The Seeds of Shalom

Posted on September 2, 2020 by ehurst

Jesus shared the Parable of the Sower. Then He later explained the meaning more plainly to His disciples. He said that it had been given them to understand such things.

This is one of those insider-outsider things. Someone who is spiritually born and heart-led is on the narrow path. Not everything is clear to them, but they are in a position to begin understanding the nature of reality as God made it. Their hearts rule over their minds, and this is how we are designed. But we have to keep nailing Adam (our carnal nature) to the Cross daily because it doesn’t want to understand.

But the mind is designed to obey the heart, and thus to learn what God intended the mind to do. The mind is not to rule, but to execute; the intellect was granted by God to organize and implement fleshly obedience to what the heart discerns from the Spirit Realm.

Thus, somewhere along this path of increasing subjection of the mind to the heart, the brain gets used to thinking and reasoning within a different frame of reference. It can deduce abstractions of moral principle from the pattern of commands from the Spirit. It has to learn not to take itself too seriously; the brain must realize that it’s abstractions will ever be no more than approximations. But it still becomes steadily more ready to map out obedience from what it has observed coming out of the heart.

Eventually, the mind is able to relate in somewhat concrete terms what some portion of the parables mean. While such analysis will always be contextual, the mind should gradually get better at making the contextual decisions better match the ineffable truth of God burned into the convictions of the heart. Jesus gave His disciples a contextual explanation of the Parable of the Sower, as the parable itself was a contextual indicator of divine truth.

Not everything that annoys or inconveniences you is from the Devil. Your flesh still has room to improve, so one of primary elements of spiritual maturity is not taking yourself too seriously, in the sense that your flesh becomes patient with things that interrupt its plans. The flesh must be forcefully reminded that it is the servant, not the master. It will never arrive at the place where it can be the master, but it can learn to become pretty useful.

We live in a very strange context right now: God’s wrath is falling full force on the USA. In times like these, Satan and his demons are cut loose to wreak havoc in ways they normally do not operate. You will see things that will make no sense to the flesh. People will make decisions that seem completely insane. Medical issues will arise that seem to have no basis on known afflictions. Random adverse events will defy the common understanding of physics and chemistry.

Not everything you experience is targeted at you. It’s just part of living in the USA during a time of God’s wrath. How you respond is the whole point. For just as there are more curses afloat in the air, so there are blessings and miracles. The two come in the same package, because that is how God shines His glory through His people. The difference is whether the Blood of the Lamb is on the doorposts of your life. If you can grasp the pattern of the curses, you can also see the openings for seeking the Lord’s shalom.

Sowing the seeds of the gospel means demonstrating shalom in the midst of turmoil and suffering.

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The Bible on Trust

Posted on August 30, 2020 by ehurst

When discussing high-trust versus low-trust in human culture, I want to note something about Scripture’s position.

If you review the Covenant of Moses, the commands lay out an expectation of high trust. You’ll see requirements to return your neighbor’s wandering livestock, watching out for the welfare of others, being compassionate with strangers, etc.

At the same time, we can note with assurance that the Hebrew people were condemned by their own prophets for acting with low trust. Further, we can objectively observe today that the Talmud encourages a low-trust frame of reference. Playing sharp via legalistic semantics with your fellow Jews is specifically encouraged.

This apparent mismatch between the people and the standard of their God was part of His plan for revelation. Try to grasp how the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) mindset was to be philosophical about the general secular trend (plotting a decline) of human behavior without the prodding of divine wrath. Then try to understand that God pointedly says He will be slow to pour out His wrath, so that things will appear to us in our shorter time sense to fester and go bad for generations before God acts.

We know that shalom is exceedingly difficult to obtain, even when you are fully educated and committed to it. We must learn from the ANE perspective that it is a tendency of how God does things with the human race. It’s not that God doesn’t bless some with more of what appears to be shalom from where we stand, but that we have seen precious little of people striving consciously to fully embrace everything in Biblical Law. We have to remember that shalom is not the externalities, but the term is used in Scripture to portray a relationship with the Creator.

