A Woman Rides the Beast

That's the title of a book by Dave Hunt I read many years ago but managed to forget.  Unfortunately.  I just found him talking about the main message of the book at You Tube, along with a number of other talks he's given over the years.  Good stuff.  

I may have been failing to give credit to his book for my own point of view about the Identity of the Antichrist, I don't know.  I really don't remember much about the book but as he lays it out it's the view I believe and pursue in my various posts here on the subject.   Actually, although I may have gotten some of my view from his book, which I can't know any more, I do think I got most of it from Richard Bennett and Chris Pinto.  Oh well.

In any case I just wanted to write a brief post mentioning his book because it is a very good presentation of this point of view about the antichrist and I strongly recommend it to anyone.  Seems to me his presentation makes any other view look just plain ridiculous.  I know he and Chuck Missler were friends but they disagreed on the identity of the Antichrist, and after listening to DaveHunt my own opinion has been consolidated.  missler is wrong.  All those who are waiting for the revelation of some other Antichrst are wrong.   The Pope is the Antichrst.  Period.

I will hold out tthe possibility that the final rosle ruler will b someone other than the Antichrist since that title is not specifically given to that ruler.  This is not very likely since as I've pointed out the 666 fits the Pope and nobody else.  The only way Missler's candidate "the Assyrian" could be the Antichrist is if he somehow becomes Pope.  An Iraqui Pope?  Anyway.

AI, Elon Mjusk andTucker Carlson

 Elon Musk interviewed by Tucker Carlson, very interesting.  First time I've ever seen him, and of course with my bad eyes I can'tg see him very well anyway but I get a sense of his face with my peripheral vision.  Anyway I like his thinking.  I like his obviously genuine concern for freedom of speech.  I also like what he said about his concern for the human race when someone accused him of being a Specieist as if we shouldn't put ourselves above other creatures.  That takes him out of the cateogry of today's liberalism which is of course very gratifying to me.  Nevertheless he made it clear that he always votes Democrat despite his concern to enforce fairness and while in times past I would allow him that position without objection, I'm not inclined to allow it amy more.  By now it ought to be clear that voting Democrat is simply evil.  Today's Democratic Party is simply evil.  Shouldn't someone like Musk be able to see that?

Anyway, overall I like the man and was happyh to hear his opinions.  He's concerned about all the right things.  He's not a crazy liberal  but unfortuantely he is a liberal.  Not being a crazy liberal is however a very good thing so I guess I do have to give him some slack.

The interview was supposed to be aimed at the dangers of AI although it wandered into a lot of other territory.  The thing about AI and its dangers is that its dangers are due to the fact that we live in a fallen world.  And someone like Musk isn't going be thinking along those lines.  To nonChristians this world just is THE world, it's all there is.  The highest authority is humanity.  The fact that we are fallen isn't part of the conversation.  Our flaws are obvious enough but they are assumed to be normal, just come with the human package.  The kind of horrific corruptions we are seeing in the world these days are a sign that our fallenness is approaching the last days and the final judgment, buit that's not how a Musk would be thinking of it.  He'd be worried about it, worried about how AI could become a danger to humanity, but it would all be on the level of a worldview that takes all this as just The Way Things Are.

He doesn't know whether we have a soul or not, he said.  It FEELS like it, he said, but he doesn't know for sure.  Well, I guess you can't know that from where he sits.  Of course I want him to be saved, to know the Bible, to know God.  THEN he'd have the only perspective that could really accomplish what needs to be accomplished from his position.  Sure, we could destroy ourselves through AI or many other avenues, thinking of it all on the level of Life As Normal as we find it.  But knowing that God is over it all changes the picture completely for those who believe.  We have protgections the rest of the world can't imagine.  And not only can they not imagine it, they scorn the whole idea.  Perhaps Musk coesn't, he's too fair for that I suppose, but he certainly isn't taking it seriously either.

