December 24, 2020

A Faith of Misfits and A Lineage of Lost Causes

Some of the people in Scripture read like a list of toys on the "Island of Misfit Toys" from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Misfits one and all from a worldly and secular perspective. The rejects of society, the rejects that the godless world doesn't want. I mean...look at what they did to Jesus. Even our Messiah was ostracized by his own people who did not recognize Him as the Son of God. Rejected and sentenced to death by crucifixion in the greatest miscarriage of justice the world has ever known.

We then have people like David standing in for King Moonracer with his dysfunctional family. A rebellious disobedient lot they were. There is Abraham with his faith and faithlessness the equivalent of Hermey the Misfit Elf who lives a double life as a dentist and one of Santa's helpers. And of course we have the Apostle Paul who reminds me of the "Bumble" (abominable snowman) who initially beats the living daylights out of mostly defenseless reindeer and has a thorn in the flesh. Paul who fell off his horse on the road to Damascus and bounced into the annals of Christianity as one of the greats in the Faith. 

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It is through God's eccentric lot that we truly see the glory and the power of God.

It is through God's eccentric lot that we see the earth move and the sky catch fire. I sit amazed after reading the Bible and the stories of the rejects God picks to accomplish the amazing tasks we see in the Bible. He has continued to pick the same type of person when he picked you and I to carry on the Good News. It is the very reason that he picked them (and us) to do His work too. Flawed vessels accomplishing great things in faith by the power of God. The very power that resurrected Christ from the grave.

"For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord!” ~1 Corinthians 1:26-31

It was once written by novelist Frederick Buechner that the absolute improbability of the Jewish and then subsequently the Christian faith succeeding based on its followers is astounding. It is exactly this reason though that brings all the glory to our holy God, Jesus Christ.

In what other book besides the Bible would we read the story of the very first pair of people who would violate the only thing forbidden to them? They would eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

That God would select an old man in the middle of the desert where it had never rained before to build a boat the size of a modern battleship. This same man after having been afloat for months on a foul smelling cramped zoo on an inundated world would immediately proceed to plant a vineyard, hit the bottle and pass out stone cold drunk.

We would see Abraham the father of the nations have his faith accredited to him as righteousness. He would also leave his wife out to dry by basically giving her away to Pharaoh to protect his own skin...Sarah be damned. Very chivalrous [sarcasm intended].

Who could've imagined God would not pick Esau who was generally honest, capable, and a provider over the lying, duplicitous and conniving Jacob who was essentially a snake in the grass?

We see that God would pick the line of Judah for His King Jesus to descend from, the same Judah that had a hand in throwing his brother in a well and then selling him into slavery. The same person that ended up sleeping with his daughter-in-law Tamar who he thought was a prostitute.

Then we have Moses, who was a murderer and was trying to outrun the homicide rap for clobbering a man on the noggin and killing him in Egypt. If it weren't for a twisted sense of honor he'd have also just as soon thrown his brother Aaron under the bus by letting Aaron go back in his stead to take the heat from the Egyptians.

That God would invariably pick David as a King who would become the archetype of every king that would come after him until the advent of Jesus Christ to surpass him. The same David who was a known adulterer, murderer and a polygamist like his son would also be. He was man that really could not keep his house in order because he had been cursed by God for what he had done to Uriah the Hittite. This incident would drive him into exile from his very own kingdom by his own son Absalom. David would also take a census of his military strength and not depend on the Lord in faith which would lead to the death of thousands.

Solomon who would be given the riches of a kingdom and wisdom from God that people would come from other lands to witness. Solomon who couldn't seem to put a clamp on what appeared to be a matrimonial obsessive-compulsive disorder. He also couldn't stop collecting horses, overtaxing his subjects and in the end allowed his nutty pagan wives to put a damper on things by introducing their false Gods and idols into the promised land. Solomon who was a perfect example of how a person can have wisdom but unless it is Godly wisdoma and used correctly...it is worthless.

We see the likes of Rahab whom the Jews well into the New Testament (Hebrews 11:31) viewed as a paragon of faith when she cooperated with the two spies from Shittim sent by Joshua. Rahab who was also a prostitute/harlot who literally lived in a hole in the wall (of Jericho). After the walls fell, her and her family were the only survivors.

...and who could forget all those wild-eyed prophets of God both major and minor? The whole lot of which were probably nuttier than fruitcakes based on outward appearances. They wore camel hair shirts, leather belts, and ate bugs dipped in honey. Crazed disheveled men that screamed at the others often times with spittle flying out of their mouths in the middle of the desert wilderness at everyone and no one in particular.

Of particular note Jonah, the most miserable excuse for a prophet ever seen. Jonah who, other than telling the Ninevites to repent, ended up serving God very little. We learn from Jonah mostly how to serve as a bad example. Jonah, who after having be told to, "Arise, go to Nineveh" gets up and goes...in the opposite direction (180 degrees) towards Tarshish. A prophet that nearly drowns an entire ship of mariners because of his disobedience. A prophet that after telling the Ninevites to repent (and they actually do), gets angry about it because he wants them to be destroyed. Instead of having mercy on them as God has done he still nurses a homicidal rage.

Then we look at God's chosen people. Of all the races He could've chosen to be His nation of priests, he chose the Jews. As somebody once said, "The Jews who are just like everybody else only more so like everybody else." When they were religious, they were more religious than anybody else. When they were piously hypocritical they were so pious and hypocritical that the term for being too pious and hypocritical is to be "pharisaic". A people who apostatized and build idols and worshipped them even before the last of God's commandments had left His mouth and were delivered to them at the foot of Mt. Sinai.

Jump into the New Testament and we have the thick-headed Peter who denies Christ not just once but three times. The same Peter who is the first to confess Jesus' true identity as the Messiah, Son of the living God. Then almost immediately needs to be yelled at when Jesus tells of his coming death. Peter who couldn’t even wait until the boat reached shore. Finally, there is Paul. The great apostle Paul who wrote more books of the Bible that anyone else (13) thirteen, (14) fourteen if we included Hebrews. Paul the expounder of the faith...and a slayer of the brethren. Paul formally known as Saul. Yeah, that Paul, the one who killed Christians prior to conversion.

The list from the Bible continues but in reality you should read it. If we look forward two millennium we now have similar situations in our church. Young idealists decked out in jeans, piercings and tattoos, share the pews with conservative white collar "suits". Teenagers and occasionally spouses tuning out sermons that others are straining to hear from the back of the congregation over top the whine of their children. Recovered and reformed drug addicts preaching from the pulpits. Former criminals, adulterers, miscreants and generally immoral people that have now become paragons of the Faith. Believers gather together methodically and move through a centuries old synchronized dance or worship.

I shake my head in disbelief at the outward incongruities and the absurdity of it all...but this is the way God has made it and this is the way God wants it. God's power is made perfect in our weaknesses. It has been done by his measure and according to His timeline. The idea that all these misfits and rejects could work and fit together defies conventional logic.

"....Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one." John 17:11

This is the only possible way something this diverse and chaotic could possibly work...it is the work of God. Only in Jesus Christ could these cast-offs of society pull this off. It’s nothing they themselves can do. If God could use all these offbeat characters this should give us reassurance that He can certainly use us who are the same. Rejects of the world. A tribe of lost causes. A Faith of Misfit Believers.

