BOOK
69
THE
BEGINNING, THE END, AND THE MIDDLE PART
I fiercely avoid scriptural
arguments. In my 40 year journey as a reborn child of God, there is
no bigger threat to our unity, our sanctification, and ultimately our
salvation than using the identical Scriptures to foment endless
arguments and finger-pointing among proclaimed “believers”. I
have to question the wisdom of emulating the very enemies of the
Christ, who chose to ignore the voice of the creator while strutting
their “holiness” and “authority” that was bestowed on them
according to the Holy Scriptures (in those days there were only 44
books). In a last ditch effort to build some kind of recognizable
distinction between the Church and the “World” (like Nehemiah
rebuilding the wall) I am offering my revelations of the present
Bible (all 66 books) in the three areas where I disagree with all of
today’s teachers, pastors, evangelists, prophets and apostles.
Thank you for considering my take on the beginning, the end, and the
middle part of the Bible Story.
“In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God” John 1-1.
When Jesus revealed that God
IS Love, this statement makes complete sense! WORDS are what gives
identity to everything that is made, and even modern science tells us
that without words, all of existence is sub-atomic radio waves
travelling through a void. The Scriptures tell us that God brought
all the birds and the beasts and “every living creature” to Adam
and he gave them names. Even now this goes on in families where the
children come up with their own names for favourite toys, or foods
that they like, and most parents smile and go along with these new
“words”. Back in the Beginning, before the “fall” it was all
Love. The only rule was not to partake of the knowledge of Good and
Evil. The words were Love (God), they were spoken With Love (God),
an expression of Love (God). And then the “fall”!
According to the Scriptures,
Eve was tempted to eat of the “tree of the knowledge of good and
evil” because it might make their perfect life even more perfect,
and what loving wife can’t identify with that? The problem was
that she was deceived about the consequences of doing this. The
devious serpent actually convinced her that she would not be struck
dead that same day! So she shared some of this “fruit” with Adam
and he ate. Unlike our present Catholic Pontiff (and countless
millions of Firm Believers) I don’t find anywhere that this fruit
was an apple. Or a pear. Or cherries. The fruit of the knowledge
of good and evil is judgement. Words of judgement.
And that was the point at which mankind rejected God’s perfect
judgement and set himself above the Creator. “Sin” entered the
world through Adam – not Eve. If Adam hadn’t agreed to start
judging good and evil, God would easily have dealt with his wife...
permanently, and sin would not have found a place in this world.
This perspective changes the current status of Adam as a ruefully
slow-witted bad boy into an incredible example of how much a man can
love his wife – enough to accept death before he allowed even God
to separate them. It makes the “fall” look more like the love
story of Romeo and Juliette!
However, there was good reason
for God’s rule, and the severity of the punishment. Six thousand
years of our history attests to the misery that results from human
judgement. It wasn’t long after the “fall” that the murder of
Able by his brother Cain took place and look what caused that horror.
Cain felt rejected because God told him that his gift was not “as
good” as his brother’s. The reason that God didn’t strike Cain
down before the murder, or even after the crime, was because Our
Creator knows what the cause of our madness is... He Allowed Adam and
Eve to continue living out of respect for Adam’s willingness to
sacrifice himself, and rather than striking them both dead, meted out
a just punishment – to argue endlessly 24/7 about who was right and
who was better and who was best. At the same time He implemented His
plan of redemption (that hinged upon Jesus and His willingness to
sacrifice Himself for anyone who would return to the original
relationship with our creator by having faith in the promise of
forgiveness of sin). But that is the middle part, and first I need
to clear up a false teaching regarding the “end” of scripture.
My Bible ends with a dire
warning that “If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add
unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this
prophesy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and
out of the holy city, and from the things that are written in this
book.” (Rev.22,
18 – 19)
I
have always understood that “this book”
referred to the “Book of Revelations” and not the entire 66 books
of the Bible. I have listened for all these years as preachers
wave the Bible in the air and proclaim “This is THE COMPLETE
WORD OF GOD” until I am
sick. The local Baptist
congregation has
made this claim part of their
Creed. “All Scripture is
given by inspiration of God,
and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness.” (Tim 3 – 16). As far as I am
concerned, when someone hears what God has to say and writes it
down, it is Scripture. Whenever
He speaks, and what He says about anything. “And
there are many other things which Jesus
did, the which, if they should be written every one, the world itself
could not contain the books that should be written.” (John 21, 25)
Jesus, we all agree, was the WORD made flesh, so are we to believe
that all those books that were not written were not inspired of God?
