False Notions of Ownership

Posted on May 25, 2020 by ehurst

We want people to return to Eden. With Creation itself, we all long for a restoration of what we lost. When those of us appointed to eternal life have fully manifested our identity by a shift in orientation away from the fallen path and back to the divine way, then Creation can celebrate, and we with it. As Paul says so very clearly:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the [full] adoption, the redemption of our body. (Romans 8:18-23 NKJV)

While we have not the slightest inkling how God decides whom to adopt and whom He has created for destruction, we are left with hoping that as many as possible will join us. The whole point of revealing that there is such a thing as predestination is that we should not get hung up on saving every soul we encounter, as if it depended on us. It does not. God is master of the whole process from start to finish; we are just along for the ride. He uses us in this mysterious miracle process, but the only thing we can possibly control is inside of us.

So the battlefield of Spiritual Warfare is your own soul. You are the turf over which you fight. Don’t blame the Devil for doing the job God assigned him; blame yourself for coming up short of God’s glorious ideal. You aren’t fighting Satan, but your own carnal nature. The only way we can do anything good is by the Lord’s power working in us. So we trust in Him for every little thing.

The only way we can participate in His redemption of Creation is to cultivate an awareness of how He communicates in our hearts. Only under the rarest circumstances will something be obvious to our fallen senses. The vast majority of the time it is a very subtle pressure from our own convictions in our hearts. This requires a lot of stopping to shut out the world so we can hear His voice in our hearts. It means cultivating a very otherworldly orientation, a tendency to ignore the things that captivate those still totally trapped in the fleshly nature. It means putting all their concerns in a context they cannot comprehend.

So inevitably we will upset the applecart of human anxieties. We will not be railroaded into doing things their way, of caring about what matters to them. It seems to them that we are crazy. That’s our job. We invoke an awareness on a different level, and willingly bear the brunt of their misguided demands. Sometimes our actions will be a subtle passive resistance. Sometimes we will speak out, either cryptically or maybe plainly. Sometimes we will fight tooth and nail to resist their ways. It varies with your calling, mission and the context, but nothing is out of range for seeking His glory.

In the given context of life in the US, that calls for a very firm grip on certain themes in Biblical Law that reflect the unique sins of Americans. We harass this whole slavish devotion to reason and Western epistemology. We can never allow for one moment to let slip the awareness that this constitutes a flat rejection of Scripture. It means we aren’t seduced by wild notions of political and social democracy, when God makes it abundantly clear that we aren’t designed to live that way. So we promote clannish tribalism and ANE feudalism, a very fierce decentralization of human government. God’s revelation says nobody has any business telling you how to live unless they are related by covenant. Without that common covenant, and a conscious assent to it, there is no grounds for exercising any interest whatsoever.

One of the dirtiest tricks in America’s culture is to evoke a sense of ownership and responsibility over things God says aren’t your problem. Divine feudalism is nothing like the deceptive Western feudalism that makes everyone else a part owner in whatever God has give to you. They have no claim on His turf in your life. You owe them nothing.

This hideous lie of democratic social accountability is fake; it’s a lie that makes you vulnerable to the theft of those in power. The whole thrust of American society and government demands that you lie supine on the ground, nailed down by bogus controls, and wide open to raping convenience of TPTB. Government officials take no interest or responsibility if that constrained openness to government rape also leaves you open to the rape of many non-government predators. Government convenience is far more important than your insignificant life. You are nothing but an economic asset of TPTB.

How and when you resist that bogus assertion will always be a matter of the leading of the Holy Spirit, but it first requires that we reject the false assumptions so that we can expect His voice. For some of us, it could mean at times taking human life to satisfy the demands of divine justice in the context. Those times should be rare, requiring a very unquestionable demand for our convictions. But our restraint is from Biblical Law, not from secular social and legal expectations. If you can’t see the difference between those two, you will never understand holiness in this life.

We prefer to simply mind our own business, our divine calling, and leave others in their reckless drive to Hell. However, there are times when the Lord will need us to say or do something that gets their attention to divine justice. Whether they even receive, much less respond to that message is another matter only God can handle. Get rid of the false Western notion that you have an interest in their lives, until God brings them into your feudal domain. Only when they somehow come under your divinely granted authority can you do anything for them. You have no power to bless them otherwise.

