23 October 2023
If you can take seriously the business of communing with nature through your heart, then you realize that this world is far less threatening that most westerners imagine.
First, we need to deal with a bit of complication. You may know that the West is a convergence of the Greco-Roman Civilization and tribal Germanic barbarians invading the remains of the Roman Empire. Both cultures are inherently pagan. When these two collided, the church leadership were far more political than spiritual, and sagely thought to shift from the fading Hebraic brand of faith to a Germanic pagan one. This is how they seduced the Germanic warlords to keep peace with the church. This is also how the West was born.
The inherent secularism of the resulting culture is just a cover; it's still larded with chaotic fear of the unknown. We have a very substantial mythology that leaks out in our horror genre of fiction. Even the most confirmed atheistic secularists carry that background of fear about the unknown. It's burned into our western emotions.
You do understand, I hope, that this pagan superstition is not at all like the Hebrew outlook of the Bible? There's a subtle nuance here. On the one hand, the world is fallen, under the dominion of the Devil. But he doesn't control the natural world. Rather, it is simply without proper management; it's chaotic, but not hostile. It does seem hostile at times, but that's not truly the case. The natural world is not out to get us.
The real danger is us. Our fallen fleshly nature is allied to Satan and his friends on the elohim divine council in Heaven. They are the hostile threat. The things in this natural world that spook us are partly the lying fears planted by Satan along with the perversions of the elohim council. They are the ones who, in rebellion, gave unredeemed and unrepentant humans the knowledge of how reality is variable, and how to take advantage of that. It's called in our language "magic" but it's not actually spooky and esoteric. The saints of God have better information, and we know how it's supposed to work.
We know that the natural world is our ally in glorifying God. We have no reason to fear, only a healthy respect for how uncontrolled it is. We know that a weakened peace with God, due to defilement, will hinder our communion with nature. But the door is open to restoration. Even down to the random events we could not possibly control, the strength of our communion with God and His Creation can tilt things in our favor. It's not that we control things, but that God does with an eye to His glory working through us.
As long as our commitment to His glory holds, we need not be spooked by anything that turns out to be uncomfortable to the flesh. We consciously avoid the trap of catering to the flesh. We don't think of human sorrow as a bad thing; it's just part of the Curse of the Fall. It's not just the natural world as "nature", but the natural world as the sum total of all matter, locked into the constraints of time and space. Everything is alive in a certain sense, and longs for our redemption so we can bring it back into order. We will be restored to our eternal form and regain our mastery over the Garden of Eden.
Now, go back and read Romans 8:12-25 with that perspective. Here, try this link.
Rather early in my ministry, I began to grasp this from my heart, though I was not fully conscious of what it all meant. All I knew was that I could barge right into so-called "haunted houses" and have only standard physical risks to worry about. There were no ghosts, though there were plenty of lies from our Enemy (capitalized as a collective plural, not a singular noun). These days I can add the better information about the Unseen Realm to bolster my flesh against typical American fears. I have been granted a sense of the limits of elohim power in reaching into my world.
There is no other power except what is defined in the Bible.
Remember what I wrote previously: Satan is confined to this world. He does not have access to the unseen powers. All he has is the power over human fleshly natures, the power of lying persuasion, of temptation. He is not the author of the powers of "magic" -- those come through the elohim and pagan worship, and the elohim don't have Satan's commission. There are firm boundaries neither they nor Satan can cross.
Most of the spooky mythology of America is a lore of lies. Nature itself cannot generate the horrors of our fiction; nature would not. There is nothing unstoppable about those horrors; they are all lies. You don't have to be a victim. Yet, to the degree you truly believe in that crap, bad things can still happen. But they happen because of the variable nature of reality and how it is subject somewhat to perception itself. It's the power of miracles turned on its head.
There are no powers from Hell that work from beyond the grave to intrude in this world. When flesh dies, that's it. Whatever manifests in our imagination regarding that sort of mythology has no power over your existence that you do not grant it. You could make it happen to yourself, and maybe some others under the same lying spell of false fear, but you cannot harm genuine covenant believers with it.
You cannot change your convictions; they are written by the finger of God. You can ignore them or adhere to them. They can overpower your human intellectual processing. You can reshape your opinion to match what God has revealed. Lord, help our unbelief.
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