I’m Stuffed

If there is one thing I feel sure about as a Christian, it’s this: if you want God to reveal things to you, you are going to have to spend a lot of time praying in the Spirit. The less I do it, the less I receive. The more I do it, the more I hear.

Yesterday was a remarkable day. I’m going through the Bible systematically this year, and right now, I’m working on Jeremiah. “Coincidentally,” Perry Stone has been doing a lot of teaching about hell. It turns out this stuff fits together in an impressive way.

The book of Jeremiah compares us to clay in a potter’s hand. It says that when we’re “marred,” God re-shapes us.

Jerusalem contains a valley known as the Valley of Hinnom. This is a deep spot where the ancients burned their trash. Long ago, it was the place where Canaanites burned their children alive as sacrifices to Moloch. God took Moloch’s holy place and turned it into a trash dump. Fires burned all the time in the Valley of Hinnom.

Judas hanged himself in this area. In all likelihood, he hanged himself near the top, and he fell into the valley, and this is what caused his intestines to burst out.

When Judas realized Jesus was not going to escape death, he tried to give his payment (silver, symbolic of redemption) back to the High Priest, but it was rejected as blood money. The priests used it to buy a place called “the potter’s field,” to be used to bury the poor.

The potter’s field was in the area of the Valley of Hinnom. Potters worked there. They discarded bad merchandise there, in the form of broken pottery, or potsherds.

The Bible calls us “vessels,” and it refers to “flasks.” The first miracle Jesus performed involved turning water into wine, at a wedding in Cana. That water was in seven vessels used to fill mikvehs (sanctifying baths). The Bible tells us the Holy Spirit has seven parts. Christianity involves receiving the Holy Spirit, which is referred to as “living water.” The Holy Spirit fills us and changes us. It’s an internal mikveh. At Pentecost, when the baptism with the Holy Spirit fell for the first time, people declared that they believed the recipients were “full of new wine.” The miracle at Cana showed what Jesus intended to do to his church.

The Bible calls proud people “stiff-necked.” When a flask or other earthen vessel is fired, it becomes impossible to mold it, and the neck becomes stiff.

In the Bible, the Valley of Hinnom is used as a symbol for hell. And it just happens to be a former center of Satan worship, where fire used to burn all the time, and where malformed vessels were shattered and discarded because they had become too stiff to repair.

Sometimes God paints a picture for us, and all you have to do is open your eyes and look. Hell is reserved for Satan. It will also receive people who are too hard to allow God to change them. And God gave us the Valley of Hinnom to prove this is all true.

This is a pretty good explanation for the phrase “stiff-necked.” Pride doesn’t make your neck stiff. People don’t respond to pride physically by stiffening their necks. But it makes sense when you’re talking about pottery.

Incidentally, Moloch worship was Satan’s imitation of damnation and the lake of fire. God does not want to cast his children into eternal fire, so what did Satan do? He created a form of worship in which people threw their babies into burning pitch, in the belly of an idol. Satan always parodies God, even when he doesn’t realize it. And as Perry Stone says, the modern replacement for Moloch worship is abortion. A womb is supposed to be a place of nurturing and growth, but Satan convinces women to turn their wombs–their bellies, just like Moloch’s–into slaughterhouses. Places where beings are destroyed. What could be more perverse or disgusting?

I’ll bet there are many women out there who have had abortions, yet who would not live in a house where a murder has occurred. If you kill your unborn child, aren’t you such a house? Strange.

In lighter news, I came up with a shocking improvement for my garlic roll recipe. I made kimchi a while back, and I realized it was full of lactobacillus (taken from a jar of kimchi I bought), so it might be a good source for bacteria to make bread. I put some kimchi liquor into a jar with flour and water, and a day later, I had sourdough starter.

I mixed some of the starter into a batch of dough, without yeast. I let it sit for a day, and then I mixed yeast in and made rolls. They were incredible. The texture was different; the rolls were more transparent and satisfying to chew. The smell of sourdough filled the kitchen as they baked. I love it. And while I was eating them, I realized I finally had a great way to make dough in advance. If you put yeast in dough, it’s hard to freeze it well because of the CO2 that escapes, but if you make dough without yeast, it will work great with vacuum bags.

I’m going to make pizza this way from now on. It will be incredible.

I credit God. He just drops this stuff on me. I also have a new way of assembling the rolls, which gives them a much more complicated and pleasing structure to pull apart and eat. I recently received two ideas along this line. I got one a few days back, and another improvement came to me as I was typing this.

Unfortunately, I am not going to be cooking for my church any more. They’re going to miss out on all my new creations. I’m sure God will show me what to do with them. It’s too bad, because the new dough will make prep extremely easy and efficient, and I would have been able to streamline pizza production enormously.

This week someone asked me to make one of my banana nut bread/pineapple upside-down cakes for her birthday, but I had to turn her down. The nature of the food I cooked was somewhat sensational. It always made a splash. I think that spark is gone from our kitchen now. The food will be good, but not exciting.

I have two new chef friends. These are real chefs, not sous chefs or line cooks. They compete in nationwide contests held by the company that employs them, and they’ve won expensive vacations. They go to my church, but they won’t go near the cafe. Very sad, because they both run commercial dining facilities for big companies. I know of three chefs who go to my church but avoid the kitchen, and now I’ve joined them.

When smart, unselfish Spirit-filled people avoid an enterprise, it’s not a good sign.

These ladies have all sorts of training and experience, but they treat me with respect, and I appreciate that. I know I don’t have their superior knowledge and training.

On Saturday, one of them is cooking for a bunch of people, and I’m invited. She just asked me to make rolls! How about that!

I finally have a decent mixer. A long while back, I recommended a Bosch Universal Plus for my church, and I’ve used it for pizza, rolls, and cheesecake. It’s so great, I got one for myself. I’ve never had a stand mixer before. It’s my understanding that a more conventional mixer may be better for cakes and so on, but the Bosch is unbeatable for dough. I’ve tried a Hobart Kitchenaid for dough, and it’s horrible. Throws flour all over, has a small capacity, leaves tons of residue in the bowl, and turns the dough into a fist that climbs up the dough hook. With the Bosch, you turn it on, turn it off, empty it, and toss the parts in the dishwasher. Bam, you’re done. And it has a lid that locks on. It even has suction-cup feet so it won’t wander around the kitchen.

I guess the one in my church will sit and rot in my absence. I was the only one who knew how to use it.

If you get a Bosch, I recommend getting the stainless bowl. It usually comes with a plastic job. The version I ordered comes with both, so I won’t have problems if I need to mix two different things. You can also hook a meat grinder to it. That would be fantastic. Homemade sausage is the bomb.

I better get off my butt and make dough. I have to be ready for Saturday.

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Gallery of sourdough rolls: