Right on the Threshold

Posted on September 20, 2020 by ehurst

For the last 25 years or so, I’ve been preparing. The only reason it took that long is because I had such a very long way to go. I’ve passed through an awful lot of ideological campsites along the way. I always knew I was in training for something, though I never understood for what it was I trained.

Okay, I always had one useful inkling. I can look back and see a thread of truth that fattened as things progressed. Still, in terms of what I was expecting to actually do in real time, things have changed dramatically over the years. And to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what remains yet in front of me on that level. However, my heart tells me over the last few days that it’s done. I have no idea what I’ve accomplished in that sense, but my spirit rejoices that I’ve graduated from the academy.

I’ve been willing to do a lot of things that provided a path of joy. For example, my time in uniform serving in the Netherlands was a wonderful period of spiritual activity. It wasn’t the location so much as the atmosphere. Frankly, my Military Police mission did tend to interfere a good bit with the real mission I had there ministering in the AFCENT Chapel. I suppose I left a mark in the lives of the people who shared that time with me, but I can assure you it changed me.

But the goal has always been shepherding the flock. I came home to Oklahoma fired up and drove all over the state, and surrounding areas over the borders of neighboring states, trying to make some kind of physical contact with churches. Nothing came of it, and that was a bitter lesson. While the bitter memory remains, I got over it a long time ago, because it was necessary to move me to yet another place on the long trail.

And then I spent a long time chasing the dream of an online church, but that simply isn’t possible. A community of shared faith, yes, but not a church. If anything, we are a religious ideology movement, if I can say it that way. There is a certain amount of organized thinking necessary to move closer to an ideal, but not in the sense of starting a new organization of people. The ideology is not the thing; it’s only a path. So I call it a covenant and give it an odd name (Radix Fidem) so that it gives folks a place to hang things they must do in order to respond to the less concrete and much deeper calling of faith.

For the longest time, I’ve been telling folks that I am an arrow in the quiver, because the battle has not begun. In a sense, I still have no idea what I’m being saved for, but I’m being held in reserve for something that has not yet come.

Well, that thing is about to come. I have some vague notions about what it looks like, but I know that the Lord is shaking his Body. He’s doing a work that will make them doubt everything that they thought they knew, dissolving their comfort zone. I have no idea what kind of numbers will be shaken loose, and I seriously doubt we are the only refuge that will be available, but I am utterly certain our numbers will grow. It’s not about the numbers, but for whatever reason, the Lord has driven me hard to prepare a conceptual place for some number of folks to escape the current churchian prisons.

I’ve tried to avoid forming a concrete identity, frankly in part to disable the numbers mentality. I am utterly convinced the boundaries need to be fuzzy, and we must guard against making them precise. The whole point of this movement is to change how folks approach the question of forming a church, not give them any particular answers. So it’s a fundamental element in our teaching that we avoid setting useful boundaries.

Please, please, please — forget my name and let’s call this a movement of faith.

Meanwhile, one of my major prayer requests currently is that somewhere in the foggy near future I can become associated with a congregation of some kind. The times in my life when I truly felt alive were those moments when I stood before a group and delivered the Word. I’d sacrifice a lot for that, though by no means would I compromise on the message I’ve shared here already. So it would have to be a congregation that knows in advance what they are getting into when they invite me to teach.

I’m confident that will happen; that’s what a prayer of faith means. You have the faith to pray for something because you know it’s consistent with what your convictions demand of you. And my convictions tell me we are very close to that moment in time and space.

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Law of Moses — 2 Samuel 24

Posted on September 19, 2020 by ehurst

We need a couple of background reminders before this narrative makes any sense. Exodus 30:11-16 is where God gives instructions about taking a census. This was during the march from Egypt to the Promised Land, when technically God Himself was the King of Israel, and Moses was merely His viceroy, in terms of governing authority. When God orders a census, there will be a census, because it is His nation. The census always came with a Temple tax that could be hard for some to bear. Modern notions of fairness and equality do not reflect God’s mind about divine justice.

It was David’s nature to be humble about God anointing him king. He was always a shepherd at heart. He genuinely loved the nation of Israel and suffered the pangs of sorrow any literal father would over the people. This was why he was such a fierce warrior on their behalf, and kept saying what a mighty and wonderful nation they were.

God used Satan to provoke David to call a census without God’s actual command. David slipped into a kind of pride that was quite uncharacteristic of him. It caused him to move away from his typical passionate concern for their welfare. He wanted a body count of able men who could be conscripted. The text does not say specifically, but apparently this time David did not collect the Temple tax. There’s no other explanation possible for why it kindled God’s wrath. For all his moral weaknesses, Joab for once understood what a mistake this was. It wasn’t like David to demand something that could only reflect pride, and it was certainly contrary to Covenant Law.

You can find any number of commentaries that speculate about other moral flaws that counted against David in this command, but most of them are unwarranted. They tend toward attempting to justify it all from a Western standard of justice. But from a genuine Hebrew point of view, it’s enough to note the obvious facts from Scripture here: David was the king and his sins could bring God’s wrath on the people, much to his chagrin.

The journey described gives us a hint to the method: The command staff would set up camp in several convenient central locations based on the terrain and hold musters of the able-bodied adult men in that area. The census is recorded in the text in round numbers, typical of Hebrew writing for something like this.

