TOSS the CROSS

        My next act attempt at shocking you would be addressing this problem of wooden crosses scattered all over the planet.  I’m about to ruin going to church for many of you.  I’m not doing this for fun, I’m not enjoying giving this bad news, but once I learn something in Scripture from GOD, it is imperative that I share it, lest I be held accountable for someone continuing in a tradition  that could very well be an abomination to the Almighty.  Some people who read this won’t care, because you’ll say that I’m being ridiculous, and that’s fine.   For those others who are sensitive to GOD’s Holy Spirit and leading, not wanting to commit any kind of offense to The Most High,  you may not sit in that pew looking up at that cross again without wondering if it offends GOD.  

I’m calling it a carved image, because that is what it is. It is wood carved out of a tree, which grows from the earth.  That one hanging up in front, over the baptismal, or the one on the top of the steeple, or the one with Jesus still on it, (the Crucifix), or the one hanging around your neck right now, is the exact kind of carved image GOD meant in that second commandment to not create any carved image.   As usual, when I heard this from a Messianic Rabbi that I’ve been listening to, as of late, of course, I want straight to the Scripture.  I got right to  the Hebrew,  and I investigated his claim, and by golly, I got the SHOCK of my life. I’m still not recovered from this. 

https://biblehub.com/text/exodus/20-4.htm

     As you can see in this verse, (of anything) is parenthesis, because the Hebrew word for image in this verse could lean more toward man or animal, as in gold calf?  However, by inserting the word    כֹּל  (kol) in there, that now covers the WHOLE gamut of images or likeness of ANY thing on earth below or heaven above.  For you protestants who thought that the Catholic statutes were an abomination, you might want to rethink that about your giant empty cross that you bow down to when you make your way up to the altar on Sunday morning, for an altar call and meeting time with Jesus.  Crucifying someone on the cross was considered the most shameful way of executing the most vile of criminals.  Jesus, our Savior, subjected himself to dying the same manner of murderers, thieves, and societies most iniquitous degenerates who would be sentenced to die a horrific death. 

Would you hang a giant wooden noose up over your baptismal in your mostly black congregations?  I dare say, no you would not.  Well, GOD sees the cross as if it is a noose to us.  You don’t believe me, open your Bibles and count how many times GOD condemns His people for crafting idols of the surrounding pagans and incorporating them into the Temple.  Now for those of you who actually know something about the Bible, you'll say that GOD instructed Moses to carve an image similar to an almond branch for the lampstand, and cherubim with extended wings over the Mercy seat.  Those are carved images, right?  Yes, they are.  However, GOD told them to build them for the Tabernacle.  GOD never told anyone that I know of to carve the image of the "noose" Yeshua gave up his life on and put it up in churches all over the world, calling these church buildings GOD's house, or the house of the LORD, which they are most definitely not.  GOD destroyed the one place on earth that He dwelt with His people.  After that, His Holy Spirit dwells within us, so essentially, we are the "house of the LORD," and very mobile, not buildings of mortar and stone. 

     GOD wanted His people to stand out and be different from the surrounding pagan nations. He did not want His people to resemble in any way the detestable ways of pagan polytheism of the pagan nations around them.  I spoke to my daughter about this, and she said, and I quote, “I always thought of it as a guillotine type symbol, anyway.”)  No more accurate way to describe it.   The carved image of the cross has for so long been a part of Christianity over a thousand years, and we have been conditions to (love) “worship” the carved image.    It’s going to require a whole new way of thinking to see that wooden cross, or that metal cross on your neck, or earrings the way GOD sees it.  Remember, GOD doesn’t think anything like man, and man can’t think anything like GOD.  Therefore, what GOD hates, man usually loves. What man loves, GOD usually hates.  One must learn to think on a completely different level when it comes to what GOD may want or like in us.  Most likely, what GOD wants or likes in us makes no sense to us, because we are but mere mortal humans incapable of thinking in GOD's higher ways.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should hate the cross, we are grateful for what Jesus did on it, but should we have that graven image around our necks? We are no different than the Israelites who bowed down to pagan idols, incorporated pagan rituals and even temple prostitutes into the Temple services.   I’m including a link to the time when King Josiah’s priest had found the Book of the Law, which had been lost for generations.  Note Josiah’s reaction when the words were read, and he learned about the True GOD and what He required of His people.    

I did some research to see just when the cross became a symbol of Christianity, and wouldn’t you know it, it is the fault of that tyrant emperor Constantine. He didn’t just make Christianity legal, and stopped the persecutions, he made it the official religion, thus f0rcing it upon all of his subjects, whether there was a regeneration of the soul or not.  He incorporated their pagan practices, symbols, idols, and rituals into his new church in order to ease the transition for the polytheists of Rome.

Contrary to popular believe Jesus did not invent Christianity, Constantine did.  The Greek word for church in the Gospels is not  what we do (are) today.  The Greek word, (: ἐκκλησία, ας, ἡ) ekklésia is what Jesus said he was his bride, and the gates of hell would not prevail against her.  That Greek word means called out ones, whereas, Constantine converted forced conversions and began the practice of building  oikodomé  which means a building used for spiritual enhancement. GOD destroyed the central worship center when He put the Gospel in legs and arms as the new mobile Temple, meant to spread, not gather.  For further references you can read those blogs.

 This is going to take me some time to adjust our thinking to because we’ve so accepted the carved wooden image as a symbol of the love Jesus had for us for 1600 years.  Nothing changes that that love or act of self-sacrifice, it is too much for us to grasp.   I hated to be the bearer of bad news, but that giant wooden cross hanging up, in your oikodomé  buildings could just be an abomination to GOD.  Are we willing to take that chance? 

David Killing Uriah was Petty Theft in Comparison. 

If I was a betting woman, I would put all my money of most of you wishing they still thrown outcasts in the lion’s den, or burned accused blasphemers at the stake, because if it were legal, you’d want to light the match.  Don’t worry, I’m not offended.  Take a minute to cool down, recover,  and open you mind to some Biblical truths, raw facts in black and white, that you never knew were in there.  You can’t stone a stone (Allen meaning stone),  for reporting in black and white what is written literally in the Bible exactly as it was written. 

Which one of those statements should I back up first?  Well, the abortion thing I already tackled in the blog, NEWS FLASH: Life does not begin at conception.    If you haven’t read it, and you have the patience to wait to learn why I said GOD killed babies in the womb and how it compares to abortion today, we can proceed to tackle the other two equally shocking statements. 

As some of you may know, I’m an avid student of the Old Testament, these last few years, because my life has sucked so bad that I have needed a distraction.  My heart has been so crushed, so bruised, so stomped on, and has bled out many times.  I needed to study every aspect about GOD and His renown heroes and how they dealt with those crushing blows.  You can refer to my blog post about Job for more detail on that subject,  Maybe it's okay that I'm not okay.   I also needed to find out how GOD dealt with His people to see if there was any offense in me that would have caused the losses I’ve had to bear. 

  Let me tell you, when it comes to GOD and why He does things the way He does and with whom, it would be a lesson in futility to attempt to get to the why’s.  So, let’s just stick to the facts.  David, as in King David but without the king title yet, was indeed a mass murderer;  not as a  prophet, but for his own profit.   I know, this is a very difficult and dreadful and disgusting thought about the greatest king Israel has ever been blessed to have, or the hero of heroes we’d like to have the same faith and heart as he did.   But, we cannot deny what is clearly written in Scripture that we have so conveniently brushed over, never really digging deep into what he did.  I aim to do that with you, and believe me, it’s pretty ugly.  It’s as ugly as the times we are living in now, if not worse .  We are talking genocide, including men, women, children, and babies, even babies in-utero. I have dealt with this in other blogs, but to save you time, I’ll give you a quick re-cap.

