Shabbat shalom kol beit Yis'rael and Mishpachah Lev-Tsiyon! May the grace or undeserved loving kindness of our Father Yahweh be with us through Yah'shua (Jesus) His Son on this qodesh (set-apart, holy) day of assembly. I know, at the very least, that the United States and a large part of the world have their eyes turned on the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President. Our prayer today is that the powers of evil will be held in check so that Yahweh's will may be done and judgment brought to the élites for the deliverance and empowerment of Messianic Israel for the final gathering.

Our plea to Heaven is for more time to complete our labours for the Kingdom even if that inevitably means much hard work at a time when so many of us are worn out. But we trust in His revitalising and healing Ruach (Spirit). As I have said before, our business is to do the hard stuff now and the impossible later! So if the going is tough, it's to prepare us for a ministry of the miraculous.

Every day we face two choices - the choice of living in one of two identities. We can either choose to live in the external mask which seems to be permanently real and which lives by a shadowy autonomy for a brief moment - that is to say, living our short lives in the fleshy, carnal or Adamic nature which we visibly see and feel as our physical bodies - or we can choose to live as the hidden, inner person who may at times seem to us to be nothing, but who can give himself externally to the emet (truth) in whom he subsists. It is this inner self which we can choose to allow to be taken up into the mystery of Messiah, by His ahavah (love), by the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit), so that in secret we can live "in Messiah".

That may seem very mystical and in a sense it is because that part of us which is hidden up with, and in, Yah'shua (Jesus) is an intensely personal reality which no one alive can see directly, let alone comprehend. Others, attuned to the Ruach (Spirit), may be granted glimpses of that personal divine reality, and especially those with whom we are close, but for the most part it is quite hidden. If we are looking for admirers - others who can see what is going on in this mystical union we have - not only is that impossible but the very desire would suggest we are not in that union at all, but rather are still focussed on the self, which is dead. We cannot display that union - ever - except it be filtered through the works that we do toward others in the little space and time allotted to us.

When you come to think about it, we inhabit a very, very tiny portion of this world - and I mean you and I as individuals. We play out our existence down here on earth within a very small radius, no more than a few feet or meters. Within this tiny piece of physical and psychic time and space we can either meet with the Creator of the entire Universe or we can miss Him altogether. Within this small space we are called to be aware of Yahweh's presence, be consecrated by it, and be transfigured in its light.

I know one or two of you have got upset or agitated when I have insisted that as men and women we are animals. Certainly biologists would have no problem with my using that terminology, especially those enamoured by such fairy tales as evolution since they are convinced we have biological ancestry with monkeys and they with various creatures hearkening back to an imaginary soup lit up by a bolt of lightening. The other day my youngest son was telling me how he could barely contain himself from bursting out with laughter as his secular school teacher was waxing eloquent on how wolves climbed into the sea and their noses migrated to the tops of their heads and thence to the backs of their heads to become whales. It is for sure extraordinary what nonsense the world has forced itself to believe in order to deny the Creator. Needless to say the teacher must have forgotten that Mrs.Wolf would simultaneously have had to migrate her nose over her head, along with all the other nunmerous physiological and anatomical modifications that Mr.Wolf had decided to busily make in order to adapt to the sea and become a whale ... along their children after them, for tens of thousands of generations, to ensure they were able to reproduce. Isn't this just another version of gender identity? Only this time it's 'species identity' only this time I choose to become a whale and get on with the magical transformation in 250,000 million easy stages.

That piece of comedy aside, what I mean by saying that we are animals is that we are both of the earth and of heaven. We have two addresses. We have a dual origin. We are, on the one hand, the most spectacularly designed and developed of all the animals Yahweh has made. I can only imagine what we were like in our Adamic state before the fall, with physical and psychic powers long since lost, and I cannot begin to imagine what we will be like in our resurrected state. We are, distinct from all other animals, stamped with the image of Elohim (God), both outwardly and - most importantly of all - inwardly. That inward part is uniquely crafted to be able to commune with Elohim (God) from whence comes the eternal chayim (life) which both connects us to, and creates the longing within us, for that higher world we have temporarily vaccated.

Now there are those who say that other animals cannot commune with Yahweh as we do, and I am in agreement with them, but I cannot agree that they cannot commune with Him at all. If animals can discern supernatural beings like demons and malakim (angels), as I know for a fact dogs can from numerous experiences in my life, then I have to believe that are able to discern the Supreme Being in some way too. Those who reject this, or any idea that a animals (and plants too, for that matter) have any part in the life to come, I think do so because they believe animals do not have what they term a 'soul', by which they mean a non-material, spiritual aspect. This is a doctrine born out of Catholicism which I reject. I have certainly seen animals in the spiritual realm that were once pets who have died and passed on, so I most definitely do believe in the restoration of the Edenic world as it was before the Fall in some form or another. What creatures will be there and what will not I cannot say but I certainly believe that all living creatures have some sort of spiritual component. What part of Elohim (God) is stamped on them, or to what degree, I again cannot say, only that there must be a connection, since when He made them in their perfect form He pronounced them "good". I think nearly all of us hope to be reunited with our pets one day.

