True spiritual literature has a soul; it has a demeanor—a living person—behind the words. We know that the story of God and man is a divine romance with its very romantic expression revealed through writing. God Himself desires to speak in a way that He can express Himself so that His person—His being—can be known to His creation. This is the purpose of spiritual literature.
The Bible is the highest literature. It is a book of life and has a soul that is revealed throughout the 66 books—each page, chapter and verse has soul; each event has soul, each conversation between God and man has soul. If a person doesn’t have that soul, then reading those relationships within the Bible carries no spiritual reality. This is our own experience when it comes to reading the Bible.
On the one hand, the Bible tells us that we should deny our soulish beings: the overcoming believers indeed “loved not their soul-life even unto death” (Revelation 12:11). On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that we should disregard the soul or that the soul has no role in God’s eyes. In the epistles, Paul says that “it is no more I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Yet, when you look at the phrase “who lives in me”—you can see that the soul still exists and is very powerful! Paul even stressed in his letter to the saints in Philippi how he wishes he had a someone “like-souled who will genuinely care for what concerns” the saints (2:20), and stresses throughout the book the need to be “joined in soul, thinking the one thing” (v. 2) concerning the Body. This means that the soul is very important in carrying out God’s purpose—actually, when it is governed by the spirit, it is crucial.
Fundamentally, when God made Adam, He mingled with the lifeless clay. Clay has no life, but God Himself is life. When He breathed Himself into this clay, that mingling with the clay produced a living soul. This was the original relationship and fellowship between man and his Creator. After man fell, there came a distance between God and man—a loss of communication, a loss of understanding, a loss of fellowship. So the Lord wanted to recover that intuitive channel between God and man. This is important for us to understand spiritually: there is a very specific way for us to communicate with Him, with one another, and for Him to recover that broken communication between Himself and man after man’s fall. What is that way? Our spirit. Whether in reading the Bible, in our personal pursuit, or in our church life, spiritual things must be discerned spiritually (1 Corinthians 2:13-15). A spiritual man can discern all things. And that discernment is simply a recovery of the fellowship human beings were created to have with their Creator since the beginning. Thus, we see that the Bible is a romance; it is simply our God desiring fellowship with His beloved. How romantic is His divine literature!
God wants us to be an expression, but not in our own way. His literature overthrows fallen human logic, justification, debating, and reasoning; it conquers man, turning him to that romantic grace. When we are saved, when that breath comes into us, we are no longer a person that is ignorant, foolish, or imbalanced as a human being. We are not people with no feeling. That’s not what God wants. God wants us to have a 𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑 soul, a 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑒𝑑 soul, a 𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑔 soul—to be brought back to that original soul from the beginning. That soul exists for nothing other than expressing this very God through humanity—everything in the human sphere has no other purpose but this.
Literature is that powerful—it has a soul! It is not a dead soul, but a living soul! It’s a romantic, colorful soul. Throughout the Bible, we see such a living soul—a living out of that Person. This One is pursuing, has a goal to accomplish, has His heart’s desire to fulfill, and has love to give, to dispense, and to demonstrate. All of these things are written in this divine romance. It’s a romantic record revealing the interaction between God and us: making us a living soul. This divine romance is the fundamental understanding for the literature work among God’s people today.
(𝐴𝑏𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑡𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑓𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑜𝑤𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑝 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑛 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑎 𝑔𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑜𝑛 6/9/2020, 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑟.)