Thou Shalt Have What Thou Sayest

There is a children’s nursery rhyme which has done more damage in this world than possibly any other: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Parents teach this to their children in order to make them feel better about being jeered at or mocked, but what are we really learning?

We are learning that we can get away with saying, or thinking, anything… totally without consequence. For this reason, the world today is filling up with meaningless words. People make entire careers out of just talking. Lies are becoming standard fare in conversation, and are considered okay in a relationship.... so long as they were spoken with good intention. But is that true? Are words really meaningless and without importance?

The belief that words don’t matter have made liars of us all. Have you ever said, “I was blown away” or “I thought I was going to die”? These are phrases used constantly in our culture, yet people understand it doesn’t really mean a tornado blew you over, or you really thought you were about to meet your maker.

I don’t even want to talk about phrases like “I laughed my ass off.”

It’s become so common to exaggerate, embellish, and make up stories to tell our friends that no one takes words seriously. It is equally common for mothers to tell their children, “if you do that, you’ll die!” or “I’ll kill you!” It is clear that no one really believes that words have any weight. After all, when all of our leaders are always lying, making promises they don’t keep, and exaggerating, we feel it’s ok for us to copy them. If the President or the celebrities can do it, it must be fine for the rest of us.

There is only one problem with this situation. The fact is that the physical world is governed by the spiritual world (see Spirit, Soul, Body). And the spiritual world, because of how God made it to work, is controlled by WORDS.

God said “let there be light,” and there was light. In the same way, whatever we speak with our mouth long enough, it is going to come to pass. It won’t usually happen immediately, because our spiritual power is a lot smaller than God’s, but with enough repetition, enough built-up pressure, if we say it with enough true belief, if we really mean it with determination, if we really believe it, it will eventually happen.

Now words that have absolutely no real belief behind them won’t immediately happen. So if you start saying, “I’m a millionaire,” it probably won’t do any good at all because you have lied so often with your words and said so many things that are not really true (like “I felt like I was gunna die!”) that your own mind knows that your words are worthless.

But any word, no matter how insignificant, can become a seed. If you say it enough, and keep saying it long enough, you will teach your spirit to hope, and hope will turn to faith, and eventually faith will take upon itself form, and what you have said will happen.

The classic example of this is a man who has an old car, and every night when he comes home, and every morning when he gets into his car, he tells the car, “you are just a piece of junk. What a lemon! You junk bucket, you’re going to fall apart any day now.” Watch what happens. Because this man honestly, down deep, really believes what he’s saying (he believes the car really is a junk bucket), one day that car will simply obey his words and fall apart all at once. And what will the man say? “I knew it!”

Or how about the old auntie who keeps saying, “he’s a good-for-nothing and someday he’s going to be thrown in prison.” I bet you two things will happen to the poor kid she’s talking about: he will become a good-for-nothing, and then he will get thrown in prison. The really sad thing about this situation is that the old Auntie will now feel smug as if she prophesied something and foresaw the future, when really all she did was help push the kid over a cliff. She shouldn’t be so happy about her own involvement in his crimes. Someday, when every idle word spoken by every human being is judged, that old Auntie will be considered accessory to everything that kid did, and she will be considered a criminal along with him because it was her words that added momentum to his ill-doing.

Ever said anything like these?

• “I have a bad back/heart/hearing (etc). It just keeps getting worse.”
• “My arthritis is just taking over my whole body.”
• “My kids hate me and they won’t come home.”
• “I’m expecting to get the flu soon.”
• “I keep getting farther and farther away from God.”
• “My marriage is going to fall apart.”
• “I feel so depressed all the time, and I just can’t find joy anymore in anything.”
• “People just don’t like me.”
• “I always get lost.”
• “I’m not photogenic, I always look terrible in photos.”

And yet people feel superior when their dark prophecies come to pass! They think it proves how much they know, or how right they are, that they could foresee this event happening. What they don’t realize is that they helped — or in most cases entirely caused — the event. If only these people actually understood that they are MAKING these things come to pass! The more they say it, the more they believe it, the sooner and more often it will happen.

Why do our words come to pass? Because we are made in the image of God. That is how God did it: he spoke, and the world was created. Then God taught us to imitate Him. He taught the Hebrews to bless one another all the time and recite over and over that they were blessed. He did that on purpose. We speak, and our life is created. It is a true fact that whatever you are living in today is the direct result of whatever you said yesterday and all the days before.

The universe can’t help it, it was created to obey the voice of God and anything like God (or in His Image). It has no choice. Physical things cannot disobey you, they don’t have a will. The spiritual world follows orders: it will just do exactly as told.

Adam was made in the Image of God. He was told in the Garden of Eden to guard the Garden, to keep it – and this was how he was supposed to keep it. By blessing it, by speaking the blessing over it, and over himself, and over his wife. But instead he didn’t say any words at all, and he allowed events to just happen to him. He was standing right there when Eve picked that fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and he could have opened his mouth and stopped the whole thing right then. He didn’t. Like most of us, he just stood there and let someone else speak the words that would become his life.

So if this is true, and what we say is what we get, why can’t we tell the physical world to become paradise, and watch it blossom overnight? Because of what Adam did. By allowing evil to become his reality, he traded faith in God (or goodness) for faith in evil. As his offspring, all of us are born with faith in evil. Evil faith comes natural. It takes effort to develop faith in good.

For example: if you were to go out into your weedy backyard and tell it to become a tropical paradise, you wouldn’t have an ounce of real belief in you that such a thing would really happen. But if you were to go out into your weedy backyard and tell it to just wither up and die and become a desert, yah, you could believe that. So the bad would happen, because we are all trained from birth to have faith in bad.

The human race has been programmed by Satan for millennia to believe in evil. We believe in it so strongly that we think good is “not realistic.” In fact, both good and evil are equally “realistic.” Either of them have an equal chance of happening, depending on what kind of faith you are putting into the situation. It’s just really hard to find a human being who has switched their natural faith in evil into faith in good.

Take a lonely single person looking for love. If you told them, “no problem, your true love will probably show up tomorrow,” they wouldn’t believe you. But if you said, “life is hard, your true love will probably never show up,” they’d believe you in a heartbeat. The fact is that both possibilities are equally valid. Forget statistics, we are talking about faith here. Faith BRINGS ITSELF to PASS. If you truly 100% believed you’d meet your true love tomorrow, guess who you’d meet tomorrow? Statistics only have power because they usually confirm whatever faith we already had! And it’s usually bad!

I am not talking about simple optimism here. I am talking about real faith. When a person has real faith, they don’t “hope so.” They don’t “wish.” They don’t “keep their fingers crossed.” When you have real faith, you KNOW it’s a fact. It’s so absolutely real to you, there is no question. There is no wondering, no hesitation.

Real faith is like when, as a child, you went to sleep Christmas Eve night (substitute your birthday for those who don’t do Christmas) knowing that tomorrow, there would be presents to open. Period. You just knew. If you were one of those families that hid the presents until Christmas morning, this is especially a good parable for faith. You did not see the presents, you did not watch your parents buy the presents, you did not watch them wrap the presents… but you knew there WERE presents, and you knew that tomorrow you would open them all in an insane ripping frenzy of joy!

Faith is exactly like that. When your faith is complete, you KNOW you have what you say in faith. You know your words are 100% truth. You know it’s out there. You know it’s coming. And you know that soon, you will have whatever you’ve been saying for days or weeks or months. You know, because it’s so real to you.

And watch… when it becomes that real, it will arrive. You won’t even be that excited, and you certainly won’t be surprised, because you’ll have been expecting it so determinedly that you’ll just receive it like getting an expected package in the mail. Happy to have it yes, but also totally confident that it was coming.

But how do you GET this kind of faith? Actually, the process is pretty easy.

Words spoken over and over can change more than just the physical world. They can also change your heart. If you don’t believe me that words can hurt more than sticks and stones, just look at what words do in an abusive household to a child who grows up in that environment. They break that child’s personality until it takes some serious healing for them to recover. If that healing never occurs, they will never recover.

Words can change the heart. Good words will change the heart for good, and evil words will change the heart for evil. This is why it is dangerous to listen to all kinds of movies, television, radio, and also reading miscellaneous words without paying attention to what exactly those words are going to produce. What seeds are you putting into your heart? Because you will have whatever words you hear (or read) over and over.

How? The words will produce a dream, a daydream, an imagination of what it would be like. This is called “hope.” Once you can see what the words are describing, you are ready to start working your faith. All you have to do is start saying it. Imagining it. Saying it. Imagining it. Saying it. The more you say it, the more you will be able to SEE it. And the more you see it in your imagination, the more you will SAY it. They build on one another, like a generator building up electricity, more and more until there is discharge.

If those words, and the resulting daydream, is evil, just watch. Pretty soon you will be speaking evil over and over. The more you speak it, the more your faith will grow, and eventually you will totally believe… and you will have what you say. And if it was evil seed, it will eventually hurt you or someone close to you. If you keep hearing (and/or watching, or reading) pornography for example, it will build up dreams and images in your thoughts, which will drive you to watch/hear/read more, which will build up even stronger dreams, which will drive you to get more… eventually you will act out in evil fornication, commit adultery, or something worse because what you put into yourself will grow and produce harvest.

But you can use this principal on purpose to do good for yourself also. First, you have to have a hope – a dream of something that you really want. Once you can see this thing as a daydream, and you can imagine it, then start SAYING it. Even if you feel really stupid at first. Start saying it.

Have you ever dreamed of being beautiful, or good-looking? Start saying it. “I am good-looking.” Ignore the mirror. Say it! Say it for a year straight, every day. Say it every time you get up or go to bed. Say it when you do dishes. Say it when you go to lunch, or when you drive to work. Pick some time during the day that you say it to yourself. The more often you say it, the faster the seeds of your words will grow.

The words will lodge in your heart like seeds lodge in dirt. The more seeds you plant, the more likely you’ll get a crop. The more words you say, the faster your faith will begin to grow, and the sooner you will get whatever it is you are working for. And yes, honest to God, your words can and will change your physical body. You will actually look different after a while. Your complexion will even out, your hair will improve, your color will clarify, I am not kidding. It’s been proven by science that people can change their eye color by will alone, surely they can change other things by faith… if fear can turn your hair white, why can’t faith turn your hair dark again? It works. You can change the physical world with your faith-words.