This is why it’s so important for you to grasp the nature of divine feudal grants of dominion in this world. You should always keep track of where God draws your boundaries, and focus your attention on those He brings inside. That alone will be more than most of us can handle faithfully. The typical evangelical panic that they might somehow lose a soul they could have theoretically “saved” is not a biblical concept at all. Yes, reach out when the Spirit moves you to broadcast divine revelation. Make some noise on behalf of His glory. Always be ready to celebrate with Creation when something feels right. But don’t assume you have somehow failed if some random audience member isn’t manipulated into making a psychological conversion. It’s not in your hands how people respond. Be faithful in the message; the response is entirely in His hands.

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Find Yourself

Posted on May 24, 2020 by ehurst

As Christian Mystics, our devotion to divine revelation is absolute, as is our cynicism about humanity. Nothing, nothing, nothing man cooks up without revelation will ever work.

The fleshly nature cannot look in the mirror. While flesh can see that things are broken, the solution is always external. Flesh blames anything and everything but itself. Even when flesh learns the rhetoric of “it starts with the man in the mirror” it’s just an excuse to drag everyone else into the solution that man-in-the-mirror sees. Flesh hates being told that it is fallen, that its reason is untrustworthy.

It’s not a question of whether revelation makes sense to us; it is our obligation to conform ourselves to its logic. There is a logic there, but our fallen human intellect rejects it. So we must force it upon our minds from a higher place. The intellect is capable of absorbing and obeying, but has no desire to do so. We drag it around while it complains about everything, always looking for every excuse to resist. Our heart knows beyond all doubt what is in our best interest, but our carnal nature is forever ungrateful.

That’s reality; that’s what revelation tells us. Further, revelation warns us that so long as we inhabit our fleshly form, there is no real hope for returning to Eden. The flesh longs to return to Eden, but tries every way but the one that is open. The only in is approaching the gate of the Flaming Sword, and that in itself is impossible for the fleshly nature. It must be driven there by a higher power, a miracle of communion with the Almighty, whose authority over our fleshly nature is absolute. He alone can grant that first step, and every subsequent step on the Path to Eden.

So the path back to Eden is called Biblical Law. You and I know that fallen mankind has fought mightily to force all kinds of garbage back into revelation. They succeed at twisting the text, but not the divine moral character behind the text. Once we reconnect with the Source of the written revelation, it’s rather like having the chef himself instead of the cookbook he wrote. What you can make in the kitchen with the chef will be quite different than you could with the cookbook alone. His recipes will never fully express his personal knowledge, and his creativity will take directions and reach distances you could never put into any book.

But even Our Lord’s written Word clearly assumes that the only way to have peace with Him is to normalize conflict among humans. Not the things for which they strive, but we must normalize the very fact of human conflict. But it’s not just a matter of letting loose the dogs of war and chaos. It’s a matter of learning the structure under which the inevitable conflict should take place. That structure is ANE feudalism. The moral truth of this is so powerful that, in order to stay on the Path to Eden, you and I must engage in ANE feudal behavior in defiance of all human authority.

Granted, there are a whole range of tactical choices we will make with the guidance of the Spirit while we are on the ground of action, but the strategy remains eternally the same. The only hope we have for moving father along the Path to Eden is pursuing that strategy within any given context. You are born equipped with certain talents and a divine calling, and it must inevitably be an enlistment in the Army of God. That means signing onto the covenant of adoption as Family of God. It’s eternal and feudal from the very start.

And most of your service will amount to sabotage of human plans that ignore revelation. That’s the strategy. In order to assert the proper divine order of things in Biblical Law, we have to show His power to elude human control. In everything you do, your tactics will aim at making it obvious the human system is inferior by obeying His system.

Only God can tell you what part you play in His tactical and strategic plans. Try to remember: For every soldier out there on the front lines, there are several more back in the rear making frontline combat possible. All of it matters; every assigned specialty is critical. And it may be some long hard labor in His uniform, and most of you won’t receive much notice for long periods of time. Don’t be deceived by that. Whatever your mission, it’s critical to the war effort.

