Touching Transcendence

Now Jacob went out from Beersheba and went toward Haran. So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And behold, the LORD stood above it and said: "I am the LORD God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants... and in you and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go... for I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you." Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it." And he was afraid and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!"

The universal human longing to touch something beyond ourselves is not an accident of evolution — it is evidence that we were made for the transcendent God.

A Vision of Something Bigger

Our vision as a church is life in connection with God. We believe it is possible for human beings to have a connection with a great God, and this year we're framing that biblically and considering how we make the case for this proposition: that it is possible to live life in connection with the transcendent God.

Genesis 28 records a story about a man named Jacob, who lived about 4,000 years ago. At this moment in his life he is fleeing his homeland because his older brother has vowed to kill him — which tells you something about Jacob's character. As he sleeps, he has a dream of a ladder set up on the earth reaching to heaven, with angels ascending and descending, and the Lord standing above it. When he awakes, he confesses, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it." He came in contact with something bigger and beyond himself, and he was struck with fear and awe.

Have You Ever Touched Transcendence?

Have you ever had the sense that you came in contact with something bigger or beyond yourself — what we call a transcendent experience? For some it came standing at an overlook above a grand landscape, like the Grand Canyon, where you feel small and sense the scale of everything before you. For others it came looking through a telescope at distant galaxies, realizing that even one inch of dark sky may hold millions of stars — or looking through a microscope at the cellular level, peering into a different depth of the cosmos.

For some it happened in the back of an ambulance or in a hospital bed. Maybe you watched the birth of your child and felt the reality of life, or stood at the bedside of someone departing this world and were confronted with mortality. It is that distinct recognition that this world is not all there is — that there's something beyond what we perceive with our five senses or test in a laboratory. It is feeling small in the presence of a Presence, capital P, and being moved to awe.

The Witness of Scripture

That is exactly what Jacob experienced. Up to that moment, God had been to Jacob just stories he'd heard from his grandfather Abraham and his father Isaac. Then he had a transcendent encounter and confessed, "How awesome is this place!"

Isaiah had a similar experience. In Isaiah 6 he saw the Lord high and lifted up, with the seraphim — Hebrew for "burning ones" — crying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts." His response was, "Woe is me, for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips." Peter experienced it after the miraculous catch of fish in Luke 5, falling down and saying, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." The apostle John experienced it on Patmos in Revelation 1, falling at the feet of the risen Jesus as dead, until Jesus laid His hand on him and said, "Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last." In each case, someone comes in contact with something perceived to be beyond this reality.

A Universal Desire

Even though we live in a hyper-modern, naturalistically minded society that assumes everything is just physical and material, tens of millions of people are longing for transcendent experience. That longing resides in everyone who meditates, prays, or fasts. I suggest it exists in people who climb El Capitan without ropes, who jump out of airplanes, and in many who take mind-altering substances. Believers and skeptics alike are longing for connection to something bigger.

Point one: our universal desire for transcendence reveals something significant about our essential nature. Every one of the seven and a half billion conscious human beings on this planet has an inclination toward and a desire for transcendence — believer and skeptic alike. This longing indicates that we are fundamentally and distinctly different from other creatures. As far as we can observe, no animal gathers for religious ritual to touch some distant reality. But human beings do this constantly.

Consider Sam Harris, a neuroscientist who writes atheistically and denies transcendent realities, yet is deeply into meditation and hallucinogenic drugs because of the experiences that come with them. As a Christian I believe we were made by God, in His image, to be connected to Him as an expression of His greatness and for His glory — and this radical reality is evidenced by the fact that every human being longs for transcendence.

Coded for Connection

The study of these things is called phenomenology, and there is little consensus among researchers about how to explain such ecstatic experiences, which appear in virtually every culture. Here is the amazing thing: scientists in laboratories can trigger these experiences — through extended fasts or certain substances — yet the very science that triggers them cannot explain them. When independent people undergo the same experience and see the same things, researchers admit they don't know how to account for it.

Point two: we are coded for connection with something bigger and beyond ourselves. Evolutionary scientists argue this inclination is a result of natural selection — a "bug" in our makeup. But the Christian says it is not a bug, it is a feature. God created us in His image to be connected to Him, and the thing we long to connect to is not a thing at all but a Person.

Two Conceptions of Reality

Every human culture, now and in the past, has a religious orientation. Even those who say they are non-religious hold their non-religion religiously. The anthropologist says we evolved this drive because it bound us tribally and helped us succeed as a species, but now that we're so advanced — as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens argued — we've outgrown religion and don't need it. Theologians say the opposite: we are made for this, it is hardwired into us, and we cannot get rid of it.

This may be the view of people in your own family or workplace. They look at your church, your giving, your prayer, and roll their eyes. How does a Christian respond? First, acknowledge that the skeptic's assertion is just that — an assertion. Every statement of faith, including "there is no God," needs to be backed with argument, evidence, or proof. Peter told Christians in 1 Peter 3:15 to "always be ready to give a defense" — an apologetic — for the hope within us. If you hope to be with God when you die, what evidence supports your claim? Likewise, the skeptic must give an apologetic reason for the non-hope within them.

So there are two conceptions of reality. The Christian says every human desires a transcendent experience because there is something beyond this reality — God, who created us for connection with Him. The skeptic says there is nothing beyond the material world and transcendence is merely an illusion of the brain.

Five Evidences for Transcendence

Point three: if something bigger or beyond exists, then there must be evidence of its existence. Let me give five evidences — there are far more.

