By Simeon Young, Jr.

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the

Word was God … the Word was made flesh …”

— John 1:1,14

“God is love …”

— I John 4:8

… the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”

— Rev. 13:8

Love is more than an emotion or feeling. It’s the greatest and most awesome dynamism in the universe. Love is a bundle of power that passes the test of time. It is the basic and fundamental attribute of who God is. God is love!

All of creation was preplanned in the mind of God. Everything came into existence out of the premeditation of God’s thoughts.

QUANTUM THEOLOGY

Quantum mechanics is a mathematical system for describing the behavior of certain aspects of physics, such as: light, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles outside the parameters of time. The outgrowth of the quantum concept is that all forms of energy are released in discrete units or bundles called quanta.

The process of human hypothesis concerning Quantum Theory is an amazing study and is capable of amazing things. But theology—the study of God, is even more amazing. God’s thoughts are more accelerated than anything known to man. The thoughts of God are like quantum notions capable of moving expeditiously through hyperspace. Hyperspace is defined as having more than three dimensions and as supporting extraordinary events. “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end” (Jeremiah 29:11). “God is the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity” (Isaiah 57:15).

God lives outside the constraints of time, knowing the beginning from the end. His love is truly eternal or timeless. God is an everlasting, all powerful, all knowing, all loving God, who placed Himself in a precarious and vulnerable position on purpose. He was in the world that He made, but the world did not realize it. The darkness could not appreciate the Light, not recognizing that the Light was there all the time. “The Light shined in darkness but the darkness comprehended it not … He came unto His own and His own received Him not” (John 1:5, 11). “In Him was life; and the life was the light of men … He was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:4, 9).

THE PREMEDITATED LOVE OF GOD

The light of God and the love of God are interchange-able. Because of His timeless, premeditated love, His light shines in the hearts of men and women. Premeditate means: to plan, to consider, to think beforehand, to deliberate, to intend on committing the act. The love of God is not a random or accidental one-time occurrence. His love is not careless, haphazard, misplaced, chaotic, aimless or purposeless. His love is thought out. His creation was not disorderly and neither is His love. There is purpose and an even-tenor to His love.

An idea of the human mind is merely a seed of possibility, and that is all. Before an idea can become a reality, there are the steps, the problems, the logistics and then the final execution which must take place. That is human premeditation. Human premeditation takes time, because we live in time. But with God, His thoughts and ideas are not restrained by the interval of time. There is absolutely no discontinuity between possibility and actuality with God. God is timeless. There is no separation between a God idea and it’s fulfillment. God has something which none of us have. He has prescience or foreknowledge. He is God, therefore, He knows every-thing before it happens. This might be termed as the premonition of God.

THE WORD

God’s plan and His purpose existed in an eternal idea or thought before time began. “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). The Word, as it is used by John, describes the Intelligence which originated everything in creation and then, in redemption, became flesh. The Logos, the Plan, the Word, the Intelligence, or the Idea of God existed before the creation of the world.

It is impossible for God to have an after-thought or to make a mistake. God anticipated the sins of mankind. God was not surprised by Adam and Eve’s failure. Jesus was not a post-thought or a second-rate answer to a cosmic mistake. Jesus was a God Idea before the foundation of the world: “Jesus Christ Himself being the Chief cornerstone” (Ephesians 3:20). Cornerstone means: A stone that becomes the starting point in a building. It is of fundamental importance to a belief or ideology. Ideology means: A system of visionary ideas or thoughts.

Jesus was the visionary cornerstone of the thoughts of God. Everything was designed or created upon with Jesus as the measuring stick. Adam was created with Jesus in mind. For Adam was created in the image of God.

Jesus is not God’s little whipping boy. Jesus is God! He is the Word of God, and God and His Word are not two separate persons. They are one and the same. Jesus is the Thought of God, the Logos of God, the Mind of God, the Wisdom of God, the Expression of God, the Flesh of God, the Revelation of God, the Manifestation of God. Let us compare: “And the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14). “God was manifest in the flesh” (I Timothy 3:16).

God reduced Himself to human form so that He might become the only solution to mankind’s personal and universal sin. God placed Himself in a very vulnerable position on purpose. “But we see Jesus … that He by the grace of God should taste death for every man” (Hebrews 2:9).

THE TASTE OF DEATH

How could He taste death for every man (past, present and future) by taking on fallen man’s position? It is too easy for us to speak casually about that tearing, bloody, redemptive act of the cross of Christ. Our minds have become too familiar with the thoughts of Calvary. They do not penetrate deeply within our consciousness. It’s old news. We’ve heard it before. We are not as impressed with the news of past events as we are the up-to-date news.

The truth of the matter is that the Good News is not old news. It is as up-to-date as tomorrow. Redemption for the world’s sin is an event that perpetually takes place in the mind of God. It is a cost beyond anything that we could ever imagine.

The redemption of humanity is an undertaking entirely beyond the mere power of mortal man and could be accomplished by only God himself. We cannot fathom the love of God that is being reflected to us from the Cross at this very moment.

