A NONSITUATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

A NON-SITUATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Generalizations from the Book of Daniel

PART 3

By J. Michael Strawn

We are going to extend our study on the book of Daniel. Daniel certainly projects the idea of a non-situated intelligence. The relationship that the non-situated intelligence has to the earth, or to what we have been calling in this series of studies, the world situation has a lot of implication for us since this intelligence is pushed into the world situation. There are at least two ways this non-situational intelligence, which is the Lord himself, is deployed.

The first one of these is non-situational explanations. We can extend that to non-situational understandings or to non-situational meanings. And, of course, what we intend to say about that is as in the case of Daniel especially in Chapters 2, 3, 6 and other places, there was understanding that came to bear on the situation that was not derived from within he situation itself. So the thinking along those lines was not derived because of the circumstance, but because of something added to the circumstance by something from outside the system which was this non-situational intelligence or what we have come to call a pushed intelligence.

We furthermore note that there is a second reaction or response that shows up from the Lord as a direct result of this pushed intelligence in the world’s situation which is non-situational outcomes. We can also talk synonymously of non-situational power. In the case of Daniel in the lions’ den, that was a circumstance where non-situational power was demonstrated and that is why this good man was saved. In Daniel 3, when the three Hebrew young men, Azariah, Mishael and Hananiah, were thrown into the super-heated furnace, there was a non-situational meaning brought to bear on that circumstance which involved all the dangers and all the threats to their life and all the implications that would have been involved in their relationship to God. Additionally, there was a non-situational outcome which is very famous to those of us who study the bible, and that is that these men were spared this death in the super-heated furnace while the guards that threw them into the furnace were themselves killed.

So here we have a clear manifestation of something that shows up repeatedly throughout the scripture. It is a non-situated intelligence standing outside the system, pushing knowledge, pushing power into the world situation on behalf of those who operate on the basis of faith and on the basis of their relationship to the unseen God. This is a fact that is well-documented about the life of Daniel. If we go back to one of my favorite passages, in Chapter 10:12, Gabriel says of him that he is a man well-known for having set his heart and mind to know these truths and to commit himself to the non-situational intelligence and to be formulated in just this particular way.

That is why we have talked about those of us on the earth who are recipients of this non-situational intelligence as being nothing more than footprints. We are not the intelligence itself; but we are symbols of it like the figure walking across the wet sand on the beach, leaving an imprint. The imprint is somewhat passive, but is somewhat active also in the sense that it points to or symbolizes the greater entity that has passed by that way and has left its mark. So what Daniel becomes is a footprint. We see that demonstrated in Chapter 2, when he admits as much to King Nebuchadnezzar, when he states that no man could tell him the significance of his dream, the meaning of it, or the implications of it; but that there is a God in heaven who reveals. Then later in that same context, he will say, "As for me this was given to me, not because I am smarter than other men, or know more than other men inherently, but because God has pushed it on me and he wants you, O king, to know what is to come to pass." So Daniel acts in just this way as a footprint. The whole idea is that this is the exact posture that we as believers need to have in the world situation.

Now this footprint-kind of existence that we have described would stand between the two worlds. It would stand between the world situation on the one hand and the non-situated intelligence which is the Lord himself. It shares that "pushed" position because it is in the index position. Spontaneity must exist therefore between the intelligence that shows up—in the man that acts as a footprint--in non-situational explanations and in non-situational outcomes. Now this is the purpose for faith in the first place. We have come to listen to the Lord. We’ve come to be shaped by him. We have come to project the will of God, the mind of God, into the gentile cosmology, or into the world situation.

We are what we are if we are those footprints; not because of the action of time or the action of physical and natural causation. Indeed in all these circumstances that we see taking place in the book of Daniel, there was no causation plus time involved, which is part of our understanding of spontaneity. We have created a kind of formulaic response to things. That is, that we believe that physical and natural causation plus the element of time, or causation acting over a period of time will always result in development. Hence, we can formalize it and describe it as causation plus time equals development. Now on the development side, these developments could be negative as in the case of being thrown into a furnace and being consumed over a short period of time. Or there could be very positive developments such as was true of them being spared from the fire. So we are talking about a particular type of perspective on what takes place within the universe.

