Whether You Are a Believer or Not Is Irrevelant: God is Still God, and He's Awesome

There are places on this planet you can go and see nature so pristine and beautiful laid out before you and you can't help but think the thought that the Creator is awesome.  I've been to a few places like that, but I've always thought that the most compelling evidence of God's creative handiwork and power was the very Heavens themselves.  I mean look at these pictures.  I look at these photos of the wonders out there in an ever expanding universe and I think to myself  "There is a God".  Galaxies, nebula, black holes, pulsars, planets, comets, binary stars and a bunch of stuff even wilder are all out there. Galactic structures so awesome in scope that there size is measured in lightyears.








 It is difficult in the extreme for me to fathom how any human can look upon the mighty works in the heavens and conclude that such awesome, impossible beauty, order and titanic galactic forces could have been produced by random chance rather than the will of a divine and omniscient Creator.  Even more awesome and mind blowing a thought for me is this: the God who made all of the Creation we can see, in all its glorious wonder and mystery, that same God cares about each and every one of us individually, personally.  He cares about me.

I'll leave you with a slightly off the wall exit thought:  I sometimes wonder, as I think many people have from time to time,  when we die (if you are a believer) and go to Heaven, what will we do? God is so awesome and wonderful that I'm sure we could simply kneel before him and worship for all eternity.  Its what the Seraphim do, just worship.  But we are not like the angels.  We are His children, created to give Him glory in service to His will.  And God does not waste anything.  The universe is huge beyond our comprehension and still expanding and there is all this stuff out there that we've only seen in pictures or in our imaginations. I think its going to be our job to spend eternity exploring the rest of God's creation.

I think Heaven is gonna have spaceships.

I'm a Hater

When it comes to Jay-Z, I'm pretty much a hater. I dislike him.  My dislike was crystallized by the song "Roc Boys" where he glorified crack dealers.  I thought it was an extremely cynical, purely commercial (in the sense that it was only for the money) song, and from a values standpoint, it was simply terrible. It didn't help that I liked the tune.  Recently he teamed up with Alicia Keyes for "Empire State of Mind".  Jay-Z combined his get the money hip with Alicia's homewrecker skeez to rock out a performance at the AMA's. But listening to the words, one could not miss Jay-Z's anti-Jesus lyrics.

Jay Z recently released a new video for the song "On to the Next One", which like "Empire State of Mind" is an ode to himself. The video has some disturbing imagery in it, with the goat's head antlers and the cross between bullets being the one that makes you think Jay-Z has a problem with God.  Which apparently turns out to be the case.  On further investigation, apparrently Jay-Z has been dropping anti-God lyrics into his music for years and engaging in the hubris of calling himself "Hov", a derivation of Jehovah.

I'm simultaneously repulsed by its values and engaged by the visuals of the On to the Next One video.  Its dark, its grim, its pregnant with the arrogance of success. The song has an inveitable forward movement rythym that I like and that repeating song being sung in the background of the song makes me think of horror flicks like "Seven".  If I read this video as Jay-Z's way of tilting at the windmill of God, its not hard to imagine the birdlike dancing woman or minor rapper Swizz Beats in the video as Jay-Z's daemonic familiars, populating his dark kindgom of flaming basketballs and money.

If the devil can qoute scripture (and he can) then even a man foolish enough to openly mock God can say something insightful, even inspiring. Jay-Z analyzes his own a success a bit with lyrics like

" I move onward, the only direction
cant be scared to fail, Searchin for perfection"

don’t be mad cos it’s all about progression,
loiterers should be arrested

World can’t hold me, too much ambition

The words are instructive, a challenge to me almost. Jay-Z values, as carried by his music, are poisonus, destructive.  Yet he's rocking the planet at the pinnacle of fame, fortune and influence with the trophy Beyonce at his side, while simultaneoulsly mocking God. Jay-Z is comfortable and confident in his arrogance, in the certainty of his money making creative purpose.  I wonder what's he doing right that I'm doing wrong that our positions aren't reversed? I listen to the lyrics again and again trying to divine his secret, stunned at his defiance of God, jealous and resenful of his success despite that. As I bounce my head and mouth the words silently yet again, I think to myself, yeah, I'm a hater.