But the most important thing is to give it TIME. Give it time, and don’t stop dreaming, don’t stop saying it. Saying it is very important; if you give up on speaking it out loud, your faith will wane and lose power and eventually die. It’s like watering your plants. If you stop giving the plants water, they will shrivel up and turn to dust. If you stop speaking your dreams, they will fade and fall apart to nothing. Keep saying it.

When do you stop? WHEN YOU HAVE IT. Don’t stop before. You are not allowed to stop before it happens. Even if you cry half the nights because you know it’s not working, keep saying it anyway. Even though you feel stupid and you feel angry at me for teaching you this, keep saying it anyway. Honestly, is this going to cost you something? Do you have to put a quarter in a jar every time you say your dream? No. So just do it. That’s the best thing: words are free, and at the same time, words are what knit you a life. SAY IT.

Yes, you will get sick of saying it. Yes, it will take a LOT longer than you thought it would. But the person who will not give up on saying it, one day a miracle will happen. You will be saying it (by this time you won’t even be able to hear yourself, you’ll just be muttering it and totally ignoring it) when suddenly you’ll hear it as if you’ve never heard it before. Suddenly, it will just dawn on you. BAM, you will be filled with confidence and passion over this thing you’ve been saying so long that you are sick of it. The dream, the vision will sparkle with new life you’ve never experienced before, you will be inspired! You’ll be so inspired in fact that you’ll tell everyone you know all about it, as if it’s a brand-new revelation!

THAT is when faith has arrived. That is when you KNOW the package is in the mail. That is when you are now only hours, or days, or weeks away from actually seeing it in real life. Because once faith shows up, real belief, deep-down knowing, then it’s done. You have it.

Once you have it though, and it has actually arrived physically in your life and things are different, what do you do next? Pick a new dream, and start over. And this is how you build, one step at a time, a completely new life. Yes, it takes work. A lot of work. But if you never start, then you will never get anything at all. Don’t be like Adam; don’t stand there and let past mistakes and stray weed-words plant your future into your heart. Take control, and start saying what you want. Because one way or another, you WILL produce a harvest. Whether that harvest is something you purposefully chose, or something you just allowed to happen, is totally up to you.

God is Brooding

Shabbat is coming after the American Election of 2008. By Friday evening, I think His decision will have been made.

God has been brooding recently. He is singing for each of the people who won’t listen to Him, the ones who pretend He doesn’t exist. He holds each of them up considering them like a cherished photograph, and His countenance is sad. He does not want to do what He has to do now. He is dragging His feet as long as He can afford; He is dwelling on memories of the past and future, knowing what is to come better than we know the past.

My brother was working at his desk in the Congressional office he staffs, and listening to their religious liaison talking to a visiting pastor in the waiting room. Ridiculously, the good pastor was saying, “God caused this to happen because sometimes He likes to bring punishment upon us to make us stronger.” He went on, but I won’t exasperate the reader with more.

This is the usual religious mumbo-jumbo that come squirting out of terrified people when their world comes apart and they don’t have any explanation. What is really frustrating is that by making up this mumbo jumbo they are completely avoiding responsibility. Never judging themselves to see if it was them who did something wrong. How could it be? We are perfect. We never do anything wrong, even though the Bible says the curse causeless doeth not come.

No, it couldn’t be that we, the believers in God of America, did anything wrong. We never let the voice of God fall on unhearing ears. We never procrastinated when we should have acted, we never ignored our heart when we knew we should stop everything and pray. Of course not. It was all God, He is the one who does everything evil on the face of the earth. He brings all destruction, He smashes every child down and every old person, He ravages the earth with fire and storm, He breaks the staff of bread and causes famine.

I knew from the moment I saw B.O. appear as a candidate last year that he would win. When he and Hillary were at war, I saw — as if watching the wheels of a great machine turn — behind the scenes. I saw that there is a very large, very unpleasant, and totally unaccountable group behind this man who had decided to put him into the position of President years ago. Powerful men, dark and nameless persons who prefer to walk around completely anonymous under the sky. But God knows each of them, and despite even their twisted ways, God is sad now as He looks at each one of them and sings to them his farewell song.

He loved them all. And He did not want what is coming to happen. God does not bring famine and disaster and plague. It is humans who do that, humans who will not judge themselves, will not check to see if they have done anything wrong, who will not clean their hands, who will not repent. Stubborn, stiffnecked people who want to believe they are always right. That is who brings disaster upon the nation.

God merely upholds the Law. He promised to make the earth forever turn. He promised there should always be planting and harvest, day and night, summer and winter. He upholds all the laws of physics. And the laws of etherics – the laws of the spiritual realm – are just as immutable as gravity. Because of God’s faithfulness there is judgment; because of faithfulness and goodness, not because He is or does evil.

God was depressed last night. Because the men of this world have lifted up an idol for themselves, a living breathing idol, and all of them have made him shine like the sun because each one is pointing their flashlight at him. See how he glows! We have made for ourselves a god. We will coat him in a layer of gold. He will fix everything. He will heal the world, stop all war, give us prosperity, bring justice to the oppressed, free those in bondage, make light our burdens and save us. Here is the savior! Look at how glorious he is!

I can’t help thinking of the final Narnia book by C.S. Lewis. When I was a kid, I used to dislike that book more than the others because I thought the tale of the donkey and the ape was so unrealistic. But these days, I am honestly beginning to think Mr. Lewis had a point.

Here is the plot in a nutshell for those who haven’t read it or don’t remember: there was a talking donkey who had a friend who was a tricky talking ape. One day a lion’s pelt was washed down the river and the ape found it and dried it out. This gave the ape a wonderful idea. He convinced his obliging donkey friend to wear the lion’s pelt like a costume, and they would pretend that the donkey was really Aslan returned, the great King of the Beasts. The Ape of course would rule as his top minister, and get the other animals to bring him food and luxuries as a tithe. The donkey-as-lion never got close enough to the people that they could see he was an impostor, but he would give orders to confirm the ape’s words from afar.

What seemed to me like a very far-fetched and improbable situation then has now taken on the gleam of lurid reality. Look, the donkey in the lion’s pelt. All hail Aslan. What I’m wondering now is who, exactly, the talking donkey is going to appoint as his top ministers. Because that cabinet of dark, mysterious men of power who put him there will certainly want their cut. I think we should keep a very close eye on who becomes powerful once President B.O. comes into his own, and mark them. Remember them. Stay away from them.

And God sings.

He gave me a verse yesterday, a very important and ominous verse that describes the results of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but in different order. Ezekiel 14:13 and onward to the end of the chapter.

Son of man, when the land sinneth against me by trespassing grievously, then will I stretch out mine hand upon it, and will break the staff of the bread thereof, and will send famine upon it, and will cut off man and beast from it: Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver [but] their own souls by their righteousness, saith the Lord GOD.

If I cause noisome beasts to pass through the land, and they spoil it, so that it be desolate, that no man may pass through because of the beasts: [Though] these three men [were] in it, [as] I live, saith the Lord GOD, they shall deliver neither sons nor daughters; they only shall be delivered, but the land shall be desolate.

Or [if] I bring a sword upon that land, and say, Sword, go through the land; so that I cut off man and beast from it: Though these three men [were] in it, [as] I live, saith the Lord GOD, they shall deliver neither sons nor daughters, but they only shall be delivered themselves.

Or [if] I send a pestilence into that land, and pour out my fury upon it in blood, to cut off from it man and beast: Though Noah, Daniel, and Job, [were] in it, [as] I live, saith the Lord GOD, they shall deliver neither son nor daughter; they shall [but] deliver their own souls by their righteousness.

For thus saith the Lord GOD; How much more when I send my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast?

Well, the land has trespassed grievously. But Noah, Daniel, and Job will be able to deliver themselves. Noah – the man who lives among sinners round about him and he is the only one who is righteous, standing alone in his righteousness. Daniel – a man in government who worships the God of Israel and refuses to worship the king as a god. Job – the man of great wealth, richest in his part of the world, who refuses to curse God even when hardships and ruin befall him and all that he has is stripped away.

The truly righteous will be separated from the rest of the people and they will be safe, they will not fall victim to the four sore judgments. They will not have lack of food and necessities, they will not have war, nor will they have nature attacking them, nor will they come down with diseases. They will be separate and provided for by God, who always saves those who trust Him. Even if He has to send manna from Heaven or ravens to feed them, they will endure.

But the land that trespasses grievously against the God of Heaven will experience all four of these judgments in order. First, financial ruin and famine, a breaking of prosperity. Second, war. Third, nature turning against them, possibly including not only wild beasts but also hurricanes and earthquakes and disasters. Fourth, plague.

God is brooding. It is a solemn night. But by Shabbat, the wait will be over. Eventually God will have to uphold His law. The Bible says the land which trespasses will experience these things, if He were to refuse to take His hand away and let them come, He would be making himself into a liar. And God never lies. What the Bible says, God will do. Every time.

But He doesn’t have to like it.

Welcome, President Obamanation. And welcome everyone to the end of our world. I truly believe America as we knew it is now over, dead, finished, and has only now to fall and crumble. And it’s not the fault of the sinners. They always sin. That’s what they do. It’s the fault of the spineless Christians who compromised. Who knew to do right, and didn’t do it. Who procrastinated. Who waited too long. Who ignored the voice of God. Who decided they knew better than God. Who were disobedient for almost a hundred years. And this is what we get. What you sow, you shall reap. And the state of the nation is in the hands of the church.

Ah, lukewarm nation. One day God said He would spew you out, and not count you along with His hot ones, or the cold ones who are merely His enemies – for God loves a sinner and there is always hope for a sinner. But the lukewarm, half-saved, weak, pathetic, blind, stubborn Christians who refused to do their job in their lifetime, who make up religious mumbo-jumbo to explain away your lack of responsibility and blame everything on God ... you guys are out. For it is not merely for the sinners that God weeps. It is for you. He will save His ‘hot’ ones, but He has spewed you out.

Is There A Rapture?

For those not familiar with the Rapture Theory, I’ll explain a little first.

