The reason I found it impossible to understand anything in the Bible when I was fallen away is because of one simple fact: I did not really believe in God. Once I had re-admitted that God was real, I still did not really believe in spirits.

This blocks all understanding of what Jesus is up to, in nearly every interaction that he has. It’s not surprising people get nothing out of the Bible today, since our Present Bias considers spirits to be the mere superstitions of uneducated fools. Our long march through the Enlightenment left our souls behind, and now we have to turn the bus around to go back and retrieve the other half of our selves.

Notice that whenever Jesus heals someone, he cures by removing something and/or making something whole. He often drives out a spirit. And spirits are everywhere in the Gospel. They seem to not only rule the nations, but they overtake people. A general observation of mental health in today’s world suggests that little has changed since the time of Jesus.

These healings happen without full explanation, but there is clearly something spiritual at work, something supernatural. Let’s run down the list:

Jesus drives out a spirit in Capernaum, he drives spirits into a herd of pigs, he heals a demon-possessed child, he heals a boy with an “unclean” spirit. That’s just for starters. He re-infuses the spirit into dead people, re-animating them. He does this to Lazarus, Jairus’ daughter, and a widow’s son; garden-variety miracles of resurrection for Jesus, not the Resurrection that Jesus does to himself that conquers death.

Next, consider the numerous healings of blindness and deafness. There are seven of these alone. Plus, he heals deformities, skin diseases, and even paralysis. Then there are the mystery illnesses that, like Peter’s mother-in-law who has a fever, the chronically ill woman in the crowd, the many healings at Gennesaret, the dropsy cure on the Sabbath, and the healing of the official’s son in Galilee. None of these medical cures require a scalpel or a prescription. He even re-attaches an ear in a split second without any plastic surgeon in sight (or proof of insurance).

Without understanding that Jesus came to a spirit-filled world, how can you possibly understand or relate to anything in the Bible? I don’t think you can, because the awareness of God, spirits, angels, and demons is fundamental. In our disenchanted scientific model, we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, we live in the boringest of all possible worlds. No wonder every libertine becomes so dull as they age and end up looking botoxically ridiculous in their luxury cars.

Our scientific obsession has sliced our ability to understand scripture by shifting our thoughts into a pancake-flat rationalism, into “nature” alone, ripped clean away from the spiritual life. We’ve lost a whole dimension of understanding by cancelling our souls and God. The funny thing is that cancel culture cannot cancel what is true, and God and souls are real. We can hear them knocking on the culture now, quite loudly, while we put our fingers in our ears and try to talk over it.

Oddly, in our collective transition from beings with body and soul into just a body and mind, we have become less and less connected to nature. This may be the greatest irony of all: in our obsession with nature as the answer to all things, we have moved further and further from the woods. We believe nature is the only thing that is real, but in our actual lives we mostly experience nature on TV, not outdoors. And if we do finally get outdoors, we make sure to bring plenty of hand sanitizer in order to quickly makes ourselves clean again. You can’t make this stuff up. I think the ancient Israelite cleanliness rituals have nothing on today’s materialist germophobes. Covid protocols doubled the fear for those already afflicted. The bright side of Covid is that people started to realize that nature must be experienced, not merely narrated by David Attenborough. The exodus from cities and throngs of people cramming into National Parks attest to the fact that a change in mood about those “flyover states” and rural living is happening. There is a transition happening as the candle of the Enlightenment has begun to flare out, particularly as its pursuit of “truth” through pure materialism and liberalism has led us directly into postmodernism, the poster-child of relativism and antithesis of truth.

Let’s briefly revisit the pre-Enlightenment era, known as the the Dark Ages.

First, you need an Enlightenment propaganda decoder ring. It’s pretty simple:

Christendom = Dark = Evil.

Modernity = Light = Good.

The name alone, Enlightenment, broadcasts the propaganda as much as “woke” implies that the pre-woke world was “sleep.” We have the same game being played out again and again. Marx tried to do a takedown of the bourgeoisie, with his villain as Christianity and the class system. In the Enlightenment, the enemy was the same: Christendom. In the latest manifestation of Marxism, guess who is the enemy? Christianity. The long-term Nazi plan was to stamp out Christianity. Is anyone yawning yet? We can keep going if needed, all the way back to Julian the Apostate to Marcus Aurelius to Nero. The common enemy of worldly power is Christianity, always. And guess who remains after all of these ideologies flame out? Jesus. I’ve heard people say, “We are finally getting out from Christianity and the patriarchy.” Today men, and white men in particular, are the enemy. It’s hard to tell these true believers that, no, Christianity is not dying. Jesus is the ruler of this world, the presidents and prime ministers are just renters.

The misapplication of the doctrine of original sin happens ad nauseam, as the underdog and the oppressor fable plays out. This is why we cannot get to the Kingdom of God, because the whispers of the evil one keeps this loop of pride happening.

