Watchmen, Not Watchers Part 2

Posted on May 2, 2026 by ehurst

While it’s unlikely that the 144,000 of Revelation 14 are solely responsible as watchmen over the slumbering ruins of spiritual Jerusalem, they are part of the team God addresses in the plural call in Isaiah 40:1-2.

With the historical Restoration of Judah, there were only two tribes returning. Both biblical prophecy and Second Temple literature kept harping on some future time when the whole of Israel will return home. It wasn’t finished until the Messiah shows up. Though He did come as Jesus, it was not as King. That awaits His Second Coming. Thus, there still remains a restoration for the whole nation. As we saw in our study in Galatians, that refers not to the lost Ten Tribes, but to the fullness of the Gentile Elect.

It’s not enough to be born Jewish. Contrary to Talmudic doctrine, it was not even enough to be born as the ruling class of Jews. The issue was not DNA; that was not the basis for being God’s Chosen. Ezekiel continues in the next chapter (34) saying that God would judge between His flocks and the appointed shepherds. He promises to search out His sheep from among the scattered and lost. More to the point, in verse 13 He says He will bring them out of the nations (AKA Gentiles).

And it was Jesus who fed the sheep on God’s behalf. That is, His teaching was their true food, now a common metaphor for teaching and preaching today. Again, Jesus stands in the place of God. All those comments Jesus made about being the Good Shepherd come partly from Ezekiel 34.

Ezekiel comes to the part where God says He will judge between sheep and sheep. Again, in Matthew 25:32 we have Jesus claiming the same role; He will judge who in the flock are sheep and who are goats. Of course, this refers to the Judgment at the Second Coming. He is the Davidic Prince who will rule and reign over His people.

In 34:25, Ezekiel gets to an interesting part: God offers a new covenant of peace. The balance of this chapter is full of phrases echoed in the New Testament. Following Jesus means breaking away from the bad shepherds (Talmudic Jewish leadership). The references to being safe in their own land and no longer a disgrace among the nations are eschatological.

Skip forward a couple of chapters as Ezekiel returns to this covenant of peace (ch. 36). Starting in verse 22, God promises to sprinkle His people clean and give them a new heart, and will put a new spirit within them. Day of Pentecost, anyone? Associated with this is another promise. In the next chapter of Ezekiel (37), we have the Valley of Dry Bones. In verse 11, God mentions the whole house of Israel, the Twelve Tribes. The whole nation must return before the Spirit of God falls on them.

These passages in Ezekiel are quoted throughout the Book of Acts. It’s not just some future millennium as far too many preachers suggest. Remember how we started this study last week? The NT is the best commentary on the OT. Here we see it’s clearly “already but not yet” — both of them. Pop theology about the “not yet” tends to ignore the way the NT cites the “already”.

The passage in Ezekiel 34 is intentionally Edenic. He almost quotes Genesis word for word in places. In our hearts, we are already back in Eden. But the more literal fulfillment comes later. This is why the scribe who recorded the visions of Ezekiel waits until chapter 38 to reveal Gog and Magog (echoed in Revelation 20) as symbols of a tribulation that will still come upon the sheep of God. We receive the earnest, the taste of Eternity first (“already”) in symbolism (in spirit), and the full meal later in our eternal bodies (“not yet”).

Thus, we see where tribulation is always inserted into the story right before the final revelation of all things. It’s that way in the OT and in Revelation. There will be more about this in future lessons.

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Intentional Destruction of America

Posted on April 30, 2026 by ehurst

It’s not as if I recommend you spend the time on this long video of Tucker Carlson interviewing John Kiriakou. They wade through a lot of history that most people never knew, while too many others who did know have forgotten. I want to point out that this kind of in-depth back and forth provoked a lot of my own memories of things I experienced first hand in the military in close proximity to strategic operations.

I’m not saying that my associates in uniform leaked secrets, but half of my friends and acquaintances had very high clearances simply because that’s what kind of people we had where I was stationed. The things they were allowed to talk about still gave tremendous clues to someone who had been to college back in those days, as I had been.

For example, very few average Americans are aware that most of the governments in the Middle East have very short histories. Their citizenry are not real nations, just mixed tribes that were caught in artificially drawn borders. Iran stands out as being quite the opposite, with a history that goes back three millennia. The current government arose from the people; it was not imposed by outsiders. The Iranian feminist on the street in Tehran who last year protested the conservative policies of the mullahs? Today she voluntarily rallies in support of her government against US/Israel.