Then the blinders were off and David realized what a massive mistake he had made. He had exposed the people to God’s wrath by not taking the Temple tax. Keep in mind, there was no reason at all for a Temple tax, as there was neither Temple nor Tabernacle at this time. The Ark of Covenant was sitting in a Tent of Meeting in his palace courtyard. David’s cry of repentance is not as self-oriented as it sounds to us in English. With his normal moral sensitivity restored to him, David felt the full load of a shepherd’s guilt who had set his own flock on fire. He wanted to take the blame on himself alone.

Upon Gad’s message, David could net decide between a long famine or a quick and deadly plague, but didn’t want to run the risk of another flight in the wilderness from human enemies, not at his now advanced age. So the Lord chose the plague and it cost a significant element of that mighty army he mustered over the previous month or so.

In very dramatic imagery we are told that the death angel approached David’s capital and stopped just outside the city on a threshing floor that was once the place where Abraham prepared to offer Isaac. The Lord didn’t recall the angel, but had him stop in place. David was permitted to see this angel, and his heartfelt cry on behalf of the people is altogether typical of him.

Gad told David his duty now was to erect an altar of sacrifice on that same spot Abraham had used. At this time, it was the threshing floor of a loyal Jebusite noble still living in the area, here called Araunah. It happened he was there on his threshing floor that day. As he spotted the king’s entourage approaching, he paid his lawful respects. Notice the very thoughtful answer the man gave to his king upon hearing the reason for this visit. The text notifies us that Araunah was not a convert, but a resident alien who ruled over some of his own Jebusite people.

It would hardly be any kind of sacrifice for David to accept the generous offer, even though it would have been part of Araunah’s feudal obligations. The ritual would have to come at some personal cost to David to have any meaning. David’s offering had to be under Moses’ Law, not the Noahic Law binding on the Jebusties. So far as anyone can say, David paid a premium price for parcel of land with the oxen and materials. This offering was accepted and the Lord recalled the death angel.

If nothing else, this serves as the moral model of biblical manhood. Men will always fail, and those who really do take on a heavy load of care will be even more tempted than others. But the sense of personal loss felt over the souls of others is what distinguishes a shepherd from ordinary guys.

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Don’t Surrender the Battlefield

Posted on September 18, 2020 by ehurst

Every crusade is a diversion to prevent a genuine repentance of sinners.

Once again: The biblical standard is exceptionally strict compared to what is generally portrayed as “morally good” in our world. Sex with anyone except your covenant spouse is evil and destructive. It’s a threat to everyone around you. Biblical Law says the process of building that covenant marriage relationship is more than just a handful of rules. It requires a genuine heart-led commitment to the covenant community and shalom before you even start to consider whom to marry.

Any and all human activity outside this path is sin, never mind sexual activity. So it stands to reason you cannot have a covenant marriage that involves minors. That kind of sexual activity is forbidden before you can even start to think about it. There are multiple layers closing off that path. Why do we even need to discuss it?

We discuss it because it has become the latest fashion in false moral posturing in the West. Granted, it’s currently the next barrier that evil people are trying to knock down in their headlong rush down into Hell. Still, the obsession of fighting over this one particular sin only means you have granted evil people their choice of battlefield.

Let me cite another example: Are you familiar that TULIP acronym used by the Calvinists? It doesn’t come from the Bible. It is a highly logical chain that reflects an attempt to confine moral truth with human reason. Where did this little list of 5 points come from? It is the reverse of the 5 points first proposed by their enemies, the Arminians. They were the first to establish this logical chain, binding themselves to a very human frame of reference that excludes them from revelation. Both the Calvinists and Arminians have locked themselves out of the divine truth by insisting on human reason.

The Bible does teach predestination, but constrains the definition to a very limited statement of what it means: God chooses your eternal destiny. It was chosen before Creation, because God is not in any way bound by our sense of time and space. We are bound by time and space; that’s part of the Curse of the Fall. Human reason cannot possibly grasp anything that is not bound by time and space. We are unable to see eternal truth because Adam and Eve rejected it in favor of human reason. So here we have two theological camps proclaiming their human logical battle and missing the whole point. They end up asserting things that are very clearly not supported in Scripture, because they otherwise can’t make logical sense of it.

But it was the Calvinist tactic of surrendering the battlefield that turned this whole thing into a debacle. It’s right down the line of Pharisaism, reducing revelation to a formula the human mind can control and manipulate. Had the Calvinists remained above the logical battle, they would be able to remain firmly in the grip of grace. Instead, they call their legalism “Doctrines of Grace.” Think about that for a minute.

And then think about how the legalism of focusing on pedophilia will keep anyone from actually finding even a smidgen of shalom. Making pedophilia a Crusade is the wrong battle, the wrong war. It confines the effort and excuses a wealth of far greater sin. It’s a really good excuse to avoid talking about covenants and biblical feudalism. Instead of hyperventilating about the Hollywood perverts as a small percentage of the USA, let’s talk about how small is the percentage of folks in the USA who actually have even that smidgen of shalom.

The sin that is destroying America is not mere pedophilia; that’s just a single slender symptom of something far greater and much nastier.

