Beer, French Fries, Obamacare and the Kingdom of Heaven: Jesus Christ from the Gospel according to Thomas

I was flying recently over Sandusky, Ohio from an altitude of approximately 28,000 feet.  A patch of cloud had opened revealing the small point of land I knew to be the Cedar Point Amusement Park extending well out into Lake Erie—looking perilously vulnerable.  I remembered upon this vision how high the roller costar, Top Thrill Dragster seemed at the peak of its 400 foot plus vantage point—barely even a blip across the surface of the earth from such a high perspective.  Invisible from such a high point of view are all the thrill rides of that famous park, the countless little restaurants, the hotels, the many street venders which give the place a sense of vibrant life.  From my airplane, they could not be seen—yet I knew they were there—and during this Christmas Season which is a celebration of Jesus Christ—and the anxiety that I know many feel because of Obamacare—the time is correct to cover some issues of great concern focused on the Kingdom of Heaven and the parallels to it with the amusement park of Cedar Point as viewed from such a high place.

Most of us live our entire lives from such a high vantage point.  We are busy with our lives, and when someone we care about becomes sick, or cannot become helped with medicine—which will become a much more frequent occurrence with the upcoming health care destruction by President Obama—we pray to God to help us.  Yet from where God is residing, the power to hear every individual prayer can be achieved just as Google Earth or a powerful set of binoculars can zoom in on those roller coaster peaks from such a great height, but often people will die, prayers will not be answered, and tragic disappointment will ensue when God fails to acknowledge the qualms of the living lost in the perspective of distance.  The sheer numbers of people suffering is just too great and in the scheme of the universe, there are more important things to be concern with other than the prayers of a college football player hoping to make his mother proud of them by scoring a touchdown during a bowl game on national television.  The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is sucking in and destroying billions of tons of matter every second and spewing it out into some other dimensional plane of reality for some purpose only understood perhaps on a multi-verse plane of reality—so the prayers of the football player, or the cancer patient being kicked off their insurance plan because of the tampering of government will likely be lost to the eyes of God’s kingdom.

But to understand why, the concept of The Kingdom of Heaven must be understood and for that I have often turned to the Gospel according to Thomas.  There are some really wonderful quotes by Jesus which Thomas recorded for posterity.  Upon hearing them I have to conclude that Jesus had learned Indian Buddhism at some point in his post teenage years, and likely the work of Aristotle which was preserved by the Muslims at the time.  Jesus must have also studied heavily the concepts or Zoroastrianism.  This is not to say that he was not the “son of God” the way people hope to believe, but that he needed to develop the language to convey what he felt coming from his mind and mouth to the people of the world.   This took Jesus down the path he was looking for, and he brought his own interpretation to these concepts to form his foundations for teaching the beginnings of Christianity—which most people fail to grasp.  As the statism through the Roman Empire sought to use Christianity to unite their crumbling empire, they of course altered, manipulated, and even extorted from the learned masses opinions which focused on the altruistic nature of Christianity—and moving mankind away from the core message of Jesus which focused heavily on the “Kingdom of the Father.”

Anyone who says a prayer is hoping to penetrate this Kingdom that Jesus was always talking about—and he even went so far to tell people where it was. It was because of his revelation about the Kingdom of God ultimately that he was killed, because the Pharisees could not put up with Jesus having the masses reach such a place without the gate keepers and tax collectors standing in the way.  So to this very day, most people spend their entire lives separated from the Kingdom of God needlessly—and suffer for no reason other than the control of politics desiring to sacrifice the masses to the blob of archaic gods like Zeus, Yahweh,  Ahura Mazda, or Kulcucan.  Most politicians and establishment types are just as stupid today as they were in the times of Jesus, and they wish to kill, destroy, and render helpless the minds of humanity with the same vigor that Obamacare hopes to stop scientific development which currently is destined to carry philosophic understanding into an intersection with quantum mechanics.  The goal of politics whether through democracies, or religions is to separate the Kingdom of God from the people who want to go there by putting height, distance, and layers of clouds between the two so they cannot find one another in the chaos of existence.  Just like the Cedar Point Amusement Park, it is there, but because of the great height of my airplane, man cannot see it.  According to the Apostle Thomas—this is what Jesus had to say on the matter.  The first one is my favorite quote from this Gospel.

The Gospel
According to Thomas

  1. His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?”  Jesus said, “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.

  2. Jesus said, “Whoever finds the world and becomes rich, let him renounce the world.” Jesus said, “The heavens and the earth will be rolled up in your presence.  And the one who lives from the living one will not see death.” Does not Jesus say, “Whoever finds himself is superior to the world?”

  3. Jesus said, “The kingdom is like a man who had a hidden treasure in his field without knowing it. And after he died, he left it to his son. The son did not know (about the treasure). He inherited the field and sold it. And the one who bought it went plowing and found the treasure. He began to lend money at interest to whomever he wished.”

  4. Jesus said, “The kingdom of the father is like a merchant who had a consignment of merchandise and who discovered a pearl. That merchant was shrewd. He sold the merchandise and bought the pearl alone for himself. You too, seek his unfailing and enduring treasure where no moth comes near to devour and no worm destroys.”

  5. Jesus said, “The kingdom of the father is like a man who had good seed. His enemy came by night and sowed weeds among the good seed. The man did not allow them to pull up the weeds; he said to them, ‘I am afraid that you will go intending to pull up the weeds and pull up the wheat along with them.’ For on the day of the harvest the weeds will be plainly visible, and they will be pulled up and burned.”

  6. Jesus said, “Whoever has come to understand the world has found (only) a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world.”

  7. His disciples said, “When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you?”   Jesus said, “When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then will you see the son of the living one, and you will not be afraid”

  8. Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, “These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.” They said to him, “Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?”  Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom.”

http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gthlamb.html

I believe based on a study of philosophy, comparative religion, observed fact, many years of bible study, and my own creative judgment that the Kingdom of God is within us all, and we reach it when we die to the flesh (pairs of opposites—male and female, good and bad, right and wrong, and all transitory perspective which places our vision high up in the clouds of institutionalism and away from the metaphorical Cedar Point—the Kingdom of Heaven.  It is always right there below us, around us, within us—but we do not see it because of the tools we are using to observe the world.

If one had to think of Heaven as an actual place that could be located with some sort of mapping system, instead of Heaven being out there someplace reachable by space ship or airplane, it is beyond our current focus—as it exists in the very small—instead of the very big according to some of the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics—perhaps as my elderly father-in-law has postulated–Heaven exists in the 12th dimension—where mankind has only yet discovered 11 of them.  The myths of many cultures use the number 12 as a kind of unified theory, and that perhaps the innate understanding of this end game has always been known to imagination even as far back as the centuries before Jesus’ birth.  Heaven is likely so small that in order to arrive at its gates to reside, we would have to strip away the smallest atom of our lives so that the cells of our bodies were like universes dotted across a multi-verse body of mammoth composure.  Heaven may well be like a Cedar Point currently viewed not from 28,000 feet, but from 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, miles away looking at the same point in space.  It will only be reached when all pairs of opposites are gone from perspective, and all reference to material flesh preventing the energy of a human body from entering such a place are removed.

So don’t be surprised when prayers go unanswered dear reader—or seem that way anyway.  It is nearly as hard to see a plane in the sky at such a height from the perspective of Cedar Point at ground level as it is to see details from up there into the courtyard of Chick-fil-A lost under the trees next to the big log flume ride.  God is getting the whole symphony of human existence in one giant played note, and there are many notes yet to be played on the backs of the many that have already reached Heaven’s Gates.   But as far as Obamacare, we are on our own—we are part of the musical piece which penetrates all dimensional plans of reality from the very large, to the very small—and it requires our participation, and understanding of what Jesus was really talking about regarding the Kingdom of Heaven.

As my plane landed I thought about the change in perspective as the craft descended out of the clouds to reveal all the details of the world that had been seen beneath, only at a great distance.  Once I was in the gate concourse I found an airport bar/restaurant to jot down my thoughts as Obamacare discussion was on every television visible—the anxiety over the matter noticeable among everyone around me.  The anxiety is in the misplaced trust that government can manage this situation—which they cannot.  The tragedy of Obamacare requires an understanding of the Kingdom of Heaven and the nature of the afterlife so that fear cannot be allowed to manipulate the masses with the major assault on their personal sanctity by promising them shortened lives, poor health care choices, and total control of their existence with a power grab disguised through altruism to end the free thought and action of every human being.

As I wrote this, the beer tasted good, the hamburger was delicious, and the knowledge that all that I could see around me was invisible to the naked eye from 40,000 feet—yet it was all here all along.  And as I finished my hamburger, beer, French fries, and captured my thoughts waiting for the next flight, I had a very good understanding of what Jesus was talking about all along.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com