Who’s looking at you?

Spiritual beings in a spiritual world?

Have you watched “The Listener” or “The Ghost Whisperer”?

What’s your concept of the spiritual?

What’s behind the seemingly unreasonable anger that we see all around us almost every day?

The book of Job, in the Bible, begins with the curtain being pulled back and a little bit of the spiritual world being exposed. God is presiding over his council meeting and Satan walks in. The question God asks him is a simple one: “Where have you come from?” The answer comes back quickly, “From roaming through the earth and going to and fro in it”.

The implication is clear; there are spiritual beings wandering around the earth looking at what’s going on, whether we see them or not. The story of Job then continues with a description of the impact that Satan has on Job.

This is not the only point in the Bible where the impact of spiritual beings on human beings is described. In fact, the interaction between the physical and spiritual is the backdrop for “the whole story” from Genesis to Revelation. In some places it is specifically described; in other places it’s simply implied. The spiritual breaks through with angelic visits, visions, spiritual battles, witches and even a talking donkey.

How I, as a human being, respond to the spiritual world around me is the biggest challenge I will face in my life. Does that surprise you? You might argue that you neither see nor hear the spiritual world, but it is nonetheless real and has an impact for good or bad on your life and mine.

God intended men and women to rule over the world in which they had been placed. They were not intended to be ruled by it or the circumstances in which they found themselves. They were not intended to “live in fear” but in hope and love. But fear is the result of a world out of sync with the way in which it was intended to function and one in which people are dislocated from their creator.

Human beings are spiritual beings as well as physical ones, and the problem is that I’m often in danger of living as though I am only a physical being. The result of that is that the spiritual world is then free to have a negative impact on me and I then have a negative impact on people around me. Fear, lies, manipulation, selfishness and anger are all fruit of the impact of a spiritual world determined to destroy the world God intended.

Some people may want to reject this idea but we can’t be neutral. The spiritual world will either have an impact on us or we can have an impact on it. We are either controlled (whether we realise it or not) by the powers around us for evil or we stand with Christ praying, in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”.

Stephen Maxted http://www.the-message-works.org.uk

(originally posted in March 2011)

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