7. The End of the World
I pulled John Milton off of my shelf. I wanted to see again his take on Paradise Lost. The actual “paradise lost” is a topic I have been writing about from the start. The best expression of how I understand the event is found in Our Glorious Salvation, Chapter 2, “An Unmitigated Disaster,” My take on it is VERY different from John Milton’s Calvinist imagination.
I knew that what I found in Milton would be awful and it was no surprise to me that I was even more appalled. Satan was the GREAT and tragic anti-“HERO.” Eve was the cause of all the awfulness happening to mankind. And, in the end, Adam came out of it “smelling like roses!”
I puzzle over this vast story of a great REBELLION in heaven, long before the creation of earth and of humans, and all the mighty angels cast down into ignominy, to become the great “gods” of human history.
From whence comes this vast dramatic tragedy? Though it includes a few Bible references, I can tell you with certainty that it does not come from the Bible.
Now, this same mind that creates a vast exaltation of EVIL as the beginning of the world also then posits a similar vast exaltation of EVIL as the end of the world.
| The GREAT fall of Lucifer –> | –> Humans as victims with “sin natures” in-between –> | –> The GREAT rule of the Antichrist |
Now, I want to draw several threads together before I get to the main topic of this letter. First, let’s just set against this great sandwich of EVIL my own presentation of the same flow. Understand that I am placing my beginning and end as of greater significance than the dramatic fiction told in Nicene Christianity.
| A man refuses Jesus. The serpent and his wife are victims of his refusal, the serpent willingly, but the woman confused, only wanting to please. –> | –> Humans hurt God. Humans hurt one another. Humans hurt everything else. –> | –> Some people receive all that Jesus is. They give themselves to the Father for the sake of all others. |
Next, I want to set in contrast to each other two English poets of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot and Mick Jagger, and their respective poems, “The Hollow Men” and “Sympathy for the Devil."
Mick Jagger wrote his song out from the enduring English tradition of John Milton, the devil as a great and tragic anti-hero.
So if you meet me, have some courtesy
Have some sympathy and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste
[Chorus]
Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name
But what's puzzlin' you is the nature of my game
Now, Christians will claim that Jagger is “exalting the devil” contrary to Christianity. No he is not. He is speaking entirely out from the exaltation of the devil perpetrated by Nicene Christian thought.
But T.S. Eliot was much wiser. Even though he drew many of his allusions in “The Hollow Men” out from that other great Nicene Christian fantasy, Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, rather he placed the “in-between” story of mankind as it is, hollow and empty, or as Shakespeare wrote, “Signifying nothing.” First, Eliot repeats this following thought in many different ways.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
Finally, he ends with this stanza, which is exactly what I want to get at in this letter.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Let me make Eliot’s final two lines eminently practical for us right now.
This is the way the world ends,
With two senile, empty, and utterly corrupt Narcissists, Joe and Donald,
The Shadow of all the hollow men.
A line spoken by Jesus, which I did not really notice until our Studies in John, has become a significant rule of all human reality. – “They hated Me without a cause.”
They hated Me for NO REASON WHATSOEVER.
The real paradise lost is not about great evil, for evil has no greatness whatsoever; it’s about great stupidity.
I want to bring another line of thought before we arrive at the topic of this letter. I started a paper titled “A Great List of Heresies.” I went a ways, but I have not finished it. The first and most important “heresy” that I teach is this.
~ 1. Jesus comes into union first with each believer in Jesus the moment they ask Him into their heart. From that moment on, the Lord Jesus is an essential part of each believer every moment, carrying them through the darkness and pain and confusion until that moment when He can show Himself to each, that they might rest utterly inside of Him. ~
The next five heresies are just an expansion of this first and most important. But for this letter, I want to include several more.
~ 7. Evil has no substance in itself. Evil is one thing only, any sentient being, human or angel, turning their backs against the good speaking of Jesus sustaining them every moment, and spinning their own false story of self inside a self-deluded mind and a self-darkened heart. Evil, then, is any thought, word, or action coming out from such refusal. Evil is only temporary; it does not endure. Yet evil, though momentary, is people hurting people, and in doing so, it is very evil indeed.
8. God does NOT know evil. The serpent in the garden lied. The translators of Genesis 3:22 all lie. Nothing in the Hebrew suggests that God knows evil, God said, “Now man has become as one who knows good and evil.” God is aware of the terrible effects of evil and bears the pain of all inside His own being, but He Himself does not know evil. This accusation against God, that He knows evil, is the base foundation of Nicene Christian theology.
