This Generation

I found this video that well articulates some of the thoughts I've been trying to put together lately (especially after being asked why I gave up Universalism for disbelief). Trying to get back to those days in early 2013 when it came tumbling down, I have to say it was still a huge struggle trying to make the Bible make sense, not in the why God sends people to hell, but what the heck does all this apocalyptic stuff have to do with anything.  I've been researching again after putting all this stuff away for a time. I've been so influenced by my extreme bias over the last couple of decades, that I need to hone my critical thinking skills.



When I first started believing, back in 1995, I was immediately fascinated by prophecy. The teachers on T.V. excitedly proclaimed that Jesus fulfilled oodles of  Old Testament prophecies and that the time of the End, prophesied by Jesus himself, was most certainly at hand. I bought it without question. I didn't check the scriptures, or church history, or secular history, I just believed it. Sure, I would read the pertinent passages in the way the teachers presented them to me, but I just didn't do the research.



It's about 40 minutes long. I listened to it on my phone as I cleaned the house, the audio is well enough to get the meat of it.

The God Concept

This is an introduction to Evid3nc3's masterfully done deconversion series. I revisit it from time to time. This time the idea of graceful degradation stuck out to me, as I am now researching the ins and outs of belief and the whys of deconversion. For example, how is it that some can not take the bible literally and still hold faith, while others see it differently?



Graceful degradation is the ability of a computer, machine, electronic system or network to maintain limited functionality even when a large portion of it has been destroyed or rendered inoperative. The purpose of graceful degradation is to prevent catastrophic failure.  (google)


As he says in the video the concept of God is a mega-belief held together by several smaller beliefs, and it's only after enough of these smaller beliefs are challenged that the system does break down.

What We Deserve

We all deserve Hell.


I heard it over and over, I believed it, I taught it to Sunday school children. Why do we all deserve Hell?


All have sinned and fallen short the Glory of God. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.



Note Paul doesn't say the wages of sin is eternal torture.  That is pieced together from other places and in Jesus's proclamation of wailing and gnashing of teeth. The fire is never quenched, the worm never dies. The smoke of their torment rises forever and ever.


If Hell forever is your default setting, then yes, any way to avoid it would be preferable. Do you love Jesus or are you running to him to avoid Hell? If there were no Hell, would you still love Jesus?


I'll link to this post today. The last few paragraphs made me think about this.


Putting aside that there is no proof of hell outside of ancient books, I like this quote:

"...Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No, it just says so in Mark 9, Matthew 13 and Revelation 14. Perhaps you'll remember from The Lord of the Rings, it says that when the elves die, they go to Valinor, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison.”-  Sam Harris

 WHY does everyone who ever lived deserve to be in eternal pain and suffering for finite sins we commit on this earth during our short lives?


An eye for an eye is infinitely more merciful in the light of this and Jesus was supposed to be more compassionate than the Law of Moses?

The only unpardonable sin is not believing? What is going on here?



The disease is created so the cure can be sold.  Don't question it, or you'll be going there yourself.

Expectations

Yaddy asked me in the comments of the last post about what it is that I want from God?



That can be a quite complex question, but again quite simple depending on how deep one wants to get into it.


If one reads through my story and even before in the posts and devotions I did as a Christian, you will see that through it all, I tried to make it (Christianity, the Bible, the observable world, reality) make some kind of sense that I could live with and say, yes this is absolute truth.

I've been accused on numerous occasions by more than one of being too black and white in my thinking.  We are all that way in many areas of our life, not to say there isn't room for gray areas at all, but when dealing with the absolute truth of life and the nature of reality, I needed some proof.


Let's just deal with prayer for now.


Would I expect a good God to take away all/prevent all evil from the world? I don't know. How can one have light without darkness? If all were good for everyone all the time, would life be less worth living? That's a whole other subject, but I suppose I would not require a Utopia for me to believe in God.


Would I expect a good God to answer the prayers of his people? Yes. Did I see many many prayers of devout, faithful, self sacrificing believers go unanswered? Yes. Did I see tragedy heaped upon tragedy in real time to a family I knew as a Christian? Yes. My own prayers were hit and miss and as many have said before, we rarely count the misses.


