Finding the meanings of 'in-the-world yet not-of-it', isn't easy. More than one possible way to understand the concept exists. I won't try to discover all herein, however the book I am reading presently-'Precious Remedies' has a section that pertains to the matter. Of the many devices that Satan has used to dupe the soul to sin, one of the more challenging is the example given unto the suffering, poor Christian of the prosperity of wicked men (and women) who follow not the ways of the Lord, prosper and are entirely without interest in God. In theory the Christian is tempted to give up and adapt to the corrupt practices of celebrity debauchees and godless predators of the time. Brook’s comment about what the reprobate or lost lack is very good writing, and I will post a paragraph of that…
Page 44 ‘Precious Remedies’; “Yet all this is nothing to what they lack. They lack a saving interest in God, Christ, the Spirit, the promises, the covenant of grace, and everlasting glory. They lack acceptance and reconciliation with God; they lack righteousness, justification, sanctification, adoption, and redemption. They lack the pardon of sin, and power against sin, and freedom from the dominion of sin. They lack that favor with God, which is better than life, and that joy which is unspeakable and full of glory, and that peace which passes understanding, and that grace, the least spark of which is more worth than heaven and earth. They lack a house that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. They lack those riches that perish not, the glory that fades not, that kingdom that shakes not.”
Issues about worldliness and how to be in the world with regard to God are a substantial part of the empirical challenge of human existence. Often the challenge is presented as a choice between worldliness and spirituality yet that criterion is somewhat disingenuous. Obviously it is a difficult to clarify dysjunctive since the spiritual too are in the world and experience all of its demands with those that choose to be entirely worldly and without spiritual interest. I think the phrasing and criterion of the choice is itself in the province of Satan. Christians are in-the-world yet not-of-it. The lost are in-the-world and are-of-the-world.
Earlier I have written of consciousness and sentience as being of a spiritual nature different than mass and material for-itself that is apparently not sentient or conscious. The awareness of being in-the-world yet not-of-the-world is obviously like the relationship of mind to being-in-the-Universe-of-matter yet not-of-it. Sentience differs from inanimate matter.
When Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge they transitioned apparently from a naïve condition of self-awareness in an Eden of a different space-time composition than the material Universe to a self-awareness of a deeper nature (aware of their own nakedness) with an infinite potential to learn. God commented that they had become as little Gods and relocated them to the containment facility of the Universe where thermodynamic worldliness and consumerism of all matter and energy that exists is an implicit aspect of the structure. Within that Universe-on-fire consuming itself original sin is inherent. Mankind are inevitable drawn toward the energy stream of pure worldliness even seeking fission, fusion and zero-point energy immersion in it-perhaps as self evolving to quantum computers making forms of pleasurable experience for-itself (as an archetype of the human conscious being). Mankind was cast out of Eden to stop them from eating of the tree of life-eternal life as well. With the hungry nature of inquiry and disobedience to God Adam and Eve were cast into an environment resembling themselves with gravity hungering to attract other mass and consume it to a black hole forever ready for more.
In-the-spirit of faith in God and the sacrifice of the Lord to atone for the problem of original sin (and subsequent sin) the Christian is set-apart behaviorally and self-consciously from worldly behavior. Worldly behavior that is not reclaimed from the draw toward pervasive Universal thermodynamic field characteristics has abandoned spiritual accountability for-itself and is condemned to eternal hell. It seems as if Satan is always reinforcing aspects of worldliness that usually draw humans to them and uses those attractions to renormalize spiritual inclinations for solely worldly thought and behavior.
Worldly behavior is in opposition to spiritually directed. Spiritual behavior may not be supportive of numerous worldly political and social goals of the lost, and the lost may therefore view the spiritual as worldly foes. A Sunday morning of beer drinking, football and wrestling isn't the same as attending a priesthood of believers liturgy.