12. There is no such thing as a “fallen sinful nature.” Every human and every angel is sustained every moment by the good-speaking of Jesus and comes out from Him alone. Yet every human who refuses that good-speaking does so for three reasons. First, they hate the way God made them, they are unthankful for the weakness and inabilities of their form and they curse the circumstances of their life. Second, they lust after heavenly superiority, spinning a fake story in their own minds of how they are true and all others are false. But third and mostly, because they reach for power over so that they might manipulate and control the other people in their lives. Humans, including Christians, do not sin “because of” Adam, but for the same reasons as Adam. They want to be better than God; they want to abuse others. ~
I am well aware of how points 7 and 12, “evil has no substance in itself” and “there is no such thing as a fallen sinful nature,” shock the “Christian” mind as being utterly blasphemous against all that is “holy.”
Yet that is not the most “evil” thing that I teach. I had not yet written this one in my “List of Great Heresies.” Here it is. – Jesus died for us, for our sakes, not to “appease” God, but to win our hearts. And now Jesus causes us to share in His propitiation of others, joining others to the Father inside our own hearts. –
And yes, this has been expressed STRONGLY to me, from more than one person, that I am FALSE in removing evil from God, in making evil small and passing away, and in removing all thought that God “had to be appeased” by murder. But the last one is the most horrifying, putting me right there with the Moonies, that we share with Jesus in His resolution for others.
Yet here is the thing to realize. My abhorrence, my SHOCK of being appalled, my agony of pain, is far greater then theirs, when I hear any Christian speak the exaltation of evil, or place evil upon God, or preach the gospel of the serpent to Spirit-filled Christians. Or, worst of all, that God had to be “appeased” by human sacrifice, that the Roman soldiers beating Jesus show us God, in His “wrath against wicked humans.” I could continue, but you get the point.
Now, with all these things in mind, let’s talk about the end of the world. Of course we know that the Bible actually says, “the end of the age.” Nonetheless, if we separate completely the three definitions of “the world” used in the Bible, then by one of those definitions, it is truly the end of the world, thank God, as well as the end of the age.
Let me put in my own words the three Bible definitions of the Greek word “cosmos” typically translated “world,” but which I have translated “world-cosmos” in the JSV, in order to provide the broadest scope of meaning.
World-Cosmos (my own wording): 1. In its larger definition, the world-cosmos is another way to say the entire creation, all things that exist, and especially, the interactions together of all created things in one unified whole, the entire ecosystem designed by God and sustained by Jesus. 2. In its second definition, the individual people of this world, whom God loves. 3. In its most frequent use, the system of inter-relationships among humans and demons in the present time, a contrived artifice of pain, abuse, self-exaltation, and control.
With the removal of all demons from the entire human experience, the last action of this age, the “world” of the third definition, the most frequent meaning of the word in the New Testament, comes to an END. This third definition of the world ENDS for one reason only, because reality has taken its place. Thus T.S. Eliot is completely correct, the world ends with a whimper.
Now, the real tragedy of Milton’s Paradise Lost is the role given to God our Father. In his story, God is distant and controlling, aloof and judgmental. A strong Calvinist would side with “God” against rebellion, but most people inside the Christian tradition would sympathize with the devil, in throwing off such autocratic rule.
Milton finished Paradise Lost in 1664; a fellow Puritan, Jonathan Edwards, preached the same view of an “evil” God in 1741.
The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight; you are ten thousand Times so abominable in his Eyes as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours.
These words are so viciously hostile against everything God is inside the New Covenant and shown to us by Jesus. Yet Milton and Edwards both belonged to Jesus and were anointed of the Spirit. But neither one is describing God, rather they are describing their own desire for a God who hates, the same old, same old accusation against God, that He knows evil. Yet this image of God through the serpent had already been overthrown by Paul’s overwhelming and revolutionary Gospel.
Before we come to the real end of the world, let’s sidetrack again to The Antichrist. Most everyone inside the cultural framework of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism right now today are looking for a great showdown of good versus evil, of “the Messiah” versus “the Antichrist,” with all GOOD in one solitary individual and all EVIL in the other solitary individual. And all are convinced that until they see such an external display, the end cannot be near and nothing God says about the completion of the age can be called fulfilled.
Everyone is convinced that they will know exactly who is “the Antichrist” when he shows up, because he will be an individual person who becomes the solitary dictator of the whole world. Besides that definition, the Antichrist surely must look like Dracula or something similar.
None of this has any relationship with reality. Yet, sadly, because of this – (we can’t even call it a “fairy tale,” for it holds nothing in common with any regular story) – this travesty, our Christian brethren are caught today in the full worship of a mesmerizing beast, cowed under by the great wound of the one head, now restored, the wound of those pretending to be descendants of Jacob. Their leaders truly are the “false prophet,” and they stand ready to receive every controlling “solution” provided by the beast.
I have a letter coming up titled “A Beast Risen Up.” I believe that I can now explain “the beast” as it exists in these last days, how and from whence it operates. And of truth, it is the definitions God is giving us inside the Flow of Gospel Word that are making everything clear, including a better take on “the mystery of iniquity” than I have ever known. Let me bring in that clearer definition now.