It’s not very difficult to see that in so many ways, human beings without the benefit of the revelation of God (and its shaping them into footprints in just the sense that we have described) would still cling very tenaciously to the belief that causation plus time equals development. That is why we would employ certain tactics that we have relative to material existence. So we would say, "well we need to get enough causation (economic causation, physical causation, natural causation, or whatever other terms would be convenient to use there) plus the element of time (things acting over time)." Now we say that because by nature we have no experience of things acting without the benefit of time over some sort of distance. It takes time for interactions between bodies to take place. It takes time for things to develop. That is what experience tells us.

Now when we deal with the question of spontaneity that is outside of human experience. We don’t feel real good about things that are considered to be spontaneous because they cannot be explained on the basis of human lived experience. This is worrisome to the human mind untutored by the non-situational intelligence. Now that is a great case for that principle in 1 Corinthians 2 where Paul, in this context, is addressing the source of his preaching. In 1 Corinthians 2:12, he says, "We have not received the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God (this is the new source), so that we may understand what God has freely given us." Now there is a world of connections right there in verse 12. Without the Spirit of God, we cannot understand what God has freely given us. There has to be an intermediary between the unseen God and man operating in the world situation. That intermediary is clearly described as the Spirit of God. He is in the index position.

Verse 13 elaborates more, "This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom." In other words, they preach what can be now freely known; but it couldn’t have been known without the intercession of the Spirit of God. So they have received, being in the world situation, this knowledge that has been pushed upon them. This is a non-situational set of truths, a non-situational set of meanings that are to be elaborated upon and expanded in the world situation. We speak these things not in words, he says, "taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught us by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit cannot accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned."

The reason one can’t appreciate the non-situational is because there is a dimension that is missing. Of course, the relationship that exists between the eternal and the temporal must be spontaneous. That is the way the Lord has always described it. He never allows us the illusion of believing that time plus causation will equal development. But yet quite to the contrary of that clear biblical teaching, we will take positions and decisions and reach conclusions and operate on tactics that are very foreign to that persuasion that the scripture is wishing to instill in us. One of the great cases of this, of course, is in the book of James 4:13 through the end of the chapter, where we have some Jewish businessmen who want to collect the product, cross some distance, and spend a year in a particular market, do business and then come back with much more wealth than they went with before. They’re accused of the sin of pride and the reason is because they believe that causation plus time equals development and that belief apparently is very antithetical to the whole concept of faith. Faith would instill in us the conceptualization that the relationship between the world that we do see and the world that we don’t is spontaneous.

That is indeed one of the ways in which our understanding of death is conceived as well.

Over in the book of 1Thessalonians, Chapter 4, when Paul was trying to comfort the Christians who had lost their loved ones in death, he says that they should comfort one another with the words he has given because there is a spontaneity that exists between the two dimensions. Our physicality does not want to agree with that. Our experience tells us that death has broken the bonds and that we are separated from one another and all of that. But in this passage, he draws a much more spontaneous relationship that exists between our loved ones who have gone on and the Lord. Of course, they are as spontaneously connected to him now in death as we are connected to him in what we like to think of as life. Although we could certainly reverse those perceptions. We are living in the world of death, and it is they who have gained the ultimate victory of life over death.

Spontaneity is the product of an intelligence. But it is not the product of a human intelligence. The only way that we would ever know about this spontaneity is if God has revealed this to us. And indeed he has accomplished that in the book of Daniel and in a lot of other places. Well, what we want to take advantage of and what we want to benefit from is this unique kind of intelligence. This runs into a kind of challenge. Because today, there are a lot of people who believe that intelligence is an emerging social property, or it is sometimes referred to as an emerging social reality. They will admit that the aggregate of this human intelligence is inexplicable by the rationalization of parts to the whole because somehow or another when you get the thing together it is much larger than the sum of its parts which we certainly could admit to. But we will have a great deal of difficulty believing that we should commit ourselves to an emerging social property.

