THE UNVEILING Volume 1

By John R Brusseau

ABOUT THE UNVEILING 

If you have been alive for a decade or so you already know about the uncomfortable persistence of destructive human behavior in our species. You've encountered it in your self and you see it in everyone else. You see this behavioral dysfunction in individual humans, and you have seen it in societies

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Brusseau
• Release date: Aug 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9798218042608

Book preview

CHAPTER 1 – JESUS JUDGES THE ECCLESIA

Rev. 1:1-12 Introduction to Jesus’ Judgment on the Ecclesia

First, I need to tell you something about what I am going to do in applying my commentary on chapter 1 of Revelation. I will post the first verse and then I will add a long section of commentary on this verse that also includes some cultural and historical context for the things dealt with in the Revelation of Jesus. In particular, I have injected a section on fertility cults, which were all the idols that the bible references. You will need to see that fertility cults are devoted to self-righteous productivity to see that Jesus is the antidote to them. He will ultimately embody in His followers the God-given alternative to human-derived productivity, which the bible refers to as the life of the Spirit.

Most of the commentary on the following verses will be of much shorter length. I just felt the need to give you some contextual information before going further with this book.

(Revelation 1:1) The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show unto His servants, even the things which must shortly come to pass:

People differ over whether this passage reads; the revelation given to Jesus or the revelation of Jesus. Since Jesus was a human, with all of the natural limitations of a human being, he would not know what God is yet to do unless God told Him. Jesus said; (Mat 24:36)’ No one knows the day (not even the Son) except God." So, whether this revelation is given to Jesus or given about Jesus, it is an unveiling of He who resolves all rebellion, all disharmony, in the universe. God gives Jesus this revelation about how His destiny will unfold just as He gives Him the scroll of judgment to unroll and implement. And Jesus gives this information about Him to us who follow Him.

The fact that Jesus is seen receiving this message implies He has been given God’s authority to rule the affairs of men and the affairs of this universe. The psychological significance of Jesus ruling the universe is that this Jesus-reality now governs the destiny of man. The prideful self-righteous legalism of Satan had been the only ruling principle of our species. This self-righteous legalism was the original sin and is based on the performance-based-acceptance delusion Satan subtly injects into us to get us to manically govern ourselves with our subjective value system. The great conflict of our species is over who will govern our problematic human condition, God or man. Will God’s Spirit (God’s mentality of unconditional love) change our hearts to want what God wants or will our relying on human understanding of what constitutes good and evil behavior effectively govern our life)? And only Jesus, divine forgiveness of our sins liberates us to let go of our self-governance and trust in God’s governance.

When people were in harmony with God they were in harmony with nature and thus with themselves and each other. Harmony is how we thrive. This revelation declares that Jesus is given all authority to rule God’s creation by restoring and maintaining harmony with God. It implies that a rather enormous development has taken shape in the state of the spiritual universe and in the conscious life of humankind.

The human species is now collectively aware (on some level) that humanity is and was always meant to look and be like Jesus. There is a problem, however, that the idea of divine forgiveness stirs up in our minds. If there is such a thing as forgiveness, does that not contradict the idea of reaping what we sow; that choices have consequences?

Unconditional love from God does not contradict the principle that choices have consequences, because unconditional love is a part of the system of the unfolding laws of cause and effect. God is love, and so He loves us, period! Yet, because He loves us, He wants us to function well, and His laws of cause-and-effect mark where we don’t function well. God’s laws of cause and effect include the laws governing our species’ choice-making factor.

The human species are designed to need to learn by trial and error how to function well. Thus forgiveness works together harmoniously with the laws of cause and effect in as much as it empowers us to learn, not having to worry about our errors rendering us of no value to the universe and God. Forgiveness expresses the unconditional love required for our species to learn from mistakes. If we cannot learn from our mistakes, we will reap dire consequences.

Forgiveness, then, does not contradict the karmic laws of cause and effect; it fulfills them by empowering us to live in harmony with God’s design for our species. If we live our life according to the most fundamental law of all, that God is love, and that this God of love gets to express His love more fully by us having to learn how to function well (thus placing a greater value on us than on our performance, as love would do), then we will reap the fruit of this sewing by learning to function well. Like the rest of Karma’s laws, submission to unconditional love’s forgiveness makes the human cognitive system operate effectively.

Here’s the last piece of the forgiveness puzzle.

Yes, although

1. love is absolutely, and can only ever be unconditional,

2. relationships are highly conditioned on whether both parties want that relationship.

3. There is also the fact that the human species’ problems with an emotionally damaged identity significantly affect how they see themselves, see God, and know what they want. Thus, how we see ourselves also determines how well we behave.

This identity problem is depicted in the Edenic story as the serpent being coopted by Satan who is the symbolic representation of pride. Pride is a damaged identity and the subjective solutions we formulate to deal with that damage. The bible’s use of the serpent symbolism necessarily implies that it views this aspect of our consciousness as something good, when God makes use of it, and harmful when Satan (pride) makes use of it. Specifically, the snake represents the instinctual drive to become cognitively aware of ourselves of our identity. Our identity is constantly changing with the unfolding of our life, so we need to constantly ask who we are now. This asking mechanism in us is the identity instinct, the serpent. Pride is what happens when our identity instinct is coopted by a subjective, fear-driven impulse to fix the damage done to our identity.

Thus, pride is essentially us subjectively trying to cope with damage to our idea of ourselves (to our identity). This means that as our idea of ourselves changes, any destructive changes to our idea of who we are result in self-destructive changes to our objectives. And the most self-destructive objective of all is the desire to feed upon the knowledge of good and evil, in order to better our performance (and thus improve our level of acceptability.).

The desire to feed on information about what constitutes good and evil behavior is a desire born of damage to our identity. We see our value as being based upon our performance, rather than upon that which is responsible for our existence (God). The delusion of performance-based acceptance is implied in the bible’s symbolism of Satan’s co-opting of the God-created serpent. This co-opting is not generally understood for the damage to our identity that it represents, yet only this meaning makes the whole story resemble our human experience. Eve could not have been tempted to sin were it not for the presence of damage to her idea of