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Posts clarifying the relationship of Christian scripture and teaching to the evolution of Human Nature.

Peek-a-boo with the Prince of Peace

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When the disciples received the Holy Spirit, they were at the end of their rope. There was no resistance to its presence, because they had surrendered their lives already. There was no place to go but up.

As the repository of truth, the Holy Spririt opens us into understanding that may make our prior lives seem shallow and vain. That was certainly true for the disciples, but it was an experience that they received joyfully for suffering had been their prior occupation. To have revealed the purpose of that struggle was to discover the extent of their own strength.

To understand the mechanisms whereby Christ arranged this transformation, we have to understand the nature of Death. Not “death”, which is the end of our physical existence, but “death” as revealed in Revelation: one of the six forms of selfishness that-  approximately three billion years ago – were released upon the world when the seals of the scroll were broken.

Death is not the destroyer, but a divider. When we die, we pass through a door that human love can rarely penetrate. In moments of intense psychic focus – when our lives are threatened, for example – messages may pierce the veil, but the grieving that survivors suffer reflects the loss of a relationship with the departed soul. Death is the personality that manages that barrier.

Sometimes there is value in separation. It allows us to shed associations that are harmful to us. As suggested in the parables of Hades and the Inferno, that process may continue even after dying, as we surrender to Death the destructive energies we accumulated during our lives. Consider the pride of the pathetic Sisyphus, mindlessly pushing a rock up against the pressure of Death’s will, like a galley slave pulling an oar. This is why the evil fear to die – they know intuitively that their spirits will be broken and repurposed in the afterlife.

So why did Christ struggle for us against Death? Because Death serves no purpose but the spread of its influence. It is a greedy spirit, and loathes to surrender its captives. Indeed, it held sway in the world for a long, long time. The drives of Darwinian evolution are simply an impotent exploration of biological strategies for avoiding Death’s grasp.

This is why the innocent Adam was told “Do not eat of the fruit of the tree [of the Knowledge of Good and Evil], for surely you will die.” The pull of death on our physiology is manifested by a deep winding of its influence within our DNA. When God “breathed life” into Adam, it was to dispel that presence. When the fruit was eaten, we opened our hearts once again to death.

We are nearing the end of the long road of pain and suffering that was set before us. The key is to embrace the Prince of Peace. Looking at the degree to which human history is defined by our wars, we need to step back and consider why that has been so difficult.

The short answer is because it is like dying.

You see, when Jesus took up his cross, he did not conquer death. He confronted it, let it work its will on him, and suffused it with love. Jesus tamed death, chaining its hunger to the service of love. There are things in the world that do not work well together. The tension between Hitler and Stalin is an illustration, as is the tension between freedom and government. To prevent those tensions from flaring into destruction, sometimes things need to be separated. They need to “go to their rooms,” not as punishment, but to give them time to relax and envision a resolution of their differences.

This is the authority that Christ gained on the cross: To turn the talents of Death to the purposes of healing and creation.

The challenge that we must confront is our investment in the psychological practices of death avoidance. For many of us, they define our existence. We create conflict around ourselves as a means of protecting ourselves from loss of life. In a sense, the strong still eat the weak, it’s just that they do it indirectly, using the police to impose the Sisyphean burden on our underclasses. Having acquired that power, we console ourselves with the construction of a facade of elegance and civility, a facade now being torn away most notably by Donald Trump.

So to accept the Prince of Peace is to become aware of that social vampirism. It is to become aware that there are others that need his attention more. It is to become aware that we are the cause of our own pain.

That is why those that have the power to elaborate it instead run from the Truth that transforms the world.

Pity poor Christ in his suffering for the oppressed. Calling out with love to the powerful is the only method allowed to him.

The Final Surrender

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With others, I am repelled by the “violent apocalypse” model of the Second Coming. It’s propagated by addictive personalities that enjoy the adrenaline rush that comes with fear.

But what would you expect from a religion that’s all about men’s problems?

The  three books I have published all attempt to redirect that misguided intention. I think that there’s too much padding, though.

Let’s try this as a means of characterizing Christ’s victory:

“We” (the protective group) has victory. “I” (the creative self) has victory. They stop struggling long enough to surrender to love – which was never fighting with them in the first place.

Marriage, Clerk, Hypocrisy

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The reactionary right has seized upon the cause of the Kentucky county clerk jailed for failing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. When challenged to justify her position from the New Testament, two passages of scripture are offered.

A reference to Old Testament law, of which Jesus said [NIV Matt 5:17-18, emphasis added]:

…I have not come to abolish [the Law and the Prophets], but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until all is accomplished.

That “all”, of course, being the crucifixion and resurrection, through which the fulfilled Law is superseded by the New Covenant.

But then there is Jesus’s response to the Pharisees [NIV Matt 19:4-5]:

“Haven’t you read,” [Jesus] replied, “that in the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh’?”

Of course, if you back up just one verse, you’ll see that this is in response to a specific question [NIV Matt 19:3]:

Some Pharisees came to [Jesus] to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

Which is elaborated further [NIV Matt 19:7]:

“Why then,” [the Pharisees] asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”

In other words, Jesus was confronting the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, who reference the Law of Moses as higher than the direct effect of God’s presence in the lives of a married couple [NIV Matt 19:6]:

“So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Understand this: such joining occurred without the sanction of any court. It was a natural state of union arranged by God. A marriage license is merely a recognition of that spiritual reality, backed by conventions and sanctions that ensure that the temporal fruit of that union are shared equitably when the union is dissolved.

So, there is no New Testament justification for asserting that “marriage” is only between a man and a woman. Trumpeting the faith of a clerk that refuses to issue same-sex marriage licenses therefore has no foundation, particularly as the woman has been divorced four times. Of course, the Law of Moses appears to justify the practice of divorce, in spite of Jesus’s direct teaching on the matter.

I, for one, will continue to celebrate the sensitivity of clerks that recognize when God has joined same-sex couples, clerks that proceed joyfully and proudly to issue licenses that ratify the spiritual unions that God has formed.

And lest these words be taken as a declaration of war on divorce, let us be aware that God can separate as well as join. The state of spiritual union is something known only to the two parties to a relationship. Let not material concerns prevent the parties from seeking renewed fulfillment with other partners.

Mercy for Abortion

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Pope Francis proclaimed today that during the Jubilee year starting on December 8th, priests will be allowed to absolve contrite women of the sin of having procured an abortion.

Francis hails from a region with both a high rate of abortion and relatively religious populations. As my mother continued an active role in church after starting birth control in the ’60s, I wonder how many women who have had an abortion continue quietly to participate in Catholic life. The proclamation of mercy may simply be a concession to practical realities.

I have offered meditations on the problem of abortion. In the wording of his proclamation, I feel that Frances has a heart that is open to the realities described in my first post. Abortion is not a choice that any woman would seek, and it indeed leaves scars. Those scars deserve healing. It is here that I find Pope Francis’s message to be yet a little tone-deaf, in that it trumpets “mercy” rather than healing.

When incarnation has already occurred, among the most significant scars of an abortion arise from the struggle of the infant spirit to disentangle itself from its mother’s womb. I know of two ways of solving this problem: one is for the chastened mother to seek a stable relationship in which a baby will thrive, and to bear the worthy father of a child. Church should be an incubator for such relationships, and keeping women out of Church is contrary to that purpose. The second mechanism is for a mature spiritual practitioner to aid the infant spirit in its liberation. This is an intercession by Divine Love that priests are supposed to mediate.

I also am frustrated that the conditions of mercy are limited to “a contrite heart.” I have voiced the opinion that religion should be seen as the mechanism by which we bring people out of primitive spirituality into a rational engagement with the divine powers. Cain was not punished for the murder of Abel, but sent away to reflect and learn. I believe the same is true for any sin, including abortion. The repentant woman should be asked not only “Are you sorry?” but “What did you learn, and how have you changed your life as a result?”

