Law of Moses — Exodus 20:1-17

Posted on October 26, 2019 by ehurst

God takes you where you are, and speaks the language you recognize, in order to move you where He wants you. The language of the Covenant begins with a suzerain-vassal treaty. It’s a form the Hebrew people would have recognized, all the way back to Abraham and even before. This first section is typically called the Ten Commandments. It depends on whom you ask how they are divided and listed as ten separate items. We won’t bother with that here. The point is that this represents an image of what God wants to see in His people.

So this is just an overview. It is the part written for all to see and review often. It’s meant to be fairly concrete and simple. It would never occur to Hebrew people at this point in their history to play semantic games. They would understand what was demanded here. The rest of the Books of Moses are judgments the Lord made regarding various issues, but these first provisions here are universal, with no context needed.

The prologue is simple: Jehovah identifies Himself as the deliverer who invested a ransom for this nation. He took them from slavery and set them free to serve Him. They owe Him their very lives. He is their God; He owns them.

The wording of the next line says that He will not tolerate them attempting to adopt foreign deities, strangers who have no interest in them, who did nothing for them. The wording echoes many marriage covenants: They are His bride and shall not turn to any other man for support and love. Thus, the Covenant already starts to be tinged with other types of covenant.

Next, He will not tolerate the use of idols in His household, imaged dedicated to Himself or any other. They must not use anything they can make with their hands to form a barrier between them and God. They must learn to come before Him personally and directly. No proxies allowed. He will treat it like adultery, and His memory of such things is longer than any of them could live.

By the same token, He shows favor to those who genuinely favor Him. He doesn’t lose track of those who love Him.

He will not tolerate people defaming Him and tearing down His reputation. Don’t act in ways that will embarrass Him. Don’t pretend you can keep secret your lack of respect for Him. If you rally under His flag, don’t cross Him.

One of the best ways to honor Him is to remember that He claims each seventh day for Himself. You can’t use it for your own purposes; it belongs to God and will be rendered as your justly owed time-tax. No one will be required to work for you on that day, whether it be family, slave, or animal. Don’t allow your guests to work for profit, either. Everything you do on that day will belong to God. He rested from His labor of Creation on the seventh day, and you will, too.

Live so that people around you get the impression your parents were really wise. Don’t make them look bad. God expects His people to maintain a stable society from generation to generation, so take the established customs seriously. God will honor your commitment to that stability by keeping you alive long enough to pass on your wisdom and experience.

Don’t murder; don’t kill people for your own personal gain. Killing is reserved for protecting the Covenant.

Don’t break your marriage vows. People who cheat on their spouses are cheating on their God.

Don’t plunder your own people. Respect their property as you would your own. They are your family; defend their control of their possessions.

Don’t betray your people by lying about them. Report the honest truth of what you have witnessed about them, for good or ill.

Don’t let your fleshly lusts for things of this world turn you against your people. Don’t let envy corrupt your heart, making you a threat to them. Be glad and grateful for what your God provides you and trust Him for your needs. Stick to your mission and calling and mind your own business.

The context is entirely Ancient Near Easter feudalism. This list offers a very potent warning that He regards them all as one family under His adoption. If anyone has a complaint against his brother or sister, he must bring it before the Lord. We must not take matters into our own hands, but defer to His decisions in all things. They must cling to Him first, then to each other.

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Talk the Walk

Posted on October 23, 2019 by ehurst

This won’t take long.

When I talk to people about religion and faith, most of what I say that seems to have any real impact is just this: Listen to your heart. Walk by convictions, not reason. You can’t trust your senses and what other people think to tell you what you really need to know to have peace with God.

All the other stuff I could talk about seems to have a lot less impact, but the one thing no one seems to miss is the encouragement to walk by conviction. So naturally I’m going to suggest that this is our primary message.

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Where and Who We Are

Posted on October 22, 2019 by ehurst

Let’s get real: Radix Fidem is unlikely to grow much until one or more things happen.

