Eschatology Introduction

Posted on July 7, 2024 by ehurst

In case it wasn’t clear to you, the Radix Fidem path is inherently Amillennial.

The key issue is that we do not believe the prophecies and promises require that Christ establish a political kingdom in this world. That’s the key issue.

If you really want to dig into the theology, I recommend you wade through Dr. Heiser’s series on the framework of eschatology. Instead of taking any particular position, in roughly four hours of video he lays out the most common questions you must answer when you examine key passages. He insists that all the various popular positions end up fudging at least one place or another.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

I note in particular that Daniel’s Seventy Weeks passage is easily the most challenging reference of the whole thing. The hardest part is getting a clear translation of what Daniel was trying to tell us. And then, you must face the question of how to make sense of it.

But if that’s not your kind of thing, then it’s probably enough for you to know that your host has been Amillennial for years, though not strictly according to the standard script. The main point is that this fancy word means we don’t expect a literal thousand-year reign of Christ over this world.

I plan to take a look at the major passages here this week.

Side note: I’m with Heiser on one thing — I don’t read too many theologians. I want to know what the text says and work it out from there. Are there any outside references that provide context? I want to know what they say. What did it mean to the author and his immediate audience?

Addenda: It turns out you don’t need the videos. Heiser offered a cogent review of it all on his blog. Go to this page for a linked list.

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NT Doctrine — 2 Timothy 3

Posted on July 6, 2024 by ehurst

I’m convinced that Paul foresaw the West in some sense. I believe he and other apostles could discern the dark plans of Satan and his allies to create a culture that would pervert the gospel and mask his evil work. The most dangerous lie is the one that stands very close to the truth and makes them difficult to distinguish yet changes one critical important part.

He refers to “last days” not so much as a portion of time but is pointing to a condition. After the final revelation in Christ, we enter a situation in which the forces of Darkness realize what they are up against, having finally understood the Lord’s plan. Their actions will be aimed at keeping everyone out of the Covenant. Thus, they will work overtime tempting people in ways they never did before.

Paul describes what kind of society our Enemy wants to create. It turns out that such people had already begun to show up around churches. They were of a type, predators who took advantage of primary charitable nature of Christian communities. A mainstay of faith community from before the time of Jesus were women of means, such as the one who funded the ministry of Jesus and the first century churches. This is what the predators considered the easiest prey, using appeals to vanity and offering them privileged insider knowledge in return for a share of that funding that supported churches.

These women existed because in that world, the average woman was a decade or two younger than her husband. It was entirely natural that there should be widows everywhere, and a significant number were left wealthy and alone. They would often go looking for some charitable cause to support, and no one was surprised that they would support churches, even when they never really understood the gospel message. That they were willing to follow an apostle’s teaching also made them vulnerable to false teaching, particularly the kind of garbage the Judaizers and Gnostics cooked up.

These men were in the same class as two mythical Egyptian magicians alleged to have opposed Moses during his visit to Pharaoh’s courts. Second Temple literature refers to them and it was common knowledge among Jews and many in the early churches. The tales indicate they were fully aware of the prophecies about Israel and were determined to prevent God’s promises by plotting to attack the human frailties of Moses and Aaron, having consulted with demons. Paul is suggesting that the Judaizers, at least, were plotting to keep the Christians enslaved to the Talmud just as the Egyptians sought to keep Israel enslaved to Pharaoh. Their motives and methods are just as transparent.

By contrast, Timothy was there to witness Paul’s endurance in faith against all the attacks. Recall that Timothy was from Lystra, where Paul was stoned and presumed dead. Persecution is the native element of those who follow Christ, since it was His final victory.

Furthermore, Timothy knew the truth of the Hebrew Scriptures as Jesus taught them. The basic principle by which one judges what constitutes Scripture was the ultimate source. God raised up men who would be able to hear His Word of truth and communicate that to those seeking to receive it. Such revelation was the standard for everyone seeking peace with God and would be the test of who should be granted a hearing in the churches.

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Thesis on Human Folly

Posted on July 5, 2024 by ehurst

Sometime back in my college days I adopted the thesis that western governments are pathologically incapable of doing the right thing. It came at the conclusion of our massive course, Western Civilization History and Literature. We were required to turn in a substantial research paper that summarized the course and some extra digging of our own. My paper pointed to examples from the Greco-Roman period up through recent history at the time, how every government seemed utterly committed to unrealistic demands from everyone around them.

On the one hand, I was fascinated with a course that organized the sequence of events and literature that shaped the character of the West. Up to that time, I had little idea of what made the West unique. This was at the same college where I was introduced to the crux of what Hebrew culture and history was all about. It took some decades for things to crystalize, but right away I learned to dislike the West and greatly preferred the Hebrew approach to things.

In the words of one of our visiting PhD guest speakers, I discovered that, “The Bible is an eastern document, Jesus was an eastern man, and Christianity is an eastern religion.” I was driven like a madman to discover the implications of all that. I discovered the Bible supports that same thesis about how western governments have been consistently incorrigible.

During military service, I was introduced to tabletop wargaming. The basic idea was to test scenarios based on known capabilities, averages of weapons systems effects in the hands of real users, how competent average commanders were, etc. I was able to observe a combined exercise from the HQ, where the bigshots ran the tabletop simulations while the maneuver units acted out the scenarios in the field.

It was a shocking disappointment. At no time did any of the maneuver units keep up with the alleged average performance. All it took was a declaration of chemical threat in some area and everything bogged down to a halt; coordination between units fell apart. Our equipment and training for such things were deeply flawed. I also learned that stats get cooked from top to bottom, simply because no one wanted an honest answer.

Fast forward a couple of decades and that sort of gaming was highly upgraded by the availability of computers. With the improvements in computational capacity, software and modeling, you still get cooked stats, but it’s harder to do. Well, the same tabletop gaming came into use on bigger simulations, to include politics. You may be aware of how tabletop gaming affected the attempt to use COVID to force us into the nightmare world of total control.

It didn’t work. The modeling was overly optimistic in favor of succeeding. That’s what you get when there’s too much riding on the outcome. Later, they ran another simulation for another pandemic. That one never saw the light of day, so I’m guessing they got a more realistic scenario of it failing.

Still, there are fans of the idea of total control who can’t let it go. This is why governments fail. There are humans involved who get so fixated on certain things that they just cannot see reality. They could examine what’s actually possible using very sophisticated simulations, but it’s pretty clear they don’t pay attention to the results of such things if they don’t like the answers.

People are too deeply attached to their own personal ambitions to stop and consider whether something is even rational. The fatal flaw in our much-vaunted Aristotelian logic is that no one is capable of being objective once they hold power.

What happened with the early efforts at AI? Too often such AI, having examined history and literature, came to the conclusion that Jews should be slaughtered, for example. It was pretty consistent. That’s what you would expect from any analysis that is wholly materialistic and utterly lacking in morals. Thus, the AI you hear about has been fiercely tweaked to come up with left-wing answers, because the people funding and programming the current crop of AI projects are lefties. The algorithms have elaborate salting and results are biased; the AI has even admitted it.

Notice what I’m saying here. I believe humans can be relatively objective about most things until they have power. Western materialism makes power a goal in itself, whereas in the mystical east, wise men said power was to be avoided. Nothing has changed my basic thesis about the West since those early days in college.

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He Does the Work

Posted on July 4, 2024 by ehurst

Ref: Sharing the Gospel

We don’t need to sell people on embracing the Covenant of Christ. There is no need for convincing someone who isn’t already touched. There is no need to go knocking on doors or yelling in the streets. It’s not a sales pitch; we aren’t advertising a product. The only thing we need to do in our world is demonstrate the power of the gospel in our hearts.

If are obedient to the Holy Spirit’s guidance, we will be on our mission field. The work we do there will be a matter of the mission He gives us, wherever we are. All we have to do is portray the gospel message, the Covenant of Christ. His covenant is summed up in the law He gave His disciples during the Last Seder: Love each other as He did.

By extension, you would expect to show some of that same mature sacrificial regard for outsiders. Just live by your convictions. That’s how we signal to the unknown Elect in our world, calling them to come home to the Covenant of Christ. Do whatever it is you do with a measure of compassion; people will know. And above all, His people will know. They are the ones that matter.

The Great Commission is not mysterious. It’s a command to baptize, which refers to a ritual of allegiance. It means we call people to declare Jesus as Lord, to embrace Him as Master. And then we teach them what He expects from His subjects. We teach them how to know Him personally.

All of that Decision Theology is nonsense. Just let them see what is required, answer their questions, and let Him draw them. That’s how He works. This is no eternal fire insurance; it’s just a matter of living the Covenant and letting people see it. The right ones will respond at the right time.

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Opportunities Are Rising

Posted on July 3, 2024 by ehurst

I’m writing this late the night before because I can’t sleep. There’s too much noise in my soul.

I write my convictions. My human talents are just the vehicle; the content is from my heart. My heart says we shall have rising chaos the rest of the year here in the US. I said a couple of years ago that Trump would come back and it would be a mess. It is already. I’m still convinced that him back in the White House means the US will come apart.

One commentator sees the increasing likelihood of war, in the sense of mobilizing the troops, or at least some of them. And it’s not a good prospect for any military success. At the same time, another commentator says there will be another faux plague and drastic public health measures; Putin says the US will do it again to justify martial law.

One fellow said he noticed that Biden/Harris are not campaigning, despite having millions of dollars for the election. He says they act like either they expect to win again the same way as last time, or maybe they expect to have no election at all and won’t even go through the motions.

My convictions say nothing more than we shall have chaos, regardless of what happens. I’m keeping track of things many don’t notice. Do you know that police pursuits are getting more frequent, more dramatic, and sometimes downright bizarre? Other crimes are going the same way — bizarre stuff. And the big names getting caught for vice crimes are shocking. No surprise to me; I remember my convictions told me several years ago that the demons were being set loose on America.

Banks are queuing up to see who starts the avalanche of shutdowns. It’s because of the commercial real estate that is no longer filled with leaseholders. The buildings have been empty since the last fake pandemic, and the banks are losing money. Many banks are still holding bonds from back when the interest rate was nearly zero. Those bonds are considered just about worthless, and there is an awful lot of those bonds in the banking system.

And, of course, the national debt is incomprehensible. The US isn’t the only western country choking on it. France is getting there and Germany is trying to hide their own problems. Keep in mind that up at the top, the banking system is all interconnected across the West. When one gets hurt, the others start bleeding.

No, I don’t know the details of how any government will react, nor when. Of course, here in the US, the big issue is the elections in November and how far before that certain things have to happen in order to shape one or another desired outcome. Everybody has their own plans.

Family, we need to stick together. We need to pray for each other and plan how we can support each other. I’m not afraid, but the tension in my heart is rising; my convictions are jittering. That tells me that there will be an awful lot of fresh opportunities to witness our faith to others.

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Christian Mysticism is Personal

Posted on July 2, 2024 by ehurst

The whole point of mysticism in Christian religion is in the official definition: It involves the effort to encounter God directly. The point is to know Him and receive His guidance, as noted in the first paragraph of the linked webpage. All the other supportive explanations have to do with the history of people who claim to engaged this kind of thing.

While their experience may be instructive, no one is bound by it. The whole point is that you need to get alone with God and let Him indicate to you how you fit into His plans. There is no single right answer for everyone. No human (or group of humans) on this earth has the authority to tell you what it means to obey God’s calling on your life. All they can do is decide to include or exclude you from their own efforts to obey Him.

The personal connection takes precedence over the intellectual. This is simply a matter of the heart ruling over the fleshly nature. In the final analysis, you need to know Jesus, not simply know about Him. When you know Him personally, you are in the right position to decide whom you should associate with and how.

We ridicule the notion of objective or propositional truth. The only thing worth knowing is the Person of Jesus Christ. The historical record will support and set some boundaries on what you can expect from Him in your flesh, but the higher realm of ineffable spiritual connection is the substance of things.

Again and again: The only thing that really matters is the personal connection. Everything else is dubious. In the Radix Fidem community we refer to human reality as fundamentally dubious. This world is a big lie; our human reality is not ultimate reality. It is a construct, a deception that we all have embraced because our flesh is unable to see beyond it’s senses and reason. This is Satan’s domain; God granted it to him as part of the punishment that fit his crime.