Intelligence is always taking shape, always being structured. It is something that is always emerging. What humans thought 150 years ago is not what we think now. The social circumstances or the social reality that we had 150 years ago is in no way in agreement with what we are contemplating today in the last quarter of the 20^th century. And people would say that this is good because intelligence is constantly emerging. Things are constantly changing and it is the result of the aggregate. All of these minds working together contributing to the whole somehow or other pulling this mass together in an aggregate that is much more, much larger and grander than the sum of all of its parts. And so that is what we want to make available to the children who come into the world, who come into the society. That is what we mean by socialization, bringing them into this structure where they can be elaborated as minds in this emerging social property or this emerging social reality.

If we took that kind of a definition literally, we could go back and see a lot of cases where people thought perhaps intelligence was a social property and that therefore to violate that would be a violation of all that is reasonable and right. But we don’t think so, because of the book of Daniel and because of other statements made in the bible about the nature of the intelligence of God. We have come to recognize the fact that intelligence is not situated. It is not supposed to be situated. In fact, man is never and was never supposed to see himself as a situated intelligence. In Genesis 3, they commit themselves to become a situated intelligence and we now know the result of the terrible outcome and the ongoing agony that that failure has precipitated in human history. The Lord made it quite clear to the pair as he puts them into the garden that their minds were to be non-situated. So when they contemplated those things in the world situation they were to be contemplated from the point of view of a non-situated set of meanings and of a non-situational kind of power. Man opted for an entirely different take on intelligence and because of that he was destroyed.

Spontaneity, which involves the absence of time, and the absence of natural causation, has a great deal of implication in the 20^th century and beyond. It means that things do not develop over time. However, human wisdom is very much committed to the belief that things do develop over time. That is why we would say if you take a small amount of money and invest it at interest, you will find an increment in well being if you let that money sit. So that becomes the genius of investment because we believe that things develop over time. When we become ill and sometimes desperately ill, the idea is if you add this causation plus time, then you end up with a good development which could be remission in the case of some diseases or outright cure in the case of others. However, if causation plus time is ignored, it will result in the development of death. We believe that we should go to college and get our degrees and then work hard and over a period of time our ability to earn will increase and our ability to control our own destiny and ability to secure our well being will become much more enlarged.

So causation plus time allows for development. In fact, the wisdom of the world is built on those sets of assumption. We could go to a lot of different passages in the bible and we could divine or generalize that worldly wisdom really amounts to such things let’s say as accumulation. You can accumulate money, you can accumulate things over time because that is what we need to be doing because that is one of the functions of time. It is to help us accumulate, to help us to secure something. Most especially what we are trying to secure is our own well being.

If we depart from that kind of wisdom, if we say that time is not to be seen that way, then it looks rather foolish. Worldly wisdom, as far as I can see so far, both in the old testament and the new always is very much wedded to a recognition that things develop over time. In Deuteronomy Chapter 8, when the children of Israel were about to go in and take the land that had been promised to their forefathers, the Lord sends them this message and he warns them about the tendency to forget that God was spontaneously bringing all of this wealth to them. So he warns them assiduously about that. He wants them to understand that this is not the function of time. The function of time is not to allow for the securing of our well being. That is the purpose of God. That is the business of the Lord. The purpose of time from our point of view being believers of the word of God is that it is a field in which we come to know the Lord. It is a circumstance, a situation in which we come to know the unseen world.

Now in Deuteronomy Chapter 8 he warns them in verse 6 about observing the commands of the Lord and always walking in his ways and always revering him. He says in verse 7, "For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land (see the conquest is not a matter of causation plus time. It is a matter of spontaneity)—a land with steams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees…where there will not be scarcity and you will lack nothing." This is the gift of the Lord. In verse 10 he says, "When you have eaten and are satisfied (when this spontaneity has satiated you in other words), praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build find houses and settle down, and when you herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery." Now he begins to describe in the latter part of that context how it was God who had spontaneously supported them in the desert when they were brought to this vast and dreadful desert where there was thirst and no water and the venomous snakes and the scorpions and they were fed by manna.

