The bible according to Alice
Ok, so it’s a little weird to think Lewis Carroll’s “Alice through the looking glass” tells a message like the bible, but there’s a connection. Someone once said that theater holds a mirror up to life; but there’s a problem they forget, a mirror reverses the image! I think we’ve already gone through the mirror and are living in Alice’s wonderland! Look at how we’ve got everything backwards; the “i am” versus “I AM” dilemma (here), and thinking that this life is normality rather than what we were actually created to be.
For example, I have a friend who tries to decompose God as if He were something merely complicated (like a computer); instead of understanding God is simply complex, like love. The thing about complicated objects is that with enough studying you can understand it all. The thing about complexity is that you can never fully understand, and in trying to you miss the underlying simplicity – like love is so simple and yet so complex.
The bible is full of comment about this topsy-turvy view we tend to hold, and Jesus teaches us again and again to turn it around, to go back through the looking glass to find reality! As one song says, the real reality is the “inside, outside, upside down kingdom, where you lose to gain and die to live”, and again “I’m in love with a King who became a servant, a God who is humble. You’ve got to go down if you want to go up, you’ve got to go lower if you want to go higher and higher”.
Jesus says it in so many ways, such as Luke 13:30 and 14:10, or the more worrying warning in 7:31-35. Again and again in Scripture we see the message “You’ve got it wrong! God and His glory come first, you come second. But being second to God puts you first!” I hadn’t realized, but this thought has been a thread that’s run through all I’ve written over the last 5 weeks!!! And I come back to two weeks ago (here) – when will we hear, when will we see?
Pray that we do not have to wait to become so frightened in order to put aside our petty self interests, and only then to step back through the looking glass to see God!
“Tweedledum and Tweedledee |
Just then flew down a monstrous crow, |