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ENEMIES AND FRENEMIES
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 27, 2025 – I wrote earlier about how God blesses those who look after his children. They don’t even have to be believers, those people; they just have to do right by us. The people who do God’s will without realizing they’re doing God’s will are immensely rewarded for good, both in this life and in the next. This is how important it is to do right by God’s children.
But what I’m writing about today is the other kind of people – the ones who purposely harm God’s children. If you’re born-again, you know what I’m talking about. I don’t mean the people God permits to come into our lives and hassle us to a certain degree by following us around and demanding our attention. Jesus had to deal with those people, as did the disciples, and as do we, if we’re genuinely born-again. It’s part of our job to learn how to deal with them. But they’re not what I’m writing about today.
Today I’m writing about the people who purposely target and work against us, aiming to bring us down spiritually. For their efforts, they earn an entirely different type of reward than those who either consciously or consciously help us. By “purposely target and work against us”, I mean people like Judas Iscariot or Herod or the temple elders and chief priests who conspired to kill Jesus. I mean satanists and witches. I mean the powers-that-be in secret and not-so-secret societies. That’s the level of nasty I’m talking about. If we don’t have fake friends (“frenemies”) and outright enemies like these in our lives already, we will some day; that’s a guarantee. It’s actually a badge of honor to be targeted by these people. It means our witness is perceived as a threat to Satan’s plans.
And how should we interact with our own personal Judases? We should treat them the way Jesus treated Judas Iscariot – just like everyone else. Even though they target us while feigning to be friendly, we should never target them (except with prayers, in private). We should never “out” them. We should never attack them. We should never condemn them. They’re already condemning themselves by their choices, so there’s no point in our doing it: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay.”
Our own personal Judases require an especially light touch and certain kindnesses that God will direct us to extend. We should never be spiritually color-blind to our Judases by pretending they aren’t what they are, but we should also never be hostile to them. We’re being tested on how we treat them, once we know who and what they are. For explicit details on how to treat your frenemies, refer to Jesus’ treatment of Judas Iscariot. That’s our gold standard.
As for how to interact with our own personal temple elders and chief priests – well, that’s a whole different kettle of fish. Jesus never held back on them, and neither should we. But at the same time, Jesus didn’t go looking for a fight; he only ever defended his position when the fight came to him. He never went on the attack. If they accused him of something, he unraveled their lies. If they baited him, he refused to bite.
With our own personal temple elders and chief priests, as with our own personal Judases, we need to follow Jesus’ example to the letter. That means we defend our position when we’re attacked, we set the record straight when we’re falsely accused, but we never – NEVER – start the fight. Call them out for the hypocrites they are, certainly, like Jesus did, but for educational purposes only. We need to know who our enemies are. They need to be identified.
Like our Judases, our own personal temple elders and chief priests come into our lives as tests. They’re being used to measure our response to provocations, so we’d better respond appropriately. By “appropriately”, I mean the way God wants us to respond. I mean the way Jesus responded. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be polite or even on the level with them. Jesus on many an occasion famously breached the line between civility and hostility with his tormentors, even getting called out for it by the assorted powers-that-be, but he didn’t dial it back. He didn’t allow them to silence him or even to lower his voice. Sometimes, when it’s called for, and with God’s approval and guidance, ya gotta let loose, ya gotta call a spade a spade, even while holding your own cards close to your chest. In this, as in everything, Jesus is our example.
The world is a spiritually hostile environment for born-again believers. We can’t sugar-coat that reality and we’re not meant to sugar-coat it. Even in the worldly church we have more enemies and frenemies than friends. Still, God protects us constantly and powerfully, which is part and parcel of being born-again. Everyone is under God’s protection to a certain extent, but we’re especially protected not only because we’re God’s children but because we need the extra protection while we’re still here on Earth. We’re constantly being targeted, and if it weren’t for God surrounding us like an impenetrable spiritual firewall, we wouldn’t survive a minute. Jesus could only survive as long as he did because God was so powerfully with him, protecting him like a 24-hour highly trained elite security detail that no-one and nothing could get past. We have the same security detail surrounding us, if we’re genuinely born again, because if we are genuinely born-again, we need the protection.
I’m sending out this guidance for born-again believers, not the general public or people in the worldly church who are not genuinely born-again. This is not and never was an evangelical outreach site. We, the prophesied remnant, are a set-aside people, a peculiar people – a spiritually targeted people – and we need to look out for each other. That’s what this blog aims to do.
We’re surrounded by people who hate us, mock us, smile to our faces and then tear us down behind our back. We are despised, misunderstood, loathed, pitied, shunned, and that by our frenemies. Our enemies just want us spiritually dead.
Don’t respond to them like the world responds. Love your enemies and frenemies even as you see them for what they are. Pray for the ones God guides you to pray for and bless the ones God guides to bless, but leave the rest alone. They’re not our business. Our whole business and full job description is “Do God’s Will”, like it was for Jesus during his ministry years.
As for those who are not born-again but still help us in ways God enables them to help us, they will be generously, generously blessed.
SEED
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 24, 2025 – They dream of us, the kind of dreams you don’t tell your spouse or your significant other or even your therapist. (And never your mentor.) Dreams so raw, they rush in a fever as soon as they wake to look us up. But we have nothing to do with those dreams; they aren’t from us. We aren’t responsible for them. We haven’t sent them. God uses us as we’ve given him permission to use us, in some cases begged him to use us, and so he makes use of us. Some of our best work for the Kingdom is done entirely without our knowledge and solely because we begged God to use us.
After the first dreams comes the obsession. Not for all, but for some. Flashbacks that progress to a slow reaching out and then a quick pulling back when they find who we’ve become. Then the headshaking and sneering and dismissal, but still the thoughts. Always the thoughts. Back of the mind, front of the mind. Seed planted. And, for some, more dreams.
The first heart-pounding contact tests the waters. They don’t tell their spouse or significant other or therapist about that, either. Sometimes we engage and sometimes we don’t, depending on what God advises. Sometimes it’s best just to stay out of it completely and let God use us as we’ve given him permission to use us. God knows exactly what to do at precisely the right time, when and where to plant seed. We don’t. We’ll likely only make a mess of it.
Did you know that we’re being tested by those dreams, too? Not just the dreamers – we dreamees are also being tested. We’re being tested in how we respond. Which is why we need to defer to God and not take matters into our own hands. We must never forge ahead thinking we’ll wing it and that we can handle it and that we have everything under control, because we can’t handle it and don’t have anything under control. The forces working against us, though nowhere near as strong as God, are still degrees of magnitude more powerful than us. We cannot deal with them on our own, and to believe that we can is a trap.
I’ve been caught in that trap, many a time, and had to learn not to take the bait. I had to learn to defer to God, always defer to God. We’ve not sent the dreams, but they’ll come looking for us. How we handle them is a testament to who we’ve become.
Some of our best work is done entirely without us.
GOD’S WILL: JUST DO IT
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 20, 2025 – I wrote a few days ago about Jesus’ comment regarding God numbering all the hairs on our head. I mention this again (that God always knows precisely – to the strand – how many hairs are on our head) because we need to understand the absolute level of power and control God holds and exerts over all creation.
So, when people say “sh$t happens”, they’re wrong. When people refer to “luck”, they’re wrong. When people describe an event as “unforeseen”, “random”, “accidental”, or “serendipitous”, they’re wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. When people say: “He died way too young”, they’re wrong. There’s no such thing as “bad timing” or something happening when it shouldn’t, just as there’s no such thing as coincidence, not in the sense of something randomly happening at the same time as something else. As born-again believers, we need to wipe the notion of random events and occurrences from our minds (and vocabularies) because they’re false teachings that originate with the devil.
And yet, God being in control of everything doesn’t mean we don’t have free will. We do. Even people who’ve signed on with the devil through the various secret and not-so-secret societies and organizations that administer the world (with God’s permission) still have free will. They can forswear their oath to the devil if they choose, but there are severe (i.e., fatal) worldly consequences, which is why most of the “brethren” remain within those societies and organizations, even to the detriment of their soul. But the point is, even those self-condemning people have free will while they’re yet on Earth.
