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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For Jesus’ Name

Posted on May 26, 2026 by ehurst

Upon some offline discussions about Divine Election, it seems I need to add some clarifications.

Start with the foundation: We cannot know eternal things the way we know about our lives here in the Fallen Realm. From ancient times, our Heavenly Father has revealed just as much as we need to know about the situation in His courts via parables. His revelations came in bits and pieces over the centuries. This is how the entire Ancient Near East understands spiritual things. Eventually He sent His Son, who in turn also spoke in parables.

Parables are understood by the heart. If you strive to live from your heart, you’ll have a much clearer connection to what God has revealed. Your heart can translate parables into the context for your mind. It’s not as if nothing can be explained in more or less concrete terms, but that such explanations will always lack something that is better expressed in parables.

Typically, Scripture tends to offer concrete descriptions of things that point back to the ineffable truths of the Spirit Realm. Paul does this quite a bit. When he talks about election in Romans 9-11, he’s offering a more concrete discussion of something that far exceeds human understanding. He also uses parabolic language. In other words, you cannot nail down what he says as anything more precise than manifestations of something we can experience here and now, but that reflects truth beyond words.

The huge flaw in the debate between Calvinists and Arminians is that both are striving to nail down concrete logical conclusions for the mind that are hardly on the same level as divine truth. The entire TULIP thing is asking the wrong questions. You cannot nail down how God operates the way TULIP attempts to do. You will invariably get something wrong that does not fit the rest of what the Bible says about God’s sovereign will. You cannot hope to understand what motivates Him or how He makes decisions that affect His Creation, to include us.

The best you can hope for is something that describes how you and I will experience that sovereign will. We cannot know who is Elect. We can only grasp how this or that person acts enough like God’s eternal family that we should treat them as such.

The whole point of Paul mentioning Jacob and Esau is to bring the discussion back to the practical results: Jacob became the progenitor of Israel, and Esau became the father of the Edomites. Election has a broad purpose. We are permitted to understand something about the Three Rebellions and the Divine Council of elohim in terms of the details about how some of the rebellions affected humanity. We know the history of how those rebellions resulted in God’s actions through Abraham’s lineage and the give-n-take between Israel and Edom. Otherwise, we cannot fully comprehend what’s going on in Heaven.

If you think about Divine Election in terms of what kind of privilege it hands to you, then you have missed the whole point of Paul’s discussion. It’s not about that at all. It’s about what role you are supposed to play in His Kingdom while living here below. Trying to nail down the logic of election in human terms is almost as bad as rejecting His will for you.

One of the few things we can nail down is that Election is part of how we understand that the majority of humanity at any given time and place always seem bound for Hell. There is nothing we can do to change that. The change has to start somewhere else, not with us or the people we would dearly love to bring into the spiritual family. We need to know that. We need to understand that it’s not a conversion, but a miracle of grace. We can’t possibly try to understand grace, and it’s wrong to even try. What we can understand is how God uses us to reach just a few here and there in our world. It’s always just a select few individuals who truly turn out to manifest a strong faith in Christ.

So, if you waste your time building large institutions so you can call them “churches”, you will miss everything that God is doing through Election. You’ll have large institutions of people who have never found grace, but are deceived into thinking they have found it because of what they were told that by well-meaning people trying to talk them into the miracle of faith.

The most important two things about Election are that (1) it is not democratic because God plays favorites in our experience and (2) the whole point is what role individuals play in shining divine glory into this world. Don’t blame sinners for not responding to the gospel; they cannot. Don’t blame yourself for failing to move them; they cannot move by any human agency. Know that everything you do and say feeds into either God’s glory or the Devil’s contention against humans.

Stop and look at the pragmatic meaning of doctrines like Divine Election. Maybe you cannot avoid trying to make sense of it, but never take yourself or your answers too seriously when it comes to understanding such things. It’s not about you, but about what you will do for Jesus’ name.

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Heart-led Necessity

Posted on May 25, 2026 by ehurst

After giving it a couple of days to germinate in your souls, we still have more to say about evangelism.

Only a minority of the human race is Elect. Spiritual birth is limited. We can learn indicators of spiritual birth, but it’s only enough for the practical necessity of deciding with whom we can fellowship and carry out our divine commission. In the final analysis, we can never really know.

However, the one thing that is utterly democratic in the human condition is living from the heart. The heart-led existence is available to all humans ever born; it’s built into the mortal nature. Everyone who has ever lived, or ever will live, can move their focus of consciousness into their hearts.

In our evangelism, we conceptually hope that our actions and words call out to the Elect, but the methods we use will focus more on cultivating heart awareness in those around us. So, we can say that a major element of our outreach is to awaken the heart-centered awareness.

For folks in biblical times, the vast majority of living humans were already that way. It was the fundamental assumption behind every culture within reasonable traveling distance. People already lived in their hearts, and only a tiny few Greek philosophers were plotting a course toward elevating the intellect over the heart. That kind of shift was still quite rare even among Greeks. Indeed, the whole concept really never took hold among them; it waited until the European Enlightenment dredged up classical Greek philosophy.

For the First Century AD, the Christians could count on a common assumption about heart-led living, which carries with it a basic assumption of transcendent spiritual powers. Even among pagans, the heart knows instinctively that such powers exist. That’s not to say folks in the ANE always walked in the leadership of their hearts, but they were at least aware that it was a common expectation. We don’t have that when we deal with the world around us.

No two people are alike. There is no quick and easy recipe for teaching people about the heart-led way. You’ll have to be aware of the person you are dealing with, where they are and what they need most. And because it is so universally rare in the West, it’s something that tends to keep us from distinguishing between “the Lost” and believers. We would tend to have the same basic testimony with both, because very few church folks live by their hearts.

Until a spiritually born person begins to walk by the heart’s leadership, they cannot claim the blessings of the Covenant. The Covenant of Christ assumes walking by the heart, as does the whole Bible. Faith cannot be born in your head because faith arises only in your heart. It’s not an intellectual persuasion; it’s a driving need for hope.

Thus, a primary starting place for evangelism is cultivating the heart-led way in others. As previously noted on this blog, almost everyone will misunderstand this. In America, the heart is simply a repository of sentiment and emotion. It’s really difficult to use the language of heart-led living. Instead, we might talk more about faith and commitment, which are rooted in the heart.

But sooner or later you’ll need to introduce the biblical terminology for heart-led living, and disabuse them of the false notions of what the heart does. And frankly, this is how you filter out people who cannot receive the gospel message. You don’t stop trying to manifest the gospel in how you live, but you limit any efforts to share the explanation of the gospel to only those who grasp the heart-led consciousness.

The heart-led way is fundamental to the gospel message. Spiritual birth happens when God moves, regardless of what’s in your head, but to actually walk in the Covenant of Christ requires a heart-led consciousness.

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No Shortcuts to Faith

Posted on May 23, 2026 by ehurst

What would we say is our gospel message? It’s certainly different from the mainstream. Because we strive to understand the biblical Hebrew outlook on things, we don’t see the fundamental human need the same. For us, it’s not about sins, guilt and penalties, but a mortal nature that enslaves you to our Enemy. We typically say something like this: “Embrace feudal submission to Christ as Lord. You must grasp the necessity of vanquishing your fallen nature to enslave it to a higher purpose. This higher purpose is that you love His people the way He does; that’s the whole Covenant.”

Those three items are difficult to separate. It won’t sound like what anyone else says. I realize that this calls for a bit of explanation that might not easily fit in a tract like the “Four Spiritual Laws” or something similar. The beginning point is simply assuming that most people can understand the notion of kneeling before Christ and declaring Him Lord. That’s the foundation of redemption in terms of the individual experience.

Whether or not that can really take hold in the hearer’s life is a matter for the Lord to handle. We can help explain what’s entailed, but we cannot make it happen, nor can the person trying it. Only the Lord can enable that kind of faith. It’s a free gift from Him to His Elect.

We should never get the idea that we can talk someone into this. It’s not conversion; it’s the birth of a whole new existence.

