They Are Not Your Friends

Posted on June 7, 2020 by ehurst

Get a clue believers: This world is your enemy. You aren’t this world’s enemy; you are one of its best friends. But it has made itself the enemy of your Father, your Savior and yourself.

If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, “A servant is not greater than his master.” If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake, because they do not know Him who sent Me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would have no sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. He who hates Me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would have no sin; but now they have seen and also hated both Me and My Father. But this happened that the word might be fulfilled which is written in their law, “They hated Me without a cause.” (John 15:18-25 NKJV)

You do the world no favors by acting as it does. Granted, there are some things humans do regardless of their orientation, but there are plenty of things this world does specifically because it rejects divine revelation. We have a duty to discern those things, and sometimes to point them out as such. A true believer cannot afford to give approval to systems and ideas contrary to divine revelation.

On the other hand, the whole concept of having a witness is mostly a matter of simply living the Word in defiance of the world’s ways. It doesn’t have to make sense to people who don’t walk the heart-led path of faith, but our habits must be consistent with the path back to Eden. We belong to a different culture because we belong in a different world, and we must manifest that difference. This is our message.

Stop clinging to this life, this world. There is nothing here that will be remembered in Eternity, except those things you do for the Lord’s glory. The most precious treasure of all will be the souls you touched, the people who were moved to embrace the Kingdom because of your otherworldly witness. Stir their hearts by a commitment to a way of life that often makes no sense at all in terms of human reason. Reason is the place we fell to in the Fall, dropping out of the Garden of Eden where divine revelation dominates.

Genuine faith makes the most audacious and unreasonable demands. Living by those demands will draw the contempt and anger of this world because it brings conviction and discomfort. Stop trying to make sense to them; they are not your friends.

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Law of Moses — Judges 3:12-30

Posted on June 6, 2020 by ehurst

The basic cyclical pattern of Judges goes like this: Israel would engage in idolatry. God would remove their covering and deliver them into an oppressor’s hands. They would pay a hefty tribute to someone who was not a covenant ruler. Their economy would suffer from the drain. After doing this for a while, they would remember to call on Jehovah. It wasn’t necessarily full repentance, but they would call on Him as their national deity. He would send someone to execute covenant justice and deliver them from oppression. Things would be fine until that deliverer died and then Israel would slip back into idolatry again.

During this period they could really drift very far into pagan ways. We get little bits here and there indicating just how normalized it became from time to time. Consider that the very name of Samson celebrated a pagan deity, and some of his exploits were related to pagan practices for marriage and romance.

The story of Ehud rests on a wealth of historical detail that is not included in our Scripture text. The author presumed the reader already knew the story, but if everything we find pertinent was included, the Bible would be a massive tome. While we cannot trust the Talmudic legends, and better sources are few, we can get a clearer picture than what one might guess from the text itself. Keep in mind that the Book of Judges is not in chronological order as we would view it, so the dates of the various narratives can only be guessed.

We know that Moab had several tribes jockeying for primacy, just like a lot of other tribal nations in the Ancient Near East (ANE). Eglon’s pedigree is uncertain, but we know that he would have struggled with keeping the whole nation behind him. Most likely he rose to prominence through bribery after some windfall. This is most likely how he managed to gain an alliance with the Ammonites and Amalekites. These he then relied on to keep him in power over his own Moabites. In the narrative here, Eglon’s behavior betrays a man who faced intrigue against his life every day.

Using his freshly assembled army, he raided the area of Jericho (City of Palm Trees). Once they held it, the area became a source of revenue to help him stay in power. Besides, Jericho had been rebuilt by now and he had himself a nice palace there. It was out of easy reach from his competitors among the Moabites, and it was a really nice place to live. It was warm in the winter, wet in the dry seasons, and provided crops year round. Whatever size he was when this all started, living in Jericho kept him fat — massively obese, even.

So this situation lasted 18 years before Israel started paying more attention to their own God. The Lord raised up Ehud. A significant number of Benjamites were left-handed. That was a very rare trait in the ANE. Given the length of his rule, Eglon’s bodyguard probably became a little complacent about some things. Ehud, as a noble warrior, put himself at the head of the tribute delivery entourage. He had strapped to his right inner thigh a bronze dagger the length of his forearm, and it would have been handle down. Eglon’s bodyguard were unlikely to search there because it would be inconvenient to a right-handed fighter, if you understand the protocols of how this stuff works.

