Not Special

Posted on June 22, 2025 by ehurst

President Trump is not special.

I realize just saying that by itself is enough to raise his ire. He’s not special; he’s no different from any other president we’ve had for at least a century back. Every one of them has acted for his own personal interests first. The party affiliation simply tells you the flavor of his personal interests. In Trump’s case, it’s not even that. He was a lifelong Democrat until he decided to run for President; using the Republican Party was the easiest path for him. He has made a deal with the neocons to seize full control of the party.

There’s nothing new about that among Republicans. What distinguishes him is his monumental ego and arrogance, and his willingness to lie without limits. There is nothing at all he wouldn’t lie about in order to manipulate the public. The man has zero principle, as vain as they come. He lied about his reason for bombing Iran. It’s all about his ego and his personal financial profit. This action is entirely unreasonable and based on flat out lies about Iran. It has nothing to do with what Iran did or didn’t do.

All of this is just regular American politics and would normally be unworthy of remark. However, it is important to note that in sending military power into Iran, Trump has torn away the last shred of provisional covering America had before the Lord. He has openly sided with Satan, whom Jesus said was the father of Judaism. Follow the logic here: Jesus said the Pharisees were children of Satan. Judaism is simply Pharisaism. Even secular Jewish ethnic identity is tainted with that, and Zionism in particular is Satanic.

Pharisaism lifted up a false image of who God is, so fatally blinded that it didn’t recognize His Son. It was like the sin of Jeroboam all over again, raising up a false image and calling it “Jehovah”. Trump has joined in this sin. He has raised up false idols and called them “Christian”. He has placed Christ’s name on something that does not represent the Lord of Scripture. Everyone who supports Trump will participate in defaming the Lord.

As always, I’m not writing to present you with a well reasoned argument. This is about the Holy Spirit; either God will confirm what I say or you will reject it. I have no doubt that, if/when this message comes to the notice of certain people, I will face persecution. Censorship will be the least of my worries. Trump has been maniacal about using government to hound anyone he considers an enemy. Perhaps my readership is too small for anyone much to notice. We’ll see.

I must speak my convictions and let the Lord provide whatever cover He sees fit for His glory. Trump’s actions are the straw the broke the camel’s back. America has zero covering and will reap the wrath of God in His own good time. Having chosen to serve Satan, America will discover what wages he offers.

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It’s the Rituals

Posted on June 21, 2025 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 79: Leviticus 17-18

We aren’t through with Leviticus. Already we’ve discovered some details that most readers never catch because the Hebraic and ANE background are missing. Starting in Leviticus 17 through 26, we are looking at what most scholars refer to as the Holiness Code. What may not be obvious is that the items discussed in these two chapters refer to worship. It has to be done right.

Thus, when the first few verses refer to killing an animal, it refers to sacrifice, not just slaughter for food (see Deuteronomy 12:15-16). The whole point is twofold: forbidding offerings to other deities, but also to ensure that every sacrifice to Jehovah comes to the Tabernacle. If nothing else, this ensures that the priests get their share.

Heiser belabors the meaning of “cut off” — Hebrew karath. I believe he overstates the situation. After his wrestling through all the references how that word is used elsewhere in the Bible, I think it boils down to ostracism or excommunication. The offender becomes a Gentile, and an unwelcome one, at that. Whether or not God does more to them is not the point; they are not allowed back into fellowship. Moreover, when they die, they likely will not be “gathered to their ancestors”. There is no expectation of welcome into eternal fellowship in the afterlife.

The term translated into English as “detestable things” or “abominations” (Hebrew toebah) refers to various pagan worship practices. Consuming blood was a pagan practice, but in Leviticus 17 blood belongs to God. The blood is the life, and life belongs to God. Don’t steal from the Lord! That blood was spilled in place of your own blood, substitutionary atonement. That’s the whole point of the sacrificial system; you bring a substitute to die in your place.

There is a strong record of pagan ritual magic using blood in other ways than consumption. Thus, Heiser notes a high probability that draining and burying the blood prevents anyone else collecting the spilled blood from food slaughter to be used in pagan rituals. It’s also a way of honoring the life given to sustain yours. You bury your fallen ones and leave the enemies to rot in the open.

Regarding Chapter 18, we note there are a lot of sexual boundaries here. It should be obvious that “uncovering nakedness” refers to having sex with someone. The boundaries here don’t match those in our American culture and law, but they make sense in the context of the Old Covenant.

