God's Bitcoin Bet

God's Bitcoin Bet

God’s Bitcoin bet is not on the coin. It is on you.

I check the wrong books every day. Gold. Silver. How my stash is doing. My 401k, up or down. Stock portfolio, same question, different screen. I have worked hard to accumulate. My debt is zero. My credit score is off the charts. None of that is hard to see. The number is either there or it is not, and I can refresh it until I feel informed. I have more trouble with the other set of books. Spiritual accounting does not post overnight. There is no quote. I cannot tell, most mornings, whether I am up or down, only that I am still the man who went looking for a number.

That habit has done more damage to my discipleship than most bad talks. If we had all bought Bitcoin early, we would be rich. Fine. Also useless. It taught me to treat a small righteous thing like an early coin.

Plant a prayer. Plant a fast. Plant a refusal. Plant a promise I actually keep. Then sit on it and wait for the chart to do something indecent. The return should be wildly out of proportion to the deposit, and it should arrive on a schedule I can check. Worse, I want it denominated in the wrong currency. I tithe and expect the windows. I fast and expect the lab result. I forgive and expect the other person to come back decent. I keep the commandment and expect the business, the body, the reputation, to mark my obedience to market. Spiritual capital in. Temporal coin out. Same motion as the morning refresh. I am asking the heavens for a quote.

Scripture is not without example here. A mustard seed. A little leaven. Five loaves. Two Fish. A cup of cold water. The widow’s mite. Small inputs are not nothing, and the fruit can be disproportionate. Malachi really does say the windows of heaven, and the devourer rebuked. People in the Gospels really are healed. I am not arguing with that. The lie is not that fruit comes. The lie is the kind of return, the clock I put on it, and the assumption that righteousness is a claim on temporal bid.

Bitcoin’s myth is one early buy, then sit. The gospel is repeated small obedience in weather that does not look like a bull market. Line upon line. Grace for grace. The man with five talents and the man with one are not judged on whether the first deposit did a hundred times. They are judged on whether they did the work. The servant who buried his was not punished for failing to 100x. He was punished for refusing the job. Fear made a theologian out of him. It usually does. I understand him better than I want to. A buried coin at least holds still. I can count it.

Here is the part I kept/keep missing. If God is placing anything like a bet, the bet is not on the coin. The coin does not appreciate into a saint. The bet is on the holder. He is not watching the mite to see if the treasury reprices it. He is watching what the giving does to the woman who dropped it in. He is not betting long on the loaves. He is long on the hands that broke them. Job’s friends ran the other book: spiritual books balanced, therefore temporal books must balance. The whirlwind was not a revised earnings report. My gold does not become a different metal because I looked at it. I can become a different man because I obeyed, and the screen will not show it.

A coin’s gain is mostly someone else deciding it is worth more. The coin does not change. I do not change. If the market reprices it to zero, I am the same man holding the same object. The value never lived in me. It lived in a third party’s willingness to take the other side of the trade. God’s position is the reverse. Spiritual investment has no ticker. The thing being formed is the investor. Obedience, repentance, patience, telling the truth, refusing an idol: these alter capacity, sight, and desire. If nobody notices, the change is still there, because the asset and the owner are the same person. I cannot sell it. A crash cannot separate me from it. “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much” is not a promise that least becomes a press release. It is a statement about the man. That is the position He is holding. It is also the position I cannot refresh.

The counterfeit feels reasonable because sometimes the temporal quote does arrive. Rain falls on the field of a man who prayed. A check clears after a fast. I log it as proof of concept and quietly turn the next prayer into an invoice. Then the quote does not come, and I have only two explanations left: He failed, or I did. Both assume the trade was temporal. Often the investment did exactly what that kind of investment does. It changed the holder. It refused to become a claim on someone else’s bid. I was waiting to be paid in the currency I prefer. He was waiting to see whether I could be trusted with the next ordinary step without the bribe.

Some fruit does leave me. A cup of cold water, and the Lord says the giver shall in no wise lose his reward. A promise kept. A child formed by a house that did not collapse. That looks a little like value transferred to a third party. It is not a price. It is an effect of what I became. The widow’s mite was not valuable because the treasury repriced it. It was valuable because of what the giving confirmed in her. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth. The warning is not that earth is fake. The warning is that I will start serving whichever master is paying me in the coin I can actually see. Zero debt is a real mercy. It is not the accounting that counts.