Again – God controls everything, which is why there’s no such thing as “luck”, either good or bad. If God wants you to win the lottery, you’ll win it. If he doesn’t want you to win it, you won’t, no matter how many times you play your “lucky numbers”. If God wants you to run into someone unexpectedly, you will; if he doesn’t want you to see that person at that particular time, you won’t see them, even if they walk right past you. God doesn’t make our choices for us, but he does try to steer them this way or that. He does try to influence our choices, even while ultimately letting us choose on our own using our own decision-making processes. That’s free will. We’re not automatons, but everything outside the realm of our free will is entirely under God’s control based on God’s perfect justice mitigated by God’s perfect mercy.
That God has complete and absolute control of our natural and artificial environments is the best situation we can hope for. Scripture tells us that God made the planets and the stars and set them on their courses, and that he also made all the non-human creatures on Earth and set them on their various courses while keeping in close contact with them. God talks to his creatures just as surely as he talks to us. Even the tiniest of insects know God on a one-to-one basis and gravitate towards him, loving him in their own way just as we love God in our own way. So if you think you that you just randomly got bitten by a mosquito, think again – God either sent that mosquito (by name!) to bite you or he permitted it to bite you for a specific reason. Nothing happens beyond our free will that isn’t either willed or permitted by God. Our free will he won’t touch, but everything else is fair game.
Knowing that God is in full control not only of our environment but of our every interaction within that environment is, for me, massive cause for celebration. There’s no-one else I’d rather have in that role than God, because whatever God wills or permits, he does it with an eye to our benefit. Everything God does, he does it with an eye to our benefit, though it might not always seem so at the time. That’s why we need to trust God and have faith in God and let his plan unfold in his time and his way, all while saying “Yes!” to whatever God asks of us.
Our time here is short, and when it ends, we’ll be glad we did those things that God asked of us, the way that Jesus did everything that was asked of him, even in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus says that those who choose to prosper in this world rather than to follow him into the next will ultimately lose everything of real value. They might gain wealth and prestige and immunity from prosecution for a time, but their reward will be that of the rich man who suffered eternal torments in Hell while the poor man (Lazarus) was rewarded with eternal comforts in Heaven.
Our time here is very short. Whatever God asks of you, do it. Do it unhesitatingly and to the best of your ability, allowing his power to flow through you. Don’t think about it, don’t overthink it, don’t try to understand it, and don’t try to explain it or justify it to anyone.
Just, whatever your Father asks of you, do it.
Y’AIN’T NUTHIN’ IF Y’AIN’T GOT SOUL
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 15, 2025 – Years ago, I used to fly back and forth between New York City and Amsterdam on People’s Airline ($99 one way; byob, baby!). Every now and then when I arrived back in New York, I would pass groups of men sitting on the floor in the arrivals area. The first few times I saw them, I didn’t really think twice about it; New York being New York, there was never a shortage of oddities to behold. But one time my curiosity got the better of me, so I asked a passing flight attendant why the men were sitting there. What he told me has stuck with me all these years: He said they were waiting for their souls to arrive.
Being an atheist at the time, I didn’t believe in souls, so I laughed it off as ridiculous. The attendant explained further that sometimes they’d sit there for days until they were certain their souls had caught up with them. What I didn’t realize, in glancing at these men in passing, is that they would become one of those scenes that would haunt me for the rest of my life: I can still see them sitting motionless on the cold hard floor, not talking or eating, their heads bowed, waiting.
Just waiting.
As a born-again believer, I do now unquestioningly believe in souls, and I think about those men and what their days-long silent protest at the airport hoped to accomplish. I hesitate to say they didn’t achieve their goal. I understand how jet lag can disorient you well beyond normal fatigue, but they must have understood jet lag, too, and could distinguish between it and a tardy soul. Surely it wasn’t just jet lag that drove them to do what they did?
I’ve tried researching this phenomenon online and have come up empty. Nothing’s been uploaded to the internet about people who wait at the airport for their souls to arrive. Could the flight attendant have been pulling my leg? Or was this an Olde Worlde tradition that has since passed into oblivion? It reminds me of the stories of North American natives who, back in the day, would refuse to have their pictures taken, as they equated picture-taking with soul-stealing.
Somewhat related in spirit if not in mode is a guy I know in Germany who knows a guy who won’t travel farther in a day than he can comfortably walk (~20 miles). If he goes on a 60-mile journey by car or train, he does it over three days, stopping every 20 miles to spend the night at a local hotel. He’s quite religious about this. I used to laugh at him, but now I think he might be onto something.
What about you? Does any of this resonate with you? Do you think we’re moving around too much and too fast, lured by cheap travel options and the pressure to do more and go farther in less time? How is this affecting your soul? As the Bible attests, we used to measure distance by how far people could walk in a day, but now we peg distance to car travel time. “Just five minutes to the mall!” really means a two-hour walk, and usually along a busy highway. When we frame travel distance by car rather than by foot, what affect does it have on our perception of time? Does it bias us against taking the more leisurely travel options or against taking the scenic route? And if it does bias our decisions, what are we missing out on? How are we hurting our souls in the process?
Did those “crazy” guys sitting on the floor at the airport actually have it right?
A soul is a terrible thing to abuse. If we’re discombobulating our souls by our travel modes, we need to radically consider slowing things down.
WHEN GOD BLINDS
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 13, 2025 – We’ve all been blinded by God on occasion. He blinded me for the first 36 years of my life, when I suffered the same deserved blindness that Isaiah describes and Jesus quotes:
“By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and not perceive:
For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.” (Matthew 13:14-15)
If you’re genuinely born-again, you were also once blind. If you’re not genuinely born-again, you’re still blind.
God famously blinded Pharoah just before the exodus from Egypt. Scripture calls it a hardening of the heart, but it’s the same as spiritual blindness. The result is the same.
Sometimes God physically blinds people, like he blinded Paul on the road to Damascus or he blinded the men who were trying to sexually assault the angels at Lot’s house. And sometimes he unblinds people, like the ones Jesus healed.
So, God can make you spiritually or physically blind, and he can make you spiritually or physically see. Nothing is impossible for God.
Sometimes God will blind you spiritually as a form of protection, following the adage “what you don’t know, can’t hurt you”. Sometimes he’ll blind you as a form of punishment, and sometimes he’ll blind you because he needs you blind for his plans to proceed. This is the form of blindness that affected the disciples just before Jesus’ crucifixion, so they wouldn’t stop Judas Iscariot from betraying Jesus.
Even Jesus was blind to a certain measure and for a certain time. For instance, he knew what his mission was and he knew the intended outcome, but he didn’t know when it would start or end until God let him know. Jesus also said that no-one but God knows the timing of his second coming and of the end of the world. These things are hidden from us to thwart our spiritual enemies and to test us. If we knew the end was a long way off, we might slack off doing God’s will. Conversely, if we knew the end was coming soon, we might focus solely on that event and ignore everything else that God’s asking us to do.
I see this in the “Jesus is coming back soon!” cult that currently infests the worldly church. Nothing matters to these people except the presumption that they’ll soon escape all their troubles by being raptured to Heaven. Their whole witness is based on Jesus whisking them away to safety, but Jesus himself told us that he’ll come when he’s least expected. In other words, we’ll be spiritually blinded just before his second coming so that we won’t be expecting it. Because Jesus told us point-blank that he’ll come when no-one expects him to come, the “Jesus is coming back soon!” cult is clearly false.
God allows us to be blind if our life choices lead us to that state, and he also purposely blinds us whether as a form of punishment or protection or so that we won’t disrupt his plans. But he never maliciously blinds us. If he, for a time, physically or spiritually blinds us to further his agenda (like he did to the man who’d been blind from birth and who Jesus later healed in the temple to show God’s glory), he repays us multiple times over whatever we “lost” in being blinded.
Although we can see, we born-again believers still don’t have perfect spiritual vision. We have the measure of vision that God permits us, according to the measure of God’s Spirit that’s in us, which means that a certain measure of spiritual myopia is our unavoidable lot here on Earth. Paul likens it to seeing through a glass darkly, but he promises that we’ll all see clearly if and when we get to Heaven.
This is what I’m holding out for – perfection in Heaven. In the meantime, I don’t fight the blindness or curse the blindness or try to see more than God allows me to see, because I know that whatever God wills or permits, it ultimately works in my favor as long as I remain his child.
HOLY NIGHT
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 12, 2025 – If we follow God’s directive for the timing of the Passover (which we need to do as born-again believers), it starts tonight. That means the act of remembrance that Jesus directed us to do in remembrance of him should be done tonight, without fail. When Constantine corralled a group of elites into creating a religion called “Roman Catholicism” in the early 300s AD, he purposely changed the timing of the Passover so that it wouldn’t coincide with the timing of the real Passover, or what he snidely referred to as “the Jews’ Passover”. He didn’t want Catholicism to reflect anything done by the Jews. And so Constantine purposely changed the timing that Jesus asked us to perform the act of remembrance, and it is this changed timing – fake timing – that most Christians adhere to today.
As born-again believers, we need to do exactly what Jesus directed us to do, and what he directed us to do was to keep the Passover as God directed, not as Constantine directed. We need to keep the so-called Jews’ Passover, and that starts tonight.
We keep the Passover because Jesus directed us to keep it, but he also directed us to keep it in a very specific way. We’re to offer up unleavened bread as a token of Jesus’ sacrificial body and wine as a token of Jesus’ atoning blood. How we choose to keep the Passover beyond that is up to us, but it must, by a directive straight from Jesus (who got it straight from God), include the act of remembrance that Jesus showed us. And it must happen on the first night of the Jews’ Passover.
As born-again believers, we’re holy by virtue of the presence of God’s Holy Spirit with us, a Spirit given to us by God at our rebirth that signifies our spiritual adoption by God. When God gave us his Spirit, we became his children. The abiding presence of God’s Holy Spirit with us separates us from everyone else, the way it separated the children of Israel from the heathens around them during their final days in Egypt and their 40 years of wandering in the desert.
We are holy by the presence of God’s Holy Spirit with us, but tonight is the holiest of holies as far as nights go, because tonight we do as Jesus directed: we do it exactly at the time he directed, and we do it exactly in the way he directed. Nowhere else in the gospels does Jesus give us a directive that is so specific in its timing and content. And because the directive is time- and content-specific, it needs to be done exactly as written.
We need to keep the Passover tonight in remembrance of Jesus, as he directed us to do, and we also need to keep it in remembrance of the first Passover, when God, as he’d promised, “passed over” the children of Israel, leaving them unharmed while killing the first-born of every other human and beast in Egypt, sparing none.
This is a profoundly holy night, by directive of both God and Jesus, and it must be kept as such.
PASSOVER 2025: THE FEAST OF UNLEAVENED BREAD AND A CALL TO FASTING
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 10, 2025 – Here’s your annual heads-up that Passover is coming soon (it starts at sundown on Saturday, April 12th), followed by the weeklong Feast of Unleavened Bread. So if you haven’t yet thought about what you’re going to eat as a bread substitute next week (anything with a leavening agent is a no-no), now’s the time to brainstorm.
You can even make your own unleavened bread with just flour, water, and salt:
How you choose to commemorate the Passover ritual on Saturday night is up to you, but commemorating it how Jesus showed us to commemorate it in the gospels is a good start.
And for those of you who feel called to do it, fasting to mark the time that Jesus was taken away from us (this year, commemorated from mid-afternoon Sunday to early morning Tuesday) will be greatly blessed by God. When the scribes and Pharisees ask Jesus:
“Why do the disciples of John fast often, and make prayers, and likewise the disciples of the Pharisees; but thine eat and drink?”
Jesus tells them:
“Can ye make the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them?
But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days.” (Luke 5:33-35)
This is a 40-hour fast over three days to commemorate “those days” that Jesus was taken away from us, from the time of his death mid-afternoon on the first day of the Passover (this year, it falls on Sunday, April 13th) to the time he was seen resurrected by Mary early in the morning on the third day (this year, it falls on Tuesday, April 15th). This is not a reenactment of the crucifixion and resurrection; it’s a commemoration. How deep you want to go for your fast (zero food/water; water only; unleavened bread and water; soup, juice, and water; etc.) is up to you.
Forty hours is not a long fast, but again, this call to fasting is meant only for those who feel called to do it. There’s no obligation, keeping in mind that any fasting not done free-willingly has no spiritual value, whereas fasting done free-willingly is mightily blessed by God.
May your Passover be mightily blessed!
THE EVENTUALLY
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 9, 2025 – We’d been emergency evacuated from our train, and I found myself on a station platform surrounded by a press of noise and people in heavy winter clothing. The stench of diesel was nauseating. This wasn’t my stop. I was frantically trying to see if I had all my belongings with me, but the light was so dim, I couldn’t tell my luggage from other people’s luggage, and there were so many passengers thronging past me that I got caught up in their motion and had no choice but to hurry along with them. If I’d stood still, I would have been trampled.
Two men closed in on me to my left. One of them gestured that he wanted to help me with my suitcase, but I could tell that he just wanted to steal it. He leered at me and muttered something in a language I didn’t understand. I held onto my suitcase all the tighter.
As we hurried along, the platform turned into a narrow, paved pathway with high thick bushes on either side. Suddenly, the twilight plunged into darkness. It wasn’t a normal nightfall of gradually dimming light, but more like an eclipse. I could see nothing but a thin beam of light illuminating the path directly in front of me. I must have fallen far behind the other passengers because I couldn’t see them anymore, as if they’d disappeared. I couldn’t even see the bushes. All I could see was a thin strip of paved path.
The next thing I knew, it was morning and I was at another station, but this one was deserted. It was an old-style wood-framed building with gingerbread trim and a long portico supported by thin wooden pillars. The tracks in front of the station were covered in flowering weeds and obviously hadn’t been used for a while. As I stood in the cool of the morning under the portico’s shade, it occurred to me that I no longer had my suitcase with me, the one the man had tried to steal. It was gone. I looked up at the pathway behind the station, but I couldn’t see the suitcase. I thought maybe I should go back and look for it, but then I thought there was no guarantee I’d find it (or had even lost it there). Someone might already have nabbed it or someone might have taken it the next station. And if I did go back looking for it, I’d never catch up with my fellow passengers who were heading (or so I suspected) to the connecting train that we were all supposed to take after being evacuated from the earlier one.
As I stood there chasing ideas back and forth in my head, the trill of a bird cut through my thoughts. It so startled me, I felt like I’d just woken up. What a beautiful day! The air was fresh the way it only is after an early morning shower and everything sparkled with the last of the raindrops. I reckoned it was around 9:30 or 10:00. I had no idea where I was, but I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to backtrack and frantically search for my suitcase, and I didn’t want to rush forward to try to catch the next train. I just wanted to stand there in the quiet of the coolness and the sparkling of the beauty, hearing the bird sing. This is where I needed to be.
It wasn’t until later that I realized that the road leading to the next train station also led to the view I have from my house in Heaven, and that the missing suitcase was full of moldy old Bibles I hadn’t read in years.
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God wants us to be patient. It’s supposed to be one of our defining features – “the patience of saints” – but not all of us have quite yet earned that stripe. We’re to be patient the way Isaiah was when he walked barefoot and naked for three years, or patient like Ezekiel when he lay for 390 days on his one side, and another 40 days on his other. We’re to be patient like John the Baptist was when for all those years he lived in the desert and ate nothing but locusts and wild honey, or like Jesus, when he was ready to start his ministry at 12 years of age but had to wait another long 18.
We’re to be patient, and it’s not something we can do on our own. It’s a supernatural ability that comes from God, the same way our sainthood does. We can’t make ourselves patient any more than we can make ourselves saints. We can’t even pray for patience. We need to open ourselves to it and wait for it, and wait for it, and wait for it, and then – eventually – like a dream – it will come.
We have to be patient because God’s timing is perfect, and you can’t rush perfection.
THE SWORD OF OUR MOUTH
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 9, 2025 – Jesus never engages in hand-to-hand combat anywhere in scripture. We don’t see him pull a knife, brandish a sword, hurl stones, or even gently push anyone. Sure, he turned over a few tables in the temple to get the message across to the moneychangers (and whipped a few of them who weren’t paying close enough attention), but the only thing he really hurt was their pride. When push came to shove, it was always other people doing the pushing and shoving. It was never Jesus. He didn’t promote physical violence, and he stood by the motto that those who live by the sword, die by the sword.
