Pope's green imagination sucks 'em in

How very fitting that the Pope wore green vestments yesterday for his arena Mass on global peace at Madison Square Garden.

It was only the day before that Francis was personally welcomed to Washington, D.C. and the Capitol by John Boehner sporting a green tie, something he had specifically been told to wear by his staff.

Through an interpreter, the laughing pope commented, "The tie is the color of hope." Boehner replied, "We need a lot of hope today."

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As the Huffington Post website reports on this historic exchange, “Those cameras showed the Ohioan pacing nervously as he waited in his formal office, tugging at his suit buttons and repeatedly adjusting his green tie.

“After telling Francis how very glad he was the pontiff could come, Boehner sat down with the Pope for their photo op. And explained his tie.

“Boehner said he had wanted to wear an older ceremonial blue tie ‘with the little hands on it,’ but his staff wouldn't let him.

" ‘My staff insisted I wear the green tie,’ Boehner said.

“A member of the pope's entourage said the staff chose well. And through his interpreter, the pontiff himself found a way to elevate the mundane moment a bit.

" ‘The tie is the color of hope,’ he said.

" ‘We need a lot of hope today,’ Boehner answered.

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In a blog post here from 6/13/15, entitled “It’s easy being the Green One,” I referred to an article called “The Green Hope,” written by Dr. Terry Watkins, regarding the New Age perversions in Eugene Peterson’s incredibly successful 2002 bible paraphrase (consistently ranked among the top-five bestselling bibles) called “The Message,” endorsed by such Christian “heavyweights” as Billy Graham, Chuck Swindoll, Rick Warren, Max Lucado, etc., etc.

Watkins notes that Romans 15:13 in “The Message” contains “the most bizarre statement ever in a mainstream Bible.”

The verse reads, “Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope!”

This compares to the King James Bible: “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.”

Watkins writes, “Who is the ‘God of green hope’? The ‘green hope’ originated with the hellish, human sacrificing, Druids. The publication Talks on Freemasonry states, ‘Green was, with the Druids, a symbol of hope and the virtue of hope with a Freemason illustrates the hope of immortality.’ (Kenneth Tuckwood, Talks on Freemasonry).

“The ‘green hope’ mantra is a popular rallying cry in the new age Mother-Earth environmental movement. In the New Age Movement, ‘green’ signifies ‘Oneness with the Earth,’ hence the title of William Anderson’s book, ‘Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth.’ ”

Watkins references page 159 of the “Dictionary of Symbolism,” considered the most comprehensive one-volume work on the language of symbols ever published, in which author Hans Biedermann notes:  “. . . the devil appears as ‘the green one’. . .”

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One of things people love most about the Pope is they believe he has supernatural “connections” that can directly influence their lives.

It comes out of the imagination that says there’s something in all the Catholic hoodleedoo; there’s something in the supernatural that you can’t see except if you come and do it exactly the way they do it.

Followers of the icons, rituals, dead saints, etc., etc., try and bring the supernatural into their natural life.

“The symbols, the allegories, the imaginations that the world is so full of are designed simply to promote the Lie program,” said Jordan in a recent sermon on man’s religions. “What does Satan tell Eve in the Garden? ‘There’s something that God knows that He doesn’t want you to know that I can tell you, and when you do, you get in contact with the supernatural; you’ll get in contact with something that’s bigger than you are.’

“In witchcraft, for example, you’re communicating with the spiritual world, trying to get something out of it. Well, Satan has a plan, an enticement to get you involved in that and it’s this hidden stuff.

“Now, God makes it all known. In Isaiah 14, when Satan’s original intent is identified for you, his original plan and strategy, there’s a five-point goal he sold to the other angelic host. Satan started at the top echelon and worked his way down.

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“You’ve got a worldwide system that’s developing around that curse. An education system, a social system, an economic system, a political system . . . and now we’re ‘casting off the bands' that God’s established.

“When you study marketing, the whole idea is creating a need in someone they didn’t know they have yet. There are hidden meanings in all of merchandising. It’s all done subtly.

“What did Satan do? He created a need in others for him, but was the need real?! No, he had to trick them. He had to have a ‘secret’ reason for doing things to entice them in.

“When Satan comes to attack Eve, she doesn’t even have the basic knowledge of what God told Adam. Now whose fault would that have been? Adam didn’t do his job very well.

“Satan says to Eve in Genesis 5:5, 'For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.'

“When you see that phrase ‘your eyes shall be opened,’ the word ‘eye’ is the 33^rd word in the quote.

“Satan's saying, 'God’s got a secret knowledge out here, Eve, and He’s not telling you about it, but if you’re one of the initiated, you’ll know it.'

“Thirty-three in the Bible is a number associated with illumination. You ever read in the occult about the third eye? You ever seen people going around with a third dot on top of their forehead or a little jewel up there? It’s said to be an ‘eye of perception.’ This is the ability to see into something and have knowledge that you couldn’t have any other way. It’s secret knowledge that you can only have IF you are in the initiated.

“Where you got to go to be initiated? Satan’s offering it to Eve: ‘I know something God doesn’t want you to know and you can’t know unless you become ONE with me.’

“Ultimately, when the Antichrist and the system that brings him to power is manifested, it’s that MYSTERY (Mystery Babylon the Great). There is a secret purpose; this idea of secret wisdom and hidden understanding, and the gain you can get if you get it, that’s associated with Satan all the way through the Bible. It’s associated with his Lie program.

“What do you say about a lie? A lie can be 98 percent truth, but it’s the two percent that isn’t that kills you. You see, it’s the tares-are-hidden- with-the-wheat kind of a thing. The Lie program is all this good, good, good, but there’s that secret thing in it.

