Follow the leader

An old saying goes, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

"The way to become a leader in any area of life is to become a follower; look around for somebody and find, ‘Where can they be my leader?’ " instructs Jordan.

“You’re teaching them how to be a follower by following their lead. When it comes time for your area of leadership, you know what they’ll all do? They’ll follow you.

“Leadership is not something you demand or command from people; it’s something you earn by demonstrating largely how it is to be a follower. And let them be responsible. You’ve heard me say for 30 years, ‘I don’t care who makes the decisions as long as they’re responsible for them.’ ”

“When you’re in an assembly of people, there are some people you can be their leader and there are people you can be a follower of and teach them to be a leader. It’s that ‘body life’; every part supplies to the good of the whole.

“You wouldn’t want everybody to be right at the same level all the time because then there could never be any real growth--unless, of course, you had just one person out there ahead of everybody and then that person becomes, functionally, the pope for the group and that’s not a good thing.

*****

“It’s a fascinating thing: there are no genuine atheists. Romans 1:18-19 makes clear, 'For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
[19] Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.'

"Notice they’re not holding the truth in a manner in which to believe it and to enhance it. They’re holding the truth in unrighteousness. These are not people who are going to deal honestly with truth; they’re going to pervert it.

“God built you in such a way that you know there’s a God. He manifested that. God has put in His creation a knowledge, an inward understanding that there’s a personal, individual relationship that you were designed to have with your Creator. It’s witnessed by creation out here; the things that are seen evidence that to the point that men are without excuse.

“They know two things: they know there’s a God (His eternal power and His godhead) and they know they’re going to face Him in judgment and that they’re without excuse. There’s no person who reaches the age of personal accountability for himself who doesn’t know that because God put that there and that’s what the age of accountability is all about. It’s coming to that realization and that consciousness.

*****

“As Psalm 14 says it, ‘The fool has said in his heart there is no God.' How’d he get there? He didn’t start out there. He didn’t start out as someone who didn’t believe in God.

“Richard Dawkins, for example, talks about how he gave up on the idea of God. He knew there was a God but there were some things that happened to him where he got mad at God, and rather than glorifying Him as God and being thankful to Him, Dawkins became vain in his imaginations and he talks about that in Ben Stein's documentary!

“Dawkins didn't know it but what he was doing in Ben Stein’s movie, when he talked about giving up on God and developing this rational alibi system to not believe in God, was describing what Paul two thousand years ago wrote as a biography of the guy! You say, ‘Whoa, that’s pretty good!’

“So when you come over to II Thessalonians where it says God’s going to ‘take vengeance on them who know not God,’ this isn’t people who never could of possibly heard, known or didn’t know anything about it, sitting off in a dark closet with the light off and had no hope of ever knowing about God. These are people who have willfully kept themselves completely ignorant! They had a knowledge and they rejected it.

*****

“There’s often the question, ‘What about people who don’t know?’ I remember back in the '70s I was out knocking on doors, trying to share the gospel with people, when a postman came up to me and asked, ‘What about the heathen who don’t know? Where do they go?’

“People think about ‘the heathen’ as being off in the darkest Brazil, or Africa, or the remote rain forest somewhere. You rub shoulders with the heathen right down at Walgreens and Sears! You don’t know what they know.

“In Moody Church’s science films they’ve got a great old movie where they trace some of these tribal regions in Africa that, when Europeans came in contact with them in the 17-1800s, they were in dark savagery and Moody went back and traced the lineage of some of these tribes into more ancient times and discovered that these people, a thousand years before, had light and knowledge; they had associations with truth but they rejected it!

“What happens with light rejected is it becomes lightning and so you don’t know where those people have been because you haven’t been there. You aren’t God and you aren’t accountable for them. But you know how they got there—by holding the truth (the truth God put within them) in unrighteousness.

“The Scripture’s real clear in Romans 2 that if you walk in the light you have, no matter how dim the light is, it will give you light.”

(new article tomorrow)

When whip-poor-wills call, 'mermen' dye their hair blue

Swimming with a friend the other day in the clean, crisp chlorinated water of her condo complex’s pool, I was inspired to share my unexpected “journey into the blue” from the day before.

I was checking headlines on a favorite news site and clicked on a pop-up blurb about “the accidental discovery of a new shade of blue.”

“So what makes this new blue pigment so special?” read the Forbes Magazine article. “To find out we need to once again consult the spectral profile of the pigment, and also at the crystal structure of the compound. The intense blue color of the pigment is a result of the strong reflection of blue light, and blue light alone. It absorbs green and blue light, making the blue color incredibly vibrant.”

I was working on my computer inside a Starbucks at the time and long after I’d returned to concentrating on a deadline project, I was distracted by the sound of a young woman giggling loudly as she waited with a friend for their drink orders. When 

I glanced up she was flipping her long hair, even twirling her body around to make the hair fly. She could not have been more delighted with her brunette tresses, dyed a very unnatural blue!

Later that same day, waiting in the checkout line at my neighborhood grocery store, I suddenly noticed that a cashier who I sometimes encounter there had dyed the front section of his curly brown locks with an alien-shade blue similar to a Blue Man Group performer!

