Sometimes you need the liberty to just start over. Throw off baggage and start anew. It's not really starting from scratch, but in terms of feel it needs to be.
I need to, for instance, load up on influences that are at least reasonably new to me.
And get into some fast work. You know, no screwing around, fast, zealous, doing things.
For instance it's new to me to see Protestantism as a 'school.' So to see it in history, throughout history, as a school, using influences I now know about, is new. 'Protestantism' sounds like a banal, or pedestrian, or boring name, but if you know it basically means the school of individuals who confess and give witness to the Word of God (the very Word of God itself) you can see the power and centrality of that school.
There were two historians of the Reformation who really caught this vision and wrote in an almost prophetic style on it. J. A. Wylie and J. H. Merle D'Aubigne. Both are very prolix, but the latter tremendously so. The only thing by Merle D'Aubigne I have is a smaller work on Oliver Cromwell called The Protector. Of course J. A. Wylie's great work is The History of Protestantism. Also, his various shorter works on the Pope regarding it being the antiChrist are worth reading as works of spiritual warfare.
Everything for me vortexes (if that is a word) into spiritual warfare. Knowledge and understanding of the Bible; knowledge and understanding of biblical doctrine, the deep archetectonic understanding that is the Covenant of Redemption from eternity to eternity; knowledge and understanding of the Work; the most important things that come to fruition at death; the most needful things; the whole armour of God; development of level of being; union with Christ; it all involves spiritual warfare. That is the practical point of convergence while in this world.
Seeing Protestantism as a 'school' - getting back to the first subject above - allows me to run through worldly history from a deeper, perhaps more meaningful, angle. There is even deeper history, which is the history of redemption, which is what you find in the Bible and in works of biblical doctrine, but that also plays out in real time in the era between the first and second comings of Christ, and seeing Protestantism as 'school' is an angle on that history that is new to me...
1.09.2008
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7 comments:
Ha, ha, ha...I said 'start over' then proceeded to reference two historians to be read... How grotesque a pit I have fallen into.
The other day (on the theme of nothing that happens doesn't have meaning) the window behind my computer was hit with something, it sounded like a soccer ball had been thrown against it, without breaking the glass. I scurried around out the back door to investigate and found a surprisingly little bird lying on her (she looked like a she) her side, stunned, still breathing, but very stunned and not trying to move at all as I approached. I looked at her and figured there was nothing I could do and hopefully she was just stunned and would regain her senses and eventually fly away. So I left her. Then I went back a little while later, and she was setting on her legs, upright, but still stunned because she didn't move at all as I walked right up to her. I said, you're looking better, then I left again. The next time I came back to check on her she was gone. Presumably flown away.
So, I take this as metaphor for my own situation. I'm pounding into the same thing and getting stunned. A state of stunnedness. But I can recover.
Interesting. The bird may have needed water, even a safe place to recover free from hostile predators. All the studying you've done will blossom when you step away from the machine.
It thought of the predators, and I knew our cat rarely walked through that part of the yard, and was in fact asleep in the garage. Water didn't cross my mind, but since it had been raining rather extensively that probably wasn't a problem. My main thought was some childhood thing you learn about not touching birds that fall out of their next because then their mother won't have anything to do with them. Something like that. So I wasn't going to do anything that involved picking it up or moving it. I could tell it was just stunned.
What do you mean by 'machine.' Internet? World in general?
I'd say I already did the stepping away bit in previous stages of study and development and all that.
But I can see truth in what you say too. Get out of this current situation, and...
Still, until glorification we are still in these bodies of flesh that withereth away... Except that I'm an ocean nymph. Though one who is going through the process of getting into the Kingdom of God. So just the same as anyone else. Zeus and Apollo are the same...
The machine is ever recreating itself and manifesting - that's for us as individuals to understand. A vile monster defiles the law ...
I remember one of my deeper insights that the Beast, or the General Law, is the perfect law of God defiled by fallen man and fallen creation.
Fallen man takes the perfect law of God and turns it into the Beast system. And at a deeper level it becomes the General Law.
The perfect law of God becomes the Beast system and all that it is known for, moralism, fear of man, ritual, policing its domain and attacking those outside its domain or trying to leave its domain; self-will, vanity, worldly pride, resentment, violence, illusion, delusion.
You can take each of the Ten Commandments and see how they are perverted and made pillars of the religion of the Beast. Well, the Romanist papacy was known for breaking each of the 10 commandments.
But anyway, sex and money and human idols replace God. Well, it's too big a subject to try to thrown down notes on here. The point is made.
Something I feel as a constraint is something everybody has to deal with but I was sheltered from which is all the details of life regarding bills and taxes and keeping a home maintenanced, and everything to do with cars, and a thousand to-do lists.
I use to say I'd feel oppressed if I had a dentist appointment 4 months away. "Oh, no, that dentist appointment! It's weighing on me...!"
It's interesting how my dad just threw all that stuff out of his mind in his last months. Like, no more of that.
You can see perhaps some of the pull some homeless people feel. The ones who seem to prefer to be in that state, to a basic degree.
I do like to get things done, but I HATE things that you just know will never get done. Settling insurance policies where they keep moving the goal posts regarding what you have to do on your end. That kind of thing. Or unending identity theft things.
Sometimes I think I am being tested just where my chief feature resides. I like order and peace and things getting done and in their place, and so I have all this unending chaos around me.
But it has changed me. If the average person looked at their credit report and saw accounts opened that they didn't open they would FREAK OUT!!! I would just glance at it and say: "Been there, dealt with that." (I of course freaked out at first though.)
"I remember one of my deeper insights"
Ahem.
I think I see what you meant by machine. All these laws we are in the grasp of now, even when one develops beyond them. The ones you can't cut loose from until death.
(See? You have to use the language of the Work so that we can be understood. Laws...)
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