He diverges just a moment to explain the business of Noah and his son Ham exposing his nakedness in Genesis 9. Hebrew tends to euphemism (AKA, symbolism, parable) for some things too sensitive to state plainly. Recall that uncovering one parent is the same as both. The best way to make sense of that story is to understand that Ham had sex with his own mother, and that the child of that union was Canaan. That’s why Canaan is the one who suffers the curse.

The whole thing includes the image of taking control of the tribe, as Absalom did with his father’s concubines. Ham was trying to seize control of the household. He crows to his brothers about this and they refuse to go along with it. They engage in a ritual act of putting their father’s covering back over their mother. They reject the usurpation. Noah’s curse on the child (naming him before birth) halts Ham’s attempt to begin a new dynasty.

I’m disappointed that Heiser leaves this pagan ritual theme behind when he addresses other sexual boundaries. This whole section of Leviticus is about ritual acts of idolatry. Everything in this chapter is certainly under that covering. Thus, it is not about sex itself; it is ritual sex acts. That’s what defiles the land. All the chatter about why it’s wrong for men and not for women misses the point: lesbian sex was not a common ritual in the ANE.

Also note that a man having sex with his menstrual wife is a small issue in Leviticus 15:4, but here it becomes an excommunication offense. The difference is the context of this latter portion of the Book of Leviticus. Here we are dealing with pagan ritual idolatry. The meaning of the act is the whole point.

Heiser’s argument about wasting procreative activity stands on its own, but does not fit here. Homosexuality is wrong regardless of why anyone does it. But any sexual act for the purpose of magic or idolatry is particularly evil; the Covenant tribe must be cleansed of such people. Paul’s prohibitions on such acts are more because he defines such self-centered behavior as a New Testament form of idolatry — self worship, the worship of the fleshly urges.

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Leviticus and Sacrifices

Posted on June 14, 2025 by ehurst

It’s not just Heiser, though I believe he leads the way in clarifying the sacrificial system in the Old Testament, but a lot of obscure scholarship attempts to dig into something that most Christians just do not understand.

Naturally, a major problem is that the history of church theology has really drawn the boundaries in a lot of wrong places. The western concept of justice really does defile our understanding of God’s Word. In broad simple terms, western justice is entirely depersonalized and dehumanizing, punitive and vindictive. Divine justice is restorative and personal. In moral matters, God is the offended party.

As noted in a previous lesson, God distinguishes between normal human mistakes and willful blasphemous defiance. There is no atonement in Moses for the latter, and the whole sacrificial system was all about the normal human mistakes. You can find any number of outlines online and in books for a list of the sacrifices required in Leviticus 1-7 (the context of this lesson). Most of them rely on English translations that are flawed in large part due to flawed theology based on western assumptions.

1. The Burnt Offering (Leviticus 1) — Heiser summarizes the crux of the matter with the image of bringing a host gift when visiting a VIP. You are coming to spend time with God in sacred space. You want to put Him in a good mood about your presence. The whole thing goes up in smoke on the altar. Further, it is often accompanied with the next item.

2. Grain Offering (Leviticus 2) often goes with a burnt offering. It’s primarily a nod to the priests, since they get to consume the bulk of it. The symbolism of adding salt is critical as a preservative of the Covenant, as it is sometimes referred to as a “covenant of salt”.

3. Peace Offering (Leviticus 3) is a shared meal that includes the priests and everyone else. Naturally, God needs no food, but it’s the image of you coming to His table. You give it to Him initially, and He graciously shares it with you and everyone else He includes in His household. It is a feast, a celebration of shalom — stability, prosperity, safety and health. You are giving Him credit for these things as a natural result of His reign.

4. The Sin Offering (starting in Leviticus 5) is no such thing. It’s a misleading label we instinctively assume is to atone for individual sins. The blood is not applied to the worshiper. Heiser suggests it should be called a “decontamination offering”, something that we must bring in order to protect sacred space for the contamination we all carry from the Fall. The blood is splattered on the structures of sacred space as a means of building a barrier against our fallen nature, which can be seen as a communicable defilement. Again, the priests get a piece of this offering.

5. The Guilt Offering (starting in Leviticus 6) should be called a “restitution offering”. It’s to make up for an actual loss suffered. In Hebrew law, you always add 20% to any loss you have caused another. The priestly share is the same as the previous.

Notice how we are reminded that these offerings could not take away sin (noted quite boldly in Hebrews 9-10). They were only for ritual purity, with a primary purpose of making the covenant people aware of their sinful mortal nature, while much of the rest of the Law pointed to the costs of sinful actions. There was a big emphasis on building a sense of holiness in the appointment of sacred spaces. People died for taking just the symbolism lightly.

In Christ, all sins were atoned. Not only can we enter sacred space, but we become the sacred space. This would be earthshattering for Jews who were paying attention. We owe it to ourselves to absorb the Hebrew understanding of these things.

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Cloud Shots

Posted on June 12, 2025 by ehurst

Today’s training ride was about 35 miles, out to NE 122nd and Westminster. It had been raining overnight. The humidity remained quite high and the scudding clouds east of us still brought a little drizzle. I got damp on my ride out in the countryside, but looking back west where the skies were clearing, we had some dramatic formations drifting across the horizon. These are not rain clouds, but the result of upper atmosphere moisture that could cause rain. Given a little instability, those would become thunderheads.

Once I got back into town, the formations had changed a bit. The winds aloft are still blowing this moisture inland (northward here in Oklahoma) and will result in rough weather somewhere up north, maybe around the Great Lakes. The park below is the newest one finished just about a year ago. The old Midwest City clock tower stands over what was once the municipal offices, but they were moved a long time ago.

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A Spiritual Free-fire Zone

Posted on June 9, 2025 by ehurst

As I’ve said before, Americans have a persistent problem with binary logic. It’s the go-to assumption everyone makes about anything they don’t really understand. While Americans are capable of gradations, levels and nuance, they don’t go there until forced into it. I’m forcing it on the issue of moral and spiritual things.

Divine covering is not an on/off switch. He offers one kind of covering for His Covenant family, another for His human allies, and another for His tools, etc. God has commissioned many servants, both individuals and nations, to serve a particular purpose, only to discard them later. There are the Elect, and then there are others. These tools were covered during their usefulness, but they were not family. Some of these provisional coverings may stretch over limited time frames and apply only to certain purposes.

But it gets even more challenging: Moral and spiritual truth cannot be objectified. You cannot examine it from the outside. You must get directly involved personally in order to understand anything at all about it. That’s because such knowledge is a matter of personal contact with God. Morality and spirituality are not things that exists in themselves; they are aspects of God and our roles in His Kingdom. If you don’t know Him, you don’t know them, because they are expressions of His personality and character.

As an elder, my spiritual covering is a resonance of God’s. I’m limited and so is my covering. If you are a husband/father, God grants you a limited covering over your household. As heads of households, there are varying gradations of covering we grant to children, females, males, etc. It’s all loaded with nuance, and your headship covering can be reinforced by your association with an elder, pastor, and others who have a strong role in the Kingdom of Heaven. That means the gaps in covering are also varied and nuanced.

Most of it is not too hard to estimate because of conviction and covenant. But sometimes it rests on your spiritual awareness. What you don’t know can harm you, but God may be patient with you, offering a covering you didn’t know you needed. It’s not guaranteed. Your role, mission and calling are also factors, as well as things like what happens in the Unseen Realm.

Understanding covering is like understanding a natural forest as a whole, all at once. It’s a living entity that can be fostered or neglected; it can thrive or degenerate. Bits and pieces can shift in strength and new demands on you may arise today simply because it’s not yesterday.

Our US government is under a provisional covering. It’s partial and has a limited shelf-life based on how it serves God’s inscrutable purpose. At some point, it is altogether likely that our ruling regime will slip out from under that covering. As far as I can discern, it’s getting very close. The anointing-for-purpose will expire or be abrogated.

I say that, not trying to speak for others, only for those who rely on my spiritual covering as elder. My convictions tell me that we are in grave danger of persecution of a type and means I cannot clearly see just yet. For now, I am convinced we need to do all we can to stay out of the way. Our community is currently avoiding provoking any government authority. But all too soon, the government will make new demands that will be impossible for us. The government will see it as politics, because our government has neither clue or interest regarding eternal spiritual matters.

In military jargon, we would say our government will wander out into a free-fire zone. Think about what that means in terms of spiritual warfare.

I have every confidence that God can make that moment clear to you without any need for me to point it out. At the same time, I can assure you I’ll find a way to let you know when I believe that moment has come. How you respond is a matter of your own convictions. I encourage you to study and pray about this before that day comes.

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So Should You

Posted on June 7, 2025 by ehurst

Human politics is not a driving force, not a cause; it is a consequence.

There may be more elections in the US. They won’t change anything that matters. No one is riding to the rescue; no human agent is appointed by God to restore some vision of peace and prosperity. There is no great revival of truth coming from human political affairs. All that you see is coming down from a far higher level of power, and it is designed to deceive. The thesis of the Unseen Realm should have locked that down for you already. The only way to understand what is happening in politics, economics, social movements, etc., is to have some way of sensing what God and the powers of Heaven are doing.

If God does not grant you some spiritual gift for seeing what is happening in His courts, then you are left to extrapolate from your convictions. Be very careful in doing so. What God requires of you is for His glory, not for your information, not to satisfy your curiosity about things. You should not imagine He won’t lead you into conflict with others He has called. Such conflict would be the context in which you demonstrate how God wants you to do things. The Scripture is loaded with instruction on handling conflicts because they are part of our human existence. His ways are inscrutable; you know only what He reveals to you. The issue with convictions is clarity for your choices in the context, not necessarily as guidance for anyone else.

I profess to you that my spiritual gifts are limited; they fit my mission. Today my mission is to remind you that what we are seeing is much more than simply a matter of cyclical human behavior at large. The cycles of human politics are in there, but there’s more to it. God has decreed destruction for Western Civilization as a whole. What happens in the US is just a small part of that.

The Enemy of Faith offers everything that’s got a name in order to keep the Elect in slavery. Don’t be a fool.

Reminder: Not a single government on this earth is under any covenant with God. There is no human political, economic or social activity that reflects His will for us. He does not interact with human events at large as Father, but as Judge. Any protection or anointing on public figures is wholly conditional based on the temporary usefulness of the person or thing. They are just tools, not His family. Your allegiance and support should be only provisional.

Yes, I will assert that this is true of Israel, as well. That government is already fracturing, and the mess is only beginning. Eschatological hopes for modern Israel are sheer folly; there is nothing covenantal about what’s going on there. Whatever vision of redemption you might be looking for is not there. It’s just a giant lie of Satan. Stay out of the way; we have no authority to change the situation.

I’m not saying, “Don’t get involved.” That would be silly. Rather, I’m saying don’t invest yourself into any of this. It is nothing more than a mixture of opportunities to testify. Otherwise, it is all meaningless chaos. Turmoil, tribulation and chaos is the only meaningful prediction anyone can make. Human wisdom can probably detect certain trends and outcomes, but the core meaning of what is happening is rooted in Heaven.

In Heaven, God has loosed the Watcher spirits, the Nephilim and their allies to deceive and destroy. Events at large will remain unpredictable to humans unless/until God commissions a prophet to warn about specifics. This would be someone who has been stood before the Council in Heaven as His anointed spokesman. I’m quite convinced there is no such person right now. There are only servants of the Lord with a very limited grasp of what is happening, and I’m the least of them.

I’m not going to tell you, “Thus saith the Lord.” All I can tell is what my convictions say to me. They are informed by my best effort to understand His Word in its own context. I stand on my commission to warn the Elect that an apocalypse is here. The Spirit should make that obvious to anyone who pays attention.

Basic principle: Our Lord is not working with large human structures. From the Cross onward, He works primarily in small communities. That’s where you’ll see His face. He will be absent from large crowds. So should you.

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Here’s Your Definitive Answer

Posted on June 6, 2025 by ehurst

This is your weekly Bible lesson.

3 So he carried me away in the Spirit to a wilderness, and there I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. 4 Now the woman was dressed in purple and scarlet clothing, and adorned with gold, precious stones, and pearls. She held in her hand a golden cup filled with detestable things and unclean things from her sexual immorality. 5 On her forehead was written a name, a mystery: “Babylon the Great, the Mother of prostitutes and of the detestable things of the earth.” 6 I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of those who testified to Jesus. I was greatly astounded when I saw her. (Revelation 17 NET)

Most readers recognize that, while John recorded here a parable of Rome as the Beast and religion as the Harlot, the image applies throughout human history, at least after Christ walked the earth. The expression “the Harlot Church” is recognized even among non-believers.