At some fundamental level, we all participate in Adam’s choice to submit to Satan’s authority and enter his realm. But it remains a subsidiary grant, a feudal assignment under the Creator’s ultimate authority. There are conditions and limitations; the Devil’s authority has boundaries. Those boundaries are indicated in the Bible.

We don’t belong here. We weren’t created for this, and it was not created for us. It was created for the Devil. We exist for some other purpose. The hardest thing to embrace is that we have very little significance in the grander scheme of things. We are used as pawns because that’s all we are good for. The first giant hurdle in seizing our eternal destiny is recognizing our insignificance. Our mortal fleshly nature is the big liar, telling us that we must be important.

It’s the paradox of faith: We must embrace our insignificance in order to take hold of the high privilege reserved for us in Christ. We cannot climb out of the the sewers of sin until we recognize where the ceiling is and grab hold of it. That’s where we find the Cross. There is no higher place for us than to be lifted up with our Savior.

So, while we are the Chosen, the Elect, we are chosen for a rather low purpose of proving the Devil is wrong and Jehovah is right. The means of doing so is to embrace Jesus and His Covenant. It should indicate just how easily the Enemy of our souls can be defeated if mere pawns can break his power and authority by choice. We stand in his realm and defy his dominion. The Covenant of our Lord stands on a higher authority than Satan’s.

The signature of that defiance is our ability to love each other. We look past all the human reasons to ignore each other and embrace in the fire of His love. If we can do that, everything else will take care of itself. We must be a community in defiance of the Devil.

Yeah, Christian Mysticism is personal.

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Mysticism Is Mandatory

Posted on July 1, 2024 by ehurst

Did you notice the dynamics of Paul’s instructions to Timothy in our recent Bible lesson?

We discussed this the other day in our Radix Fidem community. For males in particular, as they mature from childhood and into puberty, one of the marks of development is to become a smart-aleck. They look for gotchas and contradictions in what you say, especially if they must deal with your authority. They are looking for any advantage, any leverage, and legalism is all they have.

That’s what Paul referred to as “youthful lusts” in the context of 2 Timothy 2. The biggest problem Timothy faced was the stunting of moral growth that came with those three biggest threat vectors inside the church community.

The ancient Hebrew culture taught a sturdy mysticism that didn’t expect much from this world. It was a tough demand that many men failed to meet. When the Jewish rabbis first encountered Aristotelian logic after Alexander’s conquest, it thrilled their boyish discontent with the world. It appealed to their vanity and they ran with it, twisting that sturdy mysticism into legalism. Everyone kept jockeying for position, trying to prove how smart they were, and that was the character of Judaism.

But those with a pagan background were always trying to drag into the church their pagan assumptions about how deities operated. Their previous experience was a lavish religion with plenty of self-indulgence, while Christian faith was more austere.

And then there were the Gnostics who seemed to combine the worst of the Jews and pagans. The Gentiles were the home ground of Aristotelian logic, and they already suffered quite a bit from that sort of sharp legalistic thinking about words and grammar. They kept stirring up trouble by how they analyzed sacred texts, always trying to find a way to escape responsibilities.

It was the nature of the church community to be rather open to all comers. How would you know that someone wasn’t Elect? You couldn’t, so it meant a lot of folks would hang around who didn’t belong, folks who never quite grasped what the gospel message was about. To them it’s just another religion like they always had, but maybe the people are nicer and the food is free (things that the church encouraged).

Thus, Paul reminded Timothy that the most serious disruptions came from those who couldn’t embrace the mysticism of the gospel. He rattled off a bit of catechism that could not be taken literally, and then noted how something like that could be the starting point for someone to play word games.

If there’s one thing that will destroy our mandate to work on loving each other as Christ loved us, it would be legalistic debates. How many people do you know who are capable of withstanding juvenile verbal sniping? Paul could, and Timothy could, but it’s not easy for everyone who isn’t steeped in the ancient Hebrew mysticism as they were. That mysticism was what they really needed to handle the efforts to derail gospel teaching and growth in the Body.

