And Shabbat Shalom

If you read this blog, you may know that I visit Internet forums to keep up with my hobbies. I always complain about the negative attitudes I encounter. Rudeness is amplified on the web because people feel safe. It’s hard to punch someone who insults you from across the country. Today I got up and looked at my email over breakfast, and I found I had a private message at one of my forums. Someone was wishing me and another person a happy Easter. I don’t use the word “Easter” because it’s pagan, but other than that, it was a great surprise. Much better than starting the day with a message calling me a Nazi or asking me to cite multiple sources for a controversial claim such as “iron rusts.”

After responding to the message, I watched some Youtubes. I found a new series of healing videos. I thought watching God heal people would be a good way to acknowledge Passover, which is the real name for Easter. Tom Fischer, the guy I’ve been watching lately, has friends in Canada, and they go around healing people.

I want to stress that none of the people I watch ask for money when they heal. Tom Fischer has a Paypal account and so on, for donations, but those are for people who watch, not people he helps. He quit his job and uses the money to pay his bills while he wanders around pursuing his ministry.

It seems strange to watch Canadians heal people. I think of Canadians as naive, starry-eyed leftists, and leftism is enmity to God. But every country has a remnant of serious believers.

I’ll embed a video so you can see what they do.

It’s terrible that the church gave up on miracles. What a monumental sin church leaders committed when they started preaching cessationism (the belief that manifestations of God’s power stopped). Look at the weapons we threw away. Look how we blocked God in his desire to help people.

Carnal men took over the church, and because they were carnal, they didn’t know God. They didn’t know anything about him. They made up doctrine from thin air and pagan scraps, and they created the Catholic and Orthodox churches. The leaders didn’t know God, so they couldn’t do miracles or manifest any of the fruit or gifts of the Spirit. To save face and keep their slaves in line, they taught that God had stopped working in the earth. The black poison then ran down onto the Protestant churches, in a grotesque parody of anointing oil running down Aaron’s beard and clothing.

It’s bad not to be able to flow in God’s power and righteousness, but what about preventing other people from receiving his gifts? That’s infinitely worse. Millions of people have died with unsolved problems God was eager to fix, and millions more have been turned off by our powerless, corrupt churches. The apostles healed people as a matter of course, to show them God’s power and love, but all we can do is hand people a list of rules and tell them to tough it out until they die.

God wanted hordes of ordinary people to go around teaching and healing for nothing, and he intended to use ministers to replicate themselves, but man preferred a few ignorant old men in big, fancy, ridiculous hats.

You can go into established churches today and have ignorant old men tell you miracles are rare or nonexistent, while people who don’t go to their churches are actively working miracles all over the world. Here’s supernatural symmetry for you: the old men replicate themselves just as real ministers are supposed to. People who listen to them pop up in Youtube comments and criticize people who heal in God’s name. I’m talking about Christians, not unbelievers.

The Christian church has a sad history as one of the world’s largest and most successful terrorist organizations. We’re pretty peaceful now, but it hasn’t been that long since disagreeing with a pope or a preacher could get you tortured to death. Today I can talk about prayer in tongues and miracles, but not too terribly long ago, a person like me could have been falsely accused of heresy or witchcraft and then murdered in a way that would have caused great suffering.

An “infallible” pope threatened to torture Galileo, imprisoned him, and kept him under house arrest until he died. Pope John Paul II “recanted,” to use a term Galileo would have liked, long after Galileo’s death. Two infallible popes disagreed about a matter clearly well within the realm of doctrine, and the doctrine of infallibility didn’t suffer. That’s really something.

The Jews killed prophets, kidnapped and beat Jesus, and had Jesus murdered. Christians have a long history of crushing people who prove God is alive. There are no new types of error under the sun.

I’ve been healed numerous times. What am I supposed to do? Write a letter to the Pope or the heads of the dead Protestant churches and apologize? Should I get some matches and burn myself, to undo healings I’ve received? Should I say I don’t really pray in tongues or that I haven’t seen spirits, just to make dried-up old men who know nothing feel better about the nonsense they dispense?

Catholics teach that people like me–all non-Catholics without exception–go to hell. All. They have a temporary version of hell called purgatory, which contradicts scripture, and they say I may be lucky enough to go there instead of grown-up hell, but it’s still a hell. Jesus visited me personally twice and never mentioned this. I don’t know, but I’ll bet the pope has never met him. I base that on his leftism and his bizarre remarks about religion.

Think how different the world would be if men stopped fighting the Holy Spirit. A few people here and there are healing others and getting them free from things like addiction and homosexuality, but most churches are against them, and generally, if you go to a church for healing or deliverance, you will get…NOTHING. Then we expect people to stay in the faith, with no reason to believe there’s anything to it. What if most Christians were capable of healing people and setting them free?

Uptight Christians say we shouldn’t follow signs, and they use this doctrine to shut down the miraculous, but who provided more signs than Jesus and the apostles? They were sign factories. They shed signs like trees shed leaves. They healed people so they would know God was real and that he loved them. The Bible says signs will follow us, and it doesn’t provide a cutoff date. How can that be squared with cessationism?

On one side, we have churches that hate miracles, and on the other, we have huge TV ministries that fake them for money. They seem different, but it’s the same thing. Both types of churches work to discredit God and come between him and people he wants to adopt.

Seeing people set free is wonderful. It’s so great, it’s tempting to try not to believe it. We hate having our hopes shattered, so instead of risking it, we kill our own hope and miss the obvious. We feel like we can’t lose if we don’t play, but that’s not true. Everyone is on the field, all the time.

Youtube has startled me by turning out to be a blessing. Can any good thing come out of Youtube? It’s a celebration of idiocy. If you’re careful what you search for, you can find wonderful things.

My advice is to go after the supernatural. Paul said, “Follow after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy.”

Christianity is a supernatural thing. It’s not a list of rules. It’s not a lifestyle. It’s about spirits and supernatural righteousness and power. We can’t make it work on our own, and we were never asked to.