A Reminder: Evangelism

Posted on September 25, 2019 by ehurst

As we prepare for the next wave of tribulation, can we summarize our evangelism?

We aren’t trying to save this world. And there is nothing we can do about getting people into Heaven. Going to Heaven or not is entirely in the hands of God. The problem is not getting folks into Heaven, but making them aware that God has chosen them. Our mission is to make them aware of their divine heritage while they are here.

The heritage of the Saints is the glory of God. We participate in that glory by obeying His will. We should seek to act like His children, deeply committed to whatever pleases Him. His will is represented in revelation, typically in the form of Law Covenants. The Law Covenants point to something that is not easily put into words; it’s a personal living connection to God and His Creation. We abstract the Law Covenants as an ideal of life, and call it “Biblical Law.”

We hold that Jesus Christ was His Son, and the fullest expression of all divine revelation. He is revelation; He is Biblical Law personified. He is still alive and still among us in the form of the Holy Spirit. But He is also manifested in how Creation works, something not obvious from a human perspective. It requires a moral awareness.

We cannot in any way make people spiritually aware; that requires spiritual birth, something that rests entirely in God’s initiative. However, by living the meaning of Christ in our own bodies, we can engender in other people a moral awareness, a moral awakening. We don’t need to worry about whether they are spiritually aware, only that they are morally aware.

Thus, we can raise the standard of heart-led moral awareness as a demand, a requirement of Biblical Law for this life. If necessary, we can talk about various frames of reference to help people get there. We talk about Creation (AKA, reality) as a living being, the sentient awareness of the natural world, how it speaks back to us in our hearts, etc. We raise this as a challenge to the false epistemology of the world around us.

But more than anything else, we must demonstrate all of this. We must live Biblical Law so vividly that we harvest the blessings of following Christ. The primary manifestation is a sense of peace with God, and thus, peace with reality. We do what’s right because it is right, not because it seems to accomplish anything in human terms. We know in our hearts that it accomplishes things in Heaven, regardless whether those moral accomplishments manifest anything discernible in this world. We demonstrate a mystical, otherworldly focus.

We belong to another realm, one that mere flesh cannot see. It requires a higher awareness, something above human intellect. We are so heavenly minded that we may well be little earthly good, at least as fallen humans measure such things. We insist that a worldly orientation misses everything that matters. At the same time, we really do understand what works in very practical terms, but we aren’t confined by fleshly goals in evaluating what it means for things to work.

We haven’t arrived; we are on the way. We have found God’s path back to Eden, and it means the Flaming Sword of rejecting the leadership of the fleshly nature. Instead, we follow that heavenly voice speaking in our hearts. It has to make heart-sense, even if it makes no head-sense.

This is our message.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 16:1-15

Posted on September 21, 2019 by ehurst

Jesus prepares the disciples for the coming of the Holy Spirit. While He walked in this world as a human, it was His spirit alone. Once He arose into Heaven, it was possible to share His spirit with everyone who gave their allegiance to Him.

But first, He needs to plant the seed of thinking that this life isn’t worth much. This life cannot be saved; this world is doomed. He tells them these things so that they are hardened against the temptation to believe that their national identity matters. They need to clearly understand that the politics of Judaism is a trap; it’s just a way of getting them distracted. It would lead them to invest effort in saving something in this world that they imagined they once had.

They should not imagine that the synagogue and all it represents warrants their loyalty. The synagogue is all about the Talmud, the traditions of fallen men, not the Word of God. So as they devote themselves to that Word, the synagogue will reject them. Indeed, the nation will reject them and try to kill them.

The Jews will somehow imagine this is obeying God. But the real problem is that they never understood Jesus because they never understood God. They conjured up an imaginary god that bore no resemblance to the God who met with Moses on the mountain, or the God who called Abraham from Mesopotamia. It’s a god of legalism and mere human reasoning.

Jesus is telling them these things now because He is about to leave them on the earth to carry on His ministry. When that stuff starts coming true, they’ll remember that He told them. He didn’t tell them about this way back when He first recruited them because He was the embodiment of the Holy Spirit they would soon inherit. It was a time to celebrate the joy of the Lord’s Presence on the earth, not get weighed down with how things would end some years later.

So now Jesus is just about to leave them, and it seems no one is paying attention to the most important issue of all: Where is He going? Was it merely to the grave? He has been telling them for quite some time that He must return to His Father’s throne. Their fleshly minds had no significant teaching on this, and their gut instinct in the flesh was to react with horror that He is about to die on the Cross. They didn’t see what was on the other side of that Cross.

