THE ARIAN HERESY

 

In a recent edition of a Christian blog, actually my favorite, one post lamented the result of a poll taken of Evangelicals. When questioned about some key theological issues, the respondents indicated that they showed a distressingly shallow understanding of the Bible and the God whom it presents to mankind.

This apparent revelation comes as no surprise to me. For decades our collective understanding of Scripture has moved toward the superficial. In fact, the author of the post claimed that a majority of Evangelicals have gone off the reservation into actual heresy.

That’s no news to me either. Or to many of my peers. One only has to witness the number of television preachers with huge audiences who attempt rather successfully to peddle prosperity, self-improvement and positive-thinking messages to their gullible followers to gain a graphic understanding of wholesale misdirection of the true Christian message that is taking place.

After reciting some generalities, the author of the post zeroed in on what he thought was the most egregious of the Scriptural violations: the Arian Heresy, which seems to be enjoying a revival of sorts. A full seventy-eight percent of Evangelical Christians, the author claimed, subscribe to that particular heresy. He went on to define the heresy itself. According to him, the Arian Heresy asserts that Jesus was a created Being.

I wish to take exception to both the author’s definition of the Arian heresy and his claim that it is heretic. In addition, I would ask the author to go back and research more thoroughly what the heresy actually consisted of. To the readers of this blog, I present below my own take on it.

The Alexandrian priest Arius (256-336) became involved in a very heated controversy over the deity of Jesus Christ, particularly during the debates at the Council of Nicaea, convened by the emperor Constantine in 325 A.D. Arius did indeed claim that Jesus was a created Being, but that wasn’t the real issue. Jesus, identifying Himself in His message to the Laodicean Church, Revelation 3:14, claimed to have been created:

“And to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write, These things says the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God:”

The actual heresy was what Arius inferred from that fact, which was that Jesus, having been created, was less than God. Arius violated common sense – Jesus’ origin as the Son of God in no way diminishes His status as God. The two issues aren’t even connected. Arius should have understood that just by perceiving from history the numerous examples of children who have surpassed their parents in greatness. The time factor simply doesn’t have anything to do with personal attributes. Given the Holy Father’s ability to do anything He wishes, it’s not a stretch to understand that He certainly possesses the wherewithal to create a Being equal to Himself.

Moreover, time itself didn’t begin until the Creation.

The Arian position was rejected as heresy at the Council of Nicaea, which initiated the ill-advised concept, intrinsic to the Nicean Creed and more overtly in the Athanasian Creed, that the three Members of the Trinity co-existed from all eternity. These creeds asserted further that none within the Holy Trinity were created, in effect throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It should be noted that at that time those attending the council of Nicea were fed up with the constant bickering over these issues and were motivated to shut the lid the debate once and for all. In my opinion, they behaved rashly and quite inaccurately. It should also be noted that the creeds are extra-biblical; as such they don’t necessarily enjoy the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture in the original autographs.

The author of the blog’s misidentification of the Arian Heresy is but one facet of the post-Nicean Church’s transformation of a natural and intuitive understanding of God into a complex, confusing and self-contradictory view of God. Count me in as one of the seventy-eight percent of evangelicals who participate in the heresy as defined by the author.

ARGUMENTS BASED ON FALSE PREMISES

 

If we’ve managed to shove the 800-pound “He”-issue gorilla out the door, there’s still a few 200-pound gorillas lurking in the corners of the room.

Scriptural references to gender neutrality: Two such references stand out in particular: Galatians 3:28, which declares that in the spiritual realm humans are neither male nor female, and Matthew 22:30, in which Jesus asserts that in the resurrection, men and women neither marry nor are given in marriage. These passages are frequently interpreted as declaring that the realm of God in heaven is genderless.

The obvious alternative interpretation, which also is a more logical one, is that while individual humans aren’t gendered in the spiritual realm, their aggregate, as the Church, is indeed gendered, that gender being female. Paul himself, in describing spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, depicts spiritual humans as components of the church, likening them to body parts such as ears. Body parts of themselves are not gendered. In the material realm, the exercise of gender requires a multitude of body parts, including the mind, interacting in close cooperation. Scripture indicates that this is precisely how gender works in the spiritual realm. That being the likely case, the Scriptural references noted above make no statement whatsoever about a supposed lack of gender in the spiritual realm.

Wisdom associated with the Holy Father as a personal attribute: To those who consider the Godhead to be either masculine or genderless, the intra-Godhead bond is seen in somewhat similar terms to that which may be found in a corporate boardroom. In that context, in Jeremiah 10:12, where God describes His creation as being made by His power and wisdom, those descriptors are naturally interpreted as His personal attributes.

But there is an alternate interpretation that not only makes more logical sense, but is beautifully descriptive. In that alternate interpretation which again is obvious, the Father and Holy Spirit are considered to be a tightly-bonded couple, each possessing the other in a romantic relationship. Under that alternate understanding, the Holy Spirit, along with Her attributes of Wisdom and Power, are naturally seen as an intimately-loved possession of the Father, and therefore belong to Him as part of Him in the same context as Adam’s understanding of Eve and his description of two joining to become one.

The personification of Wisdom in Proverbs is often interpreted as simply a literary device: Those who would deny the femininity of the Holy Spirit correspondingly deny the Personhood of Wisdom. Instead, they view the feminine voice of Wisdom in Proverbs as a literary embellishment of the wisdom of God.

An alternate and more reasonable interpretation exists here as well. It is supported by Jesus Himself who in Luke 7:35, in opposition to the interpretation of wisdom as a mere literary device, confers motherhood on Wisdom. Motherhood is an eminently personal attribute, was well as being a hallmark of femininity. Jesus more emphatically personifies wisdom in Luke 11:49 and 50, having Her speak and perform actions.

Femininity is viewed as inappropriate to Godhood: This slanderous, misogynistic rebuke of womanhood is surprisingly common among theologians. Paul’s commentary in 1 Corinthians 14 on the role of women in Church (“it is a shame for women to speak in the church”) is often taken as justification for this view.

Given Paul’s beautiful description of the future spiritual woman, the Church, in Ephesians 5, and his friendship with many women and use of them in Church activities, his probable intent with regard to womanhood is much more benign than the usual interpretation of this passage would suggest.

My view in opposition to that stance attributed to Paul, as I had noted in Marching to a Worthy Drummer, sees Eve’s error in the Garden as a transgression on her proper role as a type of the feminine Holy Spirit by failing to limit her responsive role to that of the will of either her husband Adam or of the Holy Father. In that context, Paul’s commentary in 1 Corinthians 14 actually supports a feminine Holy Spirit.

God is above the passion that a gendered Godhead would suggest: This view arose from the attempt to purify the Church of all sexuality. It was supported by Augustine and other Church Fathers and, centuries later, was formalized by medieval cleric Jerome Zanchius in his tome on Absolute Predestination. This work consulted very little, if any, Scripture.

Scripture itself provides a rich source of alternate viewpoints, all of which endow God with passion, including love, possession, anger and sorrow. Examples include Exodus 32:10, Hosea 1, Matthew 19, 21, 23 and 26, and Luke 24. Jesus’ response to the Pharisees in Matthew 19 indicated a familiarity beyond His human form with love and its implications regarding inter-gender relationships. He was fully aware of the passionate nature of the marital bond and went so far as to claim (Matthew 19:6) that the source of the bond was God Himself.

The grammatical “she” in the Hebrew language does not necessarily indicate femininity: There has been much ado made by deniers of femininity in the Godhead about the fact that some objects are given feminine designators when no actual femininity is involved. The situation here is similar to the standard practice in English of calling a genderless object such as a ship “she”.

This argument would typically apply to objects, but not to sentient beings such as humans or Members of our Trinitarian God. If indeed the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs did not refer to an actual Person but was simply a literary device, then this argument might apply. But, as already noted, the Holy Spirit is indeed a Person within the Godhead.

Moreover, the gender distinction in Hebrew (the original versions of the manuscripts) is more rigidly applied in the modifiers, which very often define the Holy Spirit as feminine. This important point is often overlooked by those who would claim that a noun in Hebrew doesn’t necessarily depict gender.

The bottom line is that for every argument of which I am aware that calls into question the femininity of the Holy Spirit there is at least one alternate explanation, often considerably more reasonable than the original argument, that negates the argument itself and supports the notion of a feminine Holy Spirit. Furthermore, where the argument references Scripture, the rebuttal also appeals to Scripture.

As I review these arguments I find myself thinking of those responsible for establishing and maintaining Church doctrine in terms of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. Did the Jews get it wrong in refusing to see Jesus as God? So did we in refusing to see the Holy Spirit as the feminine complement of the Father.

THE “HE” ISSUE

 

Something’s definitely wrong about the Church’s current understanding of the Holy Spirit. A recent poll of evangelicals revealed that 68% of us consider the Holy Spirit to be an impersonal force, indicating the shallowness of a large group of Christians that would permit the movie Star Wars to influence their perception of God to such an extent. But shallowness isn’t the only culprit. Theologians with advanced degrees in Divinity admit to being stumped by the nature of the Holy Spirit.

The problem is at once both simpler and more profound than confusion or shallowness of thought. The primary source of our misapprehension of the Holy Spirit has been with us for a very long time and is our presupposition, inculcated by the Church herself, that the Holy Spirit is either genderless or weakly masculine.

With regard to the common perception of the Holy Spirit’s masculinity, the enormous gorilla in the room is the use, in virtually all translations and versions of the Bible, of masculine pronouns in reference to the Holy Spirit.

Examples of this include John 14:16, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7 and 8 and 13-15, and Hebrews 3:7 and 10:15, although some verses reference the Holy Spirit as neuter. These references constitute the most common argument against a feminine Holy Spirit.

The most likely reason for all those “he”s in the Bible is the certainty that the Bible we use today does not represent the original. While I believe that the original autographs of Scripture are inspired and inerrant, I don’t extend that trust to the various translations and versions that are available to us today. There is ample reason to suspect that a gender switch took place around the time of Constantine under the misguided motive of purifying the heavenly domain from all connotations of sexuality. Many well-known Church Fathers at that time have conveyed, through their writings, their repulsion of matters involving gender and their equation of purity with chastity.

We know that the Hebrew name of Spirit, ruah, is feminine, while the Greek equivalent is neuter and the Latin equivalent is masculine. These language-based gender differences may partially account for the gender switch in the translations. The more likely scenario, unpleasant as it may be to consider, is that the switch was deliberate. The Jewish religion had, for the most part, viewed the Holy Spirit as feminine, as did a large group of early Christians, as demonstrated by the femininity of the Holy Spirit in the Syriac Scriptures. In addition, the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the original writing of which is thought to be close or identical to the Gospel that Paul taught from, depicts Jesus in John 14:26 as describing the Holy Spirit as feminine.

There are multiple reasons why it is thought that the switch was deliberate: first, the neuter description of the Arm of the Lord in Isaiah 51:9 and 10 is known to be a deliberate switch from the feminine; second is the motive: the prevailing sexual debauchery of the secular society surrounding the Christian community led the Christian leaders to set the Church apart in perfect purity, even to the extent that motivated some early Christian males to attempt to castrate themselves. Sometimes, as was possibly the case with Origen (according to Eusebius), the attempt was successful. Many of the early Church Fathers, including Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Ambrose of Milan, and, most famously, Augustine, vehemently equated purity with chastity. Some of them were misogynistic as well. Supporting that urge to switch genders was the pressure of numerous heresies that confronted the early Church. One important threat to the Church was Gnosticism, which favored a femininity of the Holy Spirit. The heresies embraced by the Gnostics placed their belief in a feminine Holy Spirit, which was common to Jewish faith and early Christian expressions in general, in disrepute. The rejection of gender in God seems to have been a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The switch to the masculinity of the Holy Spirit was probably complete around the time of Constantine.

It’s a matter of concern to me how reluctant the Church leadership has been throughout the past several centuries to see God in the light of His Word rather than blindly adhering to Church doctrine in the face of Scriptural passages that are inconsistent with dogma. There are plenty of indications in Scripture, even in the versions we use today, to support the femininity of the Holy Spirit in opposition to the use of male pronounce in reference to Her. All it takes to see this is scripturally-compatible eyes.

We revere Christians of the past who had the insight and courage to reform the Church in the face of the corruption that attended her political power. But these Church Greats were human just like the rest of us. None of them was perfect, nor were their insights complete. Martin Luther, for example, was a rabid anti-Semite; he also thought that Jesus had an affair with Mary Magdalene. Those who are inclined to avoid any questioning of the Bible as it stands now should apply that same inclination to Luther, who lashed out against the Book of James and supported the removal of the Book of Wisdom and others from the Protestant canon of Scripture.

SEA STORY

 

Going back in time from the revolutionary period of our history, those who look for them can find many examples of God’s Hand, both positive and negative, in the affairs of the American political experiment in freedom.

Why negative? Because that’s how God operates, as He has told us numerous times. In Deuteronomy 11:26-26-28, for example, Moses told the Israelites who had left Egypt with him:

“Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse; A blessing if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day: And a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you this day, to go after other gods, which ye have not known.”

This admonition applies to every Christian today just as much as to the Israelites whom Moses addressed back then. It applied as well throughout the American experience. According to the authors of The Light and the Glory, it took only one or two generations after they landed before the pilgrims, in experiencing an increasing ease of existence, began to fall away from their daily devotion to God. At first the chastising was mild, and quickly returned to blessing as the people heeded the correction:

“Perhaps the most extraordinary chastisement in this vein was the rain of caterpillars which Winthrop reported in the summer of 1646. ‘Great harm was done in corn (especially wheat and barley) in this month by a caterpillar, like a black worm about an inch and a half long. They eat up first the blades of the stalk, then they eat up the tassels, whereupon the ear withered. It was believed by divers good observers that they fell in a great thunder shower, for divers yards and other bare places where not one of them was seen an hour before, were presently after the shower almost covered with them, besides grass places where they were not so easily discerned. They did the most harm in the southern parts, as in Rhode Island, etc., and in the eastern parts in their Indian corn. In divers places the churches kept a day of humiliation, and presently after, the caterpillars vanished away.’”

God also is a champion of justice, particularly when mixed with compassion. There are several Old Testament references to how God prefers justice and mercy over lip service to Him. One example is found in Hosea 6:6; another in Isaiah 58:6 and 7:

“For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”

“Is not this the fast that I have chosen- to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to deal your bread to the hungry, and that you bring the poor that are cast out to your house? When you see the naked, that you cover him; and that you hide not yourself from your own flesh?”

Jesus repeated these sentiments in Matthew 12:7 while He explained to the

Pharisees how much more important it is to show mercy, even on the sabbath, than to participate in spiritually empty adherence to the law:

“But if you had known what this means, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless.”

It is much more fun to describe blessings than curses, and justice served rather than justice denied. Here is a good sea story, also taken from The Light and the Glory regarding that time period in America’s history:

“Our favorite of these sea stories involves two ships in distress. The first, under the mastery of William Laiton, was out of Piscataqua and bound for Barbados, when, some thousand miles off the coast, she sprang a leak which could not be staunched. He crew was forced to take refuge in their longboat. It happened that they had a plentiful supply of bread, more than they could possibly eat, but so little water that after eighteen days of drifting, they were down to a teaspoon per man per day. Meanwhile, another ship, captained by one Samuel Scarlet, was having its own difficulties, being ‘destitute of provisions, only they had water enough, and to spare.’ The spied the drifting longboat, but as Scarlet made ready to take them aboard, his men ‘. . .desired that he would not go to take the men in, lest they should all die by famine. But the captain was a man of too generous a charity to follow the selfish proposals thus made unto him. He replied, “It may be these distressed creatures are our own countrymen, and [anyway] they are distressed creatures. I am resolved I will take them in, and I’ll trust in God, who is able to deliver us all.” Nor was he a loser by this charitable resolution, for Captain Scarlet had the water which Laiton wanted, and Mr. Laiton had the bread and fish which Scarlet wanted. So they refreshed one another, and in a few days arrived safe to New England. But it was remarked that the chief of the mariners who urged Captain Scarlet against his taking in these distressed people, did afterwards, in his distress at sea, perish without any to take him in.’”

AND HE DID THAT WHICH WAS EVIL . . .

 

When Israel was torn from Judah after Solomon’s reign, its leadership failed to follow God, giving rise to a familiar litany regarding its kings, as is exemplified in 2 Kings 13:2a:

“And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.”

This litany is frequently accompanied by the mention of King Jeroboam of Israel as being a prominent example of evildoing. What did Jeroboam do to so thoroughly offend God? According to 1 Kings 12 and 13, he made two golden calves, reminiscent of what Aaron did to evoke the wrath of God when Moses remained in communication with God on Mount Sinai; he also set up altars for the worship of these abominations in two cities of Israel. In Exodus 22:20, God made plain His displeasure with that practice:

“He that sacrificeth to any god, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed.”

Moreover, he set up as priests people of poor character, unqualified for that office, and who were actively and deliberately disobedient to God.

This accusation of God against the leaders of Israel sounds strangely familiar. We now have a man sitting in the office of the president of the United States who refuses to personally participate in a national day of prayer, who has removed all evidence of our Judeo-Christian God from the venues that he selects to speak to the American public, who celebrates, the Muslim feast of Ramadan at the White House to the exclusion of similar Jewish and Christian observances, who grants sanctuary to Muslim refugees from the Mideast to the exclusion of persecuted Christian refugees from that area, and, in general, exhibits at best a cold indifference and, behind the scenes, a teeth-gnashing hostility against our Christian God.

This hostility is evidenced by the individuals of poor character whom he has selected to oversee his interests in matters of government related to the public worship of God: Mikey Weinstein, who, as overseer of chaplains in our armed forces, has prohibited at the threat of court-martial mention by a chaplain of the name of Jesus Christ; Loretta Lynch, who as United States Attorney General has promoted laws regarding the gay and transsexual agendas in opposition to the Word of God, and the punishment of Christians who attempt to hold fast to their faith in response to these new and obscene laws; the White House staff and advisors, who actively work to marginalize Christians; and Hillary Clinton, who as Secretary of State has supported, through her work and example, the undermining of the nobility so closely associated with the Jewish and Christian faiths.

It wouldn’t surprise me if God has already written Obama’s epitaph:

“And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.”

A SPEECH AMERICA NEEDS TO HEAR AGAIN

[Note: this is a rare case where I’ve posted the same article on multiple blog sites.  It’s just too good, and too relevant not to.]  

I’m a packrat. My wife finally convinced me to make it easier on the kids by tossing out all the old papers and memorabilia that’s been accumulating in the garage for several decades.

“Do you think the kids will want to read all this when we’re gone?” she asked pointedly. “Nah, I replied. It’ll just go into a black garbage bag, and from there to the dump.”

“You’re right. Now I have another question. Do you think that you’ll ever want to read it yourself, particularly when, I’d guess within another five or ten years, you won’t remember your own name?”

I didn’t answer. I just did it. But in going through the odd scraps of paper, I came across a copy I’d retrieved from the Internet of actor Charlton Heston’s 1999 speech as then-president of the National Rifle Association to a group of Harvard Law students. As I reread it, I was moved by how his words came down across the years as more relevant to our own time than to his.

His speech follows:

“I remember my son when he was five, explaining to his kindergarten class what his father did for a living.

“’My Daddy,’ he said, ‘pretends to be people.’

“There have been quite a few of them. Prophets from the Old and New Testaments, a couple of Christian saints, generals of various nationalities and different centuries, several kings, three American presidents, a French cardinal and two geniuses, including Michelangelo. If you want the ceiling repainted, I’ll do my best.

“It’s just that there always seems to be a lot of different fellows up here. I’m never sure which one of them gets to talk. Right now, I guess I’m the guy. As I pondered our visit tonight it struck me: if my Creator gave me the gift to connect you with the hearts and minds of those great men, then I want to use that same gift now to re-connect you with you own sense of liberty – your own freedom of thought – your own compass for what is right.

“Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America, ‘We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure’ Those words are true again – I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that’s about to hijack your birthright to think and say what lives in your heart. I fear you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you – the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the miracle that it is.

“Let me back up a little. About a year ago I became president of the National Rifle Association, which protects the right to keep and bear arms. I ran for office, I was elected, and now I serve – I serve as a moving target for the media who’ve called me everything from ‘ridiculous’ and ‘duped’ to a’brain-injured, senile, crazy old man.’ I know, I’m pretty old – but I sure Lord ain’t senile.

“As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I’ve realized that firearms are not the only issue. No, it’s much, much bigger than that. I’ve come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated.

“For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 – long before Hollywood found it fashionable. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else’s pride, then called me a racist.

“I’ve worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe.

“Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh.

“From Time magazine to friends and colleagues, they’re essentially saying, ‘Chuck, how dare you speak your mind like that? You are using language not authorized for public consumption!’ But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we’d still be King George’s boys – subjects bound to the British crown.

“In his book The End of Sanity, Martin Gross writes that ‘blatantly irrational behavior is rapidly being established as the norm in almost every area of human endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules, new anti-intellectual theories regularly focused on us from every direction. Underneath, the nation is roiling. Americans know something without a name is undermining the country, turning the mind mushy when it comes to separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong. And they don’t like it.’

“Let me read a few examples. At Antioch College in Ohio, young men seeking intimacy with a coed must get verbal permission at each step of the process from kissing to petting to final copulation – all clearly spelled out in a printed college directive. In New Jersey, despite the death of several patients nationwide who had been infected by dentists who had concealed their AIDS, the state commissioner announced that health providers who are HIV-positive need not – need not – tell their patients that they are infected. At William and Mary, students tried to change the name of the school team ‘The Tribe’ because it was supposedly insulting to local Indians, only to learn that the authentic Virginia chiefs truly like the name. In San Francisco, city fathers passed an ordinance protecting the rights of transvestites to cross-dress on the job, and for transsexuals to have separate toilet facilities while undergoing sex change surgery. In New York City, kids who don’t speak a word of Spanish have been placed in bilingual classes to learn their three Rs in Spanish solely because their last names sound Hispanic. At the University of Pennsylvania, in a state where thousands died at Gettysburg opposing slavery, the president of that college officially set up segregated dormitory space for black students.

“Yeah, I know – that’s out of bounds now. Dr. King said ‘negroes’. Jimmy Baldwin and most of us on the march said ‘black’. But it’s a no-no now. For me, hyphenated identities are awkward – particularly ‘Native-American’. I’m a native American, for God’s sake. I also happen to be a blood-initiated brother of the Miniconjou Sioux. On my wife’s side, my grandson is a thirteenth generation native American – with the capital letter on ‘American’. Finally, just last month . . . David Howard, head of the Washington D.C. Office of Public Advocate, used the word ‘niggardly’ while talking to colleagues about budgetary matters. Of course, ‘niggardly’ means stingy or scanty. But within days Howard was forced to publicly apologize and resign. As columnist Tony Snow wrote: ‘David Howard got fired because some people in public employ were morons who (a) didn’t know the meaning of ‘niggardly’, (b) didn’t know how to use a dictionary to discover the meaning, and (c) actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance.’

“What does all this mean? It means that telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can’t be far behind. Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: why did political correctness originate on America’s campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who’re supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression? Let’s be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really believe?

“That scares me to death. It should scare you too, that the superstition of political correctness rules the halls of reason. You are the best and the brightest. You, here in the fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you are the cream. But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that and abide by it, you are – by your grandfathers’ standards – cowards.

“Here’s another example. Right now at more than one major university, Second Amendment scholars are researchers are being told to shut up about their findings or they’ll lose their jobs. Why? Because their research findings would undermine big-city mayors’ pending lawsuits that seek to extort hundreds of millions of dollars from firearm manufacturers. I don’t care what you think about guns. But if you are not shocked at that, I am shocked at you. Who will guard the raw material of unfettered ideas, if not you? Democracy is dialogue! Who will defend the core value of academia, if you supposed soldiers of free thought and expression lay down your arms and plead ‘Don’t shoot me.’

“If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does not make you anti-religion. If you accept but don’t celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe. Don’t let America’s universities continue to serve as incubators for this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism.

“But what can you do? How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation? The answer’s been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people. You simply – disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely. But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don’t. We disobey social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom.

“I learned the awesome power of disobedience from Dr. King, who learned it from Gandhi, and Thoreau, and Jesus, and every other great man who led those in the right against those with the might. Disobedience is in our DNA. We feel innate kinship with that disobedient spirit that tossed tea into Boston Harbor, that sent Thoreau to jail, that refused to sit in the back of the bus, that protested a war in Viet Nam. In that same spirit, I am asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives and onerous laws that weaken personal freedom.

“But be careful – it hurts. Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots of balconies. You must be willing to be humiliated – to endure the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs at Montgomery and the water cannons at Selma. You must be willing to experience discomfort. I’m not complaining, but my own decades of social activism have left their mark on me.

“Let me tell you a story. A few years back I heard about a rapper named Ice-T who was selling a CD called ‘Cop Killer’ celebrating ambushing and murdering police officers. It was being marketed by none other than Time/Warner, the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world. Police across the country were outraged. Rigthfully so – at least one had been murdered. But Time/Warner was stonewalling because the CD was a cash cow for them, and the media were tiptoeing around it because the rapper was black. I heard Time/Warner had a stockholders meeting scheduled in Beverly Hills. I owned some shares at the time, so I decided to attend. What I did there was against the advice of my family and colleagues. I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of ‘Cop Killer’ – every vicious, vulgar, instructional word.

“’I GOT MY 12 GUAGE SAWED OFF I GOT MY HEADLIGHTS TURNED OFF I’M ABOUT TO BUST SOME SHOTS OFF I’M ABOUT TO DUST SOME COPS OFF. . .’ It got worse, a lot worse. I won’t read the rest of it to you. But trust me, the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces. The Time/Warner executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their shoes. They hated me for that. Then I delivered another volley of sick lyric brimming with racist filth, where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing two 12-year-old nieces of Al and Tipper Gore. ‘SHE PUSHED HER BUTT AGAINST MY . . .’ Well, I won’t do to you here what I did to them. Let’s just say I left the room in echoing silence. When I read the lyrics to the waiting press corps, one of them said ‘We can’t print that.’ ‘I know,’ I replied, ‘but Time/Warner’s selling it.’

“Two months later, Time/Warner terminated Ice-T’s contract. I’ll never be offered another film by Warners, or get a good review from Time magazine. But disobedience means you must be willing to act, not just talk. When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself, jam the switchboard of the district attorney’s office. When your university is pressured to lower standards until eighty percent of the students graduate with honors, chock the halls of the board of regents. When and eight-year-old boy pecks a girl’s cheek on the playground and gets hauled into court for sexual harassment, march on that school and block its doorways. When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you, petition them, oust them, banish them. When Time magazine’s cover portrays millennium nuts as deranged, crazy Christians holding a cross as it did last month, boycott their magazine and the products it advertises.

“So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobediences of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God’s grace, built this country.

“If Dr. King were here, I think he’d agree. Thank you.”

It is a given that it is ultimately God who emplaces the world leaders. But remember one thing: while the great prophet Daniel submitted to Nebudchadnezzar’s secular lordship over him, he refused to worship him. To that dictate he was willingly disobedient, just as were those Christians who were martyred for refusing to worship Caesar. Charlton Heston’s speech is an excellent reminder that nonviolent disobedience in the face of corrupt and ungodly leadership can be a noble and godly act. A thoroughly appropriate example from Scripture is taken from Acts 4:27-29:

“And when they had brought them, they set them before the council; and the high priest asked them, saying, Did not we strictly command you that ye should not teach in [Jesus’] name? And, behold, ye have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man’s blood upon us. Then Peter and the other apostles answered, and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.”

God apparently approved of this stand, for not long after that incident they were tossed into jail for continuing to speak out about Christ, with the following result as described in Acts 5:19 and 20:

“But an angel of the Lord by night opened the prison doors, and brought them forth, and said, Go, stand and speak in the temple to the people all the words of this life.”

THE DEADLY DEADNESS OF IDOLS

 

In Leviticus 26:1, God gives us a straightforward commandment:

“Ye shall make no idols nor carved image, neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your land, to bow down unto it: for I am the Lord your God.”

In a rather different context, Jesus gave us a reason for that commandment in Matthew 22:32 in speaking of what God the Father said regarding the resurrection:

“(Have you not read that) I am the God of Abraham, and the god of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the god of the dead, but of the living.”

Psalm 135:15-18 establishes more clearly the connection between these two passages:

“The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but the see not; they have ears, but they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths.

“They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.”

That passage is pretty scary. It echoes Isaiah 6:9 and 10, and Matthew 13:14 and 15:

“And [the Lord] said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heard, and be converted, and be healed.”

“And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, which sayeth, By hearing, ye shall not understand; and seeing, ye shall see and shall not perceive. For this people’s heart is become gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.”

Returning to the passage in Psalm 135, note that God views the idols as worthless, nothing but inanimate material, and that those who make and worship idols are as dead as the inanimate idols themselves. Then Isaiah equates the nature of idol-worshipers with a lack of understanding of God that is so profound as to prevent their healing . Jesus goes yet further, declaring that healing follows salvation and spiritual rebirth, the implication there being that idol worshipers are not only spiritually dead and unable to be saved, reborn or healed, but that they cannot and never will understand the Word of God.

Idol worshipers have come in many flavors over the centuries. Modern versions of idol worship include money in its many manifestations, adoration of the famous, and narcissistic absorption with self.

SEPARATION FROM GOD

 

One concept that is stressed within the Reformed Baptist community is the transcendence of God. The Christian understanding of the word “transcendence” is that God is separate from and above His Creation. Unlike the god of some other religions, our Judeo-Christian God is not Himself a part of His creation. This concept is softened and balanced somewhat by the companion term “immanence”, which essentially means “God with us”.

Transcendence is an important notion. It should remain in the Christian’s vocabulary. The separation of our transcendent Judeo-Christian God from His creation emphasizes His superiority over it. Creation didn’t make God, but rather God made creation.

The emphasis sometimes made by preachers of transcendence over immanence, however, needs to be curbed. When it is not, the transcendent nature of God is used to contrast God’s greatness, His magnificence over mere humanity. We all know that to be the case; we don’t need to be hammered on the head over its truth.

We do need to know our place in God’s scheme of things. We don’t need to go off the reservation by thinking of ourselves more than we ought. We don’t need to play god by attempting to decide on our own what we think represents truth in Scripture, or whether God embraced evolution as a working tool, or whether our science is more authoritative than His Word, or the like. The notion of God’s transcendence helps us realize that we ourselves are beneath our God.

But we need balance in the matter. The beautiful wonder of what God desires in our relationship with Him is that despite His magnificent greatness, He wants to have a loving connection with us, and in the process to actually elevate us to a level closer to His. We don’t need to wag our tails in self-serving abject sycophantic fawning. God doesn’t want His boots licked. He doesn’t want His ego stroked. He wants to love us, and for us to love Him back, as Jesus told us in Matthew 22:37 and 38, repeating Moses’ exhortation to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 6:5:

“Jesus said unto [the lawyer], Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.”

As John said in 1 John 4:8: “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”

It’s just as simple and profound as that: God is love. Even the negatives that are thrown our way, properly interpreted, are intended to develop our capacity to love Him back.

Transcendence over-emphasized stands in direct opposition to the love of God. It does nothing but separate us from Him with the feeling that if we are so very different (read “lower”) than Him, we have nothing in common with His nature. Consequently, He is alien to us. How in the world are we supposed to love an alien Being? He might as well drive a UFO and we might as well bury ourselves underground so He can’t reach us with His impossible (read “alien”) demands on our lives.

GENDER MISMATCH

 

The other day I read the transcript of a speech given by a pastor to a Christian women’s group. I found it to be fascinating, particularly the relationship between the topic and its Baptist source.

The pastor was attempting to uplift the women by addressing the importance of femininity to the economy of God, even to the extent of including the feminine element in the nature of the Godhead Itself.

The human family, he began, is itself a representation of the Godhead. In that correspondence, the human father is an obvious type of the Divine Father. The human child, to continue in that context, is just as obviously a type of the Divine Son, Jesus Christ. By a process of elimination, he said, the human wife and mother must typify the nature of the Holy Spirit. He ticked off some of the feminine virtues that typify the Holy Spirit’s role within the Divine Godhead: compassion, comfort, support and the like, all of which we typically associate with femininity.

I was delighted with that comparison, having made it myself long ago and written much about its implications regarding the nature of the Godhead after having researched what Scripture had to say about the dots I had connected in that regard. I was particularly pleased to note that these words were penned from a Baptist hand.

But then I encountered a difficulty, one that represented a discrepancy between what the pastor was implying in his description of the woman Christian’s role and what he actually wrote. What he wrote, when referring directly to the Holy Spirit, was the pronoun “He”, implying, as Church authorities usually do, that the Holy Spirit is either genderless or a weakly-gendered male. In making that overt gender assignment in direct contradiction to the association he had made to the women, the minister was simply following the party line begun centuries ago in the translations available to the Christian community, all of them using either the male or the neuter pronoun to reference the Holy Spirit in opposition to what was said in the original manuscripts.

I suspect that, along with a large number of his predecessors, this minister attempted to avoid the inevitable condemnation of his peers that would have been his lot had he used a feminine pronoun in reference to the Holy Spirit in keeping with the association he was attempting to illustrate between womanhood and the functional role of the Holy Spirit.

The man should have read Joshua 1:6-9 and acquired some backbone before delivering his ultimately confusing message to those women in the conference:

“Be strong and of good courage; for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land which I swore unto their fathers to give them. Only be strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses, my servant, commanded thee; turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper wherever thou goest. This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein; for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.

“Have I not commanded thee? Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed; for the Lord thy God is with thee wherever thou goest.”

Let me complete the pastor’s message for him a little more boldly than he did, as I have done previously in many places. The association between femininity and the Holy Spirit is correct; in fact, given the entirety of what Scripture has to say about that association, it is the only correct one that can be made. The obvious implication, that the Holy Spirit also has a feminine role within the Godhead, is just as correct: the Holy Spirit is feminine in nature, being the complementary Other to the Divine Father. In every case where Scripture associates man and the Godhead, the woman is a type of the feminine Holy Spirit.

Genesis 1:26a and 27 can only rationally be interpreted in the context of human womanhood representing the Holy Spirit:

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

Genesis 2:18, 21 and 22 can only rationally be interpreted in the context of a reprise of the formation of the Godhead out of the Father, the feminine Holy Spirit having Herself been fashioned out of the Father’s essence in conformance with His selfless nobility:

“And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help fit for him.

“And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.”

The repetitive statement of Genesis 2:23 and 24 in Matthew 19:4-6 (Jesus’ pronouncement of the godliness of human marriage) and Ephesians 5:31 and 32 (Paul’s statement that the Church will participate in an intimate spiritual marital relationship with Jesus) underscores the importance of marriage to the extent that it also represents the relationship within the Godhead between the Father and the Holy Spirit:

“And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.”

In what alternate context would Proverbs 8, the Song of Solomon, John 2 (the wedding at Cana), and John 3 (spiritual rebirth) even make sense?

The pastor also tried to gain the affection of his feminine audience by claiming that Woman was created out of Man (Genesis 2:22) last because this final act of creation, that of Woman, was the most perfect of all, surpassing even the creation of Man. That might be the case – or it may not be. The real issue regarding Woman’s formation out of Man, in consistency with the femininity of the Holy Spirit, is that this final act of creation itself was a reprise of the Holy Spirit’s formation out of the Father.

Many of the Church’s problems with indifference and poor attendance could readily be mitigated through a deepening of our pastors’ understanding of Scripture and their acquisition of bones to replace the jelly in their backs. Their position regarding the gender of the Holy Spirit is not only indefensible, but places a stumbling block in the way of the Church members’ love of God. Church members are not blameless either. They could read Scripture on their own more than they do and use their own minds in the process to the extent that they could hold their pastors accountable to what the say.

THE EARLY MORAVIAN CHURCH

 

A few weeks back as I was browsing the Internet I came across a fascinating article written by Dr. Craig D. Atwood entitled Motherhood of Holy Spirit in 18^th Century.

According to Dr. Atwood’s biography, his current title is the rather lengthy “Charles D. Couch Associate professor of Moravian Theology and Ministry Director of the Center for Moravian Studies”. He is a faculty member of the Moravian College and Theological Seminary located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he teaches Moravian theology and history, Christian history, religion in America, and history of Christian thought.

His current interests include a desire to help the Christian community in general to “rediscover the riches of the Moravian theological heritage”. There is a hint in this aspiration, supported in the article noted above, that he sees that something quite valuable was lost in the transition of the Moravian Church away from its unique early dogma toward a more mainstream perception of our Trinitarian Godhead.

The perception that was abandoned by the Moravian Church is identified in the title: the femininity of the Holy Spirit.

The article itself, which was delivered in a presentation to the faculty of the Moravian College in 2011, traces the history of the Moravian Church in America during its most controversial (and possibly its most fruitful) period, the two decades of the 1740s through the 1750s. From the establishment of the Moravian community of Bethlehem in 1741 on a 500-acre plot purchased from the estate of George Whitefield, the Church initially adhered to the theology of Moravian (now Czechoslovakia) Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf.

Zinzendorf’s theology is rooted in the Czech reform movement of the fourteenth century, in which John Hus’ protests against the Catholic Church a full sixty years before Luther landed him astride a stake, where he was burned as a heretic in 1415. Followers of Hus organized the Moravian Church in 1457 in the village of Kunvald, about a hundred miles east of Prague. The Church spread into Poland through heavy persecution in the sixteenth century. Continuing persecution in the seventeenth century contributed to a relative stasis in the Church. It enjoyed a revival in the eighteenth century as the Church planted roots in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania under the leadership of Count Zinzendorf.

According to Dr. Atwood, Bethlehem, which lies on the outskirts of Allentown in southeastern Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia and west of the New Jersey border, enjoyed particular favor from God, as the community was one of the most successful in pre-revolution America. Atwood implies that this favor resulted from the unique theology of the Moravian Church, in which the Holy Spirit was considered the Spouse of the Holy Father and Mother of Jesus and His Church.

This perception of the Holy Trinity continued at least for the twenty years following the establishment of Bethlehem, but following the death of Count Zinzendorf and his wife and son, the far-weaker post-Zinzendorf Church leadership fell away into a desire to conform more closely to the more popular “mainstream” dogmas of the Protestant Churches in the surrounding communities. They completed their abandonment of dogma by burning Zinzendorf’s writings.

Dr. Atwood appears to lament this transition toward “normalcy”, implying that Bethlehem and the Moravian Church did not continue in the favor of God thereafter. He expresses disappointment in the manner in which this transition was handled during the time he was a student of the Moravian seminary, claiming that in continuing embarrassment Church historians label the two initial decades of the Moravian presence in America as “a time of sifting’, wherein the theological “experimentation” of the time eventually led to the more stable dogma of mainstream Christianity. In opposition to this false and rude dismissal, Dr. Atwood claims that a substantial segment of the Moravian Church continues in the initial dogma even to this day.

Dr. Atwood himself seems to be seeking a re-establishment of that early doctrine of the Holy Spirit, not only for its intrinsic truth but for the good of the Church and perhaps even America.

Here’s my take on this account of accommodation to popular thought: as the reader of my blog postings is well-aware, I consider the perception of the femininity of the Holy Spirit not only to represent truth, but to be the only viable way to worship our Judeo-Christian God with the love that He demands of us. Beyond that, the transition of the Moravian Church to “normal” is just another sad tale in a very long litany of similar ungodly, cowardly acts of appeasement to majority thought, begun in the New Testament by Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus and continuing on to this very day, where we see, among other examples of falling-away, the Church’s attempt to accommodate herself to the false and thoroughly secular notion of evolution.

GOD’S RESPONSE TO CONSPIRATORS

 

Previous postings have cautiously asserted that a conspiracy may exist, one with the intent to replace national governments with a multi-region, tightly-interconnected, essentially totalitarian governmental system.

Scripture asserts more boldly that such a conspiracy will certainly exist. God, however, has other plans. These plans involve His own conspiracy. One might be attempted to argue with the term “conspiracy” as it would apply to God, as with God no secrecy is involved. He has laid His plans out quite clearly in Scripture. That open depiction of our future would seem not to qualify as a conspiracy, as the meaning of a conspiracy involves secret knowledge that only the elect are privy to.

But the Bible has been so maligned and generally avoided in our society that it might as well contain secrets to which only an ever-smaller minority has access to. In brief, society shot itself in the foot by making information in the Bible a de facto secret, and thus that information, to all intents and purposes, describes a conspiracy to which only committed Christians have access.

God’s response is previewed in Daniel 2, which is summarized in Daniel 2:44:

“And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever.”

The Book of Revelation gets into details. After a series of awesome judgments of God in which a large percentage of the world’s population is killed through disease and warfare, in Chapter 17 a specific prophecy is pronounced against a harlot, taken by many to be the end-time apostate Church of Laodicea, of which Jesus spoke against in Chapter 3.

“And there came one of the seven angels who had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come here; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters; with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication; and upon her forehead was a name written Mystery, Babylon The Great, The Mother Of Harlots And Abominations Of The Earth. And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus; and when I saw her, I wondered with great awe.

“And the angel said unto me, Why didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, whichhath the seven heads and ten horns. The beast that thou sawest was, and is not, and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition; and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in gthe book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is. And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come, and when he cometh, he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition. And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, who have received no kingdom as yet, but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.

“These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them; for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings, and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful. And he said unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues. And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naket, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire. For God hath put in their hearts to fulfill his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled. And the women whom thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.”

Given the use of purple garments by Catholic bishops and of scarlet ones by cardinals, many people place this melancholy pronouncement onto the Catholic Church. It need not be the present one, but a future one that may be a chrislam conglomeration consisting of the most watered-down elements of Islam and Christianity. This association might seemingly be strengthened by the identification of seven heads with seven mountains, Rome being called the City of Seven Hills, but note that heads in Scriptural prophecy usually depict rulers rather than geographical features.

Revelation Chapter 18 addresses next the judgment upon and demise of a mysterious Babylon:

And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power, and the earth was lightened with his glory. And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues; for her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works; in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double. How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her; for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine, and she shall be utterly burned with fire; for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.

“And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning, standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy judgment come. And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more. The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and al thyine wood, and all manner of vessels of ivory, and all manner of vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble, and cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men. And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thoushalt find them no more at all. The merchants of these things, who were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing, and saying, Alas, alas, that great city that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls! For in one hour so great riches are come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off. And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying What city is like unto this great city? And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, in which were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! For in one hour is she made desolate.

“Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her. And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus wil violence shall that great city, Babylon, be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all. And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters shall be heard no more at all in thee; and no craftsman, of whatever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee; and the light of a lamp shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee; for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived. And in her was found the blook of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.”

Some eschatologists claim that Babylon is indeed the Babylon of old, situated in Iraq. That association was most popular under the regime of Saddam Hussein, who had reconstructed that city and vowed to restore it to its former greatness. But the Babylon of Revelation 18 also can be a suggestive reference, the name of some other great community whose characteristics followed those of the original Babylon.

Note the suggestion in Revelation 18:17 that it is a seaport. Mighty as is the River Euphrates, I doubt that it properly meets the description of Babylon as a seaport in Revelation 18. Note also that every time the word fallen is used, it is used twice, and that its destruction occurs in an hour. These items mesh disturbingly well with the events of 911, in which Manhattan’s twin towers, representing the ultimate in commerce, were destroyed, virtually within an hour. Equally disturbing is Manhattan’s long-standing nickname, “Babylon by the sea”. Regardless of its identification, this great center of commerce and corruption is destroyed.

In the very next chapter of Revelation there is rejoicing in heaven over the judgments that have destroyed the kingdoms of mankind, and the war of Armageddon, and the return of Jesus Christ to reign on earth and to marry His wife, the Church.

CONSPIRACY – IMAGINED OR REAL? (CONTINUED)

 

Daniel actually had been describing the composite modern beast of Revelation Thirteen as well as the sequence of world kingdoms which had led up to the modern world. This can be seen even more clearly as the passage in Daniel Seven continues: the modern incarnation of the Persian bear would be Russia, whose icon is indeed the bear, and Germany of the Grecian leopard. Daniel continues, in verse 7, to flesh out the modern world government:

“After this I saw in the night visions, and, behold, a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly, and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet; and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it, and it had ten horns. I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before which there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots; and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.”

Daniel’s mention of a “little horn” introduces a probable feature of the coming world government that most eschatologists tend to overlook. The horn is indisputably a leader, but of what? As Bible scholar Daymond Duck proposed, the final world government may well be composed of ten regions, rather than of ten nations. In that context, the “little horn” of Daniel Seven may refer to a nation, a smaller entity than a region, which would place the “little horn” as the president of a nation. One could then speculate that perhaps this president may be a president of the United States, for example, who would, in Daniel’s parlance, pluck up the presidents of the United States, Canada and Mexico to become leader of what would then be the North American Region, a supranational entity composed of those three former nations. In my novel Home, Sweet Heaven, as a matter of fact, I describe just that scenario. This regional leader would then go on to be head of the world government comprised of those ten regions.

Is that why the present government of the United States recently kicked its campaign of gun control back into high gear on the heels of the several recent shooting incidents? Keep in mind that whatever gun control the government might come up with doesn’t apply to those who would wish us harm. Is that why the government insists upon maintaining open borders and is actively bringing in refugees without vetting them? (I think helping refugees is a good idea if it’s handled with American safety in mind. It isn’t – and why is that?) Is that why the government seems to be stirring up the racial pot? If these issues aren’t intentional methods of creating problems that only a repressive government can solve, they’re certainly working toward that end.

The Christian doesn’t have to go as deeply into the weeds as we have just trekked to perceive from the Bible that a world government will become a reality. It’s not a question of whether, but of when. In that sense, virtually all Christians with any interest whatsoever in eschatology could be labeled as conspiracy theorists.

Are there other indications, aside from Scripture, that a conspiracy is underway to integrate nations into a larger governmental system, indications that might move more individuals to perceive that the notion of a conspiracy might be more than a paranoia-fed myth?

One simply has to make a quick glance around at the various problems that exist in our modern world to appreciate that society the world over is encumbered with a number of negative issues, each of which represents a very real threat of turning our present order into a chaotic mess from which we have the possibility of emerging only through a centralized system of government that possesses the will and the strength to impose the harsh measures required to restore order. To enumerate just a few: the terror threat from radicalized Muslims; the terror threat from society’s misfits; the terror threat from rogue nations motivated either by unreasoning hatred or the desire to call forth the Mahdi; the increase in natural disasters, exacerbated by the unwise location of populations, the over-use of available resources, and the decay of infrastructures; environmental pollution leading to disease and degeneracy of living conditions; overcrowding; and loss of survivability due to substandard schooling and training, compounded by growing political corruption.

This partial list can easily be expanded, but one item that probably doesn’t belong on it is global warming, which points to what may be the most important item on the list – the manufactured issue that can only be resolved by a more powerful government. Some may argue that there are very real indicators that global warming is a real and important issue. But even if it is a real issue, it may not be caused by man – off the top of my head I can point to at least one potential source other than man – and the issue may not be permanent or life-threatening. Furthermore, if it is a real issue, the motivation for labeling it as threatening may be a primarily political one.

Given all these potential causes of disaster and chaos, most of which are solvable only by God or a centralized government that has the will and means to impose harsh controls over its subjects, it isn’t difficult to perceive that if a cadre of exceedingly wealthy and powerful individuals exist, and further that if these individuals have no understanding of or faith in God, such people would be more than willing to create such a government.

We do know of the existence of such a cadre of people, and we also know that, like bugs that hide under rocks and logs, they are prone to conducting meetings away from the public spotlight.

Moreover, we can infer from the conscious effort to discredit the notion of our Judeo-Christian God and to remove all references to Him from society that the most powerful of this cadre of individuals has absolutely no truck with this God. Yet further, we have clear evidence that this group already has exercised a heavy-handed influence over society to worsen rather than mitigate our problems. We can see this by observing the atrocious mishandling of our public education systems from kindergarten all the way through college and beyond; the ineffective manner in which terrorism is addressed; the enormous effort expended to propagate godless myths such as macroevolution in the face of scientific findings to the contrary; the attempt to prohibit the chaplains of our armed forces from uttering the name of Jesus Christ; the characterization of Christians as “disturbed malcontents”; and the use of the gay agenda to label portions of Holy Scripture as “hate-inciting”.

Given, then, the numerous paths to disaster that exist in the world today, the cadre of immensely wealthy, powerful and godless individuals that exist as well, and clear evidence that this group is fomenting issues rather than attempting to control them, it is only a matter of common sense, driven by the obvious issues and the equally obvious reluctance to mitigate them, to perceive that a conspiracy to form a totalitarian one-world government is indeed afoot.

Why, in the face of the Bible’s forecast of just such a conspiracy, and the obvious indicators of the same, have we been led to view those who have simply connected the dots as being dangerously removed from reality?

The mere fact that “conspiracy theorists” are commonly thought of as dangerous misfits may actually be the most powerful indicator of its reality. Why else would a common-sense conclusion be labeled as dangerously wrong?

CONSPIRACY – IMAGINGED OR REAL?

 

The notion has been around for quite a while that a conspiracy might be afoot, wherein a cadre of enormously wealthy and powerful individuals band together to plot a worldwide system of government that will work to their exclusive advantage, effectively enslaving all but a privileged few.

Those who read their Bibles don’t find that to be so hard to believe. It’s right there in the pages of Scripture, particularly in Daniel and Revelation. In Daniel 2, for example, Daniel interprets a dream of King Nebudchadnezzar, the ruler who sacked Jerusalem and took Judah into captivity in the sixth century B.C. This troubling dream involved a metallic image representing the mightiest kingdoms of man on earth, appearing in sequence from the time of Nebudchadnezzar’s dream up until the time that Jesus reigns on earth.

“This is the dream, and we will tell its interpretation before the king. Thou, O king, art a king of kings; for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory. And wherever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heavens hath he given into thine hand, and hath made thee ruler over them all.

“Thou art this head of gold. And after thee shall rise another [silver] kingdom inferior to thee, and another kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron, forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things; and, as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise. And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided, but there shall be in it of the strength of iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with clay. And as the toes of the feet were part of iron and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly broken. And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men; but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.

“And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold, the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter; and the dream is certain, and the interpretation of it sure.”

Up to our own point in time, Daniel’s prophetic interpretation of Nebudchadnezzar’s dream has been sure indeed. Nebudchadnezzar’s Babylonian kingdom of gold came and went, as did the silver kingdom of the Persian Empire, and after that the brass kingdom of Alexander the Great. The iron kingdom of the Roman Empire followed the others in its rise and fall. Daniel in Chapter Seven also described these kingdoms in terms of animals: a lion, a bear, a leopard, and the most dreadful beast of all, which had iron teeth. These animals fit well with the features of the first four kingdoms. The Leopard, for example, is fleet of foot, as was Alexander in the speed with which he conquered the known world in the fourth century B.C.

We now await the rise and fall of Scripture’s final worldwide kingdom of man, Daniel’s kingdom in Chapter Two of iron and clay and in Chapter Seven having ten horns, also known as the kingdom of the antichrist as described in Revelation 13:

“And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like a leopard, and his feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion; and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. And I saw one of his heads as though it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed, and all the world wondered after the beast. And they worshiped the dragon who gave power unto the beast; and they worshiped the beast, saying, Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him? And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies, and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months. And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them; and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

“If any man have an ear, let him hear. He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity; he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience of the saints.

“And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spoke like a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them who dwell on it to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast, saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, that had the wound by a sword, and did live. And he hath power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads, and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.”

This awful ten-horned beast that shall be the final kingdom of man has features that represent a composite of the earlier sequence of kingdoms spoken of in Chapter Seven of Daniel: lion, bear, leopard, and power from a great and terrible dragon. This similarity of features evokes a closer look at that chapter of Daniel. There, in verse 4, the lion is found to possess a feature of startling significance in a modern context.

“The first [beast] was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings; I beheld till its wings were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man; and a man’s heart was given to it.”

The association of England with a lion is a common one; the lion is an iconic fixture of government buildings in that nation. It is also common knowledge that America sprang from English roots. Its first non-indigenous people were English, and it was an English colony before gaining its independence. Given that America’s icon is the eagle, this passage in Daniel, as Bible scholar Irvin Baxter first pointed out, very clearly relates to America. It is wrong, therefore, to assert as many theologians do that America can’t be found in the Bible. There are other Scriptural references to a modern kingdom that match well with America, such as the feckless young lions of Ezekiel 38:13 and the twice-fallen Babylon of Revelation 18. But these associations are more speculative than the eagle of Daniel Seven, which points quite strongly and, to my mind, unequivocally to the United States.

[to be continued]

FRAUDS

 

Several years ago in The Tacoma [WA] News-Tribune there was an article datelined London by Jill Lawless of the Associated Press entitled “Scientists study ‘missing link’ hoax”. The article described the so-called “discovery” in 1912 by amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson of an ancient and apparently pre-human hominid near the village of Piltdown in southern England. The age of the “Piltdown Man” skull, as it was subsequently labeled, was thought to be nearly a million years.

This widely-broadcast “find”, representing as it did the fervently-sought “missing link” between ape and man, lent tremendous support to Darwin’s controversial theory of evolution, seriously wounding the faith of many Christians and impacting even the houses of Christian theology, the seminaries. From Darwin’s time on, aided by such “finds”, Christians who had placed their faith in the inerrancy of the Bible desperately sought ways in which they might accommodate this new “fact” of evolution into the creation story of Genesis Chapter One.

For the next forty years, as Ms. Lawless’ article notes, the Piltdown Man was perceived to be irrefutable fact. By then, some seminaries had backed off from their stance on the inerrancy of the Bible, and many Christians, pastors and laypersons alike, had accepted this new thought into their personal understandings of Christianity.

The Piltdown Man was then exposed as a hoax, found to have consisted of a human skull (a few hundred years old) and the jaw of an orangutan. The fraudulent assembly was then stained to make it look ancient.

The rest of Ms. Lawless’ story centered on the ongoing scientific investigation into what possibly could have driven the perpetrator(s) of such an egregious hoax to do such a dastardly deed and, peripherally, what could have allowed it to have been accepted by science for so long. What was missing in her story is the half-hearted manner in which the scientists of that day up to the present, disseminated to the public the truth of the matter. It is doubtful that this omission was intentional, as was the flavor of her story, which appeared to convey the thought that this hoax was an exception to an otherwise completely honest run of subsequent “findings” of supposed “missing links”. One would think from the tale that this was a one-time aberration in a science dominated by objective researchers whose hearts were as pure as the driven snow.

Nothing could be further than the truth. The actuality of the matter is that the Piltdown Man was just one of an unbroken string of deliberate deceits. It wasn’t even the first. One Christian scholar who investigated the whole sordid affair up until the time of his passing was Dr. Grant Jeffrey.

According to Dr. Jeffrey, in his 2003 book Creation, published by Frontier Research Publications, Inc.,

“There is no fossil evidence to support evolution. Many Christians and Jews who have been troubled by the claims of evolution will be astonished to discover that the evolutionists knew all along that there was no fossil evidence in support of evolution. Yet, many textbooks and teachers boldly declared that the fossils proved evolution to be true.

“After a century and a half of claims by evolutionists that just a little more time would produce the necessary fossil evidence of the missing links between species that would confirm the theory of evolution, we find there is an astonishing and total lack of fossil evidence to confirm any indisputable transitional forms, or ‘missing links,’ that must exist if the theory of evolution were actually scientifically true. However, in over one hundred and fifty years of a massive global search by scientists that has catalogued over one hundred million fossil specimens in museums and laboratories, they have failed to discover a single ‘missing link’ fossil. If the evolutionists were intellectually honest, they would have abandoned evolution long ago.