Many have a distorted understanding of God. They see Him only as the righteous and holy God with no tolerance for humanity’s sins. They picture Him as an angry, impersonal force wanting to doom all souls for eternity.

Jonathan Edwards, best known for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” was not only a preacher, but also a philosopher and writer. He was admired as one of the most effective preachers in. America. The sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is regarded by some as a blatant, one-sided presentation of God that is out of balance in its concept of eternal punishment. So let us look at the other side of the coin. Instead of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” look at God in the hands of angry sinners.

They sought for a way to kill Jesus. Plotting, planning and scheming. They thought it all out. They had a taste for blood. Yet the death of Jesus on the Cross was not an accident or an after-thought. Many of the Jews wanted Him dead. He crowded their comfort zone by claiming to be God, so they murdered Him. But what looked like a situation of premeditated murder was actually the premeditated love of God. A love that was purposed towards mankind before the foundation of the world. “The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 3:18).

God knew what was required before He created man. He knew there would be a cross to carry, a hill to climb and a death to die. He knew what was coming.

DEFINING PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

God’s love takes quantum leaps from the past into the present. “Seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame” (Hebrews 6:6). So we must abandon our thinking of it as only a past event. The crucifixion never stops happening in the mind of God. He “tasted death for every man” (Hebrews 2:9).

Do we really understand all that God has done just to save us from hell? Do we really grasp what He is going through on the Cross? Jesus Christ feels more than the physical pain, He feels the overwhelming responsibility of representing a world of sinners. That means that He is judged and sentenced to death under His own holy judicial displeasure.

At Calvary, the world’s only sinless Man bares all the sin ever committed and experiences all the anguish ever birthed from such sin. He is not dying bravely as a martyr. Instead, He is facing death as a sinner with overwhelming guilt and the fear of eternal torment in hell. The external suffering of Jesus is extremely severe, but it actually depicts only a small part of His sacrificial death. “Who in the days of His flesh when He had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard in that He feared” (Hebrews 5:7).

This is the only scripture which portrays Jesus experiencing fear. At this point, He sees the complete repulsiveness of sin and the horror of it’s consequences. His strong crying and fulminating screams do not arise from a fear of physical death, but a fear of experiencing the second death. The fear of going to hell. Even though He has no sin of His own, He stands in the place of every sinner.

The terror involved in this particular hour of pain is enough to cause Him to pray loud and to be afraid. He has come to such a place of fear and trembling that He experiences travail of soul (Isaiah 53:11).

How can we ever mentally grasp what our Lord is going through as He hangs upon the Cross, suspended between time and eternity? Most only think of the Cross as an ancient symbol of christianity past, rather than seeing it as the timeless quantum leap of God’s love that reaches from the past into the present and is already waiting for us in the future.

THE CROSS = THE ULTIMATE GOD IDEA

Our world has cheapened the cross. There are cross factories that manufacture crosses on production lines to be sold as religious icons and conversation pieces. But Jesus is not God’s kid neatly hung on a glittering rhinestone-studded $5 cross. He is God, wrapped in the flesh, condemned to a brutal death on a rugged cross for the sins of the world. The Cross of Jesus represents the perpetual timeless and priceless love of God. “For the preaching of the Cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God … and the wisdom of God” (I Corinthians 1:18, 24).

The Cross was the foundational idea of God before He fashioned the cosmos. The ultimate God idea. It is the wisdom of God. He thought it out and foreordained it before the beginning of time, then spoke it into existence. He preplanned the chance for redemption and knew what it would take to save the world before it was creatively actualized. “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). While we are in the process of sinning, His flesh is in the process of dying. The death of Jesus is not merely an historic event that happened 2000 years ago on some obscure refuse heap. It’s happening right now in the mind of God.

Before the foundation of the world, God saw every individual sinner, among the teaming throngs of humanity, and the Cross of Calvary simultaneously. God’s love takes quantum leaps, as though time was standing still. He loved me before I was born. “Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee” (Jeremiah 1:5).

Everything about God’s love is indeterminable. Who can grasp the depth, riches and wonder of God’s love?

His love isn’t bound by the interval of time. “Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make inter-cession” (Hebrews 7:25).

THE FOREKNOWLEDGE OF GOD

The Spirit of God intercedes for us with groanings which cannot be uttered “and He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God … For whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He did predestinate” (Romans 8:26-30). The foreknowledge of God is a hard concept to grasp because we don’t live in the future. But God knows the beginning from the end. The term ever liveth, means He lives in the past, present and the future. He knew us and loved us before time began. His love is an all-encompassing, supernatural phenomenon that is reaching into this present moment, even as you read these words. “And I, If I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” (John 12:32).

The Cross of Jesus Christ takes bounding leaps through time and reaches out to every man, woman and child and draws them closer to Him.

 

The above article “The Quantum Leap Of Love” is written by Simeon Young, Jr. This article was excerpted from chapter six in Young’s book God Ideas.

The material is copyrighted and should not be repainted under any other name or author. However, this material may freely be used for personal study or purposes.