Reprise: Two Realms

The world is fallen. It’s broken and will not be fixed. It can only be transcended.
When mankind in the Garden chose the path offered by Satan, his spirit died. While recovery was possible, it meant passing through the Flaming Sword. We know this as the symbol of God’s revelation. It’s both a threat and a gift; paradox is a primary feature of Truth. That Sword as two edges. You can reap the wrath of God’s Laws, or you can reap the blessing. If you embrace the Flaming Sword, turn it willingly on your own soul, you can pass and the Sword becomes yours to wield on His behalf. But the scabbard remains your own soul.
This truth stands on both levels. On the level here below, you can only approach truth through His revelation, His Laws. The only way the fallen soul can know God is through His demands. You aren’t family; you are merely a subject in His domain. You aren’t invited to the parties, but your life can be decent because what He requires to be at peace with Him on this earth simply isn’t that hard to understand. The degree of soulish peace (shalom) possible and the blessings of reasonable prosperity, health, social stability and security — depends on how seriously you take His Laws.
On the spiritual level, His Laws introduce your soul to the true redemption. Without the soul’s repentance under His Laws, the entrance to the Spirit Realm remains closed. The Flaming Sword must kill your fleshly self, and release your spiritual self from the grave. The fleshly self stands on the lid of your spirit’s casket, so to speak. Not that flesh will remain dead, once killed, but it’s doom is set in eternity. It remains your daily chore to keep nailing the flesh to the Cross every time it comes down. It will come down every chance it gets.
While the Law is not binding on our spirits, it remains in effect on our flesh. We aren’t under Law, but under Grace, because we are alienated from our flesh. Law still instructs our minds, though, so we can organize our response to grace. As a matter of principle, the Lord does not speak directly the mind of any man. He speaks only to the living spirit of one He has raised to life, speaking to His Spirit in our living spirit. The task of life here is to so train the mind to obey and implement the spiritual communion with God’s Spirit. The mind learns from the Spirit via the will, where the eternal convictions of God are written. The mind interfaces with the will via the conscience. The conscience is merely the intellectual reflection, the conscious awareness of the convictions burned into our will by God’s Spirit. The conscience will change, grow, gain a greater accuracy of interpretation, but convictions are unchanged from the moment of spiritual birth.
Even this is merely parable. The human mind cannot understand eternity, nor spiritual matters. It can gain some indication, but it must be taught the logic of revelation. That logic is symbolic, not analytical. The language is parabolic (of parables) and indicative, not descriptive. To the human mind, everything is uncomfortably fuzzy and variable, but the Spirit Realm is far above the capabilities of the fallen intellect. Could we see beyond our fleshly limits, we would recognize things in the Spirit Realm are more real, more solid and invariable, even as it lives and thrives and grows. So we simply accept by faith what the mind cannot grasp. We teach our minds to take a back seat, to be the servant, not the master. It is the student, the disciple who simply absorbs without question what is handed down by the teacher.
Thus, our daily task is to keep the mind focused and obedient to the Spirit-spirit communion. We assume without question we will not understand, because what our minds could grasp is not worthy of full attention. We live in a broken world and it’s a blasphemous lie to suggest our Christian duty is to make the world a better place. That simply cannot be done. We can bring truth to light in this world, and that’s the duty. Our actions are not to change things, but light a blinding fire of revelation in the gloomy darkness of this world. Our primary means of starting the blaze is that Flaming Sword. We brandish it, slicing through the death and darkness of this world. It is His unconditional love, His sacrifice of His Son, His peace and power over sin, living through our actions. They will be consistent only in the logic of Heaven, not so much to those who have no such enlightenment. And we will surely fail, because the flesh refuses to die. That’s not our problem; our mission is not to bind truth under human logic, as if any human could manifest perfect moral consistency of itself, not to force our lives to make sense to fallen minds, but to simply expose the lies with our truth, and wait on God to use His own truth to cut a path through darkened human souls. He will use our mistakes in the process, because it’s not about us, but the truth we bear. It’s not about fitness or being worthy, but His sovereign choices.
We are dismissive of our own human welfare, looking for our own cross to bear in this dying world. While we may well use our inner resources to reduce human suffering, that is not the objective. The purpose is to show His love, to show we are willing to sacrifice in His name. The Laws of God serve to instruct the mind what love looks like, because it is always consistent with the moral fabric of Creation.
Walk in His love, His truth, His revelation; observe His Laws. How hard is that?