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betweengenesisfrogs · 7 years

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OFF-THE-CUFF HOMESTUCK POSTS #6: THE TRAGEDY (AND SECRET TRIUMPH) OF JADE HARLEY, OR: THE GNOSTIC GARDENER

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[Note: Content warning for brief mention of sexual abuse and longer discussion of perceived suicide and associated thoughts.]

Let's talk about Jade Harley.

A common feeling I've seen about the final chapters of Homestuck is that Jade Harley deserved better, that she suffered completely unfairly and arbitrarily in the final timeline.

I actually completely agree. Jade *absolutely* deserved better. Where I disagree is with the argument that Jade's suffering somehow shows Hussie is a bad writer.

I think it's important to recognize that good storytelling isn't always the same thing as happy storytelling. Some stories or parts of stories are *about* suffering. They're tragedy, a form of storytelling I'd define as an examination of a negative set of events: why they took place, why the characters involved couldn't escape them. Done well, this can be as meaningful as any happy ending.

I mean, there's a reason a bunch of Greeks wanted to watch a series of plays about a guy who accidentally marries his mother and then stabs his eyes out.

So when we're talking about good storytelling in Homestuck, i.e.: whether character arcs reach meaningful catharsis, we have to bear in mind that the bad shit that happens to our characters is sometimes the very subject of the story.

In other words, yes, Jade Harley deserved better.

That's the *entire point.*

Now, that said, I actually think Jade does have a happy ending, and a damn cathartic one. But we need to understand the unfair suffering she went through to understand why. What I find fascinating about Jade's arc is that she confronts the tragic, suffering-causing aspects of SBURB and the domain of Lord English more directly than any other character and finds a way to become free of them. It's not that her suffering was in any way merited or right, it's that by rejecting that unfairness, she finds incredible self-affirmation, freedom, and escape in a way that makes her the most direct manifestation of Homestuck's Gnostic themes.

In the causes of her suffering, and in how that suffering is overcome, Jade Harley is the key to the deeper meanings of Homestuck.

The Absent Grandfather

As a person, Jade has suffered unfairly on more than one level. Her later tragedy echoes and recapitulates the tragedies of her childhood, which makes it all the more painful. To understand this suffering, we need to understand her relationship with her guardian, Grandpa Harley.

[A brief digression: at this point, I should probably mention a recent theory by mmmmalo that posits Grandpa Harley as a sexual predator and Jade as a victim of abuse. I feel bad even bringing it up, because mmmmalo seems like a really nice guy, and I really enjoy his work tackling Homestuck from a psychological/psychoanalytical perspective, but I just can't really buy this theory. For one, Grandpa isn't at all characterized as capable of that kind of evil. The closest we come are some dubious feelings about Grandpa from Dave that are clearly him projecting his own issues onto Jade (he's never even met her grandfather), and the odd fact that Grandpa obsessed portraits of beautiful blue women from beauty parlors--discomfiting, but ultimately kind of harmless, unless you really stretch it as a psychological metaphor. To my mind, there really isn't that much to substantiate anything worse here.

Furthermore, the Alpha kids, as ever, offer opportunities to understand the Guardians in more depth, and there's little reason to think Grandpa would be substantially different from Jake English. mmmmalo posits that in DBZ-esque fashion, Jake hitting his head turned him good, but I just don't buy it, especially when Jake's "head injury" isn't actually real--it's one of his excuses for avoiding his own failings. (See the Jane's birthday conversation for how this plays out.) For my money, Jake and Grandpa are pretty similar: nice enough people whose biggest flaw is avoiding responsibility by retreating into the landscape of their own fantasies.

Ultimately, this particular leap is too big a leap for me to take, particularly because I feel like it would need to be addressed on a textual level (like Bro's abuse was with Dirk and Dave) if it was meant to be taken as canonical fact. I feel like mmmmalo's theories are at their strongest when they focus on the psychological experiences of characters, rather than when they try to posit hidden secrets in the canon. The first just feels so much more useful and reliable for me as a method, at least. No shade to mmmmalo, though: I hope he keeps on writing his own brand of fascinating Homestuck analysis for years to come, because he's doing stuff no one else is and it always leads to exciting new approaches.]

Now, none of this is to say that Grandpa Harley never had a negative impact on Jade. Her childhood trauma actually concerns him very deeply. As we see in the scene where she imagines him dictating to her in the foyer, she's both nostalgic about her grandfather and angry with him. She's filled with conflicted feelings about him, positive and negative at once. But the harm comes across in a completely different way, a way that's deeply textually supported and fits with what we know about Jake English.

Jade thinks that her grandfather committed suicide.

At least, she does for the vast majority of her life, until Tavros explains otherwise.

At a whimsical tea party with a plush doll, Grandpa seemingly, from Jade's perspective, took his own life. Here's Jade telling the story: GG: i spent years wondering about it! GG: when i was REALLY young, i was sure the doll sitting across from him did it GG: and for a long time i was terrified of the evil blue girl!!! GG: she sort of haunted my childhood and i had trouble sleeping for a long time GG: but of course i got older and realized that was silly, but then i just speculated that maybe it was suicide GG: which was just a really sad thing to think about!!!

Understatement of the century. This moment shaped Jade's entire psychology. Those who have lost loved ones to suicide often report wrestling with a mixture of grief and anger: anger that they were left to pick up the aftermath. For Jade, this was a moment of abandonment. Her guardian, who should have been there to take care of her, took his life and left her alone on a deserted island with only her (admittedly magic) dog to help her survive. For years, she had to take care of herself, to serve as her own guardian in his absence. Grandpa should have been there, but he wasn't. The culmination of the "increasing stakes" of the Beta kids' guardians is that Jade's guardian is dead and gone.

The scene of Jade squaring off against her stuffed Grandpa in the foyer is thus, like many elements of Hussie's writing, played for both comedy and horror at once, a true Hussnasty grotesque. For some time, Hussie builds up the mystery of Jade's guardian (using, I think, Dave’s remarks and Grandpa’s weirdness to build a sense of unease), only to shock the reader with an ugly revelation that carries echoes of horror-movie jump-scares. The man in the foyer is no man, but a symbol of death, a skeleton, a mummy, a rotting corpse in the place where a protector should be.

Grandpa's fatal flaw is absence itself.

[This is maybe the psychological motif mmmmmalo's picking up on? I feel like you could very easily read Jade’s feelings of horror and disgust as an echo of this suicide, and thus see Lord English as a mythic echo of Grandpa's absence as much as his presence. That’s my take, anyway.]

Hence Jade's anger in the foyer. He has left her alone, forced her to take up the responsibilities he failed to uphold. She pretends he's alive and imagines him chiding her for not being prepared to face the wilds alone--a situation she knows he put her in. Hence her snapping back at the corpse that she's already perfectly prepared, thank you very much. The scene mixes nostalgia, grief and anger in the saddest way.

This fits with the way Grandpa is themed around DEATH. Not only is he a mounted corpse, his collections of knights, mummies, big game, and degraded beauty shop photos evoke history and the dead, echoing his undead presence in Jade's life. (They also suggest he carries memories of Jake's friends: an orange knight, a pink girl from a land of pyramids, and a blue beauty, furthering the connections between Grandpa and Jake.)

But Grandpa, like Jake, is also themed around FANTASY. Or ESCAPISM, perhaps. Grandpa lives the life of a millionaire explorer-physicist, the boy howdy rough-and-tumble existence that never existed out of Boys' Adventure Comics and Teddy Roosevelt. His trophies and relics suggest a life of constant fantasizing, a retreat into his own self-image to avoid facing the world. After all, if you move to a deserted island in the middle of nowhere, you never have to interact with anyone else. This is astoundingly consistent with what we know of Jake's flaws: he constructs narratives to hide from responsibility and his own mistakes, from ignoring Jane's anger to ignoring the unaddressed issues in his relationship with Dirk to ignoring Jane's romantic interest in him the moment he finds a convenient excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway. Grandpa seems to be cast in very much the same mode, and his whimsical relics further the theme.

For Jade, though, Grandpa's ESCAPISM has also been harmful. Because Grandpa left her what must have seemed the ultimate moment of escapism: a tea party with a stuffed blue doll. Think of what Jade must have thought later: that Grandpa went out lost in daydreaming about a beautiful blue girl. That maybe he planned that as a way to end it all. Her anger is fueled in part by the fact that he ran away from the responsibility of raising her, into his fantasy world instead.

Of course, as readers we know that's not true: Tavros was the one who, through Bec, shot the gun. But there's a grain of truth in Jade's perception of the situation: while not suicidal, Grandpa was being irresponsible. Lost in his silly tea party, he missed the fact that his granddaughter was about to shoot herself with a flintlock pistol. She was saved by Tavros's redirection, while he paid the ultimate price for his distraction.

So Grandpa's flaw, like Jake's, is one of absence and escapist irresponsibility, death and fantasy. Grandpa really did harm her by his absence. And in his absence, all he left her with was necessity.

Jade takes care of herself, because what else can she do? She feeds the dog. She does what she needs to do to survive. She goes about her day. She defines herself in opposition to her grandfather: if he was irresponsible, she will be responsible. She will do what's necessary, no matter what it takes.

And she represses the fuck out of her grief.

This is way buried for most of the time we know Jade, but it comes to the surface when we meet Jadesprite. See, in addition to having a reminder of her Grandfather's mortality, Jade has spent her life face to face with her own. Her dreamself, which represents the one place in her life where she let herself go along with fantasy and escapism, is already a stuffed corpse. Consciously or subconsciously, she knows that happy escapist world will also die. When she prototypes that body, though, she's acting out of responsibility and necessity as part of an effort to defeat the threat of Jack Noir. She expects that a version of herself will share that desire.

But Jadesprite presents what is to her the most nightmarish possibility: that she might prefer living in the fantasy to responsibility. She tries to comfort her alt-self at first, but quickly becomes disgusted that a version of herself could feel that way. But it's not surprising: Dream Jade was the only version of herself who could let herself lay down responsibility and necessity and admit to herself the extent of her fear. Unfortunately, this isn't the way Jade would like herself to be. Jadesprite is exactly what she represses. There's a seeming moment of catharsis when Jade and Jadesprite become one, but, as I've noted before, Hussie ultimately suggests that spritefusion isn't enough to fix what Jade struggles with.

None of this is Jade's fault. It's the way she's been shaped by the outside force of her grandfather's death. Her grandfather was flawed, she lives with the consequences, picking up the pieces of the loss, doing things out of necessity.

SBURB recapitulates that tragedy, forcing Jade to reckon with her trauma and her perception of her own relation to it.

The SBURBan Tragedy

Is SBURB evil? I used to see it that way. These days I'm not so sure. Conversations with revolutionaryduelist have shown me that, despite its dangerous side, SBURB is usually presented in a neutral light in canon, more amoral than deliberately cruel. It's a Game that can be put to different purposes. RD argues that SBURB is ultimately little more than an extension of its players' wills, and I find a lot of reasons to agree.

As I've argued before (particularly in my Self Pile Essay, though my feelings have evolved since), I strongly feel that the ending of Homestuck relies on a critique of SBURB, that it depicts the Game as inherently tragic. You wouldn't think this would jive with RD's notion of "do what you will," but I actually think these two perspectives can be easily reconciled. A Game that's an extension of everyone's wills can still have a tragic effect on its players, especially on those who don't realize their own power within the system. I'm sure we can all think of times when the wills of others were an oppressive force in our lives. Our critique of SBURB, then, is really a critique of the uses to which the Game has been put, by overpowering wills like that of Caliborn/Lord English, who makes the alpha timeline bend to him without realizing how much it echoes his own limitations.

Like Grandpa Harley, Lord English (the unseen conductor whose riddle is absence itself) forces others to reckon with the implications of his choices. The complex web of time loops and paradoxes LE leaves in his wake forces our heroes to act out of necessity and to take responsibility for their escape.

So while I might talk about SBURB in negative terms here, understand I'm talking about the mess of all the loops, all the implications of the many harmful wills and choices our kids have to deal with. Jade in some ways most of all.

Initially, Jade experiences SBURB as a positive force in her life. It allows her freedom and happiness; companionship among the people of Prospit while in her most optimistic, worry-free mindset. She participates in its necessities, its enforced time loops, not out of obligation but in connection to her dreaming happiness.

As the kids' game goes on, though, Jade loses Prospit and her dreamself, and loses, too, the easy release from herself that they represent. Like all the kids, she becomes aware of the threat of Jack Noir, and directs her responsible mind towards the necessity of dealing with him--leading of course, to her clash with Jadesprite. Later, this focus shifts to take in the true cause of everything that went wrong in their session: the unseen guiding hand of Lord English.

We all know what happens to Jade because of this. In the original timeline, all our kids' efforts fail, and all of them die in the events of Game Over, Jade first and most surprisingly. John retcons the timeline using his retcon powers, and achieves victory by changing the course of events. However, it's a victory that causes Jade to suffer deeply: in the final timeline, she loses and grieves John and Davesprite, her closest friends on the Battleship voyage, and for a time wonders if she was responsible for their horrifying, baffling death. Later, she learns from a mysterious sentinel (Alt-Calliope) that it was all part of a larger plan. This is a relief to her, but as much as she'd like it to, it doesn't erase her grief.

This is brutally, totally unfair. And that's the point.

I've seen folks point out that the retcon could have gone many other ways: for instance, merging the populations of the meteor and the battleship. That's true, but it misses the point a little, I think. The Retcon is an arbitrary solution to a large problem in Paradox Space, acting out of necessity to bring Caliborn's will to a close. Remember that John didn't choose how his retcon would go: he worked it out with the Game itself through his Denizen. Not only did the Game bring forth the very tools to end Caliborn and close his time loop, finishing what his will started, it also worked out the logistics of the timeline that would get them there. And that's the tragedy.

John had only the vaguest idea how his actions would affect Jade, knowing only that either he would die or people would grieve him. By working with his Denizen, he mastered his powers and managed to create a reality where everyone could escape the will of Lord English. But it created an awful situation for Jade, and indeed, he's horrified when he finds out that was the result.

For me, the victory our kids experience over Lord English and his will as manifest in SBURB isn't presented as an unambiguous one. Rather, it's triumph mixed with shades of tragedy. John's reformulation of reality has consequences. The loss of our kids' coherency of self (see the Self Pile) is one of them--I do think it's meant to be at least a little disconcerting that it's new versions of our beloved characters who get the victory. And it's Jade who represents that tragic element the most, because she suffers the brunt of it. The fact that Jade suffers because of the Retcon tells us that for all the positivity of the final scenes of Homestuck, there's still a dark side to the system of SBURB.

Because there was never any point at which any of this took place outside the system of SBURB. It gave Caliborn what he wanted, and then took it back again, not because it had any intentions towards him, but because his will was self-defeating and self-limited. And through the Denizens, it gave our kids the escape they wanted: but they still had to deal with the necessity of responding to Caliborn's intentions, and perhaps SBURB'S own limitations, too. It could give them an escape, but not without certain consequences.

It's no coincidence that Denizens make a resurgence near the end of Homestuck. They are the Game's way of engaging in dialogue with its players, and they preside over every aspect of everyone's ending. Yaldabaoth gives Caliborn his deal, while Echidna signs off on the birth of the Genesis Frog once she's had a chance to inspect its guardians. Echidna is also the one who guides Alt-Calliope towards ending Caliborn's reign. And Typheus lets John become a retcon master so that he can win his friends their complicated victory.

Thinking about this has helped me make sense of a scene that initially baffled me. Near the end of Collide, the story turns absurdly positive: our kids win victory after victory over every opponent they were facing. And then, suddenly, disconcertingly, the scene begins to fade out and flash with static, while strange cries are heard. Then it freezes, and the mechanical contrivance that Hussie once used to represent Homestuck's Acts and narrative is all we can see, frozen in black and white.

Those strange sounds are the sounds that played in scenes with Denizens. And not just any Denizen: the specific whale-song we hear is the voice of Typheus, the Denizen who helped John negotiate his retcon and who, through blowing up a duplicate John and Davesprite on LOWAS, is the most directly responsible for Jade's suffering.

The message of the end of Collide, then, brought spectacularly home by this juxtaposition of victory poses and sudden distance, is that the victory achieved, while real, was negotiated by the systems of SBURB and Skaia every step of the way. This, too, is the message of the Spirograph that suddenly appears at the end of Act 7: our kids have left the Game for good, but the Game goes on without them, and always will.

Jade's experiences show what the costs of that might be.

The Gnostic Triumph of Jade Harley, Witch of Space

And yet.

Jade also achieves victory. An even more powerful victory, in fact. In a deeply Gnostic moment, she confronts the arbitrary suffering of SBURB in a way none of the other kids ever do. She directly confronts the Game, and the cruel intentions unleashed through it by Lord English, by moving beyond them altogether and claiming her own agency.

It's Davepeta who helps her see it.

Once, Jade thought she was responsible for her friends' deaths. Later she learned from Alt-Calliope it happened as part of SBURB's cosmic plan. She was able to take some comfort in that: but it didn't keep her from her grief. When she meets Alt-Calliope again, Jade continues to try to make sense of her experiences through the lens of necessity, through the lens of a responsibility she has to fulfil.

Let's look closely at the difference between what Calliope says about the Space role, and how Jade interprets it for herself.

CALLIOPE: why the hurry? CALLIOPE: you have already proven your heroism in the moments when it was needed most. CALLIOPE: it is important to know when the greatest good is best served by remaining dormant. CALLIOPE: whether that burden is for close to eternity, or only a few more minutes. CALLIOPE: it is something to learn as a space player. CALLIOPE: space falls back. it yields. hosts the play silently. CALLIOPE: then, it roars to life when its time comes, showing all who is really the master. CALLIOPE: and so too when the time comes, it collapses in on itself, taking all else with it.

Calliope argues that Space is about patience, that patience itself is heroic. But Jade interprets this to mean that loneliness and suffering are a cross she must bear. As she says shortly afterward:

JADE: as a space player... someone who "falls back" as she said JADE: maybe being pushed aside by fate, and like JADE: being deprived of important people and experiences JADE: no matter how painful it is, or how much you feel like you need them JADE: i guess thats just how it goes for us JADE: i think i never appreciated how much of a burden your aspect was to you JADE: but i think im starting to get it now JADE: it just took a long time to figure out what mine really meant

But that's not what Calliope is saying. Alt-Calliope is talking about Space, to be sure, but she's talking about it in terms of her own role. Alt-Calliope is a very different person from Jade, one who is entirely comfortable with placing her identity and agency in the hands of necessity, with sacrificing everything for necessity. But what works for Alt-Calliope won't work for Jade. Jade needs friendships, needs her own life and happiness outside the Game in a way Alt-Calliope does not. (And a Muse of Space is a very different creature than a Witch of Space, a much more active and self-oriented role.)

