Prayer, Time & Eternity, Cosmic Justice, the Secret Gospel of John

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:34

Well, greetings, welcome to the Dividing Line. It's a little bit early today, and by the way, I am the popular internet apologist.

00:42

Remember PIA? It seems like a lifetime ago. It really does, but it was only last

00:48

December, if you recall. Oh, yeah. There you go. You got to keep this up here.

00:55

I'm still fasting, so we got to keep it away from the other noises. Anyway, remember before COVID?

01:02

It's hard to recall the things we were all arguing about and stuff back then. But back in December, well, in the fall, as well as in December, I was responding to the

01:17

TR Only guys, the Ecclesiastical Text guys, but they didn't want to mention me by name.

01:26

So remember Jeff Riddle? All those guys have sort of gone into hiding.

01:32

They all blocked me on Facebook and stuff, and if they're doing anything, they're keeping it well hidden today, which is still satisfying.

01:38

Anyway, so I was the PIA, the popular internet apologist, and so my thanks to StitchesByStephanie.

01:52

You can look up StitchesByStephanie made a shirt for me, and Rich has a shirt, too.

01:58

He has Popular Internet Producer is what he's got. Popular Internet Producer is his shirt, but mine's

02:06

Popular Internet Apologist. Oh, there you go. All the lights turned off.

02:12

I thought, what did he do there? Anyway, so thank you for clothing us.

02:19

That's the way things are going. We may need the extra clothing. But we're here early.

02:27

I'll be honest with you. We're here early because of my wife's work schedule. My wife works for a very, very, very, very, very large corporation that is losing billions and billions and billions of dollars, as everybody is, during the panic -induced insanity that's going on right now, and that's really, really what it is.

02:48

And it needs to end as quickly as possible, but it won't because it's 2020 and there's an election coming up.

02:54

But I'm not going to get into that today. She had to take a month off without pay, and now she's back to work, but she's at work at home.

03:02

And only 75 % of the time, but she's at work at home and trying to do having me around doing stuff while she's on the phone and doing something that doesn't work well.

03:12

So we're switching times around, and so it's best for me to be doing this earlier.

03:19

That's not going to be the case all the time. But hey, we've always been flexible. In fact, it was not that long ago that we had some kind of...

03:31

It was like 11 o 'clock on Tuesday, and it was because of your schedule. It was because of kids.

03:38

That's right. That was your... Man, that was... What? It was that long ago. That was a long time ago.

03:44

But for some reason, one day of the week, it was a different time the other day of the week.

03:50

Am I remembering that correctly? It was. It had to do...

03:56

Just a little behind -the -scenes thing here. It had to do with what time I had to pick the kids up from school.

04:03

Right. Yeah, I know. And so... But why would it be different Tuesday, Thursday?

04:08

I don't remember. At the time, Matt was in kindergarten. Oh. And I was, if you'll recall...

04:13

I mean, you said not that long ago. It was long ago. It was. Summer got out in the afternoons, and they were both going to the same school at the time.

04:23

Oh, wow. Okay. And so, yeah, it's... You know, we've...

04:29

Yeah, so we've always just... Working with a shoestring. I mean, it's just what we're... Yeah, you gotta do what you gotta do.

04:36

So my dear wife is sitting there at the kitchen table, and we set up an extra monitor, and she's doing her thing.

04:43

And she's been with this company almost a quarter century. We were hoping for retirement, but I don't know that almost anyone's going to be retiring now for quite some time.

04:56

I mean, when oil goes negative, things are weird. I still paid $2 .19

05:03

for a gallon of gas today, but... You know why? Yeah, because what you're pumping out of the ground now was put in at a different price.

05:11

Well, that, and we have all these... What do they call it? Blends, these... Oh, yeah, yeah.

05:16

Boutique blends. Yeah, blends. It's like coffee. Yeah, and so all of our boutique blends are still on the ground, and we're pumping those.

05:25

But, yeah, it's starting. We said it would happen.

05:32

We said just a few weeks ago this would happen. But, oh, no! Oh, no, no, no.

05:37

You guys are the naysayers. You're terrible, and you don't understand, and we all need to go into our homes and hide out.

05:45

Yeah, I'm not going there today, but, yeah, I know. But the thing is, one more thing. You're doing this, not me.

05:51

I know, I know. But there were times we couldn't say anything.

05:57

Oh, I know. Because the reaction was so visceral. Oh, it's still out there. It's still that way for many people.

06:03

But society is starting to see the hammer on the wall of what they've done. Oh, yeah, a lot of people are waking up and going, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute.

06:10

What have we done? Hey, let's just be honest. There ain't nobody in Washington that you can't point a finger at right now.

06:18

Oh, no, that's a stone -cold fact. It's sad. We're going to have to be...

06:23

We didn't have anybody to... Well, there may have been a few voices back then, but anyhow, anyhow. All right, so anyway, that being said, that's why our time frame is a little bit different.

06:38

And you're just going to have to follow on Twitter and Facebook if you like watching live as to when we're going to be able to do the program.

06:47

And we'll just keep doing the best we can. I know I'm not doing a program tomorrow, so we're going to...

06:53

Last week, we did five in a row. That was more than most people could handle for us with you.

07:00

I think people need a break once in a while. So no program on Wednesday, but my plan is to do

07:07

Thursday and Friday, so we'll see how that works out. So with that,

07:12

I would like to talk about a subject we don't always discuss, but hopefully it'll be helpful to you.

07:24

I came up with this idea on a run this morning while I was listening to some of the stuff

07:29

I listen to. No, it was not the... I was doing more stuff on Gnosticism.

07:36

I'll be dragging out the... I've discovered my library is actually, especially in this area, really good.

07:47

It is something I have sort of kept up with over the years. I pointed out to you last time the

07:53

Coptic Gnostic Library. It's a five -volume set that I had from Brill. But there's an easier -to -read translation, the

08:04

International Edition of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. I'm hopefully going to have time here.

08:10

I will. I will have time to be reading some stuff. And then I'm struggling in looking up references because I'm discovering that some of my resources might be a little bit older and are not as standardized as far as the

08:31

Dead Sea Scrolls stuff goes. So I'm working on that, trying to find a... Maybe some online resources will help me to get things to work right.

08:39

But anyhow, we are continuing doing our in -depth studies. I'm enjoying it.

08:47

I hope that you all will enjoy the fruits of it when we get around to dealing with all these things.

08:54

I'll just tell you right now, before I get into the main subject. I'll tell you right now. Here's the plan.

09:00

For those of you that are interested, man, this is... Remember Levenger and all the cool

09:06

Levenger stuff? They were. I'm not sure if they still are after what's happened.

09:13

There's going to be a lot of companies that are not going to be around. How do you respond to a 380 -page dissertation in a meaningful fashion that's understandable to people and will benefit people?

09:32

Well, you figure out what the real focus is. And remember, we've mentioned what the fundamental assertion being made is.

09:46

And that is, Reformed theology is nothing but Manichaeism. The concept of God's sovereign decree, which forms the very fabric of time.

10:03

That this is actually based upon Stoicism. Gnosticism and Manichaeism.

10:11

And so if you want to be a Manichaean Christian, then you can believe in these things. And if not, you need to be a good traditionalist, provisionist, whatever terms they want to use.

10:22

You need to be a good synergist to where you don't believe that terrible, horrible stuff that we all believe.

10:31

Only because Augustine tells us to believe it. None of us have ever read a word of the Bible. We don't ever do exegesis.

10:36

We've never studied Hebrew or Greek or any of those things. We don't do philosophy. There was never a

10:41

Van Til. None of that stuff. We just, whatever Augustine tells us, we believe.

10:47

So, how do you deal with something like that in a way that's going to help others?

10:54

Well, obviously, what you think through is what would be the necessary documentation and argumentation in this dissertation to substantiate the conclusion that is being presented by Dr.

11:07

Wilson himself. As I've said, I don't think that's what his readers were thinking.

11:13

I think that when it comes to this, all they were looking at is, did he deal with Augustine and establish a thesis regarding the possible editing of a couple of works of Augustine later on in his life that aren't mentioned in his retractions, retractionis?

11:32

And I think that's all they were looking at. That's why so much of this stuff just went right on by and no one even bothered to look at it.

11:41

But the real issue would then be, is there, does the dissertation give you a meaningful definition of Manichean interpretation of the

12:02

Bible, of scriptures? Is there a discussion of their hermeneutic? Is there a discussion of the application of their worldview to linguistic theory?

12:12

If you're going to say that Augustine was using Manichean interpretation, then there should be an extensive discussion, examples of Manichean interpretation, hermeneutical methodology, and then the demonstration of the consistency of that to Augustine.

12:36

If you could say that the Gnostics believed in dupied, divine, unilateral predestination of individual destinies, eternal destinies, sorry,

12:50

I keep forgetting eternal, then there is going to need to be, and if you're going to talk about Stoic, Gnostic, and Manichean in a line, then there's going to need to be extensive discussion of what

13:04

Stoics believed, a consistent understanding of their determinism, what nature it had, was it naturalistic determinism, was it providential, is the deity of Stoicism sufficient to have within itself the capacity of accomplishing a decree, a deterministic decree.

13:31

You have to do the same thing with Gnosticism, and of course once you get into Gnosticism, you have to start talking about the different kinds of Gnosticism, you have to talk about the

13:39

Gnostic myths, the Barbalo, and Yadbaoth, and all the

13:44

Eons, and Sophia, and all that stuff.

13:50

And then you have to get into Valentinian Gnosticism, which becomes a much more Christianized version of Gnosticism, all the different versions of these things, which have all sorts of different understandings of free will, and all that kind of stuff.

14:04

That's going to be an extensive section of the dissertation, I'm sure. It's six pages.

14:11

And then you have to get into Manichaeism, and the various forms of Manichaeism, the development of Manichaeism, and the other influences that came into Manichaeism, other than Gnosticism, such as Iranian religion, and Judaism, and Christianity, and Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism.

14:26

Talk about the biggest mishmash of stuff you've ever wanted to put in one place.

14:32

And what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to demonstrate the consistency of Dupede across those three massively different periods.

14:43

And then, having established that, demonstrate that Augustine is simply utilizing that kind of interpretation.

14:54

Demonstrate the consistency of hermeneutics into Augustine, and then fly from the 5th century to the 16th century.

15:05

You can skip over Gottschalk if you want, but all the way across. And so that the interpretation that Calvin then adopts is just simply straight from Augustine.

15:18

Now, I know the code he's going to use. We're going to look at it. Demonstrate exactly what Calvin meant, and everything else.

15:27

But, zoom, all the way up to Calvin. So Calvin is not going to be influenced by any medieval stuff.

15:34

He's never read the sentences, none of that type of stuff from the medieval period. He's not going to have any other influences in his interpretation of Augustine.

15:45

He's just simply going to take whatever Augustine says, lock, stock, and barrel, no critical analysis, no development.

15:53

And that's just going to be directly from the Manichaeans, the Gnostics, and the Stoics. And that's how you substantiate the argument, right?

16:03

Well, you can tell that would take about 14 volumes to actually do something, not 388 pages.

16:11

And that's including all the notes and references and bibliography and stuff like that. It's probably much more like 300 pages of writing, with lots and lots and lots of quotes.

16:21

So it's probably only 150 pages of actual writing, production of material.

16:31

To say that the dissertation doesn't even try to do any of that is really to understate everything.

16:37

But that's what we'll be focusing on, that's what I'm focusing on right now. There is, right at the beginning, a discussion of Stoicism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, the

16:50

Qumran community, and a couple other things. Cicero ends up there, or Kikoro, depending on how you do your

16:55

Latin. It's very short, and it does not even try to do what is necessary to establish the application that is being made by Dr.

17:08

Wilson and by the Provisionists. It does not even try. But we're documenting that.

17:14

We've already put a couple little articles together as we're looking up references and going, oh, I see where you got that.

17:20

Oh, didn't mention that part. You know, that type of stuff. So in the process,

17:27

I'll admit, spending time on Stoicism has some level of interest.

17:36

The audience are going to be people that are interested in apologetics. Let's be honest, this gives us an opportunity of really filling in some gaps that need to be filled in in our historical reading to be better apologists for every, just for Christianity, it's historicity and everything else, because we're talking

17:58

Dead Sea Scrolls. We're talking familiarizing ourselves with the various understandings of where the

18:06

Dead Sea Scrolls are coming from, what they contain. And then, of course,

18:11

Gnosticism. Wow, Gnosticism gets thrown around by everybody today. And yet there are so many flavors of Gnosticism.

18:22

And as I was saying in the last program, it's much more evil than you're normally allowed to think of as a historian.

18:32

When you're studying it simply from a historical perspective, the tendency in Western scholarship is to try to avoid terms like evil.

18:44

Because, and it is a struggle, you need to fairly read anybody.

18:50

But when you fairly read the Gnostics and the

18:56

Valentinians, they are evil. They are purposefully, specifically seeking to imitate elements of the

19:07

Christian faith while denying its fundamental heart. That's evil. But knowing

19:15

Gnosticism will not only help you historically and to make proper applications today, because there are people pushing

19:26

Gnostic stuff today. There are Gnostic categories in people's thinking today. But also to avoid, to recognize when someone's just throwing it out and they're not using it properly at all because they don't really understand where the

19:36

Gnostics are coming from. So that's really good. And then Manichaeism. Same issues.

19:42

You end up knowing much more about historical groups. All of this will make us better apologists as a group.

19:53

Those of you who are willing to put out the effort. So I'm excited about it.

20:00

I'm learning. I'm seeing connections that I had not seen before. That's really, really good.

20:07

Especially when you're talking about Gnosticism, the technical vocabulary, depending on which group you're looking at, each one has its own technical vocabulary.

20:14

But especially just the general Gnostic myth itself. How many people...

20:21

Yaldabaoth. Yaldabaoth. The god who created the physical universe.

20:28

Well, not created, but... The source of the physical. The misshapen, misformed offspring of Sophia.

20:39

Wisdom. The lowest of the eons. The Barbalo.

20:48

And then even figuring out whether they're male or female or a mixture of both. There is so...

20:55

You want gender confusion? Try Gnosticism. San Francisco's got nothing on the

21:03

Gnostics. Let me tell you. Nothing on the Gnostics. Weirdness.

21:08

Now, these are terms that I had seen, you know, like when we were dealing with the Gospel of Peter that showed up in the

21:15

Talpiot tomb stuff. Remember all that? But now we get to really get into it and hopefully get a good handle on it.

21:24

And, hey, I'm willing to do the work if you're willing to do the listening and the learning. So that's what we're doing.

