Interference

In response to my first post about speaking in tongues, a woman on a forum that I frequent gave me something to ponder. She had said in her response that when we pray to God, Satan hears everything that is being said and sometimes interferes with the prayers, but when praying in tongues, Satan does not know what is being said to God.

So, here are my thoughts:

I am assuming that Satan's interference with prayer to God means that Satan is somehow intercepting said prayer so that it does not reach God.

If God is omnipotent, then no amount of interference from Satan should be able to keep a prayer from reaching God. Otherwise, if God is omnipotent AND Satan is able to keep prayers from reaching God, then God must be allowing this to happen. My question from this conclusion would be why? What purpose would it serve to permit Satan the authority to determine which prayers get through and which ones do not? I have a real problem with the idea of Satan being the filter on God's mail. It seems like a poor way to save a lot of souls, if you ask me.

So, if God's not allowing Satan to interfere with prayer, then He must not be omnipotent. I'm not comfortable with that idea either because like the idea above it, it grants far too much power to Satan. In fact, it put him on equal if not greater footing than God and that just will not do. It doesn't really give us a whole lot of hope for being able to win the good fight.

So, maybe this isn't exactly what she meant about Satan interfering with our prayers. I honestly think that the interference is something much more insidious. I see it more along the lines of Satan diverting our attention away from what we should be praying about. It's a very subtle manipulation of our human desires and feelings that makes us think we're going about things the right way when we really couldn't be further from the mark. Like when we decide not to say our evening prayers because we're too tired. Or when we pray for patience with a person and end up listing off all the things about them that annoy us. Of course, it could always be something I mentioned in an earlier post. Perhaps, he only really deceived us once, and we being the intelligent creatures that we are, thought we knew it all and got so wrapped up in believing the deception to be true that we can't get ourselves out of it without some help. Perhaps, Hell is a prison of our own making.

Falx

*Note: If you want a good book about temptation, read C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters

Dreams and Stuff

Sometimes, dreams can be funny things. Sometimes, they deliver messages that we really need to hear or, as the case may be, read. I don't remember much about the context of this one, save that I was trying to help out a friend by cleaning her house for her. During one part of this dream, I was looking at the door of the refrigerator, and was reading two bumper sticker style magnets that were stuck there. The first read, "Help me to harm not those who would harm me" and the second read, "Be merciful to those who colour me a..." I didn't get to finish the last one because I woke up.

I was pondering these statements on the car ride to work when the completion of the second statement popped into my head: "Be merciful to those who colour me a villain and to those whom I colour a villain myself." Pretty weighty stuff there. It brought me back to a verse in Matthew: "You have heard it said that you should love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you love your enemy..." And I thought that maybe the dream was a response to my conflicting feelings over Osama bin Laden's death. On the one hand, I am glad that it is over and that those who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks can get some closure, but I feel very weird about celebrating his death... or any death for that matter.

If we really are to love our enemies, then so too must we love him, regardless of what he has done. We color him a villain, and yet, there are those who at the same time color him a hero. It makes me wonder if we humans really know the difference between good and evil at all, or if we're just muddling through thinking that we do.

Maybe that was the snake's great deception: that in eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we would believe that we know the difference when really we wouldn't. Perhaps, that's why we were forbidden to eat it: not because God was afraid that we would be on equal footing with Him, but because He knew that in having knowledge that we weren't ready for and therefore didn't understand, we wouldn't be able to apply it properly.

Falx

*Quick note: The spelling of colour in the second statement in the dream was how it appeared in the dream. I'm not sure why the British spelling was used and I'm not sure if it's significant.

Another Thought

I find myself thinking today about the idea of "eternal damnation". Once again, this is something that bothers me.

The way I see it, God has eternity. This means that time is pretty well an irrelevant concept when it comes to God. After all, time is a construct of man: a construct that I believe God uses to help teach us. But back to the topic at hand...

Allow me to propose a few things as true: 1. God is Love. (and all the things that go along with love like forgiveness, mercy, and grace) 2. God is eternal. 3. Eternity never ends. 4. In the scheme of eternity, a human lifetime is the equivalent of the blink of an eye.

