THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ON THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE

One day during prayer, the Lord lifts your mind’s eye to see a wonderfully weaved tapestry hanging in the courts of Heaven. Vivid images cover the vast tapestry top-to-bottom and form some kind of grand cosmic narrative. The tapestry tells a glorious tale, even though you can’t yet decipher it.

The tapestry is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. Threads of every vibrant color sway, shift, shine and pulsate all over the masterpiece, causing it to come alive, to actually breathe out its story. Each individual thread is somehow independently alive, but the threads also share a corporate life together as they seamlessly swirl and sway in unison.

The human and divine figures which are stitched on the surface of the tapestry actually move, speak and sing. To compare it to a movie screen would do it a gross injustice. It is a thousand times more panoramic, more communicative, more interactive, and more informative. It conveys a million things at once, and one thing a million different ways. It’s not just three dimensional, but four, five six-dimensional, and beyond. It’s holographic, fractal and mesmerizing.

Everything on the tapestry is occurring simultaneously. Whatever the story is, it’s not linear at all. It’s more like a swirling spiral of events, explanations and exhortations. In fact, because it’s so overwhelming, your vision gets blurry because you can’t keep up with all the intricate thread movements at once. This living tapestry is telling some sort of story, a narrative of something spectacular, but you can’t yet process it.

In fact, as you begin to experience more and more sensory overload, the Lord quickly directs your focus to a small and particular area on the tapestry. Your blurred vision subsides momentarily as you fix your eyes on the specific patch of the tapestry. What you see is both wondrous and exciting, public and personal, important and intimate. It is good news! But, you still can’t yet understand it fully, but something from it has nonetheless been internalized deep within you.

You are invigorated!

In that moment of clarity, you know that the Lord wants you to remember and record this patch of revelation for others to see. You instinctively know that the Lord has placed a spiritual camera strapped around your neck. You reach down and grab the camera. You bring it to your eye and take a snapshot of what you see.

The Lord then tells you, as your mind’s eye returns to earth, that you are to use that snapshot of spiritual memory. It will help you to better recollect, process and explain the divine truths contained on the patch of the tapestry you were assigned.

You then use the snapshot memory to write down the description of what you saw. Even though the snapshot memory is helpful, it doesn’t perfectly capture the incredible fluidity, the boundless energy, the swirling life, the panoramic profoundness, the holographic epiphany of what you actually beheld.

You then basically reproduce your snapshot in written and spoken language for others to see. But you sense frustration from within.

While your snapshot helps point the way to the rich revelation of the Lord’s tapestry, it is not the tapestry itself. Human language only allows for snippets and snapshots of spiritual truths, two-dimensional representations of a hundred dimensional reality.

The snapshot alone is not enough. It can help us to better seek, understand and prepare for encounters with the Lord’s tapestry ourselves. But, the snapshot itself is only a rock of remembrance, a memorial to the experiential knowledge of God we received from our previous encounter with the Lord’s tapestry.

As you pray to the Lord, He shows you that what was perfectly inspired was the tapestry itself. The snapshot you took is a memory of an inspired truth, a distant echo, a partial portrait, of a perfectly inspired divine encounter with the Lord. The snapshot is a “still-life” reproduction of an “un-still” dynamic. And for that reason, it will always fall short.

As you struggle with the limitations and inadequacies of your snapshot, the Lord comforts you. He assures you that the Lord’s tapestry is weaved into each man’s heart, and that each man is a living epistle of God waiting to be revealed. He explains to you that the snapshots are fingers pointing to the heavenly tapestry, but not the tapestry itself. Don’t worship the finger. Follow to where the snapshot points and THEN you will encounter the ecstasy of epiphany. The inspiration of the snapshot lies in where it points, NOT in the finger itself.

Your written description of your snapshot memory is a copy of a copy, a reproduction of a reproduction. Helpful to be sure, but it is NOT the tapestry itself. The tapestry can only be properly perceived from heaven’s gates within you. It is written in your hearts already. The snapshot is merely a phrase paralyzed in time and space. But, when you use that snapshot to direct your surface emotions and mental focus toward the heavenly tapestry at which the snapshot is pointing, THEN you refresh yourself in divine encounter.

So, regarding Scripture, is it inspired? Yes, the Lord’s tapestry, His book of pre-destinies, His volume of life, are all the purest form of Scripture. These are HIS original holographic manuscripts. The Lord’s heavenly tapestry exists only in perfect holographic form in heaven and on our hearts. The indwelling Holy Spirit IS the holographic living logos imprinted on our hearts.

But, what about written Scripture? Is it inspired too? Yes, written Scriptures are inspired reproductions of an earlier snapshot encounter with the Lord’s tapestry. They are there, like a contemplative mirror, for us to “selah” (reflect) our consciousness up and into genuine orbital encounters with the Lord’s tapestry.

We are all threads in and on that tapestry. Can you feel it?