Wednesday, March 2, 2022

The Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Knowledge of God's Moral LLaw.

A few days ago it occurred to me that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil which was the instrument of Adam and Eve's disobedience of God, the Fall, Original Sin, and our inherited sin nature, may represent the Moral Law of God. I've often wondered what is meant by the knowledge of good and evil. Of course in one sense it is easy enough to understand that our original parents were innocent of the knowledge of evil so that it came to them through that sin and of course we know we have tht knowledge. But i didn't really get the import of it, why that particular name for that tree and so on.

Unbelievers like to deny what the scripture tell sus, that this was a great calamity for the human rce, and like their father Satan they read the passage to mean that God lied and that we acquired powers He didn't want us to have, powers that made us AS "GODS" AND God didn't want rivals or some such nonense, nonsense tht is a terrible blasphemy against God.
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But I've been thinking a lot about the meaning of "knowledge" in scripture, such as in that passage in Hoszea I've mentioned a few timees now, where God says "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.." Often I've heard that preached as referring to practical knowledge of various dangers we encounter in the world, poisons, diseases, who our enemies are and so on, and certainly that's a kind of knowledge that helps protect us from such dangers.

But as I read that passage it became clear to me that in context God is talking about knoweldge of His Moral Law, such as the Ten Commandments. He says His people commit various sins such as sealing and lying, swearing false oaths, murdering, committing adultery and so on, right before He says they are destroyed for lack of khnowledge. Also that they don't want to have this knowledge, they rejecit. That doesn't sound like the kind of practical knowledge so many impute to it since why would we reject such useful warnings against harm?

So surely the meaning there is that God is condemning the leaders of His people for not teaching His commandments to them to protect them from the real danger, which is the death that comes from sin. "The wages of sin is death." And death includes every other kind of suffering, diseases and dangers of every sort that can become the instruments of suffering and death to us. When God gave the Law through Moses how did He put it? He was giving them the knowledge they needed for life or death or something like that, "therefore choose life." Choosing life meant obedience to the commandmeents. If we belive and obey the commandmenets we will live, if we violate them we will die, and that means we will be subject to all kindsof suffering short of physical death as well.

then I was listening to the Book of Proverbs and was struck by the repeition of the word "kowledge." It is used more or less synonymously with "wisdom" and "undderstanding" and it's all about tknowledge of the dangers that come through sin, the death that comes from sin. Long life and health are promised to those who obey the commandments of Wisdom, who is the wsisdom of God. '
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What is this knowledge or wisdom that is the main focus of so much of the Bible? Can't it becammed "the knowledge of good and evil?" That is what led me to the meaning of the Tree of the Kowledge of Good and Evil as represen6ting a new condition for Adam and Eve in which they came under the Moral Law of God which runs the universe. It's not a happy knowledge beause they are now sinners and being subject to the Law of God means they are subject to death and disease and iseries of all kinds.
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I recently heard on some radio show or other that Hindu parents teach their chidlren about Karma in a certain way that I didn't catch, but it was their teaching that moral system that caught my attention. Karm is at least a form of the Moral Law that people haeve intuited, and I was thinking how right it was that they teach it to their children. It seemed to me that although we get moral instruction from our parents in one form or other it isn't a systematic form, it's piecemeal and imperfect and shouldn't we be taught the moral law of God? Christians certainly, at least the Ten Commandments. And you'd think we would be, or think thaty we are taught it but I'm not aware that anyone teaches it to their children in any systematic way. Even the churches don't really. We may learn the commnandments but I don't recall learning that life and death hang oon them. Maybe it is taught in some places, I just haven't run across it.

And I don't think I've ever heard the Tree of the KNowledge of Good and Evil taught in terms that relate to the Moral Law. Again I may have and just didn't register it. But it hit me as a revelation. Not that I get its full import I'm sure, it raises more qustions than it answers, but at the same time it is a satisfying way of thinking about it.
If we were taught that the universe will punish us for transgressions of this law wouldn't we be a lot more careful than we are? I say the "unoiverse" because there is something inexorable about the Law. God is in some sense synonymous with His Law, He can't violate it, it is inherent in His Being, it IS him in some sense. But it is applied with fine intelligence that takes into acccount degrees of motivation and understanding and balances it with a zillion other transgressions and obediences all in the flash of a momnent's judgment. It makes no mistakes. God makes no mistakes. "The windmillis of the LORD grind exceeding fine."

The Law bites. When I was an unbeliever I scoffed at the idea that there were any spiritual forces in the universe. I'd become a miserable aheist in my teens after being sent to church as a child and learnign a few things about God though in a pretty garbled fashiohn. I was a believer but not a very well taught believer. Then I met sophisticated teenagers and became an atheist and remained in that condition for the next thirty years. Scoffing at what i'd once believed.

If you scoff at sin you get smacked down. At least if you are God's child you do. I've been smacked down quite a bit. It makes me wish I'd learned at least the karma version of the Law as it might have protected me from a lot of smackdowns. But karms is a very shallow and distorted version of the Moral Law of God and now I'm wishing we were all taught more about the biblical Law. I think a lot these days about how the nation is going to hell in a handbasket as it were, and how people have no idea that they are "storing up wrath" by their beliefs, by the evil laws that are being passed by our government and that sort of thing. The natio itself is under God's judgmednt for those laws, but the individuals who promote them have no idewa what they are doing to their own souls. In a way it's a big comfort to know that the current lawlessness and insanity will be punished by God in the end, but I wish people would wake up NOW, that the country could be saved NOW, that God would sensd revival NOW.
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I'm sorry my typing is so bad. I have to mention it from time to time. I can't see what I'm typing, it's a very faint image and if I have to stop to correct something I get copletely lost becauae my eyes are so bad. I can often feel with my fingers when I've hit a wrong key but I don't dare stop to try to fix it because I'll end up having to retype a whole paragraph just because I an't make out what I've written.

Anyway, I wanted to write a post, yet anjother post, on the subjeject of God's Moral Law, thoguth this encounter with the term "knowledge" in the Bible. There's probably more I should say but I'll leave it for another post. >

Well, one thing that needs to be said is that the New Testament teaches that the Law is a "schoolmaster to bring us to Christ," meaning that the Law can't save us, it can only condemn us because we are sinners. We can't escape it. Only Jesus Christ was sinless, no other human being can do anyhthing but sin. And the longer we are a Christian, a serious Christian, the more we become awayre of the depths of our sinfulness. It would lead to despair if it weren't for the knowledge that Christ paid for our sins so that we don't have to be condemned. "there is now no condemnation in Christi Hesus>"

Agai Again, sorry for the messy typing. I know there are lots of errors just in that last paragraph.

Power Over the Paranormal, the Occult, Demons and Their Deceptions Such as ufoS, NDE Etc., Comes Only By Jesus Christ

Again I caught some of the Coast-to-Coast late night radio show with George Noori, whose guest was talkinjg about demon possession and how to differentiate it from mental illness. I missed most of it but it made me realize I need to say more than I did in my last post on this sugject.

It can't be emphnasized enoutgh that WE LIVE LIVE IN A FALLEN WORLD, and we ourselves are fallen creatures. We are born into sin because we inherit the sin nature fromj our original parents who disobeyed God and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That act of disobedience changed our spiritual naturre, we lost the spiritual faculty by which we could communicate directly with Gode, we became subject to the rule of Satan and his devil hordes. By sesducing our parents Satan "earned" the right to become what Jesus called him, "the price of this world." We have a broken spiritual nature, a distorted spiritual nature, that is more easily in touch with the demonic realms than with the God who made us.

From the very begtinning, after the Fall, God promised to send a Savior who woujld restore us to our original creatured condition and remove our sins. "As by one man, Adam, sin entered the world and death by sin, so by the one man Jesus Christ, God's anointed promised from Eden, we are restroed to life and health. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoeverr believes on Him should have eternal life."

The first desendantof Adam and Eve knew of these things, knew of the promjise of the Savior, and religions grew up around various heroes who were claimed to be that messiah or anointed one of god.Himrod was the prototype of these false messiahs. the book, The Two Babylons, by Alexander Hislop, traces a long line of pagan religions from that original. The image of mother and child that became prominent in the Roman Catholic religions goes all the way back to the religion of Nimrod and his mother Samiramis. That image is part of pagan religions from Japan to India before it settled on the Antichrist religion of Roman Catholicism.

Then the true Savior came "in the fullness of time" as the Bible puts it, and we have His story in the New Nestament. He was promised throughout the Old Testament in hundreds of prophetic statements, to come throutgh the people God raised up fromt the patriarch Abraham, then narrowing His tribe down to the tribe of Judah through King David. Mary and Joseph were of the lineage of David.


He has come and because He has come we who believe on Him have eternal life. He paid with His own sinless life and death on the cross tje som debt we pwe tp Gppd amd of we trist om Jo, we are saved frp, pir som matire amd tje ri;ersjo[ pf tje devo; pver is/ >br?AAs the Christmas carol says, He came "to save us all from Stan's power when we had gone astray, oh tidings of comfort and joy..."

All this has to be understood in order rightly to understand what's going on with all this paranormal and occultic phenomena that so many people get so naively caught up in. I got caught up in it myself during the period when I had become fascinated with religion, before I finally realized that Christ was the truth and everything else a counterfeit.

Counterfeits. Harlots. the message on the forehead of the Harlot Church of Revelation 17, "Mytery: Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots and the Abominations of the Earth" sums up all the counterfeits from Babylon to the ROMAN cATHOLIC cHURCH. tHE THE rOMAN cHURCH IS THE FINAL EXPRESSION OF THIS PAGAN RELIGION, THE SEAT OF THE aNTICHRIST. aS THE pROTESTANT rEFORMERS KNEW, BUTBUT NOT ONLY THEY BUT HUNDREDS OF OTHERS BERFORE THEM. sO THAT THE FACT THAT IT IS MOSTLY cATHOLIC PRIESTS WHO ARE KNOWN FOR THEIR PRACTICE OF EXORCISMS IS A BIT LUDICROUS. rOMAN PRIESTS WERE MENTIONED BY gEORGE nOORI'S GUEST AS AT THE FOREFRONT OF DEALING WITH DEMON POSSESSION, BUT THEY DO NOT HAVE THE POWER TO DEAL WITH IT BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT THE REPRESENTATIVES OF JESUS cHRIST THEY CLAIM TO BE. tHEY ARE THE INHERITORS OF THE COUNTERFEIT MESSIANIC RELIGIONS. tHE rOMAN cHURCH DOES NOT TEACH THAT WE ARE SAVED ONLY BY THE BLOOD OF cHRIST AND NOTHEINBG ELSE. THEY ADD TO THEIR cHRISTIAN MESSAGE ALL SORTS OF PAGAN TRADITIONS THAT DESTROY THE POSSIBILITY OF SALVATION. THUS THEY DO NOT HAVE THE POWER TO CAST OUT DEMONS. THE DEMONS MAY PRETEND TO BE CAST OUT, OR THEY MAY LEAVE FOR A WHILE AND THENCOME BACK WITH HUNDREDS MORE WORSE THAN THEMSELVES, AS jESUS TAUGHT.

iT IS ONLY THROUGH THE TRUE POWER OF cHRIST THAT DEMONS CAN BE AST OUT OF A PESON, AND IF THE PERSON DOES NOT BELIEVE IN cHRIST THE DEMON ISN'T GOING TO LEAVE. ,BR> <
BR> mUCH LESS IS THE DEMON GOING TO LEAVE IF THE PERSON COMMANDING IT TO LEAVE IS A SECULAR PSYCHIATRTHE LIKE. tHE DEMONS OBEY only God and Chrfist is God.

Christ and only Christ has power over Satan because He defeated him at the cross, by dying for the sins of human beings who believe on Him, which releases us from Stan's power. NOBODY ELSE HAS THAT PROTECTION. ONLY THOSE WHO ARE SAVED by the grace of God through the blood of Christ.

there's a lot of religious talk on the George Noori paranormal shows but I haven't yet heard anything that presents Christ as the Savior from all of it. they don't even know they need to be saved from it. So many of them carry on aout "the other side" as if it's just a wonderful scientific discovery and they see no danger in it. Every time I listen to one of these shows I cringe at the dangerous naivete of it.

they believe the lies that come from the demons or devils, such as that UFOs are manned by creatures from other parts of the universe, when they are just demons who are always present in the atmnosphere of this planet, seeking to deceive hhuman eings. Seeking, basically, to keep us from being saved. If people get all carried away with the wonders of the paranormal, say near-pdeath experiences and trips to "heaven," they are deceived into thinking they are safe and will go to that happy place when they die. They don't believe the bible, which is our only source of true knowledge of life and death, instead they are believing "doctrines of demons" that are designed to keep them fromj salvation.

And that reminds me that when I brought up the Nephilim in the previos post I mentioned only the fact that if they corrupt the "seed" or genetic constitution of human beings they make them unsaveable, but the main aim of the manipulations of the gene pool is to sorrupt the seed of the Savior Himself. Now that He has comje they may focus on corrupting those that could be saved. Just as most of these occultic demonic paranormal phenomena are designed to do.

People don't understand that theBible is the ONLY source of tr4uth we have. It is truly God's word, it is His merciful gift to us since through our fallen minds we have no hope of ever figuring out the truttruth and the demons are only too happy to lead us as far away from it as they can. That's what the whole paranormal thing is ALL ABOUT. There is nothing benign about any of it. It's not about extraterrestrials, it's not about some more advanced phyhsics, it's not about other deminensions and it's not about heaven, it's all a deception. The only sasfety is in Jesus Christ and Him alone. NOTHING ELSE.


I hope I got it said right finally. >br?