The Bible never assumes that our faculties are limited to our supposed “five senses.”
The Bible assumes that we are able to discern the essential nature of God from creation, and are therefore “without excuse.”
We all have God-given faculties to see the invisible world. We all have a built in microscope. Some of us don’t know its there. Some of us don’t know how to use it and many of us don’t know how to use it to consistently discern the reality of the spiritual dimension around us. (I may fall in this category.)
There is a big difference between rational and rationalism… between empirical and empiricalism. One says that reality can be substantially understood or measured, the later says that IF it cannot be understood or measured, THEN it doesn’t exist.
To be “tangible” means that it can be felt.
So if I can consistently feel or sense the spiritual realm, then it is tangible and no less empirical than anything else. It was a rational, measurable (empirical) process that led Heisenburg to conclude that the Universe was not ultimately measurable.
Even with a real microscope, I cannot train a student to find a TB bacillus every time on a given pathology slide. Sometimes even the lab expert misses what they should have found. And it will always be this way, yet that doesn’t make microscopic lab work somehow “mystical”, only somewhat uncertain.
This week I want the Lord to help me use this faculty more consistently.
Allan Robbins
© March 1999