Prayer and Repentance or Entertainment?

 Big gathering in Washington DC a month ago for "Prayer and Repentance," that God would give us revival.   Just what I've been wanting, right?  

https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2020/september/be-a-part-of-the-return-a-national-and-global-day-of-repentance-friday-evening-and-all-day-saturday

 So why am I disappointed?  I've watched half an hour of it and I'm terribly disappointed, discouraged.  Is this the Church of Jesus Christ?  Is this Prayer and Repentance?  Does this please God?  It's like a big entertainment, rousing speeches and rock music.  Instead of inspiring me it's making me cry from disappointment.  I don't know if the fault is my own or I'm seeing this accurately.  I'll have to pray about it for a while but I'm afraid I'll conclude I'm right.

It's supposed to be the Church responding to God's call in 2 Chronicles 7:14:   "If My people, who are called by My Name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways then will I hear from Heaven and heal their land."  LORD, are they doing that?  Will you hear and heal our land?  

I'm going to keep watching at least from time to time, it's many hours long, hoping I'll be more in tune with it as it goes on.  But has there been any hint of revival in the month since that gathering?    Again, is the fault with me or am I right that the tone here is all wrong?

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A lot of good preaching after the above.   But.  But I suspect there are many churches represented there that could be considered apostate,such as signs and wonders or spiritual-gifts churches, and I've been arguing that God is not likely to bless those churches with revival, He'd only bless the churches that have a basically sound biblical doctrine.  But I'll keep listening.  

Oh, and I found Gordon Robertson's talk objectionable in the extreme.  He thinks we need to repent of racism.  Well, maybe some individuals need to repent of racism, but it's been proved beyond a doubt by police statistics that there is no SYSTEMIC racism, and no evidence whatever that racism of any kind played a part in the deaths of the blacks that BLM has made the reason for their protests.  BLM itself is a self-proclaimed Marxist organization that has just about no interest in black lives.  Why doesn't Robertson know these things?  Iknow why most of the public doesn't:  media suppression of the truth, but Robertson shouldn't be dependent for his information on the mainstream media.

And Voddie Baucham, a black preacher, made a point of joining a mostly white church because he says it takes determination to mix the races in the churches, NOT because of racism as Robertson claims, but because the racial communities naturally gather with their own race.  We should probably repent of that habit, but it's not racism.   Or if it is then the black churches are just as guilty of it -- it was hard for Baucham to make the decision to leave his black community to join a white church.  He considered it a duty to act on his conviction that there should be more of a racial mix in the churches, but it wasn't easy for him to give up his own community.

 If we need to repent of something in the context of the rioting and destruction we are seeing today done falsely in the name of racial injustice, we need to repent of failing to use the proper authorities to quell it.

I haven't listened very far yet, a little over an hour, and although there have been some very sincere biblically astute talks and prayers offered, I don't see any fruit in actual revival from this gathering after a month, and I'm suspecting there are reasons God won't honor it with revival that maybe we don't know and aren't looking for diligently enough.  I'd love to be wrong, I'd love to see a great revival come to this nation, but as I've mentioned a njumber of times here, there have been many calls to revival in thelast few decades that have not brought about revival, except for some bogus charmismatic demon-powered"revivals."  If enough Christians were clear-sighted enough to recognize such apostasies and not join with them,  maybe, just maybe because I may not know enough about it either, but maybe God would THEN give us revival.  We need a LOT of prayer too though, one weekend tgathering isn't going to do it, we need consistent persistent protracted prayer by many Christians.

Why the West is Being Destroyed

 We in the West should be weeping as the Porphet Jeremiah wept for his nation under God's judgmednt.   The West is being systematically destroyed.  Europe is going first, but America can't be far behind.  I like Douglas Murray, I've heard him now in a discussion with Bret Weinstein on Weinstein's Dark Horse Podcast, talking about the rioting in Portland and how American leaders are not interested in stopping it.  Now I'm listening to an interview with him about his book The Strange Death of Europe.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQXHc-tJMXM

In a quote from his book he says that Europe has given up on her traditions and has lost the will to defend herself against the foreign invasion that is destroying them.  

