Upon finishing a first read of the entire Bible cover to cover over the course of the three years ending in my 25th, I paused to take note of what I had learned. Regrettably, it had simply reinforced what I had already discovered from my previous quarter century of study while attending church – namely that the Bible contains many seemingly conflicting statements regarding the nature of God and the bounds of his patience towards his rebellious creation. Accompanying each favorable promise on God’s part was the inevitable disclaimer starting with “but if” and followed inevitably by the list of conditions which clearly no honest man could ever claim to uphold.
The Biblical narrative had left me quite underwhelmed with the image of such an inadequate God contained therein. And in spite of most Christian apologist’s claims to the contrary, the New Testament really did not appear to provide much of an improvement over the Old when it came to the revelation of a more compassionate Deity. It was no wonder that even “Gospel” sermons had always left me squirming, as the preacher never failed to dig up at least one verse somewhere in the Bible to counteract the previously quoted assurance of irreversible salvation, thereby thwarting any possibility that I should dare exit the pew with any real confidence in the sufficiency of God’s love for me.
In spite of all such teaching to the contrary, my personal intuition of what must be the nature of the true God had by that time coalesced into a simple trust in His unconditional love. Having tangibly experienced an ample dose of this love from my parents and friends and from instruction in good psychology, I knew first hand of its reality and of its indispensable place in the nurturing of the human soul. And once tasted, no counterfeit would do, no matter what kind of false authority figure was claimed to have endorsed it. While the true God may not have left any reliable written account of his character, it was nonetheless evident in my experience.
Still I hoped that a clearer record might be found, some kind of external objective manifestation to verify my innate personal inspiration. And then it arrived, appearing in the form of an extraordinary little book entitled “Unveiled glory”, written by the fairly well known English author, Hannah Hurnard. Through the things she experienced on the mission field in Israel, accompanied by much internal mental anguish and heartfelt questioning, she came to see that the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ was not so much done as a requirement for our salvation, but rather to once and for all remove the veil from our eyes as to who God really is. And what we behold is One that will stop at nothing to redeem the entire fallen creation. And it was at the closing seconds of that incarnation when Jesus declared on the Cross “It is finished”. The tangible revelation of His immeasurable love for us had been delivered. The veil had been torn from within and without. Thus the title, “Unveiled Glory”.
Upon viewing the life of Christ through this glory-ous lens, it dawned on me that the living God I had come to know existentially was in fact one in the same as the God of the Biblical record. A clear image of God was thereby etched into my mind’s eye which matched precisely with what had already been formed in my Spirit. And lo and behold the Bible came alive to me in a way I never dreamed possible. Not only was its message more profound than anything I had ever read of other religions, but it was really the only description of a God that actually put his money where his mouth is within the very real timeline of history by becoming fully immersed in the messy creative process that he himself had initiated here on planet earth. At long last, what was presented to my most grateful awareness was an image of my Creator that appeared not only worthy of my worship but for which the love of my heart, mind, and soul effortlessly poured forth.
What follows are the highlights of this spiritual awakening as presented in the pages of Hannah’s book. The entire text (~ 80 pages) of this out of print work has recently been transcribed to a PDF file and will soon appear on a website I have yet to create. Until that time, for anyone interested in receiving a copy, I would be happy to send it by email.
Now just one more thing before we get started. Soon after reading her book and having unsuccessfully contacted the publisher in England to obtain more copies, I was fortunate to have been given the opportunity to meet with Hannah and stay overnight in a home where she had come to speak to those interested in her writings while on a rare visit to the United States. She was a sweet soft spoken lady with a sincere dedication to the God to whom she had dedicated her whole life’s work on the mission field. When I arrived at the meeting place I was quite surprised to find something less than a standing-room-only crowd of those who had come to enjoy the words of this prolific writer. No, there were just two people seated there in the living room of her friend’s home, a mother and son.
