Bob Dylan on Bob Dylan experts, ouch

In an interview conducted by Alan Jackson for The Times Magazine in 2001, before the album [Love and Theft] was released, Dylan said "these so-called connoisseurs of Bob Dylan music... I don't feel they know a thing, or have any inkling of who I am and what I'm about. I know they think they do, and yet it's ludicrous, it's humorous, and sad. That such people have spent so much of their time thinking about who? Me? Get a life, please. It's not something any one person should do about another. You're not serving your own life well. You’re wasting your life."

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Now, imagine if you were one of those Bob Dylan devotees, with your own thousand page Bob Dylan website... Probably you just shrug it off. "He's talkin' about those other guys who don't have a clue. Not ME. Heck, and I've spent hardly any time on this stuff (tears starting to roll down his face). Just a little hobby."

Now I'm crying. Life is sad, isn't it?

Predestination and reprobation

How to answer people who get angry at the biblical doctrine of predestination and reprobation? Tell them a tree is known by its fruit. Which is what Jesus Himself tells us.

That means you produce what you inherently are. I.e. it's not a matter of self-will.

Still they'll say: "But that bad tree can decide to become a good tree."

Can a thorn tree decide to produce plums? No, only God can make it a plum tree. God is sovereign in creation, providence, and grace. That thorn tree needs to become a new creation, by God's grace.

Trees produce the fruit they inherently are.

What does this mean practically? Accept the hard truth of the Bible, and it will re-orientate you internally from being man-centered to being God-centered (and you'll stop lecturing God about how things 'should' be). It also means that evangelism is meaningful. How could we have known if we hadn't heard? Give people the Word, explain, teach, but don't beg. Plant the seed diligently, water, leave it to God to grow.

Be prepared

The next calendar year leading up to the United States 2020 elections is going to challenge awake Christians like nothing else in our lives.

Satan is a troll at heart. A being with his unachievable goal can only annoy and troll. His goal is to defeat God and God's plan of redemption. That obviously will never happen, so Satan and his followers (conscious and unconscious) can only annoy God's plan and play for time......and troll God's people. Endlessly. (By God's people I mean everybody who feels all this hellish evil in the pit of their stomach and want it done away with. Want it sent down to hell where it belongs.)

The unending lying, the gaslighting, the murder, the false flag events (which combine lying and murder); the willful, designed destruction of what takes generations of sacrifice and effort to build up, all done with a mocking face (think deep state operative Peter Strzok with his weird pixy-faced shimmying before a congressional hearing), all of this will be ratcheted up to levels challenging our limits in the coming year. Everything distorted, everything twisted, everything turned upside-down. Everything inverted. All mixed with hysterically emotional ignorance from the armies of the duped; and studied, straight-faced orchestration from the Beast demons duping them.

Be prepared, awake Christians. We're going to want to kill the enemy, and some are going to want to kill themselves.

We're going to be forced to understand what the Bible tells us in the face of all of this. I've recently begun a cover-to-cover reading of a full commentary on the Book of Revelation (Revelation by Joel Beeke). We can't just be continually shocked and outraged at the evil and obnoxiousness of these human demons. We have to develop a biblical stance and strategy and discernment, and, yes, plan of action if just personal so as not to allow ourselves to be drowned in evil's confusion and despair-making.

Get prepared, and be ready.

Orange trees produce oranges

The mistake theologians make in trying to find a place and a reason for the law after the Incarnation and death of Christ is still seeing it in isolation. In their minds there is the law, and there is the gospel.

No. There is the law of Christ. And it's simple. Matthew 22 -

37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

When you still consider the law in isolation you don't understand this:

The law minus the gospel is demonic.

But the law is good! you protest.

The law as it's wielded by fallen man and fallen angels is twisted, distorted, and turned upside-down.

But surely the law can be wielded in its pure form?

Regenerated and glorified man do not need to wield the law. It's in the Devil's and fallen man's interest to wield the law.

But we must follow the law?

Once regenerated it's in our heart to follow the law. Actually, to live and breathe the law; just as an orange tree produces oranges; not out of a sense of following the rules, but because it's an orange tree.

Exoteric, mesoteric, esoteric (the Book of Revelation)

In church history there have been theologians, church fathers, what have you, that saw ascending deeper influence in a series of books of the Bible.