December 18, 2020

Scientific Exclusio: Into Thin Air/Aether

People rely far too much on what Science says is truth/true and never question its outcomes. This is now being brought into a spotlight in lieu of the Covid-19 vaccine that is about to be foisted on a world population. Science is routinely wrong and the next two posts on my blog I will show two examples of Science's failures. First, I will show how something real in Science was abandoned completely at the dawn of the 20th Century and shouldn't have been and in the second I will show how Science created a field of science and put forth theories and 'evidence' that were horribly wrong because it was interpreted through a racist and supremacist viewpoint. First up...

Abandonment/Exclusion of a Scientific Idea

There was once a scientific theory of an unseen substance in the universe that affected the travel of light and effects of gravity but was subsequently disproven…or was it? Aether or Ether, the stuff of Fantasy novels and Steampunk lore. According to science until well into the early 20th century the aether, æther, aither, or ether and also called quintessence, was the material that supposedly filled the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere (hencefore referred to as aether). The Greeks believed it was the rarified air αἰθήρ/aither at the mountain tops that the gods of the Greek Pantheon breathed on Mt Olympus in Thessalonica in the clouds. Not the air or ἀέρα· aera/air that humans breathed at ground level as noted in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Originally the concept of aether was used in several theories in science to explain several natural phenomena. In particular, the traveling or transference of light and of the effects of gravity. In the late 19th century, physicists postulated that aether permeated all throughout space, providing a medium through which light could travel in a vacuum, but evidence for the presence of such a medium was not found in the Michelson–Morley experiment, and this result has been interpreted as meaning that no such luminiferous aether exists. Please note that ‘it was interpreted as not existing’. It was believed to be imaginary. That is to say that there was no evidence to prove it didn’t either. Logically, you cannot prove a negative. So…the idea was never actually disproved. It was abandoned just. Why?

The belief in aether persisted until approximately 1905 to 1915. What happened in that ten-year timeframe? Einstein happened. The ether wasn't proved imaginary, it proved inconvenient. Like the Bible it was viewed as not necessarily incorrect but rather irrelevant. Einstein banished the aether by postulate (not by experiment) in his famous 1905 Special Relativity paper and resurrected a form of the ether in his 1915 General Relative paper. Just as Marx did to the Bible in politics/economics and Darwin did in biology and the origins of life. Conversely, the Michelson-Morley Experiment in 1887 (and similar experiments after it) proved nothing of the sort. Einstein himself stated explicitly that if the results of Dayton Miller's interferometer experiments (1904) were true (concerning the ether) his Relativity Theories were false. Dayton Miller’s test results were viewed as a statistical anomaly and disregarded but Sagnac's and the Michelson-Gale experiment (1925) proved conclusively against Einstein with regard to the objective existence of an ether----these were ignored or explained away and ignored as Einstein’s theories had been embraced and subsequently promulgated by those of influence in Science...much to the chagrin of modern Quantum theorists in 2020. Quantum Theorists have now accepted that "space" is not ‘nothing’ or pure vacuum but consists of a sea-foam of Planck sized particles---contradicting Einstein's claims about the ether.

Yet science in its all-knowing wisdom forged ahead with its alternate explanation from Albert Einstein and forsook the theories and ideas of aether altogether. As if it had never existed at all. The entirety of scientific thought wrapped around the concept of the aether were expunged from scientific historical record and now only exists in the limbo of irrelevance and novelty in the realm of pseudoscience and anti-vaccination folks. Its kind of the same place they try to jam the Bible too. A land of myth, fable or folklore. Neither real nor not real. It as if it disappeared into the air/aether.

Moral of Story: By accepting without question what has been indoctrinated is dangerous if one fails to find the real truth(s). The real fact(s). We as a people need to develop more skepticism after being misled by Science so many times. Question the answers. Science isn’t infallible. Science is not a god. Science is in-fact very fallible. Why? Because Science is the religion of man. It is therefore capricious and flawed just as men. Religions are manmade things. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. But God is still God. If he is truly omniscient and omnipotent, He is therefore wholly other and wholly perfect. Infallible. Unchanging.

https://archive.org/details/luminiferousthe00woodgoog

https://archive.org/details/aethermatterdeve00larmuoft

 

November 20, 2020

Download from Divinity: Truth Brought Forth by Word

The following paragraphs are some reflections on the transference of information, immortality, mankind and God. When I write about Jesus’ resurrection body and resurrection, I am intending to clearly delineate it from the physical body he had before His death at crucifixion.

In many Biblical traditions there are visions of the final coming of the Son of Man. They deal with eschatological (End Times) visions, and these are only visions. Not actual pictures of actual events as they will happen in the future as they haven’t happened yet. Why? It is because the resurrected and exulted one will not come only in a specific year or to a specific area of the world at the end of the age. The resurrected and exulted one comes in all times and to all areas of the world. He judges, as the Apostle's Creed says, 'the living and the dead'. This is a vision that necessarily transcends all natural and empirical conceptions. It is important to understand that this vision opposes all explicit and implicit egoisms of particular cultures and eras and attempts to pin it down to a specific time. Jesus comes to all in death. Men die once and then face judgement. Whether guilty or not, all face Him. If we only have a vision of the Son of Man coming from the heavens at the end days with his angels, we’re in serious trouble. Mostly because we are severely misunderstanding our Bible and our God.

The talk about the 'coming' Christ becomes comforting because the one who is 'coming' will not be revealed for the first time only at the end of all times and eras, but rather, he is already among us now as the crucified and Resurrected One; and because the crucified and Resurrected One is the one who has been revealed in his incarnational nearness of his human life and work. For this reason, we cannot separate the memory of the historical Jesus from the realization that the crucified and resurrected one is present now and will 'come again' for his full and complete revelation of Himself forever at the Second Coming when He comes to rule supreme. The creating, maintaining and saving of our existence requires that God is present here, now. He is Immanuel. He is immanent. He is surrounding and carrying his creatures in his word or ‘yes' or affirmation to life against the powers of sin and death. These powers are dramatically depicted at the cross of Christ. At the cross, Christ is condemned in the name of politics and religion. He is executed in the name of both Jewish and Roman law. Even public opinion is against him. All principalities and powers. work together, and the worldly 'immune systems' collapse. The reciprocal checks and balances between religion, politics, law, and morality fail in the event of the cross. Conflicts between the occupiers and the occupied, the world superpower and an oppressed people, are simply glossed over. Even the disciples betray Jesus, abandoning him and fleeing,

Everything collapses in the  face of the Kingdom. Why? Nothing can stand against it and the crucifixion is part of the plan of that Kingdom. Everything goes according to God’s sovereignty.

The cross reveals, as the Biblical. texts say, 'the world under the power of sin'. It reveals 'the night of godforsakenness', not only of Jesus himself…but of the whole world. The cross reveals the presence of this dire need and misery, not only in Jesus' hour of death, but as a real and present danger in all times. The resurrection liberates from this night of godforsakenness. God's activity alone, and not human initiative, brings salvation. The true saving power and vital necessity of the resurrection only become manifest against the background of the cross. 

God, and God alone, brings salvation to humanity becomes recognizable in view of the harrowing possibility and reality that, despite the best intentions and the best systems, humanity alone is doomed. Even the 'good law' of God can become fully corrupt and be abused by humanity under the power of sin. Perversions of religion, law, politics, and public opinion then triumph. Therefore, it is crucial to recognize that God has saved and saves humanity, which is completely lost without God.

How God saves is also crucial: In a powerful yet growing embryonic way without loud fanfare or drumbeats. Although the experiences of the resurrected Christ both of th e first witnesses and of contemporary witnesses do have the character of . visions, memories, and anticipatory imaginations, they are not mere mental or psychic phenomena. They respond to the self-presentation of the resurrected and elevated Christ in a Resurrection body and they participate in that real Resurrected life.

