25 October 2023
Think it through, folks. God gave us brains, not to run the show, but to organize and implement our response to His divine call. The heart runs the show; it is the part of you that is able to commit to Him. The brain cannot do it. The heart is directly connected to your spirit. Our spirits are dead without His Spirit's Presence. He does not speak to the intellect; He speaks only to the spirit and through the heart. It is the heart that directs the intellect.
In a sense, divine election is another way of saying that God has already marked one's spirit for His Presence. This is not something that takes place within the space-time continuum; it is eternal in nature. The question is not whether His Spirit is there; it's a question of when your conscious awareness (within space-time) becomes aware of it. That, in turn, enables the redemption of your fallen human existence.
Such redemption of this life is limited. This human existence will not go to Heaven; your spirit and heart are going and your flesh will perish. Some portion of your conscious awareness is going. The human conscious awareness is not a thing unto itself; it is merely a manifestation of the interaction between your mind and your heart.
All of this is parabolic talk, symbolism because clinical truth is simply not possible. What I wrote above will bump up against the limits of rational explanation. The problem is that reason itself is limited; don't extrapolate too far, our you'll be off into falsehood. What I've given here is not ultimate reality, but a working model. It permits us to participate in His redemption while stuck in our fleshly nature. This allows us a frame of reference so that our minds can organize and implement a response to faith.
From this frame of reference we can shovel a lot of crap out of our minds.
The starting point is recognizing crap for what it is. In this model (or parable), the crap is a growing medium for lies that keep us from living in the fullness of Christ's promises. The weeds of deception can obscure vision and produce fruit that invites evil spirits, and releases pollen all over the place, consuming resources, keeping us weak and ineffective. It defiles our bodies, the temples of the Lord.
The first pile of crap I want to point out is the western mythology of childhood. In particular, it is the false doctrine of childhood innocence. If we were using the word "innocence" as a symbolic term, as it is used in Scripture, then it wouldn't be a problem. However, western minds read that literally. The honestly believe that when children under a certain age die, they automatically go to Heaven.
The biblical Doctrine of Election denies that flatly. If a child is Elect, only then do they see Eternity. Children without election go to Hell, in the symbolic language of the Bible. This is part of the broader lie that everyone starts off somehow morally neutral, and that they have to do something to warrant missing Heaven. This, in turn, depends on the lie that Satan is lord of death and Hell. He is not; he is the Prince of the Fallen Realm -- this world. Every human is born under his authority by virtue of simply being born mortal. Human flesh belongs to Satan.
The whole doctrine of Age of Accountability is a twisted lie. Children are mortal; they belong to Satan. And Satan's realm is this world, not "Hell" -- unless you understand "Hell" as this fallen world. Get this: the word "Hell" is a symbol, because the literal truth is not possible to state in any human language.
We do get a glimpse of things in the Parable of Lazarus. The Rich Man (historically called "Demas" in religious literature) is tormented in death, while Lazarus rests in the "bosom of Abraham" (the image of being cuddled like a child). And while there is a gulf fixed between them, we nonetheless have the Old Testament image of God's enemies held in His Presence in Eternity as enemies, not as family or friends. The "gulf" is that their fate was settled before they died. There is no longer any possible redemption.
Paul's discussion of election in Romans is not something he dreamed up after his conversion. It is an Old Testament doctrine. Paul goes out of his way to declare something verbally that genuine Hebrew scholars believed long before. In the Hebrew world, everyone already understood this, so it was not necessary to comment on it. Because everyone already understood these things, they spent more time talking about what the truth of the Unseen Realm required of them. But in the case of the Roman Christians Paul addresses, it becomes necessary to openly state Hebrew assumptions to Gentiles who had no Hebrew background, people whose worldview and assumptions about reality lacked the revelation of the Unseen Realm God had granted the Hebrews.
What Paul said in Romans is supported by doctrinal revelation in the Old Testament. But those statements in the Old Testament assume you already knew about election. It's the same issue that Dr. Heiser deals with in explaining the Unseen Realm. We have to go back and reexamine what we read in the Old Testament from an Old Testament point of view, so that we don't miss little cues that indicate just how far off track we are in our post-modern western assumptions.
So, for this post, I want you to contemplate this: Children are not born innocent in the sense of their moral condition. They are morally undeveloped, but still fallen. A lot of adults are still undeveloped. There is nothing "magical" and wondrous about being undeveloped; it's a big pain in the ass for everyone else. With children, that's normal. As parents or relatives, we have an instinct to protect them from lies and moral perversion. The discovery of moral truth is wondrous, but the crap we feed them with western pagan fairy tales is deadly.
There is nothing sacred about childhood itself.
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