Mike

WRONG! We become Christ-like. We are supposed to PLAY Christ on the stage of life. Where did you get that "We become Christ..." garbage? I hope you washed your hands.

2 Cor 5:20 Contemporary English Version We were sent to speak for Christ, and God is begging you to listen to our message. We speak for Christ and sincerely ask you to make peace with God. Here is a larger section from that same version: 18 God has done it all! He sent Christ to make peace between himself and us, and he has given us the work of making peace between himself and others. 19 What we mean is that God was in Christ, offering peace and forgiveness to the people of this world. And he has given us the work of sharing his message about peace. 20 We were sent to speak for Christ, and God is begging you to listen to our message. We speak for Christ and sincerely ask you to make peace with God. 21 .*/*/*/*/* The reason God made Jesus absent on the day of the Ascension was so that this responsibility of taking the stage FOR CHRIST while he is absent. In theater world we would be called Christ's understudies. un·der·stud·y /ˈəndərˌstədē/ noun plural noun: understudies (in the theater) a person who learns another's role in order to be able to act as a replacement at short notice. "I was understudy for the lead role in the opera"

LoL. Well I did press through the odd feelings first hearing the show gave me, so maybe I am ready now for that hot date to coax me into a murder mystery dinner theater.

You got it backwards. FIRST the scriptures say so, and that makes it true. THEN mike and radio theater merely ILLUSTRATE the truth. I never once heard VPW talk about actors on stage identifying with the role they played. That's just little old me doing the illustrating from the items of my everyday life.

...that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works. How much time have you put into thinking about this image that I have of being an ambassador for the absent Christ? Yes, it is dangerous to the devil. That's why the devil wants people to merely have their Jesus sitting across the table from them, instead of living within them.

Like THE 1942 Promise that I received countless blessings from, along with thousands of other people who are similarly thankful.

THANKS. Yeah, it was 1949 politics that set up Hal Lindsey with his positive conspiracy theory and calendar for Christ's return. The books' purpose being in the bookstore was to quash the Lindsey calendar which was screwing with peoples' heads. The reason I am interested is I'm just trying to get the history details straight. Lots of people thought that it was anti-Semitism that those books were in there. I heard that explanation I offered earlier just once and very long ago, and then never re-surfaced again. It seemed to be forgotten.

