Nonconformist Faith 03

Posted on December 30, 2020 by ehurst

Limits to Authority

Apostle Paul said that human authority has limits. In Romans 13, often falsely cited by civil authorities looking for a legalistic pretext for evil, Paul says later in the chapter that all you really owe anyone on this earth is agape. They can’t demand to be your god, and they are certainly no representative of His divine will. Their grant of authority from Heaven is limited to merely keeping order. Pay no attention to Bible studies written by people who don’t love Jesus.

Yes, we are warned they can take your human life. Let them. At some point your commitment to Christ will trump their demands. Notice that Romans 13 comes from the man who was willing to use partisan disputes to disrupt a government meeting (Pharisees versus Sadducees), and played off one civil authority against another (Judea versus Rome). While that did bring him to the attention of Rome and eventually cost him his life, it was all in obedience to a yet higher authority.

You are the only one who can decide where God draws the boundaries for you. No one on this earth speaks for God when His voice is in your heart. How often have you caught civil authorities lying? Church authorities? Too often there’s no difference between church and state in terms of how they try to establish a regimen of control over human behavior. The penalties differ in the USA, for now, but in times past the church authorities used the secular sword to enforce their will. This is a false legacy going back in Church History at least as far as Constantine. Only a harlot would ride the Beast.

Nobody is suggesting you should disrupt anything. If God requires that of you, then jump in with both feet and forget the parachute. However, the bulk of New Testament teaching on handling persecution is to expect moments when our Father will open the door for His Word, and the rest of the time you try to avoid human attention. This requires you notice where God is driving the cattle when you hide in the herd from predators. Don’t pick sides in political disputes, because none of that can accomplish the will of God. No human agency kneels before the God of Creation. The will of God is for people to leave this world, and we spend our lives in preparation for the departure.

Clearly this calls for a paradox: You must be virtually militant about your otherworldly focus. Don’t trust any human agency, including the person in the mirror. Keep your conscious awareness in your heart, so that you can distinguish between your fleshly nature and the soul God made. Keep nailing your flesh to the Cross; keep denying it the things you should not have in your life. And that means not fearing what civil governments can do to you.

Jesus could have done a lot of worldly good if He had chosen to, but He did not agitate for change, nor try to alter the natural course of things (Matthew 12:15-21). The world has no clue about what is morally good or right. Indeed, the world outside of Christ is utterly incapable of doing good. There might be a lot of things people do that eases our path of service, but nothing will be credited them eternally unless they act with Christ in their hearts. Their only blessing is standing in the shadow of our covering.

The world is one big relentless lie of Satan. Always, always, always — follow your own convictions. You may be forced to act on what some human agency says is true, but never actually believe it.

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Nonconformist Faith 02

Posted on December 29, 2020 by ehurst

In Hebrew culture, your heart is the seat of your convictions.

Modern medical science knows that the human heart has its own sensory field, projecting out from your body somewhere between 10 and 15 feet (3-4.5m). At that distance, other sources interfere with the signature wavelength from your heart, but in theory, the sensory field goes out into infinity. The same medical science tells us that the heart has its own nervous system and processing nodes. I cover this in more detail in my book, Heart of Faith. What matters here is that science has no idea what the heart does with that sensory field.

That’s because the whole of modern medicine, and Western Civilization, assumes that there is no higher faculty than the human intellect. So everything in the West presumes that your conscious awareness should be in your head. This is precisely what the temptation in the Garden was all about. Satan wanted Adam and Eve to stop listening to their hearts, and pay more attention to their fleshly nature in the human intellect. Human intellect is fallen; it is flesh and cannot be perfected.

However, the Lord can perfect your heart (Matthew 5:8). In the Bible, the heart acts as a higher faculty. It is also the seat of faith, the will to commit to moral truth. It can be darkened by commitment to something else, but it is the home God made for Himself in your soul. If the Holy Spirit is in you, that’s where you’ll find Him. The Hebrew Scriptures presume, as did virtually all of the Ancient Near East, that you could center your conscious awareness in your heart, instead of merely in your head. Most of the time, simply saying so is sufficient for you to instinctively make that transition. Nobody can do this for you.

