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Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Now if you want to terrorize the globe, you need followers as well as a vast network of folks who are willing to supply you with the equipment you need to blow things up. A single man who dreams of killing others is never going to get anywhere by himself. He needs to find people who are willing to help him pull off his grandiose plans. After all, well-executed terror attacks require a lot of firepower, upfront planning and split second timing. One man working alone will never be able to do enough damage to hold the attention of the world.

But then we come to the end time prophet: an individual who is going to break all of the rules about what is required to make a global impact. The end time prophet will be a solo act. This person will not have any underground network of folks to help him (or her) carry off his attacks. He won’t partner with any other humans, nor will he try to rally any followers. In fact, when folks do try to publicly attach themselves to the end time prophet as fans or followers, the prophet will swat them away like a man swats at a bothersome fly. Such behavior is so unprecedented that governing authorities won’t be able to get their minds around it. A ton of resources will be spent trying to locate the end time prophet’s human support network because it will be inconceivable that the man doesn’t have one. When no one can explain how the prophet is pulling off the feats he is performing, people will conclude that he must be working for aliens from outer space. Either way, people will be convinced that the prophet must be working in tandem with a vast network of other created beings, because what other explanation could there be?

Now when it comes to God performing epic miracles through a human, there are two historical figures who Christians might think of: Moses and Jesus Christ. How will the end time prophet compare to these two? Well, one thing that the prophet will have in common with Moses will be his humanity. While Jesus was God in a human costume, Moses was just a regular human being. The end time prophet will also be a regular human being. But while Moses’ loyalty to God was fickle, the end time prophet’s devotion to God will be unwavering.

The man Moses had a ridiculous fixation with the issue of ethnicity. He felt that it was of great importance that he was Jewish, and he was very emotionally bonded to those who shared certain ancestors with him. Moses was so obsessed with genetics that he once told Yahweh that he’d rather be eternally damned with his fellow Jews than have to continue life on earth without them. This is like a woman with naturally straight hair deciding that she can’t find happiness in life unless she surrounds herself with a bunch of people who have the same kind of hair that she does. When God gets really angry at straight haired people and says He’s thinking of killing them all off, our woman says she’d rather be killed along with them and thrown into Hell rather than continue developing her relationship with God in a world full of curly haired folks. This is how absurd Moses would talk to God when his love of his fellow Jews became greater than his love of God. Moses really isn’t the fabulous spiritual role model that Christians and followers of Judaism make him out to be. Unlike Moses, the end time prophet will give us an example of what absolute devotion to God looks like. Of course the problem with a guy who is fully devoted to God is that he’ll consider everyone else to be expendable. Moses’ divided loyalties made him a far more likable person than the end time prophet will be. While Moses cared deeply about the welfare of the people he was leading, the end time prophet is going to come across as callous and uncaring. It’s hard to snuggle up to someone when you have reason to think he might stand there smiling while God does terrible things to you.

[snip]

So what about the end time prophet? Will he also have a teaching ministry? No, he won’t, and this is yet another reason why this person will seem so bizarre. What’s the point of getting the attention of the whole world if you don’t have something to say? The end time prophet will have news cameras thrust in his face so often that he’ll never have to search for a pulpit he can preach from. People will be chasing after the prophet, desperate to get him to show up for televised interviews, press conferences, and religious conventions. While the prophet will occasionally say a few words, he’ll mostly blow off the invitations he’s given to speak. Unlike Jesus and Moses, the prophet won’t be trying to shape people’s theology or educate the masses. This person won’t have the raging ego that we’re used to seeing paired with world fame, nor will he have any interest in self-promotion.

When a man has a deep need to feel understood by his fellow humans, he becomes distressed by people spreading lies about him and he looks for opportunities to protect his reputation. Many lies will be told about the end time prophet. People will make up all kinds of wild stories about things that the prophet did or said in order to poison the public view of him. Rather than try to correct the rumors and accusations, the prophet will be fine with letting people bury fact in fiction. You see, when a man isn’t interested in gathering followers, and when a man is backed by God, he really doesn’t need to care what people think of him.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

During the end times, we will see God doing many horrifying miracles with plants which will defy explanation. There is nothing natural about mature, freakishly large cacti ripping buildings apart. There’s nothing natural about hundreds of ugly black vines suddenly busting up through the asphalt and sidewalks of a bustling city street, either, but this is also something which we will see happen. In the case of the black vines, we will see plants displaying a chilling degree of intelligence and anti-human malice. These vines will not only lunge at passing humans with precisely calculated moves, but once they grab hold of their victims, they will swiftly immobilize them by strategically wrapping around all of their limbs. The vines will then invade people’s bodies—ramming their way through every available orifice until people die of severe internal injuries.

Now a city that is caught by surprise won’t just have people in its streets. There will be vehicles as well. In the case of the black vines, while humans are getting pinned down on the sidewalks, those who are driving in vehicles will discover that they’re not safe, either. Vines will wrap around cars, and use any available opening to work their way into the cabs where the humans are. These plants will be so strong that once they wrap around vehicles, people will be unable to open their doors and escape, which means they’ll have no choice but to sit there and get attacked.

...The attack will end as suddenly as it started, and when it does end, the super strong vines will disintegrate into an ash like material which falls apart when touched. This mysterious transformation will allow anyone who isn’t dead to easily break free of their vine chains, but for most people it will already be too late. When autopsies are done on the corpses and it is discovered how the vines penetrated into bodies, naturally people will be very afraid. There won’t be any rational explanation for this plague, just as there won’t be any way to explain the monstrous cacti.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

It doesn’t take long to figure out that God doesn’t pass out the help and healing at an even rate in this world. Ever meet that person who went through a similar or even worse trauma than you, only today they’re totally over it while you’re still stuck with life stopping scars? Ever go to counseling for years trying to work through your issues only to be surrounded by Christians who get the quick fix from Jesus? While some addicts are faithfully attending weekly support groups only to keep losing their grip on sobriety, others say one prayer and down comes the miracle cure. Those who are healed quickly love to go around talking about how great God is, while those who are never getting healed sit there feeling like members of God’s reject pile. If God keeps saying “not now” to all your requests for deliverance, how should you interpret the fact that He keeps withholding His favor from you? Isn’t that what God’s healing is supposed to be a sign of—His favor? This is what many misguided Christians will teach you to believe, but in reality their idea of Divine favor is a very shallow, fleshly thing. All they’re focused on is being comfortable in their earthsuits. When they get physical, emotional, and mental peace, they think they’ve won the grand prize. Well, they are wrong. God has far grander prizes that He wants to pass out and while many want you to think you’ve been bumped to the back of the line because God won’t free you up, from His perspective, there’s something very different going on.

(...)

When God withholds healing from those who sincerely want to please Him, it is NOT a punishment, it is NOT a rejection, and it is NOT evidence of His disinterest in them. God operates differently than we do. When He is super excited about a soul, He doesn’t go trumpeting their name all over the earth. These Christians who go swaggering around flaunting their abundant blessings in your face and trying to imply that they’ve “earned” God’s favor by wowing Him with their great faith and loyalty—they’re already collecting their reward. The fickle envy and temporary applause of other Christians is all these braggarts are going to get. So never mind these idiot shepherds and healers who try to tell you that you’re some lesser sheep in God’s flock because He is withholding healing from you. These people are blind fools who can’t recognize the real evidence of Divine favor when that evidence is right in front of their faces. When you sincerely want to be closer to God in life, you WILL be closer. When you sincerely want to please Him, you ARE pleasing Him. When He keeps the burdens on your back it’s because the pressure they create in your life is going to take you places with Him that are infinitely better than a life of carnal comforts. You might feel stuck, but from His perspective, you’re making fabulous progress. You might feel slow and stupid, but you’re not. These lessons are HARD. They take TIME to grind through, so try to be patient with yourself and with God. He is not leaving you behind. Instead He’s leading you away from the main herd so you can experience a kind of communion with Him that He only offers to a select few. Sure, we’d all like to have instant cures and a comfy life. But if we’re wise, we’ll realize that far better treasures exist and we’ll ask God to help us hold out for HIS best.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

So what do you do when you’ve decided to turn a dead guy into one of your national heroes? Well, consider what the Catholics have done with Mary: they have invented a whole bunch of ridiculous fables about her to make her sound extra awesome. The Jews did the same thing with guys like Moses and Abraham. This business about Michael and Satan fighting over Moses’ corpse is a way of making Moses sound super awesome. He’s so fabulous that the highest ranking angel in Heaven just has to have him. But the notorious king of evil–Satan–wants him, too, and that’s a kind of reverse compliment. Once you understand that New Testament Jews viewed Satan like a kind of demigod who actually ruled over the earth, well, then it’s even more impressive that Satan was paying so much attention to Moses. Whether you’re good or bad, if you’ve got power, then your opinion is considered important. Old Moses had the top ranking officers on both sides of the supernatural realm fighting over him, so obviously that meant he was big stuff.

(...)

Now obsessing over the body is nothing new–the ancient Egyptians and many other ancient cultures showed a lot of concern about burying their earthsuits in good condition. But all of this fussing over the body is based on the very wrong assumption that our bodies continue to matter after we die. When you die, only your soul goes on to the next world. Your physical body decomposes as part of God’s fabulous recycling program and it ceases to exist. When Moses died in real life, his soul went on to a new dimension, and his body became irrelevant. But since Moses was a hero, the Jews couldn’t accept that no one in the supernatural realms cared about his body. Instead, they whipped up a bunch of wild tales like this one that Jude is referring to.

No one wants their great hero to just fade out quietly–heroes are supposed to go out in some dramatic way so we can keep talking about them for generations to come. Just look at what Christians have done to Peter–the man volunteered to be crucified upside down. Of course tales like this are just a bunch of hokum that we invented to make our heroes sound more heroic. But such stories keep the idolatry flowing, because how stellar does Peter sound to go for an upside down cross? Obviously a man’s devotion to God is illustrated by his method of execution, right? Well, no. The manner in which you’re killed really doesn’t have bumpkus to do with your soul’s attitude towards God. Whether you’re crucified right side up, upside down, or sideways, God is going to be judging you by the soul choices you made during your whole life on earth. You don’t get extra points for going out in some ultra agonizing way, just as you don’t get docked points for dying of natural causes. The morbid Christian fixation with gruesome martyr stories only reflects how backwards our priorities are.

(...)

It’s a very neat trick Yahweh did about hiding Moses’ body from the Jews. And when we see what the Jews turned Moses into, we can appreciate why God did this. Just imagine if Moses’ bones were enshrined in some temple somewhere today–no doubt scores of people would be camped at that place praying to the bones, kissing the bones, and worshiping the bones. When you see how modern day Christians fruit out over their “holy relics”–weeping, crying, and praying to fragments of cloth, old bones, and splinters of wood–you can see why Yahweh just wasn’t interested in arming the Jews with a whole corpse that they could deify.

Now when you consider that millions of Jews were present at the time Moses died–and when you consider that those same Jews faithfully carried Joseph’s bones out of Egypt and hauled them around for forty years in the desert just so they could bury him in the Promised Land–it is really quite miraculous that Moses’ corpse was completely lost. The Jews usually made quite a fuss over the remains of their prominent leaders, so how do millions of eye witnesses fail to remember where Moses was buried? This account demonstrates how easy it is for God to cause us to lose track of things that He doesn’t want us to keep holding onto.

Wherever Moses was buried, his corpse is long gone. Since the Jews weren’t practicing the mummification rituals of the Egyptians, God’s natural processes would have made short work of Moses’ corpse. As for Moses’ soul–that was immediately transferred to another dimension after Moses died. How Moses is doing with God today is something only he and God know about. We certainly don’t want to view him as some kind of standard that we can only hope to live up to. Instead, we should set our sights on doing far better than Moses did by making our own submission to God a lot deeper than Moses’ was. And as for Jude and his silly tales of angelic beings fighting over a corpse, well, what can we say? It’s Jude. It’s the Bible. Don’t expect perfection.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

As we said before, gaining knowledge about God is a whole different deal than learning about other humans. In this world, knowledge is a commodity that we buy and sell. It’s ammunition that we use to gain power for ourselves and trash others. But because knowledge is so readily accessible, we’ve learned to treat it as a cheap and common thing. We’re used to feeling entitled to it, and we’re used to flaunting it like gaudy jewelry just to draw attention to ourselves.

Consider how often you see people broadcasting intimate facts about someone else just to draw attention to themselves. Gossip rags delight in posting pictures of celebrities sobbing or making out just so the rags will sell more copies. With the introduction of forums like Facebook and Twitter, we’ve seen the value of private information drop even lower. It used to be that couples went on their honeymoons to get away from others and share secret, intimate moments in the bedroom. Now people bring their phones with them and take pornographic photos of themselves making out with their spouses. Pregnant mothers post pictures of themselves in the nude just before giving birth so we can all see the size of their stomachs. When loved ones are ill, we photograph them sitting in hospital beds and invite the whole world to gawk at them. People can’t share secrets or sincere compliments anymore without some concern that what they said will end up pasted on the internet. “My husband said the sweetest thing to me in bed the other day.” Really? Since when are bedroom conversations supposed to be broadcast to the whole world? Did you even bother to ask for your friend’s permission before you repeated what she said to you to an audience of strangers?

Now in the Church, we find a similarly nauseating show of people broadcasting their personal conversations with God just as a means to draw attention to themselves. Pompous prophets crank out the books and blogs in which they give us all a blow-by-blow description of the night Jesus materialized in their bedroom and told them how impressed He was with them. Many fat-headed pastors just can’t wait to get onstage Sunday morning and tell us all about the conversation they had with God at breakfast. Prayer warriors are always going on about who said what in the prayer closet. Healers are known for flaunting the secret insights they claim God has given them. Christian musicians turn their personal prayers to God into songs for us all to sing. And then there are all of the untitled masses who are always competing with each other to come up with the best “God said something to me” story. It’s really quite repulsive, the way we’re treating our personal exchanges with God so cheaply. And as long as we’re only interested in God talking so that we can have new material to boast about, we can be sure that He’s never going to invite us to really know Him.

God doesn’t view Himself as our toy. He doesn’t share information with us to entertain us or to help us exalt ourselves in this world. To know God is a priceless privilege, not a right. When we reject this, He begins taking back any knowledge that He shared with us and we drift into ignorance without even realizing what’s happening.

When you’re attempting to relate to the Beings who made you, you are relating to three Beings who consider Themselves to be the most magnificent, fascinating, and desirable Beings in existence. To say that They are “egotistical” is a major understatement. There is no limit to how highly our Gods think of Themselves, and understanding this about Them is critical for anyone who wants to approach Them correctly. We are not dealing with our equals–we are dealing with Beings who infinitely outrank us, and who say that we ought to consider ourselves humbly honored by any invitation to know Them better.