First – • Definition: Lawlessness does not refer to the law of sin and death, but to the law of the Spirit of Life inside of Jesus (See Romans 8:2 & 2 Corinthians 3:7). Lawlessness, iniquity, is refusing to live inside of Jesus as your only life; it is using your sinful actions to place a barrier between yourself and God. Iniquity is trying to fix yourself. Yet the greater iniquity, standing in the very place of God, in His temple, is that awful action of trying to fix your brother or sister.
Then, the “mystery of iniquity” we can now define inside the definition of the world as the interrelationships among humans and demons inside this present age. The mystery of iniquity is that spirit that wants to control one’s neighbour and which will seek to do so even with violence. It is a “mystery” because it is always kept hidden, hiding behind “kings” and “law and order” and “political systems.”
The terrible thing is that the majority of humans, though capable of some decency, really, really want to control their neighbours as well (there ought to be a law). Thus the high IQ and hardcore psychopaths are actually admired and cheered on, in some way. This is what Hannah Arrendt called “the banality of evil,” that regular people are quite willing to “do what they’re told” without thought of the evil being visited on others. It is the argument of Leo Tolstoy, that hundreds of thousands of Christian men marched into Russia in order to commit very un-Christian crimes against their Christian brethren, things they would never do at home, not because of some collective force, but because each one wanted the chance to do just that. Napoleon just gave them the excuse.
The thing about the end of the world is that God has given six thousand years to the expression of such demonic wickedness, and when that time is over, it ends with abruptness, inside of complete shame. Yet it’s end is caused by something very, very different.
I want to consider the word “air” as it is used in the New Testament. Through the Gospels, the word translated “air” is actually the Greek word for heaven, as in “the birds of the air,” that is, of “heaven.” In the epistles, the word chosen is aera, directly meaning “air.” A few times, it does reference the actual physical gas we call the air or the atmosphere.
But three times, the meaning of the word “air” is entirely a metaphor. Let me first give those three times, in the order of when they were written, with the assertion that the word “air” means exactly the same thing in each. (And I have gone so far as to re-check my translation of each.)
For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also God will carry those who have died, in joint-togetherness with Him, through Jesus. For this we declare to you inside of the word of the Lord, that we who live and remain into the presence of the Lord, shall not arrive ahead of those who have died, because the Lord Himself, in a great shout, in the voice of an archangel, and in the trumpet of God, will descend out from heaven, and the dead inside of Christ will rise first. Then, we who live and remain, right along with them, will be seized inside the clouds into the meeting, connecting with the Lord into the air; and so, we will always be jointly-together with the Lord [sharing the same form] (1 Thessalonians 4:14-17 – this is long because we need the whole sense).
And you, being once dead in your own offenses and disconnection from God, in which you formerly walked according to the world-cosmos of this age, according to the influences of the authority of the air, the spirit now energeoing inside the sons of refusal, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the desires of the flesh, doing the wishes of the flesh and of its thinking; and were children of angry opposition, just as the others (Ephesians 2:1-3 – this passage conveys the definition of the metaphor).
Then the seventh angel poured out his bowl upon the air, and a great voice came out from the throne in the temple, saying, “Become!” (Revelation 16:17).
The phrase that defines the metaphor of “air” as God is using it in all three of these passages is – “the influences of the authority of the air.” Not one Bible teacher will claim that “air” here is the literal gas of nitrogen and oxygen which we breathe, as if Satan controls the weather or that airplanes fly by his power, etc.
Yet such a “literal” rendition is just as ridiculous in the other two verses. Prior to finishing this letter, I saw God’s meaning. Let me justify my thinking before I give that meaning.
I would never begin with an interpretation of Bible prophecy and then attempt to force that interpretation upon other things. In complete contrast, I begin only with the ruling verses of the Bible, that I might know them. As I search for God’s meaning inside the ruling verses, I see them expand in size and scope, reaching out to include in their sphere more and more other Bible passages. As the ruling verses become really big and clear, all kinds of odd things suddenly make perfect meaning inside the scope of the LIFE carried by all the ruling verses.
I am speaking now of Revelation 12:11. It is clear that, in wanting to be with Jesus in the revelation of His glory, we have considered for decades what it means “to overcome.” And for decades, our definitions were very small and limited because we could not see the Tree of Life.
And so, yes, I have been pondering the meaning of Revelation 12:11 for nigh on fifty years. Two wonderful things happened while I was writing The River of Life through 2019. The first was the incredible connection that happened between the overcomings of Revelation 2-3 and the removal of the seals in Revelation 6 & 8. My understanding of that connection grew enormously as I wrote about it in A Highway for God, and then again, with far greater clarity, in Symmorphy VII: Completion, Chapters 13–16.
