My spiritual
biography
At the bottom of my home page I give an outline of my personal biography, but here I describe my spiritual
biography, an altogether different thing.
My spiritual biography has become very important to me because of its uncanny
parallels with the history of God’s people since the time of Abraham. I have come to see the history of God’s people as my
own personal history; and at some visceral level I feel I have personally experienced every major stage in the journey of
God’s people since Abraham.
There’s a well-known principle of evolutionary biology (no longer much respected) expressed
as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” One manifestation is that, as a human embryo develops in its mother’s womb, it passes
through stages that were once thought to represent various animals, such as fish, in the order that they evolved in past ages
long before humans arrived on the scene.
My spiritual life similarly seems to have gone through the same stages in
the same order as the collective spiritual life of Abraham’s spiritual children. In other words, my spiritual life has recapitulated
the religious experiences of God's people as described in the Old Testament.
Here are the parallels as I see them:
God called Abraham to leave his familiar home environment, to separate himself from relatives and friends to become
the father of God’s chosen people. Similarly, when God first touched me, I had a stong sense of being chosen out of the world
for a special purpose.
Abraham’s descendants, the Israelites, soon fell into slavery in Egypt. My personal slavery
was of a conceptual kind, but it was nevertheless real: I desperately needed time and space to seek a better relationship
with God, but I was trapped in a career path in a professional college that for various reasons, mostly social and psychological,
I could not escape.
God intervened through Moses in extraordinary ways to extract his people from Egypt. God likewise
intervened in my life in an unusual way to get me expelled from college so that I could seek him unencumbered.
The
Israelites wandered 40 years in the desert after leaving Egypt before they arrived at a homeland where they could worship
God unencumbered by pressures from surrounding idolatrous nations. The 40-year period in the desert was a time of purification
that God imposed on them. I fasted 42 days in my search for God and emerged unencumbered by pressures of the modern world
in a remote part of the country. My fasting was a time of purification.
Through Moses God gave the Israelites long
lists of laws that the people had to comply with in order to separate themselves from the surrounding idolatrous nations and
remain in good standing with God. At the time of my fast I similarly became very legalistic, thinking that I had to comply
with all sorts of rules in order to separate myself from a godless world and maintain good standing as God's chosen. Most
such rules I can’t even remember anymore; but one I clearly remember was that I had to avoid all personal exposure to man-made
chemical products, including all pharmaceuticals. For several years, for example, I took showers without soap.
After
arriving in their promised land, Israelites experienced God’s intense love. This love was sexual but spiritual. After my fast
and arrival in my own “promised land,” I experienced God’s intense love (see My
revelation). God's love for me was unequivocally sexual but at the same time spiritual.
The Israelites became arrogant
because of their status as God’s chosen people and demanded to be ruled by a king. My favored status with God made me overconfident.
The Israelites soon fell into flagrant idol worship, which some biblical prophets characterized as sexual intercourse
with foreign deities. Their nation immediately split into two kingdoms, the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah, and
the status of God's people plummeted. I got sucked into sex with demons (see Extrapolations), who drew me away from God. It was as if I'd become two people, one who loved God
and one who loved demons. Although I could not resist the demons, my behavior devastated me and messed up my relationship
with God.
God destroyed the kingdom of Israel and sent Judah into exile in Babylon. I got drafted into the US Army.
Judah returned from Babylon, I got out of the Army.
At length God became incarnate in the man Jesus at a time
no one expected. One day completely out of the blue God announced to me: “I am coming into you.” And he did. This was one
of the very few times God ever communicated with me through words. (Exactly what happened to me at that time is still unclear.
I recognized that a major event occurred in my life and that I had changed, but after several months I became well aware that
I was by no means "perfect" and was largely the same flawed person I'd been before.)
At that point the parallels end.
I'm confident that God continued to have a sexual relationship with his people after Jesus' appearance on earth, but I have
had no sexual relationships with God or demons since my time in the Army. In fact, such relationships were tapering off fast
even before I went into the Army.
Are these parallels real or just fanciful inventions? To me they are as real as can
be. In fact, my confidence in the basic truthfulness of the Bible is greatly increased because of these parallels. I know
Bible history is true because I personally lived it. This conviction is not a matter of head knowledge but of heart knowledge:
Even if my mind were to deny it, my heart would continue to believe.
Certain prophets of the Bible accused God’s
people of having sex with foreign deities. Interpreters of Scripture often interpret these words metaphorically. I interpret
them literally, because I myself had sex with demons, and this activity paralleled the behavior of the nations of Israel and
Judah in the days of those prophets.
Furthermore, God’s relationship with the nation of Judah at earlier times was
sexual, because God is a sexual person. I know that God is a sexual person because his relationship with me was sexual.
If
these parallels are as real as I say, why? I don't yet fully understand their significance, but one thing seems clear: If
God wanted to proclaim himself a husband in a marriage relationship, as he would do to establish this new paradigm, he would
need to make it clear that he is a kind of person who can be a real husband. For him to enter into a sexual relationship with
me as an isolated phenomenon separate from all his other activities in the world would make our relationship very strange,
to say the least. But if my spiritual history closely parallels the spiritual history of his people in Old Testament times,
then God's message becomes obvious: As God was a husband to me, he was in like manner a husband to his people in Old Testament
times. A further implication is that he continues to be a husband to his people on earth today.
Why God might want
to be a husband in a marriage relationship is a question I address in my book. It has to do with his fundamental goals as
a person.