If we consider the era of the Enlightenment, which is now being replaced, we can track the language of “Dark Ages” rather easily, all the way back to Petrarch in the 1300s, but the label really took off with the French Revolution. See, people were not free until they rejected God. Here’s another clue for your decoder ring. Freedom = Rejection of God. That’s how the story goes. Ignorance and error only comes with obedience to God, or so we’re told, and given that we want to taste all the flowers of life, we are easily sold.

But that story is always a lie. It’s the wrong kind of freedom. People find this out in their own falls and redemption just as nations do. Repeatedly. Israel itself found this out the hard way, repeatedly, until it finally was kicked out of the promised land entirely for 1900 years. Choosing the freedom of the self versus the freedom of obedience to God takes you down very different paths. This is the story of the decline of Christian values in the west. Taking the easier path is the lesson of Lot going to live in Sodom instead of taking the less arable land that Abraham chose. In our current state, we constantly choose the easier path, and have done so with massive encouragement from writers and media, from the Renaissance era right up to the iPhone today. The perceived gains in efficiency and leisure come with a cost. It’s been long observed by writers like Neil Postman that we are Amusing Ourselves to Death. But not only does entertainment take our eye off the road of life, it breaks our connection to nature entirely, to the point that people become disconnected from even the sources of food that we eat.

During the “Dark Ages,” we lived in far greater connection with nature. When we had no radios or phones, when we shivered near wood stoves, when we lived near animals, near the woods, near pastures, we had a far better idea of “spirits” than we do today. I suspect it was far easier to talk about spirits when you could hear the blizzard whipping at night outside the hut, or even the castle, than it is today where we watch TV in our Snuggie in front of the gas fireplace amid the humming white noise of forced air furnace heat and walled within airtight spray-in insulation and drywall. No, they did not have hot tubs or cold beer or vibrators, but they had something much greater, and that was a spiritual sense of life.

The many advances that came through engineering and science proclaimed that unending progress in technology would bring freedom. Now, I don’t want to experience a Minnesota winter without a forced-air furnace if I don’t have to, but a furnace does not bring salvation, and faced with the choice of losing God or losing my furnace, I would choose to remain with God, and ideally, I pray, avoid living in the eternal furnace.

My point is that people were far more in touch with nature and its awesome power, and likewise were more connected to the world of ghosts. We don’t experience either now, as we lean over Chromebooks and live out the myth of Narcissus, staring into the mirror of a screen. Unless the storm breaks into our lives somehow, we don’t get to recognize our weakness and need for something greater than ourselves. And God still does find a way to invade our lives, it just takes longer than it did in the “Dark Ages.” God still has a way of breaking in to our world, even with all of our engineered comfort. A storm can strike even while you lay on the couch and the sun is shining outside. Jesus climbs into our boat, invading us with Grace. How you react to it will be the climactic moment of your life. Never coercive, God lets us choose, and we do. One way or another, we say yes or no to God, whether we think we have or not.

Many people today say, “Nature is my church,” and I know why. Those who spend time in the woods sense something out there, something awesome. You don’t need a sequoia tree to appreciate the awesomeness of nature. A sapling will do. An acorn or a pine cone will do. You can spend time in amazement looking at a blade of grass if you hold it close enough.

My point is that we do not experience nature reading papers in the journal Nature. Knowing how nature works is not an experience of nature. We experience the awe of nature by participating in nature, being out in nature. Being able to summon from memory the Latin names of plants is not experiencing nature, it is bottling nature for our consumption. A child jumping in a pile of leaves understands nature far better than a naturalist collecting beetles in jars. There is more nature experienced in slapping a single mosquito around a campfire than reading an entire book on microbiology in a library.

This is exactly how the prayer life works as well. It’s how speaking a foreign language works, or playing a musical instrument. You don’t experience things from books, you experience things by participating. I have a book about the science of swimming, but I don’t take it with me swimming.

The reason people feel churchy in nature is because they are no longer watching Planet Earth on the discovery channel, they are discovering earth and creation itself. When we disconnect from cities, books, screens, traffic, noise, ego-dramas, TV shows, and every other pornish eye candy we have invented, something incredible happens. We become more whole. When we become whole we become more spiritual, because we are both body and soul, and whenever we deny the soul we becomes less human. We become only half of the image and likeness of God when we downplay the soul.

Whenever I am on a hiking trail and come across someone blasting music on his smart phone, I say to myself, sarcastically, “You know what this walk in the woods is missing? Top 40 music. Thank you, Justin Beiber. You’ve made it complete.” The silence of the woods - the bird songs and the babbling streams - recalibrates the soul to the tune of God. Bieber does not do that. By no coincidence, fairy tales mostly occur in the woods, since that is where spirits are felt. Being in nature re-enchants us, giving us a sense of the spiritual.

We feel whole in the woods, and thereby a sense of holiness. Here’s a hint: these two words are related.

The reason the woods doesn’t need Justin Bieber is because it is already complete by itself. What people find in the woods is creation, and like God when he finished making it, we all can see: “It is good.” Even if we come across death in the woods, of plants or insects or animals, we can see the circle of life without the need for Elton John to sing about it. Like the woods, we feel more whole because a spiritual presence can be felt, and it can be stifled and ruined by simply pulling out your iPhone to take a selfie. Gadgets and phones in the woods is the guaranteed way to lose the wholeness, because they have all the temptations of the city, the world, and the nations. All the falls of man are present in the phone, so that every time you place a screen before your nose, you are less whole. This is because the self gets in the way of the soul. The mind is meant to connect body and soul, but the mind becomes the self, and even the word “Selfie” gives away the essence of the problem.

