An Uncommon Sense

Our five physical senses are incredible gifts from God, as He created us and shaped us to adapt to our physical world. Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling are all conduits to experiencing the world around us. But did you know that each of these five senses have a spiritual dimension, as well as application, in the Bible? Are you aware that the Biblical writers often gave our physical senses an elevated sense of knowing and experiencing God? How else can you understand, for instance, the reference in Psalm 34:8 which says we are to "Taste and see that the Lord is good"? Clearly David’s intent cannot be understood or applied in an ordinary sense. This is something special, something extraordinary, something wonderful! Let's call it our "Un-common sense."

It is an amazing journey to explore in the Bible our God-given senses and seek to discover how each one of them is a portal to understanding God and the world He created all around us. This is all the more essential in a world in which our actual senses have become distorted. They run the extremes of being marginalized and muted to being exaggerated and exploited. One thing is for certain, we cannot avoid what our senses tell us.
As only he can, A.W. Tozer captures our attention with this analysis:
The world of sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the whole of our lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent and self-demonstrating. It does not appeal to our faith; it is here, assaulting our five senses, demanding to be accepted as real and final. But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that other reality, the City of God, shining around us. The world of sense triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal, of the eternal. That is the curse inherited by every member of Adam’s tragic race.

So, God seeks to restore some much needed sanity here, and to bring what we know about our physical senses into the spiritual realm so that we might know Him better. Each one of our senses in Scripture is an interesting and thought-provoking journey of study and meditation. Each provides us the opportunity to connect with God in a meaningful and enlightened way and to appreciate life as an adventure. Therefore, what we have available to us is not just common sense, but an un-common sense. We have been blessed with senses that are Spirit-driven, God-honoring and emotionally and psychologically fulfilling.