BAD HABITS
CHARLO, New Brunswick, November 20, 2023 – I know someone, a lifelong Catholic, who once explained to me why she sticks with the Catholic church despite its brutal history and endless scandals. “It’s like a friend”, she said, staring rather pointedly at me, “who does and says some things you don’t agree with, but she’s your friend, so you overlook them.”
As charitable a gesture as that may be in terms of friendship, it doesn’t pass the smell test for the things of God. There should be nothing about God or anything related to God that you overlook or look past because, well, it’s God, so exceptions need to be made. There should never be a sense that you’re compromising some part of yourself to remain loyal to God. With God, there should only be a sense of homecoming and of all parts falling into place and fitting perfectly. With God, there should be no part of you that you hold back or any part of God that you agree to agree to but only while holding your nose.
I could never remain within an organization that alleged to represent God and yet committed crime after crime, most of which went unreported and unrepented. I would think that, after poring over and considering the presented evidence, I would remove myself from such an organization. When I was a practising Catholic for the first three and a half years after my rebirth from atheism, I lived and moved in what I can only describe as a Catholic bubble. Yes, I’d heard rumors about what all those priests had done, but I was sure it was mostly only rumors and if there had been any truth to the rumors, the issue would have been dealt with appropriately.
I trusted the priests in the churches I attended. I trusted the deacons. I trusted everyone who worked in the churches or their affiliated organizations. I attended mass every day, sometimes twice during the weekdays and always twice and sometimes three times on Sundays. I was besotted with God and Jesus, and the heady scent of incense during mass was to me like their aftershave cologne. I was convinced that God lived in the churches I attended because that’s what I’d been taught, as a Catholic, to believe. I wasn’t taught that God was with me – born-again me – through God’s Holy Spirit. No, I was taught that God was only in the Catholic churches and if I wanted God to hear my prayers, I had to go to church to pray, God being (by implication) rather hard of hearing.
God let me labour under the delusions fed to me within my Catholic bubble because at least I had a place to go every day where I could be a believer. At least I had a place to go every day where I could hear God’s Word being preached. The reading of scripture during the mass was always the highlight of my day, and sometimes I was invited to read – never the Gospel (only the priests were allowed to read that), but I could read parts of the Old Testament or Paul’s letters, or better said, God read them through me. The priests and parishioners liked it when I read. They’d say to me: “Something happens when you read.” The priests looked at me strangely sometimes, as if they were trying to figure me out. The parishioners, too, would approach me after mass and ask me why my faith was so strong, and I would tell them I was born-again. At the time, I didn’t realize that talking about being born-again was all but verboten in a Catholic church. One of the priests sniffed at me when I said I was born-again: “We’re all born again at baptism”, he stated curtly and then walked away.
When the evidence against the Catholic church started to present itself to me, my Catholic bubble began to deflate. I ignored the evidence at first, wanting to protect the “Mother Church” that had protected me during my spiritual infancy, but not all parents are loving and not all parents should be parents. The deeper I looked into the long dark history of Catholicism, the more uneasy I grew, and the more uneasy I grew, the deeper I looked into the church’s history. What I found both horrified and outraged me. I finally got to the point where I was even changing the responses I said during mass because I didn’t agree with their content. I remember the priests and deacons glancing at me quizzically when I did that, wondering if they’d misheard or I’d misspoken, but I refused to say something before God that I didn’t believe. It was during this end-phase of disillusion that, in answer to a prayer, God showed me how Catholicism was keeping me from doing his will. The minute he gave me this revelation I walked out of the church, never to return.
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I dreamt last night about the diehard Catholic I mentioned at the outset of this article. She was waiting for an elevator, and when it arrived, she tripped walking into it. Her head was inside the elevator and her body was outside, so when the door closed on her neck, she was decapitated. The elevator then went up and down with just her head rolling around inside. I thought about calling her today and telling her about the dream, but God said no, just write this. She won’t want to hear about the dream.
Just write this.
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Nothing about God should feel like a compromise. Nothing God does or says should make you uneasy or hesitant. God is Truth, and as born-again believers we’ve been given God’s Spirit of Truth that resonates with God’s every Word and Command. Jesus says that we live by every word that comes from the mouth of God. He says “we live” – he doesn’t say we cringe or recoil. He doesn’t say we compromise or look the other way. He doesn’t say we give God a pass because he’s God – he says: WE LIVE by every word that comes from the mouth of God. There is nothing that God says that we should disagree with. Nothing. And if an organization that purports to speak for God makes us feel uneasy, ashamed, or compromised, we need to leave it.
