Love and Law

Posted on September 9, 2019 by ehurst

When you take away familial warmth from a society, you destroy everything. That destruction is seldom immediate, so most people lack the ability to understand this with their intellects; it requires a heart-led consciousness. The problem for us today is a long history without any covenants, so that we have built a massive society with no rooting in reality. What people regard as “reality” is one big, massive lie.

In place of covenant identity, Western civilization as a whole is under a deeply oppressive structure of materialism. Instead of beloved covenant family, we associate with each other as physical economic assets. We have given birth to a mentality of the secular state, in which a very impersonal government hive-mind owns everyone, and everything you think/do/say is subject to government interference. You are an asset of the State, and you must be constrained by the demand of the State for profit.

The State is composed of the hive-mind of the worst dregs of society. Not social outcasts in terms of resisting social order, but the lowest of our society in terms of not giving a damn about anything except the most basal hedonistic creature comforts. It’s a mind of fear, fear that such comforts might recede out of reach. It’s better by far to enforce uniformity in having just a little than to take any risk at all.

Thus, we see people claiming to be concerned about your welfare, when “welfare” is defined as being useful to the State and its hive-mind values. It becomes your moral duty to remain profitable for the State. Everyone walks through their day with a mindset of what they owe the State. We might say “the people” but what we really mean is hive-mind, “the State.”

This is why we think in terms of contracts instead of covenants. It’s a serious hard struggle to get that turned around in your head. This is why we reflexively think of “law” as something cold and harsh, rather like fate or things inevitable. We read the Bible and references to “Law” not as the personal attachment of God to us, but as an impersonal and implacable standard we already know instinctively that we cannot sustain.

God’s Law is His grace for us. The act of revealing His Law for us is the most loving thing He could do. So when you see the New Testament writers talking down “law,” most often they refer to the Talmud and the Jewish attitude of implacable and impersonal constraints. That attitude is what Aristotelian reasoning makes of divine revelation. Instead of the blessing of helping us see the nature of the situation in which we exist, it has perverted Law into a pile of restrictions from a capricious outsider who is just looking for an excuse to damn us all to Hell. Who doesn’t long for escape from that?

God’s Law is His love for us. He goes to the trouble of revealing for us what we need to know about the fundamental nature of His Creation, which in turn is based on His divine moral character. Biblical Law is a term we use to designate the mystical body of understanding written in our hearts — our convictions — by the finger of God. It is equivalent to the personal character of Jesus as the Son of that same Father God. It is manifested in the Law Covenants of Scripture, but it is the same Covenant of Christ we all should know about.

So revelation is giving us a break. It is taking into account our weakness in our fleshly nature, and placing that gateway to a deeper understanding someplace where we can see it, where we can find it and explore what’s behind it. And in that certain sense, all revelation is Law; all Law is divine revelation. It becomes for us a mental reflex to contrast human law against divine Law. We recognize the latter as a personal effort from God Almighty to reach out to you.

And in that reaching out, He exposes to us the very personal and individual revelation carved in our souls in the form of convictions. The consistency of divine revelation between each of us remains something we can recognize with our hearts, but struggle to put into words. It provokes in us the kind of love God has for us as His children, so that we can love each other. This leads to yet another contrast for us, between what mankind calls “love” and what God says it is.

Divine sacrificial love is the Law, and the Law is love.

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Discernment 05: Occupy

Posted on September 8, 2019 by ehurst

In general, if a particular health issue doesn’t yield to standard medical treatment, it is likely related to demonic presence. That goes for other shalom failures in life, as well. If it resists sensible moral treatment, then you should suspect demons holding some claim on things. Begin praying accordingly and asking for the Lord to show you what you need to know to take action that glorifies Him.

As previously noted, everyone has demons in their lives. The question is not how to get rid of them altogether, but a matter of when things have developed to the point God is ready for you to conquer the specific problem. Satan is master of all flesh (AKA this world), so redemption is becoming more spiritual and less worldly.