When the Apostles spread out across their world, virtually everyone shared certain common assumptions about reality. The early believers knew that their message was commonly accepted in form, if not in the specifics. Everyone understood a universe populated with spirit beings as the ultimate powers over human fate. Thus, the terms of their message was already well understood. It was just a matter of announcing a fresh offer from yet another deity. Any miracles were an acceptable proof for their contention that Christ was the ultimate ruler in Heaven.

But the greatest miracle, of course, was that people would respond. It was not always compelling against the testimony of other deities and their alleged miracles. Everyone believed in at least one deity already. The only question was whether they would shift their loyalty to Christ. That such a shift in feudal loyalty was also viewed as a threat by some governments was taken for granted.

That common public understanding is long gone. We aren’t dealing with a world where everyone can grasp the deep background of Hebrew cosmology. There are no common elements. Worse, that background is now foreign to just about everyone who claims to follow Christ, as well. Somewhere along the path, the philosophical assumptions shifted dramatically. If you quote English language Scriptures as your gospel message today, it’s guaranteed it won’t mean what the Apostles were sharing in their day, neither to the speaker nor the hearers.

We are compelled to distinguish our message from the mistaken one already standing everywhere you go now. I would suggest that the starting place is your life under the Covenant, demonstrating the power of your message before you even open your mouth. People need to see that we are different from the rest. They need to see the fire of commitment, AKA faith, to Christ’s law of love. Our sense of purpose and aplomb in the midst of any chaos is the strongest testimony we can have.

Should anyone ask, you should be ready to start with the simple message of feudal submission to Christ as Lord. That in itself would probably take some explaining. The primary issue is that you avoid the westernized worries about sin and guilt, and lean more toward the issue of overcoming a fleshly nature that will not play along with genuinely following Christ. It requires conceptually distinguishing oneself from the mortal fleshly nature.

You need to address the issues that hinder the individual to whom you are talking. There’s no way we can make this a memorized spiel. Submission to Christ is not democratic; everyone has different struggles with the Devil.

Submission to Christ means you’ll pay any price, go anywhere, and do anything He demands — sight unseen. Serving Christ is a black box before you get inside. The entrance is nailing your fleshly nature to the Cross. There is no peace otherwise, because the whole world is Satan’s turf. You aren’t entering an institution with rules, but the personal submission to someone who loves you and knows you better than you know yourself. Faith defies human logic. People come to faith because they can’t ignore the calling that burns in their souls.

I can’t give you a snappy little pamphlet. You need to be able to keep it simple. Let them ask questions and be ready to answer them. Your best answers will always be how you have handled things so far. You can always talk about the Unseen Realm and Three Rebellions later. Not to hide it, but to prevent overwhelming them. Don’t be afraid to address those things if anyone asks. They aren’t joining an institution for personal growth, but an eternal covenant family to reclaim stolen lives. There are no shortcuts.

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Assertion of Justice

Posted on May 22, 2026 by ehurst

The gospel message has been garbled over the ages. What we proclaim to the world must be rooted in what Jesus and His followers actually believed. It was a Hebrew frame of reference quite alien to our western outlook today. The legacy of that teaching has been buried under centuries of ignorance brought on by the manipulation of those who seek to keep us enslaved to their plot against their own Lord.

TL;DR — The key to peace with God is feudal submission to Christ as Lord. It is not a matter of coming to embrace orthodox thoughts. It’s not at all a question of what’s in your head, but what’s in your heart. You must commit to Him as Lord. It’s personal.

Now for the background.

One of the biggest blocks to serving Christ is the western mental framework on sin and salvation. That flawed orientation is written into most English translations of Scripture. The very word choices lend themselves to an erroneous grasp of how God sees the whole thing.

We are not born into a contractual standing before God. Sin is not transgressing the provisions of a contract. Sin is a status or condition. Your need is not a matter of paying penalties but of healing and restoring fellowship. The original Hebrew concept in the Torah was a matter of personal feudal relationship with God.

The OT sacrificial system was meant to instill a feudal perspective. Feudalism is not evil; it is fundamental to God’s Creation. Western thinking does not allow for the head of household to own his family. He simply has provisional custody; the family members are on loan from the government. That kind of thinking pokes God in the eye. You are supposed to be His family and He owns you.

