Hallelujah!

Posted on June 11, 2019 by LovingLikeGod.com


“After these things I heard something like a loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, saying, “Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God; BECAUSE HIS JUDGMENTS ARE TRUE AND RIGHTEOUS; for He has judged the great harlot who was corrupting the earth with her immorality, and HE HAS AVENGED THE BLOOD OF HIS BOND-SERVANTS ON HER.” And a second time they said, “Hallelujah! HER SMOKE RISES UP FOREVER AND EVER.” And the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshiped God who sits on the throne saying, “Amen. Hallelujah!” And a voice came from the throne, saying, “Give praise to our God, all you His bond-servants, you who fear Him, the small and the great.” Then I heard something like the voice of a great multitude and like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, saying, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.” Revelation 19:1-6 New American Standard Version

Most all of us are familiar with the Hallelujah Chorus, but perhaps less well appreciated is that the word or expression, “Hallelujah” does not appear in the New Testament writings until Chapter 19 of the book of Revelation. It appears or is heard in connection with the fall of Babylon. The immediate context is the two preceding chapters – 17 & 18. But for a much greater perspective on the full significance of Babylon and its fall we have to go all the way back to Genesis, Chapter 11:

“Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words. It came about as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.’ And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. They said, ‘Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.’ The LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. The LORD said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.” Genesis 11:1-9 NAS

Right from the beginning, Babylon is pregnant with meaning! From here, to Revelation Chapter 19, stopping off at the book of Daniel is also helpful in providing perspective on the truth revealed in and by Babylon.

While we don’t normally associate the Hallelujah Chorus with the fall of Babylon, (and who knows what was in Handel’s understanding when he wrote this monumental song) in the context of the New Testament, it has to do with the fall of Babylon. The greatness of Handel’s masterwork does suggest that we stop for a moment here on the brink of current events, and think about the multifaceted significance of the Fall of Babylon. The Biblical perspective on this economic collapse (i.e. the perspective of Heaven and the saints of God) is that this disaster is a long awaited cause of celebration.

P.S. Hint: common language is not unlike a common currency – wrong language – wrong currency. A city, and a tower in our day, more often than not is a bank building or a financial center.

By Jay Ferris, originally posted Feb. 24th, 2012

Posted in J.Ferris: Reposts with Notes | 2 Comments

EXPONENTIAL TIME

Posted on June 4, 2019 by LovingLikeGod.com


First a couple of introductory thoughts:

There is time, and then there is eternity. For the present, time only touches eternity in the moment. Eternity is on the other side of resurrection for those of us who are time bound. Resurrection is on the other side of death, and more specifically the death of the cross, both in the first instance, and in the “all day long” instance. To go from resurrection to resurrection is to go from death to death.

What I have to share here is not about eternity, but rather has its focus in time – time in three phases – lag time – on time – lead-time.

(The following is excerpted from my book on money: For Love or money: Understanding The 2nd Parable – Book Three. For present purposes I have taken it out of Biblical context in hope of finding a more open-minded readership.)

I should also say that one of the things that prompts me to address this particular matter of timing is the fact that it is still not part of the public dialogue and warning as to what is coming as the economic “Titanic” heads for the bottom at an increasingly rapid rate of decent.

With that said, let’s look at the time we are living in, and finally at the financial or monetary times we are living in.

There are many activities or trends in the world today, which could be plotted against time in this way. They all make essentially the same exponential curve. Population growth may be the most striking example, but there are others: the increase in human knowledge, the advance in technology, man’s ability to destroy, immorality, and many other areas that all suggest the end of time as we have known it – or certainly the “lag time” phase of it.

Inflation can also be spoken of in three phases. In phase one, (“lag time”) the money supply increases faster than the corresponding increase in price levels. This is the result of something called the “money illusion.”

The “money illusion” is that perception of the value of something as a medium of exchange that makes us take care not to throw it away as worthless. Of course, it’s easier to believe that a gold coin has value than it is to believe that a paper image has value, especially if the relationship between the paper image and the gold coin has no integrity.

When those who control the printing presses increase the number of paper images relative to the gold coins, the money illusion begins to break down. That’s what happens when bankers get their hands in the cookie jar. Normally it’s called “theft.”

What no one seems to want to talk about yet is this “theft” business. The only place that newly printed money can get its value is from the value stolen from the money already in savings or circulation. This is ignoring the velocity of money, which increases as the money illusion breaks down.

When this stolen value is done in collusion with the U.S. Treasury Department, it’s called “monetary policy.” In either case there are guns involved on, or behind the scenes. People begin to hang on to their gold coins, but their willingness to trade in their paper images causes prices in the market to rise in proportion to the increase in the paper money supply. This is phase two. (“on time”) During phase one, (lag time) the price rise lags behind the increase in the money supply. By phase three, (“lead time”) the money illusion is shattered to the point that prices increase even faster than the increase in the money supply. Back in the Carter years we began to get a glimpse of this phase of the destruction of printed monetary value. Since then we have been living in a lull between labor pains, which are also exponential.