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“Isaiah 33:6 is a verse I used to keep posted on my wall: 'And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, and strength of salvation: the fear of the LORD is his treasure. ' If you want the nation to be filled with judgment and righteousness, here it is.

“When you sit down today and you talk to someone out in the world, you have to start be teaching them the ABCs. Most of you were raised in a culture where everybody knew what the ABCs were. They might not have believed them, but they had a knowledge base in spiritual Bible things that people today don’t have.

“In Hosea 4:6, he told Israel ‘my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,’ and it wasn’t because they couldn’t calculate and make chariots and build buildings. It was knowledge of God. They didn’t have the basic building-block information.

“Knowledge is important. Eve didn’t have the knowledge even straight in her thinking, so when Satan came along and offered her this SECRET knowledge, she couldn’t say ‘NO, I know what the truth is.’ She’s over there dreaming up stuff, leaving stuff out—where’d she get that stuff about ‘I can’t touch it,’ for example? She made that up in her imagination.

“Notice in Deuteronomy 29:29, with God talking to Israel through Moses, everything you need to know to do everything God has for you to do, He revealed to them.

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“Genesis 5:6 says, ‘And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.’

“That expression ‘the imagination of his thoughts,’ you have to understand there are the two sides of the way you think. You have a part of your thinking process that thinks thoughts. It’s the logical side where there’s facts and understanding.

“It’s two plus two equals four. It’s the way you understand things and it’s reason. That’s the realm of your thinking where truth resides, where reality resides, where the facts are ‘this is the way it is.’ That’s the part of your thinking that’s designed to be in CONTROL.

“You also have an imagination. That’s the creative side of your thinking. That’s the part where you have entrepreneurial kind of ideas. That’s where you have the pictures and you can see yourself doing this or see yourself doing that. You can see something bigger than what reality is.

“Poetry and the arts come from there, that kind of thing. Now, that side of your life is where the Lie dwells. Because when you’re thinking something that’s not there, not on the table yet, it can be a good thing, something you can accomplish . . . I often think about people who paint. They put the canvas up there and they see something. A sculptor sees something in a big piece of marble; he just gets rid of all the trash around it.

“The creative side can be good but that’s also the side where the Lie exists. That’s the part of your thinking where the Lie system gets its hook.”

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"That word 'vanity' in Romans 8:20 ( 'For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope') means ‘empty.’

 

"When all the substance is gone out of it, you create a vacuum. Satan comes along and says, ‘I’ve got a plan,’ and it’s sucked right in. People think they’re wise but they’ve become fools.

“Satan knows that every time you choose verse 21 (‘they glorified him not as God’), they say, ‘He’s not going to be the one who runs things; I’m going to be the one.’ Now whose philosophy did you just follow? You just bought into Satan’s Lie. You just said your ideas are better than God’s ideas and your ‘truth’ is better than God’s truth.

“The Lie is you can do it your way: ‘I’ll run my life.’ You know what that is? That’s an imagination. That’s a vain, worthless, senseless, foolish imagination but you have it anyway. We all do that and if those imaginations aren’t controlled by the truth of God’s Word . . . Satan works in THAT program."

The encoding of our being

Describing the creation of man, David writes to God in Psalm 139:16, “Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.”

Jordan explains, “Your mom’s 23 chromosomes joined with your dad’s 23 chromosomes to make the 46 chromosomes that made you, and when you were conceived, all of the identity, the genetics of who you are, what you’re going to look like was determined right there. Everything else is just letting it grow, letting it come out, doing just what that verse in Psalms says.

“Listen, DNA is not a random sequencing of stuff; it’s a genetic package that’s in your chromosomes that is a book of your life, pre-written the moment of your conception. David knew that 3,000 years ago. Modern science figured it out 50 years ago. Stick with your Bible; you’ll be way ahead of life.

“When you read that expression ‘thy book,’ and you see here it’s talking about David’s genetic coding, God wrote another book, didn’t He?

“Isaiah 34:16 says, ‘Seek ye out of the book of the LORD, and read.’ Where’s the book of the Lord? That’s the Bible. So not only did God have this book of DNA He wrote, He wrote a book called the Bible.

“Now, there’s an interesting comparison all through the Scripture between the book He wrote and your DNA and the book He wrote called the Bible.

“As we learn from Psalm 139:16, that DNA is a book of your life. You know what the Bible’s called? Philippians 2:16 says, ‘Holding forth the word of life.’ What’s that? That’s that Book. Philippians 4:3 talks about those ‘whose names are in the book of life.’

“You know why it’s important to have your name in the Book of Life? Revelation 20:15 says that people standing at the White Throne Judgment to see whether they’re going to be cast in the 'lake of fire' or not, everybody’s name that is not written in the Book of Life gets cast into that lake.

“It’d be an advantage of have your name in the Book of Life, wouldn’t it? You have to have the life that that Book of Life gives you and that life is Jesus Christ, who said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’ Jesus told his apostles in John 6:63, ‘The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.’

“The Book of Life is a LIVING word of the living God, and that written word puts you in connection with the LIVING Word, the Lord Jesus Christ. So there’s going to be a connection between the structure of your existence, the way God made you in the DNA, and His Word and the Lord Jesus Christ.

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“Your body is equally divided into two parts by your spine, right down your back. One side of you will be stronger than the other. For a left-hander, his left side is stronger than his right.

“You know how many bones are in your spine? 33. How many books are there in the Bible? 66 books. The Bible’s divided into what we call the Old and New testaments, but the real way to divide the Bible is between prophecy and mystery. You’re really dividing it between law and grace ‘and what the law couldn’t do because it was weak . . .’ There’s a weak side and ‘you can be strong in the grace that’s in Christ Jesus.’ See how that kind of thing works out there?