So, it’s not as if He is pissed at your behavior. He’s disappointed and grieved that you are enslaved to His opponent in a dispute that centers on the very existence of humanity. It’s not as if humans are neutral territory at birth. We are born mortal; that mortal condition starts us off as on the wrong team. We are born the provisional property of the Devil. That’s where we start. He already holds a claim over us and our lives in this world.

This whole context — “this world” — belongs to the Devil as a feudal grant from God. The existence of a fleshly mortal body makes us the property of the Devil. He owns all flesh. The beginning point of redemption, escaping this slavery, is recognizing that there is something in us that doesn’t belong to the Devil. We must develop an awareness of eternal existence that is separate from our mortal condition.

The only way you can do that is if God calls out to you and awakens that eternal awareness. He awakens His own Spirit within us. We begin to long for something outside the slavery to the Devil. We find ourselves trapped and call out to our real Father for rescue. Then, we spend the rest of our lives remaking ourselves into the image God shows us.

The fundamental question is feudal loyalty. You declare yourself the property of the Father and swear your allegiance to Him. It’s an act of rebellion from the lord of our mortal birth. That false lord will use all he has to interfere, but your task now is to begin the process of reclaiming your existence from that slavery to the fleshly nature.

It’s not a question of what you believe in your head, but your voluntary willful submission to Christ as the rightful Lord you serve. You alienate yourself from the fleshly nature, dragging it along reluctantly into something it does not want. You cannot satisfy the logic and reason your flesh demands. You squelch that demand with a passionate drive against all the limits of reason to seize a divine heritage, a high privilege of power and authority over your own fleshly nature.

You end up living in a fashion that defies what makes sense to your fleshly intellect. You silence the whining of the flesh and drag it kicking and screaming into divine service. Your flesh is not you. Your intellect is not the real you. Your conscious awareness is no longer in your head, but in your heart. That’s where you’ll find an open connection to God as a Person. The flesh must be subjected to the demands of this new unity with God. It becomes the slave instead of the master.

It’s not the triumph of reason over emotion; those two are actually allies. It’s the triumph of faith (commitment, feudal submission) over the flesh. You now represent God as a ruling power against weaker opponents, a host of forces working in alliance with the Devil. He is making a point in a debate; you are backing a declaration that He is right about everything. You are taking sides in an eternal dispute. You are declaring Him just in how He handles dissent on His staff.

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The Fallacy of Individualism

Posted on May 21, 2026 by ehurst

That American culture stands firmly on the concept of individualism is what keeps American Christians from the Covenant.

God’s Creation is inherently feudal. You can choose whom you will serve, but you cannot choose individuality. There is no freehold; it’s not even an option. You will serve someone as long as you are mortal. Your only options are to serve Christ or any number of allies of Satan.

Divine justice is not at all a matter of accounting for your sins. It is all about healing the broken relationship with your Creator. It’s not a matter of penalties for individual failures. It’s entirely relational.

I highly recommend Dale Moreau’s brief study in Psalm 106 as a tonic for the sickness of individualism. He’s a disciple of Heiser.

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Violating the Boundaries

Posted on May 17, 2026 by ehurst

Ezekiel mentions how the final end of the Dark Army of Gog will be in the Valley of Travelers (Ezekiel 39:11-16). Given the context, we know that this location is somewhere east of the Transjordan Ridge above the Dead Sea.

This is the same approximate area of the Pentapolis, the five cities that included Sodom and Gomorrah, which were all destroyed. I’ve already mentioned the various ancient shrines found in this area, dominated by death cults, necromancers, etc. The whole point is that the tribes living there were seeking ways to cross over (travel), to make illicit contact with the Spirit Realm.

Sodom was a part of this. Most people don’t get what their sin actually was. Jude says they went after “alien flesh”. It’s not really the homosexuality as sex, nor the horrendous lack of hospitality. It appears they were guided by some Nephilim. The people of Sodom knew that these two visitors were angels, beings from across the boundary between this world and the Unseen Realm. They were seeking to breach that boundary in a complementary fashion to what the Watchers had done (according to Jude 6-8).

