Pondering

 Pondering: What did the British, Americans and Israelis (atrociously) do in Ukraine in the nineties and since then to foster the resurgence of pre-war ideologies to counter their competition in the region? Did they open Pandora’s Box and precipitate a nuclear WW III?

Book of Isaiah chapter 6

The biblical prophet Isaiah received many prophecies from the Father but it was only when Isaiah saw his Lord, who is Jesus, that Isaiah exclaimed that he was undone because of having seen the YHWH (who is the Father) - Isaiah chapter 6. Seeing Jesus we see the Father because the bond is so great between Father and Son and the Father sends the Son and the Son is so much in the likeness of the Father. It is important to realise that Isaiah, Jesus, apostles who saw Jesus and were sent by Jesus, all these testify to what we have seen. It is not merely hearsay, testifying to what others have seen, but tacit experiential knowledge, first hand. "We speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony." Jesus said it, Isaiah said it ("Lord: Who has believed or testimony and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed"). I echo it too.

Did they know Who they were dealing with?

 It might amaze the Christians and Jews today to find the Bible book of Exodus is a record of events to prove that other gods beside the Most High, Supreme God, do exist but that God is greater and can overrule them. If Christians and Jews knew this well they might rethink calling God the only real god in existence. This might surprise people today. The well known ten plagues of Egypt recorded in Exodus have an interesting and hugely significant detail recorded about them: Many of them were copied by Egypt’s magicians of the time who were able to make rods of wood turn into snakes on demand. If you have seen the movie Prince of Egypt you might recall the striking scene with the song “You’re playing with the big boys now” in which the magicians and their gods of Egypt stand-off with Moses and his God. The outcome reverberates through the religious history of the Israelites and later the Jews and Christians and even Muslims too. 

What are we seeing in Ukraine in the first half of 2022?

 Is the West and Russia together perpetrating some kind of vicarious mass human sacrifice with Neo-N***s in Ukraine? The daily deaths are in the hundreds and with no chance of a game change. Nobody outside of the USSR  was really punished for what the original N***s did in the early 1940s first throughout Eastern Europe then in the West. Is this an attempt to balance the scales? Should the punishment not be against those who failed to carry out justice in the 1950s? Almost all of that generation died out in the 1980s and 1990s and the N***s in the following decade, all now gone. Is this a visitation of vengeance on their children and grandchildren who seek to perpetuate the N*** ways? Can this appease the wrath? Can it avert the nuclear apocalypse? Love God and preserve His teachings and teach the next generation this too rather than the anti-religious, anti-Russian hateful ways of N**ism. Maybe simply following through with proper justice in humility will avert divine vengeance more than callously throwing the offspring to the frontline ad infinitum. It is our traditional governments and institutions and ruling elite and lords and judges who carry the blame for failure to punish Holocaust perpetrators: In the West where it happened (given justice was carried out on the other side of the Iron Curtain) but then many of the Jews among these left for new-formed Israel in the 1950s. These, instead of self-conviction, are making scapegoats of Neo-N***s. Yes the Neo-N***s are a tinderbox and a ticking time-bomb, but it is failure to follow-through with proper justice which is behind their resurgence. The whole system must change so it does not happen again. Human sacrifice is what this looks like more than justice. But maybe God is in it. God’s will be done.

Evolution and information about the future

 The information of a living parent organism that is needed to make a child organism, for that child to be able to produce further children, this information must include the information needed to pass that information on again to future generations in such a way that they can use it. This means the parent needs to possess and pass on information about the future. A parent living thing must include knowledge of the future for their offspring to survive and carry on passing on information for future generations to survive and live and thrive. This must have been so at any point in the history of life. It therefore must have been so even at the beginning and even before organisms existed. We simply tend to regard a parent with information about the future as godlike. So an organism which does not have information in it about the future would not be able to procreate offspring able to themselves procreate further offspring with information needed to produce successful, surviving offspring. This is all the more important if life is evolving because the future would need to have offspring with more information than the parents and a way to store that information and pass it on successfully in the future and therefore need information about the future. This goes back to the start of life. If parents do not have this information and yet evolution is happening as the fossil record suggests, there must in every case be another parent besides the information-deficient organic parents, a parent able to add the extra information needed with each successive generation. This invisible parent must know the future and be able to include information about the future or information needed to deal with the future when a new generation forms. We simply call this parent an invisible god, a creator spirit, visible to science only by its indirect contributions to what the fossil record and studies of life shows. Known yet ignored.

