Giving Thanks vs. Thanksgiving

Post 278

In the previous two Posts I think the scientific complexity became so overwhelming in thought that the actual point may have been missed; that is the Northern kingdom abandoned God and was destroyed without hope of recovery, and the Southern kingdom was itself internally divided, shown in time by the successful repulsion of the Assyrian that conquered the North, but then fell to the Babylon whore that does not kill the less than faithful wife, she just transforms her.
It is the complexity of this last fall of the second part that needs to be explored because that unfaithful wife is still alive and can be redeemed with the remnant if she will repent. This is the topic of today’s Post.

Can you identify the significant difference between giving thanks and Thanksgiving? In our Type of the two-part kingdom we see that Israel refused to give thanks at all while Judah had Thanksgiving, but God was looking for them to give thanks… which neither of them did. This distinction, though seemingly small, is vital. Like the genesis of the species, the fundamental important details are in the differences, not in the similarities.
To help you readily grasp my proposed concept, think of Thanksgiving as the theory of Evolution and giving thanks as the Creator God theory. Remember; we have discarded the unbeliever as the Northern kingdom and we are now investigating complexities of only the Southern kingdom of God’s “faithful” people, to discover the cause of their subsequent incarceration style “discarding” as well.

Think back to the American Pilgrims, just what did they have to be thankful for? Those poor people had experienced the flight from religious persecution in their homelands, the hardships of losing loved ones while crossing the sea in less than five star accommodations, to end up on the hostile shores of a strange and unbroken land when starvation, disease, hard life and cruel winters cut their ranks by less than half. Where was God in all that? Why did they give earnest and heartfelt thanks to the Creator and Sustainer for his seeming lack of help and sustenance? We will answer that question later only by reflection, but now let’s look at today’s Thanksgiving by comparison:

The average American has so much money that we don’t need to scratch our very lives from the soil with our fingernails, we just drive to the store and pick through the heaps of world sourced foods piled onto shelves and bins just waiting for us to poke and sniff, pretending to have such scrutinizing palates as to search for the best of the lot to take home and fix into so much perfectly prepared provision that we have to take fizzy tablets to keep our stomachs from hurting. Then we waddle into the living room with our loved ones and flop into padded chairs that even recline so that our overstuffed carcasses can be supremely comfortable while we watch the religiously traditional football game or parade on a 52” High Definition TV.
“Now that is Thanksgiving at its best!”

But just what are we giving thanks for? Are we even giving thanks at all? Or is Thanksgiving just the name that we gave a specific day of ancient and unrelated memorial to yearly take off work and fill our every pleasure to the maximum capacity?
Isn’t the actual spirit of Thanksgiving today a kind of twisted excuse to over indulge as a way of expressing our gratefulness for having so much? For many years, before the arrival of our utter destruction, Conservative Christian America did not actually abandon God as the Northern kingdom of the Liberal Godless, we just traditionalized him into our own gluttony and called it faith.

But if I ask you to show me the spirit of thanksgiving in the events of the Thanksgiving day, you will be able to show it to me in everything that was done; Inviting loved ones to fellowship in the special day honoring the LORD, eating the huge volume of provision and taking time to actually bow the head and say “thank you” for the excess of abundance, taking the day off from work and its secular drive for Money to “relax in the Lord’s provision,” and an overall warm feeling of good-will and a break from frustration and anger of a normal day; “Yes, this is a great day to give thanks!”

Same event, but two different angles of perception. How do we know which is the true rendition and which is the illusion? Is it only a matter of personal perspective or is there a way to find out for sure?
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Tradition:
Don’t misunderstand me, I am not suggesting that tradition is a bad thing; in fact it is very, very good… until the tradition itself replaces the actual meaning of the tradition. Allow me to show this in another current-events way:

I just spent a significant amount of time reviewing the plethora of this year’s Christmas presentations on TV in an effort to identify the overall theme.
“Theme?” you query, “It’s Christmas of course!”
But is it?
Now while I am not going to provide the details of the shows individually, the trending through them all was very striking. Interestingly enough they all fell well within the “outline” of the Christmas pageant titled; Trans-Siberian Orchestra: Ghosts of Christmas Eve. There is no doubt that this musical presentation had some of the recognizable trappings of a traditional Christmas pageant but the DNA of The Christmas pageant was utterly missing while it retained enough proteins to make it seem “Christmassy.”
Now while this seems like a simple step away from traditional, in the harmless expression of a younger generation’s creative rendition, the real trap is that the traditional Christmas pageant which it pretends to be, is itself only pretending to be true worship. So in all reality the Trans-Siberian Orchestra: Ghosts of Christmas Eve is really only the worship of the image of a dead religion and not the dead religion itself.