The very notion of such an awful thing was encouraged by the Watchers and Nephilim. Indeed, we can’t even comprehend just how hideous this whole concept is. But consider how every mention of this entire eastern side of the Jordan Rift Valley tells us it was historically populated with various clans of the Nephilim. Indeed, the far northern end of this ridgeline is Mount Hermon, considered to be the site where the Watchers descended and vowed to violate this boundary between realms.

Something in the teachings of the Watchers and Nephilim generated some fantasy about restoring the powers of Eden, where humans didn’t live by the “sweat of the brow” but kept God’s private garden by His Word. There’s something about this kind of power that calls to the flesh, seeking the advantage of powers that exceed what God offers to us by the Covenant.

It’s an extension of the temptation the Devil offered in the first place, that the humans could decide for themselves what was good and evil, becoming their own gods. Fallen men have always longed to seize the powers of Heaven without having to pass the Flaming Sword or the Cross.

The Flood wiped out the first generation of Nephilim. I believe it’s safe to assume the Watchers found a way to draw people within range of the Abyss so they could spin off another generation of half-breeds. From there, they spread across Palestine to form a baited trap waiting for those who sought to appropriate the promise to Abraham.

The ethnic cleansing of the Conquest was as much about removing the filthy seed of Nephilim as it was about tearing down the pagan shrines. The nasty shrines of Canaan Land were like flags marking clusters of Nephilim kinfolks. Yes, it was by definition “genocide”, but the targets were not mere humans. They were demonic beings who simply looked like people.

This was the mission Israel failed by growing weary of conquest, leaving too many of the Nephilim to survive until much later. From what we can tell, David killed the last of them. But the fantasy of humans “evolving” to be like the Nephilim is still with us today.

Few understand that the whole reason the Nephilim existed was to destroy the human race altogether and to seize the world for themselves.

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The Gog and Magog Delusion

Posted on May 16, 2026 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 152: Ezekiel 38-39 Part 1 and Naked Bible 153: Ezekiel 38-39 Part 2

We could spend weeks trying to counter the nonsense of Dispensationalism, but for just one lesson, we will look at Ezekiel 38-39 for a clear view of the Gog and Magog delusion of Dispensationalism.

One of the first things we must establish is the image of “Evil North” in the OT and broader ANE thinking. The compass direction is frankly incidental. From the perspective of people living in the ANE, that happened to be the mythical home of dark spirits. It’s not centered on any particular location, just a general perception. Trouble can come from any location, any direction, but this is a consistent reference for things that actually transcend geography.

It was regarded as the place where Baal had his home, the mysterious stormy mountains where he held court. The point here is typology, not factual details. It never really mattered who lived up in those mountains or beyond them. This is the key to understanding the Hebrew language and culture, as well as the broader ANE. We have certain images specific to the Hebrew people, but they take their cue on the use of language from the rest of the ANE.

As hard as scholars have tried, a historical identity for Gog is simply not possible. You’ll find any number of ideas, but none of them work for various reasons. I believe that’s as it should be; it wasn’t meant to be confined to a single individual. Rather, it’s a role that transcends any historical reference. Various rulers can be called “Gog” but so can Baal, the Devil, the Antichrist, etc.

Sidenote: The Beast (arising from the sea) is most closely identified with Leviathan. Oddly enough, this is the typology for “King of the South” in Hebrew prophecy.

However, if we are going to point to literal geographical references, it can’t be Russia. We know more about Tubal, Meshech, Magog, Gomer, and Togarmah. They refer back to the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 as various descendants from Japheth, who took up residence in modern Turkiye and Northern Syria. These are all well known to scholarship; there should be no question about those names. Any attempt to equate them to Russia is intellectually dishonest.

Additionally, the idea that “rosh” refers to Russia is grammatically impossible in Hebrew. It cannot be taken as a proper noun. In the context, rōʾsh is either a parallel label (“chief”) with the previous word meaning “prince” (nesiʾ), or it is used as an adjective (as is the case in other places in the Bible). There is zero historical reference to such a place name anywhere in any ANE language. The birth of the label “Russia” is from the Vikings long after biblical times; it would have had no meaning to Ezekiel and his readers.

