Q & A

And what happens when you do believe?

Do you remember when I said that Christ’s students went on to realize that what happened to Him (crucifixion), happened to them also? Well, at the moment that you believe, what happened to Christ will happen to you in your inner world of Chicagoland. Your act of faith in time becomes his act of obedience in time (enduring the crucifixion), which was also an act in eternity that stands out of time, and therefore becomes available to you now.

Remember that Christ, being the head of humanity by virtue of the incarnation, took the root of Chicagoland’s spiritual "tree" down with Him into death, rendering it inoperable in all those who were born into it.

So in your inner world, in your deepest self, the faulty Chicagoland Version 1.1 is now dead to you and you to it. And that being the case, the resurrected Christ, as head of the new creation, places next to your dead Chicagoland Version 1.1, His own "down payment" on your future eternal life - the very Holy Spirit of God, the third person of the Godhead.

You are "born again." Or rather, as an alternate translation of that Greek phrase allows, "born from above." You are plucked from the spiritual tree of Chicagoland Version 1.1, and made a branch of the spiritual vine, who is Christ, and made a part of the new creation that He is the Head of. You are made another part of the second immersion that occurred along time ago. Your spirit becomes immersed in the Holy Spirit of God, and by Him you become spiritually immersed "in Christ."

Doubtless you have many questions about this new condition you find yourself in.

Well, what happens next?

Yes, that’s a good start. I will layout some items in a logical order, but which may occur in a different order for different kinds of people.

The Holy Spirit of God who is now resident inside your inner world (quite possibly in the background at first), will start to witness to your spirit that your union with the eternal God through His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, is real, and that your sonship by adoption is valid. Or as Romans 8:14-17 has it:

"For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba [ quite literally, "Daddy"!], Father.The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together."

And how does that work?

Well, remember when I said that demons have the ability to place thoughts in your mind that you go on to mistake for thoughts of your own? Well, the Holy Spirit of God has a like facility in you now. From time to time you will find yourself having thoughts that you never suspected you were capable of having before. Thoughts about God. Thoughts about the Son of God, Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior. Thoughts about other people. (And they will be good thoughts. )And some of your new thoughts will be about yourself. But they will be truthful this time. And that may mean that some of them will hurt. But you will recover from them and heal. And eventually there will be fewer thoughts that focus on yourself. This is the witness that Holy Spirit of God begins to make to your spirit in the deep places where you really live.

And this witness will not always be just thoughts. They may be what the Victorians used to call "affections." Or as the apostle Paul writes in Colossians 3:1-3:

"If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right haind of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God."

The thought of the spiritual riches that God has for you in "the heavenly places in Christ Jesus" (Ephesians 1:3) will surprise you from time to time and nourish your very soul. I’ll give you a metaphor for this.

The Forgotten Joke

Once, during a very busy day at work, someone stopped by my desk to tell me a very funny joke. And as I was in the middle of laughing at it, another person came by and interrupted me with a bit of serious business. But after that was finished, I found that, for the life of me, I could not recall what the joke was that I had just heard. But for the better part of the day I still had that happy feeling of humor in my soul.

That is my metaphor for some of the kinds of things that may begin to happen to your soul, going forward. Your spirit will experience those little moments when God Himself, through His Holy Spirit that is in you, bisects your spirit and then is gone before you even know He has been there, and leaves behind, in your spirit, intimations of His greatness and glory.

Which is going a long way to say that you will begin to start doing what you were originally designed for in the first place: worship. It will start to become a part of you spontaneously.

Is there anything I can do to help that process along?

I won’t say that you can "force it." But I will say that having a set time when you can be quiet and read the Bible and pray certainly helps it along a great deal. It’s kind of like being an artist. An artist spends a great deal of time at making sure he or she performs and refines his or her craft every day. More often than not, it is plain old donkey work that seems like rolling a boulder up a hill. But what makes up for the donkey work are those divine moments when the craft seems to take over the artist and work its will through him or her, and something results that the artist cannot believe he or she has created. The worship of the eternal God that results from prayer and Bible study is like that.

Is Bible study really necessary?

Absolutely. It is pivotal to your spiritual growth, as the apostle Peter makes plain in 1st Peter 2:2-3:

"As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious."

You have tasted that the Lord is gracious (He has shown you unmerited favor in what He has done to you and for you on the cross). The milk of your growth in Him is in reading the Bible, which gives you even more of a taste of Him. Repeat as necessary.

But I will grant you that it is difficult. It requires a workman-like attitude to do it right, as the apostle Paul tells his young apprentice, Timothy in 2nd Timothy 2:15:

"Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth."

That "rightly dividing" means to break it down for your understanding and figure out how all the parts fit together into a unified message from God to Man. ventually, you will arrive at what the apostle Paul called "the form of sound words" or "an outline of sound doctrine." (2 Timothy 1:13). (This document you are holding is the author's).

Remember that you are a being of Fecundity. Your intelligence has to be gradually build up. The quality of you worship of God will go up as you begin to acquire the ideas about God that God has of Himself. What you will worship will cease to be that of an idolatrous daydream of your own making and become instead the very God of Heaven Himself.

There are basically two kinds of Bible reading. You will start out doing the first kind, and then gradually you will graduate to the second kind.

The first kind is the simple donkey’s work of actually reading it, studying it, taking notes, breaking it apart, find out what’s in it and how it all fits together. There is a lifetime in just that.

But then later, as you become more familiar with the Bible, and more of it sticks in your mind, you will begin to experience the truth of what Christ said to His students:

"But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost [Spirit], whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you."

Do you remember what the apostle Peter said about how the scriptures were written?

"... no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost [Spirit]."

Well, the second type of Bible reading is when you realize that the Holy Spirit of God who caused the Bible to be written is the same Holy Spirit of God who now resides in you, and He begins to take the scriptures you have read and show you what they really mean in such a way that it causes a mysterious stab of worship to arise in your heart. I’ll give you two examples of this from my own life.

When I was a young man, I had always been aware of Christ being referred to as "the man of sorrows." This was accurate, taken from Isaiah’s prophecy about Him (Isaiah 53:1-6):

"Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all."

But I had assumed that His sorrow had to do with under going the crucifixion for us all, as the above passage seems to indicate. Later, as an older man, two other passages of scripture came together in my mind to show me the true extent of Christ’s sorrows. The first was Ecclesiastes 1:17-18:

"And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."

I had found this to be true as an adolescent when I graduated from the children’s section of my local public library to the adult section. In the adult section I learned a great deal more about Tomas de Torquemada, Vlad Tepes, Adolf Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, Adolph Eichmann, Joseph Mengle, Joseph Stalin, Richard Speck, and H. H. Holmes, then was perhaps good for me.

The second passage was the crucial one of John 2:23-25:

"Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover, in the feast day, many believed in his name, when they saw the miracles which he did. But Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man."

With this last passage the Holy Spirit of God had shown me something about Christ that I have never forgotten since. He knows every human being who has ever been on the planet. And He has seen every sorrow there is to see.

Here is the second example of something the Holy Spirit of God showed me, which demonstrates that sometimes He will use something you’ve seen in The World to press home a point.

One time I was changing the channels on the television set and stopped momentarily on a talk show. This was at the time when there was a vogue for actor Jack Nicholson because he was considered the definition of "cool." I caught the host of the talk show in mid-joke talking about his night on the town the previous night. The host said that he found this cool nightclub that had a cooler bar, an even cooler clientele, and that there was an even cooler private room in the back where Jack Nicholson would sit and be the coolest of all, all by himself.

That was one night.

Some time later I was reading the epistle to the Hebrews, and read the following that is in reference to the worship sanctuary of the ancient Hebrews (Hebrews 9:1-3):

"Then verily the first covenant had also ordinances of divine service, and a worldly [i.e. earthly, physical] sanctuary. For there was a tabernacle [a tent] made; the first, wherein was the candlestick, and the table, and the shewbread [bread for showing to God]; which is called the sanctuary. And after the second veil, the tabernacle which is called the Holiest of all."


When I read that last verse, I had a picture arise in my imagination.

