On God’s Terms

Posted on November 15, 2020 by ehurst

I strive after shalom. That’s peace with God; it’s living consistently with His revelation. This world nailed Christ to the Cross; peace with God means enmity with the world. There’s no avoiding that. The Holy Spirit makes me desire peace with God more than peace with my neighbors.

Drawing a boundary against sin is provocative. I’m not trying to provoke them, but I can’t avoid having a witness that tends to raise conviction of sin. People living outside Biblical Law are under demonic influences, so they rarely react honorably when conviction rises. That means my presence in a community does have certain soothing tendencies on the surface, but sooner or later it’s going to explode. The trend is always to push people down to their bottom; that’s how God works.

But this looks a little different when we scale it up. When groups of people draw shared boundaries against sin, the surrounding worldly community will call them “a cult.” Spite rises rather quickly when people start operating in groups. They feel a desperate need to defend their group choices; it feels to them like their tribe has been assaulted, and they take it personally. As long as they aren’t alone with their convictions, it’s easier to stay entrenched in sin. That’s how it works when the demons build a community of deception. It is a divine principle that communities will always be more truculent than individuals.

Scale it upward farther and we have whole coalitions of countries taking umbrage that anyone would dare to depart from their socio-political orthodoxy. They are convinced that material progress is all the proof they need that materialism is right. It’s a circular logic.

On the one hand, I know that my Father has promised to supply the needs of the mission. He supports what He calls us to do. On the other hand, we have been warned a thousand different ways that materialism is evil. God’s abundant supply isn’t according to our reasoning, but according to His. It’s too easy to forget that our lives in this fallen realm are forfeit when we follow Christ. The whole point of the gospel message is that you aren’t stuck here, that this life isn’t all there is.

This is what that fancy word “otherworldly” is all about.

So I cannot avoid provoking my neighbors sooner or later. And all the more so with faith communities provoking the society around them. And could there actually be an otherworldly country, every other country in the world would do all in their power to crush them. The political excuse is always material progress, as if that somehow justifies anything and everything. Every political sales pitch comes with that inherent message somewhere in the package. If not dreams of prosperity for the people, there’s an inherent aim to make some elite leadership wealthy.

Isn’t it crazy that US law and jurisprudence presumes that the State has an unquestionable claim on your productivity, as if you were merely an economic resource? Nothing else matters. Everything enthroned as “rights” is just a cover for that. All other considerations fall away quickly when it comes to material prospects for the State. Think about it: The only reason the State senses any obligation to provide some kind of civil order and preserving your property is so the State doesn’t lose the prerogative of taxing or taking that property for itself. That’s what it boils down to.

A critical element in my calling and mission is to point out such things. I make myself an enemy of the State by daring to help people see this. It’s not that I call for resistance, and sometimes violence, but that this is all the State leaves us. It is the State that has chosen to provoke God so that people have no choice but to resist with some measure of violence. The State is founded on a rejection of the terms by which God says social stability is possible. The State is lying about human nature, to itself and to those it claims to govern.

My mission is to declare what God has said, and to expose the lies of those who have tried to hijack His revelation for their own ends. I’ve said before that the real battle in our future is information; it’s the warfare of revealing God’s truth. What I say should provoke violence, even though there is nearly zero probability that I will be violent in the flesh. I’m constrained by the gospel calling to reveal that violence is not good and right, but that it is unavoidable. I have to point out the terms under which God Himself commanded His people to violent action against sinners who threatened shalom. The violence is the choice of the sinners. I can assure you that God’s people have always been pretty lazy about violence, unwilling to get their hands dirty that way, even when the command from God was unmistakable.

It cannot be reduced to a formula of human logic. It can only come from a heart-led commitment to truth. God alone can tell you when violence is part of your mission. What I do is point out what God said about such things in the past, and testify if/when it’s my obligation today. I walk my wife to the car every morning when she goes to work. When she feels the need, she’ll send a text message so I can meet her when she returns. If I testify in meat-space that violence is possible under certain conditions, I should have the same testimony online. Yeah, I’ll get my hands dirty when the time comes, but not necessarily when it makes sense to people with a worldly orientation.

It’s not merely the State that is wrong, but society itself has no interest in what God says about the situation in our world. And in most cases, the churches are wrong, too. I cannot be silent about any of that. Maybe I’m no more threat than a gadfly, but I refuse to go away. I’ll stop buzzing and biting when there is peace on God’s terms.

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Law of Moses — 1 Kings 16:23 – 17:1

Posted on November 14, 2020 by ehurst

We skip over some quick and dirty changes in who reigns over Israel. As noted previously, the Northern Kingdom goes through frequent dynasty changes. Where we pick up is the beginning of the Omride Dynasty.

His reign was twelve years. For half of that, he continued using the palace Jeroboam built in Tirzah. Then he went and bought a hill (along with the surrounding land) from someone named Shemer, as the new site for his royal capital. He named it after the previous owner. Samaria is the English version; in Hebrew it’s more like Shomerone. Vowel shifts are common in Hebrew, particularly when you name something after someone.

There was a tremendous building program under the Omrides, and the new capital was just the beginning. Omri and his successors also refurbished just about everything Solomon had built in the Northern Kingdom, in part to put their own mark on things. In many foreign records of this period, the term for the Northern Kingdom shows up as “House of Omri” or similar labels, and they stuck long after his dynasty ended.

But what matters to us is how he continued in Jeroboam’s footsteps in keeping the two rival shrines open in Dan and Bethel. Thus, the prophetic scribes who wrote 1 and 2 Kings noted little else.

Omri’s heir was Ahab. He continued his father’s building program, and the text notes that he also introduced more abominations. He took for his queen Jezebel, a fanatical advocate of pagan idolatry. The narrative gives us the heart of the matter, but not the complicated story of how Jehovah’s name was used for a lot things that He hated. The prophetic authors talk about Baal and Asherah because that was essentially what kind of pagan practices were observed under Ahab, despite how Jehovah’s name appeared on some of the shrines and celebrations. The rituals bore some similarities to the worship of Jehovah, but He was properly worshiped only in Jerusalem.

