There is mystery throughout the revelation of God. The earliest recorded history of God’s interaction into the physical world contains the cryptic creation of male and female, distinct in their individual personalities yet each existing only through the other. It continues with the incomprehensible gathering of all ethnic groups, genders, and statuses of life into a kingdom where there is neither Jews nor Greeks, males nor females, masters nor slaves. It concludes with the mystery of mysteries, the manifestation of the risen Christ coming into the world of men to bring order out of disorder, harmony out of disharmony, and atonement out of separation. The outworking of the life of God in man has always been mysterious to man.

The essence of the mystery lies in the fact that man is a flesh and blood creature that has been animated by the Spirit of God. Being a creature of two different natures, he is caught in a world of physics yet the essence of life is nonphysical. In other words, man always experiences life in a physical setting yet it is never the physical setting that produces the life that is being experienced.

With the fleshly mind of man given the capability to interact with intellectual thoughts, emotional feelings, and willful acts, the human experience is grounded in the knowledge of the Divine. Man can know, appreciate, and worship the God who created him. The magnificent sensory network of his body allows him to experience the glory and the power of the Divine--the heavenly realm.

It is the reality of experiencing the heavenly in the earthly that not only enables man to know the spiritual with his mind but it also gives the opportunity for the fleshly to dominate the spiritual in his mind. The same interaction of intellectual thoughts, emotional feelings, and willful acts that makes it possible to know, to appreciate, and to worship God brings with it the possibility of that intellect, emotion, and will to turn from God in his mind. The capability of knowing what the mind is experiencing automatically gives the mind the possibility to interpret what it is experiencing.

Being capable to interpret what he is experiencing enables man to not only know, appreciate, and worship God but also to misinterpret his experiences. It is this susceptibility to misinterpret that gives man the possibility to perceive that he can actually control his experiences. Desiring for control, he then moves into the illusion that he is responsible for his life. The ultimate illusion of man is the belief that he can make life happen by the power of his own thinking.

When man attempts to control life, man’s intellect (the sensing network) becomes the center of his existence. The living or the experiencing of life itself then becomes the object of his existence. Moreover, when life becomes the object of man’s existence by the use of the mind in the attempt to control life, the simplicity or the innocence of life is lost. Man has fallen and the good life is no more.

Mysteriously, life is not the object of man’s existence in which he attempts to produce life. Life is the subject, or the substance of man’s existence itself. Therefore, living in harmony with life is the path to the good life. Coming to understand the ways of life, through the revelation of Jesus Christ as life, is the secret of the rich, full completed life.