Hello everyone, and welcome to the tenth Weekly Nutwatch! I’m your host, QueenofSwords, and since this Nutwatch marks an anniversary of sorts, I thought I’d search for something deep and utterly shocking to celebrate. None of your baby angels or Recipes for Submissiveness. No, the idiocy has to be balanced with a fundamentally twisted mindset, if it can be honored with such a term, and I was (un)lucky enough to find just the site. A fetish with pottery shards, a salivation over suffering and a delight with death… Internet Infidels, it is my (dis)pleasure to present
The complete title is “Restoring the Vision of the End Times Church” (with LASIK eye surgery, no doubt) and the website features the chapters of a book which Vernon L. Kuenzi wrote about the end times, thereby placing himself in a select little category with Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye and other kooks. What distinguishes Mr. Kuenzi are two things. Firstly, his self-loathing and rabid thanatomania :
The Lord interrupted my selfish life, devoted primarily to windsurfing
I wonder if anyone ever interrupts the Lord’s selfish life, devoted primarily to getting attention?
and began uprooting things and replanting from then on, all for the best. I guess He designed me to have a passion for the end-times
But something went terribly terribly wrong, hence the windsurfing.
I believe I either will see Jesus returning in the clouds or be martyred as a result of teaching this message.
Personally, folks, I’m really looking forward to seeing this guy (he was born in 1946) live on and on into old age until he’s rocking on the steps of the nursing home, muttering, “They were supposed to martyr me. Why didn’t they martyr me? Say, are you Jesus?”
“No, Mr. Kuenzi, I’m Nurse Scott. Why don’t we go inside and have some strained peas?”
The second incredible thing about the author is his belief that there will not be a rapture. Yes, you heard that right. God won’t turn on a cosmic vacuum cleaner to suck up all the christians, because it is necessary for the christians to suffer and perish. Just as Jesus died for them, they have to die for him. Mr. Kuenzi eagerly looks forward to a “christian holocaust”, and in consequence, he comes off as the strangest fundy I have ever encountered. I mean, come on – even Jack Chick seems to have a sense of self-preservation.
We have not yet entered the advanced birth pains of the intense persecution of the Great Tribulation… Notice that the persecution described by the fourth seal of Revelation 6 involves the potential death of one-fourth of the world's population. We are not there yet (September 2001), but we are daily drawing closer.
Yes, the WTC tragedy is shoehorned into the picture, even though I can’t quite figure out how that translates to persecution, or even why it would imply that the Mother of all Tribulations hasn’t happened. But every national and international development is food for non-thought :
We think we are on the side of Israel, but how can we be on the side of God when we are insisting that Israel give away her covenant land?... Might this even be a reason for judgment on our nation?
As if sexual freedom, diversity and science weren’t reasons enough.
It is God's land to give, and He has given it in eternal covenant to Israel.
Except when he let the Palestinians settle in it and the British divide it. What was He thinking?
The birth pains… will increase in frequency and intensity until the birth takes place. Who or what is being birthed? The birth is the Sons of God for which all groaning creation awaits…
I’ve heard of creation screaming out that it had a designer, but now you know that it groans as well. One noisy creation, this one.
Intense persecution has been the fiery crucible of purification.
In that case, God should give the persecutors a medal or something for performing such an important and valuable task. I assume the Christians and Nazis will be vying for first place in line.
For those of you who are not Christians (and perhaps some who are), this must seem like raving lunacy.
I really have nothing to add here.
To you I can only say, seek to personally know Jesus, Who is truth. The WTC disaster was a birthpain. WW2 was a birthpain. Vietnam was a birthpain.
Why stop there? The engineering of Dolly was a birthpain, the Temptation Island show was a birthpain, the storm last Saturday was a birthpain, and the author is a birdbrain.
Please reflect on Amos 3:6, "If a calamity occurs in a city has not the LORD done it?"
If a sewer pipe breaks, did not the LORD do it, perhaps with a clothes-peg holding His nostrils shut?
When Job was sitting in the ashes scraping his sores with a broken piece of pottery (having lost all of his children in another building that collapsed), would we have been quick to say God could not have done it because He is loving and merciful?
Note the pottery reference – one of many throughout the book. Since Mr. Kuenzi revels in human misery, he refers again and again to Job and the pottery, to the extent that I wonder why no one has placed Job’s Pot alongside the Turin Shroud and the bits of wood from the True Cross. Still, it’s good to see that God was making buildings collapse even thousands of years ago. He hasn’t lost His touch, though his plans for Flight 93 were foiled. Poor God!
Let's not in our fleshly wisdom presume to know what God will or will not do in the restoration of His creation.
Even though the author of this website wrote an entire book on that topic. Brother, look to the plank in thine own eye.
Disasters we might otherwise think are God's wrath are His judgments designed to bring us to Him, that we might come to know Him and be saved.
How this helps the people who die in the disasters is unclear.
We have not yet seen His wrath. When we do, it will make all that has come before --- including the events of September 11 --- look miniscule.
I have a vision of God stomping through the streets of downtown Manhattan like King Kong on the loose, yelling and snarling, then stopping to pick up a nubile Christian woman before He crushes any police cars in His way.
The Bible says God only disciplines those He loves. And suffering is redemptive in God's plan to restore His creation (Because ALL creation is groaning in the pains of childbirth).
I’m sure that there’s generally a great deal of “groaning in pain” around this author. Perhaps anesthesia is a thing of the devil?
Remember that Job was a righteous man, but God still allowed Satan to collapse the house on all of his children. God will use Satan to discipline His children.
<Satan’s children run in terror, screaming, “Don’t let the mad guy catch us!”>
Satan : Damn, you’re good.
It really boggles the mind as to what Mr. Kuenzi and his ilk (if others of his peculiar persuasion exist) derive from such a bloody, depressing view. Are their lives so boring or insignificant that they need to envision a Christian Holocaust?
[Jesus] was naked, beaten beyond recognition, impaled by spikes, speared in the side... torn, ripped and shredded like a piece of meat savaged by animals.
And this was before the missus gumby Photoshop treatment.
Yet did not Jesus warn us, His disciples, that in many cases we would be treated as He was treated? Have you been reading about the graphic details of the world-wide persecutions of the saints currently making the news?
No, because the Antichrist is suppressing it and apparently removed all the links to this “world-wide” cataclysm from the relevant webpage.
But our deaths can be redemptive in God’s plan to restore His creation.
We are cosmic fertilizer.
I believe this numberless multitude who emerge victorious from great tribulation, having washed their robes in the Blood of the Lamb, are Christian martyrs potentially in excess of one billion in number.
But if no one martyrs these Christians, all that blood will go to waste. It’s making Baby Jesus cry.
The Bible says we are as sheep to be slaughtered. Can our theology embrace that? Do we understand the redemptiveness of such slaughter in the Father’s plan to glorify Himself through His Church?
The Father seems to have a mutton craving. Or a human flesh craving. Either way, I must respectfully ask him to consider veggies, which may include the author.
But worthiness for the Kingdom (that’s what the Bible says!) appears to be a process to be worked out in part by sharing in the suffering of our Lord. If He was perfected by His suffering, how much more need we be perfected by our suffering?
So Jesus wasn’t perfect originally? This guy’s just making it up as he goes along! Of course, like every other self-appointed preacher out there, he has a direct link to the Divine Executioner, so much so that he can tell the rest of us
And the perennial broken pot crops up again.
If we were sitting in the ashes scraping our sores with a pottery shard having just lost all of our possessions and children (in a building that collapsed), would we be patient and longsuffering, confident that God was working in our lives because He loves us and desires to demonstrate His compassion and mercy through us?
Did it ever occur to Job to bury his children, consult a priest about his sickness or make an attempt to recover what he had lost? What kind of lame-ass guy is this?
God rules the universe
With the Power of Grayskull.
and Satan is an underling in the scheme of things. And as revealed in the case of Job, God allows Satan to come against His children FOR REDEMPTIVE PURPOSES. The falling of the twin towers was for redemptive purposes.
And yet none of the New Yorkers are sitting in the ashes with pottery shards. I don’t get it.
Of course it was Satan who piloted the planes, but God let him do it.
Both the falling of the tower of Siloam in Jesus' time and the falling of the twin towers in our day were promptings from our Heavenly Father calling us to repentance so that we might be saved.
What is this, some secret code where the preferred method of communication is destroying a tower? Hey, there’s a Tarot card called the Tower Struck By Lightning. The author should add that to his peculiar little mythology.
It will be as we, the Church, allow ourselves to be physically crushed that Satan will be spiritually and ultimately crushed.
This sounds like a very strange see-saw where the people sit on the ground under the two ends of the plank. Both end up with serious injuries that are somehow transmogrified into a “you should have seen the other guy” victory.
So by “losing” the battle physically, we win it spiritually.
The rallying cry of losers everywhere.
God never did answer my question as to what the WTC disaster was specifically about. Probably there are well over 3,500 reasons known only to God… He did indicate that my priority was not to know all the answers to such questions, but to SEEK HIM.
“I was deeply ashamed of having the presumption to even question Him, so I went out into the street and repeatedly yelled, ‘someone martyr me!’ Since it was midnight, the neighbors called the police. I waited for them to send me to God, but they failed to do so. Satan’s power was too strong that night!”
The evil in the world HAS TO hate us and kill us so that we can respond in the wisdom of the cross. This is the plan that God has elected to destroy evil.
This is the most screwed-up Scorched Earth policy I’ve ever seen. Why does the author hate life so much? I could understand this if he was writing from some slum in a Third World country (presumably scratching away with a pottery shard), but he exists (I can’t call it living) in Hawaii. And we see a glimpse of his personal hyster--I mean history in
The deaths that we are called to will be like that of Stephen, when he looked into heaven and saw Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father.... It is questionable that he even felt the stones.
He was heavily drugged at the time, with the opiate of the masses and St. John’s Magic Mushrooms.
And then he fell asleep.
What were they stoning him with, Styrofoam pellets?
Such will be the grace of God for those of us who will glorify Him with our deaths.
Presumably living a long, happy and productive life and then dying peacefully in bed earns you Back Of The Bus status in heaven.
Being an engineer, my natural mind was whirring and ready to get well prepared for great tribulation or Y2K, whichever came first.
Hint : It wasn’t the great tribulation.
I carried a can of Dinty Moore beef stew around in my van for almost ten years and it didn’t spoil, so I thought, "Ahaa! I have found the great tribulation staple."…
Let me now introduce you to Ramen Noodles. The other half of the Tribulationist’s diet, providing just enough calories until Jesus comes back.
But one morning… I felt led to ask the Lord if it would please Him if I did nothing. I immediately felt His presence and pleasure. So I did nothing.
God’s a big fan of the “twiddle your thumbs” approach. This probably prepares True Christians for the mind-deadening tedium of heaven.
The moral of the story is, "Who cares what’s going to happen --- Jesus is Lord!" And if you seek Him, He will tell you what to do. Maybe for the great tribulation He will tell you to store food. Maybe He will tell you to do nothing. Do whatever He says!... Who cares if the planet is going to melt down. Jesus is Lord!
And He likes Dinty Moore!
If God is our protector, do we need life and health insurance? Do we need fire and theft and flood and hurricane insurance for our houses if angels are guarding the four corners of the property?
The angels seem to have forgotten the gates, doors and windows. This must be how Bad Things happen to Good People. Nevertheless, for all questions, the author has a simple fallback :
I didn’t say it, the Bible said it.
Ja, and I was only mein Fuhrer’s orders obeying. When will people learn to think and take responsibility for themselves?
We conclude this interlude in dementia with a final article which contains the brilliant Song to the Bride, a love paen that has to be read to be believed.
All of us who consider ourselves His disciples still have the option of deciding how we will finish this race. Will we embrace the cross now and be broken at its base, offering ourselves as living sacrifices and drink offerings to be poured out?
I can’t make out if this is heaven or hell. God works in mysterious ways, especially when He’s partnering with Satan.
Our flesh has only one acceptable place and that is six feet down and dead.
“Dear Diary. Woke up alive again. It was a very bad start to the day. Come quickly, Lord!”
It may not stink to us because we have gotten used to it, but it is a stench to God.
God : I made stinky beings! What was I thinking?
God’s passion and jealousy burn for us like a jealous lover. His hot love is the substance from which passion is modeled between a husband and a wife.
I really don’t have anything to add here.
When we look with lust at another thing, be it another person or an idol, we break His heart, for He is jealous for our single eyed affection…
Or here.
He calls us to the secret place behind closed doors,
The confessional? The maximum-security solitary cell?
the place where lovers go.
Could be either, I guess.
We must see that the events touching us to transform us are a result of God’s passion for us, not just ordinary love, but passion!
Unbridled, raging passion as His stormy-grey eyes feast on the firm, rosy orbs revealed by his reckless onslaught. Tonight He would claim the feisty Christian vixens and feel their burning, primitive response!
Only the glance and woo of a lover can draw the bride to the heights that she is destined to skip freely on.
<hands the bride a jump rope>
"Come, My precious bride… Let the fiery passion of My glance wake you from your bed of slumber to seek Me on the heights.
Only in this upside-down world would a hot-blooded lover encourage his bride to get out of bed.
I am constrained to remain hidden if you will not seek Me…
A game of hide-and-go-seek substitutes for foreplay…
I made your spirit that way. It can be satisfied with no other lover, because your spirit is pure. It is only Myself that I have made you hunger for, though you may not know it.
Seems like a selfish thing to do, unworthy of a proper god, but just right for the tiny clay deity that the author has constructed in his own image.
“Father, perfect us through the crucible fires of Your passionate love and mercy and then slay us on Your altar for Your glory and Your glory alone.
Ah, it’s turned into a snuff film.
Only in this way will we achieve the eternal joy for which we are designed and long.”
And the credits roll, with one last disclaimer :
Heavenly Father, we praise You for Your master plan which is far beyond our ability to understand.
Even though the author’s been telling us about it for about twelve chapters now. Or does he have to add this in case his god gets angry that a smelly human figured anything out? Either way, when it comes to out-martyring the martyrs, no website succeeds like the lemming-brained Restoring the Vision. It would be to the interests of any non-fundy to keep this author alive and writing, and I can only wonder what he will do when he realizes that.
Hint : It will involve a pottery shard.
Till next week, everyone! Keep watching the nuts!
QueenofSwords