Friday

034 The Christmas-Pentecost Connection

I just read a quote in the December edition of the "Link," one of the magazines our Family produces, which triggered a train of thought about the connection between Christmas and Pentecost. Christmas is the first incident we celebrate related to Christ's coming to earth, and Pentecost is the last. In other words, Pentecost is in a sense the end of the story that Christmas begins to tell:

At Christmas we have a handful of rather poor people, a carpenter from Nazareth with his pregnant wife (whom he almost didn't marry because it wasn't his child she was bearing, had God personally not encouraged him to go ahead), a handful of shepherds, and a bunch of animals. Okay, there were the 3 kings, but they came later, and all in all, it was a bit of a motley crew gathered in that stable there in Palestine.

Pentecost - well, since some folks can't really pin down what exactly Pentecost is or was in the first place - was traditionally the Jewish feast of the harvest, which happened to be the occasion at which the Holy Spirit was poured out among the disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem after His resurrection. The result of that outpouring was the beginning of the Christian church: 3000 new souls won on that day, and 5000 more a few days later (Acts 2:41, 4:4). In other words, the seed which God had sown by sending down that little baby on the first Christmas in that shaggy stable was blossoming forth into it's first bloom, and exploding with fruit, on the day of Pentecost.

The day of Pentecost also resulted in the greatest and purest form of Communism ever known to man, which Karl Marx pitifully tried to imitate in his idea, and we've seen the results of that. If you don't believe it, read Acts 2:44,45 yourself. This distribution of wealth, over time, also brought the transition for many people from lack, want and poverty to abundance, apart from the spiritual riches which were poured out (you can find the gifts of the Spirit listed in 1.Corinthians 12, and the 13th chapter dedicated to the greatest of them alone, and the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22, 23).

Most people aren't even aware of the gifts of the Spirit nowadays, nor of the spiritual riches that have been poured on us through Christ's coming, but instead we're extremely preoccupied with the physical abundance God has blessed us with (or at least the ability to obtain some of that abundance via loans & credit), heaping on our children and loved ones such an abundance of material things, that there's hardly ever time for them to ponder or grasp the spiritual meaning of Christmas.

As far as I can see it, the material and physical appearance of Jesus in Bethlehem points, 34 years later very clearly in the direction God wanted to lead us through Jesus: to the Spirit. Jesus said during His lifetime: "The flesh is good for nothing, it's the Spirit that gives life" (John 6:63). And isn't that the very lesson that God is trying to teach us throughout the Bible, from Moses and the Pharaoh, Joshua and Jericho, over David and Goliath, on to the greatest victory ever through a seeming defeat on the cross?

Yet some people don't seem to get the point. The wall that today desecrates Jesus' birth place we so fondly commemorate during this season, is one silent, terrifying testimony to that fact.

Wednesday

033 IT WAS NOTHING, REALLY!


When I was a young teenager, I came across a book by Science Fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, "Sturgeon is alive and well," a collection of some pretty far-out sci-fi stories - not the space travel kind, but fairly down-to-earth ones, such as the story about an inventor who discovers the power of nothing while sitting on the toilet, entitled, "It was nothing, really." The inventor in the story develops a powerful force field out of the very substance of nothing, which sounds very much like what the new physics tells us: We used to think all the energy was in the particles of the atom; now it seems that the energy is, in fact, in the space between the particles!

I used to think that air was pretty much like nothing: I took it for granted, since I couldn't really touch it or see it or feel it, and I'm sure many of us are not really aware of the miracle that's happening with every breath we take. Yet, when a space craft re-enters the atmosphere, the astronauts encounter the fact that air isn't nothing at all, but fairly solid, compared to the nothingness they just came from, in outer space. It starts to dawn on one then, why, when God created the sky, He called it firmament (Genesis 1:6,7), indicating that the stuff He made it of was firm and relatively solid, compared to all the nothing, that empty space between the planets, the 'particles' of the universe...

Some bright guys, like Mark McCutcheon (I mentioned him before), are finding out that maybe the forces we knew in physics aren't really separate forces at all... maybe there's more to all that nothing, all that empty space between the particles of the atoms and the universe, than we know.... Maybe it hasn't even dawned on us yet how little, how nothing we know...

One of the best Christians songs ever written, from a time way before Christian music ever became as huge as it is now, is "Oxygen" by Richard Page, in which he describes the Lord as being our oxygen. How fitting and appropriate, because with every breath we take, God proves His love for us, or, as Richard Rohr puts it in "Everything Belongs" (a book I can whole-heartedly recommend to any truth seeker, which has not only triggered the inspiration for this blog, but also quite a few of my forth-coming songs): "We're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is awareness. Little do we realize that God is maintaining us in existence with every breath we take. As we take another it means that God is choosing us now and now and now..."

He also says that God is hiding in the physical world, which is something David Berg, founder of The Family International, also taught, and I was able to confirm by personal experience many times. I personally suspect that the place God chooses to hide specially - perhaps His favorite 'hiding place,' is nothingness, that empty space between the particles, where all the energy lies, just as He chooses the little, humble and 'invisible' people, the 'nothings' and 'nobodies' in this world to do the great works that nobody else wants to do.

I don't know who said it first, David Berg or Eric Idle, or yet another inspired thinker: "God made the world out of nothing and He hung it on nothing. Hangs pretty good, doesn't it?" So, nothing seems to be a pretty trustworthy substance, because God seems to be in it. After all, if everything is made from nothing, and nothing is our origin, than maybe there's more to nothing than we've been able to fathom thus far...

Saturday

032 Did God Make Man, Or Did Man Make Him Up?

I've briefly written about this before, when I first caught this drift, but there are people who think that the whole concept of the God of the Bible, including the Gospel story about Jesus & Mary, in other words, the entire Jewish and Christian faiths (along with other religions) are a concoction of the Illuminati, the secret planners and makers behind the scenes in the body of politics, in order to mentally enslave mankind.

They argue that the story of Jesus & Mary is just another version of the ancient Babylonian goddess Semiramis and her son, who is sent to have been to earth on December 25th, which is why some straight-liner, fundamentlist Christians don't believe in celebrating Christmas, since they believe that it's just an ancient heathen celebration camouflaged as a Christian ceremony. While those Christians might have a point, in that December 25th most likely was not really Jesus' actual birthday (after all, if they didn't even get the year right, how much less likely is it they got the month or the day right?), those afore-mentionen conspiracy freaks, like David Icke and friends like Brian Desborough claim that the whole thing, the Bible in its entirety, and thus all belief in our one God, is a fabrication of evil "reptilians" who have enslaved mankind since the beginning.

I think the Illuminati must either be very thankful for guys like David Icke, or paying him a lot of money, for creating an even greater confusion around their mystery than there already is. In reality, Illuminists are a lot more realistic, down-to-earth & everyday type of people than mystery cracks like Icke want to make us believe, and while some or most of them may be working for the side of what we Christians call "the Enemy," and may be subjected to his spirits and direction, many of them are probably doing so totally unbeknownst to them, and with a lot of "good" intentions. Although it's also quite probably that they invented this whole scheme of claiming that Christianity, Judaism and monotheism per se is just one of their inventions.

After all, the Devil claims the credit for a lot of things he's not really responsible for, like sex (since he obviously got many to believe that it's something evil, and thus coming from him), and there were days when he got many church Christians to believe that musical instruments were his invention, just because they were being used in worldly entertainment establishments like saloons, etc.

The only thing I give the Devil credit for is being the greatest liar there is, and the only reason he manages to cheat everybody bigtime and have a lot of people totally deluded and blinded is because he's a fairly decent imitator, and if he sees God doing anything decent, he tries to copy it. By comparison to the real thing, his copies are lousy, but they're still good enough to impress us dumb folks living in the material world.

Probably the majority of Christians would call me a heretic, but thankfully, some have open enough hearts, minds and channels of communication with God to realize that Heaven is not a joint run by 3 dudes, as in guys or masculine personages, as commonly perceived: "Uncle God, Uncle Holy Ghost and Uncle Jesus," but since God has made physical things to be an illustration of spiritual truths, and earthly families thankfully (usually!) don't consist of two papas and a child, but a mother and a father, etc., and since it says right in the first chapter of the Bible, "In his own image created He them,... male and female," (Gen.1:27), it is quite reasonable to believe that the Holy Ghost is actually not a "He," but a "She."

We may not have known that, but I'm pretty sure the Devil has known that all along, and thus created his little counterfeit "trinity" in his Babylonian and Egyptian counterfeit religions (which again, he claims now that Christianity is just another version of - true to his motto, "if ya tell a lie, tell a biiig one!").

One should not give the old punk that much credit for anything too quickly. After all, he's nothing much but an imitator, a copy cat. Pretty soon, he's even going to send his own "son" to earth, his imitation "christ", whom the Bible calls the Antichrist. The Bible even says that the true Christ would not return until his diabolical imitation had been around (see 2.Thessalonians 2:1-12), pretending to be God. After all, He wouldn't want to miss out on the final showdown to expose the fake & show the world Who really is the Real Thing, plus, to put an end to his ptiful reign and attempt at Utopia personally (2.Thes.2:8) at that event the Bible calls the Battle of Armageddon (Rev.16:12-14, 16-21, 17:14, 19:11-21).

Giving the Devil and his ilk too much credit is like living in the "Matrix" (as in the epic with Keanu Reeves), without seeing the Greater Picture (as in BIG) around it (ever wonder how Neo ever got his supernatural powers even outside the Matrix, in the real world in the sequels?). Don't limit your focus and vision to the puny, finite concoction of Lucifer's plan for the world, however impressive they may be (after all, the Bible calls him "the god of this world (2.Cor.4:4), but look beyond, at the Big Picture, that's engulfing the Devil's matrix and everything, way beyond what we may now call history or the world... The "End of the world as we know it" will only be The Beginning.

Did God make man, or did man make God up? As far as the Bible, and myself are concerned, if you've got any brains at all, the answer is evident (Ps.14:1). Try to figure out the probability of all the miracles needed to keep you alive with every breath you take & every beat of your heart to just be happening by accident. Try to seriously figure it out, without cheating, and you won't have any doubts anymore about Who made who, either.

November 26, 2006