Won’t Admit It

Posted on March 17, 2026 by ehurst

When I was a ministry student at Oklahoma Baptist University, studies in Western Civilization were a very big thing. It was a major course of study that occupied something close to a quarter of our entire undergraduate course load. By the same token, we were all required to take at least one major course that awakened our awareness of what Western Civilization was not.

I suppose the 1970s was a time when academia across the US had a thing for pointing out a vast lore of non-western civilizations and history. This showed up in philosophy classes, which was a significant part of my ministry curriculum. You could say it was an emphasis for missions preparation. One of my professors was deeply into pointing out western biases. At the same time, our Church History classes made us aware of how the growing institutionalization of Christian religion contributed a great deal to the birth of Western Civilization.

We were taught to have serious doubts about what passes for morality in the West.

Apparently that’s not a thing in Christian education any more. If you pick up a copy of older Bible commentaries from the 1960s and 1970s, you’ll probably find a strong background in comparative civilization studies. If you examine more recent materials from the past two decades, it appears this emphasis is gone. It’s not as if the Biblical Studies folks aren’t aware of the differences between ANE and western thinking, but that there seems zero effort to evaluate the West from a biblical philosophical perspective.

They know about it, but it never occurs to them to use it, much less favor it.

I’ve been looking through commentary materials written since about the turn of millennium, and this is what I keep running into. I’m not saying it’s bad scholarship, but that it’s weak. Granted, there is a bit of silly pro-western cheer-leading. I consider that the default for people who don’t know better. The only reason such a thing is possible is due to the lack anything countering it.

I’m sure some of it can be blamed on the invasive feminism that helped to drive me out of the mainstream church life. Genuine Red Pilled masculinity is quite rare in the mainstream. Indeed, churches that seem to embrace the Red Pill are marginalized by the feminist mainstream. Nobody seems to notice that the thesis of the Red Pill outlook is easily the single best explanation for some of what shows up in the Old Testament. The ancient Hebrews were quite Red Pilled.

To be honest, I don’t expect this to change. That is, I am utterly convinced that the mainstream cannot be better informed, reformed, or in any way steered back onto a biblical path. I believe the window for repentance on that has closed, along with a raft of other issues that call for repentance. Instead, I am convinced that it will require an apocalypse of some sort that destroys the current mainstream along with the civilization on which it is founded. They must “hit bottom”, as it were.

A few individuals, many who pass through a personal apocalypse, have hit bottom and are embracing the truth. It seems the Lord always keeps a righteous remnant who do not bow the knee to pagan influences. You couldn’t get anyone in the mainstream to admit that Western Civilization is pagan. Thus, Bible Commentary materials will never give it a thought; they will generally promote the West, even if only passively.

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His One Law

Posted on March 14, 2026 by ehurst

In Acts 1, the resurrected Jesus warned His followers that they were not going to hear from God about specific human political changes, because those issues didn’t matter to His Kingdom. He wanted them to focus on spiritual power for spiritual ends. Indeed, in Matthew 24-25 He had already offered rather obvious generalities they could have figured out for themselves. He said when Rome mobilized against Jerusalem, it was time to get out of town. There was nothing useful they could do by hanging around. Nothing in His Kingdom had any concern over controlling political outcomes. All they needed to focus on was His teaching about the Father’s priorities for souls.

What we are allowed to know about God’s eternal agenda includes His determination to have a family household that includes some of us humans. It will happen. He had already gone to the trouble of establishing a garden in which they could live. Upon making humans to populate the garden and to carry out the commission of conforming the garden to His divine character, it provoked an uproar from some of His staff.

One of those staff members went so far as to invoke a fury aimed at destroying the humans outright. For this act of rebellion, God prepared a prison attached to the garden, compelling an eternal being to live within space/time constraints. The prisoner raised objections that echoed with some other staff members, and a debate ensued. God allowed a sort of gentleman’s dispute to follow.

Nothing about any of this caught God off guard. We can only estimate how much the players deviated from the rules. The first of the Three Rebellions, the Fall in the Garden, was likely part of the bet between God and the Devil. The second was a dirty trick, in which some elohim descended to the space/time bubble and got directly involved in corrupting the humans so that their sins would make them ineligible to live. Thus, we got the Flood of Noah. This was an egregious violation, so the slimy traitors were compelled to stay in the prison with the Devil, becoming the Watchers. Their progeny were compelled to stay with them, and eventually were not allowed to have their own bodies.

The third trick was a little more subtle, in which the elohim council members sympathetic to the Devil’s case took advantage of the delegation of the nations to their care at the Tower of Babel. They began presenting themselves to the humans as gods and misled them against God’s rules for the game. God went on to create His own nation against all the others, knowing this nation would eventually become too corrupt for Him to stay directly involved.

But during that nation’s existence, we could say God had a distinct interest in human politics. God had an agenda of eventually playing His trump card of bringing forth His Word as the Messiah. If the staff were going to break the rules, He would simply reserve a secret element in His plan for the Messiah. The kingdom of the Messiah was spiritual, not a human political entity. The citizens of this kingdom had all been chosen before the game began. They were eternal creatures already.

After that kingdom was established, God withdrew from human politics. There was no further need to mess with it. The nature of this divine debate changed completely. From that time forward, the Devil and his friends could do as they liked, within certain boundaries that God enforced on them directly. Whatever they came up with, it had no bearing on the final outcome. That doesn’t keep them from trying to turn the entire human race against God, but it simply doesn’t matter because of the Elect salted throughout the human race who would eventually all change sides.

The only question now is revealing who the Elect are, because they will replace the rebels on God’s staff. The whole focus of the Devil and his allies is keeping the Elect from their divine heritage promised in the Covenant. The mass of humans he could destroy by his deceptions, but the Elect would never be his, except in the very limited sense of keeping them enslaved to their fleshly natures while they lived on earth.

Thus, we see in the Old Testament history how God intervened directly in political affairs because it was necessary to bring forth His Son. He made sure to reveal His intentions to the nation He shepherded and guided their choices. After the Son, most of that went away. He has surely revealed some political events to His Elect from time to time, but we have come to a stage in the game when it simply doesn’t matter what humans do under the guidance of Darkness.

Granted, you can sometimes make educated guesses about human politics. I consider this estimate reasonable. The only reason we have any use for such analysis is to better inform our mission work. It shouldn’t affect primary decisions; those should be steered by conviction. Rather, we would use such analysis to maintain an awareness of conditions we must face.

For example, we can be sure of economic stress. We knew that was coming because our convictions warned us, but we could have guessed a year ago neither the specific timing nor specific means by which such stress would come. Now we can see the concrete reality that our convictions warned us about.

Nothing that is coming at us is germane to the mission. That’s why God isn’t releasing more prophecies about any of it. The mission remains the same: We must restore the habit of conscious covenant community building. We must learn to focus on the ultimate threat to the Devil’s agenda, that we love each other sacrificially. We must become good at it, well versed in all the difficulties we must vanquish in our own souls. Monster churches with all their organizational grandeur is a fleshly work that distracts from the real mission.

The obsession with orthodoxy is easily the single greatest barrier we face among believers today. We are confronted with a fixation on organizational unity as the false idol erected to keep us from even seeing spiritual and moral unity. We do not need to agree on theology; we need to love each other. We don’t need organizational unity at all. We need a culture of highly decentralized small communities of faith that are flexible on theology.

Our sole identity in Christ is how we learn to care for each other. That’s His One Law as King.

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Dumbfounded How Bad It Is

Posted on March 10, 2026 by ehurst

Re: Is America Winning or Losing the War with Iran?

Leave it to Ron Unz to defy censorship with such flair.

We are not there to see it. The people there are generally not allowed to talk about it. Still, there has never been a time when leaks have been so generously given as right now. I’ll grant you that I’m not in a position to verify much of anything, except in broad general principles of what I saw during my time in uniform.

Never put it past the upper staff to lie. Moreover, never put it past them to lie beyond your imagination — egregiously and even hatefully. I saw it myself. When you factor in the ego of Trump and the utter moral filth of Netanyahu, it goes beyond calling it “lying”.