Trust in God means we should be cynical about human trust. We should be cynical about ourselves, while we are at it. That is, we must draw a moral boundary around the fallen fleshly nature that we drag around involuntarily. We need desperately to see that our carnal nature is not our whole self, as implied by a false Western brand of philosophy, but that we are in a prison of flesh. We have a better nature that will one day be set free from the flesh, and this is our reward for striving throughout life to distance ourselves from the carnal nature. We are trying to kill it before we actually die.

Just because God grants us an understanding of the problems of this world, it doesn’t mean we have any hope for resolving them. We should despair of resolving them. That is, we should seek to address them individually, knowing that most of the world will slide off down into Hell despite our efforts based on a flaming conviction. It’s not a waste; Biblical Law is its own reward.

We trust God unconditionally for the outcomes in this world.

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Law of Moses — 2 Samuel 7

Posted on August 29, 2020 by ehurst

For once the passage very nearly speaks for itself. Yet the lesson here is critical to understanding the Covenant of Moses.

The potential for what God promised here was very much in the Covenant, but the direction it took added substantially to that covenant, giving it a shape that no human could have foreseen. This is very much according to the ideals of a national adoption covenant, but given the history of Israel up to this point, with her stumbling, bumbling failure to fully obey the Covenant, who would have expected this one man to rise to such heights of God’s favor?

So I want you to notice the depth of personal loyalty between God and David. It’s everything God had always offered, but David is the first in a long time to seize the opportunity. This one man saw the offer as a bonanza, a rich treasure, an offer to which he could hardly say, “No.” It was a privilege no man could merit.

Notice that David makes much of how great his domain is in terms of the people. Notice how great the people are for one reason: They were called by God to declare His glory. It was a nation God Himself redeemed and treasured.

Now consider that in Christ, the Son of David, you and I inherit all this. We can have the same depth of personal communion with God that David had. We can together hold the high privilege of being His glory on the earth.

Read the text for yourself.

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Selling Shalom Tourism

Posted on August 28, 2020 by ehurst

I am expendable.

It was never my intention to build some kind of legacy in my name. From the very start, I strove to work within the system. I really was dedicated to the gospel message. I was deluded in thinking my calling meant that I needed to become a church pastor; that was how the system worked. But I was called to teach, and I knew that.

And I knew the message I was going to teach would be different from what was common in the system, even if I hardly knew just how different it would end up being. Again, I was misguided by the system in thinking that having a unique approach was a matter of career and offering a distinctive product on the market, as it were. Still, it wasn’t hard to shed that whole mindset when it became clear the system refused to let me offer even the very tame shift I was proposing.

So I was spat out by system politics, but it served only to harden my resolve to seek farther along the path I was already on. There’s nothing heroic here: The message called to me. I’ve always known that my best work would be behind someone who had the charisma to actually lead. I have no doubt it called to others, but somehow I managed to be available when others weren’t. The Lord uses those who respond, even when they aren’t to best for the job.

So this is not about me at all. Radix Fidem is simply what I call it because it saves your valuable time not having to restate the particulars every time I try to post something. I’m assuming you are reading my stuff for pretty much the same reason I write it — that God Himself is driving this whole thing and has a claim on your life. It’s all about the message.

Is there any doubt that this message demands radical changes? It’s not for everyone. So far, it’s been only for a very few, indeed. But God is our publicist; He’s the one who decides how much attention, and from whom, this thing receives. Our part is merely to share it however we are called to share it.

And you should know that we will bump against a lot of human barriers. Nobody in my neighborhood wants to hear about it. A good number of regular readers have passed through my blogs, and I sense that very few of them have taken the message with them. That’s okay, because it’s not about branding. It’s about bringing people closer to their divine heritage of shalom. It’s a very long and very hard path.

I still maintain that if there is one thing we must do, it’s increase the awareness that conviction trumps reason. If we could just get that one concept across, it would change everything. Sure, there’s no doubt it would change the world, but that’s not the point. It would bring more people onto the path back to Eden, to explore the Land of Shalom. Maybe we can get a few who come to visit and stay.

For me, that’s the bottom line.

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A Social Ideal

Posted on August 24, 2020 by ehurst

What would be our social ideal? I’m not trying to speak for Radix Fidem here; this is just my personal standards, and what I would teach my own local covenant family. Keep in mind that we are all fully aware of the vast distance between the ideal versus where we actually live in the US today. I strive to come as close to this ideal as possible while in the context of today’s American society.

By the way: “public” refers to any setting which is not confined to members of the family or covenant community. Mixing with the wider society is inevitable, but there is room for discussion on how to go about it. How much mixing is necessary for a shalom witness?

Working in the secular society is one thing, but males should have no social contact with females who come from outside of the covenant community, and vice versa. That goes all the way down to school age kids. There would never be mixed schooling, swimming, sports, etc. All romantic contact comes via community arranged marriages. (Obviously a little chaperoned contact is required to ensure the couple don’t hate each other for some unexpected reasons.)

In general, children should not be exposed to the external society until around age 12, and later is better. Public schooling is forbidden, and TV should be highly restricted. Most of what you normally see broadcast is entirely unacceptable. This is not a matter of “old fashioned” because the problem is Anglo-American culture in the first place. It leaks through in ways most of us would never recognize.

People of both genders in public would cover their bodies in relatively loose clothing, more or less in a rectangle from shoulder to shoulder, from the base of the neck to the knees, at a minimum, generally without regard to posture or position. (Have you thought about how hard it is to buy clothing that meets that standard?) Private settings, or gender separated settings, are a different matter.

We should debate whether photos require the same standard, since there is a difference in how humans respond to images versus in-the-flesh, and because it’s virtually impossible to control the use of cameras.

And there could be more, but you get the picture.

The whole idea is that we should avoid accommodating the world as much as possible. We would welcome outsiders as long as they have some idea of the differences. The problem for us is just how far away we are from a world that would permit us even just a little bit of separation. Secular governments instinctively treat every resident as an economic resource, as property of the State. This is anathema to followers of Christ.

But this is where we live, and even if you personally bought into such rules, no two of us would come up with the same answer of trying to find the place of God’s peace in a situation where we have little control.

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A Big Ripple in the Fabric

Posted on August 23, 2020 by ehurst

As always, I am not your leader. For some of you, I am your elder, which means that I don’t tell you what to do or what to think. I can only offer my personal experience, and encourage you to find your own path. I can help you discover who God is, but only He can tell you what He wants from you.

It’s a big ripple in the fabric of reality. My world crossed one of those invisible boundaries, where my prophetic sense tells me that reality has shifted again. It’s a decision point for which there is no going back. The trigger of recognition was my post on the other blog about Google Chrome Browser. It doesn’t matter too much about the humans involved; you will best understand it as things moving in the Spirit Realm. Sure, there are people involved making decisions, but that’s not what triggers my soul. This is a message from God.

And a message from God is always personal. It’s not about the facts, though it will surely result in temporal changes. In this case, I’ve been warned to back off from the Internet. Not because it’s either good or bad, but it’s now less pertinent in many ways. Nor is it completely useless, but it’s an incremental change. It’s less important to my mission. It remains a critical means of communication, but not in the same ways as before.

Keep using my email addresses, and the forum, etc. However, I want to encourage you to text me or call me more (405-503-1692), especially if it’s something time sensitive. If possible, it’s probably smart to text first to arrange a voice call, since I can’t predict what I’ll be doing at any given time of day right now. It’s not about my personal preferences; it’s a matter of how God wants me to do it. I’ll be trying once more to switch to a flip phone in the near future. Depending on what device I end up with, the chances I’ll be able to keep track of email by phone are shrinking. And there is a growing sense that I won’t be near a computer quite so much any more. I’ll be sure to let you folks know either way.

There is a powerful drive in my heart to be ready for changes yet unseen. Granted, in the past, this kind of thing has had a surprisingly long lead time. It has taught me patience, a lesson I still need to learn better. I’m getting better at waiting until my convictions tell me, “Okay, go!” It has to come from my heart.

