Long Journey of the Soul

It took a long time to get here.
I have peace in my soul. Stuff doesn’t rattle me nearly so easy as in the past. I have an answer for just about everything you throw at me, especially if I understand the context well enough. That is, I have an answer that fits my needs. I’m not a guru, just somebody way down the road calling out to others: You can find a path to the truth.
There is no sharp line of departure, just points along the way where something inside you clicks and you know it’s not the same. You realize you are in control of things that really matter and you just don’t care about things that don’t matter.
If you are born and raised in America — it applies perhaps to a lesser degree in the rest of Western Civilization — you have a long way to go. Everything in your world fights the truth. Instead, it substitutes something cheaper and calls it “truth”. You may come to terms with the tension and decide you can handle it, but something inside of you knows it’s not right. It’s not a matter of hitting the psychic bottom, though that helps motivate you to start the journey. That’s not enough by itself. Some part of you has to recognize there are simply too many lies and you will need help from someone who doesn’t live by those lies.
Let me clarify something that seems to have confused long-term readers: The Ancient Near Eastern way is not the only way. Rather, it is the clearest manifestation of the way men operate when the Spirit leads. Nor do we need all the particulars of the Law Covenants to grasp the heart of the Blood Covenant. So far, nothing has offered a better manifestation of the Law of Love and Spirit than Moses and Noah. Nothing in human experience as a whole, since the Fall, has come so close to the truth as the Hebrew people during the Conquest and shortly thereafter. The generation that grew up in the wasteland, for all their flaws, once free of the old slave generation’s influence, was the pinnacle of morality. Their intellectual assumptions about reality was the closest man has gotten.
It’s very hard to teach that ancient understanding. Most Western brains are so utterly pickled in the Post-Enlightenment rationalism, they simply cannot find the mechanism to consider the ANE approach to reality. It’s so alien, there is no means to process what comes into their sensory organs. There’s no neural pathways for it, no structure, none of the prerequisite matrix of mental organization. Even when I manage to explain it clinically and factually in terms they understand, it still becomes a disassociated concept they cannot integrate into their soul.
I could go on for pages and pages about the factors leading into this. Fortunately, intellectual shock and awe is not the sum of things. Even with all the proper intellectual background, there are a surprisingly large number of people who simply prefer some version of Western Civilization over the truth. The deciding factor that bypasses the necessity of convincing someone is the power of the Spirit. That’s part of what the Cross did. Instead of requiring mankind to first adopt the Hebrew way and the Law of Moses so they could be ready to receive the truth, Jesus said He would bring His own Spirit to bear on the process of changing people.
So we have this unspeakable power of change sweeping the whole world. It remains incomprehensible; God does what He does to breathe life into dead spirits and people suddenly to turn to Christ as soon as they hear about Him.
And the promptly fall into the cesspool of Western Christianity.
Everything the Apostles taught about conforming your human life to the implications of spiritual birth has been perverted. In that sense, the Judaizers won the intellectual battle. They managed to bring the churches under the Pharisaical model of thinking. Today’s Western Christianity is precisely what the Judaizers hoped to accomplish. Paul and his peers taught the discernment of the Law of Moses that made it possible to filter through the ancient Hebrew ways to find what was applicable to walking in Christ. The mind of Christ was the filter, and it bore only a thin superficial resemblance to the Judaism of that day. But the Judaizers were less about the particulars of the Talmudic Law and more about the intellectual approach they adopted from the Hellenists. They were selling a rationalist reinterpretation of Moses that had excluded the revelation in Christ.
In terms of my mission calling, my greatest enemies are within Western Christianity. No one threatens and hinders my ministry half so much as my fellow Christians. No one has done more to destroy my efforts than preachers — those who make their living professing Christ. From where I stand, Christians are the greatest threat to the gospel message. I can’t point to any one figure the way the Old Testament points to Balaam, but someone has set loose a perverting influence that has captured the entire camp of Christianity. Christians don’t even recognize how deeply compromised they are.
At least, that’s my story. I’m not alone, but those who have heard the same calling are so bruised and battered that we all tend to hide away. It’s hard to find each other because we haven’t been allowed to develop a common canon of terminology and expression. In a sense, that’s all good, but it does hinder us from finding each other easily. We are so busy trying to draw distinctions from the vast core of false belief that we are scattered around the periphery, far away from each other. Still, I’ve encountered a few here and there and we recognize each other. We are isolated from each other by the interference of the Church, which has so compromised with the world that it uses the levers of human government to oppress us and keep us in hiding.
Something in my spirit claims a hope that this system will break down before my eyes, before I die. Somehow, we who know this Harlot Church riding the Beast — both will sicken and die. Those of us who want no part of that evil will have an opportunity to reclaim our stolen heritage. I’m guessing that opportunity will be brief. We have to make the most of it, and that’s what I’m trying to teach here.
We are the Tribulation Church, and we have already come very far on our journey, with a long way yet to go.