IVa: Macro Role, of Alpha Precedence | IVb: ..of Body | IVc: ..of Trial Combat | IVd: ..of Your Own Destiny |
Now to Father's Other Reasons for the pre-Trib Rapture besides Precedence, and the Truths which these Reasons, display. It's a cardinal rule of hermeneutics that you "compare Scripture with Scripture." What matters is Doctrinal Fit. Rapture is a contested doctrine, by those who've not yet examined the Bible's proof of it. Proof would not be acceptable only from citing the many relevant verses -- which some think contestable -- but even more importantly, one must demonstrate the underlying Doctrinal Fit of pre-Trib Rapture, with respect to all the rest of Bible Doctrine. So accounting for the Doctrinal Fit of a pre-Trib Rapture becomes paramount, whether you believe in it or not. If you don't believe in it, then the Fit has to be explained away. If you do believe in it, you don't understand what you believe, absent seeing the Fit. More, if there is a Fit, then you can compare pan-Bible with many more verses, accounting for that Fit. After all, truth must be consistent with all other Truth. Accordingly, what Doctrinal Fit have we seen thus far? We observed how the CHARACTER of Precedence, forms the legal parameters of Church; and hence, the exigency of Rapture being pre-Trib. There are eight major types of Precedence, which here are mnemonically listed:
So Daniel 9:26c still characterizes all remaining history, just as God promised Daniel it would. But Now, Revelation elaborates on Daniel 9:26c and 9:27, so you know to interpret Revelation both paradigmally and then literally, for the actual Tribulation. An inserted elaboration, due to an inserted Church. Thus current historical events always 'advertise' Daniel 9:26c as our slot on the 'time map', to advertise Messiah both Came and LEFT The Building. So The BRIDGE Is Out. So Rapture is therefore tachú, next-in-sequence without prior warning, since Daniel 9:26c gives no warning for the Tribulation.
So the Rapture's date is unpredictable and pre-Trib: we Church weren't 'in the cards', but were inserted into the game, Now being decked out for our wedding, thus constituting the Bridal BRIDGE back to Dan9:27, trumping Satan at our own last trumpet. [Our last trumpet is an ENDING trumpet ("last" as signalling an end, not "last" in the sense of its own sequence); it not the same type of trumpet nor blown by the same angel, as the allegedly-last trumpet in Revelation. Our trumpet is the Trumpet of God, commanded by and maybe also blown by an archangel, 1Thess4:16, 1Cor15:52. The allegedly-last trumpet in Revelation, is not even called the last trumpet, but rather a seventh angel blows one; it is blown by a lower-ranking angel, BEGINNING the last half of the Tribulation -- so that trumpet doesn't end anything, but begins something. So the trumpets are not the same at all. Rank has its privileges, and we are Royal Family of God; the angel blowing the seventh trumpet of judgement for the world is not an archangel, as the text will show (Rev 11:15, Greek). Different trumpets for different events and audiences, different endings for each, blown every time by a different angel, couldn't be plainer. Just as all verses with "save" aren't on the kind of "save" that saves you from hell, not all "trumpet" verses reference the same trumpet. Many kinds of saves, many kinds of doors, many kinds of trumpets.]
Here we notice four imperative reasons for the Rapture to be pre-Trib and unpredictable:
So Now what happened to Him, happens to Church, since we are His Body, a First Fruits Extension of Him in the world, James 1:18, Rom11:26, 1Cor15:20-23, 1Jn4:17. Our Exit is predicted, as was His. However, God will no longer predict when, since His Gracious 1000-year advance notice, was rejected; also, since His Own Death Year was provisioned, but not predicted, lest our free will be compromised. For it was His Own Life, to lay down. Consequently, the same issue applies to us. So the Rapture's date is unpredictable, as it's impossible to calculate when Church's Elongating Exit RESURRECTION should occur. "Exit Resurrection" is one of the Bible's terms for Rapture (Phili3:11), Greek word exanastasis. Another one is harpazw, 1Thess4:17, which in Latin uses the verb rapere ("rapiemur" in Vulgate), perfect tense rapto, Anglicized into "Rapture". So the Rapture must precede the Trib, for the same reason that the Harvest of First Fruits always did: again, see Luke21:24 in context, notice how Church is NOT mentioned, though obviously included. For Church is inserted, might not ever have existed: so the ORIGINAL Plan of Time, which didn't include any "Church", still holds. It's just Elongated, Extended. For Israel effectively Elongated Time by rejecting Him. Elongated, but didn't abrogate it or change its initial order. Christ fulfilled Time for all time, Heb10:14, hence as an Elongating Extension of Him, our Elongating Exit Resurrection effects the Original Goal of Our Archegos, completes the Bride-worthy Battle, Crowns us, meets the Daniel Deadline as Originally Intended. God sure likes dovetailing His Goals, huh.
The Lord's Birth was a warning of the EXITING of Israel's favored status, as we saw in Part IVa: Isa7 prophecy and Daniel 9:26 tie together as a warning of the END. Israel had 1000 years' advance notice on that deadline. The larger doctrine underlying it is that believers must be removed prior to judgement, a precedent since Adam, covered in #17 of Part IVc. So Church must be REMOVED else the Tribulation cannot begin for that JUSTICE Reason, above all. Justice is CONSISTENT. Past is prologue, precedence, consistent. Time is thus elongated by Justice Judging, so that those undergoing the judgement can change their minds and BELIEVE. Judgement is always a blessing. It just hurts, that's all: we need it to hurt, in order to hear. So one "J", "Jesus", and the "J" of "Judgement" He received on behalf of our sins, leads to another "J", Justice Hurting so we get the Justice we need in order to Hear to have yet another "H", the "Heaven" of living with THE "H", "Him". Forever. God sure likes dovetailing His Alpha/Aleph +Beta/Beth Goals, huh.
So Our Royal Spiritual Life is opposite Israel in nearly every respect, as we saw in Part II's "Covenant Properties" link section, and the "Bridal Contract" link section's pink table in Part IVa (LvS4aContinued.htm). Our Archegos had to invent a higher spiritual life than the Mosaic Law, to be Crowned. So as Bride, our Battle to be Crowned must have the same Characteristics, which is why we are Royally Invisible, disparate, Crafting Our Own Rules from His Thinking, the Bible. Hence, one of the oppositenesses, regards that Daniel Deadline: the Jews had 1000 years' advance notice on Messiah's Birth and Death deadline, framed by David's dates. So Church is opposite, has no notice, since we Elongate, Build the Bridge, as part of our Crafting job to be Bride-worthy and get Crowned. It's also sudden-death if we fail, just as it was for Christ; Time would have ended had He not succeeded; same is true for us, Heb11:40. So no time guarantee can be granted us, because HE got none. So the Rapture's date is unpredictable, as Church's FULFILLMENT has no time set: for God doesn't begin to number days and hence set time, until failure occurs. And for us, it's sudden death if failure occurs. So we might FAIL rather than FULFILL, just as He could have. Thus our covenant deliberately omits any Time Allotment, i.e., 1Jn2:28, 3:2, Phili 3:11. [Greek of those verses is clear, English is terrible. John uses ean+subjunctive, proving it's a contingency; Paul uses ei pws, ="if by whatever means", again showing contingency; see also Rom11:14, same contingency construction with same Greek; parallel to Rom11:14 is 1Cor9:22, which shows there is no doubt, but the WAY in which it happens is contingent. So Paul's not doubting his resurrection, either, in Phili3:11. Helps to do one's homework, huh. By contrast, the 2nd Advent has NO contingency element, it's long been predicted to come at the end of the Tribulation, viz., in Zech 14:1-7. By contrast, Rapture is contingent, could have come during John's or Paul's day, just as they show by using those Greek constructions.]
God's Grace GRAFTING is the Precedent of Precedence. There would be no Archegos to Wed, absent His Vote to do so. No Vote to do so, if no Choice to do so. So no Bride to develop, whether Israel or us, absent His Grace Choice that it be so. No Battle to win, no Crown to receive, had He not Voted for it, Himself. The Daniel 9 Deadline came from GOD's (not a human king's) Decree in Jer25:11, which Daniel was reading in Daniel 9:2; that decree in turn was Graciously dated from 586BC and predicated on six time grants given David, three at 490 years, and three at 1000 years (see "David" links in Mirroring.htm for details). Without those Grants, there would have been no 2nd Temple, no rebuilt Jerusalem, and no Christ to become Archegos, to have a Battle, to have a Bride, to be Crowned, to have a Deadline, to Elongate Time, to Fulfill the Failure since Adam's Fall, thus making Him the Last Adam Who Never Fails. So He can make an open-ended contract with Father in His Humanity, even as the contract to BECOME Humanity, 1Tim2:5, was ratified by Him as Son of God, before even angels existed (no verb in 1Tim2:5, tells you that). So it's wholly consistent with HIS Choosing, that Choosing, Voting, Testimony, Invention, Bridging, Elongating Resurrection Fulfillment -- or Failure -- should determine outcomes. God chooses to Love. Hence we can too, 1Jn4:19. So the Rapture being unpredictable, based on Voting Testimony Invention Bridging Elongating Resurrection Fulfillment -- or Failure -- is determinative. By God's Gracious, Choosing-Love Decree, John 17:20-21, Eph1; James 5:7-9, 1Thess 4:17 and Phili3:11, Heb11:40, Jude 21&24, 2Pet3:4, 8-10, 1Jn2:28, 1Jn3:2. [Jude closely parallels 2Pet3, and may be much later than I supposed in PopeMyth.htm and Part IVa, given the mention of apostles in the past tense in Jude 17: wow, no apostolic succession, baby: just read and remember what they said -- this, said by the logical next head, the Lord's own brother. John's exile might have brought about the letter, Revelation not yet being penned? Ask God about this, research it more.]
It's a BALANCING thing, this GRAFTING. Body balancing is the theme of this webpage. For a quick video review of the GRAFTING God does, play my Youtube video:
You know Satan's objection as a Mistrial claim, from many other Bible verses and especially from fake holy books, but you can see it plainly enough even in translation, in Job 1:9-11, 2:4-5. Satan accuses God of Bribing Job, a fatal misuse of Justice. That accusation remains, viz., Zech 3. So God's Grace GRAFTING Precedence is itself really on Trial, here. God Himself is accused of being a rapist, or at least being arbitrary in His Love; and of being therefore UnLoving, to punish anyone who freely chooses not to love Him in return. Thus God is argued to be less-than-advertised, a liar, manipulating the evidence to make Himself look right. Accordingly in this phase of the Trial, legally the Rapture must precede the Tribulation, as Church is NEW Evidence introduced DURING the Trial. Is God manipulating Evidence, since who but God could know what FUTURE souls were paid for on the Cross? For when Israel rejected Christ, that should have provoked a Mistrial Verdict -- meaning Satan would win -- if the Lord didn't invent Church. So Rapture signals the end of God's Presentation of Church in Evidence, hence concludes His Appeal Trial Rebuttal to Satan: that despite having the same covenanted spiritual life as given the Christ, fallen man is happier than under Satan's plan. Let's review why.
Consequently, here in Part IVb we'll thread in the above Precedences, and further examine Father's Other Body-Building Criteria, all of which surround the fact that Father wants the Rapture to depend on Believers Voting To Learn His Son. Since we can't read each other's souls individually, let alone in aggregate -- no one can predict when that Voting will suffice to complete Church. So scrap all those drooling historical event programs which choke Christian media: every generation will have the same Daniel 9:26c trends, as we saw in Part IVa. (To read a longer sidebar on this topic of our misreading Bible re Rapture, click here.)
See, the Rapture is a warning, both to us and to them. It's not some drool-over Disneyland thing. You don't look forward to a hurricane, so you don't look forward to the Rapture, either. You respectfully fear it, and seek to grow up spiritually as fast as possible.
Notice how, quite independently, this "H", Heaven's Historical "Harpazw" Mistrial Precedence, ACCOMPLISHES all the A-F goals of "G", God's Grace GRAFTING Precedence. For all the "H" reasons for Rapture to predate Trib, 'just happen' (yeah, right) to be the very conditions God Sovereignly wants and contracted with His Son -- before angels even existed, per Eph1 (especially verses 19-23). Satan has his own reasons for insisting that we get the same terms, battles, and hence spiritual life as Christ Himself -- it's IMPOSSIBLE to want and live that Life, evidenced by the fact we've been here a whopping 2000 years since the Crucifixion, yet the paltry number of Pleroma kings needed to warrant the Rapture, haven't been developed! (Possibly as low as 1000 top-tier for 100 billion souls, covered in "God's GAAP Balancing" link section of this Part IVb.) It should be obvious that Satan wants to put off the Tribulation and ideally prevent it altogether. For at that point he knows he's only got seven years' freedom left. So Church CANNOT be in the Tribulation for all the above reasons, plus this one: Satan doesn't want it, either. Satan therefore FAKES the Church, and will PRETEND it is there in the Tribulation, so to debunk the Rapture, so Trib believers won't recognize the time they live in; meanwhile, to fake out Church believers, so you think you're being godly, but instead are kowtowing to the god of this world -- all in God's name, of course! More about how Satan plays us, will be in Part IVc. Here, we're just focusing on the precedents giving birth to the parameters of Church and its pre-Trib required Exit.
So let's next catalog some of the balder Bible English verses and keywords, which show that the NUMBER of PEOPLE in Church is something FATHER will DETERMINE, so no one can predict when Rapture will occur. This rebuttal-phase "Church Age" will continue, until the number of PLEROMA are "complete" -- á la the criteria in
's eternity past, two people-booty clauses (b'rabbim in laken ahalleq-LO b'rabbim, and wa-et-atsumim yehalleq shalal). This is the Contract To Make Church; it's open-ended, based on Body Count.
[1Cor12:7 is slightly mistranslated; I exegeted the passage live onscreen, to refute King-James-Only garbage, starting here: click here to watch it. The other videos follow as responses, through '13/72' of that KJVOB series. Or, here are my raw notes on the corrected translation: "L 1604, 92 Spiritual Dynamics, series 376. Thieme's translation is VERY different:
"Now to each one is given for the benefit (didomi+dat of advantage) of the team (sumpheron), the Doctrinal Teaching (phanerosis) OF (objective) the Spirit, for the purpose of being beneficial to the team." (pros to sumpheron, with pros as acc of PURPOSE and sumpheron, idiomatically: it's ATTIC GREEK prep phrase, concept of purpose of benefit to the organization). BibleWorks BDAG lexicon "y.subst.to" heading confirms this, and has cross-refs. Again, idea of public contribution -- so is it related to sunteleias in Matt28:20 (see VERindex.htm on that word)?
Early in s.1 of tape is exeg. BDAG noted that sumphero has also a connotation of benefit-for-the-team (didn't use quite such words, but same meaning).
Thieme STRESSED that one should regard phanerosis as a "noun of action", and that to Pneuma is OBJECTIVE genitive, but sounds like it functions like subj gen but he kept saying obj gen. Listen in later tapes to see if he changes to subj gen."]
It's astonishing, how this numbers-fulfillment concept is so stressed in the NT's well-known metaphors. It's more astonishing, how we overlook them and then claim Rapture isn't in the Bible, lol:
The Standard for Completing Church is that in aggregate and individually, His Maturity is 'built' in us, Eph4:13. Greek verb "katantanw" (used in Eph4:13) means a journeying to a destination, and is often used in Greek to signify the "journey of life". You can find that in a Bauer, Danker lexicon or another one of like quality. It always takes the preposition eis to show the destination, His Maturity Level, Eph4:12-13. So Church's 'life' reaches its destination when that Maturity has been built into it. So Rapture is not based on historical events. Pattern of history is the same since the Crucifixion, as there are enough human bodies on earth in any generation, to become believers and complete Church. That gives you a sense of its size. More about the size criterion will be said later on in this page.
Paul in Ephesians 2, passim in Romans and Corinthians (maybe Colossians also), plus the writer of Hebrews, also reference this custom of "far off" and "near", to explain our relationship with God in Christ. [The terms were also used in Greek worship rites: 'core philosophy of the phallicism. More will be said about them when "menw" is explained, in the beginning of Part IVd.] Of course, everyone remembers how no one during Moses could go close to Mt. Zion, on pain of death (see Heb12:18ff). The point, which we also saw in Part III's Corollary 3B: you will be as close to God as you Want, And God Will Be As Close To You As You Want; and if You Don't Want Bible Doctrine, You Don't Want To Be Close. So, you will be Far Away from Him, though saved -- Forever.
Here's the FOUNDING OF BRIDE outline in Ephesians:
(Chapter divisions in English are "off" versus the conceptual divisions in the writing, but you'll see that as you read. Someday I'll revise the above bullets to better fit the verse numbers of these themes: for example, the themes listed for Chapters 3 and 4 really focus in vv3:10 through 4:16. "As is", the association of a particular subtopic with a chapter was based on where that subtopic reaches a climax in the letter. Later I'll revise the bullets' descriptions.)
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(Parallel passage is Phili1:6.) |
God the Holy Spirit constantly stresses the extreme Leveraging Value of Bible Doctrine, in every verse of Scripture. He always does so by small and deft deployments of arcane characteristics of the original languages of Scripture. So if you don't know those original-language texts, you can't see what He's saying. Tiny particles and case endings, subtle etymological wordplays, rare grammar constructions, allusions, imports from other languages -- oodles of little things placed just right! change the entire meaning! Since Part I, many of these deft deployments have been mentioned in small-font notes. So let's go on a Greek-techie ride. Here in Ephesians, you can't see the Founding, Begetting, Financing Structure of our Royal Spiritual Life in Christ, if you don't study the Book in the original-language texts. This table will illustrate why.
Ephesians 2:10 in corrected translation reads: "For we are His Craftsmanship, CREATED in Christ Jesus for the FOUNDING purpose of DIVINE Achievements which God [Father] prepared in advance, that we should/may walk/live in them." A parallel verse is Romans 8:28, which is also Greek Drama, as explained at length in Fixes.htm.
As has been said repeatedly since Part I, We are the Work, done to us by God.
Ooops. All those good-deedy ideas pandered by the religious types don't add a farthing to becoming Christlike; don't add a copper to the spiritual capital you take with you at death, huh. |
via Holy Spirit's Ministry of Feeding Bible Doctrine, Eph3:15-19, Eph 4:11-16. |
[Thieme notes: 85EphT440s2ff re Eph4:16 (4:11-16 run from T419-460 and later, but t.450-452 have exeg: see pink stickies in notebook E); his resulting trans is very different from all Bibles, mostly because translations don't recognize (or clarify) what Paul in Greek means by the body-parts analogy. Worse, they mistranslate or poorly place heautou as if it ref'd body (rather than pastor=HAPHE); v.13 is in BibleWorks notes, from L.1603.]
Backdrop for Ephesians 3 and 4: when you have a relationship with someone, the quality of that relationship is entirely determined by It should be obvious that we all get attracted, knowing little about the other person. But as we know each other better, we find differences which are unpleasant. So the bonding doesn't progress, or it stays less intimate, so we don't associate more closely. If we keep on trying to know the other better, then we find ways to bond. God by nature is alien to our nature. He being Infinite, can bond to us, and did. But we being of the opposite desires (Isa55:8-9), don't want to know Him. No amount of works, emotion, rituals on the planet can solve that problem. Such activities don't really bond people to people, and certainly not to God. The first bad experience generally breaks a relationship, or seriously erodes it. So one needs a deeper level of sharing, to weather the ups and downs, especially if that relationship is to be intimate. God's will is FULL INTIMACY, John 17. So that's the point of this 2nd Criterion: creating that intimacy. You will get as much or as little of it as you want. And that level chosen, lasts forever. God never coerces us to have a relationship, and never coerces what level of relationship, either. So we get as close to God as we want, and if we don't want to learn Him, we don't want to be close. Period.
That was His Job, so it's also Your Job: Under Christ the King-Priest kata Melchizedek, you also are a Royal Priest To Father Who Hears You Every Second. That's the real "work of service" you are being trained in. So, you must be continually Fed His Thinking, or the ABC's of your spiritual life will be Absent, Babyish, and Crude. So will be your eternal future, if you don't eat and live on Bible. It's that simple. No other rules, and nothing other than Bible (i.e., good deeds, rituals, singing songs) can PUT HIS HEAD INTO YOURS. Your Craftsman Alone can do that. So, Your Craftsman -- the Holy Spirit -- teaches you how to craft your thinking on all the specifics in your own life, every time you are in a state of 1Jn1:9 used, as you DAILY go through this eating learning living procedure of Bible in your head, 24/7. Eph3:15-19 depicts the outcome if you learn from your Craftsman. Eph4:11-16 explains the procedure, being under a pastor He has personally appointed to train you in Bible. RightPT.htm is a fuller explanation of that rule. Here, Paul again tweaks the play "Ion" to show God's True Priestly 'Service' Rule of learning and living on Bible 24/7, so to think Perfect Thoughts before Father. Ion is a DIAKONOS in the Temple, serving in it, a priestly function; he is as well, a DOULOS, slaveson. Paul will be playing on these meanings in Eph 4. In the play, you see a lot of Ion's thinking, and he's wholly occupied with what he understands to be the god's standards and thinking, while he does whatever he does. Ion is the dedicated slaveson. Both Greek words were frequently employed in plays to develop subplots, since both words have double-entendre, High-and-low-status meanings which make for what we would consider 'Shakespearian' twists. DIAKONOS was either a waiter, kitchen slave, or diplomat, emissary, representative of the king: more on DIAKONOS follows below. DOULOS, as just mentioned, was a slave or a son. So you can have lots of fun writing plots where the son is mistaken for a slave, and an emissary of the king is mistaken for kitchen help! We Church are both, lol! In the play Ion, DIAKONOS is used in both senses: Ion is actually in charge of the Temple's possessions, a cushy position of no little honor; but in the first scene, the talkative Ion's sweeping the front of the temple with a laurel bough, and shooting arrows to drive off birds trying to eat the sacrifices or nest in the Temple -- quite the caretaker! English can't replicate all that witty meaning. Still, most translations of Eph3:15-21 are decent enough that you can see Paul is talking about The Individual Being Built Up In Him. For, Eph1 was Father's Purpose of Endowering; Eph2, how We Are All Being Built Up Together Into A Temple; so, next question -- What About The Person? Well, the person gets built up, living stone quarried (note how it's done to you), then all the stones get fitted together. So, Eph3, is on the individual's being built. Unfortunately, Eph4 is egregiously fuzzed up in Bible translations. Paul's meaning is clear and witty, but only in the Greek. Eph4 is on the fitting together of ALL the individuals, and answers the question how each of them is 'supplied', so that Eph3's individual purpose, is accomplished. Hence, Eph4:11-16 baldly states (in Greek, not trans.) that Eph2:10's AGATHOS, ="intrinsic value Divine achievement" (not insipid "good works") is accomplished in the Body Of Christ Via Eating Doctrine, so we can Serve Doctrine. The wordplay in Eph4:11-16 is fabulous! It's all one sentence with four main subjunctive-mood verbs (you can't tell that in English), signifying the intimate connection between the clauses, á la Eph1:1-18. For a fuller description with the Greek text, translation and important embedded exegetical notes, CLICK HERE for Eph41216.htm. Two other corrected translations, working and smooth, are in RightPt.htm. A new and hybrid translation appears below which I like even better than in those webpages. Frankly no translation can ever do justice to the God-inspired original. That's why God preserved the original-language texts. Every time one revisits the text one finds ways to improve the translation versus what one had before. God is Genius! Key to translation and interpretation: recognize how Paul parallels his EIS clauses as 'branches' from KATANTANW in 4:13, the climactic verse about reaching Christ's Own Maturity level (most shocking verse in Bible, imo). This recognition is not done in any published Bible, so the passage is fuzzed up; typically, EIS clauses are mistranslated in English with some horrifying results. (i.e., making Rom10:10 look like you must say aloud you believe in Christ to be saved, what a lie. Rather, the EIS=Because, since it's the second EIS in the sentence. So, Rom 10:10 should read EIS=Because you are already saved you are able to say aloud that you believe. Typical, the published translation reverses what the Greek says.) In Eph4:11-16, Paul uses KATANTANW with its EIS clauses to construct a ROAD MAP in which all roads lead to the same destination; en route, there are benchmarks of development to 'get there', else you don't make it. Subjunctive mood in Greek with EIS indicates purpose and objective, but allows potential for failure: "qualified by the element of contingency", as my pastor puts it. So Paul makes the EIS clause do double duty, showing the destination as well as the purpose. In our modern English, this deft parallelling should be translated with bullets. Each bullet below is an EIS clause in the Greek, and begins with EIS. Note well the parallel objectives in each such bullet. Idea is that all of them meet together. [I'm not wholly using my pastor's translation here, but just translating straight from the Greek, lest someone think I parrot him. The interested reader can get his 85 Ephesians series beginning about lesson number 870 until about 970 to see the exegesis he uses. Study Socrates on the meaning of HENOTES, because it's a culturally-loaded word of being in harmony with the gods' thinking, not the insipid "unity" you find in English Bibles, aarrrgghhh.] The main verbs are in caps, below. All the other text is 'spoked' around the main verbs via subordinate clauses, dramatic usage of verbal nouns and adjectives. EIS clauses are underlined, for easier spotting. When eis clauses are chained as here, they are causal. KATANTANW takes EIS, and the object of EIS is the 'destination' object of KATANTANW, the verb meaning "to arrive at", "reach" (a destination in your journey, the spiritual life's destination here). [God bless BibleWorks. Its search function lets you specify a narrow verse range and then search on the Greek word you want, exactly. So many uses of EIS would else be hard to track!] Words you see here but don't see in published translations are actually included in the Greek words' meanings; but the translators are required restrict themselves to one English word per Greek word, so you get the wrong translation if you obey that standard. No one in professional translation would ever use such a standard: he'd be fired. So I'll not use it, here.
[v.12] each one provided for the thorough spiritual training of believers, It's really important to note that the ALLOTMENT (METRON..MEROUS) language is legal, contractural, coming from Isa53:12's booty-sharing (merizw..skula) clauses in the LXX. Paul uses that language to introduce Eph4, in 4:7; also in Romans 12:3, 1Cor10:13, 1Cor13:9-12, 2Cor1:14. Idea is that Christ's Thinking paid for us, so is now "booty" for us to plunder, so we can become booty for Him in the eternal state. Really cool analogy. Christ bluntly makes that analogy in Luke 6:38 (using METRON, which is the cognate noun from MERIZW). Certain Greek words and their import in Ephesians 4:11-16, should be highlighted.
Continuing with Eph4, now verse 16:
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That service is Thinking 'sweet savor'(e.g., 2Cor2:15, 10:5), just like the Cross. Can't do the Will of Someone you don't first know! And that, you yourself live on! So IT sustains you. Get it? So we 'serve food' by Living On The Word. Just as Our Lord did: Matt4:4. Whatever else we do with our bodies, varies with the spiritual gifts we were given, as Eph4 (and 1Cor12, among other places) explained. So we aren't all pastor-teachers, but we are all to live on The Word. That provides the Priestly Sweet Savor of Son's Thinking to Father! and a way for the 'peasants' to get out of peasantry: to Live Royally, instead. [Again, the similarity between artios, mature, and artos, bread (cf Matt4:4) -- gotta research if the etymology between the two words is connected. Bet it is!] Your Role In Life Key ==>The English translations all stress man, but the Greek stresses God. He Is The Recipient Of Our Thinking, which in turn is based on the Bible Doctrine we 'ingest'. That's what saved us, that's what we live on: Christ's Thinking. Only then, are we truly functioning ministers in His Kingdom, Priests To Father, Our First and Last Purpose In Life! Only then, can the peasant get any kind of 'message' attractive enough for him to choose to leave his peasanty ways. Man's thinking is helplessly ugly. Always trying to get something, always afraid, always blaming, always negative, always shallow, always pumping up his fragile ego with the puny deeds he'll call 'good'. No wonder most people wish to die, by the end of their lives. So what atones for all that ugly thinking God is stuck with hearing? Our thinking. Same exact principle, as the Cross. While it's clear Christ paid the entire opportunity cost of creation on the Cross, and therefore all of us are dividends, so to speak -- even so, who wouldn't want to max out the value of the dividends? So -- your thinking Scripture is applied by God to the evil thinking he hears in someone else. Thus, that someone else, can have a life. Is there a greater work than this? God does it, but He does it in your name. Which is ironic, since only the Holy Spirit runs the cycling Doctrine, in you. Pure profit, to you. Pure profit, to Him Him Him. So, justifies Him spending some of that Blessing Profit, ON those whose thinking, is ugly. You couldn't do any work as great as God directly blessing them because HE likes how HE hears you think. Okay, does that mean you go to a mountaintop somewhere and meditate or sit on a park bench contemplating your navel? Nope. It means you get in and stay in God's System and keep on ASKING Him for His Will on a thing. Don't do what Peter did in Acts 1, presenting Him with your OWN choices and making Him pick among them. (Peter had a bad hair day. Notice, as my pastor reminded us, you never hear from those two straw-picked disciples again.) God does all the picking. Be alert for what He picks. It will usually seem like the wrong choice. God is not politically-correct in any generation, Isa55:8-9. "Least-expected, most desired" characterizes all His answers. Abraham wanted one son, God wanted to make a universe of sons. That kind of thing. |
What "Body" Fits & Complements His Son's King of Kings, Bright Morning Star, King-Priest kata-Melchizedek Battlefield Royal Patent. This Kingship predates time, so predates Israel, as the Book of Hebrews takes great pains to explain. Church is not Israel, ever. See Ps110:1, Isa52:13+53:12, 1Tim2:5, all of Eph1, Matt16, John 17:20-21: these are the actual contract verses with oodles of Precedence, as explained at length in Part IVa. Then, read the entire Book of Hebrews repeatedly until you can't even forget it when sleeping; pay close attention to the flow of the author's points, especially since Hebrews is surgically mistranslated (demon surgeons, we humans aren't that smart and long-lived, in our coverups). Then next, Acts 1:7, Matt24:36, Matt25:13, Mark13:32. Since Eph1:1-18 (longest sentence in Bible's Greek) proves Father made our Dowry in Eternity Past, obviously exploitation of the Body is what He wants. What He wants. HE, not us. Because, we are a gift to Him from Christ, inasmuch as we are to be Royal Priests to Father forever. Body of Christ, the King-Priest kata Melchizedek. So it's a PRIESTHOOD type of Kingdom, which is a type of AMBASSADORSHIP, our friend DIAKONOS. Serving Father. Just like Ion was a servant in the Temple, an ambassador for the god, someone others sought as a go-between to 'put a good word in' to the god. Well, the Real God gets paid by Thinking, and even back during the Levitical priesthood the priests were separated, having a 24/7 job. Thus those more DISTANT could get blessing from God. So it is, in the eternal state and even while down here, as the Seven Facets link sections of this webpage, will explain. Takes special training to be a priest, not in the rituals -- but in the thinking. God doesn't need rituals or works. Doesn't mean you can't do them, does mean that whatever you do with the body, the right thinking better be in it at the time, or your relationship with God is fanciful toast, 1Jn1:6, 8, 10. If your spouse just went through the right motions but the thinking was elsewhere or ugly, those motions would become immediately ugly to you. How much more, to God (i.e., Isa1:13, 65:5).
It's neither good for ruler nor ruled that what's incompatible, should be confined together in close quarters. What Presidency runs well or happily, when those hostile or incompatible-of-policy, reside alongside? Disagreement is important, but that doesn't mean proximity should accompany it. How much more, God should not have to listen to, put up with, be 'near', those who disagree with Him? It's not as though He withheld the means for getting close. So the rejectors, can get the distance their rejection obviously chooses. A modern term for this Body would be "economy". That's also a common Bible word, OIKONOMIA (Eph3:9); it has a building-word counterpart, OIKODOME (Eph4:12). Both are Bible keywords for the structure of what's called (in olde English), a "dispensation", the covenantal period, aka "Age". Yes, dispensations are Biblical: but like any other doctrine, the way some particular person divides them up, might be wrong. Truth is, the "covenant" is the contract, and the "dispensation" is the period over which the contract is valid. Ephesians and Colossians are God's main macroeconomics books for Church, though a lot of microeconomics verses are in there. Philippians is His microeconomics text, though macro-stuff is in there also. 1John is microecon. The other NT epistles are more of a mix. So of course one can argue what are the provisions during what period, but clearly there's no contract ever born which lacks duration clauses. Whew: now we don't have to wrestle over the convenantalists versus the dispensationalists' debates, and can leave them all thrashing in the sandbox, as if the discussion were either/or. It's two sides of a coin: covenant, the economic provisions: dispensation, the time period OF those provisions. Simple. So these STRUCTURE words add up to a whole series of interrelated polities, complete with flourishing economies: Kingdoms. We know they are federated and hierarchical in nature, because Bible says there are plural kings. An empire, really, in which the constituent kings 'rank' relative to each other. So there are interrelated economies, as well. Given the believer numbers in history since Adam, heaven is quite large, so the eventual eternal state would be a whole universe of maybe 100 billion humans, before we even estimate the angelic population: this, because anyone too young (or handicapped, etc.) to reject the Gospel by the time he dies, is saved. Well, that kind of mortality alone has always been quite high among humans: those since-Adam numbers alone, could easily run in the tens of billions. "God's GAAP Balancing" link section below will cover that and other numbers estimates in more detail. Paul starts the economy/polity analogy immediately (Eph1:3), and it keeps weaving in and out of what he writes in Ephesians. The polity is built upon the Eph1 eternity-past escrow, and we are citizens of it. (Eph2:19, "politeuma", favored-citizenship, a big deal in those days.) Since God is Omnipotent, the question of an economy, money, etc. is based on Reasons, not abilities. So when He says "every spiritual blessing", He WILLS to match that with whatever material EXPRESSIONS will best go with the spiritual reasoning developed. Each person being unique, reasons slightly differently from the next, so a wide variety of provision will be caused to exist. Again, to express the spiritual variety. So there will be vast differentiation in material provision. Those who opted to be close to God by learning Him, will have more to go with the larger expression of intimacy in their souls. Those who opted to be distant from Him will have less, because they opted for less. So too, among those who have much, the KIND of muchness they have, will vary. Some people don't mind owning lots of things; the upkeep and maintenance isn't a hassle in their minds, they enjoy it. Others would rather own little and spend their money in other ways they find more pleasant. We differ. A lot. So the polity God makes must be varied enough to accommodate all the freedom which will then be 'heavenly' to have. Now, each of us lives in some country. Each country is full of people who are rich and poor. Unequal effort, unequal 'supply' of money. Problem is, how are the poor gonna get fed? Problem is, how can the country avoid going bankrupt if it feeds the poor, who don't add anything to the production value a country can sell? Problem is, how are ya gonna do this, without being unfair to those who work hard? Since heaven is a free place, these questions are still valid, but of course have perfect solutions which will perfectly operate, too. Lack of intimacy with God is a kind of poverty. Since anyone can get that intimacy, the vast majority don't want it, so won't have it in the eternal state. So they will be poor, and need others richer than they are, to make up for that difference. As will be explained more after this table ends, the key is to get "economics of scale": a successful company or economy requires ENOUGH people, and ENOUGH money, in AGGREGATE; because money flow among the people, and production from its flow, is like the cardiovascular system. So, if the 'blood supply' is smaller in some places, but large enough elsewhere, then 'circulation' can continue. Hence the economic "body", like the physical one, is unequal, but each part is necessary. So the doctrine learnt is likewise UNequal, but in aggregate is sufficient for the health of the whole. Which means, the Pleroma are Very Rich. They have to be, because those who did not opt to learn God's Script shall be poor (Bible term is "naked", gumnos) forever. Thus, in aggregate, there will be enough for the kingdom to thrive -- freely. God never gerrymanders Truth. Therefore: the big goal of any Christian who claims to love "the poor", should be to grow on God's Script all the way to Pleroma: so he will be big enough to make up for the millions of believers who (every generation) opt for Satan's Brother-Foot myocardial infarction ('heart attack', in plain English). So there will be enough Doctrinal Money Flowing to bless everyone, in the future. Just as we are all "in Christ", so also those who don't grow up to Pleroma, are IN the Pleroma rulers. That's why the Pleroma will be ruling kingdoms in eternity: the masses elected to live far away from Christ down here, but close to each other and to their emotions, rituals and works, Phili3:18-19, Romans 8. Subsequently, they will be in heaven alright -- but far away from Him, and under some king who unlike them, elected to be Close to Christ, learning Him intimately. It's the exact same analogy as for Christ. He, elected to be One with Father -- in His Deity He was naturally "one", but His Humanity could choose distance. Instead He chose Full Oneness, John 17. Hence the Cross, a-knowing-sin-yet-staying-sinless just as is His Deity (and of course Father's). So, His Human Soul had to be built up in Divine Truth by the Spirit; as a result, all sins could be put IN Him. So, all mankind is technically IN Him (theme of Romans 6). So, He will "divide the spoils", as it says in Isa53:12, and "with the great ones". Great, because IN Him. Great, because Grew UP in Him. Which God the Holy Spirit playing 'Mother', so to speak -- did TO us. For Him. So, those who didn't take that offer get apportioned out "among the great ones", owned by them. Which is a terrific blessing to them. Because, they will have smaller souls, so need the 'intermediary' of a king (who needs his own staff), to enjoy being ruled. All this, is communicated in Bible both blatantly and with 'invisible' original-language characteristics. Alpha and Omega. Founder And Finisher. Which you are also to provisioned to become. Invisibly. The higher you go in life the more your job owns you, not the other way around. So the higher you grow in God the more that thinking owns you, and you progressively stop having a life of your own, 2Cor5 and the Lord's "lose your life" comments (Matt16:25, Mark 8:35, Luke 9:24, 17:33). You don't mind losing your life to something you love, and in fact consider yourself gaining. But technically, you sacrifice yourself to that object of your love. So poverty is the result of refusing to love, essentially. So the ability to love is smaller, and therefore poverty of love down here, leads to poverty of love up there. Perfect, loving.. but small. So needs from those bigger than the self. So rulers and a hiearchy are needed forever. Thus everyone can have what he wants, whether poor or rich. So notice the two-fold economic nature of this future federation of Church polities God is crafting: i) a federation whose Thinking Pleases Son, fits Son's Thinking, Reflects Son's Thinking, and thus 'smells good' to Father; and ii) a federation within which everyone needs everyone else's thinking to operate optimally and synergistically, such that everyone can be free to be what he chose to be down here, in the relationships he chose down here. We don't all choose to be high. We don't all choose to be low. Freedom means we ought to get what we do choose. And that, is heaven. We are finite, and are unequal in every respect. Spiritually, our inequalities ONLY result from our choices, since we all get the Holy Spirit without measure, John 3:34. Without measure, but also without coercion. We will unequally CHOOSE to grow up, and whatever we CHOOSE will be our lot in the eternal state. The poor will have become poor solely by choice, and the rich will become rich solely by choice, and we will be freely NOT sinning, so we won't have the hangups about rich and poor that we do now. So heaven is not like down here, where we are often unequal irrespective of our choices; where we are insecure or bullying based on our own perceptions of inferiority or superiority (contrasted with angelic behavior in Rev 4:10 and 19:10). More about that inequality and its uses will be covered just after this table ends. |
(a common refrain in Ephesians, i.e., 1:22-23, 2:21, 3:5+9+10, 3:21's "by means of the Church throughout all generations of this Age Over the Ages, Amen.") |
Each NT writer has his own way of expressing this refrain. Paul seems to like sweeping clauses with the following terms in them: "Age", "fill"+ "all", "riches of His Grace" or "Glory", "the all things" (ta panta). The latter keyword is very commonly used in NT (and maybe LXX, I've not yet checked that), and it always has a universally-encompassing meaning. So, then: very near any clauses with these keywords in them, you'll find the Church; if you look a bit closer, you'll find that the Church is made a catalyst, subject, or object of "all". Nearby any of these clauses you'll find something to do with the Angelic Conflict, usu. via keywords translated "rulers" and "powers" or "authorities" (which are levels of Satan&Co. organization). Of course, nearby any of these clauses, the Lord Jesus Christ is Most Prominent. For, we are His Body. And He's why Father (with Spirit) exploit all else through the Church. Blessing by Association. With Christ, so therefore with Christ's Body. We are not our own, and our being so highly-favored is due to Him. Always. Let us never be Uriah-Heep nor puffed up, about this epic truth. So God, Who takes ALL facts and interrelationships into account, also has other Criteria for His Decision, besides our being internally developed into "Fit Bride". These other Criteria also require Rapture be the kickoff for the Tribulation. The Criteria all intertwine, thus constituting the main 'threads' of of Part IV and V. Briefly stated, these other Criteria relate to
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Now let's examine Father's Criterion 3F, The Finishing Nature of Mankind's Votes: for man's votes are the Substance of the Angelic Trial (Criterion 3A), Heb11:1 (Greek). This NUMBERS criterion is multi-faceted, and impacts how Criteria 3A-E, transpire. There are unbelievers and believers 'voting' on how much they want God. The voting, of course, affects the balance among people both now, and in the future. That balance thus determines how history goes. |
Since the sine qua non of Perfection is BALANCE, as we saw in Part II, and since finite creatures exist, a question arises: what is the perfect number of them? [Pity the ancient philosophers: they argued this number thingy for eons, and got nowhere, because they kept starting with mere math, instead of with Absolute God!] Moreover, what is the requisite proportion of Divine Thinking (or bad thinking), sufficient to bless (or hurt) them? Notice how there's a certain "ripeness" quality about number: too few, and a thing doesn't work. Too many, and a thing becomes bad, even if it was good. The "balance" is the right time to 'pick the fruit', as it were. Likewise, in science we routinely see a Bell-curve property of destruction whenever the number of a population becomes too high (e.g. in viruses, Malthusian theory). We've seen in Part II and will see in Part IVc that the 'contagion' of thought is in part quantitative -- when 'too many' bad thoughts are in a populus, it degenerates.
What's the role of "numbers"? Well, first let's look at what numbers, really are: VARIETY. The very word "numbers" means "variety". There must be MANY, and each one is different from the next (+1 property of uniqueness). It's the combining of the numbers, the combining of the varieties, which underlies virtually every structure in life. Like many dots, but..each one at least slightly different from the next. So each number is unique; each combination is unique; the rate and manner of change in Living Numbers Of People, Is Thus Unique. Like a snowfall. Among all these uniquenesses, some combinations are small in 'size', but BIG in effect. Likewise, at the opposite end of the VARIETY spectrum, some combinations are big in size, but small in effect. Sometimes, ONE is so big (Christ, for example), that ALL are affected (anyone can be saved). At the reverse end, MANY are so individually small (sins, for example), they have NO positive effect. Only their WEIGHT has effect (i.e., weight of our sins crushing Him, Isa 53:5's dakah, the volume of plunder, 53:12).
So, variety means hierarchy. The Numbers Have To Fit Together In Just Such A Way, So They Can All Benefit Each Other, No Matter How Big, Or How Small; However Disparate In Compatibility; or, however alike. So, the Relationship Between Small And Big Within That Hierarchy, is simply this: Mass depends on LEVERAGE. Leverage, as you probably know, is the property of a small thing being able to 'cause' a big effect. A 'small' amount of malaria can kill you. A 'small' amount of anthrax in an envelope killed a lot of people. Germs are small. Their 'leverage' value is high. The military equivalents for this financial (and science, biology, etc.) concept is "economy of force", and "concentration of force". Use those analogies as you read, if they are more familiar to you.
This same leveraging of mass applies in happier areas, of course. Say you bought your house with just a little money "down". That downpayment leveraged the entire value of the house, for it was what the bank wanted, in order to justify Lending You The Rest Of The Money. So, that little down payment "blessed" the mortgage, without which you couldn't get the house. Thus you see how "mass" (the whole cost of the house) is leveraged (justified) by means of a little. So that 'little' is called "leverage", "seed/venture capital" (economics/finance); "hub", "pivot" or "vector" (physics); "cornerstone/foundation" (architecture); even, "preservative" (food industry). In the Bible, negative leverage is called "leaven" (yeast); positive leverage (pivot/ preservative, etc.) is called "remnant", or "salt".
Moreover, in the ancient world, they didn't have refrigeration. So, salt was a highly-valued commodity, for it PRESERVED large amounts of food from spoiling. So, it was often used as we use currency, today. Like currency, it was easily transportable; durable; easy to measure; universally acceptable, and needed. Just a little salt leveraged, so to speak, a lot of food. This created an economic prosperity, for if food could be preserved, the work otherwise needed for food production could be spent on other goods; so, the family with a goodly amount of salt could become more prosperous. So, the polity with a goodly amount of such 'salty' people, could become prosperous. Just a little salt leveraged the prosperity of even a whole nation. Then again, if a major flood hit a salt dome, the salt was washed away, or leached into the soil; this made the salt "saltless" (unusable, for the water leached out the sodium). So, that polity's prosperity depended on preserving its preservative!
Conversely, seawater has TOO MUCH salt. Modern Israel has no end of problems trying to desalinize its water supply, so that the soil won't become overladen with salt. For, the good thing about salt is also potentially the bad thing about it: it sterilizes. That is why it's great for food, but terrible, for soil: soil needs bacteria (mold etc.) to provide the properties food needs to grow. So, too much salt in the irrigation water overburdens the soil with salt, so nothing will grow. So, see? The "leverage", the "salt" depends on "mass", too. Body needs a Head, and the Head is much smaller than the Body, mass-wise. But the Head still needs a body, too. So mass depends on leverage, and leverage, on mass: and both must be in the proper proportion to each other. Else, growth (enjoyment) is impaired. Or, even ruined. So, both mass and leverage are mutually-dependent. For Better or Worse.
So, then, whether looked at from within the Bible's text itself, or observed from extra-Biblical sources, these leverage principles of "salt" or "leaven" are obviously structural properties woven into the entire universe. The "few" have what economics would term a "multiplier effect" on the "many". In fact, in economics, "multiplier effect" means that the "few" actually CAUSE the "many".
Thus you have tax law: the purpose of tax law is to cause a multiplier effect of changing mass behavior in an economy; 'purportedly, in some salutary direction which those ruling think the country needs. See, if you pay a dollar less in taxes, you'll spend that dollar a different way. To influence you to spend it in a certain way, a government might reduce your tax by a dollar if you spend that dollar on item "x". You, and millions like you, say, do this. That money then multiplies (changes hands) many times over, circulating in things related to "x". 'Supposedly, to benefit whatever "x" is supposed to do; which, supposedly, is to benefit the people as a whole.
However, taxes you pay TO a not-for-profit government don't circulate in this way. For, a not-for-profit government itself is a cost without production. There is no "product" such a government produces. It alleges to produce something, but think: all such a government does, is buy! It doesn't "sell" anything. Unlike you, who go to a job and actually produce something NEW during the day (product or service), that government just takes your money, and gives it to other people. It, itself, produces no new goods/services in return for its own expense. You gave it money, but it gave you nothing in return. Instead, it gave your money to someone ELSE. All this, at a cost of overhead, for oodles of officials are needed to choose and then account for the movement of this money from your pocket to whomever's. So, a not-for-profit government's "product" is merely a report of how it spent something. Oh, and lots of laws, to make that report even more expensive.
American liberals, of course, argue that the government does indeed produce value for the money given it. What they forget is that the private sector will always do a far better job, because Profit Drives Productivity. Government Can Just Take Your Money: It Has A Monopoly On Your Taxes, Even To The Extent Of Putting Liens On Your Property. So, It Has Insufficient Incentive To Be Efficient in how it decides to give your money away to other people. If government were run like a business, and didn't have a monopoly, then you could vote your money ELSEWHERE, which would motivate it to ATTRACT your money by producing a better redistribution of your money. As is, it only needs to promise money to those who as a consequence will vote for its own desires to TAKE your money. How well it lives up to those promises, well.. everyone knows that answer.
Liberal or no, it's true that government must exist. We need certain centralizations and laws, so a government must have certain limited monopoly-rights over your money. For, there are certain functions which only government can do: transportation/infrastructure oversight (for the sake of efficient military and inter-province/state movement), foreign policy, currency, military, costs of making those laws (as low as possible, please -- few laws, not many) are examples of the few valid governmental monopolies. And, let's face it: since the way those things are provided is by giving your money to other people WITHOUT you first getting equivalent or better value in exchange, it's just an added cost. Without production. Multiplier Tax, baby. Principle: the higher the taxes, the higher the drain on the polity, no matter how those taxes are structured to hit given groups of folks.
Here's why: Taxes only get paid if the payors HAVE money. As we saw in this subsection's first indented paragraph, people only have money if they produce something and SELL that something to someone ELSE. So, if you buy a can of tomatoes, the corporation making that can of tomatoes must charge YOU part of the tax it will have to pay, in order for it to have money to PAY THE TAX. Since the corporation, like you, pays a tax on income, and that income comes from you, YOU PAY THE TAX. Of course, you have a job, too: your job costs a corporation (assuming you work for one), money. Those who are CUSTOMERS of the corporation, which buy its products/services, thus also PAY THE TAX, AND YOUR SALARY. So if your corporation is not competitive, or overtaxed! less income will be available; so some other corporation (or person, entity) will get that income. So, You Might Lose Your Job, As The Corporation Tries To Cut Costs In Order To Save Enough Money To Pay Taxes And Stay Alive. Frankly, that's been the history of the US since about 1975 (friend of mine would date it earlier, to the late 1960's when the oil depletion allowance rules got so bad).
Now let's tie the 'multiplier effect' and taxes concepts, to Church. Bible calls itself money in a bizillion ways, most of which aren't well-translated, but some are: "gold", "silver", "precious stones", "deposit" (NIV manages to catch some of these terms), "true riches" (a favorite term of the Lord), "riches", and a wide variety of financial synonyms, all conveying the idea that Christ's Thinking (Deity, OT, Humanity, NT) is Spiritual Capital. So, since thought CIRCULATES (Bible depicts this via the metaphor "heart", "blood"), we're looking at the multiplier effect of Bible Doctrine in a populus; or, conversely, the Tax of Anti-Scriptural Thinking in a populus. You can flip open a Bible even in translation in almost any place and see how God excoriates bad thinking, and blesses good thinking, but the easiest-to-read passages are Lev26 and Deut28. Note how God holds a nation together due to Sufficient Circulating Spiritual Capital (Hearing His Word); or, destroys a nation due to Excessive Anti-Spiritual Taxation (Rejecting His Word, main theme of Hosea and Malachi 3). The concepts in these passages will be very useful to remember, as you read what follows.
Here's another critical numbers concept which economics addresses: money begets money. The larger the pool of capital, the more income that capital can earn, the more Addition TO Capital is available. This is the most important reason why one needs a class of wealthy people for a polity to be healthy and strong. (If you know anything about actuarial welfare/pension science, all that knowledge analogously applies here in spades, especially with respect to the role of present values.)
See, because mass depends on leverage, and because there must be a balance between them, There Must Be Sufficient Leverage, Capital, To Fund whatever mass exists or is desired to exist. So, you try to save money in a savings account, for until you have enough, you can't buy what you need, or..save for retirement. Your "mass" -- needs you have -- can't all be paid for at once. So, you try to borrow (a form of leverage) based on the mass-of-savings you have, or the expected-mass-of-income you will get. Or, you FOREGO your needs until you accumulate sufficient funds. Ideally, you keep accumulating funds by foregoing so that at some point you can stop working and just live on your accumulated capital. This, of course, is called "investment".
No country can operate if its accumulated savings/investment by its people is too small. This is called "capitalization". Lack of proper capitalization means that needs exceed funds, so a person, a company, or even a whole country, can go bankrupt. This, because There Must Be More Wealth Produced Than Spent. The leftover money is invested. Investment fuels jobs; makes available money to borrow; enables trade with other countries; makes people able to finance current needs, i.e., because there is an expectation based on the current capital/health that whatever is borrowed can be repaid.
INESCAPABLE PROFIT KEY ==> God is Uncreated, so doesn't have to work at 'being God'. Thus, there is no such thing anywhere as 'deserving', a term which ONLY has relevance with respect to works-issues. The term is merely a benchmark we can use to figure out how much toward-Righteousness a thing is. See, because God didn't 'deserve' to exist, but just DOES, forever; so it's NOT possible for deserving to exist: God didn't MAKE HIMSELF, so you can't technically say He 'deserves' to exist.
So John uses the Greek imperfect of eimi in John 1, to stress that The God of the OT who Named Himself to Moses, is The Man he's writing about. Clever, deft, undetectable-in-English way to shout Who Messiah really is. Can't miss it. So given John 1:14&18, YHWH: meaning, He Who Always WAS, Becomes! -- a concatenation of hayah and hawah, which when merged (Hypostatic Union!) and spoken quickly, sounds like Yahweh or Yahwah or Jehuwah, etc. And of course, sounds like Yehoshua ("Joshua"), hence Yeshua, hence Jesus. [Joshua 1:1's Hebrew is very funny when it says that YeHWaH spoke to YeHosHua...] Also, the concatenation signifies that anything 'becomes', via Him. See? It's not rocket science. There's no reason why His Name should be a 'mystery' -- God Wants Us To Know Him. We don't need "ineffable names" to block our learning Him!
In short, God by nature is all-at-once, not 'time' related. So, theology tries to simplify this fact by claiming God 'can't' sin. Very misleading. If God couldn't sin, He'd not be Omnipotent, get it? So, while theology might try to claim (again, to simplify) that God 'deserves' to be God because He never sins, even that is an inaccurate argument. For, God Didn't Create Infinity, So He Doesn't Do Anything To Perpetuate Himself.
So, however bad man is, he's but a negative mutation from God's Nature. So, just as in math/physics the derivative of a thing is but LEVERAGE, due not to itself, but rather due to the (here, Infinite) Power From Which It Derived (God), all bads are but fractional divisors, so will inevitably return a bizillion percent interest to God. This fact is repeatedly stated in Scripture using irony: verses like "valley..exalted", and Isa54:1's barren bearing more kids, and the quintessential, 'even-the-wrath-of-man-praises-God'. So "Cost" is but an interim accounting term; "Investment" is the true character. 'At a bizillion percent, Because God Is Unmade, Unsustained, And Infinite. So the smallest thing, even the baddest thing, first exists as some DERIVATION of God, so can only 'bounce off' God's Nature, thus producing a gain DUE TO the bounce-off value, INFINITY. It's how big GOD is, not the size of the derivative, as any math/physics student can demonstrate. So the 'return' on any existence reflects Infinity, so we have to use the term 'bizillion percent' to reflect the gain value.
So, if on the other hand, man is left on his own, and charity is limited, he gets to look UP to God, and look up to Learning HOW to get money. Thereby, learns how to save and use money. Starting with a little, starting in extreme difficulty, perhaps. It's a slow but permanent process of learning how to handle wealth, if he sticks to it. Every rich guy gets there that way. Those who inherit another's wealth, only keep it that way. You must learn how to forego. It's like dieting: portion control.
As we saw earlier about how the "multiplier effect" works, person A buys a product from B, with the result that B can pay whatever taxes he owes, and PAY SALARIES. So every dollar you spend, buys jobs and pays taxes, along with buying whatever product/service you wanted. For a rich person, this fact is exponentially more true, so it's absolutely impossible for a rich person not to provide jobs no matter HOW he spends the money -- well, except that if the money goes to taxes, there is no production from that expense, so NO net value-added jobs are added to the economy by it. Instead, productivity is LOST. [Due to taxes, jobs merely shift, and as a consequence, jobs are always lost. Get a classic macroeconomic textbook, i.e., by Paul Samuelson in the 1960's or 1950's, if you find this statement hard to understand. Since about the 1980's, macroeconomics laws, which are by NATURE as unchangeable as math itself, are no longer accurately explained: political-correctness interferes.]
A rich person generally has personal use of .1 percent (.001) of his wealth, if even that much. Anyone not rich has personal use of at least 90% of his wealth (97%, in the US). While the rich person's dollars are greater (because .001 of a Billion Dollars is a lot of money), he spends his time on the other 99.9% -- managing it, much like a "steward" (KJV Bible term) -- whether he wants to do that, or not. For, wealth owns the rich person, not the other way around. So, then: whatever the Rich Person does, is noticed. Is catered to. Is aped. So, whatever the Rich Person buys with his .1%, Buys Jobs. Moreover, no matter what he does with his money, someone will watch him, learn from him, and make money on whatever was learned from watching. So, the Rich Person is a walking investment benefit for all who see him. He can't ever be anything else. He's also a walking textbook of standards (hopefully, the right ones) -- which everyone APES. That, too, generates INCOME to those who watch. For, by aping, they learn to do what it takes to become wealthy themselves. In short: if YOU get rich in Bible Doctrine ("true riches", "gold/silver/precious stones keywords in Bible), because both the Holy Spirit and Satan&Co. must point you out as being so RICH -- as we saw in Part III's "Second Reason for Royalty" -- People Aping You Will Get Rich As A Result. No matter WHAT you do.
See? "True Riches", like the Lord told folks in the Gospels, is Thinking. Which is the Ultimate Wealth. Which, by the way, is the MANDATE we have toward Father: Think Son's Thoughts. Now, obviously, God owns everything: so what would GOD consider valuable? Son's Thinking. So, What you think is the true value in life, according to Very God. This Thinking Must Be Accumulated, Just Like Any Other Type Of Wealth. The more of it you have, the more you can do with it. The more you can do with it, the more yield (return, money on money) you get. The more yield, the more HAPPINESS you have. See? Better than money, 'where thief cannot steal nor moth destroy', as the Lord put it in the Gospels. Where your treasure is, there will be your heart (circulation of thought, Bible metaphor).
Examples
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Hence, long-term investments usually entail considerably more risk, but usually pay off many times more than small-term alternatives. The bigger yield must 'make up for' all that extra waiting, and risk. Bible Doctrine is the most risky investment of all, because it has the most enemies, and because God's Infinity means one must accumulate a lot of Doctrine before the "payoff" can be seen! For, investing in Bible Doctrine means you are the target for the investment! God invests IN YOU for the LONG TERM (eternity)! So His Investment (with your consent) is designed to pay off, IN YOU! So what's the risk? That you won't stick with it, but rather you'll 'sell out' to Satan's counterfeit investments...
So, then, YOU are taking a risk, too. You think how, 20 billion years from now, you yourself will have had 20 billion years of perfect rapport and happiness with the Most Gorgeous Persons in the Universe; that you will have had 20 billion years of perfect rapport, activity, happiness with ALL your fellow-beings. Moreover, that 20 billion years is just a drop in the bucket, compared to the billions of billions, of billions of Unending Future Years with the happinesses all just being bigger and bigger and bigger...All this, God promises is the result of investing in Bible Doctrine during this dust-speck period called "life". Think, then: isn't the rate of return on 'your' investment in Bible Doctrine, a bizillion percent? Which He Himself (Holy Spirit) Alone can invest in you (you merely consenting)? So what's your risk? That you'll get tired of 'waiting', and instead opt for Satan's pretend-gain investments, which are all really debt, so you become a spiritual bankrupt!
So what have we seen thus far, about "numbers"?
So above all, since God is Omniscient and therefore Must See All The Small, As Well As All The Big, At Once And Forever; don't you immediately know how He'd DESIGN the relationship between Doctrine-Dollars and life? Wouldn't
Of course, only GOD could make those bullets hit their targets! |
God is the Ultimate Capitalist, and Thank God for that!
Thinking alone is the true currency in life, buying everything bad or good, since the effects of the thinking are always REAL. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that Real God Really Knows The Real Effects Of Whatever Thinking He Perpetually Hears.
FREEDOM means VARIETY. Freedom within finite beings, means societal barriers in order to create BALANCE among them, and SYNERGY among them. Because, individually, We Are Each Different. So, we're not gonna be sitting up on clouds all chirping away, strumming golden harps. We will be perfect and far bigger persons, then. But we will be, essentially, much like we are down here: one does one thing, and another, another; NOT EQUAL. Even nations and taxes eternally continue, Rev 21:24! Because, each person is unique. Unique combination of interests, abilities, and especially, Doctrinal Thinking. Which we had to ACCUMULATE down here, as we saw in Part III.
So, in life down here as in life post-body-death, we differentiate and as a result, fit together as a whole. Down here, we often don't get to make choices about how we differentiate; a person who wants to be a ballerina, is too heavy, so can't. Someone who wants to be President, has too checkered a background for the opposition, so can't be nominated. Lots of restrictions. But in God's Economic and Political Plan for Church, There Are No Restrictions, because Christ paid for them all, theme of Eph1. So He is free to make what He wants, juridically, at HIS end. However, He is FREE, so we must be also. That's HIS CHOICE. So, What We Choose As Our Relationship To Him, Is What We Will Get. In this division of the webpage, you'll learn more about why. Tangentially, you'll also learn that very reason is why you can't predict the Rapture's date...
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"GAAP" in the American Public Accounting means "Generally Accepted Accounting Principles", meaning the STANDARD by which ethical accounting, should be practiced. Well, God's Accounting is always and ONLY based on the Impossible, in order to be Infinitely Acceptable. Because "nothing is Impossible, for God." That verse is in the context of the rich man asking Christ what good deed the guy could do to get to heaven (Matt19, Luke 18, and esp. Mark 10:17ff). Because even he knew that his wealth wouldn't get him there. What he didn't know, was that all the good deeds he could ever do (and he was doing a lot of them, with all that money).. wouldn't add up to a hill of beans in God's Accounting. Because, GOD IS INFINITE.
See, if you don't know that the rich guy was hung up on his money because of his honoring his father, and his doing good deeds with the money, you miss the entire import of the passage. And you know that's the kind of hangup he had, by the question he asked. Moreover, in the Mark passage, the guy runs up and kneels (oriental sign of complete deference) at the feet of Christ. So he believed Christ was a good teacher.. he just didn't take that next step, of seeing Him as Savior -- we should take deep notice, of that kind of unbelief! So pity the greedy legalists who use this passage to rail against wealthy people, and thus miss the Wealth Of Beautiful Doctrine really in the passage. They thus have the exact same hangup as the rich guy they rail against. The rich guy was thinking he could buy his way into heaven by GIVING the money into particular good deeds. So Christ played on his hangup: Ok, Then Give It All Away. Kinda like Paul would later do with the Galatians, telling them to cut off the whole phallus, not just the foreskin, in Galatians! (How my pastor LOVES TO LINGER over that Galatians verse! It's a play on the cult of Cybele, in Galatians, a real tweaking verse!) But look: even that's not enough, see -- for Christ then told the rich guy, "then follow ME." So give all your money away, avails you nothing (1Cor13:1-3). So pity those legalists who harp and harangue, to get your money, in the alleged "good cause" of helping the poor, etc. Christ saw through all that. Hope we do, too...
Believer learning Bible is the Sole CONDUIT for Divine Blessing to the Human Race. |
Divine Thinking in us puny humans is of utmost historical importance to the preservation of the human race, as we saw in Parts II and III. Satan rules this place. So people can't get blessed by God, except through us "salt". It's a Judicial Issue: the one who you select as your ruler, rules. So the one you didn't select, doesn't. See Romans 6-8. The unbeliever is selecting Satan, whether he knows it or not. The carnal (not using 1Jn1:9) believer is also selecting Satan, but his legal status remains as a citizen of Heaven (Eph2), so some de minimis blessing still goes 'through' him. For, he's getting TIME to grow up. Clearly, the growing believer who's using 1Jn1:9 is selecting God. So, the Blessing thus Authorized through venue of that person, is.. stupendous. Note how it's not due to works.
Remember the Trial basis from Part I: who is better for the human race, God.. or Satan&Co.? The Superior Side wins. So the SUPERIORITY has to be demonstrated, but within Trial terms. And one of the most important of Trial terms, are man's Votes. In fact, the Voting criterion is the central focus of this Part IVb. For now, let's just focus on the fact that voting for God, is the harder of the two votes to make, and it almost never 'plays' pretty. Voting for Satan&Co. is always the easier of the two votes to make, and they'll play any way they can, to GET your vote. So for the Divine Benefit Plan to be operating, believers must exist. Since Satan's plan always ends with ennui, as we saw in Part II, the human race needs Divine Blessing. But, isn't Voting for it. Thus believers have always been automatically determinative of history: even though technically we are "no longer OF the world", and even if we ourselves, Do Absolutely Nothing, But Breathe.
This point cannot be overstressed. If there was only ONE believer on earth, and that person was bedridden, barely able to think, even; but what few thoughts the person had, were Doctrine, the entire planet would be blessed in some way. Even if not doctrine, but alive, Divine Blessing is allowable, because that person ONCE believed in Christ. Never underestimate the power RELEASED in consequence of the Cross, Eph1:19 and 2:7. You can practically predict a rise in prosperity following a rise of interest in getting Bible, anywhere in history you look. (In Part IVc is a "Blessing History" green table, listing epochs you yourself can empirically check.)
There are at least seven categories of this CONDUIT role of Blessing which occur locally, regionally, nationally, worldwide:
As demonstrated in GeneYrs.xls and Mirroring.htm, God granted the world 1000 more years to live, due to Abraham. Abram found God when he was age 75. Poor guy, he went wacko, on and off for the next 25 years; with the result that the whole world today suffers from one set of cousins (the Arabs) being dead set against another set of cousins (the Jews) -- and probably at least 80% of today's world population, has at least one 'drop' of either Arab or Jewish genes in its DNA. God's sense of humor: for "Abraham" means "the father of many nations"! For all during Abram's wacko zig-zagging growth, he kept believing. By the end of that time, he'd grown up, so now he was ready to have the promised heir. Well, look at the result: we are all children of his belief (theme in Romans 4, real important to grasp).
Next example, Moses: due to him, the world got 490 and 1000 more years to live, as well. And Moses got his time, due to Joseph being granted 490 years, so the world got to live from Joseph TO Moses, only because of that TIME Grant. Through Moses, the whole of Israel was preserved, as we saw at the end of Part III. But it's really the whole world, for all history goes by Israel, and Moses was the SOLE reason for Israel's preservation, at that time. So too, Noah, like it says in Gen5: "but Noah found Grace". Compared, to everyone else in the world: God gave the world 490 years and 1000 years due to Noah, without which there would not have been an Abraham, who got his award the year Noah's expired. Many other confirming verses can be listed, like the statement Moses was the most humble man on earth, like the Genesis 5 roster (showing the heroes in GOD'S eyes, and notice how few there were), the Hebrews 11 roster. David, for example, was the reason why Israel continued to exist, viz., in the catchphrase about how God Keeps Israel Alive Due To His Servant David. Then there are the Righteous Branch verses, which refer to Christ; most famously, the Seed passage (i.e., in Galatians 3). So, see? If God Is Pleased By Even One Person On Earth (Job being another example, especially in the Trial context), then the earth continues. Never Underestimate The Priceless Value Of Bible Doctrine Learned And Circulating In Your Own Soul!
Biggest example, David. God gave David SIX Time Grants! The entire world since 963BC survived based on them. Daniel 9 is an accounting based on the time grants to David, because the TEMPLE was a promise to David, 2Sam7. Temple represented MESSIAH, was a kind of down-payment guarantee that Messiah would come. So the Temple was given its own 490-year time grant, from 950BC-460BC. But apostacy, a kind of negative voting by believers, resulted in God razing the Temple using Nebuchadnezzar, in 586BC. So it was 126 years short of its 490-year grant. So God ALLOCATES BACK those missing years, in coming up with the accounting pieces in Daniel 9. That puts Time back on track in light of David's three 490-year and three 1000-year time grants, the endings of which bracket the scheduled and realized, lifetime of Messiah, Jesus the Christ. Christ Bought Time by dying successfully on the Cross, Gal4:4. So, that's our legacy in Him: but that rule, has been true since Adam, as GeneYrs.xls and Mirroring.htm explain. (TenWaysThisTimelineDiffers.doc is a shorter explanation, so you might want to read it first.)
So clearly these many heroes were not the paragons of virtue you hear about in childhood Sunday school. So, think! You can be a hero as well. Become one the same way these guys did: Live In And On His Thinking. Don't worry about what a skalawag you are or were -- Paul was the worst sinner in history (1Tim1:5 or 15?), and he lived on Philippians 3:8-14. Keep on keeping on: after all, if you are such a skalawag, then wouldn't that be more reason, to keep on going?
Legalists will never become God's heroes. They are Satan's heroes, though. Like Satan, they pride themselves on how good they are, what they do, how moral they are. Yeah: they, not God. Better to commit sodomy, than think like that. Paul was the worst sinner in history because he trusted in his goodness and morality; and as a result, he did the most immoral things (casting whole families in prison, murdering people -- see his biographical sketches in Acts 8-22, 1Cor15, Gal2, 1 and 2 Tim). But any legalistic skalawag can alike get into God's System and stay there!
We just saw that believers are the sole conduits of blessing to the world. In itself, that First Facet is a direct blessing TO the world, not to us, but BECAUSE of us. Here in this Second Facet, we'll see that the blessing accrues TO us, not the world; they share indirectly, due to their PROXIMITY to us. This has a multiplier effect, just as we saw earlier with money: blessing is better than money. The multiplier macro preservation value, as we saw in Part IVa's "re-routing" section on Legal Precedence, was VESTED in Christ, so the re-routing to us, varies with how much we've grown in Him (main theme of Paul's and others, tapping the merizw keyword in Isa53:12's LXX). So how much of it we directly get, depends on how much we are learning Him Now.
Notice the parallel. The world breathes because we do, and we breathe because HE does, and HE does, because He paid for all sins. So There Must be a Far Bigger Macro Effect Due To Believers Learning Him, post-Session. For Now, He Himself is BIGGER, Having Been Seated, Heb1:4; for He is Risen and Ruling. This fact is the central theme of the Book of Hebrews: see Heb1. We are Body, so We Are To Have The Same Effect on History. Even though, and especially because, we are not of the world, anymore.
So the sum of these three, combine into a Blessing ABC: ASSOCIATED BASIS CHRIST; those ASSOCIATED with us are more blessed because the BASIS is our need for spiritual Priestly Training for Father, due to CHRIST. Now you know one reason why the wicked prosper. Some growing believer NEEDS them to prosper. (More often they prosper because believers malign them, lol, Matt7:1-2.)
For True Blessing in Life is THOUGHT, not outers. All the outers in the world won't make you feel good if your soul is full of sick thoughts. Conversely, if your thoughts are healthy, bad outers won't matter. That is a significant testimony in the Trial (Fifth Facet), that blessing is an INNER thing, not an outer thing (i.e., accoutrements and works). Only God can bless you on the inside. So then whatever you have on the outside, is worth having even if painful.
Meanwhile, other people are only alive because believers are alive. Because believers need to learn Him, and need circumstances which constitute a Training Environment. A 'job' requires a setup so that 'job' can function. Again, we've voted for God to rule us forever, that first nanosecond we believed Christ paid for our sins. Everyone else, didn't vote for Him (at least, not yet). So, They Continue Only Because We Do. And we continue, only because CHRIST does. And the quality of our continuance, likewise depends on Him: Learning HIM, and not learning the world. For the world, Satan owns. But God, owns us. So what we Think, Learning Him, 'pays' for the continuation of Planet Earth, even as His Thinking on the Cross, paid for us to even exist. See how that analogy continues? See how it's Only about Learning Him?
Bible "riches" keywords are many, but often translations fuzz them over. "Riches", especially in the NT, means this category: "riches of His Glory" is pretty easy to find. "Treasure" and just about any material-good word (and all food and shelter words) depict Diamond Doctrine Bucks, in the NT. For the Word is likened to every kind of material good man has or wants.
So why are we so blessed? God likes the SMELL of His Son's Thinking in us. I like to call it the "isotropic property of the universe", that God the Father Sees His Son, Everywhere He Looks. To depict this, OT uses the smell metaphor all over the place, signifying that future Son's sacrifice by means of the cooking meat of the Levitical offerings. "Sweet savor" is a really cool translation in the KJV, and it's used often. Idea was that the believer in the OT who sacrificed an animal, cooked it. The smell of the cooking is called "sweet savor". It's a really great tweak at the world's religions of the day, because they all taught that YOU did something for the 'god', YOU sacrificed. Heathen religions were all about pain. Even the mandated sex acts were designed to be degrading. So, sacrifice was about pain to you, pain to the victim. Religion is always and only about pain, in any period of history. The other polities also were often HUNGRY. They didn't get blessings of weather and agriculture, akin to how in the last Exodus 9 plagues, Goshen (where Israel lived) was always exempted. So if you travelled, you knew you were getting near Jerusalem because all you'd smell, was cooking meat from all the animal sacrifices. Meat was hard to come by, in the old days. So right away you associated the blessing of FOOD, with Israel. Easy to want to convert! So these two things, a God-sacrifices FOR you faith, plus all that meat, did a great job of evangelizing. For Israel was a center of commerce, and the world travelled through her.
For 'Smell' is an intangible thing; so is Thought. [It's interesting that the sense of smell is so vital to man's life. I forget the name of the guy who recently won a Nobel prize for his work on the faculty of smell.] Therefore, the ultimate Chef, Christ, cooked all our sins on the Cross By His Thinking, say both Hebrew and LXX texts of Isa53:10-12. Thus, He Who Was Made Sin, Made Sin Useful, Savorful, to God. He did this by Getting The Truth Poured Into Him, Not By Works. No amount of good deeds is powerful enough to deposit Truth into the soul. So if the soul remains tainted, all the good deeds in the world can't fix it. All this, the Levitical sacrifices explained metaphorically: especially, with the emphasis on blood (depicting Circulating Thought in Messiah-to-Come). For the quality of life with someone depends on Shared Thinking. All the good deeds in the world can't create, rapport.
They got mere 'dinner', but we get EUCHARISTIA, Col2:7, His Thinking to 'eat', 24/7. So the effect of that food must be light-years larger than what they got to 'eat'. We've already seen how much bigger is our spiritual life individually, in Part III. Well, What Must Be The Macro Effect? If only one guy, Moses, was carrying the whole nation of Israel, God's Chosen People, as we saw at the end of Part III; then what 'multiplier effect' must we potentially have? Moses didn't have the Thinking of Christ in writing, "but we have the Thinking of Christ", 1Cor2:16 (theme of the epistle). Moses saw through the veil, and he was the only one allowed to do so; but we have unveiled face; he saw like a child, but we can see as adults (1Cor13:9-13).
Re-routing of blessing to us spills over to them, since we are in the world being 'cooked', while they remain raw. Idea is, the Smell Of His Thinking Is Innately Admirable, and so maybe they will opt for getting cooked, when they 'smell' us. That's a corollary and very-minor reason for our existence down here, since The First Reason Is To Think Toward Father What Pleases Him To Hear/'Smell'. But it's impossible to be down here learning Him and not 'smell' good to others, even if one never talks about God. It's the Attitude. Oh boy, people notice!
So even now, God 'deploys' you as it were, to an audience. They get information from you, whether you realize it or not, whether you talk about God or not. In exactly the same manner, that selfsame 'deployment' creates CONTACT; because they are associated with you in some manner (even a chance encounter), God Can Justify Blessing Them. For, you must have some need of the encounter (i.e., for spiritual training, the foremost reason for deployment). So, They Have To Be Blessed In Order For Your Need To Be Met. The company you work for must be blessed, so you can be paid. The nation you live in must be blessed, so you can live in it. Notice that carefully: YOU are the cause, not them. You need it, so to provide for your needs, they all have to be blessed. What a humbling thing to know!
No-extra-charge corollary: "9/11" was a re-route of cursing due to believers not growing. The terrorists are just pawns of Satan&Co. So believers like me, my church, who had the most exposure to Good Bible Teaching, are the most responsible for "9/11". I can't pretend it's not true: after these years of research, I realize how very blessed we have been, and how very unappreciative we have been, of it. So, every day, I live with that knowledge. Generals live with the knowledge of how many mother's sons they sent to die in battle. Kings live with the knowledge of how many of their own, they damage when they make a bad decision. Can't learn leadership, else. Can't be a blessing to others, apart from this understanding. Which usually is learned, the hard way. For a king is but human. Big role, big mistakes, big learning (hopefully) -- so that all those damaged, did not suffer in vain!
For Bible Doctrine really IS the ultimate wealth, and if you were given a lot of it via your pastor, well.. then you have a lot of liability when things go wrong. It's one kind of liability if you never learn Bible, or learn it a little bit; it's another kind of liability when you did learn a lot, but didn't progress as a result. See, the goal of learning, is Living On What You Learned. All too often, people who get good Bible teaching, sorta preen about it, and a kind of roteness, a flashcard-knowledge approach, is adopted. To preen, one must have petty markers, like how much Doctrine one knows. That is not really knowing, anything. Until you can account for the whys, and live on the Diamond-Doctrine, you don't know squat. And of course once you really do learn the whys and living-on, you realize you are still a nothing. For IT is soooo much more valuable, than you. So you don't preen, you Prepare. With fear and trembling, as Paul remarked (Phili2:12).
If you want to see the ultimate type of re-routing, the Re-Routing of Time, spend time (heh) on Mirroring.htm. Notice how OTHER people got or lost Time, blessing, due to the individuals God used. A great example in that page, is Joseph. The development of the 12th and 18th Dynasty of Egypt is literally TAGGED to the 490-year awards to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph like birthday presents. For Joseph, it was a slavery present: Egypt was blessed 490 years due to him alone; and in the 490th year, the Exodus occurred. The 80 years while he was vizier (12th Dynasty, starting with Amenemhet II), gave Egypt a chance to develop so well economically, my 1985 Encyclopedia Britannica waxes rhapsodic about it in its "Egypt, History of" article (without noticing Joseph was the vizier, of course). God uses everyone, so orchestrates all the foreknown effects, so that Justice is Always Served. Because God Sees It, and HE should get Sweet Savor. That's why the Cross, so we are free to screw up -- that's why everything happens as it does. Freely, yet never 'outside' the Justice Requirement of Sweet Savor, Ps37:28, the quintessential Psalm about why you don't worry when the wicked prosper.
So you are being blessed or cursed SOLELY based on whether you are learning or rejecting, Bible. And everyone around you, depends on you learning Bible. Couldn't be a balder way to prove that fact, than by how God orchestrates Time around believers, none of whom did any good deeds by modern standards, but by God's Hebrews 11:6 standard!
As explained in Part III's "Third Reason for Invisibility" and "Third Reason for Royalty",
[Doesn't mean you can't have rituals and works. Does mean you MUST evaluate them in light of What Thinking Drives Your Choices And Execution of them. For example, it is now quite wrong to impose on others or claim that set rituals or works are "spiritual", see Romans 14. These are now individually determined. Of course, if you belong to a church, you are to submit to that authority until you quit that church.]
So our first three Facets of Mega-Doctrine Diamond Bucks, look like this:
to the human race, simply because you are a believer. That, because YOUR King is God, and the rest of the world has voted instead for Satan to be its king. So it's a problem of JURISDICTION. God is King only of all believers. So Blessing FROM God can only be granted DUE TO believers. This has been true since Adam's Fall: had he not believed for Salvation (Gen3:21), we'd all not be here. So the Jurisdiction Rule applies, throughout history. It's phenomenally upgraded, for Church, as we saw.
Let's walk through how this works. If a point seems confusing or wrong, use 1Jn1:9 if needed and Ask God to show you the relevant verses. There are so many, I'm not sure which ones you need to see. So what follows is a summary of the doctrines, and any citations will be restricted to those which spring to mind per John 14:26.
God Is Immaterial: Pure Thought, His 'DDNA', so to speak. Godness is Infinite, therefore the only 'body' He has, is a 'Body' Of Thinking, aka YHWH, Essence (ousia), Being (ho own=YHWH, Exo3:14, a term John uses), Substance (hupostasis), Reality (ho logos), The Word (ho logos, first meaning, Hebraistic for dabar and emeth). Concrete doesn't think. A couch never laughs. The planet Venus cannot read you a poem named after her. Inanimacy doesn't think. The ability to be alive had to come from SomeOne Greater Who Was Already Alive. Big hint: "Spirit" means life, breath. Gen1:2, incubating, Speaking Into Existence The Restoration Of The Earth. Heb1:3, the Hupostasis, Christ, Who (John 1) was Always God, upholds the universe by His Word. Wow. Thought is pretty enlivening, huh. So much for all those reincarnation fantasies about our coming from some bleeping amoeba, lol.
We also know that thought makes alive because Christ paid for our sins with His Thinking, Isa 53:11. Obviously, since He was Nailed to a Cross, Thinking was the only 'thing' He could 'do'.
But Love-based Righteousness is relaxing, a relief, a joy -- God's -- and wants to MAKE ALIVE. So when you read the Bible, if you read it with hatred-based righteousness, you get a lot of fire and brimstone, pounding. But if you read it with 1Jn1:9 on as needed, you see that God stresses how you are Made Alive Again -- to Him. He's happy about you, never condemning, Rom8:1. The parables of the lost coin, the lost sheep, and especially, the prodigal son, all show Love-based Righteousness. The joy at finding, not anger at what cost the one lost inflicted. Love subordinates. Love substitutes. Love Lingers. Because, Love Loves. And what Love Loves, is Righteousness. Adamantly, Absolutely.
So the Love-Absolute Resurrection Power of God is used to save you, and to resurrect your dead-thinking soul via learning and living on Bible, 24/7. Just read Ephesians, see that stress yourself. Do you ever wonder why God allows bad to exist in the world? Because He Can Make Good On It. God is Omnipotent, so He can make anything. So, He can make a thing perfect such that it can't become imperfect, INSTANTLY. But He doesn't want that. He enjoys the slower creative process, and He wants Free. So He wants to make a thing Free.. and then if it freely becomes imperfect or dead, He wants to pay for its perfection and resurrection; and then make it Perfect and Alive, from what He pays. He wants to do it the slow way, the hard way, because He actually Loves Righteousness, enjoys it. So enjoys lingering over making what's bad, good. This is a joy to Him, no matter how much it costs. So here, it's a True Pleasure to save us, and then to remake our souls into His Thinking post-salvation. Not a burden or a chore. So that's why so many Bible verses exult over our future status as sons. Notice how even in the judgement passages the Bible continually stresses the happy side -- no condemnation, no remembrance of how bad we were. But only, on how happy we will be. True Love for Righteousness actually enjoys Righteousness, that's why there's no condemnation in Christ, Romans 8:1.