It is not our intention at this point to get into the nature of the present pregnancy or the nature of what is being birthed. The point I want to make here is that printing money is theft, and timing is going to be increasingly important in the days ahead.

By Jay Ferris, originally posted February 21, 2012

Posted in J.Ferris: Reposts with Notes | Tagged | 1 Comment

Relationship

Posted on May 28, 2019 by LovingLikeGod.com

Relationships
My understanding of relationship is first, the relationship of male and female. It is couched in what seems to be sexual or gender terms, but those two words go way beyond and much deeper than simply gender connection.  They are more like the math symbols for the unity of the Godhead which they image. As such, they are rather generic, with broad application where connectedness is concerned.

Not too long after the removal of the female portion or side of the equation, we get the man-woman connection, and that leads to parent children connection, and that leads to sibling connection – and those are the relational facts of life. Life does not come in the form of, or reproduce as, undifferentiated brotherhood. “Brotherhood” may be relational on some level, but it was never intended to produce or reproduce life. For that you need the family package.

Jesus didn’t promise us “100 times” brotherhood, He promised us a 100 times family – Mark 10:29-30, but He made it conditional on a relational priority change. The Lord didn’t give Abraham a sibling. He gave Him a son – a son containing a SEED. Without relationship with a woman, that has no place to go unless of course you are sexually confused, and then we know it goes to a place that doesn’t produce life, but only old waste.

Why is it so difficult to grasp that this created, and reproducible life in the flesh is a parable of reproducible life in the Spirit?

My impression is that the flesh is so wounded early on due to the parental, or familial dysfunction of the flesh that it can’t manage to get that wounding to the cross where it is redeemed and changed into new life, “Except you come as a little child… (that for me means you come prior to the knowledge of good and evil which is the result of early woundedness) you shall not enter the kingdom of God.” Relationally wounded people are incapable of healthy relationships. They can only manage wounded codependencies. As long as we continue in not allowing The Lord to have His way with us, we remain in that unspiritual place. It is not pretty. :-/ More often than not it remains fixated on gender specific body parts, and so can’t make it to Spiritual relationship without the very strong possibility of moral failure. This was a big problem at Corinth.

The oneness that Jesus prayed and died for is just not possible unless we allow the lord to put us together in and by the Spirit, In short, we need to get beyond the shadow images of gender specific flesh. Does the Lord put brothers and sisters together gender specific, as well as gender neutral? Of course He does, but it needs to happen by the Spirit, and not by the doctrinal bondage of some kind of “new testament law” or relational buzz words used to bolster the latest cutting edge dog and pony shows. That is an oxymoron!  Law is simply the “leaves” we continue to hide behind. It is the foundation stone of the relational bondage of systematic religion.

“For this reason I kneel before the Father,  from whom every family¹ (or fatherhood² in heaven and on earth derives its name,” Ephesians 3:14, 15

The Father is looking for hoods, and that’s us. The same goes for all the other hoods, but we must never lose sight of the fact that He is the Father under the hood… What’s under your hood? :-)

What’s under the hood includes “El Shaddai, or “the Breasted One.”  I’m not sure how He/She does that, all I can think of right at the moment is the answer of a Father to his son’s query: “Dad, how come men have nipples?” And the really anointed answer: “Just in case we need them.” Paul did, and so do we on occasion.

Well that took me to another fact of life, the one that makes sense out of “the first commandment with promise.” Parents get to do life a generation ahead of their children, and that positions them with life’s truth that the children need if they are not going to make the same mistakes their parents made. Seems to me they are still left with plenty of mistakes to make of their own.

The thing that makes this promise keepable are children who recognize and honor the wisdom of their parents, and pay attention to it. Siblings give each other a lot of really bad information. It’s perhaps just as bad as what children are getting from the media in our increasingly debauched culture. Sad to say this is true with the undifferentiated brotherhood doctrine that is presently running away with what’s left of “the house church movement.”

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to mention that “every fatherhood in heaven and on earth,” includes grandfatherhood. It is this season of life that the lessons of fatherhood have been tried and tested, qualifying grandfatherhood for the role as elders or overseers. Overseers need to be willing, 1 Peter 5:2. For some years now, my understanding of this willingness is first the willingness to stop being overdoers! It is very difficult to keep your eye on things if you are still caught up in the overdoing season of life. That’s the fathering season – the hands on season. The age of elders under the shadow Covenant gives us a clue into the the season of life of overseers or elders – 50 plus. (Numbers 4:3-47)  Those under that age are the doers. Fifty is kind of old for fathering, but just about right for grandfathering – eldering – overseeing. :-)

Love!

¹/²  The Greek for family (patria) is derived from the Greek for father (pater)

By Jay Ferris, originally posted February 18, 2012

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