How to poison a king

A PICNIC SPREAD is laid out. A tablecloth, two goblets and between them, a small leather wine container. And some cheese and a couple of apples. The picnic is set on a lovely spot, high on the edge of a mountain path with a view all the way back to the sea.

As Vizzini fills the goblets with the dark red liquid, the Man In Black pulls a small packet from his clothing, handing it to Vizzini.

MAN IN BLACK "Inhale this, but do not touch."

VIZZINI (doing it) "I smell nothing."

MAN IN BLACK (taking the packet back) "What you do not smell is called iocane powder. It is odorless, tasteless, dissolves instantly in liquid, and is among the more deadlier poisons known to man." - From the screenplay for "The Princess Bride"

Arsenic is known as "the poison of kings" or the "inheritance poison" since it's been used many times for murder due to it's ability to kill and disguise it's effect as some other common ailment. Someone once told me that you can poison someone slowly over many years by giving them smaller amounts. I've also heard that there could be traces of arsenic in our local drinking water. The symptoms are myriad but it usually affects the brain.

This gets me to thinking, if I was the devil how would I poison believers? Would I show up all horns and fangs with a bubbling poison cocktail to drink? Or smiles and friendship with a drink of something good. Something delicious, odourless, tasteless but at the end it would carry the sting of death. Something to slowly but inevitably bring about your death.

I'd slip trace amounts in the things you watch and do. Small enough so you think its not poisonous and after awhile I'd hope you wouldn't even notice. I'd try to change the way you thought and hopefully you'd stop reading the Word.

Their vine comes from the vine of Sodom and from the fields of Gomorrah. Their grapes are filled with poison, and their clusters with bitterness.

Their wine is the venom of serpents, the deadly poison of cobras.
- Deuteronomy 32:32-33

Strange attractor

Most of us tend to view information one of two ways.

The first is to simply observe events.

Imagine you are watching the waterwheel in the picture below. Water drips from the yellow bucket into the multi-coloured cups on the wheel and as the cups fill and get heavier they cause the wheel to move one direction and then the other. Back and forth, there seems to be no pattern as the wheel spins chaotically.
If you look closely, you'll see that the wheel is hooked up to a computer that plots its every motion on a graph versus time. This is fairly common, produces the boring graph you see below and is the second way we usually look at information.
But there is another way to look at information and it's a way of looking at it outside of time when velocity and direction are plotted in something called "state space". In state space, the motions of the waterwheel, that once looked random and unpredictable, instead now form a beautiful shape resembling the wings of a butterflyYou may find it hard to believe but these are two graphs made from exactly the same data. When data that may have seemed random or chaotic takes on an ordered shape like this the shape is called a "strange attractor". It's an attractor because the data is attracted to the shape in the sense that it continues to draw the shape over and over and it's strange because... well, no one knows why it would form this shape.

I've often looked at Biblical prophecy like an x/y graph, looking for patterns in the seemingly random happenings of the current events or past history to see if I could get some hint of where we are on the revelation continuum. This is probably at best naive and at worst, arrogant. Since God exists outside of time its likely that the prophetic books can't be read as if they are step by step lists of what is going to happen in sequence. Maybe each state relates in some way to the "next" state in the pattern but not necessarily to what happens next in time.

So many people have tried to predict Christ's return or Armageddon or the rise of Antichrist maybe they've seen some seemingly obvious sign that suggests that they can predict what will happen next or maybe there is some greater pattern that is being formed that we are unaware of or unable to visualize and the best thing for us to do is to just make sure we're awake

Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” - John 8:58

Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you. - Revelation 3:3

Perceptual rendering

‘…Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? 'Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse's?

Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it? Don't try to go confounding the rights and wrongs of things in that way. But it's worthy of the sneaking spirit that robs a live man.' – Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens

Money belongs to this world, Jesus taught this as well. And the dead to this world belong to the next.

And they questioned Him saying , “Teacher, we know that You speak and teach correctly, and You are not partial to any, but teach the way of God in truth. Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

But He detected their trickery and said to them, “Show me a denarius. Whose likeness and inscription does it have?”

And they said, “Caesar’s”

And He said to them, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” – Luke 20:21-25

I picked up a devotional the other day that got me to look at what Jesus said from a totally different perspective. The writer of the devotional asked three simple questions and I was left to extrapolate if Jesus was speaking to people other than the Pharisees? Maybe He was speaking to me too?

Whose image am I made in?

Whose inscription do I bear?

Knowing this what should I do?

So God created man in His own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female He created them. - Genesis 1:27

And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit – Ephesians 1:13