This is an honest assessment but obviously from someone who himself doesn't really understand the nature of  the traditions that are being lost, doesn't appreciate for instance that what made the West the West, what made the West the place the whole world wants to be, was Christianity.  Christianity is the source of both a rational liberalism and a rational conservatism.  Unmoored from that source either can go wrong, but at the moment it's the liberal side going wrong.  True faith and obedience to the supernatural Christian God is what we've lost.   The list of stellar men of faith in Britain is staggering, and all that has been lost in less than a century.   It was the abandonment of Christianity that began the downward slide to destruction.  Just as the destruction of israel lamented by the Prophet Jeremiah was God's judmgnet for their abandonment of God and His commandments. 

In Leviticus and Deuteronomy blessings and cursings on the nation are spelled out in some detail, blessings for living by God's commandments and cursings for abandoning them.  We are to take these passages as applying to all nations, especially those who have had a commitment to the God of Israel, as the Christian West originally had.  Among the consequences given of abandoning God is the invasion by foreigners.  This is how Europe is being destroyed right now.   It is God working in the minds of the leaders of a nation to bring about such destrucrtion.  Once God has been abandoned His enemies accomplish His judgments for Him.  

I know what MIGHT stop this whole destruction in its tracks, although ti may be too late as there is a point when it is in fact too late to turn back God's judgments, and that is if the majority of a nation realized the cause of the problem and turned back to God, people in great numbers getting on their knees in repentance, asking for His forgiveness and seeking to live by His rules again.   You laugh.  Or maybe you cry.

In America the policies of the Left are clearly aimed at the destruction of the nation and one of them is the same kind of foreign invasion seen in Europe, through foolish "compassionate" poolicies, and our insufficeintly policed borders.  The lies that fuel the destruction of cities are another part of the judgment of God, also coming from the Left.  That's why we hope the Left won't win this coming election.  But they may.  God may be through with us.   I've hoped for a great revival to turn the tide, but too many of the churches are too far into heresies and apostasies for that to be a strong hope.  So I do a lot of crying myself.

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All that is very general of course, and there are what are caled "proximal" causes or issues involved that may or may not be of value in this discussion.  For instance there are definitely conspiracies involved, such as the rewriting of history textbooks to indoctrinate students against American history and toward a global Marxist historical outlook and specifically the acceptance of Communism in the place of the American founding ideals.    This is known to have been accomplished through the work of the great tax-exempt Foundations, Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and Guggenheim.  All this has been discussed by Norman Dodd in an interview that can be found on You Tube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYCBfmIcHM    There is also an interview of Yuri Bezmenov, an ex-KGB agent about Soviet work in the US for the same kind of purpose of subverting American culture.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrS1qDcgdTk  It's in the last fiteen minutes that Bezmenov describes what he considers to be the immensely successful propagandizing ("demoralization" and "destabilizing") of Americans.  A note beneat this video says it had been taken down as "hate speech," an interesting interpretation of that bit of current political correctness, but the interview itself has been circulated as a DVD so even if they take it down again there are people who possess it.

Then of course there was what should really be thought of as the great Marxist revolution of the sixties,, which among other things provoked the removal of required courses in American history and Western Civilization at all our universities, and led to the the huge influx of Marxist professors into those universities where they have been indoctrinating students ever since.  The whole social justice way of thinking comes out of that influence, it is NOT just a development from normal liberalism or the Democratic party, it has all been orchestrated by committed Marxists.  The current actions of Antifa and BLM have historical roots in these things, they are far from a grass roots uprising on behalf of racial justice, in fact their connection to racial issues is extremely tenuous at best.  It should all be understood as the playing out of the revolution planned for almost a century now by the American Communist Party that came to prominence in the sixties.  They aren't particularly interested in black lives at all, they are using incidents that aren't even racial when you finally get to know what really happened, as a vehicle for their anti-American anti-Western ideology, the destruction of the West altogether and its replacement by their utopian fantasy of Collectivism.  With themselves at the top of course.

