Daily Bible Reflection- Isaiah 55:8-9
Verse of the day:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
-Isaiah 55:8-9 KJV
(I’ve chosen to not reflect too heavily on the book of Isaiah and more on the actual two verses here.)
The more I’ve continued to think through the major themes of the bible (especially with regards to the concept of original sin) I find myself drifting away from the gnostic ideas of the creation of matter. Specifically, that matter is in of itself sinful or inferior product in comparison to the soul. This has a troubling implication of nature being itself inferior to the spirit. I can’t speak to whether the Spirit is superior in totality to say the aesthetic (and sometimes transcendent) property inherent in nature, but when I sit by a babbling brook and see a mountain ahead of me, as I do every year when me and vros rent a cabin in the Appalachian mountains, I feel a greater connection to God than, say, something more along the lines of spiritual activation through kneeling-by-the-bed praying, meditating, or divination.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that taking the eucharist has never brought me closer to God, but sitting beneath a pine tree has. Nature represents reality, and I’m just going to leave it at that so that we don’t get into one of those ‘the chair exists/doesn’t exist’ arguments, while man’s Free Will (subjectivity, interpretation, biological determinism, postmodernism, post structuralism, every one has a different Soul, you can pick your poison, it’s all Free Will, which is to say it’s inherently human, so bear with me when I say this next part) is Sin.
We conceptualize sin incorrectly. Sin shouldn’t be thought of as the laundry list of misdeeds to slight god and put me on the nonstop express train to Hell and more as the tides that pull our lifeboat away from God. Alone, adrift in the sea of infinite possibility, we face total drowning in the sea of annihilation. In addition, Sins are about retreating into pure pleasure (that is to say self serving in totality) as a path rather than happiness (inner peace, wholeness). I can’t quite explain it as a whole because i’m on some Delta 8 rn, but I guess it’s the difference in ‘consuming’ for peace rather than DaSein of Peace. This is kind of an interesting concept- Ontology of christianity.
The tldr version of all this is ‘even mushrooms, which stimulate the ‘spiritual’ part of your brain, tends to cause preference for being around the natural world. )
Anyways this is a long way of me saying ‘nature good, and is not sinful. man is.’ Even in gnostic thought the Monad cares about people not sinning so that they may pursue Goodness. And if nature is good, then why would the Demiurge create it, if the Demiurge is a less perfect god?
However, on the other hand, I have to admit that the thematic elements of Gnosticism are very compelling regardless. I’ll get into those later in another article probably.
The reason I say all of this stuff is that I’m overthinking this stuff. Overthinking has always been a huge problem for me. I tend to run very anxious, and will be quick to run a risk assessment of social situations and play my cards way too close to my chest, choosing always the safest outcomes rather than the higher risk/reward ones. This is because I am too fearful. In fact, I often were rather more keen on being comfortable than happy, because the pursuit of happiness is fraught with failure, and no guarantee of ever achieving it either.
and don’t get me started on all the information. Modernity has caused us to fall hypnotized into the endless black void of the internet (effectively making the internet ‘Die Sündermaschine’) and turn from good. This is why we must remember Ecclesiastes 1;18- “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” In fact, ecclesiastes is key to understanding the very fundamental core of sin ‘takes us away from God’s glory’- even in the pursuit of the flesh, (and in knowledge, worldly matters, philosophy, so on) you essentially end up pleased but unhappy. The sinner who turns his back on God does himself the disservice of being existentially, and even just mentally, unfulfilled. Why should I though, concern myself with anxiety when I am in the Lord’s hands? That is to say, not that I am somehow shielded from suffering, but that I am going to strive for righteousness so that should I die I' will be at peace in all moments leading up to death. and that death even is not the end.
I think this is implied in the first part of the verse. Granted, I understand the the original verse also is meant to say more on the mutable unknowability of our human minds in conceiving in the spiritual grandioseness of God (in Islam I think there is a verse about how ‘god obscures his face with 100 veils in order that you are not obliterated by his presence) (also refer to Job), but why can it not also imply that our concerns in the material realm are kind of insignificant (smaller in scale would maybe be a better way of thinking about it) compared to the whole of the cosmos.
And Man playing as God is a great sin, as it is Sin imbuing life into sin. Yes, I wrote that correctly. I can’t elaborate on this anymore, i’m getting sleepy.
Anyway, the real main point, and the simpler one, is that we cannot understand god fully, which is cool though because he can send us visions in dreams that may lead to prophecy.