The bible says over and over that God loves us and is listening and will answer our prayers. Think about the prayers you and others have prayed.



Why won't he heal you and  your loved ones? Why won't he save the sinner who you are constantly praying for? Why won't he bring in the Kingdom?


If he could part the seas and raise the dead and heal the lepers, why not now? Why are we going to doctors instead of praying for new limbs, hearts, kidneys?


I'm not asking in a selfish way as if he were a genie. I'm taking the scriptures (Jesus even) at their word.


And if this doesn't happen, ever, then what?


Apologetics, excuses, mental gymnastics, all the things I did to try and ease the dissonance.



I stopped believing in Hell as forever at least about a year and a half or so before losing faith and in that time, since the fear was gone I was able to really question. I discovered that it was just not true.



I expected the promises of the Bible, as far as prayer, to be true.

Bored

It gets kinda boring not arguing for or against anything anymore.



Peaceful, but boring.


I used to just love debating on the Christian message boards and in the comments sections of blogs. My theology is correct and I can prove it .....


Even now, that I have a rare couple of afternoons to myself, I feel the urge to start some stuff up somewhere, I guess I really like debating and defending my position on things.




I could easily do that here with you-know-what, but really I don't see the point of it. No one is going to change their minds and after all, I never set out to be a mind changer in this matter. I just wanted to tell what happened.


I don't need to be right anymore, I just need to be true to my own mind.

Sunshine

(Warning: some language at the very end- not in the main video itself).

Finite Atticus's deconversion series is also very interesting. Completely NSFW or children, but check it out, too.

Circle

Last summer I was conversing with my sister one glorious afternoon as our little girls played nearby.


At that time it was almost impossible to talk about any of this to anyone without coming unglued, but I know my sister is totally non judgmental and I needed to tell someone.



I had still not come right out and said I don't believe it to anyone, but I came as close as I had thus far that day.



My sister believes in God or the idea of a higher power, but certainly not the narrowness of Bible God. She never tried to convert anyone either, something I always did. Because of course, I knew the TRUTH.



She would often say in these attempts of mine that no one knows what happens after you die.

Well of course we do, it's in the Bible.

She would humbly suggest that maybe God wasn't angry at the gays.

Again, Bible, duh. 




So that afternoon when I suggested that what could be known of God and what was in the Bible was just circular logic, the look on her face was pretty much, finally.



She had never been one to have her mind bound by anyone or anything, so she couldn't understand the way I could believe without question the Bible's (and Christianity's) corner on the truth. And I could never understand why she would want to risk eternal peace and happiness by not converting to the One True Faith.


And that day I broke out of that circle out loud.

A Life's Work

I was going through the closet where I keep my home-school materials today while getting a bunch of them ready to ship. I also found a pile of Bible study materials that I once cherished and now just don't know what to do with.



It's a huge pile, too- like a good 4 inches thick. I thought about throwing them out, since the presence of them brings back the guilt and shame of just ducking out of things like I did regarding our old fellowship. But on the other hand, I once so admired this man's teachings and true love for what was true. He is someone that I very much felt a strange bond with even though we had never really spoken. I guess it was because  I had a bit of a "theological crush" on him (or more specifically the teachings). He was very dispensational and I think a bit of a closet Calvinist.


So for now there they sit. A huge pile of this man's life's work in searching out the mind of God.

An Involuntary Testimony

I was watching this deconversion series for the second time yesterday and the last part especially spoke to the things I can't always articulate.

At about 5 minutes in:

Christians can acknowledge many ways a person can become an ex-Christian except for one: except for the most genuine: a broken Christ-follower who tries desperately to not become an atheist but is finally forced to accept that the message of Christianity, that Christ died for your sins, that you are defective by your nature, corrupt and lost without God, is not true.

And if that happened to you, would it be your fault, or would that make your life an involuntary testimony of the poverty of Christianity?

I had written a post a few years back titled "Broken". I thought about re-posting it, but it was just basically me struggling with my sins and unworthiness. I remember that day clearly sitting at the old family computer in the morning, my soul writhing with anguish that I would ever be good enough. That my sins were too great, that I hadn't followed closely enough, or loved enough, or been obedient enough.  (I know, it's not about me, but what He did for me) but I have to tell you that was never very much comfort.



It didn't make sense.



And now looking through the archives of the old blog this morning, I can see how the whole thing was a deconversion of sorts, an unintentional one. Since the first day I started to blog, I guess I was trying to make my case for God, for Christ, why it all was true- letting my little light shine.


I dug, I prayed, I read and studied. I asked the hard questions. I know others come to different conclusions.

Scrupulosity

Back when I was a practicing Catholic, this would pretty much describe me:


Scrupulosity is a psychological disorder characterized by pathological guilt about moral or religious issues. (wikipedia)



I remember once reading that even that it (scrupulosity) is a sin because in a way I was believing that God wasn't merciful enough to forgive me.


Yeah- I did that a lot.


I wonder if it is just something in my psyche that made me prone to such super-guilty thinking. But it was real- the guilt. I do not miss that at all.


Now that I'm out of the Christian mindset, I can see my sins or mistakes in a much more realistic light. Sure, I've done bad things (nothing I would be in prison for or anything) but in terms of "sins", there have been many.



But being overly concerned with one's unworthiness is also touted as a virtue in some circles. While reading one book about a Catholic mystic way back when, she would go without eating for days because she remembered being so greedy for fruit as a child and wanted to make up for that. Actually in hindsight, she did a lot of very weird things that would probably have her institutionalized if she were living in modern times.

                                   

                                                   




When you tell a small child over and over (even in a nice way) that they are unworthy and are going to Hell without Jesus, I wonder how that child can ever be able to relax without constantly being on guard even within his or her own mind. Thankfully, I wasn't raised this way, so I can perhaps leave it behind easier than one who was. Sure, I had a conscience growing up, but never the idea that the things that made me feel bad were going to send me to Hell. I just didn't do them anymore.



Question for the deconverted out there:

Did you find that you were lost and without morals after faith, or did you find that your morals were much the same?  Do you have more or less peace of mind?

Look Up

And move ahead...



I was wandering around the net a couple of days ago and wondered what may be going on on a website that I used to visit multiple times daily. It was a blog about End Times things and then branched out into a podcast.





I distinctly remember one very hot summer day a couple of years back on the way to my sister's house for a day at the beach. I was listening to this podcast and the host was connecting the dots to the pope (the last one) and the coming of the end...any...second.




It was always very energizing and thrilling to listen to the signs of the times types of shows and even more so when the host could make a strong case that prophecy was being fulfilled in real time before our very eyes. We were in on the big secret hidden in plain sight in the pages of Holy Scripture, the Master Plan. We knew things that other people did not know. We were discerning. We were God's children. We were redeemed and the rest of the world was lost and on that broad path to destruction.  As tragic as I felt that (the lost people thing) was, the fact that my ultimate purpose in life was to be on this path to Heaven was intoxicating. At least on that particular bright and sunny summer day.

A few days later, I revisited that particular episode of the podcast and realized that like so many other times, the "prophecy" didn't happen.

This would be the last full summer of my Christianity.





Anyway, I found that the blog and podcast were gone and did a little digging to see where they went. The host has moved on from "the sky is falling" preaching to a conservative Lutheran theology. It rather pleased me to see that at least he saw that something was wrong, too. And although I certainly don't join him in his Lutheranism, it is nice to see people changing it up when one thing just does not work.

Those 70 Weeks

When I first became a believer, I was quite fond of watching Jack Van Impe presents. It was on on Sunday nights and I remember trying to make it home from work on time to see it (these were pre DVR and internet days). He was so excited and had all these verses memorized. Each week he assured us that we would be raptured any second. Well, after a few years of this, and no end of the world it got old. We joined the Church and all this was put on the back burner. Babies started coming every couple of years and this kind of thing wasn't as important at the time.




After we left the Catholic church, I felt the freedom to switch on TBN and the local Christian station again. As members of the Universal Church, we were discouraged from ingesting information from our apostate friends in the ecclesiastical communities in which they were involved, but now we were free to see what the rest of Christendom had to say about things. What I found were the most frequent types of programming were the Charismatic healing and prophecy.  Prophecy fascinated me. We were really in the last of the last days and Jesus was coming back very very soon. I was so glad that God had chosen to wake us up and lead us into the True Faith so we wouldn't be found sleeping when He returned.