Which is why his advice to his followers to arm themselves can be confusing to the casual Christian. Surely if Jesus told us to get weapons, he meant for us to use them? And surely he intended that we should defend ourselves with those weapons, or why else should we get them?
Jesus is nothing if not consistent with his message. When he said that those who live by the sword die by the sword, he wasn’t contradicting his advice for us to arm ourselves. He was explaining why and to what purpose we needed to arm ourselves: for deterrence, and only if we become outcasts from society and so have to live without the protection of law enforcement. Unarmed people are sitting ducks among the lawless, whereas people armed with even one weapon are less attractive targets (which explains why Jesus told his disciples that the one sword they had was enough). When someone openly displays a weapon, it gives the impression that he or she intends to use it. That’s the impression Jesus wants us to convey with our weapon. But at the same time, he doesn’t want us to use the weapon to physically hurt anyone.
How do we know this? Because again, Jesus was consistent with his message. He never contradicted himself. He taught us to keep the Commandments, which includes the Commandment not to kill. Any vengeance we want to exact, we’re to leave in God’s hands: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay.”
So, we’re to get weapons for deterrence purposes if and when we’re banished from mainstream society and forced to live among the lawless, but we don’t have permission to use those weapons to hurt others. The only slaying we have God’s permission to do is with the sword of our mouth. That’s how Jesus fights his battles, and that’s how we’re to fight ours.
THE ONE WHERE SHE TALKS ABOUT WOMEN IN THE CHURCH
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 4, 2025 – I don’t generally like women. When I say “I don’t generally like women”, I mean I don’t generally like women who are not born-again. On the other hand, I’ve yet to meet a born-again woman I didn’t like. That’s just my personal experience as a born-again woman.
I’m not sure my experience as a born-again woman can be applied to anyone except me and I caution against anyone viewing it as a general statement that reflects every born-again woman’s experience. It’s just mine, my personal experience. And whether ironic or not, my personal experience is also that I generally like men, but that could just be because men generally treat me better than women treat me. It could also be that because I’m a woman, women let their guard down around me, showing me aspects of themselves that are not pretty, whereas most men put on their best face for me simply because I’m a woman. But again, that’s just my personal experience and perception.
When it comes to women in the Church (and here I’m talking about born-again women in God’s Church, not the worldly church), there is no distinction between them and men. Paul notoriously talked about the need for women to remain silent in the church and to be subject to men in matters of authority, but these directives are not applicable to God’s Church, just to the worldly church. I would die on that hill.
In God’s Church, there are no distinctions based on race, age, sex, or any other categorical division that muddles the world. The sole criteria to be in God’s Church are genuine spiritual rebirth and right standing with God. There is also no real authority beyond Jesus and God in the Church. Jesus said to call no-one on Earth “Father”, as God is our Father, and to call no-one on Earth “Rabbi”, as he is our rabbi (teacher and master). So, Jesus and God are our sole authorities in the Church, mediated through God’s Holy Spirit, which we received at our rebirth and signifies by its abiding presence with us that we are genuinely reborn.
If God is our Father and Jesus is our teacher and master, there’s no cause for anyone else assuming any position of authority in God’s Church. Having and speaking an opinion or a revelation, as I do here on this blog? Absolutely. God expects and enables us to do that. But holding authority over other members of the Church? No. I do not believe that God wants any of us to do that, and I believe that Jesus’ teachings support my opinion. Peter’s job, as stipulated by Jesus, was to “strengthen the brethren” and to “feed” them, not hold a position of authority over them. We don’t need any authority in the Church beyond God and Jesus.
If this is the case (and I firmly believe it is), then there should be no question of women in the Church being silent or being subject to men. We are all the same in God’s eyes, all under God’s authority and taught by Jesus. If you don’t want to listen to me because you don’t agree with me or don’t believe me, that’s your prerogative and free will choice, but if you don’t want to listen to me solely because I’m a woman, that shows that you’re not genuinely born-again and so don’t belong here.
I could not care less what the world thinks of women. I only care what Jesus and God think of them, and I know both from personal experience as a born-again woman and from what Jesus showed and taught us in the gospels that God and Jesus make no distinction between women and men in the Church. Their voices are equal.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 