 It’s in  1 Samuel 27   the whole chapter. David had been running from a mad king, hell-bent on killing him for several years now, and he was dog tired. Who wouldn’t be?  So, in a moment of despair and exhaustion, with his faith bank account overdrawn, he decided to go live with the dogs.  (Pun intended see 1 Samuel 17)  David had previously trusted GOD to provide and protect, and quite valiantly, also, but David was a man, a very tired man.  He wrote some of his greatest Psalms during those times of Supernatural faith and strengthening himself to endure, the Psalms  that get us through our worst times.

This time, it was after great spiritual victory, that David sunk into despair. Isn’t that always the way with us?  Clearly, David had given up on GOD.  Did he stop believing in GOD?  I doubt it, but having been running from a plethora of the devil’s minions hell bent on destroying me for almost 12 years, I can pretty much assume how he felt are some of the same things I’ve felt and said in my moments of despair, grief and exhaustion.   I surely believed I was done, plenty of times,  like David, in the 1^st verse. 

David Flees to the Philistines27 Then David said to himself, “Now I will perish one day by the hand of Saul. There is nothing better for me than to escape into the land of the Philistines. Saul then will despair of searching for me anymore in all the territory of Israel, and I will escape from his hand.”

     During David’s defection and spiritually dark time, he wrote no psalms, no prayers, no fruit, and he was a terrible example to all around him. Surely, he was NOT being Godly those sixteen months. 1 Samuel 27:

⁸ David and his men spent their time raiding the Geshurites, the Girzites, and the Amalekites—people who had lived near Shur, toward the land of Egypt, since ancient times. ⁹ David did not leave one person alive in the villages he attacked. He took the sheep, goats, cattle, donkeys, camels, and clothing before returning home to see King Achish  

11 And David did not leave a man or a woman alive to bring to Gath, saying, “Otherwise they will tell about us, saying, ‘This is what David has done, and this has been his practice all the time that he has lived in the country of the Philistines.’”  

Read those paragraphs again, and really absorb all that is implied here.  “He left not one person alive.” David led the General Achish to believe that he was attacking, pillaging, and raiding Israelites in the far land belonging to the tribe of Judah. Really what he was doing was attacking, pillaging, and raiding  the Canaanites who had remained in the land promised to Abraham’s descendants. They would have not been there these hundreds of years later, had the earlier generations followed GOD orders precisely.  Again, I broach that subject in a previous blog post.   David was wiping entire towns, village, cities, and clans out, leaving not a person alive who could squeal on him. This went on for over a year, so you can assume that David killed men, women, children, and pregnant women, for profit, because he kept some of the loot himself. 

David and his 600 men,  were  rioters, and looters, burning down all that they left behind.  Does this sound slightly familiar?    How’s that for the man GOD called, “a man after His own heart.”  Next time you start beating yourself up, thinking you’re not good enough for service to the King of Kings, remind yourself of just how low David had descended.  Truly, if David was an American,  that’s the equivalent of him defecting to China, and stealing all our technology and lying about it to the CCP, but gaining a vast wealth for himself.  Again, does that sound familiar?  One thing that you will find is that in the Bible and real world, history and people just repeat themselves with different elements and different weapons.   What would people think of David if he were living today?  If all that information got out to the public he'd be public enemy number one. 

Maybe it's okay that I'm not okay!

