In the Marvel movie, “Doctor Strange”, Dr. Steven Strange is a genius surgeon and a thoroughbred modern materialist. He’s the very embodiment of the American self-made-man with talent, humor, virility, and wealth. But, after a near-fatal car accident, his entire persona crumbles like a house of cards. His hands were crushed in the crash and in a twist of bitter irony He becomes unable to perform surgeries, causing him to spend all his wealth seeking medical treatments to regain his previous status. At the end of his wits, Strange journeys to Tibet to seek healing from a famed mystic known as the “Ancient One”.
When Steven finally meets the Ancient One, he quickly loses his patience. The two could not be more different. He’s always in a hurry, she’s calm and at rest; he’s angry at the world, she’s at peace; his mind is narrow and focused on material facts, her mind is open to greater realities. In a heated exchange between the two, Dr. Strange shouts, “We are made of mater and nothing more! You’re just another tiny, momentary speck within an indifferent universe. You think you see through me, well you don’t. I see through you!” Immediately after saying this, the Ancient One grips Dr. Strange and strikes him in the chest. Terrified, Strange looks on for a moment as his soul floats outside his body. It’s a hoaky scene, but I couldn’t help but laugh at the thrill of poetic irony and relatability I felt watching that scene in the theater. I know what it’s like to be Steven Strange, one moment mentally dismantling supernatural schemas only to be met squarely with a blow to the chest that reveals the reality of the spiritual world around me.
I doubt there’s ever been a human on earth who has lived a full life and never had a moment which made him or her question whether the material was all there is to life. Not only ontologically, in terms of feeling within themselves that there must be something else as they gaze at a sunset or mountain range, but in real experiences with either heavenly or demonic realities. Encounters are like flashes in a dark cave that make us briefly aware of our surroundings. They affirm us of our God-given suspicion that there is more beyond the neurons firing in our brains; something bigger and ‘realer’ than our skin and bone and next paycheck.
As we’ve established earlier in talking about Apocalypse (i.e. revealing or uncovering), human beings are unable to come to real knowledge of the unseen spiritual realm on their own steam. We need it to be revealed to us—there is nothing in the human being standing apart from God but ignorance and darkness leading to foolishness, violence, and despair. But with God, by His expression of himself to us in His Word, we can know, and by knowing live confidently, in a world that not only contains spiritual realities, but integrates them organically throughout the material world. So what has God revealed to us about the spiritual realms?
Overlapping Realms
Frankly, you could sink a fleet of ocean liners with the amount of Christian books written on the topic of the spiritual realm. It’s a topic with massive demand, primarily because of the massive confusion surrounding it. The root of this confusion is a mindset which seeks to figure out the spiritual realm, as if it were a problem that needed a solution, when in fact it is mysterious—according to the definition outlined in chapter 5. The spiritual realm, as it is known in Scripture, is beyond our rational senses. Therefore to seek to rationalize it is a contradiction in terms and only ends in half baked systems and a chaos of confusion. However, this does not mean we can’t know anything about it, or that we shouldn’t know anything about it. The endeavour of figuring out the spiritual realm will always come up empty unless we’re willing to limit our search to what God has revealed about it. While this path helps us keep out of the weeds of speculative guesswork, it will lead us into some very strange waters.
As we’ve already seen, the Bible’s understanding of the spiritual realm is very different from what we’re accustomed to thinking in western modernity. When we think of heaven, earth, and hell, the first images that pop into our heads have a source usually far removed from the biblical imagination. The popular image we’ve inherited of these spiritual categories in the Bible comes through a whole mess of historical filters. The order of filters tends to be a Greco-Roman filter under a Western Medieval filter under an Enlightenment filter, all held down by the sensitive layer of modern contemporary notions of spirituality. The result is a convoluted distortion of the text in the mind of the reader of Scripture. Although each era of history had its distortions, these distortions usually came as a result of seeing the text through a contemporary lens of spirituality, rather than seeing contemporary spirituality through the lens of the text. As a result, early interpretations of scripture have bouts of Gnosticism, Medieval interpretations commonly have popular astrological adaptations, and Enlightenment interpretations tend to have a materialist denial of spirituality.
As a result of this mess of filters, we tend to think in terms of humans being somehow attached to the spiritual realm by a little umbilical cord called the “soul”, and that when the physical body dies the soul floats up to heaven like a bubble in a bathtub. While the physical world can be good and manageable sometimes, it’s for the most part an obstacle to our spiritual destiny, an obstacle that will be gladly done away with when we die and go to heaven. I suggest to you that this perspective, which we find in ourselves almost by default in modernity, is not only unbiblical but just another shade of the Gnostic heresy seen through layers of historical rationalization.