I learned that the book of Daniel was a BIG DEAL. I never knew that before. Lots and lots of shows devoted time to interpreting it and as I made my way onto the internet, my study into this book deepened. It is claimed that Daniel predicts to the very day when Jesus is crucified, proving that Jesus is the Messiah and the book of Daniel is inspired. I took this for granted all these years and when my own calculations (non theologically trained though they were) came up short, I just pushed it to the back of my mind.


So, when I began to lose my faith, it concerned me that Daniel had predicted all these things in such minute detail. Then I found this series of blog posts looking at Daniel skeptically. In all the years I studied it, I never went to see what other views were out there.


From the introduction to the series:



Most mainstream biblical scholars who have looked at Daniel dispassionately have concluded that the bible-believer’s dating of the book is indeed flawed. They cite overwhelming evidence that Daniel was not written until 167 BCE during the Maccabean Period, or about 400 years after the fundamentalist’s claim. Furthermore, once Daniel is put into its proper historical context, the prophecies that seem to predict the events mentioned above, really concern local events of the time. (emphasis mine)




It is even in the introduction in the New American Bible (Catholic edition) that the book was written during that time and that Daniel is not the author.


I highly suggest reading the series on Daniel above and doing your own homework, but for me, it is enough to shed doubt on the 70 weeks prophecy.

Prophecy

One of the last lingering doubts I had as to the Bible (or at least some of it) not being inspired was the idea that it prophesied events well into the future. Most importantly, I suppose were the prophecies that Jesus was said to have fulfilled.



I saw an article in the comments section of another site recently in which a rabbi explains why one such fulfillment is rejected by Judaism.

Question:One of the methods you used in your tape series to refute missionary claims is to point out the context of the prophecy. For example, you point out that the seventh chapter of Isaiah cannot be a prophecy about Jesus’ virgin birth because it suggests that the prophecy was to have been fulfilled in Ahaz’s lifetime, some 700 years before Jesus.Still, maybe this is a “double prophecy,” a prophecy about a boy to be born in the days of Ahaz and also a prophecy to the birth of Jesus. The context is only for the first application of this double prophecy. Rabbi, do you have any comment? read on.... 

For me, this particular prophecy always seemed a bit of a stretch anyway, so it wasn't hard to see how it does really seem to be completely out of context when referring to Jesus. There were more, trickier ones, and I'll try to delve into those in the coming weeks and months.



Meanwhile, check out this post on the doctrine of Hell from a Judaic view.

Eternal Life and Death- Part Eleven

About Personal Experiences

Even if the Bible and the Church have it wrong in all the finer details, even if the contradictions and scandals in high places put a stain on Christianity, we always have that. Our own personal experience provides a kind of last line of defense, or at least it did for me. I recall distinctly my very first prayer for salvation and the wonderful feelings that followed. From that point forward any intense, sublime emotion was credited to the spirit of God. 

I also recall distinctly one late summer evening after having pretty much deconverted, experiencing those same sublime feelings completely out of a Christian mindset. It frightened and intrigued me. 

I wrote about my conclusions to this dilemma in the former series I wrote:

(originally posted 12/01/13)

The Spirit of God is promised to all believers. I truly believed I had it from the first time I asked God to reveal Himself to me and perhaps even before.

Back in high school and college when I was depressed a lot, I used to go driving in the country to listen to music and think. In some of my most hopeless moments, it seemed like sometimes there was a presence there, a comforting spirit that would help me to feel better. I kind of always felt like something or someone was watching me, too. I had spiritual like experiences in the past even before coming to Jesus, some may have been due to "outside influences" but in altered states, the mind goes places that one just doesn't usually go. There is another dimension, even if only in one's mind.




What I found as I tentatively wandered out the of the Christian (but not spiritual) box, that the feelings that I always associated with being the Comforter would happen anyway, without my being directly connected to or focused upon Jesus or Christianity. In the months that my faith was slipping away, many times a song, a moving scene from a movie or video game, or fellowship with my children or husband would bring about such feelings of being connected with the Spirit of God.

