Spirits and Other Stuff

Every story takes place somewhere. Or, to put it another way, no story takes place nowhere, because every story has a setting. The story of Scripture is no exception. Part of what it means to have a converted imagination is that we imagine ourselves to be living in the setting - the kind of world - that Scripture depicts. As depicted in Scripture, reality is both material and spiritual. Both of these terms mean what they mean within a story. In the story of Scripture, those terms do not mean what they mean when they are used by those shaped by the materialist story of everything. At the beginning of the Scriptural story there is nothing except God—a loving, holy, infinitely wise spiritual being who has no beginning and no end. The beginning begins when God begins to create, an act of forming the heavens and the earth and then filling both with creatures both visible and invisible. Among his visible creatures are humans, embodied souls—an everlasting unity of material flesh and immaterial spirit.