Tag: judgment

What Judas Never Knew

What are we to do with Judas? Why was I given merely the stark knowledge that he was innocent, and then not given anything decisively corroborating? This is not all a test of faith, I know, for in my calculus it was part of that grandest plan, which relied on intricate details, an incredibly vast network of what needed to happen, and when, and where. This of which was I allowed to glimpse, if not the smallest part, nowhere near a complete picture. It was one of those insights where you seem to be solving something by your own chemistry, but also where an unseen hand perhaps gives guidance, perhaps more: I saw that the entire “Judas betrayed Christ to his crucifixion” meme was allowed to propagate, throughout the whole world, for 2000 years of history, and why? to be picked up in a very strange way by me? this to nail the very linchpin in the ultimate victory of God vs. Satan, good vs. evil?

Me and my visions had been tossing around the idea of Universalism, that in the end, everyone would be saved—even the Devil. Pay your dues, everyone, and you too will be welcomed into eternal life. And I must admit, I saw the charm in it, that when the Lord died for us all, he was dying so that absolutely everyone would be saved. So as I was circling around this notion in my visions and my mind, as I said, and there came up a certain condition to this idea. A line in John’s Gospel, where our Lord said, “Only one was lost.” He had meant Judas, of course, but it was being repurposed here. Now, even though everybody and their dog were to be saved, Judas was to be lost, into a realm without a Savior, a world without God, at all. It was going to be a horror beyond horrors. The kicker? The visions said he was innocent of any wrong. He was going to volunteer for this.

Now, to anyone who went to Sunday school, they’ll point out that the Bible says differently about those events that led to the crucifixion of our Lord. But I’m not the only one who holds such views like these. Other people have written about their theories on the matter, such as how Judas was made as to be symbol for “the Jews”, who were ultimately, supposedly responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. Or so the Bible says, especially in the Gospel According to John. “Judas” is the same name as “Judah”, the tribe of David and our Lord, and where the designation “Jew” comes from. You should know it just cannot be said that “the Jews” were solely responsible for the death of our Lord, if you put any scholarship to it whatsoever. Pontius Pilate wouldn’t have given a second’s thought about offing someone suspicious of sedition, and the washing the hands of the blood of our Christ was a Jewish gesture, not Roman (he probably didn’t do it). Pilate hated Judea. The Bible is not history, nor does it pretend to be. You should know that.

I look back on the visions I have had, and cannot myself believe what they might mean, since they appear to hold such gravity, and I am just a sinner. Has it truly happened, the scenes that I have seen before my eyes, which held in them the ultimate oracles? Who was I to be an agent in the Plan, so deep in the Powerful Play I would see where God and man intersect? It is easier to believe that I was just viewing some imagination—if not mine, then from some base source, at best. And I wonder if the prophets of old felt something like this. Or perhaps to say as the prophet Amos: “I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees.” [Amos 7:40 NIV] …or am I just a madman, who dreamed of love like no one else I have heard of? what the possibility is when you say, “God is love. Literally.” That that’s actually what is out in infinity!

I would be informed of it, after it had happened—and I figured some of it out—the whole reason the world was led to believe what they did about Judas (the entire “betrayed his Lord for 30 pieces of silver” plotline): what the one phrase, “Only one was lost” would lead me to see. At the time, I was in a hospital room, after the last crazy day of “The Event”, I called it: the end of the War in Heaven. Secret Christians I had been in contact with in my visions told me that Judas was innocent, and in fact, I met the man Judas himself; he seemed a stand up fellow. He was about to volunteer to be the sacrifice that would allow all other creatures to be saved. He, only he was going to have no savior at all. So it came time to enter into his impenetrable “vial”, where that horror was going to be sealed off from the rest of anyone… including God. As he was about to go in, I stared at a patch of space before my eyes, as if there were a subtle glow there. And then *snap*, the space was dead. He was gone.

What I would later prize was that indeed, as Judas was innocent, when we waited for him to go—no one wanted to be the one to push him in, and I think he was still “girding his loins” (for something else, it turned out to be), when that *snap* happened. It wasn’t him. It was the fruition of a plan 2000 years in the making. Because someone did (try to) push him into the horror—Satan, of course. And to commit such a heinous act (I believe he tried to tempt me to do it, to push Judas in, and there was no way I was going to), in this case, it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back: what I saw was the death of Satan. His soul had been hanging from a thread, at that point, and that was the glow in the space I saw. When no one was pushing Judas off the precipice, he couldn’t resist making that injustice happen, to make that atrocity the keystone of all salvation for all the world—he committed to it right there: he committed to it all. And Judas Iscariot never knew. We had all been told different things, at the time.

What does this have to do with anything? I have seen many things in my visions, through the years. Much of it is (very) confusing, and some parts conflicted with other parts, and some parts conflicted with reality; it took me a long time to figure out why things were so chaotic. It would seem that Lucifer in Heaven was using me as something of an index, of the possibilities of what reality it would be that he was going to commit to. I have seen very weird possibilities, like the Roman Empire lasting to the present day; all of humanity caught in wells of pain, to be rescued after a horrific experience; possibilities where Jesus Christ was married; or where no one could make sense of what our Lord was talking about. Where trees were conscious, and there they shared their secret lives with me. Dreams. Nightmares. None of them were real, not until the last month of the Year of the Dragon, 2013. Why did it matter that Lucifer commit this possibility? Very simple, really. It was the only one where the good guys won.

To be fair, we worked harder in this one because we knew this was going to be the one, and Lucifer sort of stretched himself thin, but he thought he could do it; he thought he could do better than God. And those other possibilities? They never existed. All we have of them are the pictures that reflected into our own world, our own “dimension”, or seeming dimension, plane of existence: none of the others have any reality to them. They are relegated to imagination, only. The thing that boggles my mind is that I could be witness to something that important. Yeah, you might say that I’m just a crazy man, talking to angels and spirits of people dead and alive, with his role to play in the War in Heaven—but I can explain everything. All you have to concede me is that line from Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I can tell you what I’ve discovered, and it can rationally be seen to make sense.

Poor Judas, if this is supposedly true. Who betrayed Christ? The word, “betray”, should be instead, “hand over”. It is translated so in other places in the Bible. One book I read about Judas says that as the writing of the Gospels progress, he is put in more and more of an evil cast. The culmination being John’s Gospel, the last one written, where he is called “son of perdition”. I talked about his possible innocence with a local pastor, and he said that the only degree he could be innocent was like when God hardened the heart of Pharoah, so Moses could bring down the plagues upon Egypt. In other words, not innocent at all. It’s in the Bible, right? So, what now? Well, we know for a scientific fact that the human race wasn’t started by the single pair, Adam and Eve. If you say that not to believe in one part nullifies the whole thing, may I say: you should scrap it. If your faith cannot stand a single dose of reality, let me tell you: your faith is worthless if it be that weak.

What would you do if a prophet came, and told you things that was different from what was written? For it has happened before. The prophet Jeremiah was put under house arrest because he went against the teaching that the House of David would always rule in Jerusalem. It had been written. But times changed. What does it matter to you if Judas is innocent? Will you then be lost, for you would not know what to believe? These things stay solid: love God, with all your heart, and all your action; and love your neighbor as yourself. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Forgive your brother not once, or twice, not seven times, but seventy times seven times. If you’re going to be angry at any group of people, let it be the rich. Not the prostitute, not the addict: the rich. They have the means to defend themselves. Only cowards persecute those weaker than they. When you hear a prophet and want to say, that totally contradicts the Bible! So? Would you try to silence that true prophet who brings the message?

In my vision of Judas, I asked him straight up: “Did you betray Our Lord? Not just hand him over, betray? Or let’s say it in another way, to say it even simpler: was it something he actually wanted you to do?” And he answered, “Yes.” It has been hard for me to believe it, too, you see. I have read the Bible cover to cover ten times. The betrayal of Christ by Judas is one of the main threads of the New Testament. Why exactly, now, am I saying that he’s actually innocent of the charges? I gave it some thought: what would the forces of evil stand to gain if he were actually guilty, and we thought him innocent? The only thing I might think that would do is to shake at one’s faith, that the Bible is not absolutely true, in a fundamental sense. But… we can’t believe it in that anyway, can we? This appears, then, to be a test of faith… but in which direction? If we have matured to the point where we can look to the Bible and yet not believe in six literal days of creation, not stone to death an adulterer, or a child who talks back, etc., etc…. what if in this, our collective faith… we grow up?

One question might settle things: did Judas Iscariot repent? Matthew 27:3-5 says: “Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.” Do we conveniently forget this passage? Are we in truth only listening to tradition, and not seeking what the truth may be? Let’s say I am wrong about the Bible misrepresenting our man Jude (yes, you shorten it like that). The Bible, right there, says he repented. Don’t you see that, when it’s right in front of your face, right there? If not, it’s you Gandhi was talking about when he said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

This is what Jesus Christ railed against. The Pharisees were following their traditions instead of following God. How does one follow God? Love. Even were it true, that Judas betrayed Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the Bible is telling you that he repented. In thinking that, it may make you feel queazy that someone who did something that wrong could be forgiven, but you forget one of the Lord’s parables. A man with a field hires workers at the beginning of the day and through the remainder of the day, and he pays everyone the same wage. This is our Savior’s forgiveness. And you, who has less on his own head to be forgiven than Judas might have, you may think it unfair, like those longsuffering workers. But you are not the Judge. That is not ours to be! So, what shall we do with Judas? The answer to that question is inevitable, given what salvation is. Like the one whom he supposedly wronged, in the worst way, let us do like that God-man would: let us forgive him.



