Essay – Page 5 – Poetry, Short Prose and Walking

The River School of Healing

I just finished attending a two-week long session in February of the River School of Healing made available by Revival Ministries International (RMI) centered at Tampa Bay, Florida. If you are looking for a never-the-same-again transformation experience I highly recommend this.

I don’t have any life-threatening issue affecting me, but I know people who do. I wanted to know what healing meant in a biblical context. That is, I wanted to experience healing as a Christian. And I wanted to be confident I was doing the right thing should I recommend this school to my relatives and friends.

About the School

Although pre-registration is required, the sessions are free. They do accept donations to RMI during the last hour of the last day of the session, but only if the Holy Spirit tells you to do so. Participants themselves are responsible for transportation, food and lodging. A new two-week session starts every two weeks.

Being near the RMI campus there are opportunities to participate in other events such as The Stand every evening except Saturday from 7 pm to about 10:30 pm and Sunday services at The River Church. The instructors, PJ and DNA, of the healing school, led Night 1334 of The Stand.

Finally, this school of healing is NOT a medical school. If you are seeking that kind of training you will need to look elsewhere. The Bible is the only focus in the teaching and even that is from a believing, Holy Spirit led, Christian perspective.

The Two Bookends of the Session

In the classroom many Bible verses appeared on the monitors. The aim of the instructors was to revive us by getting us to receive those verses into our hearts so we could respond with our own words. This blog post is an example of such a response.

There were two verses that acted as bookends. Here is the first one:

Proverbs 17:22
A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.

That verse should make sense to everyone even to those reading this who aren’t smiling. So, receive it. Don’t take offense. Don’t just think, but receive. Then respond with joy coming out of your mouth. Be that person people want to be around because they know, whatever comes out of your mouth, that you don’t hate them. You might even, and probably do, love them.

The alternative is dry bones. The alternative is death.

Everyone knows this. So, why isn’t everyone merry and healthy? I don’t know of any meaningful justification for such deep rejoicing that does not involve the death and resurrection of Jesus, but no one is going to smile based merely on a theological justification for doing so. Every Christian with a frown on his face, or even a dumb stare, proves that point. They have the doctrine, that is, they have the logical propositions, but they clearly don’t have the heartfelt joy.

Nor do I know of any power whether that comes from some New Age meditation technique or some mind over matter gymnastics that opens the floodgates of rejoicing except what comes from the Holy Spirit. Without the death and resurrection of Jesus which makes you a child of God, a child of the Father, and without the power of the Holy Spirit within you there is only fake rejoicing.

We fake a merry heart through our various addictions and ideologies, but they lead to broken spirits which dry our bones. If you’re smiling right now with true joy that you can feel from your heart, treasure it as a supernatural miracle. Many have no clue what I’m talking about nor what you’re experiencing. It is the pearl without price.

Mark 16:18
…they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

This second bookend relates healing specifically to believers in Jesus. Believing Christians have the authority to lay hands on the sick in the name of Jesus with the expectation that the sick will recover.

It is important to keep in mind that this assumes those who are sick want to recover. This healing is not a magic trick nor is it a mechanical procedure. It does not go against the wills of those who are sick.

There are many people who feel so unloved that they want to die. They need to know that they are loved. There are some who don’t want to lose their disability benefits. They need to lose their fears. And there are some who just plain enjoy what they’re addicted to (sugar, porn, anger, dubious “highs”). They need to grow up.

Let’s exclude those classes of people who want to be sick (unless they choose to repent). The rest shall recover.

Testimony

When we think of healing in terms of having the authority to lay hands on someone and of recovery as a sign, testimonies become the way those signs are made known to others. So, if we’re sick and we honestly want to recover, we should be ready to give our testimonies. It is our joyful response to what we have received in our hearts.

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And that’s it!

That’s my testimony of how my view of the world changed in two weeks at The River School of Healing. I had a sick view going in without even knowing it, but I am seeing more clearly today. Thank you, Jesus! Hallelujah!

Either Stand in the Gap or Take the Mark of the Beast

Ezekiel 22:30
And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none.

Revelation 13:16-17
¹⁶And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
¹⁷And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

When I woke up this morning the dots were connected between these verses. If I’ve got this wrong let me know in the comments.

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Those with the mark of the beast show their support of the beast when they speak or through the things they do, because through their words or actions their support is visible to all just as if it were written on their foreheads or on their outstretched right hands. Those who stand in the gap refuse through their words and actions (indeed, even their unspoken thoughts) to be an advertisement for the beast.