I discovered this when I began meditating, too and I started to wonder about the implications of it. Maybe it didn't matter if I was praying to Yahweh in Jesus's name, Jesus, Mary, Shiva, Allah, Krishna, Ganesh or the three goddesses of Hyrule. The very act of praying or contemplating on the sacred or anything like that seemed to produce the same feelings in me. I wondered if that had happened to anyone else.


The flood of emotions that I felt during my salvation experience may not have been exclusive to Christianity. I had heard of the Mormon's burning in the bosom, but I also discovered that in all faith traditions there are similar (or essentially the same) feelings that are produced.  Maybe this feeling is coming from within one's own self and not some outside force. All people of all religions can't all have the Holy Spirit if Jesus is the only way. Are they all deceived but not us? ...

 Upon discovering this, I was more convinced than ever that I was ready to let go.

No Hell/ No Heaven

In losing the horrific doctrine of Eternal Torment, I was able to let many questions that had been stifled for years come to the surface and be investigated. It was the conviction that God was love that allowed me to let go of the fear I had to question, and eventually let go of Christianity.


I do not write to convince anyone that I am right and they are wrong, I write because being and then not being a believer was something I never imagined would happen.  I write to explain why I can't settle into any kinder, gentler, less restrictive form of the Faith.


I'm done with it.


Not to say that I disdain all spirituality, I don't...really. I don't have any answers on that front nor am I actively pursuing any. If the universe has a Supreme Being, I imagine that such a being is more than capable of revealing (if it wishes) itself to each and every one of us without a shadow of a doubt.  A Cosmic Mind? Karma? Enlightenment? I don't know. And that's okay.


In the end, if we just cease to be, that's becoming increasingly comfortable to me. If there is some afterlife, I hope it's based upon what we did here and how we treated others and not on right belief, especially right belief on so little verifiable fact.




And I hope that in the end all would be finally welcomed and would find themselves in the state of eternal peace.

Eternal Life and Death- Part Ten

Finally Realizing My Doubt was Reasonable

Back in my very early believing days (in my early twenties when I knew everything...:)) I asked my agnostic dad about the Bible. He said he had read it and just found too many contradictions. I felt as though he were dismissing me and I was offended and saddened.  Although I hadn't actually done the homework myself, the allegation that the Holy Book had errors in it was unthinkable to me. He must just have not understood, or paid attention, or read it in the right context. And besides, I was pretty sure he was just angry with God and all that. I really was. Well, God had shown me Himself and I was sure that the Bible could be made sense of and anyone who wanted to believe that could prove it to be true with the correct study and an open heart and mind. 

Fast forward 19 years.

The past 19 years were full of the homework. Some years more than others. There was a detour into the Roman Catholic religion where the Bible is not the sole authority, but I did find in those years that their authority was not all that impressive, either. After that, I jumped into the scriptures like they were literally the complete and utter answer to everything. The Jesus words only thing was my last attempt at holding onto any kind of scriptural truth.

Honestly, for me, the red letters contained some of the most confusing and scariest phrases in the Bible.  I loved the parts where Jesus pardoned the adulteress and told others to love their enemies. Father forgive them, for they know not what they do was also deeply comforting. But the parables and the judgement passages seemed uncharacteristic to the Savior. By this time, I was pretty much done playing games. In an attempt to adjust my focus, I went to see what they (the unbelievers) were saying about Bible contradictions.


I happened upon this site along with others.


If the Bible has contradictions, what parts do we pay attention to? Which parts are for us and which are not? Why would the red letters be any different? Why all the commentaries and study bibles? (I myself was using a Scofield Bible and had been for years.)


After heading down this path, I knew I could never see the Bible in way I had seen it, the way I needed to see it in order to hang onto any kind of Christian beliefs. How do we know any of this is true?



It had never occurred to me to ask.




Next Part

Eternal Life and Death- Part Nine

We are Stardust

Why I couldn't be a liberal/progressive Christian

The Kingdom was not to come with observation, but was a state of mind, a oneness with God.  I found that it was difficult to pin down what this whole thing (Christianity) was about anymore.

Especially what the whole Jesus thing was about.

If the kingdom of God was within us, what did Jesus have to do with that?


