Hidden Church History

Posted on June 14, 2026 by ehurst

Here’s a little church history you won’t learn from any books or courses.

John was the last of the original Twelve Apostles. We believe he wrote his Revelation while in his 90s, right at the end of the First Century AD. One of the themes you can pick up when reading between the lines of his contributions to the New Testament is his disappointment that there were so few believers who were even aware of the uniquely Hebraic outlook of the Bible and the gospel message. He seems to lament the loss of that orientation as the churches are overtaken with Greek rationalism and the Judaizers. I’m convinced he saw it coming.

At the same time, the middle eastern churches were overtaken with a wild mythology that was already a problem in some of the Second Temple Jewish literature. The way so many of those branches of early churches embraced non-canonical books as part of their Bibles says a lot about their ability to discern the difference. They lacked the sobriety of the first disciples, becoming a sucker for Jewish fantasies. There was more than one kind of Judaizer at work destroying Christian doctrine.

While we cannot blame the Judaizers alone, they contributed to the early churches losing track of the broader mission of Christ and how the Covenant is supposed to work. The deep historical understanding of the Divine Council Worldview (AKA, thesis of the Unseen Realm) was lost rather quickly. We have no way of knowing why God would allow this to happen.

Nor is it really obvious why the tail end of the Boomer generation is the time God has appointed the restoration of that worldview. Suddenly, the long decades of labor by men like Michael Heiser has caught fire with a new generation of scholars and pastors.

For nearly two millennia, the church has been captured by a western focus on individual spiritual redemption, as if this was the whole gospel message. Today, in mainstream churches of all brands, the sole concern in actual practice is individual self-development. Whether it’s bluntly taught or not, most church people are convinced by the church atmosphere that personal moral improvement is going far enough to get to Heaven. You can get them to talk about the Kingdom of God and loyalty to Christ, but they seem to have no idea what that really means. They are especially ignorant of what “covenant” means.

Our society and most churches have this false assumption that humanity is born morally neutral. No, the Bible flatly says we are born mortal, and this means captive of Satan under sin. The Devil has you from birth; you are doomed. Only God can breathe life into your dead spirit, making a member of His family household. Everyone believes they can find a path that keeps them from the Devil’s chains.

All they know about is the Fall in the Garden of Eden (if that much). Only a tiny few today understand what was common knowledge among Second Temple rabbis: The Watchers in Genesis 6 crossing the boundary was a rebellion, giving birth to the Nephilim, today’s demons. This resulted in the corruption and depravity of the human race. Further, another rebellion was the failure of the Divine Council to faithfully carry out their duties as God’s satraps over the seventy nations listed in Genesis when God decided to parcel them out to His staff at the Tower of Babel. While those divine satraps are individuals with their own personal agendas, the net result of their shepherding of the nations was that God warned them they had failed their commission and they would eventually be destroyed like mortals.

Very few believers today understand that the Cross didn’t remedy only the Fall in the Garden, but has empowered us to go back and claim God’s Elect from the nations He had doled out to His staff, and that our service in building His Kingdom keeps the Nephilim in check. Believers today have almost no clue about the Covenant of Christ as a covenant. They don’t know what a covenant does and what comes with it. Even among those who get the Divine Council Worldview, we still have precious few who think of the Covenant as a covenant, a change of allegiance from the Devil to Christ.

When we obey that covenant by coming together as real family and loving each other despite all the fleshly reasons not to, we are breaking the bondage of the Enemy over this world. Our love for each other is spiritual conquest. It’s not our speculative theology or organizing, not our budgets and buildings, that do anything at all to weaken the Devil’s grip on our lives. It’s only when we conquer the fleshly nature, which inhibits the love of Christ in our hearts, that we begin to oust the Enemy forces in our world.

You can’t get the Kingdom simply by getting your own individual life morally straight. The only way you can bring the Kingdom to life is by getting involved in the lives of other believers. Help them wrestle their own demons; stabilize their lives by embracing the local covenant family; help them handle bad finances, etc. Build that bond of love with others, a love that defies secular law and society.

I can’t help but believe that the reason this has been unleashed at this time in human history is because we are about the enter a time of tribulation when nothing else will work. Without that vision of cosmic warfare against spiritual forces of great power, we cannot begin to understand the mission. Yes, there is something eschatological about this, though I’m in no position to claim that we are entering the End Times. We were flatly warned in Scripture not to get hung up on that. Rather, we must realize that things are going to get very ugly; we cannot hold our witness together without holding it together with others of like conviction.

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Ezekiel’s Final Vision

Posted on June 13, 2026 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 156: Ezekiel 40-48 Part 1 and Naked Bible 157: Ezekiel 40-48 Part 2

If you think of Ezekiel’s vision in chapters 40-48 as something more or less literal, you will miss the point entirely.

