A conventional, mainstream religion will not carry you through the apocalypse. Only genuine faith can do that.
If all you know about Christ is what’s recorded in the Bible, then you don’t know Him. He transcends the written record. Granted, the Scripture certainly says you must encounter Him via the Presence of His Spirit invading your soul. But the Scripture cannot explain it, only declare it. There are no words, there is no explaining the birth of your spirit when the Holy Spirit awakens you.
And while we can talk about the effects of His Presence, no one can put into words the experience itself. Further, no one can put into words some of the ways in which He makes His Presence felt. Scripture only hints at spiritual experiences that early Christians had. It is my conviction that what they mention is not definitive. The Hebrew culture in which Christ was born militates against such a restriction. The fundamental nature of Hebrew language is more like a signpost, not a container. It calls to us to explore and find things for which there are no words.
I can describe for you moments of my spiritual ecstasy. Paul mentions leaving his body behind and being drawn up into the Spirit Realm. John’s Revelation mentions something similar. Surely these are not exactly normative, and yet they are quite common.
By the same token, our Enemy can counterfeit these things. This is only because there is something inherent in our human existence that permits us to cross that line under certain circumstances. The question is just who is sponsoring your visit. Here at least, Scripture gives a pretty good indication of how this can go wrong, though again, it is not entirely definitive. Rather, instead of a closed list of indicators, we are given insight into the kind of indicators we can observe.
Thus, we can be sure something like A Course in Miracles (ACIM) is not from our Lord, but a counterfeit revelation from the one whose lordship is limited to the fallen realm. This is not the place to explore how we can know that, but it should be obvious. I’m not referring to classical apologetics as a proper source for deciding. The issue cannot be fully captured in intellectual definitions. It’s not as if there can be no new revelations of God, but that they must not contradict the ones already established. In case you don’t know, ACIM flatly contradicts the Bible.
As a matter of practice, I consider the Bible open. Not in the sense that we should accept more written records into “the canon” but that what it addresses is not closed to only the material already included. It’s a gateway. You cannot avoid the gate, but it’s not a fence in itself. Rather, it signals the presence of a fence, a boundary to the Covenant that we must discover, both individually and in community.
Thus: Revelation is not confined to the established canon of Scripture. An awful lot of what God will do in our lives and in our faith communities is left open for contextual experience. What God has done for the Hebrews is not definitive; we are not in their world. Most of us are Gentiles, and the record makes it clear that we can benefit from the Hebrew experience, but it does not confine us.
This is why Paul used words to indicate that the Holy Spirit is like a skillful butcher (using a “sword”) inside our souls, capable of carving off the parts of the Hebrew experience that don’t apply to us. It’s not enough to say that Talmudic Judaism is not for us, but that the genuine ancient Hebrew faith is also not definitive for us. It is an example of how God does things with humans.
That these boundaries are rather fuzzy and not precisely defined drives western minds nuts. Yet, this is what we have to work with, and Scripture does say we must work this out with the Lord in person, not in some depersonalized regime of rules and intellectual definitions. Such a regime reduces things to human control, and humans are fallen. Over and over again, one of the biggest heresies of western Christian religion is the often unspoken assumption that human intellect can be perfected, and that human reason is not entirely fallen.
The crux of the Fall is relying on human capabilities instead of revelation. Satan’s offer was that we could be our own gods, which is exactly where he and his allies on the Divine Council went wrong. He wants us to join him and his rebellion. Thus, limiting our lives to what we can grasp intellectually is rejecting the Holy Spirit.
It’s not that hard to back away from purely western intellectual obsessions and understand the Hebraic outlook. It is not out of reach to get a feel for how those two are different, and on that basis, to understand how the West is fundamentally anti-faith. I’ve spent years writing about what I can see as a vast perversion of the gospel message by forcing it to fit western assumptions. I’m still calling for believers to escape that prison and explore the wider lands of serving the Lord.
As humanity together slides down into tribulation, the western outlook on life will crumble and fail completely. It is not able to connect us to what God offers His servants. There is a great deal we should have explored long ago, but we allowed our western assumptions to hinder us. A genuine faith in Christ — the feudal submission depicted in the Bible — is what we need. Some of what faith includes must be discovered experientially within our context. Yes, there are elements of the New Testament experience we can never replicate; we simply cannot do it. But that leaves an awful lot of room for exploration that simply has not happened among western Christians.
We have a lot of work to do in order to meet our apocalypse.