There are women trapped in circumstances in which the answer will be “Nothing.” I offer my own proclamation here: whether or not the Catholic Church is willing to forgive you, Christ will be with you when you are ready to receive healing. That may be in the final moments of your life, when the hold that the pimp or abuser or pusher has on you slips away. Be unafraid, and open your heart to healing. It is from the heart that unclean things come, but it is also from there that the light of Christ enters into the world. When you receive it, those that have forced themselves into you will be infected with compassion, and you will enter into the ranks of the angels.

Yes, Francis, I think that you understand me: it is the place of the Church to help the burdened carry their cross, rather than to beat them down with it.

Authority in Scriptural Interpretation: The Value of Science

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I keep on getting caught up in debates on other sites (The River Walk and There’s a Thing Called Biology come to mind) that tend to end with charges against my intellectual integrity. The progression goes something like:

  1. I observe that the people that wrote the Bible were recording experiences that they lacked the scientific understanding to describe accurately.
  2. I propose alternative interpretations of the events in modern scientific terms.
  3. I am told that the events recorded in the Bible could not have happened because they violate scientific knowledge.
  4. I suggest that science is not as iron-clad as many believe, and direct the conversation to my “New Physics” page.
  5. The responder offers the unsophisticated interpretation of the Biblical record (i.e. – Creation occurred in seven days) as evidence that people that believe in God do not understand science, and accuses me of being a poor scientist.
  6. I offer that my personal experience of God contradicts their science, and re-iterate that that I have offered models that integrate science and spirituality for their consideration.

  7. I am accused of intellectual dishonesty and ignoring scientific truth.

  8. I break off the discussion.

This may seem like just whining, but there’s a really fundamental point that nobody seems to have grasped just yet: the reason that religious authorities offered an “unscientific” understanding of scripture was because they didn’t have enough science to interpret scripture. Receiving a document through a long chain of translation from dead languages, they interpreted the words as literal truth because they had nothing else to guide their understanding.

But we do have science as our guide. So why not make use of it?

Given what we know about paleontology, for example, we can clearly interpret the days of creation as the history of biological development, running from single-celled organisms that learned to use light as a source of energy, and ending with the mammals and man on “day” six. Along the way, the development of eyesight replaces “light” with the more specific sun and moon.

Similarly, the trumpets of Revelation are seen to correspond almost exactly with the ancient mass extinctions. The era of giant insects is noted, and the final extinction episode (involving a meteor strike, volcanic vents and egg-eating mammals) describes distinctly the mechanisms that terminated the age of the dinosaurs.

Scripture and Darwin don’t contradict each other, they support each other. In the other direction, I think that the most powerful tool we have to advance our understanding of fundamental science is not the billion-dollar satellites and particle accelerators, but rather the well-documented record of spiritual experience.

Really, I would think that we’d be getting together to shake hands and pat each other on the back, not trading barbs.

Body Call

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A few years back after the local UU speaker’s forum, I was waylaid by an out-of-area couple in the cool of the spring evening. The husband explained that they were trying to relocate back to the Thousand Oaks area, but his wife jumped in to speak of her commitment to caring for the son that had been disabled in the Gulf War. She mourned that sometimes it was so hard to be strong in her faith, that it felt at times as if the window was closing on her.

These impulses come over me at times: I formed a ball before my heart with my hands, then shifted them to the right and opened them higher and lower. “Here it is.”

She paused, hand held against her breast, and offered “Thank-you.” And they looked at each other and asked, “When does Jesus return?”

“When enough of us say ‘Yes, we understand now. We are ready to love as you did. Come to us, right here, right now.’”

These are the closing lines of my exegetical book, The Soul Comes First. The most significant contribution of that work is to explain the Book of Revelation (not interpret, but explain). What is left unanswered still is the why. Why does he have to come again? Why wasn’t once enough?

One part of the answer is that we have free will. I have addressed this before: the true evil of “sin” is that it disposes us to believe that we deserve our suffering. We’re like the judges of the Darwin awards that celebrate those that have committed such incredibly stupid acts that they’ve provided the rest of us the benefit of removing themselves from the gene pool.

To recognize our “sin” is to convince ourselves that we must earn our healing. In Jesus’s era, that was transacted through the priesthood using a system of indulgences based upon blood sacrifice. Jesus came and said “Well, enough of that bullshit. I will be the last sacrifice, and for my sacrifice you will be given forgiveness for your sins.” Now, looking back to Cain and considering the eternal nature of the Divine, obviously Jesus was not changing policy. He was simply trying to get us to stop beating ourselves up so that we could be healed.

