təˈreɪn

I stand at the disposal of the fame and word of my lord. So I will bring his weapons to bear. The enemy shows no spiritual strength nor true stability in their weapons. Let the storm cover all the lands! -Sharrum-bani (the Sage of the Assembly)

This vision explained is a prologue of significance for the future. Designated by the Most High, the man emerging from the sea to honor a remnant who will rescue and safeguard many others for His ordained and renewed creation signals the disruptive ingress of a long-foretold period of redemption and disclosure. The man’s anomalous yet modest method of overcoming adversaries is without the use of conventional forces or human weapons. Disciplined by his God, instead he rises through innate powers of spirit and truth to introduce a transformative era when the Spirit allows consequences to befall a dark world as evidence of His disdain for peoples’ ego-centric prophecies and polluting dogmas spuing from self-centered political desires and blasphemous religious natures.

The concomitant bewilderment and conflicts among the devolving, tribal peoples choosing disobedient regression into ignorance and greed to destroy creation and murder all life warrant the tumultuous times that lie ahead. They brought it upon themselves, as they were too disordered to know that “there’s dead, then there’s dead.” Nor did they know how, when, or why to strike the strong man. They did not know the man who swam upon the waters and negotiated the storms because they did not know the One who walked on waters, stilled the storms, raised and sent the man. The events plotted in the vision portend substantial revelations embodied by a secondary figure whose emergence from the chaos of gentile passions, symbolized by a man rising from the heart of the sea, demarcates an inflection point in the Creator’s unfolding cosmic narrative.

Παράδος

You learn to know a pilot in a storm. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca

For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has ignored the Law of Moses is put to death without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severe punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace in? For we know Him who said, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge His people.”

A Loyal Instructor’s Thanksgiving to God

I give thanks to You, O Lord, for You have placed me in the bosom of the living and You protect me from all the snares of the pit. Ruthless men curse my life, while I hold fast to Your witness and promise. Theirs’ is the fraudulent council for the congregation of Belial; they refuse to know that my appointment is from You, that by Your mercies You save my life, for my very steps are about You. Their abuse throughout my life is from You, so that You might be honored by the judgment of the wicked, and that You might display Your might against the children of men, for I stand in Your mercy. And I endured mighty men scheming against me, they have surrounded me with all their weapons of war and the tailing birds of prey. Arrows burst forth unceasingly as the blades of their dark works devour all creation with toxic fire. Like the roar of mighty waters is the clamor of their noxious voices, a vile cloudburst, and a murderous downpour to destroy many. Wickedness and blasphemies burst forth to the stars when their waves pile high. As for me, though my heart melts like water, my soul shall hold fast to Your renewing covenant. But as for them, the net that they spread for me will catch their own foot. And snares, which they hid to take my life, they themselves fell into. All-the-while, “my feet stand on solid rock. Far from their congregation I will bless Your name.”

I give thanks to You, O Lord, for Your eye broods over my soul, and You have delivered me from the jealousy of the mediators of lies and from the congregation of those who seek flattery. You have redeemed the soul of the poor one, whom they planned to put to an end, pouring out his blood because he served You. Because they did not know that my steps are directed by You, they appointed me too for shame and scorn in the mouth of all those who seek deceit. But You, my God, have helped the soul of the destitute and the defenseless against ones stronger than he. You have redeemed my soul from the hands of their world’s mighty men. In the midst of their reviling, You have not terrified me, that I might abandon Your service for fear of ruin at the hands of the wicked, or exchange a steadfast mind from You for their selfish delusions. By Your statutes and by the testimonies of holy ones, You established me to strengthen those weak in spirit-life and for the destruction for all offspring of the strong in world-flesh. You shape my tongue according Your teachings and renew a right mind in me. You have washed my hands, feet, and face. You have made my face to shine for You and all Your intimates, with eternal glory together. Even our enemies will know You as the Living God.

Odyssey of the Bailiff

There was an unimpeachable judge who had a big day, actually many big days on the docket approaching quickly, happening everyday in fact. The judge was very disturbed by the nature and type of accounts and testimonies that embodied charges and counter-charges, ridiculous suits and countersuits. But much worse was the heinous denial of accountability by those on the docket who claimed they were free from liability. They even proclaimed that they had an extra-special deal with the judge. Most of those even had the mendacity to say that they knew him personally. But there was just one problem, the judge, who never forgot anyone, didn’t recognize many of them. Much worse, many appealed to familial bonds because of their outward physical appearance, and it was clear, even to one of the judge’s first brothers, that they didn’t know how to look in a mirror nor did they know the judge’s family truth: family members were related only by their inner, soul similarities and obedience to their father, not a litany of superficial acts made with a nod and wink which may have a thousand meanings each, as both those gestures might be born from other motivations and many dark matters.

So the judge, being renowned for his gracious disposition, even among the liars and self-deceived apparently, decided to be gracious yet again. The judge sent out a bailiff into the halls and waiting rooms to better prepare them. He selected a friend, a brother, and a soul who acknowledged his great debt to the judge in obedience to their dad. Most importantly, the elect bailiff physically came from the people who seemed to be most misguided, and he desired nothing more than to exhaust his life, in real and practical ways, among as many other peoples that the judge loved dearly but suffered most at the selfish hands and hateful souls of those who claimed to be holy just as he had, long-ago to the east, when he himself walked the halls and waiting rooms.

Now this perfect judge could only select an imperfect bailiff, as he alone was uniquely perfect among humanity. In fact, it was due to his singularity that he was the judge. So, the bailiff, while not singular, was anomalous in a couple of ways. And for a long time in his youth, the bailiff falsely believed that it was this anomalousity that was the problem, for he had the scares and wounds to prove it, which in turn led to some adjustment disorders from time to time. But through his many dangers, toils, and snares the judge, unbeknown to the bailiff, reformed his agent’s heart and renewed him in order to reveal the true luminosity of the judge to people with dark desires, who fooled themselves with a corrupt world of their own making. It wasn’t what most people wanted to see. And for a longtime, as a young man, the bailiff took it personally to falsely believe that he was actually the real problem.

It was a huge problem, especially for a plurality of those he came out of; but in mid-life, the one dispatched came to realize that it was not his problem. At least it was not his problem to solve. Like the judge before him, the vast majority of his own people rejected him. It is true, no matter the time or how perfect the messenger might be, most people only want what they want. And they are taught to be that way by their own powers that be and idols (along with the fallen powers behind those liars) what to want. And that last bit of information was, is, and will be in the end, the eternal problem for many. They are deluded about who they actually serve. That willful ignorance is not just a personal issue for their sentencing in the docket, it has murderous effects outside the court, in the halls they increasingly darken. It is a reality that most other people see clearly, but the former people’s beloved fallen powers teach them to choose shiny, terminal corruption and a strong suicidal misbelief about who they really are and what they are actually doing.

This caused great pain for the bailiff trip after trip after trip, but in debrief after debrief the judge proved to his officer, in real and demonstratable ways (I mean we’re talking massive and undeniable ways), that this experience had been his too. But being gracious, the training had been elongated in duration and even punctuated by joys that the Instructor never himself enjoyed, at least not yet. Believe me, they had many discussions, some pointed, about which experience was preferable. But in the end, it was the judge who had to be perfect. The bailiff would be the first to admit he was never perfect, often he had celebrated and reveled in those many imperfections with glee, and at these times the judge handed his bailiff over to theirself, released him in love just as he had with his followers who walked with him when he was in the halls and outer courts… So, it was the requirements of character that set the casting, that had always been the plan. Again, the bailiff reasoned a complex problem from a simple solution that it was impossible for him to be perfectly like his benefactor, so what was the dang point of all the suffering?!

The perfect trainer answered that pained question perfectly, after a very, very, very long time. Turns out it wasn’t all about helping or healing or guiding or consoling the people. That was certainly important, but the judge was preparing the bailiff too for a plan that they both knew and discussed often, but as an act of love and grace, had left some plot points to adjust (a kind bump here or challenging nudge there) based on conditions on the ground when the right time came along. In due course, the bailiff’s mind and heart were set right but then his gut had to be renewed too. So all the painful experiences of being handed over to himself that went before, even his exuberance in ignorance that demanded disciplinary action, like the people he came from, was actually a requirement so that he could closely identify with those people, even many more people, who were nothing like them, and therefore woefully ill-prepared for the courtroom. The judge hoped they, like he, would accept it and grow. But even these perfect gifts and indomitable experiences, still evoked concern every time, like a thorn in the spirit, when he met many people, and he met a lot of people… one observer in the halls said this “semi-charmed life” reminded them of Forest Gump, and the court’s man accepted it in stride, after all he too really loved Dr Pepper.

This was the weight of pure Kingdom-life walking along the sunken creosote streets of death in the world. The problem, the issue before the court for those that claim to know the judge personally, is that the bailiff’s experience and desires should have been normative, not anomalous. This sober realization caused even more, but finally, “balanced” concern for the bailiff. So there remained some disturbance but none too much anymore. For what the judge said when investing his ward with implicit trust enabled his brother’s courtly peace and serenity among the outer court chaos and calamities, “remember there’s only one person in the end authorized by me to say ‘all rise.'”

The bailiff took some pleasure in the judge’s reminder because it sounded just like what their father told the bailiff before, when feeling trepidation on a separate but corresponding mission, which the son knew very little about… “Only one priest is authorized by me to announce a couple married for the first time.” Then the bailiff was sent to guide the willing between the old end and the new beginning. It was hard duty, for few would be willing to accept the preparation, but his brother and father said, “if it were easy anyone could do it.” Also both summed-up their support for their man together, that if they could only trust a person with “certain people” and people they liked, then really, they couldn’t trust that person with anyone. But since the bailiff could be trusted with “nobodies” and even enemies, then they could trust their agent with everyone. In memorial, it still makes the bailiff cry, probably always will.

I find great comfort today in the fact that if I am doing what the one Who Is orders, then I can know that I am never alone, no matter what mighty men with their multi-year deals wrapped in golden chains shout out in cruelty from their towers. Lest I forget, I keep a worn box (a large box) of old letters, news clippings, and a few pics around just to reinforce His lesson in my life. The truth of what I said and did, and then what happened, all their cold rains in response. I watched it all. I felt it all. All so now I know, even in my guts, that if you acknowledge soul dependency on the God and follow Jesus as your lord living as an example thankfully as often as you might, and always without contingencies, you will make this passage. We have challenging and chaotic terrain to cover for an appreciable duration. So let us begin: dive, swim, and breathe.

Prescript: As a nobody, I met Derek when he was already a somebody. He treated me most graciously. Since then, he sacrificed his status and reputation among more dubious fruit-inspectors merely for trying to reach people that they use as whipping posts in their religious ceremonies. By living like Jesus, he insulted their gods and the myths they believe to justify their ritual hatred. I understand his sacrificial service, like Christ. They rage at it his sacrifice. Unfortunately, I understand their feelings too, their fruits, as they wear the mark of Cain, for hate is their liturgy to worship in cruelty.

Επεισόδια

The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven.– Martin Luther

My lord and my God together told me, “When you speak fairly, people will call Us unjust. And when you speak justly, people will call Us unfair. Therefore, let the hard words be Ours, your lips are clean.” I respond simply and always, “let it be.” All that I asked my God and my lord was to make my tongue be as soft as They desire, yet still able to slay dragons, now and forever by Their leave.

Dear readers, some among you may think that I am prosecution for the Court. I am definitively not that. I am defianablely the anti-prosecutor. I am about what any good counsel does before their clients’ days in court. There is a Higher Purpose at work, even if you don’t see it. Our hope is you will see that One Day. So whatever I say here, no matter how much it displeases your tastes or disturbs your feelings, is all to prevent any of you from realizing too late that you served the prosecutor here in the world either out of delusion, selfishness, or in simple willfulness.

I am deeply pained that for many of you as this will be the last moment of preparation that I am allowed with you. This is the letter I never wanted to write. It is an agony to me. In times like these I recall what an admiral, a highly decorated and classically educated instructor from the National War College, told me about burdens of service, “Young man, everyone wants to be a captain until it’s time to do captain shit.”

If my lord had done nothing and our Father said nothing, then I was happy to let people figure out things more slowly, even on their own, but that was not their choice. From those that were DOR’d, by their own will, it is my last will and testament for you that many of the multitudes of misled followers will be standing between the Gate and the Alter, ultimately.

