It’s not what you naturally expect.
In our fallen state, we have an awful lot of trouble discerning the fundamental nature of reality. The single most common failure is refusing to grasp the nature of the Fall itself. Most humans outright reject the notion, thus crippling every other consideration. Worst of all, we live in a civilization built on the most pernicious mythologies arising from that rejection.
At our best, we still cannot imagine in our minds the fundamental reality outside our Fallen Realm. This is the reason for parabolic language. Jesus bluntly said parables were necessary because they could only be processed by those spiritually alive. Even when He explained the meaning of a parable, the disciples only thought they understood, but missed critical elements in why the parable had to be told. The import of the parable still passed over their heads, as evidenced by their clinging to false messianic expectations.
This was a critical part of the very reason Christ lived in human flesh and sacrificed Himself on the Cross. Simply saying, “to pay for our sins” offers language that allows most people to miss the point. Under the Law Covenants, gaining actual use of spiritual truth required an awful lot of study, study from within a particular epistemological background that is quite rare among humans today. Yet, even in the ANE world of the Old Testament, rare was the individual who rose to the occasion and was able to lead others into the benefits of that spiritual truth. Christ came to make that spiritual truth a free gift, and reversed the procedure. His Spirit grants the spiritual connection first, after which the seeker then goes on to train his mind to follow where his spirit already walks. The soul has to catch up with the spirit.
The point in religion now is not first to know the moral laws of God so as to approach the gates of Heaven and petition for entrance. Christian religion assumes you hold an entrance pass and need to shed the baggage that won’t be permitted inside. The actual difference between those two images from the eternal point of view is impossible to grasp, but using parabolic or symbolic language, we can characterize the task of religion. Shedding the baggage of the Fall is not an objective, but a process requiring faith — AKA, commitment. It’s the place you live until you are called Home.
Perceptive readers will notice the fundamental task of religion has not changed. We still need to learn God’s Laws as the means to a parabolic understanding of how to manifest His glory here inside the confines of our time-space continuum. Are you surprised at how this echoes what God told Moses on Mount Sinai? God said He could not show Moses His face, only the backside of His glory. Moses would have to leave his human body to see God face to face. Whatever happens to folks who reanimate after death, they don’t see God face to face. This would represent reporting to your Lord for retirement, since the mission is complete. So long as you occupy a body of flesh, the mission continues.
The mission is not to change the world. God alone does that without any reference to us at all. Rather, the mission is self change. Some of my favorite songs use martial language.
Unfortunately, if you converse with folks who tend to love this sort of music, they reveal some horrible misconceptions about what it all means. They typically cling to the mythology of changing this world. We don’t fight Satan out there in the world around us; we fight him inside ourselves. There is no static victory place. The flesh does not stay nailed to the Cross. The battle does not end until we leave this world. Granted, there are changes we can make that tend to have a permanent effect in what we fight. Still, the business of “we wrestle not with flesh and blood” is a reference to fighting the demons in the mirror, to which our flesh is allied.
That is, we are not fighting the people and institutions we encounter in human space. Those are mere tools Satan uses to provoke us to fleshly responses. If we pay too much attention to the actions that provoke, rather than our response to the provocation, we get lost in the details and Satan wins. The question is not what God might do to change things, but what we will do whether or not He answers our prayers to change what we encounter.
The powers of the Age to Come are not for changing the world, but for changing ourselves. The spiritual battlefield is your own soul.
