Deaconesses

Posted on November 8, 2019 by ehurst

On the one hand, this is largely theoretical for us under Radix Fidem, since we have little use for most New Testament church offices as a virtual community. On the other hand, it’s probably a good idea to be sure we understand how this should work.

I’m not going to catalog all the passages that might address this; it’s not that kind of discussion. Rather, I will rely on your having read most of the New Testament in the first place. We need a bigger picture, not just proof-texts.

The primary reason for having any kind of female leadership in the church is that the Hebrew people had fairly strict rules about men and women in social settings. Those rules were based on ancient custom arising in a tribal context. Men and women who were not relatives generally avoided any kind of social contact with each other. It’s not that all contact was forbidden, but there had to be a compelling reason to cross that boundary.

There was also a sliding scale. For those residing in the same extended family household, the contact was not that restricted. As the metaphorical distance increased, the barriers got larger. The idea was to protect the honor of both sides, and reduce temptation. People were more likely to poach among strangers, because it was easier to keep it secret.

So we see that the early church was virtually a mirror for the synagogue. The sexes were segregated in worship. Frankly, the women preferred to sit behind the men, because it allowed them to whisper amongst themselves while the men were carrying on their discussions down front. Some portion of a synagogue service was preaching and some parts were discussion; men tended to formality, while women were more chatty. This was frankly quite practical and folks were generally happy with it.

For the New Testament church, it became more a matter of being very careful to uphold a high standard. This was to fend off some persecutory accusations of immorality. For example, men would not touch women in baptism rituals, some of which were fairly private due to the facilities available. Thus, deaconesses would baptize women.

Initially, deaconesses were widows, spinsters or young virgins. They didn’t have the burden of caring for a family, and their devotion to work wouldn’t deprive anyone else. As the churches sprouted in more Gentile communities, the social realities softened that rule a bit, as more women had jobs in Gentile societies. But in the church, leadership in particular benefited from women past menopause. While there was little commentary on such things in the Bible, the oral traditions point out that menopause changed how a woman viewed her world, and made her much stronger in many ways. She’s still a woman, but on average a whole lot tougher than younger ones.

We already know that no woman was allowed to teach men, but the Hebrew people still carried a firm reverence for wise women and their discernment. A feminine voice was critical in shepherding the body. Solomon’s choice to place a throne for his aging mother in the royal court didn’t surprise anyone; it was consistent with cultural biases. He would take her advice on a range of things that might surprise us, though.

Our society today is a very long way from that ancient world, in part because we are saddled with a lot of silly myths that they didn’t suffer. But in actual churches that arise from the Radix Fidem covenant, we should see some deaconesses.

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Revisiting the Definition of “Game”

Posted on November 7, 2019 by ehurst

Jack and I have been conversing about this some more. Maybe this will clarify: Game is roughly equivalent to charisma. You can abuse your charms or you can use them help people listen to your message. You are born with a certain amount of charisma, and you can enhance that inheritance. Some people mistake the word “Game” for “gaming someone” in the sense of manipulation. In the wider manhood community of blogging, the word “game” appears in both senses and it’s confusing.

As I use the term “game” in this context, it arises from the concept of “game theory.” Game theory is a mindset, an approach gamer geeks use to beat gaming software (AKA RPGs = role playing games). The various games offer virtual worlds and there is a more or less scientific approach to learning how that virtual world is designed. Once you understand it, you can go back through the game and play proficiently and collect the various rewards. You can game the game by using game theory. Do you sense we need more words here to distinguish the various meanings of “game”?

There is a very influential fellow out there who used to work in the game software business, someone very intelligent who just happened to have a very strong social instinct. He goes by the name Vox Day and you can look him up in any search engine. Be aware that Google and friends, under the guidance of the SJW agenda, will try to keep you away from Vox himself, and likely offer links only to stuff that criticizes Vox. SJWs hate Vox, and he returns the favor quite vocally.

Vox explored dating from a gamer’s viewpoint of testing how women reacted, as if they were features of a virtual world in a game. Not a very nice view of women, some say, but it had the effect of reducing the crazy cultural mythology to a manageable level of testing and verification of what was written into the game code, as it were. Some games will play games with your head, you see. He discovered that the women he encountered seldom reacted as they themselves claimed. Women were quite unaware of their own motives and desires, as he saw it. Sadly, a great many men in society are also deceived by the same batch of lies. Treating dating as an RPG, he realized there was a whole lot of mythology that ensnared both men and women.

