Saw It Coming

The true power of John’s Apocalypse is ignored by most readers.
That’s because most readers suffer from the effects of what he predicted was coming. So far as we can determine, he was the last living Apostle at the end of the First Century AD. The obvious point of his book was helping his flock face the persecution from Rome. Less obvious was something beyond, something larger and more evil standing in the shadows behind that noisy persecution. John saw that coming.
Satan had little trouble subverting the Old Testament religion. Despite building on the one cultural background created by God as the best channel for His revelation, fallen mankind cannot keep hold of anything by their own resources. It requires a miracle from God to change us, to restore the original power of the Spirit for which we were designed. Without that, we cannot even want righteousness. So while it took some centuries, Satan succeeded in subverting the Hebrew religion of old until it was the lifeless structure we see in Jesus’ day. Whatever it was Judaism worshiped, it wasn’t the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We could say they worshiped their own perceptions, enamored of their ability to reason out what God must have meant, since what He actually said demanded too much.
To which God said, “That’s the whole point. You can’t do it alone.” That’s a part of the message of Jesus, His Son.
Just as the Hebrew people lost their hold on the truth of the Law, so John saw the same diabolical forces at work against the Gospel. We grant that the very existence of Christian religion is the miracle God said was necessary to enable human faith, if we understand anything at all. Still, that doesn’t mean people will avail themselves of that power in cases, nor even the majority of them. We are too easily blinded when we use the eyes of our human perception. Making the transition from seeing with the flesh to seeing through the flesh is a very tall order, yet more of that same miracle. People who are spirit-born are truly free to choose obedience or disobedience. Everything the Law Covenants said about conduct points to a life that makes the most of God’s power, but people are born lazy in that department. The curse of the Fall doesn’t simply drop off once it’s broken; we have to choose the necessary changes to shake it loose. John knew that and saw the system Satan was building to inhibit that choice.
That system was an extension of what had already worked so well with the Hebrew religion.
Today we live in a Western society which does not even possess the intellectual tools to address the truth of the gospel. Our whole society is built on a rejection of revelation. Christian faith requires operating in the mystical realm of thought, a frame of reference wholly excluded as a joke in the West. John saw that coming. His Apocalypse warned of it in part by forcing readers to confront mystical reasoning. His book is wholly nonsensical without it. All the crazy crap we get today in discussions of eschatology arise from rejecting that mystical approach. You can’t read mystical writing without a mystical frame of reference. Because the entire Western heritage disparages mysticism, it’s easy to dismiss the distinctions between light and darkness when the entire definition rests outside the human intellect.
Thus, we call Resurrection Sunday “Easter” without a clue whence that latter term — the religion of Ishtar. We have thousands of writers trying to claim the heathen symbols as somehow transformed, a propaganda trick brought into use shortly after the Church was suckered into trusting the government. One of the greatest shysters of human history convinced the church leaders it was okay to get involved with government and vice versa, since it was so much nicer than official persecution. It was a peace treaty with Satan, and such things are always on his terms. I am forced to agree with religious pagans who point out the real meaning of the world “Easter.”
If you insist on using pagan sourced symbols to understand spiritual matters, you are agreeing with all the pagan claims that it doesn’t matter which tradition you select. You are adding your approval to their search outside the Bible for answers to the ultimate questions of human longing. You can’t celebrate Easter or any other holiday in the European traditions unless you understand you tacitly agree with the pagans. I don’t deny there is some overlap between what they teach and what I teach, but I would be among them if I agreed with their larger argument. But the overlap is why it’s so easy to ignore the differences; it explains why Western Christianity is loaded with pagan religion. Stop pretending you aren’t embracing them.
I claim there’s a difference, but it’s a peaceful claim. I’m not at war with pagan believers because I can read the Gospels where Jesus shunned using human power to enforce orthodoxy. God has said with all finality on the Cross that He will not use human government any longer to regulate human behavior in that department. Jesus was pinned to the sky but we hide eggs and eat chocolate bunnies. You are free to see no conflicts there; your conscience is the whole point of this diatribe. Nor am I some grouchy purist about saying the right words, as if they had magical powers. You can call it anything you like, but Resurrection Sunday is so utterly lost to Western Christians, it’s hard to know where to start discussing it. They are so completely hung up on words and symbols and intellectual conceptions that it seems a monumental task just introducing the non-rational point of it all. We celebrate a hundred “holy days” on our church calenders without having a clue how most of them are not biblical, aside from somehow mixing words from the Bible with symbols and beliefs from outside revelation. As a whole, Western Christianity has no clue what they ought to fight against, or even where the battleground is.
John could see this vast ocean of confusion arising in the first century churches and it seemed a monumental task to swim against that tsunami. Sure, John could handle it personally, and keep things going by his personal presence. He was transparent to spiritual truth, but transmitting that lore of ancient truth to his flock was slow going. There is a peculiar genius in his Apocalypse, because it serves to polarize, as the gospel itself does. If you dive into Revelation without a proper spiritual orientation, you’ll never understand it. A great deal of what he warns about in the book then comes true in your life. John knew how the Spirit worked; he knew people would remain uncomfortable, some nagging question lingering in the background for those who were capable of seeing what he saw. Such people would keep studying, keep seeking, never quite satisfied with what they understood. Somewhere, some how, God would break through the blindness. That’s how it happened for me.
Don’t presume I offer myself as the measure of orthodoxy. Truth transcends human thought; my beliefs reflect my own organization for the task of obeying God. If anything, I would be one of the first to tell you Systematic Theology is inevitably a matter of personal taste, nothing more. We cooperate only so far as we can tolerate each other’s unique understanding of what God demands. Pretending we can capture the heart of God in rational propositions is the ultimate heresy.
I’m not the answer to your questions. My answers won’t work for you, but those offered by the mainstream damned sure don’t work, either. That’s the whole point of John’s Revelation: You can’t get there by what human resources can make of it. You’ll still be operating under the Curse of the Fall until you step outside human reason and walk out into that storm of confusion where the Spirit alone speaks. The reason He’s there is not His choice. Satan has done his best to return to his old job of Covering Cherub. However, he now covers God with lies. It’s confusion to our minds because Satan knows that inhibits us from going where God is. Where Christ stands now is beyond reason, out in the Spirit Realm. If you demand a propositional answer, you’ll never have any answers at all. Truth cannot possibly be a proposition because truth is a Person. You can try telling His story in words, but unless there is a living spirit and a commitment to hear from Him, the words will always confuse. That was the point of Jesus’ parables; the mind cannot receive it, but a living spirit would make use of those parables to change the human soul.
If that sort of writing confuses you, then you don’t understand the Apocalypse and you don’t understand how John saw it coming.