The structured multitude of witnesses intercommunicating. The ecumenical witnesses. People from all walks of life. A concert of the individual witnesses in truth seeking peoples both while Jesus walked the Earth in a Resurrection Body and now in Spirit. The reaction in faith to this knowledge is the honest and realistic response to His presence and His word that purifies those exact witness to Christ and hearers of His word.

From His word we are told our whole perishable person will be transformed metaschematizo / μετασχηματίζω (Philippians 3:21) into a new and imperishable heavenly person that will be qualitatively different from our first. It will be much better untainted by the Fall and sin. Both continuity and discontinuity are expressed here. The body as flesh is dominated by non-divine powers will decay and die. The body as the spiritual body will be recreated by God 's grace in the resurrection. Just as Christ did when changing from pre-Crucifixion flesh/sarx/σάρξ  to post-Crucifixion Spirit body or soma pneumatikon / σῶμα πνευματικόν. We will be transformed into His likeness.

Until then…the Spirit enables co-presence, contact, and even interaction with He who appears absent, respectively a presence in absence. Through his Spirit, the invisible God communicates with the human spirit and imparts to it creative impulses. But the communicative power of the spirit can also be defended in an anthropological (man-based) bottom-up approach. According to Paul, even those who are absent can have authentic contact with others 'in the spirit', despite their different locations in space and time. By remembering his own visits, his teaching and preaching, and through his petitions before God, but also through the letter s and messages of others, Paul is present to the community 'in the spirit ' just as I am with you the reader right now. I am one with you in Christ now who is eternally present.

This presence is not merely a figment of Paul’s or our imagination. Paul sees himself becoming 'spiritually ' present in the community. In 1 Corinthians 5, he describes this process of spiritual communication and a form of communal cooperation:

1 Corinthians 5:3-4 For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus.”

'The name ' and 'the power of our Lord' and the Spirit of God, play the critical role here in the connection of the community. However, one does not need a theology degree in order to understand the spiritual process of communication between Paul and the Corinthians. We can explain basic function s of the human spirit without direct reference to theology. Memory and imagination are not just 'mental constructs'. They are shared mental constructs that are interacting in our minds even when we are not present with respective or individual people. In this way there is common understanding and consensus between all of us based in thinking, thoughts and memory of Christ and Scripture. The commonality and points of reference are Christ, the Word made flesh. A commonality that doesn’t need space or time to mediate it for it is thought in the a priori metaphysical realm.

Through the transference of information, words and idea immortality via the Spirit is imparted to a finite being from and Eternal One.

In other words, the download has already taken place into an old outdated hard drive. We are now just awaiting a new indestructible hard drive. Those that can’t receive this download are either plugged into the wrong source of their units are turned off completely.

James 1:8 ~ Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.

There is a path to salvation for a reason. A path. You need to go somewhere. You need to go to the Cross and Christ. If you turn inward and try to rely on yourselves for any form of salvation or even a single step toward that salvation…you will most assuredly screw it up. That is what the entirety of the Bible showed us. All the way through the Old Testament until the New Testament. It isn’t until Christ physically enters the Creation according to a preordained plan that the worlds begins to rectify.

November 17, 2020

Goodbye to the America of My Youth

As usual I am stunned that I need to explain this to my progressive, liberal and even moderate friends in a polite coherent manner. I guess I should not be surprised about this because as a people we have abandoned truth in the United States and Western Civilization in general. 

The rough consensus is that voters who still support Trump are either treasonous or stupid. This is repeatedly reinforced by an unconvincing insistence that there was “no fraud” in the election. The mantra by most media outlets has been, “ELECTION OFFICIALS NATIONWIDE FIND NO FRAUD.” Even though hundreds of affidavits have been filed in courts nationwide. Some even by regular everyday citizens not just the president and his lawyers. Any claims to the contrary are met with incredulity and ridicule. It doesn’t matter whether the calls of fraud are from the President or the thousands who are capable of calculating simplistic statistical methods to find the OBVIOUS anomalies in Benford’s Law or Fibonacci Set, etc. They’re deemed “baseless” or “unfounded”. But…millions in America know:

There was nothing secure or even ordinary about this election. 

No matter, activists pushed ahead, mailing ballots to outdated voter rolls. Oversight was recklessly diminished or eradicated. Time-honored methods of how absentee ballots could be collected/counted were scuttled in the shadow of COVID-19. Chain-of-custody ballots went out the window. Ballot harvesting, a tradition of corrupt Democratic political machines in places like Detroit/Philadelphia was introduced nationwide. Obviously, not all the reports of ballot shenanigans amount to voter fraud. Unfortunately, they’re just as dangerous because they undermine the integrity of an election, just as much as your dead uncle does. 

Most egregious is the case in Pennsylvania where bureaucrats and activist judges simply ignored restrictions that legislatures put into law constitutionally. The state supreme court brushed off rules set by state lawmakers thereby extending a deadline (and it looks like the Feds might too). Extending deadlines for ballots is an invitation to break election laws—especially in Philadelphia, renown for ballot-stuffing. Any reasonable person can look at the last-minute changes and conclude they created conditions ripe for fraud/abuse. Only the naïve observer would survey the above and conclude, as most of the mainstream media has, that there was “no fraud” in the election. Yes, there was, and every rational person knows it. Copping to it is another matter. Whether it was enough to change the outcome of the election we don’t know unless everyone in charge of elections is held accountable. 

Sadly, pointing all of this out, and having a problem with it to the point of saying you don’t believe the election was fair, doesn’t make you a rube or a conspiracy theorist. By contrast, pretending that none of this had effect on the election and demonizing anyone who says it did, as the media is doing now is a reaction born of oppression and despotism. It is the exact kind of thing you do when you’ve written off your countrymen as being your equal and view them as subordinate, less than human or unworthy of an opinion. Opinions, ironically…the very thing an honest and fair society seeks to give its populace through free and fair elections.

Proverbs 31:8-9 Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy.

November 16, 2020

lesser gods

A while back I realized I could tell whether or not a book was theologically sound by looking at the publisher on the binding. Similarly, we know when we are dealing with false news when reading or watching it. CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post, New York Times, Business Insider, Newsweek, Time, US News and World Report, Fox. Basically, every single news outlet that filters to the top of your Google Chrome search because Google is complicit in the propaganda. Once reputable outlets…now only caricatures of journalism past. Unfortunately, the alternate to these propaganda outlets is becoming frighteningly small and can be counted in single digits.

I found this pre-filter helpful especially when scanning through searches for discount books on Alibris, Christian Book Discounters, Amazon, eBay or on shelves in local thrift shops locally. Very rarely did I move away from a very small group of certain publishers. The usual safe publishers were IVP InterVarsity Press, Hendrickson, Eerdmans, B&H Academic for language studies. If I did, I was sure to heavily scrutinize the book’s sources that were on my reading list. Those publishers were Zondervan, Crossway, Thomas Nelson. There were good commentaries and books under the secondary publishers like Francis Schaeffer, A.W. Pink, Word Biblical Commentaries, etc. But there were also some real stinkers. Outside of the aforementioned sources, theological things became an extremely dicey minefield.

What was the difference? Hermeneutic or interpretation methods. Specifically, how polluted the interpretive method became with either cultural/political influence or academically with what is called higher criticism. How people approached the text. Liberally with unorthodoxy or neo-orthodoxy (demythologizing, reliance on only naturalistic/empirical explanation or a posteriori knowledge, errancy of Scripture, etc.). Traditionally or with orthodoxy (Belief in miracles, supernatural elements, reliance on the a priori knowledge and the metaphysical, Inerrancy of Scripture).