Eglon had a promenade leading to his palace, and the entrance was near Gilgal, the old circle of stones just across the spring creek from Jericho. He would have received this tribute outdoors in some nice shady spot. After having presented several wagon loads of seasonal produce, the group was heading back to the wadi they used as a highway into the Hills of Ephraim. Ehud stopped at the gateway of this promenade where Eglon’s stone pagan images stood, carved at a nearby quarry. Ehud turned back and returned to the outdoor meeting place near the palace. He told Eglon the he had a secret message.

Eglon was hardly suspicious of this. After nearly two decades of faithful service from Israel, and constant unrest from his own nation and neighbors east of the Jordan Valley, it didn’t surprise him that a faithful Hebrew would have a warning about some new intrigue among Eglon’s allies. So the king told Ehud not to speak. He hastily arranged for a private interview in his upper floor breeze room.

This would have been a nice room atop the palace, probably with a secure but open lattice to allow the breezes to help keep him cool. The man didn’t get around very fast, and we should expect he was most often in that breeze room. So he went up there and sent out all his servants, since he could probably never guess who was spying for an enemy and plotting against him.

Ehud would have walked in and dropped to one knee near the man’s throne, and bowed over with his face down to the floor. Announcing that he had a message from Jehovah, Eglon respectfully stood at the invocation of a deity. With his right knee bent in front of him, Ehud could reach unnoticed for the long dagger strapped to the inside of his right thigh, whip it out and stab Eglon low in the belly before the fat man even realized he was hurt. The large gut was pushed back by the thrust, then fell back over the handle of the weapon. Ehud needed to move fast and didn’t bother trying to fish it out for a second strike. Besides, it cut through his entrails and some of the contents oozed out. So he stepped out quickly and locked the door behind himself.

Eglon would have used a chamber pot, and it no doubt smelled like it at this point. So the various servants held back until they felt embarrassed enough to try sneaking into the breeze room for a peek. The found a very messy corpse of Eglon. By this time Ehud was already hustling up the wadi to give the prearranged signal that he had been successful at killing the tyrant. Nothing in the Law inhibits this kind of assassination of a ruler who wasn’t under the Covenant. Never forget: the Covenant is the sole moral covering. Meanwhile, Eglon’s court was thrown into chaos, since any number of parties would have been happy to sponsor Ehud if they had known of his plans.

So the Israeli troops were already primed for action and assembled quickly, while Eglon’s forces were probably thinly scattered and of questionable loyalty in the first place. Ehud’s attack quickly overwhelmed the troops stationed around Jericho. The whole thing was a really big surprise to Eglon’s army. With Moab’s internal disunity, and the lack of vested interest for the Amalakites and Ammonites to defend Moab, it meant a fairly quick defeat.

The tactic described in the narrative was a quick force seizing the fords which were upriver from Jericho, the only reasonable path between there and Moab. So the guard force in Jericho was isolated, outnumbered and slaughtered. Also, no messenger could have gotten through and raised the alarm back home. As even more Israeli troops assembled in the Jordan Valley, they could march against Moab itself in a surprise invasion. The situation was reversed as Moab now gave tribute to Israel for the next 80 years.

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Culture, Not Civilization

Posted on June 5, 2020 by ehurst

It’s not just Western Civilization, but civilization itself in general has been unfriendly to genuine faith in God. Meanwhile, it’s quite possible to have a deep and strong culture without herding people into urban concentrations.

The whole purpose of a city is to increase the local population enough to allow specialization and efficiencies of scale. That points to materialism. It doesn’t require conscious materialistic goals for a city to turn out that way. It’s part of the package. And the whole point of civilization is to make it possible for people to live in cities. It requires a cultural refinement that restrains people from killing each other over petty differences. While that may sound like a good thing, the specific aim of developing a civic culture is to enable materialistic pursuits. Thus, those “petty differences” addressed arise only in terms of material-centric concerns.

It’s only hinted at in Genesis, but the original dispersion of humanity outside of Eden quickly divided into two groups: Children of God and Children of Men. Those terms are challenging to parse, but it basically means Children of Faith and Children of the Fall, respectively. The former would naturally have a far less materialistic interest. Thus, they would have been pastoral and rural. The latter group wasted no time in trying to build cities, and it climaxed with the Tower of Babel.

There is no way we will ever get rid of cities and civilizations until Christ returns. Of course, they will both tend to come and go, but they will never disappear as long as a significant portion of humanity remains materialistic in their pursuits. The issue here is that we would hope that people of faith would recognize that getting too comfortable in the urban environment is not a good thing.