“Half of 66 is 33, so your Bible’s going to have a spine through it. There are 1,189 chapters in the Bible. Half of that is 594.5. That means you’d have 594 chapters before that one and 594 after and that’s going to be the middle chapter, which is Psalm 117 (the middle verse is Psalm 103).

“How many parts does that Psalm have? You see any others that have just two verses? How many parts are there to a spine? Two. If you counted the number of words in that Psalm, there are 33. divided into two parts.

it has to do with your back.

“When I think about that, I think about Moses. He told the Lord, ‘I want to see your glory. Show me your face.’ God said, ‘You can’t see my face and live, but I’ll let you see my backside,’ and He went by him and Moses saw God’s back side.

“You know where that’s at? Exodus 33. Moses wanted to see God’s face. Your face is part of your skull. You know how many bones are in your skull? 22. The No. 22 in the Bible is the number that talks about revelation, knowledge, showing forth something.

“By the way, you need to be careful when people come along and say, ‘Well, it doesn’t really matter how these verses are translated,’ because what I’m telling you is only going to be true in a King James Bible.

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“John 19:17 says, ‘And he bearing his cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha.’

“What was happening at Calvary? God was in Christ reconciling the world. If you want to see God revealed, where would you really look? If you want to see the love of God, where do you look? God commended His love toward us that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for you--at the place of a skull; a place of God revealing Himself. There’s something in your DNA that compares to what God’s doing over here in His Word.

“Again, the number 22 in the Bible is associated over and over again with making things known; revealing things with knowledge being made known.

“Revelation 22:3-4 says, [3] And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him:
[4] And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads.

“Where are they going to see His face? It’s going to be in chapter 22 of the Book of Revelation.

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“When you study DNA, you’re studying a science called genetics. when you study genertics genesis is a book of genestics, beginnings, this is the beginnign of the gernerations of adam. Genesis 5:1 says, ‘This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him.’

“Genesis is a book of genetics, of beginnings. The verse is saying, ‘Here’s the genetic coding structure of Adam’s descendants.’

“You see that phrase, ‘this is the book’? That’s the first time that term ‘book’ occurs and it occurs in connection with the encoding of what Adam’s descendants are going to be about.

“By the way, if you look at verses 30-32, you learn Genesis 5 starts with Adam and goes to Noah, the 10^th from Adam. When you take a DNA structure, it has two panels; two side posts. It’s like a ladder and there are 10 strands that make up the DNA package. It just happens that in ‘the book of the generations,’ in the genetic structure of Adam, there are 10 generations there.

“I’m trying to get you to see that there’s a connection between the physical creation and the spiritual creation.

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“Luke 8:11 says, ‘Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God.’ What’s in a seed? It’s the DNA, or genetic coding, of a plant. And the seed is the Word of God. You see the connection between the two?

“Now, with ‘the book of the generations of Adam,’ you have the seed. This Book that God wrote, that book David calls ‘thy book,’ it was written in the Hebrew language. The Hebrew language has 22 letters. DNA has 22 amino acids that make up the words that make up the DNA.

“So your New Testament, the second half of the book, is written in the Greek language, which has 44 letters. How many chromosomes do you have? 23 from mom and 23 from dad.

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“By the way, you have 22 chromosomes in your cells. The 23^rd chromosome is the one that determines whether you are a male or female. In a female, it’s called XX. In a male, you’re an X and a Y. What’s the difference between those two things? One rib is taken out. Now you know something about Genesis 2 that you didn’t know before.

“The way you make one flesh is by taking the combined 46 chromosomes and there you are. That’s described for you in Genesis 2:23: ‘And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ You become one flesh in the 23 and 23 becoming 46 in your children.

“If you sat down and took Genesis 2: 23-24 and counted the words in Adam’s quote, you’ll find there are 46 words. In the quote in your Bible that tells you about being one flesh, it just happens to have the right number of words that that one flesh produces.

“In chapter three, if you go through the first five verses and count the number of words Satan speaks to Eve, you get 46. The Bible says in Romans 5:12 that ‘by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin.’ The way Satan enticed Adam and Eve into sin, and into producing an offspring who are genetically, physically and spiritually contaminated by sin, He only used 46 words.

“Romans 1:28 says, ‘And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.’ God lists 23 specific things that life and culture will be filled with when people don’t want to retain God in their knowledge. In verse 32, it says that people who do those things are worthy of death.

“You go into that culture, you don’t need to call a sociologist or a politician to tell you where it came from; that verse told you 2,000 years ago! You see, this stuff’s been written in the encoding of our being.

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“It just so happens that I Corinthians is the 46^th book of the Bible. It just so happens to quote that verse in Genesis 2 about one flesh. I Corinthians 6:16 says, ‘What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh.’

“The problem is Believers shouldn’t be joined to the harlot so in verse 19 he says, ‘What, know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost.’ So the temple and your body, it’s the dwelling place of God.

“You go back in the Old Testament and God had a temple that He dwelt in. That temple in the Old Testament is a picture of your body. Before Solomon built the temple, God gave Israel a tabernacle which was a temple made out of skin.

“When God told Solomon how to build that tabernacle, He gave him a pattern and said it was going to be a tent, and He said on the north side He wanted 20 boards, and 20 boards on the south side. On the back were to be six. That adds up to 46 boards holding up the tent.

“He said to ‘make it like I made the pattern in the heavens.’ My point is, there’s a repetition going on here. You see how that structure works? He wrote up there, He wrote it here, then He wrote it in YOU!

“Repetition is the first law of pedagogy. You say it over and over and over again and pretty soon it gets in between that mush in your ears and sinks in.

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“I Kings 7:21 says, ‘And he set up the pillars in the porch of the temple: and he set up the right pillar, and called the name thereof Jachin: and he set up the left pillar, and he called the name thereof Boaz.’

