In terms of personal spiritual reflections, God has been
speaking to me through the nature of hip-hop to illustrate how the kingdom of
God battles the kingdom of Satan. In Luke 11:14-22, we see that the reign of
God battling the reign of Satan involves fighting over the inner lives of
individuals, namely, inside the "home" of their hearts. Spiritual battles involve power
struggles over worship/glory inside a person's heart. An Old Testament
macrocosm of this inner heart battle takes place in 1 Kings 18 where Elijah
engaged in a glory battle against the prophets of Baal. In a New Testament
understanding of these battles, God wins
when he gets the glory and Satan wins when someone or something else does
(whether it's something of the sinful flesh, the world, or explicitly demonic
stuff). In non-religious language (which is sometimes more helpful to the mind in understanding),
someone having "glory" involves causing others to have jaw-dropping, awe-filled
wonder that magnetizes a person's attention with stunning, astounding amazement.
How does this relate to hip-hop? An emcee freestyling rap battle
totally illustrates this concept. In a freestyle battle, two rappers spontaneously
produce rhymes to creatively and artistically attack the other person in the
dimension of linguistical aesthetics. What is of paramount importance is how aesthetically beautiful, "slick", "sick",
"ill", "hot", "legit" each rapper's rhymes are.
This relates to glory in how the rapper who wins (usually) ends up capturing
the crowd's attention with jaw-dropping, awe-filled wonder and stunning, astounding
amazement (albeit on a "finite" level). In this context, they do so
by rapping with a soulful rhythmic flow of fresh lyrics that are saturated with
seemingly life-giving, energetic punch-lines. This apparent "life-giving
energy" of the exquisite phonetic synchrony of rhyming words is in sync with
and propelled by the lively pulse of an awesome sounding hip-hop beat. This beat, if it
is "legit", has a dynamic bass that vibrates the air molecules of the
room's atmosphere with a soulful rhythm, which synergizes with the energy of
the spontaneous poetic lyrics of the rappers that are intended to take down one's
opponent. This is a glory battle, where the crowd, hungering to thrillingly praise
a rapper's "dope stuff", ascribes glory to who they think is worthy
of it.
(This is the cleanest example I could find of Emcee Jin
freestyle battling before his conversion.)
The spiritual parallels are what follows: the instrumental
hip-hop beat is the spiritual realm, one emcee represents the voice of God, the
other emcee represents Satan's voice, and the crowd represents the human
heart's hunger to worship something that worthily captures its attention. (As
an incidental parallel, in Genesis 3:14, God "curses" Satan with "his
voice".) The human heart desires to "enthusiastically cheer" for
something from its depths, that is, to have its attention astoundingly magnetized
by an independent life-giving, soul-pumping energy that comes from an awe-saturated
source it feels deserves deep admiration, devotion, and even obsession with.
This is glory. This can either come from God's voice wooing us to himself, or
Satan's voice wooing us to the world, the flesh, or even his demonic kingdom
explicitly. At any given moment, this "spiritual rap battle of the heart"
is always taking place. For each moment, the heart is left with a choice to
give glory to God or to something else. And Satan's voice likes to tell the human heart
to secretly (or sometimes not so secretly) have admiration, devotion to, and
obsession with the idols of the world ("a stable career", "a high-income salary", "a
prestigious position", "a relationship", "romantic
interests", "human honour", "safety",
"pleasure", "a respectful reputation",
"laziness", "looking righteous", "being special in the
world") by astoundingly magnetizing its attention by deceiving it into
thinking that these idols have independent life-giving, soul-pumping energy
that comes from an awe-saturated source it feels deserves deep admiration,
devotion, and even obsession with. Of course, a student of Jesus knows that this can only come from God. Although one's head knows it, a lot of the time, our heart does not "functionally know it" and during these moments this heart-knowledge of God's glory, for all intents and purposes, is non-operational, inactive, and stripped of its functional power. This is when we start losing the battle of glory on the "spiritual stage" of our hearts. It is a
choice each moment as to which voice my heart will functionally follow and worship. The flow of God's voice, or Satan's. Each one becomes louder, more dynamic, energetic and "hype" the more I focus on it and tune out the other.
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