Two Images

Posted on April 21, 2026 by ehurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two images are radically different.

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My Publications

Posted on April 18, 2026 by ehurst

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

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Longing to Breathe Freely

Posted on April 17, 2026 by ehurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Closing Books Account

Posted on April 15, 2026 by ehurst

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

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

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

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Privileges, Not Rights

Posted on April 14, 2026 by ehurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We Reject Calvinism

Posted on April 11, 2026 by ehurst

But we are predestinarians. I need to go back to fundamentals to explain the difference, because I’ve been asked about this again.

If we don’t embrace the Hebrew assumptions about reality, we cannot understand the Bible. Most theologians and preachers recognize that their beliefs are different from the Hebrew OT beliefs, and they consider theirs superior. It never occurs to them that Jesus believed the same as the ancient Hebrews, but not the same as the Jewish rabbis of His time. Most theologians and preachers don’t know the difference between Judaism and OT religion. They don’t really know much about the ancient Hebrew religion that God revealed on Mount Sinai. They don’t grasp what Paul had to say about the Old Covenant versus the Talmudic nonsense (“the law”) of his day.

The build up of theology over the last two millennia is a long history of increasing departure from what the Hebrews believed. John, as the last genuine Hebrew apostle, saw this coming and lamented it in his Revelation. If you read the Early Church Fathers, you can trace the departure starting almost immediately after John passed. The Hellenistic rational approach overwhelmed the Hebrew mystical outlook so that doctrine drifted quickly into questions that no Hebrew would have asked.

Hellenistic rational assumptions were read back into the biblical text, so that the words ended up meaning something different than they did to Jesus and His followers. For example, we’ve already dealt with the definition of “sin” in a previous post.

In western thinking this refers to something like culpable negligence or malice, in which there is a distinct guilt before the court. This is nothing like the biblical view. In Scripture, sin is contamination or defilement…. Sin was not something you did so much as who you were as a mortal. Flesh is intractably filthy; it must die for you to live. It confines and defiles, entraps you in its foul will. You are in a tough situation needing to seize control, to tamp down its rebellious nature and bring it under discipline. But the only way to do that was to appeal to the God who made you and wants to rescue you from this slavery.

Thus, in Romans 5 Paul talks about how defilement entered the human race and made us all mortal — “death spread to all people”. There’s nothing in that passage about inheriting guilt. Rather, we inherited the defilement inherent in mortal fleshly existence. The flesh makes us property of Satan, under his feudal dominion. God granted him the realm of mortal flesh (“outside the Garden”). Since Adam and Eve chose to accept the Devil’s authority while in the Garden, the only way to place them under his control was to put them in mortal bodies — denying them access to the Tree of Life.

The Sword of Truth kept them from the returning to the Garden. That sword would kill the mortal flesh and reveal their eternal nature. It’s a symbol of how God’s revelation to fallen mortals demands that they reject their mortal nature and embrace their eternal nature. They must repent and build a life according to revelation. That’s what the Old Covenant was all about.

The Hebrews were not confused about this. They understood that their Sin Offerings under the ritual law were not about washing them clean from bad actions, but to sanitize sacred space from their defilement. It granted them covenant access to God’s Presence in sacred space. It gave them hope to claim the advantages of family kinship with Him in this world. They never pretended to understand the afterlife. There was a wealth of symbolic speech about the Eternal Realm, but everything about their eternal destiny was in God’s hands. The only way to escape the Abyss was for the Lord to rescue you. The only thing they could change was their covenant standing with God (“shalom”) under His dominion while in this life.

They knew the difference between individual election and national election.

Did the OT saints go to Heaven? Of course they did. Jesus mentioned this when He spoke about how the Patriarchs were still living in Eternity. God is not the Lord of the Dead; that was the Devil’s assignment. Jesus also said that those who went to be with the Father rested “in the bosom of Abraham” as if at some banquet. That’s the image of reclining around a low table on long cushions in Hebrew fashion, and being able to lean back to speak to whomever is behind you by placing your head near their chest. The Scriptures indicate that many other famous figures were there.

The Old Covenant was not about going to Heaven; only God could work that out. The ancient Hebrew people knew that their sole hope was to claim all the familial privileges in this life through keeping covenant peace with God here. That meant denying the flesh as much as possible. It was their primary duty to their God.

Jesus didn’t change that. People go to Heaven on the same terms before and after the Cross: Divine Election. What Jesus did on the Cross was open the Covenant to all nations, to make them acceptable to God despite their fleshly nature and to be at peace with Him while they lived in this world. They could transcend the limits of national identity and become part of the Eternal Empire of God. That called for acting the role that came with it. All the mentions of “salvation” in the NT are about peace with God here. This concept had been completely lost by Gentile scholars who never understood the Covenant old or new.

So, when Calvin’s disciples and their opponents started debating the implications of Paul’s writing about Divine Election, they were already way off on the wrong track. On the one hand, eternity with God was the issue with that doctrine. On the other hand, theologians had long believed falsely that “salvation” was equivalent to “going to Heaven”. Thus, that business of TULIP confused two entirely different things.

T — Total Depravity misses the point. It’s not a question of guilt, but a matter of the defilement of mortal flesh. The flesh is doomed but eternal spirits are not. Everyone is still accountable to God for embracing the feudal tribal Covenant of His Son.

U — Unconditional Election simply overstates the case in rationalistic terms.

L — Limited Atonement is wrong because it’s applied to the wrong question. Jesus’ blood on the Cross was sufficient to open His Covenant to everyone while they are here in this world. We must make room for some non-elect folk to join us, for whatever motivations that move them, and teach them enough to obey and not spoil it for the Elect in the community.

I — Irresistable Grace also misses the point. Yes, God calls to the Elect, but it’s all about the Covenant, not going to Heaven. Thus, we can easily see plenty of Elect folks will die without ever coming to the Covenant, since the vast majority are confused about what the divine calling in this life is all about.

P — Perseverance of the Saints misses the point yet again. The Elect can most certainly step in and out of the Covenant of Christ, but that has nothing to do with their eternal destiny. It means that, outside of the Covenant, they are embarrassing their Lord and giving too much service to the Devil. Because of this, many of them will die early. Indeed, their lives are scarcely different from random people who have zero interest in faith.

We are not Calvinists.

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Goats among the Sheep

Posted on April 9, 2026 by ehurst

We know that the symbolic Sword at the gate of Eden is the same symbol as the Sword of the Spirit that is sharper than any sword, the same symbol that comes out of the mouth of Christ in Revelation. It is the Word of God, divine revelation, the standard by which all things in Heaven and Earth are judged.

The Bible is the written record of that Word. It is not the Word itself — which is Jesus — but the sanctioned record that introduces us to God’s revelation for humanity. It came to us clothed in a particular history and culture. God portrays Himself consistently in terms of that culture. His only Son sought to restore that culture in His teaching. Not the mere trappings, but He spoke of the underlying structure of human knowing (epistemology) and the flavor of life in obedience to what God demands of humans.

His Apostles took that teaching and carried it into a Gentile world that knew little or nothing about this underlying structure. The First Century churches in Gentile lands was taught to embrace that structure of life, regardless how foreign it might have seemed to them. The task would have been impossible without the power of the Holy Spirit working in the hearts of the Elect. He kept confirming the necessity of making the changes demanded in the teachings of Christ and His followers.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, we an debate the particulars in context, but we cannot change the fundamental nature of that teaching. The task is not intellectual; it cannot be reduced to something that the flesh can usurp for its own desires. It requires the awakening of the Holy Spirit in your spirit, so that He can speak through your heart of faith, and His power trumps all human reason. In other words, faith is most unreasonable in its demands.

The result must be fundamentally consistent with the historical teaching of the first century Christians. God consistently portrayed Himself as a Hebrew feudal Lord ruling a tribal community by faith. Any other structure does not meet His definition of “church”. He has always worked through His Two Witnesses — ritual shepherds and ruling shepherds, priests and kings, pastors and elders. Only in the Person of the Lord Himself are those two roles joined.

What that looks like will vary with the context of each community of faith. Jesus spoke about the necessity of having goats among His sheep. Sheep are distracted by their commitments and purpose, so a shepherd would add a few goats to his flock. Goats were less distracted, watching for threats and reacting by fighting or fleeing, and the sheep would follow their lead. But in the end, the goats are not really the Lord’s Elect. Every faith community will have a number of believers who are not Elect. They will learn the covenant as law and try to keep it. They will tend to see and react to threats in ways for which the Elect are inhibited.

Thus, the question is not what the community as a whole should do about external threats, but that any real faith community will always include defenders who do things that make the rest uncomfortable. Still, those things must be done; it’s how the Lord takes care of His flock. He mixes in people without a fully eternal frame of reference, people who see no problem with taking certain actions in a hostile environment.

This is why we talk about walking by your own convictions. A true elder or pastor shepherding the flock is not going to set restrictions against God’s appointed goats. Instead, he depends on them, even without a specific certainty who they are. God is the one who separates them on the Last Day. Until then, we trust in the Holy Spirit to handle the complexities.

An increasing number of western countries are making it illegal to quote Scripture that condemns public immorality. Already, people who profess the gospel message are in jail for that, or suffering other legal troubles. Every so often, yet another western county joins this madness. The Canadian government is working on such a law right now. Leftist governments are notorious for this.

However, this is neither left nor right. Here in the US, we’ve seen attempts from both sides. From the right, it’s already very dangerous to teach a biblical message that denies the importance of the modern State of Israel. It’s dangerous to quote the Scripture regarding the Synagogue of Satan. Politicians on the right are trying to make it illegal.

By no means should we pretend we can change such government policies. However, there are multiple ways of denouncing sin, and some of them require methods we aren’t all comfortable engaging. We’ve said clearly before: Scripture sees no problem with assassins, per se. Who can forget how Ehud was portrayed as a hero of faith? We don’t live under the Roman Empire of Paul’s day. Some governments are protected by God for certain times and places, and others are not.

Follow your own convictions.

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Kiln of the Soul: A Statement of Faith

Posted on April 4, 2026 by ehurst

We are prepping for tribulation. A couple of weeks ago we looked afresh at the core of the Covenant of Christ — His Law is His love. Doctrine is frankly secondary; theology is merely human speculation. Jesus said that feudal submission to the Father and His love for His family is the substance of all that God really requires of us. Everything else is just the mechanics of how we implement the Covenant.

Having established that foundation, we move onto a brief review of the doctrine we build on that foundation. Kiln of the Soul is the organization, the name we call our community. Radix Fidem is the name for our approach to the task of building a covenant community of faith. Thus, the Radix Fidem Booklet is a separate study. Our community starts with that approach.

We are accountable to the Bible. Particularly, we are accountable to ensure we develop a Hebrew outlook in order to understand the Scriptures. The Bible is a Hebrew book teaching a Hebrew religion and requires a Hebrew worldview. We sometimes refer to the fancy word “epistemology” as an academic term for a set of assumptions about reality; the Hebrew epistemology of Jesus Christ is radically different from that of the West in general, and America in particular.

While we note that a genuine Hebraic epistemology takes a lot of study, we insist it should be so widely taught that believers should take it for granted. It’s the duty of community leadership to translate the obscure biblical studies material into the vernacular of common folks. It should be available to people who don’t have any college. They should be able to figure out what it requires of them in daily life.

That includes the thesis of the Unseen Realm. That thesis was taken for granted by the Hebrew people up through the time of Jesus. It underlies the whole New Testament, as well. We have had some two millennia of Greco-Roman and Germanic converts burying that thesis under their own mythology, which they brought to the Bible. Their pagan epistemology produced a growing distance between themselves and what Jesus actually taught.

Thus, we reject an awful lot of church theology as speculative nonsense arising from a pagan mythology. If we understand the word “mythology” as a major element in epistemology, then we should devote ourselves to the Hebrew “mythology” of Jesus our Lord. That would include the substance of the Unseen Realm teaching — Divine Council, Three Rebellions, Messianic Expectations, etc.

Along with that is the biblical doctrine of Divine Election. Not Calvinism; that’s a load of rationalist speculation about election. We reject a whole bunch of speculative theology and stick with the simple assertions of Scripture about such things. We don’t elaborate; we simply translate the ideas from Hebrew culture into our current cultural orientation. Thus, “getting saved” does not mean getting a ticked to Heaven. That’s already settled by election; no human can alter God’s choices. Salvation is a matter of embracing the Covenant and gaining the full blessings that God promised His children on this earth. We are redeemed from slavery to the Devil and released to the high privilege of walking in the Covenant of Faith in Christ.

That covenant assumes a Hebrew feudal organization and tribal orientation. Every community (AKA “church”) is a tribe of Jesus’ nation. We cannot obey His command to love each other as He loves if we reject the social structure He took for granted in His teachings.

We note in passing that the Hebrew epistemology of Scripture assumes the basic truth behind the Christian Red Pill/Christian Manosphere teaching about human sexuality and romantic relationships. Without male headship in the household, you cannot claim God’s promised blessings. Most western churches have adamantly rejected this message and have compromised with pagan feminism. We will not join them.

We emphasize the mystical approach to faith. This world is not our home and Jesus rejected any ambition to change this fallen world, only some of the people in it. Satan owns all human government to one degree or another. If you live by the flesh and the concerns of this world, you remain under the Devil’s authority. We have been crucified with Christ; we live in this world by His power to discount the importance of fleshly concerns. Human ambitions are death.

A community of faith should naturally be small in number. Decentralization was God’s command very early in human existence. The Bible mandates having a pastor/priestly figure alongside an elder/king figure. That’s God’s Two Witnesses on the earth. A community can have deacons and deaconesses, but everyone is commanded to embrace the shepherd mindset in dealing with each other and the rest of the world.

While any faith community is likely to include those who are non-elect, our mission in this world is to call out to His Elect. We should live in such a way that we signal to the Elect who we are and who they are in Christ. There are some called to go abroad from home and share the gospel, but evangelism is first and foremost simply living by the Covenant wherever you go and whatever you do.

Finally, this is not an official statement, simply a reminder to our community members what sets us apart from all the others. There’s no need for hostility, but some degree of separation from mainstream church folks is simply unavoidable, and separation from the secular world is an utter necessity. We cannot afford to assimilate to the world around us the way most church folks do.

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Not Yet Revealed

Posted on March 30, 2026 by ehurst

During our community online meeting yesterday, we came to the consensus that God has been holding us “in the cleft of the rock” with His hand to protect us from some of the worst effects of the Nephilim rampage here in America. Those of us with the ability to sense the Spirit Realm have been receiving nothing but white noise. It reminds of me of that time in the military when we were learning how radio encryption works. If you tune into to an encrypted channel without a decoder, all you got was static and rhythmic noises. Yet, it serves to confirm that a lot is going on behind the veil. Otherwise, there’s no reason for all the radio traffic.

The old military phrase “need to know” applies here. We don’t need to know a lot of what is happening in the Unseen Realm; there’s nothing we can do about it. What we do need to know is just enough to denounce sin and injustice according to His Word.

Trump is not a cartoon, not a cardboard cut-out. He’s a real person with all the attending complications. He is a pivotal figure in human history with no easy paths to choose. It serves no purpose to characterize him in overly simplistic denunciations, but it’s certainly a lie from Hell to praise him as a Messiah figure. Either path serves only to distract us from our divine mission.

In Iran, there is not a single shred of gain for American involvement. It is not in our national interest. Trump knows this.

We do hear a lot of preachy rhetoric about how this will usher in the Second Coming of Christ, as if that were a summum bonum that waits for some human action. Of course, this goes against everything Scripture says. Nothing about the End of Time rests on human choices; it is wholly rooted in divine choices alone. Divine Election works across the whole fabric of human existence, not just individual redemption. The family of God as a whole is Elect, and so is all that happens to us. Our only part is to cooperate and participate willfully in divine blessings, or to resist and carp about what we want and suffer disappointment.

Up to a point, it’s the same for the non-elect. They can choose to live this life in the shadow of the Covenant, or they can chase the lies of Satan and reap the sorrows of someone who wants all humans destroyed. Does anyone believe that Trump is even a believer? He’s said and done things that indicate he is utterly cynical about moral and spiritual matters. Rather, he is the ultimate Gentile neocon. He goes with the doctrine that it’s good for the masses to believe in what he considers nonsense because that’s how to manipulate the masses in favor of whatever goals he actually pursues.

I’ve said in the past that I believe neocons use Zionists without actually believing any of that nonsense about a loving God and some divine destiny. Zionists are a very religious bunch with concrete political dreams, but neocons are something else entirely. Neocons are officially secular, but they act like The Cult. Zionists keep pointing back to the Bible as the justification for everything they do, cynical or not. If you spent some time reading what has been leaked out of the secret councils of the neocons over the decades, you know that they would throw the modern State of Israel under the bus in heartbeat in favor of a one world government they would run.

Thus, I suggest that Trump is not a Zionist; he only pretends to be. He fits neatly into the mold of neocons who are quite lefty on social policy, but don’t like socialism itself. They prefer capitalist oligarchy. And they rarely open their mouths in public without some massive lies pouring out.

So, it’s not just a matter of what Netanyahu wants from Trump, because the PM of Israel is only a placeholder. He’s a figurehead seeking to preserve his own hide; as long as he’s PM he can’t be prosecuted for crimes he most certainly has committed. So, he’s riding a wave of zeal for capturing the fantasy of a Greater Israel. Netanyahu has zero moral principle; he doesn’t actually care a whit what happens to the Israeli citizens. They are cannon fodder. But in his eyes, all the more so are the Gentiles of this world expendable.

You see, while Netanyahu has no genuine religion at all, he is held by the Satanic conviction that Jews are the only humans on the planet, while Gentiles are just animals meant to serve Jews. It’s a religious doctrine of Judaism, but it goes much deeper than that. If someone fails to be a Jewish supremacist, they aren’t actually a Jew — it’s part of what defines the Jewish identity. So, the PM must perform as if he were utterly sold out to the mission of Zionism and Jewish supremacy, set solidly on a path to rule the Gentile nations of the world. In order for Netanyahu to stay in his safe zone, he has to play along with the Greater Israel dream of Zionists.

For Zionists, the US is the servant horde groomed to carry out their will. Having broken every other country in the Middle East, in one way or another, the only obstacle left is Iran. The Zionists insist that it must be broken like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, etc. — and now is the time. The only question is how to make it happen.

The “shock and awe” didn’t work as Trump and Netanyahu expected. There was no Plan B, so Trump had to hastily hustle up some troops and move them into place for a ground invasion. It’s the only obvious next step. The problem is that the troops available are nowhere near enough for an actual ground war. There are some kind of stuttering steps here, since it turns out that the Marine Expeditionary Unit brought in from Japan isn’t the whole unit. There’s some leaks indicating that the main body of the force is still back in Japan. And the rapid deployment forces from the 82nd Airborne haven’t actually moved, only the HQ element.

Thus, something is causing Trump to delay implementation. I can only guess at some of the pressures he’s under, but I believe it has to do with his hopes for a lasting legacy in keeping control of the government when his term runs out. In other words, it’s not the Zionists that are really calling the shots; it’s the neocons keeping an eye on their long term plans.

As copiously noted in the alternative media, the American people are not wholly on board with all this Iran stuff. The threat of popular resistance is very high. In order to move forward with a real invasion of Iran, a plurality of voters must support it. And while the stock markets don’t vote, they do sway public opinion a great deal. They aren’t onboard, either.

Again, nobody in Washington DC gives a damn about how this is going to hurt the people — and it most certainly will hurt. It does already, and it will get worse. The issue is that Trump cannot move forward until he ensures his neocon entourage can stay in power. He’s caught between a rock and a hard place. He can’t afford to disappoint the Zionists who don’t give a damn about the future of the US. At the same time, he can’t afford to lose the midterm elections.

It doesn’t help that the US simply does not have the resources to actually invade Iran. We don’t have enough bodies to do the job; it would require a call-up of reserve forces and mobilization of transportation on a scale not seen in decades. Thus, Trump must figure out a partial measure that will actually weaken Iran further without risking a total tactical failure.

This is just the part we can see. At the same time, there is a raft of activity in the Unseen Realm that we simply cannot sense. Something truly awful, some kind of abomination is cooking up there that would shock us all if we knew. This is what our community believes is the thing from which God is protecting His covenant people. We can guess some of it because Scripture offers a lot of prophetic symbolism about that part of the world. Something truly ancient and significant resides in the Persian people of Iran, something that raises the stakes far beyond what is obvious from a human angle. There’s an ongoing tussle in the Spirit Realm that Daniel’s prophecy only hinted at.

This is what’s behind my prediction that, if the US attacks Iran, it would end in a military disaster. I can’t see anything feeding into that result, only the result itself. It’s a mystery as yet not revealed.

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Jesus’ Birthday

Posted on March 28, 2026 by ehurst

Ref: Naked Bible 138: What Day was Jesus Born?

The solution requires you first understand the Three Rebellions: the Fall, the descent of the Watchers, and the elohim betrayal of their commission in the division of nations at Babel. We’ll come back to that.

Heiser worked with an actual astronomer on this to get the exact details nailed down on celestial events and timing (someone who chose to remain anonymous). Most of the material in this podcast shows up in his book, Reversing Hermon, and a little is also in his two fiction books, The Facade and The Portent.

One of the first things he does is debunk the common idea that Josephus knew what he was talking about when he said Herod died in 4 BC. An awful lot of research shows it was more like 1 BC. Granted, the three articles that give us the bulk of the original materials for this date are not publicly available on the Net, but the data is not a joke. Heiser admits it is not widely known.

Then he jumps to Romans 10:5-17. That’s all a setup for verse 18: “Have they not heard?” Logically you would expect Paul to say “no” and that’s why we have missions and evangelism. But Paul says they have heard the gospel, and quotes Psalm 19:4 — the Septuagint version: “Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.” It’s part of that passage that declares the Heavens have been a consistent witness to the revelation of God. Not in a literal voice of words, but it’s inherent in the glory of Creation.

More to the point, it was the celestial bodies in the sky that declared the coming of the Messiah. Certainly not in sufficient detail to tell how to be saved, as Paul outlines there in Romans 10; that’s why Jesus had Apostles to share His teaching. Nor do the Apostles talk about the message in the heavens. It wasn’t that specific. Indeed, in Luke 24 the resurrected Lord stands right there among them and they still didn’t get why He had to die on the Cross.

Rather, the message of the stars was simply that the Messiah was coming, and when He did, the stars told observers that He was born. Note: the statement in Matthew 2 uses a generic term of any celestial body, not just stars. It could have been almost anything that typically shows up in the sky. Heiser suggests it was Jupiter in retrograde motion. The Magi were peculiar in having had generations of study tracking the stars, planets, etc. They knew the math and had a broader context for reading the meaning of such things.

However, the clue is mentioned elsewhere in the NT: Revelation 12:1-6. This is one of those portions of Revelation that does not refer back to the OT, but it appears John spoke to some experts like some Magi or someone who knew the details of what they told Herod and others in Palestine. He included it because it coincides with Jewish Messianic calendar expectations. Further, the date is quite plausible in the wider context of the NT; it matches all the variables.

In John’s passage there he looks up in the night sky, describing what he saw. The woman is the faithful among the nation of Israel (OT “virgin daughter of Zion”), not just Mary alone. Her child is the Messiah who ascends to Heaven (after the resurrection and the 40 days). The woman flees to the wilderness to a place God has prepared, a covenant home for those of true faith.

Most readers would not likely have known much about Mary at that time, but they would recognize the imagery of faithful Israel in things like the dozen stars around her head as Virgin Zion. Gentiles would probably recognize it as Virgo, with a literal twelve stars around her head in the constellation. John is co-opting that pagan image and echoes the astrological jargon of his time as borrowed from the Magi and their astrology. Second Temple Jewish literature would have brought in mention of Joseph and his dreams, along with other references to Abraham and Sarah.

But returning to John’s hijacking the zodiacal signs, for Virgo to have the moon at her feet refers to the passage of the sun and moon through her constellation at the proper season. That’s where the Masoretic text gets the reference to “their line” in Psalm 19, a reference to the alignment of the sun/moon which puts Virgo “in the ecliptic”. The sun was positioned in the constellation as if it were Virgo’s clothing. It’s a 20 degree arc of the sky bracketing when Jesus would have been born.

How likely would the Magi have known the OT? It’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t, as they collected that sort of religious literature from all sources. Jews were scattered all over the Mesopotamian Valley in which the Magi traveled and worked. The Magi already believed in the coming of three Messiahs (Zoroastrianism), so comparing notes with Jews about their Messiah would be a natural point of convergence. See Isaiah 7:14; they would have known about the Messianic prophecy of a virgin giving birth to a Davidic King. Pagan literature referred to Virgo giving birth to divine kings.

Keep in mind: The astronomical math of how the moon acts while the sun is in the constellation of Virgo, we have a period of about an hour and a half for Jesus to be born to satisfy the signs John describes. See Psalm 2:7-9; John’s image is undoubtedly Jesus. John makes it obvious that it only appears that Satan has won the day. In the end, he is defeated by the ascension. There’s no doubt that the sea monster is Satan, the monster of chaos, and sometimes refers to the nations as those who reside under his authority and become agents of his chaos against the people of God.

We cannot rest on Revelation 12 alone. The NT points to other celestial indicators that we must include in our reckoning here. What would the Magi have seen from their homeland? The constellation Leo is directly above Virgo’s head, known as the ancient symbol of Judah (Genesis 49:9-10; Revelations 5:5). It was an important constellation for Jews, obviously. In that constellation is Regulus, known in the ANE as “the King Star”. Just so, as the largest and brightest of the moving stars, Jupiter was the King Planet. It could track into conjunction with Regulus to signal a strong omen.

When you take all the details into account, you come up with only one possible date even close to the time of Jesus: 11 September 3 BC. Heiser goes on to detail how the motion of Jupiter from the viewpoint of Magi would be heading toward Judah. When they get there, Jupiter appears to stop visually because of the complex motion of planets in the Solar System. It then begins to travel backward (retrograde) for a while and rejoins Regulus sometimes. That it halted signaled to the Magi they had arrived in the general location.

Heiser goes on to note that this date was also the Day of Trumpets (Tishri 1) and connects to Noah’s Flood.

John mentioned the Ark of Covenant in Revelation 11 right before his description of the birth in chapter 12, so his imagery of the birth of Christ is a way of declaring that the Divine Presence of the Ark has returned in the form of God’s Son. Jesus was born on the Day of Trumpets, 3 BC, which had become the Jewish New Year by that time. Many kings in the history of Israel regarded that as their coronation day, too. Jewish tradition also regarded it as the day of Creation, and the celebration of Trumpets was partly the renewal of that.

Heiser also tracks it to the sin of the Watchers and the Flood. Keep in mind that the Day of Trumpets (in the fall) was the start of the agricultural calendar, the time of harvest, going back before the Exodus from Egypt. The official ritual calendar in Exodus begins the ritual year with Passover (in the spring). Both calendars were in use at the same time. By placing Adam and Eve in the lush Garden with all the food, it was traditional to think of the Day of Creation as being in the fall harvest. Life begins anew on Trumpets.

Jewish tradition tracked the Day of Trumpets as Noah’s birthday, as well. Noah’s Flood wiped out the Nephilim (at least for a while). This associates Jesus with the redemption that the Flood brought, wiping away the nasty influence that corrupted humanity.

Heiser goes on to associate other obscure Jewish lore with the deep importance of the day and purpose of Jesus’ birth. He was the One who would reverse all the awful things that happened in the Three Rebellions. Paul’s point in Romans 10 was that the people should know; maybe in some unconscious way they do know, since the message has been around since the Fall. Still, we share the gospel and make it all conscious for the Elect.

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