If there is anything we can impart to our fellow believers, that would be it. Radix Fidem is not an organization, but an approach to faith. Nobody has to know the name for it, just this one key thing: convictions trump reason. People who are spiritually born cannot argue with that. It’s a simple thing we can say, but there are a ton of things we can use to make it real for them. If we can get that one message across, and it catches fire in their hearts, then we have done way more to change the moral landscape than any discrete teaching of our covenant could do.

And it’s the one lesson you all must get for yourselves. Don’t depend on me; I could disappear from the Net at any moment for reasons none of us could predict. I’m not expecting it to happen, but my point is that you should stand on your own faith. I’ve known for several years that the nature and focus of my ministry would shift, and I believe it’s getting pretty close. I crave your fellowship, but God has plans for this thing that we cannot envision.

You have a mission and calling, too. Dig into it. Take charge of the things God has placed in your hands.

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Law of Moses — 2 Samuel 6

Posted on August 22, 2020 by ehurst

Sometimes the specific rules do matter. The Ark of the Covenant was regarded as God’s Throne, the Mercy Seat. It could not be treated as any mere talisman. The issue was not the Ark itself but that it represented the place where Jehovah rested invisibly. Of course, this had nothing to do with the shekhinah glory that came and went with the moral fortunes of the nation, because it was typically invisible in daylight. In the dim shadows of the Tabernacle, and then the Temple later, it would have been visible above the Ark when God’s glory was with the nation. The Ark was His Throne whenever He pleased to use it, and no mere man could touch it without a commission from God.

The Ark had been lost in battle to the Philistines, during which defeat the Tabernacle at Shiloh was apparently destroyed. The Ark was eventually returned and kept by a nobleman of Judah in Baale-judah (Hebrew: “Lords of Judah,” a cluster of towns, including Gibeah, dominated by Kiriath-jearim). It had never been returned to the priests and Levites. Remember also that Saul commissioned Doeg the Edomite to destroy the whole city of Nob and the worship facilities there, and only one of those priests survived to join David’s entourage. There were other priests not living in Nob at the time, but this would have killed their regular service. There was no proper place to keep the Ark, but David felt moved to do what he could to honor the God of Israel.

Our passage begins with David calling out the noblemen and elders of the nation to accompany him to escort the Ark of Covenant to the City of David where the king had set up a proper Tent of Meeting.

But it started off all wrong. It was put on a cart. Granted, it was a new one that hadn’t been used for any common task, but that’s not how God said the Ark should move; it was copying the Philistine behavior. Nor are we told what happened to Abinadab’s son Eleazer, who had been properly consecrated for keeping the Ark. He wasn’t in the company that moved it. Only two of his brothers are mentioned. So when the Ark joggled a bit crossing the threshing floor of Nachon, one of those brothers — Uzza — put out his hand to steady it. He was not consecrated to touch the Ark, so it killed him.

It was not so much Uzza’s sin, but the failure of David and his entourage for not paying strict attention to the requirements. Thus, they were responsible for Uzza’s death, both because he wasn’t consecrated, and because the Ark was supposed to be carried by Levites on the fitted poles. This whole scene really struck David hard. So he turned aside to the nearest Levite in the area, Obed-edom. He’s called a “Gittite” which normally indicates the Philistine City of Gath, but he’s originally from Gath-rimmon, one of the 48 Levitical cities.

During the three months the Ark rested there, the Levite’s house was notably blessed. At least it was in the possession of the right man. So when David heard, he was reminded of his errors on the previous attempt and this time resolved to do it right. On this occasion we know it was properly born by Levites because the text talks about it being carried. After they took six steps and nothing went wrong, David celebrated by having some animals ritually sacrificed and burned on the spot. This would require having a significant number of priests and Levites, more than those needed to carry the Ark. Thus, the journey to his palace courtyard was completed.

But during this journey, David danced ecstatically the whole way. We are told he was wearing only an ephod. There is a lot of debate what that Hebrew word covers. All we know for sure is that it was a ceremonial garment, commonly worn by priests on down to attendants in the Tabernacle/Temple service, sometimes over other garments. Whatever it was, David’s dancing caused him to be a bit exposed in this garment. His first wife, Michal, was not too pleased with this.