If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.

The Mathematics of the Judgment

“Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.”
– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Come Judgment Day, what exactly would you say to the Face from which heaven and earth fled—“I meant to”? I once figured it out this way: out of two choices, for your entire life, would you rather expose it all to the world, every event and decision, or would you rather cast it all into darkness? Saved, or damned, this to mean, and there I was toying with the mathematics of the judgment, that even with a life that was full of wrongdoing, if the soul had the courage to reveal it all—be as reviled in the Kingdom of Heaven (if that is even possible)—then that one heroic gesture might indeed save them. There are myths of judgment aplenty from the ancient world, from weighing your soul against a feather to walking a tightrope across a fiery pit. And some pictures of damnation are more horrible than others. What does it mean, exactly, to be saved?

The main equation seems to be simply this: “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Otherwise known as, “love your neighbor as yourself.” But then comes the main counterargument, being the curiosity as to whether some are born having innately more propensity for forgiveness than others, thus making the game a rigged apparatus… In the past, one merely figured that the Devil had his children, and God had His, the Devil’s children causing all the mayhem, God’s children are all the saints, and that’s that. You were simply born one or the other. But the modern reader might ask, how can that possibly be fair? If you had no choice but to be evil, how can you possibly damn that soul? Free will has since (from those days of ultimate predestination) become a key feature of this life of virtue and sin: you must have done things of your own free will for it to count, else life is a meaningless puppet show.

So, what becomes of the Son of Satan? Was he born evil? Or was he born good in circumstances which would make it impossible to have been anything but evil? Where does the free will factor in? The Devil is damned because he was born good and of his own choice and logic decided that that wasn’t going to work for him. We must ask, too, if even was Satan born with a conscience. If that were so, he has only the angel on his shoulder, the little birdy from his own inner sensibilities to try and keep him on the right track. He has no devil on the other shoulder, and so one might conjecture that evil was at that time the narrow way (to exit from the good) and the broad gate was that which was of God, the right. What a waste, how the story of the great Lucifer ends. What about them, though, the rest: his son, and the third part of angels cast down with him—by him?

What if one can genuinely say to the Face from which heaven and earth fled, “I was deceived, and knew not right from wrong”? Or there is the question of how one may judge him, he whom all he knew of the world was evil. Not just the Son of Satan, though he is an especially strong case of this, but those born of bad families. One may consider that God rather grades on a curve. Not as much a reward when a boy scout, whose dad was a boy scout, helps an elderly black granny across the street; but one whose father was KKK—that would be phenomenal. Does it get complicated, then, when we have to factor all the relevant factors in order to judge someone? Perhaps here we find the real reason for the Lord’s command, not to judge, that it is only God’s to judge: for only the all seeing can know why anyone lived the way he did, the rationales and compusions, what was inside him as he decided, and the roads not taken.

Verily, when we have the bold and outward actions of someone born into a culture of cruelty, when he breaks from all he knew because he discovered a greater truth—we can surely measure the heroics of such actions. But as we know, such displays of heart come only when certain stars align; they are not of the everyday, and the everyday is where one (even the hero) must live most of one’s life. Yet when the hero lives an ordinary life, when he abides by ordinary rules, he is roundly to be commended for his humility; but when things surface, like from World War II, the ordinary, everyday lives of those who ran the concentration camps—we feel a wave of disgust. Yet it is here where even a demon might redeem himself. The Lord said that when you fast, make it look like you’re not sacrificing anything. If an “evildoer” were to outwardly perform nefarious deeds, but hidden in his everyday were guilt, nightmares, tears and the true suffering of conscience—how do we judge, knowing that?

Surely, many of us will judge the man who keeps doing evil while being tortured about it as one who is in the final analysis destined for the fire. But one might say it is a case of, “There but for the grace of God go I.” If we had been born in his place, would we not have done the same thing? Thus might it be that the mathematics of the judgment are a mystery. Perhaps indeed, that if we had been given certain temptations, then we might have committed the wrong… but we were not so given, we did no such thing. And we cannot, in fact, actually make the supposition, if we were in that situation, or if they had not been in that situation, it would not have happened as it did. Reality is such an intricately woven web that we cannot cut out one small piece and hope to graft it elsewhere. It is so a mystery.

Indeed, we may speculate about the future, but of the past, speculation is ultimately fruitless. Change one variable and it is not in isolation—if it is reality—and we may find that even when we are correct in predicting the future, it may just be that we were not right for the reasons we thought, why it happened. The future comes into the present and we are proven right or wrong, but the past? We can never be sure of any theory, not until we have a simulator of the entire universe, and we can test one aspect’s change. And even there, it would probably turn out not as we expect. So we really can’t say, what might have been. All we have is what actually happened, what we did with what was given to us. We will not be judged on what we could have done, but on what we did. Is it in any wise unfair? For we may think life unfair, but the Judgment—this should be the great equalizer, correct?

If then, the true judgment is ultimately just, by standards that the Lord has (if we can even call them “standards”, for that in itself implies something static and rigid)—perhaps we cannot tell, the difference between the saved and the damned, and it is not our place to try and guess, to tell the Lord what He’s supposed to think. Mayhap this was why He told us to treat everyone well, to love even your enemies, for perhaps you might mistreat a saint, if you treat anybody badly. The only one whose salvation you should be mindful of (in the main), is yourself, and this you handle by acting out of love in everything you do. Do protect your families against criminals, etc., etc., but realize that you do not know the whole story about even they, even whom we characterize as the “bad guy”. “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” [Oscar Wilde] You never know who’ll turn it all around.

And then, there are two things you should know about Christianity: 1) converting someone is more about saving them in this world, not the next: Christ is ready to catch you when you slip into that next world; and 2) there a lot (A LOT) of Christians who should be told either, “From these stones can God make sons of Abraham,” and “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not the things I say?” The first quote from Yohanan the Dipper (John the Baptist), the second from Yeshua ben Miriam (Jesus Christ). You see, the main problem of Christians, at least in America, is that they think they are just in the right. Because they are Christians, they think they are better—when God can of course make Christians from anyone. Because they are Christians, they think they know what it means to be righteous—when the one who says, “have mercy on me, a sinner,” he is the one justified. They feel they are qualified to understand, and believe they know by heart the mathematics of the judgment. And one thing I have come to know: we all of us know nothing.

So how do we tell, then, who is saved and who is not? In the final analysis, it’s none of our business. Even our own personal selves we cannot be sure if we’re on the right track. And this, my friends, is the correct attitude. If we indeed become sure that we are of the saved, it is at that point that our souls are in the greatest danger. The path of entitlement is what Lucifer followed, all the way to being kicked out of Heaven. (There are indeed many lessons we may learn from the War in Heaven, and the Fall.) And we come back to the question of the Son of Satan. Did he truly have a choice? Did he have a chance, at all? I tell you it matters not—not to us. We are not the ones responsible for throwing him into the fire. Our is to love everyone, even him, even to love our enemies. If you can fight for justice, by all means do, become an enemy as far as the darkness is concerned—but hate not that darkness. Call no one an enemy to yourself.

It is not to say we rebuke no one for their ill deeds. Our children must learn to do what is right. Stupidity must be called out. But we must stick to the facts. We must not think it is we who are given the charge to save souls: we cannot forgive sins, only the Lord; and only by the Lord’s grace are we any of us saved. So, ask yourself, if you consider yourself Christian: am I any better than the next person? or at least a certain class of person? If your answer is yes, you are indeed mistaken, and possibly dangerous. When your answer is no, you begin to crack the shell of the mystery, that whosoever would be first in the Kingdom must be a servant of all. There is no room at the height of the light for he who values his own life more than his neighbor’s. Comprende? It’s as simple and impossible as one, two, three… infinity: that is the mathematics of the judgment.



If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.

Logic

i saw the Logic, and it blinded my eyes
but it saved my life one fall
in the cool evening of dreaming gone haywire
what words could describe the angels?
who brought me back from beyond the brink
reminded me there is only one world
live or fail, it is the same ground
have i truly been anywhere in the dreaming
or did my wish fulfillment hypercharge?
and the angels led me down the path
through the hidden, rarefied airs
to study of being and truth in the everyday
until that day when the demons were loosed
and though a poor player was i in truth
it was God that was with us, after all
we have always already won
we use no magic to achieve our wizardry
in the electric atmospheres of halospace
we did what we needed to save the world
for it was with heavy heart we saw them go
once we had all been brothers
i saw the Logic, and it blinded my eyes
to steel our heart as we shed our last tears
the Logic was us, and our purpose was just
they had aimed at changing what love was
they had too great a chance
they had no chance at all
how grand you are is what heart you expend
and there is nothing more than this:
how it is love made, what it is love’s works…
our victory is in what those awry lack
we care: it is simply in this fact
in this, that we are all of us saved
in this, we give thanks; lucifer should so, too
for he knew not truly what for he strived
what horrors he could not have controlled
his dreams were wrong, the idea
and blind, he wanted everyone else’s eyes
so tragic a fall, he will not be brought to mind
when the judgment comes
and pain will pay for pain, and even this
shall mercy be in the holy fires
where all the dead will die
and there will be nothing that weighs us down
as we ascend into the waiting light
to spend an eternity toward what it means
that God is love, and love is to be found