Several months before all this started,  a friend had blogged that her husband had blogged about some atonement theory that I had never heard of. When looking into that I was surprised to find that Penal Substitution (which is what I learned pretty much from the start) was not one that was always believed and that, really, there had been several ideas to come out of theological minds (and scripture) as to why Jesus had to die.

Did God demand blood or did Jesus offer it?

Was Jesus's death a payment for sin or a ransom to Satan?

Was He a martyr or a victim?

To get us back to the Garden or to save us from Hell?


(One could pick any one of these ideas and run with it, but what was the TRUTH?)

I began to venture out into the sites of liberal/progressive Christians. As much as I enjoyed the non-judgmental love and the great social justice ideas something was off. For the most part progressives are for gay marriage rights and the ordination of women and many are even pro choice, but what did the bible say about these things?




Many would point to the red letters only. Okay, I get that idea, but if these same letters were in the same canon with all this other stuff, what was true and what was not?  And even so, Jesus said that if one divorces, it constitutes adultery. ????? How many churches are still clinging onto that one? Even in a metaphorical sense, Jesus says a lot of things that many Christians ignore:

 (I know this video is quite irreverent, forgive me)



It started to occur to me that just about all of us pick and chose what we think Jesus's words mean.  I found many of the things he said so unsettling that I was thrilled when Pauline dispensationalism entered my life years before.


So in looking into these red letter words more closely and very seriously for the first time (if this was the only part of the bible we could really count on) something was becoming more and more clear.



The whole thing (including the red letters) was full of contradictions, or at least it seemed to me.  At that I began to look into these contradictions objectively without running to apologists to comfort me. I also began to wander outside the boundaries of Christianity and explore what the other faiths had to say about spirituality.




Next Part

Eternal Life and Death- Part Eight

Waiting for the Sun

What If Jesus Isn't Really Coming Back?

(In the way we think, I should say.)



Easter is THE BIG one holiday wise for the Catholic church. Christmas has nothing on it. On the first Easter I spent as a freshly baptized Christian (at age 28 for anyone who missed the first series), just minutes after being washed in the waters of regeneration, we participated in a Vigil ceremony. In fact, the night before Easter is just that, a watch for the coming of the Lord on Sunday morning.


Christ has died,
Christ is risen,
Christ will come again.



We said that every Sunday. The Faithful had been saying that every liturgy for hundreds of years. Generations of Christians had come and gone, lived and died, fought and killed, all in the name of Jesus. But where was he? I mean, it has been a long long time. Why didn't he come soon like he said?




Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.



Over the next few weeks, I wrestled with the idea that there would be no Great Tribulation, no Rapture, no End Times as I had spent the last 19 or so years looking for. The millennium itself proved troublesome to reconcile with either past events or my new found conviction that God was indeed done pouring wrath onto the world. And why shouldn't it? Church theologians throughout history have had a heck of a time figuring out what the 1000 years meant. I'll admit, I still don't know, but it was beginning to not matter to me as my thinking drifted into more spiritual territory:


The Kingdom of God is within you...

It Comes Not With Observation

Jesus said so in the gospel of Luke. I couldn't believe I had missed (or most likely ignored) that for all the years I had studied the Bible. Another parable that I had often wondered about was this one:

He spoke another parable to them: The kingdom of the heavens is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until it had been all leavened. (Matt. 13:33)

No one sees the action of the leaven in a huge dramatic way. It happens gradually, over time and does permeate the whole. As a bread baker myself, I know that there is never a part of the lump that is unaffected by the yeast.  The kingdom of God leavens all....eventually. Now, I had always been taught that leaven was a bad symbol (the leaven of the Pharisees and all that.) But this seemed to be saying just the opposite. The kingdom of God was like leaven?


Yes.


And this fit right in with my Universalist views. Cool.


It was not coming with observation. It was an individual thing.

We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto you do well that you take heed, as to a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts:

 I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.

The Day Star rising in our hearts. 

The Kingdom of God within me, you, all of us.

God all in all. 

I began to look into Gnostic teaching* and found that I had much more in common with them than I had though before.