In a recent discussion, I asserted that the authority of Jesus over heaven and earth is rooted in the irresistible admiration that comes with his perception of the possibility of our wholeness. This is what gives him the ability to heal the world: the fact that it comes not with scorn, but a joyous “Good job!”, much as that offered by the father to the prodigal son. “You were lost to me, but – Lo! – you have shed your burdens and now are returned!”

So in this framework, Jesus comes again to deliver us the promise of healing that can only be received when we stop believing that we don’t deserve it.

But there’s more.

In the end-times prophesy of Daniel and Revelation, we have the appearance of three corrupted beasts. The first of these in Revelation famously bears the number ‘666.’ This was first explained to me as a numerological reference to the days of Creation, with the conclusion that the beast was man. But that is to make too much of ourselves: it was not only man created on the sixth day, but all of the mammals.

Carrying this back to Daniel, it becomes clear that the beast (the fourth to appear in the dream) is the collective spirit of the mammals. In Eden, human intelligence was protected by the presence of God, but the Fall forced us out into the world to struggle with all the primitive urges that preceded us. Daniel sees this only abstractly: the beast bears teeth and claws of iron that destroy life. These represent the machines that we use to reorder the earth. We use them as predators, not attempting to integrate ourselves with other life, but exploiting it for our gratification.

In Revelation the personality of the beast is resolved in more detail. There are two of them, the second a red beast ridden by the feminine avatar called “MYSTERY.” So what does this tell us about the second coming? The masculine expressions of the primitive urges, represented by the first beast of Revelation, are the hunt and sacrifice. Jesus confronted and mastered them on the cross. The feminine expressions of the primitive urges are intercourse (the mingling of personalities through sex) and maternity. What about this aspect of human nature? When does that submit to Christ?

I feel this confrontation in my own life like a wall around my soul. It comes to the fore when I walk into a store and the counter girl pushes her breasts up at me, or when a pastor looks at me, interrupting my meditation on the cross to suggest that I am sexually harassing the members of his congregation. It has been the focus of so much conflict in my life, from the Sterling Men’s group that tried to force me to stay in my marriage, into the family law system, and in the workplace where brilliant women at home find that I disrupt their influence over the men at work. It is a wall rebuilt every night when I wake up at the witching hour with sex crawling all over my body.

How to resolve this problem, the problem of “MYSTERY,” the influence that reaches into our souls from a distance and leaves us wondering “Why did I do that?” Is the image of Christ in confrontation with this influence that of the rock star with a bevy of beauties moaning in the audience? Or is it the image of the celibate, relinquishing all experience of sexuality?

My two fiction books, Ma and Golem, are meditations on this problem. Ma begins with two dysfunctional erotic encounters – one a casual hook-up and the other a long-term political bonding – and evolves as a slow-moving train wreck with the men struggling against the consequences of their failure to honor their women. Golem elaborates with a truly amazing sexual explosion between Corin and Leelay, both introduced in Ma, that arises as an expression of their service to the survival of Life. And it confronts us with an encounter between the Goddess Zenica (Corin’s mother) as she uses sex to break the will of an old adversary to accomplish the end of her re-incarnation. In relating the events to Corin, she simply offers “I did what I had to do.”

Is that where it ends: sex as a tool?

Revelation does offer us an image [NIV Rev 22:1-2]:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

To me, this imagery is incredibly sexual. And I think that is as it should be: there is no part of our nature that cannot be sacralized, that was not given to us for the purpose of healing ourselves and this reality of corruption by selfishness.

I believe that intercourse must be brought into the service of Christ. So this means that it should be a means of bringing Christ into our lives, of pouring the love that we receive from him out over each other. My interpretation of my experience in church is that the opposite has happened: we take sex as the center of our intimate relations, and when Christ enters into that he is perceived as a threat. Or for sexually active single women, the presence of Christ in a man is interpreted as an opportunity to have really great intercourse – that is, to receive a love that would be given to them directly by the source if only they would ask for it.

As long as this persists, we are going to continue to struggle. My question is whether this is really the business of Christ. Eve was sent to Adam as his help-mate. Jesus confronted the masculine pathologies on the cross. Is it really possible for him to do the same work on the feminine side? My sense is that the end game would be far less painful if women stood up to take ownership of their problems.

Love Works Posted

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Just a note that I’ve uploaded the rest of Love Works. Click on the page link on the banner. The post explains the delay.

The document was originally created in OpenOffice, and the images acquired a grey background in the port to Word. At some point I’ll fire up my old laptop and break it apart in OpenOffice. If there’s an immediate need, let me know and I’ll push it up on the priority list.

The Trust Mind

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Hundreds of years before the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the mystics of Greek Hellenismos understood Humanity’s spiritual development as a growth into engagement with certain fundamental natural forces. Aphrodite, for example, was represented as a beautiful woman, but as a god mediated between humanity and the force of attraction, which manifests as much in gravitation as it does in sensual desire. Following the era of the Titans and Olympians, the aim of the mystics was to usher in the age of Dionysius, allowing men to interact directly with the principles. In other words, for us to become gods.

When this truth was first revealed to me, the speaker admitted that in the modern era, we view Dionysius, the “party god”, as an unlikely avatar. We view alcohol as a vice, but the Greeks saw it as a tool. When we are drunk, we “lose our inhibitions.” That may manifest itself in a tendency to orgy, but at a deep spiritual level reflects the loosening of the protective barriers around our souls. We surrender ourselves to trust, and so relate more freely and deeply than we would otherwise. (See this post by Irwin Osbourne for more on this experience.)

The power of this relation can be abused. Megalomania is one pathology. In “Ray”, the film biography of Ray Charles, one scene reconstructs a set in which a horn player stands up to take an impromptu solo in the middle of a number. The man was dismissed, not because he violated the integrity of the rendition, but because Ray recognized intuitively that the man was on heroin. Accused of hypocrisy, Charles’s retort was that he had to be the only one. A second pathology is dependency. In graduate school, a friend shared his experience of a teacher who drank incessantly, and actually could do chemistry well only in that state. It took me a while to figure out how to suggest that maybe the teacher wasn’t doing the thinking at all – that the alcohol enabled him to inject himself into a community of minds that tolerated his needs.

There are other methods to achieve this integration. A young woman can be almost suicidal in her disposition to trust the men that she desires, and when that is manifested in sexual license, she may serve as the pool in which men join. Junger’s book “War” documents the characteristics of men that survive constant threat only by surrendering themselves to trust in each other.

There is enormous power in such melding, but the methods listed above cannot be sustained by our physiology. The licentious woman becomes corrupted by masculine demons, and loses her beauty. Substance abuse drives our metabolism into pathways that destroy our health. And war is a process that no one escapes without harm, even if it is hidden deep in the soul behind a stoic mask.

It is for this reason that everdeepening.org opens with this statement:

Love dissolves the barriers of time and space, allowing wisdom, energy and understanding to flow between us, and embracing us with the courage, clarity and calm that overcomes obstacles and creates opportunities. When we open our hearts to one another, there is no truth that is not revealed, and to those that love themselves, no impulse to harm that cannot be turned to the purposes of healing and creation.

As a Christian, I see the ultimate human manifestation of this truth in the march of Jesus of Nazareth to the cross. And behind that sacrifice, I must see the yearnings of a perfect and unconditional love that invests itself in the realization of that truth in our lives.

But when picking up the Bible, it doesn’t take long to reach contradictory evidence. Taking Eden as a metaphor for a relationship of trust between the source of love and humanity, that trust is corrupted by the serpent, which appeals fundamentally to human selfishness. In God, we were gods, but Eve is encouraged [NIV Gen. 3:5] to “be like God, knowing good an evil.” For this breach of trust, Adam and Eve are dismissed from the garden, and punishments are heaped upon them.

What was so heinous about their crime? Was it worse than the slaying of Abel, for which Cain was allowed a lifetime of repentance? And what is so important about us that God would give Jesus as a sacrifice to the goal of our redemption?

