Fire

Image by Malene Thyssen

"This third I will put into the fire;

I will refine them like silver

and test them like gold.

They will call on my name

and I will answer them;

I will say, ‘They are my people,’

and they will say, ‘The Lord is our God.’ ”

~Zechariah 13:9

The world is a fire. It is however very hard to be objective about a fire when you are burning in it. I am not at all sure I am objective about it myself.

I have tended to agree with the Gnostic idea that the world is inherently evil and dominated by evil. The Gospel of John appears to agree with that appraisal. But this leads inevitably to the question, and it is a question the Gnostics clearly had issues with, of how then it is allowed to be such. For the Gnostics... the world is a mistake. The creation of the world was an error, a malfunction, one having nothing to do with us. For more mainstream Christians it is also a mistake of sorts, but in this case entirely our own. Or rather, our ancestors, and ourselves are allowed to carry the burden of our ancestors mistake down to this day. For some, it is an inevitable consequence of our free will.

I am going out on a limb and say that they are all full of horseshit. As unsatisfying and tacked-on as the Adam and Eve story is as an explanation of evil, the Gnostics are even worse, coming up with the most convoluted explanation of how divine but not supreme or even knowledgeable beings wound up creating the world in a rather bastardized way. To me, what that suggests is that neither the ancient Jews nor the Christians nor the Gnostics - none of them had a clue, and they had to come up with something. Because they didn't know.

To have God create the world when the world is evil is rather problematic. Of course Christians don't agree that the world is evil, despite John telling them pretty point-blank that it is. Not only John either, you can find snippets suggesting the same in other Gospels. I would go so far as to say that the Christians' lack of appropriate revulsion for the satanic nature of worldly power and authority was the cause of many of their excesses and evils in the centuries afterwards. How you could go from "do not love the World" and "the prince of this world (Satan) now stands condemned" to having a ROMAN EMPEROR preside over the consolidation of church dogma is a game of mental Twister that I have a hard time understanding.

Anyway, back on topic, did God create the world? Because if He was in fact the author of a place of evil and suffering, that would challenge the idea of the goodness of God. If like the Gnostics think he didn't create it but doesn't UNcreate it, it matters little. You would either have a God that creates an evil world or a God who doesn't give a whit about it existing. Any way you look at it, unless you have a God who is powerless or a God who is okay with evil, it presents the same problem.

Believers in God, Jew Christian and Muslim alike, have tended to take a pretty hard attitude towards those perceived to be evil. Stone em, burn em, behead em. They have condemned them to their hells, to burn everlastingly. They have not been very tolerant towards them. I approve of their hatred of evil, if that is actually what it is, but say that it is improperly directed. The place where the hatred of evil is appropriately applied is within yourself, not without. Within the believer himself. Not to other people.

I am going to say something that might be kind of hard to wrap your head around. You might accuse me of spinning horseshit about God's theoretical responsibility for the world like the Jews, Christians and Gnostics have done before me. And maybe you are right, I wouldn't be the best judge of that.

The world is evil, yes. Its fundamental processes are evil, human power structures are evil, it's evil.

God willed or allows it to exist, yes. Both those things are true. The omnipotence of God means that the world could not exist if God did not will it to do so.

And though the world is genuinely evil and dominated by evil, and that evil is extremely real to those suffering the consequences of it, that evil in the end will not exist except abstractly and will not have really existed. None who were ever truly alive will be dead or impaired in any way. There will be no adverse consequences of having lived in the world except for how long you have to spend there.

Imagine a future schoolroom. In this future there is no war or injustice, but parents want their children to understand war and injustice. So there are very high-tech equivalents of VR headsets through which these children can experience what it was like to be in the trenches during WWI or in the Holocaust in WWII. And they experience everything exactly as it was, perfectly. But at the end of class, they take off their VR equipment and go home to their loving parents, and aside from a remembrance of what happened (and perhaps a few late-night nightmares) there are no lasting consequences. They felt the bullet enter their heart, but they are whole. They breathed the cyanide and mustard gas, but they still breathe. They murdered their fellow man, but they did not truly sin, because none of it ultimately exists. They did this to understand how precious their current liberty and peace was. This evil of war and death and hate, it still existed abstractly, their society could decline again to such a state, but it will not.