Some issues are more of a demonic presence in human institutions and activities. Every geographic place has peculiar demonic authorities associated with it, as well. Again, it’s not driving them out, but a matter of limiting their influence in your life. In some few cases, demons will manifest very strongly in individual lives.

The best Scripture reference we have is the Gadarene Demoniac (Matthew 8; Mark 5; Luke 8). Please note that Western traditional mythology about “demon possession” is nonsense. It doesn’t work like that. It’s much closer to the psychology of multiple personalities. For whatever reason, demons are allowed to set up housekeeping in a soul and eclipse the actual root personality of the victim. It’s typically the result of some particular trauma that isn’t managed properly. In the case of the Gadarene man, once the demons were gone, he was thrown back to his original personality, whose normal development had been arrested some time in the past. Thus, he returns to himself with an almost childlike awe of Christ.

But notice something that almost every commentator on that story seems to miss: The narrative makes no sense standing on its own. You must place it in the wider context of what Christ did on this earth. A critical element is that everything took place within the boundaries of the Covenant.

This demonized man was a Jew. The pigs that rushed into the sea were herded by Jews, contrary to the Covenant — no great loss. This event took place most likely just inside the Tetrarchy of Philip. That boundary line cut across older historic territorial associations this area once had with both Gadara and Gergesa. But the only place on the shore of the entire Sea of Galilee that matches this story is down near the very southern boundary of Philip’s domain.

The authority to act against demons rests entirely on one biblical covenant or another. You must remain aware of which covenant applies to the situation you are addressing when you sense in your heart a need to combat a demonic presence. If the victim has no particular affiliation with any covenant, then your assistance may be limited. Our leverage against demons is Biblical Law, not some personal blanket permit from God. The authority of Christ granted to you and I is always constrained by Biblical Law, and this always takes shape under one covenant or another.

Don’t buy into claims someone makes about being a demon hunter. Exorcism isn’t a ministry; it’s a sideline, a part of the wider repertoire of things we all can do in this life to bring glory to our Father. Some folks will do it more consistently than others, but it should not be viewed as a profession in itself. The end result of such a thing always rests in the hands of the victim, and the victim’s fate rests in Biblical Law.

This is not a question of going to Hell. Satan has no authority on that issue. Most Westerners, Church folks in particular, confuse the Lake of Fire with Hell in the first place. Satan has no delight in folks going to either place; his domain is this world. That’s “hell” enough in itself. We are all born into his domain, and his mission is to keep us wrapped up in it.

Our mission is to take back our lives from him and render them to the Father for His glory. The process tends to be incremental. The focus is on covenant living in this life. Satan tries to deceive and confiscate our covenant blessings (shalom), to keep us from the path back to Eden. That’s his job as God’s servant. His restriction to this world is his prison, and his final judgement is that place of fire.

Dante’s Inferno is silly mythology. Demons don’t torment souls in Hell; they are tormented themselves in a place called the Abyss. It’s a figure of speech. We don’t even have sufficient words to discuss all that. Our main concern right now is walking in the Father’s glory and helping other folks to see how that glory is the answer to everything.

The overall focus is on the Father’s glory. We glorify Him by living Biblical Law as our Covenant, and harvesting the blessings as we take back from Satan things that aren’t his.

End of series; got questions?

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Teachings of Jesus — John 15:9-17

Posted on September 7, 2019 by ehurst

We could easily weary ourselves spewing forth poetic blather about this one overused word in English — “love” — and never quite get to the point Jesus is making here. It gets worse if we can’t be bothered with putting that word in the context of what Jesus taught, which in turn must stand in the context of the ancient Hebrew culture.

This is all about pulling people into your family household. Jehovah consistently portrayed Himself as a feudal nomadic sheikh, the type of Ancient Near Eastern potentate Abraham would have easily recognized, since it was a fair description of Abraham himself, once he settled in Canaan Land. Jesus kept calling His people back to that image of His Father and the life it portrayed. The Covenant Nation was supposed to be Jehovah’s adopted family household.

Such is the meaning behind this teaching on love. Jesus kept trying to portray serving God in the Kingdom of Heaven as a restoration of that feudal nomadic sheikdom. He kept calling people to return to that covenant communion with their Lord as their Father. It was supposed to be full of warmth and sacrifice both ways, but always under the lordship of that Father. This is the context for Jesus reminding them that the Father loved His Son, and in that same way, the Son loved His chosen ministers. They should keep their hearts focused on that kind of communion, and make it the center of their existence.

As we should naturally expect, warm communion with their Teacher was the same thing as the Teacher’s communion with His Father. How could one claim to love like that and not observe everything He says is right? It’s no different than how they should love the Father, as well. This is the only joy we can have in this life. Obeying revelation is its own reward; it’s the discovery of the divine purpose in all of Creation as a whole.

Jesus was about to demonstrate the depth of that warm communion on the Cross. The whole of revelation could be summed up in that willing sacrifice. Thus, if they simply grasp that kind of commitment to each other and to revelation itself, all the details would work themselves out. So Jesus said that this kind of love was the substance of all His commandments to them.

Where are the boundaries of that love? They go beyond death in this world. The greatest love is a willingness to pay the ultimate price of flesh for the welfare of those who were closest to Him. To Jesus, they were worth that kind of sacrifice, but only if His love was born in their hearts. That’s what marked them as family.

And to make sure they noticed, He pointed out that they weren’t just servant disciples, but actual friends — the same as covenant neighbors, close associates, His loyal royal counselors. Unlike slaves and hired servants in a sheikh’s household, He shared with them the divine counsel reserved for family. Servants and slaves were never privy to such information, but these disciples had been fully briefed on what God intended.

They didn’t come to Jesus looking for a job. They were chosen from among all the Covenant Nation. The choice was made from the viewpoint of their God, who knew exactly what they were made of, and all their human imperfections. They were elevated and granted the most private counsel, so that they could bear an abundant crop of divine glory. That glory would be eternal, not something that was forgotten by the next sunrise. With that kind of insider viewpoint, they were in a position to ask God for some of the most outlandish miracles, and Jesus would see to it they were granted.

Once more He repeated the whole summary of His personal law for them: Love each other with the Father’s kind of love.

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Disturbing to See

Posted on September 6, 2019 by ehurst

While I had some hope that it would be useful, that wasn’t why I undertook the task. I did it because my heart demanded it. With all the destruction from the winds last week, the entire state is still cleaning up from downed trees, and I believe there are still some power outages in a few places. The local municipality — Midwest City — is also way behind the curve on removing downed trees and limbs. There is lots of wilted greenery along the curbs in yards all over the city.

As you might expect, that includes the city parks. During my mid-week heavy workout in the park, I had to ride around some broken limbs, and one huge sycamore lying across the trail. Something hit me today and I loaded up some tools to see if I could help a little by doing some preparatory cutting. But the real reason was to go and pray, and to also show some respect for the tree that had served so long as a beautiful shade and companion to those few whose hearts are awake.

The first image above shows a little less than an hour into the job. I worked with reverence, praying that the remains would still serve some purpose. I admit I don’t know whether a sycamore offers anything edible or medicinal, but I do know that trees have life and purpose in Creation. At the same time, I felt it would lighten the load a little on the city workers if all they had to do was swing a chainsaw on what was left when I finished. But after another half-hour or so, a very large articulated front-loader came roaring up from the other end of the park. I knew the worker was coming to move the tree I was working on, because it was lying across the path.

He said something to indicate he appreciated the thought, but I could tell he was thinking I wasted my time and energy. It didn’t hurt my feelings. Try to understand: I wouldn’t scold him for not understanding the heart-led way. He’s just one example of the mainstream, without a clue to a whole world of life around them. But what did unsettle me just a bit was watching how he went about the job of moving that tree off the path. He viewed the remains as a problem, a hassle. It’s one thing to note that this was just one guy working alone with a machine poorly suited to the job, but the whole scene was a little disturbing. The tree was not too happy with it, for sure.