I then thought about how U.S. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte had just dyed his hair an “ice blue,” as it was reported, to greet the Rio Summer Games.

This all led me to go home and type into Google something like “blue hair craze.” Among the articles was one from the London Daily Mail about--get this-- mermaid and “merman” hair!  

“Men are joining in with a bold new trend of their own which is seeing more than a few fellas adding bright blue hues to their locks in a new trend being dubbed 'merman hair,' ” revealed the lifestyle piece. “The half human creatures of the sea may be more commonly associated with women in bikini tops and long, flowing, brightly-colored locks, but that hasn't stopped hundreds of men from hopping on board with the trend. From turquoise mohawks to teal-hued pompadours, there is plenty of inspiration for this vibrant look all over Instagram and Twitter.”

Of course, this fits right in with the information from my blog post yesterday! Possibly dying the hair bright unnatural colors is just another outward manifestation of that inner appetite driven by bondage, just as with tattoos, piercings, etc.

I thought about how people used to say things like, ‘I’m going to beat the blue blazes out of you,’ or, ‘It’s hotter than blue blazes,’ to avoid using the word ‘hell’ and thereby swearing. It’s the electric blue flame that appears when a fire is at its hottest.

*****

Predictably, blue is a very important color to the secret societies. Just look at this entry from Masondictionary.com:

“Blue is the supreme color of Masonry. First, because it is that color which . . . among all those used in Masonry, is acknowledged by every Mason to belong to us all and no Mason, whatever his degree, questions the Master Mason's ownership of blue. Second, blue is the supreme color because it has, coupled with its universality, a place in symbolism which, both as regards importance of lessons taught and as regards legitimacy as a symbol, is second to that of no Masonic color.

“The use of blue in religious ceremonials, and as a symbol, comes to Masonry from many of the different peoples of antiquity. Among the Hebrews various articles of the high priest's clothing were blue. one of the veils of the tabernacle was blue. In his initiation into the Druidical Mysteries the candidate was invested with a robe one of whose colors was blue. The Babylonians clothed their idols in blue. The Hindoo god Vishnu was represented as blue. And among the medieval Christians blue was considered a peculiarly important color."

From the website Masonicworld.com is this definition of blue:

“Blue, then, is the Craft colour par excellence, used in aprons, collars, and elsewhere. Let us quote Bro. Chetwode Crawley. 'The ordinary prosaic enquirer will see in the selection of blue as the distinctive colour of Freemasonry only the natural sequence of the legend of King Solomon's Temple. For the Jews had been Divinely commanded to wear...a 'riband of blue' (Numbers 15:38).' A modern translation of that verse in Numbers is: 'You are to take tassels on the comers of your garments with a blue cord on each tassel.' The biblical text, then, refers to blue cords to be incorporated in the tassels worn by pious Jews, while Bro. Chetwode Crawley is speaking of blue ribbons which somehow became the embellishments of aprons, sashes and collars.”

******

As any well-read person from the occult world knows, novelist-poet philosopher Aldous Huxley was a tremendously influential figure in the 1960s-drug-culture-rock-and-roll hippie scene. He was among the Beatles’ heroes splashed across the cover of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

In his ever-popular book, “The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell,” which inspired the name of the rock band The Doors, Huxley gives a personal account on what he experienced taking the psychedelic drug mescaline, famously regarded as a "chemical means of inducing a state akin to religious enlightenment."

Huxley writes, “From the French window I walked out under a kind of pergola covered in part by a climbing rose tree, in part by laths, one inch wide with half an inch of space between them. The sun was shining and the shadows of the laths made a zebra-like pattern on the ground and across the seat and back of a garden chair, which was standing at this end of the pergola.

“That chair--shall I ever forget it? Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they could be made of anything but blue fire. For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade.

“Today the percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else. Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow--these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event.

“The event was this succession of azure furnace doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.

“ . . . Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment--or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair--I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance.

“The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrat- ing under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.

“The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the in- compatibility between man's egotism and the divine purity, between man's self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.

“Following Boehme and William Law, we may say that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can be apprehended only as a burning, purgatorial fire. An almost identical doctrine is to be found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the 'Pure Light of the Void,' and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of un- mitigated Reality--anything!

“None too soon, I was steered away from the disquiet- ing splendors of my garden chair. Drooping in green parabolas from the hedge, the ivy fronds shone with a kind of glassy, jade-like radiance.

“A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision. So passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the blue. Like the chair under the laths, they protected too much. I looked down at the leaves and discovered a cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights and shadows, pulsing with un- decipherable mystery.” 

*****

Huxley relates that earlier in this same mescaline trip--an hour and a half after first taking the pill--he sat in his study looking at a small glass vase.

He writes, “The vase contained only three flowers—a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal’s base of a hotter flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. The little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste.

“At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. 

But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence . . . a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged.

“I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing--but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like ‘grace’ and ‘transfiguration’ came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. 