Lately I’ve been asked why I object to the various manifestations of Eastern Orthodoxy. For me, it’s the same question as to why I reject Catholicism and Protestantism. Rather than load you down with a detailed list of features, the answer is rather simple: They all keep asking and answering the wrong questions.

I often say that the fundamental issue here is reclaiming Biblical Mysticism. That mysticism is actually quite practical. The only biblical question is: What does God require of me? What do I need to know to understand His glory? How often must we remind ourselves that the Hebrew mind did not speculate on what was beyond the visible horizon? The Apostles were fully aware of the western obsession with visualizing things not present, and they contended against the tendency to ask a jillion detailed questions about the mechanism of divine power, when Scripture repeatedly says that we cannot understand it. We don’t need to know in order to be faithful.

Orthodoxy was born of dispute over questions that were wrong in the first place. Catholicism arose from seeking to sate human fleshly desires for control over things Christ did not place in our hands. Protestantism was born from political disputes over Catholic abuses. All of them are wrong because they are rooted in non-faith issues.

How easily we forget what “faith” means! It does not refer to intellectual content nor practices. It is another word for feudal submission to God. Trying to settle intellectual and procedural questions outside of what is revealed in Scripture is a fool’s errand. Speculation about the details of who Christ is — which is the bulk of early church controversies — is a sin in itself. Restoring the Hebraic context means adopting the Hebraic approach to such issues: Don’t approach them at all. That’s what it means to obey Christ.

The Harlot Church today is every religious organization that clings to the sinful human speculations that no Hebrew would have dared to ask. Seeking to nail things down intellectually is how humans do things when ignoring God’s revelation. That’s why we see the Harlot riding the Beast of human government. It is adultery and idolatry, and leads to the bloodshed of the Elect.

From this you can understand that the Lord periodically destroys some portions of human civilization. It’s an act of mercy to destroy systemic lies that herd humanity so far from God’s Word that they can no longer find their way back. The only reason I write so much is because there is too much to say against the lies of our world. Anyone can look around and see that we have arrived at that place yet again, and God is already at work destroying what blinds humans to faith.

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Not a Human Center

Posted on June 5, 2025 by ehurst

The New Testament says it clearly in many different ways: Contend for the truth. This is the image of spiritual warfare, fighting the Enemy and his allies in the Unseen Realm. We’ve said it here often enough that the true battlefield is your own soul. You must make war against your fleshly nature, dragging it out of the Enemy’s camp and compelling it to obey the Word of God. Your fleshly nature is not the real you; it is the turf over which spiritual battles are fought. You must conquer, capture and occupy your fleshly nature in the name of Christ.

My writings are filled with discussions of how that works out in detail. It’s a matter of your feudal submission to Jesus as Master and Lord. You learn the Word and learn how to hear His voice in your convictions. Of course, learning the Word means seeking to embrace the Hebraic mindset that was the primary vehicle of divine revelation. You must understand Scripture in its own context.

But this is not the end of the matter; it is only the foundation. The Great Commission demands that we take this battle with us throughout our human lives, finding ways to confront the rest of the human race with the gospel message. The model for this is not just yelling at everyone you see. The model is the totality of your existence, from which you might also sometimes say a few words appropriate to the context. If that background of your existence is not the primary witness, then your words will mean nothing. Mere rhetoric is the same as Satan sarcastically preaching the gospel message on every street corner. There must be Holy Spirit power behind the words, or they become a lie.

The primary means of establishing that background of power is in forming a covenant community of faith. The world needs most to see how Jesus loves His people in how we love each other. It is already trite to say that this love is not just a feeling, but a commitment to each other’s welfare, because their welfare is your own.

And while I must certainly offer compassion to those outside the Covenant, I dare not equate that with the love I build within the community. It is not the same love, because for it to be agape it must resonate and magnify within the recipient. This is the real treasure, the divine inheritance of Christians in this world. We are not permitted to throw those pearls to swine, or give what is holy to dogs (the words Jesus used). We can show affection to stray dogs, letting them lick up the crumbs from the covenant children’s food. But they must come inside the Covenant first in order to be treated as people. Still, we must show compassion in one way or another.

The primary thrust, the substance of that compassion is the truth. His love is His law, and it marks His dominion. This is how we contend for the truth in this world. If the truth is defined by how we love each other as Christ loves us, it still results in actions and words that indicate the boundaries of that love. For example, we are not some “free love” cult. There are boundaries to how we express divine love and the world needs to see them.

In America, a major area of contention is the boundaries and structure of human affection. America worships sex. At the same time, sex has never been so twisted and perverted as it is now in this country. It’s not just the covenant boundaries of sexual behavior that is perverted, but the raw data of how human fleshly nature works is also denied. The pagan deity of feminism is a pack of lies women tell themselves, and demand that men also bow down and worship. It is spiritual warfare; feminism is the work of false gods.

The so-called Manosphere and Red Pill lore is just a movement about restoring the data itself. It clarifies the nature of the human problem. It’s a major chore just rescuing the data, never mind applying the Covenant to that data. If the data is falsified, the meaning of the Covenant is also perverted. You cannot bring the Covenant to a false reality. We must fight through two fortified lines of the Devil.

A recent wave of fiery darts of Satan comes in the form of a Netflix series called Adolescence. The promoters of this crap directly mention the “manosphere” as if it were a great evil. It is a direct attack on the raw data of how men and women interact, a fresh assertion of the lies of pagan feminism. What can we do about it? How do we contend for the truth in this context?

I’m not going to give you a plan. There is no single divinely inspired method of making war. There is no single centralized facility or institution. That’s how humans think when they ignore God. It is necessary for each of us to build a community of faith so that God can reveal the particulars of how He wants to use you.

If you aren’t already living in acknowledgment of the raw data of human sexuality, you have no hope of even understanding the problem. On top of that, you still must stand up for the Covenant truth of how people should live with all the very real problems of human sexuality. And you still must know the Word and be firmly in the grip of your convictions to know what your role is. This is a spiritual battle, and it requires a firm foundation in the Spirit Realm, or your plans to act will be futile. The raw data is not the whole story.

God alone decides what He will bless, and I assure you it’s not human-centered living.

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No Human Proxy

Posted on June 2, 2025 by ehurst

We call it the Great Commission:

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)

Let’s break that down.

We have learned that “all nations” is less about location and more about peoples. It’s not so much a goal for us to accomplish as it is Jesus telling His Hebrew disciples that the whole of humanity is the field of harvest for His Covenant. The identity of “Chosen People of God” was no longer ethnic Jews, nor were all of them the Chosen. The Chosen/Elect will be found in every nation, people who respond to the call, never mind whether Jew or Gentile.

Baptism refers to the ritual of allegiance. The Chosen will be anyone who can embrace Jesus as their feudal Master and Lord. As Jay reminds us, the key issue has always been loyalty and belief, AKA trust, faith. The loyalty is from your heart; the belief is what follows. You would expect obedience to became that person’s new orientation.

The gospel message is not words; it is introducing people to Jesus. People get to know Him first by getting to know us as His feudal vassals. We incarnate His Word in our lives; we represent Him. The best way to get better at that is for us to invest our earthly resources into other believers. We form a covenant community and work hard at making divine sacrificial love real among humans. It’s not just the individuals, but the communion of souls longing for the Spirit Realm. We manifest our identity as His human family.

His Law (obeying all the things He taught) is summed up in what He said at the Last Seder: “I give you a new commandment — to love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. Everyone will know by this that you are my disciples — if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35 NET). The strongest witness we have is conspicuous communion with each other, an obvious commitment to each other’s welfare followed by compassion for outsiders.

The whole community together will draw only a targeted portion of the Elect. Even more so will the individual members feel driven to seek a particular slice of humanity among whom to seek the Elect. We typically recognize this in terms of what sort of activities we engage as the means to whittling down the audience to something we can handle.

For example, this blog is rooted in my personal burden for those who have suffered institutional abuse in churches. All my work in seeking to recover a Hebraic understanding of Scripture is aimed largely at restoring divine justice for people who come to the realization the mainstream church is not doing the job. It’s not as if I seek to sour everyone on the mainstream, but I’m trying to restore faith for those who are already soured on the mainstream because the church refuses to address their particular needs. Most churches build institutions, not people or community.

I won’t hide from you that mainstream church leaders don’t want me around, and I’d rather avoid any unnecessary conflict. Yet, coming under my spiritual covering does not guarantee you’ll be required to leave any church you may have joined. All I’m doing is filling in the blanks they have left. They don’t want me calling attention to those blanks. Thus, the mainstream church membership turns out to be my main mission field. Even then, I strive hard not to interfere directly in what the mainstream churches are doing. I’m just not allowed to help folks from inside the organization.

Because I’m outside mainstream organized religion, it just so happens that I also draw a few who aren’t already part of it. This is not a movement to reform church. I generally avoid making reference to the organizations in my ministry. They can just keep on rolling along their current path for all I care. I’m quite cynical about church leadership. Rather, I’m trying to build faith despite religion. In or out of any church, let’s look at the issues the Lord has called me to examine. Whether that means you stay with church or leave it is between you and the Lord. What matters most is that you are loyal to Him first, not some human proxy, including me.

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The Bible in Your Heart

Posted on May 31, 2025 by ehurst

For this Bible lesson, instead of a discrete study of specific Bible passages, I’m going to ask you to think broadly about the Bible as a whole. We are supposed to embody the Word of God, to be the Bible others read. Let your heart recognize the message here.

While I cannot cite specifically which of my professors said it, by the time I left Oklahoma Baptist University in 1978, I was convinced by my studies there that the common use of parable/symbolism across the Ancient Near East was due to a basic shared worldview. They were not obsessed with data; this was backed up by our examination of Boman’s book. The Hebrew mind did not think in terms of precision and did not attempt to envision (form a precise picture or image of) things that were not present, things that were speculative. Logic was a tool, not a rule.

Instead, the ANE mind was more concerned with moral obligations and burden of duty. A Hebrew man had zero interest in what was beyond the horizon because he didn’t have to deal with it. God did not hold him accountable for what was outside his reach. He had enough on his plate for things at hand that he could touch. It never occurred to him that he should be curious or interested in things he had not experienced.

Solomon was an exception, a rare of example of a Hebrew who wanted to learn things others could not tell him. After decades of effort, he wrote about it. Eventually he came to the place where he dismissed a lot of that in his Book of Ecclesiastes and told people to stick with what God places in their hands. And in his Proverbs, he warned against excessive intellectual curiosity. It can take you only so far before it gets you into trouble. It became a Hebrew discipline to be wary of speculation.

The Hebrew scholar had no need for direct knowledge of things in Heaven. It was beyond human ken. Rather, it was more than enough to take what God chose to reveal and make the most of that. Think for a moment about some of the book studies we’ve done in our community. Think about some of the things I’ve been saying for decades. Very early I knew that the whole point of parables was not to talk about Heavenly things, but to discuss our duties as humans in a fallen world.

So, Heiser’s thesis of the Unseen Realm drops neatly into place as a parable of how we should address our situation. It grants us a big picture we can use as a reference to explain things like Divine Election. It’s not a question of how logical it is to us, nor do we need to embellish it by dragging out all the speculative details. It is enough to recognize what it tells us of our duty to God.

We have been warned to avoid trying to extract from the biblical narrative data that satisfies human curiosity. Rather, seek to know the Scripture for what it was intended to do: to make us familiar with what Christ our Lord demands of us. We must embrace His Covenant of faith.

We are under no obligation to make this faith sensible to people outside the Covenant. The obsession of Big Eva in particular for compelling the world at large to take them seriously, to build up a professional corps of leaders that would carry secular authority, has done serious damage to the gospel message. Churches are chasing something that matters only to those going to Hell. Meanwhile, there is an awful lot of work we should be doing that is neglected.

What are God’s priorities for us? It’s very easy to misread the answer to that question if you approach it bearing a heavy load of secular assumptions. The world at large is going to Hell. There is really nothing we can do for the world. Most of humanity are born incapable of receiving the gospel message. Spiritual birth is a miracle of grace, not something that happens by human choices. You cannot submit to Christ as your Lord unless He calls you first.

Just so, taking the biblical message seriously is a miracle, not something that will ever arise from human scholarship. A significant portion of academic biblical scholars do not believe in Christ. Their opinions don’t count for much. It’s bad enough these non-believers have so much influence on those who do believe. But it’s a complete failure when you imagine that your witness for Christ depends on holding a position that non-believers take seriously.

The world hated our Savior first; we should hardly be surprised when they don’t like us who follow Him. We should expect them to reject our testimony. The Book is a means to an end. It gives shape and substance to our Lord, the living Word of God. If you don’t have Him, all the biblical scholarship in the world does you no good at all.

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