He organized his thinking about this and published it as his “Game Theory of Human Socio-sexual Response.” He wasn’t alone in his analysis, but his presentation of what he learned got a lot more attention than other men with similar knowledge. That’s because he was already deeply involved in publishing his thoughts on a lot of other things. I already noted he was involved in gaming software, and had published a lot of reviews in commercial publications. He got paid for it. He also wrote a lot about politics and economics, which is related to his graduate degree, and he garnered much fame on that stuff. And naturally some of what he wrote was commentary on culture and social trends.

So when he started revealing his research into Game Theory of Human Socio-sexual Response, it got the same level of attention. The reaction was very strong, as you might expect, because he consistently says that women suffer from a lot of socially enforced mythology. In my assessment, most of what he says about such things overlaps with what the Bible says, in that the feminist agenda is a lie of the Devil.

But other men have written on the subject, and Vox has promoted or disputed with them publicly, and there arose a very large community of men discussing this whole thing. The debate itself brought the whole topic into some prominence on the Internet. Some of these men cared only for sating their degraded lusts, but at least their assumptions about feminine nature was accurate, against the social mythology of feminism. These men scored well in their flesh game because they ignored the propaganda. They had a strong “game.” But there are even more men interested in making their marriages better, and the marriages of others. They used this lore to build a strong open communication between men and women. Quite a few women have absorbed this lore and write their own blogs about gaming men, or more often, making their marriages better.

As confusing as all this use and abuse of the word “game” can be, I doubt I can simply use the term “charisma” as a blanket replacement. Way too many people have funny ideas about the meaning that word, too. The best I can do is make a reasonable effort to put them both in a useful context and try to explain what I see as the hand of God working in our lives. I don’t mind taking the time to explain my approach, and I won’t hesitate to shut down people who offer silly arguments over semantics. You believe what you want, but I know what my God demands of me, and that’s what I write about.

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Random Photos for Early November 2019

Posted on November 6, 2019 by ehurst

Here’s another look at the OKC skyline over some trees. I was standing near the middle dam on the Oklahoma River project. Off to the right is the Scissortail sculpture, marking the southern end of Scissortail Park.

Midwest City is pretty active still with their bike trails planning. A couple of weeks ago they opened a new trail that runs northward along Soldier Creek after it passed through the Barnes Park system. The trail runs up to something called Mid-America Park. It’s a small spot along Soldier Creek with virtually no place to park. It was meant as a strictly local neighborhood park back when families owned fewer cars and walked more.

Plans for the trail system indicate it will extend farther along Soldier Creek until it joins another proposed trail along Crutcho Creek, into which Soldier Creek empties. This shot is the last corner of the park where you can look in the direction the creek flows away.

This field used to be mowed for hay, but it hasn’t been cut in a couple of years. The field stands behind a row of houses; you reach it by following a path through an empty lot that never saw a house. Nothing was built because the developers had to leave access for whomever owned that field. Anyway, the path cuts across one end of this field.

From that last view, pivot to your right just about 90° and you’ll see this railroad bridge where Soldier Creek turns back north. That path runs under the left side of the bridge, and it’s almost rideable on my bike. Midwest City’s plan calls for a path to run along the bank from the park and under this bridge, which is just a hundred yards from the park. I followed the existing ad hoc path and it took me to the SCIP Trails I used to ride once in a while. The path I took runs right into the last third of the Blue Loop.

Once I left the SCIP Trails park, I went east to Midwest Boulevard and headed north to one of my favorite prayer chapels on the North Canadian River. I haven’t been there in quite a while. The river was way down and there happened to be a substantial sandbar just below my chapel at the mouth of Crutcho Creek. I clambered down and took this shot at river level, looking downstream.

Later today a huge rain system should move in, dropping some 2 inches of rain in the next 24 hours or so. The river bank near my chapel shows signs of cutting during high water a month or so back. If it continues, my chapel could disappear and the Crutcho could get a new mouth, because that cutting is right where the creek and river nearly converge before the creek snakes away again.

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Purpose and Mission

Posted on November 5, 2019 by ehurst

The original purpose behind opening this blog under private hosting was because I was frankly worried at how WordPress in their own hosting had shut down in quick succession a handful of blogs I had been following. I was hardly alone in thinking I might be next; several other WP bloggers voiced concerns about it. But that furor died down and the old blog now seems safe, for awhile at least.