21:31

And so... If Google's satellites are following me around, seeing that slow -moving

21:41

Scottish guy listening to stuff on his phone, on his headsets, while he's slowly, painfully running around Phoenix, Arizona, that's what he's doing.

21:57

That's how I get my study in. So I'll be doing more of that. In fact, this afternoon.

22:04

Getting a ride in, inside ride in, this afternoon and trying to get through some more information on that.

22:11

Putting all of it together for you folks. I will have a little more... Later in the program, I want to read to you from the secret revelation to John.

22:22

It's called different... The Apocryphon of John. That's the other thing. It's half the books that you find in Nag Hammadi or sometimes in parts in Oxyrhynchus.

22:36

They go with different names. And so you're going, what's that? Oh, that's that over there.

22:42

Okay. Then you have different translations. It's challenging, but it's good stuff.

22:49

Anyway. But before I read any of that stuff, just letting you know where we're going in the study, focusing upon the necessary argumentation and documentation that would have to appear in Ken Wilson's dissertation to establish the assertion now being made that we

23:10

Calvinists are actually Manichaeans and we're just too stupid to have figured that out. Yeah.

23:17

That argumentation is not present in the dissertation, but we'll be getting to that.

23:23

Okay. Changing gears, there are many

23:32

Reformed people who I think struggle to discuss and to visualize in their own mind, their own thinking, the subject of prayer in light of time and eternity.

23:56

Time and eternity. We are creatures who, because we have access to divine revelation, we have necessity must deal with two different realms.

24:19

So because we have this and because this at times, not at all times, certainly not even the majority of the time, but because this word, this scripture, does at times draw back the veil of eternity, speaks of eternal realities, and of course introduces us to the

24:45

God who created all things and is not himself subject to temporal limitation, then of necessity, we have to balance these things with the recognition that we are creatures.

25:06

And right now, as I'm communicating with you in a way that 30 years ago could not have been imagined, but so wonderful to be able to do so live with people literally around the world, for now, be thankful for it.

25:25

When it's taken away, we're going to miss it. But for now we can do it. And so while we're doing it, we're going to speak the truth and hope that that truth continues to bear fruit even long after we can't do this anymore.

25:40

But I am using human language. Now look at that last sentence.

25:47

I am using human language. I used forms of the language.

25:53

I used a existence verb, I am, and then with a gerund, a participial form,

26:01

I am using human language. That has a tense concept to it.

26:09

I was talking about right now. I didn't say I was using or I will be using. By changing those words,

26:17

I would be changing the tense formation of the sentence and what I'm trying to communicate.

26:26

So, we are time -bound creatures and our language cannot exist without temporality, without present, without past, without future, without conditionality.

26:43

I might be doing another subject later in the program. Conditionality. And all of this means that we think temporally.

26:59

I know that as a kid, one of the things that fascinated me was when

27:06

I would try to force myself to think of eternity. And you couldn't do it, but it got you into this strange state of mind and it was just, even as a young person,

27:20

I recognized the limitations that are ours as human beings.

27:27

And so, when Divine Revelation forces us to consider eternal realities, our tendency is to flatten those eternal realities out and just make them a longer category of timelessness or eternity.

27:51

Rather than letting them be eternal, because of the way we think, because of the way this stuff in here, this amazing stuff in here, is made and designed, clearly designed, that is the tendency that we have.

28:09

And so we've talked in the past, when we talk about the doctrine of the Trinity, for example, we have talked about how we have to be very, very careful that we do not import creaturely categories into our discussion of the attributes of God and the relationship of the

28:26

Divine Persons, a very word person. The tendency is for us to limit that term to creaturely categories, and we force that upon God.

28:39

We've talked about all that before, and it's just as true, if not more true, when we talk about this aspect of time and eternity.

28:48

So we as Christians of necessity are a people that must affirm the reality of eternity, not just as a long, long, long, long, long period of time, but we likewise are forced to deal with two different aspects of experience that stretch us, that can be dangerous for us, and that make it difficult for us to use human language to really communicate certain aspects of what we have in Divine Revelation as a part of our faith.

29:33

This comes into our experience in a number of different ways, but certainly when we come to the issue of prayer.

29:44

One of the primary arguments that is used against those of us who we believe are simply accepting everything

29:52

Scripture says about God's nature, not limiting Him, but who believe in Ephesians 1 .11,

30:00

that God works all things after the counsel of His will. We believe that you intended it for evil,

30:09

God intended it for good. We believe that God brought Assyria against the

30:16

Israelites as punishment, in accordance with His truth, and then punished the

30:23

Assyrians for the attitudes of their hearts in having done so. We live with that necessary revelational tension that exists between the eternal and the temporal realm, and that our

30:40

God dwells in eternity, is the source and creator thereof.

30:48

And so when you communicate, when you pray, how are we to understand this activity?

30:58

Well, first of all, we know we are commanded to pray. This is, you know, we're commanded to love, we're commanded to pray.

31:04

And some people would say, well, you can't command either of those two things. Well, God does. He does, and He doesn't apologize for so doing.

31:16

When we pray, we are praying as time -bound creatures. We cannot pray based upon knowledge of future events which we do not possess.

31:31

We cannot pray based upon an exhaustive knowledge of past events which we do not possess. And so we are creatures, yes, formed in the image of God, made a little lower than the angels, and yet we are time -bound, briefly existing, and pathetically ignorant.

31:52

We are pathetically ignorant of what has happened in the past, we are pathetically ignorant of what's taking place in the present, and we are massively ignorant of what's going to take place in the future.

32:03

As evidenced by the fact that we were wishing each other Happy New Year! Yay, 2020!

32:09

And I was like, oh, wow. I had no idea it was coming. So, uh, we don't know the future, and we don't know much more about the past.

32:19

So when we pray, what are we doing? How does, and I'm speaking here as a

32:26

Reformed person, I'm not speaking first and foremost as a one trying to broaden this out,

32:35

I'm talking to my fellow Reformed believers right now, if you're not a Reformed believer, we don't have the same common foundation upon which to discuss the matter of prayer.

32:46

Sadly, that doesn't mean I don't believe you're praying, it doesn't mean I don't believe you're a

32:52

Christian, but it obviously, in this instance, I can only address those who share with me the presuppositions of biblical theology regarding the nature of God and His relationship to His creation.

33:10

So when we pray, the objection is you're not doing anything. Or you've been eternally praying.

33:17

Well, no, we've not been eternally praying. We can leave that one off to the side immediately. But has

33:25

God had perfect knowledge of every prayer

33:30

I will ever utter? Well, that's like asking, does God know what I'm going to say? And the answer, of course, is yes.

33:39

And so that raises the entire issue of the meaningfulness of the words that I speak.

33:48

Are my words meaningful if they have been known to God from eternity? And the only way that you would go no to that is if you define meaningfulness in a completely creaturely category that means the only thing that's meaningful is that which arises apart from any divine decree autonomously from my human existence.

34:15

And that's how most people function. That's how most people function. Because we live in a limited finite world, then we assign value and meaning based upon our particular experiences.

34:37

I had a really good example of this. I've really thought about doing this, and I think I'm going to do this.

34:43

Hey, I know what I can do here. Calling my fellow

34:49

Trekkies. Yes. Would someone get a hold of me?

34:55

Twitter, Facebook, email, whatever. Would someone get a hold of me?

35:01

This is what I need from someone. Because I'm putting a lot of time into this other stuff. I mean, we're talking hours and hours and hours.

35:09

There's been a bunch of stuff, little projects I wanted to do that have just been put off.

