@ericmknight1906 Said
Paul, was basically stating that unless you have spiritual understanding, you will continue to try and decipher the word of God with your natural mind. This will just lead to frustration, and confusion.
According to Scripture
The only way to truly understand God's word and how God operates if you will, is to:
Acts 2:38 Repent and be baptized everyone of you in the Name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sin and ye shall receive the Gift of the Holy Ghost.
And the Holy Ghost is that Comforter that will give you the Spirit of Truth. (paraphrased) John 15:26
Unless you commit to Acts 2:38, the bible won't mean much to you other than just being a stupid fairy tale..
Just as an example of how the phrase WAS used:- in an exchange between myself and a Conservative Christian I said I could not understand how anyone could assert that it was justice for a human being to be tormented forever, eternally, without end, as a result of ANY decision made in this one short sharp life full of inequalities and ambiguities. This Christian just said that he could show me why I was unable to understand this, and proceeded to quote those words. As I have said, no attempt to demonstrate how eternal torment could ever be considered "just", merely an assertion that as a "natural man" I did not "understand", while he, the "spiritual man", could.
Just as a bit of dialogue, I have a high regard for the Catholic monk Thomas Merton. In his Journals and letters I discern what for me is a true person of the spirit speaking. There are some words of his concerning "faith" that are apt here.
Merton is responding to a passage from Irenaeus......(A passage that my own understanding and experience associates with the Pure Land notion of "being made to become so (of itself) without/beyond the calculation of the devotee, where "no working is true working" )
If you are the work of God wait patiently for the hand of your artist who makes all things at an opportune time........Give to Him a pure and supple heart and watch over the form which the artist shapes in you........lest, in hardness, you lose the traces of his fingers......
Merton comments......
"The reification of faith. Real meaning of the phrase we are saved by faith = we are saved by Christ, whom we encounter in faith. But constant disputation about faith has made Christians become obsessed with faith almost as an object, at least as an experience, a "thing" and in concentrating upon it they lose sight of Christ. Whereas faith without the encounter with Christ and without His presence is less than nothing. It is the deadest of dead works, an act elicited in a moral and existential void. To seek to believe that one believes, and arbitrarily to decree that one believes, and then to conclude that this gymnastic has been blessed by Christ - this is pathological Christianity. And a Christianity of works. One has this mental gymnastic in which to trust. One is safe, one possesses the psychic key to salvation......"
For me, natural man or spiritual man - you are free to judge - the "presence of Christ" ( the Eternal Word that lights all who come into the world) can never be determined by any sort of allegiance to any particular theology of salvation. The spirit "blows where it will",
not as determined by our stringing together sets of Biblical verses to form some sort of "narrow way" to hop through. Even more so, to imply that any other human being is "natural" (not "spiritual" ) and "unable to see the Bible as anything other than a "stupid fairy tale" unless they have hopped through our own particular hoop, is for me the assertion of a "natural man" who does not comprehend that the "salvation" of the Divine centres upon grace and mercy, which in my faith works in ways beyond my own comprehension.
All the best