Unchained Vision, Part 1

Once more the mad prophet gibbers and jabbers, rattling his chains and scrawling on the walls of his prison cell.

Trying to explain some of this stuff is what drives me nuts. I’m compelled to use a language that is hostile to the very truth I seek to reveal. And I’m projecting that truth into a hostile culture. It’s a miracle of God that any of you catch onto what I’m saying.

In one sense, Eden is nowhere on this earth. In another sense, it is earth. Plato really muddied things up with his perverted view of real-versus-ideal. This is the genius of Satan at work here in how he twisted the minds of the rabbis who sought to embrace Hellenism (Plato and Aristotle) and ditched their Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) mystical assumptions about reality. It was the Pharisees, those who most thoroughly promoted Hellenized Judaism, who came up with the idea that Heaven was a far distant place that could not be understood by their legalistic reasoning.

This made the Spirit Realm into a mythical nothing that was far separate in rather concrete terms. Heaven and Hell become literal locations with confined borders, someplace in the Fourth Dimension. The mystical approach of their ancient Hebrew ancestors was far different, in that the only separation between this realm and the Spirit Realm was the Curse of the Fall. You cannot get to Eden because Eden is right here, all around us. We cannot perceive it because our fallen nature is like a prison with walls that hide the real world. But it’s a prison of the soul; fallen flesh is the prison. It’s not so much the literal body, but the fallen nature that inhabits that body. We know that resurrected bodies look enough like our current bodies that the disciples easily recognized the risen Jesus, so something about our bodies is eternal, but it won’t suffer the time-space limitations.

The soul doesn’t die when our mission is done here; only the fleshly nature dies. It’s not that our bodies are so foul, but that the fallen nature is. We have to shed that nature to take our rightful place in Eden. So long as God allows this time-space realm to exist, we don’t have use of our divine bodies in Creation. In death, we rest with Him until time-space is ended and He will reveal our true nature in a re-creation of Eden; we will reclaim our resurrected bodies. What we now experience as “nature” will be redeemed from our mismanagement as fallen creatures, and restored to its truly natural state.

When we encounter personal redemption, it’s not a matter of getting a ticket to some far away place called Heaven. Redemption is reclaiming our divine heritage of Eden. But because the Fall is not yet dealt with finally, it means we are granted a partial release from the Curse of the Fall while we are still here in time-space. We are permitted to sense what Creation could and should be; we reclaim some portion of what Adam and Eve had in the Garden of God. We are still mortal and burdened with that prison of the soul, but we have an added component of being able to shift into a higher realm of awareness that belongs to Eternity.

So this whole business of redemption is not getting out of here, it’s fixing what we can do and have here. It’s a foretaste of what is to come (mentioned in passing in Hebrews 6:4-5). We are reclaiming the heritage of what God delivered to His children even as they remained in their fallen state. The whole story of Scripture is a narrative of revelation, starting with the Creation and the Fall, and pressing on to the final revelation in the person of Jesus Christ. A part of what we see in Christ’s life is the kind of miraculous existence possible for those who walk in the revelation.

Jesus struggled with the weakness of the flesh, but without a fallen nature. There is really no way to explain that, but we know He walked in demonstration of what we could have. Thus, my religion and teaching are all about restoring a vision of what we could have here and now as an organic part of what we have in Eternity. It’s all one thing; it’s redemption already before we die. Dying is just a shift in circumstance.

In that sense, we are already “in Heaven.” Our citizenship is secured as we are current residents. It’s just that we are still dragging around our fallen nature and it’s really difficult to keep a proper focus with the eyes of our hearts. The siren song of the fleshly nature is loud in our ears, driving us mad with desire for things that could never matter, because they will not survive that moment of change “in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Corinthians 15:51-55).