If there is one government in that region that will stand against all odds, it’s the government of Iran. Wipe out the entire bureaucracy of government and it will be replaced with more of the same. They were Islamic a full millennia before the white people colonized North America. (Largely the same could be said of Turkey, but almost no other country in that region.)

I’ve said quite often here that I’m not a fan of Western Civilization. It’s not an activist hatred, but a passive displeasure over something I know I cannot change. The anti-biblical nature of American culture is very unfortunate; in due time, this culture will pass because God has no vested interest. Human cultures and civilizations come and go. However, the truth of the Bible stands eternally.

But what can we make of the video linked above? Granted, I’m not a big fan of Carlson, but Kiriakou has proven himself reliable and honest over the years. I believe the interview provides evidence that Trump is willingly participating in destroying the West. If you look at all the things he’s done, you can only conclude that it’s quite intentional. I’m not saying it’s his personal plan, but that he is playing along with something that is so acidic and destructive that it will be finished before we know it. Indeed, when it’s all done, the vast majority of people won’t even understand what happened.

Some of Trump’s ideas are quite good. A border fence is a great thing. Mass deportation is a really good idea; it will benefit the American citizens in the long run. The tactics of ICE are not the right way to do it. You could not help but conclude it’s a wanton provocation intentionally designed to develop so much resistance that it stops deportations. Obama did a better job of it. How could anyone not know the current actions would provoke resistance? A good thing is being perverted into the nastiest abuse.

Let’s be clear: People who know more than I do about the way deportations are handled are saying this. They suggest that the best way is to clear out the jails of illegal immigrants first. Take full advantage of federal jurisdictional superiority; get it done quickly. Then, simply target people for arrest here and there, passing them into the same system, to enable a quiet deportation. It’s the big “show of force” actions that generate resistance.

Meanwhile, the same loud-n-proud handling of trade issues is clobbering our historic alliances. We have made enemies of everyone who helped to make this country rich, the English-speaking countries in particular. I agree they are all going down the tubes with their hideous woke oppression of their own people, but that’s none of our business. If their internal policies resulted in breaking off trade and security agreements, let it be their move first. Trump has driven them away with open hostility. Friendship with Israel is not going to make up for the huge losses to our economy.

The linked interview points to several other forms of national suicide our government is pursuing. The people advocating for these things are American citizens, but nobody is doing anything about it. Trump is working with them instead of prosecuting them. Destroying the US is now official government policy.

Trump’s actions in the Persian Gulf have already shut down fuel for most of Europe and many Asian countries. That spells a recession. Because of the petro-dollar, the petroleum market is global. That is, a price rise in one place is a price rise everywhere. The same goes for every product that is directly sourced from petroleum, such as fertilizer. Yes, the US has plenty of petroleum, but that doesn’t keep the prices from rising here when they rise elsewhere. It’s all tied to the dollar itself, which happens to be the primary currency of trade in all other goods, as well.

There’s no escape. If the supply shrinks, as it has with the war on Iran, then the price in US dollars rises — the dollar buys less. If something happens to break that link, the value of the dollar falls substantially more. It won’t be as useful and valuable in other countries. If the link does not break, that recession in other countries using the dollar will follow the dollar home to America, since our economy rests too heavily on imports.

It’s already broken. If the US simply walks away from Iran right now, it will be a year or more for the petroleum-based trade to recover. The whole world will be in recession that whole time. Some trade simply will not recover. If this stand-off continues, the global recession will be deeper and longer. If you think China is a problem now, wait until her economy goes bust and we lose the majority of what we import from her. It’s fragile right now.

The European economy is also tanking. Indeed, Russia will be the biggest winner of all simply by virtue of not having to suffer as much as everyone else.

Certainly, I could be wrong on some of this, but I’m echoing people who know more than I. The only analysis I have contributed to this picture is recognizing by conviction who seems to have a good grip on what’s happening.

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Expectations of Trouble and Recovery

Posted on April 29, 2026 by ehurst

I notice that there are quite a few folks striving to predict where the current trends are going. The problem is that most of them are quite expert at only a few things, and their analysis is restricted to what they know. Worse, far too many of them insist that their perspective is sufficient to explain just about everything. It’s really quite rare to find experts who can address multiple angles on the same problems.