Heiser punches another big hole in Dispensationalism here. It’s common to see Ezekiel’s final vision (40-48) as a depiction of the Millennium. That’s simply not possible. Given a genuine knowledge of Hebrew prophetic literary conventions, the “millennium” refers to the long period between Christ’s Ascension and His Second Coming. Heiser also ties this passage to Revelation 20, pointing out how it’s the same event. Revelation is written in cycles, not chronological sequences. What’s in Revelation 19 does not come before Revelation 20 in chronology. Further, there is no literal millennium anywhere in Hebrew thinking.

In his previous podcasts on Ezekiel 38-39, Heiser had already shot down the idea that Gog/Magog had anything to do with Russia; it referred to people living in modern Turkey. Heiser talked about how the Valley of Dry Bones (AKA Travelers’ Valley) refers to some place on the eastern ridge above the Dead Sea. It’s the same place fire and brimstone fell on a previous occasion (Sodom and Gomorrah). The entire eastern ridge above the Jordan Valley all the way up to Mount Hermon is the homeland of the Watchers and the Nephilim clans, but the valley with the bones is a place also dotted with various shrines for death cults. It will become the graveyard of Satan’s army. It won’t be much of a battle, and nobody who understands Hebrew traditions could possibly take it literally.

The New Earth Kingdom is after the Second Coming, not some alleged Rapture followed by a literal Millennium. That’s an interpretive system, not the Bible. There will be no new Temple built in Jerusalem. Ezekiel’s description here cannot be taken literally. Why not?

1. The proportions are unbalanced, with the doors being half the length of the room inside.

2. There is no height indicated, no roof.

3. There are no instructions on building this thing, only measurements of something God Himself builds (for Eternity, not some resurrected Jewish kingdom). The whole point of this vision is to record symbols that would convict Ezekiel’s listeners of their sins.

4. There are no furnishings for a priestly offering, no place to wash, etc. The water flowing out of the Temple is a mere trickle at this point. This cannot represent a restored OT Temple with sacrifices.

5. After the Cross, there can be no purpose in a sacrificial system in a Millennium. Either Christ paid it all or He accomplished nothing.

Reminder: The OT sacrificial system was never about covering individual sins in the first place. Quoting Heiser —

People think this is about getting moral forgiveness and having your sins wiped away as an individual. In other words, they’re superimposing the talk about Jesus onto the Old Testament sacrificial system. If you have listened to our series on Leviticus, you know that doesn’t work because that’s not actually what Leviticus says ninety-nine percent of the time. The sacrifices are really about purifying objects and purifying sacred space and that sort of thing.

God would not commission a restoration of the sacrificial system since that pointed to Jesus, who would have already finished His redemptive work before any alleged Millennium. We are the sacred space; we are His Temple until He Returns. We are also the New Priesthood under Christ, who is High Priest under the Order of Melchizedek. Ezekiel does not envision a false Temple to a false worship.

6. You cannot separate the redrawn tribal boundaries from the Temple, and those tribal allotments in Ezekiel are clearly not literal. Indeed, the territory is considerably smaller than what David and Solomon held. Instead, it looks more like what Joshua conquered, minus everything on the East Bank of the Jordan, which land was never part of the promise in the first place.

7. The image of the Prince is not the Messiah if we take this literally. In Ezekiel’s vision, the Prince must offer sacrifices for himself; Christ is the Final Sacrifice. In the case of this Prince, there are places off-limits to him in the Temple. He also has a wife and children. There are restrictions on his land holdings, and he has no political authority to “rule the nations with a rod of iron” as the Messiah does. Making this figure the Messiah requires you start from an entirely different thought process, trying to see things the way the exiled Hebrew nobles would have, way before the New Testament imagery.

Saying something like this is a symbol does not mean, “It won’t happen.” It means what is coming cannot be understood in clinical terms. If you wipe away the awful nonsense of Dispensationalism and return to a genuine Hebrew Second Temple outlook, Ezekiel’s description says something totally different. The key here is restoring Eden, not some political-military state on the current earth.

Ezekiel’s verbiage here is the same as the ancient cosmic Mountain of God, the place where He resides and from which He reigns over Creation. The Garden of Eden is attached to that as His private space away from the courts. Ezekiel’s map of the future land of Israel is geographically impossible with earth as it now exists. The whole thing is realigned so that Jerusalem stands in the center of the territory, not in the south where the site stands now.

