Faith Becomes Knowledge by Means of Communication with God's Spirit World
The phrase "God's Spirit World" will naturally sound odd, unusual, or "off" to most Christians, be they Catholic or Protestant. The terms "kingdom of heaven," "kingdom of God," and "heaven" are the usual ones with which Christians are most familiar. Indeed, they should be; they are the very terms in the Greek New Testament translated into our many English versions (Greek phrases are basileia tou oranou, "kingdom of heaven," basileia to theou, "kingdom of God," and ouranos, "heaven").
Nevertheless, the phrase "God's Spirit World" or "the Spirit World of God" is not a novel expression. We see that God is [a] Spirit (John 4:24) and that "a holy spirit" and "spirits of truth" arrive from heaven or from God (1 Peter 1:12, 1 John 4:1-6), and that such spirits endorse an allegiance to Christ (Who is a spirit in heaven) in their acclamation of him as "Lord" (1 Corinthians 12:3) and as the One who came in the flesh for a specific task (1 John 4:3). By deduction, we can say that these "spirits" (for which the Greek term is pneumata) reside in the kingdom of heaven. Hence, the spirit world of God would describe heaven, at least, as a place in which "spirits" reside. St. Paul alludes to this in 1 Corinthians 15:50 when he writes, "I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God," i.e., only disincarnate spirits inhabit the kingdom of God, a kingdom to which we also are heir. The term "spirits" is typically used of disincarnate spirits in the New Testament, be they evil spirits or holy spirits. Human beings are also "spirits," but spirits in the flesh or incarnate, and thus are sometimes called in biblical and extra-biblical literature "spirits of the flesh."
Once these bits of information are pondered, we can feel a little more comfortable with the expression "the spirit world of God" without fearing that it is somehow non-biblical or non-Christian. If human beings are heirs to heaven by the Victory wrought by Christ on the Cross, then we don't get there in our present physical bodies. Christ's resurrection appearances have been hopelessly confused with his physical appearances that occurred during his ministry. If we are to "follow Christ" into heaven, then it will be in a body that Paul calls "a spirit body" (pneumatikon soma), or better, "the body of a spirit," a body that he contrasts with the physical body he calls psuchikon soma, "an ensouled body," or better "the body of a living physical creature" that is perishable unlike the imperishable body of a spirit. The term psuchikon, literally, "soulish," referred to a vitality that maintained the vigor of the physical or carne (flesh) body that is buried in the ground once deceased.
References to the "spirit world" can include any number of spirits, both good and evil, those still wandering the Earth, those in the lowest hells, and those in the highest heavens, from God to Satan, and all in between (animals, plants, insects, creepy-crawly things, minerals, and human beings of all types). For a Christian to communicate with the spirit world is a matter of making contact with spirits who 1) arrive from heaven, 2) assert the existence of a God Who is over all and, more specifically, 3) swear their allegiance to Christ as the Messiah/Savior whose victory over Satan (Lucifer) is an accomplished fact for ALL, believers and unbelievers alike.
For many, the term "spirit world" evokes images of Halloween, haunted houses, spooks, ghosts, scariness, night-time hags, cemeteries late at night in a dense fog that moves among the graves, and nightmares. It is true that opening contact with the spirit world should be approached with grave caution and, more so, with the maturity of a Christian in the fullest sense of that word: the setting of a Christian prayer meeting is one in which the participants harbor no ill thoughts, words, or deeds toward others, and that they try to adopt as positive of an attitude as possible, e.g., patience, understanding, and forgiveness. These qualities are much easier to sit here and type than they are to practice. We have all fallen short of these virtues. The point is not to beat ourselves up over it, but to confess our past failures and determine to do better from here on out, with daily "check-ins" to God, e.g., thanking Him, asking for His guidance and counsel. This should be the underpinning of any Christian prayer meeting whose participants are following the Greber book. Spirit communication is not a parlor game, a "fun" thing to try out to see "what happens," and to test claims that spirits exist.