“In the temple, Solomon’s going to be put a pillar on each side of the entrance. If you read the text, you know how high each one of those things are? 23 cubits high. That’s just fascinating.

“In the structure of DNA you have two pillars, two panels. Those two panels are made out of sugar phosphate.

“In Revelation 10, John says he ‘took the book and ate it and it was sweet.’ Sugar is sweet. Phosphate gives light. ‘The entrance of thy word giveth light.’

“In DNA, the ladder up is a twisting one. It’s a spiraling staircase. Every 10th spiral you get a period and start a new one, so you have that panel of DNA but it’s got those two pillars on the side and the 10 spirals of a ladder on the inside.

“I Kings 6:7 says, ‘And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready before it was brought thither: so that there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building.’

“I Peter 2 says that Israel’s made with lively stones, talking about the members. Verse 8 says, ‘And a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed.’

“So they’ve got a staircase, a ladder, but it’s not just a straight ladder. By the way, in Genesis 28, you read about Jacob’s ladder. The top is in heaven, the bottom’s on the earth. The ladder’s designed to bring heaven and earth together. Who does that ladder represent? In John 1:51, Jesus said, ‘That ladder represents me. I’m the one going to bring heaven and earth together under God’s authority.’

“You see, there’s a connection between your DNA, that Book and the Lord Jesus Christ. The thing that God wrote in creation reflects what He’s done spiritually in His Word.

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“God wrote with His finger the 10 Commandments. By the way, He wrote them on two stones.

“Romans 2:14 says, ‘For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves.’ Any culture you go into, anywhere on the planet, no matter what the level of sophistication is, they all know it’s wrong to murder. They all know it’s wrong to steal, lie. That’s something written into the spiritual DNA of every person. The problem isn’t that they don’t know it; they know it’s WRONG. God fixed you with His Word written into your spiritual DNA.

“Verse 15 says, ‘Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another.’ You don’t know these things because of man’s law; you know them because of God’s law and God’s Word. The problem is they hold it in unrighteousness.

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“When you trust Christ as your Savior, there’s a miraculous thing that happens in your spiritual DNA. Colossians 3:11 says, ‘Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.’

“In every Believer, Jesus Christ has come to be our life, not be some entity that floats around in you. Verse 16 says the Word of Christ literally DWELLS in your spiritual life, in your soul.

“How this happens is in I Peter 1:23 says, ‘Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.’

“What does it mean to be ‘born again’? Jesus defined the new birth in John 3:6 when he talks to Nicodemus he says, ‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.’

“That’s fleshly DNA. So just like your physical birth produces life, your spiritual birth produces life. Just like there’s a combining of the 23 and 23 into a new creature here, there’s a spiritual union that your spirit has with the spirit of God. Verse 23 says it’s by the Word of God. There’s the spiritual DNA that gets implanted into your spirit that produces this new life.

“James 1:21 says, ‘Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.’

“What He does is He literally grafts into your spiritual DNA Jesus Christ’s life. How does He do that? By His Word: ‘Because the words I speak unto you there are spirit and they are life.’ You and I literally have the spiritual DNA of the life of Christ engrafted into our inner man and we are begotten, given life, by the gospel. That’s why there’s a comparison.

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“Now, Satan looked at man and all he saw was the physical, so he missed the real source of God’s life. If all you look at is the physical, you don’t really see the real Church the Body of Christ. Where’s the real life of God today? It’s not in the outward. Jesus told the apostles, ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and the physical will be added.’

“That’s always the way it is. Paul says ‘the kingdom of God is not meat and drink but righteousness, joy and peace and the Holy Ghost. It’s always the spiritual first that then lives itself out. The real genuine working of truth, the Body of Christ is a spiritual body of Believers.

“That’s why ordinances, rites and doing this and that won’t help you. It has to be a supernatural transaction that God accomplishes in your inner man when He implants and engrafts His word into your spirit because you believe it.

“I Thessalonians 2:13 says, ‘For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.’

“The real genuine working of truth is in the inside by His Word working.

“Now, Satan’s trying to counterfeit that. He’s trying to join together God and the earth by physical means; by genetic manipulation. God wrote a DNA code and man’s trying to read it and rewrite it. God wrote a spiritual DNA and man reads it and tries to rewrite it. You need to understand where your spiritual life is and let it make the choices for you."

God's DNA code sequence

When Genesis 6 reports on the supernatural giants upon earth who impregnated human women (“and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown”), the issue was genetic engineering.

“It had to do with the ability to produce offspring that would be a mixture of heaven and earth,” says Jordan. “In modern terms, in terms of the Human Genome Project and such, we think we’ve broken the code, but I’m telling you it was broken many thousands of years ago!

“Go back and read Genesis 4 and see those cultures back there could do things that we today don’t even understand how they did it, much less are able to replicate. Nobody can explain to you how they built The Pyramids. Take the Great Pyramid and all the geographical geometrical and algebraic equations built in to it.

“Nobody can explain to you how you get all the observation and astrological information on Easter Island, a little island in the middle of nowhere with all these images on it.

“People say, ‘Where’d that come from?!’ You get the idea when you read our government education system that man started out in a cave and you know, some guy went out and found some gal he liked, hit her in the head and dragged her home by the hair of her head. Forget ‘Alley Oop’; that’s a comic strip.

“In evolution, you go from the puddle to paradise, but in the Bible, you go from paradise to the puddle.

“Adam started out as an intellectual genius. God gave him intellectual pursuit and the first job He gave him, He said, ‘Here, look at all these animals, examine them, understand them and name them.’ Adam didn’t have to go to a university to do that; he did that the first day he was created.

