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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Uncovering Nakedness

Posted on February 16, 2020 by ehurst

In the Old Testament, the phrase “uncovering someone’s nakedness” was invariably a reference to sexual intercourse. Even if it was a private thing, as sex should be, it could be tantamount to a public humiliation. It was something degrading and abusive. It exposed someone’s nakedness to demonic infestation. From that time forward, their private parts were a domain of demonic presence. The “covering” of God’s blessing was torn away. Publicity wasn’t really the issue, but the exposure to demons; however, it might as well be public humiliation.

This was typically associated with idolatrous practices, but it didn’t have to be. People had little or no reason to publicly humiliate someone sexually except as a matter of degrading pagan ritual, but it was still an open invitation to demons. It was making a sacrifice of someone else’s innocence to a pagan deity, and in Scripture, all pagan deities are demons. There is only worship of the true Creator; all others are demons who capture the worship that should go to God.

If you worship your own self, in the sense of self-glorification, or simply can’t restrain your lustful impulses, it’s still service to a demon. Thus, any public act of sexual humiliation is inherently an act of demonic worship. But secret sexual encounters are no different. Notice that Leviticus 20 is all about stoning to death, and sometimes burning the corpse. The same actions without an idolatrous intent would not necessarily bring the same penalty, but sexual sins do.

We’ve already covered how private marital sex occurring during a wife’s menstrual period is treated as a mere ritual defilement in other passages, not a capital sin as mentioned in Leviticus 20. Hebrew men didn’t loathe menstruation, but feared the intimation of idolatrous practices associated with seeking a woman’s menstrual blood for demonic ritual magic. But according to Biblical Law, every sex act outside the bonds of a marriage covenant was de jure demonic.

Thus, proper marital sex was never “uncovering someone’s nakedness.” Pay attention to the context when reading the Law of Moses. Then again, in Old Testament History, nearly every instance of homosexuality was tied to vile pagan religious rituals. There were very few men and women sexually attracted to their own gender without a pagan influence; it was nearly always a matter of service to some pagan deity. And those who were homosexual or bisexual were suspected of being idolatrous, because demonic influence is considered the source of it. That’s what made Sodom and Gomorrah so disturbing. It wasn’t a pair of cities filled with queers, but degrading ritual sex practices in service to demons.

And publicizing any kind of sexual desire in that context was inherently an act of devotion to demons. It’s a paradox that the Old Testament Hebrew culture was so matter-of-fact about human sexuality, but then held it as something that must be kept private. It wasn’t embarrassing, just none of your business. That’s quite different from our Anglo-American cultural silliness of being so prissy about human sexuality, so that the only way to be “honest” about it is to engage in vulgarity.

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FYI: The emergency blog I started yesterday will remain open as an echo of this blog. It will serve as the backup blog, but is also an experiment to see what traffic it draws on another platform.

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Law of Moses — Leviticus 20

Posted on February 15, 2020 by ehurst

This is an austere chapter, enumerating a list of sins for which the death penalty is demanded. That would be hard to understand if you fail to realize that all of these represent pagan practices. The chapter begins and ends with a reference to idolatrous rituals, and everything in between is best understood as more of the same. Thus, it is not the acts in themselves that are so wrong, but that they are all associated with pagan practices that defile the nation and threaten covenant shalom.

Please note that the frequent comment “his blood shall be upon him” is a specific formula that forbids relatives of the guilty from seeking any blood vengeance rights. The perpetrator executed for any of these crimes against the Covenant was no victim, but brought on his own death.

Sacrificing children to Moloch involved building a brass oven in some likeness of the deity, with the arms as the focus of the heat. Once hot enough, a child was thrown alive into the arms and cooked to death. For the most part, it was meant to curry Moloch’s favor for predictable weather and a good harvest. That’s bad enough, but the whole symbolism of giving children granted by Jehovah to some other deity was just beyond the pale. However, the failure to zealously prosecute those who commit this foul idolatry is considered equal to the sin itself, and thus the penalty is the same. The People of the Covenant are all equally charged with guarding the Covenant regardless how dear the life that was forfeited.

The various practices of divination are condemned yet again. The people are warned to commit themselves to a zeal for the Lord and prosecute the defiling idolatry wherever, whenever and however it rears it’s demonic head. Cursing one’s parents was another foul act of idolatry, since there was no ritual for that under the Covenant. It was defacto a pagan practice that involved consorting with demons.

The list of forbidden sexual relations is not new at this point. Most of them were part of Egyptian religious practices. Again, the reference to sex during a woman’s menstruation is not a mere sex act, as we noted in a previous lesson, but refers to a pagan practice meant to conjure power from blood. The mention of burning with fire was not a means of execution, but what happens to the bodies after they are dead from stoning. Also, “they shall be childless” is a reference to execution well before the woman can give birth. If her pregnancy is the evidence that brings on the charge, she is to be executed before giving birth, because the child is defiled.

God depicts the land — the natural world — as intolerant of these filthy pagan practices. The land itself would facilitate the slaughter of the degraded Canaanites living there, and it would do the same to Israel by someone else. Holiness meant taking seriously the heart-led way of sensing moral danger, and these commandments would set a baseline for understanding what moral danger looked like. Thus, anyone who practices any idolatrous rituals for any reason must be stoned to death.

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Context for Service

Posted on February 14, 2020 by ehurst

It is no longer possible to bring together the divided halves of America. The only question now is when the shooting starts. There may be some false starts, but we shall have a civil war that will not end before things become horrific on a grand scale. Both sides have long postured about being the true American path, but it won’t matter. This is how empires die.

On the one hand, we dare not take sides. On the other hand, we cannot avoid it. That is, we must be prepared to find ourselves in the middle of something with no way of escape. Even if you are certain your abode is where God wants you, there will be hard decisions that no one else can make for you. Salute whatever flag flies over your place of service; embrace it as God’s choice for you. Otherwise, be ready to migrate when the Spirit moves.

You are the only one who can know what God requires of you in any context. It is your faith alone that can read the convictions of your heart. Your divine call and sense of mission is the frame of reference. It will never make sense to anyone else, unless they understand the nature of the heart-led path. So the way folks divide into opposing camps has nothing to do with righteousness. Holiness is following the path God lays out for you. The source of human conflicts is our fallen nature; the conflicts are a feature, built into our world. We engage those conflicts in one way or another because that’s where God puts us, not because the side on which we end up is somehow righteous. It’s simply the context in which we serve.

That service is the thing God sees; the context is His to control.

This is not nihilism; it is holy cynicism. As long as people are focused on this world, they will never understand what God demands. Instead, they will serve the idols of various human interests, calling those things “God” because they don’t know God. None of their idols will survive the cleansing hand of God. The only thing we take to heaven when we die is our witness to the otherworldly truth of God.

I know what my mission is. Already people have tried to hijack it, subvert it to idolatrous pursuits of whatever false gods they serve, and I haven’t even gotten started. My first long bike trip waits for warmer, drier weather here in Oklahoma. Until then, I’m simply training up to long rides with a loaded bike.

By the way, someone asked if the bike I linked to in a previous post is the only one I would use. No, this one could also fill the bill, and costs a little less. But either this or the other one is simply a material ideal, not the iron choice of God. His will isn’t like that when it comes to mission equipment. To be honest, God can provide a wide range of things, because things don’t really matter. They are just tools for service; the service is what matters. We seek to match the tools to the context, and our understanding of the context is likely to vary from moment to moment. It’s the commitment to service that really matters. God will provide, and will bless what He provides.

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Prayers for Frustration

Posted on February 11, 2020 by ehurst

Today I went down to our local military surplus and picked up a poncho. It was advertised is equivalent to the US government issue stuff, and it was all they had. It was not equivalent. It was a very cheap knock-off at too high a price; it’s not even close to full sized. It’s about right for a large child. If I search online, I see a lot of vendors assuring me I can get the government issue item, but then the pictures show the kind of cheap junk I bought today. I can’t trust any of them.

This represents what I’ve been running into a lot lately on things. Right now we have a windfall, but it’s almost as if forces of darkness are trying to consume all of it on junk. Not everything turns out sour, but something like half of it is just useless effort, chasing the wind. I’m not deterred, but I know that this isn’t going to get anywhere without some prayer support. Keep your money (unless you want to spring for that new bike); pray with me about how to use the money I already have.

I’m not going to replace my current bike until I can gather up something over $2k. That’s for something specifically designed for what I’m doing (Trek 920). What’s out there for sale at lower prices is no better than what I have, or it’s not at all designed for what I need. Unless my current bike simply breaks down completely, I’m going to keep riding it. So for now, I need to get two more things fixed, and both need special tools that I haven’t been able to find yet. There are still some bike stores I haven’t checked. Keep in mind that the tools have to be chosen for the bike, so it must be with me when I get them. The two issues are: the freehub and the bottom bracket bearings. Things will work okay for a while, but I want to get them fixed before I get out on the long trips.

I will have to build a front luggage rack, because apparently nobody makes a generic one that will work with my bike. I have a few ideas, and none of them are expensive, but they will require using materials I have little experience with. It has to be pretty lightweight. Since there’s no way I can get the right kind of aluminum tubing and bend it, and then weld it, I’ll have to use combinations of things like fiberglass rods and short pieces of curved steel tubing held together by epoxy — this is my current idea. Yes, I need a front rack. Long rides with all the load on the back are frankly dangerous. The load needs to be balanced between front and rear.

Camping gear is a little more flexible, so I’m not sweating that so much. I’ll have to order the sleeping bag; nothing available locally is suitable without being way too expensive. Same with the sleeping pad. They won’t stock the good stuff that costs less. My junk poncho will serve as a ground cover; I still need to identify a good tent that will be easy to carry and use. I’m pretty happy with my cameras for now. My emphasis will be telling the story of my experiences in writing, with pictures to breathe life into it. Right now, I don’t feel led to worry too much about video. I’ll do that in small doses for things like panoramas of terrain. I’m not even thinking about a camera drone; those cost way too much for too little gain.

Some of the things I’ll emphasize: advocacy of cycling itself, particularly here in Oklahoma. Not just recreational use, but to indicate what sort of things people could do with bikes. I’ll be putting pressure on the system to accommodate cyclists and tent camping, both of which are sorely lacking in Oklahoma, particularly in some of the most beautiful areas. Another emphasis is the communion with nature, not just the visual beauty. I haven’t forgotten the heart-led way by any means; I want to touch all of Creation with at least one experience of a heart-led human. I’m starting right here where I live, and I’ll be developing more writing on how that works. But not just the writing, the pictures and videos must arise from that communion, and should help to transmit that experience back to folks who see my work. I don’t want to compete with the YouTube guys and gals; this needs to be something different.

This needs prayer so that I don’t get sidetracked from the core issue. The current advocacy for bikepacking is not in tune with what God has called me to do. Some of it overlaps, but there’s plenty that completely misses the point, and won’t accommodate me trying to make that point until they embrace what we have.

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Additional Notes on Leviticus 19

Posted on February 9, 2020 by ehurst

Something we noted in this chapter, but shows up in a lot of other passages, is the warning about divination, soothsaying and mediums. The whole problem with these pagan practices is that they arise from a desire to see the future. Once one knows the future, the temptation is to decide how to meet it by your own reasoning, and to stop seeking God’s face. You aren’t supposed to poke around in the future itself; any choice you make about it will always be based on human thinking. Rather, you are supposed to pray and ask the Lord to tell you what to do next. It doesn’t matter what’s coming with that; you need to know what God wants from you regardless of what’s coming.

Even when you seek a prophetic word, the whole point is to know God’s will for you, not God’s will for everyone else. We aren’t looking for any particular advantage in this life except what comes in the same package as shalom.

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Law of Moses — Leviticus 19:19-37

Posted on February 8, 2020 by ehurst

We continue a laundry list of commandments that are designed to set Israel apart from other nations.

The business of mixing animals, crops and fabrics has provoked endless debate, even among Jewish scholars. Nowhere else in Scripture is this explained. The only obvious reason for this prohibition is that it represents pagan religious practices. This section of verses seems to address a lot of that sort of thing.

The penalty for adultery with a concubine is much lower, especially for the woman. She’s not a free woman, but a servant or slave taken into the household as a concubine. Thus, she can be scourged, and it’s likely the man would be too, but he has the added penalty of a sin offering.

The prohibition of eating from fruit trees the first few years is a common practice today. So far as scholars can discern, it is simply good agricultural practice, since pruning is almost a necessity for the first few years to make the tree hardy and not drag its limbs on the ground. Some fruits don’t even produce for the first few years. The fourth year crop belongs wholly to God. Fifth and subsequent years, the Lord took a tithe from the first fruits. On the other hand, this prohibition had nothing to do with wild fruit, only cultivated trees.

The next few verses cover a range of idolatrous practices. Not eating blood is covered repeatedly because it was a vile pagan practice to seek magical powers from bloodshed. The term “divination” is a collection of dark practices that have to do with changing one’s voice to indicate another being is speaking through them, while “soothsaying” refers to any number of practices based on reading the future, like astrology, for example. The odd beard trimming, scars and tattoos were all well known pagan practices.

One of the most hideous practices was ordering one’s daughters to serve as temple prostitutes for a period prior to marriage. At least one religion demanded this as an annual sacrifice, when all women were encouraged to sell their bodies in exchange for offerings to the temple. The reaction to this is why genuine virginity is so prized by the Hebrew people. The people would have all they could do properly observing the Sabbath and treating the Tabernacle with respect; they didn’t need the slavery of pagan practices.

It was common to find pagans who claimed to have contact with spirit beings. The “medium” refers to any number of practices, but typically a ventriloquist. It was silly hocus-pocus. Another more dangerous practice was actually a person cultivated by a particular demon as their “familiar spirit” who would manifest at times with supposed messages from the dead. Jehovah says this is all threats of moral defilement.

Stand or rise in the presence of elders as a sign of respect, because God will take it as an insult if you are disrespectful to them. Aside from certain rituals prescribed elsewhere, treat a peaceful Gentile resident in your lands as one of your own, with due care and consideration. In other words, don’t drive them out. Give them a reason to reverence your God. He reminds them not to act like the Egyptians did, enslaving Israel just because they were a convenient labor source. Don’t cheat each other in commerce. Fall in love with honest measures, weights and scales.

All of this contributes to the image of what “holiness” means.

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Current News Review 14

Posted on February 5, 2020 by ehurst

This time, at least, this series feature will appear on this blog.

Are you watching the conflict between Syria and Turkey? Here’s what I see. For unknown reasons, God is raising up Turkey. She can’t have everything she wants, but she will be a power no one can ignore. If Syria wants to clean up the mess the Western countries have caused by provoking civil war, she will have to stay snuggled up close to Russia. But more importantly, the Syrian government must win the full support of the people, whatever that means (which is wholly unlikely anything resembling the claims of “democracy” by Western propaganda). If the Syrian people do not rise up to push Turkish forces back across the border, then the Syrian people deserve to live under Turkish rule. And Syria needs to present an ultimatum to the feckless Kurds: Support the government or be slaughtered/driven out. The Kurds are a serious threat to any country that hosts them. Giving them a token “Kurdistan” would be a huge mistake.

What happened with the Iowa Democratic caucuses? First, you have to understand how those caucus meetings work. The main point is the 15% threshold. During the recent Democratic caucuses in Iowa, the party leadership did some rigging to ensure Bernie Sanders didn’t win. The primary trick was to send in extra caucus members who showed up pre-organized and committed to foiling a Sanders win. They didn’t vote for any particular candidate, but tried rig the outcome so as many candidates as possible got 15%, thus depriving Sanders of any realignment votes. Sanders consistently received a smaller share than would have happened without the rigging.

The Democratic Party is anything but democratic. I’ve already written how I believe that party is run by globalists, and Sanders is not one of them. Rather, he’s a huge favorite of the leftward leaning part of the US population at large. As things stand, he could never win against Trump in a general election. I doubt any of the Democratic candidates could. But we have two or three who are owned by the globalists. Biden started as the anointed one, but it’s obvious he can’t hold it together, and it looks like Buttigieg has made a deal with them. If that doesn’t work (black voters and Muslims aren’t likely to support him), Bloomberg is the fallback. He’s agreeable, but too powerful; he could buck the party and no one could touch him once in office. He already has an armed “palace guard” — one like Trump should have organized on his way to the White House.

I sense that we are still some years away from a break-up of the US. However, we remain on the knife edge of financial collapse. Notice I’m not saying it will be a full economic collapse, but the high finance system will shatter. Things like the stock market will drop, venture capital could dry up, banks will close or drastically change their policies, etc. I suspect the massive bailouts we saw previously will not be possible the next time. Look for currency controls, making it much harder to rely on cash for significant business transactions. Large hordes of cash will be confiscated and we will all be forced to use bank cards or cellphone apps for even small stuff. Those things aren’t guaranteed, but highly likely if the current trends continue.

Let your convictions tell you what to do with this information.

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