Tag: sin

The Prophet’s Brief (A Theory of Everything)

I, being a prophet of the Lord Jesus Christ, in the line of Philip K. Dick, present to you what I have pieced together as a theory of everything. In what it solves, it does in broad swaths, but how a God can be all good while there is pain and unjust suffering—I believe I have an answer. See if it makes sense to you, and better yet, more sense of the world around you. It is one of the central documents of the War in Heaven. Take it as you will.

  1. In the very beginning, before the universe, there was Eternity. No evil existed, there God and His angels lived in the light, with other heavenly beings.
  2. Lucifer said “no” to the Holy Spirit, that being the unforgivable blasphemy, from his pride becoming Evil. (God is love, and to say “no” to love is for that part to die.)
    • The “no” was the birth of Sin/Pain/Error (Daughter of Satan). Before, there had been none of these. No one had ever committed an error. No one had ever done wrong. And how great a wrong it was.
    • The entity known as Sin was to have been born into excruciating pain, through her very essence, so she was killed out of mercy before she was born (given the light of life). However, she still had a semblance of form (antiform), and this form had enough spirit (antispirit) in its essence to move the form as if it had life. Antiform and antispirit were the power rendered to darkness by Evil.
    • Lucifer (Evil) copulated with Sin and Death came to be (Son of Satan).
  3. Satan convinced 1/3 of the angels to commit sin and become evil. In committing Evil, (and bringing about Sin and Death), Satan and his angels ruined a part of Heaven, and this part was to become Hell when torn away from the main. For Heaven was so good that it could even accommodate such evil and its works.
  4. The body of Sin was cast into the outer darkness. This was the primordial chaos (formlessness of Genesis 1). Also known as Rahab.
    • The one about whom it is said, “She is dead and giving birth to monsters.”
    • Here was the environment wherein would form the material world, and this world—to use her body as the basis for its first stuff—this world is in part was a tribute to the one that was lost. For she was never given a chance.
    • That it was so difficult to work with, being formless, being of essence “error” itself, and from that it was made beautiful by God, in fitting ways, explains much of the character of this universe, that even the worst situations can bring forth wonder.
  5. Satan sought to kill and replace the Logos, who was God (see John 1). This was the beginning of the War in Heaven. Michael and his angels were dispatched to fight the Dragon (Satan) and his angels. For Satan desired power ultimate, unholy.
  6. The War in Heaven was combat between Logos and derangement, truth vs. lie, and to be on one side or the other was good vs. evil.
    • The battleground were the Godhead itself, the root controls of existence. So that all creation groaned under the War.
    • Every one of Michael’s angels (and of course Michael) won, so that derangement—none of it—it did not ultimately win anywhere. There was no crack in the edifice of creation, the pillars of its existence (there are four).
    • But that there was even a fight at all meant that the created world would have such things as natural disasters in it—just that laws of physics would not break—and there would be opportunity for the evil we now witness, to this day. That which was permissible in the matrix.
  7. They did kill God, this being called the Cross, but that concluded not with that death, but with His defeat of Death itself: the Resurrection. Being the Son of God means that he is God (this was the “blasphemy” that he had been charged with by the Sanhedrin). 
    • That Jesus Christ had to die for the world to be saved tells you how FUBAR things got, how powerful the forces of evil had become, that the will of God would be so forced. To hold to logic is sometimes finesse, often brute. At times one invoking the other. But there was no getting around it in this fight.
      • Having been sinless his whole life, in his death was the defeat of Sin.
      • This is how the God who is love defeats Evil: Jesus gave himself and was obedient to God with the whole of his own life, even to the death. The whole of his trust. To defeat Death not with any weapon but the nature of what love truly is. The light by which life moves, and is moved.



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

    To Die as God

    Epicurus asks of the theist, if God has the will and the ability to prevent evil, why is there evil in the world at all? The question reminds me of one of the temptations of the Devil when our Lord was fasting in the desert: “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written: “‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'” [Matthew 4:6 NIV] One imagines, whatever the Devil says about how things are, had the Lord jumped from the building, he would have seriously injured himself. It’s not what the passage meant. And of Epicurus’ interpretation of what God is supposed to do, he thinks not of another possibility in the apparent inaction of God: would things have happened for a better end, for all eternity, had some finite evil been allowed to prosper in the world? One might think then that it is quite worth it, the suffering that we spend.

