Totem

The future of traditional Christianity is the future of every religion.  Sooner or later, religions become relics powered only by the old folk.  The young walk away because religion is not the security blanket advertised.  As a result, the number of believers will increasingly decline.  We God believers’ have a choice, change the language (doctrine) or die!  

God on the cross is a primitive totem pole religion. Jesus was on the cross with the message given to him by God.  Religion pulled the cross trigger but the message cannot be stopped.  For God so loves this world filled with we very different peoples.  Our God has a plan for all of us, trust the plan, the how and why remain open for discussion.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca

 

Blind from Birth

Our personal selfishness, sometimes labeled sin, has a natural negative spiritual and physical consequence in this our earthly experience. God doesn’t have to club us over the head in this world or the next, we create our own hellish inferno on earth by choosing the “me first path” instead of the “we path”.  We experience these selfish consequences because there is an invisible God seam or fissure running through all things.  Our world has a God code.

If we go the “me first” route, the resulting self-imposed judgement will happen, the negativity will succeed.  You or I may be able to avoid some or most of the negativity in our lifetime but our future generations will not. They will shoulder some of our negative consequences in addition to their own, talk about not fair.  No way you say! 

Allow me to inject one illustration.  Counterpoint, please explain the hateful insanity toward the Jewish people duplicated again and again over thousands of years. Why does our world want to exact retribution against the Jewish people?  Could it be that the taking of the promised land became not a gift from God but rather a conquest with the sword? The devil is in our world not the next and the devil is in the details.

One additional cruelty is dumped upon we earthly humanoids.  Has anybody got a map?  If spirituality were just a simple matter of making the correct choices, there must be a map.  Please, show me the map, the book or the blog that charts a course to spiritual authenticity.  There are numerous pretenders out there with a biblical marketing plan.  They will take your money but the awful truth is that there is no map or the truth may just be that we are all spiritually blind.  We couldn’t read a map (Bible) successfully even if we had one. 

The only remedy for our spiritual blindness is a personal spiritual intervention. It is time to stop our wandering and wondering, we can look up and then we can listen for the voice of God.  What are you hearing?

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Babes

The table seating at the eternity banquet will be a function of the justice of God. We all have been taught that God is Love and a Holy God.  This dualistic understanding of God is difficult to put our heads around. It need not be so.  The justice of God is exercised in eternity to compensate for the injustice experienced in this world.  

We have all mouthed the words, “it just isn’t fair!”  Nothing about life is fair, we all live in a world that is random and temporary, very little seems to have a rhyme or reason.  Eternity and the justice of God is about bringing eternal justice to compensate all of us in varying degrees for the injustices of this world.  God knows who has suffered the greatest earthly offense and will seat us at the banquet accordingly.

Who will be celebrating up closest to the head table?  Certainly not me nor you, we will not be so blessed.  To pick and choose is impossible for us but as has oft been voiced, nothing is impossible with God (Luke 1:37; Matt. 19:26). I am not God nor are you so I guess we’ll just have to guess. Any takers, how would you arrange the seating at the banquet?

Please allow me to guess.  If God’s standard of judgement has been reflected correctly in the words of Jesus, relative selfish actions in this world will be how God decides.  Choose any word you like, sin or selfishness.  We all have a lifetime of choosing; shall I be selfish today or not?   This was the focus of the Sermon on the Mount; the question of ethics is how we unselfishly treat others.

Killing of another human being is the ultimate act of selfishness. Moses gave us the Ten Commandments, one of which is “thou Shalt not Kill”.  For four thousand years we seemingly spiritual peoples have been making exceptions.  Killing in the name of religion or politics, under certain circumstances, is unavoidable.  Really? 

Jesus put it this way when asked about the greatest commandment, “He replied, thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 37,38,39).  I believe that Jesus was misquoted, what he must have said was “your neighbor before yourself” because that is how he lived and died.  Instead of silence, he could have defended himself.

Killing is playing God in the life of another human being, robbing them of their God given spiritual potential.  Maybe, in this world, the evil of killing is a seemingly necessary evil but killing is always an evil.  We shall be judged and seated at the banquet accordingly. Returning to my guess, two killing circumstances appear to be the most egregious.   One is killing in the name of God and the other is killing of another human being in the womb before it has any spiritual opportunities.  These folk, these babes, will be closest to the rejoicing table in eternity.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca

 

 

 

 

 

Hell

Dualisms are of the devil.  Again, please excuse the pun. They are everywhere and they go nowhere, round and round they go.  In railroad talk dualisms are like the siding track, it is there only to park railroad cars out of the way.  This is why dualisms exist, to park your brain so you don’t ask questions.  On every siding of dualistic thinking there is division and stagnation.

