How the symbolic works in prayer, worship and interface with the spiritual realm through Jesus. God is symbolic, and one strata of His communications occur through symbols. Dreams are an obvious form, but everything has a symbolic dimension of meaning. How we interpret symbols is part of how we interpret God.
Ministry to God comes before ministry to others. When we are ministering to God, we are lifted into His realm, as much as His Spirit guides us into it. We do not just take drugs and break into heaven, we are led there by His Spirit. Seated with Christ above. We have heavenly access because the Life and Ongoing work of Jesus.
Now when we pray and worship we place ourselves in an orientation of entering the spiritual realm where He is. This is normal for a believer. It is not really mysticism, but we go where our Lord is, and we gain strength to return and bless from being in His Presence.
A lots of christians avoid the symbolic aspect of who God is. But when we do, we miss much of what even the bible is talking about. Jesus symbolized things. He modeled made patterns for us to live by. We need to read that symbolic dimension to understand who He is.
Intepreting art is practice for interpreting the spiritual realm in its symbolic dimensions. Love is the center of all the realms, as God is Love.
He is also Light therefore wants to illuminate, to bring truer understanding. The Holy Spirit among other things, guides us into all truth. This includes an understanding of the symbolic dimensions. Again, dreams and visions and prayer impressions are all spoken in symbol.
God likes to communicate through symbols. He symbolizes Himself! So we understand Him, and therefore love Him more.
Jesus taught often in symbols as well.
I want to dymystify myticism. When we pray, we see things, get impressions, feel His Heart towards something. This is symbolic communion. We get to know God through symbols. It’s another area of meeting Him, tabernacling. All of life is meant to be a tabernacle of meeting God—marriage, taking out trash, going to work—the whole of life is a potential place of communion.
Spiritual perception is seeing by our spirit through His Spirit into the spiritual realm. God is Spirit, so we have to move in and by the spirit to understand something from His Perspective.
Spiritual perception then, is seeing things more as they truly are. It’s not an uber mystical activity really, but it is supernatural.
When we say we look at something spiritually, we are also looking at how the spiritual realm interfaces with the natural realm. God is incarnational, so He, who is Spirit enter into that which is natural. There is a way to two interface. When we pray, we start to see as Elisha’s disciple the spiritual realm in the midst of the natural realm. Elisha prayed his student’s eyes be opened to the spiritual realm, and the student suddenly saw the armies of heaven encamped above that place.
Similarly, we pray to see. And as He opens our spiritual eyes, we start to see more present dimensions in this situation. We start to see the spiritual backdrop. From that vision, we can more wisely choose how to bless in the natural. Paul prayed that the eyes of hearts be ever more enlightened.
Things must be revealed. Paul elsewhere in galatians said that the gospel was revealed to him, and that it was revealed to me to go do such and such. He was led by spiritual revelations.
In this article, I want to also focus on why the priestly comes before action on earth. We must see what the Father is doing, before we know what to do on earth.
Jesus only did what He saw the Father doing. That took prayer, worship, retreat. Then He would return and teach and do things.
He discerned their hearts, so that He could actually teach them what they needed to know.
This was a common practice and pattern of Our Lord while on earth. He would stop pray and see, and then act. This is why spiritual perception comes before intervention.
Prayer by its nature engages the spiritual imagination. When we pray, we start to see things, get His Heart or impressions about whatever we are praying about. Afterwards, we understand the situation more clearly. This is one of the reasons for prayer. It’s a way of getting to know God, and then to be able to see more of how He is intervening in the situations around us.
We must minister to God, before ministering to others. From that ministry comes all others.
Where He is, we are also. The veil was torn at the Cross. Spiritual Reality is open to us who are in Him. We can already be getting to know His spiritual realm.
The gospel did not come from man, it came down from The Father. The gospel was and is about His Son, and what He was offering through His Son to people. Paul says, that he did not make up the gospel, but that is was revealed to him. He went and tested it with the elders, and it was confirmed to have come from God.
Paul had many other, what we would call mystical experiences, even at his conversion. He gets a visitation from the Risen Jesus; and then at some point is lifted up into heaven and shown things. We are not told all he saw, but there was a type of mystical occurrence at that stage of his life, and repeatedly afterwards in his ministry.
Spiritual perception governs how we interpret things. Peter was blessed because the Father had revealed to Him the true identity of His Son. So even to see who Jesus really is, requires a revelation, a new spiritual perception of things.
How does spiritual perception work? How do we lose our own imaginations to find and be informed by more of His?
Prayer seems like a key. When we pray, we place ourselves in an orientation which is receptive to Him, and He begins to show us things, sometimes in images, impressions or full visions, other times in words of sensations. In prayer, we are listening. We are overhearing and overseeing what God is thinking feeling imaging. We are coming into deeper communion with His Imagination—how God sees. This contextualizes what we are experiencing in our lives. It helps us interpret them better. And I think is part of what it means to be renewing our minds daily in the Light coming from His Cross!
Jesus is The Light, so when we draw close to Him, everything is illuminated, made full of color and life. Therefore, our practice is always to be drawing nearer to Him. When we do so, we start to see things more in His Light.
So spiritual perception does involve Light. In Genesis, God made light, and saw that it was good. He illuminated things in order to make delineations. So must we.
We have a crowd of those watching with us, as we draw above (Hebrews), so we are not on some disorienting trip, although it can be disorienting as it was for John when we are having open visions and visitations. Yet, God is not a God of confusion. We are meant to know things more deeply in Him.
The prophets saw cities coming out of heaven, they saw beast and monsters of all kinds; they saw new temples and could measure their dimensions, they saw a reign of global peace at the end. They were shown many things. God knows how much we can handle, as we see in Daniel, when God tells him that is enough, you cannot see more in that area. God guides our perceptions, unlike in drug trips or ecstatic religions. The Holy Spirit guides us into all truth.
And Love is there as well, for God is Love. That is one way to discern whether your vision is from God, does it have His Ways in it—is it Love centered.
The prophets had activated imaginations, their spiritual perception was alive and in communion with Him. So, He could share lots with them.
We often, in the church, have had a poverty of imagination-an un-activated imagination. We haven’t allowed our perception into our relationship with God. That’s tragic. For His Creativity is Life, and brings Life to us! He wants to heal this, and awaken our spiritual perception so we can have a deeper communion with Him, and so we can be useful stewards and partners with Him on earth.