And Calliope knows this, too. While she teaches Jade about her own understanding of Space, she doesn't ask that Jade follow her into the Green Sun, nor does she ask that Jade construct her life in the same exact terms. Again, it's Jade, not Calliope, who tries to suggest that losing all her friends is her Space-y burden to bear. Calliope, however, reminds Jade that they're very different creatures, and need different things:

CALLIOPE: you are still quite young, and your kind is soft. CALLIOPE: the ability to absolutely dominate is better housed in a being designed for seclusion, singularity of purpose, and remorseless resolve. CALLIOPE: it is too much for one like you.

(And here the domination Calliope's talking about isn't just Lord English's, but her own Muse of Space response to that domination, the reshaping of Paradox Space by falling back and then roaring to life.)

Calliope suggests that Jade might choose to go along with the sleep that keeps her from being a danger in the final fight, but she doesn't require it. Instead, she says:

CALLIOPE: if you must have advice, i will give you some similar to that i gave your other space-playing friend. CALLIOPE: i told her to live, where before she had not. CALLIOPE: so too, you are similarly imprisoned by various inertias. CALLIOPE: these weigh on you. CALLIOPE: you are a child, belonging to a race for which that distinction is understood to correspond with experiences of "enjoyment." CALLIOPE: perhaps you should try to have, CALLIOPE: "fun."

Calliope doesn't need what Jade needs. But she knows Jade is more than a means to an end. Jade needs fun, she needs friendship, and she needs happiness. Even though Calliope sees advantage in Jade remaining asleep, she goes out of her way to tell her about the alternate possibilities that might free her from imprisoning inertias.

This leaves Jade somewhat confused. She wants to make sense of her life in terms of the mandates and loops of SBURB/Lord English, fulfilling every necessity. But Calliope rejects that notion for Jade and emphasizes the difference between their species.

So when Davepeta comes along, Jade is wrestling with the strangeness of the Calliope encounter.

JADE: calliope said i was too strong or something JADE: but she also said i should have "fun" so JADE: i dunno JADE: i guess im just waiting around for the right moment

She's trying to make sense of Calliope's offer while still trying to see herself in terms of necessity. Davepeta, though, rejects that completely. When Jade tells them her statement above, trying to describe herself in terms of someone who "has to" be pushed around by the rules of Space, Davepeta responds extremely skeptically:

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < so THATS what space means? DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < bein lonely??

Note the incredulous extra question mark. Jade continues to try to describe herself as someone who has to follow the mandates of others and systems outside her control. And yet as she talks about it, she reveals how dissatisfied she is with that notion of herself:

JADE: but i think that can be one of the results of gaining a deeper understanding of it JADE: or becoming connected to it more... JADE: i dunno, this stuff is all pretty mysterious :p JADE: i dont have it all figured out yet obviously JADE: i just feel pretty sad that as i get closer to understanding my abilities and true nature JADE: it apparently means being deprived of some important experiences JADE: like i get closer to my aspect, but further away from everyone i love, and further from... JADE: feeling like a person? JADE: its just a really empty feeling after a while JADE: empty like... JADE: space i guess JADE: heh

I don't think we're to take this as an absolute statement. While there's truth in Calliope's depiction of space as receptive and patient. I think we're to take these lines as Jade wrestling with her own feelings about the way she should be. Davepeta doesn't argue that Jade should accept this description of herself. Instead, Davepeta opens up a startling alternate possibility: that Jade is more than necessity, bigger than her circumstances, larger than her suffering. If Jade's suffering is an echo of the arbitrary unfairness of the way SBURB divides up our protagonists' selves to bring Lord English to an end, then Davepeta suggests that the key to escaping suffering is to see the self beyond those individual identities:

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < but you werent actually deprived of important experiences DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < stuff like us dating and johns stupid birthday parties and playing shitty ghostbuster mmos DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < that stuff all happened to you, its just you dont have access to the memories DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < they didnt happen to shape this particular version of yourself DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < but they all played a role in helping like "greater jade" grow if that makes sense DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < everything that ever happens to every version of you is an important part of your ultimate self... like a superceding bodyless and timeless persona that crosses the boundaries of paradox space and unlike god tiers or bubble ghosts or whatever, it really IS immortal DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < but in your physical form there are all these partitions in your mind that prevent you from remembering any of that which makes your existence f33l totally linear DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < which is probably for the best! DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < in a regular body s33ing all that would be too overwhelming DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < in an advanced sprite form like mine tho its fine DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < i guess the same spritey magic that makes it possible to suddenly understand so much is also what makes it possible to make it bearable all at once DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < not even just bearable actually sorta liberating and cool DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < and after it sinks in for a while you start coming to this understanding of a greater self

AVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < im not COMPLETELY sure because im not like some sort of ASPECT MASTER but DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < my avian slash feline intuition tells me that all roads will lead you here eventually DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < gaining the d33pest possible understanding of any aspect will bring you to the same final conclusion about your ultimate self DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < so maybe thats starting to happen for you too DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < the space aspect sounds like a hard and lonely road to travel... i think they probably all are DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < but youre gettin there jade DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < you are doing great and im so proud of you!

Once again, this isn't Davepeta saying that Jade needs to be happy about what's happened to her--they acknowledge that living in SBURB is painful, a hard and lonely road for anyone of any aspect. But seeing oneself as this "ultimate self" allows one to see a bigger picture, to find meaning in one's actions even when buffeted by what seems to be the cruelty of fate. In a Game whose tragedy is that divides people up into different manifestations of themselves, each going to an arbitrary fate, that's the way to find victory, to find happiness beyond each tragedy. That's the balance that Homestuck's ending is deeply concerned with, and Jade Harley represents it all: both the suffering and the remedy.

Davepeta's proud of her for coming this far. I'm proud of her, too.

But does this understanding work for Jade? Does it free her from the way she saw herself as an instrument of fate, a tool of necessity? I think it does. Because after talking with Davepeta, Jade starts to live her life differently.

We see this clearly in Collide and the events leading up to Collide. Jade was ready to accept that she had to stay asleep merely because it was what others expected of her. But Davepeta convinces her that she should wake up if she wants to wake up:

JADE: i guess im just waiting around for the right moment DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < nah thats dumb DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < you should be able to do whatever you want JADE: really? DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < well at least she was right about the having fun part DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < maybe thats what she meant?? DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < maybe she was leaving it up to you in a mysterious way JADE: leaving what up to me? JADE: the decision to wake up?

Davepeta's message to Jade, informed by their deep understanding of life beyond one lifetime, is that Jade can do things for herself, rather than do them as a reaction to necessity. And the secret is that that choice makes all the difference.

Jade does choose to wake up, and after waking up, rejects any idea that she should go back to following necessity, or other people’s commands:

DAVE: jade DAVE: god dammit DAVE: GO BACK TO SLEEP! JADE: NO WAY!!!!! :P

JADE: i am very much awake! JADE: and i intend to stay that way :)

Jade chooses to take Calliope up on her offer: she chooses to go have fun. For the first time, she pursues her goals completely and utterly for her own reasons. She chooses to take on the mission of dealing with the Omnidogs Bec Noir and PM...pretty much because she wants to. And she does it in her own way: she doesn't get in a fight, but plays with her dogs, recreating the fun times in her life with Bec by warping around and dancing around in the sky with them.

While she ends up getting punched out by PM, it's mostly comic: she isn't hurt or upset--she had a fun time, and did what she wanted to do. She's asserting her own agency, not responding to the will of anyone else, be it Lord English, Dave, John, or any of the other players. She takes on SBURB's boss mechanics in her own terms and enjoys herself doing it. And what she's able to achieve by this is *reshaping the rules of the Game.* Because of her, PM beats Bec Noir. For the first time in the known history of SBURB, White beats Black, Prospit beats Derse, entirely thanks to her presence. This change is subtle but huge. It represents what Jade's doing on a cosmic level: she's creating the Game, creating her reality, for herself, not responding to anyone else's intention, but putting forth her own to shape the world.

The Gnostics of ancient times said that the material world we lived in was merely an illusion created by the tyrant Yaldabaoth, and that all we needed to do to escape his tyranny was to look within ourselves. Because we were made of the same stuff as the True God, filled with the same wisdom as Sophia, and if we could truly know ourselves, could know exactly who we were, we could walk back through the gates into the Garden of Eden, knowing that we were God, part of a true divine reality bigger than anything Yaldabaoth could understand.

So, too, does Jade Harley, GardenGnostic, in that moment, know that she is bigger than anything that once defined her. Not her grandfather's death and failings, not her role as a link in the prophecies of Skaia, not Jack Noir, and not the limitations of a single Jade in a tragic timeline. None of those things define her. She is greater still, the JADE beyond Jades, and she has just as much power to make SBURB, to make all of Paradox Space what she wants it to be as any would-be tyrant. She stares Lord English in the eye, and knows she is as great within this contest of wills as he is. They all are.

And that makes Jade a little bit different from her fellow gods: she knows in full what the rest of them are only beginning to understand.

When we next see Jade after Act 7, in the Credits sequence, we see her growing plants again after a long time away from her garden, returning to her own personal Eden, and we see her spending time with John, Dave, and Karkat--all the people that she loves.

Knowing who she is, she has escaped all the inertias that once bound her, and is turning reality into what she wants it to be.

In the world of SBURB, that's the way to find a happy ending.

[Next time: Maybe I’ll do that reception of the ending thing I promised last time? Or maybe not? Maybe I’ll be too busy playing Hiveswap? Maybe life is full of infinite delicious possibilities, and we’re all riding this magic train out to the Pleroma together? Who knows, man. Who knows.]

#jade harley #grandpa harley #homestuck analysis #jake english #homestuck #off-the-cuff homestuck thoughts extravaganza 2017 #gnostic influences #gnostic themes #alt calliope #space aspect #freedom to live #THE ULTIMATE SELF #homestuck ending #understanding homestuck #suicide cw #csa mention

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dying-of-thirst-here · 7 years

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The Light of Providence and the Spiral of Death: FFX and FFXV Compared

This is a pretty lengthy stretch of meta comparing FFX and FFXV’s attitudes toward death. Since that obviously ties into their plots, this will contain copious spoilers for both games.

The stories of FFX and FFXV do not remotely resemble one another. They do, however, in my opinion, contain parallel situations whose resolutions go in completely opposite directions. There isn’t anything particularly significant in that except that they are both major titles in the same series; I don’t know if they share any writers’ credits, but I would tend to assume not.

Both games depict sets of characters who’ve grown up in cultures that glorify self-sacrifice on behalf of a greater good. Their narratives, however, show wildly different depictions on the worthiness of that glorification.

These are not going to be brief rundowns, but I’m going to try to keep things simple. Like, I know one of the risks of being unsent in FFX is turning into a fiend, I know afterlife stuff happens in FFXV, but things like these are not really relevant to what I’m talking about. Yes, I am aware the main character in FFX also dies. But Tidus is not Noctis’s parallel in FFX; Yuna is.

So lemme start by laying out the cultural contexts we’re working within.

FFX: Just Don’t Climb Mountains with Corpses on Them. Don’t.

So Spira, the world of FFX, has a problem: it’s actually kind of hard to die. In fact, in some situations it might be impossible to die.

Okay, we don’t have to oversimplify: anyone can die in FFX. But unless a ritual undertaken by a specialist is performed immediately… not a whole lot happens when you die. You remain in the world of the living as something like a ghost, but you are for the most part indistinguishable from a living person. These ghosts are called “unsent,” due to the ritual performed for the dead being called “the sending,” as in sending them to the afterlife. Unsent can and do blend into the rest of the population and live relatively normal lives, not necessarily bothering anyone. Obviously, this is kind of fucked up, and no one wants to end up unsent or have their loved ones become unsent, so the sending ritual is treated as a matter of urgency… officially.

It almost goes without saying, then, that most of the people in positions of significant power in FFX are dead. Leaders hold onto their power by letting their deaths go unannounced and staying where they are, unsent. There are two examples in the game of massive unchanging power structures made up of unsent that exist solely to protect and perpetuate themselves. The game’s story is about how everyone who lives within the cultures that uphold these power structures ultimately suffer due to the people in power being unwilling to let go or accept change.

I know that’s a strange place to start explaining the religious atmosphere of FFX, but populating the upper reaches of power with undead incumbents is exactly the sort of situation where you’d want to weed out powerful up-and-comers. The religion itself – the worship of a figure named Yevon – dominates Spira’s culture, and it promotes faith to the point of such zealotry that people do actively seek to die for it. There a number of ways this works (Yevon is very complicated and you, reader, have presumably played FFX and do not need it explained in great detail), but we’ll focus on the two big ones: the fayth and the high summoners.

The fayth are people who have willingly had their bodies sealed within statues that worshipers form temples around and pray to. So first of all, they are officially sanctioned unsent. You can interact with ghostly versions of their human forms. Their primary method of interacting with the living world, however, and the reason they’d die in this horrible way to begin with, is that a fayth can take on the form of a fantastical and powerful creature which at that point is referred to as an aeon. The interchangeability of these terms varies; both the statue and the unsent ghosts are called fayth, but the dragons and the kirin and the fire demons and their ilk are always called aeons, even though the dragon and statue and ghost are all the same ‘person.’ I want try to avoid getting into these games’ weird vocabulary too deeply, but the distinction here is important when talking about summoners.

If you, hypothetical reader, have not played FFX but came across this essay and thought 'eh, fuck it,’ I respect that decision, and though you must be familiar with the summoning tradition in Final Fantasy as a franchise, you might be wondering why a strong religious culture would require people entombing themselves so they can become miserable unkillable fantastic beasts. You will probably not be surprised that this is where things get horrible.

The specialist mentioned earlier who needs to be called in to perform the sending for the dead is a role within Yevon called a summoner. Yes, like the summoners from almost every Final Fantasy game. Summoners train and work intensely with a fayth so they can form a bond that enables the summoner to call on the fayth’s aeon. Summoners are also the only people who can perform the sending, for… a reason, most likely. Becoming a summoner is a lot of work, though, and some villages lack any resident summoners at all, which is probably one reason there are so many dead people hanging around and getting away with it.

So that’s a summoner. Not all summoners are high summoners – in fact, there are only a handful of high summoners acknowledged in the game – but during certain cyclic periods of Spira’s history, all summoners want to become high summoners, or they come under a great deal of social pressure to attempt to become a high summoner. A high summoner’s job is to die.

The narrative that Yevon has embedded in its culture – and, to be fair, very much what appears at first to be going on – is that Spira is under a sort of curse that calls forth a massive sea monster unsubtly referred to as Sin. It appears without warning to destroy villages and ships; Spira consists of a number of small landmasses that contain a lot of coastline, so during the periods in which Sin is active, Spira’s population lives in constant terror. These periods of activity are not set to any kind of predictable system or cycle. Sin will vanish for years, and then it will just appear again one day. The only thing that can send Sin back into its temporary banishment is the most powerful aeon in Spira. This can be obtained by first earning the approval of a core set of the fayth (which itself involves walking most of the length of Spira, since the fayth are all located in regional temples), then climbing a mountain that kills most people who manage to make it that far, then getting into the dead city beyond the mountain and locating and praying to the fayth whose statue is unhelpfully based there, who will then hopefully grant you access to the aeon that can destroy Sin.

All of the other aeons have names – Valefor, Ifrit, Ixion, Shiva, Bahamut – but this one does not. It’s simply called the Final Aeon. It costs the high summoner his or her life to call on it - the high summoner doesn’t even get to see the fight - and then both Sin and the Final Aeon vanish.

The people of Spira believe the high summoners are laying down their lives to save everyone else’s, and they are granted the status of something like a saint in death. In actuality, the high summoner’s death sets off the conditions to begin the cycle of Sin eventually reappearing again.

But hey, we have to believe in something, right?

FFXV: The Once and Future Kings

So… FFXV has strange ideas about Christ figures. Not Xenogears strange, but… like, there’s official artwork strongly suggestive of the Triumphal Entry only there’s a chocobo instead of a donkey??

There is nothing in the story or setting that is actually thematically Biblical at all. JRPGs! What can you do.

This is going to be a little more difficult to lay out, because FFXV doesn’t really believe in things like backstory and exposition. Which I actually like in fantasy fiction, but it’s going to make explaining the self-serving power structure in this game a matter of interpretation here and there. Bear with me.

There are a number of regional cultures in Eos, FFXV’s loose floating jumble of continents, and none of them seem particularly religious. But they do have six gods, and they physically exist within the world. No one worships these gods, exactly. They are looked on with awe and respect and fear, but there are no organized religions around them that we see. This was a terrible oversight on the part of the ancient people of Eos, because these gods historically needed something to distract them from destroying everyone’s lives constantly. Eventually they all just agreed to go to sleep, I think.

But despite the lack of organized religion, Eos has an interesting figure known as the Oracle. There is only ever one Oracle at a time, and the role is passed down within one of the royal bloodlines. The Oracle’s power is that she can wake up the gods and speak and understand their speech, which is a great idea, probably.

The Oracle is a universally popular figure. During the game’s time frame the role is fulled by Lady Lunafreya, and the radio newscasts and newspapers you can find suggest a culture of celebrity worship of Lunafreya herself. She’s got other things going, like she’s a white mage and sorta princess, but the gods she’s supposed to commune with don’t seem to command much influence.

BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK we’ll come back to that

Anyway, the Oracle ties into The Prophesy. Yes, FFXV is a The Prophesy story. Everyone in FFXV knows The Prophesy. But there are also aspects of The Prophesy that you have to have explained to you by a rock or a dragon, so there’s The Prophesy and then there’s like The Gnostic Prophesy–

I really, really like FFXV. I do not The Prophesy stories. FFXV is a really bizarre example of a The Prophesy story, so honesty I kind of give it a pass. It’s just… okay, look

There are books scattered around the world that are parts of a cosmogony explaining bits of Eos’s mythology. The cosmogony explains that the gods picked the Oracle’s bloodline, and another magic bloodline kind of self-selected itself and established its own kingdom, Lucis, to whom the gods entrusted a supposedly wondrous but frankly pretty evil crystal; the royal family can tap into it kind of like a magic battery, so it does have its non-evil uses, but using that way drastically shortens the king’s lifespan, so… yeah, still pretty evil. This cosmogony also frequently mentions that someday the world will get dark and awful and then a king of light will make it better, yay, monarchism and a passing familiarity with Latin! It says it fancier than that, but that is pretty much all it says regarding any future bad times that I saw. This seems to be what people mean when they talk about The Prophesy, so most of the people in Eos can be forgiven for having no idea what that’s supposed to mean. Unfortunately, that does not include Lunafreya, who has one of the gods just like hanging out with her all the time, nor does it include the current King of Lucis, Regis, whom the crystal… talks… to? I don’t know, but when Regis’s son Noctis is five years old the crystal somehow tells Regis that Noctis is going to be the king of light. Oh, hey, guess how the king of light saves the world?