In Christian circles, one hears about “the Rapture” in awe-struck, whispered tones. It seems to be the great event that every Christian is waiting for, the wonderful reward and escape that will lift us up and away from this miserable, dreary, unfulfilling life like a fairy tale come true.

In short, the theory is that either before or some time during the Tribulation (the last seven years before Jesus returns to the earth to take possession of it as King Messiah), all the believers who follow Jesus will hear a trumpet and be suddenly transformed into immortal bodies. Moments later, all the believers of past ages who are currently dead will be miraculously resurrected, appearing on the Earth as living breathing people once again. And a moment after that, the ex-dead people will fly upward into the sky, followed by the living newly immortal believers, and the whole gang will literally fly away to Heaven with Jesus, where they will have a wonderful party for some unspecified amount of time.

While they are gone, the world will be beat black and blue by the Judgment events of the Tribulation, such as massive storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, hailstorms, fire from Heaven, plagues, war, famine, wild animal attacks, and any number of other calamity. But we won’t be bothered by all that trouble, because we will be happily shut away in Paradise drinking Heavenly wine!

What a wonderful way for God to show His great love and mercy for the sinner, eh?

There are pre-Tribulation Rapturists, Mid-Tribulation Rapturists, and Post-Tribulation Rapturists .... which means that Christians are arguing about when, exactly, we get our Heavenly party ride. Before, during, or after the earth is wrecked? (Frankly I don’t know what the point of going up post-trib is, except to get a good view of the earth from orbit before we come right back down.) Christians seem to love to argue about when the Rapture should happen, because frankly it is extremely difficult to find a place in the Bible where it happens at all.

The idea of the Rapture hit the mainstream in 1861 when Margaret McDonald reported a vision she’d had in the publication ‘The Restoration of Apostles and Prophets In the Catholic Apostolic Church’. This vision seemed to hint at this fortuitous vanishing into Heaven during the horrible events of the Tribulation (during, but not previous to), and that only those with true spiritual awareness would participate.

Margaret started out really struck by the realization that the “sign of the Son of Man” would literally be the Son of Man himself appearing in the sky. While this seems obvious to us today, in her time the verses that speak of that event had been so religiousized and smothered that she stirred up quite a bit of controversy with her awakening.

She went on to say:

Only those who have the light of God within them will see the sign of his appearance. No need to follow them who say, see here, or see there, for his day shall be as the lightning to those in whom the living Christ is. 'Tis Christ in us that will lift us up - he is the light - 'tis only those that are alive in him that will be caught up to meet him in the air.

Ironically, in her article she never specifically said we would go up to Heaven before the Tribulation. People assumed that because they wanted it to be true. Rather, even in her article it sounds as if there is going to be trouble for us before we learn to fly around.

Also, although I feel she did indeed have some really good points, and did experience a true spiritual revelation, it should be pointed out that Yeshua Himself said in the Bible that everyone would see the sign of His appearing, not just ‘those who have the light of God within them.’

There are a lot of people who believe there will be two different appearings of Yeshua in the sky, once before the Tribulation for us (and only we will see Him) and once at the end of the Tribulation for the world when they will be scared spitless; but that theory is still grasping at straws. In scripture, He is described as appearing only once. And when He appears, everyone will see and fall flat on their faces.

If Margaret was a little off on the point of only the believers in Jesus being able to see Him, she might be off on others. Her report might be a little subjective and slanted, since it was merely an enlightening vision sent to a woman and not Scripture. Can we base all our hopes on this slim foundation, one woman's vision, when the Scriptures tell a different story?

In her article, the catching up into the air mention was referring to Paul’s passage in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 which states:

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of {the} archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord.

This ‘catching up’ into the air event should not be confused with the ‘twinkling of an eye’ event in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 which is, in fact, a completely separate occurrence and might not even happen at the same time.

Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality.

It does sound as if at the sound of the last trumpet, both living and dead followers of Yeshua will be given immortal bodies, but how long between that moment and learning to fly is a guess. All the Bible says about it is ‘then’ we will rise. How long is ‘then’? A few minutes, an hour, a day? Other places in the Bible seem to describe events right on top of one another that, historically, happened months or even years apart.

In fact, the last trumpet will occur during the great last battle over Jerusalem, while the returned Ten Tribes led by Ephraim alongside the nation of Israel led by Judah are under seige by a vast army from Gog and Magog (the Land of the North, which may either be Turkey or Russia or both; they are joined by “the Nations” which are all those hostile nations surrounding Israel who wish to do them harm). This battle is at the very end of the Tribulation, and the Trumpet of God signals its close.

In fact, this is also when we see the Sign of the Son of Man appearing in the clouds. He literally appears over the city of Jerusalem to save His combined thirteen tribes, wipe out the enemies of His people with the sword of His mouth and with the swords of the massive army of angels at his back, and begin the Messianic Kingdom on earth. This is the Day of the Lord, when the sun and moon will darken, and there will be fire and great slaughter and trouble for everyone who is still an enemy of God at this point. (Note: the Day of the Lord is only one day long.)

I can find no place in the Bible that says we will see Jesus before this final battle, but I have found quite a few scriptures that tell me God’s true believers will probably be inside the City of Jerusalem during this final battle. How they will get there I am not entirely sure. I have some ideas from reading the scriptural prophecies, such as Isaiah 60:8, which mentions the people of God flying around like doves in the sky. Suffice it to say, both the believers from the Church and the Jews who are waiting for Messiah will end up trapped together in Jerusalem besieged by the enemy, and Messiah will show up to save them.

So when John says in 1 John chapter three....

Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.

...we can assume that during the battle when the People of God will be in their greatest hour of weakness, they will be given mighty power because they who cry out for Messiah shall be transformed at that moment into immortal creatures ...and those who had fallen in the battle will stand back up. That should scare the living daylights out of the enemy, to say the least.

Then the scripture in Zechariah chapter 12 will take place which states that during that final battle...

On that day, even someone who stumbles will be like David; and the house of David will be like God, like the angel of ADONAI before them.

We literally will be like God. We will be just like Messiah, because we will have seen Him as He is, and have been transformed in the ‘twinkling of an eye’ into immortal, powerful beings. We will then proceed, with Jesus at the helm and angels as our reinforcements, to slay every single one of the enemy with the sword, with the exception of the Beast and the False Prophet, whom Jesus himself will throw alive into the Lake of Fire. In that day we will all be great warriors, and we will be given the greatest millitary victory ever known in the history of Man. The Bible goes on to say that we will plunder the Earth, and bring all the riches of the earth back to Jerusalem to be split up among us.

None of this involves pre-Tribulataion, mid-Tribulation, or even post-Tribulation earthly evacuation, teleportation, or vanishing. But it does involve pointy weapons, victory, and glowing like the sun.

Matthew chapter 24 and Luke chapter 17 both quote Yeshua as saying something about people being “taken” on the night that He returns. Here is Luke's version:

I tell you, on that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other will be left. There will be two women grinding at the same place; one will be taken and the other will be left. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other will be left.

Due to the popularity of the Rapture theory, most readers assume Yeshua is saying these people will be taken by Messiah into the air, “in the twinkling of an eye”, but that may not be the case at all.

In fact, seeing as this passage comes directly after a dire warning to not be like Lot’s wife who stopped to look back at Sodom being destroyed, and a firm command to run for the hills when the Day of the Lord approaches, it may be that Yeshua was warning that one will be taken by the Authorities and another left; one will be ripped out of his bed in the middle of the night and beaten, and one woman will be taken to prison, and the other left. We cannot assume that being ‘taken’ in this verse is necessarily a good thing.

But if we are to assume that being “taken” is a good thing, where will they be “taken”? And how? If the Day of the Lord is the day that Yeshua returns in power and glory to defeat the Antichrist and his army, and conquor the entire earth for himself, and if we then plunder the entire earth, it is very possible that these people will be taken away from the nations of the earth by the other believers who had victory in the battle and are now flying around through the air with super-powers. Or these people who are “taken” may be transformed into immortal beings on the Day that the Lord returns to slay the enemy and deliver Jerusalem. The passage does not indicate in any way that these people will be “taken” before the Tribulation, but rather, during or after great distress.

There are other verses that Rapturists like to quote, such as the parable of the Ten Virgins and the Lamps in Matthew 25. Five virgins went in with the Bridegroom, and the ones who were not ready didn’t go in and the doors were shut.

Most assume the doors are the Gates of Heaven, but why should we assume that? Usually the parable of the wedding feast is used as the biggest defense of the Rapture theory. In an ancient Jewish wedding, the groom would sneak over to the bride’s house in the middle of the night and steal her away, then take her to his chupah, or wedding-chamber, for a week-long honeymoon. During this week the whole town would celebrate and have a big party. At the end of the week, the bride and groom would come out of the wedding chamber and party with all the rest, acting as a King and Queen, complete with crowns and the ability to tell the guests what to do!

Rapturists say the ‘seven days’ of the wedding feast must certainly be the seven years of the Tribulation. This assumption becomes proof that we will be ‘carried away’ by the groom before the Tribulation begins, and spend the seven years having a wedding party.

But the Bible says that the Day that the Lord is crowned King is also the Day of His wedding. It will happen on the same day, not seven years later. He will return to claim His Kingdom on the Day of the Lord, which is the day He defeats the Antichrist and his evil army and kills every enemy of God. He will then judge and conquor the whole earth, and on the day He is crowned, Jesus will officially become King of the earth, and He will be ‘married’ to His bride, His people, whom He will never leave again.

This is further made significant if we understand the Jewish Feastivals: Rosh Ha Shana, the Jewish New Year, is the date that the Jews know the Messiah will return. Exactly ten days later is the dreaded Yom Kippour, the day that the world will be Judged. (Jesus talks about judging all the nations, separating them as sheep and goats.) Then a mere five days after that, we have the Festival of Sukkot, which is also refered to by the Jews as the Wedding Feast. So if we follow the schedule that God wrote down in the Bible, also known as the Jewish Festivals, we see a clear timeline:

The Lord will return on a Rosh HaShana; ten days later (after we have plundered and conquored the earth) He will judge the nations; and five days after that, He will be crowned King, and have His seven-day wedding feast. Sukkot is seven days long, and the eighth day is Simchat Torah, the Celebration of the Torah which is a separate holiday. Since Jesus is the Word, that is our day to celebrate our new King.