One is the trio of books written by Solomon: Proverbs - Ecclesiastes - Song of Songs. Words to describe them in order would be exoteric - mesoteric - esoteric. (Modern dictionaries will have esoteric, with probably a limited translation; and exoteric and mesoteric will be missing in action.) Exoteric means the most worldly level, and seen as the least threatening to the mainstream, establishment environment. Mesoteric means a mixture of hidden and mainstream, or half physical, half spiritual in nature. Esoteric means hidden. It also means practical level (where the mainstream only considers it 'safe' to reside at the philosophical or theoretical levels).

Another series of books of the Bible that ascend as deeper influence is: the 3 synoptic Gospels - the Gospel of John - the Book of Revelation. This correlates to level of being.

The first level would be the ordinary human level where people are mostly physically, or emotionally, or intellectually oriented. The soldier, the singer, the accountant, etc.

The second level is the rarer occasion when an individual develops all three parts of themselves. They've developed as a soldier/athlete, a musician/artist, and a writer/thinker, for instance. A balanced development.

The third level is a new level. It is like the difference between a regular knight of the Round Table vs. a Grail knight. The Grail knight can do things the regular Round Table knight can't do. Such as reach the Grail castle (or mountain), which is in another dimension than the everyday world. The ability to navigate the trackless forest (being awake); then to fight off several attacking knights while not falling from one's horse (controlling emotion), to then proceed to enter the other-worldly dimension of the Grail realm is skill unique to the questing Grail knight.

The Book of Revelation is difficult for the first two levels; but it is visionary language to the consciousness of the third level.

For structure and theme the idealist/amillennial appears most on-the-mark.

The Returning King - Poythress
The Triumph of the Lamb - Johnson
More Than Conquerors - Hendrikson
Revelation - Beeke (This one appears uniquely valuable.)

Absorb the higher, visual language of the Book of Revelation to build deep understanding.

New level

Thomas Sowell wrote of the conflict of visions between leftist people and conservative (classical liberal) people. The main difference being leftists thinking people are inherently good and conservatives seeing people as fallen and sinful. So leftists strive for utopias (that routinely turn into police states and genocide), and conservatives look to create checks and balances on our fallen human nature and accept results less than perfect, but at least avoid the police states and genocide.

I see another difference that Sowell didn't mention. Conservatives like order and uniformity in the way people act and dress and groom. Leftists seem to be more comfortable with purple hair, alternative lifestyles, and so on. Conservatives like things in their place and uniform because it suggests things - the fundamentals of survival on this difficult planet - are taken care of. If you see a group of young cheerleaders in formation, in the same uniforms, the same race, it gives an impression that a lot of necessary things behind all that are getting taken care of. Parents are providing shelter, able to buy the uniforms, have the responsibility to have their children in school, the children are well-groomed and healthy, and the fact that they are all one race means social trust exists which means social cooperation exists in ways that in the the delusion of multiculturalism are absent.

Now here's a different version of this. When you become regenerated by the word of God and the Holy Spirit and become truly unusual in that you are separated out from the world with understanding of human nature and sin (biblical anthropology) to ultimate degree you tend to look at the landscape of humanity and see it as an unholy mess. Even the cheerleaders in the example above strike you as potential explosions of demonic chaos (they are prey - shallow prey - and have no defenses against the Devil and demonic predators, or even their own sexual desires which are peaked and like bags of gold walking down the street). You know too much.

Here is how I see that situation for the real Christian though. You are now at a new level. You are with Christ in the heavenlies. You are a soldier with Christ. You are in heavenly formation. You are part of a heavenly host. (You're all wearing white!) You are now in an environment that is sublime. Of course when you look at humanity now even the most responsible, conformed member of a stable, prosperous society will strike you as being like a heroin addict splayed out in their own filth on the sidewalk of the business sector of a city. Because you see inherent sin. You see inherent ignorance of the spiritual battlefield. You see inherent weakness to desires and temptation. You see vulnerability to a thousand deceptions. You see potential chaos in everyone and everything.

