Paranormal and Revelation

Another comment today about wisdom, picking up where I left off last time.

For many years I've been fascinated by what psychologists call paranormal experiences. These are events or phenomena such as clairvoyance that are beyond the scope of scientific understanding. Most psychologists reject such ideas. They insist, as good scientists, that everything can and must be explained on the basis of experiments with our five (or six) senses. Nothing exists or can exist beyond that.

Now some psychologists come back to say that is not so. There are human experiences that exist alongside our otherwise normal ones. We non-scientists can discover these in our homes. They call them Ganzfeld Hallucinations. "Ganz Feld" is German, referring to the entire field. It's an area of psychological experimentation that is open to much controversy.

People following the described procedures report things like the following:

“In the right side of the visual field, a manikin suddenly appeared. He was all in black, had a long narrow head, fairly broad shoulders, very long arms and a relatively small trunk…. He approached me, stretching out his hands, very long, very big, like a bowl, and he stayed so for a while, and then he went back to where he came from, slowly.”

I leave you to decide the validity of such experiments. The one thing I note, however, is that we all bring a certain view of how the universe works into our science and into our conclusions. As a Christian I am confident that there are many things outside of what I can discover with my senses and rational mind, things that I can only know if the Spirit of my Creator and God reveals to me. Here's what the Apostle Paul wrote about such godly wisdom:

"We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written:

"No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him"— but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit." (1 Corinthians 2:6-11)

The Spirit has revealed God's endless love most clearly in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth, born of Mary, suffered on Calvary, dead and yet raised on the third day as God's sign that His sacrifice has brought all who trust Him forgiveness and unimaginable glories yet to come.