35:15

So this is something somebody else could do to be really easy for me. It would help me out.

35:22

I've wanted to have a discussion, a worldview discussion, about something that happened in the final episode of the currently running series

35:33

Star Trek Picard. Why? Because it's about what we're talking about right now.

35:40

There were only... I didn't... Not big on the series, I'll be honest.

35:46

I didn't think it was all that well done. There were two episodes that were worthwhile. Mainly because you got to see folks from back in the 90s.

35:59

But in the final, final episode... By the way...

36:06

Warning! Warning! Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! If you have plans to watch

36:13

Picard, you're going to have to mute me or something. I'll wave at you.

36:19

When I'm done, I'll wave at you. But I have to contextualize this because it is fascinating.

36:26

It is the same subject we're talking about. In the final episode, there is a conversation that takes place between Picard and Data.

36:39

And it takes place within the context of the fact that they're both dead. Picard has died.

36:47

And Data died in one of the movies in 2379, as I recall.

36:52

Please don't hold me accountable for having known that, but he mentions it, and that's why I remembered it. And they're having a conversation in a quantum simulation before Picard is then...

37:07

Well, I told you this was a spoiler. Before Picard's consciousness, his mapping of his brain, and this has a bunch of stuff to do with materialism and all the rest of this stuff, is placed into a synthetic body.

37:20

Picard in the future is a synth. His body died at 94 years of age, but he's going to continue on.

37:26

But he still looks like he's 94 years of age. Anyway, that's a whole other area of the materialistic

37:34

Star Trek universe. Um... One of the things that is said by Data is that he requests, since Picard's going back, he requests that Picard disconnect his consciousness, which has been maintained in this way for quite some period of time.

37:58

I'm not sure how time passes in a quantum simulation, but he can listen to music in a quantum simulation, so there has to be some type of temporality.

38:08

We can't even discuss these things without using categories of time. Anyway, in the conversation where Picard says, you want to die,

38:22

Data's response is, not really die, but actually live.

38:27

And here's where... Here's the issue. He says, I want to live, if even for a brief moment, recognizing my own mortality.

38:43

Because it's that mortality that makes human life worthwhile. Now remember, for those of you who don't know,

38:48

Data was the whole thing throughout Star Trek Next Generation was Data wanted to be more human.

38:56

So he tried to learn to tell jokes, and oh, man, was that bad. But it was funny, but it was funny because it wasn't funny, if you know what

39:05

I mean. And so he says, it is, he says, friendship, love, sacrifice, all have meaning because we know they cannot endure.

39:21

Because we're mortal. And then he opens his hand, and one of the things they had done in this synth world is they had developed butterflies.

39:31

They're synthetic butterflies. They're beautiful. But we all know butterflies don't last very long.

39:37

In fact, butterflies have very, very short lifespans. But these butterflies don't.

39:43

And so Data lets this butterfly go, and it's flying up toward the camera when

39:52

Data makes the statement that we know that a butterfly that lives forever is not a real butterfly.

40:04

And because of this, Picard says, I will do as you have asked. Says, goodbye,

40:09

Commander. And Data says, goodbye, Captain. And so, anyway.

40:17

So here's the point. The worldview behind this is that if you live eternally, the value of temporal things is destroyed.

40:33

If you live eternally, friendship in the now, love in the now, relationship in the now has no meaning.

40:47

Now, when I first saw that, and it was a very emotional scene, the first thought across my mind was, wow.

41:00

That's something that needs to be discussed and thought through. Because that interfaces this.

41:07

Because the Christian worldview affirms the meaning and reality and worth of both realms.

41:20

We affirm that God makes man in his image.

41:31

And in and through, his work gives eternal life to man.

41:43

But does that make what takes place in time meaningless? From the

41:52

Star Trek perspective, it would. What we as believers need to think through, because it's biblically discussed, is that the recognition of the sovereignty of God's will and the accomplishment of his decree is actually at the foundation of, and gives rise to, the meaningfulness of temporal actions.

42:21

Actions within time. Rather than having, this is one of the fundamental differences between Manichaeism, Gnosticism, Stoicism, whatever, they're all different from one another, but all of those systems did not have the idea of the

42:48

God who has revealed himself in Scripture. That's why the Gnostics mocked Yahweh, the

42:54

God of Genesis, called him Yaldabaoth, and said he was ignorant and arrogant and all the rest of this stuff.

43:06

They mocked God because God was different. I am turning the temperature back up.

43:12

You are freezing me out in here. Sorry. I could tell someone was messing with something.

43:19

And so, thankfully I can adjust things with my phone. So, my toes are turning blue, and I won't mention who did that.

43:29

I had set everything just right before we got started, but I'm not going to say anything more about it from there. What were we talking about?

43:35

They were mocking Yahweh because their idea of God is of an unknowable, pure mind.

43:51

Not a God and, by the way, a pure mind who has no connection to materiality.

44:00

The God of Gnosticism could not create good matter.

44:09

In the emanation, for example, in the emanation of all the eons which are just basically erotic thought processes in the one

44:17

God, the one mind, I hate to use the term God because it's not really

44:22

God. It's a mind. It's an essence of something. It's all done in silence.

44:33

It's all done in silence. It's very important that it's silent because silence is a part of creation.

44:39

The idea of God speaking, the eternality of God's word, this is all unknown to these other concepts.

44:50

They consider what the scripture says to be beneath them at that point. They don't have a

44:56

God who can form the fabric of time. Even their mind, purity, light, whatever you want to call it, does seem to be subject to time.

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The idea of one who has created all things including time is just not there.

45:17

They don't have any mechanism for thinking about the importance of what takes place in time in light of the eternal purposes of God, eternity itself.

45:36

Obviously, one of the most important texts of scripture on this subject

45:47

I think is wonderful because it's the early church praying and they are being threatened by Caesar.

45:57

Well, it's not yet Caesar, but the people who are threatening them can back things up with Caesar if they need to.

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Right now, it's just the Jews. It will eventually be Caesar. It's opposition from the world.

46:11

Let's just put it that way. The Apostles have been released. You know where we are in Acts chapter 4.

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When they had been released, they went unto their own and reported to them the things that the chief priests and the elders had said to them.

46:30

When they heard this, they lifted up their voices to God and said,

46:40

Despotah! Despotah! Sovereign Lord!

46:48

They didn't say Koreos. They said Despotah, which always has in it the idea of reigning, rulership, active control.

47:01

Active control. And then, what I love is they prayed from the

47:08

Scriptures. They prayed from the Scriptures. It is you who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.

47:19

They start with the reality of God as creator.

47:25

So you have quotation from Psalm 146, Exodus 20, all put together.

47:31

This is part of what the people understood. They knew their Scriptures very, very, very well.

47:38

You are the maker of the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything that's in them. So, these people who think they have authority over us, we recognize you have authority over them.

47:49

There is no one who has authority over you. And you spoke by our

47:57

Father, by the Holy Spirit, by the mouth of David, your servant.

48:06

That's it. There is a sermon's worth of information about how the early church viewed

48:17

Scripture in that what you have right there. Because it's actually, now that I'm, I wasn't going to be translating it, but that's interesting.

48:33

The one, you have the article and then you have its participle down at the end and everything is sandwiched in between it.

48:42

So it's meant to be one big long description. The, our

48:47

Father, by the Holy Spirit, mouth of David, your servant said.