I suppose my overall point here is to not let this vision of humanity upset us. It is, in the sense above, inevitable. We can play our role (which is summed up in the word evangelism and all the activities that word contains), but we act from an understanding of where we sit now, with Christ in heaven, and with that understanding we don't get too upset with what is presented before us in the here and now. It is getting worse down here, no doubt, but anything will look very worse from the sublime new level of heaven.

How to be a warrior

The question is how to be a warrior?

1. Get rid of your fear of the world. That is bondage. A sort of guilt bondage. The world wields the law against you. You, Christian warrior, have victory and freedom over the ancient curse of the law. Fear God alone. Fear God alone in the face of fallen man and fallen angels.

2. Have gratitude over resentment for everything all the time. For everything, all the time.

3. Cultivate joy in the battle. When you're of a higher being (when you've tapped the higher elements of your soul) anger and hatred of the enemy no longer exists. The battle exists, but anger and hatred of the enemy no longer exists. What is left is a joyful warrior who can put fear and retreat in the enemy merely with presence.

Don't be bored of the terminal

It occurs to me there is great power in recognizing that there is a difference between engaging influences in a scattered, myriad way (I'll put it like that, I think it gets across what I mean) vs. finding a concrete number of them and really focusing on them in a way where internal power can develop. Creating a boundary by them being few in number so force can accumulate within. Like a poem that is within the structure and boundary of a form (like an elegy or an ode) vs. a poem that is free form. Force of meaning can accumulate in the former whereas force dissipates in the latter.

Similar to Luther saying instead of reading a thousand books and being a mile wide and an inch deep with influences fix your attention on a small number of worthy ones and own them to your essence.

An individual who is fixed on one or two or three great ideas or influences is potentially going to be more of a force to reckon with. For good or evil.

Notes

1. It's interesting we have in our power to truly change ourselves for the better, or at least in an interesting way, by simply picking up the right book at the right time and making the dedicated effort to read that book, cover-to-cover, and get real understanding of it.

I say 'real' book, though. I.e.:

a. Not something that covers old ground for you. (Necessarily. Reading a good book again is one of the least exploited benefits of having read a good book once to begin with. I.e. you've earned a second read, and if it's a great book you'll get much more out of it.)

b. It should be a book that's objectively good rather than something you already know about and know you like. Classics are objectively good. Time-vetted even.

c. A book that's not just one of many, but is iconic. Any novel by Trollope is perhaps classic and interesting, but War and Peace is iconic.

Imagine knowing a kid who often referenced Dostoevsky. He'd made the effort to read the great, iconic works. Then maybe he'd read a biography of Dostoevsky. Then maybe he read a great work of literary criticism of the works like Konstantin Mochulsky. You can see that Dostoevsky changed this individual's life, and all he had to do was pick up a book.

The act of picking up the right book at the right time may only be a gift from the gods, so to speak. Maybe some individuals plow through all influences and force the gods' hands.


2. Staying on the subject of books...

There's something to be said for a complete, contained influence. I'll use Bible commentaries as an example. Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible is a complete, contained, 'plain' influence. I know it was finished by different hands from Romans to completion, but even that well-organized effort to complete the work shows perhaps a providential hand in it being 'supposed to be' a complete, contained work.

It's a work that a person can give themselves to and rely on solely. A desert island book if you will. The scholar would shake his head and grin, but does his state of being drowned in a hundred different modern, scholarly commentaries show in any way in his life or ability to navigate effectively the spiritual battlefield?

The scholar's experience with the Bible becomes scattered and never whole or complete. The simple Christian with the simple, plain - complete, contained - influence is drinking water from a wooden bowl and building real, whole understanding.


3. Epstein didn't kill himself. (Ha,ha, just kidding...) We're all learning just how much of a grip Satan and his influence has had on us and our history via dynastic and racketeering and gang stalking influence. All of us, all over the world.

We live in a Satan-marinated world, and we've been unconscious to it, for the most part, at least to the extent and degree of it.

Yet when we read the Book of Revelation it's all there; and it's through all that evil that biblical prophecy of the consummation of God's plan of redemption comes through. I.e. Rothchilds are not operating outside of God's sovereign decree and revealed prophecy. They are God's monkey just as Satan is. Lord rebuke them all.

Metaphor

Predestination is a subject that punches shallow people in the face.