God’S Mysteries and Paradoxes: Looking Through the Glass, Darkly

God’s

Mysteries and Paradoxes:

Looking through the Glass, Darkly

Dr. Carroll M. Helm

Copyright © 2013 Dr. Carroll M. Helm.

Interior Graphics/Art Credit: Carroll Helm.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-1313-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-1314-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-1312-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013918687

WestBow Press rev. date: 10/31/2013

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 Paradox, History, and the Birth of Christianity

Chapter 2 The Early Christian Church—Its Purest Form

Chapter 3 The Christian Church after the Council of Nicaea

Chapter 4 Ancient History of the Paradox through the Dark Ages

Chapter 5 Who Was Hermes Tristmegistus?

Chapter 6 Ancient Teachings of Hermes Tristmegistus

Chapter 7 Secret Societies of the Past

Chapter 8 Secret Societies Today

Chapter 9 The Paradox of Free Will Versus Determinism

Chapter 10 The New World Order—What Will You Choose?

Works Cited

About the Author

Preface

After the death of my twenty-year-old son, Lucas, in a car accident, I lost myself for more than a year. The only memories I have are of how I questioned God about everything I ever believed. Some questions were pretty tough, like: What happened to all the joy, the peace, and the love in living the Christian life? Why do the young have to die when the old live on? Why do you let so much evil go on in the world?

The answers didn’t come immediately, but after about six months, I slowly began to glean small amounts of understanding. The Bible became my closest companion as I searched to find the exact Scripture to explain it all. God gave me comfort through His Word, and on the days I needed it most, one particular Scripture would be supplied to give me peace.

As I continued my search, I was drawn to the concept of the paradox. I read a number of articles and several books about them, but I wasn’t sure why I was drawn to such a confusing topic until something rather unique happened on a cool morning in November of 2008. I was standing in front of the mirror drying my hair when I became instantly aware of something that had happened a thousand times before—something I’d never paid attention to until then.

As the warm air from the hair dryer began to blow on the cool, misted glass, the image in the mirror became clearer and clearer, until my face was fully visible. At that very moment, a verse of Scripture came so vividly to my mind that I could almost see the words. It was 1 Corinthians 13:12. The New International Version of the Bible puts it this way: Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now we know in part; then we shall know fully, even as I am fully known. The King James Version explains it a little differently: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. Why, I wondered, do we have to see things in such a fuzzy or distorted manner? Why can’t we have full knowledge? Why are there so many so-called mysteries of life? Does anyone have all the answers?

I began to wonder if God was showing me the answers I sought were to be found beyond the misted glass. Was the key to be found in the paradox? Was this the way I was to receive the answers to the questions I so desperately needed resolved?

What first appeared to be simple questions brought more than I could ever have imagined. I found that the deepest questions of life are usually some form of a paradox and can only be understood by applying this principle to complex problems. I still have only a few answers to the questions I posed, and these came in indirect ways, not directly by God’s voice in my heart as I had hoped. I know that I probably will never have them all, but the small glimpses of heaven God gives me are enough to keep me going for now.

I want to be clear: God did not create paradoxes to confuse us. He created them so that those who seek Him and His wisdom will come to a fuller knowledge of truth. The apostle Paul said, God is not the author of confusion (1 Corinthians 14:32 NIV). Francis Bacon¹ used Solomon’s quote many times: It is the Glory of God to conceal a matter; to search it out is the glory of kings.² I earnestly believe that God wants us to question the issues of life rather than be mere players in a game we don’t understand. Some would say man himself created the paradox, but man could never create such a fundamental principle of life; he can only discover its many properties.

My primary question for God was, Why did my son Lucas have to die so early in life? The question has not been answered yet, but God has shown me how little I actually know and understand. Life is a process that requires me to trust Him in every difficult situation. He knows I would have gladly given my life that Lucas could have had a full one. I don’t blame God, and I am no longer angry. In eternity, God will give me the answer, and it will be as clear as fine crystal.

The death of Lucas opened my eyes to a great many questions. How could my eyes be opened to questions? That’s the exact nature of the paradox. Many times, my question will be answered by another question. I now believe there will always be more questions than answers in life.

God is good, but bad things do happen to good people. Is this not a contradiction to all the promises found in Scripture? No, not when we see the true nature of evil and who controls the present world order. Doesn’t God control everything? Ultimately, yes. Faith must be applied in order to see that all things (good and bad) work together for those who love the Lord. As Christians, we must believe God and that all the events of this life will bring us to an ultimate place where we will see why things had to be the way they were. God wants us to question Him, but this questioning is not the same as unbelief, and we must be sure that the tide will ultimately turn in favor of His children. Job said, Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.³

My hope and prayer is this small book will give insight into a few of the mysteries of life. I claim no equality with philosophers or theologians, and the paradoxes of science and mathematics are beyond my own understanding. I humbly believe God is the source of all wisdom and He has promised us nothing we can desire in this life can compare with her. By wisdom a house is built and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures.⁴

All the answers cannot be found here, but the search for truth begins with the question, not the answer. Do you want to find God? If so, then seek Him with all your heart and you will find Him; this is God’s promise. Ask and it will be given you; seek and you will find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.⁵ We have heard these verses so many times, but what is keeping us from believing them entirely?

This is a mystical journey, and many of the concepts and ideas can only be understood and accepted with eyes of faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.⁶ If this is true, then the evidence could actually come from God through the enlightened wisdom He will give us. Maybe it was not intended for us to be able to see all things in the natural world but in a spiritual or metaphysical dimension.

Scientists tell us that metaphysics is the study of things outside the physical, and even they are beginning to realize all things may not be explainable in the physical; there may be other dimensions not seen with human eyes.

The journey has only begun for me, and ten years after Lucas’s death, I still have many unanswered questions. Parents who have experienced a similar fate know what I’m saying. You love your children so unconditionally it’s impossible to completely mend the gaping hole the loss has created. Until I see him again, I can only learn to be content in knowing God has all the answers and the glass may remain misted for me for a time.

What follows is a part of my reflection. I have attempted to share a portion of the journey God has begun, not only in my heart, but also in my mind. Both are battlegrounds the Devil seeks to control in order to keep us defeated and without hope. Life is complex, and there are scores of competing ideologies and worldviews. All claim to have the answers. The following are some of the answers God has given me.

¹ Francis Bacon, The Wisdom of the Ancients (Mobile Reference, 2010).

² Proverbs 25:2, NIV.

³ Job 1: 21, NIV

⁴ Proverbs 24:3, NIV.

⁵ Matthew 7:7-8, NIV.

⁶ Hebrews 11:1, NIV.

Introduction

Religion: It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.

—Jon Stewart

T his book is about logical paradoxes and how they were created by God to show Christians the dichotomy between living a life for Him and living a life for the world. The concept of good and evil is a paradox and embodies within it multiple paradoxes. Satan uses all his forces in an attempt to deceive man into thinking he can be self-sufficient by obtaining the world’s knowledge without faith. Satan’s plan is to discredit God by creating doubt on the part of believers and promoting a worldview devoid of faith in God. Satan’s worldview is embedded in many secret societies, whose ultimate purpose is to promote a new world order that Satan can control.

God is good. His glory is the glory of His goodness—brighter than any sun. A small amount of this glory was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai. The result flooded Moses with God’s glory to the point the Israelites could not look upon him until he put on a veil to cover his face (Exodus 33:18-23 and Exodus 34:29-35).

Satan is evil. Although he once had the title of an angel of light, he now embodies all that is dark and evil. He and his angels of darkness (demons) shared with man many hidden secrets of the cosmos, which were only to be revealed at God’s discretion. These secrets are part of the ancient mysteries scholars, theologians, and philosophers have tried desperately to uncover.

The ancient mysteries were handed down from past civilizations, like the Persians, Babylonians, and Egyptians. These civilizations promoted the practice of demon worship through their idols and so-called gods. All included the elements of temples, priests, and sacrifices—sometimes child sacrifice. They were patterned by Satan to mimic the model set up by God within the Hebrew nation, whose sacrifices of sheep, goats, and bulls were to point to the ultimate blood sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

In an attempt to uncover answers from our past, this book provides a brief history of the Hebrew nation, shows cultural influences on their development, and offers a snippet of the history of the Christian church. Paralleling the growth of the Christian church is the development and growth of the philosophical paradox, mysticism, and the occult. You will be introduced to the writings of Hermes Tristmegistus, who synthesized the knowledge of ancient cultures into books on just about every topic known to mankind, including astronomy, alchemy, physics, mathematics, communication, transmutation, and philosophy. He also wrote books on tarot, numerology, and astrology. These elements are many times combined by diviners and fortune-tellers.

Hermes’s seven principles are the basis for the worldview that rejects the conventional Judeo-Christian worldview. A full chapter is given to this discussion. Most of us are familiar with the occult as being about the mysterious, supernatural, or magic arts. This is true, but it also deals with secrets hidden away and restricted to the initiate into the dark arts or secret groups. The discussion of initiates will be more significant when we explore Hermetic doctrine and secret societies, like the Templars and the Freemasons.

The Greeks used the word kosmos for world—not the globe, as we know it, but the world order at that time, the order of all things. We use the term cosmos to mean the entire universe, as in cosmopolitan or cosmonaut—the cosmos of the stars and planets, including Earth.

The church is in opposition to the world (world order); its very name means a called out company.⁷ If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.⁸ Make no mistake, Satan hates you and wants to destroy you. Why? Because you represent his defeat, and you will ultimately judge his fallen angels by the life you lead. Satan himself has already been judged by God, and his ultimate defeat came when Jesus died on the cross.

Before the cross, Satan could argue that man deserved the same fate as he, since man disobeyed God and his disobedience was the same as rebellion. Jesus squelched that argument by demonstrating one of the most beautiful paradoxes in the Bible. He, being high and lifted up, chose to reach down to the lowest level of humanity and lift man up to his original place of honor. By lifting up man with Him, He could truly show that the way up is down and the way down is to lift oneself up. This is a universal principle, not only in the Christian faith, but all of life: whoever humbles himself will be exalted and he who exalts himself will be humbled (Luke 14:11).

Satan and his fallen angels continue to be active in subverting the nature of true knowledge and wisdom by discrediting God and His relationship to mankind. The first way he used knowledge to subvert was by undermining God’s own words. God said to Adam and Eve: You must not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.⁹ Satan said: You will not surely die… For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.¹⁰

As with everything Satan says to man, there is some truth, but not all of the truth. This is how he traps those who rely on pure logic without faith. Some of what he says makes sense. In this case, their eyes were opened, but what they really received was the knowledge of evil. They already had the good, in every way, but they were unaware God was protecting them from the knowledge of this evil.

Satan has organized his coconspirators, the fallen angels, into an effective army with ranks and positions patterned after God’s model in heaven. Satan is given, for a time, dominion over the earth as we know it. His demons are called powers and principalities; they are unseen but active in subverting men’s hearts and minds from true knowledge of God. In Ephesians 6:12, Paul said: For we wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with powers and principalities, against rulers of darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters is a witty, yet serious, parody of how demons attempt to cause man to fail. It is a must-read for any Christian who seeks to understand how unseen forces work in the Earth.

In the coming pages, you will be introduced to examples of how Satan uses knowledge of this world and its operations to deceive man into thinking he has discovered the way to true wisdom. He doesn’t need God to show him anything.

Ancient mysteries embraced by secret organizations are all part of the world of the occult—a world of dark knowledge and sinister worldview. God’s kingdom is pure light, and those who walk in this light have fellowship with God and each other, based on the shedding of the blood of Jesus on the cross.

Satan was, and is, a rebel. He rebelled against God and is seeking to deceive all mankind into rebelling against Him also. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.¹¹ People who are stubborn make idols of their own thoughts and refuse to be swayed by real truth, even though God’s Spirit makes a way for them to do so. Fallen man seeks to dominate, manipulate, and intimidate. These are all methods the Devil uses to get people to display rebellion. In doing so, they display the very tactics he is using on them.¹²

When I think of manipulation, I immediately think of the voodoo dolls and how, when a pin is jabbed into the arm of the doll, it causes pain in the real person the doll is supposed to represent. Actually, manipulation is trying to get someone to do something he or she doesn’t want to do by using dishonest and deceiving practices. This is just what Satan and his demons do. Many great minds have been manipulated by Satan, and he continues his manipulation today, even with ordinary people like you and me.

The paradox of good and evil is a wonderful example of how there is an unseen dimension in which battles are being fought every day. That dimension contains the forces of good and the forces of evil. Satan’s powers and principalities are squaring off with the forces of God, represented by his angels of light, led by the glorious archangels. We don’t see the battles, but they are being fought nonetheless. The battlegrounds are our hearts and our minds, our feelings and emotions, and the way we think.

Paradoxes help us identify the true from the untrue, the light from the darkness. We may not always see the difference, and in some cases, we may never see the difference. That’s because the glass is misted for us. We won’t be able to see clearly until we are able to ask God Himself for the real truth of the matter. Some paradoxes will be clear. Light and darkness are clear in our mind, but sometimes, Satan even uses the light to deceive and distract unwary victims.

The concept of the paradox is not new. It has been observed and discussed for centuries. The philosophers were the first to describe paradoxes, and as man has made additional strides in mathematics, science, and religion, he has encountered the paradox at almost every level of his investigations. In fact, most of the key mysteries of life appear to contain some form of paradox.

According to theologian Kenneth Kanster, there are two basic kinds of paradoxes: logical and rhetorical.¹³ Most of the chicken-or-egg types of paradoxes fall into the rhetorical category. Logical paradoxes present the deep questions that appear at first to be contradictions but that have some type of logical explanation. For the purpose of this book, a paradox is defined as a statement that initially appears to contradict itself, which makes it false, but after some deeper examination appears to be true.

The earlier example of being raised up by humbling oneself is a good example of a logical paradox. Another example from the Bible would be the paradox of being poor in matters of this world, but being more than just rich in the kingdom of God. In fact, we are going to be kings and rulers in the kingdom.

The chicken preceded the egg. It’s a perfectly rational hypothesis and requires only a means to test it (for which, I think, there hasn’t yet been a method developed). You then have to consider whether or not a paradox can be solved by logic.

There are those who will disagree with my premise regarding paradoxes in the Bible, denying the fact that they exist. These believers present their stance in this way: Any such so-called logical paradoxes found in the Holy Scripture are little more than charley horses between the ears that can be removed by rational massage; they are the result of faulty exegesis; not God’s word. Any stumbling in this area will lead (at least) into neo-orthodox nonsense.¹⁴

Since many well-respected Christian writers have embraced the concept of the paradox, and since several books have been written on the topic, I don’t feel that I am on shaky ground to write a book about them. James Anderson in his Paradox in Christian Theology explores the weightier issues of the paradox, including complex topics like the Trinity and the paradoxical nature of one God in three persons, which is an impossible paradox for some. Others, like Randy Alcorn, Erin Biviano, Karl Galik, and Palmer Parker all discuss particular Christian paradoxes and their effects on living the Christian life. Please refer to the endnotes at the end of this chapter for specifics on these books.¹⁵ To my way of thinking, dismissing the paradox in Scripture as a charley horse between the ears is extremely short-sighted and limits discussion to a one-dimensional debate, because there is always more than one side to every story.

Everyone on this side of death is looking through the glass darkly. As long as we are in this