There is also a huge Jesuit influence in all these things, still hard at work in their never-abandoned CounterReformation by which they aim to destroy Protestant nations.  Chris Pinto is a major source of this kind of information, and the Marxist activities mentioned above as wel.  He has two websites, Noise of Thunder Radio where he reports on such topics of interest, http://www.noiseofthunderradio.com/show-downloads/   and Adullam Films where you can buy his many documentary films on such topics as the history of America and the history of the Bible..    

All this must also be understood as part of God's judgment on America and the West.  Marx came up with a plan diabolically designed to destroy Western civilization and it is working beautifully.  

Every kind of Biblically defined sin is now embraced by the West, and the whole "woke" movement which started out as all the Liberationisms of the sixties, all of it comes out of Maxism or Communism, it's even on their lists of objectives for taking over a culture.  Homosexuality is the latest.  Romans 1 describes how it is the result of the abandonment of the true God.  There is very likely demonic involvement in it as well as in all the gender confusion cases we're hearing about lately.

Turning all this back is likely beyond any merely human effort, it's a supernatural problem at root and it needs a supernatural remedy, if one is possible at all.

If we can't have a general revival why not at least revivals in what is left of the good churches?. Granted there is no perfect church, there are doctrinal flaws in all of them, but if they are basically sound they should be avidly seeking revival just in their own corporate bodies.  Enough of such revivals scattered across the country might have a dramatic effect on turning the tide.  It would take committed prayer by the congregations of these churches, daily prayer  I would hope, including repentance for individual and corporate sins, and maybe God would hear,  I wish.  I hope.  I pray.  Have mercy, LORD, let it be so.  Amen.

People are Dying Because of Misinformation and Bad Science, including about Remdesivir as well as HCQ

So they did a study on this new antiviral drug Remdesivir     https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007764

We conducted a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial of intravenous remdesivir in adults who were hospitalized with Covid-19 and had evidence of lower respiratory tract infection. Patients were randomly assigned to receive either remdesivir (200 mg loading dose on day 1, followed by 100 mg daily for up to 9 additional days) or placebo for up to 10 days. The primary outcome was the time to recovery, defined by either discharge from the hospital or hospitalization for infection-control purposes only....

Our data show that remdesivir was superior to placebo in shortening the time to recovery in adults who were hospitalized with Covid-19 and had evidence of lower respiratory tract infection. 

Many questions come to mind in the light of what I know about the hydroxychloroquine debacle.

I don't know much about this new drug but it's called an antiviral, same as HCQ, which works to prevent replication of the virus in the cells.  It seems that both do that, they work the same way.

That being the case is it fair to guess that Remdesivir also works best in the early stages of the disease and becomes useless when the disease has progressed to the severe stage when there is immune-system overreaction and inflammation throughout the body?  \

If so, this study is just as irrelevant as the ones done on hydroxychloroquine.  That is, as they say, it was done on HOSPITALIZED patients, who have progressed beyond the early stages to be sick enough for admission to the hospital.  THEREFORE, if Rendesivir works similarly to HCQ, it was given to them after the window of opportunity had already passed.  It may nevertheless work as long as it is not TOO far past that window.

We are also not told the ages of the patients.  They were "randomized" as a total group, but all we know about them is that they were all "adults."  

But don't we also know about this disease that it has over a 99% recovery rate in general, that the younger patients are most likely to recover in the greatest numbers, and that it is the patients over 60 or with underlying diseases such as obesity, diabet4es, asthma and so on, who are at greatest risk of dying?  

