For if what is passing away was glorious, what remains is much more glorious.
Therefore, since we have such hope,
we use great boldness of speech
—  unlike Moses, who put a veil over his face
so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the end of what was passing away.  

But their minds were blinded.
For until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament,
because the veil is taken away in Christ.  

But even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil lies on their heart.  
Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

But we all, with unveiled face,
beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord,
are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory,
just as by the Spirit of the Lord.

Take a look at yourself in a mirror. Raise your right hand. Note that the person in the mirror is raising his left hand! Strange. Your head is still there, vertically, on the image of the person in the mirror. You are not upside down at least. (The term “mirror image” is very meaningful, or ought to be.) 

Consider the eye: it has a lens up front but the image on the retina in the back of the eye is inverted. The retina digitizes and “scans” the image and sends the data to a brain data processing center where “you” see the outside world right side up, in 3D and color. The inventors of television simply copied God’s design. We are good at imitating nature! Most of us, but not all, perceive the world right-side up. But not quite everyone.

The brain is amazing beyond all understanding! But the mind is not the same thing. Your present physical body exists only in Four Dimensions. You are not your body. Your body is just the house you are presently living in! According to the Bible we (Man) are the true temple where God ultimately dwells. While he was on Mt. Sinai, Moses was shown the temple in heaven from which exact copies were to made in the Jewish Tabernacle, and the two temples in Jerusalem which followed. The physical body is described in the Bible as an earthen vessel, a house for soul and spirit. To Christians, “...we have this treasure (Christ) in earthen vessels so that the excellency of the power might be of God and not of us.” (2 Corinthians 4:7) Our bodies are mortal, running on 4-dimensional time (length, width, height plus time). Because of sin our bodies age, get tired, become sick, and eventually we all “die.” Of course our bodies, though fallen, are fearfully and wonderfully made, equipped with amazing files and systems.

The mortality of the mortal body does not mean that our present bodies are not redeemable. They are, and will be, redeemed and made new when Christ returns. The redemption of our bodies and the resurrection of the dead are important teachings in the Bible. This discussion on Man as tripartite is naive and incomplete. For the sake of my model, our mortal bodies are containers for our Soul and Spirit which are not physical places, or tangible entities. These invisible dimensions number at least ten, according to Chuck Missler. The Bible locates the invisible, unseen realities in “the heavenly places,” (Romans 6:7-12). 

"For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, [Greek: skenos, a tent] is destroyed, we have [present tense] a building [Greek: oikos, a permanent building] from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord. Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to Him."

The Soul in Larkin’s diagram (above) interfaces with the Body and the external world on the one hand and the Spirit on the inside. The boundary between Soul and Spirit is generally thought as somewhat diffuse. The Soul is usually modeled as “Mind, Emotions, and Will.” The Spirit of a person is thought to dwell in the “Heart” and “Mind” but these entities cannot be localized in our physical brain or our heart muscle. The role of our emotions, our self-image, our personal history our genetic and cultural values, and such, are probably recorded in data files resident in the body and the soul. From the Bible we can be assured that God has a long memory and does not forget anything we say or do.

“How shall we escape if we neglect such great salvation...” (Hebrews 2:3). |

He does promise us, “For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” (Hebrews 8:12)

“Soulish” or Carnal Christians are said to have excluded Jesus Christ from the control room of the Spirit, allowing Him to influence them only from the Soul. Many professing Christians have not yet surrendered to Jesus Christ as Lord of their lives. This last step makes all the difference in the world! If Jesus is not my Lord then my final authority is some other god, not Jesus. In terms of man as tripartite, my spirit attempts to live my life from the soul rather than from the innermost chamber, the Holy of holies of my body. My surrender to the Lordship of Christ, allows God the Holy Spirit to rule over all areas of my life. God has my permission to sanctify me. This is step two in His work of making me holy (whole). The three stages of Christian life are often categorized as Justification, Sanctification and Glorification. (Romans 8:30) Those persons who do not yet know Jesus in a personal way are described as dead in trespasses and sins. But giving Jesus permission to take residence in our spirit changes everything!

“...and you God made alive when you were dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air [Satan], the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among whom we all once lived...” (Ephesians 2:1-10)

The benefit of the tripartite model of Man is that I can check daily the status of the Most Holy Place-- where my spirit lives in union with the Spirit of the Living God. (1 Corinthians 6:17)  One final word, the Bible speaks of “man” in the generic sense. Most of the time this term applies to both men and women. Ray Stedman taught that men and women were identical in spirit but different in soul and body. God addresses all of us as living spirits. He speaks to us Spirit to spirit.

My present body is a masterpiece of design, but it leaves somethings to be desired. It hurts, aches, groans. When injured it hurts a lot! My body must be carefully maintained and fed. It’s trapped in time. I’ll get less than a hundred years of service in this body before it’s time for an upgrade. My resilient old body is getting old and seems nowadays to be shutting down.

My body fights valiantly against diseases, tolerating much abuse, and still works overtime to repair itself when diseased or damaged. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is nevertheless still at work. Repair, healing, rebounding systems are working less well every day.

Not only that but my body is porous spiritually, regarding many deleterious outside influences—such as lust, greed, covetousness, envy and selfishness. 

Portals, gates, doors and entrances are everywhere in our world. Gardens have gates, so do some cities. Most houses have front doors, and back doors, and doors to every interior room to every cabinet and closet. Bank vaults and gold depositories have massive doors with several locks and a timer.

Many gates in life are unseen--the unseen realm is full of portals, and gates into other dimensions. There are gates leading into secret gardens and hidden chambers. The secret gardens are for the intimates of God, and are not to be seen with telescopes or space radars.

No amount of detective work, self effort, trying harder, or searching will get us admitted to heaven.

Preoccupation with the dark side is not advisable. There is a dark side of life of course, it's "dark" because the entire creation has been damaged, and is temporarily in the hands of an evil angel. His evil angels are at work behind the scenes. See The Beast in the Basement for a few clues.

Access to the genuine hidden splendors is only through Jesus. The main gate in life is Jesus. He Himself said so.

“Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. “Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.

“I [Jesus] am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” (John 10:9-10)

Time Warps: We are so accustomed to thinking only in terms of linear (historical) time, we are stretched when we stop to contemplate eternity. A summary of the nature of Time and Eternity is a good place to gain an overview of time. The subjective quality of Time is important to us as well. History itself, while seeming to flow from past, to present, to future, is marked by kairos and chronos, times and seasons.

“I am the Lord, and there is no other;
There is no God besides Me.
I will gird you, though you have not known Me,
That they may know from the rising of the sun to its setting
That there is none besides Me.

I am the Lord, and there is no other;
I form the light and create darkness,
I make peace and create calamity;
I, the Lord, do all these things.’
“Rain down, you heavens, from above,
And let the skies pour down righteousness;
Let the earth open, let them bring forth salvation,
And let righteousness spring up together.

I, the Lord, have created it.

“Woe to him who strives with his Maker!
Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth!
Shall the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’
Or shall your handiwork say, ‘He has no hands’?
Woe to him who says to his father, ‘What are you begetting?’
Or to the woman, ‘What have you brought forth?’ ”
Thus says the Lord,
The Holy One of Israel, and his Maker:
“Ask Me of things to come concerning My sons;
And concerning the work of My hands, you command Me.
I have made the earth,
And created man on it.
I—My hands—stretched out the heavens,
And all their host I have commanded...”
(Isaiah 45:5-13)

“Eternity” is not the absence of time, a kind of suspended animation of being “frozen” forever. Only God enjoys unending time where past, present, and future are all panoramic “now.”

