John 17:14-16 (NIV) -
"I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it."
I was reading a book yesterday - classic fantasy fiction tropes, wizards fighting each other in a Hunger Games style tournament to see who will come out on top and receive the Almighty MacGuffin™. Pretty standard stuff for me, until they introduced a character who was revealed to be something called an "ethereal".
In this book, the people recognise the distinction between body and soul. They believe the body lives on the Material Plane (the normal world) while the soul exists on a different, but connected, level of the universe called the Ethereal Plane. The body and soul are tied across these two planes, and while most people would recognise their bodies as the main place they exist, these "ethereals" identify with their minds - in other words, they are a soul trapped in a body, not a body that has a soul.
C.S. Lewis made a remarkably similar comment about humanity: "There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors."
As Christians, we recognise that we are not bodies with souls, but souls with bodies. Whether we realise it or not, we traverse across two realms of existence, impacting and being impacted by both. These are the physical world, where we live and breathe and work and relate, and the spiritual realm, where we dream and love and mourn and rejoice. Satan has been given permission to roam and rule the physical world for now, but over it all, we know that God reigns supreme in both physical and spiritual.
The world is much like the majority of people in the book I was reading - they believe they are physical people who might be something more, who have a soul that is capable of reason and sentiment. As Christians, we have been awakened to a rather incredible truth - it is, in fact, the other way around, and we are spiritual beings who inhabit physical bodies for a time. We have been shown that the life we live on this earth is a mere fraction of the eternity that we will spend spiritually, and this is why what we do here on earth has such significant consequences, both for us and those we love.
There's actually another post that I thought I was going to be putting out before this, but I am realising now that God seems to have some things he wants to say on this matter. He wants us to learn the significance of our immortal spirits and how that plays a part in how we live in this physical world. He wants us to learn, as they have already been doing in the book I was reading, how to traverse both worlds, living in the physical world not as physical beings, but as spiritual ones. In the words of Jesus during his prayers in Gethsemane, "My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one." We need to learn how to fight and walk and conquer in this world, and that comes first from knowing our identity as spiritual beings who are lead by the all-powerful, all-knowing Spirit of God.
I hope y'all have a great day, and I'm quite excited to see where this goes!
Bless you Brother