Adjust Your Perceptions

You cannot know Christ without your heart. It may well be you are His, bought with a price, but you cannot truly know Him without a mystical encounter through your heart-mind. It’s not a question of sentiment, though it will most certainly have a strong emotional impact. It’s most certainly not cerebral, because that you only brings knowledge about Christ. You must know Him as the core of your convictions, a personal loyalty only the heart can hold.

We are born under the dominion of Satan. That’s part of what the Curse of the Fall means; we are born in sympathy to his agenda. His agenda is to deny you the heritage of blessings, to keep you away from the Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden. As long as you keep eating from the Tree of Knowledge, you cannot eat from the Tree of Life. The Forbidden Fruit is your commitment to trust your intellect over your heart; it’s the rejection of God’s revelation.

Nothing else in all of Creation changed at the Fall. What changed was human perception, now locked under the intellect, under senses and reason and emotions. In pulling those faculties out from under the dominion of the heart, those things were broken. Even their own native capabilities are hindered by the deception of the Forbidden Fruit. That term “Tree of Knowledge” refers to “knowledge” in the sense of being the judge, of deciding what is good and evil without reference to divine revelation. But of course, good and evil are not decided by humans; they are written into the fabric of universe. Humanity together is not capable of legislating what good and evil should be; moral truth existed in Creation before mankind was made.

It’s still there, plain to see, but not with the eyes of the flesh. Only the heart is capable of discerning it. Unless you are a priori committed to Christ in your heart, you cannot hope to understand anything about reality.

Don’t be a fool — it hardly matters if you know Him by that name. He was there in Spirit from before Creation and has always lived in the moral fabric of the cosmos. His birth of the Virgin was simply an incarnation. He was always within reach of the heart under any number of names, and still is. That never changed. The advantage now is that He took on human form and demonstrated it. So painfully clear it is that the last bit of excuse was wiped away.

He is the personification of Biblical Law, the personal living will of God. Sure, the specific Covenant of Moses is ended, but the Biblical Law that ever lived behind that covenant has never changed. Try not to get hung up on the English translation of the New Testament when you run into the term “law” — it could indicate any number of things. It could be a reference to the Talmud, which was little more than the civil law of Judea, something pasted on top of the Covenant of Moses. Or it could be a reference to the Covenant of Moses as a specific example of Biblical Law in a particular context. Or “law” could have other meanings best understood from the context.

Don’t be deceived by the moral decay in the natural world around you. It’s polluted by the folly of humanity ignoring God’s revelation. Natural decay was a part of nature from the beginning, the cycle of life God designed. The defilement of human sin afflicts Creation as a whole, including our own bodies. Don’t look for the cycle of natural decay and rebirth to change after Christ returns. Look for Him to heal the moral decay and defilement resulting from human evil. There will be some massive changes, but they will all be a matter of restoring God’s original design.

Nor will time and space end; “eternity” doesn’t mean what you probably think it means. What will change at His return is how humans perceive time and space. Indeed, it’s virtually impossible to explain in words. It will be a reset back to the way it was in Eden. But we will take with us the experiences we have had since the Fall; this will prevent a second fall. Then the Lord Himself will return to walk in the Garden with us once more. Try not to get hung up on some alleged literal meaning in 1 Corinthians 15:50-58 and 2 Peter 3:10-13. They are summarizing what it will look like to anyone living at His return. The effects of sin will be burned away.

Test these declarations against your heart.