This subtle differentiation ….is the pivotal dividing factor in the United States current polarized state. What half the country bases its morality on. What half the country bases its Truth on. Everyone does one or the other. There are no other options. There are no fence sitters. One bases its truth in a belief of an absolute. The other in relative truth. One believes in an absolute arbitrator of truth (God, something greater than themselves) the other a relative arbitrator of truth (man, courts, government). Errancy/Inerrancy. Physical only or Metaphysical and physical combined. A posteriori knowledge only or a priori and a posteriori knowledge combined.

For me it really is that simple. We made things far too difficult. We made the simplest easiest thing in the world into a nightmare. Listening to God. Just listen. In His place we've placed a million and one obstacles to the simplicity of obedience. Just as the Jews placed a impenetrable wall around the Torah with additional rules and laws that added nothing but more places to fail. They made belief in God into a minefield. So too we've massacred the truth and made an ever shifting sand or morass impossible to pin down. 

Limiting the amount of functionable components and simplifying things makes them easier. A concept so simple even a child can understand it. In our arrogance and intelligence we've become like fools. In search of something besides God we found a million lesser gods. Each one leading us down a million dead-ends. In an effort to disobey One God we obey a myriad of lesser gods. Then we wonder why we are overwhelmed and overmedicated. In the Bible they were called Ashtoreth, Baal, Chemosh, Dagon, etc. Today they are called Democrat, Republican, 401K, Academia, Bills, Science, NFL, LGBTQ, Self, etc.

In lesser gods we trust and because of it we die.

November 8, 2020

The Parable of Two Politicians

Now two politicians came to the judge and stood before him. One of them said, “Pardon me, judge. This man and I live in the same town, and we had voters in the same election. The third day after the election, this man said he has more votes than I did. We were alone, there was no one at the poll but the two of us. During the nighttime, this man’s ballot count ended up in a winning total and mine in a losing total after he had been losing when we went to bed. Now he is winning and no one knows why. I believe he got up in the middle of the night and found ballots possibly some of mine which gave him a winning total.  He put the winning ballots in his ballot box and my total in my locked ballot box is losing.

The next morning, we both got up to finish counting ballots—and he, the losing candidate had miraculously won! But when I looked at his ballots closely in the morning light, I saw his ballots were fake. The other man said, “No! The winning ballots are mine and they are all real ballots; you’ve lost fair and square.” But the first man insisted, “No! You are cheating and trying to steal the election; I am the true winner.” And so, they both squabbled before the forbearing but quickly angering judge.

The judge said, “This one says, ‘My ballots will allow me to win and your ballots will cause you to lose’ while that one says, ‘No! Your ballots will cause your loss and mine will allow me victory.’ Then the judge said, “Bring me a torch.” So, they brought a torch for the judge. He then gave an order: “Burn all the living constituents of both men in town. Then split the ballots in half and give half to one and half to the other.”

The man who was a true leader and truly cared about his constituents was deeply moved out of love for his people and said to the judge, “Please, my lord, give the other man all the ballots! Don’t kill my people!” But the other said, “Neither I nor you shall have them. Burn all the people. The ballots!” Then the judge gave his ruling: “Give all the ballots to the first man. Do not burn anyone; the first is the true leader. Send the other into obscurity.” 

When all in the land heard the things the first man had said and the verdict the judge had given, half the people didn't care and the other half were sad because their candidate lost and conceded the race. Yet the irony is that inevitably all that was done in the dark will come to the light. If there was sin, God will judge it as all kings will lay their crowns at Jesus' feet anyway. Those that believe realized their salvation does not lay in elections or men but in the Gospel. For the believer they realize that a sovereign God allows these things to transpire for His glory regardless. So they moved on with their lives rather than desiring to burn down a nation and the people in it.

[The parable applies to both the 2000 and 2020 election]

November 7, 2020

The Watered-Down Gospel 2020



It has come to my attention that some of my Reformed brethren are calling out the false prophets for their worldly prognostications and claims that they were God's prophetic voice. Stating Trump was God's anointed and getting a second term. They're being called false prophets. Rightly so. Your energies are being wasted and can better focused elsewhere. These self-proclaimed prophets were so blatantly off-base and moronic that those outside the church can see they're hucksters and charlatans.

We have a larger problem as the imps got inside the walls. The circus monkey is picking our pocket as we look the other direction. The one's who soft-pedal their neo-orthodox or heretical wares. A tinkerer of recycled errors. Old errors with new names. Specifically, in the form of the Social Gospel this year. This needs to be addressed as it has allowed the monkeys to close to the nursery of our Faith. It allowed the little bastards to pluck the infants right out of their cribs. The place right within sanctuary near the newbie believers. Infants that can't tell the difference between that which is right and that which is wrong. I'm starting to believe the culture is even causing a theological dementia in some of who we thought might have been elect but alas...nothing more than entertainers. Al Mohler, Tim Keller, Doug Pagitt, J.D. Greear, John Piper and ten dozen localized pastors that believe they can bring the Kingdom through protest and the point of a sword.  Never mind the heretics on the Theologically Bumbled Network. They're easy to spot. No, the real danger lies with the ones we thought we could let into the inner circle and teach our new converts. Time to clean house.

Start with the likes of the aforementioned ‘leaders’. They compromised at the most dangerous and influential time making them the most dangerous of all. They’re the Judas goats that walked some sheep right up to the door of the slaughterhouse. Counterfeits are often those closest to the real thing. Some of those we thought were the best Christianity had to offer turned out to be nothing more than organ grinder monkeys picking theological pockets. If we settle for anything less than the full unadulterated Gospel we are no better then snake oil salesmen or clowns.

November 4, 2020

In A Country of the Blind, A One-Eyed Man is King

Truth has been on a Procrustean Bed over the last decade and it will likely disappear completely over the next few years. I have repeatedly written on the topic of truth. I've purposely made axiomatic philosophical states of what is and what it isn't. At times I am waxing poetic but before the end of my articles I always come back to square one of philosophy and epistemology and make absolute truth statements. In the last few years of 'fake news', 'deep fakes' and coming years of deliberate and outright propaganda promulgated by a socialist media...knowing what is truth will become extremely difficult as we plunge deeper into the confusion of a postmodern society. A people bent on ignoring or mocking God. In the disappearance of God from schools, government and society...absolute truth disappeared with Him. WIth the disappearance of the truth the basic ability to discern what is right and what is wrong. Even what were once theologically solid churches abdicated their roll as defenders of the Truth. In reality God never disappeared, man just chose to ignore or deny His presence. Paraphrasing Francis A. Shaeffer from his paper The Common Man as Mystic...

"What is taught [in government, media and academia] is that there is no final truth, no meaning, no absolutes, that it is not only that we have not found truth and meaning, but that they do not exist. The student and the common man may not be able to analyze it but day after day they are being battered with this, and we must not be blind to the fact that it is being accepted increasingly by a majority of society."

In contrast, this way of thinking has not had as much influence on the middle class. Specifically the middle-class that were not indoctrinated with academia's reasoning. Many of these keep thinking in the old way as a memory of the time before the Christian base was lost in the mystic post-Christian world. However, a majority in the middle class have no real basis or their values since so many have given up an absolute Christian viewpoint. They just function on the memory or morality of what once was. Furthermore, that middle class is looked down upon as the 'uneducated', 4x4 driving, gun toting, banner waving, Walmart shopping Trump supporter.

