"The Missing Nutriment"

I ended the last post quoting Willard saying that appropriate relation to the spiritual Kingdom of God is the “missing nutriment” in the human system (The Spirit of the Disciplines, 65). He had been saying that the Bible teaches there is an ordered spiritual realm that centres in God, who is himself “spirit”, and that we as humans were made to interact with that realm. The present human condition, however, testifies that something is missing from our existence – that there is a “nutriment”, as it were, that is lacking. And that nutriment, Willard claims, is “appropriate relation to the spiritual Kingdom of God.”

We were made, he contends, with spiritual capacities intended to “feed” on the spiritual Kingdom of God. “When the human organism,” he writes, “is brought into a willing, personal relationship with the spiritual Kingdom of God, ‘sucking in orderliness’ from that particular part of the human environment, it becomes pervasively transformed, as a cornstalk in drought is transformed by the onset of drenching rain – the contact with the water transforms the plant inwardly and then extends it outwardly... In the same way, people are transformed by contact with God” (ibid, 65).

That’s how we were made to live, but it is not the way we do now – at least, not until God restores us to relationship with himself. The “death” that came upon Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden after eaten the forbidden fruit, was first of all a death to God and to his spiritual kingdom. “Adam and Eve did not cease to be ‘living beings’” Willard writes. “But they nevertheless died, as God said they would. They ceased to relate and function in harmony with that spiritual reality that is at the foundation of all things and of whose glory the universe is an expression. They were dead to God” (ibid, 66).

That’s where we are today, and why human life generally is so stunted and deformed. Apart from Christ, we are unable to live the life that we were made to live. Purposeful, appropriate interaction with the spiritual kingdom of God is the nutriment that is missing from the lives of most men and women who live on earth.