That’s The Spirit

We live in a spiritual world. That is a world with many spirit beings — angels and demons are what I am specifically referring to. God Himself would of course, also be included. If you have trouble with the idea of such spiritual beings, you might as well close your Bible and go home. The foundations of Christianity depend on each of us understanding at least that much of the world around us.

Angels and demons, by all accounts, have influenced the direction of every culture since the dawn of mankind. Every single human being has been (and is being) influenced directly or indirectly by them.

While there is a great deal evidence that we live in a world populated by both visible and invisible beings, further evidence can be found within each of us. We all have an invisible aspect variously addressed as mind, soul, ego, psyche, etc. Those invisible parts of us exist in an invisible world.

A worldly mind might recognize that such an invisible realm exists, but insist that our invisible parts exist only as a function of our physical selves and cannot live independently from our visible bodies. Of course we cannot see these invisible parts and we cannot normally communicate with them, there is strong evidence to support the belief that our visible and invisible parts can exist independently. For example, we are told that every cell in our body is replaced at more or less regular intervals. So the entire body each of us has today is not the one we started with. Yet, our identities are not replaced. We are who we have always been. That distinction strongly suggests that our bodies are simply containers for our souls. Another piece of evidence is that nearly every culture that exists or has existed holds the belief that departed spirits (sometimes called ghosts) function on their own. Such a belief has credibility because it is universal. And of course the Bible tells us that our souls are not only independent, but eternal. Hence, the need for salvation.

And another somewhat obscured piece of evidence: our souls know they are eternal. We see this especially when we are young and have the usually rather vague idea that we will live forever. While our souls know that, our flesh doesn’t know that. In fact, the limitation on our flesh is heavily documented — the human with the longest verifiable physical life since Noah’s day passed away in 1997 at 122 years of age. Most of us won’t make it to 90 years.

One might ask, “If invisible beings (spirits and ghosts) actually exist, then why aren’t we in communication with them?” My answer to that is, “We are.” But it usually happens in ways that are different from from what we think of as communication. Understanding such communication can be complicated. As an example, our invisible parts (our minds) don’t communicate directly with one another. We aren’t telepathic — at least most of us don’t claim to be. Speech, for instance, works like this: our thoughts and information are transmitted to our physical, visible parts which then mechanically communicate that information through the physical world to the physical, visible parts of another being. Those physical parts in turn, relay the transmitted information to that being’s invisible parts where the information is interpreted and realized. We call that communication — and we wonder why we aren’t always clearly understood!

Extreme care must be exercised in any sort of communication with spirit beings. In fact, it is probably best avoided all together. Demons often masquerade as angels or departed loved ones, so interaction with any spirit being is potentially dangerous. However, angels do occasionally contact us. They bring important messages from God – that sort of thing. So if you are contacted by a spirit being in a godly way and nothing in that interaction contradicts the Bible — okay — otherwise run like you are running away from Satan himself.

Living things in general seem to exist in a sort of spiritual spectrum – a continuum. Starting with an object as simple as a rock with no spiritual aspect — through a bacterium which appears to be mostly physical with very little in terms of an invisible nature — through humans which are part spiritual-part physical — on through angels and demons which can exist as either spiritual or physical beings — to beings which exist as totally spiritual, such as departed human souls and God Himself.

We live in that kind of a world. Knowing something about both the visible and invisible world and accepting it is essential to understanding not only the world, but also oneself. It is also an essential part of self defense.

Copyright © 2019 Sam Dronebarger | All rights reserved