“In 1859, Charles Darwin acknowledged that the utter lack of fossil evidence for these missing links between one species and another provided ‘an unanswerable objection’ to the theory of evolution. However, Darwin assumed that the search for fossils that would establish the truth of evolution was just beginning and that, given sufficient time and effort, scientists would soon discover the millions of transitional fossils required to prove that one species gradually transformed itself by natural selection into a new species.” [Italics in the original.]

Jeffrey goes on to say that “To date, though, every species discovered in the fossil record appears perfectly formed. Paleontologists have never discovered a fossil showing a partially formed species or a partially formed organ.”

He documents a number of supposed ‘missing links’ between ape and man, all of which were subsequently exposed as outright frauds. They are listed below.

With the help of untrained convicts, fossilized bone fragments of what came to be called Java Man were dug up in 1891 on the Indonesian island of Java. On the basis of nothing more than a fragment of a skull cap, three molar teeth and a bone fragment of a thighbone, the director of the find, Dr. Eugene Dubois, identified the fossils as belonging to Homo erectus, a humanoid three quarters of a million years old. Attempts to confirm his claims uncovered the following facts: the thighbone fragment was identical to that of a modern human; the skull cap was found forty-six feet away from the other fragments; there was no logical reason to associate the skull cap with the thighbone.

Piltdown Man I and II were supposedly discovered in 1912 and 1917 at the Piltdown quarry in England by amateur geologist Charles Dawson. In 1953, after over forty years of unquestioning acceptance of these findings as genuine, the skulls, after being examined by more modern techniques, were found to be intentional frauds. The skull described by Jeffrey was a composite of skull fragments of modern man and orangutan jaw. Worse, the bones had been dyed with bichromate of potash to make them appear ancient. Although evolutionists generally agree that Piltdown man was an outright fraud, they don’t speak much about this incident.

Nebraska Man was found in 1922 in western Nebraska by Professor Harold Cook. His find was supported by Dr. Henry F. Osborn, head of the American Museum of History, who touted the find as finally representing the evidence linking chimpanzees, Java Man and modern man. The Java man, as noted above, was since exposed as fictitious. So was Nebraska Man, whose supposed existence was used as evidence in the famous 1925 Scopes evolution trial. The problem was that the ‘evidence’ amounted to a single tooth, around which very imaginative evolution-minded artists created a picture of how they wished a missing link to look. It gets worse: the tooth was later found to have belonged to an extinct pig. The same fiction applies to the Southwest Colorado Man, another ‘evolutionary discovery’ that also turned out to have been based on a mere tooth, this one belonging to an ancient horse.

In 1932 another supposed missing link, Ramapithecus, was found in Africa. This ‘discovery’ amounted to nothing more than some fossilized teeth, which were later found to belong to the modern orangutan. Here again, evolutionists generally acknowledge this ‘discovery’ to be false.

Dr. Jeffrey also notes that the same kind of problems attend the discovery of ‘Lucy’ in 1974. In this case, Professor Richard Leakey claimed that ‘Lucy’ was an ape-like creature who walked upright. However, the lengths of the forearm fossils found in the vicinity strongly suggest that ‘Lucy’ walked on all fours like any other ape-like creature. Even Dr. Leakey admitted to exercising a large amount of imagination to create a picture from a few bone fragments. What puts the lie to these excursions of the imagination is that in many, if not all, cases there is actually no logical reason to assume that the fragments belong to a single creature.

Even with such a shady history of attempting to create missing links where missing links didn’t exist, the evolutionists continued to pull the wool over their own eyes as well of those of their associates and an all too-trusting public by trotting out Peking Man, Neanderthal Man, and Cro-Magnon man in a dismal and apparently desperate attempt to justify their system of belief. All three of these, it turns out, were nothing more nor less than fully human, a fact quite reluctantly admitted by the community of evolutionists.

If the history of evolutionists’ attempt to find the missing link between ape and man has yielded nothing more than a sordid collection of frauds, perhaps they can fall back on the find in Australia of an archaeopteryx fossil, this creature supposedly representing a link between reptiles and birds.

Perhaps not. At least not in honesty. The notion that this bird represents a transitional form came from its teeth, which are unusual in a bird and more usual to a reptile. Everything else about this fossil shows absolutely nothing contradictory to what constitutes a bird. The unusual feature of teeth is not so unusual after all, considering that some reptiles have no teeth while other fossils of birds do, and other strange creatures, like the duck-billed platypus, exist that are not considered to be missing links.

But what about the dinosaur-bird so highly publicized by the National Geographic magazine, who artistically (and fictionally) portrayed a baby dinosaur with feathers and claimed that birds belong to the family of bipedal dinosaurs.

Even the community of evolutionists was taken aback by this hasty conclusion. Jeffrey quotes Professor Storrs Olson, curator of birds at the Smithsonian in the following condemnation:

“National Geographic has reached an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated, tabloid journalism. . . It eventually became clear to me that National Geographic was not interested in anything other than the prevailing dogma that birds evolved from dinosaurs.”

Nor has the media changed its tune in the years since Ms. Lawless wrote the article. ‘Finds’ sporadically continue to surface, with no more justification than the others.

CESSATIONISM (CONTINUED)

CESSATIONISM (CONTINUED)

In her book Eucharistic Miracles, Catholic author Joan Carroll Cruz relates the following account of a ministry supported by tongues, this account occurring closer to our own time than that of the early Church:

“Another who shed tears before the Sacrament of the Altar was St. Francis Solano (d. 1610), a native of Andalusia, Spain who was pious and contemplative in his youth. He communicated frequently and devoutly and was able, because of his edifying example, to draw other youths to a similar devotion. At the age of 20 he entered the Franciscan Order, where he so impressed his superiors that soon after his ordination he was given the assignment of novice master. When King Philip II of Spain asked for missionaries for South America to evangelize the native Indians, St. Francis Solano volunteered and set out with a party of priests in 1589. After a trying trip in which his ship was wrecked in a storm, he found his way to Lima, Peru, where his principal labors took place. Because of his gift of tongues he was able to preach to wild tribes in their own dialect. It is said that during his missionary endeavors more than 9,000 persons asked for Baptism. The wildest animals were subject to him, and birds sang at his invitation – as they had for St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of his order.”

One can question the validity of this claim, although the validity itself of one’s question in that regard would be nothing more than a matter of opinion. But one cannot question the fact that the circumstances under which St. Francis Solano was reputed to have spoken in tongues was virtually identical to the situation at the birth of the Church, where Scripture itself openly declared the use of tongues in supporting its development. This fact alone refutes the reasoning behind Mr. Fisk’s declaration that the gift of tongues was a one-shot event.

In his diatribe against the use of the gift of tongues, Mr. Fisk makes another assertion, that the Holy Ghost was not given to individuals prior to Jesus’ glorification, which is demonstrably a patent falsehood. While this assertion may have been true during the period when Jesus was active in His ministry prior to the establishment of the Church, the Holy Spirit was certainly active within Jesus’ predecessor John the Baptist and his mother Elizabeth as well, for in Luke 1:39-45:

“And Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Judah; and entered into the house of Zacharias, and greeted Elizabeth. And it came to pass that, when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. And she spoke out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy greeting sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy. And blessed is she that believed; for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord.”

There also are cases in the Old Testament where the Holy Spirit clearly indwelt selected individuals in order to accomplish the will of God in specific situations. An example that points directly to the Pentecost experience is presented in Numbers 11:25, where God gave the Spirit to the seventy elders, who subsequently prophesied “and did not cease”. Another example is given in Nehemiah 9:20, where the prophet recalls God’s gift of the Holy Spirit to individual Israelites to instruct them in the building of the temple.

Mr. Fisk’s assertions with respect to Acts 10 (the inclusion of Gentiles into the Church through the conversion of Cornelius) and Acts 19 (the establishment of Churches in new and predominantly Gentile lands) are based on the same presuppositions behind his commentary regarding Acts 2. As before, I make the counter-assertion that these situations, far from being unique to that period, are in effect existing at this very moment in various locales throughout the world. I also repeat my assertion that the referenced Scriptural accounts in no way imply that such situations would be unique to that time, nor even hint that the gift of tongues was unique to that period.

Regarding the gift of tongues as noted in First Corinthians 12-14, Mr. Fisk declares that while all Christians receive the indwelling Holy Spirit, not all speak in tongues, nor does this gift represent sanctification. Having established those points, he then distorts this basic understanding into the familiar assertion that the gift of tongues was reserved for unique situations (the ones he attempted to establish earlier and are supposedly no longer in existence) and eventually into the assertion that the practice was actually discouraged. Along the way, he addresses the real reason behind his assertions: the abuse of the gift of tongues. His statements with respect to this abuse reveal his reactionary overgeneralization, amounting to a desire to suppress the gift in order to stop the abuse, or, equivalently, to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”.

There is a particular passage, 1 Corinthians 13:10-12, that is a favorite of cessationists, being frequently cited as “proof” that the gift of tongues was fleeting in nature:

“But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then, face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

The gist of the cessationist argument here is that the gift of tongues was intended primarily for the apostolic age before Scripture was completed. When Scripture was fully written and canonized early on in the history of the Church, Christianity had come of age. Man now had the opportunity through Scripture to clearly see God in more detail than before, making the use of tongues unnecessary.

My response to this argument is that it is a gross misapplication of the passage. A more reasonable interpretation of “seeing (God) face to face” is in connection with 1 John 3:2 when we possess spiritual bodies:

“Beloved, now are we the children of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.”

Mr. Fisk concludes his discussion with a summary of his interpretation of what Scripture has to say about the gift of tongues. I will present below his various points along with my own commentary regarding them.

“Tongues served as an initiatory token to confirm the establishment of a new order, the Church” This is pure conjecture, not related to the cited Scriptural passages. In fact, as I have noted above, there are renewals currently taking place around the world whose circumstances closely resemble those encountered in Acts.

“The Holy Spirit’s power and blessing was entered into without tongues.” This over-generalization is arrogant and unjustified. The linkage of the indwelling Holy Spirit with the gift of tongues is a matter entirely up to God, most fortunately without the participation or direction of Mr. Fisk.

“Tongues was not given to all believers.” I’m tempted to agree with Mr. Fisk on this point, but then again, the gift and its exercise are two different things, so who’s to say whether we who don’t use the gift don’t do so because we don’t think we should or because our devotion is lacking.

“Tongues was only one of several spiritual gifts granted at that time.” Okay, but so what?

“Tongues evidently was a peculiarity of the age of apostolic signs and wonders.” Perhaps Mr. Fisk may think so, but that doesn’t make it true. There is no Scriptural basis whatsoever for this assertion.

“The appearance of tongues was manifestly occasional.” Perhaps, but by no stretch can that be interpreted (and over-generalized) to preclude its validity today.

“Tongues was an inferior gift, even in the day of its occurrence.” How wonderful that God has Mr. Fisk to tell him what’s important and what’s not in His relationship with mankind.

“Tongues is not to be sought, but passed by in favor of gifts that edify all.” At first, I tended to agree with Mr. Fisk on this point, as the seeking of tongues is a common starting point for abuse. On second thought, the implication made here by Mr. Fisk is that this gift, even if valid, is to be rejected in favor of “better” ones. If this is indeed what Mr. Fisk meant, he’ll have a lot to answer for to God. I, for one, would never be so impudent with God as to reject an offered gift.

“If manifest, the employment of tongues was sharply restricted and regulated.” Certainly, because of the obvious problem of abuse. But again, who is man to turn up his nose at anything offered by God?

“Indications are that tongues would not be permanent.” This is a restatement of an earlier point he made regarding the uniqueness in time of the gift of tongues. Again, there is absolutely no Scriptural justification for this statement.

In conclusion of my review of Mr. Fisk’s commentary on the gift of tongues, I assert that he is doing exactly the same thing as those who he claims are abusers of the gift: he’s attempting to put the Holy Spirit, and thus God, into a box of his own design and dimensions. In doing so, he’s creating his own God. But his box is not only glaringly hypocritical, it is even more confining and ugly that the one he accuses the abusers of creating.

CESSATIONISM

CESSATIONISM

I once knew a person, a close relative actually, who would periodically express outrage at some perceived injustice in the world. At such times he would express his heartfelt desire to stamp out the root cause of this injustice or abuse, which inevitably would turn out to be closely related to the item that was abused, if not the item itself. If a car had run through an intersection without looking and caused an accident, he would demand, usually by written notice to the city fathers, that a stop sign be placed on every intersection. If a tree fell during a windstorm, he would insist that all trees over a certain height or age be cut down.

There’s a well-used phrase that describes such over-the-top, knee-jerk, all-encompassing and basically thoughtless over-reaction. It’s called “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.

Recently I was handed a small pamphlet that apparently represents the prevailing Baptist position on tongues. Entitled Speaking in Tongues in the Light of the Scripture, this booklet by Samuel Fisk, published in 1967 by College Press on behalf of Western Baptist Bible College, attempts to demonstrate Scripturally why speaking in tongues is inapplicable to the modern Christian experience. In other words, according to Mr. Fisk, some gifts of the Spirit have essentially ceased, since they are no longer necessary to the spread of the Gospel message. The formal name for this supposition is cessationism.

The Baptist position on tongues has been long established: the practice is neither necessary nor appropriate to Church worship; moreover, it is disruptive to the orderly conduct of the service. To give the benefit of doubt to the Baptist community, it may have been driven to this position by excesses in other sectors of the Christian faith. The motivation behind the publication of this booklet, as well as the Baptist position itself, could be a reactionary stance against the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements that emphasize the ability to speak in tongues as an outward sign of having been indwelt by the Holy Spirit. As I know from personal experience, some congregations of the Charismatic persuasion have indeed thoroughly abused this gift by attempting to call forth the Holy Spirit during worship services, as if God Himself is on call to respond to such self-serving requests. This practice, in effect, tries to place the Holy Spirit into a box of the Church’s own choosing, thus attempting to confine God into a position of obedience to man. Jesus made it perfectly plain during his talk with Nicodemus in John Chapter Three that the Holy Spirit does what God wants, and when and where God wants it to be done.

I have witnessed such an abuse of the practice of speaking in tongues by attempts to call forth the Holy Spirit through the use of “mood singing”. That Church placed such importance on the gift of tongues that Scripture itself was subordinated to it. The subordination of Scripture caused me to leave the Church. Therefore, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Fisk’s concern: it is real. But his response heads in the wrong direction.

Cessationists, Mr. Fisk included, attempt to set the record straight on the issue of speaking in tongues by appealing to Scriptural references to the practice, which are basically limited to three books in the Bible: Mark 16, Acts 2, 10 and 19, and l Corinthians.

So far so good. But then Mr. Fisk starts to over-react, with what I consider to be devastating consequences.

With respect to the passage in Mark, Mr. Fisk argues that the manifestation of tongues was a sign following the preaching of the Gospel to a world to which the Gospel was novel, namely the time in which the Church was newly founded following the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here the author attempts to show that the gift of tongues was a one-shot event, reserved for the very early Church following the first Pentecost after Jesus’ resurrection. As if to add credence to this notion, he makes the observation that other gifts of the Spirit, such as healing of deadly wounds and sicknesses and casting out devils, cannot be seen today. In direct opposition to this observation, Christian news sources such as Prophesy News Watch (PNW) and World Net Daily (WND) often cite counter-references to this claim, in which modern instances of healings and exorcisms are well-verified, having been attested to by multiple witnesses. As a matter of fact, in locations today such as Asia and Africa where persecution of Christians is both commonplace and brutal, claims have been made of a new Pentecostal experience with the same manifestations as described in the Book of Acts. A July 9, 2016 WND news article noted the intensity and strength of God’s interaction with the persecuted Christians, which included visions, healings and even resurrections.

In his discussion of tongues in the context of Mark, Mr. Fisk makes an unjustified, and in my mind egregiously illogical, extrapolation of Scripture to suit his preconceptions. The relevant passage, Mark 16:15-18, consisted of words by Jesus to His disciples following His resurrection:

“And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. And these signs shall follow those who believe: In my name shall they cast out demons; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”

Nowhere does the applicable passage of Mark even imply that the gift of tongues was limited to the Apostles alone, or to a single period of time. Nor is it proper to hint, as he does, that the very exercise of the gift of tongues represents a theological error. Mr. Fisk simply attaches his own “reason” for the gift of tongues to what Mark actually wrote about it, which is that the gift was only given to Jesus’ disciples and only because the Gospel was so new to the world. He then claims on the basis of that manufactured supposition that this “reason” no longer exists. He is really saying that modern Pentecostal attempts to exercise this gift amounts to abuse. However, even if he is correct about perceived excesses, it is illogical to attack an abuse of a quality by attacking the quality itself. That kind of reaction amounts to over-reaction, a “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. This mindset can reach beyond nonsense to cruelty, a historical instance of which existed in the inhumane practices associated with the Inquisition.

Regarding the accounts in Acts of tongues, Mr. Fisk is quick to point out the significance of the small number of instances in which tongues is mentioned, which, as he says, indicates the small value of this gift. Here the relevant passages are Acts 2:7,8, followed by Peter’s sermon in which three thousand souls came to accept the salvation of Jesus Christ.:

“And they were all amazed and marveled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these who speak Galileans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?”

Mr. Fisk’s claim here is that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit was a novel event underscored as a legitimate act of God through the sign of speaking in tongues. The tongues, moreover, were intelligible words to the listeners. Yet further, there is relatively little mention of the use of tongues after that event. Similarly, Acts 10, involving Peter’s bringing the gospel to the gentiles through Cornelius and his family, was another unique event that required the confirmation by extraordinary means that God intended that the Gentiles be included in His gift of salvation. Another extraordinary event in which speaking in tongues is mentioned is the re-baptizing in Jesus of those who were baptized by John. The account is given in Acts 19:3-6:

“And [Paul] said unto them, have ye received the Holy Spirit since ye believed? And they said unto him, We have not so much as heard whether there is any Holy Spirit. And he said unto them, Unto what, then, were ye baptized? And they said, Unto John’s baptism. Then said Paul, John verily baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying unto the people that they should believe on him who should come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus. When they heard this they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke with tongues, and prophesied.”

Mr. Fisk’s commentary regarding the significance of the few instances in Acts of the use of tongues is mere supposition that can be countered by pointing to other qualities of our relationship with God that, while exceedingly important, are also mentioned but a few times. An example is Paul’s message in Ephesians 5 regarding the Church’s marriage to Christ. As for the account of tongues in the Pentecost, Acts 2, Mr. Fisk claims that this event was never repeated. This statement would be true for him, because virtually by his own definition all modern accounts of speaking in tongues are fraudulent. But such a statement is an outrageously arrogant and biased presuppositional error.

In virtually every new generation in diverse locations throughout the world, the Holy Spirit is not known. Indeed, in many parts of America today the Bible itself is not understood and await a person of God to step in and offer the Gospel message. In areas where Christians are routinely persecuted, unlike the relatively comfortable circumstances of Mr. Fisk’s world, there are numerous accounts of the gift of tongues. I myself, despite my own witness of abuse of this gift, am also a probable witness of genuine instances of this gift. Again, Mr. Fisk supplies no logical basis for his assertion that the gift of tongues was never repeated. It was simply conjecture on his part, conditioned by his own presupposition regarding the gift and having no definitive Scriptural basis. The majority of his argument regarding Acts 2 represents a story of his own manufacture, again based on conjecture. He embellishes on the Scriptural account without actual Scriptural justification for it. He repeats the charge that the Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit following Jesus’ resurrection was a unique event caused by a unique situation, namely the need to get the Church started. His assertions refuse to grasp the essential notion that there are many situations throughout the centuries in various regions of the world, particularly those where the Gospel has been suppressed by wicked governmental systems, that the Church must be freshly and newly established, often repeatedly. Consider, for example, the growth of the Church in Russia, China, Indochina and the Muslim nations over the past several decades, where suppression is and has been extreme.

[to be continued]

FRANKLIN GRAHAM’S TOUR

FRANKLIN GRAHAM’S DECISION AMERICA TOUR

In early July, we residents of Washington State received thank-you notes by email from Franklin Graham for supporting his Decision America Tour at the State Capitol in Olympia.

Franklin held the Washington rally on Wednesday, June 29, 2016. He included the crowd in the event by leading us in several public prayers. The message itself was brief but strong: America’s in serious trouble spiritually, morally, and financially. The root of our problems, according to Mr. Graham, is our removal of God from our institutions, particularly our local, state and federal governments and our schools, from kindergarten through college. The only way out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves is our return to God. Individually we can repent of our own sins, personally acknowledge God’s sovereignty, pray fervently for God’s mercy on our land, and step up to the plate by boldly proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ and entering the political arena, both by voting and by direct participation. Mr. Graham quoted from Jonah and Nehemiah 1 to illustrate the effect that prayer and national repentance can have in delaying the consequences due a country for its removal of God from its society and institutions.

That last item was unexpected. As Franklin Graham noted, many Christians disdain politics, perceiving it to be filthy and corrupt. It is corrupt indeed, Mr. Graham acknowledged, but the corruption could be diluted and perhaps even overturned by Christian participants in sufficient numbers to count.

The turnout in Olympia was encouraging. It was good to see how many people made the effort to attend. Arriving in Olympia about half an hour before the event, we almost didn’t make it ourselves, as the off-ramps from the I-5 freeway became virtual parking lots by the overwhelming number of cars. An estimated five thousand people were standing on the lawn in front of the podium.

Given the basic liberal-leaning bias of the population in the Seattle/Tacoma area, my wife Carolyn and I were surprised at the size of the crowd. A friendly man standing in front of us told us that he and some other men of his Church had come all the way from the Packwood area. I’d be willing to bet that there was significant representation also from the more rural east side of the Cascades.

There was one disappointing element of the rally. Mr. Graham had begun his talk with an attention-getting assertion. “I have no hope,” he said, “in the Democratic candidate for president of the United States.” (I’m probably paraphrasing here.) After a pause, he continued. “I have no hope in the Republican candidate for president. My only hope rests in God.” When we returned from the rally, we put the three local television news stations on record. That evening we monitored the three channels for news of the rally. Despite the large turnout of the rally saw no mention of it on Channels 5 and 7. We have the feeling that, had the rally been about gay pride or some other liberal cause, the coverage would have been entirely different. The minuscule time devoted to the rally on Channel 4 presented it in misleading fashion: Mr. Graham’s comment regarding the Democratic Party was left out, having him appear to be commenting negatively only on the Republican Party.

But then, what can one expect of a media that has been instrumental in support of kicking God out of our society?

We pray fervently that the turnout in the remainder of Franklin Graham’s tour will be as large and successful as the one we just attended. We can assure every Christian that the events are worth going to, if for no other reason than the spiritual lift that God will give to those who go to the rallies.

UNIVERSAL VIOLENCE

UNIVERSAL VIOLENCE

In America, widespread and growing campus unrest. Mass protests against racial inequity and police brutality. Mass murders by shooters and terrorist suicide bombers. Elsewhere throughout the world, Christians being persecuted and slaughtered. More terrorist mayhem involving mass murcders. A worldwide rejection of the Judeo-Christian God. Economic upheaval.

Violence everywhere evokes a remembrance of Noah’s Great Flood and the situation that initiated it as told in Genesis 6:5-13:

“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

“But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God. And Noah begot three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

“The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence.

There was rampant violence on the Earth in the days of Noah, and because of that violent behavior God decided to destroy the earth with the Great Flood. But in the Flood’s aftermath, God gave us the promise that He would never again repeat that planetary catastrophe. The primary account of that promise is given in Genesis 9:11-15:

“And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my [rainbow] in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud; and I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.”

Well, that’s certainly a relief! It appears from this promise that either mankind will never again indulge in that amount of violence, or else God will overlook it. Seems like, despite the mess the world appears to be in, that we’ve dodged a big bullet.

No. Wait. God only promised us we wouldn’t suffer through another Great Flood. But there are other things of potential worldwide scope that can be catastrophic to the Earth. As a matter of fact, we still have the passage in 2 Peter 3:1-12 to contend with:

“This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you, in both of which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance, that ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us, the apostles of the Lord and Savior; knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water, by which the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.

“But the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness, but is long-suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also, and the works that are in it, shall be burned up.

“Seeing, then, that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy living and godliness, looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, in which the heavens, being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?”

Oh oh. If, as Peter claims, a thousand years can be likened to a day, and the Genesis creation epic covered a six-day period before God’s rest, then perhaps what might happen as we approach the end of six thousand years of Biblically-relevant human existence with imminent event of the thousand-year millennial reign of Christ promising to appear very shortly, the earth might again experience a destructive force of planetary scale with a suggestion of nuclear warfare.

This scenario fits right in with the devastation forecast in Revelation. Is the worldwide violence rampant now on Earth an immediate precursor to a buildup to that event?

GOD’S RESPONSE TO CONSPIRACIES

GOD’S RESPONSE TO CONSPIRACIES

Previous postings have asserted that a conspiracy exists, one with the intent to replace national governments with a multi-region, tightly-interconnected, essentially totalitarian governmental system.

God, however, has other plans. These plans involve His own conspiracy. One might be attempted to argue with the term “conspiracy” as it would apply to God, as God has laid His plans out quite clearly in Scripture. That open depiction of our future would seem not to qualify as a conspiracy, as the meaning of a conspiracy involves secret knowledge that only the elect are privy to.

But the Bible has been so maligned and generally avoided in our society that it might as well contain secrets to which only an ever-smaller minority has access to. In brief, society shot itself in the foot by making information in the Bible a secret, and thus that information, to all intents and purposes, describes a conspiracy to which only committed Christians have access.

God’s response is previewed in Daniel 2, which is summarized in Daniel 2:44:

“And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever.”

The Book of Revelation gets into details. After a series of awesome judgments of God in which a large percentage of the world’s population is killed through disease and warfare, in Chapter 17 a specific prophecy is pronounced against a harlot, taken by many to be the end-time apostate Church of Laodicea, of which Jesus spoke against in Chapter 3.

“And there came one of the seven angels who had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come here; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters; with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication; and upon her forehead was a name written Mystery, Babylon The Great, The Mother Of Harlots And Abominations Of The Earth. And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus; and when I saw her, I wondered with great awe.

“And the angel said unto me, Why didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, whichhath the seven heads and ten horns. The beast that thou sawest was, and is not, and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition; and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in gthe book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is. And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come, and when he cometh, he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition. And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, who have received no kingdom as yet, but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.

“These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them; for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings, and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful. And he said unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues. And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naket, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire. For God hath put in their hearts to fulfill his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled. And the women whom thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.”

Given the use of purple garments by Catholic bishops and of scarlet ones by cardinals, many people place this melancholy pronouncement onto the Catholic Church. It need not be the present one, but a future one that may be a chrislam conglomeration consisting of the most watered-down elements of Islam and Christianity. This association might seemingly be strengthened by the identification of seven heads with seven mountains, Rome being called the City of Seven Hills, but note that heads in Scriptural prophecy usually depict rulers rather than geographical features.

Revelation Chapter 18 addresses next the judgment upon and demise of a mysterious Babylon:

And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power, and the earth was lightened with his glory. And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues; for her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works; in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double. How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her; for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine, and she shall be utterly burned with fire; for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.

“And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning, standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy judgment come. And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more. The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and al thyine wood, and all manner of vessels of ivory, and all manner of vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble, and cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men. And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thoushalt find them no more at all. The merchants of these things, who were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing, and saying, Alas, alas, that great city that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls! For in one hour so great riches are come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off. And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying What city is like unto this great city? And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, in which were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! For in one hour is she made desolate.

“Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her. And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus wil violence shall that great city, Babylon, be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all. And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters shall be heard no more at all in thee; and no craftsman, of whatever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee; and the light of a lamp shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee; for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived. And in her was found the blook of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.”

Some eschatologists claim that Babylon is indeed the Babylon of old, situated in Iraq. That association was most popular under the regime of Saddam Hussein, who had reconstructed that city and vowed to restore it to its former greatness. But the Babylon of Revelation 18 also can be a suggestive reference, the name of some other great community whose characteristics followed those of the original Babylon.

Note the suggestion in Revelation 18:17 that it is a seaport. Mighty as is the River Euphrates, I doubt that it properly meets the description of Babylon as a seaport in Revelation 18. Note also that every time the word fallen is used, it is used twice, and that its destruction occurs in an hour. These items mesh disturbingly well with the events of 911, in which Manhattan’s twin towers, representing the ultimate in commerce, were destroyed, virtually within an hour. Equally disturbing is Manhattan’s long-standing nickname, “Babylon by the sea”. Regardless of its identification, this great center of commerce and corruption is destroyed.

In the very next chapter is rejoicing in heaven over the judgments that have destroyed the kingdoms of mankind, and the war of Armageddon, and the return of Jesus Christ to reign on earth and to marry His wife, the Church.

CONSPIRACY – REAL OR IMAGINED? (CONTINUED)

CONSPIRACY – REAL OR IMAGINED? (CONTINUED)

Daniel actually had been describing the composite modern beast of Revelation Thirteen as well as the sequence of world kingdoms which had led up to the modern world. This can be seen even more clearly as the passage in Daniel Seven continues: the modern incarnation of the Persian bear would be Russia, whose icon is indeed the bear, and Germany of the Grecian leopard. Daniel continues, in verse 7, to flesh out the modern world government:

“After this I saw in the night visions, and, behold, a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly, and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet; and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it, and it had ten horns. I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before which there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots; and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.”

Daniel’s mention of a “little horn” introduces a probable feature of the coming world government that most eschatologists tend to overlook. The horn is indisputably a leader, but of what? As Bible scholar Daymond Duck proposed, the final world government may well be composed of ten regions, rather than of ten nations. In that context, the “little horn” of Daniel Seven may refer to a nation, a smaller entity than a region, which would place the “little horn” as the president of a nation. One could then speculate that perhaps this president may be a president of the United States, for example, who would, in Daniel’s parlance, pluck up the presidents of the United States, Canada and Mexico to become leader of what would then be the North American Region, a supranational entity composed of those three former nations. In my novel Home, Sweet Heaven, as a matter of fact, I describe just that scenario. This regional leader would then go on to be head of the world government comprised of those ten regions.

The Christian doesn’t have to go as deeply into the weeds as we have just trekked to perceive from the Bible that a world government will become a reality. It’s not a question of whether, but of when. In that sense, virtually all Christians with any interest whatsoever in eschatology could be labeled as conspiracy theorists.

Are there other indications, aside from Scripture, that a conspiracy is underway to integrate nations into a larger governmental system, indications that might move more individuals to perceive that the notion of a conspiracy might be more than a paranoia-fed myth?

One simply has to make a quick glance around at the various problems that exist in our modern world to appreciate that society the world over is encumbered with a number of negative issues, each of which represents a very real threat of turning our present order into a chaotic mess from which we have the possibility of emerging only through a centralized system of government that possesses the will and the strength to impose the harsh measures required to restore order. To enumerate just a few: the terror threat from radicalized Muslims; the terror threat from society’s misfits; the terror threat from rogue nations motivated either by unreasoning hatred or the desire to call forth the Mahdi; the increase in natural disasters, exacerbated by the unwise location of populations, the over-use of available resources, and the decay of infrastructures; environmental pollution leading to disease and degeneracy of living conditions; overcrowding; and loss of survivability due to substandard schooling and training and political corruption.

This partial list can easily be expanded, but one item that probably doesn’t belong on it is global warming, which points to what may be the most important item on the list – the manufactured issue that can only be resolved by a more powerful government. Some may argue that there are very real indicators that global warming is a real and important issue. But even if it is a real issue, it may not be caused by man – off the top of my head I can point to at least one potential source other than man – and the issue may not be permanent or life-threatening. Furthermore, if it is a real issue, the motivation for labeling it as threatening may be a primarily political one.

Given all these potential causes of disaster and chaos, most of which are solvable only by God or a centralized government that has the will and means to impose harsh controls over its subjects, it isn’t difficult to perceive that if a cadre of exceedingly wealthy and powerful individuals exist, and further that if these individuals have no understanding of or faith in God, such people would be more than willing to create such a government.

We do know of the existence of such a cadre of people, and we also know that, like bugs that hide under rocks and logs, they are prone to conducting meetings away from the public spotlight.

Moreover, we can infer from the conscious effort to discredit the notion of our Judeo-Christian God and to remove all references to Him from society that the most powerful of this cadre of individuals has absolutely no truck with this God. Moreover, we have clear evidence that this group already has exercised a heavy-handed influence over society to worsen rather than mitigate our problems. We can see this by observing the atrocious mishandling of our public education systems from kindergarten all the way through college and beyond; the ineffective manner in which terrorism is addressed; the enormous effort expended to propagate godless myths such as macroevolution in the face of scientific findings to the contrary; the attempt to prohibit the chaplains of our armed forces from uttering the name of Jesus Christ; the characterization of Christians as “disturbed malcontents”; and the use of the gay agenda to label portions of Holy Scripture as “hate-inciting”.

Given, then, the numerous paths to disaster that exist in the world today, the cadre of immensely wealthy, powerful and godless individuals that exist as well, and clear evidence that this group is fomenting issues rather than attempting to control them, it is only a matter of common sense, driven by the obvious issues and the equally obvious reluctance to mitigate them, to perceive that a conspiracy to form a totalitarian one-world government is indeed afoot.

Why, in the face of the Bible’s forecast of just such a conspiracy, and the obvious indicators of the same, have we been led to view those who have simply connected the dots as being dangerously removed from reality?

The mere fact that “conspiracy theorists” are commonly thought of as dangerous misfits may actually be the most powerful indicator of its reality. Why else would a common-sense conclusion be labeled as dangerously wrong?

CONSPIRACY – REAL OR IMAGINED?

CONSPIRACY – REAL OR IMAGINED?

The notion has been around for quite a while that a conspiracy might be afoot, wherein a cadre of enormously wealthy and powerful individuals band together to plot a worldwide system of government that will enslave all but a privileged few.

Those who read their Bibles don’t find that to be so hard to believe. It’s right there in the pages of Scripture, particularly in Daniel and Revelation. In Daniel 2, for example, Daniel interprets a dream of King Nebudchadnezzar, the ruler who sacked Jerusalem and took Judah into captivity in the sixth century B.C. This troubling dream involved a metallic image representing the mightiest kingdoms of man on earth, appearing in sequence from the time of Nebudchadnezzar’s dream up until the time that Jesus reigns on earth.

“This is the dream, and we will tell its interpretation before the king. Thou, O king, art a king of kings; for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory. And wherever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heavens hath he given into thine hand, and hath made thee ruler over them all.

“Thou art this head of gold. And after thee shall rise another [silver] kingdom inferior to thee, and another kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron, forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things; and, as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise. And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided, but there shall be in it of the strength of iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with clay. And as the toes of the feet were part of iron and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly broken. And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men; but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.

“And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold, the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter; and the dream is certain, and the interpretation of it sure.”

Up to our own point in time, Daniel’s prophetic interpretation of Nebudchadnezzar’s dream has been sure indeed. Nebudchadnezzar’s Babylonian kingdom of gold came and went, as did the silver kingdom of the Persian Empire, and after that the brass kingdom of Alexander the Great. The iron kingdom of the Roman Empire followed the others in its rise and fall. Daniel in Chapter Seven also described these kingdoms in terms of animals: a lion, a bear, a leopard, and the most dreadful beast of all, which had iron teeth. These animals fit well with the features of the first four kingdoms. The Leopard, for example, is fleetfooted, as was Alexander in the speed with which he conquered the known world in the fourth century B.C.

We now await the rise and fall of the final worldwide kingdom of man, Daniel’s kingdom in Chapter Two of iron and clay and in Chapter Seven having ten horns, also known as the kingdom of the antichrist as described in Revelation 13:

“And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like a leopard, and his feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion; and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. And I saw one of his heads as though it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed, and all the world wondered after the beast. And they worshiped the dragon who gave power unto the beast; and they worshiped the beast, saying, Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him? And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies, and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months. And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them; and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

“If any man have an ear, let him hear. He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity; he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience of the saints.

“And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spoke like a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them who dwell on it to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast, saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, that had the wound by a sword, and did live. And he hath power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads, and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.”

This awful ten-horned beast that shall be the final kingdom of man has features that represent a composite of the earlier sequence of kingdoms spoken of in Chapter Seven of Daniel: lion, bear, leopard, and power from a great and terrible dragon. This similarity of features evokes a closer look at that chapter of Daniel. There, in verse 4, the lion is found to possess a feature of startling significance in a modern context.

“The first [beast] was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings; I beheld till its wings were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man; and a man’s heart was given to it.”

The association of England with a lion is a common one; the lion is an iconic fixture of government buildings in that nation. It is also common knowledge that America sprang from English roots. Its first non-indigenous people were English, and it was an English colony before gaining its independence. Given that America’s icon is the eagle, this passage in Daniel, as Bible scholar Irvin Baxter first pointed out, very clearly relates to America. It is wrong, therefore, to assert as many theologians do that America can’t be found in the Bible. There are other Scriptural references to a modern kingdom that match well with America, such as the feckless young lions of Ezekiel 38:13 and the twice-fallen Babylon of Revelation 18. But these associations are more speculative than the eagle of Daniel Seven.

[to be continued]

A NEW BREED OF AMERICAN

A NEW BREED OF AMERICAN

Many years have passed since I was the age of the current crop of American Millennials. I’m tempted to think back on that time of my youth as being different, perhaps more Christian, with the qualities that are implied by that label: self-disciplined, considerate of others, loving, maybe even noble.

When I think back on my teenage years and young adulthood, however, the hoped-for memories don’t surface; others crowd in unbidden: instances of gross disobedience to my parents; underage drinking (lots of that); reckless driving; wild parties; poor grades (mainly due to a pronounced lack of self-discipline and the prioritizing of parties over studies); and the supremacy of self and personal welfare over thought of others.

God? What God? It would be another two decades before God came into my vocabulary.

If I want to be honest about my past, I basically followed the traits outlined by Paul in 2 Timothy 3:1-5. At least that’s what came to mind as this bleak recollection proceeded. I decided to give the passage another review:

“This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God, having a form of godliness, but denying the power of it; from such turn away.”

The score wasn’t pretty: out of the nineteen traits that Paul had listed in that passage, I was guilty of possessing fourteen of them. But it wasn’t a completely devastating hundred percent. There were some characteristics that didn’t fit me, and for that small comfort I could thank the influence of society at large, which at the time had maintained some semblance of the Christian influence that had prevailed at the founding of our country.

It was that small but persistent influence that separated my youth from the Millennial generation, which seems to possess all nineteen of the negative traits listed by Paul in the passage cited above, with each trait being embraced in more generous measure than was the case for me and my generation.

That sorry state of affairs was exemplified recently by scenes on the news that graphically depicted college boys and girls at the beach during spring break engaging in unrestrained drinking, open sex and general mayhem. They had abandoned all sense of responsibility. Most of them, at least those who had managed to maintain some minimum level of consciousness, behaved as one might expect of third-graders who had been granted adult privileges.

More recently yet, the news described a movement that is spreading among universities around the country that’s demanding administrators to resign over their failures to enforce the “well-being” of the students. In this case, one egregious wrong that had been perpetrated by the culprits was their allowance of the use on campus of certain politically-incorrect words that have been considered offensive and thus have intruded upon the students’ bubbles of controlled mental and emotional environment in sufficient measure as to cause them distress. Other offenses included student loans and other negative circumstances that had threatened their sense of entitlement.

Developments such as these indicate that a fairly substantial portion of Millennials represent a generation of perpetual babies who have abandoned all semblance of the nobility and selflessness that was associated with the Christianity of our forefathers. Some day soon we will necessarily look to them in increasing measure for the continuation of our society. When they do, if their collective mindset isn’t preempted by outside events, we shall almost certainly drift into a socialistic form of government intended to perpetuate and expand upon existing entitlements. That will pass quickly, however, morphing into a more permanent dictatorial regime that will impose upon the public a measure of distress that will be unimaginable to the coddled and privileged students who comprise today’s academia.

CORRECTED VERSION – IS THIS ALL THE CHOICE WE GET?

 

 

 

[Note to the reader: earlier today I made a posting with the title below, but the text was an incomplete version; the completed version was on my thumb drive but didn’t get transferred in a timely manner.  My apologies.  The version below is what should have been posted to begin with.]

IS THIS ALL THE CHOICE WE GET?

From the way this election cycle is shaping up, we might be left with the choice of either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump for our next president of the United States. What kind of choice is that?

Clinton has an extremely shady past. Her Machiavellian acquisition of wealth and power at the expense and lives of others includes the Benghazi debacle that smacks of an unthinkable abandonment and the email scandal that reeks of a felonious placing of self before the interests of our country. But even before those more recent suggestions of malfeasance on a grand scale, she had left in the wake of her self-centered acquisition of power and wealth the Whitewater scandal and the death of associate Vince Foster that evoked a number of unanswered questions that suggest murder rather than the alleged suicide.

Machiavellian is a strong word. It implies a dark and deadly hunger for power that descends below normal humanity. It will be useful to explore the word in some detail. To that end, I have extracted from Part 3, Chapter 1 of my book Family of God information relevant to the association of darkness with Machiavelli:

“Truth perverted has the power to enslave us. In the two thousand years since the death of the innocent [Jesus] who was thrust before Pilate and evoked from the Roman the famous question “What is truth?”, battles have been fought and countless people have suffered in the struggle to define truth for gain. No one knew this with more clarity than Niccolo Machiavelli, the fifteenth century Florentine who set out in The Prince to describe the means by which an ambitious man might acquire and maintain power over others. It has been recognized for centuries as a handbook on deception and betrayal in which the manipulation of truth is wielded with the objective of obtaining unfair advantage over innocent people. This kind of self-service is the very antithesis of the Judeo-Christian God; it represents a horrifying death of the soul. Below, in his own words (translated by N. H. Thomson), Machiavelli relates a classic instance of the application of duplicity:

“In our own times, during the papacy of Alexander VI, Oliverotto of Fermo, who some years before had been left an orphan, and had been brought up by his maternal uncle Giovanni Fogliani, was sent while still a lad to serve under Paolo Vitelli, in the expectation that a thorough training under that commander might qualify him for high rank as a soldier. After the death of Paolo, he served under his brother Vitellozzo, and in a very short time, being of a quick wit, hardy and resolute, he became one of the first soldiers of his company. But thinking it beneath him to serve under others, with the countenance of the Vitelleschi and the connivance of certain citizens of Fermo who preferred the slavery to the freedom of their country, he formed the design to seize on that town.

“He accordingly wrote to Giovanni Fogliani that after many years of absence from home, he desired to see him and his native city once more, and to look a little into the condition of his patrimony; and as his one endeavor had been to make himself a name, in order that his fellow-citizens might see that his time had not been mis-spent, he proposed to return honourably attended by a hundred horsemen from among his own friends and followers; and he begged Giovanni graciously to arrange for his reception by the citizens of Fermo with corresponding marks of distinction, as this would be creditable not only to himself, but also to the uncle who had brought him up.

“Giovanni accordingly, did not fail in any proper attention to his nephew, but caused him to be splendidly received by his fellow-citizens, and lodged him in his house; where Oliverotto having passed some days, and made the necessary arrangements for carrying out his wickedness, gave a formal banquet, to which he invited his uncle and all the first men of Fermo. When the repast and the other entertainments proper to such an occasion had come to an end, Oliverotto artfully turned the conversation to matters of grave interest, by speaking of the greatness of Pope Alexander and Cesare his son, and of their enterprises; and when Giovanni and the others were replying to what he said, he suddenly rose up, observing that these were matters to be discussed in a more private place, and so withdrew to another chamber; whither his uncle and all the other citizens followed him, and where they had no sooner seated themselves, than soldiers rushing out from places of concealment put Giovanni and all the rest to death.

“After this butchery, Oliverotto mounted his horse, rode through the streets, and besieged the chief magistrate in the palace, so that all were constrained by fear to yield obedience and accept a government of which he made himself the head.”

One does not need to look closely to see obvious parallels between Hillary Clinton’s past actions and this brutal example of reckless self-devotion.

Opposing Clinton is Donald Trump, whose immense ego and empty-minded bombast suggest a deranged personality far darker than the self-absorbed immaturity of a schoolyard bully. Elevation to the presidency would have a good chance of placing the consequences of his inevitably misguided acts on a destructive level with that of Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator who brought his country to its knees in World War II.

The young Mussolini was described as a disobedient and unruly schoolyard bully, who couldn’t be handled by schools noted for their expertise in discipline. Nevertheless, his intelligence allowed him to educate himself broadly if not deeply in philosophy and political theory. His self-assurance, speaking presence and apparent knowledge of the political issues of the day granted him the respect of his political peers despite the shallowness of his actual knowledge, which few bothered to explore in detail. Embracing violence as a means of acquiring political objectives, he was arrested a number of times. He was also becoming a person of note in the socialist community, enhancing his standing in that community with frequent articles.

He was known for frequent and radical changes in position, morphing from a socialist to a fervent nationalist, and from there, as it suited his rise to power, to a Fascist dictator.

During World War II he cast his (and Italy’s) lot with Hitler’s Germany, anticipating an equal standing with the Nazi dictator. To his jealous dismay, that never happened, and Hitler’s stronger control over the war in Italy virtually destroyed that nation as the conflict brought in the Allies. As the end of the war approached, he attempted to flee the country disguised as a German soldier, but was recognized and shot along with his mistress. Their bodies were put on display in Milan, hung downward.

Disturbing parallels between Mussolini and Trump include a shallowness of political understanding, a proclivity toward changing position on issues, and, of course, their common self-aggrandizing bombast. True wisdom was lacking in Mussolini, and it’s probable that Trump shares this characteristic. In the end, Mussolini almost destroyed Italy. Given their commonalities, it is possible that America’s future would also be in peril with Trump at the helm.

Mussolini got the Italian trains to run on time, true to his promise. But then he destroyed them.

The poverty of choice that limits us to either Hillary or Trump was handed to us by an electorate who is unable to distinguish between the ability to act boldly and the ability to act wisely. As Proverbs says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Having removed God from the public domain, we appear to have lost our wisdom.

IS THIS ALL THE CHOICE WE GET?

IS THIS ALL THE CHOICE WE GET?

From the way this election cycle is shaping up, we might be left with the choice of either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump for our next president of the United States. What kind of choice is that?

Clinton has an extremely shady past. Her Machiavellian acquisition of wealth and power at the expense and lives of others includes the Benghazi debacle that smacks of an unthinkable abandonment and the email scandal that reeks of a felonious placing of self before the interests of our country. But even before those more recent suggestions of malfeasance on a grand scale, she had left in her self-centered wake the Whitewater scandal and the death of associate Vince Foster that evoked a number of unanswered questions that suggest murder rather than the alleged suicide.

[insert excerpts from the Prince-taken from Part 3, Chapter 1 (The Perversion of Truth) Of Family of God]

Truth perverted has the power to enslave us. In the two thousand years since the death of the innocent man who was thrust before Pilate, battles have been fought and countless people have suffered in the struggle to define truth for gain. No one knew this with more clarity than Niccolo Machiavelli, the fifteenth century Florentine who set out in The Prince to describe the means by which an ambitious man might acquire and maintain power over others. It has been recognized for centuries as a handbook on deception and betrayal in which the manipulation of truth is wielded with the objective of obtaining unfair advantage over innocent people. This kind of self-service is the very antithesis of the Judeo-Christian God; it represents a horrifying death of the soul. Below, in his own words (translated by N. H. Thomson), Machiavelli relates a classic instance of the application of duplicity:

“In our own times, during the papacy of Alexander VI, Oliverotto of Fermo, who some years before had been left an orphan, and had been brought up by his maternal uncle Giovanni Fogliani, was sent while still a lad to serve under Paolo Vitelli, in the expectation that a thorough training under that commander might qualify him for high rank as a soldier. After the death of Paolo, he served under his brother Vitellozzo, and in a very short time, being of a quick wit, hardy and resolute, he became one of the first soldiers of his company. But thinking it beneath him to serve under others, with the countenance of the Vitelleschi and the connivance of certain citizens of Fermo who preferred the slavery to the freedom of their country, he formed the design to seize on that town.

“He accordingly wrote to Giovanni Fogliani that after many years of absence from home, he desired to see him and his native city once more, and to look a little into the condition of his patrimony; and as his one endeavor had been to make himself a name, in order that his fellow-citizens might see that his time had not been mis-spent, he proposed to return honourably attended by a hundred horsemen from among his own friends and followers; and he begged Giovanni graciously to arrange for his reception by the citizens of Fermo with corresponding marks of distinction, as this would be creditable not only to himself, but also to the uncle who had brought him up.

“Giovanni accordingly, did not fail in any proper attention to his nephew, but caused him to be splendidly received by his fellow-citizens, and lodged him in his house; where Oliverotto having passed some days, and made the necessary arrangements for carrying out his wickedness, gave a formal banquet, to which he invited his uncle and all the first men of Fermo. When the repast and the other entertainments proper to such an occasion had come to an end, Oliverotto artfully turned the conversation to matters of grave interest, by speaking of the greatness of Pope Alexander and Cesare his son, and of their enterprises; and when Giovanni and the others were replying to what he said, he suddenly rose up, observing that these were matters to be discussed in a more private place, and so withdrew to another chamber; whither his uncle and all the other citizens followed him, and where they had no sooner seated themselves, than soldiers rushing out from places of concealment put Giovanni and all the rest to death.

“After this butchery, Oliverotto mounted his horse, rode through the streets, and besieged the chief magistrate in the palace, so that all were constrained by fear to yield obedience and accept a government of which he made himself the head.”

One does not need to look closely to see applications today of the methods of deception set forth by Machiavelli and his disciples. Problems are created by governments for which the only solution is more state control. Information is hidden and compartmentalized in the name of national security. Groups who oppose state-sponsored agendas are isolated through public marginalization.

Opposing Clinton is Donald Trump, whose immense ego and empty-minded bombast suggest a deranged personality far darker than the self-absorbed immaturity of a schoolyard bully. Elevation to the presidency would have a good chance of placing the consequences of his inevitably misguided acts on a destructive level with that of Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator who brought his country to its knees in World War II.

[insert writeup on Mussolini]

This poverty of choice was handed to us by an electorate who is unable to distinguish between the ability to act boldly and the ability to act wisely. Mussolini got the Italian trains to run on time, true to his promise.

SCRIPTURAL SUGGESTIONS OF THE FEMININITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT (CONTINUATION #2)

SCRIPTURAL SUGGESTIONS OF THE FEMININITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT (CONTINUATION #2)

Inclusion of Gender in the Creation of Man in God’s Image

Genesis 1:26 and 27 links the creation of man in God’s image as possessing gender:

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

An alternative interpretation of this passage would not only attempt to split an intimately interconnected verse with no substantive justification, but it would also demonstrate an indifference to God’s aversion to the practice of homosexuality (as well as other sexual sins), as may be found in Genesis 19, Leviticus 18 and Romans 1. This strong antipathy of God toward sexual sin would more properly be indicative of misrepresenting man’s creation in God’s gendered image.

In Genesis 2 verses 18, 21 and 22 the detail of Eve’s formation out of Adam is highly suggestive of the counterpart formation of the Holy Spirit out of the Father.

“And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. . . And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.”

A shallow interpretation of this passage would suggest that since it follows the story of the creation of Adam and Eve sequentially, the creation of Eve was removed from that of Adam by a significant amount of time. A more logical interpretation would view the insertion of this passage as a matter of emphasis, suggesting perhaps that this extraction of Eve out of Adam was illustrative of the extraction of the Holy Spirit out of the Father.

The Embedding of Feminine within the Masculine

In Genesis 5:1 and 2, Adam and Eve are both named Adam, suggesting that Eve, while being functionally feminine, is also named after her masculine counterpart.

“This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.”

This naming convention furnishes some justification for describing the Holy Spirit with masculine pronouns, although it should be kept in mind that the original Hebrew described the Holy Spirit in feminine terms.

The Femininity of the Executive Function

It is generally recognized and specifically noted by Bible scholars that Scripture depicts the Holy Spirit as operating in an executive function, responsive to the Father’s Will. A responsive nature is distinctly feminine. Genesis 1:1,2 furnishes a specific example of the Holy Spirit operating responsively to the Father.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”

Although I prefer to remain entirely within Scripture in my responses, I also could cite Benjamin Warfield’s commentary in page 122 his book The Holy Spirit that “In both Testaments the Spirit of God appears distinctly as the executive of the Godhead [italics in the original].” This reference is particularly appropriate, in that Benjamin Warfield is held in high esteem within the Christian community. I also point to Warfield’s more lengthy discussion on pages 124 and 125 that elaborated on the role of the Holy Spirit in the act of creation in responsive fashion to the Will of the Father, therefore representing a feminine role.

The linkage given in Proverbs with Wisdom in an executive role, as well as its personification of Wisdom as a complement to God the Father amply justifies the inclusion of the Holy Spirit in that linkage.

Furthermore, in Ephesians 5, Paul repeats Adam’s words to the effect that a man shall leave his father and mother and join his wife, and they two shall become one flesh. In applying this entire passage to Jesus, does not Paul imply that Jesus had a Mother to leave? As there is a general consensus that Jesus existed long before He came in the flesh, we also must agree that here Paul is not speaking of Mary as Jesus’ Mother.

It may be the case that most theologians don’t perceive any compelling reason to equate Christ and the Church to Adam’s words regarding leaving father and mother and joining unto his wife to become one flesh. But Jesus Himself as quoted in Matthew 19:4-8 appears to attach a significance to Adam’s words that transcends a mere man-woman relationship. In addition, there are other passages in Scripture, including Genesis 24 and Isaiah 54, that tend to confirm the notion that in the spiritual realm the Church shall indeed serve in a female role as the Bride of Christ.

The Holy Spirit Identified as Feminine in Original Scripture

It is an undeniable fact that with regard to Scripture, “Church authorities” did indeed engage in a sexual cleansing operation, for not only were the Godhead and Mary stripped of their sexuality, but there is indisputable evidence that Scripture itself was altered to sexually mutilate the Godhead by substituting a weak all-male congress for what always was perceived by the Jews and also by the earliest Christians as a Divine Family consisting of Father, Mother and Son.

It wasn’t always that way. In the Hebrew Old Testament, the Holy Spirit, as the Ruah or Shekinah, was viewed as feminine. The switch to masculinity occurred in the New Testament.

In Isaiah 51:9 and 10, for example, the King James Version reads:

“Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not it who hast cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not it who hast dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; who hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?”

The original, however, read as follows, and some Bible scholars assert that the neutering was deliberate, for there is no way that the original can be construed as depicting other than femininity, in opposition to the oft-mentioned comment that some grammatically feminine words in Hebrew don’:

“Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not She who hast cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not She who hast dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; who hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?”

According to an Internet search of “feminine Holy Spirit in the Hebrew Scriptures”, multiple modern, deeply serious theologians and ancient language scholars share the view that the earliest Hebrew Christians had access to Scripture that presented the Holy Spirit as a feminine Persona; this feminine persisted within the Syriac and other Eastern branches of Christianity and within the Gnostic sect as well. A prime example of this is the Scriptural passage known as the Siniatic Palimpsest (a palimpsest is a recycled writing medium, wherein a second layer of writing was applied over the original, the original usually consisting of more important information) uncovered toward the end of the nineteenth century by Agnes Lewis. The original writing included portions of the Gospel of John of which a quote from Jesus Himself in John 14:26 asserts the following (translation attributed to Danny Mahar):

“But She – the Spirit – the Paraclete whom He will send to you – my Father – in my name – She will teach you everything; She will remind you of what I have told you.”

