NOAH AND ENOCH AND DOUBLE-TEAMING THE WICKED

I get a majority of my blog topics (the ones that aren't just newsfeed dumps) I think, in the night.  When I wake up, if I am not distracted by my beautiful wife or by a pressing appointment (I love working second shift because it makes for lazy mornings), I just lay there and remember dream threads, if I can still at that point and ponder and pray and just let my mind wander over things that have been on my mind.  Sometimes I will read and then I usually fall back asleep and then lather, rinse, repeat.

The mind, when it is tightly wound, needs to rest and decompress.  We are on an unhealthy treadmill in this life driven by alarm clocks, deadlines and pressures that most previous generations did not have to deal with.  Don't get me wrong - they had other pressures than we have today, but they were different and often more tied to the land and making sure enough food was put up for the winter.  Work or die.  Little was done under the influence of adrenaline - whereas today a majority of it is.  When I am working the farm, there is much time to ponder and think mowing a field or digging at potatoes or weeding the berry patch.  So it was back then.  Today, our lives are so frenetic that little time is left for deep pondering and thinking and it is causing a "reflexive" people instead of a "reflective" people.  Not having "put it all together" in their heads before they are faced with a major challenge, they cannot stand when sudden "make or break" decisions have to be made.  Many within the Church are falling and crashing and burning doctrinally for this reason.

I am very excited about being able to teach the GD lesson about Noah and the ark in the next couple of weeks.  That is a topic I love to ponder on - precisely because it was the "end of the world" back in those times and there is much foreshadowing to our day and our circumstances.  Many of the "koombiah"-types (including many who are close to me) cannot fathom a God who would "arbitrarily" wipe out a majority of His posterity in one cataclysmic act (or so they think it is so - in their minds).  They seek to blame God as the horrible, psychotic freak who just drowned all his own children.  As if.  So many members of the Church - when faced with this question, simply cannot answer their detractors (such as many on LDSFF, like l'Aussie bOi) and shrink from the argument - giving the victory in the war of words to the d'evil and his earthly minions.  What they fail to point out is that God gave the unholy pre-flood inhabitants every possible chance to repent and change.  He even provided something WAY better than the ark of liquid as a means of escape from this blue space marble, that was about to become a whole lot more blue and liquidy....  That was Enoch's escape pod - or ark that floated on a sea of gas.  Enoch was a contemporary of Noah - probably not next door neighbors, but on the same land mass in those days before the "days of Peleg".  The fame of Enoch had spread throughout all the land and to all people and many either sought him and his people out to become a part of them - or to fight them to attempt to exterminate them and to rid the earth of the "reminder" of what and how they should have been living (this is that seething hatred for what is good and right that I speak of).  I picture Enoch every bit the military general that Moroni was and would love to have a vision of that epoch to see all of the details of how that history evolved.  Much could be gleaned from that information to be applied in our day of coming near utter destruction.

So, the people had around 200 hundred years of Enoch blathering til he was blue in the face, speech impediment and all, followed by around 200 more years of Enoch, now successfully living the Law of Consecration (still blathering away) along side another "freak" that was building a massive boat and warning of a flood that would utterly cover the utmost top of the utmost hill (the earth was mostly flat in those days - picture a just-cooled crust, devoid of massive "wrinkles" created by whatever the heck it is that keeps perturbing our planet, with mostly rolling hills as it is in Western Missouri in the land of Adam-Ondi-Ahman).  So no, it did not take water, 30,000 feet deep to cover this baby - it was probably in the order of 500-1,000 feet, if that.  The BAC biblical apologetics attempt to use a local flooding theory (Black Sea area) for their model to explain it away - not having all revealed truth at their finger-tips, and forgetting that the really wild geological disturbances happened during the flood and shortly after the Tower of Babel when the "earth was divided".

So, with these two contemporaries warning the people, they had two hundred years to hear the message and either heed it, or not; and perish.  About as much as we have had since Joseph Smith started laying it down (with the people having largely ignored him; and so we will perish mostly, as a group).  All of the same stuff was presented (albeit, two-thirds of the message with the most precious of the jewels, is still sealed awaiting the repentance of the people who are "a whoring after Babylon").  No, all is not well in Zion - in fact, there is little that resembles Zion that is truly alive on the face of the earth.  Sadly, one must look around outside of the Church for pieces of it in groups like the Hutterites, the Amish and even places like Seattle where people have formed not-for-profit gardening and woodworking co-ops in order to "get it done".  Many people have a spark of desire to make it happen, but do not have the working tools of knowledge because they either know not where to find it (non-members), or have potential access to it but are not willing to work hard enough in order to qualify for it.  I lay much blame on the collective people of Joseph's day and the folks in the 1870's who did not just suck it up and show the people of the world God's true power.  The majority of the battle was lost back then - making it nearly impossible to recover from it and we have been limping along for the last 150 years.  I would give a lot to see what would have happened had the people of the early Church been righteous enough - and the people of this nation had been righteous enough - that Joseph would have been allowed to remain alive to a full measure of 85 years.  I think 1890 might well have been radically different in our historical timeline from what it turned out to be.  So, I think about what might have been and look hopefully forward to the purging where we can all be tried and tested to the limit (those who have not been pruned and burned) so that we will be humble enough to be entrusted with the sealed portion; and thereby have the keys of knowledge of living truly consecrated lives.  A terrestrial existence.  One that will prepare us to receive the Bridegroom who will come in His glory for the final fiery cleansing of the earth (the one that comes at a time that "no man knoweth").