Though at first stunned by the lack of interest in meeting this popular Christian author (check out her numerous other works on Amazon), I quickly remembered that such has always been the general ambivalence to matters unconditional. Of the three of us who had come to listen to her speak, only I had been exposed to “Unveiled Glory”, the pinnacle of her writings by far, one of her necessarily self published books of “heresy” which no publisher in America would touch.
The book traces the story of the natural unfolding of her own Biblical understanding through the very disturbing experiences she encountered on the mission fields of the Holy Land. Violence between the British soldiers and the Muslim population was a continuous reality of that environment during the years before Israel became a nation in 1948. It was in this volatile setting that her spiritual journey on several occasions had been steered away from a longstanding attachment to traditional doctrines now found inadequate to the task at hand. She was compelled to ask the tough questions raised by the horrors set before her. Fearing that even their asking may be “heretical”, she knew they must be addressed head on without delay. In each case she overcame her fear of righteous admonishment through an honest plea for a better understanding from the Lord of Love, as she often referred to Him.
This was all so reminiscent of my own unresolved personal struggles with these same Biblical doctrines. But here at last, with the turn of each page of Hannah’s book, a growing sense of excitement and anticipation was building, soon to break forth into sheer delight as it became ever so clear to me that the Holy Book of my youth not only contained a detailed description of the God I had come to know, but that this was its central thesis. The buried treasure of historical confirmation which I had hoped to find had been sitting hidden in plain sight right there in my own backyard all along.
Throughout her striving with all these controversial spiritual topics it had been her steadfast rule not to ignore scriptures which did not seem to fit the image of God for which her heart longed to embrace. Her belief in the Bible as the absolute inerrant Word of God was never in question. Instead of selecting one set of verses over another when there appeared to be conflicting messages, she would wait upon the Spirit to reveal the higher meaning which would allow the seeming contradictory Biblical messages to be resolved into one harmonious principle. While this insistence on Biblical inerrancy was certainly not in line with my own perspective, it did provide an extra level of confirmation for my personal beliefs when Hannah was able to find complete agreement between them and the totality of the Scriptures.
Her book is broken down into just five chapters, each one dealing with a single aspect of the life of Christ as it served to unveil some crucial but heretofore hidden attribute of the Father’s character. Chronologically the events in Christ’s life are presented in reverse order to their actual occurrence. So the first topic is the “Veil over the Glory of Christ’s Resurrection Victory”, followed by the “Glory Unveiled by the Resurrection”, then “The Glory Unveiled by the Descent into Hell”, the “Glory Unveiled by the Cross”, and finally the “Glory Unveiled by the Incarnation”.
A brief discussion of the major themes in each chapter is given below.
In the first chapter she relates various incidences involving real live suffering people in non-Christian surroundings which caused her to question the validity of the Biblical teaching concerning their apparent destiny in eternal damnation. These were people who had grown up in a literal “Hell on earth” in some of the darkest pits of despair imaginable and who were either unfortunate enough to never have heard the Gospel or even once having heard it had been preconditioned to reject it either through fear of reprisal from their “friends” or family, or were otherwise incapable of perceiving its value.
After providing graphic descriptions of these real life encounters and the resulting intense struggles between what she knew in her heart versus the apparent Word of God, the end of chapter poem sums up her joyous breakthrough after having made peace between the living God within and the Biblical God without. Here is that poem copied in full:
The cry of all distorted things!
Why hast Thou made us thus
To bear the anguish that life brings? –
Why didst Thou not love us?
So marred – that God Himself must weep,
Fit only for the rubbish heap.
The cry of every breaking heart,
Why were we born for this?
Anguish alone is made our part
And nothing of earth’s bliss.
Why didst Thou give us human birth
To live as sinners here on earth?
The cry of each despairing mind
Goes up before the Throne;
Behold us, God! or art Thou blind?
Can we be blamed alone?
If Thou be there, then answer us,
Why make us? or why make us thus?