In the parable of the Ten Virgins, perhaps the gates being spoken of here are the gates of Jerusalem on earth, not Heaven. It is possible. Think about it.

Ezekiel 34:22 talks about Messiah judging between the sheep of His flocks, between one sheep and another. (Notice there are no goats in this judgement, this is a judgment just between sheep.) Some sheep will enter the Kingdom, some won’t. It seem the same principal is at work with the Virgins. Those who have the Holy Spirit in abundance (the oil) will go in, the others will not. He doesn’t have to take everyone. In fact, many will say ‘Lord, Lord’ but he will say He did not know them.

Since only the truly righteous can enter the New Jerusalem in Heaven, we can safely say this judgement between sheep, or virgins if you like, is happening on the Earth in some physical localle here, where the less righteous can gather together along with the righteous. And since the bad sheep and the good sheep are still mingled together until he shows up to separate and judge them, that means we have remained on the Earth the whole time. The flock didn’t go up to Heaven, then come back down, then get judged! No, He will sit as King and judge the sheep in person, on Earth, while they are still mingled, which means He returns to Earth before He judges His own.

There is also a parable of the Pearl of Great Price. Both the parable of the Virgins and the Pearl are talking about the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. In the parable of the Pearl, a man finds a treasure and sells everything he owns to buy the field in which the treasure is hidden. That doesn’t sound to me like going to Heaven; it sounds to me more like selling everything you own in your home nation in order to buy a plane ticket to Jerusalem so you can gather together with the rest of the People of God, and be there to see Messiah return and transform into a super-hero. Or something like that.

There is also the parable of Noah’s ark, and the cryptic reference in the book of Isaiah, chapter 26:

Come, my people, enter into your rooms and close your doors behind you; hide for a little while until indignation runs {its} course.

Could this be speaking of Heaven as an ‘ark’ or a ‘bridal chamber’ of safety? Perhaps, but it could equally be speaking of the city of Jerusalem and the Mountains of Israel as that sanctuary, the Land of Goshen, where God will protect His people until He returns. Or it could simply be advising God's people to shut their mouths and keep their heads down during the Tribulation to stay out of trouble.

The point I'm making here is this: sure, we could go to Heaven for a while in the middle of the Tribulation, that would be fun. But it isn’t necessary. God could very well do the entire thing without anyone ever going to Heaven, the Biblical verses would be perfectly satisfied, and the righteous would still be protected.

One last point I might bring up: the place of protection, or the wilderness. We simply don’t need Heaven as a sanctuary to escape the coming Judgment if God has already prepared a place for us to be protected down here on Earth.

This protected place is called the Wilderness in the Bible, both in the old-testament prophets and in the book of Revelation. The old-testament prophets get a lot more specific about which ‘wilderness’ we are talking about: the Mountains of Israel, which is the current West Bank. Is it possible that God will prepare a safe zone for all the Believers on earth who follow Him, a place where they can ride out the Tribulation safe and sound in the West Bank?

I know it sounds crazy, but the very stigma of danger that the West Bank has would be a wonderful ‘winnowing’ device. Only the courageous who truly hear God’s voice would come, if He were calling them to the West Bank. Only those who have no fear, who trust God. All the lukewarm scardy-cat Christians would stay home.

We can see this happening in the story of the Woman Crowned in Stars in the Book of Revelation. In Chapter 12 we see the following:

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; and she was with child; and she cried out, being in labor and in pain to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: and behold, a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads {were} seven diadems. And his tail swept away a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child. And she gave birth to a son, a male {child,} who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron; and her child was caught up to God and to His throne. Then the woman fled into the wilderness where she had a place prepared by God, so that there she would be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days. — Revelation 12:1-6

The woman is very easily identified. She is clothed with the sun, which is a reference to the glory of God, for as Ezekiel among others points out (1:27 and 8:2) God wears fire as clothing. She has a crown of twelve stars, which quite obviously point to all twelve tribes of Israel; not just the tribe of Judah, or the tribe of Judah, Benjamin, Levi, and the smattering of the rest who are called 'Jews,' but the fullness of all twelve tribes, which include the Lost Ten Christian tribes. She has the moon at her feet, a clear reference to the Church of Messiah.

She is in fact all the true People of God, all together, who ever followed God and obeyed Him. No denominations, no labels, no banners, no titles.... just all of God's true people, Christian and Jew alike.

As we can see, this woman is given a place prepared by God, where she is nourished for three and a half years. This corresponds to the first half of the Tribulation. Since the old-testament prophets identify her abode as the West Bank, I am very curious to know exactly how God is going to do this. All it says is that she will “flee”.

She will have a great time in this place of safety. As Isaiah 32 says:

My people will live in peaceful dwelling places, in secure homes, in undisturbed places of rest. Though hail flattens the forest and the city is leveled completely, how blessed you will be, sowing your seed by every stream, and letting your cattle and donkeys range free. — Isaiah 32:18-20

After three and a half years of living a rather nice life in the Wilderness, Satan will again return to harass the woman.

And when the dragon saw that he was thrown down to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male {child.} But the two wings of the great eagle were given to the woman, so that she could fly into the wilderness to her place, where she was nourished for a time and times and half a time, from the presence of the serpent. And the serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, so that he might cause her to be swept away with the flood. But the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and drank up the river which the dragon poured out of his mouth. So the dragon was enraged with the woman, and went off to make war with the rest of her children, who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus. — Revelation 12:13-17

In later verses in the next chapter, we see that Satan begins to kill “the rest of her children” left and right, leading to the wholesale slaughter of Christians and their martyrdom. But we never hear about the Woman again... all the verses say is that she is protected for yet another three and a half years. So we must assume that she remains safe for the rest of the Tribulation, untouched, while the lukewarm believers who didn't come to her place of safety are destroyed.

Only those who hear the Call of God and “flee” to the wilderness at the beginning of the Tribulation will escape this slaughter. Only those with courage, who are willing to go anywhere God calls, who are not afraid to sell everything they own, and buy the field that contains the Pearl of Great Price, will be at peace. These are also probably the people who end up in Jerusalem at the end for whatever reason. (Maybe because the army of the Antichrist sweeps through the West Bank as it moves westward, thus she flees from before their advance and ends up taking refuge in the Old City. But these are just theories.)

God’s people remaining on Earth during the Tribulation would be a powerful sign to the world that shows the separation between God’s people and the nations who do not follow Him. During the Tribulation, the protected ‘wilderness’ spot will be prosperous and untouched while heathen lands will be mashed. People will see that, and understand why. Remember the Land of Goshen during the Judgment of Egypt in Moses' day! The Egyptians looked and could see that the Land of Goshen was prosperous and happy, while they were miserable. This led them to understand that the God of Israel is real, and protects His own.

Here is another point: during the Tribulation, there will be people getting saved by the hundreds of thousands; where will they go? Will God just leave them to suffer? I doubt it. If God's people were living safely in a wilderness, they could provide a sanctuary for them as well. If there was no place for them to go to find safety, God would be punishing the righteous with the wicked, and the Bible says He will not do that.

Remaining on the Earth during the Tribulation, as a visible group, serves a far more useful purpose to the rest of the world than a bunch of believers vanishing overnight does. If we vanish, they can explain it away. (Abducted by aliens? Used the Cosmic ‘Om’ to Ascend to another plane? Killed ourselves like cultists?) If we are standing there in their midst doing miracles, they can’t ignore us. They can’t pretend we never existed. They can’t shut their eyes. In fact we may make them SO angry, that when we move from the Wilderness to the City of Jerusalem as described in the Prophets, they may attack the City just because WE are there!

After all, going up to Heaven instantaneously may not be the best God has for us. Think about this: how many people have really done their life’s work for God? How many people will be proud of this life they’ve lived when they stand before the King, giving an account of what they did with all that He gave them, their life and their gifts?

Most people haven’t accomplished anything satisfying at all. And most people won’t accomplish anything as long as the world continues to be normal, as long as they go to work every day hum-drum, and nothing ever changes. Wouldn’t it be magnificent if He would give us all a chance to do one really amazing thing for Him before we all get assigned our rewards for eternity? But remember, great heroic deeds only happen during times of great distress.

I’ve seen something very interesting about the Tribulation, something that I have never heard before. But it fits so perfectly with God’s great, powerful, and merciful character that I cannot ignore the vision I saw.

I have the feeling that we will be needed during the Tribulation. If we just up anchor and leave, we are abandoning the people of the Earth in their greatest hour of peril. God is not a God of wrath, but of Love; the only reason the Tribulation is going to happen at all is because the Tribulation is a seven-year time period during which God begins to regain authority over the Earth. As His holiness begins to interact with sin here on Earth, that holiness begins to cause the Earth to convulse and to tremble. Storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other horrible occurrances will happen not so much because God is a raging pissed-off Deity, but because the sin-tainted Earth cannot handle the thunder of His coming Presence!

Yes, the Bible says Jesus comes in anger; but He is angry with people for killing and destroying one another. He would rather see a world where nobody acted like tyrants and monsters, and all men could live in peace. That is what the Tribulation will accomplish; it is a cleansing that will consume all sin on the face of the earth, and cause there to be only peace for a thousand years after it.

God wants to save the people of the Earth, not destroy them. The Bible says God loves the sinner. But because of sin destruction at this point is inevitable and the Judgement of the earth is coming. Yet I can’t imagine God would simply turn His back on billions of people and just let them all languish and die without even trying to save a few. Has He done that before? Consider Ninevah in the book of Jonah. God saved the entire city because they repented. We know that during the Tribulation a lot of people are going to be getting saved — how? Who is going to be doing the preaching? And the Bible does say that people can't be saved without having the gospel preached to them by someone.

The Scripture promises very ardently that we will do greater miracles than Yeshua Himself ever did, and that miracles would abound on the Earth in the Last Days that astonish everyone. Where are these miracles? They aren’t happening right now. The earth is troubled, yes, but there is nothing really extraordinary happening at the moment. No big earth-shattering miracles. Some believers have learned to heal, to raise the dead even, and that’s great! But the Bible describes masses of miracles that are bigger than the miracles of the Exodus itself! Where are our clouds of smoke, and pillars of fire? Where is our splitting of the Red Sea? Where are our Elijah-fires?