Black and White  

Love and Hate

God and Satan

Heaven and Hell

Angels and Demons

Mind and Body

Body and Soul

Eternity will bring unity while respecting our diversity.  Hell is anyplace where all the residents think alike.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

Stuff

Science has discovered that the cosmos is ever expanding.  This proven fact means that all the stuff of the cosmos is in flux.  Nothing is as it was seconds ago.  This proven fact also means that the stuff of the cosmos, all of life to include we human beings, are in rejection and disintegration mode.  We are ruled by our rejection of one another, trapped by our supposed survival needs, most times the rejection is violent. 

Just as a magnet repels and attracts, maybe, eternity is God’s attraction mode.  Eternity is then the coming together or the unification of all that stuff.  Death and disintegration is the pivot point, instead of preferring to run from our source, we will be running toward our ultimate meaning. I have no other word that fits, we will be running to gather around our God.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca  

 

Slippery Slope

Selfishness of its citizenry killed the Roman Empire, it rotted from within. The 500-year empire saw 250 years of rising greatness and then 250 years of constant decline in all measures of national success, including economic factors and political influence in the world.  2026 will be America’s 250-year pivot point, some would say, we have bested the Romans. 

It is all downhill from here. 

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA     

 

Judgment

 The Jesus ethic is the ethic of his and our Father God. It is not an ethic given to us to navigate the craziness of this world because passivity is dangerous in our world. Maybe that’s the point?  The ethic, turning the other cheek, is a promise of another existence beyond the grave. The ethic is a promise that a new kind of life will exist in the other world of eternity.

Jesus preached to all the people on that Judean hillside to love your enemies and those who spitefully use you in this world.  We all know our dismal success rate following this believer’s expectation but when we arrive at eternities door, we all, the successful, those who have tried and failed or those who never tried, shall be welcomed home.

Wait one minute you say.  The Bible does not say that!  The Bible says that God is the eternal judge of our earthly lives.  Yes, God is the judge but as has been stated previously, we can find everything in the Bible if quoted with assumptions.  When Jesus spoke about knocking at the door, was he describing our spiritual search on earth or was he describing a passport to a blessed eternity?  You decide.

St. Luke’s Gospel chapter 13 records the Jesus’s understanding of eternity.  We can experience eternity in the now and it is a narrow door that few will choose to access.  However, the spiritual now is not eternity.  In eternity we all shall be judged and given a seat at the table according to our God worthiness.  Some of us will be seated up close to the honored table and some of us will be seated at the outer fringes of eternity.  God will decide but there is no hell talk from Jesus.

Verse 30 has bugged me for some 40 years.  How can we make any logical sense out of this verse if God is the judge of our eternal destiny bound for heaven or bound for hell?  One cannot. The religious crowd that was hounding Jesus and who would finally hang him on a cross were the crux of this Jesus description of eternity.  They were there, the one's who killed Jesus but they were judged by God as unworthy of honored seating. Jesus says that in eternity, “Indeed there are those who are last who will be first and first who will be last.”

I ask you, who will be seated close to the action, could it be “the sinners”?  

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca

 

 

 

 

Holding Pattern

Jesus was only slightly less than God.   The prophet Jesus, the long-awaited spiritual leader spoken of by the Old Testament prophets was about to share his God given message.   People, he said, there is truth in the old ways but that truth has gone sour as our religion has allowed our spiritual vision to be turned inward in seeming hopelessness. 

I ask you, have you no God faith?  Is the temple ritual of our religion just enough to satisfy your spiritual longings?   I ask you, who is more respected by God, the spiritually defeated and searching or the spiritually pompous?  

I am here today to say, it is not the pompous and they are plotting to kill me and my message.  Their plan will ultimately fail.  I will hold on believing no matter what may come my way and so should you!

Jesus lived that faith.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca     

 

 

 

Quote

It was once said, “I may or may not believe it but ours is a better world because I believe it.” ….. the religionist

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

 

Mud

In the Bible, as in every age, we find both flashes of rabid spirituality and the mud of religious judgementalism.  Jesus was 100% spirituality; the disciples didn’t get it but the mud understood the threat.  The mud slingers were in attack mode.  Jesus had many choice words for these folk.  Is it any wonder that post resurrection, the mud was mixed with the New Testament writers accounts of Jesus talk?  Which is it, Jesus or the mud?  

The textual criticism of the last 100 years is way above my pay grade, however, could the efforts of these biblical scholars have been an attempt to separate the mud from the spirituality?  Let’s hope so but their success or lack of it has not proven to be beneficial to the people, the regular folk like you and me without the intellectual and language backgrounds.  The problem, again, was the focus on the minutia of scripture avoiding the broad and obvious conflict between people of the spirit and the ever present mud slingers (Sadducees and Pharisees).

Religious judgementalism survives and thrives on threats.   What does it matter who is right, correct or in sync with the authorities?  It’s kind of like the evil of war killing.  Considering who and where we are, we will always have enemies to kill.  What would Jesus have said about that certainty?

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA  

 

 

 

 

Surprise

God has a positive spiritual eternity ready for everyone.  At birth all of we folk were gifted with an eternal passport.  If we have breath, a pulse and brain function we are said to be alive.  We call this existence on earth life but is it God’s definition of life? 

