“When He had been baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened to Him…” (Mat 3:16, NKJ).
Throughout Scripture, baptism in water is followed by baptsim with the Holy Spirit, just like what happened with Jesus in the verse above. And a wonderful thing occurs: the heavens open. In this sense one could say that the spiritual realm, which is usually unseen, begins to be visible. That is why Jesus said to Nicodemus in John 3:3: “… unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God”. Before you can enter the kingdom of God, you must first see it with your spiritual eyes.
This is also why Paul prays in Eph 1:18 for “the eyes of your understanding [to be] enlightened”. To be able to see in the spiritual realm means, firstly, that you must understand. The manner in which you look at things after your rebirth makes you a spiritual person because, unlike the natural man, you now consider all things from a spiritual perspective. “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” (1 Cor 2:14).
But how does one discern things spiritually? You no longer see the world and that which happens to you and around you as mere coincidence. You consider the path that you are walking on as a very specific implementation of His will for your life. You interpret events in the light of the fact that the whole world is under the control of Satan (1 John 5:19), but that Prov 21:1 is the guideline by which you walk in carrying out your everyday life: “The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, like the rivers of water; He turns it wherever He wishes.”
Jude 1:10 explains that there are believers who understand “whatever they know naturally” and as a result they see their demise! A spiritual person must judge all things (1 Cor 2:15), otherwise he will be destroyed. Rebirth makes it possible for you to begin to see things spiritually (= understand), but this must be practised. Just as a newborn baby only sees partially and then progresses in its sight as it grows, so too is it in the spiritual realm.
Become like Balaam who, in Num 24:3b-4, proclaimed over himself: “… the utterance of the man whose eyes are opened, the utterance of him who hears the words of God, who sees the vision of the Almighty, who falls down, with eyes wide open”!
- Sela: Think and pray about how you judged things yesterday as spiritual man.
- Read: Gen 29; Ps 29; Jude 1
- Memorise: Jude 1:20