The second wonderful thing that happened while writing The River of Life was that God graced to me the meaning of Jesus setting forth His soul for us, and we also, the incredible depths of meaning found in Psalm 22.
Out from that backdrop, let me now give you God’s meaning of the metaphor of “air” in the three passages I included, for we are speaking of the actuality of the END OF THIS WORLD, something Paul claimed everyone WANTS with all that WANTING means, something more WONDERFUL than we can imagine.
There are many levels found in the spiritual heavens, the spiritual component merged with all that is physical inside heaven-earth. Some levels of the heavens have more to do with present things happening in the human experience and some levels have less.
A very important level of the heavens can be called “the influences of the authority of the air.” Some translations say, “the Prince of the power of the air,” but that translation is not the Greek words and gives an inaccurate impression. My translation is accurate.
The “influences of the authority of the air” are a significant element inside the heavens of God. I have called them “the pathways of power.” Yet, like any part of creation, they can be filled with two different spirits. Inside the present world, those pathways are the hollow authority retained by humans in this world, energeoed by evil spirits – the spirit now energeoing inside the sons of refusal.
In the age to come, those same pathways are the authority of Jesus inside of us through which flows the energeoing Power of the Spirit.
The “end of the world” is marked by one thing only, the removal of ALL demonic influence from the human experience. That removal happens for ONE reason ONLY, the insertion of the authority of Christ Jesus, out from our bellies, into those same pathways of influence.
The DIFFERENCE from the moment before to the moment after is extreme, but we can hardly know what that will mean, for we have never lived apart from the influences of authority flowing over us, the AIR, being entirely the energeoing of demonic spirits.
Yes, we do have some limited experience in some interactions with our brethren, of knowing those same pathways filled with the Spirit of Christ, but we have no idea of the full meaning among all humans on this planet.
Revelation shows us that there are seven such pathways, or influences of authority. And I am certain that I have given to you an accurate explanation of them in Symmorphy VII: Completion, Chapters 13-16. Obviously, our understanding must increase as we go forward in this great happening that ends this world with a whimper. And I am convinced that our prayers over the last few years are an essential part of the coming overthrow.
You see, why would anyone have heeded such meaningless nonsense? – In fact, think of the 600,000 Christian men from across all Europe, who followed Napoleon into Russia because each one loved the energeoing of demons, just as they do today. Yes, 10,000 made it back, through tales of unspeakable horror. But 590,000 ended their lives that year of 1812, in some of the worst ways it is possible to die. They accomplished nothing, except to bring ruin and suffering into the lives of other Christians, and their deaths had no meaning. – Not with a bang, but a whimper.
Now, this is a valid, weighty, and immensely Biblical interpretation of Ephesians 2:2. Then we take the same thing and place the same meaning on 1 Thessalonians 4 and Revelation 16.
And here is the RULE, the strong companion verse to the Ninth Ruling Verse of the Bible, for He MUST reign.
Then the completion, when He shall give the kingdom to Father God, when He shall have rendered inoperative all other sources and authorities and powers. For it is fitting for Him to reign until He has placed all enemies under His feet. The last enemy to be rendered inoperative is death (1 Corinthians 15:24-26).
We are the feet of the Body of Christ, that is, those walking now upon this earth.
To be “seized inside the clouds into the meeting, connecting with the Lord into the air, always jointly-together with the Lord” is to participate with the Lord Jesus inside of us, in full confidence of faith, in giving to the Father the authority He has given to us that the Power of the Spirit might flow through those pathways of power, through the “air,” through that level of the heavens inside of which all humans interact together.
“Seized inside the clouds” is a subset of Revelation 12:5, “seized into God and into His throne.” “Jointly together with Jesus” is Ephesians 2:6. And raised us up together, sharing together the same awakening, and seated us together, sharing together as believers, being seated in the heavenly realms inside of Christ Jesus.
The final act of God’s judgment in Revelation 16 is the removal of all demons from the air, from the pathways of power influencing humans. – It is finished. It has happened. It has become. “The world” has ended.
The KEY, the thing that makes it all happen, is you and me meeting with the Lord Jesus “in the air,” in sharing with Him in His authority over all things upon earth inside of heaven, that He through us, His feet, will render inoperative all that energeoes that which opposes the revelation of our Father coming Home.
Here again is the “end of the world.” But the foolish things of the world God has chosen, that He might shame the wise; and the weak things of the world God has chosen, that He might shame the strong, and the low-born of the world and those who are despised God has chosen, and that which is not, so that He might bring to nothing that which is existing, so that no flesh might boast inside the presence of God (1 Corinthians 1:27-29).
I believe, with quiet confidence, that I have given you an accurate account of the soon-to-come end of the world.