In the Hebrew’s worship of eternal holy God, there was an outer courtyard that was "common." Then there was a tent that was "holy." And then inside that tent was another tent, where the manifestation of eternal God on earth would reside, that was considered "the Holiest of all. " And ...

"into the second went the high priest alone once every year, not without blood, which he offered for himself, and for the errors of the people."

Where the talk show host had been talking about the narrowing down of the quality called "cool" into one person in a room by himself, this verse gave me a vision of the quality called "holiness" being narrowed to the possession one particular Being, in a particular tent by Himself and with no other.

I got a vision the God’s synesthesia and perfect pitch. And it fed my soul for days.

Those are my two examples of the second kind of Bible reading that you will graduate to eventually. Sometimes there comes a point where this second kind of Bible reading (the visionary) starts to interfere with the first kind (the fact gathering). Then you can’t get very far in gathering more facts without the Holy Spirit of God showing you something that will feed your soul. But that is a happy problem to have.

Does prayer really work?

After receiving my Chicagoland metaphor, need you even ask? Your body may be here on earth and make you feel lonely, and like you are taking into the empty air while you pray, but rest assured, your spirit is available to be heard by Christ in the Heavenlies and His Father also, "which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." (Matthew 6:6).

And realize this: if the Holy Spirit of God is able to put thoughts into your head because he indwells you, don’t you think the Holy Spirit of God is able to put thoughts into other people’s heads because He indwells them too? In fact, since the age of the Holy Spirit of God on earth has begun, He is now referred to as "he who now letteth" (2nd Thessalonians 2:8 KJV) or "He who restrains." This means He has access to even bad people’s thoughts and therefore restrains some of the evil things they plan to carry out.

So when you pray, God begins to put thoughts in other peoples minds that can bring about a chain of events leading to the thing you pray for coming into being. Prayer works.

Hmmmm? In that case how is prayer different from magick? Is it possible for me to pray wrong? What if I’m not good at praying?

Well now, that is an interesting question. And it is not an idle one either.

Aleister Crowley once warned his "disciples" that trying to get results from magick could have unintended side-effects. One wants X to occur. One instead may get -X. Or half an X. Or double an X. The classic example of a side-effect is the couple performing a magick ceremony to receive $5,000, and then getting it as a result of a settlement from the life insurance policy on one of their children who got killed in an accident.

The difference between prayer and magick is that prayer is always subject to the will of eternal, holy God, to whom we pray. "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven." (Matthew 6:10). And God decides whether or not anything will come of the prayer. "Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts." (James 4:3).

One reads the Bible to become better educated about the kinds of things that God wills. In Magick, the only consideration is one’s own will (Crowley’s famous dictum was "DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW.") And one pays the consequences for that (especially since the only beings who will carry out whatever you request are those from the diabolic realm).

Another difference is that magick requires skill and exactitude in making requests. You have to get it exactly right for anything to happen (which might be bad anyway). In prayer, even an unskilled person is taken in hand by the Holy Spirit of God. And sometimes even inexpressible things can be prayed because the Holy Spirit indwells one (Romans 8:26):

"Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered."

But over time, and with Bible reading, you will eventually know how to pray, and it will hopefully become second nature to you.

But if God has His own will, why does He take prayer requests from mere human beings?

Because prayer is really God’s way of letting us participate in the great things He is planning and doing in the world today. And while we are doing it, it gives Him a greater access to our spirit for Him to work on it and leave us better off than we were before we prayed.

Overtime, with our education in the scriptures by the Holy Spirit of God, and our frequently putting our spirits into the presence of Christ, prayer becomes less and less about what we want, and more and more about what God wants, and true prayer becomes more and more effectual. When I think of all the wonderful things prayer does for us, I consider it the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is more than well worth your time.

Hey, I just re-read Romans 8:14-17 above. What's that bit about "suffering with Him?"

Oh, that.

