holistic knowledge

It surprises me that lots of people are terrified of multi-sensory worship experiences. (sorry, did I just use the word experience? We’re even afraid to engage the spirit and so prefer the intellect. We prefer to learn rather than to know. We can’t trust our senses, our emotions, our feelings. It seems, at times, that even our own motto at work, “to know Him and to make Him known,” would be more appropriately stated, “to learn about Him and to teach others about Him.” When God uses the word know he is talking about the kind of knowledge that Adam had of Eve when children resulted. He is not referring to Adam’s knowledge that Eve likes tulips, drinks cream in her coffee, and enjoys warm bubble baths with soothing adagios played by string ensembles.
We’re too easily confused. Ironic that the bible is so chock-full of multi-sensory worship, the smell of a burning sacrifice, or smoke rising as prayers. Sensory metaphors are used to implant the understanding into the whole person. Taste and see that the Lord is good. The teaching of God is like honey on my lips. You can feel the effects of the wind, but you can’t see where it comes from or where it goes…”
In our fear of trusting anything but our intellect to approach God, we miss out on knowing Him as we could. We actually fall short of loving Him with our heart, soul and strength – our emotions, spirit and bodies.
God has even asked us to read the bible in a multi-sensory way. We are asked to connect with God’s jealousy and pain in His people’s wayward hearts, by using marriage and romantic metaphors. Our responses to these metaphors allow us to identify with God on some tiny level by calling upon our emotional, even physical responses.
Ezekiel, lay on his side with a pile of cow manure in front of his nose, staring at a model of Jerusalem for a VERY long period of time. It’s as if God is saying, “Get the picture? Now do you understand what I experience?” In the revelation, John describes what he saw, heard, smelled, and yes, that he had a complete emotional breakdown and wept uncontrollably when the search in all of heaven and earth for one to open the scroll seemed to produce no result. Isaiah describes the sounds in the temple, thunder, fluttering wings, smell of smoke; and he even has his lips burned by a hot coal from the altar. Jesus didn’t say, “I am the living water” while standing at a lectern speaking to sleepy parishioners, he was standing beside a river where a priest was wading with a pitcher and pouring out water. He was teaching an object lesson.
We have allowed ourselves to use language that refers to a more holistic God experience, but we have narrowed or co-opted their meanings. Though Jesus spoke of the Spirit as something that could be felt but not defined or understood, we don’t trust things that we feel and therefore try to understand Spirit intellectually. He said, “that which is flesh is flesh, but that which is Spirit is spirit.” In other words, “go ahead and try to explain the natural, but you don’t stand a chance with the Spirit.” The Spirit can only be understood with the spirit, a Jesus Himself said, can only be felt. I fear, that as a result, we don’t trust the Spirit. Too often, I feel that sola scriptura stifles our ability to hear and feel the Spirit.
In our frustration, we’ve changed the meaning of spiritual to refer to religious subject matter, morality, behavior, and theology – all things that can be outlined, codified, bulleted, and measured.
The problem with the spiritual is that it is too easily confused with the emotional. Neither seems as trustworthy as the intellect. But to know someone is very different from learning about him. We are told to memorize and learn and meditate on scripture. No doubt this approach will cause ownership and even knowledge of God. But Jesus also told us that there is more that He will later reveal to us through the Spirit. Sorry, but to acquire this revelation, one is going to have to deal with feelings and a greater amount of faith and discernment than is required of an umbrella trust in the validity of the written scripture. It is one thing to say, “God said it, and I believe it,” it is quite another to feel that your relationship with God is strong enough that you say, “though it was spoken inside me, I recognize that as the voice of God, and I believe it.”
Perhaps we will have to trust in the midst of confusion and access the spiritual through the emotional. Go ahead and check it out against the written revelation, but don’t close your heart to a living, breathing, speaking relationship in favor of an intellectual knowledge of someone who never speaks to you.
Taste and see that the Lord is good. Smell the fragrance of Christ on His people. Feel the Spirit as it blows through the recesses of your soul. Hear the gentle, quiet whisper in a world of a earthquakes and fire.