The division isn't starting in the public community due to race so much as its starting right within our families and churches because we haven't taught our kids to reason properly. This isn't so much a social issue as it is a moral generational one.

This is why so many young people now feel the middle-class Trump supporter/people are plastic and ugly. Hypocritical. Because they try to tell others what to do on the basis of their own values. Values that have no ground in God anymore. They have no base and they have no clear categories for their choices of right or wrong. They are morally ambiguous. Their choices tend to hinge solely on what is for their material benefit. One cannot appeal to one’s own authority and be legitimate. Those that do base their morality and ethics in a Christian worldview are in a minority and are grouped in with the rest.

That is why the promise of something different is so appealing to the youth. A promise of equality or an equaling of the playing field in socialism is so inviting. The media feeds this lie. The socialist politicians feed this lie. The actions of the godless middle-class reinforce this lie.

We need to do better. Through Christian inaction and improper education our children are being brainwashed right within our own homes, churches and families. 
They're not learning through our positive Christian actions and words but by the action/inaction to teach proper Christian truth for fear of offending. The enemies of God look educated, caring, selfless, socially minded and conscientious. The people of God look uneducated, uncaring, selfish, self-absorbed and devoid of conscience. Truth has been flipped on its head.

Do we want to have only a remnant trace of Christianity left in the collective conscience of society? Do we really only want to have a remnant Christian population? Look what this failure has already wrought on a godless society. In the country of the Blind one-eyed men are kings.

November 1, 2020

Frequency

We often scan the skies looking for God but in reality, we should primarily be looking to other human beings to see God in action. God most often uses a person to complete His work in this world. He doesn’t usually use signs in the sky to rephrase the Truth of Scripture, he uses the repeater or reader of Scripture. A person. The believer and sometimes inadvertently a non-believer. Yet in our zeal for worship of the person instead of the message we miss the message completely. Our reception gets blocked because we blind ourselves to it. Instead of a coherent message. We receive only static.

Why does our connection become distorted? In a word: Sin. Sin distorts the signal coming from the Transmitter.

Sin is a distorter. Sin clouds the skies. It jams the message’s transmission. That’s what the Gospel is. A message transmitted over the airwaves. Through sound waves. PA systems and radio amplify the signal or the waves but it is the Spirit that accepts it and amplifies it in our soul. When we suppress the witness or truth of the Spirit of God, we not only block the transmission of God to our heart through the Scripture, we block the truths it attempts to have us embody. Things like living our neighbor as ourselves. In this way the message of God never fully downloads into us like an attachment on the message sent in the transmission.  To receive the message perfectly we must be attuned to it not fiddling with other knobs in our lives. If we do tinker too much with our tuning mechanism, we can end up out of phase. Unreceptive. What we then discharge out to others is a distortion of the original message. A distortion of a distortion. A bad copy of a bad copy. Interference. This can turn others off to the original message we were meant to send out.

We cannot send the message if we alienate the recipients. We cannot have the receiver of the message receive it if the receiver is shut off. If we turned the receiver off to the message. We push the receiver so far away it cannot pick up the signal sent from the broadcast source. We act as a carrier signal of the broadcast. If our actions push the receiver too far away the message never reaches them. They can therefore not rebroadcast to other receivers in a self-perpetuating chain of broadcast and rebroadcast. A series of announcement and transmission.

God is the highest frequency that can get through. Sometime he chooses to use the direct method but this can overpower the receiver. Blow it out. Unless it is acclimated or strengthened to deal with the increased power it can be overwhelmed or stunned. No, He often He chooses to send his message through a lower frequency through a lower line of transfer but still powered by the Spirit. If the message gets diluted or attenuated it can easily be lost in the static. It then needs a repeater that increases the power of a signal and retransmits it, allowing it to travel further. Since it amplifies the signal, it constantly requires a continued source of power. The Spirit. The Scriptures. Reamplifying, repeating, reiterating.

The receiver needs to be tuned the right frequency. It needs to be tuned within the correct bandwidth.  There is a possibility that there will be resistance within each receiver to the message. So, the only way to overcome the resistance and increase possibility of reception is by opening more channels to the source of transmission.

Obstacles will cause our receiving frequency to oscillate causing the receivers behavior to fluctuate also. Is the message wrong or the message being distorted? We’ll need to scan the Scriptures and the world to verify whether the message has come through true or in error. We need to analyze the things we hear coming from God to assure they’re actually coming from God and not a counterfeit broadcast source. A pirated or hijacked wavelength. We’ll need to do the same when hearing the messages from earthly origins. From human origins not just divine.

Above all we’ll need to maintain radio silence on the correct frequency until we hear the needed incoming transmissions. An open channel on a two-way radio. Once received we will need to relay it to others in the same way we received it leaving nothing out for fear of altering the intent of the communication. New units will hear and possibly record for later use or to echo the original. Resonating in the earpiece of another.

An SOS sent out. A message of salvation returned. Repeated over and over. The Gospel. An eternal broadcast for the right receiver at the right place at the right time and for those with ears to hear. As long as they’re tuned to the correct frequency.

<….I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures><over>

<message received> <over>

<Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age> <over>

<message received> <over>

<It is finished> <over>

October 30, 2020

Election 2020: Cracks In The Foundation

I have always sought to unify not divide. But we live in a divided nation. I have always sought to avoid politics on my site but everything has been politicized. So I will present my view. I have also never minced words about President Trump. I was somewhat vocal about my dislike of Donald Trump’s character early on in 2015 and never overtly supported him. I still often reserve comment because mentioning him 'triggers' people. Once they get spun up, few can listen with open minds. During the course of his term I have seen actions that have continually led me to believe he's still a narcissist and a misogynist that objectifies women. Indeed, he still comes off as detestable at times and his outbursts are at best unpresidential, petty or petulant. But…

I have also watched him follow through on campaign promises. I thought he was merely grandstanding for votes to win an election. Things that actually mattered. Of paramount importance has been his open support of pro-lifers and efforts to defund Planned Parenthood much to the consternation of murderers nationwide. They ask if my vote can be swayed by one issue. Yes, abortion. In addition, he’s tried to assure the sovereignty of the United States. National sovereignty that sanctuary cities in sanctuary states have undermined. We had a booming economy until the farce that was the COVID shutdown killed many state’s revenue. In truth, his policies have been friendly to Christians and people of faith in general. But…

I also need to admit I do not fully understand professed Christians that can or will vote unabashedly for the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ticket in the coming days. They have been informed of the deceptions of the Biden CCP connections and it doesn’t matter. A large portion of the media will not cover the outing of the Biden family by an old business partner Tony Bobulinski and the duplicitous Quid Pro Quo of the former Vice President. Quid Pro Quo...the very thing the entire Democratic party tried to pin on a sitting president through the charade and political theater of impeachment. An impeachment covered ad absurdium by a complicit media. These Christians will vote for these two anyway and it may become a contested election. I understand the non-believer with their seared minds (Romans 1) but I do not get proclaimed Christians doing the same. Unless those claiming citizenship in God's Kingdom aren't of the Kingdom.

The Christians that voted for Biden/Harris know Biden's and Harris’ monstrous voting record on abortion and/or partial birth abortion. Harris’ position is especially heinous being a woman willing to kill a child in her own womb as her right while hypocritically denying rights to that murdered child. At least Biden has a logistical out by being a man and deferring to a woman’s choice. Yet, off the 'Christian' voter will go and vote for the very people that promise them the world and will take the entire world away from them through legislation, executive actions and judiciary manipulation via packing a court. 

A willingness to manipulate the system to their favor just as they do with the truth. The Democrats have clearly asserted themselves to be a godless party. They even went as far as to remove ‘Under God’ from the Democratic National Convention in 2020. In God’s place they’ve supplanted themselves (in socialism / communism the State replaces God). In so doing they have literally taken on Romans 1 as the platform for their run for the White House. At least Trump feigns being Christian by appealing to the Christian base and makes Christian-like statements at times backed with reinforcing action (as with Planned Parenthood). Biden and Harris will feign no such pretense.

In truth I expected the godless (depraved) to subscribe to this philosophy but I never imagined a 'Christian' voter would take up the banner. What’s worse is that there are some orthodox churches jumping ship into the Romans 1 party too. Otherwise sound Reformed churches have succumbed to the Social Justice movement based on Liberation Theology started by Gustavo Gutiérrez (Roman Catholic priest, Peru). The theological mentor of the current socialist Pope (Francis). Socialists that are in fact Dialectic Materialists. If socialists were honest adherents to their own socialist philosophies, they would acknowledge their belief system is atheistic and godless (self-contradicting). But they’re not honest. They’re being disingenuous or they're deceived. If they do understand the philosophical foundations of their belief, they’re deceivers. If they don’t understand, then they’re deceived. Either way I clearly see Satan working here in the Democratic party and with the apostate Pope. Satan is at work aiding those who would suppress the truth of Scripture. What did Romans 1 tell a true believer about events we see unfolding right now?

Romans 1 says that wrath (therefore punishment) of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness of men, who by their sin suppress the truth. They receive upon themselves the penalties of the very same decisions they make. They’re own decisions and sins come back to haunt them. Bad decision-making is its own punishment because bad decisions usually produce bad results. Higher taxes, more sexual immorality spreading more disease. They know who God is but reject Him and his truths clearly written in the Bible. In so doing they begin to undermine their own thinking processes. Logic becomes a victim or slave to their emotion. We see this all around us. Anger. Fear. Confusion. They react based on emotion instead of reasoning and thinking. Inevitably they are unable to reason their way through easily remediable moral dilemmas. They become futile in their thinking. A society of confusion ensues. A place where people can’t seem to understand what is really going. Like America in 2020. Truth becomes foreign to them. Everything shifting and always in flux. By abandoning God, they thereby abandon any basis for moral and logical absolutism. A ship tossed about on a stormy sea with no anchor or compass.

Yet many will lay claim to the truth like politicians. Many will claim wisdom but their actions will scream foolishness and stupidity. Their comments and political positions will be at odds. They will pass laws that contradict what they say. What the say will contradict what they do.

In a word: Hypocrisy.

A kingdom in conflict with itself. A kingdom divided cannot stand. It will slowly divide within and die. Sloughing off morality and truth piece by piece until nothing is left of it. Like pieces of a sandcastle being eroded by a relentless tide. By not having a cornerstone of truth under it...cracks begin to form in the foundation compromising the democratic edifice. That is what we are already seeing. A nation undermined like the a kingdom built on sand at low tide (Matthew 7:24-27). The tide is now rising and beating against the shore like a hammer of justice.

Of course, divine punishment like the power of the tide is so powerful it will act as undertow and pull us all down. One person doesn't suffer for their sin, the entire community does. Especially when the sinner is the leader. People will pursue the lusts of their hearts into impurity or insanity. People misuse their bodies because they exchange the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve the creature (themselves). They will self-idolize. This is why when a man attempts to elevate himself to God’s level he is always cut down (Adam/Eve, Tower of Babel, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod the Great, Antichrist). It literally is the clearest form of idolatry. It is also the purest example of Romans 1. We will idolize ourselves or love images of beings identical to us…instead of God. Stars. Heroes. Champions....idols. With no God, there will be no truth as truth is…absolute. If no absolute definitive truth exists then all truths can be true or nothing can be true. Both scenarios self-negating. It is madness…an ever-circling dog chasing its tale or returning to its own vomit.

If God does not exist everything is permitted. ~The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880

A debased mind cannot reason or arrive at an answer that makes sense. The conclusions that a debased mind does arrive at are either contradictory or folly. He is therefore deemed a fool. No agreements with those that do not think the way they do will be possible because there can be no agreement on words: Love, Hate, Tolerance. Never mind big ideas formed from words: Theology, Socialism, Fascism, RacismEntire party platforms become the ‘Big Lie’ as coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. A lie so enormous that no one would believe that someone could have the audacity to distort the truth so disgracefully. The Big Lie…

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. ~Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany

This should give everyone pause and give rational people a wakeup call. A call to action.

“The State” needs to “...use all of its powers to repress dissent…”

“…truth is the mortal enemy of the lie”

Therefore, 'by extension the truth is the enemy of the State' that seeks to repress the truth by propagating a lie in its place.

How is there any difference right now between Joseph Goebbels’ statement and what a majority of the media and social media outlets are doing? Except for a handful or sources like Epoch Times and Andy Ngo at the Post-Millennial most are in the tank for one specific ideology or the other. Twitter and Facebook literally suppressed the Hunter Biden story last week. I see no difference anymore between Goebbels statement and the current media blitz in the days leading to the 2020 United States election.

The goal: Distortion of truth. Into the vacuum of political chaos steps those who will then manufacture a new truth or the big lie (Antichrist). A person who does not stand for absolute truth will fall victim to any statement. When you have half the people who know the truth of God/absolutism and half who do not have the truth of God/relativism you will have a sharply divided conflict. The endgame of distorted truth is conflict. A war is arising between absolutism (God) and relativism (Satan).

The only way I can make sense of all this chaos is that the hate of the president’s personality or persona overrides a desire to vote in favor of his policies which in many cases are vastly more Christian than the Biden/Harris ticket that is pro-abortion, pro-gender confusion, anti-sovereignty, etc. I like quite a few of these people and other then their politics I get along with them well. I can’t attribute it to anything else. The only way I can conceive that a Christian would knowingly vote for a Democratic platform (a pro-Romans 1 platform) is that they have embraced an all-or-nothing attitude. Anything but Trump. Even if it means voting for the Devil. It the end it may be self-defeating to these Christians but getting rid of Trump is all that seems to matter. Not even truth matters in this instance. Sadly, they’re not just rejecting Trump, they’re rejecting policies that have aided Christians and saved unborn lives. The hate of the president binds them to a commitment against him. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In the case of abortion...literally. The opposing view has trouble being able to comprehend those Christians. They find it remarkable that people are being presented with the truth and they still don't believe it or refuse to budge from their position in the face evidence to the contrary.

He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’ (Luke 16:31)

People will die if they believe they are fighting for the truth. Right now, there are multiple ‘truths’ out there but only one of them can be correct. The Law of Non-Contradiction requires that fact. Therefore, truth is absolute. It really does come down to one word: Truth. Everything else falls out from that.

Pilate said to him, “Quid Est Veritas/What is truth?” ~ John 18:38

What did Jesus say the truth is?

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. ~John 14:6

In the end when it comes to this election and the love or hate of Trump, I will only say this. Trump is still a narcissist and a misogynist. He really isn’t a good person. At the same time, he is not the monster or the demon he is being made out to be. He has done some good things. Even Anthony Kapel 'Van' Jones on CNN admitted as much...and now the Progressives are calling for Van Jones' termination. As a Christian I will be voting for what the candidates have done not what they have said. As voter I am voting for policies and how a person has historically voted or performed their job. I am not voting for their personalities and private life. I have to draw that distinction. I’m voting to seat a leader over a sinful fallen nation not for a pastor over what is a holy church. We’d be wise to consider this before we pull a lever. The two candidates we are now forced to choose from are truly a revealing 'representation' of the United States populace. What these two candidates reveal about our nation is troubling and saddening. They reveal that there are cracks in the very foundation of truth, morality and our democracy. They reveal how far we have drifted from God.