I’m not going to compete with them; I know better than to try. All I can do is share my convictions. It’s one of the few things I honestly believe I understand.

For example, from way back fifteen years ago, my convictions told me that any American attack on Iran would fail. I had a vision that I thought was not literal, but it included equipment smoking on the battlefield and the dead bodies of US troops. According to reports over the past few weeks, that seems to have been more literal than I expected, especially if you count the actions our military took in relation to that lost weapons officer. The US left a couple of large airplanes and several choppers destroyed on the ground there, but no one wants to talk about any dead bodies.

I’ve learned to trust my convictions because of things like that. I could relate plenty more examples, but most of them are too close to me personally, and you wouldn’t be able to see how accurate they have been. That’s the whole point: Your convictions speak to your situation in service to Christ and His Covenant.

Because precious few people in the US are even aware of the Covenant and what it means, we should expect events to be rather random. God is not working closely with events here because none of them are under His covering. He gets more directly involved when it impinges on His plans, but almost nobody in America is worried about His plans (which are always under the Covenant).

Instead, we have the Devil and his allies working away at keeping folks deceived about almost everything. There are multiple agendas pushed by various forces that may or may not mesh in any way. There is no single human agency with a solid grip on what transpires, no single core conspiracy that rules the rest. All of them are chasing false dreams Satan has sold them and none of them will turn out as promised. Yes, some of them will succeed in some measure, but not as they expect. None of them will get what they are really after.

It’s not necessary for me to understand their plotting. I could never have guessed which president would go to war against Iran, much less when, yet here we are. There’s no way I can estimate how, but I’m quite sure the value of the US dollar will tank, and that seems to be rather close. My convictions keep warning me that I need to ensure I have purchased all the things I really need to make it through hard times, because there isn’t much time left.

My convictions say that whatever happens with the Iran War from here on out won’t matter much. It compares nicely to a poisoned trap; the US has tripped it and the damage is done. There’s no antidote. I suppose there could be a beneficial solution, in theory, but there’s no way our government is going to learn from mistakes. That is particularly true of our two major political parties.

I sense that I need to prepare for political chaos. Not just blow up suddenly at some point, but what turmoil we already have will simply continue to get worse. Again, too many smaller groups chasing conflicting agendas, so that there can be no uniting against a common problem. Both major parties are riven with internal feuds.

The economy will continue to degrade slowly for a while yet. It’s too big and complicated to simply break down all at once. More importantly, various states and regions will do better at one thing or another. There are states that have masked mismanagement under massive financial flows, but that’s going to fade. Some of those states will be lucky they don’t break out into civil warfare, but plenty of states will do okay. Given the current level of economic rot, nobody is going to be fat and sassy, but some regions of the US are in much better shape to face the challenges. The biggest issue is that wealth made from knowledge (Big Tech, for example) and financial management (not just banks) will evaporate while actual production of things people use will save a lot of areas.

A couple of states could fracture, but most will remain as they are now. Somewhere out there will arise one or more issues that divide the states from each other. I’m convinced the US will balkanize into regional powers. I honestly doubt that the US will last longer than Trump’s term in office. My convictions don’t say much about why, or who will get the blame, because it won’t matter. What matters is that the US will decentralize, whether officially or simply in practice.

Yes, I still expect Israel to implode and Dispensationalism will virtually die. There will be an exodus from Big Eva. I still expect Microsoft will seriously step on it and lose an awful lot of customers and revenue. Computer hardware for the consumer market will be difficult to get for a while. I hope your current equipment is pretty good and can last a few years.

But it’s not the end; there will be a form of recovery somewhere on the other side. No details, but my convictions say the worst of our troubles will fade again in a few years. But we still have to get there first. Yes, sometimes I mistake what my convictions can tell me. I might read them wrong, but they have never failed me.

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Submission Is Power

Posted on April 26, 2026 by ehurst

Suppose you are asked to enter a decrepit property to help in reclamation. On a structure you encounter a painted pentagram with the goat’s head symbol. Does it spook you? Aside from the possibility that such a symbol might be a marker of criminal activity, does the mere presence of such graffiti make you wary of spiritual powers of Darkness?

