I am nearly finished reading "The Shack" and in Chapter 14 "Verbs and Other Freedoms" there is a discussion between the Holy Spirit and the main character Mackenzie that for me sums up the whole point of the book as follows (Beginning with the Holy Spirit speaking):

 

____________________

 

"The Bible doesn't teach you to follow rules. It is a picture of Jesus. While words may tell you what God is like and even what He may want from you, you cannot do any of it on your own. Life and living is in Him and in no other. My goodness, you didn't think you could live the righteousness of God on your own did you?

 

"Well, I thought so, sorta..." he said sheepishly. "But you gotta admit, rules and principles are simpler than relationships."

 

"It is true that relationships are a whole lot messier than rules, but rules will never give you answers to the deep questions of the heart and they will never love you."

 

Dipping his hand in the water, he played, watching the patterns his movements made. "I'm realizing how few answers I have... to anything. You know, you've turned me upside down or inside out or something."

 

"Mackenzie, religion is about having the right answers, and some of their answers are right. But I am about the process that takes you to the living answer and once you get to Him, He will change you from the inside. There are a lot of smart people who are able to say a lot of right things from their brain because they have been told what the right answers are, but they don't know me at all. So really, how can their answers be right even if they are right, if you understand my drift? So even though they might be right, they are still wrong."

 

"I understand what you're saying. I did that for years after seminary. I had the right answers, sometimes, but I didn't you know. This weekend, sharing life with you has been far more illuminating than any of those answers."

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Okay, back to me, Barry again...

 

Basically, our purpose in life is to get to know God, who is Spirit, and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth, not just fill our heads with knowledge about God. When we operate in spirit we are different.

 

Jesus said something amazing to Nicodemus. He said that every one who is born of the Spirit of God will appear to others to be as mysterious as the wind is or at least as unpredictable.

 

John 3:

 

 8.  The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

 

Notice Jesus didn't say that the Spirit Himself is like wind, as is often what people mistakenly say, but that every ONE, meaning the people who are born of the Spirit will be like wind because others hear the sound they make but cannot tell where they are coming from or where they are going any more than they could the wind. My point is that if a person is not born of the Spirit but is, to use Jude's description, "sensual, having not the Spirit," when they try to understand someone who is born of the Spirit, they will not be able to. So they must discount those people and when they see the spiritual effects in that person's life they assume that those who are born of the Spirit must be of the devil because they themself do not have the spiritual nature of these people working in their own lives or in the lives of the other "Christians" with whom they associate so they assign it to the devil and leave it at that. Jesus was treated this way by His enemies the religious Jews and stated that His true followers could expect the same thing to happen to them and so we see it today. These people only know head knowledge but do not have the relationship with God that is in the Spirit where they that worship must do it...

 

That pastor who preached against "The Shack" or that man who wrote his book against it called "Burning Down The Shack" are classic examples of religious scholars who don't have the Spirit because if they did they would understand this book but it is as the wind to them, completely mysterious so they assign it all to the devil. Well, that's my opinion.

 

If the author of The Shack has an agenda toward "Universalism" or whatever, I haven't seen it so far but I still have a few chapters to go... But so far I think it is a very useful tool to show the true point of how God wants to know and love His people daily.