But truly, it was in their best interest that He die. It is the only way out of this world and into Heaven. Once He’s in Heaven, He can dispatch His spirit to them as the Holy Comforter. His power will be sufficient to shake the fallen world. The Spirit will refute all the fleshly wisdom about things that really matter. The world has no proper understanding of what sin is, as witnessed by the Jews’ rejection of Jesus as Messiah. The world cannot grasp the nature of righteousness, since they plan to kill Jesus without knowing it will simply send Him Home. Human reason cannot comprehend God’s wrath, because people allow themselves to be ruled by Satan, who became Prince of this world as punishment.

Jesus could tell them so much more, but their hearts were hindered by minds filled with confusion. It was all they could do to walk with Him to the Garden of Gethsemane and face what will happen there. But when the Holy Spirit comes, He will be the voice of Jesus restored to fresh life in their souls. By His divine wisdom, they will see clearly how God works in this world and know what to expect. This Spirit will be the very character and personality of Jesus, and clearly recognizable as such.

Everything that belongs to God in His Kingdom of Heaven is the inheritance of Jesus the Son. And everything the Son can access in His co-regency with the Father will come to them via the Holy Spirit.

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Islam as Partisan Blowback

Posted on September 21, 2019 by ehurst

If you are paying attention, you’ll notice that the globalists, under the guise of leftism, are promoting Islam. Not as a religion, though this is alleged by many. Rather, they promote it like a hobby, as if it were the fashionable thing to do, being knowledgeable about such things. They want nothing to do with Islam having any actual influence in their lives. Their interest is in Islam as an intellectual exercise.

Of course, it’s not hard to understand where this comes from: It’s a counter to conservative evangelical Christianity’s influence. Giving some fashionable credence to Islam as a philosophy is spitting in the face of the opposition. Of course, leftist Christianity has no problem with any of this. It is leftist first, and Christianity is just flavoring.

But that exposes the problem with the right-wing Christian religion: It is right-wing first, and Christianity is a thin veneer over it. This is the same thing we saw with the Pharisees, who were a partisan force in the Jewish politics of their day. To this day, conservative Western Christianity takes seriously the Jewish contention that Talmudism is actually what Moses taught. They are siding with the Pharisees against Jesus.

So what the lefties are doing is merely a matter of spite. It’s an all too natural blowback from the falsehood inherent in American evangelical religion. It’s the strongest force the leftists can find to counter their enemies.

Stand aloof from this partisan sniping.

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Early Fall Flowers 2019

Posted on September 19, 2019 by ehurst

It’s rare that we have such warm weather this late in the year. With some rainfall, we get the rare exhibition of wild flowers in September. I spotted all of these around Draper Lake. These tiny white puffs are seldom seen because this is the only time they blossom, and the conditions have to be right. We are hitting upper 80s and lower 90s (F) with some rain just about every week.

This thing grows most of the summer, but usually fades away before now. Instead, we have a visual treat of lavender colored petals covering the ground and more sprouting every day. These little bushes are making quite a comeback right now. Not so much the plants themselves, but the blossoms have been missing for a few weeks.

Most people think of this as a bright weed. The “flowers” are actually specially formed leaves at the tops of the stems. They turn bright white around the edges, while the center stem in the leaves remain various shades of green. Seems to me that as the plants age and keep getting longer, the white fades away to become green leaves on the stalk as the “flowers” continue sprouting more stem from the end.

This is another come-n-go blossom. It always grows down close to the ground and sports tiny fingers of lavender color, so it looks like a puffy stalk. This is a particularly nice specimen protected with taller grasses, and growing in a low spot that stays wet longer.

These pink trumpets tend to grow all over the place, but you seldom see them because they hide in deeper grass. The crews did a pretty good job of not denuding the soil along the bikeway, so the roots of these things remain viable in the shorter grass planted on the sides. They can pop up overnight, seemingly from nowhere. Like most of the flowers featured today, this is the perfect weather for them.

These puffy yellow stalks appear to share a lot with those lavender colored ones above. These, though, tend to pioneer when ground has been turned over. They pop out when it’s damp and warmish, holding the ground after it dries until other plants can get started later.

By the way, the last two miles of bikeway are being paved today, so it should be all finished next week when I go back again.

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The Spirit of Compliance

Posted on September 18, 2019 by ehurst

Under the Covenant of Christ, we don’t stone our covenant members for their grave sins against shalom as was done under the Covenant of Moses.