For those that misled and continue to mislead, for whatever rationalization you think you have… In sum, all I am free to say directly to you now, apart from my witness today, is that you are without Excuse and free to do as you please. I confess to you now, that all my life I have taken pride in never telling anyone that they had no hope, for better or worse. May God forgive me.

To the least and those who stayed true this far, you have stayed the course for rescue, well done. But the next exercise before you is real and present. I desire nothing more than to remain among you and do what little I might do for you with real love to the point of death. But God help us, that is not His plan, so I may do no other…

Therefore

It was plain for me to see that Americans take their religion seriously. When I arrived there so long ago, I was fascinated with all the churches I came across. And then I found one fellowship serving only by the whole-life healing Power of the Creator, the Spirit of an anonymous God. I was there to introduce all the others to this God so they could worship wisely, not foolishly as idolaters, and to know Who you’re dealing with.

He Is, the God who ordered His good creation and everything in it, this Master of sky, land and sea doesn’t live in swanky edifices or need people building nations in their idea of His image… as if he couldn’t take care of any of that himself! He makes the creatures; the creatures don’t make him! Starting in the beginning, by his orders, he re-ordered chaos to draw out what he said was good.

He formed all peoples for benediction and made the earth hospitable, with plenty of time and space for living so we could seek after God, not just grope around in the dark but actually find him. He doesn’t play hide-and-seek with us. He’s not remote. He’s very near. We live and move in Him. I can’t get away from Him! One of your poets said it well: ‘We’re the God-created.’ Well, if we are the God-created, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to think we could hire human wall builders of violence to chisel out their cruel and fallen human beliefs concerning godliness from the world for us, or anyone else, does it?!

God overlooks it as long as you don’t know any better—but that time is past! The Unnamed is now known, and He’s called for a radical life-change but was met by towering rejection. So, He has now set a day when the entire human race will be judged and all things righteousified no matter the cost. And He has already appointed the judge, confirming him before everyone by raising him from the dead.

I know that many of you said, “Let’s do this again. We want to hear more.” There’s everything left for you, but that will come later. For those who split at “raising him from the dead,” those who doubted or laughed at me and walked off making jokes, bless you, I’ve told you the truth in the right Spirit, but you are free to go.

Legacy of the World

Where do you think all these appalling wars and quarrels come from? Do you think they just happen? Think again. They come about because you want your own way, and fight for it deep inside yourselves. You lust for what you don’t have and are willing to kill to get it. You want what isn’t yours and will risk violence to get your hands on it.

You wouldn’t think of just asking God for it, would you? And why not? Because you know you’d be asking for what you have no right to. You’re spoiled children, each wanting your own way.

You’re cheating on God. If all you want is your own way, flirting with the world every chance you get, you end up enemies of God and his way. And do you suppose God doesn’t care? The proverb has it that “he’s a fiercely jealous lover.” And what he gives in love is far better than anything else you’ll find. It’s common knowledge that “God goes against the willful proud; God gives grace to the willing humble.”

So let God work his will in you. Yell a loud no to the Devil and watch him make himself scarce. Say a quiet yes to God and he’ll be there in no time. Quit dabbling in sin. Purify your inner life. Quit playing the field. Hit bottom, and cry your eyes out. The fun and games are over. Get serious, really serious. Get down on your knees before the Master; it’s the only way you’ll get on your feet.

Before Noah and the great flood there was a “lesser flood” and character, Enosh. He is not well-defined and he knew pagans well too, like Melchizedek. Moreover, depending on how you translate an ambiguous Hebrew verb, Enosh either honored God or profaned him. If he worshipped the Most High, then he knew pagans from those who truly honored the one Who is, which is also like Melchizedek, whose name alone presents a gnarly interpretive issue (but that’s for later). The point now is that they are ambiguous by time, space, and interpretation, so that peoples’ faith might grow, knowing that the divinity you honor in reality always manifests in your world. It is the Divine difference that makes all the difference for life.

I can understand that for political utility many today chose to render the verb a certain direction. But the earliest and wisest dragomans debated the issue about Enosh. Fortunately, we do not need to solve that problem today. What is important now is to understand that in Enosh’s day, within the days of Noah, groups began to worship communally the true Name, therefore the spiritual character and true power of God was known to be different, at least to a few. All had faith in those days, but too many had faith in other gods. The story of Enosh and Melchizedek, among other ambiguous ambassadors, is God’s pleasure to highlight the differences between Himself and his people in relief against the backdrop all the fallen gods and their peoples.

“Great right?!” Not so fast goldfish; let us tread in the depth of this key but almost universally overlooked vignette. What we can be certain of, then and now, is that even when God is actually known to people there’s always groups who get God very wrong. As in the beginning, from the advent of communal worship some jugheads are already piling up wrath for themselves by heaping up suffering on others. I know it is a bit of a bummer, but that is the life exercise that we are given, by our master today and our God, from east of Eden to here. Moreover, this plot point aligns perfectly with the course of humanity’s descent from the Garden to Noah. So let us backstroke a bit, to the beginning and lap back and dive down a minute.  

Eve and Adam got together and decided to “re-interpret” (their corrupting the power to revise their recent history) what God clearly told them. Of course, many people, especially those who dislike accountability, want to blame a serpentine creature. Now, the problem is not just that they put their collective wants before God’s by refusing to obey him or even to later own it and repent, which is very human, we’ve all done it and do it. No, spiritually speaking, they had custodial authority, stewardship power, entrusted to them from God to be exercised wisely, rightly, his focused way –over the animal spirits which human flesh was and is connected with, at an intimate level. That connection must be managed purely (knowing good from bad) in whole health for life, not giving into self-will run riot. A human life run on craving kills everything.

Craving more, they chose a lie together, lethal practical theology, because they wanted something God said to avoid in their face. That personal and social human volition, even in the garden, was already so self-centered that all it took was the lowest of creatures to hiss, “Ah, God does not really mean what he said. He really does not want what is best for you. Trust in me instead.” This is how the enemy would reap by rape communion, praise, and worship to himself so that he could kill the people who followed him, steal God’s treasure, and destroy the Garden. The conspirators were cursed and ushered east of Eden, to a time and place where there was a long road just to reach the path to life, which would become even more narrow and difficult, amid the wide world of broad corruptions to death where all creation would suffer for the vanity of humanity, being led by that old fallen serpent and his minions of darkness.

How stupid would people have to be to fall into the trap of wanting to “unleash the animal spirits” today out of personal desires contrary to God’s, even after we have received God in flesh and written books as references for discernment to navigate the narrow way of our master, the Lord of Life? Well people today, like Adam and Eve, have messed about and they are finding out. The in-group club, the heads, believe they are safe, but that’s the biggest lie. All of the serpent dies, in its last hour from its first moment of madness. The critical point is when it begins consuming its least part, its tail. As its tail dies, its head believes it’s alive for a time. But once it begins on its tail, it can do no other than double down in ever greater stupidity. It is already in terminal descent, and then greedily starts working up to the juicy bits. So paddle with me away from them or they could drown you, and worse, all those you might have rescued.

Cain’s (selfishness) did not take long to accelerate the fallenness of the former generation. He did something as well that is all too human concerning worship, murdered/hated a brother. So, the bitter fruit planted in the hearts of his parents by a scheming animal spirt did not take long to blossom into flesh, the homicide of Abel. We all know this story, yet stunningly, many still refuse to walk in the hard lesson God gave the murderer: “You are your brother’s keeper!” And after we have been given continuous expanding reiterations of this Law, perfected in the New Law of loving your enemy, still most are enthralled by the seductive hiss echoed in the false teachings, the un-Christlike myth of redemptive violence. Just to be sure no body today could be that stupid, Jesus died to self instead, so that we would follow him. The fact that legions of people could pass on such dark doctrines and old lies in their ideas about God is literally re-markable. Yes, by their own acts, like their father Cain, a mark is upon them eternally. If they could only –unlike their father and their guiding spirits –confess, repent, and spend a life making amends, then the Grace of Jesus Christ would heal all their marks and scares, even their genocidal rage.   

Finally, we are back to Enosh. I told you to keep an eye out for those “lesser characters,” especially those like Barnabus or Melchizedek. They maybe ambiguous, but within that undefined space the Spirit has plenty of room to not just change the character, but more important, he can turn the course of human events. But misusing this power in corruption, which is abuse of power and trust for self-gain, can sink souls and cancel the reality of others until they cease to be. The least of these for the wicked become targets of opportunity to hate instead of love (their religion in lieu of the Faith of Jesus Christ), all the while using God’s name religiously for a worldly, “successful,” lifestyle choice. It is a dilemma of delusion that only God’s choice and right consequences might break their thrall to other gods and deformed images of the Most High God. For a few may be still exfiltrated from their seas. But as they persist in corruptions, well… there’s no way anyone can reveal algebra to people if they believe profanely and always that 1 + 1 = “4 more for me!”

Profaners of God en masse, who served the fallen of Hermon in the beginnings, went too far and became so ubiquitous in their inequities that the Creator finally allowed their consequence to befall them in the Day of Nimrod, within the Days of Noah, an irreversible descent into the chaotic depths of the nations. A whole “great people” led by the totemic “strong man,” mapped from the archetypal image of Gilgamesh or Baal, decided that they’d build something, promising to attain the Heights of God, by socio-political action. Like Lucifer I am sure they had an influential, broad, and enmeshed following to soak in status from filthy lucre and expensive oils. They sold their souls to build the tower of their dreams, their utopia, which Goddamned literally. They provided a lying myth to justify a dark ritual, which had already begun in their predecessors. The corrupt preached that whosoever followed them could ignore God’s most obvious commands to build an abomination by violence and selfishness that would assure their place to rule as gods, a special status in the history of world. Well, they enjoyed a season, then a last hour came. I think it is interesting that in all these moments people had to re-cling and refine other teachings, philosophies, and spirits that they desired more over a time, and it was only after they made so many unwise choices habitually that the higher wickedness was allowed to enter into them to insure a global, hard reset because of their dark matters of desire.

Now to Noah, a son of man, a soul born to a human man and a human woman, through whom God kept within His personal counsel on earth. And in this case, He inverted humanity’s dark plot-line, flipped-the-script, or it turned an upside down world upside down (that’s actually right side up, all deference to Luke). What strikes me like a divine blast is the hard work done over a very long period of time, which Noah undertook in faith just to make me possible for Jesus to save. Imagine the patience and endurance the Creator grew and drew out of Noah’s enduring and sacrificial acts of faith, a right proper response to God’s call. Obviously, the man was not perfect but that is not the issue to pond-er today. What counted then, now, and through eternity is the partnership he built with God. By staying on the narrow way of God’s plan, while also shepherding all creatures. He not only survived the rain, but he got to experience the rainbow afterwards.

Can you imagine being entrusted with all the creatures of the world, which God adores, besides the future of humanity, for which He, his unique son, and all the saints sacrificed? That is a most heavy weight, soul-crushing when reflected against the abject religious refusal of the most wicked generation to accept even a small portion of that responsibility today. These are the darkest matters. But hey, they have too much to lose to even help others or be good brother and sister keepers. They much prefer their beloved gilded walls to arks of refuge, which they hate. I can tell you now, that “their truth” will not washout, it can only be destroyed. They are anti-Noahs because they do not know his God, the Creator.      

Now, there were other old stories of these people that pulse tides of good or break bad the waves according to their abyssal preferences and feelings at any given time, even to the point where the Prescence was taken away from them, as God granted to them their gods, when their idolatry and disobedience crossed the Line: the terrain gave way to swallow a people, the generation in the wasteland, and the Departure at the temple to name a few, but all for disobedience. Given this metanarrative, it should come as no surprise that of over two dozen times “religion” appears in the newer stories, only once does it have a neutral value in passing on a faith in the Pauline pastorals, and only once is it desirable and pleasing to God in James. Every other time, “Katie bar the door,” it is pejorative or a cherished devil nearby. But that’s for later, much later unfortunately. Fortunately, many people within these declining generations were counted as righteous, not despite the dark worlds that bounded them, but because they shown brilliantly surviving and loving into their last stormy nights.

Wisdom tells us idolatry is the genesis of sin, and the past is prologue concerning their dark matters. This is doubly true for those who claim to follow God erroneously. History affirms that they have taken self-ascribed license to definitively insult the spirit of Grace habitually. They never had that right. They even stomp on God’s children. It is an abomination before God’s eyes. How could it not be? So now, they are now at liberty to reap what they sowed. I do not condemn them today for they have already marked themselves enough, to my lament.