48:56

So that's, that's how it, that's how it goes. There's a bunch of high, high theology about Scripture there that we don't have time to unpack today, but don't skip it.

49:11

Because that means the early church had just as high a view of Scripture as we have today.

49:17

Well, we have. I'm speaking of a minority of us that have that high view of Scripture.

49:23

I can guarantee you there ain't nobody at Union Theological Seminary that has the view of Scripture that is enunciated in Acts 425.

49:31

But then you have the quotation, Why did the nations rage and the peoples devise futile things?

49:42

So, interesting enough, they're identifying their own leaders, the Jewish leaders, as taking the place of the ethne.

49:49

That's a bit of a shot when you think about it. That's a bit of a poke in the eye.

49:55

Why did the Gentiles rage and peoples devise futile things? The kings of the earth took their stand.

50:03

This is the highest levels of authority amongst men. And the rulers, the archontests, that's interesting because archon becomes a really important word over there in the

50:17

Gnostic stuff. They pull that. But this is coming from a Jewish context. The rulers were gathered together against the

50:32

Lord and against His Messiah. So they're seeing fulfillment from the

50:40

Old Testament Scriptures and what is necessary for fulfillment to exist in the

50:48

Tanakh, in the Hebrew Scriptures. God has to know the future. Not just passively.

50:57

We're not simply saying that God's a really good historian when He looks back and He's a really good historian when He looks forward.

51:04

As if what He's studying is external to Himself and He just learned it really well. The reason that the

51:12

Church can quote from these Scriptures is because they've got a God who is big enough to be eternal and yet have the actions in time flow from His decree and still be real, important, vitally important.

51:34

That's the basis for it. You don't have these guys over here, the Gnostics and the Manichaeans and all these guys where your eternal destiny doesn't flow from the wise plan of God.

51:46

It's which group you were born in. Are you a Sethite? Are you a descendant of Seth?

51:52

Are you a Numa -type person or a Suke -type person? You're born that way.

51:58

It's just the way it is. That's the kind of determinism they're talking about. It is determined that I will never play in the

52:05

National Basketball Association. That's been determined genetically. It's a materialistic thing.

52:11

It has nothing to do with the fulfillment of the good will of God in time itself in the lives of free creatures.

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There's nothing nothing in Manichaeism and Gnosticism that even comes close to what we're talking about.

52:31

It's a sad little little misrepresentation. Against the

52:39

Lord, against this Christ. Quoting from the Scriptures, for truly in this city notice something.

52:52

I'm looking at Acts 4 .27 if you're looking at your Bible. There were gathered together.

52:58

Who gathered them together? Did this just happen to happen?

53:05

No. Oh, I forgot to wave. I'm sorry. I knew I'd do that. I knew I would do it. I told people

53:10

I would wave at the camera when I got done with the spoiler stuff. And I sorry.

53:18

You missed a lot there. Sorry. Hey, look, that aired months ago, so come on.

53:26

You can stop that now, Rich. Thank you very much. It's very distracting. They were gathered together against your holy servant

53:38

Jesus whom you anointed using the term

53:47

Christ, you anointed with oil. Herod and Pontius Pilate together the

53:57

Gentiles and the peoples of Israel. So here you have all of these groups brought together.

54:07

They all have different motivations. They all have different sins.

54:16

They all have pride of some kind. But they have different motivations, different backgrounds.

54:24

But they were brought together in this city, the holy city, your holy servant

54:33

Jesus. What brought them together? Verse 28, I mean, you could not express a more complete statement of God's sovereign decree in time in Greek than what you have in Acts 4 .28.

55:05

You really couldn't. I challenge you to do it. I challenge you to do it.

55:14

Here you have all these different people. Crazy Herod, political

55:20

Pontius Pilate, the Romans who just kill things because they kill things, the people of Israel, possessors of God's scriptures, the physical offspring of Abraham, and yet consumed in their hatred of the

55:41

Messiah because he exposed their sin, exposed their hypocrisy. Massive differences all brought together to do whatever your hand and your boule, will, purpose predestined genocide to take place.

56:05

That's in time. God's will, God's boule,

56:12

His hand, that's the hand of God in the Old Testament, does what? Creates, stretches forth, helps.

56:20

It's a description of how the eternal

56:26

God acts in His own creation. Your hand and your purpose, your boule, predestined praorison, so that's in eternity, genocide, that's in time to happen.

56:45

The early church believed in compatibilism. I saw a reference just yesterday to an

56:56

Arminian who had written an article why no classical theist and certainly no

57:04

Christian should ever believe in compatibilism. The early church did. That's why

57:10

I do, because Scripture does. What they did, they did because God's hand brought it about.

57:20

How many times, look up hand in the Old Testament. Maybe we'll have to do a study of hands sometime. Look up hand in the

57:26

Old Testament. It is God's active providence.

57:34

You brought them out of Egypt by your what? Your strong hand, your strong arm.

57:42

You think God was active in bringing the people of Israel out of Egypt? Is this really a question?

57:51

Your hand and your boule. Your purpose.

57:57

He has a purpose. He is accomplishing his purpose. His hand and his purpose predestined something to take place and it did.

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Think of all of the free will choices that brought about someone like Herod.

58:19

That brought about someone like Pontius Pilate. That put them in that place at that time.

58:28

Don't tell me the fabric of time itself does not come from the hand of the all -wise

58:34

God. Well, it was just that one thing. It can't just be that one thing.

58:41

It wasn't just the one thing of Joseph, was it? It wasn't just the one thing of the Assyrians and Israel, was it?

58:51

Here you have time and eternity. And it's in a prayer.

58:59

Now you have to ask yourself the question, alright, if they recognize these things, if they recognize the boule, the way, the purpose of God, then why are they praying?

59:18

Right? That's the whole point here, isn't it? Why are they praying? Notice what he says, and now,

59:24

Lord, now it's kurios instead of despotah. I think that's purposeful.

59:30

And now, Lord, take note of their threats.

59:39

Did he not know their threats? Of course they know they knew. God knows their threats.

59:45

It's part of his purpose, too. So, on the one hand, they start, we know this high order truth.

59:56

God is sovereign, but we live in time.

01:00:03

And so, we now come to you, Lord. Take note of their threats.

01:00:09

Grant that your bond servants may speak your word with all confidence while you extend your hand to heal and signs and wonders take place in the name of your holy servant,

01:00:19

Jesus. You see, we can look up there, and we can see the reality of the eternal truths, but I can't see past the next second.

01:00:38

And so, I know the one who has woven the very fabric of time.

01:00:43

I know what he has revealed his will is. His prescriptive will he has revealed with clarity.

01:00:54

I am to live in such a way as to honor him, give thanks to him, glorify him.

01:01:01

And so, Lord, my desire is to be able to fulfill your prescriptive will.

01:01:09

And so, protect your people. Allow us to proclaim your gospel.

01:01:17

Protect us from evil rulers. That's a prayer I'm praying all the time.

01:01:26

All the time. But might

01:01:32

God give us evil rulers? I don't know what the future holds, and I don't know what his purpose is.

01:01:38

I do know one thing. His purpose is always good. His purpose is always holy. His purpose is always just.

01:01:46

His revealed will is that I am to seek to glorify him in whatever condition

01:01:52

I find myself in. And I express to him my desire.

01:01:57

I want to be able to openly and freely proclaim the gospel. So protect us from evil leaders, from those who are right now seeking to silence the proclamation of the gospel.