Gnosticism has been a thorn in orthodox Christianity’s side since its infancy. Very simply put, Gnosticism sees the fall occurring prior to creation, and sees creation as a result of the fall. Thus, there is nothing material that isn’t evil. Gnosticism stresses the distinctness of the two realms: heaven and earth, and sees the salvific bridge between them as the “gnosis”, which is personal knowledge of the supreme deity (a god distinct from YHWH the creator God, who is called the “Demiurge”).
For simplicity’s sake, you can illustrate gnosticism as two circles labeled “heaven” and “earth”. First, draw a circle representing heaven. Then draw your earth-circle underneath it—and make sure they don’t touch. Then draw an arrow going from the bottom circle into the top circle and label the arrow “gnosis”. The biblical view differs in a very crucial way. To illustrate this, you can draw your two circles again, only this time draw the heaven circle slightly overlapping with the earth circle, like a venn diagram, and draw an arrow descending from top to bottom. You can label this arrow, “logos” or “word”.
Did you catch the difference? God never abandoned or jettisoned creation, either before or after the fall. In the Judaochristian understanding, He has always been its King and Father. Although the two circles don’t overlap perfectly, they were always intended to from the moment YHWH declared creation “good”. But what do we make of the logos arrow going down rather than the gnosis arrow going up? One of the core defining characteristics of the God of the Bible is that He habitually steps into human history and declares that He is sovereign over it (1Kgs. 12:15; Amos 9:7; Dan. 2:21; Matt. 24:22). So, when I say logos, I do not primarily refer to it as the ‘divine reason’, so much as its function as a spoken word of God to mankind. It is a powerful symbol of the unique relationship found between humans and their creator in the Bible.
The Seen and Unseen Realms
To understand this unique and strange realm in the Bible, we must draw our attention to an equally strange set of characters in the Old Testament, the Priesthood. Most modern Christians don’t exactly know what to make of these gem-encrusted characters who seemed to act as a conduit between YHWH and His covenant people. At best our eyes glaze over when reading the Priestly portions of Scripture, which seem to go on and on about seemingly erroneous requirements for everything from what they ate, what they wore, their genetic lineage, etc. You won’t see many people picking up Leviticus for their leisure time. Or, on the other hand, we let our modern protestant sensibilities get the better of us and we get offended at all the pious externality of their function. After all, didn’t Jesus call the Pharisees “whitewashed tombs” because of their outward religion? But even Jesus participated in the cultus (religious system) of His day, and more than that He is repeatedly called our “High Priest” in the New Testament. Rather than burying the uncomfortable topic of the priesthood, it could serve us better to learn from it as a natural outflow of a spiritual reality which necessitates just such a strange class of humans.
Similar to most world religions and philosophies, the priestly rendering of the spiritual realm has a seen and an unseen realm. However, where as such things Platonic Dualism (and subsequently Gnosticism) illegitimate the material and magnify the spiritual, and such spiritualities as Animism see little to no divide between the spiritual and the material, the Priestly view does not delegitimize either realm and maintains that they remain separate realms.
The seen world consists of humanity and all that humans can see and experience: earth and sky, sun, moon, and stars, plants and animals, birds and fish, mountains and seas, and, of course, humanity itself. The unseen world is a separate and alternative sphere of existence, standing alongside the seen world, with its own distinctive character, inhabitants, vital life force, and structure. It is “located” above and beyond the seen world, and it is perceptible only through special revelatory experiences, such as those accorded to prophets and seers….[T]hese two worlds were seen as existing alongside one another and that contact between them, which sometimes occurred, was generally fraught with danger. (Kessler Old Testament Biblical Theology p. 326–329)
This view is standard in Hebrew thought, and sets the precedent for such ceremonial institutions as: the Israelite priesthood, the sacrificial system, altars and the temple, and the Hebrew calendar. All these are built on the notion that the seen and unseen realms, while remaining very different and in many ways very distant, do in fact overlap and that this overlapping, though dangerous, is a very desirable thing. In this way, the simple metaphor of a venn diagram begins to break down. In priestly thought, the seen realm is not partially infused with the spiritual—like a half-full glass or a metaphysical sponge—but rather the physical was created intentionally to be separate from the spiritual. Priestly theology is not an island amid the other theologies of the Old Testament, but stands on the shoulders of a Creation Theology which understands YHWH as having created the heavens and the earth as separate and distinct realms which were designed to intersect and cooperate. This is why, in the Genesis creation narrative God is depicted as setting divides between certain branches of His creation, allotting categories of creation into kinds—just as the priesthood was meant to set distinctions and limitations on things which were clean and unclean etc.
The seen realm, in this understanding, is subsistent on the unseen and not an autonomous other which can function properly without the order of the unseen. The distinction is subtle: the seen realm was made to be separate from the spiritual while also being purposefully intermeshed with it. As such, the unseen is understood to break through into the physical in certain times, places, objects, and historical events. Take, for example, the story of Jacob’s ladder (Gen. 28:10–17). Jacob is traveling and decides to stop somewhere for the night. While he’s sleeping, he sees a vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder going up to heaven. YHWH speaks to him and reaffirms His covenant to Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham. When Jacob awakes, his immediate response is, “Surely the Lord is in this place” (v. 16). The next thing Jacob does is to build an altar and call the place the house of God (vv. 18–19)—and for centuries after, that physical location continued as a place of worship.
The material world, while itself separate in being from the spiritual, has unique connection points in the spiritual world where YHWH chooses to manifest His presence. As such, these in-breakings of the spiritual are revelations—peelings back of the curtain to reveal and uncover what was previously unseen. For this reason, where there is revelation from YHWH, everything which that revelation encompasses falls under a spiritual weight of meaning and significance. A perfect example of this is the Tabernacle.
As a divine abode, the tabernacle was also analogous to Eden. Like Eden, the tabernacle was cosmic in conception, the place where heaven and earth met, a veritable microcosm of the Edenic creation where God first dwelt on earth….As Eden was the place where humanity experienced the presence of God, so too was the tabernacle. This was particularly true for the priests (Heiser pp. 174–175).
This special, locational overlap of the seen and unseen realms came with the need for special near-scientific precision on the part of those who would oversee this sacred space. But this was a science based uniquely on revelation from the creator, and not merely on human observation. The physical imagery harking back to Eden which permeated the construction of the tabernacle, and later Solomon’s temple, was not erroneous artistic enthusiasm but was commanded by God. For reasons which can be difficult to see through our myriad filters today, YHWH Himself placed extreme significance on the external renderings of everything surrounding temple worship, from decoration to furniture to garments—in fact He gave His own Spirit to the select men who would work these crafts (Exod. 31:1–11). This care for physical details in the construction of this heavenly replica gives us a window into the epistemology of priestly thought as guided by the revelation of God. It shows us a way of seeing, not only the natural created order of YHWH, but how human beings fit into that created order with YHWH.
The author of Hebrews described the temple and the priesthood as “a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, “See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.”” (Heb. 8:5). As we established, the tabernacle was a place of overlap between the seen and unseen realms, with corresponding parts of connection, much like Eden. The lamp-stand stood before the holy of holies like the tree of life with branching arms, the showbread—which lay open all week—was eaten by the priests on the sabbath as a reminder of God’s provision and rest on the seventh day of creation. The wall hangings and art which went into the essential model of the tabernacle were designed meticulously to illustrate garden imagery. The obvious question which comes to mind after all this is, why does God care so much about all these external things?
YHWH Bridges the Gap
The answer to this question is threefold:
1.) Human beings live in the seen realm and because of sin the earth itself is no longer an adequate “tabernacle” which can represent God’s perfect form of life. For human beings to have knowledge of the unseen realm they must, ironically, actually see something.
2.) Precisely what humans physically see matters. The tabernacle and the priesthood was not meant to be aesthetically pleasing only, and maybe give ancient Israelites something to do on the weekends, the tabernacle was meant to radically reform their lives as people living in the relational reality of YHWH. The dichotomy between external and internal worship finds no grounds in priestly theology, and for good reason. Along with the priestly conception of the tabernacle is the implicit idea that what people see shapes their thoughts, and what a human thinks develops his/her character, and that purity of character is essential for living in relationship with YHWH. The external bleeds into the internal like snow melting into the soil.
3.) Although God is spirit (the great Elohim), and He inhabits the unseen realm, He actively works within the seen realm, among humans, to bridge the gap. YHWH has never been the kind of God to be content with distance from His human creations—He is constantly interfering with their plans (Gen. 12:1), interjecting into history (Josh 1–12), and condescending to intimately personal levels (Gen. 21:17). His primary goal in ‘tabernacling’ at all is to cultivate His covenant relationship with human beings—which brings us to a core principle of the divine-human relationship.
Along with Gnosticism, there is a resilient heresy subtly persisting in Christian thought today, the heresy of Deism. It’s easy to say “God is not a clock-maker God”, the kind of God who makes creation and then leaves humans to their own devices. But for some reason it’s less easy to believe God actually loves and always intended to dwell among His creatures—physically in the seen realm. But this is the trajectory of Scripture from the very beginning. God always intended to dwell with human beings in the seen realm. The tabernacle was not a mere concession to get people back on their feet spiritually, it was to create a new kind of human. Just like we addressed in chapter 7, God’s divine instruction (Torah) and the overlapping of the seen and unseen realms are inseparable concepts. Tabernacle, priest, prophet, and Torah are all constituent parts in God’s plan to bring earth back in line with heaven through covenant relationship with human beings.
Covenant and Reconciliation
The way YHWH choses to go about the task of reintegrating humanity into His divine order should not surprise us from what we’ve seen in Scripture so far—He does it through delegating authority. In this case, He begins by delegating authority to the Patriarchs by first establishing a covenant with Abraham (Gen. 12).
Genesis 12:1–3 is clearly a pivotal text insofar as the book of Genesis is concerned. Heralding yet another new stage in God’s dealings with humanity, it is set against the backdrop of the primeval prologue (the Babel incident in particular) and fixes the agenda not only for the patriarchal narratives, but also for the rest of the Pentateuch and beyond (Baker, David W. and Alexander Desmond. Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch
A Compendium Of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship. InterVarsity Press, 2020.).
A covenant is, at its most basic, a relational pact between two parties. God does not force himself on Abraham—the deciding factor is Abraham’s own faithfulness in obedience to YHWH (Gen. 26:4–5). God, in a way, comes alongside Abraham and partners with Him in a project which will extend far beyond Abraham’s own lifespan to accomplish God’s will in blessing the nations—which is, in fact, God’s core agenda (Gen. 22:18). Although laws and statutes make up the main body of the covenants in the Old Testament, they are not alien meteorites that fall from heaven and impose themselves on weak humans. This is not the unseen throwing out all the categories of the seen and unrealistically expecting humans to conform to a foreign standard. Rather, as Psalmists tell us, they are “light”, “comfort”, and “delight” (Ps. 119:18, 70, 105). It is the other way around, the expectations placed on humanity under the oath of a covenant with YHWH were incarnational expectations, intentionally and naturally overlapping the seen with the unseen, as it had been intended from the beginning. In fact, it is widely known among Ancient Near Eastern scholars that the notion of covenant was already a commonplace practice when God made His covenant with Abraham. The idea of covenant was familiar to Abraham, and YHWH chose to utilize this human convention to convey a matter of cosmic importance. This fact helps illustrate the point that God’s redemptive plan can not be boiled down into legal or technical terms but is, at its root, a relational reality.
The Laws were never a perfect recreation of the unseen in the seen realm, as the epistles would gladly remind us, but we must remember they were never meant to be an end in themselves. God’s covenant project of restoring humanity to its heavenly potential was and progressive—bringing us out of sin and death gradually as we conform to the way, truth, and life of God’s word.
Covenant is the fulcrum on which the Kingdom of God pivots, in both Old and New Testaments. The evident complexity of human brokenness did not discourage biblical writers from assuming a way back to God’s order within the context of the covenant community under the rule of YHWH. The practical method Scripture follows for solving the cycle of sin caused by the human condition is twofold: 1.) by addressing the problems of the community as errors within the individual human heart, and 2.) by recognizing YHWH as their prime governing authority.
Christ’s Covenantal Kingdom
In the first case, although confessionally today the belief that the hearts of individuals is the defining forcing of a community continues, in practice this belief is almost completely abandoned in the spheres of societal change. The command: “You shall not covet…” (Exod. 20:17) did not have its end in the individual, although it was undeniably a command for individuals to follow through on. Its end was a society of people who had hearts which did not covet. Imagine a society of individuals who, on a heart desire level, did not feel discontent with their possessions. This shift in the hearts of a community of individuals would have major repercussions on the world order. The economy would have to adapt to less demand, people would experience less need and would be more generous in giving, and conflicts on both personal and geopolitical levels would decrease. All this, because a change of heart.
However, most people, whether lay people, politicians, or economists agree that if there were a mass change of heart, change would occur on a multitude of levels. But still our resources and funding go into brute-force programs which cooperate with systems of management rather than working toward changing hearts—and that is because realistic people realize that it is harder to change an individual’s heart than it is to simple coerce them into complying. The covenants of YHWH are an alternate, organic means of establishing order in humanity. The Torah contained in these covenants inform the human heart, teaching individuals how to individually live in such a way that sustainable order in society would be possible. But if we stopped here then Torah would merely be another social program. Laws, even divinely inspired laws, do not have the power in themselves to change a human heart. A heart can go on in wretched sin and discontent and still be technically keeping the law. There is a second half to the transformation procured through covenant with YHWH, and that is to have YHWH as your supreme authority.