I’m doubly assuming that if you’re reading this you have played FFXV, so yeah, after two thousand words we are finally preparing the cabin for our final approach to my narrative comparison: he has to die.

Regis knows this. Lunafreya, a close childhood friend of Noctis’s, knows this. Noctis does not know this. Neither of them ever tell him. Noctis spends the game walking toward his death blind. And to make sure this point isn’t lost on you, it turns out that this isn’t the first time the conditions of The Prophesy, vague as they are, have been met. There was a king of light chosen by the crystal who predated Noctis by some two thousand years, and what happened to him was arguably worse than death. No one warned him, either.

The king of light is a venerated figure in Lucian artwork and poetry. He’s also a lamb for the slaughter. Even Christ got a heads up.

The Meta-narrative

“Meta-narrative” can mean about a dozen things depending on what school of postmodernism you’re incorrectly quoting, so I’ll be clearer: it’s the story that the story tells about itself. We know what these stories are both about, but how are they about them? The characters in FFX venerate and aspire to be as great as the high summoners, but what does the game itself think about what the high summoners have to do? What does FFXV think about what Noctis has to do? What are the games’ respective opinions of dying for a cause?

Well, that is of course up to interpretation. Neither fate is what can be comfortably regarded as a “good” death: the circumstances surrounding the high summoner and the king of light are very different, but in both cases they are lied to in order to put them where the real power of their respective worlds want them. Yevon wants to maintain the status quo to a degree that is obsessive and stagnant. The gods of Eos want to eliminate their own mistake, the previous king of light, which should tell you how much priority they’re giving The Prophesy.

I can’t speak on behalf of the culture that produced both of these stories, but I can say with some confidence that in Western culture we regard the concept of dying for the sake of others as a very noble calling. FFX has to make you look at that ideal from different angles to make its point about how much a single life sacrificed willingly can destroy the people left behind who didn’t get a say. It does this repeatedly: Wakka’s brother, Seymour’s mother, whichever of those two Crusaders you decided to doom, but it does so with the most impact when the game reveals the nature of the Final Aeon. There is no fayth in the ruined city. In order to obtain the most powerful aeon a summoner can call upon, they have to offer up the soul of one of their companions to be turned into a fayth.

What’s that? You’re balking at sacrificing a friend in order to save the world? But you were perfectly willing to sacrifice yourself! Your friend stood with you for your entire journey and is already mourning your impending death; going along with this plan is a way to follow you to the very end. It may even be seen as a relief from the burden of guilt and grief.

In order to become a martyr, you have to go through with murder. All the high summoners you’ve looked up to your entire life achieved what they did through killing someone they loved. Someone who had been willing to die for them every step of the way there.

The last high summoner had two companions with him on his journey. The surviving member of the party didn’t survive for very long. And with no one to perform a sending, he was left to become a ghost.

That is what FFX thinks of the nobility of suicide.

The Greater Good

FFXV’s situation is harder to make emotional sense of, not least because because the end of the game presents a scientific problem with a magical solution. The world has done dark because… parasites… release of light-absorbing particles into the atmosphere… yeah, human sacrifice ought to do the trick.

But let’s set the plot aside. The plot’s excuses for killing Noctis don’t literally matter, because, you know, The Prophesy. Ardyn has to die, Noctis has to die, and then Ardyn has to die extra, and thus the sun returns. But how does the story itself feel about this?

FFX never shows the audience how a person is turned into a fayth. It never shows us how the high summoner dies. But FFXV shows us Noctis’s suicide-by-summon in brutal, extended detail. We’re finally faced with Noctis at the edge of death begging the ghost of his father to kill him; Regis hesitates, and then he runs Noctis through. Regis kills Noctis. This can’t be a death we’re supposed to feel good about.

FFX is less interested in the deaths themselves than it is in their aftermaths. We don’t see the aftermath of Noctis’s death. We don’t know what his friends do after he dies. Noctis’s death is the end of the story; it’s the note FFXV decides to go out on. The story presents it as very sad, but also as the right thing for Noctis to do.

You can certainly make that argument considering the scale of what his death achieves. I believe that is what the game thinks, with its final shots of the sun rising over various game locations. Noctis was the only person who could do this, and he was strong enough to go through with it even though he emphatically didn’t want to.

Tidus basically ripped reality apart in order to save the next person slated to die as high summoner. He didn’t cry at their last campfire. He… well, he murdered his dad, look, FFX is complicated and deeply invested in its metaphors.

But it’s striking to me that none of Noctis’s friends try to brainstorm another way out of this. That’s the direction any other Final Fantasy game would have taken, so I suppose it’s to FFXV’s credit that it doesn’t do that. But have his friends really just… given up? None of them even declare they’re willing to continue to live in perpetual darkness for the sake of keeping Noctis now that’s he’s finally come back? Any one of the three has the background and motivation to at least suggest it, even if Noctis disagrees.

They cry for him, but they don’t believe they can save him. They grew up believing in the king of light that would save them.

The King Must Die

This is a question that can only be applied very broadly, because both games have their individual answers, but I find it interesting and am therefore ging to pose it anyway: why, on a thematic level, is Yuna spared and Noctis killed?

Again, it’s entirely up to interpretation, but I think a lot of it has to do with character agency. From the beginning of FFX to the end, Yuna makes her own decisions and carries them out, even when the rest of the party opposes her. She decides she wants to become a summoner, and she does. She decides she wants to embark on the journey to attempt to become a high summoner, so she gathers her friends and off they go. When she’s asked to partake in a political marriage, she recognizes that the situation is weird, but it’s still her choice. She ends up basing her decision on information only she has access to, so for a while her friends have no idea what the hell she’s doing, but whatever, she’s doing it anyway! And when she’s faced with the question of which of her friends she’s going to sacrifice for the Final Aeon, she doesn’t. She refuses. She was indeed willing to die herself, but she does something no one else has done and draws the line there.

It’s easy to forget this aspect of FFX, because Yuna is quiet and timid and kind of an idealized white mage type character. She cries over her impending fate. But that was still a fate she chose for herself, and she rejects it as soon as she realizes that entire high summoner aspiration is a lie.

Noctis is never given the opportunity to make decisions like this. As a prince, he’s locked into his fate regardless, and on top of that the crystal declares that this prince in particular was born to die. He is told half truths about this - he knows he’s fated to be the king of light, but neither his father nor Lunafreya will tell him what that means. One bit of party banter even has him complaining about The Prophesy being “vague.” Like Yuna, he’s to be a part of a political marriage, but he was informed of this, not asked. The gods jerk him around with migraines, bad weather, and occasionally just showing up and telling him what to do. When he’s finally told the king of light’s purpose, he’s essentially been imprisoned by one of the gods, Bahamut, and he again just is being informed. You’re going to die. Bahamut then proceeds to hold Noctis captive for ten years. He lets him go when he decides Noctis is ready to be sacrificed. There is nothing approaching a choice in any of this.

To add insult to this, Bahamut’s explanation for why Noctis has to die is largely unrelated to The Prophesy and is manipulative as hell. Yes, the world is shrouded in darkness, that’s bad, agreed. But his version of The Prophesy introduces an entirely new character. The Accursed! The Usurper! You’re kindly given a dialogue option to ask who the hell we’re talking about now, and oh, you mean Ardyn. Your previous chosen king of light. The one you tasked with curing a plague, allowed to get sick himself doing so, and subsequently denied any kind of access to the afterlife because you think his illness is gross. So he’s just stuck being alive and sick and increasingly vengeful forever. ….oh, hey, I think that’s my pager, I’ll just, uh, be a minute

Bahamut also tells Noctis that he has to sacrifice himself for the people because so many people have sacrificed themselves for him. Okay, whose deaths are we holding Noctis responsible for here? Is this still about Jared? Because we avenged the FUCK out of Jared!

My point is, by the end of the game we’ve gone well beyond denied agency; Noctis has ended up kidnapped and imprisoned. As of this writing, we don’t know what was going on with Noct during those ten years. If he was sleeping, dreaming, being brainwashed by a dragon – we don’t know. What we see is him telling his friends that he’s made up his mind to do this, but being back with them is weakening his resolve. He doesn’t want to go. He wants to stay with them.

But he does go. He restores the light, though he doesn’t live to see it.

FFXV admires Noctis for fulfilling his destiny, but it has no reason to. It never gives him the option to choose another path. This cup will not pass from him.

Noctis’s life was short and painful, and he had ten years of even that stolen from him. But he loved his friends. For them, he found the courage to walk back to that throne room alone.

#ffxv spoilers #ffx spoilers #final fantasy xv #final fantasy x #yuna #noctis #meta #yeah sometimes i write 4000 word essays out of nowhere about useless things #if only this power could be used... for good

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thebaalpit-blog · 7 years

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I like P5 a lot (Spoilers)

So I finished P5 and now that i’ve come out of playing it twice, both in separate languages, I have a lot of wild opinions to go about so here we go. It should go without seeing I’m gonna talk about the game freely, but here’s a warning in case.

I would have to say I like the story of the game a lot, but I’m accounting for the first, fourth, and everything after the fifth arc. Kamoshida is an incredibly strong antagonist who does a million things for setting up the game very well, Sae and Futaba are great ways of showing that Changes of Hearts can happen to people on their own so long as they’re willing to make the change, and Goro and Shido are great personal antagonists for the group and Joker respectively. I like the final storyline a lot too with Yaldabaoth, but it’s very cheesy social commentary in a lot of ways and Yaldy himself isn’t a compelling antagonist so much as the idea that the strict social order that controlled Japan so strongly gave birth to his existence. I’m a big fan of stories that have weird realms or things going on because of the desires of a person being so strong they manifest out of the blue due to human sin and it’s part of the reason why P3 and P4 disappoint me on that front, because they’re largely god plots with very little of that, while P5 is a god plot but it is a god plot created by humans and their sin. While Yaldy himself isn’t particularly impressive, the desire that the Citizens of Tokyo had towards not wanting any part of society to break even a little bit being so strong it creates a god to ensure that never comes about, is and it’s wonderful when Joker summons Satanael to blow his fucking brains out.

I am a big fan of things generally considered to be evil or negative are framed as heroic or things people use to grow. So I appreciate that Joker and Arsene while both very menacing and demonic looking are the heroes of the story and his persona. Arsene especially has such an amazing design that I love looking at him and honestly want to get some sort of figure of him if one gets made. Joker is a fantastic way to make a quiet protagonist that also has a lot of character to him. Between his own backstory, the grudge with Shido, Goro being his foil, and his generally menacing demeanor combined with very theatric and over the top motions he makes, he has a ton of personality in him. The game in general does, but I was not expecting to love the Protagonist more than most of the main cast. His ultimate persona being Satanael is also fucking cool, because not only is the entire moment just an amazing thing and the scope of the whole fight is absolutely beautiful, but Satanael in gnosticism is the dude who is supposed to keep Yaldabaoth in check. So it’s awesome they played to the Trickster theme, the “Blacks are whites” mentality P5 has towards the protagonists, and the lore of the mythological figures themselves. It’s such a cool moment and the music that plays during the summoning is a great arrangement on the boss them that played prior. I can talk forever about Joker and his persona, but I need to talk about other stuff.

The main cast is great. I love Ryuji, he’s easily the best bro character of the games excepting maybe Eikichi. You get to see him grow from a bitter teenager with a huge chip on his shoulder, to a young man with a strong sense of self respect and justice. He gets into silly situations and can be stupid, but he’s a genuinely cool dude and I love him. Ann’s alright and she enhances Ryuji a bit too since they’re both old friends, but they can mess around with one another and it feels organic. I don’t think highly of her tbh, but she’s alright for the most part. Makoto is awesome, being Joker’s contemporary in the group. She’s smart, she has a good head on her shoulders, she kicks ass, and has an amazing outfit. It’s really cool that when they thought of a girl they would try to push as the romantic interest for Joker they made her as much of a character in the group as him. Yusuke’s hilarious, but also is one of the more emotional parts of the team. His interactions with Futaba are great and shows how his weird perspective connects with others. Futaba herself is a ton of fun with her goofy ass personality and smart ass comments. Haru I don’t care for much, but she’s got cool animations so I warmed up a bit to her over time.

The antagonists are all kind of a mixed bag, but the great ones are great. I won’t talk about Yaldy because I already mentioned his deal before. Kamoshida’s an immaculate piece of shit. I cannot tell you how happy I am that he is never once hidden in that aspect. If they had tried to hide his shitty attitude when adults or whatever were around it would cheapen the whole thing, but nope he’s just as shitty to you regardless of whose presence he’s in. It helps that he has such a connection to the school that he effects literally everyone there even the people who don’t associate with him. The underlying character depth also of him being a gold medalist who probably got fucked up by the societal and personal pressure of having to keep being the best giving him a warped perspective on others owing him for this is also great. He’s just got a ton of fucking great things about himself and a super easily punchable face.

For Goro and Shido, they’re both great. Goro is a fantastic foil to Joker, also being a user of the Wild Card and a pawn of Shido’s due to wanting to be recognized by his dad. His being sent from home to home as an unwanted child has fucked him up so much he desires to see the destruction of the same society that allowed this to happen. At the same time though Goro only has two Persona, Loki and Robin Hood. The underlying implication of course being Goro has only ever had himself and never actually made connections with others so he has two Persona compared to Joker’s several. Shido on the other hand is a good antagonist for how militant he is and how business like he is when handling others. He doesn’t actually recognize the people he steps over in his path to success. He barely recognizes Goro looking like his mother and doesn’t even know Joker is the same child he got locked off into Shibuya. It shows his megalomania off very well that he ultimately created his own enemy and him killing literally everyone tying back to him characterizes perfectly how militant and cold he truly is.

As for the rest of them. Sae is a good antagonist for her purposes, but she’s not as strong as the other three. Madarame has moments where they characterize him later, but them insisting on his murdering of Yusuke’s mom and his moustache twirling villainy combined with that makes him a very confusing and lame character. Kaneshiro has a minute of characterization, but is a fucking joke villain. Okumura is boring and has a nice moment of depth with the space station kit, but unfortunately he’s being a nothing character every other minute in the worst storyline of the game so rip.

The music in the game is really fantastic. Beneath the Mask and Rivers in the Desert are hands down two of the best tracks in Shoji Meguro’s history of music. Blooming Villain is my favorite non-final boss track in Persona. Layer Cake is CATCHY AS FUCK. Price and When My Mother Was Around are amazing dungeon tracks with Whims of Fate being even better than those two. There’s a lot of other great tracks as well, but I cannot list every single one.

The gameplay mechanics overall improved for the better in a lot of ways and Confidants are really cool too. I do have to say though some of the non-party member ones fall into a really lame pattern of “Character is griefed by other outside character in some way, go to mementos and get rid of them.” But the storylines more than often make up for them. Hifumi, Munehisa, Sadayo, and Toranosuke are some of the more memorable ones.

If I have complaints though it’s that Mementos is fucking lame. Some of the dungeons are really boring or have lame gimmicks or are LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNG (Kaneshiro and Okumura’s palaces most notably). The story feels like it’s going nowhere for a while. Bosses are boring for the most part with really lame ass mid battle gimmicks, the Sphinx is an absolutely garbage boss fight too. The best bosses are probably Shido and Shadow Okumura, the former because of it not being a lame gimmick driven fight and the latter because you can find fun ways to negate entire legions of the robots. Shadow Madarame and Kamoshida are okay too, but they’re not remarkable or particularly interesting either. The designs on a lot of them are pretty lame too. Also Morgana needs to shut the fuck up about telling me to go to sleep. I love the little bastard, but jesus christ.

But yeah, those are my thoughts on P5. It’s a really cool game that I love a lot that honestly has a decent number of faults, but I don’t care about them which is surprising because I haven’t felt that strongly about a game since like... Metal Gear Rising. Not that those two have a lot of crossover sans the incredibly buff final boss politician with lyrical music in the back.

#Persona 5 #spoilers #P5

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johnchiarello · 7 years

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Sunday sermon

SUNDAY SERMON 11-12-17

Isaiah 7:14

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Sunday sermon- https://youtu.be/2zCSe0Sicmw

https://vimeo.com/243455143

http://ccoutreach87.com/11-12-17-sunday-sermon/

http://ccoutreach87.com/11-12-17-sunday-sermon-2/

1Thessalonians 4:16 For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:

Dewboy Lister speaks- https://youtu.be/iO-HnGoMV0g

http://ccoutreach87.com/11-18-17-dewboy-lister-speaks/

[I made this video as an update- and needed a place to link it-

His name was Lonnie- You’ll have to watch the video to get this]

Genesis 4:10

And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.

In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations

ON VIDEO- [Sunday sermon]

.I just read that!

.The real wisdom of Solomon

.Gnostic writings- why they are not scripture

.Solomon’s temple [and porches]

.White magic?

.Stick to the real source- Holy Scripture

.Have oil [storehouse] with the lamp

.Use social media to impart wisdom

.Not just to advertise your ‘church’ meeting

.New Testament canon

.Luke the historian

.Order

.Review of Luke 1

.The angel names the Sons

.Jesus and John

.Mary’s magnificat

.The Virgin Birth

Matthew 12:42

The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here.

NEW-

I did it a little different this week- instead of teaching from the verses from the Sunday churches- I talked from Luke 1 and tried to give some practical stuff.

We live in a day where we have tools to communicate- like no other generation-

We have access to the ‘world wide web’- yes- though the term sounds outdated- but in reality- we all have the ability to get the message out- world wide.

Churches- preachers- even the average Joe on the street- has their own video recording studio [camera phones]-

Free platforms to upload [YouTube- etc.]

And free blogs to put all of these messages on-

Yet- how do we use these tools for the most part?

Many churches simply advertise their church meetings- which is fine.

Many individuals use these tools to play games- or talk about the latest gossip [or news- which I also do].

All of this is ok in a way- but these tools also have the ability to actually communicate things of value.

And often times we simply let this opportunity fall by the way side.

If the apostle Paul- who wrote actual hand written letters- and had them sent to various churches-

If all he did was write something like ‘I will be speaking at Corinth next Sunday- all are invited to attend'.

