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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More Than a Conspiracy

Posted on May 8, 2026 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 149: Q&A with Fern, Audrey, and Beth

As Heiser warns up front, this is not a model for ministry. Rather, this interview aims to answer basic questions about how the Enemy and his allies operate. What is their aim in driving humans to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, formally known as schizophrenia) and Trauma-based Mind Control? What strategy is behind their efforts prevent recovery?

In order to declare the answers to those questions, we must establish a the identity of the players involved. Also, what follows here assumes you have heard/read podcast episodes 68 and 120.

I’m not going to simply echo Heiser with a summary, but add my own experience, as well.

The whole thing rests on deception. Deception was the root of the Fall in the Garden, the work of the Watchers and Nephilim, and was the substance behind the Tower of Babel and the rebellion that led to idolatry. All of them are lies about who God is and what He has said and done. More to the point, they are lies about our role in His plans.

Sadly, that deception infests the likes of traditional western deliverance or exorcism ministries. That whole thing is based on a false mythology about how the Enemy operates. The net result of most deliverance ministries can make things worse for the victims, reaffirming a false authority system that binds people in Darkness.

The focus of genuine redemption is the person in their context, not some wild fantasies about the Spirit Realm. The sin of the Watchers was to cross the boundary between the seen and unseen realms. It is impossible for us to then reach back across that boundary from our realm and pretend to command beings on the other side. The solution is to deconstruct the lies people believe about themselves and the false authority of beings we cannot see.

The power of the Apostles to deliver was not by claiming authority, but by disclaiming a false authority that ruled the victims. Victims of trauma and DID are not possessed; they are overwhelmed by deception. The Enemy has disrupted the natural process of human development. Some of the damage may be quite real, requiring either a miracle healing and/or medical treatment. In other cases, the Enemy takes advantage of natural disabilities that were already there. But the real problem is the lies people believe about themselves.

The Devil is the Master of Darkness simply by virtue of being the first to rebel, to reject God’s declared purpose and plans. He is not the highest rank, however it is you imagine such a thing. He has the support of beings who were surely higher than him, but they agree with his fundamental complaint that God cares too much about humans. Humans were granted the very high mission of imaging God in Creation without having the high rank that other beings on God’s staff held. It would require the higher beings to honor God’s imagine in them.

This the foundation of the dispute between God and the Devil. As a result, the Devil and his partisans have agreed together to destroy humans. They don’t have that power, but are trying to turn the humans against God. God has responded by giving the Devil a limited grant of authority to try his hand at provoking humans to do things that would require God to destroy them. Part of this game is that we are placed in mortal bodies. We are born into a deception about our situation as mortal creatures, which is how we got into this situation. Christ redeemed us, but it’s not enough to simply buy into that intellectually. The process includes the necessity of us dying first to our fleshly concerns, and then being relieved of our fleshly nature at God’s timing.

We rediscover our eternal identity in Christ. However, the process of rediscovery can be particularly difficult for some us. Heiser refers to the “divine council worldview” while we tend to use the term “thesis of the Unseen Realm” — there’s not much difference between the two terms. The point is that this is the biblical cosmology, if you will. There is more than enough academic evidence of what the Second Temple Judaism taught about such things, and we can see clear evidence that Jesus and the writers of the New Testament also believed some of that background, including it in their teaching.

Deliverance and exorcism ministries carry a cartoonish view demons. The thesis of the Unseen Realm pegs them as very low-level “bastard spirits” (from the Dead Sea Scrolls). They are disembodied spirits of the Nephilim and Rephaim from the Bible. These are half-breed children of genuine elohim, the Watchers who crossed the boundary to come to earth and cohabit with humans. Both Watchers and Nephilim are spirit beings who can incarnate under certain conditions, but the latter are lower rank and lower power.

Both groups are condemned to the Abyss until the Last Days. They’ll be released briefly prior to the Day of Judgment, for which the details are unknown at this point. They lost their actual powers over Creation when they were confined to the Abyss. For now, their only power is deception, same as the Devil. Indeed, they are bound to honor the principles of Biblical Law. If you don’t buy their lies and obey the Word, they cannot do much to you.

Side note: In their eagerness to keep their influence of humans, the spirits of the Nephilim will submit to conjuring. They will do everything they can to share their false lore — as if they would ever tell the truth about the situation and processes in the Spirit Realm.

However, there are members of the rebellion who are not in prison. The Divine Councilors who allied with Satan and are responsible for the deception of the Gentile nations remain on staff in Heaven. They have genuine power; they are the real trouble. This is why idolatrous cult folks can do some really strange things. It is this corrupted power that Christ broke on the Cross, so that we can be delivered from the dominion of the rebellious elohim. We don’t belong to the nations and their idolatries any more; we belong to Christ.

The resurrection of Christ broke the power of death and the power of idolatry. Do you understand that every human government is bound under idolatry? Do you understand why the truth of Christ’s Kingdom is a threat to every human government? For example, within the Imperial Roman bureaucracy, there were officials who understood this teaching up to a point. They understood it well enough to know that followers of Christ might be generally cooperative with the process of human government, but their ultimate allegiance was to something they considered much higher. The only way to combat this was to demand Christians engage in idolatrous worship under threat of execution.

Even if a given government lacks that level of understanding, you can bet the elohim know. They will steer their human servants into paths that will eventually threaten genuine Christian faith and the biblical understanding of the Unseen Realm. Indeed, the elohim have steered the US government, among others, to engage in efforts at mind control. I’m guessing the bulk of clients treated by Fern, Audrey and Beth are victims of government programs designed to test the limits of how to create and use people suffering DID and trauma.

People who work to share these teachings are at some risk of retribution from the elohim. Pray for them that they will be ready to move forward without flinching.

Final note: The Watchers and Nephilim cannot be redeemed. The rebel elohim have already been sentenced, but remain free until the Day of Judgment. They have been rejected and a major element in their wickedness with us is making us believe we are rejected, that we cannot be redeemed. The western doctrine of guilt before the law is a primary element of that campaign. It’s also a fundamental element in trauma abuse to make people believe that God hates them, that they deserve all the evil that happens to them. You would hardly be surprised that such victims are the source of a pernicious doctrine that demons can be redeemed. This has captured and destroyed many ministries led by people who falsely imagine that they can talk the demons into confessing Christ as Lord.

Yes, demons would love to be redeemed, to rejoin the Eternal Family of God, but they already know it can’t happen. They seek desperately to sucker us into talking to them for any purpose at all. As Heiser and these ladies point out, there is nothing to gain by that. Don’t even try to reach into the Unseen Realm. Just work with the victims through the love of Christ. The biblical doctrine of redemption demands that we focus on loving His human children face-to-face. Redemption is a personal process.

I recommend you listen to those three podcasts for yourself.

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Should Be Experts

Posted on May 8, 2026 by ehurst

The Covenant of Christ is both very simple and very hard. Submission to Christ as Covenant Sovereign is simply outside western experience, so it’s very hard. Yet the concept is rather simple, as is His command that we love each other as He does. That points to the Cross, the death of our fleshly natures. The implementation of that gets complicated real fast.

Believers in community should be the world’s experts at living in tension. There is absolutely nothing churches must accomplish. Nothing in Scripture requires us to build up large organizations with substantial investments in real estate and facilities. There’s nothing in Scripture about increasing budgets.

Indeed, the whole concept of budgeted giving is alien to Scripture. It’s nothing more than a taxman’s approach to coercing contributions through browbeating and manipulation. In the Old Testament, the only thing on which one tithed was agricultural production. Cash earnings were not tithed. The general principle is that you gave voluntarily “from the increase” — a concept itself arising from agriculture. If the Lord prospers you, then you honor Him. If He does not prosper you, then the issue is not giving, but finding out what He requires for restoring His favor.

Notice something: People who experience the power of the Holy Spirit of God always share freely. It’s part of the humility and love that His Presence evokes. It never fails. The giving itself is way more important than the resulting church budget. The inherent worldliness of the current common budgeting system in churches is scandalous, an embarrassment to the Lord’s name. At no point should anyone ever even think about, “How can we increase offerings?”

Again, it’s not about institutional growth; it’s about the depth of moral and spiritual development of the people involved. The whole task of any church is building love between each other. The reason the New Testament churches didn’t have denominations was not because they were all of one doctrine. It was because they knew that being together was the whole point, not some imaginary orthodoxy. There was a flexibility about what people believed.

Yes, Paul addressed factions within the body, but was quite willing to simply let people go when their distinctions disrupted the community. There are things you don’t transgress; most of the Old Covenant based on violating underlying moral truth inherent in Creation itself. If you ignore those boundaries, you are fighting reality itself.

The First Century Christians had a much stronger conceptual distinction between doctrine and theology. Doctrine means understanding what Christ taught without intellectual embellishment. Some questions will never be answered to our satisfaction. This is why our Radix Fidem community works so hard at recovering the Hebrew mindset of Jesus and His disciples. The fundamental assumptions of ancient Hebrew people were radically different from those of Americans today. We keep demanding definitions that they never would have dared to ask. The question was never a matter of what’s in your head, but what’s in your heart.

That job is hard enough without complicating it with analytical structuring so common in the West. We don’t need precise intellectual definitions; we need guidance in the one and only task of living in harmony with each other. An awful lot of biblical doctrine leaves intellectual questions hanging by design. Feel free to organize it internally so that you can implement the requirements. Just keep in mind that your internal rational considerations may not work for someone else. There is no need for uniformity in some questions.

Under the cover of intellectual organization is the awful temptation to take yourself and your talents too seriously. You must learn to live with the irritation of something seeming to you so crystal clear and reasonable, while it doesn’t work for someone you are obliged to work with in keeping community alive. People can embrace you without accepting your reasoning; it’s not a rejection of you.

Your church should not be an institution organized to accomplish concrete goals. A church does not require the kind of formal order needed for businesses to profit. Church is a family household, including people who are born sometimes very different from you. The mandate is to care for them the way households are morally obliged to handle varied temperaments and drives. Moment by moment, you must keep alive the kind of negotiated peace that allows kids to thrive and develop into functioning members of the household community.

And their only function is living together in the peace of God. Yes, there are boundaries and exclusions. The atmosphere should encourage people to play along until they simply cannot. This should be paramount in the minds of the elders and pastors. Don’t follow leaders who cannot get that. Shepherds are the folk with some expertise on keeping the flock healthy as a whole.

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Spiritual Graduation

Posted on May 4, 2026 by ehurst

Sorry, but I don’t have the footnotes for this tidbit from way back in my college days: I recall reading somewhere about an exchange between Hebrew and Greek philosophers. This was before Alexander the Great. In their discussion, the Hebrew men concluded that the Greeks had not progressed beyond juvenile thinking. To the Hebrew mystics, Hellenized assumptions about “propositional truth” sounded like something they would have expected from teenagers. It’s a focus on the fleshly nature.

One of the issues was the Hellenized reliance on binary logic. Every thought or statement was either factual or false. While Greeks did understand symbolism, for them it was limited to allegory. Thus, all symbols must be confined to a single, one-to-one representation of something concrete. The Greeks sneered at the idea of Hebrew parable because it could not be pinned down that way. Western scholarship is Hellenistic, so western thinkers keep trying to force the Bible into their logical categories.

The Bible is a Hebrew document, and Jesus was a Hebrew man. A Hellenized mind cannot understand His message.

Western theologians choke on the problem of verifying what they see as facts presented in Scripture. With our modern western scientific investigations, we can flatly disprove the Hebrew cosmology. For the Hebrews, near as we can tell, they regarded the sky as a vault standing over a flat earth. The problem is that we aren’t too sure they actually thought that way because Hellenistic minds insist that talking about it in those terms can mean only that one believed it as fact. In the Hebrew mind, it was a silly question, because they realized they couldn’t know the nature of such things. It was simply the common expressions they absorbed from the rest of the Ancient Near East.

Worst of all, to a Western mind, it seems as if God spoke in those terms. How could we have God asserting things demonstrably false?

Mike Heiser has his answer. It requires him a substantial amount of talk to get there. His answer boils down to mostly a matter of God not having much to work with when it comes to human scientific knowledge and the ancient Hebrew people. He does note that the Bible makes no attempt to address the things covered under modern science. He spends most of his time on the podcast addressing the concept of “inspiration” as it pertains to Scripture. He goes over the three basic views — verbal inspiration, limited inerrancy, inerrancy of purpose — along with a dismissive reference to absolutist dictation theory.

Eventually he gets around to questioning whether the concept of “errancy” even fits in this discussion. God chose those people with their peculiar worldview, etc.

I go a bit farther than Heiser did. God built that people and culture. He made them as the sole means for final revelation. They expressed things in terms He would have used without them. It’s not a question of God saying something that is factually in error. He spoke in parables about the things that mattered most. So it’s a matter of God expressing Himself in terms you must accept before you can join His family. You can’t drag your modern science into the Presence of God because it’s wholly impertinent.

The only question is that you bow in feudal submission and swear allegiance to His Son. That part is flatly stated without parabolic expressions. Digging into Hebrew cosmology misses the point. It is impossible to prove that they believed any of those expressions of cosmology literally. It’s highly likely they did not. Given the broader academic perspective of what we know about the Ancient Near East, the Hebrews never bothered to even think about it. They would not have cared about such things. What matters is your commitment (AKA faith) in the Messiah.

Most westerners can handle a call to allegiance and faith. That’s the starting place, the doorway to the Covenant of Christ. To rub elbows with the adults in the Kingdom of Christ requires you to grasp Hebrew mysticism and parabolic language. Theology that ignores the wealth of information available on the Hebrew mindset is just children’s Sunday School stuff.

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Watchmen, Not Watchers Part 2

Posted on May 2, 2026 by ehurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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