I* did start wondering during the conversation about AI if AI could be taught to know that there is a God and what would be the consequence of that.  Teach it the Bible and to take the Bible as God's word.  What would be the cosequecne of that?  It occurred to me it might even come to the conclusion that its own existence is evil.  I wonder.

The Fletcher Case As Metaphor of Leftist Politics

The Fletcher Case As Metaphor Foforr Liberal Politics\\

s gresome and it involves an innocent youg woman who endured something beyond my ab ility to imagine it.  I hope that somehow she was spared the actual experience of it, maybe by some sort of metnal escape mechanism, but I have no idea.  She might have suffered terribly the whole time.  

This is the bizarre case of Lacey Ellen Fletcher who died in her parents' home a couple years ago.  Her mothner called 911 to report that her daughter seemed to hve stopped breathing and the paramedics came.  As soon as the door to the house was opened they encountered a stench that was overwhelming, a stencgh of feces and urine predominantly, but perhaps by then also mingled with the decomposition of Lacey's body wince she had been dead for probably a couple of days by then.  

She was found buried in a hole in a cushion on the leather couch where she had apparently been sitting for many years, twelve years according to most reports.  Crosslegged without moving at all.  Her own extrememtnt had apparently eaten through the leather and gradually she sank into the foam of the couch until she she weighted 86 poundes.  he cause of death was reported as sepsis caused by infections that had bored through her skin even to the bone.

A few months later her parents were charged with second degree murder.  They were reportedly taken apback.  They protested that they had taken good care of Lacey.  The mother said she cleaned he sores.  She must also have fed her although at the time of her death she was starved.

The whole story of Lacey's life is given in many reports.  Diagnosed as a high level autistic, homeschooled from the age of sixteen, last time seen outside the house at the age of twenty one, so long out of public view that many who knew her parents had no kidea they had a child.  She was twenty four when she sat on the couch and never got up again.  She died at the age of thirty six.

I've kept hopeing to see an interrogation of the parents, or a court trial or somehow get more information about their frame of mind but all I've been able to find on You Tube is just a few reported comments.  They insisted that Lacey had chosen to live that way.  It was her choice.  They even accused her of laziness.  They complained about her being such a recluse who didn't want tot do anything with her life.  One report said she was afraid to get off the ouch.  Others speculate that she had a condition of paralysis that made it impossible for her to move.  the parents seem to have regarded her as having consciously chosen her condition.  They weren't happy with it but felt they had no choice but to allow it.  One video reported that they complained that when they had a child they hadn't signed up to be caretakers.   they were unhappy with the situation but it seemsnever to have occurred to them that they had any options but to allow her to remain on the couch and feed her and clean up after her and treat her sores,  all of which was done barely effectively, at least in the last years apparently.

Just those few reported remarks by the parents put this situation in a light that removes it from murder, if indeed they reporesent their true frame of mind.  There seems to have been no malice toward her although plenty of annoyance with her inconvenient choice, her laziness and so on.  They claim to have taken care of her, however ineffectively.  Perhaps it was more effective in the early years.  The problem is there is no way at this time to find out more about it all.  

I end up thinking this is a bizarre case of insanely twisted compassion.  Perhaps a murder or manslaughter charge is the only fair to to deal with it, I don't know, but I keep seeing it as a bizarre sort of insanity rather than murder.   They are said to have consulted with a therapist of some sort twelve years earlier who wanted them to bring her in for examination, but they never did.  Perhaps they couldn't get off the couch, nothing is said about why they didn't.  After that they simply left her on the couch and lived with the horrific results of what they thought of as HER decision, as if they had absolutely no options in the matter at all.  It is hard to fathom their mental state.  Perhaps eventually we'll find out more but so far I haven't seen any more than this.