*****

In a BBC documentary about Huxley appearing on You Tube, his wife is interviewed saying that in this same mescaline trip outlined in ‘Doors of Perception,’  “He went into a beautiful place . . . he said, ‘Finally, you have to say those almost embarrassing words—God is love.’ ”

A friend and peer of Huxley’s reports in the documentary, “When Aldous thought that he made the breakthrough through mescaline, LSD, to some kind of ultimate reality, well, for one thing, what was it like? He said in an interview that when you reach the ultimate mystical breakthrough, you discover that in some way, despite everything, the universe is all light.

“ . . . His encouragement in a way of the use of drugs, relatively innocent in those days, was part of this desire to feed an appetite that wanted to understand phenomenon. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was experimenting with that but he was just himself, so often transported into a world illuminated by the greater understanding of the phenomena of nature and he wanted everybody to share in that.”

Doggone if atheists don't worship Fish-god Dagon!

The “lust of the flesh,” as Paul calls it, is a common trait of humanity and people sell themselves for it; betray themselves into the hands of the enemy. “In the terms of Esau, it would be for a bowl of pottage,” explains Jordan. “What a sad thing. It’s the thing that had infiltrated Israel and was embraced by them.”

“II Kings 17: 32 says, ‘So they feared the LORD, and made unto themselves of the lowest of them priests of the high places, which sacrificed for them in the houses of the high places.’

“They had all these church buildings with images that expressed false doctrine and that’s how they feared the Lord. You say, ‘How can you do that?!’ Verse 33 says, ‘They feared the LORD, and served their own gods, after the manner of the nations whom they carried away from thence.’

“They embraced ecumenicism. They said, ‘We’ll have the God of Israel and we’ll have the god of this guy and that guy, and we’ll put it all together and that’s how we’re going to serve God.’

“What did God tell them in the first commandment? ‘No other gods besides me.’ No. 2, ‘Don’t have any images made from those other gods to represent them. You represent me; you are my image in the earth!’

“Who’s God’s image in the earth? He made man in His own image. Man was God’s representative in the earth. That’s why Jesus Christ is called ‘the image of God.’ He’s the second Adam; the last Adam. True humanity. When I think of that, I start wanting to jump up and run the benches. I know, this is the Midwest; we’re calmer than that.

“What they’re doing is worshipping this ‘host of heaven’; this satanic program and all the various forms and components of it. There are all kind of various components to the idolatrous system that Israel embraced and you see it ALL through their history—this false religion.

*****

“We talk about denominations in Christendom and every religion has various denominational things. They’re all kind of denominations in idolatry; all kind of different religious names.

“Jeremiah 8:2, talking to Israel, says, ‘And they shall spread them before the sun, and the moon, and all the host of heaven, whom they have loved, and whom they have served, and after whom they have walked, and whom they have sought, and whom they have worshipped: they shall not be gathered, nor be buried; they shall be for dung upon the face of the earth.'

“They’d rather DIE than change! Moses told them, ‘I set before you life and death; choose life!’ They say, ‘We’ll choose death.’ They chose error instead of truth. How’d they do it? They rejected the counsel of God and chose the counsel of false religions.

“But you notice how he talks about it in verse 2? WHOM they love. Not WHAT, not IT, but WHO. When they’re worshipping this ‘host of heaven,’ worshipping these images, it’s really the spirit BEHIND them; the satanic entities behind them that inspire the doctrine they’re teaching. They loved them; they served them. They walked after them. You know why you walk after and serve something? Because you love it! They LOVE darkness rather than light.

“Zephaniah 1:4 says, [4] I will also stretch out mine hand upon Judah, and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I will cut off the remnant of Baal from this place, and the name of the Chemarims with the priests.

“Notice the different gods have NAMES to them. That’s the different denominations among the pagans! In your Old Testament, God calls Himself ‘the God of Israel’ over 200 times. Not ‘the god of the land’; the God of Israel. But they got one to fit anything you desire.

“Zechariah 13 tells you what God will do with them in the kingdom. When Jesus Christ comes back and throws all these dudes out--doing what God did with them in Egypt--verse 2 says, ‘And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD of hosts, that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be remembered: and also I will cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land.’

“Notice it’s not ‘cut off the name,’ but cut off the NAMES plural. All the different manifestations; something to fit everybody’s desire. You know, you go to Baskin-Robbins and they’ve got 38 different kind of ice cream. All they need is chocolate and if you had another choice, maybe strawberry or butter pecan. But people have all different tastes. That’s why they have all these different gods. Different things people love; seduce them into it.

*****

“I want you to look at one in particular. There is a manifestation of a particular god that Israel had to deal with that is a modern secular religion of our day.

“The nation Israel was conquered about 1,000 B.C. by the Philistines. I Samuel 4:21 says, [21] And she named the child I-chabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel: because the ark of God was taken, and because of her father in law and her husband.

“God literally wrote I-chabod across the tabernacle of God and the nation of God because the ark was departed.

“I Samuel 5 says, “ ‘And the Philistines took the ark of God, and brought it from Eben-ezer unto Ashdod.
[2] When the Philistines took the ark of God, they brought it into the house of Dagon, and set it by Dagon.’