God’s definition is all about unity, togetherness, a spiritual brotherhood and sisterhood without sexual, hereditary or churchy definitions, just a spiritual gathering and bonding around the wonders of God.  There will be no qualifications for this gathering, we all shall be wowed by finding, after all the ugliness in ourselves and in this world, a joyful secure home. 

Eternity does have a special surprise for those of us who have been seekers of the God reality in the midst of our earthly aloneness.  Eternity then becomes just an extension of the journey begun in this our earthly time frame.  Don’t ask about the surprise because such a surprise can only be a surprise, if it is a surprise!   

Wait we must but the day is coming soon. 

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA      

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is an appropriate day to consider food.  Are you a pie guy or do you relish the dressed turkey and potatoes?  Faith is like that.  Faith in God can be some pie in the sky fairyland or a vital part of our daily lives in this our earthly existence.  Which do you prefer?  How do you know? 

By definition and central to New Testament faith in God is the pie in the sky, 2000-year-old doctrine of the Virgin Birth of Jesus.  Just because some of the disciples of Jesus and some of the biblical writers believed in the virgin birth, must we? Just because some Christian believers all through the church’s history are of this one opinion, must we share that opinion? Are we not humanoids of the 21^st century?  Is this doctrine really necessary or does it just make us feel good? 

Of course, you say, when it comes to matters of faith, the wisdom of the mind and science cannot be trusted.  However, Jesus said a day is coming when we all shall worship God in the spirt and truthfully.  If Jesus were sitting next to you or me in the pew this Sunday, what would he say?  Maybe, because of our insistence on the fairyland of faith, he would say, “Oh, you of little faith!” (Matt. 17:20,21)

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca

HELP!

I have so many opinions you might think, I think, I know it all.  I do not. Just like all of us, I am in a continual learning mode, my blog is a way of tracking notes.  Please comment on any point or blog (ggoslaw@gmail.com).  All negative or corrective arguments are most welcome.  No comments will be shared on this blog without permission.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca   

 

Search

Another disciple said to him, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father."  But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury the dead.” (Matthew 8:21&22).

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA

 

Evil

The most hideous and nonsensical Christian doctrine afloat in our world is that there exists out there, somewhere, a cosmic disciplinarian God who must enforce eternally an ever-changing earthbound code of personal ethics or supposed right behavior.

No one believes this crap in or out of the church, because excuses everywhere abound.  This doctrine only exists to give the church spiritual leverage with the "sinners".  After two thousand years, is it not time to change gears and find another leverage focus that speaks to each of us, sinner and saint?

Instead of focusing on the aloneness of eternal damnation, let's talk about the aloneness and separation curse that we each shoulder as human beings living in the now of time and space.   

The search for spiritual reality is the only fix for our aloneness, this search is it's own reward, today and tomorrow. 

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA   

Foundational

Owning a home has forced me to get a construction education.  This one principle is unavoidable, all successful building starts from the foundation upward.  One does not build the roof before the foundation.  The Bible speaks about a firm foundation as it applies to our lives but let’s apply the principle to our understanding of God.  How are we to understand God? 

The temptation is to start with religious dogma or descriptions and then seek confirmation elsewhere.  Christianity mostly uses the New Testament to confirm dogma, Judaism uses the Old Testament and our Muslim brothers use the Koran, their holy book.  Is not the seeking of confirmation in each case top-down thinking?

Being born into the Christian faith I will pick on our educational methodology.  The Bible is taught in every quarter top down.  Every Sermon, Bible School, Seminary or Sunday School class starts from a doctrinal premise and then teaches the student where in the Bible to find confirmation for that premise, often exaggerated as if it were evidence.  After all, the Bible is God inspired, is it not?

At least one of us believes that this top-down Bible teaching methodology is Bible abuse.  The Bible becomes a dead book, intellectualized beyond the understanding of we average Joe’s.  I am a dummy, the only good that came from my limited experience with Christian education was that I became familiar with the Bible for the first time.  I found the top-down educational method boring yet not understanding why. 

Maybe this is why believers have known little besides division for four thousand years and why most churchgoers are biblically ignorant. Once freed from the top down method many years later, the Bible became alive.  After all, the Bible is a story book, the story of different people, in different circumstance and what they experienced in their lives God wise, that is not boring.  The only downside is that this methodology is not a quick fix.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA    

 

 

Forest

Our world forces everyone to be tree watchers but the heartfelt desire to be God Forest watchers can never be forever squashed.  Religion of every flavor is not the God Forest.  Religion only changes the trees. 

Although Jesus did not use the God Forest metaphor he told the Samaritan woman about the God Forest.  Using the Father God metaphor, Jesus said that the Father God must be worshipped in Spirit and truth for God is Spirit.  