Prayer for Donetsk June 2022

 How long can Anglicans in England support a country which openly and unrepentantly bombs civilians in Donetsk? How long can Anglicans call themselves righteous in Christ and yet the worldly head of the Church of England openly supports the country which does these things? Is this Christian in any way? Is this what people do who claim to have eternal life in Christ? Judge them by their fruits. Isn’t that what Jesus said? If Jesus sent me, it is not to whitewash and justify such behaviour. It is to point to true eternal life in Him which does not support murder and murderers. Be ye separate and touch no unclean thing. Surrender up the devoted things for destruction. Put the wicked out from you. Let all those who call on the name of the Lord Jesus, every one of you, lowly or high in status, whatever status you have from God, forsake evil. This is what it means to be a true church for the glory of the name of God the Most High. In Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.

Worshipping God

The natural thinking we have might oppose us praising the Most High and oppose thoughts of what wonders He does, but the Spirit awakening our spirit bypasses all that natural thinking and brings out in us thoughts of what the Most High does in people everywhere that is praiseworthy and we praise Him by spirit and truth, irrespective of opposing thoughts. I even find this can happen in my sleep which helps to bypass the naturally opposing thoughts and allow praise to the Most High by spirit and truth. All this is what the Most High seeks. Trying to use opposing, natural thinking to praise and worship God is not what God seeks. It should not be what we seek. If a person truly serves God: If they truly are a servant of God, they will receive the Holy Spirit and have their spirit awakened to make them see visions and dream dreams which lead them to worship in spirit and truth.

Unity of faith

 I currently choose to worship online in a church I found on my smart TV. Very nice. Very convenient. Communion is blessed by God, I find, in this form of worship. But how do I contribute? All I can do is receive. So how about returning to normal church worship in a building of worship? Nothing in the gospel about having to have a building of worship - the place is the spirit and the building is the circle of believers joined by faith and the Holy Spirit in the ministry coming from the resurrected Christ. So it is a practicality, not an essential. Yet, it is frustrated anyway. If I go to a building for worship I have to choose one which fits a set of criteria. Why? Historical division. There are three or four basic ontologies about God and you have to pick the one you most accept. Why? Historical division. Christ is not divided but believers are. Trinitarians. Unitarians. Oneness. Binitarians. Take your pick. This is so ugly and unworthy of Christ Jesus who did not bring many versions of faith. He brought the faith which Abraham had. The faith produced among the first believers who followed Christ became in them a faith produced by God the Father through Jesus Christ God's Son. Was Abraham a Trinitarian? Oneness? Unitarian? Binitarian? Abraham worshipped the one God who Abraham knew would some day send a Christ to save the believers and Abraham rejoiced to see that day. So we too should humbly seek to be sure we have that same faith within us and to know that this Christ has come and is called Jesus. Then we will find the teachings of Jesus to be our salvation as the Christ sets us free as we hold to these teachings. Let us scrap our ontologies and return to the faith God first produced in the believing followers of Jesus Christ and let us all worship in unity. That way we have fellowship with the Father and with His Son.

Are you OK?

 Are you OK? Am I OK? Define OK. What if history is repeating itself? Horrible history. We should know our horrible history so we know what happens if it gets repeated. What if police forces far and wide are being influenced to be ready to do something horrible? If this is happening the most assuredly we are NOT OK. Know about the forties. 

The gravity of the blindness of Western leaders

 When the blind lead the blind, they both fall into a pit, as Jesus Christ famously put it. And the gravity of the blind leaders' wrongdoing would be lessened were they merely blind, but their claim to be able to see means that gravity remains.

