3. The Spirit Realm is real and beyond comprehension. There is a distinct realm of existence totally alien and separate from ours. It is in every way superior, and our plane of existence is merely a temporary bubble within that greater realm. The human mind is totally unequipped to handle the Spirit Realm, and it is best understood with other faculties.
This is a corollary to the previous point. A proper biblical anthropology rests on a biblical cosmology. Jesus spoke to his audience in parables, because parables are addressed to the heart, and only the heart can fully grasp the higher truth of things beyond this world. The Hebrew Scriptures used figures of speech for the afterlife that were common throughout ANE cultures. Jesus quoted both, from those more ancient images, as well as using figures of speech common to His day. However, it is painfully obvious that His teaching was a direct confrontation of the growing influence of Hellenized rationalism, with its attendant literalism and legalism. He taught in parables as a pointed rejection of trying to reduce God and His truth down to mere cerebral content. The net effect of teaching in parables was to exclude those who refused to rise above mere reason, because true commitment to His Father in Heaven demanded something more than mere intellect.
Thus, Jehovah was no mere national god, but the Creator of all things — this was an audacious claim, unique within the ANE context. The vast expanse of our physical universe is just a small element of Creation. Furthermore, a part of the Curse of the Fall was the confinement of human awareness to time-space constraints. Death was not a part of Creation. We were not made like this, but this is our condition now. It is the human perception that is fallen, along with our fleshly existence, not the rest of Creation. Instead, Creation suffers under the perversion of fallen human perception, and cries out for mankind’s redemption and restoration to full eternal communion with our Creator; that’s what we were made for.
The very nature of the Fall was man’s insistence on enthroning the intellect over the heart. Human intelligence was never meant to rule man’s life. Divine revelation is not addressed to the intellect, but to the moral faculty of the heart. God gave us over to the tyranny of human will, which is the very Curse itself. The intellect is incapable of escaping the Curse of the Fall by its own abilities. Instead, the mind is locked in a struggle to make itself god and to turn this awful state into an imaginary eternal paradise. God says He intends to destroy this world because it is all one big lie. Nothing in the teaching of Christ was meant to make this world a better, but to help us escape this world. He died to reunite us to our lost divine heritage, and that requires subjecting the mind to the heart. It is with the heart that we restore our awareness of Eternity outside the bubble of the Fall.
Didn’t Graham (Azure Ides-Grey) and I submit for this, or was it for something else? I can’t remember. Either way, glad this is getting out there.
Yes, but there weren’t enough others to complete them. When you use other writers like that, it’s all or nothing. I would have been fine with using his and your work as it was, but I needed five others and they weren’t there.
I get what you’re saying. No problem. FWIW, I like what you have so far.