David finished the rituals associated with a joyous celebration, with lots of offerings that would have been burned whole, some shared with the officiating priests and Levites, and plenty of thanksgiving offerings to share with everyone who showed up. As he went about the final step of pronouncing ritual blessings over his palace and family, Michal gave him a sarcastic remark about exposing himself to all the young servant girls in the royal household. Oh, how regal!

David responded that this was the God who made him king while her father still lived, and promoted him over Saul’s entire clan. Furthermore, David was quite willing to abase himself even more before the God of Israel. And was it not odd that those servant girls would respect him far more than his own wife? We are told in typical roundabout Hebrew fashion that David never slept with her again, bringing her into grave dishonor in the whole nation for never bearing him children.

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The Answer Lies in Your Heart

Posted on August 20, 2020 by ehurst

This may be difficult to follow, but I am obliged to try explaining it: Many of the controversies and theological debates of the Early Church Fathers were inherently false from both sides. That’s because they were asking the wrong questions. Seeking to nail down precise theological (intellectual) definitions for some things is inherently evil. For example, the question of how Jesus was both human and divine is the wrong question. It’s enough to know simply that He was.

Way back in my college days, someone said something that grabbed my soul: “The Bible is an Eastern document. Jesus was an Eastern man and Christianity is an Eastern religion.” The speaker went on to define what he meant, specifically referring to the Ancient Near East (ANE) and it’s unique philosophical assumptions. It’s not that ANE scholars were unaware of the kind of reasoning we got from Plato and Aristotle, but that they regarded it as a juvenile pursuit. You weren’t allowed to sit in the council of adult sages until you got all that stuff out of your system.

Even today, we recognize in human development that abstract reasoning typically becomes possible starting around age 12. And who hasn’t been forced to put up with the arrogant pontifications of smart-ass teenagers? Once they discover abstract logic, their intellect tells them they can understand everything. And they resolutely refuse to climb out of that concrete fortress in order to understand moral logic, which is an entirely different level of operation. Some psychologists recognized long ago that clear moral conviction is the pinnacle of human development, and a level to which few humans ascended. Psychology will never lack for people who need help just understanding reality.

Part of the reason for that is because Western Civilization denies that moral reasoning can be separate from mere abstract logic. It’s a cultural bias that holds us all back from the level of maturity that the ANE sages demanded. That’s why, in the Bible for example, a man was socially insignificant until he was over 30. The first 15 years of life bring you to abstract logic, and it takes another 15 years of experience to realize that such logic cannot answer all the questions, nor even ask the right questions.

The Apostle John saw it coming. His Book of Revelation indicates this, but oddly enough, it’s the abstract reasoning of later Christian scholars that buried the Hebrew outlook of that book. Once he passed from the scene, the Hellenized rationalism of the Pharisees also took over the majority of the Early Church scholars. All of those controversies starting after 100 AD were the result of their increasing distance from the Hebrew philosophical outlook of Jesus and the Old Testament.

When you try to nail down with intellectual precision the way in which the Messiah could be both divine and human, you are already outside of what the Messiah taught. It’s the wrong question. What we should be asking is what following Jesus demands of us. And the only way you can understand any of that is to have a direct encounter with Him as the Holy Spirit. You have to meet God face to face in your soul. The result of that engagement should resolve a lot of juvenile control-seeking logic, because that logic demands things God does not grant to any human. All that matters is the burning call in your soul to serve the Lord.

From that foundation, you end up taking an entirely different path from trying to satisfy the curiosities of fallen men. You realize that, the Nestorian Controversy for example, is sheer stupidity on both sides. That debate was an attempt to pin down the question of how it was Jesus could have been divine and human at the same time. It’s pretty much the turning point of the split between the West and East in terms of Church History. Both sides were wrong; I reject Western and Eastern Christianity together.