I confess that God requires me to live in a suburb of Oklahoma City. I will be the first to tell you I don’t care for all the conveniences. I’ll use them because they can serve a divine purpose, but it is all derivative of the mission itself. If my mission didn’t include using the Internet, there would likely be zero reason for being in this environment. There’s a good reason why most of my bike rides take me out into rural areas: I don’t want to be in the city. I’d much rather spend my waking hours out in natural environments away from large concentrations of other people, especially people who really like being in the city. I want to spend more time with the “people” who aren’t fallen.

Meanwhile, a very critical vision in my Kingdom service is the image of people who belong to a revelation culture. They are fully aware of the heart-led way and the full depth of faith, but are prepared to go wherever God sends them. They would avoid getting sucked into the trap of “making the world a better place” because they are too busy trying to get folks interested in some other place, not this world.

It’s a culture oriented on divine revelation.

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Can’t Get Enough of That Fellowship

Posted on June 4, 2020 by ehurst

The message has been pretty harsh on the other blog this past week. It’s the message for those who are not heart-led, whose faith is suspect because they aren’t obeying the Word. They get the Law part of divine revelation because they are on that level. Ephesians 2:10 says that God made us alive in Christ for the purpose of an existence consistent with His divine moral character. While Paul uses the term “good works” there, we should all know He consistently said it was impossible to do genuinely good works outside the Covenant of Christ.

So we aren’t in this to get our heads on straight. Getting our heads on straight is just a part of the good works. And the good works are never done; they are merely the expression of our changed nature. But claiming a changed nature means nothing if that change is not manifest in the net change in our behavior. The whole thing is organic and cannot be sliced and diced for viewing under the microscope. The moment you begin to deconstruct, the whole thing dies and what you get is death. It’s all one thing or it’s nothing.

We speak the prophetic message in demanding people do things they cannot do without Christ. We voice His demands, wholly consistent with the track record of His servants from the past. We know that people can’t do those things without a touch from His hand, but that’s the whole point of every Law Covenant: making it obvious you can’t do without Him.

The doorway to grace is the Cross, our New Testament equivalent of the Flaming Sword. We must crucify our own carnal natures. Without the Cross, there can be no genuine faith in Christ.

On the other side of the Cross is the Covenant. And without a covenant community, we are not serving Him. He intended that His Body be scattered over the earth, just like at the Tower of Babel. Each community of faith will generate its own unique covenant identity. So we should know instinctively that each local body will have it’s own subsidiary covenant of the Covenant. No two bodies will live in the same exact context as each other, so variations in those small-c covenants is a necessity. Our subsidiary covenants reflect the unique context in which we find ourselves called together, but must be true to the capital-c Covenant.

“Do not neglect the assembly” speaks to the purpose of a covenant community: We require fellowship to live by faith. Equipping is ongoing. No one of us is complete alone; we are a body fitted and held together by what each member provides (Ephesians 4:16). I need you, and you need me. If you withhold your fellowship, I suffer. My faith and yours will both suffer, and our ability to manifest His glory will be weakened.

Keep in touch or we die. All the more so during this tribulation. That “big thing” I’ve mentioned a few times is here now. It’s the undeclared martial law conditions of the quarantines, and now the riots, and whatever else the Nimrods of this world dream up. Of course there’s more to come. This isn’t going to stop until it has served God’s wrathful purpose in the US. This is going to be hard enough on us with strong fellowship; it will be an embarrassment to His glory without that fellowship.

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Messenger Duty

Posted on June 3, 2020 by ehurst

Today’s ride was a real blessing; I gained some really useful insights on things.

Bikepacking is my peacetime calling. It’s the default mission when nothing else is pressing. Unfortunately, we are at war — quarantines, riots and etc. demand that I mobilize for my reserve mission. Blame it on the enemy; they jumped in with a surprise attack on our covenant calling. My wartime mission is information hacker. That means countering PsyOps and war propaganda. I need to make sure God’s people can keep a clear understanding of what’s going on so they can react effectively to the move of the Holy Spirit. These are not normal times, so the threat environment is very high.

So instead of training on the bike to ride all day every day, I’m not training at all. I’m just out transporting my lardy butt to places where the Lord wants to speak to me. Sure, there’s a fitness angle, but it’s just the general goal of making sure that this body remains optimally useful for as long as I live. Nor does it mean I won’t get to do any bikepacking, but that there will be heavy restrictions on it. It’s not a high priority during mobilization.

It also changes how I view the difference between this and the other blog. The other is for milk, general moral nutrition for folks who can’t handle much. It’s like teaching the obvious meaning of the Law part of the Covenant. This blog is for meat. Now that may vary between scrambled eggs and a big fat juicy steak, but it’s not just milk. Here we cover the deeper, more mystical aspects of the Covenant.

This mission makes everything feel different. I’m much more likely to disrupt my daily routine in order to work at capturing in words the things that flow through my soul. That’s because there’s a very high probability of critical traffic. I’m more likely to neglect my fleshly human side in some ways. It means missing sleep sometimes or grabbing food that’s quick and easy. It’s hard to plan routine activity with any assurance that something won’t come through with a higher priority. When God is at work like this, He reserves the right to throw surprises at me.

So today’s ride wasn’t training, and it wasn’t a photography ride. It was transportation; it was a message ride. I’ve been warned that things will get hairy as the war progresses. No, I have no idea what that will look like. I have to be ready for anything. This is the “big thing coming” my wife and I kept sensing over the past few weeks.

One more thing: Information hacking means more chatter about computer stuff. That’s just a matter of tools, shop talk for information hacking, and you should expect to see it on the other blog.

That’s all I have for now. God bless you.

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Let It Shine

Posted on June 1, 2020 by ehurst

On some level, keep in your awareness the eternal perspective on things.

The purpose of Creation has always been to vindicate the glory of the Creator. It serves as a demonstration of His justice. It quite naturally reflects His moral character in order to achieve that. How else can His moral justice be vindicated if it is not tested and proved in playing out the scenario based on His declared will?

So the universe reflects His will. It requires a special blindness to ignore His moral character; it’s plainly visible and woven into the fabric of reality. That blindness is precisely what came upon the human race in the Fall. It was a blindness of choice, of usurping the designed function of the human consciousness. Humanity prefers to trust its own capabilities — perceptions and reason — than to rely on the revelation of God’s moral purpose. The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is all about the choice to decide for oneself what is, or ought to be, good and evil. “You shall be like God, deciding good and evil” was Satan’s lie (the Hebrew word translated as “know” actually referred to a judicial function; it meant judging).

So we became mortal, denied access to the Tree of Life. This mortal existence remains a proving ground, a place where you and I play out for some ineffable audience the difference between what we can come up with against what God has declared, what God built into the very existence of reality. Revelation isn’t merely punitive; it’s primary goal is restoring us to Eden. The punishments are meant to drive us back into His arms. Of course there are thresholds beyond which you cannot be redeemed. God alone knows where that is for each person He has made.

Don’t try to mix in the doctrine of Predestination here; the human mind is incapable of understanding how accountability and predestination work together. They do; God says so. But He also says you can’t comprehend how it works. Stop trying to figure it out, because it will only lead to very confused theology, such as the stupid debate between Arminian and Calvinist theologies.

So revelation is meant to funnel us back into Eden. If you cling to the premise of the what got us kicked out of Eden, you’ll never get back to Eden. There is only one gate, and there is no alternate path. From where we stand today, the one path is the Person of Jesus Christ; the Flaming Sword has become the Cross (Galatians 2:20). It’s not a question of knowing His name or the ritual of declaring allegiance. It’s a question of embracing the path back to Eden consistent with what Jesus taught by His words and His life, His death, His resurrection. He’s there and calling to the entire human race, regardless what name you choose to call Him.

The message is the thing.

Indeed, the message takes priority over human life. It’s more important to you than your continued existence is this miserable fallen mortality. It’s more important to the world than any human life, or all human life. The message — AKA the Word — will be here until the Word comes back for one final act of redemption. In that day, all that fallen humanity has done will be wiped away from Creation. The natural world, the whole universe, is not fallen, but is under mismanagement of morally blind humanity. All the crappy results of that mismanagement will be wiped away and Eden restored to its designed conditions (2 Peter 3:10-13).

Until that Final Day, all things are slowly degrading toward that utter chaos that God can no longer tolerate. Granted, we can see from history that it’s waves of chaos, followed by yet another wave of pitiful human creativity, another fresh rebirth of art and culture. Over and over, humanity builds yet another Tower of Babel to gain access illusory access to eternity. And every new civilization is founded on principles contrary to the Word, so that they will also be destroyed in due time. All of this will testify time and time again to the inherent divine justice of the Creator. What humans can cook up from their own capabilities without revelation is always fatally flawed.

Yes, the Word reveals a path to life that would and could work to provide everything humans actually need, and a good measure of providing for our aspirations and dreams. It would be a culture of sorts, but you would not call it a civilization, because it does not lend itself to living in cities, which is a primary part of the definition of “civilization.” The way of revelation does not answer human greed and lust for control, so nobody much will ever take the Word seriously. Therefore, every civilization will die a messy death.

Sure, mourn at the loss of lives to which you are close. Mourn at the sorrow of being deprived of your happiness. But while you are at it, mourn even more over the rejection of revelation that necessitates death. Learn to expect mortality and destruction and chaos, because it is the nature of his fallen world. Take it with aplomb.

When some talking head on TV mouths the shocked words of sadness at the loss of life, regardless whose life, all I can say is, “Frickin’ moral fool; your life is forfeit, too.” The people who claim the riots are in any way justified by some injustice are missing the point, same as the folks who justify the crack-downs. Both sides want the same thing: wealth and power. One side has it and tries to keep it; the other side tries to take it. What they both want is unjust in itself. The Word says this life is not precious. Injustice is inevitable without the revelation of God. Our whole society was built on injustice from the very start, and it has piled up more injustice day after day by rejecting revelation.

Even people without referring to revelation saw this day coming. They may have attributed it to various mechanical errors in building and keeping a stable society, but they saw it coming. They aren’t surprised by the riots; they saw them as inevitable. But America was not founded in biblical values in the first place. It was founded on Enlightenment philosophical lies. Reading those flawed notions back into the Bible doesn’t make them good or right. Proclaiming yet older Western values doesn’t make it any better; it was founded on a rejection of revelation. The record of that is clear.

The Word will be here after America is long forgotten. We can either participate in the Word or we can let ourselves be wrapped up in the sorrows of celebrating our fallen natures, as if that was something to be proud of. Stand aloof. Weep for your own losses, but don’t pretend God is obliged to take action according to your personal sense of justice. Rather, look for ways to assert His revelation and celebrate His glory in the midst of His wrath. For His wrath on sin is a part of His glory.

Let it shine.

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Law of Moses — Judges 2

Posted on May 30, 2020 by ehurst

The balance of the Book of Joshua relates the destruction of the most significant temple cities. Then, when God told Joshua to pass the torch, for the duration of that generation of people, Israel continued subduing the people of the Promised Land. Things went well until that generation aged and died off. Then the tribes began to weaken in their warfare, and great many pagan nations were left in the land.

Our focal passage explains why that happened. First, we need to understand that the Hebrew term translated as “Angel of the Lord” is a title, but it refers to several different angelic characters in the Old Testament, so it’s not a permanent assignment. Without a specific name name, it signals more the nature of the assigned mission: This angel was sent with a message directly from God’s throne. It will be the words of God in the mouth of another, speaking on His behalf.

In typical Hebrew fashion, we are given an image of this angel marching up the long wadi from Gilgal, where at least the leadership of Israel still camped. The Hebrew scribes were notorious for drifting back and forth in chronology, so this event with the angel was sometime before Joshua’s final retirement ceremony, to set the stage for the rest of this book.

God rescued them from slavery in Egypt and, keeping His promise to the Patriarchs, brought the nation to the inheritance land. He empowered them to defeat all enemies, but they were obliged to cleanse the land and ensure Jehovah alone was worshiped there. They didn’t do that. As Joshua and his retainers aged, the newer generations became less zealous, and began to compromise. They allowed too many nations to remain as feudal vassals.

So God decided to let them have their way. He would not drive them out, either. Rather, He would let them stay and serve Satan as minions of temptation. They would be a perpetual test, drawing Israel off into idolatry if they could. The image was thorny bushes pulling at you as you pass, and snares that kept catching your feet. The implication dawned on the people and they wept in sorrow. The Hebrew name for the place was Bochim (“weeping”). We can’t be sure where this is, but it would almost have to be a place where an open assembly could be held. And it seems to be in the vicinity of ancient Bethel, probably at the highest end of the wadi everyone used to travel upland from Gilgal.

The passage goes on to explain that once Joshua retired and eventually passed away, and all the leaders who served under him, a new generation arose that had no memory of the mighty miracles God had done. For some reason, we get the feeling their parents failed to teach them in any organized fashion. So the people had lost their sense of identity; the Exodus and all the trials where God showed His sovereignty were forgotten. Since the rituals of the pagans worshiping Baal and Astarte in the land looked about the same as those they grew up with in Tabernacle worship, the Israeli people started drifted off into idolatry.

Things went from bad to worse. Having been handed a situation where their nation was the ruling class over the everyone else in the land, they started losing their edge and the tables turned on them. As they mourned their situation to Jehovah, albeit doing so only as their national deity, He sent a half-measure of relief: judges. There is no Western equivalent for what these leaders did, so the word “judges” is probably a bad translation: someone who pronounced sentence, to either vindicate or punish. They exercised authority in terms of Covenant holiness. They understood the demands of the Covenant and vindicated God’s demand for obedience. These people would demonstrate that obedience in sufficient measure to gain attention and start performing the miracles promised under the Covenant. Far from perfect, these people were simply a whole lot closer to strict obedience than anyone else around.

So these “judges” were appointed to serve for life, and were granted Covenant authority to execute God’s wrath on the idolaters who weren’t under the Covenant. We know that there were national judges and tribal judges, and some whose range of moral dominion isn’t obvious. So long as they lived, they executed God’s wrath on the folks Israel should have driven out long ago.

So the deliverance was always partial and conditional. Over the long haul, some of those infesting tribes and nations were killed off or driven out, but it was a very slow process during the time of the Judges. The text tells us God saw this coming, which is why He didn’t allow Joshua to conquer every last vestige of the Canaanites.

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No Approval Needed

Posted on May 29, 2020 by ehurst

You need no human’s approval.

Given that reality is quite variable, the only hope you have for solid ground on which to stand is your convictions. In theory, you should be able to read your convictions directly. It’s part of the result of moving your conscious awareness out of your head and into your heart.

However, most people are still working on that. It’s okay; start with your conscience. Your conscience is the brain’s interface with your convictions. Your convictions respond intimately and instinctively to God’s divine Presence, but your conscience has to learn. Your conscience on most issues will appear to change. That’s because it starts off pretty confused by all the various inputs; it’s vulnerable. So obey the conscience you have. When it fails — when it guesses wrongly — pay attention and learn from it. Eventually it will gain a sharper grasp on what your convictions demand.

By the way, “failure” in this sense is not the outcomes in terms humans measure such things. The only thing that matters is peace with God, which means a sense of peace with your own soul about how things turned out. As long as there are questions and discomfort, you don’t have peace. But at the same time, don’t get hung up on that. The point here is to teach your conscience, to learn how to read your convictions, not how to satisfy all the various scolding demands implanted by people in your human memory.

So we are back to the initial point: Learn to discount human approval. It’s a useful measure of what you’ll face, but it’s not any kind of moral barometer at all. The people around you who know God best are the ones who will make the fewest demands. They’ll keep throwing you back on your own convictions. The only demands they make are for things within their own feudal boundaries granted by God.

These are the people who will still believe you might be doing God’s will for you, even when they aren’t personally happy with what you choose. They may withdraw, but only because it’s necessary for their own sense of calling and mission. But they will still encourage you to follow your calling and mission, even from a distance. “Do what God says you have to do.” For example, they will tell you to never apologize for your sense of humor. Get new friends if you have to, people who will understand your sense of humor, but don’t look for human approval. That’s how God’s people will guide you. If it leads to conflict, they will trust the Lord for how it turns out, and not take it personally.

People who seek to expand their dominion beyond God’s grant are the ones who serve darkness, as far as you are concerned. People who register a sense of personal insult about your choices in serving the Lord are people you can ignore in your moral calculus. You may still have to deal with the temporal consequences of their displeasure, but it has no effect on your peace with God. The Lord allows a lot of crap like that, in part to test His people’s faith, but also because His agenda will never be clear to us in all details.

All we really need to know is what God demands of us, and no other human can justly assert what that has to look like. Only to the degree your divine service places you under someone else’s divine authority, and only in those things their authority covers, do you owe any accountability to another human. Covenant accountability has it’s own features and boundaries, but I can assure you the vast majority of this world, including professed Christians, have it all wrong. God has appointed no human to rule over your conscience. He never does that — ever.

During your childhood, it comes close to that with your parents. However, once you have your own sense of conviction, that recedes quickly. Godly parents know this and will restrain their guidance accordingly in stages. They will be looking for you to manifest a sense of divine urgency that releases them from responsibility, or a word from God to let you go in your sin. There is no “age of accountability” — there is only a manifestation of God working in your soul to generate a sense of moral consciousness.