Well, besides any physical suffering that becoming a Christian may entail [Footnote 29], there is often mental suffering that goes on inside a Christian because a battle begins to take place between the Holy Spirit of God that is now in him and the remnants of his corrupt Chicagoland Version 1.1, or "old nature" or "carnal nature," or simply "the Flesh" as the apostle Paul puts it. Paul went through all that and has described it well in Romans 7:15-23:

"For that which I do I allow [understand] not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law [the expression of God’s personality] that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? [the sinful nature, The Flesh]"

There it is in a nutshell - the strife that goes on between the old nature, and the new. This is the battle that you will have with your second enemy, The Flesh (Chicagoland v.1.1). But it is also the battle that you will have with your first enemy, The World, because the thing The World principally does is tempt your Flesh. If you overcome the Flesh, The World will follow.

No, Christianity does not mean you become sinless.

"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1st John 1:8-9).

But it does mean you sin less.

But I am going to give you a leg up on ending this strife. You have only to remember this: the Chicagoland v.1.1 that is still in you only seems like it is still alive in you and controlling you. Let me give you a gristly metaphor of this so that you will never forget this.

The Accident Victim

A great while ago, I had a relative who attended a defensive driving course conducted by the State Police. During the course, one of the State Troopers told some gristly stories about accident scenes he had encountered (this was with a view to getting his audience to remember to use their seat belts).

One time this Trooper came to an accident scene and found a man with a large bump on his head limping and lurching around aimlessly talking to himself. He had just been in a frontal collision and had hit his head on the dashboard of his car. But here he was, limping and lurching aimlessly around while talking, apparently alive.

But then the State Trooper walked up to the man and listened to what he was saying, and discovered that the man’s brain was simply reeling off the man’s childhood memories, making him babble like a four year old. The man was actually dead, killed the minute his head hit the dashboard. The other parts of his brain hadn’t died yet, and they kept his body moving around until a few minutes later, when the rest of his brain finally died.

Now that gristly occurrence is a good metaphor for your inner Chicagoland v.1.1, also known as The Flesh. It under went crucifixion and death with Christ the moment you believed in Him and what He did for you. But you still think it is alive and is the same thing as yourself. You think it is the part of you that is the most real. But you think that only because you have a long history of obeying its promptings.

The surprise of your life will come when you begin to start disobeying its promptings and realize that it no longer has power over you. And you will do that once you understand the significance of the following sentence from Colossians 2:6:

"As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk [i.e. "live"] ye in him."

The significance of this verse is in two questions about it.

1.) How did you "receive" Christ?
Answer: By faith.

2.) So how do you walk (i.e. live your life) "in Christ?"
Answer: By faith.

Believe it or not (but do believe it), this is the key to growth in the spiritual life in Christ.

Many Christians spend their entire defeated lives thinking that the only time they have to have faith in Christ is when they "receive Him." They don’t realize that the key to denying the promptings of The Flesh (and The World that tempts The Flesh), is to deny the promptings by faith in Christ.

It may take many repetitions of this lesson for even some of the promptings to cease. But that is how The Flesh is overcome. It is overcome by the daily exercise of faith as you live your life and that’s the long and short of it. It comes down to how much you are willing to exercise your faith and believe that what Christ has done to you, has been done to you.

But having said that, you should realize that your faith is the very thing that is going to come under attack from time to time by the diabolic realm or The Devil. He is your third and last enemy in the Christian life.

Your faith is such a very affective weapon in helping you against the temptations of The World and The Flesh that The Devil (or more likely, a devil) is going to whisper things into your inner self that you will start to believe are your own thoughts. And they will be things that are designed to weaken your faith.

And that is the good news. Why? Because that is how you will recognize those thoughts for what they are. And you need only remember that because the Holy Spirit of God is now in your inner self, the diabolic realm cannot now enter there. The devils can only whisper in from without. Remember Romans 8:37-39:

"Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

I’ll give you a metaphor for what diabolic realm tries to do to a Christian since it can do nothing else.

The Fake Punch

When I was in high school, there was a strict rule about fighting and hitting people. You couldn’t hit someone without getting put on detention. So the bullies in high school used to come over to their victims and launch a hard and fast punch that they would pull back on just before it hit. The point was to make the intended victim flinch enough so that they would fall over and hurt themselves.

