It does make a difference, but it’s not paramount.
There is a sense in which human awareness is the primary field of operations for what God does in this world. Yet, human intellect is not what sets us apart from the rest of Creation; it is not the ultimate faculty for awareness. Our intellect is apparently above that of the rest of God’s creatures on this plane, but it’s not even a significant element of what will survive the passage into eternity.
Most of us are vaguely aware that this human body must be transformed into whatever it was Jesus was using for a body after the Resurrection. This flesh cannot cross over. What almost no one in Western Christianity grasps is that the intellect is sourced in this fallen flesh. God created the mind as a servant, not as the master of human existence. The Fall was in essence the human choice to usurp the Spirit and place reason on the throne.
A critical first step in redemption was the long path of learning to reassert the prominence of the heart over the mind. We don’t really have the words to describe this process because we lack the facility in English heritage to operate on the level of the heart. We don’t have a rich lore of parabolic expression because the language itself is crippled; nothing in the development of English ever passed through the kind of learning that was common to the ancient world of Scripture. So while men could spend time relearning how to operate from the heart in ancient times, we have much farther to go just to get to their starting point, never mind the long path the ancients took to find ultimate truth.
Adam in the Garden served as God’s agent. We don’t have the language to describe how he did this, in part because we are missing an entire range of understanding. We have a massive mythology, so popular with evangelicals, that Adam spoke God’s Word with his mouth and the Garden obeyed. They take that quite literally, rejecting the existence of a parabolic meaning. As God’s agent, Adam was inherently obedient, a living expression of God’s character on this lower level of existence. Adam was God’s proxy, and Creation responded accordingly. Creation bowed the knee to God’s authority living in Adam.
It was perhaps only in the most superficial sense that what Adam did might resemble management as we think of it. Adam projected God’s Presence to renew the frame of reference so that the Garden would remain a reflection of God’s design. Adam did this through the power of his heart, because Adam naturally lived in his heart, not in his head. The heart itself projects a measurable field of influence on Creation, and receives communication back. If anything, the Fall was a shift to management by the mind, and Adam’s mind was never up to the task.
With all our depth of science, our minds will never be up to the task, either. So long as we remain in the mind as the root of our awareness, we will be wrong about everything. We can see the vast details and the pattern of their operation, yet understand nothing of why Creation does what it does. Only the heart can grasp at the purpose and fulfill God’s design.
To reverse the Curse is to dethrone the intellect, and move back into the heart. For us today in our Western Civilization, that means a very hard and painful path of conquering the intellect. Our entire civilization vehemently denies that the intellect is fallen, and that anything of value can be found outside the reach of reason. The very best I can do is paint the picture of the heart in analogs of the intellect. The heart has a form of awareness, a form of operation that could compare, just barely, to logic and reason. The heart has its own way of arriving at a decision, including a vast reach of input that all of Western Civilization denies is even possible, much less desirable.
Were your heart in charge and your spirit awakened, your intellectual development wouldn’t account for much either way. Being a primitive ignoramus would not keep you from Heaven, for sure, but it would also open up the faculties Adam used in the Garden before the Fall. Not all of it, but the fundamental nature of operations would be much the same. Making the heart your master over the intellect is absolutely necessary to live a godly life on this earth. You become a very productive sheep in His pasture.
Add to that condition your lifelong efforts to understand with your mind the absolute necessity of making the heart your master, and training your mind to serve, and you are a by nature a shepherd. That is, while He owns the sheep and it is His voice they follow, your mouth will sound with His voice and the sheep will tend to follow you. What you have is an expanded and vivid awareness of how things really are, the ultimate reality of things in this Fallen Realm. You can tell others of this reality and help them formulate their own path of obedience. This is a genuine godly education, what the learned elders of ancient times held and preserved for us.
What chokes us today is how that record comes to us in a language and intellectual discipline so utterly alien to what is common today. Reading and studying the Bible from a foreign mind will bring foreign results, and Satan would love to do everything possible to falsely confirm that approach. Down to the very wiring and appetites, we don’t have a clue what’s in our best interest, nor what’s possible. We have a monumental task just overcoming that vast ambiance of deception. It’s just barely possible to bypass that if the learner isn’t fully aware of the meaning of their Western heritage, if their heads aren’t already loaded with Satanic garbage, but still rather empty.
The difference is in the calling. If you sense a drive and compulsion to learn this stuff, you had best get to work. You are appointed as an under-shepherd and the sheep need your help. If not, then stop chasing such an education and bend your will to the other tasks at hand. Let your mind listen to your heart and obey the imperatives and your body will do what’s best.
The mind is just a tool.