    I have written before that all pain has source in that one who rebelled at the beginning of time, at the end of time: Lucifer invented the concept of that which is wrong. But he is not the Logos, he is not how things come to be in the world; could it be true, however, that he was power enough, that in expending his whole potential, he could force the hand of even the Most High? One thinks of this passage, of what kind of curse Lucifer might have uttered: “To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.” [Herman Melville] I once had a vision of Lucifer with a dagger in his hand, with a great stab into the back of the Lord Jesus Christ, right where neck and shoulders meet. Was this image as it is written in Revelation, the Lamb slain at the foundation of the world? It might truly be the case that there is a certain way things must transpire in the world, for prophecy needs be fulfilled, and the will of God must be made manifest.

    One might think that it is in those terms that any sort of pain happens, even the greatest natural disasters. Being Logos and omniscient, the Lord knows exactly what happens, and how. And the why may seem long separate from the event, but it is there, too, somewhere in the matrix of all. Even his own death, he is the means by which it happens, for the Logos is the Holy Reason by which all things transpire: the very logic of logic. So in that sense, it is true when God says, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.” [Isaiah 45:7 NIV] But that there needs to be disaster at all: Lucifer threw a wrench into the gears of the Godhead. This was when he invented pain. I have written of this before, his committing of the first sin, and thus the formation of his daughter, who is also called Error, as well as Sin and Pain. To Lucifer and his own were given an aeon in which they might have influence, in which we live. And so there is pain.

    It is not as if God spared Himself pain, for as we know, Jesus Christ was God, and he was executed in tremendous suffering. One might suppose that it was not his preference to go in that way, being that the night before, he prayed that that cup should pass from him; but not his will, but his Father’s was what he would follow. Once again, one must think that Lucifer had an irrevocable hand in the whole thing: he was out to kill God. This was the ultimate showdown of good vs. evil (it was literally that). The Passion, and the Cross—the Devil and his angels amassed in the air above Jerusalem to multiply the suffering as greatly as they could—but what they may not have realized: given the circumstance, this is how the Lord wanted things to be. “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.” [John 10:18 NIV] There is a controversial scene in The Last Temptation of Christ where Satan tries to get him to die like a man—yes! on point: in real life, he died as God.

    In the words of Blue Oyster Cult, “I’m living for giving the Devil his due.” In the death of Christ is indeed shown the clash between good and evil, for under threat of pain did Christ never think to strike back, never to have overcome the physical forces that were before him, so that he would not be spared the effects of the evil that permeated the world. Bitten into the very stone were the possibility of pain, and none escaped. But in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, a grand lesson to be learned about the consequences of one’s choices. In giving the Devil his due, letting there be so much pain in the world, the Lord shows him that it could be matched by the good, that love conquers all. And so the Lord shows the rest of us. What good would it have been had all evil been prevented from happening? Surely we talk of a worse adjective than it being “academic”, then. Not to say God wanted evil to exist! Can you see a grander view of the Kingdom? He will use what is at hand, but it is of one’s own God given free will to commit the wrong, what is not of God.

    Then it is true power: to be able to force the hand of God. It must be the case that the most powerful being in creation was given power in truth. Pain is intrinsic to the structure of the universe: this is Lucifer’s magnum opus. This is that wrench in the works, which you cannot get out else the whole thing falls apart, because now, it is part of the puzzle. Satan knew what he was doing. For now, for God to be just, to show that He doesn’t win by a sort of “deus ex machina”—to give the Devil his due—bad things must happen. You can see that quite readily if you’re a scientist, that if you have such things as plate tectonics, the drift of land masses, then you will have volcanoes and earthquakes. And sometimes, there will be people in their vicinity. So, some of us will throw up their hands and say, “bad luck, chaps,” and some will say they must all have been sinners. None of the above. What’s actually happening? “There are many things which do not concern the process.” [Joan of Arc] There’s a bigger picture we’re not seeing. Perhaps that we don’t want to see.

    For blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted. [Matthew 5:4] I will go further: blessed are those who fail, those who are confounded when they try and do good; blessed are they who exert a mountain of effort for a molehill of a reward; blessed are they who are paid back evil for a good they gave; blessed are those who are humiliated for no reason at all; and blessed are they whose lives are brutish and cut short, for lo, thy reward is great in Heaven, where fate is not subject to the whim of evil—but is laid out by Holy Reason himself, whom you call Jesus Christ. He forgets none who have been robbed of life or dignity, and his will is the last word in the realm called Eternity. Jesus Christ died as he did to show you exactly whose side he was on. And there will be no stone you can crawl under that will not be overturned, nothing done in secret that will not be exposed. Woe to those who have something to hide, who has done his neighbor wrong.