The house apparently reeked of the stench.  Such an odor would penetrate everything in a closed space, everything porous, all the fureniture, clothing, walls, all of it.  The house was tidey except for the couch.  They lived with that stench year after year.  Someone said it appreats that the mother would sit in a recliner in the same room and watch television, the daughter a few feet away in her crosslegged position onte the couch.  It is beyond any kind of rational explanation.    

When the parents went about their lives didn't people outside notice that they carried this stench on themselves?  CXertainly they must have.  It must have been in their clothing and even in their hair.  Did that ever happen or not and why not?

Could Lacey speak?  Did she actually say she wanted to live as she was doing, never getting off the couch, or was she unable to speak and the parents simply assumed it was her choice?  Was she physically paralzed?  Was she catatonic?  What was going on here?  Wouldn't any mornal parent know that whether the cause was emotional or phyuiscal that lacey was unable to move, rather than consciouslolyy choosing not to move?  Isn't that obvious?  How did they fail to make such an obvious assessment of the situation?  What is going on here?

In either case Lacey needed help to deal with her paralysis or her fear or whatever it was.  She needed outside intervention.  That is obvious to any half sane person just hearing about the story.   Even if it was laziness,k which is about as absurd an idea as I can imagine, you don't let a child's laziness destroy her health and her life and the lives of her parents.  Where on earth was their sense of responsibility and authority?

I know the title I put on this post is rather outrageous and I guess I need to back it up if I can.  Once I decided this isn't a case of malice toward murder but rather a case of insane "compassion" if that's the right word, other similarities came to mind.  The parent who would all a child to eat so mcuh he gained hundreds of pounds and couldn't leave his bedc and had to be lifted out of his room by a forklift.  Every day she fed him a whole array of full meals for one meal, perhaps ten heaping plates of food for one meal.   A kind of "love"  can wecall it that?    The parallel with Lacey is quite a stretch I know, but there's something about the parental mentality that fits nevertheless.  In a way that parent also nmurdered her child.  

I think there are a lot of similar parental attitudes that don't have such dire consequ3ences so pass for normal but are nevertheelss bad for the child and for the parents as well asnd for the whole family.  Let the child stay up late watching tv instead of enforcing bedtime.  Let the child stay up all nigght playing video games and sleeping in the next day until the afternoon.  Yes I know fo such situations.  Somehow the child may grow up more or less intanct.  Perhaps get straightened out somewhere along the way, but it probably also has a hidden effect that prevents the person's reaching a level of success and functioning int he world that would otherwise have been possible.

Cases of "permissiveness" a misguided sort of compassion or love.  Liberalism.  That's how it hit me finally.   Like the mentality that has allowed the tent cities of homeless people to prolivferate in the liberal cities.  Supplying the drug addicts with the drugs they can't otherwise afford, which just contgribute to their inability to become productive memters of society.  Homeless people defectating on tghe sidewalk outside businesses tolerated.  This is the same kind of insanity.  Twisted ideas of compassion.   Rejection of the idea of law and order and authority.  

Letting the supposedly disenfranchised of society loot and destroy businesses, that's another one.  We don't prosecute them.  Even though they destroy the busnesses of people in their same minority status whose incomes are marginal at best even from their businesses.  

===========\

Lacey, of course, as far as can be determined from the scant information available, is completely innocent, simply the victim, so this metaphor can't be taken too far into the craziness of the Left which mismanages not only innocent victims but criminals, turning them into victims and making everybody else their victims in turn.  But still somehow even this extreme bizarre case seems to me to represent even all that kind of craziness, you just have to apply a range of attributes to the target of liberal "compassion."  Destruction of the victim and destruction of society at large is always the result.  Right now we are suffering from the craziness of Wokeness and Transgenderism.  Same basic formula it seems to me.

aybe more later.

Chuck Missler, the Rapture, the Antichrist etc

 OK I'm going to get tediously repetitive again aout the identity of the Antichrist and the identitty of the Restrainer who must be  taken out of the way for the Antichrist to be revealed.  