The only question left is whether your mission means playing along because the issues at hand don’t matter, or whether you need to resist, and how you should resist. There is no good and proper way to resist that we can summarize in neat little rules. It ranges all over the map. God does commission elders to help you explore such questions, but they won’t decide for you. They can only be certain of what they themselves would do, and only God can confirm for you whether that matters and how it matters.

Least of all do you need the approval of established mainstream religious leaders. Deep and wide has been the compromise of organized religion with organized human politics, seeking to be taken seriously by the world. God calls us to testify to sin by openly rejecting prevailing standards. Most churches are not different enough from the world. You need to learn how to tell compromised religious leaders to get lost when they hold out hoops for you to jump through, hoops for which you have no drive from God to comply on some level. There’s nothing wrong with telling them,”Go screw yourself.” While it may not be appropriate to say those words in some settings, there are other ways to get it across.

God does call His servants to do some audacious and crazy things.

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Why God’s Wrath Is Falling

Posted on May 29, 2020 by ehurst

Christian Mysticism isn’t a collection of principles. Discussing it is a matter of offering counter-principles to false ideas; Christian Mysticism itself transcends principles, but offers some very pragmatic guidance.

So the counter-principles we have so far:

  • We are fallen creatures; we cannot trust human capabilities to come up with valid answers without divine revelation.
  • Ultimate reality is unknowable to our fallen minds. Divine revelation is ineffable to the intellect; only the heart can process it.
  • Reality is fungible — one person’s reality is as “real” as any other person’s.
  • There is no single objective reality. Even if there was, we could never know it. All we have is human experience and perception.
  • God’s revelation is not a thing, but His Person. Revelation cannot be objectified. There is no such thing as “propositional truth.” If it’s a proposition, it cannot be truth.
  • The only sensible course is to treat all of Creation, and reality itself, as a person — living, sentient and willful.
  • There cannot be peace among fallen humans, only passing truces.
  • There can be peace with God, so that’s what we seek. Gaining His peace will affect human existence.
  • God calls us to seek social stability as a component of His glory, but His terms are contrary to human reason: covenant tribal feudalism in small communities. No other form of human relations will receive His blessing.
  • Don’t be fooled; His reticence and patience should not be mistaken for His blessings.
  • We are individually accountable to God only for things that He places in our feudal dominion granted from Him. We cannot bless anyone who doesn’t come inside the boundaries of our domain. We must learn how this works on multiple levels.
  • There is no such thing as accountability to a wider society without a firm conscious commitment to a common covenant. Human law cannot substitute for a valid covenant.

So where does this bring us? This much is for sure: The current pendulum swing of evil demands that individuals yield to the deeply flawed demands of society. Righteousness and peace with God demands that society make more room for the individual to differ. Society must incorporate a higher expectation of accommodation for variations. A tightly defined range of “rights” will not do.

More to the point, God demands that society at large make room for small covenant groups to obey the Lord according to their shared conscience, and should not demand a false conformity. God’s people never stand alone; there is no Lone Ranger in the Spirit Realm. We were created for communion. But that communion is on His terms, and He forcefully reveals that what He wants are small household societies. This what we were created for.

In other words, God’s wrath is falling on America to enforce a decentralization of political authority. Our central government does not recognize God’s boundaries. In His revelation, the ideal for human existence in a fallen world is small covenant communities, tribal and feudal. Biblical guidelines indicate that, in terms of daily government in human life, anything above 50 (roughly) should be divided into smaller groups, separate households. The standard political unit is not the nuclear family household, but the extended family household. There are distinct Biblical Law restrictions on any conglomeration of those little households, but a covenant can accommodate larger groups. We can have nations that share a common cultural orientation, a common language and identity.

Any other binding principle runs afoul of God’s expectations, and will eventually harvest His wrath. Creation itself will fight against such a thing. All the more so when any centralizing force intrudes beyond certain boundaries, attempting to govern life issues that belong to the household elders. It’s fuzzy in legal terms because God also demands that leaders commune with Him and obey the convictions He places in their hearts. And He most certainly is not silent; if we seek His face, He will always answer. His answer to one will seldom be the same answer He gives another, at least in certain details. Again, the search for legalistic details is an abomination to God. Our world has long buried the legacy of how the moral logic and customized details work out, so it would have to be recovered before we could say much more about it.

