I expect the next few years to include tests for the soul that become more and more finely tuned. The soul must eventually be made perfect, and if that seems a tall order, it is. However, the eventual perfection is not ours but God's, and acquired through his grace. All we have to do is be true to God, and to the actual reality of God not our chosen interpretation of that reality. This is what the tests are there to uncover. They are there to examine the deeper responses of the soul, beyond the merely intellectual level. They seek to unveil and reveal the heart. The true heart can be made perfect through the transformative power of God but he needs good ground in order to plant his seed.
Some of the tests will be conventionally spiritual. Do you believe in God or not? But that is just the beginning. What sort of God do you believe in? Why do you believe? What do you seek as a result of this belief? Is God more important to you than anything else, including, obviously, money and power, but also reputation and even family (see Matthew 10:21). Is it a holy God you believe in who acts for spiritual reasons and ends or is it a nice God who loves his children as they are now and accepts everyone for who they are, without requiring inner conversion, sacrifice and repentance?
Some have to do with the world. How do you see the world? How do you see the body? Do they have importance for themselves or as expressions of God and the soul or, perhaps, a mixture of the two? Some are to do with courage and response to stress, some are to do with taste and response to beauty and ugliness. Can you tell them apart? That seems an easy test but many people cannot in our day.
The purpose of the world at this time is to separate the sheep from the goats. The tests examine the mind but principally they examine the heart. The world seems real because it must do to make the tests real. But actually the world is not real in its own right. It can, and eventually will, be transformed or raised up into spirit but at the moment it serves as an environment for learning, and one of the things we have to learn is to reject the world as the world while, at the same time, love it as part of God's creation. That's an easy balance to strike if one perceives from the heart because what is, is, but it may be complicated for the intellectual mind which likes to partition and sees things in either/or terms instead of both/and.
We have it on good authority that not everyone who acknowledges God, of thinks they do, will enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 7:21). This is what the tests will pick out, the straight from the crooked, that which is true all the way down from that which is merely true on the surface. By their very nature the tests will be unexpected and require choice. Sometimes they will require sacrifice. They are a kind of mass initiation, and initiation is always preceded by tests and trails. So, be prepared for what is to come.
3 comments:
I tend to regard the tests as more like a consequence of increasing domination by the evil powers, rather than directly wanted by God.
But whatever the ultimate cause, they certainly seem to be a reality; and there is a quality of probing for one potential weakness after another - so that each new test seems to find another class of people who fail it.
I am thinking of the ongoing "AI" business, and how a whole extra group of people have apparently failed this test, yet who had come through many previous tests.
It seems that this will continue, and sooner or later we will All be tested in some place where our defences are weak.
Perhaps tempted by our personal prevailing sin, or perhaps tempted by yearning to feel optimistic about our future in this world, and that "things are getting better"? Or - in trying to avoid these - perhaps tempted by self-righteousness, or despair?
I see them as both a consequence of increasing domination by the evil powers and used by God as tests. We often wonder why God lets evil exist in the world but I think this is because the evil or potential to evil is in us. God cannot remove the evil until we remove the potential to succumb to it from ourselves. Then, I do believe, he could banish the demons. But until we overcome evil within us God cannot extirpate it from the world.
I so agree with you about AI. This is an obvious example of extreme materialism and denial of the soul but so many supposedly religious or spiritual people not only go along with it but actively welcome it. They might think they can use it without being contaminated spiritually but that is not so. Of course, you might say that about many things we all use but this is crossing a new line.
"crossing a new line" - That is how it is being promoted-implemented - it is meant (and, indeed being used, to replace human thinking - and human judgment.
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