Can I Interest You in a Metaphorical Shovel?

You can’t call it an ambition, but I strive to one end in this life: I want to be translated into Heaven like Enoch and Elijah.

Getting there requires using everything God has granted us in this world to be holy. We have to become so pleasing to Him that there is no point in dying in the flesh, because we have engaged so much self-death while alive.

I believe it’s one of the greatest heresies of Christian religion to believe we can’t get there these days. It’s a lie that what God was doing in the Old Testament is so radically different from what He’s doing after Christ came that the option of translation without death is now gone, that such miracles are no longer available. It’s that foul doctrine of cessation of miracles, that such things are not for us today. That’s a lie of the Devil to deny you your divine heritage. The only thing holding us back is the baloney in our heads from centuries of corrupt materialist Western thinking. This virtual parish rejects Dispensationalism.

God has not changed, and the coming of the Son didn’t change the nature of the universe, nor our fallen condition. The rules of existence after the Fall didn’t change with Christ; He simply breathed life into what was already there. Everything God did with the ancient prophets of Israel He still does today. The problem is on our end.

The burden is upon us to relearn all the things those ancient Hebrew people took for granted. We have to go back and lay hold of that same mental approach to reality. We have to get used to how some things were never stated directly because they were too obvious for those folks. We read their Scriptures and are sometimes quite lost, or get totally off the map, because we haven’t bothered to ferret out the differences they never discussed. In their world, they didn’t have to deal with deeply materialistic epistemology, so there was nothing like that against which to contrast their faith.

In other words, I’m suggesting that God still talks to people today the same way He did Abraham, for example. He still calls people to leave behind everything they ever knew, and to change the way they live. And it should be obvious that when He makes such a call, it won’t be audible in your ears, nor detectable to any of the other the fives senses. The Bible says it’s rare when God speaks, and it sounds to us like thunder. That is, unless we have something inside us turned on that hears a voice instead of something that assaults the senses. Obviously God didn’t speak to Abraham in thunder or everyone for miles around would have heard it.

Instead, it was more like God speaking to Elijah in that “still, small voice” that falls outside the boundaries of standard human senses. The voice calls to us using equipment we all have, but which our culture doesn’t allow us to develop.

The problem is that our culture demands a clinical explanation, something rational. That’s not going to happen. In fact, the Bible dodges the whole issue by using esoteric language of parables. There’s a reason for that; the truth of God has the inherent purpose of dividing, of polarizing humanity into those who trust Him and those who don’t. If you trust Him, you have to abandon what keeps everyone around you locked out. You have to abandon the safe harbor of human reason and intellect, and trust in things that rational people avoid.

We have the equipment built into us already, but our world has invested vast resources over two millennia destroying the reputation of that equipment. In clinical terms, the only thing we can say is that the personal communication from God comes to us through the same equipment that our science tells us is full of sentiment and wild emotions. This makes it very easy to miss the voice of God and mistake it for imagination, to call it childish wishful thinking. I’ll grant you that it’s very easy for people to chase childish imagination instead of seek out revelation from God. But that should not justify dismissing the whole thing.

So instead, we have to spend a lot of time developing ways to exercise that equipment after first instilling a sense of maturity about what God demands of us. We see that in the Law Covenants. That’s what those covenants do; they condition us to look for reality to manifest God’s personal moral character. Not in the particulars; the ancient people knew better than that. They knew it was about reading between the lines to see things for which there can be no words. Divine truth cannot be confined to mere words. It’s the kind of knowledge two close friends have about each other.

So I can talk all around it, I guess, and that’s why this blog has so much verbiage on it. More than ten years of exploring this stuff and sharing what I’ve discovered. But I’m not supposed to be doing this alone. A critical element in all that miracle stuff is how we share it with each other. So if any of this stuff calls your name, consider getting involved in pursuit of this massive task of reclaiming what has been buried for two thousand years.

Can I interest you in a metaphorical shovel? I realize this form of communication lends itself to lots of misunderstanding. I wish it was face to face so all the subtle cues were more obvious, but I’m convinced we can bumble through this with God’s help. There is a lot of treasure we need to dig up.