The Most Deceptive Heaven Experiences Yet

Two of them came up at You tube recently, and I'm sure there are many more out there. These very earnest testimonies to experiences of heaven while apparently having died for many minutes. They are by "Christians" and even include Bible quotes, and they're all ab out how God iloves us and won't leave us and how all things work together for good (that's a Bible quote but the rest of it is left out about those who love God and are the called).

IN THE TWO I SAW SO FAR THERE IS NOTONE WORD ABOUT JESUS CHRIST OR HIS DEATH ON THE CROSS TO PAY FOR OURE SINCE. THEY ARE ALL ABOUT GOD LOVING US ALL AND HOW SECURE WE SHOULD BE IN THAT SUPPOSED FACT. THIS IS A LIE FROM THE PIT OF HELL BUT OH HOW SWEETLY AND CONVINCINGLY IT IS PUT, BY A COUPLE OF WOMEN WHO ARE OBVIOUSLY SINCERE.

Ow. When the Flesh Swallows Up God We're in deep Trouble.

Another Jordan Peterson video fell across my path and caught my interest despite my determination to move on to something else. This is one of his Bible series, this one about the storyh of Jacob who becomes the father of the nation of israel. And as usual he says a lot of very interesting things about how chaaracter is formed and whatr should be nourished to develop the best character in children and that sort of thing. This is how he's treating the Bible, as stories about the formation of personaluity and character. He recognizes that the Bible is foundational to Western Civilization and he interprets its influence in these psychological terms. B,t>'

Which up to a point is interesting. But then it gets scary ads itbecomes clear that he's taking God's own revelation and dragging it down to our fleshly mentality, however high-minded his conception of the best in this life is, and in so doing he's blaspheming God and mangling God's purpose in giving us His Word. ,br>
This gets frightening when god speaks and acts in the accounts and Peterson treats Him as merely a part of the consciousness of the character involved. Although we know God is the Actor throughout the bible, Peterson treats Him as nothing but a mental state, an abstraction in his character's minds. The characters are fiction and God is fiction. Whereas we know that the characters were all living historical human beings and God is the true real living God who gave us the bible for His own purposes.

He reifies fiction and mythologizes reality. And God is not mocked. We live and move and have our being in God., He is not our invention, we are His crdeationb, and it's scary when modernity performs its reverse alchemy and turns gold into a base metal.

So the story of jacob's Ladder becomes an archetype. It is not God continuing to guide His people toward His ultimate aim, it becomes a mere elemtn in the development of conscioousness or conscience or something like that to Peterson. This is really really scary.

J. C. Ryle on End Times Prophecy

Valuable resource. J C Ryle on the Sercond Coming of Christ, a book of sermons on the subject written in 1879, or better to say, compiled. In his preface to the book Ryle lays out the elements of prophecy he's entirely sure of, and lists elemtns he doesn't discuss because although he has opinions about them they are too speculative and he wants to stick only to what he knows.

Among what he considers to be known from scripture are the certain return of the jews to their ancestral land, to be dealt with in the Great Tribulation; the identify of the Harlot Church, Mystery Babylon and the Antichrist with the Roman Catholic Church, although he thinks there will probably be a fuller expression of it by the time of the end; that includes the identify ot the Roman Church as the Great Apostasy; the resstoration of the Earth in the Millennium following the return of Christ when SWatan is bound for a thousand years. Among the things he won't discuss because he can only speculate on them, is the Rapture of the Church.

So far I've only heard the Preface. I' mm looking forward to the sermons.

John MacArthur on the Problem of Evil

Now I think this one is MacArthur's best sermon ever:

The Bible Means What It Says, Just Believe It.

Jordan Peterson does very much appreciate the bible as the foundational text of western civilization. It's a very important recognition:



If only he believed it. Early into this video he says he can't understand what believers in the bible mean when we say it is true. That is boggling to me. Perhaps he's absorbed too much of postmodern inability to recognize what truth is.