    The main point? There is always a reason why. The Devil will randomize the pain where he can, and bad things will happen to good people. Don’t be deceived. Nothing is outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Logos, yea, Holy Reason itself. Even if it all ends horribly, that is not a permanent condition. Why did it have to happen like this? If you truly saw what was at stake for the things that transpired in this world, in this life, you would not ask such questions. Count it all joy: and that, too, will be rewarded. One day you will see why things unfurled as they did, and rejoice when your faith was shaken, but did not buckle under the strain to comprehend why. No natural disaster is larger than the purpose that undergirds it. We are greater than any pain that has run through us; we are made larger by it. This is the mystery of the quotient: tragedy makes a saint of any of us.

    Do not concern yourself with any thing. Nothing is wasted. Even the evil ones, who are burned into nothing at the Last Judgment: the harm they have caused has gone to good use—in the making of the saints. Do not imagine any setback has slipped from the accounting of the angels. And it is not so much the important that the saints we are to be will go to Heaven when we die, but that in being saints we bring Heaven down into the world by the love we show. Not to hide a lamp in a bucket, but to shine it from the rooftops. And all of us are to die as God did, who in the worst of it yet loved the world. This is to take part in the Resurrection. And pain? It points to that deeper way, that there will be now what is called justice, which in the days before the world ever was, it was not known: because it had no context where nothing was ever wrong. A fascinating birth, in the world as we know it: justice. There will be justice wherever there has been pain. It is what God made out of fire.



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

    The Origin of Night

    The story? Let us say God is all that. All good, all wise, all patient, all merciful, not lacking in any perception. What would it be, what could Lucifer have possibly done that he would be forever removed from the light of Eternity? Can we suppose, should we believe that he knew what he was doing, that he knew he was going five steps too far? In a perfect world, what could he have possibly done to bring upon himself the wrath of God? “Perfect”: that’s the clue. What could Lucifer have done? Perhaps actually to create the very concept of “wrong”? Before his doing so, all there was—anywhere—was perfection. No one ever made any sort of mistake anywhere that there were beings to make them. There was no such thing. This was his “genius”. With it, he tried to overpower God Himself. For all he had to do was to make the Lord make one mistake… But after temptations of pleasure and of pain, our man Jesus Christ said at his last, “It is finished,” for indeed, his whole life had then been led without any error whatsoever.

    What Lucifer did was to sin, for the first time anyone ever in the history of Heaven and Earth even had the thought to. And Sin, his emanation, goes by other names, from the analytic name “Error” to one that is near and dear to all of us, I’m sure: Pain. Which is to say that God was not the one who thought that up… Lucifer had enough power to do this all by himself. Now, God put it to good use, a good example that it has had great utility in the process of evolution—but no, the first instance of it did not go as far back as the Most High. And Sin, the curse that it was, spawned from Evil himself, spread from the first like an insidious fire, so that everyone—all but One, were subject to it. Even the angels would from then on sin, and this is outside of all the “rebel” angels, Lucifer’s angels: they now to be called the Devil and his demons.

    Can you imagine a world without pain? For it was thus at the beginning, and it shall be again at the end (see the finish of the Book of Revelation). Do you understand that Error is Sin is Pain? Or maybe the word we used at first that says all three are what you may comprehend of what Lucifer made: the Wrong. It was his to do, surely, for perhaps no one but him could have thought of something so “novel”, and it required stretching of the mind to conceive of it, and it required effort like nothing else to commit the first fault—anywhere. And then this was a breach in the Godhead. It threatened existence itself. For we are talking about stakes where pain—the idea of pain—were invented by one created: something that fundamental and pervasive. For pain, even the idea of it: before it were made, it was an impossible thing.

    To which one might conceive, that if the whole of the universe were one grand story, could it be that all the best subplots are ones not where nothing goes wrong, but ones where we overcome obstacles—stories where there are bad things in them too? True, these of struggle may be intrinsic to the nature of creation and that is why we would see things this way, and one might imagine a physics where the best story that could be told is one where nothing goes wrong. But this universe is all we’ve got—might we find that truly, this one is all we need to make the best of all possible worlds? Like it were all on purpose! Does the best story necessarily win, in other words? Ours to follow in that path of struggle, to know that it all goes to have some meaning: this is surely God’s ultimate gift to us, what He made of the pain, that nothing is wasted.

