Walking in Kingdom Grace

There was a time "before times eternal" when all the yet uncreated worlds were abiding in the bosom of the Father. In this unseen dimension, all was in order, all was at rest, and all was harmoniously being designed by the Father's perfect will. God's entire creation was dwelling within the universe of the unfathomable heart of the Father Yahweh. His heart was His dream room. Within it was an infinitely creative expanse filled with the many primordial sketchbooks of what life was to look like, with innumerable portraits necessary to describe and sustain the various systems He was to create. Each image became part of what was to become a symbiotic whole containing exacting detail and filled with still undiscovered treasure, beauty, and mystery. The life of the Son became the heart and the blood that was nourishing the very essence of un-born creation. The Holy Spirit became the pulse of life, tenderly sustaining all within that embryonic realm. The Father breathed His love into all that was yet to be. This place was, after all, the womb of all creation, the wellspring of life both as we know it now and as we shall know it in the endless ages to come. One may call this "bosom of the Father" by this term: the kingdom of God.

In this place (the bosom of the Father) arose the eternal purpose of God. God "thought thoughts, desired desires, and willed wills" all wholly and necessarily in line with His immutable character and transcendent glory. All the Father's thoughts and desires were a potent unveiling of His divine character. In this pre-creation reality (somewhere, sometime), God made a sovereign, independent, and purposeful decision to reveal Himself. There was a definite moment in eternity in which He chose to step out of that place where He could have remained the unknowable and unapproachable God. Instead, He entered a course that would require an eternal commitment to the impossible. In an inconceivable act of love, God to explain the unexplainable. The Father decided to reveal Himself; and thus was born an eternal undertaking: a revelation of the uncreated to the created; the invisible to the material. How does God (who is infinite and and unlimited) explain Himself to us (the finite and limited)? This undertaking, given the unbounded scale of the One disclosing Himself, must be described as a never-ending task because the subject is inexhaustible. Hence, one must speak of the eternal purpose of God. This task was a passionate and wholly self-determined commitment to unveiling. The crucial question is this: "To whom was this eternal purpose of Self-disclosure directed?"

Before God brought the first atom into existence, before He laid any material foundation, before He decreed any creative act, His thoughts were toward a creature and a race He envisioned called humanity. He thought about Adam and all the people who would follow Adam. We were the very reason for creation and that which took place prior to creation. Why? It was God's sovereign choice. His desire was that humanity (and not another in His creation) would be made in God's image and in God's own likeness. He desired people to be moral, rational, and spiritual beings. Like God, they would live forever. The eternal purpose of God was that Adam and his race would know (and keep on knowing) the Father through the Son by the work of the Holy Spirit throughout the endless ages of eternity. God determined to share His yet-uncreated universe. Our destiny would be to receive unending disclosures of who God is and we would be continually transformed by the very fact of knowing and relating to God. In eternal purpose we would ceaselessly experience God on every level of our being...