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It’s the Struggle, Not the Objective

Posted on September 13, 2020 by ehurst

It’s such an unimportant thing, and yet I am struggling with it. It’s not the thing itself, but what it represents.

Let’s talk about cellphones. I hate them. But I also find it exceedingly hard to carry out my mission without one. When I think about something as frivolous as my next cellphone, I would usually stop and assess how I have used one in the previous year. What are the identifiable trends? What really matters? Try to imagine just how little I use a phone as a phone. I get roughly as many spam calls as I do genuine conversations with people I know, and the spam calls have been less than one per day. The primary use I have for a phone is so my wife and I can coordinate stuff we do. It’s just an electronic tether; there’s more texting than voice conversations.

All the other stuff I do with it can be handled better some other way. I’ve taken a lot of pictures with it, but only when I forgot my camera. It’s not a bad camera, but nothing like the really good one I got a year ago. The only difference a phone makes is how quickly I become aware of email, and how I don’t have to physically go to the bank to deposit the few checks I receive. Otherwise, it’s just one more way the advertisers can track me. While I have used it a couple of times to surf the Net, I really hate how it works for that.

How I use a phone won’t justify much of an investment, based on what I’ve done so far.

But there’s one problem with that approach: The world is about to change dramatically. Everything I do is subject to dramatic change, too. Things have already changed with the protests and quarantines; a cellphone is actually more valuable in that environment. But the situation is about to change even more dramatically as the drama ramps up to the election. It’s impossible to estimate just how things will change. There are too many variables to even guess intelligently. As I’ve warned in the past, as a prophetic word, the Lord has warned He’s not going to reveal too much because He’s got some important work to do with folks I don’t even know about. His redemptive work means He is waiting to see what path they take, and it will affect the outcomes of all this crazy chaos.

But there are things we can know. The prophetic messages I’ve gotten include the warning that we are at war, that there are people who hate Jesus and His gospel message, and they are intent on hijacking the government system at all levels. They will succeed in some measure at the federal level, but fail in many states and locales. I have no firm word on the outcome of the voting. Instead, I have a warning that the election will be such a mess that it won’t matter who wins the presidency by official count. The coup attempt will be that serious. We have never seen here in the USA just how insane things can get. None of this would surprise even those who ignore prophecy.

It’s already started. The MSM is hiding the parts they don’t want you to know about; the whole game is manipulation. The Christ-haters know they are in the minority among the the US population, but they control most of the information systems that feed the public awareness. Oddly, because of this, some parts of our daily existence will not change all that much for quite some time. Perception is everything in some parts of the system by which we now live. The economy is hugely dependent on consumer perception, running on the knife-edge of collapse if the public changes their habits. We’ve already seen a partial collapse from the shutdowns, but the underlying system can still feed us.

However, in some cities, that has already begun to change. Truckers are refusing to deliver freight to, or even to drive into, cities where the police don’t control the streets and keep the protests under control. So the economy is becoming more fragile. It’s not that it won’t work, but that it can’t keep using the same assumptions that worked in the past. The people who provide for daily life will have to pay attention and change methods to match the new situation. Most of them can do this, but it will take time for some changes that are necessary.

And the nature of this thing is so very chaotic that we can’t even talk about what’s “on the other side” of this rising tribulation. It’s obvious to a lot of very smart people that the only future we have is in decentralization. The US government must fold. Nobody can predict how that will happen, and I’m pretty sure it’s related to some of the things on which God is waiting to see what key figures choose. In a certain sense, the net result will be the same either way, but a lot of the variables will get our attention on the way from here to there. Those variables will affect a lot of our mission choices.

So on the one hand, the choice of which cellphone I might need is still a frivolous question. On the other hand, it’s one of the few choices I can begin to calculate right now. In the long run, it won’t matter. It’s that period in between now and “on the other side” that I have to consider. There are two things going on at once here: The Radix Fidem community is seeing some very active members now getting too deeply involved in their own missions to intact much online. Some of them will have no time, will have to pull away in order to serve effectively. Yet other new folks will join; I am utterly convinced of that. How can I serve them best?

Keep in mind that the nature of Radix Fidem has become more about the training and preparation for mission than it is about the fellowship. Fellowship is critical for some folks, but for many it’s just a passing need as they begin to engage fellowship on a new level in the real world. This is why I keep saying that I’m not building a private religious empire here. I’m here to get folks ready for operating independently. Those that hang around are part of the “staff and faculty” of Radix Fidem, but most of you are just passing through. I’m happy with that.

Most of you could care less about my cellphone, and rightly so. It won’t affect your life at all, nor should it. It’s just a symbol I use for something far more important: You need to seek peace with God, and it’s my mission to help you find it. I’m expendable, so you can bet a cellphone is even more so. Radix Fidem is a virtual place to learn something that’s been hidden for a long time: the study of how one builds shalom in a wide array of contexts.

We are trying to discern and share what seems common for most people in terms of the struggle, not where they end up. God alone can decide where you are headed.

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Law of Moses — 2 Samuel 21:1-14

Posted on September 12, 2020 by ehurst

The Books of Samuel appear to have been written by Samuel’s School of the Prophets. It is not a dry chronology like the Chronicles, which was likely drawn from the royal archives. But typical of some Hebrew prophets, the writers assume their readers would have access to records, if not a direct memory, of pertinent historical events surrounding the prophetic message. Stuff gets left out of the narrative because the writers assume their readers already know all of the background.