We are in this fire of evil because God wills it, and because God wills it for our good. Yes, many, most in fact, won't get that this go-round, but there are other days in school and other journeys in the VR headsets and other opportunities to learn what we should all know, how terrible evil is, and how good God is. There are no sinners burning in hell, there are only ignorant ones who don't understand and so must stay here in this simulation until they learn. Do not remain in Plato's cave imagining that shadows are reality, come outside with me to the Light.

Evil is terrible. Our proper action expressing our utter revulsion at it should be directed on ourselves, not other people. We don't have the right to judge anyone, this was one of the insightful snippets Jesus told us about. There is more than enough work to do on ourselves. I for one don't want to stay here in school, I want to leave and enter the greater world of God. This being the case, I would hope that I always examine myself for sin, not others.

How great will be our praise to God when we finally understand all that we have been going through and how great has been His care of us! Even in this fire, even here, I say that only God reigns.

No Messiah

Ruins of King David's palace, image by Deror_avi

And the Lord told him (Samuel):

“Listen to all that the people are saying to you;

it is not you they have rejected,

but they have rejected me (God) as their king.

As they have done from the day

I brought them up out of Egypt until this day,

forsaking me and serving other gods,

so they are doing to you. 

~1 Samuel 8:7-8

I am going to say something that is not going to sit well with either Christians or Jews: there is no Messiah. The idea of a Messiah, a godly king, is and always was a terrible mistake.

What is the message that God tells men repeatedly from the Exodus onwards? That men are darkened, wicked, that even the best of them are corruptible. Even the best of them sin. And of course, most are not the best, most of the Israelites were rejecting God repeatedly from the first footstep of the Exodus to the very last book of the Old Testament.

The idea of a messiah began with King David, a man who murdered a man to screw the man's wife, likely in addition to other misdeeds not chronicled. However, the reason Israelites had kings at all began in the days of Samuel. The Israelites wanted to have a king like all the neighboring lands had kings: prior to this they had judges who would wander around deciding matters. Some of the judges were good like Samuel and some were bad, like Samuel's sons. The fact that they even needed judges was a testament to their disunity and rebellion from God's law. So the Israelites came up to Samuel and said basically that Samuel was old and his sons were bad and every other people around them had kings, so they wanted a king too. Samuel took this complaint to God, and as the quote above says, God told them that the people of Israel had rejected Him (God) as their king. In other words, God was their only rightful king, and a human king would be an usurpation of God's proper place in their lives. Which means that David was not the rightful king either.

Just a quick aside - the phrase "kingdom of heaven" or "kingdom of God" has tended to take on a vaguely esoteric air in the centuries that have elapsed since Jesus' time. What it really means is exactly what it says: rule of the world and human beings directly by God. Now, what role would a human king play in such rulership? None at all: in this current epoch no human being could possibly be qualified to rule in place of God (it would be nearly blasphemous to say they could,) and in "the world to come" as religious Jews say, there would be no need of such a human king. Isaiah says, "The knowledge of God would fill the land like water fills the sea." In other words, everyone blessed to live in such a world would know what God wants immediately - no human ruler needed.

This has been what it has all been about from the beginning - the rulership of God. Not men, not "god-men" if such an abomination were ever allowed, just God.

Getting back to David - the Israelites loved David. He brought them victory in battle and did not seem as arrogant as most kings. He listened to the prophets. He was still a really bad guy in absolute terms - murder being a very grievous sin in most people's understanding of the word - but he was not AS bad as most kings of the time and he did bring them victory and glory and a capital city. So of course, being weak humans, they viewed their religion to some degree through that lens. There are Jews today waiting for their new David. Christians think they have already gotten theirs, but he has left the physical scene for a time until the end of days. In truth, there is no messiah: the whole thing was an invention of people who were addicted to worldly glory and national pride.

