The Cult, Part 1

There is a secretive cabal committed to enslaving humanity to their agenda.

Try to understand that my use of the term “cult” here does not signal a discrete organization as we might typically expect from our cultural mythology. In fact, our confusion over the term “cult” is partly due to the efforts of the cult itself. This cult is all about control over the human race, and a primary tool is keeping us confused and ignorant about elements of their core issues. The reason for calling it a cult specifically is because it works very much like a religion; it is born of a belief in some transcendent truth.

What makes it most dangerous is how close it comes to God’s revelation, for it hijacks certain key elements of His Word.

I need to make it clear that this cult is not the only game in town. There are other actors out there, both individuals and groups, that have similar aims but lack the cult’s religious fervor. Some of them actively despise those in the cult. The cult is not the whole of our consideration as we seek to bring Christ’s redemption to our world. In your individual calling, it may not even be a major element. Rather, I seek here to share what God has shown me to help you discern what God is showing you. Those of us who have been awakened in the higher spiritual awareness can sense each other in ways that escape words. We have no need to assert human controls over each other, but seek to strengthen and support each other in our highly varied individual callings. The cult I describe here is distinguished in part by mimicking that spiritual awareness, faking it through the power of our Enemy.

So this becomes a first point of description: This cult is a very close parallel to the Kingdom of Heaven. It relies on many of the same basic truths of our fallen reality, and gets them mostly correct in a certain sense, but is deluded about the purpose of it all.

It would be a serious error to imagine that the cult followers do not have a heart-mind awareness. Their hearts are not asleep, but deceived. The Bible refers to this and most Westerners (believer or not) consider it a figure of speech. However, we teach that the business of the heart as a higher faculty is rather literal. In Scripture we see where a great many sinners suffer from hearts that are asleep or souls out of touch from their hearts. That’s most of humanity at any given time in history, but all the more so under Western Civilization.

However, we know that the Bible also refers to hearts darkened by a perverse purpose. I doubt we could possibly gin up the clinical terminology to discuss this much. The concept of a darkened heart shares something with the common notion of “demon-possessed” but without all of the goofy Western mythology about demons. The point is that these folks do seek a heart-led existence, but something is very wrong with their heart’s connection to the moral fabric of Creation. Instead of directly sensing God’s character, they get a very twisted view of God that causes them to serve Satan instead.

Satan’s purpose is to keep us doing anything and everything except for that one thing God requires of each of us. Even a whole range of ostensibly good things are fine with him, but never the most important thing. Satan isn’t plotting to take over the world through the cult or any other human perversion. Rather, he’s keeping people from whatever it is God actually wants for them so that he can prevent God’s glory from shining in fullness here in this realm of existence. Satan has no real problem with Western Christianity because it is powerless. There is nothing he can do about God resurrecting dead spirits to eternal life in humans, so this “born-again” stuff isn’t his concern. What concerns Satan is making sure we never quite grasp the inheritance that God grants us here. The Devil is our Enemy in hindering us from clawing our way back to Eden.

Thus, the best tactic is to deceive people about that Flaming Sword of revelation. The essence of the Fall is choosing human faculties over the divine grant. In Western Civilization that manifests primarily as choosing reason and intellect and breaking the connection to the Spirit of God. That was pretty much the net result of all that thinking and talking among the various Greek philosophers. It puts man’s intellect on the throne of the universe. In actual practice it makes each of us our own god. We can decide whatever it is we need to know about morality — the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As Satan characterized it in Genesis, we can be like gods knowing (judging) what is good and evil.

That Flaming Sword at the entrance to Eden was not simply a code of laws, but the Person and character of God Himself. It means taking your self off the throne, which feels very much like death. Most people aren’t eager for that, and the human mind rebels against it.

The focus of Scripture is the narrative of redemption, so an awful lot of human history is not recorded there. A whole world of detail that we today consider pertinent is left out, which is typical of human faculties in contrast to divine revelation. What we have instead is the story of how God remained in contact with those few who were determined to face that Flaming Sword. He used their existence in the ever-changing fallen context to expose more and more of His character. His Presence in His people affected the development of human culture in at least one part of the world. At the same time, a vast accretion of confusion grew alongside it. So we have at some point a fellow we call Abraham called out of this confusion to focus on one thread of revelation available to him. His contextual knowledge was the vast Mesopotamian complex of cultures and religions.

He gradually left behind a lot of the cultural clutter and spent time living very simply in a land that, at that time, was very thinly populated. God granted him a covenant and things got under way. However, his education was incomplete and God made it a point to acquaint him with the ancient culture of Egypt, as well. Over several generations that followed, God kept bringing him and his descendants back to Egypt for a bigger dose of that culture.

At some point God was ready to get rid of the cruft and ordered events to get the growing tribe descended from Abraham-Isaac-Israel out of there. God appointed another central figure named Moses with an indescribable level of awareness of moral and spiritual things, a man who bore a solid background in both the Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures, and drove him out into the wilderness to live simply in tents again and sort things out. In the presence of a stabilizing priestly household (Jethro), Moses ended up ready for the job. God used him to move this people out of Egypt, nearly destroying the indigenous culture in the process. Then while keeping the nation out there in the simple tent life, He called up His servant Moses to discuss what did and did not belong in this new culture God wanted to raise up in this nation of people who would otherwise be a pestilent presence on the earth.

In other words, God Himself was directly involved in what became the Hebrew culture, to include the intellectual background and all the basic assumptions about reality underlying what followed. While it’s not hard to detect the various elements in both Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, God made it a point to filter out the things He didn’t want, and then destroyed those source cultures sufficiently to prevent any of it from coming back too easily in human awareness. Today we have darn little of those ancient cultures available for our inspection. We know about them, but precious little of the content. Meanwhile, we have an awful lot of direct awareness of Hebrew culture. God saw to it they saved a collection of their essential documents.

The resulting culture and intellectual assumptions as a whole are an essential foundation for the revelation of God’s character. Don’t let that zip past over your head the way it does with the majority of mainstream Christians. If you don’t somehow catch onto the essence of how they approach knowledge itself, the question of epistemology and what can we claim to know, then you cannot grasp His revelation. Without all of that, you might come to face that Flaming Sword at the entrance to Eden, but you cannot pass. You see, there is no way you can wield the Sword of truth in this world until you first pierce your own soul. The Hebrew intellectual assumptions are the handle of the Sword.

God placed that Sword in the hands of the Nation of Israel. It implied a specific calling, that there is also a Mission of Israel. As time wore on, the record shows that the nation and the mission became separated. They lost their grip on the Sword, and it fell on them as wrath. The Sword can cleanse you or kill you, and it eventually became their instrument of execution. When the Sword showed up in human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, they refused to handle it any longer. Israel the Nation came to an end.

But Israel the Mission still stands. Only now, it’s how we characterize the teaching of Jesus. Individual Jews can easily return to that mission, but they have to come the same way as all of humanity: through Jesus Christ. Paul noted they have certain advantages coming into Christ, but whatever grand promise they could have had is gone outside of Christ.

We need to understand what it was they traded for their grip on the Sword.