 

 I've been trying my hardest to do that which goes against every fiber of my being and experiences in life, which is what every believer is asked to do,

T R U S T G O D

Some of us grew up in homes where trust was a foreign language. Some of us grew up in homes where we held on to the walls of the house with a vice-like grip, because we didn’t know when the next time the bottom was going to fall out. My entire childhood was like that. It seemed each year got worse from six-years-old and up, until I was eighteen and I could get the heck out of there. Recently, I heard a sermon about how a woman gets her sense of being loved by GOD through her father and later her husband. Oh, brother, I can attest that to be the absolute truth.
If her father showered love and confidence in who she was, and her husband did likewise, then she can easily see a loving GOD doing the same thing. Trusting Him would be a piece of cake. If a woman is spoken kind to and affirmed and shown unconditional love by her husband, she is able to be confident in the LORD in almost anything. On the other hand, for a woman who has gripped the walls all her life because the bottom always fell out, and there was no loving fatherly figure in the background, or loving faithful husband present or past accounted for, it is impossible for her to conceive of a loving GOD. Sure, she can believe the words on the pages of the Bible, but believing them and feeling them are sometimes on the opposite spectrum of experiences. Unless you’ve walked through or lived in the fiery furnace of afflictions for decades, you can’t possibly begin to fathom the never ending hurt and fear that takes a hold and control of a person’s psyche.

The stuff started hitting the fan for me when I was only in first grade. My home was far from a loving home. We weren’t a stable family by any stretch of the means. Our mother was a mess, our father was absent, because our mother made sure to keep it that way. We siblings had to learn, survival of the fittest. Those who were the toughest were able to take the pain of it all and stuff it, while the black sheep of the family only made matters worse by expressing it, because stuffing it wasn’t an option. Guess who that was! The trauma finally ended when I went to college, and those were some great years. I had my first love, first experience with someone who actually just loved me just because. Those were wonderful years, and then being the unstable girl I was, I threw that all away. 

 

I don’t have any regrets, because I believe in the Absolute Sovereignty of GOD.  I believe that His hand guides us with every step we take, and HE sets us on the path that He had already ordained for us before the creation of the world.  Although, we weren’t believers when my husband and I got married and first became parents, we became believers soon after that.  It didn’t make the marriage a lot better, but it did make it more tolerable and permanent, or so I thought.  We were getting along like any normal family, struggling, but holding each up as best as we knew how. That was until the bottom of the bottom fell out again in December of 2008.  The problem here was that the bottom never stopped falling out, each year, a different trauma, a more devastating loss, a worse crisis until it consumed our marriage and our marriage succumbed to the cancer in the church called D-I-V-O-R-C-E. 

I have already touched upon this subject several times in my other blog posts, so, I’m not going to beat a dead horse, but what I will say is that no one in the church in a stable marriage is capable of handling, counseling, empathizing, or dealing with this properly, because they haven’t walked that road.  No advice is the best advice. The next time someone happily married tells me that GOD hates divorce, I probably won't be able to control my Italian Yankee firecracker response. While we are in the fire, getting scorched, do not turn up the heat with piety, lest we just may breathe fire out of our nostrils and burn you in the process. We know GOD hates divorce, and to tell you the truth, I did not know just how much until it happened to me. 

I get so angry with  pastors misquoting Job 13:15, saying we should take the same approach.  They skip over the entirety of that verse, as if the second half of the Scripture didn't exist. Read those words,  “Nevertheless, I will defend myself to His face!” (NKJV). Stop listening to your pastors, only, and break open your Bibles yourselves and search. The narrative about Job handling his traumas with near perfection is about as fake news as CNN could possibly report. GOD did eventually call Job on his high and mighty fist shaking, but at the end, and not until after Job spilled all his anguish over his pain and suffering publicly, I might add. Guess who wasn’t mad at Job, GOD was not angry. He was about to hit Job with some serious truth as to Who He was and who Job was in comparison to Him, but he allowed Job to process all that happened to him.