Again, this has very potent pragmatic implications. In our current context, we can be sure that God’s wrath falls on society at large for poking its nose into the daily affairs of private human behavior. The burden is on society, not the individual, and not on the small group that feels led to take a different path.

So our God is destroying the institutions that bind humans together unjustly. Just as God forcefully decentralized Nimrod’s reign over the human race at the Tower of Babel, so the Lord today is crushing the systems that came far too close to being another Tower of Babel kind of idolatry.

Think of it this way: The Devil has convinced the Nimrods of this world — human predators — that the best way to enslave humanity is to atomize the biblical social structure, and make everyone stand on their own as isolated individuals. But then, all those individuals are herded pell-mell into one homogenized and dehumanized mass that is accountable to one central authority. You cannot restore individual liberty; there is no such thing. There is only covenant liberty in small tribal communities. The individual must yield to the family household, but a secular (non-covenant) social mass is no substitute for feudal family loyalty. The TPTB want to be your “daddy,” but without any compassion and accountability to God, and that’s an abomination.

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A Home Elsewhere

Posted on May 28, 2020 by ehurst

Another practical implication of Christian Mysticism is shrugging off persecution.

Jesus warned it was coming. Fallen human nature craves control and plunder, and divine revelation condemns that. We are duty bound to prophesy against those things. Anytime we start trying to set people free from such things, we threaten the existing institutions, which inevitably trend toward control and plunder (AKA enslavement). TPTB feeding off the existing system will always attack anyone who seeks the freedom and welfare of those TPTB control and plunder. It’s the fundamental reason why they crucified Jesus. It’s called persecution.

But our focus is not on fighting back against persecution. Sure, there are some among us called to answer, even debate, the persecutors. Still, the primary focus of what we do is celebrate the deliverance of the Lord. God needs no defenders; His Biblical Law is its own reward. We revel in His mercy and give thanks. Then we stand back and see what His power can do. This is our default approach to things.

The holiness of Christ will always be against the establishment. It’s not possible to establish anything in this fallen world without moral compromise. The very nature of this world system is hostile to divine revelation. There is no way to avoid the conflict; following Christ means shaking the establishment. It means walking out from under the control of the human political system because that system can never long permit free consciousness. It’s a relentless desire to control every factor that affects control and plunder. Serving the Lord means aligning yourself against all human systems.

What happens when you try to form a system consistent with the Word? It either compromises with the world, or it is attacked by the world. Any congregation of people with a common interest becomes an asset the system must control. But if you truly follow the Word, your congregation would be well nigh impossible to seize. The life of the Kingdom Eternal will never yield itself to human control. The moment you try to bring in human habits of organization, you have fundamentally changed the nature of the group. It becomes a human institution, subject to human leverage. The only system consistent with the Word is the very thing our carnal nature hates.

We must guard against the fleshly nature that demands something our human abilities can manipulate. It’s very frustrating, but you have to let go with your intellect and your hands, and let your heart run the show. Radix Fidem will never be anything more than a handful of people who love each other and share a commitment to something not of this world. What binds us together is ethereal; it’s no more than the gossamer links of heart-led volition. There’s nothing for human hands to attack and seize.

What’s left is our communications. This is what they will attack. We should expect some really nasty stuff intruding into our virtual spaces. Right now we have a lot of advantages, because networking itself does not easily yield to their kind of controls. God is our publicist and He brings to our message the people He wants to read it. The Devil will bring a lot of people who reject our message, and will attempt various ways to control it. Online persecution is still persecution, because the message itself is their enemy. In the long run, they won’t accomplish much. In the day-to-day, it can look bad at times, but the Lord won’t allow anyone to snuff out His voice in the hearts of His people.

Individuals among us will certainly suffer some significant sorrow, even death. But for Christian Mystics, death is the final reward in this life. We long to be with Our Lord in person, but only on His terms. We’ll gladly die when His time for us comes. Until then, we seek His power to withstand persecution. Fully embracing the meaning of Christian Mysticism makes the wait tolerable.

When you set your foot on this path, you set aside all human advantage. You take what God provides and drive forward against enslavement. We get free and draw others after us. The attraction is the power to overcome this world. Sure, God miraculously grants things that this world can see and understand, but for reasons it cannot. Don’t get lost in the miracles, because that leaves you still enslaved in this world. See the miraculous provisions as mere symbols, expendable to God. He can move mountains without batting an eye, and anything you need to shine His glory is easily granted.

None of it matters at all compared to the treasure of your heart set free to hear His voice, and the assurance your home is elsewhere.

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