There are several reasons behind this. First is that the Covenant of Moses was meant to fail in a certain sense. It was staged as an experiment of what could be, what could work, if human nature wasn’t so damned weak. In particular, we suffer the arrogance of the intellect, so utterly sure it can handle everything. This militates against the fundamental requirement that we trust in God’s revelation, because the intellect is incapable of discerning what’s really real.

It wasn’t the Fall that gave us this arrogant intellect; that is what intellect is like. It must be guided by the heart. The Fall added to this weakness mortality: the inability to see or act beyond the space-time constraints. Our fleshly bodies are not all that different from our Eden bodies in terms of appearance, but radically different in substance (same as Christ’s resurrected body). In that sense, Eden isn’t a place on earth; Eden is earth. It’s not a place we go to, but a condition, an existence without mortality.

And the earth we see around us would be a whole lot different if we were in our Eden bodies with a full trust in divine revelation (eating from the Tree of Life). What we see in the natural world around us is the long term result of human mismanagement. We do not commune with nature and our plans, purposes and actions are not according to its design. We don’t commune with Creation because we don’t commune with the God that made it.

So the only hope we have is getting back to Eden and the Tree of Life by surrendering our arrogance and false sense of control. Humanity has been trying to return to Eden by every means they can dream up, but the only way is restoring that reliance on revelation. Over the centuries outside of Eden, humanity kept losing track of revelation. So in the Exodus, God had a nation He pulled out of the mass of human truculence about divine truth. He met with them almost face-to-face at Sinai and wrote with His own finger an outline of a covenant.

Moreover, the whole context of this revelation, with all its trappings, were very much what that nation would have expected. It was in their language, in their customs, and consistent with their best scholarship. They didn’t even get far away from Sinai before rebelling. Very quickly their arrogance took over, and they were convinced they could work things out for themselves. This went off and on for centuries.

Finally, God sent His own Son, His revelation in human form. His nation rejected Him, so He rejected them. He gave His final revelation to a whole new nation, one that was not in any way reliant on human frailties. It’s a new form of covenant; the national identity was His personal Presence in their hearts. There will be no mass of unredeemed hanging on to complicate things.

Today, we who follow Christ are allowed to see what the Covenant of Moses was trying to say. We carve off a lot of stuff that no longer fits our context. That includes the death penalties. We are no longer confined to a specific human identity with fixed national boundaries, saddled with family that refuses to fully embrace the covenant. What could have worked in the Old Covenant doesn’t work in the New. We have restored the ancient moral lesson of Babylon: We avoid any effort to place more than a tiny few under covenant rule. We are formed in thousands of tiny clans, each with a highly variable human content, but bound together by His Spirit.

In our New Covenant, “death” is simply dis-fellowship, declaring someone an outsider. If they refuse to act like an insider, then they are granted their obvious wish not to be an insider. Being an insider means compliant with the Spirit of Divine Law. We don’t stone sinners; we simply refuse to recognize them as family.

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A Different Standard from the Herd

Posted on September 17, 2019 by ehurst

If you dig into the Law of Moses, you’ll find references to stoning as a primary means of execution for capital sins. There are a dozen instances where it is commanded:

  1. Touching Mt. Sinai during the meeting with God (Ex 19:12-13; Heb 12:20-21)
  2. Breaking the Sabbath (Num 15:32-36)
  3. Child sacrifice to idols (Lev 20:2)
  4. Being a medium or wizard (Lev 20:27)
  5. Cursing God or blaspheming (Lev 24:10-16, 23)
  6. Idolatry (Deut 17:2-5)
  7. Someone who entices another to commit idolatry (Deut 13:6-11)
  8. Rebellion against parents (Deut 21:18-21)
  9. A woman who falsely claimed to be a virgin at marriage (Deut 22:13-21)
  10. Sex with a virgin betrothed to another man (Deut 22:23-24)
  11. Adultery (Lev 20:10; implied by Jn 8:3-5) (both man and woman to be stoned)
  12. An ox that gored someone to death was also to be stoned (Ex 21:28,32)

The actual method was not so much throwing the rocks as dropping them on someone who was in a low place. It could be a natural pit or one dug for the purpose, but the idea was to bury the person under the stones dropped on them. It was presumed each member of the community involved would drop at least one stone, and the size of the resulting heap indicated something of the seriousness of their crime.

So the emphasis was on the community recognizing how the particular sin threatened their shalom. Typically the person making the accusation — the witness, the person with the evidence — was the first to drop their stone on the perpetrator. This presumes that, if their conscience afflicted them in any way, they couldn’t do it, and no one else would, either. This called for a sense of conviction about holiness and moral threats.