We have a choice: either stand in the gap or take the mark.

Although this has been going on for thousands of years, it is hard to avoid today in the market place of ideas and in the physical things we buy and sell.

We can still repent and change sides. That mark is not a permanent tattoo. Although it is visible to all, it may be difficult to discern just what one is advertising and what one needs to repent of. If anyone is in doubt about what is true, remember what Jesus said and ask the Holy Spirit for help.

John 14:6
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

When we make sure we are standing in the gap,
we have rejected the mark.
When we reject the mark,
we become an offense which puts us in the gap.

Blessings to you!

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Also posted on Substack.

A Remembrance, Three Recommendations and a Song

Remembrance

I just heard that Oneta Hayes, a blogger whom I have read for some years, passed away on January 4th.

May the Lord bless the entire Hayes family and all of those who knew Oneta. Thank you, Jesus, for her faithfulness and love.

Three Recommendations

Jan writing in Mercy for the Day began the story, Book of Names, with the following:

Court documents were unsealed this week. Previously unpublished names were released. Trouble is. These people want to remain anonymous.

I wasn’t sure if I missed some political event which is likely since I don’t follow politics. Then I found out the story was going way beyond politics. The released names were those missing from the Book of Life.

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Pat Barrett’s book, Lives Forever Changed: My Spiritual Adventures With the Lord, recently became available from Barrett Publishing.

This is a book of Pat’s remembrances from 30 years of deliverance ministry written for those who would like to minister to people influenced by such darkness. It read like it could even be valuable for those suffering from such influences.

Pat told me that he was told that all we need do is get the hunger for the Lord out of our heads and into our hearts.

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Esperanza Dia (not her real name) published a memoir of faithfulness called Twisted Sisters of Bating Hollow: From Cult to Freedom: the Story of Hope.

With names changed she tells her story of 28 years in an Anglican nunnery where manipulators gained power and took advantage of the women who gave their lives to God. This is a story of how she was set free and how she continued to love Jesus even after the experience.

She helps lead a worship service at the Upper Room in Fort Mill, SC, which we often attend on Saturday evenings.

Song

Finally, a song I heard this evening that reminds me of Oneta Hayes.

Blessings to you this week.

Scripture as First Axiom and Its Circumvention

“Simply because the Bible has a different view of origins to those put forth in human philosophy, there is a period of conflict whenever the church comes under the influence of a human philosophical system. Thus, any defender of neo Platonism in Augustine’s day or of Aristotelianism in the late Middle Ages found himself in trouble with Genesis.” Noel K. Weeks, The Hermeneutical Problem of Genesis 1-11, originally published Themelios 4, no. 1 (September 1978): 12–19

There’s a lot of historical information in Genesis that one would not have imagined could have happened especially in the first eleven chapters, such as, the Lord’s creation in six days of everything from nothing, mankind made male and female in His image, the fall of mankind and its consequences for the world, the global flood that reworked everything, and the creation of language families as a response to disobedience.

Much of this is offensive to non-Christian philosophers whether they are promoting evolution, neo Platonism, Aristotelianism or whatever other rationalized treasure they have gilded with fool’s gold for our consumption. In Genesis the Lord gets so messy through His personal interactions with the material world and mankind that He becomes intolerable to philosophers hoping to be guided solely by the authority of logical deduction from a minimal set of axioms of their own choosing.

Admittedly, in perhaps the only defense of these philosophers, without being told any of these events most people would likely start just as they have done with simple axioms. If we didn’t know better, we would likely also have imagined a clean, transcendent deity removed from material interactions with the world except for occasional mental connections through psychic fields or forest faeries. Our philosophies would rely on uniformitarian processes based on patterns of material change we observed in the world without getting a deity involved rather than messy events we had no control over or, worse, were our own fault.

That’s what we would have done. The problem is, we’ve been told what happened. We don’t have to make those mistakes.

Genesis As a Test

Because of this potential conflict, a Christian could use Genesis as a quick test for philosophical error. Genesis could also be used to test whether a professed Christian has capitulated to some erroneous philosophy. If the Christian reinterprets or rejects what is in Genesis to make it conform with what is in some philosophy, then capitulation has occurred.

Here are some tests.
1. Has “day” been reinterpreted to mean “billions of years”? (Genesis 1)
2. Can the philosophy correctly count how many genders there are? (Genesis 1-2)
3. Has mankind, a special kind of creature made in the image of God, been replaced with talk about a human animal species evolving with other animals from primordial pond scum? (Genesis 1-2)
4. Does evil originate with a fall of mankind or does the finger get pointed elsewhere? (Genesis 3)
5. Was there a global flood that completely churned the face of the earth, set tectonic plates in motion, destroyed radioactivity as a clock, flipped the geomagnetic poles multiple times, raised mountains, allowed glaciers to form, filled the oceans, buried fossils, dug canyons, and left, since then, only about 5,000 years of non-biblical history or are there allegedly archeological sites still around dating from before the time of this catastrophic event? (Genesis 6-9)
6. Does the diversity of languages have a miraculous origin with the intent to disperse a rebellious population or did languages evolve over tens of thousands of years coming from pond scum which came from some explosion which ultimately came from what precisely? (Genesis 11)

Why Is the Test Important?

The historical events in Genesis are the context in which the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah and the prophecies of His return make sense. They are part of the revealed plan of salvation. The messy, but wondrously miraculous, events throughout this plan of salvation (past, present and prophesied future) characterize the Lord of the Bible as personal and powerful unlike any other deity ever offered by philosophy including New Age pantheistic projections of the human mind.

Without Genesis Christian salvation history would have no justification since there would be no need (no fall) nor way (no promised miraculous intervention) to redeem mankind. If Genesis were false as history, then Christian history and its prophetic future would be false as well. If one removed Genesis as history, the plan of salvation would unravel into a New Age philosophy of sentimentality and self-help where death, not life, dominated all available future outcomes.

The Guidance from the Authority of Scripture

From a philosophical perspective one might as well accept the history in Genesis as true no matter how messy it is. It does account for the world we see around us. Since the alternatives to it lead to death there is no point in wasting one’s brief lifetime in philosophical investigations at all if any of those alternatives were true.

However, once we accept Genesis as the history of what actually happened it becomes authoritative for our philosophy. If there is any conflict between our philosophy and Genesis, it is our philosophy that must change, not Genesis. The authority of Genesis guides the construction of our philosophy.

One way to make sure Genesis is that authoritative guide is to explicitly insert the authority of the entire Bible (which includes Genesis) as the First Axiom of any philosophical system or scientific theory we attempt to construct. Then as an axiom it would guide our intellectual system building by steering us away from error through the threat of derivable contradiction with that first axiom which is all that would survive such a logical collapse.

Circumventing the Authority of Scripture

One would think this would be an obvious thing for Christians to do. However, as Noel K. Weeks notes conflict can arise if the church comes under the influence of a human philosophical system. When under the influence of a human philosophical system such as atheistic evolution, neo Platonism or Aristotelianism a Christian philosopher would try to tweak Genesis to suit his needs rather than modify or reject his own philosophy.

For example, if the authority of Scripture were really guiding Alvin Plantinga, who was busy assigning God the task of guiding alleged evolutionary processes that don’t exist, he would never have written, Christian belief just as such doesn’t include the thought that the universe is young. As another example, if the authority of Scripture were really guiding William Lane Craig he would never have jumped into the pit of big bang mythology turning the personal Lord of Genesis into an impersonal first cause.

In both of these examples, Christian philosophers circumvented the authority of Scripture as a first axiom. They rejected the guidance that Scripture could have provided them in their philosophies to help them avoid error.

However, I doubt that either of them think they committed any error. In their minds they likely imagine themselves innocently coming under the influence of a human philosophical system that just happened to be offended by Genesis. They would likely see themselves as having nothing to repent of even if that philosophical system were later acknowledged as wrong since philosophy is little more than a hypothetical mind-game where no one gets hurt by false teaching. All such a defense would show is that capitulation to human philosophical systems results in delusion.

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Without God You Can’t Get There From Here

I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea for a great story. I take no credit for the idea. It suddenly manifested, but I was tired. It was like I found a shiny treasure on the ground and all I had to do was pick it up, but I was tired.

Since it was a great story and it kept repeating, I eventually did get out of bed and started typing. I wrote the following sentence.

Then Timothy said something else as if it all depended on his words, but it didn’t all depend on his words.

I knew I should have written more before I went back to bed, but I was tired. Since I knew what I should have done, but didn’t do it, I disobeyed. When I finally woke up and read that sentence, the bare bones of the great story, I realized I lost it. I am left with a reminder that disobedience brings consequences. Sure God loves me and all, but if I don’t want to receive a great story by waking up long enough to write it down how can I receive what I have chosen not to receive?

Here’s the point of this essay: Can I get that story back with my own mental abilities?