“The next chapter, he sins and winds up hiding in the bushes. Could there be a dumber thing to do than think you’re going to hide from God behind fig leaves and a bush? He fell right into the can of moral stupidity.

“My point is, though, they had capacities back there . . . we today talk about trans-human genetic engineering. There’s a big thing today called singularity and that is to bring these things out of the spirit world into humanity; bring things from the technological world.

“Technology today works so fast because we’ve developed the ability to speed it up. Well, they had that ability back then too.

“Jesus says, ‘And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.’ Daniel 2 is a passage that looks toward the future tribulation period with the Antichrist and the characters that are operating with him in the time of Revelation 17. Daniel 2:42 says, ‘And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken.’

“In the Bible, clay is man; man’s made out of the dust of the earth. Verse 43 says, ‘And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.’

“There’s the issue of genetic engineering and the goal is to unite mankind with the spirit world under the headship and leadership and authority of Satan.

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“Now, understand something, we’re not into superstition and hidden codes. You don’t understand the Bible by finding something hidden behind a rock. The way you understand the Bible, the words on the page, right on the surface for everybody to see, you read them, study them; you have to know first that you possess the Bible and then you have to appreciate that it says what it says and look at the text.

“The information is right there, revealed on the page. You’re not looking for hidden codes behind the scenes. There’s no magical potion in numbers, symbols or experiences to give you some ability to discern some secret meaning behind things.

“That’s what all the conspiracy stuff does. That’s what the occult stuff does. That’s what religion does. Religion will tell you, ‘Here’s a piece of bread, bing, bing, bing, and it becomes the body of Jesus.’ But you chemically analyze it and it’s still just that piece of bread. Here’s a chalice of hooch and, bing, bing, bing, it becomes the blood of Jesus. It’s still grape juice or wine. You say, ‘Well, that’s the mystery of faith.’ No, that’s superstition.

“In Genesis 2:7 ‘God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’ You are not the breath of life and you are not simply the body.

“The part of you that is unique and distinctly you, as opposed to anything else, is your soul. You have a spirit, soul and body. Satan could see the breath of life going in--he could see the body but he couldn’t see something happening inside of man, the creation of his soul.

“There’s something Satan didn’t see by studying man. What he’s looking for is, ‘How’s God going to use man to beat me?’ He’s looking for any hidden danger in man, any potential in man to defeat him and he looks, observes, but he can only see the physical.

“What Satan’s trying to counterfeit and duplicate is this. In Psalm 139:15 David is describing the creation of man; he’s describing our creation. He writes, ‘My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.’

"He’s talking about how we were made out of dirt. You’re not a real high-class cut of meat. Listen, there’s more valuable minerals in my cell phone here this morning than there is in your body.

“But notice something else happened: ‘I was made in secret.’ He understood that the real him was that soul. I, the part of me that can never be shared with anybody else, is my soul. So there’s a secret part of him that was made by God.

“Verse 16’s fascinating. David says, ‘Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.’

“Now, that book David’s talking about, written by God in advance, you see how he says 'my substance was yet unperfect, but in this book you wrote’?

“He’s saying, ‘They’re all written here ,and as I grow, what’s growing is what God wrote over here in the book. Until the 1980s that verse would have puzzled people.

“When the Human Genome Project was taken to President Bill Clinton it made the news and he said he was so fascinated by it that he spent the whole day being taught about it. I thought, ‘Wow, if it’s that important to him . . . ,’ so I started reading about it.

“They discovered DNA in the 1950s, but they began to understand how to operate it and read it in the ’70s and ’80s. We tend to think about DNA as how they fingerprint people, but DNA is the basic building block of our life and it’s WRITTEN.

“When David says ‘thy book,’ DNA literally is written like a book. First, they thought it was just a bunch of trash, but now what they’ve discovered is that DNA has letters that make words that form sentences. There are periods, stops and paragraph marks.

“It literally has letters that make words that make sentences that tell a story and everything you are—the color of your eyes, the color of your hairs, the look of your hand . . . ”

(to be continued tomorrow)

Courage for honest, brutal soul-searching

Earlier this year came the unbelievable news that a favorite preacher of mine, David Reid of Columbus, Ohio, was diagnosed with a rare cancer called multiple myeloma. He is a young, successful lawyer with a beautiful wife and four young children.

Here are outtakes from a powerful study he gave soon afterward at the Great Lakes Bible Conference (find audio at www.ohiograceministries.org) outside Berlin, Ohio:

“What the Book of Galatians tells you is that the core problem every grace Believer has, or one of the core problems, is you can start by grace and get removed from it and go back under the law. So if we don’t consciously decide, ‘I’m going to daily walk by grace,’ we’ll go back under the law system, and not only that, we’ll be under that same mentality of how we think of our lives.

“When Adam, instead of answering God’s question, said, ‘The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat’ . . . It’s not me; it’s her!’

“That’s exactly the way the law system works. He’s justifying his behavior. My point I want you to get is, because it’s a performance system, it leads to self-justification.

“If you go back to that way of thinking you will get into the self-justification business and you will not be honest about what’s really going on.”

*****

“In grace I would say you need to do two things. The first is you need to get completely comfortable with the absolute, unforfeitable, eternal standing you have in Jesus Christ. So when He saved you, He made you complete in Him. Colossians 2:10.

“Ephesians 1:6 says He made you ‘accepted in the beloved.’ Doesn’t that phrase just amaze you? So when I feel like a jerk, which is often, and I feel inadequate, God views me in Christ and accepts me because He accepts His Son, and that fundamentally changes my relationship with God. I can’t ever be changed, right?

“Romans 5:1 says I have peace with God. I’m not waiting for it, I’m not hoping for it, I have it! Not because of me but because of Him. I have been blessed, past tense. Eph. 1:3 says we have ‘all spiritual blessings in heavenly places.’

