Letters to Laodicea

What does it mean to be a child of God? I discuss some thoughts on this issue in the context of my previous episode Light Pollution (check that one out first). Resist the temptation to dismiss everything I say in this episode by saying something like, "We aren't supposed to stay spiritual children, but rather grow in Christ." By saying that, you miss my point—I agree we are to grow. But we are also to be humble and childlike if we expect to be the greatest in the Kingdom.

I've been developing a metaphor describing our sinful condition as spiritual "light pollution," the equivalent of the physical phenomena. A light-polluted environment (such as an urban city) will cause the dark background of the night sky to become brighter, thereby 'hiding the face' of the more subtle, dim stars. It occurred to me that the same thing happens when, in a sinful condition, we try to understand the fullness of God's revealed truth. Just as you can't shine a flashlight up at a star or nebula and expect to see more clearly (actually the opposite will happen), you can't expect to understand the deep things of God when you are anything but totally and completely receptive. Selah

This episode is kind of a response to the question, Does God Need Us? To which I basically answer, "Yes, but not necessarily," which is, I think, a compromise between William Lane Craig and James at FuzzyRadioX. This episode is also a kind of inauguration of the series I've been promising for so many episodes: God's relationship to time, quantum uncertainty, and other weird things. As we get into those topics, know that no matter how weird it gets, it's all a labor of love (on my part yes, but especially on God's). God is far less concerned with whether or not you understand String Theory correctly than he is with whether you love him.

In this episode I discuss the recent saving of the Hollywood Sign by, among other investors, Hugh Hefner. There are several layers of meaning behind what Hef represents, what the Hollywood Sign represents, and what those representations seem to be selling to us. The logical extreme of this brought me to a discussion of pornography and images as they relate to the culture of celebrity. I also praised Shelley Lubben and her organization The Pink Cross, which brings Christ to those trapped in the world of porn production.

In this episode I discuss how television affects the brain, including the repression of certain fight/flight/help reactions to violence, which seems to give rise to a change in the way one experiences real life—one becomes "at home" in the watching of fiction, and real life situations start to have less consequential weight in one's mind. In the podcast I liken this to an overdose of "catharsis," the emotional purging which happens when we are able to experience fear, terror, dread, in a safe environment such as a dramatic play or movie. However, this disconnect is not just due to television—it is fed by our ever-increasing use of electronic substitutes for real communion with one another. The increasingly passive approach to real life versus the appetite for consumable eye-candy is likened to the faith versus works discussion.

In this episode I discuss four topics:

Topic 1. An insight about the 7 letters to 7 churches in Revelation 2-3, specifically regarding the wording of the greeting in the final letter, the letter to the church "of the Laodiceans" rather than the church "at Laodicea." (This is the phrasing in the KJV, and not necessarily other translations, but my insight seems to be backed up by the original Greek).

Topic 2. Whether or not rewards for works are retroactive, or put another way, does a lifetime of good works that show love to others go rewarded or unrewarded after a deathbed profession of faith? Although I only touched on Abraham briefly while reading James citing it in James 2, a good study would be to study the faith vs. works in the life of Abraham, specifically when he was asked to sacrifice Isaac. In Abraham's example, his faith was made perfect by his works. My question is whether works can be made perfect by faith after the fact.

Topic 3. An incident on Facebook regarding an apostate former high-school classmate of mine.

Topic 4. How social networking is a gnostic heresy, sort of. The normalization of non-fleshly interaction is degrading the quality of our face-to-face interactions. In the deception-riddled world of today, it is not hard to come to the conclusion that in developing new conceptions about human interaction to make sense of "technologized" human relationships, the various neo-gnostic new-age philosophies (which would deny the flesh, etc) will gain a foothold. We should be careful not to join the anti-flesh bandwagon, but rather seek to put flesh in its proper context, in balance with the spirit, through Christ.

In this episode I discuss some songs from Lady Gaga in terms that I've discussed in the previous Cult of Celebrity episodes. The rumor about her being a hermaphrodite is interesting from an alchemical/luciferian perspective, and I briefly touch on that. In view of her foregrounded gender ambivalence, one of her songs, "Paparazzi," reminds me of the process in which sin grows. I discuss it in terms of a gender reversal, emblematic of the change in the balance of power between us and sin, as sin grows. At the beginning sin inflates our pride, enticing us in a "feminine" way, causing us to believe we can control it. Then it starts to grow, and little by little it chips away at the idea of the easily-controlled temptation, and starts to reverse gender and dominate us. When sin is most complete in our lives, it makes us cause others to sin, and we generally use the same "feminine" temptation when we are tempting others. Incidentally, in this episode, some of my ideas also sound like I'm The Church Lady from an SNL skit.

I discuss the two sides to God's will—His directive will and His permissive will—and see it as logically equivalent to the will that human governments impose or refrain from imposing on their citizenry, depending on the type of nation in question. The US is starting to become more active in its directive will. I also play a "sermon jam" from Paul Ryan's speech on the House floor the night the bill passed. To listen to the speech without the rest of the episode, it's available here. This may well be the only time I delve into the political arena on Letters to Laodicea.

The fourth episode on the cult of celebrity. In this episode I discuss the suicide of actor Andrew Koenig. Andrew Koenig was on Growing Pains in the 80s. His father Walter played Chekov in the original Star Trek. Andrew was my neighbor down the street, and I could tell that he seemed lonely and depressed. I saw him just the day before he left LA for Vancouver, when he was giving things away, including a lot of old vintage Star Wars / Star Trek memorabilia, that seemed to be valuable. I grapple with the opportunities I had (and forfeited) to share Christ's love with him, and whether it would have made a difference.

The second half of the episode devoted to Avatar, in which I analyze the lyrics to 'I See You,' the song from the movie. Could this song, which comes from a movie selling pantheistic Gaia worship, actually be a secret worship song to Jesus Christ? I looked up several of the phrases from 'I See You' in the online bible site Blue Letter Bible, and found some astonishing verses, which all seem to have bearing on the themes of James Cameron's epic.