One: If one or more people with a high public exposure adopt Radix Fidem and promote it, we will get a lot more attention. Advertising won’t work; this has to be something people promote because they love it and live it. It has to catch the public eye as genuine.

Two: If a substantial number of mainstream religious institutions break down rather quickly, we would find at least a more receptive audience for our current subtle approach. What keeps us from growing is the huge number of people who are quite comfortable where they are, and have a set of defensive arguments in their minds to protect what they have. Other Christians aren’t likely to be receptive to our message unless they are individually feeling very displaced and vulnerable.

Three: If there is a rather sudden loss of the broader social and cultural comfort zone most people cling to, we are more likely to find a receptive audience among those who don’t do much church. This is the analog to number two above, but affects generally unchurched folks. If we are able to live by a strong and secure faith in the midst of turmoil, people will notice.

And in all cases, we are waiting on a miracle of God. What we do in Radix Fidem is such a long way outside the mainstream, and rests so very much on faith itself, that the normal human path to change is simply not there to draw people to us. We are not elite, but rare.

Granted, I believe Two and Three above are inevitable. But we still have to live and grow our faith in the meantime. It’s not as if we wish to keep people away; we cannot avoid that effect when we do this with genuine faith. The issue is not our peculiar religious habits; we aren’t calling people to that. Those are just the individual outworking of a radical commitment to Christ. We are calling people to a redefinition of how to do religion. It’s not the destination, but the path. It’s not the product but the process.

You aren’t supposed to like all my answers, my choices in belief and practice. I would be frankly very uncomfortable if you told me you did buy into my personal answers. It would indicate to me you didn’t go through the process of searching for answers yourself. What I do hope for is that you would find yourself nodding your head and saying that you can deal with my answers for the sake of fellowship. And when it’s your turn to stand up and lead, I should be able to reciprocate.

Biblical Mysticism is hard work; it demands we get comfortable with ranging uncertainties in the mind. People in the West in particular are looking for something concrete. They don’t like the hard work of honoring differences without conflict. They aren’t comfortable having to keep a living and vivid connection to the Holy Spirit, moment by moment deciding what really matters in a given context. The flesh prefers to be in charge, and the flesh likes to automate and simplify routine operations. The tension of always having to pray and sense with the heart is too much work.

But that hard work of mental uncertainty is the whole point of being guided by faith and conviction. We trust God, not our human capabilities. So the real issue in growing a fellowship, whether literal or virtual, isn’t just embracing the Radix Fidem Covenant as written, but of discovering a community of people who stand in relative comfort with each other’s varying expressions of faith. Do we overlap enough to work together?

Do not try to nail down more definitions for Radix Fidem. It’s not that the outline is written in stone, but that it must remain an outline. It is supposed to supply just enough framework to coexist in a community aimed at growing faith. We have no pretense of limiting future generations, trying to prevent them from making adjustments in that framework to better fit the context of their lives. This is simply where we are for now.

And right now we are a relatively small group, thinly scattered across the world. If you can recall how you stumbled across this community, you might get some idea of just how little exposure we have. We can’t call it zero growth, but it is very small and quite slow. And it will remain small and slow until God sees fit to change the situation.

This is where we are, and who we are.

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Introducing the Moses’ Law Series

Posted on October 21, 2019 by ehurst

The next series of weekly Bible studies will be the Covenant Law of Israel. This is in keeping with 2 Timothy 2:15, in which their Scriptures was then only the Old Testament. We are to study the Law to discern the heart of God.

In this post, we review the frame of reference for thinking about Biblical Law. At the root, divine revelation is what God wants us to know about Him and His Creation. This revelation is written in Creation itself, but in the Fall, we lost our ability to sense that revelation directly. Our fleshly minds have rebelled and usurped the throne in our souls reserved for God. Divine revelation doesn’t restore that direct sense of truth, but it does lead us on a path that brings us back to that truth.