Foreign rulers never quite grasped the finer points of this issue. As far as they were concerned, the God of Israel was still named Jehovah. That’s because in their daily speech and correspondence, they still used derivatives of Jehovah’s name, but were often talking about pagan idolatry. It was further confused because the official names of these people still echoed with references to Jehovah.

There is a sort of footnote at the end of the chapter here about Jericho. Someone named Hiel (Hebrew Chiel), from the shrine city of Bethel, went down to the site of Jericho and proceeded to rebuild the ruins. As promised in Joshua 6:26, when his servants began this task, his firstborn son died. By the time he set the gates to finish the work, his youngest son died.

We end with just the first verse of the next chapter. We are introduced to the prophet Elijah. He hailed from middle Gilead, from the village Tishbe, about half-way down the wadi that contained the Brook Cherith. This prophet was sent to warn Ahab that his provocations justified a total drought on the Northern Kingdom. The implication of what Elijah says is that unless Ahab turns to the true God of Israel and appeals to Elijah as His prophet for relief, there would be none. None of the pagan idols Ahab worshiped could help him.

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Western Idolatries 03

Posted on November 13, 2020 by ehurst

God does not dwell in houses made by human hands. He is a spirit being whose existence is rooted in a different dimension. His is the original, the true “reality” and ours is the fallen illusion. You can touch His heart, but you cannot in any way make a difference in His existence.

This life we have now is not what He intended for us. Mortality is not our nature, but our situation. It’s the fallback plan, the state in which we find ourselves because He couldn’t let us stay in the Garden of Eden. Our conscience drives us to hide from Him. We can’t see Him face to face in our flesh. The path to recovery is in revelation.

We are accountable to God for what Scripture says. I’m not going to bind you to my sense of what is and isn’t canonical. I confess that we can’t really know for certain how we arrived at the canon of Scripture, but we can be sure He will not take it lightly if you don’t have some sense of conscience about what the Bible says. If you get too far from my convictions, I don’t have to take seriously your claims of faith. My convictions say that your convictions will not contradict the written record of divine revelation, though we are likely to come up with varying understandings of what it demands of us. Anything we might have in common starts with some diligent effort to understand what is revealed in the Book, and the tradition of what we can know about divine revelation begins with the Covenant of Moses.

The rituals of that covenant religion were not for Him; they were for His people. As a part of the legacy of Biblical Law, the prescribed rituals and requirements were designed to speak to our souls, to awaken something eternal in us. It calls to us so that we seek Him. Rituals and observances don’t change the situation; they can change our hearts if we are seeking Him.

In the Covenant of Moses, baptism was a ritual that was repeated often. It was part of that awareness of our fallen nature. If you intended to come to the Tabernacle or Temple to meet with God, you would want to ensure you observed the protocols of reverence. As a part of that, you would want to stop and bathe as you got near the place to demonstrate to God your sincere desire for a clear conscience. That’s why there were so many baptismal pools around the Temple Mount. You were expected to avail yourself of these public accommodations. It was never meant to be a one-time ritual.

Being aware of this should help to provide the context by which we move away from the idea of ritual as somehow magical. If the rituals could do us any good, if the sacrifices in the Temple actually changed anything, then there would be no reason to keep coming back. You could meet God once in the Temple and never return. But the Lord Himself demanded that His people keep coming back, because we live in a temporal existence in which our flesh keeps pulling us away from the Spirit. Adam won’t stay nailed to the Cross, so we have to repeat the rituals to remind him he is fallen.

The importance of baptism to the Ethiopian Eunuch was that he was finally welcome in God’s Presence. Under Ritual Law he was not allowed in the Temple, and baptism was pointless. But in Christ, being a eunuch was no longer a hindrance to worshiping the Lord. Something had changed with the death and resurrection of the Anointed One. The Temple Veil was torn open. There was no longer a constant Temple ritual of sacrifice. Instead, there was the constant reminder of self-sacrifice. If the Ethiopian was going into God’s Presence finally, why did he continue on his way back home to Ethiopia? Because what Philip taught him from the Book of Isaiah was that there was a final point to the rituals, and it was the Anointed One. God’s divine Presence was no longer restricted to one geographical location. The Temple was just a facility sitting on real estate, not the House of God. He lived in hearts; people are His New Temple. So, now the rituals were done, but the meaning of the rituals remained eternal.

It is symbolism; it is mystery and mysticism. You are required to internalize the rituals. Adam would love nothing more than to restore all the fleshly ritual requirements, to restore the control to fleshly existence, because it permits him to ignore their eternal meaning. He can jump through the hoops and push God back into the closet when the rituals are done. Well, that veil of covering has been ripped away by the Cross. You can no longer hide in the ritual observance and national laws. There is no longer any earthly tribal identity by which you can safely ignore the Spirit Realm and boast in your DNA. Your citizenship in the Kingdom is not an earthly artifact, but a matter of spiritual reality.

The Kingdom of God exists only in hearts. It is not an earthly political domain. There is no valid meaning to the term “Christendom.” That word itself perverts what Christ came to do. Even if there were such a thing that God honored, not a single earthly political entity meets the requirements. There is no special nation on this earth protected and granted some unique destiny under God’s hand. Not a single political entity exists under a valid Law Covenant, with a tribal identity and a proper God-ordained feudal order. The priesthood is not inherited in the flesh, nor in authorizing rituals, but in a heart that seeks the Lord.

Naturally, there is no end of people using mystical statements in Scripture as an excuse to make law. It’s bad law because it abuses the words to mean something God didn’t actually require of His people. For example, we see “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” bandied about as a call to embrace one or another particular expression of faith as somehow the only thing God will bless. Let’s re-translate Ephesians 4:5, which looks like this in Greek:

εἷς κύριος, μία πίστις, ἓν βάπτισμα

The Letter to the Ephesians, so near as anyone can tell, was aimed at all the little satellite churches that had sprouted around the community that was born from Paul’s visit to Ephesus. It was a cosmopolitan place, with people bringing to one location a vast wealth of human traditions. The fourth chapter was an appeal for unity in the Spirit, even though it was not possible to have unity in the flesh. Given the broader context of their lives in that region and the Hebrew mystical legacy of the existing Scriptures at that time, we could translate those words like this:

We have one feudal Lord, we share one common commitment of loyalty to Him, and His cleansing is the one thing that brings us all into His Presence.

What holds us together as a kingdom is our hearts, not an order and hierarchy of mere humans. There’s nothing wrong with a hierarchy of people; that was implied by the existence of a law covenant. The churches were meant to be little feudal households, but the authority was spiritual, not fleshly. You could decided at any time that your heart no longer bound you to the church family and you would go seek another that was more consistent with the fresh demands from God in your life. The temporal reality was meant to be temporary and provisional, subject to revision on some level from day to day. Your church family doesn’t own you for life. You can go and start a new faith household, or join one that accommodates your mission. But there was nothing at all sacred about this or that particular expression of faith in organized religious activity.

The Good Samaritan would never have wanted to become a citizen of the Judean nation, nor worship in Herod’s Temple and live among the Jewish people. They were sworn enemies. But God counted that Samaritan as part of the Kingdom of Heaven, and required that him to treat the distressed Jewish man as his brother in that other spiritual sense. God wasn’t the property of the Jewish people. The Samaritan recognized that requirement of faith and obeyed. He was part of that “one Lord, one faith, one cleansing.”

We can symbolize the whole point here by focusing on that word “baptism.” By never translating that word from Greek, but anglicizing it as a special word with sacred meaning, we have lost what it should have meant for the Hebrew people. It was a ritual cleansing; that’s what baptizo means in Greek and that’s what it was in the Old Testament. It was used by John the Baptist as a symbol of the call to repentance. He warned that without a genuine sense of calling in the heart, it was noting more than getting wet. Jesus didn’t need to repent, but He needed to testify that John had the right message.

He also needed to debase Himself and wash the feet of His disciples at the Last Seder. It was another cleansing ritual. He also needed to point out that it was the Last Seder. He seized upon bits and pieces of Ritual Law and gave them a new meaning. He told the Woman at the Well that once He was risen, temples and rituals wouldn’t matter that much. What would matter was a sincerity of heart, a genuine prostration of the soul before the eternal feudal Master of Creation.

Don’t let mere men decide for you what God requires. If God drives you to fellowship with this person or that group, do so. But realize that there is nothing sacred in the context itself, only in the shared commitment to obey the convictions of the heart. A lot of churches aren’t actually covenant communities of faith. A lot of governments claim a form of deification. There is no real difference; an organizations of humans is still just a human institution. No church and no nation can claim your eternal allegiance. That’s reserved for the Lord alone.

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Western Idolatries 02

Posted on November 12, 2020 by ehurst

It’s important to go back and examine the ground on which we stand. Divine truth is always contextual — contextual to you and your faith and calling. Ultimate truth cannot be stated in words or ideas; it is Person to person.

One of the fundamental flaws in Western mythology is the assumption of an impersonal institutional ownership of the individual. This is a lie from Hell. First and foremost is that every standard formulation of institutional concepts is a flat lie about claiming to confer liberty on the individual. It does no such thing; the underlying and unspoken assumption is that you submit to the ownership of the system. In most cases, that works out to be ownership of the State.

You cannot relate to an institution; it’s not a person. Instead, you are subject to the whims of those who gain official authority within the system. In other words, it is always persons, with only a thin fiction of objectivity. The institution demands your allegiance and gives damned little in return. There’s no covenant.

Strictly speaking, you should not put your hand on your heart and swear allegiance to the US flag. That little ceremony renders the flag as a pagan deity, an idol. But it’s a very dehumanizing idol that claims ownership of your soul while denying that you have one. There is this utterly false notion that religion should not be the basis for government, when the US government re-institutes every aspect of religious devotion in the ceremonies and theology of the State.

But keep in mind the testimony of Joseph, who was obliged to feign a pagan religious observance of Pharaoh’s religion based on the mission and calling of God in his life. The whole point is that you not adopt a false conscience and false guilt about something God requires of you, just because it makes other folks unhappy. You are serving God; this is a personal feudal loyalty, and no mere man can define for you what that means.

The most anyone can justly do is disassociate, to refuse fellowship. They would never have standing to declare you a sinner, only a transgressor of the community covenant. That’s the full extent of human authority on this earth.

By definition, the State is an anti-covenant entity. It denies the existence of a God who works directly in human affairs, who calls individuals to serve Him and makes demands that constitute a literal government. You belong to Christ or you belong to the Devil. End of discussion. People who belong to Satan might not know it, might not have made any conscious choice about it, but that doesn’t change the moral truth of the situation. You can never be sure of their loyalties, but you can be sure of whether they share a covenant with you.

This is why God makes so much of ANE covenant feudalism and the tribal social structure. There is an inherent loyalty and honesty required for those who share a covenant. Your are under no such obligation for those outside the covenant, though there is a broad presumption you would prefer conditional honesty and loyalty as part of your witness to those outside the covenant. But let them see there is a difference in how you deal with those outside the covenant. You want them inside; you want them obedient to your Master. You want to grow His domain. But He may tell you that such a good divine longing is pointless in certain contexts, and with certain people.

That has nothing to do with whether He intends to claim them at some point later. The point is what He requires of you in dealing with that person. They are a pagan outsider unless they share enough of your covenant commitment to warrant treatment as a brother/sister, or as a safe ally. Keep in mind that in the household of God, He recognizes children, hired servants, and slaves. You need to keep that in your mind when dealing with every human on this planet: Is this family, ally or enemy? Don’t deny just privileges, nor grant them, to anyone in the wrong category.

The secular State cannot declare for you whom you shall consider family, ally or enemy. The State itself is an enemy in the first place. As long as the laws of the land do not permit you to live in a feudal tribal covenant community, and hinders your obedience to Biblical Law, it is not even an ally of God. It is an oppressive idolatrous regime. The only question, then, is how God wants you to interact and live under such an idolatrous regime.

Don’t presume to tell your covenant brother how he must live with the laws of the land. Tell him what you can tolerate from a covenant brother, and set the boundaries to fellowship accordingly. Without boundaries, Satan reigns. This bullshit about inclusivity is a lie from Hell.

Make sure you understand the boundaries and who has what kind of dominion in this life.

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Western Idolatries 01

Posted on November 11, 2020 by ehurst

In our studies in the Law of Moses up to this point, we should have absorbed some indications of how God views human activity after the Fall. We cannot go on through life giving credence to Western notions of democratic rule of law; those things come from the Devil. They are clearly contrary to what God revealed. This is not merely a matter of God trying to enlighten some dark barbaric people, so that only in the last few centuries has He spoken clearly, as if somehow human reason is no longer fallen. What He revealed in His covenant with Israel shows clearly that human reason cannot be trusted for anything that matters.

I’ll start first with a modern example of how that works. We hear reports all the time about how medical science has made marvelous progress in understanding how the human body works, and that there is nothing of importance on the subject outside what physicians and researchers can report. That’s a lie. Medical science has no clue how the sensory heart works, for example, and assumes that the body is just a bunch of biochemical processes over which we have precious little control. All we can do is throw chemicals and energy at it and hope for the best. The Bible flatly says that the moral condition in the heart can affect your physical constitution far more than mere biochemical or physical inputs.

Taking nutritional supplements is not merely a matter of biochemical inputs; it is listening to that still, small voice in your heart about what God wants you to do for His glory. Maybe there is no clinically observable change from taking one supplement or another, but your heart knows what God wants you to do. Regardless of the effects, taking certain supplements can make the difference between obedience and going your own way down the Highway to Hell. This is why there were certain conditions laid down in Kosher Law. The issue is more than just what was scientifically healthy under their circumstances, but a matter of obedience from the heart.

And by the way, Jesus said directly, and Peter got it confirmed by a vision, that Kosher Law no longer applies to us. It’s not that it was just a head-game God was playing — and if it was, it wouldn’t matter. But the Covenant contained a lot of details the still exemplify holiness, while the manifestations of holiness drifts with God’s changing plans for the human race. God has not promised, and is under no obligation, to reveal every pertinent detail to anyone living on this earth. What He does with us, and what He commands, is by definition righteous. It’s the attitude toward revelation and obedience to God that matters most here.

What follows is a head-on confrontation with other fallen reasoning by which we are bludgeoned over the head every day, often with no valid explanation at all.

1. Democracy is founded on the rejection of God’s revelation that we are fallen. It assumes a basic goodness in human nature, and that it needs only be teased out to discover ultimate truth. Give people the right atmosphere and they will grow up and take responsibility for themselves, right? Wrong. This false notion presumes that humans are the measure of all things, and that any divine revelation is simply impertinent to human existence.

God says there is no such thing as objective truth. It’s all personal and subjective; there is only experience and perception. The underlying assumptions of the entire Western Civilization is the perverse lie that emphasizes as morally good the one thing that we all share: our fallen nature. It was the human choice in the Garden to ignore revelation and trust one’s own very limited sensory perception and reason that constitutes the real meaning of Forbidden Fruit.

It’s not that people should have no say in things, but that God will protect and bless only a government of the family and by the head of household — ANE covenant feudalism. Every other system will garner His wrath, which will fall at His convenience.

2. Protests are not healthy. It’s one thing to register dissent; you must do it respectfully with the rulers God has placed over you. If you persist in disrupting daily life, like petulant children throwing a tantrum, God says it warrants military action against you. Yes, you should expect to die if you can’t go along with the plans of your God-appointed leadership.

3. If you know in your heart that you cannot tolerate the leadership you have, then consider whether it’s proper for you to depart outside their jurisdiction, or whether they have so thoroughly violated the covenant that you must rebel. In such case, tell your leaders one time only why and how thoroughly you object to their decisions. Then either depart of take military action. You are not obliged to give more than one warning, and none if you feel driven to depart.

4. There is no particular requirement to follow common rules of warfare as published in the West today. They aren’t followed anyway, so it’s just a false pretense meant to provide an excuse for inexcusable hatred and contempt. The Bible justifies assassination and terrorism, going by Western definitions. The use of those tactics is not immoral. Killing evil rulers is altogether proper and justified; the idea that they are just the messenger following the laws of the people is bullshit.

As for so-called innocent civilians: If they provide the support and resources for the evil you feel driven to fight, then they are fair game. Granted, it would be a waste of effort and resources most of the time, but unless you are seeking to deliver them from some awful slavery, there’s no particular reason to be selective about targeting. If something or someone supports and enables your enemy, that something or someone is a just target. Under Biblical Law, those people and resources are forfeited by the evil rulers who rule them. Human life is precious when God tells you it is, and any assertion that He always says it is precious is just a lie from Satan. There were good and righteous reasons for the capital crimes under the Law of Moses.

5. There’s nothing unfair about war by deception. It is no sin at all to pretend you are friendly when your enemy is clearly devoted to the destruction of what God has granted you. There’s nothing immoral about biding your time and stabbing your real enemies in the back when the time comes to strike. This assumes you have taken some time to consider and pray about what they are demanding that is so evil.

Be aware that such a path is one way; you will be burning your bridges. Westerners have an assumption of trust that is false, based on pagan idolatry. You owe them nothing, in one sense. In another sense, you do have a truce with them, as any covenant community could have with any non-covenant outsider. Not a threat means not a threat; see the Good Samaritan. Your daily witness should indicate in advance the terms on which you are at peace with them.

6. Never assume that God is going to let you win. This comes back to that false notion that God is obliged to play fair with you by some silly rules your logic imagines. His inscrutable plans for the human race trump your perceptions of His promises. Notice what I’m saying here: If you belong to Him, your human existence on this world is already forfeit. Your success here in this life is now subsumed under His ineffable plans, and if He needs to use you for cannon fodder, that’s His prerogative. He will tell you that as part of your mission calling, but there’s no promise you’ll understand. It’s on you to be receptive when He tells you. The only proper response for you internally is to find joy in belonging to Him, and being quite eager to sacrifice this fallen human existence for eternal glory on any terms He deems appropriate.

Thus, you stand up for your convictions at all times, regardless of how it turns out. The good guys don’t always win on this earth, but they do always go to Heaven.

7. Never hesitate to shed blood when that’s what God requires of you. Not everyone can and should be involved in military action. Those who can and do should not be condemned if it’s apparent they are obeying their convictions. Never judge what you could not completely understand. Your full commitment and trust in Him leaves the door open for Him to demand things you cannot comprehend. Pacifism is a pagan idolatry. Obey your own convictions and mind your own business. But never assume God isn’t going to demand you draw the sword. Then again, if you aren’t ready to use the sword, get rid of it. Never bluster.

There’s more to come about this.

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Child Trafficking Is a Western Problem

Posted on November 9, 2020 by ehurst

Teach your children about heart-led moral truth.

There are some who say the current political regime in the USA has accomplished great things. On the list of victories they cite is a huge number of “child trafficking” prosecutions. It’s a lie. The vast majority of prosecutions under that label were merely going after individual child porn consumers.

It is the biggest waste of time and resources to go after the end user. If you could survey the clinical literature on pedophilia, you’d find that the vast majority of pedophiles have never once molested a child, nor do they have the self-will to try. They know it’s evil and harmful to children. Granted, for the few victims there is no distinction, but if we allow victims to rule our policies from their rage, it would be hell on earth. That’s a fundamental flaw in our political debates today. Satan alone speaks through rage; the angels will not go there.

There have been very few prosecutions of actual child molesters in our current government. Have any big shots from Hollywood of Washington DC been prosecuted? In the US population, there aren’t that many child molesters out there in the first place, though far too many. Still, on the scale of things, actual child sexual molestation — in the sense of lasting harm to the child — is quite rare. In the context of biblical justice, there is nothing you can do to make life better for victims who get on with their lives and aren’t deeply tormented by whatever happened to them, and there are a lot more of those than you might imagine.

In the Bible, actual harm is never measured objectively, but always rests on the sense of loss and hurt. People whom the Lord heals aren’t hurt any more. There is no secular State to which we owe all moral debts. All things belong to God personally, and His decisions are final, and by definition, normative. Human reasoning is incapable of discerning moral truth.

We have to get away from this absolutism common with materialistic assumptions. I can’t say that enough, and unfortunately, I know the people who most need to hear that never will. In the broader context of reality after the Fall, we all carry wounds on our souls, and we can’t pick out one kind of wound as somehow far more terrifying than another. The greatest threat to victims of child molestation is the absolutist campaign against child trafficking, as if it were the single greatest threat to our human future. It’s a problem that must be addressed in the wider context of what sin has done to us.

I am against prosecuting people who are found with child porn on their computer, unless they refuse to reveal where they got it. The real crime is not looking at the pictures, but enriching those who produce them. To the degree we can stop people looking at the pictures, we have to go after those who produce that stuff. Wasting time with the end users is a very hollow victory. It changes nothing of substance; it’s a lie of Satan. There is simply no proof that gazing at those images provokes actual molestation. It may seem obvious to Western legalism that it does, but that’s not how it actually works in the human soul. The human race is full of harmful fantasies that almost no one dares to actually try indulging.

Ever looked in the mirror and examined your own perversions? What keeps you from indulging them? We all lust for things we shouldn’t have. Even without faith, culture is the single greatest restraint on human perversity, and at the same time, it gives birth to the temptations we didn’t know would call to us. Scripture says that; do a search on the word “temptation.” The point of having a covenant of law is to hinder the action, not the temptation. It’s the Curse of the Fall that law also identifies things for our fallen nature to lust after. In our fallen condition, having a desire for something is not sin in itself, but it is merely the result of being fallen.

It is a perverse lie of Satan written into Western assumptions that the desire for something is itself a sin. This horror at the very idea that someone would desire sex with a child is itself a perversion of our culture. The horror provokes the desire. The West has way more child molestation because it’s such a shocking thing in the first place. It’s an obsession arising from a materialistic outlook, in which this life is all there is.

So we have this rather open obsession with youth as an idol, and it’s only natural that people with sexual urges would include in their lusts a lust for younger flesh. It’s just not a big deal where cultures tend to mysticism and reject materialism. Do you know that child trafficking in Asian countries was not about sex until Western tourists showed up? Until that kind of tourism became a way to make money, child trafficking was all about labor slavery.

I don’t advocate for making pedophilia legal. I advocate dismantling Western Civilization as the single greatest threat to moral truth in human history. Short of that, I advocate putting arrest pressure on pedophiles collecting child porn only so the source can be prosecuted. We should work through the dealers until we get hold of the producers. Offer clemency to every link in the chain until we find the folks who actually perform this crap. The product itself isn’t worth prosecution. Such a false and shallow endeavor serves only to protect the wealthy and powerful who routinely indulge in this predation on children.

And the protection of children would go far, far better if we took it for granted that our children would be desirable to almost any random person, both family and strangers. We should consider that normal, not creepy and certainly not criminal. And because it should seem common to us, we can take sane precautions, including teaching our children about it as early as possible. Our obsession with childhood “innocence” is bizarre in the extreme compared to what the Bible teaches. In the Bible, children become aware of human sexuality very early, and saw it in the proper context, as well.

I’ll harp on this because it’s one of the biggest problems I’ve dealt with myself. It’s a part of the much bigger question of how humans should relate to each other, so as to build shalom. We should want social stability, and only divine revelation can get us there. It requires a complete shift away from the “American dream” and to look for the things God has promised, which is most certainly not the same thing. Create an atmosphere of understanding the risks and rewards of living in a fallen world while walking the path back to Eden. This issue is just one part of a much larger whole.

