Earth is an incredibly strong magnet, drawing everything close by toward its center. Escaping gravity is difficult. Jump, and you will come right back down. Throw a basketball as high as you can, and it will arc and return to the ground. Fly in a commercial airplane, and you’ll cruise along about seven miles up—but you have to land before you run out of fuel.
We can compare that pull of gravity to this world and the materialistic things that pull us down.
God resides in the heavens. His ways and thoughts are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:9). But He wants us to rise to His level. He wants us to set our affections on things above and to lay up treasure in heaven.
That is easier said than done, because there is so much pulling us back down.
The Pull of Human Nature
Ephesians 2:2 calls Satan the prince of the power of the air. Herbert W. Armstrong described him as surcharging the air with attitudes of vanity, selfishness, materialism, greed and other evils. His way of thinking fills the air; it is all around us. Since we are automatically “tuned in,” this way of thinking is within us, in our very nature.
Mr. Armstrong likened human nature to a “magnetic pull,” like gravity. He explained in The Incredible Human Potential that when a person is baptized and receives the Holy Spirit, “his human nature does not flee. It was (probably subconsciously) injected within us by Satan, the prince of the power of the air. He still exerts a pull. We still live in this present evil world, and it exerts a pull. … He still has this pull of this invisible but powerful Satan to overcome. This pull has been subtilely instilled as a law working within him—produced by the broadcasting of Satan the devil—the prince of the power of the air” (emphasis added).
Study that paragraph and you see that we battle three forces—Satan, society and self—that each pull us down.
God wants us to soar! But how can we?
The Feeling of Weightlessness
Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men in the world, and one of his greatest passions right now is space tourism. His company Blue Origin has engineered something remarkable: a capsule called New Shepard that ascends straight up into space. To be more precise, it rockets upward until it pokes just above the Kármán Line, 62 miles up, the internationally recognized boundary of space.
To propel that capsule to such a height takes considerable energy. It rides atop a reusable rocket that launches vertically, burning 20 to 25 metric tons of fuel—roughly equivalent to the energy in 500 to 700 gallons of gasoline. A New Shepherd launch burns the equivalent of 40 or so suv tanks of gas in less than 2½ minutes.
Imagine being strapped into that capsule. When it launches, you are thrown back in your seat while the rocket accelerates, faster and faster, past Mach 3 to about 2,300 miles per hour. Then the engines cut off and the capsule separates from the rocket. Everything goes silent.
Now New Shepherd is coasting in microgravity. For three to four minutes, you experience weightlessness. You can unbuckle your seatbelt and float freely around the cabin, looking out the massive windows at the curvature of Earth and the blackness of space.
It feels like there’s no gravity. But in reality, at 62 miles from Earth’s surface, you have barely escaped Earth’s pull. Look at a classroom globe; your infinitesimal capsule has only separated from the surface by the width of two dimes! At that altitude, Earth’s gravitational pull is still 97 percent as strong as at sea level.
Why do you feel weightless? Because you are free falling.
From the moment the engine stopped until the parachutes deploy, that capsule is in a parabolic free fall. It is as if you are inside that basketball you threw. It was traveling the fastest at the moment it left your hand, then it slowed and slowed until it became momentarily weightless in air, then it reversed and slowly began descending, picking up speed as it went, with you inside falling at the same rate.
From launch to landing, the entire Blue Origin space experience—which costs something like a million dollars a pop—lasts only about 11 minutes.
Spiritually, it is kind of like going to the Feast of Tabernacles or hearing an exceptional sermon. You’re in the spiritual stratosphere momentarily, but then you come back down to Earth. That spiritual and emotional high doesn’t last. Gravity pulls you back.
Battling Gravity
In this life, we will always feel gravity—and we will battle the gravity of our human nature for as long as we are flesh.
But God wants us to have more than just a short Blue Origin-type experience. He wants us to continually work to break the hold of our human nature, breaking those physical pulls more and more.
“If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God” (Colossians 3:1). God wants you to be risen with Christ, eventually to become a spirit being! To do that, you must be seeking those things above.
“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth” (verse 2). This means to set your mind, to feel, to think, to direct your mind to a thing, to seek and strive for. We must get our minds more and more on the things above, the things of God. Don’t set your affections on things on Earth; that will drag you down. The more you do that, the more you will feel that “gravitational pull.”
Verse 5 says we need to kill off everything connected with Satan’s way: sexual promiscuity, impurity, lust, doing whatever we feel like whenever we feel like it, grabbing whatever interests us. “That’s a life shaped by things and feelings instead of by God,” says one Bible paraphrase. Truly, most people live lives shaped by things and feelings instead of by God!
Verse 8 says we need to leave all those things behind for good: bad temper, irritability, meanness, profanity, dirty talk. Put those things away so your mind can soar!
In Galatians 5:16-17, the Apostle Paul describes how the desires of the flesh and of the Spirit are contrary to one another, opposed to each other. So the more you give in to fleshly desires, the harder it is to elevate your thinking. But the flip side is, the Spirit wars against the flesh! So the more you elevate your thinking, the less hold gravity has on you!
Achieving Orbit
Elon Musk likes to make fun of Jeff Bezos’s rockets. They just pop up to the edge of space and fall back down. Musk is building rockets to slip Earth’s gravity and make their way to Mars.
The trouble is, “on Earth, the gravity seems perversely calibrated to make reaching orbit just barely possible,” writes Walter Isaacson in his biography of Musk.
