***I couldn’t call this a morning musing because it is so late in the day, but it’s not long enough to qualify as digging in deeper into anything. So, you get an afternoon musing today. Enjoy.

“Now we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who comes from God, so that we may understand what has been freely given to us by God. We also speak these things, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual things to spiritual people. But the person without the Spirit does not receive what comes from God’s Spirit, because it is foolishness to him; he is not able to understand it since it is evaluated spiritually.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I used to love looking at Magic Eye images. Do you remember those? It was a picture that upon an initial inspection just looked like an abstract artistic design on the page. It was just visual nonsense. Even looking closely didn’t change that initial impression. But if you looked at them in just the right way, all of a sudden, the page came to life. There was shape and depth to the image that had previously looked flat and lifeless. It wasn’t always easy to maintain an ability to see what was really there. That took some work and intentionality, but the more you looked at them, the easier seeing what was really there became. If you weren’t willing to take the time and do the work to learn how to see them, they were never anything more than gobbledygook on the page. I have reminded of late that something very much like this is true with life more generally. Let’s talk about it.

Humans have always had a nagging sense that there is more to this world than we can see with our own eyes or engage with using the rest of our natural senses. The idea that we are totally alone in the universe and that the world as we see it is all there is to reality is a fairly recent philosophical invention from an historical standpoint. Today, a small but often vocal (online anyway) segment of the culture will insist that there’s just no evidence for anything even remotely supernatural. This group has mostly limited itself to the philosophically incoherent position known as scientism which holds that the only things we can actually count as knowledge are those we can know by empirical means and empirical means alone. Everything else is nothing more than a silly fantasy that is disconnected from reality. And yet we just haven’t been able to shake that sense that there is more to this world than we can fully understand on our own.

One of the things most followers of Jesus believe (because He is credited with telling us as much) is that when we are in Him, God the Father sends His Spirit to live in us. We have the presence of God with us all the time and everywhere we go. For folks who have chosen to see the world through a lens of methodological naturalism, this sounds like so much nonsense. “How could you possibly know such a thing as this?” they’ll ask. Or, better yet, they’ll simply insist you can’t (again because of that commitment to scientism).

The truth, though, is that there are ways of knowing that go beyond merely what our senses can easily detect. For instance, I know that I love my wife and my kids. A lot. How do I know? Well…I just know. I mean, I can declare it, but that could be faked. I feel strong emotions about them, but those are just emotions. Emotions can be out of sync with our circumstances. I do things for them, but I do things for lots of people who I don’t love like I love my family. So, again, how do I know? I couldn’t begin to quantify it for you. At the end of the day, I know it because I know it. And, the only way you are going to be able to know it as well is if you take my word for it. You’ll have to go on faith. It is a faith backed up by your observations of my actions toward them, but again, those could all be faked. My word is the only thing you really have to go on.

The supernatural works a little like this. Expecting to be able to engage with it, much less demonstrate it, through natural means is a fool’s errand. Those kinds of methods don’t work when talking about the supernatural by definition. It’s sort of in the name. It is supernatural. That is, it exists beyond what is merely natural. You can choose to philosophically limit yourself in terms of your ability to interact with and describe the world around you to strictly natural terms, but that doesn’t mean the supernatural doesn’t exist or that you have proof it doesn’t exist. Similarly, but from the opposite direction, trying to prove it does exist using natural means isn’t likely to accomplish very much. Whether or not you are willing to accept that there is more to this world than we can detect with our five senses depends on the worldview commitments you have made; it depends on the philosophical understanding of the world that you have adopted for yourself.

And the thing is, if you adopt the wrong one, you won’t be able to see or understand anything beyond what your senses can detect. This matters when it comes to engaging with a supernatural God as Paul points out in this passage. If you want to properly understand who God is, you are going to need God’s help to do that. His help is going to come primarily by spiritual means, not physical ones. This is because He is a spiritual being, not a physical one. He can and has taken a physical form to help with our understanding (most notably in the person of Jesus of Nazareth), but the spiritual means will always be the most important to grasp.

Apart from these spiritual means, though, it’s all going to sound like so much nonsense to you. And again, Paul spells that out here. ‘But the person without the Spirit does not receive what comes from God’s Spirit, because it is foolishness to him.” It’s not simply that he doesn’t understand it, though, but that he can’t. “He is not able to understand it since it is evaluated spiritually.”

This is why in other places in the New Testament people who are living apart from Christ are referred to as blind. They literally can’t see the world as it really is. For some of these folks, it is an ignorant blindness. They don’t want to be blind, but aren’t aware that they are. Once this lack has been made apparent to them, they earnestly desire to see. For others, the blindness is willfully chosen. They don’t want to see and have in fact convinced themselves that they can see just fine; they have convinced themselves that they are the only ones who really can see. But they can’t. Not without help. God’s help.

As followers of Jesus, it’s our job to help. We can’t make anybody see. Only God can do that. What we can do, what we are commanded to do, is to tell them how they can have their eyes opened. That’s our job: to bear witness. We need to do it winsomely and well understanding that some people just don’t want to see, and they’ll hate us and hate on us for trying to help them see, but that’s okay. They’re not ultimately rejecting us at all. We can just be faithful and let the chips fall where they may.