Spirit communication should have only ONE goal: to draw the participants closer to God and all that that closeness requires of the participant's change of attitude and living a more virtuous life, e.g., avoiding loose language (swears, curses, gossip), avoiding ill thinking toward others, and learning how to keep disappoint from turning into hate. After all, spirit communication that seeks contact with spirits sent from God is communication that seeks GOD by asking Him to share one of his messengers with us, if we, indeed, merit such contact. All the verses in the Bible about "purity" before the presence of "the Lord" or "God" fit squarely into the context of a Christian who seeks contact with spirits during a prayer meeting. The sanctuary of God is the very table at which the participants sit during the meeting. Consider the verses in the Bible that speak of being pure when approaching God's temple or sanctuary, and translate all of that to the Christian prayer meeting and you will get some idea of the mind-set and attitude that one must harbor while attempting to communicate with the spirit world of God. This is serious business. If you want to put your Christian behavior and character to the test, this will do it like none other. Notice how much of a change certain persons made once such contact had taken place. Paul's encounter with the "risen Christ," i.e., a mighty holy spirit being, and Peter's visionary experiences and encounters with spirits after Jesus ascended into heaven show us the lives of two one-time suspicious, dubious, and miserable people whose lives switched to those who preached love and virtue first, all as a result of these encounters and contacts with spirits from God. This should give one an idea of the extent to which spirit communication includes a person's character and the kind of attitude required when approaching such communication. It is a solemn occasion marked by hope and faith, but not by expectation. The primary concern is the prayer meeting itself. IF the participants ask for holy spirits to manifest, and IF spirits manifest perceptibly so, e.g., through a speaking medium, then that is in addition to the purpose of the meeting, i.e., a weekly get-together of like-minded Christians who want to pray for others, the world, and to draw ever so closer to the Almighty.
The word "faith" is often defined as "wishful thinking," especially as it pertains to faith in God. Many thoughtful people will argue that wishful thinking in X does not make X real, and I would agree that there is some merit in such a critique of "wishful thinking." I may wishfully think that the Earth is a flat disc, but that doesn't make it so. Or I may wishfully think that I can fly like Superman but that does not make it so. Since God is not directly or immediately available to human beings as God really is, this has given many the impression that whatever the word "God" refers to is no more real than what the word "Superman" refers to. Like Superman, God is an idea in someone's head, imagination, or thoughts. Certainly, we can and do have ideas about what God is like. For example, the great early-medieval philosopher and bishop of Canterbury, Anselm, defined the word "God" as "the being than which nothing greater can be conceived." This certainly is an idea which includes other ideas such as "perfection" and the omni-titles for God (omni is Latin for "all"), e.g., omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing), omnipresent (all places at once), and omnibenevolent (all loving). How do these ideas make God any more real and existent than any other idea we might have? Might we even overcome Anselm's definition by querying, but might there be a being "even Greater than the being than which nothing greater can be conceived"? Such are the shortcomings of definitions and mere ideas when trying to make a case for the reality of the thing to which those ideas refer, so argue many philosophers.
God's existence as He really is defies our sensory perception and possibly even our cognitive ability. To presume, however, that God does not exist because He is not directly or immediately available to human beings as He really is is a presumption that needs critiquing. Animate and inanimate objects in the external world are often cues for us as to what exists and what does not exist. If X is available to one or more of our sense organs, then that weighs in X's favor as a reliably known and real object that can be observed by anybody. Are there things in nature whose existence is not directly or immediately known or available to our five senses? There are many objective, natural realities that occur within our physical space and yet, they defy all of our sense organs; but we would not deny that they exist because we have developed technology to detect their existence for us, e.g., observing the existence of atoms, subatomic particles, radio waves (and others on the electromagnetic spectrum), germs, bacteria, genes, and the evaporation of water. If we judged their reality on the basis of whether we can know them through our perceptions, then they never existed. But they did; in 20/20 hindsight, we can say that they were always there; it wasn't until our ability to perceive them made it possible for us to determine and demonstrate their reality to ourselves. God seems to be like that as well. But this claim suggests that I am ready to explain what kind of technology may reveal His existence, if the analogy to knowing natural things with technology is going to translate over to how we may know God's existence. Let's turn there now.
