32. A Great Chasm

© Daniel Yordy – 2019

A tremendous grief has come upon me the last few days, more than is normal, a grief for all people across the earth right now, Christian and non-Christian. We are in the time of the greatest of sorrows.

The word John used in his vision was the “abyss,” or, as the King James has it, the “bottomless pit.” I used to understand this to mean a falling into darkness and evil that never ends. I no longer define it in that way; evil cannot “increase,” for it does not exist. Demons are not “gods,” they do not generate themselves. All that defiant angels and humans are able to do is to block their ears to the good-speaking of Jesus that does sustain them and to mutter their own self-story as loudly and as fervently as they can.

And that is now my definition of the “abyss,” a disconnection from God that hurls the defiant one into an endless self-centered story that cannot satisfy.

People are LOST. The traditions that once gave shape and purpose to the human self-story have been broken and cast off. People, especially in the West, have lost all touch with heritage or culture, family or ancestry. Now, it’s all about “me” – “this is me!” Yet the “me” they create is only an increase in awfulness, a “me” that hurts other people and doesn’t know or care.

There are two ways to view our present day. One way is by the flow of years, nearly 6000 years of human folly, one day, one year, one decade at a time. In that view, the present period of 10-20 years is just a blip. But the other way of seeing the present 10-20 years is quite different. Consider all humans who have ever lived on this earth. One half of them are alive today; one half of all humans spoken into existence by the Lord Jesus Christ are experiencing the year 2019 with us. One half of all of God’s created image and likeness is entering into the time of sorrow and confusion, of darkness and horror greater than anything known before.

And no one, including Christians, knows just how lost they are.

Let me define lost – lost means the spinning of a false story, a story that cannot satisfy and that cannot be escaped except by stepping through the cross and into Christ.

Our focus is and must be upon God’s Church, for Salvation can come to all only through her. That does not mean, then, that we do not carry also inside our hearts the lost, those not given to Jesus in the present season, but who are just as confused and filled with hurt as those who do belong to Jesus in the present season.

We see the Church first, yes, but we also see all created beings through and on the other side of her, each in his or her own season.

You and I are inside of God above the storm, “leaping,” one might say, over the top of this great chasm of human falseness and agony all across the earth, right into the only thing that will help anything or anyone – Jesus proven faithful and true through Christians loving one another with a pure heart fervently.

Yet in our leap, we look down upon the fakery and the hurt, bearing that great sorrow inside our hearts as well, but knowing that we cannot “fix” it now, but only Christ revealed through His Church, a Church living only inside of all the fullness of God.

I am writing these two letters, then, only to express some thoughts, to get down on paper some understanding of the madness into which our fellow humans are rapidly descending. Because that is my only purpose, I will simply ramble from one thing to the next with no need for any connections.

Except, the Lord reminded me of another bit from Agur, something few have ever considered. I will use Agur’s thoughts to break the darkness of the chasm and the flood and to give us a right perspective. Here are the lines; hold them in your thoughts and we will come back to them as we continue.

There are four things which are little on the earth, but they are exceedingly wise: the ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their food in the summer; the rock badgers are a feeble folk, yet they make their homes in the crags; the locusts have no king, yet they all advance in ranks; the lizard can be caught with the hand, yet it is found in kings’ palaces (Proverbs 30:24-28).

Think of the larger claim that I seem to have made in the last letter, that you and I, insignificant and weak, are able to carry all our Christian brethren inside our hearts right over this great chasm and into the Holy of Holies. The line that tugged at my heart is “four things which are little on the earth.” Yet these four LITTLE things prevail.

Now, when we say, “chasm” and “flood,” we are talking about human identity, how people see and define themselves inside of how they perceive their world. More than that, each of Agur’s “little things” is a picture of identity. “Exceedingly wise” means a true self-story.

As I wrote Through Eyes of Fire, my first study of Revelation inside this word, I spent a fair bit of time on identity. It was this same issue, then, that inserted these two chapters here.

Humans ARE symmorphic. We are created to be the express image of another Person.

Consider a dog. The dog is what it is, knows what it is, and does what it is. A dog can be made sad or vicious by the treatment of humans, but at no point does the dog wrestle with its identity.

Who am I? – This is me!

When we observe people in our present time, whether in real life or as presented in various TV shows, etc., we are struck with how anchorless they are. There is no core, no center, no purpose. People are falling and they know it. So they grab anything coming by that fits their fancy and cling to it as a “purpose” or “identity.”

Human identity has never been more disconnected from any sort of anchor than it is in our world today, and especially in the Christian West. Every former point of identity in culture or history, any involvement with something wholesome outside of one’s self, has been found false and thrown off. Thus, for someone to assert that there is some good in Western Culture is to be identified as a “Fascist hater.”

Family is not known, even when there are parents and children, which is sometimes less than half the time. And there is a definite reason or cause of such a thing.

The generation of children growing up in the West today cannot survive. They have been made into an unsustainable generation. This is intended.

And I saw a star out of heaven, having fallen into the earth, and the key of the well of the abyss was given to it. And he opened the well of the abyss; and smoke went up out of the well, like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened out of the smoke of the well. And out of the smoke came forth locusts into the earth, and authority was given to them, like the authority of the scorpions of the earth (Revelation 9:1-3). – And when they shall have completed their testimony, the beast ascending up out of the abyss will make war with them and will overcome them and will kill them (Revelation 11:7).

I am using the word “chasm” as this “abyss.” Note that the word is “the well of the abyss,” meaning the source of the story of false identity. The abyss in our world today opened up from January of 1942 until May of 1948 at which time the beast stepped forth in full upon the earth.

Two things shattered the former attachments of identity that had allowed humans disconnected from God to survive through the centuries. Those two things were World War II and the modern school.

Now, in Chapter 22 The Number of Its Name in Through Eyes of Fire, I looked at the overwhelming cultural constraints inside of which children grew up in the past, attached absolutely to their place in their environment and culture. No one could self-identify; everyone was required to be what they were told. Inside of such a forced identity, you and I could never have come to know Christ as our only life. We would not have been allowed. Michael Servetus tried, but John Calvin, the mind out of which modern Christianity comes, burned him at the stake.

In other words, having an identity and purpose that is forced upon a child by the culture in which he or she grows up is NOT a good thing. But it is far better than today’s lack of any attachments and a free-for-all in which no real human identity can be found by children growing up in today’s world.

Now, I do NOT discover the years 1942 to 1948 by looking at John’s vision and “trying to figure out” what these things mean. Rather, my approach is entirely the opposite. In my study of this world, I have determined that through these years in particular, and because of decisions made, that is, the embracing of demons arising from the abyss, in January of 1942, the connection to human culture, place, and identity was shattered, never to be rebuilt. Then, as I read through John’s vision, in the light of Paul’s gospel, I discover a series of pictures that give me exactly how to understand this out-of-control free-fall that is the identity of humans in our world today.

Christians like to argue that WWI and WWII were just wars against an enemy that would have destroyed the West. What they refuse to see is that Christianity has vanished in the West BECAUSE of those two wars, and that this result was foreseen and fully intended.

People like to call the generation that went overseas to fight in WWII, the “great generation.” What they fail to understand is that these millions of men came home shattered because of the evil things they had witnessed and done. This generation then procreated children who grew up with shattered and disconnected fathers. Those children grew up just old enough to be sent to Vietnam where they committed greater crimes than their own fathers had ever conceived. I missed Vietnam by two years. That is, it ended the year before I turned 18. Had it continued two years more, I would have been drafted and sent.

Nonetheless, I knew well many shattered men who came home from Vietnam. They were hard, cruel, and disconnected men.

The purpose of the great wars from 1914 to 1975 was not to “save the world for democracy,” but rather to shatter the one influence in human society that prevented the rise of the beast in our day, and that is the fathers. A shattered father has no identity to impart to his children.

Today, the idea that a father should impart an identity to his children is not only mocked absolutely but is called by most to be the great “enemy” out of a very “dark” past.

Look at John’s picture of the abyss. “Smoke” means one thing, it means falling disconnected, but inside of that which blocks your seeing in a manner that stings and hurts. A “fog” blocks one’s seeing but can be peaceful and calm. Smoke burns the eyes even as it confuses the mind. Then, locusts, as John uses them, devour all that is good, and scorpions are not seen until they cause you great pain.

Let me give you an example. A young woman has her identity set on having a specific career. Then, because she has no attachment to father and mother, she becomes pregnant. She realizes that raising a baby means sacrificing her identity as a careerist. So she pays someone to murder her baby before it can be born. She is happy, now, in the present moment, for she has remained free to pursue this identity she imagines will give her some purpose and place.

Yet her problem becomes that her identity is now caught in a stinging smoke that she does not understand, and the things she reaches for become stinging pains that she had not imagined. She does the only thing she knows; she plunges ever further into her identity as a careerist and sidelines in drink and casual sex, all to hide the shattered-ness of her soul.

Her self-story has become awful, yet as a human, she remains arrogant in herself and contemptuous of all others. Thus she clings to any twisted identity that comes through the smoke; we could call those twisted identities as locusts, taking life and giving none.

And, of truth, all human identities that are not Father Himself through the good-speaking of Christ ARE fallen angels, that is, demons. All. Humans are symmorphic, and either we share form with Jesus, or we share form with demons.

Yet here is the wonderful thing. My human identity, coming out of Father’s thoughts and becoming me through Jesus is ME. This IS me. And I am the human I find myself to be, completely human, completely me, and utterly embedded in my Father’s love.

Connecting with Father, in all of my self-story and personal identity, does NOT make me something else. In complete contrast, it is the ONLY thing that makes me to be ME in all goodness and wholesomeness!

The growth of a child’s identity passes through three stages. (This is a psychology according to Daniel Yordy.) Those three stages differ in length and age from one child or situation to the next, but, in looking at my own life, I can see them distinctly.

The first stage is from birth to around 8. The second stage is from around 9 to around 15. And the third stage is from around 16 to around 22. By the time an individual has turned 22, their brain has grown into its completion, they can reason as an adult, and their identity is pretty well fixed.

The modern school is the incubator in which their identities grow all the way through.

In my experience, most Christian schools are the same as public schools in their setup, philosophy of education, and destruction of godly identity in the children growing up inside of them. And they can work their destruction because all other identities have been shattered in the Western world. There is no other milieu in which children can grow up.

The purpose of modern education is to eliminate all connections that might remain between a child and any other identity in that child’s life. Then, modern education fully connects that child’s identity to the only FORCE allowed in the world today – the state.

Let me define the state. In its simplest form, the state is that institution that holds to itself a monopoly on violence inside a given geographical area. In its practice, the state is the rising of the worst form of human identities – politicians and bureaucrats – into obsequious and criminal gangs that use their hold on the monopoly of violence to dominate and control the masses who, themselves, have no other identity than that given to them from their schooling – and that is to the emblems, the lies, and the violence of the state.

The state, human political government as it exists in our world today, is the BEAST. And all humans today worship the beast and marvel at its authority over all.

The modern school is designed with intent to break all other connections of identity, to bore the children into utter submission, to give them a deep sense of worthlessness, and to attach their identities entirely to the purposes of those various criminal gangs calling themselves “the government.”

And when I saw that the Christian school was far more successful at attaching their children to the state than the public school ever could be, I was utterly appalled.

Here is what I mean by an unsustainable generation. Take today’s 16-to-21-year-olds. Remove all the rest of society that nurtures them yet give them the land as it is today. Within one year more than 95% of them will be dead.

I find it amazing and reflective of the ignorance of this generation, that, when they make any movie about a dystopian future, after some sort of “apocalypse” as they falsely call it, the people in these stories are busy doing anything and everything except the ONLY thing they would be doing in real life.

The moment the system is shattered 95% of all people MUST become farmers. There is no other option. Food does not magically appear in grocery stores. Look at the children graduating from high school this May-June. Can they get their food out of the ground? Since they cannot, they will die. Yet getting one’s food out of the ground is the first part of, as well as a metaphor of, all human identity. Gardens show us the nature of God-Life more than anything.

When I look at today’s generation, I see billions of people lost in a great chasm, unable to see anything because of the sting of smoke in their eyes, reaching for any identity passing in that smoke and finding only things that strip all life and purpose from them, identities that become only the pain of the scorpions’ sting, yet finding everything in their world pressing them towards the worship and exaltation of the beast.

I am using John’s vision by God’s purposes for such a vision – to understand what I see in my present world as God gives me understanding.

I included Agur’s further puzzling about things he perceives but does not quite understand because the line about the ant came to me from the Lord and I quickly realized it was a line from Agur. I find it convenient, once again, to use his pictures as an outline of understanding, this time, the issue of lost human identity.

Yet I find that the meaning I had thought to gain from the ant belongs rather to the “rock badger.” The picture of the ant, then, is the antithesis to the formation of the identity of children today inside of modern schooling.

Each of these things Agur has chosen for his list is a little, little thing. Yet the results coming out from what and who they are, those results are huge, in seeming contrast to the littleness of the source of those results.

One half of all humans coming out from God inside of this time of human folly are caught now inside this abyss of identity, this stinging smoke that detaches every individual from all other connections of identity developed over centuries to sustain generation after generation, and to re-attach those connections of identity to the image of the modern state, and to the purposes of the criminals and Satan worshippers who control it.

And as we look across our fellow humans upon the earth today, we are looking at a generation more lost than any coming before.

“Lost” means identity, the story each one spins inside themselves.

I lived for 8 ½ years as a part of the Blueberry Christian Community in northern British Columbia, very much involved in the work and education of the children. Whatever faults that setting had were caused by Nicene Christian thinking, shared in common with all Christians today. Yet the good fruit of Christ was also very much a part of our experience.

I think of two young men whom I had in my classroom from 8^th grade to 12^th grade, sons of the community who knew only life in the Blueberry agricultural setting. If you said to them, “Boys, I need you to be up at 5 in the morning to clean out the pig barn before school,” they would have done just that with all cheerfulness and alacrity. If you said to them, “Prepare yourself, because you will be meeting the President of the United States this afternoon,” they would have made you proud with their poise, their conduct, and their open hearts and faces.

They were just boys, yet they had learned through the rhythms of their lives that young people work with adults to prepare food in the summer so that we might have food to eat through the long winter months. Their identity, their knowledge of their place inside the world of the adults around them, was one of value and usefulness, of giving and receiving.

Modern education confines children through all the years of their growing up into three horrific things. The first is completely disconnecting them from the adults in their lives and attaching them to a whole bunch of kids their own age under the guidance of, typically, a Marxist woman. And remember that Marx attaches humans to the state by two different methods, the right and the left. So, yes, the thinking of the Christian teacher in today’s world comes as much from Marx masquerading as a “Christian world view” as the feminist teacher in the public school who is the “left” side of the same Talmudic thinking and identity, the faction of the Pharisees.

The second horrific thing is that they are trained by endless exercise for years and years that all of their work is worthless. That NO ONE places any value on what they do every day. And so their work, on a daily basis, is crumpled up and thrown in the trash can because NO ONE wants it. Their work for years and years benefits no one.

The third horrific thing has two parts. First, they are trained that life is a series of disconnected boxes governed by the bell inside of which, second, they sit in sheer boredom for years and years. Everything the children would want to do if they were not chained and dragged from desk to desk is denied, even to the point of drugging a large number of the boys solely to keep them seated quietly in their chains and to get them to the next “box” without fighting.

Most of our present generation knows no other identity than that which was forged for them inside of these three anti-human and thus anti-Christ horrors. And underneath and on top of every element inside modern education, Christian and public, is the violence of the state. The state puts the children into the classroom by violence, obtains the money to pay for it all by violence, and controls by violence everything of method and content being taught.

The great chasm of human lostness over which we are leaping has NO answer EXCEPT the fulfillment of the Feast of Tabernacles in the life of the Church. Of truth, it is my hope that these four little things of Agur will show up again in our description of what Tabernacles means for all humans.

It is the “rock badgers” that gives the other side of this equation, however. These are little animals, similar to prairie dogs, that are found through much of Africa and up into Israel. They are known officially as “rock hyraxes,” little creatures who build their homes among the rocks.

There is nothing more powerful that I have found in my 62 years of life thus far than my sense of identity that I am utterly embedded in my Father every moment, that all that I am is coming out from His good thoughts concerning me, and that even as my own story unfolds as me, my Father shares all of that entirely with me, two walking as one.

I received an email from a brother with whom I have had connections in the past. It was a short email, sent, I assume, for the purpose of reconnecting with me. Yet in that email he ridiculed me, leaving me feeling like a worm, he threatened me, and he left me with the probability that I am in rebellion against God. Because I know his earlier communication, I assume that “being submitted to God,” in his eyes, was for me to connect myself to his “gift.” There was not one word in the email that treated me with respect, nor was there any symptom of compassion. Yet, strange as it seems, he makes full use for his own ministry of the things I write.

Ten years ago, such a thing would have thrown me into utter confusion, with everything in it making NO sense whatsoever. In my confusion, of course, I would have wrapped myself in the words my Father speaks to me in the gospel.

Yet when I awoke in the night, understanding the mockery of the words in the email, I practiced what I wrote in “Setting Forth Our Souls.” I drew Father into my confusion; I drew the brother into my heart, and I joined them together, there, just above the Blood. In doing so, I set both Father and the brother together entirely free of me.

Oh, what a sea change occurred immediately all through my knowing. I KNEW that I was embedded utterly in my Father. The entirety of my story of self comes only out from Him, and He shares all things with me. More than that, all confusion engendered by the brother’s email vanished. I got up and listened to the audios of “Setting Forth Our Souls” and “No One Left in Her,” before returning to sleep. Right into the first audio, I heard Jesus saying, “I am a worm and no man.” And I was deeply comforted that I am just like Jesus, with no sufficiency in myself, but embedded, rather, utterly in my Father’s love. You see, the first line in the brother’s email was written to make me feel like a worm, that is, just like Jesus.

We are little, little things. How could we possibly imagine that our faith inside our own story can move mountains, can affect people’s lives in heaven and on earth, and can alter the course of history? We can and we do because, though we are feeble folk, we live inside the Rock that is Father.

As we fly inside of Father in all our identity, carrying inside our hearts ALL who belong to Jesus, right over this great chasm of a vast generation of billions falling lost inside an identity of smoke, of loss, and of pain, we KNOW with all peace that we are, in all our littleness, accomplishing mighty, mighty things.