For further conversations, it’s time to talk seriously about God and the politics of Heaven and, in general, everlasting life. A lot of people think that death is the end of it all, but I would argue that it’s just the beginning, and part of the point of life is to grow into something that can function well in the existence of a multidimensional political universe, because as it is in Heaven, so it is on Earth. The original sin was that God created man in his image because he wanted a family who would rule on his behalf over the Earth in ways that always had the eternal perspective in mind, and in that way, humanity was created to be over angels and demons relative to the Divine Council as it is talked about in the Bible many places, especially Psalm 82. This is important because to understand the fight we have today, politically, we have to get our minds around the concept of God and not think of him as a solitary figure sitting on a thrown in everlasting life waiting for everyone to go to Heaven and sit around in the pearly gates to do “something” for the rest of eternity. We tend to view Heaven as a destination at the end of the tunnel of life. But I think that’s just where the battles begin, and what we see on earth are reflections of that eternal life, and God, Yahweh, has always been under pressure to manage the vast populations of eternal existence. And that is why the Fall in the Garden was such a tragic occasion for him, which he has spent many thousands of years trying to resolve to his satisfaction. That might seem strange for an entity that created the universe and everything in it. But there is more to the story regarding the challenge of free will that is ultimately the point.
We all know the story of the Garden of Eden, where the snake tempted Eve to eat from the Tree of Good and Evil. This is the fruit of the lesser Gods, those in the pantheon at that time, for which Yahweh managed within this universal spectrum but constantly tried to undermine his authority. Those Gods would be characters who had been around for many tens of thousands of years before the biblical period we are talking about here, gods like Baal, Moloch, Ishtar, Marduk, and a long list of the same names that would be called other names in other countries such as Greece, Egypt, and the Americas, but would be the same essential characters. Yahweh was trying to do something different, and the rebellion on the Divine Council was certainly intent to challenge his authority, just as we see in our political order, which we can say reflects the actions of eternal life. Of course, once God’s creation had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and become like “them,” the gods of the Divine Council, they had to be cast away for God to try again and again to make the human experiment work by comprehending the aspects of Eternal Life that God intended for humanity. Not the kind of stuff they teach you in Sunday school or Church. But if you dig into scripture and read what it tells us from thousands of years of interpretation and analysis, things start to appear much more as they indeed are. In that case, the world opens up much differently for those with the courage to eat from that Tree of Eternal Life.
Humans couldn’t handle such a task, so they were thrown out of the Garden guarded now by Cherubim, creatures that have a recurring theme in ancient times. And eventually, because they fell from grace and were now functioning in the politics of the lesser Gods, such as Baal, God wiped them all away with the flood story, which is very much the same story we find in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Noah and his family are God’s chosen people, and they try to start the Garden story once more. Only to fail when people attempted to build the Tower of Babel, again setting their sights on the kind of mistakes the Divine Council had made for thousands of years. God came along and scrambled their speech so they could no longer build the Tower of Babel to reach Heaven. And Yahweh sent them to the corners of the earth to separate them politically from one another. But God doesn’t give up on this experiment with humans. Instead, he turns to Abraham and decides to make a new people from his line, which becomes the generations of Israel, Moses, King David, King Solomon, and the like. But again, once Solomon died, his children fell to the temptations of Baal and the gang, so God allowed Nebuchadnezzar to raid his people and punish them for their discourse, which was their political alignment and worship of the lesser gods of the Divine Council. Understanding that Divine Council, it helps to read from the ancient literature that comes out of Syria and modern-day Iraq. No wonder those areas are war-torn today; the conflict is a mask of the truth. Governments always want to think they are in charge as they completely are creatures eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. From there, after 70 years, God allows the people of Israel to rebuild and continue again, but of course, they fail, so he sends Jesus, his representation on earth, to be sacrificed like just another lamb out of Nazareth to solve the political problem with that Divine Council once and for all.
God’s problem, which is eternal, is how to get people to do the right thing of their own free will. God could undoubtedly punish them and impose his desires through force. But the divine experiment and the intentions of God’s purpose, and therefore, the meaning of life, is to create religious partners who can function for what’s right as interpreted by an eternal perspective. Not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the political world of the Divine Council. But the infinite aspects of all existence, as the universe knows and understands it. God was looking for reflections of him and his intent to do on Earth as it is in Heaven and to share rule with such creations. To say God has struggled with the Divine Council might seem odd, but the problem is free will, whether talking about people or angels, demons, and the pantheon of maniacal characters of eternal existence. Life and death is not the goal of these considerations, but free will is. And it is free will that is at the core of the American experiment, and it is the suppression of that free will that the world is attempting to stop presently in our political world. But the root cause of the problem is an ancient one, considering the fall in the garden and why it was so tragic to God. Because the politics of the Divine Council sought to corrupt the effort from the beginning, those characters would not allow God to create beings superior to them, such as humans were designed to be. To hatch from life into death as reflections of God himself and to rule over the Divine Council. And once that is understood, much of the trouble of our current time can be comprehended more fully.
Rich Hoffman

