July 29, 2009 by Bill.

“For fire has been kindled because of My anger and burns to the depths of Sheol it devours the land and its produce and scorches the foundations of the mountains.” - Deuteronomy 32:22 Holman Illustrated Study Bible

This scripture is intriguing to me because I think it may indicate the origin of hell. This verse came from a “song” that God gave to Moses, ordering him to teach it to the Hebrews before they entered the promised land–the land flowing with milk and honey, the land, you will recall, in which Caleb and Joshua returned a good report and for which they were subsequently blessed–and before Moses died and “was gathered with his people.”

God knew that the Hebrews would almost immediately turn their back on His law and begin serving other gods, and so He wrote the song so that the Hebrews knew He knew, and understood what He was going to do to them should they commit such atrocities.

History shows that they did, and He did.

According to JewishEncyclopedia.com** Sheol is “very deep” and “marks the point at the greatest possible distance from heaven.” Sheol is a place of silence where warriors carry their weapons with them but have no power, they are mere shadows of themselves–hence they are the name “rephaim.”

Sheol is divided up into compartments. It has gates. It is a place where both the righteous and unrighteous go–the righteous to one day ascend unto God, the unrighteous elsewhere.

In the Deuteronomy verse quoted above, we see that God says that His fire burns to the depths of Sheol. If the righteous are also there, then my question is obvious: What becomes of them if they don’t deserve the fire of God’s anger? Moses, for example. Did he go to Sheol, and if so, was he rescued before God’s anger kindled and burned to its depths?

Another interesting phrase is that God’s fire “scorches the foundations of the mountains.” I assume the foundations of the mountains are the tectonic plates, which at their seams certainly contain untold quantities of molten rock.

But the most mysterious phrase is the one that says God’s fire “devours the land and its produce…” Clearly this has not yet happened. There have certainly been large fires over the millennia, but I (perhaps naively) assume this clause is saying the entire earth’s land and produce are devoured. This reminds me of Luke 12:49 where Jesus says “I came to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already set ablaze.” Also 2 Peter 3:10, which says “But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief; on that day the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, the elements will burn and be dissolved, and the earth and the works on it will be disclosed.” And finally, Revelation 21:1 says this: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea existed no longer.”

So, I’m wondering if this is a prophetic verse: God is saying that as He watches the Hebrews turn from His law to the foolishness of idolatry, His anger will so greatly kindle that His fire will ultimately burn up even Sheol.

Those that are found unrighteous are said to be cast into the lake of fire. This is the hell that I understand from my earliest days of Sunday school.

All of this activity seems to happen on the Judgment day, when the Book of Life is brought forward and those whose names are found in it are taken into the Lord’s presence, but those whose names are blotted out are cast into the lake of fire. I believe all names are written in the Book, but those who finally, ultimately and irrevocably reject God and His son are blotted out. I don’t think God happily does this blotting. I think this is a very sad time for the hosts of heaven.

Anyway, Deuteronomy 33:22 is an extremely interesting verse, one that is prophetic in nature and denotes God’s emotions toward a stubborn and rebellious people.

** http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?letter=S&artid=614

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July 22, 2009 by Bill.

In Lewis Carroll’s famous 1872 poem The Walrus and The Carpenter there is quite a stanza:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”

In this missive I don’t intend to argue the merits of what Carroll was trying to say in his poem, I’m merely fixated on the notion that he succinctly sums up what we must all be talking about at this point in 2009 and beyond:   The myriad things inadvertently swirling together that are bringing about worldwide chaos, perhaps even deep monetary depression.

The time has come for people to be paying serious attention to what their Congresspersons and Senators and POTUS are up to in Washington, because  the decisions being made there are setting up nearly every American for a drastic decrease in lifestyle, one we have never observed before in this country. As much as people hate talking about doom and gloom predictions, there are a lot of these predictions out there and we simply cannot like ostriches put our heads in the sand hoping they’ll go away. I would steer you to this YouTube video as one compelling example.

The stimulus package is not working, and I for one have serious reservations a second package will somehow, like a drop or two of penetrating oil, ratchet loose the spending logjam. Americans are not spending, they’re saving. This is a good thing, and it hearkens back to post-Depression-era American ideals. But as happy as that is, there are big problems.

One issue is that between housing, various loans and leases, and credit-card debt, not to mention the dramatic losses in our retirement savings accounts (the 401-K became the 201-K overnight) Americans are in serious debt. This was not the case in the Depression. It wasn’t very long ago that a person had to pay cash for a car–there simply weren’t any financing mechanisms available. And that 20% down a person had to have in order to purchase a house could not somehow be merged into the financing package: One had to literally have 20% of the house’s purchase price in the bank in order to make the transaction.

But today there are all sorts of first-time buyer plans. People who shouldn’t be able to buy a house do so anyway, even though they cannot afford them. This creates a huge problem because once people decide they cannot go on living in their house, they simply bail out on the loan, allowing the house to go into foreclosure. If there were only a handful of such houses, there would be no crises, the banks would merely carry the notes on their books as bad debt until the houses were sold. But if there are hundreds of thousands of these houses on the market, as there are now, that is quite another issue.