01:02:08

But if he gives evil rulers, I am to, in that situation, continue to be obedient to him, knowing that in whatever situation

01:02:18

I'm in, he is conforming me to the image of Christ. But why then pray if what you're saying is protect us from evil rulers, but if he may still give evil rulers, then why bother?

01:02:39

You've got the wrong idea of what prayer is. Prayer doesn't change God, it changes me. Prayer doesn't change

01:02:45

God, it changes me. God's already as good as he can possibly be. I am not.

01:02:53

I need to be changed, God doesn't need to be changed. You need to understand, when Jesus says, if you ask according to the will of God, it will be granted to you, the whole point is, you're the one that needs to be in line with the will of God.

01:03:08

You're not getting God's will in line with your will. That's why the whole word -faith, whack -a -doodle stuff, is a bunch of upside -down, stupid heresy.

01:03:22

When you are in line with the will of God, when you are in complete subjection to God's will, then whatever you pray will take place, because you are in subjection to God's will, and what's going to take place?

01:03:36

God's will is decreed will. You can't know that, but you can be in line with his prescriptive will, which is revealed to us in scripture.

01:03:48

Now, let me make another application here. I think it's important.

01:03:59

Very, very important aspect. I've talked about this. One of the major problems that we are facing today in our culture, and I'm speaking primarily as an

01:04:18

American here in the United States, but Western culture as a whole. Our legal system was deeply influenced by the thinking of men who believed that there would be someday a day of judgment.

01:04:38

That the judge of all the earth would do, right? The whole idea of putting your hand on a

01:04:44

Bible. Why would you do that? Well, you're swearing by something that's greater than you, and there's a

01:04:51

God who will judge you if you lie in this context. So, our legal system is deeply, the very crevices of it are formed by the recognition of that future day of judgment when justice will be done.

01:05:19

Now, why is that important? Most of our people don't believe that anymore. They do not live in the light of a future reality of justice being accomplished.

01:05:37

They don't believe there's a creator. They don't believe they have transcendent meaning. They're just a cosmic accident.

01:05:45

That's why so many of them are panicked right now, because this life is all they've got. There isn't anything more.

01:05:51

There cannot be things like liberty or justice or freedom.

01:05:57

Those, what do those mean to evolved hominids who can die like that, and that's it.

01:06:10

There's nothing more. There's nothing beyond that. You're just gone. Everything that you collected goes to somebody else.

01:06:20

Right? So, why worry about it? What we're seeing, one of the things that has fundamentally changed, and hence is having horrific results within our culture, is that since there is no cosmic justice, there is no day of judgment coming, then we have to have justice now.

01:06:52

We're made in the image of God. We recognize the need for justice. That's why you still take 98 -year -old

01:07:01

Nazi prison camp guards and chuck them in the huskow, because we want justice.

01:07:08

It's the way we're made. But for many people, since justice can now only happen in time, the necessary, vitally important distinction between cosmic justice and temporal justice has been lost.

01:07:32

That's why people will look at what this says about the necessity of two or three witnesses, and they go, oh, that's stupid.

01:07:46

Oh, the injustice that has been done because people believed what this said.

01:07:55

Now, you are able to hang somebody on the word of one person 30 years after the event, and you can destroy them.

01:08:07

God's word said, no, you can't. Why? Because God's word protects in time the innocent.

01:08:19

The cost of that is that sometimes the guilty get away with crime, but only in this life.

01:08:31

There was always the day coming. There was always the judgment.

01:08:37

You get rid of that. Now, you have to get all the bad people now.

01:08:43

We saw this with the Kavanaugh thing. What did you hear people say?

01:08:49

Who cares if some innocent people get caught up? We've got to get all these people.

01:08:58

Wow. That is horrific. It is much more important.

01:09:08

Much more important. True justice protects the innocent and maintains the highest standards of judgment in accusation.

01:09:20

In fact, God's law even said that if you falsely accuse someone, what you tried to get them in trouble for should come back upon you.

01:09:33

We go, no we can't because there is no longer a final judgment.

01:09:39

It's not there anymore. That's why we've lost any meaningful sense of justice.

01:09:45

That's why we are embracing this insanity of one person 30 years down the road can accuse you of something and that's it.

01:09:53

You're done. We're all just going to believe it. Two or three witnesses?

01:09:59

No way. May I suggest that Christians should be in the forefront of condemning what's coming.

01:10:14

What's coming is a technocracy. What's coming is you no longer have witnesses.

01:10:24

You just simply have the all -seeing eye of the net.

01:10:30

I just cannot believe it will always be called Google.

01:10:36

That's just not appropriate. Skynet was so much better than Google. Skynet, call it what you will.

01:10:46

But can you see the day when judgment will be done on the basis of AI?

01:10:58

Don't have to have witnesses. And hence, there can never be cross -examination and can be no refutation.

01:11:05

Can't be done. We don't possess the ability to do it. But as long as the AI says you did it, you did it.

01:11:12

We should be the first ones to say, no, no, no, no. We should be the first ones saying, look, there are neat things in this world that can benefit us.

01:11:23

But when you start sticking them inside our body, no. Stop. Stop.

01:11:29

That's what's coming. Genetic manipulation. Implants. We say, no.

01:11:38

God made us this way. We're going to stay this way. Thank you very much. Stuff on the outside, great. This is my

01:11:45

Ura ring. O -U -R -A. It is a really cool thing for someone who's had cardiac ablation like I have.

01:11:53

It's a heart rate monitor, sleep monitor. Bluetooth to my phone.

01:12:00

I love it. It's great. This morning, I got up and I looked at it and I got to get rid of the air conditioning thing here.

01:12:11

It encouraged me. You know why it encouraged me? Because last night, my resting heart rate was 43 beats per minute and my heart rate variability 100 microseconds.

01:12:22

The higher the number, the better you're recovering. That means I can beat myself to a frazzle on a 90 minute to hour and 45 minute ride today,

01:12:34

I can push my heart rate as hard as I want to today. I'm recovered. That's a good thing to know.

01:12:40

I didn't stick something inside myself to do that, that then can be used to in some way change my way of thinking.

01:12:50

That type of thing. We've got to draw a line because this stuff is coming and it's coming fast.

01:12:57

We have to stand up and say no. There's going to be a lot of people saying, yes, you need to.

01:13:04

I am not just sitting around reading 1984 all day. Let me give you an example right now.

01:13:15

How possible is it that by January of 2021, less than a year away, for me to fly to many places in the world,

01:13:31

I will have to prove my immunity to COVID -19 by either taking a vaccine or having taken a test that proves

01:13:40

I have the antibodies. What do you think? Is that really that far -fetched an idea?

01:13:47

Of course it's not. Of course it's not. In fact, during this whole program, I asked a friend who has other friends,

01:13:57

I won't go into detail, knows about the vaccines that are being developed and the genetic stuff because one of the big issues right now, everybody's talking about, is what about this vaccine?

01:14:14

Was it made from aborted babies? Does it come from stem cell lines from aborted children?

01:14:22

And since I know someone who's in the field front line, who knows someone who's in the field front line, very close,

01:14:31

I asked and I haven't been able to read all of this, but I'll give you, in summary, these responses indicate these vaccines being tested are not being developed from fetal cell lines obtained through abortions.

01:14:44

But that's the lines this person knows of.

01:14:52

Might there be others elsewhere in the world? Of course. That I don't know about. But, well, there's nothing to stop, especially in places like China.

01:15:04

They're going to do whatever they're going to do. No question about it.