With a friend, you can overlook bad habits, but not with a church.
CIRCUMCISION OF THE HEART
CHARLO, New Brunswick, November 19, 2023 – Lots of people claiming to be this or that these days with very little but their own insistence to back them up. Men claiming to be women, women claiming to be cats, Whites claiming to be Aboriginal. In every case, there’s something to be gained from the claim or it wouldn’t be made. Usually, what’s to be gained is money or a competitive edge. For kids, claiming to be the opposite sex gets them lots of attention. Kids love attention. It’s like emotional candy.
Paul talks about true Jews being those who are circumcised of the heart. Circumcision used to be a big deal in Old Testament days; if you wanted to join one of the 12 tribes, you had to submit to getting a part of your privates chopped off (if you were male). Sometimes, a part of the privates of other cultural adherents was also chopped off, as booty. David chopped off the foreskins of 200 Philistines to win the hand of King Saul’s daughter. I guess people were generally less skittish in those days about chopping things off.
But if true Jews are now those who are circumcised of the heart, then the chopping or non-chopping of this or that body part bears no relevance anymore. This has been the case for nearly 2000 years, ever since the coming of Jesus.
So what exactly is circumcision of the heart? It’s a spiritual state of full repentance and humbling before God. A breaking of the ego, if you will, exposing the soft underbelly of the soul. A circumcised heart enables God’s Holy Spirit to enter into that individual through the process of spiritual rebirth. A soul that is inhabited by God’s Holy Spirit is in a state of grace and has the capacity to know God personally, which means that soul is able to know and speak God’s Truth.
Since the time of Jesus’ resurrection, the spiritual lineage of the children of Israel has come through Jesus. In other words, the true Jews are born-again followers of Jesus and have been for the past 2000 years. Born-again followers of Jesus are the inheritors of the promise made by God to the children of Abraham, as the prophesied promised land is a spiritual realm, not a geopolitical one.
Spiritual rebirth confers circumcision of the heart, which Paul says is what makes a Jew a Jew. Circumcision of the private parts alone no longer makes a Jew a Jew, any more than genetics or a passport does. Yet, as I mentioned, lots of people are claiming to be this or that these days based on little more than their insistence that it be so. If true Jews are those who are circumcised of the heart, then true Jews are born-again followers of Jesus.
Scripture tells us that the children of the promise will inherit a spiritual realm where they’ll be safe from their enemies. This realm was established by Jesus – the deliverer of God’s promise – and goes by the name of Kingdom of God, Kingdom of Heaven, and Mount Zion. It is peopled only by those with circumcised hearts. The world offers a poor facsimile of this realm – a Promised Land™ that is more a mockery than a mimic. The tiny tatter of blood-soaked real estate ripped from the body of Arabia is not the land of the promise, though it is the spoils of war, won fair and square through blood sacrifice and negotiations.
Let whoever wants to fight over it, fight over it. What spiritual value is there in the future throne of the anti-Christ? Do you think that, in Heaven, Jesus is fondly remembering Golgotha, or that Mary and Joseph are nostalgic about the land they had to flee from to save their firstborn? Do you think that God is waxing poetic over a temple desecrated by those claiming to be his own people? That land has no spiritual value, not in a positive sense. It’s been a stronghold of Satan for millennia, with God’s permission. Those who are circumcised of heart well know it.
Let whoever will fight over it. We, the circumcised, shake its dust from our feet, having followed Jesus to a far greater place.
THIS ONE’S FOR THE WOMEN
MCLEODS, New Brunswick, November 16, 2023 – I don’t know about you, but 40 days and 40 nights in the desert sounds like a dream vacation to me.
No cooking, no cleaning, no laundry, no rent, no mortgage, no dependents, no co-dependents, and you’re dang-tootin’ I wouldn’t be dragging a laptop or cell phone with me. Cold turkey on the comms. A rock for a pillow and the blowing sand for a blanket.
And ministering angels for room service.
Jesus’ minimalist lifestyle during his ministry years is an inspiration. God told Abraham that his seed would be as countless as the stars in heaven or the sand on the seashore, but for me God can use the number of dishes I’ve washed over the years. Those are just as countless. Jesus, during his ministry, didn’t bother with mundane housework; anything that needed to be done, the women did it. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundry. Jesus didn’t even have to wash his feet; the women did that, too – just showed up out of nowhere and started cleaning and kissing his feet. And perfuming them.