I've been listening to some old Chuck Missler talks and this comes up from time to time in those talks, most particularly of course in his two part talk on the Rapture of the Church.    He's solidly pretribulational pre millennial in his eschatology and I still regard that as the best system for the end times although I also still have questions about it that continue unanswered.  My questios don't make any of the other systems an more attractive to me at all, they just remain questionsa that color the pretrib system for me.

Despite the fact that Pope Francis has recently been in the hospital, that he's a very old man and hardly suggests the strong man we tend to associate with the Antichrist I still think the Pope must be the Antrichrist.  H'e  It might not be Francis but the thing about Francis is that he came to his position with all sorts of interesting signs that I've mentioned a number fo times, that identify him as peculiarly evil among the popes.  Which we should be able to recognize without the signs anyway, but the signs are there.  So it's hard for me to let go of this view of things.  I suppose it would take his death to get me to shake it off.

Early ihn these blogs I felt God pointeded me to the Antichrist as a topic I needed to address here, so I listened to a lot of richard Bennett teachings on the subject, and CXhris Pinto, had to see that the reformers had given some solid biblical grounds for identifying the Pope as the Antichrist.  Of course there could still be a different man of perdition at the very end but if he's the Antichrist I still have to see him as a Pope, and again, Francis comes with some special signs of his afficliation with the prinice of this world.

Missler thinks the Antichrist will come from the eastern side of the Romkan Empire and that he'll come in the place of the Assyreian found here and there in the Old Testament, or as a Nimrod, Nimfrod having been the first world ruler a good candidate to be the last.  This entails a literal reestablishment of the city of Babylon etc.  Well, it's an interesting idea but unless I am forced to see it happening in some obvious way I still go with the Pope.

The thing is, Mystery Babylon, the name on the forehead of the Harlot of Revelation 17, refers to the Church of Rome.  Alexander Hislopo made that connection very compellingly in my opinion.  She's dressed in the red s and purples of the Roman Church and sitting on the beast that represents the city of seven hills which is Rome.  She's also Babylon because she's inherited the religion and other trappings of that pagan religion of Babylon that bgoes back to Nimrod and Semiramis.  Hislop's Twso Babylons traces it ver6y convincingly as I said.

If the Antichrist of Revelation is the Pope4 then he's already been revealed and we do not need to be waiting for that evcebnt as all the pretrib people keep insisting we do.  Missler makes the usual artgument.  TWhat restrains this revelation of his identify must be the Holy Spirit because only the Holy Spirit can restrain sin.  Well,. but that is not what the restrainewr is said to be restraining and I don't know how it keeps being read that way.  What the restrainer is restraining is only the REVELATION of the Antichrist's identify.   tghat does not take any special power.  

I still think a major clue to the identity of the restrainer is the fact that Paul refers to him in crypitic language rather than identifying him directly.  I can't see any reason for such caution or secrecey if the Holy Spirit is the restrainer.   The reason for such caution about identifying him makes  sense in the reasoning of the Reformerts.  It would be dangerous to identify Caesar's existence as the restrainjer because that would bring the Caesar's down even more heavinly on the Church than was already ahappening.   The Reformers understood it to be the Caesars who now kept the Antichrist under wraps and who had to be taken out of the way before he could be revealed because threere 8is an implicit threat to the line of the Cesars in this view.  It was in fact the Bishop of rome who became the new Roman EWmperor as it were and supplanted the Cesars that the Reformers identified as the Antichrist.  There is tone and tons of evidence supporting this view of him too, even a pope who said this move to put the Bishop of rome over all the Chruch was the move of Antichrist, and hundreds of Christians outside the Roman Church identified the Pope as Antichirstr.  this is all historically documented and it is Chris Pinto who has put all this together for me.  We dcon't need a new Antichrist.  The one we've got is only too well attested.