I don’t think I can, but that is because I don’t think these things come from my own mental abilities in the first place. I’m not a materialist. That noodle on top of my head can only do so much. All this applies to you as well, of course. Even if we pooled our heads together and used our best efforts we could not come up with that great story again.

Hopefully I finally learnt my lesson because this was not the first time I was too tired to receive a blessing. Knowing my tendency to get tired, I have even kept a notebook by the side of the bed so I have less excuse not to write what comes from dreams or even from thoughts upon awakening, but I still get tired.

I’ve got to stop letting my body tell me what to do.

If you really understand that you can’t get there from here you will not waste any time trying to do so. In the case of my story, I will wait for fresh inspiration and stay awake next time.

Inspiration comes from God. If you don’t believe in God, it doesn’t matter. Inspiration still comes from Him. However, those who deny God lose a Way Maker. He’s still there but they have to delude themselves by inflating their own abilities or the abilities of nature to pretend to get stuff done without Him. There’s nothing like delusion to help one come up with ways to go from there to here or here to there forgetting that without God, most of the time, you can’t get there from here or you’d wish you hadn’t if you did. Without God we get lost.

There are many ways people try to get there from here without God. Here are a few that come to mind.

You can’t get a starry universe from a big bang

Since an orderly universe exists those seeking to explain how it got here without God have a lot of explaining to do. Some think a big bang might work. If you are trying to get order out of chaos an explosion has to be the worst starting point.

To make a star after the big bang makes a mess you need a cloud of gas. Gravity brings the gas together, but only if it can overcome the pressure to expand by somehow staying cool. Assuming you do get enough gas compressed that it becomes a thermonuclear accident waiting to happen, you then need a star to come along and blow itself up to ignite that “protostar” so it can blow itself up as well.

At least that is how I understand the alleged process which suggests to some that the laws of physics can’t explain star formation.

You can’t get reality from simulations

The whole point of artificial “intelligence” is to reduce human intelligence to machine-executable instructions. Then human beings could be thought of as made in the image of a machine, rather than made in the image of God.

A simulation takes this further and reduces reality itself to computer code. For me a simulation nightmare would start with the thought of a teenager in his basement in a galaxy far far away deciding to simulate a universe and suddenly I find myself in it.

That’s when I’d wake up.

You can’t get a diversity of creatures from mutations

It is amazing how often those who want to get where they’re going without God rely on decay processes to do so.

In the case of biological evolution, if you want a new kind of creature without God creating that creature you start with a creature and hope random mutations will turn the creature into something else before the mutations decay the creature to the point that it can no longer reproduce.

Mutations are decay processes. They don’t add information; they destroy it. On the way to extinction one may get a large variety of the same kind of creature, mutated, for sure, but one doesn’t get a new kind of creature with a lot of fresh information for mutations to destroy.

One is always racing against the clock when one relies on decay processes or has to counter them. Having a gazillion years to get it all done doesn’t really help. All it does is give those decay processes more time to decay stuff.

Conclusion

Face it: you can’t get where you want to go without God’s assistance. Without God, you can’t get there from here. With God, you have a Way Maker. Without Him, why bother?

Just because I wake up with an idea, a gift from the Holy Spirit, for a great story does not mean I can go back to sleep and come up with that story again later on my own when I am awake. I didn’t get that story in the first place on my own. All I could do on my own is write it down, that is, receive it.

I will have to wait for the Holy Spirit to offer something new, perhaps, something like this essay as a kind of repentance for my disobedience.

https://youtu.be/n4XWfwLHeLM?si=7nl3O4S_PiDNuOOd

The Fairy Tale Bible Vs the Real Bible

The Fairy Tale Bible has the same words in it as the Real Bible. What makes it different from the Real Bible is that the words in the Fairy Tale Bible mean something different from what they mean in the Real Bible.

It is easy to get started with a Fairy Tale Bible. Go online and find any popular bible offered. To transform it into a Fairy Tale Bible rather than a Real Bible, don’t read any more of the book than you have to. This is the first rule regarding the Fairy Tale Bible. The second rule is to fake-read this bible by listening to New Age or atheist leaning commentators who will tell us what the text says since we aren’t going to be reading it ourselves anyway.

We can then babble about “evolution” or write poetic nonsense about “the universe” and pretend that we are just as “biblical” as the next guy.

Examples of Fake-Reading

Genesis 1

For example, if we were reading about the six days of creation in the Real Bible, we would understandably think of six 24-hour days because they have an evening and a morning and we know how to read.

