A friend of mine from India shared with me a spiritual experience similar to one we had this year. It involved a premonition about the need to go visit his ill father in India, followed by making arrangements for his wife to go there on a separate trip. The timing worked out wonderfully, although the trip was planned many months in advance. It allowed him to spend precious time with his father before he died, and then allowed his wife to be there during the funeral in order to provide significant assistance and comfort to his mother. He felt that having these premonitions was evidence of a Supreme Being who cares for us, and I agree.
He then quoted an old sage who wrote in Sanskrit something to the effect that when we become more cunning and devious, we have a harder time hearing and responding to these promptings. And I agree.
We both recognized that while this mortal existence is filled with trouble and pain, beyond it all is a purpose and hope that is brought by a Supreme Being who cares for us and help us through this journey, if we will free ourselves from the deafening cares of the world and listen. People of many faiths have reached this conclusion – a testimony to the universal love of God and the strivings of the Spirit of God to bless our lives, if we will listen.
Thanks for the much needed reminder, Jeff.
I suppose that epitomizes the challenge is Christ’s exortation to be “wise as serpents yet harmless as doves.” To become like our Father in Heaven, we surely need to become knowledgeable. We need to understand the ways of men. We even need to become strategic or “cunning.” (After all, it’s God who is so tricky he can outfox Satan and make him play into his hands, as he did in Eden.) But the challenge is to maintain the harmlessness and the love that are more difficult as we obtain all that knowledge and wisdom.
I have always felt that when we read “the glory of God is intelligence”, that many scholars feel like this means we need to fill our minds with secular and sacred knowledge. But if we don’t gain a charitable nature as we go through our various experiences in life and learn unconditional love as the Savior did, then our “intelligence” is for naught. We have not passed the ulitmate test of life.
There is a law, likely consisting of many rules and conditions upon which all blessings are predicated.
I believe being a member of the true church is not a pre-requisite for all conditions needed to satisfy the particular law for a particular blessing.
Anonymous: My sense of “intelligence” in the scripture you quoted is rather different. I believe it has something to do with a state of existence–a spirit, or something less than a spirit. Have you heard it said that we were “intelligences” before we were “born” to heavenly parents? I think being “intellingent” or being an “intelligence” has something to do with having agency–being able to act for oneself and exercise will. But as you can see, my thinking is pretty fuzzy here, and I hesitate to give it too much definition in the face of a paucity of actual scripture on the subject.
Intelligence is not always the same as knowledge.
Knowledge is information. Intelligence is understanding the information, and the capacity to process, act upon, and react to the information.
I use the following account as “proof” of intelligence continuing beyond death:
A relative of mine was a real estate agent. She had been researching a family in her genealogy. The family she had been researching suddenly seemed to “disappear” from the records. They were there in the deeds and tax records one year, then they weren’t in following years. She didn’t know where to look for them. She was really stumped by this dead end in her research.
One day she went to an empty house she was going to show to prospective buyers to familiarize herself with it before they showed up. As she walked through the house, she sensed a spirit entity was there with her, and she heard in her mind a man’s voice. He identified himself as the man she was researching, and he explained how badly his farm was doing because of poor soil and lack of water, that he had heard that land across the river in a neighboring state was a lot better, so he moved his family there in 1865.
As soon as she could, she visited the genealogy library and looked up the records in the neighboring state for the year he had told her. Sure enough, he and his family showed up in the land records, etc. and she was able to continue researching their line.
I love this account because it shows these things:
This lady received intelligent communication from a source outside of her own self. The information that was given to her was coherent and served a specific purpose: it solved a problem she had. The identified source of this information, the spirit of the dead man, knew facts that she did not know until he told her: she did not make up the information. The source of the information was self-proving: he said he was so-and-so and the information she looked up based on his information him had to do specifically with the same man.
All this goes to show that this lady was not delusional, she was not hallucinating, and she was not fabricating her experience. To me, it supports the claim that spirits of those who die survive into “the next world”, continue to have intelligence, have memories of their former life, and sometimes are allowed to communicate with the living.
Ryan Whitaker
Vancouver, Washington
http://www.ardydub.blogspot.com