Jesus often spoke of another world that should govern how we live in this one. That’s not to say this world doesn’t matter…Jesus was opening our eyes to realities that had prior to been unseen.

“Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.”
—C.S. Lewis

“What if God were one of us?” singer Joan Osborne asked. Her popular mid-nineties song continues the hypothetical with the lines, “Just a slob like one of us…just a stranger on the bus…Tryin’ to make his way home?”

That is an interesting line of thought. What would it look like for God to enter this world. What would he be like? Would he be a slob, like one of us? How would we know it was God? What would be some signs.

I recently shared a conversation with my oldest son on this very theme. I used the illustration of a two dimensional world as I verbally processed with him. Since God, by definition, is not of this world, but rather, the creator of the world, he must exist in a very different dimension, one not defined by time, space, matter, and energy.

If God entered into the world he made, what would that be like? What would he be like? Of course, this is the claim at the heart of Christianity. So, another way to ask the question within a Christian framework would be “What should Jesus be like if he really were God in the flesh?”.

1. Jesus would be like us.

Let’s hold off on formal philosophical arguments and just think about this with the example I shared with my son. If we lived in a two-dimensional world, like a comic strip for example, how would we conceive of three-dimensional things like a sphere. That’s not hard to consider. If you’ve ever tried to draw a sphere you know you just make a circle with shading. The better the artist, the more representative of a sphere the circle would be. But it would still be flat.

For sake of the analogy, let’s think of God as a three-dimensional being. We can use a sphere as a reference point.  If God entered into our world, he would surely have to limit his third-dimensions qualities in some way for us to know him. The nature of our 2D world would seem to require it. A sphere entering into a flat world would seem to us like a circle with really good shading. It would appear like all the other lines in our flat world. It would seem two dimensional to us.

This metaphor has implications for theology, doesn’t it? In our 2D world, we are trying to explain 3D realities using flat lines. That means our very best and most clear explanations of a sphere are severely limited. If we were ever able to enter a 3D world and experience a real sphere (not just a circle with good shading), our knowledge would increase exponentially. I would venture to say  a single encounter with a sphere would teach us more than an entire lifetime of studying flat lines.

That’s why I think a deceased believer, though a layperson in life with a simple understanding of the Bible, now, at this very moment, has far more knowledge than the greatest of living theologians. She has passed on from the two dimensional world into the third dimension. She is no longer studying flat art. She is now beholding glory. Forgive my evolving metaphor.

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