This Resurrecting is the main theme in Isa53-55, and is always masked in translations: the chapters explain in detail, almost blow-by-blow, how, because we got borne on the Cross, so we become birthed as His sons forever. Isaiah has no end of fun with pregnancy metaphors in his Book, so the metaphor pops up often, and especially when talking of Messiah (i.e., Chaps 7 and 9); so, especially the Lord Himself and Paul, plus all the NT writers, carry forward the metaphor, thickly threading it through their letters. [This wordplay is the main theme throughout Isa53-55. Crescendo verse 53:11, "Out From His Labor", in corrected English, are the first two words in Hebrew: wordplay between labor-stage of pregnancy, and labor as in bearing a load. Very funny: Hebrew preposition min is always used with birthing/separating connotation, and to study it in Scripture is a treasure worth more than all the world's wealth. Job and Psalms make the same wordplay with those two Heb words in 53:11. Maybe other verses also, I stopped checking when I saw so many in those two books. Fabulous, how Isaiah uses words there. So fabulous, how you can also use your Word Learned, in your life! Heaven, in earthen vessels!]
How apt: we die twice (muth..muth construction in Gen2:17) and we live twice. We, born the first time dead at the same time in Adam, become alive to God via that first nanosecond's faith in Christ (John 3, Romans 5, esp. v.12ff). So, if now alive to Christ and in Christ (Romans 6-8, 2Cor5, Col1-3), then our thinking is precious to God, even as God's thinking was precious to David, the only reason why David felt it worthwhile to be born either time (Ps139:17, in context). Physical birth is still a kind of deadness, since one is 'dead' to God's Thoughts. Spiritual birth depends on physical birth to precede, so now physical birth is made alive to God, due to spiritual brith -- and thus its sterility is made alive, Isa54:1! Paul plays incessantly on that theme, especially in his grand drama of Romans 8 and all of Ephesians and Philippians, 1Cor12 and 15, etc.
Consider: God already knows how you will be thinking once you've died and are up in heaven. He could have chosen instead to just MAKE you like that from the get-go, eliminating the interim process of you being born physically on earth, Christ having to go pay for your sins beforehand, you believing in Christ and then undergoing whatever spiritual growth you would go through, down here. All that pain, eliminated. God could have just made you as the end product, rather than as a beginning. Sounds good, right? Yes and no. Yes, eliminating the pain is nice. No, because The Pain Never Got Associated with Thought. So it is always a dead thing, never enlivened by the birthing thought could have given it; always a woulda coulda shoulda, never a reality which goes on forever. So it's not merely a God-would-cheat question --which is impossible, for whatever God wants is valid, even were it wrong, He's Free to Choose -- it's an ENJOYMENT question. God would be cheated of Enjoyment, and that's why He won't 'cheat' by doing something which impinges on freedom, whether His.. or yours. "Filling all in all", as Paul puts it, end Eph1. Nothing left out, nothing left 'unbaptised', as it were, by Christ's Thinking.
So it's Always And Only The Thought That Counts, since Only The Thought Makes ALIVE. We all know this instinctively, and even if we are unaware of the fact that Only Thought Counts, we are wholly controlled by that fact. If you aren't happy, then what would normally make you thrilled, is.. boring. Lack of "appetite". Grieving people lose interest in their own lives. Why, because their thoughts are on the grief: what's alive is their grief, so all else is 'dead' to them. So, that's how their lives really are, Prov23:7, KJV. So also, whatever you buy or do or get is all run by what you THINK of it. So too, all compatibilities among people: Shared Thinking. It's a real pain to be around someone whose thinking you don't share. Painful for them, too. So, reflect: To Share God's Thinking, is the Ultimate Happiness. So, consider: Wouldn't He want you to be Like-Minded?
As we also saw in Part III's twinned Third Reasons, due to the Cross everything is ruled "Qorban", dedicated-to-God. Nothing in life is excluded for being too low. Qorban is a voluntary thing. Christ has ruled on it. Now, it's our turn. To the extent therefore that we Practice Him, we are ratifying qorban. So, we get built into Qorban, as He was the Ultimate Qorban, the Holocaust Offering for the whole world. That "qorban" OT concept had two basic elements: dedicated to Destruction, or dedicated to Service -- Paul illustrates this with aposiopesis, in Rom9:20-23. See, the OT problem was, only certain things/people could be dedicated-to-God, since Christ had not yet come. But now that He has come, everything can be dedicated-to-God. And everything IS.. in Him. So now everyone can choose Which Way To Be Qorban: and everyone makes himself a "vessel of destruction", as Paul explains in that Romans 9 passage -- if he rejects Christ. Pre-salvation, never believing. Post-salvation, never learning, so No Treasure In Earthen Vessels to Survive Bema Burning (1Cor3).
Everything is holy, now. It wasn't, before He completed the Cross. Hence our Priesthood is not like the OT (central theme of Book of Hebrews). New covenant, to implement the New Covenant for Israel. So Everything About Your Life, Is Dedicated To God: Qorban table in Part III's "Third Reason for Royalty" showed how that works. So if you refuse, you get punished. It's Not About Sin, But About Growing Up In Christ. Far worse than sin, then, to refuse. Part III's Four paired Reasons covered these concepts in great detail, especially the Third and Fourth Reasons for Invisibility and Royalty. If you refuse, you are still qorban, so you will be devoted to destruction. You never lose your salvation, But There's More Important Stuff To Lose -- the Kingship rewards, which make you close to God.. forever. [Why pastors don't teach this fact, I'll never fathom. A few do: search the internet for "doctrine of crowns". There will be many goofy websites, but a few good ones. My pastor calls it by other names, so you shouldn't get his site in the mix. I want to say Travis Baptist Church -- I forget where it is -- is another listing with sensible teaching. But the teaching is out there -- sparse, but it exists. This replaces the sin question with a More Serious Issue -- and obviously, sin obstructs spiritual growth, creates more downtime getting past the habit, etc., so you won't want to sin anyway. The Bar was Raised by the Cross to Eph4:13: that's rarely taught, too. But you should be able to tell that even in translation of that verse, plus via reading even a translation of Romans 6-8, if breathing 1Jn1:9 as needed, the whole time.]
The NT references qorban concepts often, too many to list. But here is a sample grouping:
Thinking makes or breaks the value of a thing. You know how upsetting it is when you hear thinking you don't like. Doesn't matter how right or wrong you are or the other person is -- it's not likeable, due to the thinking. So a pretty gal with a petty mind suddenly becomes very ugly. So An Ugly Guy/Gal With A Doctrinal Mind, Becomes Very Handsome/Beautiful. We've all experienced this, so now just extrapolate our smaller-version of pleasure or upset.. to Infinity. How pleased must God be, when He hears what He LIKES?
What does God like? Well, you'd have to know the Bible, to know that. You'd have to analyze Bible, to know that. Hence the need to be in God's System, and live on God's Script. Then practice analyzing, learning, playing with, using, living on it, 24/7. So you know He'd not like blamesmanship, excuses, pity-me, bullying, crusading, anti-doctrinal stuff like prolife, false Gospels, rah-rah, sacrificing, false witness, laziness, hypocrisy, flatterings, pettiness, judging, gossiping, maligning, jealousy, implacability, envy, anger (yes, anger IS a sin, Eph4:26 is mistranslated, should be "STOP BEING ANGRY and STOP sinning"), etc. Nor ideally, do you like those things when you hear them in someone else. So what you hear you don't like, don't foist on God, either. That's a starter list, anyway. God is not petty. So we should not think petty thoughts. Religion is nothing, if not petty.
Paul caught onto this fact, bigtime. Every one of his epistles is a primer on How To Think Scripture. It's really cool to see the way he matches ironies, like in the last half of Romans 5; all of Romans 6 (which is about how you are dead to this world and alive to Christ). Romans 7 is about the paradoxical tug-of-war the soul goes through, as a result of being divorced from the world, yet finding self still seduced by it. Romans 7 is somewhat prophetic, for just after Paul wrote Romans, he went back into Judaism, doing a Nazarite vow.. twice! My pastor spent a year covering that failure ("Paul's Fall" subseries in 92 Spiritual Dynamics, April+ 1999, maybe 200 lessons). So when he writes about the warring in Romans 7, it's real, baby: read Acts 18-22, see for yourself. More about that war will follow in the Fourth Facet.
Like Paul, if you keep on staying in God's System (see GodSystem.htm), eventually you will have a crisis or epiphany (often, several) where you realize, I just gotta get SERIOUS about learning Him. It's as if you wake up one day and realize it's only about the Relationship to Him, and devil-take-the-hindmost, you're gonna spend some alone time, learning. All that isolated-life you see in Moses, Paul, David, the Lord -- that's why they spent so much time alone. Once you make this decision, no matter how beset by people and circumstances you are now, God will move heaven and earth (pleasantly or unpleasantly) to get you that time, so be alert for it.
So as time passes, a focus of Looking At God In Your Thinking Will Become Habitual, as Part III's Third and Fourth Reason for Royalty, explained. So you are constantly evaluating, monitoring, analysing. That's an executive's job. That's why they need to play golf or go for other excursions, to get something mindless to do: not that golf is mindless, but missing a putt doesn't put your company in bankruptcy, and it's nice to make a decision which is not going to have epic repercussions. For all that command pressure of thinking, needs a Rest.
In short, it's command pressure you are learning. Command over your thoughts, over your tongue, over your body. Even brushing the teeth is thus of mammoth importance. Does your mind wander? Do you use the time to figure out something you heard in class? Do you relax with God, in the activity? All these things are Thinking Skills. You can't become a ruler without them, and you get no other training except via God's System (GodSystem.htm), which means living on God's Script. Living on -- in your HEAD. Not demanding someone else do it. You do it. Kings must become "spiritual Atlases", as my pastor likes to remind us.
This is a hard lesson to learn, that Thinking and not doing, is the spiritual life in Christ. The world is all about YOU doing something. It's ingrained from childhood. But the spiritual life is all about GOD doing something TO you. So you sit. Christ is Sitting, not running around doing potlucks and charity bazaars, hey-see-me-i'm-a-good-person. Matthew 4 temptations are to good deeds! But you can't do any good deeds God will accept, else every good-deeder would be long saved, and there'd be no Cross. Only God-Deeds are good enough, Matt19:17.
This shouldn't have to be said, but obviously you don't spend your life on a mountaintop contemplating your navel, since the spiritual life is about thinking. Rather, EVERY ACTIVITY is EVALUATED in light of Bible you know at the time. Even brushing your teeth. So, since you have a body and family and all kinds of obligations -- even if you're not working, you have to take care of yourself -- you will have stuff to do, every day. Ok, those things are all QORBAN, whether the world would consider them good deeds, or not. So you evaluate them, and your thinking 'cooks' the interpretation of what you do, so to make sweet savor for Father. Whether they also happen to be good deeds in the world's eyes, is beside the point. You obviously will get a lot of opportunities to do what the world also considers good. But it's just a dessert, adjunctive, not important compared to how you THINK when you do it.
In the Third Facet, we just saw the Impossible Requirement for Christ-Perfect Thoughts Toward FATHER. Everything else in life is qorban, devoted; even, brushing your teeth.
So this Fourth Facet is about that Warring Transformation, and the underlying dichotomies which are being resolved through it.
First Dichotomy: Infinity is never compatible with finity; that's why Christ had to be Two Natures in One Person, and then in that Dichotomous Status, Complete the Cross Without Sin. The Cross simultaneously resolves this Dichotomy, resolves the Trial and defeats Satan, creates a New Kingdom of Church, as well as accomplishes the payment for sin to Father forever. God is nothing if not efficient in His Goals. It's God Who 'goes low' (tapeinow, verb in Phili2:8), to Unite with Man. Man can't go up, see. Note well: perfection doesn't mean compatibility. The problem even in perfection, is to GET compatibility with Infinite God. The angels were initially perfect too, but not fully compatible: had there been full compatibility, Satan wouldn't have sinned. Same, for mankind: Adam was initially perfect, but not automatically compatible. God, as we know, is Infinitely Perfect. And, because He is, He Unites All Incompatibilities to Himself. That is a Choice. Perfect Infinity makes that Choice, flat. Togetherness, flat. No conditions, Eph1, "filling all in all."
This First Dichotomy between Infinity and finity, is why the Lord said you cannot be a slave to both God and mammon, Matt6:24. The entire Trial is about whether God or mammon, is better. "Mammon" isn't really worldly wealth, but the thought process behind it. So, a Trial of Two Thought Processes: God's, or Satan's. So "mammon" isn't money per se, being rich per se -- but rather, what conclusions do you draw as a result? Do you think well of yourself, as if some external made you a good person, like the guy in Luke 11:12-21? See, "mammon" represents the world's preoccupation with itself. Idea of believing in, trusting in, and above all preferring something other than God; trusting in whatever that other thing/person is, more than God. Christ is talking about God and mammon in this context: Matt6:21's, "where your heart is, there your treasure shall be also." So He's not browbeating anyone when He says you cannot be a slave to both God and mammon. It's just a fact, and He's explaining the problem: the thinking, depicted by "heart" in the verse. Not, what wealth or goodies. But how you value them, i.e., as being your 'god'.
This dichotomy between God and mammon is more fundamentally, the dichotomy between Infinity and finity, for finity is SEPARATIST, small, needy. No matter how big it is, its 'interests' are opposite those of Infinity. Infinity is inclusive, wanting all big and small, uniting, loving, holding. Finity must push off, since after all, its birth (creation) is separatist by nature. Mi beten, ek koilia, Out From The Womb. See the humorous Hebrew of Gen 3:22, how God uses the preposition "min" to communicate how man SEPARATED from God, due to sin. But look: to be born, to be created, is already a type of separation.
Thus finity by nature is incompatible with God. But God resolves it in the very Person of Christ. Satan disputes God's Solution and Togetherness Plan, so this Dichotomy is a Central Issue in the Trial. Here's how that works:
If you don't understand the Hypostatic (God-man) Union, here's a helpful hint: you get thoughts from two sources, your sin nature and your soul, but you are still one person. One will. You decide between the inputs. You can choose to 'tap' your sin nature (give into temptation), or not. Christ, of course, had no sin nature, but as God, He could have humanly chosen to 'tap' His Deity to learn, to speak stones into bread (Matt4:3), etc. Obviously as Human He didn't automatically know all His Deity knew. But He Could Have, If He Chose to. Satan was trying to get Him to choose to, in Matt4. The Word He got from the Holy Spirit in His human Soul was sooo great, not any temptation to use His Deity contrary to Father's wishes, 'broke through'. That's why being God-man was harder, not easier.
So, think: you are getting temptations to give into bodily stuff, to which you must say no. You can only learn how to do that (and it takes time), The Same Way He Did: learn under the Spirit, under your right pastor. Meanwhile, the resultant continual struggle will help you appreciate what life for HIM was like.
See? It's not about your weaknesses: those are but a 'format' for Learning Him. He went through it without sin, Hebrews 2 and 4 (last half of each Chapter). We go through it with sin, but look: it's the same process. Our version is small, compared to what He went through, but we get the SAME spiritual life (theme of Part III), so we get the Same Testing. So we can know more intimately, Our Greatest Love Who Saved us. You can't get this knowledge any other way. Learning Bible is the base of operations, the foundation -- but Living on it, is a separate learning experience. Because, there is a duality of nature, soul and body. Body can't handle Bible, will always have a childish 'read' on it.
So in this way you get the tension, the 'stretch' of incompatibility. So you can learn better how it was, for Him Whom you have come to love. That's why combat becomes what you yearn for, from spiritual maturity, onward. It takes a lifetime of learning.. because He is so big, and this experience is playing for Father. Royally. So it's not about sin, but about Christ!
God went low. Why did He WANT to do that? We saw in the Third Facet that He wants not only to go low, but forever -- for we are forever a low, compared to Him, even once perfect -- and He LIKES IT slow, low. He can instantly get what He wants, didn't have to go through this long process of building us, could have made us differently from the get-go. But did not. WHY? Satan's positively apoplectic over this, as you'll see in the Fifth Facet. But for now, consider that your own dual-nature dichotomy gives the 'high' of you the opportunity of learning to love the 'low' of both you and everyone and everything around you. It's a lifesaver, to look at life this way. Everything teaches what Christ's Life was Like, Why God Chooses to Structure Creation as He does. So teaches His Absolute Love, despite our puniness. During the day, I try to make it a drill to name what about CHRIST is depicted by some menial or frustrating or grand thing in my life. Then I try to 'rehearse' how He'd view it and deal with it (I like acting). Maybe you'll enjoy doing that, too. Keeps one sane. It's a kind of hands-on Bible class lab, very satisfying.
Repeat: it is Hell Not To Be God, and no one knows that fact better, than God. So He's out to put Himself into us, so that even hell is heaven. Our hell only lasts while we are down here: the purpose of life is to get saved, and then learn Him before we die. For God will only change what you authorize Him to change: love never coerces. So your happiness forever is determined solely by how well you learn Him, down here. My pastor calls this "Capacity Righteousness", and I use the term "soul size" and "dendrites" in the DDNA webseries for approximately the same concept. Another good analogy is a cup size. Idea is, the bigger you are, the more you can hold. Greek verbs auxanw and megalunw denote that idea of Bible growing your soul ("grow", "enlarged", "magnified" are some of the English translation words).
And as you do learn Him, it's a real pistol, to tolerate life. The high standards and the low body which can never meet the standards, is progressively intolerable. Even if breathing. Even if wealthy and in good health.
God is not compromised by incompatibility, because He created. We are the ones who cannot handle the incompatibility. So our closeness to Him, even in heaven forever, will be limited by whatever Doctrine we lived on, down here. Again: works can't make this compatibility happen. Only God's Word in you, moving! can make this happen. When we all are dead and/or Rapture occurs, we'll be standing before Him hearing our future roles. We will not want to have roles closer to Him than the ones we get, because then we will realize just how incompatible we would be, if we were made closer. It's not God who will have a problem with the closeness.. but US. So the incompatibility problem we have down here, to the extent UNresolved by learning Him, will remain permanent. By our own choice. [Nerd note: we will all be a bizillion times bigger and better than we are now, but the compatibility differential will still be vast -- just that "de minimis" level, the floor, is far higher than we can now imagine. But still, paradigmally, the differentials in compatibility will be vast. Remember that verse in the Gospels, when the Lord did the fish miracle for Peter, and Peter begged the Lord to leave because "I'm just a sinner, Lord!" (Luke 5:8, in context.) That's how we'll feel, only bigger. We will want the distance then for a very different reason, versus now. Now, we are disinterested in learning Our Husband's Thinking, but then.. we will be vitally interested, yet -- due to a sense of Justice -- vociferous about how we should not get so great an intimacy.]
For God is Holy; and even though perfect finiteness is short of His Infinity and thus short of His Glory, and thus not Holy -- God is not compromised. The term "holy" is so abused by religion, we can't even properly understand it. "Holy" means Pure, Inviolable, Happy. Can't be happy, except to the extent you have integrity: the pressures which knock you down, are more powerful than you, so your happiness is -- as it were -- enslaved to those pressures. But God is Total Integrity, so nothing can compromise His Nature. So, He wants to Give that Nature, to us. God is "set apart" (root meaning of 'holy' is Dedicated, hence set apart, sanctified). Nothing can 'dent' Him. He doesn't have to work at it, so He Infinitely enjoys Himself. That's what "holy", really means. Safe, secure, not needing any defense, all offenses against Him, simply bounce off harmlessly. Even though, He more than all creation put together, experiences all hells, all pain, all everything -- all at once. That's how HOLY He is. [Nerd note: to say God 'experiences' everything is not like man 'experiences'. It's not a feeling. It's an Absolute Knowing, which frankly is the true experience -- feeling is just a reflex of the body in response to thought, which is a knowing.]
Consider your body's capacities: you can lift so much weight comfortably, run only so fast, engage in only so much acrobatics or gymnastics or racquetball or whatever is your preferred activity. So whatever other activity is beyond your body's capacities, you cannot undertake. Same, for the spiritual life; so the problem is, these limitations LAST forever. It's kinda like growing up: you only grow so tall, and then you stop. With the spiritual life, there's no inherent limit on how 'tall' you can grow, except to the extent you refuse God's System. You take your soul with you, at the end: so whatever 'size' and 'capacity' it has at that point, becomes forever boundaried. There's a de minimis increase we all receive, and then atop that, an increase for what Bible we learned down here, because Bible increases your soul capacity for Relationship with GOD. So if your capacity for that relationship remains small and distant because you became intimate with works and rituals -- rather than becoming intimate with God, Learning Him Personally via His Word -- then you've a smaller soul. Forever. Happy, sure. Free, sure. Freely perfect, sure. But only within a certain sphere of 'activity', so to speak. Your choice while down here, what intimacies you want to have forever.
Satan is royally ticked off at this Relationship God Designed to handle the incompatibility problem; Satan fancies himself mankind's defender, to 'save' us from this Design. Satan's quintessentially moral, and really imagines God is wrong, unfair, Unloving -- all due to this First Dichotomy. For it's true that God COULD have binged us all instantly to be what WE WOULD BECOME, bypassing the entire growth process. More on these satanic objections will follow in the Fifth Facet. For now, just notice how this First Dichotomy creates all the others which follow. There's a reason why you always feel like a failure, if you love God: this First Dichotomy is it. The more you grow spiritually, the more you notice the Dichotomy, and the more unbearable your life becomes. So just imagine, how IMPOSSIBLE it was for Our Lord! Again, more about this Dichotomy follows in the Fifth Facet.
Second Dichotomy, your Royal Position in light of God's Ultimate Design for Your Life has to be the SAME as Christ's, even though you are puny compared to Him. God can do anything, including make alive what is dead, Isa54:1. God knows everything, and He wants to put His Son into everything, even as He put all sin into His Son on the Cross. Thus Everything is made Compatible. For us, that means Rapport, Like-Mindedness. Now consider: if you're going to become Like-Minded, then you must get Parallel Training Which Puts You In The Same Position As God Is. Else, you can't know Him well enough to have Rapport. That's why Adam was made ruler of the world (parallel to how Satan was made ruler of the angels). God was training Adam using animals -- which were far inferior -- to see that God Who is Far Superior, is not demeaned or offended, but happy to GROW Adam (and later, the woman). For Power means RULING, not willy-nilly grabbing and doing like some lottery winner or kid in a candy store, busy purchasing everything you ever wanted, etc. When you have absolute power, you use it based on REASONS, since you are not limited by characteristics. Doesn't matter, therefore, that finity is too small. Doesn't matter, then, that a menial task has no innate value. Doesn't matter, then, that sin is disgusting. Omnipotence Can Create Any Result For Any Reason Sovereignty Chooses, and that's How It Will BE, Period. God thinks. So God wants Thinking to be the Criterion, the Reason for judicial matching of thing "n" which is mindless and even disgusting, with Thought "X" which is Christ's. So that kind of reasoning and matching, is what we're being trained in. The pressure helps us gain a stamina so that when when we die, our souls will be big enough for the new life we'll be getting.
Next related Ruling Issue: we all like creating things. Parenting is a type of creating. When you're rich (or poor, for that matter) -- you're the parent of all you own. Owning requires a lot of training and self-control, as any parent or rich person, can tell you. So the Richest Parent of All, Christ -- tells us in His Word that He Loves Creating Salvation, even from sin, even from evil, even from all the wiles of Satan. And He loves it being done TO Him by the Holy Spirit -- slowly. One 'dot' at a time! So now that you are saved to heaven, well -- what about saving your soul from all the trashy thoughts, down here? So that Father can smell better thinking? That's why you are still alive, down here. One moment at a time, learning and living on Word, your soul is being REMADE -- fit for the King, from the very soul OF the King, in the same Holy-Spirit-Does-It process as the King Himself went through -- so that you too can become a King, under Him forever. Pretty creative and parenting, huh.
Ergo you must learn lessons Now based on how you would be, if you were already in heaven and promoted as a king. So when you go through your small life, you must think paradigmally, for the small structures still depict the Big Issues in Ruling. So look at anything around you, and you'll find Underlying Structure Patterns: lots of small stuff which has to be 'just so' in order for some whole to work; stuff which is always a hindrance; stuff which always just works beautifully. High and low, great and small, totally-profitable and total waste. As you work with these things in your life certain thoughts occur to you. Certain Thinking Skills are being developed, used, discarded. Question is, What Quality Of Thinking? Life=Bible principles, or death=world's principles? Life Means Life With God. All else is dead, sterile, futile, mataiotes -- black hole. Rigor mortis, still twitching, pretending life. Nothing is more dead, than morality without God running it. 1Jn1:9 means God is running it. Self considering self moral, means 1Jn1:9 is deemed unecessary. Self-righteousness is a sin. So that's dead, however moral.
God is BIG. So we need training in Big, parable of the talents [of faith=Bible=Money], Luke 19:10ff. We don't believe Him enough, so we get little; and then are resentful, wondering why God won't 'do something'. We don't get because we don't ask, James explained. We don't ask, because we are too busy trying to get from other people, what we can get from God. Because, God isn't interesting to us, except for His goodies. So we don't want God to be God, but a dog. So, He acts like one. But the believer growing in Him, wants to know Him. So gets a bigger life -- not necessarily visibly bigger, but definitely bigger on the inside. Every decision you make should be made as if you were ruling as a visible king, in public. For, you really are: in public before God and in the Trial, Heb11:1. Even if you lived in isolation. Nothing is menial. Everything is Royal. [I must have read the parable of the talents a bizillion times, but it wasn't until just now that I realized how you can prove it's Bible Doctrine which He's talking about -- because it's money you invest while He's gone, and He's giving you the WORD -- dabar, a command, Hebraistic -- and comes back, Rapture parallel. How could I have overlooked that obvious reason! Oh well, better late than never. My pastor has taught the meaning for years, and I just took his word for it, lol. But now I see it myself!]
Third Dichotomy: your entire life is Now "MISSION IMPOSSIBLE": Thinking Toward God must be CHRIST-KINGLY, PERFECT. But cannot be. Thus you are in the same dichotomous position as Christ was: Divine Thinking Required, but hampered by being human at the same time. As we saw in Part III and IVa, due to Matt16:18, it's a requirement of the Trial that we inherit the same spiritual life as Christ's: and how well we live that spiritual life, is the Substance of the Trial and the Reason for the Rapture's unpredictable timing, Greek of Heb11:1 (covered later on). So we are in the Same Position as He is. Obviously the scope is smaller; but you are in Him, so you are in His Same Position, as while HE was down here. You need that status, in order to train in His Thinking. So, that's your real status, whatever you look like to yourself and others 'outside'.