Ezekiel echoes the language of the global navel, the center of the universe, etc. The altar is at the “bosom of the earth” (literal Hebrew translation of 43:13). Nobody takes that literally. Instead, the description of the Tabernacle and Solomon’s Temple, as well as the construction of each, echoed the language of Creation. That’s not apparent to us from English translations, but Heiser digs into the details to show how this is all tied together in symbolism that would be obvious to an ancient Hebrew mind. Don’t think about a physical structure, but metaphorical construct that speaks the language of Edenic paradise.

As part of this symbolism, Ezekiel’s temple is loaded with images of the Jubilee. Everything about his vision is in terms of 25 (half-jubilee) and 50, the Year of Liberation. The whole vision in chapter 40 opens with a notice of the date: 571 BC, the 25th year of captivity (half-jubilee), on the tenth of the first month.

Side note: Israel had used two calendars at the same time for several centuries. The original was the “religious calendar” (Nisan Year, first month at Passover) starting in the spring. However, King David was crowned the first of Tishri. His son Solomon began organizing his reign under a “civil calendar” (Tishri Year, seventh month). When the Kingdom split, Israel went back to Nisan Year calendar, while Judah retained the Tishri Year. Ezekiel was using the Tishri Year calendar, so his first month was Tishri, and the tenth day was the Day of Atonement.

The only other mention of a tenth day in the Torah was the start of a Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25:8ff). Ezekiel is giving us a clue here — God is hitting the reset button. The numerology here would be kindled in a Hebrew mind, starting to watch for the Passover Lamb. Everything was here except the Lamb. That Jesus was born on the first of Tishri matters a lot here; we get that from Revelation 12. But Ezekiel’s audience didn’t know that yet, so we realize that it’s left hanging intentionally. The idea was to pre-load the Hebrew awareness of a Messiah yet to come on King David’s Coronation Day (in the ANE, this was a king’s “birthday”).

It was left hanging intentionally because God was keeping the Messiah a secret from His rebellious staff. Paul said, “If they had known…” Jesus had to explain it repeatedly, so it wasn’t obvious, but the existence of this huge blank spot in Ezekiel’s message was meaningful in itself. Heiser goes on to mention other obscurities, but you get the point. Even the dimensions of Ezekiel’s new map of Israel is offered in multiples of 50. The coming of the Messiah would be the Final Jubilee.

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So That’s What It Was!

Posted on June 11, 2026 by ehurst

Over the years I’ve often felt a strong move of the Spirit. In my youth, it was often quite confusing; no one around me could give a reliable answer. Frankly, most adults dismissed it as my own emotions. In the past three decades, I discovered that a few others I knew were getting the same sensations surging through their hearts, but not from their bodies. One person mentioned “raging convictions” that something was afoot in the Spirit Realm.

Looking back, I realize that some of those moments were answered by discoveries regarding what was in the Bible. For the longest time, I never put two-n-two together, but something as simple as a fresh revelation from the Lord to guide my understanding of His work in me was the target of those strong convictions that something was about to happen. I was too busy expecting external events.

Thus, in the past year or so one of the strongest ongoing storms in my spirit was answered by discovering Michael Heiser and his vast work in recovering the Hebrew intellectual traditions. It was something I had prayed about for years, longing for a better understanding. It’s not as if I have arrived at some terminal or end-point. Rather, it was simply a major shift in my expectations.

One of Heiser’s students has been Dale Moreau. While I sadly note that he tends to restrict his material behind a paywall on Substack, sometimes he drops hints for free. Try this one. You’ll get a prompt asking you to subscribe, but it’s not mandatory to read the article. You can read the first half of this “note” (an informal post) to learn how the symbol of “bright morning star” points to an official role in God’s divine court. Moreau traces several passages to clarify the issue.

The second half is him advertising about the longer version coming out in the fall. I can’t afford his paid subscription service, so it’s not a big deal if you ignore it. Take a look at what he does release for free. It’s generally more coherent to lay readers than Heiser’s stuff.

Keeping track of what is going on in the Unseen Realm — to the degree God allows us — will change your whole attitude about this life. It will give you a better place to anchor your faith and endurance in the coming tribulation.

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Not Bound by Lies

Posted on June 6, 2026 by ehurst

Re: Philosopher’s Corner (Jack Bowers) — “The Drama Behind the Darkness”

Jack Bowers addresses a frequent objection people make to the gospel message:

Ask almost anyone why they find it difficult to believe in God, and the answer will come quickly: just look at the world. Childhood cancer. Genocide. The slow disintegration of a mind swallowed by dementia. If a God of unlimited power and perfect goodness exists, why does evil not merely persist but often appear to go unchecked, senseless, and grotesque?

