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What the Bible says about Understanding Spiritual Things
(From Forerunner Commentary)

Ecclesiastes 3:9-11

A beautiful flower blooms, but it is only beautiful for a little while, not always. Even though things are beautiful—and in an overall sense, he means life is beautiful—it is perplexing because we cannot figure out what God is doing. We have a deep desire to understand the beginning from the end. Everyone likes to know how things are going to work out! Everybody would like to know a little bit about what lies ahead in the future for him. But we cannot know, so life perplexes us.

Maybe we want insight into or a sense of something that transcends our immediate situation. But we are left without really knowing all we would wish to know about the future as it relates to the present and what we are experiencing. This has a beautiful purpose in it; God designed it so. He has not told us everything. Why?

It forces His children to live by faith: "The just shall live by faith." Those who trust God will be cognizant of the fact that they cannot control everything and that they must rely, not in their wisdom, abilities, intelligence, power, or money, but in Somebody who is really in control of these things.

John W. Ritenbaugh
Ecclesiastes and the Feast of Tabernacles (Part 2)

Isaiah 28:9-13

This is very similar to Jesus' explanation of parables. God says He scatters understanding on any given subject throughout the Bible, and our job is to put it all together and see the amazing truth that results. Therefore, parables cannot be interpreted alone; they rely on the revelation of the rest of Scripture.

Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Parables and Prophecy

Matthew 13:9-17

Christ did not speak in parables to make the meaning clear to just any reader! From the very beginning, God has supervised the writing of the Bible so that it cannot be understood without outside help. Even prophets and righteous men of old did not understand, nor did the multitudes who heard the parables of Christ. According to Romans 11, the meaning is veiled from most of mankind until the day God offers them salvation. They are relegated to unbelief until a later time (i.e. the Millennium or Great White Throne Judgment), lest they rebel and must be destroyed.

Staff
Biblical Symbolism

John 6:44-45

No man - by scholarship, human reason, or intelligence - can comprehend the whole truth of God apart from the Holy Spirit. Only by the intervention of the Spirit are we called to understand it. God, by divine revelation through the help of the Spirit, opens our minds to the "mysteries" of the truth, allowing us to discern what is truly vital to our salvation.

Martin G. Collins
The Holy Spirit

John 6:44

God has set up a system to call, convert, and educate a people for Himself. They are a minority, very few in number. They are not mighty, noble, and learned, but the weak of the world. God calls them and gives them His Spirit and teachers to help them understand. Of all people on earth, only they have a chance to understand the Bible.

Staff
Biblical Symbolism

John 6:44

God foreknew us and determined to call us before He ever made His summons known to us. By doing so, He was making a prognosis. We are in this elite group, the called, only because the great God of heaven and earth specifically and personally summoned us by forcibly bringing the good news to our attention so we would be motivated to choose to respond freely to it.

He then led us to repentance, to a personal understanding of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and to an acceptance of it. Then He gave us His Holy Spirit to enable us to obey the obligations of the New Covenant. It is in this combination of factors, plus a few more, that we can begin to understand the possibilities of human life. We see in Christ the pattern of what we ought to be, and the motivation to be in His image begins to arise in us. But this occurs only because God has summoned us to be in this elite group, the firstfruits, to run for this awesome goal.

John W. Ritenbaugh
The Elements of Motivation (Part Five): Who We Are

1 Corinthians 2:10-12

We see three things here:

1. There is a spirit in man that enables him to understand physical things.

2. God reveals to man through His Spirit, which enables man to penetrate the deep, spiritual things of God.

3. We have received the Spirit that is from God, and there is a spirit of this world.

Here, Paul shows at least three different spirits: the spirit in man, the Spirit of God, and the spirit of this world.

John W. Ritenbaugh
Satan (Part 3)


 




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