Not in the juvenile sense of trying to create a separate thing, of refusing to use their terminologies, etc. Rather, I tend to ignore what both demand. I refuse to worry about whether either one will accept me. They do not represent my Savior; they are both a departure from His teaching. Jesus was a Hebrew man with a Hebrew philosophical approach, and neither West nor East will accept His fundamental intellectual outlook. Yes, we can know about the Hebrew mystical approach, and we can use it today. And using it puts you outside the mainstream historical traditions of conventional Christian religion.

Knowing Jesus is not an intellectual position; He’s a Person. You get to know Him by hanging around Him, and the only way you can do that is to turn inward in prayer and contemplation. Granted, we do need some cues as to what to look for, and that is a very large body of instruction helping us to unlearn both Western and Eastern false teachings. Both of them assume the answer lies in the intellect. The Hebrew outlook is different; it says the answer lies in your heart.

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Thinking Hebrew, Writing Greek

Posted on August 18, 2020 by ehurst

Let’s look at an example of Paul writing Hebrew thoughts in the Greek language. Keep in mind that Paul grew up bilingual in Greek and Aramaic (the “Hebrew” of his day), and appears to have been familiar with a couple other languages. He was highly educated, and his intellect was quite substantial. His background was Pharisaical, with all the Hellenized reasoning, but he would have been familiar with what was still then a strong competing viewpoint that was more ancient and eastern. Once he met the Lord on the Road to Damascus, and then spent another three years with the risen Lord in the Arabian wilderness, he was transformed into one who sought to restore the ancient Hebrew approach to religion.

The teaching of Jesus was distinctly aimed at restoring the Ancient Hebrew approach to reality. It’s only natural Paul would have absorbed that. We will look at a short passage in Ephesians 4:17-24.

This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.

But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness. (NKJV)

Every English translation I have ever examined makes the same basic mistake. It is not enough to focus on the Greek meaning of the words Paul uses; you must try to see through those word choices to the Hebrew style thinking behind them. Thus, most English translations miss the point of some word choices.

The word translated “Gentiles” in Greek is actually ethnos — “nations.” In some contexts, a Hebrew man would use that word to indicate Gentiles versus Jews, but not here. Paul’s emphasis is that his readers, mostly Gentiles with a few Hebrew Christians, should not walk like the world they left behind. It would be more appropriate for us to read that as “other nations” in the sense of “the fallen world” — a fallen world that includes Talmudic Judaism. It’s not just the Gentiles that have left something behind, but the Hebrew Christians also have left the perverse atmosphere in Judaism. We are no longer have an identity based on our ethnic background and human identity, but a new identity as citizens of Eternity. Our human ethnic identity no longer matters so much.

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with certain habits from the former life. But it requires discerning what can follow you into your new identity. You can’t use human reason to get there.

Paul’s emphasis here is on heart-led consciousness, something not common in the Greek-speaking world. That heart-led awareness was more common in the ANE (especially Hebrew culture), at least among the better educated folk. He thus refers to the futility of trusting your intellect, in the sense of trusting human capabilities outside of revelation. The ability to make sense of the world had been darkened and such people find a life led by the Holy Spirit to be alien. They find it alien because the limited grasp of reality available to the fallen fleshly intellect is simply not enough, and it blinds them to the leading of their hearts.

The term “past feeling” is an idiom of the Greek language; we would say “insensible.” The image is someone who will reliably come up with the wrong answers when they try to process by fleshly reckoning the inputs of the five senses. They lack the revelatory insight that shows us how God designed reality. So without the moral guidance of the Creator, they do what makes sense to their fallen fleshly nature. In that fallen nature, immoral behavior makes good sense when you take into consideration the lusts of the flesh (“greediness”). The concept of what is good versus what is evil is entirely different from a fleshly reckoning.

This is not what you learn from Jesus Christ. If you have had that mystical spiritual encounter with the Holy Spirit of Christ, as Paul did, you cannot continue living that old life. You come under conviction and find that your own soul rejects that kind of life. Jesus isn’t a bunch of propositions the mind can process; He’s a genuine Person who comes to live in your spirit, and speaks through your convictions. Only your heart can understand Him, and your heart must awaken and take the lead in your decisions. He renovates your life, rearranging and rebuilding you from inside out. People who knew your old self will realize you aren’t the same person any more.