This Biblical Law works on multiple levels. At the lowest level, the Law Covenants in the Bible tell us how Creation works. If the best a person can do is grasp the meaning of the provisions of Law, then they will be far better off than those who ignore revelation. It’s not a good frame of reference, but is less dire, and merely the first step on the path to truth.

At some point, we should hope folks will recognize that Law is actually a covenant. They will begin to understand the significance of a way of life that seeks the favor of the Lord and Covenant Holder. This opens the door to the awakening of heart-led consciousness. It allows the rise of awareness of just how different the covenant approach to life is. This includes the awareness that everything is personal, that Biblical Law is fundamentally feudal and tribal. People begin to absorb the truth organically and it becomes a part of their sense of identity.

At a higher level, the Law begins to speak of God’s divine moral character. This is when revelation becomes truly personal. This is when we realize that Jesus is the revelation, He is the Law personified. It’s the point when words and knowledge can no longer carry us along; we become spiritual beings with roots in another realm of existence. We then decide that the fleshly nature must die, and willingly seek its demise at the hand of obedience to God. We seize that Flaming Sword and turn it upon our selves; we become the Law of God in our selves.

This is how we will approach the Covenant of Israel. We will seek to examine the context of the provisions of the Law to ensure we understand what it meant for the people of Israel. Then we will strive to dig deeper and try to understand what it could and should have meant to them, driving them into the arms of their God.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 21:15-19

Posted on October 19, 2019 by ehurst

John records very few words from Jesus between the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane and the Resurrection. However, there is this one exchange with Peter after the resurrection that hides something very important. It’s not obvious in the English language what’s going on here. As usual, we trust John’s translation skills in bringing to us the Aramaic conversation in his schoolboy Greek grammar.

A more obvious point is that Jesus asks the same question about Peter’s loyalty three times. This matches Peter’s three denials of Jesus during the kangaroo court trial at the High Priest’s palace. This is Jesus rehabilitating Peter as the man to inherit leadership of the group once Christ ascends to Heaven. But there is something else going on in the words of the conversation itself.

Peter was the eldest, likely older than Jesus Himself. And most of what we read about Peter makes no sense at all unless we picture him as rather large physically. During the entire time of discipleship, Peter was the natural leader after Jesus. But following the crucifixion and resurrection, Peter was also a broken man. For all his boasting about loyalty, he had failed quite miserably. And Peter knew Jesus knew about it. He couldn’t just desert the group, but no longer pretended he could lead anyone. There was no way his boldness could paper over his mistake.

It was Peter who did the one thing that made sense to any of them during that lull after the initial sightings of Jesus. Hanging out in their old quarters in Peter’s home in Capernaum, the silence got to him, and he had to do something. There was still one thing in life he knew — fishing. So he headed out in the evening to go fishing, which is when that was done in Galilee. They fished all night and caught nothing, but it was better than doing nothing. It was all they had left, at this point. As they neared the shore to haul out their nets for cleaning, they ran into Jesus. At first He seemed just a fish buyer, but then He suggested they try just one more time on the starboard side of the boat.

They dropped the net to humor Him, and it nearly broke under the massive catch. Peter knew immediately who it was. He grabbed his personal gear and dove into the water, leaving the rest of the crew of disciples to bring the boat in behind, dragging the overloaded net. Jesus had a fire going with some bread baking and told them to bring some of the better specimens they had caught. They all celebrated seeing their risen Lord once again, though seemed at a loss for words. What do you say to someone who died horribly, has risen and can walk through walls?

So they had a pleasant if somewhat nervous breakfast, and as they sat quietly by the fire, Jesus turned to His lieutenant and said quietly: “Peter, do you have the passion to lead these men in following Me as Lord?” John tells us He used the Greek word agape which translates as “love.”

Peter was embarrassed, but he was man enough to tell the honest truth now. “I’ll serve You Lord as your friend.” Here John uses the word phileo to signify friendship, something generally recognized as not quite so driven as agape. Jesus seemed to accept this and told Peter to lead His followers.