    This is not a setup. Even predestination is not so simplistic, so simple-minded as that. The meaning we have, that given us and that which we make—if this is just a chess game where we set the pieces up to systematically knock them down, we have then as much meaning as a chess game. We would be poor players indeed. Know this: Lucifer had his chance, had a real chance to repent of his wrongs. They we not simply token offerings of forgiveness for the clearing of our conscience, for the sake of the story. Thus it is with anyone who ends up being damned: they had a real chance not to go down the path they did, and they did not take it. If they didn’t have that chance, and were damned anyway, we to indict them would be the worse side of evil, and we would surely all be lost.

    And God can forgive many things. If Lucifer had turned back, after committing that heinous first error, indeed how different things would have been. But the pride that made him think he could outdo the Most High, this pride was not satisfied with merely the opening salvo of the War: he was bent on seeing it through, a furious obsession that became the more inflamed with every defeat. At every step, he would attempt the worse, thus the evil knew deeper lows. And the Dragon also threw down a third of the stars with his tail: a third of the billions of angels fell with him. This was part and parcel of that evil. These angels’ lives we lost by him. Sympathy for the Devil? He surely has my sympathy, that justice so harsh will be done on him, but he has the least of that sympathy. More goes to the least of the angels who fell, than ones who caused said fall.

    It was that I saw Satan and his angels fall from Heaven like the ground of the place dropped out from beneath them, out of sight. He made himself out to be darkness itself, but all he did was block the light so that there would be shadow. God answered the darkness with the origin of night. And I saw Satan full of wrath when he landed in the Earth, for he knew his time was short. What if the story were just as real as the pain we go through? And what we do on this world ultimately has import, has gravity, for we are caught up in that story… God Himself came down here because it required His personal attention. This is our only world, this our only life we live: so now, will you not do something? If perhaps nothing else, to pray? Let it not be to watch it all go by, and not having lived, lament the dream not followed…

    You are a human being alive on this green Earth: while you are alive, while it is still green: will you not seize the day, will you not do something so easy and impossible as love? And what can you love? Think of this: you can thank God for the pain you have experienced in your life. Decide to do that. You will then be forgiven for the pain you yourself have caused. (Pain is a saint’s excuse to be thankful.) And so, we fight the good fight, and defeat Satan at the first, and then even the last and worst of his evils. All you have to know is this: don’t give up. There is always hope: believe this, and it will be true. The Devil started with everything and threw it all away because of his pride. Be happy with nothing, instead. Do you not know? The Man Upstairs made the stars above for us, the ground below. All He wants from us is to stand and look up, and to feel small, and to be amazed. For that is what it means to be a child of God.

    And that’s how the story goes, right up to your doorstep. Go.



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

    Sanity (cont’d)

    And the nature of this world: imperfect can be more beautiful than perfect. Though, of course, nothing that is truly perfect was ever a part of this world (save Christ). Error, or more romantically, accident, can be much the more beautiful than straight on poetry writ flawless. This is the memory of her who had no chance. She was the first Sophia, who was not acceptable, but by no fault of hers. She was the first that was not caused to be by the Lord our God. It is our duty to do as God did here: we do not prefer that the evil occur, but to make of things in its aftermath better than if the wrong had never been done at all.

    Look: one of the greatest factors in evolution? Pain. Prey flee from predators because of the threat of pain. And death? One wonders if they comprehend it, never having experienced it but maybe having witnessed it, and one wonders there if they fully understand that, there; but pain? they get that. So the prey is fueled by fear of pain and they get faster. Predators run faster to catch prey. So it goes. Pain has other uses, of course. Philip K. Dick once called it the most efficient motivation. We escape damage because of pain. Some people of the S & M crowd thank their lucky stars that there is pain. Death, too, is a motivating factor, but more abstract, for we do not remember when we blinked on, in the womb, and have only unconsciousness as a comparison. Pain we know.

    So what exactly is that streak of insanity that runs through the universe? Though Sin is dead, she behaves as one who is supernaturally animated. The universe is not her body, but her body was like the seed of it. There is of her darkness spread through and throughout creation. If you perchance a pocket of crazed circumstance, it might be her center, blowing by. And beware her children, every bit as dead as her (for the offspring share the nature of the parent), who are monsters. Do not mistake their madness or motion for life. On the Last Day shall they all be collected and burned into nothing, and no one will mourn their passing. But all of it is indeed a sad tale.