“There’s more and more to list but my point is this, write it down, submit it in your mind. Your position in Christ can never ever be lost; it can never change. You’re complete; you’re exactly the way He wants you to be and in that CONFIDENCE, in that CERTAINTY, you can now tell the honest truth about where you come short.

“You see, the law system is excuses and rationalization. But if you get in grace, this is now who I am and it can’t change!

*****

“The key to this is we have to redeem the rest of our lives, and to do that we have to have the courage to do that honest, brutal soul-searching.

“Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve become convinced of this. I’ve been too lax, there’s too much sugar-coating, there’s too much rationalization and there needs to be more brutal honesty about, ‘This is what I need to do with the rest of my life.’

“I ask that you ask of yourself this question: 'What is the single most important thing that you could accomplish in this life for the Lord Jesus Christ?' I think that’s the question. Whatever it is, do THAT! Whatever it is that’s not THAT, don’t waste time on it!

“I understand you have to work and pay bills, but the bottom line of our lives is we have a lot of discretionary time and we often use it to do, like Martha, good things.
 

"But what I’ll tell you is this: I think we have multiple priorities and there’s multiple good things, and then what we do is, as long as we check a bunch of things off our list so we accomplished a lot of things, we feel good because we were productive and we evaluate ourselves by how MANY things we got done, not whether we got the most important things done. That’s all the difference in the world because the most important thing matters.

“There’s a lot of stuff you can do that’s a lot of activity but it’s not the most important thing. I think what happens is we want multiple priorities because then we can pick the ones that are not as hard.

“The very most important one may well be the hardest, but it’s the one that’s going to impact eternity the most. But we want to have the liberty to pick the other ones. In my opinion, what I need to do is say ‘no’ to a lot of things.
 

*****

“I’ll give you an example, and if I’m meddling you can ignore this too. One of the things we come up against all the time is what’s called ‘stranded grace Believers.’ They’re grace Believers who don’t have a church in their area so what are they to do?

“I’ll just tell you honestly, sometimes you just have to do it. Sometimes you just have to say, ‘I’m going to start this Bible study for the community. I’m going to start this church. I’m going to start this family Bible study.’ Whatever it is, you just have to decide to be the difference.

“As a personal example, I was once in a grace church and we were told to get out. At that point in my life I had all kinds of things to do otherwise and I had no interest in starting a grace church in some ways. In other words, I hadn’t started one before; do I want to start one now?

“The thing that’s daunting about that is you bump into all the most basic things. Where are you going to meet? Where do you find a pulpit? My point is, you get pushed into this thing and you’re like, Okay, what do I do here?’

“I became convinced that it was necessary to do that, and it was something where if we didn’t, I don’t know that anyone else would have done it.

*****

“I’ll give you a different example: When we relocated from Beaver Creek to Columbus, I spent time on the web trying to find the grace churches in the area. You know how many grace churches there are in the Columbus area that believe what you believe? Yeah, there’s one now. There’s ONE now.

“But I reached out to all of them. The closest thing I found was a church that had a statement of faith that they were affirmatively against ‘hyper-dispensationalism.’ That was my other option. I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna last long there.’

“Here’s the point. You just got to choose to do it. You just got to say, ‘Look, I’m going to purpose to make this happen because this is the most important thing I can do. Because this community needs a witness to the truth.’

*****

“Don’t leave here without thinking about that and writing it down. If you put off and say, ‘I’m going to think about that in a month,’ things like that often don’t happen. I say this only as someone who cares and wants what’s best. Decide it this weekend, purpose in your heart, write it down and decide to do it.

“You’re going to end up in the next life and the question will be, ‘Did you accomplish for the Lord Jesus Christ what He wanted you to do?’

“I want to hear Him go down the line and say, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant.’ That’s it! That’s the ONLY unknown in your life! There’s no unknown in your life about your being blessed in Christ. The only unknown is what happens at the judgment seat of Christ. So let’s get it resolved.

*****

“Feeling sorry for yourself is the greatest lie there is. God saved me, this utter wretch who deserved hell, so what am I sad about? That I got a little medical thing? I have ‘all spiritual blessings in heavenly places.’ What are you going to do to me? Torture me? Do you think that would hurt me? Shoot me? You can’t do anything to me, right?

“That, in and of itself, I’ve got nothing to complain about, but you know what God did? God gave us opportunity to preach the gospel. You can sit down next to someone and point them to eternal life.

“How exciting is it going to be when, as you traverse through eternity and bump into people in the Body of Christ, there’s someone there that every time they see you, ‘It’s good to see Pete! Pete’s the guy who told me about the Savior!’ And every time you see Pete, you're going to think the same thing! Isn’t that unbelievable?

“That’s just it! That’s just unbelievable! That person throughout eternity will rejoice over you!

*****

“I used to think that after I learned right division and the King James Bible issue, ‘You know what, there’s about four people on the universe who agree with me.’ Right? ‘What are the odds that any of them live in North America?’ Right?

“As that was going on, I used to think, ‘Man, I’m just like painting myself into the strangest corner there is.’ You know what I found? I found I got narrower and narrower and narrower. I was in the place where I found people who were the same as me and were real.

“We didn’t operate on a superficial level; we had the same understanding of what’s going on in the universe and we had a connection that, even if I don’t see you for a year, the next time I see you, are we going to have that same fundamental unity we always had?

“And you had this depth that, honestly, I don’t have with people I talk to on a daily basis. Right? So God did that for all of us. My point is, we don’t have anything to complain about.

*****

“As part of (my illness), one of the things we ended up doing is taking a trip out to Arizona to get some medical advice and it just struck me on that trip more than it has in a while . . . we’re sitting down having a number of conversations with folks about what’s going on in their life, just things that happen as you go through your life, and the misery of the ‘lost’ is something we occasionally lose sight of.