The quote from Samuel should tell us everything we need to know. We should feel it in our bones, too: I have no king but God. Not a distorted Christ, not a past or future Jewish David, no king but adonai elohim, the Lord our God. The only one possibly qualified to run the world. The only source of sufficient wisdom. The only incorruptible. The only sinless. Why in the world should we look to some human ruler instead of the very One whose knowledge is like the sand on an endless beach, like the stars in the universe? The very idea of a messiah is a confession of ignorance.

Of course, people like messiahs. Messiahs are glamorous. They flatter human vanity and cater to human emotions. But there is no messiah.

No King But God Alone.

Predestination and Gnosis

Image by Sten

"All the days ordained for me 

were written in your book 

before one of them came to be."

~Psalm 139:16

Predestination, the belief that some people were predestined by God to be his people while some people were predestined not to be, and that this was decided before any of them were born or had done anything good or bad. It is a very difficult belief for human beings to like. It's a very thorny and seemingly unpleasant belief. It seems to strike at our views of fairness, and our hope that all people can be brought to the light in the end.

It also strikes at our ideas of freedom and autonomy, that we are free to make of our lives what we wish. Of course any freedom we could have would be very limited by our opportunities in life and by our knowledge. But we like to believe we have such freedom and such autonomy, however limited it must be. Even according to common sense, it must be quite limited.

Such an idea also is offensive to evangelism. Evangelism is based on the idea that you can convince people of God, that God is somehow the sensible choice that they are missing out on. It is like your friend was about to buy an air filter for his car, and you knew that he could get a better air filter for the same price. You simply explain the merits of the other filter in a rational manner and of course he will see that you are right. If God chooses people directly, your evangelism is totally pointless. Also, if godly knowledge is unworldly as John says, your evangelism is futile because you are trying to sell someone on the virtues of something they cannot sense for themselves. It is like you were saying to the guy buying an air filter, "this air filter has more charm and dandiness, and less kerfluffle." They would think you had lost your mind.

However, both the Old Testament and New seem to firmly back predestination, that everything, even your personality and will, are according to the intention of God. If anything, the New Testament seems to back it more emphatically than the Old, but both lend ample support to the idea. If you want some quotes, Romans 9:19-22, John 15:16-19, John 10:3, John 6:65 and there are many more. Romans 9 contains perhaps the most hard-edged, most unsentimental statement of that position. But in many ways it is most eloquently stated in John.

"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 

If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. 

As it is, you do not belong to the world, 

but I have chosen you out of the world. 

That is why the world hates you."

~John 15:18-19

On at least one level though, predestination is almost certainly true, and I will explain why.

Most people in the world are worldly people. They think about matters of the world, their hearts are set on matters of the world. This is because this is what makes sense according to our physical senses. We must understand this: being worldly makes sense. Being unworldly does not make sense according to the world we can see and taste and touch. Some things give us pleasure and we want those things, other things give us pain and we avoid these things. And so we occupy ourselves with what is necessary to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Knowledge of God is not one of the things that our senses can ever give us.

In fact, consciousness of God is completely unworldly - the Gnostics called this "gnosis," knowledge that our spirit gives us instead of knowledge that our senses give us. This knowledge comes from one source and can only be received from one source, God. That means that only God can give it to us, and He decides when or if that happens. Not me, not you, nobody else. The Gnostics however believed that this knowledge is intrinsic to human beings, or at least some of us. It isn't. It is intrinsic to God, it is his knowledge, that He shares or not.

Now, many claim knowledge of God who do not have it. They claim this for reasons of the cultural background they have or social milieu or personal ambition. Jesus usually points out the pharisees as being this sort of person, someone who is outwardly religious but whose heart is not actually set on God. Religious leaders almost invariably don't have it, because religious leaders have some degree of worldly power or influence and John tells us that the world will hate us and that the world rejects knowledge that comes from God. If people like what you say, you are probably saying the wrong things. If you are saying the right things, you will either be ignored or hated depending on how forcefully and publicly you are saying them. Because, from the point of view of the world and worldly minds, you are not making sense. Worldliness makes sense. Carnality makes sense, and the only question is how to manage it, not how to resist it.

