MYSTERIOUS EVENTS
Suppose that, as incomprehensible as God is, you’ve sort of grasped it. It’s a little like those moments in school when a mathematical principle fleetingly rested in view of your mind and you hoped that you’d still retain an ethereal mental outline of it the next day for a test.

God is. Okay. Son of God came. Okay. Spirit still hangs around and nudges us or sometimes smacks us right in the face. Okay. Spirit exists outside time, outside space. Independent of. Okay.

When we can allow God his freedom from the constraints of time and space, we can begin to understand how the Spirit (or other spirits?) can influence us. It’s not a matter of reaching through time and leaping across space. It’s a matter of connecting with us. It’s a matter of our being open, or at least non-resistant, to a spiritual influence. If the Spirit can connect with us, we may encounter some rather mundane or some rather profound experiences. Or none at all.

I think I’ve been open-minded about spiritual things all my life. And yet very little has happened to give me any great conviction about it. I accept what I’ve witnessed. I haven’t sought more. If it happens, I’m okay with it. If I chased it, (attending séances, visiting psychics), I could no longer be objective. I am interested only in the spiritual connectedness that God seeks to have with me. I’m neither fascinated with nor afraid of the other; I simply don’t have any use for it.

I’ve always been interested in the stories of the inexplicable, sometimes told in church or published in magazines. I’m intrigued by the many instances when someone has had the unexpected urge to take a detour or call a friend, and the result was amazing. I’ve saved a small stack of columns cut from Guideposts. (I liked Guideposts back in the 1980s and early 1990s, before Norman Peale gave it up for heaven, but not since then. It’s become secular and condescending.) The column, “His Mysterious Ways,” always intrigued me. I give credence to it because, even if an occasional story is fabricated by the purported witness to the event, they all can’t be. “His Mysterious Ways” often concerns people who have apparently been contacted by a loved one at the moment of death or from beyond the grave. I’ve known a few people myself whose credibility is beyond question, and they’ve had experiences just as amazing.

I was sucked along for a while in the pseudo-scientific “study” of ESP, extra-sensory perception. (“Study” is too generous a word. There is so little to go on and all of it subjective.) I am not skeptical of ESP. I accept it as fact, but unprovable. How is it related to prophecy? (I was fascinated with Jeanne Dixon when I was young.) How is it related to divine inspiration and visions seen by ordinary people? All of it is probably related. It all derives from some spiritual source that is unaffected by time and space and physical energy. I expect that those who have had such an experience are in some way receptive to spiritual contact. I don’t mean receptive in the sense of willing. I’m willing but have not been affected. I mean receptive in the sense that a person has some sort of internal “antenna” which is receptive to an experience of spiritual contact or ESP. Brain chemistry, perhaps, or simply a special grace from God.

Who or what are the spirits who evidently contact certain receptive individuals? Are they the souls of the dead? And what is a soul? (See below.)

I stand in awe of God’s willingness to heal, which is one of his mysterious ways. Although I resist praying for healing (for a couple of reasons), I know that people do and they are healed. One of the reasons I resist it is that I’ve known worthy people who have prayed for it and they weren’t. It’s crushing to see people who “deserve” it but who are apparently turned down. It doesn’t diminish my faith. It just makes me see the inexplicability of God’s grace in granting petitions.

END-TIMES
Some otherwise-rational people are obsessed with the end-times. The Bible and the Apocrypha include several apocalyptic passages. There is a brief apocalyptic passage in Isaiah, for instance, and the latter half of Daniel is apocalyptic. The book of 2 Esdras in the Apocrypha is apocalyptic. Paul writes apocalyptically in 2 Peter 3:10 that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.” (It’s a fairly safe bet that it’s only a matter of time, perhaps a great deal of time, before another monstrous chunk of planetary material once again strikes the earth, so Paul can’t easily be disputed. The question is, how did he get this information unless by God?) But the Revelation of John is the only entirely apocalyptic book in the Bible itself.

Apocalypse is from the Greek word “to uncover, to reveal,” and means “unveiling” or “revealing” of matters that would otherwise remain forever hidden because they cannot be apprehended by the unaided reason of man. Someone needs to reveal these things, presumably through an intermediary. John considered himself one such intermediary. John of Revelation may have been John the apostle of Yeshua. But there is much to contradict this supposition, so it remains forever debatable.

