The spiritual man is one who has experienced spiritual circumcision.
He has attained the New Testament reality of the experience of the Church in the wilderness just at the threshold of the Promised Land when the foreskins of the male members of that congregation were literally removed as a necessary condition for entering into God’s Promise. The parallel for a New Testament believer is when, through the rigorous application of the spirit of the revealed, Living Word of God, the spirit of a man is separated from the clutches of his soul, with the latter completely subsumed in the spirit which is now yoked intimately with the Spirit of God.
It is a hallmark of divine approval and signals entrance into the rest of God (Hebrews 4:10-12). The person can access the mind of God quite more easily. His spiritual senses have become very well if not fully formed; he becomes empowered with the ability to live the Kingdom life of righteousness… (Hebrews 5:13-14); and he can pass very spiritually informed judgment on virtually every issue of life (1Corinthians 2:15).
The spiritual person is one who has also experienced resurrection, not as a notion, an idea, or just as a future prospect or mere potential reserved for after physical death, but as reality in the present life he now lives in this earth (see John 11:25-26 particularly verse 26; in Acts 1:26). To become a witness of His resurrection does not refer here to being physically present when He literally rose from the dead, rather it means a personal experience of resurrection from spiritual death; Acts 4:33 – the apostles here were testifying or witnessing to Christ’s resurrection here by evidence from their own transformed lives. The resurrected life amounts to having the Kingdom of God which is the same as eternity or the eternal life come into the heart of a man while he is still living in this world (Mark 9:1; Luke 9:27).
The spiritual man is the only type of believer that is desired and approved by God in the real sense, because he is the one that can actually meet the need of God for sending Christ. He is well-equipped, tooled and enabled to truly partner with God in the fulfilment of man’s regency role of enforcing God’s divine order on earth.
The spiritual man is a clear-sighted man. He has access to divine omniscience (the mind of God) and therefore sees very well into the purposes and plans of God. He is enabled to interpret issues and events clearly in the light of God. The spiritual stream that forms the supply line from God to him is very pure, and therefore gives him the advantage of not having to contend with all the problems associated with colouring of opinions and views, and lack of clarities, or even sometimes outright deceptions that are capable of tainting anyone’s perceptions and understanding of God and His manner of operations, especially in the days in which we live.
The spiritual man sees very clearly into the mysteries of God. Paul the apostle was clearly describing the features or attributes of the spiritual man in that prayer for the Ephesian church (1:17): “…that… God… the Father may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding (be) enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of His calling, …the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and… the exceeding greatness of His power towards us who believe…”
The spiritual man is a man of very intense and deep commitments; he is the only one human who is capable of dealing with issues at the level of the heart, past mere emotions and sentiments. The natural man lacks such a capacity as everything he does only has its roots in the shallow dimensions of his head or mind. He (the natural man) does things including relationships and such other forms of commitments for reasons that are ephemeral, shallow, base, material and self-centred. Only the spiritual man can do things for deeper, eternal and selfless motives because God or eternity dwells in his heart. Whenever the temporary, material, self-preserving anchors upon which the natural man’s actions are predicated, are removed, all facades of human pretensions get stripped or exposed.
The spiritual man is the only man fully equipped like Daniel and Joseph to take on the system and engage the marketplace of the world on God’s behalf. He has the divine certification to act in the NAME of the LORD.
The spiritual man is a man of the blessing and favour of God. The blessing that the Lord promised the whole earth through Abraham was none other than that of the spiritual life (Gen. 12:3b; Gen. 22:18; Gal. 3:14). This is not just about possessing some spiritual gifts, but that a human has become the beneficiary of the power and the favour of God. It is a mark of divine approval. That God so much approves of a human as to make him the place of His holy habitation. The life of such a person has become a vessel for the active expression of the power, life and the glory of the presence of God.
The spiritual life is a higher, elevated form of life, the natural life to which the “Fall” plunged us is an ordinary, base and low-grade alternative. The latter reduced us all to a fearful, awe-stricken lot, conquered and defeated by the elements, constantly harassed, supplanted and enslaved by spirit beings which we were originally created to dominate and rule over. To go through life without accessing the spiritual life is to be shut out of a whole realm of an existing life – the real one indeed – and to be confined to a rather shallow, fake and unreal form of life. The natural life is like a vapour; one moment it is seen, the very next moment it cannot be seen anymore. To go through life naturally is like groping through life like a dreamer in spite of whatever amount of so-called material successes and accomplishments.
Genuine spirituality (rather than some affected spookiness or mere sentimentality and other forms of pretensions) has the inherent power to reverse the consequences of the Fall of man at Eden, thereby restoring the spiritual essence of the original human created by God in His own image and likeness.
One prayer that anyone who truly desires to reap the full benefit of the life of faith must constantly lift up to Heaven, is that the door of spiritual life or existence be opened to him or her.
Olushina Adisa is Associate Editor with Kingdom Times and wrote in from London, where he is based with his family.