Lebanese ‘Vision for Peace’ for a brighter future for the people in North America
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
No, no!
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
The Who – “Won’t Get Fooled Again”
By now, one has to understand that it really makes no difference who is president, except for maybe if one has the gift of eloquent speech, another a gift of making it to 3rd base with an intern, another a gift of “duh” while targeting countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, another the gift of racial equality and finally a politician that can create tweets on Twitter and trigger millions. We sure have made “progress”.
However, in the real world, the US Empire has been marching on from CIA assassinating other nation’s democratically elected presidents (1953, Iran) to open US military assassination of other nation’s #2 national leader and hero from his strategy to defeat ISIS (2020, Iran), nothing has halted the evil empire’s advance. Yes, I agree with Oliver Stone that the evil of the USSR in the 1980s has been replaced by the US Empire of the 2000s and beyond.
Things have changed a lot since then, at least for Stone. “Empires fall. Let’s pray that this empire, these evil things… because we are the evil empire,” he said in an interview to RT. “What Reagan said about Russia is true about us.” – Sputnik / Alexei Druzhinin
To get a real picture of what has evolved in the Middle East and how we (US Empire) are not helping, I believe that Eric Margolis’ experience is something that can be drawn on as a starting point where one can research for themselves from there. In his latest piece picked up by the Ron Paul Institute from Lew Rockwell, called “Grand Theft Property”, Eric outlines how this latest Trump “Peace Plan” is nothing more than continued theft of Palestinian land that will only serve to ensure continued violence in the region that the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) will love so that their profits are assured. Eric explains:
As they ask in my native New York City, “Is it good for the Jews?”, the answer is a resounding no! The Trump-Bibi theft of ancestral Arab lands condemns Arabs and Jews to another five decades of violence and hatred. The Promised Land was not supposed to be like this.
Ain’t that the truth. The fact is, visions do not create rights. They have no legal grounds. They do not convey legality to anything.
Don’t go away, for the backstory is even better. One needs to know the context and history that brought us to this point where it seems to be accepted that Israel and the US can decide how to partition up the Middle East:
In 1916, as World War I raged on, a British diplomat, Mark Sykes, met with his French counterpart from the Quai d’Orsay, Monsieur Picot, and signed an agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire once victory was achieved.
The heart of the Mideast – Palestine, Syria, and Iraq – was divided between Britain and France. Italy and Russia were offered other Ottoman lands: southern Turkey was promised to Italy and Constantinople to Russia. All this was top secret but was later revealed by the Bolsheviks after their 1917 revolution.
Do you see this? World powers, the empires, can just decide where to draw the lines, the benefits of wars go to the state while the cost of war is the burden that those who fought and sometimes died along with their families and the innocent civilians caught up in these great conflicts where life is never the same.
I have heard the term that bigger is better, however, when it comes to states, the bigger the state they more tyrannical they can be. This tyranny extends from the politicians who enable the state and give the state legitimacy, because politicians were “voted” in, all the way to all the people who follow orders blindly, from CIA assets, to the military all the way to the police, from the capital, to the states all the way to the local governments that are dependent on federal funding.
I agree with G.K. Chesterton who said:
“The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”
That kind of local government could easily have prevented the following:
70 million killed in China
60 million killed in USSR
4 million killed in Cambodia
5 million killed in North Korea
1 million killed in Yugoslavia
1 million killed in Ethiopia
1 million killed in Indonesia
800,000 killed in Rwanda
800,000 killed in US Civil War
Anyway, it appears that the US Empire train, similar to the USSR and Roman ones before it, will continue on down this track until it self destructs, no matter who is the president.
Usually, when the bombs start to drop, it is really the middle of the story. The start of the story is usually hidden to the public at large, both intentionally and by sheer ignorance.
The “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq by US forces in 2003 was not the reaction to something Saddam did wrong, like having WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction), but was part of an agenda that was set in motion years if not decades before:
It’s surely clear to almost everyone now that we were lied into an illegal war which not only destroyed an entire country, but which also led directly to the rise of ISIS and helped bring terrorism to Europe too. – Ron Paul (2016)
While statism kills, empires kill on a whole different level. While nations like Germany (Jews) and China (farmers) and USSR (Ukrainians, etc) and USA (Southerners and American Indians) do their share of genocide, there is nothing like an empire that can take that to a whole different level.
