israel." 2-3 As I opened my mouth, he gave me the scroll to eat, saying, "Son of man, eat this book that I am giving you. Make a full meal of it!" So I ate it. It tasted so good—just like honey.

Acts 2:42 [The Fellowship of the Believers] They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

1 John 1:6 If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.

1 John 1:7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

It is startling to realize that everyone worships! Everybody! Everywhere! Worship is the fundamental drive of life. Atheists worship. Infidels worship. Skeptics worship. Even Republicans and Democrats worship. Lawyers, insurance agents, and even Internal Revenue Service agents worship! All people worship for worship is the fundamental difference between humans and animals. Animals do not worship. They have no sense of the beyond or of the numinous. But God has placed eternity in man's heart, as the book of Ecclesiastes tells us (Ecclesiastes 3:11). This urge causes men everywhere to worship. If they are not worshipping the true God, they are worshipping a god of their own composition. Worship, therefore, is a universal phenomenon.(Ray Stedman, 2005)

And I have to tell you, if I still have your attention, the biblical worship depicted in books like the Psalms or Exodus, was, compared with our worship, really “untamed”, to put it mildly.

Exodus 23:25 Worship the LORD your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water. I will take away sickness from among you,

Psalm 29:2 Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name; worship the LORD in the splendor Psalm 100 (NLT)

One of the songs I had introduced lately, is called “God Alive” and is, basically, Psalm 149. I just put it to a new tune and choose some words that will guide us trough the meaning of worship.

Mathew 28: ¹⁹ Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. ²⁰Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age."

There is a song that my daughter has been singing during this week. It says: I’ve got the Joy of the Lord on my heart/ I can’t keep it to myself/I’ve got to give it away.

Either we choose to share the joy of the Lord with others or we just shut up and let the world do its job.

The job of the world seems to be changing biological functions and leading us to believe that we can be cats, or snakes, or even worse, wolves.

The job of the world seems to be to convince us that the only reason we’re here is to be rich, to be beautiful and find our true love.

So, if we believe that wholeness is to have together all the parts which were intended to be there, and to have them functioning as they were intended to function, that means that a fundamental change has to happen in our life.

Wholeness in our daily lives; wholeness in our relationships; wholeness in our churches; wholeness as a way of life.

Dedicating time to studying and learning the Word, to fellowship with other Christians; dedicating time for worship and time, above all, to tell everybody else the Good News of Christ resurrected, the only one that takes the sins of the World.

There is a song in the last album by U2, called “Yahweh” that talks about being whole again and I think is also a beautiful prayer:

“YAHWEH”, by U2, from the Album “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb”. 2004 Universal Music International BV under exclusive license to Interscope Records. Lyrics by Bono and The Edge.

[1] http://www.raystedman.org/leviticus/leviticus.html

[2] Interesting enough, a similar word qadesh, is used to signify a temple prostitute.

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