Upshot of these Chapters: Parallel to Christ's Own Innate Structure as God-man, the Believer Becomes Two Natures within himself, and these two natures are not at all compatible. It is no exaggeration to say that a mini-Hypostatic Union is Being Created IN you. So you will constantly be at WAR with yourself. Romans 5-6 explains the basis, and The New Hupostasis You Find Yourself In, due to being in Permanent Union with Christ; 5 is about the basis and its eternal goal (not well discernible in English); 6 is about the Union, and the death of the 'old husband', the sin nature. [Sadly, translations can't show the marital and pregnancy wordplay rife in the Bible. Each Bible writer uses keywords, and Paul especially makes very sophisticated use of them in all his letters, for he knows they are to tie together. So first read Rom5-8 over and over until you see something of an outline. Then, do it all again and again -- this time, with Bible software which has lexicons with etymology. For, Bible wordplay makes extensive use of etymology, and you will miss the point of what's said, if you don't know the etymology of the original words. If you can't afford that or do that, parse out the origin of the Greek syllables, since most Greek words are compounds of simpler words you can look up. So, break down compound words into the root meanings you can search on. Like, menw means to dwell, remain, etc. Hupo means "standing under" (connotation of submission, trust). So, hupomenw means to remain under, dwell under as a mental attitude. So, stay under, keep going on in the Word! Granted, you need to know the idiomatic meanings as well, but at least you can get some of the etymological wordplay which is stuffed into every word of the Word. If you're interested, my pastor exegeted Romans verse by verse, and frankly that's when all the Greek-geek stuff I'd been learning under him, began to gel for me -- it's the '77 Romans series, about four years of daily classes. You can order them for free on MP3 or DVD from his ministry, up to 36 lessons per month, rbthieme.org. Suggest you go sequentially, not topically, with anything you order from that ministry, so you get the comprehensive fit of the doctrines as you learn them.]
So, Divorce And Remarriage Is In Progress; and you know what a fight that is! So, Romans 7 shows how it feels, and Romans 8 explains what it is and how to resolve it: Bear Kids For Your New Husband, His Thinking! Very funny in Greek: you yourself are a spiritual child growing up in Him, and yet the Thought He (the Spirit) teaches you in order for you TO grow up, also makes you become pregnant! LOL! Hence the war, your "labor pains": your flesh (your nature apart from what you learn of Him) will never learn the Doctrine, for it is only spiritually apprehended under the Spirit (1Cor2, Rom8:1-10). [Chaps 9-11 are a parenthesis explaining how Israel and Church are related. Isa53-55 are used to continue the birthing analogy climaxed in Rom8. Romans 12ff then basically answer questions related to, 'where do we go from here?']
This new tripartite structure (body/soul/human spirit) eventually makes the Christian either the happiest person on the planet, or the most miserable. No middle ground. So as you grow, you will constantly mistake your 'normal' human nature's recalcitrance for something bad about you, because due to learning Doctrine you are no longer compatible with your human nature, frankly. So the truth is good, not bad: you are being remade. You're in a chrysalis, now. Your old nature is the chrysalis -- that's all it's good for. So, it keeps on acting like it is, and by contrast, what you are learning about Him changes your soul to be more Spiritually Compatible: but the body, never learns (Rom8:7 -- NAB trans is ok). It will abuse, misuse, mutate any doctrine you learn. Obsessively.
For if thought makes alive, then it also, KILLS. Old sin nature is essentially an unendingly arrogant warring, a death thought pattern with its own thinking skills, as my pastor likes to remind us: self-justification, self-deception, self-absorption. If you become competent in arrogance, you will come to love, hating. At the extreme end, you would love hating so much, even flames licking around you in hell, buttress your hungry ego: note the extremely cruel thought pattern of the rich guy in Hades, in Luke 16! Have you ever seen two people fight? Didn't it occur to you, oh, they both are so silly/ugly/stupid! How tragic! But clearly, those in the fight were so wrapped up in fighting, they didn't see themselves 'from the outside', and fancied themselves, both oh-so-right! So you, on the outside, see what's really true. But they, on the inside, are living this warped fantasy. And there's no way you can explain anything to them, then.
So you'll see this internal arrogance fighting the growing Word in you, and the fighting becomes very intense. Notice how you learn via this struggle,
Satan&Co. use that growing frustration at yourself to foster substitute thinking so you can get relief. That's why Christianity goes in for works, ritual, etc. to make themselves FEEL 'spiritual'. Yeah, only the body feels, and it is dead, so the thinking substituted is likewise dead, passing itself off as alive: Frankenstein. Just so much meaningless electrical current, making body parts move like reflex motility, chained to the table, fancying oneself holy. All Christianity reflects this fight, with the body's distortion, winning. It's one thing to be saved; it's quite another to grow up spiritually. The thinking is the issue. So if belief that body does something to be 'spiritual', then that view is dead as the body, get it? Christianity thus has historically played mortician, selling God as Doctor Frankenstein. Your big clue? Look who is emphasized in Christianity: people. What we do. What we don't do. What we find immoral. What we find moral. And then worst of all, we slap God's Name on everything we say -- and bethink ourselves holy! That's 1Jn1:6,8,10, 2:4, 2:9, 11, 15, 18, 22 (see 2Tim2:26-3:7), etc.
So works, which are done by a non-thinking body, are absolutely not the Bible's prescription for spirituality. Works are so excoriated, real Bible practically nags the reader: can the writer of Hebrews make it more bald, than to say "dead works"? Heb9:14, 6:1-6, good deeds are dead, just like the temptations to them in Matt4. Really bald, in Heb6:7-8, showing how without the Water of the Word 'watering' what you do, your deeds are but prickly weeds, harming anyone touching them. Of course, in the original-language texts, you see clearly that any praising of works references GOD's works, never man's, wholly consistent with Isa64:6. In all such verses, the article is used either monadically or omitted, to stress Divine Actor. But in translation, lol -- all that meaning is stripped out, reversed -- so it looks like MAN is doing the works, praise me praise me praise me i'm so good. Satan's not stupid: he knows what to target, in Scripture mistranslation!
Two-sided dichotomy, then: internally, and externally with respect to everyone around you, especially other believers. Nothing ever measuring up, who will deliver us from these bodies of death, Romans 7! Truth mediates them all, and you'll need to live on the Word to live through, the day!
If you become competent in cycling Scripture, which means competent at continually wanting it, since the Holy Spirit alone can run it for you -- if you become competent at cycling Scripture, you will come to love everything. Suffering becomes just as much a gift to you, as anything man could even fantasize as wonderful. This is Christ's testimony: even the Cross was happiness (Heb12:2, Heb5:9). So, by Thinking Scripture all the time (which means the principles, essentially -- though it's really nice when the verses come to mind), you will develop a Competence In Love which nothing can touch. But you'll FEEL more incompetent than ever. It takes a long time to recognize that what you see and feel, is the very opposite of the truth, i.e., defeat will feel like victory, but victory, like defeat; competence will seem like incompetence, and vice versa. That's why Paul quipped, "when I am weak, then [at that moment] I am strong, 2Cor12:10. Impossible to live, without that verse!
Even if you are brushing your teeth, the Doctrinal thought in your head, THAT'S awesome. You aren't capable of thinking "God's Thoughts", Isa55:8+Rom8:7+8 (NIV), as my pastor explained (92 Spiritual Dynamics, L. 1740-2, or 1723, I forget which one). We were born spiritually dead. Dead people can't think -- the soul is OUT of the body, so it's just rotting away, no person 'inside' it. Well, we were born dead to God, no ability to think toward Him, and any "god" concepts we get, are completely wacko. (See godnotmag.htm for a deliberately-ridiculing roster of the more popular god ideas in mankind's history.) So what's this? Now we can think Divine Thoughts? It shouldn't be happening. We're too small, too fragmented, God is alien to our nature, and we to His; we are completely fettered by needs, so are one jot above an animal, even though souled; our vaunted philosophies are hypocritical in the extreme, everyone using them only to preen; our vaunted good deeds do nothing but complicate life; thus it's true that "no good deed goes unpunished." And on and on and on.
So there is no way to avoid suffering as you learn God's Thoughts. The differential between His Holiness and your own puniness is intolerable, the more you age in Christ. More about that problem will be said in the Fifth Facet, but for now, notice: it hurts. God knows it hurts. God doesn't want it to hurt, but freedom means consent, and the changing from what you were to what He's making you can't be always pleasant. Meanwhile, along with the hurt is a growing pleasure at knowing Him. They come to sit side by side, Heb12:2 in the making. For God is Omniscient, knowing at once all Good and Bad, so how is it, He's Happy? That's what's being developed, the same besidedness of knowledge. Again, it's about Rapport, and Intimacy with Omniscient God means ALL Truth. So, it hurts -- and no greater happiness exists, either. Side-by-side. As my pastor likes to explain, spiritual maturation is a process characterized by a gradual equating of adversity and prosperity, such that you come to welcome the one, as much as the other. For the One You See Who Is Invisible, gifts them both. Thus you'll suffer. And of course, all this equating is humanly impossible, Heb5:8.
So God is AMAZED that you would want to go through this growth process. Witness the besidedness, the impossible dichotomy of your life:
Main theme of the last half of Romans 8: whatever you are doing, high or low, unpleasant or pleasant, the structure of that thing is a kind of 'cross' -- which gets your thinking 'applied' to it, which Father Hears Forever. If you read the Bible accounts of Biblical heroes or even anyone mentioned, you'll see God's Assessment is always Based On What They Thought. Not, what they did. Like He told Samuel, when Samuel went to Jesse's sons: Man sees on the outside, but God sees on the inside. The flipside of that remark, is this: we only see ourselves from the inside of the battle, grunt-level: but God sees from the inside at His Level. When you're in combat, you don't see the success of the operation, you're too busy slopping up Hamburger Hill, falling down ten paces for every one you advance. So it feels like failure. But you saw (or should see) that movie: didn't you admire the soldiers? They weren't feeling admiration for themselves, they felt like losers. But we see their insides from above the fight. So does God.
Now, you yourself only see from the inside, the grunt level. So you are constantly tempted to be offended or ashamed, because you're bombarded with temptation. But think: if you're using Doctrine to parry the temptation (like the Lord does, in Matt4), God sees you go through a parallel of what His Son went through! Matt4, The Exact Same Mechanic As The Lord Used During The Cross (again, Isa53:10-12, probably the most important passage in Scripture). Now happening in parallel form, in you! That's why it's such a sweet savor!
Let's posit two people standing in front of a mirror, brushing their teeth. Pretend one is poor, and the other, rich. One of them is thinking how unfair it is that so-and-so got something; how bad the teeth look, and how upsetting it is that they can't be fixed. The other of them is wondering how the Hypostatic Union works, mulling over what was learned in Bible class, grateful for the information, exulting in it. Then, this other one tries to figure out how to use that information, concluding that Psalm 22:6 was used by the Lord on the Cross to name the very thing He found repugnant, as His Dream-Come-True! Which, it was. Which, he decides to use on the disease he has, which he cannot fix...
Which of these two persons, pleases God? And which one is really rich, whatever his material 'status'? And how much Joy there would be in rescuing, both of them!
We humans obsess over our bodies. A pimple, hair out of place, fat, wrinkles, lack of muscles, shape of body parts -- all these we obsess over, spending trillions of dollars to make ourselves look better. Yet the body of our thinking goes seriously neglected, and wow is it ever ugly. Just turn on TV and look at the shallow, petty concerns, interests; what is called good; what is called bad; how there is zero concern for God in any of it. How the ugliest thinking of all, is Christian -- mouthing God's name all the time, yet clearly knowing nothing about Him. Hypocritical, holy tones to please people, for crying out loud. And now imagine you are God, hearing all this! Makes you wonder why He doesn't command another Flood.
But we're on the inside of the obsession, so like those two hypothetical people fighting, we're so engaged with how right we are, we don't notice how ugly we are. How silly we are. For we are not engaged in thinking Bible using 1Jn1:9, living in God's System. So we are truly ugly. Sin, human good, evil all share one characteristic: they are ugly to those viewing them from the outside; but deemed beautiful, to those viewing from inside. Divine Thinking in you has the opposite 'look': to you on the inside, you don't measure up, so you think self ugly. But on the outside, your inside body-of-thinking looks beautiful/handsome, to God.
Pharisee and the publican, Luke 18: let's posit two cockroaches. One is busy gloating over what power he has, looking for whatever he can devour in your house, telling himself that he's one of the most ancient lifeforms -- you know, like folks who claim they are of the "original" Christian tradition -- exulting in his huge numbers and calling himself holy because so many other cockroaches just like him, agree. Off to the side, though, there's another cockroach which recognizes itself as evil, and wishes the resident humans would just kill it. Which cockroach do you think God would rescue? Assuming cockroaches can think (and we know many human cockroaches who do) -- which one would God happily turn into His Own Son? Bing! You're NO LONGER a cockroach, but I Make You a King! Celebrate! But the other one? Okay, you exult in being a cockroach; so that's what you want, and that's what you get.
When you are truly growing in Him, you will constantly be valuing self AS a worthless cockroach, because you never measure up to His Standards. But God sees on the outside, which you can't: you want to learn My Son, you are trying to obey as My Son does, you are trying to think as My Son does, that makes you beautiful. As for the specific doctrines you fire to analyze, ponder, decide, avoid temptation, etc., well those are like home runs in a baseball game, or touchdowns on the football field. Beautiful. Fluency and quantity of these thoughts increase as you grow spiritually, but no matter how childish or infrequent, each such thought is precious. So you and the world, get blessed. But to you, it looks and feels like Hamburger Hill: hopeless, and you'll deem the self a loser. That's when you need to fire Bible like never before, every promise you can remember, every doctrine which tells you the outside reality of your situation. For Bible is Truth, and all else is but a funhouse mirror. [Cultural note: a funhouse mirror in 1950's America was a carnival attraction; warped mirrors which made you appear much taller or fatter than you were, had been arranged in a tent, and you stood in front of each one, seeing a radically distorted version of yourself and your friends. It was funny. Not so funny, is the fact that the world radically distorts reality in just the same way, deeming itself accurate. Here's your big clue: pick up a newspaper from maybe 10 or 15 years ago, notice how stale the material in it; how silly the preoccupations back then. Yet we get so riled up over politics in today's news, as if it were of vital importance? How come?]
Fourth Dichotomy: our post-salvation life here is a PREGNANCY. That, because
2Cor5:21 is the flagship verse on this juridical exchange, explaining Isa53:11's "bedato yasdiq" clause. Him being MADE sin (far worse than a cockroach), so we could be made sons (zera ya'arik yamim clause in Isa53:10). Ephesians 1 explains how that was the Plan from Eternity Past, Isaiah tells you how it got accomplished on the Cross, and Eph2-end book plus all of Hebrews, are flagship passages on the results. We truly go from bar-khockroach to king, in Him. John 10:34 is not hyperbole. Our current nature is just a training aid in 'low' and 'bad', because Omniscience knows all that, and how else can we too get that information, without our volitions being compromised, 1Cor15:37-57? Our souls must be grown, one consent and precept at a time. Nothing's more beautiful than His Thinking. In us earthen vessels, even. One Loving, Lingering Moment at a Time, which Father relishes forever.
So we see shame, but God sees what He can make out of it for our benefit. Isa54:1 (my translation directly from the Hebrew, aping the meter): "Whoop for joy, You-Barren-Never-Birthed! Burst into neighing trill, You-Who-Never-Writhed! Far more, the sons of the Shamed One, than of her who is Ba'aled', rules the Lord!" Translation's "Ba'aled" is literal, but the term came to mean husbanded, legally married. But in Isaiah, it's a play on words to Ba'al, a false god. The world depends on a false god, marries itself off to worldly attractions; and especially, the religious attractions, preening itself holy. But we are of the Real God, and God LOVES that being true. So Christ Who became the Shamed One ("asham" in Hebrew means a substitute offering for sin, in Isa53:10) -- HE is not ashamed of us, Heb2 (see also Ps40, which ties). Because, God Sees Accurately, And What He Sees, Doesn't Make Him Ashamed, But Instead, Loving (see also 2Tim2:13, a humorous and tender use of Ps40, Eph1:15-23, 1Cor12). [Sadly, 2Tim2:10 and 14 are legalistically mistranslated, so you miss the context. Takes too long to explain why. Basically, the mistranslation reverses the meaning of "tugchanw" in v.10, and "logomachew" in v.14, to make both look like works is better than Word. How sad; so the reader of v.13 is supposed to feel guilty, and misses the humor of the Lord being unable to deny Himself (we are part of Him, and He won't refuse Himself).]
GOD'S ALCHEMY: you contribute the doo-doo (we all are doo-doo, down here) -- and He makes diamonds out of your doo-doo. That's the deal! See 1Cor3, Phili3:8. Isa53:10-11 is quite explicit about this. Isa53trans.htm has a corrected and expanded translation of the whole chapter.
We think that what we see, is the reality. But it's not. The reality, is that we are "sons of God in Christ Jesus", Galatians (and elsewhere). Rescued (real meaning of sozo, usu. translated "saved"). Rescued from this hellhole called "life". That pleases God utterly, for the suffering of being a cockroach, He experiences more than everyone, and All At Once. He's dying, as it were, to rescue us. In fact, He Did Die For That Very Reason. So that He can be the Parent of Our Salvation, shouting Isa54:1 forever. And so can we. For those of us who won't grow up in God's Perfect Thoughts, will be perfect forever but smaller in size, and yearning to be bigger. And then those of us who become kings, can have that same pleasure of growing those in our kingdoms, in the King's Thinking. Because no one will like sinning then. No one will care about inferior or superior, then. All anyone will care about then -- is seeing Him Who is Currently Invisible.. except, through His Word.
Hence the ironic, impossible life we have in Christ: it's just a pregnancy (Rom8:11ff), this groaning, shameful life down here. Sown in dishonor, raised in max honor, 1Cor15. Even as He was, Phili2:5-10. You are no longer the same being as you were pre-salvation, 2Cor5:17. Spirituality cannot be felt -- that's why John had to write 1Jn, because believers were mixed up about it, since in those days the temporary spiritual gifts were felt, and the gifts had pretty much ended; so believers didn't know what it was, anymore. [Tongues is Isa28, related to Temple Destruction (see 1Cor14 which reminds believers of that fact), so died with the Temple. Other spiritual gifts like healing and miracles, were already dying out while Paul was alive, viz., the verses where he could no longer heal anyone. 1Jn was written circa 90AD.] But spirituality is real, and if you persist in using 1Jn1:9 and studying Scripture under your right pastor, you will see the Invisible.
God Alone makes you human at birth. It's a very important fact to know, because the spiritual life is a type of pregnancy too, meaning that what is happening here is not the real life, and only what God Makes, is Life; so, He Makes You Down Here, even as He made your soul, at your physical birth. Paul depends on reader understanding of that fact when he writes Romans 8, because it's an analogy. Same, for 1Cor12 and 15. All this life's stuff has no more 'life' in it, than developing foetal body parts, in preparation for the Real Life to come.. forever with God. Or, apart from Him, if that is what the living soul, elects. No soul is in a womb because it would not be able to think (brain is the last to develop, so no 'hookup'), and not able to be independent and see: volition would not be free until the fetus exits the womb. So God will never put a soul inside a womb. So there is no life inside the womb, it's just developing biology, an organic machine. Moreover, all that biological change would be painful if a soul was in the womb; God is neither murderer nor sadist, so He makes you alive at birth, so you can see His Thoughts (Ps139:13-17, main theme in Heb or Greek, but not the egregious translations). If you want more on that topic, read Caveat4.htm and its webpage inset, NoWombLife.htm.
Likewise, we are physically alive once born, and spiritually alive once we believe in Christ, but that only sets up the potential to be in another 'womb' -- Of Spiritual Development, which the Holy Spirit 'mothers', even as He mothered the restoration of the Earth, in Gen1:2ff. So, being in this 'womb' of earth with the Holy Spirit and the earth groaning in pregnancy-labor (Rom8:11ff, Greek), we groan, too: for we can't yet see the angels and Christ Seated (big theme in Heb2ff), but we know it is true (Rom8:28-end). And that, because Isaiah 52:13-54:1 is on the theme of how Christ was raped with our sins in order to birth all sons for all eternity.
Again, you are in a Romans 7 situation. Two natures are struggling inside you, analogous to how two developing sets of body parts were 'wrestling' in Rebecca's womb (Gen25). She sought the LORD about that problem, and so should we. It's a pregnancy, not real life, down here. What's happening is a Transformation. But that doesn't mean you abort the struggle. Ask God What To Do. Great advice for physical pregnancy, for spiritual pregnancy. The dead life down here, pretends to be alive. But the real life, seems dead. Doesn't seem that thinking toward God means much, but rather movements with the body, matter. Yeah, and you can make a marionette move, and it remains just as dead. That's what Satan&Co. do to the human race: puppet us. How well they succeed at it, will occupy most of Part IVc. For now, just notice that movement is a false 'god'. Body loves that 'god', and can only see that 'god', because that election was programmed into the biological nature, from our original parents: Adam and the woman. So it's a mindless urge, an animalism. Whether expressed as works (figleaves) or hedonism, it's still but an urge, like going to the bathroom. Dead, deaf, deafening to the soul. Only His Thinking can fight the urge which was 'birthed' by bouncing off Infinite God, rejecting Him. Maximum negative derivative, an atom bomb, constantly exploding against (or in), the soul.
So, the question boils down to developing a 'Spiritual Body' of Thinking, which means.. Growing in the Faith. Faith is first the Doctrine in Bible, and then also Believing It. Lots of words for Bible, each one stressing some facet of its value: "faith" stresses eating the knowledge and believing (metabolizing) it. That makes your spiritual body parts, grow. Your spiritual body won't be born until you die (see 1Cor15:39ff). So, while you live down here, it's a struggle, and you are blindsided. So Don't Abort The Spiritual Life. See also Jas1:15's and Gal4:19's Greek (lexicons may euphemize), and like passages. [Satan plays on this purpose, bigtime. Evolution and Gen6 and Greek-type pantheons, gnosticism, eastern religious 'reincarnation' concepts alike mock the real 'womb' meanings in Bible; the prolife campaign is also a satanic ruse. Notice how all of these ruses abort understanding about what Bible really says. Whoa, Satan's not stupid, but we sure are! Satan's trying to 'mother' us into being smothered before we are born; whether with respect to the REAL mechanism of spiritual birth (John3:16) or the real mechanism of post-spiritual pregnancy for developing our spiritual body, Satan has a brilliant and largely-successful plan to abort us all!]
Romans 8 is the happy ending of the play (begun in Romans 5, sotto voce), where finally Your Soul Reconciles Under His Thinking, no longer seduced by the thinking of this world. So, by that end, you too come to want the combat of it. In the beginning, the combat really bothers you, and you fall down constantly; but by the end, You Love The Fight, Because It Gives You Something To Give Him. So, victory: I am convinced that nothing can separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus. No barriers. True miracle. That's what's really going on in your life right now: all the surface stuff, are just training aids. Your flaws, your strengths, another's flaws or strengths, things, events -- all just cannonfodder so you can learn, to shoot Doctrine! Which, by the way, ennobles the cannonfodder, Blesses it. Sacrifices it, Cooks it. Making it smell good because the Doctrine Applied, is such a great Chef: Him.
Imagine: here we are, dog-doo-doo by nature. Yet we can give God a gift? For surely all the money and charity and other stuff we do, God doesn't need. What do you give, to God? Thinking: His Son's. It is a volitional act, the Holy Spirit produces it, á la John 14:26 (recall of what you've learned). It's Superhuman, this Divine Thinking in you, an earthen vessel otherwise dedicated to destruction; who, of yourself, couldn't be giving anything. But now, oh! Everything is Qorban! So: that's where your body goes, but you go to Heaven. Meanwhile, you can devote this dead body to training in Qorban, to becoming a Worm of the Worm, and think like a King. Isaiah 52:14, last half: ken mishhat meish mareyhu, wa toaro me bene adam -- see all those m-sounds? More than Human, Born from the Worm Who Bore More than All Mankind Put Together.
To sum up: We get Infinity, His Thinking, CYCLING in our puny bodies, so we get an Impossible Life of learning and living on Bible, so to have Perfect Thoughts Father Will Forever Hear. Impossibly wonderful life, if we stick with it; impossibly horrible, if we do not. Bible terms depicting this impossible cycling are very wry, and usually not visible in the English. Most common, is the "Love of God" or "Love of Christ" or "Love" verse with a motion verb that is used for Bible itself; like, Rom5:5 (Word=water, in OT). Greek subjective and objective genitive ("of" in English) is a CIRCLE; subjective, God's Love; objective, Love producing Love FOR Him (i.e., Rom5:5, which is bald on the mechanics, but also 2Cor5:14, and many parallel verses which most study Bibles and Bible software, will list). So it's God's Thinking (technically, Christ as God and Man is stressed as Source). "Treasure in earthen vessels" is another catchphrase; so are "mirror", and "glory to glory" phrases (or their concepts, viz., in 1Pet1:7-8). Then there are the multitude of ironic phrases so common everywhere in Scripture, like valley exalted, mountain made low, dead made alive again; poor made rich, and rich made poor (see James 1, then look for the many parallels in Gospels and OT); all these are communicating what the Circle is: "Christ in you, the Confident Expectation of Glory" (Col1:25-27, again).
Again, It's Only The Thought That Counts to make you happy and sinless and Pleasing-to-God. God's Thought. In You. Whatever your nature. Col 1:25-27, Philippians 1:21!
Even -- and especially -- when we are hurting. This defeats Satan in the Trial. |
This Cycling of Infinity inside Finity, is an Impossible Profit: "Christ in you, the Confident Expectation of Glory", as Paul puts it in Colossians 1:27. That's a Trial verse, a demonstration to Satan&Co. why their contentions are false. So here in the Fifth Facet, The Diamond Doctrine Bucks are extreme. So let's review again the Facets thus far:
To the large soul, nice isn't what "love" means. Love includes nice, but also includes giving. Extreme love needs to pour out for the object of that love, not looking for anything in return. The Largest Soul in History needed the Outlet of such Pour-out: the Cross. As you grow in Him, you progressively will have the Same Love, Rom5:5; so you will progressively have the same Pour-Out Need. So, when you've grown enough -- and at training intervals even prior -- God will Gift you pour outs. And instead of qvetching and preening when you suffer unjustly or for someone else, instead you are relieved and grateful. Just as Christ is. Welcome to the nature of true love, which is THE Issue in the Trial: "Does God love, that He would create us so?" You can hear that accusation any day in any mouth in the world; for it echoes Satan's plaint in the Trial.
As explained in Part I, this spiritual development to resolve incompatibility with Infinite God was the very same problem angels all faced, too. They had to grow up via adjusting to God, or sin. See, unlike us, all the angels were simultaneously created, and with full knowledge of Him. But, like us, knowing a thing doesn't mean your will positively adjusts to the knowledge you have. Because, you are a whole being with volition. So "knowledge" doesn't mean "wisdom" or "strength". Those things come with turning over what you know, thinking about the meaning, using what you learn. And most of all, your attitude about it. Like Paul quips in 1Cor13:1-3, even if you had all the gifts and all the knowledge, but didn't have Love, you'd be nothing. Well, love depends on your attitude to what you know, don't know, etc. Especially, with reference to God.
So also it was, for the angels; so also it was, for Christ Himself. Same issue. So, for the angels, and even more for Christ, it was not easy to adjust; it was a struggle, because as we saw in the First Dichotomy of the Fourth Facet, Infinity is not compatible with finity.
For Christ it was the Worst. For here He is, One Person, in effect torn apart by Two Antithetical Natures: Infinite, which is innately inclusive; and Human, which is innately exclusive. The sheer tension of living.. well, it's beyond what we can imagine; even if we analogized His Life to being a victim of the Hittite post-war game of 'skin the prisoner', we'd not even get a glimmer of the pain He suffered. Long before He even got to the Cross. How do you live being God and puny, at the same time? Being human and perfect is still being puny, compared to Godness. How was it He could wait on the Spirit to grow Him, when He had always at His beck-and-call, the ability to just bing! whatever learning, good, etc. He wanted? Just one thought in that direction, would have made it happen. Satan's counting on that fact, in Matt4!