If any portion of Theodore Postol’s reporting is true, it’s far worse than I would have ever thought. I knew the US forces were not prepared for this crazy mission. I’m dumbfounded at how bad this is going.

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Clarification: Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28

Posted on March 10, 2026 by ehurst

Short answer — most people read this backwards. They insist that the text points to something else, when it is that something else is pointing back to the text.

In your mind, envision an oral body of lore about the Fall of the Devil. It’s not written in Scripture, but we know it exists because of so many references back to it that are fairly consistent. Other passages of Scripture give us glimpses of it. This in itself reflects a broader ANE lore about similar things: people and demigods whose ambitions drove them too high out of personal arrogance. The Hebrews sampled some of this material for obvious reasons.

In Hebrew culture, arrogance is a character flaw. By the same token, taking up the reins of delegated authority and acting with assurance is a virtue. Humility is not a particular set of actions, nor an attitude you put on, but is the constant awareness of whence power descends. In humility, you never hesitate to deny the authority is yours, but affirm that it is a burden upon you. You operate in the name of some higher power.

Back to that body of lore…

When the prophets discuss the fall of great arrogant rulers, they would naturally reference some of the lyrical imagery and verbiage of that oral lore. “In the same way that the Devil fell…” In other words, these arrogant humans (in these passages) were suckers for the temptation offered by the Devil, who wants nothing more than for humans to endorse his error as if it were not an error. To become arrogant is, in effect, to worship the Devil. In your own awareness, you may be worshiping yourself, but it’s a self imbued with the Devil’s spirit.

Thus, by no means should we say those two Bible passages are about the Devil, but that they reflect something of the Devil’s story. The prophets used him as a morality tale. “You are no smarter than the Devil! You are trying to act just like him!”

If you grasp this, then we you recognize the echoes of how Satan got into his current situation, an eternal creature stuck here inside of the time/space continuum. It is for him rather like dying and going to the grave. It is an experience of death. That term might mean literally expiring in some cases, but it’s more important to portray the hideous realization that you really messed up.

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Escaping the Empire

Posted on March 8, 2026 by ehurst

There were three rebellions in the Unseen Realm: the Fall in the Garden, the Watchers before the Flood, and the betrayal after the Tower of Babel. The Cross addressed all three. NT evangelism should also address all three.

Churches today are addressing only the Fall. They don’t even understand the Watchers and they have no concept for the third. At Babel, the Lord handed over the nations existing at that point to the Divine Council as satrapies. He then proceeded to build His own nation through Abraham. The members of the council went and corrupted the nations they shepherded, seducing the humans to worship them as deities.

Throughout the history of Israel, the Hebrew people never batted an eye at how the world around them failed to give worship to the true God, Jehovah. For quite some time, there was no condemnation for that particular issue. Yes, the prophets spoke up about it, but the habits of the nation as a whole was to let it go. Still, the elohim councilors were not content with that, and began seeking ways to corrupt the Hebrews further. Not just in theology, but the agents of Darkness got involved in cultural habits that made too much of the Hebrews being the Chosen. The nation turned inward, having lost sight of its mission of priesthood to the world.

Remember Jonah? He didn’t want the Assyrians to hear the Word, didn’t want them to repent and turn to Jehovah. In the time of Christ, Jews were just fine with Gentiles worshiping their pagan deities, as long as the Jews could avoid being sucked up into it. Wherever they traveled, they were notorious for their arrogant refusal to join in local festivals, which were always pagan in nature. They kept to themselves and talked about how the locals were “unclean”.

It seemed not a single Jew understood the message of Jesus. They saw His power and believed He might be the Messiah, but He kept failing to push that message of crushing the defiled pagans who oppressed the Hebrew people. They wanted vengeance. Even the Nephilim and Watcher spirits assumed the Messiah would come to crush them. Remember what the Legion demons asked Jesus when He showed up on the eastern shore of Galilee? “Have you come to torment us before the Judgment?”

Jesus comes right up to that moment of crisis and dies on the Cross. Nobody expected this, neither human nor eternal. Whenever any human nation rose up to reign, the rulers crushed everyone, blood running across the landscape. The divine rebels loved that. But Jesus gets nailed to a crossbeam, shedding His own blood. He crushed the power of the flesh to keep us in bondage. His enemies were not people, but the rebellious elohim.