But it was not always so. Take for instance a majority of the time the British Empire was a world power, as Eric S. Margolis in this article explains:
The British were always masters of efficient imperialism. In the 19th century, they managed to rule a quarter of the Earth’s surface with only a relatively small army supported by a great fleet. Many of their imperial subjects were so overawed by the pomp and circumstance of British rule that they often willingly cooperated, or at least bent the knee.
Call it colonialism 101. Ardent students of Roman history, the British early on adopted the Roman strategy of ‘divide et impera’, divide and conquer. The application of this strategy allowed the British Empire to rule over vast numbers of people with minimal force.
For over one hundred years, life in the American colonies were not bad at all actually. This is why there was 1/3rd of Americans that did NOT want to go to war with the British Empire, as up until the 1760s, the British ruled in a minimalist way!
When we reflect on the poor country of Iraq, and how it was somewhat abused by English power in the early 20th century especially after the discovery of oil, never really knew what was in store for them by 1990. From a post WWII transition that saw American influences in the Middle East region on the increase, and with Saddam Hussein in the employ and control of the CIA, even supplying Iraq with chemical weapons in its war against Iran in the 1980s, it is clear that the American Empire was in the driver’s seat.
In 1990, when the world was shocked that Hussein invaded Kuwait, there were those in the US Government that were not surprised as they gave him the green light. This even allowed the US Empire a “reason” to respond to this attack on an adjacent sovereign nation and allowed a “coalition” of UN nations to mount an attack on Iraq (Gulf War I) to place it under tighter control until the US again invaded 12 years later.
Eric S. Margolis goes on to explain:
I was in Iraq in 2001 and 2003 and saw how much it had developed in spite of the draconian rule of Saddam Hussein. I was one of only a few journalists trying to dispute the western lies about Iraq. The dim-witted Iraqi secret police threatened to hang me as a spy – after I revealed their germ warfare plant at Salman Pak had been set up and was secretly run by British technicians.
There was enough fake news in the early 2000s to convince the American public and the world that Saddam was bad and that the US and its allies were good.
Iraq, let’s recall, was the target of a major western aggression concocted by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Britain’s Tony Blair, financed and encouraged by the Gulf oil sheikdoms and Saudi Arabia.
Truth be told, these “leaders” are in fact war criminals still walking free.
Most people don’t understand that Iraq remains a US-occupied nation. We hear nothing about the billions of dollars of Iraqi oil extracted by big US oil firms since 2003. For the US, Iraq was a treasure house of oil with 12% of world reserves. It was OPEC’s 2nd largest producer.
Recall one of the leading neocons who engineered the invasion of Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, claimed the US could finance its entire invasion of Iraq (he estimated the cost at about $70 billion) by plundering Iraq’s oil. Today, the cost of the occupation has reached over $1 trillion. Wolfie is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, President Trump says the US will grab Syria’s oil fields.
It is all very sick, but the problems in Iraq do not make it into MSM these days:
Ever since the 2003 invasion, Iraq has been ruled by a succession of US-appointed figureheads who have proven as corrupt as they are inept. During the war, the US destroyed most of Iraq’s water and sewage systems, causing some 500,000 children to die from water-borne diseases, wrecking much of its industry and commerce, leaving millions of men unemployed. Public services have broken down.
Before the US invasion, Iraq led the Arab world in industry, farming, medicine, education and women’s rights. All that was destroyed by the ‘liberation.’
The fallout from this conflict and that in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria have produced economic refugees that have invaded Europe and dispersed Christians out of the Middle East. Will we ever know the true statistics for all the chaos that was put into action in 2001 (Afghanistan) and 2003 (Iraq)?
How is that for the legacy of American Exceptionalism?
Blow-back (CIA term) is a thing, and we thought the 2000/2010s had seen enough terrorism as a result, just wait ..
If you had asked me 20 years ago if I thought that the US government was a criminal organization, I would have laughed and called you a conspiracy theorist (a CIA term to discredit those who have doubts about the official government narrative).
Since then I have read a lot about our history (American and pre-American) from a variety of sources that have links to established source materials. At the end of the day, I can say with certainty, that there are elements of our government, and some of the elite who pull the strings they have at hand, that pure evil does exist in this world. This evil prefers to operate behind the mask of the state to accomplish its evil deeds. All too willingly there are political minded people that start out to make the nation or world a better place then over time will either be blackmailed or bought out to follow along with this evil agenda, taking on a mask of themselves as being one who “helps” “the people”.
