Tangible Mysticism 1/3
If we take the scriptures literally, humankind has undergone significant genetic change since Adam, Noah and Abraham. As recorded in Genesis and Job, at one time human life was measured in hundreds of years. Obviously, this is no longer the case; something has happened so that man no longer lives to be 900 years old. I propose that the cause is genetic, a degradation. Jacob mentions this degradation in Gen 47:9--
So Jacob said to Pharaoh, “The years of my sojourning are one hundred and thirty; few and unpleasant have been the years of my life, nor have they attained the years that my fathers lived during the days of their sojourning.”
Let’s examine the ages of each generation from Adam to Jacob as recorded in the Bible; the numbers support Jacob’s conclusion.
Age Man Ref.
930 Adam Gen 5
912 Seth Gen 5
905 Enosh Gen 5
910 Kenan Gen 5
895 Mahalale Gen 5
962 Jared Gen 5
365 Enoch Gen 5 (did not die)
969 Methuselah Gen 5
777 Lamech Gen 5
950 Noah Gen 9, 11
600 Shem Gen 11
438 Apachshad Gen 11
420 Shelah Gen 11
464 Eber Gen 11
239 Peleg Gen 11
239 Rue Gen 11
230 Serug Gen 11
148 Nahor Gen 11
205 Terah Gen 11
175 Abraham Gen 25:7
180 Isaac Gen 35:28
147 Jacob Gen 47:28
137 Levi Ex 6
133 Kohath Ex 6
137 Amram Ex 6
120 Moses Deut 34:7
I believe that in addition to living long lives, these men also tangibly experienced what we call the “spiritual.” In other words, I believe that the Bible describes a time when humankind had the ability to objectively and physically communicate with spirits in ways that have been lost – I would say genetically lost.
Scripture records direct interaction between God and men: Adam, Cain, Enoch, and Noah. God spoke to and even walked with these men. I maintain that these were not mystical experiences; rather, they were body reality experienced with physical senses of hearing and touch.
The Scriptures also record objective interaction between God and the Patriarchs after the flood. God ate with Abraham, His angels grabbed Lot by the arm, and Jacob physically wrestled with God. Again, these men were not better mystics than we are; they dealt with spirits through their bodies – eyes, ears and fingers. After the flood, however, things began to change; human life spans that approached 1000 years rapidly declined. I believe that the Scriptures indicate that this objective interaction between man and spirit also changed.
I believe that Genesis 6 describes this phenomenon of actual intercourse (physical humans with spirits) and God’s decision to put an end to it. Genesis 6 states:
Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
At this time, the physical intercourse between spirits and women was so real that half-breed offspring were produced, both before and after the flood. These women were not mystics, but women with real bodies who touched and held spirits. The result of this interaction was only evil continually. This “tangible mysticism” was both evil and seductive – so much so that by the time of Noah, he was the only righteous man of pure lineage left in the entire earth. His fathers and grandfathers had raised other sons and daughters but they had all strayed and become corrupted. Finally, God determined to eliminate this physical and objective communication between man and spirits. When He accomplished this, He reduced the human lifespan to 120 years.
Moses was the last man who spoke to God face to face. He was also the last man to have an unbroken lineage back to Adam of fathers who lived for more than 120 years. At the exodus, Deut 18 recounts that God directly spoke to the people of Israel from the fiery cloud on Sinai. The people said, “Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God, let me not see this great fire anymore, or I will die.” Far from being disappointed, God was pleased and said, “They have spoken well. I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.” God had determined to interact with His people through a mediator, first Moses, and secondly through the Great Prophet that Moses predicted in Deut 18. With the advent of Moses, the one who lived 120 years, tangible mysticism was obsolete and unavailable - from then on God spoke to His people through a man. The rest of Deut 18 outlaws the mystical practices to contact spirits and circumvent God’s mediator. God had decided to speak to men through men and He determined these men were to be Moses and the prophets.
Moses documented the definitive revelation of God for His people and all subsequent prophets were subject to Moses’ writings. He also predicted the coming Great Prophet that we must listen to. Concerning this One at the Mount of Transfiguration and with Moses present, God spoke from heaven and told Peter to listen to His Great Prophet, Jesus. In his sermon in Acts, Peter claims that Jesus is the Great Prophet we must listen to; the One that Moses predicted. Hebrews 1 states, “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world.”
