The Day the World Died Supernaturally | Jesus' Tears in the Second Woe

In the article Communism, Fascism | Liberal and Conservative Christianity in the Bible | The Alabaster Jar of Anti-Sacramental Mystery, we saw that the associated Biblical numbers and theology place most ecclesial spiritual disorders in their proper place and with their own anti-Sacramental imagery and theology for take out and beyond.

More specifically, what did we find there in summary? Let us recap.

Summary of the Mystical Numbers

Protestantism

Well, we saw that, firstly, the loaves and fishes reveal sacramental mysteries. We saw that five loaves and two fish were an image of how heretics, or conservative Protestants, are split up. More specifically, we saw that heretics lose five loaves, five sacraments, and retain only two fish, baptism and marriage. Further, we saw that baptism and marriage are like basic sacraments in that they shew forth the basic essence of our faith: to know and love God and to be happy with Him forever in the next, or that is, to have faith [knowing truth] and repentance [love, or turning from sin] (the proper disposition of baptism or its vows), and to marry Jesus forever in heaven (we will have a spiritual spousal relationship with God eternally in heaven).

Godlessness in Apocalypse

Too, building on this, we saw that to totally mock these two basic principles of all goodness, or, that is, the basic sacramental signs of that same goodness, was to set up the total principles of evil, of the fall:

• The Anti-Baptismal Lie of the Fall: no faith and no repentance; believe as you wish, and do as you wish, and you will be fine, better off.

• The Anti-Marital Lie of the Fall: here, we speak not of literal unchastity; per se, as much as apocalyptic anti-marriage: rejecting the spousal ecstasy of spiritual union with the CreaTOR forever in the NEXT life in exchange for the superficial, figurative fornication with the CreaTION in THIS life, or materialism: living for the Creation instead of the Creator, or living for this world rather than the next.

This was also anti-sacramental imagery: the world asks a “father,” in fact, the father of lies, for two fish, baptism and marriage, and is given two serpents, the lies of the fall above. This takes care of godlessness in apocalypse: the lamb has seven horns, and the false prophet has two horns, like a lamb, but speaks as a dragon, who is, incidentally, also the serpent. Indeed, horns in Daniel many times denoted rulers, which means power. So if the Lamb has seven horns, it could easily mean he has infinite power, just as his seven eyes, which see all that is, means he has infinite knowledge. However, the false prophet is mocking two of Jesus’ horns, so there must be more to this. Long story short, Christ’s power is in redemption and in grace. His grace prevails in seven supreme sources, the sacraments. Now then, which two sacraments is the devil mocking in the two horns? Bingo, use what we have, seeing as it perfectly fulfills all evil.

This, enables us to see any godless age of the world’s history through this lense in the apocalypse, the beast then being the age of sin itself, and the devil the one who breathes into the sinful age these very lies of the diabolical prophet.

What else did we see?

Conservative Protestantism Locusts of Battle in Apocalypse

Yes, the heretics, we know from history, opened the Scriptures, which are—God forbid we say, but we must—a can of worms without the Church to guide you by Bishops and Tradition and created a torrent from the dragon’s mouth to carry away the faithful woman into oblivion and error. But the solid earth of the Magisterium answered all these lies, swallowed them, and thereby saved the Church from peril.

This we saw, in that same article, was the meaning of the locusts in the first great woe:

In Apocalypse Chapters 7-9, there are the seven trumpets that bring with them various calamities, and those Sealed by God in the forehead are not harmed by them. We can see the “trumpets” as the “proclamations” of the Church in her major doctrinal development over her history. When persons do not heed the Church, they are “spiritually harmed” in the same manner as their rejection of teaching. But good Catholics are spiritually protected in their minds from false teaching, protected in their forehead from heresy and error. Hence, the Seal is faithful Catholicism.

The last three trumpets are great woes. Considering this, we consider, too, that the last phases of attack on the Church and the fall from Catholic Christendom were three great negative chapters in the history of the Church:

• Protestantism

• Enlightenment, age of worldly reason

• Secular Apostasy

Protestantism unleashed an unfathomable geometric progression of mutating and mutually conflicting factions of heresy that tortured innocent heretics by leaving them in uncertainty. The loss of five of the seven Catholic sacraments, the ones that require the Episcopate, served as torture and fear in their hearts.

Excerpt on the Spiritual Torture of Protestantism:

Confession

The true doctrines implied by Confession are these, among others:

• any grace is resistible

• the grace of justification can be lost and is lost through grievous sin

• there is non-grievous sin

• grievous sin has clear defined parameters: grave matter, full culpability in intellect and will

• grace of justification can be restored through confession with at least imperfect contrition

• perfect contrition restores justification if penitent intends confession asap

• one must die in charity to be saved

• charity necessitates proactive acts of love

• grave sins of omission of charity result in loss of justification

• charitable acts are signs of grace, but are not guaranteed since grace is resistible

Protestants confound these truths ad infinitum. Half of Protestant Christendom believes that grace is resistible, and half [Calvinists] does not. Consequently, Calvinists do not believe that justification can be lost. They believe that positive movement in grace is guaranteed if one is elect, since grace is irresistible. Most Calvinists would say that if someone who seemed elect fell into serious sin, it would mean that person never knew God to begin with. Protestants seem to have aversion to the doctrine that distinguishes mortal sin from venial sin.

On the other side, of those Protestants who believe that grace is resistible, there is no clear agreement as to how justification can be lost. For many, it would involve a grave sin, but probably not as clearly defined as by Rome. Some might just have conditions like, stop believing, stop trying, stop trusting in Jesus to cover you, and so forth. For them also, to get it back is not clear. It almost never involves confession to a priest or minister. Repentance would be common as a condition for reinstatement but not necessarily as defined as imperfect or perfect contrition. Sometimes it might just mean, as per above, resuming in fiducial trust in the merits of Christ, possibly starting trying again, or having faith again.

Works as necessary for salvation might be believed by some on the resistible side, but obviously, for the irresistible side, works are guaranteed from irresistible grace and so are not salvific, being just a manifestation of a salvation begun by initial conversion.

The heresy of imputation also comes in. The notion that there can be a contradiction between the actual state of one’s soul and actions and what God “considers” the reality to be is absurd. Catholicism is very realistic: God sees the soul as it is, whether there is divine love within it or not. This reality translates by way of implication into confession: confession presupposes that God is seeing the true state of the heart of the person. If they have cast Him aside by grave sin, then God can see it and renders the person an enemy as regards charity. If the person is in God’s friendship, that is, is in grace and has no stain of unrepentant grievous sin, then God sees that and is overall pleased with the soul. If these realities were not implied, confession would make no sense.

Let us move on to the Anointing:

Anointing of the Sick

The main true doctrines implied are:

• God will pursue the soul unto the bitter end. Mercy is possible right up until the moment before death.

• consequently, there is no unforgivable sin before death

• suffering is part of the Christian experience and can be united to Jesus’ pains on the cross to purify the soul and to add to the redemption of other souls

• through anointing, the soul’s sufferings are sanctified, and one is strengthened in the evening of life to suffer with patience and charity and to prepare for the ultimate union with God at death

• suffering does not necessarily represent that the soul has fallen out of favor with God, but rather, God calls all of us, at various times, to participate with Christ in the cross

Protestantism confounds many of these things. With regards to unforgivable sins, Scripture seems to suggest at least these in several places:

• Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, Matthew 12

• Apostasy from the faith, Hebrews 6

• Swearing before God and breaking the promise [James, but whoever swears is damned]

• The mark of the beast

If a Protestant sect has a more conservative bent of eisegesis, then they may have no other choice than to take these frightening passages literally. Consider the fate, then, of souls who are told that they are unforgivable, or who have come to believe they are unforgivable. This would be incomprehensible torture. It could be an “anointing unto damnation”: “Well, since you are now damned beyond relief, you may as well take up what pathetic time you have left before death, and eat, drink, fornicate, and be merry, for when it is through, you go into eternal fire!” This would then be the antithesis of the anointing of the sick, in that whereas the sacrament strengthens one in one’s suffering out of love, to prepare for ultimate salvation, the other, on the other hand, is a diabolical christening of pleasures to prepare for an irreversible damnation. Too, I have seen sects that claim that if any Christian sins seriously, his salvation is lost permanently. This fits here as well.

Moving on to suffering, there are definite poles. On the one hand, because the Pharisaical sects have separated themselves from the Incarnational and Eucharistic reality of the Gospel, where the Church on earth is intimately intertwined with the Christ and the Churches suffering and triumphant, they do not have a strong conception of the Christian who suffers in and through Christ and by His strength. Consequently, suffering is a sign of loss of favor with God. We must repent and get our life back in order if we wish to escape our misfortune. This then spiritually victimizes the suffering soul with spiritual torture like the anointing unto damnation. The suffering soul searches his heart for sin, for what he is doing wrong, and begins to despair. Too, some Calvinists have a teaching that if you are not overcoming some sin despite all efforts, it may be a sign that you are damned.

 

Election, Predestination, and the Charisms

The next set of errors flows from Confirmation. Here, the implications include election, predestination, gifts and charisms, and the divine resolve to save all men.

Confirmation

• God has predestined the elect positively and the damned negatively; the elect were chosen from all eternity but not without consideration of their free will and good deeds. Similarly, God has foreseen and allowed that some men will not make it, but it is merely in consideration of future sins, merely allowed and not positively willed, that this is so, and noting that God will have offered salvation to the soul at multiple intervals, unto the bitter end.

• Confirmation is to strengthen the soul for the mature fight for salvation; it is available to all Catholics who desire it and are properly prepared and disposed; it implies a positive Divine resolve to save all men

• charisms are gifts to the soul that are not for the soul but for the Church; God gives some unique subset of them to all the faithful.; no one charism or set of charisms are necessary for salvation

The Protestants confound all these issues. Firstly, there are extremes in predestination. On the right, in Calvinism, God not only knows the future, but positively chooses persons to save, and passes over the others. This effectively means that God does not will the salvation of all men but only “the chosen.” Signs of being elect can include, amongst the sects: holiness, worldly favor, materialistic blessings, or charisms, eg. for Pentecostals, one must have tongues to be saved. On a personal note, I once came across a sect that believed that unless you had all of the charisms, you will not be saved.

The tortured souls are then, again, those who are struggling to maintain holiness, those who are in destitution, those who are not blessed in the way of material things, or ones who don’t have “charisms,” or at least the right ones. When God does not desire to save all men, being in the downside group becomes this spiritual torture.

The opposite extreme is an assault on the omniscience of God: Open Theism. This heresy takes beginning Scriptures that use anthropomorphic language and that seem to suggest a God that is “caught off-guard,” and extrapolates to the erroneous notion that God is operating in time and is therefore as surprised by history as we are. He is not adapting His activity to what He knows is coming down the pike, but rather reacting to things He did not know were advancing.

The final set of errors in this section are the conundrums of Holy Orders and Eucharist. Both of these sacraments are intimately tied to the notion of the “true communion,” or, that is, which men truly speak for God.

Holy Orders

Eucharist

• the only true men of God, who are guaranteed to speak the truth and mediate the authentic graces formally are the men who have holy orders in union with the Pope: deacons, priests, and bishops. This is the sure sign of faith and right doctrine.

• Holy orders inaugurates a sacramental economy of rituals and mysticism

• Where the Eucharist is, there is the true Church

Protestants have no stable, centralized authority but only countless men with Bibles in their hands, all mutually conflicting and preaching that the Holy Spirit has shown them the fullness of truth. And which of them really speaks for God? They say, if you call them on it, “Don’t take my word for it, read the Bible for yourself.” This means, as in Steve Ray’s story, once you become a bible-believer, you have an enormous task on your shoulders: to develop the correct doctrines over the rest of your life through painstaking, humble and sincere Bible-study. This is obviously absurd, since you are not a full-time bible scholar and noting that there are full-time bible scholars in every denomination who have accepted Jesus into their heart, and are sincere, and who really repent every day, and who take everything in context, and who have read Scripture 40 times over; and no two of which can agree on all doctrinal issues. And you are not even a bible scholar, yet you have a 40-hour work week, wife, kids, chores, and so forth. How the hell are you supposed to solve Scripture when the full-time people cannot?!

The presumptuous one says, I just know because I am holy and learned, or they say, most of those questions are not essential doctrine. Just repent and follow Jesus. On the other hand, the fearful one who believes that he needs to get all doctrine correct, can only cower before the myriads of hell-fire “men of God” and try to sort out what the truth is. All with a full-time job (not a religious job), family, kids, and so forth.

As for sacraments, Protestantism has divisions across issues of what degree of ritual should be present. Modern evangelicals have a largely absent sacramental and ritual-based worship. Older, but more liberal sects, retain sacramental nature to varying degrees. Indeed, if it was true that in the OT, the Pharisees had physical rituals and no inner renewal, then we can say modern Pharisees have inner renewal but no physical rituals. The Catholic Church has the balance.

The sister doctrine is the Eucharist: the true Communion. This is a corollary problem from just above: you cannot find the true Church unless you figure out which of the 1000+ Bible-thumpers has the fullness of truth. In Calvin’s view, if you don’t find the exact one, you are toast. Today, in light of the confusion, the Protestants usually just shuffle off the doctrinal issues, as above, to non-essential categorization, get into a generic “bible-believing” Church, and consider it good.

But Catholics, who have the stability of the Church, were protected from this great age of sorrow and confusion. This was how we interpreted the five months of scorpion sting on those without the Seal of God: this was the spiritual torture from the uncertain and dreadful void that the five sacraments that were lost left.

Regarding the Enlightenment, or age of Reason, we note that Protestantism left its victims spiritually tortured but still supernaturally alive with Scripture and Baptism and Marriage. But in the Enlightenment and general age of worldliness, supernatural religion was cast aside in favor of merely natural knowledge and goodness, or Reason. Because supernatural truth and life was extinguished, it was a “death” of a great portion of mankind, a supernatural death, even as the warriors of the second great woe “kill” a third of mankind. We will cover this momentarily in much more detail.

We have already seen the Secular Apostasy, which rejects even Reason that the Enlightenment and general age of worldly reason retained, is finally completely godless: atheism, relativism, hedonism, violation of all natural law, and materialism. It is veritably “the false prophet and beast”.

So, then, we have that Protestantism and utter godlessness are in apocalypse as the first and third woes. This leaves, as we have just seen above briefly, the middle woe as the general age of worldly reason, which encompasses the conglomerate movements that have rejected a supernatural conception of reality: Enlightenment, deism, rationalism, the French Revolution, Masonry, and the endless versions of the worldly sciences that use mere natural intellect to try and solve human problems without God.

Because this middle age bears so much complexity and profundity, we will now treat of it in depth fully:

The Enlightenment

And the sixth angel sounded the trumpet: and I heard a voice from the four horns of the great altar, which is before the eyes of God, Saying to the sixth angel, who had the trumpet: Loose the four angels, who are bound in the great river Euphrates. And the four angels were loosed, who were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year: for to kill the third part of men.

And the number of the army of horsemen was twenty thousand times ten thousand. And I heard the number of them. And thus I saw the horses in the vision: and they that sat on them, had breastplates of fire and of hyacinth and of brimstone, and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions: and from their mouths proceeded fire, and smoke, and brimstone. And by these three plagues was slain the third part of men, by the fire and by the smoke and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths. For the power of the horses is in their mouths, and in their tails. For, their tails are like to serpents, and have heads: and with them they hurt. And the rest of the men, who were not slain by these plagues, did not do penance from the works of their hands, that they should not adore devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and wood, which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:

Neither did they penance from their murders, nor from their sorceries, nor from their fornication, nor from their thefts.

First, an interesting digression of how we get the number 20,000 times 10,000. In this Scripture, the Greek is rendered literally myriads of myriads. Now a myriad is either an uncountable number or 10,000 in Biblical theology. Secondly, when a number is mentioned in the plural (as in a time, times, and a half time) and no quantifier is given, we assume the smallest countable plural, 2 (that is, “a time, times and a half time” is … “a time, TWO times, and a half time”). Hence, myriads of myriads is literally "two ten thousands of ten thousands", as rendered by the Catholic Scripture Douhay Rheims version.

Now, remember how we factored 144,000 as 12 x 12 x 1000 to make the fullness of the People of God, of Old [12 Tribes] and New [12 Apostles], the Catholic Church [1000, a countless multitude].

Now, in biblical theology, 10 can be established as a symbol of the world, or worldliness (Daniel's fourth beast of chapter 7 has ten horns, the dragon and first beast of apocalypse 12 and 13 each have ten horns.)

Remember also, 2 can be a symbol of heresy and basic religion [heretics retain basic religion, 2 sacraments, 2 fish, baptism and marriage]. Therefore, the first number, 20,000 becomes...

Heresies or basic religion [2] of the World [10] Multiplied or Confounded [1000]

2 x 10 x 1000

The second number is pure worldliness [10] multiplied or confounded [1000]

10 x 1000

What we will actually find is that, more or less, the Enlightenment has two sub-stages, or dimensions, that match these characteristics. Let us probe it.

In the first stage, its adherents are still religious but only naturally so, in that they believe that religion is on the level of the world, meaning, that religion is never supernatural, that is, never on the level of heaven, never God coming down to meet man from above. Rather, they believe religion is on the level of the world, that is, man tries from below to find God above. In other words, man strives on his own to find the truth and the ability to live virtuously. The belief that man must find the truth on his own, from merely Reason, is called rationalism, and the idea that God does not intervene with this world, leaving man to his own devices for happiness, is called deism. Hence, for the deists and rationalists, religion is, again, of the world [10], and since all their ideologies are heresies [2], this first stage of Enlightenment is worldly heresy [2 x 10]. Further, these worldly heresies were just as confounded as the multitudes of Protestantism, in that there were as many opinions in deism and rationalism as there were deists and rationalists (just as there were as many forms of Protestantism as Protestants) [1000].

In the second phase of Enlightenment, the philosophies were no longer regarding religion, if even natural religion. They were purely worldly. For, the social and political ideologies of the 1800's and first half of 1900's were strictly worldly, trying to solve the problems of human life with only reason, or the base knowledge of the world, without regard for God. In fact, the world wars brought back neo-pagan nationalism, which is itself worldly, as it was in pagan kingdoms of rivalry in ancient times. Nazism and Fascism were regarded as the peak of Enlightenment thoughts, and they were purely worldly, asserting superiority of race and dictatorship of the states, again, like the pagan kingdoms of ancient times. Hence, this was, again, purely worldly [10] thought confounded [1000].

And what did these two phases of worldly religion and purely worldly philosophies do to the world? They only killed a great portion of man supernaturally, in that they stripped man of his role as dependent upon a Creator for supernaturalintervention and revelation. They caused a supernatural death in those who were deceived by them.

For, if it was true that the Protestants did not fully die supernaturally, seeing as they retained supernatural Christian religion, so the Enlightenment brought about supernatural death. The Protestants who were scrupulous surely wished they could die spiritually, in the sense that they did not want to cower in fear of hell through uncertain spiritual torture. But they did not die, for they retained supernatural fear of God, the base sacraments of Baptism and Marriage.

The Futility of the Merely Natural Means for Salvation

Now, let us probe some further Scriptures related to our analysis. In a Gospel narrative, Christ says count the cost. Do not build a tower if you cannot complete it. If you have an army of 10,000 and you are going against 20,000, better to send a delegate and call a truce, as if to imply that the 10,000 and 20,000 should unite and compound their armies for a greater cooperative victory (even as the Enlightenment has two great armies in alliance, worldly heresies and purely worldly philosophies).

In the preceding section, Christ says, you must be ready to hate even your own flesh and blood family to inherit the kingdom.

A deeper meaning is present: supernatural love of God must take precedence over everything in this world. For, you can never refuse to convert to the Gospel to save your family peace. If your family threatens to disown you and turn you in to die by the state if you convert to Christianity, you must convert and be left for dead by your family.

And why? One, you will go to hell if you choose natural relationship with physical kin over supernatural relationship with God and spiritual kin.

And secondly, it is because no merely natural goodness, even the love of physical family, can fulfill you. Only the supernatural possession of God and the saints' fellowship in heaven can fully satiate what you long for in the recession of your hearts.

Also, the tower of the Gospel here can parallel the tower of Babel. Recall the tower of Babel: man is trying to find his fulfillment in the material world, joined as one human race, but not in love of God. Rather, man is infatuated with himself and material glory. But the point is, THIS CAN NEVER FULFILL HIM. No amount of materialistic grandeur can ever satiate the human heart. The lie is materialism: that pleasures, possessions, and egotistical accomplishments can ultimately fulfill what you are looking for, and not immeasurable love forever in the next life. Hence, at Babel, the world is pursuing an end that will never give it rest and true beatitude, but it is too early for early man to understand. So God must interrupt the construction of the tower and divide humanity against itself, as in the kingdoms that wage war with one another, the aftermath of the fall of Babel: war, divisiveness, strife. The conquering of kingdoms, one upon another is the lot of man who fails at utopia. For even after Babel, humanity still strives to regain it, and does regain it by the time of Christ. Eventually, all the armies of the best of the world called a truce and were ruled by the great king of Rome.

But now, here is the lesson: natural goodness, even the relationships of family members, the highest good of the natural world, can never inherit the kingdom of God (“for even the heathens love those who love them, and what good is that?”, and, “for with man, it is impossible, but with God [supernatural life and revelation], ALL things are possible.”)

Even with 200 Days Wages

Therefore, it is written of St. Phillip in the same story of five loaves and two fish: Lord, even with 200 days wages, we could not afford to give these families even a little food.

What is 200 except 2 x 10 x 10? And what is a day except a thousand years? And what is the wage of a day of natural goodness except simply a day of natural goodness, which can never approach God or please Him. But a day of natural goodness is also a thousand years of natural goodness.

And also, what are the wages, if even natural goodness, of a fallen man in this world? Is it not death? “For the wages of sin is death!” Therefore, the wages of 200 days is 200 thousand years of death; yet, each of those days in that amount is a thousand years. Hence, the wages are also 200 thousand years of a thousand years of natural labor, which is simply death, even as the army of the second woe, which was 2 x 10 x 10 x 1000 x 1000, was the supernatural death of many in this world.

And also, what can we say about all the goodness and knowledge of this world alone? For, the totality of worldly religion, the army of man trying to find God on his own and to please him on his own power, is merely 2 x 10 x 1000, that is, heresies [2] of the world [10] confounded and multiplies innumerably [1000]. And even less powerful is the army of man in all purelyworldly knowledge, that is, 10 x 1000, strictly worldly ideologies without regard to religion [10] multiplied innumerably [1000].

And in the end, none of these great armies' fruits, even if they call a truce, will ever purchase a single coin of merit in God's eyes, because only grace and revelation can do this. Rather, the fruits of such armies will only kill their victims spiritually, cutting them off from supernatural grace and revelation, which is the very thing these armies cast aside!

Hence, again, we read with St. Phillip to Jesus our Savior, "Lord, even with 200 days wages [2 [heresies] x 10 [of the world] x 10 [and purely worldly ideologies] x 1000 x 1000], we could not afford to give all these children of thy Father even a little food (no efforts of this world [10], be they religious [2, or heretical, since they reject God's supernatural involvement], much less pure efforts of the world [10], can ever bring us any ounce of supernatural goodness, no life from God, no truth that transcends our human minds, without which none of us can be saved. And therefore, only Jesus can fix this problem with His supernatural life, which, in the greatest form, is indeed the seven sacraments, as we have seen, the loaves and fishes of the Sacraments that Christ feeds us, the children of His Father, unto eternal life.)”