What about fairness? Is it fair that God shows some of his secrets to some people and not others? We cannot ultimately know the plans of God or why He has done things one way and not another, but generally worldly people get their recompense in this world and do not seek and would not understand other recompense. Its like how some foods humans eat are poisonous to dogs: to humans peanuts and chocolate are food, to dogs they are deadly poison. To a deer, ivy is food, but toxic to humans. Humans in their natural state don't want this holy knowledge, the world is enough for them. If the world was not enough for them, then their condition would be abnormal. Perhaps they are ill, or perhaps they are set apart by God, but abnormal either way.

Predestination also comes into play in an attitude spoken of by some mystics: the idea that whatever happens to you, however bad it may seem, was meant for you personally by God for your betterment. That in other words all the experiences in your life, good or bad, were intended by God for you. This is a radical theology and the mind rebels against it as much as it does against predestination. How could God want someone to get cancer, much less His child?! But according to this point of view, everything, EVERYTHING that happens to a child of God has been dictated to happen directly by God, for his or her betterment. This is a hard saying. What about things you do to yourself? If they are bad, then yeah, you needed to learn not to do that. What if it was a terrible cruel thing that happened to you because of things beyond your power? According to this point of view, it wouldn't be happening to you unless God willed it, because God is not going to give over his Children to random pointless events. This is a very hard saying, hard to accept. I do accept it however.

The works I do in my Father’s name testify about me,

but you do not believe because you are not my sheep.

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.

I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish;

no one will snatch them out of my hand.

My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all ;

no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.

I and the Father are one.

~John 10:25-30

Now, you see me quoting the New Testament despite the fact that I am not technically a Christian. What does it mean to be a Christian in the modern understanding? To be a Christian, you have to believe in a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and I do not believe that. I do not believe that Jesus the man was the same as God. I don't think he believed that.

The word "one" can have two meanings. It has two meanings in the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith:

"Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One."

"Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is Unity."

Unity, not Trinity. So I interpret what Jesus was saying as that he had no will of his own. There was no separation between his will and God's will and that because of this, whatever he said was according to what God wanted him to say. Not that a man was God or ever could be, but that the man in fact had left the stage and the One God was speaking through him.

Because of the corruptions that took place to Christianity, I had tended to want to ignore the New Testament altogether and regard Jesus himself as suspect. While I still hold that no man could be God and that there is no Trinity and that the whole Jewish idea of a messiah is a mistake, the New Testament is still a treasure trove of knowledge. I don't think what happened to Christianity was ever Jesus' will, except in that his words would not have been carried down through the ages without an outer wrapper of worldly religion. Christianity the religion was the sugar coating, the pill casing that allowed the World to propagate the unworldly to those in the future who would be able to piece together what the real message was. If Jesus died on the cross for anything, he died for that. Maybe he knew that, maybe he didn't, but either way that was the real functional purpose of it.

I believe that Christianity was the pill casing as it were to allow unworldly knowledge to be propagated in a worldly world. Christianity itself then is to some degree a worldly vehicle: the knowledge concealed within is not.

The worldly vehicle burned people at the stake and killed and invaded and repressed people and so forth, and produced crazy televangelists who enriched themselves from widows and the poor and elderly. I am saying that this is not a bug of Christianity, it is a feature. Christianity exists for one purpose: to carry the information hidden in plain sight within it to be conveyed across the world. It is a worldly chariot for unworldly information that its own practitioners may be unaware of. It is like a virus carrying its DNA across the body, a container for propagating in the world texts whose real meaning is unworldly and not the same as they believe it to be. What Jesus died for, in actual fact, is this: that his words and that the Old Testament too would be propagated throughout the world, so that those who need it would find it. The vessel is not divine, but it is the only vessel that could achieve the purpose in a worldly world.