This past week at my Sunday afternoon discussion group (“Perry’s Dangerous Undertaking”), we explored Revelation 21. Consider these verses:

10-14 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.  It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west. The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

15-21 The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls. The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long. He measured its wall and it was 144 cubits thick, by man’s measurement, which the angel was using. The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third chalcedony, the fourth emerald,  the fifth sardonyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of pure gold, like transparent glass.

Notice how expressly physical – how concrete – is this place that John describes. This is not a wispy, dreamy, ethereal world of playing harps and floating on clouds. It is an experience of immense physicality, of tangible reality, of walls and gates and streets and intense artistic perfection. Buildings and mansions and brilliant light. An inside an and outside. A place of kingdoms and nations and hierarchies and seats of great power. A place where there is no deception, no impurity, no wrong.

It is that place where the concrete and the spiritual have been perfectly and completely merged together.

Normal life on planet earth doesn’t help us with this integration. The divide is visible in the way people congregate in the world. There are the pragmatic, scientific, “hands on” people who only believe in what they can see and touch; to them the idea of “spirit” is perhaps merely a literary or artistic abstraction.

Then there are the artists, the intuitives, the spiritually minded people who, while in tune with their inner visions, seldom seem to have their feet on solid ground.

What if you could span both? What if you could do both? What would it be like to be equally comfortable, walking in the concrete and the spiritual?

Considering this, it’s no accident that Jesus Christ is Himself the WORD incarnate. John 1: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, that of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

I submit to you that there is no higher place to fix your thoughts, than to meditate on the thought of God’s Son being fully Divine and fully Man. That even in the emptying of Himself and his divine privileges and being a hungry, thirsty, sweaty, emotional human being, He was still completely guided by the Spirit; He only did what He saw His father doing.

What greater validation and blessing upon mankind for God Himself to have taken our exact same form, to have had an imperfect mother and father just as we have had, for Divinity to be fully expressed in human form?

Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. YOU are made in the image of God. He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it. In height and length and depth.

Perry Marshall