“You ever sing that song, ‘Here I raise my Eben-ezer, hither by thy grace I come’? That’s a Bible term; a place of significance in the Bible. They took it from a place of blessing, where God’s blessing resided, and took it to Ashdod. Why there? When the Philistines took the ark of God they brought it into the house of Dagon and set it by Dagon.

“The name Dagon, that god, the first part of that name means ‘fish.’ Dagon was the fish god. You ever see the pope when he comes in with that hat (called a mitre) where the top looks like a fish mouth? That’s the hat of Fish-god Dagon. Get the book ‘Two Babylons,’ by Alexander Hislop, and he’s got wood carvings and pictures of it from 1,000 B.C.

*****

“What Catholicism does is, when Rome would take over a country, they would do what Israel did. They would assimilate all their gods and all their paraphernalia into the worship of Christ. That’s why I keep telling you that modern Christendom is just a plagiarized form of Old Testament Judaism. They’ve made all the mistakes Israel made and they assimilate that.

“That’s why when you study Baal worship in the Bible, you see over and over and over and over and over again what you see in Catholicism, whether it’s Roman Catholicism, Eastern Catholicism or the Protestant versions of Catholicism. The symbols, so the pope wears the fish god’s hat in his ceremonies.

“Now, it’s important to understand who Dagon was because Dagon, the god of the Philistines . . . they take the ark of God and place it before Dagon. They’re adding them together. They’re ecumenicists. They’re going to put Israel’s ark in with their god and they’re all going to be TOGETHER.

“Nebuchadnezzar did that. He’d take the things out of the temple of God and put them in his temple. Why? Any time you see the ecumenicists get together, that’s what you’re dealing with. ‘Let’s mix truth and error; let’s put God and the gods together, because they’re all equal.’

"Watch what happens: ‘[3] and when they of Ashdod arose early on the morrow, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the earth before the ark of the LORD. And they took Dagon, and set him in his place again.

“Dagon has hit the ground and he’s bowed down to the earth before the ark of God! I don’t know about you, but if I had set my god in front of the ark and now he’s bowed down to Him, I might get the idea that my god, the stone, thinks that’s who I should be worshipping. Right?

“Well, they set him up in his place again. Picked him up, he can’t even get up himself. That’s what Isaiah says about how stupid it is to worship false gods. If my god couldn’t get up himself, wouldn’t you get the idea that maybe you’re on the wrong team?! But if you live in darkness and that’s who you love, because you love what he lets you do, you make excuses for him.

“Verse 4: [4] And when they arose early on the morrow morning, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the ground before the ark of the LORD; and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold; only the stump of Dagon was left to him.

“I mean, the dude’s done come to pieces! The guy’s fallen apart--his head, his hands. They loved, they served, they took his advice (his counsel, his thinking) and did what he said, and it’s all gone to pieces!

“You know what happens when you follow Dagon? Everything’s going to go to pieces before the ark of God. Now, while you’re all by yourself and don’t have the truth of God around, it might be okay. That’s why men love darkness rather than light.

*****

“Dagon was the Babylonian god of fertility and nature. He was said to be the son of Baal; the son of God. He was the personification of the primordial waters, or the primordial soup, that man evolved, or emerged out of. That’s why he’s represented in idolatry as half-human, half-fish.

“You can go on the internet and look up pictures of Dagon that look like what Walt Disney animates as the Little Mermaid. You know what they’re doing? They’re inculcating into the minds of people—children and adults . . . You have this lovable little half-fish, half-woman, and you don’t know where it came from.

“Listen to me, Dagon was the god of evolution. The teaching, the idea behind Dagon was the religion of evolutionism that’s taught in the government schools and in religion all over the world.

“When you hear atheists protest over somebody teaching Jesus Christ in the government schools, they’re literally pulling their tongue out of their own mouth because what they want taught as fact is the ‘theory,’ the call it, of evolution, which is really the religion.

*****

“The Babylonian doctrine, or teaching, of evolution demonstrated by Dagon was picked up by the Greek philosophers. The religion of evolution didn’t begin with Charles Darwin.

“Just go look up the history of evolution. The Greeks had no term for evolution but they used the term ‘emanation.’ Faels asserted that all things originated from water. Eximenes called ‘air’ the principle of all things. They considered individual beings and the phenomenal world as the result of evolution, development.

“The Epicureans and Stoics they had the rudimentary suggestions of the 

Darwinian Theory whereby things are adapted to a certain end by a sort of natural selection. That didn’t start with Darwin. Darwin took the Greek philosophy, looked for it in nature and applied it to it.

“You come to guys like Plato and Aristotle and they used the Teleological addition. They say it didn’t just mechanically get done but it was overridden by a deity and they came in with the theistic evolution.

“Anaximander taught life originated from the moisture that covered the earth before it dried up. It was dried up by the sun. The primordial soup man emerged from—you know, first he was a tadpole swimming in the sea, then he . . . you know the stuff.

“Bodies come into existence out of atoms and ultimately entire worlds appear and disappear from and to eternity, over and over and over. Organic beings from what is inorganic moisture, earth, or slime.

“You read that stuff and say ‘Wow,’ but the Greek philosophers are the people who set the tone for Western culture and they had the idea that all living organisms lived in an evolutionary hierarchy.

“Aristotle called it ‘the great chain of being,’ and man is at the top. They expressed that stuff before the time of Christ so don’t give me this about evolution being all brand-new and ‘something they just found.’

“You know what it is? Dagon falls down before the God of the Bible and his head falls off. It’s mindless, brainless, religious fanaticism. That’s all it is. The worship of the ‘host of heaven’ didn’t stop two millenniums ago; it permeates the world out there and comes right in to where you are today.”

(to be continued tomorrow)  

Inner appetites behind tattoos, et al

A computer term that fits with the illustrations/types given in the Bible is “meta-template,” explains Jordan. God sets up a template about how He’s going to do things, then uses examples through the Scriptures and ultimately explains, “You see how I did that back there, and how I did this and that, and you see how that worked? That’s how the REAL thing is!”

“When you think about what God’s going to do in the universe, He gave a picture of how He’s going to do it with the nation Israel, focused on the earth.

“He’s brings Israel out of Egypt where they were in satanic captivity. God judged the gods of Egypt. That’s why there were 10 plagues. He judged each one of the 10 gods that ran Egypt, demonstrating He was God and they weren’t.

“He brings them out to the Red Sea, carries them across, divides them away, destroys the Egyptians following them, puts them on new life ground and makes them His nation, giving them new life. Then He sends them into Canaan.

“Moses brings them to Canaan but doesn’t go in with them. He writes the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy in order to explain to Israel what they experienced in Egypt and what they’re to face in Canaan. It’s not just that they were in slavery; they were enslaved to satanic captivity. That’s what those plagues were telling them. It wasn’t just that Pharaoh was a (slave ruler); there was a satanic force behind him. They wouldn’t have known that if God hadn’t told them and demonstrated it to them!

“In fact, when it says in Exodus 1 a Pharaoh came on the throne that didn’t know Joseph, Isaiah 52 calls that Pharaoh an Assyrian. The Assyrian in the Bible is one of those little tag words, or identifiers, of the Antichrist.

*****

“In Numbers 33, Moses instructs the children of Israel that when they go into Canaan, [52] Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places:
[53] And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it.

“So they’re first to go in and ‘dispossess’ the inhabitants, throwing them out. Then they can possess the land. They were to get rid of them and destroy all their pictures and molten images and pluck down all their high places.

“Immediately when you read this you think of the Tower of Babel, where they went out and worshipped on the high places, saying, ‘We’re going to go up here on this high place above everybody and do some things that will get us to God!’

“Pictures and images are representations of the spiritual forces that are behind those things. It was pornography and that kind of stuff and it wasn’t just pictures on the walls; we looked at passages where they painted pictures on their bodies. We call them TATTOOS. They carried around SIGNS of these gods. They are all physical manifestations of the life.

“He’s talking about, ‘Don’t get involved in idolatry that’s used to represent the forces that are back behind all that stuff!’

“You wind up trying to worship in connection with the invisible powers of darkness those (images) are used to represent. And you serve it because there are acts of service in connection with any kind of worship that produces a culture and a lifestyle; the inner appetites.

“When Moses says, ‘Lest thou be driven to worship them,’ he’s talking about that stuff putting an internal compulsion in you; an appetite. It sears your conscience and puts an appetite in you to go after it, not just in you, but in the culture.

“What God’s telling them is, ‘Go destroy all this physical and philosophical filthiness associated with Beelzebub.’ You remember that title of Satan? The ‘sons of Belial,’ the sons of Beelzebub, the ‘lord of filth.’ It’s the unclean spirits that produce that kind of stuff and He’s warning them about the seduction of their hearts: ‘Don’t adapt to the worldview that produces that kind of stuff! Get rid of it! Drive it out! Destroy it!’

“You see, that satanic darkness--the philosophy, or the thinking that produces a bunch of images and lifestyles that are based on a worldview, on an ideology, a culture; that’s the expression of the extension of the worship of your heart and these things come from the darkness. Before they could possess the land they had to rid themselves of the lifestyle of the things that caused them not to be able to possess the land.

*****

“Deuteronomy 4:5-7 says, [5] Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the LORD my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it.
[6] Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.
[7] For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the LORD our God is in all things that we call upon him for?

“Where were they going to get the ability to have people look at them and say they were wise and understanding? Moses writes, ‘I’ve given you the Word of God; I’ve given you what God says to you and it’s going to give you the ability to carry out His purpose and demonstrate His wisdom and understanding. People are going to watch you and say, ‘Wow, what nation has such wisdom and understanding about what creation is about?!’

“As Isaiah 33:6 says, ‘And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, and strength of salvation: the fear of the LORD is his treasure.’

(new article tomorrow)

Little peons judged with darkness

Considered by some the “smartest man in the world,” physicist Stephen Hawking concludes in his book “The Grand Design,” “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

As a blogger (Gavitron) reasons, “But how then does Hawking explain the existence of his metaphorical 'blue touch paper' that set the universe going? How does Hawking explain the existence of gravity in the first place? He doesn't! He simply presupposes that it exists. Hawking does not know how to explain gravity. To him that is simply where explanations come to an end.”

*****

Starting in Genesis 1, the Bible explains, [5] And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

“God named Day and Night; that’s a personification,” says Jordan. “That’s more than just the physical; there’s a spiritual darkness being dealt with there. When He said, ‘Let there be light,’ that’s the ‘God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,’ as Paul writes.

“He’s declaring to His creation right there that the only place you’re going to find the purpose of God and His exaltation and His glory in His creation is in Jesus Christ; it’s not in that make-believe wisdom of the Adversary.

“You go down to Genesis 1:14 and you’re on Day #4 and God said, ‘[14] And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.’

“Now He’s going to put lights in the heavens. You’re going to have a physical light that’s going to separate the spiritual darkness into two categories and they’re going to be for signs.

"In other words, they’re going to divide up the darkness from the light and they’re going to be physical manifestations.

*****

“He’s going to start using sign language in His creation. You know Psalm 19: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.’

“But there’s a little more to it than that because He’s going to use the sun, the moon and the stars. The thing about them is they produce light. The moon reflects the light of the sun but it lights the earth with reflected light. Even in the darkness, when the earth is on the dark side of things, it can reflect off the moon and light the earth.

“The stars are light sources. One of the reasons angels are associated with stars in the Bible is angels don’t function in darkness. Darkness is a chain that immobilizes. God did that in Egypt in Exodus 10. Verse 21 says, [21] And the LORD said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, even darkness which may be felt.

“That’s darkness that could be felt. You read that and you see nobody could get around it—it was such oppressive darkness that it immobilized people, the Egyptians.

“In the Book of Jude it says God has those angels ‘bound in chains of darkness.’ They look for and gather around the light sources because they need those things to function. That’s why they’re associated with them.

“By the way, you see at the end of Genesis 1:16 it says, ‘he made the stars also’? That’s not saying, ‘Oh, yeah, by the way, I think I’ll make a few stars.’ 

"He made the sun, the moon and the stars also to do what? The verse says 'God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.' He made the stars also to RULE.

"Verses 17-18 says: [17] And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
[18] And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

“Who did God put in the heavens originally to rule the heavens in the earth? Lucifer and His angelic creation. That word Lucifer in Latin means he’s a ‘light-bearer.’ The original light-bearer was Satan before he became Satan, and ‘the host’ before they became fallen angels.

*****

“When the original light-bearer fell into a false wisdom experiment, God judged him with darkness. ‘Their foolish hearts became dark.’ God withdrew His wisdom and understanding and darkness consumed them.

“On that fourth day God put into the heavens some new rulers to replace the old rulers. The Book of Job talks about the ordinances of heaven; the constellations ruling the seasons in the earth. God literally set up a new structure in His creation; new laws, new rules to do to replace Satan, and they are for signs.

“They physically manifest the power God put in them that, when Satan usurped all that stuff, he’s getting people to worship the HOST of Heaven. They aren’t just worshipping the sun; they’re worshipping the power they think is behind that.

“Satan takes those rulers and wants them to worship him as the REAL power. You watch people worshipping fertility gods; that’s what you do with the sun and they’re trying to get the crops to grow. They’re not worshipping just the mechanics of the sun; they’re wanting ‘the god of the land’ to come and fill up the earth with food. So they are symbols, signs.

*****

“In Genesis 11 all this stuff got codified, if you can put it like that. At the Tower of Babel it was all organized into a worldwide religion. Remember, after the Flood God added nationalism. A nation, as we know from Genesis 10, is made up of borders, language and culture.

“Genesis 11:3 says, ‘[3] And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.’

“They say, ‘We’re not going to use God’s stone to make stuff; we’re going to use our own.’ They substituted man-made stuff—slime for mortar.

“Verse 4 says, [4] And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

“ ‘Let us make us a name.’ You see what’s driving this? There’s a philosophy; there’s a thinking process. ‘I want to have a name.’ ‘Lest we be scattered on the face of the earth.’ What did God tell Noah? Scatter.

“’They built the city in rebellion against God’s prescribed social order. Then they built a tower against God’s prescribed spiritual order. And they take the whole world in rebellion and all God had to do to thwart it was change their language. I think it’s so funny! God wasn’t sitting up in heaven, fretting, 'Oh, my, I wonder what they’re going to do.'

"As Psalm 2:4 says, ‘He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.’ God looks down and says, ‘They think they’re so smart. Watch! Ha, Ha.’

“The old boy’s over here trying to lay some bricks and he looks over to his helper and says, ‘Go get me some more mortar,’ and his helper hears, ‘Hit me in the head with a hoe.’ ‘You sure?!’ ‘I’m the boss, do what I tell you! Get on with it; do it in a hurry!’

“Can you understand how they couldn’t get along and He scattered them? What was happening there? It was all to reach heaven. It was to ‘worship the creature rather than the creator.’ What happened with all that stuff is God destroyed it.

*****

“When you read this stuff in Genesis 11, remember Moses is writing this to some people who just came out of Egypt and were going into Canaan, experiencing this stuff. Moses is explaining, ‘All this heathen stuff you’re going to face--this is where it came from and this is why they do it.’

“Now, fast-forward a bunch of centuries, more than a thousand years, and watch what happens with Israel. II Kings 17:

[7] For so it was, that the children of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, which had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods,
[8] And walked in the statutes of the heathen, whom the LORD cast out from before the children of Israel, and of the kings of Israel, which they had made.
[9] And the children of Israel did secretly those things that were not right against the LORD their God, and they built them high places in all their cities, from the tower of the watchmen to the fenced city.
[10] And they set them up images and groves in every high hill, and under every green tree:
[11] And there they burnt incense in all the high places, as did the heathen whom the LORD carried away before them; and wrought wicked things to provoke the LORD to anger:
[12] For they served idols, whereof the LORD had said unto them, Ye shall not do this thing.

“Drop down to verses 16-18: [16] And they left all the commandments of the LORD their God, and made them molten images, even two calves, and made a grove, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal.
[17] And they caused their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire, and used divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger.
[18] Therefore the LORD was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of his sight: there was none left but the tribe of Judah only.

*****

“What happens is when Israel got in that land, rather than them being separated from (the evil), that stuff infiltrated and they embraced it.

“You go down in the chapter and you see over and over, ‘they know not the manner of the God of the land.’

"That term ‘God of the land’--you ever hear anybody talk about territorial spirits? You know who believes in that? Heathen. That’s a pagan doctrine. They believe there’s a god for this land and a god for that land.

“When God brought them out of Egypt, it wasn’t just that they didn’t have to make cakes anymore; He brought them out of captivity to the gods of Egypt and set them free from that religious system that made them think that those little gods were God.

“You know how the Believer thinks? ‘The heavens are the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.’ He owns it all; He’s the God of it all. All these little guys are just little peons; false claimants of pieces of the land that God Himself owns, not them.

“Look at II Kings 17:32-33: [32] So they feared the LORD, and made unto themselves of the lowest of them priests of the high places, which sacrificed for them in the houses of the high places.
[33] They feared the LORD, and served their own gods, after the manner of the nations whom they carried away from thence.

“That’s the ruination! They said, ‘We’ll serve Jehovah and all these other gods like they’re all the same.’ God told them it don’t work. That’s why Paul says, ‘Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate.’ You can’t serve Baal. They don’t mix. That’s why Moses said to destroy them.”

(new article tomorrow)

Out from under the leash

In Malachi 3:6 is the testimony, “For I am the LORD, I change not.” Who is this "I Am" that doesn’t change? Hebrews 13:8, one of the most misunderstood verses in the Bible, says, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and forever."

"You know the one who, if He says it never changes His Word, it’s Jehovah, who is Jesus. They’re the same. So when Jesus says that to the religious muckity-mucks in John 8, they got it and understood it, but He meant it, too, and what He said was, ‘I am Jehovah God.’ "

Jeremiah 23:5 says, “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.”

The Messiah was going to be Jehovah, their Redeemer. That’s what Jesus is saying. “I’m Him; I’m the hope of Israel.” Jordan says, “If anybody ever tells you that Jesus never claimed to be God, there’s a verse where He did! Proved Himself to be! Anybody who ever tells you the Bible doesn’t say Jesus was God, yawn real big and tell them, ‘You need to get a life. Wake up!’

*****

Paul makes long-range plans. In Romans 15, he said, ‘I’m going to take that offering to Jerusalem and I’m going to come by you and then I’m going to Spain.' I mean, this guy’s planning to go to Spain, and church history says he went all the way to the British Isles.

“Do you know that in church history, there’s evidence that the Apostle Paul visited the British Isles? Now that would be a stroke, wouldn’t it? I know he went to Spain. He lays it out in the Scripture and says, ‘I’m going to be refreshed by you and let you help me and I’m on my way to Spain.’

"He didn’t quit. He said, ‘I’ve already preached over here in Europe and Asia and everywhere I can preach where I’m not laying on another man’s foundation—I’m off to the regions beyond.’ And he wasn’t a teenager when he said that, by the way. He’d been in the ministry about 30 years when he said that. He can quit.

“He’s like old Caleb. Old Caleb over there; he’s 85 years old and he says, ‘I want that mountain with the big giants on it. Moses promised me that, Joshua, and you’re not going to keep it away from me, are you?! I want that mountain with those big dudes!’

" ‘I thought we should have gone in there 40 years ago,’ Caleb says, ‘and I was going to go with those guys, and my hand’s just as strong, and my eyes just as good ,’ and you know he’s just lying.

“You know he didn’t see as good. He didn’t have 20/20 vision anymore. Maybe he did, but it’s very unlikely, you know. I know it says their shoes didn’t wear out, but it didn’t say their eyes didn’t get dim. They all grew old and died. Paul’s that way.