So, whether the angels or even Christ Himself, Compatibility with God must be forged out from many volitional choices to adjust to the Object you know, so to be compatible. And frankly, no one can make good on such choices, with respect to God. HE has to use His Power IN you, to make that choice work. Which means, you are continually voting FOR Him to remake you, and continually voting against your own nature. "Something better" than your own nature -- His -- is what you keep voting FOR. He responds with a Yes Vote and remakes you precept on precept; and the process continues. It's a zig-zag:
Satan says, "works" should be the governing standard, precisely because we're not God: since, for crying out loud, we're finite, we can't have another standard! So, those works also have to be PRICED. So those who are less valuable than others, can have incentive; so those more valuable than others, can feel rewarded. God's Impossible Infinite-Righteousness Standard, and therefore His Design and Plan, throws away the entire PERSON He Himself Created! Not Fair! What kind of love, Satan asks bitterly, is that????? Hence as we just saw above, Satan contends that God's going slow -- creating creatures lower than the ultimate intended Design goal -- is really a form of sadism, not love. Especially, since if they reject as they inevitably do -- they either go to hell, or have a hellish post-salvation life. For if God loved creation, He could have INITIALLY made us all in the Ultimate Design which He Foreknows we'd choose, anyway. Pretty powerful satanic apodosis, huh. Satan's arguments are all good. Just not as Good as GOD's. Matthew 4 temptations are to good deeds, not to sin. But it would be a sin, for Christ to do those good deeds. Let's see why.
But INfinity means, No Barriers. Love means you THROW DOWN your barriers, like those angels throw down their crowns, in Rev4:10ff. Like Christ threw away His Own Life, on the Cross. For, love is essentially alien to finity's need to push off, be on its own. So even were you perfect, you would have this 'tug'. It's not temptation, but the natural property of being finite, the 'tug' of independence. Since love is all about dependence, especially the superior choosing to spend self on the inferior (parents to children, for example), love is alien to independence. That's why it feels like a defeat or a threat, to BELIEVE. For inherent in belief, is DEPENDENCE. The foundation of love is belief, so to the extent a person doesn't believe in God, he is incapable of any kind of love, even toward humans. Yet it's quite understandable, for belief is a kind of 'surrender' of your independence.
If you want to be close to God, you must go against your own finity, not merely resist sin; and ALL its innate barriers must come DOWN, with Divine Love=Truth REPLACING them. Thus functional reconciliation is achieved; for God's Attributes are Indivisible. So when the believer receives deposits of His Truth, His Love is being 'deposited', too. For there are No Barriers in God.
The warring we saw in the Fourth Facet is essentially the symptom of internal soul barriers ALL coming down. Part III's First Reason for Invisibility covers the listing below in more detail. Here is but a sketch of what amounts to an internal soul 'guerilla' war of attrition:
So the Impossible Profit of "Christ in you, the Confident Expectation of Glory", Col1:25-27, demonstrates you are supernaturally, Free; suffering DIDN'T undo the Love. God is Unpriced, and so are you. "Having done all, to stand", Eph6:13 (KJV). The Impossible Ruler is in your head, so you the Impossible Ruled, are Impossibly a Priest to Father; katartizw'd, kitted out with an Impossible Life, so now that Impossible Profit, generated via the individual mechanics of Eph3:15-19 via Eph4:11-16.. pays off. Oh, how rare a gem the Holy Spirit has made you, by this point. In Part IVc, you'll see how rare, how powerful, all this Thinking you're learning, really is. You're only getting the design, now. But remember the First Facet? The Ruler couldn't justifiably BE a ruler benefitting Earth, if you weren't learning. Not someone else, YOU. We Christians are soooo busy looking at others, we forget all about, ourselves. That's not altruism, but stupidity. Each of us is a King-in-Training. We should regard ourselves that way. Objectively, like God does. This is the Dowry Father pays Son: our training. You're worth an incredible amount of money. Will you bring it to the wedding? Or have it re-route to someone else? That's where this Thinking, Vests: in you. Not, in someone else.
So Note The Impossible Profit.. Love! As Galatians 5 explains, God wants the Impossible Profit of Infinite, Divine Love, which He produces via the Spirit Pouring In the Truth, operating in every believer, and at Christ's Level! ["Fruit" in Bible means thinking, teaching, and is always an agricultural word for PROFIT, the 'crop' which made all that husbanding, worthwhile. So when reading Gal5:22, keep that fact in mind. For the "at Christ's Level", see Eph4:13, Greek -- astounding verse! If you don't get the Greek Marital Vocabulary Paul uses in v.16, you won't understand v.13. It's a real pistol to find out from the lexicons that sumbibazw, etc. are Marital sex verbs, and even (sometimes) crude ones, in Greek lit. See RightPT.htm's exegesis section, if God thinks you should.] Love.. because God is Love (1Jn4). So, God makes Love Pour in You via those Truth Deposits, Rom5:5. So: You Are To Be Transformed, just as Paul explains (by way of imperative), in Rom12:1-3. This is a very important passage, and its translations are a royal mess. Here's a quick translation of 12:2 from Greek, so you can see how different, the meaning. Capped words vary from the translations extant. Trans:
Study Rom12:1-3 in Greek, you'll love Paul's sense of humor! For the full passage, CLICK HERE.
So how is it we finite puny can be compatible? God Cycling His Thinking in us every second is done BY Him. So it's Godness cycling in finiteness. What God does to an object makes it HOLY. Again, this is the Resurrection Power concept of the Third Facet: Only Thought Makes Alive. So if it's GOD's Thought in you, it's alive at God's Own Level, since done By God. Yes, that means we are utterly dependent, a kind of kenosis. That's why all the barriers have to come down, that's why it feels so bad and defeating. What's being defeated, is the natural barrier against God doing it all TO you. We humans value ourselves in terms of what WE do. That valuation must be utterly destroyed. Satan contends this destruction is the wrong way to have a relationship. Well, if you love God you want to be destroyed, just because: and just because He is forever better than you are, you NEED it to happen, to be happy that He's getting His 'money's worth' out of you, so to speak. That's the reasoning of Love. In humans, this reasoning has a price. But when Divine Love is built in you, it becomes Priceless, Isa55:1ff. No price is too high. God doesn't love us for what we can do for Him. He just loves us, period. And, in Pleroma, you find out you too just love Him, period. That's why Abraham needed to sacrifice Isaac, to see that it wasn't God's Promise he loved the more, it was GOD he loved the more. Love never accounts itself as loving. So the proof of it, must be demonstrated TO the one loving. By the One Loving.
Consequently God the Holy Spirit is not ashamed of us, but He is Mothering us to beat even Satan's arguments in the Unseen Angelic Trial, Heb11:1. What beats Satan is thinking Bible, 24/7, 1Jn5:4. That's how the Lord became the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life, Matt4:4. So can God do that to us also? If Yes, Satan is defeated. Writer of Hebrews likens this life to wandering in the wilderness (esp. in Heb4 and 11), during which the Unseen Trial Evidence Of Christ Is Our Faith, His Thinking, Heb11:1.
[I translate the verse differently in other sites. Greek layers of meaning can't all be fitted into one set of English wording. We all should just study and learn the original languages, and forego translations, imo.]
So what's being tested in the Trial which our faith, proves victorious? God's Choice of going slow is proven the more right. Remember earlier, this paragraph? "Consider: God already knows how you will be thinking once you've died and are up in heaven. He could have chosen instead to just MAKE you like that from the get-go, eliminating the interim process of you being born physically on earth, Christ having to go pay for your sins beforehand, you believing in Christ and then undergoing whatever spiritual growth you would go through, down here. All that pain, eliminated. God could have just made you as the end product, rather than as a beginning. Sounds good, right? Satan sure thinks so, and is mightily mad at God for not doing it that way. But consider: Yes, eliminating the pain is nice. But No, because The Pain Never Got Associated WITH Thought. So it is always a dead thing, never enlivened by the birthing thought could have given it; always a woulda coulda shoulda, never a reality which goes on forever. So it's not merely a God-would-cheat question --which is impossible, for whatever God wants is valid, even were it wrong, He's Free to Choose -- it's an ENJOYMENT question. God would be cheated of Enjoyment, and that's why He won't 'cheat' by doing something which impinges on freedom, whether His.. or yours. 'Filling all in all', as Paul puts it, end Eph1. Nothing left out, nothing left 'unbaptised', as it were, by Christ's Thinking."
Satan's saying God's going slow like this is wrong, immoral, unfair. Satan contends God's unfair to require us believe in God, to keep trusting Him to grow us, because it means rejecting all we are -- which God made, of course.
For Satan contends that the Lord won solely because His Nature was SUPERIOR from the get-go, even though human (i.e., because perfect and God-man). Thus,
Christ was at the opposite end of all this. He couldn't sin one sin without tanking forever. No second chances. His Spiritual Life was far higher than the Law, as Book of Hebrews painstakingly explains. And, He's UNIQUE: shemah, Yisroel! Accordingly, Satan contends that His Unique Nature plus the OT flash, 'contributed' to the success of His Spiritual Life. Thus Satan calls for a Mistrial, alleging that God rigged the Evidence, and instead really proves Satan right: See, Elohim, He only won because you made Him superior, and because you used 'enticements' to Israel to believe. That's just what I've been contending, all along! You made creation TOO LOW, and that's why we sin. So it's YOUR FAULT. Aha. Now you know why Matt16:18 and the inauguration of Church, for another reason besides Israel's rejection.
So here we are Church, all the flash gone! with no rituals, no visible manifestations, no cookie-cutter rules, and an NT which is ABSTRACT in spiritual life construction. We must make rules out of principles. Humans don't do that very well; our eyes glaze over even basic math and dates. We need stuff to DO, a track to run our bodies on, paint-by-numbers. If you ask us to define ourselves, we pick irrelevant body stuff such as our names, birth, parentage, gender, nationality, occupation, behaviors, looks -- but not soul characteristics. So "abstract" is not something we understand. But Christ won by His Thinking, Paying for Sins. So doo-doo's aren't our spiritual life, either -- we have the exact same setup as Him. Thinking. Abstract. Toward Father. 24/7. It should be impossible, since we are of inferior nature -- human, not God-and-human, and sinners, to boot. Saved, but with sin nature and messed-up souls in a world which is spiritually dead. Talk about a rigged deck! Everything is rigged AGAINST us.
So here we are, in this stadium called Planet Earth, each of us choosing (or not) to get this Impossible life: "what think ye of Christ?" If we want Relationship with God, we believe in Him; if we want an Intimate Relationship with God, we learn His Word all our lives, in God's System (i.e., 1Jn1:9 breathed and learning Bible under your God-appointed pastor). Else, we might marry Him (initial faith in Christ), but -- well, we just want the status (being in Heaven forever), not really the Person. So, that's what we'll get: fabulous status, retarded relationship, Matt7:1-2. Those having voted for Intimacy all their lives will get to Pleroma, and will rule the rest of us who didn't make and stick with, that election. Intimacy is voluntary.
The REAL building of the Body Corporate is largely something only God sees. God knows how the eternal state needs to be, for His Son. That's one big reason the Rapture is unpredictable, we are all in a state of spiritual flux. Those who died before us had certain characteristics, individually and corporately, which of course we don't know. The Body of Christ is an aggregate, composed of those still alive and those dead, those yet-to-be-born. So really, your own Bridal Diamond Doctrine Buck value is established wholly by your own personal spiritual growth, not by how you interrelate to other believers down here. Even were you isolated your entire life, part of your value is related to all those other believers in eternity. God knows how you need to develop for that value to fit exactly right. So again, it's what He does to you, not what you or other believers do to each other, that constitutes TRUE AND ETERNAL "Christian fellowship".
Only about 10% of the NT is about stuff you do with the body, and the material is usually placed at the end of the letter, expressed in a peremptory fashion, axiomatic. But 90% is on how you should think, what you should know, with pretty much every Greek verb for THINKING that existed in that language. Yeah, because God HEARS us 24/7. So with Whom should our 'fellowship', be? And if you're busy worrying about what God hears, won't your behavior improve? So you don't even have to worry about relationships with people. GOD FIRST, main theme in 1Jn. And if it is God-First, then you have to spend time alone with Him. Away from people: just like Christ, Paul, Moses, David, Abraham. If you don't seem to have that time now, ASK GOD for it. I am proof that He grants it, and there are hundreds just like me who asked Him for the same thing: just cruise the internet, see how many Bible-fixated websites there are by mere individuals, alone, puzzling out the Word. It's not wrong to be isolated. It's not wrong to want to spend what the world considers an "unhealthy" amount of time, to study the Word. There is a problem of going too far with it, as DDNA2.htm explains. But isolation itself is an important phase of the spiritual life.
No wonder the Rapture hasn't happened until yet. If ecumenism was as holy as it claims, if all that Sunday potluck good-deedy nonsense was as good as claimed, the Rapture would have happened before 200AD. Revelation 17, baby. Keeping us babies, not growing the Body, delaying the Wedding. Satan must be laughing his head off. Pharisees are clearly good-deeders in the Gospels, you can see it even in translation. Yet we Christians don't notice that, what with all our many Passion plays and Christmas pageants? Nope. We childishly define the spiritual life as people being nice to people. I just got an email of some gardener guy who got beat up over and over and one of his tormentors was so impressed that the old man didn't fight back, the tormenter became a "pillar" of the community. "This is the true Gospel", the letter said. Really? You believe ONLY that, and you go to hell! Christ paid for us, not good works: John 3:16, Romans 4:1ff, Eph2:8-9. See, we Body are truly destructive to each other, spreading lies and calling ourselves holy. It's spitting on the Cross, just as the writer of Hebrews says, in Heb6:1-8. Frankly these days, it's better to avoid believers altogether, the world is so full of their apostacy. You can't be a hermit, but you can limit social contact and buying into their garbage. Quietly.
Clearly, then, TRUE Christian fellowship is that each of us is in Fellowship with GOD, never mind people. The people fellowship is adjunctive, optional. 1Jn is all about that fact, the Greek sarcasm sometimes so pointed and finely-honed, you have to stop reading. It's pretty bad when John has to warn someone not to even GREET those who are apostate, 2Jn9-10. James and Galatians too, for that matter. If you grow up, then in eternity all these Churchinanity people will have a conduit -- you -- for fellowship with God they had rejected, while down here. Whew. THAT's building up the Body.
It takes a long time to learn about the hidden trap of so-called "Christian fellowship". When you are a child, you're taught principles in terms of stuff you do with your body. So you think that's what "good" means, your little gold stars and your washings and making the bed, taking out the trash, which Mommy and Daddy praise. But they do that, because you are a child, and don't yet know the meaning behind the motions. The goal is to GROW OUT of that childish association, eventually. Many humans don't. More believers don't. After some point, Word Eating is supposed to grow you out of that. But if you keep eating it with childish eyes, and never progress into at least a curiosity to know God better for HIMSELF, well.. you'll just keep on seeking those little gold stars.
Worse, Scripture goes hidden when people stop wanting it. Just because we've got the technology now, doesn't mean this can't happen again. Bible was very widely available during the first century, and they had no technology. After that, it quickly vanished. Which means interest in God was generally extremely low between 96AD and 1850 AD. Reformation and other movements (like the Waldensians) show blips of increase in interest, but these blips are of childishly-narrow Biblical scope (i.e., Reformation was about true Gospel (faith-alone), Luther and Calvin), and short-term (going apostate within a decade/generation or two after beginning). When interest in Scripture declines, interest in education declines, especially in the languages of Scripture. So yeah, maybe the technology remains, but who's around to TEACH it? Hence the need for us Christians to be adamantly seeking good teachers. We don't crusade on this. We just do it, ourselves, one at a time. Back in the 1930's, you had to study Bible languages for years, and you took your exams in Latin. For the past generation or so, you don't even need but a year or maybe two of Greek, let alone much Hebrew, to graduate -- and seminary students even complain about that much. That tells you properly-trained teachers, are NOT coming out of seminary. So yeah, the Word in the original-language texts is now in public domain, accessible on any computer. But NO ONE TO TEACH IT means it's just as hidden, as if still buried in crocodiles, within caves. Same thing happened in the 2nd century. We have come full circle.
Even worse, Lev26 plays its negative contract paragraphs when we reject Bible, so major historical crises are in the offing. By now, 6 or 7 generations into the major trend of world history since the Crucifixion, which is the Kidnapping, Freeing, and Now Worldwide Availability Of The Original-Language Texts of Bible (2-3 generations into the ease of use of those texts, see MirrorNOW.htm), our patent disinterest in Word, means a future negative history of extreme magnitude. Which negativity, can only be offset by us Learning Him -- again, demonstrated by seeking good pastors. So the magnitude of Our Learning Him in this current period of Church, is vitally necessary and extremely high. Way bigger than in the past. For there has been so much loss in past centuries, there must now be a bigger gain required. Every century which passes from here on out, must have bigger believers still; and if they aren't produced, then Satan wins in the Trial. We know Satan won't win from prophecy, but on a micro level -- what you gain if you stick with God's System, versus what YOU lose -- the results are dramatic. Positive, or negative. Every Believer Counts!
So on behalf of Our Bridal Body yet-to-be-born, it behooves us to individually grow as much as possible; and, not only for that reason, to seek good pastors, plus instill in our children a refreshing idea of God and Bible, not the legalistic Dour-God or Circus-God image of past generations. So in terms of how we relate to other Christians, probably the most useful thing we could do is TALK BIBLE. Brainstorm the doctrines with each other, find out who the good pastors are and pass on that information, encourage them and each other who are under them, think over what we are learning under our pastors. That will encourage thinking in ourselves -- ideally, without us descending into my-pastor-or-denomination-is-better-than-yours. For we all can learn from each other, as all of us are Crown Princes, whatever our gender or societal status.
The only other visible thing we should do, is STAY OUT OF POLITICS. That's Revelation 17. God will curse us bigtime for our politicking, urging our home nations to do something we consider 'moral'. We don't need Caesar, we need Prayer. We're the only people on the planet who have the right of prayer. We just ask God for whatever we think is needed. By contrast, the prolife movement is a blot on Christianity. It isn't functioning in the Right Jurisdiction, so none of its proponents are growing much spiritually, if at all. If you believe abortion is wrong, Ask God YOUR King -- not Caesar, who is one of Satan's subkings. Satan rules this world; any cause you get into will only be a vote for Satan, in the end. Why else do you think, the worldwide weather and other disasters like terrorism, have been so weird the last decade or so? Does no one bother to read Lev26 and Deut28? Guess not. So what do we do about all this? Get in and stay in God's System, First Commandment. Then He will use us to rescue our respective peoples, nations. That's the Precedence of the Cross. Christ went to FATHER for everything, not the Sanhedrin, not Rome -- get the point?
Like all other Diamond Doctrine Buck categories, this Progeny Diamond Doctrine Buck Value will be a basis for determining your inheritance at the Bema. So there are a total of seven whole Faceted 'funds' of Diamond Doctrine Bucks with which you get accredited, simply by voting for the Holy Spirit to do TO you, what He did to Christ, via learning and Living on the Word, 24/7:
It's hard to be categorically specific here, other than with respect to the blessing of Time, which I could document since Adam. But if that blessing is so dramatic and specific, then we know other categories exist as well. There are trends of history which help us see the post-mortem impact. You can look at the increase in Bible interest in nations historically, and see the contemporaneous (same-generation) rise in material prosperity; you can see it continue for about four generations within that same nation, generally each time. Sometimes only one or two generations (which tells you subsequent generations were quite negative) remain prosperous. So we know the CONDUIT blessing categories continue post-mortem, as they can be empirically traced. So if what we can see continue is so vast, then other types and smaller-scale blessings continue as well.
The most important 'progeny' we can 'propagate' is correct and INTERESTED understanding of Bible. Typically, people use the Bible as a mere location for genealogical records, or trot it out at holidays, reading Psalm 23 or some other 'traditional' passage. How sad. Historically our theologies remain quite puerile, even after centuries of having Bible. We still wrestle over GOD101 topics, as if we were all stuck in the Reformation, as if frozen in time. There's no excuse for that: our theologies of God's Nature should be way better than they are. Moreover, there's no excuse for us not understanding that Bible Thinking Alone Toward Father is The Spiritual Life, since Christ Paid For Our Sins To Father by means of His Thinking. So if you're trying to figure out what's the best propagating you can do, learn Bible and pass on your learning to anyone who wants to brainstorm it with you. People talk. Good Bible topics or ideas are refreshing, delightful, light-years more delicious than ALL other information passed on. God never lets His Word return void. But we can refuse to learn it, talk about it. What a loss to us, if we do.
GOD's GAAP Balancing: How MANY Believers with Diamond-Doctrine "bucks", 'ripen' Church? |
As we've seen since Part II, God's Covenants require enough "salt", and "mass". Only a little salt, applied to a whole lotta mass! Consequently, the "mass" leveraged by the "salt", the "multiplier effect", the "economy of force" and "concentration of force" values for even a buck of Divine Thinking, is extreme; for, if the leverage/multiplier is high in natural things (germs, physics, finance), how much higher would it have to be, in supernatural things? Ergo the Seven Macro Effects of God's Balancing Criteria to Make Fit Bride. These seven are the product of the seven micro facets of each Diamond Doctrine Buck accumulating in us, solely by agency of the Holy Spirit (never by means of works). This accumulation -- or lack of it -- accounts for the 'play' of History until the Rapture. So the following seven Macro Effects are always ongoing, 'til then.
Let's revisit the Divine Formula for making the economy (oikonomia) and body-house (oikodome) for Church. At the beginning of this "Balance-in-Numbers Makes Church Ripe for Rapture" section, was a white table like the one below. Now that you've some sense of the Diamond Doctrine Bucks God wants to deposit in you; now that you see each such Buck has Seven Divinely-Rich Facets, let's ponder God's Building Formula again:
God's Macroeconomics: How much aggregated Divine Thinking will result from "X" composition of Church? Again, Divine Thinking is the true currency in life, buying everything: the "every spiritual blessing" clause in Ephesians 1. Real God really knows the real effects of whatever thinking He perpetually hears. When you have a lot of power, the way you happily use it must be keyed to Good Reasons. Else, the power becomes a misery, rather than a pleasure. So Good Reasons Require Good Thinking. God is Total Power, so Total Reasons are alone enough. Total Thinking, therefore, is the criterion. All else is just binged! to go with that Thinking. Because, God can indeed do anything He wants, so what He wants, is the Free Thinking To Be Right. All else is a passive thing, a go-along, even as the body just goes along with whatever the soul, thinks. Ergo:
God's Economic and Political Plan for Church won't impose restrictions, since Christ paid for us ALL, theme of Eph1. So He is free to make what HE wants. What He wants, is that we choose our relationship to Him while down here: that's what we'll get 'up there'. Did we choose a works-based, ritual-based relationship, closer to people but far away from knowing Him intimately? Did we choose emotionality rather than Word, being close to feely stuff we hallucinated, but far away from knowing the Real God? Ok: that's what we'll get in heaven, too (sans the hallucinating, of course)! True Justice. Truly derived. No coercion. YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT FROM GOD by Divine Decree, Matt7:1-2. |
Now let's try to calculate these numbers. First, the overall size of Church is much bigger than believers expect. Ever since Adam, anyone in history who died before being old enough mentally to reject the Gospel went straight to heaven, 2Sam12:23 and all the "blot out" verses. Every human born is registered in the Book of Life. You ONLY get blotted out because you REJECTED the Gospel all your life. Well, lots of babies didn't reject the Gospel, they couldn't even understand it to reject it. Infant mortality is and remains high, throughout history. Then there's the number of people with diseases or malnutrition which so hamper mental function, they couldn't understand the Gospel. Lots of reasons why lots of people died without being able to reject the Gospel. So they went to heaven. [A child comes to recognize the idea of an Omnipresent God sometime. If he consistently rejects that idea he might not go to heaven, and it wouldn't matter if he got the Gospel, for the Gospel is based on God being of a certain character which is already rejected. Only God has all the facts. I know I was aware of God in this manner when I was maybe four or five years old, as were most of my generation. So it can happen that young.]
That means heaven's human population is in the tens of billions. Since from any ONE generation Church can complete, its size is a dynamic: on earth now, there are mainly three generations at about two billion each. (More about that valuation follows later in this section.) Conversely, how many too-young died since the Crucifixion? That number alone easily exceeds two billion. So we know that while any one generation CAN complete Church, a much larger "Body" exists.
So what's not yet enough, is the number of RULERS. So what we've not done since 30AD, is grow up spiritually. Hence Christianity's had a Macro Flunk Effect, our failing grade mentioned above. We piously claim thousands of spiritual giants among us from past and present in far larger proportions than needed to complete Church. So they aren't spiritual giants, after all. Numbers can't lie, they don't have political agendas, and the meaning of the numbers is clear: we are STILL here, so we've a very sorry report card, even among those whom we consider 'spiritual'. They are not. We should thus revisit our notions of what constitutes spirituality, since obviously our notions are NOT God's. You'll see just how stridently the math proves this, a bit later on in this section.
Accordingly, although Church can complete in any generation, there is a backup contingency criterion -- enough BALANCE between the underlying population, and the rulers. Well, duh -- the rulers are always very few. Many body parts, but only one brain. So notice: the ideal is actually the balance between, not the aggregate number itself. A dynamic -- so again, the Rapture cannot be predicted. As a result, we'll see how any ONE of us growing up spiritually, makes an enormous impact on history.. forever. (My pastor has taught this fact for decades, but until writing up this page I didn't understand the numbers. Maybe it will help you too. Scary stuff!)
Think about that. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all base their faiths on this would-be murderer. In Judaism and Islam, you don't get an answer why, yet this Abraham is a good guy for sacrificing? Well, lots of other fathers sacrificed to Molech or Kali (etc.), and they really did kill their sons. What's the difference? Sure doesn't seem like Abraham is any better. See the skewing? The REASON WHY is not addressed. So now, it's evil. So now, both the Jews and the Moslems PRIDE themselves on being descendants or adherents of the allegedly-same faith that Abraham had. Abraham, a would-be murderer. And these who pride themselves on him, don't 'get it' about Abraham, at all.
Christians don't get the point of Abraham either, just as blind as their unbeliever counterparts in Judaism and Islam. But at least the BIBLE explains what we stupid believers cannot: God is Holy, So No Works Can Pay For Sin. So He Took On Humanity, of which Abraham was to be the progenitor. So Abraham needed to see that he himself loved God in the same way as God loved him, by (in the future) saving him at such an unconscionable price. God didn't need it, Abraham and Isaac needed that test. Isaac was between age 20-40 by the way: Hebrew na'ar means a marriageable youth, Gen22:5. So Isaac, like Christ he represents, was WILLING. That's why it's NOT evil, Rom5:8. So again, only the Bible tells you the full story. So Misreading or Masking Bible is Satan&Co.'s Number One Priority. Once you know Isaac was willing and Abraham was willing, there is no way you can mistake the spiritual life for works; no way you can miss the meaning of Christ. So, of course you don't know Isaac's age in Christendom so you have all those dippy cartoons and documentaries depicting him as a child being sacrificed -- all because no one cares to look up the Hebrew, lol. So both Abraham and God look like loonies.
