How to explain the Spiritual to those who don't have the Spirit.
Recently, by miracles of miracles, my atheist 91-year-old father decided to come to visit. We haven't ever been a really close family, and my relationship with my father has been somewhat strained over the years. I grew up in a very dysfunctional home, where my mother and father came from two different extremes in thought and behavior. It was a marriage made in hell, no doubt. From that marriage, GOD brought forth six children. For some strange in explicable reason, GOD chose me out of the entire bunch to be His exclusively, in other words, I am the only "born-again" believer in the entire line, going beyond both my mother and my father's lines. If anyone understood how Abram felt when YHVH GOD called him out of his family and homeland, I do.
When it happened to me in 1989, I did not come seeking GOD, I did not have any kind of traumatic event in which I was desperately seeking some kind of life-saving miracle. I hadn't hit rock bottom and realized there was no place else to go, nor was I converted in a church or pounded over the head by a Bible thumper with the ABC's of salvations. (Admit you are a sinner, Believe you need a Savior, Jesus, and the Confess him as your Lord and Savior.)That is the church's 3-step plan to becoming saved out of our lost state to people have no concept of being lost. That's man's way of explaining the Gospel, it is not the Biblical and Spiritual way. He, GOD just came for me. All of a sudden, there was another world that I was aware of and drawn to, and there was no way to resist the pull. It was from there that I sought out the truth from the only "Bible thumper" I knew at the time. I asked him where it said that one had to be born-again, and although it took him way too long to find it, I read my first Scripture (John 3:3), and I believed it to be true. From there, with the door open, GOD did the rest of the work to complete the mission of bringing me into a world I never knew existed before. It was then that I went from lost to saved, even though I had no idea that I was lost in the first place.
1 Corinthians explains the difference between the "lost and the saved," far better than any church person can, but how do we explain 1 Corinthians 2 in the spiritual to one how has not the Spirit. It's like teaching Greek to an English speaking student using only the Greek language with no translation tools. Or like typing Scripture out in wingding font and expecting them to get it. There must be some kind of translation tool that opens the world of Greek to an only English speaking person. It's is the same in the Spiritual. That tool is the Holy Spirit.
If the Holy Spirit doesn't translate from "wingdings font to cursive, and then to regular print (for those under the age of 40) we will never be able to understand the Scriptures. Sometimes, the Holy Spirit will give someone like me a great metaphor that will explain to the unspiritual what it is like to travel and operate in the spiritual, and that just happened. I am awake at 2 AM because I just had this vivid dream, and I woke up abruptly. I know when I've had a dream like that, waking up abruptly out of it, my mind automatically starts to mediate on that dream to try and understand why I had it. When I can't get my mind off the topic or my body back to sleep, I know it is the Holy Spirit saying to me, "Think Kristina." Sometimes, my dreams have no point, and then there are times like tonight when I can see the point clear as day, clear as looking at a photograph instead of the negative. I am going to attempt to explain the unconscious mind and where it can go in sleep/dream state, because many of you know that when we dream, it's nearly impossible to explain the circumstances of the dream because it's almost as if it is in a different realm. Quite frankly, it is.
I once heard a sermon that hinted that dreaming was much like entering the Spiritual Realm where angels dwell. We cannot see that world, but when our minds are free to go, because our bodies are at complete rest, we dream what scientist call REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. It is then that most of us have dreams. Some of us have quite vivid dreams that we can remember, even if the details are foggy. Then there are some of us never seem to dream at all. My husband is like that. He said he never dreams, or remembers dreaming. That's almost kind of scary, because it would make me question his salvation, but, maybe being saved isn't just about dreaming. I think that some of us are "gifted" with the ability to go to that "dream place," the Spiritual Realm, while sleeping, and there YHVH GOD communicates with us. That certainly is how it happened in the Hebrew Scriptures with prophets like Joseph, Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah, and the like. I am one of those person who dreams almost before REM even starts. I'll start to fall asleep and I'm already dreaming, even though my mind is still conscious of the physical realm. It's that really deep sleep that I go to a place that I cannot explain in words that can be understood. It's not every night, but it is most nights, and on a rare occasion like tonight, I'll wake up abruptly from a dream that has deep Spiritual connotations, and I'm forced to contemplate them over ad over, enough so that going back to sleep is out of the question.
So, to the best of my ability, I'm going to try and put into words what has no language. In my dream I was in some kind of medical training. Imagine being up on top of water, learning how to live underwater, even though one must keep their eyes closed under water because it's pitch dark under there. In this school, I was learning how to function in the complete darkness under the "sea," and then, it was my turn to go under. I went under the "water" in complete darkness into this hospital type and my personal trainer was saying to me from above, "Okay, now, you've been trained where the walls are, where the hallways are, where the rooms are, and how to hear the patients, use what you've learned in your head to function. Use the map we gave you from your mind in the pitch dark."