The fact is that miracles of that magnitude don’t happen unless there is dire need and trouble of equal magnitude happening in the Earth. We would have to be standing smack dab right in the biggest trouble the world has ever seen to be doing the greatest miracles the world has ever seen, that is just how it works. As long as we are in a relatively peaceful, hum-drum world, we are not going to be doing the “greater miracles”. But the Tribulation WILL BE the greatest trouble the world has ever seen, the perfect time to do the greatest miracles.

In visions, I have seen these mega-miracles done during the Tribulation to save normal, common people out of the massive earthquakes, floods, and storms that will pummel the planet. The people of this world need us! How could we abandon them? That would be like everyone walking away from the victims of Hurricane Katrina! Who could walk away? Who could fly away to Heaven to party, while millions of people are dying and in desperate need? We are the only ones who know how to heal! We are the only ones who can save them from the floods! We will show them the mercy and compassion of God as we rescue them, and tell them why trouble is come upon the Earth, and get them saved!

Going to Heaven would be missing the greatest opportunity for evangelism the world has ever known! People will ignore God when they are at peace and have their TV and their good food and their comfortable slippers. But put them into the middle of catastrophe and they will listen! Can we just leave, when all the disasters of the Tribulation will open up millions, possibly billions of desperate hearts to the truth? Who will be there to preach to them?

In visions I have seen the Tribulation, and I have seen myself using massive spiritual powers greater than anything I have even heard about. There was no high, no drug to compare with it. It was so amazingly good... Using spiritual power on that level is better than the best high you have ever experienced. It was better than a rock concert. It was higher than winning the lottery or becoming President. It was a lot better than going to Heaven! (I've seen visions of Heaven too, so I can compare.) You don’t want to miss this.

Frankly, if we went up in a Rapture that missed the Tribulation, we would be cheated out of the most spectacular, amazing, awesome, ecstatic time of miracles and power the human race has ever experienced. During the days of thunder we will fly, we will walk on water, we will lift cars off of people, we will literally glow with the power, and we will save them. While the storm rages, we will become like the superheroes which are foreshadowings and visions of a greater truth. And a thousand years from now, we will look back on the Tribulation as the most worthwhile seven years we ever lived, and everyone who wasn’t there will envy us. All the greats from the past... Samson, David, Gideon, all of them... will be jealous.

So what about going to Heaven?

Here is another problem. Jesus told us to keep His Kingdom for him while He was gone. If we just leave for seven years, then return with Jesus at the end, we won’t have been keeping His Kingdom very well. We will have ditched it to leave it to the heathens for seven years, and a lot can happen in that time... like World War Three.

We are commanded to keep the Kingdom and to look after it until He returns to claim it. It is our job, as His subjects, to make sure the King has some place and something to come back to, something to rule over when He does show up. There has to be infrastructure. There has to be at least the beginnings of some kind of framework. Jesus is not going to have angels doing all the paperwork while we all lay on hammocks! We will be doing the work of the Kingdom. Since His physical return is very close now, we must all get together in one place and start organizing. A king needs warriors, messengers, diplomats, ambassadors, administrators, mayors, and citizens! A Kingdom has to be born here and now, for the King to return to!

People assume He could do it all Himself with a snap of His fingers. But that is not usually the way God works. He could have made the entire Hebrew exodus fly over the Red Sea, but instead He demanded faith. He demanded that they set foot in the water BEFORE the waters began to part. They walked to the Promised Land, carrying all their worldly belongings with them; He did not teleport them. He demands that we do our physical part on this earth before He will come in and do the rest.

But this is not the article to establish the need for a physical Kingdom, I am just saying the establishment of a Kingdom is yet another reason it would be irresponsible of us to vanish and party for seven years before He returns.

Now I’m not against visiting Heaven, going to Heaven sounds like a great idea. Personally I plan on making many visits there long before my “twinkling of an eye” experience. There are many prophecies given through very established and trustworthy prophets during the last hundred or so years that have spoken about people coming from Heaven to Earth, and people going from Earth to Heaven, during the Last Days.

In fact, it has been prophesied that the ‘Spirit of Elijah’ will come upon the Believers of God in the last days. This exciting little fact will completely pass over the head of most Christians who do not know Jewish tradition. Elijah is known to the Jews as “The Bird of Heaven”. This is because there have been Elijah-sightings for hundreds of years; it seems that the man doesn’t stay in Heaven at all. He is traveling up and down from Heaven to Earth and back so often that he barely touches foot on either shore.

Can we have the spirit of Elijah, the Bird of Heaven, the spirit of going up and coming down? Can we really commute from Earth to Heaven and back during the Last Days, and especially during the Tribulation? Can we perhaps go up and get training, advice, council, teaching, and spiritual endowments from the Jerusalem Above, then return to Earth to use those tools for the final work of establishing the Kingdom? For spreading the word of Yeshua and saving the lost? For performing miracles that save thousands of lives out of disaster during the Tribulation?

From what I read in the Bible, anything is possible; and anything a believer asks, fully expecting to receive, he shall have. God may not need to snap His fingers and teleport us all to Heaven en masse; we may be able to go up and come down right now, and we just haven’t realized it.

After all, each of us is the Temple of God, right? And the Temple of God in Jerusalem had a heavenly stair that went from Earth to Heaven. Doesn’t it follow then that if we are also the Temple, that each of us must have a Heavenly Stair that stretches from our place up there to us?

Why can’t we find and use our stairway to Heaven? It belongs to us. Surely with faith all things are possible, and during the Tribulation our spiritual power will be increased thousands of times more than during normal life. Who says during the Tribulation we can’t work to save millions and billions of people on the Earth, and at the same time visit Heaven too? We can do both!

So if you want to visit Heaven, go. You are a citizen. They can’t keep you out. Find your stair now, go up, visit, come down. Going to Heaven should not be some kind of escape, or a reward held at a far-away distance like the cookie jar on the top shelf. Going to Heaven is our right. It is our home. If we aren’t doing it, it’s because we have no idea that the Spirit of God is our passport.

I wrote all of this just to get people thinking. As far as I know the Tribulation hasn't started yet so we time. Until then, let us keep laboring here on the Earth so that when our Master returns, he finds us hard at work and not napping on our couches waiting for Him to do everything for us. It is time to arise, get up and grow up; we are no more children but men and women of God.

Our Hero, Darth Vader

Some people don’t understand my generation’s obsession with Star Wars and comic heroes.

When I was about four years old, Star Wars came out. Now just try to imagine what kind of impact a masterpiece film like that would have on a four-year-old. Think about it; the world is new. You are new. You know nothing but what your parents tell you. All you’ve seen of the world is a few weird streets, some shopping marts, and a school you don’t like. You’re still not even sure who your Grandparents are, you’ve only seen them once or twice in your life that you remember. You’re still trying hard to figure out what toes are for.

Then suddenly one day, mom and dad take you to this dark mysterious building full of the smell of popcorn and candy and other seductive delights of the Dark Side, and suddenly the lights dim… and your brand-new, untouched, impressionable, clean-slate consciousness is permanently imprinted with the most mind-blowing experience you could have possibly had as a human being. You are suddenly in Outer Space, looking through a giant window of light that looks more real than the real world, and hearing Darth Vader’s theme-song rumbling your seat cushion with the power of the Force in spine-melting jaw-dropping ecstasy.

I swear, I don’t think I blinked for two hours. I certainly don’t remember breathing.

I lived a whole lifetime in those six hours it took to watch all three movies during my young childhood. I grew up in ways, in the corners of my mind, that I never imagined I would. I developed a hunger for fearlessness, power, courage, justice, respect, and a world worth living in. I saw the Rebellion and I knew it was my own; I knew if the world refused to change into a world we could be proud of, we could MAKE it change, even if we were just a little ragged force and the Empire looked vast and official and undefeatable.

But most of all, I loved Darth Vader.

Adults I talk to sometimes don’t understand why my generation latched onto the ‘bad guy’ so strongly. They saw the scene where Darth Vader is choking the life out of an underling using the Force and are horrified. My generation sees that and all of us uniformly grin in feral glee. Is it because we were permanently warped by our collective childhood awakening? No. It’s because as children we saw something in that great film that perhaps only a child could see. But watch out: children see things sometimes more clearly than adults do.

The fact that George Lucas himself didn’t understand his own inspired message was clear to everyone who saw his attempts as a prequel. He ripped Darth Vader apart and made him into just another pre-fabricated bad guy, and a pathetically weak one at that. An insult to the very name of Vader, like pissing on his funeral pyre. Obviously the entire revelation of Lord Vader had been completely lost on his creator. Perhaps Vader had been a message from God to Lucas trying to teach him a lesson that Lucas never learned.

The thing about Vader was that he was just as much the good guy, perhaps more so, than Luke was. In fact, nobody liked Luke. He was weak, sniveling, whining, a little spoiled brat child who reminded everyone of the kid who eats paste in the back of the room. There was no role-model there. As a four-year-old, I remember a vague sort of pity for him and a grudging sympathy that yes, everyone wants to get off of Planet Dirtball, and we were a little bit proud of him that he actually had some kind of mystic power that redeemed him from being a complete and total waste of flesh.

But that was all. Nobody liked Luke. Why? Because he was a coward. I suppose the story was supposed to be about him coming to grips with being a coward and getting over it, but from our perspective he was forced (no pun intended) to ‘get over it’ by pure circumstances, and never did it of his own free will. Thus, he never got over it in truth; he just somehow managed to grit his teeth and temporarily endure his obvious cowardice long enough to do a few ‘hero’ like things in the war, as if by accident.

But he was no hero; he was certainly nothing we wanted to follow. He reminded us too much of the rest of the ‘can’t we just get along’ whiners who would rather give you a flower than pull out a light saber; the proof was when in the end he threw his weapon away and refused to fight. Hippie. Bah. And we all knew that as soon as he got the chance, he’d crawl into a shack somewhere and become one of those old Nam War Vets who boobytrap everything, live in a bottle, and are afraid of their own shadow.

Luke, in our mind, was merely a mechanism of the plot who existed only to show off Darth Vader’s glory.

