He Came as a Thief in the Night

Matthew 8:8-10 - King James Version (KJV) <8> The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. <9> For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. <10> When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. In order to answer your question one has to relate this "great faith" of which the Lord speaks here to His use of the identical expression in His exchange with the Canaanite or Syrophoenician woman (Matthew 15; Mark 7); and to His healing someone not physically present in both cases due to that "great faith". And in order to do that, one has to relate this "great faith" He sees in people outside the Jewish Church to th...

If we are to obey the commandment to "Watch and pray", we must go inside of ourselves and watch our actual processes of feeling and thought. For if we do not understand the arena whereby we must become more loving and with thoughts supportive of that love; then we will "stumble on dark mountains" (Jeremiah 13:16). We will not optimally favor growth in love because of insufficient light. "Evil spirits [flow] into affections for evil and into falsities, in short, into a person's passions and appetites, and into convictions and principles of falsity, and then hold the person captive" (Spiritual Experiences 4621). We must watch the beasts and the birds, the feelings and the thoughts, within our platters (our hearts or wills) and our cups (our thoughts or ideation). We must be right there with them in the arena of love and its supportive ideation, the inward world where the Lord says to find the Kingdom of Heaven (Luke 17:21). "Be sober, be vigilant; b...

To obey the law to love God and the neighbor, make a habit of multiplying excuse-the-neighbor ideation like 'Are they undergoing stress or sick? or were they abused?' Once you construct a plausible excuse for nasty behaviors, this blunts evil feelings as though one were kicking a puppy. Think how difficult it is to disprove plausible excuses for unfortunate behavior! Such plausible excuses may seem flimsy and ethereal, but they have a concrete dampening effect on evil feelings and excuses-for-these thoughts in adulterous interrelation. For the sin and error nature of the proprium, our fallen egos, yearns to caricature the neighbor so as more easily to hate them! If we do not make excuses for the neighbor, then we accuse them; and we accuse them the more readily as we caricature them and thereby commit false witness within us. "Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else ex...

People will certainly ask you about problematic passages in the Word of God in the literal sense. It matters so much to have answers ready for those difficult questions that are actually loving and healthy.  1 Peter 3:15 King James Version 15 But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear: One wishes in this spirit to "give an answer" to the problematic parts of Numbers 31 involving the slaughter of all the men, all the male children, and all the women who are not virgins. Whatever this slaughter was for the children of Israel, for all of humanity in all times and places this slaughter represents purification from sin and error. Men, women, sons, daughters, all of these express goods and truths or evils and falsehoods in various relations to each other. The clue that this chapter is about purification can be seen quite clearly in verses 23 and 24, where it ...

True religion involves facing one block on love and wisdom after another, peeling off one layer of the rotten onion of self-love and the excuses for self-love which commit adultery with it after another.  True religion faces the evil of self-love and the excuses for it, climbing the ladder of rungs towards milder and milder adulteries of sin and error. True religion involves passing through the flood of fire and flood of water of sin and its supportive ideation, evil and excuse for evil.  True religion involves keeping one's vessel and ministering to orphans and widows with good and truth, facilitation of keeping one's vessel in others. True religion involves pouring the oil of love and the wine of truth into the wounds of one beaten and left for dead by thieves and passed on by priest and Levite. True religion involves anointing the stones of truth which are our pillow with the oil of love beneath the Ladder of Christ, His will and mind and the rungs of our ascendance degree ...

It is hoped that people will come to see the Heavenly marriage and infernal adultery and correspondences heads or tails in all things in themselves, the universe and the Word; to see these things of the heart and thoughts, the platter and cup, directly; and not have blind faith. For it is He who tries the heart and the reins (Psalms 7:9), that is the kidneys. And what do the kidneys do? They filter blood. They are a crucial stop on the train line of urine. And urine is water one expels from the body.  What is water? What is blood for that matter? They are truth, and if you see them both together in the same verse they are higher (more inward) and lower (more external) truth.  That is to say, the correspondences in such an instance -- in this case blood and water -- comprise a cluster of predicates of the understanding of truth. It is thus that they resolve into the hierarchy of the particular predicate cluster, as in their incidence in the Wedding at Cana.  But back to ur...