Dream. I arrive at a large house which I am welcomed in to. There’s a lot of space and posh features. The rest of my family are there. I’m hoping we might all meet all at the same time.
I meet one of my relatives indoors who I’ve not met before who’s very posh and speaks about his wife or other relative in the third person. We walk out together, and he is still speaking to me as he moves off to exercise around part of the garden. I meet other family members. He looks like (I dare not say as it fixes him) Elon Musk, Mark Mitchell or similar.
At one point I’m sitting in my family car and I see one of the posh family’s dogs coming. He’s a larger than life golden springer spaniel. I’m not quick enough to shut the door and he sees me and gets in with me and is rather friendly and climbs all over me. I manage to get him out of the car but not without him leaving slobber all over the window.
I witness some interaction between other family members. We are all supposed to be seeing each other but everyone is doing their own thing and it’s taking a long time to see everyone or for them to assemble.
Eventually on one of the lawns I see a line out of the family there must be around 20 of them. It’s like one of those photo shoots. I scan along the line seeing if there’s anyone I know. The only person’s I know are my parents(?). I think who are all these people? I don’t know them or I didn’t know I had such a large family. They all look so different.
There’s something here in this dream about the family of God. My first thoughts about the dream are to do with the Royal family. [Pray]
I think about what is a spaniel and also his playfulness and exuberance. Springer means one who leaps. That could be something about me and how I suppress that part of me or try too and it will keep popping back up however hard I try! I might try and shut the door on this golden bundle of life and joy but he won’t be stopped! A first thought was King Charles spaniel. [This may have come from yesterday (at the time of writing) and the ascension to the throne of King Charles iii. Queen Elizabeth died yesterday late afternoon early evening 8th Sept].
There’s an underlying sense of frustration and impatience about the family not getting its act together in the dream. There’s a sense of helplessness about that. Even though the line-out of people has a lot of people I feel that not everyone is present. How can we get the rest of the family to turn up? This is an underlying question which I feel relates to the church. Or is that The Kingdom? This dream is a picture of that.
I think that’s clearly the main emotion.
Even when walking along with ‘Elon Musk’ there’s a distance between us. It is demonstrated both physically, mentally and emotionally.
I feel this in my own family at times quite acutely. It’s both a spiritual thing and real. The only time we might come together in real life is for a photo.
This is amusing; Elon is from the Hebrew for oak tree and musk is possibly Dutch origin – a nickname meaning house sparrow!
Mark means male and Mitchell big or large and who is like God?
As I begin to pray about the Royal family it suddenly hits me. I’ve been thinking of overarching biblical themes and this one is obviously one my attention is drawn to. I’m not sure we can say the grand narrative of the bible is just about the kingdom of God – yes it is a grand theme but it’s one of many grand themes and family is certainly another.
Interesting that I’m talking with Elon Musk in my dream who represents an oak and a house sparrow.
Even the swallow finds a nest in your house. Oaks of righteousness a planting of the Lord.
Ephesians 3:14–15 (LEB): 14 On account of this, I bend my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,
The word every there can be translated as the whole and the word family is the Greek word patria:
πατριά, a group of persons united by descent from a common father or ancestor, a family, a tribe.
Here’s a play on words in this scripture.
The love of a dog, the love of God. He leaves his mark whether you like it or not. He’s left his mark on your family vehicle. He’s left his mark on your ministry which is his ministry.
See what sort of love the Father has given to us: that we should be called children of God, and we are!
W. Hall Harris III et al., eds., The Lexham English Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012), 1 Jn 3:1.
See how much the father has lavished on us that we should be called sons of God.
1 John 3:1–3 (LEB): See what sort of love the Father has given to us: that we should be called children of God, and we are! Because of this the world does not know us: because it did not know him. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that whenever he is revealed we will be like him, because we will see him just as he is. 3 And everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as that one is pure.
How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
Lavished isn’t in the LEB, given is and it’s the same Greek word where in 2 Corinthians 5 it says he has given us the ministry of reconciliation.This word given is a very important word as it is in the LXX (Septuagint) New Testament and Apostolic Fathers 2088 times!! If a word in the bible is used that many times one needs to take note.
Taking a deeper look at the verse 1 John 3.1 we can see the Greek word behind ‘sort of‘ can mean, from what country? (Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament – MGLNT) And it’s written as a question. This reminded me that I was asking myself and the Lord about the Mauritian dream and I saw a relationship between that and the current one in discussion. The Father’s love does indeed come from another country, not a country we know so well but a heavenly one.
(The celestial bodies will be burnt up at the end but the earth will be found or disclosed (2 Peter 3:10), allow something hidden to be seen – could that be the supernatural world will be more obvious and all will see it for what it is? Also find by surprise?)
The Hebrew Bible describes a person in terms of the fusion of material flesh and immaterial inner life (Johnson, The Vitality of the Individual).
Humanity was created “as” the image of God. The concept can be conveyed if we think of “image” as a verb: Humans are created as God’s imagers—they function in the capacity of God’s representatives. The image of God is not a quality within human beings; it is what humans are.
That paragraph may help explain why we act and do what we do. We act like god’s, having been changed by the fall the lives that we lead have been affected hence we need a king (see Matthew Bates quote at the beginning of this page.
This view means that all human endeavor and enterprise has spiritual meaning—work is a spiritual exercise. Vocation is worship, no matter how mundane. Any task performed to steward creation, to harness its power for God’s glory and the benefit of fellow imagers, and to foster in the harmonious productivity of fellow imagers, is imaging God. This application of the image has been referred to as the “cultural mandate” or the vocational view of the imago Dei (Sands, “The Imago Dei as a Vocation”).