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SCHISM
CHARLO, New Brunswick, March 1, 2024 – There’ll come a time of no more turnings, a time when no matter how much you preach, there’ll only be permanently deaf ears and ears that already hear. The sealings will be sealed and the saints will be undergoing their final trials to see where they belong in Heaven’s hierarchy, if indeed they belong at all.
Nothing will be certain still at that point except the fact of no more turnings.
And Jesus’ return.
And God’s coming wrath.
Did you know that the saints in the early Church believed they were already living the end? Already nearly 2000 years ago they were waiting for Jesus to come down the same way he went up. They were waiting for him to come down not to set up an earthly kingdom but to gather his people together and take them all Home the same way he had gone Home. This is what they believed, and that belief persisted for hundreds of years, through countless persecutions and martyrdoms.
And then one fine day in the early 4th century, Christianity was normalized, it was sanitized, it was compromised and institutionalized. This represented the greatest schism in all of human history – the dividing of the church from the Church.
The Church has lived on, though. The Church has survived. It has not changed. The Church has not been transitioned like Christianity. So not surprisingly, the Church is still persecuted and the latter-day saints still understand that we’re in the tribulation that began when the early-day saints said it did thousands of years ago. There are lulls in the war, but no ceasefires. There will never be a permanent ceasefire between the church and the Church.
There’ll also not be a seven-year Tribulation with a capital “T”. What there will be is a worsening, by orders of magnitude, of the now 2000-year tribulation. There will be a turning of thumbscrews, though not of souls anymore, because souls will be done turning when the orders of magnitude appear.
The Church has always been persecuted. Jesus said it would be and so it is. All the saints I know are mocked and despised; saints have always been mocked and despised: That’s how you know they’re saints. The Roman Catholic church, which first tried to supplant the Church and then tried to kill it by a thousand-year Inquisition, teaches that you have to die first to be a saint, and then only if the pope says you’re a saint, though I would be very hesitant to believe anything the pope says about spiritual matters, since he isn’t born-again. If he were, he’d know what a saint is.
The day after I was reborn, God showed me during my first-ever reading of the book of Revelation that the Roman Catholic church was the whore riding the beast. I didn’t want to believe it at the time, so God tucked that knowledge away for me until later, until a time when I could see it for myself. That time came three and a half years into my rebirth when I was sitting in a Roman Catholic pew with a key to the church door in my pocket. I was on my way to becoming holier than the pope when God opened my eyes and I saw where I was. I ran screaming. Actually, I walked very quietly and orderly out the front door in a state of shock at what I had just seen. Then I dropped off the key and never went back.
The church is an enemy of the Church in the same way that Lucifer appears as an angel of light. That’s all I’ll say about that for now. There are no more turnings and then comes the judgement.
We’re already living the end.
ON SHUTTING UP IN THE CHURCH
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, March 3, 2015 – Physically, I’m a woman. I don’t think about that fact much; I just kind of take it for granted. God made me female, and that’s the way I am.
So it always surprises me when someone uses the fact that I’m a woman as grounds for telling me that I can’t do something or that I should just shut up. I’m not very good at shutting up, never have been – not as an atheist, and certainly not as a born-again follower of Jesus.
I mention this because I came across a website today that seemed to have good “God intel”. I was just about to email the site’s creator to tell him how much I enjoyed his site when God suggested I take a look at one of the blogs first. It was about “Women in the church” and how they are just to shut up. More to the point, and based on the blog-writer’s rather narrow interpretation of scripture, women shouldn’t teach, women shouldn’t preach, and women sure as heck shouldn’t hold ministerial positions of authority over men.
Needless to say, after reading that blog, I moved my half-written email to the “draft” file and had a little chat with God. I even tried the blog-writer’s advice of “shutting up” on for size, but it didn’t fit me very well. I kept thinking: Why would God give me the gift of grace if he doesn’t want me to use it? Jesus tells us that we are not to put our light under a bushel but on a candle stick, so that all will see it. He also tells us not to bury God’s gifts but to invest them so that they’ll grow. In other words, Jesus wasn’t telling me or anyone else to shut up about God but rather to do the opposite.
The Old Testament was all about genetic exclusivity. If you weren’t one of the twelve tribes of Israel, you weren’t in “the chosen” club. Certainly, you could petition to get in, but it was a lengthy and complicated procedure. Few “gentiles” bothered to do it, unless they truly felt called.
Jesus overthrew all that. Just as God promised through his Old Testament prophets, the kingdom has been taken away from “the chosen” and given to those who are considered more worthy (meaning, the followers of Jesus). Salvation is no longer based on membership in the Olde Jewish Boys’ Club but on the belief in Jesus as the Messiah and on a genuine willingness to live by faith by follow the promptings of God’s spirit. Jesus’ followers come from every nationality and culture and are of both sexes. In fact, Jesus even overrode gender by stating that his followers should strive to become spiritually like eunuchs (Matthew 19:12), who are neither male nor female, just like the angels are neither male nor female.
When God looks at me, he doesn’t see me solely as a female. He sees my will and my soul first, and my sex is secondary. What I’m saying is – my femaleness is just not an issue with him. If it’s not an issue with God, then it shouldn’t be an issue with anyone who says he’s a follower of Jesus. God made me a woman but he also made me a born-again believer, which de facto makes me a spiritual eunuch. I am a woman to those who are outside the kingdom, but to those inside the kingdom, I am simply brethren. As brethren, we all equally have the right and duty to preach the Word of God, whether our voice is high or low.
So no, I’m not going to shut up in the church or elsewhere. God doesn’t want me to, Jesus doesn’t want me to, and neither do I. If you can’t get past my sex, the problem is yours, not mine. Physically I’m a woman, but spiritually I’m genderless, just like Jesus. Maybe you should try looking at me through your spiritual eyes, not your physical ones.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 