Cosmos

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
~ Genesis 1: 1

God created the heavens and the earthly realm. God created men and women in His image. God places within each of us the animating spirit, the soul, that distinguishes the living from the dead. God is the source of all souls which come into existence by a heavenly procedure. God remains connected to your soul.

You may choose to think, metaphorically, about this connexion being akin to the connexion between an enormous oak tree and any number of acorns. Similarly, the objective of the oak trees in the forest in having acorns is to have more oak trees in the fullness of time. Obviously, many acorns are eaten as they ripen by creatures such as squirrels whose droppings fertilise the trees. Many acorns are crowded out on the forest floor and their seedlings never mature. But some acorns grow into great oak trees and the cycle persists. Do with these aspects of the metaphor as you wish.

You should, by now, know that Yuval Harari has murdered men, women, and children in his vivisection experiments in his disgusting effort to “prove” that there is no soul within us, that there are no inherent rights, that we are nothing but flesh and blood. He is incapable of perceiving the dimension doorway which allows the soul in the heavenly realm to animate the body in this realm.

Tremble Before the Word of God

Somewhat less than 400 years ago, a man named George Fox walked up a hill, known as Pendle Hill, in England. There, he had a spiritual experience. He saw a vast multitude dressed in white raiment coming to the Lord. He had previously experienced repeated “openings” of the Holy Spirit, learning from God that “the people not the steeple make up the church,” and that attending university does not make a minister.

In one of his journals he reports that he had visited different churches and found hypocrisy everywhere. He found the established churches of England and of the Roman Catholic communion to be full of corruption and sin. How could he lead a life of devotion to God amidst such sinfulness? Looking out on the scene before him, George heard a voice say, “There is even one, Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition.” Of course, Jesus had the same experience of the corruption and sinfulness in Jerusalem including within the Temple.

For his preaching to the public, outside Puritan gathered meetings and on the steps of established church buildings, Fox was persecuted. He was persecuted for saying that Christian men should be obedient to God, should be honest in their commercial dealings, and should be compassionate to the needy. He was persecuted for insisting that the truth of the Gospels was available and should be shared with everyone.

At one point under the supposedly Puritan government of Oliver Cromwell, roughly Anno Domini 1650, an aristocrat named Gervase Bennett was trying Fox for heresy. Speaking in his own defence, Fox said that the members of the court should tremble before the word of God. Bennett retorted that Fox was the only quaker in the court room. Although we call ourselves the Religious Society of the Friends of Jesus, or sometimes simply, the Society of Friends, we are known as Quakers to this day.

Waiting Worship

I had a vague sense from my studies of the English civil war in history class that there were various denominations of Christian believers, including jumpers, barkers, Quakers, Puritans, and many others. In 1988 and for a few years thereafter, I spent quite a bit of time with a Quaker woman. Later she invited me to her wedding which was held in the Quaker fashion. Christian weddings have often included a worship service because of the sanctity Jesus brought to the wedding at Cana.

We all sat around on a large patio, in a circle. We had been instructed to sit silently for a few minutes. Then, if any of us felt moved to speak, we should stand up and say what we had to say. After anyone spoke, there should be a period of silence so that people could consider what was said and if they were then moved to speak, in response, in addition, or otherwise, another speaker would stand up. I myself was moved to speak about how I knew the bride and the groom and how happy I was that they were together and would be taking care of one another.

About 7 years later I felt the presence of God. I invited Jesus into my heart. I became and remain a Christian. After my spiritual conversion, I spent a very long time looking for a spiritual home.

I visited many churches. Roman Catholic churches and cathedrals. Churches of the Baptist communions. An Anglican church which featured a rock band. Many other churches, for twenty years. I didn’t feel the presence of God at any of these places.

One day in the tenth month of 2017 I was walking to a business errand in Dayton, Ohio and walked past a building that I hadn’t seen because I hadn’t walked that way before. It had a sign out front that said Dayton Friends Meeting, and listed times for “Sun Worship” and Singing. I showed up the following first day of the week and was welcomed into the meeting house by Barbara Robinson. I felt truly seen and welcomed. I sat in the meeting hall and felt the presence of God. I was home.

From the Quakers I learned that the waiting worship approach works by attending to the voice within. If you feel an urge to speak you should discern whether it comes from your ego, or whether it is consistent with Scripture and with love. If it is consistent, it is from the Holy Spirit, and you should obey the impulse to speak. Becoming a warrior for God is substantially about listening for God to direct you and obeying God.

From the Quakers, I learned that Jesus created one church, one body of all believers, the believers who hear the words of Jesus and do them. From the Quakers, I learned that there can be tension between faithfulness and charity. Ultimately, in 2020, I felt that the meeting elders had betrayed the Holy Spirit by closing the meeting house. Very soon thereafter I was told to leave Dayton, which I did.

There was a period in Quaker history when God was silent. I have a general understanding that this took place in the late 18th and the early part of the 19th Centuries. There were, at the time, a number of factional disputes about how to conduct Quaker worship services, what personalities were to be heard and obeyed, and other aspects of ego interfering with obedience. Quakers have spoken of this period of time in my presence as “the great silence,” when there were still three hour and six hour meetings and nobody was moved by the Holy Spirit to speak. It was a time when God had withdrawn His presence. I was directed to include this topic in my current essay.