This propensity for evil to find power structures to use for their own personal agendas is nothing new. Reading the accounts of God’s own nation of Israel or even the atrocities of the Roman Empire can give you a flavor of the depravity of the human soul.
Assisting me in coming to terms with this reality, in light of my indoctrination fo American Exceptionalism in government school systems, have been articles and searches from Lew Rockwell’s site over the past almost two decades. I have always been amazed by the sheer volume of material available for free from his site or others like the Mises Institute that can help anyone research for themselves how the world really operates, as well as the United States government, the Deep State and even Deep Politics.
There has been an article that I bookmarked earlier this week that referenced another lengthy article that intrigued me earlier this year that I never had time to really look at in detail. Let’s just say, I am still overwhelmed by the HTTP links, books and articles that cover not only US history but also world history that unveils what has happened behind the curtain for so many decades and centuries. Let me just say, the trust factor of government in general just keeps ratcheting down the more I read. I think I now know how many of the founders felt when they attempted a “good version” of government after it’s War for Independence from the British Empire.
I have to admit, I have scrimped when it comes to researching history before the 1770s, and have found myself ill prepared to understand why the wheels came off the American Revolution’s “cause” so fast after the war had ended. In less than a decade, some of the same people that were pro-liberty, took up the reigns of government to be used as the British Empire did, to control the people, to enrich themselves at their expense, and establish a central strong government and central bank to keep people like them in power for generations to come in America. At the end of the day, America looked more like Europe with each passing decade. I guess the imperialism DNA is a strong thing to resist for even noble causes and honorable principles.
Even the honorable Thomas Jefferson tried to do the right thing as President of the United States and came away discouraged for how he had led this young country in those early years. As a older man he was actually thinking that yet another revolution could bring about two or three confederations out of the exiting united States.
In part two of Charles outline, he focuses mainly on the United States trajectory of becoming a hidden organized crime unit led by the power elite:
It is beyond a doubt, that even if one were to investigate only a fraction of these things, it would remain as the tip of the iceburg as to what was really accomplished via politics in secret.
What I appreciate about Charles Burris is that he then goes on to outline some of the historical events that were made possible by the power elite. Going back from the present to WWI, one can only imaging the lives lost or scared by these sociopaths in our midst:
The question for someone in the present is not whether the US should have intervened in these conflicts but what have we learned from this previous century of war, destruction, and the needless death of millions?
What we now know concerning the horrific wars of the previous century, as well as 21st century conflicts such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, provides us with a historical template to guide us in making future principled decisions concerning intervention or non-intervention.
Briefly, working backwards, what have revelations concerning non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, deliberately falsified intelligence from the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, and an elaborately coordinated media disinformation campaign done for the case for US intervention in Iraq in 2003? For falsified (and/or still classified) information concerning the September 11th attacks leading to intervention against Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Afghanistan?
What has declassified revelations from the archives of the former Soviet Union and the Venona files in the United States done to totally reshape the narrative story of espionage and the Cold War?
What has archival revelations concerning the Pentagon Papers and the deliberately contrived Gulf of Tonkin Incident done to spurious justification for the massive intervention in the Vietnam conflict?
What has fifty years of revelations concerning the November 22, 1963 coup d’état and brutal murder of President John F. Kennedy by Lyndon Johnson and the highest echelons of the National Security State done to totally reassess the dynamic behind the change in US policy toward Vietnam within days of JFK’s assassination? How have the powerful behind-the-scenes revelations concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 aided in seeing a more complete picture regarding Kennedy’s murder and the subsequent change of policy toward Vietnam?
How have incisive revelations concerning the birth of the National Security State in 1947 impacted the story of the Cold War? How have revelations concerning the use of former Nazi intelligence officers in the Reinhard Gehlen organization grafted upon US military intelligence and the CIA, been shown to have provided unreliable and provocative disinformation which fueled early Cold War tensions?
How have decisive revelations concerning the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor reshaped the narrative of US intervention into WWII?
How have revelations concerning the Hitler/Stalin Non-Aggression Pact and the joint German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 affected our historical portrait of the larger story of how the Second World War began?
How have revelations concerning American and British financial, corporate, and political elites substantially aiding and rebuilding the Nazi war machine in the years prior to WWII as a bulwark against the Soviets change our view of the deep historical background?