I am not yet an old man, but in my own lifetime, though I was too young to accurately remember true worship in the faith at Christmas, I do remember the very earnest and glorious Christmas pageants that honored that faith. Now today, the pageants are honoring the pageants of the past and have completely forgotten the faith that those earlier pageants honored. Once it was the worship of the Son of God come to Earth, then it was Baby Jesus in a manger, then it was Santa Clause, and now it's "the Magic of Christmas."
Remember the old black and white movies that, although already secular, still retained the pageantry of Church and “the meaning of Christmas” in the moral that they preached? It’s a Wonderful Life was already sliding down the rails of secular but you could still find the Christmas root buried down deep if you wanted to. Though the people depicted in the movie were not seriously faithful to God they nonetheless held the traditional values of Christmas. Then we went through several years of abandoning the traditional Christmas and replaced it with Santa Clause, Miracle on 34th Street was just such an example. The already warped spirit of It’s a Wonderful Life passed on that warpage, now slightly more warped with still newer values, and so the change happened perceptively gradual and uncontested. The problem is that It’s a Wonderful Life had already morphed the spirit of Christmas and so the spirit that was transferred wasn’t even the right spirit to begin with before it morphed again. But today we look back on that old movie as the perfection of representing Christmas. Now today our Christmas pageants, devoid of any hint of Christ, are of the warped spirits of yesterdays warped Santa Clause spirits themselves warpages of the previous pageants that warped the worship of Jesus. The former actual worship of Jesus Christ the Mighty Savior, is so forgotten that to restore the old ways of Christmas is to bring back a simple, clean, and un-warlock type Santa Clause! Today the spirit of Christmas is all about Mystical "Christmas Magic.”

While most all the programs this year are personal family based stories with “real life” settings of people in need of a “Christmas Miracle,” some of this year’s programs retained renditions of Santa Clause with combined elements of the traditional manger scene Jesus, but even those were presented in the “real life” presentation of Mystical Magic helping real people in need. The entire spirit of Christmas today is expressed in the now familiar whisper; “BELIEVE!”
Believe in what? It doesn’t matter; Baby Jesus, Santa Clause, Good Fate, Hope, it’s all the same thing, it’s simply; “Y’u gotta have FAITH in faith.” Christmas has now become a special time of year when you can hope for miracles to happen more than at any other time of year; the source is really unimportant, and in fact not actually knowing the Mystical source is an important part of the miracle, as in the spirit of not telling what you wished for or it wouldn't come true (*1).
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Where am I going with this in any practical way?
The key to proper comprehension of what is observed is based on perspective. Let’s say that reality is exampled in a described event like a snap-shot in time:
A person is drowning at the bottom of a water-tower tank and another person is standing on the walkway at the top of the tank looking down into the water, their eyes meet. The perspective that really matters in this example is whether you are the one standing on the walkway, or are you lying on the bottom looking up? Every discussion about the drowning person takes on completely different meaning and application depending on your perspective. Are you in the condition to help or are you the one needing help? Until the event actually takes place the discussion of which you are is subjective in the following definition:

Subjective: b. arising from conditions within the brain or sense organs and not directly caused by external stimuli.

Let’s take this a step further in the example and let’s assume it is just before the event in question, and by scrutinizing the details in the photo we positively identify that it is indeed you standing on the walkway looking down into the water. This is a good thing right?
All the presented parameters allow you to become confident that you are the rescuer; You got ropes and harnesses grapples and pulleys. Any warnings or further statements regarding the drowning person are perceived by you as information that you can use to help the person you see at the bottom of the tank; The tank is so deep and so filled, the walls are thus composed, the water is such a temperature, etc., etc., all easily seen as very good information to describe how they fell in and the dangers they now face and useful to aid you in the rescue attempt.
The problem is that the picture is a warning given to you, because a board is about to break as you look into the tank and it will be you that falls into the water loaded down with all your rescue equipment. It will be someone else who is seen standing on the walkway looking down at you drowning at the bottom. But now you know how you got there.

This is why you cannot clearly comprehend yourself as the Jew in the holocaust. By a wrong perception you are sure that everything the scriptures and history has to say about “them” is not speaking of “you.” When the “photo” of scripture in Type talks of a board breaking and someone falling in and then someone standing there looking down, you perceive yourself being the second individual because the Jew has already fallen in. Don’t be such a fool! If you walk on the same platform the same fate will be yours because all those boards are rotten! This is not a forth-dimensional discussion of timing; it’s a fifth-dimensional discussion of patterns.

“Thou wilt say then, The branches were broken off, that I might be grafted in. Well; because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith. Be not highminded, but fear:
For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee. Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, If thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off” Romans 11:19-22.

“So how does one actually change their present perception when all of the evidence leads me to conclude that I am the rescuer and not the victim?”

The very question is the beginning of the answer.
Now let me help:
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Why did the Jews suffer the holocaust?
Being the generation after the holocaust and not being Jewish, we have a two-fold numbing of anesthesia that blinds us to really seeing. It is natural in this drugged state to imagine that their real world situation of cause-and-effect does not and cannot affect ours. In this way we again literally dehumanize them just as the Nazis did at the time by forcing the Jew into a pathetic condition that allows us to then make this dehumanized distinction of their animalistic condition in contrast to our own refined condition of life.
A month before the events the Jews were just normal happy families of working class people making a living to pay their mortgages and feed their families, and buy them delightful things as expressions of their love for one another. A month after, they were filthy animals sleeping on a flea infested blanket unfit for dogs and eating inedible scraps from the floor or a parlor pot like wild beasts at an unusually cruel zoo.

But think about it; Were the Jews irreligious just before the holocaust, were they indistinguishable from their Pagan neighbors? Didn’t they faithfully carry out their religious traditions of Holy Days handed down through Moses? Weren’t they carefully living out the regimented Jewish life? Were they so evil as to be worthy of such torment that would befall them within a month?
“NO! What they experienced was not their fault! It was Hitler and his demonic spirit of violence against the innocent!”
Who is going be so coldly brash as to argue that point?

“Oh God! Why make it me?!” (asked only rhetorically since I already know the answer).
His answer is because I have no dog in this fight. I am simply the obedient messenger of what God really wants you to grasp, for a reason that you cannot yet perceive. So allow me to continue.

I have watched many hours of original footage as well as many interviews with actual holocaust survivors in the attempt to discover why God would have delivered these people into such atrocities. Why them specifically? They really didn’t appear wicked at all, and especially not by comparison of other far more wicked but not likewise abused nations. What is God’s perspective in light of his promises to carry out exactly what happened? (Deuteronomy 27:20+31:29+32:30-31). Here is what came loudly through:

Admitting that I have not seen all the interviews done, and all the interviews were themselves only a fraction of the survivors, and the survivors were but a fraction of the incarcerated, yet I have seen enough of them to formulate an unbroken trend: In every case I heard victims. I never heard repentance. Not once.
The Horrors that those poor people suffered are beyond human comprehension. This is not debatable except for the wildly insane who claim it never happened, the volume of documentation is too profound and conclusive. The problem is that by experiencing those horrors, there is no evil more great that can be compared next to it to show the suffering as justified. Where is the darker blackness to show them that their innocent victim mentality of “light” is a flawed perception? How does God justify such things?
Today in our geographicly far-away and years-removed timeframe of reality, we too ask these questions of God because we have no greater blackness by which to compare the events. This is completely a perceptional issue that affects virtually every verse of scripture we read.

God’s simple two-dimensional answer is in effect; “I told you not to climb the water tower of sin.” And the beginning of our self-justifying reply of well-intended rebellion is; “But…”

In our self-justifying god-status of free-will we require more information than “Don’t” in order to justify God in conflict with our own rational superior-opinions on the matter. And in kindness and patience God provides that more information, but it’s not simple; It’s very complex; it’s fifth-dimensional, which is why he gave it to us in the simple and easy to understand version of “Don’t.”

What didn’t the Jews do?
Isn’t it obvious by now? They didn’t obey God.
But that is not obvious, is it? Why?
Because we are just as disobedient as they were, and like them, we feel that we are faithful. We refuse to see our sin as God sees our sin and so we accuse God of unjustified abandonment just as they did… and still do, even after their incarceration.
I have shown you in over four years and 250 posts the guilt that, by the very definition of “remnant,” you most probably cannot yet fully accept because you still see yourself as the saved rescuer of sinners standing on the platform looking down, rather than the one drowning (Luke 6:39, Romans 1:32). So providing more scripture as support of my “picture” is not going to do a bit more good.
That is not why I am still writing.