First, a few reminders. The Gibeonites were the folks, living in several cities strung out along a wandering valley west of the Jerusalem area, who had deceived Joshua during the Conquest. They pretended to come from a distant land and wanted to make a submission treaty with Israel. Once made, the deception was found out. Too late; it was solemnly sworn before God without asking Him, and these Gibeonites were quite willing to pay whatever tribute was required by their new rulers. So they were placed under a rather substantial tribute of wood and water for use in Tabernacle worship. Don’t read too much into comments about this being “slavery” in any Western sense of the word; it was tribute to which they agreed in the first place.

That was roughly 400 years before David learns that a three-year drought and famine was because of violations of that treaty. So David asks them what he can do to set things right. Keep in mind that the Gibeonites did not convert; they were placed under the Covenant of Noah. If you review the terms noted in the narrative (Genesis 9:5-6), you’ll see that it calls for murderers to lose their lives. More to the point, they are to be executed on behalf of the victims. Given the Ancient Near Eastern cultural viewpoint, we already know that refers to blood feuds, in which the closest kin of the victims accept the lives of the perpetrators (or their closest kin) as the peace offering that the victims make to the Lord to declare the matter settled.

Anyone approaching this from a late Western point of view cannot fathom how God would honor that kind of feudal approach to things. But they refuse to understand that this kind of feudalism was designed and demanded by God. It’s written into the very fabric of Creation, which is why it comes wrapped in all this talk about blood speaking and Creation echoing. Blood for blood — and the community that stood to benefit from the crime is guilty as a whole. By rights, that community should be eager to clear their shalom from the blood guilt. See Numbers 35:33-34 about pollution of the land.

Saul had at some point in his reign killed some Gibeonites in violation of the treaty. Given what we know of Saul and his clan, with the notable exception of Jonathan, it was likely something to do with trying to seize Gibeonite land. That lovely valley was right on the edge of Benjamin’s tribal holdings, and wasn’t officially part of Judah’s just yet, since it was still occupied by Canaanites. It’s a good bet Saul killed a substantial number of them.

The Gibeonites were not in a vengeful mood, to be honest. They were suffering from the famine, as well. They didn’t want to take anything for themselves, and didn’t wish suffering on anyone. Knowing the terms of Noahic Law, since it was imposed on them as part of the treaty, they said it would require an Offering of Seven. This has flexible connotations, and is often some innocent animal lives, but this time it’s an issue that required human lives. It’s not tit-for-tat; it’s a matter of sacred execution rituals of sufficient number to answer very ancient traditions — to “seven” something (as a verb) in Semitic tongues was to make it sacred. The men didn’t have to be directly culpable; they stood to benefit from the crime. By Israeli custom and the Law of Moses, five of those men were not in line of Saul’s succession. They were grandsons-in-law, if you will. But by Noahic Law, it was good enough. David was scratching to find even those few.

The action of Rizpah was quite honorable. They were hung under Noah’s Law, so it’s different from what happens under Israel’s Covenant Law. Since the whole point of the sacrifice of these men was to move God to make it rain, she stood watch to keep the carcasses from being picked over and carried off by scavengers. Nobody was keeping her from taking them down, but she knew she had to wait until it did rain, to indicate God’s favor restored, when she was free to have them buried. Her action reminded David of some unfinished business, which apparently also contributed to the wrath they all faced. So David went and gathered the remains of Saul and Jonathan and performed the obligatory rituals (Deuteronomy 21:22-23).

These two actions together settled some old blood debts in order to cleanse the land. If we don’t understand how blood guilt can be inherited, we cannot understand how to avert the wrath of God. This is a covenant obligation that falls on both the individual in one way, and upon the covenant community in another way. It explains how the sin of Adam and Eve is imputed to the whole human race. It explains how the Blood of Christ cleanses us, because we are adopted into the family that paid the blood price.

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The Logic of Biblical Death Penalties

Posted on September 10, 2020 by ehurst

In the Covenant of Moses, the entire nation is adopted by God into His personal household.

As you might expect, He holds certain minimal expectations for those living in His household. In theory, if He were to pass from the scene, any successor would be fully authorized to change those expectations to suit himself. The whole point is that God is current Master, and He owns the whole thing personally. It’s not just a role, but far more than that. We are accountable to Him, regardless of any imagined alternative authority, since He owns this particular Creation. It is an expression of His Person. Everyone involved is required to honor that personal bond, without which there is no covenant, no blessings and promises, no protections from harm, etc.

He has unrestricted and unconditional claim on us. We have no claim on Him except what He grants conditionally. What He does grant is always consistent with His own holiness, and He never deceives about such things.

So the assumption behind the Covenant of Moses was a very personal commitment of each individual member of the Covenant Nation. While God is certainly able and eager to deal with each individual member of the Covenant on a personal level, He has commissioned human leaders to handle some of the mundane daily details on His behalf in our fallen world. The structure is feudal because that is how He designed us. No other system of organization is permitted, simply because we cannot be faithful to Him any other way. Outside of ANE feudalism, genuine personal faith is hindered. It’s a measure of grace to demand ANE feudalism.