How have revelations of the decades of joint military training and cooperation by intelligence services between Germany (during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich) and the Soviet Union impact upon the lead up to WWII?
How did the Treaty of Versailles and agreements such as Sykes-Picot affect the interwar course of events leading to the Second World War?
How did the internecine network of secret treaties, entente cordiales, and clandestine military alliances drawn up prior to the First World War lead to this conflagration?
To this legacy one can only conclude that maybe America is not really exceptional at all, but just another self-serving nation who stuck their nose in other nation’s business totally contrary to the wishes of even the very statist George Washington!
The great American Experiment has indeed run its course. It would be nice if the next revolution was one of minds and hearts and not violent, however, man is prone toward the shortcuts of utilizing sanctions and war to accomplish the ‘greater good’.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Jesus said:
“Love your enemies,
Do good to them who hate you.”
But do notice, in pragmatic terms, Jesus made himself scarce around the religious elites who were out to get him and his small band. He too encouraged the selling of a cloak (coat) to purchase a sword (gun) for the disciples to use as self defense in times of crisis.
However, the truth is there as Paul notes in his letter to those in Rome:
“But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heapburningcoalsonhishead.”
Jesus too set the stage for a unique way with dealing with those out to do one harm:
Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you.
While this all sounds like life on a personal level, this also extends to relationships between communities, cultures and countries as well. I am guessing I would get booed like Ron Paul did during a GOP debate in South Carolina years ago, but I stand by it. So would Francis Marion! But I digress.
The reality is that those that choose to do good in this world will find opposition. Even back in the 1st century Paul wrote to the Thessalonians:
“For we wanted to come to you — I, Paul, more than once — and yet Satan thwarted us.”
The Roman Empire had good roads too .. so this was not an infrastructure issue, but a real one with a real adversary. There is evil in this world that makes life difficult.
So on to the core of my message here and the article and book that led me down this strange path. “The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs” by Andrei Martyanov does a convincing job at painting an accurate picture for the state of the American Empire, which by definition is the enemy of most of the people of the world and IF we were honest, considering our erosion of privacy and freedoms, it is also an enemy of its own citizens, not unlike the USSR of its day.
This book gives an insight into the evolution of weapons and the way they influenced international relations in the 20th and 21st centuries. It also defines Revolution in Military Affairs as manifested via policy, politics, and technology. It reviews some models which are useful in assessing the current geopolitical situation. This book also tries to give a forecast of the future development of warfare and the ways in which it is going to change the whole system of international relations, hopefully towards a new geopolitical equilibrium.
Some helpful early quotes from this book will help you see the value of knowing your enemy, knowing the truth, so that y’all can be prepared.
modern war between nation-states became so complex, in reflection of the tools of such wars, that it is an axiom, not even a theorem, that people who cannot grasp fundamental mathematical, physical, tactical and operational principles on which modern weapon systems operate are simply not qualified in the minimal degree to offer their opinions on the issues of warfare, intelligence operations and military technology without appropriate backgrounds. Failing that, what can one think but that they are merely in the business of content provision (filling space/entertainment) or of propagating the official line—of propaganda, in short—mostly with regard to warmongering? In today’s information-oversaturated world of massive egos nurtured by the dopamine of public visibility and of American politics turned into showbiz, these are the types who dominate the discussion on the most important, vital issue of war and peace in our time.
This is so true, the information overload renders most people helpless in sifting through the lies to find the foundational truth. So much of media is indeed government blow-horns used to confuse and disorient the sheep on any given day making them in fact impotent.
I can only hope that the knowledge readers will gain through this book will help to increase public awareness of the deadly consequences of even a conventional war between global superpowers and will help to dispel the war propaganda being pushed on the public by ignorant and incompetent pundits who have no business offering even an iota of their opinions on what is today a Revolution in Military Affairs of historic magnitude.
Again, the ignorance of the elite usually leads to the slaughter of the innocent. Herein lies the dilemma, how does one find the time to sift through all the Geo-politics while real life is raging right along side in real time in their own communities and their own relationships?
Those holding a modern Ph.D. in philosophy or political science, unless they have a serious education and experience in other fields, will be hard-pressed to derive any sensible conclusions on automation, for example, barring some self-evident and easily accessible truths such as that increased automation removes workers from the manufacturing floor, thus increasing unemployment. This same Ph.D. will have very little knowledge of what goes into the fundamental technological principles relating to the automation of modern industry or, for that matter, how G-code interpreters work for Computer Numerical Control machining centers and what is required to run them—a knowledge domain belonging to college-educated engineers.