There is a suggestion, from a comparative review of this text with Paul’s letters that Paul, among the numerous early Hebrew Christians, used the version of John’s Gospel from which this passage came. References to the Siniatic Palimpsest may be found on the Internet. Unfortunately, many of the translations into English found under the search phrase “Siniatic Palimpsest” apply without justification the more conventional “he” rather than the “she” of the original language. Some Internet references, however, do acknowledge the proper “she”.

The identification of the Holy Spirit as feminine in the Siniatic Palimpsest is no small matter, for this document is the oldest of all copies of the Gospels, being dated to the second century A.D. It is a recognized principle of textual interpretation, even by the most conservative of Biblical scholars, that the older the text, the closer it is thought to be to the original Scripture. This is particularly important in light of the fact that there are no other Scriptural texts between it and the oldest Greek text dated to the fourth century A.D. One can only surmise that between the second and fourth centuries Scripture had been altered to substitute “he” for “she” in references to the Holy Spirit. Even then, at least one reference to the Holy Spirit as “she”, apparently having been overlooked in the switch, was allowed to remain. As Romans 9:25 reads in our King James Bible,

“As he saith also in Osee [Hosea], I will call them my people, who were not my people; and her beloved, who was not beloved.”

Despite the overt mistranslation of the pronoun “She” to “It” or “He” in modern English translations of Scripture, these modified versions still provide sufficient evidence of the feminine nature of the Holy Spirit to convince all but the most reactionary of individuals. Among the most assertive in that regard is the Glory of God, the Hebrew feminine Shekinah, who indwelt the temples at their dedication. The obvious connection between the feminine Shekinah described in Exodus 40 and 1 Kings 8 and the indwelling Holy Spirit described in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles and referred to by Paul is, of itself, overwhelming evidence of the feminine gender of the Holy Spirit. The link between the Holy Spirit and the Shekinah Glory is also supported as well by the many references to “Eloah”, a feminine term for God in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the recognition of feminine expressions of God in the books of Job and Judges, as acknowledged by at least one expert in the specialized field of ancient Hebrew.

Why would Church authorities be so boldly heretic as to deliberately alter Scripture as to mislead the Church regarding the gender of the Holy Spirit and to remove all traces of sexuality from God? A number of possibilities have been raised by multiple scholars, among which two stand out as particularly plausible candidates. First, the Gnostic Christian community, which adhered to a feminine Holy Spirit, went overboard on some of its misunderstandings of Christianity, and was considered to be a dangerously heretic sect; in its attempt to stamp out this notion of God, the community that eventually came to represent mainstream Christianity engaged in a wholesale rejection of its precepts, in effect throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Second, the presence of femininity within the Godhead came perilously close to pagan theology, which involved the worship of divine families consisting of father, mother and son, and was often given to lewd ritualistic behavior, as lamented by Augustine among others. Here again, in her attempt to separate herself from these other religions, mainstream Christianity rejected the notion of a divine family out of hand, once more tossing the baby out with the bathwater.

A number of modern Bible scholars agree as to Old Testament references to the Holy Spirit in unambiguously feminine terms. This goes beyond grammatical considerations. R. P. Nettelhorst, for example, Professor of Bible and Bible Languages at Quartz Hill School of Theology in Antelope Valley, California, who is an expert in the Hebrew language, changed his thinking on the gender of the Holy Spirit upon coming across undeniably feminine references to the Holy Spirit in the Book of Judges. After further research, he found the femininity to be scattered about in various locations in the Old Testament, beginning at Genesis 1. Other scholars have found the same feminine descriptors elsewhere, including the Book of Job.

[to be continued]

REBUTTALS TO CLAIMS THAT THE HOLY SPIRIT IS NOT FEMININE (CONTINUED)

REBUTTALS TO CLAIMS THAT THE HOLY SPIRIT IS NOT FEMININE (CONTINUED)

Lingering references in modern Bibles of a feminine Holy Spirit

There actually are references in current mainstream Bible translations to the Holy Spirit by the pronoun “She”. In Romans 9:25 of the King James Version, Paul uses “her” in referring to the Holy Spirit:

“As he saith also in Hosea, I will call them my people, who were not my people; and her beloved, who was not beloved.”

Again, in Romans 1:20, Paul’s reference to the Godhead is made in the feminine derivative of the word “theos”.

Furthermore, it is known that in Scriptural translations of Isaiah 51:9 and 10 in the Nicene era and later, the reference to the feminine Arm of the Lord was deliberately switched from “she” to the neuter “It”.

In Isaiah 51:9 and 10, for example, the King James Version reads:

“Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not it who hast cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not it who hast dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; who hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?”

The original, however, read as follows, and some Bible scholars assert that the neutering was deliberate, as the grammatical construction of the original text prohibits any other interpretation of it than a feminine description:

“Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not She who hast cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not She who hast dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; who hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?”

Claims that romance and passion are not intrinsic to God or the spiritual realm

Scripture itself contradicts claims that God might be above the romance and passion intrinsic to a fully-functional spiritual marriage. Examples include the Song of Solomon, Jesus’ passion in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Jesus’ discourse on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24).

Many theologians insist upon interpreting the feminine imagery in the Book of Proverbs as simply figures of speech. Correspondingly, Proverbs is depersonalized, being considered at most an attribute of the Godhead. This view is contradicted by the intensely personal nature of Proverbs 3 and 8 and their link to the role of the Holy Spirit in Genesis 1:1,2. It is further disallowed by the direct personalization of Wisdom and the equation of Wisdom with the Holy Spirit in the Book of Wisdom, which is canonical in the Catholic religion.

Many pastors, having interpreted 1 Timothy 2 as limiting the role of women in Church, shy away from the thought of conferring Godhood on a female. Given the general responsive role of women as described in Scripture and Eve’s obvious misapplication of that role, Paul’s commentary in 1 Corinthians 2 actually supports the notion of a feminine Holy Spirit.

Some pastors point to mention of the Church as the Body of Christ in Ephesians 5 and elsewhere as conflicting with a meaningful role for the Church as the Bride of Christ. A careful reading of Ephesians 5 contradicts this apparent conflict: Ephesians 5:31 directly identifies the male/female union as a mutual ownership of each other. This ownership, in a possessive sense, assigns the wife’s (Church’s) body as the body of her husband.

There is a centuries-long tradition within virtually all Western Churches of a male Holy Spirit. A feminine Holy Spirit would go against the grain of this tradition. However, tradition isn’t Scripture, there are readily understandable reasons as to why the switch from the original was made, and there are understandable, albeit selfish, reasons as to why there haven’t been more disputes in that regard over the years.

It wasn’t always that way. In the Hebrew Old Testament, the Holy Spirit, as the Ruah or Shekinah, was viewed as feminine. Aided by Justin Martyr, the early Gnostic controversy within Christianity, Augustine and Jerome Zanchius, the switch to masculinity occurred in the New Testament.

Foremost in the minds of many of the new Christians were the lewd and disgusting bacchanalias associated with the devotions to the Greek and Roman gods, who themselves were prone to bouts of lust and sexual perversions. In sharp contrast to the gross depravity of these gods, Jesus stood apart, radiant in shining moral splendor. At a time of rampant sexual excess, Jesus’ Words sparkled like swords of righteousness and were taken deeply to heart. Among these were His own pronouncements of the place of sexuality within the Christian economy, which were immortalized in Scripture. His Words that are handed down to us in Matthew 19 must have been very important to the new Christians:

“The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read that he who made them at the beginning, made them male and female; and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore, they are no more twain, but one flesh. What, therefore, God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away? He saith unto them, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to put away your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery; and whosoever marrieth her who is put away doth commit adultery.

“His disciples say unto him, If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry. But he said unto them, All men cannot receive this saying, except they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, who were so born from their mother’s womb; and there are some eunuchs, who were made eunuchs by men; and there are eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”

The new Christians, in overlooking much of what Jesus actually was teaching, placed a heavy emphasis on the latter part of this saying by Jesus, the part that dealt with eunuchs. It may have called to mind a piece of Old Testament Scripture, verse five of David’s fifty-first Psalm, attaching to it a meaning that went beyond the words:

“Behold, I was shaped in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”

This passage was written after Nathan confronted David with a scathing rebuke over David’s murderous lust for Uriah’s wife Bathsheba, and was an expression of guilt, which very much included his own, over the baseness of motivation behind some sexual unions.

Paul, too, in support of the Christian desire for moral cleanliness and writing to a Church that was in danger of returning to the materialism of society at large, added his obviously conflicted opinion of the meaning of sexual purity and the role of women within the Christian economy, but questioning himself as he did so as to whether he was writing on behalf of the Holy Spirit, or whether his was doing so entirely on his own. In 1 Corinthians 7:1 and 2, 25-40, he said this:

“Now concerning the things about which ye wrote unto me, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. . . .
“Now concerning virgins, I have no commandment of the Lord; yet I give my judgment, as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful. I suppose, therefore, that this is good for the present distress, I say, that it is good for a man so to be. Art thou bound unto a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife. But and if thou marry, thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin marry, she hath not sinned. Nevertheless, such shall have trouble in the flesh; but I spare you. But this I say, brethren, The time is short; it remaineth that both they that have wives be as though they had none; and they that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they possessed not; and they that use this world, as not abusing it; for the fashion of this world passeth away. But I would not have you without care. He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. There is a difference also between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit; but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband. And this I speak for your own profit; not that I may cast a snare upon you, but for that which is comely, and that ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction. But if any man think that he behaveth himself uncomely toward his virgin, if she pass the flower of her age, and need so require, let him do what he will, he sinneth not; let them marry. Nevertheless, he that standeth steadfast in his heart, having no necessity, but hath power over his own will, and hath so decreed in his heart that he will keep his virgin, doeth well. So, then, he that giveth her in marriage doeth well; but he that giveth her not in marriage doeth better. The wife is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth; but if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to when she will, only in the Lord. But she is happier if she so abide, after my judgment; and I think also that I have the Spirit of God.”

Although Paul repeatedly noted that the union between man and wife is not sinful, it was his admonition that life as a eunuch was better, in that it permitted undiluted focus to the Lord. It was that sentiment which stood out in the early Christian mind as the golden standard of behavior.

That standard was expressed, for example, by Justin the Martyr in his first apology for (defense of) Christianity, as compiled in the book Early Christian Fathers, edited by Cyril C. Richardson. This commentary was written around the middle of the second century A.D., about a half century after the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation. In it, Justin echoed the sentiment of Paul regarding sexual circumspection:

“About continence [Jesus] said this: ‘Whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery in his heart before God.’ And: ‘If your right eye offends you, cut it out; it is better for you to enter into the kingdom of Heaven with one eye than with two to be sent into eternal fire.’ And: ‘Whoever marries a woman who has been put away from another man commits adultery.’ And: ‘There are some who were made eunuchs by men, and some who were born eunuchs, and some who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake; only not all [are able to] receive this.

“And so those who make second marriages according to human law are sinners in the sight of our Teacher, and those who look on a woman to lust after her. For he condemns not only the man who commits the act of adultery, but the man who desires to commit adultery, since not only our actions but our thoughts are manifest to God. Many men and women now in their sixties and seventies who have been disciples of Christ from childhood have preserved their purity; and I am proud that I could point to such people in every nation. . . But to begin with, we do not marry except in order to bring up children, or else, renouncing marriage, we live in perfect continence. To show you that promiscuous intercourse is not among our mysteries – just recently one of us submitted a petition to the Prefect Felix in Alexandria, asking that a physician be allowed to make him a eunuch, for the physicians there said they were not allowed to do this without the permission of the Prefect. When Felix would by no means agree to endorse [the petition], the young man remained single, satisfied with [the approval of] his own conscience and that of his fellow believers.”

Two and a half centuries later Augustine experienced much the same revulsion as Justin did over the moral tawdriness of the Roman society in which he lived. Having become a Christian thirty two years after his birth in 354 A.D., Augustine had spent much of his dissolute pre-Christian years in the enjoyment of the depravity of the society in which he lived. The shame and regret of these early years served to drive Augustine into a passionate rejection of loose morality and unbridled lust. The strength of his feelings in that regard are demonstrated throughout his book City of God, an example of which is given in Chapters 4 and 5 of Book II:

“When I was a young man I used to go to sacrilegious shows and entertainments. I watched the antics of madmen; I listened to singing boys; I thoroughly enjoyed the most degrading spectacles put on in honour of gods and goddesses – in honour of the Heavenly Virgin, of of Berecynthia, mother of all. On the yearly festival of Berecynthia’s purification the lowest kind of actors sang, in front of her litter, songs unfit for the ears of even the mother of one of those mountebanks, to say nothing of the mother of any decent citizen, or of a senator; while as for the Mother of the Gods – ! For there is something in the natural respect we have towards our parents that the extreme of infamy cannot wholly destroy; and certainly those very mountebanks would be ashamed to give a rehearsal performance in their homes, before their mothers, of those disgusting verbal and acted obscenities. Yet they performed them in the presence of the Mother of the Gods before an immense audience of spectators of both sexes. If those spectators were enticed by curiosity to gather in profusion, they ought at least to have dispersed in confusion at the insults to their modesty.

“If these were sacred rites, what is meant by sacrilege? If this is purification, what is meant by pollution? And the name of the ceremony is ‘the fercula’, which might suggest the giving of a dinner-party where the unclean demons could enjoy a feast to their liking. Who could fail to realize what kind of spirits they are which could enjoy such obscenities? Only a man who refused to recognize even the existence of any unclean spirits who deceive men under the title of gods, or one whose life was such that he hoped for the favour and feared the anger of such gods, rather than that of the true God.

Augustine was enormously influential to the Christian Church at a time when Church doctrine was still being formulated and heresies were still emerging, to be debated upon and rejected. In his wake, the Church charted a course that polarized itself away from any hint of the depravities associated with the corrupt gods and goddesses of the world about her. This extremity of purification, for which purity was equated with chasitity, cleansed the Judeo-Christian God of any taint of sexuality.

A thousand years later, this insistence upon purity had not only remained, but had crystallized into a rigid perfectionism, enshrined by the medieval cleric Jerome Zanchius, a rigid adherent of the heavenly perfection envisioned by Aristotle and Ptolemy. Zanchius, in his rather pretentious work Absolute Predestination Stated and Defined, included some Scripturally unjustified statements regarding the nature of God, of which the following excerpts are representative:

“I.—When love is predicated of God, we do not mean that He is possessed of it as a passion or affection. In us it is such, but if, considered in that sense, it should be ascribed to the Deity, it would be utterly subversive of the simplicity, perfection and independency of His being. Love, therefore, when attributed to Him, signifies—
“(l) His eternal benevolence, i.e., His everlasting will, purpose and determination to deliver, bless and save His people. Of this, no good works wrought by them are in any sense the cause. Neither are even the merits of Christ Himself to be considered as any way moving or exciting this good will of God to His elect, since the gift of Christ, to be their Mediator and Redeemer, is itself an effect of this free and eternal favour borne to them by God the Father (John 3.16). His love towards them arises merely from “the good pleasure of His own will,” without the least regard to anything ad extra or out of Himself.
“(2) The term implies complacency, delight and approbation. With this love God cannot love even His elect as considered in themselves, because in that view they are guilty, polluted sinners, but they were, from all eternity, objects of it, as they stood united to Christ and partakers of His righteousness.
“(3) Love implies actual beneficence, which, properly speaking, is nothing else than the effect or accomplishment of the other two: those are the cause of this. This actual beneficence respects all blessings, whether of a temporal, spiritual or eternal nature. Temporal good things are indeed indiscriminately bestowed in a greater or less degree on all, whether elect or reprobate, but they are given in a covenant way and as blessings to the elect only, to whom also the other benefits respecting grace and glory are peculiar. And this love of beneficence, no less than that of benevolence and complacency, is absolutely free, and irrespective of any worthiness in man.
Given this unnecessary but historical antagonism between Christianity and gender, one may readily perceive how tempting it must have been to downplay gender in Scripture by “correcting” certain references to it.

REBUTTALS TO CLAIMS THAT THE HOLY SPIRIT IS NOT FEMININE

REBUTTALS TO CLAIMS THAT THE HOLY SPIRIT IS NOT FEMININE

The Implied Gender-Neutrality of Galatians 3:28 and Matthew 22:29 and 30

These passages are presented below:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

“Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels of God in heaven.”

The claim has been made that since Galatians 3:26 and Matthew 22:29,30 describe humans in the spiritual realm as being gender-neutral, the spiritual realm doesn’t involve gender. Neither of these passages remotely suggest that heaven is a gender-neutral domain. The myopic and unjustified extension of statements beyond their meanings fails to take into account that whereas spiritual individuals will not be gendered, an appropriate interpretation in harmony with Scripture elsewhere and with the understanding that the Church is a collective aggregate strongly suggests that the Church, as an aggregate of individual components, will indeed be gendered.

Jeremiah 10:12 has been interpreted to suggest that power and wisdom, rather than representing a separate Entity, are attributes of the Father

Jeremiah 10:12 is presented below:

“He hath made the earth by his power; he hath estab lished the world by his wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by his discretion.”

This passage which God describes power and wisdom as belonging to Him, is cited as indicative that these are God’s own attributes. This claim fails to comprehend that the union between God and the Holy Spirit, being a romantic one, is also possessive. God here is speaking of the mutually possessive nature of marriage. The implication in this passage of mutual ownership intrinsic to a romantic relationship is simply overlooked by those who fail to understand that romance is a vital part of the spiritual realm.

The “He” issue

The “He” issue, for which the Holy Spirit is referred to in Scripture by masculine pronouns, may be resolved in two distinct ways, both of which permit the Holy Spirit to be viewed as functionally feminine while being composed of a masculine or neuter substance. Scripture’s treatment of spiritual humanity furnishes ample justification for viewing the Holy Spirit to be functionally feminine and compositionally masculine, as suggested by Paul’s description of spiritual mankind as genderless in the face of his description of mankind’s aggregate as the Church as the wife of Christ. In the alternate but equally valid view there is also ample justification for appreciating that in the original autographs in the Hebrew and Aramaic languages, the Holy Spirit was perceived as feminine. Examples include John 14:26 in the version recorded in the Siniatic Palimpsest, Isiah 51:9,10 and Romans 9:25.

Basically, I said in Family of God that the Holy Spirit, while performing an essentially female function in the context that I have defined in the introduction above, could also legitimately be considered to be male with respect to substance, composition or union. I went on to speculate that the Scriptural emphasis on the male substance as opposed to the female function may actually be a promise to mankind regarding his future spiritual participation in the Godhead as the Bride of Christ. This viewpoint, however, applies to the entirety of redeemed mankind who constitute the Church, and not to redeemed individuals, who simply comprise components of that Body.

A paradox stands in the way of internalizing this new and welcome information. This inconsistency first must be resolved in order that we may fully accept it. The issue is this: we, redeemed mankind, are collectively treated as masculine whereas in Scripture we are given to understand our spiritual role in relationship to Jesus as feminine. This conflict requires us to differentiate between our gender as an aggregate of individual elements and our gender in a functional application. Thus, regarding our future spiritual identity, as an aggregate we shall be male whereas functionally we shall be female.

I expanded on this thought in my blog friendofthefamily.wordpress.com by noting that as Bride of Christ, redeemed (spiritual) mankind itself, while being designated as male in composition (mankind is a male descriptor), will obviously be performing a female functional role that is harmoniously complementary to Jesus Christ.

Actually, the issue may be taken to a more basic level than that. According to Genesis 2:18-22, God fashioned Eve out of Adam. Therefore Eve, while being female in function, may be thought of as possessing the substance of her male predecessor.

A conflict of much the same nature exists in our understanding of the Holy Trinity: Among the Members of the Trinity, the First and Second Persons, as Father and Son, are naturally considered to be male in gender. Regarding the Third Person, the Holy Spirit, however, there is no small amount of gender ambiguity. Obviously, if future mankind can legitimately be male in composition and female in function, the same attributes may apply in an equally non-contradictory manner to the Holy Spirit, in Her feminine functional role as distinct from Her substance as originating from the masculine Father. Indeed, why would it “not be good”, per Genesis 2:18, for Adam to be without a complementary other, yet be good for that situation to exist within the Godhead?

Scripture as most of us know it attempts to remove the ambiguity surrounding the Holy Spirit by routinely applying the pronoun ‘He’ to this Person. In doing so without explanatory or qualifying remarks, the Scripture handed down to us in the West automatically assigns only the male gender to this Divine Person. It has often been commented, however, by respected theologians, that Scripture elsewhere seems to develop an image of the Holy Spirit that is female in nature. We saw this in the review in Chapter 4 of some Christian authors who attempted to describe the nature of the Holy Spirit. To the Holy Spirit are regularly assigned the attributes of comfort, nurturing and compassion, supported by statements made by Jesus Himself. These female descriptors are functional attributes, whereas the pronoun ‘He’, when applied to the Holy Spirit in Scripture, refers to the Divine Person in the sense of object. There is a striking parallelism here with the object/function gender differentiation of the Church and in mankind itself. It is tempting to point to that parallelism to claim the same object/function gender differentiation of the Holy Spirit: male in substance, but female in function.

Could it be, then, that the use in Scripture of the pronoun ‘He’ in reference to the Holy Spirit, instead of constituting a gratuitous introduction of confusion, is related to this parallelism? Despite that possibility, the mainstream Christian Church is committed to its view of the Holy Spirit as being gender-neutral, masculine or sometimes even hermaphroditic in basic nature.

Up to this point, an argument has been made regarding the legitimacy of viewing the gender of the Holy Spirit differently between function and substance. As I noted at the outset of this argument and applied to the Church, this difference from function may involve other descriptors besides substance, such as composition and union, related to substance but with slightly different connotations. Returning to the human spiritual model of the Church, it is a fact that whereas functionally the Church is overtly feminine as set forth in Scripture, it consists of numerous individual elements which in the aggregate, the collective definition as mankind carries with it a male designation.

While substance or composition or both may be factors that legitimize the application of masculine descriptors to a feminine function, the most basic factor may simply be the notion of union, the loving merging of two complementary others into one. In marriage the male and female members are components of a greater unity than either of them alone and as one, they would rightly be addressed by the gender of the dominant Member, the male.

Exploring this notion further, we readily imagine that the relationship between Father and Holy Spirit is so perfectly close that the Holy Spirit is considered to be One with the Father, as suggested by the wife’s use of her husband’s surname in our own society. There is justification for that in Genesis 5:1 and 2, wherein the perfection of unity in love carries with it an implication with respect to the name of the female partner.

“This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.”

This is a love kind of thing. God never intended either a man or a woman to remain as an individual. Instead, He created them to be in union together, one man and one wife. This unity is emphasized by His calling them both by the name of the male, a custom that is practiced to this very day. In that context, the “He” associated with the Holy Spirit may be intended to convey the unity between Father and Holy Spirit, wherein the Holy Spirit is always considered not as separate, but united in everlasting love with the Father.

The significance of this passage to the view of the Holy Spirit as a Complementary Other to the Father is that it justifies the use of a male pronoun in referring to a basically female Holy Spirit. It implies that the bond between Father and Holy Spirit, representing the image upon which the bond between Adam and Eve was based, is so perfectly close that they can truly considered to be one. In that context, the male pronoun applied to the Holy Spirit would represent the perfection of that bond.

Of course, one can’t ignore the possibility of a very simple yet profound explanation: that the Holy Spirit was sent to us in Jesus Christ’s name, which, of course, is male.

After having said all that regarding the gender distinction between substance and function, I now will address a little-known but very significant complicating factor in this ‘He’ business, hinted at earlier, that may well settle the issue in favor of a fully feminine Holy Spirit without the necessity of making an object/function differentiation. It turns out that while we may still be able to claim that Scripture is inerrant in the original, the Scripture to which we have ready access isn’t the original. It’s been tampered with, probably at some time after Constantine made Christianity a state religion in the early fourth century A.D.

It is an undeniable fact that with regard to Scripture, “Church authorities” did indeed engage in a sexual cleansing operation, for not only were the Godhead and Mary stripped of their sexuality, but there is indisputable evidence that Scripture itself was altered to sexually mutilate the Godhead by substituting a weak all-male congress for what always was perceived by the Jews and also by the earliest Christians as a Divine Family consisting of Father, Mother and Son.

According to an Internet search of “feminine Holy Spirit in the Hebrew Scriptures”, multiple modern, deeply serious theologians and ancient language scholars share the view that the earliest Hebrew Christians had access to Scripture that presented the Holy Spirit as a feminine Persona; this feminine persisted within the Syriac and other Eastern branches of Christianity and within the Gnostic sect as well.

According to the words of Jesus in John 14:26 of the Siniatic Palimpsest, (translation attributed to Danny Mahar) Jesus Himself characterizes the Holy Spirit as feminine:

“But She – the Spirit – the Paraclete whom He will send to you – my Father – in my name – She will teach you everything; She will remind you of what I have told you.”

A palimpsest is a recycled writing medium, wherein a second layer of writing was applied over the original, the original usually consisting of more important information. This document was uncovered toward the end of the nineteenth century by Agnes Lewis. The original writing included portions of the Gospel of John that quoted Jesus.

There is a suggestion, from a comparative review of this text with Paul’s letters that Paul, among the numerous early Hebrew Christians, used the version of John’s Gospel from which this passage came. References to the Siniatic Palimpsest may be found on the Internet. Unfortunately, many of the translations into English found under the search phrase “Siniatic Palimpsest” apply without justification the more conventional “he” rather than the “she” of the original language. Some Internet references, however, do acknowledge the proper “she”.

The identification of the Holy Spirit as feminine in the Siniatic Palimpsest is no small matter, for this document is the oldest of all copies of the Gospels, being dated to the second century A.D. It is a recognized principle of textual interpretation, even by the most conservative of Biblical scholars, that the older the text, the closer it is thought to be to the original Scripture. This is particularly important in light of the fact that there are no other Scriptural texts between it and the oldest Greek text dated to the fourth century A.D. One can only surmise that between the second and fourth centuries Scripture had been altered to substitute “he” for “she” in references to the Holy Spirit. Even then, at least one reference to the Holy Spirit as “she”, apparently having been overlooked in the switch, was allowed to remain. As Romans 9:25 reads in our King James Bible,

“As he saith also in Osee [Hosea], I will call them my people, who were not my people; and her beloved, who was not beloved.”

Despite the overt mistranslation of the pronoun “She” to “It” or “He” in modern English translations of Scripture, these modified versions still provide sufficient evidence of the feminine nature of the Holy Spirit to convince all but the most reactionary of individuals. Among the most assertive in that regard is the Glory of God, the Hebrew feminine Shekinah, who indwelt the temples at their dedication. The obvious connection between the feminine Shekinah described in Exodus 40 and 1 Kings 8 and the indwelling Holy Spirit described in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles and referred to by Paul is, of itself, overwhelming evidence of the feminine gender of the Holy Spirit. The link between the Holy Spirit and the Shekinah Glory, as well as the many references to “Eloah”, a feminine term for God in the Hebrew Scriptures, will be discussed in a later posting.

[to be continued]

REVISITING FRIEND OF THE FAMILY

REVISITING FRIEND OF THE FAMILY

Several years have passed since I posted my initial Friend of the Family entries on this blog site. My motivation at the time for those postings was my conviction, in the face of general Church tradition to the contrary, that the Holy Spirit possessed a gender, and that moreover that gender was feminine.

Back then I included several Scripturally-based reasons for my contention of the femininity of the Holy Spirit. Now, several years later, that conviction remains. It is, in fact, stronger than ever. Over the years since those initial postings, a number of additional Scriptural suggestions of that femininity have come to my attention. In the next few postings I’ll share with you a more comprehensive set of Scriptural suggestions that point to a feminine Holy Spirit. But first, before developing them in logical fashion, I’ll summarize here all the suggestions that come to mind at this point in time.

These suggestions are developed in three phases. In the first phase, the full functional nature of Jesus’ spiritual marriage to His Church is presented as a means of countering the prevailing Christian misunderstanding of that marriage as being without significant substance, as that marriage is an important element of the association of the Holy Spirit with femininity. In the second phase, rebuttals are presented against claims that the Holy Spirit is not feminine. Thirdly, overt Scriptural suggestions of the femininity of the Holy Spirit are presented.

FUNCTIONAL MARRIAGE BETWEEN JESUS AND HIS CHURCH

Paul’s stunning statement in Ephesians 5:31,32 regarding Jesus’ marriage to His Church contains multiple elements that identify this marriage as much more than merely a figure of speech.

Romans 7:4 corroborates Jesus’ marriage to His Church; beyond that, it identifies the union as creatively productive.

Jesus first miracle described in John 2, the wedding in Cana, identifies Jesus as anticipating with joy His own future spiritual marriage.

In the parables of the marriage feast (Matthew 22) and the ten virgins (Matthew 25), Jesus describes His own future marriage without ambiguity as an important and joyful occasion.

Isaiah 54, as a follow-on to the great messianic Chapter 53, is a passionate statement of Jesus’ future marriage and is summarized as such by Paul in Galatians 4:27.

The Song of Solomon is a romantic, explicit depiction of the bonding between male and female; it would not belong in the Bible if gender had no place in the spiritual realm

SUMMARY OF REBUTTALS TO CLAIMS THAT HOLY SPIRIT IS NOT FEMININE

The claim has been made that since Galatians 3:28 and Matthew 22:29,30 describe humans in the spiritual realm as being gender-neutral, the spiritual realm doesn’t involve gender. This myopic and unjustified extension of statements beyond their meanings fails to take into account that whereas spiritual individuals will not be gendered, the Church, as an aggregate of individual components, will be gendered.

Jeremiah 10:12, in which God describes power and wisdom as belonging to Him, is cited as indicative that these are God’s own attributes. This claim fails to comprehend that the union between God and the Holy Spirit, being a romantic one, is also possessive. God here is speaking of the mutually possessive nature of marriage.

The “He” issue, for which the Holy Spirit is referred to in Scripture by masculine pronouns, may be resolved in two distinct ways, both of which permit the Holy Spirit to be viewed as functionally feminine while being composed of a masculine or neuter substance. Scripture’s treatment of spiritual humanity furnishes ample justification for viewing the HolyH Spirit to be functionally feminine and compositionally masculine, as suggested by Paul’s description of spiritual mankind as genderless in the face of his description of mankind’s aggregate as the Church as the wife of Christ. In the alternate but equally valid view there is also ample justification for appreciating that in the original autographs in the Hebrew and Aramaic languages, the Holy Spirit was perceived as feminine. Examples include John 14:26 in the version recorded in the Siniatic Palimpsest, Isiah 51:9,10 and Romans 9:25.

Scripture itself contradicts claims that God might be above the romance and passion intrinsic to a fully-functional spiritual marriage. Examples include the Song of Solomon, Jesus’ passion in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Jesus’ discourse on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24).

Many theologians insist upon interpreting the feminine imagery in the Book of Proverbs as simply figures of speech. Correspondingly, Proverbs is depersonalized, being considered at most an attribute of the Godhead. This view is contradicted by the intensely personal nature of Proverbs 3 and 8 and their link to the role of the Holy Spirit in Genesis 1:1,2. It is further disallowed by the direct personalization of Wisdom and the equation of Wisdom with the Holy Spirit in the Book of Wisdom, which is canonical in the Catholic religion.

Many pastors, having interpreted 1 Timothy 2 as limiting the role of women in Church, shy away from the thought of conferring Godhood on a female. Given the general responsive role of women as described in Scripture and Eve’s obvious misapplication of that role, Paul’s commentary in 1 Corinthians 2 actually supports the notion of a feminine Holy Spirit.

Some pastors point to mention of the Church as the Body of Christ in Ephesians 5 and elsewhere as conflicting with a meaningful role for the Church as the Bride of Christ. A careful reading of Ephesians 5 contradicts this apparent conflict: Ephesians 5:31 directly identifies the male/female union as a mutual ownership of each other. This ownership, in a possessive sense, assigns the wife’s (Church’s) body as the body of her husband.

There is a centuries-long tradition within virtually all Western Churches of a male Holy Spirit. A feminine Holy Spirit would go against the grain of this tradition. However, tradition isn’t Scripture, there are readily understandable reasons as to why the switch from the original was made, and there are understandable, albeit selfish, reasons as to why there haven’t been more disputes in that regard over the years.

SUMMARY OF SCRIPTURAL SUGGESTIONS OF THE FEMININITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

The Shekinah Glory who indwelt the Tabernacle in the Wilderness (Exodus 40) and Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 8) is recognized as feminine. This same Shekinah Glory is intimately linked to the Holy Spirit through the corresponding indwelling of Christians who are described in 1 Corinthians 3 and Ephesians 2 as living temples of God.

The only logical way that the Judeo-Christian monotheism may be reconciled to the general Judeo-Christian understanding of the Godhead as being a Trinity is to perceive the Godhead as representing a tightly-knit Family.

Through passages that describe Her presence alongside the Divine Father during the creation epic, the female Persona in the Book of Proverbs is identified as the Holy Spirit.

Jesus’ fully functional marriage to His Church demonstrates the existence of gender and its associate romance in the spiritual domain.

Genesis 1:27 and 28 links the creation of man in God’s image as possessing gender; in Genesis 2 verses 18, 21 and 22 the detail of Eve’s formation out of Adam as being highly suggestive of the counterpart formation of the Holy Spirit out of the Father.

In Genesis 5, Adam and Eve are both named Adam, suggesting that Eve, while being functionally feminine, is also named after her masculine counterpart. This naming convention furnishes some justification for describing the Holy Spirit with masculine pronouns, although it should be kept in mind that the original Hebrew described the Holy Spirit in feminine terms.

It is generally recognized and specifically noted by Bible scholars that Scripture depicts the Holy Spirit as operating in an executive function, responsive to the Father’s Will. A responsive nature is distinctly feminine.Executive. Genesis 1:1,2 furnishes a specific example of the Holy Spirit operating responsively to the Father.

There are indications that the original Hebrew and Aramaic Scriptural texts depicted the Holy Spirit as feminine. Of particular interest in that regard is the Siniatic Palimpsest, in which Jesus describes the Holy Spirit as feminine.

The Book of Wisdom, which is canonical in the Catholic Bible, presents the Holy Spirit as feminine and directly links Her to Wisdom as presented in the Book of Proverbs.

Chapter 3 of the Gospel of John describes the Holy Spirit as possessing the function of spiritual birth. Birth, of course, is an eminently feminine attribute.

WHAT’S REALLY WRONG WITH AMERICA

 

 

WHAT’S REALLY WRONG WITH AMERICA

 

 

Sincere as our presidential hopefuls may be about “fixing” America’s woes, their focus on the fundamental cause of our problems isn’t quite laser-sharp.   Perhaps the reason for this is that their first objective is to get elected, and they’re attempting to appeal to what the majority of Americans perceive to be the basic problem.  The drawback of this is that mainstream America seems to be as clueless of the real issue as Germany was back in Hitler’s heyday.

 

Whatever the reason for their avoidance of the most pressing problem with America, the fundamental issue with America is crystal-clear to a segment of our population that now finds itself to be in the minority: committed Christians.  As they well know, things started to fall apart when God was dismissed from the public conscience, and the only way that America can retrieve its former glory is to invite God back into the public square.  Knowing their Bibles, they can point to the precedent of Israel’s decline from her former greatness following her public rejection of God.

 

I had addressed this issue in my novel Jacob, the third in the four-book Buddy series.  I’ll let Earl, one of my main characters, do the talking here as he did in Chapter Nineteen of that novel.

 

“Hi, everybody,” he began.  “I already had a talk on my mind for this morning, but I suddenly realized that there’s a more important topic that needs to be addressed.  So if you’ll bear with me, I’m going to speak out of my heart, calling upon support from the Holy Spirit rather than my usual notes.  If I were going to give the subject a title, I guess that ‘What’s Really Wrong with America’ would be as good a one as any.  I don’t need to tell anyone here that there’s something wrong.”  His statement of the obvious brought a few half-hearted laughs, but the mouths of most turned grim.

 

“What really happened to America started before most of us were born,” Earl continued.  “Like a serious disease such as cancer, it started slowly, with hardly any symptoms at all.  Only when it got to the terminal stage did we all become aware of what had happened, but by then it was too late.

 

“What was this dreadful disease?  I’ll tell you what it wasn’t.  It wasn’t a failure of leadership.  Nor was it a takeover by unprincipled, self-absorbed rulers who cared nothing for our God-given American constitution.  The sickness is a disease of the heart, of our indifference toward the Judeo-Christian God who played such a vital part in the founding of the American dream.  This disease didn’t turn our leaders into evil, vicious persons.  It infected us instead, creating the environment in which evil people could thrive and prosper.

 

“The sickness began within four of the institutional systems upon which we base our understanding of the world around us.  The first of these is the secular media, which provide us with news and entertainment; the second is the scientific community; the third is our schools, wherein our children are supplied with a formalized version of knowledge; and the fourth is our seminaries, which supposedly offer us a specialized knowledge of God.  These institutions were the first to get sick, and then the disease metastasized from there, branching out to infect the general public.

 

“The secular media was infiltrated long ago by selfish, godless people, to whom the physical world in which we reside is the only world there is because that’s the way they want it to be.  They were repulsed by the thought of some higher being looking over their shoulders, or knowing their thoughts, which probably did run into some colorful fantasies and mean-spirited notions.  But in their torrid love affair with their own minds, they embraced the ever-expanding world of science as much as they were put off by religion.  In their wholesale rush to glorify mankind’s scientific achievements, they bought into some very bad and very false ideas, being so incredibly shallow of mind as to unthinkingly accept these ideas simply because they were generated by so-called experts in the field.

 

“The sources of these very bad and very false ideas were people of the same kind of godless self-absorption as the media representatives.  Encouraged by the adoring media, they assumed the intellectual authority of the God they had in mind to replace.  The only difference between these self-styled scientists and their media counterparts is that the scientists possessed some knowledge of the subject upon which they made such weighty pronouncements.  But their education in some cases actually was as sparse or nearly so, as that of the public at large, because the scientific disciplines were in their infancy, with very little knowledge to be obtained through formal training.  Such was the case in the fields of natural history, geology, and biology.   I could go into a very detailed expose of the reasons why, for example, the theory of evolution is a misleading, dead-end path, but time doesn’t permit that.  The reasons involve some very important and revealing scientific discoveries in the field of biology by Darwin’s far more knowledgeable modern counterparts.  If any of you are truly interested, see me after this meeting and we’ll set up a workshop on the subject.

 

“But just as the media controllers bought into false scientific notions that confirmed and increased their distance from God, so did the educators, who also infiltrated the school system all the way from kindergarten to the great universities.  John Dewey was among the worst of that lot.  After assuming dictatorial power over the machinery of public education, this godless Marxist developed curricula that opposed Christianity at every turn.  His ideas also began to sway students away from nationalism into a world citizenry, and fostered quasi-scientific notions that supported our alienation from God.  His most devastating weapon was his appreciation that he wouldn’t accomplish his objectives in a day, or even in a decade or a generation.  His gradual insertion of bad ideas into the classroom began in the classrooms of the teaching colleges, infecting the teachers first with false notions, and letting them be his unwitting tools in disseminating his notions to the public at large.

 

“The same thing happened in our seminaries, the schools that supposedly train men and women for Christian service as pastors, chaplains and religious instructors.  Just as John Dewey infiltrated the secular teaching system, so did self-centered and basically godless men invade the seminaries, attempting to turn theology into a strictly intellectual endeavor.  They elbowed God aside with their false theories that the Bible was nothing more than a work of man, and attempted to strengthen that assertion on the basis of literary reviews that claimed various books to be written by several authors and at widely different dates, all of which were established on the false presupposition that prophesies could not have involved a God-given knowledge of the future.  Not all, but way too many of the pastors that came out of these wicked seminaries were just as self-centered as the secular educators.  After having avidly internalized the false teachings to which they were exposed, they lost their focus on God, which was tenuous to begin with, and concentrated instead on the task of creating successful income-producing congregations based on the false pictures of God which they had uncritically embraced.

 

“So what?  What is the bottom line in all this?  It is that the public at large perceives that the Bible was a work of man and riddled with errors and fuzzy, unsophisticated and basically meaningless passages.  In line with that understanding, the God of that Bible is seen as either imaginary or a very distant and essentially alien being.  Considering the Bible to be less than profound, the general public long ago released itself from the odious task of attempting to read it.  Refusing to understand the Bible as the only reliable Word of God, these same people lost most of their knowledge and understanding of God.  In the end, God became to them at best a stern taskmaster and at worst a distant, alien being who was entirely indifferent to the daily affairs of mankind.   Perceiving God in that way, they themselves distanced and alienated themselves from Him.

 

“But as history has demonstrated time and again, mankind needs God.  We certainly need God for the salvation that offers us a ticket into the next world, for which there’s reason to believe that it’s much more colorful and real than this one.  But we also need God’s Word and the Holy Spirit to impart to us the selfless nobility that is so necessary for us to get along with each other in this lesser world.  Without the lofty standards established by God for human interaction, the world quickly descends into mean-spirited, selfish, hate-driven acts of people showing unkindness toward each other for their own profit.  It becomes an insane hell of our own making.  Does anyone doubt that this is exactly what has happened outside these doors?

 

“I’ll wind up today’s talk on that sour note.  But think about the implications.  The solution of our present distress isn’t about patriotism or patriotic acts.  We lost our patriotism to America when we lost our patriotism toward God.  Our forefathers knew their God in an intimate way that is almost completely lost to us.  They had their eyes on a greater world than our material realm.  They knew, for example, what Paul had to say about that other, better world.”  Earl picked up his Bible from the upended box beside him and turned to First Corinthians Chapter 2.

 

“’But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.  But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit; for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.  For what man knoweth the things of a man, except the spirit of man which is in him?  Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.  Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.  Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Spirit teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.  But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.’

 

“That, my friends,” Earl said as he looked out to the audience, “is what we have lost in maintaining our focus on the material world to the exclusion of the spiritual realm.  But it is in the spiritual world that the biggest battle is being waged.  Paul was very clear about that.”  He turned to Ephesians Chapter 6 and continued reading from it.

 

“’For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.  Wherefore, take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.  Stand, therefore, having your loins girded about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith, with which ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.  And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God; praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spriti, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints; and for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in bonds; that in this I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.’

 

“Now, after hearing that, let me ask you: is it better to contribute our own violence to the mess we are surrounded with, or rather should we turn back to God and, as Jesus said in His Sermon on the Mount, show our love of God to the world by loving our enemies, no matter what that might cost us?  While you’re thinking about that, you might offer a prayer for me and all your fellow Christians that, like Paul, we may receive from the Holy Spirit the courage to continue speaking out about our convictions.”

 

 

UFOs CONTINUATION #4

CONTACT, COMMUNION AND CHRISTIANITY CHAPTER 7 (CONTINUATION #4)

 

 

Chapter 7: Biblical Accounts of UFOs (Continued)

 

 

Example 18 – Luke 24:1-7:

 

“Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulcher, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them.  And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulcherRemember how he spoke unto you when He was yet in Galilee, Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.” 

 

 

Example 19 – Luke 24:13-32:

 

“And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs.  And they talked together of all these things which had happened.  And it came to pass that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus Himself drew near, and went with them.  But their eyes were holden that they should not recognize him.  And He said unto them, What manner of communications are these that ye have one with another, as ye walk, and are sad?  And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering, said unto Him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast no known the things which are come to pass there in these days?  And He said unto them, What things?  And they said unto Him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet, mighty in deed and word before God and all the people; and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to be condemned to death, and have crucified Him.  But we hoped that it had been He who should have redeemed Israel; and, besides all this, today is the third day since these things were done.  Yea, and certain women also of our company amazed us, who were early at the sepulcher; and wen they found not His body, they came, saying that they had also seen a vision of angels, who said that He was alive.

 

“And certain of those who were with us went to the sepulcher, and found it even as the women had said; but Him they saw not.  Then he said unto them, O foolishe ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!  Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?  And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto them, in all the Scriptures, the things concerning Himself.

 

“And they drew near unto the village, to which they went; and He made as though He would have gone farther.  But they constrained Him, saying Abide with us; for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.  And He went in to tarry with them.  And it came to pass, as He sat eating with them, He took bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them.  And their eyes were opened, and they recognized Him; and He vanished out of their sight.  And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while He talked with us along the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?”

 

Example 20 – Acts 8:1-4, 9:1-1-9

 

“And Saul was consenting unto [Stephen’s] death.  And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judah and Samaria, except the apostles.  And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation over him.  As for Saul, he made havoc of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison.  Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word.”

 

“And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.

 

“And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?

 

“And he said, Who art thou, Lord?  And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

 

“And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?  And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.

 

“And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.  And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus.  And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink.”

 

The following excerpts from the Bible, which are merely ‘tips of the iceberg’, demonstrate how thoroughly this encounter turned Paul’s life around.

 

Example 21 – Acts 9:10-20, Romans 1:1-8:

 

“And there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias.  And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord.

 

          “And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and inquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth, And hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.

 

          “Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem: And here he hath authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on thy name.

 

          “But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel; For I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake.”

 

          “Paul [Saul], a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, (Which he had promised afore by his prophets in the holy Scriptures,) Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh; And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead: By whom we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith among all nations, for his name: Among whom are ye also the called of Jesus Christ: To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints: Grace to you and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

          “First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world.”

         

Here again we see evidence that the encounter imparted wisdom; it totally and permanently changed Saul’s mentality and his life.

 

Example 22 – Hebrews 13:2:

 

“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

 

Example 23 – Revelation 1:9-20:

 

“I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.

 

          “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.

 

          “And I turned to see the voice that spake with me.  And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; And in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the food, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle.  His head and his hairs were white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.  And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.

 

          “And when I saw him, I fell at his feed as dead.  And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and death.

 

          “Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter; The mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in my right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks.  The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches.”

 

This close encounter follows a pattern that is seen throughout the Bible, that of an apparition who imparts wisdom and understanding that reaches out beyond our human abilities and our conception of time.  In every case, the knowledge and information dovetails perfectly with other parts of the Bible, contributing to a consistent whole.

 

The involvement of past UFOs in Scripture should not be surprising.  Given our faith in the God of Judeo-Christian tradition, we must necessarily assume that if UFOs exist, God is involved.  As Creator of the universe He created all that exists within it, including the things we call UFOs regardless of whether they exist within or outside our imaginations.  It matters very little whether these objects are primarily physical or spiritual, for even the casual reader of the Bible knows that God’s domain includes both.  In that sense, our own technological wonders, our Mars rovers and space shuttles, including their operators, belong to God.  This is anything but a trivial issue.  The notion of UFOs as technology-adept aliens comes straight out of the more far-reaching notion that God as an Entity who is personally involved in and relevant to our lives does not exist.  The fact that most of us fail to appreciate is that our understanding of the ultimate ownership of our universe is perhaps the most influential element of how we have perceived UFO events in the past, and of whether we consider them to be basically good or evil.

 

Regardless of their origin, however, their current reputation is not so good, and at least part of the blame can be placed on their behavior toward us.   Based on their perceived secrecy, apparent indifference toward humans, and the terror which they evoke in those whom they abduct, it would seem reasonable to suggest that they come from the wrong side of the good-bad line.   Perhaps some of them do.  But as one reviews the many abduction accounts and their supposed horrors, one gets the unmistakable impression that the most terrifying aspect of these encounters is the lack of control experienced by the abductees: being under the absolute dominance of their captor conflicts sharply with their materialistic, probably godless view of life and their place in it.  Accustomed to perceiving themselves as self-driven, they are forced to confront an absolute powerlessness to escape the situation or to influence the unfolding of the event.  In Witnessed, Budd Hopkins captures the essence of this aspect:

 

“When UFO abductees come upon evidence that, for them, confirms the physical reality of their encounters, their reactions are invariably shock and depression.  No one I have ever worked with has indicated pleasure or relief at any kind of confirming news.  Treating their UFO memories as earthly, explainable dreams or fantasies is for abductees a necessary hope, a bulwark of denial against the unthinkable.  But when that protective dam bursts and the abductees’ tightly held systems of defense are swept away, they are left with a frightening and intolerable truth.”

 

For many ‘victims’, the experience flies in the face of the way they were taught to believe regarding the ultimate independence of the individual, their understanding of themselves as being masters of their own destinies.  Most of us, whether our backgrounds were religious or not, tend to compartmentalize our religious meditations, separating them from the everyday reality of our lives.  When we think of God, we perceive our thoughts to be of our own volition, another exercise of free will.  We rarely perceive our relation with God in terms of His absolute dominance over our lives.  For the most part, God appears to be content with this arrangement.

 

But there are significant exceptions.  A review of the encounters experienced by Daniel, Paul, and John, for example, demonstrates quite clearly that they were life-altering events.  The experiences had many of the same characteristics of modern UFO abductions.  They involved discomfort and terror as well, even for these individuals who had an unusually intimate relationship with God.

 

I would suggest that if the modern abduction experience is perceived as a negative one, it is because the absolute dominance of the ‘occupants’ over their subjects conflicts so greatly with the secular world view held by most of us.  Should we blame the UFOs for this, or should we instead understand how far from God we have put ourselves?  Having made that general commentary, we shall turn next to specific details of UFO involvement in our secularly-described history, and of how these details relate to our religious past.

 

 

 

 

UFOs CHAPTER 7 (CONTINUATION #3)

 

CONTACT, COMMUNION AND CHRISTIANITY CHAPTER 7 (CONTINUATION #3)

 

 

Chapter 7: Biblical Accounts of UFOs (Continued)

 

 

Example 13 – Ezekiel 2:1-3:

 

“And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.  And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet, that I heard him that spake unto me.  And he said unto me, Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me: they and their fathers have transgressed against me, even unto this very day.”

 

A great many present-day Jews and Christians consider Ezekiel’s ‘dry bones’ prophecy in the 36^th chapter to have had a remarkably accurate fulfillment in the restoration of the State of Israel following World War II.

 

Example 14 – Daniel 10:5-21, 12:1-13:

 

“Then I lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold a certain man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with fine gold of Uphaz: His body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in color to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude.

 

“And I Daniel alone saw the vision: for the men that were with me saw not the vision; but a great quaking fell upon them, so that they fled to hide themselves.  Therefore I was left alone, and saw this great vision, and there remained no strength in me: for my comeliness was turned into corruption, and I retained no strength.  Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face toward the ground. 

 

“And, behold, a hand touched me, which set me upon my knees and upon the palms of my hands.  And he said unto me, O Daniel, a man greatly beloved, understand the words that I speak unto thee, and stand upright: for unto thee am I now sent.  And when he had spoken this word unto me, I stood trembling.

 

“Then said he unto me, Fear not, Daniel; for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words.  But the prince of Persia withstood me for one and twenty days; but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia.

 

“Now I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy people in the latter days: for yet the visions is for many days.

 

“And when he had spoken such words unto me, I set my face toward the ground, and I became dumb.  And, behold, one like the similitude of the sons of men touched my lips: then I opened my mouth, and spake, and said unto him that stood before me, O my lord, by the vision my sorrows are turned upon me, and I have retained no strength.  For how can the servant of this my lord talk with this my lord? For as for me, straightway there remained no strength in me, neither is there breath left in me.

 

“Then there came again and touched me one like the appearance of a man, and he strengthened me, And said, O man greatly beloved, fear not: peace be unto thee; be strong, yea, be strong.  And when he had spoken unto me, I was strengthened, and said, Let my lord speak; for thou hast strengthened me.

 

“Then said he, Knowest thou wherefore I come unto thee? and now will I return to fight with the prince of Persia: and when I am gone forth, lo, the prince of Grecia shall come.  But I will show thee that which is noted in the Scripture of truth: and there is none that holdeth with me in these things, but Michael your prince.”

 

 

“And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.  And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall, awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.  And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars for ever and ever.

 

“But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.

 

“Then I Daniel looked, and, behold, there stood other two, the one on this side of the bank of the river, and the other on that side of the bank of the river.  And one said to the man clothed in linen, which was upon the waters of the river, How long shall it be to the end of these wonders?  And I heard the man clothed in linen, which was upon the waters of the river, when he held up his right hand and his left hand unto heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever, that it shall be for a time, times, and a half; and when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished.

 

“And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things?

 

“And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.  Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.  And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.  Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days.

 

“But go thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.”

 

The ‘angel’ who appeared to Daniel would be treated as a ‘Close Encounter of the Third Kind’ today. These passages in Daniel were so prophetically accurate that they have come under severe attack by secular skeptics over the past century with respect to their actual dating.  There is much reason, as developed in detail by Grant Jeffrey and other theologians, to consider these attacks to be void of any merit whatsoever.

 

Example 15 – John 24-29:

 

“But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, as not with them when Jesus came.  The other disciples, therefore, said unto him, We have seen the Lord.  But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.  And, after eight days, again hi disciples were inside, and Thomas with them; then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.

 

“Then said He to Thomas, Reach here thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach here thy hand, and thrust it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing.  And Thomas answered, and said unto Him, My Lord and my God.

 

“Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

 

Example 16 – John 21:4-14:

 

“But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore; but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus.  Then Jesus saith unto them, Children, have ye any food? They answered Him, No.  And He said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the boat and ye shall find.  They cast, therefore, and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fish.  Therefore, the disciple whom Jesus loved saith unto Peter, It is the Lord.  Now when Simon Peter heard that it was the lord, he girt his fisher’ coat unto him (for he was naked), and did cast himself into the sea.  And the other disciples came in a little boat (for they were not far from land, but as it were two hundred cubits), dragging the net with fish.  As soon, then, as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid on it, and bread.  Jesus saith unto them, Bring of the fish which ye have now caught.  Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land full of great fish, an hundred and fifty and three; and although there were so many, yet was not the net broken.

 

“Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine.  And none of the disciples dared ask Him, who art thou? Knowing that it was the Lord.  Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise.  This is now the third time that Jesus showed Himself to his disciples, after he was risen from the dead.”

 

Example 17 – Luke 1:26-38:

 

“And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.  And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

 

“And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.

 

“And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God.  And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.  He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

 

“Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

 

“And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.  And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.  For with God nothing shall be impossible.

 

“And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.  And the angel departed from her.”

 

It would be interesting to know what these angels actually looked like to Daniel and Mary.  What is certain is that they both perceived these apparitions to be other than merely human.

 

[to be continued]

 

 

UFOs CHAPTER 7 (CONTINUATION #2)

CONTACT, COMMUNION AND CHRISTIANITY CHAPTER 7 (CONTINUATION #2)

 

CHAPTER 7: Biblical Accounts of UFOs (Continued)

 

 

 

Example 13 – Ezekiel 2:1-3:

 

“And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee. And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet, that I heard him that spake unto me.  And he said unto me, Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me: they and their fathers have transgressed against me, even unto this very day.”

 

A great many present-day Jews and Christians consider Ezekiel’s ‘dry bones’ prophecy in the 36^th chapter to have had a remarkably accurate fulfillment in the restoration of the State of Israel following World War II.

 

Example 14 – Daniel 10:5-21, 12:1-13:

 

“Then I lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold a certain man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with fine gold of Uphaz: His body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in color to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude.

 

“And I Daniel alone saw the vision: for the men that were with me saw not the vision; but a great quaking fell upon them, so that they fled to hide themselves. Therefore I was left alone, and saw this great vision, and there remained no strength in me: for my comeliness was turned into corruption, and I retained no strength.  Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face toward the ground. 