October 26, 2020

Singing A Life Into Existence

In a recent post on Facebook about abortion and when life begins, I stumbled across a premise that should’ve been extremely evident yet had evaded me about the exceptional similarities between the creation of life via sperm fertilizing and egg and the creation of a life created by the binding of two adults in marital relationship. They are in essence the exact same thing.

Please allow me to explain.

I stated in my original post that life starts at conception. Specifically and scientifically at the zygote. Greek ζυγωτός zygōtos "joined" or "yoked", from ζυγοῦν zygoun "to join"). I believe there is a direct correlation to the passage about man being joined to his wife. Likewise, man will leave his parents and be cleaved προσκολληθήσεται from the root proskollaō (joined to) to his wife (Genesis 2:24, Mark 10:7).

One must leave one’s parents and join to one's spouse. Just as a sperm must leave the body of a man and reside within the woman. Israelite marriage was usually patrilocal or man continued to live in the same community or even home of the man’s parents. It was the wife who left home to join her husband. There is literally an exchange. Man would need to differentiate himself from his parents but the woman would geographically need to leave her parents. Literally, in becoming one there first needs to be division. Just as for a human embryo to produce sustainable stand-alone new life its cells must first completely divide to become independent. Yet it is still a merger of two different. Just as a marriage. Distinct from one another but unique in merger.  It was the idea that the combination was to be permanent like the merging of a seed and an egg in conception. Once together it cannot be taken apart unless death intervenes.

In both there is the assumption and evidence of something completely new…from the old. There is a genealogical continuity. A continuation and a departure. A permanency of lineage but also a diversification. Created from two differentiated individuals yet absolutely unique. New life/lives. Another very close parallel world is the Greek σύνδεσμος sundesmos or 'to stick together' in a manner in which it is nearly possible to distinguish the original components of the amalgamation. Whose identity produces such a close harmony between members joined together that one note merges seamlessly into another as notes do in music. As one letter merges together into words and then sentences in Scripture. Like one lettered nucleotide merges into another in DNA to form the genome. 

Quite literally σύνδεσμος sundesmos means to ‘sing in’. Singing…as in music. A congruence and flow of a symphony. A symphony that literally means συμ syn/sym together; synthesis and φωνή /phone meaning voice or sound. Together sound. A sound or melody caused by being together. If they’re not put together they do not form the music. In Greek medical terms it also meant that which binds together, a band of the ligaments by which the members of the human body are united together…ζυγωτός zygōtos, σύνδεσμος sundesmos and προσκολλώ proskollaō. Joined in harmony. Every time a new life is created it is as if God is singing another person into existence. Just as He spoke the Universe to fruition. Poetry in motion...literally, forever.

As the tape passes through the head of the recorder it is 'read' and converted into music or other sounds. Thus magnetic markings are 'translated' into notes. When a 'string ' of mRNA passes through the 'playing head' of a ribosome, the 'notes' which are produced are amino acids, and the 'pieces of music' which they make up are proteins. Thus DNA as the base code provides the structural framework, thus the notes of amino acids are formed into are proteins or 'pieces of music'. Douglas Hofstadter. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. (New York: Vintage Books Edition, (1980)

… the principle of repetitious recurrence pervades both the construction of coding sequences in the genome, which can be regarded as being representative of nature and musical composition which can then be regarded as the most abstract and therefore the most intellectual expression of nature.' ~Dr. Susumu Ohno, Geneticist-Beckman Institute of the City of Hope Hospital, Duarte, California (1988).

Cleaving or the joining referred to in zygōtos/proskollaō resembles weaving two threads into one new piece of cloth. Like a DNA helix. Two completely different symphonies weaving together. Also referred to as antiphony/antiphons in music. The anti/ἀντί meaning "opposite" and phone/φωνή again meaning "voice". The texts of antiphons are in the Psalms in the Old Testament. When a chant consists of alternating verses (usually sung by a cantor) and responds (usually sung by the congregation), a refrain is needed. Antiphonal music is music that is performed by two choirs in interaction, often singing alternate musical phrases. Not unlike the different interactions of a husband and wife or parent and child and the very DNA within them. Therefore, word zygōtos suggests the ideas joining passion and permanence. In marriage a man's priorities change. Before they were primarily to his parents, but now they are primarily to his wife. This can then be extended to an even larger group in community and this is called polyphony or a musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody. Within these layers can be symphony and/or antiphony. Weaving, interacting forming new creation. Like music. Like relationship. Like life. Expressive. Unique. Beautiful. I am convinced this is why music impacts people so profoundly. It is literally in our DNA.

Genesis 2:24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and join to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

A modern reader needs to realize that "one flesh" is not the same as marriage (1 Cor. 6:16). For a marriage to exist there must also be a commitment to "leave" one’s family and create a new one by joining to what is essentially a complete stranger prior to meeting. In this way it can then also be reasoned that the bond of spouse is even more functionally important than that of parent-child. Why? Because the child will essentially do the same when it is presented with the same choice at adulthood. Everything is secondary outside of the προσκολλώ proskollaō of the parents. We are only stewards of our children for a short time. At the same time though it should be understood that the child’s identity is a result of that one flesh that the union produced. The children possess a special genetic makeup and markers that identify it as unique but also carries vestiges of what constituted it before being sung together in the mother’s womb like the ligaments tying muscles to bones.

It is as if the mother and father are instruments and the children are the chords of the song. The combined notes forming more than the sum of its individual components. These individual notes make up the family. These families make communities. The community at large is a constitution of all these individual melodies. A unified communal symphony of flesh and blood. This helps us understand why a divided community causes such pandemonium. We now can see that when some of these elements become out of synch with others a cacophony occurs. Instead of harmony we only hear dissonance, discord or noise. Diverse but unified in strength. We are indeed one body yet utterly unique.

1 Corinthians 14:26 What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. Everything must be done so that the church may be built up.

October 14, 2020

A Last Great Awakening I: The Devil, Forever God's Ape

If one does a historical examination of the (Christian) Great Awakenings in the United State and Europe, a pattern slowly emerges. I am beginning to believe the Great Awakenings caused two things to happen. One helped focus society back on God. A theological re-centering. This is the view taught in all orthodox church history degrees. I also believe there was another simultaneous counterfeit revival of unorthodoxy that allowed a gradual if not imperceptible drift away from God. I believe the Church history I learned only captured half of the true picture. These incremental changes affected both religious and political thought within the nation over the last 300 years. I believe we need to analyze this thesis to understand what is taking place today in a dangerously divided America. These are not coincidences, they are indicative of existing socio-political and socio-economic conditions and the work of larger spiritual forces not easily quantified through natural means. Most have attributed these awakenings solely to the work of God. They are. I believe God allowed them. I suspect also that all the events that transpired were not of complete divine origin. There is a mixture here that needs to be shown. Not all the fallout of the awakenings were benevolent. The Devil tried to mimic and therefore mock God (1 Peter 5:8). The evil like a parasite hung on the revivals lurking in the shadow. Regardless, God worked through events to achieve His ends (Genesis 50:20).

