Mind of the Prophet – Entry #1 (Retired. Archived for Posterity).

Have you ever given serious consideration to the mind of God’s prophets? Their mental strength and faith to dutifully execute their divine assignments are why their names are recorded in the pages of history.

My question goes beyond their mental strength and reaches to their mental health.

Consider the mental health of a human being whose consciousness ascended into a divine reality only to return to the suffering existence where God found them. Holy book recollections of prophetic, supernatural experiences confine the experience to the imagination of the reader unless similar moments have been personally experienced.

Someone unaware of the actual feeling may romanticize the experience, and ask God to ignite their divine spark and be swept into His glory to receive a revelation. Prophetic revelations, I learned, are not instant. Time passes between the revelation of the word and the manifestation of the word.

Before manifestation of God’s promise, consider the mental distress of being thrust into God’s presence.

Your personal awareness of God’s majesty is the only way to honestly deliberate the matter. For the prophet, I know the experience was life altering. Imagine being swept into a moment you lack the mental faculties to comprehend, all of a sudden, with a supernatural presence showing you some future reality, dry bones re-assembling into an army, and simultaneously giving you instructions, or [insert any other prophetic revelation].

Imagine the first time they were swept away from a three-dimensional reality into an eternal one their minds could not possibly conceive. Could they handle God’s glory all at once? Or did God have to administer it to them in stages so they wouldn’t be a mental wreck once the Spirit of God left them?

What did the moment feel like to them? What did it feel like to experience a perfect, orderly reality in one moment; and wake up to their present suffering in the next? Were they plagued with the burden of making mental sense of what they experienced, and what they were ordered to accomplish?

How could a human mind make sense of it all? Most Old Testament prophets received their revelations during periods of great suffering. Consciously transcending from suffering to glory was most certainly a prayer answered. I make this statement with confidence because no one consciously desires to live a painful existence.

To personally experience divine perfection must have felt euphoric, at first. Prophetic descriptions of God tell us as much. Moses was radiant when he descended from Mount Sinai. Other prophets spoke of bowing in terror from God’s brilliant radiance, afraid to look Him directly in the face.

How did their bodies respond to being saturated in divine energy? Imagine the weight of its intensity. The electric jolt of magnetic intoxication. The evaporation into perfect order from chaos.

What. Were. They. Thinking?

These are all abstract questions no one, except the prophets themselves, know the answers to.

However, we can imagine the violent mental transition when their consciousness devolved from perfect order back into chaos. Who in their right mind would intentionally decide to leave God’s presence? Who by their own consent would leave heaven?

Literally, no one. Not if you believe heaven to be real and God to be perfect.

Imagine their despair after tasting eternity and waking up to a bitter cup, unsure of who to tell and wondering if it was a spectacular fantasy that made them needlessly question their reality.

How could a human mind mentally reconcile such an experience?

I submit the prophets mentally struggled to do so. They consciously experienced a divine first person encounter surpassing anything they believed possible within Creation. The ecstasy of the moment far surpasses any feeling of intoxication or sexual pleasure.

How could they cope without, at some point, questioning their sanity?

#mindoftheprophet