The image of a personal bond is mandatory; you are the vassal of the Creator. How He chooses to run His household is not open to discussion. Having made us, He knows what is in our best interest. Your frustration with the system is your problem; it is still in your best interest to obey. This is why we say that Biblical Law is its own reward. It’s consistent with your very designed nature. Your wild imagination — or reason — will never come up with anything better, because revelation is based on God’s character woven into the fabric of reality.

He decrees that there shall be a feudal community seeking to glorify Him. It will be enriched by His generous blessings and patient guidance. It is a family household life, and the whole point is that He is glorified by how we are moved daily closer to His ideal. The stuff we might think we accomplish is really not that important, but it’s not evil as long as it drives us to serve His glory. It’s when we seek accomplishment for our own names that it becomes a problem. All our glory must be a reflection of His.

Failing that is what got Lucifer in trouble. And it’s now the character of all temptations, in that Lucifer’s punishment is the ugly task of tempting us to make the same mistake. He gains nothing on his own, but only if he defrauds us of our inheritance. If we care enough only to try obeying, we starve the Devil, as he deserves. God counts our desire to please Him as a success in itself, given we are stuck in a mortal fallen condition. Our performance failures can be overlooked, but not a contrary heart. When you seek a “clear conscience,” you are asking for a pure heart, a heart that is singularly devoted to Him.

So in the Covenant of Moses, some sins are bluntly described as being contrary to the heart He gives us, and a real threat to the shalom that God is building into His family. It’s more than a threat to His sovereign authority; it’s a threat to everyone. He takes the trouble to declare such threats quite openly so there’s no confusion. He even makes it a point to warn how this means giving our Enemy all of our blessings. It’s an open betrayal of His ownership and mastery over His own Creation, simply because, though we might hide it from each other, nothing is hidden from His sight.

No one has any excuse for not understanding how these things threaten shalom. He even offers the opportunity to leave the community and go off and practice your sins anywhere you like. But you cannot do those things in His household. You cannot engage certain sins in the Covenant Community and pretend you don’t know how seriously He takes the threat. It’s not that you aren’t free to do as you damned well please, but that you are not free to do it on His personal turf. It constitutes a direct attack on Him; it’s poking Him the eye, after all He’s done for you.

So if He says something is a capital sin, your death sentence is decreed as soon as it is exposed. Further, the whole community must walk through the ritual of being reminded how serious a threat it is, and then they must themselves execute the sentence on sin that so gravely threatens them. They have to own it. (You can always flee, but you can’t come back.)

God isn’t interested in human theorizing about better, more efficient and effective means of government, nor human evaluations of what is a more just law. Without referring back to His revelation, the declaration of His divine moral character, and how it is woven into the very fabric of reality itself, there’s no point in pontificating about “improving” on Covenant Law. The only thing that changes now is that, without that covenant community relationship in our human government, there is now no divine backing for any law, or any system of government. All of it is sin, fully incapable of doing justice, except perhaps by accident. It is not possible to even claim a good intent without referring back to revelation.

But without a valid Law Covenant, there can be no justice among humans. This means that the character of our faith covenant communities today is bereft of any full authority to carry out a capital sentence on the members. All we can do now is cleanse the community by ostracism. We must declare that person “dead” to the community.

People can repent and seek to come back, but they must then strive to demonstrate the full power of faith in coming clean, and walking in faithful obedience. They cannot continue in their ways and claim a restored full acceptance. They have to go out of their way to demonstrate they are no longer a threat. It takes time to restore that trust. There’s no sense in truculence about it on either side. However, the leverage is with the community that has not yet strayed whether they grant full acceptance of the member restored in humble repentance.

Nor is it something like a piece of property they can claim. It’s not as if, once they have it back, it can’t be taken again if they don’t work through the process of proving themselves just like any other neophyte penitent seeking to join the community. They were dead; now they must show themselves fully alive in the power of penitence. Nobody owes them anything at all.

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Understanding Divine Will

Posted on September 7, 2020 by ehurst

Let’s talk about the sovereign will of God.

On the individual level, we’ve discussed this at length. God decides who will be spiritually born and initiates a sense of calling and conviction to suit His whims. His children are chosen before the Creation of the world, and at some point in their lives, they discover this election. God doesn’t talk much about what the deal is with other folks who aren’t chosen, and we are fools to imagine we could understand it.

But God also works His sovereign will on humanity at large. He steers the fortunes of kings and nations to suit His whims. We’ve already discussed how we should never expect to see a single human government take revelation seriously, so all of them will be herded like cattle, having no clue what’s really going on.

His children are permitted to understand His divine moral character and intuit what sort of things are likely to happen under various conditions. On top of this, God also works in some of His children by letting them see things more specifically. Thus, we have prophets who will warn about certain unpleasant consequences. The prophet’s gift is an extension of a general moral understanding of God. You won’t understand your prophetic gift if you don’t already have a good grasp of God’s moral perspective.

God’s dealings with His children individually sets them in the context of wider events. For example, it makes a huge difference if you are seeking shalom in some kind of covenant community, as opposed to just following some human traditions regarding Christian faith. The latter puts you much closer to God’s herding activity. The former puts you in a position to hear more about His actual plans for you and your faith community.