Manna is certainly a symbol for the whole idea of spontaneity. There was no causation plus time involved in the presence of manna among the desert wanderers. When water would flow from the rock, there was no causation plus time. It was all spontaneous. Their well being in the desert did not develop over time. It showed up in time. Of course we have tried to make the point that this is precisely what we Christians are to be thinking. Therefore, we have to depart form the general interpretation of the word "wisdom" and the whole concept of wisdom. For us, wisdom is to use time as a space, or a place, or a context in which we come to know God. Everything else is taken care of by the Lord and is provided to us on behalf of his interest in our well being. Well that is a monumental difference, of course, between us and the world. The emerging social property as they wish to refer to it (a lot of post-modernists use that term) would not agree with that whatsoever. They believe that even "truth" is created by man. So it involves effort and expenditure. We, however, do not take that position.

Spontaneity is the key for us. Therefore, we have to come to a conclusion that things do not develop in time for us and for our well-being. And rather they are demonstrated in time. In Matthew 6, he would criticize the pagans who were busy grappling for all of these physical things that they thought they need; and the only way they thought they could get them was through causation plus time (being the ultimate progenitor of their well being). He criticized them. And he said just "pursue the will of God and all these things will be added unto you." Well that clearly leads us to the concept of the definition of spontaneity. Now, the difference between those two types of wisdom is going to be the generation of symbols. We should talk a little about that. Man is created to generate symbols. That’s just about all he ever does. He thinks. He brings meaning to bear on certain things of his experience. He generates symbols. He generates meanings. He generates words.

It turns out that there are two generators of symbols. One of those generators would be the absolute symbols that have been revealed to us. We are called to generate symbols on the basis of the revelation of God. So as in the case of Joshua and Caleb, they had been given the absolute representations about the land of Canaan and about the purpose for which Israel had been chosen and they generated symbols built on that. Taking Deuteronomy 1 seen in the context of Numbers 12, 13 and 14, they would generate symbols and say, "let us rise up immediately and go to battle against he Amorites without further contemplation or without further delay." Why? Because God has promised that he would go before him and defeat their enemies. So they are generating symbols based on a set of symbols that have been revealed to them by God. This is one generator of symbols.

There is a second generator of symbols—and that, of course, is the flesh. People regularly generate symbols on the basis of the flesh. So all of these passages that we have heretofore mentioned would yield to us other examples of how the flesh is allowed to generate symbols. In that terrible encounter at Kadesh Barnea in Deuteronomy 1, the nation of Israel generated symbols built on the flesh that amounted to faithlessness. So it must be considered that faith and the generation of symbols based on the revelation would be one and the same thing. Faithlessness and generation of symbols based on the flesh are synonymous. Our responsibility as believers would be to generate symbols, words, meanings and apply those to the material world based on absolute symbols, on absolute representations.

There is within us, of course, this strong tendency to represent things on the basis of the flesh. We want to generate symbols based on what we know or what we think we know or what we’ve experienced or what we believe based upon our own observational skills as to what would result in our ultimate well being. And we are always going to be wrong when we do that. We generate symbols regularly about health, economics and about social realities. We generate symbols about God and the world and even about the revelation of God itself. The generation of symbols is exceedingly important.

Now let’s draw a distinction between the generator of symbols and the symbols themselves. We can go to a text and pull out the symbols and in the case of the scripture we can say, "Well here children is what we believe and what we do in certain situations." And we can say, "Here learn these symbols. Accept by tradition, and by he authority of your parents, the validity of these symbols. And this is why we obey certain doctrines and why we will regard certain things as ethical and other things as unethical, certain things as right and certain things as wrong. Accept these symbols." It’s one thing to accept a set of symbols. It is quite another to develop oneself into a generator of symbols.

I believe that unless we develop as generators of symbols built on the revelation and instead of just trying to hold on to certain symbols that we see as rules, we will never be able to be what God calls us to be. Because the world will always try us particularly at those points and our appreciation of those symbols that we have been given and asked to believe may not be enough. Because we are going to find ourselves in situations where we must think, where we must represent, where we must generate symbols. We know a lot of symbols. Let’s say from 1 Samuel 17, where David faces Goliath. We know those symbols. But can we take that passage and learn to generate symbols; or can we take that passage and generalize from it about the world around us? Lots of times kids feel like they have symbols, but they don’t know how to generate symbols based on the text of the revelation. That becomes a pronounced weakness in the way we try to teach them.