*My boldness in searching out Gnostic teaching was due to the fact that I was no longer afraid of being led astray by the devil. "There in no fear in love," as John said. For better or worse, I truly believed that I had nothing to fear my honestly turning over every stone.



Part 9

Eternal Life and Death- Part Seven

Which Generation?

Matthew Chapter 24 as History

As premillenials do, we awaited the Great Tribulation and Rapture with great anticipation. Every headline, every disaster, every disturbance in the Middle East pointed toward the rebuilding of the Temple and the rise of Antichrist.




It seems all so macabre in hindsight.




But in order to get to our Blessed Hope, this all needs to go down first. Just turn on TBN on any day and you will see those spokesmen for the Creator tell us why America and the World in general (but mostly America) is going to face the Wrath of God and really soon.


As I went down the path in pursuit of the truth of things, I was pointed to this passage from The Wars of the Jews by Flavius Josephus:

Accordingly, it appears to me that the misfortunes of all men, from the beginning of the world, if they be compared to these of the Jews are not so considerable as they were; while the authors of them were not foreigners neither. This makes it impossible for me to contain my lamentations. But if any one be inflexible in his censures of me, let him attribute the facts themselves to the historical part, and the lamentations to the writer himself only. (Preface, section 4)

It sounded an awful lot like what Jesus said in the Olivet discourse to me. An awful lot like it (it never entered my mind until months later that this possibly wasn't a prophecy at all, but written after the fact...more on that later).

Preterism

That used to be a dirty word to me.  Preterism is the belief that most (if not all) of the prophecies in scripture have already been fulfilled. Crazy, right?  I knew that Catholics and most mainline Protestants were partial Preterists, meaning that all events except for the second coming of Jesus were already done. But hey, they just didn't understand prophecy correctly, they were all led astray by the Catholic church, blah, blah, blah. But now I started to see why. I searched it out and found that the things Jesus said would happen to "this generation" actually did.



Ask any futurist and they will change the meaning of generation. I did. But what if Jesus meant what he said and was saying it to the actual persons that he was addressing, not people hundreds of centuries in the future?

There are some here that will not taste death...All these things will come upon this generation...When YOU see Jerusalem surrounded by armies...

Really, go back and read Jesus's prediction of the destruction of the Temple and then Revelation and then go and read what Josephus recorded as what historically happened.



Click to enlarge this chart:

Source

Applying the words of Jesus and John to things that had already historically been recorded was satisfying in a way that I cannot even describe. It was like I had been putting a puzzle together with the wrong pieces and someone had finally given me the correct ones. There was no more speculating about how and when all this would happen, it was over, past history. Although I had no idea where I would end up, I knew that I could never, ever see it the way I had before. This just made too much sense. Jesus said these things would happen soon, very soon, upon this generation, very quickly.


And they did.


Why was I just now hearing about this?



I felt a bit embarrassed at myself for all the time and effort and energy I had spent on trying to map out the End Times, but I tried not to dwell on that. There were still a few correct pieces that I needed to finish this puzzle once and for all, I was almost there.




Part Eight

Eternal Life and Death- Part Six

Signs and Symbols

The Spirit and the bride say, come.




The Book of Revelation has always been fascinating to me. In fact, it was the first part of the Bible that I ever read as an adult. I had always known it as a map of The End of All Things, but it was now just more confusing than ever. Now that I had been shown by God that He was all Love and all this crazy torture stuff was misunderstood, this book had some rough spots for sure.

At the time I began to open my mind to the alternatives, I was frequenting a Universalist site with hundreds of pages of text. Being as I didn't have much time to sit and read, I would transfer the text to mp3 using a free online program and I would listen to the pages and pages of written material while doing my housework. On that particular site was a whole series about how Revelation was not a literal book at all, but completely symbolic. I put the series off until I got through all the Universalist stuff and then decided to hear him out.





While I did like what the author was doing, something was still unsatisfying to me. If everything in the book was symbolic, then it could be interpreted in an unending number of ways. And I wasn't completely buying this guy's interpretation of everything. I looked around a bit more at other authors and thinkers who were doing the same things- all claiming Holy Spirit guidance.




 That's all fine and good, but what is the Truth?