Still, everyone must be prepared at times to do combat. Our way of war is simply asserting by our actions and words what God says. In the face of human pressure to do things the wrong way, we must assertively say and do it God’s way. God will assign your objective; it may not make sense to you, but it does to Him. Your flesh will fight to mislead you into things that it would prefer, either in open defiance, or in a more subtle misguidance into something God has called someone else to do. Anything at all to avoid what God says to you individually, that’s what the fleshly nature will do. However, if you fail to assert His authority in the one place He calls you to, you will have failed your mission.

For most of us, we play along with human systems. We infiltrate. But at those critical moments, we manifest divine authority, knowing it means defiance of the human system. Most often, it will be just a matter of saying something in those critical moments, something that will awaken an awareness in others. Then again, there’s a lot of ways to “say” things. Know your calling and mission.

Don’t be shocked, don’t reject a brother or sister whose mission rips across the human fabric. Some of us are called to make big trouble for the human system. Sometimes the trouble we make in His name will affect what you believe is your own calling. Don’t confuse your mission with your human occupation. Your ability to stay focused on the strategy is what sets you apart from the mass of humanity that has no moral strategy at all.

Again: Find yourself in the bigger picture of what God is doing. That’s your duty; this is spiritual warfare.

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Law of Moses — Joshua 7

Posted on May 23, 2020 by ehurst

Once again we are dealing with Amorites, who are not famous for building much of anything. The east ridge of the Jordan Valley was filled with sites of ancient pagan shrines, mostly in ruins at this time. The Amorite way is to pitch tents among the ruins. If there was enough usable building materials still at hand, they might try to reconstruct the shrines. However, they seldom bothered with building much else if it required significant effort.

The best we can tell, the site identified as Ai was just ruins at this time, which is just perfect for the Amorite ways. Most likely they partially rebuilt the shrine and began turning it into another tourist trap, claiming that they had restored the ancient worship of some forgotten deity. A primary element in their shrine services was various types of “sacred prostitution.” Like Jericho, the site was on a major through-route.

Indeed, Israel’s conquest would require using the route that runs past Ai, so they didn’t need a filthy idolatrous shrine overlooking their march. Again, this is a religious war. So Joshua sent out his combat surveyors. It was a short journey upland via a wadi that ran west of the Jordan. The hilltop ruins weren’t very well protected, and it was a nice flat top, probably not fully occupied, since the ruins didn’t spread over the whole thing. Attacking troops would be able to take up a good formation before that assault.

So the report came back that this was an easy job, and again, no need for conscripts. Just a relative handful of professional warriors should be able to take care of it. But they were unable to handle the few Amorite defenders from the ruins. The attacking force was driven down the slope and some three dozen were killed in the pursuit. The location of Shebarim has not yet been identified, but it probably refers to a quarry on the route back to the camp at Gilgal. The Lord was not with them in battle.

Joshua was extravagant in his approach to the Lord, and his words include typical Hebrew hyperbole. He laid there until evening, technically the next day. God’s answer was curt in Hebrew terms: Go find the sin in the camp. The Hebrew term behind the English words “cursed thing” is more ambiguous than that. If it’s something that was dedicated to God as a burnt offering, you can’t touch it. If it’s something God says He wants to use, you can’t touch that either. Doing so creates a barrier to shalom, AKA a curse. It removes the covering of God.

Since no one fessed up a the assembly the next morning, Joshua and the High Priest went through the ritual of selection using the Urim and Thummim. It got whittled down to the household of Achan. Finally this man confessed and described what he took from the destruction of Jericho: a fancy robe from Shinar (before it was called Babylon), a gold bar and silver in coin form. The robe was supposed to be burned, and the precious metals were supposed to be in the Tabernacle treasury. That gold bar was about as big as a large modern clay brick. The reason he hid the silver on the bottom of his stash is because in those days, silver was cash, but gold was mostly for decoration. We have reason to believe that a lot of folks in those days valued silver more highly than gold.