We supposedly KNOW this.  So what is the point of a general randomization with a general  group of "adults" whose ages and possible co-morbidities are not given?  Wouldn't we be able to predict just from that general information about the susceptibility of different populations that those who are younger and healthier will survive it in greater numbers anyway, so that there would be no way to assess the contribution of an antiviral drug to their recovery?  It is possible, it seems to me, that just as with the Ford study of HCQ that came to a positive conclusion, this study of the new drug may simply be recording the survival of the low risk group that would have survived anyway, and nothing about the effect of the drug at all.  There is no way to know.  And some died in both studies, no doubt because the drug was administered too late to do any good, WHICH SHOULD HAVE BEEN KNOWN ALREADY BUT FOR SOME REASON WASN'T.  Since neither study reports ont he ages or co-morbid conditions of those who survived and those who died there is no way to know anything at all about the effect of the drug.

Those who have been defending Hydroxychloroquine as an effective antiviral therapeutic for COVID-19 have consistently used it with the high-risk ppopulation, the older ones and those with co-morbidities, who should be given it, and in the very early stages.  It should be effective in reducing the severity of the disease with any age group but there is not much point in giving it to the low-risk population.   AND if Rendesivir does work in the same way that HCQ works, giving it to hospitalized patients is counterproductive.  It would work best in the early stages of the disease as HCQ does.

In other words this is just another big fat irrelevant study based on amazing ignorance.  We're supposed to respect the "science" but this is such bad science it's laughable.

Just to sum up for Hydroxychloroquine and probably antivirals in general:I

• tt is extremely effective, even a 100% cure, if used within the first seven days of symptoms or a positive test for  COVID.  If used at the right time NOBODY SHOULD DIE OF THE VIRUS AT ALL.  If they are already very sick they may die of that illness but not the virus.
• It would work for all who have the disease, but since the low-risk population would likely survive even without treatment it skews the important statistics to include them.
• After the disease has progressed to the point that the immune system's overreaction has taken over with the inflammatory response, difficulty breathing etc., no antiviral drug is going to be helpful at all.  It may be that there is an intermediate stage where it can sometimes help but nobody is studying any of these questions.
• Conscientious reputable doctors have lost their jobs, had their websites taken down, and been banned from social media for reporting on their positive results with HCQ, which they were using correctly.  They had enormously positive results because they used it with the high risk patients in the early stages of the illness, thus saving the lives of the ones who are at highest risk of dying of this virus.  This is what the studies should be focused on and it is a strange irrationality that does not discriminate between populations based on their ages and co-morbidities, and adminsters the drug after the disease has become severe.  
• If Remdesivir is similar to HCQ in how it works, fine, since it so far doesn't have the problem of political suppression against it, but if it is subjected to the same kinds of irrational assumptions in studies of it, it will never show the highly positive results it is capable of with the high risk population.
•  While Remdesivir may be as effective as HCQ, since HCQ has a known 65-year old track record of safety and is a lot cheaper than the new drug, it should be the treatmet of choice.   However, since both are being subjected to irrational misuse based on misinformation, that has to stop first.

The correct information about the use of HCQ, and probably antivirals in general, has been available from the ver beginning, and for this information I refer you to the long article I included in the previous post by Dr. Steven Hatfill.   

(An Effective COVID Treatment the Media Continue to Besmirch     https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/04/an_effective_covid_treatment_the_media_continues_to_besmirch_143875.htmlI)

The doctors who have used it with great success have been silenced either because of completely unnecessary ignorance or political maliciousness.  I for one would like to see a massive movement to sue those who have suppressed the truth, which has led to thousands upon thousands of unnecessary deaths from this virus.

A Clearer Presentation, I Hope, of the Efficacy of HCQ and the Unnecessary Deaths caused by its Banning

From the WHO website a perfect example of the misinformation about HCQ:  referring to studies on which they based some decision about a particular trial: .