Then what impact would his use of the tool of writing have had?

If we opened the bible today- and simply read that- we would have no lasting ability to actually learn from the things he wrote.

In Luke chapter one- we read the same-

Luke 1:1 Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,

Luke 1:2 Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word;

Luke 1:3 It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus,

Luke 1:4 That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.

Luke wrote- used the tools of communication- to actually instruct those who would read his gospel- for 2 thousand years now and counting.

His task was to set in order- lay the message out plainly- then write it- and hopefully it would have a real impact on the hearers.

Here’s one of the verses I quoted-

Proverbs 21:20

There is treasure to be desired and oil in the dwelling of the wise; but a foolish man spendeth it up.

We see the storehouse principle here- meaning their is a thing of value- and it is stored up- it is kept in a dwelling- and will be released in it’s proper time.

Jesus rebuked the foolish virgins [they were virgins- meaning set apart]- yet- they had no reserve-

25 Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.

2 And five of them were wise, and five were foolish.

3 They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them:

4 But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.

They all had lamps- tools that had the capability of shining a light- of reaching others with this light-

Yet their tools- their lamps were of no lasting use- simply because they had no resource- no oil- they made no preparation ahead of time- so that the lamps could serve an effective purpose.

I see our generation like the virgins who had no storehouse of oil.

Many of us are simply living for the moment- the great ‘lamps’ of the day are going out- because no preparation has been made- no long term view of what others can learn from us down the road-

Because many of the tools are being used to simply promote some church meeting-

or to engage in things that have no long term value-

Another verse-

3 Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding it is established:

4 And by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches.

If we have the ability to build the structure [wisdom] and for it to be long lasting [established] what good is it- if the house has no knowledge in it?

It took a lot of wisdom for men to develop the tools of our day- the things I spoke about above-

They have made platforms available to us- in a way like we have never had before-

But what are we filling the chambers with?

Is there any long lasting knowledge that we are communicating to others?

In the chapter I actually spoke on this Sunday we read how the father of John the baptist had order to the things he was doing-

Luke 1:8 And it came to pass, that while he executed the priest's office before God in the ORDER of his course,

Luke 1:9 According to the custom of the priest's office, his lot was to burn incense when he went into the temple of the Lord.

He was not sitting around waiting for a miracle- for some break thru moment- that would change everything.

No- he was committed to the task at hand- and it was in this committed life- that the miracle did come-

Luke 1:11 And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense.

Luke 1:12 And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him.

Luke 1:13 But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.

Luke 1:14 And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth.

Luke 1:15 For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb.

It was his perseverance- his dedication- that led him and his wife to the miraculous child-

A child who the prophet Malachi spoke of-

Malachi 4:5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD:

Malachi 4:6 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

And a prophet who Jesus himself testified of-

Matthew 11:11

Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

Yet- this son- this prophet- was born to a man and his wife in their old age- while they were still serving God after many years-

These were people with ‘oil in their lamps’ if you will.

I would simply encourage all of you- whoever you are reading this write now-

You too have all the tools I have mentioned in this post- or at least have access to get them.

Most of the preachers who have church web sites- you already have the tools to use them in an effective way-

But it does take a degree of discipline- a desire that you develop over time- a desire to learn and give your time to using these tools in a more effective manner-

Proverbs 18:1

Through desire a man, having separated himself, seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom.

Yes- it takes separating yourself from the fast food mentality of our day-

From the entertainment mentality that simply uses the lamp- the gift- the resource- for some quick fix of an Instgram post [or whatever other social platform].

It takes a desire to see the long lasting effect of putting time and effort into the things you communicate.

To put the time in- is a requirement that the bible speaks of-

2 Timothy 2:15

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

Luke- and Paul- and all the other writers of the New Testament were writing at a time when it was not an easy thing to do.

The letters were being hand delivered to various cities-

Often times there were illiterate people in the congregations- and the hand written and delivered letters had to be read by one person out loud for the others to hear..

And yet- we still have these valuable letters today-

We still have the writing of Luke- which I read and taught from this very day.

Because the early church saw the value of setting these things in order for us.

They had a desire to communicate the message- and went thru much difficulty in doing so.

They were communicating from a storehouse- they had oil in their lamps- and had a reserve as well-

They would be shocked to see the advancement of our day- the ability to speak on such a world wide scale-

And then to see how many of us have wasted this great opportunity-

Many of us have let the lamp simply burn out.

PAST POSTS- [Past teaching I did that relates in some way to this post- Sunday sermon- 11-12-17]

https://ccoutreach87.com/john-complete-links-added/

https://ccoutreach87.com/1st-2nd-corinthians/

https://ccoutreach87.com/james-2015/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/11/17/crisis-in-corpus-christi-texas-3/

(565) John 3[radio # 586]- Nicodemus comes secretly to Jesus, he is one of the few in leadership that is having doubts. The others with one voice reject Jesus, Nicodemus is wondering. Jesus rebukes him for being a ‘ruler’ of the Jews and not being able to comprehend the most basic stuff. I have found it disheartening over the years to talk with Pastors who heard someone teach that because Jesus had an expensive coat, that he must have been rich. Despite all the evidence in the New Testament how Jesus was the son of a carpenter and lived an average life. The tons of verses where Jesus is reproving rich people. The whole historical and biblical truth of Jesus being a man of humble means. The fact that he had an expensive coat can more than likely be explained by the custom of people doing extravagant acts of worship towards him. The woman and the expensive perfume poured on him. Things like this. Someone probably gave him the coat. But for Pastors, who are good men, to fall for this stuff was unbelievable. Sort of like Jesus telling Nicodemus ‘you are a leader and can’t discern the most basic stuff’! Jesus teaches the reality of the new birth. All people must be born of God thru belief in Jesus, or they will not be saved. We must stand strong for Jesus as the only way to God. John the Baptist will be told that all men are going to Jesus. John says ‘great, he must increase and I must decrease’ John understood that the role of leadership [prophets] was to point to the fame and persona of Jesus. Not to go down the common road of pointing people towards us. In modern ministry we draw people to our gifts and abilities. We structure modern churches around the gift of the Pastor. We allow leadership to become preeminent in our minds and thoughts. John knew better. We also see that the wrath of God abides on all who do not believe in Jesus. If you believe in Jesus you escape Gods wrath. It can’t touch you. Whether you are in heaven or earth, or like David said ‘in hell you are there’. That is you can’t escape Gods presence anywhere. So if you are in Christ, wrath can’t get you. If you are not in Christ, it continually abides on you. You do not escape wrath by leaving the planet during the tribulation. If an unbeliever was on a rocket ship right before the tribulation started, and wound up on the moon during the 7 years of wrath, he wouldn’t escape Gods wrath. You don’t escape judgment by being in the right geographical location, you escape it by being IN HIM! John also says a man can receive nothing unless it is given to him. Why be jealous if all of our gifts and abilities are free gifts? We act like we earned them! John says no man receives his testimony, then he says ‘to those who have received it’. What’s this mean? Paul told the Corinthians that we have received the Spirit of God so we might know the things that are freely given to us from God. God gives us his Spirit first, so we can receive his testimony. This goes back to the early centuries of the church and hits all the major doctrines on sovereignty. Augustine, Calvin, Luther [Yes Luther was a strong believer in predestination, it was no accident that he was an Augustinian monk!] Paul tells the Ephesians that were are dead in sins and completely incapable of receiving spiritual truth until God pours his Spirit into us and we become alive. Thank God that even though no man [in the natural] can receive his testimony, that God gives us his Spirit and births us so we can know the things that he has freely given to us in Christ!

(1232) 2ND CORINTHIANS 9- Paul encourages the church to be generous ‘give much, and you will be blessed much’. The principle is clear. The other day I wrote on the verse ‘he hath distributed and given to the poor, his good works will endure’ [my paraphrase] let me give you what the message bible says- ‘he throws caution to the wind, giving to the needy with reckless abandon’. Yesterday my friend John David came by. He’s the friend I wrote about a few weeks ago, one of the local homeless guys. John is doing well; he made it thru the local drug rehab and is attending the aa/na meetings. John is really excited about the lord, even though he is an older brother [57] he really wants to do things for God. I gave him a few old copies of some of my original books I wrote years ago, and I gave him all the cash I had [around 15 dollars from my wallet]. He didn’t ask for it, I just felt ‘what the heck, if I don’t give it I’ll just spend it’. Later my wife asked me if I could take my daughter to get her I.D. at the driver’s license place. You need cash, it’s around 16 dollars. I thought ‘geez, maybe I’m too reckless in giving to my buddies’ and then I read this verse this morning. Paul exhorts these believers to give themselves and their goods away for the gospel. He challenges us to live with ‘reckless abandon’ knowing that our lives are like a vapor that appear for a little while and then vanish away [James]. If you give yourself away, God will increase ‘your seed’ and multiply the results 100 times, but you must lay down your life first. Jesus said unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abideth alone. But if it dies it will bring forth much fruit. He was speaking of his impending death, how he saw it as a necessary event for the purposes of God. Paul also says in his letter ‘if Jesus died for everyone, then we are all dead. He then that lives should now live for God.’ We are not here to please ourselves, to derive some type of fulfillment through our Christian experience. That is to ‘seek to save our lives’ we are here to lay them down for a greater cause, Jesus showed us how this must be done.

Jersey City ride [Mark 1]

POSTED BY CCOUTREACH87 ⋅ FEBRUARY 28, 2017 ⋅ LEAVE A COMMENT

MONDAY 2-27-17 Isaiah 42:1 Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him: he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles.

https://youtu.be/ZqN2KEmxBRk JERSEY CITY [Mark 1] https://ccoutreach87.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/2-27-17-jersey-city-ride-mark-1.zip ON VIDEO [Past links- verses below] .See Jersey City- Journal square- Kennedy Blvd. to 41st st. .CNN and Jesus? .John who? .Why no miracles before Jesus baptism? .Alone with God .Who said this ‘Prayer is strength for the weak’? .Another Mustang story NEW- Took a drive thru Jersey City and did the video from the car. In Mark 1 we read about the forerunner- John the Baptist. He baptized in water but said ‘a mightier one is coming- he will baptize you with the Spirit’. Sure enough- Jesus shows up and John baptizes him in the Jordan. As Jesus comes up out of the water we hear ‘this is my beloved Son- in whom I am well pleased’. The Father is testifying of the Son. Jesus is now anointed for the 3 year earthly ministry we read about in the gospels. He begins going to the synagogues and preaching- casting out demons. The people are shocked ‘he preaches with authority- not like the regular preachers we are used to’. Jesu beings gathering his team of men- and the crowds are being drawn. Yet- he seems to be avoiding the crowds. He heals a leper and tells the man not to spread the word about it. Yet the man ‘blazes’ the matter to everyone. The Spirit descending on Jesus like a ‘dove’ was right before his temptation of 40 days- in the wilderness- by satan. It was this test that prepared him for the work. We read in another gospel that he returned in the power of the Spirit after his temptation. The same Spirit that anointed Jesus also is now with us. The Spirit of God is in all who believe-and that same Spirit empowers us for the task. Jesus rose up early in the morning and went to a place where he could be alone with the Father. Even after the anointing of the Spirit- and the test- yet he taught us to have ‘alone time’ with God. Jesus told his men ‘Pray- the spirt indeed is willing- but the flesh is weak’. In this chapter we see the beginning of the ministry of Jesus- and his proclamation that the kingdom of God is near. He called the people to repentance- and to believe the good news of the kingdom. John [the Baptist] served his purpose well- he introduced the Lamb of God- and then fades from the scene. Yes- John showed us what it was all about. 26 And they came unto John, and said unto him, Rabbi, he that was with thee beyond Jordan, to whom thou barest witness, behold, the same baptizeth, and all men come to him. 27 John answered and said, A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven. 28 Ye yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. 29 He that hath the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled. 30 He must increase, but I must decrease. PAST LINKS- [My past teaching that relates to today’s post] https://ccoutreach87.com/hebrews-updated-2015/ https://ccoutreach87.com/john-complete-links-added/ https://ccoutreach87.com/romans-updated-2015/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/18/acts-1/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/26/acts-2/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/02/02/acts-3/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/02/09/acts-4/

VERSES- [I quoted/talked from 3 accounts of the baptism of Jesus and the temptation of Jesus as recorded in the gospels- below are all 3 accounts- as well as the verses I quoted on the video] Mark 1:1 The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; Mark 1:2 As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. Mark 1:3 The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Mark 1:4 John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. Mark 1:5 And there went out unto him all the land of Judaea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan, confessing their sins. Mark 1:6 And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey; Mark 1:7 And preached, saying, There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose. Mark 1:8 I indeed have baptized you with water: but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost. Mark 1:9 And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan. Mark 1:10 And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: Mark 1:11 And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Mark 1:12 And immediately the spirit driveth him into the wilderness. Mark 1:13 And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him. Mark 1:14 Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, Mark 1:15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. Mark 1:16 Now as he walked by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. Mark 1:17 And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men. Mark 1:18 And straightway they forsook their nets, and followed him. Mark 1:19 And when he had gone a little farther thence, he saw James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, who also were in the ship mending their nets. Mark 1:20 And straightway he called them: and they left their father Zebedee in the ship with the hired servants, and went after him. Mark 1:21 And they went into Capernaum; and straightway on the sabbath day he entered into the synagogue, and taught. Mark 1:22 And they were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes. Mark 1:23 And there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit; and he cried out, Mark 1:24 Saying, Let us alone; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God. Mark 1:25 And Jesus rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace, and come out of him. Mark 1:26 And when the unclean spirit had torn him, and cried with a loud voice, he came out of him. Mark 1:27 And they were all amazed, insomuch that they questioned among themselves, saying, What thing is this? what new doctrine is this? for with authority commandeth he even the unclean spirits, and they do obey him. Mark 1:28 And immediately his fame spread abroad throughout all the region round about Galilee. Mark 1:29 And forthwith, when they were come out of the synagogue, they entered into the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Mark 1:30 But Simon’s wife’s mother lay sick of a fever, and anon they tell him of her. Mark 1:31 And he came and took her by the hand, and lifted her up; and immediately the fever left her, and she ministered unto them. Mark 1:32 And at even, when the sun did set, they brought unto him all that were diseased, and them that were possessed with devils. Mark 1:33 And all the city was gathered together at the door. Mark 1:34 And he healed many that were sick of divers diseases, and cast out many devils; and suffered not the devils to speak, because they knew him. Mark 1:35 And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed. Mark 1:36 And Simon and they that were with him followed after him. Mark 1:37 And when they had found him, they said unto him, All men seek for thee. Mark 1:38 And he said unto them, Let us go into the next towns, that I may preach there also: for therefore came I forth. Mark 1:39 And he preached in their synagogues throughout all Galilee, and cast out devils. Mark 1:40 And there came a leper to him, beseeching him, and kneeling down to him, and saying unto him, If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. Mark 1:41 And Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean. Mark 1:42 And as soon as he had spoken, immediately the leprosy departed from him, and he was cleansed. Mark 1:43 And he straitly charged him, and forthwith sent him away; Mark 1:44 And saith unto him, See thou say nothing to any man: but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer for thy cleansing those things which Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them. Mark 1:45 But he went out, and began to publish it much, and to blaze abroad the matter, insomuch that Jesus could no more openly enter into the city, but was without in desert places: and they came to him from every quarter. ________________________________________ Matthew 3:1 In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, Matthew 3:2 And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Matthew 3:3 For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Matthew 3:4 And the same John had his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey. Matthew 3:5 Then went out to him Jerusalem, and all Judaea, and all the region round about Jordan, Matthew 3:6 And were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins. Matthew 3:7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Matthew 3:8 Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance: Matthew 3:9 And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. Matthew 3:10 And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Matthew 3:11 I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: Matthew 3:12 Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. Matthew 3:13 Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him. Matthew 3:14 But John forbad him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? Matthew 3:15 And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him. Matthew 3:16 And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: Matthew 3:17 And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. ________________________________________ Matthew 4:1 Then was Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. Matthew 4:2 And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred. Matthew 4:3 And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. Matthew 4:4 But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Matthew 4:5 Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, Matthew 4:6 And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Matthew 4:7 Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Matthew 4:8 Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; Matthew 4:9 And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Matthew 4:10 Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Matthew 4:11 Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him. 4 And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 2 Being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. 3 And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. 4 And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God. 5 And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. 6 And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. 7 If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine. 8 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. 9 And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence: 10 For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee: 11 And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. 12 And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. 13 And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season. 14 And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee: and there went out a fame of him through all the region round about. Matthew 26:41 Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations 16 And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read. 17 And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, 18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, 19 To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. 20 And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. Luke Hebrews 4:15 For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations Matthew 6:6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations Romans 8:9 But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations Deuteronomy 32:2 My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass: In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations

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(562) John:1[radio # 584] Jesus is called the Word of God, he comes into the earth as the incarnation, the ‘fleshed out’ fulfillment of Gods Word. John the Baptist is asked who he is. The Jewish leaders ask ‘are you that prophet?’ he says ‘no’. What prophet? The one Moses said would come ‘the Lord God will raise up a prophet unto you, like me. Whoever doesn’t listen to him will be destroyed’. We covered this in Deuteronomy. They ask him ‘are you Elijah’ he says ‘no’. John was the fulfillment of the Malachi prophecy that said before the Lord comes he will send Elijah the prophet. Jesus says this about John. Why did John deny it? I am not sure, but it might be because he really didn’t know. Sort of like the thorn in Paul’s side, God allowed things to happen to Paul so he would not get puffed up in pride and side track his mission. Maybe the Lord never let John see how truly effective he was. John does say ‘I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness’ John does see himself thru the prophet Isaiah. I like this. I have personally had many words from Isaiah that I felt the Lord had given me, John saw himself in this book too. John was ‘the voice’ just like Jesus is ‘the Word’ John is ‘the voice’. John was a voice before he was a man. God had predestined John to carry a message before he was born. He had this word in his DNA at birth. His body was simply a carrier, an ‘incarnation’ of the voice that he was to have. God has predestined all of us with a purpose before we were born. Our appearing on the planet is for the sole purpose of carrying out this destiny. You are not here to be happy, have a nice income, go to a nice church. You are here to fulfill Gods will, you can have the other things or not, that is irrelevant. You must first fulfill the mission! John testifies of Christ by the Spirit descending on Jesus. John says ‘I knew him not, but by the Spirit’ John knew Jesus, he was his cousin! But John was only going to recognize the gifts and callings on people. He would follow Paul’s admonition ‘know no man after the flesh’. It is incumbent upon us to recognize the gifts in others and to operate accordingly. Don’t make alliances and pacts with people based on friendship and personal affiliations. It’s good to have friends and all, but the Kingdom is built upon recognizing and receiving those who have come with a mandate from God. John saw Jesus in this light. Scripture says ‘the world was made by him, he was in the world, yet they knew him not’ Jesus was creating a divine atmosphere of grace for people to access. They didn’t even know or recognize him, yet this didn’t side track him from his purpose. Understand that God has placed you in a geographical location with a pre planned destiny in mind. God has chosen you to be where you are and for this season. You will fulfill your calling whether people ‘know’ you or not. God requires us to see the gifts in each other, but many will not appreciate what you are doing, do it any way, you have come with a destiny to fulfill, so fulfill it!

(563) John 2[radio # 585]- Jesus does his first miracle, changes water into wine. They say ‘most people put the good wine out first, but you have saved the best for last’. This is a type of the new covenant of his blood [wine], Jesus will introduce a better covenant thru his blood. Many will not accept this new way because they have been ‘drinking’ old wine for so long, they are not willing to change. We often see this in Christian circles, people who have functioned in a limited way for years, God might bring to them new ways of seeing things, they will often reject the new wine on the basis of being comfortable with the old way, we don’t want to shake the apple cart. God wants us to shake it! Jesus finds the money changers in the temple and drives them out with a whip, turns the tables over and gets mad. He didn’t take the ecumenical approach! There are times for radical transition, I feel we are at that place now as the people of God. The gospel is not about us increasing our portfolio, it’s about laying our goals down for the kingdom. These money changers lost their influence in the ‘temple’ after Jesus got thru with them, I think it was prophetic. Jesus says ‘destroy this temple and in 3 days I will raise it up’ those hearing this mistake his Body [temple] with the building [temple in Jerusalem]. Evangelicals [some of them] make the same mistake today. They are looking to the natural events in natural Jerusalem, they should be looking at the real temple! [Both Jesus and the Body of Christ]. Jesus goes to the Passover, the people hail him and Jesus says he will not commit himself to them, because he knew what was in man. What was in man? These same people will be asking for his death not long from now. Jesus did not seek commitment from men, contrary to the way we see ministry today. Modern ministry seeks to increase man’s commitment to them ‘pledge so much money, join this or that’ Jesus knew he had a destiny, he would fulfill it without the help of man!

Note-

Last Sunday I spoke about the word- CHRIST- And I hope to speak on the meaning of the name JESUS on the video for this Sunday [I haven’t made it yet]- I thought it would be good to simply copy a section [not my writing below] that teaches them both-

Here’s a link to the meaning of John’s name- https://www.behindthename.com/name/john

I. JESUS

430 Jesus means in Hebrew: "God saves." At the annunciation, the angel Gabriel gave him the name Jesus as his proper name, which expresses both his identity and his mission.18 Since God alone can forgive sins, it is God who, in Jesus his eternal Son made man, "will save his people from their sins".19 in Jesus, God recapitulates all of his history of salvation on behalf of men.

431 In the history of salvation God was not content to deliver Israel "out of the house of bondage"20 by bringing them out of Egypt. He also saves them from their sin. Because sin is always an offence against God, only he can forgive it.21 For this reason Israel, becoming more and more aware of the universality of sin, will no longer be able to seek salvation except by invoking the name of the Redeemer God.22

432 The name "Jesus" signifies that the very name of God is present in the person of his Son, made man for the universal and definitive redemption from sins. It is the divine name that alone brings salvation, and hence forth all can invoke his name, for Jesus united himself to all men through his Incarnation,23 so that "there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved."24

433 The name of the Savior God was invoked only once in the year by the high priest in atonement for the sins of Israel, after he had sprinkled the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies with the sacrificial blood. The mercy seat was the place of God's presence.25 When St. paul speaks of Jesus whom "God put forward as an expiation by his blood", he means that in Christ's humanity "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself."26

434 Jesus' Resurrection glorifies the name of the Savior God, for from that time on it is the name of Jesus that fully manifests the supreme power of the "name which is above every name".27 The evil spirits fear his name; in his name his disciples perform miracles, for the Father grants all they ask in this name.28

435 The name of Jesus is at the heart of Christian prayer. All liturgical prayers conclude with the words "through our Lord Jesus Christ". The Hail Mary reaches its high point in the words "blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." The Eastern prayer of the heart, the Jesus prayer, says: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Many Christians, such as St. Joan of Arc, have died with the one word "Jesus" on their lips.

II. CHRIST

436 The word "Christ" comes from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Messiah, which means "anointed". It became the name proper to Jesus only because he accomplished perfectly the divine mission that "Christ" signifies. In effect, in Israel those consecrated to God for a mission that he gave were anointed in his name. This was the case for kings, for priests and, in rare instances, for prophets.29 This had to be the case all the more so for the Messiah whom God would send to inaugurate his kingdom definitively. 30 It was necessary that the Messiah be anointed by the Spirit of the Lord at once as king and priest, and also as prophet.31 Jesus fulfilled the messianic hope of Israel in his threefold office of priest, prophet and king.

437 To the shepherds, the angel announced the birth of Jesus as the Messiah promised to Israel: "To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord."32 From the beginning he was "the one whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world", conceived as "holy" in Mary's virginal womb.33 God called Joseph to "take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit", so that Jesus, "who is called Christ", should be born of Joseph's spouseinto the messianic lineage of David.34

438 Jesus' messianic consecration reveals his divine mission, "for the name 'Christ' implies 'he who anointed', 'he who was anointed' and 'the very anointing with which he was anointed'. The one who anointed is the Father, the one who was anointed is the Son, and he was anointed with the Spirit who is the anointing.'"35 His eternal messianic consecration was revealed during the time of his earthly life at the moment of his baptism by John, when "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power", "that he might be revealed to Israel"36 as its Messiah. His works and words will manifest him as "the Holy One of God".37

439 Many Jews and even certain Gentiles who shared their hope recognized in Jesus the fundamental attributes of the messianic "Son of David", promised by God to Israel.38 Jesus accepted his rightful title of Messiah, though with some reserve because it was understood by some of his contemporaries in too human a sense, as essentially political.39

440 Jesus accepted peter's profession of faith, which acknowledged him to be the Messiah, by announcing the imminent passion of the Son of Man.40 He unveiled the authentic content of his messianic kingship both in the transcendent identity of the Son of Man "who came down from heaven", and in his redemptive mission as the suffering Servant: "The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his lifeas a ransom for many."41 Hence the true meaning of his kingship is revealed only when he is raised high on the cross.42 Only after his Resurrection will peter be able to proclaim Jesus' messianic kingship to the people of God: "Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified."43

III. THE ONLY SON OF GOD

441 In the Old Testament, "son of God" is a title given to the angels, the Chosen people, the children of Israel, and their kings.44 It signifies an adoptive sonship that establishes a relationship of particular intimacy between God and his creature. When the promised Messiah-King is called "son of God", it does not necessarily imply that he was more than human, according to the literal meaning of these texts. Those who called Jesus "son of God", as the Messiah of Israel, perhaps meant nothing more than this.45

442 Such is not the case for Simon peter when he confesses Jesus as "the Christ, the Son of the living God", for Jesus responds solemnly: "Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven."46 Similarly paul will write, regarding his conversion on the road to Damascus, "When he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles..."47"And in the synagogues immediately [paul] proclaimed Jesus, saying, 'He is the Son of God.'"48 From the beginning this acknowledgment of Christ's divine sonship will be the center of the apostolic faith, first professed by peter as the Church's foundation.49

443 Peter could recognize the transcendent character of the Messiah's divine sonship because Jesus had clearly allowed it to be so understood. To his accusers' question before the Sanhedrin, "Are you the Son of God, then?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am."50 Well before this, Jesus referred to himself as "the Son" who knows the Father, as distinct from the "servants" God had earlier sent to his people; he is superior even to the angels.51 He distinguished his sonship from that of his disciples by never saying "our Father", except to command them: "You, then, pray like this: 'Our Father'", and he emphasized this distinction, saying "my Father and your Father".52

444 The Gospels report that at two solemn moments, the Baptism and the Transfiguration of Christ, the voice of the Father designates Jesus his "beloved Son".53 Jesus calls himself the "only Son of God", and by this title affirms his eternal pre-existence.54 He asks for faith in "the name of the only Son of God".55 In the centurion's exclamation before the crucified Christ, "Truly this man was the Son of God",56 that Christian confession is already heard. Only in the paschal mystery can the believer give the title "Son of God" its full meaning.

445 After his Resurrection, Jesus' divine sonship becomes manifest in the power of his glorified humanity. He was "designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his Resurrection from the dead".57 The apostles can confess: "We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."58

[parts]

2ND SAMUEL 6- David attempts to retrieve the Ark and bring it to the new capital city of Jerusalem. On the way back one of the brothers tries to steady the ark as it was about to fall. They were carrying it on a ‘new cart’ with oxen pulling it. This was not the way the law prescribed carrying it! This was the formula that the Philistines used earlier. So David’s man touches the Ark and is killed. They leave it at another brother’s house for three months and the brother is blessed, David goes and retrieves it. This chapter doesn’t say what changed, but obviously David went back to the law and used the prescribed manner this time around. As he enters Jerusalem with it there is this joyous picture of everyone leaping and dancing and praising the Lord. Sort of like the triumphal entry of Jesus [Gods ‘fleshly’ ark, who had all the fullness of God dwelling in his physical body!] to Jerusalem when the people shouted ‘Hosanna’. David places the ark in a tent/tabernacle that he personally made for it. I wrote earlier how this was an open tent that had no barriers between the ark and Gods people, a contrast between Moses tabernacle where God and the people were separated [law versus grace type thing]. David’s wife mocks him because he took off his royal robes and wore an ephod [priestly garment] and danced and humbled himself before the Lord. David says ‘I will even be more lowly than this’. His wife is barren for the rest of her life as a judgment for mocking David. What ever happened to the ark? Well let me give you some history. The ‘story’ [tradition] says that when the queen of Ethiopia visits Solomon to see his wealth, that eventually he ‘marries’ her and they have kids. The queen goes back to Ethiopia and supposedly takes the ark from Solomon as a gift. The Ethiopian orthodox church claims to have it in the main ‘church’ in Ethiopia. Because of this history all the Ethiopian churches have replicas of the ark in their buildings as well. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is one of rich tradition. They are technically not considered ‘Catholic’ [western] or ‘Orthodox’ [eastern]. They are part of the church who are sometimes referred to as Oriental. This referring to the historic churches [not necessarily Oriental in geography] who never accepted the traditional churches belief in certain expressions of the Trinity and the relationship between Jesus and God. They stuck with the Arian view of Jesus deity and are not considered ‘orthodox’ in this area. As the centuries developed and various barbarians who were raiding the empire were converted, they also believed in a Christianity that would be more aligned with this type of belief. Now, I know Christians do not consider this to be correct doctrine, but I am simply sharing the history with you. I am not siding with their belief! We really have no idea where the ark is today, to be honest it doesn’t matter. We ‘see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the purpose of dying, and he was raised again for us’! [Hebrews]. We have the real McCoy!

[parts]

A few years back I did an on-line teaching about the other books that never made it into the bible.

Many years ago I bought some of these- and when you study church history and theology- well- these are an aspect of that type of teaching.

So I commented on them- gave the reasons why we don’t have them in our bibles.

But I also said that when I read some of them- I have found some are actually quite good.

One of my favorites is called the Epistle of Barnabus.

But there are others as well.

Some in the early church actually had a couple of these that were included in some of the early bibles- others were never given a 2nd thought.

By the way- in this field of study- I come down of the conservative side.

That is I don’t hold to the ideas of men like Bart Ehrman- the more liberal scholars.

They seem to give more credence to the books that never made it into the canon- and cast too much doubt on the bible we have today.

Anyway- the few that I do lile- when I re-read them as the years go by- there have been times when God did speak to me.

Here’s one.

As my prayer time developed into this inclusion of dead folk [above].

I felt much more awareness of my friends who have died- as being amongst us during prayer.

Now- I don’t ‘pray to them’ but I have a greater sense of praying ‘with them’. I mention their kids and all- because these guys- some- were actually friends of mine- who came to my church meetings I started years ago.

So- I painted a spot on my wall- it was dedicated to this group.

I simply wrote a few things- stuff that reminded me that these were those who have gone on- and are yet ‘here’.

Sort of like my ‘friends in prison’ type of thing.

Prison represents those who have died- and we are not so sure where they are- to be honest.

I’ll explain it in a moment.

So- right after I painted this little altar area- I read in one of the ‘lost books of the bible’ [I think it was in the Revelation of St. Peter?].

It said ‘have you preached to the spirits in prison yet’.

Meaning- have you included those who have died yet- have you yet ‘learned this’ son?

That was the type of sense I got.

As I read the verse- I simply said ‘yes’.

Now- I do know the source is from one of the early books that is not in the bible.

But this reference- even if it is a copy- or a fake- does come from our bibles as well.

It’s in the letter of Peter [I think 1st Peter 3?]

And it’s one those texts that scholars haggle over.

But Peter is speaking about some who died before the days of the world wide flood [Genesis 6].

And he refers to these dead people hearing the gospel- by Christ himself- after he died and rose again.

And they are called ‘the spirits in prison’.

So- that’s the same thing I felt/understood as I began seeing those who have gone on- well- they are still with us in a way.

Yeah- in a few minutes I will post little Niko’s picture up on my wall.

I’ll look at it as time goes by- as I see all my friends- both living and dead- and I will read his words.

‘Today I have to go- don’t worry’.

Yes- Jesus said out of the mouths of babies thou hast perfected praise.

You think?

[parts]

MARK 13

Mark 13:24 But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light,Mark 13:25 And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken.Mark 13:26 And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory.

ON VIDEOS-

MARK 13- https://youtu.be/vYBGKqDp5aE

https://ccoutreach87.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/7-18-17-mark-13.zip

https://ccoutreach87.com/7-18-17-mark-13/

FRIENDS- https://youtu.be/-NmAm67q4BU

[Made the 2nd video the other day with some friends- figured I would post it now]

.Olivet discourse [End times]

.Herod’s temple

.Ventriloquist

.Demon possession

.Signs of the end

.A.D. 70- Titus

.Qumran community listened

.Dead sea scrolls

.Anti- christ

.Preterism

.2nd coming

.Rapture?

.What generation?

.Hal Lindsey- Harold Camping

.Prophetic clock?

.End of age [not world as you might think]

.Man of sin

.Reductionism

.Salvation from what?

.John Nelson Darby

.Tacitus- Josephus

.End times- according to Jesus

FRIENDS-

.Furman- Andy

.George- Craig

.Cassie

.2 Bobby’s?

NEW-

Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple- which took place in AD 70 under the Roman General Titus [who later became an emperor]-

Mark 13:2 And Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

In Mark’s Gospel the disciples ask ‘when will this be’- talking only about the destruction of the temple-

Mark 13:4 Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign when all these things shall be fulfilled?

In Matthews gospel they ask 3 things-

Matthew 24:3 And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?

Luke follows along the line of mark-

Luke 21:5 And as some spake of the temple, how it was adorned with goodly stones and gifts, he said,Luke 21:6 As for these things which ye behold, the days will come, in the which there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.Luke 21:7 And they asked him, saying, Master, but when shall these things be? and what sign will there be when these things shall come to pass?

John’s gospel has no end times passage- possibly because he wrote an entire bible book on the end times- Revelation.

Jesus gives us the basic signs that most of us are familiar with.

Wars- persecution- those who endure to the end will be saved.

Jesus also speaks of his second coming-

And he says this happens after the tribulation-

He sends forth his angels and they gather together his people-

Mark 13:27 And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.

On the video I tried to explain the various ways bible teachers have approached the end times teaching.

Some view the fulfillment as having happened in the 1st century [Preterists].

The historic belief of Christians is there will be centuries of difficulty for the church.

The gospel will go to all the nations-

Mark 13:10 And the gospel must first be published among all nations.

There will be a great shaking of many things.

After all these things- Jesus will come back again- bodily- and there will be a Resurrection of the dead-

KJ21

And I have hope in God, which they themselves also hold, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust.

Acts 24:15

All will stand before God and give an account-

Revelation 20:12

And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.

There will be a new heaven and earth- all will be made new-

New International Version Then I saw "a new heaven and a new earth," for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. Rev. 21:1

There will be no more curse-

Revelation 22:3

And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him:

There will be many false prophets- men who claim to be Christ himself- we are to avoid them-

Mark 13:5 And Jesus answering them began to say, Take heed lest any man deceive you:Mark 13:6 For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.

The only one who knows when Jesus will come back is God the Father-

Mark 13:32 But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.

We are to avoid setting dates for the 2nd coming.

There have been many wicked men in the history of humanity that have been types of the anti- christ.

There will be more to come-

John himself said he [the spirit of anti christ] was already in the world- in the 1st century-

1 John 4:3

And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.

Our eyes should be fixed on Jesus- we should not become fixated on the figure of the anti- Christ.

We should live our lives as if Jesus could come back at any time.

Mark 13:34 For the Son of Man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch.Mark 13:35 Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning:Mark 13:36 Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.Mark 13:37 And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.

Because even if this event does not happen in our life time- we might die any day- and will also have to give an account to God-

Hebrews 9:27

And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:

On the video I also tried to show you the different views of ‘This generation’ -

Mark 13:30

Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.

In your life- you have about a generation- 40- 50 years- in which you will fulfill your destiny.

You will go thru great struggles in life- there will be a time of trouble like never before- you will be hated by people-

Mark 13:12 Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death.Mark 13:13 And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake: but he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

Mark 13:19 For in those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created unto this time, neither shall be.

But if you endure thru all this- then you too will have a role in publishing the good news in all nations-

Mark 13:10 And the gospel must first be published among all nations.

You too will send out ‘angels’ [messengers] to all the ends of the earth-

Mark 13:27 And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.

You too will be able to show your self alive after your suffering by many infallible proofs-

Acts 1:3

To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God:

And even in your life- you will have the honor to complete the mission God has given you- and then shall the end [outcome] be-

Matthew 24:14

And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.

PAST POSTS- [Past teaching I did that relates to today’s post- MARK 13]

http://corpuschristioutreachministries.blogspot.com/2017/07/rock-city-c.html

https://ccoutreach87.com/588-2/

https://ccoutreach87.com/romans-updated-2015/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/07/07/acts-16/

MARK-

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/02/28/jersey-city-ride-mark-1/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/03/02/mark-2-north-bergen/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/03/04/mark-3-isaiah-61/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/03/14/mark-4/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/03/27/mark-5/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/04/05/mark-6/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/04/16/mark-7/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/04/30/mark-8/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/05/14/mark-9/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/06/07/mark-10/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/06/22/mark-11/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/07/14/mark-12/

Ok- the ruling empire at the time of Christ was Rome- just prior to the appearance of Jesus- the Roman Emperor- Caesar Augustus- consolidated the Roman Empire under his rule-

Rome was ruled by a senate- some famous names from history were in it- Cicero being one.

Caesar Augustus was the nephew of Julius Caesar- his real name was Octavian [Octavius].

After the death of Julius Caesar- there were some power struggles that took place- between some other famous people.

Marc Antony being one of them [Cleopatra too- he was in love with the girl for sure].

Now- we read about Augustus in the New Testament- and we read in the book of Revelation about the Mark of the Beast- and that those who don't worship- give homage to the Beast- they will be killed.

So- Many Christians would be killed because they would refuse to give homage to Caesar Augustus [meaning son of the Divine].

‘Wow- how did he get a name like that’ [there was more than one Caesar by the way- as well as more than one Herod- who did play a part in these power struggles- it can get confusing- even to me].

When Octavian defeated Marc Antony at Actium [32 BC].

Herod [The Great] had a problem- he had previously sided with Antony and found himself on the losing side.

Yet he was smart- did some ‘brown nosing’ as we say-and patched things up.

Herod had 3 sons- who would eventually take positions of authority in the Roman government at the time of Christ.

Herod Antipas was over the region that we read about in the New Testament where Jesus did most of his ministry- Galilee.

Ok- Octavian claimed deity because of a heavenly sign associated with his rise to power- and this is how he became called ‘Caesar Augustus’.

He sort of saw himself as a ‘re-incarnate’- of his great uncle Julius Caesar.

‘John- what in the heck does this have to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls’.

Ok- good question.

The Jews had various responses to the empires that ruled over them during various times.

Alexander the Great instituted Hellenization- a sort of cultural compromise over the people he conquered.

They could keep their religious/cultural roots- but would be subservient to Alexander and Greek rule.

Some Jewish people rejected any compromise- we call them the Essenes- they moved out of town- so to speak, and lived in what we refer to as the Qumran community.

This was a few centuries before the time of Christ- and this was where the Dead Seas Scrolls were found in the 20th century.

A Bedouin boy was looking for his goats- threw a rock in a cave right off the Dead Sea- and that’s how we found the scrolls.

The scrolls might have been hidden there by the Essenes-

Now- when my friends asked me about them- I told them that it’s been a while since I read up on any of this- but to the best of my memory the thing that made them significant was the fact that they were very old manuscripts- from the bible- and they backed up what we had had all along.

I did read up this week- and basically had it right.

The earliest Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament we had previously dated back to around 900- 1000 A.D.

These manuscripts went back about 1000 years earlier- and they contained portions from almost every book of the Old testament- and some complete books.

The only book missing was Esther.

So- this was indeed a very significant find for scholars.

But the Scrolls also contain some of the writings from the Essenes themselves- things we never had before- so this too was significant.

There were Jews at the time of the first century who tried to ‘get along’ with Rome- and with the person in charge of their region [one of the sons of Herod the Great at the time of Christ].

These are referred to as Herodian’s in the bible.

Some wanted a revolution to rid Rome from Jerusalem- these were the Zealots [one of Jesus disciples was in this group].

Some thought if they returned to a legalistic obeisance of the law- that this would bring in a deliverer- like the stories we read about in the Old testament- these were the Pharisees.

And some took more of a political compromise- these were the Sadducees.

Eventually a war with Rome would be fought [By the way- Josephus- the famous 1st century historian- fought on the side of the Jews in the war- and after Jerusalem was sacked in A.D. 70- he went to Rome and wrote his great works- thinking he would make a case for the Jewish people with the Romans. This is why we have his works today- which are very valuable to scholars].

NOTE- In time I’ll try and cover how we ‘got our bibles’ [called the Canon- meaning Rule/ Measurement].

Frankly- there is a lot of confusion in the general public about conspiracies [like the Catholic Church had some type of plot to keep certain books out].

Or stories about how the Church taught Mary Magdalene was a prostitute so they could discredit her.

Actually- we read in the gospels that Jesus cast out ‘spirits’ from a woman who was probably living this type of life-

And Jesus had a ministry to the down and out- it is indeed possible that Mary was one of these women-

And if true- it would not demean her in any way-

That’s how this tradition more than likely developed- But- we don’t know for sure.

So a few years back the Church officially said ‘we don’t know’.

Ok- Plot?

No- just being careful.

So there are other misguided beliefs like this- that sincere people have- and over time I hope to get to them.

I’ll do one more in keeping with this post.

I mentioned above that Caesar Augustus did indeed take the title of ‘son of God’.

And some critics of the Church say ‘see- there were all types of religions that had Sons of God’.

I watched one show a few years back- and it stated that these religions had ’12 disciples- a leader named Lord and Savior- and he healed and claimed to be God’s Son- and rose from the dead’.

Ok- that show was ‘fibbing’ to put it lightly- they went too far [historically speaking] in trying to diminish the Christians claim of Christ by doing this.

Now- is there some truth to this at all?

Yes- like I just mentioned above- Octavian did indeed claim deity- a ‘son of god’.

So- how do we explain this?

In the book of Galatians the bible says ‘in the FULLNESS of times God sent forth his Son’.

Jesus came at a set time in history- in fulfilment of the Jewish Prophets- to be who he was- and to do what he did.

Now- this is not special pleading here- but I find it a masterpiece that God’s Son came at a time when the Roman Empire had one sitting on the throne- who too claimed deity.

Yet Jesus was in a region of the lower class- his men were not highly educated- and his followers were people under oppression.

Augustus lived in the wealthy and influential capital of ‘the world’- he had all you could ever ask for- he was worshiped as a god.

Yet in 3 short centuries- one of the heirs of the empire- Constantine- would have an experience – not with a former Caesar- but with a vison of a Cross-

He would convert to Christianity- and declare Christianity to be the religion of the realm.

[parts]

I quoted from these too- on today’s video-

https://ccoutreach87.com/hebrews-updated-2015/

https://ccoutreach87.com/1st-2nd-samuel/

https://ccoutreach87.com/nehemiah-isaiah/

[1560] BUT THOU BETHLEHEM, THOUGH THOU BE LITTLE AMONG THE THOUSANDS OF JUDAH- YET OUT OF THEE SHALL HE COME FORTH UNTO ME THAT IS TO BE RULER IN ISRAEL. Micah 5:2. In the gospel of Luke we read the story of Jesus being born in a real place- at a real time. Chapter 2 says that Caesar put out a decree that ‘all the world should be taxed’ that is they did a kind of census where you had to go to your native town and register. It just so happned that Mary, Jesus mother, was living in Nazareth [Galilee] at the time and Joseph- Jesus’ step dad- was from the lineage of Judah [King David’s tribe]. So at this very inconvenient time- at the hour of child birth- they make the trek to Bethlehem of Judea- just in time for the census- and for the baby! Hundreds of years before this event there was this obscure Jewish prophet named Micah- he blurted out one day ‘out of you Bethlehem- the least of all places- shall one come forth- a great ruler of all men’ [my paraphrase]. The Jewish nation was waiting for centuries for this ‘sent one’ this messiah who would come to them in the midst of their oppression- and he would fulfill the promise that God made to father Abraham millennia before ‘we will serve him without fear and in holiness all the days of our lives’. As a matter of fact- jump back to Luke chapter 1 and you can read this promise being uttered from the lips of John the Baptist’s father when he praises God over the pregnancy of his wife Elisabeth- you see John the Baptist was also spoken about centuries before his birth- he would come on the scene as a forerunner- a precursor to the messiah. Yes, John’s father had reason to rejoice. And when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary- he told how that she was chosen for this great task- possibly the greatest task that any human was ever given- she would give birth to this promised messiah. She asks the angel ‘how can this be- I know not a man’ he tells her the Holy Spirit will come upon her and she will conceive a child from God- none before could claim the title ‘the only begotten of God’. Read Mary’s prayer in chapter 1- it too is a cry for social justice ‘the high and mighty will be brought low- the poor will be lifted up’ we call her prayer ‘The Magnificat’. Both Zacharias and Mary spoke/prophesied of social justice- that thru these seemingly strange miracles- God put in place a plan that would bring justice to all those who were being oppressed. So the day came for Mary to bear the child- but he was prophesied to be born in Bethlehem- so God preordained that the great Caesar Augustus would make a decree that ‘all the world would be taxed’. Caesar came from the beginning line of Rome’s great Caesars. Octavian- Rome’s first- would be a devastating military leader who would strike fear into the hearts of Rome’s enemies- the kingdom [Roman Empire] would take her initial form under his rule. Of course most of us our familiar with Julius Caesar- he’s made it into the Hollywood hall of fame- and Augustus- he would be the third in a line of 12 Caesars who would rule Rome. He ruled at a time when Rome was the center of the world- all roads truly did lead to Rome- the great eternal city. Rome had her religious adherents- Rome practiced a type of pluralism- when they conquered an enemy- they would allow the people to continue to have some form of self rule- believe in whatever religion suits you- but you were still under Roman rule. The Pantheon [a sort of pedestal for the various god’s of the day] represented this religious openness of Rome. Yet the Jews had a different type of belief- they held to what we describe as Monotheism- a belief that there was only one true God. Her prophets spoke the words ‘hear O Israel the Lord our God is one’ and they held to their peculiar belief while Rome overlooked it. In the midst of all these developments, Caesar makes the decree ‘everyone go back to your towns for the census’ and Mary and Joseph hit the road. Sure enough the time came for her to deliver the child- he was born in a stable- laid in a manger and the world would receive her king. 2 Thousand years have passed- where are the great Caesars? Have you ever even heard of the name Octavian before today? Yet all over the world- in every nation- on the radio- over the internet- being shouted from the speakers at the mall- yes, all over the world we sing that Jesus Christ is king- the one born in Bethlehem of Judea- the one for whom the whole world was a stage- even the mighty Caesars of the day bowed the knee unto this eternal purpose of God- they would be puppets in the hand of God- used of God to make decrees that would fulfill the obscure prophecy of some Jewish prophet named Micah- yes- the Virgin had it right ‘God brought down the mighty- used them for his purposes- and exalted those who were struggling’. Rejoice- for in this day- 2 thousand years ago- was born a great ruler- a ruler of all men- his hometown is now famous because of this birth.

[parts]

Francis [the name he took- from Francis of Assisi- also speaks about his character. St. Francis forsook family wealth to work in Gods field- he believed God called him to help restore the church to her original design].

So- Pope Francis lived the same type of calling.

He’s the first Pope from America [albeit Latin America].

He’s the first from the Jesuit order to hold the office- the Jesuits are my favorite Catholic order.

If you remember my church history section- I covered the Jesuits- and complimented them a lot.

The Jesuits are the intellectuals of the church- now- the Catholic Church as a whole is of course very intellectual.

But the Jesuits were very influential in the development of the scientific method.

As a percentage- there were more Jesuit leaders in science than any other group.

They also were missionary minded.

When I covered them in the past I showed how after the 16th century Protestant Reformation the Jesuits did a sort of Counter Reformation and evangelized Asia- an area where the Protestants fell short.

So- as you can see- I’m a fan of the Jesuits.

Francis- from Buenos Aires Argentina- lived among the poor- he cooked his own meals and rejected the perks that Cardinals/Arch Bishops get.

Yet- he was a ‘conservative’ in doctrine.

Huh?

How could he be a sort of Liberation theologian- and yet hold to conservative views?

Here’s where our modern news shows mess stuff up.

As an avid news watcher- the last few years one of the critiques I gave was the mistake of men like Glenn beck and others- who associated Liberation Theology with heresy.

Now- Beck and others meant well- they just made the mistake of demonizing people they don’t understand [remember the rampage against Van Jones?]

But that’s why we need to get our info from better informed folk.

Anyway- Liberation Theology is a form of Christian teaching that associates the ministry of Jesus to the poor- and seeks to impellent that- sometimes too far- with government programs.

So- in Latin America- you have had Catholic champions of the poor and down trodden- who advocated for the poor- and at the same time believed in the historic positions of the doctrines of the church.

For instance- some ‘liberal’ scholars reject the resurrection of Jesus- and other key teachings of the church.

These men [both Catholic and Protestant] are referred to as Liberal scholars.

Francis is not one of them- he’s ‘conservative’ when it comes to the historic faith.

Yet- in his actions [Orthopraxy] he is ‘liberal’ [that is if you think identifying with the poor is liberal].

So- Francis is a lot like me in my belief [I too am conservative in doctrine] and practice- I have lived with the poor and down and out for years.

So- he just might be my favorite.

Let’s wait and see.

[parts]

THE BREAKING IN OF THE KINGDOM- BEHOLD THE LAMB

https://ccoutreach87.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/12-3-14-teaching-in-san-antonio.zip

I taught yesterday in San Antonio- BEHOLD THE LAMB

http://wp.me/a4V5qQ-7X Radio show

Ok- I am going to try and segue into the fulfilment of the promises that we have been covering for the last few months

The appearing of Christ- what we call The Advent- which we celebrate at this time of the year [December 25th].

Jesus comes into the world- thru a Virgin- Mary.

If you read the Prophetic Praise/prayer of Mary- found in Luke- you see the Hope of Israel- for the coming of a deliverer who would save the people of God from their oppressors [remember what I said- in the videos- about Christ/Messiah- like the judges of the Old Testament- they came to deliver the people from oppressive rule].

We call this prayer of Mary- ‘Mary’s Magnificat’ [Latin for ‘my soul magnifies the Lord’]- she is the chosen one- to have the promised child.

The prophet Malachi spoke about a Forerunner- one who would come before Christ-

The bible refers to him as Elijah- who would prepare the way for Christ.

Jesus tells us that John the Baptist was the fulfillment of this prophecy.

John makes the great declaration ‘Behold- the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world’.

REPENT- AND BE BAPTIZED- ALL OF YOU

John’s ministry was- well- rough.

Jesus said ‘what did you go out to see- some timid guy dressed in expensive clothes? No- but a prophet- and more than a prophet- this is the one spoken about who would prepare the way’ [these are my own paraphrases- I’m writing them ‘on the fly’- when I do this I’ll try and copy the exact verse at the bottom].

It’s significant that John- In his first prophetic announcement of Christ- ‘sees’ a LAMB.

Remember what I said when teaching the book of Revelation- that the apostle John [not the same John] also saw a LAMB [They were both functioning in a prophetic/apostolic role when they made these proclamations- remember what I said in our videos? How the church is a spiritual temple- built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets- meaning their teaching- the things God revealed to them- so they SEE Jesus as the Lamb- because this kingdom will be established on the Death and resurrection of Christ- note in the scriptures I pasted at the bottom- How the Lamb is ‘the light’ of this city- how the revelation [understanding] of Jesus as the final Lamb sacrifice is indeed the foundation that the Apostles/Prophets built the church upon]

Luke 1:46 And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord

Luke 1:47 And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

Luke 1:48 For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

Luke 1:49 For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.

Luke 1:50 And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.

Luke 1:51 He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

Luke 1:52 He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.

Luke 1:53 He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away

[just a note here- this becomes one of the major themes in the ministry of Jesus- and the Apostles- especially James letter[ not the apostle- but the brother of Jesus- who was the main leader at the Jerusalem church- read about him in Acts 15]. The rich are often contrasted with the poor- and in a negative light. I could give many scriptures on this. The point being that in today’s Protestant world- there is a focus on wealth- the obtaining of it- yet- a careful reading of the New Testament does not follow this very popular line of thought- and we already see this in this prophetic proclamation of Mary].

Luke 1:54 He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;

Luke 1:55 As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.

5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: 6And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. Malachi 4:5-6

Jesus began to say unto the multitudes concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness to see ? A reed shaken with the wind? 8 But what went ye out for to see ? A man clothed in soft raiment? behold , they that wear soft clothing are in kings' houses. 9 But what went ye out for to see ? A prophet? yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet. 10 For this is he, of whom it is written , Behold , I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. 11 Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. 12 And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence , and the violent take it by force . 13 For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. 14 And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come . 15 He that hath ears to hear , let him hear Matthew 11

The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith , Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. John 1:29

And looking upon Jesus as he walked , he saith , Behold the Lamb of God! John 1:36

And I beheld , and, lo , in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain , having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth. Revelation 5:6

And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying , Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints

And he saith unto me, Write , Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of theLamb. And he saith unto me, These are the true sayings of God.

And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. Rev 21:23

NOTE- The proclamation of John ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world’- In Latin the term is Agnus Dei- as a boy we sung this hymn in Catholic church ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world- have mercy on us’.

[Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.- this is the full phrase in the Latin – taken from John’s declaration- where the Christian song/chant comes from]

[parts]

Note- Morrison got the name for his group from Aldous Huxley’s book ‘The Doors of Perception’. Strangely- the book- 1st published in 1954- deals with Huxley’s drug trip- on Mescaline [the drug I took- and seemed to open up a fascination with near death experiences]. Huxley recorded his own trip on Mescaline- and even used the term ‘sacramental vision’ describing the hallucinations he had.

One of the quotes I found interesting while researching for this post was ‘We need to experience death consciousness to awaken to what’s important’ the bible says ‘teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom’.

Another quote- from the Nihilistic perspective- ‘we are condemned to be free’- without a God perspective- free will- even when talking about the ‘choice’ to die- has no real meaning- there really is no higher good served- because life has no meaning. But- when your death serves a greater purpose [like redeeming mankind] then it can actually be a virtue- a good thing- if your death impacts others in a positive way- then yes- it’s not meaningless- to the contrary- it’s profitable.

VERSES-

Luke 1:1 Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,

Luke 1:2 Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word;

Luke 1:3 It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus,

Luke 1:4 That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.

Luke 1:5 THERE was in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia: and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth.

Luke 1:6 And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.

Luke 1:7 And they had no child, because that Elisabeth was barren, and they both were now well stricken in years.

Luke 1:8 And it came to pass, that while he executed the priest's office before God in the order of his course,

Luke 1:9 According to the custom of the priest's office, his lot was to burn incense when he went into the temple of the Lord.

Luke 1:10 And the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the time of incense.

Luke 1:11 And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense.

Luke 1:12 And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him.

Luke 1:13 But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.

Luke 1:14 And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth.

