A Call for Prayer

Posted on March 13, 2020 by ehurst

It’s here.

At least three decades ago I began sensing in my spirit that an apocalypse was approaching. God is a real Person, not a computer, and His Creation is also alive and personal. On some issues He waits to see how people will respond to His efforts to get their attention. Very few things in prophecy are fixed, so I knew our doom was flexible. Over the past few years, the path changed a few times, but my last impression was that we would come close to an apocalypse. That near-apocalypse has begun in earnest with the Corona virus and the broad human panic.

This is a call for prayer for each other. I’ve started a forum thread in Prayer Requests on this issue. The US is not monolithic, and the Corona virus is not going to act the same in all parts of the country. As a covenant community, we are thinly scattered over the earth, so it’s unlikely any two of us will have the same experience. I’d like for those of you who consider yourselves part of the covenant community to share those experiences in the forum so that we can pray for each other. If there is anything that can prod us to be more like family, this would be it.

My state of Oklahoma has made the first few steps toward an official state of panic. Stores are being stripped of certain kinds of supplies, in part because of a shapeless fear of quarantine, or something like that. Most people have no idea how governments implement such things, despite the guidelines having been published for years. FEMA has been offering free courses online for at least 20 years.

At any rate, let me encourage you to stop in the midst of all this madness and pull together in heart-led prayer for each other. This is family, and God answers the prayers of His people.

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Shadows of Persecution

Posted on March 11, 2020 by ehurst

There is no prediction here, only a sober look at what is possible.

Given the Corona virus panic and the ensuing economic collapse, there is now a genuine possibility that Trump could lose the next election. As previously noted, it is not that he is such a good man, but that he remains the lesser evil. Granted, he could use executive powers to seize greater control via quarantines and other forced medical procedures, but I tend to doubt he would go that route. Meanwhile, his administration would continue permitting us to practice our faith with only the caveat that he is a premier Zionist.

But Biden is almost as bad on that issue. Sanders is quite unlikely to score an upset at this point; Biden would have to forfeit in some painfully obvious fashion. Biden is set to not only protect the Zionists, but to crush genuine faith on behalf of the SJWs. This would mean persecution for church folks in general, and if we come to anyone’s attention, a rather severe persecution for you and I.

That guarantees a violent response from those who consider themselves right-wing. So we would have combative righties protecting Zionism alongside their constitutional liberties on one hand, and SJWs forcing anti-christian idolatries on the other. There really aren’t that many folks out there who like us, and during a civil war, everyone is looking for a target.

Pray that you receive the insight into how you can seize opportunities to shine His glory.

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Law of Moses — Leviticus 26

Posted on March 7, 2020 by ehurst

The balance of chapter 25 gave us the exceptions to Jubilee and basic right of redemption. God is the one who divided up the Promised Land, and it was He who decided what could be redeemed, so as to keep things balanced among the tribes the way He wanted. But that chapter reflects the underlying nature of how we must live on this earth to make the most of what God has granted.

In this chapter, the Lord offers a very strong warning. Notice how He promises that the land, the earth and nature itself, has a will to enforce the Covenant. It’s one thing to fear the forces of the natural world; that’s not what the Bible teaches. It’s another thing to realize that Creation is responsive and obedient to the Creator. In this we should be eager to join.

There is no substitute for reading this chapter yourself. The lessons are both gentle and stern. The power to live with confidence and joy is hidden between the lines of God’s Word of revelation. Keep in mind that the specifics of the Covenant of Moses are more precise and detailed, but generally the same covenant as that of Noah. The Covenants work completely regardless of human consciousness. But He has not been silent or coy; everything we need has been clearly revealed for all to see and understand.

If your heart is committed to Jehovah as Lord and Master, you will surely find a way to please Him. Creation itself will witness to your heart the truth of what God requires of you. If you embrace Him as your truth Father, it’s not that hard to touch His heart with your passion.

Thus, the chapter ends with the promise to Israel that this covenant will never end. And it didn’t; it was transformed when Christ arose. It became the covenant God had always planned to reveal to all of humanity. But to understand how the Covenant of Christ works, you must absorb the powerful sense of communion with God and His Creation, and commit yourself to avoiding things that irritate Him. This is a fresh revelation of what shalom means.

Read it for yourself.

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The Philosophical Question of Violence

Posted on March 3, 2020 by ehurst

Violence is part of our fallen nature. If the world were more inclined to seek God’s favor and learn His revelation of how to live in a fallen state, there would still be violence. It cannot be quantified; there’s just something fundamental to the fallen state that makes violence an utter necessity. That’s why Biblical Law has rules about warfare; you cannot escape it even under the best circumstances.

So the question is not whether violence will have a part, but to decide what part violence plays. Not embracing this is by far the single biggest lie Satan has gotten churches into. The idea of “a just peace” is a lie from Hell; it is an artifact of Western mythology. It’s part of the false notion that we can bring Heaven down to this earth. It’s a horrible misreading of what the Model Prayer is trying to say in that line, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” Satan wants people to imagine a sterile and fixed situation in Heaven. He doesn’t want them to see that God tolerates a lot of variables. Sovereignty doesn’t work like they think it does; the ANE model of thinking on this is radically different from the West. There is combat in Heaven, as it were (Daniel 10:13; Revelation 12:7), so it should be the norm here.

Again: This life is not all there is, and certainly is not normative for human existence. However, it is where we are and the only hope for making anything work for us is to embrace Biblical Law. There is a distinct mission here to participate in divine revelation, and the only way to do that is to live by it. Driving forward with that mission of revelation — reflecting God’s glory — is the only reason He delays bringing us Home. The only reason we live is to die with glory, and getting yourself involved in glory typically takes time.

Once you ditch the idea that “peace” is equal to “lack of conflict”, you stand a good chance of understanding your mission better. Conflict is utterly necessary in this life, so the real question is discerning which conflicts are part of your mission. The fallen fleshly mind rejects this answer, just as the fallen mind refuses to admit that it is fallen. And it’s bad religion to promote an end to human conflict, versus promoting conflicts that are consistent with God’s glory.

And for sure, “just war” is not a trademark of the secular state. Nothing in Scripture teaches us that human government has a clue about this; any government not under a Law Covenant is always hopelessly wrong on everything. It cannot possibly do right, except by accident. The problem here is, this whole line of discussion can easily become technically illegal under US legal policy. It’s not actually illegal, but enforcement policy is the issue. The state demands control over all violence, insisting that it and its agents alone are permitted to use violence. The Beast is pretty intolerant on that score. But this is why we have a religious doctrine that violence is wrong — the state promotes bad religion.

This is also why we have so many agents of the state suffering from PTSD. When everyone grows up with that crazy doctrine, and then the state demands they do violence that clearly violates that doctrine, it tends to break stuff inside people’s heads. It’s not a sane situation at all. It doesn’t help much if you realize that the state is lying; that’s not going to fix delusions about what your moral duties are. When you realize that the state is not God, you still need to understand who God is and what He has revealed.

Under Biblical Law in broad general terms, violence is neither the last resort nor the first. There are contexts in which both of those have their place. Rather, violence must obey divine standards as a whole. You cannot make clean and neat rules about it. You have to learn how to handle it from the heart, to become familiar with your own convictions so you’ll know where violence fits into the picture of your own divine calling and mission. What it means for you may not be what it means for someone next to you, but you sin if you don’t walk in your own convictions.

God does call some of His servants to use violence. That’s a part of what it meant when God told King David that he was “a man of blood.” David’s mission was to crush the enemies of the nation, and that was impossible without a whole lot of killing. It wasn’t that warfare somehow stained David with immorality that kept him from being pure enough to build a House for God. You should realize that Solomon engaged in plenty of warfare, himself, completing the job his father started. The issue wasn’t violence, but mission and calling.

Don’t get lost in reflexive condemnation of violence. It has a place in God’s kingdom, even if it has no place in your divine calling. If there is no harsh torment and death of sinners, then revelations of Biblical Law mean nothing. There comes a point when some people in the community have to leave or die. It’s not as if God was unable to reveal some imaginary peaceful image of Himself to the Old Testament barbarians. He’s still the same God; the problem is Satan’s lies incorporated into Western Civilization. We aren’t the definition of “civilized”. Look at how much strife and destruction the West has wreaked or provoked in this world, trying to force non-Western folks to conform. Every civilization in history was just that arrogant, so it’s nothing new.

The only question left is whether violence is a part of your divine calling and mission. You are burdened with the task of deciding with whom you’ll fellowship and with whom you will pull in the gospel harness. But you don’t get to define what that gospel harness means for others. Don’t make a doctrine of your individual mission.

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Law of Moses — Leviticus 25:1-22

Posted on February 29, 2020 by ehurst

The laws of land rest are not limited to the Covenant, but are universal in nature. They are offered as something inherent in the natural world itself. The land itself shall keep a sabbath. Every seventh year, you shall not plant or harvest anything. However, the voluntary crops can be eaten as you pass through, grazing as it were. To be more precise, you can take enough at one time to make one meal for your household, but so can anyone else who would normally be in your village. Even the livestock were to be allowed access to the fallow croplands.

As we might expect, this placed a greater emphasis on summer fruits and wild produce. Those were always available for harvest, but there would naturally be a preference of effort for domesticated crops. The Sabbatical Year was a time of going back to the roots of faith and trusting the Lord to provide, as if one were a mere nomad in the land. This is the quintessential image of the Covenant Nation.

The law of Jubilee has been debated for centuries, and is in dispute to this day among rabbis. Was it the 7th of Sabbatical Years (49th), or was it the 50th, another year after the seventh Sabbatical? For us, it doesn’t matter that much. The whole point is that we know how every national economy needs a reset just about every generation or so. Otherwise, tyranny results and revolutions are inevitable. So God commanded Israel to do this on a schedule. The text says the fiftieth year was sacred.

In that year, all productive farm land was returned to its original clan ownership. That way no part of Israel could ever be completely alienated from their original grant from God. Property mismanagement must be forgiven at the end of the guilty generation, so that their descendants can try to learn from the mistakes of their elders. In like manner, bond-slaves must be released from their bonds. All debts must be forgiven. This formalized a schedule of redemption that, by Ancient Near Eastern custom and tradition, occurred when any new king took his throne. Instead of relying on the vagaries of how long a king might reign, it was scheduled by a set number of years.

Notice that, in effect, Israeli land cannot actually be sold, only the produce of the land for a set number of years can be leased. The price was to be adjusted, prorated on the basis of how many years were left before the next Jubilee. The same with any Hebrew bond-slave; you could only lease the labor, not keep the person as a permanent possession (barring the special ceremony previously mentioned in our study).

As for Gentiles living in the land: They were not protected by the Covenant. They could be permanently bought and sold, but the could not do the same to the hosting Hebrew people. Furthermore, nobody could abuse a Hebrew bond-servant. This was a matter of respect for the God who owned all things, land and people in particular. Also, the Levites and their land grants were given a different treatment as God’s unique personal property tribe.

Urban property was not affected by Jubilee, particularly houses (again, except for Levitical cities). The point here was productivity. The people were God’s treasure, and arable land was one’s heritage granted from God. So what would God’s people eat during the Sabbatical years? God promised to ensure that the sixth year would see the people harvest enough to last three years. That’s enough to eat that year, all year during the Sabbatical, and to eat and provide seed for that next year. That implies they were likely to grow enough to export some in any given working year, but not for those three years.

This is part of the definition of shalom: God promised reasonable prosperity for those who obeyed His revelation of how to live — “and you will dwell there in safety.”

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Nature Is Not Your Enemy

Posted on February 27, 2020 by ehurst

One of the single biggest points of failure in Western Christian mythology is the insistence on defining what is good or bad in terms of material outcomes.

For example: Tornadoes are bad because they shred people’s homes and businesses. This is wrong, of course. Tornadoes a gift from God that allows atmospheric pressures to equalize, preventing radical and massive shifts in climate conditions that are too extreme to imagine. The problem with people’s houses and businesses is that they build them in places tornadoes are common, and don’t bother to fortify them against harsh conditions — places like Moore, OK.

God didn’t send tornadoes to tear up their lives and property. God sent tornadoes to keep natural conditions in balance, as He defines it. Idiots who don’t listen to God have placed their lives and property in His path and dared Him to tear it all up. A sensible policy would be a building code in Moore that requires above ground structures have no less than foot-thick reinforced concrete walls with a design basically like a Quonset hut, and very few windows of bullet-proof glass. They would all be oriented so that the general storm tracks from SW to NE would strike the curved side of the building, not either end.

Granted, such destructive tornadoes come on average only once in five years, but that doesn’t excuse being complete idiots and ignoring the long record of weather patterns in this area.

Human existence on this earth has storms because we humans in the Fall surrendered our management of natural processes and found ourselves now hapless victims of unguided nature. This is not the norm; it wasn’t supposed to be like this. But now that we are fallen, there is absolutely no means to taming those natural processes. The next best hope we have is to face the uncertainties of a fallen existence with the help of divine revelation. That excludes the silliness of both, idolatrous worship hoping to placate nature deities, or deifying human reason as the means to discovering secret control mechanisms that actually don’t exist.

Praying for God to stop the tornadoes is asking for trouble you cannot imagine. Panic stricken prayers for God to spare your house in the storm may be answered, but don’t hold God accountable for your failure to listen to His Word.

The heart-led path of moral awareness would teach us not to build houses in places like Moore, OK, unless we were ready to invest in resistant structures. It teaches us to observe natural rhythms and how stuff happens so we are at peace with natural processes put in place by our Creator. The storms ran across Central Oklahoma long before people started building houses here.

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Christian Marriage in Context

Posted on February 26, 2020 by ehurst

Over the past few posts at Sigma Frame, Jack has gotten some other commentators involved, including reposting something from yours truly. For those who have been following my years of chatter about the advantages of the tribal social structure, it probably seems obvious that the answer to many questions about Christian romance and marriage is the faith community changing how it does things.

That doesn’t do much good to a man or woman feeling the powerful urge to find a mate, because those kinds of changes that I suggest are a long way off, even if anyone is listening — and mostly they aren’t. So what do we do in the mean time?

You aren’t going to like the answer, because I am duty bound to include a prophetic warning. In broad general terms of how God is working right now, particularly in the West, this is a bad time to worry too much about getting married. That is, don’t get wrapped up in thinking that marriage and raising a family is a given in following Christ right now. Maybe in a few years His wrath will be spent enough to start looking at a different “normal,” but this is a bad time. Indeed, if you have a marriage now, there is a higher probability it will dissolve. These are not normal times.

That’s not to say He won’t build good marriages right now, but that it’s less likely. We as His servants have other, higher priorities. Having a good sex life on any terms is just not that important in this context. We should build a vision of following Christ that is much more willing to sacrifice such things. You’ll notice Paul in some of his letters said similar things, and we happen to know the historical context indicates a similar social instability. He never forbade marriage, but encouraged some of his readers to put it aside if they could.

Still, even without that prophetic message, there are important issues that seem to be missing from the common lore of Red Pill for men. I discern an element of idolatry for “hot” women and a vibrant sex life. Nothing — nothing — in Scripture encourages men to pursue those things. There may be a little lyrical chatter in Solomon’s writings, but it’s just that: lyrical Hebrew symbolism. The symbols point to something much more important, and we have good evidence that even Solomon, for all his divine wisdom, got lost on the path to a truly righteous marriage.

I’ll reiterate what I said before: the divine mission comes first. I treat that is an emergency issue, hammering it home with urgency as the first priority right now in my teaching. I’ll skip over a lot of other stuff I might be able to write about because all of that other stuff cannot possibly be done right until we settle the issue of a seeking a sense of divine calling. And if everything else in your life is screwed up, let it all go to Hell if the one thing you can do is secure in your own soul that sense of mission.

God may not want you married. Or He may want you to marry someone who doesn’t inspire envy from other men/women. Yes, God grants us all different provisions in our divine mission callings, and it has nothing to do with our Western sense of fairness. It’s the same basic answer we give to all the perverts out there: sexual satisfaction is not a fundamental human right. Nothing in revelation points to the existence of any kinds of “rights.” It’s the wrong frame of reference. Sometimes you find yourself born into a situation that calls for celibacy. Celebrate the goodness of God, because whatever He chooses, by definition, is in your best interest.

That said, only you can know what God wants for you. If you don’t explore the possibilities, you may be missing out on something really wonderful. I know a thing or two about that kind of wonderful. I broke lots of churchian rules and still do, and my mission is sweet, and so is my beloved wife. It’s going to look like luck, but that’s just a sign you are facing something God hasn’t explained to you, yet. And He may not explain it ever. I also know a thing or two about frustration and having to settle for things that aren’t what I would call “the best.” The path of my life is littered with big ideas that never worked out, glowing visions of glorious things that could be, but that turned out to be other than what God had in mind. Some of those things are recorded on my blogs.

I didn’t marry for beauty, or love, or any number of other things. I married for the mission; I had full assurance of faith that my God would make it work. That’s my testimony. My divine mission calling includes trying to explain how I did that, in hopes that somehow some of my story will have meaning for others. Based on the testimony of other men with a sense of being truly blessed, there seems to be a few common threads in our stories, even if they aren’t entirely aware of what we share.

A blessed marriage is the side effect of something else, so getting too deeply involved in chasing the dynamics of romance isn’t going to do much good until we settle on that “something else” that makes marriages work, because it will be the same blessings that arise from marriages that come apart when your spouse refuses to join the mission. It’s not a question of what we deserve. What we deserve is a short miserable life, a lingering painful death and eternity in Hell. As long as you can’t embrace that truth, nothing else is going to work very well.

That said, there’s a lot of teaching in the Red Pill lore that points back to Biblical Law, and much that does not. There’s plenty that is simply not relevant to you. Get out your Sword of Spirit and starting trimming out the gristle.

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Law of Moses — Leviticus 24:10-23

Posted on February 22, 2020 by ehurst

We skip over some ritual law that does not apply to us today, except to note that rituals are meant to stir the consciousness of our need for redemption.

The narrative turns to a story about a man whose loyalty to the Covenant is obviously questionable. His mother was Israeli, but his father was Egyptian. They hadn’t been out of Egypt all that long, and we can guess that he came along on the Exodus most likely because he was expelled from his father’s homeland at that time. Pharaoh kicked out a bunch of folks along with Israel, and many of them hung with the nation because they had nothing better to do. At any rate, the man’s sense of identity was divided, and during a bad moment tussling with an Israeli, he let his passions overload his mouth.

Blasphemy is defined as insulting Jehovah, diminishing His glory. Most often it takes the form of either pulling God down or elevating someone lesser to divinity. Either way, it is an attack on God’s unique position as Creator, suggesting He isn’t who He claims to be. We aren’t given the half-Egyptian man’s actual outburst, but we can guess it was designed to denigrate the Israeli man as inferior against the superiority of the half-Egyptian man. He could have said all kinds of things and not crossed the line.

Whatever he said was also an insult to Jehovah, under whose dominion this half-breed was living. Anyone living among the Israelis would have been required to respect the nation’s sovereign had he been a human, so how could it be less so when their ruler and owner is God? But it’s worse than mere rudeness. Human rulers could have come up with all kinds of penalties for it, and God made it plain that in His special domain, His name is sacred. A pagan can be forgiven for not knowing about the Covenant God, but not a pagan living among the Covenant People.

This would be a ritual execution. He was removed outside the camp. Everyone who witnessed the blasphemy would put their hands on his head. This is a condemnation of the man’s sin by those who had first hand knowledge. Then he was stoned — placed in a low spot where those condemning him would be first to drop large stones on top of him, a place he could not easily escape. It continued with everyone in their extended families getting involved, along with the appropriate elders, until the man was buried under the stones. Everyone has the duty to protect the Covenant. It was basically crushing the man to death.

Then the Lord takes a moment to put everything in context. He reiterates that humans are not treated as animals. Crimes against animals are actually crimes against the owners. And crimes that fall below execution will mean the perpetrator must bear the same loss as the victim. Jehovah is no mere man. Simply insulting His position as Sovereign of the Covenant is a pretty serious crime. You can insult men and injure them, and not be executed, but insulting God is a high injury because the shalom of the nation rests on God’s glory. Diminishing His glory is a threat to everything the Covenant stands for.

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Legalistic Reading

Posted on February 21, 2020 by ehurst

Have you noticed the tendency of many Western Christians to read Scripture legalistically? They get it from the Pharisees. Their mind approaches the Word with a legal frame of reference, looking for loopholes and ignoring the wider context of the culture from which Scripture was written.

Thus, we have to deal with various brands of name-it-and-claim-it Charismatics who will attempt to make you feel bad because God, for whatever reason, chose not to heal some malady afflicting you. They forget that Paul walked through his years of ministry with a “thorn in the flesh” — that means something God didn’t heal in his life. Are we better than Paul? Not all maladies are going to be healed, and it’s not a failure of faith when your convictions tell you that God isn’t going to heal this or that issue. It’s legalistic to assume God promised to heal all maladies in all cases.

How many people insist that, because Jesus didn’t say certain things, didn’t do certain things, that somehow it is indicative of something? Jesus came to correct the Jewish people for their covenant failures. Everything He taught was from the Covenant frame of reference. If there was something the Jews were doing well, why address it? Of course He never had to address homosexuality; the Jews forbade it anyway, and rightly so. There were plenty of things they got wrong that He did address. He was very strict about sex and marriage, more so than Moses.

And they forget that Jesus cracked a whip, but insist that we must eschew violence in every situation. Jesus used whatever means were consistent with His calling and context. You need to seek the face of God and be sure you do the same. Don’t assume that Jesus is a literal, legalistic pattern for how we must act. Follow the pattern of faith in your heart. Nobody else can tell you how to act; they can only choose not to serve alongside you.

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The True Guardian of Souls

Posted on February 18, 2020 by ehurst

I won’t tell you that your heart will protect your mind, only that it can.

There is a large body of clinical literature on the power and limits of verbal manipulation. It works best when practiced by a certain group of people within the spectrum of psychopathic tendencies. It’s a part of the unique genius of psychopathy to discern your weaknesses.

However, what the clinical literature fails to take into account is the resistance to manipulation exhibited by those who tend to focus on their convictions as the source of mental orientation. To some degree, the brain has to agree with the safety of having the heart in command. This arrangement is presumed in some non-Western cultures, but flatly denied by Western psycho-mythology.

The intellect is part of the fallen nature. On it’s own, it remain vulnerable to all sorts of fears and other emotional prodding. It is incapable of forming the kind of self-control depicted by the likes of Spock in Star Trek. Reason has never been, and never will be, strong enough to protect the soul from the madness of demonic influences. Only the heart is capable of tapping into the divine power of sanity.

The story of how Western Civilization was formed reveals the deep roots in demonic superstition. Without this wide open fear of the unknown, it would not have been possible to manifest the corrupting power of Aristotelian logic. The sense of rational order is just a thin veneer over superstition; the two are symbiotic and the result is quite Satanic. It breeds a pretense of reason, and allows the superstition to fester and lurk in the shadows of the unconscious mind. As long as that area remains repressed, it’s power over human behavior is ignored. There is no effort to remedy.

A critical element in Western mythology is rejecting the truth of the Fall. While the rational mind can swallow it as doctrine, the underlying subconscious beast is unable to act on it. The biblical heart-led path acknowledges our fallen nature and takes for granted how it will influence human behavior. While we can make efforts to build a culture that prevents the fallen nature from ruling, the biblical approach focuses on redemption, cleaning up the mess and healing the wounds from an already fallen condition.

We know that choices made based on our fallen lusts will open the doors to demons. We know that our sins give Satan permission to enter our lives. Instead of wasting energy over horror at the thought, we take for granted the much larger mission of winning back that territory within us that he holds by default. We regard preventing sin as the impossible dream; we will work for it, but don’t expect flesh to ever get there. We work for it because that is how we manifest holiness. But the majority of our time and energy goes to discerning how to reclaim what was already lost by the mere fact of being born in the flesh.

When wrestling with demons becomes routine, so do miracles and blessings from God. Life is prayer; prayer is life. It is in prayer that we defeat the forces of Darkness. All the other stuff we do with our fleshly existence is laying claim to the plunder of prayer warfare. In prayer we are granted insights into the actual reality of things; in prayer we make those fateful decisions. The flesh must then be prodded into lining up with that.

The current churchian obsession with objective reality on the one hand, and surrendering to the pursuit of feel-good religion on the other, is the product of Satanic influence in churches. This influence is borne through the doors by the impression that the church must be taken seriously by the secular society around us. The proposition that we have only objective or subjective truth is a false dichotomy. Divine truth cannot be known by the intellect except as a side effect of the heart knowing the truth and walking in it. The heart knowledge of the truth is neither objective nor subjective, but far above the level of the intellect.

Your heart-led convictions can guard your hearts from lies.

(This kind of contemplative teaching is one of the goals of those long bike rides. Pray that the Lord delivers support for keeping up the habit of long, hard rides.)

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