Good and Bad "Mysticisms"

So I heard some more of MacArthur on the subject of mysticism and it just gets more frustrating.  ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0fETODHsoM&t=71s)   He's preaching on Colossians 2:18 which he calls a warning against "mysticism."   He likes the NASB and my favorite is the KJB, and since the KJB can be hard to read I'm also including the NKJB (New King James) as possibly clearer, so here are three different translations of that passage: 

New American Standard 

 Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking his stand on visions he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind,

New King James Version

Let no one cheat you of your reward, taking delight in false humility and worship of angels, intruding into those things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind,

King James Bible
Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind,

There is nothing in the scripture itself which labels this kind of behavior as "mysticism" so this is MacArthur's own idea of what mysticism is.  It makes me wish I had another term for what I've been talking about here but the problem is there isn't one.  Better the phenomena described above were called "occultism" or  "Gnosticism."   As MacArthur continues his talk he uses terminology associated with Gnosticism, and there are other places in the New Testament where Gnositicm is specifically warned against.  When I first startied reading the writers identified as the Mystics, during the early years of reading back in the late 80s, those years that led to my becoming a Christian,  that's what they were called and changing their name isn't going to happen.  But they are not anything like what that scripture passage is describing and what MacArthur thinks is mysticism.   It is also not  Gnosticism.  One of my atheist friends during those years didn't like the "fundamentalist" direction my thinking was taking and gave me a book about the Gnostics, which for some reason have a higher standing among intellectual types than Christianity does.  I could only read a few pages of it.  It so blasphemed God it frightened me and I couldn't go on readingf.  I like to think that's because I really was already one of the Lord's sheep who hear His voice and won't follow any other.

Even in my own reading, however, I did come across people who were called Mystics that not only did not attract me, they seemed to be pursuing a spirit completely different from the love of God I'd been finding in the ones that did attract me.  Jacob Boehme was positively scary and offputting, so was Mechtilde of Magdeburg.  So it has to be acknowledged that there are different mysticisms and some are not good, some are probably witchcraft rather than anything truly Christian.   Perhaps Edgar Cayce could be put in the bad cateogry.  He had some kind of supernatural or spiritual experiences and was considered to be a healer and thought of himself as a Christian, but there's really nothing in his writings about God or Jesus except as perhaps instruments of the paranormal phenomena he experienced.

I hope I don't have to get more deeply into all of this.  I'm no expert, I've merely read enough to have a general idea of the spiritual territory that's involved in these questions, and I've already done some posts on it in the past.  In the upper right margin I have listed Andrew Strom's film on how Kundalini Yoga has found a welcome in some churches and needs to be recognized as demonic and repudiated.  Hinduism loves to make claims about Jesus Christ and to confuse Biblical teachings with their demonic practices and Christians should not be falling for this.   Practices of the eastern religions have found a place in the churches because Christians are naive.   Yoga is not necessarily harmless for instance.   God says in Hosea 4:6: 

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge   

They have rejected the knowledge of the true God and therefore He will reject them.  They have forgotten His law and He will forget their children.    It is the "liberal" churches that invite the eastern religions in, and they are open to the charge of rejecting the true God and forgetting His law.  But unfortunately some of the eastern practices entice the merely naive who are not strongly grounded in their faith..  

Maybe I will have to say more about all that after all eventually  But this all came up because I wanted to renew my own spiritual life and immersing myself in devotional reading has often accomplished that for me.  Devotional reading such as Tozer's Pursuit of God and his book of Mystical Verse can certainly revive my spiritual life, but it also raises these questions about what mysticism is.  I usually answer that it is the intense longing after God that inspired Tozer and those writers he includes in his book of verse, that takes the longing soul deeper or higher into the Christian life than many others go or want to go.  

One of the most famous mystics is John of the Cross who wrote the poem "Dark Night of the Soul" and the book in which he elucidates the poem at great length, "The Ascent of Mount Carmel."  

Here are the first few stanzas of the poem.  It is considered to be a mystical poem.  

On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.

In darkness and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised–oh, happy chance!–
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest.

In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart

 If you read the book about it you'll certainly understand that there are some methodological issues involved, as he discusses how prayer is practiced in a way that subdues the flesh and releases the spirit.  It's been a long time since I read the book and I'm sure I don't know exactly what he means by many of these figures, but at least the "dark night" refers to the subduing of the flesh, perhaps the overactive wandering mind, perhaps the senses,  as does his "house being now at rest,"   It is when the clamoring of the life of the flesh  is "dark" and "at rest" that the spirit is most alive to the things of God.  

That is what this poem is about, the soul's drawing near to God in prayer, or the"ascent" to the presence of God in the quietness of the flesh and the world.   "Be still and know that I am God" may be the apt scripture reference.  In a sense it is a treatise in itself of the practices that lead to the experience of God;s love and our love to Him.  "Kindled in love with yearnings" sets the emotional tone, which is probably the engine that drives the whole undertaking.  Much  of the poem probably refers to the moritification of sin and the growth of virtues such as humility, but I'd have to reread the book to know how he talks about those things.  The emphasis on being unobserved, concealed etc., suggests we're not talking about a state of false humility, and there is no hint of anything like the worship of angels here.  This is not what Paul is warning against in Colossians 2:18.

The poem is about how by subduing the flesh and the world the soul is enabed through prayer to have a deep loving experience of God.  THIS is what I've understood to be Mysticism.  

A pursuit of God in prayer that starts out in the right direction can take a person deep enough to start having "supernatural" experiences of various sorts.   Or as the mystics may think of it, these may be rewards from God, or "consolations" from God.  Tozer isn't writing about that aspect of things but to read any of the mystics themselves will make that clear.  Yes there is a deeper or higher Christian life but it isn't something different from Christian life in general, it's the result of a more intense pursuit of the biblical revelations of God.  

HOWEVER,

In that pursuit it is possible to get off into the "spirit realms" if you don't know what you are doing or you let yourself be attracted too much to whatever supernatural experiences you might have.  The Christian mystics themselves are always warning against taking such phenomena too seriously because you often can't tell where it is coming from.  You may assume it is from God when it is in reality a demonic counterfeit.  So they recommend simply leaving them alone, not dwelling on them, not trying to hold on to them.. 

As I hear more of MacArthur's sermon I have to say that he's right about what he's right about.  There is a lot of what he is calling mysticism in the churches these days and it is dangerous.  I'm in this uncomfortable position of trying to defend what I think of as a genuine Bible-based experience that comes to some people as a result of a true passionate love of the true God and Jesus Christ and not an ego trip and not a pursuit of experience for experience's sake or for thrills,   As I said I wish I could just use a different term for it but Tozer called it mysticism and it has a long history of going by that name so that's not going to work.  Guess I'm going to have to continue this is in the next post.

Trump is the real Democratic Party we used to know; Hillsdale College could teach us true American History; and HCQ should be saving lives

 I only got to hear a few snippets of Rush Limbaugh's show this morning but it was enough to produce three gold nuggets to mention here.    Nuggets of perspective that could get America back on track if enough people lerned from them.

Realized that two of them came from callers to the show.  Of course Rush himself is full of good stuff but oh well in this case it happened to be incidental things.

And the third was just an ad for Hillsdale College which is offering free online video courses on American history.  I think if enough Americans imersed ourselves in those it could go a long way to bringing us back to the America we were meant to be.

that's one nugget.  The second was the caller who said she'd been a Democrawt until she realized that the old Democratic Party is no longer what it was but that Trump is really that old Democratic Party.  She's right.  Trump is the real Democratic Party.  Now if only so many misguided Democrats recognized that fact.

And nugget three was the caller who was lamenting the bad press heaped on the drug Hydroxychloroquine since if used in the right dose at the onset of COVIC it is as good as a cure for it.  The bad press has come from a  few really stupid studies of the drug's MISUSE, in the wrong dose at the wrong time with patients already dying of conditions other than COVID.  But if it's used at the right time, in the right dose with Zithromax and Zinc it even saves the lives of people with these co-morbid conditions.   I've posted information on this earlier.

So people are dying who don't have to die because this drug has been buried under propaganda through studies that may have been politically motivated in the first place, since they were so bad they shouldn't even have been published.   

More of the story:  Democrats realize where your Party really is these days and leave thtqa anti-American Marxist-Communist monstrosity the other one has become;  Democrts, Republicans and everybody else:  sign up for the Hillsdale course which you can take at your convenience; and everybody make sure you have a source of HCQ with Zithromax and Zinc lined up in case you get COVID.

There is a true Mysticism that is Biblical.

 Oh groan.  So I've been writing about mystical verse as presented by Tozer, and he has the same idea of mysticism I've had since I first encountered it in the first years of seeking God.  It's about God, it's about Jesus, no it is not about some kind of method of meditation or even faculties of the soul although I know some of the old mystics spent time on that subject.  I've known there is a current movement in the church that calls itself mystical, that teaches something it calls Contemplative Prayer but the little I know about it hasn't attracted me in the slightest.  It isn't the mysticism I'm talking about, that Tozer displays in his books.  

Why does language get so bollixed up anyway so that we talk at cross purposes about such important things?  I just took a look, a look that lasted half a minute I think, at a video of one Dallas Willard who is one of the teachers of this Contemplative Prayer movemeht and he was about to give a definition of the "will."  Yes that's what I'd begun to grasp, this movement is about US, it's about the human being, it is not about God.  Or God is secondary.  What we are to learn is something about our own faculties and so on.  This is not the mysticism of Tozer.

I heard a few minutes of John MacArthur on the subject, calling the Contemplative Prayer movement "bunk" and going on to define it as looking within for spiritual intuition, and it's all about this personal intuition as he understands it.  

Well, maybe it is as this movement is practicing it.  I'm not going to find out because I'm pursuing another kind of mysticism and I don't think I need to know more about that movement for this purpose.  According to Tozer we should think of the Wesleys as mystics with their magnificient verses and hymns to God and the spiritual life of a Christian.  Isaac Watts is a mystic to Tozer.  Surely MacArthur isn't oging to dismiss Watts in the way he dismisses this current movement.  But that's the problem with how language is being used in these different contexts.

I'm definitely being inspired by the book of mystical verse Tozer put together.  Solidly biblical thoughts about such subjects as the incomprehensible greatness of God, about the nature of God the Trinity, about Jesus, His suffering for us, His love to us, about the Cross he  endured for us, about our undeservingness, the meanness of our fallen nature and God's astonishing mercy to such ingrates, all biblical Christian themes as appreciated by different believers who thought more deeply about them than the rest of us.

If the current movement called "mysticism" that MacArthur is debunking should be so debunked and dismissed, this other mysticism should not and I've been trying to get across here how we need it.  Its focus is loving God, expresseions of love to God by some who pursuied it passionately, beyond the level of most Christians in the churches.  Simply because we don't invest the time in its pursuit, we've never been exhorted to deepen our experience of God as these mystics did.  In fact we are sometimes exhorted NOT to pursue these things.   

As Tozer analyzes the problem in the beginning of his book "The Pursuit of God"  this may largely be due to a shallow understanding of Justification by Faith that keeps us stuck always in the beginning stages of salvation rather than prompted to seek the very life salvation bought for us, the whole point of it all, "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever" as the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it.  It's a tragedy.  Sometimes God has sent true revival into a church or community and His presence alone teaches us that there is more to the Christian life than salvation, but somehow the lesson doesn't get learned.

Perhaps this current Contemplative Prayer movement could be understood as one of those reactions against this unnecessary limitation on the Christian life, a misguided reaction, a reaction that went wrong as so many of them do.  The point is to know God as He shows Himself in scripture, not to "intuit" anything else or get all wrapped up in the capacities of our human spiritual faculties.  Yes we have the "means of grace" and if we put enough energy into those we might become mystics too, Prayer alone touches God.  If our prayers are brief and not focused on knowing God we won't become mystics, but a determination to seek God Himself and know Him better is all it takes to become a mystic like those who wrote the verse in Tozer's book.

Even the Catholic mystics sound like Protestants in this book, because they are drawn to the true God and the false practices of Catholicism simply do not draw them at all because they are false.  They are seeking God Himself who is not to be found in those practices so they simply are not enticing to them.  Scripture itself reveals God and that entices them.