Does this mean that Abram did not worship in Spirit, no, Abram was a God Forest watcher, communicating with God through our shared spiritual antennae. 

WOW!

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca 

Crazy

One has to be a tad crazy to believe in the existence of a God.  Our world seems to pose an unexplainable pointless reality populated with only assumptions and surmises.  Our God, if one exists, is invisible, he or she or it, has no cable TV channel and seems to be blind to our ravages of injustice that we constantly dump on one another.  Our God, if one exists, has no beginning and no end. We use the word eternal but what does that really mean?  Time is not a constant, we have a thousand questions but few answers.

At this point, the fur is standing up on the backs of God believers everywhere. These folk are the easy believers, they just want an answer, any answer, from the pulpit of religion, the podium of politics or the laboratories of science.  Subconsciously, they say, give us something to believe so that we can get on with living our lives. You know, they are missing the forest by focusing only on the trees.

Abram, later to be renamed Abraham, was not a tree watcher 4000 years ago.  Abram was seeking the believer’s forest in one of the far corners of the globe, the Ur of the Chaldees. The place is very insignificant with few trees but the ring of the name is so engaging, Ur of the Chaldees. Three of the five major worldwide religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, claim this parttime desert nomad and shepherd keeper as their spiritual father who inadvertently has reached billions of peoples with a God message.

Abram was a tad crazy.  One day, a day like every other, probably in the early morning hours pondering the stars while tending his herd of sheep, Abram believed he heard from the forest, the God Forest.  Startled, he probably reacted like you or I would react, who me?  The comedian George Carlin had a funny routine that exploited the humor in God craziness.  As children, we all had a good laugh.  Out of all the billions of earthlings, God is aware of my, Abrams, existence and this God has a plan for my, Abram’s, future.  

Crazy it is!

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

 

 

 

Message

Human life is an opportunity.

Human life is random.

Human life is temporary.

Human life is only the beginning. 

G. Goslaw,                                                                                                  Landers, CA 

 

Listen

Some folk believe that spirituality is a function of religious form or dogma. Nothing could be further from the truth. Spiritual messaging from beyond our place in this world is our only connection to the reality or existence of God. The philosophers try to devise varied intellectual arguments for the God reality but all are disappointing. The dogma bound will spend their lives arguing belief systems instead of listening. We human God seekers only have to listen and share notes.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca

Rug

President Biden has a huge rug. Americans died and are being held captive by HAMAS. What is he going to do about the killings?  Oh yah, sweep them under the rug again!

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA

Mongrels

 Godless mongrels kill in the name of religion. The Biden administration and the gutless Democrats are using our American tax dollars to appease Iran and in so doing they a making a nuclear catastrophe inevitable. Does not the terrorist raids from Gaza a week Saturday, prove that Iran will use the bomb?  

Does anyone not understand that Islam is a terrorist behemoth? Believe or die, those are the only options Mohammed gives the world. They will never change and playing nice is suicide.

G.Goslaw

Landers,

Ca

 

Taste

We are alive to receive a taste of eternity. My father left us theology books, an old-fashioned photo slide collection of my parents travels, furniture, family documents and memorabilia. They were always doing their church thing somewhere else. I remember only one sermon that my father preached, the “Kip” sermon. One would have to be ancient to know about the ointment Kip. Any sermon records are scanty or bare outlines, I assume he shared mostly from his heart. If I could turn back the pages of my life, I would choose, above all else, to hear him share.

Kicking around our garages for years was a freshly painted cast iron railroad sign. We were never told the significance of the sign or more likely, I was not interested in questioning my parents. After their passing, I took the sign, more than anything else, as a part of my father and mother’s heritage. Now it sits on a post in the corner of my front yard. Cast iron is almost eternal but for now, I must guess as to its significance.

We need only one guess for my parents were evangelistic people. All the problems of this world are solved at the altar as one repents. This summary is an exaggeration but the evangelistic message was the focus of my parent’s lives. The sign reads, STOP - LOOK – LISTEN. The sign is a warning to stop at the railroad crossing, look both ways for an approaching train and as a last resort, listen for any train noises. A safe crossing of the tracks with your car is then possible.

The evangelistic takeaway has the same three points. Stop living in sin (repent), Look up to Jesus Christ (faith), Listen for instructions from Jesus and your newly discovered spiritual leaders. All we humans are different. For some of us, this message has proven to be a spiritual positive in our lives and for others of us, this message has shut down all spiritual curiosity. The evangelistic message is divisive and needs some work.

Above all else the evangelistic message is a churchy spiritual methodology. There is an element of Bible based truth in all three points but Jesus did not teach a methodology. Jesus taught an openness to spiritual messaging from God. There is an invitation open to all persons to be a part of the kingdom of God, an invisible, borderless kingdom where the spirit of God reigns not by might but through the whole truth of God.     

The confrontation between Jesus and the Samaritan women at the well in Chapter Four of St. John’s Gospel has been preaching fodder for the evangelistic message for generations. The woman had five husbands and the man now in her life was not her husband, she was a ready target for evangelism. Yet, Jesus doesn’t tell her to repent of her lifestyle, they go into a conversation about how God speaks to we humans, not through one religion or another but directly, God and the individual, one on one.

Getting back to the R/R sign, maybe, the order should be reversed, spirituality begins with listening. Be aware, the voice of God, the spirit reality sneaks up on us, are you listening?

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

   

Future

American politics has changed post Trump. The new politics is about we the people and not the government.  The government Republicans have funded a slew of contenders against Trump in this primary season, all to no avail, they are losers. Former president Trump should not put any of them on the ticket for 2024.

Trump and JFK jr. in 2024!

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA     

Contrast

 The bigness surrounding our place among the galaxies contrasts with the smallness of our theologies.

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA

Entity

How would you describe God in our human understanding? Is God the ethical supervisor, judge and jury of the galaxies? Maybe, for want of a better definition, God is the only complete creative entity (reality) of all existence. All other realities are interdependent, linked by gravity or heritage, ever expanding into new realities. The Entity (God) was the beginning. 

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA    

 

Wondering

Without mental or emotional assent, my gut goal in life has been to understand. I did not choose this goal, I now know, after 78 years of living, that the need to understand is a part of who I am. All the luck, the knowing need is just as much a life curse as it is a personality trait. Normal life should have goals like wealth, power and prestige, the goal of scoring the winning touchdown. These needs are easily digested, they are socially relevant in almost every culture, yet, this guy needs to figure it all out.

Am I somehow special? Is the path that I have trod through life unique? No way, every one of us has the need to understand or explain our existence. Most of the time, most of us muddle along through life burying this need as deep as one can dig. Survival needs, making the mortgage every month or running after the approval of another person or community of thought, all bury the personal need to know. 

Let’s get on with living, some say, because wondering is wandering.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca

Bet

Are there any takers?  The big guy who sold American influence was Joe and Hunter Biden but Barack Obama was the final big guy who got a large slice of the pie.  Do you think he could afford all those mansions on a presidential retirement?  No way, Palm Springs, Washington and Martha’s Vineyard, one might ask where have all the millions gone?  Joe and Barack, this is a sure bet!

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA   

Life

Life force…. Commonly called God.

This world was never a Paradise that God constructed to make life easy for we humans.  The Garden of Eden scenario is a convenient biblical ploy to explain how a good God would create or allow such an uneasy world. It would seem that the only possible outtake is that God didn’t do it, the first human did the deed that condemned all humans to a life with suffering.  Adam takes the fall and we humans keep our ancient juvenile misunderstanding of God. 

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca

 

Sad!

The historical faith of Abraham in the one true God did not conspire to kill Jesus.  The cold dead religion of Judaism that had failed the vision of Abraham, killed Jesus in order to survive.  Every religion of whatever flavor will eventually rubber stamp spirituality and kill for its own credibility. 

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA

Cowardice

President Biden and his son Hunter are thieves, liars and traitors to America.  All coconspirators in our newly formed (2020) leftist driven government are as guilty as these two have proved themselves to be.  Their corruption is a given but that is only the tip of the iceberg, their motive operandi are even worse, it is the overthrow of our Constitutional government and the enslavement of every America to the all-powerful leftist mongrels.  

As crazy as our national circumstance has become, the ultimately guilty co-conspirators are those of us who ignore this reality and still call ourselves Americans and Democrats.  The left has always called themselves Democrats and have always proved themselves to be the least democrat driven people on the face of the earth.  They exist by the force of Law, enforced by the police in order to subjugation the people. 

The really pitiful people, however, are those of us who sit this one out.  Those of us who place any priority as more important than our beloved country.  These pitiful folk will answer to history for their cowardice. 

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca          

 

 

 

 

 

Favorites

Every human being is a mystic.  Too borrow a phrase from a Clint Eastwood movie, we mystics all, include the good, the bad and the ugly.  There is not one of us that has not, for at least a brief moment, received a message from eternity.  Much like the meteors of varying sizes, God is bombarding all of us for as the Apostle Paul said in Romans 2:11, “God has no favorites”. Some messages are burned up in our Godless atmosphere while others make contact with the people indiscriminately.  Inside of religion or among the religion less, we all are targets for God’s appointed messages.

Some of those contacted deny even the possibility of a message from the spirit world, fearing being outed as a freak.  Some of us hide in the bushes with the messages from God, hiding with an overwhelming sense of unworthiness.  Some of us take the messages from God as proof of our own personal specialness, much like the Pharisees that hounded Jesus.  Some of us take and accept the messages from God to build an orthodoxy around which they expect other people to gather and bow.   Some of us take our God gifting to impress this ugly world through writing, poetry and art.

