You Must Be Born Again

 Unless a man be born again he cnnot see the Kingdom of God.  Said Jesus in John Three.  Which he restated a verse or two later Verily verily I say unto you, unless ye be born of water and the aspirit ye cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.  Can't see, can't enter in, to the Kingdom of God.  And he goes on about how you can't see the Holy Spirit but can see its effects, and that is the way it is with those who are born again of the Spirit.  And after that we get into the familiar verse about how God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoesoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.  A line or two before that He says that the Son of Man must be lifted up just as the serpoent was lifted up in Moses' day so that whoever looked upon it would be healed of the bite of the serpent.   Born again of the Spirit in order to e see and enter into the Kingdom of God, believing on the Son of Man as lifted up on the cross in odrder toe receive eternal life.

And what is eternal life, He says in chapter tseventeen, but that they know YOu, the only true living God.  

It isn't said in so many words anywhere in scripture that I fcan think of, but what else can it be saying but that we can only know god if we are born again.  And only those are born again who believe in Christ.  the only people on the planet, in this world, who can know God are those who are born again of the spirt.  And this first with the interpretation of the Fall as the occasion of our losing our faculty of knowing God, or the spiritual faculty itself by which Adam and Even had Known god personally.  What died first at the Fall was this faculty, and it is this faculty which is reborn as it were when we come to believe in Jesus' sacrifice for our salvation.  The restoration of our original connection with God.  And only those who do come to this belief have this resotred connection.  the rest of humanity is fallen humanity, humanity wihich is "but flesh" not having the spirit.  We are boall born into the flesh alone when we are born into this life.  It must be the "born of water" Jesus is talking abourt, all born of water, but only those who believe are also born of the spirit.  

There is some dispute about what Jesus means by the word "water" which He contrasts with the Spirit, some even claiming it means baptism so that being born aagain is associated with that rite.  But because He goes on to the contrast between flesh and spirit it seems pretty clear to me that this is the actual meaning of the previous phrase, so that the water is a word that stands for the flesh.  Perhaps the water that breaks before a baby is born.  That is the wonly water I can think of that is connected with the birth of us into this fallen world.  So we are born of water and spirit or flesh and spirit and that is what it means to be born again.  

Fallen humanity clearly does not know God.  In our fallen state we may be taught about God and come to believe in His existence in one form or another, but wqe can't know Him unless we are born again which is the effect of believing in His death for our salvation.   And \\\\  Whis means rthat Jews and Muslims who believe in he one God cannot actually know Him personally because they don't believe in Jesus' death ofr their sins, and the other reliegions of the world don't even have a clear sense of a one true God at all, but many lesser Gods, some three hundred or so in India for instance.  Demons who present themselves as gods.

Post in progress.

Later.

It used to be more or less generally understood when the country was still culturally Christian that this is a feallen world.  What that means may not have been grasped beyond the main outlines of its being a less than perfect place full of evil as well as good things with sufferings and joys all intermingled according to the notion of the Fall has having been the coveting of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  That is, although it was accepted as the right biblical view of things there was probably not much real concern to live as if it were a reality.  Even in the Christian west people live in this world as THE world, as the normal world, the only possible world.  Not the broken imperfect devious world brought about by the Fall, the first disobeidnece of God by the human race.

For he last couple of years I finally had a more definite idea that in fact I really am living in a fallen world.  I've mentioned it before as stemming from a period in which Hell had become a reality for me.   So did the fallen world.  I really do now thinki of this as not the normal world God created but a broekn deamaged world.  I think of it as transitory, I mean I pretty much FELL it to be transitory as well as broekn and battered and dangerous in a way I hadn't before.  Subtly I suppose but in reality, it is a different world I've been living in for the last two years than I had lived in before.  Oh I always thought of this as a fallen world because of the biblical account of it, but in that way I desribe above, of being aware of it because it was been revealed to be that, but not by experience or feeling.  That is what is different.  I FEEL it to be a different place, and by using the word subtle I just mean to say ithat it's not a big dramatic thing=, but it is definitely a change, a coloration at least but more than that, a real change in how the world feels to me.  It's no longer THE world, it's a way station.

