The Fallen Soul Cannot Know God

And this is eternal life, that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent.  That's part of Jesus' "high priestly prayer" in John 17.  Eternal life is to know God.  And in that same prayer Jesus says He is the giver of that eternal life to those whom the Father has given Him.  

I keep trying to remember the Westminster Catechism answer to the question, what is the purpose of life, and I can't remember the first part of it.  To love God, to worship God, to know God, I can't remember.   But the second part is "and enjoy Him forever."  

To Abraham God said, "I am thy exceeding great reward."  In the 42nd Psalm David writes, "As the deer paneteth for the water, so my souil longer after Thee.  You are all my heart's desire and I long to worship thee.  I think that second line is how the song from that psalm goes on, but the psalm itself says somjething else.  I can go listen to it and I may be wrong.  But the idea iclear, the soul longs after God Himself and takes pleasure in worshiping HIm.

That's the message of all these quotes.  Knowing God, loving God, longing after God, that is the hieghtt of the Christian life.

A Q Tozer wrote about this in his book The Pursuit of God, where he laments the fact that Christians are often kept on the level of doctrine when doctrine should be pointing us to the adoration of God Himself.  I think that is true.  We get stuck on justification by faith, forgiveness of sins, even maybe to some extent sanctification or growth in holiness and the Christian life, although that is less emphasized than the principles of salvation.  The point is that a hunger after God Himself is the purpose of it all and yet that is often neglected, and as Tozer laments, even prevented by the way doctrine is emphasized.

But my point in writing all this is to contrast this Christian goal of knowing and loving God with the kinds of teachings we get from the New Age and Easter religious practices, those Near Death experiences and so on.  God get mentioned in all that but certainly not ever as the supreme object of human longing.  And of course the ideas of why and what God is are very vague.

Although I could recognize the essentially demonic nature of most of those experiences even before I knew of Watchman Nee's writings on these things, Nee's perspective does bring it all into focus in a very ueful way for whickh I am very grateful.  For one thing he makes it possible to see that some of it isn't demonic in its essence but comes from powers originally possessed by Adam before the Fall, hu;man powers.  Although they are easily exploited by demons they are not demonic in themsevles    However, the Fall buried them in the flesh as he thinks of it, and made them far less ac

cessible to us than they were to Adam and Eve.   He

\Sorry, I can tell I'm garbling some of itthis.  I'll try to straighten it out as I go.  

Nee says that Satan is very interested in releasing the latent powers we all possess from their entgrapment in the flesh so that he can use them to counterfeit true spirituality.  When I the stories of near death experiences, so many of which are so similiar in their claims to be spiritual experiences, I have to conclude that Nee got it right.    The people who have these  experiences are falln human beings, unregenerate, which means not born again as Christians are.  It tgakes regeneration or being born again to hav any contact with God at all.  The spirit is what died first at the Fall, the spirit that had been in communication with God.  The soul which formerly had been able to know both God and the life of the senses or the flesh, now only could communication with the world of sense.  It had become fleshly.  God says in Genesis six, I tghink, that He will no longer strive with manhkind because he is but flesh.    Adam lost the ability to communicate with God and we all inherit that inability.  It's pretty obvious isn't it?  

All people are discovering with all these experiences of The Other Side, and paranormal powers, is the world of the soul which is now confined to the The idea of God remains but it's a pretty shadowy vague idea.  We need the revelation of the Bible, God's own word to us, because we do not have the capacity in ourselvdes to discover God.    But we can have all these spiritualistic type experiences and mistake them for true spirituality and even think we've encounterered heaven or the true God.  Or in some cases think we've discovered that thesere really isn't a God of the sort we know from the Bible.  Epxpeirnce trumps it all.  Out goes the bible which is the only way we could ever really know the truth about God and instead we rely on all thse demonically influenced experiences to tel;lll us what reality is all about.    N ojudmgnet they tell us, unconditional love they tell us, nothing to fear about death they tell us, we just get to go "home" where everything is light and love and beautiful fields of flowers and the like.  

realm and has no contact with the true spirituality which is of God.  \\\\\

In

The ONLY way to know God at all is through the death of Christ.  Through believing that His death paid for our sins.  That's the Open Sesame to the regeneration of the spirit that reconnects us with God, undoes the Fall.  That means that all the religious practices of other religions can relate only to the world of the flesh, the soul as clothed in the flesh, and demonic or spirit realms.  Buddhism doesn't recognize God at all, which is quite in keeping with the reality that the spirit that could know Him is dead in them as it is in all of fallen humanity.  Practices of meditation and other disciplines of the nonCHristian religions may succeed in releasing the soul powers, or siddhis, from imprisonment in the flesh, and create the belief that the spiritual has been awakened, which it is onlyh the soul powers that have been awakenened to imitate and counterfiet spirituality.  Even if God is somewhere in the the picture he is not knowable in the personal way He wants to be known and has made possible through His word and in no other way.

Nee mentions in his book that F B Meyer had written about the great increase in spiritism in the late nineteenth century.  Christian Science for instance.  But there were many more.  I think  of Madame Balavatsky and the Theosophy movement.  Meyher recognized these as spiritual counterfiets.  Nee classifies it all as manifestations of the powers of the soul that had been released in various individuals, those powers that had been possessed by Adam and Eve and more or less disappeared after the Fall.  Again, after the Fall they would now be subject to the flesh or the physical world, since the spirit had died by which humanity could have known God.  Now subject ot the flesh alone they were prey to the satanic hosts that sought to use them to deceieve people into acceptring them as the heights of spirituality.

Within the churches today the charismatic movement is probably the best example of how the deception has persisted even in our midst.  The spiritual gifts of the early Church are claimed by the charismatics, and the penecostals, to have persisted throughout history, but when the expresseions of these gifts today are examined they pretty clearly demonstratae that they are not the same spiritual gifts that were practiced in the early Church.  They are sounterfiets and byu Nee's lights most likely those latent soul powers, soulish and fleshly, not spiritual.  The supposed prophetic gift is pretty clearly simply psychic power where it is at all real.  The tongues are not the languages epxressed in the early Church but some kind of imitation of language.  App[arently some healins are possible through the soul too, something that doesn't reach to the level of the miraculous healings of God.  We are easily deceived into accepting unuusual paranormal phenomona has coming from God, that wseems to be what has happened in the case of the supposed continuation of the spiritual gifts.

I would like to think that this sort of information could help people free themsevles from such deceptions, but of course only believing in Christi's death for our sins and consequent regeneration of the spirit that died at the Fall could really save anybody.

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Prostrate before Thy throne to lie, and gaze and gaze on Thee.    The Levis had no inheritance in the land when the Israelites took possession of Canaan, but God said that He was to be their portion and that made them richer than all the rest of them.  

This mindset couldn't be more unlike that of the soulish or fleshly sort of spirituality which isn't technically speaking spirituality at all.  The soulish mindset cultivates the things of the soul itself, experiences, growth in knowledge or whatever, it is self-focused, or if focused outside itself at all focused toward learning how to be kind to others.  A nice enough of objective but still a matter of developm,ent of the soul, fulfillment of the sul.  Certainly there are elements of that in the Christian life but ultimately they are in the service of seeking and finding God, loving God above all else.    And we are to deny ourselves, die to self, rid ourselves of attachments to this world in order to find God.Take up our cross, the instrument of our death.  We are to die in order to find.  He who would save his life will lose it but whoever would lose it for My sake will find it.  The route to God is the giving up of everything that is contraary to God, everything at takes His place in our hearts, our idols.    It's not about fulfillming the self our soul at all.  But much of the New agey typie of spiritualitiy seems to be entirely about that fulfillment.  Far from self-abnegation it's about self-fulfillment.

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But of course all they have to do is arrogantly claim that Jesus didn't mean what He's always been taken to mean, but rather He meant something more in keeping with their own demonic doctrines.  So for instance when He said I am the way, the truth and the life, Nobody comes to the Father but by me, they say oh but he didn't mean we are to follow Him personally or that He was the ONLY way, He just meant He's one example for us to follow and we all can be what He was. 

I'd laugh but it hurts too much

I Suppose It's Futility to Make any Comment at all about This Fake Spirituality

He got started on his spiritual path when he was quite young, he said, he didn't believe what the churches taught, he said.  Somehow they never answered the questions Where did we come from, why are we here and where are we going?  

Really?  How odd.  Of course I don't know what "churches" he is talking about but surely it is fair to assume he means some pretty standard Christian churches, in which the Bible is taught as inerrant, and in that case the answer is given quite clearly to all those questions.  We descended from Adam and Eve, we are here to come to know God, and we are going either to Heaven or Hell in the end.   Seems pretty clear that it isn't that he didn't find any wanswers but that he didn't like the answers he got from the churches.  As he went on to pursue various other

I'm talking about another interview on Next Level Soul.  Hans something or other, Wilhelm?  I couldn't quite make it out.  Apparently my ears aren't a lot better than my eyes.     religions and occultic practices he apparently liked their answers better.

He doesn't like Christianity at all, and he keeps talking as if his own preferences amount to the truth rather than just his own preferences.  And I suppose he sounds credible to all those people out there who nothing whatever about Christianity.

 And yet what else can I do?  It's futile both because they who are persuaded of all that nhonsense don't have the faculty to hear what's wrong with it, not being regenerated but mere fallen human beings, and becuase my own spiritual faculty is not in the best shape so that I fail all the time to convey what I want to convey.  

Try anyway.   

Of course it is all of grace.  We can only believe and know God's word because He has regenerated us, because we are born again.  In our fallen state the Bible is nonsense to the reader and hearer.  When they discover the powers of the soul, which Watchman Nee has brought to my attention, they now have an answer to the Bible's incomprehensibility to them.  they mistake the soul powers for the spiritual powers that commjunicate with God.   They can't communicate with God but the demons who do communicate with our soul powers can easily ;create a false impression and call it God and convince the unwary fallen mind.  

They don't find the biblical revelation of who we are and where we came from and why we are here to be convincing.  One life?  But then some have it good and many have it bad and how is that fair, how does that show a loving GOd?  For mself it was only when I discovered the biblical understanding of who we are and where we came from and why we are here that I finally knew there is a real reasonable and meanfinful answer to all those questions.  Original sin was a reveleat ion to  me because it answered the question of why this life is so full of ugliness, or disease and death, of wars and hostilities and so on.  It makes no sense if you think this life is just normal life.

Who we are is God's creation for the purpose of creating a people after His own heart, a people who reflect His own being and share in His plans.  That's our purpose, that's why we are here, but there are many who won't join in this purpose but be led off into all sorts of weird fables and ultimately end up in Hell.  

The Most Christianistic Deception Yet

Randy Something, Kay?  Interviewed at a table full of gigglin women about his NDE which made a Christian of him, where he claims to have been cheek to cheek with Jesus.  The talk at the table was all very Christian sounding, abourt prayer and loving the Lorfd and all that.  Jesus loves you very much.  All that.    Forgiveness of sins and all that.  Nothing about His death on the cross though, but I suppose they could have found a way to work that in too if they'd wanted.  Something about a battle between a group of angels and another group of fallen angels.  That was at the beginning.  This man claimed to know the Bible which he'd read after years of being an atheist tring to disprove Christianity.  But the way we are saved was not mentioned.  Again, I suspect they could have found a way to counterfeit that too.  Perhaps.  But in this one they didn't.  Maybe it's in his book.

These counterfeit heaven experiences can get pretty sophisticated.  This one is just about terrifying in its willingness to sound Christian while managing to avoid the cross as well as add in a New Agey message about learning not to judge yourself.  Jesus tells us we must deny ourselves and take up oiur cross.  Doesn't that imply that we ARE to judge ourselves?  Now that central Christian message never shows up[ in these things, not even in this one.  But again, perhaps it's got a representation of some kind of bogus sort in his book.

And of course "heaven" is as usual depicted as a beautiful landscape with colors not seen on Earth.  There is of course no hint of this idea of heaven in the Bible.  Heaven is the throne room of God in the Bible, and the New Jerusalem is a city, not a landscape.  But I guess a landscape appeals to people.

What what what.  I wasn't looking for this stuff but it keeps showing up while I'm looking for other things.  Maybe if I get it written out it will benefit someone.  I tried to copy the URL for this one but I kdon't know if I succeeded.  I'm always flying blind these days, literally.  I THINK it might have said "copy" but I don't know.  Guess I'll find out when I post this.

 //www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKNNdnGBbtY

Holy and Unholy Angels, NDEs and Other Last Days Deceptions

People often encounter what they believe to be family members who died before them and other people as well as various spirit entities in their near death experiences.  Going by the Bible, the only trustworthy guide to all these things, since it tells us that there is only one life and then the judgment and that people go to either a place of punishement or to Paradise after death, we knoww that the "people" in those experiences mustg be impersonations, and since the teachings given in these experiences always contradict the Bible we also know those are demonic spirits or fallen angels who are doing the impersonating.

The

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I just heard one in which the NDE traveler encountered a being she identified as the Archangle Michael.  He appeared a few times to her and gave her messages over the years.  How do I knoqw thaat was not the Archangel Michael>  Because in the Bible we only hear of him once and it is the Archangel Gabriel who mentions him as the defender of the nation of Israel.  Gabriel has been sent to explain a vision to the prophet Daniel and says he had been detained b6y a barttle overt the nation of Persia as I recall.  I hope I don't have theis wrong but it is simomething lie that.  

The pint is that the archangels are tghe highest angels and they have imporetant roles in the redemptive histgory of the Bible, Gabriel who brought understanding to the prophet Daniel and then brought the news to the father of John the Baptist out his son to be, and to Mary who was to be the mother of the Messiah promised from all the way back in Eden and aounced from time to timje throughougut the Old Testament.  These high angels do not appear to ordinary people who have mnothing to do with the great plan of redemption.   And I might add, Gabriel would not have talked with Mohammed in the cave because that "angel" contradicted his work in the Bible.  He would not be party to the formation of a new religion said to supersede the Bible and he would not serve an idea of Jesus as a mere prophet when in the Bible he announced Him as the Messiah who was the Son of God, the only begotten SWon of God.   It'

s elementary, but you need to know a little about the Bible and of course wyou have to believe it.  

Another popular idea these days in connection with all this psychic phenomena is the idea that we all have past lives, that we keep coming back into one life after another.  It's a form of the idea of reincarnation but of course it is nothing like the classical idea of reincarnation which is all about the kind of life whyou had leived  in a moral sense ieven if they moightg not use the term moral, which determines what sort of life you will have next which could be to return as a lower animal if you didn't deserve to come back as a human being.  Of course a Christian rejects all such ideas but the idea that we choose to come back as a human being in order to learn this or that lesson of lifek which is the current popular idea, fits no religion at all, it's all made up to appeal to totday's mentality.  No judgment eve, no sin, you are just learning this or that lesson of life, something nmindnumbingly pedestrian usually, oh you need to learn patiences for instance.  You need to overcome a phobia.    

The Bible is God's word.  He gave it to us because on our own, in our fallen nature bequeathed to us by our original fatgher Adam, we have no chance at all of ever figuring anything out.  At the Fall, when Adam and Eve rebelled against God, they lost many of their former powers.  The spirit in them that had comunicated with God died immediately so all tgheir offspring no long have the ability to communicate with God.  We are all born as pretty much nothing but fleshly creatures, our souls communicating only through our physical senses, knowing things in the phyiscal world as well as things in the demonic realms oif we are opened up to that, but we have no ability whatever to know God.  That ability is restored to us when we believe in the death of Christ as paying for our sins.   Redeemed by His blood, crucified on the cross with Him.  When we be3lieve tghat we are saved by His death then we are born again, our spirit comes back to life and we can acommunicate with God.  Without the new birth we cannot knoww God.  All these bpeople who are having these NDEs are unregenerate people, fallen people whose souls powers have been awakened by one means or another, but the spirit that communicates with God is dead in them.   So the demons are free to give them all sorts of preposterous lies that contradict God's word and they are dazzled by the powers of the demons into accepting it all as true.  

Sometimes people think they are serving God because of some impersonation of God by a spirit entity or demon and that particular kind of deception makes me particularly sad for some reason.  All deceived people are sad but for some reason it bothers me more when people are deceived into thinking they are serving God andI know it's a demon feeding them lies.   All of them need to be saved but I find myself praying particularly for those under that kind of deception.

How I would love it if anything I write here might be the means to save evenone person from this sort of demomnic abuse.  Please Lord?

Added later:  I have to suppose that the fallen angels can also create that unconditional love feeling almost all the NDEW people experience, also that sense that they know what others are feeling when they have their Life review and see bad and good things they did to others.   telepathic communication is something I think we will experience in the afterlife amont many other restored powers, and I suppose the demons also have such powers.  But it's all a supposing at this point.   

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Couple days later:  One guy hears the voice of "Christ" although he says any name wouild do, another prays to"heavenly Father" but not in the name of Christ and has a lot of New Agey ideas along with it.  The one who hears from "Christ" has been reading A Course in Miracles.   

But their context is Christianish and therefore a more subtle form of deception perhaps than some of the others.  One of them has a Catholic background.  In factr a lot of these people who have NDEs come from a Catholic background, it would be interesting to know the percentage overall of those with that kind of background.  Here and there someone with an evangelical background can be supposed to have simply a very nominal experience of it so the doctrines that would keep them from being deceived aren't available to them.  Catholics often don't get those doctrines at all anyway so they are probably more vulnerable to begin with.

So easy for the demonic spirits to take advange of people who have no real kowledge of the truth of the Bible.  

They think they are in touch with "the divine" when it is only a coulish counterfeit, to refer back to Watchman Nee's way of putting it all together.  If you aren't born again you don't have the reborn spirit with which to contact the divine, or God Himself, you are once born only and it is your soul not your spirit that is contacting whatever it is contacting.  Nee says you can have your soul powers awakened or released by something that suppresses the body or flesh, which in a lot of these cases is some kind of injuuiry or medical trauma.  That may be why is b ringing all this about.  Buddishists and Hindus and others may release this power through intensive meditation and thaot sort of thing.  But it is only soul power, it is not divine power, it can only connect you with the demonic realms, not with God or the divine realm.  Demons know a lot and can wow people with their wisdom but they certainlyu are not divine.

Soul power is the arena of witchcraft, as well as telepathy and  cclarivoyhance and that sort of thing.  ASome miracles also come with this power.  Unusual knowledge can come with it.  But it is from the fallen nature, the sin nature in this fallen world, and is therefor forbidden to a Christian and shouldn't be practiced by anywone.  It's very likely going to become the basis of the Antichrist religion of the last days, which are fast approaching.   People with these exprieriences and powers are lulled into a false sense of security.  Only the true Christ can save us, but these experineces make people feel safe when in fact it is all just going to plunge them into Hell after this life.  Diabolical deception.

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It

s not that doctrine is an end in itself, that's for sure, but the point is that if you don't have right doctrine whatever experiences you are are not going to be trustworthy.  And besides, even when you do have right doctrine you shouldn't be too ready to trust your experiences.   In this life we are to walk by faith, faith in the revelation of the word of God.  Faith in the god there revealed, faith in Christ and his death on the cross.  We do not walk by sight in this world but by faith, that's the only safe way./

But again, we're talking faith based on right doctrine.