Worldly Culture vs. Heavenly Culture

"For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." 1 Corinthians 1:18

     I've often thought about the difference between the culture of the world and the culture of the people of God. I know that worldly culture is absent of God, a culture of vain indulgences and selfish decadence that disregards many spiritual concepts as illegitimate or even non-existent.

       The worldly culture focuses on immediate fixes and gratifications, taking the predisposition that there is only one life you live and than cessation of your existence after death.

    The worldly culture worships pleasure and it worships wealth. It sees no higher meaning or purpose in life and even denies the existence of concepts like purpose. It denies the existence of a lot of things that make worldly people uncomfortable and fearful. The worldly culture has imagination to an extent, but is limited in its grasp of the depth and nature of its own imagination. 

       The worldly culture denies many aspects and constructs of reality to the point of putting people into a blindness of the mind, not realizing or seeing the legitimacy of what is often right in front of them to such a fault that they render their lives and activities vain and meaningless, with any higher thought or higher calling ignored and even denied to be real.

      Heavenly culture embraces the wonder and mystery of God, and the wonder and mystery of existence, and doesn't deny their legitimacy. To the people of God, concepts of a spiritual nature, like the need for a savior or things like redemption, atonement, and sacrifice and concepts like eternity and infinity are not denied as illegitimate or unreal. 

         They are celebrated as components of the awesome and wondrous power of the Creator and God's immense love for us demonstrated by the sacrifice of the Christ to save us from death and condemnation and bring us into a Kingdom which I believe to be only as limited as God's creative capacity is. It has no limits. A truly infinite Kingdom. 

           To a heavenly culture, the possibilities of an infinite mind like the mind of God are not as readily denied or dismissed. If God did indeed create an infinite existence, than reality is a lot more real, deep, and complex than people realize, and many things the worldly culture denies the existence of out of their lack of understanding or lack of imagination probably do exist in ways not clearly understood or are not of this world and exist elsewhere in existence.

      To worldly people, these concepts are alien, "other-worldly," pun intended, and may be hard to understand. They cause great fear in some and great discomfort in others. 

      Often, to worldly people, people involved in the heavenly culture may appear to be what the worldly would be considered to be as "crazy" or "beside themselves." Worldly people often can't suspend their disbelief long enough to have their mind opened to other more exciting and glorious possibilities and relieved of their blindness. 

      In their blindness, many see spiritual thought and ideation as insanity and, as such, illegitimate. Many consider it to be problematic, and some consider it to be a blight on society rather than a remedy to much of the darkness of the world and seek out its elimination.

      To people who are in the heavenly culture, the worldly culture is depraved, vain, and sinful. To these Godly people, who are in a strong relationship with the Creator and many of whom have a greater knowledge of the spiritual and eternal and a much deeper imagination and comprehension, the worldly culture is so engrossed in its own pleasures and vanity that it is blinded to its very demise. Those worldly people don't realize they are dying as they are dying.

       Blindness to the broader complexities of existence and the wonders of God, as well as the need for redemption and salvation, is leading the whole world astray, even as far as to the world's death. The devil, for much of humanity, is doing his work rather well.