We can even sense that our bodies are good in nature. I don’t think a hiker looking at a grove of trees is likely to think, “I need to lose weight” or “I should inject botox into my face this week.” But if they are taking selfies, holding up the mirror to their face, those ideas leap to the forefront of the mind. Or maybe I’m wrong. Carrying a mirror of our thoughts everywhere we go doesn’t give us connectedness, it reduces our wholeness.

In the woods, the wholeness seeps in, the joy of something profoundly close touches you in the brush of a fern, while the sense of something higher and unreachable calls out to your soul. This is the paradox of the transcendent (farness) and the immanent (nearness) nature of God. The reason nature feels spiritual is because God made it, and he made you. Of course it feels spiritual. In the woods, you are closer to home than ever. When out among creation, you are reminded of your own creation.

The spirits identified by the ancients are still in the woods. They are still everywhere but we ignore them, walled in by the sound and light produced by artificial gadgets. Distraction is the best angle the devil has to make us forget not only God, but to make us forget the devil, too. He is counting on us doing that, and every time your reach for a device, he is rubbing his hands in lieu of taking your soul on the last day.

Through our obedience to science we have decided angels and devils are too childish to accept. Those ideas were for the primitive minds of people before the year 1500. Those ideas are for the fearful, we think. Surely, we are more sophisticated. Our sophistication is our paper shield against all superstition. Hence the need for cartoon Tinkerbells, Caspars, and red devils. It assures us that there is nothing to fear.

But there is something to fear, and we all know it, and it’s called death. The whole reason for the walls we build is to push that fear aside, down the line, away from our present. Our society reviles death to the point that open casket funerals are nearly a thing of the past. No one wants to see a body. A neat cremation is preferred - it’s cleaner - much like our dinosaur chicken nuggets that bear no resemblance to the once-living chicken.

This is the irony of our alleged sophistication. It isolates us from the reality of life and death. We openly mock those whose lives still occupy the spaces of nature. The hillbilly with his trout, the hunter that we call savage, and the farmer who delivers piglets all have a far closer relationship to nature than the billions who live in cities. We mock what we fear.

Having had a chance to work on farms, I have noticed that those who live among palpable nature, with daily chores that involve blood and manure, who see life and death as daily occurrences, have an understanding of things that books can never provide. This is why I turn the volume down whenever someone from Silicon Valley offers instructions for living. I have gained more in five minutes watching a calf being born, delivered by a farmer with an eighth grade education, than I have ever gained from one hundred hours of human resource training videos on how I should think. The birth of a calf, let alone a human being, is watching a sacred miracle of life bursting forth. Watching an HR training video is a mandatory brain-death march at the bayonet of my paycheck.

The spiritual flatness we have allowed into our lives is stunningly obvious to an increasing number of people, but the pleasure of making money lures and keeps us in this trap. I was nudged, even coached into the office life, despite the movements of my heart telling me from my very first hour in a cubicle: “This is a birdcage. Escape now!” The language of Babel kept me there. After all, I speak Babel. “God helps those who help themselves.” “Get rich or die trying.”

This wall against the possibility of spirits is built and shored up with mockery as mortar. We’ve forgotten that spirits can pass through walls. Disney is freezing spirits in time every time they portray another fairy tale. By bringing fairies to the screen, fairies becomes less believable. Science has decided what is reasonable to believe and Disney has killed our imagination. Disney is in the business of turning imagination into a science, even calling their engineers, “Imagineers.” They are quantifying and qualifying the intangible. Cinderella was once a fairy tale for each of us to imagine, and now she is cast into a single image, in her blue dress, as if her image was hammered onto a stone tablet in Orlando. Science and Disney have denied the spirits by reducing them to engineered cartoons. In the former we downplay it, and in the latter we play it up as quaint fantasy.

So I’ve taken a huge detour into the woods here, but now let’s bring it back to the desert, to Jesus and that third temptation.

Jesus has three temptations in the desert, and in Genesis there are three falls: Adam, Cain, and Babel. (Again, I’m skipping the Nephilim story in chapter 6 of Genesis. There is a fall there as well, but I’ll stick with Adam, Cain, and Babel, or this series will never end).

In all three falls, spirits are involved. In all three temptations of Christ, spirits are involved. The falls all occur due to our failure to accept God. In all three falls, humility before God is lacking. Pride reigns. Pride cometh before the fall.

The whole Bible is about mastering yourself by tamping down pride. To keep from being deceived, we have to ignore the questioning whisper that suggests to you that God is lying, that he is not real. To keep sin from pouncing on you, like Cain, we have to mash our pride into a slurry and send it down the disposal. To keep from trying to manipulate God, we must offer him gratitude and praise, not sacrifices for a transaction.

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