..both showed that hydroxychloroquine does not result in the reduction of mortality of hospitalised COVID-19 patients, when compared with standard 

Excuse me, I have to shout:  OF COURSE IT DIDN'T RESULT IN THE REDUCTION OF MORTALITY OF HOSPITALIZED COVID-19 PATIENTS:  IT ONLY WORKS IN THE VERY FIRST WEEK OF THE ILLENESS AND IS USELESS WHEN THE VIRUS HAS GONE TO THE SECOND STAGE, WHICH IS THE CASE WITH HOSPITALIZED PATIENTS.  IT SHOULD BE USED ON OUTPATIENTS AT THE FIRST SIGN OF ILLNESS OR EVEN BEFORE IF THERE HAS BEEN A POSITIVE TEST THOUGH NO SYMPTOMS.    EVERYONE WHO HAS DEFENDED THE DRUG HAS SAID THIS, WHY DOESN'T THE WHO KNOW IT?  PLEASE READ THE ARTICLE BY STEVEN HATFILL THAT IS No.4 POSTED BELOW:

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In the rest of this post I want to expand on some of the informatin I've given before on this subject.  

1)   Here is my abstract of the main points made on the drug HCQ from the video I posted of Drs. Simone Gold and Daniel Wohlgelernter:   https://watchpraystand.blogspot.com/2020/07/hydroxychlorophone-another-victim-of.html

 The discussion of Hydroxychloroquine starts about 13:00 into the video.   Dr. Gold discusses how three prestigious journals published faulty studies and then had to retract them.  The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.   The JAMA study was done in Brazil using not Hydroxychlorowuine but Chloroquine, a precursor to HCQ that has a known lethal dosage limit which was exceeeded with many of the patients in that study.  About 24:45 Dr. Gold starts talking about the VA study and how it went wrong in the first place by studying people in the late stages of the virus, that HCQ especially with zinc, works best in the vert early stage to prevent the virus from replicating in the cells, but that later there is too much viral load in the body, with a high inflammatory condition and organ failure as the immune system overreacts, and it's too late for the drug to do any good.  So of course people died in that study.

2)   Dr. Harvey Risch wrote for Newsweek a piece titled

The Key to Defeating COVID-19 Already Exists:  We Just Need to Start Using It   https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-already-exists-we-need-start-using-it-opinion-1519535

As professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, I have authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications and currently hold senior positions on the editorial boards of several leading journals. I am usually accustomed to advocating for positions within the mainstream of medicine, so have been flummoxed to find that, in the midst of a crisis, I am fighting for a treatment that the data fully support but which, for reasons having nothing to do with a correct understanding of the science, has been pushed to the sidelines. As a result, tens of thousands of patients with COVID-19 are dying unnecessarily. Fortunately, the situation can be reversed easily and quickly.

I am referring, of course, to the medication hydroxychloroquine. When this inexpensive oral medication is given very early in the course of illness, before the virus has had time to multiply beyond control, it has shown to be highly effective, especially when given in combination with the antibiotics azithromycin or doxycycline and the nutritional supplement zinc.

3)   Here is an interview of Dr. Risch by Mark Levin at You Tube.  Lasts about 12 minutes:     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6lNoFBTlfI 

4)    The disinformation problem was pursued in a Real Clear Politics article by virologist Steven Hatfill , who also gives a rather detailed history of misunderstandings and bad judgments including the use of bad studies like the VA study, that led to the banning of HCQ and still continue to dominate policy and the public consciousness 

   An Effective COVID Treatment the Media Continue to Besmirch     https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/04/an_effective_covid_treatment_the_media_continues_to_besmirch_143875.htmlI". 

Washington Post reporters Ariana Cha and Laurie McGinley were back again on May 22, with a new article shouting out the new supposed news: “Antimalarial drug touted by President Trump is linked to increased risk of death in coronavirus patients, study says.” The media uproar this time was based on a large study just published in the Lancet. There was just one problem. The Lancet paper was fraudulent and it was quickly retracted.