The problem is that Bowers tends to be pedantic. Oops; I said that the way he would. Bowers uses academic language far too much and too often, alienating a lay audience. He uses too many words and, if you ask me, only touches on one kind of answer. That’s what “pedantic” means. The quoted sample above is pretty tame, but the rest of his post is too much saying too little.

Basically, he says that if you understand the Divine Council Worldview (thesis of the Unseen Realm) you should have no trouble recognizing the problem with the common secular answer. There’s a lot of players in the question besides humans and God. They have free will, they have power over us, and God has said they are doing a bad job of managing humanity.

He does raise the interesting issue that an expectation that God be accountable to human reasoning is way off the mark. Referring to the Book of Job, he points out that this is morally childish. God is under no obligation to satisfy our curiosity about what He’s up to.

This opens the door to something that he apparently does not address: Human existence is supposed to suck. We’ve been saying that for decades. Living in a mortal form is inherently awful and we should expect it so. This is not what God had in mind when He made us. We belong in a wholly different situation, but this is where we are now.

Thus, the only proper question is, “How do we get where we are supposed to be?” The answer is simple: die.

Of course, that answer is both symbolic and literal. It’s the symbolism part that most people refuse to discuss in this context. We are obliged to separate our conscious awareness from the fleshly nature. You must recognize that your mortal flesh is not the real you, but a burden you must drag around until you have accomplished the purpose God had in putting you here. You must learn to disregard the childish demands of the flesh and strive to live like someone who belongs in Eden.

And after a lifetime of fighting that war, your reward is to finally ditch that fleshly nature and go to a resting place in the afterlife until God is finished with the rest of the human race.

One thing you need to remember is that most people who complain about the apparent contradiction between our claims of a good God with unlimited power versus His apparent lack of concern for human suffering is that we aren’t confined by their definition of God. If they have the wrong concept of Him, we should point that out. No one can justify demanding that we discuss a God that doesn’t exist.

It’s simple; tell them, “You have the wrong ideas about God.” Proceed to explain the truth about who He is and what He does. You aren’t bound by some other “Christian” declaration about Him. We stand outside the church mainstream.

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The Role of Satan

Posted on June 4, 2026 by ehurst

The word “Satan” comes directly from Hebrew. However, it never appears by itself. The word is always prefixed to indicate it is a title — ha-satan, “the Satan”. The word is typically used to indicate a role, a position in a royal court. As we have taught in our community for several years, the role of the Satan is some ruler’s Black Hat, the Left-hand Man, the Accuser.

His job is to catch people who manifest disloyalty, to accuse them before the ruler, and he usually runs the jail, as well (Jailer). Yes, it’s easy for someone in that position to become corrupt. They could simply decide this or that fellow would make a good slave for his profit, so he could make up an accusation and provide fake evidence. Once in custody, the victim must serve a term of slavery from which the Jailer profits.

Among human rulers, it was common to give that role to the most powerful opposition figure. At other times, it was a position signifying demotion or punishment for offending the ruler. Some of these jailers were themselves required to live in their own jail.

This is the historic meaning of the Hebrew word ha-satan. It’s a specific role with certain powers and authority, making them accountable under the feudal system of government. I realize that in the English language, the word is used as a name, but that’s not how the Bible uses it. We need to get that part right.

We tend to use “the Devil” to indicate a specific person who started out as God’s Chief Bodyguard (cherub) and was demoted to the role of the Satan. He was put in a prison and became accountable for prisoners delivered into his domain. That would include the Watchers in permanent detention, the Nephilim who come and go, and every human born in mortal flesh except the Elect. God consigned them to confinement in the Devil’s hands. There’s nothing to prevent God having more than one Satan. Not every mention of a Satan points back to the Devil specifically, but points to a role, an office held by some elohim level creature.

Thus, for example, the Satan who shows up in Job may not have been the Devil. The identity of the Accuser doesn’t matter, only the nature of his mission. The prologue and epilogue are in drama format, meaning you cannot take the scene literally. The kind of conversation God has with His staff in Heaven would not be in any human tongue, and the scene as described only approximates the nature of the exchange. That’s how a Hebrew would read it. The whole point was the accusation and the results.

By the way, at no time did God explain to any human what was happening to Job. There is no answer to his questions. What mattered was his faithfulness, which God commended. Job’s buddies were condemned for trying to give a human explanation for something they could not comprehend in the first place. The explanation is that stuff happens in God’s courts and it affects us, but it seldom makes sense from what we can see down here. Get used to it.

When we see the title “Satan” in the Bible, focus on his role. Don’t get tangled up assuming it just has to be the Devil. The name “Lucifer” is also just a title or nickname, a mistaken translation of Scripture into Latin. Learn to recognize how the Hebrew language was written and how the Hebrews would read it, what they would make of it.

