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Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God assesses the action of killing someone based on the heart intentions of the murderer. He says there are times when it is appropriate to kill. Many times in the Old Testament, we find Yahweh commanding people to kill others. Anytime God gives the order to kill, we are not going to be in trouble with Him for attempting to kill someone–instead, we get in trouble with God for not killing, because that means we are intentionally disobeying Him. A good example here is when the Jews refused to kill all of the original inhabitants of the Promised Land.

So how do you know if God is telling you to kill someone? Step one is to make sure you are personally in alignment with Him. Step two is to wait for His clear instruction. Regardless of what your current communication with God is like, He knows how to make His orders very clear to you, and you can’t possibly justify murdering someone until you receive such orders. In real life, people rarely seek God sincerely in cases of premeditated murder. Instead, they do what they want to do for carnal reasons, then later try to justify it by saying, “God told me” when they know He really didn’t. Another popular game to play is to use God as an excuse to justify killing people you don’t like just to satisfy your own hate issues or because you want to get your greedy hands on their property and land. When you hear people talking about holy war, there’s usually nothing holy about it. If the real God is even being referred to, it’s highly doubtful He’s being sincerely sought. You need to look at the bigger picture. Clearly any Muslim who is trying to claim that god is telling them to kill is lying because Muslims worship Allah, who isn’t even real. If a follower of Judaism tries to use the holy war excuse, you also know there’s a problem, because it’s impossible to be in alignment with Yahweh while you’re clinging to a religion which rejects His New Covenant and the Divinity of Christ.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Well, here’s a straightforward command, right? And yet Yahweh is going to tell His people to murder all of the inhabitants of the Promised Land that they are heading towards. So what’s with the doubletalk? Well, the bottom line is this: you’re not the Creator of life, therefore you have no right to be trying to squelch it. Now Yahweh will say elsewhere in the Old Testament that He is the One who holds life and death in His hands. In other words, no one dies before God wants them to. Yahweh will also address the issue of accidental killings—like when your ox gets out and mows down the neighbor’s kid. He’ll also say that sometimes it’s okay to murder—like when someone sneaks into your house in the dead of night and you’re acting to defend yourself. When we don’t read the entire body of Yahweh’s commands, we come away with a false impression of what He actually said.

There are times when God authorizes Christians to kill, and in such cases, He does not accuse them of rebellion. When the Christian doctor has to choose between saving a mother or saving her baby, he needs to ask God to have His way in the situation and then go with whatever leading God gives him. When a Christian soldier gets called to a battlefield, he needs to make sure he has God’s Authorization before he starts blasting bullets at people. Just because we don’t have the power to end lives prematurely doesn’t get us off the hook for submitting to God’s Authority. This command calls us to respect life as God’s property, not ours, therefore we need to be seeking His input on what to do. How far should a Christian fireman go to try and save a child from a burning building? When is it okay to pull life support? When is it okay for a cop to shoot his assailant? These are questions that each individual soul needs to take to God as they come up. For many situations, there is no blanket rule we can lay down because God is a wild card and He has a long history of unexpected moves (see Does God kill? What is the difference between killing and murdering?).

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Sin basically comes down to the concept of you wanting to do things that God says are wrong. This results in a conflict of wills: you want one thing, He wants another. Well, this is fabulous, for where there is a disagreement of wills, there is an opportunity to practice submission. You see, submission doesn’t come up until there is a disagreement, because as long as everyone is approving of the program, no one has to yield to anyone else. Well, Jesus is not your buddy or your friend, He is God Almighty. He infinitely outranks you, and you’re not going to get anywhere with Him until you accept and respect this difference in rank. Submission is a soul attitude which is critical for succeeding with your Gods, but until you clash with Them on some issue, submission will never come up. This is what makes the whole sin issue such a fabulous thing, because by instilling in us a strong attraction to evil, our Gods create a context in which we can choose to submit to Them. When God tells you not to do something that you really want to do, it irritates you. You want to blow Him off. But He says that He outranks you, thus what He says goes. Here is where your soul has a choice to make: you will either submit to God’s Authority and say, “Fine. You win. You’re the Boss. I don’t like Your orders, but I’ve decided that pleasing You is more important than pleasing myself.” Or you’ll say, “Stuff it and go away. I’m doing things my way.” If you were really freed from the burden of sin and never tempted to disobey God, this kind of conversation would never occur. You’d be skipping along in your perfect little life, utterly self-absorbed and not giving a hoot that God outranks you. How is this pleasing to Jesus? Jesus wants submission from you, He doesn’t want to just stand there watching you coast along like some independent being. So Jesus is going to constantly set up situations in which you loathe what He’s telling you to do, and then you’ll be stuck having to choose between submitting to Him or defying Him. The more you practice submission, the more bonded you will become to Jesus, and the more you’ll begin to cherish Him the way Jesus wants to be cherished. He is your Lord, God, and Master—not just some vending machine of blessings and power. Jesus wants you to learn to view His approval and pleasure as the greatest rewards—not just obsess over having a conflict free life.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Now God says that it is wrong for a man to marry a man. Why? Because it is a violation of His moral code and a celebration of sexual activities which He says are wrong. Once God has educated us on His standards in this area, we can hardly agree to marry gay couples without being guilty of spiritual rebellion. God has told us not to do something, and we’re doing it anyway–that’s what rebellion is. And we’re not just doing it in our own homes, we’re doing it out in public and modeling for the flock that this is the right way to treat God. That’s called bad leadership, and Christian leaders who are intentionally encouraging their flocks to disrespect God are going to have to deal with some very unpleasant discipline.

Why is the gay issue so hot right now? Because it’s one of the better known moral stands that God has. By pressuring Christians to publicly disrespect God by celebrating something which they know He hates, spiritual rebels try to get us to turn away from God in our own lives. We need to remember that life is about God, and everything that happens to us in this world has some spiritual agenda behind it. It’s hardly an accident that of all the religions in the world, America is fixated on stomping out Christianity. By the time people get furious about God being honored, they usually have a pretty good idea of who the real Gods are, thus we find them spending more time attacking Christianity than other religions. In America, it’s perfectly acceptable to park your statue of Buddha in the workplace, but if you hang up a cross, everyone goes spastic. If we post pictures of Hindu gods, that’s good art, but if we post pictures of Jesus, that’s an infringement on everyone’s rights. Of course it’s totally acceptable to mock Jesus in public by displaying irreverent artwork in a museum or putting on Broadway productions which utterly slander His Person. But if we put out a Nativity scene that honors Him, or if we say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” well, that’s enough for a lawsuit. So we all know what the game is: the world hates God and she wants us to publicly side with her against Him. It’s been like this from the beginning, which is why Jesus was so clear that we’d have to choose between pleasing Him and pleasing people.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

The miracle of life begins the very second that a sperm enters an egg. At that moment, drastic changes happen to the egg, other sperm are blocked from entering it, and the great mystery of human life begins. To try and deny that this is the beginning of a human being simply because it doesn’t look like a human being is wrong. A tadpole doesn’t look like a frog, yet it is still a frog in the making. To kill a tadpole, is to kill a frog, and to kill a fertilized human egg, is to kill a human being.

Trying to tell God when we think the evolving human becomes advanced enough to meet our approval is utterly obnoxious. He has made the creation of humans a continuous, ongoing process which begins the moment sperm and egg meet. So then, when it comes to murdering our infants, we commit abortion anytime we intentionally destroy a fertilized egg. This means that any form of birth control which does harm to a fertilized egg is a weapon of murder, and must be considered morally unacceptable for Christians. On the other hand, forms of birth control which prevent sperm and egg from ever meeting can be considered morally acceptable, since no life is being destroyed. On their own, a human egg and a human sperm will never create a human being, just as an amputated arm will never grow back the body it was separated from. We are not committing murder when we discard a man’s arm, nor are we committing murder when we destroy eggs or sperm.

Even though it is morally acceptable for a Christian to use certain forms of birth control, God might direct you as an individual down a different course of action. Some Christians feel strongly convicted that it is morally unacceptable to try and interfere with God’s creation process in anyway. If this is how you feel, you need to obey your convictions. If God specifically tells a man not to use condoms, then the man needs to obey those clear instructions. But before you obey any instructions, you need to make sure that they are actually coming from God and not just from people or Satan.