To fake-read this in the Authorized Atheist Version of the Fairy Tale Bible we would let some commentator tell us that the word “day” means a gazillion number of years over which an unscientific process called “evolution” turned a random explosion called the “big bang” into stars, galaxies and people through chance events. The commentator may, or may not depending on how supposedly Christian he is, graciously give God permission to “guide” that unscientific process (which doesn’t actually exist) so God has something useless to do.

Admittedly fake-reading is a pathetic alternative to actually reading the Real Bible, but I suspect, indeed from my own personal experience I am convinced, that is how some people read the bible.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts – the whole NT

As another example, if we read about the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus in the Real Bible we would see these as real historical events with significance for ourselves and our families regarding repentance and salvation.

However, if we were fake-reading the Lalaland Edition of the Fairy Tale Bible we would read a commentator who’d compare what happened to Jesus to what happens in near-death experiences. Then we would listen to a commentator claim someone found the very box in which the very bones of Jesus were stored. And then we’d watch a movie based on a novel that showed us how Jesus and Mary Magdalen had children who became royalty in Lalaland.

Genesis 6-9

It doesn’t get any better when reading about Noah’s flood. In the Real Bible we would think of a global catastrophe which ultimately formed the mountains, glaciers, canyons and oceans that we see around us. Our praise and gratitude to God would be immense for His mercy in protecting those eight people along with two of each kind of breathing creature so they could have survived that event and we could be here.

Should we want to switch over to the Fairy Tale Bible all we’d have to do is pretend that flood catastrophe never happened or at least wasn’t global. We would see it as one of those goofy things primitive people without any brains make up. We’d blindly believe that “scientists” one day would be able to explain, or at least convince each other, how those mountains, glaciers, canyons and oceans got there.

Real Life Example of a Fairy Tale Bible Commentator

Consider what the philosopher and supposed Christian apologist William Lane Craig said about Genesis: There are hints in the text itself that a seven day twenty-four hour day Creation week is not contemplated by the author. (1:44)

In case you didn’t notice, Craig is reading “hints” which aren’t actually there, in spite of him saying “in the text itself”, rather than the actual words which are, indeed, in the text itself. Although I’ve been plenty gullible in the past, today, as soon as I hear words like “hint” about a bible verse I anticipate that I will be led down a rabbit hole the commentator himself can’t find his way out of.

It is also worth noting for those not familiar with fairy tale thought patterns that Craig said contemplated by the author, but not contemplated by Moses whom most people would recognize as the author of Genesis. This omission of the name “Moses” was likely deliberate. The point of the Fairy Tale Bible is to discredit the Real Bible as an historical document. One way to do that is to fictionalize the people mentioned in it. Here Craig is subliminally suggesting that someone other than Moses might have written Genesis to raise our suspicion about the truth of anything else in that book or in any other book in the bible.

If the Real Bible is history we would have to take it seriously. That is why historicity is attacked by those promoting the Fairy Tale Bible. Fairy tale commentators do not want us to take the Real Bible seriously.

Craig excuses his position in advance by saying, I think that the book of Genesis is open to a wide range of legitimate interpretations. (1:19)

That he has to make this excuse at all is a sign that he’s aware that his position is not what his audience is ready to accept. He wants to disarm any hostile reaction from them. Some of them may even see him as a heretic. To avoid such a charge up front he asserts on his own authority that the book of Genesis is “open” to “wide” interpretation.

Since Craig is a philosopher, it’s a fair question to ask him what it means philosophically for him to call his interpretation “legitimate”? Unless he’s an atheistic humanist believing that man is the standard of all things, it doesn’t really matter what he thinks. What matters is: Does God think his interpretation is legitimate? What evidence does he have that God agrees with him?

If Craig is honest, he would not be able to answer that question and so he would likely throw it back at me. He would demand to know: What evidence do I have that God agrees with me? My response would be that I am a reader of the Real Bible. My “interpretation” is neither more nor less than accepting God’s Word as it was written. Given his searching for hints that contradict the actual words in the text that would be a response Craig could no longer honestly give.

Craig also said, There is a very tiny minority of Christians today who believe that the world was created some ten to twenty thousand years ago. (0:45)

And he proudly proclaimed that he’s not one of them. Oddly, this analytic philosopher doesn’t seem to know that truth does not depend on a majority vote. His reference to “a very tiny minority” does sound like an underestimation to make his own position look better than it is.

However, even if his poll numbers were correct (which I doubt), being part of a remnant is not necessarily a bad thing especially if one considers the remnant entering by the narrow way in Matthew 7:13-14. You would have to be reading the Real Bible to even know those verses. So, just in case you aren’t, let me quote them. (The red emphasis, however, is mine.)