To those who stayed the course, we have a rich history of people, including our master, to instruct us in the Way to make it to the beach, to guide us through any circumstances that may befall us, even to overcome all enemies. But that is for next time, in the first course of Tactics. These few examples above are sufficient to reorient yourselves in the present moment to swim well and make it to shore. To those who do, before we get to the hard part, I leave a most weighty and lovely blessing of peace, delivered by an inspired talent, and another old story, wrapped in another great story, from the shores of a pseudonymous “new world”. And, in appreciation to my wife, it is living proof a great sermon can be delivered in just under 5 minutes, and in a nautical theme.

Hostis Humani Generis

They should have purified their inner lives. From the beginning I said that I was sent for the righteous and those interested in the reality of Jesus’ righteousness. The wicked are free to continue being ever more wicked, while the righteous engage in the work of His Spirit. This numinous Image-embodiment has been more and more obscured in reality across time as “Christians” increasingly fell for other gods, to their promises of status, affluence, and worldly power. These are corruptions rejected by Jesus himself to the face of their promoter, who was brilliant on the outside but sourced on the inside by filth. It has been a long time since the corruption was this great or obvious to clean eyes. Now it is to the point of depravity where the “greatest of people,” supposedly worshipping the Jesus, their trademarked deity, are literally persecuting “the least of these.” Today, a plurality of these villains even support the genocide of God’s people, who look like Jesus and live where Jesus did; he said the most wicked people ever would in these days. So, as a generation, they have been the more than casual; they are the most adulterous, despite the outside of their cups and lips appearing so clean.

It is astonishingly perverse to me, how they preserved the only issue that 16th century Puritan Divines were absolutely wrong about, cultural decline. It is just cultural change, which is exactly that Jesus called us to overcome in the storms of fears and hates from religious elites in all cultures, no matter the time or terrain, according to his lived principles and unique love displayed on His mission, in his every action. We see the greatest hypocrisy in those who scream, “we cannot compromise!” For they have proven to be the greatest punks to the powers that be, both today and across most of church history. After mis-discerning the obvious, then they threw out everything else, which their predecessors were right about. These bent latter-day narcissists turbocharged the political argument for dominance with vain-glorious genocidal apocalypticism for worldly power, as they abandoned spiritual holiness with lived integrity, because it did not suit their Ozempic crazed political-economic appetites. This adulterous desire produced the roughest and fattest beast ever born of gentile bloodlust and avarice in labor for their dark powers.

If they knew what was coming for them, the ones they truly served in cruelty here by proxy, then they wouldn’t be tearing their clothes in the privacy of their prayer closets. No, they’d be out in the streets ripping their flesh and crying out to the skies seeking penance from those they hated. How they got this… bestial… is a long story, even in the best of times I’d just be able to skim the surface. And as I’ve been ordered to not look back but also pass on the message today, cutting the finest of surgical incisions between admonition and judgment, I won’t dwell too long and discuss only parts byway of just a few of my firsthand testimonies and show only some of their poisonous fruits, which they themselves produced to come to such a mortifying end. For someone who knows God through Jesus, the saddest thing about them is that the Prescence leaves them and they cannot even tell the difference. That is the final state of mortification every time around. So, I have no need or desire to revel in their critics’ accusations from the outside, but God help me I cannot lie to the neighbors either. Friend or foe, I lay out my witness at their feet. And no matter what either imposter does, I will return to my Master’s feet. I always go and return at his bidding alone, as pleasing him is my beacon no matter the terrain.

In summary preview, if someone lies to you about who is a honorable citizen today, who a saint really was according to God’s standards from only 90 years ago, or the prayers of a renowned noble countryman 250 years ago… We ask you, how on their unholy scorched earth can they be trusted to speak wisely, or at least somewhat accurately, about our master who lived 2000 years ago? They cannot. We know they can’t even be trusted with toilet paper in a basic humanitarian crisis. Further, I cannot assist anyone who won’t stop lying and destroying what pleases God for their own dissolute desires. I cannot with alcoholics or addicts, so it would be a waste of Breath on people who chose to be even sicker, more destructive, slaves to death. They don’t want to be rescued and don’t care who else their decision destroys. They refuse to accept reality, because if they did, then they’d have to change. And worse, they would have to confront their own moral bankruptcy and couldn’t keep blaming others. Perhaps you can reach some now goldfish, but that doesn’t mean they are ready for the next steps in a rescue. Good luck “giving babies to crazy.” Otherwise, pray and practice so that you might learn to discern those that are ready for rescue from those who will drown you and anyone else they might grip.

I’ve known since the early 80s about this generation. I spent several high school terms to begin a life-long topic of study by reading books about the forces that shaped them and their possible futures (e.g. Fire in the Lake, Megatrends). They would be the richest and most powerful generation of people in world history. And collectively, they could have ensured a better future for the following generations, and a better earth with a once in history stewardship opportunity for the world. But in a plurality, they broke bad the other, easier way. Now they will leave people and planet much worse off, at home and abroad, for the first time in American history, just by looking out for number one, making it all about themselves in bad faith. I had great hope for them. I was a fool for God as I honored the dishonorable among them many times to no avail, until I was called out from them. When the final results came in I was despondent, but only a day or two. I must keep my eyes on the Prize in faithfulness, pressing ever on to Righteousness.

I surrendered the few remaining profane attachments that I shared with them in the summer of ’18. So it was no surprise, because the plans that were discussed ahead of time to best resolve their coming choices had a Tone that I needed time to accept. So, there was always a Plan. The only concern was the time and manner of execution, which is always a dynamic situation. Now it is clear, a cacophonous plurality have ensured that multiple American generations entrusted to them will be poorer, sicker, and die sooner, likewise most the peoples around the world for a time are suffering due to their acts. They’ve commanded that others pay for their spiritual bankruptcy, and support their material desires, and praise them for it. With glee and pleasure this debased people tipped God’s good creation toward life-extinction for their immediate comfort. I won’t lie about it. These are the darkest matters, for future judgment by God alone. But today, it pains me, that they make sure the moniker affixed to them, “The Me Generation,” is prophetic.

Their passing was unexpected yet also inevitable, like the plot of every good story. It was unexpected by the blind guides but inventible to whomsoever paid sober attention, like history it makes sense but like prophecy a surprise to misbelievers, just Like Jesus’s first coming, preserving consistency by harmonizing the ordained with the volitional for good order overtime in a way only a few true believers foresaw. It is excessively good if you make it to the end. Again, I hope many followers still make it inside the wall, I’d like to see some near the Lamb’s Stand for that most joyous celebration. Most the evil they did in past was out of naïveté, ignorance, and even arrogance… That could be forgiven in their cups in the future, but vile or malicious intent on the inside will not be overlooked today, especially after so many calls to repentance.  Their mode of operation is never admit wrong and always demand acknowledgement, in the currency of praise and privilege exactly like their spiritual father. Their most requested burial song? “I did it my way!” All that is necessary for cults of personality (socially fetishized narcissism adoringly resolved into a single person), but spirituality like cults, they’re antichrists. Paul and Jesus saw this rising problem within of the cups of their followers, so they handed the wicked to the devil, so their insides might be poured out and cups cleaned. Just as our Father did to the previously most favored generation who broke bad to die short of their promised land.

I was considering these same issues in the fall of ’04. I had just left my pleasure dome where I wanted to die, to be delivered onto a beachhead of reality with overwhelming hostilities. So, I set about to reading. I was at half priced books in the village to collect my medicines, the most current books on physics and good books on theology. A rabbi approached me, I am not speaking metaphorically, he turned out to be an important priest and teacher in that neck of the woods back in the noughties. He approached me directly and said, “Excuse me sir but you are obviously a spiritual man, I must ask you something.” I was taken aback, so I thought to explore what he knew or wanted to know. I responded, “I have but One spirit… I believe you encounter us as shalom. If you are interested, I am here to help.” His eyes lit up, so we grabbed some java and copped a squat next to an arch.

I liked him very much, he was honest, knowledgeable, and none too proud because he was willing to sacrifice, to ask hard questions to my face, to grow nearer the truth. He didn’t mess around either, once I had my coffee and he a tea, he led well, “These baby-boomers of yours, are they the most wicked generation of self-proclaimed God-fearers in history? Or was it my former generation who were sent into the wasteland? For no other generations in history have expected to cease working, disobey God, and then only to be served.” We talked about the presupposition of rights assumed by religious people: hubris before God. It was one of the greatest conversations I ever had. It was long, but not nearly long enough for me. It was a blessing in a time of doubt and need, and still it resonates within me to this day, with sober followers of Jesus:

Because humanity is exclusively a gift from God, a person can be fully human without working, but because God gave him humanity partly in order to work, he cannot live as fully human without working. It is, therefore, contrary to the purpose of human life to reduce work to a mere means of subsistence [or retirement from labor]. One should not turn a fundamental aspect of life into a mere means of life. Just as the whole of human life is an end in itself – without, of course, ceasing to be a means to glorify God and benefit the creation – so also must work, as a fundamental dimension of human life, be an end in itself.-Miroslav Volf found in https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/work/work-that-glorifies-god?utm_source=Plough+-+English&utm_campaign=35f63161ba-Dig&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4cbb94afa4-35f63161ba-297225196

God sends enigmatic and odd agents to leave a holy Ebeneezer, a reassurance in review and a stone of help before a hard period of testing. It is God’s witness that you can find Him everywhere, if your house is in order. These apparently unlikely ones are the echoes of God’s holiness resonating in separate beings, which we’ve yet to identify because of their “otherness” that we’ve been taught to see. I take it as God’s encouragement to live in the moment, with and for Him. The one thing that I walked away with from that memorial meeting place, which might be some comfort to many today is this: “Certainly not everyone who died in the desert stayed dead!” Or as I summarized to him “some may beat the rap but none can beat the ride.” Master Shlomo, enjoyed my bit of cracker-barrel wisdom so much that he asked if he could use it in his house. I didn’t know that man long, but I knew enough about him to know that his rhetorical request was the highest compliment he could give. In addition we bet on it, he on his and me on mine. If you see him tell him to reach out, he owes me a dollar. I am sure he’s good for it.

As an anthropologist I have always examined the names and titles people give to themselves and others. As a theologist I am increasingly fascinated with the religious implications of humanity’s self-entitled name calling. Most importantly, these understandings aid me in examining the actual spiritual realities attached to these tongue-made names at a capillary level. Then I might separate the difference between what people say they believe inwardly from what they are actually manifesting outwardly, into our common reality. In this way, I can diagnose the etiology of the fruit that is their lives. I can know these manifestations, either as they arise from the dank abyss as threats or to from above as lights, before any are born into materiality here on the surface. Christians have been crap at this too often, but Christendom is an upside-down desiring machine that concretizes an assurance in the world they commoditize that these two cardinal, oppositional apparitions will always be reversed in value.

Accordingly, Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity was key to my early training on the subject. And it serves as an instrumental model to simplify what is most often a very complex causality field. There is a more direct route to this great and secret view of existence but most people haven’t learned the maths, so we’ll go with the great saint. He was a simple man, which should have made his legacy impossible to exploit. But we saw a horrifying example recently that teaches us to never underestimate political animals’ ability to champion stupidity for profit, both material and ideological.

From these socio-cultural formations, it is only one small step for mankind to make their worlds really dark and religious, as they become libel to one another. Much of the noxius-Politik networking them I was taught, as a child, vectored pathologically by even worse theologies of honor and shame for their utopia, literally nowhere for nowhere men. I could doubt and still understand because one of first scary lessons I learned in real life: that’s okay to follow a snake as long as you remember it is a snake. As a man, a dinner acquaintance of mine who is an Inspired thinker, reaffirmed this reality by teaching me to listen but always with a hermeneutic of suspicion to people when they talk about their version of God. He delighted at my analogous childhood aphorism.

The snake monster epitomizes the lowly embodiment among the gentiles (ocean serpents) of not living as a sacrifice to God through Jesus. These dragons sacrifice other humans for their “way of life,” constantly demanding someone else pay with their lives for their serpentine existence . They bear the mark of Cain, always outside the wall, where all the pride of life ends. So, we don’t murder or cancel people swept up in that creatureliness, but simply let them murder themselves like Judas, outside the walls with their blood money mixed in their own entrails. Jesus handed him over to his own personal power-mad financial-theological desires. If any one claims to know God or follow Jesus, they really should live his Way. Peter did well, really well ultimately, after our lord handed him over to his own selfish desires.