I could use a few of those women right about now.
Before Jesus started preaching, he whittled himself down to just the shirt on his back and the Gospel. That’s the main reason he went into the desert for 40 days and nights – to get whittled down. I’m guessing that after a few nights in the desert, Jesus very quickly learned the difference between wants and needs. And in classic Jesus style he learned that lesson well – so well, in fact, that when the devil pulled up in his stretch limo to make Jesus The Offer™, he was easily able to turn the devil down.
All the power and wealth in the world holds no appeal to someone who’s found freedom in the desert. Even a fresh-baked loaf of bread is no temptation when you live instead by every word that comes from the mouth of God. But you’ve gotta get whittled down for the “no” to come naturally. You’ve gotta do your 40 days and 40 nights in the desert, or the devil will eventually push through your defences. He’ll find a chink in your armour, a gap in your hedge. He’ll bide his time, watching your every move and dissecting your every word until finally making his move.
I don’t think it’s possible to do what Jesus did without first being whittled down. That’s why he made his disciples clean their slate of people and possessions before following him in the ministry. You can’t be burdened with anything but the shirt on your back and the Word of God if you’re to do what Jesus did. When he emerged from the desert, it was like he was living and moving in a parallel universe, which in fact he was, the Kingdom of God being a spiritual realm parallel to the worldly one. But it’s hard to live and move in the spiritual realm when you’re weighed down by cooking and cleaning and laundry and bills.
So 40 days and 40 nights in the desert is more than just a tongue-in-cheek dream vacation for the domestically burdened – it’s a rite of passage. The whittling down that comes from walking away from everything and everyone and throwing yourself fully into God’s hands is the only way to free yourself from worldly distractions and serve God with the power and authority of Jesus. But you don’t head into the desert until God calls you, and you wanna bet he’s going to call you when you least expect it – not when you’re up for the challenge and at the top of your game, not even when you’ve had enough and are at the end of your rope – no, God is not going to call you when it’s convenient for you. He’s going to call you when you least expect it.
Your job, while you’re waiting for the call, is to keep on washing those dishes. I know it’s not very sexy and you were probably hoping for a more inspiring finale than “keep on washing those dishes!”, but that’s what you’ve gotta do when you’re watching and waiting for God: You gotta keep on washing the dishes, and you gotta do it as cheerfully as you can.
Until one day, suddenly and out of the blue –
SUPERNATURAL BLINDNESS
MCLEODS, New Brunswick, November 15, 2023 – There’s a passage in scripture that many find odd – the one in Isaiah about God blinding people supernaturally so they won’t convert and be healed. Why would God prevent people from being healed? Isn’t God all about leading people to the Truth? Why then does he purposely blind them?
Supernatural blindness is the state of being unable to receive God’s Holy Spirit. It is a state imposed by God on people who are burdened by sin but who refuse to repent or even acknowledge their sin or need for repentance. In such a state, you can still believe in God, though you can’t know him personally. You can know of him, but you can’t know him. Only through the presence of God’s Spirit in you can you know God personally.
God will not give his Holy Spirit to those who are motivated by lust or pride. They may well want to know God personally and receive all the blessings and rewards that come with knowing God, but they don’t want it enough to give up their sin. Sadly, the majority of professing Christians fall under this category.
I knew God personally before I had any real knowledge of him, as I was an atheist until I was born-again. God had supernaturally blinded me for all the usual reasons (lust, pride, etc.). But being supernaturally blinded by God didn’t mean God had given up on me. Far from it. My supernatural blindness, like that of everyone else, formed a sort of invisible prison wall around me that served both to restrain and protect me. Being supernaturally blinded doesn’t mean you’re an outcast from God, like the fallen angels; it just means you’re a work-in-progress that has yet to reach the repentance stage.
Jesus spent much of his ministry reminding the supernaturally blind of their need to repent. The so-called religious elite were a particular target of this message, as they well knew that God existed, but they refused to acknowledge their sin. Their hard-hearted and proud stubbornness against repenting or acknowledging Jesus as their Messiah not only deepened their sin but further separated them from God.
In the book of Acts, a magician offers money to the apostles, eager to buy God’s Holy Spirit so he can perform miracles and charge money for them. This is one of the main reasons why God supernaturally blinds people. Peter tells the magician that his heart is not right before God and that God’s Holy Spirit cannot be bought for any amount of money. If God gave his Spirit to those whose heart was not right, what damage they could do in his name! It would be like giving a nuclear detonation code to someone who hated humanity.