"What’s he doing? He’s got a heart motivated by Christ and he takes the truth and he says, ‘I’m going to apply it and go!’ He makes the long-range plans. But, you see, it wasn’t self-willed activity. That’s the point in I Cor. 4:19.

“Paul lived not self-willed. You see, when you talk to people about doing the will of God and being out from under this leash, and that you’re free to make choices, not governed by some pre-arranged plan, people immediately think, ‘Oh, well you CAN just go and live self-willed,’ and Paul said, ‘No, it’s not a self-willed life; it’s a God’s-willed life!' "

Chimps know better, Jane

I read this quote from 82-year-old Jane Goodall appearing in today’s Wall Street Journal and thought, “Whew, inquiring minds who don’t really want to know a single thing.”

Goodall testified, “I was totally curious as a child. I once took worms to bed, wondering how they walked without legs. I watched intently as they moved about. Chimpanzees are very curious too. If they come across a hole in a tree, they want to know what’s inside. Curiosity is supposed to be a measure of intelligence, but it’s difficult to say. Intelligence is the way you express curiosity and the lengths you’ll go to satisfy it. We’re always coming up with new questions. Science thinks it’s got the answer to the appearance of the universe with the big bang, but that leads me to ask, ‘What came before the big bang?’ I still have a lot of questions. What will happen to me as I get older? What will happen to me when I die? That’s my biggest curiosity and has been for a long time. But you can’t find an answer. It’s unknowable.”

Unsaved people love to claim curiosity as their own. Some will say of fundamentalist Christians that we have no real curiosity; we just take God at His Word and don’t ‘explore’ whether He’s really right or not. A favorite Robert Browning quote, for example, is, “Where the apple reddens never pry -- lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I.”

*****

David writes in Psalm 14, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”

“That’s not a head problem; that’s a heart problem,” says Jordan. “Somebody says, ‘How do you know there’s a God?’ Go look in the mirror. You exist; you had to come from somewhere. Common sense tells you that. Cause and effect tells you that; the rule of first cause. You argue around it because you want to get rid of what you already know.

“There’s a current that runs through the world system that manifests itself in expressing the philosophy of the world. The channel through which the world works and is developed is the lie program that says, ‘Get rid of God!’

“There’s a culture in ‘this present evil world’ where the world wants to replace God’s truth with the vain imaginations--the empty rational reasoning of man’s attempt to make himself control things and come up with his own vain ideas; his own ideas about how it ought to work and what purpose and meaning of life is.

“Satan’s directing and promoting the philosophy, the course of this world so he can eliminate the Creator. How he exerts his influence and his rulership; he’s the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience. He has access, as it were, to their will. He works in their inner man.

“They have no Savior. They have no Holy Spirit within them. They have no light and truth within them. So he has free access to work.

“Listen, the genius of unsaved people is satanically inspired. He’s the creature that works, and he uses that to captivate them; to eliminate any ability on their part to see any glory in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

“If you wonder why the world we live in is falling apart, the answer’s right here. II Corinthians 4:3: ‘But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost.’ If people don’t get saved it’s because they’re blind, and when it comes to the gospel, they don’t get it.

*****

“When it says he’s ‘the god of this world,’ he’s behind the ideologies, the opinions, the hopes, the aims, the goals, the viewpoints that are expressed in the world. He’s the one they worship.

“You see the world does worship a god; they just don’t worship the Creator God and the one that they’re following is the god of this world. That’s what he wanted to be--'like the most high God.' That was Satan's goal and ambition.

“Paul writes, ‘In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.’

“You see, his tactic is to blind people; to hide the truth. In darkness things are hid. When things are in darkness you don’t SEE them and that’s why Satan is the ‘power of darkness,’ where the light isn’t there.

“That’s why in Ephesians 4 he talks about ‘through the blindness and darkness of their heart.’ He wants to keep people from seeing anything glorious in the gospel. You remember what Paul said in I Corinthians 1: 18? ‘For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.’

*****

“You go out and tell the world that a dead Jew hanging on a Cross is God saving them, you know what the world thinks: ‘Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.’ Why do they think that? Because the god of this world hath blinded their minds.

“Colossians 2:8 says, ‘Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.’

“Think of Sophia, a lover of wisdom, i.e., human viewpoint: ‘I think I know how to do it. I can figure it out on my own, thank you. I don’t need God.’ So let’s get rid of God in every way possible. Let’s don’t talk about Him. Let’s get Him out and forget about it.

“If it’s religion, philosophy, tradition--anything to keep you from focusing on what God is doing in the Lord Jesus Christ.

“Paul says in Galatians 6:14, ‘But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.’

“But you see to glory in the Cross, you have to not glory in anything you do. You can’t glory in ME—my ideas, do it my way.

"Satan blinds lost people, but he also uses their own sinfulness to do it. That’s where the flesh comes in. You see how he says, ‘the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.’

“They’re blinded by Satan but they’re also blinded by their own sin. Disobedience is a willful, deliberate refusal to comply with the demands of authority. The whole tactic is to hide and do away with the truth."