Apocrypha, on the other hand, is from the same Greek root word but the form that means “hidden, unknown.” It is a rather curious way of referring to the 14 books that are included, because they aren’t hidden. But they were not considered canonical and were left out of the Protestant (that is, King James) Bible, so perhaps they are referred to that way because they have been “hidden” in the sense of being “kept apart.”

It is the Apocalypse of Saint John the Apostle in the Roman Catholic Bible, the Revelation of Saint John the Divine in the King James, the Revelation to John in the RSV, or just the Book of Revelation in the Jerusalem Bible. Some have studied it and found hugely-significant allegory to our present time. I’ve tried to listen open-mindedly as snakes in Revelation are identified as missiles today and that sort of thing. But there is nothing in Revelation that I’m persuaded specifically refers to Hitler or Saddam or nuclear weapons and so on. It’s way too subjective. Isaac Asimov has written about Revelation and makes many sensible arguments that John was writing about various Roman emperors and armies of his own period.

Revelation also gets specific about certain numbers. But it is a fact of history and mathematics, not just of religion, that the highest number for which any of the ancient languages had a word was a thousand. It wasn’t until the late middle ages that the Italians started adding number-words for million and so on. Asimov points out that the Greeks used the word “myrioi” to signify ten thousand, but that isn’t really a name for a number, and ten thousand is till “thousand.” “Myrioi” meant “innumerable” originally, which is the sense we use it for when we speak of a myriad objects.

Consider the number 144,000, which Revelation 7:4 implies is the number of those to be saved in the last days: “I heard the number of them which were sealed [saved]… an hundred and forty-four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel.” Compared to the total number of people who have ever lived, 144,000 is a very small number indeed, and self-righteous, frightened Christians are desperate to be among that number. But is that a divinely-dictated and deliberately small figure? Or is it meant by John to be a reassurance? It’s 12 times 12 times a thousand. There were twelve tribes of Israel. The number 12 times 12 reminds me of seventy times seven, the number of times we are to forgive. That doesn’t mean cease forgiving the 491st offense! It means forgive and forgive and forgive. Similarly, 144 may mean all those whom you can conceive in all the tribes times the greatest number, a thousand, that anyone can conceive. It is, in my opinion, not meant to convey an exact and restrictive number, but a very meaningful, complete, number.

The number in Revelation that makes people shudder is 666. Asimov points out that “…Down through medieval times it was common to use letters of the alphabet to signify numbers. The Jews, Greeks, and Romans all did this. We are most familiar with the Roman numerals where I=1, V=5, X=10, L=50, C=1000, D=500, and M=1000. It follows that words made up of these letters would also be seen to have a kind of numerical value. If an individual were named Dill McDix, for instance, one could set each letter equal to a number, add them, and reach a total of 2212.

“This is hard to do in English since only a few letters of the Latin alphabet [those above] are assigned numerical values. In the Greek and Hebrew languages, however, every letter was assigned a numerical value. Naturally, then, all words in Greek or Hebrew would have numerical meaning.”

Jewish mystics long ago spent much time analyzing such numbers, a practice they called “gematria,” (a corruption of the Greek “geometria”). The “number of the beast” in Revelation is the only significant example of gematria in the Bible. If the name, Nero, is written in the Greek form, Neron, and if his title, Caesar, is added, and if Neron Caesar is written in Hebrew letters, then the total numerical value is indeed 666. If the final “n” is left out, the total is 616, and some old manuscripts have 616 as the number of the beast.

Since very ancient times, the number seven has had special meaning, and if uttered three times it had a sort of mystic perfection. It might have been well understood, then, that the number 666 represented perfect incompleteness, and therefore was a further insult to the emperor or whoever it referred to.

Why Nero and why encode him? Since they often risked their lives to criticize the ruling class, many writers since ancient times, for their own safety, referred to a ruler obliquely. This would sometimes escape the notice of the censors and the rulers themselves, but also, if charged with overt criticism, the writer could testify that he never named the offending ruler and would, with luck, receive a lighter sentence.

Nero had been dead a quarter century when Revelation was being written, but for a time he had been succeeded by Domitian, who also persecuted Christians. It could be that Domitian’s name also could be summed as 666, or that, unknown to historians, he was insultingly known as a second Nero. Or Nero was simply the last bad emperor on whom John decided to spill his vehemence.

If this is not the explanation, then I fall among the ignorant who will some day face some sort of beast who will wear a license plate with 666 on it (or 616), and I will quietly say “Oops!”

But I don’t fear such a beast, or four horsemen of the apocalypse, or things with eyes all around. Quoting Chambers: “When you fear God you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God you fear everything else.” As far as I’m concerned, if old 666 shows up, he can kiss my protected ass.

I’m inclined to agree with Asimov and offend the scholars who have dedicated their talents to discovering predictions of modern significance in Revelation. John, whoever he was, wrote feverishly and mysteriously about events of his own time. His predictions were about his own era. Yes, he defended the Gospels and worshipped the Christ. His peculiar book may have remained in the canonical Bible simply because there was no other compromise possible at the councils of Nicea.

What about other end times predictions? What about the thousand years in Revelation 20 during which satan will be bound up, after which he will be “loosed” for a little while? What about the king who shall speak great words against the most high in Daniel 7 and who will rule until “a time and times and the dividing of time”?

It’s all obscure, debatable, endlessly debated already, and it doesn’t matter! If these old predictions, as has been well-suggested against what was happening then – things like: The loud beast put forth four snarling vipers, which can be shown to represent a 5th century B.C. king and his four sons – are truly about the ancient times in which they were written, then they certainly don’t matter now. If these riddles are about events still to occur in our future, they certainly haven’t been solved by all the monks and rabbis who have studied them for thousands of years. Therefore, no God I believe in can hold me accountable for not understanding them – or hold me accountable for not caring, or that matter, because he has already showed us, O Man, what is good and what he requires of us… He doesn’t require that individual Christians who can’t agree about riddles and a Christian dress code and the proper language in which to speak go out and start up new denominations. He doesn’t require that we breathlessly agonize over the asteroid scheduled to sideswipe the earth somewhere around 2079.

I do suspect, though, that there will be some sort of second coming. I’m not going to wait up for it. People have done that for generations and they’re still waiting, as dust. Perhaps there is something still prophetic about Revelation, and the increases in pestilence, war, greed, and licentiousness we see now are the times that were predicted. It does spook me a little that ancient Babylonia (Iraq) and Israel, the two places where it all supposedly began, are close to mutual destruction. If they do destroy one another, ironically we could all go down with them. (The fallout and climatic change possible with modern nuclear weapons could compare with the meteor strike that wiped out the dinosaurs.)

THE SOUL
There is no controversy in Judaism and Christianity that, upon the end of this temporal life, each of us survives into an eternal afterlife as a soul. Eternity, of course, is merely the absence of time, the freedom from it altogether. Is soul equivalent of spirit? Not precisely. For even now each of has a soul. We are affected by the Holy Spirit. I conceive that, if you survive judgment, you become one with the Holy Spirit. If you don’t survive judgment, your soul is satan’s.

I am not greatly interested in the soul debates. In the same way that there are inscrutables in the debates over the end-times, there is too little information from God on what the soul is and what becomes of it. He makes it clear that there is a selection process and that it’s heaven or hell. But what we consist of when we land in one or the other is pretty vague, and I’m content with that.

I have already decided that if God isn’t as smart as I am, I don’t want heaven. Of course God is smarter, but I am continually confronted with someone else’s version of God, and their versions limit God to some tyrant who is interested only in the inconsequentialities of American life. The God I believed in as a youth was smarter than I was then but not as intelligent as I am now.

Those who are waiting for the rapture insist on binding God with ropes of time. They don’t consider that, to God, it has already happened. I submit that God sees all time at once.

I have found scant mention in the Bible of Yeshua’s visit to hell, which has been more widely developed as a theme in some denominations. I have looked again but can’t find it at the moment. The idea is that, in the span between his death and resurrection, Yeshua visited hell and threw open the gates to release all the souls kept there who had been redeemed by his crucifixion. Set aside the apparent contradiction that, although exempt from the constraints of time, he did it during that time. The more intriguing question is whether those who were thus freed from hell included only those who had been condemned there up until the time of his crucifixion, or whether hell, being also exempt from time and space, include all condemned souls of all time, including perhaps mine, such that I may have landed in hell after my death some time in our future, but was not only redeemed forward from the crucifixion, but also freed from hell when he came.

This time thing is tricky, but it is even more tricky to assume that God is subject to it.

I fully understand that my soul is somehow part of my being, my consciousness, but is not physical. It is also a valid question to ask where was my soul before I was born? Are heaven and hell filling up with souls being stamped out in some spiritual soul machine, like new coins being poured into circulation?

2002
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