01:15:10

But could we be in a situation where we are going to have to ask, if I'm going to take a vaccine, it needs to be a vaccine that was not, that innocent human beings weren't murdered to produce?

01:15:22

And, of course, they might say, well, we're not, it doesn't matter. And then there are literally countries in the world right now that have already irrigated themselves police authority to forcefully vaccinate.

01:15:34

It's happening, folks. It's around us. What's behind all of that? Any nation that is led by people who think that they someday will, in fact, be judged by God is not going to engage in that type of activity.

01:15:52

But when you have entire nations being led by people who do not believe they're ever going to be judged by God, look out.

01:16:01

Look out. Look out. So, cosmic justice will be done.

01:16:09

Cosmic justice will be done. We will mess it up royally when we try to do it in time, apart from God's revealed world.

01:16:22

Okay, now, I said I was going to do this. I'm going to do it. I don't have much time left. But that's okay.

01:16:30

So, what I have, like I said, if you're looking into some of these things, a lot of this stuff is available online.

01:16:36

Some of it isn't. It's of different, varying qualities. But, I think it's four or five,

01:16:43

I think it's five volumes. The Coptic Gnostic Library from Brill. I'm sure that was, we got that years ago, but I'm sure it was probably three, four hundred bucks, minimally.

01:16:54

Then you have a cheaper one. Here's a Harper 1 version of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures edited by Marvin Meyer.

01:17:02

The International Edition. And unfortunately, it will require my

01:17:08

Captain Kirk glasses right before you mess with Khan. This wasn't cheap either, but at least this doesn't have all the

01:17:18

Coptic in it that that one does. These translations. Let me just mention some of the things you've got in here.

01:17:24

You've got the Prayer of the Apostle Paul, the Secret Book of James, the Gospel of Truth. I think the Gospel of Truth is

01:17:30

Valentinian, as I recall. Trius and the Resurrection, Tripartate, Tractate, the Secret Book of John.

01:17:35

The Secret Book of John is probably, what I'm learning anyways, is probably the best summary of a straight -up

01:17:45

Gnostic myth, the straight -up Gnostic cosmogony that you're going to get. That's what

01:17:50

I'm going to be reading from. You've got the Gospel of Thomas, with the Greek Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip. That one was important.

01:17:56

That one's important in regards to Mary Magdalene. That was central to the Talpiot tomb theory and things like that.

01:18:05

The Nature of the Rulers, that's a nice translation of the Hypostasis of the Archons.

01:18:11

I mean, that stuff sounds... On the Origin of the World, Exegesis of the

01:18:16

Soul, the Book of Thomas, the Holy Book and the Great Invisible Spirit, etc., etc., etc. There is a bunch of this stuff.

01:18:25

My recollection off the top of my head is in Nag Hammadi, they found 52 books, but some of them were repeats, so I think it was 46 different works that were found there, which were not all

01:18:38

Valentinian, but some were. There you go.

01:18:47

I just want to give you a taste of what some of this stuff is like. The problem is, like with Storytime with Uncle Jimmy before, when

01:18:56

I read Prodevangelium of James, when I read the Gospel of Thomas, there are so many of these concepts that are totally foreign to us that it sounds like babble.

01:19:08

So, for example, in the Gospel of Thomas, at the end of the Gospel of Thomas, when Jesus says about Mary that I will make her male, that strikes a lot of us as very...

01:19:19

Well, the term today is misogynistic. Anything that would be quote -unquote anti -woman in any way is immediately hatred of women.

01:19:27

That's what misogynistic is. Two Greek words. Miseo and gune. But actually, it's not because the background to the

01:19:37

Gospel of Thomas is probably this Gnostic idea that we are...

01:19:43

that our human aspect is feminine, and we have an angelic masculine aspect, and so if you make it past the authorities and into the final realm, the

01:20:00

Pleroma, then you are rejoined to your angelic male aspect and therefore become male, become one.

01:20:11

And that's for everybody, whether female or male. Here on Earth, we are female. Like I said, the

01:20:18

Gnostics would get along really well in San Francisco. They do get along really well in San Francisco.

01:20:24

I actually come to think of it. Anyway, so, I'm jumping into the

01:20:30

Secret Book of John, which allegedly is a revelation that Jesus gives to John.

01:20:37

And before this, there has been this description of the One. So, I asked if I might understand this, and it said to me, the

01:20:49

One is a sovereign that has nothing over it. It is God and parent, Father of all, the invisible One that is over the all, that is incorruptible, that is pure light, at which no eye can gaze.

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Now, what we do automatically is we translate this into our system, rather than letting it define its own terms.

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Don't do that. The One is the invisible spirit. We should not think of it as a

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God or like a God, for it is greater than a God, because it has nothing over it and no

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Lord above it. It does not exist within anything inferior to it, since everything exists within it, for it established itself.

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It is eternal, since it does not need anything, for it is absolutely complete. It has never lacked anything in order to be completed by it.

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Rather, it is always absolutely complete in light. The One is illimitable, since there is nothing before it to limit it.

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Unfathomable, since there is nothing before it to fathom it. Immeasurable, since there is nothing before it to measure it. Invisible, since nothing has seen it.

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Eternal, since it exists eternally. Unutterable, since nothing could comprehend it to utter it. Unnameable, since there is nothing before it to give it a name.

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The problem is, you can say all these things, but you still don't have any positive revelation as to what this

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It is. And then you get this. Lots of names are used of it, but it is

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We would not know what is ineffable, we would not understand what is immeasurable, were it not for the

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One who came from the Father. This is the One who has told us these things to us alone.

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The Father is the One who beholds Himself in the light surrounding

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Him, which is the spring of living water and provides all the realms.

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He reflects on His image everywhere, sees it in the spring of the

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Spirit, and becomes enamored of His luminous water, for His image is in the spring of pure luminous water surrounding

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Him. His thought became a reality.

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So, He contemplates, the Father contemplates Itself in the luminous water.

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His thought became a reality, and She who appeared in His presence in shining light came forth.

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So here is the first emanation. She is the first power who preceded everything and came forth from His mind as the forethought of all.

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Pronoia. One of the problems is, most of these

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Greek words have translatable meanings, but in a lot of the translations they're just kept in their

01:23:56

Greek form because they become a substantival word, a name. So some of it will be forethought, some will just be pronoia, which means forethought.

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So, Her light shines like the Father's light. She, the perfect power, is the image of the perfect and invisible virgin spirit.

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She, the first power, the glory of Barbalo.

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Barbalo, the perfect glory among the eons, the glory of revelation, She glorified and praised the virgin spirit, for because of the spirit,

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She had come forth. She is the first thought, the image of the spirit. She became the universal womb, for She precedes everything.

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The mother, father, the first human, the Holy Spirit, the triple male, the triple power, the androgynous one with three names, the eon among the invisible beings, the first to come forth.

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Barbalo asked the invisible virgin spirit to give her foreknowledge, and the spirit consented.

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When the spirit consented, foreknowledge appeared and stood by forethought.

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This is the one who came from the thought of the invisible virgin spirit. Foreknowledge glorified the spirit and the spirit's perfect power,

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Barbalo, for because of her foreknowledge had come into being. This is the initiation of the emanation of the eons and their relationships to one another.

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The Barbalo, the father gazed into Barbalo with the pure light surrounding the invisible spirit and his radiance.

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Barbalo conceived from him. There's always an erotic, sexual overtone to what sounds like it wouldn't have any of that, but it does.