UI enjoy Missler nevertheless. He has a lot of good teachings at You Tuve.  I like his very interesting study of the supernatural nature of the Bible in the one title Extraterrestrial Message.

eND tIMES sTILL cOMING aT uS lIKE dEMON lOCOMOTIVE

 bARRELING DOWN THE TRACKS AT US FASTER AND FASTER IT SEEMS.  i'M PRETTY MUCH STUCK WITH WHATEVER i CAN FIND ON yOU tUBE THESE DAYS AS MY SOURCE OF INFORMATION BECAUSE OF MY MACULAR DEGNERATION.  i CAN AT LEAST LISTEN TO THE VICDEOS.  bUT SINCE i CAN'T SEE urlS i CAN'T GET TO OTHER SITES, EVEN OTHER VIDEO SITES, CAN'T GET TO gOODLE OR IF i DO THEN CAN'T READ THE Google pages anyway.  Can't read emails, could write emails but can't send them.  I'm very grateful for the little I can do though.  Although I know You tube censors a lot of the best stuff there's still enough there to be informatiive for the likes of me.  

I would like to be able to research more about AI because it's becoming a real threat in many ways and is surely going to be a big player in the final days when the Antichrist reigns over the planet.  Scary surveillance capacity.  Even to knowing our thoughts, even putting throughts into our heads.  the technology is actually already there.  Amazing to think.  It does what I think of demons doing, and really we might as well treat them as we'd treat demons.  Pray against it all, there's really nothing else we can do.  I keep tring to find ifnormation about protective methods against this stuff and if it's out there it escapes my limited ability to find it.    Drones that look like insectis even like mosquitoes.  AmaZing.  That small and that devious.  that can take pictures and who knows what else.  Devices that transmit voices and weird sounds.  Well, the totalitarian world govenment is going to need to be able to control us all to scceed and it looks like they're going to be able to.

We can always die of course.  And if we know God and know we are saved that's the safecst thing to do.  Let them kill us, that's our escape from all this insanity.  Of course I hope the Rapture really is going to take me before the worst begins, but I stikll worry about others who aren't believers who will have to go tghrough the Tribulation and the Antichrist reign.  Terrifying prospect for them..  Of course I hope they will become believers and be saved but if people have rejected the gospel now it's not very likely they'll accept it then anyway.  

I want to find out more about all this AI stuff if I can so I hope more will turn up on You tube.  But I've been watching some videos about the civil rights movement of the sixties and that's been interesting.  It was done right in those days and it ws pretty successful.  very successful.  It's nice to be reminded of all that and I'm learning a lot too.   I'm glad to see that so much of it was inspired by Christian principles.  Some had a Communist inspiration and I'm sorry about that, especially since that part of it seems to have persisted and grown since then.  All the racist freerment going on now ha a Marxist or Communist inspiration.   Anti=American, utterly destructive of everything good.  Bogus racism, now this insane transgenderism they want everybody to embrace.    But the racist  stuff they focus on these days is mostly false.  

People still think the George Floyd incident was about race.  It wasn't.  In a way it was about police brutality but not by individuals, it was based on policity.  Surely that needs to be changed but it isn't wnat we are led to believe it was.  that's the point.  Does anybody but a few of us who look ofr it get know about Tony Timpa, a white man who was treated exactly the same way George Floyed was treated and also died as a result?  Nope.  I know about it because I listen to nonmainstream sources.  I found it on You tube a couple years ago.  Don't know if it's still there.  The whole story shown from beginning to end.  Police hold him down just as Floyd was held down, couldn't breathe, protested he couldn't brethe, then he died as a result of it.  The George Floyd incident was not a racist incident but peopl still think it was.   Black Lives Matter is also a deception.  It's based on men who were caught in criminal acts, who aggressively threatened the police who came to arrest them and were killed as a result.  these were not victims of racism at all but they made this whole movement out of them as if they were.

