[aron]

OBW,

All quite true. I am doing a sort of haphazard conjecture of life on the other side of the veil. But on this side, while we still dwell in the flesh, all quite true.

The Spirit has come to be quite an interest of mine. I lived in the Shouter mindset for years. Now I am actually trying to 1) look at the text, absent Lee glasses, and 2) square that with my feeble and shallow experience.

So I am drawn, at least conceptually, to the mystical "I was carried away in spirit and beheld x, y, and z" imagery, but the hard and fast is all of which you speak. I tried to reference that in the Lord's 'wait in Jerusalem for the promise of the Father' in the first 2 posts. But that was certainly not some all-encompassing, comprehensive command.

Nonetheless, when Jesus prayed, "on earth as it is in heaven", shouldn't we consider "as it is in heaven", if we are to square up our earthly journey? That includes visions of angels ascending and descending, and the inexpressible glory of the Spirit, which does indeed go forth from the throne. If Jesus said "You will see this" kind of thing (John 1:51), then I will indeed struggle to obey, and enter. And here especially, "without vision we perish". And if Lee wasn't interested, focusing instead on his masticating his "processed Triune God", then I'm not terribly interested in his so-called economy, nor his ideas on 1 Cor 15:45. Which is sort of why I parked my mystical notions outside that thread. The Spirit is not something we define, or examine. It is something (or rather someone) we find, or rather are found by, and that finding will define us. That finding defines the journey.

Notice that the Jews found and lost again and again. Out of Chaldees, out of Egypt, out of Babylon. Etc. The Spirit is a hard road. But it is the only road.