Totally the opposite of Luke, Darth Vader was literally the embodiment of fearlessness. He was the physical representation of power, magnificence, confidence, even justice and honor. He never flinched, he never feared, he never looked back. He forged ahead, a dark god in a universe that needed to be spanked real bad. And in the end, even his unshakable loyalty to his master (something we could totally understand) had to fall to his true heroism: doing what was right and killing the Empire itself in the form of the Emperor, and everything he represented.

Why did Vader represent justice? Because his nasty, sniveling underlings were so truly puerile, they deserved to be choked to death. We’d all seen snot-noses like those guys ruining our parent’s lives at work, and we dreamed of a Darth Vader coming to the office and doing the death-grip thing in order to give them what they deserved, and save our parents. Everyone my age knows to the core of their being that in this society, at least since 1970, there’s been no justice. The arrogant criminals get away with everything, and everyone turns a blind eye from bosses to city administrators, and your parents repeat like a chant that we have to “grin and bear it”. But Vader didn’t. Vader had a light saber, and knew how to use it. Vader was like the Angel of Justice, the Angel of Death.

And why honor? Because Vader always, always, always, did what he said he’d do. In an age when all of our fathers always lied about every promise they ever made, and no promise was ever kept, we knew that when Darth Vader swore that he would come after you and hunt you down, you were a gonner. We felt true love and admiration. Yes: here was a man who would do what he said. He was our father figure. Love, after all, is not kindness. Love is doing what is right, no matter what it costs.

My generation grew up in a world without heroes, without defenders. All of the men who were held up to us as “great” were just talkers and hippies. Martin Luther King Jr. might have impressed our parents, but all we ever saw him do was yell at people to be nice to each other. We learned that in Kindergarten. So what? This is our hero? The same old black and white worn-out clip, over and over. He sounds like our dad giving a lecture.

And the hippies were guys who invented… what… a new kind of eco-friendly toilet paper? A new type of fluorescent light? Some of them got Nobel Peace Prizes for something. I have no idea what the hippies ever did that was useful.

In other words, every adult in our world was blowing a lot of hot air about inventing esoteric stuff nobody needs, talking about making rocket ships, saying ‘why can’t we just all get along’ and pointing fingers at one another accusing each other of not being nice... while they all totally ignored the REAL problems. Things like crooks running all the businesses, and every boss keeping double books and overlooking scams. Things like landlords who could destroy you if they felt like it. Things like rapists and gang members on the streets so kids were terrified to ride their bikes home from school every day of their lives.

These were the problems no airbag or hippie could ever help us with. We needed Darth Vader; we needed him, his light saber, his unwavering determination to kill anyone who annoyed him, and his god-like invincibility. We could all imagine him taking on every freak on the face of the earth and just slaughtering them, and the world would be healed.

For the same reason, we loved the Terminator. These were our fathers. These were our heroes. These were the men we looked up to, the kind of men the boys wanted to become. The kind of men that don’t exist in our father’s generation. Fearless, knowing what just had to be done, and able to do it with mighty unstoppable power.

No rules, no red tape… every kid my age knows that the world-wide culture of bureaucracy and law only exists in this age to give the criminals a nice big webwork of cover, and to screw every single law abiding citizen until they have to pay more in taxes than they have food money for, so their families go hungry. Perhaps once, law was excellent and protected the people, but increasingly today law is becoming hypocrisy; again and again it ignores the misery of us, the normal people, and it spins webs of intrigue that cover evil men’s scamming everyone else. This is because the law is amoral, and headless; it has no leader and no police. Whomever is most clever makes policy, and the criminals are the most clever, so the criminals are the only ones who are not touched. Just look at the insurance system.

They say the law is blind; we saw that the law is a blindfolded marionette.

But Vader didn’t follow law. Neither did the Terminator. They ignored “keep out” signs, which shut us kids out of every place we could go to play and trapped us in a prison cell world. They did what we must not, what we can not; they were freedom, they were truth. They did what needed to be done at a fundamental human level, basing their decisions solely on their gut instinct, totally ignoring today’s crooked web of politics which is just a shadow of the law-web.

They were like Punisher, and Wolverine, and a variety of other comic “anti” heroes. They were of the people, they were normal people like us, tired of being thrown in jail or having our cars taken away because we forgot to dot an “i” or cross a “t” in some paperwork somewhere, or getting handcuffed and thrown in jail for an overdue parking ticket. But unlike us, they were able to fight back.

A generation has been born, and has now risen to their maturity, who grew up waiting for Vader to come. We grew up waiting for the Terminator, and the Punisher, and Wolverine. We are all looking for them to arrive; and when they do, we will have our Rebellion. Because we cannot destroy this system of increasing corruption until it has been judged by the One who is master over all; but the judgement is coming. When Heaven hands this world over to us, we will know, and we will take up our light sabers. 

We want to run free in the world. We want to be able to walk down the streets without fear. We want to buy a car and be able to keep it all our lives if we want, without asking anyone’s permission and without paying protection money to the legal mob. We want to work for a living and actually keep the money we make. We want to be able to live in a house we own forever, that nobody can kick us out of and make us and our children homeless overnight. We want… we NEED… freedom. 

Be comforted. The judgement will come. The Empire will fall. The red tape will burn. The system of corruption will be replaced by honesty. All the paperwork that so cleverly stole our lives will vanish forever like a bad dream, and we will have a government that really is for the people. The land will belong to nobody again. The water will belong to nobody. The air will belong to nobody. All the criminals who take our food money and take our cars and houses away will die and pass away like a bad dream. And finally, finally, we will be free as human beings for the first time in our lives.

We will be fearless. We will BE Vader.

Love Defined

What is love? One would think that any third-grader could tell you the answer to that one. Love is when two people meet and have this overwhelming feeling of need and attraction for one another that is so strong they can’t eat or sleep unless they are with each other.

The essence of this popular ‘love’ is that the other person completes, fulfills, makes whole. Without them, the one who is in love is absolutely miserable as a half-person, a wretched starved creature who cannot — and does not want to — survive alone.

Odd that this ‘half-creature’ seemed perfectly happy and able to survive before meeting their supposed ‘other half’ then, isn’t it? If they were okay before they met their one true love, where did half of them vanish to? Did it vaporize the moment they came into contact with this ‘beloved’ so that for the rest of their lives they are no longer able to function properly? Or did they just never realize they were miserable until they came into the presence of this deity?

The workings of this popular ‘love’ is peculiar. In pursuit of ‘love’, people act insane. They will do very bizarre things trying to get noticed… either by a paramour, or by their family whom they feel don’t love them enough. Ironic that half the time the one who falls in love doesn’t even really like their beloved.

It drives some people to whine and nag their relatives and friends who don’t remember their birthday, and it drives others to attack those who are closest to them. Still others make fools of themselves and willingly take upon themselves massive amounts of shame and humiliation — which they usually never recover from — in a gamble that if they trade enough currency for a chance to get noticed by the beloved, the beloved will be so smitten with them that ‘true love’ will blossom and they’ll live their life in bliss. Faith in this gamble — which is surely worse odds than even winning the lottery — is probably why so many innocents lose their virginity at so young an age. It’s lottery with the soul.

But ‘true love’ never seems to blossom, even after romance has come and gone. A person who can be life and breath to his or her lover one day can overnight transform into a stench that cannot be endured. Love can turn to hate so quickly and so fully that divorced people think of their former mate as the very devil, often for the rest of their lives. More so the one who wanted to divorce a long time ago, but who was never allowed to and had to live with the sorry bastard until he (or she) died.

Looking at the realm of ‘love’ this way, there seem to be more questions than answers. One would even think it’s too complicated, it can never be understood, it should only remain in the realm of poetry and philosophy forever. But one of the fundamental lessons of Etherics is that only darkness is complicated, and only wickedness cannot be understood because it must always hide; anything true is simple, and anything right is very plain.

So we must not be seeing the real ‘love’. This popular love must be some kind of an imitator attempting to creep in and take the place of real love for some nefarious reason of its own, because real love should be really easy to comprehend. The only person who needs to make things confusing and complicated is a deceiver, and the only purpose of a deceiver is to steal, kill, and destroy.

True Love

Why are people so desperate to find love that they will risk their life, their sanity, their dignity and their self-respect? Is life really that horrible without this punishing, brutal beast that we must slave and sacrifice all on its unforgiving alter?

The fact is that the human spirit has a fundamental need for love just like the physical body has a need for food. Without love the spirit dies, and without food the body withers. But people these days have gotten completely confused over what, exactly, love is. They keep trying to ‘eat’ this popular ‘love’ stuff, and it doesn’t satisfy or fill them up; it just makes things even more miserable.

Thus, poets and songwriters yowl continually that one must always seek for love but never find; and one must always bare one’s soul to the soul-eater and never be comforted.

The basic mistake is to believe that love is a feeling. There are feelings of relief, delight, pleasure, gratification, satisfaction, etc. that come along with love, but love itself is not a feeling nor does it dwell in the realm of the soul (see Spirit, Soul, Body). Love dwells in the higher realm of the spirit, and it is a spiritual force, not a soulical (or emotional) one. In fact, one can experience true love and feel nothing at all in an emotional way.

The second misconception is to believe that love is the receiving of something. One often hears formerly married people (who, amusingly, never had any happiness in their marriage) harp about ‘give and take’. What they really mean by this is that the spouse is supposed to give, and they are supposed to take. Others believe that their own ‘giving’ is simply the absence of giving pain; if I don’t do anything particularly nasty to my mate, they should be happy that I’m acting so civil and thank their stars.

In fact, true love is the spiritual determination to give. That is, in fact, the full and complete definition of love. It may seem overly simple, but truth often does. For all its simplicity, like a prism in a beam of light, its effects are diverse and astonishing.

This true-love giving is not the sort of petty, conditional giving we are used to. The usual sort of giving secretly keeps a little tally in its head: I have given this much of such-and-such, that means I should get something of equal value back someday. Usually we expect to receive the same amount of ‘give’ back from our mate (or family), and we are very disappointed when they do not ever pay their debt. But what are we? A spouse, or a merchant?