And Love’s Voice answers from a cross,
I BEAR it all with you;
I share with you in all your loss,
I will make all things new.
None suffer in their sin alone,
I made – I bear – and I atone.
What an exhilarating expression of God’s unfailing love. If I had heard no further description of His heart towards His children than the last six lines of her prose, I believe that alone may prove sufficient to carry me through life’s many challenges with a sense of profound worship.
In the second chapter, covering the act of Resurrection, she points out that Christ’s body (representing all of mankind) was not allowed to remain in the grave but rather all members were restored to perfection, every part of that body fulfilling its God-ordained purpose in eternity. Once again, the poem at the end of the second chapter provides a clear summary of the content which precedes it:
Now is Christ risen from the dead!
Firstfruits of all the Race;
No more is Adam Mankind’s head,
But Christ doth take that place.
“In Adam” Mankind died in pain,
“In Christ shall all men live again!
Let Christ be preached that He arose!
Triumphant over sin,
His victory tell! Let none suppose
That death and Evil win.
No single member of our Race
But shall be quickened by His grace!
Let Christ be preached as RISEN LORD,
The Head of all Mankind;
In Him this fallen Race, restored,
New life and health shall find.
Three days and nights the Grave may boast
Then burst from thence Christ’s conquering host.
Yes, He shall reign – till every knee
Most willingly shall bow,
His enemies shall cease to be,
All men their love avow;
And joyful worship be outpoured
To Christ their crowned and chosen Lord.
Where is thy victory, O grave?
O death, where is thy sting?
The Son of Man doth all men save,
He shall be crowned as King.
All men from love of sin be won
This is the triumph of God’s Son.
In chapter three, the Descent into Hell, she takes a fresh look at a passage which is ironically most often used to reinforce the mandate that the gulf between Heaven and Hell is fixed forever so that no one may pass from one state to the other. The story in question is that of the Rich Man& Lazarus. Here she demonstrates how a more careful study of this tale shows Jesus to have chosen his words carefully in describing the redeeming power of receiving even just a glimpse of Heaven-sent Gospel while being seemingly stuck without hope in a self made Hell.
Further evidence of this principle is observed in Christ’s actions immediately following his own experience of feeling totally forsaken by the Father on the cross. It was at that very moment that he descended into Hell, not for his own sins but to demonstrate for us in time what God is doing continuously in His ever effective outreach to “…preach to the Spirits in prison” in order to “lead captivity captive” (I Peter 3:18-19 & Ephesians 4:8-10 NIV). She points out here that Christ has been given the keys to death and Hell for the purpose of freeing those found captive there (not as I recall a preacher to have once claimed, “to visit those in Hell in order to inform them that their condition was well deserved and hopelessly eternal”), and then to use those keys one last time to lock those gates closed before tossing both Death and Hell into the Lake of Fire.
The next chapter covering the Cross, I found to be the biggest eye opener of them all. I had always imagined that, while the suffering which Christ had experienced on the cross and during the days leading up to it was immense, it still seemed to me almost insignificant in duration at least, if not intensity as well, compared to what millions of innocent children suffer for their entire wretched lifetime on earth through no fault of their own, not to mention the countless examples of prolonged suffering on the part of so many of God’s quasi-innocent adult “children”.
How sobering and frightfully enlightening it was to consider that perhaps Christ’s suffering on earth was a mere window into what God has not only experienced from the beginning of time until now, but which He will endure without pause until the end of time when all suffering in all of creation shall cease. If for a moment the reader would consider the implications of Christ taking on the role of the Head of the Body (traditionally limited in concept to “the Church”, but now seen absolutely expanded to include all of Mankind) then the extent of his suffering is revealed to be of infinitely greater scope and magnitude than ever imagined. While we are allowed to suffer here and there over the course of one lifetime, He as the Head is fully conscious of every pain of every person everywhere and every-when. (Note: this is precisely what Angie Fenimore learned in her life-after-suicide encounter with Christ described in her book: “Beyond the Darkness”)
Thus it is immersed within the sinful state of all of mankind that our God is found to be continually crucified and thus constantly bearing the sins of the whole world, having been “…slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8 KJV) Now that speaks of suffering on a cosmic scale by a God thus proven eminently worthy of our trust. With Job I wholeheartedly proclaim… “though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him”. For he certainly would not needlessly prolong in anyone the suffering in which he intimately participates.