The meaning I am ascribing to the term “supreme authority” is a difficult one to convey, much the same way “kingdom” is a difficult term for us today. The kind of authority YHWH ought to wield is not the same as a theocracy, a society which has a deity in place of a king. His authority is not just in doling out demands and punishments, it is a more foundational authority, something conveyed in Scripture’s language of fearing God. When God is our supreme authority He is the one we make our plans on. It is the influence a reality with God at the center has on the way we perceive and live life. The one who believes in God fears God because he/she knows that it is God who moves creation—creation really revolves around God. When one has God as his/her supreme authority, then the Laws of God can never be reduced to checking boxes—they are acts of obedience to the order of reality, much the same way we drink water when we’re thirsty. If our supreme authority becomes anything else, we will not live in a way that reflects the reality humans were designed to live in.
A community with YHWH as supreme authority in this way—as King, Father, and Shepherd—is near to the Kingdom of God. Even if this community is still very far from the perfection of God’s order in the Law, it can still be steered toward His Kingdom in small and seemingly pedestrian ways. This was a truth powerfully illustrated in Christ’s earthly ministry, where He interacted and befriended those people in His cultural context who were furthest from fulfilling the Law. The Law became a dull shard of mirror when compared with the One it had always reflected. More than this, Christ Himself provided the power for transformation necessary for Human beings to enter into the Kingdom of God. This is where our doctrines of substitutionary atonement and imputed righteousness carry an essential burden in theology. The Law itself had no power to justify us before God—and because of the weakness of human flesh, it cannot be done and have its intended effects in us. (Gal. 2:16; Rom. 8:3). This essential power must come from God Himself, energizing us in the seen and unseen of the human self to accomplish His will, which is succinctly to live in the overlapping reality of the Kingdom of God.
It’s for this reason Christ came as “King” and “Shepherd”, terms intimately associated with the blend of political rulership and divine authority common to eastern thought. Christ came to a society steeped in Law: post-exilic, Jewish fundamentalism of the Galilean variety—what some preachers have cleverly termed, “the Bible-belt of the first century”. The society of the pharisees was one of living fifty percent of the covenant life at one hundred percent. They knew the Law well enough, but they had little to no knowledge of the God who gave it, and even when He manifested Himself in front of them they could not bring themselves to call Him King. Their supreme authority had become the Law, rather than God Himself.
The fact that Scripture hails Jesus as King is no trite metaphor, it is a foundational truth necessary for living rightly in reality. To have Christ as one’s supreme authority is to plan on Christ, to build one’s life around decisions He has already made for you to live into. This is the gospel, a good news which only became possible with the incarnation of Jesus, that the overlap of the seen and unseen, which had progressively been developed through covenantal history, had finally come. Christ Himself was the bridge, and in Himself came the new covenant, fulfilling both the covenantal variables of divine Law to change the individual human heart (Jer. 31:33a; Matt. 5–7), and the divine authority to bring it to completion (Jer. 31:33b; Matt. 28:18).
This redemptive overlap, restoring humanity to God’s intended order, which is at its core a relational reality defined by the love of God. We see the final vision of the kind of man who lives in both the unseen and the seen at once in the character of Christ, who is both our forerunner into the Kingdom and the King of the Kingdom He came to establish on earth as it is in heaven (Heb. 1:8, 6:19–20).
Christ’s rule in this new covenant Kingdom is neither especially moral, practical, political, or religious—it is meant to swallow up our entire notion of what it means to live as humans on the earth. The present Kingdom of God under Christ cannot be relegated in any way to one or more categories of human life without jettisoning the whole message of the good news. It is meant to infect, influence, transform every category of human life—healing the heart and rewriting our desires and priorities as we submit to His commands and supreme authority. Those who believe on Him in this way are destined to inherit the Kingdom of God simply because they have ceased to live in any other kingdom. They, in reality, live with His life and die with the hope of eternal life in the Kingdom they have already learned to love and live in (Gal. 2:20). This leads us to ask another question, which I hope has become frequent in your mind as you’ve been reading this: what does salvation mean if all this is true about the Kingdom of God? That is a topic I will reserve for the next chapter.
The Warped Kingdom