So many steps go into a journey. Suppose you’re a college kid who wants to go from Ohio to Miami for Spring Break. It takes funds and everything is tight, but if you skim a little money off the Room and Board allowance, you’ve got it. Then there’s the car—your transmission is going. Small trips become big dares. Stranded in a wheat field with your Triple-A used up? No thanks. Let’s say plane tickets are expensive, so think hard.
You need someone else’s car. Cam and Kelly and Dale want to do Times Square, so now you must win an argument. Talk about the big crowds at Miami Beach and poor weather predicted for NYC. Kelly is still against it, and you need Kelly’s car. Remind her of a cousin on the way.
They cave. Things look Miami sunny at last.
Then comes a hurricane advisory for Florida. And warning of a virus around Kentucky and Georgia, the puking kind. And your absentee father suddenly wants you to join him on a nostalgia trip.
So many obstacles. You want to give up.
Why should eternal life be any different?
The path to destiny in the Bible is rocky too. It starts with what you think about the book. Some see it as a prized possession, others as a coffee table prop.
For most its status remains a fable. Collected wisdom and stories from old tribes. In college you get a crossfire of critique that places it somewhere between scam and sham. Comparative religion teachers pick it apart: veracity of dates, conflicting accounts, competing histories. Now it loses even the luster of “fable”. How could it match your other priorities—food, dates, study. Coffee, road trip, ballgame.
If eternal life seem more of a mirage than Miami Beach, what are the odds you will beat these obstacles? Fight hard for a fleeting vapor?
The odds are low.
Suppose, though, that you feel a vacuum inside. Other things feel empty. The Bible graduates from fable to “serious text”. Now you slog through it along with the Koran and the Vedas, going on a spiritual quest.
Maybe Miami Beach is worth fighting for. You pluck a few nuggets from it, like the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule. You might bother with an Easter or Christmas service. Wisdom from bygone centuries floats through your head in lyrical style.
Then lightning strikes. A romance goes bust or a relative dies. You run out of money and suddenly there BETTER be someone out there to help. Dead ends lead to new beginnings. Lines from the Bible suddenly mean something.
The Bible gets promoted again. Now it becomes “revealed truth”. Suddenly you’re spending nights alone with it, squinting and puzzling. You might skip an outing with friend. Or argue with a parent. You learn enough to become excited and defensive.
Attending church reveals a community of unlikely people. Things improve in your life and joy comes at unexpected times. Electricity happens in prayer, sometime twice a month. You master the Freewill Argument and learn that lots of things are “God’s will”.
But there are strange loose ends. Times of deadness and boredom. And a lot of confusion coming from Netflix. Do I stay or do I go, you ask.
On the day I’m writing this, a leading Christian entertainer declared on Twitter that he no longer believes in God. Hawk Nelson—whoever that is. Now wait, you think, if someone that deep in the faith, a “career Christian”, so to speak, could bail out, is it a farce? Or did he miss a turn in the labyrinth of his thought life and decisions? Maybe something darker happened to him.
The perils of staying a shallow Christian become clearer. There are powers that resist and sheer cliffs on this path. You thought this was a paved highway and you had it backwards. The highway part goes to Hell.
Perhaps the Bible is actually a “blueprint”.
Then every word is intentional. Every story quirk and flourish of poetry resonates to deeper realities—ones going on around you. All the time. You were driving roads of life at high speeds and thinking of traffic signs as pop art and advertisements.
Take 1 Peter 2:24, which speaks about Jesus wounds at crucifixion: “by whose stripes ye were healed”. Past tense. The book of Hebrews says to add faith to it. That means you take it personally and declare a settled heavenly reality into your real time problem. Divine medicine treats your flu or cancer as just what it is: an attack on your body. An enemy to defeat. The least you’ll get is a road towards recovery. Visit the doctor first, but if the antibiotics or chemo don’t work, try this.
This part is very personal for me. In my 20’s I suffered an illness that lasted six years, with diagnoses ranging from SAD to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to candida and more. My life was stopped short, I couldn’t finish college. I couldn’t concentrate and I tried everything. I went through every conventional and alternative medicine, from psychiatry to kinesiology. It wasn’t until I lost some pride as a skeptic and learned faith that I got out.
That faith journey began three years into the illness and took three more to reach the knowledge and determination I needed. One thing about progress in the spirit realm: it’s a war. You discover an Armageddon fight in your soul against opposing spirits and cultural influences over mere shades of meaning in the Biblical text. The shift in my life crisis happened over the above verse from the book of Peter, and related verses. That means my huge clash concerned one word. More than that, the tense of a word.
There are nuances in scripture that by themselves alone are the fulcrum for your future. You have to get it down. God is merciful, but perseverance is a must.
The question buzzed in my brain, “Am I healed already? Or do I just wait and hope God heals me?” Once I learned that faith was an attitude you adopt before you see results (Hebrews 11:1), things started rolling. Realizing I was already healed in the Heavenly realms shifted my attitude, but I still had to use my authority on Earth to enforce it. I went to war with sensations and all the input that tried to say it was all over, I must stay put, I’d never be anything, sit down, shut up. And everything changed.
After four months.
I had to go at it like that, feeling like an idiot saying I was healed when I obviously wasn’t for four months. Then, like a sun coming up, it manifested. Knowing exactly what God said and why transforms your whole existence.
The Bible becomes a blueprint for his plan in your life. Dig up the gold within it up, go over every piece. Examine it like a diamond from every angle. Read between the lines, all the time.
When I think of how hard I had to battle to that breakthrough, it gets hard to take Hawk Nelson’s apostasy seriously. It’s like someone in the thick of battle at the Somme saying he no longer believes in bullets, and leaves his post.
Good luck with that.
Every person—Christian or not—was born into a war zone. Decide how you’ll live your life and pick you’ll you follow, on social media or in a wider context, but one thing for certain: this battle is bloody and it’s for keeps. Don’t fight it without the blueprint for victory.
T. D. Freitag 