To understand this, we have to understand the nature of thought. We have succumbed in the modern age to scientific materialism, and so hold that thought occurs in the brain. I know this not to be true: I relate frequently to thinking beings that have no bodies and no brains, and so must recognize that my brain is merely an interface to my soul. To facilitate the expression of will through my body, the operation of the brain must correlate completely with the thinking done by my spirit.

Thus I interpret “In the image of God he created them” [NIV Gen. 1:27] in this way: our bodies are a tool through which we manifest the will of our souls and – given the quote above – they operate most effectively when used to express love.

The problem is that every interface is a two-way street. While through our commitment to creative expression, we can bring truth and beauty into the world, the opposite can occur. In the experience of pain and suffering, we project thoughts back into God. In the expression of greed and lust, we corrupt the purity of love. This is articulated many times in the Bible: consider Noah, Exodus and Ezekiel. Rather than being remote and impervious, God suffers from our wrong-doing. The flood is thus a desperate move to rid himself of the irritation, as is the destruction of the Holy City through the witness of Ezekiel. While horrifying to us as humans, we might imagine that so must the bacterium feel when confronting the operation of the immune system.

The error of the Law is to interpret these actions as a judgment, as an evidence of sin. They are not. The effect is to destroy the material manifestations of the success of selfishness, revealing its sterility. They are actions taken to frustrate selfish personalities that attempt to prevent love from liberating and healing their abused captives.

This is “The Knowledge of Good and Evil” that brings death into the world. Lacking appreciation of the virtues of love, we chose not to trust in love. We demanded understanding. But understanding is gained only through experience, and experience requires expression of both good and evil. We are educating ourselves.

In the end, Christ gathers those that chose good into the fold of the perfect love that originates from the divine source. We join our shared memory and wisdom into a single holy mind, and heal the world of the disease of selfishness. Thus I do not interpret the Crucifixion as atonement for our sins. Rather, I believe it should be seen as a surrender to trust in love, a struggle waged most fiercely in the Garden of Gethsemane, and redeemed by the proof of the power of love in the Resurrection. Rather than an indictment of our frailty, it is meant to be an exhortation to manifest our own forms of greatness.

Trust in yourselves. Trust in love. Welcome yourselves into the Holy Spirit, the mind formed when that trust is perfected in us.

Women: Being Loved by Christ

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When Jesus first taught in the synagogue in Jerusalem, his neighbors received him with skepticism verging on outrage [NIV Mark 6:2-6]:

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.

This contrasts with the events just prior with a woman who had bled for twelves years, and was healed simply by touching Jesus’s clothes. Shocked by the experience, the woman hid in the crowd, but Jesus persisted [NIV Mark 5:33-34]:

Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

How does this work, spiritually? The aura that forms around the head of a saint is generated by souls pressing against their minds in the hope of discovering meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose are discovered most readily in the saint because they have surrendered themselves to love of the world, and the world in turn reveals itself to saint’s examination. It is as said by Tagore:

Power said to the World, “You are mine.”
The World kept it prisoner on her throne.
Love said to the World, “I am yours.”
The World gave it the freedom of her house.

The saint looks into the world and sees its spiritual needs. Among the souls that surround the saint are such that can fulfill those needs. The saint has the privilege of facilitating the union of the two parties. But where the party in the world (the soul currently “living”) seeks instead power, the union fails. The souls choose to remain to the company of the saint. That saint, honoring the compact of their company, accepts them back.

Spiritual union can be ravishing, having many of the aspects of intercourse. For this reason, Catholic nuns once referred to themselves as “brides of Christ.” But the union can be a tenuous thing. If Jesus had not been present to voice his approval, would the hemophiliac woman have maintained her cure?

When I encounter woman struggling with this dynamic, I offer the encouragement, “Believe in yourself!” There are angels in the air wishing to enter into you to heal the world. Yes, it feels wonderfully sensual, but you don’t need sex to receive them. You don’t need the approval of a father. Spirits becoming angels yearn only for the spiritual union we know as “Christ” that found its steward when Jesus took up the cross. To receive them, you need only their approval, an approval gained most powerfully through a commitment to love and heal the world.

