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Saturday, April 3, 2021

When the Blind Behold and Know

Last night, I had one of those bad dreams about having been called into a situation of responsibility, being there long enough to get to that familiar place of people not wanting me any longer, feeling hopeless about figuring out what to do, and being so thankful to wake up!

Lots of real life came into the picture, and so my morning began with plenty of interacting with God about how to have a face-to-face encounter with him when we cannot see his face with our material eyes.

I am a novice when it comes to understanding brain-science. However, the snippets that get through to me leave me fascinated with the way God created us for attachment. This week I have been trying to understand how God designed our brains to respond to face-to-face interactions. As we look at someone when we are chatting, our sub-conscious thoughts are assessing and reacting to them faster than our conscious thoughts can process what we think we see.

With this design of our physical bodies aimed at helping us attach to God and one another, it has me considering how this works with the soul/spirit part of who we are. If our brains are designed to build attachment by looking into someone’s face, how do we build attachment to Jesus Christ with our minds, particularly considering God giving life to our spirits so we can attach to him in the spiritual realm as much or more as we could have attached to Jesus in the material world when he was here?[1]

I will share some things I am pondering in prayer and meditation on the word. My hope is that I can encourage you to come into God’s presence with questions, and wondering, and curiosity, the way children love to attach to us about the things they are learning.

·  My starting place is whether prayer and meditation on God’s word is a sufficient counterpart to looking into someone’s eyes so that it has the same effect on our minds as eye-to-eye interaction has on our brains. Jesus “lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, ‘Father…’”[2] Can we lift up our eyes to heaven in our minds so that what we “see” of God’s face is just as, or almost as, real as if we saw him with our eyes?

·  I think that Paul’s expression, “when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed”,[3] is true for everyone who believes in Jesus since Paul adds, “And we all, with unveiled face…”[4] This seems to mean that the veils of dissociation and self-protection believers wear are deliberate acts of our own, at least so far as personally allowing our WoLVeS to keep us from Jesus.[5] As a shepherd (pastor), it grieves me to watch professing believers permit their WoLVeS to hinder the church when Jesus has given us everything we need to be done with them.[6]

·  The connection between, “beholding the glory of the Lord,” and, “being transformed into the same image”, has me fascinated with how the synchronizing of our brains makes us like or dislike each other, and how we relate to Jesus spiritually so our minds synchronize with him in the light of his love for us. It also scares the heebie-jeebies out of me that self-protective adults are synchronizing the brains of our children to be like us in the things that are most influential inside us (often a deep-seated belief that we are worthless and have no hope of fixing that problem). The fact that it happens faster than our conscious thinking makes me desperate to get us adults living out of our new identity in Christ so all our children are synchronizing with our new hearts and minds.

·  Satan’s success as, “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers,”[7] has me deeply concerned for the unbelievers in our lives and the necessity of spiritual warfare praying for their salvation.

·  Paul talked like God already “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”[8] God clearly wants us to attach to this “knowledge”, and Satan clearly wants to stop that attachment. It only takes a faith-response to Jesus for us to have “the victory that has overcome the world”.[9]

·  This attachment between, “beholding the glory of the Lord,” and, “in the face of Jesus Christ,” along with the, “looking to Jesus,” and, “Consider him,” of Hebrews 12,[10] has me asking God to reveal to me how this works in real life so that looking into the face of Jesus Christ spiritually has the same effect on my mind as looking into his face physically would have on my brain.  

·  When we combine an understanding of God’s desire for us to behold the glory of God that is in the face of Jesus Christ, with the brain-science that demonstrates how God’s creation of Man’s physical being is designed to facilitate the greatest attachment ever, it begins to stand out how often God addresses us with some reference to seeing his face. This is particularly notable in the blessing God commanded Aaron and his sons to pronounce over Israel, Yahweh bless you and keep you; Yahweh make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; Yahweh lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”[11] And it is crowned with the promise that, “when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”[12]

Although I have had a growing faith in Jesus Christ from childhood, I have also had to deal with the real-life damage of living in a sinful world. I grew up fitting the description of a fear-based identity. I was the Attachment-Light-Always-On kid who had to come to God with all my attachment-failures, trusting him with what people have done to me, and confessing to him what I have done to others.

I am quite sure that my nightmares about failure in life and ministry have enough truth in them that I am asking God to show me what it means in real life. Whatever ails me in that regard, whatever veil of self-protection may be hiding anything from my consciousness, the thought of synchronizing my mind to the mind of Christ has me longing for the fullest experience of this as is possible this side of heaven no matter what painful realities I still must face about myself or anything that has happened to me.

Since it is true of every child of God that, “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another”, I want to grow in my beholding so I can grow up in Christ. I  hope this sharing helps all of us attach to Jesus more and better than we have ever known him before.

© 2021 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8

Email: in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)



[1] I mean this in reference to those who have been made alive in Jesus Christ by faith in his name (see Ephesians 2:1-10).

[2] John 17:1

[3] II Corinthians 3:16

[4] II Corinthians 3:18

[5] WoLVeS stands for the Wounds, Lies, Vows and Strongholds that, if left unresolved in our hearts, become like a pack of wolves constantly hindering God’s work of shepherding us in Christ. Thanks to Marcus Warner of Deeper Walk International for introducing this acronym.

[6] II Corinthians 10:4 (context is II Corinthians 10:1-6)

[7] II Corinthians 4:4

[8] II Corinthians 4:6

[9] I John 5:4

[10] Hebrews 12:1-3

[11] Numbers 6:22-27

[12] I John 3:1-3

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