I think that’s the nature of subjective reference frames. Something that is life-changing for one person might be insignificant for another. For me, it was a confluence of events that all came into focus at that moment. I actually thought at first that I had made a mistake in the translation. You can’t “am” before something else “was”. After checking and rechecking the Greek for each word, I read the sentence as a whole. Having a melancholy temperament, and therefore demanding a strict ordering of things, the juxtaposition of tenses was unsettling. I was stoned at the time, and after struggling with the sentence for a bit, I looked out the window at the beautiful mountain scenery passing by, and for a moment was sufficiently distracted to let down my intellectual guard.
And that’s when it happened. I suddenly understood everything. Practically my entire theology as I hold it now occured to me then all at once. Jesus was saying that He is eternal. It isn’t that He existed before Abraham; it’s that He *exists * before Abraham. In the Old Testament, Abraham had asked God what His name was. “When people ask me who sent me, what should I say?”, he asked. God replied, “You tell people that I AM sent you. I am. That is who I am.” And now Jesus was saying, “Before Abraham was born, I am.”
I suppose it was the sudden understanding of everything at once that took my breath away. I realized that it didn’t matter how old the universe is — from God’s eternal frame of reference, the beginning and the end are the same. For Him, the universe is at once not yet begun, ongoing, and already finished. It’s kind of like the four-spatial-dimension creature who looks at a closed box and sees the inside and outside all at the same time whereas we cannot, much like a three-spatial-dimension creature sees the inside and outside of a circle at once, whereas a two-spatial-dimension creature cannot. He sees only the outside or else the inside but not both.
I understood that God is the Objective Frame, that He is ontologically perfect, and that I, as a subjective frame, am entitled to see Him in a completely different way than someone else, who is also a subjective frame. Everything now made sense. We cannot judge each other’s morality because we do not see objectively. Your frame is not accessible to me, and mine is not accessible to you. I understood that the universe is morally irrelevant, and that the scenery I saw out the window was just like the scenery in a play. Actors interact with scenery, and I understood that my life was the acting out of moral decisions. When I looked back at the people in the van, I saw them not just as friends but as gods — people who, like me, were free moral agents. I was a character in their play, just as they were characters in mine. Without morality, they were nothing more than organisms, morally irrelevant and good for nothing other than my own entertainment. But now, how I chose to interact with them became significant.
I realized that I loved them, and I realized that I knew what love was — the distribution of moral goodness. I realized that goodness was an aesthetic, and was the aesthetic most valued by God. I understood why he created the world and breathed His spirit into man. It was so that goodness, His favored aesthetic, might be multiplied by the decisions of free moral agents. I understood what it meant to be created in His image. It didn’t mean that He had two arms and two legs, but that we were spirit. Just like Him. We were free moral agents, just like Him. Free to make choices, not with our brains, but with our hearts.
I understood the dichotomy between the intellect and the heart. I understood that the intellect was trivial since it was a part of the amoral universe, whereas the essence of a man is his spirit. I understood that love in the sense that God loves is not an emotion but a decision, specifically, a decision to bring goodness into someone’s life. I understood that the nature of goodness is to edify, and that the nature of evil is to destroy. I understood that sin is not an action, but a decision, just like love. It is the decision to obstruct goodness. It is the opposite of love. I understood that there is nothing sinful about gay sex; rather, the sin is in condemning people who are gay because condemnation obstructs goodness. It is moral murder. To condemn a man is to declare that he is cut off from God.
I knew now that the atoms were not real because what is real is whatever is eternal. Something that rots or fades away or loses energy available to do work over time is not real; it is illusory. Jesus is eternal and therefore real. These are but a few of the things that I suddenly understood in the blink of an eye. You can surely understand how terrifying and wonderful it was, and how it could be life changing. It was with this new understanding that I began to reinterpret the scriptures that I had been translating. The statement, “God is love”, for example, now meant something different to me. It did not mean that God is emotionally fond of people. Emotions come from the brain, and the brain is only atoms. It was not a metaphor. It was a description of God as morally perfect. If love is the facilitation of goodness, then if God is love, then it means that God facilitates goodness perfectly.
I understood what Jesus meant when he said that neither He nor His Father judges anyone despite that Their objective reference frame entitles Them to judge perfectly; rather, we judge ourselves by His standard. Our eternal disposition is our own moral decision. It is we who determine whether we are in heaven or hell. We simply decided whether we value goodness. If we do, then we are like God. And so I understood that an atheist with a loving heart is closer to God than a Christian with a hateful heart. And so on and so on and so on. You get the picture. Everything else followed from the understanding of that one single verse. I died and was reborn. It was therefore profound for me.