    And about Phil thinking that other thing about all these things that happened, the Godhead itself in jeopardy, all of it because of an intellectual and not a moral error—really? The error being mistaking the illusory world for the real world? That’s what he said, that all of us so fall, and the powers that be will tell you when you fall that you have sinned, and not that you committed an honest mistake. But the streak of the irrational in the shadow of everything—what is irrational is the illusion we see, that the “real” world actually is supposed to make sense. The true way of the world has always been inaccessible to us. To be sane, therefore, to be of the outward forms we see, is to be insane. The sanity is actually the insanity. And indeed, this is something like an intellectual error, not moral.

    So they are opposite sides of the coin: to find the beauty in even the faltering of things; or be as like the powers that be, and grasp after power by taking advantage of the irrational, phenomenological world. Even in the purely intellectual, there is in practice always a moral dimension to your actions. Maybe just the ones who made up the rules being at fault. If you think about it, much of all sin is an intellectual error. The logic of them, however, contained in the heart, and not the head. When we do not understand the consequence of a sin, then it is purely an intellectual error. Only when you know it is wrong can you call it so. Ostensibly, of course, for the record counts even unknowing sin as sin.

    In the War in Heaven, the main goal was preservation: Logos (Holy Reason) vs. derangement (evil). The angels fought for the fundamental structure of our reality. If you can tell, we did take damage, but if you also have eyes to see, then see that ultimately, we won. I think there is a reason we feel so satisfied at the end of a movie when the good guy wins. I think it’s cooked into the soup of existence itself. Along with the tribute to Pain, there is the blood, sweat, and tears of all the angels who fought so hard to keep things from falling apart. And in it, even how there is no victory without first conflict. Lucifer ultimately plays his part in the Plan; there is no escape from that. Not to say things aren’t his fault. It’s just how good God really is. And for how seductive evil may seem, how senseless it ultimately amounts to.



    Sanity

    Have you at some point thought that there is a streak of insanity that runs through the fabric of the universe? Philip K. Dick had several explanations about that. The first, and probably closest to his heart, was that the original Mind mourns after a woman who has died, and all of creation is awry because of that grief. Another is that the primordial Fall from grace was not a moral error, but one of intellect. And one may find the latter sounds unsatisfying. All the bad stuff that ever happened, because someone forgot to balance a checkbook? We shall return to that, but the former speculation: this does indeed seem to be the case of how things are.

    When Lucifer decided to sin, in its most formidable cast, that urge did not sit idle, but its consequence bore fruit. When he sinned, he gave birth to Sin. This was the fruit of his overwhelming genius, and sad that is. Where nothing could go wrong, there in Heaven where God’s will is done as a matter of course, he invented Error. He invented Pain. And he, being the progenitor of same, he himself became Evil. This is in line with the writings of Milton, Paradise Lost, but it has its origin in the Bible: “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” [James 1:15, NIV] And the term, “playing God”—and how wrong that could possibly be—is most fit in describing this creation, Sin.

    I wrote once: “imagine every fiber of your being twisting in agony; it gets worse if you move; it gets worse when you stop.” I had not realized it at the time I jotted that time, but such a tortured soul was what Sin was to be, behind her eyes. This was Error, this was Pain. So before the life could light within her, just at that moment, she was slain. And mercy it was. But this is the one whom we grieve, the woman that died, the innocent that died—for she was not given the chance at all. And this is an argument against the question of why does not God select them to be born who would not sin? Because everyone should get a chance, a real chance, if life were to be given to them. Sin’s life was zero sum: perfectly fair, no gain nor loss. Except the potential of what might have been. And that is real too; and this is why we grieve.

    This was what was meant when the Lord said of the Devil that he was a murderer from the first. The Lord would not let the light behind the eyes, the life, suffer so catastrophically… Philip K. Dick said that the universe is a tale told of the one that was lost, and indeed, is it not so? Is it not a tale of sins, of pain, of mistakes—do we not relate to these ideas? It is of fruitless speculation to wonder how she would have turned out. There is no way to tell. As it stands, you may interact with Sin, and she will seem like she were of like any other spirit being, until you look into her eyes, and at the cores exist only vacuum. She reacts like she feels, but ultimately, there is nothing there that looks out.

    So it was her body out of which God created all things material. Lucifer thought that by poisoning creation by the body of pain, of error, he was “salting the earth” as the saying goes, so that it would be impossible to build anything out of the watery chaos that that body was. But God wanted it that way, all creation the reminder of the one who was lost. That all might remember her. Indeed, it was impossible to build anything solid from the barely there watery chaos, but as we know, with God nothing is impossible. What you see all around you has this one thing in common: nothing is perfect. But there is so much beauty. This is what God can do with the body of Error itself.

    (continues…)