Law of Moses — Deuteronomy 6

Posted on March 28, 2020 by ehurst

How would you maintain a feudal commitment to a Lord you never saw?

In the previous chapter, Moses reminded the people that it was their own decision to avoid getting too close to God. They begged Moses to go and face Jehovah on their behalf, and they would surely obey whatever it was Moses relayed to them. The Lord agreed to that, but even with the column of fire and smoke hovering over the Tabernacle, the people still quickly went astray.

The power of leadership cannot rest on a shock to the human senses. That might do well enough to establish authority, but it cannot maintain the sense of awe. The sense of awe must come from within; the newness of external shock wears off in the fleshly mind. So Jehovah lays before the people a very strong command to make a commitment from the heart.

So after a few introductory matters, He states flatly that He is their sovereign Lord, and they are His vassals. He is the one and only Master they have to deal with. It was utterly necessary that they fully commit their whole beings to Him. Nothing could be kept back.

Then in a symbolism they should have understood, the Lord warned them to provoke themselves from within, to find any and all means necessary to keep this fresh in their minds. It was literally their law to talk about this often, to teach and to make it a habit to think about it often. But everyone knows that, if it rests on a human discipline, it simply will not stand very long.

So the Lord goes on to remind them how much it will hurt if they forget.

He’s going to let them conquer the people and drive them out, and let His nation just walk right in and take over where the previous occupants left off. He was giving them the whole land and all its infrastructure as an inheritance. They didn’t have to work too hard for it. Would they be able to make it a habit of mind and mouth to give Him credit for it?

Maybe if they sort of regimented the business of teaching their kids about how Jehovah saved them from Egyptian slavery. Maybe if they reminded themselves how all of this was promised and prophesied, and then brought to reality before their eyes.

It is just possible for humans to engage in a heart-led conscious awareness. In that culture, it was a basic assumption, but we can see that far too many people slipped below that standard too often. But those who understood all that made a portion of this chapter a sort of daily ritual chant, in a desperate bid to keep that heart-led commitment alive:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.

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Your Own Word from God

Posted on March 26, 2020 by ehurst

A couple of weeks ago, Jack at Sigma Frame wrote this about prophecy:

What is not commonly understood is that if a prophetic message says something about the future, then it is because God wishes to outline a judgment on the present situation by revealing the eventual consequences thereof.

The purpose of prophecy is not to reveal the future. The purpose of prophecy is to promote changes in the present to make us more consistent with divine revelation as a whole. Prophecy in Scripture was quite often hyperbole, a dramatic presentation of the moral threat meant to enhance your perception. “Do you really want to end up like this?”

Such is how I experience the prophetic gift. Only rarely do I get a strong sense of something specific; it is typically a sense of foreboding that can only be expressed in dramatic and symbolic terms. And while my mind tends to take that in the wrong direction, my heart knows that the whole point is a warning that I need to build some resolve, and let that resolve shape my actions.

The messages have almost all come into my conscious awareness from somewhere deep inside, impinging on my soul in various ways. This morning I awoke from a dream about being back in military uniform and highly confused about the situation, completely without any clear orders from superiors. It was as if there was some big secret and no one could tell me anything useful. Yet everyone else was going about their own orders with a clear purpose in mind, leaving me to figure out everything on my own. There was that strong sense of foreboding that something big was about to happen and I lacked even a shred of a clue what I was expected to do.

This thing stuck in my craw. It wasn’t just a passing curiosity of my own self awareness; most of my strange dreams fade away. This one kept pinging off my conscious mind so that I knew it was more than a simple dream. It was a word from God; it resonated with my convictions. Further, it did so in a way that indicated I really need to share the message. Other little things throughout my morning routine clicked with it to help define the meaning.

I confess openly that this sort of thing comes into my awareness via the exact same wiring as my creative imagination. In my youth I suffered from a very wild and potent imagination that led me down countless wrong paths, and got me hurt too many times to count. My psyche is littered with scar tissue from those moments. And yet, all of that together is itself a message that God was speaking and no one could help me understand the language. It required much trial and error, prayer and contemplation, an awful lot of time alone with God, to begin turning that into a useful lore of experience that helps me feel more sure when stuff like that hits me again. And this morning it did just that.

Here’s what I make of it so far: Nothing we’ve been told about this COVID-19 plague is the full truth. Nothing. Nobody who’s talking about it knows the whole story, and those who do know aren’t talking. Most of the stories you read/hear will have factual elements, but something very substantial is being kept from us. Unless you have witnessed something of this plague first hand, you cannot know for sure anything you hear about it. Worse, we may never really understand who is playing what part in this massive deception. So you are left to your own convictions to help you decide whom to trust, and what part of the narrative applies to you.

Keep something in mind here: No two of us should expect to come up with exactly the same answers. When the lies are big enough and pervasive enough, the whole point is to drive us back upon the one thing about which we can be certain — God’s voice in our hearts. If you can read your own convictions about what to do, that’s all you really have to know. And it is the nature of convictions that they will always move us along slightly different paths. Convergence does happen at points, but God speaks to you just as faithfully as He does to me. You are obliged to check what I suggest against your own internal voice.

I’m called to share my personal narrative as an example, not as instructions. I can tell you that I know my mission hasn’t changed. I’m supposed to be riding bikes around the Oklahoma countryside and taking pictures of various natural features and just whatever God brings to my attention. And I’m supposed to publish the pictures and stories of those adventures. I have a very strong pull to visit certain places right now; those natural features are calling to me across the miles. There is this big barrier of government interference, but that’s just a temporary hindrance. I’m supposed to play along for the most part with government demands, but with a deep cynicism about the honesty of those making all the pronouncements.

I’m supposed to keep faith with my commitment to buy that new bicycle, and I’m communicating with the shop owner because God has told me to treat that man as my good friend. I’m supposed to trust Steve Gooden to do what’s pleasing to God in this matter. Further, the money is already on the way; it will be there when the time is right. So yesterday I took the money I was planning to add to the fund myself, and gave it to some relatives who were dangerously close to running out of food.

Meanwhile, I need to act like whatever it is that’s going on behind the scenes isn’t going to stop my mission. It will delay the mission, but that mission remains out there ahead of me on the path somewhere. For now, the main point is to be skeptical and cynical about the mainstream news, as well as the alternative news sources. I doubt any of them really know what they are talking about. I suggest you play along, but don’t commit to anything except your own mission and calling from God.

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A Psychology of Temptation

Posted on March 24, 2020 by ehurst

What does God really expect of you?

Cry out to Him the moment you sense temptation coming at you. Of course, you first have to invest time and energy understanding what temptation is, and that requires you understand what sin is. We don’t have a culture that teaches this properly. Our Anglo-American mythology says that a sting operation is generally unfair, where the government offers temptations to do things the government says is evil. And those government sting operators seem to have zero morals, don’t they? They’ll do anything to sucker you into it.

Yet that is a broken image of how God operates with His own people.

First off, our “government” from Heaven is much more personal and loving than any human government. Our Father genuinely adores us, and wants us to escape evil. His Law isn’t “law” like a human government, especially an impersonal and inhumane Western government. His Law is the fabric of Creation, the very nature of how things work. Unlike lazy and venal government agents, Creation itself is the good cop that never fails to act consistently with God’s Word. No temptation is ever stronger than the Creator’s revelation.

Our God isn’t out to take away all the fun, but to teach us that not all fun is fun. Some fun offered to us is destructive. Once we understand it as destructive, we have an edge on escaping temptation. We have to understand that some of our strongest human urges are deadly if not kept inside certain boundaries. Our own fleshly nature tells us that this or that temptation is harmless. We are taught to ignore that Creation is alive and watching our every move. By building a vision of the natural world as inert and impersonal, we are blinded to how reality works.

Maybe you remember that song by Bruce Springsteen, “Hungry Heart”? It’s evil. It excuses moral depravity and blames the heart, but it’s actually just fleshly sentiment. Your fleshly nature is not you. It is an enemy you are forced to endure in this life, chained to your side as long as you breathe oxygen. Your heart is a much higher element in your soul, beckoning you to higher things.