If I were God, which I am not, I would say, why should I even bother?  Why bother to share the blessings of eternity by sending messages to these self-involved, dunderhead humans?  Are not you rejoicing that I am not God?  Despite all our receiving delays, his messages continue to fall upon we undeserving.  God says, we are in this together, there is a planned future for you, trust and work the plan.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

 

 

 

Safety

 A mystic is one of us who makes or is reputed to have made a connection with the spirit world.  Our secular Godless culture laughs at such claims and calls these people fools.  The Bible says much about who are the fools.  Proverbs 18:6 says, “Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions (TNIV).”  Is this not an apt description of secular culture?  

Jesus contrasted the wise man and the foolish man in Matthew 7: 24 to 27.  The fool builds his or her life on the sand of popular culture refusing to understand spiritual matters as outlined by Jesus to his disciples.  The winds and rains of life will eventually blow and scatter the sand dwellers.  The wise man will hold steady on the rock, the very words of Jesus, in every tempest.  There is safety on the rock.   

G, Goslaw

Landers, CA 

 

Panic or Panacea

As much as we try to avoid or redefine our reality, we cannot avoid the angst resulting from our aliveness.  We sometimes weather this angst by grabbing hold of a panacea that avoids the terror in the short term.  A panacea can be anything, family, friends, money and all religions.  Kierkegaard, the father of existentialist philosophy and a theologian named the “why are we here” angst, dread.  One of his translators preferred to name this unavoidable emotional state, anxiety.  We are all talking about the same thing but let’s call it what it is, a life-long panic attach.

What are we to do with this universal human panic reality?  Historically, we have devised religions of every sort and in every culture to relieve the panic to give us a short-term feeling of pseudo security.  The opposite reaction to avoid panic is to kill the other guy and build a humanly devised sense of pseudo security.  This security will eventually fail us as religions fail because they are a temporary fix only for the minority.  All of human history can be condensed into our human search for security, both now and into eternity. 

Is there not then another alternative that is proactive?  The Jesus way is the only way.  That way is to live with faith in our eternal Father God and thereby to trust this reality as our present and future hope in the face of our anxiety.  The living angst will always be with us every day on this earth.  The only alternative is the forward vision of the very short Jesus prayer given as an example to his disciples.  They were just like us, regular powerless folk.  They were filled with life anxiety as we are and justifiably so.  Please check it out, Matthew 6: 9 thru 13.

“This then is how you should pray.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”

 

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA   

      

   

 

 

Simple

Leave Jesus with his message about the faithfulness of our Father God on the cross. 

Take down from the cross the unnecessary, superstitious and ancient God hyperbole. 

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA  

Leapers All

 

I once heard an educated Bible theologian say that to understand the Bible, we must either believe that Jesus was God or that he was only a crazy deluded man.  This was probably the excuse he used for not dealing with the contradictions in the Bible.  Does the reader have to take one or the other of these extreme mindsets?  Is there no middle ground?

Sure, there is a lot to talk about between the two polar extremes, the question is, will we?  For sure, the Church trained and financially supported Biblical theologian could not even hint for a second that Jesus was slightly less than God.  The heretic label would have devastating consequences within the hierarchy of the Church, both to one’s career and income.  He or she would achieve, in an instant, leaper status to be shunned.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA.

     

   

Eternity

Why have you and your Facebook friends taken such offense at my words, Suzanne?  I thought that we were at least acquaintances.  Heaven as a reward is one of those biblical words that has been corrupted by the Christian religion.  When Jesus used the word heaven he did not mean to agree with your heaven and hell scenario.  Yes, he also used the word hell but, in most instances, he was playing mind games with the hell raisers.  There were hell raisers then as there are hell raisers now.

This is why I prefer to us the word eternity which foretells of a positive or good or redemptive future for all of humanity.  Case in point, let us return to our prior discussion of Matthew 10, 32 & 33.  According to the text, those who “acknowledge” Jesus and those who are disowned by Jesus are all before the Father in eternity.  No where is it said that those who are disowned are to be sent to hell, that is an assumption that you are making. 

Who can say for sure?  Maybe, eternity is like a building with many floors and we will have the opportunity to move on upward to full understanding.  Having something to work on in eternity should be a positive, right?  If you think life can get boring at times here on earth, just wait. 

For now, let us be open to a myriad of possibilities.

Respectfully,

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

 

 

Pain

If I were a preacher, which I am not, what message would I share on Father’s Day 2023?  I would begin by sharing about my earthly father, that seems reasonable.  There’s the rub.  We all lived in the same house, sat together at the same dinner table but we three boys, were never a part of or a reflection of the adult world of my parents.  That world was the church.  We were just the kids.  If asked, my parents would say, we love our children but that love, if it existed, was not expressed or shared.  Nothing about life and family was ever shared.  I grew up believing that was normal, not understanding what I was missing.  Normal, it is not.