We want to depart from that. There is a great illustration of this in the book of Daniel. There are cases where Daniel generates symbols based upon the absolutes that he knows about, having had those revealed to him from God. He was a Jew. He knew about the covenant. He knew about the ten commandments. He knew the law of his fathers. He was committed to follow that. So he was going to generate symbols about his life, and about his relationship to the Babylonian empire, about this job, and the bureaucracy there and what the Lord would require of him as he stood in an index position between the two worlds—the world that he could see and the world that he could not. It would have been open to him as an option, should he have desired to do so, to generate symbols based upon the flesh. He could have decided for instance in Daniel Chapter 2 that there was no sense trying to pray about this whole situation when he could get on his knees before Nebuchadnezzar and beg for mercy. Or as demonstrated in Daniel Chapter 3 when the three Hebrews are threatened by death in the fiery furnace, they could have decided to generate symbols built on the flesh instead of on absolutes. But they generated symbols based on the absolute symbols that had been revealed to them by God, and because of that they were spared.

The generation of symbols becomes fundamental. In the New Testament there is another case that is very similar. I say its similar because here we have a situation where Paul, the apostle, is inconvenienced in the province of Asia. We begin reading 2 Corinthians 1:8 and following: "We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships that we suffered in Asia (now this is his flesh describing how it felt to be persecuted and under the immense pressure that they felt at that point). We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death." So he precisely was generating symbols, not based on absolute revelation, but based on his flesh and his human experience. And his flesh said of the situation, "This is hopeless, our position here is untenable. This can only result in our death." He believed that and it became so profound in him that he says "we all despaired even of life." So they believed it all to be over and without possibility here of survival. All seemed hopeless. In verse 9, he carries this to the extreme where he felt the sentence of death. It was pronounced, it was a reality in his mind.

Now that was not the reality of the situation in the mind of God however that we discover later. But this is how he generated symbols built on the flesh about that incident. In other words, he like Daniel was in the midst of a world situation. In a world situation, he would need a pushed intelligence to intervene in his mind, to show him what he needed to think about that particular world situation in which he was involved. He would need to build generalizations on the basis of non-situational intelligence. He wants non-situational understanding and comprehension and wisdom. He wants non-situational outcomes and that is what he should have sought. But he admits, we would all have to admit, to a kind of failure here.

Now in the latter part of verse 9 it says, "But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God who raises the dead." This is a remarkable statement that Paul makes because if he is going to generate symbols on the basis of a God who raises the dead, those symbols will be of a very different and higher order than anything he would have thought otherwise. This is something that only the Lord himself can bring into our understanding and our awareness. The flesh will fail us in bringing understanding, enlightenment and power to bear on the world situation. He is quite willing to take the wrap for that.

He says in he latter part of verse 9, "But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God who raises the dead." When he says that, he means that we have to generate symbols in a non-situational way. Only God can raise the dead and the dead are raised always and uniquely within a world situation. He is talking about non-situational power and non-situational meaning being extruded into, being pushed into the world situation. And, therefore, changing the world situation. This becomes the basis for our generation of symbols. So in all of the circumstances into which we fall, or those circumstances that come to bear upon us, we have one obligation--to be faithful.

Well the question would remain, what does it mean to be faithful in the midst of the world situation? It means to generate symbols built on absolutes that have come from God. So one says, "Here I am faced with a specific temptation. I know what my responsibility is. My responsibility is not to try to manipulate the outcome. My responsibiliity is to generate symbols based on absolutes. Therefore, I must forego the ability I have to generate symbols based on the flesh. Now this circumstance in which Paul found himself here in 2 Corinthians Chapter 1, is exactly the situation that the three Hebrew young men found themselves in Daniel Chapter 3 and the same situation in which Daniel found himself in Chapter 6.