In general, a prophet should understand that God’s will is not like iron. Rather, God often sets forth a range of consequences and waits to see what key figures will choose. With His own children, there’s a lot more conviction at work, and they would struggle to ignore His preferences. But for the dumb cattle, it’s more a matter of long-term plans that we could never possibly understand. He grants to His children only glimpses of certain portions of His plans, and most of that has to do with His will for them, so it’s only what is pertinent.

When it comes to wrath, you should get the idea that certain parts of His wrath are locked in, while other elements are floating. It has to do with His wisdom and righteousness revealing His divine glory within the context. His glory will be seen, but on some issues, He waits to see how certain key figures, through whom He chooses to work, are going to react to what He holds out before them. In the long run, it makes no difference, but in the moment, God wants to maximize the potential for slapping people upside the head with His glory, so that when they stand before Him on that Last Judgment Day, they’ll have no excuse.

So, for example, my convictions tell me that I should expect to live a lot longer than I would really like. That gives me confidence to face things without fear of dying, though I could still get hurt a lot, as we saw with my shattered knee cap four years ago. I’m still convinced that was God’s determined will no matter what I did, and that it was for someone else’s benefit, but they refused to embrace the opportunity. Now, that knee was God’s property in the first place, so He can do what He wants with it. If nothing good came from it that I can see, that’s not my problem. My faith says I should work through it.

On a wider level, my convictions tell me that the US will experience an apocalypse in some places. I think it’s safe to say Portland, OR is an example of that (I’ve been there; the place has always been a left-wing hell hole). But the whole US will not go down the tubes that way. In fact, a handful of individual state governments will not tolerate that kind of thing, and are already prepared to react with overwhelming force. Still, what we see in Portland — a highly organized and well-trained red communist revolt — is going to spread some. The tactics rather loudly reported there have been reported much more quietly in other places. It’s already happening.

If my state were heading for an apocalypse, I’d be praying fervently for a substantial motor home, and be ready to accept something smaller if necessary, in order to preserve this ministry. But I am convinced that isn’t in the cards for Oklahoma, and that I should not anticipate moving. There might be some disruption to my Net access, and the other blog is already at some risk of being shut down. Still, I’m about as prepared as can be for keeping myself accessible to you.

I have no way of knowing what God plans to do in other places where you folks live; He’s not telling me anything that doesn’t pertain to me. You’ll have to pray and seek your own sense of conviction. But for me living here, I have a burden to plan on eventually doing some touring within the state (the bike, the camera, etc.) and promoting it as a good place to live while the USA comes apart.

That doesn’t keep me from praying for all of you in the places where you live. I sincerely hope that things work out well for you. I pray that you get a firm sense of conviction about where you should be and what you should do there for His glory. Some of you will no doubt feel called to stay right there in the middle of an apocalypse. Whatever the case may be, feel free to tell me about it so I can pray more specifically for you.

At any rate, I’ll continue sharing whatever my prophetic gift tells me. In my heart, it all feels a lot closer than it does to my mind. There is only so much you can do to prepare, because God isn’t revealing much about a range of certain things not yet decided.

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Law of Moses — 2 Samuel 12:1-25

Posted on September 5, 2020 by ehurst

We skip over some of the highs and lows of David’s regal manner to look at something that reveals a lot about how the Covenant worked.

David should have gone to the field with his army. If the battle didn’t justify a full mobilization, it still needed his direct attention. It certainly would have kept him out of trouble. Instead, he stayed at home and fretted over things to the point he couldn’t sleep at night. So up in the cool night breeze of his palace rooftop, he spotted a woman enjoying the same thing for her bath.

Let’s not get tripped up in whether she meant to tempt anyone. David was the one who made the move, when he should have stopped watching her. No, she put up no resistance. We aren’t told about the possible intrigues, only that David is the one who sinned by his initiative, when he should have been somewhere else. He is the shepherd of his nation, and should have been, at most, amused if this was her attempt to get his attention when her husband was away. In ancient Hebrew culture, it was expected that women were the weak ones, which is why they were typically not allowed to socially mix with men outside the family. What woman didn’t desire a romp with this charismatic King?

Good men of God don’t succumb to groupies, even if they are the hottest babes ever seen. Good men are supposed to protect women from themselves.

So David took her to bed and made her pregnant. And this really complicated things, so David cooked up a scheme with his cousin Joab to get Uriah to come home and sleep with his own wife to cover it up. Uriah was too much a soldier to do that, so David conspired with Joab again to have Uriah killed in battle. Then he jumped at the chance to pull Bathsheba as the widow of a war hero into his harem. Now it was all legal. Except it wasn’t. David knew it and God knew it.

Our focus text begins with Nathan the prophet using a parable to catch David off-guard. The parable was about David’s abuse of his position and attempts to cover up his skirt-chasing. God was watching. The Lord would have been quite generous if David didn’t have enough of all the good things in life, but David had to poach on what little God had granted some other man. This was one of the Ten Commandments: Do not covet your neighbor’s wife.