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Racism and Context

Posted on June 2, 2026 by ehurst

A cosmopolitan human population is not a society. It is multiple societies forced into a single geographic area. The division into tribes is automatic. People are social creatures but with limitations. If the peculiar hopes and needs for any one tribe is infringed or neglected, gang warfare is inevitable. No power on earth can stop it. It is typically expressed as turf wars, drawing boundaries that those in power sought to deny.

This is not a Caucasian thing. If anything, white people tend to try harder to find a compromise than almost any other racial identity. This is a fact you can suss out for yourself if you bothered to try. Northern Europeans were the quickest to accept wholesale intermarriage with other races. For only a very brief period in American history did we see a rollback of that ancient attitude. That rollback is virtually non-existent today.

Meanwhile, every other major ethnic identity residing in the US has been encouraged to keep their tribal instincts. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is that whites are officially discouraged from doing the same thing. Human nature is inherently racist. It’s there for a reason that has nothing to do with the Fall. The animal world is racist; animals in the wild recognize the differences between human races and have expressed preferences in some situations.

Humans are hard-wired to recognize the differences between tribes. We should invest time learning what it is supposed to do. God put it there; ask Him why He did that. Part of the answer will have something to do with how we should live as humans until Christ returns.

Racial consciousness need not lead to hatred. An awful lot of church folks have been chattering lately about Exodus 23:9 or 22:21 and taking it out of context. Israel was commanded not to oppress or be hostile to foreigners. The concept of “foreigner” means basically Gentile. This applied only to foreigners who had not already expressed enmity for Israel.

The various clans of Nephilim were not included in these admonitions. Amalekites were also not included, along with several other Canaanite tribes. Those were to be wiped out on sight. Furthermore, the Gentiles who passed through or wanted to live in the conquered lands must adhere to the Code of Noah. They could not worship their pagan idols openly, and must remain under the feudal control of the government of Israel, swearing allegiance to the king. They were obliged to observe certain parts of the ritual laws.

Gentiles were not required to convert. They were required to understand and respect the Law of Moses. They must assimilate to some degree. Anyone wanting to promote the same ethical standard today must not neglect the bigger picture. It’s not a bad recipe for any government today to follow. For Americans, it means folks can come and sample our liberties, but not to abuse them. They should be able to understand English at least well enough to learn and obey the laws of the land. They will remain second-class residents until they assimilate and become citizens. There are restrictions on what they can do and say. That’s pretty much what the Law of Moses required of Gentile residents in the Land.

Broadly speaking, the local church should have no trouble allowing outsiders to participate in worship and fellowship, as long as they agree to assimilate to some degree. If their presence is disruptive, give them a chance to understand. If they cannot agree to the rules, they need to be kept out. This is not necessarily something like written or memorized rules of behavior. Your church will naturally manifest a certain cultural alignment based on the people who are most active. The visitors should honor whatever that turns out to be. The church was never meant to be a public accommodation, but a private family gathering.

The distinction between culture and race is mostly artificial. The whole point is tribal identity. People form such an identity by the common experience of life in the local context. They have adapted according to their abilities and perspectives; there’s no sin in that. It’s the natural result of living in a mortal world.

Nothing in Scripture requires a cosmopolitan openness to folks who harbor hostility to your tribal identity.

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Imaging Eden

Posted on June 1, 2026 by ehurst

Not only does the common perception of Hell fail the biblical test, but so does the western mythology of Heaven.

As previously noted, the Hebrew imagery of a transcendent realm was based on the common Ancient Near Eastern concept of the sky. It was “up” for them and became the parable everyone used. Thus, we have the language of stars representing deities. Instead of simply popping in and out of this world, Jesus pointedly rose into the sky at the end of His time with His disciples. The literal meaning of such things was never the point; it was what it represented to them in the language of their own minds — the language God built for them.

God made us for Eden. The biblical language about Eden includes imagery of both garden and mountain. Trees and mountains have both served as parables for critical concepts of how God works in this realm of existence. Any attempt to wring out of such language a clinical description would fail almost immediately.

However, reading between the lines, we can certainly characterize things just a little bit: Eden was God’s private reserve away from His divine courts. It bore the imprint of His divine character. It wasn’t the place to do business, but to show His private familial side. The people He created to manage the garden on His behalf were capable of reading His character as personal servants who saw Him in a relaxed state. They were His imagers, ensuring the garden reflected His character.