The SECOND fun item is MUCH MORE ODD and even bizarre, but in a good way. This too has lots of instruction to help up us understand the Absent Christ. But first an introduction. */*/*/*/* Many are concerned about their relationship with Christ suffering because of the way things went in the later years. My experience outside the Corps in the early years of TWI were rich in thought about Jesus; I was fearful that maybe Jesus WAS God after all and I would be in trouble. So I worked the Word a lot on this and especially on who Jesus said he was a lot. I know the apostles did not want Jesus to go. They liked the relationship they had with Jesus, while he was in the flesh and with them personally. This is the kind of relationship I have seen lots of grads yearn for. But God had a better TYPE of relationship available for the apostles on Pentecost, much to their natural chagrin at the Ascension. What I see grads yearning for (and sometimes I have felt similarly) is the kind of relationship with Jesus where he could sit at the opposite side of the table at Starbucks while we sip coffee together, and chat about big things and about little things. "So, Jesus, tell me how you learned to speak such good English." That is the kind of relationship the apostles had with him. It looks good at first, but you can also see its limitations, as they were recorded in the Gospels. The apostles were fast to hand their problems and questions to Jesus to let him handle them. But they were slow to go to God directly (like Jesus did) and imitate Jesus solution techniques. THIS is the part that God wanted to improve on, and that is why he ascended Jesus into heaven. He raised the bar for us to aspire higher. So at Starbucks, God wants something bigger than Jesus, the answer man, the solution man, sitting opposite you at a table there. God's plan is for you to have Christ's hand inside your hand as you open the door to Starbucks, and Christ's legs in your legs as you walk in. For the people you can meet there YOU are the answer "man," and YOU are the solution "man" to those people inside because you have Christ in you. */*/*/*/*/*/*/* This SECOND FUN ITEM is an radio show, called “The Jesus Christ Show.” You can find this show on the Internet (I Heart Radio) every Sunday morning at 6 am Pacific Time, at KFI 640 AM radio, Los Angeles. This is a highly polished, very professional radio production, that has been on the air, I think, for 30 years. You can also find podcasts of this show in various locations that go back years. I first started hearing this show in the 1990s when I was doing a lot of comedy radio work. I heard this show one Sunday morning and I thought it was very interesting. This show is a combination of “radio theater” and regular radio “Call-in” talk shows, where they give out a number and people listening to the radio call in to talk on the air with the host. The “radio theater” part is what gets very interesting. Back in the 1930s and 40s this art form was perfected for comedy and drama, and is sometimes called “Theater of the Mind.” The host of the show, named Neil Saavedra, plays the role of Jesus in this theater, and people call in and pretend to talk to him as Jesus. There is zero comedy in this; it is pure and serious. This guy, Neil Saavedra, is an all-around genius, and was a theology major in college, and then he went into radio. On Saturdays he does a four hour radio show on cooking, as he is also a master chef. I first heard him on the radio doing comedy, so he’s an actor also, and a superb one when he plays Jesus. He doesn’t get all the theology right but he gets enough of it right to make it a very interesting radio show. Now it starts to get a little weird, but not too weird. With Neil playing the role of Jesus, he answers people’s theology questions and is fast with the scriptures, and seriously counsels them on their lives’ problems. Sometimes he cleverly handles a heckler who sneaks past the telephone screeners. After so many years of doing this he has the role down pretty well. What is a little weird is how serious some of the callers are; I mean people with serious problems, looking for serious help. It can get down into real life and this host really witnessing the real Word on the air. At first I was occasionally very squeamish listening to this because I’m always very squeamish about adults playing like this. Those “murder mystery dinner theater” things that is a restaurant setting with real food make me squeamish just to talk about. Or the Renaissance Fairs where people get dressed up in costumes and start talking with “thee” and “thou” and pretending like they’re living 1000 years ago. I have always stayed away from those things, and I’m even laughing right now typing about them. I don’t see how adults could go there, but if I guess I had the right date coaxing me, I could get talked into it. But I also had feelings this radio show that it could be blasphemous AND squeamish simultaneously, but it turned out not to be so. It’s a valuable learning experience. */*/*/*/*/* Now what else is interesting about this radio show is that Neil Saavedra gets to really work the idea of being an ambassador for Christ and helping people in Christ’s place, instead of Christ, and doing it personally himself. So Neil gets to learn this wonderful new relationship that was made available in this administration where he gets to play Jesus. On top of this the people who call in to this show get to enjoy a little taste of the “across the table at Starbucks” type of relationship that people yearn for. Neil’s little taste of playing Jesus is just like us having Christ’s tastebuds behind our tastebuds, tasting coffee at Starbucks where WE are that Jesus across the table for someone else. */*/*/*/* This radio show calls to mind another theatrical production with interesting similarities. Decades ago an actor named Hal Holbrook did a live theatrical Broadway-like ONE MAN play where he played Mark Twain (Samuel Clemons) on stage, and just talked to the audience like he really was Mark Twain. Holbrook did a whole one-man show this way, and took it on tour for many years; decades I think. How well do you think he “knew” Mark Twain by playing him on stage every night for years? I can imagine he could well relate to many, many things in Mark Twain’s life. THAT is the kind of relationship God had in mind for the apostles and for us. We get to “play” Jesus for others, and for far more than the entertainment value to the audience. We actually take Jesus’ place while he is absent as his ambassadors. We can’t “leave it to Jesus” during this time; it is up to us to get the job done. If we PFAL grads are not up to the task of accurately representing Jesus to others, then God will find some other believers to do it. But seeking the “across the table at Starbucks” relationship with Jesus, the old kind of relationship that God ended, is not wise at this time. It is outside God’s will and Word, and we can get tricked into all sorts of counterfeit “Jesus relationships” that are of our own making or worse.