In the Church, Christians have become far too slack about the issue of birth control. Some have talked themselves into believing it is fine to slaughter a human in the making, as long as they do it within a certain window of time. This is a lie from Satan. God has allowed us to invent amazing tools with which we have been able to film the entire conception process live with a camera right inside the female womb. If in doing this, we had observed the exact moment when the soul enters the body, then we could make a sound argument for a human embryo being “not quite human” before it received its soul. But as it is, God does not show us any such moment. It is an utter mystery to us how soul and body come together. What we do know for certain is that the soul of a child is very much present inside his mother’s womb. In the Bible, John the Baptist was still in his mother’s womb when he had a spiritual reaction to being in the Presence of unborn Jesus. Both babies were not yet born, yet they were spiritually communicating somehow. Such a story should make us quite reverent of the whole creation process. Since God is intentionally not telling us how soon the soul gets involved in the creation process, we must play it safe and assume that it could come the very moment an egg becomes fertilized. There is no possible grounds on which we can argue that the soul is not present from the very moment that the formation of a physical body begins. This being the case, we should be most fearful of flushing fertilized eggs from the body as if they are so much garbage. To treat life in such a disrespectful manner is to insult God.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

The only sperm that God authorizes a woman to voluntarily put into her body is that of her own husband’s. To seek out the sperm of other men from any source is a violation of His moral code. If your husband was disappointed by your infertility, does that mean he should get to go sleep with some sexy stranger to make up for it? Of course not. In the same way, it is totally unacceptable for you to go and try to collect the physical benefits of sleeping with another man simply because you and your husband are unable to have children. If you’re not even married, then you really have no justification for trying to get pregnant. To try and force a child into a fatherless home just because you’re in a hurry to be a mother is utterly selfish.

With the world cooking up so many ways to blow off God’s moral code, it’s easy to think that there could be some room for compromise in this area. But there’s not. The fact that God is blocking you from having children through moral channels does not mean He is authorizing you to start sleeping around—and that is essentially what you are doing, even though you are skipping the physical bonding part and going straight for the end result. Let’s be honest: seeking out sperm donations is about trying to force God to give us children. Our motivations are wrong, our methods are wrong, and the whole package is going to have very negative spiritual ramifications.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

As we’ve already discussed, once you doubt God’s goodness, you can’t possibly avoid doubting His love for you, His care of you, and His willingness to guide and help you. Once all of these things get thrown into question, you will be forced to ask yourself: “Just why am I following God?” Are you just in this for the goodies and the future perks? Is that all Christianity means to you? The end times are going to be a time of major sifting for the Church. We’ve always been taught to believe that it will be the pressure of external persecution which will divide us. But no, the pressure to cut and run will come from within: from God Himself challenging you about why you are claiming to be one of His followers. Are you just in it for the perks? What if there are no perks? Then what? What if it turns out that God really is some shady Character who you can’t count on for anything? What does this change? What doesn’t this change? He’s still the One who created you. Are you going to start lipping off to the One who can rip your molecules apart simply because you don’t personally approve of the way He operates?

Submission is the bedrock of your whole relationship with God. And if you really think about it, submitting to God is the only wise choice in any situation. If God is good, then we can add all kinds of happy assurances to your beliefs. But if God is not good, He is still God, and that fact alone makes refusing to submit to Him beyond foolish. It is now, while things are still relatively calm, that you need to give serious thought to this submission issue. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you the wise answer to this question: “What should my motivation for submitting to God be?”

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

There must be disagreement before we can submit, because submission essentially says, “I don’t approve of what You’re doing, but I’m going to yield to Your Authority because You outrank me.” Obeying God simply means doing what He said. When obeying God is easy and fun, it’s because He’s asking us to do something that we want to do anyway, thus there is no submission required. Now there’s nothing wrong with having an easy time of things, but if we are never submitting, then we are never accepting our place as God’s subordinates. You see, it’s only when there is a strong disagreement of wills that the importance of rank is recognized. As long as God is doing everything you want, you never bother to give much thought to His supremacy over you. This is a major problem, because God refuses to relate to you as your buddy, friend, or partner. He insists on being viewed as the Supreme Authority in your life, and He won’t invite you close to Him until you submit to His total domination. God intentionally provokes you to feel angry and upset with Him in life in order to give you the opportunity to submit. You see, while we get all huffy about God not doing what we want, we’re missing what a priceless gift this really is. We need God to royally irk us at times if we’re going to ever develop deep submission to Him, for the stronger our disapproval of God is, the deeper our submission must be before we will align with His will in a situation.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God has no desire for functional relationships with His creations. What He wants is a bunch of dependent, clingy children who come running to Him for help every second of the day and demand His undivided attention. He doesn’t want quiet children who go off and play by themselves while He runs His universe. He wants pestering flypaper types who follow Him around everywhere He goes, clinging to His leg and vocalizing every thought that enters their mind. He doesn’t want brave, independent children who grow up and go off to handle life on their own. He wants fainthearted, frail types who clutch His hand tightly and rush into His arms every time something upsetting happens. He doesn’t want perfection, He wants endless mistakes. He doesn’t want smooth, He wants bumbling and stumbling. He doesn’t want helpers, He wants kids who need His help desperately every minute of the day. It is only in the context of what we would call an extremely dysfunctional relationship that God is most pleased. It’s only when we see ourselves as totally helpless and hopeless without Him that He feels very satisfied and honored.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Here’s a critical point to grasp: if your trust was fully anchored in your Creators the way it’s supposed to be, then it wouldn’t matter that the Bible isn’t perfect. The degree to which you feel stressed over all of the errors we’re pointing out to you is the degree to which you’re still depending on the book to guide you in life. You can’t depend on a book. You need to be depending entirely on Yahweh, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. If you’re going to get far with Them, then every obstacle that is standing between you and total dependency on Them must be torn down. That’s why They have intentionally preserved a collection of records that are so full of wrong theology and bad examples. Our Gods knew we humans would try to turn the book into an idol that we could replace Them with, so They made sure to riddle the book with idiotic thinking and such glaring errors that we’d be forced to stop worshiping it if we ever started down the road of honest seeking, and we can’t get anywhere with our Gods until we are honest.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Our primary motivation for wanting to mature in life should not be to please others, but rather to please God. God’s opinion is the only One that matters. God is the One we’re supposed to be living for. So we want to learn to think more like He thinks out of a desire to build identity with Him so that our own communion with Him will become richer and deeper. If this sounds selfish, it’s because it is. God created us to be selfish beings, and He wants us to remain selfish about some things. It’s selfish to want to obtain God’s approval, yet this is also a very correct priority for a Christian to have. The altruistic mindset of wanting to help others just to help others is totally off the mark. God didn’t create us for the purpose of going around trying to figure out how we could help other created beings enjoy their lives more. He created us to revolve around Him, and improving our own relationship with Him should be our primary reason for submitting to His maturation program.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Now your kid is going to need help with this concept of a good God doing nasty things. Here’s where you need to step up with some education about Divine motivations. God loves all people and He wants everyone to come to Him. But God doesn’t force salvation on anyone—He gives them the option of defying Him and ending up in Hell. Now is not the time to pussyfoot around the topic of Hell with your kids. We aren’t doing them any favors by presenting God as some smiling pushover who takes everyone we love to Heaven just because we love them. God is the King—if we don’t obey Him, there are serious consequences. When we intentionally hide this truth from our kids, we end up in big trouble with God.

God has arranged things so that you have enormous credibility with your kids from the moment they are born. You’re supposed to be using their trusting nature to expose them to essential truths about God: who He is, how much He loves them, and what He requires of them in order for them to obtain His salvation. We need to be careful not to put obstacles between our kids and God by teaching them a bunch of lies. When you know there’s a 99.99% chance that Aunt Martha went to Hell, but you tell your kids that she’s turned into some angel who is looking down on them from Heaven, you are BOLDFACED LYING and you are getting yourself in big trouble with God. No, it’s really not okay to make a mockery out of salvation and act like God’s wrath is non-existent. It’s really not okay to teach your kid that eternity is some “choose your own ending” affair. Hell is real. God’s wrath is real. God’s disgust with rebellion is going to be in front of our faces like never before during the end times, and you need to prepare your child to recognize what is going on. God is GOOD, but God has BOUNDARIES. He doesn’t let people mock Him forever.

Now clearly we need to be sensitive in the way that we present tough truths to our kids. We don’t go on at length about Aunt Martha roasting in eternal torment. But instead of making empty promises, we say, “IF she submitted to Jesus, then she’s certainly in Heaven. But unfortunately, we don’t know for sure that she made that choice. Obedience is a very serious issue to God. He says that once we die in this world, it’s too late to change our attitudes towards Him. If we haven’t gotten right with Him, we are going to end up in Hell.” We don’t encourage our kids to view the dead as their supernatural guardians. This kind of idolatry infuriates our jealous Creators. Instead, your kids need to know that God loves them a billion times more than any humans ever could, and the fact that HE is always with them is more than enough. Once loved ones die, they are GONE, and there is no way to communicate with them. Should God choose to kill YOU off before your kids during the end times, you want to have done what you could to steer your kids away from spending the rest of their lives praying to you for protection and talking to some photograph of your face. Such a focus won’t take them anywhere good. They need to see God as the One who is always with them, and He is the One they need to be talking to when they are alone and afraid.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Every culture has its preferred “proofs” that it relies on to determine truth from lies. As a general rule, Americans exalt logic and human reasoning as their ultimate guides in life. Our science is atheistic in nature. When we set out to explore the universe or study our own anatomy, we first decide that there is no God and that everything is here by freak accident before we even begin to theorize. Then we crank out countless scientific documentaries which all put forth the same ridiculous theory that slime became fish, fish became monkeys, and monkeys became humans all through genetic striving. According to the Theory of Evolution, human beings could develop two extra arms and move their brains into their knee caps if we all just strained our genes hard enough. Evolutionists would have us believe that snakes got tired of slithering, hence they decided to grow legs. Birds got tired of getting eaten so readily, hence they changed their plumage in order to blend in better with their surroundings. No one wants to admit that a purposeful, non-human Creator is the source of the intelligence we see all around us, and we’re certainly not going to ask God directly to give us discernment in life. No, we’ve got our logic, and that’s enough.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Submission is vital to succeeding with God. In this relationship, all of the power and authority are on His side. He won’t let you be His partner—He insists on being the Alpha. He insists on His opinion being viewed as the one that trumps yours. He says that you must surrender yourself to the idea that pleasing Him is more important than pleasing yourself. Most Christians don’t come anywhere close to giving God full submission. They just give Him enough submission to acquire salvation, but then they spend their lives trying to keep Him at arm’s length by ignoring Him as much as possible. Decide that you’re not going to be just another fool who refused to pursue what really matters in life.

You were brought into being for the purpose of pursuing a personal relationship with your Maker. Sinking to new depths of immorality and being shocked by the discovery that your potential to do evil is far greater than you thought—these things should not be viewed as reasons for despair, but instead as priceless opportunities to move much closer to God. Ask Him to help you learn everything that He wants to teach you and to make you all that He wants you to be. Such a focus will not only steer you away from despair, but it will set you on a new course in life: one that involves the pursuit of what really matters. In the end, it really isn’t going to matter at all how many battles you won or how many bad guys you arrested or how many wars you helped to prevent. All that will matter is how well you know your Creator and how pleased He is with you. God often uses traumatic experiences to motivate us to correct our priorities in life. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

In the Church we say that Satan is evil and God is good. Everything Satan does is evil. This is all fine, until we come across a man like Job. If everything Satan does is evil, and Satan is the one attacking Job, then Job is correct in claiming he is being treated evilly. And if Satan can’t do anything without permission from God, then Job is also correct in saying God is the One truly responsible for the evil in his life. Job is not afraid to recognize that God gets His Divine hands dirty with evil all the time. What Job doesn’t understand is that God always uses evil to bring about a greater good. Job grasps the first critical truth: evil and God are inseparable, for God is ultimately responsible for all evil. This is a very important point to understand and not many Christians can handle it. Like Elihu, they try to divorce God from all evil, completely ignoring His intimate relationship with demons and the fact that He created Hell—a place filled with horrible torments and never ending pain. How can a God who is all good sustain the existence of such a horrible place? Because God is only “all good” from His point of view. Whenever God does evil things, He calls it good because He’s the One doing them. But if a human were to do the same things, God would call it evil. God operates by a double standard—He is above His own Law. It’s evil when we murder, but it’s good when God murders. It’s evil if we watch someone be abused without trying to help them, yet it’s good when God gives Satan permission to torture us and stands there watching us writhe. It’s evil when we injure someone, but it’s good when God injures them. God is always good from His perspective, but from ours He does both good and evil.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Human beings were created to serve. We must serve to thrive. When we stop feeling subordinate to someone who is greater than ourselves, it has a very detrimental effect on us. This is why fully submitting to God is so essential to our basic happiness in life. Yahweh, Jesus and the Holy Spirit designed us in a way that makes it impossible for us to ever experience soul peace and satisfaction until we are consciously choosing to live in submission to Them.

It’s very interesting to note how critical the element of conscious choice is in this equation. The fact that we are totally dependent on our Makers for all things is a reality which we cannot change. Yet if we choose to ignore this reality or pretend that it isn’t true, we languish. Submission to God must be something we voluntarily choose if we are to gain any benefit from it. We must consciously decide to accept and embrace our absolute dependency on our Makers—a dependency which exists whether we acknowledge it or not—if we are to thrive.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

The real end times are at the door, and because God is so gracious, He’s been suddenly giving us all a plethora of useful insights that will help us keep our priorities right and our brains in check when it all hits the fan. On our site, we have a lot of end time preparation material available and if you read through it, you’ll discover that it is vastly different than what the mainstream Church is pumping out. When God speaks, He doesn’t jack us up on fear and then tell us to hide in some hole in the ground while we pray that Satan won’t find us. Yes, the end times are going to be a very dramatic and shocking period. But when God prepares us to deal with scary things, He does so in a way that encourages us to keep our focus on Him. Will the real end times be filled with shocking violence, epic destruction, and frightening displays of God’s destructive power? Yes. But does that mean you have to melt into some puddle of fear and spend the whole time in some faithless paralysis? Not at all. When we listen to God, He can prepare us to thrive no matter what.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Every National Day of Prayer, it’s the same old dribble: “God, bless America–You know, that same country that is banning prayers to You and spitting in Your face 24/7. Heal our land because we’re suddenly so repentant and concerned about treating You with respect–can’t You tell by the way we’re all droning the same words at You and treating You like You’re some kind of blind idiot?” Who are we kidding? The Church has turned the National Day of Prayer into a national day of treating God like He’s a moron. It’s time to wake up and realize that you can’t do someone else’s repenting for them. Stop insulting God by trying to tell Him about what is going on in other people’s hearts because the truth is that you don’t know what you’re talking about. God knows how America feels about Him, and our constant lying and whitewashing isn’t going to blind Him to the reality that most Americans are steeped in spiritual rebellion with no interest in repenting. No, we’re really not sorry. We’re too busy legalizing sin and celebrating irreverence to be sorry. Even God’s own people are insulting Him 24/7 by constantly bossing Him around and never shutting up long enough to listen to what He has to say. No, He’s really not going to bless America. He is going to spank America, along with the Christians who live in it. The Church desperately needs a refresher course on what it means to revere God. The next major wave of spiritual activity we’re going to see in this country is not going to be some happy Jesus movement. It’s going to be a violent storm of Divine discipline which is going to remind us all that we are not God’s supervisors.

The next time some idiot leader in the Church invites you to join them in reading some irreverent pile of hypocritical guff at God, you’d better pass. And if you need some national holiday to remind you to talk to your Makers, then there’s a serious crisis that needs to be addressed. Ask the Holy Spirit to teach you how to be a better listener so that you won’t keep missing the things that God is sharing with you. Ask Him to teach you how to improve the way you talk to your Gods. It starts with getting the focus off of yourself and asking Yahweh, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit to make Their goals, Their feelings, and Their desires far more important to you than your own.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

We love working with sexual perverts—especially those who have a bunch of sex crimes on their record. Why? Because there’s just so much good news that we can tell you which no one else wants to talk about. We know that you’re getting seriously desperate by the time you become an active sex offender, and the higher the shame piles up on you, the closer you’re getting to your breaking point, and that’s when you will finally become receptive to some critical truths that can radically improve your quality of life. One of those truths is that you simply had no say in defining the basic appetites of your sex drive. Sure you can do things to warp it further once it’s already in motion, but when it comes to defining the kinds of targets that it initially wants, that’s just not in your control. Just as God didn’t ask you which flavors of food you’d like your tongue to enjoy most in life, He didn’t give you a say in what kinds of targets your sex drive would fixate on. And where God gives you no choice, He doesn’t sit around blaming you for being who you are.

While it’s commonly believed that God hates gays and pedophiles, this is simply not true. God loves all souls, and He doesn’t confuse your soul with your sex drive. Every human is packed with depravity, and every human is filled with perverse sexual desires. While your society uses a very narrow definition of the term sexual pervert, God’s definition of the term is so staggeringly broad that we all qualify. This means that if God isn’t willing to seriously love on sexual perverts, then no one can get saved, and we’re all on our way to Hell.

God has a glorious of way of leveling the playing field so that no one can pull rank on anyone else. While the straights look down on the pedophiles, they’re no better in God’s eyes. By the time we’ve got men jumping in the sack with every sexy babe that they meet and women fantasizing about fictitious dream lovers, no one is anywhere close to meeting God’s definition of sexual purity. We’re all in the cesspool of perversion together, and God is right in it with us, calling us to stop using our sexual issues as an excuse to keep our distance from Him.

Is it a drag to be stuck with a sex drive that is lusting after the wrong targets? Yes, it is. And does being stuck with depraved desires mean we have some pity pass from God to go ravage whoever we want whenever we want? Certainly not. God calls us to come to Him and surrender ourselves into His hands—perversity and all. He tells us that if we do not hold back in the submission department, He will use our perverse desires as a catalyst for positive transformation. Show us a mind that is plagued with sick fantasies, and we’ll show you a breeding ground for fabulous compassion, mercy and love. It’s by getting continuously pummeled with defeat that we acquire true humility and a strong grip on our dependency on God. Nothing shatters the illusion that we are intrinsically good like a perverse sex drive. Nothing crushes the delusion that you can rise above sin like having those disgusting fantasies running in a continuous loop through your brain. Sexual perverts are like diamonds that are buried in a swamp of sludge: they’re just waiting to be fished out and washed off so that their beautiful sparkle can be seen by all. So if you’ve come to realize that something is seriously warped way down deep in the core of your being where you just can’t get at it, don’t despair. A perverse sex drive isn’t cause for despair. It’s evidence of thrilling potential.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

No matter how many people you’ve killed or how vicious your methods were, you can choose the path of redemption and seize hold of the invitation your Creators are extending to you. Theirs is an invitation to a far better quality of life and an existence that is filled with purpose and hope. You are not just a screwed up mess in Their eyes. You are Their dearly loved creature who They want to see experience the vast benefits of the pain that They have put you through. Our Gods don’t enjoy inflicting suffering on us in life, but They love us too much to block us from the experiences we need to become able to receive all that They want to give us. Choose the path of redemption and refuse to accept that where you are now has to be the miserable end to your story. This doesn’t have to be the end of anything. Instead, it can be the beginning of a truly beautiful transformation.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Your relationship with God is supposed to be considered critical, whereas your relationships with humans should all be viewed as expendable. Again, this doesn’t mean you don’t form strong emotional ties with people. But when your priorities are the way God wants them to be, then should you ever find yourself forced to choose between pleasing God and pleasing people, there’s simply no question in your mind about who you’re going to side with. When God is the right kind of first, we will sacrifice everything for His sake, because pleasing Him is the goal which our lives revolve around. When God is the right kind of first, His approval is what we live for, and what He wants defines what we want.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

We don’t love people for people’s sake. We love people because God loves them and we want to honor Him by aligning with His view of the creatures He has made. People are precious because God says they are, and He is the One who defines the value of all things. Pleasing God is supposed to be the motivation which drives everything that we do in life. It should never just be about pleasing people, because people are not first: God is first. We should be viewing God as so superior to all created things that His opinion is the only one that matters. Once we have our priorities right, we simply don’t need to stress over how we ought to treat other people.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God is always very fair and very merciful. When He looks at a child molester, He doesn’t see some evil hearted creep who gets off on maligning children. He sees fallen flesh that is so obsessed with getting its own selfish way that it couldn’t care less about who it hurts. Then He sees the soul trapped inside that flesh that is either celebrating the activities of its body or writhing in repulsion. If the soul sincerely desires to please God, then being trapped in such out of control flesh is utter torture. God understands this. He is One who is intentionally blocking the soul from being able to reign its monstrous flesh in. To God, this soul is not failing, nor is his flesh worse than anyone else’s. Apart from the empowerment of God, we would all be molesting children or doing something equally loathsome.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Yahweh is the main Star of the Bible, Jesus gets a minor supporting role, and the Holy Spirit is virtually ignored. Why is this? Because the biblical documents reflect the theologies of the men who wrote them. Take the apostle Paul, for example. He didn’t come anywhere close to accepting Jesus as Yahweh’s equal (see The Great Offense of Paul: Rejecting the Divinity of Christ). To Paul, there was only one God: Yahweh. Jesus was just Yahweh’s super great human Servant on earth who turned out to be the fulfillment of all of those Old Testament Messianic prophecies. Paul was an adherent of Judaism who accepted the idea that Yahweh’s Messiah had finally come and that Yahweh had ended the sacrificial system. But Paul didn’t qualify as a Christian because a true Christian must submit to Jesus as God Almighty, not just submit to Him as some impressive human being. Listen to how Paul totally insults Christ in this passage:

For there is one God and one mediator between God and humanity, Christ Jesus, Himself human, who gave Himself—a ransom for all, a testimony at the proper time. (1 Tim. 2:5-6)

You see? Paul says there is only one God and Christ is not that God, because Christ is just a human who mediates between the one God—Yahweh—and human beings. Sure, Paul acknowledges that Christ gave Himself up as a ransom for sin. But so what? If you do not accept the Divinity of Christ, you’re going to Hell. Kinda makes you wonder where Paul is today, doesn’t it? Paul wrote a lot of epistles in his day, but the common consensus is that the letters to Timothy and Titus were written during his final imprisonment, which was followed by his execution. So what we have here is a man nearing the end of his life and he’s flat out rejecting the Divinity of Christ. Yikes. And here we’ve spent hundreds of years exalting St. Paul when Scriptures strongly indicate that Paul ended up in Hell. See what happens when you start to think for yourself instead of just believing everything you’re told?

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

The desire to hurt and be hurt, along with the desire to dominate and be dominated, runs deep within human nature. We were created by God to find pleasure in total submission to Him, and since submission is only possible where there is a difference in wills, God then designed us with an intense desire to dominate. Throw God out of the picture and these two intensely strong desires start looking for other targets that they can feast on. Other humans stand out as very tantalizing subjects, and soon we’re grouping up in partnerships in which BDSM “play” is engaged in.

So what exactly is BDSM? The broadest definition of the acronym attempts to combine the concepts of bondage/domination (B/D) with dominance/submission (D/S) and finally sadism/masochism (S/M). The basic goal is to enhance the experience of sexual arousal by introducing the elements of physical abuse, emotional degradation, and sexual abuse. Fans of BDSM look down on normal or “vanilla” sex as being dull and unsatisfying, thus they say, “Hey, here’s an idea: let’s torture and rape each other.” And because there are two consenting adults involved (at least everyone’s consenting when the games first begin), they don’t use words like torture, assault, and abuse, even though they’re engaging in the same kinds of activities. Online there are whole arsenals of torture devices which are being sold under the label of “sex toys.” The draw of these things is that they make it easier to really hurt each other. Whips, blindfolds, collars, chains, spanking paddles—it’s all good fun, right? It’s a cinch to find special devices that are designed to inflict pain on the most sensitive areas of the body (bring on those nipple pinchers, and genital whips). And if anyone tries to use the term “perverse” about such activities, the BDSM community gets all up in arms about being discriminated against.

So why is BDSM bad? It’s a very real thing to get sexually aroused by beating someone until they’re bleeding and crying. And as long as your victim cheerfully signed on to “play”, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that mutual consent doesn’t define right and wrong, God does, and He says that this whole BDSM package is very wrong. Try to blow off the limitations God has set on you, and He responds with some creative forms of discipline. For example, God has set limits on how much heat your soft tissues can withstand without becoming damaged. You can try to ignore those limits by sticking your hand in a fire or touching that hot stove burner. Rather than take away your option to disrespect His rules, God lets you rebel to your heart’s content—but He also makes sure you get burned in the process. Keep sticking your hand in that fire, and you’re going to end up with severe injuries and eventually a loss of functionality.

The same principle is at work with BDSM. God is totally against the entire “degrade and be degraded” package. You can choose not to respect this, but you can’t change the fact that God has set limits on you which you cannot push past without injuring yourself. BDSM is going to mess you up on deep levels. It will cripple your ability to form healthy relationships, it will warp your view of people as well as yourself, and it will cause you to drift way off course spiritually. You see, you can’t go against God’s rules without getting burned. There’s just no way to sneak around a Creator who rules with absolute Authority while carefully coordinating every detail of your personal life.

So what exactly is God’s problem with BDSM? God is certainly into submission, and He’s a very dominating Guy. So what’s wrong with us having a lark with these themes? Well the problem is that when we play our BDSM games, we’re focusing on the wrong targets.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

While human bosses reward independent thinking among their employees, God rewards dependency. The more we lean on Him the better. The less we trust in our logic and instead rely on His wisdom to guide us, the brighter we shine in His eyes.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Why can atheists say anything they want about Christians and their God and receive no backlash in the western world? Why do they hide behind the one half of the First Amendment while bashing those who practice the other half? Why do they never protest in front of a synagogue? I rarely see them traveling to Muslim countries, insulting Allah and debating evolution and moral truths. Does “turning the other cheek” make us punching bags for the non-Christian?

In these situations, it helps to step back and take in the whole picture. People who mock God’s existence are being led by Satan. Satan tries to keep unity within his own groups, which is why you’ll find some pretty impressive tolerance happening for cults like Islam in America while Christianity is being aggressively attacked. You can put a Buddha in your workplace, but not a cross. Yes, we’re being singled out for extra aggression, but with good reason: we are the only ones siding with truth. Our God is the real God–everyone else is believing in lies.

Now even though Satan tries not to attack his own, he can’t resist having fun with his human pawns. You’ll notice that the IS terrorists aren’t just killing Christians. They’re murdering the followers of any faith that they don’t approve of–even those who subscribe to a form of Islam that is less extreme than their own. So being of a different faith doesn’t guarantee you won’t be persecuted. If we think different skin colors and ethnicities are sufficient reasons to kill people, we’ll gladly use religious differences as well. Satan wants people dead and in Hell–if he can get his followers to murder each other, it feels like a victory from his perspective. Of course the Holy Spirit is calling all souls and giving everyone a chance to repent and be saved. But most will rebel–this has been true since the beginning and will remain true until the end.

Now atheists are just, well, pathetic. Most people would rather invent a phony deity instead of trying to argue that there is none. Evolution is the atheist’s attempt to explain how things could have come into being without a Creator and of course it makes no sense at all. But any belief which tries to promise an escape from moral accountability to God will always have some degree of popularity on this earth (see Evolution).

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Now about timing: this site has only been around since June 2013. In those two years, we’ve noticed that the Holy Spirit is getting more aggressive in calling out the things He doesn’t like. You may have noticed how frequently we use the word “idiot” and other condescending titles as of late. Speaking for God means accurately conveying His message using His tone, His words, and His emphasis. Right now He wants to hold certain lines on vulgar language, but to be honest, “idiot” isn’t nearly a strong enough word to describe how angry and disgusted God is about some of these issues. God doesn’t have a problem being vulgar, as He demonstrates in the Bible (see this post). We expect that when the end times start, His language will get a lot more acrid. Meanwhile, He makes this site increasingly divisive by the kinds of topics He chooses to cover.

We do feel there is a strong connection between the end times being at the door and God suddenly making this information available in a public forum. The end times are going to be a major theological test for Christians. God is doing us all a huge favor by suddenly opening our eyes to understand so many of these issues. Consider what the end result is: we’re now able to swiftly get aligned with Him in many areas that we’ve been totally backwards about until now. Serious Christians sincerely care about honoring God–but there’s only so good of a job we can do without education. You’ll notice how many posts we put out about prayer–who ever saw any of that coming? Where do you ever hear it being taught that God finds it insulting when we keep asking Him for the same things over and over? Who knew He found the whole “prayer warrior” package so irreverent and irksome? Today Christians are intentionally imitating the prayer style of folks in the Bible, with no regard for what rebellious twerps so many of those folks were. Who ever points out how guys like Moses and Jeremiah were being inappropriate with some of the snarky prayers they put out? Unless God opens our eyes and shares His heart with us, we’re going to keep right on treating Him dishonorably. With the Church egging us on in all the wrong directions, what will happen when the end times start? We’ll all become that much more snarky.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Now the idea of some vast alien Being hovering over us and controlling our lives can either seem very unsettling or very comforting, depending on what we believe about God’s Character. Happily for us, the relativists are wrong: reality is not created by us. God is who He is, and if we have misconceptions about Him, they need to be unlearned if we are going to live in alignment with His truth. The truth is that God is good. He is not some sadistic monster who gets off on leading His creatures down paths of torment and destruction. God is a very kind and generous Creator who wants human beings to experience His best. But because God is not a doormat, He isn’t going to accommodate our bratty behavior. When we fight Him, He will come back at us with discipline. When we resist Him, He will put us through miseries in order to break us down. And because God created each of us with different purposes in mind, it is necessary for Him to put us through various kinds of hardships now in order to prepare us to get the most out of our experience in eternity. The paradise chapter hasn’t started yet, so we need to throw out the dream of “peace on earth” and recognize that this place is always going to be filled with hardship and strife. This is a training and shaping ground—it’s not the rest period. We’re here to be changed in positive ways through both negative and positive experiences. Getting the most out of life comes through total submission to God’s will for us, not through trying to control our own futures.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

And what many of us don’t realize is that God is constantly coming up with new things. We downplay His inventiveness by saying variations among species is a simple matter of genes mixing and matching in different ways. Well, this is absurd, because who came up with the concept of a gene pool in the first place? When a species of bird that is always yellow pokes through an egg and we see that the little guy has red feathers, we’re very surprised by the sudden variation. Here’s where the morons who promote the Theory of Evolution will tell you that the red bird consciously choose to change the color of his plumage in order to blend in with the red flowers around him and be less vulnerable to attack. These are the same dingdongs who would have us believe that human beings are merely a byproduct of apes who were discontent with their lot in life, so they strained their brains until they physically morphed into an entirely different kind of being. Well, such idiocy is its own reward.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Ever notice how the bad stuff is always black in horror movies? Ever notice how the evil beasts often have red, glowing eyes? Well, is there some rule that says God can’t make critters with red, glowing eyes show up in real life? No, there isn’t, and we need to be ready for these kinds of dramas. The power in a city goes out and suddenly there are black rats with red eyes swarming everywhere in the darkness, viciously attacking people. Such an act combines two elements which we find very disturbing: the spontaneous creation of large masses of critters, and critters acting in atypical ways. We will see God using these two themes over and over again during the end times. Sudden swarms of living things will appear out of nowhere and maliciously attack people. Footage of such events will abound on the internet and, well, it’s going to look like scenes out of a horror movie. Except it won’t be fictional, it will be real, and it will result in a lot of gruesome deaths. As a Christian, how should you respond to these things? And what do you do if you are personally caught in the middle of one of these events? Well, there’s no way to make such events pleasant. After all, when the firstborns were dropping over in Egypt, some degree of heartache was inevitable. But there is a major advantage to understanding that plagues are being controlled, and that the One controlling them is good in Character and acting out of positive motivations.

God is pro-human, and this is an important thing to keep in mind. It’s also important to realize that He is a very purposeful Micromanager. When snakes are raining down from the sky and biting people, your natural reaction is to freak out. But what exactly is it that is spiking that fear? There are couple factors. First, there is the element of spontaneous creation—a boatload of snakes are appearing out of nowhere. Well, yes, God is a Creator of infinite abilities and spontaneous creation is a very simple thing to Him. The second factor that freaks you out is that critters are acting in atypical ways. After all, everyone knows that snakes aren’t supposed to rain down from the sky. Well, frogs aren’t supposed to wander far from sources of water, either, since they depend on moisture to survive. Yet in ancient Egypt, Yahweh made frogs go hopping into homes, ovens, and beds—all of which were dry places. Why? What is going on in that amphibian brain when Mr. Frog keeps trying to hop onto the lap of some screaming, flailing woman? Who knows? God controls everything that He creates. It’s a very simple thing for Him to instantly create millions of frogs that all feel compelled to leave the comfort of the Nile River and go hopping over to where the humans are. It’s a simple thing for Him to suddenly turn hundreds of pet dogs against their owners without warning. One minute, Fluffy the poodle is sitting peacefully by your side, the next minute she’s snarling rabidly and trying to tear out your jugular vein. We are not in control of the created world—God is, and a fabulous way for Him to flaunt His supremacy over all things is to suddenly cause large masses of critters to act in atypical ways.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

We can’t come up with a roster of the specific names of those in Hell, because God doesn’t give us that kind of information. When we are in doubt about where a loved one ended up, there’s nothing for us to do but ask God to help us let go of them in our hearts and move on. Deciding that our loved ones must be in Heaven just because we loved them is blasphemous rot which elevates our desires as more important than God’s. We are not the creators of humans, and we have no say in what happens to them in eternity. Human souls are the property of God, and He gets to do whatever He wants with them. It’s not our place to tell God where some particular soul deserves to be in eternity. It’s our place to practice submission to God’s Authority and remember that He is the One in charge, not us.

God hates His enemies, and so should we. We should not be mourning over the fate of demons or the misery of souls in Hell. Instead, we should be supporting God’s judgments and wanting Him to be satisfied above all things. If tormenting His enemies forever is what satisfies Him, then so be it. This is an issue of loyalty: are we going to side with God or His enemies? There is only one acceptable answer.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Here’s a reality about growing closer to the Lord: He tends to have a negative effect on your social life. He’s jealous, possessive, and a wellspring of strange commands. Everyone else thinks it’s a great idea to go on a prayer walk through the neighborhood, and you’re the only one hearing God telling you to stop telling Him what to do in other people’s lives. Everyone else is helping out with VBS and God is telling you not to get involved. It’s not like He’s giving you some other holy activity to engage in that you can tell everyone about–He’s just telling you that He’s the Boss, and you’re to follow His orders. Stick close to God and it’s only a matter of time until He makes you look like a self-centered stick in the muck to everyone else.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

To put mind manipulation techniques in proper perspective, you need to realize that your entire existence is about accomplishing Someone Else’s agenda. If you want to experience a positive existence, you need to get in touch with that Someone Else, ask Him why He made you, and find out what He wants from you. It is through absolute submission to our Creators that we thrive, and yet many self-improvement theories lead you in quite the opposite direction. Many who promote themselves as healers will encourage you to view yourself as an autonomous being who can learn to greatly control the circumstances of your life. Yet this “be the captain of your own ship” mentality is only going to land you into trouble, for you are not the captain of anything. Your life is being run by your Creators, and nothing you do will be able to lessen your dependency on Them. So before you waste countless hours chanting some useless mantra about your internal greatness, and before you surrender yourself into the hands of some irreverent fool who can’t wait to toy with your subconscious, you need to seek the wisdom of the Ones who created you. You need to accept the fact that They created you for purposes that please Them, and until you choose to embrace those purposes, you are not going to thrive.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

So why are we all still here? The answer is a gracious God. Forget about the rest of the globe for a moment and let’s just talk about your own life. By now you’ve done all kinds of nasty little sins, and God could have used any one of them as justification for wiping you out. How many times have you blown off God’s convictions not to sleep around? The first time you had sex with someone outside of marriage, BAM, God could have nailed you with some heinous STD and had you die some agonizing death. Why shouldn’t He? He’s God and you’re some little fleck of dust—how dare you defy His Authority? Ever have an abortion? In the laws that Yahweh gave to Moses, He said it was “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.” So since you went and had your baby’s body hacked apart, you can’t possibly argue why God shouldn’t rip you apart limb from limb and let you die in a pool of your own blood. The same goes for all of you men who pressured your women into murdering the baby who you helped procreate: you’re just as guilty. And how about all those times you said cutting words to someone? How about all those promises you broke?

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

When that priest assaulted you, he was thinking certain things, and those things were not at all what God was thinking. When the Church system worked to hush up what happened, they were thinking certain things, and what they were thinking was not at all what God was thinking. Understanding God’s involvement in your assault begins by recognizing that a group of individuals can engage in the same activity without having the same motivations. One man eats a plate of food because he’s very hungry and he really enjoys it. Another man eats a plate of the same food because he’s trying to be polite to his host, but he really hates it. On the outside, both men are going through the same motions, and where we humans see the same behaviors happening, we assume uniform motivations. But the truth is that these two men have vastly different reasons for doing what they’re doing. One man is thinking of pleasing himself, the other is thinking of blessing someone else. In the same way, when that priest assaulted you, he wasn’t thinking of you, he was thinking of himself. For humans, sexual assault is a very self-serving activity in which we degrade someone else for our own gratification. But for God, this is never what sexual assault is about. For God, putting you through this kind of experience is about helping you by forcing you to change in drastic ways.

There’s no way to remain unchanged by trauma. This is by God’s design. Before you were assaulted, you were not all that God wanted you to be. You were—and still are—a work in progress. We could say the same of every human. We’re all works in progress. We’re all walking down roads that God has set us down on. The road that you’re on is unique to you and as you walk, God creates forks in your road: decision points at which you have to pause and decide if you’re going to go right or left. These options are forced upon you—you don’t get to decide when they will appear. God makes them appear in your life.

Being assaulted is a major fork. Now that this horrible experience has been forced upon you and you find yourself reeling with all kinds of distressing aftereffects, what now? Well, it’s like you’ve been thrown into a scary maze that you’re now trying to find your way out of. There are a lot of guides available to you. You can try to find your own way out by relying on your gut instinct. You can take the advice of friends who have been where you are and do what they did. You can seek help from a professional human counselor. But what about God? He’s the One who threw you into this mess in the first place. Since He created the mess, obviously He would be the best Resource to guide you out of it. But you’re so mad at Him for putting you into the mess in the first place, that maybe you don’t want to talk to Him. Maybe you are going to intentionally ignore anything He has to say, or perhaps you’ll do the opposite of whatever He says just because He’s the One saying it. But what is that going to accomplish? Since this whole mess is God’s design, He could easily prevent you from ever getting free of it. And perhaps that’s what He will do if you’re giving Him perpetual attitude. Because you see, God’s whole purpose in doing this to you was to strengthen your personal relationship with Him. This is about you and Him—it’s not about priests or the Catholic system. This isn’t about punishing you. This isn’t some statement on how you are unloved. On the contrary, you are very loved. But it’s a very imbalanced relationship at the moment, for God loves you far more than you love Him. How does He step up your interest in Him? By creating crises which only He can save you from. By creating situations in which you desperately need His help.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

So what’s the point? Why does God insist on keeping us in the dark so much? It’s about crafting the right relationship dynamic. He’s God Almighty, not your peer. This isn’t a relationship in which both parties are of equal rank. This is a dot of a creature learning to bond with the One who sustains all things. God demands a whole lot of submission and trust from you. He is the Leader. He is the Alpha. He is the King. It takes us a humans quite a while to get comfortable learning how to live under God’s domination. Yet if we stick with His program, we discover that being fully dominated by God is actually what we were designed to love. Once you get through the pride grinding period, you end up in a place where it’s simply fabulous being the one without any power in the relationship. It’s hard to picture how this works, because in human relationships, a major imbalance of power always leads to misery. But with God, it’s quite the opposite. With God, our soul joy and satisfaction is greatly increased through deeper submission.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.
But the angel of Yahweh called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!”
And he said, “Here I am.”
The angel said, “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.” (Gen. 22:10-12)

If God hadn’t commented on this scene, then we could get away with pretending that Abraham didn’t really believe God would make him go through with it. But God’s response to Abraham’s actions gives us a clear view into Abraham’s heart. He had every intention of murdering his son in order to please his God. He wasn’t going to hold anything back, Covenant or no Covenant.

So what was the point of this traumatic ordeal which must have permanently damaged the trust between father and son? God has already told us what the point was.

“—for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.” (Gen. 22:12)

This whole thing was about correcting Abraham’s slipping priorities. Why was there ever a question that God wasn’t first in Abraham’s life? Because the promised child was becoming a bit too important in the old man’s eyes. God was starting to feel crowded, so He came up with a way to swiftly get Abraham back on track. By now, Abraham and God have a long personal history together. They have a solid bond. God isn’t about to let His little man slip away without a fight. When you’ve waited twenty-five years for God to give you a son you desperately want, it’s hard not to start obsessing. Abraham has already driven away his first son Ishmael for Isaac’s sake. Isaac is the shining star of the family—the heir to all of his father’s great wealth. No doubt he was spoiled rotten and probably a bit of a brat. But when God saw that Abraham was getting too attached to his son, He made His move. God wants to be first—totally first, not sharing the position with someone else. Isaac needed to be shoved way back from God’s throne in Abraham’s heart.

Personally destroying something you care about is a very powerful way to detach yourself from that thing. If I take a hammer to your phone, then you will think I was a jerk and fixate over the loss of something that was very important to you. But if you’re going to be the one who smashes your own possession, then a different mental process must take place. First you must choose to sever whatever heart bond you have formed with the object that you’re going to destroy. And once you make this mental shift, it’s never the same again. When Abraham looked at Isaac after God called off His test, he no longer saw someone he couldn’t stand to lose. Instead, he saw someone that he was willing to throw away for God’s sake. This ordeal had a very powerful, long-lasting effect on Abraham’s mind and soul. For Isaac, it had to have been extremely traumatic. A boy is going to be cautious about moving within dad’s reach again after he’s been seized and bound. No doubt there was a healthy distance between these two as they made the long journey home again. No doubt Isaac was extremely glad to run into his mother’s protective embrace. And yet the damaged trust would have only worked in Yahweh’s favor by preventing the previous bond of intimacy from being restored to its original strength.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

If we’re going to thrive in our walks with God, we need to align with His priorities. Since He says that your relationship with Him is infinitely more important than your relationships with created beings, then developing that relationship needs to be your top priority. We shouldn’t be trying to divide our resources 50/50 between God and people. We should be aiming for total obsession with God and trusting that He’ll guide us with people. Surely God knows how to instruct you on how to be a better parent and spouse. When you focus on God, you end up with help in every area. But when you focus on people, you end up trying to coast on your own wisdom and tanking. This is because God isn’t going to sit around teaching you how to excel with people while you ignore Him. God demands to be first. He’s jealous and egotistical. He wants to be center stage in your life. If you have Him there, He’ll guide you in every area. If you try to put someone else on His throne in your heart, He’ll intentionally plague you with problems.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

As a shepherd of the flock, your job is to keep the flock focused on God. You can hardly succeed at doing this when you’re confusing God with Satan. Just look at those New Testament Pharisees: what a train wreck. You don’t want to be like those morons. And yet the prophet who is going to be playing a Moses-type role during the end times is going to look and sound a lot more demonic than Jesus did to the Jews. Of course this is only because the litmus tests we’re using to tell God from demons these days are completely irrelevant. We think that anyone who gets off on God killing people can’t be aligned with Him. Why ever not? Shouldn’t a true prophet of God be displaying a zealous devotion to God’s agenda? We all know that people don’t die by accident in this world—God kills them. If God is killing people, He obviously has good reasons for doing so, and any prophet who is truly aligned with Him will not be publicly beefing against His Divine agenda. Because God is going to be doing so much killing during the end times, His devoted prophet is going to come across as a rather bloodthirsty sadist, especially when the media goes to work with their usual biased reporting. This is going to result in a bunch of wide-eyed parishioners coming to you asking, “How can someone like that really be from God?”

As we explain in some of our other end time preparation posts, God is going to be performing all kinds of devastating and destructive miracles through His end time representative. You are going to see film footage of this person appearing to kill and maim people merely by pointing at them. You’re going to see stereotypically “good” targets like emergency workers and hospitals getting nailed by God’s destructive power. Efforts to help the hurting will be dramatically sabotaged. Impossible alterations of matter will occur: skyscrapers being turned into ice, asphalt morphing into molten lava, sidewalks behaving like quicksand. Don’t believe it? Read your Bibles. If you can believe in a worldwide flood, God causing the sun to stand still in the sky for Joshua, and Him creating a dry path through both the Red Sea and the Jordan River, why is it so fantastic to think that He can cause a city street to turn into a carpet of stinging insects? Didn’t God turn all the dust in Egypt into a plague of gnats? If God could open the earth to swallow up the rebellious Korah, then close the earth again immediately afterwards, why can’t He perform similar feats down a city street? He can and He will. If you’re going to blow off prophetic warnings of the end times, make sure you’re not blowing off the wrong ones. The end times are not going to be at all like these idiots in the Church are saying. All of this guff about America turning Islam or President Obama cooking up evil conspiracies behind the scenes. You ought to know better than to believe any prophecy that turns your focus off of God and onto idiot demons and their foolish humans. While countless false prophets are filling your heads with a bunch of theatrical rot just to try and make a name for themselves, we are telling you what is actually in store so that you can start seeking the Holy Spirit’s wisdom now about how He wants you to guide your flock when the theological crisis begins.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

There are only two kinds of preachers in this world: those who are authorized by God to speak on His behalf, and those who are not. Those who are not are already in a mess of trouble, and the Church is working hard to corrupt those who are legitimately called to preach by punishing them if they actually do what they are supposed to do, which means relaying God’s messages to the flock without altering them. Relevancy is utterly irrelevant. Relevancy shouldn’t even be on your mind. If God tells you to preach in Swahili to an English speaking audience, then you need to do so out of respect for who He is. You don’t sit there saying “But why God? No one will understand if I speak in a language they don’t even know.” Since when does God have to justify His orders to you? Since when does He have to defend His methodology? You’re not His judge. Your approval is meaningless. It’s so easy to forget our place in this whole serving business. We’re the slaves; God is the Master. He gives the orders. He calls the shots. He writes the sermons. We just take notes on what He wants to say so that we can make sure we’re not leaving anything out. He chooses the tone, and He tells us which points to emphasize. We don’t edit God. We don’t take responsibility for how other souls responded to His words. If you defy God’s Authority by mangling His message, do you really think He’s going to shrug it off just because your message was well received? No, He’s not, because you dared to attach His Name to your guff. That’s obnoxious behavior. That’s begging for a spanking.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God is not just a God of love. He’s also the God who arranges for kids to be molested, adults to be raped, and prisoners to be tortured. God is overseeing, directing and choosing all of the sick and twisted activity that goes on in this world. It’s very easy to stay in denial about this until God starts coming after you personally. But when you find yourself being singled out as His next torture victim, suddenly your view of Him is massively challenged. Every time you try to get up, He kicks you back down onto the ground. Every time you try to muster up some perseverance, He slams you with a new wave of pain. You feel like He’s got you in a nasty game of cat and mouse, and it doesn’t take long before you decide that you don’t want to play any more. But here’s where things take a dark turn because God won’t let you quit. You want to emotionally disengage, but God has taken that option off the table. You are going to feel as much as He wants you to feel. You are going to care as much as He wants you to care. It’s in these periods that we get a whole new realization of just how helpless we are to defend ourselves against Someone who controls every aspect of our beings. We like to think of ourselves as independent from God—getting to freely choose how we will respond to Him. But no, we are not independent, and freedom of choice is a gift that God can revoke at any time. During certain seasons of refinement, He forces us to suffer intensely without any avenue of escape. Psychological games can work against human abusers, because they can’t get inside of you and control the way that you internally react to them. But God is inside of you and He controls every aspect of your being. Your best defensive strategies crumble against Him. If He wants you to hate Him, He will drive you to it. If He wants you to think He’s a sadistic monster, He knows how to convince you. You cannot stop an all-powerful God from completely dismantling your trust in Him, and often this feels like exactly what He has set out to do during this phase of the valley experience.

So where’s the good news in all of this? You hurt like hell, you feel like your soul’s been gutted, and STILL God won’t give it a rest. What are your options? It’s no small wonder that many souls start entertaining thoughts of suicide during this period. After all, humans are frail creatures and we can only take so much. But of course if we kill ourselves, we’re just going to end up in a totally different dimension in which God has a whole new array of torture devices at His disposal. Let’s remember this is the Guy who came up with Hell. Do we really want to rush to a place whose biggest draw is supposed to be that we’re closer to God than we are on earth? Why would we want to do anything that will bring us closer to Someone who treats us like this?

An honest scrutiny of our options during this period reveals that we don’t have any. Once God sets His mind on destroying us, there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop Him. Christians think that they understand what “God is in control” means until they end up where you are now. Then suddenly a phrase that used to bring comfort suddenly becomes a terrifying trap. God IS in control, and His control is ABSOLUTE. Sure, you have made certain choices in your life which we like to label as “free.” But is anything really free in God’s universe? Of course not. The only options you’ll ever see in front of you are the few options that God wants you to have. When He doesn’t want you to have options, He takes them all away.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

But that’s just the human perspective. As a Christian, God calls you to look beyond the human perspective and recognize that there is a Divine plan being carried out as well. God makes it very clear in the Bible that no one will die until He wants them to. But He also makes it clear that we will all be judged by our individual motivations. This means that if it’s God’s will for you to be stabbed to death Thursday night, He’s going to find a way to make that happen. But if I am the one who stabs you for my own self-serving reasons, I’m going to answer to God for what I did. I’m not going to be excused because my behavior coincided with His will for your life. I didn’t know that He wanted you to die on Thursday. I arrogantly thought I had the power to end your life without God’s permission. I will be judged for my evil intentions, yet God will still enable me to kill you because He wants you dead anyway. See how it works? No one died in Paris prematurely from God’s point of view. But also from His point of view, the terrorists who killed those people and everyone who helped them were acting with evil intentions. No one gets out of anything in God’s justice system because we are stuck dealing with Him on both sides of death. So when you act like there’s no punishment for the wicked, what are you saying about God? You’re saying He’s an incompetent Judge, and that is hardly an appropriate way for you to be speaking of your King.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

One of the stupidest games atheists play is pretending that God can be proven or unproven by human logic. How ridiculous is it to take creatures who know as little about their own world as we do and set them up as all-wise? The assumption that all reality can be revealed through logical musings is in itself utterly illogical. The history books are filled with humans making absurd assumptions about their own anatomy, the world, and the universe because they thought their logical arguments were the epitome of proof. Well, suppose your mother starts coughing up blood, wheezing, complaining of chest pains, and losing a lot of weight. We could form a very logical argument that she has advanced lung cancer, because these are the symptoms of it. If human reasoning is the ultimate proof of reality, then we should start pumping her full of chemo and surgically removing portions of her lungs. Why bother with x-rays and CT scans? Once we’ve built a logical argument, we need no further proof. And yet would you agree to have some doctor slice open your chest simply based on a collection of symptoms? Certainly not, because those symptoms could be caused by many other things as well. In the same way, Christians can weave together impressive arguments for why God must be, or they can stutter and stammer and end up thoroughly stumped by your clever comebacks, but so what? Are you going to let the quality of someone else’s debating skills determine who you pray to? If God is real, do you really think He’s going to let you off the hook because you never found a Christian who could argue as well as you can? Debate and human reasoning have nothing to do with it. God isn’t some theory cooked up by Socrates, He’s a living Being who says that if you keep defying Him, He might suddenly decide that He’s done with your attitude and kill you off. Then you’ll end up in Hell with more proof of God’s existence than you ever wanted and no way to reconcile with Him. Is that your idea of a victory?

The reason we don’t get into long debates with atheists is that we’re simply not invested. Unlike some Christians, we don’t have a burning need to see your soul end up on the right side of eternity. The God we know says He’s perfectly fine with you roasting in Hell. He’s God—we’re not going to criticize His preferences. Since He’s fine with you defying Him your whole life, so are we. We know as well as you do that these little fits you work yourself into are just a game. If you were really serious about finding God, you would seek Him directly. But the truth is that most of you have already met God, and you found Him to be Someone who you heartily disapprove of. Fine. If you want to pretend that God thinks you’re a higher authority than He is, what can we say? Have fun in Hell.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Strong trust cannot be anchored on feelings and sensual feedback—it must be anchored solely on God’s Character. It must become so anchored on Him that it can persist in the face of contrary sensual feedback. Strong trust knows that God is present even when emotions are screaming that He is far away. Strong trust does not rely on senses to define reality—it relies solely on God. The only way to develop this kind of trust is to go through “dry spells”—periods when we experience no warm fuzzies in our relationship with God. To survive such a period, our trust must find a better foundation to cling to, for the sensual foundation it was leaning on has crumbled beneath it. Once trust re-anchors onto God’s good Character, it is in a position to grow much stronger. But to really attain more strength, it must now be put through a period of countering emotional feedback—times when it is bombarded with sensual “evidence” that God is the opposite of everything He says He is. By intentionally doing things that will cause us to feel deeply betrayed by Him, God forces us to really scrutinize the foundation of our trust. We must decide if we are going to believe the things He says about Himself—that He is good, that He is faithful, that He is for us, etc.—or if we are going to throw out everything He said because our sensual experience of Him isn’t lining up.

To reach deeper levels of intimacy with God, we have to let go of this need for our experience of Him to always feel like a logical match to the things He says about Himself. God is good, but there are many times when He will behave in ways that seem very evil to us. God is trustworthy, but there are many times when He will do things that we don’t understand. Our trust in Him must become strong enough to allow room for Him to behave in ways that seem illogical and contradictory without us immediately questioning His entire Character. God is far too huge and complex to be understood by our limited minds.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God wants you to become confident in His great love for you. He says that you are His priceless treasure, that He cares immensely about your suffering, and that all the misery He’s put you through so far is about preparing you to experience His best. Where you’re at now, all of this sounds pretty meaningless, yet it is true nonetheless. How do we emotionally connect with truths that sound too good to be true? By practicing those truths; by rehearsing them over and over again until they finally sink in.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Why did Yahweh have to make every single animal sacrifice such a gross and complicated process? Well, apparently Yahweh is into this idea of collecting blood in one bowl and piling up smelly fat and slimy organs in another. God has a very gross and graphic side to Him. We don’t want to think about this, which is why the book of Leviticus isn’t a favorite among Christians. But then we get to the cross, and suddenly our Gods are shoving Their propensity for gore and pain into our faces like never before.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

The cross isn’t supposed to just make you feel amazed by God’s great love and grace. It is also supposed to deeply disturb and frighten you. Because God chose the cross when He had infinite options at His disposal. He chose to act totally two-faced regarding the topic of child sacrifice. He chose to mix lessons on love with reminders of His brutality and warnings about the intensity of His wrath. When we look at the cross, we should not just be feeling all safe and happy with a God who love, love, loves us. We should also be remembering that our Gods have a very dark side—one which never tires of brutality, gore, and pain. While our Gods certainly want us to feel secure in Their care, that security is supposed to be built on trust in Their good Character, not on a lack of fear.

If there is no element of fear in your relationship with God, then you are rejecting who He really is. Once you reject who God is, you run the risk of deluding yourself about your own salvation. You see, it isn’t some sweet Savior who offers to rescue us from Hell. It’s the same Guy who created Hell and considers it a fine idea. Reverence is a deep respect for God which comes from a great fear of His dark side. God demands that people fear Him throughout the Bible. Reverence is a requirement, not an option. Without reverence, it is impossible to please God, for the only way you can get yourself into a position where you have no fear of God is by totally denying so much of who He is. Yes, God is amazing love, abundant grace, and incredible patience. But He’s also terrifyingly violent, shockingly sadistic, and zealous for revenge.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God is a whole lot smarter than we humans are. While we struggle over basic calculus problems, He’s managing every atom in existence. Given the obvious difference in our intellects, it’s a bit obnoxious for us to decide for God that sexual assault can have no possible benefit. Obviously He thinks it does, because He’s making it happen all the time in this world.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Now the existence of Hell opens the door to many fascinating insights about God. Ironically, it is Hell that helps us unlock this mystery of what really happened with Jesus on the cross. We’re used to thinking of Hell as a statement on how much God hates sin, but it’s much more than that. It’s primarily a statement on how self-centered God is. God will always exalt Himself first—He will not take a backseat to anyone. He will dominate everything that He creates. If any human tries to resist His domination, they’ll end up in Hell, where they will be utterly dominated by Him forever.

Our next clue comes from understanding God’s view of time. Though God describes Himself as “long-suffering”, this is really a lie. God is only long-suffering from the perspective of humans who are living in a temporal dimension. In this world, it’s like we’re running through a pool of Jell-O: everything is in slow motion. Snap your fingers together once: that’s how long your life on earth is from God’s perspective because He is not in time. So when God talks about being so patient about waiting for you to repent, in reality He’s not being patient at all. One snap is all the time God is giving you to fall on your face and revere Him. If you take longer than the length of a snap, He throws you into Hell.

So what can we conclude from a God who applauds Himself for being so patient with rebellious humans when really He’s only giving them one nanosecond’s worth of time to align with His program before He starts to eternally torture them? God is so consumed with exalting Himself, that as far as He is concerned, He really is being incredibly generous to put up with your snarky attitude at all ever. You see, God considers Himself to be so infinitely magnificent that it is utterly inexcusable for us to intentionally withhold praise and glory from Him.