Faith in a thought does not make that thought really independent of our thinking it, no matter how strongly we feel about its existence, or how tightly we shut our eyes in thinking about it. We can be pretty sure that, speaking philosophically, if the God of the Bible really exists beyond our ideas of what that God is like, then a measure of hope in God's existence is required of us, in the same way that we hope in the arrival of someone whom we've never met. This is not wishful thinking. A wish is something that we want and is based on a desire to have something. Hope is based on an expectation, sometimes grounded in past experiences that lead us to believe that they will occur likewise in the future. My hope in what happens tomorrow is often based on what I experienced of that hope in the past. Hope is more confident than wishful thinking.
When the early Christians were said to have "faith" in God, it was often grounded in personal experiences that had led them to this faith in God in the first place. Such a faith was rooted in the hope that God would continue to bless them by His grace by granting them communication with His spirit world, an explicit (although little understood and often mistranslated) example for which is 1 Corinthians 12-14. Faith was not simply a matter of walking into a group of people listening to someone assert that they must believe in God and have faith in God's existence because this book says so, or else suffer the consequences. Faith was the hope of speaking with God as you might speak to your friend (as Moses was described in his relationship with God). Today, we can read for ourselves from a book just what those experiences included: contact with God's spirits from heaven. The Bible is filled with encounters with God's spirit world as well as spirits antagonistic to God, i.e., evil spirits and demons, who played a major role in the early-Christian warnings: Do not be deceived; Even if an angel from heaven tells you differently than what I've told you, don't listen to it; Satan masquerades as an angel of light; the false prophet is a wolf in sheep's clothing; God's spirit world warns of the doctrines of demons that will, in the future, sow dissent and false doctrines; discern the spirits; test the spirits; test all things and hold on to what is good.
This was no sort of "wishful-thinking" faith. This was a faith built on personal experiences that changed the lives of the percipients in obvious ways, just as the feeling one gets after having come through major storm while on the Interstate Highway; once you hit the daylight and all of the clouds have disappeared and all you see is blue sky, you feel a more secure, safe, and confident drive ahead of you. This was the effect of communication with God's spirit world on the earliest Christians, for through their spirit communication, they "had the mind of Christ" (1 Corinthians 2:13-16), which served as their counsel, their guide through life, their teacher, and their adviser. Faith of this kind is certainly not "blind," as Christian faith is sometimes describe as "a blind leap in the dark;" just believe because that is all there is. But that is NOT all that there is. There is God. God who is waiting on you to communicate with His holy spirits from on High just as He blessed earlier generations and guided (literally) their lives (note the Hebrews following the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night in the desert. Paul identified that Spirit as Christ Himself, 1 Corinthians 10:4). The biblical record provides pithy examples of what early Christians did when they came together to seek the counsel of Christ from one of his spirits called "a holy spirit." Other non-canonical early Christian texts do likewise, e.g. Didache 11 and the Shepherd of Hermas, Mandate 11. We are not without a good selection of texts that attest directly to spirit communication via speaking-trance mediums (called "prophets" in these texts) through which a holy spirit spoke in the first-person to those who identified as "Christian."
But, unfortunately, none of these texts serve as a guide, as a map for showing us today how to communicate with spirits. What is needed? What, indeed, is a spirit in the first place? How can we tell when one is present? As far as speaking-trance mediums are concerned, what about other possibilities besides "a spirit is speaking" that might explain the medium's speech? Is it simply a good acting job, i.e., is it faked? Is it a psychosis of some sort like what used to be known as multiple-personality disorder? Modern medicine knows of hallucinations, psychoses, and other like psychiatric phenomena that are endogenous, i.e., they originate within the person; but it knows nothing of spirits. The book by Johannes Greber, Communication with the Spirit World of God, serves as a bridge from the early Christian world of personal experiences with spirits to our modern era whose generations have not fared well with spirit communication for several reasons. For one, long ago, spirit communication was put to rest and substituted by the canonization of written matter by the Roman Catholic Church that became "the Bible" during the fourth and fifth centuries, after Rome had adopted Christianity as its state religion. Secondly, with the rise of the scientific revolution, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the European Enlightenment, cognitive autonomy became the new "Light of the World." Reason trumped religion. The supernatural was superstitious. A new-knowledge explosion occurred with beneficial effects, e.g., the rise of hospitals, universities, libraries, science, and a critical attitude that was constantly correcting itself to secure the most certain and reliable knowledge attainable. But often, this new criticism had deleterious effects on "beliefs in the supernatural." Whereas such beliefs were "quarantined" in the "superstitious" churches and those who practiced "witchcraft," the critical philosophers scoffed at such things as "metaphysical jabberwocky" or "nonsense about reality." Where's the evidence for such claims? Show me spirits, devils, demons, and God. From whence do they arrive, and why?
This is where the Greber book fits securely into the field of the modern era with that era's analytical approach to the world in order to ferret out error and replace it with understanding and knowledge. More than any other book, the Greber book provides a guide to communicating with God's spirit world with explanations and even pontifications on Scripture that explain their real meaning, thereby defacing the errors that have, like layer after layer of cheap paint, accrued on its surface over the centuries. Greber's instructions are testable by anyone willing to carry them out for themselves. Greber devotes a section of his book to manifestations of spirits among the "highly educated," those with degrees in the humanities, the physical sciences, medicine, and law, and how they critiqued such manifestations that occurred before their very eyes in open daylight in controlled settings. You will also find that such communication, at least with God's spirits, requires the character and attitude that I've describe above; that of the earliest Christians who preached love, patience, and forgiveness. These are the hallmarks of successful spirit communication, i.e., making contact with one of God's spirits.
Faith becomes knowledge by means of communication with God's Spirit World. Hope in God's existence, which includes praying to God without any expectation that God will ever answer, means that you have placed, first and foremost, your confidence in God's existence by the fact that YOU will begin talking to Him. Much more than believing is required of us. We have to act in our minds and hearts; this may even include discovering error in our long-held religious beliefs, which, for many, will be a tough test, indeed. But then, a quick scan of today's Christian landscape will show any inquisitive and honest seeker that something isn't quite right here. What is it? Can it be made right again? The Greber book is the Answer Book to these (and many other) questions.
Among the early Christians, faith became knowledge by means of instruction from a spirit of God. A case in point is Ephesians 4:23. The Greek text reads: ἀνανεοῦσθαι δὲ τῷ πνεύματι τοῦ νοὸς ὑμῶν, literally, "be renewed, then, by the spirit of knowledge that belongs to you." The phrase τῷ πνεύματι τοῦ νοὸς ὑμῶν is sometimes thought to mean "the attitude of your mind" as in the NIV (New International Version). But the term "spirit" in the New Testament never means attitude, temper, or disposition. The import of the verse during the first-century would have been "be renewed by means of the spirit of knowledge belonging to you," i.e., through your spirit communication, gain knowledge that will renew you. Such knowledge was not the product of a human being, for it could only come from a spirit, as Paul notes, "This is what we speak, not in words taught to us by human wisdom but in words taught by a spirit, who explains things of the spirit with words taught us by the spirit" (1 Corinthians 2:13).
Likewise, for Christians today, faith can become knowledge in the same way that it did for the early Christians. But it will require "a renewal" of today's Christian mind that is heavily beset with theological beliefs that actually prevent Christians from communicating with spirits. For one thing, Christians today are indoctrinated into the "cult of the Book," be they Catholic or Protestant. The Bible is "the Word" that God has sent to His erring children who are parched with thirst and starving for true knowledge from on High. Their thirst is quenched and their hunger satiated by "the word," i.e., by the Bible. Faith becomes knowledge by reading the Bible . . . or so we are all told. Certainly, the Bible records for us many instances in which God's Word admonishes, instructs, chastises, comforts, advises, and guides human beings of the past. But never do we read in the Bible that God has "sent the Bible" to people of the past. God typically sends "a spirit" or a prophet through whom spirits manifest. God's communications were mediated in a variety of ways in the past, through word of mouth (prophets, spirits), signs, visions, and on occasion by means of written matter that originated in a prophet's ability to communicate directly with God's spirit world that communicated the words to be transcribed (Jeremiah 36). God's Voice was always available and was never to be substituted by a text handed down from generation to generation, for texts are unreliable (Jeremiah 8:8) and are in constant need of correct explanation. Who is going to provide that explanation? A human being? Or a spirit from on High? (recall 1 Cor 2:13).