Comet Terror

God closed the door of the ark seven days before the rain began to fall in the days of Noah. There is a good theory that I happen to believe is very possibly true that the major natural cause of the flood was a comet that struck both the earth and the moon and possibly even the sun. If this theory is true then the comet would have been seen approaching the earth closer and closer causing increasing fear and finally panic. It may be that the reason God sealed the door of the ark one week ahead of the beginning of the flood was to prevent anyone from trying to save themselves inside the ark based purely on motives of fear. If the only reason they entered the ark was terror of the approaching comet instead of faith in God's warning and His word, then they would only be a liability and a curse that would perpetuate the condition of overwhelming sin that brought on the flood.

As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be....

Immature Saul

When Saul was converted in Damascus, Ananias argued with Jesus about trusting Saul. When he returned to Jerusalem the same fear was exposed in the apostles and they refused to fellowship with him until one radical believer stepped forward to bridge/stand in the gap.

We piously look at their fear and think we don't have that problem, but our actions and conversations betray us. Our prejudice toward people not of our denomination is a glaring example. And even within our own community our love and acceptance of those around us is based largely on their uniformity with ourselves. We are very reluctant to affirm anyone that has style significantly different than ours. If they don't have a similar level of implicit, blind, unreasoning dependence of SP as we do they are viewed at best with suspicion.

Affirmation of inherent value of others irrespective of their behavior is a concept that usually strikes us as heresy of a dangerous order. Conformity is valued as the most noble character trait and uniformity to our sub-culture in unquestioning obedience to a religious leader's teachings is considered godliness. We insist our children memorize the quotation, “It is the work of true education to develop this power, to train the youth to be thinkers, and not mere reflectors of other men's thought” (Ed. 17), but then subtly insist they give priority to reflecting our thoughts before they are taught (if ever) to think for themselves.

Saul did not fit in well to the apostles early church style. He was a very immature, highly enthusiastic believer, passionate about his new relationship to Jesus but rather abrasive in his presentation of his current understanding of the gospel. He had not spent the years with Jesus having his rough edges exposed and mellowed as they had done. He had experienced a radical conversion of grace, but had not yet become very graceful himself. He had always been immersed in the strong tradition that winning arguments is the sure sign of being right, and this notion still permeated his thinking as a new Christian. So with his keen, sharp mental prowess and his newly discovered insights and understandings of Scripture coupled with his unbridled passionate first love for his Saviour, he boldly launched into a campaign to convert all the Jews to Christianity not wholly unlike his previous campaign to do just the opposite.

In an interesting sense, Paul was acting like Moses when he killed the Egyptian and then had to flee for his life. Moses had caught a vision of his calling and moved to aunch into it decidedly and with gusto. But he had not learned important lessons about what God is like and how He relates to humans just as most of us have not. So too, Saul had to be sent away to incubate in the wilderness just like Moses to learn lessons of humility, grace, gentleness and true God-likeness before he could emerge as the highly efficient channel communicating God's grace as the apostle Paul that he later became.

So here is this enthusiastic ex-murderer running around town claiming to be a born-again Christian. And all the church establishment leaders suddenly are eclipsed in their level of commitment and consequently have their fears exposed again. Fear seems to always be the foundational problem for all our issues and dysfunctions. We have still not grown in maturity and trust in God to extinguish some deeper level of fear unknown to us previously.

So God creates for us a new dis-comfort zone to expose yet another unstable foundation of fear in our hearts as an opportunity to repent, confess and repair these foundations and fill up the breach with deeper revelations of truth about God Himself. (Isa. 58:12) It is primarily heart work that has to be accomplished, not doctrinal belief systems rearranged. Conforming our arrangement of facts to reflect the particular view of some religious group we ascribe to most often is a pious substitute for allowing true conviction of the real Holy Spirit to take root and break up the hard ground of our hardened, pain-filled hearts. We want to avoid real heart work at all costs because we know it will involve stirring up old buried pains and will challenge our pet beliefs and assumptions. In fact, our very identity will be threatened and subconsciously we are afraid that that will just kill us. So we hide our wounds under the camouflage of systematic theological arguments and well-memorized chains of texts and quotations so we can amass enough ammunition to win any arguments that someone may launch against us.

And this we label as “righteousness” or “holiness” or whatever the preferred terminology is in vogue in our favorite group. We cover over our wounds and ignore the wounded hearts of those around us as we champion our systematical arrangement of bullet-proof beliefs and whip up confidence among our comrades that we are marching in LOCKSTEP to Zion and to victory over sin.

But Barnabas had a different spirit, a free-thinker outside the box. Maybe he had personally been praying for Saul, the arch-enemy of Christians, for a long time as Jesus had taught him to do. He believed it was now time to lay hold on God's answers to their prayers and step out of the comfort zone, step out in faith in God's ability to do the impossibly amazing feat of capturing Saul with His love and grace. It was time to trust God and embrace his former enemy before all his questions were satisfied. He was in tune with the Spirit of God more than all the others and was willing to lay down his fears and in eager anticipation and humble vulnerability be came to Saul to listen to his heart. In doing so he got the scoop on the inside story and was able to be a campaigner of grace and an instrument of reconciliation used personally by God. Paul later taught this very truth – that we are all called to this ministry of reconciliation. (2 Cor. 5:18)

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Transform me into a Barnabas, a son of encouragement, a reconciler, stepping outside the box and rejecting fear.

(part 2)

Barnabas Attitude

When Saul was converted in Damascus, Ananias argued with Jesus about trusting Saul. When he returned to Jerusalem the same fear was exposed in the apostles and they refused to fellowship with him until one radical believer stepped forward to bridge/stand in the gap.

We piously look at their fear and think we don't have that problem, but our actions and conversations betray us. Our prejudice toward people not of our denomination is a glaring example. And even within our own community our love and acceptance of those around us is based largely on their uniformity with ourselves. We are very reluctant to affirm anyone that has style significantly different than ours. If they don't have a similar level of implicit, blind, unreasoning dependence of SP as we do they are viewed at best with suspicion.

Affirmation of inherent value of others irrespective of their behavior is a concept that usually strikes us as heresy of a dangerous order. Conformity is valued as the most noble character trait and uniformity to our sub-culture in unquestioning obedience to a religious leader's teachings is considered godliness. We insist our children memorize the quotation, “It is the work of true education to develop this power, to train the youth to be thinkers, and not mere reflectors of other men's thought” (Ed. 17), but then subtly insist they give priority to reflecting our thoughts before they are taught (if ever) to think for themselves.

Saul did not fit in well to the apostles early church style. He was a very immature, highly enthusiastic believer, passionate about his new relationship to Jesus but rather abrasive in his presentation of his current understanding of the gospel. He had not spent the years with Jesus having his rough edges exposed and mellowed as they had done. He had experienced a radical conversion of grace, but had not yet become very graceful himself. He had always been immersed in the strong tradition that winning arguments is the sure sign of being right, and this notion still permeated his thinking as a new Christian. So with his keen, sharp mental prowess and his newly discovered insights and understandings of Scripture coupled with his unbridled passionate first love for his Saviour, he boldly launched into a campaign to convert all the Jews to Christianity not wholly unlike his previous campaign to do just the opposite.

In an interesting sense, Paul was acting like Moses when he killed the Egyptian and then had to flee for his life. Moses had caught a vision of his calling and moved to aunch into it decidedly and with gusto. But he had not learned important lessons about what God is like and how He relates to humans just as most of us have not. So too, Saul had to be sent away to incubate in the wilderness just like Moses to learn lessons of humility, grace, gentleness and true God-likeness before he could emerge as the highly efficient channel communicating God's grace as the apostle Paul that he later became.

So here is this enthusiastic ex-murderer running around town claiming to be a born-again Christian. And all the church establishment leaders suddenly are eclipsed in their level of commitment and consequently have their fears exposed again. Fear seems to always be the foundational problem for all our issues and dysfunctions. We have still not grown in maturity and trust in God to extinguish some deeper level of fear unknown to us previously.

So God creates for us a new dis-comfort zone to expose yet another unstable foundation of fear in our hearts as an opportunity to repent, confess and repair these foundations and fill up the breach with deeper revelations of truth about God Himself. (Isa. 58:12) It is primarily heart work that has to be accomplished, not doctrinal belief systems rearranged. Conforming our arrangement of facts to reflect the particular view of some religious group we ascribe to most often is a pious substitute for allowing true conviction of the real Holy Spirit to take root and break up the hard ground of our hardened, pain-filled hearts. We want to avoid real heart work at all costs because we know it will involve stirring up old buried pains and will challenge our pet beliefs and assumptions. In fact, our very identity will be threatened and subconsciously we are afraid that that will just kill us. So we hide our wounds under the camouflage of systematic theological arguments and well-memorized chains of texts and quotations so we can amass enough ammunition to win any arguments that someone may launch against us.

And this we label as “righteousness” or “holiness” or whatever the preferred terminology is in vogue in our favorite group. We cover over our wounds and ignore the wounded hearts of those around us as we champion our systematical arrangement of bullet-proof beliefs and whip up confidence among our comrades that we are marching in LOCKSTEP to Zion and to victory over sin.

But Barnabas had a different spirit, a free-thinker outside the box. Maybe he had personally been praying for Saul, the arch-enemy of Christians, for a long time as Jesus had taught him to do. He believed it was now time to lay hold on God's answers to their prayers and step out of the comfort zone, step out in faith in God's ability to do the impossibly amazing feat of capturing Saul with His love and grace. It was time to trust God and embrace his former enemy before all his questions were satisfied. He was in tune with the Spirit of God more than all the others and was willing to lay down his fears and in eager anticipation and humble vulnerability be came to Saul to listen to his heart. In doing so he got the scoop on the inside story and was able to be a campaigner of grace and an instrument of reconciliation used personally by God. Paul later taught this very truth – that we are all called to this ministry of reconciliation. (2 Cor. 5:18)

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Transform me into a Barnabas, a son of encouragement, a reconciler, stepping outside the box and rejecting fear.

Probation and Emotion Ring

Hard-wiring the emotion ring in the brain. Any emotions without return paths to joy are not wired into the ring. This biological event happens very early in childhood. This is a perfect explanation of the close of probation. The time has come for the wiring to grow into place, to laminate for all humanity. Everyone who has not learned the paths to joy, who have put off practicing what they even understood intellectually, will be stuck where they have emotionally chosen to live. Intellectual understanding of all the truth and even knowledge of this fact itself will not equate to having an actual, experiential, rehearsed right-brain path in the “ways of God”, an intimate experience of what it means to be “holy”, a dedicated channel of the righteousness of God.

Those who have not been exercised and become compliant mediums of His passion will find themselves hardwired out of the inner circle of intimacy with God's heart. They are identified as filthy and unholy. They are satisfied with being common vs. being dedicated. They have resisted allowing God to finish removing all the garbage from their minds. They clung to their pain or their lies because they believed it was their identity. They would not completely die to their sinful identity and choose to fully embrace their identity in Christ by faith in His good will toward men. Because they insisted on believeing something, anything different about themselves than what God had declared them to be in Christ, God now has to respect their decision about their identity and allow them to be identified with their filth, no matter how small or large.

And if they have been unwilling to be 100% dedicated (the real meaning of the word “holy”) to satisfying the heart of God and bringing honor to His reputation, then they are declared “unholy”. This simply acknowledges they are for common use, mixing worldly thinking and feeling with heavenly thinking and feeling. They are unsafe for high intensity transmission, unfit for clean, uncluttered signals. They are what they insisted on pursuing.

Left-brain/Right-brain

When we experience a dissonance between the heart and the mind, between our right and left brain, it is described by the word “guilt”. God's original design was that the left brain should be a map, a guide, an index closely linked to the various areas of the right brain. The right brain is the seat of the heart (right brain literally controls the left side of the body where the physical heart is), emotions, desires, passion, mystery, intrigue – the fire of the soul. Sin seriously ruptured the close link, the symbiotic relationship between the two. It has been noted by Jim Wilder, an expert on the brain, that when the left and right parts of the brain are not in agreement about something, the disturbing feeling resulting from this dissonance is called guilt. As soon as the two are in agreement the result is peace.

There are two ways to get rid of the feeling of guilt. The feeling is the tension of discrepancy between left brain knowledge and beliefs and the right brain experience. Typically guilt occurs when we indulge in right brain pleasure that violates left brain rules and beliefs. The two sides launch into heated arguing and guilt is experienced. Repentance simply allows the right brain experience to align with left brain beliefs and the two are in unity and peace.

However, there are other scenarios. The left brain may have been taught false guidelines and rules. When the right brain lives life doing something that is by God's view not morally wrong but is viewed by the left brain as wrong according to tradition, culture etc., we experience what may be labeled as false guilt. In this case the real fault lies in the beliefs and rules, not in the experience, but the feeling of guilt and shame is still the same. The two sides are still arguing and there is no peace.

There are actually two resolution for guilt, not considering repression as a resolution. The first and best is to first check to see which side of the brain is truly at fault according to the Designer's guide instead of what has been programmed into the left brain. This is seldom done truly objectively. Most of the time this process is supposedly invoked it is really a cover for reinforcing culture and traditional norms rather that purely tapping into God's unaffected design for us. If God's truth is really allowed to be exposed many more instances of left-brain faulty standards would be revealed and much more heart-motivated actions would be vindicated.

The other resolution is more devious and subtle and in the very long term will prove to be only temporary. This is, when we experience guilt we choose to reassemble and manipulate our left brain belief systems until they agree with our experience. This is usually called explaining or excusing. Humanism is the result of this attempt and all modern psychology generally emerges from this.

