Talk about Flying

Posted on December 21, 2020 by ehurst

By definition, tribulation is tough times. When things get more difficult, you need less dependence, not more. The more extreme the situation, the more flexibility you need to respond to conviction. That means reducing your dependencies in both directions. You need to be less dependent on others, because they have limited resources, too. You also need to carry fewer of your own dependents. Part of the reason for both is that your necessities will likely become a liability for them.

This is why only your immediate household has a divine right to remain fully dependent on you. Their kind of commitment is your life and vice versa. You can barely afford the responsibility for making decisions that affect your family; you can’t take that kind of responsibility for someone who is outside your household. You can’t afford that much blood on your hands when you fail.

It’s one thing to talk about commanders having that kind of liability with their troops. In that context, shedding blood is the whole point. Notice that, in our culture at least, the troops agreed to be in that situation in the first place. A military unit is one, tightly bound group with blood on their minds, if not their hands. Your family has no choice. You assume the liability for them. Nobody else has any business asking you to assume that level of liability. Nobody else can contribute what your family does, so you cannot afford to take care of dependents who aren’t your own flesh and blood, either by covenant or by DNA.

This sounds tough on a covenant community, but the shepherds have limitations. In ancient times, those limitations were not such an issue. They are now. The farther we drift along the path to The End of All Things, the more pressure falls on the individual child of God. We do not live under the Old Testament, wherein spiritual birth was a matter of incubation, and you always had a slew of folks who weren’t there. In Christ, you assume spiritual birth in your community of faith at much higher proportion. Church is voluntary; the Covenant of Moses was a matter of birthright. The New Testament recognizes that family members cannot be presumed spiritually born, so we have guidelines for spiritually mixed marriages. Still, the assumption is “the church body” excludes folks who aren’t spiritually born, family or not. They are included socially only.

Lest you think I’m going back on my teaching about a covenant community being essentially about manifest commitment, because spiritual birth is an unknown, keep in mind that the language of the New Testament itself says we assume spiritual birth in that manifestation. We assume someone who is faithful is so because they are divine family. The issue of differentiating, of saying that we can’t know about spiritual birth, is an organizational premise. We go into our covenant community formation knowing we cannot assess spiritual birth, so we emphasize faith and obedience; those can be assessed. But in terms of reckoning on the mystical elements that we cannot clinically describe, we are presuming that anyone who is faithful can’t fake it forever. They could not do it without the Holy Spirit.

So in order to understand the moral truth here, you have to account for the mystical elements. If I were a covenant community shepherd, persecution introduces exigencies that don’t exist when things are calm and easy for us. The moral budget gets much tighter, in the same way the monetary budget will shrink. We then have to change the administrative procedures on both levels. In order to stick around the covenant community, each member has to bear a greater burden for their own faith.

All my writing online up to now has been for incubation and fletching. Now I have no choice but to kick you out of the nest. I have complete faith that my Father has given you wings, but you’ll either fly or flop on your own. With this time of tribulation and persecution coming, you might survive hiding the bushes, but the whole idea is that you fly. That means putting some distance between yourself and this world.

I’ll meet you in the sky. Let’s talk about flying.

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Stringent Boundaries

Posted on December 20, 2020 by ehurst

For me, the basic principle is infiltrate, don’t assimilate. We have plenty of examples how various cultural minorities do this: Orthodox Jews, Romany, and in some locations, Muslims. These groups move to different parts of the world and, to varying degrees, refuse to assimilate to the ambient culture, yet engage the laws and economy in order to live.

Why do we not see this with Christians?

I tend to think that it’s because for most of Church History, mainstream organized Christian religion has been inclined to conquest. Not just social and cultural conquest, but political domination. It’s quite overt; they seek to enforce their brand of Christian obedience regardless of any change in hearts. Worse, it’s a brand of Christianity that is not at all biblical.

That’s because it’s a particular cultural milieu with a Christian paint job. It’s actually not Christian at all, but uses that as a cover. The underlying culture of this global conquest movement is pretty much primitive Germanic tribal culture. What began as merely an invasive seizure of land and property has gained the polite excuse of “evangelism.” Eventually the religion was eviscerated into a secularized version of those grouchy demands that the world conform to a certain standard of government and economics. Even then, it was never what the propaganda claimed it was. The democratic social and economic ideals were the mythology told to the people as the means of exposing them to elite domination. This should explain most of Anglo-American history.

The worst thing is that the label “Christianity” has stuck. For most of the world, that imperial drive is the meaning of the word “Christian.” It doesn’t help that virtually all of Christian mission activity presumes “telling them about Jesus” means making them more American than actually Christian. It’s a religion without any actual faith.

What Jesus taught, and what His Apostles tried to build, was certainly different at heart from Judaism, but was not all that different from what Judaism had become in terms of their resistance to cultural assimilation. Churches were very much like synagogues in appearance and behavior. The first generation of churches maintained a very Jewish-like style of separation from the world.

I’m convinced this was God’s ideal. I don’t buy the notion that following Christ can be abstracted from that social model. We need to emulate the basic structure of the synagogue lifestyle. I realize that clothing fashions change, but that certain basic elements are part of God’s definition of holiness.

By the way, I believe Muslims understand this better than Jews do, in their own respective regimens. Jews have a tendency to nail down a certain cultural fashion model from some place and some time, and call it the everlasting command of Moses. The few Christian groups who practice a strenuous withdrawal also have the same tendency. I think they are missing the point. A broad brimmed hat and overalls don’t fit every climate. I realize the difference between what we see in certain models and what I am suggesting is not easy to grasp, but I am convinced there is a difference.

I would hope to escape rules locked in time and space, and adhere to a heart-led moral standard rooted in the Person of Christ. This is something difficult to put into words. However, it should be easy to discern when it’s wrong. Do people copy the pastor’s style of dress? I’ve seen that a lot in churches. That’s missing the point of what holiness means. On the other hand, I don’t think Paul’s admonitions can be dismissed as merely a bias of time and place. He said jewelry and fancy hairstyles were wrong, and I agree. I see a lot of styles worn in churches that indicate folks didn’t get the memo.

But rather than ruling for others how they should dress, I’m trying to find ways to press the moral image of holiness that defy description, yet can be absorbed by example — what I believe “rightly dividing the Word” means. Holiness can’t be reduced via intellectual abstraction. The idea is not uniformity, but a common manifestation working through the hearts of a community.

I’m utterly convinced Western Civilization militates against this. A westernized epistemology will cripple your attempts to follow Christ. Indeed, Western mythology squelches any kind of nonconforming calling. To be Western means varying only in things that don’t matter. It means choosing your flavor of sin, but requiring you to sin in one way or another. You aren’t allowed to vary off into holiness. When the whole point of being nonconformist is the pursuit of holiness, you provoke the wrath of Hell. Western Civilization is particularly friendly to Satan, so I cannot avoid the idea that holiness means ditching your Western identity.

Since this puts me outside any sphere of acceptance in Western society, to include Western churches, it frees me to explore to the fullest all the various ways I can find holiness. What a relief! Being dismissed as a nutcase, I’m free to seek the Lord’s face in simplicity and purity of heart. No one expects me to meet their standards. And while those standards vary all over the map from one context to the next, they all share one thing: They aren’t God’s ideal for me.

How far can I go without damaging my witness? That becomes a primary issue for prayer and contemplation. Your answer will never work for me, so I must find my own. I’m the only human who can know what God requires of me. The most you can do is exclude me from fellowship.

Increasingly, I’m getting comfortable with that. I feel isolated by not alone. So this book that I believe I’m working on will include the kind of thinking that shows up in this post. I’m looking at the kind psychology that I need as basic equipment for handling all of this. Instead of focusing on the trappings of nonconformity, it’s the mindset arising from moral conviction that God is not pleased with the world. Indeed, He is so very displeased that we fail Him if we don’t draw more stringent boundaries so they’ll know.

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Law of Moses — 2 Kings 3

Posted on December 19, 2020 by ehurst

When Ahab’s heir Ahaziah died, the throne passed to a younger brother, Jehoram. This one at least had the sense to remove his father’s palace idol of Baal. However, he still kept the shrines at Dan and Bethel operating. So keep in mind that the northern kingdom was still deeply pagan in orientation.

Judah to the south was reigned by Jehoshaphat, regarded as a good king, cleansing the kingdom of pagan idols and commissioning priests to travel around the land teaching the law to the people. However, he was stupid enough to ally with Ahab by marrying his son to the latter’s daughter.

At this time, Moab was a tributary to Israel, while Edom was under Judah’s thumb. Moab rebelled as soon as Ahab died, and stopped sending the annual tribute of sheep and wool. Jehoshaphat decided to go and collect by force. He mustered his troops and sent a message to Judah, asking if his ally would like to join him in this venture. Besides, the strategy required Jehoram to march through Judah and Edom. The northern border of Moab had been highly fortified over the past few years while things had been unstable in Samaria, so he wanted to attack from the south.

Jehoshaphat’s job was to provide the reserve troops, and Edom contributed a smaller force in a similar role. We have no idea which route they took, but the idea was to avoid being seen by Moab’s lookouts and spies. They came around the south end of the sea and picked up the Edomite troops. It wasn’t far to the southern border of Moab, the Wadi Zered (Wadi al-Hasa today).