Jesus didn’t slaughter humans or elohim. He simply took away all authority. He was God’s personal revocation of the Fall, the corruption of the Watchers, and the abandonment of the Gentiles into the hands of pagan deities.

Remember when Rome marched on the world? Caesar always sent emissaries out ahead of his troops. They came announcing “good news” to the nations. Caesar is bringing Roman peace and prosperity — and justice — to your land! He is ready to accept those who repent from their old ways and embrace him! And what happened to those who resisted? Their blood was shed without mercy. What happened when the Christians came announcing their version of “good news”? The Christians themselves died, often enough. They followed the example of their Master. The elohim were in no mood to lose their chattel and continued their resistance.

Christians came announcing an empire that was not of this world. You are no longer required to serve the various false deities to whom you were handed over before you were even born. You can be set free from bondage to those who actually hate you and want to destroy you. The first step is realizing that their power is limited to things that don’t matter. Human empires are of no real consequence. There is not a thing the eternal rebels can do to keep you in their power. You need only follow the example of Christ, who surrendered His mortal existence and rose to reign eternally.

If this life is all you have, then you have nothing. There is no justice in this life. It was a bait and switch God pulled on His opposition. They invested themselves fully into seizing control of mortal existence, never giving thought to keeping their eternal privileges. They thought they had the final prize when they seduced Israel away from Jehovah. Yes, the rebels fully own this fallen world. Nothing will ever change for the better here. It will slowly degrade until mankind finally kills itself out.

But our investment is not here; it is in Eternity. America will never face “justice” for her crimes, if you are thinking along the lines of justice as humans know it. Rather, justice for America is the withdrawal of opportunity to repent, to connect with Eternity as a people. Americans now have a much bigger barrier to cross to find peace with God. They must first renounce their American identity completely and sneak out of the collapsing empire as individual refugees. Not to another geography, but we escape to an otherworldly focus. That’s what we symbolize in baptism; we declare our allegiance to another realm entirely. It’s spiritual warfare against the Darkness.

This world is not my home…

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Latter Day Idolatry

Posted on March 7, 2026 by ehurst

I’m not dead; I’ve just been busy. My biking blog will eventually explain in detail.

In the Bible, the crux of sin was not in the actions you took. The matter of disobedience was itself secondary. The central core issue was always disloyalty to God. If He owns you, He will not share you. I keep saying that faith is personal, not objective. What saves you is submission to His lordship. It’s that personal connection to Him. Even confession is secondary; you should not confess what is not first true of your faith. Confession is a privilege that God must bestow by His grace.

Heiser cites very early in one podcast the example of King David. This is the man who obtained a personal promise from God about his dynasty, right up there with Abraham and very few others. David was one of the messiest servants God ever had. His moral failures are too numerous to count. Yet, the one thing on which he never failed in the slightest was his personal loyalty to Jehovah. This is why the Lord tolerated his failures, doting on him like a very indulgent father.

David genuinely loved God his whole life long. If you need a text, look up David’s life.

From this context, we understand that idolatry is the key to the meaning of “sin”. The concept cannot be objectified; it cannot be reduced to intellectual definitions. Sin is defined as the failure of personal loyalty to Christ. We can give examples of what that might look like in actual practice, and both testaments do that very well. But some of those examples are purely contextual. I’m pretty sure you would have a hard time worshiping Nehushtan, the bronze serpent Moses formed during the wilderness journey.

The issue with Nehushtan was displacing the nation’s loyalty to Jehovah. Any displacement of that personal loyalty is idolatry in effect. Idolatry is not the symbols, but defiling your relationship with the Lord. All “sin” is idolatry in effect. Do you give any measure of your loyalty (AKA faith) to anything but God? Even trusting in yourself is defiling.

The modern western instinct to trust in science and reason displaces God. Just because you can observe and accurately estimate what actions will result in desired objectives, it does not mean nobody in the Spirit Realm (AKA the Unseen Realm) can get involved. The Spirit Realm cannot be evaluated by intellect. What any human decides outside of Christ is, by default, under the guidance of any number of unseen beings who hate humans and want us all roasting in Hell. There is no neutral ground, no neutral agency between God and His opposition. There is no part of our universe that is not subject to adjustment by God or the Darkness.

Another commentator in the podcast pointed out that English Bible translations tend to confuse cult sacrifice with giving due honor to someone or some symbol of authority. Even in the Old Testament, it was perfectly honorable and righteous, and even expected, to bow before one’s own fleshly father, never mind a clan chief or king. There is a certain level of human loyalty required, whether the person being honored is morally good or not. It’s actually part of divine revelation that we honor whomever holds the place of father and mother (not just the individual persons). That honor would include public displays of obeisance.

This also included gifts as discussed in the series on Leviticus. However, the act of making sacrificial offerings was in the ancient mind distinctly different. It’s not a question of liking money; it’s liking money enough that it displaces your loyalty to Christ. Materialism itself is the problem, not enjoying prosperity. As long as you are quite clear in your life orientation that God is the Provider of all things, there’s no sin rejoicing in His marks of favor.

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Getting Words Right

Posted on February 28, 2026 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 131: Conference Interviews Part 4

Let’s talk about terminology. This is no different than anything we’ve said before; it’s just another person expressing the same thing when Heiser interviewed NT Wright.

The Kingdom of God is what you get when the Covenant comes to life in people’s hearts. The Kingdom is all of the people who share in the spiritual inheritance. The focus is on the people, not place or time. It’s not an institution but a family. It really makes no difference if you call it the Kingdom of God, or of Heaven, or of Christ. It’s all the same thing now.

On the Cross, Jesus defeated the flesh. Galatians 2:20 explains that clearly. Prior to the Cross, defeating the flesh and slipping away from the Enemy’s grasp was much more difficult. It still happened, but the demands were much higher. It required you to move geographically, politically, socially and culturally. But the whole point has always been to conform your earthly existence to the revelation of God, the character and priorities of our Creator. It was never a performance issue; it was always a matter of faith.

In case it wasn’t obvious, God was keeping His final solution hidden from His opposition. The business of an earthly kingdom was an exhibit in the Court of Heaven regarding the dispute with the Devil and his allies. This was a set-up. God knew it would fail; the point was to reveal His character to His children through their failures. The failed earthly kingdom was the build-up to the Messiah who would bring into force the real covenant and the final revelation of God to humanity. The Messiah was the final answer to a long history of failure; there is no clearer revelation of God than His Son.

God’s opposition saw the Old Covenant only as an opportunity to seduce humans and finally destroy them. The Devil and the rebel alliance attacked the rather obvious matter of law and performance until the Nation of Israel had so deeply defected from God that they would fail to witness the Covenant and God would have no choice but to destroy them. They were blind-sided by what the Cross actually did, ending the covenant of human national identity and ushering in a covenant of faith identity.

Satan and the rebels were completely unaware of election. The Cross empowered the Elect to discover their eternal spiritual identity and dispense with human identity. They could renounce the whole thing and step into the Covenant of Christ. It was what the Passover symbolized; not a matter of breaking out one nation enslaved to another, but of all humanity enslaved to the Devil and his friends. It was no longer about human DNA, but spiritual birth.

The notion that the ultimate goal was for souls to go to Heaven was from Plato and his disciples (Plutarch, for example). It’s Hellenism. Scripture says the ultimate goal of Israel and the Messiah was to (1) translate the Hebrew Elect into a spiritual covenant, and (2) to open the Covenant to the Gentile Elect. Plato would insist it has to be democratic, something everyone could theoretically achieve. Paul warned us it was only the Elect, and it was not an achievement. Christ on the Cross did not buy us a ticket to Heaven, but to bring us into the Eternal Covenant, and it starts here in this life.

It’s not like an angry God was ready to crush us, and somehow an innocent victim interposed, so we could get on with life. That’s just a caricature or parody of the gospel message. Redemption sets us free to become the loyal priesthood while on this earth. It’s not parading about in clothing and pretense as something important on a human level. Rather, it’s taking upon ourselves an identity that cannot be read by anyone lacking the Holy Spirit. Reconciliation is all about putting us to work in the mission for which God designed us.

Sin is not simply rule-breaking. Sin is devotion to a false deity, an enslavement to deities that hate you. We have a host of false Christs proclaimed, variations on the theme of false deities. We don’t have temples with images (idols) because we are the images of Christ. Resurrection is the defeat of the false gods. In the “already but not yet” of our spiritual birth, we have the resurrection of our dead spirits, to be followed later by the resurrection of our bodies into their eternal form.

Finally, we have links in Romans 1 back to Genesis 3. Adam began to serve the created beings — the Devil and his allies. Adam and Eve exchanged their reverence for God and switched to a lesser being. That idolatry was a forfeiture of all Adam’s descendants to serve them. We do not inherit Adam’s guilt, but we inherit mortality. The flesh is mortality, and this is what the Cross defeated.

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More on Heart Power

Posted on February 22, 2026 by ehurst

Offline conversations make it clear that readers are missing my point. Allow me to make it more obvious to you: Living in your heart instead of your head is the pathway to reclaiming the miraculous promises of God.

On the one hand, Jan Walleczek and his associates have made it clear that the heart is scientifically proven to influence your health and far more. It’s what Walleczek meant by “self-organizing” in the title of his paper. The electromagnetic field can control the biochemistry of your body to do things better. Living in your head forfeits that power.

Most of the time, simply declaring to people that they have the option of moving their conscious awareness into the heart is enough for them to begin the process. For those who cannot already sense that path, there’s not much I can do. As long as you cling to western mythology about the heart as a repository of mere sentiment and emotion, you cannot live in faith.

Which brings us to the other hand: A critical element in understand how the Hebrew people lived and thought is to recognize that those faithful to Jehovah were living in their hearts. It was the assumption of their culture. They were fully aware of the human tendency to live in the flesh, which meant living in their heads. They didn’t use the same language we do because there are some things that simply cannot be put into words. Still, a solid grasp of Hebrew culture means understanding the difference between head awareness and heart awareness.

The Covenant of Moses required living in your heart. This is one of the things that carries over into the Covenant of Christ: you must live in your heart or you are not under the Covenant. The Holy Spirit does not manifest in your head. He does not speak to the fallen intellect. He speaks from your resurrected spirit to your heart. He speaks through your convictions; that’s the language He uses in your individual soul.

All the treasures of Heaven are unrecognizable to the flesh. They are understood only in the spirit, and the only way your conscious awareness can tap into that is by moving into the heart. The whole point of faith redemption in this world is to change completely how you perceive the situation; it’s not a question of what you have. The gift of Christ is to awaken faith, not to change this world.

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Symbols and Icons

Posted on February 21, 2026 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 130: Conference Interviews Part 3

Heiser interviews David Burnett regarding his paper, “Death, Resurrection, and Transformation in Scripture in 1 Corinthians 15”. This has to do mostly with how the Septuagint and New Testament documents interplay via the Greek language.

In Deuteronomy 4:15ff, Moses remarks that, at no time did they see God’s form in the fire (or the cloud). This is a well known ancient concept that there is no way to depict the Creator of all things. Keep in mind that the business with the golden calf was not to worship the calf itself, but depict it as the mount upon which an invisible deity rode. Thus, Moses says not to make any graven images (idols) of anything on earth as a substitute for God’s lack of form.

The Septuagint uses the term eikon as “image”. It’s the same term used in Genesis, in that you and I are the eikon or “image” of God. This is where He offers that list of things for which Israel must not create an image or likeness. And when they gaze into the skies, they shall not feel awed and seek to worship those things up there.

Notice that Moses does not forbid them making any eikon of those celestial bodies. Keep in mind that, in the Hebrew language, any reference to the visible stars and planets is shorthand for God’s staff in Heaven — elohim and so forth. We’ve seen how the Ark of the Covenant had “images” of those beings (cherubim and seraphim), so they weren’t forbidden to make such images, but forbidden to worship them.

Paul taught the resurrection of humans, something Greeks sneered at because they could not imagine the existence of a spiritual realm separate from this realm. In 1 Corinthians 15:35ff, we noted in a previous lesson that Paul echoes Deuteronomy 4 but doesn’t copy the list exactly because he’s talking about resurrection, not idolatry. Instead, Paul refers to the different kinds of bodies that God has given various creatures. He refers to heavenly (eternal) bodies and mortal bodies. Then he mentions the various celestial bodies. Next, Paul moves onto how resurrection is not a silly myth, as many Greek scholars of his day alleged.

Paul then refers to how our mortal existence is like a seed sown. Our mortal form is related, but bears no resemblance — no eikon — to our resurrected/eternal form. He still echoes something in Deuteronomy 4 in that we should not make images of mortal things to worship them. And while we could make representative images of eternal bodies, we still don’t worship them, either.

Why not? We are slated to replace them.

The imagery in 1 Corinthians 15 is all about seeds planted, dying, and then being reborn as something else. This is parallel to the passage in Deuteronomy 4 where Moses warns the people of Israel to remember that they were taken from the smelting furnace (Egypt) and brought out as what survived the fire. God was in that fire with them; He was the fire. They were the treasure, they were themselves an eikon of what He intended for humans in this world. It was “already but not yet” making them imagers of God. This is parallel to the concept of Paul’s death-burial-resurrection imagery via planting seeds for crops.

The OT Chosen were a symbol of the NT Elect. They were to be His testimony as a nation of flesh; we are His testimony as a nation of hearts. We are being made into the eikon of Christ. Our eternal form will see us replace those beings who have sought to seduce us to worship them. Putting materials into a furnace was part of the process of making an eikon that pagans would worship. We are in the New Exodus.

Luke 9:31 — Jesus discusses with Moses and Elijah His “departure”. Luke uses the Greek term for “exodus” on purpose. Jesus would descend the mountain and go through death, but come out the other side in His eternal body. Thus, Paul has answered the questions in 1 Corinthians 15 regarding the process toward resurrection. We die in the flesh, we germinate for a time, then spring to life eternal. We once bore the eikon of mortal humanity, but we shall then bear the eikon of eternal life, same as Christ.

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Reprise: Heart Power

Posted on February 19, 2026 by ehurst

Roughly 11 years ago I embarked on a study regarding the power of the heart as a primary organizing force in our human existence. Someone had introduced the concept to me, but from a peculiar angle that really didn’t set too well. The material mentioned some scientific research and I began chasing that down.

That this really is a science is not in doubt; see this article, for example.

The key figure was Jan Walleczek of Stanford University. You can still find online copies of his earliest publications on this (“Self-organized Biological Dynamics and Non-linear Control”) if you know where to look, but it’s not light reading. The critical point he makes is that the heart generates a very powerful electromagnetic field that does far more than you might imagine. His paper focuses on how the heart manages the activity and structure inside the body. The heart is also a sensory organ that can process feedback from this powerful field, such as when it encounters the fields generated by other living beings, and apparently some inanimate objects.

The challenge is getting our brains to make sense of what our hearts can tell us. There are several organizations attempting to do this, not least of which is the Heart Math Institute. They do a good job of summarizing the research out there, but because they are stuck in the western model of anthropology, they assume it’s primary application is the emotions.

In western mythology, the heart is the repository of sentiment or emotion. Thus, using all that research obviously means emotional intelligence. However, the West is the only civilization in human history to assume this. Every other civilization and culture assumes that the heart operates in an entirely different realm of being, something the West flatly denies even exists.

Which brings us to the field of Biblical Studies. The entire Ancient Near East assumes the heart is our only viable connection to the Spirit Realm. In the Bible, the heart is the seat of faith, the faculty by which we submit and commit to our Creator. It is the faculty by which we can discern spiritual matters. It can be steered wrong, falling off into idolatry, but God has made His mark on the hearts of the Elect. Sooner or later, they will come to Him in faith.

For our Radix Fidem community, this connection between modern science and Biblical Studies, producing the concept of heart-led living, which is much more than the common western evangelical image of “having faith”. The latter is often portrayed as a mere discipline of the mind, not a full engagement of one’s whole being.

I’m placing a copy of my book, Heart of Faith here in my blog’s media archive for easy download, should you be interested in this subject.

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