[aron]

Over the last few years I began to see things in the Bible I never had considered before. Why does it say this here, or use this particular phraseology? Why did Jesus teach that there? Slowly, with occasional "revelations", a story began to emerge, a "meta-story" if you will, which began to make sense of it all. It was really amazing; it was like the Bible was "talking" to me. The Word actually was coming alive. It's like I began to perceive things on a deeper, unseen, 'spiritual' level. The physical was still there, but behind it was the world of the spirit(s), if you will.

And yesterday, for example, I was telling someone about how Jesus quoted Psalm 82, where it said, "I said, You are gods", to those who were confronting Him. Now, we all know that God is one, and that there are not multiple Gods. So why did Jesus quote that? I told my friend that there was likely a shared understanding of Psalm 82, and that Jesus expected some level of familiarity with it among the listening audience. There was a message there, beyond the snippet of "I said, you are gods". The Psalm 82 text can be interpreted several ways, on several levels, and depending on what level you see it will give different meaning to the story in John chapter 10. To my friend I was sharing one of the more physical levels, or readings, of this scene.

Okay, now on to my point. First, there is no guarantee my "meta-story", with its dependent reading of a fairly poetical or stylized narrative in Psalm 82, is objectively right. It is just something that I am currently reading into, or onto, the text. And there's no guarantee that even if my "vision" or "revelation" were correct on some objective level (i.e. 'many scholars take this position'), that I live anywhere near the spiritual reality of what I am beginning to see in these stories. And lastly, why should I fight with someone over my so-called "truths"? What kind of truth would that be if I began to call everyone else ignorant, blind, and dark who didn't agree with my vision? What kind of truth is that? Just exactly what would I have recovered, in that case?