“I’d hear people tell me things about drug addiction, problems with their children and grandchildren, and they tell you this tale of woe and you think, ‘Well, I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how to process that heartbreak.’ And that is exactly the world we live in. In other words, what Thoreau said he’s right about: ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.’

“When someone at work asks you how you’re doing, what’s the correct answer? ‘Fine.’ You know what that answer is? ‘I’m not going to tell you what’s really going on. What’s really going on is I’m in inner turmoil. What’s really going is I don’t have any peace. What’s really going on is my family relationships are strained and I’m worried about this, and that and my wife is a wreck, but you don’t want to hear that so what I say is, fine.’

*****

“II Timothy 4:2 says, ‘Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.’

“What we need to be doing is preaching the Word more. I’ll tell you, too many times we have fear of men. I’ll confess this about myself. We care too much about what people will think and so we choose to be quiet, and what’s really going on is they are suffering and they’re hopeless and they have no idea what to do, but we don’t want to be thought weird. We just got to get over that.

“One of the things people think about personal witness is they can’t answer questions. Here’s the bottom line. All you got to do is remember Ephesians 2: 8-9, which you already know. Give them the gospel from I Corinthians 15 that you already know. Give them Acts 16: 30-31, which you already know.

“The bottom line is we already know that; we just don’t want to do it. Let’s just be honest about it. The need is great. Not only do I believe in personal witness, there’s the tracts.

“Years ago in junior high someone gave me a gospel tract and I read it and rejected it. I didn’t believe it but I kept the tract. You know how you have that experience where you know you just interacted with something true and you also know you didn’t do what you should have done?

“Years later I understood the gospel and got saved. Hallelujah. I don’t know if you have questions you want to ask when you get to heaven but one of mine is, ‘Whatever happened to that tract?’ Because I went back and tried to find it and I don’t know what I did with it.

“My point is, God’s Word has such a spiritual power that when you give it to someone they understand they are not interacting with your opinions. They are interacting with the Holy God, and when they reject that tract they’re rejecting Him. There’s a spiritual power there. His Word is that way.

“In pre-internet days, when we did a tract ministry, one of things that kept happening is we’d get tract orders  from places in the world we couldn’t figure out how they got there. You know already that the ‘Word of God is not bound,’ but the beauty of a tract ministry is that when you give someone a tract they’ll give it to other people who give it to other people and it just takes on a life of its own."

(new article tomorrow)

Neo-orthodoxy: Bible SHOULD have mistakes

(Editor's note: Working on a new article. Currently enjoying Kansas City--here for the weekend attending a wedding. In the meantime, here's an article from my old website, lisaleland.com)

 

 

In the early-to-mid-1900s, in order to avoid being mocked by neo-orthodox elitists, Bible-believing fundamentalists began to ditch the idea of “mechanical dictation.”

 

The elitists laughed, “Why, you believe God just mechanically dictated through a person?!’ and the term “mechanical dictation” became a bugaboo.

 

“Over the past 40 years, I’ve encountered Bible-believing fundamentalist people who want to defend the fundamentals of the faith but get real bent out of shape when it comes to saying the Bible was dictated,” says my pastor, Richard Jordan. “Well, God certainly did dictate it.

 

“ ‘My tongue is a pen of a ready writer,’ wrote David. “Well, that sort of sounds like dictation to me, and when God reaches down into the library of the vocabulary of a writer and selects the words out of their vocabulary and puts them on the page. . .

 

“You see, inspiration doesn’t mean God doesn’t use the instrument. I’ve got a pencil in my pocket and when I write with it, you know what it looks like? It looks like a pencil. I’ve got a pen in my pocket. When I write with it, it looks like a pen.

 

“In other words, when you write something, it takes on the character of the instrument you’re writing through, but do you know who’s doing the writing? Me. So, it’s not all that terribly screwball of an idea to believe God wrote the Word of God, using the instrumentality of more than 40 different people in various ways, and that He super-intended all.”

 

*****

 

When neo-orthodoxy came on the scene in the early-to-mid-1900s, the thinking was, “We don’t want to be like those dumb orthodox fundamentalists, but we don’t want to be like those modernists over here either.”

 

What they wound up with is reasoning that said, “Well, the Bible contains the Word of God; It’s not the Word of God, but it contains the Word of God. Within the Bible you have God’s Word, but the Book itself isn’t.”

 

Jordan confirms, “Neo-orthodoxy would say, ‘It really doesn’t matter if Adam was a real person or not. Or if Noah really experienced a universal flood. It’s the message of the Fall that’s important.’

 

“You see, they believe in the Fall; they didn’t discount that. They believe in Satan. They believe in a Judgment. But the vocabulary and the mechanism to communicate that through the story of Adam, well, that might not have ever happened.”

 

*****

 

Fundamentalists wound up making this their position too, saying, “Yes, the message is true, but the Book you get it out of isn’t.”

 

Jordan says, “The funny thing to me—as I observe it and it really does sort of make you chuckle—is you have people holding a doctrinal statement, and demanding obedience and allegiance to that doctrinal statement, but they don’t believe the Book they got the doctrinal statement out of! They believe their doctrinal statement’s infallible but the Book they get it out of, well, it has mistakes in it!

 

“That’s always kind of baffled my capacity to understand. Of course, then you get into the issue of the Bible versions. Just last night I had a man ask me about this. I told him what I tell you people here: I believe you should believe and trust the Bible you’re using, I don’t care which one it is, and when you find it has a mistake in it, it’ll teach you that it’s got mistakes.