People who know God and have his Spirit in them can also be supernaturally blinded on occasion, for their benefit as well as for God’s purposes. For instance, God may withhold certain knowledge from his children until it’s time for them to receive it. This is the purpose of revelation. In the book of Daniel, the angels tell Daniel that they’re “sealing” the book and its meaning until the end times, and that even he as a beloved prophet of God won’t be privy to its contents. This is another form of supernatural blinding.
Jesus, too, was supernaturally blinded by God on occasion as a way to test him and those around him. One example was when a non-Hebrew woman begged Jesus to heal her daughter, and Jesus told her he’d come only to heal the children of Israel. The woman then responded that even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table, at which point Jesus realized God had sent this woman to him because of her great faith in him. The date of his crucifixion was also kept from Jesus until shortly before it happened. God, at times, keeps us ‘in the dark’ supernaturally for our own protection so that we don’t over-worry things and go off the path. This protective temporary haze with regard to future events (or those going on around us currently) is likewise a form of supernatural blindness. In other words, it’s sometimes to our benefit that we don’t see clearly or at all.
Finally, supernatural blindness can take a physical form, as witnessed several times in the Bible. Paul was physically blinded during his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. He was then told to seek out a specific person to heal him. This was a type of test of faith both for Paul and for the person tasked with healing him. Other instances of people made blind as a form of faith test can be found in the various men Jesus healed from blindness, such as “Blind Bartimaeus” and the man Jesus healed on the Sabbath, whom he explained to his disciples was made blind to show the works of God. Conversely, some examples of physical supernatural blindness were less about faith and God’s works and more about punishment, such as when the Sodomites molesting Lot were struck blind or when an army fighting against the children of Israel were temporarily blinded before being defeated.
Supernatural blindness is a state of being that occurs in unbelievers as well as believers. It is meant to be a bridge or temporary state, but it can last a long time (even a lifetime) in some people. Whether spiritual or physical, supernatural blindness can be conferred by God as a form of protection or punishment; it can also be conferred as a test of faith. Ideally, believers should live in a state of supernatural clarity, but sometimes even the strongest of believers are supernaturally blinded temporarily, whether as a test or as protection.
If we find ourselves supernaturally blinded by God, our job is not to fight it but to endure it, like Paul did, and to seek to remedy it by whatever way God advises. At the same time, we should take comfort knowing that whatever God does to us – including blinding – he does for our ultimate benefit.
SLOW READ
MCLEODS, New Brunswick, November 15, 2023 – Every once in a while, I’ll do a slow read of the Bible, letting every word of every phrase sink in. In slow reads, it will take me months to get through the old and new Testaments rather than the usual month and a half, but the revelations are worth the slower pace. Yes, I’m reading a translation of a translation of a modernization that’s gone through God-only-knows how many revisions, but it’s God who’s reading his Word to me as I read his Word, so he’ll make sure I get what I need, regardless of how many changes have been made over the years.
Today I learned that God tempts people. It was hammered into me previously, based on (I guess) one of the letters in the New Testament, that only the devil tempts, but scripture says that God tempts, too. It’s right there in the chapter about Abraham being tempted by God to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice.
I was also reminded, in reading about God tempting Abraham, that the temptations don’t stop at a certain point in our lives. We don’t retire from getting tempted. It’s never “one and done” during our time on Earth, never “once saved, always saved” because even as born-agains we’ll be tempted right up to our final breath in a human body. Jesus was. And being tempted up to our final breath, we’ll likewise have the potential to fall, right up to our final breath.
There’s no retirement age for temptations. Abraham was well over 100 when God tempted him to sacrifice Isaac. By that point, God had already promised Abraham that his seed through Isaac would inherit the promised land, and yet God was still tempting him. God was still pushing his buttons to see what kind of stuff he was made of. God was still demanding that he give up that one thing none of us ever want to give up (in Abraham’s case, Isaac). We all have that one thing that we clutch and envision clutching even in our death throes. For some, it’s money. For others, it’s a cherished relative or possession. For still others, it’s a mindset or belief. And for still others, it’s the breath of life itself (or better said, the fear of death). Isaac was that one thing that Abraham had banked his whole life and posterity on, and so Isaac became Abraham’s temptation.