In mainstream Christianity, you simply aren’t going to be taught to treat your Gods with the level of respect that They want. The purpose of our site is to help souls understand what cherishing, honoring, and respecting God means. Cultivating the four soul attitudes that we’re always talking about is vital to you approaching your Creators in a way that They will be receptive to. As we often say, our Gods delight in sharing insights about Themselves with souls who are treasuring Them above all else. But learning about God requires a very different approach than learning about people. With God, we ask our questions, but then we must learn to respectfully wait for Him to bring us answers in His own time. We can’t take an entitled attitude with Him, for there are going to be many questions that He refuses to answer. If we cherish any insights He is willing to share and if we treat those things as the sacred treasures that they are, then He will be pleased to share more with us. But if we treat the knowledge of God as a cheap, expendable thing which we can use to promote ourselves–or if we try to find ways to go around God and unearth secrets about Him without His help, then we will learn the hard way just how foolish it is for specks like us to scoff at the concept of treating our Creators with respect.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

[From "You Love God But You Hate People: Why You’re Not a Spiritual Failure"]

Can you be a devoted Christian who is greatly pleasing God if you currently loathe other humans? The modern Church, the apostle Paul, and the apostle John would all say no. God would say yes. Now let’s explain.

God has always taught that He is to be our First Priority—so much so that we should be willing to lose our relationships with other humans for the sake of honoring Him. It doesn’t always get to that point, but that is the goal. You see, God doesn’t just call us to be sort of into Him—He commands us to obsessively love Him. We are to consider Him our All-in-All, our Master, our Commander, our King. God is supposed to be the One who we are living to please. His opinion is supposed to trump all others in our minds. His approval is supposed to be everything to us.

And then there are people. How does God teach us to love people? Well, we’re supposed to be gracious, generous, merciful, and kind. But we’re also supposed to have boundaries, dole out discipline when needed, and be willing to cut ties when necessary. The kind of love that we’re supposed to be giving humans is a very different, far more limited kind of love than we’re supposed to be giving God. It’s totally inappropriate for us to obsess over humans, to pray to them, to worship them, to view ourselves as totally dependent on them, or to give them our absolute trust. We’re never supposed to give humans anything close to total submission, and yet total submission is definitely an attitude that we want to develop with God.

Now today, the Church is blowing off the difference between the kind of love you’re supposed to be giving God and the kind of love you’re supposed to be giving humans. By the time she’s teaching you to pray to human saints, worship human worship leaders, blindly trust your human teachers, and view yourself as totally dependent on a collection of Scriptures which were all written by humans, the Church is teaching you to treat humans like God’s equals. Then she vaults them even higher than God by teaching you that you need other humans to pray for you, lay hands on you, interpret God’s will for you, and spiritually intercede for you. Soon humans are our first loves in life, while God is just our last resort.

[...]

Now if you try to share these ideas with other Christians, you’ll likely get a bunch of Scriptures thrown at you and a bunch of harsh criticism, so don’t bother. Because the Church worships the Bible, she ends up exalting all of the bad teaching in the Bible as correct. In the New Testament, we find the apostles John and Paul putting out a lot of bad teaching on the subject of loving humans. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul writes a long speech about love in which he says loving other people—not God—is all that matters (see Discernment Charts – NT Epistles: If We Don’t Love Humans, We’re Worthless). In other words, Paul teaches that our relationships with other humans are far more important than our relationships with God. This is the same Paul who once boasted that he’d volunteer to be cut off from Christ in order to see more of his fellow Jews saved. Paul was a horrible spiritual role model in many ways, yet you’ll be hard-pressed to find Christians who will admit how obnoxious much of Paul’s teaching is.

As for the apostle John—he’s another wellspring of bad theology. John not only teaches that no true Christian could even desire to sin—which is a totally ludicrous claim—but he also says that anyone who doesn’t love people cannot possibly know God. Well, suppose Brianna was to measure the quality of her friends by the gifts they brought her. How well would that external judgment system work? Not well at all, for the people who brought Brianna the best gifts cared about her the least, whereas the woman who didn’t bring any gifts loved Brianna deeply. When we try to assess people’s heart attitudes by their external actions, we always end up drawing wrong conclusions about them. Happily, God doesn’t fall into this trap. Unlike humans, God is able to see your true intentions towards Him, so He never misjudges you.

Sincerely devoted Christians come in a wide variety of packages—some of which are very rude, hostile, and even hateful towards their fellow humans. But because God sees into our hearts, He never rejects those who sincerely care about Him, nor is He fooled by any of our pretenses. God knows who is for Him and who isn’t. He knows who really cares about Him, and who doesn’t. As a Christian who is currently stuck in a place of intensely disliking other humans, you need to stop obsessing over the things that don’t matter. Look inward, not outward. Think about your soul attitude towards God, not your feelings towards other humans. When you know that underneath all of the hostility, you really do want to please God, then you need to stand on that. Don’t expect other Christians to understand your true feelings about God, because they won’t. But God does understand, and His opinion is the only one that counts.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Why does God let children die of cancer?

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AUDIO VERSION: YouTube  Podbean

Why does God let children die of cancer? To answer this question we need to understand some fundamental truths about how this world works.

THE INJUSTICE OF DISEASE

Why does it feel so wrong to us when a child slowly wastes away with disease? There are many reasons. It goes against the natural order of things: children aren’t supposed to die before their parents. It also hurts us and we hate things that cause us pain. We think that the things that hurt us must be evil, therefore cancer is evil. Who do we associate with evil? Satan, of course, therefore Satan is to blame for cancer. This is the theological trail many Christians go down: they end up blaming Satan or else they sigh heavily and say “It’s a fallen world.” Still others personify the disease itself and treat it like a conscious being. “#&%$@ cancer!” is a phrase we see posted on internet profiles by those who are feeling frustrated and helpless as their loved ones suffer in front of them. But is cussing out cancer really getting us anywhere? And is plastering colored ribbons all over the earth really rushing us towards a cure? Suppose they found a cure for all cancers tomorrow and began passing it out for free in every country. Do you know what would happen? A new, nastier, scarier disease would suddenly spring up in our midst. Why is this? Because the One who created this world wants disease to be a part of it.

THE ORIGIN OF DISEASE

The way Christians try to blame everything on the Fall is ridiculous. When we talk like Eve sent the universe spinning out of control the moment she bit into the fruit, we are completely denying what is right in front of our eyes. We need to start back at the beginning of Genesis and try again. No one forced God to curse Adam and Eve with pain, hardship, and physical death. He came up with the idea of making our lives a trial all on His own because this planet was always intended to be a place in which we grow through suffering. So what does this tell us about God? Is He some kind of ogre? No, He’s not. But from our perspective, His methods can seem very cruel.

GOD’S PRIORITIES

In order to understand why God inflicts kids with cancer, we need to understand what His priorities are. Keeping us comfortable, happy and healthy while we are on this earth is not at the top of His list of important things. If He had wanted this place to be a perpetual paradise He would have made it one. Instead, He made Heaven a paradise and arranged for almost our entire existence to be there, provided we properly submit to Him (see Understanding Salvation: Meeting the Demands of Three Gods). We’re only on this earth for a brief blip of time, and while we are here, we are supposed to be growing closer to God. Everything that He does to us down here is with our spiritual best in mind. That includes inflicting children with malignant tumors.

Whenever we find ourselves feeling enraged about some form of suffering, it is because we’ve zoomed the lens in far too close. When we get upset about kids dying of cancer, we are only thinking of ourselves and our immediate earthly happiness. We’re not considering the long-term view. We’re putting the temporary above the eternal in value and worth. God does just the opposite. He says the eternal health of souls is far more important than our momentary sorrow on earth. We say pain is pointless. He says pain is a catalyst for causing great change in people’s hearts. We see a child suffering and say that God is cruel. He sees one child’s experience affecting hundreds of lives and shocking souls out of a fatal stagnation. God hurts us in order to heal us. Everything He does is for our best, but too often we refuse to put any trust in His motives, even though He has proven Himself to be infinitely more loving, faithful, and wise than we are.