So I decided to continue posting there things that were less likely to get it shut down, and brought here the more controversial stuff. In practice, it works out that this is the faith teaching blog, and the old one is more about practical matters. Since I specifically deny any activist interests (except perhaps freedom of information exchange), it would take a significant shift in politics to become dangerous.

Thus, this blog is mostly about deeper matters of faith. Currently, that points most often to an expectation that our community will represent an underground church, if you will, and remain virtual for the most part. Much as I would love to meet each of you face to face, and often, this ministry is focused on developing the habits and frame of reference for a virtual parish with a mission to promote the Radix Fidem covenant.

Nothing about that restricts anyone from pursuing any kind of other work in human space. We are only too happy to support that. However, this virtual parish reflects a prophetic calling to carve out a better way of doing church for the kind of society being drawn more tightly into the virtual world. And it doesn’t matter that we think this a really bad direction for people to go; we have to meet them where they are going if we are going to do them any good. Yelling and screaming at them from the outside is rather futile, when the mission field is people in the virtual realm. It’s okay to condemn that sad situation, but not until we have their attention first.

Meanwhile, we have to avoid contaminating our witness with excessive accommodation. I doubt any two of us will take the exact same path on that. We need to stay focused on the common ground that encourages a community to remain together in sharing our faith. We need to create and maintain a space that will probably be rather small, at least for awhile, and exclude folks who simply don’t accept the mission we have. They aren’t wrong, just irrelevant.

Thus, I’ll keep blathering about networking and politics on the other blog, and here I’ll try to dig deeper into matters of faith. At times that will mean castigating Zionism and things related to that. This is still the single greatest threat to this ministry, but that’s the whole point. Jay and I reckon that it will be somewhat harder for Zionists to afflict this blog based on the context of its hosting. They will try, sooner or later; their goals include silencing any and every voice that dissents from their agenda. Right now, the situation is affordable. If things get hot for us, it may require a little more support to keep this blog alive. I’ll let you know on that, in case you believe it matters.

We may also need to look at encrypting some of our communications. I’m keeping an eye on developments in that field. It’s a very active endeavor right now, with frequent and sometimes dramatic changes.

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Defining the Term “Game”

Posted on November 4, 2019 by ehurst

I’m taking issue with Jack’s latest post on Game.

If you insist that “Game” can only mean the Pick-up Artist (PUA) model, then you and I have nothing to discuss. Stay away from my blog.

Let’s start by defining the term “Game.” In the context of discussing manhood and the so-called red-pill men’s movement, it refers to a body of lore. Within this body of lore, there is a psychological model of human behavior. As with all models in psychology, it should not be viewed as factually true or false. Instead, it is a working model regarding certain elements of human behavior. If you ask me, there is a lot of Game lore that only appears to be true; it seems to work in Western cultural settings. The lore is cluttered with false assumptions, one of which is that the Western cultural frame of reference is somehow the human default. As with any model, Game can be used or abused, to manipulate or to actually bless people, and a lot of variations in between those two poles. Game is the lore of how men and women respond in terms of their sexual identity, and how well they perceive the reality of how other humans respond.

A significant portion of Game lore does conform to Scripture. The model includes some basic truth about human nature, and it is between you and God how you sift those things out. There is a sense in which a lot Game lore can be called Biblical Law, in that it helps you deal with people who lack a spiritual awareness. You will need less Game awareness with spiritual people. You need less Biblical Law, as well. Spirituality puts everything in a higher realm of awareness, but Law is how we get there. Some people enter your life and refuse to come near that higher realm, so you deal with them based on Law. It’s what they demand. Game provides a bottom line, a default alternative that helps you show people compassion and mercy by pointing out how their fallen nature works. That’s what the Law Covenants are supposed to do — they point out a functional path through certain contexts. It can help you steer a path in situations where you must assume the worst of the people around you. That is still the grace of God, but it’s not the full grace He offers. In some cases, that’s the best you can do.

If you strip away Game lore and seek to expose the basic underlying principles of human nature, it may be pretty hard to put into words. That’s how Biblical Law works; it’s heart knowledge, not head knowledge. Dealing with persons is not a science, per se, but an art that requires some elements of the scientific approach. You can get some of it via a Law level of understanding, and that’s a lot better than ignoring revelation altogether. It’s a start on the path back to Eden.