A growing number of people today seek direct interaction with God through mystical practices. This is nothing new; it is simply another attempt to circumvent God’s mediator and experience the spiritual directly. As the Scriptures document with both the flood and the captivity, such seeking always leads away from God and into judgment.
Tangible Mysticism 2/3
From Adam to Moses, men had the ability to communicate and interact with spirits through their physical senses. Men spoke with, walked with, and touched God. These men were not simply greater mystics than people today; they were physically different and lived for hundreds of years. Direct contact with spirits had a negative side that was so strong by the time of Noah, all the other sons and daughters of the line of Adam without exception had become corrupted and evil. God declared his answer to this problem – limiting the lifespan of men to 120 years and creating a gulf between men and spirits. Beginning with Noah’s sons, this decree is gradually implemented and life spans decline until Moses lives only the 120 years God promised.
After the flood God spoke to Abraham in Gen 17 and promised to be the God of his descendents, “I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your descendants after you.” He accomplished this when Moses led the people of Israel out to meet God on His mountain. When God met His people at the mountain and gave them His commands they cried out, “Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God, let me not see this great fire anymore, or I will die.” This pleased God and He implemented a new way to interact with His people, through a mediator. “They have spoken well. I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.” Moses, God’s first great mediator, documented the revelation of God for His people for all time.
After Moses, all revelations of God had to be consistent with the God Moses knew and described. God continued to speak to His people through His appointed prophets who spoke words consistent with the words of Moses. In Deut 13 and 18 we see that God gave His people objective methods to determine whether He had sent a prophet or not:
1) The prophet was never wrong in his predictions.
2) The prophet never brought something “new” inconsistent with what Moses had revealed.
So all God’s interaction with His people came through a man; His mediator, Moses and the prophets God chose and sent. For the most part, the role of the prophets was to lead people back to the God of Moses and encourage them to obey the will of Moses’ God as expressed in His commandments – the Law of Moses.
Moses himself predicted another Great Prophet whom God would send and commanded the people to listen to this man – the Great Mediator. Because God had decreed a genetic degradation that created a gulf between man and spirit God bridged this gap by becoming man Himself, born of a virgin. Thus, the disciples of Jesus heard the words of God with real ears. The message of God to the world was not mystical, nor were the disciples mystics. They were normal men who heard a man give them the very words of the Father. These are the words that they documented and wrote down for us.
The gulf that God decreed in Genesis 6 to separate man from spirits – this still exists. To bridge this chasm, Jesus became a man, spoke as a man, died as a man and sits at the right hand of God; He is the Great Mediator between mankind and the Father. Jesus was resurrected and has a glorified body – still human but something more than we currently possess. He has promised that all his disciples will also receive a glorified body that is greater than what they currently posses and once again, like Adam, they will be able to interact directly with the spiritual.
God bridged the gap He decreed between man and spirit through His Son Jesus. God’s revelation was given objectively to men in history, men that were not mystics. John says,
“What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life— and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us— what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. These things we write, so that our joy may be made complete.”
This concept is central to the gospel of God and is central to all discernment of spirits. In 1 Jn 4:1, John claimed that the confession of the tangible Jesus, the objective physical man, separated those who spoke for God and those who spoke for other spirits.
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.
God has revealed objectively how we are to approach Him and receive His forgiveness—the means never included some mystical experience. The revelation of the true God, the God of Moses, is an objective tangible revelation heard by human ears and written down by human hands.
Tangible Mysticism 3/3
Many people claim that techniques such as contemplative prayer, Christian yoga, or other practices enable them to experience the presence of God. I believe that these practices express humankind’s seductive desires wrestled with since before the flood – desires to directly commune with the spiritual. Since Moses, God has defined the means and methods that His people are to use to approach Him. Since Moses, God has established a mediator. In God’s system documented by Moses, men are to approach God only through the Levitical system of sacrifices. Moses’ writings revealed God’s will. God also raised up prophets that spoke to His people and called them back to obey the will of God as revealed by Moses.
Through Moses, God also outlawed any other means to approach Him or the spirit-world. Broadly speaking, God in Deut 18 forbad “divination,” which is any means men create to directly access the spiritual or discover something that is not known through “natural” means. The list of practices and techniques in Deuteronomy is not exhaustive. In his lust for the spiritual, humankind has invented almost unlimited techniques to “discover” the unknown. But all of these techniques are universally condemned when God states, “When you enter the land which the LORD your God gives you, you shall not learn to imitate the detestable things of those nations.” Pagans do use techniques to access the spiritual, but God’s people are forbidden to use them to seek their God as we see in Deut 20.
“But you shall utterly destroy them…so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the LORD your God.”
Techniques are not neutral, and all pleasurable spiritual experiences are not the God of Moses. Spirits accessed through forbidden techniques are detestable to God.
With the advent of Jesus, the Great Prophet that Moses predicted, God became man and gave us the penultimate revelation of God. This man said, “I and the Father are one,” and, “who has seen Me has seen the Father.” He claimed His words were the words of the Father. This Man became the final and ultimate mediator between God and man. He offered His own blood to atone for the sins of all mankind. His unending priesthood made obsolete the Levitical priesthood just as His temple and sacrifice made obsolete the temple and sacrifice of the Levites.
Jesus, the ultimate mediator spoken of by Moses revealed new means to approach God. His means are as exclusive as those of Moses. Divination forbidden by Moses remains forbidden under the mediation of Jesus.
Anyone who has set aside the Law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know Him who said, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge His people.” It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
“Christian divination” attempts to circumvent God’s commands and confesses an experience with a spiritual Jesus instead of the objective relationship with the physical one who is currently seated bodily in heaven.
This pursuit of a spiritual Jesus or a spiritual experience with God is at the heart of Christian mysticism. This pursuit is the new “divination” which refuses to approach God through the tangible and objective Man who died and was raised in cold sober history, but chooses instead to pursue experiences with a spiritual Jesus now. Mystics are trying to “bridge the gap” that God imposed when He eliminated the direct interaction of the Patriarchs to “walk with God” as Enoch did and imposed Moses as the mediator. There are even some who seek to become the “bride of Christ” through these experiences and techniques. Ultimately, they are trying to return to the time of Noah and marry spirits, seduced by the same lust for the spiritual that corrupted all but Noah and his family in that world. Jesus spoke about this time in Matthew 24:
And just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man: they were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.
Conclusion
Scriptures record there was a time when mysticism was tangible and men dealt with spirits through their physical bodies and 5 senses. This ability only resulted in the unimaginable evil that is recorded in Genesis 6. God addressed this evil by reducing man’s lifespan to 120 years and eliminating this direct intercourse between man and the spirit-world. Beginning with Noah’s sons, life expectancy diminished until Moses, who lived 120 years and was the last man recorded with an unbroken lineage of ancestors who all lived longer than him. Moses is the last man to commune with God the spirit face to face – it doesn’t happen any more.
God made Moses the mediator between Him and His people. Moses revealed God to His people, wrote down God’s covenant, and described God’s will in the Law and the promises – once for all. Moses indicated that God would continue to speak to His people through mediators He sent, the prophets, and Moses gave strict criteria to judge a true prophet from a false one. Moses also pointed to the Great Prophet whom all God’s people were commanded to listen to. In Jesus, God the spirit became man and crossed the chasm imposed between man and spirit. Jesus was fully God and fully man. In His words, death, and resurrection Jesus became the ultimate mediator, superseding Moses and offering a more perfect sacrifice and the promise of eternal life. This eternal life is because the sacrificial blood Jesus offered on behalf of sinful men; all who repent and believe in the work the man Jesus accomplished in His death receive forgiveness for their sins and escape the wrath of God that will be poured out upon all sinners.
The desire to tangibly experience the “spiritual” is just as seductive now as it was in the time of Noah. The sin of spiritual adultery was tangible in the time of Noah. Now, after the gulf was imposed between man and spirit limiting tangibility, spiritual adultery happens through mysticism. Pursuing “spiritual experiences” through mysticism is the modern equivalent to the fornication that resulted in world-wide death in the flood. God has established a mediator and means to approach Him. There is no mystical way to approach God but only through a man who spoke, died and was resurrected in cold sober history. He now is bodily in heaven waiting to return and until He does we will not see or tangibly experience Him. Those who saw and touched Him said,
Though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls.
Unlike Peter who saw and touched Jesus, we experience love, joy and peace as we believe the testimony of the Holy Spirit concerning the message of Jesus and His work as a man and the certain promise of eternal life. This joy is the result of understanding and believing the objective message proven true by the resurrection – not a feeling based on a spirits or mystical experiences.
Spen Lake