One Hundred Fifty Statements Poem by Stephen Bennett The Playjurist

1. This is the first of 150 statements, which are trying to be perfectly true.
2. Each statement is trying to show a single idea, although it may need to have several sentences to do it.
3. Each succeeding statement is trying to show one logical step forward from the statement before it.
4. The misconception of what truth is comes from being able to possibly believe in God without knowing, and it effects nonbelievers just as much.
5. The fallacy is that we adequately sense what truth is but still continue to need to search for more of it.
6. What the word of God has to be is not in the bible's leather, paper and ink. It is in the minds of its living readers.
7. In spite of a basic sense of what truth is, we still still feel compelled to search for it, so truth has become a mystery.
8. There are ideologies, which claim to be true, that are in contradiction to the word of God.
9. Our own common sense can question truths claimed by God's word.
10. A problem comes from the fact that the question of whether the word of God is true, changes the subject from the question of what truth itself really is.
11. Seriousness about truth implies, and seemingly requires, a belief in something that is either right or wrong.
12. The entity of faith implies that one's belief in something, is a belief in something, which is really true.
13. The question: What does it mean for something to be true? is never asked.
14. We don't know what truth itself is, because truth is always the attribute of something else.
15. As long as truth is primarily a presence attributed to other things, it won't be more than one side of an argument.
16. If the word of God is what truth is, then what truth is, is only what God's word says and void of a sovereign definition.
17. Since a contradiction to the word of God is conceivable, it's truth will always be one side of an argument.
18. If there is a larger greater truth, its essence transcends any one explanation or any reactionary contradiction.
19. Even if an explanation has the correct facts, there is still a correctness, an otherness for it to be measured against.
20. Rhetorically, truth for us, is the gap between what something actually is, and the way it's explained or understood.
21. Ironically, other than in this present line of thought, we think about truth only when we're dealing with a falsehood.
22. There is an element of falsehood and a working of error in every thought there is or ever can be.
23. Truth for a believer in God, becomes what it is, when the believer encounters someone else' contradictory ideas.
24. Whatever we know or think is just what we know or think, until contradiction appears. Then only does it become truth.
25. The contradicter of one believer's side, comes to his truth through the same processes, yet the contraditer's result from those same processes is entirely different.
26. The substance of truth is the default operating medium in every thinking mind.
27. Truth to a thinking mind is the same as what blood is to a living cell.
28. Blood is blood to a cell whether it's bringing nourishment or poison. Truth is truth no matter what belief it carries.
29. While anything is being used as a thought, in the process of that thought's thinking, that anything is truth.
30. There was a Holocaust and/or there was no Holocaust. Truth and truth... not in a positive presence to either believing mind, but to both of them in opposition to each other.
31. That the world either was or was not created in seven days, will not lead us to an essence of truth that exists outside of, larger than and/or beyond the process of argument making.
32. Truth being no more than a warrior against falsehood births further falsehoods, leaving truth itself forever never found.
33. Though the discovery and reaction to falsehood is necessary, argument making strengthens the process of lying.
34. To penetrate the question, we stipulate that there is one true story, but put whatever that story really is aside.
35. Can we see just what the absolute essence of the 'truth-hood' of that correct story is, without relating to any content?
36. If we can accept things in the bible as true, can our doing so become something more than support for an argument?
37. If one has a full experience of a living truth in God's word, can one become more than a maker of sentences?
38. A position in argument will never cease to be necessary to protect us from a falsehood that's undefeatable.
39. Real truth (true truth) is larger than our own one side of it.
40. If you have read to here, and don't believe in the truth of Jesus Christ, then you're ready to really think.
41. If you have accepted Him, then I ask that you to put everything you 'know' about Him aside to get to where I am.
42. It's common to hear an opinion about a movie from someone who hasn't seen it. We know all about something as soon as we have a well thought opinion about it. Some of us think they know everything.
43. Something is well thought once you think you have an argument winner, even if you don't know the topic.
44. We all have known people who have opinions about the the word of God, who've never studied it or even read it.
45. We were each, at one time, one of these people. Maybe we still are. Maybe to some extent all of us always will be.
46. This curious phenomenon of knowing without seeing, applies to what people think they know about the word of God more than it does to any other thing.
47. Some who teach children about God, just teach the rumors they heard from other people, people who themselves knew the rumors only.
48. For everyone of us, the word of God was something we heard about before we experienced it directly.
49. And although the word of God's larger truth, may never have been met by any one of us, any one of us can still believe that our side of the argument can win.
50. And unfortunately the biggest issue concerning the word of God easily becomes just proving it's true. That means winning our arguments... including arguments with our own doubts.
51. It's a shame that people so like to think that the word of God needs to measure up to the standards of our human truth to attain validity. This is the fallacy in its full victory. We don't know what we're saying, but we can win our argument.
52. Any delusion of truth in relation to the word of God is not caused by wrong thinking. It's from the fallacy only, the error in one's relationship to truth itself. The fallacy not only effects faith but also our relationships with family, friends and all of life.
53. The error that causes this delusion does cause wrong thinking too, but wrong thinking is the symptom not its cause.
54. Jesus knew the fallacy well and had to deal with it. He lived in a body like ours, thought his ideas in a mind like ours and used the same language that was known by everyone around him.
55. His miracles were not to prove his authority, although such proof was useful.
56. His miracles were to show that he was something more than what could be seen or listened to when he was present.
57. The word of God is something beyond the content of the Lord's speech and larger than what any meaning of His speech could ever imply.
58. The living presence of Jesus was... is the gateway to what amounts to another world... the kingdom of God.
59. Consider that when God permits the working of a miracle, he is breaking one of the promises within his creation.
60. Walking on water doesn't work. Opening up the Red Sea shouldn't happen. People are scared when they see it.
61. Men and women, we... all of us, lost Eden and got this world of falsehood in its place.
62. We lost the larger truth and replaced it with the argument against the falsehood we created.
63. God created everything out of nothing. But from the taste of the fruit, the things that fill our thoughts and imaginations now have become the new everything.
64. Our taste of the fruit turned His something into nothing and our nothing into the new something.
65. The known mind is what the devil is. 'Knowing' is what the taste of the fruit from the tree of knowledge has brought.
66. The suffering that life brings upon us is formed out of the apparent factualities of this world. We are hurt in this world only by the things we know, never by the things we wonder about.
67. The Reverent Jim Jones lead his followers to kill themselves in the jungle, because he 'knew' God. If he was seeking God, he could not have done what he did.
68. The first recorded words of Jesus were directly to those whom the knowing of this world was destroying.
69. Jesus said that... happy are you now... if you are poor in spirit, for by being that way, in this world... yours can be the kingdom of heaven.
70. By being that way now, (and having faith still) you are not serving the second master, 'manna', the factuality... the flesh materiality of this fallen world.
71. It's not natural to be out of this world, because you have to be out of your natural mind, the biological mind of your creature-hood.
72. We have each heard the word, when we had nothing to relate it to. We naturally tried to make it something to know.
73. Even those of us who find a living relationship with God through the help of the bible are still mixed up about truth itself.
74. Ideas about the bible and about God, which are popularly known, try to become factual in nature in our minds just because they are popularly known.
75. But an idea that we can hold is a dead thing. Sin is death.
76. Sin is not evil. It's death.
77. Even our idea of God is not God. It's an idea. An idea in a mind is more like a memory that's finished than it is like a thought being made.
78. The content of thought is in the dying flesh of the brain. A thought content is a created thing, rather than the thing that has created it.
79. The ideas of both good and evil are each of the devil. Reward or punishment is of the devil. Beautiful ideas, hellish ideas and heavenly ideas are all the devil.
80. Ideas are dead. Are ideas bad? No. They are not bad, they are dead.
81. Relating to anything dead, as if it were alive, is idolatrous. Idolatry is the source of all the causes of disobedience.
82. But remember Jesus said 'Why do you call me good? Only God is good.'?
83. Things like saving my marriage, saving my job or saving my house are benefits of fact. They're what the devil gives. But knowing God's power being used for us, that's what the real answer to prayer is. Otherwise it's a 'it-would-have-happened-anyway' event.
84. All that we know are factual things, so they are all ownable mentally.
85. As things that are owned, they can lead to pride. My idea is greater than your idea.
86. But a flow of thought on the other hand can only relate with other thoughts. Any conflict there is, is in the idea-hood of a thought... the ownable portions of our thought.
87. Ideas are usable in arguments, because we know them, hold them and own them.
88. That they are created, finished and ownable is the reason for their power. What we have and can hold is worth more to us in the world of 'manna' than what we don't have.
89. Although the content of each mind is part of this fallen world, the process of each mind is akin to what made the world and continues making it now.
90. Creation is in the making of this day... this moment you are thinking in.
91. You can think that your understanding up to here came through a succession of steps in a thought. That would be like believing in a theory of evolution.
92. What's happening now, seems to be what came out of the things that happened in moments before.
93. To the extent that this is our experience, to that extent God is gone, and the word of God is neither spoken nor heard, and our truth is all around us as an absolute fact.
94. Adam's taste of the fruit began this factuality. It turned this life into death. Thus a reality of evolution began
95. Factuality is what's ours that we know, and ours that we have... and inevitably what we cannot have but should be able to get.
96. Prior to factuality, truth did not operate as a conclusion. It was man and God's launching point into glory and wonder.
97. The Lord said, 'I am the beginning and the end.'
98. The one and only factual thing before the fall was just that one idea that you must not touch the fruit.
99. Truth was only the launching point before then, because Adam could do literally anything else he wanted.
100. Before that one and only possible failure, we, the population of the world, Adam and Eve, we... knew God directly, and the world was secondary.
101. But after it happened, now, it's the world that we know directly. We use the world primarily, and God is secondary.
102. Our relationship to everything is not directly with God any more, as it was. It is now directly with the world, with what God is, now behind the world or above it.
103. The substance of every known and knowable thing is Satan.
104. A creator? We don't know one now. We believe there is nothing anywhere in the mystery that a human mind can ever grasp.
105. What is created is real. It's physical. It's substance. It's flesh. There is a material to the ideas in our brains.
106. Could the substance of this or that known thing in our minds or out there be just a piece of meat, holding on to its life in a body soon to be dead?
107. The domination of our orientation toward the processes of death is what sin is: the factualization of the created world naturally implies the mystification of the spirit.
108. That we break God's rules is not what sin is. Our rule breaking is the inevitable evidence of our sin. Our suffering from it leads us further in.
109. We need to survive. We need to maintain against the threat of what life seems to be doing.
110. Satan uses the legality (i.e. our 'ideas' of what's right) to focus us toward the symptom of sin and away from its cause.
111. We stay oriented toward the factual and knowable, rather than toward its source, which is creation... all of creation, which is God himself.
112. Things are what they are... solid, rule-reflective and factual under Satan's power. We bob in an ocean of consequences, with no access to ultimate truth.
113. It seems right because through the 'facts' of our thinking, we know the rules, so we believe ourselves we're okay.
114. Factuality can often times make it all seem pretty meaningless. God seems sort of dumb and uncaring, doesn't He? Well, He sure does work in strange ways.
115. We waist no attention on the miracle... the beating of our hearts and this whole amazing moment from nowhere..
116. But we wonder obsessively about what other people may think of us. Are we succeeding or failing? Are we happy? Are we fulfilled?
117. The facts of what we know and think have captured us. This is something our faith can hold. This is how Satan runs the world, even within our faith.
118. People like to think that the essence of the devil is the unknown darkness. But no.
119. The genuine unknown is the real God. Only not darkness... light.
120. True peace is not of substance, certainty and ownership. Rather the peace that goes beyond what we can own, passing all understanding is based on the larger truth.
121. All new things come from the all of creation, which can only be the workings of God.
122. The bringing forth of the new is what the unknown is and does. The unknown of the real truth, is not somewhere else apart from us.
123. The real unknown is the flight of a basketball, ahead of the hoop it's been sent toward, after having just left the hand it was touching.
124. The flight of the launched basketball is itself under the touch of a thinking mind like our own.
125. God brings forth both the new things we expect and the new things that surprise us. It is God that directs all things this way or that.
126. When we turn our head to the left, we idolize the left. When we turn our head to the right, we idolize the right. With our eyes straight ahead we see the cause of what turns left and right.
127. What seems to cause life's changes seems absent, an emptiness in juxtaposition to the substance of what's in this world to know.
128. We think we need to look behind the world for a source, because we orient toward the solidness of result, and 'know' that it came from somewhere.
129. Creation is essentially, to itself, not anything itself, it is instead all about, not what it has just done. It's really about what it is doing.
130. Creation is the the largeness of truth. What creation has done is the finished fact, the lesser truth.
131. God is looking for God, which is why we still search for truth, even though the cause of our thought is truth itself.
132. But being process rather than substance, it seeks rather than knows.
133. Satan's presence is everywhere, because we factualize the the results of creation, take for granted and overlook the miracle it comes from.
134. Attending primarily to the the results of creation especially to our personal ideas thought and beliefs. We live in a world apart.
135. Satan is not the birth point of thought, but he is the entire result at every thought's conclusion. The taste of the fruit.
136. God is all around and through us as the beginning of every new thing including thought.
137. Conceiving of Him in heaven is Satan's fact. But the Psalmist says that even in the depths of hell, 'behold he is there.'
138. He's with us and in us now. He has to be. He has to be, or He isn't anywhere. Yet we conceive of not 'meeting him' until after we die.
139. The essence of every holy messenger's message is to entirely trust the unknown.
140. Christ told us our true reward is not in the world but in heaven. But can we be right in thinking of heaven as the other side of our passing?
141. The eternal life, which is promised in God's kingdom, is now. 'I am a God of the living.' Matthew 22: 32, Mark 12: 27 and Luke 20: 38.
142. In the larger truth we see the aspect of God and Satan that is not being adversarial. Satan has sold the idea of the war. If there were a true war, it would be game over for Satan.
143. We struggle with the experience of evil in a world run by a good God. The tricks and contortions we put ourselves through to explain it.
144. Everything we know is Satan... everything. Everything that knows it is God.
145. It doesn't matter if one is stronger than the other, because if either one is, all effort would be pointless anyway.
146. God's has made a plan that's perfect, as only God alone can be and make perfection. To consummate His perfection, free will must touch it.
147. Satan's fruit, which we have taken in, is the default perception in our own thought making, telling us that we are whole unto ourselves and sufficiently adequate in the delusion of our isolation.
148. For the perfect plan to be perfect, we, or something else like us that's free, must be part of it, and continue to be free without spoiling it.
149. Think of your God. Or if you would rather, think of the greatest imagination there could be. No matter what, on some set of terms, that imagination has to exist.
150. Imagine the greatest possible imagination trying to imagine yet another imagination that is greater than itself. That's what real truth is and what it's doing.