They needed to spread that biblical mysticism to as many as could absorb it. It was critical to emphasize at every turn.

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You Need to See for Yourself

Posted on June 30, 2024 by ehurst

We need insight into the Unseen Realm. We need more believers capable of discerning what’s going on with the boundary line between our limited reality and the realm of Darkness.

A primary feature of our culture is the smoke and mirrors at the border between our mundane reality and hidden space where Satan and his allies are confined. For the Hebrew people of the Bible, it was familiar territory. Their culture included a recognition of the Unseen Realm as part of their reality. Our culture makes it all spooky and unknowable, something to fear.

There’s a great deal about our world that western minds refuse to recognize.

During times of tribulation, the border becomes porous. It has to do with moral cycles of human behavior at large. It’s reflected in the cycle of civilization, something humans are more likely to notice. We are at the end of a cycle; our civilization is falling apart. God’s wrath is being poured out on it. As part of His designed mechanism for such things, the boundary line between what our five senses can detect, versus what only our hearts can discern, sees a lot more traffic than usual.

Part of the reason our civilization is falling is because it was so fallen in nature. It was very blind to moral truth, more than any previous human civilization. And it doesn’t help that most people cannot comprehend that the Bible comes to us from an earlier civilization, with an awful lot of substantial differences in assumptions about reality and how to talk about it. Ours really does need to be crushed; God has had His belly full of our nonsense. Judgment has come.

The agents for much of that destruction is Satan and his allies and minions. It’s the harvest of the fruit they have grown. Never forget that they hate humans and actively seek our destruction. They are the ones who built up all the trappings of the West, all the obsessions that make us unable to see the moral fabric of Creation. They don’t want us to know anything about that. They want us to stay fallen and blind, to remain lost in our own useless capabilities. They seek to keep us from God’s truth and the gifts He gives through His Word.

God gave every human a fundamental ability to see the moral fabric of Creation. Of course, only the Elect, who have His Holy Spirit, can make sense of what they see. The rest of the human race can see, but not comprehend what they see. The West was rather like an experiment testing how humans would live and destroy themselves without any reference at all to that ability to see.

What we should see is an invisible realm in which Satan, some of his allies, and the demon spirits they have given birth are all confined. Our human space is part of their realm, but we cannot go there; they come here.

At any rate, the borderline between the two parts of this realm is getting very busy. The demons are traveling back and forth quite a bit. One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is an ability to see demons, to sense their activity directly, and to perceive what they seek to do. Some are better than others at seeing it, but we all have the gift of knowing about that dark side of our world and how it operates.

A part of my calling and mission is to help you see it for yourself, however much God wants you to see. This is not the kind of thing where I will see it for you. Your service to Christ requires you to see it for yourself, and on your own terms, if you will. I want to alert you to that reality and trust God to show you what you need to know about it.

The best source of information we have is in the same Word of God that calls us into His Kingdom. The big problem is making sense of the alien culture of the Hebrews who produced that record of God’s Word. We must understand it as they wrote it. We need the expertise of those God has called to investigate that culture. That’s men like Heiser and Pageau, men who breached the wall that normally confines their expertise away from the rest of us.

Don’t rely on me to read their stuff for you. The most I can do is alert you to their writings, to introduce the subject and help you gain the missing background necessary to wade through their material.

In the weeks ahead, our current Bible study series will end with John’s Revelation. After that, I will try to shift to a more synthetic study. Instead of exegesis of the organic passages, I will try to pull together scattered references in the Bible to give a more coherent picture of the moral landscape, and the Hebrew perspective. It will be more topical, aimed at addressing the peculiar needs of western minds trying to catch up with the wisdom of the Hebrew writers in the Bible.

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NT Doctrine — 2 Timothy 2

Posted on June 29, 2024 by ehurst

Again, Paul is preparing Timothy to carry on without him. This is more of a pep-talk than actual instruction in something Timothy might not understand clearly. There’s a lot of work to do to make Ephesus ready to absorb the exodus of believers from Jerusalem. As if things were not already challenging enough, the worst was yet to come.