Lucifer Was Insane

Okay, roll with me here, I'm going with something a little different today.

I read science fiction. In the last few years, I've come to favor expansive space opera novels, everything from the classic Dune and its progeny to the Reality Dysfunction and the Gap series. I like novels of the Culture like Prador Moon and most of Neal Asher's other stuff. Had a great time with a book called The Risen Empire and its sequel, the Killing of Worlds.

Reading and enjoying these stories really requires you to have an imagination that can get its head around really large concepts, such as a whole universe running on social norms and with technologies quite different from our own. Also note, like many other people, when I read a book, its not just words on a page, but more like a running movie in my head. I'm there.

An imagination like that is very handy when one is contemplating things related to the Almighty as told in the Bible. Remember the Keanu Reeves flick Constantine? Reeves played a guy who went to Hell, but cut a deal to get out if he went to work sending AWOL demons back home. In theory, if he did a good job, God might cut him some slack and let his sorry behind into Heaven. Like most films that want to play around with biblical or religion inspired story lines, the theology was all over the place, inconsistent, inaccurate or just plain wrong. You never knew what rule book they were playing out of for these characters. I'm convinced that if you actually took the time to sit down and really tease out the real characteristics of angels and demons from the Bible and the conflict for the souls of humanity, you could build an awesome action packed flick around that, without all this added stuff that is inaccurate. But I digress.

In the movie, Reeves is buddies with the arch angel Gabriel as he races to prevent the unleashing of Hell on earth, only to find out in the end that Gabriel is behind the entire plot. At the moment of revelation, he has a flash of insight and realizes that Gabriel is insane. (follow the link to the see the scene, its an awesome imagining of an insane angel's perspective)



It got me to thinking that perhaps this is the explanation for Lucifer, now Satan, the adversary of mankind. I mean, you ask yourself, why did he do it? Given what he knew? The Bible says it was his pride that caused him to rebel. I think his pride must have drove him insane. He was perfect, so his logical facilities were in great shape, but clearly went off line.

I mean, think about it, how else can we understand Lucifer's actions here? According to the Bible (Ezekiel 28: 15), Lucifer was created in a perfect state. He was domiciled with God in Heaven, meaning he had direct access to the Almighty. Unlike us humans, Lucifer could perceive God directly, had up front and personal contact with Jehovah. He existed in Heaven, surrounded by all of God's works, created from His hand. Lucifer not only perceived God in His glory directly, but he had a favored relationship with God (Ezekiel 28:14). The Bible says he was an anointed cherub. That is significant. I mean, look at us. Humans have no direct experience of Heaven, and perhaps only a small handful of humans throughout history have ever perceived the Lord directly in anything approaching even a measure of His full glory. Lucifer had no such handicaps, which makes it even more bizarre to me, because Lucifer would have been CRYSTAL CLEAR about a couple of key points about God, namely, that He was omnipotent and omniscient and that there wasn't jack going down anywhere in Creation that He didn't know about or couldn't handle.

So the guy was living in Heaven, had direct access to the Father and most favored angel status to boot, and knew God was all powerful, unbeatable and unstoppable point blank. But notwithstanding ALL THAT, Lucifer CHOSE to basically spit in God's face. The only explanation for it I can fathom was that he was literally insane. Moreover, he made a decision to be insane (Isaiah 14:12) by declaring that he would be like God, when he knew this was flat impossible. Even more incredible is the fact that this insanity was catching, since when he got thrown out of Heaven, a significant number of angels who followed him in his lunatic assault on Heaven (Revelation 12:7-9) got tossed out on their butts with him.

Given what Lucifer knew going in, pride induced insanity offers the only explanation for his behavior recorded in the Bible. He was nuts.

A Reminder: God Can Put the Smackdown Whenever He Wants