A proving ground in a sense.  But nobody could have an inkling of this who is not a Christian.  Even Christians don't, except in that theoretical sense, or if some do I have no idea how many might.  For me it has been a real change in perspective and I suppose I can't be allone in this but I can't guess how many others might share it.

The main thing it has done is make me aware of the plight of those who don't believe in anything like it, who reject Christianity outright in some scases, or rject it tacitly or don't even reject it in any clear way but simply treat it was some idea they heard from womsomewhere or other that toher people seem to be a part of but which doesn't interest them at all.

Yet I know it to be the actual true history of the world.  To say so would get me only a dismissal as taking my own beliefs too seriously as a sort of arrogance.  There are many other religions in the world after all and Christianity is only one of the many.  They have no reason to prefer it to any of the obhters.  In fact Buddhism in particular in some cases, or Taoism, etc. seem to them to be superior in every way to Christianity.  Far more sophsitcated, full of deep wisdom, CHristianity seeming to them to be some kind of picky morality or the world of all those hypocrites that supposedly dominate it.

So I can't prove it to anyone that in fact it is the true history of Planet Earth and much eyhond, I just have to suffer the knowledge quietly to myself.   And the reason I'm now breringing up the need to be born again is that a fallen world sneeds a solution .  It isn't normal, it's a problem to be solved.  If by the Fall we were made inheritors of Hell, then what we need is a redemption from Hell. And this is of coruse what Christianityh claims to offer.  And that is what being born again is all about.  It is onlyh when we are born again that we are reinstated to the original spiritual state of Adam and Eve, and ebeyond that become the inheritors of an even better inheritance through Jesus, an inheritance the Bible doesn'[t present in any great detail but is more or less hinted at as something much better than the lot of our first preearents.  

The other religions can't know God because you have to be born again of the spirit to know God.  We're all fallen we're all but flesh until we are born agains of the spirti and recover the faculty that can know God. Which occurs either as a result of or as concomitant with the belief that Jesus died on the cross to pay for the sins that keep us in the fallen state and destine us for Hell.

U;I'v now formed the habit of hearing and seeing the fallenness in humanity.  I answer wquestions that come from that fallennness through my prervasive awareness of the difference between fallenness and the redeemed state in to which we are born again.  So for instance when someone suggests that maybe Near Death experiences aren't all about the demonic realm as I have usually thought of it, my answer is But you have to be born again to see the kingdom of God, otherwise all you can see is the demonic realms.  I don't think it's a sufficne t answer to that to point out that sometimes people come back from an NDE to become a Christian because they don't know the difference between the apparently supernatural world of the demonic realms and the kingdom of God.  People who have NDEs usually think they've encountered God Himsrelf, or many of them do.  Jesus, God, they think they've talked with them.  But they can't have, and not just because they can't be in the kingdom of God but because there are many contradicitons with what the Bible says with that idea.

NDEs do show that the soul is a reality and not just a metaphor to explain our experience of consciousness.  This soul is a separate entity that can detach from the body and float above it and see things in the room where the body is lying and even see and hear things that are really going aon in that room while being under anesthesia or in some cases dead without functioning heart or brain.  Many such NDEs occur in this sort of state.  The perceiving self is vividly aware during this astate and has observations that can be verified by the epopel in the room observed and so on.  This is real proof that there is such a thing as a soul, a real living entity that is attached to the bodyh but not synonymous with it.

I doubtg that anyohne who is born again could have an NDE or ever has at any rate.  The experience could in taht case include the realm of God, but none of the acocunts I've heard suggest anything more than the sort of illusions demons ofare capable of creating.  

Post in Progress

It goes something like this:  Instead of taking this world for granted as THE world in which we all live and then die, which means we just no longer live in this world, we are gone, we were there and then we are gone, now I've begun to think of people as born into a testing ground that they don't know anything about, they will live as if it were THE world and die just as described above, simply disappearing from the company of the rest who are still living, when in reality they are accumulating the elements that will determine an everlasting existence when they die.  A Christian should see it this way all along but we don'[t.  I had to have an encounter with the real possibility of Hell to start to see things this way.  We aren't taugjt this.  Or notbody I know was ever taught it.  People live their lives heedlessly, maybe striving for good thnings, doing good to others perhnaps., a life they considere to be consequential and well lived, but this Heaven or hell thing is not part of the picture.  xcept now and then and if it is at all in the picture it isn't more than a vague possibility that nobody knows wherther to believe is real or not.