It was always possible to whip up a crowd and end up with a lynching. This is part of why there were rules about evidence. It’s not so much that two people must directly witness the crime, but that there had to be pretty strong evidence. For all its flaws, this was a pretty good system in the context of the people, culture and historical setting. Refusing to act would allow moral rot to take hold, but overly hasty actions would do the same.

At the same time, it rested on a presumption of heart-led living. Without that, any system breaks down quickly.

Given that our Western world militates against the heart-led way, we should hardly be surprised at the strong showing of rule by hysteria. This is how SJWs get their way. This is how a nation is herded into supporting blatant evil. All of the focus goes to imaginary threats, while the most egregious depravity is covered up.

I don’t promote the stringency of Mosaic Law in our social context. In Christ we learn that much of it was more important for its symbolism. At the same time, our Western heritage makes this life way too precious, putting things way out of balance. The balancing act takes place in your heart, not in your head. God doesn’t speak to fallen human intelligence, but to human commitment and faith.

Don’t believe the lynching mobs trying to silence people unfairly. Cling to a different standard, the Word of God.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 15:18-27

Posted on September 14, 2019 by ehurst

Do not expect a place at the table. Following Jesus means rejecting this world, and the world will most certainly return the favor.

We should love each other the way Christ loves us, and we should bear the hatred of the world because it hated Christ first. Being a friend of Jesus makes us the enemies of the world. He chooses us out of the world, and sets us on the path back to Eden. Eden is not in this world, if you understand “this world” as the fallen human existence. Eden is whence we departed at the birth of this world, so going back to Eden means leaving this world behind. It doesn’t mean leaving the natural world, but leaving the fallen state that keeps us from communion with Creation.

John chose the Greek word for “hounding” to describe persecution. The world hounded Christ to the Cross, and it will try to drive us there with Him. But our embrace of that Cross is our greatest relief from this world. We have no human advantages over Jesus; we should expect no relief from this world except in turning from it. Yet those few in this world who embrace Christ will also embrace us. Jesus told His disciples to seek out the same kind of people who responded to the touch of their Master, and teach them what Jesus taught.

He also warned how the bitterest pill of all is how many would claim Christ artificially, only to turn around and reinforce the persecution of His true disciples. A lot of people will claim Christ without ever having gotten close to the Father. The primary failure of Israel up to this point was moving farther and farther away from divine revelation, yet insisting they were the only earthly source for the Word the Lord gave to them.

Jesus admitted that, had He not volunteered to come down in human form and prophesy and perform miracles, it would be hard for the Father to hold Israel accountable. By coming to provoke their awareness, He took away the false covering Jews wore to hide their sins. Their hatred against Jesus for doing that was proof they never really knew His Father. He repeated that same statement twice, drumming it into the awareness of these men as they all walked toward Gethsemane.

Here Jesus echos what David said in Psalm 35. David recounts how he had often given the benefit of the doubt to those he had to judge as part of his royal duties. But he had always been totally honest, while too many people attached to his service worked cowardly, behind his back in opposing him. So it was with Jesus, sharing with compassion the Word of God and giving God’s people every opportunity to repent and return. For this, they hated Jesus. David’s experience was a prophecy about the Messiah.

Granted, the disciples at this point were hardly prepared to confront the world as Christ had. So He holds out one hope for them: Once Jesus returns to His Father and takes up His co-regency, He will send His own Spirit to come in and live in their souls. The Spirit would awaken all the things Jesus had taught them, giving it all substance and meaning. This bunch had been with Him from the beginning of His ministry, so they held more then they even knew. Once the Spirit breathed life into that legacy, they would find the power to spread that same message of Jesus.

They would “bear witness” (Greek martyreo), a term already long symbolic of dying to the self in Hebrew, as well as Greek, so that one did not fear losing this life for the sake of God’s glory.

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What You Know Is Right

Posted on September 13, 2019 by ehurst

It’s here.

Don’t let this come across as melodramatic. It may be difficult to see, but I believe your heart will know it’s true. There’s a really good reason for our difficulty: The Spirit Realm is not affected by our sense of time and space. Yes, God and His angels, and the demons, all understand our time-space constraints, but they are not oriented that way. Rather, the whole point of divine revelation is pulling us into that realm, not bringing truth down to ours.

It was very good timing for a dear sister to ask me to share about spiritual discernment and demons. For the past couple of days I’ve sensed just how important that was, but only in the past hour or so did the meaning resolve itself to my mind. In a very real sense, the crap has hit the fan and we will see manifestations of demonic presence that we haven’t seen before.