So Joshua had his attendants go check and they found all of it where Achan said it would be. We have no idea where the Valley of Achor is, but it wasn’t far. However, it was far enough that Achan’s goods and herds were fully separated from the camp. This is in keeping with bringing dangerous people and scapegoats outside the camp for some ritual purpose. Keep in mind that if the camp at Gilgal was even so much as 250,000 with tents, wagons and herds, that was quite a large spot on the earth all spread out.

This man was guilty of causing the death of 36 warriors (nobles) and his family was complicit. So all the family was stoned — crushed under big rocks in a hollow spot. They added a significant mound of stones on top of that, signifying to everyone that this was the grave of a criminal, and folks would have regarded it as cursed. All of his property was burned on the spot as an offering to the Lord. This turned the wrath of God away from the nation.

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The Hardest Message to Share

Posted on May 23, 2020 by ehurst

This is easily one of the hardest lessons of Christian Mysticism: Peace, prosperity and safety are not valid goals. They are at best the by-products of pursuing goals that are valid. The only valid goal of human life under Biblical Law is communion itself — communion with the Lord and His Creation.

Ditching goal-oriented thinking is a monumental task for Westerners. We could characterize goal-seeking as the fundamental assumption at the root of Western mythology. This is why we sometimes have to shock the Western mind with the blunt statement: Life is not precious. This life is a prison to escape. The only question, then, is how to escape it.

The means to escape is shining the light of divine glory. That translates to promoting a particular orientation on what matters and what doesn’t, what is good versus what is evil. That orientation can never be described, but it can be indicated. Our lives are properly indicators, manifestations and demonstrations. The thing itself can only be caught, not taught. It’s always a miracle of God, never a human decision.

It requires pulling the mind away from it’s own self-absorption and linking it to a higher faculty. That linkage is our native state; it’s how we are designed. Another way of expressing that is we encourage people to move their conscious awareness out of their heads and into their hearts. The heart of conviction should rule over the head full of reason and desire. The flesh is what it is, but God grants us some power to rule over it. We need to school the mind to desire the right things. We cannot trust our minds for anything, but we must delegate to the mind the task to implement and organize the fleshly activities according to a higher purpose.

That higher purpose will never be within the grasp of the intellect. We cannot put it into words; it cannot be formulated. Formulation is an act of intelligence and reason, and ours is fallen; it’s part of the carnal nature. The flesh cannot be redeemed, but it can be enslaved for its own good. What’s in the flesh’s best interest is to let the heart rule. The heart can grasp and process the divine moral character of God directly and turn it into moral imperatives that the mind can use.

So the ultimate divine moral imperative is not to do any particular thing, or collection of things, aiming at some accomplishment. The moral imperative is to reflect divine glory like a mirror. It’s all about cleaning the mirror, polishing the surface to reflect more clearly the living being of God. It’s all about the mirroring. What God decides moment by moment is sure to change with the changing context, so the issue is being ready to reflect whatever light shines from above. We reflect Him into a fallen world until He is pleased to break the mirror and call us Home to be with Him.

So this life is not precious; it’s just a tool. It’s certainly an asset the requires maintenance, but the impulse to preserve life itself is misguided. Death is not the end of all things; it’s just a circumstance of the eternal soul.

What’s the mission of a church? It’s not institutional growth. Indeed, it’s to avoid becoming an institution. The church is meant to be a living organism with the goal of communion itself. Whatever it takes for the church to become a community reflection of Christ is what a church should do. You cannot state it in objective terms. The only goal of the church is the health of the organism itself. That means purging sin, and the greatest sin of all — the crux of the Fall itself — is imagining that anything worthwhile is within human control. The ultimate task of human existence is to fan the flames of love for the Lord. The ultimate task of the church is to promote good feudal subjection to Christ.

No two churches will do things quite the same. There is no standard we can put into words. Nothing about this can be objectified. It is either alive, with attendant growth and change, or it is dead. But the business of the church is the church itself. It means the church being very church-like in every circumstance. It means bringing the gospel to life so the world will see. How the world reacts is God’s business alone. Nothing about church activities should aim at bringing about any particular response. Don’t study outside human response; study purity of commitment within the body.

Study how to live with each other in the inevitable frictions of our fallen human existence. It’s a matter encouraging people to change themselves under divine guidance, to reduce the impact of natural friction. It’s about hardening ourselves against the provocations of Satan to make us resent each other.

Stop counting bodies and budgets as if that measures a church’s performance. Talk about how your church encourages people to commune together like a natural family, however many people there are and however much stuff the group has. Getting that message across to Western mainstream churches is the hardest thing we will ever do in this world.

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Process, Not Product (Reprise)

Posted on May 22, 2020 by ehurst

It’s not at all a matter of the end product.

The single factor that most distinguishes a real Christian Mystic from other believers is a commitment to obey convictions simply because they are convictions, without any regard for outcomes. We embrace the consequences as the gift and glory of God. We know that God grants the results in this world as He sees fit. Our only part in this is to obey.

Being able to unlink from the logic of outcomes is by far the greatest freedom of all in this life. Among Christian Mystics, perhaps the greatest heresy is the illusion of control. This is the very foundation of the Fall. It appears in the The Trinity of Temptation: Lust of the Flesh, Lust of the Eyes and the Boastful Pride of Life. All three of them have that one common theme of seeking to control things that are simply not within our grasp. We want to indulge the fleshly appetites and satisfy their cravings. We have an insatiable curiosity about things because it appears to contribute to our power to control. We boast that we are able to do anything we want, if only we can find the means of leverage.

It’s the same fundamental deception in the Fall: We can decide what ought to be. Satan tells us we can establish for ourselves what is good and bad and take it from there. That’s the Forbidden Fruit.

But we do not decide. Reality does not respond to our manipulations because there is already established an inherent truth about what is good and bad, and reality answers to that moral truth. Reality has its own agenda that is quite different from anything we can gin up from our experiences and reason. We are not in control, and never can we be in control of the outcomes. There will always be factors for which we cannot possibly calculate, in part because the calculus includes a factor of moral truth that we simply cannot arrive at without revelation.

And taking hold of revelation means surrendering the illusion of control. You cannot grasp revelation until you bow the knee. This is why God used the image of the Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden: You must take the sword and turn it upon yourself voluntarily. Otherwise it will remain to deny you access. If Eden represents all desirable outcomes, then you can’t have it without first sacrificing your fleshly demand to control.

So Yoda was totally wrong when he suggested that there is no place in our thinking for “trying.” To the contrary, trying is all we have. And the only thing worthy of trying is obedience to our convictions. It matters not whether we can gain what appears to be our objective. Our only objective is to obey, to try. The outcome is never for one moment in our hands. Once we surrender the outcomes to God, we have no need for controlling any part of the process except our own inner desire to obey.

When all we have is trying, there are no grounds for seeking organization as humans think of such things. There is no need for orthodoxy or orthopraxy. There is only a personal bond of compassion between us, a compassion that tolerates a lot of apparent contradiction. Communion doesn’t rest on how much we are alike, but in how close our paths bring us to each other. The measure of what makes us a community is not human uniformity of any kind, but of moral conformance on a different level entirely. We all agree we must pursue our convictions, and that we should work together when the convictions permit, and separate to protect each other from interference when obedience pushes us apart. It’s the obedience that controls, and the obedience must be directed from above.

Given human frailty against time-space constraints, there must always be some kind of organization and leadership, but this is more than adequately addressed in divine revelation. It will always be guided by a moral vision of process, not product. The sole duty of leadership is to maintain an atmosphere of clinging to conviction itself, not where it’s driving us. The only valid objective is communion and fellowship. Social stability is the whole thrust of Biblical Law.

This business of focusing on process instead of product is easily the hardest thing for which we strive in Radix Fidem.

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Mysticism and Mystery

Posted on May 21, 2020 by ehurst

It’s not supposed to be like this. Anyone can see that the very fact of mortality is in conflict with something that calls to us and draws us to better things. Something about our human existence is seriously broken.

Take at look at my so-called “three pillars” of Christian Mysticism.

1. Commitment to Truth: Truth is defined as divine revelation. It’s the sum total of everything God intends for us to know about Him, and thus about His Creation and our place in it. Thus, the definition of sin is arguing with God. There is no truth outside of God; truth is an aspect of His Person. It’s the sum of all we could possibly know about God. To whatever degree possible, we intend to live the truth in this world.

2. Empathy: Never mind the dictionary definition of the word “empathy” — we define it as the activation of the heart as a sensory organ. Your heart knits you to Creation; can experience empathy for all of Creation. You can empathize with the misery of Creation having to live without the divine guidance humans were created to provide, and suffering the ministrations of fallen humans who have no clue. When you can remember what it’s like to live without the Presence of the Holy Spirit, then your empathy for other humans is likely to be pretty strong. It’s the ability to care.

3. Disentanglement: We could justly say this is almost the same thing as otherworldliness. We should never forget that this world is doomed, slated for destruction. Nothing of this world can be saved or made substantially better. We can sense the eagerness of Creation to be set free, restored to what we had in Eden. The only good thing in this world is a firm connection outside of it. We want that everything we think, do and say should point to the Spirit Realm. That’s the only escape from the misery of this world. Don’t take this life too seriously.

As always, these three have nothing to do with seeking to establish an orthodoxy. Anyone can come up with a neat little list like that and it would be just as valid. The issue here is to point at something that is so very difficult to put into words: The answer to this world’s problems is rooted outside of it. It’s obvious we have a mandate to do something about it, but that “something” we should do is not what would seem to be obvious. The solution is indirect. The solution starts with recognizing that this isn’t our native state.

But the fault for this bad situation is our own. Nobody did this to us; we did it to ourselves. The only way out is to reach for help from some force far greater than ourselves. Whatever we can come up with on our own is simply more of what got us into this mess. That’s not working; it has never worked and it never will.

We need the very thing we pushed aside that got us here. Christian Mysticism is seeking to restore what we once had and lost. It’s mysticism that solves the mystery.

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We Call It Christian Mysticism

Posted on May 20, 2020 by ehurst

To the degree anything we do academically has an objective reality to which we can point, we know that the Bible is an Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) mystical document. The religion of the Bible is clearly mystical in nature. This is how God chose to reveal Himself, and the New Testament echoes with images of “Christ in you” — a mystical union of spiritual beings.

So if we give any credence to phenomenology, then the only valid starting point is within your own soul. You cannot really trust your senses and reason to provide anything more than scant provisional answers. You have to believe a higher faculty is there within and that it can be trusted to provide the ultimate answers you need. There’s nothing wrong with being unsure of how to implement those answers, but there can be no doubts about whether there is an answer on offer. Since the Bible clearly builds on this foundation, what sense is there in imagining that all of that has somehow since then changed?

As someone who has professionally indulged in history and historical research, I’ll be the first to tell you the whole thing is a crapshoot. Records are typically selective and biased, and a great deal has been intentionally erased. Vast sections of what we claim to know about human history is a house of cards — Egyptian chronology is a prime example. We really have only the most tentative notions about who could have been the pharaoh of Exodus. While I might offer provisional answers for the sake of discussion, I will tell you that it’s only an educated guess.

Oddly enough, we know more about the intellectual assumptions of the Hebrew nation during the Exodus than we know about the who reigned in Egypt at the time. And regardless of all the vast theological ponderings on the matter, anyone who knows the history of things can tell you that Christ clearly stood His teachings on the foundation of Moses. For Moses, his whole life’s work rested on mystical experiences with a transcendent being. Just about everything Jesus had to say about religion was based on a mystical connection to that same spirit being. “I and the Father are One” cannot have a literal meaning, which makes it by definition a mystical teaching.

This is why we claim that Radix Fidem is an expression of Christian Mysticism. Granted, the term “Christian Mysticism” is loaded with associations to plenty of obvious nonsense, and a lot more that is simply dubious, but the actual academic definition of the term still stands: a sense of direct communion with a transcendent deity. It’s not a question of the content of your religion, but a term that describes how you arrived at your religion. The path is necessarily internal, from start to finish.

Let me recommend you take a quick review of the Christian Mysticism HOWTO. Radix Fidem presupposes you at least can grasp the key ideas, even if you feel led to do things a little differently. That would be the whole point, of course: You need your own sense of internal guidance on such questions. In the final analysis, Radix Fidem isn’t a religion per se, but a meta-religion — a religious study of how to do religion. Genuine faith defies academic definitions. Any time you stray into the territory of presuming something objective, whether concrete or abstract, you surrender the responsibility and privilege of communion with God. We already have way too much religion that requires surrendering to humans who presume authority on behalf of God, while in effect denying people genuine access to God.