If you are going to make your convictions the central reference point for everything in your life, then you will need to keep the focus of your conscious awareness in your heart. In my experience, virtually every nonconformist was at least partly there already. Once they became aware of the heart as a higher faculty of moral understanding, it was like the answer to almost every question they ever had. If there is one thing that puts you at odds with the whole world, this is it. Seeing reality from your heart quickly clarifies all the conflicts.

Further, it clarifies how you should handle those conflicts. There is much in Scripture about living in world that is hostile to your fundamental motivations. Oddly enough, letting your heart lead you will bring you into conflict with a lot of churches. How would you expect God to speak from Scripture itself? Through the heart, of course. If conviction does not witness to the truth of the Bible, then nothing any man can do will bring its power to life. Our commitment to God is our commitment to His Word. The power is not in the words printed on paper, but in your heart.

Somewhere shortly after the last of the Twelve Apostles passed from this earth, the church leadership quickly became hungry for social and government approval. Where that leaves us today is with an obsession among church leaders for trying to make faith reasonable. God makes the most unreasonable demands on us. There’s nothing reasonable about faith; it’s just a word for our commitment to doing things God’s way. Nor can we make the Bible somehow more binding on human obedience by trying to make it part of “objective truth.” If God doesn’t burn it into your soul, you aren’t going to obey it.

So all this noise about the Bible being factually infallible is missing the point. It’s not a book of facts as the world views such things. It’s a book of moral truth. We don’t have to prove the Bible to the world; we cannot. The only proof we have is our lives obedient to what it teaches. You cannot pretend that the words printed on paper are somehow magic. We don’t worship the book.

There is much more we could say about this, but the whole point is that we obey it because the Holy Spirit breathes it into our souls. It’s Him we obey. He won’t contradict His Word, but He will use it to indicate things that have meaning to you alone. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Thus, we dare not restrict His power in us by eliminating the mystical communion with the God who sponsored the book.

It’s enough to study how the book transmits the culture of the Hebrew people and the story of His Messiah. That’s how we know what it says. We have to understand it in the context of the revelation. The Hebrew language and culture was the context God built for revelation, and this packaging for revelation is part of the revelation. We cannot afford to inject Western intellectual biases back into it. The book doesn’t care about answering Western obsessions with factual queries.

So you owe it to God to learn the Hebrew approach to thinking and absorbing what the Bible has to say. No human has any business demanding anything else of you. The Hebrew people would snicker at the idea of “propositional truth” describing Scripture. Your heart will tell you what matters in glorifying the Lord; it needs to be more of a Hebrew heart.

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Nonconformist Faith 01

Posted on December 28, 2020 by ehurst

Everything Is a Matter of Conviction

Throw it all in the trash.

All the assumptions about reality we have been taught are simply to keep us in line. The mere notion that there is an objective reality that we all experience precisely the same is a part of that lie. It’s meant to make you subservient.

Over and over again, Scripture warns that serving the Lord puts you at odds with the rest of the world. That’s the way it’s supposed to be for us. Do whatever you can to avoid being in conflict with human authority, but never buy into their lies (Matthew 23:1-3). It goes all the way back to Abraham, whose covenant ritual included a warning that those who embrace his faith will suffer persecution and sorrow through the symbol of the smoking pot, but that they would also be a light to the world in the flaming torch (Genesis 15).

That this took place in a mystical vision should indicate something very important: God speaks in a very private way. Indeed, you should assume that everything God has to say to you is intensely personal. It will be a reality He grants to you alone. Reality will come to you as a person, someone who treats everyone individually. You will receive guidance from the Lord that will surely appear with similarities in how He deals with others — He is the same God — but with unique individual flourishes that signal His divine calling on your life.

So the first thing we must establish is that the starting point for your whole life is your personal experience with God. All you really have to know about anything is that God resides in your heart. He is the sole authority to whom you are accountable. You owe Him first before anyone else gets a piece of you.

