Ephesians 4:4-6, One Spirit who helps us in prayer, the Pharisee and the Publican, part 2.

Wednesday November 18,2020

 

Ray Kurzweil, entrepreneur and inventor, director of engineering at Google, predicts the rapid evolution of humanity through technology, with the end being the merging of biological and machine intelligences. Eventually, he predicts:

 

“The entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence.” Ray Kurzweil The Singularity Is Near, 2005

 

Ray is in for a big surprise.

 

“Kurzweil promotes “the singularity” not only as allowing for the perfectibility of mankind - long a goal of theological speculation - but also as a step toward immortality, with our brain patterns imprinted as software and preserved permanently. This ‘transhumanist’ vision also reflects an almost obsessive concern to the aging inventor, who takes around 150 vitamin supplements a day in the hopes of delaying his own demise.” [The New Class Conflict, Joel Kotkin]

 

As the tech oligarchs know, for decades at first, only the very rich will have access to the technology to implant machine into human so as to augment longer lives. Kurzweil describes those who will refuse cybernetic augmentation or are incapable of getting it as Mostly Original Substrate Humans, or MOSHs.

 

Meanwhile, back in reality, I assume that God is allowing these brainiac propeller heads to pursue their dreams as He allowed the pagan worshippers of old to pursue theirs. The true idol is always self and getting things for the love of self. The technocrats dream of creating their own immortality, but they don’t dream of a secure and eternal relationship with God in love. What is the use of eternity, even if you could have it, if it is only an eternal gathering of things for the love of self?

 

JOH 17:24-26

"Father, I desire that they also, whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am, in order that they may behold My glory, which Thou hast given Me; for Thou didst love Me before the foundation of the world. 25 O righteous Father, although the world has not known Thee, yet I have known Thee; and these have known that Thou didst send Me; 26 and I have made Thy name known to them, and will make it known; that the love wherewith Thou didst love Me may be in them, and I in them."

 

The technocrats want to live forever through software. Jesus on the other hand knew when He had completed what He had to do on earth.

 

JOH 17:1-6

These things Jesus spoke; and lifting up His eyes to heaven, He said, "Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You, 2 even as You gave Him authority over all mankind, that to all whom You have given Him, He may give eternal life. 3 "And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. 4 "I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do. 5 "And now, glorify Me together with Yourself, Father, with the glory which I had with You before the world was. 6 "I manifested Your name to the men whom You gave Me out of the world; Yours they were, and You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word.

 

“I have finished the work which You gave Me to do.” There remains no more reason why He should stay longer on earth; the hour for closing His earthly career and opening to Him a new period and sphere had come. He does not which and does not need a prolonged life. He had found time enough in less than thirty-three years or so to do all He had to do on earth. It is character, not time, we need to do our work. To make a deep and abiding impression it is not longer life we need, but intensity. Jesus did not find Himself cramped, limited, or too soon hurried out of life. He viewed death as the suitable timely step, and took it with self-command and in order to pass to something better than earthly life.

 

[Marcus Dods] “Too often for mankind, a broken column is the fit monument of our life, unfinished, frustrated, useless. Wasted energy, ill-repaired blunders, unfulfilled purposes, fruitless years, much that is positively evil, much that was done mechanically and carelessly and for the day, plans ill conceived and worse executed; imperfect ideals of life imperfectly realized; pursuits dictated by uneducated tastes, unchastened whims, accidental circumstances, - such is the retrospect which most of men have as they look back over life. Few men even recognize the reality of life as part of an eternal order, and, of the few who do so, still fewer seriously and persistently aim at fitting in their life as a solid part of that order.”

 

What are we to do? Become Christ-like. At the conception of His ministry, the apostle John gives us the account of Christ’s work, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father.” This work was accomplished, and so Jesus could say, “I have glorified You on earth,” and, “I have manifested Your name unto the men which You gave Me out of the world.”

 

Jesus manifested the glory of the Father and showed the full meaning of that name. By being Christlike, we fulfill the same goal, to which we have all been elected.

 

A make no mistake, there will be no manifestation of the Father through us if we do not obey and dedicate our entire lives to Him and His commands and way.

 

Christ says in vs. 3, “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” Eternal life is not merely life indefinitely prolonged. It is rather life under new conditions and fed from different sources. It can be entered upon now, but a full understanding of it is now impossible. The next life is necessary to know it. The grub might as well try to understand the life of the butterfly, or the chick the life of the bird. Eternal life is a type of life in which the Father and the Son are known. We are given that life as a grace gift through faith in Christ, for God entered our life of weakness and wretchedness and through perfect love displayed on the cross, won to Himself the impure and the outcast.

 

It is understanding eternal life, knowing the Father and the Son, coming into real contact with Them, that cleanses the human heart from pride, self-seeking, lust, and inclines it to bow before the holy and loving God, and choose life in Him and detaching from life of self and world.

 

JOH 17:15-17

“I do not ask Thee to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. 16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. 17 Sanctify them in the truth; Thy word is truth.”

 

Jesus Himself protected the disciples who were drawn to His knowledge and love. But now His time to leave them was at hand, and He prays that the Father would now protect them from evil.

 

God has allowed “the evil (one)” to openly lie about Him and to construct a world system based on those lies. Against this, God built His church, the one body of Christ.

 

We live in a dangerous world, and I don’t mean physical danger but spiritual. “Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.” Learn it and live it.

 

But these realities, knowledge of the Father and Christ shown through the word of God, are obscured and thrust aside by a thousand pretentious frivolities which claim our immediate attention and interest. We are in the world, and day by day the world insists that we shall consider it the great reality. But Christ had conquered it and left it. He didn’t take His own with Him because they had work to do that could only be done in the world, the saving of many souls; the calling of many sons to glory. And remember, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.”

 

Certainly the oligarchs of our present world have it wrong, and when the ultimate one, the antichrist, comes, it will be revealed openly before all eyes.

 

All will be accomplished when all redeemed men are one, even as the Trinity is one as Christ was and is one with the Father - the central significance of human life.

 

So then, we must be humble children before our Father.

 

It's not only that the Father would wish us to be humble, but it is a truth in the entire scheme of things that we must be humble, because of who God is and who we are before Him.

 

Directly following the parable of the relentless widow:

 

LUK 18:9-14

And He also told this parable to certain ones who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt: 10 "Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, and the other a tax-gatherer. 11 "The Pharisee stood and was praying thus to himself, 'God, I thank Thee that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax-gatherer. 12 'I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.' 13 "But the tax-gatherer, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, the sinner!' 14 "I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, but he who humbles himself shall be exalted."

 

Anything other than humility is a false front. Before the holiness and immensity of God, we must know ourselves to be a little more than nothing.

 

It is not things that we need to be separated from, but self. Nothing is evil in itself, for God has created it. It is the perversion of those things for the love of self that makes them sinful and evil.

 

God has crucified our old self. We have put on the new self and must put it on in our consciousness.