A Ruling Spirit

The barriers to the Hebraic grasp of spiritual matters are not hard to understand.
Over the years during which I was trying to play the game in mainstream denominational Christian ministries, there were thousands of conversations about very fundamental issues of how to frame our thinking about faith. It was essentially unanimous in one particular thing: a deep fear and suspicion of anything which could not be controlled intellectually. If it could not be studied, broken down into the smallest analytical fragments, and perhaps even quantified, then there was something wrong with it. There was an academic rigidness which excluded things fuzzy and unexplained in concrete terms.
This, on top of all sorts of lip service to the ineffability of God and things Above. Even those willing to leave the details of a miracle unexamined were afflicted by what they admitted was a fear of what was over on the other side of that invisible line of human intellect. Notice how utterly man-centered this is. Some characterized it all as the uncontested domain of demons. Thus, the entire range of non-intellectual grasp of the Spirit Realm was consigned to Satan.
Which is rather silly, when you consider Satan really is pleased with that. This is the same instinct that causes people to fear the unknown, to be spooked by haunted houses, regardless of knowing the whole thing is staged. It’s that same exact taste of fear, because it’s described in precisely the same words, the same feelings from emotionally laden terminology, as those who fear the monsters under the bed or in the unlit closet.
When I embarked on my study of the Bible’s mystical roots — carefully focused on the established ANE brand of mysticism — what few vestiges of those fears I still bore all died quickly. It was a marvelous sense of relief. To see how far reaching this might be, I spent some time examining the stuff most Christian ministers wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole (sometimes quite literally, leaving the room and building where it was stored). I read some of the pagan and Satan-worshiping stuff, examined quite a broad sampling of stuff which many told me would afflict me with demons just for touching it.
Here’s a concrete measure for you: God now hears my prayers better than ever before in my life. What that really means is God and I are on the same wavelength when it comes to issues I bring to Him in prayer. There are plenty of things I don’t expect, but I always find a very real peace about everything.
This whole mythology of what the Devil controls is very much the same silly nonsense we dig up from European, and particularly German, mythology. It’s the same basic stuff. While not every evangelical adheres knowingly to the Neo-Pentecostal assumptions, there is a huge overlap in their instincts about the Unknown.
Among the Charismatics is a very powerful thread of mythology about the power of words spoken. They believe they can find support for this in the Bible, but only if you remove the bulk of the Hebrew way of understanding their own writings. This is the fundamental error of Hellenized Judaism, Kabbalism, and the like. The whole din of noise about the Tetragrammaton comes from that time period when Kabbalism was in its infancy. It’s the same thread of thinking in the Judaizers seeking to pull the First Century churches back under the yoke of the Talmud, whose objections to genuine Christian doctrine gave birth to Gnosticism. And if you dig deep in the Exodus revolts against Moses, you realize it was the same error of those who argued against Moses’ leadership. Their complaint was, in essence, if they could just get Moses to reveal the secret rituals and words of power, any of them could have caused the same miracles as Moses. The ancient heresy simply lowered God to an extra powerful human with the same petty demands, but the more modern version comes from the Hellenistic tendency to objectify and depersonalize ultimate truth and power.
The underlying thread which ties all this together is never pushing into things where one has no control. There is a complete fear, distrust, even revulsion at opportunities to see what God will do. When you hear most people use such wording — “let’s see what God will do” — it’s often used as a coating to avoid saying what they are not quite sure will happen. Since it’s obvious they can’t predict the results in detail, they think it’s holier to say God will do His thing, but they are pretty sure in general terms what will happen. When something occurs completely outside the full range of what they expected, they simply say, “Satan got the victory.” That’s just a catch-phrase for not liking the results, not being prepared to find God’s purpose in it.
This is, indeed, a vast mountain which needs to be removed into the sea. It’s more than a culture war, but a war between competing civilizations. What we have today is a poor, fragile and shaky excuse for a real civilization. It majors on shallow technological achievements, fleeting accomplishments in this physical realm, and utterly devoid of any knowledge of what lies beyond that. Everything not quantifiable by scientific formulas is dismissed as not worth examination. Not just ignorant, but hatefully angry at any attempt to expose what’s on the other side. The whole thing is written off as superstition, mere emotion, when it is the silly superstitions of this age which makes them fear.
I’m praying God open hearts and perceptions. The realm of mysticism is knowable; it can be examined academically, but it requires a different academic process. The logic and parabolic language of Heaven, that part which was revealed for us here on this plane, is not hidden by anything more than fear. Whole civilizations of the past had no trouble with it, including pagan scholars who didn’t love the God of Israel. Ever hear of Balaam? He was a pagan scholar who knew how to communicate with that same God of Israel, and get reliably useful answers about dealing with very real and concrete matters on this earth. He wasn’t special; thinking of him that way is just an excuse to avoid dealing with reality.
Reality is far larger than most of the world wants to see.