The Federal government now owns the majority of private housing in America. Fannie-Mae and Freddie-Mac, both overseen by their chief benefactor, Senator Barney Frank, own 56% of American private property, foreclosed upon or not. This came about through loose legislation in the last part of the 20th century (thanks Bill Clinton), allowing for very creative mortgage loans such as loaning 120% of value (so dad could buy that speedboat he’d had his eye on), covering the 20% down spoken of earlier in a second mortgage and so on. These loose fiscal policies allowed almost anyone who was breathing and could sign his name to be able to buy a house.

This is the ships and sealing wax element of American society. We now have a double-whammy in which Americans have defaulted on a dramatic number of properties (causing a huge slow-down in new construction), resulting in the majority ownership of American property by our own wonderful government.

Additionally, the Federal government is now in the business of controlling American corporations. Instead of letting big companies like AIG and General Motors fail, as they would probably have in the mid-20th century,  and as is properly mandated by supply-side economics, the Federal government saw them as “too big to fail” and came up with an elaborate bail-out scheme. This resulted in the Feds being able to tell corporate leaders how to run their businesses, and in some cases even led to one leader being replaced by another who may or may not know anything about the business. Let’s talk of shoes and ships, shall we? The two do not go together, anymore than private corporations and the Federal government are supposed to. And yet, here we are, trying to jam a ship into a shoe. Ouch!

Then there’s the great health care plan of ‘09. Health care is too expensive, we’re told. Not everyone is getting adequate health care. What we need is a unified plan, one in which every person has the right to affordable health care.

The problem with this is that the Federal government is again a big element of the equation. Anyone who knows anything about the Veteran’s hospital system and health care for our soldiers understands that the Federal government does a piss-poor job of providing any kind of health care. (I have my own story to tell about that, but will reserve it for another time.) Suffice to say that waiting times in clinics are very long and people who need expensive tests or procedures may be forced to wait months or years for treatment, ala the Canadian, French and English health care systems. The government has done a good job of putting out propaganda artists who pooh-pooh the suggestion that other countries’ health care systems are this way, that they’re a dream of efficiency and fiscal responsibility, but this is not the truth.

We need look no further than so-called “RomneyCare” in Massacheusetts or “TennCare” in Tennessee to find out how enormously expensive and ineffectual these state-mandated unified health care plans are. Mitt Romney is running around the country proclaiming how successful his brainchild was in Massacheusetts, but the truth is that the system is so expensive state lawmakers are looking at $1 B in excess spending on the program for this year alone and have recently gone so far as to remove 30,000 legal immigrants from the list of those eligible to receive “unified” health care. Guess it’s time for the legal immigrants in this country to start going back to the emergency rooms like they were before RomneyCare. I thought unified health care meant everyone had access, but I was wrong.

The push for a national health care policy is a classic case of saying that pigs have wings, that the Federal government can properly handle the doling out of benefits for all Americans (it can’t: anyone who doubts merely needs to look at the $56 T projected deficit for Social Security).

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently went to India (as a part of the Obama Apology Tour of ‘09) to admit that we Americans have been flawed in previous times in our reluctance to deal with CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, and to ask Indians to cooperate in the plan to set a worldwide limitation level for said emissions.

You see, the sea is boiling hot, and we have to do something about our CO2 emissions before most of Europe and all of Florida are flooded. And we see the Indians as the country that will one day soon overtake us as the owners of the bad habit of pushing billions of tons of the gas into the atmosphere, hastening the day when all the ice-caps melt, the seas rise, and Phoenix becomes a bonfire.

But (and this is a big but) we’re willing to pay the Chinese carbon tax so they can keep emitting (China has recently overtaken America as the chief CO2 depositor in the world). Why? Because we need the stuff they manufacture for us! We can obtain Chinese goods much cheaper than we can make them ourselves right here in the US (which would mean jobs for out of work Americans), but in order to do that the stodgy Chinese, who absolutely refuse to come to the worldwide Cap-and-Trade table to talk about so-called “carbon offset credits,” must be able to continue manufacturing and spewing out their nasty CO2. Readers can surely see we’re in a quite the conundrum. It’s like buying cigarettes for your mom, even though she has COPD, because you know she loves you and will give you good things.

But it’s more laughable than that because we will be borrowing the money to pay the carbon credits for the Chinese. And who will we likely borrow this money from? The Chinese, of course, the only ones today with any money to spend.

There are a variety of other smaller issues that come to mind: The Gitmo detention center closure, the cigarette tax (if we tax cigarettes deeply, people will stop smoking, but then our revenue stream will dry up and we’ll be asking Camel to put out ads to entice kids to start smoking), and runaway spending on pork projects included in virtual every 1,000+ page bill that is thrust in front of Congresspersons and Senators with the demand that the vote come as early as tomorrow, never mind that lawmakers have not yet had a chance to read these bills. Oh, and there’s that nasty 9.5% unemployment rate that’s really 11.5% once you take into account that a lot of Americans’ average work-weeks have declined to 33 hours (e.g. they’ve moved from full-time to part-time).

And of course, there’s the power grab by the Executive branch–what with 27 and counting so-called “czars.”

I’m having a hard time deciding what our country is becoming, but I think it’s slowly sliding down a slippery slope toward a socialist, communist, fascist oligarchy. I can tell you it is not the country Jefferson and Adams envisioned.

Some think we have a king that’s really a cabbage. I leave that determination up to you.

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