A major source of sin is envy over what God grants to someone else, as if He slighted you. God isn’t supposed to treat any two of us alike, because we aren’t alike. His plans for us are sacred and often secret, if only to keep us from jumping the gun and spoiling things. We must learn to be patient in faith that He will get us where we need to be when the time comes for something important to His glory. Let the Lord supply what He will, when He will, while you bless His name and give thanks.

So Nathan pronounced a curse from God: David would never cease to be a man of war. Indeed, his own household would fight internally. David would be publicly shamed, his harem publicly defiled, because of his secret sins compounded.

David was at least man enough to confess he had sinned and deserved the Lord’s wrath. His choice of words signaled a readiness to die for it. However, Nathan assured him that was not in God’s plans. Still, there was one critical failure that was not previously mentioned in Scripture: “by this deed you have given great occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme.” In other words, this sin had diminished God’s reputation, when David’s sole reason for living was to bring Him glory. Jehovah’s most famous servant betrayed Him to help the enemy. This vile tale would go viral among Israel’s adversaries.

No, it was the child who would die for David’s sin, because it was conceived in sin.

During the week or so after birth, the child was gravely ill and David fasted in sackcloth and ashes. When it died, his servants despaired of telling him, lest he do even worse. Still, David caught on, and asked them bluntly. Yes, the baby had died.

That was it, then. David went back to his regular royal duties and his servants were shocked that he stopped mourning. If David mourned so while the child lived, why did he not mourn the death? When they asked for how this made any sense, he told them: As long as the infant was alive, there was some chance by faith that David could persuade God to relent. That’s a fair representation of God’s mercy. But once the child was dead, David’s faith didn’t extend to raising him back to life. He noted gravely that he would go to the boy someday, but that the boy could never come to him.

So David did what little he could to comfort his new wife, and made her pregnant again. This time the Lord showed His approval and sent the same prophet to announce His divine nickname for the boy was Jedidiah — Hebrew for “beloved by Jehovah.” We know him by the name Solomon.

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What’s on Your Heart?

Posted on September 5, 2020 by ehurst

This continues the two previous posts.

There’s no shortcut. You just have to do it and find your own path.

I can describe for you how scholars in the ANE would have learned to operate from the heart instead of relying on mere intellect. I’m not sure anyone can put into clinical terms the actual process of doing that. Since everyone they knew did things that way, their instructional materials — what few exist — operate from a broad assumption regarding symbolic language. Most ANE languages shared something with Hebrew: They were indicative, not descriptive. They portrayed things, but didn’t delineate in concrete terms. They could state things rather bluntly, but that was almost an abuse of the language.

Western scholars have often tried to read the ANE texts from a literalist point of view and it results in some godawful analysis. We end up with the conclusion that ANE folks were prone to wild exaggeration and saying things manifestly false. But if you approach such literature from a more ANE perspective, you realize most of it is parabolic. Sure, there are tons of ANE government and business records in mundane detail on clay tablets, but even there we see things stated in figures of speech you would have to know to understand it.

Most ANE scholarship itself was concerned with bigger, more important things. The myths weren’t meant to be historical accounts of real people and events, but symbolism regarding something about human existence. They expected people to grasp the symbolism and come to their own conclusions. The language of parables labels areas for exploration and contemplation; it’s not meant to lock down concrete answers.

When your conscious awareness is in your heart instead of your head, you start to think in terms of moral discernment. It is a kind of reasoning and logic quite different from the factual and abstract reasoning of the intellect. It allows you to sense directly the meaning of life in regards to the contextual particulars. That’s why it also allows us to sense the life force within the natural world. Those things speak to us on the heart level, and they testify of our Creator’s divine moral character.

If you confuse the issue by having a heart committed to obeying false gods, then you would still be able to hear the natural world. That sensory field from the heart does result in a usable interaction with living things. However, their message can be confused by commitment to gods that don’t exist. Yet, Paul testifies that they still had a good grasp of fundamental moral truth in the sense of not trusting their mere intellects to discern the truth. Thus, if you quoted to them the symbolic narratives from the early chapters of Genesis, they would have recognized it immediately for what it was.

The intellect is the core of our fallen nature. It is captured in the narrative of the Fall, when the text refers to the Tree of Knowledge, using a Hebrew word for “knowledge” that includes the concept of judging. It meant “knowing” in the sense of deciding, so a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would actually be a Tree of the Judging Good and Evil. And that would mean using mere human capabilities instead of faith in God’s revelation. It means looking at the sensory data and using your reason to decide what is morally true. And while the intellect certainly believes it is capable, it is not. It is mere flesh; it has no direct connection to the Spirit Realm. Indeed, the intellect cannot by itself even grasp the notion of a Spirit Realm.

The intellect has all confidence that it can ignore any external input and come up with a usable answer on its own. So it tends to ignore the heart whenever it can. It can fool your conscious awareness into thinking there is nothing above it. But your conscious awareness is not confined to the intellect. Quite often, simply telling someone that the heart is a separate faculty is enough for someone to realize that it’s true. It frees their consciousness to move more into the heart. From there, they begin to see the world in an entirely new way.