I speak of perfect worlds, past and future, but in the present our world is anything but perfect. The image of Elohim (God) in man is blurred and distorted and the reason it is so is too big to go into for the purposes of today's discussion. I still have many questions to ask Yahweh about this myself! One thing is certain, though - we are capable of communion with Yahweh with that nature He created in us, but only as we make that our focus, our goal, the very centre of our ambition. To 'see' Yahweh inwardly we have to train our spirits in much the same way we look down telescopic sites on a rife to see our target close-up. That requires proper callibration and focussing of our telescopic sites otherwise the target is blurred.

In the same way, we cannot possible 'see' Elohim (God) if we come to regard ourselves as the beginning and end of reality, if all we can do is define reality around us in terms of ourselves. A friend of mine, who was once a very passionately focussed believer and who has steadily rejected one emet (truth) after another, now defines Elohim (God) in terms of himself and his wife in an idealised form. He doesn't see it that way, of course, but really that is what he has done - those of us who knew him all see it. But that is what carnal unbelievers do - they see themselves as their own beginning and end, the centres of their own universe, and spend their lives trying to get everyone and everything to revolve around them. They deify themselves. Then picture everyone trying to get those in their reach to orbit around them - the system of relationships is bound to fall to pieces because a soul can't go in multiple directions.

The sin of carnal man is not his drive to survive or his disproportionate development of his animals senses in that quest, nor is his sin an inadequate development of rational control. His sin is a perversion of reason itself. He is using his spiritual capabilities, such as he is aware of, in the exercise of a bunker mentality that pits him (and possibly his family) against the world in a bid not to be erased, and to find meaning in his grand exercise of survival. Once he has realised that his wife is not a goddess (or his wife that her husband is not a god) then another major readjustment must be made as perceived reality clashes with the actual one. To survive, reason must be utterly twisted to make sense of the fantasy that he has created in his denial of the true Elohim (God).

Yahweh did not enable or equip us to usurp His toqef (authority) or to hijack the capacity to commune with Him in a futile bid to commune with a spouse or any other human being in a divine way. We have obviously been given the means to communicate with one another but not in any divine sense and the only way we can experience one another as divinely created beings, and not merely as physical and psychic shells, is through the Divine One Himself. We will only see poor reflections, hazy images, instead of the Ultimate Reality that creates us images of Himself if we try to do things without Him. And when you boil it down you discover that the 'sin of sins' is not sensuality, which inevitably results from a life outside the Ruach (Spirit), but pride - pride in thinking we could ever survive as 'godlets', let alone thrive for any length of time. All the 'godlets' that have ever lived in history have been most miserable and have made everyone they tried to control equally miserable.

Coming to a realisation that we are not 'godlets' or miniature, self-sustaining gods, and never can be, is a good thing. The only real tragedy is that so many people waste their finite and unrepeatable lives discovering this truth only to find it is too late to do anything about it because so much tinme has slipped away. Do we need to explore, or experiment, in order to discover what are not? I know a lot of people who think so, some of them who were once believers. Most of them are still at it, their spiritual capacity shrinking with each day they neglect the sacred tie to their Creator. And if they ever once exercised any spirituality, they soon forget it and instead try to reproduce it with what's left to them - their own diminishing, mortal psyche. They will typically turn inwards and try to find Elohim (God) inside themselves. Initially they surprise themselves by believing the lie they are gods because of some momentary surging psychic energy that they think comes from outside themselves that provides them with a sudden and unexpected thrill. Then the perceived need is to keep the titillation coming again and again, hopefully deeper and deeper. But the psyche is finite and it does not lead to Yahweh. It is but the fur lining of a glove, not the hand inside the glove that the soul wants to touch and hold. It's an easy thing to give the soul a thrill with some psychic titilation and to mistake that as Elohim (God). Humanity has been doing it for millennia. Self has an extraordinary capacity to delude because the Creator made us with the capacity for imagination. People look into mirrors with magnifying glasses and imagine all sorts of fantastic things and become even more excited the more bent the mirrors are.

Yes, the marks of Elohim (God) are in the heavens and on the earth but people miss them. If they can look at a whale and say, "Hey, that was once a wolf that jumped into the sea and moved its nose over its head and completely changed its internal anatomy and physiology like a caterpillar in a crysallis by the power of an imaginary fairy god-mother called 'natural selection' that originally made everything out of nothing", then man can for sure fantasise about almost anything. In ancient Egypt they used to believe that beetles were spontaneously generated by dung.

