in computer systems and programming, there’s a phenomenon of interoperable systems built on computer programs that act as a mediator between clients and servers or in non-technical parlance, consumers and providers. these systems are called application programming interfaces[apis] and they act as the middle ground between backend server activity and the user interface. they perform the desires of the client[users] and retrieve resources and responses from a server[a bank of resources].
in the same way, principles are the apis of the world, they are the intermediaries between desires and results. laws as we fondly call them can be explained as established principles, derived from proven concepts. for example, gravity is a force that was built into the ethos of the cosmos, it necessitates that whatever goes up must come down, that’s a principle, proven so well that it’s been established as a law. it’s the same with motion, and thermodynamics or any other principle that has been discovered, conceptualized and subsequently expressed through science.
i’ve come to terms with the fact that the world was designed to respond to the correct application of principles; it has no prejudice for who you are, what you believe, your character or whatever self-righteous disposition or sense of worthiness you hold onto, it’s subject to principles. God the creator also honors this concept as proven in the holy scriptures and his character, he respects and subjects himself to the principles and the statutes with which he established creation.
a major expression of wisdom is the fruit of the honor for these principles and every tangible and lasting fruit of success obtained in this realm can be tied to the accurate practice of established principles whether it be in wealth, influence or growth. this contemplation first came to me as a impression and as i meditated intentionally it expanded and i thought i’d express this reflection as it develops in my consciousness.
while this is no excuse to not have moral guardrails or ignore axiological truths that make for good living, i see that even the worst crop of humans with skewed values can get more results and fruits to show for their wisdom than even we the children of light because while we’re largely sentimental and like to display esotericism like it’s a substitute for being effulgent creatures, they pay attention to and have a dogged respect for principles and practice it as such.
while my views are clear and my belief systems are clearly expressed in my writings, the lord has begun to open my eyes to the folly of ignoring principles and the individuals who have paid the price to understand and put them to practice with fruits to show for it because they don’t share our values or belief systems. it’s one of the reasons why the world sometimes laughs at us, we don’t seem to be changing the world like the heathen do, and it can be tied to the ignorance of and apathy to honoring principles.
people in the world doggedly apply these principles and enjoy both the results and the fruits that abound from it because principles are indifferent to prejudice or your perspective. there’s no nepotism with principles, they’re indifferent to your whims and misgivings. you honour them, they produce and like a mirror, they reflect your folly when you choose to ignore them. our advantage as sons and children of light as i’ve come to understand is that light. light that gives us access to the keys that unlock these principles, light as understanding so we can produce fruits called wisdom.
in light, we operate from a realm of progressive understanding of how they were designed to be applied. most of the people who we’d call the ‘heathen’ practice these laws in isolation from the creator and credit the wisdom to themselves. if you really pay attention, you can credit a major part of the tangible results in the world today across spheres and stratas to the application of one or multiple principles, even when it’s done in ignorance and the absence of consciousness.
a great example would be the principle of faith. while most people won’t readily admit it, man is a creature made to operate by faith. dr myles munroe said and i quote “ purpose produces design and design predicts potential”. if man was made to give God pleasure; and without faith it’s impossible to please him, this points to the fact that we were created with the capacity to have faith and live by it, because design points to potential.
by design faith in God, but the world hinges theirs on logic, might and strength, science, gifts, systems, knowledge, experience and so on and while that’s a deviation from the original design, they still operate by this principle. how? well, i can express this logically from two perspectives. trust and belief. listen, whatever you trust, you have faith in and this happens in the presence or absence of consciousness; you might have to think on that one.
trust is a faith business and that’s the object of this analogy. you need faith to trust anything, or anyone. faith is the substance of an outcome believed for and hope is tied to believing in the possibility of the manifestation of a certain expectation that you trusted for. you can’t trust without faith, you can’t have faith without believing and you sure can’t believe without hope; so you either trust or doubt, they’re mutually exclusive and they are both conscious choices. this gets clearer when you understand that faith is belief.
while bible faith always begins with the knowledge of God, faith in the world begins with knowledge of the said thing, no matter how faux or distorted it is. here’s an excerpt from another article of mine – you can explain faith to an accounting expert as a discounted cash flow; it’s seeing things from the lens of what they’d be in the now. while DCF as a concept is hinged on the value of potential income or revenue; faith is hinged on the knowledge of God, his word, his nature and his character.
now while the world might not have faith in God, they have faith nonetheless, in other things, like resources, power, association, knowledge, influence, or anything they hold on to with dear life. they trust, and by extension believe and that my friend is faith. i’ve said all of this to express two things. the first is that there’s no getting around principles; no matter how misaligned you are, you have to live by them, and that the fact that you’re ignorant to this reality doesn’t negate the effectiveness of the practice of principles.
continuing in the spirit of this contemplation, i’ll point out a couple principles, prove that they were God designed, touch on how they were designed to function and show you that the heathen practice them in apathy to God to get results. my aim with this article is to first show you that principles run the world, then point out the folly in us as believers being high minded because we’re sons of God yet ignoring his set principles and watching the heathen practice them, get results while defying our father; yet we watch, like servants.
a principle that will be an object of the elucidation of this perspective is that of imagination. imagination in simple terms, is a creative ability. merriam-webster defines it as the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality and this is a well rounded pragmatic definition. imagination according to the bible can be defined with this phrase – as far as your eyes can see. i define it as seeing the end from the beginning and crafting a perspective that is defined by that reality that you have conceived.
whatever you can’t picture, you can’t have and in the same vein, whatever is not in your frame of thoughts remain outside the shores of your possibility. the greatest inventors in history operated by this principle and leveraged it to birth already existing realities albeit intangible. i say this because whatever you can imagine actually exists as a possibility that’s waiting for manifestation and if you align yourself you can partner with that reality for it’s tangible manifestation.
examples communicate principles so i’ll use a few illustrations. what do you think martin luther king jr. meant when he said “i have a dream” ?. simply put, he was saying i have a mental picture, the imagination of a reality so tangible that you couldn’t convince me otherwise. he saw a future that others without that imagination couldn’t see, a picture that superimposed his physical reality or context. you see, imagination, when done right, is a necessary component for vision, which is another principle i’ll get to later.
imagination births conviction, something you can live and if need be, die for. in the scriptures, we learn of a man who through dealings with God became a father of generations who proclaim the name of Jesus by faith today. we read that he heard a spirit – God, obeyed, received promises and walked with him. God was going to give him descendants that can be likened to the stars in the sky and a trans-generational inheritance. to help him conceptualize this promise, God told him to look as far as his eyes can see. in other words, what i’m trying to give you cannot be compared to anything in your current context, you have to picture it, because it exists, albeit not in the physical realm.
today in the secular world, we see this principle practiced in different ways, shapes and form. the architect uses this principle to conceptualize a building project and builds it on paper before any building block is laid on the ground. the painter or visual artist uses this principle to recreate what he pictures in his mind, the inventor sees the invention in his mind before he holds it in his hand. i could go on but i want to establish quickly that there’s nothing made that wasn’t made by God. everything tangible and intangible was made by him and principles are present in that number.
if that sinks in, you can understand that because principles were made by God, and because creation itself is subject to God, creation as an entity subjects itself to those that honour them. humans therefore leverage these principles even if they don’t honour the creator of the principles. most people that board flights around the world today have no idea of who the wright brothers were, yet they take advantage of the concept they birthed. most people who use pharmaceutical products don’t know who the chemists that laboured to produce these solutions were and in the same breath; principles and God.
another principle that elucidates this perspective of God, principles and results is that of time and chance or opportunity. the bible says that the race isn’t to the swift or the strong. in simple terms this law points to the fact that, you’re never really the most qualified or most deserving across board. it points to the reality of a hand at play that makes those that emerge or rise have the chance to. malcolm gladwell’s book on outliers point to this principle, he argued that extraordinary success is rarely the result of hard work, talent and skill alone but the culmination of many factors like timing, circumstances or events, culture and the fruit of this principle is what the world has come to describe as luck.
this principle found expression in the story of david, arguably the greatest hebrew king. the story points to the fact that he was chosen by God – election, he was a talented musician – gift, skilled – hardwork, was a shepherd who’d fought beasts in the wild – preparation, he found himself in the camp of the army running errands and heard the boasting of the enemy, got the opportunity to express his desire to fight the enemy to the king and was favoured by God and permitted by the king to do so. these many factors aligned together for that feat to be achieved and the absence of any of these factors would have produced a different story.
in the secular world, many people explain away this principle as the luck factor, or being at the right place at the right time. i’ll use another illustration, mark zuckerberg wasn’t the only computer science geek in 2004, who happened to have attended harvard, but he met his friend eduardo, hacked into school portals, which gave him a notoriety that the winklevoss brothers heard about that necessitated a meeting that eventually crystallized the facebook idea that he ran with, he wasn’t the only one who found himself in palo alto, he wasn’t the only guy who spoke to peter thiel about an idea, he wasn’t the only hardworking cracked programmer or hacker as he’d tag himself but time and chance happened. now isolate any of those factors that interplayed and tell me if there’s still a facebook today.
next up is the principle of process. in the aftermath of the flood, God bound himself with a promise that set forth a principle that’s known today as the law of seed, time and harvest, and the earth and everything in it is subject to this law. this law expresses itself everywhere, from agriculture, to character and deeds or the idea of karma, to the spiritual laws of giving which itself is another principle. my focus in this principle is the time. seed, time, harvest. time points to process; one that starts when the seed is put in the ground and ends when the fruits are ripe for harvest.
this phenomenon doesn’t just apply to plants, it applies to everything that starts as a seed, from ideas to concepts and insights, to building and establishment, to procreation and everything really because everything starts as a seed. a forest starts with a seed, a skyscraper starts with one building block, the human race started with one man, it’s a principle that was wound into the fabrics of the cosmos. between the first seed of corn a farmer plants and a farm full of maize ready to be harvested is process. process looks like death, life, growth, preparation, capacity building and patience and it’s typically under the hood.
“one of the most important building blocks in becoming is process. it’s involved in the creation, birth, reiteration and even the decline or destruction of anything that was made. done right, you have something that lasts, when it’s botched, you have an eventual disaster at best. it’s involved in going from bad to good and good to great. the power of process can define outcomes, it can transform potential to legacy and whilst that’s great, it can turn potential to disgrace and rot too. silent yet loud, sometimes ignored but time reveals it’s importance. process is the midwife that helps you birth what you’ve incubated. a constant force, yet dynamic. sometimes fast and at times painfully slow.”
that was an excerpt from an article i wrote on the subject of process. i believe there’s nothing birthed that didn’t go through a process and this applies in both worlds – spiritual and physical. this principle applies in both worlds whether in birthing promises or building structures and products. when humanity fell from grace, God pronounced a verdict of death, and creation has been dying a gradual but eventual death since then, that’s process; when he came in the flesh to restore, he gave life and that life canceled out that death but there’s still a process for the growth and full manifestation of that life in tangible creation.
businesses measure their progress in the secular world with benchmarks and timelines like year-on-year, year-to-date, or quarters and this is a reflection of the law of process. how? you might ask, well, every fiscal year or quarter, each business outlines their growth indices for the year; targets, projections and what have you, they apply measures, tactics, strategies based on data but they still have to wait till the end of the fiscal year or quarter to see if these strategies actually work, that’s process, the time factor, a God designed principle that man leverages.
everything that has a gestation period points to this principle, from pregnancies in humans and animals to horticulture; dreams, visions, ideas, concepts must all submit to this principle to find true and lasting expression. every f1 driver in the world started with go-karts and scaled the heights from division to division, that points to process; nearly every nba player likely started as a junior in high school, proceeded to college and then the bright lights of the nba, that’s process; even in the kingdom we go from glory to glory; process.
next up is the principle of value, value generally refers to perceived worth, importance or usefulness of a thing, but the context can morph it to mean something else. in this contemplation, my perspective for value points to productivity and diligence which in itself is a principle. value is intrinsically linked to resourcefulness; the ability to make things happen, proffer solutions, create products, offer services are all expressions of the subject of value. the bible says and i’m paraphrasing, that the diligent man will stand before kings, it also says that the gift of a man makes room for him.
gift here can be talent, skill or proficiency; anything you can truly be adept at is a way to get you to the palace. this principle found expression in men in the bible, from jacob to joseph and daniel. the principle of value made them almost indispensable; protocols were broken for them, rules were bent for them, they ushered in dispensations and revealed a greater dimension of wisdom by this principle. the man of value is almost always preferred to others because humans are inherently wired to want to satisfy their needs and they’d do anything for the one who’s able to consistently satisfy that need.