The deionizes and animators of these real beasts live by how personalities “affect them,” by feelings and tastes, instead of a commitment to God-given principles without contingencies. Given in God’s Law and Word, honesty is knowing what is true from what is false, not just filling your cup with trademarked filth. Purity’s principle truth is knowing right from wrong, not just a protocol for people’s “naughty bits.” You can not trust anyone who is obsessed with other people’s private business. Obedience is about keeping these things first, then persistence in doing them, not blind faith in whatever local guide vibes with your wants. Our Master identified our Father’s law from the principle he found inside, then he explicated, drew it outward. He viewed people in the same way. In all these things, his embodied hermeneutic expresses truth perfectly to reveal everything unseen.

If you’re just filling your cup religiously with trademarked crap, that is the same as filling to your fleshy stomach only with things that are tasty to your gross appetite. In turn, you violate your inner life as it further perverts, your spiritual appetites, out of bad habits. In fact, all your senses putrefy to the point where Hammurabi’s Code tastes like liberal extremism and the Twelve Tablets of Rome smells too woke. You become children of lawlessness, driven only by the craving for more. Pacta sunt servanda: God keeps covenant even if you don’t. So, if your soul is full of vile filth so is your future, all your future days. But that truth is denied at a great price for some because they always want more, adrift in their self-made chaos.

Lee Atwater to Elon, they led the most promising and blessed generation to make America Apartheid again. Those that followed willingly cannot blame the leaders in Court, but they always do when their worm turns. Instead of being stars, as candles in His hand, they chose to be black holes of worldly desires. And once they reach a given critical mass, God allows them to become nothingness and then annihilates the space they once occupied with Holy fire. The evidence here and there makes for a historic pile of furnace fodder.

A couple of years after this letter, Lee Atwater went to study apartheid politics because he was curious to know why he couldn’t use the n-word anymore in America (https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/03/lee-atwater-interview-with-alexander-p-lamis-rough-transcript-weekend-reading.html). He returned to institute “the Southern Strategy,” which of course was embraced by blasphemous churches that market their adulterated version of Jesus. My concern, for a time, was to rescue any of his apologists. Now that window of opportunity has closed for me, and I couldn’t reach nearly as many as I hoped. I lamented as his followers multiplied. They actually grew even more virulent and unashamed in the caustic soil of the American “me-first” generation. Worse, they are descending into Judgment in ever increasing numbers everyday at a rate many times that of the daily Russian causalities in Ukraine. The Russians started that war for their “strong man” selfishness too.

America’s foundational sin is racism, which is nothing but a religion worshipping genocide. Usually it is led by a minority political party (e.g. Nazis). But the most abominable sinners are “good folks,” the rank and file who are led into excusing or denying their own sin, yet always pointing out what they blindly see as other peoples’ sins. And by demanding others pay for their sins, they free themselves to refuse dealing with their own mistakes. That’s the spiritual power of antichrists. For we know it was “good Germans” that made Nazis what they became. The problem is not the leaders. The real problem is the plurality of their supporters, specifically their massive reservoir of pride, greed, and fear that they refuse to confess and address. Evermore hate and denial is required to ignore it overtime. So their darkness bloats, putrefies, and festers. It corrupts and destroys everything it touches, especially its owners. This fatal social contagion of worldly desires is then channeled by empowering failed prophecy with all its follow-on corruptions and blasphemous theologies for global pollutions of desecration.

All this unholy filth is ushered in by high ranking, elected government officials. One even lied with the proud devotion of a defrauder’s tongue about a prayer Thomas Jefferson never prayed: https://publicwitness.wordandway.org/p/johnson-wins-speakership-reads-fake. Devils are always served best with unreliable sources, which manifest wicked rulers. Many people will stay dead because they lie about their sources, the fantastical liars they followed as guiding lights, encouraging their idolatry. Sure, you are free go on trusting the ones who say Jewish space lasers started wildfires and the deep-state directs hurricanes, if that feels good to you, go for it. I am not being jocular, not completely. So please don’t misunderstand me: Like Bonhoeffer, I am not saying I think their lies are errors in judgement, for I know they lie because they are faithful children to their father, the Liar. The outside of his cup once shinned more brightly than any other creature’s, until the terrain gave way beneath him and his followers.

To be clear, God often tells me that A is true, then I’ll reckon how it plays out in various cascades of causalities either up towards order or down into entropy. That is okay, and it is often healthy to walk about in divine mysteries, but when your solution to a problem is making everyone else pay for your sins… From Jesus’ perspective you’re blaspheming, taking his devout hope given in and for sacrificial love and weaponized it with a ministry of disinformation toward alpha-ape self-aggrandizement. This always leads to genocidal remedies and rationalization by apocalyptically driven speculative philosophies, human teachings, not God’s. The global reality of this means that powerful people have become seducers to make future generations of humanity pay for their selfishness today. It’s one thing to get dates and times wrong or mis-reconstruct the nature of the existential manifestation of God’s parousia, but if you’re severing a lie, so that you may rationalize your rejection of Jesus’ explicit commands… Man, you are serving his enemies like a troop of dark-souled surrender monkeys in full flight from reality. You maybe living the dream in service your worldly kings, but that is the orthogonal opposite of the deepest desire of the King.

The cult leaders profane a beatific metaphor of hope for the assembly of saints. They commoditize as a militant political action plan and operationalized it for themselves and a rationalized genocidal justification, all toward their powers’ global extinction event. They know nothing of Holiness. You’d think after so many of their lies have been demonstrated false, as a dark marketing technique that never delivers, that they’d become a little more circumspect. You would think that, but instead in extreme pride like a snake, they are swallowing their own tail. Let me put it plainly: Hear me, all gentiles! If you are trusting in a flying Jew to sweep you up bodily into the sky, so you might be spared all the consequences of explicitly ignoring his Father’s directives in your life choices, while your god stomps his feet below to kill everyone that you hate, then you are not trusting the Truth. It is a social pathology. For in reality, you are believing in Baal, mounted in the clouds making war on earth for a seven year cycle of chaotic destruction for a falsely promised period of fertility afterward. Is it any wonder you chose worldly leaders that fit the fixed patterns of your gods? Like trusting in Azazael, who promises to “drunks at the end of the bar, dreaming that they’ll be magically plucked up to some high position of authority,” you need to sober up before it is too late and let God change your lifestyle in belief and deed.

The eisegesis mapped from pagan mythic cycles is wrong from the beginning as the adherents start and end with themselves. They decontextualize a Holy narrative entirely, turning the root metaphors into an turbid sea of semantics for their gain, their ideological windfall or financial harvest. Their tongues sow the whirlwind. Their methods of interpretation wreak with paranoia, pareidolia, and pipe dreams. All Cain-like ego defense desires to rationalize their murderous rituals. Their dys-metaphoria is death. If you want to live, then start living like Jesus did, not the way that feels good to you and burying your head in the sand with a bunch of people who are sick like you. Apocalyptic cults have long proven themselves enemies of truth and allies with fallen spirits in lying since Hermon, because they deny any accountability to anything else, apart from their desirously crafted gods. Therefore, they are enemies to God and his desires for humanity in the extreme. This is the opposite of Jesus’ example in every way, apart from lip service.

I don’t want to get pedantic because it would take a book to explain the root issue, but in brief: The substance of this myth is to justify the in-group’s ritual of genocide. In essence, it is tribal paganism magnified to it’s utmost through the propaganda of nationalism, the quintessential form of this is the Roman Empire where Christianity converted into Christendom through the mediation of a corrupt priesthood operating on pagan myths. Frasier’s The Golden Bough (a racist work) is the book that lays it out first, ironically. There are two other presentations that illustrate it unironically, as tragedies: a novel that sets it in Modernity is The Heart of Darkness and a film that exposes the pagan myth of redemptive violence within the ideology of militant American nationalism, Apocalypse Now. The root of this mythic cycle is buried in a dying god or gods, which must be killed in order to bring about new life. It is arguably the basis for most early agrarian societies and the later fertility cults they worshiped, and through subterranean ideology it invisibly guides most bad “Christian” theology to this day by unconsciously mipmapping the metaphoric codes in people’s minds, even those who desire to follow Jesus today, at a level that most have never seen.

To be sure, Jesus uses agrarian models as metaphors, parabolically in the parlance of that day, but not as an eschatological escape plan that he worked out with Baal. So too, I believe Paul sees it in the idolatry of his day as well, when he augmented the Jewish cosmology with Jesus. He did not make an “end-times” map compromised with unholy mythic rationales for gentile rituals. So, today to wed the New Covenant and the renewed spiritual array of forces that Jesus inaugurated by sending his Spirit to violence of any sort upon another, for faith or to deface the face of God in creation for raw greed, well that’s just tribalism blaspheming the Holy Name. This subterranean mythic syncretism is also the shady support for the cult of “the third temple.” We’ll turn that table later if necessary, but suffice to say now: Jesus Christ and whomsoever follows his example of obedience to our Father in Spirit and Truth are the Third Temple, where we die daily to ourselves in service to others. Ezekiel and the Revelator make this claim explicitly. Therefore, any stirring of hatreds or sowing of violence to “please him” will be rejected out of Hand. Oh, I know it makes for easier sale and consumption of your religion because it is metaphorically imitating common dark philosophies. But Paul and Jesus wanted to free all from that claptrap, for it literally leads to death. And the adoration of a specific fictive kinship group, either material or ideological, which religious folks are all about… Well, that is just worshipping the creature not the Creator too.

It is these types of idolatrous myths that the gentiles have always wantonly wanted more of to justify their bloodlust and greed. So these fallen teachings are nothing more than syncretism thorough pagan faith back to primitive sympathetic magic, which is always ultimately the search for a social rationale to kill your neighbor or enslave them. Paul calls them fools without wisdom. We’ll dialogue about the desirous rhizomes of pagan myth in Movement and in Fire, after Tactics. It is enough for you now to know that this mythic paganism has already obscured the truth about heaven and hell, Kingdom and world, too widely. For your soul’s sake do not let it be the way you “follow Jesus,” because if you do then you are not. He died once for all, so his followers could be free of those murderous fates and their death bondage. This pan-worldly religion is simply an arcane political economy of material desires circulating fake gods and hand-made idols and their attendant myths like currency. It is the opposite of loving your enemy or serving those who can do nothing for you, which is living sacrificially for Jesus. Jesus is about dying for your enemy. Killing your enemy is the bestial mark of primal hate, the indelible impression on hearts devoted to all fallen gods.

Empire or nation-building is humanity’s most spectacular cultural manifesto of primal hate for pride, to make themselves great and powerful. But it actually inflicts its worst destructive effects domestically. Their twisted souls seem incapable of developing a life based on honesty, so they cannot grow into a righteously True faith based on Spiritual probity. If they had encountered the truth of Jesus in reality, I’d like to think that wouldn’t be as big a problem, but still, many rejected him to his face. Most nowadays were sold the artificial product easiest to consume and called it truth, a handmade counterfeit caplet that’s easiest to swallow, because it appeals to their preferences. That is usually the widest way for “the greatest” east of Eden. Like end stage drunks and addicts, with dizzying atavism they chose to feel good or increasingly just kill the pain of all the carnage their powers wreak globally. In the end, their rage and deception turns in on themselves, like a snake consuming its tail. When the Light finally hits them it is terrifying to witness, as those who lied about God for self gain and worldly promotion meet God’s wrath when repentance is no longer an option.