That in a nutshell is how the diabolic realm tries to hurt spirit indwelt Christians whom they cannot otherwise hurt. The Christian has to learn not to listen to the voices of the Slanderers when they come by. Or as Colossians 1:23 puts it:

"...continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard ..."

And that is the other reason for continued Bible reading. To become grounded and settled. so that when the Slanderers come around, you will not be pushed around all over the place like a lightweight.

So that is your inner journey in the Christian faith: Overcoming the World and The Flesh, by faith in Christ, and turning aside The Devil by being grounded and immovable in the hope of the gospel.

But what is it all geared toward? What is the end that is in view?

Well, if you are born again into a new creation, it is expected that you will grow up into becoming a being that is characteristic of that new creation. And who is the Head of that new creation? Christ, the Lord. So He is what you are meant to spiritually grow up into being like. Or as Romans 8:28 & 29 puts it:

"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren."

Goodness. Does that mean I will lose my personal identity? Oh dear, I hear the voices of many Star-Trek(tm) fans in that question. No, being "in Christ" is not like being "assimilated" into the "Borg." [Footnote 30] According to Genesis 5:3:

"When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth."

That is what is meant by "image" when speaking of being "conformed to the image of Christ." We are all sons of Adam (and daughters of Eve), so we are in their "image," and yet we are all distinct individuals with all our individual quirks. This will also be true when we become conformed to the image of Christ. We are just passing from an old creation into a new one. 1st Corinthians 15:47-49 makes this clear:

"The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly."

We will not lose an iota of ourselves in that process, except for the willingness to sin. Spiritually, in our inner selves, we are to grow into the kind, or order, of being that Christ now is. This is only natural as His presence will one day be our habitation when our bodies are as redeemed as our spirits are.

Our bodies are going to be redeemed one day?

Oh yes. The Record is quite clear on that, as 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, and 42-44 makes clear:

"But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.
...
So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body."

If perchance your physical body does die at sometime, it will be a case of "absent from the body, present with the Lord." 2nd Corinthians 5:6-8:

"Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (For we walk by faith, not by sight:) We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord."

In my Chicagoland metaphor, your current robot body may indeed get run over by a Mack truck, but your spirit will still be "in the tank in Chicago" so to speak, only it will be in the presence of the risen Christ, and your smashed up robot body will be likened to a seed that does not look anything like the very pretty flower it will become when it is returned to you at the resurrection from among the dead. Trust me, you won’t mind having your body "planted," if it ever comes to that.

There’s going to be a resurrection from among the dead?

Oh my, yes. The Record is quite clear on that too. And it also says that some of us will not see death at all when it happens. 1 Thessalonians 4: 13-17.

"But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep [he means the big one], that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent [precede] them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words."

1 Corinthians 15:51-54 also sheds some light on this.

"Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory."

But what kind of body is this?

Well Philippians 3:20-21 tells us:

"For our conversation [ citizenship ] is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, [Footnoate 31]that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself."

It is going to be a body like His, which is fit for the fellowship of the Persons of the Godhead.

But what ultimately will go on in that fellowship? Won’t I get bored strumming a harp in heaven for all eternity?

Ah, the primal fear of all earthly creatures. Afraid heaven will be boring! Such a "fraidy" cat. You should really be more concerned about whether heaven is going to be too much for you! But I hear you concern, and I’m afraid the only way I can address it is by reaching into a less then worthy place for an illustration.

That less than worthy place is Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell. The reason it is less than worthy is that Aldous Huxley breached the two estates which are the human realm and the angelic realm in order to get the observation I’m about to use here. He did that by taking mescaline, a consciousness-altering drug similar to LSD. And true to form, the diabolic realm served him up a landscape for his belief.

But it’s not so much the landscape that he saw that I am interested in as much as the comments he made on it. This is what he saw and his comment on it. (Notice that he thinks some of it comes out of his own mind rather than objective reality):

"Let us begin with the human or, rather, the more than human inhabitants of these far-off regions. Blake called them the Cherubim. [Footnote 40] And in effect that is what, no doubt, they are - the psychological originals of those beings who, in the theology of every religion, serve as intermediaries between man and the Clear Light. The more than human personages of visionary experience never 'do anything.' (Similarly the blessed never 'do anything' in heaven.) They are content merely to exist. "

"Under many names and attired in an endless variety of costumes, those heroic figures of man’s visionary experience have appeared in the religious art of every culture. Sometimes they are shown at rest, sometimes in historical or mythological action. But action, as we have seen, does not come naturally to the inhabitants of the mind’s antipodes. To be busy is the law of our being. The law of theirs is to do nothing. When we force these serene strangers to play a part in one of our all too human dramas, we are being false to visionary truth. That is why the most transporting (through not necessarily the most beautiful) representation of "the Cherubim" are those which show them as they are in their native habitat - doing nothing in particular."

Now, what is he saying here? He is saying that in another state of consciousness, what we think would be incredibly boring because it looks so static, will actually be quite what I previously described the fellowship of the Persons of the Godhead as being - a distillation of happniness. Remember that? All true kinds of happiness we can ever know have their source and origin in "the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." If we remove all the little processes from our kinds of happiness, and the time and chance that may attenuate them, a distillation of pure happiness results that can be held as one moment of time which lasts for all eternity, "fading never."

What looks to be a static, boring picture of happiness in heaven, will, in another state of consciousness, be more happiness than you can possibly stand now in your human, time and space bound form. It would overpower you.

Take this theophany (appearance of God) from Isaiah 6:1-3:

"In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: 'Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.’"

On the bald face of it, going around and around and around all day, saying "Holy, Holy, Holy" all day does not strike one as very exciting work. But if you consider that the above is what a person with our consciousness would describe when seeing a manifestation from a realm where a different consciousness prevails, you get a better sense that something absolutely fabulous was revealed to his man, Isaiah.

Now, I’m going to tell you something else that may interest you. Remember when I said that this new creation we are in by being "in Christ" is a new link in the Chain of Being that was inserted between God and the angels?

Well that means that when our existence in time is done, and we enter eternity, we will be displacing the Seraphs and getting between them and God in His order of worship above. The apostle Paul reveals this in a question he posed to the Corinthian Christians who were having trouble settling legal matter amongst themselves:

"Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?" (1st Corinthians 6:3).

The holiest of the angels of God have always known obedience. We humans who have been redeemed by Christ have known disobedience, but have been brought back into obedience by the sacrifice of Christ, "once for all." (Hebrews 10:10). That gives us a privileged place of priority in God’s order of worship, "which things the angels desire to look into." (1st Peter 1:12).

Okay. But what’s that business with the harps and stuff?

Oh, that. Well, imagine, if you will, a composer going on vacation to the most scenic area of the Swiss Alps. He takes in the majestic view, breathes the fresh, clean air, and experiences the mellow voice of nature on his ears. What do you think he will do when he gets back from vacation? Indeed, what might he start doing even on the first day of his supposed vacation in the Alps? I’ll tell you. He will start writing a concerto, a symphony, a tone poem, a sonata. The sheer exposure to what is good brings out of any good person an unadulterated praise of that good thing.

We do a little of something like that all the time and don’t even notice it. We say, "Isn’t that a pretty girl?" or "Isn’t that a fabulous sunset?" or "Isn’t he an honest man?" Or "Wasn’t she a brave girl?" The response to good is praise of the good.

One of the limitations I feel in life is the fact that I love classical music, but can’t for the life of me make any of my own. I am clumsy and uncoordinated, so I can’t play an instrument. And something doesn’t quite come together for me when I try to match a piece of music with the notations on paper that make up its specification. I’ll never compose music.

But when I listen to a concerto, or symphony, I pretend in my mind that I am the conductor of the music, and that the music is coming directly out of my very soul. That pretense allows me to get an empathic understanding of what the nonverbal message is that is in the music. And O the glory, O the glory, the original composer speaks directly to my soul with most (if not all) of his genius.

The bit with the harp tells me that one day, I will be given a body that is perfectly suited for the fellowship of the Persons of the Godhead, and that I will be fitted with an instrument that is perfectly suited to the fellowship of the Persons of the Godhead, and that I will be given the talent to play it that is perfectly suited to the fellowship of the Persons of the Godhead, and that when that final unveiling takes place, when the eternal Son begins to reveal to me by the Holy Spirit of God the essentially unknowable eternal Father in the perpetuity of eternity, I shall sound with a perfect note that shall be held as one moment of time through out all eternity.

Can you recommend any books to read?

Indeed I can. I highly recommend reading Desiring God: Meditations Of A Christian Hedonist by John Piper. You may get the feeling, later on in your Christian life, that you have been sentenced to the spiritual equivalent of eating spinach for the rest of your life. Piper will demonstrate abundantly to you that this is just not the case. Most of what the World calls pleasure in fact does not feed the human soul, but deadens it. Piper will teach you that the true pleasures in life, and your own personal "bliss," will be found, eventually, in the service of Christ. Go to it!

I also recommend The Complete Green Letters by Miles J. Stanford. After you have been a young Christian for a good while, you eventually will burn off your quite natural initial enthusiasm. Then will come the time for some deeper growth processes that will be a good deal quieter. This book is about that. And it will give you some relief from well meaning Christians who think that a big oak tree takes the same amount of time to grow as a summer squash. It is the pivotal book that the present author read that allowed him to begin and complete this document.

I would also recommend two books having to do with Watchman Nee. Nee’s own book of doctrine, The Normal Christian Life, and a biography of him by Angus Kinnear, called Against the Tide : Watchman Nee.

The biography will tell you that the Christian life is a journey that doesn’t come to you all at once - that your understanding of it will change over time. And it shows you some of the ways you can go wrong when things get a little boring.

Nee’s book on the Christian life brings out many of the points I’ve made here, only in different words.

The last thing about Nee is that you will see for yourself that Christianity is a universal faith, and not just something for people of European descent.

You mentioned other Christians, is there some church I should go to?

Alas, this is one area in which you may have to fend for yourself. I simply do not know what is in the area where you live. I would like to say that any church is better than no church, but that would be a falsehood considering that the Swedenborgians call themselves a church, but are in fact occultists who use symbolism from the Bible to expound their doctrines.

Probably the best thing for you to do is to take the New Testament and read the letters (called "epistles") the apostles wrote to the young churches of their day. Note what they say about what a church should be and how it should operate. Then go out and look for a church in your area that has the closest approximation of what you have learned. This is called the Berean method of church finding. [Footnote 32] You search the scriptures to find out if what they say is so. It will, for the most part, keep you out of the hands of the cult groups. [Footnote 33]

Am I being overly dramatic? I would like to think so, but what I see around me in Christendom makes me think of what Christ told His students when He sent them forth to teach in His name:

"behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves." (Luke10:3).

And I am reminded by that of the apostle Paul’s prophecy about what would soon happen to the church after his passing:

"For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them." (Acts 20:29-30).

Paul looked at the church - actually the people in the church - the Christians, as being "members" (limbs) of a spiritually connected "body of Christ," each member having a particular function to perform in that body. (1 Corinthians 12:12-31).

And Peter looked at Christians as being the "living stones" of a spiritual temple, raised up to eternal God’s worship, with Christ being the chief cornerstone of that temple. (1st Peter 2:5-10).

But as I look around at Christendom today, I have to conclude that it is more like a first grade classroom who’s Teacher has momentarily left it to consult with the Principal. Yes, there are a few good students here and there, keeping their heads down, doing their homework, and minding their own business. But there are far more kids in the classroom cutting up, making lots of noise, misbehaving, and bullying the other kids.

One day, the Teacher is going to suddenly return. But until then, we have to make sure that we, at least, behave ourselves. And our guide to that is the Word of God.

"We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts." (2 Peter 1:19).

Do you have any last words of advice before you go?

Yes, I do. I have a sentence and a prayer I want to give you that will keep you on the right course in your life as a Christian. The sentence is this: Christianity is not a behaviorism, but rather, the reception of a Personality.

What is a behaviorism? A behaviorism is any system of rewards or punishments that tries to change your behavior without changing your underlying personality which supplies the impulses behind the behavior.

Legalism is a behaviorism. In legalism, you have a set of laws and a schedule of penalties for the transgression of each law. The penalties are designed to be hurtful enough so that you will be encouraged to change to your behavior. But they cannot change your personality.

A Skinner box is a behaviorism. The experimental rat is placed in the Skinner box, and each time the rat performs a desired behavior, it is rewarded with a pellet of food dropped into the box. The rewards condition the rat to perform the desired behavior. It does not matter what kind of personality the rat has, it’s just his behavior that has been conditioned.

The rinky dink "rules" of some churches, whether expressed or implied, can be a behaviorism.

The ultimate behaviorism is the Clockwork Orange I wrote about previously. In a science fiction novel, The Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess conceived of a criminal being subjected to behavior modification techniques that would condition him to become ill whenever he even thought of committing a crime. Burgess was pointing out that such a program would only change the behavior of the criminal, and not the criminal himself. The impulse to crime would still remain.

Christianity is not a behaviorism. It is the reception of the personality of Christ through the Holy Spirit of God, who comes to reside inside the Christian’s heart by faith in Christ. That Personality then begins to displace Christian’s old one which has its roots in the carnal nature. That is Christianity.

The apostle Paul has the last word on this. He had once preached the gospel to the Galatians, who then received Christ by faith. But they went on to start using the law as their "rule of life." This is what Paul asked them in a follow up letter (Galatians 3:2,3):

"This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?"

(i.e., "Can you fix the Flesh by the law?") This is another way of stating an earlier sentence of Paul’s (Colossians 2:6):

"As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk[i.e. "live"] ye in him."

And how is that? By faith. It is the whole thing, from start to finish, and it is how you receive, and go on receiving, Christ’s personality through the Holy Spirit of God.

And now I will give you a prayer you can use that will encourage you in the reception of His Personality and discourage you from falling into behaviorism. The prayer is this:

Lord, teach me to love what you love, and hate what you hate.

If you pray this prayer, doing what God wants you to do, and not doing what God does not want you to do will become, over time, a matter personal preference rather than a matter of keeping a set of rules.

What God hates will not surprise you (for the most part). Who God is capable of loving startles the holiest of His archangels.

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(29) The Philippian Christians that the apostle Paul wrote a letter to were Roman citizens who could no longer say "Caesar is Lord." They became subject to death for treason the moment they believed. A Muslim who becomes a believer in Jesus Christ is immediately subject to being murdered by his fellow Muslims. More Christians have been murdered for their faith in the 20th century than in any other. And the 21st looks like its shaping up to be even more brutal.

(30) Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star-Trek(tm) universe had leanings toward the Objectivist (and atheist) philosophy of Ayn Rand, and hated Christianity. There was an episode in the original series where these hooded figures when around saying "You are not of the body. You have not been converted," who were basically just robots of a creature of some sort. In the new series, this theme shows up again as the Borg Collective.

(31) Trust me as someone past forty. It will get plenty vile.

(41) William Blake (1757-1827). A visionary English poet, painter, and printer, who seems to have been able to see angels (he drew pictures of them). He called them "Cherubim." That is the correct name of some orthodox angels, but the ones Blake saw are likely demons who deceived him. Blake’s father was a Swedenborgian, as was Blake himself for a time. The Swedenborg Church is basically an occult group that uses imagery from the Bible to expound it doctrines (which gives it a Christian veneer). There was a Christian rock group a while ago that had song lyrics about William Blake, taking him for a Christian. That he was not.

(32) Acts 17:10 & 11 "And the brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Berea: who coming thither went into the synagogue of the Jews. These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so."

(33) Long before Jim Jones’ followers were all made to commit suicide in Guyana with him, Jim Jones had held a preaching meeting in which he held up a Bible, proclaimed that something in it was wrong, threw it down on the floor, and then told his congregation to follow him instead of the Bible. The people who left his church that day were not among those who died in Jones Town.