I have TWO FUN ITEMS to share. The first item is a set of 2 cartoons. These really can be fun. They are not perfect, but often very interesting, funny, clever, AND can even be instructive. These could be characterized as a tangent off of the idea “What Would Jesus Do,” except they are more like “How Would Jesus Be Clever with Modern People.” These play off the yearning we all have to hang out with Jesus and ask questions while we sip coffee with him at Starbucks, with him across the table from us. Below is the website that cranks out hundreds of these comics. Some are not so great, but some are gems. Interestingly, they encourage people copying and using them. They also sell coffee table books that are compilations of many such cartoons. http://www.radiofreebabylon.com/

Thanks for the link, but 5 pages may be a bit much to search for a tiny factoid like I asked. I had simply HEARD that the book Myth 6M was saying the numbers were exaggerated to influence the UN decision in 1949 to establish Israel. I simply heard that, was uninterested, and never had the desire to look into it more, and especially not to read the book. The 5 page thread I just looked at looks like FAR MORE material than I am looking for. Has anyone here read that book?

The politics part was only secondary in my theory of why TWI Bookstore had those odd books in the Bookstore. My theory is that VPW saw how Hal Lindsey's "Late Great Planet Earth" was seriously misleading Christians with timetables for the Return of Christ BASED ON 1949 being the year of a BIBLICAL PROPHESY being fulfilled. That fulfillment was the United Nations establishing the modern state of Israel in 1949. THEN Hal Lindsey says the NEXT Biblical prophecy fulfilled will be ...such and such a scripture on such and such a date. His whole book was that way. It was a best seller, and the sequel also, and I think the sequel's sequel. Christians were running up their credit cards with massive debt based on these predictions. It was a mess.... I hear. I knew a couple of Hal Lindsey fans back then (1970?) but they were fortunately cautious enough to not be so stupid. But there were newspaper articles of crazy things a few were doing. This is roughly 1970-74. SOOOOOOOOO, VPW came out and said that the 1949 prophecy fulfullment was a counterfeit. THEN, a year or two later came the odd books, myth 6 million and 13 tribe, in the bookstore. I think that is how it went down circa 1975ish.

When was that? BTW, I always noted in the 1970s that the second and third times through the class were when the most learning happened.

I never read those holocaust denial books (were there two?), but it was my impression that they did NOT totally deny it happened, and just challenged the large numbers like 6 million. The PURPOSE of them (along with "The Thirteenth Tribe") them being promoted in the bookstore was to counter the POLITICAL idea that modern Israel was a restoration of God's Israel. In the early 1970s "The Late Great Planet Earth" had rocked the USA with predictions of the Christ's Return date based on the 1949 formation of modern Israel being PROPHESY FULFILLED. I have recently (5 years ago) seen a bunch of PFAL grads get into similar predictions of Christ's Return. People literally sell their properties in anticipation of this, and even run up their credit cards, thinking they wont have to pay if Raptured. So, my impression was TWI was trying (pretty inefficiently) to thwart the idea of modern Israel being Biblical Israel with all those odd books in the bookstore. I did read "Thirteenth Tribe" though, because I was a lifetime science fan of Arthur Koestler, the author. Am I right about my vague memory that the Myth Six Million merely says that the number of people killed was less than one million?

I am slowly reading it, but now that the holiday madness is finally over, I can pick up some speed. My business goes crazy just before Christmas, and the following month is always a catch-up scene. One more big rain storm and I ought to finish that reading.

This was in response to what I had posted here: Again, I hope my "Sometimes it can be a well educated piece of guesswork" is not lost in this, but here I want to emphasize the last line: "...especially when you factor in that the devil intelligently scrambled things for us." I have mentioned this factor several times, but it seems to not be seen or understood. The devil blew it when he crucified Christ, because that made it possible for millions to challenge his grip on the world like Jesus did. To thwart this the devil sought to scramble the NT enough to occlude those NT scriptures that most assisted young believers in growing up into the stature of that Christ within and become another Jesus-like challenger of the adversary's rule. A lot of this occlusion looks like mere entropy and accident, and some may very well be that innocent. But this scrambling would me most strategic if it included something like precision surgery, instead of utter destruction. A counterfeit copy of a scripture could actually do more damage to the learning Christians, and be even more effective than a simple gap in the manuscript. All of the eavesdropping I've done on textual analysis tells me that this semi-science does not include the possibility of super-intelligent spirit being forgeries. I could be wrong here, and just missed the academic lingo for this possibility. Most of the "culprits" I heard of textual analysis uncovering were human intelligence level forgeries, and scribe copying errors, and then elemental degeneration due to fire or bacteria. The GreaseSpot reading I've done on textual analysis SEEMS to tell me that no one here considers this possibility of very devilishly direct surgical alterations. Is this a correct observation? I would expect these kinds of forgeries to exist, because the stakes were so high. The promise of us doing all the things that Jesus Christ did and greater was seriously thwarted after the apostles died. Something cut it all off, and I don't think it was God.

