Book Excerpt - The Blind Man’s Elephant

Seeing The Elephant, The Blind Man's Elephant

Living our life in pursuit of quantum theological points that we can use as our solid foundation to build on are much like the pieces of a puzzle in a box. The individual pieces of a puzzle are the details. Fitted all together, they form the big picture that is the elephant. To many, the Biblical record is exactly like a puzzle broken into little pieces in a book rather than in a box. Our adventure is powers of ten more difficult if we have a false view of the elephant when we begin putting the puzzle together. Where do we begin?

Imagine someone handing us a puzzle box with ten thousand pieces in it and a picture of a tree trunk on the box. We set out to assemble the puzzle with this picture in mind. What happens if the puzzle inside the box is really the picture of our elephant? Well, we’re like our blind men. As we attempt to fit the pieces of the puzzle to make a tree trunk, we won’t have a clue of what we’re really doing. We end up puzzled. 

While a single piece of the puzzle may not seem important in and of itself, it can send us off in the wrong direction if we have the wrong big picture in mind. But it can also send us in the right direction if we have the correct big picture. We may think that not knowing that the wise men visited Christ in a house as a young child with gifts for a king not a birthday boy in a manger is not important, or that Christ was sent “but unto the lost sheep of the House of Israel” is not important, but we would be wrong. 

Correcting false leads, ditching the lies provides us with a picture of reality. Otherwise, we will spend our time and energy walking down dead-ends. It probably won’t be long until we reach the point of frustration ready to give up on the puzzle of life because none of this makes any sense to us. Our traditional beliefs therefore lack the very real relevancy they should provide us. 

This is exactly the difficulty facing Christians today. The traditional Christian worldview is much different from what we find in the Biblical record. Thus putting the pieces of the Biblical record puzzle together has been frustrating. Many wrong conclusions have been made because we’re thinking tree trunk or snake rather than entire elephant.

Now if someone deliberately wants to throw us off the path, then of course, they will lie, keep telling us the puzzle is a tree trunk or rope or wall. They don’t want us to discover the correct image of the elephant. Even knowing that one single piece of puzzle is part of a head with large ears is important. It changes our worldview. We ask questions. What is a head and ears doing on a rope or a tree trunk? So it is with even a little piece of truth. It helps us see the big picture. It helps us find the right path.

This book has provided a glimpse of the big picture to you so you can get a better feel for where the pieces fit. You still have to do the work to put the puzzle together in your own life. And everyone may put the puzzle together differently. Some may start at the corners. Others may want to start in the middle and work their way out. Some take longer than others. We need to be tolerant of others who may be at differing stages of putting their puzzles together. 

Our goal is the completed puzzle, the entire elephant. We all should be seeking the kingdom of God and helping each other along the way. This book has intended to show you the incredibly complex, big picture contained in the Biblical record. We have discovered a different worldview than what we are probably use to experiencing. 

We started off looking at just the smallest pieces of the puzzle, five simple questions with their more than likely unexpected answers. These pieces suddenly look much different when they match the picture on the box. And if we are strong of spirit, we discover that putting these pieces together is actually fun and exciting, not something from which to run away. As the pieces of the puzzle begin coming together, we see more of the big picture, a glimpse of an ear, perhaps part of the head and the eye. [See the Feature article, You Know You're A Christian When ...].

We begin to see things we never knew were there. And it helps us to begin thinking about what else might be there too. By combining the pieces of the Biblical record with science and history, we discovered some wonderful things about time in our universe, and the history of five world empires that now have a bit more significance and relevance in our lives especially concerning the Biblical record. Finally, we saw the biggest feature of our puzzle take shape as groups of pieces began connecting with each other in our mind’s eye.

We see an empire that began forming millennia ago that now is transforming into the increasingly strong presence in our world today. Our puzzle is not just science and history. It’s also current events. Certainly, this is an adventure in discovering the many points of quantum theology, those marker pieces of the puzzle that we thought were just a rope or a wall but are much more. 

The task is not yet complete. The last chapter of this book is actually the Prologue, our base camp where we first took a look at those five simple questions. We need to connect our littlest detail ends together with our big picture ends to form a unifying circle. Remember what Edmund Hillary said. It’s not the mountains that we conquer, but ourselves. And the person who returns from the top of the mountain is different from the one who began the journey. We’ve seen the elephant.

The book’s chapters and the website’s articles chronicle the adventure on the way to finding the elephant.

The above is excerpted from the Postscript, Seeing The Elephant, The Blind Man’s Elephant. Any references to Feature and Sneakers articles are not in the book.

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