For the sacrifice, is about LOVE. Unpriced Love. We humans just can't take that message, unless we sugar it up with self-praise, oh what a martyr I am. Abraham wasn't thinking like that. God doesn't think like that. True love doesn't need to praise itself over what it pays. Only hatred obsesses over what it pays, as we saw in the Fifth Facet. True love belittles what it pays. Hatred magnifies what it pays. True Love is grateful for the smallest thing. Hatred is never grateful, always concludes self cheated. God is praising Abraham, but Abraham isn't praising himself; God gives him this 'sacrifice' to prove to Abraham that he really loves God. To Isaac, too. Because, True Love always belittles itself, always concluding it doesn't love enough. Hatred, by contrast, always overvalues what it 'gives'. See, we really don't get it about Abraham, be we Jews, Moslems, or Christians: we're just like Ananias and Sapphira, in Acts 5. Proof positive: when something goes wrong in the life, people complain Why did God let this happen, obviously concluding that it is unjust, given how 'good' they are. That's a hatred motive. Tit-for-tat is always based on hatred.
Bear in mind as you read what follows, that Ephesians 1 says EACH of us has a crown, so it is ours to LOSE (see also the "lose your crown" verse somewhere in Rev). My pastor harped on that fact for seven years of daily Bible classes when exegeting Ephesians verse-by-verse. He didn't want us to forget it, constantly reminding us that there is an "eternal memorial to lost opportunity" per person which each one losing his 'crown' can visit in heaven, because the benefits are "escrowed". A king need not have a kingdom to be a King. Christ had no Kingdom at His Resurrection. So had we all become kings, we'd have the standards, wealth, and enjoyment of a king, without the BURDEN of people to rule. So the fact that there are people to rule in eternity means most people rejected the spiritual life, and forfeited their crowns. Thus the intended wealth had to be re-routed, the Divine Benefit Plan idea broached in Part IVa (elaborated on in Part IVc), which is taken from both my pastor's exegesis of Ephesians, and directly from the wa-et-atsumim ("great ones") clause in Isa53:12. (See the JPS Tanach for the first clause, and Webster's Bible for the second; all English Bibles blasphemously mistranslate that verse, making it look like Christ only gets a part of the total, though the Hebrew is unmistakeable that He gets it ALL, and HE does the re-apportioning, laken ahalleq LO [to Him!] b'rabbim, w'-et atsumim [to the great ones, i.e., Pleroma] YEhalleq [HE assigns] shalal [the people-booty and other spoil].) Thus more training is needed to be a king, because frankly, it's a royal pain to rule people, even if they are perfect. Ruling is above all, PARENTAL: and you'll gladly kill yourself doing it, especially if the ruled are perfect. Love would drive you. Much more true, in the eternal state.
So, it becomes a race against time: will enough Pleroma be developed? And, what does this enough-Pleroma-in-any-generation criterion tell us, about RATIOS to achieve perfection-in-number? Bible and history help us here. We have some ratios to use as guidelines. None of them will be exactly correct, but they will help us get a sense of proportion. A sampling of ratios follows, with a hypothetical conclusion. You might prefer to develop your own ratios from other Bible data, etc.
The appropriate ratioing depends on how you define the scope of "Pleroma": would it just be top-tier rulers, the kings? That seems most Biblical, given verses like 2Tim4:7-8, Rev1:6, 5:10, 1Cor4:8 (sarcasm); before Church, you have the Genesis 5 roster, David, Moses -- very few people. But wouldn't it make sense also to define "Pleroma" as a designation for an entire ruling CLASS, analogous to a whole governing body? My pastor has taken both positions, from what I can tell. For example, ever since the 1960's, my pastor has speculated that the total number of Church equals the total number of demons, based (inter alia) on 2Cor2:14, since at the end of a triumph there is a one-on-one casting into the Mamertine dungeon. But he also wondered if the total number of Pleroma ends up equalling that number (in the 1997 et seq lessons of 92 Spiritual Dynamics, passim when the topic came up). In the latter assumption, "Pleroma" would have a wider meaning, not just top-tier rulers. Or, many more smaller kingdoms in a hierarchical federation. For there have to be, billions of demons. We know they organize themselves not only by task, but by nation-state in the world (i.e., Gabriel's comment in Daniel 10 on how he was detained). So there are logistical issues, and the deployment on both sides is sometimes too thin. Since the elect angels outnumber the demons 2:1, the demons have to number in the billions. Then again, a good many of them are incarcerated in Tartarus and the Abyss. (Satan is not confined to the earth, as some suppose. That happens mid-Trib, see Rev9 and 12.) So obviously many of the elect angels are on standby, or are doing other things, lest Satan contend that he's outnumbered. Therefore you also know that God gives angels a lot of initiative and executive roles as free agents -- just as He does, us. Freedom is God's Middle Name, so to speak.
That God balances to rejecting populations seems indicated by Deut 32:8, Hosea 1:10, Rom 9:27, Rom11:25. We know He cuts out and grafts in, so that doctrine ties in here. So maybe the goal is also to replace the numbers of demons, since obviously when all the angels were initially created, that number and balance was perfect. So the idea of replacement balancing makes sense. Exactly how it ought to work, well.. that's a guess, at our end. But a certitude, at God's End.
So for our purposes here, we'll use the following ratios to derive a Low-High: Low, the number of TOP-TIER KINGS needed; and High, the number needed for a RULING CLASS. So the valuation at the end of this subsection will hypothecate a Low-High representing KINGS (Low), and RULING CLASS (High). However you hypothecate the value, the number will be unbelievably small: that's the point of this exercise.
Concerning the Exodus population, the "six million" is a scholarly consensus you'll see used a lot by pastors and on the internet; my pastor used it, too. Bible doesn't say the size exactly, but you can estimate that the Exodus generation which left with Moses in 1440BC, numbered approximately six million (based on two million adults). That's a ratio of one-sixmillionth! By the time Israel entered the Land, only three of the initial adult males who'd left Egypt remained alive: Moses, Caleb, Joshua. Moses died just before they entered the Land in 1400BC, so then only two people, so 1:3 million became the ratio. Ergo to use the US government bureaucracy fraction of .02% greatly overstates the ratio.
So we see that the "multiplier effect" during a period of extreme negative volition, often boils down to just one person being 'enough' to justify the continuance of History. How much more true, Now that the Lord is Seated? With a Bride in training? That's the point to focus on, here: the Greatly Increased "Multiplier Effect" Of Blessing-By-Association, Due To His Session, through His Bride.
This Deliverer ratio is really bigger than it looks. For Israel was to be a whole NATION justifying the continuation of the world. So you'd really have 1:1 Billion, just like the Construction Ratio, since Moses was one, and you can probably presume 1 billion as the world's population (never mind its short lifespan due to infant and other early mortality). Or, you can take six million to one billion, .006, which is .6%, but that seems high.
Most believers don't execute the spiritual life, historically. Only a very small percentage do that. So, out of let's say only a million believers in Nero's (Paul's) day, wouldn't the requisite number of top-tier believers be very few: using the US Bureaucracy Ratio, there would be only 179 top-tier, per million? And if that small a number had been reached in Paul's day, the "many" would have been raptured up! But were not! Yikes, that doesn't speak well of the history of Christianity! For the Bureaucracy Ratio is the largest of the list here. So if the ratio is truly more divergent (lower) -- and the requisite proportion SHOULD be even LESS than needed for Moses to carry Israel, due to the Session -- then how vast a loss! Progeny, but no or very very few, Pleroma progenitors!
While extra-Biblical records and some references in the Bible seem to indicate that faith in Christ spread like wildfire in the generation after Our Lord's Crucifixion, as we saw in Part IVa (from the huge reaction worldwide to Christianity, reflected in literature and religion-changes globally) in the first century AD; while it's obvious, from the strategic, geographic position of Israel that such a fast-Gospel-spread would be logistically probable; still, we can tell by the same sources that most believers were truly weird. Rev. 1-3, 1 and 2 Thess., 1 and 2 Cor., and especially the Book of Acts, all reveal really bizarre questions and concerns among these folks. Well, every book in the NT does.
Also, in extra-Biblical sources, much of Christendom's goofy history is all too apparent. The many fake Gospels with their slapstick themes, goofy mysticism and lurid claims; the widespread aping of the wacko Christians seeped into non-Christian faiths, including those funky stories' themes. Christians today still act just as goofy, and if you want to know what "crazy" means, just talk to them. Then you have historians like Gibbon, Mommsen, Cary to give you a sense of how nutso we Christians were, right up through the 19th century and beyond. Earlier historians like Josephus, Suetonius and others of the time explain how Christians ("The Way") often made trouble for Rome. In short, we see that believers largely didn't catch on to the meaning of Scripture's message. So, however big or small the "mass" of (say) Paul's generation, most were pretty much like their Exodus-generation counterparts: wacko. So the "Pleroma" of Paul's day were very few. Which makes a great deal of sense, for look: back in Part II, we noticed that for a long time, the whole world was indirectly dependent on the high faith of ONE person in that world's generation: Noah. Abraham. Moses. David. Christ.
Consider: how many believers in history there have been? How many "rulers" are required to effectively rule the "many", without choking the ruled with oodles of laws? Very Few to complete their spiritual development in 1Jn's Script (Part I); easily enough in any human generation. Just like God says through Paul, at the end of Paul's prayer, in Eph3:21. [When Paul writes the doxology of v.20 and 21, he seems to know that it will be answered, and that's why he writes as he does. Thought just occurred to me while typing, considering the suddenness of the doxology. Maybe I'm wrong; the Holy Spirit will fix me later, if so.]
Think how the numbers need to work, to get a better sense of proportion and.. well, of how apostate we've been. This is Perfect Government, not like the human micromanaged version we always see in our sordid history (Asimov was right, about Trantor). Ok, let's think this out: pretend the total Church population ended up being the size of the United States in the Year 2000, 280 million; then, Church would require between 50-50,000 rulers. "50", you get by using the Moses ratio (1:6 million), which we know must be too low, because we are post-Session. So maybe use a multiplier like in Luke 8, of 30-100.
If we say a generation is 30 years, there have been 67 generations since 0AD, roughly; some portion of the 63-67th generations are on the planet right now in 2007. Just to pick a number: using only the Moses ratio, assuming Church at a per-generation size of 300 million (remember all who die too young are automatically saved): 67*50=3,350.
If we apply Luke 8 the 3,350 would be divided by factors of between 30 and 100. (Parallels: Mark 4, Matt13, the talents parable, precedence is Gen26:12.) Surely the higher spiritual life He legated to us increases the leverage "multiplier effect" value beyond that of Moses. Whether it's really by the scale of the Luke 8 factors I don't know, but since the Lord used those factors, it's reasonable to use them here. So let's play with that:
So let's next think about the number of generations since Adam. According to the Bible, the year 2007 is year 6113 since Adam's fall. GeneYrs.xls is a timeline from Adam through 2007 used to show how God grants time based on believer spiritual growth, but you can use it here to get the 6113 date. That works out to 204 generations, assuming an average of 30 years each. So applying the above assumptions,
We're really missing the boat on the value God intends to make from us, huh. Even if only 60 million, that's the size of FRANCE! It is an issue how big a country is ENJOYABLE to rule, so I tend to favor the 60-million ratio. Too big a country would make rulership too remote? Of course, the kings are stacked in a federation, since Christ is Head. So Paul is maybe ruler over several billion at least, with lesser kings below him.
Okay, what about the time it takes to grow up to Pleroma and finish the course? Does that affect the number of Pleroma? Well, that's impossible to estimate too, though we know Paul got there over something like maybe 38 years (30AD-68AD, my pastor spent some time analyzing that issue in his 1999 classes). The Lord is also atypical (The Unique One), and it took Him 33 years. Of course, the Lord is Way Bigger Pleroma than even Paul; and Paul, is way bigger Pleroma than what would be 'typical'. Still, the 30-year-build-savior number in the OT, might be a guideline. Ok: let's say 30-50 years (it can be any number, now). Well, that doesn't increase the progenitor number, because the Pleroma person would be growing up during a generation's 'time'. Okay, that's enough number crunching to "get the drift" of how the proportions, play.
Now let's factor in the eternal future. The the number of "progenitors" (Pleroma) Father wants
We don't know how long a future that represents.
Therefore, the Pleroma number needed is maybe somewhere between 1000 (Low, KINGS) and 10,000 (High, RULING CLASS) to cover all eternity. That valuation adjusts lastly for a gut sense of the efficiency in the eternal state, evidenced by the Angelic Ratio: at some size the governing body itself is too large, unwieldy. We'd have perfect knowledge then, but it would be truly annoying to have 10,000 beings meeting in a conference; the personalness gets lost? You might come up with some other adjustment. But whatever the value, notice how it must be extremely small, compared to the likely overall population in eternity. That Church hasn't been completed yet, despite the very wide spread of Christianity in history, confirms how we Christians hate God. Which of course, history all too well corroborates. So much for our protestations of how we love Jesus. The numbers prove we don't.
However you craft the ratios, it's obvious that balance between the NUMBERS of these two groups is a perfection criterion. Son wants Father to get the Maximum Amount Of Reflection of Son's thinking in Son's kingdom/economy. That's what we live for. And frankly, in heaven the only Topic of Interest is Him, so no one will care who's superior or inferior (see how the angel censures John in Rev19:10). So obviously, if the top-tier are too many, the bottom tier is too taxed, regulated. Conversely, if the top-tier is too few, the many have no cohesion, and the Royal Thinking Standards' circulation will be too weak. In short, the top needs to be few, so that the many can have more; but not so the many are choked. That has always been the case, even down here on planet Earth; so how much more true, in a perfect life?
So, Church needs certain individuals to be leaders. Aka, archegoi, rulers. Not too many, not too few. Thus all can be happy, free. No chaos; and no tyranny, either. As my pastor says so often, "Freedom without authority, is anarchy; authority without freedom, is tyranny." So a perfect balance between authority and "masses", makes for a perfect society. Especially, in the eternal state. So think of Church as this growing mixture of crops (Biblical metaphor), of which some types are ripening faster than others. When enough ripens to make the whole commercially-viable, it doesn't matter that some are over-ripe, or even unripe (see the parable of the fig tree in Greek and Jeremiah's talk about figs in Jer25 or thereabouts). That's when the Rapture, will happen.
God didn't have to make us this low. God can make us anything. So clearly, whatever we are or become, is designed for the sake of enjoying RELATIONSHIP. When you have all money and power, you don't just sit around. You do stuff. You still like the small activities, the simple things -- in fact, you appreciate them more, the greater the money and power you have. So being God or grunt, you still do something with what you are. God loves all, great and small.
So the eternal state is a BUSY life. So much to enjoy. Work, yes. Work is its own kind of pleasure. Play, yes. Play is its own kind of pleasure. Hierarchy, yes. That's a relating, too: and there, it's really important that all us believers FIT together into enjoyable relationships and compatibilities. Like stones in a building.
Obviously this discomfort doesn't exist in perfection. Yet variety must, for God is Infinite; moreover, absent variety, "perfection" is deadly boring. Thus, one aspect of variety must be the fact that we are all of unequal rank. It's neither fair nor good to force the person who's more interested in dinner than in the organization and function of a polity, to rule. Yet today, inequality is frequently condemned, as if everyone should have the same position, in order to be "happy"; therefore, if "A" has that position but "B" does not, then "B" is supposed to be unhappy due to his lower status.
We saw in Part III that we are Royal Family of God in training to become Fit Bride for Our Royal Lord. That, if we make it to Pleroma, we too shall be royally-ruling. This of course means that most folks won't be ruling: lol, the 'dinner' is more attractive! Yet, think: it's really hard to train for and function in a ruler capacity. We saw that in Part III. So, think: those who didn't opt for that, would they be happy being forced to rule? Unprepared, rulership is an intolerable burden, not enjoyment. For all the power the ruler has, he himself is owned by his title: he has no life of his own. Even the ruler's "goodies" are subject to rules-of-use. So, then: is it really so bad for "B" to be lower? Maybe what constitutes "happiness" is more a question of being fitted to your training and interests, rather than the supposed "status" of your official job!?!
So, in a perfect kingdom, there would be variety from Top to Bottom, and everyone in between, varies. So those who are most like another group, would tend to have the most rapport with that group. Those who are very different in their societal "level" wouldn't be comfortable within that group. What the heck is wrong with that? Nothing: so long as people have the capacity to enjoy the differences. Enjoyment, then, is "close" where people have similarities, and "distant", where dissimilarities. See? It's not a question of status, but of commonality. In a word, Rapport.
Those suddenly 'below' you of course become isolated from you as well. But you can count on this: they talk about you a lot, now. They think of you with your money and fantasize some wonderful life you have. They are enjoying something vicariously -- your having the money. If you didn't get it, they couldn't have this kind of enjoyment, for they obviously can't handle the money themselves (if they could, the relationship with you would not be changed due to the sudden money). By the same token, you yourself have more relationships than you'd have absent the money, and through those intermediaries you can actually come to enjoy having the money (instead of being isolated and burdened by it).
Second Illustration: Moses talked with the Lord directly, but the Exodus generation repeatedly reacted with fear every time His Presence was anywhere near them. In a word, the Lord was too "big" for them to know directly. They needed a mediative contact, Moses. Moses, because he had so much Bible Doctrine (as it was then revealed) deposited in his soul, was able to be closer to the Lord than they were able to be. Bible Doctrine gave Moses something in common with the Lord: the Lord's Own Thinking. So, it wasn't a fear or a burden to him, but a joy. Yet, because Moses had the contact, the people could get more out of their distant relationship to the Lord than they could have had if there were no Moses. If you extrapolate the foregoing, you can see how a variety of folks all up and down a spectrum of differences makes for a harmonious relationship amongst all differences: the folks in-between, as it were, have more-and-more in common with the other groups, yet also a commonality with "us".
So, we can't know exactly how large the total kingdom will be, to have the perfect VARIETY in it; so, we don't know how many "top-tier" and "masses" there need to be for the balance-in-numbers-perfection to occur. Thus, the Rapture can't have a warning event preceding its own occurrence. For, its only "trigger" is both volitional and invisible: the completion of the Bride. Your volition is YOURS. Your decisions are YOURS. Only GOD, moreover, can know what "number" constitutes completion: but His Knowing that doesn't make it happen. Instead, our volition makes it happen: believers, not God, by Divine Decree: how will we "finish the course"? 'Same question as applied to His Incarnation. For, He's our "Author" (Heb12:2), Greek word "Archegos", and we are in training to become "Archegoi".
Let's now interweave Father's Criterion 3B, The Lord's Bridegroomship, into 3F, man's voting for God. For a Bride must CONSENT to be Married. |
Christ is God-Man, and He too is Sovereign. Having been Seated, as Hebrew 1 notes, Everything now goes through the Son. Through His Human Sovereignty, as well as His Divine Sovereignty. The Church is designed by the Father (per Eph1) as a Gift to the Son: a Bride, to the Bridegroom, and the Bridegroom is a Bridegroom because He, in His Humanity, defeated Satan (cf Heb2, 1Jn3, etc). Therefore, the Rapture is a Decree, a Ruling the Son wants, first. However, what are the terms of that Ruling? Well, this Son wants a FIT Bride, and the Father wants to make that Bride Fit for His Son, which is why we get the inheritance in Him that we do (John 8,14,17, Eph1,3,Heb7-10,12,1Cor2-4, 2Cor5, Rom6-13, Col1, all "riches" passages, etc).
This Bridegroom became a Bridegroom of His Own Free Will. He freely relied on the Spirit's Power to spiritually-develop and sustain Him -- all the way through the Cross. So, this Bridegroom is wholly-freely-determined. "God's Action", the Power provided by the Holy Spirit, was only provided to the extent the Son's Human Free Will wanted it. 'Which the Son Totally Wanted. 'Even through the Cross.
This God's-Free-Action, matched to Son's-Humanity-Free-Reception sets the Precedence and the terms of the marriage contract with the Bride.
For, the Bride is to have the same spiritual life as Her Bridegroom, in order to become FIT for Him. By HER Choice. As we saw in Part IVa, precedence of the prior Bridal contract which got annulled, ported over. Further, precedence from the Groom Completing His Contract, also ported over. So it can only be a volitional criterion, for Church's 'Rapture'. Because it was ONLY a volitional criterion, for the prior Intended Couple, one of whom refused, and One of Whom Accepted.
TERMS OF OUR MARRIAGE: So, recapping from Part IVa: since HIS Spiritual Life is the Precedence for ours, which Part III explained, and since HIS Spiritual Life was fully a matter of His Freely choosing to receive, so also, the Bride's "fitness" is wholly a matter of the extent to which the Bride Herself likewise chooses to receive the same provision. And since Bride here is who-knows-how-many people, we none of us know when we are 'enough': enough due to numbers, balance, variety, etc. It's a dynamic equation, which no human can even write down, much less, calculate.
Sure, God could have predicted what date: but He doesn't, because God Follows Precedence, because He is Righteous. And He never predicted whether Israel would accept Messiah when He came; nor did He predict how Messiah would use His Spiritual life under the Spirit. All He did predict, was that Messiah would be successful. Satan took deep notice of this non-prediction, and worked long and hard to make Israel antagonistic to Messiah, by the time He arrived.
A Bride marries of her own free will. A Bride becomes 'fit' of her own free will. The fact that many others do things to and for her to make her fit doesn't mean that she is denuded of her free will in the matter. In fact, whatever others do to and for her has no effect if her free will is negative. So, it should be easy to understand that all the Father and the Spirit do to us, won't force us to become FIT Bride. We agree, or we do not. If "no", the provision for us doesn't 'attach', but remains in escrow. Or, using the Divine Benefit Plan analogy from Part IVa (which we'll revisit in Part IVc) -- the provision refused, like the talent of the stingy servant, forfeits to those who will become the "great ones" (Isa53:12), and will instead distantly benefit those who had refused.
CAVEAT EMPTOR: Those who believe in Him but don't grow up in God's Script (1Jn's Script in Part I) have, in effect, said they are Only Willing To Have The Form Of Marriage, Without The RAPPORT of Marriage. For, they did not learn the Thinking of their Bridegroom. So, then: they will be in Heaven, for that is the extent of their choice. So, then: they will be officially married to Him but will not have much contact with Him. 'Because, they didn't want to get that contact, because they didn't want to learn God's Script (i.e., "1 John Outlines God's Script" in Part I). The effects of that Script are in escrow for them, as well as the structure and mechanics of the Script's usage itself, per Eph1's "every spiritual blessing" -- since eternity past. So, we see that God's Action was made First. So, all this provision was done to and for the Bride before the Bride even existed. But, during the life down here, part of the Bride has said "no" to all of that provision. So, that part of the Bride -- which is most of the Bride, the "mass" -- will be distant from Him. Forever.
So when the Bride votes negative, the Bridal Contract is being rejected or breached. Rejection has an endpoint. As we saw in Part II, when mankind no longer responds to the spiritual life provided, the people have become "saltless", overtaxed by me-be-good governing the soul. To correct the lack of Divine Thinking production, the covenantal epoch/dispensation ends. Question is, what justifies a replacement? 'The Divine Thinking of PAST "salt" people, just as we saw in Part II. So, covenantal provisions are revised for the new group, even though they are all negative.
Each of these covenantal changes has been foretold; each change is marked by a warning "sign". Hence, there is no more prophecy to 'tell'. It's all in writing, now. Thus you can match up what God wrote with what happens, to know it's God Who's Talking, not hallucination, not happenstance. Every "sign" is always an Orchestrated Thing, so you know it's not a natural phenomenon you can explain away (no such thing, really); so you know it's not a hallucination or wizardry (since Satan&Co. can do lots of supernatural and hallucinogenic stuff). In short, God Makes Plain He is Behind a thing, by matching the Word to the wonders. If you don't know the Word, you will screw up the wonders, and .. have a very tragic life.
The "Church" was an unknown, and is not at all prophesied. Because, the LORD had to choose to bear sins for Church. Which He shows He would, in Matt16:18, and John 17. Remember: There Would Be No Church If Israel Hadn't Rejected Messiah. So there was no need to prophesy directly about it, nor would it have been fair to Christ, since HE would have to agree or disagree, to pay for sins of those yet-to-be-born. Which, again, He does, in Matt16:18, John 17 (see Eph5 commentary on that). So note the Voting Precedent: Christ had to VOTE for a Church, for there to BE a Church. If nothing else "clicks" in your head as to why the Rapture is unpredictable, that fact of Him needing to VOTE for it, should turn on a lightbulb.
Note how the prophetic "sign" always indicates changeover because apostacy necessitates it. Ergo the advance warning-event(s). Principle? 'Warning Grace Before Judgement.
Similarly, Leviticus 26, Deut 28, Rev1-3 (and like passages) tell folks how to spot when a nation is about to end due to apostacy. Warnings like these were also forecast by prophets (i.e., to the apostate nations in the Land, 40 years before Israel would enter it). So, normally, God warns of cataclysms in advance. So, the recurring historical trends of nations declining spiritually are likewise preceded by visible, predicted-pattern events. Even today. This fact is so well-known, even Shakespeare made liberal use of it in his plays. Every religion, even, Christian or no, has some like doctrine. Perhaps the most blatant recent example in history is what happened to Germany in the 20th century. It had been very strong for Bible Doctrine; got split, after WWII (akin to the splitting between Israel and Judah, which we know from Scripture was Lev26 and Deut 28's playout). Notice how a client nation drags on for awhile, before going completely out (Israel went completely out in 70AD). SPQR's client-nation history basically ended the same way, splitting and then lamely dragging on for some centuries, until 'moved' to Charlesmagne's reign. Then his kingdom split up into basically what we now call Germany and France (well, and Italy as well). So the death of a nation with enough believers in it, is slow, painful. And all written out so you can see God's running it (i.e, Acts 17:26), blow by blow, in the Book.
So the Rapture's date cannot be predicted; nor did the Lord prophesy it in Matt16:18 for the sake of Church, but FIRST on behalf of Israel. For Church is wholly founded upon an ABROGATION of a prior contract between Israel And Messiah -- a contract based solely on Voting, as we saw in Part IVa. Because He had to invent it DURING and FOR Israel's 'time', the Rapture itself is a contingent prophecy, not a fixed one. Cut out, graft in.
Oh Yeah? Where did we in Christendom ever get the goofy idea that there was supposed to be a "preceding" sign? No other sign prophecy has a sign preceding it, except the sign of Jonah (spoken/written warning by a preceding prophet). Comb the Bible all you like, take decades even, with every scientific instrument and Bible Code scholar known to man, and you won't find even one instance where the sign itself, was preceded by a sign to advertise it. For, ALL signs in the OT were "imminent" (theological term)! The very significance of "sign", is ex post facto, not ante! You know, the Dome Of The Rock And Wailing Wall Are Very Blatant Signs, And Are Ex-Post-Facto of Dan9:26c, Matt24; sorta burlesqueing the future Rev11:1, but it's Satan who made that joke (by putting up the Dome). So how much more SIGN do you want, to tell you how to read Bible, huh??? Um, how meshugge do you have to be, to go combing through Revelation dissecting what will happen then, and meanwhile ignore these Two Biggest Witnesses of Stone; and next, predict when the Rapture will arrive, and that based on literal events in Revelation, which are all POST-Rapture?! Sheesh: it's the Rapture which KICKS OFF those events! Yeah, we'll read anything but the Smart Word Already Provably Fulfilled in the Most Holy Place!