There was nothing in this scene about respect for the Creator and all that He has given us. Even if we acknowledge that the only thing anyone could do is turn that tree into mulch with a grinder, that’s better than the irritated manner in which the tree was handled. In the process he scraped a couple of still standing trees pretty hard. He did get it off the trail, but I was discouraged enough to leave and not work any longer on the job.

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Discernment 04: Authority

Posted on September 5, 2019 by ehurst

The vast majority of people exorcise their own demons.

The so-called “deliverance ministry” makes lots of noise about going on a crusade to drive demons out of people, places and institutions. But the genuine biblical ministry is not so much doing it for someone else, but helping them do it themselves. It should encourage people to consciously move away from captivity to Satan.

There are two ways you can actually banish someone else’s demons. One is that they come to you for help and place themselves under your covering. In this context, “covering” is a biblical term for divine dominion granted from God, your spiritual shepherding. The second way is when God grants you specific authority by revelation. It comes as an urge in your heart, a conviction, that you need to dispatch Satan and/or his helpers from a person, place or institution. We do this with all reverence for the authority of God.

See Jude 1:8-10 as a warning about not getting too sassy with demonic powers. However, be warned that a great many English translations mess up this passage. The context warns about following the example of Sodom and Gomorrah, referring to them as “dreamers” in the sense of delusion, fantasy, and delirium. In modern vernacular, “They must be high on something.” They recognize no authority. That is, they reject God’s authority in the first place, and so reject all the other authorities ordained by God. They even have the gall to insult angels and demons.

Jude warns us the archangel Michael, whose authority was presumably more or less on par with Satan’s, didn’t dare insult our Enemy with false charges. No sarcasm or exaggerations, but a sober statement of plain truth. In a dispute over the body of Moses, Michael was careful to warn Satan that his claims to the body were contrary to the Word of God. It was rather more like a warning to Satan not to defy his own Master.

Jude warns that there are people in this world who carelessly provoke demonic powers with only the authority of their delirious imaginations. And he has been warning his readers that these folks are drawn to churches, sent by Satan to corrupt the Body of Christ.

We’ve seen a great deal of mythical lore coming out of certain sectors of the Charismatic movement that violates this teaching. They pretend to have the right to castigate Satan and his demons like stray dogs. I’ve watched in person as this kind of teaching has destroyed churches and fellowships by opening the doors to demonic presence, sneaking in some back door that nobody seems to notice.

They “take authority” over demons, which demons then snicker at the way this gives them authority to slip around behind these mouthy people and destroy the work of the Spirit. Not directly, of course, but that work is destroyed because the people involved leave too many gaps in their spiritual armor. They are too focused on dramatic cool stuff and pay no attention to fundamentals. We know what happens when spiritual leaders compromise behind closed doors.

Your primary authority is Biblical Law alongside your sense of conviction. No two of us will approach the mission of spiritual rescue the same. There are no rituals to promote; you are obliged to compose your own rituals based on your experience and your sense of calling and mission. The one thing you need to keep in mind is that you may not have the full authority to kick out demons for someone else, especially if they don’t in some fashion communicate a request for help. Some part of them has to want that relief. But you most certainly can restrict demonic presence and influence in your own life, particularly when you are with that victim.

But even that limited authority is nothing more than plundering the battlefield after you’ve won the battle in worship and prayer. It requires coming to the recognition of conviction about confronting the Enemy after soaking yourself in the God’s Presence. Then, choose your words carefully. Don’t assert your will; declare the will of God. Make sure you understand in their full context the Scripture passages you quote.

Don’t be surprised when the people you seek to help let the demons right back in.

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Discernment 03: It’s Personal

Posted on September 4, 2019 by ehurst

Everything in revelation is personal.

