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