Matthew 7:13-14 (KJV)
¹³Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
¹⁴Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Admittedly, anyone who persists in fake-reading the Fairy Tale Bible will start thinking in fairy tale English, but the quantity of people suffering from a delusion does not make that delusion true.

Confession

The reason all of this bothers me is because I used to read, talk and think fairy tale English just as fluently as the next deluded babbler. I even tried to make sense out of atheistic big bang mythology using Craig’s Kalam cosmological argument.

But then I broke the first fake-reading rule. I actually read the Real Bible. Although I still listened to commentators, I didn’t just listen to questionable ones talk about it. I noticed that there was a history in the Real Bible that I do remember people, long ago, having mentioned but which I had forgotten. Then I became very suspicious of those commentators leading me into either an atheistic or New Age direction.

However, I can’t take full credit for this change of heart. If it were up to me alone it would not have happened, because I would not have had an experiential base for trusting what I read in the Real Bible. The Holy Spirit had to smack me around a bit.

It is helpful to realize that fairy tale English has two overlapping dialects: atheist and New Age. These dialects seem contradictory, but they actually complement each other. Each dialect contains its own blend of pseudoscientific speculation and magical witchcraft. That is, each dialect contains a different blend of Star Wars and Harry Potter, but otherwise they are pretty much the same delusion. What I have come to realize is that the Holy Spirit has nothing to do with either of them.

With results coming from the James Webb Space Telescope even atheists today are smartening up. Some of them now think that the big bang either didn’t happen (which leaves them with what?) or the mythical bang has to be pushed back another gazillion years to place it outside the falsifying reach of modern technology. Although they don’t appreciate it, they are at a fortunate crossroads where they have to start thinking and make better choices.

Craig thought he saw a crack in atheism because they hypothesized a beginning to the universe. He bought into their fairy tale of deep time and imaginary chance processes just to keep this hypothetical beginning afloat. Unfortunately he had to throw Genesis under the bus to do that.

When the big bang reaches the status of a falsified hypothesis (because it really makes no sense in any self-respecting atheistic, closed universe constrained by increasing entropy) I wonder how these compromising Christians will respond? May they repent as well as I did and may they start using their academic training to do real apologetics work in support of the Real Bible.

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It All Goes Back To Genesis 3

Genesis 3:1-5 (KJV)
Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
²And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
³But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
⁴And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
⁵For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

What would be the benefits as promised by the deceiving serpent of eating that fruit?

Your eyes shall be opened. You would become woke.
You shall be as gods. You, not God, would become the standard.
You will know good and evil. You, not God, would become the judge of others.

That is, all hell would break loose.

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For more details see Peter Wyns, Deceiving Spirits.

Revival Requires Repentance

Being lukewarm is a serious condition. It means running out of oil when one needs it most. It means missing the bridegroom. It means being locked out of the wedding feast because one’s lamp has gone out. (Matthew 25:1-13, Revelation 3:14-22)

The Spirit’s presence within us leads to a life that bears fruit. Those who submit to the Spirit will bear the fruit of the Spirit throughout the remainder of their lives or they will need to repent and receive once again the joy of revival that they could have had all along.

Galatians 5:22-23 (AMP)
²²But the fruit of the Spirit [the result of His presence within us] is love [unselfish concern for others], joy, [inner] peace, patience [not the ability to wait, but how we act while waiting], kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is no law.

How To Write a Poem

You need two things to write a poem. You need inspiration and you need to know a few techniques. I’ll cover one of the techniques called meter, but ultimately inspiration is what counts.

Inspiration

Before you can even begin to write a poem, you need something to say. Once you have that then you need words.

Occasionally you will hear poets talk about their muse who tells them what to say and how to say it. To avoid the distraction of Greek mythology, I will stop referring to a muse, which none of the poets who use that word in a modern context believe in anyway, and talk generally about a poet’s source of inspiration. However, the good thing about those poets who acknowledge a source of inspiration is that they know they themselves are not that source no matter how responsible they are for the final product.

Poets who do not believe in a source of inspiration give themselves full credit for what and how they say things. For them, poetry is self-expression. I would like to assert, so there is no ambiguity about my own views, that self-expression is tedious and overrated.

In addition as a poet you are always serving your source of inspiration. You are always serving that spirit who is inspiring you, helping you and comforting you even if you mistakenly believe that you yourself are that spirit.