And if you're not a Christian at all, even cultrually, then none of this is going to enter into your understanding of life at all anyway.  TYour own cultural framework may or may not have an afterlife to look forward to but it won't be the Christian adfterlife or built on Christian morality.

So I listen to a podcast, well no it was a talk of some sort at a gathering for somes sort, by a David Brooks, recommended by a friend, and he has bvery high ideals about the life we could or should be living .  A talk titled The Road to Depth.  He is Jewish burt quotes a lot of the Christian bible.  At the end of it I wonder what the point of it was.  I can't see m to keep it in mind.  But whatever his point was it doesn't seem to include anything about the transitoriness of life or any notion of something to come after this life.    And in any case he has no notiong as far as I can gtell that to qualify for the Christian Heaven or Kingdom of God you must be born again, that is, you need to acquire a faculty none of us is born with the first time around as we endter into this fallen world.    Nbody has any such idea except those who ARE Christians and ARE borna agin, or so I think must be the case.  But it's the life that matters to every human being born into this world and nobody knows anything about it except the very few who achieve it.

Though it is a gift and not a n  achievement so let's be clear about that much.  Still, what is the point of living at all if this is the truth about it, that at the end there is only heaven or hell and although it does have to do with how good a life you live morally speaking, in the end you have to recognize thta you can't deal with your own sin nature at all, yoyu ra stuck with it even if you live the best moral life you can, and you need a Savior from it.  then if you embrace the Savior, receiving the eternal life of knowing that He paid for your sins, then you are born again and can see and enter into the Kingdom of God.  And not otherwise.

It may sound like I'm complaining about how God aranged thisgs but I'm not.  I'm sjust scared for people.  I want them to know and I know they don't.  

And I know a lot of them wouldn't no mater how hard tI worldk to confvince them of it.  

People think they are spiritual when they are not.  You can't be spiritual if you can't see or enter into the Kingdom of God and the kind of spiroituality people think is spirituality doesn't do that at all.  It may lead into spuupernatural experiences of one sort or another, Near Death Experiences in some cases, ghosts and voices and apparitioins and so on, but all that is just the outskirts of this fallen life and not true spirituality.  And it's demonic.  It's the realm of the fallen angels.  Sometimes theyu teach nice things, like being good to other people.  That's a big one in Near death Expereinces.  But they never teah the gospel.  they never teach that you need to be saved.  Theymjust lull people into thinking everything is jut fine, they have no more rfear of tdeath etc etc.

 listening to some audio books of old classics lately, mostly Jane Austen and a bit of Bronte's Wuthering Heights.  Withering Heights is a gothis madness and it teaches a view of the afterlife that is not at all Christian.  Emily Bronte grew up in an Anglican parsonable, why doesn't she have a Chtidyian Vhtidyisn birCHristian fview of the afterlife?   She's got demonic impersonations she treats as dead humans.  but scripture is clear.  Huamns doen't come back to this life.  Ghosts and all that are demonic imperosonalitions of people.

Jane Austen also grew up in a Christian home but there's not a world in anything she wrote to suggest that life is anything more than get through it on its own terms here.  I noted a couple of places where a charatcer mentions religion as something to get involved in beyond the orgdinary as a sort of alternative to the normal means of life, but nothing is said about what that might mean, and one character is shown with his head down on a tabletop with the suggestion that he's probably praying.  And that's all.  In four of her books so far.

What good is Christian culture if it doesn't each the basics about ewhat human olife is all about?

You can't see god or know god because you were born without the facultty for knowing od.  So Buddhists don't beleive there is a God and Tthey are even rather arrogant about their supposed superiority in this sophisticated understanding, since to them it's just an anthropomorphism to believe in God when all there is is all that can be reached by either the senses or by deep meditation.  That is supposed to reveal the whole of reality.  The idea that there is anything outside the reach of those mental experiences just can't occur because that's the limit of experience from their point of view, that's all that humanity can do to known anything.  That's the end of it.  But we're born without a faculty.  No way would that enter into the thought aof any fallen bcreature without the revelation of God, and trhat revelation, the Bible, is scorned by them.  Fairy tale or some such.