True love giving gives, and when it does, it is instantly satisfied. It does not want a reward or some kind of payment, because it is finished. There is no debt. The very act of giving was like painting a masterpiece, or doing the perfect work after years of practice; just doing it was the victory. Like going alone to shoot hoops and getting ten free-throws in a row perfect, the person who does it for the love of playing itself doesn’t need an audience. They are just thrilled they saw that happen from their own hands, and they walk home with a big smile feeling content.

True love is art. It is the spiritual desire to give, more to satisfy the giver than anyone else. The giver wants to see everything done perfectly, so that he or she can be personally satisfied that it was done in an exceedingly excellent way. The giver does not want anyone else to be inconvenienced at all by the giving art; he or she will do it all themselves and will insist on it. A painter doesn’t need someone else to help them paint.

True love takes practice. Humans begin life as selfish, and slowly grow out of it as they realize selfishness sucks. Continually seeking to improve and to become happier, the mature human eventually discovers the secret of real love, and is happy for the rest of their existence. True love makes its own happiness; it is not dependent on another person to supply it. If the object of affection is not thrilled by the gift, oh well; at least the gift itself was glorious. It is never wasted, because it was a delight in itself.

The true lover can love anyone; a spouse, a family member, a stranger, whole crowds of strangers, or just themselves equally without difficulty. They feel no jealousy; their giving can be done for anyone, at any time. There is enough to go around.

No More Misery

The basic need of the human spirit is to give love, not to get it. When we spend our whole lives trying to ‘get’, we are condemning ourselves to endless years of torment and pain. That rush of excitement and desire we feel when we find a compatible person and ‘fall in love’ as they say is really just the thrill of the spirit as it gets ready to begin to give. We could give already before that to our family and friends; this is why we didn’t feel too miserable before we met the ‘other half’. However, with more compatibility comes more opportunity to give. That increased opportunity is what is exciting.

The betrayal we feel during divorce or breakup is the sharp pain of another person refusing to allow us to give any more. Probably the cruelest thing one human can do to another is to slam the doors of giving on them, making it impossible. We feel a distinct panic that we will never find another person so compatible again, thus we will never be allowed to give as deeply again! Horror of horrors!

But it is not a fear that we will be alone that is really terrible. Nor is it a fear that we won’t ever receive another gift. It is the fear that we won’t be able to give.

People who shut the doors of giving on themselves, people who hate themselves, are going to be always afraid. People who shut the doors of giving on God, and refuse to give to God, are going to feel alone. And people who shut the doors of giving on other people, from family to lovers to strangers, are going to feel unappreciated.

We must open those doors, and begin to give even if we don’t feel it will be well received. We can do something. Find out a person’s favorite kind of paperback book, buy them one. Help take an elderly lady out to do her hair. Give an extra dollar or five as a tip. Give God a little respect. Pay attention to your own birthday and celebrate even if you’re all by yourself. There are ways to give if one will only start to look for them. They don’t have to be super-huge at first, like a true-love marriage; they can be more humble and still be very satisfying.

False Love

Now it becomes easy to see why so many so-called ‘love stories’ end in disaster. For instance, take the ‘falling in love’ idea. Two people meet, they are staggered with delight to meet one another, they instantly cling to each other and… what? What do they do? They begin to try and ‘get’ something from one another. They try to get kisses, they try to get attention, they do weird things to get attention, they try to get, get, get…

The more they try to get, the more annoyed the other person becomes.

What is the problem? If true love is just giving, shouldn’t at least one half of the couple be happy to do all of the giving?

It’s not “just giving” that makes love-giving satisfying. True love giving is a burning desire within the heart to give, of one’s own free will, especially to someone who didn’t deserve it or didn’t expect it. That is when it’s best. The more the other person expects it, the less strength the giving has, until it loses all power and just whimpers and dies an early death in the face of blatant selfishness.

When one person is willing to give, but the other person is convinced it is their right and honor to do all the taking, neither of them will be happy. The taker will be miserable because taking can never, ever fill the void of their own need to give (if they are not giving, they are empty), and the giver can never be happy because all of their efforts are both expected, and not enough. Usually this relationship dissolves into the pathetic lopsided agony of the beaten wife and the abusive husband, the user and the victim, the vampire and his prey, until finally the giver just gives up and dies and the taker moves on to find fresh blood.

If both lovers are takers, there will be instant conflict because after a brief and extremely passionate (and probably steamy) episode of wild taking, very soon all the blood between the two vampires will be sucked out, and there will be no life left in the relationship. Inevitably the double-takers will both accuse the other of not giving enough, which is correct; but it is the fault of both for being selfish pricks, not the fault of one over the other. A couple who screams at one another all the time are both to blame.

If both are givers, there must also be civility. “Giving and taking” is not the answer; there should be no taking. Taking is pure barbarism. “Giving and allowing to give” is what should be happening. Both giving, and both being gracious and polite enough to allow the other to give, no matter how clumsy or awkward their unpracticed attempts may be at first.

There is a gentility to receiving which has been lost in the modern age. It is a politeness of a lost civilization, an age of chivalry whose sun set four generations ago. One does not make fun of a gift, no matter how moronic it may look. One does not ever, EVER, refuse a gift even if one does not want or need it, and especially when one does not feel worthy of it. One must always receive a gift without examining it or examining oneself to judge whether the giver is right in giving. Who made you the judge of another person’s heart? If they felt it was right to give, then it is your duty to accept with quietness, grace, and kindness.

Learning to receive is perhaps the one largest gap that has developed in American culture these days. Everyone wants to be totally independent, nobody wants to rely on “charity”. Oddly enough, the word “charity” is the English translation of the Biblical word ‘hased’, which has no English equivalent. ‘Hased’ means “a forceful desire to give”. If we won’t receive love because we are too proud, how can anyone give? And how can anyone be happy?

The Ship and the Raft

The conflict of the current political world in America can be defined thus: there are two groups which have conflicting definitions of freedom.

One group, I will call them group A, feels that freedom is to be in possession of a goal of some kind and have the power and ability to pursue that goal to success. This is like a sailing ship with a rudder. The rudder and the sails give the ship tools with which to use the sea and the wind to steer and propel it toward a goal.

The other, group B, feels that pursuing some goal is missing the point of life entirely; life is only to experience the moment, total aimlessness with a happy feeling, for every moment until death (whenever that may be). They can be comparable to a raft which has no rudder and no sail; the passenger merely lays on his back and drifts forever, caring nothing about where he is or where he is going so long as right now he is happy.

Obviously if we think about it, group A is more likely to actually be happy and live a long time, because a ship with a rudder and a sail will take them across the sea and get them out of the searing-hot sun to a place with fresh food and water as quickly as possible. On the other hand, group B’s raft is going to float around like a tiny island in the middle of a desert for only a short while until the unhappy, scorched, and extremely bored passenger perishes and dies.

Group A is known for their forethought, their ability to plan, think, succeed, and take care of themselves. They are self-motivated and always involved in new progress. Group B is known for their reliance on plain stupid mysticism that makes no rational sense, hedonism, and the ‘wounded beggar’ trick to stay alive. They are beggars and borrowers. They are a drain and parasite who slows progress in the society around them. In short, all the guys on rafts are always giving the guys on ships guilt-trips so the guys on ships will keep throwing down food and water and sunblock so these raft people don’t just all die. And the ship people keep doing it; because they have all been taught, ‘crossing the sea is hard. When someone asks for help, never ever refuse them, because someday you might need help yourself.’

When boiled down, every kind of person can fit into one of these two categories. Is he a merry rogue? He is a raft person. The philosophy of the raft, otherwise known as the bohemian and other more infamous titles I won’t bother to list, is that anything goes. As long as you continue to remain free from all ties and entanglements, any method of securing your freedom and continued existence in your happy moment is allowable. This includes betrayal, sabotage, lies, murder, anything. And no matter how ‘noble’ a raft person believes they are, at one point or another it’s guaranteed they will at some stage sink to the lowest levels to cut a clinging rope. Their very religion of hedonism insists they do so, for they must never be bound to any obligation or forced to think too deeply, or they might jeopardize the Happiness of the Moment.

Because raft people don’t later remember their evil act doesn’t mean anything; raft people train themselves to have notoriously short memories so that they can continue to experience the moment of bliss without reference to future or past. Thinking of the future (how they are going to eat and how they are going to survive) is too scary, and thinking of the past (all of their criminal actions) is too humiliating.

Raft people assume that ship people are miserable; because raft people believe fervently that their lifestyle defines true happiness. Since the ship people are their opposite, that means the ship people must also be the opposite of happy. Of course, raft people don’t realize they are building their argument on a flawed foundation: they are assuming they are both free, and happy. From a ship person’s point of view, a hapless castaway trapped on a little raft with no food, no water, no way off, and nowhere to go is in a miserable jail. Not only that, but who can be happy when they are that sunburned? But perhaps the rafters only are able to tell when they are ‘happy’ by hovering so close to misery, that any slight relief seems to them like feelings of ecstasy.

Raft people like to lecture ship people on how the ship people should become just like them; because after all, you see, the raft people have proven that you can successfully drift on a raft all your life just bumping along, doing whatever makes you happy in the moment without any forethought or hindsight. By nature of their peculiar blindness, of course, the raft people cannot see that they are actually parasites living off the ship people, and if the ship people weren’t so loyal and reliable, hardworking and forward-thinking, they would not have enough supplies to share with both their own crew and the hundreds of stray rafters they come across with every voyage.

It is no wonder, then, that ship people don’t listen to the nonsense of raft people. No ship person who has spent his life supplying not only his own needs but also making up for the lack of the rafters around him, who are bleeding him dry, could ever conscience becoming such a useless entity himself. He knows the cost, which the raft people have never counted. He would feel so guilty that he is forcing other ship people to take him on as yet another charity case that he would be unable to live with himself.

But raft people have never faced this dilemma. They feel absolutely no guilt at their shameless usury, because they have trained themselves not to think too far into the future. Perhaps their lack of the simple and satisfying ability to plan — a skill which in itself dissolves worry and fear and makes the future bright and happy — has sentenced them to their pathetic fate. Perhaps it is a purposeful refusal to plan which has done so, or an unreasonable conviction that only evil awaits them if they should ever think of the future, kind of like the superstition that if you think of something too much it must happen.