This is why we have the blind leading the blind. Those at the top are ill-informed by their own ignorance in attempting to make good decisions. This happen not just in government committees, think-tanks or even at the state and local level, but this also occurs in most major corporations these days as technology has outpaced the knowledge that middle and upper management were taught as little as one decade ago.
The article by Moon of Alabama is a good one to understand the pragmatic situation we find ourselves in with the latest Russian technology advances (such as underwater drones pictured below) as well as the coordinated drone (two pictures down) strike on the Saudi oil production facility.
Artistic rendering of a drone submersible
Martyanov explains why the models the ‘experts’ use fail. He shows how the advantage of one weapon system against another one can be calculated. People who have had a military education know these formulas. Those who only studied political science have likely never heard of them.
I will allow MOA to be the expert on that aspect of this book.
Houthi drones on display
My own interest lies in the philosophic underpinnings of Martyanov’s book itself. More posts on this book will be in the works shortly.
The occasion of the state (government) taking the life of innocent people is nothing new. History shows that government really cares very little about life and liberty. Government has its own agenda of self preservation and rewarding those who fall in line to protect it from the common person, insurrections and revolutions.
So the occurrence of an extremely innocent man with brown skin in the Middle East under occupation of an empire being put to death by the state seems to have little impact on the majority of people’s trust of the state itself. It seems whenever the people want things “fair”, the state is considered a neutral party that can facilitate that. How wrong they really are.
Consider this situation in the Middle East where the state/empire is brought a man who the religious leaders say is an insurrectionist, a revolutionary. Well the empire (in this specific case, the Roman Empire about 2000 years ago) definitely wants to minimize those people who stir up the masses and cause concern for the occupation army to be able to maintain control of this region of the empire. To defuse the public’s passion, a common move by the state is to allow the people to vote, and in this case, with their voice.
The people are offered to free one of two insurrectionists as a goodwill gesture of the occupation power in the season of Passover, the regions annual religious festival. The Roman governor, Pilate, had already indicated that Jesus’ “crime” was not worthy of death, however, the most vocal drown out the calls for justice and indicate that Barrabas (whose first name was Jesus, and his common name Barrabas means son (bar) of the father (abba)) be released and that Jesus be crucified.
What is clear is that the state did not and does not prioritize justice be served. One can never count on the state, especially an empire, to be moral or a proper arbitrator of true justice. What is worse is that in this situation, religion partnered with the state to accomplish this atrocity. What is clear is that the state and religion usually operate in very similar ways, as I said earlier:
Government has its own agenda of self preservation and rewarding those who fall in line to protect it from the common person, insurrections and revolutions.
Religion has similar DNA to the state and even empires. Do not look for justice in religion either!
So who can you trust?
I used to think that religion had the answer. The search led me through a rather complex path of mental gymnastics that focused more on a set of principles and a matrix of theological beliefs that actually distracted me from a relationship with the One who, as I found out, was especially fond of me (and you). Understanding how much one is loved releases one to explore why without a sense of urgency, without having to get everything lined up in one’s brain first, without having to know the complete truth.
One of the barriers I think that religion has had over the centuries towards unpacking who God and Jesus are is the dual mission and agenda that many organizations have in place. There are usually, at a minimum, a local building and staff that competes for the mission to make Jesus known to people. At the end of the day the local group or club, usually called a church, is very much into their own preservation, and the fact that money has been spent to establish and maintain this club has its members be protective of it and the ROI (return on investment) of the money (tithes and offerings) spent/invested to date. Many times, beyond the local is the regional or denominational aspect of the franchise network that requires more money and offers further distractions to the mission of making Jesus known.
Another aspect that usually accompanies this hierarchical organization is the propensity of titles. No matter how small there is usually always a pastor or elder or deacon or priest. The smallest clubs seem to need a holy place (house of God) and a holy man/guru.
When I was 6 or 7 and I read the New Testament books for the first time (while being bored to tears in a church service that focused on all the sins one may have committed in the past week), I was shocked to read that Jesus never established a club that had a holy place or had a holy man/guru. Those that followed him might have called him Rabbi or teacher, but at the end of the day he was essentially their friend, and in the night before Jesus’ death He confirmed that very thing (The Bible, John 15:15):
Nolonger do Icallyouslaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.
