The Name of Jesus

“It is an experience of our days that the spoken name of Jesus alone exercises an unforeseen power; and the effort which it cost to speak this name is perhaps connected to some faint apprehension of the power which is inherent within it. Wherever the name of Jesus Christ is spoken it is a protection and a claim.” Bonhoeffer Ethics p.57

CS Lewis wrote a lot about the devil. I don’t think it was for arbitrary reasons. In Surprise By Joy, he alludes to, but covers, certain instances in his life, probably before his conversion, where he apparently attended to demon possessed people. He lived in a time when there was still extensive and polite dabbling in the demonic via seances, oijia boards, and other parlor tricks, going on everywhere. He apparently had at least one rather extensive encounter in which he was the caretaker of some crazed person, that lasted some days and was horrific. I don’t think when he finally writes about Ransom meeting the devil in the possessed Weston in Perelandra that he is writing without some real experimental knowledge. When he says things like, “if you want to get to know the satanic powers better, you will…” he seems to be writing out of real experience with demons, perhaps not completely personal, but in what he observed in those close to him who partook in polite and parlor dabblings that led to encounters they had not counted on.

As a nation, we have long been dabbling in evil. It has been a self indulgent parlor game for us, like oijia boards and seances. Suddenly, the devils have begun answering back, and we are now finding ourselves being pulled into a malstream of chaos that we are not in control of but is now, like a giant undertow, controlling us. We have a Congress that began a number of years ago, playing self indulgent parlour games with various forms of evil who are now being pulled into currents that are greater than they are. It is being led by someone who seems to have been at that place long ago, and is quite comfortable with the maelstrom and is pushing us further and further out to sea, as fast as possible. Nobody seems able to stop him. And to date, not very many even want to. They still imagine they are in control, and will get real gain out of it for themselves.

It is a time when being “moderate,” meaning you are not very committed to anything other than being nice and sensible, is not going to do. It is now only the name of Jesus Christ that can create a space of lawfulness, and sanity. Only the name of Jesus Christ has any power over the chaos that increasingly, we are being pulled into.

This chaos is going to create its own momentum, and those who have been playing games with it for years for their own self interest are now going to discover that it is controlling them rather than the other way around.

Our only protection is going to be in the name of Jesus, Nice humanistic pluralism is threadbare and impotent.

Read Full Post »

Obama as Fool

It is clear now that Barack Obama is a fool. This was clear to anyone with Biblical wisdom during the campaign, but it is now becoming clear to everyone. The following analysis of this narcissist is invaluable:

  http://www.globalpolitician.com/25109-barack-obama-elections

 These rather radical comments are also worth considering:

 http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/print.asp?ID=9668

What is telling is that this is a man with absolutely no executive experience in any area of life, and also a man who has never undergone death and resurrection. In Biblical religion, both of these things are necessary for a person to exercise “knowledge of good and evil,” that is, rule over others.

Saul was a fool. Saul may have had a bit of executive experience, but he did not demonstrate it when he ordered his army not to eat anything during battle, and then sought to put fellow-warrior Jonathan to death for having partaken of the “sacramental” flow of honey offered by God’s land. (1 Samuel 14). Additionally, Saul had never undergone death and resurrection. By way of contrast, David had fought lion and bear, spent time learning executive wisdom at Saul’s court (from other men, presumably), and then was driven out into the wilderness for several years, threatened repeatedly with death, before rising to the throne. David was not a perfect ruler, but he was not a fool.

If we look at the campaign in the US last autumn, the Christian voter’s position is pretty much crystal clear. Neither Democratic candidate had any executive experience. Joe Biden is a notorious liar, who delivered no fewer than seventeen blatant lies during his debate with Sarah Palin. He is a man completely devoid of shame and morality, who has vociferously advocated the murder of inconvenient people throughout his career but who showed up last Wednesday was ashes on his forehead. No Christian could vote for such an obvious hypocrite, unless there were simply no other choice.

By way of contrast, Sarah Palin has a lot of executive experience. The numerous lies told about her in the mainstream media, blogosphere, and leaked by the “moderate” and homosexual element in the Republican campaign, only testify to her power as a knowledgeable and competent person. She was hated because she had committed the two unpardonable sins: She willingly gave birth to a downs syndrome child (95% of whom are murdered in the womb), and she did not have her pregnant daughter murder her unborn child.

By the same token, John McCain is a man who has been through death and resurrection. He is a man who understands the horrors of war, unlike Obama and Biden. He is the man who got the US out of the quagmire of Iraq by coming up with the “surge.” McCain had some unfortunate beliefs, like the superstition of man-made global warming, but he is a man of some wisdom, unlike the fool we now have in office.

It was clear to the Christian community that the Republican Party ticket last autumn fulfilled, however imperfectly, the Biblical standards for rule, while the Democrat Party ticket was a pair of fools. The Christian choice was clear, and Christians made it.

(Note: by Christians I do not mean Evangelicals. Evangelicalism in America is a species of mostly gnostic religion. There is no wine in communion. There are no psalms, and certainly no warfare psalms. Evangelicals mostly believe the blasphemy that Jesus is going to fail in His announced programme of discipling all nations. Evangelicals are anti-Bibliocratic. And evangelical academics are so compromised that they cannot understand the first chapter of the Bible. With their rock and roll jazz worship, they are irrelevant. That some evangelicals may have supported Obama is no surprise.) [On evangelicalism and gnosticism, see Philip Lee’s classic Against the Protestant Gnostics, and my own Creation in Six Days.]

Obama announced clearly during the campaign that he would increase the systematic murder of inconvenient people (that is, Jews, I mean babies). He would seek to sodomize the military, as he is seeking to do. He has introduced racism into his administration, in addition to filling it up with tax-cheating crooks. If all of this resembles Nazi Germany, it is no surprise. And if there are “German Christians” (I mean, “with-it evangelicals”) who support this, that is also no surprise.

God has given the US into the arms of fools, and this is a judgment. It is a judgment first of all on the Church, which has refused to exercise any kind of ecclesiastical discipline for several generations. The book of Revelation shows that when the Seven Churches start dealing with sin and rebellion, God begins to change the world. With “evangelicals” deciding that church discipline is unimportant, and even joining hands with the wicked to vote Obama into office, knowing his desire to increase the murder of Jews inconvenient babies, it is clear that judgment is needed. The sooner God destroys the world of evangelical gnosticism, the sooner authentic Christian churches can begin to do what we are called upon to do.

Read Full Post »

Rainbow Coalition?

I was asked to provide comments on the rainbow in the Bible. Here are some for starters:

1. God puts his warbow in the sky for HIM to see and remember the covenant.

2. In Revelation 4-5, this warbow is around His throne, so He sees it all the time.

        a. It’s green, emerald.

        b. Emerald is the stone of Levi (BHOP 19: Behind the Scenes)

        c. The Levites were camped in a square closest around the Tabernacle.

3. The other tribes have other colors, and at are the next rank around the Tabernacle.

        a. In Revelation 21-22, the City has these twelve colored stones at her border.

        b. The colored stones are chips of frozen rainbow.

        c. God’s people are His rainbow, through which He views the world.

4. Baptism, especially by sprinkling, puts rainbow on us.

        a. Rainbow is caused by light prisming through water.

        b. In baptism, God’s light is prismed through water to us, rainbowizing us, so we join the rainbow.

        c. Baptism washes away sin, but also glorifies (rainbowizes) and enlists us in the Rainbow Army for holy war.

5. In the Tabernacle, two tapestries encircled the rooms inside and out, at the upper and lower levels.

        a. These had cherubim (guardians) on them.

        b. They were woven of red, blue, purple, and white: rainbow colors. (Red and Blue-purple are the extremes of the rainbow prism.)

        c. They signified the angelic rainbow host around God.

6. The High Priest had the same rainbow colors on him.

        a. His garment had the same colors.

        b. He wore the rainbow stones on his chest.

        c. Now we are all made high priests, living rainbow warriors.

7. In the ritual of Ascension (Leviticus 1), the worshipper is by proxy put into the rainbow colors of the fire, after being divested of his old skin-clothes, and receives new fire-rainbow clothes.

        a. Again, this is like the High Priest.

        b. It is also the rainbow colors of the bride, as the worshipper ascends by proxy as an ‘ishsheh, a bride for Yahweh.

        c. Psalm 45 is a human explication of this ritual.

        d. We are all dressed in rainbow to be part of the bride of Christ.

Read Full Post »