A few moments later, Jesus asked almost the same question. “But Peter, do you really love me?” Again, that word agape. Peter’s answer was pretty much the same, a tacit denial that seemed an admission of his sense of inadequacy. It seemed Peter was saying he couldn’t claim to love his Lord, but he was certainly a friend. And again Jesus told him to lead His disciples.

Yet a third time, Jesus turned to look at Peter and asked, “So you are my friend?” The shift in meaning was not lost on Peter; it broke his heart that he wasn’t what his best friend had expected. But he honestly admitted to his weakness. “Lord, I can hide nothing from You. I am assuredly your friend.” To which Jesus replied, “I still want you to lead my disciples.”

It was going to be a rough mission. Jesus mentioned how, when Peter was young, he was quite the motivated fellow, taking his own path in many ways. Jesus then warned him prophetically: When Peter was at the end of his mission, he would be forced to surrender to a fate not of his own choosing. The final triumph for Peter would be that he felt comfortable accepting this demise, because this life just was not worth worrying about. Peter would die as bravely as he once thought himself to be, for the name of Jesus.

This is the last lesson in this series. Start praying about the next series; be ready to make a request for something you would like to read about. I am open to suggestions.

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Riding Herd on Sinners

Posted on October 18, 2019 by ehurst

I really appreciate Jack’s review of my teaching. Some of you may notice his answers aren’t precisely the same as mine, and you will already know that it doesn’t matter to me. I can’t recall when it came to me, but it was my conviction during most of my six decades of life that no two of us should come up with the same answers to eternal questions.

That said, Jack’s post raises an issue I may have neglected to some degree: the symbolism of goats versus cattle versus sheep. The first thing I have to do is remind readers that I don’t think you should make a parable walk on all-fours, as the southern American expression goes. That is, parables are always contextual. Choose wisely when you decide to use a parabolic image outside the context in which it appears in Scripture. Always make room for improving your use of imagery like that, because your understanding is not written in stone.

The business of sheep and goats shows up in one parable Jesus told (Matthew 25:31–46). It appears in the context of explaining how the nations of the world will be judged by God. Don’t get hung up on the term “nations” — in Jesus’ dialect of Aramaic it refers to people in general, not discrete political entities. And the whole point of needing to separate sheep and goats is something not lost on His audience.

A shepherd will include goats in his flock. Sheep are the “cash crop” with their wool and meat. Goats do produce more and better milk, and their was their primary value, but that was just a side benefit of having them along. Goats are far better at self-protection. They pay a lot more attention to the surroundings. If a goat moves away from a risky situation, the sheep have a tendency to follow, often without a clue why. Keep in mind that the modern habit of using dogs to herd sheep would have never been possible in the Ancient Near East. The only dogs there were more like hyenas, predatory and dangerous. No Israeli would ever consider for a second trying to domesticate those nasty creatures.

But having a few goats worked out fine. The shepherd could never be everywhere at once, so the goats took care of the balance of protection, allowing a flock to be herded and guarded without having to hire a large staff of humans. Goats would actually fight some predators. It was very efficient.

The implication for believers is not the inherent nature of sheep and goats, but their function together in a single herd. The issue here is the natural difference in focus both animals have. Sheep are very narrowly focused on eating, growing wool, and making more sheep. They just don’t pay a lot of attention to what’s going on around them. Goats are more alert, even playful as adults, but what they offer individually isn’t worth nearly as much to the shepherd. So at shearing time, the sheep are gathered into one pen and the goats are sent back out to near pasture.

The goats of this fallen world pay more attention to worldly things. They aren’t evil in any particular sense, just not that profitable to God’s eternal purpose. The sheep of His pasture are called to higher things, a different and frankly impractical focus in this world. God has appointed goats to work alongside His sheep so that things will hold together and run smoothly until it’s time to harvest the spiritual fruit of this life. But at the Final Judgment, goats will not make it into Heaven.