I never believed in their gods, but I learned from them like Daniel in Babylon, to obey God evermore faithfully. So I asked Him, countless times in pain or serene reflection, why he bore me into them and required me to learn their good, bad, and ugly so intimately. Graciously, I got different manners of answers that all basically said, “whatever you do I want you to do it for me, to carry me home even if it’s just the two of you.” Being a selfish sort, God used my inordinate desires about a partner for his gain, as I first spent decades in search of an able second. Ultimately, I was given exactly what I deserved, likewise for her. But something happened along the Way, which kind of glided at treetop-level beside my path, always in my peripheral view. He came down occasionally to build an Ebenezer with me, many memorials for as many episodes, some in joyful service, others in turgid trudges, but always they seemed random. In moments of review, it seemed wasteful even abusive. But now, I don’t wonder for an answer anymore. The answer is clear when I don’t cherish the piles of rocks we built, no, instead I find right order in all that only by doing, in tuning a believing loyalty to God’s processes. I’ve always been able to stare into the deep fields of an almost infinite number of dynamic elements and see a pattern emerge. There too, I don’t seek or ask for revelation. It comes to me when I am attentively doing what God tells me to do. It’s not about my ability, born or learned, it is about my will to let Him be who He is in me. I am sorry that I can’t explain it better now. But I will reflect on a few more seemingly random rock piles that all make sense now.

When I was a man about town in the Manchester, I lived next to a fellow of infinite jest and thought. We hit it off immediately, and often sat in Oxford Road cafes. He with his tea and I with my coffee, watching peoples pass by. We shared a bit of knowledge and a little wisdom. And I thought that what I learned from his expertise wouldn’t be important, but it was very important. He was Turkish and studied political economies, in particular he was writing a thesis on how Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reverted a free and growingly affluent society back into basic Eurasian despotism, which would in my friend’s estimation end in economic chaos and tyrannical rule. He was not a prophet, but he studied the truth of history critically without fear, so that today he appears as a prophet. His vision has greatly empowered me today to tell you the truth about another people’s future. It’s a lot, but for example he zeroed in on his despot’s invention and use of a new political concept, “the deep state.” So I know exactly what it is and why certain people use it. Moreover, I know who it preys upon and what it does to otherwise good people. A Christian should know just one thing about it, literally, it is a lie. Unless you’re talking about the Heritage Foundation (who I read religiously from 1983 on their now thoroughly disproven critique of The Global Juggernaut t0 their 2023 coup de grace of the Republic in Project 2025). They aspire to manifest the lie as themselves. But in their hubris and sin of choosing not to read God’s histories honestly, they are blind to their predictable and right end. As tragic as it is for innocent by-standers and those telling the truth (God adores both), the self-delusional leadership lacks situational awareness of the terrain that they occupy. It will give way beneath their feet on Command.

About the same time, I was fortunate be in a postgrad seminar of four about Paul and Judaism. Our facilitator was an award winning academic teacher on Judaism of the highest caliber, as well as being a righteous dude in his own context. He always instructed us with and toward reliable sources, which I’d reflect back to have him assist me in hammering out actionable intelligence. I valued his opinions and results. As I grew to apricate him, in time, I asked for his reflection upon delicate issues from my own former context. Specifically, a brand of Zionism and Jewish identity that destroyed a generation of people who claimed to be Christian fundamentalist. They failed, by every demonstrable measure, to honor that claim in a Substantial way. In fact, they always appeared to be going the opposite way. So, I gave him some of their works, written and video, in a desire to assay their scriptural positions and political acts. I am sorry to report, that my instructor thought I was pranking him. For two weeks, he thought it was a joke in bad taste.

Next meeting, another postgrad, a good pastor named David, who was familiar with this peculiar religious sect gave a similar witness in review of the material. Hearing the second witness, the face of our faithful instructor fell, for a passing moment it broke my heart to feel like the executioner of his pure innocence on the matter, now lost. Even though I know there’s a differential discretion in pains to God when either purity or innocence are altered (they are very different qualities in judgment), still when he spoke it got worse. But like a Godly teacher he didn’t judge, he articulated in love and law God’s real desire for Israel. Then, amazingly, he simply articulated his understanding of Jesus, based primarily on Paul connected with other New Testament sources drawn from the Old. It was a reliable vison of almost infinite depth; we even developed a dialog upon the different messiahs in the holy writings (e.g. the difference between son of Joseph deliverer and son of David defender). So we three followers of Jesus affirmed Daniel’s approach to Jesus, and turned the wickedness of religious elites into an educational moment for God-fearers anonymous that could bring healing, a real God moment for a season.

When we pointed out a roly-poly preacher who bragged about taking his private jet “to inform” the president of “the Israeli situation” to a hipster, seeker coach wearing $1000 tennis shoes, we agreed that it was very sad that the only drip these guys would have ever was worn on their feet or found in material possessions. Yep, Nicolaitans to the NAR, worldly “the winners,” they are always around like greedy scavengers and ghoulish power mongers. Learning the reality of Jesus from such folks is like trying to learn forestry at a lumber yard. But we broke the situation good to have a real discussion about why Jesus probably often walked at night because the Roman road salts would burn the feet of his followers if they didn’t have adequate footwear. That’s wanting to know Jesus in reality! And I am so happy there are at least a few people out there, a growing number in fact, who reject the intoxicating smoke and flattering mirrors to walk across burning coals to get to the reality of Jesus in a fallen world, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. I love those folks so much that I just want to know where and how God wants me to die for them.

Lest you believe I lack the relational experience to speak about religious elites, please allow me to assist you to ward off such a lie. Around the turn of the century, I was adulterously catfished by a woman who now stomps around in cosmetic insecurity, proudly officing by another president. She puts Ahab’s mate to shame, but she began as a poor and abused child. I met her somewhere in between on a Christian dating site… when in Rome you know. After a spell, I paid for her round trip flight so we could meet in person. The second she came off the plane, God showed me two things immediately: she had been horribly misused by men (even some called “men of God”) and she was still married. But God doesn’t hate innocent players even though He may despise their wicked games. He told me, “listen to her and gently redirect her.” So I did. She stayed in my sister’s room above my dying father. I took her to eat in some nice places and to any sites that she asked to see. I took her to my church and I wanted to see how see would respond to my bible study teacher, a likewise abused child who broke good… recently. My now “geriatric” self-effacing sister-instructor nailed it, as usual. The lesson gave me a perfect onramp to discussion I needed to have.

We went to lunch and then walked, so we could discuss what was going on. She was very honest, maybe a little surprised even though I didn’t reveal everything, so I actually liked her. I gave her my take on God’s take, and we agreed that she return sooner than planned and try to reconcile with her estranged husband. I told her if she got divorced, we could catch up later. Turns out she did get divorced but never called me. Also, on the way back to my folks’ she wanted to go to the Galleria, especially the stores with all the “nice stuff.” She had an eye for all that glittered in this world, but given her roots and where she was in life, I didn’t confront her taste for things. Actually, it led to a fairly profound discussion on the way God feels about that. But despite an intense face to face encounter and a very wholesome visitation, she went hard and long the opposite direction. It makes me very sad that I failed her, but it was her choice many times over, across different seasons, to epically reject God.

Or again, with my wife, I’d occasionally tried to introduce her to “American Christian TV.” It wasn’t all bad, there were a few shows relating personal testimonies by God experiencers and there were a few preachers she enjoyed. But I am afraid that’s the extent of our joy on the issue…

First, in aside for context, let me share one thing about my wife, while I have the Vine. I wanted one thing in a third partner for me and God’s union with them: putting God first no matter what. I know a lot of people say that, but let’s be honest, after a few personal encounters a list of contingencies emerges about their margins. I ain’t hating but again, this understanding is based on my honest personal experience, even “the best” that a church offers may have more than one or two other cherished commitments. And where I am going that would be disastrous. My bride has flaws, but the one I demanded she not have, I cannot find, even to this day. So I am as happy as a Labrador in mud. But also, while we’re being intimately honest, she holy terrifies me at times like the poorly trained dog that finally “caught” the God car. She is hard-core committed to the bullseye of the Divine. I petty the fools who get in her way and for the souls of those who reject her testimony. Also, even though it is not a competition, she’s as excellent with a firearm as I was at twelve with the very same weapons… All those scarry qualities and God designed her for me, so it’s productive fear and trembling. Often, she knows God better than I do, and I believe our Judge prefers her… very much, so a not a competition that she wins. All that to say, I’ve been awed by her growth with formidable spiritual vision and capacity. It’s hard to stay in that race with her. And I always trust her on spiritual issues, she too is a most reliable witness in this important regard, the only regard that counts in the end.

… so anyway, the last straw with god-roulette American TV. It was a weekend evening and I wanted to just put our eyes on for a few minutes. That’s when the horror show came on, the huckster host invited out Rodger Stone, who had recently been pardoned from federal crimes (turns out that the guy who pardoned him is a felon several dozen times over). So much for the “crime-fraud exception” in American jurist prudence. But wait, it got worse as he was hailed as a great patriot and shinning example of an activist citizen. Then these evils set-upon our home as my wife grew very disturbed and couldn’t watch. I am used to spectacular carnage and lies, but watching her, that upset me so much that I was pissed off at the problem. She didn’t know him or about his past, but she knew something about him was not right. My initial response put her at ease, “Oh yeah, he’s been a haunt for demons almost his whole life.” She exclaimed, “No, shit!” I was so proud of her, loved her more and teased her for some relief, “No ma’am there’s a whole sewage factory there.”

We turned it off and got tea, and when things calmed down, I shared the guest’s public history from being mentored by another of Satan’s servants, Roy Cohen, to promoting and supporting some of the most despicable tyrants in the world as a lobbyist in D.C., through more recent seditious domestic behaviors, and topped it off with the fact that he is an infamous and unabashed swinger in the flesh. Yes that kind pure hearts, literally not just spiritually or metaphorically. My beloved was rocked, and asked rhetorically, “these are the same people who say God-bless America unironically?” I revealed, “it’s a marketing term, that’s about as honest as a prayer prayed in mere repetition to influence other people.” We prayed for where I came from, even though I had already moved far away them in my heart and mind, that they might come clean and rid God’s house of money-changers, charlatans, and political punks. But they remain quiet chuffed about who they know, that they know, that they know who they are and what they’re doing. Too bad they didn’t simply know God, so we cut the cable and made a covenant with our eyes not to look again. But God still shows us sometimes, enough to know they kept descending the other way. It makes us sad, such a big number, but it was their choice. They were dropped on request.

These episodes aren’t isolated one-offs. They are exemplars of a systemic and cultured apocalyptic intoxication by design, which commodifies ideas and people for profit and power. A world desiring machine creating docile bodies craving lies, so they might swallow nations whole. Although, I must say the results over the recent term were much better than the devil said we’d get seven years ago. I mean at least 1 out of 5 of the people I came from, that’s a very fat remnant for Jesus, and well over half of my former country folk in general, well done and God bless those Americans! The devil owes me a dollar, but he’s a dead-beat dad who always demands that others pay for his privations, so I am not holding my breath. He ain’t my cup of tea, so even though I am a censer at Court I still carry a thurible around him just to be safe. Down here he seems to avoid me like I am the problem. I am not, but I hope I am for him, because I understand his ways that enthrall and empower his favorites, blasphemers. I learned those ways well so I might anticipate when some of his favorites might turn with a willingness to see truth honestly, so I might drop in quick for exfiltration. Their former master hates that, but he can’t stop me, not even if he’s finally given permission to kill me. I tried for years and failed, because when I came up for Air, I was healthier than before.

So, first lesson about the Liar: lies will never begat truth, just as a devil will never drive out devils, nor will self-sanctified politicos with false prophets usher in the Kingdom of God. All of them have the same mission objectives: multiply, kill, steal, and destroy anything God loves or calls good. As for those still captivated to rich personalities rather than Godly principles, profiting from chaotic hatreds of the gentiles rather than what God commands… I ask them, where’s their Nicolae Jetty Carpathia today? Who makes the merchants of the world weep and delink? Who’s the great king of crypto, government computer-controlled cashless currency, now? Who studies and admires autocrats? Who makes it all about himself and his power? What people have subjugated themselves to him, taken his mark, willingly to be part of his rebellion for world domination? If they had only recognized this day, and everything that was good for them! But now it’s too late. Like Santa Anna’s army, his hubris has put them on terrain that they cannot comprehend and cannot defend, when God blows Degüello. By their own choices, their own standards, even by their own lies, the light of reality reveals their true allegiance in and to a world of their making for gods that they have made for their own vanity. That’s just part of what you get hyper-following a thoughtful but corrupt reformer who became the only major God-talker to falsely justify usury, for infamy. I mean hanging bodies from the street lamps of Geneva should have been enough support for Jefferson’s critique of him.

