Friday [3 and 4]

Moning again.

4.  Housekeeping

Plan to be back in action soon.  A few things need attending to.

3.  Indicators and counter-indicators

There's a reference to Aaron's rod, also the rod of Jesse which seems to me to be, in the most volatile manner possible, susceptible to gross misinterpretation.  And it has been misinterpreted for millennia.

I read this in passing, on the destruction of WW2:

Hitler's bombers rained destruction upon London from the skies. Over 15,000 people lost their lives and many parts of the city were reduced to rubble. Yet when spring came, an amazing thing happened. Beautiful wildflowers, many of them thought extinct, sprang up in the midst of the devastation. Botanists concluded that the seeds had laid dormant under buildings and other structures until the bomb blasts exposed them and gave them the opportunity to germinate.

Decades ago, during my projectionist days, I vaguely recall a Czech movie in Super 8 on the destruction by war but more specifically, the raining down on any dissent, which brings us right into 2022/23 again. In that short film [maybe 10 minutes], every new stomping out of dissent only brought out more poppies, until the entire devastated landscape was covered by them.

There was a series of such films and once word got out that they were being projected, the available chairs were fully occupied.

The Hassidic nature of Isaiah the book can interpret Jesse's rod as a rod of wrath pointed at others, which is very much what Longrider was going on about. No one likes been preached at and lambasted. In the hands of the clumsy, not fully read-up, that can destroy years of seed planting in one year.

Jesse's rod, as far as I can see, is the story which appears in many early cultures about the rod of authority:

"And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots" (King James Version). From the Latin Vulgate Bible used in the Middle Ages: et egredietur virga de radice Iesse et flos de radice eius ascendet (Isaiah 11:1).

All right, what is my beef about it?  It is this ... yes, we should always write about what we do know, in a humble, scholarly manner:

Wise men lay up knowledge: but the mouth of the foolish is near destruction. [Proverbs 10:14]

... but one should be on guard against the two counterproductive ways of presenting it ... from the fire and brimstone preacher who loses vastly more than he saves ... to the Laodicean church in what is now Turkey:

The most important of the cities was Laodicea ad Lycum (near modern Denizli, Turkey); its church was one of the seven to which St. John addressed the Revelation. Laodicea ad Mare (modern Latakia, Syria) was a major seaport.

What was the wrongdoing of the church there?

Laodicea minted its coins that bore the images of Zeus, Asclepius, Apollo, and later - the Roman emperors, from the 2nd century BC. In the Roman period, the city was famous for its bankers. Even the famous Roman orator and statesman, Cicero, used their services.

That church, not unlike the doomed Church of England, into which I was christened, was lukewarm, chose its own comfortable way of observing, not unlike the Conservative Party at prayer.  It looks like it is being 'spewed out' even now by the look of the empty pews.  Its version of scripture was certainly apostate in the sense that it was trying to promote one thing but was actually accommodating, appeasing, that which was corrupted.

To throw in another image I've often used, which I ascribe to my mate up the road, of the canal boat failing to hold course and crashing first into the red left bank, then across to the blue right bank ... but never holds a steady course.

Notice also that the Americans turn colours the wrong way round and make blue leftist and red rightwing.  As if the confusion needed even more confusion.

Holding my bo-stick of authority here [joke, joke, just a bleedin' joke, ok], I'd advise that to be cautious and well-read is hardly lukewarm and yet one must not be Laodicean either about world events ... we do need to state what needs stating and reap the whirlwind thereby.