But this took them seven days, and Edom was in drought. There was no water in the wadi, and they had run out of what they carried; the nearby Dead Sea was toxic. Maintaining the fiction that Israel still worshiped Jehovah, Jehoram wailed that He had brought them out to this place to die. Yet the king had not bothered to inquire of Jehovah’s prophet, Elisha, who had come along for the trip (some of that Hebrew sarcasm). So it was for Jehoshaphat to suggest asking a prophet of God, and one of Jehoram’s lieutenants casually answer that Elisha was there. He was known as a close servant of Elijah (washing his hands prior to ceremonies).

That sounded quite trustworthy to Jehoshaphat, so they went down to see Elisha in the camp. Keep in mind that, as battle leaders, the kings would have been discussing things from some high spot overlooking the Wadi Zered, while the troops would have been waiting, probably setting up camp somewhere nearby on open terrain. We have no idea which of the two obvious routes they would have taken, but both the western shore of the Dead Sea, and the ancient Highway of Kings, would cross relatively flat open areas where they intersect with the Wadi Zered. However, the narrative makes it sound like they hugged the shore of the Dead Sea.

Elisha received the King of Israel with harsh words, suggesting he consult with prophets of his pagan idols. The king’s response was to blame Elisha’s God for the bad situation. Elisha came back that, as surely as his God was alive, not a dead idol, that he would not bother responding were it not for the presence of the faithful King Jehoshaphat of Judah. So Elisha called for a musician to play and sing some familiar worship tunes. This put him in the frame of mind to hear more clearly in his spirit what God would have to say. Keep in mind that a military camp of this sort would have been a busy, noisy place.

The Lord responded by speaking through Elisha: Dig some long catch basins in the wadi floor. They would feel no cooling wind nor see or hear the storms, but somewhere far upstream it would rain and the valley would run with fresh water. It would be no sweat at all to God to supply their need, and He would deliver Moab into their hands, as well. They were ordered to take advantage of the situation and set Moab back to the Stone Age: pull down every fortified and walled city, cut down every useful tree, fill the wells with sand, and fill all the farm fields with rubble from the destroyed cities.

So the next morning, with the ritual sharing of bread with God, that water filled the wadi, coming down from the highlands up on northern Edom. By this time, Moab’s spotters had notified their king that the three armies were on the southern border. This far outnumbered his troops, so he pressed into service any man large enough to wear armor. They had camped rather hastily on the border, and when they rose to face the onslaught, they saw the wet valley floor below. Having no report of rain, they mistook the red glint of the sunrise off the water as blood. Surely the three kings had quarreled and the armies had fought!

So they rushed down the slope to attack. They were met by the fully intact army of Israel in the lead, and were slaughtered. The survivors hastily withdrew and retreated back into the hills. The triple invasion force then rose and began destroying the whole countryside, as ordered.

Now, there was one city that was not easy to attack — Kir-harasheth. You’d have to see it (modern day Kerak, Jordan). The hilltop is a rounded triangle with a long tail running off to the southwest, and a skinny finger ridfe sticking out on the northwestern corner. The hill is very steep-sided, with deep ravines on every side, and heights across each one facing the city. It was such a wonderful site that the Crusaders built one of their fortresses there, and archaeology has not found much of what might have stood before that.

So there was no way to attack this thing except with slingers, the artillery of that day. Estimates vary, but we have reason to believe they could lob 1kg stones far enough to rain down inside the city walls, and probably begin the process of chipping away at some of the walls. They weren’t made of cut stone, but stacked rocks and mud.

The King of Moab, Mesha, left a stone monument that has been found and refers to this battle. Seeing that a prolonged siege would succeed, he tried to slip out with his elite troops on one side to where the Edomite forces were waiting. Maybe he thought they would be less interested in fighting so hard, but he guessed wrong and was driven back inside the walls.

So he did the one thing that would have worked. Keep in mind that the northern kingdom of Israel had become highly superstitious at this point, having no faith in Jehovah. Mesha sacrificed his first-born son to Chemosh, Moab’s national deity, right on the wall of the city in plain sight of Israel’s army. It’s not at all uncommon among Moabites to do such a thing, but Israel had some weird superstitions about Abraham sacrificing his son and what kind of magical power it was supposed to have unleashed. Notice that neither Judah nor Edom reacted much to this, but it really messed with the heads of the Israeli soldiers (the Hebrew wording in our text is rather hard to translate).

So they backed off in dismay. While Mesha didn’t have much to save, he did manage to keep his independence, as noted on that stone monument. The expedition dispersed and everyone went home.

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What Floats Your Boat?

Posted on December 19, 2020 by ehurst

Another vision shook me yesterday.

There aren’t many of us who will hear the call to a heart-led faith life. Only a few are determined to make a high level of sacrifice to get as close as possible to the biblical ideal. Granted, there are plenty who don’t feel led, and I can’t criticize their choice, because you can’t do this on your own steam. And please remember that having that steam doesn’t make you special, but may simply make you very much a nonconformist. It does put us outside the mainstream by a very wide margin.