“For thus says the High and Lofty One
Who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:
‘I dwell in the high and holy place,
With him who has a contrite and humble spirit,
To revive the spirit of the humble,
And to revive the heart of the contrite ones.’” (Isaiah 57:15) 

Man at the Center of the Universe

It appears the man has been Providentially placed midway between the very small and the very large. This suggests there is an Absolute Geocentricity

Notes from Chuck Missler: The nucleus of a hydrogen atom is on the order of 10^-13 cm., and that the radius of its electron's orbit is on the order of 10^-8 cm. ---a difference of 100,000 times. (If we were to make a model of that, making the nucleus the size of a pinhead, the electron would be a football field away!) Looking at this volumetrically, for every part of "matter," there are 1015  parts of "non-matter"! (That's about the same ratio of one minute to a billion years!) The atoms which make up the molecules of all physical things  are more empty than filled! So if matter is made up of so much "empty space," it is any wonder that neutrinos routinely pass through our entire world unnoticed? And then it isn't so difficult for us to imagine how our Lord Jesus Christ, in His resurrection body, was able to pass through walls - even though He was manifestly tangible, not just a "spirit": "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have." (Luke 24:39)

Our Finite Universe: One of the most significant discoveries of 20th century science has been the fact that our universe is not infinite, but finite. It had a beginning. That's what has led to the many conjectures making up the "Big Bang" models. We are asked to accept the explanation that "first there was nothing, and then it exploded"

From thermodynamics we know that heat flows from warm bodies toward colder bodies. If the universe was infinitely old, it would be at a uniform temperature; it isn't. It is still cooling. It had a beginning. And it will have an end. But it is in the microcosm that we find the most disturbing discoveries. You would think that if we take any length, we could cut it in half, and then take a remainder and cut it in half, etc. At least theoretically, we assume this process could go on forever. However, we now discover that when we get down to 10-33 cm., it loses its "locality." We now understand that all matter, energy, and even time are made up of "quanta": indivisible units. (That's why they call this arena of study "quantum physics.") The "Planck length" is 10-33 cm.; the "Planck time," 10-43 sec. So the astonishing discovery is that we exist within a finite boundary between the macrocosm of astronomy and the microcosm of quantum physics...There are some scholars that suspect that the original Creation was fractured as a result of the curse in Genesis 3, and that the four dimensions presently available to us which we call the "physical world" (three physical dimensions, plus time) are only a subset of a more comprehensive reality, the "spiritual" world...

So the astonishing discovery is that we exist within a finite boundary between the macrocosm of astronomy and the microcosm of quantum physics. In fact, we are in a digital simulation. The eminent atheist Paul Davies has admitted that "it seems that the entire universe may be nothing more than a thought in the mind of God." It's entirely possible we live in a Holographic Universe!

The Boundaries of Our “Reality”: The radius of the observable universe, based on secular astronomy, is estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years and its diameter about 28.5 gigaparsecs (93 billion light-years, or 8.8×1026 metres or 2.89×1027 feet).

Moving toward the region of “largeness” (which we will designate as the “Macrocosm”), we plunge into the realm of astronomy and astrophysics. Here we discover that one of the most profound conclusions of 20th century science is that the universe is finite. (It may be expanding, but it is not infinite.) And we know it had a beginning...a 10-Dimensional Metacosm.

Both the astrophysicists and the quantum physicists now tell us that we apparently live in a hyperspace of more than four dimensions—ten is a current estimate. (It was Albert Einstein’s insight that time is a fourth physical dimension which led to the now fabled “General Theory of Relativity” that created such a climax for 20th century science. It is interesting that the Apostle Paul had already listed these four dimensions in Ephesians 3:18.)

Of the ostensible ten dimensions we now know exist, only four are directly perceptible by our current technologies. The remaining six are “curled” (to use the nomenclature of metric tensors) in less than 10-33 cm. (smaller than the wavelength of light) and thus are not directly discernible by current methodologies. It is also interesting that the Hebrew sage known as Nachmonides, writing in the 13th century, concluded from his study of the Book of Genesis that the universe has ten dimensions, but only four of them are “knowable” by man...

It would seem that the domain of the “Metacosm”—which includes the elusive six dimensions—is the realm of the trans-dimensional phenomena such as angels, demons, and, perhaps, UFOs and other paranormal phenomena. 

Summary: Our observable universe appears to be about 10²⁶ meters in diameter. Man appears to be in the middle--between the macrocosm and the microcosm. The smallest possible length, the Planck length, is 1.616 x 10^-35 meters. Staggering though these numbers are, the unseen realm (off limits to science, but knowable through revelation) is far grander. But this is only what is observable! The physical world, with only four dimensions, is apparently embedded in a more solid, unseen spiritual world of perhaps ten dimensions.