We need to completely revamp how we look at human sexuality. Westerners have some of the most perverted understandings of what it means to man and woman, and what was lost in the Fall. We have made monsters of little things, and ignored the monsters that devour us (“chasing gnats and swallowing camels”).

Teach your children that expressions of admiration can be deceptive. Teach them that what looks and feels like love is not always giving and compassionate, but can be consuming and destructive. Teach them not to trust people too easily. Give them armor and weapons they can handle. Teach your children how to love, which includes being cynical. Humanity is fallen. Learn those things for yourself. Give them a worldview that reflects biblical revelation, not the foul stinking mess that is Western Civilization.

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Law of Moses — 1 Kings 15

Posted on November 7, 2020 by ehurst

This chapter can be very confusing because too many major characters are introduced and dispatched quickly. It’s a very unstable period, for the Northern Kingdom in particular. Try not to get too tightly twisted around the names and how they overlap.

Rehoboam was succeeded by Abijam (AKA Abijah) on the throne of Judah. Keeping the custom established by Solomon, he placed his mother in charge of palace domestic management. Her name was Maacah, the granddaughter of Absalom (AKA Abishalom), the rebellious son of David. The passage notes he also carried on the skirmishes with Israel to the north. Abijah was no wiser than his father, and had a short reign of three years. However, for the sake of David’s faithfulness, the Lord ensured that Abijah’s heir could take up the royal reins.

The Lord raised up a worthy heir named Asa. We aren’t told why, but he left his grandmother Maacah in place as Queen Mother of the Palace. A literal translation would not differentiate between mother and grandmother, because Hebrew language doesn’t nit-pick over family relational roles the way Westerners do. This is why we don’t take the genealogy tables as literal lineal descent of father to son. It’s not uncommon to see several previous generations of ancestor called “mother” or “father.” The reader is expected to keep track if it matters.

So Asa was faithful to Jehovah and cleaned up most of the pagan shrines within his domain. His performance was imperfect, but it’s clear he loved the Lord and tried to please Him. He eventually deposed his grandmother from her position because of her refusal to get right with God. She had built an obscene pagan shrine to some Asherah, so Asa had it burned publicly right outside the gate of Jerusalem, next to the Kidron Brook. He never got around to all the various hilltop shrines, but the Lord was still impressed.

Sometime during his long reign, there arose a new king of Israel named Baasha. This new guy kept up the hostilities between north and south. He started fortifying a hilltop town just a few miles north of Jerusalem on the ancient ridge top highway, and deep inside Benjamin tribal territory. It would have placed a significant armed force that could blockade most land traffic from the north, and this was about the only reasonable trade route from Mesopotamia into Judah.

Asa hired Ben-hadad of Damascus to attack Baasha from the rear and distract him. It wasn’t a good precedent, but it worked. The Syrian forces attacked the border towns of Israel up near the Sea of Galilee, and Baasha had to hurry and move his troops and workforce up that way. Seeing this, Asa mobilized the entire kingdom to quickly seize the building materials and move them to two other sites. Then those materials were promptly used to fortify a couple of towns up on the northern border of Benjamin. Given the nature of the situation, we can safely say that this was not an abuse of the corvee labor system.

Then the narrative switched back to Israel in the north. It backs up to the end of Jeroboam’s reign and the rise of his heir, Nadab. Because he was no better than his father, his reign was just two years. He brought a military campaign against the old Philistine kingdom at Gibbethon, and during the fighting, Baasha led a revolt against Nadab during the siege. We find out that Baasha was from the Tribe of Issachar.

And true to the prophet’s word, Baasha went about slaughtering the entire household of Jeroboam. There was not a single male alive with Jeroboam’s DNA. Of course, Baasha was no better than Jeroboam’s dynasty, but the Lord had plans for him, so he reigned 24 years. It took a little time to raise up the man God wanted to replace him.

The point here is that, barring specific plans God might have, royal longevity typically reflects whether the king in question was in any degree faithful to the Covenant. There’s no need to pick over each and every king from both kingdoms. At some point the Lord allows Israel to have wise and capable kings, though nonetheless evil pagans, to stabilize things just long enough to raise up an empire to destroy them. Judah has a couple of fine servants of God on the throne, so things go better for them.

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A Church That Is

Posted on November 7, 2020 by ehurst

Having said that Radix Fidem is no church, I’d be lying if I said there was no church here. Jesus pointedly said that, even where so few as two or three come together in His name, He is there. He is manifested wherever people commune in His power. We are His body.

You can call it what you like; I’m not going to give this de facto church a name. It is simply a spiritual family of people who genuinely consider each other brothers and sisters. I could list some names, but the reality is this family is whomever, at any given time, senses the power of agape from that interaction.

Should it seem odd to anyone that people who have never seen each other could sense a genuine bond of affection? Yet it is there. If you draw strength from that, if your faith grows because of the interaction, then it is a church for you at that moment. But where it begins to matter is when that interaction continues, when you sense the need to keep coming back for more.

You folks are my spiritual family. Whether or not we can point to any other communion in meat space or another virtual communion to which we belong is immaterial. In terms of the Spirit Realm, there is a very real church that meets here in this virtual space, a church that I address through this blog. You decide whether that includes you, but if you invest the energy it takes to talk with me, and each other, then this is a church.

When Jay and I first established our forum, the idea was to provide a virtual space where this church could interact as peers. Unlike a blog where only one person talks at a time in formal address, a forum permits a better sense of community where everyone is involved in a conversation. I can understand how some folks don’t feel comfortable typing in a setting like that, but it’s all we have. If you don’t post or respond on the forum, we don’t know you are there. That’s an inherent weakness, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Still, insofar as we have a church, it manifests most strongly there.

Over and over again, I encourage you to take advantage of what we can offer in that forum. It’s the best way we can get to know each other. It’s the only way your soul can take some shape that we recognize as a real person.

And without that, it’s exceedingly difficult to pray for you. You are leaving an awful lot of divine heritage on the table, and it really belongs to you, but you have to take a bite. That “bite” consists in saying something now and then. You’ll get a bite, but you won’t get bitten, I promise.

I still sense that out there on the ground just ahead of me somewhere is a physical church body. When that starts to take a shape I can recognize, there will likely be more online manifestations. Yes, I have some tentative plans, but there’s no point in saying much about them because it won’t mean anything until I have the reality to deal with. Until God grants souls to this dream, it remains just a dream.

The vision has morphed a good bit over the years, but the current shape of things has to do with reinforcing the heart-led way through exposure to Creation (the outdoors, in this case). I can see a thousand possibilities; I’m not sure what part of that myriad is the real thing. But I can assure you of this much: It will result in a lot of camera output. I keep seeing myself taking videos of landscapes, along with still images. We’ll see where this actually goes.

As noted on the forum, I’ve raised a prayer request in pursuit of that part of the dream. I’m praying for a motor vehicle of some sort that would be devoted to the task of getting me to those places worthy of admiration. Given the real context of what it’s like here in Oklahoma, and what my body can tolerate, there’s not that many places I can actually go on my bicycle. I’m really frustrated, because I’ve tried and it won’t work for me. The money wasn’t wasted; I’ll wear out that bike in due time. It remains a pertinent tool. Still, I know from experience I can’t do this on a bicycle alone. So if you feel drawn to the mission, pray with me about a vehicle.

For now, I envision going camping out of a small car or pickup. I have the camping gear, and I can drag the bike along that way. But that unexpected long hike I took a few weeks ago lets me know that hiking is not gone from me forever, not yet. Don’t ask me how all of this is going to be important to forming a church; I know only that it is critical to how I’ll draw people. It’s about the setting.

That’s as much as I should say for now. There is a church here online, and it will sprout at least one physical church body sometime in the future. If this ministry means anything at all to you, let’s do church.

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A Church That Isn’t

Posted on November 6, 2020 by ehurst

What we can say about Radix Fidem depends on the question and how you ask it. We are a community of shared faith, but not a church, nor a denomination. It’s really about faith itself. This is not an organization, but a way of doing religion and deciding on organization.

You can belong to any church you like, or start a new one. The latter is probably less hassle in one sense because there’s less baggage, but the former is certainly a lot simpler in execution. The real issue is to work out how a genuine heart-led faith affects what you do in religion. It’s deeply individual in the sense that the whole foundation is you directly connecting to Jesus in your heart.

Granted, we do have that covenant thing and it does propose certain ideas that will make it really difficult to fit into most existing religious organizations. So it boils down to whether the organization will tolerate those ideas. More to the point, it’s whether the organization tolerates your efforts to incorporate those ideas. It’s a matter of your personal sense of calling, and your style of social interaction. What role do you play in the society in which you live? It would also depend on what role your church plays in your social context.

If you’ve read much of my stuff, you already know I fully intend to lead a church based on Radix Fidem and my own sense of calling. But my sense of calling includes a lot of stuff that I don’t think belongs in Radix Fidem itself. Rather, I’m quite conscious that what I must do won’t work for everyone. But I honestly believe that Radix Fidem is certainly the One True Path, insofar as such a thing can be declared. I’m trying my best to keep separate those alleged universals of Radix Fidem from the particulars of what God requires of me in my own little world.

I suppose some of my readers will always wonder where to draw the line between those two parts of what I write. I assure you I’m not always certain myself. I don’t think it’s possible to be that precise over every question that might arise.

If you were to get involved in Church History and the study of what men have thought, said and done in pursuit of Christian religion, it would be a very heavy burden. I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in that pursuit, and I’m glad I know what I know, but sometimes that tends to get in the way of my sense of calling. It’s a matter of juggling my detailed familiarity with the mistakes people have made already, and are still making, and why proposing a Radix Fidem covenant seemed necessary.

For example, Radix Fidem does not lend itself to revivalist religion. I like the music, I confess, but that kind of thinking about how God works in our world is far amiss, if you ask me. Radix Fidem is all about building a parallel society, something that functions as a competing civilization in itself. My sense of mission is wedding you to an empire and culture that is distinctly different from what is available on this earth. It’s a very long term project that would rightly outlive us. So the idea that we can sweep the country with an energizing and entertaining revival is flatly contrary to the very concept of what we are doing.

I’m not interested in whipping up a transient atmosphere of emotion to bring about a change in one’s orientation. That strikes me as a sales pitch, a mere psychological conversion. It’s something that can be undone by the next revival meeting offering a competing brand. I’d much rather push away people looking for that kind of experience. We aren’t selling a brand within a competitive market. We are asking people to consider leaving the market entirely.

Radix Fidem is more about challenging the very ideas of what religion is all about. This is why I call it a meta-religion: It’s a doctrinal study of how to do religion. The result should be you and I each pursuing our own individual religion — “religion” defined as a human response to spiritual apprehensions. Religion is the manifestation of faith. And it’s a path, not a conclusion at which you arrive and stay. What holds us together as a community is the way we go about manifesting our faith, not the manifestation itself. I fully expect the religion part itself to be rather variable and at least some of it to remain in flux. It will always need refinement.

And all of this includes the ways and means for fellowship. Radix Fidem assumes a certain amount of spin-off. Once you start asking the right questions, the answers you get from God may require you to leave the fellowship. Thus, I invest a bit of time explaining what I believe Scripture requires of us in the eventual necessity of separation. There’s a right way to do that so that the Father’s glory rises. A basic assumption in Radix Fidem is that God runs the show and nobody should feel the least bit guilty about having to leave the community, or simply take up some distance. We proclaim there is a blessing for us in you finding out what God wants for you, even if it takes you away. We still love you just the same, but God won’t bless us working together. There has to be room for a gracious distancing, however far that distance must be.

And it also means you can come and go as you feel led. We’ll always welcome you back, and hug you when you leave again. We don’t have to be organized in human terms to do religion right. We believe this echoes what we see in the Bible. It is also very contradictory to what our Western society expects, so we have that thing about being anti-Western in our covenant.

But at some point a few of you feel like I should be some kind of pastor for you. We never meet in the flesh, but you still have that divine pull, that sense that God wants you to hang out with me, if only virtually. There is no clear boundary between being in a church and just being friends. I’m okay with that; it seems to work. I don’t believe God requires us to draw that boundary. Instead, we recognize spiritual and moral dominion that defies human boundaries, because it’s a kind of feudalism that is wired into Creation itself, resting on God’s own divine moral character.

That’s a part of what defines the term “elder” in the biblical sense of moral authority with contextual limitations. In human terms, I’m a freaking nobody. I’m not your superior as the world sees it, but I have a very real authority and confidence from God, and it’s up to you to embrace it or deny it. I didn’t declare myself elder; you folks made me one. You chose to believe that God speaks through me on certain matters pertaining to your life, and you decided that tolerating my limited leadership was obedience to the Lord we both serve. My eldership rests entirely on those who decide that God says that’s what I am.

It’s time for a bike ride. I need to process some things.

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A Lesson on Prophecy

Posted on November 5, 2020 by ehurst

Let me share with you how I handle this. Given the shifting context of our situation here in the USA, what I’ve written in the past needs a little refresher.

Eternity exceeds knowing, particularly in terms of what I might be able to write. The Lord never lets me forget that what I know is contextual. We are supposed to share what God shows us about the Spirit Realm, but at the same time we should understand that anything we say is limited to the space-time moment. We indicate; we cannot describe. On top of that, it’s important to remember that spiritual matters require seeing things on multiple levels. I can tell you that, but I can’t didactically point out those levels, because it’s more like domains that are both vertically and horizontally spread. They are also time-sensitive in distribution, with a shelf life of sorts.

In reading the prophetic record in Scripture, you are supposed to discern those factors. From an ancient Hebrew mindset, it’s patently silly to build a philosophical structure based on words and precise meanings. Thus, we say that there is no such thing as “propositional truth.” This is the single biggest difference between Radix Fidem and the mainstream American Christian religion. Even the best and most scholarly textual analysis can’t answer the question of what God wants you to do at that moment with a particular passage from the Bible. There is that essential personal element between Him and you that no one can answer for you. You shouldn’t get trapped in assuming it will be the same answer for what you perceive to be a similar situation later.

You also be very careful about whether your answer will work for anyone else. This is what Christian Mysticism is all about, if the term is going to mean anything: It’s you and God in an open conversation. At the risk of alienating everyone you know, it is imperative that you obey the Lord the best you know how.

And this is where prophecy becomes challenging. Like everyone else in a community of faith, prophets already have a running conversation with God about their lives. When does something God shows you become a prophetic word you need to share? When does it become essential to obedience to make a clear statement to others? The answer to that is a part of the conversation, because that conversation isn’t always so plain and open. Most of the time it’s a matter of very subtle impressions poking through your human conscience. At some point you realize this is the voice of God, and you become accountable for it.

In my case, a prophetic message is a warning or encouragement for others to keep moving forward in faith. It’s a shepherd thing. Whether you listen depends on whether it sounds like the voice of God for you, but I can’t get bogged down in worrying about that. I have to say what He tells me to say. The trick for me is making sure I offer full disclosure, particularly about how strong the message is for me. It’s not always the same.

My warning to the US as a whole that Iran is a trap came to me in a manner as clear and hard as any message I’ve ever shared. It was the moment I knew I was called to prophesy. It came as a vision that is hard to put into words, but involved seeing American troops and equipment scattered and destroyed on a battlefield in Iran. I’ll be the first to warn that you shouldn’t take that literally. The point is that Iran stands as a temptation, bait set out by Satan to sucker the USA into ignoring God’s will. Even saying that was a matter of how that vision has persisted over time and I get a better understanding of what it means.

Side note: The USA has already stepped in it. We’ve already done a lot of evil to Iran and we will pay for it. Every fresh evil simply adds more to our punishment, but it’s also a matter of justice based on what specifically we do wrong there. It’s all coming back on our heads.

A lot of a prophetic word comes to me in visions and dreams. On the one hand, I can tell when something like that is a word from God. I just know. On the other hand, I’m not always sure what to say about it. Some revelations are fuzzy, and some require a subsequent experience to give it meaning. That happens a lot. I currently have a good stack of visions and dreams waiting to be clarified; some I’ve shared partially and some are still too perplexing.

An substantial collection of things come as recognition, where issues are bounced off my faith and the bounce tells me what to say about it. This is something not unique to prophets, but is typical for just about everyone I know who walks by faith. It’s that business of “you know all things” (1 John 2:20) but may not be aware of what your convictions had to say until the question was raised. That same thing works for prophecy, in that I realize I need to say something about the issue.

But then there is also the issue of my calling and mission, in which I know the boundaries and what my response has to be. It’s the kind of thing where the core necessities for me are always in front of my face. That’s actually more of preaching than prophecy, per se, but I can’t separate out the two that easily. At any rate, it’s rather like a prophetic word with a very long shelf life, and I won’t hesitate to renew the message.

Once in a while I get a prophetic word from my sensory heart. That is, some exposure to a natural setting refreshes my soul and opens a channel from the moral fabric of Creation itself. Those are quite difficult to share, simply because they tend to be so totally non-verbal, and at the same time very heavy. It tends to be a really different kind of message, too — subtle and rather alien to my intellect, hard to process.

I sincerely wish I could have a lot more time to go out and just stand or sit on a remote windy hilltop somewhere. Or maybe it could be an isolated spot where the water splashes on the shore, or runs down a course. Those moments speak the loudest, and heal me in ways I’ll never really understand. It also helps me to see things more clearly. There’s never enough time when I do find those places.

In my ministry, the prophecies themselves are not the main point. Rather, it’s more a matter of a generally prophetic outlook. Among the different categories of spiritual gifts, I possess a prophetic temperament, and the effects of my work exhibit a prophetic orientation. You could say I don’t give prophecies, but that I do prophecy. I’m looking for a way to move people closer to God’s promises.

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