In practice, this means you must learn to hear your convictions. Perhaps you’ve heard that old saw: “You hold your opinions, but your convictions hold you.” You need to develop an internal psychology of discerning between your thoughts versus those things that you simply must do to have peace with yourself. While the interface between your conscious mind and your convictions is your conscience, the conscience itself is fallible. Still, you have to start somewhere, and your conscience is it. Once you begin to obey your conscience consistently, it will be corrected over time. What you are reaching for is better clarity, making your conscience a reliable conduit of your convictions.

The difficulty is all the stuff that’s been inflicted upon our conscience. It will start out loaded with crap that other people have put on you. It’s a lot like trying to revive an old hand pump well. The water is way down there and it takes a while to get it flowing. A lot of crap comes out at first, maybe even some little critters. It takes some work to keep pumping until the water runs clear. You dare not drink that first few pumps, but you need to make them come out. So with your conscience, you have to query it because it’s not used to pulling from the depths of your soul. Be dubious about what first comes out of it.

You need to obey the best you know at any given time. It will get better with time and practice. Don’t second guess yourself with too much regret when your first moral impulses don’t work out. The issue is that you have nothing else to work with when you first start out. You are committed to making your best effort to obey the Lord. You know He speaks in your convictions — that’s a conviction in itself — you need to use what you’ve got so the Lord can begin to flow and cleanse things.

So nail it down: You cannot trust any other agency in your life. You must go first from your convictions as best you can discern what they require of you. It will take time and it will always get better.

Reach down inside. Do what you have to do in order to remain who you are.

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Law of Moses — 2 Kings 5:1-19

Posted on December 26, 2020 by ehurst

The Kingdom of Syria at this time was mostly Aramaic people who spoke pretty much the same language as Israel. They also had some similar customs. The Syrians knew that Israel claimed to worship Jehovah, and were familiar with some of the requirements attached to that. We don’t know how Syrians looked at leprosy, but they did know how Israel’s law made lepers social outcasts, and that it was supposedly a command from their God, since it was regarded as a sign of divine wrath.

The main point to notice in the opening verses is that Naaman was the commander of the Syrian royal army, and that the King really favored him for his successes in battle. Whatever leprosy meant in Syrian society, it would become a serious hindrance to his duties, and signaled a slow and painful death, which portions of skin and limbs dying and rotting off.

We get the picture that, at this point, Israel was somewhat of a tributary to Syria, having lost in some battle. During the recent conflicts, the Syrian raiders had seized some border captives, and among them was an Israeli girl who ended up a handmaiden to Naaman’s wife. The girl was old enough to remember stories of a prophet and his miracles. She believed. At some point she remarked that she wished Naaman could visit this famous prophet who hung around the royal court in Samaria. She wasn’t hostile to her servitude; she genuinely cared about the master of the household. It’s obvious she had little clue about the whole story, and was unable to provide much information.

But this remark was reported to Naaman, who then in turn asked his master the King about it. They knew less about the situation than the girl did. Still, they were currently somewhat dominant over Israel and decided to send Naaman with gifts and a substantial escort. The essence of the letter was that the King of Israel should call in this prophet to heal Naaman. Jehoram tore his clothes as a sign of being quite distraught. He might have known Elisha could do miracles, but this was a bit much. How many lepers did he have in his kingdom, and none were healed?

He was pretty sure this was some kind of game, an excuse to attack Israel. The famous general would not have tried to enter the city, knowing the rules about lepers, but he could easily spy out the situation and make tactical plans accordingly. Jehoram was already somewhat of a tributary to Syria’s king; if he could have fought off an attack from Syria, he would have already done it.

So we can picture Naaman camping outside the city with all the finery of someone high in Syrian royal service. And word now goes out through the grapevine that this is just a ruse looking to cause trouble and Jehoram has torn his clothes in mourning. Elisha got word of it and sent a message to his king. What’s all the fuss? Elisha would gladly show Naaman that God had at least one true prophet in Israel.

We have no idea where Elisha resided at that time. Chances are he had quarters near the City of Samaria so he could be ready at hand to prod Jehoram now and then, representing Jehovah’s interests, and keep track of the King. So when Jehoram finally replied to Naaman, he told him to visit with Elisha the prophet. Naaman duly reported to the prophet’s residence in his chariot, and with escorting chariots. Again, he stayed outside the courtyard wall out of respect for the religious rules about lepers.

While he was waiting to see what would happen, Elisha sent out a servant with the message that Naaman should bathe seven times in the Jordan River. This wasn’t some crazy ritual bath, either, just that he should plunge himself under the surface of the water seven times. The promise is that it would restore his normal skin.

It was not at all what Naaman was expecting. He was used to the pagan prophets in Syria doing all sorts of mumbo-jumbo rituals. Here, the prophet never even showed his face. Naaman ranted about how the two rivers nearest his country’s capital of Damascus were much nicer than the muddy Jordan in the first place (they were and still are). But Naaman’s attendants spoke very wisely to him. If Elisha had demanded some heroic deed, would that have appealed more to Naaman? Why could the power of Elisha’s God not be found with a simple act in the local river?

So Naaman decided to give it a shot. The road between Samaria and Damascus ran across the Upper Jordan River near the Wadi Yarmuk, or he could head straight down a much closer one (Wadi Farah) starting near Shechem, just a short ride from Samaria. So Naaman does this rather odd and simple act, and on the seventh dunking, came up with skin as clean as a child’s.

It would be hard to imagine just how it felt to overcome what would have been an early death sentence, and a slow and degrading death at that. So he returned to Elisha’s residence with his whole entourage and tried to offer some kind of payment. Elisha steadfastly refused, using a strong oath — “as surely as Jehovah lives.” In this he was quite consistent with his predecessor, who was at pains to show that he could not be bribed. So Naaman decided the least he could do was convert to the worship of Jehovah, who surely was a living God, indeed, unlike all the others he had heard about.

It was common in the minds of people in the Ancient Near East to imagine a god as tied to some location. It’s not meant to be a fact, so much as symbolism. Naaman asked permission to take with him as much Israeli soil as two mules could carry in baskets. It was his way of honoring the God of the land who had won his loyalty. He would construct a shrine that incorporated the soil. He wanted to stand on “sacred ground” when he worshiped God. He also asked Elisha to intercede with Jehovah regarding his feudal duty.

Naaman, as servant of his King, would be required to engage in some of the King’s ritual worship of Rimmon. That was part of a man’s feudal duty throughout the Ancient Near East (it’s why Abraham refused to accept the burial cave as a gift, because it would have feudal duties attached to it). Naaman asked that Jehovah wouldn’t take it seriously when he engaged in such rituals, but forgive him and know that Naaman’s heart belonged to Jehovah.

Elisha told Naaman he had no cause to worry; peace with Jehovah wasn’t that tricky.

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Merry Christmas 2020

Posted on December 25, 2020 by ehurst

Here’s your Christmas gift from me.

The prophetic gift is gone. A primary symptom of having it was this constant, nagging sense of anticipation. I could sense things near and far — things that are, were to be and had once been — as having a sort of mass and shape in the moral sphere. That is gone.

It’s not a loss of privilege; I’m not being punished. I turned in the equipment from my old assignment and I have a new mission. So instead of sensing things from a peculiar, indescribable kind of radar, now I simply have that unshakable certainty about what God wants me to do. I’ve had that for a very long time, but it was sometimes eclipsed by what was on the radar.

That sense of imperative still includes things to come. I don’t see them with radar; I am told blindly, “Get ready for this thing.” I am aware that it’s not so much that “this thing” is coming, but that it’s my duty to be ready. That’s my mission.

What I’m told to get ready for is not precise. I honestly believe God will be making some of it up as events roll along. He’s still telling me that there are variables and other players involved, so I must remain loose and watchful. But I do know what kind of thing is coming.

It will be an apocalypse. There’s no other word for it. We’ll see the Four Horsemen, but this is hardly their last ride. And the one thing that most shakes me to the core is a sense of upheaval regarding religion. The established churches will be hammered, but that’s not the main point. It’s more like religion itself as a social institution will be shattered. We are going to find out a lot about current major figures and organizations, because some will turn in the right direction and sacrifice the worldly trappings. A great many will turn the wrong way and compromise to “survive”.

I will admit that’s more extrapolation than anything else. The thing weighing on me most is the absolute imperative to research and teach a particular message. It’s the same thing we’ve been doing all along, but father along that same path. The business of holding faith in isolation is a major issue for facing the future. Human society will change dramatically.

It’s as if the mere possibility of having a genuine biblical covenant community of faith will be virtually impossible. That door may open again some day, but it’s been pushed way off into the future, even as a mere possibility. It won’t do much good to talk about it for a very long time, except as a reference point to why we should reject the mainstream churches. We should not expect to see genuine elders and pastors because there’s no work for them. It won’t be possible. I’ve completely dismissed any clergy functions from my life. Instead, I do everything as a private elder/priest of my own household. Any heart-led male can do what I do. My only office is that of teacher.

So I honestly believe God is calling us to stand on our own with only the most gossamer threads of fellowship and communion. It will be like that time during Roman persecution, when believers would coyly make that half sign of icthys in the dirt with a toe, to see if the other person completes the drawing. Except we will have a different method. We will have to come up with ways to signal to each other without getting caught.

Part of the problem is that organized religion itself will lead the persecution. The “Woke Church” will become a really big problem for us. The idea of private faith that doesn’t conform to their image will become illegal, in one sense or another. The Harlot Church will definitely ride the Beast. We will be scattered.

This is what I’m preparing for, so what I write on every outlet I have will be aimed at this, with the full expectation that one after another of them will be closed at various times. I’m trying to get this message of preparation out there for you who feel called to the same kind of thing. We must keep the heart-led way alive.

Merry Christmas.

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Nonconformist Faith: Intro

Posted on December 24, 2020 by ehurst

The working title for the new book is Nonconformist Faith. What I’m posting here is the draft for the book. Don’t expect it to flow all at once in a continuous stream.

============

Introduction

I am a nonconformist. It’s not a label I sought; I don’t do this just for the sake of refusing to conform. The label is what the world has put on me. I have to live with it.

To be honest, I’m convinced the world is wrong. I’m not going to say it should be more like me, but that it should be different from what it is. I should have more room to be myself, but I find that just about everything is structured to block me doing what I’m certain I have to do. Maybe it’s not intentionally hostile, but it’s certainly not friendly.

That brings me to the “faith” part of the title. The reason I have such a strong sense of difference is the divine imperative. From my earliest awareness, I’ve sensed a calling from the God of the Bible on my life. There was never any doubt that I was supposed to serve Him, and I remain utterly convinced of it today. And the problem I have with the world is that what I believe I have to do is pretty much forbidden in one way or another, to one degree or another.

And it’s my faith that teaches me the world will never change. Worse, most of the religious institutions I’ve encountered act more like the world than what I see in the Bible. The reception I get from mainstream religion ranges between indifference and outright rejection, precisely because the churches want more of what the world has to offer. From where I stand, it’s that “Harlot Church” thing. I’ve had lots of wounds from that.

But I’m not some Alpha leader. I won’t compete for the top spot in the system. I have no doubt that I could lead, having taken a wrong turn a few times and finding myself doing just that. It scares me how people have agreed to follow me, until they realize I’m not building up the system on which they depend. I’m not going to game the system to force what I believe is right; the system itself is fundamentally wrong for me. The calling of God on my life is to simply take the path He has called me to take, and the rest of the world be damned. According to Scripture, this world cannot be saved in the first place. He’s going to come back and destroy it someday.

So most of what the world strives for is vanity. I’ve learned that there is nothing to gain from returning their hostility. Conquest is a dead end fantasy. I can play along some, because I’m in this world for now, but I don’t belong to it. It’s like living in an asylum. It requires a lot of effort to avoid being a part of it all.

I’m not looking for sympathy. This book is not an anguished cry of loneliness. Frankly I’m wired to enjoy the isolation. It makes it easier to be close to God. It’s not that I can’t embrace others, but that they seldom embrace me. My weirdness is too hard on them, so compassion means leaving them alone. I do have just a few friends, people who really can accept me as I am, but they are scattered far and wide. The lack of emotional connection is no hindrance, just another bit of misery from living in a fallen world.

All of this calls for a different mindset. It means embracing the isolation of being one of a kind. The drive to serve my God is the only hope for sanity I have. It means minimizing my dependency on other humans. There is little choice but to do everything for myself, because the world is disinterested, if not hostile, to what my God requires me to do. I expend a lot of effort and resources just staying out of their way. It requires a different psychology altogether to remain adjusted and in control of what little I am able to control.

That’s what this book is about: the psychology of balancing between the divine calling and the demands of the world. I have had to find my own balance point, and I’m going to tell that story. There are a lot of resources for those who struggle to find their way as part of the mainstream. That’s hard enough. But there’s not much that speaks to those who realize they are nonconformist by nature. Nonconforming means being unique, but I perceive there’s just a little bit of commonality in that fact itself. Maybe the other nonconformists out there can find something useful in this story.

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Persecution Threat Profile

Posted on December 23, 2020 by ehurst

The tactics for dealing with persecution are not at all like military tactics. It’s more like espionage.

There is a high probability the federal government will begin to oppress via any number of “social justice” measures. This signals a rising hatred for traditional moral assumptions, and even more hatred for genuine biblical moral standards. It’s a new brand of social orthodoxy that puts extreme pressure on nonconformists. The government will tend to respond quickly to SJW complaints. And where the government itself cannot do anything, it will encourage private efforts, encourage the organization of mob action and lynching — figurative and sometimes literal.

This is on top of economic collapse. Thus, any form of limited economic recovery will be tied to a collection of agenda items. There will be a “social credit score” — you’ll be denied access to markets on the grounds that you don’t sufficiently support various forms of oppression. So we would expect lots of noise about climate change, enforced social equality, hatred for whites, confiscation of privately owned firearms, confiscation of other forms of property for any number of reasons, soaring fees and taxation on everything imaginable, etc.

It’s already upon us. As more and more of the federal bureaucracy is subverted into this effort, as more and more commerce and various private institutions join this trend, your life as a Christian will become a target for their spite. Sure, there’s a place for bold and honest resistance, but the majority of us aren’t called to that. Our mission is to preserve the truth, even if it means keeping it out of sight for awhile.

Granted, the primary threat is someone shoving a test of social orthodoxy in your face. Some of the most innocuous activity will get their attention. Everywhere you go, you are under surveillance. In the privacy of your own home, everything you do online is being surveilled.

It’s as if you are some kind of foreign agent. During the worst of this madness, your mission is small. It’s really more like simply keeping your identity intact while in a hostile atmosphere. You aren’t here to change the world; the aim is not to change the government. The whole point is simply to be here and to maintain fellowship and communion. Keep the network alive for some later date. That’s really all you have to do. The tension will pass somewhere down the road.

Anything else you might do will be a matter of opportunity. This amounts to sabotage in reverse: You can occasionally identify someone ready to come over to your side. But the primary objective is simply to strengthen the resolve of those who have already sworn allegiance to your King.

Sometimes you can be totally unseen, avoiding the surveillance. At other times you are simply unnoticed. You don’t want to trip the alarm until it doesn’t matter. You will trip it, sooner or later, but the timing and context have to be just right.

Meanwhile, you have to understand the context of persecution. It’s oppression at large. It’s hard on everyone for all kinds of reasons. It’s hard on the police, too. Their enforcement will show the difference. Most of them are not gung-ho unless they’ve been somehow juiced up mentally to really believe in the mission. People with that kind of drive rarely bother with the slim pickings of policing the general public. In a really rough situation, perks are just as valuable as money. What kind of perks are offered to the various agents of oppression? There won’t be all that many true believers.

The current oppression will use CCTV surveillance and lots of AI. Expensive stuff, so it won’t be ubiquitous. There are places where the surveillance will be high, and you have to adjust your actions to match that. Try not to be noticed. In other places, it will be nonexistent. The issue there is human observation. How likely are you to encounter active enforcement? How probable are snitches?

A major element in such espionage is to reduce dependencies. Try to be self-contained for everything that matters. You have to examine the cost-risk ratio for everything you do. What kind of thing can tip them off and draw attention to yourself? What kind of things must you do regardless of the risks? How can you reduce your exposure?