A part of the Game lore is recognizing that different folks have varying abilities to understand the Game model; that is part of the lore itself. You can easily sort the humans you encounter based on their displayed awareness of Game. It’s a model that is not restricted to sexual marketplace behavior, but the wider behavior of humans at large. An Alpha Male is an Alpha all the time, and will manifest characteristic behavior patterns regardless of the context. Obviously real humans are likely to be a mixture of things, and these categories are likely to be fuzzy in actual practice. Still, the underlying model of human behavior holds rather consistently in terms of what you can predict about most people you encounter, if you get a chance to assess what you are seeing.

Someone who really understands Game can play the Alpha role when the context demands it. You learn to go there when it speaks the mercy of God into a particular situation. You may have a high facility with Game instinctively, or you can learn it by studying, just as you might with Biblical Law. Some of us have an instinct for revelation that is stronger than it is for others. But everyone can find peace with God if they want it. By the same token, you can learn to understand Game well enough to claim divine blessings. A lot of what Jack wrote brings us back to the same old question of whether you think it’s Law versus Grace, of if you tend to see it as the same truth addressed to different levels of understanding.

But if you can start to see through Game lore and begin to grasp the underlying model of human behavior, and then you can also carve off the fat that comes only from Western culture, you begin to see that, Moses’ Law for example, agrees with the characteristic weaknesses Game attributes to women by how the various provisions of Law seek to restrain the implications of those weaknesses. Only in Western culture are women trained to believe such an overwhelming set of lies about their own feminine nature. They are told what they want, and most of it is nonsense. The Bible offers social constraints on women that take into account the things they actually do want.

There are whole range of particulars we can discuss regarding men and women already saddled with a spouse who is not spiritual. By the same token, we may also be stuck with a spouse who lacks good Game awareness; it’s frankly rare to find someone who does have that clarity. Game can teach you not to take yourself too seriously. It can teach an Alpha to avoid his own weaknesses, as well as all the other categories, for both male and female. It can help you navigate a merciful path of blessings in a life where you are hitched in the yoke with someone who pulls in the wrong direction. Game and Law both can give you a sense of when to make hard decisions that you must make because you are already in a bad place. It can also help you do better the next time. If you absorb enough of it early on, you can make good choices in the first place.

I’m not that brilliant, but God granted me a certain amount of instinct and I married exceptionally well. I never really needed Game to make my marriage work, but I most certainly got a lot better doing marriage once I did learn Game. That’s because it fits right into the lore of Biblical Law.

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Status after the Fall

Posted on November 3, 2019 by ehurst

Anything I say about this subject will always be an approximation, a characterization that helps us know what to expect and act justly. That’s what God intended with the use of parable and symbolism in the Bible. Don’t take this explanation literally.

In a certain sense, the Garden of Eden was not a specific place. It should be seen as the whole earth. Adam and Eve in their glory-bodies were not restricted by time and space as we are now. They were put there to manage things as a place where God could enjoy His Creation and meet with His servants. The nature of the Garden was for God’s enjoyment, one of His many homes in Creation.

It’s utterly wrong to think of Eternity as some realm you can enter into at the same time-stamp as you leave this world. Eternity is not endless time; it is variable time. Time is simply not a factor except for the natural world. It’s a manipulable variable that eternal beings can see through completely. The same goes with space; they can be wherever they choose in that same time-space continuum. You might say they don’t have to travel at all, just slide the universe around themselves to the time and place they wish.

This was how Adam and Eve experienced the Garden of Eden, the natural world we live in today. What happened to us? In the Fall, Adam and Eve were forced down into the natural world. We are now a part of nature, bound under the same space-time restrictions. Space and time are barriers to us in our fallen form. Furthermore, we no longer have the full freedom to command nature to respond as Adam and Eve had in the garden. We are managers by divine privilege, but not in our current status as fallen creatures.

The key to restoring just a taste of what we lost is exercising faith. By faith we can command the natural world to do things like Jesus did. We can begin to develop our relationship with the living universe and get just a small sample of the mastery that is ours by design. The key is learning to sense the Will of God (AKA, the divine moral character of our Creator). When acting in His Will, we can do anything Adam and Eve could do, but with certain limits.

One of those limits is our human inability to think eternally. Our fallen brains cannot develop a sense of time as a variable. We can sense it indirectly in our hearts, and some level of clue can dribble down into our intellects, but the intellect really can’t go there. Thus, we cannot actually understand with our current conscious awareness the fullness of how many miracles are a matter of reaching back into time to change something so that we come back and harvest a different result.

We most certainly do not have the ability to calculate out all the implications of changing small things in the past. It takes divine moral awareness to do that properly. We absolutely must sacrifice human self-will to even approach that.

When Christ returns for His people, He will restore the natural world — His Garden of Eden — to what it would have been had we not chosen Satan’s path. He will reach back into time and close off the Fall, and then meet back with the “present” to watch the natural world change to what it should have been all along.

On a related note, I keep trying to build for you the parabolic notion that the natural world is alive, sentient and willful in its own right. It surely needs the guidance of morally redeemed people who serve the Will of God. Given the perverted way fallen humans typically approach things, this article indicates something of a mixed good and evil. It’s a good shift in assumptions about the natural world, but we can be sure it will be implemented corruptly.

We most certainly are a part of nature in our fallen state. One primary mistake is how fallen people tend to view this life and nature in general as something precious. They think what we have now can become Eden without restoring our eternal bodies. They hold this notion despite the Word of revelation saying that this life is of no consequence, since it will all be changed in a moment at Christ’s Return. It’s not that our actions have no consequence, but that the issue of deciding what’s right and what’s wrong has long been settled, even before Creation. Humans cannot possibly come up with anything approaching the truth about good and evil without deferring from the heart to divine revelation.

Our mission is to desire what is right, and strive to act according to divine justice against our lack of actual capability. The article notes that the most likely line of reasoning from most activists is that humans have no business poking around in nature in the first place, when that’s a blasphemous rejection of what God said about providing for us in our fallen state through the natural world around us. Human minds are incapable of discerning what is in our own best interest within this setting, not without first submitting from the heart to our Creator. Only He can see the whole picture, with all its influences and implications, how it’s all woven together.

Still, that movement is a glimpse of truth.

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Law of Moses — Exodus 20:18-26

Posted on November 2, 2019 by ehurst

We have seen the Ten Commandments, the initial overview of God’s moral standards for His nation. He’s taking it slow and easy with them, introducing Himself and His ways incrementally.

But first, He wants to impress on them just how real this is. Some of this Moses and his assistants could have faked, but not all of it. What got the people’s attention was a combination of things. There was the nerve jangling noise that isn’t described very clearly, only that it was loud, and the context implies it could be felt. There were flashes of lightening. Something they would surely recognize was the sound of a shofar, the traditional signaling instrument made from a hollowed out ram’s horn. The whole mountain was covered in a dark cloud, like thick smoke, but without the choking fumes.

The nation would have been assembled in a large open space, gathered by clans behind their tribal elders. The whole crowd backed off away from the foot of the mountain because of this demonstration of power. They murmured to their leaders, who in turn told Moses the people were terrified at the idea that God would speak to them, if this was any representation of His power. They would rather hear from Moses as God’s human spokesman.

Moses explained that all of this was a test. God wanted to show them some representation of His power so they would take the whole thing seriously. Don’t play games with God. If they expected to be at peace with their new Sovereign, they needed to commit to Him from the heart. God tacitly accepted their proposal to have Moses serve as His voice to them, since this was His plan in the first place. He was going to hold them to it.

To emphasize that point, Moses went back into that terrifying dark cloud of God’s Presence. While there, the Lord told Moses what he must tell them as the next step in their introduction to God’s ways. The starting point on this path is for them to realize that God had indeed spoken Himself to them from Heaven, and they witnessed that God spoke with Moses. Let there be no further questions about whom God chose to represent Him.

Then the Lord cites what was up to that point the common knowledge of those who sought His attention. We can see how this simplified protocol appears several times later on. It would have been the core of what Balaam knew as a scholar of deities (Numbers 23), though perhaps his was a somewhat confused version. Here the Lord clarifies things as the foundation upon which one builds a proper worship of Him.

There shall be no images of Him, nor any other deities in His domain. The wording almost sneers at the notion that human hands can shape something that would suffice in the first place to portray any deity. Even silver and gold, their most precious materials in that time and place, were not good enough. God demanded personal devotion, not some silly rituals via some inert proxy.

His altar would be the one He made Himself — plain earth. This would include dirt and/or stones. Everywhere they went as tent-dwelling nomads, when God appointed in that place that they should raise a monument to His name and offer up the various gifts that He would accept, they must build it from the materials of the ground. And if the ground was mostly stones, then they must use them as is. Any tooling was defiling. God would provide; they must use what He provides in the condition they find it. They can move it and stack it, but nothing more.

Finally, it can’t be raised up very high. There should be no need for stairs or ramps. This changes later, but He makes obvious the reason for this provision: His worship must be sober and without vulgarity. Unnecessary exposure of certain body parts was defiling. Most men did not wear long flowing robes, but shorter garments with no underwear. So to prevent any accidental exposure, whoever presents the offering on the alter must be standing down on ground level, so the altar must also be reachable from the ground.

This was pretty much what had stood under the Covenant of Noah. This is the baseline for calling on the Creator of all things. It was not likely all that new to them, but was a clarification of things that might have been obscured by conflicting traditions. Here is God culling the junk notions about Himself, and through Moses pulling out from the confused mass of traditions what was the actual true story about Him.

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A Persecuted Community of Faith

Posted on November 2, 2019 by ehurst

There was a time I was hoping to turn my peculiar approach to religion into something that could compete with the mainstream, become in its own right a part of the mainstream. Over the years, that vision has died. It’s not because I don’t think it can be done, but that my sense of calling has had to move a long way to finally land on what God really had in mind in the first place.

Radix Fidem stands on the assumption of tribulation. It is not a church organization, but an approach to the question of how genuine faith can be expressed in our day and age. Genuine faith will provoke persecution because it must of necessity reject the mainstream. And that persecution will grow as the social and economic system collapse. It will be a slow and painful death of the West as we know it. The leadership of the West will turn against us, blaming us for being part of the problem. The Networked Civilization rising to take its place will also hate us, but in a different way, for different reasons.

So for me, the identity of Radix Fidem includes being a persecuted minority. With that comes the expectation that we will do our best and strongest work as an underground presence. Against the background of all that could be, and what ought to be in terms of Biblical Law, our churches will tend to be house churches. This is not some proud goal; it’s just the reality of taking what’s left to us. This is what our Father provides.

The mainstream church system may or may not come after us, but they will most certainly not accommodate us. And given what I see happening in the world around us, I cannot imagine any way for us to form a presence that could resemble what those churches are doing. We will never gain a tax-free license to operate, to buy and hold assets, to advertise and have a voice in shaping the public perception of Christian religion.

And the US government will never regard me as anything but a dissident cult leader. That’s the official label for me the last time I heard from a federal bureaucrat. To the degree anyone bothers to notice me, this is what I have come to expect. Only local and state governments recognize me as any kind of clergy. That’s about as good as it gets. The situation could change for the worse, but here in Oklahoma such change is unlikely.

So within our community, I’m happy to appoint elders, and it would be nice if we could someday have a pastor or two. However, ritual leadership is pretty hard to exercise online, so any pastor would almost have to be local to a house church somewhere. That’s why I play that role online, because there’s just not that much to it, even though my actually calling is to eldership. I suppose you could imagine I bear some apostolic role, but I’m not claiming any kind of title for that. Doing so would imply an organizational structure and goals that are flatly inconsistent with my sense of calling.

The whole point here is to offer a vision of giving faith free rein in your life, and that means recognizing barriers to that faith. Right now, I’ve not seen any other form of organization that permits such faith, so aside from the sense of community in our hearts and the organizing possible through our Internet connections, there isn’t much for us but persecution as an underground presence. And I can assure you that persecution will get worse in one way or another. Get ready for it.

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On the Freedom of Conscience in Christ

Posted on November 1, 2019 by ehurst

This is not in regards to actual plans. I’m seeking to draw a picture of what Biblical Law says about certain issues. This is how I understand the revelation of our Creator.

After Cain murdered his brother, God confronted him about Abel. His tart reply to God was, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The question missed the point, of course. One does not prey on family unless one has formally renounced them as enemies. Staying inside the family community is a lie when you consider any of them an enemy. Deal with your conflict openly and in love, or the wrath of God will fall on you.

It is our duty to support, protect and love our covenant family. Yes, Cain was under a covenant, but it’s not one specifically revealed in Scripture. Yet we know from what Scripture does tell us that Creation itself is covenantal in nature, among other things. That first covenant to which Cain was liable was written into Creation itself. It is the moral character of our Creator, which Scripture says anyone can discern if they want.

It’s not that Cain had a duty to keep his brother on a leash. He knew that. His duty was that filial piety written in our very genes, the human instinct for guarding one’s blood kin. A proper moral orientation awakens that instinct, and it becomes possible to include as family folks who aren’t blood kin, but who embrace the same moral covenant.