First, our universal desire for transcendence. That every human being has this desire for something beyond this reality is itself evidence that such a reality exists. This is one of the earliest philosophical proofs for God's existence, formulated in the eleventh century by St. Anselm of Canterbury in his Proslogion — the ontological argument, from the Greek ontos, meaning being or existence. That conscious human beings universally have an awareness of and desire for a transcendent being is itself an evidence that the being exists.

Second, the historical accounts of transcendent encounters. The Bible is filled with hundreds of transcendent encounters of real people in history — John, Peter, Isaiah, Jacob. History supports that these men existed. Beyond that, all of Western culture and indeed all of human history was fundamentally altered 2,000 years ago by the testimony of a group of people who said they had a transcendent encounter: that God became a man, Jesus Christ, who lived a perfect life, performed miracles, was crucified, buried, and rose from the dead, and was seen by more than 500 eyewitnesses. That is a weighty something.

Prophecy and the Survival of Israel

Third, prophetic fulfillment. For years I've taught Isaiah and Jeremiah at a local Bible college, and I tell my students that prediction and fulfillment are like God's fingerprints on a crime scene. A prediction made and then fulfilled in history hundreds of years later indicates One outside of time who sees the end from the beginning — the One who calls Himself the Alpha and the Omega.

Consider one prophetic through-line, almost 4,000 years long, beginning in Genesis 12: the existence of Israel. God promised the childless 75-year-old Abraham a son and countless descendants and the land of Canaan forever. Twenty-five years later Sarah bore Isaac, whose name means "laughter." Four hundred years later his descendants had become a great nation and received the land under Joshua.

But they did not simply hold it. The Assyrians removed a portion, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the temple and took them captive — yet through Isaiah, God had named Cyrus of Persia as their deliverer 200 years before he was born, and Cyrus indeed sent them home. Then the Greeks took the land, and the Romans expelled them in the early second century AD. For nineteen hundred years they existed as a dispersed people without a homeland — until May 14, 1948, when the modern State of Israel was established. Today we watch this nation, of whom Zechariah said 2,500 years ago that it would be a trouble to all the world. What's the probability there's no transcendent reality?

Miracles, Near-Death Experiences, and Personal Answer

Fourth, contemporary transcendent experiences — miracles and near-death experiences. Hundreds of millions of people say they have personally experienced or witnessed a miracle. Either they are lying, they are deluded, or it actually happened. Are we willing to say that potentially half the population of the United States is delusional? Craig S. Keener, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, has written an extensive two-volume work documenting verified, substantial miracles in our own day.

Near-death experiences blow my mind. Dr. Jeffrey Long, an oncologist, says there is currently more scientific evidence for the reality of near-death experiences than for how to effectively treat certain forms of cancer, and he founded a foundation cataloging thousands of these accounts. One, recorded by researcher Dr. Kimberly Clark Sharp in the book Imagine Heaven, tells of a woman named Maria who suffered a severe heart attack. After resuscitation, Maria described not only watching the doctors work on her from above, but traveling outside the building and observing a tennis shoe on a third-story window ledge — a man's left-footed shoe, dark blue, with a wear mark over the little toe and a lace tucked under the heel. Sharp went window to window on the third floor and found the shoe, exactly as Maria described it. Statistically, one in twenty-five people has had a near-death experience — meaning four to six of you here today may have.

Fifth, personal experience. In late June 2007 my wife and I were newlyweds living at my parents' house when we received an unexpected bill for just under $1,200 — more than we had. Standing in the driveway as I left for church, my wife said, "We should pray." My pastoral cynicism rose up, but she is more spiritual than I am, so we prayed a simple prayer: "God, would You please provide for this bill."

That evening, as I set up for the service, a man shook my hand and left a slip of paper in it. I looked at it later — a check for $1,000. The next day at the Sunday service, another man shook my hand and left a folded $100 bill. The day after that, I found a check in the mailbox for $80.97 — I know the exact amount because I still have the Excel spreadsheet. In 48 hours, based on a prayer only my wife and I prayed, about a bill no one else knew about, God used three independent people to provide the exact amount. What's the probability there's no evidence for transcendence?

God Is, and He Is Not Silent

Point four: evidence abounds for the existence of a reality beyond the reality we know. "Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, 'Surely the Lord was in this place, and I did not know it.'" A skeptic calls Jacob's account an unsubstantiated metaphysical claim, but many skeptics will not consider the evidence that contradicts their assertion.

Why? Paul wrote in Romans 1 that what may be known of God is manifest in them, for since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, so that they are without excuse — yet they did not glorify Him as God, and they worshiped the creation rather than the Creator. They "did not like to retain God in their knowledge." As Richard Weaver wrote in Ideas Have Consequences, "Nothing good can come when the will is wrong." The skeptic disbelieves not because of a lack of evidence, but because he or she does not want to believe in God — for to believe is to be morally accountable to Him.

Point five: the evidence reveals that God is, and He is not silent — the title of Francis Schaeffer's book. And Hebrews 11 says He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. So I want to finish by encouraging you to seek Him diligently — in prayer, in the Scriptures, in worship, in the gathering of the body of Christ. Jesus said he who seeks will find. The more I seek Him, the more I experience the reality of God in this world in a way I cannot explain by scientific rationality alone.

Closing Prayer

God, I pray that You would stir us — as people who believe in the living God and have even experienced Your reality in this world — to share that with other people. There are people we know who need to know that You exist and that we have experienced Your presence through answered prayer, through dreams, through visions, through Your interaction in our lives. Stir us to share it, even when we feel embarrassed or weird, so that others would know life through Jesus and life in connection with You. Do that work in us, we pray. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.