What I did get out of that study, which was huge turning point, was that there was such a thing as "apocalyptic language" and it could be proven by testing other parts of scripture that used that same language- all with non-literal results.  (Please look at the chart here to see what I mean.) It had been right in front of me the whole time. The doomsday cataclysmic events that the Book of Revelation foretold were figurative. There would be no literal rivers of blood, or armies of locusts, or mountains rolling up like scrolls, or mark of the Beast.  And I could see that because this type of language had all been used in scripture before to apply to things that never literally happened.



So what then was the book all about, really?  I was shocked when I began to think it all had already happened and I found out I wasn't alone in that conclusion.





Part Seven

Eternal Life and Death- Part Five

The End of the The End of the World

What about the Apocalypse?





If Jesus saved everyone or is saving or will save everyone, my End Time theology seemed like it would need some rethinking.  The whole scenario that I had stuck with was 7 years of tribulation with the Rapture sometime before, during, or after. Then, Jesus would return for an Earthly kingdom to last 1000 literal years and then the final judgement. At the end of this final judgement was when people were to be cast into the Lake of Fire, so needless to say, something had to come after that to reconcile those people back to God.



I was still very dispensational in my thinking when first learning about Universal salvation and found that most Universalist sites save one that I found were not futuristic in their eschatology. I couldn't "go there" just yet, but was given a push.




God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. There is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ. If One died for all then all died. We are all reconciled.


One evening sitting at the dining room table, just weeks after first presenting this idea to my husband he asked me about the wrath to come. Paul says that Jesus saved us from the wrath to come.

"Well, I don't know."

"Paul said there will be wrath, everlasting destruction even."

As I recall, I started in with my new knowledge of mistranslated words when I got the "oh please" look and just gave up the conversation.

"I didn't say I had it all figured out."

In fact, I couldn't explain it at all when faced with opposition, but God had shown me. There was no going back for me at this point.



Here's some Christian Universalist dispensationalism for you:)


Could it be that what/when The End happened didn't matter as much as I thought it did? I wrote a post on my former blog thinking out loud about it.

Originally posted on Halloween of 2011:

Thoughts on a Nonapocalypse*

I thought I may do some writing in the next few days or possibly weeks about some of the ways my mind is being renewed (I hope it's renewing and not malfunctioning..lol).


The main theme for this line of thinking is that Jesus may or may not be coming back very very soon, but that is okay, either way. It is now becoming more important to me what I am doing to show His love in these last or maybe not so last times.


Eschatology is something that I have always been very passionate about, right from the very beginning of my walk. The thought that we were in the final generation and Christ could come back any second was something that never really disturbed me. Others would say things like they wanted to see their kids grow up or they were not ready and such and I couldn't imagine why.


So here is me, little miss end times, making sure all my loved ones know that Jesus is coming back any minute and they had better be getting it together. Meanwhile, Lazarus (proverbially) is lying outside my gates.


Not that there is anything wrong with being prophetically minded, but something was certainly lacking in my spirituality. I was becoming a big noisy noise. I had no love. It was about this time last year that the Lord started to shake things up, force me to think about how I saw Him, my family, and people in general.


And here is something I found out:
Upon listening to some teachers who focus was on love, it just so happened that a couple are not premillenial (gasp!) and even though I don't agree with them, I was able to give their eschatology a hearing and discovered that they (this man was a preterist) aren't scripturally illiterate monsters, but have taken what they honestly feel the text says. The verses they have to explain away are no more ridiculous or numerous than the ones we futurists do.
I'm not ready to jump camps at all, I just realized that we are all imperfect, we are all trying to make sense of it, and we are all His children.


Paul says:
...for we see now through a mirror obscurely, and then face to face; now I know in part, and then I shall fully know, as also I was known;  and now there doth remain faith, hope, love -- these three; and the greatest of these [is] love.


more to come...perhaps.


*title disclaimer...I do believe that Jesus will physically return to this earth, and that there will be an end times scenario...just maybe not as soon as I once thought.

 (End of post)




The admission to myself  that others who saw eschatology differently may have had a case was startling, but very exciting.  I was going to hear the other sides of this thing with an open mind. The great thing about losing Hell was I wasn't afraid to seek, question or ask anymore.




I was free.





Part Six