If so, you probably have an American mind. A Hebrew mind would not react so. Americans carry a huge burden of superstition about visual symbols. Hebrew minds aren’t visually oriented like that. Rather, a Hebrew mind would think about how silly it was that people imagine there is power in visual representations. Hebrew mind = biblical mind = Christian mind.

Virtually every current symbol for Satan and Satanism derives from recent history. Indeed, the very concept of “Satanism” is quite modern. For the most part, it is simply secularism in disguise. It was built on the desire to mock religion itself by turning everything upside down. Thus, they don’t actually worship at all. They hold rituals as mere mockery, mistaking religious exercise for genuine faith.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of damaged souls who will buy into Satanism as some real spiritual power. Nothing they do can reduce your covenant hedge. There are precautions you might need to learn, but they are rooted not in esoteric knowledge, but simply a biblical lore that has been lost, buried under the rubble of Hellenism. If you embrace biblical mysticism, you will instinctively know that you carry divine power in all situations and fear nothing.

In other words, virtually all of the visual symbols we’ve been told to associate with powers of Darkness are meant to mock faith. That so many fools actually believe that the rituals and symbols mean anything testifies to the idiocy of people in general. Westerners are notorious for superstition, that nagging sense of nameless fear about something they don’t understand. They don’t understand because they ignore the Hebrew lore about the Spiritual Realm (AKA, the Unseen Realm).

At no time in the record of Scripture was Satan granted power through symbols. He was not appointed any symbols. Geometric designs or pagan lore do not empower him. There is no ritual to summon him; that’s all nonsense to deceive fools. Satan has always ruled through proxies because he’s confined to the Abyss. He’s allowed to report to God in person only on certain occasions (see the introduction to Job). He roams the earth, not because he owns any part of the natural world, but because fallen human souls are his turf. In a more clinical sense, he rules over humans whose hearts belong to him. The idea he roams the world is not meant literally.

The ultimate power of Satan in your life is your agreement. You are born under his authority, but the moment you embrace the Covenant, his authority is broken. You are still stuck in his realm, and your mortal flesh still clings to his lies, but he no longer owns you. It’s not a question of spiritual birth, but of your choice to submit to Christ and embrace His Covenant. Spiritual birth only enables it.

Neither the Watchers nor their Nephilim children are interested in manipulating the natural world; they manipulate people. Their sole interest is deceiving humans about what God has provided and promised. At times they have taken advantage of the fundamental flexibility of human reality to give the appearance of great power over natural forces, but the whole point was deceiving humans. The other big lie is to hide that flexibility under the false belief that reality is stable and ultimately knowable by human intellect.

Back to our original scenario: The biggest problem you would face is not some residual power in the symbols, but your own cultural and biblical ignorance paired with a lack of sensitivity to the Holy Spirit’s guidance. There are a lot of people in the world who have yielded to the lies of Satan’s allies, believing all kinds of nonsense, but you don’t have to kneel before such mythology.

Paul said idols — symbols — mean nothing. The only problem with them has always been the captivity of the human heart, never mind to what symbols. It could be the Bronze Serpent, a temple to Cybele, the star of Rompha, etc.; they have no more power than a crucifix that is historically inaccurate. Icons and artifacts have no spiritual power. Your submission to Christ is power.

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Watchmen, Not Watchers Part 1

Posted on April 25, 2026 by ehurst

It’s a two way dependency: The only way to understand the New Testament is to fully embrace the Hebrew mind, the Old Testament imagery and promises of God. The only way to fully understand those promises is to match them up with what happened in the New Testament. Today we are going to dig into another bit of Old Testament imagery and show how it becomes the reality of the New Testament.

As the Wandering in the Wilderness came to a close, Moses sat down with the nation and recounted the Covenant they had received a generation ago at Mount Sinai. That’s the Book of Deuteronomy (“second recounting of the Covenant”). Starting in 4:25, Moses warned them that disobedience to the Covenant would result in being exiled from the land God was about to give them.

Fast forward to Isaiah, who renewed this warning, among other things. He spoke of a time when the nation would be broken down, the City of Jerusalem destroyed, and the people carried away into exile. It was a time in their future. Then, a day would come when the Lord would restore them, speaking of a coming Messiah to lead them into a fresh future.

