Beyond Rotating the Mountain to the Promised Land (Edited with ChatGPT)

  

A faithful who has tasted the heavenly touch and seen the light of the Bible cannot turn back against the true faith of the Lord—unless he thinks he is smarter than the Lord, as Judas did. Once you have lived under the bright light of life with the Lord, it is impossible to settle for less. Once your spiritual eyes are opened to understand holiness, salvation, righteousness, and the work of the cross—once you have tasted the Spirit of the Lord and the unshakable peace He provides—it is impossible to return to the world or any religion. Once you have truly encountered Jesus, settling for anything less is unthinkable.

 

When faith was pure, religious people never understood how someone who had truly been born again, who had met Jesus in spirit, could never turn back. When you have experienced heaven, you crave it like an addict craves his drug. You become addicted to both heaven and its ways. That is why they reasoned that the early faithful must have eaten cat’s meat to behave as they did. Their solution? "Do not eat and drink with them, lest they feed you cat’s meat." But it was never the meat of cats—it was the blood and flesh of the Lord that made them addicted to His Spirit. And Jesus is no cat—He is God, seated at the right hand of the Heavenly Father. Those faithful were the purest kind, at least from the outside.

 

But when faith becomes religion and aspires not to imitate Jesus but to copy the world’s religions—when the focus shifts to earthly aspirations, material wealth, and outward holiness while hiding deep corruption—then the salt and light of heaven vanish from the assembly of the Lord. In such a setting, new converts no longer see the radiance of heaven in the faithful; instead, they see sin and materialism cloaked in the glitter of faith. When the assembly is dominated by sin, idolatry begins to look purer in the eyes of those who have never truly experienced the light of heaven.

 

If a dead dog seems to smell better than you to lost souls, you need to clean up—because it is, after all, a dead dog. A faithful man will stumble, but he does not dwell in sin. A righteous man may fall seven times, but he rises again. Yet when the so-called "faithful" begin to look more like the world—when they swim in sin rather than stumble in it—their claim to faith is doubtful.

 

Jesus commanded His followers to go to the ends of the earth, baptizing people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and making them His disciples, teaching them to obey all His commandments. He also said that the one who loves Him is the one who keeps His commandments. To be faithful is to taste, smell, and resemble Jesus. To man, this may seem impossible, but to God, it is not. Since our sins are cleansed by His blood, as long as we accept Jesus as Lord and proclaim Him with our mouths, we are reborn in spirit and connected to Jesus and the Heavenly Father through the Holy Spirit.

 

The Spirit of truth, comfort, counsel, and guidance—the Holy Spirit—leads us into all truth and transforms us into the image of the Lord. This is the process of spiritual growth. Jesus is both the door that grants us access to the Heavenly Father and the road that leads us there. While the world, work of the flesh, and the devil—the gates of hell—work against us, the Holy Spirit guides us along the narrow path of salvation, which is Jesus. A man who is born again and growing on this narrow path will never turn back. That is why many choose suffering, persecution, imprisonment, and even death rather than returning to idolatry.

 

So let us stop exhausting the Lord with our disobedience. The road to our Promised Land and eternal rest is called Jesus Christ. Not only must we enter through the door opened to us by His blood, but we must also follow the road He laid out for us. Do you claim to love Jesus? Then obey His commandments—unless you dare to call Jesus a liar.

 

You can rotate the mountain of disobedience until your judgment day, but you will never find the promised land of rest and peace on that mountain. You can cry about onions, garlic, water, and the ways of Egypt until the dust returns to dust, but you will never reach the Promised Land unless you accept Jesus as the only path to salvation and follow His commandments.

 

When Jesus returns, the world will be in darkness as the foundations of the earth are shaken, and people will cast out their idols forever. But is God speaking only about idols made of stone? No. He is also speaking about the ways of the world—the things we value so much that we live and die for them. In some places, that may include stone idols, but for most of the world, it is our earthly way of life—money, power, status, nationalism, and personal ambition. When the Lord descends from heaven, all these things will be exposed as worthless, and we will cast them away as meaningless.

Are we growing toward that end or clinging to the world? Many so-called faithful fill the void left by the Holy Spirit with the garbage of this world. Like a grieving mother who hoards useless merchandise to cope with her loss, many who have lost their connection with heaven try to fill their emptiness with material things. If you touch their worldly idols, they will react like you’ve stabbed them in the eye. What lost souls!

 

They speak endlessly about politics, nationalism, development, human rights, and the supposed special status of certain nations in the world, never ceasing their chants. They have become the world, and what is worse, they reflect the ugliest parts of the world rather than its better aspects. If their lives were led by God, they would be like Paul, Peter, and John. They would receive the world as a gift from God’s hands, but their focus would be on God, not the gift. Even when you tell them this, all they hear, however, is "GIFT" instead of "GOD." Their obsession with the world blinds them to the true purpose of faith. They are hoarding garbage to fill the void in their souls where the Holy Spirit once reigned.

 

Because of their disobedience, they are lost in an endless cycle—rotating the mountain of rebellion, going nowhere, until the dust returns to dust. They whine about the power of the enemy rather than trusting the might of God. They cry about water rather than remembering the One who split the Red Sea for them. They complain about garlic and onions instead of being grateful for the manna the Lord provides. And so they go in circles, accomplishing nothing, until their time is up.

 

But those who see the might of God rather than the height of Jericho’s walls will watch those walls crumble before them. Those who trust in the Lord will see the smallest of Israel defeat the giants of the world, for the battle belongs to God. Those who wait on the Lord instead of prostituting themselves with the world will have their strength renewed—they will mount up with wings like eagles, running ahead of the enemy’s horses. They will run and not grow weary; they will walk and not faint. But the disobedient will watch from a distance, endlessly circling their mountain of rebellion until the dust consumes them.

 

Yet there is never a wrong time to do the right thing. Even at the cross, you can turn back to the Lord. The Father stands outside His gate, watching and waiting for His foolish children to return—even after they have lost it all. If He could give second and third chances to the wretched of this world like us, His door remains open to all who turn from their evil ways. Turn back from the world to the Lord Himself. Otherwise, enjoy the desert. Enjoy circling the mountain forever. You may hope to control this or that, but in reality, you will see the Lord’s eagles soaring high while you wander in circles—until the dust returns to dust.