You can’t even say your fleshly nature is your body. While your body is a component of the natural world, it’s your fleshly nature that reminds you what happened in the Garden of Eden. We forfeited our mission of guiding the natural world, so it now acts largely unmanaged. So does our body, but while the natural world is not fallen, our fleshly nature is. It is the enemy of all the God proclaimed. So when our body does what’s natural, calling out with unguided appetites, our fleshly nature is standing by to always suggest what makes the most sense to it and its sinful desire: Lust of the Eyes, Lust of the Flesh and Boastful Pride. It’s the fleshly nature of fallen mankind that makes such a mess of the natural world and our lives.

Natural bodily appetites are what they are, and they can always be fulfilled through proper moral restraint, but our flesh is there making outrageous demands out of simple appetites. You cannot ditch the flesh, and you can’t really kill it without ending this life, but you can consistently let the heart rule and put the fleshly nature in its place — nailed to the Cross.

Your conscious awareness can grovel in the flesh, maybe pretend to be reasonable, but always placating base desires in one way or another. Or you can strive to draw your conscious awareness up into the heart and keep sounding out your convictions. The power to overcome starts with awakening your conscious mind to the heart. It means learning how to actually give a darn what God thinks. It means recognizing that every decision you make is for or against Him personally.

It means ditching the false perception of objective reality, as if God is also subject to its boundaries. The universe is not inert; it lives and breathes with the purpose of Almighty God.

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Our Virtual Covenant

Posted on March 23, 2020 by ehurst

When the aim is seeking to discern God’s revelation regarding various issues in life, a fundamental consideration in reading Scripture is to recognize whether the issue, and the people involved, are inside or outside the applicable covenant.

Jesus operated from within the Covenant of Moses up until the approximate moment He rose from death. In virtually every debate He had with His Jewish opponents, the underlying message was that the Jews were just days away from losing their Covenant protections. He knew He was going to be executed, and that this would be the closure of the Covenant of Moses.

However, instead of ending that Covenant, He was going to translate it to a Heavenly realm. Instead of remaining a political law covenant rooted in this world, it would become a moral covenant rooted in Heaven. Behind all of this was the underlying point of the Covenant in the first place: a means of vivifying the revelation of God to the whole world. As the nation of Israel became more and more exclusive and racist, thinking to consume the blessings of the Covenant upon themselves alone, the more they misunderstood the very nature of the Covenant itself. Thus, Christ’s approaching death on the Cross would restore the purpose of the Covenant as a call to all humanity.

Our Lord’s brother James caught this very clearly in Acts 15:16-17, where he quotes from Amos 9:11-12. Amos quotes God as saying that in some day future to the prophet’s time, God would restore the faith of David and build a kingdom on that. Not David’s royal dynastic family or household, but Amos used the symbol of the tent David pitched in the courtyard of his fortress. In that tabernacle, David was a mere servant, huddling in the far back corner away from the Ark of Covenant (symbol of God’s Throne) as the least important servant in God’s court. David called himself unworthy. The symbolism is quite clear: David’s kind of faith would become the core identity of a people God had already marked as His People among the Gentile nations. In this, James silenced the Pharisaical insistence on excluding Gentiles from the gospel message.

Granted, these former Pharisees might have known that Jesus shot down the Talmud, and they were citing a rather pure Mosaic legal expectation, but their mental approach was still Talmudic, still legalistic. In other words, their position was arguably quite reasonable, but missed the whole point of faith by pecking away at semantic accuracy, when the substance of the Covenant was a mystical and largely symbolic expression of Jehovah’s divine moral character.

The Law of Moses was meant to instill humility and penitence, by reminding us that God would always honor a genuine heart of commitment to Him as Lord. But the Jews had pushed and deformed the Covenant into a weapon the kept Gentiles away from God, while Jews became convinced that God owed them, but did not own them. They had a claim on God; He didn’t have a claim on them.

