Saturday, February 08, 2003

I really like the way the following was written. No, I didn't write it, maybe in a hundred years I'll be able to write so clearly. It was written by Garner Ted Armstrong

The closer you look at things man has made, the more chaos, irregularity, and imperfection you see.  For example, even the period at the end of this sentence, if seen under a powerful microscope, would show as a series of tiny dots, some clearer than others; a fuzzy, irregular bunch of splotches on rough fibers which are the paper upon which it was printed.  But the closer you look at what God has done in nature, the more beauty, the more intricacy, the more perfection.

Inspect the petal of a flower, or the wing of a bird, or even the molecular structure of quartz under that same microscope, and you will see symmetry, harmony, beauty, intricate organization!

The first great independent was Satan the Devil. 

Not that Satan was "against" "organization" with him it was merely a question of "whose"?

The same is true of those who rail against "organized religion" today - as if all religious activities should be bereft of any structure; independent, disorganized, anarchistic.

Satan resented God's power.  He became insanely jealous of God. He resented God's laws, His government, His rules and regulations.  After countless periods of time, Satan had imbued his angels with his same evil, rebellious spirit.  Finally, Lucifer felt the time was ripe for a takeover!

Christ said, "I saw Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10:17).  Symbolically, in vision, John saw the same thing: "And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,

"And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.

"And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him" (Revelation 12:7-9).  The result of the great "star wars" of billions of years past is readily visible today.  All about us, so far as we can peer with modern technology such as the Hubble space telescope, we see wreckage.  Huge, poisonous clouds swirl in monstrous storms on the planet men named "Jupiter."  Billions of misshapen rocks hurtle in all directions as meteors and asteroids. The lifeless, rock-strewn face of Mars and our own moon attest to countless impacts of huge meteors.

When God decided the time had come to create man, and commence His plan of reproducing Himself through the human species, He came down to see a ?void, empty, waste, chaotic? world, covered with tossing, stygian seas, where not a single ray of light had shown for perhaps millions or billions of years.  This is the force of the Hebrew words "tohu and bohu", translated "without form, and void" or empty.

All was confusion.  Satan's handiwork always tends toward confusion; chaos; anarchy. But "...God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints" (I Corinthians 14:33).

God began RE-creating the earth, and when He had finished, all was spectacularly beautiful.  Man was created; then Eve - two perfectly-formed and shaped human beings, made in the very image of God.  They were placed in the midst of the most beautiful garden place in all history; brooks and rivulets, streams and rivers; countless shrubs, trees of every variety; teeming with life. Do not suppose Eden was like a few acres of landscaped garden in the back yard of some palatial estate.  No, it may have been several thousand square miles - an untrammeled, breathtaking scene of fabulous beauty.

But then Satan came on the scene, and deceived Eve.  Her husband followed her in her doubting of God, and the two of them broke God's laws by lusting after the forbidden fruit, then stealing it, and in so doing disobeying their only parent. By doing so, they broke four of the Ten Commandments.  Immediately, a great curse came upon them, and upon all nature.  "And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done" And the woman said, The serpent [Hebrew: "nachash," meaning "whispering enchanter"]beguiled me, and I did eat.

"And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

"And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel [the first shadow, or type, of the promise of the "seed" of the woman, which was Christ, and Satan's part in His death].

"Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children [Eve saw her firstborn murder his own brother] ; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

"And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

"Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return? (Genesis 3:13-19).

Adam and Eve were driven from the garden, to live lives as described above; hard-scrabble existence by the sweat of their brows, finding that nature itself seemed to have turned against them.  Such is the result of the first great rebel; the first great "independent" who set himself against God.

The term "pandemonium" aptly describes what it is meant to imply: "all demonism," or "demonic abandon everywhere."  Where there is no order; where there is no system, no rules and regulations, no law, there is chaos - pandemonium.


Read the rest here: Should You Avoid All Organized Religion?

This is an interesting tidbit, in light of future world events: Pope and Germany Stand Together Over Iraq

No comments: