The Bath of Wrath

Context first: I don’t dispense truth for your consumption. At most, my writing exposes to your awareness things your heart already knows. Some of us are able to subject our minds to our hearts, and we get to a point where the mind pretty much knows better than try to resist. Instead, we discover the sweet security (shalom) of learning to trust something far higher than our own senses and reason. The mind receives it’s grandest purpose — organizing and implementing the practical requirements of God’s moral truth written in our convictions. What I write here is merely my own narrative, the story of my encounters in my own mind’s exploration of the Land Without Words.

Most of humanity manages to function with a certain amount of unconscious assumption about reality. There’s a kind of glue that holds together all the pieces. It doesn’t require absolute reliability, but enough that the surprises can be assimilated. It really does vary with the individual, but we can make some broad generalizations for the sake of common understanding. What we usually mean by the term “coping mechanism” signals that a certain amount of breakage is expected. Our mind maps out reality and has to make changes now and then, so the really smart people draw their maps in pencil. But the whole map dissolves without that glue to keep the paper intact.

As you probably know, neurosis is when the glue fails in spots. Psychosis is when the glue fails wholesale. There has to be a certain amount of space in the mind for drawing the map.

So our human function isn’t tied to the facts — the details we draw on the map — but to the existence of a map in the first place. And as noted, for most Westerners in particular, it’s seldom a conscious factor of awareness. For the most part, the mapping manifests in a body of assumptions about what is morally right and wrong. It’s the individual moral ground of assumptions that make up the material of the map of what “ought to be.” Drastic changes in the facts are tough to handle, but losing the structure of knowing will drive folks crazy.

The wrath of God is rather like a good soap-and-water bath. If your map is just cheap paper, it will come apart when God’s wrath rains down in your life. If you manage to weave in the threads of God’s moral character as the fabric that holds your map together, it’s a whole different experience. Instead of destruction in your life, His wrath is just a nice bit of laundering. Afterward you feel fresh and ready to start again. Western moral reasoning is just cheap paper, rather like the mass-produced rough stuff you get with dollar store coloring books.

When I prophesy that God is shifting reality, it’s not as if I’m saying the sky will turn green, or clouds will become mashed potatoes, or something noticeable like that. Rather, I’m warning that God will rain down His cleansing wrath on peoples’ maps. It’s too subtle for most of them to notice, but He’s taking away the temporal appearance of moral substance on which people have built their assumptions.

You see, Satan is the author of a lot of cheap garbage that passes for moral truth. God in His ineffable, inscrutable plans allows the Devil to do certain things for some limited time. It serves to entice and enslave folks who swallow the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It’s not that the apparent facts of our existence here changes that much; it still looks the same. It’s much more subtle than that. The big lie is something people seldom think about consciously, a raft of assumptions what we should expect if we just push hard enough to figure it out.

For example, just about every person influenced by Western values assumes that we should be able to fold up space and travel across light years in seconds, if we can just figure out how. They assume we could, in theory, travel across time barriers and carry our conscious existence into the past or the future. And we have even been led to imagine that we humans have the power to make substantial changes in this earth, like change the climate.

Yet, if you can read between the lines in the Bible, you’d find those three things are flatly impossible. And failing that, your heart would kick your brain with the recognition that those things will never happen. The boundaries are not factual, but moral in nature. God is actively watching and won’t let it happen.

Thus, at least a portion of what God is doing in our days, right here and now, is reaffirming His revelation about those moral limits on us. He’s washing away those subtle lies under the very ground on which most minds stand and walk. While those minds are, for the most part, wholly unconscious of it, they can’t understand why everything they’ve built on those false assumptions is starting to come apart. God is actively watching and His hands are busy. It’s just the same as you and I shaping things with Playdough, though far less discernible to the human senses.

Obviously our Creator is wiser than to just make it too obvious. His revelation warns that there will always be plausible deniability of His handiwork. If you exclude His revelation, you cannot perceive full reality. If your heart is actively ruling your mind, then you can sense it these things directly. You know reality is shifting daily as people are struggling to keep things together. And failing. We know the truth of God’s wrath falling like soapy rain on all human works, and we look forward to a good bath for our lives.