 

“Now, if you believe the Bible ought to have mistakes in it, you’ll be happy with yours, but if you think the Bible ought not have mistakes in it and you’ve got one that does, it’s going to teach you you better not trust it—it must not be the right one.

 

“That makes sense to me. I’ve told you this story before about how I was at the (Christian) bookstore one time and started talking to a young man in the Bibles section who said he’d been saved only a short while and was looking to buy a good study bible.

 

“I asked him, ‘Well, what are the criteria you’re looking at?’ and he answered, ‘Oh, I want one with a good cover on good paper that will last.’ And I said, ‘Well, the thing I always want to be sure of is I have a Bible that doesn’t have mistakes in it.’

 

“He asked what I meant and I said, ‘I tell you what to do, check Mark 1:2. If that verse says, ‘It is written in Isaiah the prophet. . .,’ and the reality is the passage quoted is from a verse in Malachi, you’ve got a problem.’ I said, ‘Just start checking them out and when you find the one that doesn’t have that mistake in it, that’s probably the one you ought to have.’

 

“Twenty minutes later, I came back to the guy and he was still going through the different bibles, looking. He said, ‘I haven’t found one yet,’ but I knew that once he got down to the right-hand bottom corner, where they kept the King James copies, he’d find it had Mark 1:2 correct.”

 

*****

 

Jordan continues, “The first thing you have to get settled in your understanding is what it is God preserved. What did He write? He wrote some words in a book. The Book’s called ‘the Word.’ Do you see that it’s not just a message; it’s some words on a page that make up the Book?

 

“It’s all through the Scripture this way. In Jeremiah 15:16, Jerry’s in the dumps about his ministry and says, ‘Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts.’

 

“Notice there’s the word, singular, and it’s made up of the words, plural? In Scripture, the Word of God is considered to be the words of God.

 

“In Isaiah 30:8, God says, ‘Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever.’ Why did He want it written down in a book? ‘That it may be for the time to come for ever and ever.’

 

“When you write something down on paper. . . I was listening to a woman just the other day talking about how when you order something over the Internet and there’s a problem with it, you need to document everything, writing down who you talked to and getting it on paper. And the lady said, ‘The more documentation you have, the better chance you have of winning the thing.’ Well, the idea is, ‘We want it on paper. Put it in writing so I’ve got a record of it.’ Because then you can preserve the history that way.

 

“The reason God wrote it—He didn’t just speak the words—and caused some of them to be written down is because He wanted them to be preserved. Now, there’s two things about that: If you write it down, everybody can have their own copy to read for themselves. But also, if everybody’s got a copy of it and I lose my copy, did we lose the Word of God? No, everybody else has got a copy.

 

“And if I’m copying one out, and I lose a page of mine, well, everybody else has got the page. So there’s protection. There’s a mechanism for preserving it through this copy and multiplying it so everybody has a copy.

 

“Isaiah 29:18 says, ‘And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness.’ Now, that’s talking about the kingdom that’s future from where we are and notice what the deaf are going to hear?

 

“They’re not going to hear the message; they’re going to hear the words and they’re going to be hearing the words Isaiah wrote down, and Isaiah wrote them down so they could be preserved forever and ever—so that a dude out there way into the future from where we are today (Isaiah’s 700 years before Christ and we’re 2,000 years after Christ so that’s 2,700 years) is going to be able to read the words Isaiah wrote down in that Book! Now we call that ‘preservation of the Bible.’

 

“In Psalm 12: 6-7 is one of these famous passages people don’t like. It says, ‘The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.
Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.’

 

“God’s fixed His Word so it won’t be dissolved and lost and the Word of God is perfect; it’s pure according to its own testimony about itself. Well, if that’s true, that answers the question about how it was written.

 

“In Verse 7, when it says ‘thou shalt preserve,’ that’s saying that what God wrote, He’s going to preserve. Now, I know all about the people who say, ‘Well, that’s a bad translation and it shouldn’t be that and it shouldn’t be this,’ and that’s just a bunch of hooey. I’ve studied the Hebrew text there too.

 

“When they tell you, ‘Well, it really can’t be that because it’s singular and it’s this and that,’ that’s just their opinion written and designed to teach what they want taught. It’s not true; it’s just their idea about it because they don’t want it to be the Word of God preserved.

 

“The cheap way of handling the Bible when you don’t like what a verse says, is you say one of two things. You either say, ‘A better translation would be. . .’ or, ‘A better reading in the Greek or Hebrew text would be. . .’, meaning, ‘A better manuscript would be. . .’

 

“And when you hear somebody say that to you, what they just said is, ‘We all can’t have a common Bible we can trust.’ Do you understand that if we all don’t have the same Bible that says the same thing, that we can all go home and study, dig into and research and understand, and not have to scratch words out of. . .

 

“I remember one time my boys came back from a Bible conference at Cedar Lake, Ind., and little Rick came in and was all proud and said, ‘Look, daddy, they told me to scratch these words out of Romans 8.’

 

“Imagine teaching an eight-year-old to scratch words out of his Bible! Now, I don’t know about you, but that wouldn’t encourage me to believe the Bible. They’ll say, ‘Well, they were hard to read,’ and I think, ‘Well, then teach him how to read! You read ’em, dontcha?!’

 

“People say, ‘Well, the King James is written in old English; it’s hard to understand.’ Listen, your mommy and daddy read it! Were they really all that much smarter than you and your kids?! Most of your life you didn’t think so, did you?!

 

“You know what all that is? That’s just being lazy. That’s all that is. It’s just people who don’t study. If you study something, you become familiar with the vocabulary associated with it. And if you aren’t familiar with the vocabulary, you don’t say, ‘Hey, let’s don’t use this vocabulary,’ You say, ‘Let’s spend a little time getting familiar with it.’ ”