The left brain is where facts, formulas, explanations and factual libraries that are retrievable on demand reside. It is where concepts, theoretical beliefs and doctrines are stored. The right brain is where relationships, sensory memories, emotions tied to events in the experiential memory banks are stored. It is where we thrill or hurt deeply. It is where the sparkle for our eyes is generated as well as the lust that leaks into our looks. Ultimately it is where God designed us to live from – our heart. This helps us to understand Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon better.

We were created in the image of a God who wanted creatures who could more accurately reflect the passion of His own heart more completely than any other beings in His creation. He designed humans to live with passion, joy, abandon, delirious excitement and with sparkle, zest and enthusiasm that far superseded anything yet seen in the universe. All this He embedded into the capabilities of the right brain primarily, entrusted to be a source, a channel, an extension of the same powerful emotions that could not be contained in His own heart. He designed humans to procreate with this same passion so that the human race, this outlet of expression of the passion of God, would be able to expand and grow and multiply as an ever-increasing capacity to express the infinite love bursting from His own uncontainable emotional reservoir.

Our left brains were designed to be a template, an index, a means of both understanding the right brain as well as a filter and a channel of input and regulation for the right brain. The left brain would be the primary seat for the safeguards, the filters, the formulas and equations, the logical, factual libraries for calculating reason and “level-headed” thinking. It was designed to be able to function somewhat independently if need be in a crisis if the right brain was temporarily off on an extreme emotional trip. But this ability would require training and mentoring by other balanced minds and many experiences of practice.

Since the right brain controls the blood supply to the left brain and will by default shut it down during trauma, it has to be trained, preferable at a very early age, to allow the left brain to remain online in a crisis and to trust its (hopefully) better judgment.

The great division in thought as to the ideal way to live falls along this very issue. Are we to live primarily from our right brain or our left? This has enormous implications in religion but is really seen in all philosophies of thought. Typically most answers are to a great extent strongly influenced primarily as a reaction to a demonstration of the opposite conclusion.

Those who observe “intellectuals” that shy away from emotion and shun passion are disgusted with the resulting atrophy of emotional capacity, enjoyment and expression, so they react by putting great focus on emotionalism and spend inordinate amounts of time and energy exploring and dwelling on their feelings, fears, pains and depression. Or they may amass all the exciting, positive, exhilarating ideas and techniques they can find and whip up themselves into artificial emotional highs and then call it God's presence. Many churches have followed this formula and can easily draw in large crowds hungry for emotional satisfaction.

Many others look on this scene with pious disdain and declare all the emotionalism to be shallow at best and out of touch with foundational truth. Consequently they build massive left-brain complicated explanations and expositions that require greater and greater mind capacity to even understand. They develop prestigious institutions of “higher learning” that invest greater and greater resources into refining, adding to, and fine-tuning the growing monster of intellectual knowledge. This system becomes highly stratified not only according to levels of individual amassment of condoned information but also by acquiescence to the strict rules of conformity to what is deemed important and what is snubbed as below the dignity of established acceptability.

A great deal of pride is woven all through this system and is generally legitimized by many rationalizations and pompous ceremonies. Human value is primarily determined by where one is placed in the strata with the upper echelons composed primarily of those who best hide their emotions and amass the most left-brain prowess. Those who cannot hide their right brain functions so well drop down the ladder and those who live with wild abandon and appear to just celebrate with not thought for what comes next are considered off the bottom of the ladder.

Obviously there are serious dangers at both extremes as well as everywhere in between. However, many of the dangers remain elusive to exposure because they lie in underlying assumptions that are never challenged. They have been embedded deep in the foundations of human thinking for so many generations they are assumed to be valid and necessary since we have built so much above them that is dependent on keeping these assumptions in place. It is very much like our world economic system today. If an alternative fuel to oil was really allowed to be developed easily or alternatives to drugs were allowed to operate freely the whole economic system could quickly collapse and political power would be in disarray. Primarily for the reason of control and the excuse of stability these underlying systems are highly protected from any serious challengers at any cost.

Back to the original line of thought near the beginning. I believe it is quite possible that God designed humans as a more complete expression of His emotional passionate characteristics than any being He had created up to this point. Because sin caused a major rupture in the symbiotic relationship between left and right, the same problem was created between us and God. Two primary results occurred, as previously noted, resulting in degenerating patterns and systems of living. One side invests heavily in sensory pleasure with less or more disregard for left-brain cautions, principles and safeguards. The other side overemphasizes rules, knowledge, and pride and slowly snuffs out the essence of being alive which is found only in freedom of the heart to feel and express and connect intimately and openly with other hearts.

Maybe in the new earth God is going to utilize humanity to imprint and map onto “His left-brain” creatures a more accurate index and understanding of “His right-brain” passion that can only be expressed through our unique capability.