Interfering with God

If you love son or daughter, mother or father more than Me, says Jesus, you cannot be my disciple. When you find yourself observing God's hand heavy on your dear one and they are suffering in their friction against Him, you will be tempted to sympathize with them and commiserate with them. But this is loving them more than Jesus. You are actually taking sides with them in sympathizing with their resistance against God and thereby yourself helping them resist God's work in their lives – not a very good position to be found in. You have made yourself unworthy to be called His disciple, for a disciple is one who is submitting to discipline and growing in sympathy and understanding of his Teacher and Lord.

What Happens to Heaven?

Why does God bring the New Jerusalem down to earth and move here instead of just moving us to heaven for eternity? Is it because He is so selfless that He wants us to be able to live where we are most comfortable in the universe with the familiar stars and solar system?

One reason that God may have for setting up His headquarters ultimately here on earth is to dispossess the seat of the kingdom of Satan.

What will happen to the place where heaven is now? Will everything be emptied out or will it become a vacation spot for the universe?

Mental Filters

Our limited capacity to learn necessitates having a filter to reduce the amount of information to a level we can absorb and make sense out of. Our filters are biased and molded and tightened by culture and bigotry. The new birth brings a new filter. We will always have a filter because of our limited ability. We always believe our filter is correct no matter how irrational. A mew filter must come supernaturally but it also must be chosen and accepted. A filter strengthens and grows by feeding on information that favors its bias.

There are two basic kinds/types of filters – those based on FEAR and those rooted in LOVE.

A fear filter narrows and restricts over time until it chokes out all counter information. A love filter zeros in on life-giving information and faces, and over time is able to expand one's capacity to think more broadly, more complex and with peace. An indicator of what kind of filter we are using is how we define the word “truth”. If truth means primarily information collected to buttress our bias, then likely you will find that fear is the adhesive used to hold it all together. If truth is a balanced discovery of life-giving relationships and information that contributes to explaining and enhancing those relationships, then you will likely begin to notice that compassion and love is the substance of choice to bind together the various materials and people that bring joy.

As a person moves from the 4+ level lower and lower in the brain he loses relational capacity, synchronization etc. Ironically sometimes he believes while he is moving deeper into isolation that in fact he is ascending into higher and higher truth. He becomes more intense in self-justification and becomes frenzied in assembling information and facts in his own defense. He believes himself to be approaching the very center of truth while in fact he is losing touch with reality because of his isolation of spirit. He insulates himself with facts so that he cuts off more and more channels of communication from outside his mind. Intensification of false reality leads to a self-justifying spirit which by extension is also an other-blaming, other-condemning spirit.

Growing awareness of true reality leads to more spontaneous compassion. To realize how and why someone is self-deceived can nurture pity, caring, concern and a warming that I too often suffer from self-deception and need latitude from others and protection from God while I grow.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness to most people means excusing the offense done against them and attempting to stuff or deny the internal pain they suffer. Inherently they realize there is something wrong with this but they sometimes try to force themselves to stuff the pain and push the memory out of their mind and pretend outwardly that everything must be OK because it is a religious duty to do so. This kind of forgiveness is driven by fear – fear of God not forgiving us if we don't forgive, fear of not looking religious to those around us, fear of condemnation even from our own conscience. But running away, hiding, pretending and fear do not heal. It only masks the deep reservoir of pain, bitterness and desire for revenge seething at our deepest level. But even that has to be hidden and denied for fear of condemnation.

What we really desire is for the offender to suffer at least the same pain we have suffered, but preferably much more. We want sweet revenge. We want to even the score and then some. And we think the only way to assuage our pain is to somehow inflict the pain back onto the offender, or at the least hope to see them suffer deeply from some other source while we gloat over their pain. This emotional belief has driven our belief about the nature of hell and our desire to view God sharing our emotions. We want God to feel hatred and vengeful like we do so we can be justified in our anger. If it's OK for God to punish in anger then we feel it's OK for us to indulge in it since we are in His image. But in fact – we are only creating Him in our image – and the image of Satan.

True forgiveness means acknowledging our pain, embracing it, exploring it, not hiding from it, not stuffing it. It means recognizing the source of the pain and who offended us and how much, but then choosing to take ownership of it instead of blaming. Blame assigns ownership of our pain to the offender and leaves the key for our freedom in their hand. But even if they try, they can't use the key to set us free. Only we can use the key to walk out of our prison. Facing and owning the pain and rejecting the false hope through blame and revenge releases the other person in our mind and allows God to heal the pain and truly set us free.

WYSIWYG

I believe that the WYSIWYG principle is exactly what is demonstrated in the events and lives at the time of Hell. What You See Is What You Get. What is very interesting is that this principle has been working itself out since the beginning of sin. As Lucifer began seeing an arbitrary God Who would refuse to forgive if anyone disobeyed Him, Lucifer himself refused to turn back while there was still possibility of his own forgiveness. “Memory recalls the home of his innocence and purity, the peace and content that were his until he indulged in murmuring against God, and envy of Christ. His accusations, his rebellion, his deceptions to gain the sympathy and support of the angels, his stubborn persistence in making no effort for self-recovery when God would have granted him forgiveness --all come vividly before him.” GC 669 What he insisted on seeing was an unforgiving God and his belief became his reality in fact – he placed himself in a permanent position of unforgiveness.

Then he applied the same principle to the angels he was deceiving and caused the same results in them giving the appearance that his views of God were in fact correct. What was actually correct was that he was creating his own god and then becoming a victim of it.