No one is more dedicated to the well-being of humans than the One who created them in the first place. This world isn’t something that God stumbled upon one day and took a mild interest in. We are His carefully crafted, intricate masterpieces. He hovers over us constantly, meticulously arranging every detail of our lives. Tumors don’t just happen to people because of bad genes or exposure to toxins. God creates tumors in bodies with the same precision as He creates all of our internal organs. Tumors grow because He makes them grow. They are detected late because He blocks us from finding them early. They are cured because He cures them, and they kill us because He wants them to. God works through medicines, doctors, and a host of other things, yet we must not get so focused on His methods that we miss seeing Him. No child comes down with cancer by random chance or because God abandoned them to the clutches of Satan. God personally selects all the victims of cancer with great care, and it is not because He hates them or is just trying to punish someone.

THE FATHER OF OUR CHILDREN

All children belong to God. He is their true Guardian and when He involves us in their care it’s understood that it will only be for a temporary amount of time. At some point, He takes all of His children back again to an eternal dimension where He parents them directly. On earth, we human parents are simply mediators whose primary job is to teach children who their eternal Father is. Sometimes He gives us a lifetime to love and care for His children on earth. Other times, He reclaims them after only a few years. Do we really have the right to accuse God of being unfair in taking back what is rightfully His? Yes, it hurts terribly, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But to tell God that He was wrong to take what His own hands have made—well, that simply doesn’t work. Other souls are not our property.

DEATH

From God’s perspective, no one dies prematurely and no one dies late. We say they do because we have preconceived notions about how long people should live. We’ve decided that there’s a rule that all children are supposed to outlive their parents. God never gave us any such guarantee. We’ve decided that anyone who dies from diseases or violence has been cheated. This simply isn’t true. God is clear that He predetermines the number of days that each soul will live on this earth, and no one fails to complete their full assignment. This is because no one can end a life without God’s cooperation. He alone has the power to separate soul from body, and to withdraw the breath of life that He put into us.

Humans try desperately to control the lifespan of themselves and others, yet God says that no one can do anything without His cooperation. We can plot and scheme all day, yet it is God who ultimately decides whether our plans fly or flop. We come up with new miracle drugs for cancer, yet it is God who decides who they work on. Some survive chemo, others die from it. Some are cured and stay cured, while others get constant recurring growths. Why is every case so different? Why can’t we find a formula that always works? Because God is involved. He has a far more important goal in mind than curing our physical bodies. He is after our souls.

GETTING OUR ATTENTION

God wants creatures who willingly choose Him, He doesn’t want robots. So while He controls every atom in existence, He also gives us some degree of choice. On a soul level, we are given the option to accept or reject Him. God wants His relationship with us to be a two-way street, not something He rams down our throats. He then spends our whole lives arranging events and experiences that will entice us to seek Him out. What happens when we see a child dying in front of us? We start asking why. We start looking for a cosmic source of justice. We start wondering if life really is some random set of coincidences, or if there could be some purpose to it all. We reevaluate our own lives and wonder if we’re really living for what is important. When the child dies, we look for some external source of comfort that can fill the void in our hearts. We wonder what our child found on the other side of death. We wonder what we will find when our turn comes.

It is when we feel helpless and distressed that we remember God. Too often that is the only time we remember Him. If we had our way, we’d erase all pain from this world and thereby take away one of God’s most effective means of securing our attention. Then we’d all become completely self-absorbed and totally ignore His existence. Does God smile on this plan? Not hardly. Our Creator loves us too much to let us walk away from Him without a fight. He will do anything it takes to intensify our interest in Him

God is the One who makes pain feel stronger when children are involved. Any good parent would much rather suffer themselves than watch their children suffer. This is the way it is supposed to be. God has set up levels of suffering on this earth. All trials are not equal. Some we can easily cope with, others temporarily devastate us. God inflicts children with incurable tumors when He has determined that only extreme measures will accomplish the soul changes He is after. It doesn’t always mean people are fighting Him. Sometimes there is no rebellion at all, yet God has decided it is time to push souls on to the next level of maturity. In every case, He carefully arranges which lives will cross paths, and the intensity of each person’s exposure to the suffering child. Some will sit at the bedside in hospitals, up close to the agony, while others will only receive brief updates through the internet. Every position is carefully arranged by God to spark conversations between Him and us. When a friend of ours is hurting, our natural instinct is to pray for them and tell God to stop doing what He’s doing. Our advice is utterly useless, and our wishes often misguided, but by getting us to talk to Him, God hopes that we’ll be willing to do some listening as well. He has things He wants to teach us in these moments. He isn’t just stirring us up so we can tell Him how to better run His universe. If we want to grow from these experiences, we must be willing to let God lead us instead of trying to lead Him.

When souls cooperate with God beautiful things happen. We change into something better than we were before. Our trust in God deepens. Our perspective of life shifts closer to the eternal viewpoint. Our priorities improve. Even if the changes are only temporary, they are worth it, for we will be all the swifter to respond to Him the next time a crisis arises. It is only when we close our hearts to God that we stagnate. When we demand healing, and even threaten to walk away from Him unless He gives us what we want, we only end up harming ourselves. God is not going to take orders from us. He will continue to do what He knows is best for hundreds of people, even though we selfishly demand that He care only about our personal pain.

If we are to thrive through suffering, we must recognize that there is a bigger picture involved. God is a multitasker who is always accomplishing many things at once. Yes, our suffering matters to Him very much, but to ask Him to stop caring about every other soul who is being positively affected by our pain is going too far. Instead of accusing God of being cruel, we need to give Him the trust He deserves. God knows what is best for us. As parents, we should be well acquainted with the principle that what a child needs is not always what a child will enjoy receiving. It is the same with us and God. He has promised to do what is best for us, even when it requires some misery on our part. The question now becomes, are we going to trust His judgment? Or are we going to insist that we know better than He does and wallow in self-pity? If we are wise, we will not go through life defining ourselves by the pain we have gone through, and the loved ones we have lost. Instead, we will let pain accomplish its good work in us and then let it go. In this world, God uses evil to bring about a greater good. If we align with His Spirit, He will teach us how to thrive through all forms of suffering.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

The term “mental illness” is very broad and often misapplied. The brain is a physical organ, and like your liver, heart, and gallbladder, the brain can malfunction. Because the brain is like the central processing computer that runs your whole body, when the brain has problems, it can result in some upsetting experiences for you. But confusion arises when psychiatrists who don’t acknowledge God or demons start blaming their patients for things that have nothing to do with brain malfunctions. The fact that a demon is screaming at you doesn’t make you ill anymore than having some human screaming at you makes you ill. Now maybe you’re having more problems than just hearing voices, and maybe some of those other problems are a result of your physical brain not running totally smoothly. We don’t know your whole situation, so we can’t say. But we can certainly tell you that the voices you’re hearing are coming from demons, and that they are not originating from you, thus they are not a sign that you are “crazy.”

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Hell isn’t a bummer to God. It’s only repulsive to us, because we’re the ones doing the suffering in it. But God created both Hell and Heaven, and He finds them both quite satisfying. Rewarding people with Heaven just for submitting to God’s Authority is a way that God flaunts His extremely generous Nature. Trashing people in Hell for refusing to submit to Him is a way that God flaunts His own supremacy. God is not a shrinking wallflower with an inferiority complex. God knows He is awesome and He is always finding ways to flaunt His own brilliance, power, and magnificence. God won’t tolerate being treated as less than superior, and as far as He is concerned, the whole Hell set up serves as a fabulous way of showcasing what happens to creatures who refuse to acknowledge His supremacy.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

One Christian non-pedophile says, “God has never done anything but help me in life. I’m quite sure that He’s good.” But then a Christian pedophile says, “God has completely trashed me in life. And yet I’ve reached the point where I really am sure that He is good.” Do you think these two individuals have the same understanding of God’s goodness? Not at all. The pedophile understands the goodness of God on levels that the non-pedophile can’t even grasp, because the non-pedophile hasn’t even begun to face how involved God is in his life. The point is this: by saddling you with the immense burden of pedophilia, God is extending you an offer to commune with Him on a level that He just doesn’t hand out to most people. You see, the world is wrong about you. You’re not some screwed up piece of trash. Instead, you’ve been chosen out for a very special opportunity by the One everything revolves around.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

[Note: this is her response to someone asking her for help with their depression, which was caused by witnessing a close friend get raped]

God has intentionally blasted you with a very disturbing sequence of events–events which He says are wise and good. Your friend didn’t get raped by accident. He coordinated the whole thing. Why? Because He loves your friend a whole lot more than you do, and He is intentionally throwing her life into turmoil to motivate her to get into her own theological crisis and submit to Him. You see all of this, and it raises up serious doubts about God’s goodness. Fine. But now the challenge for you is this: you’re a powerless speck. He’s God Almighty. He can rip lives apart and you can do nothing to stop Him. He can turn your depression on and off like water from a faucet, so how much are you going to let your approval of Him weigh in on your decision to submit to Him? Saying, “I don’t get what You just did, God. It seems horrible and cruel and it makes me worry that You’re some kind of Ogre,” is honest, and honesty is critical. But reverence will then add, “However, I also recognize that You are God and I am a powerless speck who depends on You for everything. I don’t like what You’re doing, but how stupid would I have to be to defy Your Authority? I can’t escape Your domination–You’re God. Help me to be what You want, because there is no other option.” This is how reverence drives us to submission, and submission then leads to revelations about God’s goodness. But it starts with reverence, and reverence is a fearful respect for God’s awesome power. For you, there are many important lessons to learn in all of this.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

It’s good for us to experience some degree of demonic harassment. For one thing, it reminds us of how dependent we are on God to protect us. For another, it reminds us that we are not the most powerful beings in this universe. There are many excellent lessons to be learned through demonic harassment, and the Holy Spirit is the perfect Teacher. He views demons as useful little pawns which He can use to further our spiritual development.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

But now let’s take the teenage boy who is dabbling in dark magic. He is tired of watching fictitious characters like Harry Potter have all the fun. He wants to get his own access to supernatural power, and after reading the moronic advice of other spiritual idiots online, he’s ready to try out his first spell. He stands in front of a mirror and says a bunch of mumbo-jumbo which he believes is a spell that will cause glass to shatter. No sooner does he cast his spell, then the glass instantly shatters. Well, how impressive. Another sorcerer has just been born, right? Wrong. It was a demon who caused the mirror to break. But because he kept himself invisible and timed his actions to coincide with the boy’s verbal declaration, and because the boy is so eager to believe in a lie, it only takes one round of mirror breaking to convince him that he actually pulled off a successful curse. After a few more carefully arranged sequences, the demon has secured a new stooge, and our foolish boy is running around boasting to his friends of his newfound supernatural power. This is how it works in the world of the occult: there are a bunch of foolish humans getting conned by simple parlor tricks into thinking that they can actually make things happen in the spiritual realms. It’s all so laughably easy to demons.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

[From an article aimed people who have recently been widowed]

If your spouse’s soul wasn’t on its face before our Creators at some point in the earthly journey, then he or she is now in Hell. This is reality, and trying to pretend otherwise is just insulting to God.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

When you sincerely want to please God, He is going to be pleased with you. Maybe you were the guy who kidnapped little Tina, raped her, and chopped her up into little pieces which the police recently discovered. Now Tina’s family hates your guts and they’ve been quoted in the news as declaring your actions to be unforgivable. But what does God say? Does He consult with Tina’s people before talking to you? No, He doesn’t. How God responds to you is going to depend on how your own soul is responding to Him. If you’re being an unrepentant little brat, then God is going to be convicting you to repent and threatening you with dire consequences if you don’t submit to His Authority. But if instead you are horrified by the depths to which you’ve sunk and you desperately want to get right with God somehow someway, then He is going to eagerly embrace you and help you start working on the underlying issues that motivated you to snatch little Tina in the first place.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God is the only One we should be viewing as vital, priceless, and irreplaceable. While we should certainly be respecting other humans as creatures who God places a high value on, at the end of the day, all created beings are expendable. We shouldn’t be viewing each other as our lifelines, because we’re so not. All human relationships are temporary at best, and most of the people we meet in this world will end up in Hell, thus eliminating any opportunity to develop positive relationships with them in eternity. Naturally we resist facing these facts, but ignoring them doesn’t make them go away. It is God who shapes reality for us, and the reality He’s made for us is one in which He is the only One who can be counted on to stay with us no matter what. He is the only One who can satisfy our souls, and He is the only One who is capable of taking care of us. So it is God we need to be depending on, trusting, and submitting to. When He takes loved ones before we want Him to, we need to focus our energy on respecting His right to do whatever He wants with His own property.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Here’s what makes the prophetic calling possible to succeed in: you don’t have to please people, you just to have to please God. Very happily for us, God doesn’t hold His prophets responsible for how well their messages are received. If you blow us off, that’s all on you. And if we’re just another batch of delusional fruitcakes, then clearly no harm will come to you for blowing us off. In fact, you really should discount everything we say if we’re not accurately speaking for God, because He’s the only Source of truth. If our rendition of the end times is nothing more than a figment of our own demented imaginations, then you should run far and fast away from us. You really don’t want to be hanging out with folks who use the phrase “God says” as often we as do unless they’re using it correctly because when that lightning strikes us, you don’t want it nailing you as well. If we’re just putting words in God’s mouth that He never said, then it’s only a matter of time until He takes us down, and you should be cheering when He does. If we’re accurately predicting the end times, then just imagine all of the fun we won’t have when we’re getting interrogated up one side and down the other by really angry people who are looking for someone to blame their problems on. You see, there is no glory for prophets who are actually obeying God. He has a way of pinning His guys into no-win situations which prevent them from raking in any glory when He does what He says He’s going to do. And why should they? Glory is for God, not humans.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

If the American president functioned like a monarch with absolute powers, then he would be able to order executions with a single word. In such a situation, you would see Americans suddenly locate their manners and no one would be daring to post derogatory comments or pictures of their leader. You see, it’s not that Americans can’t be well-mannered, restrained, civil people—it’s that no one is requiring them to be. Reverence is a lost concept in American society. Our judges can be paid off. Our law enforcement officers are told they have to just eat the daily rudeness of civilians without retaliating. Our politicians are pretty powerless, and our president can’t make a move without hundreds of people agreeing to go along with his idea. Our schoolteachers used to be able to send snarky kids off to the principal’s office for a good whoopin’. Now many of them can’t even verbally scold children without getting reprimanded themselves. On the one hand we’ve got a bunch of parents totally abusing their kids as a means of coping with their personal issues. At the same time, we’ve got a bunch of parents who are so threatened by their kids not liking them that they won’t dole out the discipline that’s needed. Instead of killing those who intentionally murder others, we just give them a slap on the wrist and send them out on parole after they spend a few years in a prison that looks like a five star hotel compared to the hellholes other countries are stuffing their criminals into. When Americans look around, they don’t see any leaders who are worthy of reverence. Sure, everyone has personal enemies who upset them, but American society as a whole has no strong authority figure leading it, thus Americans deservedly get a global rep for being a bunch of ill-mannered brats. It is reverence which motivates us to submit to authority, obey instruction, and put effort into restraining our carnal instincts. Without reverence, we just run amuck.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

As a human, you naturally disapprove of a lot of what God does in this world. You disapprove of it so much that you try to pretend that God has nothing to do with it—at least that’s what the Church tells you to do. Well, God doesn’t want you to like everything that He does. In fact, He is going to intentionally rub your face in a lot of the stuff He does that you hate in order to give you the opportunity to practice submission.

Of all the soul attitudes that God wants you to develop, submission is one of the most important ones. Submission is the correct soul response to the fact that God is the Supreme Authority over all things. Submission acknowledges this unchangeable truth, and then says, “I yield to You as the Supreme Authority that You are.” It is submission which results in prayers like, “Not my will but Yours be done,” and “Pleasing You is more important than pleasing Myself.” It is by cultivating submission that we come to realize that God’s opinion really is the only one that matters. Submission is vital, and it is the total opposite of trying to get God to conform to our preferences.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

The end times are going to begin in America. Not because America is more special than anyone else, but because this is what God wants to do. He’ll start with us, then He’ll expand out to the rest of the world while He continues to trash us. God has specific agendas in mind for running the end times the way that He is going to run them. When you pay no regard to what His personal goals are and instead start pleading for Him to stop the damage, are you treating Him respectfully? No, you’re being a little brat and acting like God should be revolving around you and what you want. Once the end time destruction begins, it will be a complete waste of time for you to start throwing 2 Chronicles 7:14 in God’s face. He’s not going to heal our land or anyone else’s. Instead, He’s going to keep on destroying both lives and property and if we don’t want to end up on the wrong side of His wrath during this period, then we need to listen to what He is saying to us in the privacy of our own souls.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Your relationship with God is the only relationship in which it is appropriate for you to give total submission. It’s not only appropriate, it’s essential. God demands total submission from you, and until you give it to Him, He will put limits on how close you can be to Him. But total submission is a foreign concept for us humans. It’s also extremely unnerving because it forces us to accept a completely powerless position. If we’re going to totally submit to God, then that means He is free to do whatever He wants. If He makes a promise, He is free to break that promise anytime He wants, and there’s no basis on which we can cry that it’s unfair. You see, as soon as one partner in a relationship accepts a position of total submission, then the other partner is put in a situation of total domination. God says that as the Supreme Authority over all things, He is accountable to no one, and that you are obligated to respect and obey Him simply because He is God. Compromise is not on the table. God doesn’t say, “Give Me a little attention, and I’ll pour down the blessings.” God says, “I am God. I am the most glorious Being in existence. Praising, serving, and adoring Me 24/7 is the very least you should be doing as a creature who depends on Me for all things.”

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

So what happens when we start using God’s definition of submission? Let’s say you are very talented at sports. Fine. As your Creator, God says that you and all of your talents are quite literally His property. As His property, God has the right to do whatever He wants with you. If He wants to load you up with talents and then never use those talents, He gets to. When you then beef about this, are you being a good servant? Are you treating God with the respect He deserves? No. You’re trying to dominate Him by trying to tell Him how He ought to run your life.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

So what are we to make of this horrific idea of grown men smashing infants to death against rocks? Well, what are we to make of the raging popularity of boxing in the world today? Today scores of “civilized” people pay big money to get ringside seats to a show in which two strangers beat each other into bloody pulps. When one guy collapses in agony, the crowd goes wild. As some referee counts off the seconds it takes for the guy to try and struggle back to his feet, everyone is screaming with excitement, and when the fallen guy just can’t manage to stand up because he’s too badly crippled, then the whole stadium erupts in applause. How sick is this? It’s very sick, but it’s also typical behavior for humans. We all have a sadistic side to our nature, and how we express that side depends on the cultures we live in. Today we like to assault each other in video games and in formal contests. Today we write games in which one game character can sexually assault another with the press of a button. And as we crank out the sadomasochistic books and movies and sell torture toys online, can we really claim to be better than the ancient people? Not really. Okay, so they butchered kids on rocks and burned them alive to idols. Well, we build clinics in our communities where we regularly blend living human children into pulp in their mother’s wombs. So the next time you hear some God hater trying to make a thing about the ancient peoples bashing kids brains in, realize the guy is just playing the classic human game of denial. We love to pretend that different can be translated into better and worse, but in reality, much of what humans do is driven by the same depraved impulses.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Now what makes God haters so nervous about Christians being alright with God’s wrath is that they think we’ll then use God’s wrath as an excuse to go butchering people. Of course this fear is only valid if you totally discount God’s sovereignty, because according to Him, nothing in this world happens without His approval and help. The biblical records are filled with examples of God using humans as His instruments of Divine discipline.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Now of course whenever God starts talking about slamming babies against the ground and ripping open pregnant women, a whole crop of God haters start freaking out and declaring that these verses prove that the Christian God is a coldhearted Creep. Well, no, actually these verses prove that the real Gods are not boundaryless doormats who we can walk all over without consequences. You see, it’s perfectly okay if we humans draw derogatory pictures of Jesus and openly mock our Creators in public, but should those same Creators retaliate by maiming our earthsuits or slaughtering our loved ones, well then They’re the Jerks, and we’re just the innocent victims. These are the games we play, but such games don’t fly with our Gods. You won’t find Yahweh apologizing for His assault on babies and pregnant women. Instead, you’ll find Him taking full responsibility for the carnage so that the defiant Jews make no mistake about Who it is that’s tearing them apart.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Our Creators say that it is very pleasing to Them to eternally punish those who scorn Them on earth and refuse to submit to Their Authority. They also say that no one ends up in Hell by accident—we only get there through willful rebellion. Well, the more you care about your Gods, the more important Their satisfaction will become to you. Certainly humans will never like the idea of other humans ending up in Hell, but your Creators say that the whole Hell package is a fabulous thing. So who are you going to side with? Suppose you knew that some human who you cared about ended up in Hell when they died. Would it be honoring to your Gods to go into some big depressed funk and sit around crying over that soul’s anguish like it’s some terrible thing? If you were to act that way, you would be siding with humans against your Gods. Humans say Hell is bad, the Gods who created Hell say it is good. As a Christian, you have to pick a side. You can’t straddle both camps when there is such a strong difference in opinions.

Now since you are a human, you can’t help the fact that you are personally disturbed by the notion of your Gods torturing humans forever. You don’t find such behavior easy to understand, but understanding is not what your Gods are asking of you. They want your loyalty. They want you to be choosing to side with Them over other humans whenever humans decide to oppose Them. So how do you do this when you still feel squeamish about Hell? It’s simple. You pray something like this:

“God, help me to honor You with my view of death. Help me to embrace attitudes that please You and help my devotion to You to grow so strong that I never consider siding against You for any reason.”

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

In the Bible, both Jesus and Yahweh teach that all sins are not equal. Some are definitely worse than others, and those sins will be judged more harshly. But here’s where we have to remember that our Gods judge us by one factor and that is our soul’s response to Them. Once we understand this, we can understand that an “extra bad” sin in God’s eyes has nothing to do with type of action or degree of impact on other humans. Instead, God ranks the severity of our sins by the intensity of our rebellion towards Him.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

You’ve submitted to God the best you know how, but He’s acting like a monster towards you. Perhaps He has a long history of doing cruel things to you. Perhaps He has saddled you with some devastating struggle like pedophilia or sadism or an addiction which is totally messing up your ability to relate to other people and making your future feel hopelessly grim. Perhaps He’s ripped away something or someone who you dearly loved. And in the midst of all this, God says that you must learn to trust in His goodness. Right. How on earth are you supposed to do that in the middle of this hell? If God is so eager for you to view Him as good, why is He acting like such a creep?

Deep, unshakable soul peace and rest is a product of rock solid trust in the goodness of God. Deep soul peace is what God wants for you, and if you ask Him to have His total way with you, then He’s going to roll up His sleeves and start laying the groundwork for your little soul to develop rock solid trust in Him. How does He do this? Well, what makes you doubt God’s love and goodness? His behavior, of course. His treatment of you and others. Every time you see God acting like your definition of mean, evil or cruel, your confidence in His goodness collapses under the weight of fears that He really is a monster at heart.

Now being the universe running Guy that He is, God is not going to always behave in ways that you consider right, good, and loving. God’s agendas are far too complex to accommodate such limited behavior parameters, plus God just isn’t the kind of Being who allows His creatures to dictate how He can and can’t behave. Rather than agree to tiptoe around your fears, God offers to topple your fears so that you will stop doubting His goodness the moment He does something that you don’t like or understand. To do this, He creates your personal “worst case scenarios” by intentionally acting like your definition of an ogre. Then He proves to you that He’s really not an ogre at all, and eventually you learn to stop judging His Character by His actions.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

For example, God strikes Dan and Ben with the same terrible illness. Because God is angry with Dan, His motivation for striking Dan sick is to discipline him. But God is pleased with Ben, and His motivation for striking Ben with the same illness is to bless Ben by teaching Ben truths that will strengthen his relationship with God. Because God’s attitude towards these two men is different, they need to respond to God’s actions differently. Dan needs to repent out of his rebellion and re-submit to God’s Authority. Ben needs to view his illness as a growth opportunity and ask God to help him learn everything that God wants to teach him. See how it works?

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Whenever we discuss God’s moral code on a subject like sexual orientation, invariably there is a crop of gays who react with intense anger. They don’t actually read everything we say—all they hear is that God says homosexuality is wrong. Why does this freak them out so much? Because they’re gay and they can’t help it. They’re feeling condemned by their Creator for something that is wired in, and naturally that results in intense feelings of helplessness and fear.

Well, if the straights were paying more attention, they would be feeling the same panic that gays do, because homosexuality is just one of many internal qualities that God says are wrong. God says being prideful is wrong. You’re prideful. God says lust is wrong. You lust. God says envying is wrong. You envy. God says that being sinful is wrong. You’re sinful.

See, gays aren’t worse than anyone else. Neither are pedophiles or murderers or addicts or liars or lusters. Whenever you find yourself flipping out over someone talking about God’s moral code, stop and think about why you’re so upset. You’ll find that often the real problem is that you feel hopeless about ever pleasing God because whatever issue is being discussed is something that you can’t change. God says looking at porn is wrong. If you’re a porn addict, this feels like a hopeless message, because you can’t just kick your habit. You’re addicted. Addictions feel impossible to beat—that’s why they’re called addictions. Or maybe you crave sex with kids. You can’t help this—it’s wired in. But God says pedophilia is wrong. Well, rats, where does that leave you? Well, look around you: we’re all in the same mess. None of us are better than you—some of us are just pretending that we are because we’re ignoring most of God’s moral code. But if we were all to sit down and take an honest look at all of the things God says are wrong, then we’d all be forced to conclude that it is absolutely impossible for us to be sinless. And if we can’t be sinless, and God says He hates sin, then where is the hope?

Here’s where we get to the good news: God says that while He hates sin, He loves sinners. He says that being sinless is not a requirement for pleasing Him. But He does require submission from us, and that means that we need to align with His standards.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Who needs God? You do. You need Him desperately, in fact, and you are totally dependent on Him for all things. This is how God locks you into a maddening bind: you depend on Him, yet you hate Him because He’s condemning you for who you naturally are. You can’t really separate yourself from Him, and yet the negative judgments He’s making about you cause you to be both afraid and angry. And by the way, it was God who created you to have all of the qualities that He is now condemning. In other words, He intentionally set you up to fail. And this is the God who claims to be good in Character? You’re not buying it.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

First God creates us to be what He says is wrong. That makes us mad. But then He makes it so we’re totally dependent on Him to sustain our existence, thus we can’t ever get away from Him. That makes us more mad. Then God is infinitely stronger than we are, and He says that if we don’t submit to Him, He’ll chuck us into Hell and torture us forever. That makes us furious—but it also scares us. Being scared of God’s immense power is called reverence, and reverence is a good thing. It is our fear of God that finally motivates us to submit to Him even when we hate what He’s saying.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

We look at Abraham sacrificing Isaac and struggle to imagine ourselves being willing to do the same with our own kids no matter how adamantly God commands us. Yet all the superstars in the Bible had an internal advantage we can’t see: they had reached a point in their walks where their desire to please God far outweighed their desire to please themselves. We can get there as well, one step at a time, by choosing to follow the Holy Spirit’s convictions. We won’t be perfect at it, we’ll have weak moments and make wrong choices, but the more we practice obedience, the easier it will seem, and the more addicted we will become to pleasing God.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

To serve God well, we must not try to corral Him in anyway—He’s a wild and unpredictable Being, full of unexpected twists. We must keep our focus on Him, and not on our circumstances. Success is defined only by God’s pleasure with us, not by how things worked out on earth. There will be times when we will crawl away feeling totally humiliated and convinced that we botched our assignment, only to have God assure us it all went just fine. God has a different set of values and goals than we do. We think it’s extremely important to look polished and confident when carrying out our assignments, whereas God often prefers that we look unrehearsed and fumbling in front of others. As long as He gets His way, nothing else matters.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

This is where we really have to say goodbye to the crocodile theory. God is describing an animal with fire coming out of its mouth. Why are our Bible translators trying to shuffle the crocodile off on us when it’s so obviously not a fit. Because no one wants to use the word “dragon”. Well, this is silly. God has made all kinds of fantastic creatures since the beginning of this world. Just because there are no dragons around today doesn’t mean they never existed. It’s quite clear from Scripture that dragons once roamed the earth with man. Perhaps there is more truth to the stories of medieval knights battling dragons than we realize. Who knows how long dragons were around before God finally drove them into extinction?

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

If you want a useful prayer to pray, here it is:

“God, help me to get over myself and fully submit to You. I hate what You’ve done to me, I’m scared of You, and I can’t even picture liking or trusting You. But regardless of how I feel, You’re God Almighty, so what the heck am I doing trying to fight You? This is a war that I cannot win, and I own that I was a fool to even try. Please help me come up with the soul attitudes that You want from me. Make my submission to You real this time, and not a game. I don’t want to keep going through this. Maybe my circumstances will remain lousy, but I want to be able to know that I am in a good place with You. I’m not telling You what to do—instead, help me get better at having You tell me. Help me to accept what You give me, and fully release what You take away. You’re God, I’m not. Help me to embrace my proper place as Your creature who depends on You for all things.”

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

It is simply obnoxious to ever accuse God of encroaching on your rights, because in your relationship with God, you don’t have any rights. He owns you, and He can do whatever He wants with you. There is no sense in which He must provide you with options in life. He doesn’t have to give you any choice about anything, and He certainly doesn’t have to get your approval before carrying out His own will. The way things work right now, God does give us options in life, and He says the choices we make play a big role in shaping our future with Him. But while God is currently choosing to give us choices, we need to remember that He doesn’t have to. God doesn’t have to do anything—that’s one of the many perks of being the Creator of all things.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Nothing is impossible for the Gods who make and break laws whenever They want. This means our submitting to Them on the condition that They will always maintain a certain level of honesty or consistency is insufficient. Being fully dominated by our Gods requires an embracing of our subordinate position to Gods who can do absolutely anything They want. We do not say, “I bow to You because I trust You or because I understand You.” We say, “I bow to You because You are God.”

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Christians are great at saying “God is first,” but they rarely think about what this actually means. One thing it means is that our Gods’ preferences and pleasure should be considered infinitely more important than our own. If Jesus says that it pleases Him to torment souls forever in Hell, then you express your loyalty to Jesus by aligning with what He wants. If Jesus says your grandfather spat in His face one time too many, thus Gramps is now going to be roasting forever in Hell, that’s your opportunity to honor your Lord by deciding that what He wants is more important than your loved one having some positive experience in eternity.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

But as a Christian, this is a critical point that you need to grasp: the concepts of right and wrong are defined by God, and He can change His definitions any time He wants.

Today God says it’s wrong for a father to chop off his son’s finger. But should God suddenly announce tomorrow that all Christian fathers must chop off their son’s fingers, then an activity which used to be wrong would suddenly become right. You see, morality is not a fixed issue, it is a fluid issue, but it is one that only God gets to define.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Adam’s justification for being angry about his circumcision began with the following three points:

My body is my property.
I should have the right to say what is done to my own property.
People permanently damaged my property without my permission.
Notice how Adam is focusing on rights here. We humans are very good at fussing about our own rights, but we don’t spend nearly enough time contemplating all of the rights God has as the Supreme Authority. God says that everything He creates is His property and He can do whatever He wants with His own stuff. God also says that He reigns with absolute sovereignty over everything that He creates. This means that no one circumcised you against God’s will. God knew what your parents wanted to do and He provided a way for them to do it.

When we try to downplay our dependency on God, we end up in a mess. In the Bible, God makes it clear that none of us can do anything apart from Him. He isn’t just our Creator, He’s also our Sustainer, and that means that you can’t even walk to the mailbox unless God enables you to do so. God is not like a human ruler who sits on a distant throne unaware of most of the activity in his kingdom. God is an omnipresent micro-manager who is intimately involved in every aspect of our affairs. God says that you are His property, and that He is always guarding you. He says that troubles don’t just fall on you, but that He intentionally creates troubles in your little world to give you opportunities to develop a richer bond with Him. God says that this circumcising event which troubles you so much was something He brought into your life on purpose. He knew how upset you’d be by it before He even did it, but He still did it. Why? Because the experience is packed with the potential to draw you closer to Him. Consider our man Adam. He’s a Christian, and he considers himself to be sincerely committed to God. But he’s also got some obvious holes in his theology because he feels he can justify his anger over getting circumcised by waving the rights card. Adam says “My body is my property.” But God says, “Actually, your body is My property and I’m the One who gets to say what happens to it.” Well, Adam doesn’t like this. If we’re honest, none of us like this, because we take serious issue with God inflicting misery on us. Well, here is where we come to another concept which is absolutely critical to you developing a close bond with God: submission.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

When you assume that you can read God’s mind for Him and accurately anticipate His will in every situation, you assume incorrectly. In the Bible, we find God telling fathers to kill their children (Abraham, Jephthah & the Levites). We find Him telling soldiers to commit genocide. We find Him ordering cities to be burned to the ground and never rebuilt. We find Him turning sincere believers into powerful politicians who helped run their governments as they worked alongside a bunch of demon worshiping sorcerers (Daniel & Joseph). Does God want His people involved in politics? Absolutely. Does He want His people going to war? Yes. God wants all kinds of things, and sometimes His orders get downright bizarre. God told the prophet Isaiah to walk around naked for years. He told the prophet Ezekiel to lie in the dirt for over a year. He told the prophet Jeremiah to walk around wearing a wooden yoke around his neck. He told Gideon how to set up a deceptive ruse on the battlefield. He approved of the prophet Elisha publicly lying to a bunch of enemy soldiers and then leading them into an ambush. You can’t anticipate God—He’s wild and unpredictable. He has a long history of handing out some very bizarre orders. Yet because God is so powerful and so able to make your life a misery, He really isn’t Someone you should be trifling with.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Now then, you have crossed that critical line and cast your entire will permanently under God’s control. You have voluntarily revoked the freedoms He’s given you and asked Him to make you all that He wants you to be for all of eternity. When we surrender to God, we are calling on Him to use force on us: to override us and make us stay in the center of His will.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

By intentionally sabotaging your efforts to follow through on many of your good intentions, God ensures that you feel misunderstood and hopelessly frustrated in your efforts to fully bond with other humans. This is because He doesn’t want other humans to be your all in all—that’s His role. He doesn’t want other humans to be the ones who you feel fully accepted by, so He programs them with a bunch of hypocritical repulsion which ensures that they will never hold you too closely.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

You see, when you die and you find out how God has assessed your life on earth, He’s not going to talk about what you contributed to your society. He isn’t going to care about how hard you worked to make the world a better place. He will only care about how your soul was responding to Him all of those years when He was standing right in front of your soul saying, “How much do you want to please Me?”

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

So what can we Christians learn from this underwear metaphor? Well, as uncomfortable as the imagery might make us, it teaches an important lesson about how God wants His people to respond to Him. When God calls out for any soul to come to Him, He wants an enthusiastic response. He wants souls to cling to Him tightly—as tightly as, well, underwear.

Before the days of elastic bands, a man had to cinch his loincloth pretty tight to make sure it would stay on as he went about his business. So this isn’t the image of a people loosely hugging God, but one of souls locking their arms around Him in a tight embrace. Once you get past the weird feeling of being likened to underwear, think about how awesome it is that your Creator wants His teensy little creatures to cling to Him so tightly. Our Gods are not indifferent towards us—instead They respond in extreme ways to our response to Them. Our soul choices are very important to Them. They don’t take a “whatever” view of us. So now we come to that all important question: how tightly are you clinging to God? Did you fall off ten steps ago because you just really don’t care about who He is or what He wants? Or are you giving Him that vice grip? Yahweh says that what He likes is underwear that is gripping nice and tight—the kind that won’t come off no matter how many jumping jacks He does. If you know you’re just not there in your personal walk with Him, then ask Him to get you there. It is such a blessing that we have Creators who are this interested in us—if we’re going to blow off such an amazing invitation, well then we really do deserve to rot away.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Now in this passage, things quickly go from awkward to gross as Yahweh says He’s going to take His metaphorical underwear and make it rot. Since the Israelites are refusing to cling tightly to Yahweh as good underwear would, He’s going to intentionally destroy them. And of course our pride is what keeps us from submitting to our Gods as the Supreme Authorities over us. These Israelites want to worship gods who they feel they can manipulate—not the wild Yahweh. Well, bring on the rot. This disobedient underwear is going down.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

But then there’s Jen. Jen’s protective father has warned her repeatedly not to strut around downtown with flashy jewelry and provocative clothing. He’s given her pepper spray to carry in her purse, and a sharp metal stick to carry on her key chain. One night Jen is going to meet up with some friends. As she looks over her outfit in the mirror, God convicts her that she’s not being wise. She’s wearing a super tight and super short skirt, a low cut shirt and some large, flashy jewelry. God convicts her that her outfit is going to attract the wrong kind of attention. He tells her to be more modest. Jen blows Him off. Then He tells her to bring the self-defense tools her father gave her because she’s going to a dangerous part of town. Jen scoffs. She doesn’t want to jam the pepper spray into her super tiny purse, and she doesn’t want to bulk up her keys with the clunky metal weapon. So she leaves it all at home and tells God that He’s big enough to keep her safe. The problem here is that Jen is not trusting God, she’s trying to control Him. She expects Him to shield her from all harm even though she is refusing to obey His convictions. When Jen gets downtown, she immediately attracts the attention of two men who are just looking for an easy victim. They force her into an alley and Jen goes down. [...] In Jen’s case, God arranged for her to be assaulted in order to motivate her to improve her attitude towards Him.

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

God is like a strong man who snatches a young woman from a crowd of onlookers and forces her to come waltzing with him onto a dance floor. God will not leave you alone. He created you for the purpose of engaging with you, and He is going to force you to dance with Him whether you want to or not. You can either spend the whole time stumbling and lurching about, or you can focus on the subtle signals God is giving you and learn how to follow His lead. If you choose the route of submission, you will end up in a very smooth rhythm with God.

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