Jesus strove to highlight this problem to His audience, and His audience was always Jewish. Virtually everything He said presumed the target of pulling His people back under the Covenant. That Covenant was the foundation for their entrance into the True Promised Land, so that they would be ready to make the transition from a political legal covenant in this fallen world to a moral covenant based in Heaven. They could not make that transition while out roaming in the wilderness of Talmudism.

The council meeting in Acts 15 turns on understanding that the synagogue is a rejection of the gospel. If people were going to cling to the earthly Law Covenant of Moses, then the only path open was back into the synagogues. If people wanted actual peace with God, then it would be via the path of His Son. Israel the nation was no longer Israel the People of God. Those Pharisaical Christians were trying to Judaize the Body of Christ, and they didn’t stop there. The Apostles continued to face the Judaizers until the last Hebrew Apostle died and Judaist rationalism took over the organized Christian religion.

Today the organized churches have long been the captive of the Judaizers. Mainstream Christians today cannot distinguish which covenant they are under. In common church teaching, the covenants are confused, and this perverts religion. It creates a false image of following Christ, with the attendant false choices between this or that brand of Christian religion. A lot of stuff is pulled under the label “Christian” which is most certainly not what Jesus taught, largely because that stuff refuses to recognize the contextual boundaries of what Jesus said.

A primary issue would be teachings on divorce. It matters a great deal whether the marriage in question was under any covenant, as does the covenant status of the people involved. This is all complicated by false assumptions about what it means to actually be under a valid covenant. A great many people profess to be Christian without actually embracing any valid covenant. A great many church organizations assume their members are de jure under some covenant which is actually imaginary.

We as members of the Radix Fidem Covenant are not bound by any previously presumed covenant. We insist that people be made conscious of the business of covenants, and that vows taken prior to embracing our covenant may no longer be binding. That is, we recognize the difference, as does Paul when counseling in 1 Corinthians 7 that such marriages have a weaker standing than those undertaken after redemption. Paul is not declaring “law” here, but wrestling with the complications in a particular context (history, location, culture, and prophetic warnings). The whole chapter is loaded with such struggling, as are other New Testament passages.

We expect stronger and wiser decisions from covenant family. We expect people who make life changing decisions after embracing the covenant to be ready to face the consequences. We don’t give anyone a free pass just because the stupid stuff they did came beforehand. And anyone at any time can decide that our covenant rules are wrong and simply walk away. The one thing we cannot do is decide for God what He will do to bless or curse anyone. We can only cite our best understanding of His revelation and march forward with what we have.

As a virtual community of faith, our Radix Fidem Covenant is quite gossamer, indeed. Very little that we do will affect each other, unlike how it was for New Testament churches. Those folks lived in each other’s armpits; few of us have even seen each other in the flesh. I don’t have such hard decisions to make as Paul or the other leaders did. On the other hand, the moral gravity of your choices will most certainly affect you. All I can do is advise you how I foresee it turning out. The likelihood of ostracism is really quite small. You’d have to work hard to earn that. This is the nature of a virtual community with a virtual covenant.

It puts a lot on your shoulders to decide where you’ll find God’s peace, and to vivify His revelation in your own life.

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My Response to the Plague

Posted on March 22, 2020 by ehurst

Remember: If the Lord does not witness in your heart to what I say, you should treat me as a paper tiger fluttering in the wind. If He does witness in your heart to what I say, you still have to discern your own path. Anything I can give you will never be more than just a starting place, or a piece of support along the path of His calling for you. Our paths may coincide a lot, but they cannot be the exact same path.

I take the position that this virus was cooked up in a US government bio-weapons lab, and was released by accident. Any expert insisting that this is a natural virus I suspect of being a paid liar. At any rate, how you decide to handle this plague will be based on your assumptions about what it is, and how it works.

I’m going to summarize what I’ve found most plausible so far. This virus starts in the throat and hangs there a few days before moving down into the lungs. Obviously, gargling with hot salt water daily, or perhaps something with vinegar or other natural antiseptics — even hydrogen peroxide — will go a long way to preventing things getting worse. Look up recipes if you want to know, then stock up on whatever you believe works best in your situation. If you feel any symptoms at all in your throat, gargle hourly until they go away.

