Spiritual and Physical

 

1 Corinthians 1:18  “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” 

 

I was watching a broadcast of last Sunday’s Coral Ridge Hour and Pastor Pacienza made a statement that the unseen spiritual life and visible physical life both exist, but many people don’t see the evidence, believe, accept or experience spiritual, so they suppress it. In Romans 1:18-20 the Apostle Paul explains, ”For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”

 

The origins of the proverb "There are none so blind as those that will not see" can be traced back to the Middle Ages. It was initially documented in a book authored by John Heywood, an English writer and collector of proverbs, which was published in 1546. Heywood's version of the proverb goes as follows: "Who is so deaf, or so blind, as is he that willfully will neither hear nor see." The essence of this proverb lies in the notion that blindness extends beyond the physical realm. It encompasses a willful ignorance or a deliberate refusal to acknowledge the truth. The fingerprints on our Almighty, yet invisible in the spiritual realm, Creator God are everywhere in His physical creation. Check the “Is Genesis History” series, the Institute for Creation Research’s book or video “Carved in Stone”, and there are many more proofs in nature revealed by Creation Scientists.

1 Corinthians 2:14 “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

 

English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley, author of “Brave New World” stated in his book Ends and Means, “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.” That "erotic revolt" is rebellion against God.

 

The separation of the spiritual and the physical is the mentally throwing out the spiritual leaving only the physical. To the secular humanist, no sovereign God means no heavenly authority for morality over self and life, so he and many more sinfully do as they want to do, as many lustful pleasures as possible, wild debauchery, addictive materialism in absolute lawlessness. The Holy Spirit convicts us of our sins, so they say that God and adopt a philosophy of meaninglessness, believing that the spiritual doesn’t exist in order to liberate themselves from their reality and consequence of their sinful lifestyle; from God’s standards of morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. But, God created all mankind with a physical body, soul (mind, will and emotions), and spirit (a spiritual connection with God with spiritual discernment). 

When man sinned in the Garden, the physical lived, the soul lived, but the spirit of man died. The term “born again” refers to the regeneration of the spirit of man in the repentant sinner that accepts the free gift of the Savior of the world (Jesus Christ) given solely by the love, mercy and grace of our Father God in Heaven for the propitiation, payment, forgiveness and remission of our many sins by the sacrificial death of the Son of God in your, my and everyone’s place, that we may escape the just wrath of God against sin in Hell, become adopted sons and daughters of God and have eternal life as a citizen of Heaven forever in glory. The spiritual and the physical are not separate; they were never designed and meant to be apart. It is not a matter “either/or”, but both in unity. 

 

In Christ, Brian