I have been watching videos to better understand the Epistle of Jude. I wanted to know who those false teachers were that Jude warned the believers about and what was their message. While reading through John Gideon Hartnett’s post Bridge to Babylon and following his links things started to make sense even though Hartnett did not mention Jude at all.
Here is the bottom line as I currently see it. The false teachers used gnostic philosophy to discredit Jesus as our Lord and that conceptual error led to moral depravity.
There’s got to be more to it than that, but that’s how I see it at the moment.
η γαρ αποκαραδοκια της κτισεως την αποκαλυψιν των υιων του θεου απεκδεχεται
Does an extraordinary claim require extraordinary evidence? If one thinks of ordinary as natural, something one can see, touch or measure, and one thinks of extra as super, then it might make sense to transform extraordinary into supernatural just to help us see what’s at stake. From that new perspective, a supernatural claim would seem to require supernatural evidence.
True, some proudly deny the supernatural entirely. They might as well deny the extraordinary itself, but such a denial would itself be an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary or supernatural evidence to justify it.
Pause for a moment.
Without the supernatural there would be no words to describe the ordinary if the ordinary could exist at all. That we take words for granted does not mean they are ordinary or can be completely reduced to something natural. We are just used to the extraordinary, the supernatural, pervading our lives in spite of our denials.
Furthermore, we use these words that are extraordinary to form presuppositions, or believed assumptions that cannot be reduced to the ordinary, in order to rationalize those very denials.
Those presuppositions are part of our spiritual environment. Can we change our minds? From this environment do we produce wholesome fruit worth offering to our loved ones? Can we repent if that fruit is rotten? Can we be forgiven?
We sink into the waters aware of those presuppositions, those mundane, questionable, unwholesome, but extraordinary claims. As we are brought back up, having repented, having changed our minds, the Lord renews in us a right spirit and creates in us a clean heart.
As expected the corrupt judge released the assassins back onto the streets. Their attorney filed a complaint against the officers who made the arrests, but no one at the station knew who those officers were. Not even the medics in the ambulance who received the assassins with all the paperwork neatly printed out could identify them.
Since the surgeon who removed the bullets from their arms didn’t notice the tracking devices that the shots were intended to deliver, once the assassins were released Helen began logging their journey.
Pointing to her monitor, Helen said, “The way these guys wander about the city I wonder if they took the blue pill or the red pill.”
When Headquarters collapsed the surviving complicit agencies frantically made attempts to cover their tracks by assigning two hitmen to take out Bill and Timothy inside a bar. Upon entering the bar the hitmen noted the location of the barmaid and a quarrelling couple along with their primary targets.
In more civilized times opponents, in theory, would face each other on dusty streets with cemeteries in full view where one or both would be forced to rest in peace while the decent folk got out of the way.
Today when the two assassins with bitcoins dancing in their heads drew their weapons the quarrelling couple stopped quarrelling and, in spite of shots being fired, arrested these valuable sources of information on this side of eternity.
After the couple escorted the hitmen out of the bar Timothy permitted the owner with his clientele back in. Although Bill tried to convince them, scoffers all, that they were filming an action movie, it was only when the barmaid handed the owner and each of his customers envelopes generously stuffed with cold, hard, fiat cash that everyone was happy.
The men’s group I participate in will study the Book of Jude three weeks from now. So I need to prepare and I wonder if any of you have recommendations that you’ve found helpful.
After reading various translations of this short letter, I sought David Pawson’s perspective. I’ve found his Unlocking the Bible series to be helpful in the past. So I listened to the following lecture again.
Pawson noted that Jude referenced the very long Book of Enoch which is not part of either the Catholic or Protestant canon. Although I will try skimming some of that, I am aware that I might be staring at the entrance of a large rabbit hole. I have Alice’s curiosity, but I pray that I don’t lack the gift of discernment.
This wasn’t Timothy’s first rodeo, but the corruption went deeper than he suspected. The interrogations after the fall of Headquarters led to the whereabouts of additional missing people, mostly children, more than he had anticipated.
“Do you think we’ve found all of them?” Helen asked.
Helen first met Timothy when she was investigating the kidnapping of his own daughter a decade earlier. She remembered him telling her during their month-long search that his prayers left him convinced that his daughter had always been in stronger arms than his own even before they found the body.
As to whether they located all of the victims, Timothy said, “I hope there will never be any more.”
Helen laughed when she heard Headquarters claimed Bill was killed in the raid. “They don’t even know who Bill is,” she said. “The agents we arrested in that kaleidoscope of tunnels made plea bargains before Headquarters heard anything of it.”
“I wonder when the rats will start running.” Timothy added, “I hope they think it’s safe to implement the spider protocol.”
I am trying to learn Hebrew. I hope to get far enough to be able to read Genesis. I thought I knew the first verse already, but with a little exposure to what I don’t know even that verse remains a mystery.
The first thing one needs to learn is the alef bet. Here’s a song to help with that which I found among the many helpful videos on the Hebrew with Mayim channel. One can also learn these letters from the Learn Hebrew With Daniel channel, and many other places. Although that eye makes me suspicious, I figure if I ever understand this video I would finally know the alef bet. I’m not there yet.
One approach to creation is to think of God creating the Hebrew language first and then using that language to speak reality into existence out of nothing. That seemed to be Rabbi Mordechai Kraft’s message. His talk fascinated me from the beginning to the abracadabra at the end.
Rabbi Michael Skobac goes into this in even more detail. Perhaps there is also a code in the Torah as Rabbi Moshe Zeldman suggests. All of these people have convinced me that Hebrew is a language set apart, a holy language, perhaps very close to the “Edenics” spoken in Eden according to Isaac Mozeson.
So I’m trying to learn Hebrew and combine whatever I might ultimately learn with a Christian perspective.
Back in freezing Chicago as snow plows uncovered a buried street, Timothy learned at Headquarters that the raid in Miami killed his partner Bill. He delivered the zip file and reported the compromised safe house.
Timothy hoped Bill’s raid was successful, but he knew that any intel he’d receive should be viewed as psyops. Still, scraps of it might be true. From his back door to their communication system he identified and then disabled the assassin they hoped would take him out once he left the building.
Walking down the street with fresh snow falling Timothy smiled to think that those whiz kids at Headquarters wouldn’t believe how few bits he had to flip in that zip file to plow away their covers and expose them.
Poetry, Short Prose and Walking 