A covenant brother is still my brother. The communist antifa thug down the street is not my brother. The islamo-fascist jihadi across the sea is not my brother. The pagan African bushman is not my brother. They all could become my brother is they embrace the same faith covenant on some level, but until they do, they are potential enemies. But there will be no conflict until they threaten my divine mission calling.

At that point, it’s between me and God how I respond. I may be called on to explain my choices, but I am accountable to God alone. If my choice threatens your mission, then I would expect you to dissent or even fight, but you would be obliged to declare a separation, a perceived rupture in the covenant that binds us. There has to be a procedure for separating peacefully; that’s part of the moral fabric of the universe. Without that honest and open confrontation, the Lord allows me to treat you differently, and handle you more severely than I would a brother in contention. The moment I see you betraying the broader covenant with Creation, that’s when you forfeit all consideration.

When that communist antifa thug acts against me on his convictions, I am free in my conscience to choose whatever tactic seems to best answer my sense of divine mission. When that islamo-fascist jihadi seeks to migrate into my world, my conscience is free to organize and lead a defense force to keep him out. The same goes with the pagan African bushman. I could care less if you imagine my opposition is racist or imperialist, or whatever. God’s Word says I have grounds to be violent in opposing the immigration of someone who doesn’t love my Savior and hates what God has called me to do, and seeks by any means to force a change against that calling. God put me here first, and those invaders had best live in peace with what already stands here when they arrive.

What prevents me forming an anti-immigrant militia is not any kind of “human rights” magic wand. And you would be a Satanic liar if you claimed the Bible says I shouldn’t. Rather, it is the tactical guidance of my Father in Heaven under the provisions of Biblical Law. I am not guilty of ruining their lives wherever they came from; I have been telling my government how wrong that was. But I confess to the guilt of America, and that I live among a morally unclean people. Those immigrants have come because that’s how reality works; that’s what is written into the moral fabric of Creation. Instead, I am limited by that moral fabric to preparing the defense of my mission close in, on a smaller geographical scale.

They are invaders. The antifa thug is a political traitor to the nation. There are some differences in how Biblical Law says I should treat them. But then, I include American Zionists as traitors, along with the political elite who plunder this country. I must as elder distinguish between a covenant brother who betrays the covenant of the faith community, and as a military veteran the political traitor who seeks to destroy the wider secular stability that comes from following the system of government, regardless of whether that secular system adheres to any part of Biblical Law. When they succeed in destroying that system, they also lose the protections of that system for themselves.

While my actions may seem ostensibly the same when I move to defend my divine mission against these various threats, the details will vary considerably. A threat from within the covenant community is wholly different than a threat from without. But the idea that violence is not on the menu is a blasphemous lie, a demonic notion that comes from outside of Scripture. Every one of those threat models asserts a priori a false moral system that comes from Hell.

If the Good Samaritan had participated in the broader Samaritan political intrigue of provoking Rome to come down harder on the Jews, he would not have been a “Good Samaritan.” But in the parable as Jesus told it, that Samaritan was not so inclined. Thus, the Jewish hatred for Samaritans as a race was unwarranted, but a guarded readiness to get rough with him was entirely justified. Once it becomes clear that he tends to act according to the same moral law as what the Jews were supposed to hold, he could not be regarded as an enemy. Instead, he was a covenant brother who qualified as “neighbor” in that broader sense of people who serve God’s revelation. If he treats an unfortunate Jew as neighbor, then he is a neighbor to all Jews.

In the Hebrew approach to things, it was necessary to think about things on multiple levels. Because of my oath to the US Constitution, I have a duty to defend certain aspects of American life in the US. That duty is moderated somewhat by how well I can perceive the people to keep that constitutional system alive. It won’t matter a whit to me how some officious idiot interprets my duty under that oath, except as a matter of contextual response. My duty to folks who share my faith covenant under Radix Fidem is yet a different layer of consideration. And on still another level is my commitment to Christ under His Covenant, of which Radix Fidem is a subsidiary.

How I juggle the various demands on me are between me and God. One of the biggest hassles I face on a regular basis in declaring my faith is the confusion in people’s minds that arises from a damned American culture of linear thinking and legalism about words. Sometimes just wrestling with this consumes a major portion of my writing. I’m not telling you what to choose. I’m telling you how I approach things, and marking out issues over which I cannot debate without disobeying the Lord. I simply will not debate whether violence is a valid option in that obedience.