That spiritual source of inspiration may be a good spirit. It might also be not so good. If you write about topics that glorify, incite or condone anger, lust or some habitually dysfunctional thinking in your readers, then your source of inspiration is not so good. The poem may sound nice and people may write mushy music to sentimentalize it, but that source of inspiration will remain, in spite of all that sugar-coating, not so good.

Once you understand that you are not expressing yourself when you write a poem but you are serving a spiritual source of inspiration and that source may be good or not so good you will begin to see what is morally at stake when you offer a poem to a reader. I hope you won’t mind me drawing the conclusion that any not so good source is a demonic source. It is out to get you so it can use you to get others.

I see the good source of inspiration as the Holy Spirit, a Person of the Trinity with Whom the poet can enter into a relationship. I identify the demonic sources with spirits of antichrist. They are deceivers who manipulate those foolish enough to play with them.

Bottom line: Writing a poem is not a neutral artistic expression of oneself, but a moral act of service to some spiritual source of inspiration. Make sure that spirit is the Holy Spirit.

1 John 4:3
And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.

Technique

Once you have a topic, you will need to express it. Although the words may come to you from the Holy Spirit, you need to make it melodious. In English that means paying attention to meter.

Meter is the pattern of accented and unaccented syllables in the words you use. The most memorable, and influential, poetry repeats metrical patterns. Some of these patterns are given names such as limericks or common meter, sonnets or blank verse. Others are specific to the poem itself.

As an example, listen to the song, What a Beautiful Name, and try to note which words are accented and which are not in the lyrics. In particular there are four stanzas in this song with an almost identical metrical pattern except for an unaccented syllable on some lines. I’ve listed two of those stanzas below. The ACCENTED syllables I put in italicized bold red capital letters. The unaccented syllables I wrote normally.

YOU have no RI-val.
YOU have no E-qual.
NOW and for-E-ver, GOD, you REIGN.

YOURS is the KING-dom.
YOURS is the GLO-ry.
YOURS is the NAME a-BOVE all NAMES.

Were you able to find the other two stanzas?

If so, you know what meter is. You know why those lyrics are powerful even without the music. Make your poems memorable by using metrical patterns.

If not, great! You now have an opportunity to start building your relationship with the Holy Spirit by asking Him to show you what you don’t understand. If you don’t think He’ll talk to you, ask Him anyway, sleep on it and wake up refreshed. Then thank Him regardless what you hear. Giving thanks means you acknowledge that you are in a personal relationship with Him.

Conclusion

There are many tricks that will help any poem be more powerful no matter what the source of inspiration. They are just techniques. One could even program a computer, which is neither intelligent nor inspired, to follow the meter and other aspects of the sound of a poem.

Ultimately what matters is the source of inspiration. To write a poem you need to first choose whom you will serve.

And that’s all there is to it.

Joshua 24:14-15
¹⁴Now therefore fear the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in truth: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the Lord.
¹⁵And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Guided Evolution

About seven years ago I was studying the Christian analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga. I think I actually reached a point where I could explain the details of his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). However, I see now that I didn’t understand what was really at stake. Because he was a Christian and an analytic philosopher I assumed he was someone I could trust. Today I see much of this very differently and I am hopefully not as gullible.

The Capitulation

Plantinga’s argument pitted evolution, which he didn’t seriously question, against naturalism, which he rejected, to try to show that if you believed in evolution, you should not believe in naturalism. The problem with his argument, logically sound though it was, is that he thought he could separate out evolution to save it from the false atheistic mythology of naturalism.

To his credit Plantinga argued for a special kind of evolution which he called guided evolution. Based on this idea he hoped to resolve the alleged conflict between science and religion by compromising with, that is, capitulating to, atheism rather than rejecting it. He wrote in Where the Conflict Really Lies, (2011) page 11, the following:

A more important source of conflict has to do with the Christian doctrine of creation, in particular the claim that God has created human beings in his image. This requires that God intended to create creatures of a certain kind—rational creatures with a moral sense and the capacity to know and love him—and then acted in such a way as to accomplish this intention. This claim is clearly consistent with evolution (ancient earth, the progress thesis, descent with modification, common ancestry), as conservative Christian theologians have pointed out as far back as 1871.

While it may be clearly consistent in some logical system to assume the existence of a god, such as the fictitious Gaia, to guide evolution, that god could not have been the Elohim of Genesis 1 who finished creation in six days. That god who guided evolution could not have been the Christian God.

