100 Prison Meditations: Cries of Truth from Behind the Iron Curtain (14 page)

Before We Call, He Answers

God says that He will create new heavens and a new earth (Isaiah 65:17). One of the characteristics of life in these is that before their inhabitants call, He will answer (verse 24).

Modern physicists have considered the possibility of an anti-telephone, a device by which the inquirer of the future will get his reply before calling to ask the question. What is a theoretical technical development of the future was promised in its fullness to God’s children in an age when such technology was not yet dreamed of.

Einstein’s special theory of relativity showed that anything traveling at a speed greater than light—which he considered impossible—would go backward in time. Scientists now hypothesize that tachyons, faster-than-light particles, exist although they have not yet been detected. Once man is able to handle them, mankind will be caught in a paradox. It will technically be possible to communicate so that answers precede questions, which could mean the cessation of communication.

Perceiving all solutions in advance, problems will stop arising in my mind.

The child who said that Mona Lisa smiled so beautifully because she had an intuition that da Vinci would paint her, and that da Vinci painted her because she smiled exactly as he wished a model to do, was not mistaken.

The spirit passes light in speed. In exceptional circumstances, a man can perceive in the unconscious of a fellow man questions that have not yet arisen to a conscious level, and reply to them. The one who receives the answer does not even know that it is an answer.

Some believers are sad that they do not feel any fellowship with God. But it is not necessary. The communion is established on a faster-than-light level, and consists in God’s granting you things for which you never felt any desire. Many believers testify that they have received gifts of God for which they have not sought. The wish was in the depth of the soul and was fulfilled before they became aware of it.

Such will be the rule in the new heavens and on the new earth. Communion with God as between two beings who need to communicate will be replaced by union in love. We will be in God. Eternity will be an embrace in love. No wind will blow anymore. We will no longer cry out for fear of the tempests, and the tempests will no longer need be stilled. Answers will precede requests, which therefore will not be made. All will be calm, serene. This is eternity.

The Body Language of Jesus

Besides a spoken language, every man has another, the language of the body, which is in fact more ancient than speech. Whoever can understand this language has a deeper insight into his fellow men. See how many gestures of the Lord are reported in the Gospels: the stretching out of His hand, the lifting of the eyes, the touching of children. His body spoke; could it have been less than eloquent? Was it not the word become flesh?

The pupils of the eyes enlarge when something exciting occurs. An honest man looks straight into another’s face. A facial tic or the manner of shaking hands speaks volumes. Warm hands or pale, cold ones, tell much about a man’s character. So does a full, straight, smooth, and shining face as compared to a crooked or gloomy one.

Jesus would have been completely unintelligible to His disciples had He not had a very developed body language.

He tells them, “I came to send fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49). Any arsonist might have said the same.

When the Salvation Army started its work in India, the governor of Bombay forbade the display of its flag because its motto, “Blood and fire,” was misleading. Such inflammatory words as Christ’s, coming directly from the mouth of a man accused of spreading riot among an oppressed people, could be even more misleading.

Under ordinary circumstances, every peace-loving citizen would have abandoned Him when He proclaimed the kindling of fire as His program, since He did not qualify His words or explain that He meant them symbolically or spiritually. But His eyes, His face, His gestures must have spoken. None of His disciples was disturbed when He spoke such dangerous words, or even when He added, “Do you suppose that I came to give peace on earth? I tell you, not at all, but rather division” (verse 51).

Two disciples of John the Baptist, looking upon the manner in which Jesus walked, said, “Behold the Lamb of God” (John 1:36). It is written about the Jewish king Ahab that he repented “and went softly” (1 Kings 21:27, KJV). Once I became suspicious that a man was a Soviet infiltrator because of the way he walked. Ensuing events showed that I was probably correct. Jesus walked in a manner apart.

Besides His body language, the intonation of His voice must have been significant. I have already written that the Hebrew Old Testament contains musical notation for every saying and is meant to be chanted rather than recited.

If anyone, even God, had told me as He told Abraham, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love,…and offer him there as a burnt offering” (Genesis 22:2), I would not have done it. We do not know in what manner God uttered this command. But listen to the words being chanted with transcendent harmonies in a synagogue according to the melody of thousands of years! Abraham, listening, felt peace in his heart and understood it to be only a test, a ritual showing to what length love of God must go, a foreshadowing of God’s sacrifice for us. Therefore Abraham immediately fulfilled what was demanded.

