It's All About Who You Know

[HKHaugan]

There is an extreme difference between revelation and intuition. Revelation is external and intuition is internal. Revelation means that what has been revealed is from outside and intuition means what is deduced from within. Applied to each of us everything we learn is revealed from outside and processed within. From birth revelation takes place every next moment. Parents attempt to reveal, through how they train us, what life is all about and how to live it. Friends and enemies, schools and social encounters, jobs and projects all actively produce responses to what is daily revealed to our inquisitive nature. What we reason and conclude puts everything into a personal pattern of behavior that defines us. It is in the processing of what comes from parents, family, friends and culture that we as individuals build who and what we are in the world.

But all this is limited revelation. It is revelation on a horizontal dimension, our environment. It is a standard day-by-day expansion of learning how to adjust to where we find ourselves from moment to moment. It’s what we take for granted as part of life. But there is a whole lot more. We’ll get to that in a moment.

First, let’s take a look at intuition.

Where intuition comes in to play is when we put our personal spin on what has been revealed and we adjust it to ourselves. This is where we begin to philosophize making every human being a philosopher. We can say without hesitation that every single human being puts a spin, a personal evaluation and conclusion, on their experience. There is that inner sensing, through experience, how to maneuver the meadows and minefields of human interplay accompanied by the nagging urge to be settled within and avoid conflict without. It’s like survival training. Intuitively we know there is more than physical and social survival. Human philosophy is human beings attempting to find that ‘more’ and develop a comfortable way to reason and therefore justify what we have come to believe is the best way to navigate the shoals and depths of experience. It is based on the belief that humanity can think its way intuitively to intellectual control of its emotionality and all the unseen issues of life.

Now let’s look at revelation.

But what does it mean for us who are disciples of Jesus? Don’t we depend on revelation and intuition together? Absolutely, but whose?. There is a revelation that comes from outside the physical and social world. It is a spiritual revelation. It is this revelation that worldly philosophies can’t handle and generally tend to not only resist but actively reject because it challenges the pride of those who refuse to acknowledge that which they cannot control. It is this revelation that has been brought to us in Jesus. He has revealed both the basic problem that human beings have within and the answer that comes from without.

Listen to how Paul puts it, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ (Col.2:8).” Here he is speaking to the Jew and the Gentile, the religious legalist and the Greek philosopher. To the first he challenges the fence of tradition they have built around the Law in order to be in control. To the second he confronts their attitude of intellectual dependency which denies that humanity can be understood only from an external spiritual perspective. In both cases pride is the besetting factor and the real problem behind that which is sin.

Herein lays the crux of the matter. Sin is the real thorn in the side of humanity that needs to be exposed and dealt with. Here is where revelation trumps intuition. Sin is something that no amount of intellectual engineering or intuitive feeling can combat. It is that inherent conflict of inner frustration plaguing us from birth. It’s the battle of good and evil, right and wrong, the just and unjust, truth and falsehood, that humanity finds the most necessary to escape. Without the revelation of sin as the primary human problem, mankind is stuck in a rut of despair and endless personal confusion. Sin has corrupted man’s intuition. Our intuitive sense has been warped by sin. Sin is that self-aware sense of the need to be right at any cost, the need to be in control of what I think and feel and to place blame for my predicament on outside forces and to see self as ultimately good as opposed to bad and justify it. Sin tells me I am not responsible for anything in me that causes conflict, its parents, the environment, other people and circumstance. After all I didn’t ask to be born. But sin also knows that I am just the opposite of what I want to be and the inner conflict is there until I face its reality. Even the philosopher must face his own inability to handle the struggle within.

Revelation is the work of God bringing spiritual reality into the sin-wracked dismemberment of humanity. This revelation shows us the conflict within each heart is the source of every interpersonal, personal and international conflict. This is why God sent His Son Jesus to bear the inner personal conflict in each heart, die for what really causes that conflict, rise again to prove He conquered it and by belief in Him our inner struggle is placed in His care. When we trust Him as He appears in the His Word, Holy Scripture, He replaces our flawed intuition with the Holy Spirit, His Spirit, who triggers us to think and act spiritually like Him. This is how the world is reconciled to God through Jesus. This revelation and intuition was achieved through His Cross and released to us through His Resurrection and Ascension.

“So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness (Col.2:6-7)... Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory (Col.3:1-4).”