Which is worse, never knowing your birth parents or living in the same house and never knowing your birth parents?  Go figure!  Because this question is so intimately involved with my story, I would choose the latter but there is pain enough in life to go all around.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA    

 

Father

It will be Father’s Day on Sunday, June 18. On this day we celebrate our fathers but are we not celebrating our understanding of the ideal father?  As wonderful as our fathers may or may not have been, no earthly father matches our ideal, that need or desire for the ideal father, is a part of which binds all of humanity together on this day.  Are we not thankful, therefore, that there really is an ideal father?  That father is our eternal Father God.

When the disciples asked Jesus how they should pray to the eternal Father God, Jesus began his illustrative prayer with the address, “Our Father, which art in heaven” (Matthew 6:9-13).  Some would prefer an address such as “My Father, which art in heaven”.  Did Jesus understand himself as a special emissary, co-equal with the ideal Father God or was he praying as one of the believing spiritual children of God?  An argument could be made either way, but in his lifetime, as recorded in the three synoptic Gospels, Jesus never claimed to be God. The later, theologized Gospel of John, however, disagrees.  

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

 

Sorry

 Sorry blog, I’ve been distracted.  There is nothing more satisfying than being inspired to write something that pleases me, no matter what it does for anyone else.  I am selfish that way.  Then again, there are times when the whatever over the next hill, a dream or a wish fulfilment, captures my attention and I forget or intentionally avoid practicing my calling.  I am the loser. 

Dreams are not evil; they just need to be kept in balance.

Forgive me.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA  

Courage

Dear Suzanne Holbrook,

Thank you so much for sharing your Facebook post and your concern about the spiritual condition of our country.  These are definitely hard times and these hard times have only begun, ouch!  Our country and our present emergency demands that we lay people, such as yourself, speak up and show up to confront the Godless priorities of the radical, socialist political base of the new Democrat Party.  This is the radical left that has put America in chains and bondage under our largely absent president Joe Biden.

No one can question that you deeply believe what you believe. This is clear because you are courageous enough to share what you believe with the rest of us and put it out there.  Maybe, you are brave enough to listen.  The end of our suffering may be a Revelation type scenario but don’t get your hopes up, that scenario is largely fodder for the TV preachers.  It is a Sunday sedative and has been around for over 2000 years.  These prophets say, God is coming to pluck we righteous folk away from our suffering and then damn, for all eternity, the rest of humanity in judgment.  Isn’t this spiritually sensitive?  Enough said.

Please allow me to disagree with you about St. Mathew 10.  In this chapter Jesus is charging his disciples to be mini messengers as he has been a messenger of God.  Jesus has been their teacher and leader and it is their time for the disciples to share with the people.  Pivotal to understanding this chapter and the charge to the disciples is to understand the target. 

My Bible is a red-letter edition, these are the words of Jesus in verse 5, “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any of the towns of the Samaritans.  Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel”.  Jesus was sending out his disciples to challenge the spiritual status quo, the corrupt religion of Israel that was comfortable leaving the Gentile and Samaritan seekers, also called sinners, beyond the grace of God. These religious folk were also the target of John the Baptist.

Allow me to share my way of understanding the Bible.  Verses 32 & 33 are a good example.   Based on these Bible words, are my assumptions necessary?  Or are my assumptions just convenient?  We all fall into the trap of dumping our favorite assumptions into scripture at the slightest opening.  I try to work hard at not dumping. 

In these verses, is Jesus claiming an equality with God based on his sonship?  The verses in question read in the TNIV, “Whomever publicly acknowledges me I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven.  But whomever publicly disowns me I will disown before my Father in heaven.”  Father is not capitalized in the Greek and what does before the Father tell us?  Is Jesus claiming equality with God as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity of God demands?  You are welcome to this assumption but is it necessary from these words?  I think not.

What if these words mean that God is spiritually the father of us all and the father of Jesus.  This is the spirituality Jesus found in the desert.  Jesus came out of the desert to tell us all about the love of the father.  His father and our father is angered with the religious status quo which withholds the love of the father from those who fail to think, look and live according to our authorized human version.

The Bible says that we are all sinners, do we take this plain biblical truth seriously?

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA         

Fraud

One of the most abused passages of the Bible is Genesis 1: 27. “So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (TNIV) The believer in God wants to exaggerate the specialness of our human condition and the nonbeliever makes fun of anyone who claims to look like God. Both understandings of this passage are fraudulent.  What does the writer of Genesis mean by “the image of God”?

To begin with (a pun and a lousy attempt at humor), these words were originally given to us in the Hebrew language and later translated into Greek and then into English.  In Hebrew the words are “tzelem Elohim”.  The root meaning of this phrase is the shadow of God.  Answering my own question, the writer means that we human beings were created with a shadowing of God.  A shadow is not reality but a shadow gives some indicators about reality.  We humans were created, according to the writer of Genesis, with the potential to be spiritual beings or said in another way, created with a predisposition to make a spiritual connection with God.