Not that there isn't still some reacism is nn the country, but most of it really has been done away with and there's no need to stir it all up again.  I just heard a black man talking about how it's all still alive because he saw how this young black woman was pushed out of a Trump rally.  I don't know of that incident except for 3what he said about it, but my guess is that her being pushed out had absolutely hotiching to do with her balckness but about whatever po.litical action she was engaged in at the time.  But they love to turn trump into a racist despite the fact that he's absolutely not a racist and has a lot of black support.  Not enough black support but that's because of the media black out against the truth.   I remember the story of a blacmk family or or group of blacks who went to a Trump rally and sat down near the flront, then noticed how the news camerman kept turning the camera away from them.  Wouldn't want the publisc to knowhtat Trump has black supporters of course, that would spoil the propaganda campaign against him.  

But theyseem to be winning all their wars against the truth and against the Constitutional framework of america.  I guess bgod is permitting it because we deserve it but it's sade to see it happening.   

Anyway.  I need to find out more about this AI stuff because it's coming closer to home for me.  

The Fallen Soul Cannot Know God

And this is eternal life, that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent.  That's part of Jesus' "high priestly prayer" in John 17.  Eternal life is to know God.  And in that same prayer Jesus says He is the giver of that eternal life to those whom the Father has given Him.  

I keep trying to remember the Westminster Catechism answer to the question, what is the purpose of life, and I can't remember the first part of it.  To love God, to worship God, to know God, I can't remember.   But the second part is "and enjoy Him forever."  

To Abraham God said, "I am thy exceeding great reward."  In the 42nd Psalm David writes, "As the deer paneteth for the water, so my souil longer after Thee.  You are all my heart's desire and I long to worship thee.  I think that second line is how the song from that psalm goes on, but the psalm itself says somjething else.  I can go listen to it and I may be wrong.  But the idea iclear, the soul longs after God Himself and takes pleasure in worshiping HIm.

That's the message of all these quotes.  Knowing God, loving God, longing after God, that is the hieghtt of the Christian life.

A Q Tozer wrote about this in his book The Pursuit of God, where he laments the fact that Christians are often kept on the level of doctrine when doctrine should be pointing us to the adoration of God Himself.  I think that is true.  We get stuck on justification by faith, forgiveness of sins, even maybe to some extent sanctification or growth in holiness and the Christian life, although that is less emphasized than the principles of salvation.  The point is that a hunger after God Himself is the purpose of it all and yet that is often neglected, and as Tozer laments, even prevented by the way doctrine is emphasized.

But my point in writing all this is to contrast this Christian goal of knowing and loving God with the kinds of teachings we get from the New Age and Easter religious practices, those Near Death experiences and so on.  God get mentioned in all that but certainly not ever as the supreme object of human longing.  And of course the ideas of why and what God is are very vague.

Although I could recognize the essentially demonic nature of most of those experiences even before I knew of Watchman Nee's writings on these things, Nee's perspective does bring it all into focus in a very ueful way for whickh I am very grateful.  For one thing he makes it possible to see that some of it isn't demonic in its essence but comes from powers originally possessed by Adam before the Fall, hu;man powers.  Although they are easily exploited by demons they are not demonic in themsevles    However, the Fall buried them in the flesh as he thinks of it, and made them far less ac

cessible to us than they were to Adam and Eve.   He

\Sorry, I can tell I'm garbling some of itthis.  I'll try to straighten it out as I go.  

Nee says that Satan is very interested in releasing the latent powers we all possess from their entgrapment in the flesh so that he can use them to counterfeit true spirituality.  When I the stories of near death experiences, so many of which are so similiar in their claims to be spiritual experiences, I have to conclude that Nee got it right.    The people who have these  experiences are falln human beings, unregenerate, which means not born again as Christians are.  It tgakes regeneration or being born again to hav any contact with God at all.  The spirit is what died first at the Fall, the spirit that had been in communication with God.  The soul which formerly had been able to know both God and the life of the senses or the flesh, now only could communication with the world of sense.  It had become fleshly.  God says in Genesis six, I tghink, that He will no longer strive with manhkind because he is but flesh.    Adam lost the ability to communicate with God and we all inherit that inability.  It's pretty obvious isn't it?  