The reason I am still writing is because even after experiencing and surviving the holocaust, the Jews never got the message of their incarceration. They spent the entire time crying; “I’m innocent! I don’t deserve this!”
Where is the greater blackness that can show them that they are not victims? It is within their own heart; the greater blackness is their own perception of their virtue. So if that is the case, why did God not likewise destroy the far more wicked nations than the Jews?
The answer is found in the purpose of the first commandment:

“And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” Deuteronomy 6:5.

God was not the God of the other nations, so as wicked as they acted they were not violating this commandment to them; the Jews were violating His commandment to them because they were indeed God’s people and so had commandments by which they would be judged, namely a singular and complete love of God alone.

“What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said; Thou shalt not covet” Romans 7:7.

But by generations of warping the original faith, their religious pageants of traditions eventually were themselves warped into mere shadows of those pageants until their faith was transformed into meaningless national holy-days (holidays) with names like Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, or Hanukah, Yom-kippur and Passover, completely devoid of the DNA of those memorials but retaining the trappings that allow us to pretend that we are honoring God while we consume them upon our own lust.

“Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts” James 4:3.

Going into our own incarceration fully convinced we are not guilty will allow us to have incredibly enduring “faith” that, like the Jews, will wait patiently for God to rescue us even while we witness the unspeakable horrors of God’s non-rescuing abandonment wrath. Coming out the other side of the holocaust we will have a very bizarre faith in a God that either cannot, or willnot rescue us (Isaiah 59:1-2).
To the person, every non-Christian Jew that survived the holocaust will openly declare that God abandon them. The truth of their declaration is purely a fact that cannot be denied as sure as the holocaust itself cannot be denied. God did indeed abandon them. But they still retain no guilt in the matter so what they experienced lies wholly at the feet of God himself for his meglomaniacally cruel ways.
Christian Americans are the exact image of this Type as they know they are not “really” in obedience to God but by the grace of his Son’s sacrifice they are convinced they don’t need to be. So when God delivers us into the camps the strongest of these “faithful Christians” will keep their deeply tried faith while at the same time witness that the God in whom they trust cannot or willnot save them from a horribly unspeakable fate they do not deserve.
Go ahead, turn your Christian hatred on those inhuman Muslims whose teeth are filled with the flesh of your corpses made into a stew (Micah 3:3). But I remind you that it is God himself who sends them (Micah 2:3) for your own doings (Micah 2:4).

“Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the LORD shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee” Deuteronomy 27:48.

But hey, this is Thanksgiving and we should really put away all unpleasant thoughts and unsavory comments and give thanks to the LORD on this day! So eat up till it hurts and go relax in front of a really exciting game, I hope it’s a close score because who wants to see a boring game? Oh, and, HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!
(See God’s command to Jeremiah in 16:8-9).
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(*1) Christmas Miracles:
I am not going to get into the details as to the complex morphology of this concept but will provide one example for you to ponder:
I was interested to notice the very large volume of programs that all provided an actual brighter-than-usual magical star upon which to make a “Christmas Wish”. A Christmas Wish, we are confirmed repeatedly from many various and unrelated shows, is a special wish that will come true only at Christmas.

“Ya, OK, so what? It’s a fairy tale for entertainment.”
Right.
But oddly enough this Christmas Star looks exactly like those of the old shows depicting the supernatural Bethlehem Star over Baby Jesus’ manger. In those earlier shows the corruption had already begun in a far more concealed way; the focus on the symbol rather than what it symbolized (Romans 1:25). Today’s magical Christmas Star is not just some new fanciful idea dreamed up by a screenwriter trying to create an interesting fantasy as a replacement of the Biblical account; it is a corruption of the Biblical account itself.

Corrupt: 1. Now Rare. Changed from a sound to a putrid state; tainted. 2. Changed from a state of uprightness, correctness, truth, etc., to a bad state; depraved.

Something cannot become corrupted unless it was previously in a non-corrupted state.
Why not invent a unique holiday of wishing upon a supernatural glint in a diamond ring on the second Thursday after the full moon if there is new snow on the ground?
The answer is because that would have no point.
The magical Christmas wishing star must be such a star, on that day, because then and only then can it corrupt the Bethlehem Star and the declaration that it made:

Jesus Christ the Messiah and hope of the world has come!

But just to deny that declaration ever happened is not enough, the very message must be fully corrupted in order to make sure the original message cannot be recovered even to the curious historian (*1b). So, THE star is intentionally retained, and it’s supernatural presentation also remains, we just change the very nature of the star by first providing an earlier corruption long before the corruption of the corruption is made. Therefore whoever wishes to retrace the roots of the corruption will discover “the original star” but never find the truth that that star was itself a corruption of something even older (Revelation 12:1-4).

“And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works” II Corinthians 11:14-15.

vs.

“And, behold, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shined in the prison…” Acts 12:7a.
“I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star” Revelation 22:16.

The traditional pageant of a helpless baby sucking sustenance from the breast of his poverty stricken human mother and whose dirty diapers needed to be changed by the hand of his human father, a helpless child who needed to be protected by human parents and learn right from wrong by the education of human thought, all this is the perceptional corruption of the original message of salvation with those very details. The star simply proclaimed the Savior had come; the salvation was not for another three decades at his death and resurrection.
So while we forget that point and desire to return to the Old Traditional Pageants of the charming Christmas story of a baby, what does a magical Wishing Star have to do with that… Even on Christmas? The answer is that such a special star obviously has more power than the helpless baby.
(*1b) A Current Sample Corruption of a Corruption Type:
Remember at this year’s Olympics in London it was determined that the Palestinians could compete in the games under the quasi and unofficial national title of Palestine? What a wonderful and benevolent decision by the game officials, right? Never mind that the capitol of this quasi nation was officially entered as Jerusalem; it’s just pretend so that they could enter the games.
But now seemingly unrelated, only a few months later, on November 20, 2012:

“Palestinians win upgraded UN status by wide margin
The UN General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to recognise (sic) Palestine as a non-member observer state - a move strongly opposed by Israel and the US… The Palestinians can now take part in UN debates and potentially join bodies like the International Criminal Court.
The assembly voted 138-9 in favour, with 41 nations abstaining.
Hundreds of Palestinians celebrated on the streets of Ramallah, in the West Bank after the result was announced.

‘ Birth Certificate’
Sixty-five years ago on this day, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 181, which partitioned the land of historic Palestine into two states and became the birth certificate for Israel," Mr Abbas said shortly before the vote in New York.
"The General Assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the State of Palestine," he said.
...
The UK abstained from the vote, as did Germany. The Czech Republic, Canada, the Marshall Islands and Panama were among the nations voting with the US and Israel. In the West Bank, crowds celebrated the vote by waving flags and chanting "God is great!"
"For the first time, there will be a state called Palestine, with the recognition of the entire world," Amir Hamdan was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.
"Today the world will hear our voice," he added.

Symbolic milestone
The Palestinians are seeking UN recognition of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, the lands Israel captured in 1967.
While the move is seen as a symbolic milestone in Palestinian ambitions for statehood, the "Yes" vote will also have a practical diplomatic effect, says the BBC's Barbara Plett, at the UN.
The Palestinians hope that access to UN bodies will bring new rights: A successful application for membership of the ICC could be used to accuse Israel of war crimes or make other legal claims against it.
"This is a whole new ball-game now. Israel will be dealing with a member of the international community, a state called Palestine with rights," senior PLO official Hanan Ashrawi told the BBC.
"We will have access to international organisations and agencies and we will take it from there."
There had been lobbying by Israel and the US to try to delay the vote or change the text to obtain guarantees that no international legal action would be taken against Israel.
Last year, Mr Abbas asked the UN Security Council to admit the Palestinians as a member state, but that was opposed by the US…” - (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20550864).

It has only been 65 years but already the world has forgotten the complicated details that has brought us to this controversial decision of recognizing Palestine as a nation or not. It’s a little matter of a stolen name.
Historically the designation of Palestine was given solely to the Jewish nation and their lands. Palestine was a name the Jews were proud of and bore it on maps, buildings, newspapers, businesses, etc., in their homeland.
As a stroke of genius, when the Jews selected the official national title of “Israel” the Arab squatters on the fringe quickly argued for and received the former designation to identify themselves. Eventually, by the use of that old historic name these squatters began to claim ownership of the land that went with the name. Now today, after only 65 years of lobbing rockets into Israel to keep the irritating attention on themselves the UN has finally recognized these squatting unruly terrorist thieves as the Nation of Palestine… whose capitol is Jerusalem.
So until Jerusalem is also handed to them as the “historically ancient capitol of Palestine” I don’t see them becoming pleasant neighbors to the Jews.
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