“Getting to space is easy—getting to orbit is hard,” Musk said in a 2021 interview. “To put things in perspective, you need about a hundred times more energy to get to orbit versus suborbit.”
Musk’s rockets take a very different flight path than Bezos’s do. To get to space, you just go up. But to stay in space, you have to go sideways—really, really fast.
If you are orbiting Earth, you are moving horizontally at about 17,500 miles per hour. You are actually falling around the Earth at the same rate that the horizon is curving away from you!
The International Space Station is in orbit 249 miles away from Earth. Even at that distance, astronauts inside still feel 89 percent of Earth’s gravity! The reason the astronauts float around within the station is that they too are in free fall—falling over the horizon at the same rate that they are approaching horizon. So it feels like zero gravity.
In orbit, however, you can remain “weightless” indefinitely. Not just for a few minutes, but for days, weeks, months or longer.
Spiritual Rocket Fuel
Spiritually, we don’t want to be mere space tourists. We want to be astronauts. We’re not content with a 10-minute poke into space. We want to structure our lives for orbit.
How do we do that?
For one, you need a lot more fuel. Again, achieving orbit takes 100 times the energy of reaching suborbit. This is why Musk’s SpaceX Starship is enormous: 29.5 feet in diameter, 403 feet tall. It weighs 11 million pounds, and an astounding 98 percent of that is fuel weight.
Spiritually, we need plenty of propellant in our lives, the Holy Spirit that God compares to fuel (e.g. Matthew 25:1-10). We must have plenty to burn for the power and spiritual energy we need.
We can only get that fuel by connecting with God each day: through prayer and Bible study, by submitting to God and drawing on His strength. He gives us tremendous spiritual power if we will use it! God “is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us” (Ephesians 3:20). Paul could do all things through Christ who strengthened him (Philippians 4:13).
Think of a colossal Starship rocket on the pad, ready for launch. If that rocket had to be powered by the spiritual power from God that you have flowing in your life, how high would it get? Surely many of us would be embarrassed by the lack of thrust!
But God wants to give us abundant power and spiritual energy! Read, for example, Paul’s prayer for God’s people in Ephesians 1:16-19—that we would know “the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power”!
Lay Aside Every Weight
To reach orbit, you must also drop as much weight as possible. The lighter the rocket, the easier it is to propel through the stratosphere.
“Like a mountain climber paring the contents of his knapsack, Musk obsessed over reducing the weight of his rockets,” Isaacson writes. “That has a multiplier effect: removing a bit of weight—by deleting a part, using a lighter material, making simpler welds—results in less fuel needed, which further reduces the mass the engines have to lift.”
Paul admonished us to “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1). Sin is weight. It burdens us down and intensifies the pull of the world (e.g. Psalm 38:4; Isaiah 1:4). But notice, in Hebrews 12:1, Paul distinguishes between weight and sin; he tells us to “lay aside every weight, and the sin.” Some weights aren’t necessarily sin of themselves, but they still pull on us and draw us into the world. They make it harder for us to get our minds onto “things above.”
If we want to soar, we must lay aside every weight. The trouble is, so often we like those weights, especially the diversions and entertainments of this world. Satan’s society is built around those things—money, materialism, sports and amusements. For a great many people, those weights are essentially their religion. They don’t have God, so they look for anything to fill the spiritual void in their lives.
The more we lighten our load in worldliness, the easier it is for us to achieve the spiritual altitude we need.
And to stay in orbit, we need to sustain spiritual velocity—17,500 miles per hour, so to speak—so we don’t fall back to Earth. That requires keeping God in mind throughout the day. Setting our affections on things above, filling our minds with the things of God (Philippians 4:8). Praying without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Praising and thanking God continually (Psalm 34:1; 35:28; Ephesians 5:20; Hebrews 13:15). Doing your daily work as unto Christ, not unto men (Ephesians 6:5-8; Colossians 3:23-24). These things propel us spiritually, overcoming the gravitational pull of our human nature and of this world.
A Gravity-Free Future
How far away from Earth must you go so you don’t feel that pull? Geostationary orbit, where satellites are parked, has only 2 percent gravity—just enough to keep them tethered to Earth. But astoundingly, that is 22,236 miles away! Rockets deliver satellites there by climbing 200 miles and giving them a big push to make the rest of that journey on their own. At that distance, you don’t really need propulsion; you just float in orbit.
When we are spirit beings, we won’t feel Earth’s gravity, nor will we feel the pull of human nature. Our character will be perfect to where we cannot sin (1 John 3:9). How wonderful that will be!
But that is not reality today. We don’t have that option. We are still in this world. But God tells us not to be of the world (John 17:14-18).
Satan has been cast down to Earth and is now confined here. When he was kicked out of heaven, the angels rejoiced! (Revelation 12:9-12). There is no satanic broadcasting in heaven!
We can’t ascend to that altitude physically, but we can go there in spirit. We can set our affections there. We can lay up our treasure in heaven—and where our treasure is, there will our heart be also (Matthew 6:19-21).
We don’t want to be space tourists, popping up for brief jaunts at the edge of space. We want to be spiritual rocketeers and astronauts—trimming down every weight and encumbrance, amassing and burning spiritual fuel, building up enough spiritual propulsion, doing all we can to escape the pulls of this world and our human nature. We want to be getting ourselves into spiritual orbit and staying there—close to God!