Ridiculous. The purpose of binding a few scriptures together and
conclude the collection with the dire warning of Revelations was to
eliminate the role of Apostles and Prophets in the governance of the
Church. This, in turn, allowed splinter groups to form, each with
their own private interpretation of the Scriptures, and none of them
being held accountable for horrendous hypocrisy and ignorance.
It
is my fervent hope and expectation that the present interruption of
weekly “services” is a final chance for the corporate Body of
Christ, who have endured the strain of staying pure in heart (while
surrounded by the malicious chaos of our present world), to shake off
the incessant droning of religious lectures and challenge the obvious
madness that infests human government. It is time to outline the
necessary changes to “Our Way
of Doing Things” and separate ourselves in order to offer a choice
to desperate people in a collapsing society. That
is the Great Commission mentioned in Scriptures.
Which
brings me to “the middle part.”
When Jesus arrived in Israel,
there had been no accepted prophets for only 400 years. Among the
Levitical priesthood there was a well documented split in
interpreting the same Scriptures (much like today’s denominations).
The Pharisees believed (and taught) that the resurrection from
the dead was along the lines of the Egyptians and their
Pharaohs – a bodily return of dead people to life. This made sense
of the whole burial ritual and keeping track of the tombs of your
favourite ancestors.
The Sadducees, on the other
hand, recognized that flesh and Spirit are different realms, and
while all flesh would perish, the Spirit was everlasting and merely
escaped from the body at death. They tried unsuccessfully to brand
the Lord’s teaching as anti-pharisee, but to no avail. Jesus put
it quite bluntly to them both when He said “I AM the resurrection”
and proceeded to heal the sick, restore sight to the blind, hearing
to the deaf and raise dead people to life. In the early Church these
occurrences continued and caused an upset everywhere they went. Paul
(Who was trained As a Pharisee) understood the message of receiving
everlasting life by believing the Words of Jesus when he recounted
his tribulations as an apostle who had divine approval. He endured
stoning, shipwreck, lashings etc., but in his first letter to the
Thessalonian church, he comforted them with “we which are alive and
remain shall be caught up with them (the Christians who had died.) in
the clouds.”. Obviously he considered the promise of eternal life
to be exactly that. (1 Th. 4, 17).
We haven’t had any
recognized prophets for close to nineteen centuries. Today’s
teaching on the subject of resurrection is vague and theoretical
since nobody has substantive evidence to back up what they teach.
The most common theme is a glorious “afterlife” that believers
enter as soon as they die, which matches much of the dogma of other
religions. The Scriptures in the Bible can be used to insist that
the Kingdom of heaven will be here on earth (after descending
prefabricated from space), or just a giant collection of “spiritual
entities” that have graduated from their fleshly prisons. Many
people still hold to the idea that we should embalm our bodies to
prevent decay and keep meticulous records of who was buried where in
preparation for a massive “resurrection”. I prefer to stick with
what Jesus had to say. “And fear not them who kill the body, but
are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear Him which is able to
destroy both soul and body in hell.” Mathew 10, 28. His own death
and resurrection are a testament to His perfect example – He did
indeed practice exactly what He preached. As for the Kingdom of
heaven... it is amongst us; it is ours to enter in Today; it is
within; those who live in the Kingdom are like children; the Church
Is the Body of Christ. Our individual resurrection took place at our
baptism when we invited God to be Lord of our life and believed that
He forgives us our sins as we forgive others who sin against us.
That is far too straightforward to suit the arrogance of human
beings, but never-the-less, God has not given me a vision of an
alternate plan. WE ARE the alternate
plan.
This is the third book of a
trilogy. The first, Book67 the Book of Unspin details necessary
changes to our basic institutions - Religious, Financial, Judicial,
and Governmental. It also offers a five step peace plan between
modern day Israel and the Palestinian authority. The second, Book68
the Unification of Species, outlines seven global agreements that can
create peace and order out of the present violence and corruption
that dominate our global news. My hope for this final attempt to
communicate my thoughts and reasoning is to equip the vast army of
angry Christian prophets who are currently being ignored into a
unified shout to bring down the deceptions that keep the present
system operating no matter what. If anyone doubts that God still
speaks to and through human beings, I recommend they watch Michael
Moore’s new documentary, “Planet of the Humans”.
