Chapter 4 — Recap
God’s personal presence pervades all of His Creation. Here inside our tiny bubble, the time-space continuum of human existence, this presence is not obvious. There is no compelling proof that logic cannot deny; it requires more than mere human perception. It requires something of the divine essence linking to our awareness before we have any faculty for it. Reliance on human reason alone is the essence of our fallen nature. Thus, we stand in need of redemption, some help to escape the trap within which our reason holds us.
We come to life in this realm spiritually dead. On the one hand, Scripture openly affirms that while every human born at some later point becomes accountable to God, by the same token they are also offered some path of escape, something sufficient for their individual context. The ubiquitous presence of that spiritual apprehension across humanity is the plainest manifestation of this. Again, by the same token no human has standing to dispute this assertion. To whatever degree we are accountable to God, we always have offered to us a means to answer. At the very moment of the offer, whatever follows is occluded to our human understanding, in part because it is so completely individual in nature. The very act of wondering the who, how and why of what follows is the wrong question. All we know is, some take that path and a great many do not.
In the Bible, we are told that the Nation of Israel was granted a singular degree of insight regarding that path. While a basic human obedience to the Law on a worldly level was sufficient to remain under the ostensible blessings of God, the Covenant was offered in a context that openly acknowledged a higher meaning. Anyone with access to the Law who felt moved could always have that mystical enlightenment. Moses bluntly said that actually knowing God was within reach of anyone who wanted it. It was a taste of divine power and enlightenment, an unspeakable glory that overwhelmed everyone who got close. For a time, a great many embraced that opportunity. But as time went on the fire faded in the nation as a whole. At some point, the leadership exchanged this divine experience for the cheap thrill of rational discovery.
Yes, the mind is delighted by Aristotle’s order. It seems to bring the universe within the intellect’s control. It’s a lie; that rational inquiry offers no power to change anything in the soul, because it is missing a vast ocean of truth that is hidden from the intellect. Jesus taught in parables because the mind could not and should not pretend to have ultimate truth. Truth is not some objective entity apart from God; truth is the shining glory of His Person. Only a living spirit above the intellect could understand eternity, and only a mystical mindset permitted a perception of the pervasive presence of God’s justice in the world. Jesus told Nicodemas the Law meant nothing without a living spirit. Yet every miracle Jesus performed, everything He said, and everything His Apostles taught later, were already in the Hebrew Scriptures Nicodemas thought he understood.
Nothing Israel did, or failed to do, changed the moral fabric of the universe. It remains still; they simply moved out from under the blessings and into wrath within the same justice. They did so knowingly. Over the past two millennia Western Christians have done the same thing. Just as Israel’s failure could not restrain God’s hand from His plan of redemption, so the blindness of Christians has no effect on whether people are spiritually born. Indeed, God still works with His people, though more often in spite of them than actually through them. Whatever God does in bringing about spiritual birth, we know of a certainty Decision Theology is a category error against the logic of the Bible. It blindly mixes the temporal with the eternal.
Hostility to Biblical Mysticism does not result in hindering God’s eternal redemption of souls. The tragedy is in how we have all tossed aside that unspeakable joy of tasting the divine, in favor of shallow and impotent reason. We have lost out on all the blessings of God’s justice on this earth and have little hope of understanding what comes after this life.
We rob ourselves by avoiding Biblical Mysticism.
Recommended readings: Go back and reread the Bible with a proper mystical understanding of the text. Review your favorite commentaries in light of a Hebrew Mystical worldview. Pay particular attention that Paul’s Letter to the Romans was a direct repudiation of Christian Hellenism, while the Letter to the Hebrews was a direct repudiation of Jewish Hellenism.
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This is the end of ACBM; the next step is final rewrite and publication.
