Chapter 11 — Testing, Testing
I propose a test. Teaching the mind to follow the leadership of the heart takes time, for those who have never tried it. The full flower is when a firmly held intellectual belief is trumped by the heart recognizing something more accurately reflecting God’s reality. Previously I noted that relying purely on reason and dogmatic assertions have led to some bad theology.
We can agree that Jesus was the Son of God, the clearest revelation ever offered by the Father. Obviously the whole point is the Person of Christ, not merely some narratives of second-hand experience. We are accountable to those narratives because they are God’s provision for introducing His Son. Yet, the intent of the Gospels is that He should be born in your soul via the Holy Spirit. He is not confined by the Gospels, but outlined. You have to know Him as a Person, not as a collection of mere propositions. We know that His blood shed on the Cross satisfied all penalties for sin, and that His resurrection and return to Heaven did open the door for the Holy Spirit to come into our souls and live with us. When His Spirit enters our souls, our own spirits are brought to life.
It’s not as if people before Christ couldn’t connect with the Spirit of God, but they had to first go through the applicable Law Covenant — Moses for Israel and Noah for everyone else. And it should be painfully obvious that mere ritual observance was not sufficient (1 Samuel 15:22). Pharisaical legalism was the result of Hellenism perverting the ancient Hebrew approach, an approach common among all Ancient Near Eastern cultures. Everyone knew that you were personally obliged to commit your entire soul to desiring what your sovereign desires; that was presumed in every covenant. But in Christ, we can receive that spiritual birth before we dig into a long and heart-led study of the Law. We receive His Spirit first, then study the Law.
Up to this point, it’s likely that most readers with a Christian background are nodding their heads in agreement. But to show what an awful influence Western mythology has on Christian doctrine, let me pick out one story: the myth of Pandora’s Box. It’s part of a larger tale from Ancient Greece wherein Zeus gave Pandora a box (a jar, actually) containing all the evil stuff. She was tricked into opening it, releasing all that nasty stuff back into the world. As with most mythology, it’s designed to shape our view of reality itself. So we get this crazy idea that stuff we find unpleasant is somehow not from God. It’s a knee-jerk reaction you’ll see across the whole of Western Christianity, and it shows up in doctrine and theology.
The Pandora myth is entirely alien to the Bible, yet we read it back into Scripture unconsciously.
To correct this, we need to back up just a bit. Creation and nature are not fallen. You and I are fallen. Nature is under the Curse of the Fall because we are, and because we were created to be stewards of this universe. From the very beginning, poisonous snakes, biting insects, bacteria and viruses were always there, among other things. In the Fall, we surrendered our instinctive communion with nature along with the power to guide natural processes according to God’s moral character.
So when God told Adam the ground was cursed, He said it was because of Adam’s choice. We struggle now to understand nature well enough to stay alive, never mind exercise moral dominion over it. In our moral blindness, we continually place ourselves in a position to be vulnerable to everything that could potentially hurt us. On top of this, we struggle under an entirely false notion of imaginary “perfect health,” that getting sick from time to time is somehow not natural. Plenty of things we call “disease” are merely the body reacting as it should; it is part of the natural cycle of human existence starting in Eden. It’s as if all pain and discomfort is from Hell — what a pampered and entitled mindset! So we suffer from ignorance of what ought to be, and ignorance on how to avoid what ought not to be. At a minimum, we have to reclaim a connection to our hearts to even begin reclaiming what we lost in the Garden of Eden.
Please get this: Stasis is not a blessing. Reaching some ideal moment in your life and locking it in for countless years was never any part of biblical thinking. The human body might have once been able to live a very long time, but it was never meant to be eternal. It was built from the dust of the ground and must eventually return there. There is a higher realm of existence to which we belong and this flesh cannot go there. Don’t confuse Heaven and Earth. If you are going to insist that Eden was free of any human discomfort and aging, then it was never on this plane of existence and their bodies were nothing like ours. Adam could not have been made from dirt, either. Eternity is not “endless time” but timeless; the human mind cannot conceive of it. Constant change was a fundamental design feature of this universe from the start.
Nature does not need human reason to guide it. Nature is just fine as it is if reason is all you have. What nature does respond to is any individual who rises above mere reason and reconnects to their heart, because that is a step on the path of reconnecting to what Adam and Eve tossed aside in eating the Forbidden Fruit. Sickness, suffering and sorrow are not inherently contrary to the will of God. They are part of the Curse, but the Curse includes our ignorance of what is good and right. Christ on the Cross did not simply wipe away the Curse all at once; spiritual birth doesn’t grant you the privilege of healing and wealth just because you like those things and they make good logic. The Cross ameliorates the Curse and starts us on the path to redemption, which path doesn’t end anywhere on this plane of existence, but ends when Christ returns. Meanwhile, so long as you live in this fallen flesh, the Curse will remain at least partially in effect.
If nothing else, we remain under the constraints of time and space limitations. As long as you cannot fold up your house and put it in your pocket, space limitations effect you. So long as your body ages and you eventually die, time affects you. Despite using symbolic language, it’s pretty clear from Scripture that God and the Spirit Realm do not suffer space-time limitations.
Nor did Pandora release demons that hadn’t been there before. The Bible presumes you understand that demons are simply angels under Satan’s authority — John’s Apocalypse indicates it’s about one-third of the angels. Satan isn’t nasty and evil as Westerners imagine such things. Satan is a very high-ranking servant of God, His official Punisher. Every Ancient Near Eastern lord gave the office of Jailer to someone who was quite powerful. It could be very profitable to run the emperor’s prison. We can grasp that Satan took this position as punishment, a reduction from an even higher privilege (Isaiah 14:12-17; Ezekiel 28:11-19). We should avoid any notion that Satan is at war with Christ, the Divine Heir before whom he has ever been utterly helpless. That silly imagery of Satan attacking Christ is foreign to Scripture.
If anything, the Wilderness Temptation shows that Satan did His best to keep Jesus from the Cross. He tried to tempt Jesus into avoiding any human suffering. Political power and magic tricks were a diversion from the reason Christ came to earth. Far better to let Jesus have mere earthly powers for earthly gain than to keep His eyes on the Spirit Realm. Our Savior came to suffer for us, not to take over the world in a political sense. We pervert His message when we use it as an excuse to get involved in human politics.
Satan is at war with us humans. Lucifer’s office in God’s court allows him to consume the labors of those who violate God’s divine moral character. Prison in the Ancient Near East was as much about slavery as confinement. Obviously, Satan wants to keep us in his slavery, and deception is a primary tool. It’s how he subverted Adam and Eve in the first place. It’s how Satan gained authority over humanity and took away our moral perception. He keeps us from participating in God’s glory and walking in God’s Law, which Law was originally offered as our best hope, our greatest benefit.
The same Law of God woven into Creation is binding on Satan, too. Jesus obeyed the Law, as well, in part because He was that Law personified. There is a sense in which our embrace of God’s moral character is all it takes to crawl out of that prison. Those who allow their hearts to awaken, who start down the path of letting the heart lead the mind, will progressively gain more freedom from the Curse. We reduce our Enemy’s legal authority and he consumes less and less of our lives. His ploy is to keep things confused so that people don’t find out how to escape. Does it not seem obvious that Western Civilization is one of the greatest tools to ever serve Satan’s purposes?
Just this little bit is probably a shock to many Christians. You don’t have to buy into everything I wrote here. However, if you found something inside of you unable to deny parts of this, despite being contrary to previous beliefs, then your heart may be awakened.
Religion in general, and theology in particular, are simply human constructs. They are the result of the human mind striving to respond to a divine imperative. There is plenty of genuine biblical doctrine that is pretty clear, but with much dispute over it because people keep reading their theological biases back into Scripture. In the long run, your heart should help you understand that theology is merely a matter of your own personal logical organization of how you intend to respond to that divine call. One man’s theology is as good as another, though some are far more eloquent, and even compelling, in their statements. Still, it remains nothing more than a human tool for organizing revelation, not revelation itself.
We have a long way to go unlearning our Western biases and relearning the intellectual background in which the Bible itself was written.