The awakenings appear to have been cyclical. They are pointing towards something just like the Old Testament's events pointed...they point to Christ. The Old Testament point to the birth of Messiah. These Awakenings point to His return. Each awakening or revival lasted about 50-100 years in varying states of rise or fall. They are calls to repentance. This ironically parallels the cyclical nature of the Jews history in Israel. The process of: Sin-repentance-obedience. Sin-repentance-obedience ad nauseum. Second, the Great Awakenings consist of three phases, each about a generation long (30-40 years). The cycles begin with a phase of religious revival, propelled by new technological advances outpacing the human capacity to cope with ethical, moral and practical complexities that those new technologies brought.

The phase of religious revival is followed by one of rising political effect and reform, followed by a phase in which the new ethics and politics of the religious awakening come under increasing challenge and the politics promoted by the awakening goes into decline. Slowly a traditional religious orthodoxy is replaced with a ‘progressive’ movement with a diminishing moral return or erosion of righteousness. This then gives way to another revival or awakening. We see Romans 1. Given a choice man’s heart and mind are constant enmity against God. Yet God continues to draw us back to him. 

The First Great Awakening occurred around 1730 to 1830. Theologically it started with a weakening of predestination doctrine or recognition that many sinners may be predestined for salvation / condemnation. There was introduction of revival meetings emphasizing spiritual rebirth. There was also a rise of an ethos of compassion and goodwill. The rise of altruism may not have been the pure theological impetus but it is what created the change of society to look to God. Weakening of predestination allowed for the leaking of the sovereignty of God from the Church at the very same time. This allowed the ingress for liberalism to enter. The door that allows good in can also allow an enemy to enter too. Calvinism and the Puritanical belief were slowly rejected in favor of a notion that salvation was available to everybody if they worked at it.

This was consistent with the American ideal of exceptionalism. It was a time where the frontier was open and anybody who wanted could obtain land becoming relatively prosperous. Americans were asked to Manifest Destiny as a birthright. All it took was the virtues of honesty and hard work. The idea of salvation though works gained popularity even though it wasn't entirely consistent with the Bible. It was the church already beginning to cater to the culture.

This inevitably lead to the American Revolution in 1760 to 1790 because of a belief in equality of opportunity or principle that accepted the inequality of income and other circumstances of life as natural but changeable. No taxation without representation was the call-to-arms. A belief that that persons of low social rank could lift themselves up by industry, perseverance, talent, and righteous behavior. Some could even rise to the top of the economic socio-economic ladder. An affluent middle class began to emerge. What we see for nearly the first time in history is the establishment of egalitarianism as national ethos in the United States. The American ideal with all its good...and bad. Near the end of this awakening America began to wrestle with liberalization of society started in its churches and its negative political effects 1790 to 1830. A society directly impacted by the watering-down of theology in the churches. Instead of unity in the house of God, division starts. Socio-economic, socio-political discord followed in parallel with the imperceptible hairline fractures initiated in the church. The Church...made of the very people that make up society. Fractured theology assisting in the creation of a fractured society. A war of division quickly followed in 1861-1865.

For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel... Thus is the Devil ever God's ape. ~Martin Luther

The Second Great Awakening occurred approximately 1830 to 1930. Due to the downgrade of theological belief and drift from Christian orthodoxy started in the First Great Awakening we began to enter a Second Awakening. The First Great Awakening brought God back to the fore but it also brought the Devil to try and subvert God at every step. The Devil is God's monkey. The Second Great Awakening being a spiritual movement in awareness of God leading later gives way to war and subsequent repentance again in WWI. The Second Great Awakening had to do with personal salvation. The American and French Revolutions and centuries of war were still fresh on people's minds. The theory was that we were all born equal but some had not achieved their full potential. The social movements were attempts at abolition of war, discord, colonialism, slavery, temperance, women's suffrage and most of all a society of only two class, aristocracy and serfdom.

The objective was equality of opportunity. A theory of egalitarianism consistent with the new American ideal pervaded the populace...even though it is not entirely a Scriptural principle. The Bible never says that we have inalienable rights. Regardless, the belief remained that different people will achieve different levels of success due to differences in their innate nature or God given gifts. There was also a liberal belief that everybody should have an equal opportunity at the start. The Bible never promises this...the Constitution did. There was the belief that anyone can achieve saving grace through inner and outer struggle against sin; introduction of camp meetings and intensified levels of revivals; widespread adoption of an ethic of benevolence. Again, we see an honest movement towards God that was simultaneously hijack by a belief that man could somehow affect his own salvation. A nation maintained its course away from its Calvinistic/Puritan roots and accidently believed because it was wholly Constitutional it was also wholly Biblical. It wasn't. 

In terms of social politics, in approximately 1840 to 1890 America saw a rise of single-issue reform movements intending to contribute to making America more fit for the Second Coming of Christ. The belief that man could directly affect his salvation caused these. The underlying assumption was that by pushing these social agendas we were helping usher in the Kingdom of God. These included but are not limited to the nativist movement, the temperance movement and the abolitionist movement that culminated in the formation of the Republican party. This of course led to sweeping reforms aimed at eliminating all barriers to egalitarianism and equal opportunity. Although in-and-of-itself egalitarianism isn’t always a bad thing, it clearly got hijacked more and more as time progressed.

Egalitarianism helps end slavery but taken to its extreme it led to overt feminism and dismantling of the family unit/structure in the 20th century. The good that comes out of the Second Great Awakening/limited egalitarianism included antislavery and addressing moral corruption of the South. It also unfortunately led to the Civil War. As before, good comes out of the awakening but also an evil that deliberately shadows the actions meant for good. The Devil being an ape. This then leads to the transitional period between the second and third awakenings of  about 1860s to late 1910s that sees the replacement of pre-war evangelical leaders with a shift towards unorthodox liberal theology. Midway through this revival it also sees the rise of what is termed Fundamentalism which was a rejoinder against liberal theology in Europe and America.

This unbiblical shift to extreme egalitarianism led to the massive tectonic theological shift away from the supernatural elements within traditional orthodox Christianity. The liberal theology movement of the late 19th century sought to demythologize the Bible or remove the supernatural elements in the Bible to make it dovetail better with empirical scientific evidence. To move it away from what the late 19th century philosophers viewed as its ‘unbelievability’ and align it to the enlightened, evolutionary and scientific viewpoint. A view that, ironically, had begun to surface in the Enlightenment as a retaliation to centuries of religious wars. Liberal Theology like the Enlightenment sought to remove God from His throne and enshrine human knowledge and reason instead. The irony of Enlightenment or light…being that it is the primary characteristic of Lucifer…the Angel of Light (2 Corinthians 11:14). All these events leading to the imperceptible but inexorable slide away from theological orthodoxy. These liberal ideas appear to have started with Friedrich Schleiermacher and were further spread by the German schools of thought via biblical higher criticisms like the Wellhausen Theory/Documentary Hypothesis. A hypothesis that attempts to refute the truths of Scripture. This slide away from Biblical Christianity was aided by Darwinian evolution and the profound effects of the Enlightenment spread worldwide by French, British and subsequently American influence.

Did this affect all of the Church negatively? Of course not. There was still a remnant of people that were completely Biblical and orthodox in their Christian beliefs. What it did profoundly affect is the orthodox churches influence on society. With less biblical orthodoxy (truth) to positively influence the world as salt and light we see a slow degradation of morality in society. The lack of Christian influence on the world after the Great Falling Away from orthodoxy into liberal theology in the late 19th Century portends the darkest evils humanity will ever face in the 20th century. The 20th Century in which we will see atrocities, crimes against humanity in World Wars and mass deaths under godless fascist and communist regimes.

{completed in Part II}

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