Chain of Command vs. Plain Old Chains

May 31st, 2009

That Appears to be the Choice

The Bible is incomplete. Everyone knows that. We don’t know much about Jesus’s childhood or the years between Malachi and John the Baptist. We don’t have verified versions of lost books like the book of Enoch or the book of Jasher. We don’t know everything that happened in the years leading up to Noah.

Our understanding of Christianity is incomplete, too. Paul said we see through a glass, darkly. We are told that God’s thoughts are above our thoughts as the clouds are above the earth. It’s very obvious that there is information God is withholding, for his own reasons. Sometimes he releases information in code, through prophets, and later we come to understand what it means. For example, the second psalm is about the crucifixion. We can see that now; it’s undeniable. But before the time of Jesus, it made very little sense. If God had made its meaning obvious, the enemy would have understood the significance of the crucifixion and would not have worked to bring it about.

The almost-funny thing about the second psalm is that it nearly taunts Satan. If Satan were as smart as he thinks, he would have understood it and avoided motivating Romans and certain susceptible Jews to bring about the sacrifice. The Bible often refers to the wicked being caught in their own nets or falling by their own counsels, and the crucifixion is the single biggest example. Satan can’t win for losing. When he is most convinced he has accomplished something, he is most defeated.

I think God is a little like George Bush. He does things for reasons he can’t reveal. And he is criticized for it, by people who have no understanding of how a chain of command works. Sometimes human leaders do things that are unquestionably stupid, like mortgaging a nation’s future with socialist bailouts leading to massive debt and bungling, conceited, oppressive authoritarianism. Other times, they do things that only seem stupid until all the facts are known. When in doubt, you support your leader, assuming he knows more than you do. That is particularly true in matters involving classified information.

Prophecy is full of classified information, encoded in such a way that no one can understand it except a human being guided by the Holy Spirit.

And not all prophecy takes the form of human language. Sometimes an object reveals God’s thoughts. For example, I suspect that the human uterus is designed to resemble the Ark of the Covenant. Or maybe it’s the other way around. The tabernacle and the temple symbolized a female body, probably representing the church (the body of human believers) as the bride of Christ. And the veil of the temple was intended to resemble a body part normally found only in female virgins. Notably, it tore at the moment Jesus died.

I think the nation of Israel is designed to reflect the nature of human existence. Like the snow that falls on Mount Hermon, our spirits come to earth from heaven. The water from Mount Hermon flows into the Jordan, and from there it goes to the Sea of Galilee, which represents the earth. The disciples were fishermen; the fish they caught symbolized human beings coming to Christ. The water that leaves the Sea of Galilee goes through the desert to the Dead Sea, which symbolizes hell. It’s a nearly lifeless body of water from which there is no escape except for evaporation. It’s no coincidence that this is a site where hell was literally manifested on earth. This is where human beings were destroyed by a rain of fire, for the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I suspect that the book of Enoch is corrupted to some extent, but I think it’s right about one thing. I think certain angels came down to Mount Hermon, and like misguided socialists, they tried to bring about a perfect age by their own efforts. They interbred with women and gave rise to a polluted race of rebellious freaks, and they gave human beings secrets of technology and magic and astrology. Many theologians think angels can’t reproduce, but the Bible tells us they take human form. Some of us have entertained them. It’s reasonable to believe that those temporary human bodies had all the usual parts, so why wouldn’t reproduction have been possible? The Bible does not say it can’t happen.

If you accept the notion that angels corrupted the human race, the Bible makes a lot more sense. For example, many non-believers think the Jewish God is evil, because he told the Hebrews to slaughter entire cities and peoples, including the old and small children. But that makes sense, if those peoples were overly polluted with the blood of angels. God was working to get rid of them for the sake of humanity, as he did in the flood (the book of Enoch makes this claim). It might also explain why there were so many people on the earth in Adam’s time. Maybe others were created first and became corrupted, or maybe some were fallen angels.

We see a repeated theme of spirit-guided eugenics in the Bible. Satan is constantly trying to exterminate the Jewish race (to keep prophecies from coming true), and God repeatedly reduces the numbers of peoples who oppose him. One of the great sins of the Bible was the refusal to obey God and destroy all traces of the Amalekites, who are believed to have given rise to the people currently afflicting Israel. The Holocaust was probably an attempt to prevent the existence of the Jews mentioned in prophecies about the end of the world. Pharaoh slaughtered Jewish babies to prevent the birth of Moses. Herod killed Jewish babies to prevent the birth of Jesus. And both were guided by astrologers, who were using forbidden knowledge provided by rebellious spirits.

The Bible makes a number of references to the destruction of the seed of the wicked. They will be destroyed, and the righteous will inherit the earth. Look at Psalm 37, as an example. Does the term “seed of the wicked” just refer to bad people, or does it also refer to people who are largely descended from angels, and who fail to accept salvation? In a parable, Jesus suggested some people were wheat sown by God, and others were weeds sown by Satan. Maybe he was speaking more literally than we realize.

The book of Enoch says part of God’s punishment for the rebellious angels was to destroy their descendants.

The waters of the Jordan don’t just come from directly from untainted snow. They also come from the Banias, “Pan’s Grotto,” at the base of the mountain. This is near Caesarea Philippi, an evil city which was a center of demon worship. Idolaters used to sacrifice animals and throw them into a foaming pool at the Banias, and the contaminated water joined the pure water from the other sources. Just as the blood of people descended from rebellious angels joined the blood of those descended from Adam. Is that really a coincidence? Hard to believe.

Pan’s image is the classical image of Satan. A goat with a man’s torso and head, plus horns and a tail. More coincidence. And Jesus began his earthly ministry at Caesarea Philippi, in what was ostensibly Satan’s earthly headquarters. A sort of Satanic Vatican City of its time. Coincidence upon coincidence. Where did Satan begin his earthly career? In the Garden of Eden. The center of God’s earthly efforts. It all makes sense.

Truthfully, I wonder if the Banias is the site where Adam and Eve were tempted. Descriptions of the Garden of Eden mention far-off rivers, but people who emigrate often name new lands and new geographic features after old ones. New York is named after York, England. Kentucky has cities named London and Paris. Who is to say that the rivers of Mesopotamia were not named after the streams near Mount Hermon, by people whose ancestors lived near the Banias?

It would make sense for Satan to turn Eden into his home base. It would be a fitting manifestation of his pride and the joy he takes in supplanting God. And Jesus’s remark about “the gates of hell” refers to part of the Banias. He said the gates of hell would not prevail against his kingdom. The Banias is a very creepy place. There is a giant hole in the rocks there; a dark cavity in the side of the mountain. Inside this hole is the pool where the animal sacrifices were dumped. This pool is still now, but the waters used to bubble as they made their way into an underground passage that led to the Jordan. This pool was called “the gates of hell.”

It’s all very interesting to me. I don’t think it’s just happenstance. Jesus himself created the metaphor of the Sea of Galilee as the earth, and the fishermen as evangelists. I didn’t make that up. He did.

In the end, it’s all going to make sense. The concept of a chain of command, entailing faith in the competence of those above you, is central to Christianity and Judaism, and if you can’t accept it, you will always have an uphill battle before you. I don’t make excuses for God, except to say that whatever he does has to be right. If you ask me why God would be upset with your fun gay hairdresser who is nice to everyone, or why he lets good people get cancer, or why he permitted the Holocaust, my answer is that I know that he exists, and I am satisfied that he is both good and competent, and I believe he has excellent reasons for everything he does. Some questions, unlike the non-issue of whether convenience abortion is moral, truly are above a human being’s pay grade.

I can’t change God, and I’m not supposed to try. I’m supposed to let him change me. That’s what I’m trying to do.

6 Responses to “Chain of Command vs. Plain Old Chains”

  1. cond0010 Says:

    “Like the snow that falls on Mount Hermon, our spirits come to earth from heaven. The water from Mount Hermon flows into the Jordan, and from there it goes to the Sea of Galilee, which represents the earth. .The water that leaves the Sea of Galilee goes through the desert to the Dead Sea, which symbolizes hell. It’s a nearly lifeless body of water from which there is no escape except for evaporation.”
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    Hmmmm… this reminds me of a series of paintings by Thomas Cole called the voyage of life.
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    “Like the snow that falls on Mount Hermon, our spirits come to earth from heaven.”
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    Spring/Childhood
    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/The_Voyage_of_Life-_Childhood-1842-Thomas_Cole.jpg
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    “The water from Mount Hermon flows into the Jordan, and from there it goes to the Sea of Galilee, which represents the earth.”
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    Summer/Youth
    http://omtad.com/wp-content/uploads/Cole_Thomas_The_Voyage_of_Life_Youth_1842.jpg
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    “The water that leaves the Sea of Galilee goes through the desert to the Dead Sea, which symbolizes hell.”
    .
    Fall/Manhood
    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Cole_Thomas_The_Voyage_of_Life_Manhood_1840.jpg
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    “It’s a nearly lifeless body of water from which there is no escape except for evaporation.”
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    Winter/Old-Age
    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Cole_Thomas_The_Voyage_of_Life_Old_Age_1842.jpg
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    These paintings are huge (wall sized) and they are in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Full of Metaphors.
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    I hope you liked them.

  2. SallyVee Says:

    Well I finally have to grudgingly admit that all your tooling and woodworking may not be for naught… it appears that you are thinking pretty athletically while building things, fixing things, and rearranging your tools.

    I do not know about angels corrupting the human race, in general. But Satan certainly was an angel and he certainly corrupted the first woman and man. I find the other possibilities a fascinating mystery and like you, I accept that it can never be fully understood during my time here on earth. But you’ve connected many more dots and “coincidences” which I hadn’t thought about.

    Oh, and according to Rabbi Lapin, there is no such word as “coincidence” (or its equivalent) in God’s language — Hebrew.

    Another great post, Steve. Makes me feel like all that time suffering through your tool & lathing issues is worth it! *teasing ; ) *

  3. km Says:

    I quibble with the phrasing that the Bible is in any way “incomplete”.
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    It is what God wants it to be.
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    We can only say that is doesn’t exhaustively answer or explain everything we’d like. But you well understand that we are not God, and thus aren’t qualified to say any of God’s handiwork is incomplete.

  4. Kyle Says:

    These thoughts coincide with information in books and stories from other cultures all over the world. The interference of creatures from elsewhere, spawning new races via comminglance with humans.

  5. greg zywicki Says:

    Minor Quibble – the Pan/Satan connection was probably made ex-post-facto (if I’m using that right) in a time at or after the decline of classical pagan worship. It probably comes, like our dantean images of Hell, from a later source than original Christianity.

  6. Steve H. Says:

    I am not quick to accept things like this as coincidence.
    .
    Apart from that, Caesarea Philippi was not just a center of Pan worship. It was dedicated to pantheism, the worship of numerous false gods. That would be consistent with the appearance of a number of angelic beings who, to ancient humans, might as well have been gods.