01 August 2022
Another good question provokes the following.
The universe is real. This is what God made. Our human perception is what's broken. We are fallen mortals; the rest of Creation is not fallen. So the problem is not Creation being weird, but our ability to think about it.
What is so very hard to comprehend is that, on some level, the universe is more variable than we imagine. We are designed to interact and make adjustments. When Jesus calmed the storm, He was doing what we were designed to do. When He walked on the water, it was in part to demonstrate that our fallen condition is not normal. We have a tendency to see Him as the anomaly, but He wasn't fallen.
This should give rise to a whole range of recognition that we cannot trust our fleshly nature on anything. It should help to drive a wedge between you and your flesh. At the very least, you should begin to see all things on two levels. It's very important to distinguish between the two realms of existence. We have no trouble seeing our fallen realm of existence, but we struggle with recognizing the spiritual realm.
This leads to all kinds of problems that make following Christ harder than it should be. We confuse the boundaries between the eternal and fallen. We talk about physical things being sacred and try to make the symbolism of the Bible literal. We don't understand that God's Law is about moral character instead of specific actions.
In John 6 Jesus dealt with a crowd that was particularly obtuse. He talked about the Bread of Life and it drove them nuts, because they were so focused on bread for their bellies. It was part of a wider pattern of confusion that characterized Judaism itself. The Pharisees had gotten so completely hung up on the manifestations of shalom that they had forgotten what it meant to have peace with the Eternal One.
In recent posts, Jack at Sigma Frame has done a wonderful job of driving a conceptual wedge between where our Enemy wants us and where we are supposed to be. His focus is on how we are manipulated by Satan's servants in our cultural expectations. The posts on this theme:
How he uses the term catharsis may not be obvious at first. It is inherent in our fallen human condition to feel a weight of unhappiness about things. A major element in our culture is to offer all kinds of solutions that are guaranteed to make things worse. For some it's a matter of distraction through entertainment, but for others it's the driving necessity to fix things. The biblical approach is to realize that this world is fallen and cannot be resolved from this level. Jesus teaches us to get used to the tension of being human and stop seeking solutions on a human plane. The solution is to exit this plane.
Our existence here has a purpose, though. The purpose is to bring our Creator glory. The basic method is to manifest a lack of any real interest in this world and to focus on the ultimate reality of Eternity. Our catharsis is dying to this world and its concerns. We love the Lord; we don't get trapped in any number of false devotions (cathexis) to things of this world. Because of our justified devotion to Christ, we are able to sacrifice our mortal existence -- typically in small portions here and there -- to redeem small portions of the lives of those around us who don't see the Eternal.
We seek to get free, and set others free, from the prison of fallen human existence. Until we physically leave it at God's behest, we depart by small degrees here and there, and try to encourage others to come with us. The purpose of our sorrows is to divorce ourselves from the source of sorrows: a mind stuck in this fleshly realm.
Jack rightly directs our attention to 1 John 2:15-17 (NASB 1977):
Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. If any one loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God abides forever.
My blog promotes Christian Mysticism. One of the pillars of that is detachment from this world (disentanglement). Do not allow this world to pull you back down into the flesh. Climbing out the fleshly nature is what we mean by moving your conscious awareness into your heart. The heart is a sensory organ capable of discerning moral truth directly, without any filters. The heart can read the spiritual realm and interpret what is required in the specific context. This is why the Lord wrote our convictions on our hearts with His own finger. Convictions are the tablet of His Law inside of us.
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