It’s not as if the Hebrew people weren’t aware of people living in various places to their north. However, Mount Hermon, as the northernmost point in historical Israeli lands, became the symbol of the Gates of Hell. No one took that literally. But Jesus Himself took advantage of the symbolism in some of His comments, not to mention His Transfiguration. It had meaning because the Hebrew people were always being invaded from the north. It was a reference to things in the Unseen Realm, not geography.

The Rephaim (a tribe of the Nephilim giants) lived in Bashan on the approach to Mount Hermon. The whole area was regarded as the ancient nesting ground for the progeny of the Watchers. It symbolized the source of human depravity. The mythical home of Baal, Lord of the Underworld (a satanic figure), a spiritual being implacably hostile to Israel, was even farther north in Ugarit (today known as Jebel al-Aqraʿ) and was referred to simply as “North” — tsaphon or zaphon in Hebrew.

Any reference to a literal invasion from the north would be taken as just one more manifestation of an ongoing moral and spiritual threat from those in God’s court who oppose His agenda. Thus, the prophecy here in Ezekiel is God thundering at His own staff. Their plans will fail. Every time they pull this stunt, God will crush it in some way.

Thus, the current context in Ezekiel includes a list of nations at that time served the purpose of the Gog figure. In a literal sense, some of those enemies came from the south, east and west of Israel. However, they were allied with the mystical Dark Lord of the North. This is all echoed in Revelation 20 with much the same moral significance, but not the precise historical meaning it had for Ezekiel and his readers.

Nonetheless, when Ezekiel relays God’s promise to reunite the whole nation of Israel in Jerusalem again, we know that there has been on literal fulfillment, nor will there ever be. Rather, he has already mentioned pulling the northern tribes from the nations. Keep in mind: The northern tribes were already paganized before Assyria took them away. Away from their homeland, what happened was precisely what Assyria expected — the northern tribes dissolved into the pagan nations where they were dragged. Thus, the only possible fulfillment would be a new “Israel” drawn from the Gentile masses.

This is what Paul tells us in Galatians. The real identity of “Israel” was never based on Abraham’s DNA (as Jesus indicated with His comment about stones being turned into children of Abraham). It was always the Elect within the nation who were the true Israel. The Elect from among Gentiles were the new members of that ancient identity.

Ezekiel’s prophecy is couched in terms of bringing Israel back to the Holy Mountain, the “Mountain of Assembly” — Har Mo’ed — the source of the name “Armageddon” in English. Notice: That reverse apostrophe is vocalized as “gh” (not quite a hard “g”). It’s also not at all the same as Megiddo, because two “d” letters is a wholly different Hebrew word. The greatest spiritual battle of all time will take place at Jerusalem, because that city symbolizes God’s throne in Heaven, where every creature must assemble before God as His command.

All of this is quite certainly linked to the Day of the Lord. We have long taught that there have been, and will still be, many “days of the Lord” in the sense of how God does things. They all manifest in some sense that final “Day of the Lord” in which God will shut down all the resistance to His Word/Son and punish the rebellion among His divine staff. It is not, as dispensationalists insist, the beginning of the seven years of Great Tribulation. It’s the End.

Ezekiel refers to the Valley of the Travelers, AKA the Valley of Hamon-gog. The imagery is the same here and in Revelation 20. Heiser goes into great detail explaining how the Hebrew grammar here points to an army that includes the Rephaim and spirits that crossed the boundary line between the Spirit Realm and this world (“travelers”). It’s a reference to the Transjordan (“east of the sea”) where we have found evidence of a host of cults focused on the underworld, necromancy, the realm of the dead.

Thus, the Army of Darkness will end up buried in this place. The symbolism should be obvious. It’s not about the number of days it takes to bury the bodies. The number itself is symbolic of cleansing and making something sacred.

Notice something else here: There is the image of the enemies being consumed. Not locked up or tormented, but consumed. The whole army is an offering to God, consumed by birds and wild beasts as His proxy. In other places it’s consumption by fire.

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