We recently came to see several seemingly disassociated points, which on reading back revealed a certain connectedness. We offer them here for your prayerful consideration.
Our first thoughts centred on the question: “What has this got to do with marriage?” But, as we have written in the book “Where are all the Men?” these few notes are about the underlying question in the title: where are the men (in fact not just men but women also) in understanding their position with God? We are integrated beings: body, soul/mind and spirit. And these three are so interlinked that each affects the other. The mind has a particularly powerful effect on the spirit and the body. It is through thoughts that Satan finds an entry into our being.
Try this experiment for yourself: Look to spend some time becoming aware of what you are thinking, and observe how it affects (most especially) your behaviour. Psychologists say that 30,000 words go through our minds every minute, day and night. That could be an awful lot of out-of-control thoughts!
Without monitoring what is going on in our minds we are likely to be building attitudes from unworthy thoughts. As Pvbs 23 v 7 says “As a man’s thoughts are so he is…” (KJV).
1 “Where (God’s Holy) Spirit leaves off and man’s begins is difficult to determine; man is utterly dependent on God and yet at the same time this dependence does not take away from his own individuality.” Wm Dryness Themes of Old Testament Theology, p205. “The more intimate the relationship (between God’s Spirit and man’s spirit) the more natural persons become, the more they become “themselves.” One could put it very well in New Testament terms by saying the more persons lose themselves to God, the more they will discover who they are”. Ibid p209.
2 “(The prophet’s) fundamental objective was to reconcile man to God. Why do the two need reconciliation? Perhaps it is due to man’s false sense of sovereignty, to his abuse of freedom, to his aggressive, sprawling pride, resenting God’s involvement in history.” Abraham J Heschel.
(How much we need prophets for this age!)
The “sprawling pride” is in the belief that we do not need God. If we acknowledge our dependence on Him we are NOT proud. Dying to self (humility) is dying to the FALSE self – that which we have created for ourselves and is used by Satan. It is in recognising that we are made in His image that is something to take joy in – we are children of God, and as such have the inheritance of heirs. It is paramount that we grow towards knowing the God-made-self, the giftedness, the individuality, the very being that He wants us to be, and made us to be, rather than the one we have made for ourselves or adopted the one that the world persuades us that we should be.
We won’t know who we are until we know whose we are.
3 In Gen 2 v 7 we read that God breathed (His) Spirit into man: but, note, not into the animals that He has already created in Gen 1 v 24. This makes the life of man different from that of the animals; that difference is surely in the realisation of man’s “image and likeness” to God. The inference here is that man is so essentially different from animals in that they do not possess this extra quality which sets him aside from them. We should be careful in attributing to animals (by cathexis, etc), “rights” and attributes that are uniquely those of man (anthropomorphising). But rights automatically produce responsibilities. Our responsibility to animals is that of stewardship; it is not achieved by attributing to them “legal rights” which they do not have.