All people are discovering with all these experiences of The Other Side, and paranormal powers, is the world of the soul which is now confined to the The idea of God remains but it's a pretty shadowy vague idea.  We need the revelation of the Bible, God's own word to us, because we do not have the capacity in ourselvdes to discover God.    But we can have all these spiritualistic type experiences and mistake them for true spirituality and even think we've encounterered heaven or the true God.  Or in some cases think we've discovered that thesere really isn't a God of the sort we know from the Bible.  Epxpeirnce trumps it all.  Out goes the bible which is the only way we could ever really know the truth about God and instead we rely on all thse demonically influenced experiences to tel;lll us what reality is all about.    N ojudmgnet they tell us, unconditional love they tell us, nothing to fear about death they tell us, we just get to go "home" where everything is light and love and beautiful fields of flowers and the like.  

realm and has no contact with the true spirituality which is of God.  \\\\\

In

The ONLY way to know God at all is through the death of Christ.  Through believing that His death paid for our sins.  That's the Open Sesame to the regeneration of the spirit that reconnects us with God, undoes the Fall.  That means that all the religious practices of other religions can relate only to the world of the flesh, the soul as clothed in the flesh, and demonic or spirit realms.  Buddhism doesn't recognize God at all, which is quite in keeping with the reality that the spirit that could know Him is dead in them as it is in all of fallen humanity.  Practices of meditation and other disciplines of the nonCHristian religions may succeed in releasing the soul powers, or siddhis, from imprisonment in the flesh, and create the belief that the spiritual has been awakened, which it is onlyh the soul powers that have been awakenened to imitate and counterfiet spirituality.  Even if God is somewhere in the the picture he is not knowable in the personal way He wants to be known and has made possible through His word and in no other way.

Nee mentions in his book that F B Meyer had written about the great increase in spiritism in the late nineteenth century.  Christian Science for instance.  But there were many more.  I think  of Madame Balavatsky and the Theosophy movement.  Meyher recognized these as spiritual counterfiets.  Nee classifies it all as manifestations of the powers of the soul that had been released in various individuals, those powers that had been possessed by Adam and Eve and more or less disappeared after the Fall.  Again, after the Fall they would now be subject to the flesh or the physical world, since the spirit had died by which humanity could have known God.  Now subject ot the flesh alone they were prey to the satanic hosts that sought to use them to deceieve people into acceptring them as the heights of spirituality.

Within the churches today the charismatic movement is probably the best example of how the deception has persisted even in our midst.  The spiritual gifts of the early Church are claimed by the charismatics, and the penecostals, to have persisted throughout history, but when the expresseions of these gifts today are examined they pretty clearly demonstratae that they are not the same spiritual gifts that were practiced in the early Church.  They are sounterfiets and byu Nee's lights most likely those latent soul powers, soulish and fleshly, not spiritual.  The supposed prophetic gift is pretty clearly simply psychic power where it is at all real.  The tongues are not the languages epxressed in the early Church but some kind of imitation of language.  App[arently some healins are possible through the soul too, something that doesn't reach to the level of the miraculous healings of God.  We are easily deceived into accepting unuusual paranormal phenomona has coming from God, that wseems to be what has happened in the case of the supposed continuation of the spiritual gifts.

I would like to think that this sort of information could help people free themsevles from such deceptions, but of course only believing in Christi's death for our sins and consequent regeneration of the spirit that died at the Fall could really save anybody.

===================

Prostrate before Thy throne to lie, and gaze and gaze on Thee.    The Levis had no inheritance in the land when the Israelites took possession of Canaan, but God said that He was to be their portion and that made them richer than all the rest of them.  