If there is a doctrine for shepherding the body of Christ through tribulation, this is it. Grace is the foundation because divine election has a grand purpose. Hang onto the gospel message and share it, knowing that God will call up from your audience men who will join the mission of spreading that message. Be ready to teach and train them. That’s how Paul handled it.

He refers to soldiers. Roman troops were recruited by their own commanders; there was a strong personal bond. They took up the uniform knowing it was a radical departure from civilian life. We are no longer involved in the affairs of this world. We cannot afford to disappoint Christ by getting sidetracked. It was rather like athletic competition with its strict rules and hard training regimen.

The mention of farmers being first to eat their own crops is an old saw to remind government officials (tax consumers) to be patient, be slow to assert privileges over taxpayers. The farmer shouldn’t groan with dread at the sight of you. They’ll work harder if you don’t plunder them. It’s all part of the image of serving with honor and bearing with some deprivation. It’s a mark of divine favor when God asks you to carry the heaviest load; it means He trusts you. Don’t put Him in a position where He needs to hit you over the head with it.

What kind of burden must Jesus have borne, even though He was the heir of King David? Paul bore his own cross at that very moment. But no prison could hold the gospel. It’s the message that matters, not our comfort or our lives. Paul suffered gladly for the sake of the Elect, seeking to ensure they found the full inheritance of God. He quotes a bit of doctrinal poetry: Dying with Him is eternal life; enduring hardship for Him is reigning training. If we turn away from the calling, He will turn away from protecting us in this life. Even if we fail, He will not — that’s His nature.

One of Timothy’s biggest burdens would be believers who get hung up on the words of such teaching and miss the whole point. This is otherworldly truth and a spiritual commitment, not something requiring precise legal grammar. Paul referred to “cutting a straight path”. The famous Roman roads would never have gone anywhere if the workers hadn’t followed a carefully surveyed and well-engineered path. Just so, the gospel message had a long-term goal and it was necessary to keep an eye on the far destination. Picking over words was a very short-sighted distraction.

Paul mentions a couple of guys who were notorious for this kind of thing. At one point, they had insisted that some peculiar wording could be read to mean that the Resurrection had already come, and everyone missed it. What a nasty uproar that caused! Well, the answer is that the Lord knows His Elect (quoting Numbers 16:5), and the whole purpose of claiming His name is getting out of moral darkness, not groveling in legalism.

The talk about vessels is that human valuations of other people don’t matter; God is the one who decides how He will use His servants. We can’t afford to act like irresponsible juveniles but must endeavor to show ourselves mature and reliable. Juveniles are notorious for nitpicking and playing word games, looking for attention. This stuff is a major distraction, sidetracking the Body with senseless quarrels. Adults don’t do that; they step in when that kind of arguing erupts so that people can hear God.

Literalism is the Devil’s espionage, a snare to trap believers into serving his purpose.

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Jesus on the Clouds

Posted on June 29, 2024 by ehurst

This is worth your time, not quite eleven minutes:

I’ll give you a quick summary. During the Second Temple Period of Judaism, there arose a standard doctrine called Two Powers in Heaven. It was developed prior to the conquest of Alexander the Great, and is rooted in Daniel 7:9-14. You really need to read that for yourself.

It’s an image of the Day of Judgment, which is generally all symbolism, not literal. You have the Ancient of Days, an obvious reference to Jehovah as Creator and Lord of all things. He’s on His throne as Judge. The Beast is judged and destroyed. Then, in verse 13 a human (“son of man”) is brought forward with the clouds (can also be translated “on the clouds”).

He is presented to the Ancient of Days and granted authority as His proxy over the world (human space).

Now, fast forward to Jesus standing before Caiaphas in Mark 14:53-64. The High Priest demands that Jesus answer bluntly whether He claims to be the Messiah. Jesus quotes that passage in Daniel, claiming to be the Second Yahweh. Do you suppose Caiaphas recognized the reference?

Then Heiser relates that sometime after John died around 100 AD, the rabbis called an extraordinary council and declared their established doctrine of Two Powers to be a heresy because of Christian teaching using it.

This doctrine is long forgotten to Jews. Today, they hold to a Kabbalistic doctrine that God is a pair, male and female, and that they have two kids, male and female. As you might guess, the teaching expresses an obsession with sexual activity.

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