We don’t quite know how, but Eden was connected to the natural world before the Fall. The people were commanded to reproduce so that the imaging mission could be spread across the world. They were not elohim but something lesser. Second Temple literature offers a lot of embellished detail about these things and we must take it with a grain of salt. Still, the general idea is that the Devil (God’s Chief Bodyguard) objected to the whole idea that he and the rest of God’s staff would be required to honor these people who were so obviously beneath their rank as eternal beings.

God censured His Bodyguard for rejecting His plans. The punishment was to confine this eternal creature in a time-space continuum, which happened to include access to the natural world God intended his humans to modify and manage, extending His garden. The whole thing is characterized in terms of the courts of an eastern potentate. God permitted a certain amount of debate and some kind of testing and proof. As part of this arrangement, the Devil was commissioned to take as his domain the unimproved portion of the natural world, but not the Garden itself. Not so much to control the natural world, but to inhabit it and use some aspects of it. He was granted the role of jailer, but confined to his own jail.

The Devil was permitted to tempt and imprison the humans. It would serve as a test case in the central debate with God. We can’t really comprehend the crux of the matter, but there are characterizations of it in the Second Temple literature. This is sort of the mental image Jesus and His disciples had in their minds in the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament.

The natural world is not only unimproved, but subjected to the serious mishandling of humans deceived about what matters. The world in which we live is increasingly abused and poisoned. But it’s not inert; it cries out to God for the redemption of His people so that the original purpose of imaging God can be restored to Creation.

The point here is that some of us humans will be redeemed out of this prison existence. When Jesus returns, He will wipe away the mess humans have made under Satan’s dominion and return it to a primal condition. The Devil will lose his domain; he and his allies will be destroyed in the Lake of Fire.

We get the feeling God will retire to His garden estates. He will dissolve His courts and commission His human family to take over the residual roles that are still needed in His retirement. In the process, the rebellious staff will be destroyed. Their duties will be passed to God’s family.

Humans will not enter God’s courts at any point in this narrative. We weren’t made for that. Surely, those who die before Christ’s return will see paradise, but that is conceptually a part of the afterlife separate from God’s courts. Strictly speaking, “Heaven” should be a term for God’s courts, but in English it has taken on the meaning of “paradise” as Jesus used the word. This has something to do with Paul’s use of the terms for a multi-layered “heaven”. Our place in that realm for now is a holding area “in Abraham’s bosom” waiting for the Second Coming.

When Christ returns, we shall be restored to our native form, not in mortal flesh. We’ll meet Him in the sky as He restores the world to what it was before the Fall. Then, we shall return to our original purpose of imaging God’s private character in the natural world.

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Not the Center

Posted on May 31, 2026 by ehurst

I’ve pressed people on this. When I first began to explain my understanding of the thesis of the Unseen Realm, people objected. While they might be able to offer reasoned objections based on mainstream theology, only a few could pin down exactly why they resisted internally. Near as I can tell, it boils down to the loss of human centrality in the Big Story.

I said it like this: In the Unseen Realm, we are not the subject, but the object of the narrative. It’s not really about us as humans. The ultimate nature of the rebellion in Heaven is about the non-human characters and what God demanded of them. Our situation here in this world after the Fall is a drama, a demonstration of God’s justice in making those demands, and His justice in punishing the elohim for their failure to meet His requirements. We are the object lesson, God’s proof in that dispute.

It’s not that we don’t matter, but that we aren’t the center of attention. The divine logic of what we should be doing is not based on us, but on Him and His glory. And while lots of people can declare that His glory is what matters most, they still object to any reformation in theology and practice that actually takes us off center stage.

This is at least part of why the teaching of the Unseen Realm was buried over the centuries. The traditional church theology elevates humanity to a central role in everything. It assumes that we are the whole point of everything Scripture mentions. When you bring back the very real Hebrew outlook on things, it takes away that false image of the importance of humanity.

This is why the Boastful Pride of Life — a reference to fleshly arrogance — is listed as a primary temptation of our fallen nature. Our flesh does not want to accept the truth of our impotence and lack of importance.

God does have great plans for us, but there are some very important matters regarding the other creatures He made that take first priority. We aren’t kings yet; we are still servants. This is sort of what Luke 17:7-10 is all about. We must look beyond ourselves and our dreams for human existence. Our place in the grand scheme of things is to ride out the simulation until the God has handled the crucial matter in front of Him. That crucial matter is not us.

Thus, Solomon declared that human ambition is striving after the wind. At some point, he realized that (a) he was one of the greatest men to ever live and (b) it really didn’t matter. Against the scale of cosmic events, humanity as a whole was not that significant. The only way we can matter at all is to commit to serving God from the heart. It’s the only way we can possibly have any effect that will outlive us.

Thus, when the Holy Spirit is present, there are two primary symptoms: humility and a passion for making Christ look good.

