Keep in mind.... our sinful minds (interestingly enough) do not cry out for a need to KNOW something that is non-understandable, mystifying or amazing. Knowing something is different from understanding it. I know my father. His name is Nelson Mir, born in Queens, NY ca. 1955 and raised in Cuba until the age of 5. I could recite the rest of his life story, but the more time I spend with the guy, the more I realize in my deepest parts of understanding that I do not understand him. I understand a little bit. I certainly know my father. But I don't understand the ENTIRE THING, and this is the singular frustration of man's relationship with God, we know Him but we don't understand HIS FULLNESS. My question is initially this: If we cannot fully understand another man, (or as in my illustration, the closest of people to us) how can we attempt to understand God, who as the Bible says authored knowledge. That, my friends, is absurdity. And our frustrations become poignantly inflamed when God acts outside of our framework (this is usually a result of asking God to do such a thing in prayer.) Suffice to say this, if I were to say that I could perfectly understand any human around me, it would be absolutely insulting, so we cannot and must not engage those attempts with God.
Now that I've set the stage, this is what I really want to talk about. Our initial interaction with God comes in full, raw experience that satisfies the mind (the conceptual) and our hearts (the emotional). We get it; we know what we need to know and we truly know it... an abundance of information and profundity surrounds us at every turn. Our minds are alive with the life of God empowering them to understand, Him and Himself in all things. Our fear of the Lord begins our path to understanding! (Prov. 9:10)
Our emotion.. whoa.. our emotion has never been so scintillated. Our minds and hearts course with pleasure, love, joy, happiness, longing and mostly all these things come through at the same time! It is an explosion. Meeting the true and living God through faith in Christ is awesomely similar to a first kiss with someone you love... where the consummation of longing, loving, intrigue, passion, and sharing are exercised in symbolic action that is perfectly representative of your mutual feeling.
Now with all that mush said and done, I hope I've left no room for intellectualism.
Intellectualism and emotionalism are two highly active functions of the mind, but I feel it is important to know that they are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps this is the mistake we have made in our compartmentalizing western culture. Is there a marriage of the two? Do the two compliment each other or are they pitted against each other? I will say that the former example listed previously is a result of the Spirit and the latter is the flesh.
I have found that there is a place for emotionalism in my life and it is not to be discredited. As a matter of fact, the book I'm reading right now, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero argues that emotions are extraordinarily important and should not be discredited, lest we suffocate our humanity or our soul. Emotions are important, thank God we have them as they are a gift and God help us when they take us to dark places. I can't explore the deep topic of emotions now, but there is a world of truth and lies that we experience through our emotions.
The intellect is a tool, given to us by God to be more than just reactional, visceral beings. (Psalm 32:9) Emotions join together with and inform the intellect so that we can process and experience life. Now here's the problem; The various traditions of Christian faith found throughout most of the world have sided with either emotionalism that ridicules people who only operate only on a rigid method of understanding while mistakenly throwing out their soul as well, or rigid intellectualism who view the more emotional trends of faith as having discarded the very truth of God itself, looking only to experience to validate their views. But where does real faith and following Jesus fall? These two depictions of following Jesus do not do justice to what God intended our walk with His Son actually meant do they? Of course not.
Following Jesus is what it is without being confined to one of these descriptions or the other. Our mind's eventual conformity to the mind of Christ is a cooperation, and total, uncheated engagement with the fullness of our emotions and the pleasures and benefits of rational thought. We are allowed to go crazy in passion for God, even to the point of making fools out of ourselves and being subject to public ridicule. Jesus is ok with that =). We are allowed to discuss the greatest and highest being in the loftiest terms, without sacrificing our integrity or pretending to be anyone but ourselves, and Jesus is ok with that. We can sing, dance, pray in tongues, fall, cry and scream in joy, pleasure, repentance and suffering, and we can elaborate, meditate, postulate, extrapolate and explore the riches of His wonder, while knowing that He is completely beyond comprehension! And by the way, being beyond comprehension is not a bad thing, it is a great thing for this reason; When I say God is unable to be fully comprehended the operative word is fully!! This means that we have a full life, of exploring and finding out and knowing more about GOD!!! And never being bored, or watching a rerun in the Spirit, but that every day, up until and including the day we die, we will dive deeper and deeper into the heart of God, and Jesus, through the Holy Spirit. It will never end.
And when we meet Him face to face, a new pleasure arises. A great unveiling of new mysteries.