in the secular world, whether in business, sports, entertainment, governance, or any realm that is a microcosm of society, we see it play out. those that possess value as a currency remain at the forefront of important, dispensation defining conversations and make decisions for the larger crop of society who most times have no idea that these conversations are even being had, whether in board rooms, legislature and legislation, or multilateral governing bodies. wealth, as finances, influence, relationships or associations all flourish on this benchmark of value. biblical based principle diligently applied in society by those who wouldn’t acknowledge the God of the principles.
there’s a ton of other principles that elucidate this frame of thought that i’ll urge you to look into, like vision, frequently conceptualized pragmatically as goal orientation; giving, although the world calls it charity or philanthropy; diligence, resilience and productivity that the world calls grinding or hustling; relationships, alignment and positioning that the world calls networking; stewardship that the world calls treasury or wealth management. i could go on but i think my point is entrenched that these are bible-based, spiritual first principles that have been intellectualized and brought down to a lower level of pragmatic wisdom. and proof that these principles work are the fruits we see in the religious and secular worlds regardless of the imbalance on the scales.
i believe that the disconnect or chasm between the success and pseudo dominion of the heathen is not the act of defiance to God in itself, it’s the dogged respect and honour for these principles even in their ignorance of and disjointed knowledge of God. in the faith, we tend to be sentimental in our interpretation of what it means to be light and salt; joint heirs with christ and children of God. the bible soys and i’m paraphrasing again, that the heir that has the disposition of a child isn’t different from a servant even though he’s lord of all; it also says that man in honour that is unaware is like a beast of the field.
these two scriptures coupled with a third that says that the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light in their day all point to the fact that if we as children of God remain sentimental, lacking understanding, continue to ignore God’s established precepts and patterns we’d keep living as second class citizens in a realm and kingdom where we’re princes. we have to understand that as much as God is love, he is just; he’s no respecter of persons, he’s a God that permits tares to grow with wheat for a time and it’s really up to us to raise up the banner of his name with our fruits because he’s given us all that pertains to life and godliness.
purpose defines function, if he made us to have dominion, to take charge, to rule and reign, then capacity is inherent and it’s going to be up to us to take advantage of these possibilities and produce fruits that point to stewardship. the world should come to ask us how, we shouldn’t be tilting towards it because of the results they have to show. mediocrity, sensationalism, fanaticism are not fruits or expressions of dominion or sonship, they point to ignorance, a ton of it. the world isn’t smarter or wiser, they just practice principles, doggedly, albeit in decadence of character; from music, to fashion and every expression of creativity and culture, to sports, entertainment, business and governance.
in closing, i’m saying that we have a responsibility as God’s workmanship to transform and disciple nations. change agents don’t moan and complain, or live as victims; they do what their name implies, make change. but what’s a change agent without understanding? a liability. if we’d have dominion like we were sent here to, we need to get to places of understanding; higher levels of it, and that with a well curated perspective. this subject of principles is a crux; a definitive pillar in the crafting of that perspective.
the subject of dominion only applies to those who have been translated by faith into the kingdom of light. if you read this and you haven’t, or you have in the past but strayed and things are not the way they used to be.
here’s a quick prayer to get that fixed
Lord Jesus, I believe that you’re the son of God that came into the world to die for me that I might be reconciled to God. I acknowledge my state as a sinner, I receive you as my Lord and personal savior and acknowledge you as the Lord of all in my life. I declare that the power of sin and death is broken over me and that i’ve translated from darkness into the glorious kingdom of God.
that’s all it takes. welcome to the family of God 🙂
until next time, damola out!
references
And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.
— Luke 16:8
And he that sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please him.
— John 8:29
By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God.
— Hebrews 11:5
That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
— Matthew 5:45
There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, as an error which proceedeth from the ruler: Folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place. I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth.
— Ecclesiastes 10:5-7
As it is written, I have made thee a father of many nations,) before him whom he believed, even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.
— Romans 4:17
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
— John 1:3
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
— Genesis 1:1
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
— Ecclesiastes 9:11
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
— Genesis 8:22
Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men.
— Proverbs 22:29
A man’s gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men.
— Proverbs 18:16
Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all;
— Galatians 4:1
Man that is in honour, and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish.
— Psalm 49:20