This much is a mouthful but it is all that the writer is saying.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA   

 

 

Blessed

The best part of my days are the early morning hours, on my front porch with my Dobermans, my cigar and watching the sun come up over Goat Mountain.  How or why do I deserve this, I know not!  I am indeed most blessed.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca

Compass

American peoples, what’s it going to take for you to grow a backbone?  Politics is a blood sport; our politicians play the game.  The need to kill our enemies of whatever persuasion is who we are, it is in our DNA.  Get a grip, we must understand who we are in this world.  The sad reality is that there are those of us who are ready at all times to pull the trigger for power, while most of us stand aside and watch.  Again, what’s it going to take America? 

We have graduated from killing over there for just, or seemingly just, causes to eating our own.  We sit quietly in our separate hen nest’s, putting food on the table, paying the mortgage, playing the stock market and ignoring the carnage going on around us.  Women and men have been given the permission to kill new life in the ladies’ wombs, millions of new Americans have been sacrificed on the altar of expediency since Row verse Wade.  Oh well, what’s another inconvenient life?

Fast forward to 2019, the youngest Americans, they are expendable, so too are we old folks as we are being killed by the China virus and America just watches. Get a grip, America, are you asleep or dead?  As Freud says, we all have an “id”, a moral compass that is culturally derived. As with the thinking of Nietzsche, Freud was right and Freud was wrong. The moral compass is not only culturally derived, it was also the gift of God.

All of America, believers and nonbelievers, we all must come alive from the dead to embrace our moral compass.  This is an emergency! 

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

   

People

Popularity is not the test of what is righteous or true.  Despite all the reporting on the chaos on the southern border from the conservative media, a recent Fox News poll reported that only 8% of Americans are concerned about this law breaking.  Go figure!  There was a time when the popular opinion of we earthlings was that the world was flat.  Adolf Hitler became a popular tyrant in Germany.  The popular opinion in some quarters is that our world will destroy itself by burning fossil fuels.  In all these cases or opinions, the people have been or are wrong.  How come?

The ugly truth is that the people have to be lead or herded.  The bait on the hook of leadership is, as it has always been, the promise.  The leader says to the people, do this or do that, give up a little bit of freedom, and we will give you thus and so, whatever is supposedly most needed at the moment.  To make an obviously unwise choice digestible by the people, chaos on the streets is mandatory.  The uncertainty of the circumstance will sway the people to give up their own self-interest because the people are routinely wrong and easily bullied.  Some would say that the people are generally cowards.

One question, is this not what’s happening in real time in America?

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

 

 

 

 

Evolution

Dr. Charles Stanley, please allow one question to follow your many words this Sunday morning, May 7.  Do you believe that everything on this earth is at all times changing?  If your answer is no, you have a problem.  If your answer is yes, you then believe in evolution.  Evolution says nothing about what one philosopher called the First Cause or popularly God.  Evolution is only a process without a beginning.  Everyone who believes that evolution has a beginning answer, such as a grand accident, is misinformed or ignorant.

The Bible says in Genesis Chapter 2:7 that God formed man from the dust of the earth, from the dirt or the mud.  This beginning is affirmed in the Books of Job, Psalms, and Isaiah.  We are of the dust of the earth and the will of God, according to the Bible.  Please keep your beliefs up with science and the words of Scripture.  Thank you.

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA

Sin?

Religion is the preoccupation with everyone else’s sin, to avoid one’s own supposed sinful culpability.

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca

 

Hope

 Job 14:1 thru 6  (TNIV)   Job, the first existentialist philosopher, complaining to God.

“Mortals, born of women, are of few days and full of trouble.

  They spring up like flowers and wither away;

  like fleeting shadows, they do not endure.

  Do you fix your eyes on such as these?

  Will you bring them before you for judgement?

  Who can bring what is pure from the impure?  No one!

  The days of mortals are determined;

  You have decreed the number of months

  and set limits they cannot exceed.

  so look away from us and leave us alone,

  till we have put in our time like hired laborers.

If you think this is depressing, read Chapter 7!  Amidst all the negativity, Job still affirms in Chapter 13: 15, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face.”  (TNIV)  

God took everything that Job loved from him, wealth, relationships and like minded believers who then became critics and Job was pissed at God bigtime.  As one reads the existential writers and thinkers of our time, one can feel the same anger, the sense of injustice that God, if there is a God, could dump us in this hellish world.  It makes no sense.  Then this God threatens us with eternal damnation for being who we are, designed by God from the dirt (Genesis 2 : 7).  Some God, right? 

I respect the Job kind of spirituality.  The TNIV translation uses the word hope instead of "trust" as in the KJV.  Trust or faith can easily be intellectualized and the entire book of Job screams at us to say, just thinking is not enough.  God wants a wholistic spirituality with us, hope is a better choice of words because hope comes from the gut, not just the head.

The best part of this verse is, "I will surely defend my ways to his (God) face". One way of describing eternity is that eternity is the only place or condition with ultimate freedom and the God given safety in which that freedom can be expressed.  Job wanted an argument with God, what a man!  What a God! 

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA