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Following Jesus |
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Finding Actuality
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About this Website
Purpose
The purpose of this website is twofold. First, to bring to people’s awareness unrecognized prophecies of Jesus, a better under standing of his message, and how they all relate to the real world. The second purpose is to call attention to the real moral and theological dimensions and consequences of our actions both as individuals and as a society.
Website Design
Yes, this website does look like it was designed by an inept novice at website design. There is a reason for that. It was! Nevertheless, please overlook the lack of design sophistication and focus on the exposition and concepts. As the apostle Paul said, “. . . examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good;” 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (NASB)
Selection of Images
Following Jesus:
To really follow Jesus means to accept his sacrifice as the sacrificial lamb of God for our reconciliation to God as the ultimate glory of His first mission to this world. And, to really follow Jesus also means to follow his actual teachings even when they require us to “crucify our flesh” (subjugate our worldly desires).
Finding Actuality:
The actuality of the world and universe that we inhabit is both the majesty of God’s creation and the results of the depravity of mankind in following the present master of this world, that is, the powers of evil lead by Satan who uses the tools of hubris, greed, hate, and lust.
The purpose of this website is twofold. First, to bring to people’s awareness unrecognized prophecies of Jesus, a better under standing of his message, and how they all relate to the real world. The second purpose is to call attention to the real moral and theological dimensions and consequences of our actions both as individuals and as a society.
Website Design
Yes, this website does look like it was designed by an inept novice at website design. There is a reason for that. It was! Nevertheless, please overlook the lack of design sophistication and focus on the exposition and concepts. As the apostle Paul said, “. . . examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good;” 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (NASB)
Selection of Images
Following Jesus:
To really follow Jesus means to accept his sacrifice as the sacrificial lamb of God for our reconciliation to God as the ultimate glory of His first mission to this world. And, to really follow Jesus also means to follow his actual teachings even when they require us to “crucify our flesh” (subjugate our worldly desires).
Finding Actuality:
The actuality of the world and universe that we inhabit is both the majesty of God’s creation and the results of the depravity of mankind in following the present master of this world, that is, the powers of evil lead by Satan who uses the tools of hubris, greed, hate, and lust.
About the Author and the Odyssey of his Testimony
I was born into an old Mormon family in 1946. With increasing perceptual and intellectual awareness during my teenage transition from childhood to adulthood, I come to realize the inherently existentialistic nature of one’s belief system in a relatively free society. Recognizing the fundamentally hierarchical and bureaucratic cult nature of Mormonism, focused on their matrix of ritualized programs essentially devoid of any real spiritual substance, I quit them. (Unfortunately, thy still send their minions to my door to annoy me despite my requests to cease and desist.) Quitting Mormonism was one of the best choices that I ever made. Unfortunately though, as a direct result of my experience as a Mormon, I now viewed theistic belief as a form on entrapment into a denominational religious bureaucracy. As such, I became an unbeliever. (Often an unbeliever is incorrectly referred to as an “agnostic”. “Agnostic” simply means you believe the existence or non-existence of a supernatural being cannot be proved or conclusively demonstrated and there are both agnostic theists and agnostic atheists. An unbeliever is a theistic/atheistic “fence straddler”, theists and atheists both have definite beliefs.)
In my first year after high school, I worked part time and went to school part time. As a result, during my second year when I was a full-time engineering student, the draft board reclassified me as draft eligible and I was drafted into the army at the end of that school year. After completion of Basic Combat and Combat Engineer training they sent me to Vietnam where I was assigned to an artillery battery fire direction center. After a few months of that, I volunteered for duty on an artillery forward observer team imbedded in an infantry company engaged in combat in order to serve in a milieu with a less oppressive bureaucracy. For a full year I served in various capacities on such teams with infantry companies in combat. (In order to get an early discharge from the army I extended my time in Vietnam to a little over 16 months.)
It is in these circumstances that I was blessed with mortal survival only because of the repeated, fully miraculous Grace of God. I was frequently under enemy fire and had a substantial number of potentially fatal, near misses. However, there were four times in particular where I was an especially easy target for Viet Cong or North Vietnamese soldiers. In each case I was at close range, not moving relative to their line of fire, and exposed long enough that they had ample time to aim before firing at me. Each time they missed me even though I was an easy kill for them. There were other US soldiers near me in the last two of these instances that were also shot at by those who shot at me and all of those soldiers were hit and six (about half of those hit) were killed. In the last instance, the round fired at me put a hole through my rifle fore stock a few inches from my face.
Despite having been blessed with what I should have recognized as multiple instances of fully miraculous grace, I had become too hardened in my hubristic, hard-hearted unbelief to accept the actuality of what happened. That which Paul said about gentiles in Ephesians 4:17-18 described me perfectly. “. . . the gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart”.
Now over time it was always something of an incredulous wonder to me as to how I had been blessed with such extraordinary good fortune. Unfortunately, my hubristic unbelief would not allow the miraculousness of my good fortune to be acknowledged. In psychology this is called cognitive dissonance. It was decades after Vietnam when accompanying my wife to a Christian church that the Holy Spirit started to work on me. But, I still fought against accepting theism as I had done ever since rejecting Mormonism decades earlier. Then I started reading the New Testament of the Bible (something the Mormons had conspicuously avoided even suggesting, even when I was in their New Testament seminary class during high school). That’s when the Holy Spirit really started to convict me and enabled me to accept the reality that I survived Vietnam only because of the miraculous grace of God. I could no longer continue to deny the hard reality of what happened to me in Vietnam as I had for most of my life. Goodbye cognitive dissonance.
May God bless you,
Michael Herbert
In my first year after high school, I worked part time and went to school part time. As a result, during my second year when I was a full-time engineering student, the draft board reclassified me as draft eligible and I was drafted into the army at the end of that school year. After completion of Basic Combat and Combat Engineer training they sent me to Vietnam where I was assigned to an artillery battery fire direction center. After a few months of that, I volunteered for duty on an artillery forward observer team imbedded in an infantry company engaged in combat in order to serve in a milieu with a less oppressive bureaucracy. For a full year I served in various capacities on such teams with infantry companies in combat. (In order to get an early discharge from the army I extended my time in Vietnam to a little over 16 months.)
It is in these circumstances that I was blessed with mortal survival only because of the repeated, fully miraculous Grace of God. I was frequently under enemy fire and had a substantial number of potentially fatal, near misses. However, there were four times in particular where I was an especially easy target for Viet Cong or North Vietnamese soldiers. In each case I was at close range, not moving relative to their line of fire, and exposed long enough that they had ample time to aim before firing at me. Each time they missed me even though I was an easy kill for them. There were other US soldiers near me in the last two of these instances that were also shot at by those who shot at me and all of those soldiers were hit and six (about half of those hit) were killed. In the last instance, the round fired at me put a hole through my rifle fore stock a few inches from my face.
Despite having been blessed with what I should have recognized as multiple instances of fully miraculous grace, I had become too hardened in my hubristic, hard-hearted unbelief to accept the actuality of what happened. That which Paul said about gentiles in Ephesians 4:17-18 described me perfectly. “. . . the gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart”.
Now over time it was always something of an incredulous wonder to me as to how I had been blessed with such extraordinary good fortune. Unfortunately, my hubristic unbelief would not allow the miraculousness of my good fortune to be acknowledged. In psychology this is called cognitive dissonance. It was decades after Vietnam when accompanying my wife to a Christian church that the Holy Spirit started to work on me. But, I still fought against accepting theism as I had done ever since rejecting Mormonism decades earlier. Then I started reading the New Testament of the Bible (something the Mormons had conspicuously avoided even suggesting, even when I was in their New Testament seminary class during high school). That’s when the Holy Spirit really started to convict me and enabled me to accept the reality that I survived Vietnam only because of the miraculous grace of God. I could no longer continue to deny the hard reality of what happened to me in Vietnam as I had for most of my life. Goodbye cognitive dissonance.
May God bless you,
Michael Herbert