Whatever the failing, raft people are crowding up the seas in these great and awesome days, only moments before the year of fire and emergency. The first law of emergency is this: he who is fit will survive. The weak, the sick, the lame, the parasite will all be washed away by the simple logistics of calamity. Only those who can run will escape the falling building. Only those who can swim can stay afloat in the flood. Only those with a sail and a rudder can remain stable even on tempest-tossed stormy seas.

When catastrophe hits our world on a global scale all at once, Armageddon won’t be enough to destroy the earth as silly rafter-type doomsayers like to preach. (Rafters, without any ability to realistically gauge and perceive the future, always blow things wildly out of proportion; but, poor things, they can’t help themselves). The earth is a very big, very strong structure and will survive just fine. It’s survived many catastrophes like this before without so much as a few new rift valleys and maybe a slight shift in climate.

No, the ‘world’ that will be destroyed is not the physical earth. It is the world of the Rafters, a world which allows them to exist. When only the fit will survive, and only the fore-thinkers and the planners, the ones who are able to set goals and reach them, the ones who have realistic perceptions of the sea and the supplies needed to cross it, will be able to adapt to the earth’s new climate for generations afterward, this hedonistic and foolish idea that ‘freedom is aimlessness’ will vanish even from the memory of the human race.

We won’t believe in the future that people could have thought something so blatantly stupid. Our children will probably laugh at us when we attempt to tell them about it.

Sacrificing Your Children to Molech

While I was living in Papua New Guinea, I had the opportunity to attend an exclusive one-week “missions training course” which was a lot of fun; we got to go visit some really great people out in the tribal areas of New Guinea that hadn’t seen a white man until about 15 years before I got there. That was a real experience! We were a bunch of college-age kids, having come for a variety of reasons.

During the course, one night they sat us all down around a bonfire and had a serious ‘talk’ with us. As part of the training, they were teaching us what would be required of us if we decided we’d like to become missionaries. They handed out popsicle sticks and pencils, and told us to write on the stick our dearest, most precious dream. We all did as instructed, because so far everything had been enjoyable and enlightening as we learned pigin-English, went hiking in the jungle, and went to nifty native markets.

I somehow didn’t see it coming. Maybe it was because the missionary who was leading the bonfire-time was smiling and acting friendly the whole while. I thought we’d trade sticks and tell something about ourselves.

Instead, the missionary told us that becoming a really committed Christian willing to follow God to the ends of the earth meant giving up every dream, every desire, and every hope we’d ever had. He then told us to throw the stick — our greatest dream — into the fire, and when we did, we were supposed to really honestly give it up within ourselves.

I watched in disbelief as the group of twenty kids, all suddenly sad, some bursting into tears, all did as commanded. I got up and stormed back to my cabin, furious, and I still have that popsicle stick to this day.

There was a practice in ancient Israel that God found absolutely disgusting. It was based on the story of the sacrifice of Isaac: how Abraham took his only and most beloved son, the son of his old age, and laid him on a pile of firewood and almost sacrificed him like a sheep, because God had asked him to. In the story, God stopped Abraham from doing such a horrible thing, because God had only wanted to know — in Abraham’s specific case — whether he really believed God could bring about a whole nation through Isaac, and whether God kept his promises. Abraham was fully convinced that God would raise Isaac from the dead, and didn’t even hesitate.

But in later years, this test got mingled with demonic practices and turned by the religious leaders into a horrible abomination. In order to prove their loyalty to God, they taught the people of Israel to actually kill their children on alters to God, and burn them. Perhaps they believed that by giving up their greatest, most precious and beloved thing in the world, God would have to hear their prayer and do whatever they asked. Maybe they were just trying to prove how loyal they were to God.

Either way, God became furious with this evil practice and thunderously condemned it in no uncertain terms.

“And they built the high places of the Ba‘al, which are in the valley of Ben-hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molech; which I did not command them, nor did it come into my mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.” (Jer. 32:35)

“Again, you shall say to the Sons of Israel: Whoever he be of the Sons of Israel or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, that gives any of his seed to Molech; he shall surely be put to death: the people of the land shall stone him with stones. And I will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people; because he has given of his seed to Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name. And if the people of the land do at all hide their eyes from that man, when he gives of his seed to Molech, and do not kill him, then I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go astray after him, whoring to Molech from among the people.” (Lev. 20:2-5)

Child-sacrifice was evidentially rampant in Israel. There are caves under large boulders all over the land, boulders either in the ‘clefts of the rocks’ (valleys) or on top of hills, including the rock that the dome of the rock is built around, where the Canaanites would carry out disgusting practices. According to legend and such persons as Michael Rood (who may or may not be entirely accurate), they would impregnate virgins in these caves, then kill the resultant child there. Impressed by the brutality of these rites, the later Hebrews who occupied the land after them took up the same practices.

We can see however that the golden calf, and the worship of the bull-god and all of his rites, traveled with the Hebrews all the way from Egypt. Back then, he seemed to be the most popular god on the planet.

The 12th century rabbi, Rashi, commenting on Jeremiah 7:31 made the following claim:

“Tophet is Moloch, which was made of brass; and they heated him from his lower parts; and his hands being stretched out, and made hot, they put the child between his hands, and it was burnt; when it vehemently cried out; but the priests beat a drum, that the father might not hear the voice of his son, and his heart might not be moved.”

There are a variety of other accounts of the same freakish practices carried out in Greek and Roman times to Molech’s later incarnations of Saturn and Kronos, but I won’t horrify the reader by quoting any more of them. They are all pretty much the same.

Molech was probably one of the various forms of the minotaur, Ba’al, some kind of fire or sun god. Both the word Molech (Melech) and Ba’al mean “king” or “master”, and the bull is the ancient symbol for the ‘leader’ or ‘strong one’. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, “A” or aleph, meaning first or the number “one”, is the head of a bull. Molech seemed to be some kind of father-figure to the ancient Ammonites, and possibly the non-lethal fire-baptism or “passing through the flames” was a form of giving the child over to the deity, so that he would become their parent and protect them.

Early Greek mythology hints at a practice of rendering an infant immortal by passing them through a fire, and it seems the practice of giving children were given a kind of non-lethal baptism of fire by passing them through a fire to sanctify them for Molech was widespread throughout the ancient world. But although most children escaped death at the hands of the golden calf, a select few did not.

What is a dream?

In the ancient days, a child was considered in many places less than entirely human until it came of age; they were more of a possession, like a wife. God never intended people to think of wives and their children this way, but it is a natural result of the arrogance of sin. The man ‘owned’ the wife and children; like slaves, he could do what he wanted with them. This was especially true in the case of the children: he’d made them, so they were his, the work of his hands, his own craftsmanship. And he could make more to replace them.

In the same way, people these days believe that dreams are of our own invention. Somehow we have learned from the secular world that dreams are something we make up as children or young adults, and have no more and no less value than a daydream. Usually a dream is to do, or become, something wonderful. A dream to be a doctor, to be a musician, to be an artist, or to invent something, to create.

This desire to create was not generated in the heart of Man. We are in the image of God, but we are not the Creator. All thoughts come from one of two places: either God, or from the evil spiritual creatures that are now infesting our planet. If the thought is good, and brings life and hope and joy and peace, it is from God.

Dreams are given to us from God. In fact, they are our inheritance, our own individual little piece of Creation. When we are born again, we receive a piece of the Spirit of God, to make us alive and to dwell in us forever. This is like the portions of land that were given to the Hebrews when they went into the promised land: each man was ordered never to give up his inheritance, never to sell his land, and in the year of Jubilee any land that had been loaned to other families had to be returned to the original. This was also why a widow with no children had to marry the brother of her husband; so she could have a son and name him after the dead husband, so that the man’s land — his inheritance — never got given to anyone else.

That little chunk of the promised land came complete with houses, vines, fruit trees, springs of water, everything they needed to live a full and abundant life. In the same way, the dream we are given from God contains everything we need to make us gloriously fulfilled on this earth. It is what God expects of us; to take the dreams He gave us and make them come to pass. They take hard work, they take dedication, and we will suffer persecution: people will mock us and laugh at us. But it is what we are called and chosen to do.

Dreams are like children. As little ones they need constant attention; they play and they are small and silly, and they can’t support themselves. But as they grow up and get bigger they get more serious, more capable, until as adults they should be able to support themselves — and us.

Throwing that popsicle stick into that bonfire would have been just like taking one of my children and tossing it into the flames. It would be just like one of the Hebrews burning and destroying his inherited land and moving away forever, giving it up.

Why would a parent be so desperate as to sacrifice his son or daughter to an idol? Obviously he believed the return would be worth the cost. Maybe he believed he would prove his loyalty to God, and God would give him greater rewards for it. Maybe he did it to buy favors from God, or a better place in Heaven. Maybe a crown.

Why would Christians sacrifice their dreams in a bonfire to a god who doesn’t allow those dreams to live, and grow up, and become what God intended them to be?

This practice of sacrificing one’s heart’s desires, ones dreams and hopes and fondest wishes “for God” is so widespread in the Church that I doubt it will ever be removed from it. But I can assure you: God never asked them to do it. It never even entered His mind. It is not what He intends, desires, or condones.

In truth it is an abominable practice. God gave us things to sacrifice to Him; we are to give Him the first of our flocks and fruits — today that translates as any money-making endeavor. We are to bring His priests bread, and fruit, and the best food. We are to provide the House of God with everything it requires to function. But all of this is supposed to be given out of the surplus that God gives us: the blessing, the overflowing money and prosperity that comes from the fulfillment of the dreams we were born with.

If we sacrifice the dreams themselves, we won’t have anything else to give to God, because we have just cut off His source of giving. We have not only condemned ourselves to a life of lack and want, but also a life of living outside God’s will for our lives. If our dream was to be a baseball player, and we become a banker instead, we are not doing what God told us to do.

Do not sacrifice your children to Molech. Do not kill your dreams in some ill-fated quest to impress God somehow. God is only impressed by obedience, not by sacrifice.

“For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” (Hosea 6:6)

What you give up for God is not nearly as important as what you keep for God. In fact, the keeping is much harder. Anyone can kill their dreams; but how many can follow them? And anyway, if you think that God requires for you to kill your dreams in order to follow Him to the ends of the earth, you don’t know God at all and you are probably living entirely outside His plan. Don’t blame Him if your life sucks.