Big hint: We do not reference the mainstream until it comes to tactics. They get no input into any part of the formative process. Everything is a pure vision of obedience to the divine call, regardless of what anyone else is doing.

We are in the same boat as Noah (pun intended). God is providing us what we need to prepare for a real major disaster. Not necessarily a physical disaster that wipes out humans and animals, but a really big change that will seem in many ways like having to rebuild from scratch. Instead of such a massive natural disaster, it will be a social upheaval that will include a strong element of persecution.

We can ride it out, but we will be more alone than ever when we get to the other side. I’m pretty sure whatever mainstream organized religion that survives will be radically different from what it is now. I can’t discern from here what this change will demand of them, except that it has to do with a rise in technocracy and AI.

When Noah went into the Ark, the whole land mass of the earth was in a single continent. The flood completely changed the face of the earth. The permanent cloud cover over the earth was gone, too. The Flood set in motion a series of changes that kept flowing over the next few generations, so that the single land mass divided into multiple continents over a very short time (look up the name “Peleg” in the Bible). It was a whole new world for Noah.

It will feel like that for us. We need to make sure we take full advantage of what our Lord provides to pass through this tribulation. I don’t think we have nearly as long as Noah did building his boat. And we won’t be using gopher wood.

Our boat will be made from the determination to get as close to that ideal shalom as we can get. But what unsettled me most was the image of just how earth-shattering will be this big change coming at us. The mission to preserve the truth God has granted us becomes much more critical.

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How Much Shalom?

Posted on December 18, 2020 by ehurst

How much shalom do you want?

Sometimes you have to spell things out for people, because they can’t even think like heart-led people of faith. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the Hebrew culture and history specifically, and for the Ancient Near East generally. Over the years I discovered an awful lot of false assumptions I had about things in the Old Testament simply because I had been taught to read it from the perspective of my own times.

For example, we know that during the entire 1500 years of Israel’s history, the common man would never even get close to a non-family female until he was about 30. That’s when he was likely to have enough income to afford getting married. If he was wealthy, he might start moving on it as early as 25. Either way, the next step was to seek an arranged marriage. If no one in his family did the matchmaking for him, he would ask around until he identified one or more families with eligible daughters. If he had a good reputation, it’s likely fathers with such daughters would seek him out.

Those girls would have been around 15 years old. It was customary to make sure she was okay with marrying this guy. He would leave a symbol of betrothal, then go home and build on some onto his father’s extended family home, then come back in about a year and claim his bride. The wedding feast would take place in their new quarters.

God had all kinds of opportunity to notify Israel if He had a problem with this arrangement. It is conspicuous by its absence. In that part of the world, there was nothing “dirty” about a 30-year-old man marrying someone half his age and having children with her. It was ubiquitous. Why in the world would you be surprised that adult men lust after teenage girls? That’s how God wired us. It’s not evil; it’s not something that comes from the Fall. It’s not a curse; it’s normal.

“Well, not any more,” you might say. Now it’s considered creepy in our American society. But it’s our American society that is creepy.

I’m not suggesting that Christians suddenly start passing off their teenage daughters to adult men. Most adult American men who aren’t married by age 30 are likely creepy, indeed. Nobody is calling for a sudden shift of some small select portion of social custom like that, without a complete matching shift in the wider background of things that go with it.

What I will say is this: We don’t have to ape the Hebrew culture to have shalom. We don’t have to speak their language, live in adobe houses and survive on agriculture using their technology. We aren’t in the ANE, so we have a different agricultural context. God doesn’t condemn the use of what our world provides in order to build a shalom that witnesses to His glory. We start where we are.

On the other hand, there are a host of changes we might make if we could, changes that would bring us back to a much better lifestyle that is more consistent with how God wired us and the reality in which we live. I am utterly certain that if we got as close to Biblical Law as possible, we would use very little of modern technology. We would live in a more rural setting with no interest in what happens in cities. Not frozen in time somewhere back a century or two, but we would definitely have little interest in a lot of things that occupy the rest of the world. A genuine pursuit of Christ to the hilt would mean living a far more primitive existence, closer to nature, and missing a lot of material comforts.

That’s very nearly impossible right now, so you aren’t likely to see God putting much conviction on heart-led Christians to do that. It remains an ideal we long for, knowing we will never see it. So instead of having some rather uniform doctrinaire set of cultural demands (like the Amish, for example), we are all over the map on such things as our convictions demand.

However, we should know that the shalom we receive is somewhat less deep than it might be if we could come closer to the ideal. If we weren’t distracted by computers, TVs, cars and heavy industry, but lived more in harmony with the natural world, our shalom would be much greater. If we had a culture where heart-led was normal, and mysticism was the common approach, it would be quite different. Do I have to explain why? Our minds would be much purer and much easier to bend to the authority of the heart.

I don’t think we can pretend God demands that of all His children. At the same time, I think He wants His children to be aware of all the various factors recorded in His Word on the matter. It’s the kind of thing where you should be praying the Lord let you get as close to this fuzzy and ill-defined ideal, so that you can shine His glory. You’ll take as much as He grants you in that direction.

Meanwhile, it would help a lot if you would understand what God considers “normal” in human behavior. Not just a few items here and there, but to form a very big picture of what it would look like to have a more ideal society and culture, so that we aren’t surprised when human nature manifests that revealed ideal. It’s not evil for adult men to be delighted by teenage girls. It is surely inappropriate in our current context for them to act on that interest, but not evil to have it.

Nor is it somehow weird if teenage girls find themselves attracted to adult males. Given how thoroughly unprepared they are to marry one, it would never work out for the majority of them. Our society is so nasty and corrupt that it’s almost illegal to train a girl the way they were trained in the Old Testament. It’s almost universally illegal for them to marry at age 15, and certainly considered scandalous if her husband is already an adult. But that’s because American society is an awful long way from how God intended us to live. Do let your daughters know that a mutual attraction between teenage girls and adult men is quite natural and normal.

It’s part of the path to a much deeper level of shalom that most of us will never see, but may long for.

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Trying to Please Him

Posted on December 17, 2020 by ehurst

Look at the logic of it. Think about what’s bundled into the reasoning people offer; seek to understand the a priori assumptions they refuse to discuss or reconsider. Keep asking “why” until you get to the basic assumptions. God will help you do this.

If we start from the assumption that this world is fallen, and that nothing we can build is really worth a lot, it leads to a different lifestyle. The only difference civilization makes is that it increases material comfort for some. It is not an unalloyed good. Scripture warns about the pursuit of such things, that they will pull you off track. It shows up in all kinds of places.

Why did Israel demand of the prophet Samuel that he bug God about giving them a king? Was God somehow unhappy with the unruly mob that Israel had become? Not at all. Men were unhappy with the story of Judges, but God wasn’t worried about the same things at all. God was quite happy to let things run along their course with only Him as their ruler. If it could work at all, it had to work without centralizing controls. Israel demanded a king out of envy of other nations. They envied all the human “benefits” and cared not a whit that it would enslave them.

The world is filled with people who can’t be bothered doing the work of seeking God and facing the natural chaos of the Fall. They are looking for shortcuts, ways to bind the process so that the results will be limited to a narrow range of what they can tolerate. They’d rather forfeit their freedom to hear the Lord’s calling and finding peace with Him in their hearts, in exchange for a managed peace that guarantees restricting everyone to the same vanilla flavor of life.

This is why I keep raising the specter of centralization as inherently evil.

Society as a whole finds it threatening to their vanilla order if I choose to live in poverty. It’s regarded as a problem that I don’t want all the stuff they think everyone should want. I’m not normal; it’s mental illness to be comfortable with far less. They make laws to compel me to live in structures built using expensive materials and methods, and then compel me to submit to their system of finding me an economically useful job. I am required to sacrifice my whole life in labor at some kind of job that is specifically designed to make me numb to the wind of the Holy Spirit. It has been ruled in courts across the USA that my rejection of the materialistic middle class lifestyle if flatly illegal. The government must be able to squeeze me for the taxes I could make for them if I was as greedy as everyone else.

It’s not their intent to rob me of the time and energy I need to contemplate in my heart the things God demands of me. They simply deny that it could be important.

Granted, that worldly system is crumbling. That’s because God has gotten tired of seeing His children chained and pulled away from Him. Once again a centralized and “civilized” system will be destroyed and humans will be forced to start from scratch. It’s a cycle that must wear on His nerves, because they never listen. The next civilization will be even worse. Still, as with the Tower of Babel, He’s going to insure that no system raised up by men to close Him off will ever stand long.

God wanted Israel to stay in their tents, nomadic in their own land, utterly dependent on Him alone. He wasn’t too concerned about how Israel would tend to fracture. He was content for however many trusted in Him to stick to the mission of simply being the people of God.

In His Son He has shifted the whole business of the Kingdom onto a higher plane. There is no Kingdom of God rooted on this earth. It’s a kingdom of hearts. And it produces a very radical form of individuality that also allows for a very independent fellowship. It was never meant to compel anyone to adhere to one or another system that could be no better than the nation that rejected His ways. Rather, the whole thing was a matter of hearts agreeing or not as the Spirit calls to each soul.

Oddly enough, this worked rather well for a short time. This new idea lasted a generation or two before ambitious men decided it was necessary put chains on everyone again. They couldn’t attain power and comfort without finding ways to herd the faithful into convenient sheep pens for shearing. So here we are today with a culture of churches no different from governments in how they use manipulative propaganda to shame people into obeying their mass herding efforts.

I realize that only a precious few people at any given time will hear the call to a more completely individualized faith and religion. It would be easy to criticize the sheeple who substitute the hard work of trusting God directly in exchange for the easy path of letting someone else make all those decisions. But the path to which I’m called requires that I give them that choice, just as I demand for myself the choice to do otherwise. It’s tempting to think myself superior, but that’s just another lie of Satan meant to draw me off course.

But it seems to me that with all the thinking, theorizing and development given to the systems they prefer, very little has been done to bless those who know they can’t go that route. I’m not going to attempt a norming for something that rejects norms in the first place. Rather, I’ll simply tell the story of my nonconformist path and suggest some things God has revealed to bring us closer to Him in the process.

So the book I’m contemplating will offer a kind of psychology that might be useful for other people called to a nonconforming life. It will be one implementation, hoping that others can find clues and cues to a better path for themselves. That’s how God works, so it’s about the only way I can please Him. This is not “doing what’s right in your own eyes.” There’s a clear thread of revelation that sets the boundaries, but those boundaries are seldom where centralizers say they are. I’m trying to go back and identify the ones God established.

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An Alternate Reality

Posted on December 16, 2020 by ehurst

That book I mentioned won’t be coming any time soon. It’s going to be a different kind of project than my other stuff. For one, I have no idea if it will be enough stuff to call it a book. I’m not bursting with ideas. Rather, I’m exploring something that beckons to me, and some of it will be new terrain.

In fact, there’s a whole lot of fresh newness in front of me. It’s not just the formality of resigning as elder and prophet. This whole thing was a signal to me that reality had shifted. A lot of what used to matter, now suddenly doesn’t matter. It’s not that I have a sense of regret about what I wrote in the past, but that things have changed and some of what I was doing is now unimportant. It’s a matter of exploring and discovering what has died and should be dropping off, and what sprouts in its place.

It doesn’t matter to me whether anyone else sees this dramatic shift in reality. All I have to worry about is my reality. A part of this big shift is just recognizing that. There’s a meta-shift, a shift in thinking about the shift. I’ve been moved to another world. I am willing to talk about it because I suspect at least a part of my experience will have echoes for some of you. It may sound to you like a plausible explanation for what you experience in your world. Maybe there’s something in my personal nattering here that you will recognize.

Either way, I’m thoroughly convinced that I need to work from the assumption that the world itself has changed radically. There’s a disturbance in the moral sphere. Some good and some bad, but it’s big enough that a lot of other people have been writing about it on the Net, and there seems to be some common elements. Something like this has to play out, like ripples across a still pond. Except this is more like a tsunami rippling around the world and swamping every shore. It takes a while.

I doubt I’ll ever understand in this life what happened from a divine point of view. But I believe the Lord has allowed me to get just a glimmer of that. I believe that God has issued a decree that went into effect just about late last Saturday. That’s when I felt this sudden shift in my soul, that everything I had been doing up to that point was closed, even if it wasn’t complete. Time’s up class; turn in your work. The next semester is starting.

This new semester comes with a lot of tribulation and persecution. Any hope that this fallen world might accommodate some of our mission is now gone. Something this big will take awhile, but we absolutely cannot trust any part of the human system from here on out. The demons have been unleashed and all the rules have been thrown out. This calls for a new level of cynicism. Virtually every tool we’ve been using will become unfit for any purpose.

Sometime around 65 AD, Nero’s persecution of Christians got to the point that in many locations the government was confiscating all private property held by Christians. During this time Peter wrote his first letter to the Jewish Christians in what is today northern Turkey. He warned them to not be too attached to their worldly possessions. For those living in the imperial capital, it meant taking up residence in the Catacombs, just to find a measure of peace and sanity from the daily threat.

We aren’t in Rome, but there are parallels. I’m not sure how much of their specific practices would be applicable today, but the atmosphere of hatred against Christian faith is certainly going to rise for us. What we believe and practice under Radix Fidem will most certainly be a threat to what the civil government is planning. I’m sure each of us will have to find our own mixture of things we must do to respond to that, but there remains a common thread of thinking about the meaning of it all that we can share.

One of the primary parallels is that the Roman government encouraged mob action against Christians. Christians in the Roman Empire lost any of the protections of law, because it become de facto illegal to be a Christian long before it was de jure illegal. We can already see that here in the USA.

We should really think and pray about this, because I’m convinced it requires a different approach to how we think about living here in the USA. While I sincerely hope and believe local and state governments will rise up to resist in various measures, even to the point of dissolving the Union of States, I seriously doubt that will be soon. As I see it, there will be a significant period of time when the oppressors will hold the federal sword.

And while a popular resistance will rise up, that resistance will be no friend of ours. They will not be fighting our battle. Some of them will hate us, too. But for the most part, the persecution and the backlash will not be about us specifically. We will be painted into the target with a broad brush, simply because we share some external similarities with the real targets. Our biggest problem with any backlash will be their totally different focus on what they believe matters.