It does no good at all to argue what God ought to do. The best we can hope for is to understand what He is doing and how He goes about it. Our hearts can know God directly and intimately, but our minds can only characterize Him and His ways.

In the broadest sense, the image of fallen humanity is that of wayward children. Our purpose is to serve Him. We were created to handle things in a certain way, and we have all departed from that. It means we have moved away from His shadow. Without that protection and guidance, we cannot be allowed to interfere with His work, so He keeps us busy.

By depicting Himself as an eastern potentate, a sort of desert nomad sheikh, God establishes certain expectations for us in dealing with Him. A sheikh would have his right-hand man; God has His Son for that. He also has a left-hand man, the role Satan plays for Him. The left-hand man is lower ranking, someone who is required to take up a job that no one really likes. We know that Satan was once in rebellion, and we can justly surmise that his current position in the divine court is the result of God’s enforcing hand on him.

When we see Satan in the Garden, he is not in rebellion any more. He’s already been reassigned to a nasty job, but it’s one he does exceptionally well. He is the internal affairs investigator, something like the court spy. He checks to see if various servants of the God are faithful. Satan is permitted to run sting operations, to deceive folks about their own calling and mission. If he succeeds in seducing them, he is permitted to make them his slaves. He consumes their blessings, at least in the sense of confiscating them.

This slavery is not a binary in-or-out, but is complex and nuanced. There are limits, in the sense that we might serve him in one area, but not in another. It’s also a matter of degree. That’s the situation for those with a sense of spiritual awareness.

There exists, of course, a majority of humanity with no spiritual awakening at all. Those sad souls are Satan’s property, as it were. They aren’t God’s children, though they could be. They are household slaves who have no idea what’s going on in the first place, and no stake in anything. They are herded like cattle and Satan is the cattle driver.

There are at any given time a bunch of people who relate to God as hired servants, allies who support His work but haven’t yet accepted His offer of family kinship. They are servants under a law covenant, but not adopted under a family covenant. They have some idea what’s going on, but still no inheritance in the final outcome. Their level of blessings is rather like token wages. They still belong to Satan, but gain somewhat more freedom because they have taken that first step of acknowledging God as their Lord, and His Word as their law. Their hearts are moved, but their spirits are not raised up to eternal life.

But every human soul in this world has demons. Their place in our lives may be quite restricted; that’s what happens when you embrace the agenda of revelation, and snuggle up to God as your Father. The fleshly nature belongs to Satan, but Satan doesn’t have much if we keep nailing that nature to the Cross. Or we may be lacking in our ardor for His will, and so the demons hang a little closer to us than we like.

The issue is taking back from Satan’s domain the territory of our lives. Not just kicking them out, but making sure the turf they held has been redeemed and occupied in serving God. The image is that your soul is the battlefield, and each new bit of territory we conquer in faith is something that God can then use. We have a distinct part to play in making that use happen, lest the demons return and things are even worse (Matthew 12:43-45; Luke 11:23-26). We must make an active and positive decision to fill that empty space with God’s business.

It serves no purpose to know all of this in theory if we are untouched by a sense of urgency in changing our own souls.

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Discernment 02: Boundaries

Posted on September 3, 2019 by ehurst

We know that there is quite a distance between Western assumptions about reality versus the world as portrayed in the Bible.

You must unlearn at least some of what mainstream society has taught you. The call of faith will be exceedingly frustrating otherwise. It requires that your conscious awareness step across the boundary into the Spirit Realm. For some few, it’s an experience that eclipses at least some of their senses, and can be rather like a trance state. For most of us, it will be far more subtle, something easily dismissed and ignored. Nonetheless, it is there and you can experience it.

Crossing that boundary is both another realm, and yet entirely within you. The fundamental issue is your commitment — your faith — to the God of Creation. If you managed to turn within yourself to those hidden realms without such a commitment, you would encounter lies. Demons lurk there and without the hedge of God’s sanity, they will tell lies even bigger and more compelling. You cross the line into insanity, though it is far worse than mere delusion. You become more tightly chained to their lies.

There is a very concrete reason we emphasize an awareness of Biblical Law: It shields your conscious awareness from deception. It keeps you sane; it guards your intellect from dark powers. Satan is most certainly the Prince of This World. That doesn’t grant him power over the natural world, but power over human awareness of the natural world, and thus, power to manipulate human behavior. Biblical Law is a shield, a hedge of covering that binds the Devil’s hands. He can still project his lies, but against the Word of God, they are mere mists and noise.

Note in passing: Most of this exploration and exercise of spiritual awareness is meant to take place in the cocoon of faith, in the physical company of other people of faith. That God has called a few of us out of the fallen world without much of that face-to-face contact means that He regards us as equipped and able to handle the challenge. Without faith we are nothing; we are downright dangerous. With Christ, we are powerful enough to face down the Hordes of Hell.

So the issue remains a matter of mission and calling. You cannot face demons without the confidence that comes from the Presence of God. Thus, we spend a great deal of our human time investing in praise, invoking the divine Presence of the Holy Spirit. This conditions our conscious awareness and our minds to be familiar with the power and authority God designed for us, and us for it. Worship and praise exposes us to who we were called to be.

This is precisely what was meant by the phrase in Genesis 4:26. “And then men began to call upon the name of the Lord.” They were out of Eden and imprisoned in fleshly mortality. Their only hope of redemption was to invest a portion of their time in seeking God’s favor to handle the situation. They had entered a realm where Satan was the ruler, and were no longer instinctively connected to Creation. The only way forward was to stay connected with the Spirit Realm, a foot in both worlds.

We must first accept the justice of things being so crappy for us in the Fallen Realm. This is the root meaning of the word “confession” — to stand with God when He declares what sin is. If we don’t confess our fallen state and the burden of a fallen nature, we cannot safely cross the boundary. This is a part of genuine worship. From there we go on to claim the justice and rightness of Biblical Law as a divine gift. This precious gift from God makes our sad life here bearable.

Seizing Biblical Law means leaving behind a broken life, the first step back to Eden.

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Discernment 01: Unlearning

Posted on September 2, 2019 by ehurst

You will spend your whole life unlearning.

The call to faith is the song of the heart, crying out to God for redemption. It’s the song that pulls us back to Eden. This path we follow is the whole thing; the sole mission from God is changing ourselves. We must accept things as God says they are and embrace the demands that arise from that understanding.

The biggest single lesson to unlearn is the false idea that there is anything of significance we can do to fix this world. That notion is the biggest lie we face. Once you get rid of that false instinct, everything else is an easy, downhill ride from there. It’s not that we do nothing in this world, but that everything we do has that otherworldly focus. The meaning of everything is rooted in a world our senses cannot perceive.

This truth is like a sword that cuts through all the crap. But the other edge of that sword is that we must learn how to discern things from the heart. We belong to a kingdom that exists in our hearts. It’s not a kingdom of this world. It’s not that we cannot trust our senses, but that we cannot trust them very much. We learn to be cynical about the fleshly nature because we know all too well it is filled with lusts for things we should not have, things that bring death. We have to keep turning that sword of truth on our fleshly natures, so we can expose the boundary line between what is eternal and what is mortal.

There are sure to be similarities between us as a covenant family of faith, but there are also elements in this that are totally unique to each individual. One man’s essential is another man’s garbage. The variation should teach us to doubt impressions and perceptions, to run them through a filter. It should draw us together in our mutual uncertainties so we can focus more on the certainties we share in our convictions. The whole mission of a faith community is learning how to handle the ever-changing dynamic and interplay between our lives in this fallen world, as we each struggle to discern what is actually required.