Luke 1:15 For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb.

Luke 1:16 And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God.

Luke 1:17 And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

Luke 1:18 And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years.

Luke 1:19 And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings.

Luke 1:20 And, behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season.

Luke 1:21 And the people waited for Zacharias, and marvelled that he tarried so long in the temple.

Luke 1:22 And when he came out, he could not speak unto them: and they perceived that he had seen a vision in the temple: for he beckoned unto them, and remained speechless.

Luke 1:23 And it came to pass, that, as soon as the days of his ministration were accomplished, he departed to his own house.

Luke 1:24 And after those days his wife Elisabeth conceived, and hid herself five months, saying,

Luke 1:25 Thus hath the Lord dealt with me in the days wherein he looked on me, to take away my reproach among men.

Luke 1:26 And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,

Luke 1:27 To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary.

Luke 1:28 And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

Luke 1:29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.

Luke 1:30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.

Luke 1:31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.

Luke 1:32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David:

Luke 1:33 And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

Luke 1:34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

Luke 1:35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

Luke 1:36 And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.

Luke 1:37 For with God nothing shall be impossible.

Luke 1:38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.

Luke 1:39 And Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Juda;

Luke 1:40 And entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth.

Luke 1:41 And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:

Luke 1:42 And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

Luke 1:43 And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

Luke 1:44 For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.

Luke 1:45 And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord.

Luke 1:46 And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord,

Luke 1:47 And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

Luke 1:48 For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

Luke 1:49 For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.

Luke 1:50 And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.

Luke 1:51 He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

Luke 1:52 He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.

Luke 1:53 He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Luke 1:54 He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;

Luke 1:55 As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.

Luke 1:56 And Mary abode with her about three months, and returned to her own house.

Luke 1:57 Now Elisabeth's full time came that she should be delivered; and she brought forth a son.

Luke 1:58 And her neighbours and her cousins heard how the Lord had shewed great mercy upon her; and they rejoiced with her.

Luke 1:59 And it came to pass, that on the eighth day they came to circumcise the child; and they called him Zacharias, after the name of his father.

Luke 1:60 And his mother answered and said, Not so; but he shall be called John.

Luke 1:61 And they said unto her, There is none of thy kindred that is called by this name.

Luke 1:62 And they made signs to his father, how he would have him called.

Luke 1:63 And he asked for a writing table, and wrote, saying, His name is John. And they marvelled all.

Luke 1:64 And his mouth was opened immediately, and his tongue loosed, and he spake, and praised God.

Luke 1:65 And fear came on all that dwelt round about them: and all these sayings were noised abroad throughout all the hill country of Judaea.

Luke 1:66 And all they that heard them laid them up in their hearts, saying, What manner of child shall this be! And the hand of the Lord was with him.

Luke 1:67 And his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Ghost, and prophesied, saying,

Luke 1:68 Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people,

Luke 1:69 And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David;

Luke 1:70 As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began:

Luke 1:71 That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us;

Luke 1:72 To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant;

Luke 1:73 The oath which he sware to our father Abraham,

Luke 1:74 That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear,

Luke 1:75 In holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life.

Luke 1:76 And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways;

Luke 1:77 To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins,

Luke 1:78 Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,

Luke 1:79 To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Luke 1:80 And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel.

MY SITES

www.corpuschristioutreachministries.blogspot.com [Main site]

https://www.facebook.com/john.chiarello.5?ref=bookmarks

https://ccoutreach87.com/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ4GsqTEVWRm0HxQTLsifvg

https://twitter.com/ccoutreach87

https://plus.google.com/108013627259688810902/posts

https://vimeo.com/user37400385

https://www.pinterest.com/ccoutreach87/

https://www.linkedin.com/home?trk=hb_logo

http://johnchiarello.tumblr.com/

https://medium.com/@johnchiarello

http://ccoutreach.over-blog.com/

https://www.reddit.com/user/ccoutreach87

https://ccoutreach.yolasite.com/

https://ccoutreach87.jimdo.com/

https://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/jchiarello

http://ccoutreach87.webstarts.com/__blog.html?r=20171009095200

Note- Please do me a favor, those who read/like the posts- re-post them on other sites as well as the site you read them on- Copy text- download video links [Wordpress- Vimeo] make complete copies of my books/studies and posts- everything is copyrighted by me- I give permission for all to copy and share as much as you like- I just ask that nothing be sold. We live in an online world- yet- there is only one internet- meaning if it ever goes down- the only access to the teachings are what others have copied or downloaded- so feel free to copy and download as much as you want- it’s all free-

Thanks- John.

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betweengenesisfrogs · 7 years

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OFF-THE-CUFF HOMESTUCK THOUGHTS #4: ALL THAT WACKY GNOSTIC STUFF AND THE ENDING OF HOMESTUCK, OR: THE YOLOBRO PRINCIPLE

DISCLAIMER FRAMEWORK

[CHECK THE TAG FOR MORE THOUGHTS]

All right! I’ve finally had a night free, I’m hyped up on friends and good feelings, and I’m ready to continue. Let’s make shit transpire. B)

So, one thing a lot of folks were talking about near the end of Homestuck’s run was Gnosticism. Gnostic themes and references (referances) were everywhere in Act 6 Homestuck. A lot of folks were predicting these themes would be heavily involved in the ending. Then, when Act 7 came out, I saw a lot of disappointment and confusion. The major Gnostic revelations they’d predicted hadn’t taken place! Had Hussie dropped Gnostic themes like they were hot and the pimp was in the crib?

I don’t think so. I think, far from being dropped, the Gnostic themes and ideas are KEY to Homestuck’s ending. They’re vital to understanding massive parts of it, and, for me, at least, one of the things that make it so enjoyable for me. The trick, though, is to understand what kind of Gnostic story we’re looking at. So let’s see if we can crack this cueball open.

This is going under a cut, because it’s going to be an essay in itself.

GNOSTICISM, OR: SOPHIA, YALDABAOTH, AND YOU

Okay, first off: what even is Gnosticism and what themes are we even talking about? Many of you may be familiar with this stuff already from the aforementioned posts, but I’m sure there’s plenty of you out there who aren’t, so let’s do a quick recap.

Gnosticism was an early breakaway movement in Christianity back when the new religion was first finding its feet, and in fact it still has some adherents today. This is pre-Bible, pre-general acceptance of Christianity stuff. Think 100s and 200s CE. It was generally a lot more focused on individual experience of the divine than the hierarchy of the developing Church—which, sadly, was probably the main reason it was outcompeted by the hierarchy. It just didn’t have as much unified social or political power. So we’re mostly forced to reconstruct it (like so many alt Christianities) from the texts of the people who were arguing against it.

But, as far as we can tell, its beliefs were and are pretty interesting compared to the Christianity most of us are more familiar with. Basically, the God of the Old Testament, the God of Judaism, was not the God to worship according to Gnostic Christianity. He’s actually the villain. (Which was a pretty huge divergence from Christianity’s Jewish roots, so you can see how that might not have sat too well with some folks.)

Among many different texts, there’s a common mythic story that goes something like this. We live in a realm which is fallen and contains evil, but the true reality is different. The true reality is a perfect realm of perfect goodness, created by the true (very abstract) Creator. This state is called the pleroma, Greek for “fullness.” The pleroma emanates forth perfect worlds with the help of beings called aeons, angel-like beings who exist in male-female pairs, each of which is called a syzygy.

The fall occurred when the pairs became unbalanced. One of these aeons, Sophia (“wisdom” in Greek), broke away from her partner, and went off to explore the void. While she remained perfect, she accidentally emanated a being that was not paired with anyone: a masculine, flawed being known as Yaldabaoth or the Demiurge. Some folks will tell you this means “half-creator,” but that’s a mistranslation. Demiurge in Greek really means, literally, “worker from/of the people,” but less literally it means something like “artist” or “craftsman.” Usually it��s a guy who makes pretty stuff like jewelry or decoration or something like that. (Can you tell I took Greek?) This being created our world, our whole flawed material plane, believing himself to be the creator, and became the God of the Old Testament. The task of the Gnostic is to transcend Yaldabaoth through self-knowledge, or gnosis. By understanding oneself, one realizes one’s unity with Sophia, the true source of our divinity, and ultimately, with the pleroma and the true Creator.

All in all, it’s a pretty cool concept, whether you believe in it or not. And already, if you weren’t familiar with Gnosticsm before, I imagine you’re spotting things from Homestuck. Names like Yaldabaoth and Abraxas (a name used sometimes for the true Creator.) The aeons, who resemble Homestuck’s cherubs in their perfect pairing. It’s pretty clear that Hussie was familiar with this story, at least enough to draw on it for some references and motifs. So why might he have wanted to bring Gnostic stuff into his story? What might he have wanted to convey?

Let’s find out.

CHERUBS CHERUBS CHERUBS

It all begins, of course, with the aeons. I mean cherubs. OK, so I make no secret of the fact that I love cherubs. God I love cherubs. I’m a sucker for the whole cherub loredump Aranea provides, even if it had to be lampshaded to hell and back as a loredump. I think the thing that makes cherubs so interesting to me is the place that they occupy in Homestuck’s enormous, builds-on-itself-Powers-of-Ten-style cosmos. They’re not just another alien race. They don’t operate on the ordinary scale we’re used to, like trolls and humans do (the microcosm of ordinary life), but they don’t operate on the gigantic universe-spawning scale, either (the macrocosm.) They’re in between, in the “mezzocosm,” to steal a phrase from Joseph Campbell.

Cherubs act on the scale of say, galaxies. They operate within universes, many cherubs existing within each individual Billious Slick. Destructive cherubs cause huge waves of death, wiping out solar system after solar system and species after species of poor innocent aliens and fantrolls along the way. But good cherubs are protectors, defending said species from their cousins’ rampages. While cherubs resemble individual aliens traveling through the void, they also operate like much larger beings, claiming huge swaths of territory as their own, either to defend or to destroy. When they mate, their large-scale nature becomes much more evident, as they transform into AU-long serpents that wrestle for dominance in perfect pairs.

Cherubs fit the idea of the aeons really nicely. Dualities up the wazoo, obviously. (I haven’t even mentioned their inherent bodysharing stuff, where they already have to wrestle for dominance within themselves.) And a cherub, after all, in Abrahamic myth, is another kind of angel. And by being part of the natural processes of universes, they echo the aeons in being a natural aspect of reality that—as we’ll see—gets subverted with disastrous results.

They also fit really well into Homestuck’s running theme of cosmology as biology. Universes are literally frogs, whose DNA has to be combined to create the next generation, and they reproduce with massive amounts of redundancy and failure, like real spawning animals who produce hundreds of eggs. Doomed timelines are compared to capillaries, which all feed back into the central artery of the Alpha timeline (and maybe they’re literal capillaries within the universe-frog?) I gave your universe cancer, etc., etc. Cherubs, meanwhile, are compared to bacteria and cells: the destructive cherubs to viruses or germs, and the protective cherubs to white blood cells, defending the universe from disease.

Cherubs also make a really nice parallel with the events of the Game. (I’m pretty sure this insight came out of conversations between agenderarcee and zenosanalytic and other such awesome folks, so credit where credit is due.) In the Game, one party supports creation: Prospit, backed by Skaia, while the other doesn’t so much support destruction so much as oppose creation: the armies of Derse, backed possibly by the Horrorterrors. Creation vs Nullification. It’s hard to get a universe going; there’s too much inertia in the way. Meanwhile, Cherubs are an inversion—the wicked ones support Destruction, the good ones oppose it. Creation vs Nullification. Destruction vs Protection. It’s pretty cool, and maybe suggests that Skaia doesn’t just contain cherubs, but relies on them, too, working them into its system as aeons are part of the system of Gnosticism. I’m super stoked that cherubs seem to play a role in Hiveswap somehow, and curious what more we might learn about them when it finally comes out. They’re super cool.

All of which is to say: yeah, cherubs are definitely aeons, and they’re a pretty rad take on them, too.

So…what would happen if your cherubs got fucked up?

But you knew that would happen. The upfuckery was already here.

Enter *our* cherubs, Calliope and Caliborn.

THE MANCHILD DEMIURGE

Caliborn and Calliope are born into a weird code of life (set up ultimately by Caliborn, interestingly) that privileges their more down to earth side, rather than their cosmic side. Ordinary cherubs aren’t supposed to live in rooms and type on computers, but here they do. This is a problem, as I’ll explain later, but the obvious problems are that A) Caliborn and Calliope decide to play a game meant for other, less cosmic species B) Caliborn uses the game to kill his sister through artificial means rather than grappling for dominance the ordinary way and thus dooms himself to being a stunted immature tool forever C) As a solo player, he plays a very different game, with enormous and disastrous cosmic results. Namely, he becomes Lord English, an unstoppable being with incredible power over the timeline and the opportunity to devour world after world at a whim. Note that inflicting destruction is exactly what he would have done as an ordinary cherub…but here he’s able to do it on a much larger scale.

Caliborn/Lord English is pretty clearly modeled on the Gnostic Demiurge. Not only does he control a reality that our heroes are ultimately meant to escape, he also has some other familiar traits. He’s a self-described artist, obsessed with his creation, a terrible and insipid imitation of the story we know as Homestuck. A craft’s man, as he says. The irony being, of course, that the events of Homestuck are also his creation, but indirectly, as the much more powerful and manipulative English.

It’s easy to see LE’s entrance into a universe at the end of its life as an event. But in some ways it’s better to think of it as a kind of territory, marked for his possession. After all, from an outside perspective or from Skaia’s perspective, all universes are already here. Think of how the trolls are able to communicate with the universe they created at any point in its history. Think of how the Furthest Ring—the weird space-time outside of universes and sessions—is inconsistent and an event necessary to LE’s powers, the creation of the Green Sun, can take place within one of the universes marked by his predation. It’s Mobius Double Reacharounds all the way down, is what I’m saying. So really, from a perspective outside of time it’s less a chronological set of events and more a place, a set of universes that LE is able to inhabit.

Actually, I made a couple maps in past posts of what such a territory might look like. Tumblr frequently won’t let me fit images into a long post like this, but here’s two links instead.

So, just like the Demiurge, LE has a whole realm to his own. A false realm, carved out within the reality of SBURB. LE is Homestuck’s Demiurge.

Wait a minute. Wasn’t the Demiurge’s name Yaldabaoth? Isn’t that the name of a Denizen? More specifically, Caliborn’s denizen? Huh?

Let’s back up a bit. LE’s progression through the universes isn’t a surprise to Skaia. We knew early on, actually, that his actions were “sanctioned by Paradox Space.” And really, how could it be otherwise? If all universes coexist simultaneously, even during the process of their creation, the forces that create reality would be well aware of divergences from their normal pattern. The Game itself offers him his power!

Now, it’s hard to say how much of what goes on in Paradox Space is Skaia’s will. Skaia itself seems to want to make universes, but most of these efforts fail, and will definitely fail without player intervention. And it’s implied that there are forces acting against Creation. Maybe just inertia. Or maybe these are the Horrorterrors, who seem to advance their own agenda through Derse Dreamers. Maybe they’re just creatures that naturally inhabit the weird tangled space-time of the Furthest Ring. If so, it’s not surprising that they would be opposed to the creation of new universes in their midst. So whatever LE is, like everything else within Paradox Space, he’s hashed out between Creation and Nullification.

Denizens are weird and interesting in this regard. They’re the closest thing the Game has to intelligent cosmic entities that you could actually talk to. They’re like the public face of Skaia. They seem to communicate information to themselves through different realities, and they manipulate events to ensure certain results in the timeline. Their goals, though, are as inscrutable as Skaia’s and the Horrorterrors’ always are. They’re associated with the Game and therefore with Skaia. But they seem to me to be part of the ever-ongoing process of negotiation between Creation and Nullification.

So, when Caliborn finds himself in a dead session where his Denizen simultaneously promises to punish him for his hubris with a grueling challenge AND offers him incredible, godlike power if he succeeds, it probably indicates that these perspectives are once again at play. Skaia likes to figure out who will win its ongoing argument with the void through a Game. Why not offer a different Game as a way of resolving a different question?

I’m not sure if I borrowed this theory from someone, but one idea that I remember thinking about earlier in Homestuck’s run was that LE’s existence was the result of a failed coup by the Horrorterrors that totally backfired. If they really did represent the forces of Nullification, suppose they got tired (non-temporally speaking) of losing matches and seeing new frogs pop up in their precious space-time over and over again. Say they decided to switch from Nullification to outright Destruction, to make a weapon that destroys universes. But their weapon blew up in their face once it started attacking them right back.

Or, maybe let’s turn it around: say Skaia thought, hey, let’s get a leg up on these void-loving bastards for once, and make a weapon that, yeah, sure, fucks up a bunch of universes and some of our player’s lives (not that we really care), but also lets us really stick it to those tentacley motherfuckers for a change.

Both possibilities seem worth considering, depending on how much you think Skaia is willing to sacrifice.

So when Yaldabaoth offers LE the Choice and the chance to play the ultimate game of table stickball, he’s really doing a whole lot more: he’s offering the major parties involved in anything going on in Paradox Space the chance to score points in their own Game.

Denizens sometimes seem to me to represent different aspects of Skaia, or different aspects of this negotiation process. It’s even possible that they could be in competition. So what could a Denizen named Yaldabaoth represent?

The power to make and break certain players. The power to make a Demiurge.

Yaldabaoth is associated with power, and, interestingly, with the Light aspect through his shape. He can’t be easily classified as belonging to a particular aspect like some Denizens can, though, because he manifests to both Dirk and Caliborn. What do they have in common? An interest in power and a considerable amount of it, yes. But also toxic masculinity, arrogance, and an obsession with being the best.

If Skaia loves games, how does it feel about winners? Maybe Yaldabaoth represents the principle of the conqueror. The one who defies even the onslaught and punishment of the dead session. The one who’s good enough at games to become part of the game itself. Maybe Yaldabaoth is the part of Skaia that finds someone like Caliborn deserving of a certain honor. Or at least allows its opponents to make use of such a person. The part of Skaia that says, power comes to the one who overcomes it all, through sheer brutal obsession. To the bro who is the most hardcore of all the bros. Who by throwing himself into his game more than any reasonable person would…somehow succeeds.

You might call it the Yaldabaoth Principle, or maybe…

The Yolobro Principle.

So that’s how you make a demiurge. How do you break one?

With a syzygy.

THE ARTIST, THE MUSE

Ah, dear, sweet, sweet, precious Calliope, I’m sorry to have held off talking about you for so long. Your brother ruins everything. But we all know you’re leagues, no, AUs better than that guy.