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Provisional Life

Posted on May 19, 2020 by ehurst

Don’t take yourself too seriously. That’s just a backdoor definition of humility and trust in the Lord. But it’s also a warning not to trust your own human abilities, neither in establishing ideals nor in reaching them.

It’s utterly impossible to go back and fully dig out the worldview of Moses or Jesus. We simply don’t have enough detailed data about them, nor their worlds. What we seek is not some iron-clad assurance that we have the fullness of what they had. Rather, we seek as much of what they had as God will grant us. We trust in the Father to help us rediscover however much of their worldview as we need to please Him.

In other words, it’s not possible to objectify anything about His expectations. It’s totally personal and frankly subjective. You are the only one who can know whether you are at peace with Him.

Further, it’s a moving target. What pleases Him in one context may not be enough the next time you are in a similar situation. It’s developmental; the whole point is that you grow in faith. Further yet, it cannot be shared completely between any two of us. We are convinced there’s an overlap between incidents and between persons, but peace with God is inherently dynamic. It requires constant attention and devotion. It’s never finished.

Even if it were possible to objectify peace with God, it’s not possible that any of us could be so fully ready at any moment that we could grasp it wholly. We are always behind the game, no matter how much we think we have accomplished. It simply makes no sense to pretend it can be objectified, because we can’t really get it anyway. This is why we say that Radix Fidem is a bit like phenomenology: All we really have as humans is experience and perception. And what we have experienced is never fully understood because our perception is broken. We are forever trying to make sense of our limited experience, never mind what that experience may or may not tell us about ultimate reality.

So we repeat this principle often: Reality is fungible. That is, your limited understanding of reality is as valid as mine. We thank God that He has allowed us some ability to commune and fellowship, so that we can compare notes to some degree. But in the end, we are each on our own, standing before Him as unique individuals. It’s not that we can’t share something about our individual perceptions, but that the very nature of being fallen is a hindrance we can never overcome in our human existence. We cannot even define reality with any hope of a conclusive answer that isn’t subject to modification, and we certainly don’t have the means to share even what we have in any conclusive way. All we have is the limited ability to cooperate with each other, insofar as He grants us to do so, and only for as long as His grant is valid.

Everything we have in this life is provisional.

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Dreams and Purpose

Posted on May 19, 2020 by ehurst

I’m writing this in the wee hours of the morning. I was awakened by a simple decline in the need to sleep. During that period of time when my conscious awareness was slowly returning to a waking state, I crossed a boundary area where a dream was waiting for me. It was a significant dream, a message from God. It carried that signature of significance, demanding that I pay attention to what transpired.

Telling you the dream wouldn’t mean anything to you. It was one of those symbolic vignettes that evoked some of my waking awareness of the world, but with a jarring disconnect from what I knew to be real. That disconnection was the revelation. In ways impossible to explain, my awareness that this couldn’t actually happen in real life triggered a recognition of what could and should happen. It signaled to something lying dormant inside of me, waiting for this moment of half-waking awareness to open up the message the Lord left for me. The dream pushed me into a place where I could get a line of sight that showed me a piece of the puzzle previously missing.

This much of the dream would be meaningful to you: It was about a man and his ambitions. What I saw him doing, his interaction with me, and the things I saw were distinctly not characteristic of this man. Rather, the image of this man characterized what he appears to be doing in terms of my own existence. His identity won’t help you understand; the dream was not about the man, but my impression of him. The Lord was using him as an avatar for something about me, something that He has been trying to separate from my sense of calling and mission. That it became a separate person in my dream indicates how far I have come from the days when that was me.

The reason for all of this struggle, and how long it took me to get here, is that my mission and calling is wholly unprecedented in my own awareness. All of my education and training have pointed to a certain kind of mixed career that, while it was the closest approximation I was going to find in this world, was certainly not the calling itself. What the world gave me was represented by the avatar in my dream. It was the identity, the territory through which I had to pass in order to move in the right direction on a very long journey.