Victory over Sin

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In my previous post, I promised to examine how a limited human perspective causes confusion when trying to interpret the teachings of Christ through the Holy Spirit. I’m going to take one of the most fearsome passages in the Bible, that of Revelation 21:8, in which John interprets part of his vision as a “second death” reserved for those that sin.

When confronted with the reality of sin and the pain it causes, it is natural to use threats to keep it at bay. Our legal system does this, and that is echoed in the Law of Moses that was used in the Bible between Noah and the ministry of the savior. For those that sympathize with this approach, it is natural to interpret the Crucifixion as atonement for our sins, and the terrible destruction John describes in Revelation is interpreted as justice being meted out on the sinful.

But what is sin? I have suggested here and elsewhere (see The Soul Comes First) that sin is found in any act that leaves a wound in the soul. Is the propensity to sin inextricably part of humanity? I see at is something that was carried forward from our Darwinian past. Animals tear and rend unthinkingly, doing enormous damage to the souls of the things that they consume.

In the Garden of Eden, a man and a woman are found in a privileged relationship with God. They were innocent and free from sin. We know from Revelation that ultimately sin will be destroyed. God set Adam – the creature made in his image – to that work, with his true love Eve as his helpmate. As might be expected, sin fights for survival. In both the story of the Fall and Cain and Abel, sin is represented as something outside of just relationships. The serpent comes between Adam and Eve, and God speaks to Cain directly of “sin crouching at your door.” In both cases, the effect of sin is not just to separate humanity from God – it also breaks the trust we have in each other. Adam and Eve don clothing not only to hide from God, but to hide from each other. Cain’s jealousy leads to the murder of Abel, extending the loss of trust to brothers and sisters.

Sin has its way with humanity. It entered into us as an infection. This is indeed how Jesus speaks of it, saying [Matt. 2:17]

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.

Of course, Jesus’s healing skills are not rooted in knowledge of physiology, but in spiritual authority. He simply commands people to be well, and when they respond, honors their faith. The physical healings are paired to the casting out of sin in the form of demons. These were skills Jesus shared with the Apostles.

This work was interrupted by the ultimate sin, the Crucifixion of the savior. Jesus allows sin to have its way with him, suffering a brutal and painful death. In that process, he reciprocates with love. This is done in fulfillment of the promise that he would die for the forgiveness of sin, but that is only a waypoint on the journey. Humanity had a work to do in Eden, and we failed in that role because sin entered into our relationships. However, that work still remains to be done. Jesus came to restore us to the condition that prevailed in Eden so that we might complete the work that had been put before us.

Why didn’t Jesus just remove sin from us entirely, then? It is because we have free will. We have been convinced by sin, through the serpent and others, that we are at fault, that we deserve punishment. This is internalized to such a great degree that we punish each other for sin, compounding the damage wrought upon human nature. We cling to sin. In dying for the forgiveness of sins, Jesus was trying to break that embrace. He was saying “Humanity, let go of your burdens. Forgive each other, as God has forgiven you.” He resurrection was intended to convince us to rely upon the healing power of love.

We have trouble with that. Sin is wound deep into our spirits, and struggles still to survive. But Jesus promises to come again, and we can rely upon that promise though a day to him be like a thousand years to us [2 Peter 3]. When he does come to help us overcome sin, what will the result be like?

This is described by John in Revelation. He says {Rev. 21:8]:

But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.

I remind you that this is a human interpretation. Should we take the passage to mean that all those that sin will die the second death of fire and brimstone?

Well, look at it from God’s perspective: What would be the point in that, for have not we all sinned? No, Jesus’s goal is to preserve that which is good, and no one is purely evil. What John described was the destruction of sin along with the memories of the pain that it has caused. Sinful acts are written in our souls, but Jesus will return to separate us from those behaviors and their consequences so that the pure heart of humanity may be returned to heaven. When John reports people burning in hell, he is confusing the destruction of the evidence and effects of their acts. He sees the events themselves being destroyed. The fire is the fire that purges us of the infection of sin, bringing us liberty.