 

“And, behold, a hand touched me, which set me upon my knees and upon the palms of my hands. And he said unto me, O Daniel, a man greatly beloved, understand the words that I speak unto thee, and stand upright: for unto thee am I now sent.  And when he had spoken this word unto me, I stood trembling.

 

“Then said he unto me, Fear not, Daniel; for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words. But the prince of Persia withstood me for one and twenty days; but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia.

 

“Now I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy people in the latter days: for yet the visions is for many days.

 

“And when he had spoken such words unto me, I set my face toward the ground, and I became dumb. And, behold, one like the similitude of the sons of men touched my lips: then I opened my mouth, and spake, and said unto him that stood before me, O my lord, by the vision my sorrows are turned upon me, and I have retained no strength.  For how can the servant of this my lord talk with this my lord? For as for me, straightway there remained no strength in me, neither is there breath left in me.

 

“Then there came again and touched me one like the appearance of a man, and he strengthened me, And said, O man greatly beloved, fear not: peace be unto thee; be strong, yea, be strong. And when he had spoken unto me, I was strengthened, and said, Let my lord speak; for thou hast strengthened me.

 

“Then said he, Knowest thou wherefore I come unto thee? and now will I return to fight with the prince of Persia: and when I am gone forth, lo, the prince of Grecia shall come.  But I will show thee that which is noted in the Scripture of truth: and there is none that holdeth with me in these things, but Michael your prince.”

 

 

“And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book. And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall, awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.  And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars for ever and ever.

 

“But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.

 

“Then I Daniel looked, and, behold, there stood other two, the one on this side of the bank of the river, and the other on that side of the bank of the river. And one said to the man clothed in linen, which was upon the waters of the river, How long shall it be to the end of these wonders?  And I heard the man clothed in linen, which was upon the waters of the river, when he held up his right hand and his left hand unto heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever, that it shall be for a time, times, and a half; and when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished.

 

“And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things?

 

“And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end. Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.  And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.  Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days.

 

“But go thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.”

 

The ‘angel’ who appeared to Daniel would be treated as a ‘Close Encounter of the Third Kind’ today. These passages in Daniel were so prophetically accurate that they have come under severe attack by secular skeptics over the past century with respect to their actual dating. There is much reason, as developed in detail by Grant Jeffrey and other theologians, to consider these attacks to be void of any merit whatsoever.

 

Example 15 – John 24-29:

 

“But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, as not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples, therefore, said unto him, We have seen the Lord.  But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.  And, after eight days, again hi disciples were inside, and Thomas with them; then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.

 

“Then said He to Thomas, Reach here thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach here thy hand, and thrust it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered, and said unto Him, My Lord and my God.

 

“Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

 

Example 16 – John 21:4-14:

 

“But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore; but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus. Then Jesus saith unto them, Children, have ye any food? They answered Him, No.  And He said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the boat and ye shall find.  They cast, therefore, and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fish.  Therefore, the disciple whom Jesus loved saith unto Peter, It is the Lord.  Now when Simon Peter heard that it was the lord, he girt his fisher’ coat unto him (for he was naked), and did cast himself into the sea.  And the other disciples came in a little boat (for they were not far from land, but as it were two hundred cubits), dragging the net with fish.  As soon, then, as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid on it, and bread.  Jesus saith unto them, Bring of the fish which ye have now caught.  Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land full of great fish, an hundred and fifty and three; and although there were so many, yet was not the net broken.

 

“Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. And none of the disciples dared ask Him, who art thou? Knowing that it was the Lord.  Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise.  This is now the third time that Jesus showed Himself to his disciples, after he was risen from the dead.”

 

Example 17 – Luke 1:26-38:

 

“And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

 

“And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.

 

“And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.  He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

 

“Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

 

“And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.  For with God nothing shall be impossible.

 

“And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.”

 

It would be interesting to know what these angels actually looked like to Daniel and Mary. What is certain is that they both perceived these apparitions to be other than merely human.

 

Example 18 – Luke 24:1-7:

 

“Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulcher, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulcherRemember how he spoke unto you when He was yet in Galilee, Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.” 

 

 

Example 19 – Luke 24:13-32:

 

“And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs.  And they talked together of all these things which had happened.  And it came to pass that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus Himself drew near, and went with them.  But their eyes were holden that they should not recognize him.  And He said unto them, What manner of communications are these that ye have one with another, as ye walk, and are sad?  And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering, said unto Him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast no known the things which are come to pass there in these days?  And He said unto them, What things?  And they said unto Him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet, mighty in deed and word before God and all the people; and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to be condemned to death, and have crucified Him.  But we hoped that it had been He who should have redeemed Israel; and, besides all this, today is the third day since these things were done.  Yea, and certain women also of our company amazed us, who were early at the sepulcher; and wen they found not His body, they came, saying that they had also seen a vision of angels, who said that He was alive.

 

“And certain of those who were with us went to the sepulcher, and found it even as the women had said; but Him they saw not. Then he said unto them, O foolishe ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!  Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?  And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto them, in all the Scriptures, the things concerning Himself.

 

“And they drew near unto the village, to which they went; and He made as though He would have gone farther. But they constrained Him, saying Abide with us; for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.  And He went in to tarry with them.  And it came to pass, as He sat eating with them, He took bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them.  And their eyes were opened, and they recognized Him; and He vanished out of their sight.  And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while He talked with us along the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?”

 

Example 20 – Acts 8:1-4, 9:1-1-9

 

“And Saul was consenting unto [Stephen’s] death. And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judah and Samaria, except the apostles.  And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation over him.  As for Saul, he made havoc of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison.  Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word.”

 

“And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.

 

“And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?

 

“And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

 

“And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.

 

“And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus.  And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink.”

 

The following excerpts from the Bible, which are merely ‘tips of the iceberg’, demonstrate how thoroughly this encounter turned Paul’s life around.

 

Example 21 – Acts 9:10-20, Romans 1:1-8:

 

“And there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias.  And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord.

 

          “And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and inquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth, And hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.

 

          “Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem: And here he hath authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on thy name.

 

          “But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel; For I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake.”

 

          “Paul [Saul], a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, (Which he had promised afore by his prophets in the holy Scriptures,) Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh; And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead: By whom we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith among all nations, for his name: Among whom are ye also the called of Jesus Christ: To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints: Grace to you and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

          “First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world.”

         

Here again we see evidence that the encounter imparted wisdom; it totally and permanently changed Saul’s mentality and his life.

 

Example 22 – Hebrews 13:2:

 

“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

 

Example 23 – Revelation 1:9-20:

 

“I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.

 

          “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.

 

          “And I turned to see the voice that spake with me.  And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; And in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the food, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle.  His head and his hairs were white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.  And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.

 

          “And when I saw him, I fell at his feed as dead.  And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and death.

 

          “Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter; The mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in my right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks.  The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches.”

 

This close encounter follows a pattern that is seen throughout the Bible, that of an apparition who imparts wisdom and understanding that reaches out beyond our human abilities and our conception of time.  In every case, the knowledge and information dovetails perfectly with other parts of the Bible, contributing to a consistent whole.

 

The involvement of past UFOs in Scripture should not be surprising.  Given our faith in the God of Judeo-Christian tradition, we must necessarily assume that if UFOs exist, God is involved.  As Creator of the universe He created all that exists within it, including the things we call UFOs regardless of whether they exist within or outside our imaginations.  It matters very little whether these objects are primarily physical or spiritual, for even the casual reader of the Bible knows that God’s domain includes both.  In that sense, our own technological wonders, our Mars rovers and space shuttles, including their operators, belong to God.  This is anything but a trivial issue.  The notion of UFOs as technology-adept aliens comes straight out of the more far-reaching notion that God as an Entity who is personally involved in and relevant to our lives does not exist.  The fact that most of us fail to appreciate is that our understanding of the ultimate ownership of our universe is perhaps the most influential element of how we have perceived UFO events in the past, and of whether we consider them to be basically good or evil.

 

Regardless of their origin, however, their current reputation is not so good, and at least part of the blame can be placed on their behavior toward us.   Based on their perceived secrecy, apparent indifference toward humans, and the terror which they evoke in those whom they abduct, it would seem reasonable to suggest that they come from the wrong side of the good-bad line.   Perhaps some of them do.  But as one reviews the many abduction accounts and their supposed horrors, one gets the unmistakable impression that the most terrifying aspect of these encounters is the lack of control experienced by the abductees: being under the absolute dominance of their captor conflicts sharply with their materialistic, probably godless view of life and their place in it.  Accustomed to perceiving themselves as self-driven, they are forced to confront an absolute powerlessness to escape the situation or to influence the unfolding of the event.  In Witnessed, Budd Hopkins captures the essence of this aspect:

 

“When UFO abductees come upon evidence that, for them, confirms the physical reality of their encounters, their reactions are invariably shock and depression. No one I have ever worked with has indicated pleasure or relief at any kind of confirming news.  Treating their UFO memories as earthly, explainable dreams or fantasies is for abductees a necessary hope, a bulwark of denial against the unthinkable.  But when that protective dam bursts and the abductees’ tightly held systems of defense are swept away, they are left with a frightening and intolerable truth.”

 

For many ‘victims’, the experience flies in the face of the way they were taught to believe regarding the ultimate independence of the individual, their understanding of themselves as being masters of their own destinies.  Most of us, whether our backgrounds were religious or not, tend to compartmentalize our religious meditations, separating them from the everyday reality of our lives.  When we think of God, we perceive our thoughts to be of our own volition, another exercise of free will.  We rarely perceive our relation with God in terms of His absolute dominance over our lives.  For the most part, God appears to be content with this arrangement.

 

But there are significant exceptions.  A review of the encounters experienced by Daniel, Paul, and John, for example, demonstrates quite clearly that they were life-altering events.  The experiences had many of the same characteristics of modern UFO abductions.  They involved discomfort and terror as well, even for these individuals who had an unusually intimate relationship with God.

 

I would suggest that if the modern abduction experience is perceived as a negative one, it is because the absolute dominance of the ‘occupants’ over their subjects conflicts so greatly with the secular world view held by most of us.  Should we blame the UFOs for this, or should we instead understand how far from God we have put ourselves?  Having made that general commentary, we shall turn next to specific details of UFO involvement in our secularly-described history, and of how these details relate to our religious past.

 

 

 

 

UFOs CHAPTER 3 (CONTINUED)

CONTACT, COMMUNION AND CHRISTIANITY CHAPTER 3 (CONTINUED)

While Chariots of the Gods?, first published in 1970, was a best-seller, Von Daniken was considered by many at the time to be a sensationalist. Respected theologians remained indifferent to his views, treating the notion of space aliens as a mere passing fad, to be indulged in by those whose literary tastes run to those expressed by the supermarket tabloids. Much of Von Daniken’s work, however, is insightful enough to merit more respect than he has received from the mainstream religious community. Since Von Daniken, moreover, others have taken up this particular baton with quite serious scholarship. Notable among these researchers is Zecharia Sitchin, who authored the Earth Chronicles book series centered on his 12th Planet concept.

Many aspects of Sitchin’s arguments are not original with him. He repeats a variety of facts and conclusions that were presented before by Von Daniken. Nevertheless, like many scholars who flesh out the pioneering work of others in greater detail, Sitchin brings out a wealth of additional background information in support of Von Daniken’s original claims. Furthermore, his theories regarding the source of the cosmic visitors do indeed appear to involve some original concepts which add depth to the discussion. Because of his scholarship, consistency of thought, and clarity of presentation, Sitchin’s writings will be included with Von Daniken’s as the generally representative focus of discussion.

Regardless of whether one agrees with part or all of Sitchin’s thesis, he presents a good case, providing in the process a very concise, readable story of how the history of man developed through the eyes of nineteenth and twentieth century archaeologists. As Sitchin follows the successive discoveries of the sites of ancient near-Eastern civilizations, he manages to convey a sense of excitement over the archaeologists’ growing grasp of the information which was revealed therein and of his own developing realization of the enormous implications of their discoveries. The civilization of man, Sitchin asserts in The 12th Planet, began in the fourth millenium B.C. along the Euphrates River just above the Persian Gulf, at Eridu in the Biblical land of Shinar which modern historians call Sumer. Its expansion from there followed the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers into Akkadia and Babylon, and from thence northward into the region of Mount Ararat and eventually into Europe, westward via the Mediterranean Sea to Crete and then Greece, back southward along the eastern bank of the Mediterranean into Canaan and Egypt, and eastward into the Indus Valley. Its northward progression was facilitated by the Horites (Hurrians), who communicated with the Akkadian civilization to their south and the Hittites to their north.

The change that the civilization of Sumer represented from the primitive lifestyle of man up to that time was so sudden that scholars called it astonishing. Modern society could easily identify with it: it had a Government with a bicameral congress, a code of laws including those to protect the poor (preceding Hammurabi by almost a millenium), schools, artistic sophistication, music with the flavor of our own Country/Western music, a pantheistic religion of twelve primary dieties which formed the basis of the Grecian, Roman, Canaanite, Hittite, Amorite, and Egyptian systems of worship, and a written language which was passed on to these same societies. Its people practiced law, medicine, agriculture, studied mathematics and history, and concerned themselves with world peace.

Sitchin claims that the rise of the Sumerian civilization was too abrupt to have been accomplished by man alone. The suddenness of man’s progress there led Sitchin to surmise that man was given a big push by outside influences. Mankind had help, he says, and that help came from beyond earth. Moreover, he claims, the Bible speaks of it. In his book The 12th Planet, Sitchin interprets the Biblical book of Genesis as describing humanoid beings from another planet who visited earth many thousands of years ago. Their first and principal occupation was in the region of ancient Sumer, where they built several cities. The Sumerian name for the region was E.din, which means ‘home of the righteous ones’. The Biblical implication of this name is obvious.

Portions of the Bible, as a matter of fact, have a startling similarity to some recently-decipered Sumerian texts. To support his view that humans were visited by aliens, Sitchin points out the many Sumerian, Biblical, and other ancient records alluding to ‘gods’ who possessed an advanced technology having characteristics paralleling those of our modern age, including flight above the earth and into space. He also shows that mankind, while venerating these beings as gods, attributed curiously human characteristics to them, chief of which was their ability to mate and have offspring. They also had shortcomings of a human nature, such as jealousies, anger, untruthfulness, unfaithfulness, and self-serving motives. These records, Sitchin asserts, are consistent with passages in the Bible, if those passages are interpreted from the perspective of an alien presence on earth which, despite its advanced technology, fell far short of the Godhood which mankind attributed to it.

Among this ancient literature is a rich and colorful tradition of dieties who form a family dynasty. The members of this dynasty are subject to the same nobility and moral faults as mankind. Stories of their personalities, the relationships among themselves and with mankind, and their exploits form a cosmic drama whose main players seem to be somewhat akin to the characters of Dallas. Indeed, their loves, jealousies, sexual liaisons, and adventures would make good material for a television soap opera.

Sitchin notes a close correlation between the pantheon of gods in other cultures and their Sumerian counterparts. He furnishes compelling evidence to support his claim that this Sumerian pantheon was the basis of the Hittite, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman religious systems, and that Sumerian knowledge and religious concepts greatly influenced religious thought throughout the world, including that of the Hindus and the Hebrews. The Egyptians, for example, believed that their gods came from a far land, most likely in the region of ancient Sumer, after the Deluge. In fact, the primary deities associated with both earthly and heavenly activities and celestial bodies, in particular, have been accepted among many archaelogists as having originated in Sumer. Sitchin notes, in support of this supposition, that the hierarchical structure of the gods, which was maintained at a constant number of 12 in the Sumerian pantheon as some of them were replaced by others, was similarly maintained at 12 in the later Egyptian, Greek, and Roman pantheons.

There is some minor overlap of material between Sitchin and Temple, but it is not known to what extent they may have shared data, if at all. There are, however, significant differences in focus. Where Sitchin primarily (but not exclusively) references Mesopotamian, i.e. Sumerian and later Akkadian and Babylonian, clues to extraterrestrial visitations, Temple extracts his information from historically more recent source data, including epics and myths from Egypt, Greece, Rome and other civilizations from the Mediterranean area. Temple engages in much speculation out of a comparative review of mythology and word roots. His primary intellectual tools are an unusually comprehensive knowledge base of legends and myths, an impressive memory, and a rather freely-employed flair for creative associations. Many of his associations are tenuous at best, while others are somewhat more plausible. Although his treatment often lacks the integrating theses which other authors such as Sitchin employ to tie together the various components of their developments, the sheer aggregation of the associations gives weight even to some of his more tenuous connections. Temple believes, as Sitchin does, that an extensive knowledge was imparted to mankind 5,000 or so years ago. A part of this knowledge, elements of which it is highly unlikely that man could have obtained on his own, concerned the Sirius star system, as noted in the commentary above regarding the Dogon tgribe o Mali, Africa.

Temple went on to claim that the knowledge which the Dogons possess is but the tip of the iceberg: the Greeks as well as the Dogons borrowed this knowledge from the more ancient Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations, which were not only contemporary with but in communication with each other. Intrinsic to their common knowledge were the same elements which the Dogon most probably borrowed and display in their rituals: understanding of the Sirius system, including the small size and great density of Sirius B, its approximately 50-year orbit about Sirius A, and the ellipticity of the orbit. Greek language and mythology, he asserts, encodes a somewhat imperfectly-understood vestige of this ancient knowledge and its associated rituals.

Temple, like Von Daniken, supports his thesis of alien visitations with the observation of records of strange hybrid partly-human, partly-animal creatures. According to Temple, the creatures, some of which were considered to be quite ugly and fear-inspiring, were supposedly intelligent, extremely knowledgeable, and adept in the arts of civilization. He implies that the aliens themselves may have had these forms. Von Daniken, on the other hand, attributes these forms to experimentation on species indigenous to the Earth. A variety of such beings, mostly amphibious but sometimes possessing features of snakes or other creatures instead of fins in their lower parts, were depicted in the ancient art of a number of societies, including the Dogon, Chinese, and especially the Egyptians. It is only with recent advances in genetic science that we can perceive the possibility that the depictions represent reality: perhaps at some time in the distant past there was much experimentation with gene splicing. In Gods from Outer Space, Von Daniken notes the many references to hybrid creatures in ancient literature and art from the Sumerian civilization forward. As he implied in The Eyes of the Sphinx, the many odd forms of artifacts uncovered in Egypt, which often combine portions of vastly different species, indicate that the genetic manipulation may have attempted to cross species boundaries. Whatever the origin of these odd creatures, the depictions appear to represent something other than fiction. They lend weight to the alien thesis.

But in reviewing the works of these authors of the historical alien genre, one can discern a number of common assumptions that are not necessarily true, and, in fact, severely restrict their visions of our past. Their primary assumption is that the Bible, while it might contain interesting and perhaps even valuable historic information, is just another document written by men. As such, there is nothing in it that can be attributed to the influence of God, nor is the majority of information treated by it as fact anything more than oft-repeated fable. Even the fables are considered to be degenerations of earlier, more accurate accounts. Several other assumptions directly follow this first one, especially the notion of evolution – that mankind, in opposition to the events catalogued in Genesis, evolved from a lesser creature, and from a primitive state to increasing levels of sophistication. In lockstep with the theory of evolution and equally opposed to the notion of Biblical truth is the companion doctrine of uniformitarianism, that the present is the key to the past and the state of the earth and life within it as we see it today is the result of billions of years of slowly-working processes. With the rejection of Scripture as truth, God Himself doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant to science, or even history for that matter. Thus in attempting to address the UFO phenomenon, God isn’t seen as particularly relevant to that issue either, and the researchers are left to their pursuit of answers along the lines of cutting-edge technology. When researchers find evidence of technical sophistication in our historical past, the rigid constraints that they impose on themselves by their godlessness impels them toward one of only two possible answers: either mankind was visited in the past by technologically superior beings, or there is insufficient data to say what went on in the ancient past and the subject would be best left alone (for now). This is why the group of investigators who are interested in ancient technology are predominantly spokespersons for UFO visitations in the past.

What if the Bible is historically accurate after all? Then it’s immediately another ball game. According to Genesis 6:1-7, we started out with a lot of talent, and quickly became corrupted, probably worshipping the same inventive spirit that modern man does:

“And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My Spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.

“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.”

We would no longer need ancient aliens to account for the Nazca Lines, the Great Pyramid, the Egyptian Tombs, and a host of other intriguing archaeological relics. Intelligent and sophisticated humans may have existed in the ancient past, turning into cave-dwelling primitives only temporarily until they recovered from the necessity for mere survival following the Great Flood. Perhaps their technology even surpassed our own. After all, it took us less than 400 years after we got on the technology wagon to achieve the sophistication in the mathematical and physical sciences that led to automotive transportation, manned flight, supersonic flight, space flight, worldwide communication, radio, television, computers, robotics, bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers and gameboys.

Actually, it is no longer logical to reject the historical accuracy of the Bible in favor of the opposing pseudoscience. Not after the The notion of uniformitarianism, at best a conceptual tool but not a very good one at that, has pretty much received a well-deserved comeuppance, with numerous former adherents rushing to discard it. With the arrival on the scientific scene of fresh new insights into the process of life, especially at the microscopic level, the theory of evolution is following suit, only not so quickly. The major hindrance to its utter rejection is the lack of any other theory of life’s origins that doesn’t involve God.

UFOs CHAPTER 2

CONTACT, COMMUNION AND CHRISTIANITY CHAPTER 2

Chapter 2: The Secular Perception of UFOs

There is a group within the secular community whose members are entirely indifferent to the UFO issue. This group can be categorized as consisting of imagination-challenged, intellectually shallow people who are focused on the mundane throughout their lives, being aware of only those events that might affect their own highly-developed self-interest. Not only is this camp indifferent to UFOs, it is also indifferent to the subject of God (except, perhaps as God might relate to Santa) and pretty much to anything not involving the next hamburger or the next episode of the Wheel. I dismiss it with a matching indifference, with the exception that I do enjoy watching the unsuccessful attempts of such people to answer the ridiculously elementary questions posed by Watters on the O’Reilly Factor.

The remainder of the secular world is divided into two sharply opposed camps regarding UFOs. A substantial segment of mainstream society, having bought into the prevailing paradigms of the world, places those who claim involvement in the UFO phenomenon as credulous, out of touch with reality, and rather on the fringe of social acceptability. They deny the existence of UFOs altogether, assuming that accounts of them originate with individuals who are burdened with problems of one sort or another. They are supported in large part by the mainstream media, the mainstream educational system, and mainstream science, to whom they prefer for answers to their own minds and common sense. This group, being marginally more intelligent, are marginally more aware of the world about them than those who are completely indifferent to the UFO phenomenon. They also are marginally more interesting.

The opposing secular camp not only believes in the existence of UFOs, but sees in them an alien presence, irrelevant to God, that has invaded us both now and in the past. This more interesting group consists of those who not only believe in UFOs, but acknowledge their historical existence and generally think that they are up to no good. Investigators within the camp of historical or ancient encounters are represented by authors Von Daniken, Sitchin and Temple. The more speculative details presented by them include mythological connections to Sirius or alien visitors in our past who came from an unknown planet of a highly eccentric orbit within our own solar system. There are a number of investigative organizations such as MUFON that focus on more modern sightings. Such can be readily acquired on the Internet. We shall set aside the speculative details as interesting but somewhat irrelevant to a demonstration of the reality of extraterrestrial visitors. For the most part we will confine our attention here to the core thesis of past and present visitations to earth by extraterrestrial beings, whatever their possible origins. The basic questions alone raise a variety of issues important to the speculative Christian.

If there is reality behind the UFO phenomenon – and that’s a very big if to the secular mind – the perception of their craft is consistently viewed in naturalistic terms. Whether they come from a different planet or galaxy, UFOs belong to the same universe as we inhabit, along with our own dimensional constraints. The craft, to them, are electromechanical devices like our own aircraft and space vehicles but designed and fabricated with the aid of a technology that is more advanced than ours. The implications of this standard perception have both technical and social components.

Technically, we are intrigued with the capabilities of UFOs, because evidence of their existence includes features such as their maneuverability, speed, power source, mode of overcoming gravity, and electromagnetic effects when they are in proximity to our own vehicles and appliances that extend rather far beyond our own capabilities in these areas. Some individuals would welcome contact with UFO occupants for the superior knowledge that they might be able to impart to us and thereby raise us up to new levels more compatible with their own. Such individuals are in the minority due to the social implications noted below.

The social implications of a more advanced society go beyond perceptions of UFO occupants as alien beings. Whether they are similar to us or not, their presence on earth represents de facto superiority. We know from experience within our own human society that when two peoples of unequal civilizations meet, they will clash, with the more advanced civilization dominating and eventually destroying the less developed one. This understanding is not lost on those who contemplate a future world in which UFO occupants would openly interact with humanity, and the thought is sufficient to generate real fear. This perceived threat to our way of life and even to our own continued existence would be more than sufficient to erect a governmental barrier of secrecy around the UFO phenomenon and to downplay the existence of such to the general public.

Difficulties have emerged regarding a materialistic view of UFOs. The enigmatic features of modern UFO sightings initially raised a number of questions relating to the technology that aliens might possess to enable them to perform the radical maneuvers associated with them or their vehicles. Over the several decades that have elapsed since the first well-publicized modern sightings in 1947, it was recognized that technology alone furnished an insufficient explanation of their characteristics and capabilities, which led a number of researchers in that field to question whether the aliens might have a spiritual quality. The mindset of Dr. J. Allen Hyneck, who came into the field of UFO investigations as a consultant to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Bluebook, evolved over the course of his investigations from skeptic to believer in the alien hypothesis, but he went beyond the extraterrestrial notion to a belief in something perhaps more spiritual in the nature of the alien beings than the common understanding admits. Jacques Vallee, a long-time UFO investigator who has gained a considerable measure of respect in the field, echoes this thought.

In his 1988 book Dimensions, Vallee asserts that UFO visitations, with many of their modern characteristics, have been with us since the beginning of mankind’s civilization. He traces the evidence for this assertion throughout our history, noting the many famous sightings which extend past a number of recorded incidents from the present down through the middle ages into antiquity. Most important to our subject, he cites the numerous Biblical passages such as the vision of Ezekiel, which overtly refer to such visitations as having a distinct flavor wherein the UFO aspect merges into Judeo-Christian canon. Moreover, he notes, the nature of these visitations, in which the ‘beings’ appear to be beyond the constraints of mass, space, and time in their ability to levitate, withstand violent maneuvers, and pass through solid objects, possess the same features that make the modern UFO sightings so enigmatic. It is these disturbing characteristics which so oppose modern rationalist thinking, Vallee claims, that put the UFO ‘occupants’ into a category beyond the mere extraterrestrial. He speculates on the possibility that they might be interdimensional, occupying a universe parallel to our own.

Secular accounts of ancient UFO visitations and theories regarding them will be explored in more detail in a later chapter. Here it will be simply noted that in general troubled and partially-formulated speculations like Vallee’s serve to emphasize the ultra-rigid boundaries of the modern rationalist way of thinking. The notion of a spirit-based entity capable of passing through solid objects is usually rejected quite rapidly as ridiculous. The assertion of this as impossible in our ‘real’ world also denies the possibility that the soul, so important to the Christian belief, can exist. A passage in Chapter 20 of John’s Gospel directly refutes this denial. In that passage the resurrected Jesus performs the same acts that the UFO debunker uses to discredit the reality of UFO sightings:

“But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither they finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.”

In the above passage, Jesus not only passed through solid walls to appear to the disciples, but presented the form of flesh to Thomas. He also ate with them. These capabilities that include the materialistic but extent beyond materialism are precisely those characteristics of many UFO sightings which cause such consternation among the investigators and their audience. Yet many of our cutting-edge physicists confront these mysterious capabilities on a daily basis in their investigations into quantum physics.

[to be continued]

GOD, FACE TO FACE CHAPTER EIGHT (CONTINUED)

CHAPTER EIGHT (CONTINUED) The Meaning of Biblical Morality

It has been said, in defense of Zanchius, that in describing God as above passion, he was referring exclusively to God transcendent, a state of being connoting God separate from and above His creation. God immanent, on the other hand, referring to God among us, would indeed possess passion.

This defense is weakened by the fact that it puts words into the mouth of Zanchius that the gentleman never put there himself. Nevertheless, the assumption shall be made herein that Zanchius meant this all along.

It will also be presumed, so that the discussion might proceed without immediately being cut off, that somehow the following Scripture verse, namely Hebrews 13:8, can be interpreted to be not applicable to a change in God’s personality from ‘God transcendent’ to ‘God immanent’.

“Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever.”

It will yet further be presumed, for the sake of initial argument, that ‘God immanent’ refers exclusively to Jesus in the flesh. But since Jesus preexisted His sojourn in the flesh, his or any other Member of the Trinity’s existence prior to that event would necessarily be ‘God transcendent’. But Exodus 32:7-14, for example, describes that same God, who is, by our initial definition ‘transcendent’ at that point in history, as possessing passion in abundance:

“And the Lord said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, whom thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made a molten calf, and have worshiped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These are thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.
“And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.
“And Moses besought the Lord his God, and said, Lord why doth wrath wax hot against thy people, whom thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand? Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou didst swear by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed, and they shall inherit it forever.
“And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.”

Perhaps, then, lest we find immediate fault with this notion that ‘God transcendent’ differs with respect to nature than ‘God immanent’, the term ‘God immanent’ would better be defined as ‘God interacting with man’. But that doesn’t work because the creation itself of man is one aspect of God interacting with man, whereas it is the very endeavor of creation that defines “God transcendent’.

We could narrow the definition of ‘God immanent’ further to mean ‘God communicating with man’. As redeemed mankind will be communicating with Jesus as His Bride throughout eternity, that raises a very strange and difficult, if not blasphemous theological issue: Jesus as God was once transcendent before He came in the flesh, but never shall be again.

We could narrow the definition still further to mean ‘God communicating with man while He is in the flesh’ But that doesn’t work either, because Ephesians 5 demands that in His spiritual form, Jesus will be communicating quite intimately with His Church, to whom he is Husband. By this new definition, Jesus shall no longer assume the role of ‘God immanent’, but instead shall be ‘God transcendent’. Shall we then insist upon a passionless marriage, one that violates the whole concept of marriage as God Himself in both Scripture and creation has presented it to us?

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul’s mystery in Chapter 5 gives us a very different message than this. It speaks of hope and joy to which Zanchius’ definition of God simply doesn’t do justice. It is to be treasured not only for its contribution to our future hope and expectation, but also to clarify our understanding of our God. This mystery is encapsulated in Ephesians 5:25-32:

“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.
“So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth it and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.
“This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.”

A devoted Christian condensed this beautiful statement into the following magnificent observation: “Just as Adam’s side was opened for Eve, so Jesus’ side was opened for His Church.”

In dwelling upon this wonderful notion, we also anticipate a God who is capable of passion toward us regardless of whether His presence is transcendent or immanent. In recognizing this fact, we can return to the assurance in Hebrews 13:8 of God’s unchanging nature.

What might change in God between transcendence and immanence is the dimensional constraint that Jesus experienced in becoming flesh. But that implies a limitation on His attributes rather than His basic nature, where passion belongs. Furthermore, it would be a limitation on His immanent form, not His transcendent form, which demands that His immanent form involves a subset of the attributes associated with His transcendent form, not the other way around. Therefore, even if one should insist in opposition to logic that passion was an attribute rather than an element of His basic nature, passion would be part of His transcendent form and not His immanent form, in contradiction to the argument that attempted to support Zanchius’ omission of passion in God’s nature.

Having refuted Zanchius’ assertion on this point, we can state without restraint that God, regardless of whether His form or state of being is immanent or transcendent, is capable of possessing passion. An immediate implication of this is that God is not alien to us.

The notion that God is above love of a passionate nature appears to violate Scripture, the most obvious case being ardor and passion intricately woven into the Song of Solomon, otherwise known as the Song of Songs. At least two Bible commentaries (in the Reformation Study Bible, New King James Version and in the New Schofield Reference Bible), both as introductions to the Song of Solomon, consider the Song to be an allegory of the future union of Jesus Christ with His Church.

My perception of the glory of God in all three Persons of the Godhead is far more the quality of their selfless willingness to give up the majesty than the grandeur of their possession of it. Connected with that perception I view the Members of the Godhead as capable of experiencing love with intensity and passion, which to me includes love of the romantic kind. Otherwise, the Song of Solomon would seem to be a wholly gratuitous insertion into Scripture of material extraneous to the Word if it didn’t speak either of Jesus’ future relationship with the Church or of the inter-Member relationship within the Godhead or both. Even more telling in this regard is the Shema of Moses, which Jesus presents as the greatest commandment in Matthew 22:36-38, and which demands a passionate commitment to the Lord. In light of the fact that Jesus, as a superlative Leader, never asked of His disciples anything that He wouldn’t do of Himself, it would seem to be contradictory to His character for Him to ask of us a passion that He Himself was incapable of exercising or even possessing.

The Song of Solomon raises issues in that regard that are worth addressing in detail. A host of Christian authorities readily acknowledge that it speaks of marital love in terms of passion and ardor. The same authorities admit even the erotic nature of some of its verses. The 1995 Reformation Study Bible (New King James Version), for example has this to say of the subject matter of the Song of Solomon:

“The beauty and worth of sexual love is affirmed at the beginning of the Bible, where the difference and relationship of the sexes is associated with the creation of humanity in God’s image (Gen. 1:27; cf. 2:19-25) If sexual love were evil in itself, it would be inappropriate as an allegory of Christ’s love for His church.”

Here Editor R. C. Sproul and his associates not only acknowledge the sexuality of the topic, but link it to both the nature of the Godhead and with the relationship between Christ and His Church. Indeed, in their same introductory commentary, the editors make the following statements:

“The Song of Solomon reveals three qualities of love between a man and a woman: self-giving, desire, and commitment. In all these ways love reflects the greater love of God our Creator. God delights in us and gives Himself to us. . . Christian marriage, according to Paul, should be modeled on the most perfect expression of such love, the self-giving love of Christ for His church and its willing response (Eph. 5:22, 23). The climax of the Song of Solomon is the praise of vehement and faithful love (8:6,7). The Song of Solomon. . .looks back to the gift of love in creation, and forward to the perfection of love in One greater than Solomon, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

The editors, after implying a gender attribute of Jesus and the Godhead Itself, back off from openly declaring a sexuality of God:

“Although it is not proper to attribute sexuality to God, there is an analogy between the love we experience in marriage and the love that God has for us.”

While I would have wished that the editors, after having stated here what easily could be interpreted as the essential opposite of what they presented elsewhere in their introductory remarks, might have explained to us what they meant by the words ‘not proper’ and ‘sexuality’ and how they might justify using these words, their comment here may be reconciled with their other insinuations while leaving intact the notion of gender in the Godhead by considering the word ‘sexuality’ to refer to the human-specific form in which the function of gender has been implemented. If that indeed is what the editors had in mind, then I would be somewhat in agreement with them (while, with one eye fixed on the Song, wondering if they hadn’t been a bit hasty themselves in this declaration) and be tempted to applaud their discernment in declaring ‘sexuality’ to be an inappropriate attribute of the Godhead.

The commentary on the Song of Solomon presented in the New Schofield Reference Bible (1967 Edition edited by C. I. Schofield) echoes, but even more forcefully, that given in the Reformation Study Bible:

“Nowhere in Scripture does the unspiritual mind tread upon ground so mysterious and incomprehensible as in this book, whereas saintly men and women throughout the ages have found it a source of pure and exquisite delight. That the love of the divine Bridegroom, symbolized here by Solomon’s love for the Shulamite maiden, should follow the analogy of the marriage relationship seems evil only to minds that are so ascetic that marital desire itself appears to them to be unholy.

“The book is the expression of pure marital love as ordained by God in creation, and the vindication of that love as against both asceticism and lust – the two profanations of the holiness of marriage. Its interpretation is threefold: (1) as a vivid unfolding of Solomon’s love for a Shulamite girl; (2) as a figurative revelation of God’s love for His covenant people, Israel, the wife of the Lord (Isa. 54:5-6; Jer. 2:2; Ezek. 16:8-14, 20-21, 32, 38; Hos. 2:16, 18-20); and (3) as an allegory of Christ’s love for His heavenly bride, the Church (2 Cor. 11:1-2, refs., Eph 5:25-32).”

As there appears to be a general agreement among established Biblical authorities regarding the relevance of this openly passionate Book to Christ and His Church, and there appears to be a similarly general agreement among established Biblical authorities regarding the Diety of Jesus Christ, an inescapable observation must be made: At least one Member of the Divine Godhead is openly acknowledged to be fully capable and willing to (passionately) exercise His male gender.

GOD, FACE TO FACE CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER EIGHT: The meaning of Biblical Morality

General

According to Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance for the King James Bible, there is no Biblical reference to either morality or immorality.  There are, however, multiple passages in the Bible that essentially equate our notion of the word “morality” to other common terms.  These will be explored below.

There are numerous discussions on the Internet regarding Biblical morality, two of which reference a number of Bible verses the authors thought to be appropriate to the topic.  Many of these verses reference notions that are thought to be equivalent to our basic understanding of what Biblical morality might represent.  They are arranged below according to their commonality of these alternate expressions.

Morality as fulfillment of the Law (sometimes equated with love, other times equated with doctrine, most dealing with sexual deviation): Genesis 19:1-38; Exodus 20:13; Leviticus 18 and 20; Deuteronomy 23; 1 Kings 14:24; 2 Kings 23:7; Proverbs 20, 23; Matthew 5:27, 28; Matthew 7:12; Romans 13:8-10; Galatians 5:17; 1 Timothy 1:10; Revelation 21:8; Revelation 22:15;

Morality as righteousness, which is most used in terms of our obedience to the call from God to love our neighbors and most specifically for our honesty in dealing with others, our responsibility toward those under our control or supervision and for our compassion toward those hurting or less fortunate than ourselves:  Isaiah 64:6; Matthew 6:33; Matthew 25; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; 2 Timothy 3:16

Morality as love of God: Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 22:37-40; Mark 12:30, 31;

Morality as obedience to God: references under fulfillment of the Law; references to righteousness; Proverbs 6:23-25; Proverbs 12:1; Matthew 6:24; Matthew 24:44-46; Acts 5:29; 1 Corinthians 2:13; Ephesians 6:4; James 1:22-25

Morality as good manners (responsible, thoughtful conduct): 1 Corinthians 15:33

Morality as harmonious with man’s creation: Genesis 1:27

Sexual Morality

The issue of sexual morality, and in particular the Biblical implications regarding it, is so important and so generally misunderstood that it deserves a separate discussion.

Webster’s New American Dictionary, 1956 Edition, defines “morality” as follows: “right living, virtue; conformity to generally accepted standards of conduct. “ Virtue, in turn, is defined therein as: “moral excellence, chastity”.  Continuing on, chastity is defined therein as: “the state of being chaste; purity”, where the word “purity” is defined as: “the quality of being free of blemishes and without admixture; chastity”.  Despite this unhelpful circularity of definition, chastity is commonly equated with virginity, which, in that dictionary, is defined as: “the quality of being a virgin; celibacy; chastity”.  Therefore, according to this dictionary, the term “morality” is equated, in a roundabout way, with celibacy.  There certainly are other, nonsexual, connotations of morality as well, but the sexual connotation takes center stage.

This linkage of morality with sexual purity, most commonly interpreted as strict celibacy, has been with the Church virtually since its beginning.   The implication is that sexuality of any nature, is at best a diversion preventing full intimacy with God and, at worst, a sin.  This notion is sometimes taken to the extreme of pronouncing as sinful passion of any kind.  This notional attitude is common in both Protestant and Catholic denominations, the Catholic expression of it being the most open.   As demonstrated in numerous Catholic publications, and particularly in those that deal with Mary, this equivalence is quite pronounced.  As an example is the Catholic insistence upon Mary’s perpetual virginity, despite the clear contradiction in Matthew 13 of that notion.  (The Catholic answer to Matthew 13 is her interpretation of the terms “brothers” and “sisters” is that of close relatives rather than siblings.)  It is true that Paul, in 1 Corinthians 7, describes celibacy as a desirable objective with the intent that the virgin may place all his or her affection on God undiluted, but note in verses 6 and 25 his acknowledgment that virginity is not a commandment from God.  Note also in verse 40 that Paul seems unsure as to how much of the call to celibacy of which he speaks is actually of God.  Nowhere in the Bible outside of Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 7 is there a hint that celibacy is a desirable practice.  There is no commandment that says “Thou shalt not lie with a woman.”  To the contrary, in Genesis 1:28 God told them to be fruitful and multiply.  Furthermore, Deuteronomy 23:1 insists that full masculinity is required for service to the Lord by stating that “He who is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.”  As a final point on the sexuality issue is the presence of the overtly sexual Song of Solomon in the canon of Scripture.

On the other hand, there are a host of abuses of normal sexuality that are proscribed in the Bible (especially in Exodus 20:14 and 17 and Leviticus 18 and 20) as abominations, or as one might otherwise put them, as immoral acts, such as adultery, homosexuality and bestiality, all of which represent violations of the way that God designed us, and consequently are in disharmony with our basic (unfallen) natures.  Adultery, in particular, also directly violates God’s second greatest commandment (Matthew 22:39), which is to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Additional  Comments on the Church’s Notion of Sexual Morality

Perhaps the most intellectually theological expression of the notion of sexuality or even passion as being beneath God is the virtually Gnostic pronouncement given by Jerome Zanchius in his tome “Absolute Predestination Stated and Asserted”.  The first of these statements may be found on p. 40 as “Position 2” under the heading “The Mercy of God”.  In that statement Zanchius says “Mercy is not in the Deity, as it is in us, a passion or affection, everything of that kind being incompatible with the purity, perfection, independency and unchangeableness [immutability] of His nature; . . .”  The second of his statements is on pp. 43 and 44 under headings I and II of chapter 1.  Therein he fleshes out his concept of God’s love, as the following excerpts show: “When love is predicated of God, we do not mean that He is possessed of it as a passion or affection.  In us it is such, but if, considered in that sense, it should be ascribed to the Deity, it would be utterly subversive of the simplicity, perfection and independency of His being. . .”;  “. . .His love towards them arises merely from ‘the good pleasure of his own will,’ without the least regard to anything ad extra or out of Himself.”; “When hatred is ascribed to God, it implies (1) a negation of benevolence, or a resolution not to have mercy on such and such men. . .”

Zanchius thus defines a God whose primary attribute is his majestic greatness.  Had his mind access to expressions denoting higher level superlatives, he certainly would have included them.  In defining God in this way, he automatically makes love a secondary attribute, despite John’s emphatic identification of God as the very embodiment of love.  Zanchius’ passionless God, in fact, is alien to the God of Scripture.  This is to be expected, as he assigns attributes to God without any reference whatsoever to Scripture itself.

Zanchius’ God, then, being positionally remote from and by nature very different from the mankind of His creation, is alien to it as well.

In opposition to Zanchius, Scripture paints a far more beautiful picture of God, depicting His majestic glory as His willingness to give up the majesty of greatness and power in favor of a love of great fullness and depth.  The Gospels appear to support this view, depicting Jesus Christ (as God) as a Being full of the attributes of love as we know it, including passion.  Examples that come to mind include His weeping over Jerusalem and Lazarus and His ordeal in the garden of Gethsemane.  It is difficult to picture the risen Jesus talking to His followers on the road to Emmaus in the context of Zanchius’ notion of God’s remote perfection.

Zanchius’ definition of God not only suppresses His most important attribute, but inhibits those to whom Scripture was written from loving Him back.  This is a serious issue because it runs counter to His Great Commandment to love Him with all our hearts, and our souls and our minds.

[to be continued]

GOD, FACE TO FACE CHAPTER SEVEN (CONTINUED)

CHAPTER SEVEN (CONTINUED): The issue extends beyond the gender of the Holy Spirit

One further Biblical suggestion needs to be addressed regarding the importance of gender in the relationships within Godhead and between the spiritual Church and Jesus Christ.  In Genesis 17, God talks to Abraham, telling him of a blessing that he will receive that will greatly impact the future of mankind:

“And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.  And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly.  And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him, saying, As for Me, behold, My covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations.  Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee.  And I will make thee exceedingly fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee.  And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.  And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a sojourner, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.

 

          “And God said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep My covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations.  This is My covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee.  Every male child among you shall be circumcised.  And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and you.  And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every male child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any foreigner who is not of thy seed.  He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and My covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.  And the uncircumcised male child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken My covenant.

 

          “And God said unto Abraham, As for Sarai, thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be.  And I will bless her, and give thee a son also of her: yea, I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of people shall be of her.  Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is an hundred years old?  And shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?  And Abraham said unto God, Oh, that Ishmael might live before thee!  And God said, Sarah, thy wife, shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac; and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him.”

 

          The primary theme of this passage continues in Genesis 18:11-14:

“Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.  Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I have become old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?  And the Lord said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying Shall I of a surety bear a child, who am old?  Is anything too hard for the Lord?  At the time appointed I will return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son.”

I now present the gender issue to the reader by way of a question involving the passage above that requires nothing more or less than a common-sense answer:  Why, if God isn’t intimately and personally involved in gender, would He present one of the most important transactions between Him and the human race in terms of a sexual miracle?

As God had suggested, nothing is too hard for Him to accomplish.  If God were indeed above gender, as many past and present theologians insist, He certainly could have altered the story line and associated miracle to remove sexuality from it.

Sarah would bear their son Isaac the next year.  Why indeed would God demand a token response of Abraham and his offspring in the form of the sexual ritual of male circumcision?  This ritual had little or nothing to do with cleanliness.  The human race had survived for centuries before the ritual was established.  In Acts 7:51, Paul echoes Ezekiel 36:26 in furnishing a hint as to the real purpose of the ritual:

“Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do ye.”

 

In a very graphic way, Paul used the term to chastise his audience for their lack of sensitivity toward God.  That was indeed the imagery that God intended to convey to the nation of Israel through the institution of the rite.

Isaac was the son of Abraham through his lifelong marital partner, as God had intended marriage to be.  Through Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac later, Abraham became a strong type of God the Father, while Isaac represented the Jesus as Lamb of God who was obedient to the cross.  Years later, Abraham sought a suitable wife for Isaac, one who would maintain Isaac as a strong type of Christ.  The account is in Genesis 24:10-32:

“And the servant took ten camels of the camels of [Abraham], and departed; for all the goods of his master were in his hand: and he arose, and went to Mesopotamia, unto the city of Nahor.  And he made his camels to kneel down outside the city by a well of water at the time of the evening, even the time that women go out to draw water.  And he said, O Lord god of my master, Abraham, I pray thee, send me good speed this day, and show kindness unto my master, Abraham.  Behold, I stand here by the well of water; and the daughters of the men of the city come out to draw water; and let it come to pass, that the damsel to whom I shall say, Let down thy pitcher, I pray thee, that I may drink; and she shall say, Drink, and I will give thy camels drink also; let her be the one whom thou hast appointed for thy servant, Isaac; and thereby shall I know that thou hast shown kindness unto my master.

 

          “And it came to pass, before he had finished speaking, that, behold, Rebekah came out, who was born to Bethuel, son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham’s brother, with her pitcher upon her shoulder.  And the damsel was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her; and she went down to the well, and filled her pitcher, and came up.  And the servant ran to meet her, and said, Let me, I pray thee, drink a little water from thy pitcher.  And she said, Drink, my lord: and she hastened, and let down her pitcher upon her hand, and gave him drink.  And when she had finished giving him drink, she said, I will draw water for thy camels also, until they have finished drinking.  And she hastened, and emptied her pitcher into the trough, and ran again unto the well to draw water, and drew for all his camels.  And the man, wondering at her, held his peace, to learn whether the Lord had made his journey prosperous or not.

 

‘And it came to pass, as the camels had finished drinking, that the man took a golden ring of half a shekel weight, and two bracelets for her wrists of ten shekels weight of gold; and said, Whose daughter art thou?  Tell me, I pray thee: is there room in thy father’s house for us to lodge in?  And she said unto him, I am the daughter of Bethuel, the son of Milcah, whom she bore unto Nahor.  She said moreover unto him, We have both straw and fodder enough, and room to lodge in.  And the man bowed down his head and worshiped the Lord.  And he said, Blessed be the Lord God  of my master, Abraham, who hath not left destitute my master of his mercy and his truth: I being in the way, the Lord led me to the house of my master’s brethren.  And the dams and he ungirded his camels, and gave straw and fodder for the camels, and water to wash his feet, and the men;s feet that were with him.  And there was set food before him to eat: but he said, I will not eat, until I have told mine errand.”

 

The man related to Laban and the others the unique way that God had precisely answered his elaborate test for the suitability of Rebekah for marriage to Isaac.  Then the man gave Laban the riches he had brought with him on the camels.  Laban responded by consenting to the marriage.  But as the man prepared to return to Abraham with Rebekah, Laban backed off somewhat, asking for another ten days before giving up his sister.  At that point, almost as an afterthought, they decided to ask for Rebekah’s consent as well.  (As a side point, I see some implication in that regarding the issue of free will, most often expressed as the Calvinist/Arminian divide among Christians)

After receiving Rebekah’s consent to the marriage, they journey back to Abraham’s home, where Isaac marries Rebekah.  She gives birth to Jacob and Esau.  Jacob is renamed Israel by God, continuing on the bloodline to Jesus Christ.

I offer another question to the reader: What was so important about Isaac’s marriage to Rebekah that it involved such an intricate selection process that was so detailed in Scripture?  Permit me to answer that one:  Isaac, who was a strong type of Christ, continued to be a type in this marital relationship, anticipating the future role of the Church as the Bride of Christ.  Paul expressed this blessed hope quite boldly in Ephesians 5:31 and 32:

“For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.  This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church.”

 

Christians sometimes claim that Jesus never married, nor ever will marry, perceiving Him to be “above” sexual matters.  Others claim that He did marry, to Mary Magdalene.  I would claim that both these presuppositions are wrong with immense implications regarding our understanding of God, suggesting instead that Jesus never married on Earth because He already is betrothed to his future wife, the Church.  I see Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding in Cana as anticipating the joy of that future marriage.               

           

GOD, FACE TO FACE CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER SEVEN: The issue extends beyond the gender of the Holy Spirit

It is a left-handed tribute to the thoroughness by which the Church was cleansed of all matters sexual to appreciate that not only was the Holy Spirit stripped of gender, but that this wholesale gender denial extended to our future spiritual relationship with Jesus Christ.  Even today, pastors who should know their Scripture better downplay Paul’s beautiful presentation in Ephesians 5 of our future spiritual relationship with Jesus as His wife.

Claiming, no, demanding rather, that procreation doesn’t exist in the spiritual realm, they prefer to perceive the Church’s future bridehood as nothing more than a figure of speech intended to convey the greatness of Jesus agape love toward mankind.  As to what the actual relationship consists of, they refuse to extend their imaginations beyond some kind of bright light in heaven and go no further, their impassible mental wall being their equation of purity with chastity.  In doing so, they miss the boat on the Godhead’s involvement in the entire creation epic.

It is common knowledge that Scripture describes the Church as the Bride of Christ.  But Scripture also describes us as Jesus’ spiritual wife, which defines the relationship as having been consummated.  Examples include Revelation 19:7 and 21:9.  Romans 7:4 is even more explicit in that regard, going beyond describing our relationship with Jesus as a marital one to identifying it as bearing fruit:

Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ, that ye should be married to another, even to Him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.

It is an undeniable fact that consummation and birth go hand-in-hand.  The insistence upon its denial in the face of its obvious truth reminds me of an incident in which my brother and I were involved in junior high.  Regrettably, our involvement was thoughtless, causing us to engage in some soul-searching afterward.

There is a saying in the Marine Corps that there are always the ten percent who never get the word.  This is true not only in the service but in all walks of life.  In the particular case that I’m recalling here, the fourteen-year-old classmate of ours had no knowledge whatsoever regarding the birds and the bees.  My brother and I, upon discovering this oddity, proceeded to explain to him that his very presence on earth required his mother and father to have engaged in sex.  He subsequently displayed, in very rapid succession, all the stages of grief.  He went into denial, but then his mind caught up with that and his face turned quite red.  He wept crocodile tears and, bawling, he got up and rushed out the classroom door while the rest of the class snickered.  I imagine that he went directly home thereafter to confront his parents with their disgrace.

That poor unfortunate kid reminds me a lot of our mainstream Church leadership, both Catholic and Protestant.  The main difference is the probability that over ninety percent of them never got the word.  The problem is not that God has engaged in disgraceful behavior, but that the Church leadership now and in the past has insisted upon perceiving all sexual conduct as dirty.  They need to grow up.

With that thought in mind, I present the following questions to them:

QUESTIONS FOR THE MAINSTREAM THEOLOGIAN WHO INSISTS UPON THE LACK OF GENDER IN THE SPIRITUAL REALM

All of the following issues have straightforward, Scripturally-compatible answers.

Please explain the mechanics of Jesus’ birth in the flesh, with reference to Luke 1:26-35 and “the seed of the Woman” in Genesis 3:15.  Regarding this issue, the proper interpretation of “seed” is the male contribution to life, as opposed to “egg”, which is the female contribution to life.  Also, in Luke 1, the “highest” is the Father.  Putting these facts together in the context of a feminine Holy Spirit who is creatively responsive to the Father’s will leads to a conclusion that is very different, less self-contradictory, fully intuitive and eminently more logical than the mainstream views of both Catholic and Protestant Churches on this topic.

Please cite Scriptural descriptions of the spiritual Church that are not relevant to depictions of Jesus’ marital relationship to the spiritual Church.  Do not include references to the Church as the Body of Christ, as that is explained in Ephesians 5:28 as integral to the marital union.

Please explain, with reference to John 3 and Revelation 12, how Scripture denies the possibility of procreation in the spiritual realm.

Please explain the relevance to the body of Scriptural canon the presence in Scripture of the following books and chapters: Genesis 2 and 24; Song of Solomon; Isaiah 54; Jesus’ first miracle described in John 2 – the wedding in Cana; 1 Corinthians 6 and 7; Ephesians 5; and Revelation 19-21.

Please explain Scripture’s emphasis and often continuous focus in both Testaments on gender, marriage, birth and offspring.

Please account for Scriptural references to feminine characteristics, including executive roles and the portrayal of Wisdom in Proverbs as feminine, within the Godhead in the face of the strong masculinity of both the Father and Jesus Christ and the anti-Scriptural notion of both masculinity and femininity residing within the same Being.

Please point to those passages in Scripture that label gender or sexuality as beneath God.  Please include those passages that describe the only purpose of the marital union as the begetting of children.  Such would appear to contradict 1 Corinthians 7:9.

Please explain why Jesus remained celibate during His time on earth.

Please explain the difficulty of mainstream theology in its understanding of the Holy Spirit and its perception of the issue as complex, and why, in the face of a simple, intuitive answer to the issue given a feminine Holy Spirit, it is necessary to suggest that an answer is unknowable and can be resolved only through a face-to-face meeting with God.

Please explain the attachment in Genesis 2:18 to the notion of complementary otherness and why that doesn’t apply to the Godhead.

Those who found that they couldn’t answer all of the questions with reference to Scripture should get the hint that maybe their understanding of God needs some extensive revision with respect to gender and love within the Judeo-Christian Godhead.  Perhaps some re-examination of the meaning of sexual purity also would be in order.  The following chapter addresses that issue.

