Another holiday passing--MLK. Today is also my sister’s birthday. Thankfully I won’t be spending this one completely alone. At 4:30, I pick up my friend Sheri and head to the Davis on Lincoln to see “The King’s Speech,” getting in “Before 5” for their reduced ticket price.

I just heard last night from Jordan that a remake of “True Grit” is also on the big screen currently. I had no idea, but then I don’t keep up with anything much anymore.

I’m really just going to see “The King’s Speech” because my former roommate Clement (who I sadly said goodbye to one week ago before he set off for his native Catskills to start his first career job as a prosecutor—there goes another friend, sigh!) made me promise him I’d see it.

I guess the movie has a strong message for those of us who work with people who are either deaf or hard of hearing, have low vision and/or are learning-impaired or facing dementia and Alzheimer’s. I also work with stroke victims who have a terrible time enunciating. Then there are my other elderly residents who only speak Spanish or Russian (and not hardly one lick of English!).

One of my favorite movies going back to my teenage years is the sequel to “True Grit”: “Rooster Cogburn” with Katharine Hepburn and John Wayne. A lot of people don’t know that the two acting legends actually had an unexpected romantic attraction that blossomed on the set of the 1975 movie, although it never went any further.

They had a very high regard for each other coming into the movie and it just got bigger and bigger with all the filming in the back-woods mountain forests of Oregon. I’m guessing I would have a hard time not being attracted to John Wayne! As far as their characters’ romance in the movie, it was a keeper, in my opinion, but then I was always a huge Hepburn fan who even once kind of idolized her in my high school/college years.

*****

While I now sit in a coffeehouse in Bucktown off the Kennedy Expressway (a rare treat for me as someone living on the lakefront near the Evanston border), I am going to pick up on my latest series of studies on angels. Look for the next installment tomorrow and I’ll be sure and tell you what I think of the movie . . .

“Those wise men, and they were, were taken serious in Matthew 2; they weren’t just blown off,” says Jordan. “Herod took them seriously, so you know they had a reputation. You try to go in and see the president with some cock-and-bull story like you saw a star in the east and see how far you get! These guys had a status that was accepted because the world’s always looked away from God’s Word. Daniel was 10 times smarter when it came to wisdom and understanding because he trusted God’s Word. But there’s some wisdom involved here; it’s just corrupted.

“In Matthew 2, the wise men say, ‘We have seen his star in the east.’ That’s a reference to Numbers 24 when Balaam talks about the star of the Messiah in connection with the scepter, but you notice they didn’t say, ‘We saw a star.’ They say, ‘We saw HIS star.’ These guys were fixated on stars. But in Amos 5:24-26 you see that they were fixated on a particular star of their own and it’s named. So the idea that He would have a star--they have a star and they’re coming to add Him to the pantheon of the gods who run the stars. All of that goes back to Genesis 6.”

The chapter begins, “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
[2] That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.”

Jordan explains, “The ‘sons of God’ are angels. These celestial creatures, aliens from Planet Earth from outer space, from the realm of the stars (angels are identified as stars in the Bible because of their association with the stars), invade Planet Earth and literally begin to conduct procreation experiments, and they begin to experiment with genetic engineering; biogenetic engineering at an advanced level.

“Verse 4 says ‘there were giants in the earth in those days.’ The experimentation that these celestial creatures engaged in with humans produced abnormal offspring. The Hebrew word that is translated ‘giants’ is the word ‘nephilim.’ You’ll see that through the Scripture—the giants.

“The verse goes on to say that ‘when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’ They became people of extraordinary enhanced intelligence because of the inbreeding; the genetic engineering.

“Now we have no idea how that could have happened until just recently with the discovery of the human genome and DNA and all that kind of stuff. People, 4,000-plus years ago there were aliens on this earth who understood that and experimented with it and practiced it!

“If you look into the history of ancient cultures, consistently there is a storyline of alien, extraterrestrial invasion. In fact, it is becoming common place today. Richard Dawkins, the leading atheist of our day (he took Carl Sagan’s place), has come out publicly suggesting life on Planet Earth perhaps came from an alien invasion and the aliens came here and produced life.

“In the late ’70s there was a big, popular book called ‘The Chariots of the Gods,’ and it postulated that the human race was the direct result of extraterrestrial activity. They made movies about it. One of the ways they argue this is they show you the murals from the caveman, they say, and you see these strange looking creatures that are half-human, half-animal; weird-looking kind of things. You say, ‘Where would they have got that idea?!’ but you begin to realize there was a lot of genetic experimentation going on back there, as in this passage from Genesis 6, and then you begin to realize maybe there’s an explanation for some of it.

“I was looking just the other day on the internet at a mural of a Roswell New Mexico, big, bug-eyed dude supposed to be the alien, and he’s got the little-bitty feet and arms and you think, ‘He’d be worthless!’ It didn’t look like he could even feed himself if he had to. But when you’re trying to genetically engineer things you got to come up with some things like that.

“If you go down to Easter Island in South America . . . or you take the Great Pyramid . . . There are navigational markers in both of those places that, until we sent people into outer space, we didn’t understand. After going to outer space, experts went back and looked at those things and said, ‘They’re spot-on exact!’ People scratch their heads and say, ‘Where did it come from?’

“Listen, the reason these guys were observing the stars thinking they could get wisdom is there WAS a time when some of that stuff WAS going on, and when God abandoned the message He put there in the stars, and man’s ability to read it was corrupted by these birds coming along and doing to the Word of God (that He put up there in the heavens) what people are trying to do to the Word He’s put on the page now, it became worthless.

“I read Wired Magazine, which is sort of the Mad Magazine of the 21^st Century. The January 2011 cover reads something like, ‘Artificial intelligence is here but it’s nothing like we expected. How genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, now a technology in human enhancement, herald the dawn of techno-dimensional spiritual warfare.’

“Every year now there are increasing numbers of scientific gatherings, many sponsored by the government, where trans-human technology is being produced. You see it every now and then; the human cloning kind of thing is just the tip of the iceberg!

“Just like there was a spiritual invasion from the heavenly realm . . . why did those angels come down in Genesis 6 and do that experimentation? They did it because they were trying to corrupt the seed of the woman. And it said that ‘after the Flood there were giants.’ They didn’t give up with the attempt to corrupt the seed line. What happened after the Flood is God said the seed line is not just any woman; now it’s just the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

“No longer did the (fornicating angels) have to go and try to corrupt all of humanity. Now it was just Israel. And the attacks began on Israel’s seed line. And that’s why the giants were in Israel’s land. And when Israel goes into the Promised Land, the giants, or the nephilim, are already there, holding it as ‘the sons of belial’ to prevent the land from being occupied and used by the promised nation to accomplish its promised purpose. God didn’t mind that, though, because Israel needed a Redeemer first, so he had time . . .”