Everybody tries to hang on to what they’ve got; hang onto financial security, hang onto personal relationships, hang onto reputation . . .

Job said, “Naked came I into the world, naked I’m going to go out.”

What the world forgets to grasp about Christianity is that God gives the Believer a great many things in Christ—things that last forever and never diminish; in fact, they only get better—that are accessed by faith. The key is walking in the truths of God’s Word rather than by any outward circumstance or sign.

Obviously in Israel’s program, they got signs from God, and that’s what the big difference is between then and now. In Exodus 14, God said to Israel, ‘Go and stand still and SEE the salvation of God,” and when they did they saw a bunch of dead Egyptians bobbing on the banks of the Red Sea.

In the gospels, when “Doubting Thomas” reasoned, “If I can’t put my hand in Christ’s side I won’t believe,” Christ appeared to him. Thomas then hit the ground and declared, “My Lord, my God!” Jesus responded, “Blessed are they that having not seen and believe.”

*****

A verse in Hebrews 11 says Moses “endured, as seeing him who was invisible.” In Exodus 33, God told Moses, “I’ll let you see me but I’ll put you in the cleft of the rock; I’ll put my hand over you until I get past and then I’ll let you see my back parts.”

The message was, “After I’ve gone by in my judgment and wrath the only thing left is mercy and grace, and, Moses, what I want you to see is I can have mercy on whom I’ll have mercy and grace upon whom I’ll have grace.”

Moses saw who God is in Himself but there was no other witness. Israel had to take Moses’ word for what he saw and believe in it because Moses said it.

*****

“It all starts by believing what God says and then letting that be what’s real—just as real as that wall, or that desk, or the seat you’re sitting on,” says Jordan. “That’s what faith allows you to do. It gives you substance and evidence, and it becomes as real to you as anything you can see, feel or touch even though it’s invisible.”

As Paul puts it, “While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

The reason God uses words to communicate and do His work is because there’s a spirit transaction that takes place through the sharing of words, ideas and concepts.

“If God is a Spirit, you can understand why He gave you a Spirit; because essence needs a point of contact,” says Jordan. “Your spirit has intelligence; it has intellect. Just like you and I communicate with words and we know things because of the words that we communicate, we know the things of God because God has communicated them to us by words.

“People look for the Spirit of God to be working out in the physical realm, but the Spirit of God, if He’s a Spirit, He’s going to work where? In the spirit. The spirit is what gives you the capacity to communicate with each other and with God. Now, lost people are all alienated from the life of God. They can’t communicate with God, but their spirit still works; they can communicate with one another and with ‘the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience.’ ”

*****

The spirit is connected to the soul, which represents each person’s own personal identity. The soul has a bodily shape and the capacity to animate the body and use the body as a vehicle.

“Your soul gives you the ability to know yourself; to be conscious of yourself,” says Jordan. “That little voice in your head that does all that self-talk—that’s your soul talking to you. The heart is the mentality of the soul. That’s why the Bible says, ‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.’

The will is a function of the soul, just as are emotions. In Matthew 26, when Jesus is in the garden, He says, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful.”

Jordan explains, “Your emotions find their seat of life in your soul. That’s why you can control them by the way you think. They’re designed to respond to the thinking process that’s going on in your soul.

“All of this resides in a body that is made out of the same stuff that desk is made of—Carbon-14. If my soul was standing here without my body, and it reached up there, it would just go through all that (material) stuff. None of that stuff would stop it.

“Now, you saw Whoopi Goldberg and Patrick Swayze in the movie Ghost and he couldn’t pick the penny up . . . But don’t think just because you saw it in the movies and then you read something similar in the Bible . . . You see, that’s the satanic plan to make you discount the Bible and make you think it isn’t real when you read about it . . . It was in the Bible before it was in that movie.

“It’s amazing to me how much of the movie and literature stuff out there is just nothing but a reflection of Scripture, and the people doing it oftentimes know that. Guys like Steven Spielberg with Star Wars and all. If you listen to him talk about where he gets his material, he’ll tell you a lot of it comes out of religious content. Some of it is pagan religious content, but it’s religious content.

“There are, according to the people who study these things, only 33 original plots in drama, literature or the arts. Whether its Spielberg or Shakespeare or Tom Clancy, they all use variations of these 33 plots, most of which aren’t used (only about a dozen or so are regularly employed) and all of which come out of the Bible.

“The same goes for the philosophers in the Greek world that everybody goes bugs and ape about—Socrates, and Euripides, and Homogenes, and these Stoics and Epicureans. All these guys that everybody thinks are so great—and have been movers and shakers in Western culture—all plagiarized their ideas right out of God’s Word.”