Last night, someone compared Job to me and how Job handled his trauma’s with near perfection. This person claimed to know the Bible cover to cover.  This person absolutely refused to accept the truth, but continued to "rebuke" me for how I was handling my pain.  He went on to rebuked me for my response to his/her rebuking.  Of course, it was an anonymous account, because these people are too shameful to show their faces. He claimed that Job never sinned, that he never questioned GOD's justice, and that he never blamed GOD for his calamity.  I asked him from which Bible did he get that, because the one I’ve been studying for thirty-one years, says quite the opposite.  None of Job’s traumas were because of sin, but they surely did bring out the sinful nature in Job.  If you don’t believe me, do what I did one weekend.  Get a notebook and copy down in that notebook every word Job said, and only his words.  We tend to get lost in the dispassionate reprimands of Job’s attackers, and we focus too much of defending Job from his attackers, rather than really looking at his response.  We  lose sight of what Job really said.  Chapter 2 says, "in all that, Job did not curse GOD."  Sure, that’s right, he didn’t, up until chapter three when the lamenting and cursing the day he was born, began.  Then a whole new Job took over and he shook his fist at GOD for the next 36 chapter

Let me also add, it was GOD who rebuked Job.  No stranger on any social media site has any right to rebuke you. They will throw in some caring and concern and compassion with the Bible verses they weaponize, just so it dresses up their rebuke.  That's like throwing dog poop in a cupcake wrapper with frosting on top of it.   They'll tell you Scripture says they are to correct and rebuke. Do not believe them. Scripture does not give these anonymous church people carte blanche to rebuke every stranger all around the globe. GOD compared Job to Himself.  That doesn’t give ANYONE else the right to do the same to any brother or sister currently suffering as a crispy critter. 

Church people, stop telling bruised reeds how they should survive, heal, behave, think, or feel, because you have no rights to do so, and nine times out of ten your bad advice was unsolicited.  Jesus never beat up on those who were already beating up on themselves, rather he beat up on those who were beating up on the bruised reeds.  Jesus knocked down the standing tall and proud, but lifted the fallen and broken.  My friends, GO and do likewise. 

By claiming to know anything about the suffering saint  is the same thing as Lucifer claiming to be like the Most High, and we all know where that got him.  You don’t know their heart, you don’t know their past, you don’t know their successes, you don’t know there failures. You don’t know their pain, unless you’ve walked in the exact same kind.  I can guarantee you that if someone has walked in the suffering shoes, they surely do not rebuke the current shoe-wearer.  

We want to hear your story of deliverance.  If you want to give them Bible verses, give them one of the 7,474 promises in the Bible, and you can knock Jeremiah 29:11  off the list.  If you are really wise you can also knock Romans 8:28 off the list of potentials. 

If you are the type to have to always go in and “solve” someone’s problem, practice self-control and move on, because you will likely make the pain worse, the self-degradation worse, and the last thing a broken vessel needs is a worthless glue of guilt that will stick more to their cracks, keeping them from becoming whole and one piece, again.  Of the Spiritual Gifts the Holy Spirit gives us, if you don’t have Mercy, then move on.   

To my fellow bruised reeds out there, it's okay that you’re  not okay, and anyone who comes along, especially a church pew warmer with their unsolicited “rebuke/advice,”do your best to just thank them, and move on, don’t even give them the time of day.  GOD knows what's in our hearts, before we even form the words in our brains.   I promise you, there is nothing you can say to GOD that he does not already know if going on in your mind and your heart.  Prayer isn't us informing GOD of our needs and pain, it's GOD helping us discover them, so we can learn from them, deal with them, and grow from them.  We cannot hide things from GOD, but sometimes, He hides the solutions from us, until we are good and ready to hear the answer, see the answer, or even understand the answers. 

 I take longer than most, in fact, most times,  I wonder why GOD would pick someone who is not only not the sharpest knife in the draw, but even as a butter knife, she doesn't get the job done.  You’d think after dozens upon dozens of Twitter fight with modern-day, know-it-all 21^st Century Pharisees, you’d think I would know where this next one will go, ALSO!  

One last thing for today’s Job’s accusers,  even if you think you’re admonishing someone, many times, a bruised reed will complete break with your “admonishment,” because to them, it’s another rebuke of failure coming right at them.  Believe me, they already feel like a total loser, you don’t have to compare them to a superior Bible hero and make them feel ten times worse.