17 July 2023
How did the Devil influence Eve? He appealed to her free will. It is simply impossible to have free will without the vulnerability to temptation.
So far as we can tell from Scripture, God alone has the power to harden, to reduce or remove free will. Without His hardening, for whatever incomprehensible purpose, everyone is also capable of submitting to His will. We aren't talking about submission to some concrete diktat, but everyone is designed with the ability to submit to Him as Lord and Master for life. Furthermore, that is what He requires of every free will agent in His Creation. Feudalism is fundamental to Creation.
To map out the implications of Romans 9 consistent with the rest of God's Word: Once Egypt was destroyed according to God's purpose, Pharaoh was released from hardening and could have submitted to Jehovah. Our God is not vindictive and spiteful; His mercy is eternal. We can safely assume Pharaoh chose not to submit, but went back to his traditional deities. They surely called to him. The hardening Paul talks about in Romans did not result in eternal damnation, but a lack of earthly blessings under the Law of Noah.
Of course, this assumes that Pharaoh was not also hardened spiritually. While possible, it is not clearly stated anywhere. Being hardened in his moral commitments is sufficient explanation for his actions and the results.
In other words, Elect or not, the blessings of the Law Covenants are there within everyone's reach, sooner or later. God Himself flatly asserts as much in Micah 6:8. Deuteronomy 30:19 included all the Israelis who were not Elect; such a demand assumes the possibility of obedience. The power of the heart to submit to God as feudal Sovereign is there as a matter of human design, and every Law Covenant includes that requirement. Eternal election empowers that submission, but lack of election does not prevent it. That's how I read it.
The theoretical existence of exceptions -- the idea that some are eternally hardened and damned before birth -- doesn't change what God asserts for us, nor what He requires of us. The question was never a matter of what is, but what God requires of us.
If we understand the concept of the divine council, then we should also understand that a commitment from the heart can also be given to other, lesser beings. If the Law of Moses presumes an Israelite was required to give allegiance to his/her king, priesthood, clan leaders, etc., then it surely makes sense that humans can give their allegiance to members of the divine council, as Pharaoh surely did. The entire range of Ancient Near Eastern cultures uniformly assumed the supremacy of the heart over the head, and the capability of the moral will to submit in feudal vassalage beyond mere intellectual assent.
The peculiar danger of Western Civilization is in denying that there is a heart in humans that can operate on a moral level. Indeed, the West fundamentally denies the existence of the Spirit Realm and considers the moral realm a mere subset of the intellect. Culture has stolen the moral capacity of humans, so that conscious feudal submission to any deity is virtually impossible.
This flaw is equally fatal as the awful sins of the people before the Flood. This is what justifies the approaching solar catastrophes. I am in no position to comprehend, much less explain, what kind of rebellion this represents within the divine council, but I can comprehend just how radically threatening this is to human redemption. This is huge, and it is why Western Civilization cannot be saved. The whole thing is built on sand. If God ignores this, then He leaves a mass of humanity to miss out on a critical truth of human existence. It's a festering rot that would corrupt any hope of redemption in this life.
Yes, it remains a possibility that this is the End Times. However, there are yet only some 20 years left for one or more members of the divine council to provoke an attack on faith itself. Without that, we have a critical marker missing that God promised would warn us. On the one hand God said we cannot know the day and time. On the other hand, He promised that we would recognize that it was approaching because of how things were going.
Remember the Mark of the Beast? John's numerology behind the meaning of 666 could not reasonably apply to names in English. He referred to a Hebrew prophetic symbol, but revealed it in Greek. Neither of them uses a Latin alphabet. Whatever he's pointing at isn't going to make sense in English, nor any other non-biblical language. Because it's a Hebrew concept, it has more to do with the meaning of the name in question, not simplistic numerical accounting. The Hebrew meaning of 666 is "consistently falling short of God's standards", which standards would be symbolized as 777.
The NET Bible translates that verse best in English: "Let the one who has insight calculate the beast's number, for it is man's number, and his number is 666" (Revelation 13:18). It is mankind's number, always coming up short of God's standard. Whatever the Mark of the Beast means, it has to do with the quintessential nature of the Fall.
That crazy video about 666 with darkness, fire and horror completely misses the point John was making. Satan's agenda with us is not to deny that he exists, nor to inflate his power as a threat. Those are mere distractions. His ultimate goal is to convince us that what he proposes isn't rebellion, and that God is no better than any other member of the divine council. That's what he sold to Adam and Eve.
Whether you cooperate as a true believer (marked in the head) or simply play along out of self-preservation (marked in the hand), the Mark of the Beast signifies ownership. Do you belong to God's agenda, or something -- anything -- else?
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