What is a mercenary? The answer given to this question might be a matter of life and death for those who fight in the wars of foreign countries. To try to circumvent this, there are groups such as the French Foreign Legion which tries to give non-mercenary status to its foreign fighters. Ukraine did something similar in a hurry this year. It set up its own International Legion of Territorial Defence of Ukraine. In an announcement of this, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba gave the game away by mentioning that some of the home countries of members of this legion forbid their citizens from fighting for other countries. [1] Even the UK has such a law, although it is rarely applied. It does not take much common sense to work out that if a country forbids its citizens from fighting in wars against countries against which the UK is not at war, then the reason for this is to do with the common understanding that such fighting is considered mercenary fighting, and is therefore not given Geneva Convention protection. The UK in recent years seems to have sought to play down the distinction between a mercenary and someone fighting in such an international legion. Unfortunately this muddying of the water may have helped to persuade British fighters to embark on actions leading to their deaths. Ref 1[1]: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/ukraine-says-20000-volunteers-from-52-countries-sign-up-to-fight

Pentecost 2022

 On the Day of Pentecost, 2022, I would reflect on what it means to real Christianity. Many merely imagine what the Holy Spirit visitation on the famous original New Testament Day of Pentecost was like and what a similar visitation might be like today. Yet it is not every believer in Christ who needs to use imagination: Many have memories and ongoing experiences of what happens when the Holy Spirit helps believers and their church circles. For me the first experience I was fully persuaded was this kind of visitation happened as a private, prayerful vision like a movie in my mind after I had pleaded with God for the Holy Spirit - like a waking dream and yet with subtitles - a visual depiction of  builder's bucket of sand tipped out in front of me and the words going across this vision "BUILD THE TEMPLE". I asked for threefold confirmation and this was given soon afterwards. Second experience was in a church service months later when a preacher took the microphone and spoke angelic words but in my ears I heard them inspiring English words inside my head telling of the power of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ within Nature. The speaker then gave those same English words at the microphone, confirming what I had received by way of interpretation of the angelic tongue. Years later in private ("What is whispered in your ear proclaim from the rooftops" said Jesus) a voice told me to look at a chapter in the Bible "Daniel 3" in answer to a question about angels which I had been pondering. The invisible speaker not only knew my thoughts and the mind of God about the answer to my question but also knew the version of the Bible I would use to look up that chapter - where the answer was a note in the margin in a Bible version edition I had never read before. Yet now on Pentecost Sunday 2022 the simple experience I received was more ordinary but no less helpful. A terribly painful condition hasn't been healed though I have prayed about it for months. I went to a service online on my TV and just felt confident that advice about this would be given me from the Holy Spirit. Sure enough, as soon as I tuned in, one leader interrupted the other to say "You must always persevere in your prayer and not give up". It helped so much that I almost turned off the TV and left it at that. I kept watching and further articles and interviews said the same thing, that healing sometimes requires that we pray for months, and that Jesus taught this. I remembered the lesson in which Jesus had taught it. The Holy Spirit, said Jesus, will remind of all that Jesus said. We can read it in the gospels and then forget it after years, but the Holy Spirit brings it back when we need it. The ministry of Jesus continues with the Holy Spirit bringing us not only things Jesus said long ago but what Jesus receives from the Father in out times today. Pentecost can even become quite normal. But is always the ministry of the Wonderful Counsellor.

A week later an interesting dream taught me why we are sometimes keep praying before receiving an answer. The dream was like a parable of Jesus. Perhaps it was a parable of resurrected Jesus given by the Holy Spirit, coming as instruction ultimately from the Father. In the dream I was newly employed as a personal servant to the patriarchal father of a very rich and powerful family. Many others were employed as servants too and had some pretty tough jobs to do, as you would expect in such a situation. I was just starting. This father came to me and requested in procure a nice-looking box of a certain size. It seemed an easier task than other servants had to do. I got a bit distracted procuring this box, mainly when a child in the family was demanding something. As I was helping get what the child wanted a party was starting in this huge family mansion and guests were arriving and the father arrived too. Another servant told me I had better put on a suit. I still hadn't got the box. I had no idea why getting this box was important. Time had gone by and the father came up to me with some items which he dumped in my hands and walked away hurriedly. I realised it was a gift for me. I suddenly understood that the box had been for these items so he could present them to me nicely. Now, because I had failed to procure the box and take it to him at the party he had unhappily been forced to give me the gift without a wrapping gift-box. He was not happy but he had given it to me anyway. As I woke from the dream I suddenly understood that the command to pray persistently for what we ask from God is like this gift box. God wants us to do the task of creating the gift box into which He will place the answer to our prayer.