By the way, my obsession with cycling in particular, and fitness in general, is connected with my premonition that I will live a lot longer yet. I need to keep this fleshly body in the best shape possible so that it will serve as a good tool, not as a burden to be dragged around behind me. Cycling is the primary avenue left after all the things I’ve lost along the way. Also, cycling serves as the single best way of keeping my communion with Creation alive. Cycling gets me out away from the interference of human noise so that I can hear the voice of Creation calling. It’s another kind of fitness. I would have kept cycling if all I could get were battered used Walmart bikes, but this fancy one I have now vastly improves my ability to get out and stay fit both ways. It calls to me and evokes my desire to ride.

At any rate, the dream has prompted me to review some things I’ve covered in the past. I’m convinced the Lord wants me to talk about those things. I may never really understand how I gained the attention of so many fine children of God, but while I have that attention, I need to make sure it gets used for a divine purpose.

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Law of God — Joshua 6

Posted on May 16, 2020 by ehurst

First, a few reminders are in order. Jericho is one of the most ancient sites of human occupation one can find on the earth, all the way back to Neolithic times, at least. It was a fairly high mound already before Israel invaded Canaan Land. And so far as anyone can tell, the Amorites occupied this mound at the time. Keep in mind that the Amorites are best understood as a class of people, not exactly an ethnic nation. The name comes from one of the Sons of Canaan, but at the time of the Exodus, that name came to represent a group of opportunists, often dwelling in tents, always cheating, stealing and raiding. They would have justly been regarded rather like today’s Gypsies. If they built much at all, it would have been mud or mud bricks. Archaeology indicates they hadn’t been there long enough to do much building, only a decade or less.

Their use of the Jericho mound would not have left much archaeological evidence. However, Jericho was a shrine city, or Israel would not have bothered with them — this is a religious war. Whatever else we might know about the Amorites, their pagan idolatry was loaded with depraved practices. Jericho was the ancient version of a tourist trap, a place that was warm and dry most of the year, yet highly favored with very generous flowing natural springs. It was a tropical paradise with lush growth and year round fruit. The Jericho shrine was most likely one that featured prostitutes of various types, and the place was decorated with lurid images of what one could have for a price. Calling Rahab a prostitute is nothing more than saying she was an Amorite; it was just part of their culture. They used the shrine to sanctify their predatory greed and low morals.

This explains the austere commands Joshua gave his troops. Please don’t envision brass instruments; the priests blew hollow ram’s horns. These would make a high-pitched, almost squealing noise that anyone was likely to hear over the normal buzz of human activity. In this case, it was the only noise anyone heard from the procession during the six days of preliminary marching, perhaps with taunting from the walls. The symbolism was unmistakable to anyone in those ancient times: This massive army of infantry with their sacred totem could quietly march around the city walls without any opposition. They controlled all the land outside the walls. In the pagan minds in the city, the trumpets were summoning spirits to battle, quite nerve wracking to those trapped inside.

The procession came every morning just after daybreak. While the Hebrew text is typically vague on some details, we can get a sort of picture of this event. Only the full time professional warriors were involved, without any of the lightly armed conscripts that made up the bulk of the army. Most of those professional troops led the march, with the priests and Ark of the Covenant at the rear, followed only by the standard rear guard (something like one fifth of the armed men bearing a heavier defensive armament in this context).

On the seventh day, the same procession repeated seven times. Sometime during that last circuit, something caused the mud wall to dissolve and it collapsed into sand piles that poured down the slopes of the mound. It was a simple matter to charge up the rather gentle slopes of the ancient hill. Whatever shook the wall down would have dissolved the rest of the mud brick structures. All that was left standing were tents and wood structures, all of which were torched in the attack. The people and livestock were slaughtered except for Rahab and her household, according to the promise made by the spies. The only plunder was items of gold, silver, bronze and iron, all dedicated to the Tabernacle treasury. It was for sure everything they found was stolen from somewhere else; Amorites rarely even made their own pottery.

This tested the discipline of the troops who would lead the rest of the army in future battles. Considering what happens next, we can safely say Israel’s troops played by the rules this time. Joshua laid a public curse on the city mound. We find out later that it comes true.

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