As the day of exile approached, Jeremiah hammered home the message that they had brought this upon themselves. At that point, the only thing left was for the people to individually choose to submit to God’s will and save their lives to live in exile. At about the same time, Ezekiel prophesied in the Babylonian Exile why these things were happening. He further warned the exiles already there that the Lord would not relent from His declared punishment.

Sure enough, in Ezekiel 33, a refugee escaped from the destruction of Jerusalem to inform Ezekiel that the city had fallen. Just before that happens, Ezekiel had been called on the carpet before God, as it were, given a stern message about staying the course. His commission was to be the watchman on the wall. We are all familiar with the protocol here. He must remain faithful in warning the people, regardless of how they react. If not, he will become accountable for when God’s wrath falls on them. If they refuse to listen, then their sins will be on their own heads. Connected to this timely reminder, Ezekiel is struck dumb for a time. The arrival of the messenger looses his tongue.

We all know that the job of watchman was a metaphor. Ezekiel was in Babylon, not Jerusalem. He was a moral watchman over the message of God to a people already in exile. Their biggest threat was not a literal invasion there under the watchful eye of the Babylonians, but of their own tendency to assume they had God’s favor unconditionally. They forgot what Moses said back in Deuteronomy. Where else does this image of the watchman show up? We need a broader grasp of how this was used in Hebrew lore.

It showed up earlier in Isaiah 40, where the prophet speaks for God, addressing someone who is given the mission to comfort the nation after a storm of divine wrath — they had paid double for their sins. This is one of those places where Isaiah had warned the nation of coming wrath and exile, followed by restoration. Thus, God is telling some agent of His to restore the people to His favor. The city has been destroyed, but God is coming to remedy things. Thus, a herald is commissioned to run through the land telling the people to prepare a welcome for Him. Prepare a path for the coming restoration! He will come as a conquering hero.

Where was that quoted in the NT? John the Baptist (John 1:19-31) was accosted by a commission of Pharisees examining his ministry. They were asking peculiar questions based on their corrupt interpretation of the Scriptures, so John denied being anyone fitting their labels. Instead, he quoted Isaiah 40 about being that herald who was running through the land before the Messiah came, warning everyone to prepare to welcome Him. It wasn’t literal, of course, because Jesus wasn’t expecting road building projects and rest stations along some highway route.

The Pharisees were being obtuse about this, but they should have realized John the Baptist was calling himself the forerunner of the Messiah. The Messiah was coming to restore the nation and reign as King. Not in a literal sense, because the Covenant was slated for translation to a spiritual kingdom.

But notice that God’s voice in the first few verses of Isaiah 40 is addressing someone in a Hebrew plural, something that doesn’t come across in most English translations. He’s calling out to some persons watching over the ruins of the City of Jerusalem. That could not be human watchmen — it was ruins — but spiritual beings guarding a spiritual heritage for renewal. It’s a Divine Council scene. That would be more obvious in Isaiah 6, where the prophet is called before God’s divine courts. There would be the divine host and all the heavenly staff of God present.

And while this image in Isaiah 40 includes the idea of a divine herald running over the mountain tops, it is more bluntly stated in those terms in Isaiah 52. John the Baptist was in verse 7 there. And in that next verse, we see the divine watchmen again. They celebrate to see John the Baptist coming to prepare the way for Jesus. And then comes Isaiah’s Suffering Servant messages shortly after that.

We can find other references to human watchmen in the OT: Micah 7:4, Jeremiah 31:6 and 51:12. The symbol is more important than the historical instance in each case. They represent the role over the actual figures. It was not merely John the Baptist who filled this role; the ultimate use of such symbols is in the Book of Revelation 14:1-4. It’s a case of “already, but not yet”.

Who has been standing ready, “watchmen” waiting for the final Day of Christ’s ascension to His Throne? The Apostle John describes 144,000 male virgins — both the numbers and the virginity are symbols. These are not mere humans, but people who have “endured to the end”. That image of enduring and passing on into an eternal form is echoed in lots of NT passages. This is where we remind ourselves that in Eternity, humans restored to their eternal form will displace the rebellious Divine Council. This hoard of male virgins are celebrating the same thing Isaiah 52 prophesies.