We are going to generate symbols when we face circumstances relative to economic problems, or we reflect on circumstances of a biological nature. These two areas are going to be routine experiences in life. In fact, in 1 Peter we discover that the Lord allows the sociological aspect to lean in upon the Christians, which would involve economics and biology. They’re under persecution. They have an obligation, Peter says to them. And that is to remember who they are and to generate symbols built on what God has said to them about life, about himself, about his power, about the world situation, and about their unique posture within the world situation. We have to generate symbols and that becomes the real pivot point of faith or faithlessness.

So in terms of developing the minds of children, or in terms of developing our minds as preachers of the gospel or as students of the word, it becomes fundamental that we learn how to generate symbols. I mean to generate symbols by an act of the will based on that which has been revealed to us by the Lord himself. That wisdom, that set of generated symbols is always going to be larger than and more powerful than we are told the world situation. Even though the Lord might want to allow us to die, the truth that we have spoken into the world situation is still more powerful than anything that the world itself has in it inherently. However, we know from experience and also from the text itself that the flesh never wants to consent to our desire to generate symbols based on absolutes. We say that because from what we can tell, the flesh has no consent mechanism. That is how we shall describe this circumstance. The flesh does not want to consent with the spiritual side of things. The flesh constantly wants to argue. It constantly opposes the spiritual inclination. So within us, we carry this battleground where the spiritual and the flesh are constantly in conflict, constantly one trying to overcome the other. Since the flesh will not consent, we have only one resource available to us and that is our will submitted and devoted uniquely to the Lord in a purposeful way to override it. And that is what, among other things, faith becomes.

If we go back and look at those interesting situations in the book of Daniel, we would assume by analogy since they were human and we are human that there would have been a certain amount of reservation when you are facing the hungry lions in the pit. You wouldn’t relish being torn apart. You don’t know exactly what the Lord is going to do. Perhaps Daniel was as surprised as Darius was to find that the night had passed in a very tranquil way; and that he was not consumed by the lions. But the flesh does not look forward to that kind of treatment.

Or in Daniel Chapter 3, when these young men were subjected to the super-heated furnace. No one looks forward to that sort of thing or the danger of threats. In the career of Daniel, there were many psychological times or events in his life where the psychological pressure would have been pronounced—fear of the unknown, the same things that would have affected us. But we get the impression that Daniel was a man, and these other three Jewish young men, were types who had the ability to rise above all of this. We say rise above it meaning they were going to somehow or other be open to the influence of worldly thinking because they were human beings; but they had to make a decision. That decision was whether or not to be faithful or unfaithful relative to God in their world situation, knowing that the flesh would never consent to the what the spiritual side of them would want to dictate then. So they decided to generate symbols based on absolutes and that became their renown—the source of their encouragement and their influence on us even today across these many centuries.

We are exposed to symbols on a regular basis. Now we are not only exposed to symbols, we are exposed to generators of symbols. If we go in to the medical community as an illustration, you are exposed to all sorts of symbols about biological circumstances and needs and realities a lot of which apparently involve the question of life or death. And now we enter into that situation and we find that we have statements in the scripture and we have symbols that are made to us about biological concerns by the establishment. But you also have to take into consideration that we are dealing with two entirely different generators of symbols. Now it is often thought I think that we could take the symbols themselves and sort of put them together. You could take symbols created by the world and you could take some of the symbols that we find in scripture and we could peg them together so they apparently fit. So that’s why we have often amalgamated or incorporated certain things from worldly categories into our usage in the church. For example, the case of conflict resolution, the addition of psychology into our thought processes and being appreciated within the church in general; and then there are some other things as well such as business tactics which we find it very convenient to use in the business practices of the church.

Now while one might be able, and that is questionable, to peg together different symbols from different sources, one would never be able to create a unity out of these two distinct generators of symbols. The mind that generates symbols based on the absolutes would have nothing in common with the mind as a generator of symbols built on the flesh. So that is where we need to be concentrating. When we read books or when we are exposed to the wisdom of the world, one might say "that makes a lot of sense. I think I will incorporate that little gem of wisdom into my way of thinking." We can unify so to speak, or fabricate, some sort of unity between disparate symbols one supposes. But you cannot do that with the two different generators of symbols. And that is explicitly stated in all of these passages that we have mentioned heretofore. Paul knew that you cannot amalgamate or create a unity between symbols generated from the revelation of God and symbols generated from the flesh (2 Corinthians 1:8 and following). In 1 Corinthians 2, he is quite particular in the way he dismisses that possibility of unifying the two, when he describes those who are without the Spirit. He says in 1 Corinthians 2:14, "The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God because they are foolishness to him and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned." Then he says in verse 15 that the spiritual man is very different. "He makes judgments about all things but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment."

It is not reasonable to think that we can take two entirely different generators of symbols, attach them together in some sort of way to create a supposed unity which in fact is an illusion. This becomes rather obvious in the cases that we see in the book of Daniel as well. You can’t conveniently connect or amalgamate or incorporate these two different generators of symbols. So we have this constant battle taking place within us that is not easy to overcome but it becomes the very nature of our practice of faith. And it does require us to act in a very vigorous and a very authoritative way over the flesh as a generator of symbols.

These two things are constantly at war and we have to see them in precisely that way. Of course, here you have another great recursive manifestation. Just as the eternal world must subordinate the temporal or just as a totality must subordinate the individual particle, so the generator of symbols built on the spiritual must subordinate the generator of symbols that is built on the flesh. So it is a manifestation again of the interrelationship between the two dimensions that exist. And fortunately for us, the Lord has allowed us to see that relationship quite clearly and cleanly deployed in the lives of the individuals that are mentioned in the book of Daniel and some of these other passages to which we have alluded. It makes a vast difference.

So from that point on, it becomes very obvious to us that this persistent monitoring of our wills and monitoring of the world situation becomes essential. Daniel had every opportunity to forego his commitment to spontaneity. And incidentally, spontaneity is a way of understanding the way in which the universe is governed by God. He had the opportunity to operate on the basis of his flesh, to be socially and culturally elaborated and to create and generate symbols built on that elaboration. Yet he defied adaptation to the world situation and he committed himself to something else. And that is why he is a great example to all of us. He becomes a man that points the way to much higher calling for man and it reflects too upon the nature of our intelligence.

What we want to become and what we want to hold onto, what we want to cherish among other things is this posture that we sustain relative to God. We are the footprints. We sit there and in one sense one might call us passive, but we certainly are active in symbolizing the unseen world that has passed through that can be the only possible source of explanation as to why we are what we are, why we think what we think, and why we do what we do. This becomes for us the totality of our salvation. Minds that have been pulled out of the world situation who relate to it on an entirely different basis.

And it is the grace of God that has allowed us this wonderful privilege; and it has to be understood as a privilege. It is not something that should be diminished nor underestimated nor under-dimensioned in our understanding. It becomes the reshaping and the reformulating of our souls, the reformulating of our minds. We are destined to generate symbols in the world situation. Now the only way we can possibly do that is to generate symbols in this posture of being footprints. We know that God is pushing intelligence upon us from outside the system and we know that this is going to show up in our lives in two precise ways. Maybe three if you want to include the idea of being a footprint. That is the general nature of our lives, as we have talked about.

But also we are going to push equally, as the Lord does, non-situational comprehension, non-situational understanding, and non-situational power into the world situation. That is why we pray. And in Daniel Chapter 2, that is why he and his three Hebrew friends joined together in prayer before the throne of God. They were going to be part of this pushed relationship to the world. This is very much in concert with the concept of non-commutative movement—things that start within the unseen eternal world and move toward, are distributed in, deployed in and demonstrated in the world situation. We become part of that movement. That is another reason that the cosmology in which we dwell is much different than the cosmology that grips and controls and has grasped the minds of men who are separate and apart of this pushed intelligence.

To summarize this point somewhat briefly, we know that from the very onset of man on the earth, starting in Genesis and going all the way to the book of revelation that there are terrible consequences associated with operating on a situatedness. If we believe as churches, as individuals, as families, as particular personalities that intelligence is and should be forever situated, then that will become the pretext and all of the incentive necessary for us to root into the world, to root into its understanding of intelligence. Now from the Lord’s point of view, of course, if we root into that brand of intelligence, to that definition of rationality, we have become fools. (1 Corinthians 2). The scripture is pronounced in its condemnation of worldly wisdom. This is the root of our problem.

This is the root of the problems in the church. We as preachers often talk about problems in the church, difficulties, directions that are improper, and inclinations that remain fixed and unchangeable. We talk about certain immutabilities. That it is very difficult to get people and circumstances and certain contexts to change. We ask ourselves where is the problem? Sometimes we offer different appraisals or different explanations of what the problem essentially is—lehargy, discouragement, absorption by the world, materialism, lack of energy, past experiences that have been disastrous and somewhat draining and scarring, faulty leadership, lousy preaching, need for different style of worship, or whatever other suggestions have been offered. But I am of the conviction that this all boils down to one precise problem, and that is Christians trying to operate on a situated intelligence. Does that not explain why certain things happen within our fellowship, why certain sins are persistent, whether those sins are of the scandalous variety that we hear so much about or whether or not they are more subliminal or whether they are more low-key sins of appraisal for instance, sins that are associated with the way we look at the world? You can see that in a lot of different places in the scripture where people were pronounced guilty because of the appraisal that they had made of certain circumstances like at Kadesh Barnea or in James Chapter 4 or in other places.

If we could root out situated thinking that would change immediately and appreciably the world situation for us and the way in which we appraise the world situation. It would affect tremendous changes I think in this wide ranging and highly explosive and highly attractive problem that we call depression. It is an intelligence situated within the world situation. There are men and women and boys and girls in this world that are personifications of that situatedness. You can see that there is no commonality, there is no point of intersection except the preaching of the gospel between a situated intelligence and a non-situated intelligence.

All through the bible, situated intelligence has led to disaster to ruin and to destruction and to death. Now we have an opportunity to destroy that particular blot on the human race. We gain so much by turning to Christ. In 2 Corinthians, Chapter 2 and 3, when Paul is describing the veil and when he comes to the point of expresssing the real point of change, he says that when anyone turns to Christ the veil is removed. This changes things as far as we are concerned. It overturns the weaknesses that often affect us in our limitations so it is our opportunity to break out in more than one way. This would become our favored understanding of what it means to be a leader. What is leadership within the body of Christ. Here we are talking about people who generate symbols on the basis of absolutes. They do that purposefully and they know that the flesh will never consent to that. And they know that they are talking to a congregation of people whose fleshly selves do not want to consent to this spiritual generation of symbols. Yet they stand there and they are persistent.

It is always going to be a constant battle. They can’t be anything other than that because of the nature of man and the nature of our fallenness and our given inclinations. But that is what we are called to do. And that is what preachers are called to do—to generate symbols based on the absolutes, not built on the flesh or inflected by anything within the range of the flesh. We can’t create unities between the flesh and the revelation of God. No such unity can exist. It is always of subordination and so the Lord is trying to push his intelligence into us.

We are going to have to find ourselves within the world situation being willing to be pushed upon and that means that by right of extension of the rationality of that, that we are going to be willing to subordinate self to that. And subordination of self, the surrender of self is one of the most difficult things that we have to do and yet this becomes the key. This is the primary coinage that the Lord is asking us to bring to this deal of salvation. It changes us and it changes the world and it changes our circumstances. It elevates the mind. This is part of the quest for redemption that we are all on. So redemption isn’t just a matter of going to heaven when we die, although no one should or could underestimate that. That is what this is all about.

But while we are here, we are footprints of the one that does redeem. And while we are here that redemption that he has wrought shows up in the way in which we think. The way in which we act. The way in which we generate symbols. So it shows up in the way children learn to generate symbols about themselves about the world, about the God that they cannot see. It shows up in the way a husband generates symbols about his wife, or about he world in general, or about his job, or about his responsibilities. It starts there and it never ends. So the redemption that he has brought is a manifest circumstance. Our redemption is not the subject of any kind of situated understanding. It is purely non-situational. It is not the result of a situated outcome. It is a purely non-situated outcome because of the grace of God. Therefore, we have everything to gain. We have absolutely nothing to lose. So we bring to a close at least this segment to begin some time later, we will start with issues regarding another aspect of the book of Daniel.