I plead guilty to being an total amateur on textual analysis. What I mean by “guesswork” is that, compared to hard core science where surety is measured with numbers, textual analysis sounds much more like qualitative sorting into categories that could be labeled “likely” or “unlikely.” Along with my “guesswork” comments, PLEASE DON’T FORGET this one line that I deliberately put in there: “Sometimes it can be a well-educated piece of guesswork.” The Joseph Smith item mentioned above (12th century scribe errors copied exactly) is an example of this. */*/*/*/* I also plead guilty to have, so far, only come up with a “first draft” for my take on the changes at the Research Dept, especially as the mission seemed to gradually change from searching to confirming. An unvarnished history of TWI will have to include this. I am just trying, here, to sort out the history of the Research Department and the shifting mission it had. I will be re-reading all this to see if I should modify my positions on this, especially as I collect more insider info from active posters, as well as in the archives.

He was not a fraud. He delivered the goods. You just don't like the messenger that delivered the goods. I know he delivered the goods because I use them every day with great thanksgiving to God that He tolerates sinners a lot better than sinners like you tolerate sinners.

That you are constantly playing gotcha with my words and not trying to understand them tells me that you (and others) have such a filter in place. I feel no need to prove it to anyone. It is extremely obvious to anyone not caught up in it. I have noted the possibility that I do not write something well the first draft, and that I may have not properly read a recent post from you or So_crates. I get a lot more people and posts challenging me here than you do. Plus MANY of them are total garbage and are just contextually framed insults. So I gloss over posts when the garbage content is high, or when there are one after another garbage posts all in a row. Want me to read posts better? Then stop participating in the garbage throwing and stop encouraging others to throw it. But that is unlikely, seeing the emotional attachments you all have to your anti-idol. So until the garbage barrage ceases, maybe you could be so kind as to tell me exactly which lines you mean, when you say I mis-read something. Maybe I can adequately handle them. Please consider my apology right this minute for not properly reading a post lately to be of the same quality and intensity as your apology right this minute for years of garbage posting against me.

Yes, for those who expected (and even demanded subconsciously) that VPW would be their Santa Claus or their goodie-goodie Hollywood Holy Man, a late discovery to the opposite would be devastating and irreversible. I saw many grads do this in the 1970s, and I often lamented over my more cautious and suspicious nature. All the while VPW was saying he was unworthy and NOT a goodie-goodie, and that the REAL holy man was Jesus Christ, and the REAL Santa Claus figure was the Father. It may be that those who locked onto the "Santa VPW" show were the ones who wanted Christ to be absent, so he wouldn't distract from that VPW idol worship that definitely happened a lot. I would expect that extreme VPW worship was probably more prevalent in the Corps applicant population than in those who held back. Penworks seems to have admitted in her book that she was in this category of quickly locking onto the idea that VPW was the holy man of our time. She was a Corps applicant in heart even before taking the Foundational Class. I remember that time in history very well. The whole baby boom population was seeking enlightenment and holy men at that time. It had been all the rage since the Beatles went to India, and the Moody Blues pumped it up even more a few years later.

Read it all better, and then you'll see all these things happened over a span of many years. From the 40s thru 1982 the MAIN goal of the research was to find the truth. At 1982 that mostly was done, and things started shifting to verification research. You filter for reading me is to look for ways to criticize me, and it filters out too many details when the topic is complicated and changes over a span of several decades.

That is correct. Fortunately, I think all of these loose ends that didn't get nailed down by senses verification were few in number, and small in impact. I think chapters and verses were found for most of the big items, if not all.

It all depends on what the goal of the research is. (A) If the goal is to FIND truths not yet known, using only methods of the senses and logic, then the known manuscripts must be recognized as the only evidence available to work with. Everything must be built on that known evidence. (B) If the goal is to VERIFY truths already known spiritually, then unknown manuscripts may be sought in that verification. Of course, method B is not recognized by academia at all. The possibility of spiritually knowing anything like this is denied there totally. In other words the students of the Bible forbid the Author from giving revelation to explain the Bible. They want to do it all themselves. The fact that the devil was the one who cleverly obscured and scrambled the originals, does not daunt these academia students. They think they can match wits with the devil and win. */*/*/* In the early days of VPW's research he knew he had to start with senses approach, or method (A). But God's assurance to him was that when he did his best and was getting stuck, the revelation would be there to get him over the hump. As time went by, it became useful to "prove" these little leaps of revelation to others to help them in their believing. Occasionally finding a manuscript that verified what God had told him would make it easier to teach others. It would also help VPW's believing for the next round of research. There were a few other reasons for this kind of Verification Research being useful. Something to remember is this. Finding a manuscript that verifies what VPW already had committed to DOES NOT PROVE that VPW was right in that prior commitment. But it does help make it easier to believe. This is a VERY subtle point that few get. I pointed it out earlier here today in this thread. There are ALL KINDS of manuscripts out there and hardly any ways to figure out how valid each one is. It is all guesswork. Sometimes it can be a well educated piece of guesswork. But without revelation, all Biblical research is really guesswork, especially when you factor in that the devil intelligently scrambled things for us.

That is your filter talking. My filter is constructed differently. I now think VPW's several SNT comments on finding manuscripts was one of the ways he documented and tried to explain what was going on with research, ESPECIALLY in the years when the need for research was beginning to terminate. In October 1982, right on Craig's Coronation SNT tape, he said the the research was basically done. That was when the Research Dept was to switch gears, but no one really got it. (Certainly not me; I learned all this many years later.) Once he stepped down as President he could no long control that as easily. So he hinted at things on tape, at a distance.

I heard a complaint, circa 1977-78, about the research department from 2 associates or members of that department, just a month or two before they were kicked out of the 7th Corps. They told me that VPW was manipulating things and not doing valid research. This is exactly the complaint I slowly developed myself in the following years about the research department, and for me it was from listening closely to weekly, public SNT tapes from 1978 to ‘85. I did not believe them, but their complaint did register strongly. And this was NOT Walter commenting semi-privately on a Corps tape; this was VPW on the public SNT tapes that I heard. Paraphrasing VPW: “We sent Walter to Germany to find some manuscripts I just know had to exist.” I forget the year Walter went there. This really bothered me. I wasn’t sure if VPW misspoke or if I didn’t understand it right, but it seemed backwards or something. Definitely a red flag. I had no idea of the following at that time, but now I look back and think VPW was trying to tell us (or hint to us) that the Research Dept at TWI worked a little “differently” than the usual expected way. It’s when I link this to other incidents, and to what I learned decades later when I locked on to the collaterals (1998), that I formed this retrospective. */*/*/* I can only paraphrase what I remember VPW saying about Walter’s Germany mission. I’d love to retrieve these exact quotes someday, in the SNT transcripts that have been slowly accumulating on YouTube lately. Another SNT tape in that early span of years (78-85) had this kind of quote, severely paraphrased again, because I have no idea which SNS tape it came from. “Someday we’re going to find a manuscript that verifies this.” That is obviously cheating, bending again! This isn’t how scientific research works. This is cherry picking among the manuscripts, at best. This is actually worse than cherry picking among the manuscripts. It is cherry picking outside the manuscripts that have been found, as in imaginary manuscripts. But the real corker I have almost perfectly memorized. This is not paraphrasing, but is a near quote on a SNT tape: “We probably won’t find a manuscript in my lifetime that verifies this, but my spiritual awareness tells me what the original has to say.” So my trust of Biblical research at the TWI was severely shaken by these accumulating pieces of hard public evidence on tape by VPW himself. I also couldn’t figure out why he was admitting it on tapes!!! I also couldn’t figure out why no one else noticed it and objected !!! It was an complete anomaly that took me about 13 years to figure out. The explanation is tied up in the complicated topic “Our Only Rule for Faith and Practice.” I tried before to explain all this here circa 2008, but nobody at GreaseSpot got it, except two: Abigail and Oakspear. Now, Abigail and Oakspear did NOT agree with my explanation, but they did understand it. Anyway, we’d have to get a whole new thread going on “Only Rule” to get into my full explanation.