While this concept of a God of all pervasive participation in our grief may appear repulsive or degrading to God’s image to some readers, I would suggest that an image less tarnished by the effects of a fallen creation may appear coldly aloof to those living a literal hell on earth. For myself it has the effect of putting to rest any indignation I may experience when wondering how a loving God would “let that happen to innocent children” when he has the power to stop it – a legitimate charge so often railed at the Creator.
It is reminiscent of the scene in the movie “The Shack” when Mac accuses God the Father of not being there with his daughter in her greatest moment of need, to which God responds by revealing the nail wounds on his wrists, patiently explaining with heavy heart that he was there all along.
Hannah then goes on to relate a very powerful expression of this same sentiment through the work of an anonymous artist who has captured this same “vision” of God with great clarity. She writes:
“I have read that there is a picture in one of the art galleries in Europe which depicts the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. In that picture, Eden lies just behind them and an angel with a flaming sword guards the gate against their return. Before them stretches a waste of briars and thorns. But Adam and Eve are not pictured as looking back with sorrowful longing towards Eden, nor are they looking with shrinking fear at the wilderness before them. The artist has depicted them as looking up towards heaven, awestruck, and overwhelmed with horror at what they see, for a great cross has appeared in the heavens above them, and the One Whom they had known and worshipped in the Garden of Eden, is now nailed upon that cross.”
Such an iconic image. That says it all!
When I read those words it literally hurled me over the brink. I was left with the unmistakable conclusion that the Bible really is the best written account of our Heavenly Father’s absolutely irrevocable love for all of His creation. For not only does He refuse to leave our souls in Hell as the Psalmist proclaims, but He is positively committed to suffering there at our side for as long as we remain in that state, whether through our own stubborn will or in utter helplessness. At last a Deity that leads by example, a God who willingly accepts ultimate responsibility as the omnipotent Create-or rather than resting it squarely on the shoulders of his clearly impotent create-ed. (see future Blog post: “Responsibility & Glory: HIS vs ours”)
For me personally, that was the pinnacle of her story. From that point on I would naturally embrace a Christian identity, echoing Peter’s response to Jesus check on his loyalty… “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”
The remainder of the book builds on this same theme of the suffering God, thus making better sense of several other Biblical concepts which had heretofore remained obscure. First there is the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. I had never really understood why the practice of endlessly repeating that event had been given such prominent focus within the liturgy of the Church, albeit at Jesus’ request. It always seemed to emphasize the whole “satisfying Justice” aspect of his death that just left me uninspired. So it’s intended impact just didn’t penetrate my understanding until I looked at it from this new perspective.
Traditional teaching would lead us to believe that Christ’s act of dying on the cross was needed to satisfy justice as though God were not free to bring man to redemption without first paying homage at its throne – as though Justice and Love were on an equal footing, or worse yet that the requirement for justice reigns just a wee bit higher. While I agree it was essential for us to witness the length without measure that God would go to redeem his children, I would ardently contend that God’s sovereign hand was not bound by any such “legal” requirement. Rather God’s answer to Christ’s bloody cry of abandonment was that in fact there is no other way to break the bonds of sin upon mankind other than to actively demonstrate that there is nothing we can do (nor fail to do) that could alter his eterenal love for us all… and sometimes words just don’t cut it.
Hannah suggested that when Jesus implored us to “Do this in remembrance of me” and spoke of the bread of His broken body and the wine of His blood flowing forth from the wounds, he may have once again been opening up a window to heaven through which we could witness the ongoing drama of his Father’s suffering.
Could it be that he was in effect asking us to solemnly remember that His blood will continue to flow as long as the Body of Mankind remains broken into pieces in need of reconciliation both to each other and to their Father in Heaven. The message here is that he remains immanent in the Body of Mankind and however we treat our brother we are literally treating him in the same manner at the same time… “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these…” (Matthew 25:35-40 KJV) If we bleed, He bleeds.
Now there is a message that touches my soul, and I often remember it when I “sup”.
And once again a chapter ending poem sums it up as follows:
Love is the Lord! He hears each cry,
His gentleness is great,
No wounded heart will He pass by,
Nor leave it desolate.
For in His love he stoops to be
At ONE in all our misery.
Love is the Lord! Love casts out fear;
He breaketh all sin’s chains,
The sighs of sin-sick hearts He hears
And feeleth all their pains.
There is no wrong that men can do,
But God’s own Lamb must suffer too.
O understand it if you can,
(Tis Love Himself Who pleads)
Whene’er you wound a son of man
The Son of God still bleeds.
And not till sin is fully slain
Can God’s own heart be healed of pain.
At this point in her spiritual journey, having been given such an immense dose of soul stretching Grace, there still remained a basic question that many will have when exposed to this new understanding of God’s plan. It has to do with what may be termed the “Missionary Motive” or the “Great Commission” …“to go into all the world and preach the gospel”. It was really only in anticipation of her fellow missionary colleague’s objection to her new found Gospel understanding that she posed the question to herself — “If all will eventually come to Christ anyways”, she could hear them saying, “then why put out the effort required in reaching out to those outside the fold?”
The answer to this objection came easily to her for it was a subject close to her heart – Why go? … primarily for two reasons. First of all, as Paul explains, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18 NIV). We are God’s ambassadors of love to the whole world. Secondly, we do so out of our love of Christ, because it is only when the Gospel has been spread into the hearts of every last individual within his Body, forming an everlasting bond of love between us all, that He will allow Himself to come down from the Cross.
Here I must insert a comment from personal experience. With all of God’s “commands” such as that contained in the “Great Commission”, the proper response will flow quite naturally from those who have been exposed to the unadulterated Good News known as Gospel. It no longer takes effort on the part of the responder. In fact it would take greater effort to try to stop the flow of love from one struck by His present-s.
Last but not least, consider what God would have us learn of Him from the advent of the Incarnation itself? Jesus sums up the purpose of his earthly life this way: “I came into this world to reveal the truth” (John 18:37 KJV) … and “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father…” (John 14:9 NIV) “If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” (John 14:6-8 NIV) And Paul points out that: “The Son is the image of the invisible God…” (Colossians 1:15 NIV) And who is God? … “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is Love” (I John 4:8 NIV)
So, there you have it. God is Love!
Unveiled in Christ
Conveyed in Spirit
“Love…bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” and “Love never fails…” (I Corinthians 13:7,8 NKJV)
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P.S… As a prologue, Hannah provides some further support for her new found understanding of the Biblical message by addressing the common misconception that the doctrine of eternal Hell was unanimously embraced by the early leadership of the Church. Ample evidence exists in written documents from the first 400 years of the pre-Constantine Church, that there were many leaders who believed Hell to be a temporary place of teaching, one of “of last resort”, used for the final uprooting of the disease of sin.
Hannah includes but a few quotes from these early leaders of which I will pass on to you a couple of samples for your consideration:
Clement of Alexandria – “He saves all universally, but some are converted by punishment, others by voluntary submission.”
Jerome – “The Lord descended to the place of torment and punishment in which was the rich man, in order to liberate the prisoners.” “All God’s enemies shall perish – not that they shall cease to exist, but that they shall cease to be enemies”