Beyond this, Jesus unpacked the real relationship matrix that would support them after He would leave them, a Dad (Abba Father or Papa) who Jesus had made known to them, having the same heart as Jesus PLUS Jesus Himself as a brother and then a Helper called the Holy Spirit who would be with them day-in and day-out. Wayne Jacobson in his book ‘Beyond Sundays‘ shares the simple reality quotes in his blog post:
Any title you wear be it pastor, best-selling author, or Done [a label that indicates one is “done” with organized religion but NOT done with God] will do more to separate you from others than it will help you recognize the incredible family that Jesus is building.
Claiming a label works against his prayer that his Father would make us one. The community of the new creation levels our humanity—from hierarchy and from our narcissistic notions of being in a better group than others. We are all sons and daughters of a gracious Father and that’s all the identity we need. (Matt. 23:5-12)
But once again, we risk being divided into “innies” and “outies” and falling into the false dichotomy our flesh so craves. Whether you go to “a church” or whether you don’t is a distinction without a difference .. the church is bigger than most of us would dare to believe and that his church takes expression wherever people engage each other with his love and purpose.
For those who claim that attendance at a local congregation is mandatory to be part of his church I hope they reconsider that false idea. Being part of his family is about following him not belonging to an institution.
Exactly. As I mentioned in one of my first posts last June, the hope that Jesus and His Father together worked to accomplish between Jesus’ humble birth, his life in a normal family and three short years with fishermen and tax collectors that ended with a state execution and Jesus’ life after death was to provide hope:
.. common people were given hope not just for what happens after life ends, but how one could live their life day to day in peace and with true rest knowing they were loved exponentially by an awesome father, well beyond how the best dads on earth can possibly love their kids.
This hope can be reignited when everyday people reach out across religious, socio-economic and racial barriers .. as well as across “in-church” and “outside-of-church” barriers as noted below in Wayne Jacobson’s blog post:
Anyone who finds more identity in their institutional affiliation or lack of it, their doctrine or lack of it, their ritual or lack of it, proves by doing so that they have yet to find their identity and validation in Jesus and their relationship with him. Can you imagine what we would demonstrate to the world if we were lovers of Jesus and each other, first and only? Isn’t that what he asked of us in John 13:34-35? By that, he said, the whole world would come to know we are his followers.
I contend that between those that really have a real relationship with the Father (Papa), Brother and Helper, and those who could be on a search for that relationship could help common people across the globe have hope and peace in the midst of the storms in this world, thanks to the thirst for war the current empire has here in 2019.
When one reads of Jesus’ and His followers talk about the new kingdom, it has to be done in a context that parallel’s Jesus own time of sharing of His Father’s love. Kingdom in Jesus’ paradigm does not focus on “church”, “royalty”, “slave”, “servant” at all but that of family … with Father, Brother, Sister and Helper .. and whenever these are together, THAT is the church, anywhere.
How can one explore this new kingdom? Wayne Jacobson has another post that has some clues:
When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. (John 16:8)
Some things in life are better explored than explained such as an alpine trail lined with wildflowers, the Basilica Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the shoreline of Galilee, or even chocolate ice cream. Explanations just can’t do them justice.
Agreed? I think Wayne is one to something. All the sermons, podcasts, articles in the world is no substitute for just “getting out there” ..
The same is true of a relationship to God. It can be explained to death, literally. We quote Scriptures, memorize cute aphorisms, and read books trying to understand it. We have sought to understand him with our heads and missed the joy of discovering how God makes himself known, and how his purpose in the world is revealed each day. Many who can talk about God in eloquent terms have no idea how to live in him with grace and affection through the difficult challenges of living in a broken world. They have never explored it.
It is like perpetual ground school for a pilot. Until they fly, until they have that experience, everything is theory only and the uptake of His relationship is relegated to basically book reading and hear-say.
Perhaps the most significant proof of this, other than what I’ve observed with people, is drawn from the way Jesus lived. He walked this out very differently than we try to. For instance, he wasn’t preoccupied with a Sunday meeting or building an institution he called church. He was more interested in letting the reality of the kingdom flow through him in the encounters he had each day. It’s why he could spend an afternoon with a woman at a well, or on the hillsides above Galilee with a large crowd.
Jesus moved with spontaneity, guided by His Father’s heart in every situation. There were times He retreated to secluded places .. other times with large crowds and parties .. other times at the bar or in family homes and then times with just His close friends. He lived life each day and never said “I will teach you about this Sunday at church”.
We act as if Jesus went to church every week to sing songs and listen to a lecture. He did no such thing, and, no, that’s not what going to the synagogue was like. He didn’t tell his disciples that’s what he wanted them to do every week. As far as we know, he never organized a single meeting, except for serving the Passover in the upper room, and even that didn’t take him long.
He seemed to wake up every day and navigate the circumstances and choices of his life with an eye to his Father’s unfolding purpose in the world…
No wonder the religious elite of the day suspected Him of perverting “religion”, and when people followed Him, they themselves were very worried and partnered with the state to plot an end game.
He didn’t offer them outlines of God’s characteristics or teach them a process for letting God’s power work through them. He didn’t offer them a curriculum, he let them watch it in his own life and explore that new reality in their own. He was offering them a different way to live—in a Father’s love, in power greater than their own efforts, in the growing simplicity of learning to trust his love.
He knew you couldn’t learn those things in a classroom or from a book. Real life has to be explored, and he encouraged them to do so—to ask questions, to struggle with their own fleshly ambitions ..
Real life. That is what Jesus did with others, a life shared. A key insight into the tight bond that developed between them is summed up in an encounter with Jesus after the cross (The Bible, Like 24:13+, The Message):
That same day two of them were walking to the village Emmaus, about seven miles out of Jerusalem. They were deep in conversation, going over all these things that had happened. In the middle of their talk and questions, Jesus came up and walked along with them. But they were not able to recognize who he was. .. They came to the edge of the village where they were headed. He acted as if he were going on but they pressed him: “Stay and have supper with us. It’s nearly evening; the day is done.” So he went in with them. And here is what happened: He sat down at the table with them. Taking the bread, he blessed and broke and gave it to them. At that moment, open-eyed, wide-eyed, they recognized him. And then he disappeared.
Back and forth they talked. “Didn’t we feel on fire as he conversed with us on the road, as he opened up the Scriptures for us?”
These friends of Jesus felt in their hearts the same fire that they had experienced over the previous three years when they had given up fishing and followed Love.
In summary, what are the paths forward? I still say a clue is to go back to uncover the Jesus style:
It is evident to me now that he [Jesus] wanted them to explore the kingdom, not analyze it. He knew they could only understand it by experiencing it, not by reducing it to a set of facts or propositions. The people I know who live most freely in the kingdom are those who are discovering it, not in seminars and classes, but in the circumstances of their own lives—a woman betrayed by her husband, a man who’s lost his job because of lies told about him, a mother whose son was convicted of murder, or a child tempted to betray his conscience for the approval of his friends. I am often asked if I have a discipleship curriculum I can recommend to others, or at least a resource to help them know the Lord better.
The curriculum for your journey is not in the Bible or some workbook based on the Bible. I know this gets me labeled as a heretic by some, but the curriculum for God’s work in you is in the Spirit himself. That’s why Jesus said that he would send the Comforter and he would guide us into all truth. He didn’t say he’d send us a book to follow, because you cannot follow a book. He didn’t entrust it to religious leaders. His Spirit alone can show us how to engage God in the reality you live every day.
Following a book is not following Jesus. Wayne explains:
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m a Bible guy. All the wisdom we need is in God’s revelation of himself, but it is the Spirit that helps us make sense of his words as they fit into our experience.
I know people well-learned in the Scriptures, who can argue theology with precision, but who have no life flowing in them. And, I know people who live by their feelings, thinking their every whim is the Spirit’s direction. They both flounder because in the end, we are still interpreting our own journey, instead of learning to listen and to rely on his indwelling Spirit.
This mirrors my own experience. So much of my more religious life took each Sunday’s sermon in application on their own tangents and never or rarely brought me closer to the One who loves me.
Jesus’ own style was a “one day at a time” adventure, seeking out those around us as the Father places them on our hearts. I contend it was intended to be that simple.
Living loved means understanding how much we are loved by Him, listening to His subtle whispers and at His prompting, love others as well, sharing our experiences as we “fly” through life’s journey.
-SF1
PS For an honest insight into the nature of Jesus is Gayle Irwin’s teaching, who admits that Christian’s over the centuries has distorted things about God and Jesus. This is entertaining and maybe corny but I love how this guy passionately unpacks these truths:
