Addendum to Notes on the Apocalypse

I decided it was necessary to add a final chapter to my book on John’s Revelation. It’s a prophetic review of where Dispensationalism comes from. This is the text in it’s current form:
Addendum: A Brief History of Dispensationalism
We won’t name names and define the vast jargon of various wild heresies regarding the End Times. Here we simply outline the story in general prophetic terms. If you feel led to study this mess, here is the single most recognizable term: Dispensationalism. With that, you’ll have the most easily identified gateway to a vast land of religious stupidity. Dispensationalism is a fancy word for a heresy now already old. It refers to dividing human history into periods of time under distinct covenants or “dispensations” from God. It misreads all of Scripture by rejecting the Hebrew mystical viewpoint of God’s revelation. As such, it participates in the same fundamental error of Judaism and the Talmud by embracing Hellenism.
Reading through the New Testament, we see where this false epistemology first destroyed Old Testament religion and became a primary point of conflict between Jesus and the Sanhedrin. While paying lip service to the idea of a Spirit Realm, Hellenism renders it meaningless by asserting we cannot use the concept of a separate eternity for any meaningful discussion of how men should live. This disembowels the reverence for God and His holiness, killing off the ancient assumption that man has a spirit which can connect with eternity and feed truth back down to the mind. This leaves humanity stuck with nothing higher than reason and intelligence as the means to evaluating sensory data. It also rips away the understanding man is fallen, including a fallen mind and intellect. It makes a god of reason. Placing the mind on the throne of human choice is the fundamental nature of eating the Forbidden Fruit in Eden.
God showed the futility of trying to fix the problem from the human end. A part of Moses’ Covenant was offering the national failure of Israel as proof. As Lord of all things, God steered human events to bring about a particular intellectual background best suited for revelation. We are granted glimpses of His firm steering hand on history through the early chapters of Genesis. Right after mankind was driven out of Eden, men began seeking how to claw their way back into Paradise by any means possible. It ranged from the rise of science and technology to delving into the dark corners of black magic, even playing with demons. It became utterly untenable for mankind to have that sort of freedom, as the whole world was quickly running directly into the mouth of Hell. There was no way to protect those few who had begun calling on the Lord in worship. So God killed off that first round of human failure and started over with Noah. The Covenant of Noah demanded men stand up, as Adam had not in Eden, and govern their own households as good shepherds.
It is not important to understand all the historical details which man’s mind so dearly loves. God clothes the facts in a narrative which gets down to the point of what He demands of us. To survive on earth with any hope of claiming what little good the Lord salvaged from the Fall, we must do things His way. We must seek ways to subject our fallen minds to a moral standard He revealed in the form of a framework of justice. The mystical approach is necessary, woven into the fabric of His revelation.
There was another failed attempt to ignore His revelation in the Tower of Babel. God had ordered Noah to spread out and build human communities that were tribal and somewhat closed. Mankind decided to unite themselves in one big tribe under a single chieftain who was a fearsome predator, not a loving shepherd. So the Lord enforced His original decree by making it impossible for humans to unite in communications. It’s one thing to be at peace with your neighbors, but you cannot possibly obey God’s revelation and cling to His moral imperatives if your communities aren’t clannish in the sense of small and somewhat insular. This is fundamental to human nature at its best, contrary to what most of modern philosophies assert. No one has any business meddling in your daily affairs who isn’t related by blood or covenant.
Arising from this scattered and mixed multitude of isolated cultural backgrounds was Abraham, a fellow with an education perfectly fitting him for God’s traumatic calling. Abraham left behind everything he valued as a human, took with him that deep mystical educational background and put it into practice as a nomad with little attachment to the comforts of this world. At the end of his life, his sons understood the world from a frame of reference as near perfect as possible for fallen humanity. In order to prepare the land in which they were to build a better understanding of life here, they had to leave while God did the work necessary. First, the worst of humanity needed one last chance to make things as bad as could be. In no human writing do we see anyone saying good things of these people and their ways. When His chosen nation was large enough for His plans, God brought them back to take control of the land and slaughter the loathsome inhabitants. In the process, He made life in that foreign land so unbearable for His people that they should have been eager to leave their temporary home. He even destroyed the entire collection of cults which had delved so deeply into black magic there in Egypt in the process.
His people were not ready and He had to kill off a whole generation of them until another culture arose which reclaimed the odd mixture of high intellect and mystical detachment which characterized Abraham, their ancestor. With a bit of training, they were able to conquer like few primitive nations ever. They overcame numerical and technological superiority at every turn by their trust in moral purity, yet utterly failed every time they forgot it. They had all the advantages, since the Creator Himself wrote the whole story of revelation, editing out all the junk mythology that hid His ancient truth. Once they held the territory, they lost no time in devising any number of ways to forget their past purity. Over the course of centuries, these people best prepared to build a path to the gate of Heaven kept running off to Hell. Even when God found ways to punish His people, they kept finding in the punishment itself new ways to depart from the one path of truth.
At about the same time, Satan sensed his opportunity to create an intellectual driving force to destroy the ancient mystical assumptions held by virtually all of humanity. Bit by bit, each new wave of imperial conquest bore with it a cultural and intellectual conquest which pushed human minds farther and farther from the truth. Satan turned these forces directly against the people of God, enticing them to leave the harsh nomadic life of simplicity, to embrace the urban delights of materialism. God’s people bought it all.