GOD, FACE TO FACE CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SIX: A summary of the God that the mainstream Christian Church refuses to see

 

This God, unlike the one addressed in the previous chapter, corresponds more closely to Scripture.  That is a most fortunate circumstance, as this God is One whom we can understand with full intuition and share a substantial measure of intimacy.  We can worship this God with fervor, because we share in many of His attributes and, more importantly, we can see this God as noble.  If there is any attribute of this God that stands out above omniness, it is the majesty of His selfless nobility.

This God of Scripture consists, at the present time, of Father, Mother and Son, constituting a perfectly functioning gender-inclusive Family enjoying perfect intra-Godhead intimacy, communication and, most of all, love on a scale so grand as to be beyond our perception.  It is the Godhead – Family – that bestows oneness on the Holy Trinity.  Within that Trinity the Members are differentiated by function: Kingdom, Power and Glory.  The characterization of the Godhead as Trinitarian is qualified as pertaining to the present, as there is every hope, within Scripture, of the spiritual Church eventually joining the Godhead.

The feature that drives this separation of the Godhead away from the God of mainstream understanding is the femininity of the Holy Spirit.  This feature instantly transforms a loose, agape-based amalgam of vaguely-defined Beings into a tightly-coupled, eros-based Family whose Members enjoy complementary, mutually-supportive functions.  Moreover, even with our fallen natures and dimensional limitations, their Holy natures, being Family-based, are accessible to our understanding, even to the extent that we can worship this God with the fervor demanded of us by Jesus in Matthew 22.

Given the notions of family and its associated features of unity of purpose, selfless participation, complementary otherness, it is a matter of simple logic to attach functionality to each of the Members within the Godhead.  As described in Marching to a Worthy Drummer, to the Father would apply the attribute of Divine Will, or the initiating thought.  Corresponding to the complementary otherness of the Will, the functional attribute of the Holy Spirit would be the execution of the Father’s will, or the Divine Means that enables the initiating thought belonging to the Will to assume reality.  To the Son, then, would be the Divine Result, the glory in reality of the initiating thought.

Where would the Church fit in?  As the spouse of Christ, of course, just as Paul hinted in so many passages, including 2 Corinthians 11:2 and Galatians 4:27 (which itself echoes Isaiah 54), and he so directly stated in Ephesians 5:25-32.  In Revelation 19:7 and 21:9, John echoes Paul’s assertion, claiming the Church to be the wife of Christ.  Given this wonderful relationship, it is only natural that Paul’s would note in Galatians 3:29, 4:5 and elsewhere that the Church is the in-law child of the Father and the Holy Spirit.

The existing relationship within the Godhead and the promised future relationship between man and God places our present relationship with God on an entirely different plane than that which is perceived by the mainstream Church.  No longer must we worship God as groveling dogs or as beggars for scraps but as future members of the Divine Family, adored and treasured by a God who knows intimacy and wants the same for us.  Of course God is superior to us in a great number of very important traits, such as character, abilities, and mind.  But it is His superiority in one trait that gives us hope and allows us to adore Him in sincerity.  That trait is His superlative love, which extends even to us.

As a beautiful token of our betrothal to Jesus Christ, we have the indwelling Holy Spirit, forecast millennia before our time at Her indwelling of the Tabernacle in the wilderness (Exodus 40), and at Solomon’s dedication of the first Temple (1 Kings 8).  The connection between these precursor events and the Holy Spirit who indwells Christian believers is given in 1 Corinthians 3:16 and Ephesians 2:19-22, wherein Paul asserts that the Church herself, through her constituents, is a temple indwelt by the Holy Spirit:

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?

 

          Now, therefore, ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone, in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are built together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

We know from this parallelism of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling of the Jewish Temples and the temples of our bodies that we the Church all have available to us the guidance of God, our future Mother-in-law, directing us as we allow toward the characters that will be pleasing to our future Spouse, Jesus Christ.  All we have to do is accept that supporting direction, scary or unpleasant as it may seem at first.  But what loving intimacy!  What hope for our future spiritual companionship with our Lord and our Spouse, Jesus Christ!

GOD, FACE TO FACE CHAPTER 5

 

CHAPTER FIVE: A summary of the mainstream Christian Church’s view of God

Extracting the essence of the previous four chapters, one readily can summarize the nature of God, as viewed by mainstreamWestern Christianity, as embracing the following attributes:

God is perceived to be majestic, all-seeing, all-powerful, and all-knowing.  These attributes are contained in the familiar omni-descriptions: omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient.  If other omni-attributes are found, they would apply to God as well, as the mainstream God is all about omniness.

Unlike us lesser beings inhabiting the material world, God is genderless, being above matters sexual.  He is also without passion in general, including love and hatred.  To be sure, He is merciful, but in a vague, largely undefined way.  Passion, gender and the intimacy of possessive love are prohibited by the Western Mainstream Church from encroaching upon His omni-qualities.

Given these general characteristics, the Godhead is found to be a Trinity, consisting of a common essence and three vaguely-defined “personalities”.  His Trinitarian constitution is considered to exist from forever in the past to forever in the future.  The intra-Trinitarian relationship consists of a supposedly benign fellowship of three characteristically male personalities who lack the function of gender, bonded together in love restricted to an agape form; love in an eros form with its possessive and romantic qualities is considered unthinkable.

The general implication of this view of God and the Godhead is that God represents an essential alien quality, one of being inexplicably different from us: He is genderless whereas we are fully gendered; He is unattainably far above us; His relationship with us is said to consist of love, but it is the sparing love of a stern, commanding Presence, constantly kicking over those of our works that don’t meet with His stratospheric standards of behavior.

Because of God’s lack of gender, we are commanded to obey his several prohibitions of sexual deviation from His established norm of a lifetime-long single marital relationship between one male and one female without understanding why that is such an important standard.  While unequivocal obedience without the necessity of knowledge is a reasonable expectation of God toward mankind, many of His other commandments are amenable to common-sense understanding.  On the other hand, it is apparent that at least in our present societies worldwide, people including Christians violate the sexual commandments with indifference toward God.

If anything affirmative can be said of the various Church authorities’ treatment of the Holy Spirit as noted in the previous chapters, it is their consistency with each other in fostering the view of God as expressed above.

Our worship of this Being must consequently consist of fear tempered by love, rather than love tempered by fear.  We worship Him as would tiny ants, looking up an enormous leathery sole poised to come down hard, smashing all below into pulp.  We appease this harsh God, either to avoid punishment or to curry favor and to obtain subsequent gifts.

In the wake of this description of our common understanding of God I offer a question: Is this the God defined in Scripture?  To that question, I respond with a resounding “no”, for the reasons explained herein.

Instead, this God is a diety of man’s own making.  Usually, when referring to a false god, the conservative Christian will point to that god’s indulgences toward a fallen Church.  The most recent examples of that attitude include the conservative Church’s denunciation of those Churches that attempt to accommodate the secular world’s insistence upon political correctness in the matters of homosexual marriages, homosexual participation in Church leadership, the Muslim view of God, or that worship the benevolent God who sheds health, wealth and happiness to those who, with itching ears, fervently believe in such.  But the conservative view of God, while residing at the opposite end of the belief spectrum from Santa Claus, is every bit as much a god constructed by man, because that god, like the others, fails to correspond to Scripture.

GOD, FACE TO FACE CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR: How modern theologians attempt to explain the Holy Spirit while excluding sexuality from God
For the most part the Protestant Church, in contrast with her Catholic sister, simply accepts the lack of the feminine and ignores the issue altogether, treating it as beyond the pale of appropriate intellectual investigation. Despite this general official refusal of the Protestant Churches to address the void caused by the removal of functional gender from God, a number of interested theologians have attempted to explain the nature of the Holy Spirit in a way that, while conforming to Church doctrine, makes an effort to present the Holy Spirit in a logical and, as they struggle to achieve, a warm manner.

Yet both Catholic and Protestant Churches have in common a view of the Trinity in which sexuality is at most a superficial feature even for birth and in which vital aspects of femininity are denied altogether. This view leads most investigators into the nature of the Trinity into an admission that the topic is very complex, to the extent that in the end they admit further that. like attempting to understand the duality of light or the logic behind quantum mechanics, they can’t comprehend it completely. This limitation has and continues to have a profound influence on the entire nature of Christianity. Didn’t any of these investigators grasp a hint in the wake of this inability to comprehend such an important topic that perhaps the standard view of the Trinity might need some revision?

Both the Father as the divine Will and the Son as Jesus Christ, the divine Word, are well-defined in Scripture as to their general natures and their functional roles. Of the three Members of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is by far the most enigmatic. It is the lack of understanding, or perhaps simply the misunderstanding, of the nature of this divine Member from which the confusion and apparent complexity of the Trinity has arisen. A substantial part of this confusion is the obviously apparent but discomforting feature of the Holy Spirit’s Scripturally-defined character as embracing specifically feminine elements in contradiction to the general view of the Trinity as being either gender-neutral or masculine.

Many expositors of the Holy Spirit see in Genesis 1 the active participation of the Holy Spirit in the act of creation. This is the position taken by respected scholar of Scripture Benjamin B. Warfield, who describes this functional attribute of the Holy Spirit in Chapter Seventeen of his book The Holy Spirit:

“His offices in Nature – The ‘Spirit’ or personal ‘Breath’ is the Executive of the Godhead, as the ‘Son’ or ‘Word’ is the Revealer. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of chaos and developed cosmos (Gen. 1:2). Henceforth he is always represented as the author of order and beauty in the natural as of holiness in the moral world. He garnished the astronomical heavens (Job 26:13). He is the organizer and source of life to all provinces of vegetable and animal nature (Job 33:4; Ps. 104:29, 30; Isa. 32:14, 15), and of enlightenment to human intelligence in all arts and sciences (Job 32:8; 35:11; Ex 31:2-4).”

Dr. H. A. Ironside, in a little tome first printed in 1941 entitled The Holy Trinity, also interprets Genesis 1:2 as asserting that the Holy Spirit, in concert with the Father, was actively involved in creation. Interestingly, in referencing Isaiah 66 as an Old Testament reference to the Trinity he quotes from verse 13:

“As one whom his mother comforteth so will I comfort you.”

Although Ironside invariably interprets the Holy Spirit in terms of the masculine pronoun ‘he’, he also confesses a lack of full understanding of the nature of the Trinity. Yet the passage quoted above, by associating the word ‘mother’ with ‘comfort’, furnishes a key argument for the feminine function of the Holy Spirit. For Jesus, in John 14:16 and 17, directly links the Holy Spirit with the name (implying role) Comforter:

“And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.”

Dedicated theologian Dr. Bruce A. Ware makes similar statements to Warfield regarding the executive (implementation of will) role of the Holy Spirit in his work Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. In fact, this executive role of the Holy Spirit is a general theme among theologians. In his own work, Ware encapsulates the roles of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as follows: Father – Grand Architect; Son – Submission to the Father in doing (displaying) His Will; Holy Spirit – Carrying out the work of the Father.

Alister McGrath, who wrote the work Understanding the Trinity, provides a representative viewpoint of this genre, yet also furnishes some remarkably fresh insights. He stands on what I humbly perceive as firm soil in his eloquent and moving descriptions of God and the incarnate Jesus in chapters 1 through 6. In reading it for a second time quite recently I realized afresh how his treatment of the Trinity had influenced my own work Family of God. It was Dr. McGrath, in fact, whom I mentioned on pages 24 through 26:

“Some theologians, having briefly noted the one intuitively satisfactory functional description of the Trinity, reject this particular answer quite abruptly, justifying their rejection on the basis of insufficient logic. They proceed from there to hammer out tortuously-derived and ultimately insufficient, emotionally empty alternatives. One such expositor, who otherwise paints with highly readable and insightful words a delightful description of God, mentions the Trinity with profound understanding and then quickly discards it as a misapplication of a familiar model in an attempt to apply too much of what is, after all, just a simplistic and imperfect model to the reality of God Himself. In his haste to reject that application, however, he violates the same logical guidelines which he carefully presented in the immediately preceding pages of his discussion.

“This same theologian, in viewing the Trinity in the uncontroversial terms of man’s encounters with God, explains it as different facets of His nature through which God has chosen to reveal Himself to man. God, he asserts, is altogether too vast for man, with his limitations in time and space, to acquire a complete picture of His entire nature. We can sample portions of this Divine Entity, however, and by thinking through the implications of the composite picture that He has given us through Scripture, we perceive His Trinitarian nature and the necessity for it. This experiential description is, I think, a valid one and has the advantage of being safely neutral with respect to gender. It is certainly the most intuitively satisfying characterization of the Trinity that I have seen to date. Yet such an exclusively man-centered description yields a disappointing poverty of information about God Himself, leaving the reader to ask why, if God does indeed have a Trinitarian nature, He is so reluctant to share a picture of that characteristic with us in terms of His intrinsic functional attributes. It would seem, after all, that a God-centered intuitive understanding would naturally lead to a greater appreciation of Him, and consequently a greater love toward Him on the part of His subjects. One might easily suspect, as a matter of fact, that those individuals in the past who were named in the Book of Hebrews, did indeed have personal insights into the nature of God beyond those which the usual churchgoer might have access to via his pastor or his reading of Scripture.”

The description of the Trinity that Dr. McGrath presented with profound understanding and subsequently discarded in haste begins on page 57 of Understanding the Trinity. An important continuation is presented twelve pages later, where the author appears to wish to tone down his rejection of the earlier model by presenting some qualifying remarks which suggest that perhaps he himself had some persistently lingering thoughts about the nature of the Holy Spirit that he didn’t wish to assert directly:

“It was therefore assumed that light also needed to travel through something [as was the case for sound, upon which light was modeled], and the word ‘aether’ was coined to describe the medium through which light waves traveled. If you read old radio magazines, or listen to old radio programmes, you’ll sometimes find people referring to ‘waves traveling through the aether’. But by the end of the century it had become clear that light did not seem to need any medium to travel through. What had happened was simply that the logical necessity of one aspect of the model (sound) had initially been assumed to apply to what was being modeled (light), and this assumption was gradually recognized to be incorrect as the experimental evidence built up.

“And so it is with models of God. For example, we often use ‘father’ as a very helpful model of God, emphasizing the way in which we are dependent upon God for our existence. But for every human child there is a human mother as well as a human father. This would seem to imply that there is a heavenly mother in addition to a heavenly father. But this assumption rests upon the improper transfer of the logical necessity of an aspect of the model (father) to what is being modeled (God), in just the same way as the necessity of one aspect (the need for a medium of propagation) of the model (sound) was transferred to what was being modeled (light). . .”

“. . . Although the strongly patriarchal structure of society of the time inevitably meant that emphasis was placed upon God as father (e.g., Jeremiah 3:19; Matthew 6:9), there are several passages which encourage us to think of God as our mother (e.g., Deuteronomy 32:18). We shall be considering these two images together, and ask what they tell us about God.

“The first, and most obvious, point is that God is understood as the one who called us into being, who created us. Just as our human parents brought us into being, so God must be recognized as the author and source of our existence. Thus at one point in her history, Israel is chided because she ‘forgot the God who gave [her] birth’ (Deuteronomy 32:18; cf. Isaiah 44:2, 24; 49:15).

“The second point which the model of God as parent makes is the natural love of God for his people. God doesn’t love us because of our achievements, but simply because we are his children. ‘The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you’ (Deuteronomy 7:7-8). Just as a mother can never forget or turn against her child, so God will not forget or gturn against his people (Isaiah 49:15). There is a natural bond of affection and sympathy between God and his children, simply because he has brought them into being. Thus God loved us long before we loved him (1 John 4:10, 19). Psalm 51:1 refers to God’s ‘great compassion, and it is interesting to note that the Hebrew word for ‘compassion’ (rachmin) is derived from the word for ‘womb’ (rechmen). God’s compassion towards his people is that of a mother towards her child (cf. Isaiah 66:12-13). Compassion stems from the womb.”

A delightful feature of his discourses, remarkable for its rarity, is a description of God’s loving relationship to mankind in romantic terms. Another feature of his presentation is his lengthy discussion of the necessities of Jesus’ essence as both man and God, and of His resurrection.
Unfortunately, Dr. McGrath appears to be on less stable ground in his discussion of the Trinity. In his presentation of this dogma he avoids delving too deeply into God’s intrinsic nature or attributes by substituting in its place a lengthy experientially-based account of Him in terms of His interaction with mankind. He is careful near the outset of his discourse, however, to distance himself from any notion that the Trinity includes a female Persona. He does so in his chapter entitled Thinking About God by noting that intellectual models are subject to misapplication through the improper assumption that every attribute of a model must apply to its counterpart in reality. As already noted, he cites as an example the wave characteristic of sound as a model for light, as was quoted directly from his work above.

But is the assumption of a Divine Mother in the economy of God necessarily a misapplication of the human parent model? It could be, but that’s a long way from must be. Nowhere does Dr. McGrath justify the necessity that he associates with that application. Instead, he elevates a mere illustrative example to the status of a law.

Moreover, and again as we have already noted, a short twelve pages further along, Dr. McGrath equivocates a bit regarding the possibility of motherhood in God’s economy, citing a number of Scriptural passages that describe God in a role more appropriate to motherhood than to fatherhood.

Almost at the end of his book it can be seen how Dr. McGrath rescues himself from this apparent inconsistency: as discussed in more detail below, he does not posit a distinct member of the Godhead who possesses the attributes of femininity; instead, he attributes this characteristic to the same Person as the Father. But rather than solving the problem of the feminine side of God, he comes dangerously close both to ultra-monotheism and modalism. Beyond that, he defines a God with gender characteristics indeed, but in the same Person. According to 1 Corinthians 6:9, 10, this suggests a model for a human malady known as hermaphroditism, which is contrary to Scripture, even to the extent of being labeled as unrighteous:

“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

I find it hard to believe, given its treatment in Scripture, that in His own organization God would wish even to hint at sexual perversion, or even sexual difficulty.

The essence of McGrath’s description of Jesus may be encapsulated in this passage, found in his chapter entitled God as Three and God as One: “The difficulties really begin with the recognition of the fundamental Christian insight that Jesus is God incarnate: that in the face of Jesus Christ we see none other than the living God himself. Although the New Testament is not really anything like a textbook of systematic theology, there is nothing stated in the great creeds of the church which is not already explicitly or implicitly stated within its pages. Jesus is understood to act as God and for God: whoever sees him, sees God; when he speaks, he speaks with the authority of God; when he makes promises, he makes them on behalf of God; when he judges us, he judges as God; when we worship, we worship the risen Christ as God; and so forth.” Dr. McGrath goes on to characterize Jesus in his incarnate form as not actually comprising the fullness of God, but merely as a representative sample of God suitable for furnishing humanity with some comprehension, consistent with their limitations, of the far more complete spiritual God who resides in heaven. He claims in a similar vein that the Holy Spirit, like Jesus, is another manifestation of God, in this case one that indwells the believer, that furnishes another way by which redeemed mankind can encounter, or experience, God.

Dr. McGrath ends with this commentary:

“We can now see why Christians talk about God being a ‘three-in-one’. One difficulty remains, however, which must be considered. How can God be three persons and one person at the same time? This brings us to an important point which is often not fully understood. The following is a simplified account of the idea of ‘person’ which may be helpful, although the reader must appreciate that simplifications are potentially dangerous. The word ‘person’ has changed its meaning since the third century when it began to bed used in connection with the ‘threefoldness of God’. When we talk about God as a person, we naturally think of God as being one person. But theologians such as Tertullian, writing in the third century, used the word ‘person’ with a different meaning. The word ‘person’ originally derives from the Latin word persona, meaning an actor’s face-mask – and, by extension, the role which he takes in a play.

“By stating that there were three persons but only one God, Tertullian was asserting that all three major roles in the great drama of human redemption are played by the one and the same God. The three great roles in this drama are all played by the same actor: God. Each of these roles may reveal God in a somewhat different way, but it is the same God in every case. So when we talk about God as one person, we mean one person in the modern sense of the word, and when we talk about God as three persons, we mean three persons in the ancient sense of the word. It is God, and God alone, who masterminded and executes the great plan of salvation, culminating in Jesus Christ. It is he who is present and active at every stage of its long history. Confusing these two senses of the word ‘person’ inevitably leads to the idea the God is actually a committee, which, as we saw earlier, is a thoroughly unhelpful and confusing way of thinking about God.”

One certainly could not accuse Dr. McGrath of being a tritheist. On the other hand, despite his denial on the back cover of the book that he entertains the heretical notion of modalism, he’s on shaky ground there, being right on the edge or over it according to his own words.

Dr. Mcgrath is somewhat unique among other well-established theologians in that his scientific training has furnished him with an ability to be objective in his presentation and make use of useful intellectual tools such as models to make his points. Further, he at least addresses some notions that others avoid like the plague, as if they themselves might be infected by ideas they may have been taught were close to blasphemous. He has in common with the others, however, several notions regarding the Holy Spirit that are generally accepted within faithful Christendom: while all Members of the Trinity possess the same substance and are fully and equally God, they differ with respect to functional role; the role for the Holy Spirit conforms most closely to that associated with executive companion and motherhood; the Holy Spirit is a background Entity, more self-effacing than Father and Son; the Trinity (as confessed by the Church) is a mystery beyond man’s comprehension. The ‘others’ who share these particular view with Drs. McGrath and Ware include Dr. Peter Masters (The Faith) and James R. White (The Forgotten Trinity).

I agree quite thoroughly with all of these points except the last, regarding the mystery which appears to be beyond comprehension, with which I disagree quite thoroughly. To me, the incomprehensibility in understanding the Trinity is another typical case of man’s brain outsmarting his heart. What should be an extremely simple and intuitive understanding, man has turned into a riddle, in the process wrapping himself tightly around the intellectual axle.

A case could be made that in the many attempts made by scholars of Scripture to describe the Holy Spirit, they end up implying an association of the Holy Spirit with Wisdom. Wisdom, of course, is given a lengthy treatment in Proverbs, with a female gender association.

It must be noted that in every case, these respected theologians are consistent with each other and with general Church dogma, represented by the early Church Fathers, Zanchius, and Catholic theology concerning the absence of gender within the Godhead.

GOD, FACE TO FACE CHAPTER THREE

 

 

CHAPTER THREE: How the modern Catholic Church excludes sexuality from the attributes of God

As was noted above in the context of Father MacQuarrie’s view of the distribution of secondary gender characteristics within the Godhead, the Catholic Church responds to a genderless God in a unique way.  Having removed the female gender from the Holy Spirit, the Catholic Church, to her credit, understands that an unnatural gap was thereby created in its sterilized perception of the Godhead.  She has filled the perceived and all-too-real void of a genderless or (mostly) all-male God with Mary, the mother of Jesus, whom she has elevated to a superhuman status that falls just short of deity.  It is Mary upon whom the Catholic Church places her love and devotion, restoring a semblance of the fervor of worship commanded by both Moses and Jesus in asking of us the entirety of our hearts, souls and mind in our love toward Him.  To most Catholic laypersons, Mary’s position of subordination to diety is so minuscule as to be nonexistent, wherein the veneration of her is indistinguishable from worship.

The Catholic text Mary in the Church Today, a compilation by Father Bill McCarthy of papal pronouncements and other official Catholic teachings regarding Mary, mother of Jesus, is an excellent source book for the understanding of the Catholic position regarding Mary.  The teachings, from which the following entries are gleaned, speak for themselves.

“’For,’ the text [Lumen Gentium, 62] goes on, ‘taken up to heaven, [Mary] did not lay aside this saving role, but by her manifold acts of intercession continues to win for us gifts of eternal salvation.’  With this character of ‘intercession,’ first manifested in Cana in Galilee, Mary’s mediation continues in the history of the Church and the world.  We read that Mary ‘by her maternal charity, cares for the brethren of her Son who still journey on earth surrounded by dangers and difficulties, until they are led to their happy homeland.’  In this way Mary’s motherhood continues unceasingly in the Church as the mediation which intercedes, and the Church expresses her faith in this truth by invoking Mary ‘under the title of Advocate, Auxiliatrix, and Mediatrix.’

“Through her mediation, subordinate to that of the Redeemer, Mary contributes in a special way to the union of the pilgrim Church on earth with the eschatological and heavenly reality of the Communion of Saints, since she has already been ‘assumed into heaven’.  The truth of the assumption defined by Pius XII, is reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council, which thus expresses the Church’s faith: ‘Preserved free from all guilt of original sin, the Immaculate Virgin was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory upon the completion of her earthly sojourn.  She was exalted by the Lord as Queen of the Universe, in order that she might be the more thoroughly conformed to her Son, the Lord of lords (cf. Rv 19:16) and the conqueror of sin and death.’  In this teaching Pius XII was in continuity with Tradition, which has found many different expressions in the history of the Church, both in the East and in the West.”

-exerpted from Redemtoris Mater, Articles 40 and 41

“Subsequently, in 1962, on the feast of the Purification of Mary, Pope John set the opening of the Council for 11 October, explaining that he had chosen this date in memory of the great Council of Ephesus, which precisely on that date had proclaimed Mary ‘Theotokos’, Mother of God . . . “

“2. At the second session of the Council it was that the treatment of the Blessed Virgin Mary be put into the Constitution of the Church.  This initiative, although expressly recommended by the Theological Commission, prompted a variety of opinions.

“Some, who considered this proposal inadequate for emphasizing the very special mission of Jesus’ Mother in the Church, maintained that only a separate document could express Mary’s dignity, pre-eminence, exceptional holiness and unique role in the Redemption accomplished by the Son.  Furthermore, regarding Mary as above the Church in a certain way, they were afraid that the decision to put the Marian teaching in the treatment of the Church would not sufficiently emphasize Mary’s privileges and would reduce her role to the level of other members of the Church. . .”

• excerpted from the ninth of Pope John Paul II’s series of catecheses on the Blessed Virgin

“Mary’s fundamental dignity is that of being ‘Mother of the Son’, which is expressed in Christian doctrine and devotion with the title ‘Mother of God’.

“This is a surprising term, which shows the humility of God’s only-begotten Son in his Incarnation and, in connection with it, the most high privilege granted a creature who was called to give him birth in the flesh.

“Mother of the Son, Mary is the ‘beloved daughter of the Father’ in a unique way.  She has been granted an utterly special likeness between her motherhood and the divine fatherhood.  And again, every Christian is a ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’, according to the Apostle Paul’s expression (1 Cor 6:19).  But this assertion takes on an extraordinary meaning in Mary: in her the relationship with the Holy Spirit is enriched in a spousal dimension,  I recalled this in the Encyclical Redemptoris Mater:  ‘The Holy Spirit had already come down upon her, and she became his faithful spouse at the Annunciation, welcoming the Word of the true God. . .’ (n. 26).”

– excerpted from the eleventh of Pope John Paul II’s series of catecheses on the Blessed Virgin

“The freedom ‘from every stain of original sin’ entails as a positive consequence the total freedom from all sin as well as the proclamation of Mary’s perfect holiness, a doctrine to which the dogmatic definition makes a fundamental contribution.  In fact, the negative formulation of the Marian privilege, which resulted from the earlier controversies about original sin that arose in the West, must always be complemented by the positive expression of Mary’s holiness more explicitly stressed in the Eastern tradition.

“Pius XII’s definition refers only to the freedom from original sin and does not explicitly include the freedom from original concupiscence [generally, the desires of the flesh in the Catholic vernacular].  Nevertheless, Mary’s complete preservation from every stain of sin also has as a consequence her freedom from concupiscence, a disordered tendency which, according to the Council of Trent, comes from sin and inclines to sin (DS 1515).”

-excerpted from the twenty third of Pope John Paul II’s series of catecheses on the Blessed Virgin

“In recounting the birth of Jesus, Luke and Matthew also speak of the role of the Holy Spirit.  The latter is not the father of the Child.  Jesus is the son of the Eternal Father alone (cf. Lk 1:32-35), who through the Spirit is at work in the world and begets the Word in his human nature.  Indeed, at the Annunciation the angel calls the Spirit ‘the power of the Most High’ (Lk 1:35), in harmony with the Old Testament, which presents him as the divine energy at work in human life, making it capable of marvelous deeds.  Manifesting itself to the supreme degree in the mystery of the Incarnation, this power, which in the Trinitarian life of God is Love, has the task of giving humanity the Incarnate Word.”

-excerpted from the twenty eighth of Pope John Paul II’s series of catecheses on the Blessed Virgin

“1. The intention to remain a virgin, apparent in Mary’s words at the moment of the Annunciation, has traditionally been considered the beginning and the inspiration of Christian virginity for the Church.

“St. Augustine does not see in this resolution the fulfillment of a divine precept, but a vow freely taken.  In this way it was possible to present Mary as an example to ‘holy virgins’ throughout the Church’s history.  Mary ‘dedicated her virginity to God when she did not yet know whom she would conceive, so that the imitation of heavenly life in the earthly, mortal body would come about through a vow, not a precept, through a choice of love and not through the need to serve; (De Sancta Virg. IV. PL 40 398).

“The angel does not ask Mary to remain a virgin, it is Mary who freely reveals her intention of virginity.  The choice of love that leads her to consecrate herself totally to the Lord by a life of virginity is found in this commitment.

“In stressing the spontaneity of Mary’s decision, we must not forget that God’s initiative is at the root of every vocation.  By choosing the life of virginity, the young girl of Nazareth was responding to an interior call, that  is, to an inspiration of the Holy Spirit that enlightened her about the meaning and value of the virginal gift of [sic, substitute ‘chasitity’] heresy.  No one can accept this gift without feeling called or without receiving from the Holy Spirit the necessary light and strength.”

-excerpted from the twenty ninth of Pope John Paul II’s series of catecheses on the Blessed Virgin

“2. It may be presumed that at the time of their betrothal there was an understanding between Joseph and Mary about the plan to live as a virgin.  Moreover, the Holy Spirit, who had inspired Mary to choose virginity in view of the mystery of the Incarnation and who wanted the latter to come about in a family setting suited to the Child’s growth, was quite able to instill in Joseph the ideal of virginity as well.”

-excerpted from the thirtieth of Pope John Paul II’s series of catecheses on the Blessed Virgin

This view of Mary, as described by the highest Catholic authority and seconded by the entire Church, presents Mary with the warmth of humanity.  But she, like the Godhead Itself, has been stripped clean of all sexual experience except for the pain of childbirth.  In thinking about that rampant sexual housecleaning, it seems strange indeed that Peter, the iconic and revered founder of the Catholic Church, was himself married, according to Matthew 8:14 and 15, while his successors and the entire body of clergy were and continue to be prohibited from doing so:

“And when Jesus was come into Peter’s house, he saw that his wife’s mother laid, and sick of a fever.  And he touched her hand, and the fever left her; and she arose, and ministered unto them.”

We all know how that worked out in practice: instead of taking wives and thereby participating in a relationship established and condoned by God, the clergy instead took the wives of other men, prostitutes and, ultimately, altar boys.

If anything can be said in favor of the Catholic view of God, it is consistent with the views expressed by the early Church Fathers.  It is consistent as well as with the views of Zanchius, although considerably softened by the treatment of Mary.

GOD, FACE TO FACE CHAPTER TWO

 

CHAPTER TWO: How the removal of sexuality from God propagated into the Middle Ages and beyond

A thousand years after the Church had formalized its dogma, her insistence upon purity had not only remained, but had crystallized into a rigid perfectionism.  This absolutely flawless state was enshrined by the medieval cleric Jerome Zanchius, a strict adherent of the heavenly perfection envisioned by Aristotle and Ptolemy.  To this day, Zanchius is held in high esteem by many mainstream Church leaders.  And why not?  Zanchius’ vision of God is perfectly compatible with the omniness, perfection and asexuality of the mainstream God.

In his rather pretentious sixteenth century work Absolute Predestination Stated and Defined, Zanchius included some Scripturally unjustified statements regarding the nature of God, of which the following excerpts are representative:

“VI.—I shall conclude this introduction with briefly considering, in the sixth and last place, THE MERCY OF GOD.

“POSITION 1.—The Deity is, throughout the Scriptures, represented as infinitely gracious and merciful (Exod. 34.6; Nehem. 9.17; Psalm 103.8; 1 Peter 1.3).

“When we call the Divine mercy infinite, we do not mean that it is, in a way of grace, extended to all men without exception (and supposing it was, even then it would be very improperly denominated infinite on that account, since the objects of it, though all men taken together, would not amount to a multitude strictly and properly infinite), but that His mercy towards His own elect, as it knew no beginning, so is it infinite in duration, and shall know neither period nor intermission.

“POSITION 2.—Mercy is not in the Deity, as it is in us, a passion or affection, everything of that kind being incompatible with the purity, perfection, independency and unchangeableness of His nature; but when this attribute is predicated of Him, it only notes His free and eternal will or purpose of making some of the fallen race happy by delivering them from the guilt and dominion of sin, and communicating Himself to them in a way consistent with His own inviolable justice, truth and holiness. This seems to be the proper definition of mercy as it relates to the spiritual and eternal good of those who are its objects.”

Zanchius continues as follows in his Chapter 1, entitled in grandiose manner “Wherein the Terms Commonly Made Use of in Treating of this Subject are Defined and Explained”:

“HAVING considered the attributes of God as laid down in Scripture, and so far cleared our way to the doctrine of predestination, I shall, before I enter further on the subject, explain the principal terms generally made use of when treating of it, and settle their true meaning. In discoursing on the Divine decrees, mention is frequently made of God’s love and hatred, of election and reprobation, and of the Divine purpose, foreknowledge and predestination, each of which we shall distinctly and briefly consider.

“I.—When love is predicated of God, we do not mean that He is possessed of it as a passion or affection. In us it is such, but if, considered in that sense, it should be ascribed to the Deity, it would be utterly subversive of the simplicity, perfection and independency of His being. Love, therefore, when attributed to Him, signifies—

“(l) His eternal benevolence, i.e., His everlasting will, purpose and determination to deliver, bless and save His people. Of this, no good works wrought by them are in any sense the cause. Neither are even the merits of Christ Himself to be considered as any way moving or exciting this good will of God to His elect, since the gift of Christ, to be their Mediator and Redeemer, is itself an effect of this free and eternal favour borne to them by God the Father (John 3.16). His love towards them arises merely from “the good pleasure of His own will,” without the least regard to anything ad extra or out of Himself.

“(2) The term implies complacency, delight and approbation. With this love God cannot love even His elect as considered in themselves, because in that view they are guilty, polluted sinners, but they were, from all eternity, objects of it, as they stood united to Christ and partakers of His righteousness.

“(3) Love implies actual beneficence, which, properly speaking, is nothing else than the effect or accomplishment of the other two: those are the cause of this. This actual beneficence respects all blessings, whether of a temporal, spiritual or eternal nature. Temporal good things are indeed indiscriminately bestowed in a greater or less degree on all, whether elect or reprobate, but they are given in a covenant way and as blessings to the elect only, to whom also the other benefits respecting grace and glory are peculiar. And this love of beneficence, no less than that of benevolence and complacency, is absolutely free, and irrespective of any worthiness in man.

“II.—When hatred is ascribed to God, it implies (1) a negation of benevolence, or a resolution not to have mercy on such and such men, nor to endue them with any of those graces which stand connected with eternal life. So, “Esau have I hated” (Rom. 9.), i.e., “I did, from all eternity, determine within Myself not to have mercy on him.” The sole cause of which awful negation is not merely the unworthiness of the persons hated, but the sovereignty and freedom of the Divine will. (2) It denotes displeasure and dislike, for sinners who are not interested in Christ cannot but be infinitely displeasing to and loathsome in the sight of eternal purity. (3) It signifies a positive will to punish and destroy the reprobate for their sins, of which will, the infliction of misery upon them hereafter, is but the necessary effect and actual execution.”

We observe in these few excerpts from his book Absolute Predestination Stated and Defined that Zanchius’ God, while exhibiting the stability of a rock, does not indulge in excesses of emotion such as fervor would induce.  Fervor, on the other hand, is precisely what God demands of us in our relationship with Him.  As Jesus declared in Matthew 22:37 and 38:

“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.  This is the first and great commandment.”

Zanchius repeatedly cites like a mantra his justification for his view: God’s purity, perfection, independency and the unchangeableness of His nature.  But where in Scripture can we find such descriptors of God other than His constancy of nature?  Where in Scripture is purity defined in the manner that Zanchius intended to convey or in the manner that mainstream Churches presume to interpret?  More importantly, how can these attributes furnish justification for an assumed lack of passion that directly contradicts Jesus’ call for our fervor of worship?

In His absolute perfection, this God of Zanchius was of a remote grandeur.  This notion, which the Church leaders of that time and since rather naively bought into, gave rise to a God whose primary attribute is his majestic greatness.  By defining God with majesty in mind, love became a secondary attribute, despite John’s emphatic identification of God as the very embodiment of love.  They went (and go) too far.  The perfection embodied in their eulogies renders them sterile.  In defining God in this way, love automatically becomes a secondary attribute, despite John’s emphatic identification of God as the very embodiment of love.  Zanchius’ passionless God, in fact, is alien to the God of Scripture.  This is to be expected, as he assigns attributes to God without any reference whatsoever to Scripture itself.

Zanchius’ God, then, being positionally remote from and by nature very different from the mankind of His creation, is alien to it as well.  This perception of remoteness is evident in modern Churches, where pastors complain, with some justification, that mankind has a proclivity toward defining God according to what he wants God to represent.  In noting the truth of this objection by observing the numerous ways in which the modern Church has created gods that deviate quite strongly from the God of Scripture, we also note that the early Church did its share of creating a God apart from Scripture by the simple expedient of performing a hasty castration while maintaining a complete oblivion to its long-term collateral consequences.

Downplaying Scripture’s instruction to us in Genesis 1:27 that mankind was made in the image of the plural Godhead, Zanchius and his followers emphasize God’s difference from us.  While mankind may share some of the more superficial features of living beings with God such as our rationality and moral sense, the basic concept of gender is seen as over-the-top and a plainly inappropriate attribute of God.  But gender represents far more than mere sexuality.  It also involves the notion of complementary otherness, the idea that a team consisting of complementary others synergistically supports both love and function.  Without the sharing intrinsic to otherness, unlimited power automatically fosters narcissistic self-adoration.  The sharing of power with a complementary Being requires each Partner to contribute something lacking in the Other.  It is the self-humbling lack of completeness that so beautifully endows each Partner with adoration toward the Other rather than to Self.

It has been standard practice, to those who bother to think about the fact that some attributes of God are feminine in nature, to assign elements of both genders to each Member of the Godhead.  Such was the path taken by the prominent Catholic theologian John MacQuarrie.  I wrote of his approach in my book Marching to a Worthy Drummer:

One of the more intelligent discussions of the Godhead that remains within the Church-imposed boundary of asexuality has been supplied by Catholic Father John Macquarrie in his book Mary for all Christians.  In his chapter entitled “God and the Feminine”, he acknowledges the incompleteness of male alone or female alone without its complement.  While touching on the all-important notion of complementary otherness, he goes on to other topics rather quickly, largely overlooking the most important aspect of otherness, which is its necessity in supporting the noble selflessness intrinsic to God as emphasized throughout the Bible.

Father Macquarrie also openly states, reminiscent of medieval theologian Jerome Zanchius, that God transcends sex.  How does he apply that concept that God is above matters of gender to his perception of the incompleteness of a single-gender Godhead?  He does so in distressingly extra-Biblical fashion.  Being well-read in psychology, Macquarrie turns to C. J. Jung and his concept of shared gender.  In that context, Macquarrie asserts, all the Members of the Trinity share both male and female characteristics.

Many Catholic theologians, perceiving despite the Church’s grand elevation of Mary that there were some elements of the feminine within the all-male Godhead, grasped onto the Jungian notion that each of the divine Entities possessed both male and female attributes.  Here again is a view that suggests gender weakness in contradiction to Scripture.  In addition to promoting a divine narcissism in distinct opposition to the general tenor of Scripture, this notion is logically untenable in the face of the pronounced masculinity of both the Father and Jesus Christ and the proscription against male neutrality in Leviticus 21:20 and against male femininity in 1 Corinthians 6:9.  That leaves the Holy Spirit alone as the possible embodiment of the female gender.

As if the direct problems associated with the gender-neutral or all-male viewpoints of the Godhead aren’t bad enough of themselves, they sometimes create collateral difficulties.  Among some Christian communities the ever-present threat that these viewpoints will inhibit ardor in worship has led to further misunderstandings that are intended to correct their deficiencies and restore the fervor suggested by Scripture.  One such compensating offshoot practice is the Catholic veneration of Mary as the primary female persona of our religion.  Despite protestations to the contrary from Catholic authorities from the Pope down to the pastoral level, this veneration, as was noted in Chapter 4, approaches actual worship to such a degree that it represents a de facto integration of Mary into the Godhead.  Indeed, Mary is endowed in the Catholic Church with a number of attributes that rightly belong within the Godhead, specifically the Holy Spirit.

In opposition to Zanchius, Macquarrie and their numerous followers, Scripture paints a far more beautiful picture of God, depicting His majestic glory as His willingness to give up the majesty of greatness and power in favor of a love of great fullness and depth.  The Gospels appear to support this view, depicting Jesus Christ (as God) as a Being full of the attributes of love as we know it, including passion.  Examples that come to mind include His weeping over Jerusalem and Lazarus and His ordeal in the garden of Gethsemane.  It is difficult, for example, to picture the risen Jesus talking to His followers on the road to Emmaus in the context of Zanchius’ notion of God’s remote perfection.

Zanchius’ definition of God as remote from and alien to us not only suppresses His most important attribute of love, but inhibits those to whom Scripture was written from loving Him back.  This is a serious issue because it runs counter to His Great Commandment to love Him with all our hearts, and all our souls and all our minds.

One thing can be said regarding Zanchius’ view of God: it is certainly consistent with the alteration of Scripture performed by some of our respected Church Fathers under the motive of stripping sexuality from all things associated with God.

Our brief review of Zanchius and MacQuarrie can be summarized by the notion that God is an omni-everything, kind of a super-superman, complete with x-ray vision to peer into the hearts, minds and actions of His subjects.  Given Zanchius’ vision of the absolute nature of His mastery over our lives, we need to obey Him, because otherwise we can get into some very deep trouble.  Beyond this control, God differs from us in so many ways that we’d best not try to approach Him from the standpoint of shared weakness.  We must instead resign ourselves to the bleak fact that His majestic betterness can be used against us if we don’t toe the line.  We ourselves should pray with fervor that we will be undeserving recipients of His benevolence rather than deserving objects of His wrath.

Along with our prayers, we’d do well to read what Scripture has to say about God’s relationship with us, which pretty much contradicts just about everything in Zanchius’ and MacQuarrie’s views of God.  We should be particularly careful to understand God’s willingness to become a man, subject to every temptation we possess, for the sake of His great, overwhelmingly fervent and loving passion toward us.

 

 

 

GOD, FACE TO FACE CHAPTER ONE (CONTINUED)

CHAPTER ONE (continued): How some eminent early Church Fathers set the stage for the removal of sexuality from God

As the story of Abraham unfolds from Genesis 12 through 25, the narrative stresses the importance of his natural wife Sarah to God’s promises to him. It is in Sarah that the covenant promises reside through Isaac and then Jacob. The poignant account of Sarah’s death in Hebron is given in Genesis 23, where Abraham came “to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her.” Abraham honored her memory by purchasing a cave in Hebron for her burial. It is the resting place for all the patriarchs, including Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their three primary wives.

Virtually every Christian recognizes that the story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 represents a forecast of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for our salvation. This event in Abraham’s life immediately and quite strongly identifies Isaac as a precursor to Jesus. Isaac is mentioned again in Genesis 24, this time in the context of his betrothal to Rebekah, which turns out to be an elaborate affair. The imagery in this prolonged event speaks quite plainly of another betrothal, that of Jesus to His Church, as described by Paul in Ephesians 5:25-32:

“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it, that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word; that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but noourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church; for we are members of his body. Of his flesh, and of his bones.

 

          “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and his church.”

 

This passage so plainly states the spiritual role of the Church as the Wife of Christ that any negation of gender in the spiritual realm speaks only of the poverty of the skeptic’s understanding of God and Scripture, and of the blindness and deafness of his anti-gender presuppositions.

It has been argued in the past that Matthew 22:29 and Galatians 3:28 preclude the role of procreation in the heavenly realm:

“Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels of God in heaven.”

 

          “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

The key phrase here is “power of God”. In other words, if you subscribe to the notion that the spiritual realm doesn’t involve reproduction, lift your eyes from the mundane, thoroughly shallow little details and look at the big picture. Paul even spells it out for you in 1 Corinthians 12:12-20:

“For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it, therefore, not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? But now hath God set the members, every one of them, in the body, as it hath pleased him. And if they were all one member, were were the body. But now are they many members, yet but one body.”

Paul couldn’t have said it plainer than that: we as individuals are a tiny element of the Church, not the whole. Our being spiritually genderless doesn’t make the Church genderless, just like my genderless toenail doesn’t make me genderless in the flesh. Yet there are many people in the mainstream Church, even some who consider themselves to be among the spiritual elite, who are so blind to Scripture’s account of the Church’s future spiritual role as to be unable to differentiate the individual from the whole.

Beyond the Book of Genesis, there are a multitude of Scriptural corroborations of the essential role of gender in the spiritual realm. Among these is one of my favorites, the Shekinah Glory who inhabited the temples of Moses in the wilderness, as described in Exodus 40:34-38 and I Kings 8:10 and 11:

“Then a cloud covered the tent of the congregation, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter into the tent of the congregation, because the cloud abode therein, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And when the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the children of Israel went onward in all their journeys; but if the cloud were not taken up, then they journeyed not till the day that it was taken up. For the cloud of the Lord was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys.”

 

          “And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the holy place, that the cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord.”

 

It is generally acknowledged by Christian experts in the matter that the Hebrew word Shekinah is equivalent to the phrase glory of the Lord. It is also generally acknowledged that the word Shekinah is feminine. Furthermore, this indwelling function of the Shekinah has a counterpart, the indwelling of Christians upon their acceptance of Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. According to Acts 2, this indwelling is the Holy Spirit, as promised by Jesus in John 14. The parallelism of the Shekinah with the indwelling Holy Spirit is vividly described by Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:16 and Ephesians 2:19-22 wherein Paul asserts that the Church herself, through her constituents, is a temple indwelt by the Holy Spirit:

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?

 

          Now, therefore, ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone, in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are built together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.”

Another favorite indication of feminine gender in the spiritual realm, again of the Holy Spirit, is the passage of spiritual birth in John 3:

“There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; the same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God; for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. Jesus answered, and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto you, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound of it, but canst not tell from where it cometh, and where it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit. Nicodemus answered, and said unto him, How can these things be? Jesus answered, and said unto him, Art thou a teacher of Israel, and knowest not these things? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that which we do know, and testify to that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness.”

But there’s plenty more regarding spiritual gender in the Old Testament. How about the Book of Proverbs, particularly in Proverbs 3 and 8, where the feminine Wisdom is personified as a Helper at the side of the Father in the creation of the world? According to those who take issue with the association of gender with God, the personification of Wisdom typically is explained away as merely a literary device. This attribution is an arbitrary claim without Scriptural support that does nothing more than identify the claimant as biased against gender in the spiritual realm. In contrast to this lack of Scriptural support against the personification of Wisdom, the notion that Wisdom is indeed personified by the Holy Spirit enjoys support from the Book of Wisdom, which is included in the Catholic canon but was deleted from the Protestant canon in 1827 by the British and Foreign Bible Society.

I noted in Marching to a Worthy Drummer in support of the Personhood of Wisdom the following statements by Jesus in Luke 7:35 and 11:49, 50 that associate Wisdom with motherhood, which is an eminently personal attribute:

“But wisdom is justified of all her children.”

“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute, that the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation.”

In addition, Proverbs 8:22-36 and 9:1-6 directly link the act of creation to Wisdom, whereas the act of creation is also linked to the Holy Spirit in Genesis 1:1-5, Job 26:13 and Psalm 104:30. This functional parallelism strongly suggests the equivalence of Wisdom to the Holy Spirit.

Then there’s the explicitly romantic Song of Solomon, which would be extraneous to the Bible if gender is missing from the spiritual realm.

This sampling of Scriptural support for a gendered heaven illuminates a face of God that is altogether more lovely, compassionate, firm in the intra-Godhead bond of family than the sterner, informationally-poor and remote face as understood by the mainstream Church.

But there is yet more: evidence that the Church was cleansed of sexuality through the tampering of Scripture

According to an Internet search of “feminine Holy Spirit in the Hebrew Scriptures”, multiple modern, deeply serious theologians and ancient language scholars share the view that the earliest Hebrew Christians had access to Scripture that presented the Holy Spirit as a feminine Persona; this feminine persisted within the Syriac and other Eastern branches of Christianity and within the Gnostic sect as well. A prime example of this is the Scriptural passage known as the Siniatic Palimpsest (a palimpsest is a recycled writing medium, wherein a second layer of writing was applied over the original, the original usually consisting of more important information) uncovered toward the end of the nineteenth century by Agnes Lewis. The original writing included portions of the Gospel of John of which a quote from Jesus Himself in John 14:26 asserts the following (translation attributed to Danny Mahar):

“But She – the Spirit – the Paraclete whom He will send to you – my Father – in my name – She will teach you everything; She will remind you of what I have told you.”

There is a suggestion, from a comparative review of this text with Paul’s letters that Paul, among the numerous early Hebrew Christians, used the version of John’s Gospel from which this passage came. References to the Siniatic Palimpsest may be found on the Internet. Unfortunately, many of the translations into English found under the search phrase “Siniatic Palimpsest” apply without justification the more conventional “he” rather than the “she” of the original language. Some Internet references, however, do acknowledge the proper “she”.

The identification of the Holy Spirit as feminine in the Siniatic Palimpsest is no small matter, for this document is the oldest of all copies of the Gospels, being dated to the second century A.D. It is a recognized principle of textual interpretation, even by the most conservative of Biblical scholars, that the older the text, the closer it is thought to be to the original Scripture. This is particularly important in light of the fact that there are no other Scriptural texts between it and the oldest Greek text dated to the fourth century A.D.

On the other hand, it is not really necessary to assert that Scripture was altered to change the references to the Holy Spirit from “she” to “he” to justify a feminine function of the Holy Spirit. As I had noted in both Family of God and Marching to a Worthy Drummer, it is more a matter of recognizing the Holy Spirit as functionally feminine in the face of the possibility that She may share in the masculine substance of the Father. This is certainly the case with the Church, in that Scripture describes her as functionally feminine, being the Bride of Christ, while the aggregate of individuals that describe her are collectively described as masculine, as in the term “mankind”. This view of collective masculinity and functional femininity is supported in Genesis 5:2:

“Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.”

This differentiation between substance and function, in fact, is suggested by the Nicene Creed, in which in the original version the Holy Spirit is referred to as follows:

 

“And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.”

Around the sixth century A.D. the filioque (the words “and the son”) were inserted into the Nicene Creed after the phrase “who proceeds from the Father”. This insertion was finally approved by the pope in 1014, an act that contributed to an uproar among the faithful that led in 1054 to the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western branches of the Church. The insertion of the filioque into the creed suggests the loss of the Church’s initial understanding of the Holy Spirit’s role within the Godhead.

 

 

 

 

GOD, FACE TO FACE CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE: How some eminent early Church Fathers set the stage for the removal of sexuality from God

In the book Early Christian Fathers, edited by Cyril C. Richardson may be seen Justin Martyr’s attitude toward the place of sexuality within the Christian faith This commentary was written around the middle of the second century A.D., about a half century after the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation. In it, Justin clearly expressed his view of the importance of sexual circumspection:

“About continence [Jesus] said this: ‘Whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery in his heart before God.’ And: ‘If your right eye offends you, cut it out; it is better for you to enter into the kingdom of Heaven with one eye than with two to be sent into eternal fire.’ And: ‘Whoever marries a woman who has been put away from another man commits adultery.’ And: ‘There are some who were made eunuchs by men, and some who were born eunuchs, and some who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake; only not all [are able to] receive this.

“And so those who make second marriages according to human law are sinners in the sight of our Teacher, and those who look on a woman to lust after her. For he condemns not only the man who commits the act of adultery, but the man who desires to commit adultery, since not only our actions but our thoughts are manifest to God. Many men and women now in their sixties and seventies who have been disciples of Christ from childhood have preserved their purity; and I am proud that I could point to such people in every nation. . . But to begin with, we do not marry except in order to bring up children, or else, renouncing marriage, we live in perfect continence. To show you that promiscuous intercourse is not among our mysteries – just recently one of us submitted a petition to the Prefect Felix in Alexandria, asking that a physician be allowed to make him a eunuch, for the physicians there said they were not allowed to do this without the permission of the Prefect. When Felix would by no means agree to endorse [the petition], the young man remained single, satisfied with [the approval of] his own conscience and that of his fellow believers.”

In writing about the sexual purity of Christians, Justin intended to contrast this behavior with that associated with the false gods and the rampant and often cruel immorality that not only was involved in the worship of them, but which had infected secular life as well:

“Far be it from every sound mind to entertain such a concept of deities as that Zeus, whom they call the ruler and begetter of all, should have been a parricide (killer of a relative) and the son of a parricide, and that moved by desire of evil and shameful pleasures he descended on Ganymede and the many women whom he seduced, and that his sons after him were guilty of similar actions. But, as we said before, it was the wicked demons who did these things. We have been taught that only those who live close to God in holiness and virtue attain to immortality, and we believe that those who live unjustly and do not reform will be punished in eternal fire.”

“Secondly, out of every race of men we who once worshiped Dionysus the son of Semele and Apollo the son of Leto, who in their passion for men did things which it is disgraceful even to speak of, or who worshiped Persephone and Aphrodite, who were driven made by [love of] Adonis and whose mysteries you celebrate, or Asclepius or some other of those who are called gods, now through Jesus Christ despise them, even at the cost of death, and have dedicated ourselves to the unbegotten and impassible God. We do not believe that he ever descended in mad passion on Antiope or others, nor on Ganymede, nor was he, receiving help through Thetis, delivered by that hundred-handed monster, nor was he, because of this anxious that Thetis’ son Achilles should destroy so many Greeks for the sake of his concubine Briseis. We pity those who believe [such stories], for which we know that the demons are responsible.”

“That we may avoid all injustice and impiety, we have been taught that to expose the newly born is the work of wicked men – first of all because we observe that almost all [foundlings], boys as well as girls, are brought up for prostitution. As the ancients are said to have raised herds of oxen or goats or sheep or horses in their pastures, so now [you raise children] just for shameful purposes, and so in every nation a crowd of females and hermaphrodites and doers of unspeakable deeds are exposed as public prostitutes. You even collect pay and levies and taxes from these, whom you ought to exterminate from your civilized world. And anyone who makes use of them may in addition to [the guilt of] godless, impious, and intemperate intercourse, by chance be consorting with his own child or relative or brother. Some even prostitute their own children or wives, and others are admittedly mutilated for purposes of sodomy, and treat this as part of the mysteries of the mother of the gods – while beside each of those whom think of as gods a serpent is depicted as a great symbol and mystery. You charge against us the actions that you commit openly and treat with honor, as if the divine light were overthrown and withdrawn – which of course does no harm to us, who refuse to do any of these things, but rather injures those who do them and then bring false witness [against us].”

Two and a half centuries later Augustine experienced much the same revulsion as Justin did over the moral tawdriness of the Roman society in which he lived. Having become a Christian thirty two years after his birth in 354 A.D., Augustine had spent much of his dissolute pre-Christian years in the enjoyment of the depravity of the society in which he lived. The shame and regret of these early years served to drive Augustine into a passionate rejection of loose morality and unbridled lust. The strength of his feelings in that regard are demonstrated throughout his book City of God, an example of which is given in Chapters 4 and 5 of Book II:

“When I was a young man I used to go to sacrilegious shows and entertainments.  I watched the antics of madmen; I listened to singing boys; I thoroughly enjoyed the most degrading spectacles put on in honour of gods and goddesses – in honour of the Heavenly Virgin, of of Berecynthia, mother of all. On the yearly festival of Berecynthia’s purification the lowest kind of actors sang, in front of her litter, songs unfit for the ears of even the mother of one of those mountebanks, to say nothing of the mother of any decent citizen, or of a senator; while as for the Mother of the Gods – ! For there is something in the natural respect we have towards our parents that the extreme of infamy cannot wholly destroy; and certainly those very mountebanks would be ashamed to give a rehearsal performance in their homes, before their mothers, of those disgusting verbal and acted obscenities. Yet they performed them in the presence of the Mother of the Gods before an immense audience of spectators of both sexes. If those spectators were enticed by curiosity to gather in profusion, they ought at least to have dispersed in confusion at the insults to their modesty.

“If these were sacred rites, what is meant by sacrilege? If this is purification, what is meant by pollution?  And the name of the ceremony is ‘the fercula’, which might suggest the giving of a dinner-party where the unclean demons could enjoy a feast to their liking.  Who could fail to realize what kind of spirits they are which could enjoy such obscenities?  Only a man who refused to recognize even the existence of any unclean spirits who deceive men under the title of gods, or one whose life was such that he hoped for the favour and feared the anger of such gods, rather than that of the true God.

Augustine went on to lament, as he called them, the obscenities performed in the worship of the “Mother of the Gods”:

 

            “The last people I should choose to decide on this matter are those who are more eager to revel in the obscene practices of this depraved cult than to resist them. I should prefer the decision of Scipio Nasica, the very man whom the Senate chose as their best man, whose hands received this devil’s image and brought it to Rome. Let him tell us whether he would wish his mother to have deserved so well of her country that she should be accorded divine honours. For it is well known that the Greeks and the Romans, and other peoples, have decreed such honours to those whose public services they valued highly, and that such people were believed to have been made immortal and to have been received among the number of the gods. No doubt he would desire such felicity for his mother, if it were possible. But let me go on to ask him whether he would like such disgusting rites as those to be included among the divine honours paid to her? Would he not cry out that he would prefer his mother to be dead, and beyond all experience, than that she should live as a goddess, to take pleasure in hearing such celebrations?   It is unthinkable that a senator of Rome, of such high principles that he forbade the erection of a theatre in a city of heroes, should want his mother to be honoured as a goddess by such propitiatory rites as would have scandalized her as a Roman matron. He would surely have thought it quite impossible for a respectable woman to have her modesty so corrupted by the assumption of divinity that her worshipers should call upon her with ritual invocations of this sort. These invocations contained expressions of such a kind that had they been hurled at any antagonist in a quarrel, during her life on earth, then if she had not stopped her ears and withdrawn from the company, her friends, her husband and her children would have blushed for her. In fact the ‘Mother of the Gods’ was such a character as even the worst of men would be ashamed to have for his mother. And when she came to take possession of the minds of the Romans she looked for the best man of the country, not so as to support him by counsel and help, but to cheat and deceive him, like the woman of whom the Bible says, ‘she ensnares the precious souls of men’. Her purpose was that a mind of great endowments should be puffed up by this supposedly divine testimony and should think itself truly exceptional, and therefore should cease to follow the true religion and piety – without which every national ability, however remarkable, disappears in the ruin which follows on pride. And thus that goddess should seek the support of the best men only by trickery, seeing that she requires in her worship the kind of behaviour which decent men shrink from even in their convivial moments.”

Augustine was enormously influential to the Christian Church at a time when Church doctrine was still being formulated and heresies were still emerging, to be debated upon and rejected. In his wake, the Church charted a course that polarized itself away from any hint of the depravities associated with the corrupt gods and goddesses of the world about her. This extremity of purification, for which purity was equated with chastity, cleansed the Judeo-Christian God of any taint of sexuality.

This view of sexuality as representing a taint frowned upon by God raises an issue that was brought up at the end of the Introduction: is the view Scriptural?

According to Genesis, it is not. Right at the beginning of Genesis, the creation epic describes the reproductive process extending even into the domain of plant life, wherein the fruit of the tree yields trees of its kind. Moreover, God saw this as good. Reproduction becomes more overtly sexual in the created animal life, wherein this life bore young after its kind. God also saw this as good. In the creation of man as described in Genesis 1:26 and 27, their gender differentiation now extends beyond mankind himself to hint of a like feature within the Godhead, here specifically described as plural:

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

 

In blessing Adam and Eve, He specifically told them to multiply.

This time God saw His creative act as not only good, but very good.

Many theologians down through the centuries have attempted to separate the gender differentiation of Genesis 1:26 and 27 from the creation in God’s image. All such discourses, at least the ones of which I am aware, are logically weak and based on the unbiblical presupposition that God is “above that kind of thing”. The passage says what it says, and does so without ambiguity. Moreover, if this gender differentiation is not to represent the image of God, then the feminine half of the human race would have no representation in God. Some religions take that notion to its logical extreme, its male members treating women as animals.

[to be continued]

SOME APPALLING CHRISTIAN STATISTICS

In a recent televised broadcast of his weekly show Christ in Prophecy, Dr. David Reagan of LambLion Ministries presented some shocking statistics that he had acquired from Jim Garlowe, pastor of Skyline Nazarene Church.

Dr. Garlowe, who is an acknowledged expert in the field of Church history, sources the following appalling information regarding the practices and beliefs of evangelical Church constituents:

19% are living with partners outside of marriage

37% do not believe the Bible to be totally accurate

45% do not believe that Jesus was sinless

52% do not believe that satan is real

57% do not believe that Jesus is the only way to eternal life

57% believe that good works play a part in gaining eternal life

Note that these figures pertain to evangelical Christians, those most noted for their obedience toward the Great Commission defined by Jesus Christ in Matthew 28:18-20:

“And Jesus came and spoke unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.”

These horrifying statistics come on the heels of an Internet edition of Prophecy News Watch that addressed the severity of another problem associated with the modern Church.

It was estimated in that article that almost eighty percent of Christian men regularly indulge in the viewing of pornography. It’s not difficult to imagine where that behavior leads. The number of actual pornography addicts is about half of those. That’s a very distressingly large portion of the Church. In effect, the cleansing of God of sexuality has not led to the cleansing of Christians from sexual deviation. To the contrary, it has had precisely the opposite effect. Not only have women been degraded in this monstrous misrepresentation of the Godhead, but Christian men have allowed themselves to be degraded as well. It doesn’t end there – degradation, whether or not it is perceived as relevant to God, leads directly to alienation from God.

Alternatively, this drift away from God may have less to do with a misunderstanding of the nature of God than a more basic indifference to God resulting from a complete devotion to the secular world.

The lack of interest in things godly represented by these statistics corresponds distressingly close to the description of the last of the seven Churches addressed by Jesus in Revelation. His message to the Laodicean Church in Revelation 3:14-19 reads as follows:

“And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write: These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God. I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot; I would thou wert cold or hot. So, then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing, and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked, I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anount thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten; be zealous, therefore, and repent.”

It appears that Jesus already has lit the fire by which the Church shall be refined as gold, for, in his A Prophetic Manifesto, Dr. Reagan outlined three steps toward a nation’s destruction as it turns its back on God. These steps (paraphrasing Dr. Reagan’s treatment) follow Paul’s presentation in Romans 1:24-32:

First, as a nation turns from God, God Himself politely steps back, allowing evil to flourish in the form of sexual deviation from the Biblical standard of monogamous male-female marriage (Romans 1:24, 25). This roughly corresponds to the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Second, God unleashes a plague of explosively rampant and ubiquitous sexual deviation (Romans 1:26, 27). This began in the 1980s.

Third, society at large is delivered unto a depraved mind. At that point, as described in 2 Chronicles 36:15, 16, there is no remedy – no return and no healing (Romans 1:28-32). We seem to be there.

Returning to Dr. Reagan’s presentation of Dr. Garlowe’s historical information, Christianity in America appears to be adhering to the following event timeline:

1607-1833 (236 years): Christianity represented the establishment

1833-1918 (85 years): Christianity was the dominant force

1918-1968 (50 years): Christianity represented a sub-dominant force

1968-1988 (20 years): Christianity became a sub-culture

1988-1998 (10 years): Christianity became a counter-culture

1998-2008 (10 years): Christianity devolved into an antithetical culture

2008-present: Christianity has become a persecuted culture

Keep in mind that persecution of the Church actually performs a healing function: the superficial are removed, leaving behind the fully-committed, within whom the light of Christ shines ever brighter against a darkening world.

[Note to the Reader: Carolyn and I will be heading out on vacation for 2+ weeks. Be back with you when we return!]

A SUMMARY OF THE FEMININITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

 

 

 

Direct Scriptural support

 

 

The Siniatic Palimpsest

 

According to an Internet search of “feminine Holy Spirit in the Hebrew Scriptures”, multiple modern, deeply serious theologians and ancient language scholars share the view that the earliest Hebrew Christians had access to Scripture that presented the Holy Spirit as a feminine Persona; this feminine persisted within the Syriac and other Eastern branches of Christianity and within the Gnostic sect as well. A prime example of this is the Scriptural passage known as the Siniatic Palimpsest (a palimpsest is a recycled writing medium, wherein a second layer of writing was applied over the original, the original usually consisting of more important information) uncovered toward the end of the nineteenth century by Agnes Lewis. The original writing included portions of the Gospel of John of which a quote from Jesus Himself in John 14:26 asserts the following (translation attributed to Danny Mahar):

“But She – the Spirit – the Paraclete whom He will send to you – my Father – in my name – She will teach you everything; She will remind you of what I have told you.”

There is a suggestion, from a comparative review of this text with Paul’s letters that Paul, among the numerous early Hebrew Christians, used the version of John’s Gospel from which this passage came. References to the Siniatic Palimpsest may be found on the Internet. Unfortunately, many of the translations into English found under the search phrase “Siniatic Palimpsest” apply without justification the more conventional “he” rather than the “she” of the original language. Some Internet references, however, do acknowledge the proper “she”.

The identification of the Holy Spirit as feminine in the Siniatic Palimpsest is no small matter, for this document is the oldest of all copies of the Gospels, being dated to the second century A.D. It is a recognized principle of textual interpretation, even by the most conservative of Biblical scholars, that the older the text, the closer it is thought to be to the original Scripture. This is particularly important in light of the fact that there are no other Scriptural texts between it and the oldest Greek text dated to the fourth century A.D.

 

 

The nature of the spiritual birth by the Holy Spirit points directly to a feminine Holy Spirit

 

Quoting from John 3:

There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; the same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God; for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. Jesus answered, and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto you, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound of it, but canst not tell from where it cometh, and where it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit. Nicodemus answered, and said unto him, How can these things be? Jesus answered, and said unto him, Art thou a teacher of Israel, and knowest not these things? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that which we do know, and testify to that which we have seen; and ye receive not our witness.

Dr. McGrath on the Protestant side and John MacQuarrie on the Catholic side, among many other theologians on both sides, argue that each Member of the Godhead has both a masculine and a feminine side enabling each and every Member of the Godhead to perform that birth function. This argument is negated not only by the strong maleness of the Father and Son as presented in the Bible, the proscription against effeminate males in Deuteronomy 23:1 and 1 Corinthians 6:9.

Acts Chapter 2 makes a singular association between this rebirth described in John 3 and the Holy Spirit, identifying the Holy Spirit as the Birther. Because gender weakness is frowned upon in the passages cited above as well as the proscription against homosexuality in both Testaments, the Holy Spirit must be identified as functionally feminine.

 

 

A Feminine Church suggests a feminine Holy Spirit

 

The femininity of the spiritual Church was established in the article entitled The Church, the Bride, the Body and the New Jerusalem. The spiritual Church, being a feminine entity and the Bride of Christ, requires Jesus Christ to be gendered. This was the great mystery of which Paul spoke in Ephesians 5:31 and 32:

For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and His Church.

 

This relationship between Christ and His Church elicits a profound question, one that can be answered rationally only one way: why, if Jesus partakes of both gender and marriage, would the Father and the Holy Spirit not?

Given the male gender of the Father, the obvious answer is that the Holy Spirit is the feminine Spouse of the Father.

The feminine Shekinah Glory points to a feminine Holy Spirit

 

Perhaps the most significant suggestion of femininity in the Bible may be found in the property of indwelling, a characteristic of the Holy Spirit that strongly connects the New Testament with the Old.

That the Old Testament Shekinah is the New Testament’s Holy Spirit is manifestly evident in the precursor role to the indwelling Holy Spirit of the Shekinah Glory who indwelt both the Tabernacle in the wilderness and Solomon’s Temple at their dedications. Since it has been claimed that the word Shekinah does not exist in the Hebrew Scriptures in its noun form (the situation there being similar to the absence in the Bible of a noun form of the word baptize), the following commentary will be made regarding its origin before proceeding with examples of the Shekinah presence.

In the Hebrew Targum, the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, the word Shekinah is used as a noun. It means “intimate dwelling” or “the presence of the Glory of the Lord”.   Justification for the use of this word is the use in the Hebrew Scriptures of its root word “shachan”, referring particularly to the pillars of cloud and fire that accompanied the Israelites in their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land through the wilderness. The prophet Isaiah referred to it quite graphically in Isaiah 4:5 and 6, linking this pillar of cloud and fire to a covering presence. It is generally understood that this same pillar is referenced in Isaiah 51:9 and 10, where the prophet goes out of his way to describe by feminine pronouns the same pillar of cloud and fire that accompanied the Israelites on their journey from Egypt. The Targum interpretation leaves no doubt that the Shekinah Glory is a feminine presence, and represents an equivalence with a feminine Holy Spirit. Isaiah 4:5 and 6, and 51:9 and 10 read as follows:

“And the Lord will create upon every dwelling place of Mount Zion , and upon her assemblies, a cloud and smoke by day, and the shining of a flaming fire by night; for upon all the glory shall be a defense. And there shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the daytime from the heat, and for a place of refuge, and for a covert from storm and from rain.”

 

          “Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not she who hast cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not she who has dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; who hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?”

Exodus 40 and 1 Kings 8 provide prominent examples of the Shekinah as a precursor to the indwelling Holy Spirit of the New Testament. Exodus 40:33-38 describes the indwelling of the Tabernacle in the wilderness:

“And [Moses] reared up the court round about the tabernacle and the altar, and set up the hanging of the court gate. So Moses finished the work.

 

          “Then a cloud covered the tent of the congregation, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And when the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the children of Israel went onward in all their journeys; but if the cloud were not taken up, then they journeyed not till the day that it was taken up. For the cloud of the Lord was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys.”

 

The description “cloud of the Lord” , “fire by night” and “taken up” leaves no doubt that this “cloud” is equivalent to the Shekinah of the Red Sea adventure and of Isaiah 4:5. The corresponding incident with respect to Solomon’s Temple, taken from 1 Kings 8:6-13, is given below:

And the priests brought in the ark of the covenant of the Lord unto its place, into the inner sanctuary of the house, into the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubim. For the cherubim spread forth their two wings of the place of the ark, and the cherubim covered the ark and its staves above. And they drew out the staves, that the ends of the staves were seen out in the holy place before the inner sanctuary, but they were not seen outside; and there they are unto this day. There was nothing in the ark except the two tables of stone, which Moses put there at Horeb, when the lord made a covenant with the children of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt. And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the holy place, that the cloud filled the house of the lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord. Then spoke Solomon, The Lord said he would dwell in the thick darkness. I have surely built thee an house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide in forever.”

In this passage the meaning of “cloud” is closely linked with “dwelling place” and “glory of the Lord”, which again point to the phrase Shekinah Glory.

The connection between these precursor events and the Holy Spirit who indwells Christian believers is given in 1 Corinthians 3:16 and Ephesians 2:19-22, wherein Paul asserts that the Church herself, through her constituents, is a temple indwelt by the Holy Spirit:

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?

 

          Now, therefore, ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone, in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are built together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

The facts embedded in these passages are no surprise to Christians, who generally accept without question that believers are indwelt with the Holy Spirit and comprise, as the Church, a holy temple. What some of us may not be aware of is that this temple and its indwelling by the Holy Spirit was represented numerous times as the Glory of God in the Old Testament. Turning to the Internet, the Wikipedia entry for “Shekinah” begins as follows:

“Hebrew [Shekinah] is the English spelling of a grammatically feminine Hebrew ancient blessing. The original word means the dwelling or settling, and denotes the dwelling or settling of the divine presence of God, especially in the temple in Jerusalem.” An accompanying figure shows the Shekinah, or the Glory of God, indwelling the temple as described in 1 Kings 8.”

Noting the female gender of this indwelling Shekinah, we find here by comparing the indwelling presence of the Glory in Solomon’s temple with the description in Ephesians 2 of the Holy Spirit indwelling the human temple that Scripture itself, by furnishing this direct comparison, supports an interpretation of the Holy Spirit as a female Entity in the face of conventional Christian thought, as driven by the use in Scripture of the male pronoun in reference to the Holy Spirit.

This feminine gender attribute in Exodus 40 and 1 Kings 8 may have been simply lost in the translation from Hebrew (Aramaic) to English, which could have been a result of the lack of gender precision in the English language. (Actually, the first transference from feminine to masculine occurred in the Latin, for which the Holy Spirit was definitely presented as male.) But there is an associated gender misrepresentation in Isaiah 51:9, 10 that appears to be more deliberate. What the translators did in that passage was to substitute the grammatically incorrect ‘it’ for the gender-correct ‘she’ in reference to Shekinah. In their desire to maintain a fully masculine Godhead, they neutered the female. In the process, they inadvertently managed also to castrate their masculine God. As just one example of this removal of gender, Isaiah 51:9 and 10 refers to a neuter Arm of the Lord rather than the original feminine gender.

Proverbs points to the femininity of the Holy Spirit

 

The Book of Proverbs beautifully and harmoniously supports a female functional designation for the Holy Spirit., as the subject of this book is uniformly feminine, and whose functionality closely parallels that of the Holy Spirit. Of particular interest in this regard are Proverbs 3 and 8, from which the following excerpts are taken:

“Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. . .She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her. . .The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens. . .Doth not wisdom cry? And understanding put forth her voice? . . .The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: When he gave the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men. Now therefore hearken unto me, O ye children: for blessed are they that keep my ways. Hear instruction, and be wise, and refuse it not. Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates, waiting at the posts of my doors. For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favor of the Lord. But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death.”

Several items come to mind from the above review of these passages in Proverbs. The first is that the Persona is female throughout; an attempt to assign some of these passages to Jesus Christ, as many do, would constitute an unnatural force-fit, most obviously in the issue of gender, but also with respect to function and role. The second is directly related to function, wherein the passages suggest a connection between Wisdom and the Holy Spirit as furnishing the most likely Person to which a female function may be assigned; the third is that the Holy Spirit was active in creation itself, as summarized in Genesis 1:1-3:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

 

The frequent Catholic attribution of Wisdom to Mary faces the equally grave difficulty of linking Mary with capabilities such as creation that are reserved for God alone.

 

In the context of Scripture’s general treatment of the Holy Spirit, the passage in Genesis quoted above more than suggests that the Father was assisted by or in union with the Holy Spirit in the act of creation, the result being, as Jesus Himself suggested in Revelation 3:14, a manifestation of the Son. I am not alone in this assertion regarding the active participation of the Holy Spirit in the creation event. As a matter of fact, I simply repeat the position of Benjamin B. Warfield, a noted Bible scholar who is well-respected among conservative theologians.

 

Any attempt at a rebuttal of this association must address Proverbs 3:19 in the context of Genesis 1:1-5, Proverbs 8:22-36, Job 26:13 and Psalm 104:30. The attempt to attribute Proverbs 8 to Jesus rather than the Holy Spirit must explain the out-of-context insertion into material descriptive of Wisdom, as well as the feminine description of Wisdom throughout the Book of Proverbs as opposed to the depiction of Jesus throughout Scripture as strongly masculine and the image of the Father. Furthermore, the attempt to link Wisdom with the Virgin Mary is unsustainable in the light of Mary’s full humanity and consequent absence in the creation epic, wherein according to Chapter 8 Wisdom was at the side of the Father during the process of creation.

Wisdom, as depicted in Proverbs, is strongly female and only female. The attempt at rebuttal must also avoid taking the Jungian notion of the human psyche, both male and female, as containing both masculine and feminine elements, and extrapolating it to his notion of the Trinity. There are logical difficulties in doing so, as described below.

Scripture rather exclusively associates the Father with the Divine Will, which, as an initiating role, also is exclusively masculine. Similarly, Jesus the Son is presented in Scripture as the Divine Representation which, as the perfect image in reality of the Father would also be predominantly masculine. The masculine predominance of Jesus is given further weight by Paul’s characterization in Ephesians 5 of Jesus as the Bridegroom of the (functionally feminine) Church. In Family of God I simply noted what to me was an obvious connecting function of the Holy Spirit between Father and Son: the Divine Means which, in union with the Divine Will, gave birth to the Divine Implementation in reality (Divine Representation). Obviously, this Divine Means, being so closely linked with the other two Members, is also Deity. Because the Divine Means performed a function that was responsive to the Will, an obviously female role, I attached a female gender to this Person. Scripture and Christian tradition both understand this third Member of the Trinity to be the Holy Spirit.

Another difficulty, and it is a big one, that I see in the notion of each Member of Godhead possessing elements of both genders is that such a state of affairs would promote self-adoration, a characteristic that I sincerely hope is lacking within the Godhead. Love and adoration require otherness. The alternative is narcissism.   I truly believe (and hope) that both Father and Holy Spirit are as selflessly noble as the Son demonstrated on the cross.

Indirect Scriptural support

 

 

The personhood of Wisdom in Proverbs

As for the interpretation of the association of femininity with the subject of Proverbs as being nothing more than a literary device, the same is no more consistent with the general tone of Scripture than Zanchius’ removal of passion from God.

Jesus Himself, in Luke 7:35, associates Wisdom with motherhood, an eminently personal attribute.

“But wisdom is justified of all her children.”

 

While that verse possibly could be interpreted as being merely a figure of speech, Jesus in Luke 11:49 and 50 more emphatically personifies Wisdom:

“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute, that the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation.”

In further support of my equation of Wisdom with the Holy Spirit, I cite Isaiah 11:1 and 2:

“And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots; And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord,. . .”

Another item that presents itself in a reading of Proverbs with an eye to the Personhood of Wisdom is the implied intimacy between mankind and Wisdom in the warning given in Proverbs 8:36: he that sins against Wisdom wrongs his own soul. Could this imply that our own purpose and function in the spiritual realm might actually parallel that of the Holy Spirit? There may well be a correlation between this caution and the one expressed by Jesus in Matthew 12:31 and 32:

“Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”

These are strong words, and they make a strong connection between Wisdom and the Holy Spirit. Perhaps theologians instinctively sense this correlation. Perhaps also not wishing to shoot themselves in the foot and instead of attempting to truly understand what is being said here, they duck away from presenting anything controversial regarding the Holy Spirit. Historically, that has certainly been the situation with numerous theological expositions regarding the Holy Spirit, all of which end up complicating an extremely simple understanding of the nature of the Trinity by claiming that ultimately man is unable to grasp it.

I must express my disappointment with all such expositors for allowing this unjustified fear to prevent them from furnishing a richer, more love-inducing understanding of their God to the Christian community. How can we possibly fulfill God’s greatest commandment to us to love Him with all our hearts if we cannot understand Him? How can we truly worship God if we turn our hearts away from His own Word? I assert with the Revised Westminster Confession that the three Persons of the Trinity have but one substance – that of the Father, shared among them, and three distinct Personalities, or roles. I identify those roles as Father, Mother, and Son, wherein the Three constitute one God in the context of Family, by virtue of the love intrinsic to that structure which, of course, is idealized in its application to God. This identification I make does not represent any cleverness on my part; rather, its very simplicity gives me cause to suspect that many followers of God would do well to actually follow God in love tempered by fear instead of fear tempered by love, and to follow God Himself instead of adhering so stubbornly to the traditions of man.

Moreover, I would suggest that in a functional sense an all-male Godhead represents a model that can be construed with little difficulty to support homosexuality, in opposition to God’s detestation of that practice, as may be found in Genesis 19, Leviticus 18 and Romans 1.

Something the Catholic Church did for the feminine which the Protestant Church did not was to include the Book of Wisdom within the body of canonical, and therefore considered to be inspired, Old Testament books. This beautifully-written book furnishes several interesting passages suggestive of the identity of Wisdom as the feminine Holy Spirit. Selected passages are presented below:

“And in your wisdom have established humankind . . .Give me Wisdom, the consort at your throne . . . Now with you is Wisdom, who knows your works and was present when you made the world; Who understands what is pleasing in your eyes and what is conformable with your commands. Send her forth from your holy heavens and from your glorious throne dispatch her that she may be with me and work with me, that I may know what is pleasing to you. For she knows and understands all things, and will guide me prudently in my affairs and safeguard me to her glory . . . Or who can know your counsel, unless you give Wisdom and send your holy spirit from on high?

– Wisdom 9:2, 4, 9-11, 17

 

A family-based Godhead in which the Holy Spirit is functionally female, united in love, naturally and intuitively resolves the apparent discrepancy between monotheism and a Trinitarian Godhead.

In Matthew 22:37, Jesus identifies the greatest commandment as the one Moses gave in Deuteronomy Chapter 6: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. Being the greatest of commandments, it is not one to be trifled with to anyone who wishes to be obedient to God. But its fulfillment requires one to seek intimate knowledge of the entire Godhead, including the nature of the Holy Spirit and of the intra-Godhead union. It certainly demands that one satisfactorily resolve the enigma of oneness in a Trinitarian setting.

Assuredly, a union within the Godhead involving love of a non-romantic nature can be proposed. However, a rebuttal alternative should carry as much intuitive and love-inspiring force as a relationship in which a family setting is central. A rebuttal should also explain in functional terms why there is a proscription against the gay lifestyle as presented in Leviticus 18 and Romans 1. Furthermore, a rebuttal should also address the centrality of family in Scripture as well as in life in general.

Linkage of the Holy Spirit with an executive function

 

This executive nature of the Holy Spirit was proposed by respected theologian Benjamin Warfield as well as others. It is certainly suggested in Scripture. An executive office is responsive to higher orders, this being within the Godhead the initiative of the Father, or Divine Will. A responsive office, in turn, is a distinctly feminine one. This creative response is distinctly different than Jesus’ role as the Divine Representation, or Divine Implementation, which is, as a perfect Image of the Will, the result of creative response to the Will.

The possessive nature of Jeremiah 10:10-13

 

In Jeremiah 10:10-13, God describes His creative accomplishments in a possessive way:

“But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God, and an everlasting king; at his wrath the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide his indignation. Thus shall ye say unto them, The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens. He hath made the earth by his power; he hath established the world by his wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by his discretion. When he uttereth his voice, there is a multitude of waters in the heavens, and he causeth the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth; he maketh lightnings with rain, and bringeth forth the wind out of his treasures.”

 

Wisdom, certainly, and often also power, are routinely linked to the Holy Spirit. To the person who views the Holy Spirit as feminine and bound to the Father in a family relationship in which romance is a major factor, this passage brings out the possessive nature of romance. In that context, the Holy Spirit belongs to the Father, as does the Father to the Holy Spirit. The passage above fits harmoniously into that supposition.

If, on the other hand, one presupposes that the Father and the Holy Spirit are more loosely bound in an agape relationship appropriate to an all-male Godhead, this passage would not speak of a possessive relationship between the two, and the attribute of wisdom would more appropriately be one possessed by the Father Himself. Of course, that assignment would create the collateral difficulty of rendering the Holy Spirit far less understandable as to function and attributes.

THE CHURCH, THE BRIDE, THE BODY AND THE NEW JERUSALEM

 

The beautiful mystery explained by Paul in Ephesians 5:25-32 has instilled in me the wonderful and moving view of the Church as the Bride of Christ:

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself for it, that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of the water by the Word; that He might present it to himself a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the Church; for we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of his bones.

 

          For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church.

 

In repeating the words of Adam in the Garden and of Jesus in Matthew 19, both in the context of marriage and the physical union between a man and his wife, Paul, by placing this marital union in the context of Jesus and His Church, plainly stated that the Church will be the spiritual Bride of Christ.

This statement of Paul’s echoes the numerous allusions that Jesus made to His own future marriage, including the parable of the marriage feast in Matthew 22, the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25, and, of course, his first miracle at Cana recorded in John 2, wherein He changed water into wine in anticipation of the joy of His own future wedding. Further identification of Jesus as a Bridegroom of a feminine entity is furnished by John in John 3:29.

In addition to New Testament pointers to Church in a bridal/marital context, there are at least two strong indicators of the same in the Old Testament in Genesis 24 and the Book of Ruth.

Genesis 24 describes the betrothal and marriage of Rebekah to Isaac. In Genesis 22 God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, which identifies Isaac as a type of Jesus Christ. In line with that identification, Isaac’s marriage to Rebekah identifies her as a type of Christ’s bride. According to Galatians 3:28, in which spiritual individuals do not possess gender, this bridehood cannot be fulfilled in individuals: the fulfillment must come for a collection or aggregate of individuals, which would suggest the Church. This identification of the Church as the Bride of Christ is strengthened by Paul’s characterization of the Church in 1 Corinthians 12 as a collection of individuals, each possessing specific gifts of the Holy Spirit.

In the Book of Ruth, Ruth’s husband Boaz is routinely identified by the Church as the Kinsman-redeemer, a type of Christ. It follows that Ruth, a female, represents His spiritual Wife, the Church.

Relating again to the Old Testament, it would be extremely difficult, if the Church was not a feminine entity, to justify the inclusion of the Song of Solomon in the canon of Scripture. Why, if the spiritual domain is genderless, would this overtly sexual document be a part of the Bible?

Not only is the future bride of Jesus feminine, but she is a living being, as clearly stated in Matthew 22: 31, 32:

But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

Note also in Paul’s commentary in Ephesians 5: 28, that So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies, Paul emphasizes the image developed in the restatement of Adam’s commentary regarding Eve of two becoming one flesh such that in the marital union the wife is considered to be the man’s body.   Here Paul extends the image of the wife being the body of the man to Christ and His Church, in line with an alternate description of the Church as the Body of Christ.

Paul alludes to this equivalence earlier in Romans 7: 4 and 1 Corinthians 2:15-20, where he describes the spiritual nature of the Church at Rome and Ephesus as both a feminine spouse and the spiritual body of Christ through the union of gendered complements capable of bearing fruit:

Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ, that ye should be married to another, even to Him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.

Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? Shall I, then, take the members of Christ, and make them into the members of an harlot? God forbid. What? Know ye not that he who is joined to a harlot is one body? For two, saith he, shall be one flesh. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is outside the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price; therefore, glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.

 

The plurality of the members of the Church, hinted at in the passages above, raises another issue, one that was touched on before. In Matthew 22: 28-30 and Galatians 3:28, both Jesus and Paul characterize the individual Christian as without gender in the spiritual realm:

Therefore, in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? For they all had her. Jesus answered and said unto the, Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

Note, however, that in both these cases the subject is the individual. But in 1 Corinthians 12: 4-28 and elsewhere in Scripture, Paul very plainly develops the idea that the individual is not the Church, but rather just a component of her, and a rather small element at that:

Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God who worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit. For to one is given, by the Spirit, the word of wisdom; to another, the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; to another, faith by the same Spirit; to another, the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; to another, the working of miracles; to another, prophecy; to another, discerning of spirits; to another, various kinds of tongues; to another, the interpretation of tongues. But all these worketh that one and the very same Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.

 

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Greeks, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it, therefore, not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it, therefore, not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? But now hath god set the members every one of them, in the body, as it hath pleased him. And if they were all one member, where were the body? But now are they many members, yet but one body. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble, are necessary. And those members of the body, which we thin to be less honorable, upon these we bestow more abundant honor; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness. For our comely parts have no need; but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honor to that part which lacked, that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it.

 

Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular. And God hath set some in the Church: first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Are all workers of miracles? Have all the gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? But covet earnestly the best gifts; and yet show I unto you a more excellent way.

The Church, then, as a single spiritual entity comprising a multiplicity of components, is fully capable of being endowed with gender, in exactly the same manner that while the eyeball of a person is genderless, the entire person is indeed either a male or a female. Furthermore, just as Jesus is always identified as male, Scripture always identifies the Church as either a functional female or its equivalent as the spouse of Christ.

The gendered nature of the relationship between Jesus Christ and His Church is suggested in the strongest terms in the Song of Solomon, for why would this romantic, even erotic, relationship be included in the canon of Scripture if such was not the case? This remarkable passage has been equated by several respected Bible commentators as representing the eventual marital relationship between Jesus and the Church. A typical example follows, taken from Song of Solomon 1: 14, 15:

 

My beloved is unto me as a cluster of henna flowers in the vineyards of Engedi. Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes.

Scripture also describes the individuals comprising the Church as living human beings. Examples include Matthew 9:15 (also Mark 2:19 and Luke 5:34) and Ephesians 2: 4-7:

Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the Bridegroom is with them? But the days will come, when the Bridegroom will be taken from them, and then shall they fast.

 

But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love with which He loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath made us alive together with Christ (by grace ye are saved), and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus; that in ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.

 

To this point, Scripture has shown that the Church is a feminine living body comprised of a multitude of genderless spiritual human souls which, in the aggregate is espoused to Jesus Christ as her future husband. Uniting spiritually through the marital union in the spiritual realm, the Church becomes the Body of Christ precisely as the wife is considered integrated into the body of the man in the material realm. But Revelation 21: 2, 9 and 10 paint an alternate picture of the wife of Christ that easily can be construed to represent an altogether different picture of this Bride:

And I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her Husband. . .And there came unto me one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues, and talked with me, saying, Come here, I will show thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife. And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God.

 

The passage above can readily be interpreted to suggest that the Bride of Christ is a building, albeit a beautiful and magnificent one, rather than the Church, which, as has been noted, is comprised of living souls. Several Scriptural passages that suggest the same thing come to mind, of which the following three are prominent:

1 Corinthians 3:9, 10 and 16:

For we are laborers together with God; ye are God’s cultivated field, ye are God’s building. According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master builder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth on it. But let every man take heed how he buildeth upon it. . . Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?

 

Ephesians 2:19-22:

Now, therefore ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner stone, in whom all the building fitly framed together growth unto an holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are built together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

Revelation 3:12, in Jesus’ message to the Church at Philadelphia:

          Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out; and I will write upon him the name of My God, and the name of the city of My God, the new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from My God; and I will write upon him My new name.

But note from these three examples that while the imagery is one of a building or components thereof, the components themselves are living human souls, all redeemed by Jesus Christ and therefore identical to the components of the Church. Given that identity, the imagery in Revelation 21 of the new Jerusalem is not mutually exclusive with the imagery of the Church. Indeed, the two images are entirely compatible with each other and mutually supportive, each adding color to the understanding of the Church as the spiritual Bride of Christ. This understanding brings this commentary full circle through Revelation 19: 7-9 back to the character of the Church as not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing:

         

          Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor to Him; for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white; for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they who are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he saith unto me, These are the true sayings of God.

 

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #38

Chapter Thirty Seven

 

“We’re back!” Joyce cried joyfully as she looked about her in wonder at the lushness of the landscape, so perfect even in its imperfection. The scene embraced her participation in it, the colors more vivid in their multidimensional hues than anything she could have experienced on Earth. This is so real! Joyce thought with pleasure. The presence of God was everywhere, joyful in His radiance. “Oh, thank you, Wisdom! Will I ever have to go back to Earth?”

“Earth?” She asked with a grin. “What Earth? No. You’re a spiritual being for good now, but you might be going back periodically as you serve at Jesus’ side. But it’ll be your choice and you can return here – home – whenever you wish.”

“Can I see my Sammy now? Oh, where’s Earl? How beautiful this all is!”

“Slow down, darling!” Wisdom responded with a rich laugh. “No, you won’t have to go back this time. You can stay here forever, if that’s what you want to do. There’s a very big event coming up that you’re an important part of. We’ve been waiting for you to come back to it, the marriage of Jesus with His Church. As for Earl, he’s right beside you now, and Sam’s running our way with Earl’s Alicia in hand. Go ahead – merge.”

Without conscious effort, Joyce merged into Earl so that their togetherness was complete. Although they still retained their individuality, they were open to each other’s internal thoughts and emotions, becoming one in a sense that was impossible in the material world. They hugged each other and opened themselves to their former spouses, weeping without restraint in the emotion of the moment.

“Come,” Wisdom said after allowing them time to understand and appreciate their new lives together. “About that event- it will be happening now. For that you’ll be merging with a great many more Christians, those who comprise the spiritual Church. Don’t worry about that, Earl,” She said in response to his brief flash of negativity at this new revelation. You four are a special component of that Church. You’ll be operating together as a unit, so your interaction with others won’t be quite so close. Close enough to experience the mutual love, but not so close as to evoke thoughts of invasion. And wait ‘till you see your bridegroom!”

“Will our marriage be romantic, like between men and women on earth?”

“Yes, but more so. Much more. Jesus Himself gave you the tiniest of hints of that joyful occasion in the Gospel of John, Chapter 2.”

“Oh! I – we – know what it says! We don’t have to remember. It’s imprinted in our beings! Can I recite it?”

“Of course. Go for it!”

“’And the third day there was a marriage in Cana, of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there. And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage. And when they lacked wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come. His mother saith unto the servants, Whatever he saith unto you, do it. And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece. Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them up to the brim. And he saith unto them, Draw some out now, and bear it unto the governor of the feast. And they bore it. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not from where it was (but the servants who drew the water knew), the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, and saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine and, when men have well drunk, then that which is worse; but thou hast kept the good wine until now. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana, of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.’

 

Wisdom spoke in response. “Besides the obvious fact that, being Jesus’ first miracle in His incarnation, it also was very important, there are a number of nuances in this passage. Do you recognize some of them?”

“Oh, yes! The wedding too, place on the third day, a reference to Jesus’ statements elsewhere that He would rise again on the third day, meaning the third thousand-year period since His resurrection.”

“Yes. Which, according to Psalm 90 and 2 Peter 3:8, would be the sixth millenium after the creation of man, the beginning of the Millennium. That also is why Jesus waited four days to resurrect Lazarus, for His incarnation, death and resurrection was in the fourth millenium, and in raising Lazarus He was prophecying His own resurrection.”

“And then there is the mention of His mother. I think You were there too as His divine Mother.”

“You’re right again, darling. I was there overshadowing Jesus’ earthly mother Mary, and it was a beautiful moment of anticipation for both of us.”

“Did it bother You that the Catholic Church gave all the credit for motherhood to Mary?”

“Of course not! Mary is a very special daughter-in-law to Me, too. I love her very deeply. She did indeed suffer along with Jesus at His crucifixion. And, of course, now that she’s among us and knows her true place, she’s an obedient and loving daughter. She really can’t wait for the marriage!

“Will we individuals, as just components of the Church, be able to participate in that romance?”

“As you already know, your individuality in the spiritual realm doesn’t imply the isolation that it did down in the material world. You are far more integrated into each other here than you were down there. Yes, to answer your question. Most happily, each of you, in the different circumstances that prevail here, will fully participate in that romance.”

“How can we, as created beings, marry God? Wouldn’t that sort of confer godhood upon us, too, being one with Him and all that?”

“Good question, and the answer is that yes, you as spirit beings will automatically partake of godhood. Whan Jesus merges into you,” Wisdom replied, “you will partake of His substance, elevating you into godhood. Beyond that, creation is a circular process, as you will have the ability to appreciate in the greater dimensional reality you will have in your marriage to Jesus. I’ll remind you that throughout the history of mankind, special people already have contributed under My supervision to the creation of Jesus as the Word of God in Scripture.”

“What are we going to do as Jesus’ bride?”

Wisdom laughed at that. “Oh, you have no idea,” She said. “I won’t spoil the excitement by telling you everything, but I will point out to you, as if you didn’t already know, that mankind has trashed the earth in a very big way. Somehow mankind managed to uglify the beauty We created beyond all rational expectations. The giant plastics industry turned out to create a huge mess; your playing with atoms didn’t work out too well, either. I could go on and on, but you already know all that, having lived there during the most profound destruction of the land, which included the greatest battle ever waged by man. You also saw the beginning of what We are doing to correct the trashing of your planet, something that you yourselves will become intimately involved in as the Wife of Jesus.”

“Oh? What would that be?”

“The planetoid that We brought close to earth – Our most direct method of participating in the battle of Armageddon – managed to perform some rather extensive cleanup work in the process of getting rid of so many evil little men and women. The catastrophe that We brought to bear on earth was planetary in scope, creating enormous earthquakes, and tsunamis, and windstorms. The water movement lifted up and deposited a brand-new system of strata. The earth movement created brand-new and pristine landmasses. Best of all, much of that plastic trash, much of those ugly chemicals, much of that radiation, is now down in the earth’s mantle where it belongs. But there’s still more of that disgusting trash still around. You’ll be busy creating and implementing means of cleaning that up and using the Millennium survivors to do the physical work. And then, there’s the restoration of Mars as well.”

“What about Venus and the rest?”

“In their own time, dear. You’ll have plenty to keep you very happily occupied.”

They came up to a quiet little stream. Looking down, they saw a large trout moving placidly up the middle. “Look!” Joyce exclaimed. “It’s smiling at us!”

“Yes!” Alicia said, laughing. “It’s that way everywhere here. I’m so glad that now we have a chance to experience this wonderful life together!”

They topped a rise and looked down into a bowl that contained an innumerable company of fellow Christians. Somehow they knew where and how to interact with them so that together they became a new entity whose features rivaled Wisdom’s own beauty. The amazing thing about this self-understanding was that they all were intensely aware of their composite Persona, just as they understood Wisdom.

“Jesus is about to join us,” Wisdom told them. “Let the music begin.” Accompanied by a thousand harps, and angelic choir sang the prelude to the Wedding March.

“Who is going to give us away?” came into Wisdom’s attention.

“It is my very great privilege, as your loving Mother-in-law, to perform that exceedingly welcome task,” She responded.

“Oh!” The gasp of awe was shared within the entire Church as she saw Jesus enter her assembly. What followed was a ripple of passion, like an electric shock, that permeated the Church as she saw Jesus in Truth and Light. The communal passion welled up into a romantic yearning for Him that transcended the earthly experience of imprinting between mates.

The marriage ceremony was performed by the Father Himself, His own perfect features visible to the Church for the first time. As they said their vows in giddy anticipation and were finally pronounced Man and Wife, Jesus turned to His new Bride and kissed Her deeply on the lips. With that He entered Her space and merged with Her, causing every element of Her being to glow with delight.

“It is finished!” the Father pronounced. “You are now Man and Wife, each God and together God. Welcome to the Godhead. Our Trinity is now a Quaternary!”

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #37

Chapter Thirty Six (continued)

The drastic cutback of life repeated itself throughout the Earth. On the other side of the world from America a young girl named Jana happened to live in one of the rare and widely-scattered enclaves of human habitation where survival was possible. Her own continued existence was either a miracle or an odd freak of nature gone berserk. Born into modest but comfortable means nine years before the beginning of the Great Destruction, she was a toddler when the Wave came. Her mind mercifully blanked out most of the events of that day, but throughout the rest of her life she was constantly subjected to flashbacks of overwhelming terror that she was helpless to resolve. The certain knowledge that they would return to torment her kept her in a shy and humble prison of fear. The image that she most dreaded was the morning on the seashore, where she was playing on the ground with her mother in sight and the water close at hand, its gentle lapping just one of the many mild background noises. Then the ground beneath her began to shake and great cracks opened up everywhere. In one terrible moment her mother was gone, lost inside the voracious mouth of soil that had suddenly turned into a hungry monster. But it shook so badly that Jana couldn’t think beyond the terror. She could only stare without comprehension at her loss, the tense ground shivering in rage. The shaking went on and on, it wouldn’t stop, and she could see, again without understanding, great palls of smoke where red liquid gushed out of the ground to engulf houses and screaming people and turn trees bright red and sometimes white before they vanished. These images burned themselves into her mind, storing themselves for nightfall, when they would return during unguarded moments to torment her. Much later the shaking stopped, and she sat where she was, on an island of undisturbed ground, numb with shock. Not a soul came to her aid; she could see a few others but they were either quite still, like herself, or slowly and awkwardly reassembling themselves.

After a time Jana became aware of the intense, oppressive silence, and that was when she turned her head toward the coast and screamed in fright, for the sea was gone. Instead, the land continued out from the shoreline, brown mud and rock that dropped gently but steadily down into a plain that extended out to the horizon, as far as the eye could see. She stared at this new land in disbelief, her terror so extreme that she was unable to move. She was still staring when her mind dimly recorded motion on the horizon, a movement so vast that it was beyond the power of her brain to put it into the proper perspective. A dark line, glints of silver, marching across the plains below, expanding, a dark wall advancing upward, blotting out the sun. It moved faster now with the shortening distance, looming upward, filling the sky, filling the valley as it rushed headlong toward her. Roaring, peaking, cresting up, engulfing clouds, ripping them into streamers and wisps, the hurting pressure of her ears tightening in pain, the air exploding, lifting, hurtling headlong toward the town, spanked from behind, thrust faster, tumbling, overtaken, shaken, engulfed.

Jana hit something, flattened into it and continued to swirl and churn in the crushing grip of violently moving water. Every day thereafter she would vividly remember that first desperate gulp of air as the tree to which she clung tossed about on the restless water, traversing mountains that suddenly turned into valleys and then back into peaks. She would often wonder but never come to fully understand what freak motion of water or indentation in the ground over which it surged prevented it from falling down upon her and crushing out her life, as it did with the rest of her village. She wouldn’t realize that she was badly injured until several hours later. Only when the water deposited the tree and her with it scores of miles inland from her village, and the adrenalin subsided to be replaced by pain, did she understand her state.   Her left eye was damaged beyond healing from the blow of the initial contact with the tree that saved her life. Even in the sorrow that comes from remembered violence and loss she possessed the vanity of a pretty girl. She grieved over her damaged face, but was later able, with clever arrangement, to cover the empty eye with her hair.

Very soon after she returned to the ground she was seen by an aimlessly wandering man, a kind person who picked her up and carried her with him in his search for his village or someone he knew. They were very lucky; his village, being situated on a high plateau, was spared the violence from shaking and water that had destroyed hers. Although much of it was severely damaged, some shelter still remained and there were people who remained alive, with whom they could share experiences and talk out their fears. Jana was given to an elderly lady, old enough to be her grandmother, but she was also kind, and gently nursed her back to health. Jana remained with the old lady, a time when dark, murky clouds extended down to within a few feet of the ground and very little sunlight penetrated the gloom. It became cold and there was very little food to eat. The tiny village subsisted mostly on rats, who had become fat on the death that stalked the land. This unpleasant fare was washed down with stale, rank-smelling water from the marshland to the west.

In spite of the hardships and discomfort of attempting to survive in a world that suddenly had marginalized mankind, Jana was given a precious gift. The old lady with whom she lived was a devoted Christian, and every night at bedtime she was in the habit of imparting to Jana a portion of her knowledge of God.

Far below the turmoil on the surface, the earthmotion yanked at the underground communities scattered throughout the earth, where the majority of political movers and shakers now resided. The terrific heat from the moving crust-mantle boundary surged upward through layers of rock that were turning soft and in some locations molten, themselves merging into the boundary and becoming part of it. The effects, which were strongly influenced by latitude and crustal depth, were felt unequally. The pressure of moving ground drove the nearly plastic red-hot walls of the Malaysian shelter inward toward each other, squeezing the long-dead community inside into a soupy pulp that was forcefully mixed into the surrounding rock. The meltdown of the reactor generated an insignificant little belch. News of this disaster never reached the other communities. From the very first there was a sharp rise in electrical activity that rendered electromagnetic communication impossible. Earthshocks made a joke of the alternate laser communications, their violence completely overwhelming the optimistically-designed damping mechanisms. Then when the winds came and the lands were breached with water the ground was immediately swept clean of sensors.

The European governmental community located in Belgium was particularly ill-sited, having found itself covered by water to a depth of a mile and a half. The extreme pressure forced water down the cracked heat-exchanger pipes that were exposed on the surface, creating colossal jets of deadly liquid that sprayed into the shelter, uprooting people, buildings and equipment before the invading liquid eventually settled down to fill the caverns, drowning the trapped inhabitants. Here the reactor survived intact for a time, humming away happily in the midst of quietly floating bodies.

The Brazilian facility remained intact in its entirety, continuing to function through the directives of automatic control systems, its human inhabitants being dead to the last man. They simply couldn’t handle the sustained one hundred fifty degree temperature that was maintained by a greatly overloaded environmental system.

GLOW, of course, had rapidly moved into the nearest underground shelter that was available to him, which actually was very close to the position where Jacob and Moira, along with Sidney and Mary, lay at their observation post. This shelter was virtually unique, in that it remained intact throughout the major part of the bombardment from above. The facility’s communication with its above-ground sensors was destroyed, however, causing him to be irritated with his lack of information on the world above the shelter. Quickly tiring of this forced isolation from the world that he had come to understand as his personal possession, he took the elevator back up to the surface. He just had time for a swift glance around when a final piece shed from the comet stamped on his head and smashed him into the ground. Despite the finality of this event, there was yet another leg to GLOW’s involuntary journey. Eventually Wisdom would oversee his transportation to the fresh new daughter of Jupiter that still loomed over the Earth. There, in the somewhat warmer climate that prevailed in the center of that planetoid, GLOW would literally and quite spectacularly represent the name he had chosen for himself.

With a precision unique to God, there existed by His divine Hand a tiny enclave of life in addition to the hills below Dafna in Israel that escaped the general turmoil. This island of life was located in midwestern North America in the Black Hills region of South Dakota. Here in the vicinity of Mount Rushmore the territory not only was spared the hurricane winds but became blanketed above by cloud, being located near a node of minimum atmospheric disturbance. The people who resided there in temporary but quite adequate shelters had very little knowledge of the worldwide disturbance, as their communication devices were inoperable due to intense ionization.

Shielded from the awful apparition above them, these people shared a thread of commonality: most were Christians who had come to this singular location at the nudging of the Holy Spirit; the others came, albeit reluctantly, as family members. They had in common one other thing, which was an extremely rare and precious circumstance: some of them continued to survive through the next day.

The Black Hills began to rise even as the giant tsunami rushed toward them from the east. As the land rose, cracks appeared in the soil and snaked upward to the precariously balanced rocks above. Responding to the shaking and the undermining, enormous pillars of granite toppled and rolled down the moving slopes, like giant sequoias, felling the trees in their paths and leaving scratches like giant claw marks. Jackrabbits and deer scattered out of their paths along with terrified humans. Most were successful. Some were not. Those who managed to dodge the monsters were troubled yet further by a noise from the east that rose above the nearby din of tumbling boulders.   Far below them the Cheyenne River became a metallic ribbon of reflected light from the leaden sky above as the outflow from the broken dam of the Angostura Reservoir cut into the changing topography to pencil out a new channel. But this insignificant line was dwarfed by an astonishing plane of pewter rimmed with silver farther to the east that stretched to the horizon. As the frozen people stared in open-mouthed awe, the plane continued to flow toward them like liquid mercury as the horizon itself rose perceptibly and light and shadow firmed to define a crest fifty miles to the east of the rapidly approaching trough. The scale was too large for the human mind to grasp, living beings never having encountered before such enormity of motion. Only when the new water tumbled over the changing Cheyenne River, completely dwarfing it, did the awful scene come into perspective for a few. As the magnitude of the liquid cliff became apparent the revelation evoked the dizziness of hanging over a sheer precipice; many were so overwhelmed that they simply stood there, puke pouring from their open mouths. As it bore down upon them, the white frothing vanguard of water was a roaring cliff of such incredible height that it appeared to be above them. The roar deafened them; before they fell onto their faces in panic the compressed air threatened to lift them into its turbulent maw and fling them headlong to the west. Then the wind front swept past, followed by the sea of darker water, furnishing a more constant reality to the nightmare. The level of onrushing darkness continued to rise about them with the approach of the first crest. But then it finally passed them and the water started slowly to descend. They began for the first time to breathe hope.

Through all this commotion the Christians had prayed fervently for deliverance, but they also were quick to appreciate that they were located at that spot for just that reason. With the passage of The Crest, as the peak of water would be called for generations to come, their prayers turned to thanksgiving. As the turbulent ocean continued to rush past beneath their amazed eyes and which had instantaneously turned their mountain into a western Atlantic island, they came to the conclusion that such force must necessarily have been related to a planetary event and pondered the significance of it to the rest of the world. Being attuned to the Biblical account of Noah’s flood, some had now come to appreciate that the Bible was far more accurate that the contradictory science to which they had been so thoroughly indoctrinated. Implicit in that new understanding was the realization that what they were now experiencing was a repetition of events that had occurred long ago.

San Francisco was still in nominal night as dawn arrived in New York; however, the large globe sitting on the western horizon lit the sky with a white glow that totally dispelled the darkness. Those who could bear the sight watched in horrified fascination as the comet noticeably increased in size before their eyes and then, as it approached the Van Allen zone, appeared to spread vast wings as an eagle swooping down on its prey. Most who watched this appalling scene from their apartment windows were unaware of the drama taking place on the waterfront below them. For the first time in over three thousand years the sea was transgressing its boundaries to complement its retreat from the eastern continental edge. Slowly at first, the tide kept rising. At an ever-accelerating rate, the black water engulfed first the docks, then the low-lying buildings, and began to mount the hills. The apartment dwellers first became aware of this new disaster indirectly, noticing first how slowly the comet moved below the horizon, and then how the reflected light of the comet on the ocean appeared where land was shortly before. Then the winds came and the ocean continued to rise, white caps gleaming, then great waves, monsters smashing into buildings accompanied by tornadic screechings and the jolt of buildings being ripped off foundations, glass breaking and frigid wetness.

Within a short time the western coastline of the American continent was inundated to a depth of over six hundred feet. San Francisco was now eighty five miles seaward of the new, violently battered shoreline. Then, as quickly as it had come, the sea receded back, forming an enormous mass of moving water that would cross the Pacific to smash headlong against Asian coastlines. The lifeless remnant of San Francisco would stand, dry, to receive the rays of a tropical sun. To the north, Portland lay buried beneath two hundred and fifty feet of mud, silt, and the remnant soils of what used to be the banks of the Columbia Gorge. Here, during the inundation of San Francisco, the mighty Columbia had been an immense river of saltwater that roiled up the gorge to smack into dam after dam, mountainous white spray bursting upward to the sky, cracking each in turn like a fragile eggshell. But each assault and breach claimed its toll of energy. As the sea reached its easternmost boundary, it spread out and gently licked at the dry plains. For a tiny instant, with mountains flaming and smoking, bleeding lava from thousands of rotten sores, the water itself was expended and quiet from the exhausting climb landward. Then, slowly like a brakeless freight train gathering downhill momentum, it began to recede. Shortly it was speeding out of control, sucking at the river banks, digging up new channels, creating a new Grand Canyon that, like its predecessor, now lay at a latitude that used to mark the boundary between Arizona and Utah. From time to time rumors of Portland’s existence would surface, but Portland itself would never be found again.

“Let’s call it a wrap,” the Divine Will said to His beloved Consort, who responded with an outstretched finger leveled at the threatening monster. Seen by fewer than a thousand people, a great sword of blue-white light connected for the merest instant the Carlson Comet with the Earth. Had the atmosphere been quiet instead of the raging maelstrom that it was, the thunderclap could have been heard around the world. But in that same brief instant the world was saved: no longer did the Carlson Comet loom larger with each second that passed.

The Carlson Comet came to within less than five earth diameters of the ravaged planet before hurtling away along its own path. Close as they came to actually colliding, and devastating as its proximity was to the earth and to the life upon its surface, pockets of life nevertheless remained, humbled and ready to fully accept the leadership of God and His Christ. To prepare the way for this welcome transformation, the physical devastation of the planet served to bury the ravages of man so far beneath the surface that for all practical purpose the numerous blights no longer existed. Particularly satisfying to Wisdom was the complete removal of all the disgustingly ugly wind farms, every windmill of which had deliberately been thrust past the Earth’s mantle to melt back into basic molecular constituents.

The strange violence on the surface of the Earth died out over time, but slowly. Its passing was reluctant, attended with endless battles between sea and land, taking its time to subside as the floor beneath the seas continued ever more slowly to restore itself to equilibrium.

Existence would be primitive from that time forward for over a century as the remnant of mankind learned to adjust to new latitudes and piece out the rhythms of new seasons. But God was now with them and, despite the hardships of their daily toils, they would sit by campfires at night and recount tales to their children of a great winged monster who shook the earth, and of enormous waves, and blood-red lava, and of God with them.

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #36

Chapter Thirty Six

 

 

 

 

 

In its lust for oil the Chinese government turned its face from the portent of doom in the sky above. Its leaders, having survived many internal battles through cleverness of mind, had been quick to perceive that this Earthwide crisis was not the first to have been experienced in the memory of mankind. Recognizing the basis of the ever-present appearance of dragons at important events, they had early on made the association between portents in the sky and massive disturbances in the earth below. They reasoned that although this latest catastrophe might be the end of all mankind, whatever course China took wouldn’t matter. On the other hand, if by chance mankind managed to avoid its ultimate doom and survive, and China ended up taking possession of the earth’s greatest cache of oil, China would dominate the world from that time onward. It was worth the gamble; besides, what did China have to lose?

GLOW’s anger, meanwhile, had developed into an insanity that drove him to battle in the face of the bigger issue in the sky above.

 

Well before I-day the vanguard of the enormous Chinese expeditionary force crossed the now dry Euphrates River under a gray and threatening sky. It was initially unopposed, but GLOW reacted with a hastily-assembled army of his own, which raced into the Mediterranean Sea and along the land routes traveled before by the invading hordes of the Russians and their confederates. GLOW’s objective was the same: kill the enemy in Jerusalem and take over the state apparatus, particularly the control over the Israeli oil field.

GLOW’s response had restored unity to the ten regional governments, as did his demand for the immediate drafting of troops from each region. It didn’t matter that the draft quota that he imposed involved most of the workforce: if he didn’t get the oil, there would be no need for the workforce anyway.

In some respects the resulting battle for Jerusalem was a reprise of the earlier battle waged by the Russians and their Mideast cohorts. The objective was similar: remove Israel from the world map. The routes the GLOW power took to get to Jerusalem were virtually the same, and their entry into Israel began at the port that used to belong to Haifa. But other aspects of the battle were quite different: The motivation of hatred was replaced by an even more evil indifference to the fate of Israel in the greedy quest for oil. The routes of advance, while similar to the earlier ones with respect to GLOW’s Western powers, involved the additional route from the east taken by the Chinese army. Haifa, being the location of the first assault, now no longer existed, although the ground upon which it stood was trampled by the marching feet of soldiers too numerous to count. The advancing troops weren’t told that the ground beneath them was so radioactively hot that in merely being there they had probably signed their own death warrants. No matter: they’d last long enough to do the job.

The new combatants, in representing all the peoples of the world in a vast conglomeration, was more racially and ethnically diverse than the earlier invaders; there were more of them, too – far more.

Now, with the immanent approach of I-day, Jacob and Moira viewed the assault from the same position they had taken during the Ezekiel 38 war. This time they had Sid and Mary with them. “I don’t know how many angels that God is planning on deploying in this battle,” Moira said, “but from the looks of things down below, the entire world is showing up to kick the Jews into the Med.”

“Yeah, looks that way. Whatever’s going to happen next, it’s not going to be pretty. I feel badly for our brothers and sisters in the middle, engulfed by all that vicious sub-humanity. But at least you’re here and not there, and, I’d hope, safe from what’s going to go down in Jerusalem.”

Before he could speak further, Jacob and Moira were tossed into the air. They returned to the ground to be shaken like they were in the teeth of a violent, angry dog, complete with a rumbling growl.

They heard Wisdom speaking to them through the noise of this enormous quake. “Hide your eyes,” She warned them. “You don’t want to watch what happens next.”

Still shaking, they buried their heads in the ground. Even with their faces in the dirt, their eyes registered such an overwhelming brightness that they could see the bones in their hands. Multiple seconds later the shaking of the ground jumped to renewed life and the couple began to think that the end of the world had just arrived.

The shaking slowly subsided, only to be replaced by a windstorm of epic magnitude. Cautiously raising their heads as this new force diminished, they saw that most of the troops were no longer standing, but were flat on the ground. Looking back, Moira noticed that the blast and its aftermath had leveled the buildings of Dafna. The destruction saddened her. “Look behind us, Jacob,” she said. “No Dafna.”

“Too bad about that,” he replied. “But look on the bright side. There’s still us. Besides, Wisdom is around to comfort us. God matters more than anything else.” His eyes returned to the battle below, and Moira’s soon followed.

But then, as they continued to look, they saw the majority of the closer troops raise themselves back up to standing positions. “What was that, Jacob? God or man? Nuclear or something else?”

“No, it was nuclear, all right. Look at the mushroom clouds. They look like textbook photos. GLOW may have set them off, judging from where they hit southeast of Jerusalem. Look over there,” he said, pointing to the largest cloud. It was still glowing red from some massively hot internal violence as the central column reached for the stratosphere. “That entire area was filled with human beings before the bombs, and now look at it. It’s completely barren for acres upon acres around the central column, empty of soldiers. And I wouldn’t count on anything living inside the column itself, not even the meanest snake.”

The battle for Jerusalem continued to rage for three days. The attackers had breached the defensive lines of the city and had entered it, bent on the utter destruction of its terrified inhabitants. The horrified people of Dafna looked out on the distant slaughter taking place in their beloved city. Their own front had remained quiet, but the spectacle of what was happening in Jerusalem tore away at whatever relief they may have enjoyed.

“Bury your heads again,” the two couples heard from above, and responded instantly. What happened next dwarfed the turmoil of the nuclear blasts. As I-day arrived, the ground thrust them upward again, but this was an impact shock, not a quake. Several more shocks occurred in rapid succession, each closer to them than its predecessor. Once again, the air above them moaned in hurricane strength. After a chaotic eternity, this next phase of violence settled down. Once again Jacob and Moira lifted their heads, to be confronted with the shocking sight of massive dirty-gray columns that reached upward beyond their vision. They had the appearance of exceedingly broad tornadoes, but they were stationary. At their bases the ground bulged upwards in circular rims. Flecks of red revealed the molten state of the soil beneath the surface. The columns extended beyond the land to the Mediterranean Sea, where their color was whitened with water. Even as they watched, the water began to fall with majestic slowness into a sea troubled with enormous impact waves which raced toward the shore. Awe-struck with the overwhelming visual magnitude of the events playing out before their eyes, they recoiled in horror as the first tsunami breached the land and overwhelmed the waterfront buildings and continued inland, virtually unimpeded by the apartment blocks and even high-rise constructions and the hills upon which they stood. Before the first wave receded, another came crashing ashore, to be followed by many others. The troops, so impressive in their size before these catastrophic events, were washed out to sea like so many tiny ants.

“Now that looked like an asteroid strike!” Jacob said laughingly. “Did you see how it dwarfed the nuclear attack?”

“Give it to God. But I wonder about Jerusalem, being in the middle of all that.”

“I don’t know,” Jacob replied. “I can’t see it any more.”

The sky was so cluttered with the columns of smoke and pulverised earth that Jerusalem was no longer visible to the pair. “I wouldn’t worry, though,” Moira said. “Jerusalem’s special to God. Somehow it must still exist.”

Jerusalem did continue to exist, but virtually every city, town and community throughout the world fared less well. The American Midwest was hit particularly hard. The impact of that day on the newlywed couple George and Linda Kasik was typical of that area. Awakened by tremblings and rough shakings, they had arisen from their happy bed and left their country cabin hand in hand to survey the commotion outside, still secure in the knowledge that their love was sufficient to overcome any kind of trouble that life could throw at them.

They had walked about a quarter of a mile when the tremors sharply increased in amplitude. George and Linda continued to hold hands as they rode out the undulations of the ground beneath them. There was a sharp jolt and they squeezed each other fiercely in a mutual gesture of support and reassurance. Not more than half a mile to their front the ground reared up as if it had suddenly come to life. It refused to stop, but continued to rise more sharply. They realized to their horror that where they were on flat ground scant moments before they were now on a slope that was rapidly becoming steeper, and were looking up at a crest of ground that was reaching heavenward.

Looking back, George was astonished to see the ground recede below them. He was overcome by vertigo and put out his free hand to cushion his dizzy drop to the ground. As his hand touched the earth it recoiled from the intense heat, and George suddenly apprehended that the ground was smoking. Attempting to return to an upright position, he wobbled drunkenly as the surface gave way and a gaping red crevasse opened up beneath his feet. Fixated on the landscape rising above her, Linda felt his pull on her hand and screamed in horror as she saw him sink to his knees. Close to fainting from fright, she struggled to pull him free even as she saw the flesh of his legs bubble and redden. His eyes pleaded with hers and then she saw him accept his fate. He jerked his hand free and with remarkable grace allowed himself to sink into the widening crack. Wailing, Linda averted her eyes toward the rising peak.  They focused on another crack that was racing downward directly toward her. Screaming again, she ran downslope. The path she took ended abruptly a hundred yards ahead in a hump, the far side of which was rapidly developing into a cliff. Then the wind came up.

Screaming all the way, Linda ran down to the hump and just kept going out into empty air.

For over an hour after the Kasiks came to their abrupt end, their neighbor Billy West had been laying in a virtually prone position in the lee of a huge boulder, unable to move more than a fraction of an inch for fear that the screeching wind would pluck him from his shelter and fling him into the midst of the airborne debris that had hurtled past. Some of the debris had been human, damaged beyond anything recognizable. The ground here had remained cold, and it was robbing him of heat where he had soiled himself earlier. He was shivering, but he did not recognize his discomfort, for he was held in the thrall of a terror so complete that it occupied every nerve in his body.

Suddenly the vicious motion of the air stopped, as if something larger and infinitely more menacing was sucking it into its maw. The screaming ceased, to be replaced by a lower, more distant rumbling, so powerful that the ground trembled and quaked. This ominous sound was frequently interspersed with the hollow thumping of objects falling from the sky. Billy felt one land nearby. It had once been a dog, but was now a mixed bundle of fur and red flesh like he used to see infrequently on the side of the highway. There was another thump, and he saw another bundle of raw flesh, to which tattered strips of clothing still clung, smack into the dog. More human remains landed about his inadequate shelter and he began to smell the cloying stench of raw meat mingled with contents of stomach and intestines. He saw these things but he didn’t react, for fear continued to prevail.

His present location was several hundred miles inland, so Billy had no thought of danger from the ocean. This state abruptly ended as he peered around the boulder, looking to the east. In that direction a new mountain range stood as a sentinel to protect the land about him. But now he stared in disbelief above the mountains, so far above them that the distant intruder was obscured in haze, an enormous but rapidly moving wall. Even as he looked it passed overhead, blocking the sun and casting his world into deep shadow. He trembled involuntarily. Unnoticed, his bowels moved again.   As the top of the cliff receded into the distance tens of miles to the westward of his position he felt the shock wave as its base collided with the mountain range to the east. His eyes watched but failed completely to grasp the scale of the event they were registering as mountains were dwarfed by white spray. Moments later the ground began to vibrate and the spray spanned the thirty miles or so between his position and the mountains, and continued on past him like the top of the wall, a low, dirty grey roof that rapidly darkened as the wall continued to advance westward.

He had just a short but indelible glimpse of dark water following the white spray to breach the mountaintops when the mist began to settle about him and cut off his view. Now he was in the midst of a dark fog and could only hear the roar of the turbulent sea reaching toward him.

The first blast of water kicked him like a football. He was still conscious but trying to will his crushed chest to breathe as he tumbled through the air. He hit the ground and lost his consciousness a quarter of a mile from the point of first impact and remained unconscious as the water kicked him a second time and rolled him like a pebble. The third impact buried him beneath the moving wall of water and crushed him into jelly that quickly diluted into nothing.

[to be continued]

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #35

Chapter Thirty Four

As the residents of the tent city in Custer Park near Mount Rushmore awoke and began to greet the day among their beautiful surroundings, that same Saturday morning began quite benignly elsewhere as well in North America. Springtime was becoming apparent in the pleasant temperature and new growth of grass and leaves. Despite the excesses of the government and the repression and slaughter for which it was responsible, the land itself appeared to be enjoying a rebirth of sorts. The hue of the sky above was a deep blue almost to the horizon where it paled almost imperceptibly, just enough to confirm the new warmth of the surrounding air. In those areas that had been the least troubled by the brutal events of the recent past, the world outdoors was a fresh tapestry of soft, brightly blooming trees and flowers and lush green fields. Birds called joyfully and their songs blended harmoniously with the lively warm air.

At precisely 8:15 that morning, Alan Carlson shut off his phone and returned to his breakfast nook, where he sat disconsolately sipping coffee. He was a lucky man to have coffee to enjoy. But then he had reason to be so favored. As an astronomer he was, like all prominent scientists, a quasi-governmental official who, although not permitted the amenities of the FEMA underground facilities, was blessed with housing and food in relative abundance. He was given guard protection as well. These niceties came at a substantial price: Alan had finally succumbed to the prodding of government officials and accepted the mark of the beast.

Dr. Carlson was not a happy man, the phone call having changed his day from joy to a bleak horror. Thirteen nights ago he had discovered through his telescope a previously-undiscovered comet, a finding that had given him an ecstatic boost and his name a household term, at least among those fortunate enough to remain in the possession of households. The comet was even labeled the Carlson Comet in honor of his discovery of it. Since that discovery, up until the phone call, he had felt a possessive bond with the object, as if it belonged to him personally. Very quickly, however, other experts had inserted themselves in on his find to evaluate its characteristics, including its size and particularly its path. The first surprise that confronted these experts on minutiae was its size: it was massive, almost the size of the moon. Comets of such size were of such rarity that some experts would have denied the possibility of this newcomer’s existence without visual proof, just as past peers of equal authority had denied the existence of meteors until they were forced to view the meteorites that had landed virtually at their feet. But it was the trajectory that stumped them, causing them to wait for several days’ confirmation before they officially announced the comet’s apparent destination.

After they had reviewed the numbers several times over, quiet panic set in among the astronomers who had so callously muscled in on Carlson’s new pet. Their preoccupation with this new object grew rapidly as communications networks carried urgent requests for support to colleagues around the globe. Ultimately, the government got directly involved by commissioning the world’s finest computer-knowledgeable mathematicians to perform more sophisticated trajectory computations as if man, by mathematical precision, could alter the path of a several thousand-mile wide rock. With the unwelcome confirmation they provided, GLOW tried briefly to suppress its disclosure to the rest of his government for regional security reasons. Finally the hitherto-omnipotent GLOW himself came to the disturbing realization that the issue was bigger than regional security. His unhappy mind churned out random thoughts that equated, in the aggregate, to his displeasure at being usurped by a mere object. Darkly appreciating that a problem of this magnitude took all the fun out of elitism, he removed all obstacles he had inserted in the information path between the scientists and his government functionaries. If there was anything good to come out of this flap at all, he thought with resignation, it was that if crises were useful tools for the manipulation of peoples, this was the mother of all crises.

Dr. Alan Carlson, who himself had been kept in the dark regarding the object’s path, had just been informed of it by the latest phone call. The problem was specifically that the trajectory of the Carlson Comet, as confirmed by at least a thousand independent calculations, was found to terminate a very short time in the future at a point in space that would be concurrently occupied by the planet Earth. From this time forward, the unfortunate Dr. Carlson would be identified not for his expertise as an astronomer, but as the first harbinger of Earth’s inevitable doom. The corresponding intra-governmental communiques were brutally truthful: man, with all his ingenuity and scientific prowess, would be helpless before this monster, unable to deflect it from its path by any meaningful amount. The beast was simply too massive, and time was too short. The advent of the Carlson Comet was a complete surprise.

Over the next couple of weeks the earth and the planetoid went on about their respective businesses with benign indifference to each other. People continued to suffer under the repression of the regime, which had become even harsher in the wake of the discovery. Those individuals who had accepted the mark and had been relatively well-off now were making general asses of themselves as they went through the grieving sequence of denial, anger and grudging acceptance.

The period of denial varied with the level of understanding. The average person took it on faith that the “science guys” would send up a nuclear-tipped rocket that would blast the cosmic intruder to smithereens. Having thus solved the problem to their collective satisfaction, this group quickly reverted to their usual activities. The “science guys” knew better: their period of denial was virtually nonexistent. They knew that the Carlson Comet was far too massive to be blown to smithereens by anything that they could cook up. Besides, even if they could have found a method to counter the beast, recent cutbacks of applied technology had made launch vehicles way too scarce to deploy all but the most puny firepower.

It would be theoretically possible, over a span of fifty years, to alter the comet’s trajectory with existing knowledge and materials found on earth. Fifty years, however, was significantly longer than the allotted time to collision. These intellectuals, who were a dollar short and a day late and knew it, knew also that the world was expectantly waiting for them to solve the problem. They made the first transition from denial to anger. Discarding their assumed images of disinterested professionalism, they shamelessly and with quite shocking vehemence blamed each other (and especially the hapless Dr. Carlson) for discovering the offensive object in the first place. Then they blasted their own shortsightedness and fixated next on the shortsightedness of government and the apathy of the common person with respect to scientific matters for their current inability to solve the problem. These carryings-on eventually filtered down to the common person, who finally perceived that indeed the “science guys” were not coming to the rescue. Once this perception was attained, they, too, immediately entered the anger phase. Of course the primary focus of their anger was the “science wimps”, chief among them the poor Dr. Carlson who, although just an innocent astronomer, was bombed out of his car one morning. Demonstrations were held; these pathetically inept demonstrations of the public temper quickly progressed into ugly riots with demands for governmental intervention by those who wore the mark and relied on the government to solve all their problems.

The transition to the acceptance phase was universally shared. Riots began anew and quickly descended into self-serving orgies of looting and destruction. Society throughout the world once again became disordered and chaotic, and with this breakdown of order the means of production and distribution halted. Just as the pinnacle of power finally had come into his grasp, GLOW realized that he might well become virtually ineffective, an understanding that made him very, very angry.

Chapter Thirty Five

 

 

 

 

The belligerent nature of the angry hot body extracted from Jupiter and set in motion by the Holy Spirit mirrored the troubled arrogance of the insignificant little specks on the surface of a distant companion in space, Earth. Angry with the descending quality of their lives under the brutal new North American regime and its sibling governments throughout the world but curiously stubborn in their insistence in ignoring their God, men of ill-will continued to clash one against another in their headlong pursuit of Self as they attempted to eke out acceptable standards of life in a land where such standards no longer existed. The government, even more devoted to Self than its subjects, continued its quest for absolute control over its miserable and impoverished subjects, committing a wholesale slaughter of both the land and the people within it.

But the new planetoid had a destructive potential that exceeded by a huge margin the capacity for evil of Earth’s occupants. This body now held all the cards, subject only to the will of the Father and the response of His Divine Companion.

In this cosmic game the unwelcome intruder slapped its first card on the table by interfering with Earth’s gravitational field and causing a movement of the mantle.

This new development reached North America with a deep rumbling sound like that of an enormous trumpet that pierced the air and white-hot rock belonging to the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted from the tortured ground in a massive outpouring. A vast wind came up and blew the enormous black cloud of ash eastward, enclosing the entire southeastern portion of the old United States in a suffocating, poisonous cloud that slaughtered millions of people, relieving them rapidly of their miserable lives.

In faraway Israel the land below Dafna began to be pelted with fast-moving rocks that rained upon the masses of intruding soldiers. Astonished people looked upward toward the source of this vast commotion to see a more amazing spectacle yet, that of a sky lit up like a Christmas tree and beyond that another moon that wasn’t their own familiar Luna. Awed people around the globe first assumed that this enormous object was an asteroid, but after a while they began to notice things about this new cosmic intruder that didn’t square with what they knew about the behavior of asteroids.

In the first place, it wasn’t barreling toward them with the speed of a bullet. It was just standing still, or if it indeed was moving, it wasn’t moving fast. Not only that, but it was much too large to be an asteroid. It looked more like a planet, or at least like the moon, which it appeared to match in size and brightness. It was barren and void of any atmosphere of its own, but it appeared to be shedding pieces of itself, some of which were igniting into flames and making the sky sparkle as they entered the earth’s atmosphere. The boulders that survived this fiery entry turned ugly as they hurtled into the militant crowds and left roadkill behind. In North America, the onlookers watched amazed as a particularly large chunk of extraterrestrial matter splashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island Sound, creating an enormous circular wave that inundated the surrounding area. The sight led the observers to switch their focus to the larger ocean beyond, which had become so turbulent that it was sinking many ships, both small and great.

As a catastrophe of planetary scope, the destruction and terror was almost universal. With a few exceptions in isolated localities, life for humanity became very basic and very, very ugly. At about that time also, the first real effects of the cometary encounter appeared with the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano. With less than a few days to go before I-day (I for impact), the intruder’s gravitational influence became sufficiently large that the magnitude and frequency of earthquakes accelerated beyond the already-disturbing upward trend. Japan was almost obliterated by the explosion of Mount Fuji and the tidal-wave aftermath. In the Western Hemisphere Mount Rainier and Mount Baker both resumed activity. After burying several large communities under carpets of mud, Mount Rainier continued to grow, reaching a lofty altitude of over twenty three thousand feet before exploding in a gigantic eruption that sent two thirds of the mountain skyward in a cloud of dust. Mexico City buckled and heaved once more, this time taking seven million lives.

Each hour, as seismic activity increased, the source of this horror became larger and more apparent to the naked eye. There was no remaining doubt about the seriousness and inevitability of this event. One day before I-day the animal kingdom became generally aware of impending disaster. Animals of all kinds began to congregate together oblivious to the usual natural relationships. Most pathetic was the inbred reliance of the domesticated animals on their human masters. They looked to them for safety, but the masters turned away, focusing on their own plights and indifferent to the problems with the animals.

As I-day approached, the comet began to dominate the sky, mocking the helplessness of mankind to control it. By this time all the sequestered liquor, pills and drugs had essentially run out, forcing the elite to face their doom sober. Suicides increased to epidemic proportions; roadways of all sizes were impassable, littered to uselessness with shapeless hulks of vehicles whose drivers had raced headlong into welcome oblivion. Within the military, the sound of self-directed gunfire was commonplace until the bullets were all gone. Then the knives and razors took over, finding their ways to veins and arteries. The major cities began to smell of death.

The earth had by now reached an equilibrium of gravity-induced stress. Earthquake activities diminished dramatically. An ominous silence blanketed the earth, presided over by the giant and yet more rapidly growing apparition that dominated the sky.

The dawn of I-day arrived in New York on time. But at that point time had lost its usual meaning, for the sun took until noon to reach only halfway overhead, and there it remained. During that time the tide continued to ebb, outward, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. Land was newly exposed in inches, feet, yards and then miles. Ugly, barren, terrifying plains finally extended over the horizon. The wind came up, from gale to hurricane and quite unbelievably beyond, a smashing fist that broke every window in the city and then, one by one toppled every skyscraper. By early afternoon a shadow appeared on the distant horizon, shimmering and indistinct. With unexpected speed the shadow materialized into a wall of moving water that, had they remained upright, would have dwarfed the largest skyscrapers. This wall overshadowed the city like a tornado of infinite extent and, rushing through, killed every living being in its path. The wall would continue on across the great plains and beyond, finally dissipating itself on the western slopes of the continent. Although nobody remained to appreciate it, the sun itself was larger and hotter in the new, more southern latitude of the late New York City.

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #34

Chapter Thirty Three

 

The soft but insistent whisper in his head gently woke him. “Time to saddle up and move out,” Wisdom told Earl. “I know it’s early,” She added as he glanced over to the clock on the dresser, “but you need to be on the road before dawn.” Earl woke Joyce and they quickly dressed. Joyce went to the neighboring door and softly knocked. She was greeted by Marge, who also was fully dressed, as was Ellery in the background. “Yeah,” she said, “She told us too.” Moshe and Miryam were already in the kitchen when they came in. Henry and Terry were there too. Terry softly wept as she cooked breakfast.

“How did this happen?” Terry wailed. “Why does my family have to go? How on earth did we get ourselves into this ungodly mess?”

“You said it yourself,” Wisdom interjected.

“Huh?”

“You said it now in one short word. ’Ungodly’ was the operative word, Terry. The United States, in particular, had chosen at the outset to align itself with God. The hand of God is on your constitution and many other guiding documents. That closeness to Us brought Us closer to you, and in turn gave you a special status, almost approaching that of Our beloved Israel. For centuries you remained somewhat faithful, falling away into complacency for brief periods. It was about the best We could expect from you. Up until recently most of you would repent and return to Us. But some of you never returned, and those of you who didn’t were a vital part of Our relationship with you and your country. Colleges like Princeton and Yale, which were established with the express purpose of teaching the Bible and Biblical principles to future leaders of your society degenerated into bastions of secularity, wherein the future leaders were taught the principles of material success over a relationship with God. This mindset bubbled over to infect the Christian seminaries, supposedly fulfilling their mission of preparing devout men of God to become pastors and spokespersons for God. Out of these terribly wounded seminaries came yet more secular attitudes and worse, doubts over the nature of God and whether He even existed. These seminaries turned a blind eye to the encroachment of false science, including Darwin’s theory of evolution, being indifferent to its obvious rejection of the Creation narrative of Genesis.

“Jesus said something very relevant to your collective turning away,” She added. In Luke 12:48 He said this:

“’But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. But unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required; and to whom men have committed much, of him will they ask the more.’

“You began as a holy nation,” She continued, “willingly setting yourselves apart from other nations to serve Us in love. We gave you much in return.

“So now You’re going to ask much,” Terry said dully.

“We already have, and in the past you have responded admirably, helping yourselves to achieve greatness among the nations.  We’ve always given more than what We’ve received, and for a long period of time, you were among the happiest of people.  But then you began to turn away, exactly like Israel did after her glory years under the kingships of David and his son Solomon. I realize that you never read the blessing and the curse that We had pronounced over Israel who, even more than America, are Our special people. The major portion of it is in Deuteronomy 28. Since you don’t have a Bible either, I’ll give you a few excerpts, paraphrasing it a bit for your modern sensibilities:

“’But it shall come to pass, if you won’t listen to the voice of the Lord your God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command you this day, that all these curses shall come upon you, and overtake you. You’ll be cursed in the city, and in the field. Your harvests will be cursed, and so will your offspring. . .The Lord shall send upon you cursing, vexation, and rebuke, in all that you set your hand to do, until you’re destroyed, and you die quickly, because of the wickedness of your doings, whereby you have forsaken me. The Lord shall make disease cling to you, until He has consumed you from off the land. . .The Lord shall smite you with cancer, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with extreme burning, and with violence, and with failed crops, and they shall pursue you until you die. . .The Lord shall change rain into dust. . .The Lord shall smite you with the boil of Egypt, and with the tumors and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof you can’t be healed. The Lord shall smite you with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart. . .You shall marry a wife, and another man will have her; you shall build a house, and you shall not live in it; you shall plant, and another will harvest it.’

 

“I could continue with this litany of painful consequence,” Wisdom continued, “because there’s much more in that dark chapter, all of which Israel had to endure over the centuries after she divorced herself from Us. But I think you get the point.”

“So those things that have been happening to us over the past decades – they’re actually consequences of removing you from public conversation? The superstorms, the earthquakes, the droughts, and the diseases?”

“Yes, Terry. Some of you Christians have attempted to warn the public about that connection from time to time, but each time they did so, they were immediately shouted down. They should have stuck to their guns. After all, the Bible is very clear about it, and not only in the words of Moses. Listen, for example, what the prophet Haggai had to say in verse seventeen of his Chapter 2:

“’I smote you with blight and with mildew and with hail in all the labors of your hands; yet ye turned not to me, saith the Lord.’

 

“Over the years, that portion of you who stubbornly chose to separate yourselves from Us grew ever larger in proportion to the rest of society. Eventually that group became the dominant one and included the nation’s opinion-shapers. Then, with the extension to secondary and state levels of the takeover of the institutions of government and education the secularization of America metastasized and spread more thoroughly into the organs of everyday life. Teaching colleges pushed a secular agenda onto their candidates, who themselves were selected as future teachers not on the basis of academic excellence, moral clarity, character and a love of God, but rather for their shallowness of thought and secular outlook on life. Once those teachers entered the schools, the cancer of secularism spread very rapidly. Look around you, Terry, and you others also. Didn’t you ever wonder why you as Christians are such a marginalized minority? America wasn’t that way for a very long time. It was its Christianity that made it great, because We favored you with a loving Hand that matched and surpassed your loyalty to Us. Now you’re going to have a measure of pain and suffering, not so much by your actions as by the actions of your secular brothers and sisters. But there’s a silver lining in that. We’ll understand your trials and be with you all the way. You’ll end up having lived noble lives, possessing qualities that We’ll cherish forever.”

They ate breakfast in uncomfortable silence, assuming that Wisdom had left. Moshe scratched his head. “I don’t even know where we’re heading,” he told Earl. “Sturgis,” Wisdom broke in.

“Sturgis? Wow. I had no idea You’d go for that kind of thing,” Ellery responded as a kaleidoscope of lurid images entered his mind.

“Enough,” She told him, but with a smile. “This conclave at Sturgis isn’t going to be the drug-infested biker Woodstock of past years, with naked women riding men on bikes and the fully connected but unstable assembly wobbling down the street. It’s going to be a Christian gathering. As a matter of fact, it’s only a jumping-off spot for Mount Rushmore, which is your ultimate destination.”

“What is that about, a modern-day Masada?” Earl responded.

“More than you possibly can imagine,” She told them. “But let’s save the details for later. You’ll be taking your bikes, of course, for the protection they’ll give you from the authorities. I’ll leave it to you as to the route you’re going to take to get there, but with the warning that it won’t be an easy trip.” She left.

Henry brought out an old Triple-A map of the United States. The regime may have changed, but the highways hadn’t, except for some earthquake damage and much neglect. They decided to head north almost to the border and pick up Kansas Highway 36, which they’d follow to Oberlin, where they’d go into Nebraska to the town of McCook, then take 2 to 61 and north along 61 into South Dakota, where they’d travel a very short distance along Interstate 90 to reach Highway 34, which would take them directly to Sturgis, bypassing Rapid City altogether. Although motorcycles were usually effective in preventing checkpoint halts, there was no sense in asking for trouble by taking the more well-traveled highways.

The men left the house after breakfast to take care of last-minute packing chores while the women and Henry said their good-byes, knowing that Henry and Terry would be left behind for good, never to be seen again. Behind her sorrow, Miryam harbored a gleam of excitement in her eyes. Terry noted it and was comforted by it, knowing that at least Miryam possessed the possibility of happiness, however brief it might be. Understanding that her own end was likely to be both soon and bleak, Terry nevertheless resolved to be brave about it, as a host of predecessor Christians had been with the comforting help of the Holy Spirit that was companion to their faith in Jesus. She looked at her husband with fondness and linked her arm in his. I have God and a good husband to live and die with. What more can a person ask?

 

A gloomy dawn came with a steady breeze as they traveled westward across Kansas. The fractionally increasing light revealed thick dark clouds that threatened rain, and maybe worse. Despite the ominous weather, for the first couple of hours the riders thrilled to the new adventure, the men enjoying the fresh experience of two-wheeled travel and their mates enjoying the openness of the view. Around noontime the south wind, which had been increasing in gradual stages and causing them to lean to the left, suddenly strengthened to the point that the riders were getting buffeted so hard that their leaning became precarious. Earl in particular began to feel that he was right on the edge of control. The spindly extension to his right arm that Moshe had cobbled up began to ache and his control over the handlebar was beginning to slip, but he knew that he must persevere through the obstacle or risk falling behind and losing the others. Wisdom, please give me strength to handle this, he pleaded. He continued to fight the wind, gritting his teeth.

A brief respite came when they reached Oberlin and headed north into Nebraska toward McCook. The storm became a tailwind, which was much easier to handle. Before they reached McCook they stopped by the side of the road and ate the lunch that Terry had lovingly packed. The wind buffeted them again when they left McCook to head northwest, but that leg was short and Earl was able to handle it. He still was very relieved when they turned back northward for the longer journey up through Nebraska into South Dakota. His relief was so palpable that he operated the cruise control, stretched out his legs, and leaned back to relax. He hummed a tune. The relaxation ended abruptly with a blow to his kidney. “Don’t get cocky!” Joyce shouted into his neck. He stiffened his back. His feet went back onto the pegs and remained that way for the rest of the trip. They left the stiff wind behind when they turned westward again along the final leg into Sturgis, and by the time they arrived in the evening the sun had made a brief appearance.

Regardless of whether the rest of the country was in the grip of a repressive regime, Sturgis was biker country and off-limits to authority of any kind except the local sheriff, who, the town had made sure, was also a biker with a biker’s attitude. At increasingly widely-spaced intervals one authority or another had attempted to impose a stricter control over the town. Such visits were invariably brief with quick descents into violence that left the feckless visitors worse for the wear.

The three weary couples parked in front of a likely bar, stretched their legs, and went in. Emboldened by the feel of the place, Ellery walked up to the bartender, noting that he didn’t seem to be wearing the mark. “We’re pretty hungry,” he said, “but we only have cash.”

“We only take cash,” the man said. “Take a seat at a table and Janie’ll come around and take care of you.”

They plopped themselves gratefully into chairs and looked over the menus, which boasted of a large variety of beers and stronger drinks but was limited in food to burgers and fries. The thought of hamburgers appealed to them all. Halfway through the meal they began to wonder among themselves as to what to do after they ate. The question was answered for them as a few people began to enter the bar and drift over to their table and sit. The newcomers eventually grew into a substantial crowd. Ellery adjusted to this development by extending his hand in greeting to the first of his new neighbors, who responded in kind. “Where’re you headed?” the man asked.

“Rushmore,” Ellery told him.

“Same here,” the man replied. “There’s a park outside the main attraction, the Presidents and such. It’s a tent camp now. Got a lot of people, Native Americans too. Don’t know why, but they all seem to have gotten the word to be there and be quick about it. Same with us. Somebody in my Church seems to have an inside track to God, or so she says. Told her to get herself over here and bring the rest along. I’m part of the rest, kind of tagging along. Nothing for me back home, so I might as well be here as there. Hope you have a tent. We’re kind of filled up.”

“We do,” Marge said, thanking God for the insistence on being prepared.

 

Outside the bar the street was almost filled with bikes. The three couples decided to go with the flow and followed the group out of town and up the mountain toward the park. It was now dark but the clouds were gone and as they traveled the inky blackness above them was the sky was dotted with bright pinponts of light.

The drive up the Rushmore Parkway was smooth, the numerous curves being wide and easy and, from what they could see from all the headlights, beautiful. There were trees in abundance, tall conifers silhouetted by the full moon that had just arisen over the mountaintop. I can’t wait to see what it looks like in the daytime, Joyce thought to herself. Eventually the bikes peeled off into the park, where gas stoves and lanterns lit up the tents. It looked like a city. They found an empty spot and unpacked their bikes, lighting a lantern for the illumination they’d need to set up their tents.

When they finished the housework, by common consent they turned off the lantern and lay on their bedding looking up at the sky. In their own way, each of them thanked God for the adventure and their rest among the grass and trees of His natural creation. I wonder what God has in mind for us now, Earl thought.

 

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #33

Chapter Thirty One

Since the completion of Jerusalem’s Third Temple, the nearby HaRamban Synagogue had been nearly deserted, its staff reduced to a skeleton crew consisting of the most junior rabbis and their assistants. Now it was densely packed with hundreds of scared and hungry humans. Some, the most fervently religious, awaited their fate stoically while many others openly wept at the misfortune that had befallen them. Virtually all of them were Messianic Jews whose crime was that they had failed to leave the city as quickly as the rest of their fellows. The crime carried the penalty of death.

The doors were locked, but it was only a matter of time before they were breached and the angry troops outside rushed in to slaughter them. One of these soldiers, a man named Mark, looked over at his buddy Jake, who was eagerly awaiting the order to advance. “Stand down, soldier,” Mark told him, grinning. “Rumor has it that we’re gonna spread napalm around the periphery and light the building up. We’re probably just waiting for the flame tanks to arrive.”

“I sure hope you’re wrong,” Jake responded. “My knife is sharp as a razor. I wanna try it out.” Blood lust was evident in his eyes. Mark looked around. The eagerness was universal among the men, as it was with him.

Mark laughed again, a short, brutal bark. “Hey, this time we got a double reason to kill. They’s Jews, but they’s also Christians. Means maybe we should kill ‘em twice!”

“Be okay then if we rape ‘em and kill ‘em after,” Jake said, his eyes bulging in anticipation.

“Hey, genius!” another soldier called. “You just come up with that idea?”

The soldiers became impatient and, their military discipline weakened by the drugs they had been issued by their leaders to dull any residual sense of morality, they began to act on their own. A group managed to lasso a lamppost and, tugging together, brought it down. Hefting it, they ran together with it, ramming it into a door. It took five attempts to batter down the door, but when it gave way there was a mad rush to enter and kill the men. The building erupted into a cacophony of screams and wails, and the smell of blood mingled with the stench of urine and feces. Eventually just the women and children remained, and then just the women. Several hours later the last woman was gone and an eerie silence prevailed as the soldiers lay around, tired and sated, oblivious to the carnage that surrounded them. The calm of the soldiers clashed wildly with the scene, which looked like the inside of a meat packing plant that had suffered the violence of machinery gone berserk.

“Okay, men. Up! Out! Out!” came the shouted command by a major, who was supported in his task of rousting them by a troop of MPs. A flame tank had arrived after all, its turret traversing one side of the building laying a patch of unlit napalm as the soldiers filed out, tired and disheveled. It’s engine shouted momentarily as it moved to another side, treads clanking heavily. When it had completed its traversal of the perimeter the tank returned, aimed through the open doorway and discharged a gout of napalm, this time aflame.

The grisly scene at the synagogue was played out in the same manner throughout the city, in other places of worship, in public meeting places, in shops and in private homes. The shops and homes didn’t rate the tank, but were set ablaze manually with gasoline. Except for a very few enclaves that had remained untouched, the Jerusalem that remained was no longer Christian or Jewish.

Jerusalem now was firmly in the hands of GLOW, who quickly restored peace to the city through implacable force.

That small but important portion of the vast Muslim community that insisted upon adhering to what they considered to be the important precepts of Islam utterly rejected the Catholic Church’s appeal to the majority of Muslims. They made their displeasure known through a continuation of the terrorist war that their predecessors had waged. The GLOW-dominated media refused to disseminate news of their numerous attacks, which gave the majority of mankind the impression that such extremism no longer existed. Life for most of mankind remained as it had throughout the early years of the twenty-first century, with the poor getting poorer and more miserable and the very wealthy reaping the comforts and privileges of their vast wealth. There was now no place on earth where the middle-class entrepreneur could gain a foothold and raise himself above the ranks of the unionized factory or farm worker. With few exceptions personal property was a privilege of the wealthy, the mass of humanity being consigned to a minimalist apartment existence.

Many of the Israelis who had fled Jerusalem at the desecration of the Third Temple found shelter from the government and people of Jordan, for which they were very grateful. Those who had managed to escape Jerusalem but were slower in the general rush to leave fared rather more badly. They were taken back to the temple, where they were tortured to the point of insanity, and then they were put to death in a mockery of the Jewish ritual of sacrifice. It was they who were butchered upon the temple altar, their blood running in a river down the exit channel.

Yet the system ran quite smoothly, just as those who had first created the structure of government had anticipated. That situation came to an abrupt end with the elevation to enormous of the importance of the disaffected Muslims’ decision to poison the wells, those wells being the vast and far-from-depleted oil wells of the Mideast and South America. In this case the poison was nuclear, inserted into the oil-bearing soils by missiles. Given half-lives exceeding ten thousand years of some of the nuclear materials, the oil fields that had fueled the economies of the world for a hundred years were lost forever.   The alternative oil beneath the ground of Russia and North America may have been sufficient to meet the primary needs of the system had their exploitation not been halted by the humbling of Russia in its war against Israel and the halting of drilling in North America due to the worldwide economic depression that had led to financial chaos and destroyed the oil extraction infrastructure.

The only truly viable source of oil left was the vast Mediterranean field controlled by the Israelis, which destroyed much of the unity among the world’s Regions as their individual leaders scrambled to outbid each other for access to this oil.

The Chinese leader found the hasty response of the Regional leaders to be humorous. “Look at those blind mice!” he chuckled at a video of their push to gain the benevolent attention of Israel’s prime minister, who now was enjoying an unprecedented surge in popularity among the world’s elite. “They’re falling all over themselves to lick the prime minister’s boots!”

“Don’t forget our own situation,” one of his peers in the politburo commented drily. “We ourselves are on the verge of oil starvation. At least they’re attempting to do something about it.”

“And we’re not?” the leader shot back, affronted. He stared at the offender as if he wished to strangle him for his stupidity. “Come here,” he said shortly, walking over to a large framed picture hanging at the most prominent position on the wall. The picture depicted a relatively small but numerically impressive portion of the vast Chinese army in full battle dress. “The other leaders are attempting to negotiate to their advantage. While they’re preoccupied with that futile task, we are going to march over there and simply take it. Does that address your ill-conceived concern? Have you no memory for how easy it was to reassert our dominion over Taiwan?”

The man shied away from the leader in humiliation while his other peers laughed openly at him. Why was I left out of this information? he asked himself, now in dread for his own future.

A day later the Chinese government began to prepare in earnest for a full-scale, take-no-prisoners assault on the already hotly-contested nation of Israel with the intent of grasping their oil field, now prized by virtually every nation on earth.

It was at this precise point that God decided that He’d had quite enough of mankind’s childish, arrogant foolishness. It was the perfect time, as He’d anticipated millennia before, to step into the affairs of man in a larger and more direct way. Merging with His Divine Consort, He communicated intimately with Her His will in that regard. Wisdom responded immediately.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty Two

 

 

 

 

There are a number of theories as to how the ring of space rubble that comprises the asteroids came to be formed. According to the planetesimal theory, it formed by accretion as the planets themselves supposedly did, but consisted of remnants that did not coagulate with the others because they lacked the collective mass to configure into a single, distinct body. There are problems with the planetesimal theory, chief among which is an inconsistency with the Newtonian law of conservation of momentum.

Another theory has it that the asteroids are the partial remnants of an enormous collision between a planet and some other very large body. This is the more likely supposition. A different kind of space object, the comet, is distinct from the asteroids in the location of its orbit and sometimes but not always its composition. Until the latter years of the twentieth century, comets were thought to be invariably cold and icy. This supposition was challenged by data gathered with the aid of modern equipment and techniques. While some comets are still known to possess characteristic ice, that is not always the case.

There are three types of comets: those that belong to the Kuiper belt, another belt like that of the asteroids but farther out, beyond the orbit of Neptune, and those associated with a hypothetical Oort Cloud that envelops the Solar System. The Oort Cloud has been placed as far out as 50,000 times the distance from Earth to Sun, almost a fifth of the distance to the nearest star. Those comets that belong to the Kuiper Belt populate the plane of planetary orbits and have shorter periods of orbit about the Sun, on the order of ten years, whereas the Oort comets have significantly longer periods.

The third type of comet is created directly by God when and where He wishes, but typically from material found within a large planet. Having been created by God Himself, its composition, size and trajectory are entirely up to God’s discretion. From the time of the Flood until now, Wisdom, in Her periodic entrances into the affairs of mankind to help some and wake others up, had contented Herself with picking up one of the numerous stones to be found in the asteroid belt and tossing them earthward. Now She decided to go big.

Bathed in the soft, weak light of its remote sun, Jupiter as viewed by the earthbound stargazer appears benign and cheerful in its cloaking hues of orange, red, and brown. Closer to its surface, the dominant planet of the solar system reveals more of its harsh and troubled nature. Gases thrust and swirl viciously against a starkly glaring backdrop of arcing electricity. The restless atmosphere provides but the merest hint of the seething hell far below, where element clashes with element in a heaving, boiling maelstrom as the massive giant on the very edge of starhood struggles to stay a planet, to avoid the fateful ignition.

Wisdom looked lovingly at this enormous planet, recalling with affection how many times She had used one of its offspring in the past to influence Her beloved mankind’s sojourn on Earth. The Flood; The Exodus; Joshua’s long day and America’s corresponding long night; Isaiah’s Errant Sundial

 

She recounted in Her mind the long and hazardous journey that Venus took as a wayward planetoid before it settled down into a stable orbit. Birthed from Jupiter by Wisdom as She was about to repeat with another planetoid, Venus at the Hand of Wisdom was directed toward Earth, which at the time had been enclosed by a beautiful, paper-thin canopy of ice. At that time, due to the canopy’s effect of creating a nearly uniform temperature from poles to equator, there was no rainfall on Earth, but a mist came up from the ground to water the life that God had placed there. Venus came close to Earth at the time of Noah, its gravitational influence shattering the canopy and shaking the Earth to release the highly-pressurized water in the aquifers buried underground. With the canopy gone, clouds formed, rain fell and the sun shining on the rain created rainbows for the first time.

Venus retreated from Earth with the Flood in its destructive wake, and continued on its awkwardly unstable orbit around the sun, which brought it back to the vicinity of Earth nearly once every Earth year. At its first return the planetoid remained far enough away from Earth that it didn’t do any further damage. On its next return Earth again remained undamaged, but the planetoid’s closest approach was just a little nearer to Earth. On its fifty-second return it finally got too close, and created more mayhem.

These fifty-two year cycles had repeated several times, each time visiting panic and terror upon mankind. One cycle was intimately connected with the Exodus of Israel from bondage in Egypt; the next caused Joshua’s long day and America’s corresponding long night. Things quieted down with respect to Earth after that, but then Venus, still in an unstable and dangerous orbit, nearly collided with Mars, stripping it of its water and half its surface, creating giant rifts, the Tharsis Bulge and Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, in the process pushing it like a giant billiard ball toward Earth. It was then Mars that threatened the Earth, coming so dangerously close every fifteen years that it influenced the Earth’s rotation and generated devastating earthquakes. The spectacle of errant planets was visible to men on Earth. Eyewitness accounts extend beyond the Bible to Homer’s Iliad and terrifying images of witches on broomsticks and dragons and sacred horned cows. The Israelites, in their journey to the Promised Land, were so terrified at the sight that they had decided to worship this apparition in the sky instead of their living and most loving God:

“And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Arron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, or your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me. And all the people broke off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with an engraving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These are thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, Tomorrow is a feast to the Lord.”

When the game of cosmic billiards was finally over with Venus tucked away into a stable orbit, mankind did its utmost to forget the entire thing. Learned men who should have known better invented natural laws that violated common sense, like uniformitarianism that demanded that the processes that shaped the earth and influenced geological formations were tiny and slow. Whenever a braver person would come along and attempt to point out the truth, the establishment scientists would generate tantrums and attempts on the poor creature’s life and career.

These things Wisdom pondered as She prepared to act again. Man refuses to learn from the past, She thought, shaking her lovely head in sadness. But yet there still is some nobility among them.

 

It troubled Her briefly that in the process of correcting the frequently-errant mankind Mars was nearly destroyed, but then rejoiced that the situation with that planet ultimately would be a good thing too, as it would give Her Son and future daughter-in-law an excellent task to restore that planet to its former beauty and utility as a haven for life.

Okay, honey, Wisdom spoke softly to the giant planet. Time to be a mommy again.

For the most part, Jupiter’s mad tantrums remain confined to the planet itself, the thrashing hidden below the colorful atmospheric cover that belies the unending struggle within the tortured interior. At rare intervals, however, in explosive fury the angry giant hurls a piece of itself outward with such speed that it strains the bonds of the mother planet’s enormous gravity.

Let’s see, Wisdom thought, cocking Her lovely head in a pose of studious observation.   She poked and prodded here and there, and the huge mother planet responded by ejecting a massive, white-hot ball of magma out of its molten interior. At first this proto-moon joined its siblings that circled the parent giant. Wisdom gave it another nudge and it left Jupiter’s gravitational bond to wander as a planetoid through the solar system. Its movement was far from random. Wisdom’s precise poke directed it straight toward Her target planet.

 

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #32

Chapter Thirty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Pope, having been informed of Israel’s selection of Simon ben Gideon as the world’s messiah, was apoplectic. After all the effort he’d put into placing the Catholic Church at the forefront of the world’s religions through ecumenization, this action on the part of the hated Israel had just cut him off at the knees. What rankled the most was that they’d done it behind his back. It was not that a new Jewish messiah would compete with the Catholic Jesus for the title and the religion. The Pope didn’t know whether this usurper was or wasn’t the actual messiah spoken of by the prophets. Nor did he care. Regarding the bottom line, however, he cared with a rabid intensity that took him over the edge into insanity. That bottom line, as he perceived it, was that the religious leadership of the world was slipping out of his grasp. And by a filthy, rotten Jew, no less! He had a terrifying image that the loyalty he’d won of many of the world’s movers and shakers through back-door bribes of money and prostitutes was wasted effort and that he was about to be consigned to history’s trash bin. Jerusalem would have been mine! he thought, horrified by the probability that he and his theology were on the verge of simply being shoved aside to make room for the Israeli messiah.

 

Insane or not, the Pope was correct in his dark assessment of his future. After GLOW’s meeting with him, the world leader had started asking questions. In very short order GLOW was fully apprised by the most trusted member of his personal staff of the Vatican’s rapidly-diminishing stature within the community of Regions. His ecumenism went too far, GLOW realized. The compromises left nothing of substance for committment to any one of the world’s religions, let alone them all. At any rate, one set of religious bandidos is quite enough, GLOW thought to himself, and I already have this new “messiah” in my pocket. GLOW correspondingly had directed staffer Abe Wilson to set in motion the elimination of the Pope and a media blitz intended to fully and irrevocably discredit the Vatican and its resident personnel.

It was not necessary to personally assassinate the Pope. The entire Vatican was torched to the ground in the dark hours of a cold, windy morning. Diabolically clever methods were employed to ensure that nobody escaped, so that the Pope went down in flames along with the entire Vatican organization. Given the increasingly open corruption of the Catholic leadership, the lamentation over their passing was minimal. With this removal of the central authority of the Catholic Church, each diocese was put adrift to survive individually the best it was capable of. Very soon thereafter, having bought into the necessity of a central leader and having accepted a theology so watered-down as to be meaningless, most of these Catholic representations closed their doors due to the profound loss of worshipers. A large number of elegantly purple-robed bishops and scarlet-robed cardinals found themselves without constituencies.

Good riddance! thought Wisdom as She observed the debacle, being perfectly aware that the real Church, consisting of widely-scattered individual Christians in diverse races, ethnicities and walks of life, had always existed apart from the man-centered and bureaucratic monstrosities controlled by self-serving leaders. They all were forewarned. Had they bothered to read and digest Scripture, they never would have put up with that mess. Well, Jesus through John told them, and He told them well.

The Scripture to which Wisdom referred in particular was Revelation 17:

“And there came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls, and talked with me, saying unto me [John], Come here; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters; with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness and I saw a woman sit on a scarlet-colored beast, full of the names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and bedecked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornications. And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth. And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus; and when I saw her, I wondered with great wonder.

 

          “And the angel said unto me, Why didst thou wonder? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns. The beast that thou sawest was, and is not, and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition; and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is, not, and yet is. And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come, and when he cometh, he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition. And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, who have received no kingdom as yet, but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast. These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them; for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings, and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful. And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues. And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire. For god hath put in their hearts to fulfill his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled. And the woman whom thou sawest that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.”  

 

As in the earlier declaration of Simon ben Gideon as Israel’s messiah, Jerusalem was again crowded with excited Israelis for the dedication of the newly-completed Third Temple. Another stage had been erected for the event, which held the most prominent of the orthodox priesthood. Messiah ben Gideon, who had willingly allowed himself to be placed above the Chief Rabbi, stood at the podium, ready to introduce the majestic GLOW, now seated behind the messiah and waiting to be formally introduced to the adoring crowd. Before the introduction, the rabbi gave a short dedication speech, quoting the first several verses of Haggai Chapter 2:

“’In the seventh month, in the one and twentieth day of the month, came the word of the Lord by the prophet Haggai, saying, Speak now to Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua, the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to the residue of the people, saying, Who is left among you that saw this house in its first glory? And how do ye see it now? Is it not in your eyes in comparison with it as nothing?’

 

“Well, that was what our new temple looked like a few short years ago,” the rabbi continued. “Nothing. But now . . . well, I’ll continue with Haggai:

“Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, saith the Lord; and be strong, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; and be strong, all ye people of the land, saith the Lord, and work; for I am with you, saith the Lord of hosts. According to the word that I had covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt, so my Spirit remaineth among you; fear not. For thus saith the Lord of hosts. Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; and I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come; and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the Lord of hosts. The glory of this latter house shall be greater than the former, saith the Lord of hosts; and in this place will I give peace, saith the Lord of hosts.’

 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” intoned the rabbi, “this day this house shall indeed be filled with glory, for I present to you now our savior, Simon ben Gideon!”

Messiah ben Gideon pointed to the temple. “A marvel of construction,” he said to the crowd. “Utterly magnificent, a miracle, really. And so from this day forward, Israel has its temple, its messiah, and,” turning to the man seated behind him, “its God. God of Gods, very God of very God, majestic in stature, all-knowing, all-seeing, all Being. Ladies and gentlement, I present to you his majesty, GLOW.”

When the handclapping and cheering died down, GLOW began to talk, so quietly that the crowd had to strain to hear. Silence prevailed, intruded upon only by GLOW’s words. “People of Israel – hear me when I tell you that no longer are you to be forgotten and stepped on. You are my chosen people, chosen from before the Great Exodus from Egypt. I now announce a new covenant, the passing away of the nation of Israel. From henceforth, this shall be the home of your god, my home, and I shall name it after me. It shall be called Glowland, for I, GLOW, inhabit it as god with you. I call upon your messiah, Simon ben Gideon, to perform the prayer of dedication as I ascend the steps and enter my new home.

Ben Gideon stood before the steps as GLOW ascended them, spreading his hands to heaven as did King Solomon centuries before at the dedication of the First Temple. His prayer, in fact, attempted to parrot the words of this early king, a much wiser and God-fearing man.

“Lord god of Glowland,” Gideon began, “there is no god like thee, in heaven above, or in earth beneath, who keepest covenant and mercy with thy servants who walk before thee with all their heart; who hast kept his covenant and fulfilled it at this day. Therefore, now, lord god of Glowland, keep that which thou hast promised thy people, and dwell everlastingly with them. But will god indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that has been built in your honor!

“Yet have thou respect unto the prayer of thy servant, and to his supplication, O Lord my god, and to hearken unto the cry and to the prayer, which thy servant prayeth before thee today; that thine eyes may be open toward this house night and day, even toward the place of which thou hast said, My name shall be there; that thou mayest hearken unto the prayer which thy servant shall make toward this place. And hearken thou to the supplication of thy servant, and of thy people of Glowland and beyond to the whole Earth, when they shall pray toward this place, and hear thou in this dwelling place.

“We come before you in most humble thanksgiving for your condescension to dwell among us.”

At the completion of this dedication Gideon looked upward toward the sky above, which was empty of clouds except for one round, puffy cloudlet directly above them. Extending his arms yet further, he pointed both index fingers to that cloud. In response, a laser-bright beam of red light emanated from the cloud and rested on the new Holy of Holies, within which GLOW now entered, hidden from the crowd by the building itself.

Awestruck, the masses knelt before the temple, their hands in positions of supplication. Occupied as they were in worship to GLOW, the crowd failed to notice the Messianic Jews among them depart in haste. They had come out of curiosity; now, they were obeying the command of Jesus in Matthew 24 to run for their lives, their destination the other side of the Jordan River into the hills of Jordan:

“When ye, therefore, shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place (whosoever readeth, let him understand), then let them who are in Judea flee into the mountains; let him who is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house; neither let him who is in the field return back to take his clothes. And woe unto those who are with child, and to those who give suck in those days! But pray that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day; for then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved; but for the elects’ sake those days shall be shortened.”

The Great Tribulation had arrived on earth.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #31

Chapter Twenty Nine

Jacob and Moira had thoroughly enjoyed the respite from fighting given them by the cessation of the Russian-led conflict and the subsequent emergence of Israel intact and now recognized by her people as truly blessed by God. They had used this time wisely to more fully integrate themselves into each other as a complementary team, putting the extraordinary bond they shared into use in their presentation of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah to a multitude of their countrymen. They often went on such missionary journeys to the Galilee area and into Jerusalem and the West Bank cities of Hebron and Ramallah. On many such occasions they were joined by others from Dafna, but at other times they preferred to go by themselves, considering those times to be mini-vacations in which they enjoyed the differences in people, scenery, the restaurants, and their overnight accommodations along with the pursuit of their mission.

Half of their free time was spent on the Temple Mount, watching the pace of construction of the Third Temple, which awed them with its beauty. So many Israelis had converted to Christianity, however, that Jacob and Moira began to wonder whether the ancient temple practice of slaughtering animals would actually resume once the temple had been completed. Perhaps, even though the Messianic Christians realized that the animal sacrifice had always pointed to Jesus and were no longer necessary since He had made the ultimate sacrifice on the cross, they would allow the practice to continue out of respect for tradition.

The other half of their free time was spent on the odious task of helping to bury the bodies of the dead invaders, a seemingly endless job that not only stank to the point of intolerability but carried with it the danger of radiation poisoning. Yet the couple, like many other Israeli citizens, considered it not only a duty but an honor to the mercy of God to be alive to carry it out.

On rare occasions Jacob and Moira would make the trek down to Gaza to visit their old companions Sid and Mary, another happily-married couple who were engaged in the task of rebuilding the area that was so devastated by the Palestinians when they were granted the formerly-lovely place by an ill-advised Israeli government. The restoration was quite far along, and when they visited, the two couples spent much of their time on the beach swimming and collecting sun tans. At least once on every such outing Sid would laughingly tell Jacob to keep himself away from the odd bullet, referring to the time Jacob was shot in the chest by a bullet from a would-be terrorist. That little drama would invariably be followed by a clinging hug from Moira.

One day while they were enjoying an idle day of sun at the beach, Jacob looked over to his lovely companion with a question on his mind. “Do you think that Jesus ever went swimming?”

“What kind of question is that?” she replied. “He made the ocean. He made the water that’s in the ocean. In fact, He made the molecules that make up the water, and the atoms that . . .“

“Okay, enough. And then you’re going to ask why He’d need to swim in the first place, since He can just walk on the top. That’s not what I’m asking   I’m thinking of what He did in an experiential sense while He was on the Earth. What He tasted, or felt. Did He enjoy the sun like we’re doing now? Did He get to feel His body surrounded by warm water? What did He know of His own Godhood. How far did He go in His kenosis?”

“I can’t answer that intelligently, dear. How can anyone possibly know what went on in Jesus’ mind during His incarnation.”

“Agree. But I’ve read a large number of accounts, many of which diverge rather extensively from what Scripture itself teaches. One that did agree with Scripture was particularly appealing. It was written some time in the 1920s, as I recall, by a professor by the name of Alva McClain. In his article he said something that really stuck with me, something to the effect that it would be infinitely better to give up the notion of his absolute attributes than his moral heroism. That statement alone fits perfectly with Earl’s notion of God’s omni-attributes being subordinate to His primary attribute of His willingness to give them up for the sake of selfless love.”

“What a beautiful thought!” Moira remarked.

“Yeah. McClain’s concept of Jesus’ kenosis makes sense in terms of the Scripture he cited as driving the entire controversy over how much Godhood Jesus maintained in His human form.

“Which is?”

“Philippians 2, verses 5 through 8. Here, I have a Bible in the backpack. I’ll read it to you.” He extracted the Bible and started reading:

“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God. But made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and, being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”

“McClain differentiated the form of God from the intrinsic nature of God,” Jacob continued, “the nature of God being His transcendent attributes as well as His personality. The implication is that in His kenosis, his emptying of Himself, Jesus did not give up His Godhood, but just His form, which is the exercise of Godhood. What He really gave up was the independent exercise of Godhood, voluntarily and in perfect obedience to the Father’s will restricting any manifestation of Godhood to that specifically willed by the Father through the Holy Spirit. That restriction included His knowledge as well as His actions, which means that He was fully aware of His Godhood, but voluntarily maintained, in humble obedience to the Father, any actions or knowledge that wasn’t in perfect conformance to the Father’s will. To me that makes perfect sense, and it emphasizes Jesus’ selfless nobility.”

“You’ll have to revisit the issue in more austere surroundings. I’ve absorbed as much as I’m able to, and right now I can’t help but think of that beautiful water in front of us. How about a dip?”

That evening the two couples went up to Jerusalem to attend the ceremony in honor of Simon ben Gideon, the courageous soldier who had risked his life to save the children trapped in a burning building during the Russo-Israeli War. Jerusalem was packed with people wishing to add their own presence in support of the countrywide expression of gratitude for his selflessly heroic act.  The four crowded in best they could as the Prime Minister recited the soldier’s brave deeds, adding that ben Gideon had come to his country’s aid at precisely the right moment like David and his namesake Gideon before him, when all appeared to be lost and Israel desperately needed a champion. Proclaiming ben Gideon to be the very champion Israel needed, the Prime Minister draped a wreath of flowers on his shoulders and then placed a crown of olive twigs on his head in keeping with the millennia-old symbol of military valor. He kissed the man’s cheeks and turned him around to face the crowd. “Men and women of Israel,” he proclaimed, “I present to you the savior of our land!”

“That’s going a bit too far,” Moira murmured in Jacob’s ear. “We saw with our own eyes what happened. It was all God’s doing. I’m not saying that the man isn’t brave or shouldn’t be honored for what he did, but to claim that he saved Israel . . .“

“Yeah, what next?” Jacob broke in. “Are they going to make him the Messiah?” He was bumped in the shoulder by the woman next to him, who had overheard his comment. When he turned toward her, he was greeted by a vicious glare. “You’ll shut your mouth if you know what’s good for you,” she snarled, pointing to the large man standing beside her.

They were interrupted by a commotion on the makeshift stage. The cluster of dignitaries behind the Prime Minister parted to permit the entrance on-stage of the Chief Rabbi, a Levite from among the community of orthodox priests who had been waiting for their entire lifetimes for the privilege of constructing the third and final Temple of God on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Now was an unprecedented opportunity: Israel’s primary enemies had been vanquished and the great Temple could now be built without meaningful opposition. The Chief Rabbi strode up to the Prime Minister, who deferentially withdrew himself, and moved over to stand behind ben Gideon. He gently turned the man around, gazed into his eyes, and kneeled before him. The sight of the religious potentate kneeling astonished Jacob and Moira, and much of the crowd with them. When he found his voice, he whispered in Moira’s ear, “I was only joking before, but I think that this is actually going to happen!” He turned to Sid, who was standing next to Moira, and they rolled their eyes in unison.

The Chief Rabbi stood and addressed the crowd. “This is a momentous day in the history of Israel,” he began. “I proclaim Simon ben Gideon to be our long-awaited Messiah, the Savior promised by our prophets, by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah. Represented by King David and represented by our Gideon of the past. By . . .“

He was drowned out by the noise of the screaming crowd. He patiently waited until the clapping and shouting began to die down, and then continued. “Our Messiah’s presence leads to another great and holy event. Wc can now start to erect our Temple.”

The crowd erupted in jubilation once more. When the noise dimmed again, ben Gideon took over. “Fellow Israelis!” he said loudly, and the crowed quieted in response. “I thank you for your recognition. I am indeed the one for whom you have been searching, and I myself proclaim a new era for our nation. But I must humble myself. As our orthodox religion implies, I cannot claim to be God. That singular attribute belongs to one person, and one person alone, the man you already know as the former president of the North American Region and who has now ascended to the position of GLOW. But through me, we of Israel have the unprecedented honor of serving GLOW as priests in fulfillment of his kingdom. Sons and daughters of Abraham! Very soon, with your help, we will begin anew to honor the tradition of sacrifice to your God and to mine. We shall restore the covenant, so dear to us all, the sacred transaction between God and our father Abraham and thus enter an era of endless blessing. Let the building begin!”

Once more pandemonium prevailed as the enthusiastic cheering began afresh. Jacob tugged at Moira’s sleeve. “Let’s go,” he said to her.

“You bet,” she replied, motioning for Sid and Mary to come with them. “Something’s terribly wrong about what he said.”

“What he said?” Jacob answered as they distanced themselves from the crowd. “Not a whole lot of kenosis there, although he did deny his godhood. But that’s not right either. Interesting that we were just talking about that. That’s not the only thing wrong with this scene. The very fact of his claim to messiahship is extremely wrong. He couldn’t be the Messiah, because the time window of the prophecies has come and gone. Furthermore, Jesus fulfilled that title so completely that there’s no room for another. But the biggest problem with the whole business is that since Jesus’ sacrifice of Himself on the cross, once and for all in our behalf, there’s really no reason for the continuation of animal sacrifice. And GLOW? From what I’ve heard about him and his unmitigated arrogance, there’s certainly no kenosis there either.” He turned around and received another shock. “Look at that, will you?” he said, stopping short. Following the lead of the Chief Rabbi, the people were now on their knees in worship.

“So now we have a messiah who’s not God, and a God who’s not the messiah,” Sid quipped, as they turned back and continued walking away from the spectacle. “I wonder how that strange theology will affect the Messianic Jews.”

“Probably not at all, except for a disgust with their fellow Jews for falling for such a blatant falsehood,” Jacob replied. “Their acceptance of Jesus as their Messiah in the face of Jewish tradition required them to give some serious theological thought to the matter. It would take me too long to list the contradictions in Scripture that this evil arrangement entails. The only part of Scripture that it agrees with is the end-time scenario.”

“Time to hit the road,” Wisdom said, walking with them. “Meaning to get yourselves in gear and head back to Dafna. But this time, Sid, you and Mary will want to go with them. Now scat.”

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #30

Chapter Twenty Seven

“Dinner’s on the table,” Terry called. When they were seated the empty chairs spoke eloquently of two missing people. “Where’s Miryam? Terry asked, and received blank stares in return. “And Moshe?”

“They went out for a ride,” Earl said. “Said it would be short, but that was over an hour ago.” He looked at Ellery. As the others followed his stare, Ellery’s countenance fell and stomachs dropped around the table. Suddenly the dinner had lost its appeal.

Ellery rose from the table. “I’ll go look,” he said, and rushed out the door with his coat in his arm. The others heard the crack of his bike’s exhaust. Several eyes followed his back as it diminished down the road into the distance.

Ellery had guessed right about the route they had taken.. Half an hour later he found their motorcycle as he rounded a bend. In fact, he had to swerve to avoid it, as it lay on its side in the middle of the highway. Ellery hit the brakes hard and slowed, easing up to the head of a gravel road to the right. A hundred feet farther up the road a deer also lay on its side. It was dead. He looked around for signs of Moshe and Miryam, finally seeing the couple beneath a large tree. Miryam was lying down as Moshe leaned over her, attempting to administer some kind of help. He saw Ellery and beckoned him over.

As he approached the couple, Ellery saw that Moshe was crying. “I hit a deer,” he said. “It happened so quickly I couldn’t do anything. Miryam’s in trouble, Ellery. I can’t lose her.” His weeping became desperate.

“It’s okay,” Ellery said. I’m sure you couldn’t help it, so don’t blame yourself. Where’s her injury?”

“Her right leg is all torn up. She may have broken a bone in her leg or hip. But she’s so quiet! She was talking a while ago, sounded normal, and then she kind of fell asleep. She may have a head injury too. Aw gee! Why’d I have to . . .”

Miryam chose that moment to stir. She opened her eyes to look at Moshe. “Are you okay, Moshe?” she asked.

“Me okay? Me? I’m just fine, not that I deserve to be. How about you? You got me real worried. Are you still sleepy?”

“No. Not so much.” She struggled to get up, but Moshe firmly held her down. “What about the bike?” she asked.

“I don’t know. The bike’s not that important, not next to you.” Ellery assessed the couple. In actuality, Moshe didn’t look all that great. Both legs of his Levi’s were shredded and red, bloody flesh peeked out from the tears in the cloth. “Got a good dose of road rash yourself, I see,” he told Moshe. Miryam looked at him and put her hand to her mouth in horror.

“Yeah,” Ellery said. “You two are a fine-looking pair. Seems to me you’re just perfectly ready to get hitched. Would be a wedding to tell your grandkids about. Problem is, we can’t take you to the hospital, Miryam. Not after what Earl’s told me about what they do with sick folks. I don’t want to see you carted off to a death camp, and I’m sure that Moshe would back me on that.”

“Maybe you can go back and get us a vehicle that Miryam can ride in.”

“Sure thing. Here, take this and wrap her up in it. She’s probably still in shock.” He removed his coat and handed it to Moshe.

Returning back to the road, Ellery was prepared to steer the bike into a ditch and write it off, but in lifting it back upright he saw the deer must have hit the bike a glancing blow, enough to kill it and for Moshe to lose control, but damaging very little. He walked the bike to where his own stood and, leaving it parked there, got on his motorcycle and headed back for the house in a big hurry. The speedometer needle hit the hundred mph mark several times on the trip home.

They were waiting on the porch as he entered the driveway, but Henry took one look at his lone figure and ran down the stairs before he arrived and headed off to his old SUV. It was already moving as Earl and Ellery ran after it and piled into the front seat. Ellery returned first with the motorcycle, having managed to re-start it and drive it back. Henry’s car followed soon after with Moshe and Miryam inside. Dinner remained on the table, cold and forgotten.

Several anxious days passed before the extended family began to assume that Miryam’s head injury wasn’t life-threatening or permanent. Happiness prevailed when that was settled. Whatever else that was going on in the world was insignificant next to Miryam’s recovery.

One evening during her recovery Wisdom showed up at Miryam’s bedside. “Still a little sore, I see,” She said.

“I’m still alive,” Miryam replied. “I thought You wanted us to do this thing,” she added. “Why this?”

“I do want you to do ‘this thing’, Miryam. You and Moshe got banged-up some, but look how I preserved the motorcycle!”

Miryam couldn’t help but laugh at that. She stored it in her memory to share with the others later. “No, but really, did we do something wrong?”

“No, at least nothing serious. Moshe was getting cocky on the bike. He needed to shed some of that before the important trip. He’ll be a little more appreciative of you after that last little excursion. But those weren’t the main issues. You both need to develop more faith in Us. I don’t want to scare you, but there are some pretty heavy moments in store for you in the near future, and you’re going to need some mental preparation to match.”

“Oh-oh. Now you have me on edge. What do You have in mind – the end of the world?”

“I’ll make sure you both can handle it. No, it won’t be the end of the world. Not exactly. But it might seem like it . . . well, whatever. Just get well. We love you. ‘Bye now.”

For the next several minutes Miryam pondered the emotional grenade that Wisdom had tossed her way before leaving. Then she recognized it for what it was: another call to exercise faith. She began to relax and soon fell asleep.

Chapter Twenty Eight

Moshe and Miryam were married on a spring Sunday at Henry and Terry’s home by Pastor Arnold Bliss, an ordained minister who had lost his Church to the city fathers, who then had sold it to a group of entrepreneurs who turned it into a wholesale marijuana outlet. The loss was minimal, as the Church had been extensively vandalized two years ago, and the congregants driven to home worship, meeting at a different location each week. As the home for this Sunday’s worship service was at Henry’s, the entire congregation was there to witness the joyful event.

“That was rather rude, don’t you think?” One of the guests said to another after Moshe and Miryam abruptly departed for their honeymoon directly after the wedding ceremony, their destination happening to be Miryam’s room down the hall. The woman with whom she was conversing had a considerably sunnier personality and responded accordingly. “Not at all. I remember – vividly – my own marriage to Charlie, and how I was thinking that the reception was endless and all I wanted to do was grab my new mate and make it happen.”

“Really, Alice, was that kind of talk necessary?” They drifted apart after a brief but uncomfortable silence. Poor Adam, Alice thought, looking at the woman’s husband. Poor, poor Adam.

As Moshe and Miryam were enjoying their honeymoon, a continent away the Pope was having a heated discussion with a number of his bishops and cardinals, many of whom had arrived at his bidding from their homelands scattered about the world. “But how can you possibly reconcile Christianity with the Muslim faith?” one cardinal brought up for the fifth time that day to what appeared to be deaf ears. “It’s a monotheistic religion all right,” he continued, “but it’s monotheistic to a fault. When they speak of one God, they mean it so literally that they exclude the possibility of a divine Son and a divine Holy Spirit. In other words, your holiness, there cannot be a Trinitarian Godhead. And they aren’t about to back down on that issue, believe me.

“I hear you,” the Pope said over the murmurs of others. “I heard you before. And quiet down, people. I can hardly hear myself think. If they remain firm on that, it’s just a concession we’ll have to make to them as the price we’ll have to pay for world peace.”

“I wonder what God will have to say about that,” one bishop murmured under his breath. The Pope, who was endowed with exceptionally sharp hearing , picked up on it.

“God?” the Pope responded. “If God really existed, the world wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in now. You know as well as I do that it’s our responsibility to maintain the myth of God to the masses of the world for the sake of world stability. It won’t do us any good to be caught up in the belief ourselves.”

The bishop who had commented was certainly caught up in the belief that God did indeed exist, having personally experienced the hand of God in his life. The Pope’s statement shocked him, as it was the first time that his superior had openly expressed his denial of God. Now he wondered what had happened to his beloved religion that had allowed an atheist to assume the lofty position as representative of Christ on Earth. But he kept his thoughts to himself, suddenly realizing that he must be in the minority. Although he privately chastised himself for his cowardice, the enormity of what he had just heard paralyzed him from speaking out about it.

“As a matter of fact,” the Pope continued, “in this modern era Christians have been quite thoroughly weaned from the Bible. They’ll readily accept a doctrinal statement from the Church that’s more all-encompassing than the narrow Biblical concept of there being only one path to heaven. The Church urgently needs to extend her reach beyond the Christian and Muslim communities to all the world’s religions for the sake of world peace. Look at how little our own Christian flock understands what Scripture says of God. Or even cares.”

“Well, maybe the Christians may not know what’s in their Holy Book, but the Muslims certainly do,” another bishop said. “I don’t think a statement of faith contradictory to the Quran will wash with them.”

“I do,” the Pope said. “Think of how contradictory the Quran is with itself, advocating both peace and violence at the same time. With the proper wording, we can easily get past that tiny little hurdle.”

Then he got to the heart of the matter. “We need to place more emphasis on the material world, minimizing thoughts of heaven or spiritual intangibles. What we really need to do is get in line with GLOW’s agenda. Look at what this magnificent man has already accomplished! And see how he’s been received by people of all faiths! Think how we can help by reconciling all the world’s religions – we’ll accomplish nothing less than the restoration of the original Babel, and indeed there will at last be nothing preventing mankind from pursuing every dream, every thought, and every delight that his rich, fruitful imagination can produce!”

“What about Israel?” another bishop pressed. “They’ve been clamoring for the right to build a new temple in Jerusalem.”

“What about it?” the Pope responded, irritated with what to him was an extraneous comment. “Let them build it. Since the Palestinians got so thoroughly trampled, they’re not likely to put up a fuss. And don’t talk to me about including Jews in our policy of thorough ecumenism. They’ll put up with anything we decide to do if they know what’s good for them.”

Within weeks the Catholic Church announced its position of tolerance and welcoming acceptance of all creeds and faiths within the vast community of mankind. To prove that new and kinder attitude, they published in all the world’s media their statement of faith, one in which the person of GLOW was prominently honored. GLOW responded by honoring the Church in a widely-publicized celebration held in the Vatican.

A major development that emerged from this celebratory gathering was another document, signed jointly by GLOW and the Pope, stating the Church’s support of GLOW’s confirmation of Israel’s covenented right to exist, a right that included Israel’s access to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the purpose of establishing a new temple. One item in the document that received much enthusiastic media attention was the formalization of the world-embracing Common Economic System, abbreviated to CES, its main feature the ubiquitous mark that symbolized patriotic obeisance to GLOW. CES promised to rid the world of the numerous curses by which the underworld had plagued modern society: theft of property and identity, money laundering and illegal transactions of every dark sort, and hoarding. CES made perfect sense to everyone except a tiny segment of society, those malcontents labeled Christian Fundamentalist Terrorists.

The peace in Israel imposed by GLOW led to the desire on the part of the rabbinical staff to forge ahead with the construction of a new temple, which had been a national desire for over a millennium. In synagogues the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of a temple was quoted often, particularly selected passages of his Chapter 40 which was written while Ezekiel was still captive in Babylon:

“In the five and twentieth year of our captivity, in the beginning of the year, in the tenth day of the month, in the fourteenth year after the city was smitten, on the selfsame day, the hand of the Lord was upon me, and brought me there. In the visions of God brought he me into the land of Israel, and set me upon a very high mountain, on which was a structure like a city on the south. And he brought me there, and, behold, there was a man, whose appearance was like the appearance of brass, with a line of flax in his hand, and a measuring reed; and he stood in the gate. And the man said unto me, Son of man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears, and set thine heart upon all that I shall show thee; for to the intent that I might show them unto thee art thou brought here. Declare all that thou seest to the house of Israel. And, behold, a wall on the outside of the house round about, and in the man’s hand a measuring reed of six cubits long by the cubit and an handbreadth; so he measured the breadth of the building, one reed, and the height, one reed. Then came he unto the gate which looketh toward the east, and went up its steps, and measured the threshold of the gate, which was one reed broad; and the other threshold of the gate, which was one reed broad. And every little chamber was one reed long, and one reed broad; and between the little chambers were five cubits, and the threshold of the gate by the porch of the gate within was one reed.”

 

While some rabbis would continue with the details presented in the remainder of the chapter, most would stop short after a few samples and exhort their congregants, saying in effect that since God had provided them with such minute details, many of which could apply only to the temple that hadn’t yet been built, did it not behoove His people to respond by implementing this great vision? This message, repeated often in diverse locales, brought the nation together in a unique way to fulfill Ezekiel’s vision.  

The nation of Israel commenced immediately with the construction of their Third Temple, working at a feverish pace as if its completion was a national emergency.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #29

Chapter Twenty Six (continued)

“I wonder if you could teach me,” Earl said, entering the conversation for the first time.

“Gee, I don’t know.” Moshe scratched his chin as he reflected on the possibility.

“Forget it, Earl,” Joyce told him. “You’re not exactly young any more. And what about a missing piece of your body? An important one for a would-be biker, I’d guess.”

Moshe was quiet for a time, thinking, as all eyes were leveled on him for the final answer. “It turns out that with a motorcycle the left hand is more important than the right,” he said after a lengthy pause. “The clutch is mounted on the left handlebar and takes a good squeeze to operate. The brake’s on the right, which if it was the only one would be at least as important as the clutch, but there’s also a foot-operated brake pedal on the right side, which makes for some redundancy. You’d just have to work around your handicap there, be more aware and leave extra space between you and the vehicle in front.”

“But what about the throttle?” Earl was excited about the prospect of riding a bike, but he was beginning to see the negatives. “How can I twist it with nothing to twist with?”

“Exactly right,” Joyce commented. “Which is why you’re not going to be playing with a motorcycle.” Joyce wasn’t conflicted in the least about preventing Earl from embarking on another risky adventure. Uppermost in her mind was her love for Earl, and her rich imagination presented a number of images of Earl bleeding from various abused body parts after falling off a bike. But also was her hospital memory of Maggie’s lengthy expositions of the hazards and discomforts of motorcycle riding behind her husband. Joyce knew that if, by some miracle, Earl would become proficient in riding a bike, he’d be bugging her to ride with him. No way that’s going to happen, she told herself, dismissing the possibility as ridiculous.

“Forget Earl,” Joyce said to Moshe. “Try it with Ellery. Let Marge have fun on the back.” Marge rolled her eyes to Joyce, giving her a sarcastic “Thanks, but no thanks.” But Ellery became excited about the prospect of a new adventure and coaxed Moshe outside for a first lesson.

Ellery had the entire household as an audience for his first try on the bike, which was a Yamaha Virago. The Virago was a sporty machine with an 1100 c.c. V-twin engine that Harley riders tended to call a Harley wannabe, but the truth was that it was a great engine in its own right. They were amply rewarded by the hilarity of Ellery’s ineptitude, which included a spectacular brush with a tree limb. Not to be put off by a little pain, Ellery persevered until he was able to keep the bike in an upright position for minutes at a time. The wobbling continued, though, which kept the mirth alive to the onlookers. Several days later, Ellery became proficient enough as a rider that his audience lost interest, and he continued to develop his skills in relative privacy.

A week after the previous session, Earl opened the Wednesday night Bible study with a direct rebuttal of Darwinian evolution. “In the first place,” he began, “natural selection doesn’t address the issue of how the first living thing began. All life has something in common: DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, which consists of a sugar-phosphate matrix that operates like the tape that used to be the storage medium for software instructions. Inside that matrix is a very long string of chemicals called nucleotides, whose pattern, like that of digital ones and zeros, describe a code for life. This code not only defines the nature and operation of a living being, but includes the instructions for making it.

“Natural selection describes a process by which a living being that is subjected to random variations in its DNA code may improve its characteristics or even, hypothetically, to develop into an improved being. Even if one accepts that premise, which is demonstrably false, natural selection has nothing to do with the creation of the first living being, because that process involves competition only remotely, if at all. One of the biggest problems with getting to that first living thing is the stumbling block of chirality. All of the enormously long sugar-phosphate molecules comprising the DNA string must be of a single orientation, called right-handed, whereas such molecules exist in nature with both left- and right-handed orientations in equal measure. The ability of randomly assembling even a small portion of a DNA string of the proper chirality has been mathematically demonstrated to be impossible, given all the time in the world. The same chirality issue exists with the assembly of amino acids into proteins.

“Speaking of assembling proteins, genes are the subroutines within the DNA code that specify the sequence by which specific amino acids are assembled to form the desired protein. But the assembly itself requires another protein to read the code and perform the actual assembly. This begs the question like the chicken and the egg of which came first: the protein being assembled to support a living being, or the protein required to perform the assembly? Entertaining the notion that they both formed at the same time is beyond naive.

“Then there’s the equally big issue of sexual reproduction: both male and female had to have been formed at the same time to make it workable. Moreover, sexuality is just one example of many living systems that require symbiotic relationships to maintain life.

“But even supposing that these issues could somehow be resolved, what about the fact that, by its own definition, a purely natural system lacks intelligence. The implication of that limitation is rather obvious: unintelligent systems cannot anticipate, meaning that they can’t visualize beforehand a function that doesn’t yet exist. Because of that inability, they can’t create that function, which is the basis of Dr. Michael Behe’s famous ‘irreducible complexity’ issue. By the way, there were some early attempts, since thoroughly discredited, to refute Behe on that score by proposing that new systems can be generated by ‘borrowing’ features of earlier systems.

“Then yet further, there’s the huge issue of systems integration. Even if a ground-bound animal with legs were to somehow develop wings and got past the transitional stage intact, he’d have to have the bone structure, musculature, tendons, nervous system, lung design and a host of other companion features to be able to fly with those wings.

“There are many more issues described by highly-qualified scientists that inhibit evolution from being a viable process. But our time’s up for tonight and you’ve been given plenty to think about. I hope that what I’ve said to you so far will help you see that the Genesis story of creation is the more scientific one after all. Good night and God bless you.”

The next evening Moshe opened the dinner table conversation with talk of the bike, but this time he switched the subject back to Earl.

“We can make you a prosthetic,” he told Earl. “Nothing that can rotate and twist, but I think we can modify the throttle grip, add a lever to it so that instead of twisting you can nudge it. The most difficult part there will be doing it in small increments. If you can master that, you’ll be home free. There’s something else in your favor – we can put you on the Goldwing after you get proficient on the Yamaha. The Goldwing is a bigger bike, but it also has an electronic cruise control, just like a car and it’s a good one. Once you get to highway speed, you can set that with the push of a button and relax.” Moshe looked at Joyce, expecting an onslaught of negative comments. He was astonished with her response.

“Good idea, Moshe,” Joyce replied. All eyes were on her, stunned with the acquiescence.

“She had a conversation last night,” Earl supplied economically.

“Oh,” was murmured about the table. But Henry didn’t get it. “What’s that all about?” he asked.

“Apparently, Wisdom thinks it may be a good idea for me to learn to ride a bike,” Earl told him. I don’t know why, but I’m sure She does, and I’m not going to argue.”

“Me neither,” Joyce said. It’s a matter of trust.”

Moshe spent the evening working on a throttle attachment. “It’s ready for you,” he told Earl the next morning over breakfast. The news excited Earl, who wolfed down the remainder of the meal and jumped up from the table, signaling Moshe to follow him out. Ellery was disappointed with the proceedings. “I guess I’m not gonna have a bike any more,” he said dispiritedly. “I was planning on taking Marge on a ride.”

“Hey, you still have your choice of the other bikes,” Moshe replied. “How about the Goldwing? But I’d get a little experience on it before taking Marge along.” The suggestion brightened Ellery’s outlook and he went out into the yard with Moshe, a happy grin dominating his features.

Marge was grinning too. “Another reprieve for me,” she said happily, to the laughter of Joyce and Terry. But Miryam was as excited as the men at the prospect of riding. “You’re lucky, Joyce,” she said. “You’ll be getting the Goldwing when it’s time to ride. Moshe took me out on it yesterday. I couldn’t believe the comfort. I felt like a queen. It’s the ultimate convertible. I love riding, cold out as it is now, and I’ll bet you will too once you get used to it.”

“As long as it stays upright,” Joyce countered. They all laughed at that.

Moshe fitted Earl with a stick-like extension to his stump of a right arm. The fastening device was an awkward arrangement of a belt and several bungee cords, but that wasn’t the problem. Try as he might, Earl couldn’t muster up the small muscle control required to operate the throttle, to which Moshe had attached a lever. The motorcycle remained in neutral while Earl’s struggles consistently brought the engine abruptly from idle to redline. Discouraged, Earl shut off the engine. “Good try, Moshe, he said, “but it looks like Joyce’s first assessment was right after all.”

“What, and deny the Holy Spirit?”

“There is that.”

“There has to be a way,” Moshe said, rubbing his forehead as if his brain needed stimulation. For several minutes they both were silent, each reflecting on how better control could be achieved. It was Earl who came up with a possibility. “How about if you added another lever? A stationary one, something that I could use as a brace to operate the other lever.”

“Yeah,” Moshe said. “Hop off, I’ll take the bike back into the garage. I’ll let you know when I’m ready again.”

A half hour after Earl had returned to the house, Moshe stood at the front door and called him back outside. The stationary lever was mounted on the bike and Moshe reattached Earl’s arm arrangement. “Try it now,” he told Earl.

Earl climbed back on and started the engine. He displayed a huge smile as the engine volume rose fractionally. That did the trick,” he told Moshe gratefully. “As a bonus, I can rest my arm on the new lever, which lets me feel that I have both handlebars under my control. Thanks a lot, man.”

Moshe went into the other controls, focusing first on the clutch handgrip, and then the foot-operated shift lever. “It’s not like a car,” he began. “In a car, you go to the position of the gear you want to select. Low’s one place, second’s another, and high another yet. But on a bike, it’s all sequential. You kick down from neutral into low, and then back up into second and up again into third, and another up takes you into fourth. Kick down and you go back into third. Up from there back into fourth, and down from there into second. You get back into neutral between low and second, it takes some practice to get the feel for where it is. Right now you want to keep it in low until you get comfortable with handling it. Now, about the brakes. Forget the hand brake, at least for now. The foot brake’s on the right. Go ahead, step on it, get the feel.

After several minutes of mentally reviewing the instructions, Earl felt ready to take the first try at moving. Moshe reviewed the controls once more with him, and then stood back. “Grab the clutch and kick it in gear.”

That part was successful, but what came next wasn’t. Earl was too quick on releasing the clutch and the bike jumped and bucked him off. Joyce was watching, and her concern added to the confusion. After settling them both down, Moshe switched tactics. “Keep your right foot on the brake as you release the clutch,” he told Earl. “Just keep your foot on the brake and do that several times until you get a feel for how to do it smoothly.”

Earl did as he was instructed, and then on the final iteration of that exercise he lifted his foot from the brake. That journey lasted for a hundred yards before he wobbled into a fall. Joyce was about to run after him but was surprised to see him laugh as he picked up the bike. “This is just like learning to hang glide!” he shouted to Moshe. “Lots of dust and muss and smashing into the ground, but that’s half the fun of learning!”

“If you say so,” Moshe said dubiously as he and Joyce came up to him. Earl got back on and lasted marginally longer in an upright position. Joyce refused to continue watching the debacle and returned into the house. At dinnertime Earl and Moshe came into the dining room with smiles on their faces. “He’s made real progress, Joyce,” Moshe told her.   At least now we know it’s doable.”

It took Earl two weeks of exhausting practice, but at the end of that time he was an accomplished rider, and graduated to the Goldwing. It took him another two weeks to become proficient with that bike, but finally the day arrived when he proudly invited Joyce to ride with him.

Joyce wasn’t at all happy with the prospect of riding behind a one-armed driver on a bike that looked about as big as a small car. She climbed on reluctantly, but was surprised at the smoothness of their departure. After a half hour of riding, she began to relax, appreciating that Wisdom knew what She was doing with Earl. The more she let go, the more she realized that her seat was beyond comfortable. Now I know why Maggie was so contented on the back of a Goldwing, she thought to herself. And why Marge was all smiles when she got on it. I think I can live with this, Wisdom, and thank you so much for the experience.

As Ellery and Earl became self-sufficient with their motorcycles, Moshe spent more time alone with Miryam. They rode together often, and with the weather warming up somewhat they took to packing their lunches and stopping at some inviting meadow for picnics. Their excursions grew bolder with time, as they began to appreciate that the authorities, of whom they saw plenty along their routes, avoided direct confrontation with motorcycle riders. The picnic sessions also grew bolder, becoming more intimate with time, and so did the petting, which finally led to Miryam’s jumping up with a shout to stop. “I can’t take this any more, Moshe,” she said, looking down on her man. “I’m getting so frustrated we either have to do something to make me an honest woman, or stop this altogether.”

“What do you suggest?” he asked, looking up at her with a wide grin.

“Don’t you think it’s your job to do the suggesting?” she shot back.

“You know exactly how I feel about you,” he said, laughing. “What’s more, the way the world’s going, I don’t think the usual lengthy engagement is in order. So then,” he said as he got on his knees before her, “Miryam my darling, will you marry me?”

It was her turn to grin. “Of course. What was the hold-up?”

Henry and Terry were thrilled with the news which, in opposition to the end-time lifestyle they were daily confronted with, spoke instead of the happy continuation of life. Terry went up into the attic and retrieved her own wedding dress, which she happily altered for Miryam’s use.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #28

Chapter Twenty Six

POTNAR failed to deny himself sleep over the loss of Taiwan to China. As long as this insignificant little island remained in its traditional place in the world economic system, he could live with the regime change. What did occupy his happy mind was the peace treaty. Its mere existence elevated him to a position of the most commanding respect in the world community for its accomplishment, something that American presidents had sought without fulfillment since just about the beginning of time. It’s time I put that respect to use, he thought, reminding himself of the deference that Poteur had shown him over the recent past. Collecting his enormous staff, he put it to them with his characteristic directness: convene a conference of the Regional Presidents. When asked deferentially by his Chief of Staff what this conference might entail, he merely said that he had a speech to deliver. With that, he retired to his favorite lounge, uncapped the exquisitely costly decanter of Scotch Whisky and poured a generous amount into a waiting goblet of silver inlaid with enormous diamonds and a painstakingly-crafted gold image of his crowned head. He called for his private secretary, who sat on the spartan chair provided for the purpose of dictation and began musing on the broad outlines of the speech he would deliver to this convention of world leaders. These days he usually delegated the task of speechwriting, like all his other duties, to his staff. But this time his mood told him that he could do this better by himself. Almost magically the most appropriate and eloquent words came into his head and out his mouth, to be collected with reverence by his secretary like precious jewels. He didn’t need an outline. The words just seemed to come out in the right order and fit without further adjustment into a grand organizing pattern that was simply there. He finished within the hour, filled his goblet with scotch, and shooed his secretary away to have the speech immortalized on paper without the usual invitation to sit on his lap. What he had just accomplished was far more enticing than the prospect of sex, and he used the interim to reflect on the recognition of greatness that this message would engender among those to whom he would deliver it.

Indeed, as he presented his speech to the body of leaders, they displayed the deference that he had anticipated. Actually, he reflected as he looked at them, their attitude went beyond deference to a state of awe, which led directly to the bottom line. “Gentlemen, I am now prepared to assume the duties and responsibilities, as is my rightful due, as your ultimate leader. I wish to formalize that position with your vote of confidence.” He paused, allowing the vote to be taken. It was unanimously in his favor, as he had expected, knowing that a win in the face of dissension by a minority would be met with virtually instant excommunication of the opposition, with a most unpleasant death very close behind.

His position having been formalized, Potnar informed them that henceforth he would be addressed by a title suitable to his position, which was GLOW, Grand Leader of the World. Under his leadership, all the world governments with the exception of China and the Vatican were now under his sole control, these governments consisting of the five Western regions of North America, South America, Western Europe, Indo-Australia and the Pacific Far West and the five Eastern regions of what remained of Russia and its old Eastern European satellites, Persia, Syrio-Turkey, Arabo-Africa and Southern Asia.

GLOW had managed to discount China in his mind as neither a loss nor a threat, preferring to adhere to the old Western view of that country as a sleeping giant, which was no longer true. The Vatican was a different matter. He had met with some resistance from the Pope to his assumption of world leadership, as evidenced by the hint in his pronouncements that the Catholic Church was still rather far away from the ideal of full secularization. It was time to have a personal confrontation with the Pope. He directed his staff to set up a face-to-face with the Pope at his residence and at a time convenient to his schedule.

The Pope knew that he couldn’t turn down a demand from GLOW to meet with him. The man was simply too powerful. What rankled him more than anything else was GLOW’s insistence that the meeting be held in the world leader’s own palatial estate, which now was considered to be the seat of world government. This venue meant that the leader held all the cards, as was obvious the moment they came together for a direct confrontation. The fearful Pope wondered if, perhaps, GLOW had a well-stocked interrogation chamber tucked away somewhere in the basement of this vast complex, which was more opulent by far than the once-grand Vatican.

The intimidation wasn’t as bad as the Pope had expected. Actually, the Church had come quite far into full ecumenism, almost to the point of accepting Islam into her fold despite the obvious differences between Christian Scripture and the Quran. What it would take to complete that massive accomplishment would be to continue the quiet, gradual setting aside of virtually all the meaningful portions of both texts, retaining only that material that would be acceptable to both peoples. This material was rather tiny and insignificant, but then most of the masses never had wanted to read their sacred texts in the first place, so the people themselves would be more than happy to see this information go by the wayside and worship a more benign and tolerant god of their own making. Given the prevailing state of the Church, the Pope was satisfied, albeit with a fearful look at GLOW, that he could support GLOW’s wishes.

During GLOW’s presence at the leadership conference and his follow-on meeting with the Pope, his staff was preoccupied with maintaining these events on track with his wishes and demands. America enjoyed a brief respite from his micromanagerial interest in the everyday affairs of the citizenry.

During that time a kinder Ralph took over some of the duties in the store, freeing Henry to wander down the aisles chatting up his customers. Putting his people skills to use, Henry was able to accurately differentiate between those who might be open to barter business and those who would call the authorities. Although there was an ever-present danger of his encountering a well-rehearsed government spy, he had devised a series of clever questions to help in outing such a person. Of course, he had the ever-present assistance of the Holy Spirit, although for the life of him Henry couldn’t grasp how such a presence could be so ubiquitous as to include him among the billions of people on the planet, each with his own problems.

Over a relatively short period of time the shop acquired a substantial base of repeat customers, most of whom came in to utilize the shop’s black market service. Collecting a nominal fee for each barter transaction, Henry was able to maintain the survival of his extended family, which included Ralph and the three couples who continued to live in his home along with his wife and himself.

There was a side operation to the business, one that fulfilled Wisdom’s motivation to create it. As the store became ever more popular among those who had avoided accepting the body mark, Henry was able to offer them the Scriptural materials that the three couples had generated. As a result, there was a substantial harvest of souls. As Ralph continued to develop spiritually, he also began to be influential in winning people to Christ. With every soul he participated in bringing to Christ, his countenence became sunnier. Henry slowly lost his missionary sense toward Ralph, which was replaced with a real brotherly friendship.

As Henry’s business expanded, so did Arnold Bliss’ Church, thanks to the excitement over Earl’s ongoing presentation of Jesus’ feeding events and the word-of-mouth draw of people into the Church and her Bible study.   This Wednesday evening in response to a question he moved on from the topic of Jesus Feedings to the trustworthiness of the Bible.

The question had been posed by Dick Billings. “Given the precision of the information on the feeding events, it kind of suggests that the Bible should be interpreted more literally than most of us are used to doing. At one Church I attended several years back the pastor scoffed at the notion that the creation story in Genesis One was literally true. He’d told us in the congregation that science, and particularly Darwin’s theory of evolution, had pretty much trashed the possibility of a literal interpretation.”

“Well, at least he told it like it is,” Earl responded. Too bad about that. Let’s see by a show of hands how many of you have bought into Darwin’s evolution.” Earl didn’t need to count, as everybody’s hand except Joyce’s shot up, including pastor Bliss’.

“Are you trying to suggest otherwise?” Dick asked as Earl shook his head in disbelief.

“Suggest? No, that’s way too weak a word. I’m telling you that Darwin is wrong, and that you and the rest of America should have placed more faith in your Bibles and less on the culture. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Christians who blew the whistle on him. It was science itself.

“For well over a century now,” Earl continued, “we have been told with the most positive assurance by our scientific authorities how the earth was formed. They have told us with a fool’s certainty how long ago this was, and how the life upon it came to be and how it changed, always upward, from the simple to the complex all the way up to that masterpiece of chance, mankind itself. Not only are we told by them, but their words are parroted to us by their followers in all walks of life. Our teachers from the very first grade had measured and controlled our development by the efficiency with which we swallowed the information that they had implanted within us. Added with equal authority to their voices are those who wrote, enacted and produced our television programs, especially by those who had professed to teach our children. Absurdly, even our national park rangers had arrogated to themselves this same function, who took it upon themselves to furnish us with the prevailing view of our geologic and archaeological history. We were told by this legion of instructors that man’s current understanding of his roots and the surrounding soil is so complete, exact and infallible that it must obviously and necessarily be true.   No matter if, from time to time, the mechanism of formation changes a bit here or there, or the time frame is halved, or quadrupled, or slashed to a tenth of the previous date so long as the antiquity is sufficiently great, measurable in millions of years.

“But common sense alone should have told you that the entire uniformitarian scheme of huge tracts of time has a serious flaw. Who among you doesn’t retain some unease at the concept that out of all these millions of years man in his full glory as recorder of history has been around for only the past few thousand years? That just seems a bit too coincidental, too pat in reasoning, does it not, the apparently sudden explosion of the ability to reason abstractly and to write? Perhaps we should question our experts a bit more, make them more accountable for what they insist is the truth. Despite the rigorous training that supposedly places them above errors of logic they remain, alas, human beings with all the faults of the mind that we share, perhaps even having a larger portion than others of that most disagreeable shortcoming, intellectual arrogance.

“This unjustified attitude, as a matter of fact, extends to all of us who were taught to believe that our present age of technoscientific enlightenment prevents us from falling into the errors of our ancestors.   We shake our heads condescendingly at the rigid thinkers who came before. We marvel that they were so blatantly medieval as to accuse as blasphemous such forward thinking geniuses as Galileo and Kepler and Columbus, men who risked their lives in their insistence that the earth was not the center of the universe, nor that the heavenly motions were composites of perfect circles, nor that the earth itself was flat. Virtually all of us would agree that such narrow thinking as fueled the engine of the Inquisition could not happen today. And in our agreement we are all terribly wrong. It may so happen that we are every bit as narrowminded as those who persecuted Galileo, being every bit as wrong. And the motivation behind their savagery and our just as terrible sin of passive acquiescence to our own self-proclaimed experts of the natural sciences would not be religious. It never was. It is now, as then, the attempt on the side of the information disseminators to maintain the concepts most dear to the prevailing intellectual regime, and on the side of their audience of a vile and ubiquitous intellectual indifference. Galileo, by the way, was a devout Christian. He was chastised for attempting to tell the Duchess of Tuscany that the geocentric view of the solar system was extrabiblical. But in the end he was right – the Church had embraced a notion that wasn’t even Scriptural.

 

“Over and above our own indifference, the uniformitarian basis of our earth and life sciences threw an almost insurmountable conceptual stumbling block into the path of any person who came to the Bible and other historically respected sources in search of understanding the nature of the world about him. The person who wished to speculate on the accuracy of our current understanding had a lifetime of injected information to sort through and logically test for truth and consistency. Beyond that, he had to have sufficient courage to withstand the attitudes and opinions of his associates, neighbors, and often even his loved ones. This was especially true for the individual who sincerely desired to comprehend the truth of the Bible, for our present science had declared it mythical, allegorical, and certainly not compatible in a literal sense with our advanced understanding of ourselves and the universe around us.

“I see that I’m running out of time and I haven’t even started to show you how modern molecular biology has tossed the theory of evolution into the intellectual dumpster despite the efforts of several molecular biologists to assert that Scripture and evolution were compatible. I’ll end this session by putting it to you straight. What if, despite the ponderous mass of prevailing opinion and the enormous weight of malevolent disdain that presses against those whose intellectual vision disagrees with it, our entire system of naturalist thought was indeed wrong? What if the Bible contained far more literal truth than virtually all but a tiny minority of the persons in this or the last several generations could have imagined?

“What if the gradualists had been recognized as wrong at the outset, allowing the early catastrophists to pursue their initial advances in the field of natural history? An acceptance of a different truth in Charles Darwin’s day might have led his naturalist contemporaries along a quite different path in their acquisition of knowledge than the one they so foolishly chose to follow. They may then have arrived at a scenario similar to the one that real, working scientists just a short time ago finally came to recognize as representing our very recent geological past. This picture places Jupiter, in response to the awesome Hand of God, as a source of very great violence against the Earth.” He and Joyce left, allowing them the opportunity to digest that thought.

One day Henry received a visit from several bikers, whose presence initially alarmed him. They turned out to be so cheerful and friendly that he went out on a limb and bought several of the bikes, giving them some badly-needed cash to survive as human beings for whatever short time remained. Although cash had been prohibited, the black market continued to use it as its principal means of exchange. Its portability and generality continued to make it more useful than straight barter, and the bikers insisted that the transaction involve cash.

Henry knew that he’d have to face Terry’s wrath when he told her about his purchase, and was sorry that the apprehension that he’d harbored about it was confirmed as all too real when he discussed it at the dinner table. Her tirade had hardly gotten off the ground when Moshe intervened. “Please,” he said. “Those bikes just may be the most valuable possessions you have.”

“How so?” Henry asked. Even he was taken aback by Moshe’s enthusiasm. “Nobody here even knows how to operate one.”

“Wanna bet?” he retorted. “I had a bike in Israel while I was going to college.”

“Did Somebody talk with you last night, Moshe?” Joyce interjected.

“Yes. She did. I have a very strong feeling that what you did was in the will of God, Henry.”

“Isn’t that interesting,” Henry responded enthusiastically. “I had this strange feeling of comfort while were were making the transaction – like this was something that was supposed to happen.”

“I give up,” Terry said in exasperation. But she, too, seemed to accept this new development.

[to be continued]

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #27

Chapter Twenty Five

The abrupt end of hostilities between the Israelis and the Russian-led enemy forces created what the president of the new North American Region saw as an opportunity. He jumped on it, sending his Secretary of State to Tel Aviv with the mandate to forge a more permanent peace between Israel and their Palestinian neighbors, even though the subdued Palestinians were no longer seen by most Israeli citizens as a threat to the security of the state. Nor did the Palestinians themselves have an appetite for further conflict. Perhaps it was this new meekness that elicited compassion from the Jewish people toward those who wished to share their land.

At any rate, to the immense surprise of the world’s politicians, perhaps most of all to the feckless Secretary, Israel signed on to a binding agreement, effective for seven years, after the North American dignitary gave a speech in which, with all the considerable pomposity that he could muster, he delivered a pronouncement that he claimed came straight from the mouth of his boss: henceforth, provided that Israel agree to comply with the terms of this “interim” contract, the president would personally guarantee the maintenance of the original covenant between God and Abraham, basically that Israel had a right to exist.

 

The time was ripe for Israel’s compliance and the consequent solution to what had been considered an intractable issue. In utter disregard of the obvious intervention of God in the recent battle, the Israeli citizens remained fearful of yet more violence. The loss of Haifa was a big blow to the collective Jewish psyche.   They had had their fill of bloodshed. The countryside was littered with the ugly, rotting leftovers of the recent conflict. A massive cleanup campaign would be necessary to render much of the country livable.

The contract was, in fact, quite reasonable to those Israelis who had no knowledge of their prophets: simply for agreeing to live side-by-side with a new Palestinian nation that would formally govern the historically Jewish lands of Gaza and Judea, Israel would be able to call it a day on the fighting. It was a great solution, the new Israeli government claimed, because any threat of mass destruction would also threaten the new Palestinian nation with unthinkable collateral damage. With great relief, the Israeli population gave up its weapons, tossed their gas masks back into their closets, and tore down the walls that separated them from the Palestinians.

Centuries ago in the distant past, the prophets had said otherwise about this very event. Joel, for instance, had said the following in his Chapter 3:

“I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage, Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.”

Ezekiel and Jeremiah both spoke out about the false hope of peace, wherein in Chapter 13, Ezekiel said:

“Because, even because they have seduced my people, saying, Peace; and there is no peace;”

Centuries later, Paul echoed that concern in Chapter Five of his first letter to the Thessalonians when he paraphrased an aspect of Jesus’ Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24:

“For when they shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child, and they shall not escape.”

But of all the prophets, Daniel in his Chapter Nine was the most clearly foreboding with respect to this issue.

“And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week; and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.”

 

In utter disregard of foreboding pronouncements of their ancient prophets, the Israelis set about in the wake of this agreement to commence building a new temple, to be erected on the Temple Mount under the sharing arrangement that was established in the contract.

Responding to a runner from Dafna, Jacob and Moira left their overlook at the crest of the ridge between Israel and Syria and returned to the kibbutz, somewhat happy with the situation and looking forward to a restoration of normal life in the community but yet, in their knowledge of Scripture, wary of the future. Knowing that they had but a few years at most of peace, they continued to feel that the time was not appropriate to have children. Nevertheless, and despite Moira’s sense of loss that they wouldn’t be sharing their love for each other with a child, they adjusted quickly to their new lives in Dafna in which their bond of love toward each other continued to grow and strengthen.

 

The Peoples’ Republic of China had observed the unfolding Mideast conflict with intense interest. Of particular relevance to the Chinese politburo was the neglect with which the Western Regions treated the little nation of Israel. The other governments could be forgiven for having mixed feelings about the clash between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but the North American Region was another story. Throughout most of its previous incarnation as the United States of America, this entity was the professed friend and ally of Israel, and in the past it had come through with support for the nation at critical times. Perhaps that support was reluctant at times, but it had never really let Israel down when the going was tough.

Until now. America had offered no support whatsoever in this most recent unrest. Whatever caused the cease-fire, it wasn’t America that did it or even contributed. But then, Armerica has a rather poor record when it comes down to helping friends out of jams. Hungary in ’56, the leader noted. What a fiasco that was! How naive of the Hungarians to think America would come to the rescue. And Cuba. And Africa. As he ticked off he various countries that America had betrayed, the thought in the back of his head leapt to the fore: is Taiwan ripe for the plucking? Have we been too worried about a threat from America that in all likelihood would never materialize? The president reflected on the state of Chinese-American relations over the recent past, beginning with his country’s enjoyment of Clinton’s policy of “engagement” with them, which amounted to a winking at China’s brazen theft of military technology. They were cowardly then and are just as cowardly now. Undoubtedly more – worse than Neville Chamberlain of Britain as he fell over himself attempting to appease Hitler. Idiots. Now that the American government has decimated its own population and torn its own economy to shreds, they’re no longer even useful for trade.

Concerned now that the Chinese leadership historically had been far too cautious about retaking what really belonged to them, the president called for a formal meeting of the members of the politburo. When his peers were assembled, he shared his thoughts with them. His proposal was met with more timidity than he expected, his comrades voicing their concern over the American involvement in the peace treaty. But the Chinese president promoted his view of the new confirmation of God’s covenant with Israel as nothing but a lukewarm show of support to a nation that continued to survive without America’s help when they most needed it. Even as he overcame the objection of his peers, however, he was annoyed at a dark, troubling thought that persisted in the back of his mind. It was an undeniable fact that Israel had continued to survive under the bleakest of odds. How could that have happened? he asked himself. Unable to answer it, he forcefully shoved the apprehension from his consideration.

Quickly thereafter, the command was given to assault selected Taiwanese political targets with missiles from the mainland, to be followed by a massed assault by amphibious landing of the island by the most highly-trained troops, with sternly-expressed orders to leave the manufacturing sector and other elements of the economic powerhouse untouched. All that was needed was a change of owners.

The assault was carried out with overwhelming force and merciless precision. By the end of the next week, the economic powerhouse was running quite smoothly as if nothing had just happened. But now it was working on behalf of its new Chinese masters.

There was not so much as a peep out of the North American Region, leaving the Japanese people fretting about whether they would be the next in line for a Chinese takeover. The Australians also were rather concerned with the development in Taiwan, as were the Philippine people. But, given the absence of North American leadership, none of these fearful neighbors made the slightest move to confront the giant that was now fully awake, staring with wide-eyed lust at its potential enemies and breathing fire like the dragon that represented it.