This is not a cult and nothing binds you to my teaching except what’s in your own heart. But if you feel called to follow my lead, know that violence is on the menu, even if I bear a potent self-restraint about it.

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Ready for the Harvest

Posted on October 31, 2019 by ehurst

A part of the festivities of this last day in October is recognizing the bounty of a good harvest.

The lesson of Babylon is that human organizations are not where God’s glory shines. The silly notion that a church or similar faith-based organization is somehow not a human organization, that it could be rightly called a “divine institution” in that sense, is a rejection of that lesson. Further, a major element in what Jesus did was to end the idea that it is even possible to have a human organization that would remain faithful to a divine purpose. No matter what God did for His appointed nation, it simply was not possible to stay on track.

So this whole “Kingdom of Hearts” business means that whatever Christ is doing today does not require any kind of political unity on the human level. It does require tiny bodies of people who live like extended families under a feudal covenant, but nothing bigger than what would be feasible with blood kinfolk living together in a community.

So we can conclude that the various organized bodies of Christian religion today will never, ever fulfill the gospel mandate. We don’t need any more reformations to change the organizations; we need to stop assuming that such organizations matter. They can surely serve a good purpose, but we should never take seriously the idea that they fulfill the gospel until they live by the gospel. That gospel message of Christ includes the underlying message of the Law Covenants. Jesus clearly supported the Covenant of Moses, and demanded that His people return to it.

That they refused to do so was the death of their blessings under that covenant. Look at Luke 22:35-38. Jesus refers His disciples to their experience as preachers spreading the message of repentance and restoration of the pure message of Moses to the people of the Covenant of Moses. Under that covenant, they could make some claims on the provisions of the people to whom they preached. And that system worked well enough, as they lacked for nothing essential on that mission.

So what changed that Jesus would say they now needed to keep their survival gear handy? It was the end of that ancient covenant. The blessings of that covenant would no longer rest on that nation. They could no longer trust in the power of that covenant identity to support their gospel mission. The hedge of God’s protection was about to be removed, and people would begin to act accordingly. Walking among the Hebrew people would become difficult because that people would be under harsh tribulation and wrath. Jesus said literally, “We shall be counted as those without law” (verse 37).

His disciples missed the point, indicating to Him that two of them were armed contrary to Roman Law, but that wasn’t what Jesus meant. He was referring to the end of the Covenant of Moses as a viable treaty between God and Israel. It’s not that the provisions of the Law had failed, but that the people rejected the terms. They no longer loved their Lord from the heart. The Jewish leadership taught the people that such love was of no consequence, but that only their particular brand of legalistic observance was what really mattered. This was a rejection of the very foundation of everything on which the entire Old Testament stood.

Oddly, the Jews today remain a byword for refusing to assimilate. Everywhere you can go in this world, you will find that the Jewish identity rests on that same legalism that Jesus taught was contrary to the Covenant of Moses. They make a virtue of continuing to reject the terms of the Covenant. Whatever it is that holds them together, it has no claim on the Covenant protections and blessings.

To live Christ does not require the kind of organizations we see claiming His name today. It does require something, but churches have avoided those requirements. The very foundation on which churches are built is a rejection of what Christ taught about organizing. John saw it coming, as noted in his Revelation; the next generation behind him wasted no time denuding the gospel message of its ancient covering, and turned the church into a brash harlot, seeking compromise with the ways of the world.

Right now, the only game in town is either infiltrating the harlot church or operating in some kind of social isolation outside of it. It’s between you and God which path you will tread at any given time, but the current system his wholly unlikely to accept the message of Radix Fidem. Our covenant assumes that the only thing that really holds us together in Christ is the shared heart-led commitment, AKA faith. Any organizations we form mean nothing; they are mere tools to be used or put away as the mission requires. It’s that shared bond of love for our Savior that binds us together.

We have been granted this calling in hope and in preparation for the changes even now falling upon our world today. God’s wrath will destroy the works of the flesh; we should be eager to call that wrath down upon our own. We rightly long to be purged and purified of things that can’t follow us on that same path that Jesus pointed out to the Twelve. We want only the tools that will allow us to fulfill the mission. We need His wrath to clarify our understanding of what those tools are.

Pray for His wrath to fall, to shake loose the useless baggage of the flesh. Pray for His wrath to fall on the works of those who reject His Word, so that people are forced to confront their sins. We have no idea who will turn, but we need to be ready to harvest souls that come out of the collapsing matrix of lies.

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