Their ultimate failure was directly attacking His truth in human form. Fundamental to their decision to attack God was a complete rejection of His written record of revelation. Clinging to the words and external trappings of His revelation, they tossed aside all the equipment necessary to use those words. They were Hellenized, adopting a broad mixture of intellectual assumptions that fundamentally excluded God from everything, even as they ran around waving His name over their hideous perversions. In essence, they replaced their God with their own intellects.
The grand story fizzled to a sad end. The one nation best equipped to understand God Almighty turned on Him. As if it were an experiment in a class to prove His point, God showed how the ideal setting with the direct revelation of His truth would not offer mankind a path back to Eden. When they arrived before the Flaming Sword, they could not pass because nothing on this level of existence could prepare them for it. Having made that point, God then revealed why the best He could offer that way was to give men a decent existence on this plane. That offer remains open to all humanity until Time is no more. Meanwhile, the only way to Eden had always been to face the Flaming Sword directly. So in Jesus He threw open a direct path to that Sword of Truth. Let men die in the flesh first, then discover what it meant, what it demanded of them. He saw to it the legacy of His revelation was preserved through that failed nation as something to study after facing the Sword. Die first, then begin a new life working your way backward across the narrative of revelation, back to Eden’s gateway.
This is what nailed Jesus to the Cross. Christ rose from the grave to prove He was right and they were wrong. His own people strove mightily to put Him back in the grave by murdering everyone who followed Him. The message of truth only spread farther for it. When physical violence proved pointless, they substituted a more subtle attack. Using the very same false epistemology which destroyed their own faith, Jews tried to pervert Christian teaching by emptying the gospel message of its mystical truth. This Hellenistic attack was taken up by Gentiles under the guise of Gnosticism. The Jews drifted farther into Hellenism, and could scarcely find their way back to the mystical truth. Most Gentiles in that part of the world never had a taste of Eastern mysticism, so Hellenism was something they had to actively flee. Spiritual birth was handled by God, but actually following Christ was a very large undertaking against many enemies. Eventually Rome renewed the physical violence with a passion and efficiency Jews could not have imagined.
Christians had no friends in the world. Satan raised up a series of truly predatory intelligent men in the mold of the ancient Nimrod and one of them realized the powerful unity of otherworldly Christians might offer some political opportunities. So he made some show of embracing their faith as his official governing principle and suddenly Christian leaders were tempted with political power they had never imagined possible. It was too much for them, now with three centuries of intellectual drift away from their Lord and Savior. John had seen this coming, though not in precise details.
When the leadership of church organizations had been fully compromised, pulled into political government directly, they began crushing those who clung to the old mystical spiritual understanding. Most of their legacy was lost and for several centuries only a precious few here and there carried the light. Those whose names we remember in history were not among them, for the most part, only somewhat affected by those who bore the truth. The Reformation was politics in the name of genuine faith, bearing only a small measure of a very confused genuine commitment to Christ. Arising from this somewhat religious political movement was an effort to point out how the established religious hierarchy was even more wrong. Attacks on the office of the Pope ranged all over the intellectual and political map. One of them labeled him the Antichrist.
Efforts to defend the Pope’s worldly authority also ranged all over the map. One of them was an attempt by an educated priest to write some fictional material published under a Jewish pen name. The idea was to undercut the popular Protestant teaching about the Antichrist. Up to this time, virtually no Christian scholar had ever taken literally any part of John’s Revelation. Interpretations varied within a narrow group of symbolic approaches. This priest’s book was later reworked by another much more fanciful reading of the Apocalypse in the process of translating it into another language.
Some long time later, a Protestant huckster found this book and translated it into English. The timing was perfect for the ultimate deception. He began preaching the ideas he got from the book during a time of widespread emotional stirring over End Times by people whose understanding of Scripture was far removed from the first century Christians. It has been common through human history during times of political turmoil to attach religious meaning to their political aspirations. It ends in a strain of arrogance about being God’s very own special people. It’s the same spiteful arrogance that kept Jonah from wanting any part of redemption for the Assyrians. It was the same arrogance that characterized Jews under Rome, who were spitefully arrogant toward all Gentiles and who killed the Lord Jesus. It should surprise no one that latter day Jews with political aspirations found this wild heresy useful enough to sponsor secretly some American crooked scoundrel with a talent for writing so he could put this awful heresy into his Bible study notes. American church members took it all in as gospel.
Thus was born into American consciousness the wild notions of Dispensationalism. It smells just a little bit like the gospel, but is chiefly political in aim. It keeps the Talmudic Jews front and center as somehow having unfinished business with God. It points to the Cross while denying everything Jesus taught and did, turning it all on its head. The Judaizers win again. Today’s Christian Zionism is destroying the gospel as few efforts of Satan have ever done so far. The jargon for the vast collection of beliefs about the End Times is confusing and it serves no good purpose trying to study them. The various flavors all share the same godless purpose of ripping the heart out of John’s Revelation by making it seem to say precisely opposite of what John had in mind.