Liberalism Rests on Fantasy

Posted on July 9, 2025 by ehurst

It was good timing that Ron Unz chose to share with us this bit of clear reasoning about individualism and the collapse of society in the West.

Not that we agree with the answers suggested by the author (Jef Costello) nor the book from which he draws his thesis, but that they ask the right questions. That book is by Alain de Benoist, Against Liberalism: Society Is Not a Market, trans. F. Roger Devlin, Middle Europe Books, 312 pp. (found here). I will trust Costello’s summary.

The reason this is worth pursuing is the clear argument of what western individualism is. Somewhat less useful is the explanation of whence it comes. If you accept the self-declaration of western church doctrine as biblical, then the accusation is accurate. However, we hold that such a declaration is false, that western church traditions very early left the biblical outlook and substituted something false, reading it back into the Bible. We’ve been saying this for decades.

The blame rests with Hellenized minds seizing the teachings of Christ as translated into Greek and failing to search the Hebraic background of Christ. Thus, the claims of western church religion are false from the start. The real blame falls on Hellenism, not the actual teachings of Jesus.

Thus, Costello tells us that modern secularism is the logical outcome of western religious traditions:

All that then remained was for the educated, urban classes to discard entirely the individual’s relation to God. What we were left with was a secularization of Christian religious individualism: The individual is what he is prior to and independent of family, nation, race, and social role and is not fundamentally defined by these. But with the individual’s relation to God discarded, he is now nothing more than a social atom who is nevertheless still supposed somehow to possess intrinsic worth and dignity. And this worth is exactly the same in all individuals. In other words, all men are equal.

In his words, the entire human race is individually interchangeable before God. It makes no difference to Him who claims their ticket to Heaven. This is about as far from the truth as can be. I agree with his assessment of Calvinist doctrine, but we aren’t Calvinists. We do hold to the Doctrine of Divine Election, which apparently Calvin himself didn’t understand properly, as you can tell from reading his Institutes.

We look at the Two Realms in Scripture. Your value to God in the Covenant of Christ here in this world is based on how well you embrace and fit yourself into that Covenant. Your place in Heaven is not your choice at all. While there is a connection between your Covenant obedience and your place in Heaven, Scripture carefully avoids trying to explain that link in terms we can understand intellectually. It’s a mystery, something understood in the heart without words. It is ineffable, cannot be declared.

While God recognizes your individuality, it is from within His domain, His family household of faith. Your flesh cannot shed your tribal identity (race, ethnicity, culture, etc.) and we are advised to be careful about mixing cultures in our churches today. It can be done, but we cannot forget the sorrows Paul suffered so greatly from dealing with mixed churches.

There were several factors that made things so hard on Paul. The Jews were not Hebraic, but insisted they were. They constantly provoked Gentiles by their arrogance, while the Gentiles with good educations countered with their own prejudices. The early disciples had not studied the problem of mixing cultures, but simply assumed it was supposed to work. The power of the Holy Spirit is more than sufficient, but the path to changing one’s tribal identity was not clear to them. There is still a lot of work to do in bending the fleshly nature to the Spirit’s will. It’s not automatic; you must nail your flesh to the Cross repeatedly. Further, the early disciples had too much work to do just pulling away from the false doctrines of Judaism, while keeping the treasures that had not been lost.

No one had bothered to study the ancient Hebrew outlook in terms that could be offered to Hellenists. Paul had just barely begun to approach the task. It’s not that God could not commission someone to take up that job, but for whatever reason, it didn’t happen in the records of church history that we have. Instead, the Hebrew outlook was abandoned and became increasingly remote as time went on. We can only conclude that someone dropped the ball. God wasn’t caught off guard, but had His own ineffable reasons for letting this problem fester.

All I can say is that it seems to have fallen to recent generations to begin this work. The problem is that there is no possible way to stand up a body of work that can be absorbed by any and all cultures. Each human culture must make its own study of Hebrew epistemology and explain it in their own terms. Unless you can see the differences, you are in no position to meaningfully renounce your fleshly identity in favor of a spiritual one.

This is the one thing that the article linked above misses: Genuine Christian faith does not atomize humans, but demands they yield to an identity that is alien to this world, yet does have a very clear image of what it should look like in this world. We have no interest in rights, nor liberty (whatever that means), and we certainly denounce individualism. The Covenant of Christ is feudal and tribal. But Mr. Benoist is quite right that we are dealing with a monster in western liberalism:

Such forms of belonging are regarded with suspicion by liberalism because they make the individual less free in his choices — especially when they are not voluntarily chosen. This means that, effectively, liberalism sets itself against history, tradition, and nature. It becomes a denial of everything that transcends the atomic individual and his personal autonomy[…] To liberate or emancipate individuals meant breaking the bonds of community and freeing individuals from the circumstances into which they were born. “A radical devaluing of the past in the name of an optimistic vision of the future.”

The ability of the human subject to separate himself, even if only in his imagination, from all bonds and all historical context is regarded, moreover, as what makes him truly human[…] While for the ancients the ideal was conforming ourselves to the natural order, for the moderns the ideal is freeing ourselves from it. Human self-actualization is thus understood to be a process of liberating oneself from all unchosen connections or attachments.

These are the basic assumptions of almost all western church folks. We have an awful lot of work to do.

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Of New Wine and Old Skins

Posted on July 8, 2025 by ehurst

We talk a great deal about the mindset and worldview of the Hebrew people, because that’s the only way to understand the Bible. But not everything about that outlook is admirable, especially in light of the very real changes brought about in the Covenant of Christ.

The western outlook is still perverted. The changes Christ brought don’t justify anyone who truculently insists that God built Western Civilization. That notion is blasphemous. Rather, the New Testament outlook corrects the Old Testament a little, and condemns the western outlook in whole. A significant part of John’s Revelation laments the fading of Hebrew influence in church doctrine. This is where the Harlot Church image comes from, a church that became so westernized that it bore little resemblance to the faith community of those who knew Jesus personally.

Let’s remind ourselves of something: On the one hand, Judaism is a perversion of the Old Testament, a clear departure from the ways of Moses. Looking back, we can see just how radically different those two things are. On the other hand, Judaism did not arise as a clean break from the Old Testament, as if you could go back and pin down a specific time and place when the Israelis got lost. Rather, it is the net result of trends that have always been a part of who they were, and their tendency to wander from God’s Word.

Judaism is the net result of Israel’s fleshly nature, their peculiar moral flaws as a nation, perverting divine revelation. Throughout the history of Israel, we can see how the best and most faithful kept trying to pull them back on track, but the truth is that they were never really there. The bulk of the nation was never faithful without a very active sword keeping them in line. Their foul nature was never far below the surface.

When they ran into the peculiar materialism of Babylon during captivity, followed by another form of materialism from Hellenism’s conquests, they quickly detached from their ancient mystical orientation. They kept a hollow shell of symbolism very much like the Greek version.

This is the core issue I’m getting at: Jews claim to understand their own Hebrew roots, but their actions as a people betray a literalism that Moses did not promote. The hardest thing for western Christians to grasp is the tension between the symbolic and the literal. The western form of mysticism is intellectual, while the ancient Hebrew form was rooted in a whole range of heart-led wisdom that defies intellectual grasp. It’s not a question of data, but the power of a living Lord in your soul.

Divine Election is not a law or decree; it is the divine Presence Himself. The concept of Israel as “chosen” was not a status painted onto them as a people. It was a domain God built to house them, and which most of the nation at any given time would abandon with glee. It was Israel as the mission and message, not Israel the people who were chosen. English translations of the Hebrew Scriptures are often misleading in how things are worded. English transmits data like ore in a string of carts; Hebrew is a collection of signposts pointing out the Person of divine truth you should get to know better.

Thus, the fundamental image of the Covenant for the Hebrews was like a closed camp within a wilderness ruled by Satan. They were besieged, and dare not leave the boundaries without an armed force under God’s command. They sought to expand that domain when God commanded it. The difficulty here is understanding how that symbolism applies in real life. For the flesh, it’s easy to apply the imagery in ways that don’t work out too well. It’s the old proverb of having only a hammer so that everything looks like a nail.

The living truth is not an instrument. It is a divine Presence with all the subtlety and whimsy of any real person you encounter. You cannot reduce divine revelation to a set of rules. The Decalogue was a manifestation; it was not God Himself.

The only thing Judaism today remembers from that background image is that they insist they should conquer the world with their list of rules, and when it doesn’t work, they are under siege. They see themselves as persecuted because they don’t rule, whining and carping until they do rule. God is not commanding them, so it’s all a fleshly operation. Had they understood the moral and spiritual mandate within that image, then a physical conquest would be unnecessary.

The Covenant of Christ inherits that image. We should recognize that the image is symbolic. We conquer in the moral and spiritual realm, and scarcely pay any attention to the politics of this world. We do not whine about real world persecution; we welcome it as Jesus did the Cross. The sorrow of the Cross led to the joy of conquest in the Spirit Realm. We are besieged in the flesh, but we reign in the Spirit.

The conquest has already taken place in the Unseen Realm. We are not under siege there, and what happens in the flesh is of little consequence. The political manifestation was important for Israel in the Old Covenant. That ended with the Cross; God abandoned human politics into the hands of His opposition, but seized the victory in the Spirit Realm. He now rules in the hearts of humans, and the worldly situation is just the background against which His glorious reign shines.

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Submission Is Freedom

Posted on July 5, 2025 by ehurst

This is one of those Bible lessons where you must think of the message of the Word as a whole.

Reviewing what we have seen in Leviticus, we get an image. In the Covenant of Moses, there is no distinction between incest for sheer animal pleasure and incest as a pagan magic ritual. It doesn’t matter why you did it; this was a capital offense. This requires that we go back into the depths of the Old Testament to understand that people naturally avoided such things by instinct. It’s a taboo that goes back before human laws. In other words, the only way people would have considered such a thing in the first place was because the Watchers and Nephilim taught them to do it.

The Watchers and Nephilim knew this was a boundary God had established in Creation itself, and they were rebelling against God in the sense of persuading humans to do things that would defile them and lock them away from redemption from the Fall. They want us in Hell before we die.

After the Fall, mortality required procreation to keep human society going. Sex is an urge built into the flesh. God granted it to humans as a means of breaching the alienation and isolation that came from the Fall. Edenic communion in spirit was lost; we are mortals now. A measure of redemption is sexual union to create families that can stand united together against a world over which we no longer have divine authority. If all you notice is the physical thrill, your sex life is really poor. We don’t even have what the animals have, because they aren’t fallen. The Fall didn’t change animal existence, but we don’t fit into that because we were designed as eternals. We are strangers in this world.

Having a family that can rally to your support and keep you alive is a real blessing, but it has boundaries. If we transgress those boundaries, it’s not simply that we mess up a good thing God gave us by having sex that confuses roles and boundaries. Incest crossed a line that made folks ineligible for redemption in this life. The blessings God has for people who call on Him and obey Him are rejected by following the advice of the Watchers and Nephilim.

Following their teaching locks us into the hands of Satan. We are born mortals and that puts us in his domain. The only escape is to live by God’s revelation, the Covenant boundaries that alienate us from Satan’s mastery. The Covenant places us in a sort of sacred space where his claim on us is weakened. We still have to deal with temptations, but we have clear boundaries so that we can loosen that grip.

It’s acknowledged in Scripture that if you are determined to treat God as your Father and Lord, He will change your heart and give you strength to resist the siren call of Satan to come outside the household of God and taste his goodies. All of those goodies will lock us under his control; they will defile us. That defilement includes numbing and eventually silencing our inner moral consciences. It severs the conscience from the heart. We gain so much scar tissue that the conscience no longer works. We no longer hear in our souls the voice of Creation itself crying out against sin.

For Israel, it was not merely that they were to be a different kind of nation, but that they were supposed to be His family, the supporters He could count on to take His side in the ongoing debate with Lucifer. A part of that debate was Lucifer’s claims in Job about how shallow humans are, how unworthy we are of redemption.

What an unspeakable gift from God that He gave to His nation that they could sharpen their sensitivity so that they could start to recognize sin anywhere it was found. They grew beyond mere boundaries for the flesh and began to escape this world, little by little, gaining distance from the mortal fallen nature. This was how the Covenant of Moses was supposed to work. It was supposed to alienate them from the fleshly view of existence. It was intended to build a solid fortress of moral awareness in the hearts of the people as a whole. It was intended to turn them into a lighthouse to the nations, to send out the signal that it was possible to leave that grubby mortal life behind, that God had provided a path back to Eden.

Every slip at God’s boundary lines was damage, and some of it was permanent. Losing one’s virginity cannot be undone. Human science knows this; it’s called “sexual imprinting”. But science cannot tell you of the way illicit sex defiles everyone around you, how it threatens human existence as a whole. This is what the Old Covenant implied by using the language of defilement, or pollution of the land. It gave Satan and his allies a permit to own people, leverage confirming his bogus claim over them.

You are part of a tribe and nation. That’s built into Creation. Your sin harms the other members of the tribe, even if nobody in the whole tribe recognizes their connection. Creation itself is tribal. A default tribal identity in the flesh is part of the damage done in the Fall made worse by the rebellion of the Watchers and the one at Babel. Those other two rebellions were designed to lock us into the worst consequences of the Fall.

Christ on the Cross ended the limitations of the Old Covenant. By our submission to Christ as Lord, by embracing His Covenant, at one stroke we gain the power of a renewed conscience and a tribal identity rooted in Eternity. While this does not wipe away all the natural consequences of defilement in the flesh, it does awaken a purified moral awareness by the power of the Holy Spirit. We no longer have to work for His Presence as they did under Moses. It’s a free gift from Christ. We still need to do the work of building a strong connection between the Spirit and our fallen human conscience, but there’s no doubt about an inborn ability to discern sin in our daily existence.

Submission to the bondage of Christ is the ultimate freedom from the Devil.

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Already Provided

Posted on July 4, 2025 by ehurst

God set His humans in the Garden to manage things for Him and His glory. They were imbued with a native understanding of what He required of them. No one had to tell them where the boundaries of moral action stood. Divine revelation was rather simple: take care of the Garden and avoid eating from that one tree.

When the Tempter approached Eve in the Garden, what he suggested was tantamount to calling on humans to evolve, to rise to higher beings, to become their own gods and seek their own glory. It was a blatant transgression of the boundaries, seeking to be what they knew they could not be. While the temptation included all three core weaknesses of human fleshly nature — Lust of the Flesh, Lust of the Eyes and Boastful Pride of Life — the one I will emphasize here is the last.

They lost access to the Garden and the Tree of Life. That’s a symbolic way of saying they were forced to abandon their eternal form, enshrouded in mortal flesh like the animals. The Sword of God’s Word stood guard; they would have to die physically to see the Garden again. Instead, they faced a mortal existence without that inherent knowledge of the boundaries. They eventually began calling on God to reveal those boundaries in ways they could understand.

It was a continuation of that temptation when the Watchers transgressed their boundaries and came down to the humans. Their progeny, the Nephilim, presented themselves as teachers who could elevate humans to that greater power, showing humans how to do all sorts of things that violated the boundaries God revealed. The Flood killed the Nephilim, but they eventually sneaked back into this world and had to be killed off during the invasion of Canaan Land by the nation of Israel. So far as we can tell, David killed the last of them. The only way they can animate now is to seize a mortal human soul.

In his documentary Aliens and Demons, Heiser explains how all of this is connected to the kind of human ambition promoted by the Nephilim spirits — the demons we face today. The human obsession with advancement and pushing the boundaries of human knowledge is just a continuation of the Three Rebellions. Heiser connects the secret government research that did awful things to so very many people, and the insistence of keeping these abominations hidden, with the necessity of creating the myth of Roswell aliens as a way to misdirect investigations away from the awful results of that immoral research.

We would surely debate what falls on which side, but I distinguish between learning how to live with our current situation, gaining the knowledge of how to implement God’s plan, versus the effort to ignore God’s Word and learn to manipulate Creation. God says the wisdom of Creation is not secret, nor is it obscured such that it requires grand human talent to dig it up. Rather, the truth of His Creation is hidden by the moral darkness of humans who reject His Word. That deep knowledge of the boundaries of His revelation is right there in plain sight.

A part of that truth is that we have no real use for most of our efforts to plumb the facts of intellectual knowledge about the universe. There is nothing we can do to change anything that matters. Whatever it is we figure out does not lead us to a better place; we are still mortals living in a false reality. This whole thing, including our fleshly existence, is slated for destruction. It has a distinct shelf life and will be destroyed in due time. The only thing worth understanding is how we can get out of here to an eternal existence that is a free gift.

Everything you could possibly use in this life is already provided in Christ.

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Radically Different

Posted on July 2, 2025 by ehurst

Kiln of the Soul parish is neither liberal nor conservative in our political outlook. Those terms refer to persuasions based on secular materialism. They are to varying degrees hostile to genuine Christian faith. The Covenant of Christ does not lead to either of those positions because it transcends human political reasoning.

In order to live out the Covenant, divine revelation gives us a polity that is tribal and feudal. We are not even on the same planet with the secular political ideologies of Americans. To the degree we engage human politics at all, our message points to the Covenant of Noah to guide those who are not Covenant Elect. Any other political ideology or theory is a rejection of Christ’s Lordship.

That said, we can stand back and evaluate what we see in the secular political wrangling of those outside the Covenant. As long as you wallow in the social culture of America, you cannot see clearly how it is filthy or why it is filthy. If you renounce it and depart from it into biblical faith, you can understand why things work the way they do. You can see clearly the inherent flaws in all the various positions in light of how they depart from God’s ways for us.

We can see that there is theory and then there is what actually exists on the ground. We can filter the rhetoric and lies designed to manipulate the masses who are still wallowing in the mud. There is talk of a “conservative agenda” that does not exist in any political grouping in government, and is foreign to virtually everyone in politics. The chatter is meaningless, except to indicate that this or that idea is simply “not progressive”. No one actually promotes a genuinely conservative agenda.

Within the context of our American heritage and culture, “conservative” is a fairly realistic and mature outlook. It arises from paying attention to the disasters of the past. It’s the thinking you expect from adults who want to preserve what humans can gain from social and economic activity. It seeks stability and material prosperity. Further, they seek it for the whole country, not just a select few. So, for example, a genuine conservative outlook would hate the many wars and military actions the American government takes these days. No one is attacking the US. War is a hideous waste of productivity and benefits only an tiny few upper class folks.

Against this, the progressive viewpoint is childish, a fantasy, a siren song claiming what could be, but which is utterly unrealistic. It comes dressed in all the implacable demands of spoiled brats. To this day, you would be hard put to find any progressive representative capable of even understanding conservatism, much less being fair and impartial about conservative people. It’s not a matter of intellect, but moral development. Progressives have no moral development.

Genuine conservatives have no trouble understanding progressives because they were children once. But left-versus-right is not the real debate in America. The real conflict is a constantly morphing and shifting array of folks neither conservative nor progressive in their commitments, but people seeking wealth and power by any means possible. They use the false left/right paradigm to manipulate the masses.

And none of this is news on this blog, but I would like to recommend to my readers that you learn to enunciate these political outlooks. Be ready to answer when people press you to affirm their silly political agendas. Almost without fail, those yapping fools have no idea what they are talking about. Tell them that. It’s not so important to correct their false narratives; that is likely not even possible. Most people who talk about such things are already worked up in a heedless frenzy. Rather, it’s important that you communicate a lack of interest in whatever is driving them to distraction. You are not a pawn in the political manipulations of the day.

No one is going to hear our story except a tiny few whom the Lord moves. Most of us are not in a position to withdraw from society right now. We cannot go off and build our own society of faith. Our missions keep us involved in the lives of people around us. But it’s important that we insure people know we are not a part of the herd. We distinguish ourselves by refusing to wave flags and slogans. We represent the Lord of all Creation, and His agenda is radically different from that of mere humans.

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Turn Freshly to the Lord

Posted on June 30, 2025 by ehurst

Let’s look at the trends. I won’t predict the eventual fallout, only what seems to be the strong thrust of human sentiment at large right now.

First, I must reiterate that Trump has no agenda aside from his own self-aggrandizement. Someone who knows him says that if six different people get his ear on the way to a press conference, he’s most likely to remember only the last conversation. You cannot appeal to his sense of direction, only his ego. This is reflected in his frequent changes in direction. There is no discernible policy basis at all, no clear agenda.

Instead, he has a collection of hobby horses without any philosophical cohesion. Thus, anything that can change easily probably will do so. He’ll be persuaded by whatever appeals to his ego. Those changes in government policy that take a long time with a high commitment up front will likely keep going forward until something breaks. And you can be sure a lot of stuff will break.

Meanwhile, you might wonder if the globalists are on the ropes. They are, but not everyone on the leftist/materialist end of the scale is wiped out. The socialist candidate for New York City mayor is the new face of leftism. If you want to know more details about why he is a threat, try this. I’d say it’s as accurate as anything else.

But more to the point in this post is that his rise signals another part of a larger ongoing shift in the Democratic Party (think AOC and her ilk). Classical socialism has lacked a friendly front until now. Hitherto, socialists have nagged and harassed everyone. The appeal now is not purely ideological; with charisma it will fool a lot of people — millions of them are ripe for that kind of manipulation. And because it’s mated with a pro-Palestinian message, that factor alone will draw millions who cannot support Israel, never mind any other policy.

In the long term, this movement will destroy parts of the national economy. But Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill will do the same, just in a different way. I’ve said in the past that the whole economy won’t collapse, only some parts of it, and I’m still saying that. People in big lefty cities may face serious food shortages, but not the rest of us. Instead, we will face a reduction in choices.

And genuine socio-political conservatives have nowhere to go right now. They have almost no representation in the federal government. They have been herded in under Trump, but he has already betrayed them. They will grow increasingly restive.

Nor have I changed my tune about another expectation: Sometime this calendar year, the system breakage will be enough for people of covenant faith to see a clear and present threat of persecution before the actual persecution starts. Keep your eyes open; all will be revealed in due time. But there’s also a threat for everyone else: Big Tech will snuggle up to government like never before. Surveillance through your computer and phone has already been much deeper than you know. In the near future, the likes of Palantir (the name of a fictional “all seeing stone”) will collate all the disparate and clunky government databases and everyone who’s had an unpleasant experience with any federal agency will be tagged as a problem by a centralized authority. Ready for a “social credit score”? It’s very popular with bureaucrats and politicians on all sides.

For now, it’s all about the immigrants. Once enough of them have been abused, more and more of the federal oppression will fall on legal citizens. We already have horror stories of legal citizens being swept up with immigrants and not released for weeks. A Real ID? Nah, they claim it’s fake. A substantial number of folks seeking asylum here for their Christian faith are being shipped back out. ICE is the new “jack-booted thugs” people should fear, kicking down doors and arresting anyone on a whim while ignoring all rights.

Against this, foreign money is funding protests like never before. There might be more than one kind of fireworks on Independence Day. If these trends continue, things will collide and martial law is highly likely. Welcome to your new apocalypse.

Covenant people, turn freshly to the Lord and trust in Him.

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Leviticus 19

Posted on June 28, 2025 by ehurst

While I do take some of this from Heiser’s podcast, this is not an echo of his material.

We begin with noting that the Lord commands Moses to review and summarize the Covenant Law with the nation. Previous chapters of Leviticus often referenced the situation in Egypt and was a reaction the pagan practices there. Here we get the feeling they are now closer to the Promised Land it’s time for a review against the Canaanite pagan practices, because things are stated a little differently this time around.

An unspoken emphasis is that Israel is one big family; your neighbor is your brother/sister. Much of what is said here points to treating each other with respect. But the point is not the respect itself, but the divine justice of caring for people, particularly those who are under the Covenant or seek its shelter around the fringes (i.e., Gentiles who submit feudally under the Code of Noah). It was to be a tightly knit community, bound by a common commitment to serving Jehovah as Lord as His earthly family.

The first few verses are straight out of the Ten Commandments and have not changed. It’s just a reminder to cling to these basic moral characteristics.

Nothing stops anyone from eating food the third day after cooking except the risk to your digestion. You are free to decide for yourself if it’s safe. However, a shared Peace Offering gets special handling. Don’t treat God’s food as common.

Even the dreary science of economics will tell you that any given economic system will include people in poverty for any number of reasons. Jehovah’s people make allowances for them to feed themselves. There’s no command to do the work for them, but to give them a chance to work for their own food by gleaning. Build an economic system that provides opportunities for them, even if you can’t hire them.

Be honest and don’t prank or mock the disabled. This is not a competition. Don’t show favoritism for people, but for God alone. Much of this sounds like “be nice” but that would miss the point. A society under Jehovah’s name must be stable, peaceful, and there must be a minimal level of trust. There’s that famous quotation: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

One thing does require explanation is the prohibition of mixing animals, fabrics, seeds, etc. The whole point is boundaries. The cherubim are mixed creatures in the Tabernacle/Temple, the priests wear mixed fabrics, your average Israeli was supposed to have a single thread of blue in a tassel on their out garment, etc. Mixing is a divine prerogative, often restricted to sacred space, but forbidden for common use. It is a mark of privilege and power delegated by God, not claimed by any human.

Notice commands regarding sex without consent. Role (social status) is a big deal here. Without female agency, it’s not adultery, so it’s not a capital offense. It doesn’t threaten the social stability the way a rape of a free woman would; all the more so when most of the women a man might encounter in daily life were close relatives by blood or marriage.

Common fruit trees do not produce until they are five years old. In nature, the poorly developed early fruit would fall and fertilize the tree. Believe it or not, this is a rather firm command to treat fruit trees with respect. In the fourth year it probably won’t produce a lot; give the first fruits to the priests. In the fifth year the tree is fully established and harvesting the fruit does no harm.

Verses 26-29 belong together as a paragraph on the same basic topic: avoiding specific pagan practices. Don’t consume blood, particularly as part of a divination ritual. The business of trimming beards (and hair by implication) had to do with cutting ritual symbols into the hair or skin. The Hebrew word here often translated “tattoo” shows up only this one time in Scripture, and it is ambiguous. Apparently, Hebrews did not differentiate tattoos or branding. Both were used to mark people as temple property, or at least as servants of some deity or as slaves (marked with their master’s name).

God Himself promises in several places to “put My name on” His people, so that is not forbidden for obvious reasons. It’s marking yourself for other deities that He forbids here. These days, such things seldom have that kind of meaning, except branding animals. But it’s connected closely in this passage with offering one’s daughter to a pagan temple as a ritual prostitute, something quite common across the ANE and Mediterranean Basin.

Instead, keep the Sabbath (only Israel did this). Don’t look for answers from anyone but God. Be polite to elders and respectful Gentiles. Don’t cheat anyone. All in all, it’s an abbreviated recipe for honoring Jehovah and boosting His reputation.

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Have Pity on Them

Posted on June 24, 2025 by ehurst

Divine justice is not simply the wrath of God falling on sin and sinners. Rather, it is the provision of redemption through covenant boundaries. The Lord revealed Himself — His moral character — through His covenants and His actions within those covenants. The boundaries reflect the very nature of reality itself, because His personality and character are inherent in His Creation. The way Creation works reflects Him. The covenants are a guide to discerning His character as manifested in reality.

Thus, divine justice is not merely retribution, but is restorative. It brings us back into His mercy and provision for fallen humanity. His revelation teaches us about our situation here and how to orient our thinking about what really matters.

We should already understand that only His Elect can receive the Holy Spirit. Without the Presence of the Holy Spirit, it is impossible to understand His revelation of His character. Thus, it requires the Holy Spirit to discern how you should think and act in context so that you manifest His glory. We are taking sides with Him in the heavenly debate on His Divine Council about things we cannot really comprehend.

That’s what we were made for in the first place. We worship Him and obey Him as our feudal Master and Lord. The act of baptism and other rituals are demonstrative protocols symbolizing our loyalty to Him.

We do all of this knowing that the majority of those around us are likely to be non-elect. His revelation gives us provisional indicators we can use to estimate whom we should treat as part of the divine family of Christ, but there is no certainty available on a human level of understanding. For the most part, we must build a lifestyle that leaves the ultimate question open as to who is Elect and who is Damned. The issue is not for us to attempt to nail it down, but to trust the Lord and His guidance about how to act with other humans.

Jesus warned that it is impossible to weed out the Damned from our community of faith (see the Parable of Tares). Instead, we are to operate in a certain way that gives them room to prosper until the harvest of souls. It is the glory of God that we toil away at keeping a community prospering in faith so that the fakes expose themselves and depart on their own. We are trying to make it very hard for them to tolerate our company.

In the process, we challenge the Elect to rise in faith and submission to Christ, while encouraging the Damned to move on. The goal is not a state to be achieved, but a process to be maintained. We must understand from the start that this is a dynamic situation, ever changing, responding in faith to changes in the context. We are building a community as a living thing.

A part of this process is understanding that we will never nail down who is Elect and who is Damned. Rather, it works out in practice to discerning how to keep shalom working as His glory. We maintain a cynicism, a skepticism about ourselves. We don’t trust our own flesh, but are obliged to drag it around and make it do the work. It becomes a matter of keeping an eye on the eternal goal of our human existence, but struggling with a fleshly nature that will never fully surrender to that divine purpose. The best we can do is learn to tolerate our own weaknesses and those of others, Elect and Damned.

No two communities will be the same. Uniformity as humans imagine it is not a part of the picture. Rather, it is a host of living communities expressing traits that arise from and match the local context. Further, that context includes the members themselves. Always imperfect, yet seeking to be more perfect, we maintain a community ever in tension. The best we can do is discover the limits of toleration within individual selves and the community as a whole. Who leads and how they lead will indicate who needs to go and who needs to stay — and when — along with how to pass through the days in shalom and glory.

At some point, the tension must break from time to time. Someone will become intolerable in the context and must be excluded. The details must be worked out within the context.

Throughout this process, we should be ever mindful that the Damned are damned. We cannot remake them into Elect. The most we can do is build an atmosphere that calls the Elect to rise and the Damned to feel unwelcome. Worst of all is that the New Covenant in Christ wipes away the linkage between society/government at large and the covenant community. There is a clear gap between the secular life and the community of faith. We are obliged to withdraw from the world at large in some measure, however the Spirit leads in the context.

We don’t hate the Damned; we pity them. They have no hope! The most we can do for them is to manifest what they cannot have. The more faithful we are, the weaker they will appear in our community. It’s not the question of identifying them officially as Elect or Damned, but identifying whether they are people who belong in the covenant community. If the answer is exclusion, then we must treat them as Damned, as outsiders who could never even understand. How sad for them! We must turn them over to the Devil; we must withdraw the spiritual covering. They will become wide open to whatever God decrees in His wrath against sin.

The blessings of covenant covering cannot extend to people who act like the Damned. Yes, weep for the losses of the fleshly nature, the sorrow of disentangling from them emotionally and physically. It hurts. We are losing an investment of our souls in the lives of others. But don’t surrender to the anger of your flesh, trying to claw back that investment, as if it were some material accounting process. We are not the instruments of wrath, though we are the instruments of exclusion.

This has nothing to do with the obscene calculus of the world and its ways. We should expect the world to reject the whole process of spiritual reckoning. We should expect worldly society and government to interfere in various ways. The world does not recognize the mission of the covenant community, and will seek every opportunity to assert its own system of control in every process it notices. This is why we are obliged to withdraw as far as possible as a community of faith.

But you should hardly be surprised that, in our American culture, we see a vast degree of compromise in organized religion. It is the long result of centuries of compromise that began back before Constantine. Today, churches seldom bear any resemblance to a covenant community. They should be treated as secular organizations that just barely permit some limited spiritual fellowship. The Lord can use us to influence some individuals there, but don’t expect churches to do anything to seriously alienate the Damned; they often run the show.

Pity the churches that are so spiritually destitute. Pity the Damned. Do what you can to keep them out of your hair, but they will never go away until the Lord returns.

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Not Special

Posted on June 22, 2025 by ehurst

President Trump is not special.

I realize just saying that by itself is enough to raise his ire. He’s not special; he’s no different from any other president we’ve had for at least a century back. Every one of them has acted for his own personal interests first. The party affiliation simply tells you the flavor of his personal interests. In Trump’s case, it’s not even that. He was a lifelong Democrat until he decided to run for President; using the Republican Party was the easiest path for him. He has made a deal with the neocons to seize full control of the party.

There’s nothing new about that among Republicans. What distinguishes him is his monumental ego and arrogance, and his willingness to lie without limits. There is nothing at all he wouldn’t lie about in order to manipulate the public. The man has zero principle, as vain as they come. He lied about his reason for bombing Iran. It’s all about his ego and his personal financial profit. This action is entirely unreasonable and based on flat out lies about Iran. It has nothing to do with what Iran did or didn’t do.

All of this is just regular American politics and would normally be unworthy of remark. However, it is important to note that in sending military power into Iran, Trump has torn away the last shred of provisional covering America had before the Lord. He has openly sided with Satan, whom Jesus said was the father of Judaism. Follow the logic here: Jesus said the Pharisees were children of Satan. Judaism is simply Pharisaism. Even secular Jewish ethnic identity is tainted with that, and Zionism in particular is Satanic.

Pharisaism lifted up a false image of who God is, so fatally blinded that it didn’t recognize His Son. It was like the sin of Jeroboam all over again, raising up a false image and calling it “Jehovah”. Trump has joined in this sin. He has raised up false idols and called them “Christian”. He has placed Christ’s name on something that does not represent the Lord of Scripture. Everyone who supports Trump will participate in defaming the Lord.

As always, I’m not writing to present you with a well reasoned argument. This is about the Holy Spirit; either God will confirm what I say or you will reject it. I have no doubt that, if/when this message comes to the notice of certain people, I will face persecution. Censorship will be the least of my worries. Trump has been maniacal about using government to hound anyone he considers an enemy. Perhaps my readership is too small for anyone much to notice. We’ll see.

I must speak my convictions and let the Lord provide whatever cover He sees fit for His glory. Trump’s actions are the straw the broke the camel’s back. America has zero covering and will reap the wrath of God in His own good time. Having chosen to serve Satan, America will discover what wages he offers.

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It’s the Rituals

Posted on June 21, 2025 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 79: Leviticus 17-18

We aren’t through with Leviticus. Already we’ve discovered some details that most readers never catch because the Hebraic and ANE background are missing. Starting in Leviticus 17 through 26, we are looking at what most scholars refer to as the Holiness Code. What may not be obvious is that the items discussed in these two chapters refer to worship. It has to be done right.

Thus, when the first few verses refer to killing an animal, it refers to sacrifice, not just slaughter for food (see Deuteronomy 12:15-16). The whole point is twofold: forbidding offerings to other deities, but also to ensure that every sacrifice to Jehovah comes to the Tabernacle. If nothing else, this ensures that the priests get their share.

Heiser belabors the meaning of “cut off” — Hebrew karath. I believe he overstates the situation. After his wrestling through all the references how that word is used elsewhere in the Bible, I think it boils down to ostracism or excommunication. The offender becomes a Gentile, and an unwelcome one, at that. Whether or not God does more to them is not the point; they are not allowed back into fellowship. Moreover, when they die, they likely will not be “gathered to their ancestors”. There is no expectation of welcome into eternal fellowship in the afterlife.

The term translated into English as “detestable things” or “abominations” (Hebrew toebah) refers to various pagan worship practices. Consuming blood was a pagan practice, but in Leviticus 17 blood belongs to God. The blood is the life, and life belongs to God. Don’t steal from the Lord! That blood was spilled in place of your own blood, substitutionary atonement. That’s the whole point of the sacrificial system; you bring a substitute to die in your place.

There is a strong record of pagan ritual magic using blood in other ways than consumption. Thus, Heiser notes a high probability that draining and burying the blood prevents anyone else collecting the spilled blood from food slaughter to be used in pagan rituals. It’s also a way of honoring the life given to sustain yours. You bury your fallen ones and leave the enemies to rot in the open.

Regarding Chapter 18, we note there are a lot of sexual boundaries here. It should be obvious that “uncovering nakedness” refers to having sex with someone. The boundaries here don’t match those in our American culture and law, but they make sense in the context of the Old Covenant.

He diverges just a moment to explain the business of Noah and his son Ham exposing his nakedness in Genesis 9. Hebrew tends to euphemism (AKA, symbolism, parable) for some things too sensitive to state plainly. Recall that uncovering one parent is the same as both. The best way to make sense of that story is to understand that Ham had sex with his own mother, and that the child of that union was Canaan. That’s why Canaan is the one who suffers the curse.

The whole thing includes the image of taking control of the tribe, as Absalom did with his father’s concubines. Ham was trying to seize control of the household. He crows to his brothers about this and they refuse to go along with it. They engage in a ritual act of putting their father’s covering back over their mother. They reject the usurpation. Noah’s curse on the child (naming him before birth) halts Ham’s attempt to begin a new dynasty.

I’m disappointed that Heiser leaves this pagan ritual theme behind when he addresses other sexual boundaries. This whole section of Leviticus is about ritual acts of idolatry. Everything in this chapter is certainly under that covering. Thus, it is not about sex itself; it is ritual sex acts. That’s what defiles the land. All the chatter about why it’s wrong for men and not for women misses the point: lesbian sex was not a common ritual in the ANE.

Also note that a man having sex with his menstrual wife is a small issue in Leviticus 15:4, but here it becomes an excommunication offense. The difference is the context of this latter portion of the Book of Leviticus. Here we are dealing with pagan ritual idolatry. The meaning of the act is the whole point.

Heiser’s argument about wasting procreative activity stands on its own, but does not fit here. Homosexuality is wrong regardless of why anyone does it. But any sexual act for the purpose of magic or idolatry is particularly evil; the Covenant tribe must be cleansed of such people. Paul’s prohibitions on such acts are more because he defines such self-centered behavior as a New Testament form of idolatry — self worship, the worship of the fleshly urges.

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