Through all these episodes, and too many others to write here today (that’s a library for later), I like my lord, never sought the upper hand. Moreover, I never sought revelation or the power of creation. I urge you to be a Renewed creature, be God’s revelation to a dying world. I chose and choose to humble myself and to try to reveal Jesus in all my ways. I was/am NOT perfect! But overtime and through pains, a joy is given to me, a desire be the best bricoleur I might. It is the art of simply reordering mundane things, be they broken people or fallen songs, in such a way that it will bring glory to God… not something the world wants. I have done my best knowing often that it was not near good enough. But I cannot give God’s love to people with lost forms of love, nor can I gift sorrow to the unaccountable in this present darkness.

My bride and I are so tired of soft-path patriarchs holding up “recovered” leaders who are not sorry about what they did. They don’t even confess, just saying “well, the deacons thought it best.” We both work with people to help them confess and make amends, on a daily basis, and once you’ve done that awhile, it is real easy to know who’s being honest and who isn’t even willing to become honest. These sad cases don’t even know for whom the bell tolls. Or more simply, the truth that when you run game you’re only gaming yourself. Heck, just a few years ago I tried to tell a decent coworker we were headed to Ezekiel. They just blew me off by thinking, “Ah, no, things aren’t that bad.” To cure their denial, the war broke out a few years later. I hope they finally got over their denial.

Still, bogus preachers are on public display being stick-waving oracles, destroying children’s toys with bats wrapped in bibles, or selling five-gallon buckets of “Armageddon Soup.” A few even tell poor folks that they need to send a certain sum of money to receive “a presidential blessing.” How is that not a barefaced political idol worship ritual? That is straight out of the bedeviled pagan playbook, which these latter day gothi clerics add to by chapter and commentary in their ceremonies. Don’t they know that real Christians were martyred for not burning incense to Domitian? All of these things are literally happening, then and now, as demonic influence spreads from depraved ministers. Meanwhile, lukewarm pastors say and do nothing about the horror consuming their flocks. There are a few who speak and stand against the darkness. But it is too few who say or do anything, so these frauds and their tepid enablers are left unchecked and uncorrected. That’s not simply “different ways to express the faith” or even “just heresy.” That dark carnival is not even about malicious divisions in the church. It is an entirely different category of error: apostasy. And they keep choosing to fall.

Wisdom says it will only increase because idolaters die for their feelings and blasphemers lie for profit, but both live and die in their worldly desires. They continuously chose personalities over principles, to lord power over people instead of serving them, blaming others and accepting no accountability for themselves. It is their faith, yet they descend ever farther away from becoming the image Jesus in the world. It is this activity, by them profaning his Name and Likeness, that brings God to let them finish in their fallenness. So if you see them, ask them but these questions and tell them to try to not lie, because be they a woman believed to be of ill repute who finished well or a human-proclaimed “father of the faith” who is conspiring to coverup abuse and lies, all of them are about to answer with their very lives, how their measure of breath was spent:

Wasn’t our ancestor Abraham “made right with God by works” when he placed his son Isaac on the sacrificial altar? Isn’t it obvious that faith and works are yoked partners, that faith expresses itself in works? That the works are “works of faith”? The full meaning of “believe” in the Scripture sentence, “Abraham believed God and was set right with God,” includes his action. It’s that weave of believing and acting that got Abraham named “God’s friend.” Is it not evident that a person is made right with God not by a barren faith but by faith fruitful in works?

The same with Rahab, the Jericho harlot. Wasn’t her action in hiding God’s spies and helping them escape—that seamless unity of believing and doing—what counted with God? The very moment you separate body and spirit, you end up with a corpse. Separate faith and works and you get the same thing: a corpse.

The oldest idolatries and blasphemies bound as one revenant Roman corpse

I know their vile, oily gods but none of them will ever be my god because I know the one God. The only thing to fear more than not knowing Him, is claiming to know Him and not living as he did. They tell the atheists it is terrible not to believe, but it is much worse to lie about knowing Him. For there is only one notion more horrifying for the blasphemous than living in a universe without a Creator, it is much more ghastly to live in a creation with the Creator as revealed in the holy writings and dare to interpret Law and Word through their pagan mythologies.

Listen to the kakistocracy empowered by their idiocracy, for they are legionsaying, “Invicta” (winning), “pax et securitas” (peace and security), only to ultimately say “Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant.” What’s old is new again. “See us and fear as we are what heaven looks like, you must praise us!”… babel-on neo-Romans in utopia. Cue the lamentations of the merchants, Pax America is fallen. Having the most of everything ever in world history wasn’t enough for this proudest generation. So, in their blind decadence and bad faith, they are bringing it all down on themselves. It bemused some of the loyalist creatures I know that they didn’t get a chance to knock something down again. But let all down in their pit hail their great gilded skank and her Red Caesar Cult. Phew, I know the smell of their old fallen leader too well, and together they make “the beast with two backs”… Man, even if you’re just an alcoholic you must address your own issues first. Blaming a neighbor is just a sick knee-jerk response to defend a luciferin ego. But villainy is what intoxicated people do, they demand that everyone and anyone else pay for their mistakes. To them in parting, I’ll quote Claudius for my response to their spiritual deception that they tried to lift high but is now being brought low into their darkness, “Aut nōn.”

A great light was written from a dark pitted isle long ago. The Apocalypse attributed to John seems to base the most wicked “church” that he could foresee, as a social formation that he already knew and then projected it forward into the distant future. This defiling image to come appears to be drawn from the greatest oppressive strategies of dark powers arrayed against him in his day. For the revelator, they were embodied by the Flavian Emperors. Then most dreadfully, he beheld a people who claimed Jesus wed with these most gentile of rulers and their mythic paganism.

The Flavians had no legitimate claim to power in truth, for their claim to divinity was completely a human fabrication, an idol of the mind, an ideology to direct social action religiously. Their early propaganda was primarily an attack on the previous rulers, the Julio-Claudians, who made the Roman Empire the wealthiest it would ever be, before the ages of evermore debt-ridden conflicts for economy and pride, until the ultimate collapse. The Flavians spent their wealth to flood social systems and entertainment communications with lies and threats of violence to come to power amid a civil war. Once in power, they turned their systemic lying machine, a virulent political movement (e.g. the good news of Caesar), to threatening neighbors, oppressing former allies, and suppressing any voices of domestic dissent. They reinforced their privilege by way of culture elites, who falsely claimed to represent the pious citizen, by coopting mythic systems of messianism and marshaling cultural forces with singular militancy. This allowed them to place corrupt priests and unqualified patsies in high offices according to only one criteria: blind loyalty to Caesar.

Even today this power over history, which doesn’t last long, is pursed in violence. They forsake eternity in the truth and their souls. They exchanged the Kingdom that will heal the nations, even the gentiles, for a tower of moths and rust. They didn’t value the Gracious gift, and used it as a credit card that they never intended to pay to buy the gifts they wanted more. No sorrow for the unaccountable until their violent end. I say “let evildoers do their worst and the dirty-minded go all out in pollution, but let the righteous maintain a straight course and the holy continue on in holiness.” Let the snake swallow its tail, it’s just empire being empire in it’s time, like boys being boys in the locker room… But even the revelator didn’t foresee firenados of today. Yes that’s been a thing for a few years now, and there’s so much more to come upon Flavian Baal-worshippers. Their bride of Christ has been turned out as John Wayne impersonator. No human soul may sing ketava with the rulers of this world today in corruption, and rightly expect union under the roof of eternity in purity tomorrow. But I came not to bury the Caesars, only to warn them of the ides of March, which just passed. I did, and then I hoped they would listen when Wille sang to us a few years ago, *now the preach’n is over and the lessons’ begun.* But instead today, they support the ultimate move of Antichrist, genocide, as they are in legion with crimes on humanity and blasphemy against God.

Letter from a real Jesus-follower suffering a lifetime of real persecution.

CHRISTIAN REFLECTION FROM JERUSALEM

Legacy of the Seal and the Bears

There once there was a seal, his Creator kept him hidden in time and space from where we are today. His name is… Joel… because his ineffable, unspeakable, or practically unnamable lord is God. There wasn’t anything visually special about him, except for some reddish splotches on his fins. He knew this was true even though his bob by birth claimed to be the most special bob ever. Later he discovered that was not true either, for they were just one of almost countless colonies. But even before he figured that out, he never felt snuggly or cozy in his pod. Afterall, they demand that every seal do what they do to know their animal spirt(s). From the giddy-up, it was clear that Joel didn’t want to exchange his Spirt for theirs. They affirmed it time and again whenever he attempted to preach to them, calling him ignorant in his youth, made up even worse lies about him when he was older, and then just straight up rejected him in the end. This was because the loudest and fattest seals drove the herd with lies and fear to treat the pod as if it were their harem to exploit.

This reality was never more terrifyingly true than when the bears came around. The self-appointed drivers told the whole colony to surround them, so the creepiest were in the center, and when a bear came to the edges, they told the least ones at the edge to “act like bears!” Now this was great for those in the center because bears always took the seals from the edges. So after giving the orders, they never even got their hair ruffled. They didn’t even do anything when bears attacked large groups of pups in training! The unaffected leaders would simply send hopes and prayers to the bereaved, and proclaim soon after that the bears were just being bears, and that bears are entitled to arms. As the more vulnerable died within the camp- clocklike regularity, the seals least at risk would say things like “all seal lives matter” or “we cannot be replaced at the center.” And then, when survivors reported their eyewitness, the bear wannabes would always act like compassionate seals saying, “I am sorry for the way you feel.” They obfuscated reality lavishly and emotionally like a gang whenever another, lesser seal voiced a grievance or loss. Worst of all, these frauds claimed to be representing the Spirit and Creator to take the least’s pebbles and shells. They tried to justified this daylight robbery by saying their larger collections were proof of the Spirit’s approval. They were liars about the Spirit. And they demanded that others pay for their greedy mistakes in stewardship, as they hated the Creator.

It was nothing but seal-icidal stupidity on a colonial scale. Joel had known, even as a pup, this whole scenario was just very, very old and stinky whale poop. You see he, even as a pup, really talked with the Spirit. But what could he do about the slaughter? Well, the old stories say that the Creator came as a seal even longer ago, so that seals would no longer act like bears. That seal was the Creator’s exemplar in life and death and the true life after, in act and speech. They preached for seals to embrace that particular way, so They could reform and direct the unique, free gifts They had given to seals. But there were also earlier fat bloodthirsty seals who had their bears kill that Preacher too. The truth is seals can be very selfish and lazy, so most rarely tried to follow the Seal because of their nature and murderous leadership. The leaders taught cheap gifting, by even more selfish and spiritually lazy influencers who got cozy with their own want to-be-a-bear, anti-seal, teachings. They demanded that others suffer for their mistakes in teaching. That’s not a Gifted teaching, just a darker layer from an oil spill. Whenever our irregular red-finned pup tried to discuss any of this, well, you can guess the response that he got, almost always. So, Joel learned to treasure the occasion of the least and rejected so much, that he asked the Spirit what he might do for them.

Far from being what the bear-be claimers taught, the Spirit led Joel far away and back, many times. First, nearby as a pup he learned about the currents, the icebergs, and the ocean of airs above it all, and even the lights above, and highest of all, their Creator and Father. Despite this, the self-invested murders called him funny and precocious. Later, as a young seal, Joel was Called to explore depths and store houses of other oceans, as the Creator empowered Joel with internal light to see through even the darkest matters and deepest elements of creation. With great joy he got to know other pods, which his pod said didn’t matter, at least not as much. The Spirit even led him to love and care for other animals in the ocean, which his own pod’s whale poop traffickers saw as food and said knowing them was dangerous. They just wanted the other creatures to die for their mistaken privilege, lesser seals or any others. This time when Joel tried to share some light on these matters with the ones who claimed to possess the old stories, they made up lies about him and then called him a liar, turned their backs on him, and even made fun of his splotches, which at that time were a sensitive issue to a youngish seal. They called Joel weak or crazy or sick, like they never heard the Spirit say if you act like a bear you’ll be eaten by a bear… Again, he asked the Spirit what to do.

