More about demons, sin and temptation

Following up on previously discussed material with a bit more detail of "how it works" using analogies, of course.

When thinking about demons and devils, remember two things. They are not fallen angels, who are confined to hell (only Satan can wander, not the other fallen angels). Also, they are not life forms created by Satan. Only God can create life in any form, including life forms we may consider "bad." But God did not create demons, although he allows them to exist as the consequence of human's continual accumulation of sin.

There's an old country saying "Hell's a popping." What that means is that hell is so active that it is exploding in a spewing type of way, like popcorn exploding from a heated container to escape. Another analogy is when a volcano erupts lava spews out of it, both flowing but also viscous globs of it fly through the air, landing with burning force on whatever it hits.

Demons and devils are like the hunks of spiritual evil, like lava, that is spewed from hell. So they are "globs" of hell evil combined with the accumulation of unrepentant and unforgiven sinners in hell, plus all of the sins that have ever been committed, which are also consigned to hell. Remember there is no sin in heaven. While God forgives sin through Jesus Christ as if it never happened, that means the soul is restored pure; it does not mean that the sin itself or its harm to others never happened, of course. God does not erase time or the consequences. So when he purifies a soul before it goes to heaven all sin is shed and dropped into hell.

This is why hell emits three things: demons (devils), temptation, and sin.

But one cannot blame hell's emissions for making one be tempted or sin. Think of the volcano analogy. If the blob of burning lava flies through the air and hits water, it steams but is harmless and cools to rock. If the blob hits rock or other inert ground it also cools and turns to rock. But if it hits the roof of a house it might burn the house down, and if it hits a person, it could burn and kill the person from either impact or being on fire.

That is how it is with sin and temptation. If it hits something "inert" there is no impact. But if it hits something (someone) who is predisposed to be weak to sin, it impacts and "takes hold" of that person. This is what Paul meant by being "dead to sin," which we discussed previously. Someone who is dead to sin is also dead to temptation. When hell spews sin or temptation it does not take hold of such a person, as that person is like the glob of lava hitting the bare ground or the water. The temptation and sin "lava" blob does not stick, does not adhere, and instead is rendered harmless by turning into rock. But someone weak to temptation or sin is like a house with a flammable roof, or the person who stands unprotected outside during an eruption, waiting to get hit.

So the spew from hell is all of the same substance but has as you can see increasing impacts, just as if the glob is small, medium, or large. Small globs are temptations. They can be felt but resisted. Sins are medium blobs, where the person does not resist the temptation but commits sins, both minor or grave. The quantity and degree of sin can be thought of as the damage done to the house or the person due to burning. Then the worst of all is the impact of hell spew that becomes a resident demon. As I cited previously in Bible study this is very rare and because it is rare the Gospel authors made great note of Jesus' cure of those with demons, singling them out for specific recording.

People tend to exaggerate the number of demons abroad in the world (very few) and minimize their own receptivity to the small and medium spew of hell, which is temptation and actual sin. Much of what people attribute to demons or "devils" is actually their listening to and being receptive to temptation and sin that is of hell but not demonic in nature.

Think of hell as the giant library and storage facility for all of the sins that have ever been committed. That should scare you straight if nothing else does, as no one would want to be doomed to live in torment eternally within the inventory of every single sin that has ever been committed. I explain this so that you realize that everyone's sin harms everyone else as it simply builds not only a living culture of sin on earth that promotes temptation and sin, but also continually "adds" to the inventory of every sin ever committed in hell. While hell is sealed off from heaven, of course, and also does not have free access to earth, it does emit its malevolence back to earth from which much of it came. Satan moves about trailing behind him a train of potential sins and temptations. People who are pure of mind and deed tend to not even notice. Others stop to "look" and "listen" at what temptation and sin "wares" that Satan has on display for them. Thus a culture that specializes in a particular type of sin adds many examples of that sin to hell, and then finds that in a feedback loop, Satan is more than happy to drag along behind him as he travels earth some examples for further consideration. This is why it is a vicious cycle. Humans, sadly, seem to only become less holy, not more and, further, they add to the repository of sins all that time, that then echo back into the current time.

I want to address two New Age obsessions as if any of you are still prone to believing them, they will be easier to refute and discard if you think about what I said. One is that many New Agers think there is some sort of celestial "book" of wisdom in the sky, and that "adepts" can access it. That is wrong because there is no matter, energy, time or other temporal knowledge in heaven as God is all knowledge and heaven exists through his continual emitting of his core being. There is no need nor is there the physics of having a place of "reference material" in heaven. However, here is the problem. One of the greatest temptations for false prophets (and well meaning followers) is the classic "having a secret source of arcane knowledge access" temptation and it is all of those past believers that they have some "secret lore" that resides in, yes, hell, that people tap. In other words, all of the sins of occult and other inappropriate study and the temptation to do it are all residing in hell. Each generation raises up people who are certain that they are the ones who "really, really, really" "access" all of this supposedly celestial knowledge, but they are just, like children playing dress up, dragging out of the trunks of hell the discarded clothes of temptation and sin to believe in having "secret," "spiritual" access to the "books" and "records of what had been and will be" etc. etc.

This is why when you first heard that type of idea (maybe while smoking pot), you thought, "Wow, a book in heaven with everything recorded there. That makes sense." It "makes sense" because it is a generation after generation temptation of hubris and pride with a huge repository of those sins ready for you to be tempted by and emulate from hell. That sense of familiarity and that this notion could possibly be logical thus, through temptation, overrides real common sense which would tell you that God and the angels have no need for any books or records at all.

The second New Age idea that you can better understand and refute is the idea that so called "aliens" have anything to do with human beings. They do not. Again, when people theorize and even state as a fact that aliens have a karma, reincarnation or spiritual relationship with humans, that is because that person is responding to the "something is out there" instinct, but that "out there" is, well, no nice way to put it, hell. People who believe that aliens have an influence on humans are those who have the biggest ears toward hell and that particular line of temptation. It's related to the first temptation of having "access to heaven's books" but different because it's more a temptation of "it's not my fault that bad things happen; it's the bad aliens" and those sins, while the first is more the sin of false prophecy, pride and hubris. (Trying to reduce the grandeur and all knowing of God as if he would have a book with spiritual lore laying around for those really special people to access). As we all know the book of God is those who are saved, who are written in it for saving. That does not mean it is a literal book anyone can read any more than when Jesus says that some people are wheat and some chaff that if you had a DNA test you are either the grain or the leaf. I mean, duh.

Here is another way to better detox from the alien myth. Notice that humans are tempted by the same old sins relating to being human. I mean, have you noticed that humans are never tempted to act like a "bad wolverine" would act, or tempted to commit some sort of interspecies fraud? I mean, people do not in general run around being tempted to construct robotic birds to disrupt mating seasons and survival of a particular bird species. People may be tempted by gluttony (shoot all the birds for food until none left), but people are not tempted to act the way a "sinful parakeet" might act if animals were capable of sinning. Likewise no humans feel "alien" temptations. If aliens exist (and God has wisely made a vast universe that, science fiction aside, no one need worry about every encountering any aliens at all.... in fact I seriously doubt that humans will every leave the solar system in space flight before the End of Days, actually) they have their own biology, mentality and sin profile. If humans had even the smallest amount of spiritual so called contact with aliens they would know what their sin profile is more surely and more quickly than knowing how to say "hello" in their language. Why? Humans sure pick up sin faster than anything else. So this is a way to logic through genuine science and philosophy, forget even being religious, to reason through that if aliens had been "spiritually" among humans there would be a very strange eruption of mental illness that is totally incomprehensible since humans would be feeling alien temptations and sins that are totally outside the realm of human understanding.

I've explained this before regarding reincarnation that, with all respect of the traditional faiths who believe in it, if you only think about the problem of animal and human instincts one would realize that reincarnation would never have evolved because it is antithesis to survival, not beneficial to survival. Butterflies, bees, bats, salamanders, dogs, cats, whatever the animal, they survive as a species because they have the genetics, parental learning and instincts that their species needs. If a butterfly had residual "reincarnation" "memory" of eating dog food that would sure be a problem. So through sheer science and logic one can rapidly and totally refute any notion of interspecies "reincarnation." That belief was simply the way those cultures had where wise men taught the young that if they lived bad lives they would come back in a reduced state as punishment, and that is what they envisioned. Not knowing science and evolutionary realities, of course, they had no way to realize that blackbirds could not exist if they subliminally had a "reincarnation" "memory" of eating pasta with spaghetti sauce, and thus stopped looking for their natural food. You must combine kindness, in understanding that people of different cultures tried to reason their way through a "survival and subsistence" level worldview before they even knew of the existence of simple things like germs, genetics, and the evolution of complex life from simple life over millions of years: facts we all know now (or at least should, assuming you have stopped with the pot and cutting school) with being truthful, even if the truth hurts.

So to recap what we have discussed, recognize these points:

1. Satan and hell cannot create; only God can create life.
2. God allows humans to suffer the consequences of their own temptations and sin.
3. Even when God forgives sin and washes the soul clean as if the sin never happened, that means the soul is clean as if it never happened; the sin, of course, did happen and continues to resonate in the consequences in life and also in the repository of hell.
4. Only Satan is free to roam among humans from hell, the other fallen angels reside in hell at all times. Demons are eruptions of tempting, sinful and chaotic energy from hell, fueled by human's own patterns of sin, since hell is where all stain is discarded, either attached to the damned who are unforgiven who go to hell, or shed from those whom the Lamb has washed clean and who are saved.
5. Eruptions from hell are not even felt by those who are, as Paul puts it, "dead to sin." Temptations do not even enter the mind of such people, even when placed directly before them. That is what people need to strive toward.
6. Those who are, like the vast majority of humans, unable to be completely dead to sin feel the occasional temptations put their way as eruptions from hell that they can either ignore or allow to stick and thus sin. Thus those who live in a society that pushes one or more particular forms of sin have the double challenge of not only being pressured by that society to sin likewise but also more sensitively feel the temptation of that societal sin by all who have gone before them and who have discarded that still active form of sin in hell, which can and does erupt.

For example, with point number 6, here is how to understand what I am saying. Suppose someone lived among a political system that uses genocide. There is the temptation to preserve one's life and also to gain power by joining in with that genocidal mindset. That is practical, earthbound temptation. At the same time, however, such a person might be sensitive to all those who have performed a genocidal accommodating sin before him or her and who are now either in hell for their sins or are forgiven, in heaven, but their stain and sins are shed into hell. So some people are tempted both by the realities of their day to day existence, but also feel the temptation of spew from hell of those who "solved the problems" using the same sin that one is tempted by in the current timeframe. This is the cumulative and corrosive effect of sin, both on earth as societies structure themselves to accommodate more and more sin, and as hellish spew, as more and more people and instances of sin fill hell to bursting with historical pressure and temptation legacy. Satan, even without trying, drags such samples from the warehouse behind him as he roams the earth: past models of sin and temptations for people to follow once again in the current time, rather than shun, as one considers what happens in consequence.

7. When those in occult or other New Ages or marginal beliefs "feel" the "rightness" of their "worldview," often they are "feeling" the weight of "truth" alright, but it is the truth of what has happened in a bad place in the wrong way, which is the patterns of past sin. Because they "feel" the "rightness" of their "adept" "readings" they confuse correctness as in, yes, people have had these same thoughts and beliefs before and acted upon them, with being correct in their perceived spirituality, which they are not. Just because one thousand people before you believed in the planet named Dingbat made out of marshmallows, and you "correctly" "pick up" that one thousand people believe in the marshmallow planet Dingbat, does not mean that the planet exists.

I hope this helps, though I feel like a broken record.