15 January 2022
We don't have the terminology to explain it, but I'll do my best to point out the path for you to explore on your own.
For all his mistakes, CS Lewis got one thing quite right, this world is the "Shadowlands". The question is not a matter of what God made; the natural world in its essence is unchanged since before the Fall. Humans are fallen, Creation is not. Whatever else you make of the early chapters of Genesis, we humans have chosen to reject divine revelation and embrace our human capabilities (Tree of Knowledge) as the path to truth. Those capabilities can't get you the truth.
So we end up with God coming into His garden while Adam and Eve were hiding. The only thing that had changed was human perception. It became crippled and filled with lies. The truth is that God was their Father, but their perception was only fear and wrath. Without the revelation of God, that's all you could know of God. This moral blindness extends to all Creation.
Since that moment, mankind remains crippled by this false perception, utterly devoid of the vast truth of divine revelation. It is this atmosphere of deception that defines the biblical term "this world". It is not a reference to Creation, but the false human perception of it. We are fallen; we cannot get to the truth from where we are now. We can recover a taste of it by redemption, but to fully regain what we lost requires leaving this mortal existence. That's what "this world" means.
And "this world" is Satan's domain. It's just one big lie.
I will admit that the so-called "Christian Scientists" have one little piece of the truth: Human suffering is largely a deception in itself. Most of their doctrine is nonsense, but this one thing they have right, adding a bunch of false baggage. It's not as easy as simply declaring that you refuse to suffer any more. You can't box God in on this. You can't take for granted by fiat declaration or doctrinal assertion that every element of human suffering is going to go away by command (a notion they share with Charismatics). Rather, it is the burden upon us to enter the Covenant and learn from the Father what He will give and what He will take in order to restore His reality.
The whole point of faith as a form of perception is that you discern from the Lord what He wants to change, when and how. A miracle is the restoration of what God says is real, but which Satan has lied and hidden from us. In this, we could say that "reality" is variable. In the Shadowlands of our fallen existence, the lies of Satan can range over a lot of falsehood. What appears as Black Magic to us is variations of Satan's deception, and we buy into it, to some degree. But it's not a deception in the sense that secular humanism has it. There is no objective reality to be discovered, as if it were unfailingly reliable. That's just trading one lie for another. If you truly believe something, it's real enough to affect your existence. If you have faith, then what God wants you to have also becomes real enough to affect your existence.
The question is not what's "real", but what your faith can embrace, matching with what God tells your heart He wants to do to make things match His version of real. You can fail to believe it and hamper the realization of it, but it's there waiting for you. But you need to understand that this "reality" is not just one single thing. It's variable. You can't rightly say it's just a matter of perception on the fleshly level; it's a matter of perception in the heart.
Granted, your heart can be darkened, as well as enlightened. This is where all those Dark Arts come from. It's Satan deceiving someone into believing the lies about an even nastier reality than what most of us experience. If one strong figure believes the lie, then it will rope in others who believe the lie, and it will become "real" for them. It's not really magic, just the perception, a perception so strong that those without protection from the Covenant cannot escape the lie. It's as real as it needs to be, and it works in practice.
Bringing yourself under the Covenant, walking inside the boundaries of God's design, protects you from those deceptions. Your flesh might still believe what it sees, but your heart knows better. You simply reject it. Even if you can't break the spell for anyone else, you don't have to buy into it. But the reality for most of humanity is being under that spell. So when you manage to claim a gift from the Lord, they may not believe that, either. Still, it becomes yours because you are more out from under the spell.
Yes, it can be faked on both sides, but the point here is that reality isn't locked into just one thing. It's variable to some degree, and Jesus can rebuke the storm and make it quiet. The main point is not the reality you live with, but the change in your heart that makes you part of His eternal Kingdom. The miracles are just a side effect, and shouldn't be a major focus.
So, Satan doesn't change what God made; he binds under his spell people who lack the Covenant covering to protect them. And God allows humanity to adjust their reality as part of their created nature. The Fall takes away from us the kind of awareness that guides that kind of ability. Instead, we forfeited that ability to Satan in the Fall, and he has a field day creating lies that we believe, and that we act on, so that it's as real as it needs to be to trap us.
Thus, as my friend says, "Reality is fungible." One reality can be as "real" as another. With the Fall, we are in a condition where "reality" is variable. What we want is the ultimate reality our Father made for us.
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