So, we DO have a God who is merciful in the case of Noah.  I imagine the population of earth in Enoch/Noah's day to be multi-billions and the inhabitants of Enoch's city to be in the millions.  All, who qualified, were welcome there (just as in our temples).  There was no exclusivism (I am sure the repentant homosexuals were never turned away); and never was there a happier people.  God saved as many as would listen.  Just before the flood, this city was taken up to the bosom of God (one of His few victories from this wicked world) leaving Noah and "the rest" - who simply refused to recognize goodness when they saw it and who were (yep, I have to say it) "marrying and giving in marriage" as they lived lives of unrepentant homosexuality and lesbianism in a "state-sanctioned" environment (previous blog piece on Talmudic definition of marrying and giving in marriage).  To these, I am sure Noah was eventually commanded to shut his mouth, as so many prophets were including Mormon and Ezra Taft Benson, and then commanded to separate himself from them as the Lord "shut up" the ark and the destruction began.

So the next time one of the apologists with their twisted logic from realm of "devil logic" or liberal logic, or whatever you want to call it, tries to tell you that God is the one who is twisted and sick or backwards in His thinking or actions towards His children, just give them the facts and send them on their way.  Set them free with logic, if they will have it.  God sent two escape pods to take those who would go onto better things, leaving the rebellious trash to be taken to the curb.  It is an iterative process designed to give as many of God's children as will have it, the chance to get above satan and his minions after the reset button is hit.  And I am quite sure God is pretty tired of hitting the reset button.

The first one - where a third of our "less brilliant" siblings got tossed for rebellion - did not elicit a response from God (so far as we have it in scripture).  It is sort of like the dean of a college mourning over the kids who were skipping class and shooting spit-wads from the back of the class during the sophomore year of their high school experience....  Probably not college material anyway.....
What was done simply was done for administrative purposes - in order to give the rest of God's posterity the best shot at perpetuating what has been perpetuated since the beginning of time.  We have chickens on the farm, and last fall, I was pretty sure we were having some kind of epidemic go thru the flock judging on die-off, etc.  I set my criteria for those that should be culled and was about to embark on a cleansing of sorts.  I was rather mechanical about it - and pointed out to my emotional daughters that it was better that a few perish (in the culling), than the entire flock perish due to inaction on my part.  They got that.  A few endangering the whole did not make sense - and especially if you were the other chickens who were not ready to move on to the freezer phase of life....

Now, we DO have a scriptural response to those who did make it as far as getting tabernacles of clay - but yet who still rebelled in that state and were cut short in their wickedness.  God wept over that event.  Life had been created - well beyond the organizing of spiritual matter into spirit bodies - and some skin was in the game, so to speak.  We also are given the solution in the NT narrative where these rebellious ones will eventually be sent emissaries from Paradise to Spirit Prison where they are holed up in order to set things straight.  These - because they were given the word thru Noah and Enoch - will never amount to more than citizens of a Telestial glory (if you are angry, read your doctrine in Section 76 and either get aboard or jump off the boat).  Unrepented rebellion is NEVER rewarded, so a place has been prepared for them to inhabit the eternities, while still not being able to spoil the finer things attained to by those who have striven and been in a state of repentance through their lives.  It truly is about survival of the spiritual fittest - and the Plan of Salvation shows it.  However, in the latest cultural war within the walls of the Church, we have a koombiah-fest going on where everyone is going to be saved (at least in the minds of many members).  I have even heard it from some bleeding hearts that the "tender mercies" will extend to satan and his minions among the third of those who originally rebelled.  Sorry - it simply never will be that way - it was a "DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200.  No body, nor forward progression.  I have even heard some bleeding hearts say that those from the Telestial sphere will be able to eventually work their way up to Celestial felicity at some point.  To you, I again say, "SORRY!".  Each step of the plan is a culling maneuver where God gives every one of his kids the chance shoot for the top spot.  God loves all of His children and would most likely hope that all would waltz their way back to His presence out of our love of truth and for Him and our Elder Brother, but it cannot be that way as statistics show the delusional improbability of it.  We have to want it for ourselves, or it is meaningless.  In every instance where agency is involved, you will always find a bell-curve in the data.  I have not seen an exception yet.  God has a perfect plan for the non-six sigma folks who just don't care.  The matter that our spirits were created from was not perfect (I would presume) and the matter that our tabernacles of clay were created from definitely was not - so there will be loss in that equation.  Or risk, if you will.

There is no better way to put it - and no better way to think about it.  Agency has to account for loss.  Satan's plan did not - and it was rejected as the declaration was made that not one soul shall be lost.  So for the koobiahers out there, I suggest you readjust your lens you are looking at the world through.  It is off - and you might find that you are indeed fighting on the devil's side of the equation - and not on God's.  If this is the case, you will most likely find yourself short in the final judgment.