Unseen Things – Foundations of a Worldview

Unseen Things
Foundations of a Worldview

Deuteronomy 6:5

“You shall love the LORD with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.”

All worldviews are rooted in unseen realities, things we cannot see, or cannot see yet. Such unseen things include ideas about the greatest good, expressions of hope, statements of vision, mission, goals, and so forth. None of these is presently visible. They exist only as projections of the thinking and aspirations of those who hold to them. They are unseen except in our mind’s eye or our heart’s desires.

Which things—mind and heart—are also unseen, though few doubt their reality.

The difference between the worldview of Scripture and all other worldviews is that the unseen realities in which the Biblical worldview is rooted are real now. They come before and give shape to the thinking and desires of those who articulate visions, goals, and aspirations according to the worldview revealed in Scripture, beginning in the Law of God.

The motive force in any worldview is our vision of unseen things. And when those unseen things are real, that is, they exist in a real unseen place entirely independent of our imaginations, they have real power to shape the lives of those who engage them.

The Biblical worldview grows out of the worldview kernel deposited in God’s Law. It does not surprise us that, in God’s Law, the unseen Lord holds out His unseen promises first of all to the unseen portions of the human being—the soul. We do not, in the first place, love God with the strength of our physical members, doing and obeying in a merely rote and robotic manner. This is not the way to realize the promises of God. Our first calling is to engage the Lord and His promises in our souls—heart, mind, and conscience—and then, as our God-enthralled souls direct, to bring our bodies into conformity with and obedience to His Law.

Faith, the writer of Hebrews tells us, is the assurance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. And that faith begins in the soul, where the unseen parts of us connect with the unseen realities of God and the unseen realm.

Act: Meditate on Hebrews 11:1 How clear is your vision of the unseen realm? How much does your vision of that realm inform and guide your daily life?

The book of Ecclesiastes is a crucial resource for understanding the Biblical worldview against the backdrop of our secular age. Follow T. M.’s studies in Ecclesiastes by downloading the free, weekly studies available in our Scriptorium Resources page at The Fellowship of Ailbe. Click here to see the weekly studies available thus far.

Want to learn ore about the unseen realm? Order a copy of The Landscape of Unseen Things, T. M.’s 24-lesson study of that realm which anchors our Christian worldview.

Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T. M. Moore, editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).