We receive guidance from the Lord. Be attentive to its music and to the gestures of the messengers.

The Numbers and the Story

Ancient Hebrew and Greek had no written symbols for figures. Letters were used to express numbers. Words of Scripture can be understood as part of a story or teaching, or can be considered numbers because they are constituted of letters which are also figures. Some believe that the sum of the numerical values of the letters in a word gives its mathematical value.

The first word of the Old Testament, Bereshith (“In the beginning”), has the numerical value 913:

The Bible can thus be a communication in numbers or in text or both. Which is the primary value of the Bible?

Mankind uses thousands of languages and dialects. French- and English-speaking Canadians, French- and Flemish-speaking Belgians, Afrikaansk- and English-speaking South Africans—all engage in bitter conflicts over which language should be spoken in their countries. But all nations of all continents employ the same system of numerals. No disagreement here.

Numbers probably correspond to a deeper layer of the human psyche. Symbols might have been used as figures before they were used as letters.

In 1965, at the site of the New York World’s Fair, a capsule was buried to be opened after 5,000 years. It contains a message of 1,271 figures containing in mathematical formulae the essential information about life on earth. If in that future time the same symbols are used for both letters and figures, those who read the formula could encounter double meaning, just as we do when reading Scriptures in the original.

The key figure in the Bible is the figure 7, the symbol of human holiness. There are directions in which a man can move: forward, backward, upward, down, to the right, or to the left. And there exists something more excellent: the holy attitude, to remain quietly at the center, like Mary when she sat still at the feet of Jesus. This is symbolized by 7.

Seven plays an exceptional role in physical reality too. Think of the seven colors of the rainbow and the seven musical notes on the diatonic scale.

Two Israeli scientists, Nobel prize winner Isidor Rabi and William Markowitz, discovered “chordmater universal time,” a system of defining time that is more exact than astronomical measurement. A second is no longer defined as a fraction of the time in which the earth accomplishes an orbit, but is the time that an electron near the outer edge of an atom of cesium wobbles: 9,192,631,770 times. This figure is a multiple of the sacred 7, which is the mathematical seal of God’s creation.

The ancient Semitic people did not have a decimal system, but a heximal one—six figures plus zero. This system passed into Europe through the Arabs and its remnant survives today in the French language, which has no words for seventy, eighty, or ninety. These numbers are expressed as sixty-and-ten, four-times-twenty, and four-times-twenty-plus-ten.

Since 6 was the last simple figure in the Semitic system, our 7 was written by them as 10, 8 was 11, and so on, until they jumped from 16 to 20. In this system, 10 (our 7) was the first composite figure. It became the symbol for how great a zero, a man of nothing, could become if he placed before himself the great One, God. Therefore 7 is the figure of holiness, and 6, being the last simple figure, became the symbol of pettiness. The apocalyptic beast is 666, the superlative of 6, a paper tiger (Revelation 13:18). Do not fear it. Jesus will destroy it with His breath. The numerical value of Jesus in Greek is 888, the antithesis of 666, surpassing the apogee of human holiness. He represents divine sainthood.

Perhaps there are secrets enshrined in the mathematical structure of the Bible. We read in Proverbs 1:1, “Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel.” The value of the three proper names is:

which happens to be the total number of instructions contained in the whole book of Proverbs. It is like an indication for the reader, “Seek sense not only in the text of the Bible, but also in its mathematical form.”

The apostles, who were fishing, toiled a whole night and caught nothing. When the resurrected Lord appeared (John 21) and told them where to throw the nets, they caught many fish. The catch was not due to their skill. Every fish caught was a sign of grace. They counted them and found 153 fish. Is it a simple coincidence that the word “grace” occurs 153 times in the New Testament?

Every figure in the Bible has a deep meaning. Nothing in it is superfluous.

Why Are So Many Biblical Questions Unanswered?

Having read the Bible, there are a few things we know. Many more questions remain unanswered.

How is it that there is a God? Who made Him? Why did He make man? Why did He allow or ordain him to sin? Why does suffering exist? Why do even fish in the depths of the sea have cancer? Why do beings live on each other? Will we know one another in the life hereafter? How is it that the death of a being 2,000 years ago affects the state of our souls? Why is it important that Fiji Islanders should know the stories of the Jewish kings? Why should some souls suffer eternally in hell for sins committed here during only a fragment of time? And so on and so on.

There is a Mexican story that contains the best solution to the problem of all those unanswered questions.

A dwarf named Tchuda, tired of the world’s mockery and derision, decided to end his life by throwing himself into the abyss from the mountain Tchumanda. On his way he met the beautiful Armida who was going to commit suicide because of betrayal by her lover. They were joined by prince Christopher who was on order from the king to seek and kill the bandit Fukinama. This thief would be recognized by the six fingers on his right hand.

The three stopped to rest at an old monastery where they were received by the abbot Timothy. Although Timothy had not been a monk for long, the fame of his holiness had already spread far and wide. When Armida bowed to kiss the holy man’s hand, she noticed six fingers. The wanted criminal had become a saint.

And…

Most people want to know what happened next with the dwarf, the maiden, the prince, and the king who had ordered the bandit’s death. There are some, however, who do not ask any more questions but are in ecstasy about this one great wonder: the bandit has become a luminous example of love, and when asked how it occurred, he answered, “God performed it through the sacrifice of Christ.”

The other questions remain unanswered, forgotten. The elect do not ask them anymore. The Bible contains no answers to satisfy the curious. I hope you are not among these.

The Forbidding of Quarrels

We can discover the facts of nature and establish causal relations. We know why certain phenomena will produce others of a predictable nature. We do not know why existence exists, why it is as it is, why there are causal relations and why the effects are these and not others.

One of the basic facts of nature is the struggle for life, a struggle that every living creature has to accept. Every species fights against some other species. The herbivores destroy the life of plants. As for mankind, beginning with the first generation born after the expulsion from paradise, there have always been conflicts, fights, killings.

There is one exception to this rule which God establishes for His children: that even the slightest quarrel must be completely excluded. When elephants fight, the grass is injured, but when Christians attack each other, their souls are doomed for eternity.

The motive of a quarrel is unimportant. An admiral once said to some officers who were clashing, “I know not what the argument is, but I do know that the enemy is out there.” As Christians, “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). Internecine conflict for any reason is not permitted.

With a Christian, harsh criticism addressed against him does not produce a backlash. If you must justify your behavior, you can spend your life trying to satisfy your adversary, instead of taking the actions you have chosen.

Every believer who quarrels with another is foolish and forfeits one of the qualities that characterize him as a believer.

During the reign of Henry VIII, Bishop Ridley and Bishop Cranmer, reformers of the Church in Britain, were so opposed to Bishop Hooper, another eminent reformer, that they put him in prison. They found him guilty of ideas about reformation that were too extreme—he refused the invocation of saints in giving an oath, and disapproved of bishops wearing heavily ornamented vestments. A few years later, under Mary Stuart, all three were imprisoned and finally burned at the stake. From his prison cell, Ridley wrote a conciliatory letter to Hooper.

The wise Indian king Asoka, who took the ideas of his country into Asia Minor and influenced the Essenes, cut into rock the motto:
samavaya eva sadhuh
—“Concord [harmony] alone is meritorious.”

Struggle for life is the general law of nature, but for saints there exists an exemption. They do not struggle for life, but live to combat struggling.

However, a limit to harmony does exist. A Jewish ballad tells of a little sardine swimming off the shores of Eilat. He meets a shark, and of course politely says Shalom (“Peace”). One thing leads to another, and to placate the shark, the sardine offers his tail, some fins from his belly, and some scales from his back, but nothing helps. In desperation the sardine tells his foe that for a real and lasting peace he is prepared to give everything. Hearing this, the shark relents, utters the magic word “peace,” bares his teeth and swallows the sardine whole.

There must be a limit to the desire for peace.

Kissinger reportedly said, “I have gone to the Soviets as the first Christian entered the arena to be devoured by wild beasts, but I was determined to speak to the lion. When I happily exclaimed, ‘You see, we have agreed to communicate,’ the lion replied, ‘I don’t know about your side, but what I have to say is simply the grace before a meal.’”

Do not quarrel, but do not allow anybody to swallow you, either. Children of God are too valuable a species: we have to survive.