No News is Very Good News

January 17th, 2018

Rapture Yourself and Get Peace

This morning something disturbing happened. I was reading the news on the Internet, and I got so disgusted I decided to get rid of the bookmarks on my phone’s browser. I had been used to looking at Fox, CNN, and Drudge every morning, but it got to be too much.

Yesterday, the world learned that Donald Trump is in extraordinary health, just as he had claimed in the past. He proved it beyond all doubt, with an extensive medical exam. He even asked for a completely unnecessary dementia test, which he aced. He ordered his doctor to be as open about the results as possible, unlike Obama, who hid the fact that he continued smoking cigarettes in the White House. How did America respond? I’m sure a lot of people didn’t care, but as for the rest, half were happy about it, and the other half were so disappointed and angry, they lost their minds.

I looked at the comments on a Fox story about Trump. They were horrible. Leftists said all sorts of filthy things, and they made up facts. The doctor was wrong. The doctor was lying. The results were actually very bad, if you just looked at them the right way. And of course, offended conservatives said vile things in return.

Even worse, established leftist pundits were doing their best to “debunk” the exam results. CNN has a TV doctor named Sanjay Gupta, and he and Fox reject Alisyn Camerota appeared in a video under a remarkable headline that looked something like “Trump has Heart Disease.” They found one (and only one) heart test that had an unfavorable result, and they also pounced on the fact that Trump is on the fat side. This is what they harped on. Never mind the fact that they were discussing a 71-year-old man who only took two prescriptions for his health, ate whatever he wanted, never exercised, and had a strong heart and a blood pressure of 122/74.

They should have been asking what kind of miracle they were witnessing (and why their own gene pools couldn’t compare). Instead, they were gleefully looking at the results, like pagan priests poking around in bird guts, celebrating any sign that Trump might die soon.

How crazy can people get?

My dad is in very good shape, apart from dementia, and he takes eight prescribed medications per day. Eight. Used to be nine. And he’s not allowed to touch alcohol. If he quit taking blood pressure pills, his systolic pressure would probably be near 200. That’s what “good health” looks like in an elderly American. Trump is on a completely different level.

Hillary Clinton has been obese for a long time. She wears pants to hide the fat (and possibly edema) around her ankles. During the campaign, she had to be loaded into a special van after a collapse. Like a sack of flour. Her legs stopped working, and they held her up by her arms. She has some kind of foot injury that won’t heal. She wears a special boot. Her husband kept McDonald’s in business when he was in office, and he ate and smoked himself into a multiple bypass operation. We don’t hear about these things much. But give Trump an astonishing physical exam indicating freakish good health, and leftists take the day off from whatever real reporting they may still be doing, to look for a speck of morbid light at the end of the tunnel. “Maybe if we look real hard, we will find hope that President Trump will die in office.”

I saw material related to the Trump physical, and while I read, I saw a lot of other things that gave me pains in my heart. I was reading this excrement during a break in prayer. Prior to the break, I had felt pretty good. I had felt the presence of the Holy Spirit, and I was expecting good things to happen. After reading the news, I felt like I had swallowed a pint of gasoline.

I took Fox, CNN, Drudge, and Yahoo out of my browser. I am done. I may become ignorant, but at least my insides won’t be twisting like worms in a jar of lemon juice.

In 2016, I experienced a wonderful event I call “the Little Rapture.” I got fed up and deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I upset some people, but I didn’t care at all. I felt great, knowing I wasn’t going to be treading water in a sea of ignorance and carnality. People could get by without me. They weren’t listening to me anyway.

The churches I went to between 2008 and 2016 were ghetto churches. That means I know a lot of people with ghetto ideas corrupting their lives. They don’t accept responsibility for their problems. They feel like victims. Many of them really have it in for white people and Republicans. They are EXTREMELY proud and very unteachable. As Shakespeare himself noted in Twelfth Night, the poor are much more arrogant than successful people.

They have bad ideas about morality. Many of the girls and women post photos of themselves in their underwear or tiny bathing suits. Some go farther, posing naked or topless and covering up only what they have to. Pregnant wives often post photos of themselves in their underwear, with their bellies hanging out. They hire photographers to help them. You’ll see a prominent guy from church, kneeling on the beach with his older kids and his partially disrobed pregnant wife. Pastors and ushers and whatever will “like” the photos and gush over them. What? Seriously? What Bible do you read?

Many of the people I know love socialism. They want open borders. They are not loyal to the United States. They think of themselves as Puerto Ricans or Haitians or Hondurans (or whatever) first. When elections come, they get very militant about supporting candidates that love abortion, hate God, and hate Israel. You can’t tell them a damned thing. They complain about our godless country, and at the same time, they break their backs supporting the people who keep it that way. They’re responsible for gay marriage and the persecution of Christians, but they think they please Jesus by supporting forced handouts to poor people who don’t feel like working. They’re hard on minority friends and relatives who come around and see the light. They seem to think minorities own all their members, like slaves.

I’m not exaggerating at all. The proud hypocrisy of the American poor is a stronghold like no other.

I got tired of it. Eventually, you realize you’re hanging out with people who are never going to make it, and they wear you down and make you angry, which leads to self-righteousness and a lifestyle of persistent wrath. You have to make the healthy choice. God told me to bail out, and it was wonderful.

I’m glad I wasn’t around for the kneeling business. Colin Kaepernick is a spoiled fool who hates his own country. His own words prove it. But people who stand a better chance of being aborted by their own mothers or killed by their non-white neighbors than by the cops think he’s Jesus II, and you almost never see them complaining about the sick culture that puts them in danger to begin with.

Every culture has problems. The problems of the healthier culture in which I am now immersed are bad enough. I don’t need to look for something worse to waste my time. No one is going to fix our ghettos, any more than they are going to fix the white ghettos of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. Put me among people who have some chance of being reached, any day. I abandoned my own people, and I am certainly willing to abandon other people who are just like them.

My native culture is inferior, and I happily admit it. Eastern Kentucky isn’t poor because successful yankees took all the coal and didn’t give anything back. It’s poor because the people are foolish. Put people from, say, Iowa there, and the poverty will disappear forever. Want to fix Haiti? Move the people to their own resort in Montana and turn the Japanese loose in Haiti. Successful people succeed everywhere they go. Failures fail regardless of what you do for them.

The Rapture will be God, saying, “I am fed up. You are done abusing my patience and my children. You can’t learn from love and kindness, so we are leaving, and you can learn–maybe–from unspeakable pain.” It will be God, giving the stubborn their own way. It’s bad to abandon people before the appointed time, but when God blows the whistle, you need to GO. Very often, giving up on people is not merely okay, but mandatory. It happened over and over in the Bible.

When God got me off social media, it was a rapture. I was surrounded by people who thought they knew it all and could not listen. I was attacked for telling the truth. It was tiresome and unproductive. It was like watering plastic plants. Leaving brought me relief.

I love not being on Facebook. I don’t miss the discouraging social media posts of the doggedly misguided. I love being far from Miami; I wish such places did not exist. If I can sustain a practice of avoiding reading the news, I will love that, too. I don’t know how it will work. Maybe I’ll be allowed to read little bits here and there. I hope I will get as little exposure as possible. My reading the news doesn’t help the world, and I’m not sure it’s necessary to my own welfare.

We will find out.

I don’t think the blessings of getting away from Miami and backward people are wasted on me. I am grateful from one end to the other, all the time. I have absolutely nothing negative to say about the move, in spite of the considerable suffering I went through after I left. I wish the move had happened earlier. I hate Miami. I wish I had never been there; not for one second. I miss nothing, nothing, nothing, NOTHING. I wish my remaining connections were gone and had never existed. No pillar of salt here, believe me. When God decides to promote me out of Ocala to an even better place, I will hit the ground running. Thank you, God, thank you, God. Please continue what you’re doing.

In other news, I am wondering about a theological question: can you lose your salvation? We all know the answer is yes, for those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit. The Bible says that. But what about people who accept salvation and then turn away from God and continue in sin? In other words, what about 95% of the people who attend (and pastor) Trinity Church in Miami? Trinity is a rotten church. It’s a washing machine. Sin all week, come in on Sunday, get yourself scrubbed, pretend you care about God, feel justified, and get back out there to sin some more. Or sin right there at church. Kids used to have sex there, in the stairwells.

For a long time, I’ve believed that it was hard to lose salvation. When you’re saved, God forgives your sins, and if you think about it, turning away from God is a sin, so why wouldn’t it be covered? Every Christian continues to sin at least a little. Will God put you in hell for an occasional slip that you fail to acknowledge? Will he put you in hell for common “harmless” sins like gluttony and gossip? If he won’t punish a fat Christian with hell, why would he punish one who fornicates or takes drugs?

Can eating a large pizza all by yourself put you in hell?

Arguments for permanent salvation seem to make sense, but there are a lot of testimonies out there from Christians who say they died temporarily or had visions and learned they were headed for damnation. Some say they woke up in hell.

A lady named Mary K. Baxter wrote a book about her alleged visits to hell, and she said she saw a lot of Christians there. One damned woman fell away because she murdered her husband and the lady he had an affair with. She killed them and then killed herself. Before that, the murderer had been a hard core Christian, and even in hell, she supported Christianity while she burned. Baxter also says she saw a preacher who was confined to a coffin, and that demons marched around the coffin shoving spears through holes, into his heart. He had stolen from the church and taught bad doctrine.

Rich Wilkerson knowingly teaches false prosperity doctrine at Trinity Church in order to make money. He has been informed that the Steven Munsey prosperity fables he teaches are lies. If you can go to hell for persistently stealing from Christians, what will happen to him, especially given that 95% of his audience is dirt poor?

Baxter’s stories about hell, taken in their entirety, seem very credible, but what about the theology? What if weak preachers are sending millions of people into hell?

Also, what is the standard? If I’m doing okay, but then I see a woman walking down the street with a revealing top, and I turn around to look, and a meteor hits me, do I go to hell? Can one quick sin do you in? Does a sin have to be habitual in order to get your ticket canceled? Do you have to be unrepentant?

Many people say Christians can’t visit hell and come back. They say a Bible verse proves it. It is appointed to man once to die, and then the judgment. Okay, but Elijah never died. Some disagree about Enoch, but it certainly appears that he never died. Jesus raised dead people. So did Paul. It looks like there is no 100%-airtight rule saying you have to die or that you can’t return. Maybe Elijah and Enoch will return and then be killed (possibly to be the two witnesses of the Revelation), and that would support the rule that all have to die, but what about the dead who have been raised? They died twice.

Before Jesus showed up, John taught repentance. That was his big thing. It’s clearly important. And through Peter, God killed Ananias and Sapphira (believers) for lying. Would God kill someone in anger and then welcome that person into heaven?

In the Revelation, we are told people will be killed by unbelievers for refusing to renounce God, just as they were killed by Jews in Jesus’ time and are killed by Muslims today. Why? Why would Satan bother forcing Christians to recant? Why not just kill them immediately and get them off the playing field? By keeping them around while he coerces them, he will allow them to continue to work against him, as Stephen worked against him when he was stoned by unbelieving Jews. Can it be that a Christian who recants becomes his property and goes to hell? If so, the “once saved, always saved” doctrine is wrong.

Permanent salvation is an attractive notion. All of us know dead backsliders. Is your mom in hell right now? Your child? Your husband? Can you stand to consider it? No one wants to consider such things. That reluctance, all by itself, shapes our ideas about damnation.

I remember the movie Awakenings. People who were paralyzed by Parkinson’s disease were under consideration. They sat or lay in nursing homes for decades, unable to speak or move. A scientist proclaimed they were not conscious. When asked how he knew that, he said, “because the alternative is unthinkable.” Not logical, but completely typical of the way we come to conclusions.

We make a lot of theological decisions based on our desires, not the truth. We say God doesn’t work miracles, because the alternative is to admit we are bad Christians who can’t get miracles. We say homosexuality is okay, simply because we are tired of fighting about it (especially with our rebellious wives and girlfriends). We love religious tolerance–a concept abhorrent to Jesus–because without it, we have to have backbones and stand up for something.

We are always looking for ways to make hell seem less terrifying, and we don’t care if the truth itself has to be consigned to the flames.

One thing is pretty obvious: regardless of the rules, we should live as if we could lose our salvation at any moment. Many people choose to believe in permanent salvation because they love to sin and don’t want to stop. I know how that is, because I lived that way. “I’ll do this real quick and then ask for forgiveness.” If that works, aren’t we mocking God? The Bible says God is not mocked.

We shouldn’t be wondering if it’s necessary to stay repentant. The fact that we fight about it shows that we want to sin. We should be afraid to sin, even if we don’t expect consequences, and we should be very fast to repent. If you’re doing things right, which is not that hard, the whole discussion should be unimportant to you, at least as it impacts you.

How big a percentage of humanity goes to hell to burn forever? It’s a serious question; the most serious question I can imagine. What if our churches are pumping unsuspecting newcomers into the caverns of hell all day, every day?

We can’t do much about it, even if we know the truth and teach it. That’s a hard fact. Even if you do everything perfectly, most people won’t listen to you. Look how they treated Jesus. Look how they treat the Holy Spirit and God’s ministers right now. Knowing the answer, firmly, would not change the fact that most people go to hell. It would still be a very inconvenient truth. But it would help a substantial number, in absolute terms, avoid damnation.

I am trying to get understanding from God, so I will know the answer to the salvation question. In any case, I am more determined than before to behave myself. I shouldn’t have to worry about damnation in order to behave, but there it is.

3 Responses to “No News is Very Good News”

  1. Steve B Says:

    A tough question. Peter openly denied Christ three times, and was still forgiven for all three. Bible also say “by your fruits you will know them.” So if we have rotten fruit, are we really saved?

    It can’t be like a red-light, green-light, where I lose my salvation, get it back, lose it again, get it back. Either you are, or you aren’t.

    I think there’s some latitude built in. I think you could even make the case, based on New Testament scripture, that once you are saved, nothing is counted against you as sin any more. If our salvation wasn’t a result of our works, than can we undo it based on our works?

    I also think that your “salvation experience” is the start of the journey, not the end. If there’s no provision for learning, for growth, for mistakes (which usually make up the better part of gaining “wisdom”), then it devolves back into legalism.

    But I agree fully that we should live as though it matters. Otherwise we are treating as a trinket or bauble the gift Jesus gave us at the cost of his life (and who knows how much more?).

    Some people say baptism is a requirement for salvation. But the thief on the cross was promised that he would see heaven.

    I also wonder if anyone is actually in Hell yet? Doesn’t Judgement have to happen first? Aren’t people at worst in purgatory awaiting judgement before being cast into the lack of fire? Or, is what these people witnessed purgatory?

    I also question the idea of demons running Hell. Hell is a prison for demons, and for Satan himself, who will be chained there. Satan isn’t Hell’s overseer; Jesus is. Satan is the prince of the air, of this world. Hell is his punishment, not his throne room.

  2. Steve H. Says:

    I have no problem with the notion that demons and fallen angels have power over human beings in hell, for reasons involving the remarkable symmetry of the supernatural world.

    If you set God above you on earth, he will be above you in the hereafter. If you set evil spirits above you on earth, through rebellion, it makes sense that they would continue to have power over you while hell endures.

    After it gets pitched into the lake of fire, I would guess that their power disappears, and that they find themselves in the same boat as everyone else.

    The Revelation talks about evil spirits being given power over people. For example, God releases Satan from the pit after the Messianic Age, to tempt people.

    Jewish legend says there were no demons on earth after the flood, and that Satan petitioned God to release 10% of them to tempt humanity. I don’t know if it’s true, but it sure sounds like God.

    I recall Jesus casting demons out of the Gadarene. He didn’t send them to hell or imprison them. He let them go into some nearby pigs, which promptly drowned themselves, presumably freeing the demons to torment new people.

  3. Stephen Says:

    For a while, I avoided all news because it’s mostly very negative. But I’ve let it creep back in lately – the BBC on TV and The London Times newspaper online. Can’t say whether I’m any less happy for it but I don’t like reading about the bad stuff that happens in the world – I tend to not read those stories if I can.