This is not a call to arms in the human sense. There is no coordinated strategy, only tactics. The strategy is simply keeping in touch with each other, praying for each other, and living out the implications of what we have already learned. Claiming our divine heritage, our shalom, is our warfare.

That said, I do have some concrete plans. For example, when the series on the Teachings of Jesus run out, as it will soon, the next course will be a close examination of Biblical Law. This will be a review of pertinent bits from the Law of Moses, as an example of divine priorities.

The point of this is to gain a sense of certainty about what is good and right in rather concrete terms our minds can use. We are preparing our minds for ever improving our Kingdom service. When the mind is more consistently aligned with divine priorities, it’s a lot easier for the heart to speak of your convictions. You’ll be better able to hear; your fleshly assets will serve to amplify the Truth.

Don’t get the idea that we are locked in place in any way. The imagery of making all the tactical preparations for an attack is not appropriate. It’s been going on for a long time already. We aren’t trying to put in place our defensive posture, as if the last supply run has arrived and the battlefield is now active. We need to get away from that kind of feeling. As I’ve said often, it’s not like the economy is going to crash and grind to a halt.

But it will slow down and require you to be more creative. God will provide. There are things He will yet supply to those who serve Him. Stockpile stuff if your heart demands it, but don’t get locked into that mindset. What matters most is the stockpile of obedience to revelation.

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Draper Bikeway 20

Posted on September 12, 2019 by ehurst

It’s getting close! Here is a view back the way I came this morning, at the crossing over East Elm Creek below the dam. Both layers of asphalt have been laid. I can tell you that the section of trail from the previous dead end (the image looks back that way) up to the incline down from the eastern end of the dam (at my back) needs some drainage work. And I know that the crews will need to landscape and roll out the turf, but this section below the dam is now passable.

This is what the old dead-end portion looks like with all the sod rooted down. It sat like this most of a year, waiting for the crews to come back to work and start paving again. They’ve been at it pretty hard the past couple of weeks. There is now only a two-mile section between SE 104th and SE 134th that lacks the second layer of asphalt. I rode the entire loop today except one short section where they are laying the top coat of asphalt.

And just for fun, here’s a random image. It’s a view toward Downtown OKC from the shady strip along the river bank in Wiley Post Park. I lost two more images when I lost my phone today. Maybe I can get them back later.

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Divine Discrimination

Posted on September 10, 2019 by ehurst

The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-29) is used by a lot of people who have no idea what it’s really about. The fundamental question asked by the lawyer is how to identify who is and isn’t your “neighbor.” In this context, “neighbor” is a code-word for “covenant brother/sister.” It’s a totally different question from how most people use it in America. To be more precise, the lawyer was asking whom should he treat as a covenant brother/sister, since he can’t always know for sure who claims Jehovah as God, and actually stands in His favor.

So that’s the crux of the issue: Who merits treatment as spiritual family? Jesus clearly did not teach that everyone should be treated as family until proven otherwise. In other words, Jesus did not live in a high trust society, and the Bible does not presume such a thing as normal or correct. Rather, the Law of Moses commanded a guarded tolerance for those who aren’t obviously a threat (see this list of passages).

People outside the covenant can be treated as friends and allies. You should expect them to receive some of your shalom. You will try to include them as much as possible, but there are distinct areas where they are excluded because they exclude themselves. The point is that you should keep an awareness of the issue, and discriminate righteously.

But the fundamental issue is that, if someone acts according to your best understanding of the Covenant — for us, that means Biblical Law — they should be treated as covenant family until you learn otherwise. Clearly that Samaritan treated the victim as family. This wasn’t just a “fellow human” kind of thing, because that’s definitely not in the Bible. That’s why the Law of Moses required you distinguish, that you discriminate. You cannot give God’s family blessings to someone who isn’t family. But you should be kind to strangers who aren’t a threat. And as long as you don’t know either way, look for clues that your heart-mind will recognize as marks of commitment to Christ.

There are a great many people out there who are, at least to some degree, heart-led. Oddly, a great many of them will not be Christians. The heart-led way is one distinction. But a full commitment to the Creator is the highest distinction, and we need to be careful about where we drop that marker for our own use. Stay conscious of the boundaries of dominion God has granted you.

And for sure there is nothing wrong with recognizing partial commitment, partial heart leading, etc. The whole idea is that you learn to discern, and that you learn to handle God’s gifts according to His desires. Don’t throw pearls to swine; don’t give what is holy to dogs — those are parables that the world at large rejects. But they are the command of Christ.

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