In a very real sense, we’ll be caught in the crossfire. It will be hard to find cover from stray projectiles, and we are as likely to be hit by one side as by the other. It will be doubly hard on us. At least, that’s how I see it. That’s what I’m preparing to react to.

As always, most of the battle will be online. Sure, there will be more street brawls, takeovers of neighborhoods, transportation and specific locations bombed, etc. And then there’s the collapsing economy. Still, the source of those conflicts will be found online. I am pretty much convinced that very, very little evangelism is possible online now. Rather, the whole value of the Internet for us will be as a means of sharing our faith with each other, of strengthening our faith as disconnected individuals. Only in the most gossamer sense of things will this be any part of a church. That’s why it will be like a Catacombs experience, because there were no large spaces where believers could assemble. They remained thinly scattered to protect each other, since any time they got together, they became a juicy target.

Yet I’m certain the power of the Spirit is able to keep us tied together in fellowship and communion even in the most restricted means of communication. I’m convinced God is telling us that this is our new reality. But it’s as if I have been side-shifted into an alternate reality, and I’m not sure how many of you have shifted with me, and whether it will seem new to you, as well. So from here on out, I’ll be writing as if this were little more than some kind of published diary.

Update: Someone asked about the Catacombs. So far as we know, very few people actually lived in the Catacombs. Christians went there to worship and fellowship after church buildings were confiscated. The Christians pretty much owned the Catacombs because they buried their dead, continuing the Jewish practice, while most pagans preferred cremation. Graves were not permitted inside the capital, so the Jews first, then later the Christians, gained rights to dig into the volcanic stone ground outside the city. There were numerous catacombs and most of them had multiple levels. Chapels were inevitable for Christian burial areas. When the surface accommodations were closed to them, meeting in the Catacombs became the only option. During brief periods, some Christian households might stay in them while preparing to seek some other refuge.

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Another Book?

Posted on December 15, 2020 by ehurst

I am starting to feel another book coming on…

I’m driven. It feels like there’s a jockey on my back flogging me hard with a quirt. But I’m not trying to catch up with anyone in a race. It’s more like being driven out into the wilderness.

I won’t blame anyone for stepping back from my writing. I’m definitely going somewhere and you may not want to go there. Whether or not you believe it’s the Holy Spirit, demons or some other thing driving me will depend on what you believe is real.

There are plenty of blog posts here and on the other blog that denounce the idea that reality is consistent with everyone. I characterize it as a living person (generally female, like a mother) who doesn’t treat us all the same. There’s enough overlap that we can recognize each other’s descriptions of encounters with reality, so we know it’s the same person. But it’s clearly relating to each of us somewhat individually.

And even then, I’m quite certain reality changes her mind from time to time about something. I’ve often woken to a new day and found that something I knew for certain the previous day was suddenly no longer true. Not always just piddling things, either. Sometimes it’s major elements of my world.

It used to drive me nuts, so to speak. It doesn’t bother me any more. I’ve been at peace with that state of affairs for a long time. In essence, it brought me to a rather different understanding of God, since reality is simply an expression of His character. It made Him more real to me. It also gave new meaning to the idea of living in a fallen world.

I’m not a shepherd, but sometimes I think I feel like a sheepdog. Dogs aren’t a good symbol in Scripture, but I don’t live in the Ancient Near East. At any rate, there’s no doubt I can’t lead the sheep, but I do want to hunt down the lost ones and try to persuade them to come back to the fold. I want to protect them from harm as much as I can.

So the particular lost sheep that my trusty sheepdog nose can smell are those who struggle with reality. I want them to get to know her better, and figure out how to deal with her. I think it requires a whole book to work through the details of reorienting from the typical American/Western viewpoint. They are wandering too close to the precipice. It’s an alluring majestic view, but sheep aren’t wired for that. You can see a lot from the peaceful valleys, too. They need green pastures and still waters. They can’t be fruitful chasing the next vertiginous vista.

So I feel driven to think this through and imagine how I might say it if I had real people sitting with me, talking it over. That’s why it feels like another book, but it’s going to take awhile. I’ll serialize it here, of course.

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Vision of Abraham

Posted on December 15, 2020 by ehurst

If I am hardest on myself, no one else has to do it for me.

While I’ve surrendered the prophet’s mantle, I still have visions. There’s no way I can keep them to myself, but you’ve been warned that they are not always connected with reality. Having resigned eldership, these are now the mysterious gibberings of a madman who may or may not say anything useful.

That’s a good thing, in that it now requires more of you. Instead of trusting me simply because of my name and title, you have decide whether to trust the message itself. You have to decide whether it rings a note of truth in your own heart. Even then, it’s not a question of what’s real, but a question of what God requires of you. There is a place for God to lead people into madness for His own glory.

I will never again tell you, “Hear the Word of the Lord.” Rather, I will tell you what I see and you can decide what part, if any of it, is from the Lord. Sometimes even I don’t know what I’m saying.

Here is what I see — We are starting back at the beginning. Like Abraham, we each have been called from a world that is ending.

Quick note: If our dating is anywhere near correct, Abraham left Ur around 2100 BC, during Sumer’s Gutian Period. The Gutians were barbaric tribes from the Zagros Mountains east of Mesopotamia, truculent in their resistance to being civilized. During their reign, a lot of infrastructure degraded from lack of maintenance, including the canals and irrigation system, which in turn caused famines. Sumerians regarded that as a very bad time in their history, a punishment from the gods.

It was the perfect time for a man to begin questioning everything he thought he knew, so that he was ready to hear from the one true God speaking of an entirely shocking revelation. While the Sumerian Empire did recover sometime after Abraham left, it went in a very bad direction. To secular minded people, it looked like a very good time, because a great deal of what we do today was born in that period (Ur III). However, it alienated people from the kind of openness to genuine faith that God wanted to implant in Abraham’s heart, and for his descendants. Abraham missed out on the birth of this period in Sumerian civilization, instead building the model of desert nomadic living that was the foundation of God’s revelation. That revelation climaxed in the Messiah.

So back to the vision. There are lots of parallels here. We are on the threshold of a fresh civilization and it will carry secular humanity far, far away into horrors of oppression we cannot imagine. On the way there, we will pass through a very barbaric time as current civil governments are wrenched and torn. However, there’s not a lot of open land to which we can migrate, so the plan is a little different this time around. God is going to call a bunch of Abrahams into a recovery of simple living in faith where they are.

But the point is that we will all have to learn how to stand alone in Christ. We won’t be in a literal wilderness like Abraham, but a virtual wilderness where genuine heart-led faith is quite rare. Our brand of connection to Creation is exceedingly rare among believers. We will each have to receive our own individual covenant from God, with a promise that our descendants will inherit things we see only dimly in the future. But as in the New Testament, it’s not literal descendants, but spiritual descendants.

As with Abraham, those spiritual descendants will come very late in the game. There is way too much we have to learn from scratch, even with most of us already way past our prime. But in order to hear from God what He really wants from us, there has to be a very radical decline in the civilization around us. We won’t see too many spiritual children until they are shaken free from their dependence on a very badly failed civilization.

In other words, our current persecution and tribulation has very little resemblance to the persecution and tribulation the first century churches faced.

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Not Many

Posted on December 14, 2020 by ehurst

Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, “Now salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.” (Revelation 12:10-11)

The hint here is that they overcame Satan by dying. His authority is confined to this fallen plane of existence. The other two items were the things they did while they yet lived. They gloried in a sacrifice on their behalf when they had nothing that would suffice for recompense, and it gave them a testimony of power and righteousness while they lived.

It’s not despair or suicidal depression if you know that your life is forfeit when you kneel at the Cross. That was inherent in the image of the Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden. The Cross and the Flaming Sword are the same thing, in that sense. The only reason this fallen existence is worth the trouble is because His glory isn’t finished with us yet.

It’s my character to face high risk situations as if they were a game. Dying is winning, if it’s for the right reason. That’s how I’ve gotten to the place that I have so many injuries. That sense of adventure is a part of manifesting divine glory; we delight in His mission calling on us. I’m hardly the kind of guy who would run away and hide.

But I’m convinced my mission and calling requires that I go underground. It’s not a question of the risks, but of what’s most effective for His glory. I need to know what He has in mind for me. He’s the one who decides what effectiveness is, and in my life, the will of God is to avoid making myself a target right now.

I didn’t ask for this. It was not in my planning at all. But in order for me to please Him and continue serving, I have to operate in a way that will protect others from being targeted. That means a measure of anonymity. If they don’t know who we are, they can’t target us. Resigning from any pretense of leadership means I’m not leading anything that can be a target. It’s the same principle of military maneuvers: You walk dispersed enough that a hand grenade won’t wipe out the whole platoon. Thus, the force remains mostly intact and able to carry out the mission.

If they decide to target me, we need to keep enough voices alive to keep our gospel message present on the battlefield. That’s the other half of resigning from leadership. It’s more than my taking the discipline of the Word. The Lord brought me to this place and I’m only now beginning to see clearly why He did that. What some would regard as public shame actually means moving me to a different, clandestine mission. The shame was just the cover for pulling me out of the limelight. He’s not hiding me from you folks, but from those who would seek to stifle the message.

This blog remains mostly private; it’s a sort of half-way ground where I can share with those of you who sense a strong kinship. If you need a word of encouragement, I’m still within reach. Anyone wishing to be closer will have to take that extra step of coming to find this blog, and it’s a much harder target than the other, more public blog I have. Given the traffic stats, that’s a very small group. That’s how it should be.

We overcome by our shalom, and apparently there won’t be very many of us.

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