We know that there is quite a distance between Western assumptions about reality versus the world as portrayed in the Bible.
You must unlearn at least some of what mainstream society has taught you. The call of faith will be exceedingly frustrating otherwise. It requires that your conscious awareness step across the boundary into the Spirit Realm. For some few, it’s an experience that eclipses at least some of their senses, and can be rather like a trance state. For most of us, it will be far more subtle, something easily dismissed and ignored. Nonetheless, it is there and you can experience it.
Crossing that boundary is both another realm, and yet entirely within you. The fundamental issue is your commitment — your faith — to the God of Creation. If you managed to turn within yourself to those hidden realms without such a commitment, you would encounter lies. Demons lurk there and without the hedge of God’s sanity, they will tell lies even bigger and more compelling. You cross the line into insanity, though it is far worse than mere delusion. You become more tightly chained to their lies.
There is a very concrete reason we emphasize an awareness of Biblical Law: It shields your conscious awareness from deception. It keeps you sane; it guards your intellect from dark powers. Satan is most certainly the Prince of This World. That doesn’t grant him power over the natural world, but power over human awareness of the natural world, and thus, power to manipulate human behavior. Biblical Law is a shield, a hedge of covering that binds the Devil’s hands. He can still project his lies, but against the Word of God, they are mere mists and noise.
Note in passing: Most of this exploration and exercise of spiritual awareness is meant to take place in the cocoon of faith, in the physical company of other people of faith. That God has called a few of us out of the fallen world without much of that face-to-face contact means that He regards us as equipped and able to handle the challenge. Without faith we are nothing; we are downright dangerous. With Christ, we are powerful enough to face down the Hordes of Hell.
So the issue remains a matter of mission and calling. You cannot face demons without the confidence that comes from the Presence of God. Thus, we spend a great deal of our human time investing in praise, invoking the divine Presence of the Holy Spirit. This conditions our conscious awareness and our minds to be familiar with the power and authority God designed for us, and us for it. Worship and praise exposes us to who we were called to be.
This is precisely what was meant by the phrase in Genesis 4:26. “And then men began to call upon the name of the Lord.” They were out of Eden and imprisoned in fleshly mortality. Their only hope of redemption was to invest a portion of their time in seeking God’s favor to handle the situation. They had entered a realm where Satan was the ruler, and were no longer instinctively connected to Creation. The only way forward was to stay connected with the Spirit Realm, a foot in both worlds.
We must first accept the justice of things being so crappy for us in the Fallen Realm. This is the root meaning of the word “confession” — to stand with God when He declares what sin is. If we don’t confess our fallen state and the burden of a fallen nature, we cannot safely cross the boundary. This is a part of genuine worship. From there we go on to claim the justice and rightness of Biblical Law as a divine gift. This precious gift from God makes our sad life here bearable.
Seizing Biblical Law means leaving behind a broken life, the first step back to Eden.