Don’t mix this with the image of sinners as cattle. You cannot herd cattle and sheep together; it will not work. The sheep cannot tolerate too much exposure to cows, and will run away from the lumbering rowdy beasts. This is a different image for a different context. There is a sense in which God herds cattle one way, and sheep in a different way. You can sleep next to sheep, but you cannot invite cows into your family enclosure. The latter simply have no understanding of what makes life comfortable for people.

What binds all of this together is that God still uses sinners one way or another. How He uses them is difficult to explain precisely, but it can be depicted in contextual symbols.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 17:11-26

Posted on October 12, 2019 by ehurst

Jesus continues praying aloud for His disciples as they make their way past the Temple plaza.

As Jesus prepares to return to His Father’s throne, He asks that His Father watch over them as they continue His ministry. They are a part of His divine inheritance and Hes asks that they remain united in the Spirit. Jesus kept guard over them during His ministry and managed to preserve all but Judas, just as was prophesied in the Scriptures. He notes that He prays out loud so that they will remember all of this later, and their joy will be completely filled up.

Jesus delivered to them the Word of divine revelation. This makes them otherworldly, and the world hates them, just as it hated Him. But instead of taking them Home to safety right away, Jesus prays that the Father would keep them from slipping back into the wickedness of the world. They don’t belong to the world any more than Jesus did.

Rather, let them be purified by divine revelation as they live in this fallen world. The Father sent Jesus into the world to be a living truth; now He sends them to the same work. For their sake, He was committing Himself fully to that same truth, at the cost of His life, so that they would be able to hold the same commitment.

And it’s not just these men alone, but Jesus prayed for those who would be moved by their preaching to also commit to the Son. Let them all commune in the same Holy Spirit shared by the Father and the Son. He wanted the same divine glory He bore to shine through them, as well. This would be the one thing that would hold them all together. Their spiritual unity would be the full realization of the divine message, the signal proof that they belonged to Jesus, just as Jesus belonged to the Father. This is how divine favor works.

And when their work is done, Jesus wanted the Father to bring them Home to join Him in Heaven. Let them see that glory face to face, that which stood before Creation. The world never really knew its Creator, but Jesus knew Him, and these disciples were convinced that Jesus had been sent by the Father. Jesus had manifested the Father’s authority to them, and in the coming hours would continue to show that authority. This would confirm everything they could possibly know about divine truth, so that the Father’s favor for the Son would come to life in their souls.

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Give Him Time

Posted on October 11, 2019 by ehurst

Give God time to do His work His way.

Today was consumed in messing with my computer. You can read about that tomorrow on my old blog, if you are interested. But the important thing that happened today was the Lord also began using me in a pastoral service. I spoke with my son this evening about His faith. It was a very important conversation, and I was able to give him something he could use. He had some really tough questions; by God’s mercy I was able to assert firmly my own answers. But I told him the crux of the issue was that his own heart must rule his choices.

That was the same message he got when he was a child, but he needed to hear it again in a different context, now that he’s up against some things that he knows aren’t right in his world. I warned him that the reason he had such a sense of turmoil was that God was calling him to a special work. I have very little idea what that might be, but it’s important that he seek the Lord’s face for his own answers. And I promised to remain available for any further consultation. Pray with me about my son; you can call him Alwyn.

Convictions require experience to become real. In particular, they require some pain and suffering, and my son has been through some of that. That’s how it is for all of us. We have to give God time to lead us through certain formative encounters in order to be fully equipped for His calling.

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Shepherd Dreams

Posted on October 9, 2019 by ehurst

There’s one thing that keeps me going: I have a dream that I will one day lead in a covenant fellowship somewhere on this earth, that I will be a part of a church that takes at least some of my message seriously.

Right away, I should warn you that it is no bright image of earthly paradise. I know for certain that any human congregation of folks will always include at least a portion who just have not embraced the fullness of faith. It means dealing with folks who suffer varying degrees of deception about what’s really real according to how God’s revelation. It’s no different from what Moses faced leading Israel in the Sinai. From this great distance in time and space, I look back upon the experience of Moses and try to learn the lesson of how to put up with people who just do not get it. It includes a very human distrust of whether I really get it, but nonetheless the worldly necessity of exercising leadership.