God does not need my currency because the currency will grow in value. Money, work, compassion, kindness, sacrifice: He asks for them because I will. Alma’s seed does not make me a spectator of my own portfolio. If I do not cast it out by unbelief, it swells, sprouts, and begins to enlighten. The experiment is run on me. The first fruit is not a healthier balance sheet. It is a different man, and I will not get a morning number for him. In the world I will have tribulation. That sentence was not a rounding error.

So the correction is not that small things do not matter, and not that temporal mercies never come. They do. The correction is that righteousness is not an asymmetric bet I place once and then watch, and spiritual capital is not a wire into a temporal account. It is the slow construction of a person who can be trusted with more, and the more is often just another ordinary step, taken without a visible quote. When I have done all those things which are commanded, I am still an unprofitable servant. I have done that which was my duty to do. My 'stash' I can price. The man I am becoming, I mostly cannot. That is not a reason to stop looking. It is a reason to stop confusing the two screens.

His bet is not on the coin. It is on you.

Bit by bit. Not one bit.

Signed 

John  The-Not-So-Beloved

You Can’t Overcome What You Never Meet

 You Can’t Overcome What You Never Meet

Assume for a minute the Covenant Christians have the map right: this mortal stretch is one of the rounds. You are here to be added upon. You are here to overcome something.

If that is true, then the something has to show up. You cannot bury a thing you never met. Opposition is not a glitch in the program. It is the classroom.

Ether 5 COC already said it without the extra vocabulary. He will show you your weakness. He gives men weakness that they may be humble. His grace is sufficient for those who humble themselves and have faith in Him. Then—and only then—He makes weak things become strong. That is not a motivational poster. That is a sequence: shown, humbled, enabled, changed.

Here is the part people like to skip.

Encounter is required. Captivity is not.

You can meet the appetite to be sure, the hunger to be thought spiritual, the reflex that would rather win the argument than come unto Him—and refuse it. Failure is common. It is often useful. It is not the assigned homework. The Prototype was tempted in all points and did not become subject to any of them. Our path includes more falls because we start weaker, not because falling is the curriculum.

Pardon alone will not bury the problem.

If the only result of the Atonement in this round is “you are forgiven again,” the same propensity can walk into the next veil-covered life wearing a different hat. Forgiveness removes the guilt. Overcoming is supposed to remove the dominion. “Bury it eternally so it no more vexes you” is not poetic. It is the difference between a reset and progress.

Pride is a better type than the usual catalog of visible vices, because it hides in the pew and in the remnant meeting alike. It will quote Ether 5 CE while refusing the first move the verse requires: come unto Him so He can show you the weakness.

A life is rarely one clean defect. Fear, family pattern, ambition, and old wounds arrive tangled. We still try to flatten the mess into a single cosmic assignment—“this is the one thing I was sent here to beat”—as if the Lord planted a vice so we could check a box. He doesn’t need to. He uses the clay already on the wheel. And “this is just my assigned weakness this round” is a very convenient sentence. It can become an excuse dressed up as doctrine, which is pride wearing work clothes.

Two questions the rounds-talk has to answer or it collapses.

First: what actually transfers when the veil drops? If memory of the victory is stripped and the next round meets the same appetite as if nothing happened, you did not overcome. You postponed. Something real has to survive—disposition, strength, a sealed change—or the eternal round is just a hamster wheel with better lighting.

Second: is the goal a résumé of conquered vices, or a person who no longer needs the same lesson because the nature that produced the lesson has been altered?

Christ is not collecting trophies. He is making sons and daughters who can stand in His presence without the old claim still barking. Ether 5 COC is not “become impressive after a few rounds.” It is: come, see the weakness, humble yourself, trust Him, and let the weak thing become strong. That is the burial. Not a nicer relationship with the problem. The problem losing its vote.

So the work in this round is not to become interesting. It is not to become experienced. It is to let Him show you the thing, refuse to make peace with its dominion, apply the atonement and the grace until it no longer owns you, and then go on to the next layer instead of circling the same drain.

If that is what a round is for, then stop treating the Atonement like a hall pass and start treating it like the only power that can actually put something in the ground and leave it there.

Signed    John-The-Not-So-Beloved