Seems so simple: What it says is true. Just as written. God made the heavens and the earth. Adam and Eve are really our first parents. Really. Cain really did kill Abel. They were both real people. Jesus Christ really was born of a virgin so that He had God for His literal father. That was so He would be sinless because only a sinless man qualified tro die in the place of sinners to pay our debt for us. He really did die. The text says He died. You lie about it whehn you insist He didn't really die because it says He died. And He came back to life. Really came back to life. But in a new body that would walk through walls. Yes really. We don't have any problem knowing what true means. It can only be that Peterson does because he simple can't believe what it says so he finds it "true" in some other sense than that it really is true in the sense that iwhat it says really happened.

When you read it, simply believe what it says. Very simple.

Jordan Peterson: Would you Tkae Seriously a Warning From an Obscure IBlogger About Psychologizing God's Wo?

It just hit me this afternoon and of course it will sound crazy to many people but I feel obliged to write about it. I'd send an email but I can't see well enough to do the research to find that kind of information any more. I can't read much and websites are usually a confusing chaoes of images and unreadable print.

JORDAN PETERSON: After doing a few posts on you and your Bible series it hit me that what you wree doing is actually blasphemy. I'm slow on the uptake, I didn't catch that for a while. but whenever a person adds to or subtracts from the word of God we are warned that plagues will be added to our lives. That part is what just hit me about an hour ago because I know you've been sick for some time.

I'm glad you are better, I missed your voice on the internet like so many others deid, but now that I've seen some of your Bible series I'm worried that there is a cause and effect hjere that you wouldn't suspect and I even missed it myhself until now.

If you really want to live as if God exists, as you've said, please take this seriously. God does not let us get away with this kind of sin. You are actually defending the Bible in many ways, but since you are refusing to take it as written and imposing your own interpretations on it, treating the actual meaning as myth and offering metaphorical meanings instead, you are tampering with the actual word of God and that is very dangerous. I just hope that since you do it in ignorance you may be forgiven.

I wiswh I couodld write this to you personally. I hope that somehow someone who sees it might get it to you and that you would take it seriously. I know that is not too likely with people who believe in evolution and have dismissed the Bible as the actual revelation of God irbelievers know it to be, but if you have a concern about your own wellbeing, PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY. God is not mocked.

Then I started wondering if Chrisopher Hitchens' untimely death had a similar cause. He actively ridiculed the Bible and its central teaching of Christ's death in the place of sinners.

I don't know the timing of Peterson's Bible series but I rthink it preceded his sickness in a way that is suggestie r of a connection.

It's rReally Modernity Not the Ancient World, tthat's Build on Myth Rather than Reality.

Enough of Jordan Peterson for now. He's got some interesting and useful ideas for how to live one's life that are apparently benefiting many people, but making the Bible represent those ideas is a sort of blasphemy. he's attracted to the Bible, that's obvious, he likes some of its teachings very much and doesn't even have to doublethink some of them, such as leaving father and mother and cleaving to spouse. That's practical wisdom for life in his thinking. But the Kingdom of God becomes your highest ideal, as does God himself, the highest good, the ennobling aim and so on.

That's what happens when modernity has stolen your ability to believe the bible as written, which so many of the thinkers of the nineteenth century did to us. You either just throw it out and don't give it a second thought or like Peterson who appreciates it as an ancient text containing wisdom even for today however pincomplete or however he sees that, then you just double think it and put your own best concepts in its place.

So they think we believers are just reifying -- making read -- what is really only mythical or an abstranction. So unsophsticated are we. Funny, it's really evolution that reifies what is really nothing but an imaginative construct. The whole thing is a mental construction that has no solid grounding in reality. but people get convinced of that idea and must throw out the Bible as a consequence. It really isn't that hard, at least once you see it, to recognize the utter nonsense of evolution, but the myth holds them spellboudn. ,br>
So a real Godis too much for them now.

Later: It really IS blasphemy, it's been nagging at me. You don't take God's word and substitute your own earthly wisdom in place of its truth, no matter how good your wisdom is in its right context. The Bible has p has plenty of wisdom for our current situation, the woke insanity, the identy politics insanity, the COVID nightmare insanity, the evolution insanity, but it's to be taken on its own terms, you don't make it mean something else.