Sin becomes sin only when spiritual law exists Paul observed. Spiritual laws intervene in worldly behavior that causes cruelty and destruction to human beings and the human spirit. It's probably not a coincidence that spiritual law intended to draw the human spirit back to a transcending trust in God also discourage human behavior that is destructive to the self and others.
Sin labels behaviors that cause the destruction of the self, of others, and of spiritual awareness of God and his will for humans to be in a right relationship with him. His perfect goodness requires perfect obedience and order, yet that liberates, for God is absolutely good, right and just. For a human to be in-the-world and to be only worldly is fundamentally to be a raw savage, thermodynamically immersed animal without moral reservations. Even worse than that, the thermodynamic animal with no good whatsoever, given a human level sentience intelligence quotient, has the capability for unlimited lies, dissimulation, deceit and wickedness, believing it has no transcendent moral authority (God) to be concerned about, if it even thinks that far. It is free to develop itself and its technology through innumerable permutations of ‘progress’ until it becomes a quantum computer Cyborg or whatever. None of that direction is good for humanity , yet humanity with a majority saved through the grace of the Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus and God the Father would have better prospects empirically and existentially in a post-space/time dimensional sort of way.
Just God has the wisdom about how to address the thermodynamic and sin criterion ultimately, and just God knows how mind as spirit with physical being characteristics to support it can exist for eternity without burning everything up applying entropy transformations to make practico-inert substances and event-processes.
Being in-the-world yet not-of-it means that Christians have a deeper spiritual awareness of the creation that God made (the Universe and its content) as good, since God made it as an event-process in a thermodynamic stream, and God is good creating good. With God tempering the problem of original sin to a subdued level through the salvation of the Lord a better humanity may be able to negotiate their existence in the thermodynamic Universe with better Christian ethics and social relationships enabling safer progress through the shoals of materiality transitions from organization to disorganization of inherent energy and mass.
It is a paradox that as society prospers through the grace of the spirit and as society generally achieves a better condition it has sometimes become entirely worldly again, drawn toward attractions of the spiritless realm of thermodynamic content as an end-in-itself. Practico-inert manufactures and evolved objects permuting form and content through blind chance (rather than the Queen of Heaven in this century) seem opulent seductive and irresistible..
The human experience today has massive common social thought and beliefs disseminated through electronic media and replicated micro-socially as monkey-see, monkey-hear, monkey-do. The oppressive pressure of incorrect or inadequate intellectual criteria assaults individuals including Americans in continua of corruption. Plain worldliness as conscious applied philosophy and religion is an existential oxymoron of form since awareness of the world only arises with sentience that is a basic spiritual phenomenon differing in character from the forms of inanimate worldliness.
Mass social worldliness devoid of regard for the problems of sin directs the course of social progress toward worldlines with enhanced prospects for mass destruction, materially speaking. Regardless, worshippers of blind chance thermodynamic primacy speak of comfort and safety while Godly ethics are deleted from their concerns.
Even so, people cannot be saved by spiritual laws that are externally structured. Such laws can only bring the soul to awareness of sin and inability to adhere to all of the laws of God they need to exist as God would have them exist. Only the sacrificial love of the Lord and faith in the Lord given by the spirit of grace that writes the laws of God upon hearts can draw the Christian along correct paths in this world and beyond. Only in transcending spiritual trust in Jesus Christ can the grace of God reach into the individual’s life and bring him into the sole project transcending space and time and move him from the city of man in-the-world into the city-of-God in the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is forever transitioning to eternity from the temporal, worldliness of the Universe. Its phase changes may be sudden, or it's descent from heaven as a new Jerusalem may be a gradual evolution of change. Phase change ordinal actualizations inferred from scripture often cannot be made with certainty.
The kingdom of God is within, because God transcends worldly constructions and appearances of mass and energy in any temporal Universe, and God knows where those that are of His flock are. God is within the heart of every Christian, and every Christian is in the kingdom of God, that is, where God wills it to be, when and how.
