There were many things that Jesus did not tell His disciples ahead of time. Or if He did tell them, He used vague language so that they would not understand His meaning. He continues to do this even with us today. We often chafe at this, but when we look at the situation with Jesus’ disciples, we can see why Jesus did this.

It would have frightened or discouraged the disciples if they had known that Jesus would be crucified, instead of being crowned King of Judah. In the early days of their discipleship, they were too immature spiritually to handle such truth—even if they knew that He would be raised from the dead on the third day.

“Troubled” is from tarasso, “to be agitated, stirred up, to cause inward commotion.” Jesus had been troubled in John 11:33 when He saw people weeping at the tomb of Lazarus. He had been troubled in His soul when He began to speak of His impending death to His disciples in John 12:27. He was troubled in His spirit when He talked about His impending betrayal in John 13:21. Finally, in John 14:1 and 27 Jesus comforts His disciples in their commotion, as the reality of His leaving them took effect.

When Jesus died on the cross, His soul was “poured out unto death.” The fleshly (carnal) soul is in the blood, says Leviticus 17:11, and for this reason the blood of sacrifice was to be poured out upon the ground. The essence of sacrifice is to substitute the soul of the animal for the soul of the one offering sacrifice.  Hence, they were not to drink blood, because God said, its purpose was “to make atonement for your souls.” The death of the body, in itself, was not the essence of atoning sacrifice. It was the death of the sacrificed soul that atoned for the soul of others.

Jesus told His disciples that He was going away and that they would “follow later” (John 13:36). Peter thought He was talking about leaving to go to another earthly country, but Jesus was referring to His journey to the Father. He was to go ahead of them “to prepare a place” for them. When Thomas questioned Him further, Jesus told him, “I am the way, and the truth and the life.”

So it is plain that this was no ordinary journey. It was not a path that a fleshly man could travel, as if going from one town to another. It was a spiritual journey, patterned after Israel’s 40-year journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, a journey from Passover (“the way”) through Pentecost (“the truth”) and on into the feast of Tabernacles (“the life”).

Before we attempt to explore the fringes—and beyond—of our understanding of the physical universe (ghosts, aliens, vampires, etc.), it is of paramount importance to dispose of the baggage of our misconceptions and the mythology of what we have been erroneously taught in this age of deceit.

The puncturing of our delusions is what some might call “a painful blessing.” That sounds like an oxymoron, but it is absolutely vital for well-being, and a prerequisite for maturity.

Much of what we have been taught is in error: some from disproven myths, others from an agenda of politics and “political correctness.” In our current culture, even the very existence of “truth” has been abandoned rather than to persist in the search! When we don’t fully understand a phenomena, we wrap it in clichés and techni-speak. Metaphors reign where mysteries reside.

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid declared his support for the two state solution while calling on the Palestinian Authority and the Arab world to make peace with Israel during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly Thursday.

Prime Minister Lapid began his speech by noting how far Israel has come in the seven decades since its founding, rising from the ashes of the Holocaust to become a world leader in many fields and technologies.

While unmanned aerial vehicles such as the multi-million dollar General Atomics MQ-1 Predator are armed with missiles, a new generation of inexpensive “kamikaze” drones is reshaping the battlefield.

The US military worries that these low-cost and deadly-effective drones could shift the global strategic balance away from the US on the modern battlefield.

To counter such emerging threats, the Army decided to conduct a field training exercise involving “a swarm of 40 quadcopters all equipped with cameras, MILES, and lethal munition,” tweeted the Commanding General of the National Training Center and Fort Irwin.

n a hidden, out-of-the-way place inside Montero’s research facility, in a briefcase measuring just twenty-four by sixteen by eight inches thick, a tiny red light flashed on the fail-safe countdown detonator.

The marauding monsters didn’t have time to register the accompanying sound as a blinding fire equal to one hundred suns shot at the speed of light from the SAMM’s hypocenter.

In the blink of an eye, temperatures inside the lower complex reached ten million degrees Fahrenheit. The once-powerful beings, together with everything around them, were reduced in a flash to raw atomic material.

China is pursuing a new concept of warfare that aims to deploy artificial intelligence to directly control the enemy’s will and subdue a nation without having to resort to conventional “hot” warfare. The idea of cognitive warfare may sound like science fiction to most people, writes Judith Bergman, and attorney, political analyst and senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

Pope Francis has ordered the Holy See to transfer all of its financial assets into the Institute for Works of Religion, commonly known as the Vatican Bank, by Oct. 1.

The Holy See is the central government of the Roman Catholic Church and falls under the episcopal jurisdiction of the pope in his capacity as the leader of the Catholic Church and the bishop of Rome.

Ben Armstrong, commenting on this news on his program “The Ben Armstrong Show,” noted that the pope’s order to get all of the Vatican’s financial holdings pooled together is a sign that an economic collapse is fast approaching. (Related: HOLY MONEY GRAB: Pope Francis imposes deadline for Holy See entities to deposit their assets with the Vatican Bank.)

A major prophetic event just happened, and hardly anyone in the United States is talking about it.

In recent years a group of western Christians known as Boneh Israel has been working with officials from the Temple Institute to search for a perfect red heifer. A red heifer is necessary if Temple sacrifices are to be reinstituted, but one hasn’t been seen in Israel for more than 2,000 years.

This is something that I have written about a few times over the years, because it directly relates to end times prophecies. For a long time, the search for a perfect red heifer seemed to be going nowhere, but now all of that has changed.

Ancient powers and principalities didn’t die in the shipwreck of the old world, they just took on new forms. Today we can, in fact, still talk about these strange, underlying forces as long as we use the correct language. Take, for example, the Silicon Valley philosopher Kevin Kelly’s pet notion that technology has its own mind and its own purpose: that through the web of what he calls “the technium”, something is using us to create itself. Kelly sees technology growing into something self-aware and independent of its human creators, as he explained in his book What Technology Wants: “It may have once been as simple as an old computer program, merely parroting what we told it, but now it is more like a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.”