That’s the mission I see before me, an adventure that ends for me only with my expiration. This is the one last mission adventure I pray for. By seeing the experience of Moses, and having lived with my own wandering in the wilderness with a lot of church folks, I have been warned what to expect from them and from God. I must be ready to lead sheep that at times pay no attention to their own moral welfare. Having seen my life in the mirror of my own redeemed heart, little surprises me any more. But the mission still stands as a grant from the hand of God.

The single biggest problem Moses had, and that I still have today, is the seemingly incurable expectations of folks regarding how this world works. The Exodus nation suffered the same pagan influence that we have today — at least it’s the same in underlying principle. They don’t fully embrace the image of a God who made all things, is truly Lord of all, and wants to be our Father. They don’t really trust His revelation, and frequently misunderstand it. Instead, the sheep of His pasture always seem deeply lost in a false image of the world as quite random and capricious, a god who must compete against other powers, in a life that requires we figure out for ourselves what we can and cannot do about anything.

As you might expect, the single biggest problem is that people find themselves thrust into a reality that seems hostile, because they bear a range of expectations and dreams quite different from what God says. So it’s not a mission of simply telling them what God says. It’s a battle within each soul to leave behind the lies of Satan and replace them with divine revelation. It is not a civilized and fair battle by any means.

As we know, the primary victory is learning to walk by the heart, not by the fleshly mind. Most human minds will not roll over and play dead. We have a human history of several thousand years struggling to make the most of the human mind and flesh and what it can know and do. There’s too much of a Sunk Cost Fallacy there to easily turn and surrender that to the Spirit leadership in our hearts.

By no means can we dream of persuading the world at large to embrace this. Only a precious few souls ever seem to be touched and persuaded to seek it. And those souls typically bring with them a raft of human relationships, some of which inevitably come into the church fellowship with them. We are all saddled with commitments to outsiders. It ranges from kinfolks to governments. The flesh will always be under pressure to compromise. That’s the whole point. We aren’t expecting to create some kind of Nirvana in the fleshly realm, but only in our souls.

And I still dream of doing the work of shepherding such sheep. Pray with me.

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Reprise: On Conspiracy Theories

Posted on October 8, 2019 by ehurst

The roots of Anglo-American culture are mostly pagan. It’s a combination of Greco-Roman Civilization and Germanic tribal culture. The influence of Christian religion was highly compromised well before it gained any entry into the mix.

From both pagan antecedents we have a very unpredictable world, filled with deities whose passions were no different from those of humans. There was no all powerful deity, no real Creator who offered revelation, compassion and mercy. Instead, you chose your deities, took your chances and tried to make the best of things.

This is whence the highly perverted image of Satan, with a range and power of influence too close to that of Christ. This is also the source of our wild conspiracy theories, in the sense that Americans are predisposed to believe that there are parties out there who approach omniscience and omnipotence, at least in terms of how they are portrayed. “You need to fear!”

A genuine biblical viewpoint is quite different from that. It’s not that there are no conspiracies, but that they aren’t anything approaching superhuman. Their plans aren’t any real threat. And the demonic powers behind them are distinctly limited. If you put yourself under the shadow of God’s favor, there is very little they can do to you.

So it’s not necessary to examine all their names, their legacies, their plans and their powers. There is no need to make deep studies and form careful and complex plans to stop them. All we really need to know is how their influences work in the world around you so that you aren’t a sucker for their deceptions.

When I wrote about The Cult, I kept it very close to the concerns expressed in Scripture. I didn’t bother trying to chase down every actual individual involved in the history of this cult’s influence, only how it tends to work in broad terms. I give you enough to recognize their methods and motivations, to discern their footprints in your world.

There is really very little we can do about all the various conspiracies in this world, real or imagined. Our God is the true Creator and Lord of all things, and He has clearly revealed all we really need to know how to live in this world. Feel free to read stuff about conspiracies, but don’t get lost in that world. It’s not the world God revealed.

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