In spiritual terms, walk in faith, knowing you've had the training and now get that hands-on experience with what has been placed in our heads. Living in faith of YHVH GOD is much like living under that water. Unless we are explained "boundaries and entrances" are we won't know where to go. We have to be trained to listen to the "patients" when and where they call and be able to attend to them. We can only be trained in the Scripture and the patients would the lost world needing us to tend to their sickness of original sin.
In my dream, I was learning all alone with my personal trainer, but when I went under, there was a fellow student who was trained elsewhere. We were both going so slow in the darkness, using the skills we had been taught to get around. It was just a short time later, an emergency came, and a patient was calling us for assistance. We both couldn't walk slowly anymore, we had to run through the hallways to attend to this patient, so we both just started running in the pitch dark. Within just a few minutes, we began to see where we were going, but not in black and white, but in negative form as in the picture above. He was behind me, and he said, "I can see now," and I said, "Yeah, me too." We bolted through the hallways and could see the patterns on the walls and the floor tiles, then I woke up.
We could see not the details of the "hospital," but the forms of the walls and floors and doorways. At the same time, we both exclaimed that we could see and we needed to hurry to that patient. The only way I can think to explain what I dreamed do that in metaphor, so hold on to your hats, we are about to enter the metaphorical world of this metaphor mama. In the world of photography, there is the picture in great detail on white film paper, and then there is the negative from which that picture was developed. An experienced photographer in his red-light developing room can see more details of his work in the negative, and it is protected from being over exposed in the bright lights of a white fluorescent world. I don't know if that makes sense, but that "negative" world needs to stay protected in the dark. In other words, the Spiritual World is alive and active under the "red-light" protective power of GOD.
This is definitely not a blog post that one can skim through and understand, but it's going to take some time and imagination to understand. The Spiritual Realm is under the control of the Almighty, only by the Holy Spirit are we invited to live in it. Some have the gift, or what I rather call the burden of being able to see "under water" with our eyes closed what other cannot see when they are swimming. It is both a gift and a burden, because it is impossible to explain to the seeing physical world, and even more impossible to explain to those outside the realm of faith who have not the Holy Spirit as their translator. Fellow believers may get it, but they don't know if they believe it.
I was trying to explain the spiritual to my atheist father, knowing he did not have the Holy Spirit. I showed him 1 Corinthians 2 passage and for the first time, as an adult, my father read the Holy Scriptures. I told him, "Dad, I can't explain GOD and the spiritual things to you, because you live in the black and white world. You haven't been given the ability to see the things of GOD, and only He can give you that ability, but this is how I am trying to explain spiritual terms in black and white."
His question to me was, "well, how then do you know what you are reading in the Bible is true?" That is the most difficult question we get hit with a lot of times. I showed him the passage about Moses. GOD had to reach down and "show up" in the physical world with a burning bush that was not being consumed by the fire, and Moses had to "turn aside" to see. He was willing to check out what this event was, and when GOD saw that he had turned aside to further investigate, it was then that GOD called to him. It is like that with us when we try to explain the spiritual terms of salvation to an atheist. YHVH GOD has to show up with a "miraculous" hand to do something statistically impossible to show that He can do the unbelievable and impossible. It is when we open our mind, or as I told him, crack the door open to the possibility that GOD exists and is truly reaching out to us that he bursts open wide the door and fills us with the Holy Spirit, the translator. He agreed to crack the door open, and now it is up to YHVH GOD whether to open wide the understanding of the Spiritual to him. I explained to him that with those little bits of proof, we are invited to hold our breath and jump into the sea of faith, like jumping into a deep blue and dark ocean. Unless we hold our breath and jump in, we will never be able to experience underwater, much less be able to see underwater. That is the faith spoken of in Hebrews 11:6. (6 And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for the one who comes to God must believe that He exists, and that He proves to be One who rewards those who seek Him.) It is that willingness on our parts to hold our breaths, jump in, trusting there is life under the sea. That my friends is saving faith.
It isn't coming to the end of ourselves, because in the natural flesh, that is impossible. Only the Holy Spirit can show us that we are sinners in need of a Savior, and that happens when we hold our breath and jump out of the boat into the sea of the unknown. We have to be told, trained and taught that there is life under the sea, then we have to trust the one who told us that they may be speaking the truth. It is only after we jump off that boat that we ourselves will experience walking "under" the water, and able to see the life under there and thrive and breathe in the the truth of the Spiritual Realm. Telling someone who doesn't believe in the Spiritual Realm that there is a Mighty GOD and beings that dwell there, then explaining their need for a Savior is the equivalent of typing this entire blog in wingdings font.
