September 8th.

He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, but not as his father David had done. In everything he followed the example of his father Joash. The high places, however, were not removed; the people continued to offer sacrifices and burn incense there.

Jeroboam son of Jehoash did evil in the eyes of the LORD and did not turn away from any of the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, which he had caused Israel to commit.

Since the LORD had not said he would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven, he saved them by the hand of Jeroboam son of Jehoash.

Therefore the LORD Almighty says this: "Because you have not listened to my words, I will summon all the peoples of the north and my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon," declares the LORD.

Now I will hand all your countries over to my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; I will make even the wild animals subject to him.

To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me.

But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

The life of the son of God starts with the knowledge of the spiritual reality. This is the foundation upon which everything is built. The house resting upon its foundation in the humans' world serves as a copy of the spiritual truth, the same way a tree stands because of its root system. A knowledge of the spiritual reality is a necessary first for the one born of God. The mysteries that the spirit enlightens us to after we have been born of God are central in understanding the new way. But that's only like the tip of a stick pin compared to what comes after, which is how the natural life goes, which is the copy of the better thing, why it exists for us to observe—because our natural faculties are just too dim and unprepared to even be able to begin to comprehend what the spiritual reality is.

The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.

Why is the body weak? We are as natural creatures heavy, dull and obtuse. We are big blobs of organic material that keep getting pulled toward the earth via the force of the gravity it generates to suck everything back into it. Finally it will one day just become another integral part of the natural creation, made one with it via the process that never stops working. The knowledge that we're chosen and that the spiritual world exists as a series of supernatural things that just keep us interested in what He is giving to us, because we are too naturally weak to ever stay interested enough to come on our own. It is too impossible a task to do such a thing, which we find out when we start trying to struggle against our selves and the instincts coming up that demand to be served all the time. Saying no takes a special kind of stamina that has to be built into us over a long period of time, by the suffering and enduring through what the Father requires of us (an impossibly unhuman requirement of pureness of heart).

"Now, son of man, take a clay tablet, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it. Then lay siege to it: Erect siege works against it, build a ramp up to it, set up camps against it and put battering rams around it. Then take an iron pan, place it as an iron wall between you and the city and turn your face toward it. It will be under siege, and you shall besiege it. This will be a sign to the house of Israel.

Then lie on your left side and put the sin of the house of Israel upon yourself. You are to bear their sin for the number of days you lie on your side. I have assigned you the same number of days as the years of their sin. So for 390 days you will bear the sin of the house of Israel.

After you have finished this, lie down again, this time on your right side, and bear the sin of the house of Judah. I have assigned you 40 days, a day for each year. Turn your face toward the siege of Jerusalem and with bared arm prophesy against her. I will tie you up with ropes so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have finished the days of your siege.

"Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself. You are to eat it during the 390 days you lie on your side. Weigh out twenty shekels of food to eat each day and eat it at set times. Also measure out a sixth of a hin of water and drink it at set times. Eat the food as you would a barley cake; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel." The LORD said, "In this way the people of Israel will eat defiled food among the nations where I will drive them."

Because we are natural creatures and not spiritual creatures we don't know any other way than just continuing to be the evil creatures we are. We love the human, natural, evil way so much, we're always given over to that reality because it is our reality; so it takes these miraculous, supernatural things to keep us interested, waking us up from our dead slumber that keeps drawing us back to the dead heaviness of the earth, the dirt, the heavy bodies, and all of the animal cravings, fears and things which keep blocking the spiritual reality from us (as they are intended to do in the humans, which makes sense because the Father put that system in place to keep them away from Him). When we continue to allow them to rule us they keep us from the Father who is pure spirit, keeping us evil because we're low and base creatures, heavy and dead, unable to be handled or enjoyed by the Father because we're so different than He is.

If your hand or your foot causes you to sin cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. 9 And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.

It's like a human being able to enjoy a fly or a gnat; he can see it and know it's there and alive, but it's so different than him, there's nothing to do with it except swat it because unless he was able to transform it into a flesh and blood son like him, who could love him and who he could love back, then it's totally useless to him except to bother him. As humans we are the same way to God—unclean, natural, earthly beings who can't enter into the narrow gate, to where God is, because we're too heavy and big and bulky, so we'd just get stuck if we tried.

Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

Jesus across the board is calling the humans evil, because of their condition as pure participants in the earthly creation, the old creation. What are the good gifts that the Father gives to His sons, if not an awareness of the hidden spiritual world where He is, and other spiritual things that leads the son away from what is natural, temporary, earthly—evil—and toward Him and being able to understand spiritual things, being able to know Him even a little. Not just knowing about spiritual things, but actually becoming spiritual themselves, as part of the process of the transformation of the son from dead to alive, natural to spiritual, born of woman to born of God, animal bound up with the earth and the devil to sons of God bound up with Him and everything good that comes from Him.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Jesus can be figured as one who after being raised up wasn't limited by the physical (since he came right through the wall), whereas the disciples were totally bound up by the natural limitations of the physical laws. The thing to note is that Jesus was pure spirit so that he wasn't affected by the natural, while the disciples were purely natural because they weren't yet affected by the spirit's power to start to transform them from what they were to what the Father wanted them to become—spiritual beings instead of heavy, dead animals, natural creatures who were 100% an integral part of the present natural, temporary, evil (because it's not made in the image of God like the spiritual is) creation.

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!" After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

Jesus coming through the wall has a lot to do with him urging the disciples to come through the narrow gate, which has a lot to do with the spiritual creation being that which is through the gate that is guarded by the angel with the flaming sword, who guards the tree of life, not accidentally on the other side of the gate from where the humans all of a sudden found themselves, in and 100% a part of the natural, dying creation, bound up with the animal and its nature, having the same existence and destiny as they have—pulled to the earth, heavy, and temporary, with bodies that go into the ground when they expire without any apparent difference between the two (animals and humans).

So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

We all inherit the animal nature, which Adam bonded to in the garden when he believed the snake (animal) over his Father. It is the thing in man that is against God, that keeps him from knowing God and the truth about spiritual reality. In fact we are all born sons of Adam and will remain that way unless we are chosen to become born of God, of spiritual DNA instead of natural. Then comes the very beginning of the long, painful and arduous transition from animal to spirit—a creature who can be enjoyed by the Father who is pure spirit. Nothing happens in a vacuum, nor in an instant. A tree doesn't grow up overnight. If it withstands the wind, rain and trampling animals, its roots take a long time to spread out and become established before it's secure in its place. It's not much different with the sons of God—slow, steady and methodically growing up before their Father, learning by the suffering they get hit with when they stray off course by a perfect pavlovian kind of method to get back on the path.

Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. "Make level paths for your feet," so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.

Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many. See that no one is sexually immoral, or is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son. Afterward, as you know, when he wanted to inherit this blessing, he was rejected. He could bring about no change of mind, though he sought the blessing with tears.

It is easy to see the animal nature in others, because one aspect of it is to always need to be better than others, so God uses it to teach us about its origin and existence. With a developing maturity in the spiritual reality, the one born of God can start to see the traits of the animal in himself. This is the beginning of the transition toward the beginning of humility, what hasn't even begun even though we will assume we're far along in it because of the animal nature's power to deceive, which is how it works. As he begins to see the ugliness of the survivalist animal in his own egotistical predispositions, worldly admiration, indulgent inclinations and defensive posturing, then the son is just beginning to even be able to look at his humanity and the possibility of humility. However, the condition of humility will be a long way off. If not for the love of the Father for His own sons, they would just be lost in the ocean of their own ungodliness, self-deception, uncleanness and ugliness of character—totally unable to ever come close to God.

No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.

A repeating trap will be thinking we can try to mix the new and the old. The new (spiritual) though is something we don't know anything about, so it will just be our ignorant assumptions about what we project the spiritual to be, via these totally natural minds. We do know a lot about the old, which we will repeatedly try to run back to and employ as part of the journey, trying to use the methods that we used before to figure out and control our reality (Nicodemus—"How can that be?") and apply them to the new journey away from the earthly and towards Him. What we learn after a while is that they don't apply because they're part of the old, evil way, and the new way cannot be put into the old way—we can't mix them up. Trying to mix them is merely the evil desire in us to be able to control what's going on, because that's how we did everything in the old life.

The journey of the son to his Father goes all the way back to Genesis 3. For the humans it's about the transformation from what God intended the human to be for Him (His own family) to what is and must be totally separated from Him, of the earth while He remains heavenly (spirit). For the chosen sons it's about the transformation back, from being earthly (dead) to spiritual (alive to the Father who can now begin to enjoy them); from being born of the animal (the serpent, the beast, the devil), to being born of God, from something totally useless to God to something enjoyable, able to be held because they are like Him.

This is not a process that happens overnight. It will be a thing we will compare to what happened in the first century, and we will always want to find a correspondence between their experience and ours. But again, our interpretation about how we even think it was happening comes from our ignorance and what we've heard from other ignorant humans who assumed to know what they couldn't know. One thing that is important for us to do is to stop thinking we can know how things are supposed to be, or what they'll be like because that will be tainted by our compulsion to color those things in our favor, making them agreeable to us and our naturally evil senses that cannot comprehend anything of substance.

God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.