Related Articles

The Vacuum: Much ado About Nothing

What Holds the Universe Together? | Is Empty Space Empty? | The Other Side of the Vacuum | When the Universe Became Fuzzy 

The Greatest Gift 1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, (agape) I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 2 And though I have the  gift  of  prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith,  so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 And  though I bestow all my goods to feed the  poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. 4 Love suffers long and is  kind; love  does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely,  does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but  rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never fails. But whether there  are prophecies, they will fail; whether there  are tongues, they will cease; whether there  is knowledge, it will vanish away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part. 10 But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.  12 For  now we see in a mirror, (esoptron) dimly, (ainigma) [enigmatically] but then  face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. 13 And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13)

1 Corinthians 13 is the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It is authored by Paul the Apostle and Sosthenes in Ephesus. This chapter covers the subject of love. In the original Greek, the word ἀγάπη,  is used throughout the chapter. This is translated into English as "charity" in the King James version; but the word "love" is preferred by most other translations, both earlier and more recent. (Wuipedia)

Other Mirrors

Narcissus	The Fun House Mirror	The Human Mind

You may remember the question the Queen asks her mirror in the Walt Disney movie "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), "Magic mirror on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?"The image at the top of this article depicts Snow White inquiring of her "magic" mirror.

Alice in Wonderland is also "too good to be true." Both books and their companion movies are fiction of course, the products of human imagination. But surely both authors were drawing on things that really exist, enigmatically, in the spiritual realm, which Chuck Missler and others have shown in the greater part of the created universe. We live in only four dimensions but probably ten exist.

And then there is the Wizard of Oz a 1939 American musical fantasy film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Often seen as one of the greatest films of all time, it is the most commercially successful adaptation of L. Frank Baum's 1900 children's fantasy novel.

The Face of God

"The Quick and the Dead" is an English phrase originating in William Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament (1526), "I testifie therfore before god and before the lorde Iesu Christ which shall iudge quicke and deed at his aperynge in his kyngdom" [2 Timothy 4:1], and used by Thomas Cranmer in his translation of the Nicene Creed and Apostles' Creed for the first Book of Common Prayer (1540). In the following century the idiom was referenced both by Shakespeare's Hamlet (1603) and the King James Bible (1611). 

Etymology The use of the word quick in this context is an archaic one, specifically meaning living or alive; therefore, this idiom refers to 'the living and the dead.' The meaning of "quick" in this way is still retained in various common phrases, such as the "quick" of the fingernails, and in the idiom quickening, as the moment in pregnancy when fetal movements are first felt.) Another common phrase, "cut to the quick," literally means cut through the dead, unfeeling layers of the skin to the living, sensitive tissues below. Quicksilver, an old name for the liquid metal mercury, refers to the way droplets of mercury run around and quiver as if alive. It is derived from the Proto-Germanic *kwikwaz, which in turn was from a variant of the Proto-Indo-European form *gwih3wos – "lively, alive", from the root *gweih3 – "(to) live" (from which also comes the Latin vivere and later the Italian and Spanish viva, and whose root is retained in the English words revive and survive). The English meaning of "quick" in later centuries shifted to "fast," "rapid," "moving, or able to move, with speed." Specifically it warns that those who sin, both the quick and the dead, will be judged by Jesus Christ. In other words, it implies that God is able to act on the sins of a person whether that person is alive (quick) or has passed into the afterlife (dead).

Not to be confused with The Quickening, a fictional concept related to the immortal characters of the Highlander franchise, first introduced in the 1986 movie Highlander. Originally, the Quickening referred to the energy immortals are said to have been born with that makes them invincible to death unless beheaded. The true quickening is initiated by God and not innate in man.

But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others  who have no hope. 

For  if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him  those who sleep in Jesus.

For this we say to you  by the word of the Lord, that  we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. 

For  the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with  the trumpet of God. 

And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them  in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus  we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18)

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