He Came as a Thief in the Night

Episodic characterization differs enormously from novelistic characterization, a common expectation modern people project on the Word of God. Episodic characterization involves things like the stories of Ananzi in Africa, where he will face first one challenge then another; but not really 'remember what he did last Friday'. Or again, it involves things like Archie Comics or X-Men or Donald Duck: do these characters 'remember what they did last Friday'?  Or do they more seem to have the memories of goldfish and live for the first time in each story about them? This sense that the character has the memory of a goldfish is one of the defining features of episodic characterization, which typically uses characters to express a definite moral or spiritual message; not to worry about character consistency between different stories, especially not as much. For sometimes there will be traces of both characterological consistency and memories of goldfish in the exact same text.  ...

 As a preacher I will not tell you whom you should vote for. But I will tell you that the 2 Minutes Hate mentioned in Orwell's 1984 happens all around you recurrently. You are regularly invited to hate particular public figures. Be alert for the temptation to hate and thus to break the commandment "Thou shalt not kill"; because this has consequences in relation to your forever home and your forever neighborhood.  When we arrive at forks in the road in which we get angry at first one person or group than another, we must be alert. For the hells will certainly offer us the poison chalice of hatred, or that of contempt, or that of depreciation, or that of inner false witness which sees only the faults of others the better to dismiss them utterly. We will be invited by society to hate each President in turn, in one's native land; so that we had or have an Orange Man Bad campaign and a Let's Go Brandon campaign. In each of these cases, we have panderers to the sin of h...

If you understand why I have paired these two passages, then you are in a position to understand how the 2nd Coming happened and how each Testament of the Threefold Word happened. Here is the first passage, from when King Jehoiakim burns up Jeremiah's scroll in the fire: "Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words" (Jeremiah 36:27). This occurs in the winter house of King Jehoiakim because winter is the final phase of the four-quarter prophetic cycle of the Church in seasonal form. If the Lord wishes to express the same fourth stage in the Church's decline as to charity and wisdom in terms of the quarters of a day, then He calls this fourth phase night. The fire is love of self and the world growing in the Church in four distinct phases; and as it g...

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...