Again, the Spirit led Joel in the wrong direction, or it seemed at the time a very bad idea. He was sent to places where the old stories were made and where the story-tellers were trained. Now to be sure there were many storehouses of poop filled and sold there, but every so often our pilgrim seal happened upon rare seals. So, he learned from all but only followed those who also had almost imperceptible splotches on their fins too. They knew their mistakes and were willing to pay themselves. They were quite reserved about it, but Joel finally learned a lot from other seals. Sure he had talked and befriended all sorts of other animals, but he never knew how to be a real seal among bearish seals. Joel watched how his valued instructors handled the cadets, and how they should let go of the seriously deluded, so that they might help those with inspired desires, albeit with a wink and a nudge, not like a bear, not ever. This was the secret, the training within the training: never act like a bear even in the midst of bear worshippers. It was hard, not physically like before when he learned, but emotionally hard to let go of the bear adorers, who claimed to be the only real seals. Joel realized that his innocence and internal light form the Creator had precluded him form seeing exactly how dark matters were really, or how really bad the situation had become. So, one more time he asked the Spirit what to do.

This time the only hard part was letting go of the bearish seals and going away, again. But this time, a great joy came to Joel. A little joy came when he went among funny talking seals an ocean away. Most of them were called bad seals by his former colony, because in their dim eyes the faraway seals didn’t behave enough like bears and didn’t have enough shells or pretty rocks, like that is a bad thing because they might take their shells and rocks. This attitude only justified their dark desire to have everyone else to pay for their “treasure” of shells and rocks. What’s more, there were even pods afar who embraced all seals, most creatures, and even the good creation they shared, which Joel knew was their Creator’s plan along. But bad story-tellers perverted this core Truth on an ever-shrinking, ever-bloodier iceberg, supposedly the greatest iceberg ever… Not.

Now, the faraway seal-like seals were curious at first and asked, almost factiously, “how is it that you’ve escaped all those bears?!” The intrepid traveler answered, “the bears thought that I could breathe under water as well as on dry land and went so far, so fast before their eyes that the bears gave up because of their inferior design for diverse environments.” Because the response from the more mature and demure pilgrim preacher among them was clever and true, they wryly exclaimed, “but that’s not true!” Smiling, winking, and nudging the joyous sojourner said, “you are absolutely correct! But the bears didn’t know that, and once they experienced the fact that I can dive and thrive where they just tread water and barely dive, then they told themselves that. And they told the want-to-be-bear-seals with whom they colluded for rape, plunder, and murder. The Spirit showed me that once the fraud seals, and real bears they follow, convince themselves of something, their own smugness never allows them to change. They have even convinced themselves that they have too many rocks and shells to lose, to ever want to swim faraway with the Spirit. It’s a lie the bears love and it’s a dying shame for the seals.” Joel sheepishly reflected a little more deeply, “Of course, first things first and always… to do any of that you must get your mind right by not pretending to be a bear, and then get your heart right to follow the Spirit instead, regardless where He leads or what happens. Then one day, somedays later, you’ll see the whole ocean no matter how dark, top to bottom and side to side, all the tides and currents in motion, all at once just as He does, as a very small place where nothing is hidden.”

It was a good place and pod to be in Joel mused. But the few times he popped his head up near his old rookery, the violence and stupidity just got worse, the blood drenched bear-feeding iceberg was almost gone as the disorder, carnage, and lies grew. Dark matters are always darkest before they get darker in places like that. It now ached the grey-haired seal, but for his commitment and loyalty to the Spirit, no matter what happened, his Creator presented him with what he always wanted most, finally! Her name is Ellie, because God fulfills oaths in her. Pretty fab name, huh? She has the most gorgeous fur on every layer, very snug-able, never smugly. She has immaculate under fur that’s hard to see, but it is more important than the outer coat, because the inner is what holds air, so a seal has vertical buoyancy to support others. Not to be too rude, but her neck was like no other. Necks are very important also, as they determine the field of a seal’s vision, even to know the Wind. She loves wolves too, so she is a bit cheeky as well. Joel even loved that… a lot.

From the start they were like two peas in their own private pod, because in another way she too had been called to learn “to breathe underwater.” The Spirit delivered her out of dark matters of intimate betrayal also, just in a different context, so they could share their experiences as their lives joined for growth in the same Way. That way was always based daily, on the best of their growing abilities, to obey the Spirit no matter what, so they might sing about future days in truth as one. That is what Joel had been awaiting and searching for in reality, because to mate with any other one who might have any contingencies attached to this Priority… Well, in the end, it would be an unkindness to that anyone else, because Joel sensed where he was headed. That meant asking any other would also mean either the other wouldn’t get all they wanted, or worse, he might betray his Calling for the desires of the any other, as he a fierce swimmer but even a fiercer lover. He was just that kind of seal. He waited painfully, not patiently, for the right one, for the Right future for every creature and all creation. Also, he waited so that the Creator wouldn’t be done with him and his their whole life. Together, Ellie and Joel had one seal-soul assignment: to carry the Source of their Spirit home, even if it was the two of them! So obviously, there was much more work with the Spirit to be done for and through them, because no place is perfect but they were getting warmer… However, that’s another pretty cool story that the Spirit is manifesting presently in them. It’s for telling in yet another time and place about Light matters.

They call me Jesus and that’s all the bother 3.3

In realty I have learned in many ways, many times that churches and church people are often very wrong. This came natural to me in my blood, with love, not through childhood indoctrination. So I was patient to endure the lies, and when the time came for God to activate this agency, little of my lived experiences with religious folks persuaded me to distrust God or what he birthed in me. A humble and compassionate hermeneutic of suspicion is exactly that I needed, in order that I might do the hardest things with his great Love. So, a preemptive admonishment made with care, not egotistical eyewitness: the wrong ones will always think that I am saying something that I am not, especially this time because they’ll be quick to add to it for their dark matters…

I worked in outreach and case management through a non-profit for years. I worked in rural counties west of Houston, providing critical information and vital connections to resources for marginalized people. Most were marginalized in practically every way possible. I acted for them as a crisis counselor, advocate, and guide to health. In this service, I saw first hand the toll that socially hateful stigmata takes on the least of us from bellicose slaughter houses for religious pride. Two different people with the same condition, but in different contexts, have very different outcomes depending on a single environmental variable: the blame heaped upon them for being a moral failure. In rural areas the invisible violence is magnified. A child who got sick from a transfusion with excellent social support could expect a near normal lifetime, whereas an an adult who became infected any other way and subjected to a hostile social environment had just a few years, perhaps just months… That is real cancel culture at work for death… Let me make this perfectly clear, if you claim the lord of Life and you judge others to death, then in His eyes you are the greater moral failure, for you have profaned Him, even his cherished Name.

The motivation behind this demanding and undercompensated work was a direct response to the willful ignorance and murderous hatred that I witnessed at many churches. They were taught these vices by their religious and political leaders. I stayed as long as I could, but ultimately, I refused to drown in their hate and stupidity, and I went to do something about it. It was the closest I have ever been to working with lepers. I loved it. My God loved it, so I treasure the experience. Working with these socially-stigmatized souls taught me infinitely more about the lived experience of Jesus Christ than I ever learned at all the trade-marked propaganda centers for cancel culture.

The man whose arm is pictured in chair above was a client. A very kind old soul, a widower, a servant all his life, who if he ever had a selfish bone in his body, it was long gone. His daughter told me I was Jesus, the angel leaving the cross on the porch, through the open door. I don’t know about all that, but he was a kind and generous man by all accounts, even from those that turned on him in the end, until his end. From his lifetime of service he thought he knew people, especially his people, well and intimately. But shortly after being diagnosed in his late 60’s the scales fell from his eyes. It was an experience that I knew well by my 20’s. So, we would sit and talk about everything, guns to butter, scripture to scrapes. I valued this time so much that I would schedule our visits last on a road day, or on my way to fish. He was too weak by the time we met for him to fish. But, to this day, it eats me up that I did not offer to take him and let him sit and look out over the water with me. He was and is still an epic porch sitter, now a lost skill in America.

A few times, while sitting on the porch, bad neighbors would abuse the privilege of voicing their distain for his mere existence. It never phased him. I wanted to acquire this skill, so I shared a few of my experiences in the field while working with others. I was physically threatened, spit on, despised in many locales, even insulted with baseless epithets and slurs. Sister, that is the business end of cancel culture. Prejudice makes peoples’ souls darker faster than any other vice. The more self-righteous even tried to abuse scripture on me. On the occasions that I was Bidden to respond with an authorized usage, they would runaway or just get angrier and then flee like pigs off a cliff. I didn’t mind. I learned a lot from those experiences, mostly about God’s will and the appropriate use of his Word regarding the hearts and minds of people. The tactics, we will discuss plenty next time. But what I wanted to learn back then from my client and friend was how to not let this baseless hatred unduly affect my understanding or response. His was an awakened serenity that bordered on apathy to average eyes. I kept a close eye on him because I was only there to help and support him. Besides, whether you’re right or wrong in your thinking, as soon as you judge someone you cannot understand or learn from them. Once you pickled your mind in evil that way for too long, then it can never be a crispy cucumber again, fresh and ripe for God to favor in due season. Cucumbers easily become pickles, but a pickle can never be a cucumber again.

The first time an appropriate opportunity to ask him about how he dealt with all the baseless hate arose, he responded with a little parable: “Son” he said, “did you hear about the fool who was convinced that he could fly by a huckster, so they jumped off a hundred story building?” I did not respond but looked at him willingly. He did not turn his head towards me, he kept rocking and looking off into the fields. We took-in three beats of heavy but heightened awareness for him to answer what needed to be a rhetorical question, “yeh, that fool was so stupid that the poor son-of-a-gun thought he was successful for more than ninety-nine and a half floors!” We laughed and enjoyed more of the gentle breeze, warming sun, and common experience.

Then, I shared with him something that I hadn’t shared with anyone else at that time. Several times when ignorant and hostile folks confronted me, something anomalous happened. I ask God to tell me what’s wrong with the person. He would still me, and a shaped colored form would emanate, which had contiguous discernable qualities and secondary impressions. They were much different than apparitions. I had talked to several neurologists and psychiatrists, and there are myriad reasons it could not be sensory synesthesia, certainly not in any pathological sense. They were like mathematical primary forms or like Grimm in a way that explained the reality we all share more deeply, rather than the superstitious grotesqueries of pulp spiritualism as presented in This Present Darkness. Käsemann argues that the gift of the Spirit is to discern spirits, so I know that I am in right fellowship on that account. I understood it immediately and without effort, as you might come to understand the stages of a Greek tragedy in this thread without even knowing it. All it took was years of fear and trembling, time and attention, and a willingness to be vulnerable before violent people repeatedly, then the sight comes with ease to simply exposes a register of forces standing behind the shadow “Punch and Judy Show” of this world, which the powers that be aim to exploit in their consumer slaves. In fact, they demand that all their subjects see nothing else except what they can preach or sell to you. If you don’t, they call you sick and mark you for cancelation.

Anyway, somehow the impressions and understandings just made since to me, even though it was initially terrifying and ultimately the source of more sorrow than joy. But in retrospect, I see it as God fulfilling His nature in mine. I learned early on that “exposing the hearts and minds of people” is key for the ministry of Christ Jesus. So it is good. It felt like Him perfecting my broken attentions, natural and learned, concerning mundane awareness. So I endeavored to feel more. It hurt, but not like fear-induced change. It was just acceptance to change, which is hard for most. It made complete sense in the arch of my life, having grown from a child who studied the streams and tides in motion to a teen with a preternatural knack for stochastic field functions, to the point that I could see probability where others only saw chaos in seemingly random data sets. I never got to finish working on that plan, but I used it a lot to fish. More to God’s point, it prepared me enough for the work He had planned for me back then, and today.

I had seen glimpses all my life in multivarious contexts, especially when people were fearful for no good reason. But then living as Christ in the field, it all came full circle. So I only ever use the gift to help people on my own volition, never for personal gain of any sort, out of my fear of God, like my lord Jesus, best I could in failure following after him. God has used it in other ways too, where only He has that right… And God knows that any charlatan with a fraction of this unction and agency would have made a killing. But the point now is that my porch-sitting companion said that he didn’t just believe me, but he knew I could before I told him! People passing through their veil of bodily mortality can see more than most. He said too that he’d always known another fella with that capacity and I reminded him of his other friend from the moment we met. The breeze picked up and the sun grew warmer, as I felt calm resolve balanced with healthy fear in a dynamic peace within like I had few times before, but now do with greater recurrence since.

Overtime it really resonated with one of my favorite Omar Bradley-isms, so I pass it on when I see a righteous person enduring the crap-fest of self-righteous people. A biographer once asked him, “a lot of people, who have known you for years. They all say that you have never yelled out an order. You often say please too. Why is that?” The five-star general answered, “I out ranked them.” Later, some corroborated tales say he had pointed dialogues with those who out-ranked him. For me, I want to think that it was because Omar knew that almost all the time he understood the larger picture better than his subordinates who just needed to focus their role on that day, not anyone else’s, or they would fail in their duty and people would die tomorrow. So, this vision was a privilege never to be abused, and a gift to be mediated to save the lives of those who he served with, and even more so, those who served under him. Jesus makes that clear across his teachings. Too bad more wanna be “strong men” model Patton, pursing personal status and fame, going the other way after pagan gods and mystical teachings only to come to an entirely different end, even before he died.

Always made sense to me, for in reality, Jesus outranks everybody, and yet he never took the upper-hand. He only barked correction at those who presumed to out rank him from their crystal-darkling of religiously self-perceived privilege, a view which does nothing in reality, but prove them to be liars and hypocrites. And for those who abused the religiously lower-ranked for material gain… He literally whooped them, before they died and encountered his Father’s wrath after they passed. Seems like anyone who knows him would know that well enough to save their hides and souls. Unfortunately, many went the other way to institute the most beastly system of cultural cancelation and profit that the world has ever been subjected. Heck, they are so stupid that they have the mendacity to say they are the ones being “canceled.” It is just like idolaters, who are always fleeing from shadows cast by their depraved imagination.

So enduring and pervasive is their global economy of hate that my client and I were able to commiserate about it even 1800 years later, thousands of miles away, on a breezy warmly lit porch just outside Wharton. The Fellowship was so strong that I learned from my client to pity the lost souls who didn’t know any better, and try to help for as long as I might. More recently, Jesus taught me not to care too much for those who persistently chose the dark over the light and know better. Today, I just miss that porch and my enlightened friend. I found great comfort in seeing him sitting on the Porch with that other fella he knew. They waved, and by them both I learned to breathe underwater.

στασιμονς

There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentleman. -Patrick Rothfuss

You know that from day one, the Palm Sunday I came into America, I was with you totally—laying my life on the line, serving the Master no matter what across the earth, just to return and be forced to put-up with no end of fascistic scheming by religious poohbahs and worldly politicos who demanded that everyone live their trademark lifestyle. I didn’t skimp or trim in any way. Every truth and encouragement that could have made a difference to you, you got. I taught you out in public and I taught you in your homes, urging confessors and profaners alike to a radical life-change before God and an equally radical trust in our Master Jesus.

But there is another urgency before me now. We were ordered away. I’m still a bit in the dark about what will happen here, for some things are ordained, while others demand that we brave the sea and respond well to conditions on kinetic terrain. I do know that it won’t be any picnic, as God and our lord told us repeatedly, and clearly, that there are hard times and suffering, more peoples with even more chains in greater darkness ahead. But my struggles matter little. What matters most to me is to finish what God started: the job the Master Jesus gave me of letting everyone I meet know all about this incredibly extravagant generosity of God.

And so this is good-bye, for a time. You’re not going to see me again this season, nor I you, you whom I have gone among for so long proclaiming the news of God’s inaugurated kingdom. I’ve done my best for you, given you all our Master has allowed, held back nothing of God’s will for you.

Now it’s up to you. Be aware—both for yourselves and your congregations. You have charge over these people—God’s people and treasure they are—to guard and protect them. God himself thought they were worth dying for.

I know that as soon as I am gone, vicious wolves who’ve always been among you are going to show up from many directions and rip into your flocks, men from your very own ranks twisting words so as to seduce disciples into following them instead of Jesus. So stay awake and keep up your guard. Remember those years I kept at it with you, never letting up, pouring my heart out with you, one after another.

Now I’m turning you over to God, our marvelous God whose gracious Word can make you into what he wants you to be and give you everything you could possibly need for a community of holy friends.

I’ve never, as you so well know, had too much love for wealth or fashion or the pride of life among the popular elites, which they sculpt so pervasively in thoughts and desires; it’s all fathered for their devils, not God. With these bare hands and wits I took care of my own basic needs and those who worked with me. In everything I’ve done, I have demonstrated to you how necessary it is to work on behalf of the weak and not exploit them. You’ll not likely go wrong here if you keep remembering, in spite of all the seductive sound and furry hissed by the selfish gentile overlords, that our Master said, “You’re far happier giving than getting.”

For Our Beloved

God, investigate my life;
    get all the facts firsthand.
I’m an open book to you;
    even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking.
You know when I leave and when I get back;
    I’m never out of your sight.
You know everything I’m going to say
    before I start the first sentence.
I look behind me and you’re there,
    then up ahead and you’re there, too—
    your reassuring presence, coming and going.
This is too much, too wonderful—
    I can’t take it all in!
Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit?
    to be out of your sight?
If I climb to the sky, you’re there!
    If I go underground, you’re there!
If I flew on morning’s wings
    to the far western horizon,
You’d find me in a minute—
    you’re already there waiting!
Then I said to myself, “Oh, he even sees me in the dark!
    At night I’m immersed in the light!”
It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you;
    night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.
Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out;
    you formed me in my mother’s womb.
I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking!
    Body and soul, I am marvelously made!
    I worship in adoration—what a creation!
You know me inside and out,
    you know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
    how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth;
    all the stages of my life were spread out before you,
The days of my life all prepared
    before I’d even lived one day.
Your thoughts—how rare, how beautiful!
    God, I’ll never comprehend them!
I couldn’t even begin to count them—
    any more than I could count the sand of the sea.
Oh, let me rise in the morning and live always with you!
    And please, God, do away with wickedness for good!
And you murderers—out of here!—
    all the men and women who belittle you, God,
    infatuated with cheap god-imitations.
See how I hate those who hate you, God,
    see how I loathe all this godless arrogance;
I hate it with pure, unadulterated hatred.
    Your enemies are my enemies!
Investigate my life, O God,
    find out everything about me;
Cross-examine and test me,
    get a clear picture of what I’m about;
See for yourself whether I’ve done anything wrong—
    then guide me on the road to eternal life.

So to then…
Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each other, on pace with each other. None of this going off and doing your own thing. And cultivate thankfulness. Let the Word of Christ—the Message—have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God! Let every detail in your lives—words, actions, whatever—be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way.

The Son judges all, but the Father who knows all selects and sends another at his Son’s behest for his bride… So playing a Cyrano de Bergerac-ist bit, like a chaperone of another order… Oh, dearest hearts these moments have been a great thrill for me! And me a chaperone? The role came as complete surprise, I never saw coming until I was already doing it for a minute. We laughed. I think it has been my favorite part. It has certainly drawn me closer to the Christ, who is Jesus, and that’s saying something these days. Besides the least, y’all are my favorites and that won’t change, no matter what the worst tell you. And for “the few” who are both least and faithful to the end, I good cry about you all the time, and hurt whenever I hear about you hurting.

I am certainly raining now. Because this is the last little bit where I’ll help you sing ketva with Jesus for awhile. But I am not important, you are able to keep in tune with the reality of Jesus no matter what, and that will keep you walking in our Father’s Ketubah, down the aisle to His son’s huppa. So, I’ll leave you with a few symbolic glimpses of your future days with our lord. The first is the most costly lesson that I had to learn to follow Christ most intimately these days, in order to divide all things rightly amid the chaos. And the second should give some joy to the poignancy of the first. Then third, last but certainly not least, a couple of very personal “other songs” that my lord wanted to sing directly to you, his betrothed, even though he’s not able to be with you in person today. We must do this the right way after all. So, I’ll let the images speak now…

The first time I saw this film, twenty years ago, I identified primarily with Fischer… Wow, how that’s changed. Now I’m the guy who feels too old for the job, Ben. The gift? Ben knew his song well before he started singing to others. Fischer was a great singer, but he didn’t know the right song yet, so he had more gifts than anyone but none to give. That took time under Instruction.

You cannot pass on a truth or a spirit that you do not have. It took a holy revolutionary act of war on myself, in all my broken parts, to stay in constant contact with God, practicing his principles in life everyday throughout my life, however fitfully, to increase or just maintain spiritual fitness. No matter which character you identify then, now, or tomorrow, becoming conformed to the image of Christ is not what you imagined, because you always began as a child only after you meet him in reality. And no matter your age at that rebirth, your perspective and skills must change from that time forward.

Let it be, stay on course, purify your inner life, be innately transformed and then you will be able to do things that were impossible before for you, even in front of your “enemies.” Great forces come to your aid as your soul will not look the same to “allies” either. Your heart will not feel the same because you will not be the same. You will come to friend or foe alike in love, otherwise you are the same imposter. When you do, then you will able to forgive yourself when you love them both sacrificially. You only fail if you convince yourself that you know already exactly what that might look like in a distant future and set your feelings on a false course by pre-judgment, which leads you ever farther from loving all others and God. But by any discernible standard, you are still here because you have a hard-earned Spiritual compass set to True north.

Έξοδος

When we are staggered by the chilly winds of adversity and battered by the raging storms of disappointment and when through our folly and sin we stray into some destructive far country and are frustrated because of the strange feeling of homesickness, we need to know that there is Someone who loves us, cares for us, understands us, and will give us another chance. –Martin Luther King Jr.

“But he knows where I am and what I’ve done. He can cross-examine me all he wants, and I’ll pass the test with honors. I’ve followed him closely, my feet in his footprints, not once swerving from his way. I’ve obeyed every word he’s spoken, and not just obeyed his advice—I’ve treasured it.”

As the lights come on across Europe and go out across America, neither theatre will be easy, as the powers of darkness and distance attempt to destroy us. But it hastens singular opportunities for all to shine, with legendary brilliance, carry Him into historic eternity. And in case you didn’t know, Eternity is the only place worth being acknowledged. I myself have a nephew headed to serve in the armed forces on the continent soon. I may only be months, not years, behind him… But that is no matter to me, paying for other people’s mistakes is the highest calling, according to Jesus. So if called and allowed, I will embrace it. What matters to me today is to finish well for those who hope rightfully for more life in the renewed earth through their personal and communal transforming, believing loyalty in God alone for his unique Life, both today and forever. I beg of you with all the earnestness at my command, abandon yourself to Him, put your own house in order, and rescue. All your world’s problems are of your own making, the chaos is just a symbol. So stop hating and blaming, repent to love and serve, not just because you want to… but because you must!

I apologized once before that you were lied to so much, so often, by so many, but that’s the reality when you dwell in a selfishly disordered pit. I cannot palliate them again. I remember praying for a boomer instructor that I admired in ‘08, because he grieved about financial retirement loses while playing the game fairly. I prayed for him and conditions changed. I’ve seen him a few times since, and I believe he is well now. But I cannot mitigate for that again, that type of intervention now would be Insalutary. It hurts me emotionally too. Before as well, I apologized that you probably weren’t looking for me, and I wasn’t what you wanted but I promised that I was what you needed according to God. And if you learned anything about me, let it be that I did nothing with you here of my own accord. Sadly for me, I knew ahead of time that many would still go on choosing other gods, instead of serving other people. More sadly, I knew some people that I treasured didn’t believe what could happen, but it has. I knew it, because it was the experience of my God and my lord too. And I certainly can do no better than they did.

I’ve known most of my life that this day was coming, and this wasn’t the manner that I wanted to memorialize Spring with you the first time. For your sakes, I wanted to get through at least one round of terrain, tactics, fire, and movement after introduction and basic principles. But people make their choices and God responds. As you should know, I am going with God, no matter what… and I dearly hope, most deeply, that the ever-shifting currents will bring me near to see you again. One of the best instructors that I ever met may have summarized this almost universal existential phenomena resulting from hard training best. I asked “why are you so hard on the ones given to you, because it’s obvious in private that you love them and care about them more than yourself?” He answered with a question, “What’s the difference between their mothers and me?” I said that I didn’t know because I didn’t want to alter his right answer. He said, “there’s only one… time. Their mothers had them for 17 years, I’ve only got a few months. And the realities they’ll confront soon are only going to be worse if they aren’t better prepared.”

I do not know exactly what conditions and the terrain will look like when next we meet. I do know that we’ll finally discuss those crooked steps and that conversation is only for serious people. Also we’ll finally use some maths, literally from the oldest character tradition in the Book… And there’ll be big surf. All that demands the kind of focus possessed only by the tried and truly tested.

(Next rendezvous at sunset on September 29th 2028… God’s speed)