There isn’t anyone named Sophia in Homestuck, but Calliope is a pretty close analogue. She’s the other half of Caliborn’s cherub pair or syzygy, and it’s her separation from him that’s the catalyst for LE’s. Much of the personality Caliborn crafts for himself is in opposition to her: she’s a passionate and skilled artist, so he becomes an artist too in order to mock her work. Even his cartoonish misogyny seems to arise mostly out of his hatred for her and everything she enjoys. Even after he becomes LE, he’s still obsessing over her, just as cherubs generally obsess over their defeated halves and seek out mates similar to them in adulthood—creating crafting a parody of her in Doc Scratch, killing limeblood trolls because she’s fond of them, and so on. Honestly, Calliope is a great and wonderful character whom a lot of the fandom can empathize with (indeed, she’s crafted as a celebration of Homestuck fandom), and so it’s a shame that we’re going to spend most of this post talking about her stupid brother. Let’s just acknowledge that she deserves better, but her dumb bro has to go make it all about himself, as usual.

But let’s talk about Calliope as the Gnostic Sophia. Like Sophia, she can kind of be described as an inherently good being who made a mistake. In her case, that was believing that she could play a cosmic game with her brother and reconcile with him, rather than defeating him in cherub puberty as cherubs usually do. This ultimately led to her death, Caliborn’s dead session challenge round, and his Yaldabothification into LE.

It wouldn’t really be fair to be mad at her, though! It was an innocent mistake born out of good intentions, and it cost her her life. Also, the warring forces of the Game totally set that situation up, as did LE himself. The cherubs’ unusual living situation encouraged them to think of themselves as the type of species that would play the Game, and thus LE was born.

But there are two Calliopes: the one who was killed by her brother, yes, but also another from an alternate timeline, who defeated her brother in the normal cherub way. Part of the difference in her timeline was that she never learned to think of herself the way humans do, never followed their adventures as a fan, and thus never believed that they could reconcile in their game. Alt-Calliope is much closer to Paradox Space’s idea of a traditional cherub. She’s much more cosmic, much more like an aeon. But also much less human. She’s a force for good, but, like Skaia, she can only see individual beings as abstractions. From a certain perspective, she’s much more empowered and much more important

And yet the game is rigged against her. The challenges of her dead session are designed for her Lord of Time brother, and it seems to be implied that hers is a doomed timeline. When she consults with her Denizen—interestingly, not Yaldabaoth, but Echidna—she is given the Choice to wait out an eternity to become someone who could bring an end to a Yaldabaoth-like tyrant. And she accepts that destiny, committing herself fully to a cosmic purpose. Like LE, the ascended Muse of Space is happy to be part of Skaia’s machinations—if for a very different reasons.

If the Denizens represent different aspects of Skaia or the Game, then maybe there’s a countervailing force to Yalda that we could describe as the Echidna Principle. A dedication to protecting and preserving life within Skaia’s system. Or at least, an acknowledgement that the reign of any false god needs to come to an end. The Echidna principle employs Alt-Calliope as a counterpart to Caliborn, bringing the two cherubs back into symmetry.

This symmetry is INTEGRAL to Homestuck’s ending. We’ll see how, once we establish some ending-related Homestuck Facts.

In the meantime don’t forget regular Calliope, either—she’s going to be important to the meaning of all this, too. We’ll catch up with her by the curtain call.

THE MAP HOMESTUCK AND THE TERRITORY ENGLISH

Okay! Homestuck Facts!

As I’ve discussed before, there’s a thing that keeps happening in Homestuck which we might call Map-Territory Confusion. This is a concept from literary studies and stuff. Basically, what we mean by Map and Territory is that representations of things are not the same as the things themselves. Like, a map of, say, Houston, is not the same thing as the actual city of Houston, right? One’s made of paper and the other’s made of, like, buildings and shit.

Except in Homestuck, the Map and the Territory blur together all the dang time. The labels for Prospit and Derse float in front of their respective planetoids. Jack knows how to flip his sprite. Terezi’s scratching the game disc glitches Homestuck the webcomic. Caliborn’s sabatoge of the expansion pack causes significant glitches in the Game Over session. Sooo many examples going on here that it would take forever to list them all. Even the way that the omniscient narration (which is sometimes the same as the character of Andrew Hussie and sometimes argues with him) blurs together with the subjective experiences of individual characters contributes to the confusion. Even though, on some level, we tend to believe that Homestuck is a representation of a set of events going on in a number of universes that all exist out in some conceptual space, we’re forced to question constantly whether what we’re witnessing is part of those events, or part of the frame we witness them through, or whether that question even makes sense.

By the time we reach Act 6, and even possibly earlier, I’d argue this confusion is being used very deliberately.

Remember how we talked about LE’s territory earlier?

In Homestuck, Map-Territory Confusion is used to draw an explicit link between the Map that is Homestuck the webcomic and the Territory that is the set of universes and sessions over which LE is able to hold sway.

This is a big part of the reason for Hussie and Caliborn’s conversation. Caliborn is arguing with the theoretical author of the map Homestuck, screeching at how his choices have affected him, and trying to put forward his own version of the narrative. Meanwhile the author is literally dead, killed by LE. And after this conversation, Caliborn takes over the narrative prompt by entering his text into the same space where he had conversations with Hussie. He tries to rewrite Homestuck in his own bad-fandom image, while simultaneously A) his sabotage of the the Homestuck narrative cause glitches, confusion, and GAME OVER for the kids and B) his future-self LE’s power over the timeline becomes even more of a concern for both the living and the dead. This, mind you, is all on the heels of us finding out through the last few acts how LE and his agent Doc Scratch have been manipulating every disaster, and indeed, everything that has happened within the narrative Homestuck from the very beginning.

An large set of universes and sessions are LE’s playground.

Homestuck itself is LE’s playground.

The two are one and the same.

The other piece of the LE’s Domain = Homestuck puzzle is of course the house-shaped Juju, and the weird powers John gets from touching it. Now, the weird timeline retcon stuff that the Juju allows John to enact is its own weird, often frustrating subject that probably deserves its own post, and if we were to discuss it here, we’d get more derailed than we already are. What’s important for our purposes is that the Juju is even more associated with the narrative than LE is. When we first see it, it looks grey but is actually transparent, by which I mean it bleeds into the grey background of the base website. This grey background is also the place John ends up when he’s testing his powers and dragging LOWAS between realities. We know that LE used it in the very beginning of his reign to trap his opponents, and we know that afterward it passed out of his control, and became something that could only be used against him. It’s shaped like the logo for the Game, in the kids’ version, which is the closest thing we have to a symbol of Homestuck.

We don’t know much about what Jujus actually are, but one thing that’s frequently true about them is that they have strong effects on time. Well, what has a greater affect on time than a story that shapes all the different universes and timelines into a coherent progression?

I’m pretty sure that what Yaldabaoth gives Caliborn and what Caliborn traps our heroes inside to ensure his ascension is Homestuck itself.

So, when I say that the ending of Homestuck is about escaping Homestuck, please believe that it’s not just some weird meta bs that dismisses the story and says it doesn’t mean anything. It’s an actual plot point. Once we learn to see the link between Homestuck the narrative and Homestuck the events, we can see that to escape Homestuck the webcomic has a deeply metaphorical meaning. To escape Homestuck is to escape the hidden conductor behind all events and enter into a domain he cannot control.

With all that in mind, we’re now ready to interpret Act 7.

ACT 7: COSMIC SYMMETRY

We see two main things happen in Act 7. Alt-Calliope makes her move, and Vriska (oh Vriska, you’re your own post and a half) activates the house Juju against Lord English, which is to say, she weaponizes Homestuck against him. The result is a black hole where the Green Sun used to be. Which of the two are responsible? Wrong question, I think. Alt-Calliope, our Sophia, is serving as the conductor of the orchestra and by implication, the guiding hand of the narrative, while Vriska is bringing the narrative to bear against him. The Juju undeniably has power, but so, too, does a Muse of Space showing that this has been her domain all along. The physical destruction they cause is inextricably linked.

Thought the timeline stuff is knotty and confusing as hell, the actual mechanics of LE’s destruction are secretly fairly simple. As others have noted, the defeat of this pool-themed villain evokes the rules of table stickball. We see the Juju/weapon/narrative briefly resemble a ball of light, like a cue ball. We see LE’s eyes become eight balls. And we see the light from the juju charging toward him, like something about to knock him into a dark hole.

Click.

The symbolic meaning of the eight ball is important to keep in mind, and in fact was evoked earlier in Homestuck. In many games of billiards, you can’t pocket the eight ball until the last shot. With Snowman, that meant that you couldn’t kill her without destroying the universe. But in fact, Snowman did get taken out—when Scratch wanted someone to destroy the universe and bring in LE. The meaning of the eight ball, then, is: the time has finally come. The rules permit victory. The right timeline has been found. Everything necessary to make the final move has already taken place.

That’s exactly what Alt-Calliope represents in the eyes of Skaia or the Game. From the beginning of LE’s power trip, the Game knew that his power trip wouldn’t last forever. It would have limits both in time and in space. For Skaia, Alt-Calliope is those limitations being enacted. She is LE’s end.

Think back to the tangled spacetime of the Furthest Ring. Scratch enlisted Dave and Rose to create the Green sun long before the chronology of their session. Thus he achieved, in one sense, LE’s beginning. The destruction of the Green Sun (which unites all of LE’s universes as an ordinary star unites its planets) achieves LE’s end. It doesn’t matter that this end has to come, chronologically, after his long reign of terror. It still ends it.

It’s an end spatially as well as temporally. LE’s rampage through the furthest ring led him opponents around in a great circle of ravaged space-time. (Like a sucker.) Which by the time of the final confrontation makes a complete loop. Imagine what effect a star collapsing into a black hole might have on that ruined space. Imagine how a fully-realized Muse of Space might be able to manipulate the fabric of the Furthest Ring to achieve exactly that effect. Now recall that the universes and sessions LE’s able to influence are part of the Green Sun’s orbit. Yeah, they’re not going to make it out of that collapse intact. Nor are the army of ghost selves that echo the twisting progression of all the universes and alternate timelines we’ve seen going to escape. They’re going to be caught up in the extinction of the domain, swept up in its wake.

That’s the physical side of things. Looking at the Juju itself lets us talk about the narrative side of things. When Vriska activates the Juju, it takes shape as the familiar house symbol of Homestuck. But that same symbol has another meaning—it’s the shape of the Exit Gate for the Game. At the exact same moment (remember, things that are juxtaposed in Homestuck are circumstantially simultaneous, meaning that they’re somehow associated or related to each other) the Juju becomes the Exit Gate, we also see the kids’ (previously red and doorless) Exit gate flip turnways, turn white, and feature a door. The two look so similar that for a moment I thought the kids were going to walk through and end up in the Furthest Ring. But no—the two aren’t two sides of the same door. They’re the same side of the same door.

Down in front of LE crashes a white door. The same white door appears to the kids at the same moment. The difference is, the kids will walk through, and LE will not. He won’t escape the end of his own ambitions. Where does the door lead from? From LE’s domain, also known as Homestuck. Where does it lead to? A new universe outside of LE’s domain, and outside the canon of Homestuck. So outside the canon that it’s only glimpsed as a flash-forward to the future, unable to be directly shown onscreen before the End of Act 7.

And—whatever interpretation we want to assign to the bizarre timeline questions that surround the retcon, Caliborn’s vision of trapping the kids, and the Juju—one thing stands out clearly. This is the right timeline. This is no longer the timeline trapped under LE’s sway. As the eight ball tells us, everything has finally lined up the way it should. Time to take that shot.

One more thing worth noting—in Homestuck, specific colors have long stood for specific timelines and universes. The curtains of the Beta kids’ acts are red, and the Alphas’ green, and their game logos invert this. Meanwhile the trolls’ curtains are blue. As was foreshadowed in Rose’s walkaround, the three colors of curtains eventually fuse to make, in Act 7, white. The color of everything coming together. The color of the Juju in its final form.

What better way to represent everything from the whole history of LE’s domain coming together? What better way to represent everything from the whole history of Homestuck combining into one victory?

In the ending of Homestuck, weird time shit, cosmic destruction, and the culminating power of the narrative all fuse together into one white-hot path toward victory. And even as all this happens, we see Caliborn smashing his clock, see LE gaining his terrifying time powers in the first place. The end is the beginning, and the beginning is also the end.

For a Demiurge and for Skaia, that’s the same thing. The Game has granted Caliborn unfathomable power. But it’s also trapped him in a false, limited world of his own devising. Forever. His obsession means power, but his obsession is also his greatest weakness. He will never know freedom from the loop he set himself in, has become the loop itself. He will never know the freedom the kids know. His ignorance of anything but himself makes him, in a way, a deeply tragic figure. Tragic because Skaia knows how limited he really is, and he never will.

Skaia, or whatever power is at work in the symmetrical ballad of the twin cherubs, is satisfied. Alt-Calliope has fulfilled her cosmic purpose. The circle is complete. The cosmos is satisfied. And our heroes have left the old world behind forever

…But what does that mean? What does it mean to escape?

A GIRL WHO LIVED

What surprised a lot of people who’d been following the Gnostic themes of Homestuck was that the kids didn’t ultimately escape the game. A lot of folks, I remember, felt sure that the kids were going to leave the Game behind forever by escaping into a limitless realm, the pleroma of Gnostic myth.

Here’s the thing. They did.

What I’ve been trying to show here is that the Demiurge to escape, as figured in Homestuck, isn’t Skaia, but Lord English. And the pleroma, the realm of freedom we’re trying to get to? That’s not some place outside Skaia and its cycle of universe after universe being born.

The pleroma is Skaia itself.

This is deeply weird and it’s easy to see why it would catch a lot of people off guard. After all, the pleroma in Gnostic myth is a deeply positive thing, a realm of perfection and joy. It’s the home of the perfectly good God, as Christians tend to view him. Skaia, however, is depicted as amoral, uncaring, even cruel.

But I think this ties into Homestuck’s major themes. The amoral, almost animal-minded cosmos Homestuck depicts is fascinating precisely because it offers no caring God. Cherubs are part of the ordinary progression of things, just as aeons are, but reconnecting with that progression simply means the continued perpetuation of reality through an infinite frog machine. The deep meaningfulness of mythology clashes, quite deliberately with the deep meaninglessness of perpetual motion. God is a video game that doesn’t care about you as a person, but as a tool it can use to keep the whole show running. And yet, like a video game, it offers grand, mythic narratives and archetypes you can invest yourself in, to the point where you can lose sight of the fact that they don’t necessarily mean anything for your life. Skaia will always exist, even after the story is done, as the Spirograph at the end of Act 7 suggests. It’s up to us human beings to make sense of that.

I’ve talked before about the difference between huge, archetypal narratives and actual personal experiences. Within the context of Sburb, that usually means the difference between the game and your experience of it. But it can also be the difference between Dave and the toxic masculine narratives he inherited. The difference between your archetype and yourself. Or the difference between Calliope and her doppleganger.

To Skaia, Alt-Calliope is the important one, because she enacts its mythic narrative and brings the ballad of Lord English to an end. To Skaia, the Calliope we know is a footnote, an accident, an irrelevant detail. It doesn’t care whether she lives or dies.

But we do. Because we know her. We’ve seen her suffer and struggle, just as we’ve seen all the heroes suffer and struggle. We’ve seen her yearn to be part of something important, celebrated fandom with her, and wanted to defend her against her horrible brother. We’ve seen her dream of something better than a limited life locked to a monster with a chain. We’ve been rooting for her to achieve it.

There’s no reason, from Skaia’s perspective, that Calliope needed to be brought back to life with the ring of life. The ring allowed Aranea to cause Game Over, which was important to the retcon and thus to its grand plan. Calliope is irrelevant.

But she gets brought back to life anyway. Why? Because her friends care about her. Because we do.

Because our Calliope isn’t part of the construction of a grand cosmic architecture. She’s a person.

She has the right to exist. Not because she fulfils some time loop or causes some outcome. But because she’s a person. She doesn’t exist for the cosmos. She exists for herself.

In our Calliope, what was formerly godlike, angel-like, beyond mortal comprehension, gets a chance to be something more human. Calliope expects her doppelganger to be superior to her. She fears her friendships, her peacefulness, her history make her weak. But it’s just the opposite. She’s strong in a way that has nothing to do with what Skaia values, but everything to do with what we value as readers. She matters in dreaming and striving. In herself.

As Alt-Calliope says, recognizing this truth about her counterpart, even as she lives out an entirely different story:

CALLIOPE: you don't need to do anything.

CALLIOPE: be who you've become, and who i didn't.

CALLIOPE: consume the fruits of an existence i could never understand.

CALLIOPE: live.

The kids escape Lord English, but at the expense of all their past and possible selves, and are left to wrestle with the meaning of their victory: is it divinely ordained, or just an accident, just Skaia’s whim? Is it truly victory when they’re not sure if they’re the same selves, or have they lost something along the way? Caliborn and Calliope embody a similar dichotomy. Caliborn will forever be archetypal, larger than life. But he’s doomed to live out a foolish, self-indulgent story in a bubble of space-time he will never escape. Calliope will never have the glorious, cosmic importance Skaia granted to her brother and to the ghost of her it conjured up to defeat him. But she has a freedom that neither of them will never be able to possess. Freedom to live.

Ultimately, Homestuck uses Gnosticism, a mythic framework all about the relationship between human and the divine, to show the difference between the two. It suggests that the divine, the archetypal, the stuff of grand heroic stories is ultimately limited. In the end, Homestuck argues, there’s great strength and freedom in being mortal. Being human.

I think that’s a pretty cool story to tell.

Next time: other ways of thinking about the ending.

(PS: This essay turned out to be 11 pages in Word. The first mention of Vriska is on page 8. Of fucking course.)

[EDIT 5/21: A previous version of this post claimed that Abraxas was the name of Sophia’s syzygy counterpart, but looking around, that appears to be unsubstantiated. Instead, Abraxas appears to be used as the name of the Ur-God who created the Pleroma or of another Aeon within the Gnostic system. This is pretty cool, as it ties the Denizen Abraxas and the Hope aspect even more fully into the normal functioning of the Sburban cosmos/pleroma. Pretty cool stuff! Thanks to @revolutionaryduelist for pointing it out!]

#off-the-cuff homestuck thoughts extravaganza 2017 #homestuck #homestuck analysis #gnostic influences #denizens #calliope #caliborn #lord english #homestuck meta #homestuck worldbuilding #the game #the endgame #fuck yeah cherubs #corrected posts

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