JJ: The class today is on the subject; “Is this your last life?” How many people have you talked to in the new age community that say, oh yea I am on my last life? Have you heard people say that before?
Audience: Yes
JJ: Yes you hear quite a few people say this but who do you think set the example of what a last life is supposed to be?
Audience: Jesus
JJ: Right and has anyone you ever met been able to say walk on water for instance? That might be one of the powers that one might accumulate if you were on your last life, right? Or say, He raised Lazarus from the dead and this was very interesting. Lazarus was a good friend and the Jews had this belief that nobody could be dead for more than three days and come back to life because, just like today, people have near death experiences and die for a short period of time and then return. Well their belief was that people can die for a short period of time and return but it was absolutely impossible for someone to be dead for three days and then come back.
Well Jesus received a communication that His friend Lazarus died and he piddled around three days and everyone said, “Well, how come He is piddling around like this because His good friend died and you would think that He would go to him right away and bring him back to life.” But no. Jesus just hum hawed around for three days. Of course He did this on purpose because He wanted to demonstrate that God could defy the Jewish belief that no one could be brought back to life after three days. So finally after about three and half days had passed and He goes to where Lazarus had died and there were a bunch of mourners around and Mary and Martha greeted Him. They said, “It is too bad you could not have been here earlier because three days have passed and now nobody can bring him back to life.”
Then Jesus turned to Martha and asked her, “Do you believe that I can raise him from the dead? When He asked that question Martha began to think and she says, “if you say you can do this than I will believe it.” Now Lazarus was wrapped in all these burial clothes and put in this tomb and he looked like a mummy in there all wrapped up in these white rags. When He spoke to Martha and she believed that Jesus could do anything that He said He could do Jesus then confidently reached forth His hand and said the words “Lazarus come forth!” It says that he spoke this very loud and when He said the words, all of sudden Lazarus comes forth walking out of the tomb looking like a mummy and you can imagine the shock and surprise of the people there mourning this guy’s death and all of a sudden Lazarus starts to stir and comes walking out of this tomb with all these rags wrapped around him. They then unwound him and as we know he came back to life.
This upset the Jewish leaders more that anything else. When the Jewish leaders heard of this they said if we do not do something about this guy then all the world is going to follow Him, after all, He raised somebody from the dead that was gone for three and half days and broke the three day barrier. This is when the Jewish leaders got really serious about doing something about Jesus.
Even after all his great works that may not have been Jesus’ last life because He said He would come again. So He is going to come again in yet another life still and there are all kinds of interpretations about this and one of those is that He is going to appear one day in the sky. James here is going to be outside mowing his lawn and his neighbor is going to be out mowing his lawn as well, now James is a really nice guy so Jesus is going to save him but all of a sudden James looks up in the sky and there is a blaze of glory up there and descending is this guy in a white robe flanked by angels and it lights up the sky in the entire east and all of a sudden his neighbor out there mowing the lawn catches on fire and burns to a crisp just like the scripture says, (Laughing), and James looks down the street and two thirds of his neighbors houses are on fire because they are non-believers and James says well I guess I do not have to worry about those guys anymore. Now James goes in his house and sees his kid and he is okay because he is a really good kid and he is playing with a neighbor’s kid and he is kind of a rebellious kid and he catches on fire! And he is burning to stubble right in front of James and they have to put a blanket over him to keep their house from burning down!
Audience: Laughing!
JJ: So if you by the orthodox scenario it is kind of funny when you really think about it, is it not? People do not question why they believe what they believe or what it would really be like if things transpired the way they expect. Now others are expecting rapture. There will be this airplane flying and all of a sudden a third of the people on the plane disappear and if the pilot disappears then everybody is going to disappear!
Audience: Laughing!
JJ: So hopefully the pilot is not a born again Christian that gets the raptured!
Audience: Laughing!
JJ: Or you would be driving down the road and the guy in front of you gets rapture and the driverless car causes a terrible car accident.
JJ: So when you think about that, seriously is that really something that might happen?
Audience: I hope not.
JJ: Laughing, for one thing it is not even Biblical and it is amazing that people who read the Bible get such odd stuff out of it. There are people who say that if you have enough faith then you can be bitten by a serpent and it will have no adverse effect on you. There are several cults down in the south that cultivate these snakes and then dance around with them and every once in awhile one gets bit and dies but that does not deter them and they say well he must not have had enough faith, others got bit and nothing happened because they had faith. So it is amazing what people cultivate from their beliefs. Now the Mormons have an interesting belief. They are told to store food because the day will come when there will be a major calamity from God and so we will grow our own food. Everyone must have a year’s supply of food and they have been preaching this for over a hundred years now and so far they have not needed it yet unless they are out of a job and then they need it. But do any of them look into the future and think about what would really happen if there were no food and they had a year’s supply of food, what would happen in real life?
Word would begin to circulate that the Mormons had stored food for each one of them for a year and people would go and knock on the Mormons door and the Mormon would say no I just have enough food for me and they would say like heck you do and they bust in and take their food and pretty soon there are gangs hunting down the Mormons for their food. So the Mormons are in worse shape than the rest of the people because they have a big bull’s eye on them having a year’s supply of food. So the Mormons would be in really bad shape if this happened because only one out of twenty Mormons really has a year’s supply of food because it is one of those things that is preached a lot in the church but hardly anybody does. A really good Mormon may have a month’s supply of food or something like that but not very many of them have an actual year’s supply. So because this word gets around that they have a years supply if a gang did come knocking on their door and find they only had a months supply or none at all then the gang would probably torture them because they would figure they were lying. So it is interesting that if you take various religious beliefs and really project the event really happening and then asks the question; is God really behind this plan or idea?
Now the Jehovah Witness’s had an interesting one. The guy who started the group did a lot of study in the Bible and concluded that Jesus was supposed to come in 1892 and everybody was all prepared and ready to become one of the 144,000 and everything. The year came and no Jesus showed up so the guy went back and studied the Bible and then came back and said I made a mistake in my calculations here and he said it is supposed to be 1904 or something like that, so everybody got prepared again and the new date came and went and still nothing happened. So he goes, mmmm…. something is weird here and I will have go back to the drawing board here. So he went back and studied like crazy and this time he came up with the date 1914. Well they all waited and waited and World War l started and there wars and rumors of war and there was few earthquakes around and they thought, well it is bound to happen this time for the stage is all set.
1914 came and went and still Jesus did Jesus did not show up. Everybody was really down for a while. The guy’s name was Charles T. Russell and he got a bright idea after this third failure so he called the group together and says, I have gone back to the Bible and I have checked and rechecked and it is 1914 and I got the date right this time but what we did not realize is that Jesus did come and he came invisibly. And the Jehovah Witnesses believe that to this day! Jesus came in 1914 but He came invisibly!
Audience: Laughter.
JJ: So anyway, do they take a step back and look at it on a logical basis? No, they have a big contorted explanation of how He came invisibly and why they think that is true. I have listened to it several times and I still don’t understand it and I am pretty good at understanding these types of things but I can’t get a handle on why someone would believe it even after they have explained it to me several times. I mean the guy got it wrong three times so he could not set another date. He had to get creative to keep his flock.
Audience: Laughing!
Audience: Of course being prepared does not really work when you have a flood like a Tsunami or something like Katrina and it would not really matter if you had a years supply of food or not.
JJ: Oh yes, a years supply of food would have been washed away.
Wayne: Or if a kid catches your house on fire it would burn up your supply of food or give a really nice barbecue!
JJ: We have some really great examples in history of people approaching their last life, from Jesus to Buddha to Krishna to even more recent heroes like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Winston Churchill. These were great men and the people that I have met that claim that they are on their last life I would not even put them in the same category. So the question is how many lives do we live before we reach our last life?
Audience: As many as it takes.
JJ: Perhaps another question would be, is there such a thing as a last life?
Copyright 2011 by J J Dewey
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