However, the damage from the biased media storm was done and it was long-lasting. Continuing patient enrollment needed for early-use clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine dried up within a week. Patients were afraid to take the drug, doctors became afraid to prescribe it, pharmacies refused to fill prescriptions, and in a rush of incompetent analysis and non-existent senior leadership, the FDA revoked its Emergency Use Authorization for the drug.... 

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, a search was made for suitable antiviral therapies to use as treatment until a vaccine could be produced. One drug, hydroxychloroquine, was found to be the most effective and safe for use against the virus. Federal funds were used for clinical trials of it, but there was no guidance from Dr. Anthony Fauci or the NIH Treatment Guidelines Panel on what role the drug would play in the national pandemic response. …. 

Following a careful regimen developed by doctors in France, some knowledgeable practicing U.S. physicians began prescribing hydroxychloroquine to patients still in the early phase of COVID infection. Its effects seemed dramatic… In contrast --- and in error -- the NIH-funded studies somehow became focused on giving hydroxychloroquine to late-presenting hospitalized patients.... 

By April, it was clear that roughly seven days from the time of the first onset of symptoms, a COVID-19 infection could sometimes progress into a more radical late phase of severe disease with inflammation of the blood vessels in the body and immune system over-reactions. …, [by then]  no antiviral drug could be expected to show much of an effect during this severe second stage of COVID. 

On April 6, 2020, an international team of medical experts ...reaffirmed that hydroxychloroquine was a safe drug with no serious side effects. ... Consequently, [many] countries ... began to use hydroxychloroquine widely and early in their national pandemic response. ... 

However, the NIH promoted a much different strategy for the United States. The “Fauci Strategy” was to keep early infected patients quarantined at home without treatment until they developed a shortness of breath and had to be admitted to a hospital. Then they would be given hydroxychloroquine. The Food and Drug Administration cluelessly agreed to this doctrine and it stated in its hydroxychloroquine Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that “hospitalized patients were likely to have a greater prospect of benefit (compared to ambulatory patients with mild illness).” 

In reality just the opposite was true. This was a tragic mistake by Fauci and FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn and it was a mistake that would cost the lives of thousands of Americans in the days to come. 

At the same time, accumulating data showed remarkable results if hydroxychloroquine were given to patients early, during a seven-day window from the time of first symptom onset. ...In mid-April a high-level memo was sent to the FDA alerting them to the fact that the best use for hydroxychloroquine was for its early use in still ambulatory COVID patients.... 

Failing to understand that COVID-19 could be a two-stage disease process, the FDA ignored the memo and, as previously mentioned, it withdrew its EUA for hydroxychloroquine based on flawed studies and clinical trials that were applicable only to late-stage COVID patients.

 By now, however, some countries had already implemented early, aggressive, outpatient community treatment with hydroxychloroquine and within weeks were able to minimize their COVID deaths and bring their national pandemic under some degree of control. 

In countries such as Great Britain and the United States, where the “Fauci-Hahn Strategy” was followed, there was a much higher death rate ....

[In Switzerland] Following a lag of 13 days after stopping outpatient hydroxychloroquine use, the country’s COVID-19 deaths increased four-fold .... Early outpatient hydroxychloroquine was restarted June 11 but the four-fold “wave of excess lethality” lasted until June 22, after which the nrCFR rapidly returned to its background value. 

Here in our country, Fauci continued to ignore the ever accumulating and remarkable early-use data on hydroxychloroquine and he became focused on a new antiviral compound named remdesivir. This was an experimental drug that had to be given intravenously every day for five days. It was never suitable for major widespread outpatient or at-home use as part of a national pandemic plan. We now know that remdesivir has no effect on overall COVID patient mortality and it costs thousands of dollars per patient.  

Hydroxychloroquine, by contrast, costs 60 cents a tablet, it can be taken at home, it fits in with the national pandemic plan for respiratory viruses, and a course of therapy simply requires swallowing three tablets in the first 24 hours followed by one tablet every 12 hours for five days. 

