Sheridan Voice

Enhil, the king of the gods of Mesopotamia, was so disturbed with humanity for disturbing his nap, he wiped out most of them with a flood – so the legend reads. Imagine what this belief does to a person’s psychological state! Nay, the psychological state of a whole culture!

The God of Scripture is nothing like this. He is a God who loves mankind, He is obsessed with it, and He desires a true union with the human race. The Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the entire human system.

This is why Scripture calls God the “True and Living God,” to contrast Him with the gods of the nations.

Search the Scriptures
And you will see
The God it reveals
Loves you and me.

God is light and God is love. Those who learn this can enjoy a peaceful and joyous psychological state in rain or shine, sickness or health, or in whatever circumstances life throws our way.

I believe also that is was a terrible thing when men took the word ‘ekklesia’ and said it meant what our word ‘church’ means. I think that was a terrible mistake from which we still suffer today. Take any definition of the word ‘church’ and that is not what ‘ekklesia’ means. Ekklesia simply does not mean church and church does not mean ekklesia. It was a tragedy that this was imposed upon the Word of God.

Then another mistake was made when the word ‘judgment’ was made to mean ‘punishment.’ Instead of seeing that God’s judgments are good and greatly to be desired, that they are sweeter than honey and the honeycomb, and that when the day comes when the earth will be filled with God’s judgments that this will be the greatest possible blessing that men can ever enjoy, and when God causes judgment to be heard from heaven and the earth be filled with His judgments – Yet men took this word and made it to mean punishment and you can still hear evangelists talking about how God is pouring out His terrible judgments and His frightful judgments upon the sons of men. That was a great error which still persists with us today and is hard to get away from.

And then another error that was imposed upon men which came out of America’s frontier days, and this was just about as bad as any of them. People began to imagine that the work of the Holy Spirit was to get people worked-up emotionally and enthusiastically, to get them shouting and screaming and running up and down the aisles – they said this was the work of the Holy Spirit. I know that the established Churches in those days were so sedate, so high-bound, and so creed-bound that when people began to have their ‘store-front’ meetings, or their brush-hopper meetings, or their tent meetings they felt more liberty there and began to let their emotions run riot and as a result they began to think that this is the work of the Holy Spirit. But that isn’t what the Holy Spirit does. You just couldn’t find that stuff in the pages of the Word of God.

(I transcribed these words from an audio of Otis Sellers – good stuff!!)

Those who will have eonian life in the kingdom of God will flow out to others leading them to the knowledge of the true and living God.

Orthodoxy messed this word up. There are two kinds of people according to orthodoxy, those with “eternal” life and those going to hell. But when you understand eonian life you can’t possibly teach annihilation or hell. That’s because if one has eonian life, who will he or she flow out to? They will flow out to those without eonian life. In the future, those with eonian life are God’s representatives who will flow out until God finally becomes all in all. Those without eonian life aren’t going to be destroyed, but they will be resurrected to learn through God’s flowers about the God they either rejected or didn’t know in this life.

Take Job, for example. He had three daughters, the Miss Worlds of the day for their great beauty, and Job gave them an inheritance among their brothers – these ladies had their own portion! Their lives and position weren’t morphed into a husband. Job was from the line of Esau and had nothing to do with God’s arrangement for his distant cousins.

The moral of the story: God’s plan for marriage in Israel was just that, God’s plan for THEM – it was His arrangement. Marriages aren’t God’s arrangements today. “Ministers” or Justices aren’t God’s ministers putting God’s sanction on a marriage. Today marriage is completely our choice, some choices are good, some not so good. But let’s not make the mistake of saying that our marriages are God-sanctioned and our divorces are against God. You don’t need a minister, a church, or any ceremony to create a marriage – it is completely your arrangement with your significant other. If you want to have the state sanction it for various reasons, that’s your decision.

I made a good choice, and I hope God continues it in the kingdom. Until then, I try to follow Ephesians five for my marching orders as a husband.

The term firstborn applies to adult males who occupy positions of authority – either in the family or the government. My wife and I were watching a show called Designated Survivor. On the night of the State of the Union, the Capitol Building was destroyed and all three branches of government with it. Keifer Sutherland, who played a member of the President’s Cabinet, was suddenly President – he was the designated survivor. Now imagine if every Federal, State, County, City, and Township official were wiped out on a single night. That’s what happened in Egypt the night of the Passover – only Pharaoh was spared.

The Firstborn of people were the leaders – from Pharaoh’s cabinet down to the nomarchs and other nome officials. The Firstborn of beasts were the best of the stock – we might call them the breeding stock. Imagine the shock in Egypt that night.

No babies were harmed in the original epic – only Hollywood revisionist histories and the orthodox hell-fire monster kills innocent babies.