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