The choice is not really between worldliness and pure spirit someplace else metaphysically speaking. Some people would be worried about giving up security in the world and relying upon faith in spirit. About that the Lord said that those who save their lives would lose them. The choice is between a thermodynamic worldly alienation without spirit, or faith in the living God of spirit and truth. Faith in the living God provides Christian ethics incidentally that better human society and technological-environmental utility.
Page 44 ‘Precious Remedies’; “Yet all this is nothing to what they lack. They lack a saving interest in God, Christ, the Spirit, the promises, the covenant of grace, and everlasting glory. They lack acceptance and reconciliation with God; they lack righteousness, justification, sanctification, adoption, and redemption. They lack the pardon of sin, and power against sin, and freedom from the dominion of sin. They lack that favor with God, which is better than life, and that joy which is unspeakable and full of glory, and that peace which passes understanding, and that grace, the least spark of which is more worth than heaven and earth. They lack a house that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. They lack those riches that perish not, the glory that fades not, that kingdom that shakes not.”
Issues about worldliness and how to be in the world with regard to God are a substantial part of the empirical challenge of human existence. Often the challenge is presented as a choice between worldliness and spirituality yet that criterion is somewhat disingenuous. Obviously it is a difficult to clarify dysjunctive since the spiritual too are in the world and experience all of its demands with those that choose to be entirely worldly and without spiritual interest. I think the phrasing and criterion of the choice is itself in the province of Satan. Christians are in-the-world yet not-of-it. The lost are in-the-world and are-of-the-world.
Earlier I have written of consciousness and sentience as being of a spiritual nature different than mass and material for-itself that is apparently not sentient or conscious. The awareness of being in-the-world yet not-of-the-world is obviously like the relationship of mind to being-in-the-Universe-of-matter yet not-of-it. Sentience differs from inanimate matter.
When Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge they transitioned apparently from a naïve condition of self-awareness in an Eden of a different space-time composition than the material Universe to a self-awareness of a deeper nature (aware of their own nakedness) with an infinite potential to learn. God commented that they had become as little Gods and relocated them to the containment facility of the Universe where thermodynamic worldliness and consumerism of all matter and energy that exists is an implicit aspect of the structure. Within that Universe-on-fire consuming itself original sin is inherent. Mankind are inevitable drawn toward the energy stream of pure worldliness even seeking fission, fusion and zero-point energy immersion in it-perhaps as self evolving to quantum computers making forms of pleasurable experience for-itself (as an archetype of the human conscious being). Mankind was cast out of Eden to stop them from eating of the tree of life-eternal life as well. With the hungry nature of inquiry and disobedience to God Adam and Eve were cast into an environment resembling themselves with gravity hungering to attract other mass and consume it to a black hole forever ready for more.
In-the-spirit of faith in God and the sacrifice of the Lord to atone for the problem of original sin (and subsequent sin) the Christian is set-apart behaviorally and self-consciously from worldly behavior. Worldly behavior that is not reclaimed from the draw toward pervasive Universal thermodynamic field characteristics has abandoned spiritual accountability for-itself and is condemned to eternal hell. It seems as if Satan is always reinforcing aspects of worldliness that usually draw humans to them and uses those attractions to renormalize spiritual inclinations for solely worldly thought and behavior.
Worldly behavior is in opposition to spiritually directed. Spiritual behavior may not be supportive of numerous worldly political and social goals of the lost, and the lost may therefore view the spiritual as worldly foes. A Sunday morning of beer drinking, football and wrestling isn't the same as attending a priesthood of believers liturgy.
Sin becomes sin only when spiritual law exists Paul observed. Spiritual laws intervene in worldly behavior that causes cruelty and destruction to human beings and the human spirit. It's probably not a coincidence that spiritual law intended to draw the human spirit back to a transcending trust in God also discourage human behavior that is destructive to the self and others.