Now, from these truths, I propose the following question: If God is Love, how could He condemn a soul to never-ending pain and torture for things that happened in the blink of an eye? To me, this kind of thing is like a parent who, when they find that their child has stolen ten dollars out of their wallet, takes them out and beats them nearly to death. We would look at that and say, "How awful! Look at how that parent abuses their child!" We are God's children, and I should hope that He is not an abusive parent. If God wished to condemn souls to an eternity of suffering, what then was the point of giving his only begotten Son to cover our iniquities?

And so, the answer is simple. Eternal damnation was never the plan. Eternal salvation was. Not eternal salvation for the chosen few, but eternal salvation for everyone because we are all God's children. Yes, that means that we must come to terms with the fact that when (not if) we get to Heaven, we might very well meet Hitler on the other side. Now, that's a point a lot of people are going to be angry at me for. I chose one of humankind's worst examples for a reason. I chose it because I'm sure it wasn't the first time (nor would it be the last) Christ said, "Forgive them Father, they know not what they are doing." Of course, I myself find it hard to swallow that I might well see Hitler in Heaven, but then again, I'm judging from the perception of man, not the perception of God, and we all know that man perceives in the flesh, not the spirit. That's why we don't get a say in where people's souls go, after all.

I think that when we die, we go through a major perspective shift. As we are: living, breathing, and doing stupid human things on the earth, we perceive things in the flesh. It makes it very hard to see the living God in everyone because God is in the Spirit and we're not perceiving in the Spirit, we're perceiving in flesh. When we die, we are only Spirit, and thus perceive in the Spirit and in truth. I think at that moment, we finally do "know what we have done" and in knowing the truth, how could you not ask for forgiveness? Ask and ye shall receive.

Out for today.
Falx

A Few Thoughts

As I lay in meditation today, my mind, as it often does, drifted off on a tangent. The tangent, however, I feel is an important one.

I found myself thinking back on this week and a conversation at lunch which had turned, as it often did, to religion. We spoke of many things, but one of the most interesting was the idea of speaking in tongues. Several of my lunch crew had been to services where they witnessed the occurrance and spoke of what an awesome experience it was to know that God's Holy Spirit was there in the room with them. I realize that for them, it was a very deeply spiritual moment and I do not wish to take anything away from it, but for some reason it bothered me. There was an initial reason, but also an underlying reason that this experience they had concerned me.

Initally, my question was: "If God wished to speak to His people through someone, why would He do it in such a way that no one could understand Him?" Thinking more on this question, I could not come up with one instance in the Bible where God spoke to His people, either directly or through a prophet, in which He spoke in a language they could not understand. It seems to me that this would be an extremely poor manner in which to get a message across.

And then another thought struck me: Sending a message in such a manner that the recipents can't understand it is not only poor communication, but it's also very confusing and frustrtating for the recipient. Nearly the moment that thought hit me, another occurred in the form of a verse from First Corinthians: "For God is not the author of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints. "

So, my conclusion was that God wouldn't try to communicate with people in a way that no one understands. Now, that isn't to say that God isn't speaking to the person spouting what sounds like gibberish on a deep, personal level that only they understand. To me, it just means that the message maybe isn't meant for everyone.

The second thing that bothered me about the description of the experience was a phrase about how they "realized that God's Holy Spirit was in the room at that moment." Again, I'm not trying to take anything away from the experience. They spoke of it with all the awe due the Creator and I know it affected them quite deeply. In fact, I didn't even realize that this particular phrase had bothered me until my mind drifted over this conversation during meditation today. So, I started analyzing: Why did this phrase bother me?

I took the phrase and turned it over a few times in my mind. I knew full well what they meant: That here was the physical proof that God was in the room with them and made His presence known. Okay, so that shouldn't bother me because, let's face it, that has to be an awesome experience. After turning it over a few more times, I realized that it was an implication of that phrase that bothered me.

The phrase, while spoken innocently enough, implies that at some point God's Holy Spirit wasn't in the room and that there would be a point in the future when God's Spirit would leave the room. Now, there's a thought I don't like. I don't think God pops in and out like that. He's here. He's always been here and He'll always be here. He's not here when He feels like it and gone when He doesn't. However, I do believe that there are times when we get so far off track that God has to make His presence known in a very real way because otherwise there's no way we're going to "get it".

I think that's all for today. I'm out.

Falx