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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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>