Thus any warning sign, including the Rapture, is always predicated on Justice 'replying' to the cumulative effects of volition. It is a Ruling, a Judgement, a Decree Response By God. Directly. His Volition, His Sovereignty, chooses the reply to make. So let's review how Bible uses signs: the sign itself, is always a result of something, never a cause of something. Again, God's Action in Reply, to man's votes. Sure, the sign itself becomes a cause, and sometimes once the sign begins, there is a fixed time period it "announces", as we'll see below. And what does the "sign" announce? JUDGEMENT. In every case, whether the sign kicks off a fixed-time period or no, Judgement is God's Own Justice Reply, not some action undertaken for no reason. God is Just. In other words, any "sign" in the OT is the "sign" of something beginning based on PAST cumulative results. Moreover, the initial "Warning" was always a Statement, not an event, and the occurrence of the "sign" warned meant that the Previous Warning Was Not Heeded. Duh. Can God make it more obvious? Why then do so many obsess over "signs"? No wonder the Lord said, "an evil generation seeks a sign" (e.g., Matt 12:39). Furthermore, "signs" are chained, kinda like a "child process" in computer programming. So the Divine Broadcasting System exhibits a very predictable pattern: Stated-Warning (this is how we learn what a "sign" is, even); then, the KICKOFF sign; then, any RESULTANT ("child process", so to speak) "sign(s)". Even so, the occurrence of the events within that pattern are not necessarily tied to fixed-dates, just as a "child process" in computer programming sometimes starts or ends based on user input, rather than on an elapse of time. The chaining is exhibited in many ways in Scripture, depending upon the type and nature of Judgement which needs to be executed. God's Judgement Replies thus come in two 'flavors': fixed-sentence, and contingent-sentence:
PROPHECY KEY ==> Every Fixed-Sentence Prophecy Is A 'Child' Of A Kick-Off Sign. Also, No Fixed-Sentence Prophecy Depends On Volition. Check it out yourself. Go through the fixed-sentence prophecies in Scripture, and note how these parameters are always true.
In a similar way, but on a macro level, the Leviticus 26 and Deut28 punishments are all judgements contingent on the 'user input' of volition awakening DURING the punishment. So, the "time" period is determined by volitional responses. For, God does not coerce. 2Chron7:14 is a good sample verse to show the Divine Policy here. It currently applies to the US, which is under the "5th" of the "cycles" of Divine Discipline ("cycles" being my pastor's term for the fifth round of the punishments in those passages). So, no definite time period is set; rather, it's Contingent Upon Sufficient Change-Of-Mind By The Believers In The Polity Being Judged. ANOTHER PROPHECY KEY ==> Every Contingent Prophecy Is A Kickoff Sign, And Every Contingent Prophecy Is A Result Of Prior Accumulated Volitional Votes. So, Every Contingent Prophecy Is 'Imminent': Its Occurrence Date Cannot Be Predicted. Again, go through Scripture, check it out for yourself. So, to properly understand 'where' the Rapture belongs, we only need to see whether the Rapture is a 'child' or a 'kickoff' prophecy. If the former, then we have to look for a kickoff sign (the 'child' is always dateable). If the latter, then the prophecy is 'imminent': the date is unpredictable ('kickoffs' cause 'children', but not vice versa). Obviously, the Rapture is a kickoff prophecy, and therefore date-unpredictable: for, as we saw at the beginning of this subsection, the Rapture is Contingent On Aggregate Volitional Responses to the "Warning" of Getting-With 1Jn's Script. So, it, too, falls under this Flavor "2", not -- repeat, not -- under Flavor "1". Those who inanely try to fit the Rapture under Flavor "1" will thus become obsessed with dating the un-dateable, and will thus miss out on growing up in Christ, because they fruitlessly spent their time trying to date the Rapture, rather than trying to LEARN THEIR LORD. Thus, such folks will only have the "mass" Royal inheritance: distance from Him for all eternity. So, Matt 7:2! Caveat Emptor: Be Warned. So, frankly, the pious eye-roll quotes that "we are in the end times, brother", and bizarre trying-to-date-the-Rapture craze, long the bane of Christianity, are completely at a dissonance with every other kickoff-sign's function. For that "Sign" Begins A Thing, can't ever be predicted, since it's Invisible Negative Volition Which Always Gets The "Sign" as a Judgement Reply from God. 'Simple as that. So the Rapture, being as it too is a kickoff "sign", can only be "imminent": we know that at some point, the world-wide trends become so apostate, man becomes "ripe" for "the Rapture" to occur. Further, we know that the Rapture itself falls into Flavor "2" of the Divine Justice System, given the terms of our marriage contract with the Lord (discussed above -- Bride's free will is determinative, just as the Groom's Free Will was determinative). So, in any period of Church history, the viewed declines are inconclusive, because the spiritual life might be flourishing, and God is just "cleaning house". So one can't do any date-setting for the Rapture -- at all. One final and very happy comment on the interplay between 'kickoff' and 'child': nearly every promise in the Bible is in the contingent category, or the 'child' of one. Like, the Lord promises that "I give to [us] eternal life: no one shall pluck [us] out of [His] Hands". That is a 'child' promise of an already-fulfilled contingency, the Cross. See? Not our volition, but His, produced the 'child' of permanent salvation (see also 1Jn5 in this connection). Heh. Another example: He promises that we believers go to heaven when we die (contingent on death), and God Chooses How We Die, And What Date. Still, we don't know that information. So His Volitional Vote makes our date of death, a kickoff! Imminent! But next begins our 'child' promise of living with Him forever and ever. Fixed! Double-Heh. This is all the more meaningful when you know what "sealed to the Day of Redemption" means: that's the Holy Spirit's Guarantee That You Will Go To Heaven ("seal" was a legal guarantee, in the ancient world). A Fixed Guarantee Contingent on..what? Only on what date you die. Not on 'where you're going' in the spiritual life. Triple-heh. |
Now, let's interweave Father's Criteria 3C, The Lord's Precedenting Role in History for Church. |
Since we have this sealed guarantee, since no one can pluck us out of His Hands, since the Trinity Indwell us -- let us not settle for a mess of pottage, like Esau did. Let us remember to Whom we are Betrothed. We are Betrothed to the Nexus of History, The King of Kings, the Word of the Cross, the Word of God, the Word. He, and He alone, truly is history. (Isa 28:16-17, Heb1, John1, Col1:16-18,"Alpha and Omega" verse, etc.) Thank God for that! For, what value is there to breathing at all, if He's not the REASON? So it comes as no surprise that He also controls history (e.g., Acts 17:26, Isa28:16-17).
So, it should come as no surprise that the Father would want a Fit Bride for this Uniquely-Born Son. So, then: it should not be surprising that the Role for this Bride, while she trains down here, is to BE History, even as Her Betrothed already is History (cf Rom9:33, 1Pet2:6 and similar-concept passages). If even earthly kingdom's histories rested wholly on whom the Crown Prince would marry, how much more, the kingdoms of the Eternal State! We are not our own, but His, and His Title rules us. So, then: we have enormous power, and need to wake up to that fact. So, then: we must learn the rules-of-use of our "goodies", Our Extreme Profit In Christ. For, His Kingdoms are His Personal Property. Forever. And therefore, as Bride, ours.
Thus, we don't set dates for the Rapture, we instead PREPARE for it, and our preparation is likewise a volitional contingency. For, as will be shown in Part IVc's "Rap the Rapture" section, we do know from Scripture that each of the New Testament writers themselves expected the Rapture to occur at any time during their own lifetimes. What was the criterion? Had enough believers in Paul's day reached their full Royal potential -- "the fullness of Christ" (Greek word "Pleroma") -- the Rapture could have occurred before Paul even died; same, for the time of John; same, for any generation. That's another reason why the Rapture is unpredictable, since we don't know who of us will grow, and who will fail.
So, then:
If a believer-generation is apostate, immediate history is adversely affected ('explained in Parts IVc and d). That increase in "progeny" also requires an increase in "progenitors", for balance, so history must (badly!) continue. Conversely, if a believer-generation is unusually positive, immediate history is prosperously affected ('also in Part IVc and d), and the "progenitor" group increases. That increase in "progenitors" also requires a decrease in "masses", for the requisite balance to occur. Of course, such a decrease means that the quality of life improves even more (Malthusian people-nomics). See how important our lives are? This open-endedness is unique. |
Christ's "ending" at the Cross was foretold by Isaiah 53:5-6, for example. ("[C]rushed" there is really Hebrew for a burden-too-heavy-to-carry! A perfect analogy to Stone-too-heavy-to-lift!) The length and features of His Royally-Invisible Spiritual Life, however, were not foretold. Why? 'Because He Himself was to INVENT the Spiritual Life, while He was here. ("Archegos" means Author, Originator, Inventor, Pioneer, Hero -- cf Heb12:2.) See, He was Free To Choose Whether He'd Even Go To The Cross. He was Free To Use The Doctrine Or Not -- or, use His Own Deity. Thus the features, and the length of time it took Him to advance, were options via the Spirit which He Himself Chose While He was Living Here. His Humanity INVENTED the Spiritual Life of the Cross ("The Word of the Cross"), as well its character and length, because His Job Was To "Redeem..Time": to Pay For The Rest Of Time. See Mirroring.htm for the full story. It's utterly provable from Bible, math, history. Shocking stuff. His Precedence, Our Corollary: Thus, He's our Precedence, our "hupogrammos", our Copybook, as noted in Parts I and III. So: the length of our individual spiritual lives are also not forecast by God, for we inherit Christ's same Rulership Spiritual Life: 'difference is, He's Our Spiritual Life. The Pattern He Invented is Now the Standard for us; however, we are to make the rules OUT of His Pattern, the Doctrine in our own souls, just as He did. So, the Church Is Thus To "Redeem The Time": buy the time for the rest of the human race, because we ARE the Bride, the Evidence of Him in the world (1Jn4:12-17). |
Remember how in Part II, it took only three Evidence Test 'passers' to justify the Royal Bloodline? Only one, to justify the continuation of the nation for 40 years, then only three, to justify the growth of the remnant? Then only a small remnant? What's the proportion there? Well, Moses was "one" compared to about 6 million people (including children). One to six million! Ok, then: what about the 'proportion' The CHRIST justifies? That was One Person For All Humans. What's that proportion? "Infinity", so to speak. So, don't you think the leverage we Church have, given our Precedence, is potentially rather more than 1:6,000,000? Since Christ's leveraged Blessing-By-Association is Uncountable? Okay, let's really be conservative. Even if we just use economics concepts, the "capital", "leverage" and "multiplier" effects are gigantic. What "multiplier effect" shall we assume results from the "capital leverage" of just one believer who's grown up in Christ? Let's pick a low number, say "10", even though the Biblical multiplier seems to be something more like "100" (cf the parable beginning at Luke 8). So: each of us is potentially the on-earth conduit of blessing or cursing to 60 million people, roughly the size of France? It's too awesome a thought to bear, a stone too heavy to lift! Thank God for 1Cor10:13, since "the way of escape" is the same as Our Christ's: Live in the Word! 2Cor12:7-10![NB: L1520, 5/99, 92SD estimated the needed Pleroma for US to avoid Lev26/Deut28 "Five Cycles of Discipline" at between merely 25-50 believers; at "25", his estimate is roughly 50% of Moses' ratio, meaning an estimated multiplier versus Moses for CA Pleroma at between 1-2. Thus the number to remain a client nation is far lower, because the 5th Cycle in the US is currently in-process. Since the client nation is the justification for the continuation of history for the world, the actual multiplier is of course far greater, but impossible to accurately estimate. One would need to know how many client nations there are currently, and population of each, versus how many non-client nations and their respective populations.] Bigger than that: the WORLD kept on living because Israel did. We saw in Part IVa how God grants 490 to 1000 YEARS for the entire planet to go on living, due to some one believer on it; if more than one can be granted, the times improve in quality. But at least one. So also, that one justified the ENTIRE PLANET. So one nation of believers, justifies the entire planet -- Israel's existence justified the planet continue. So it's not really even 60 million, but the nation which has the Pleroma, is used to justify the planet go on breathing. Could this be more intimidating? The smallest thing a king does, is front-page news. The smallest thing you do is front-page news in heaven. Think of it that way, for if you would be close to Christ forever, you're stuck being a public person forever. Every thought you think is heard by FATHER. For, that's your JOB: Royal Priest to Father. That He ordains your breathing justify the world's breathing (or breathing a little easier) is quite secondary, huh. What's bigger, than God? |
Next, Father's Criterion 3D, the Defending Role of Church relative to Israel. |
The most important part of this Criterion Is Whether Church Actually Completes. Part IVa, the origin of Church is to create a bridge back to Israel's time, since she rejected Christ. So an entirely new entity was needed, which He invoked in Matt16:18, and left up to Father to configure, in John 17:20-21. So we defend Israel, as shown in Part IVa, by GROWING UP. Consequently, as we've just seen, human history is wholly determined by how Church goes. Therefore, our role in the Millennium will likewise have that role, but the specifics of its configuration are in process and can't be specified. Part IVa covered how Church is being used to rescue Israel, as an Esther-type, Now. In the Millennium, no matter how we turn out, those who are Pleroma will rule Gentile nations in the Millennium, to implement the promise that Israel will have peace from her enemies, as a Wifely Service to Our Lord. Part V will cover how Church functions (and does not function), in the Millennium.
So, as already explained in Part IVa, the only prophecies during "Church" can be its terminii. And the occurrence of the second of the terminii, Depends On How We Grow, Now. This, because the terminii Bracket Jewish-Age Events:
[Joel 2:28-30, see Acts 2, which interprets it: "last days" in Acts 2, means last days of Israel. Which fact you know, because Peter is speaking to Jews, not Gentiles, so can't mean last days of Church] and
BIGGEST PROPHECY KEY ==> All prophecy is solely related to the Jewish covenants, because all prophecy is about the "Testimony of Jesus" (Rev19:10; this is but one layer of meaning in that verse). The very meaning of the name (in Greek) "Jesus" (Heb:Yeshua, English "Joshua") stresses His Jewish Humanity in Hypostatic Union -- which wasn't predicted AT ALL until the Covenant to Abraham, the progenitor of the Jewish Race. For, until Abraham circumcised himself, there was no Jewish Race, as Romans 4 explains.
So also, There Was No Church Until He Prophesied It, In Matt16:18. Even then, His prophecy was based on Father calling the shots as to the terms, and He said in that verse, I WILL BUILD, future tense of oikodomew. Future, after He paid for sins. Because, there still might not have been a Church, if Israel had accepted Him. He had to announce the prophecy of it while alive, so Israel would be forewarned she was playing Vashti. The outgoing broken vows could yet be mended. He just knew they wouldn't be; and in typical Jewish play of prophecy, When The Days Get Numbered, Israel Gets A Prophecy About It.
So again: we are the Fulfillment of Prophecy, so we make History. They are to look at us BE the fulfillment. Church gets no prophecy of her own, for her days are NOT numbered, get it? So those days can end in the next five minutes, next five years, next five centuries. But here you can assume without being a donkey, that the sooner is the more likely --
So, during the "Church Age", the Lord's not wearing, so to speak, His "King of the Jews" hat. That 'hat' is set aside, as it were, temporarily. Instead, He is Seated as the Heir of All Things (Heb2), Not Testifying. The King is deliberately absent from the world's view (parable of the stingy servant, and Matt24's king-gone-away), due to the four Reasons explained in the "First Characteristic" section of Part III. Instead, we are testifying, as Bride-Evidence of Him in the World. That is why we are Ambassadors. 'Whether by blood Jewish, or Gentile. All Church believers are "one" new-in-species spiritual race (cf Gal3, 2Cor5:17's Greek). So, see? We Are A Different 'Race', and have Our Own Covenant. We are used to Rescue Israel's Covenants, not replace them. Different "R". In PartIVa, the precedence spawning our creation was covered. In Part V, the outcome of our creation for Israel, the Millennium, will be covered. For now, notice How We Are Agents Of The Rest Of History, By Divine Design. Because we are IN CHRIST, not in Israel.
Tribulation Warns Of HIS Coming. Not, warning of our coming or going or anything about us. For, we are an Index of HIM. Not, of ourselves. So we Church are a "mystery", a folded in, grafted in, part of The Vine. But the Prophecy of the Trib, preceded us, and we wouldn't even be here Now, were it not for Israel's playing Vashti. So we are a Leftover, a "remnant according to the Election Of Grace"; a prophecy on earth in progress of fulfillment, not for ourselves, but for HIM. So we make history, not new prophecies. So we get history, not prophecies.
So We Go Up When We Are Complete. No prophecy needed, for that: Preparation, that's what's needed. Different "P". And since you don't know how fast even you yourself are growing, you can't possibly know how many others in the needed Very Few Number are growing even faster than you. So the whole 'balloon' may go up before you finish reading this page. Or, maybe it ends 1000 years from now. You cannot know. But you can.. prepare.
In sum: We Are The Fulfillment Of The Prophecy Of His Coming, The Means Of Implementation Of "Operation Footstool" (my pastor's term, taken from Ps110:1). So We Are Here To Make History, Not Prophecies; Because We Are Grafted In, Part Of, The Fulfilled Prophetic One, The CHRIST.
Thus, as the last section of each chapter in Hebrews notes, Operation Footstool is in its preparatory phase, and we Church are 'it'. Because, we are Body of Christ, an Extension of Him. The historical trends of Operation Footstool are also foretold in the NT, with rubrics like "the latter days"; but no specific prophecies are to be fulfilled, since the Church is NOT in the Jewish Age. We were "grafted in", remember. (Cf. also the bracketing-method of writing Hebrews uses, culminating with effective present tense of martureo in Heb10:15 -- the earlier 'bracket' being Heb8:8-12.) So there is no prophecy, no date-setting. Rather, there is a need for the Bride to Prepare, since preparation, by nature, is a behind-the-scenes function. You don't announce "the play" until it's ready to go onstage! 'Which readiness can't be dated, since it is entirely volitional.
Therefore, all events between the two prophetic terminii, as well as the quality of the epoch itself, are determined EXCLUSIVELY by how we grow or retrogress in Christ. By How Many Of Us Grow Up Spiritually To Complete Pleroma Status -- and as we saw, only a very few are needed, maybe between 1,000 and 10,000 to suffice for all time, oh! A dinky fraction of a modern city on any given day! 'Just as history during the 1st Advent was wholly dependent on how Our Lord of the Sabbath would grow toward His Cross. (Matt12:8, Heb4:10-16, Rev19:10.) In sum, this open-ended role for the Church is unique, because:
So, then: we can only say that "the play WILL go on!" And, Get Ready! Tachu!
CLICK HERE to go on to IVc, the Macro Role of Trial COMBAT. |
Rapture is a valid doctrine for many reasons, and the many ways the Rapture is expressed in the NT, are overlooked by 'scholars' who demonstrably do NOT test pan-Bible. Witness how in the typical allegedly-scholarly documentary you see on Bible in the History Channel or elsewhere, degreed people(!) claim that "Rapture" is an invention of the 19th century. What a crock. Guess they can't read Bible, for look: "rapture" is really an Anglicized Latin Bible term: viz. 1Thess4:17 in Vulgate Online Bible mapped-to-KJV. The verb "rapere" means to snatch/take/pluck up, and has a violence/suddeness connotation. Perfect tense form is "rapto". So, in old English, "rape" -- which didn't only have the sexual connotation it does in modern English. "Rapture" in olde English then meant simply, taking-suddenly. So the term's origin has nothing to do with the insane allegation that Darby or someone else in the 19th century invented "Rapture". Bible 'scholarship' is inexcusably bad (especially in documentaries), yet passes itself off as competent. Thank God it's so easily proven inept by a little Bible digging.
For if you don't balance ALL the checkbook, you didn't balance it AT all. How much more important, is Scripture's 'checkbook', to 'balance'? It's bad enough to have a check bounce -- but your whole spiritual life?! Me ginoito, perish the thought! Of course, this kind of testing is also trial and error, many mistakes made en route. So the key is to stay somewhat 'loose' about what you believe, always open to a better accounting than you currently have. Only God is Perfect. Dunno about you, but I don't give a flip if I'm wrong. I do care about learning something better than I know it now. I had to be saved, so being right is impossible. Being wrong is the norm, and learning God is the magnificent life legated to us in Christ Who Made Me Right In Him 2000 years ago. So being wrong in a Bible interp is no biggie. Standing pat on an interpretation, is insane. Why people do that, baffles me no end. Stubbornness is not 'loyalty', but spiritual apnea: leading quickly to spiritual coma and 1Jn5:16, after which one lives happily with the Lord forever, sans rewards which could have been received. What a waste.
The Revelation imagery, just as in the rest of Bible, is metaphorical: the metaphor stands for something LITERAL the image represents. That's not symbolism, really. Symbolism is vague and ephemeral, but a metaphor depicts something real. So when John writes he's trying to describe what he sees in terms the reader can use to LITERALLY relate. Yes, they are OT and Greek drama images and each one means something real that will or is really taking place. For example, Ezekiel's vision of the wheels within wheels is literal -- he really saw it -- and metaphorical, for the Justice of God. Same too, with John: he really saw those things, and they REPRESENTED other things which will really happen, like the demon (not human) armies swarming up out of the literal Abyss, in Rev 9. (Satan opens the Abyss where demons are locked up, text is plain.) In short, those who dismiss Revelation as allegorical or merely symbolic instead of metaphorical, do so because they are uncomfortable with the supernatural. Then they don't even believe in God, Who by definition is Supernatural. Oh well.
This really can't be too hard, can it? In Rev4:1 two "meta tauta" clauses wall off Church from the Tribulation, since Rev4:1 is the actual Rapture Event. We are a sea of glass in front of our King, so the Kingdom is complete, and we reflect Him. Nothing in Revelation after that speaks of any Kingship He has over the earth, until the 2nd Advent. So there is NO Church on earth except the Fake Church, after Revelation 3 ends. It's as bald as a blimp flying overhead. Title deed ceremony in Revelation 4 means that His Kingdom is not on earth, which is why He's OPENING the seals (Roman custom of inheritance, the heir opens the scroll). So we are not on earth, since we already know He is Our King. Can this be more obvious? Just like He said in Luke 19, He would go away to a 'far country' and receive his Kingship appointment and then return (2nd Advent). We are there in the throne room with Him when He gets that Appointment, so now He is ready to open the inheritance deed -- which has to happen with us present, since it's the Bema, in Rev4:1. Dunno how God could make it all plainer.
Every image John uses in Revelation is backed up in either the OT's imagery, so there's no mistaking the meaning -- or was current in Roman culture (i.e., tableaus and miming were then-current features in Greek and Roman plays). So those who find Revelation vague, aren't doing their Bible and isagogical homework. Revelation 9, for example, specifically says demons come from the Abyss, a jail under the sea. Those aren't human armies, they are demon armies, and Satan unlocks them. Text is very bald. Yet if you look around on the internet, even Pre-Trib Rapture teachers misread Rev9 and call them human armies with 'modern' vehicles and weapons, making a big stink about how China's reserve army is 200 million. Yeah, it is (military training is compulsory in China), but that has zippo to do with Rev9. Point is, when Revelation is bald even in translation, we don't read it rightly; so we don't read its sophisticated OT-documented imagery rightly, either. No excuse for that.
If you don't know God's underlying Accounting System for Time, then you can't see this deadline structure is quite literal, real, and during at least seven times in the past, time almost ended. The timeline BALANCES from Adam through today, so you have to know its accounting structure. Thus you can proof event dates derived, for error. The timeline is self auditing, wholly contained in Bible, so it's the BIBLE you use for your proofing. Not, the stars, Roman calendars or other pagan stuff. After you've constructed the ENTIRE timeline and proofed major event dates in the Bible, you see a pattern of these time grants; then of course! you can verify the event times historically, as you'll finally be looking in the right PLACE for the information. Exodus per Bible was 1440BC; only the 18th Dynasty which was on Egypt's throne then, used the "moses" moniker. It was the Greeks, not the Jews, who renamed the Yam Suf as the "Red Sea", owing to the carnage drowning in it. Hello! Joseph was made vizier in 1916BC and ruled Egypt for the next 80 years. Extra-Biblically, you can establish that a "vizier" during that same time reorganized Egypt for the 12th Dynasty, and the farming of the Fayyum Depression was a phenomenon of its day. Yeah, they wouldn't call him "Joseph", but by his title, just as "Pharaoh" is a title, not a person's name. See: ask the right questions, ask them in BIBLE, look for them -- and then you don't chase your empirical tail making silly searches for relics long since trampled underfoot by wandering beasts, covered up by sand or mud, picked up by travellers, tomb robbers, or weathered to dust by time.
Once you've constructed and tested the timeline PER BIBLE, you find that Daniel 9's 490 is but one time grant of eight which have been going on since Adam's fall; there have been four more, since the Crucifixion. (Latest grant was awarded to someone on earth in 1990, which was the AWARD deadline, not the historical deadline.) Mirroring.htm explains the accounting pieces God uses, and shows you from Bible in detail, who got these time grants; GeneYrs.xls is a timeline from Adam through 2007 showing these people and the trends post-Crucifixion show the time grants continue (but to whom, we can't now know); and TenWaysThisTimelineDiffers.doc summarizes the parameters. Suggest you start with TenWays, as it's a well-written overview (only 29 printed pages). You'll need the xls and htm files also, but the doc file best speeds comprehension of the big picture. There's nothing like these three pieces on the internet, so use 1Jn1:9 and keep asking Our Mutual Dad for verification insight as you read them, if you read them. [In GeneYrs.xls, one can document from Bible a) the intercalated historical solid-gold and green deadlines; one can likewise document from Bible b) the contiguous, baton-passing personal 490s and 1000 grants since Adam. One can likewise document from Bible c) the voting periods which show in GeneYrs.xls. However, the d) contiguous qualifying historical deadline every 490 and 1000 years (non-intercalated for voting periods), is rather an INFERENCE from the Bible's doctrine behind its given numbers; the doctrine makes consummate sense and fits the accounting philosophy Bible discloses. Furthermore, I can't find anything in Bible to contraindicate d); but more testing of that contiguity rule is needed.]
Second quick example:
Let's not even talk about the fake Star of Bethelehem, which is nowhere in the Bible. All the foregoing was covered in Part IVa. Point here: see how we're bleeping lazy about doing our Bible homework. So we ask wrong questions, come up with wrong answers, and blame the Bible for being obtuse. Handy excuse, huh.
Bottom line: we are queasy about supernatural stuff, so we try to explain it away -- betraying that we don't really believe in God Who by definition, is of Supernatural Nature. So what's natural for Him to do, is not going to be reflected in our dead, natural terms.
God isn't kidding when He says we can ask anything in His Name, and He's not kidding when He says you have to Believe In Him To Be Rewarded, John 3:16, John 16:9, Heb11:6, Eph2:8-9. God is Merit. So if you don't Believe In Him Who is Merit, you are saying He's worthless, so that's what you get from Him: nothing. That's why prayers go unanswered, why people lose faith, can't reconcile Bible, etc. They don't BELIEVE. So they get what they don't believe: nothing. Bible is totally provable by any standard man can come up with. But we don't test it properly, because we don't READ it properly. No excuse for that since 1850, when the whole world started to have ready access to the original-language texts. So what passes for Biblical scholarship is likewise nothing of value. There's no belief inside the scholars, so of course they don't find the Bible up-to-snuff! Use 1Jn1:9 and go through Bible, keep plugging yourself. You'll find more proof of God than you ever dreamed of!