Look at the state of mankind today in the once Christian West - half the population today believes in crazy things. They don't even know how to think rationally anymore, they don't even want to. You can't have an intelligent conversation because everything is driven by emotions. They just want to angrily shout you down if you dare to challenge their fantasy, and many of them would kill you if they were allowed to. And in a few years they'll probably be allowed to, and encouraged to, as they were in Mao's 'Cultural Revolution' in China. If you think the world is insane now, just wait another ten or twenty years. People are going to invent all kinds of new 'alternative realities' and religions to service them. Every man will become his own religious dispensing machine - he'll probably change or tweek his religion on a daily basis depending on how he feels.

I've not mentioned the part played by demons in all of this and I don't need to, so I won't. In the space of one decade we have seen once intelligent and level-headed people completely lose it. And these weren't ordinary run-of-the-mill people but well educated, disciplined and spiritual people who once knew and communed with Yahweh. Somewhere along the line they let go of that invisible rope that linked them to their source and they began to float around like drunkards in outer space becoming more and more delusional. If that isn't a judgment for sin I don't know what is.

It is neither a good nor a pleasant thing to be lost. Some of you may remember a true story of a man whose plane crashed on a remote island in the Pacific where he was marooned for years. Not knowing Yahweh and overwhelmed by loneliness, he formed a relationship with a basketball on which he had painted a face came to view as a person. It's easier when there are other people with you marooned on this planet we call Earth because we can then sustain one another's fantasies. However, those who know Yahweh can be alone for long periods of time and both survive and thrive.

John the Baptist was one such man. He was called to be a navi (prophet) and prepare the way of Messiah to a disbelieving and highly rebellious people who thought they knew Elohim (God). They had the same Scriptures - the same Tanakh (Old Testament) - that you and I have, but they didn't know Him personally. They ignored the Scriptures anyway by reinventing them with their own written 'explanations' and not only called these 'Scripture' but had the conceit to say they were more important than the original Scriptures they purported to explain. Never mind that the explanations contradicted one another. The final insult to the Creator was to insist that the sayings of their learnèd teachers take precendence over Yahweh and the original nevi'im (prophets) - one of them even said that if one of their esteemed Rabbis said something and Elohim (God) said something to the contrary, that the people should followed the esteemed Rabbi before Yahweh because that's how Yahweh set everything up. Do you suppose that system was able to prevent the growth of pride? That pride mushroomed and became murderous. It trampled and then killed anything that dared oppose it. It killed Yah'shua (Jesus) in the end.

Such men and women have arisen in our own day. Nothing much has changed. So-called believers are still chasing after self, the psyche, and calling it 'God' and the 'Spirit'. They have fantastic experiences. Their followers have fantastic experiences. Sometimes people are healed...for a while. Converts come pouring in, and it all looks, oh so wonderful, and surely 'God' must be in the midst of it? People are happy in a way though they have to keep coming back for more and more fixes to stay on top of those happy-waves. They need more and more revelations, more and more prophecies, more and more teachings, more and more clever interpretations of Scripture in order to fashion out something new and even more exciting than the established, well-worn but solid wisdom of the ages. And when the novelty of that has worn off, they turn to yet something newer. Pretty soon there's a spiritual famine happening and people are restlessly looking here and there for nourishment and not finding it. Man never ceases to invent more doctrines and experiences. Some of the 'churches' that are popping up are like something far more monstrous and far more ominous than Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice and Wodnerland, could ever have conceived of. People today are going down all sorts of psychic holes and into upside down, twisted and psychadelic worlds made to get people as lost as Carroll's Mad Hatter.

It is going to require a special toughness on the part of the Remnant to walk through the purposeless delusion that the whole world has fallen into. Wolves turning into whales will seem like quaint children's stories by comparison to the firhgtening reality of man's lostness. I am glad I shall not see it's global hegemony.

"What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?
Most men eddy about
Here and there - eat and drink
Chatter and love and hate
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurled in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving Nothing;
and then the die -
Perish; and no one asks
Who or what they have been." [1]

The poet John Oxenham said:

"To every man there openeth
A Way, and Ways, and a Way,
And the High Soul climbs the High Way,
And the Low Soul gropes the Law,
And in between, on misty flats,
The rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth
A High Way, and a Low.
And every man decideth
The Way his soul should go." [2]

You and I - everyone - at this critical juncture with the current Jubilee Year due to end in 2½ months, have a monumetal choice to make, a choice that will determine the rest of our lives - to take the High Road, the Low Road, or wander aimlessly inbetween. The High Road entails great sacrifice but brings the highest reward; the Low requries less and yields less - and those who refuse to choose will wander, lost, in an alternative reality and be swallowed up into the Kingdom of Darkness. What will you choose?

Endnotes