Our minds are a battlefield in a war that many of us are afraid even to acknowledge is being fought. But it is being fought, all around us.
Mark 13:7 When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. These things must happen, but the end is still to come.
Mark 13:8 For nation will rise up in arms against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and there will be famines. These are but the beginning of birth pains.
We have entered a new cold war, in which the destruction of the world is threatened. Such things as these are rumors of wars, which may come to pass, or may be plans only to suss out those who would want them to come to pass. But they are frightening.
As the man says, “Do not be alarmed.”
This is easier said than done, sometimes. But we can do it. We can overcome fear, any kind of fear and any amount of fear, if we pull together.
Fear is the chief weapon being used to wage battle inside your mind. Alcohol is a weapon. Drugs are a weapon. Marijuana, for instance, suppresses your memory of dreams, but turns those dreams into nightmares, living in your brain just beneath the surface of your mind. Conversely, law is also a weapon, restricting your freedom to choose for yourself the best path for your unique life, as long as you don’t hurt others. If you allow God to personally write his law in your heart, then your actions will not be in contradiction with human law, but human law will not be on you.
(God bless America, we are free to say that here – human law, in any form, whether disguised by religion or not, does not have primacy over our souls – only God almighty has jurisdiction over our hearts. And usually God lets us figure that out for ourselves, to freely take that gift when we find we cannot live without it, because God is cool like that.)
Both law and lawlessness are tools of fear – fear of the unknown. Fear of losing control of others and of one’s self. Fear of the subconscious. Fear of releasing ourselves to God’s will.
Especially, fear of the subconscious: Fear that your brain has already figured out everything, because the Kingdom of God is already everywhere within you – but to embrace that, you might have to give up the boundaries that you have defined for your self over the course of your life. You would have to live without certainty – in the unknown.
That is a scary prospect, but that is why Jesus came to us and is with us. He lives in that unknown, in that transformed life, without fear. He, and possibly some others with him, live that transformed life. That transformed life is more than what we have learned of our bodies, from our scrapes and bruises, our sensations, drives and impulses, our diseases and our deaths. Yet it is also in the same world in which we exist in this form, for it cannot be in any other. “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”
One of the fears used to manipulate people for war and violence, is the idea that Heaven is somewhere else, another world beyond this one, which is not connected. That is used to justify all manner of sins, of brutality and cruelty in the world. Jesus discounts this idea. Heaven is here. Resurrection occurs in this world. That transformed life is available to you, it is offered to you – this is the good news.
This idea runs so contrary to our normal thinking from what we learn from the world, that it is very frightening to let go of our learned associations, to let go of our earthly form. But, to turn Yoda’s phrase, “luminous beings are we – not this crude matter.” We have learned that not even matter itself is really solid, that all of our sensations are projected illusions. We are, in fact, pure energy.
Modern science has taught us with certainty that the things we perceive are never certain. If you want to live in reality, you have to accept that, and it is a difficult thing to grow up and get over your fear.
And, our special minds, which are not like the animals whose forms we proceed from, can somehow connect the realms of matter and energy. We feel it there on the edge of our subconscious, in our dreams, in our deepest meditations on the nature of our reality. Our words of human languages are never enough to explain what it is that we are, so we invent new words, but they are never enough either. That is when we must recognize, that we are going in the wrong direction.
Words are helpful tools, but they are not the answer. Even the words of holy scripture are not the whole answer. God’s word, “The Word,” is something beyond symbol, beyond form and references to ideas. It is the source of our thought and intelligence, yet it is a mystery beyond our understanding.
Yet we cannot give up. We cannot give into the easy answers, the people who say that they know, who say that recitation of the same words over and over again will ever bring meaning. All that does is nullify meaning, making God’s Word easily replaceable by dictates of power and violence. This doesn’t refer just to militant Islam, but to all religions. All kinds of scripture or mantra cease to lose meaning when repeated enough without open-minded exploration, leaving the mind vulnerable to exploitation by those with crude minds who hate others, themselves, and God.