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He produced a spark of light similar to the blessed light, but not as great. This was the only child of the mother -father that had come forth, the only offspring, the only child of the father, the pure light.

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So there's all this relationship. What I'm trying to get to is an important part here. You have different sets and different groups of Gnostics sort of came up with different ideas here, but different sets of eons that come out of all of this.

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Seth gets involved in here someplace even though there isn't a creation yet for Seth to exist in, but that's because the

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Seth that is the child of Adam is a reflection of a primordial

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Seth. Anyway. Here's the important part. The last of the eons, the lowest of the eons, so the one that's still a divine creature, a divine creature.

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See, we're using Christian categories. It's still divine, it's still part of the

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Pleroma, but it's the farthest removed from the one, the invisible spirit, is

01:27:14

Sophia, wisdom. Okay? So, now

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Sophia, who is the wisdom of insight, and who constitutes an aeon, conceived of a thought from herself with the conception of the invisible spirit and foreknowledge.

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She wanted to bring forth something like herself without the consent of the spirit who had not given approval without her partner and without his consideration.

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So the eons to have balance are in male -female pairs, depending upon the gender of the name, the

01:27:57

Greek name that's been assigned to them. Which is really weird, because sometimes Greek gender has nothing to do with gender at all, but anyway.

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Sophia is feminine. So, she wants to do something separate from her partner.

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This produces instability in the Pleroma. Okay? The male did not give approval.

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She did not find her partner, and she considered this without the spirit's consent and without the knowledge of her partner.

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Nonetheless, she gave birth. And because of the invincible power within her, her thought was not an idle thought.

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Something came out of her that was imperfect and different in appearance from her, for she had produced it without her partner.

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It did not resemble its mother and was misshapen. I'm reading straight from the

01:29:02

Secret Book of John. Probably the best summary of a pure form of Gnostic mythology cosmogony that we have.

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When Sophia saw that her desire had produced, it changed into the figure of a snake with the face of a lion.

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Its eyes were like flashing bolts of lightning. She cast it away from her outside that realm, so it's cast outside the

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Pleroma, outside the fullness, so that none of the immortals would see it.

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She's embarrassed. She's produced a monster. She had produced it ignorantly.

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She surrounded it with a bright cloud and put a throne in the middle of the cloud so that no one would see it except the

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Holy Spirit, who is called the Mother of the Living. She named her offspring Yaldabaoth.

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Yaldabaoth. Yaldabaoth is the name. This is the first ruler, the archon who took great power from his mother.

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Then he left her and moved away from the place where he was born, so he's outside the Pleroma.

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He took control and created for himself other eons with luminous fire, which still exists.

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He mated with the mindlessness in him and produced authorities for himself.

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Now there's this big, long list of authorities that Yaldabaoth creates, the archons.

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Yaldabaoth stationed seven kings, one for each sphere of heaven to reign over the seven heavens and five to reign over the depth of the abyss.

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What does he do? Yaldabaoth creates physical matter. Yaldabaoth is

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Yahweh. Yaldabaoth is the god of Genesis.

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He is a misshapen, ignorantly conceived offspring of one of the eons.

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That's who he is. Then check this out. When light mixed with darkness, it made the darkness shine.

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When darkness mixed with light, it dimmed the light and it became neither light nor darkness but rather gloom.

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This gloomy archon has three names. The first is

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Yaldabaoth. The second is Sakla. The third is

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Samael. He is wickedness in the mindlessness within him.

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He said, listen up here, folks. This is why I wanted to get to this. I know we're going a little bit over, but he said,

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I am God and there is no other god besides me. Straight quote out of Isaiah.

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Since he did not know from where his own strength had come. This is

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Gnostic cosmology. You do not have the human man yet.

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We'll get to that. Because that's important to understand.

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Adam and Eve and then Yaldabaoth wants to rape

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Eve to get the power that's in her because they were supposed to eat the tree and it gets really complicated.

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We'll keep working on that from the secret gospel of John.

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Some of you are sitting there going, what did you just do? We just went from the divine to the demonic in one program.

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In essence, yes. The early church identified this stuff as its greatest external enemy.

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If you go to almost any university or college today, that will be called

01:33:24

Christian Gnosticism. Christian Gnosticism. As long as there is a

01:33:31

Christ figure somewhere in it, they'll call it Christian. It is the exact repudiation of Christianity but in scholarship today, it's called

01:33:42

Christian. It's not by any stretch of the imagination but there you go. These Gnostic myths are actually very popular amongst many people in Hollywood.

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There are a lot of singers that will quote from this stuff from the

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Nag Hammadi Library because it's cool, it's cutting edge, etc. It is a fundamental denial of the reality that the

01:34:14

God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the Gnostics told the

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Christians the God that you are worshipping is Yaldabaoth. Salvation will come to you only when you recognize your true nature and stop worshipping

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Yaldabaoth. In fact, every time that God in the Old Testament does something major like the flood, it's because mankind was learning what its true nature was and so he wiped them out.

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Not because of their sin. This is a mirror image negation of the

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Christian message. And it was the greatest enemy of the church for hundreds of years. And we're letting it back into the back door.

01:35:04

Oh, not necessarily. I've not heard anybody talking about Yaldabaoth.

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But, the idea of the

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Gnostic cosmology, the evilness of the physical realm, that type of thing is all over the place.

01:35:26

It really is. And, one last thing. This is fascinating. I don't know if you remember this,

01:35:32

Rich, but about 20 years ago, I was involved in a controversy here locally with a man who was

01:35:43

Presbyterian who began teaching not going to get into the names here.

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Oh, that's true. It's an unusual thing. He began teaching that the basis of all sin is ignorance.

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That someday the earth will be filled with the knowledge of Yahweh and that's what's going to get rid of sin is because sin is all based upon ignorance.

01:36:25

That no one sins willfully. I was involved in a meeting with this guy and some other elders and we went through Romans 1 and stuff like that.

01:36:41

I now in doing much more of this kind of reading and learning about the various aspects

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I mean, I obviously had, I laid out in the Forgotten Trinity when I dealt with Colossians chapter 1 the eons and the

01:36:58

Pleroma and stuff like that but the spins that they put on it and how complex it was and how deeply it went now that I've learned about this stuff

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I know where he got that stuff. I know where he got that stuff. He is a Christian Gnostic.

01:37:20

He's still around. He's a Christian Gnostic. A Presbyterian Christian Gnostic. Literally.

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Because salvation in Gnosticism now we all know it involves receiving knowledge but in this case especially in Valentinian Gnosticism the most

01:37:41

Christianized version what Valentinus does is he gets rid of Yaldabaoth he gets rid of a lot of the terminology and uses

01:37:50

Biblical terminology instead he does have a God above the

01:37:55

God of the Old Testament but the God of the Old Testament isn't an ignorant arrogant fool he's just sort of bumbling he's not against mankind he just bumbles around because he's not the highest

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God but yeah what that guy was being presented in a

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Westminster Confession Church was that we do not willfully sin it's a lack of knowledge and it's like then

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I remembered his background and went, oh! I see where that came from it's still out there folks it's all over the place it's all over the place well hey!

01:38:41

that was a wide variety of stuff um huh? all before lunch yes, all before lunch it does seem like it's later in the day doesn't it because we've sort of gotten used to that so, no program tomorrow please try to not complain about that or if you just have to call and talk to Rich about it but Lord willing we'll be back on Thursday, we'll see you then