From the throat, the infection slips down into the lungs and binds on the alveoli there. It convinces the nodules to produce massive amounts of fluid, and you begin to drown in your own lungs. This stuff can thicken and make it really hard to remove. The biggest challenge in treatment is clearing enough fluid to then get something in there that will weaken the virus. So the second research topic is steam inhalant formulas or other natural treatments that help to clear the fluid from the lungs. Stock up on whatever it is you prefer for that purpose.

Wash your hands frequently; plain soap will dissolve the sheath that protects this virus during transmission. Without the sheath, the virus breaks down naturally in seconds outside its preferred target zone. Try keeping your hands away from your facial orifices and ears, especially if they haven’t been recently washed. It’s not possible to do this totally, so just keep in mind to wash them based on your activities and exposure to unsanitary conditions. Scrub with plain old soap until it foams up. Bleach isn’t worth much as a disinfectant on this stuff except on inert surfaces. I’m told that ammonia is much better, so Windex or clones of it are good for general cleaning.

Do not use any kind of NSAID (ibuprofen, for example) or aspirin, because they have been shown to make the virus worse. You can use Tylenol if you really need a painkiller, but be aware that it attacks your liver.

Vitamins C with Zinc, D3, and Magnesium are the three most useful supplements in prevention and treatment. Elderberry seems to help a lot, too. Almost everyone is likely deficient in vitamin D, so it stands to reason that exposure to the sun is a good thing. Don’t stay indoors unless there are armed guards keeping you there. Then look for ways to get raw sunlight through open windows as early in the season as you can. Sun filtered through glass doesn’t do nearly as much good. Sunlight and fresh air are two of the simplest and best preventatives and treatments.

Need we say that smoking makes you exceedingly vulnerable to this virus? Even reformed smokers will have some greater weakness. Nobody knows how the measure it, but it should be obvious that, since this virus can survive in the air for a while, there is a saturation point at which quarantines serve no real purpose. At that point, the virus will spread like wildfire. So it’s much better to aim for resistance to it than avoidance.

Pray for mercy. This is not an apocalypse, but it is the wrath of God poured out on folks who have ignored His revelation. Their punishment can affect us, so put your trust in God. Obey what you are convinced He wants you to do, and leave the results in His hands.

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Law of Moses — Numbers 30

Posted on March 21, 2020 by ehurst

The Talmud made a hash of things with vows and promises, creating a whole category of vows that had no effect, and allowed the smart-aleck rabbis to get away with lying. The New Testament makes a point that you shouldn’t need a vow in the first place, that people should be able to trust your word on the matters great and small.

In this case, it has to do with making a vow of obligation to the Lord. In most cases that refers to including God as witness of some promise you make to anyone else. In Matthew 5:33-37, Jesus specifically refers to this chapter in Numbers. He said vows and oaths should be unnecessary, that people should stop cheapening the whole process of communication under the Covenant.

Still, in the Ancient Near Eastern culture, people would typically bind themselves under oaths for any number of reasons, but mostly because ANE folk were skeptical and cynical in the first place. At any rate, God tolerated a certain amount of this, but the basic requirement is that people of the Covenant follow through unless released from the promise by the beneficiary, or by some higher authority.

This is the nature of small “c” covenants between people in that culture. If you were wise enough to operate from the heart, you would not likely bind yourself in folly. However, this was a feudal society and higher authority would have to be made aware for most covenants to stand. This chapter assumes things that don’t interfere with a higher feudal authority. Thus, a man should bear the price of keeping his promises.

However, a woman was protected from her folly. The reason was stated clearly in the matter of the Fall: women can be morally deceived more easily than men. Thus, this passage warns that any vow a woman makes under patriarchal authority requires her covering’s acquiescence. Not his permission, you notice, but simply that he is aware and had nothing to say about it.

This holds for a woman whose covering is either her father or her husband. A widow or divorcee without patriarchal covering is stuck. Of course, in modern Western societies, the state stands in for her covering, but God doesn’t buy that. His law stands on Creation itself. While the consequences may not come right away, Creation itself marks the defilement of manipulation and deception.