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Two Images

Posted on April 21, 2026 by ehurst

In the past, I used the terms “quantum reasoning” and “quantum logic” to refer to a process of breaking down our assumptions to the lowest level possible. What’s the smallest quantum of thinking? What are the constituent elements of awareness? And how did we get where we are today? How is this different from where people were in some previous era, in some other land? What do we take for granted today that is different from other contexts?

Further, the process of questioning such things must account for different levels of recognition. Can we see reality on different levels when we seek to evaluate a thing as good or bad? This becomes an issue because westerners in particular are really very good at seeing the needs of the individual, but are exceedingly poor at accepting responsibility for a wider community. Everything is measured in terms of the individual. Thus, western minds have virtually no concept of broader common welfare; it’s subconsciously redefined in terms of the individual. The concern for benefit to any aggregate is completely absent in western reasoning.

The reason for this peculiar blindness is the singularity of western heritage against every other civilization or heritage in human history: All things are purely a matter of cerebral evaluation. The intellect is intractably self-interested. You cannot use intellect to evaluate a reform for the intellect. The intellect presumes itself to be god. If the intellect is your highest faculty, you cannot make the thing itself morally responsible.

Every other civilization and culture in the world throughout human history has assumed the existence of a higher faculty of awareness that fed into the the intellect, but was not a part of the intellect. Thus, it was assumed human nature could include an awareness of higher moral considerations that might trump the self-interest of the intellect. The West flatly denies this. Thus, the development of this higher faculty is severely stunted among westerners. It becomes a major endeavor to simply wedge open a space for this faculty in western minds, since the very notion is treated with hostility and derision.

This is where we begin talking about the heart as a separate faculty of consciousness. The problem is the serious deficit in awareness westerners bring to the Bible. The Bible arises from a heart-led culture with little trust in the human brain. Even very serious scholars in the field of Biblical Studies can spend their entire career ignorant of this.

And this is part of why western streams of Christian religion are so utterly foreign to the Scripture. The reflexive western promotion of the individual forces religion to take a false path away from the entire foundation of biblical faith. The western definition of “faith” is merely a matter of individual cerebral consideration. In the Bible, faith is an exercise rooted in the heart.

But for westerners, the heart is reduced to a repository of sentiment, tradition, social conditioning, etc. This makes it inferior to the mind. In the Bible, the mind is part of the fallen flesh, while the heart is the only faculty capable of connecting to the Holy Spirit. In the Bible, if you do not submit and commit to the Lord from your heart, He simply will not communicate with you directly. Faith is not data, but a personal communion with a transcendent Being.

American Christian religion and institutions are obsessed with public fame, which in turn requires measurable accomplishments. It’s all about bodies, buildings and budgets. In the Bible, the concept of “church” was a spiritual family that simply existed as a family. There was nothing to accomplish, no measurable goals. The whole point was organic, a question of the nature of development for a living entity.

The two images are radically different.

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My Publications

Posted on April 18, 2026 by ehurst

At the request of a member of our community, I’ve posted a new tab at the top of the blog listing where readers can find some of my books and articles already published. There’s quite a few titles hosted on the blog here.

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Longing to Breathe Freely

Posted on April 17, 2026 by ehurst

Then Jesus came up and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20 NET)

What distinguishes the covenant life of following Christ from any other lifestyle? Could we propose a biblical model of culture and social behavior that separates believers from non-believers? There must be something we identify that transcends human culture so that, no matter where Christ’s followers are found, they can identify each other across those human boundaries. We need to work on identifying believers within every cultural context.

I’m convinced that we haven’t done that work. To be more specific, we haven’t bothered to identify the difference between American culture and eternal priorities so that we can ditch things that don’t belong. We keep reading American mores back into the Bible.

I’ve done my best to point out the difference between the West and the ancient Hebrew in terms of epistemology (assumptions about the nature of reality). It’s been a major element of my ministry since the 1970s. It seems to me that only in the past two decades has this effort edged its way into the mainstream consciousness of western Christians. Whatever study there was of such things, the scholarship behind this effort was virtually hidden in obscurity for a long time. Out of the hundreds of ministries that touched my life up through the 1970s, only one preacher brought it to my attention.

The point was never to insist that we must embrace the totality of the ancient Hebrew lifestyle. Any fool can ape another. Humans already have a major problem with that. The real question is to see through the manifestation and recognize the fundamental priorities that shaped ancient Hebrew life within their own context. Given the same divine moral priorities, what would our lives look like in our current context? I’m quite certain we are not even close.