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Burning in Hell?

Posted on May 30, 2026 by ehurst

Re: Heiser Lake of Fire

It has become trendy among American evangelicals to question whether Hell actually exists. Some go so far as to slip into universalism, but most just kind of edge away from historical evangelical theology about Hell, what it is, and who ends up there.

Review: The Hebrew language itself is first and foremost symbolic. Thus, no one should be surprised when Hebrew discussion of eternal truth is in terms of parables. It started out using expressions common across the Ancient Near East, but as the Lord continued revealing more about His realm and His ways, the Hebrews developed their own imagery. Sometimes they captured the ideas of competing religions and claimed all glories for Jehovah. At other times, they reworked the ANE concepts more thoroughly, along with having their own unique expressions.

Some of their lore was published as Scripture. A substantial amount of it remained oral for a time, then was eventually committed to writing during the Second Temple Period. Some of that lore was heavily embellished, and so those books were not accepted into the canon. Yet those materials was still either referenced or even quoted in the New Testament. Thus, we have Jude and Peter echoing some wording from the 1 Enoch.

Once you become aware of the core themes in 1 Enoch, you can find them echoed in more Scripture. As Heiser explains in the linked video, the notion that Hell is a place of fiery punishment first appears in Hebrew writing in Enoch. It’s not in the Old Testament at all, but it shows up in Enoch. Jesus Himself echoes the theme of fiery punishment when He mentions the term gehenna, pointing to the flaming trash heap in the Valley of Hinnom to defile the old shrine to Moloch.

We have other terms from Hebrew and Greek, translated into English words that may or may not come very close to the same ideas — Tartarus, Hades, Sheol, the grave, etc. There seems to be very little differentiation between them. To the Hebrews, Mount Hermon in particular, and the Bashan region in general, were somehow connected to this dark realm. Indeed, the entire eastern ridge above the Jordan Rift Valley was considered the home of the Rephaim and other clans of Nephilim, marked by all sorts of death cult shrines, plus Sodom and Gomorrah.

The writers, and many readers, of the New Testament are clearly familiar with the Second Temple literature in general, and 1 Enoch in particular. We don’t get wholesale copying from it, but certain core ideas that appear to represent the older, unembellished oral lore included within the ancient tale of Enoch.

The primitive notion of the underworld was depicted as a dark and foreboding place that was connected to the world we know. You can go there from here, but can’t come back. The whole concept was symbolic of everything people don’t like: dark, inside the ground with no fresh air, etc. Hebrews used various terms for such a place, including Sheol, with which we are most familiar. Only much later, in the Second Temple Period, does the theme of fiery torment get added.

In theory, Hell exists solely for the Devil and his allies. It was not made for humans; it was made for the elohim class of beings who had rejected God’s commands to His staff. It is not eternal. The space/time limitations apply there in some sense, likely as part of the punishment effect for the confinement of eternal beings.

In broad general terms, Heiser tells us that the Watchers are confined in the same realm, but it seems in their own peculiar dungeon within that realm. We get the concept that the Nephilim come and go, but we have no idea on what terms. Recall that the Legion of Nephilim infesting the Gadarene madman didn’t want to be sent back to the Abyss, as if it were hard for them to get back out.

However, there are no sharp definitions for any of this. In general terms, the Devil is Lord of the underworld, but he also seems free to wander this world. He reports to God on a regular basis regarding his new mission after demotion. If you recall the Fall in the Garden, the Devil was allowed to go there and make his bid for human submission. Once that submission was secured, humans were ousted from the Garden and forced to live in a world that has not been conformed to God’s image as the Garden is. East of Eden is not a pleasant place in symbolism, and one of Satan’s titles is Prince of This World.

One thing for certain is that Hell is virtually nothing like common American conceptions. Western mythology is alien to the Bible. The western notions include the skin-tight red suit, horns, tail and trident for the Devil. And strictly speaking, the Lake of Fire is not Hell, but the symbol of the final destruction of Hell, death, the Devil and his allies, both human and elohim.

Part of the problem with common understanding is the western concept of retributive justice. It presumes without saying so that humanity starts in a more or less neutral situation instead of already belonging to the Devil. It goes all the way back as early as Eusebius reasoning that sins create a debt to be paid due to a misreading of the New Testament — “wages of sin” became “debt of sin”. It depersonalized our standing before God, introducing an intervening system of justice between us and God. That’s another rabbit we’ve chased often enough before. But it produced an image of Hell as a punitive prison, rather than a simple continuation of one’s default slavery to the Devil and his realm.

At it’s most primitive conception among Hebrews, Sheol was simply the grave. While there were exceptions, people there did not come back to this life. They were confined, constrained, not in a position to operate with any degree of freedom as we do here in this world. But it wasn’t exactly Hell, either. It was a sad confinement from which a faithful servant of the Lord would hope to be freed, redeemed by God as His family.

It was the basic concept carried over from the Mesopotamian roots of Hebrew culture. The Egyptian mythology didn’t think of the grave as a bad place; it was privileged a existence for some. That’s why we have the symbolism of great figures buried in pyramids with what they might need in the afterlife. But the concept of afterlife as paradise waited until Persian exposure (Zoroastrianism). Regardless of the source, Jesus reaffirmed that concept (using a Persian word) from the Cross, telling the confessing thief they would meet together in paradise that very day.

The key was that the dying thief confessed Jesus as innocent and appealed to Him in submission. Not everyone declared their allegiance to Jesus. The New Testament flatly says that certain types of people would never see paradise after death. However, the portrayal is not that people failed to do certain things, but that they did those things because they weren’t the right kind of people to submit to God. The underlying cause was a matter of loyalties.

In other words, people end up in Hell because they never left the Devil’s domain in the first place. The route out is open to anyone who claims it. As previously noted, we use the Doctrine of Election to help us set our expectations for the kind of response we get from our efforts to portray what freedom from slavery to the flesh looks like.

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We Hold It Forth

Posted on May 29, 2026 by ehurst

This conversation continues, and I’m hoping you can wrap your head around this.

It’s not a question of what God does behind the scenes in Heaven. We cannot possibly know about that until we are there with Him. What really matters is whether we can build a foundation of expectations that accord with what He has revealed. He does work and does keep His promises, but it’s not always visible to our human eyes until later.

Your theology doesn’t mean a damned thing against what God actually does. It’s a question of what we have seen and held with our hands interpreted by the Presence of His Holy Spirit in our hearts.

We have seen this: The way believers act leads me to rely on individual divine election. For that matter, my own personal experience with God cannot be explained any other way. When God moves, human resistance is fruitless and people eventually surrender. I’ve never seen it otherwise. It’s not about issues of what those people believe, but about how they act, how they are driven. I insist that you can tell when God is moving and the results are never in doubt.

Thus, the doctrine of Divine Election, bare bones as outlined in the Bible, is an accurate predictor of how people respond to the moving of the Holy Spirit. It’s not necessary for me to formulate any logical implications, but I know what I’ve seen. I simply trust God for things I cannot do.

Yes, it is quite possible to manipulate people into some sort of religious confession and goad them into complying with a set of expectations presented to them as the Word of God. I’ve done it under the pressure of bad leadership. And it always turns out poorly. It’s not so bad when they fall away under testing, but when they harden in their own logical system and never trust in the move of the Holy Spirit, it’s really tragic. That’s how we get so many leaders who live for the institutions and their iron-clad rules.

It doesn’t help that American history is loaded with people who insist their own emotional feelings are a move of the Holy Spirit. We could talk about a doctrine of identifying His hand prints, but you can find thousands of examples of such things and many of them are mutually exclusive. Everyone wants some kind of leverage to move the world.

I don’t want that. All I’m doing is explaining how I operate in my own faith community, the domain God has entrusted to me. With Kiln of the Soul, we will act as if certain things are so according to God’s work in our lives. Nobody dictates; we share and discuss.

We will act as if individual divine election is true. We won’t act as if people can be persuaded by human argument. We will “pretend”, if you will, that only God can change a human heart, that nobody can change themselves. We deny Decision Theology.

Instead, we find peace in trusting the Lord to move His people. We find peace in waiting for folks to respond in God’s good time, and in their own way under His convictions in their hearts. That internal sense of peace is by far the best indicator that we are walking where He wants us. We don’t trust what our own reason and logic can build, never mind that of another; we cannot live on someone else’s sense of peace.

We don’t find peace with Christ in the institutions. It doesn’t matter how much blood, sweat and tears anyone else has poured into those institutions. At the end of the day, they remain human constructs, and nothing man produces is eternal. We know that the past 2000 years of church history is a long, sad tale of trying to shut down the Hebraic outlook of the first disciples. We can see in their writings that they departed from the intellectual background of Jesus and the Apostles. It’s plain as day to anyone who examines the records. Historic institutions have not preserved the gospel message of Jesus the Messiah.

Again, we deny that eternal truth can be codified in any human language. We deny the myth of “propositional truth”. All we can do is point out areas of exploration for hearts that have been changed from above.

We hold forth the invitation to submission to Christ. We advise people that our fleshly nature is a burden to be borne through life, but is not really us. We must deny the flesh in order to be free from slavery to the Enemy. Everything else will take care of itself.

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