Your focus is pleasing your Master. You discover a sense of being separate (holy) from the old ways, and you look for ways to manifest this new Presence in your soul. You try to discern what is appropriate for this new situation. You have a burning desire for what is right.

This is just a small sample of Paul’s renewal of Ancient Hebrew thinking expressed in Greek language.

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The Driving Assurance

Posted on August 16, 2020 by ehurst

I am utterly certain that I am on the right path. Often I’ll stop and review what I’ve written in recent weeks, and the same burning conviction that wrote them still drives me. I don’t regret any of it.

Let me tell you a secret: Every day my memories hound me, calling me to look back over the years of my life. All the stupid things I’ve said and done fill me with regret. I can look back and see that I often acted against my conscience. I can recall realizing immediately even in those moments how wrong I was. I carry a burden of guilt, and I’d give almost anything to go back and make things right. On rare occasions I get to try, but for most things that haunt me, there is no realistic hope of dressing those wounds on my soul. Now, at last, I’m quite certain that I am following my convictions. That burden of regret now steels me for acting with a clear conscience.

One of the nagging temptations I still carry with me to this day is the false vision of spreading this Radix Fidem teaching, like something more virulent than what officials claim is happening with COVID-19. Working too long in conventional Christian ministry has burned into me the urge to capture a billion souls with the message. While that might sound like a good thing, it cannot be done without tainting the message. Indeed, the message was shaped in part by the failures of those traditions.

Spreading faith is a divine miracle. The only thing we can do on the human side of things is something very distinctly in Biblical Law as law: the heart-led way. Whether someone invests their heart-led commitment in Christ is God’s doing alone; it is for His Chosen. But the necessity of having a heart-led consciousness is a divine necessity for the whole human race. We don’t have something so simple as, “Thou shalt be heart-led.” Rather, it’s woven into the whole image of divine revelation itself.

The problem is that it is only ever clearly stated as a requirement in the context of other commands: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart.” And what makes that a problem is how Western lore has hijacked the meaning of those words to indicate something else. Thus, our biggest battle is often getting people to realize that “heart” is not the seat of sentiment, but of conviction. We have to show that faith is not mere sentiment.

In other words, a critical element in our mission is convincing folks that they should live by their convictions, regardless of what they might find written there. There’s that nagging temptation to believe that what we find in our own convictions somehow represents a universal truth for all mankind. We have to see for ourselves, and help other people to see, that it is largely individual and unique. Most people have a false expectation of conscience being constrained by human logic.

Of course, it never works out like that. Most people suffer from a high degree of social conditioning that masquerades as conscience. A part of our burden is pointing out to folks how they have been herded. We have to encourage them to think individually and shed social conditioning.

So our evangelism, in seeking to address the cultural context in which we live, is to emphasize that people should live by their own individual conscience. Of course, we dress it up with the label “Christian Mysticism” so that it signals more than just a momentary quick glance at the conscience. We hope to convince them that their conscience is not their convictions, but that the conscience is merely the initial awareness of conviction. It’s a fallible transmitter of conviction. We hope to encourage introspection and taking time to meditate on what is really buried down there in the foundation of the soul.

If they don’t get that part, there’s no hope they can go any farther. But this much is within reach of every human alive, in part because it is the only doorway to faith. There’s just enough lore of such things out there that, while the core of Western culture militates against genuine faith, we still have this one useful anchor to slow their rush down to Hell. There are precious few out there so badly damaged that they have no conscience.

This is the part of Radix Fidem that can be universal. But it won’t take much searching to find that it’s hardly unique to us. Still, it’s not a bad starting point to begin sharing the gospel delivered to us. “Take time to stop and review your conscience about what you’ve done and what you will do.” If that does them any good, and they want to hear more, then we can look at pressing ahead with talk of convictions and eventually what it means to be heart-led. That is the foundation on which to build faith. That’s the gateway on the path to Eden.

What I know I can wish for the whole world is that they discover the sense of assurance I have now, regardless where it drives them.

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