There are now 53 studies that show positive results of hydroxychloroquine in COVID infections. There are 14 global studies that show neutral or negative results -- and [those were severely flawed].

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Want to add here that I ran across an interview at You Tube with a Dr. David Brownstein who has been using what he calls a holistic treatment method with COVID patients, using IV vitamins,A, C and D, and  iodine  particularly, and claims nobody he's treated has died of the virus.

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Now want to add one more thing.  A Dr. Brian Tyson of El Centro, California, reports positive results of HCQ on over 1700 patients but I want to point out that it was given to patients of all ages, which as Dr. Risch has said is not necessary, and it confuses the data since patients younger than 60 would most likely have recovered without any treatment.  It should be given to the high-risk groups who would likely die otherwise.  I found the same problem with the Ford study which also reported positive results.  That too did not discriminate on the basis of age, and since it was done with hospitalized patients who are already into the inflammatory and immune system overreaction phase, the older patients of course had the highest death rate even with the HCQ..   It's unfortunately likely in that case that only the younger patients survived, and that was credited to the HCQ although it may simply have been that they are low-risk and would probably have survived anyway.  There's no way to know since they don't isolate the data for these different conditions.

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Another interesting bit of information:  Fox News reported on a study of the use of comercial mouthwashes and nasal irrigations that showed they kill the virus at anything from 30 seconds to two minutes.  Good to know.

A Succinct Presentation of the Pretribulation Rapture

I'm posting this just because David Guzik does such a good job of laying out the biblical basis for the  pretribulation rapture in one hour.  I have some problem with the arguments for the Millennium but I'll get to that in some other post.

Sorry again, Blogger changed things a couple months ago so that I can no longer figure out how to embed a You Tube video;  all I can do is give the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QiXG7bpKec

Another Teacher on the Spiritual Meaning of Song of Songs

I love discovering a new inspiring Christian voice, someone I hadn't heard of before.  I just discovered Charles Alexander when I was looking for some good preaching on the Song of Songs at Sermon Audio.  Vernon McGee is good but I think Alexander is better.   Nobody yet is completely convincing on all parts of this subject though.  Many parts of the Song get a new interpretation from each individual preacher and I'm not in a position to know who is right.   All I know is I'm attracted to those who bring out the most glorious characteristics of the Beloved and I'm looking for something to increase my love of God far more than I'm looking for correct theology.

Besides sermons at Sermon Audio, I found this page of Alexander's thoughts on the Song of Songs -  http: www.allbygrace.com/alexsong04803.html  - which has many inspiring passages.  "Name Above All Names" is the theme.  I just ran across one statement that particularly thrills me though it's not directly related to what I was just saying:  

We repudiate with disgust the modern attempt to force upon the Christian public the false name YAHWEH in place of Jehovah. No such name exists. It is without meaning, invented largely when theology had begun to be perverted during the course of the nineteenth century.

YES YES YES YES YES!    Thank You Lord.  I don't recall ever before seeing anyone repudiate that abomination of a name for God, but it's grated on me for years as so many products of the "higher criticism" do (along with so much of the work of Westcott and Hort in foisting an abomination of a Greek manuscript and a repugnant English translation on the Church).   I've mentioned my abhorrence of this name many times in my blogs though I really only have my own visceral repugnance for it to go by.  At least now I find that repugnance shared by someone whose perspective is appealing to me in general.

There are so many things in the Biblical record that I think most of us grasp only superficially without making an effort to understand them better.  That's true of me anyway and now that I know it I'm hoping to get more deeply into these things.  Alexander for instance discusses the incarnation in far more depth than I've encountered before, and of course it must be a very complex topic that could take us deeply into mysteries of God we've hardly ever touched on if we spend time thinking it through.   We believe it of course, we know it's true, but how many of us have spent any time contemplating its mysteriousness?  And that's just one of hundreds of topics we could and should think about more deeply.  Jesus prayed that we would "know" Him after all, and that takes learning more about Him, spending more time with Him etc..