Maybe you are aware that American-based missionaries have struggled with this every time they are sent into a new culture outside the US. There has been plenty of open condemnation of Americans carrying their social habits and expectations as if it were the gospel message of Christ. It’s more of exporting American values than actually sharing the biblical Savior. Our missionaries ended up promoting something that struck the locals as immoral, and too often, rebellious against the government. It’s a major element in the hostility some governments have to Christian missions.

Let me cite a small example. Have you ever heard of the “American lean”? Americans are known for leaning against fixtures, something virtually no other country does. It’s generally regarded as lazy and disrespectful. The CIA has to teach their agents not to do that to avoid standing out.

From what I understand, Christian missionary agencies are very uneven in the level of preparation they offer to their missionaries in training. It’s bad enough that we already have a vast smorgasbord of theologies to muddy the message, but too many missionaries carry their cultural expectations as if such were the gospel. Even the most popular Christian musicians offer songs in which western democratic theories of government are mistaken for the biblical doctrine. And somehow it’s not “worship” if the audience doesn’t act like rabid fans at an American football game.

How many people in other countries have we taught to regard “Christian” as equivalent to America’s debased, materialistic and immoral lifestyle? How much resistance to the gospel message is the product of American missionary activities?

Let me propose something: Christian discipleship could use a measure of CIA type training. Who doesn’t realize that joining the CIA requires one to cease being a mainstream American? In order to do what the CIA does, people must be internally divorced from their social identity, making it just a cover for use in some contexts. Instead, they become part of a clandestine world nobody outside can understand. Of course, they do everything possible to ensure nobody understands.

That would be one of the features that we don’t need. The gospel opens us to a realm the world cannot understand. We don’t want to hide it, but the Devil blinds his captives to the truth Christ shines into our souls. Still, the mission of sharing the gospel does not necessarily require that we stick to simply one cultural style of presentation.

In New Testament times, making a public proclamation in the local public square was the only way to spread something new. The average person might not be able to read, and printing tracts and pamphlets was all but impossible, not to mention awfully expensive. But there were a few parts of the Roman Empire where preaching in the public square would get you killed. In those places the Apostles were careful about how they went about the mission.

Given how much trash has been pasted on the gospel message of Christ, I would suggest we need to invest a lot more time and effort in developing a different approach to missions. To avoid having to deal with false assumptions about our message, we need to come up with a stronger non-verbal expression of our faith. The only path left to us is clandestine behavior patterns. The one thing we can best cadge from the CIA’s operations is the firm intention of changing how the locals perceive our message, while avoiding making it a target for reaction.

How do you imagine Christians operated during Nero’s persecution? Our own American government is edging closer to that kind of persecution of a biblical covenant faith in Christ, never mind governments around the world. Like the CIA, we should be wholly committed to the mission, allowing only the priorities of the gospel itself to limit what we are willing to do. The resistance to the message serves only to shape how we operate in pushing that message into the awareness of the people.

We are spying out Satan’s turf, seeking to undermine his authority over people who long to breathe free in the Holy Spirit.

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Closing Books Account

Posted on April 15, 2026 by ehurst

For years I published my books on Smashwords and offered them to the world free of charge. It worked rather well and I was pleased with the situation. A few years ago, Smashwords was absorbed by Draft2Digital. This brought a lot of changes, most of which I did not like. However, I kept the new account as things kept getting more onerous. This week, they announced a new mandatory fee structure. Since my books are all free and don’t make any money, I would be required to pay money just to keep the account open.

I’m not willing to do that. It’s not about the money itself, but the anti-user attitude of the management. It’s the standard cut-throat corporate nonsense we have come to expect from the world.

So far as I know, this will not affect the books I have on Amazon, since that’s handled differently. As always, anyone who wants a copy of any books I have written can simply ask me and I’ll email a copy in ebook, PDF or MS Word format.

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Privileges, Not Rights

Posted on April 14, 2026 by ehurst

Whenever I write about Divine Election, I always get questions. The majority of the time, they are questions asked from an American point of view, with all the bogus nonsense about human rights, etc. The ancient Hebrews never thought in terms of rights, nor did God ever talk about them.