This mindset couldn't be more unlike that of the soulish or fleshly sort of spirituality which isn't technically speaking spirituality at all.  The soulish mindset cultivates the things of the soul itself, experiences, growth in knowledge or whatever, it is self-focused, or if focused outside itself at all focused toward learning how to be kind to others.  A nice enough of objective but still a matter of developm,ent of the soul, fulfillment of the sul.  Certainly there are elements of that in the Christian life but ultimately they are in the service of seeking and finding God, loving God above all else.    And we are to deny ourselves, die to self, rid ourselves of attachments to this world in order to find God.Take up our cross, the instrument of our death.  We are to die in order to find.  He who would save his life will lose it but whoever would lose it for My sake will find it.  The route to God is the giving up of everything that is contraary to God, everything at takes His place in our hearts, our idols.    It's not about fulfillming the self our soul at all.  But much of the New agey typie of spiritualitiy seems to be entirely about that fulfillment.  Far from self-abnegation it's about self-fulfillment.

-------

But of course all they have to do is arrogantly claim that Jesus didn't mean what He's always been taken to mean, but rather He meant something more in keeping with their own demonic doctrines.  So for instance when He said I am the way, the truth and the life, Nobody comes to the Father but by me, they say oh but he didn't mean we are to follow Him personally or that He was the ONLY way, He just meant He's one example for us to follow and we all can be what He was. 

I'd laugh but it hurts too much

I Suppose It's Futility to Make any Comment at all about This Fake Spirituality

He got started on his spiritual path when he was quite young, he said, he didn't believe what the churches taught, he said.  Somehow they never answered the questions Where did we come from, why are we here and where are we going?  

Really?  How odd.  Of course I don't know what "churches" he is talking about but surely it is fair to assume he means some pretty standard Christian churches, in which the Bible is taught as inerrant, and in that case the answer is given quite clearly to all those questions.  We descended from Adam and Eve, we are here to come to know God, and we are going either to Heaven or Hell in the end.   Seems pretty clear that it isn't that he didn't find any wanswers but that he didn't like the answers he got from the churches.  As he went on to pursue various other

I'm talking about another interview on Next Level Soul.  Hans something or other, Wilhelm?  I couldn't quite make it out.  Apparently my ears aren't a lot better than my eyes.     religions and occultic practices he apparently liked their answers better.

He doesn't like Christianity at all, and he keeps talking as if his own preferences amount to the truth rather than just his own preferences.  And I suppose he sounds credible to all those people out there who nothing whatever about Christianity.

 And yet what else can I do?  It's futile both because they who are persuaded of all that nhonsense don't have the faculty to hear what's wrong with it, not being regenerated but mere fallen human beings, and becuase my own spiritual faculty is not in the best shape so that I fail all the time to convey what I want to convey.  

Try anyway.   

Of course it is all of grace.  We can only believe and know God's word because He has regenerated us, because we are born again.  In our fallen state the Bible is nonsense to the reader and hearer.  When they discover the powers of the soul, which Watchman Nee has brought to my attention, they now have an answer to the Bible's incomprehensibility to them.  they mistake the soul powers for the spiritual powers that commjunicate with God.   They can't communicate with God but the demons who do communicate with our soul powers can easily ;create a false impression and call it God and convince the unwary fallen mind.  

They don't find the biblical revelation of who we are and where we came from and why we are here to be convincing.  One life?  But then some have it good and many have it bad and how is that fair, how does that show a loving GOd?  For mself it was only when I discovered the biblical understanding of who we are and where we came from and why we are here that I finally knew there is a real reasonable and meanfinful answer to all those questions.  Original sin was a reveleat ion to  me because it answered the question of why this life is so full of ugliness, or disease and death, of wars and hostilities and so on.  It makes no sense if you think this life is just normal life.

Who we are is God's creation for the purpose of creating a people after His own heart, a people who reflect His own being and share in His plans.  That's our purpose, that's why we are here, but there are many who won't join in this purpose but be led off into all sorts of weird fables and ultimately end up in Hell.