And I just want to say one more time that the Song of Songs must surely be understood in the spiritual sense and that those who interpret it as about human married love are missing the whole point.  For one thimg it just seems so unlikely that God would include a whole book on that subject when there are so many believers who are single and will never marry.  Addressing specific instructions to special groups (husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, parents, children, slaves, slave owners, pastors, elders, women etc.) makes sense, but not writing a whole book about married love to congregations in which there are many unmarried people.   The love between Christ and His Church, which scripture calls His Bride after all, includes all believers.   And that's not even to address the point that the ancient Jews called the book the Holy of Holies.  Married love is certainly a great blessing given by God, but calling it the Holy of Holies, no.  But the mystery of the union of Christ with His Bride deserves such a designation, a union of soul with soul or spirit with spirit, not a carnal union.  And only the carnally minded are going to think of this as something wispy or unreal, whereas the spiritual has a reality far more solid than the physical.

Another that belongs in the Evolution blog.

 Evolutionary Biology is an amusement I indulge from time to time.  They discuss many things biological that can clearly be discussed without the slightest reference to evoltion and yet they always have to tack it on at some point and carry on as if it were relevant.  You can discuss the mesentery, the membrane that holds together the internal organs of many creatures, without any reference whatever to evolution.  It apparently has interesting properties that have never been fully appreciated.  You don't need evolution to think about those things.  

But then someone mentions Junk DNA and vestigial organs and they have to discuss them as products of evolution --  Junk DNA MUST have a function you see, because after all it's such a huge percentage of the genome evolution requires it.  I dunno, in reality not much actuall function has been found in these otherwise normal-looking genes.  The chemistry is so complex it can still show some signs of life I suppose, long after having lost the normal coding function of a gene, which suggests SOME sort of continuing function of a different sort, though what that function might be is purely speculative.  Something more like rigor mortis comes to my mind but then I'm no biologist.  And it's Evolution that requires the function so they'll turn even rigor mortis into a function to fit the theory if they have to.  (Funny though, some evoltuionists think that just as dead genes it supports evolution, being a record of former evolutionary experiments in the long history of evolutionary change.  Or maybe they've realized that one didn't work, I haven't kept up with it).    

They seem also to think that what are called vestigial organs have a function too.  Organs the creature can apparently survive well enough without.  Seems to me that they could have lost their function and still go on sort of more or less doing something or other even though it's no longer a necessary something or other.    Oh well.   These things are such wonderful evidence for Creationism and against Evolution but oh well, oh well.  All life is running down as it were, the whole planet is running down as it were, the cosmos is running down as it were, all that is evidence for the Biblical accounts of Creation, Fall and Flood, not Evolution.   It all implies a formerly perfect biological system that has lost its functions over the millennia as Death took over through the Fall.   Stages of death over time you could say, the Flood being one gigantic death that all by itself could have brought about Junk DNA in the ensuing centuries.  A long litany of loss is the most likely explanation for what we actually see.

I was pondering again how each creature certainly seems to demonstrate a Species coherence that belies the whole idea that Species evolved from other Species.  Well there are many reasons that idea is bogus but I'm thinking at the moment of how you can often see a structure that defines each that remains quite recognizable through all the variations within a particular Species.  You can always tell a cat from its skeleton, can't you?  Or a dog.  Distortions can occur but the basic structure is reocgnizable.  Many other parts may vary according to the way the DNA gets sexually combined, but something in the basic structure remains definitive of the catness of cats, the dogness of dogs and so on. Birds too..  Penguins don't look a lot like other birds on the surface but they sure do in their skeletons.  Ostriches too.  Yep and the trilobiteness of trilobites, yep, I hope I'll get to spend some time putting that one together some day if I live so long.  Or maybe we'll get to do such things in the Millennium.  That would be fun.