This process is virtually the same as encouraging someone to live by their convictions, if we add that convictions are not mere sentiment, but the finger of God writing on their hearts. Saying it in those terms tends to get people in a position to recognize what it means to be heart-led. Convictions are your personal moral fabric, and will often contradict your reason and intellectual knowledge. If you can fight your fleshly reliance on reason and knowledge, and trust the instincts of your convictions, it’s very nearly the same as being heart-led. The difference is that your convictions won’t put you in a position to make sense of what your heart’s sensory field can pick up from the world around you.

It still requires a conscious effort to move out of your brain and into your heart, and then you have to at least imagine that nature celebrates and worships the Creator. If you can imagine it, then you are likely to begin hearing that worship. Oddly enough, nature responds on a heart level even when you speak audibly with your mouth. It’s designed to do that. Do you recall how Jesus often commanded natural forces verbally and they obeyed?

All I can do is tell you that this is the way ANE folks in general, and ancient Hebrews in particular, looked at their world. Moses held his staff over the Reed Sea and the waters moved to either side to make a path. He heard a message in his heart from a glowing bush. He didn’t trust his fleshly senses to tell him the whole story, but if he had listened to his heart instead of his flesh, he could have spoken to the rock in his halting tongue and made water come forth.

You probably don’t have a promise from God to make water come out of rocks, but I’m willing to bet you could sit on one and eventually catch it talking to you about the wonder of our Creator. And if you get used to the idea of talking to natural life, and hearing back from it in your sensory heart, you can eventually have some useful interactions on things your faith does tell you that you can have from your Father’s creatures. I can assure you that the natural life around you does know when you are heart-sensitive; it can tell when you are trying to learn it. You’ll get help.

But more importantly, you will begin exercising a faculty that is far above mere intelligence. You will become sensitive also to moral truth. It’s all in the same package. Hearing from trees, grass and rocks is part of hearing your convictions speak more loudly and clearly about things God requires of you. You’ll know what matters to Him. Eventually your brain will get used to all of this, and you’ll be able to tell people about what’s on your heart.

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Clinical Evidence for Heart-led

Posted on September 4, 2020 by ehurst

Ref: The Seeds of Shalom

Over the years I’ve reiterated the clinical evidence cited in my book, Heart of Faith, indicating that the heart has a sensory field of its own. While in theory that field extends outward to infinity, the interaction it has with other living things is measurable with instruments to about 10-15 feet (3-5m). However, it has proven impossible so far for clinical testing to discern what that interaction is or does.

Similar studies have noted that the heart also has a rather independent nervous system, with nodes that appear capable of processing something, likely to be whatever that sensory field encounters, but no one is sure.

That doesn’t stop sleazy outfits trying to profit from a little knowledge and a whole lot of ignorance — such as the Heart Math Institute. They’ve built a whole market in courses teaching folks how to maximize their “emotional intelligence” based on this incomplete clinical evidence. Their mistake is building on Western cultural assumptions about the heart as the repository of sentiment, a quasi-emotional something inside of us. There’s no doubt their books and courses do include a lot of good stuff, but the basic assumptions about what the heart does is purely speculative, not based on science at all. Yet they claim science as their basis.

We make no such claim. The best that science can do is indicate that there is something there in the heart that is separate from other sensory inputs, and not directly connected to the intellect. We cite such limited science as support, but not as any kind of basis for extensive speculation and selling books (all my books are free) or expensive courses.

Our basis is a different culture — broadly the Ancient Near East (ANE) and specifically the ancient Hebrew background. The whole ANE was mystical in orientation, but such mysticism bore little resemblance to what passes for “mysticism” in the West. ANE mysticism was based on a very wide and extensive lore, but nothing we would call “clinical” literature. They would never dream of nailing down something important in concrete descriptive language. Indeed, most ANE languages were indicative instead of descriptive, relying heavily on parabolic expression. Readers were supposed to understand this in the first place, recognizing that most discourses on important matters could not be taken literally.

Hebrew Scripture in particular refers to the heart as the seat of the will, of commitment and faith. The heart could be corrupt, but it could also be fully committed to the Creator as feudal Master. Sometimes the heart was a symbol of conscious awareness, because it was assumed you were not “living” in your head, but in your heart. If you lacked a firm commitment to the Lord, you were considered to have a corrupted consciousness. It was untrustworthy, duplicitous.

In this sense, faith is not a matter of what’s in your head, but what’s in your heart. Faith was not something that could be defined in terms of knowledge and practice. Rather, your knowledge and practice were manifestations of faith, which was somewhere else. Faith is a distinctly separate faculty from the mind. By faith you could “know” things your fleshly nature could not discern through senses and reason.

Throughout the ANE, a simple reliance on mere sensory data and reason was regarded as juvenile, making one unfit to lead. It meant you were unable to handle things at the heart level, that you were ill-equipped to make clear moral commitments. Everyone knew the intellect was variable, deceived in thinking it was capable of objectivity, when it was actually wide open to influence from the lower passions of the flesh. Thus, a man in his mind was manipulable by anyone appealing to his lower nature. Men of heart and conviction were more likely to resist such temptation.

In the psychology of the Bible, convictions are the finger of God writing on the stone tables of your heart. Your mission in life was to clear away the garbage that obscured a clear view of your convictions. By your convictions you would know God’s will for you. In more modern terms, convictions are burned into your very DNA. You can hold opinions, but convictions hold you.

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