It would be easy to get lost in a host of Bible passages that appear to address the idea that anyone who decides to follow Jesus can find redemption. Way too many people read those passages in the English language with a legalistic eye. We’ve been over that a thousand times. If you are going to debate like a Pharisee, I really don’t need to answer you. Unlike the situation in Jesus’ day, today’s Churchian Pharisees have no legal authority over me. I can answer if I feel moved, but I will start with a rejection of legalism.

In His ineffable wisdom, the Father decided He wanted a garden attached to His divine courts. He chose to make a creature specifically designed to be His gardeners. These people were shaped to project His character onto the garden and compel it to conform; we are His imagers. They were eternal creatures, though not like the rest of His divine staff. Still, He wanted His staff to honor these people in certain ways. It provoked a revolt in portions of His staff.

We could hardly understand much more than that from where we are today, but we are permitted glimpses here and there. The point is that in our position right now, we aren’t really that important. We will be eventually, once we are restored to the Eternal Garden, but as mortals we aren’t that significant. Thus, in the process of setting things up they way they are now, it made sense to God that some humans were eternal creatures in a mortal envelope, while there were also a large number of empty envelopes running around. It’s part of the situation in which God shows His righteousness and glory over the opposition on His staff.

There is no explanation for this that we can comprehend. We simply must accept it. We aren’t supposed to worry about the empty souls around us. As previously explained, we can treat them with the same compassion as we do other mortal creatures with which God populated our world. Indeed, it’s our default approach to everyone until someone starts responding like they have an eternal spirit somewhere inside.

When Jesus opened the doors of the Covenant to all mankind, He raised one caveat: We must take up our own crosses to follow Him. It’s tantamount to a death sentence on our fleshly natures. We must regard our mortal envelopes as justly deserving death as soon on as it suits God. Since it is doomed, we strive to pay no attention to what the flesh wants in any situation.

If the fleshly nature is all you have, you won’t be able to make that choice. You won’t even be able to understand it. However, you may have sufficient good sense to somehow believe in Jesus, at least on a surface level. You may arrive at that place through intellect, emotions, etc. It looks good to you, so you take it. But without a spirit, you’ll struggle to make sense of some parts of it. You’ll do quite well with what looks like a law code and commitment to an ideal.

But the Elect with their eternal awareness should be able to recognize these folks who believe the message as they understand it, but lack the power of the Holy Spirit. You make a place for them because you never know when they might awaken spiritually. Meanwhile, you shouldn’t allow them to take substantial leadership of the covenant faith community.

Unfortunately, over the past two millennia, those fleshly believers have seized control and created a broad system of professional leadership in the flesh, but are simply unable to make spiritual development mandatory. They don’t even understand it, using the words to mean something largely cerebral in nature. Thus, we have the situation we see today in the mainstream religious organizations. The whole concept of the Covenant has become a bit of a mystery, and is treated like an unpopular option at the religion buffet.

If you feel led to attend a regular church, you’ll need to humor the leadership in their dire confusion about how it’s all supposed to work.

Can the fleshly people find peace with God? Not really. They absorb the blessings of that peace by hanging out with covenant folk. They can live under the covering of Christ’s shalom and offer a useful level of allegiance to the Elect leadership. But they are allies, not family. Still, we don’t get to inspect anyone’s spirit, so we have only various clues and the power of conviction to decide who we should treat as divine family versus those we regard as something else — allies, machinery, background, or enemies.

Thus, it’s not a question of what they really are — we cannot know — but what role they play in any given context. Plenty of Elect will fail to rise to the privileges of covenant family. By the same token, a handful of fleshly creatures may hang out with a genuine covenant family.

The concept of fairness has no place in these things. That’s an artificial ideal unique to the West. God has always played favorites (Exodus 33:19). Every ruler across the entire ANE was expected to do the same, as was the same with everyone who filled the shepherd’s role on any level. The only reason the question of something we take as fairness shows up at all in Scripture is because the authority figure may tend to favor someone God doesn’t like so much. No one was condemned for playing favorites, just for favoring the wrong person.

God gets to decide who is His family and who isn’t. He’s not telling us about other people, but He certainly tells us individually when we are family. Isn’t it such a huge privilege to be included? we are awestruck by His mercy and grace on us.

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