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Meet the Context

Posted on March 20, 2020 by ehurst

There’s no way we can tell the secular world that death is not a tragedy. Leaving this world means going to be with God, on whatever terms we have worked out with Him while we were here. It’s pretty sad for the majority of humanity who refuse to come to God and work out any terms at all, but we knew that long ago.

So God is culling the human race and bringing home a select group whose flesh can’t fight off the effects of this COVID-19. This is not random. Whatever God decides, no one person or group of humans can stay His hand. For the most part, paying attention to wise health guidance makes you as immune as you will get, and the rest is in the hand of God. A significant element in Biblical Law has always been keeping an eye on such things in accordance with His revelation. That’s how you paint the Blood on your doorposts so He spares you; it’s the fastidious obedience to His revelation.

We should be prepared to go Home on His whims. For as long as He delays that, we have a mission to manifest His glory by our fastidious obedience. That’s the only reason we have for hanging around.

I’ll give you a concrete example: I still plan to continue the mission of riding long distances on a bicycle and taking pictures of the Oklahoma countryside. There will be an obvious delay for things like this sudden cold snap and wet weather. And there will be some kind of delay for the COVID-19 plague, though what kind of delay remains to be seen. The mission will wait, but it won’t end until my life ends. And I’m still raising funds for that new bike. That will probably take awhile, but it’s still in God’s hands either way.

If the government releases a bunch of stimulus checks, that would speed the fundraiser up quite a bit. And such a stimulus is not a bad idea. This is probably one of the few good things our government could do to help the dying economy taper off slowly. Nothing will stop it from collapsing, but the most moral course is pumping the money into the people’s hands, not those of bankers and big corporate investors. This gives folks one last chance to invest wisely in God’s mission in their lives. Most people have no such notion, but that kind of stimulus is still the right way to do things.

If the new bike never materializes, it doesn’t change my mission, it simply limits how I can execute. Meanwhile, I’m moving ahead in faith as if it’s coming sooner or later. I’ll keep training as much as the situation allows. It’s the same faith that doesn’t fear catching the virus; I’ll play by the quarantine rules that arise where I live because I have no call from God to resist. Eventually this will all be over and I can continue where I left off.

The world will surely change, but this speaks to me that my mission will become even more important. Getting sick or dying would be just a circumstance. It’s all part of shalom — peace with God.

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The Shape of Tribulation

Posted on March 19, 2020 by ehurst

People are too quick to give the Devil credit he does not deserve. That was the nature of his rebellion in the first place: taking credit he did not deserve. He was trying to absorb some of the glory meant for God. How much of a punishment do you think it is for him to be assigned a task of hindering the glory in which he once basked?

Satan is not all powerful and does not own this world. He is tightly constrained, restricted in what he is allowed to do. He remains hungry for divine blessings, but only gets to take them second hand from the people he deceives. Since they aren’t his, it never satisfies. All he can really do is work to ensure that he is not alone in his punishment.

Once again: We are seeing the hand of God’s wrath on the world. Since my mission and calling are to the US specifically, that’s where I’ll focus, but you have to know that the deceptions of Satan are global. What we are seeing in terms of disaster is not going according to some great and super-intelligent master plan. There have always been some grand conspiracies in place, and we can easily characterize the general outline of what they have been, and are, and will be, because it never changes by much. It’s always the same human folly based on the restricted temptations of Satan.

Some people, like Brandon Smith, are convinced that government officials and agencies are uniform in seeking to carry out the will of certain conspirators. It seems we can’t shake the mythical image of super-intelligent masters ruling in the shadows. Therefore, Smith counsels that people in all places should prepare for an armed revolt against what he sees as inevitable uniform oppression. It’s not like that. The US is not that tightly welded together in the first place, though it appears to be so at times. The ferment of secession has always bubbled below the surface. National unity has been quite strong during times of national prosperity, but that’s about used up. Prosperity has flagged, and once it falls below some invisible line in the mass consciousness, all bets are off. Unity is very fragile at the best of times.

Some very large parts of America will never join in the tyranny hovering over us. This is part of what will destroy the system that has been the US government. Instead of treating the population like an enemy, some parts of the US have long regarded the federal monstrosity as the real threat. Indeed, you probably don’t need to be heart-led to sense where those places are. Just look at the record of resistance to federal mandates already.

We stand on the threshold of national martial law. There’s a very good chance it will be declared. Once done, it will open up a potent boiling brew of disunity. The very thing many official hope will bring forced unity is exactly what will destroy it forever. This is built into reality itself.

So the servants of Satan in high places among humanity are not all-knowing, and most certainly not that powerful. Satan is leading them to destruction; that’s his job. He deceives them about the nature of God’s Creation and what is possible. They will fail in the end. Yes, they have created the setting for something like a pandemic to bring down the system, but it will not grant them rich opportunities to plunder the world. It will appear to do so, but it won’t work out that way. It cannot work that way.

And because the deception is uneven across the US, so any resistance should adapt to the context. On the coasts and in large metropolitan areas, it’s a good time to get out, or to hunker down and plan to fight an overwhelming evil tyranny. How much wisdom does it take to recognize tyrants in local government? In other places, government officials will be more sensible, and restrictions will be relatively light. When handed more power, they will tend to use it more to pull away than to make policies uniform.

I can’t tell you what to expect where you reside. I am pretty certain that where I live things will be far more sensible. I sense no need at all to prepare resistance. What you do where you live is between you and God. Your heart knows already. But that shocking changes are in store for all of us is not in doubt.

I have no prophetic word on the timing, nor could I hope to estimate at this point when the US will be dissolved. I have only a dim notion of the sequence of some events, and those are subject to change because of too many unknown factors, such as this COVID-19 itself was before it hit our awareness. The one thing I’ve long been certain of was that there would be some big surprises. This virus is one of them. And at this point, I can’t imagine how this can pass without changing just about everything we’ve known on the human level.

This is it; now we know the shape of our tribulation.

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Stained Glass Defilement

Posted on March 16, 2020 by ehurst

We aren’t under any kind of quarantine, but it’s rainy weather. It’s not that I mind getting wet when riding my bike, but I don’t care for it when it’s a cold rain. It makes the clothing soggy and pedaling gets a lot harder. And then there’s the clean-up afterward. I’ll go through that when there’s a good reason for it.

So being bored as I was today, I moved most of the furniture and swept the whole apartment, mopping parts of it. That’s how I handle boredom. It makes for a so-so workout.

Everybody knows Facebook is loaded with manipulative nonsense, tugging on your emotions. The worst stuff is the religious glurge, the pious frauds that seek for some perverted reason to twang the heartstrings of Christians. Today I spotted a picture of a little girl with tubes connected to her, sitting in a chair with a sign that read something totally improbable: “No one wants to pray for me.” You were encouraged to repost the image and seek comments that so-n-so was praying for her.

The original picture had the girl holding a sign that said, “Last day of chemo.” It was supposed to be a celebration, and maybe now she could start getting her hair to grow back. Whoever perverted that message is not a follower of Christ, but felt some demonic urge to prey on the feelings of those who believe at some level. I’m waiting for someone to scold me because I made note of the fraud.

Churchians get worked up about all kinds of things. Mostly it’s because they take themselves too seriously. Do you know people are still wasting energy debating the possible pagan roots of the word “Easter”? Legalism serves no good purpose. It doesn’t matter where the word came from; it represents a paganized celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus. The name doesn’t matter nearly so much as the pagan rituals associated with Resurrection in church celebrations.

Bunnies and eggs are unquestionably a part of the barbaric pagan background of the Germanic tribes. When the Roman Church felt threatened by the conquering hordes, church scholars cultivated Germanic warlord protection by twisting the gospel message to sound more like Germanic fairy tales. There’s lots of literature showing the shift from a somewhat Hebraic outlook to a Germanic pagan viewpoint.

Time and time again, the idolatrous roots of Westernized church traditions are the real problem. This is how the Nation of Israel kept slipping off into idolatry. Despite Jehovah saying clearly that His people were not to mimic the pagans around them, Israel found it so easy to do. Granted, a great many protocols in the Law of Moses resembled those of the idolatrous nations around them; that was no excuse. The protocols God included in the Law were ones He commissioned in the first place. The things He excluded were added to ANE customs and traditions by demonic influence.

So even the lauding of visible physical fitness has pagan roots. The Greeks developed a philosophical approach that man was the measure of all things. They consciously rejected any divine revelation that couldn’t be made to fit into human reason. They rejected the Fall and all its implications. Thus, a man who disciplined himself was the epitome of divinity itself. Bodybuilding as an ideal is just one step away from that blasphemous idea. Fitness isn’t such a bad idea; the Bible promotes that as a manly ideal. But nothing in Scripture promotes the near reverence for the human physique so common in the body building community.

Physical fitness efforts and priorities should result from your best understanding of what God has called you to do. Your goal is to offer God the equipment He gave you in the most useful condition you can manage.

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Law of Moses — Numbers 25

Posted on March 14, 2020 by ehurst

In Numbers 22-24 we have the dramatic tale of Balaam, a gifted prophet and scholar of the ancient religions of nomadic Semite tribes. He was familiar with the religious lore and practices of people like the Midianites. It was Jethro, a Midianite priest who taught Moses the ways of God under the name El, so that in the end, it was this God who revealed Himself to Moses by the name Jehovah. Balaam didn’t know the much about the Covenant, but he knew plenty about the God who established that covenant.

When it became obvious that there was no way Balaam could use sorcery to find a way to persuade El to curse His own nation, he went to the fallback plan: defiling the people. Working with Balak and the Midianites still residing east of the Jordan Rift Valley, Balaam concocted a way to get the people to curse themselves before God, using a common pagan religious practice. Women living there could raise money for their patron goddesses’ temples by selling themselves as ritual prostitutes.

Thus, chapter 25 opens with this practice in full swing, sending their women on a sacred mission to seduce the men of Israel. The patron goddess in this case was the Asherah consort to Baal of Peor, for whom Mount Peor was named. Historical records indicate this was a particularly degrading sexual cult.

God told Moses the only way to mitigate this vile self-curse on the people was to execute the Israeli men who had indulged in this cult worship, by impaling them with poles and standing those poles out in the heat of sun. Moses thus ordered his Sanhedrin to take responsibility each for the guilty men in their own feudal domains within the tribe and begin the grisly executions.

Now this consultation between Moses and the Sanhedrin took place during a gathering at the Tabernacle, where elders of the tribes had gathered to meet with Moses about this hideous moral plague in their camp. No sooner had Moses given this grim command, but one of the battle chiefs came into the camp escorting a Midianite prostitute, and in full view of this distraught conference, presented her to his brethren as their new hired play-toy. He then took her to his own tent first, before passing her off to others.

Among those standing near the Tabernacle to watch this flagrant evil was Phinehas, a grandson of Moses’ brother Aaron. He grabbed a spear, ran to the tent and nailed them both to the ground with one stroke. The narrative uses the term “plague” to describe the moral weakness that had compromised so very many men. When people saw what the Sanhedrin were going to do when they caught someone involved in the cultic ritual sex, they were turned away from the temptation to join in. Thus, the plague was stopped.

This dramatic act also spurred the rest of the leadership to get to work. Most translations tell us that some 24,000 died in this tragedy. For his zeal, Phinehas was rewarded with a personal covenant promise from God to keep his household in the priesthood. Granted, as one of the Sons of Aaron, this was already something God had commanded, but the implication here is God’s special favor. This wouldn’t excuse the sins of his descendants, but it promises they would prosper as leaders among the priests. Phinehas clearly understood the gravity of this situation.

The two executed in the tent are named, and then the Lord says that from here on out, there could be no peaceful alliance between Israel and Midian. While massive slaughter wasn’t in order here, there could be no trust in these former allies. They were too willing to sell themselves into moral corruption.

It’s no surprise that the New Testament warns us how sexual impropriety is such a grave sin against oneself. Worse, it cannot be removed from its idolatrous associations. When sexual morals are loose, demonic presence is inevitable. The hard choice of Phinehas took away the demons’ power to corrupt Israel.

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