Be warned that God will be after your Isaac some day, whoever and whatever that may be. And like Abraham, you’re going to have to unhesitatingly give it up when God asks for it. God will never leave you or betray you, but he very likely at some point will ask you for that one thing you don’t want to give up. Just a reminder, so you’ll be prepared when it happens. You don’t want to fail that test. Of all the tests that God and devil will put you through, that’s not the one you want to fail.
Something else God showed me in this latest slow read is that animals used to get along. They didn’t used to eat each other. That was a revelation to me, as being a child of the 20th century, I was raised to believe that all God’s creatures (including us) are natural born hunters and killers, and that we need to kill to eat (in other words, we need to kill to survive). There’s a pecking order, we’re taught. There’s a “food chain”, we’re taught. And yet scripture tells us that all the animals in Heaven get along and eat “grass” rather than each other. It was like that in the Garden of Eden, too, the animals eating “green herbs” and all getting along and even being able to communicate with each other and with Adam and Eve.
When God decided to destroy the world with a flood, killing the animals at the same time as the humans, it was because the animals had, like the humans, given themselves over to violence. They had “corrupted their way”, indicating that animals have free will. If they have free will, then they have souls (which anyone whose ever had a pet already knows, even without scripture implying it), and if animals have souls, they can go to Heaven. I knew this already, because God has shown me animals in my visions of Heaven, and scripture describes all the animals getting along in Heaven with no more violence (that is, no more killing and eating each other).
Still, it’s good to see it all laid out in black and white. It’s good to see it laid out in black and white, because there are many false prophets who claim that animals don’t have souls and so there are no animals in Heaven. When you come across a false prophet who claims that animals don’t have souls and therefore can’t go to Heaven, you can use the “black and white” evidence to refute it.
Something else about Abraham and Isaac that the current slow read revealed to me is that God referred to Isaac as Abraham’s “only son”. And yet Abraham at that point already had another son, his first-born, Ishmael, whom he actually seemed to favour over Isaac. But the lineage of the promise was to be through Isaac, and so God referred to Isaac as Abraham’s only son. Isaac wasn’t the elder, and yet he was preferred by God. Similarly, when Isaac had the fraternal twins Esau and Jacob, with Esau emerging from the womb first, it was Jacob who became the lineage of the promise, even though Isaac favoured Esau. God favoured Jacob, and so it was Jacob who received the blessings allotted to the promised lineage. In both of those cases, it was God who chose, and he didn’t choose the first-born or the earthly father’s favourite. The same happened with Jacob, when Joseph (his youngest at the time) was chosen by God, and later with Jesse, David’s father, with David being the youngest of seven and far from favoured by his father.
We, as Christians, are also not God’s first-born, but we are God’s chosen children by the spiritual lineage of the promise that runs through Jesus. We and we only are now God’s children.
So the slow read showed me that it’s God who chooses the lineage of the promise, not “nature” or genetics or the parents, and it’s also God who denotes who is and who is not his child. We are not born children of God; we are chosen to be children of God. God alone chooses and designates who are his, and those he doesn’t designate as his are not his, regardless of what they call themselves. Still, God looks after those he doesn’t consider his children, blessing them and protecting them, like he blessed and protected even Cain.
Finally, and because Adam’s gotten such bad press over the millennia, I was happy when God highlighted for me during this latest slow read that Adam is in fact the start of the lineage of the promise. Yes, through sin Adam lost his place in the Garden of Eden, but his third-born son Seth (not Cain and not Abel, Adam’s first- and second-born sons, respectively) carried on the promise. It began with Adam and was carried on through Seth. Adam is our spiritual forefather of the promise, and as such is worthy of honour. He isn’t a dead branch on a tree. He isn’t the one who messed it up for the rest of us and therefore should be trash-talked. He’s our great-great-great (etc.) grandpappy, spiritually speaking. God chose him to be the lineage of the promise, and after him Seth, and after him Enos, and so on, all the way down to Jesus, and through Jesus to us. So we should honour Adam – not malign him, honour him – in our spiritual family tree.
And speaking of Adam and trees, isn’t it interesting that God warned Adam to steer clear of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but gave him no such warning about the tree of life? Why do you suppose that was? The tree of life was literally infinitely more valuable (probably the most valuable tree in the Garden), and yet no warning was issued to stay away from it. Only after Adam was expelled from the Garden did the tree of life come under special protection.
There’s a reason for this. I don’t know what it is yet. I have a few inklings, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe during my next slow read of that passage God will reveal it to me….
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 