Let me cite an extreme example to indicate the kind of thinking it requires. I’m not facing any real threat right now, but I’m thinking in these terms. Now, on the one hand, the truth is I have a very real need to work at keeping my heart healthy. Whatever the doctor’s diagnosis means, a significant element of therapy means keeping up my cardiovascular fitness. So that means engaging in cardio exercise without exposing myself unnecessarily. On the other hand, let’s imagine that I face a high threat of persecution.

In a high threat environment, riding a bike makes me a moving target. And if I tend to ride out into rural areas, I’m less likely to be noticed, unless I present a nuisance on busy roads. So I practice staying away from high traffic areas. Nobody is likely to track my route on longer rides, but the shorter ones need to be randomized. I need to know the back roads well enough to mix it up. A part of my advantage is that most cyclists are some brand of SJW, so it’s an approved activity already.

But the rest of my body is involved in heart health, so I have to work out my entire musculature. Go to the gym? That leaves a record, establishing a habit profile. It also increases social exposure. Go to the park? That raises a fairly high risk of snitches and actual policing in most of our parks. Work out on the mat in my front room? That’s pretty secure. Not as much fun, but I can tweak the workout to give a good physical benefit that, for the purpose of my heart health, can match a workout anywhere else.

None of these are genuine issues right now in Oklahoma, but you get the idea. Part of the game is assessing the real threat. I could easily add things like mask mandates as another factor. Right now I live in a state where the government doesn’t always cooperate so well with federal authorities, but we have way more SJWs than I like. We need to begin preparing now for what is likely to come. We need to be aware of how to calculate costs and risks for every little thing.

The issue of anonymity online is a part of this picture. Anonymous posting of the gospel truth is a clandestine attack on the system. It will not go down smoothly in the future. It’s not paranoia to be aware of a very real threat.

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Own Little World

Posted on December 22, 2020 by ehurst

The idea that we are living in a simulation is actually quite ancient. If you can understand Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” then you’ve encountered that very idea. The difference is that Plato believed you could escape the simulation, whereas the modern notion suggests that we are locked into it. You’ll get echoes of it from The Matrix movie franchise.

For people who find themselves taking the nonconformist faith path, it would actually be more sane to assume that the only way to escape is to die. In other words, each of us is in a simulation, rather like a computer game, with some variation between individuals. There are things that overlap, elements that are in the nature of the simulation itself, but that no two of us get exactly the same settings in our game, and the control panel is missing a lot of options.

I make no pretense to calling this the truth. What I’ll tell you is that it is how I approach things. The very notion that you can never honestly know in this life what’s truly real is very much a part of the Doctrine of the Fall. It suggests that you should expect glitches in your understanding, whether they are ultimately real or not. It boils down to a question of what you experience and perceive. This is why I favor phenomenology. It takes that same approach: There is no reality. There is only your personal experience and perception.

I believe this is critical to taking the nonconformist faith path. If you are going to seize firmly on your convictions as the true anchor or your being, you are going to need the kind of orientation that allows you to reject attempts by other humans to demand you conform to their expectations. You have little choice but to deny that their particular reality applies to you.

Thus, accusations that you are in your own little world are accurate, as far as they go. But we assert that no other world is valid, because all worlds — all realities — are imaginary. Yours is equally valid. Thus, I say that reality is fungible: Yours is as good as mine. This is what enables us to live by our convictions.

This does not require that you adopt a chaotic stance of widely competing variations on reality. If reality is a person, then we can all talk about reality as possessing a lot of similarities for each of us, otherwise we can’t be talking about the same person. In other words, the variations are likely to be small, and sometimes not the kind of thing you mention. It may be too personal, too much like intimacy that justifies privacy.

Still, it does mean that you will qualify by some definitions as insane. It’s because you reject the notion that there is one unified reality. You reject the notion of “objective reality” for which we should all have some unified experience. You should get very comfortable with people regarding you as nuts, even revel in it. It does not damage your testimony if what you testify is true. The default assumptions of a fallen humanity are the big lie.

This is partly an outline of what my proposed book will cover. By the way, this will be echoed in what I post on my other blog tomorrow.

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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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