Sin labels behaviors that cause the destruction of the self, of others, and of spiritual awareness of God and his will for humans to be in a right relationship with him. His perfect goodness requires perfect obedience and order, yet that liberates, for God is absolutely good, right and just. For a human to be in-the-world and to be only worldly is fundamentally to be a raw savage, thermodynamically immersed animal without moral reservations. Even worse than that, the thermodynamic animal with no good whatsoever, given a human level sentience intelligence quotient, has the capability for unlimited lies, dissimulation, deceit and wickedness, believing it has no transcendent moral authority (God) to be concerned about, if it even thinks that far. It is free to develop itself and its technology through innumerable permutations of ‘progress’ until it becomes a quantum computer Cyborg or whatever. None of that direction is good for humanity , yet humanity with a majority saved through the grace of the Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus and God the Father would have better prospects empirically and existentially in a post-space/time dimensional sort of way.
Just God has the wisdom about how to address the thermodynamic and sin criterion ultimately, and just God knows how mind as spirit with physical being characteristics to support it can exist for eternity without burning everything up applying entropy transformations to make practico-inert substances and event-processes.
Being in-the-world yet not-of-it means that Christians have a deeper spiritual awareness of the creation that God made (the Universe and its content) as good, since God made it as an event-process in a thermodynamic stream, and God is good creating good. With God tempering the problem of original sin to a subdued level through the salvation of the Lord a better humanity may be able to negotiate their existence in the thermodynamic Universe with better Christian ethics and social relationships enabling safer progress through the shoals of materiality transitions from organization to disorganization of inherent energy and mass.
It is a paradox that as society prospers through the grace of the spirit and as society generally achieves a better condition it has sometimes become entirely worldly again, drawn toward attractions of the spiritless realm of thermodynamic content as an end-in-itself. Practico-inert manufactures and evolved objects permuting form and content through blind chance (rather than the Queen of Heaven in this century) seem opulent seductive and irresistible..
The human experience today has massive common social thought and beliefs disseminated through electronic media and replicated micro-socially as monkey-see, monkey-hear, monkey-do. The oppressive pressure of incorrect or inadequate intellectual criteria assaults individuals including Americans in continua of corruption. Plain worldliness as conscious applied philosophy and religion is an existential oxymoron of form since awareness of the world only arises with sentience that is a basic spiritual phenomenon differing in character from the forms of inanimate worldliness.
Mass social worldliness devoid of regard for the problems of sin directs the course of social progress toward worldlines with enhanced prospects for mass destruction, materially speaking. Regardless, worshippers of blind chance thermodynamic primacy speak of comfort and safety while Godly ethics are deleted from their concerns.
Even so, people cannot be saved by spiritual laws that are externally structured. Such laws can only bring the soul to awareness of sin and inability to adhere to all of the laws of God they need to exist as God would have them exist. Only the sacrificial love of the Lord and faith in the Lord given by the spirit of grace that writes the laws of God upon hearts can draw the Christian along correct paths in this world and beyond. Only in transcending spiritual trust in Jesus Christ can the grace of God reach into the individual’s life and bring him into the sole project transcending space and time and move him from the city of man in-the-world into the city-of-God in the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is forever transitioning to eternity from the temporal, worldliness of the Universe. Its phase changes may be sudden, or it's descent from heaven as a new Jerusalem may be a gradual evolution of change. Phase change ordinal actualizations inferred from scripture often cannot be made with certainty.
The kingdom of God is within, because God transcends worldly constructions and appearances of mass and energy in any temporal Universe, and God knows where those that are of His flock are. God is within the heart of every Christian, and every Christian is in the kingdom of God, that is, where God wills it to be, when and how.
The choice is not really between worldliness and pure spirit someplace else metaphysically speaking. Some people would be worried about giving up security in the world and relying upon faith in spirit. About that the Lord said that those who save their lives would lose them. The choice is between a thermodynamic worldly alienation without spirit, or faith in the living God of spirit and truth. Faith in the living God provides Christian ethics incidentally that better human society and technological-environmental utility.
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