Ignoring Genesis

Faced with such a complaint a Christian who supports evolution, even if it is just physical/chemical evolution of planets, stars and galaxies, has to rationalize how six days can be interpreted to mean a mythologically large number of years. Plantinga does this far too quickly by dismissing young earth creationism on page 10 with the following:

Of course Christian belief just as such doesn’t include the thought that the universe is young; and in fact as far back as Augustine (354-430) serious Christians have doubted that the scriptural days of creation correspond to 24-hour periods of time.

He even admitted (footnote, page 144) that his resolution of the conflict between science and religion is not concerned with belief in a universal flood or with a very young earth. According to him, these are not part of Christian belief as such. On this ground alone Christians should reject his argument.

Redefining “Evolution”

To make his theory work he not only had to ignore Genesis, but he also had to redefine evolution to allow for creative activity of some sort. However, the very point of evolution is to come up with natural processes that completely account for changes that take one from nothing to something, from non-life to life and from pond scum to human beings without involving the creative activity of any God, angel, demon or human being.

On this ground alone even atheists should reject his argument. It doesn’t matter whether he finds it clearly consistent to add in creative agents. According to atheist mythology they are not wanted. Atheists don’t need them. His EAAN argument attempts to show that such views, however, are not reasonable, but why should that matter to atheists who rely on randomness, not rationality, and can fantasize a multiverse of universes in which to play atheist roulette?

Christian Alternatives

Confronted with evolution the Christian has three options:

Accept evolution and become an atheist.
Compromise (capitulate) in some way as Plantinga has done.
Reject evolution along with the rest of atheist mythology.

This may cause some people grief. No one wants to capitulate regarding their faith. However, there is no need for grief. It is a rational and scientific stance to reject evolution. Just ask yourself: what repeatable, measurable, non-creative, natural processes can you use to explain how nothing (not even a quantum vacuum) can turn into something? There are no non-creative, natural processes that can explain such a transition. That means physical evolution is atheist mythology. It is neither scientific nor rational to hold such a belief.

Continue this line of thinking. What natural processes exist that allow one to go from pond scum to human beings? If someone suggests that mutations and natural selection might work, then remind them that those processes lead to mutational meltdown (extinction). They do not lead to more complicated beings, but rather to less complicated ones. That means biological evolution is also impossible. One should reject it with the same conviction that one rejects the rest of atheist mythology.

The problem with evolution is the problem of building a house of cards without a creative agent. In the real world, not some magical, mythological world the atheist would love to live in, if you want to get a house of cards you need a human being, a creative agent. You need someone to build it. Natural, non-creative processes, such as a gust of wind and gravity, can surely knock that house down. Natural processes, however, cannot build it. That takes a creative agent, but evolution does not acknowledge them.

Ancient Earth

Plantinga describes evolution in these terms: ancient earth, the progress thesis, descent with modification, common ancestry. Note that without an ancient earth there would not be enough time for the rest of that mythological stuff to happen. On the Bible’s timeline of less than 8000 years there is no time for the progress thesis, there is no time for descent with modification and there is no time for common ancestry to occur.

Everything Plantinga wants to protect about evolution depends on an ancient earth, but what is the evidence for that?

Human history does not record more than 5000 years and even much of that is sketchy. There is no evidence for an ancient earth here.
Axiomatizing relativity with the two-way speed of light being what is constant in all frames of reference permits a convention of simultaneity where distant starlight arrives on earth in less than a second of time. There is no evidence for an ancient earth in distant starlight either.
Measurable, non-catastrophic, natural decay processes put upper limits on the age of anything they go about destroying such as rock formations, radiocarbon in diamonds, soft tissue in fossils and genetic code. These decay rates directly falsify the mythological ages assigned to rock formations, diamonds, fossils, and DNA. There is no evidence for an ancient earth when natural decay processes are taken into account.

Fulfilling Prophecy

Rather than trying to help atheists maintain their mythologies, Plantinga should have pointed out that evolution has never occurred and that the earth is not as old as atheists would like you to believe. Why didn’t he do that? Why did he add atheist mythologies to his Christian presuppositions? I think 2 Timothy 4:3-4 (NIV) tells us why:

³For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. ⁴They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.

Alvin Plantinga is an example of the fulfillment of this New Testament prophecy. Logically there is nothing wrong with the EAAN. It just doesn’t address the right problem which is the need to reject, not capitulate to, atheist mythologies. That capitulation turned Plantinga’s ear away from the truth and toward accepting myths.

Admittedly I used to be an example of this prophecy’s fulfillment as well and maybe I still am in ways I am not yet aware of. That is why I am writing about Plantinga’s EAAN and his claimed resolution of the conflict thesis. I want to make sure I put this stuff behind me having already repented of ever considering it helpful.