You should be aware that God respects your freedom to choose. In accord with that respect, God does not choose to look into your mind and see your thoughts and intentions, most of the time, unless you invite God to do so. Part of becoming a warrior for God is inviting this inquiry. God knows that for you to be free to choose you must be free to have your private thoughts, to think what you choose, Freedom of conscience is vitally important. There can be no true conversion through compulsion, through coercive domination - because the person who says they are converted to avoid punishment is not being devout, they are engaged in avoidance of harm. There is no correct “convert or die” mentality, and anyone who practices such is not of God.

The Illumination of Conscience

God lives. Jesus Christ sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty and will come to judge the living and the dead. God speaks to whom He will. If you believe these things, you will not find it surprising that things not written of in Scripture are said to people who have lived in the centuries since the Resurrection.

As early as the latter half of the 16th Century Edmond Campion and subsequently other spiritually blessed people were told about an event which is coming. The event is called the Great Warning or the Illumination of Conscience. Since it is important for you to be prepared for it when it happens, so you understand what is happening, Jesus has spoken to, for example, Saint Faustina:

Write this: before I come as the just Judge, I am coming first as the King of Mercy. Before the day of justice arrives, there will be given to people a sign in the heavens of this sort: All light in the heavens will be extinguished, and there will be great darkness over the whole earth. Then the sign of the cross will be seen in the sky, and from the openings where the hands and the feet of the Savior were nailed will come forth great lights which will light up the earth for a period of time.

First there will be a warning seen everywhere in the world. Then the warning will be conveyed from our connexion to God through our souls to our consciousness. Although the actual passage of time will be very brief, there will seem to be a long time involved. This illumination of your consciousness will be for the good of your soul. You will know where you stand with God.

You will see, and experience, the good you have failed to do. You will see and experience the bad you have done. You will feel a great love toward our Heavenly Father. You will feel the inclination to repent and ask forgiveness for all your offences. You should not be afraid of this day, of these events, when they come. God doesn’t cause these things to happen for the sake of fear but, rather, for the sake of love and of justice. God loves you and cares for you and wants you to enjoy eternal happiness and not be lost.

Long Ago

I am told that mankind as our particular species, homo sapiens, came into this world about 480,000 years ago. I’ve written about this topic previously. We have a certain number of artefacts from long ago, but of the advanced machinery that could shape stones that we have found or move large blocks of stone that we see arranged in ancient buildings we have found none. From these facts, certain myths and fantasies have arisen.

We also have certain traditional stories of a time long ago. We have a story of seven league boots that allow a person to move very rapidly over the world. We have a story of a beanstalk that grows upward to the sky. In that story, there is a powerful presence in a castle in the sky which has access, through a goose that lays golden eggs, to vast wealth.

Since 1982 when I met him for a meal in Boston, K. Eric Drexler has gone on to write about nano-technology. One of the interesting developments in this area is single crystal graphene which is a material made of carbon atoms tightly bound in a lattice of hexagons. If you grew enough of it, you would be able to build a space elevator or “bean stalk.” A space elevator is a tether between a minor planet put into orbit around Earth at about 44,000 statute miles and the surface of the Earth.

It has a lot of difficulties inherent in it, as an idea. We live on a tectonically active planet. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Even if you start with the anchor point on some part of a continental plate that is distant from hotspots, the pull of the minor planet through the tether will generate a significant force on the crust. I’m told that there were technologies and techniques to temporarily overcome that difficulty, and that these were employed.

About 310,000 years ago there was a civilisation of hominids on Earth that grew a space elevator. It grew from what is now near the island of Sumatra about 2.6 degrees north of the Equator. Having it somewhat off the zero degrees inclination of the Equator meant that it was possible to grow it out to 44,000 statute miles without interfering with the geosynchronous orbiting spacecraft of the time.

Their civilisation includes our sort, homo sapiens, as well as Denisovans, Neanderthals, and floriensis. Millions of people went up the elevator and explored our star system and travelled to other stars. They are out there still.

Thus far, they have travelled about 20,000 light years from Earth in many directions. At their closest approach, they are about 7,000 light years from the centre of the galaxy. Some of them have cultures that thrive and continue to grow and explore. Others have suffered from the great war.

And there was war in heaven

God was present in the lives of people in those days. About 200,000 years ago, an alliance was offered by a race of beings that had been encountered a few thousand light years from Earth. Those beings sent an embassy to Earth. God advised against this alliance. God was not obeyed.

Evil came to Earth on a scale never before seen. The beanstalk fell. From time to time, people have recovered ancient records and attempted to build another tower to heaven. Our Bible story of the Tower of Babel is one such subsequent attempt. It failed. It would be unwise to attempt to build another, though there are a number of dynamic tether systems that can be used to, in effect, lower to the surface a bucket of sorts that is loaded and then lifts off, without ever making a permanent connexion to the ground.

Those who proposed alliance under false pretences have been wiped out. One of the reasons many star systems are empty of our peoples in that region of space is the vast destruction involved in the total war that ensued. That was long ago.

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
~ John 10:10

We live in a special time. Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into Hell. The third day he arose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven where he sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. The Resurrection means that death has been defeated.

God loves you. God wants you to have eternal salvation. Mary was sent to bear Jesus and did so in perfect obedience, although she suffered seven great sorrows. Jesus was sent to purchase for us the rewards of eternal salvation, and did so, in perfect obedience to God. Therefore we are now at the time of the Great Commission. We are called to translate the Gospels into every language and to spread them throughout the entirety of the earthly realm, to “every creature” capable of understanding them. Those who believe may be baptised in water and in the Holy Spirit.

Which purposes are among the reasons for the Holy Order of Three White Roses. We must be about our Father’s work.

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That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.