This is why, in these times of the “birth pains,” secular America is, in fact, of service to God, more than any other nation. Freedom to think, to speak and express ourselves is what human kind needs to pull off those chains of our animal past and become the new, inexplicably changed creatures that God has grown us to be.
In that you were seeing feet and toes partly of wet clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom. Some of the strength of iron will be in it, for you saw iron mixed with wet clay.
42 In that the toes of the feet were partly of iron and partly of clay, the latter stages of this kingdom will be partly strong and partly fragile.
43 And in that you saw iron mixed with wet clay, so people will be mixed with one another without adhering to one another, just as iron does not mix with clay.
44 In the days of those kings the God of heaven will raise up an everlasting kingdom that will not be destroyed and a kingdom that will not be left to another people. It will break in pieces and bring about the demise of all these kingdoms. But it will stand forever.
45 You saw that a stone was cut from a mountain, but not by human hands; it smashed the iron, bronze, clay, silver, and gold into pieces. The great God has made known to the king what will occur in the future. The dream is certain, and its interpretation is reliable.
America – and the modern democratic world – fits the description of the “kingdom of iron and clay” from Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, just as other kingdoms have fit the other parts of this prophecy. Silver, probably Persia, Rome seems like bronze, and the colonial and industrial empires of the 15th through 20th centuries, iron.
Then the iron, clay, bronze, silver, and gold were broken in pieces without distinction and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors that the wind carries away. Not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the statue became a large mountain that filled the entire earth.
The old empires want us to believe that they will be the new kingdom that cannot be destroyed. This is, especially, the hubris of the Nazis (Socialists), of the Masons, the Egyptian Rosacrutians, those who wish an Islamic Caliphate under Sharia law, corporatist global Capitalism, or global Communism, and other similar power-mad, mentally ill people, who believed that they would bring about the destruction of the earth, and that their psychotic fascist vision would bring about the eternal kingdom on Earth that can never fall. This, of course, is rubbish – the delusional machinations of diseased egos who believe that they can take credit for the plans and actions of God Himself.
The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.
When the empires of the world blow away on the winds of history like the chaff on the field, the everlasting kingdom will be nothing like what they envisioned, because with God, and the future, only the unknown is certain.
Both major parties in America today operate out of fear of this unknown future. Especially the Republicans, but Democrats too. They want to circumscribe a narrow view of politics for we free people, to corral us into one or another holding pen, in which our minds are stunned, slaughtered and butchered for their uses. They do not want to face a future in which America, with the rest of the kingdoms of the world, are swept away like chaff on the field, in which our children become something more than human, something unrecognizable.
Fascism, whether religious in Islam or hateful sects of Christianity, or secular in Nazism or Communism, operates purely on the basis of fear – fear of the unknown, fear of loss of control, fear of death, fear of judgment. People who rope themselves into these ways of thinking delude themselves into believing that their actions will bring about the everlasting Kingdom, that somehow they have it all figured out, that they can dictate the future to God, and make Him dance like a puppet if they keep saying the same thing over and over. They are wrong too, and their imaginations of that future kingdom and the enticements and temptations that they fantasize for themselves will also be swept away, forgotten by the children of humanity as a distant nightmare from an age of ignorance.
God offers the whole world unconditional love, but all these men and traditions stand between you and God, claiming to know what is the truth.
But if God is real, omniscient, ever-present, and all-powerful, why do you need these people? Cut out the middle-man. Why don’t you ask God yourself?
Matt 6:7 When you pray, do not babble repetitiously like the Gentiles, because they think that by their many words they will be heard.
Matt 6:8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
No one and nothing can stand between you and the Word of the Lord, if you make the commitment to listen – no politician, no priest, and no scripture, either. God is a living God, not a word in a book. Those words are only echoes of a voice that still speaks today.
Tonight, before you go to sleep, ask God silently to intercede in your dreams, to show you what you need, for your life. If you have a scary dream, fear not, for that is evil making a last effort to steal your soul. Cast that bad dream out of your mind, ask again, and go back to sleep. God will be with you, and will answer you.
Seek, and you shall find. Ask, and you shall receive.