Because we remain in this prison of the flesh, much of what we do must be understood as approximations. We get used to parables, to parabolic thinking and symbolic packaging. We express the truths of our souls, our encounters with the divine plane, in terms of what we experience in the flesh. Nothing elevates your IQ like having the heart take command of your existence, because it teaches you to think far more deeply about the meaning of things. The intellect is never more powerful than when it serves the heart, when it discovers its true purpose from God. And nothing makes our human interactions sweeter than heart-led communion that we struggle to put into words.

We struggle to find words for that heart level of perception. It’s more real than real, but we are often at a loss to tell about it. Some part of us recognizes this invisible realm with a clarity that leaves us speechless at times. It sets us on fire with joy unspeakable, full of glory. Our flesh is embarrassed at its poverty and instinctively shies a way from sharing such things.

Frankly, some of it cannot be addressed. Paul warned that there are things we simply are not permitted to share (2 Corinthians 12:1-10). He expresses serious doubts about whether he was even still in his fleshly body during those experiences. This is the man who spent three years in the Arabian wilderness in a prolonged encounter of the risen Christ, rather like a disciple of Jesus out of sequence, but with the same length of exposure as the others. We piece the story together from Galatians 1:10-19 along with the reference in 2 Corinthians. We know so little about it because Paul was warned to keep some of it to himself, and the rest was simply beyond the range of words.

Do you feel envious of his experience? You won’t know what God can do in your life until you make yourself available the way Paul did. Not that you should have the same mission and calling, but that you are faithful to your own. But you have to know that a big barrier is the cultural distance between us and Paul. Our Western culture is strongly perverted against that kind of thing, and it does take some time to unlearn that. I can’t promise that you’ll experience what Paul did, but if you start down the path toward Eden, you can never predict what God will show you.

So our biggest problem is unlearning what hinders us taking that path.

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Strategy for Radix Fidem

Posted on September 1, 2019 by ehurst

There is a strategy behind Radix Fidem, but we don’t know all of it.

What we do know is that God has called some of us to a restoration of some things we believe have been lost since the days of the Apostles. There is no precise list, only a certainty that what we have today is not what they had back then. We are further convinced that some of that lost legacy can be recovered.

But the edges are rather soft and not clearly defined. Only the heart of the matter shines clear and bright. A part of the lost legacy of the First Century Christian religion is the willingness to accept a lack of precision as necessary, somehow essential to the thing itself. It can’t be the same for all of us; we don’t try to nail it down or control it. This is how we find it when the Lord reveals Himself to us.

It’s really not in our hands. This is the essence of faith. I suppose we can guess how these things go from past experience and from human history. Will this become a big thing that grabs the attention of millions? Not unless God wants it that way. There would have to be, at a minimum, someone appointed to bring it to the world’s attention, someone with a calling and access to attention that none of us currently have. Unless God raises up someone like that, we have to content ourselves with obscurity.

To be honest, that obscurity has become a part of my personal vision. That is, the situation awaits dramatic changes before Radix Fidem — or what it represents — can draw a wider notice. Until those changes come, the mission is to stay small as a recognized consequence of how we are called to live. While there are plenty of parallels, we don’t have the same situation that Jesus faced.

Until that big change arises in our world, the best I can do is seek to explain things well enough that folks drawn to such faith can drag their own fleshly minds into a different world. If we can shake loose long encrusted thinking that doesn’t match the truth, we make room for God to fill the void with His revelation. I have a limited ability to put into words my own thoughts, but it seems the Lord makes it work rather well.

My vision need not limit you. Pray for your own guidance and mission. That’s the foundation of the whole thing.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 15:1-8

Posted on August 31, 2019 by ehurst

We don’t know where the Upper Room was, only that it was already established as a place Jesus and His disciples could use. The events that night established the Upper Room as their new headquarters, which had previously been in Bethany, over the crest of the Mount of Olives. There weren’t many homes in Jerusalem large enough to offer a substantial, second floor dining room, but the few that did always had a separate exit with an exterior staircase. This kept the whole event private without disturbing anyone in the house below when they left.

It’s likely they had a decent stroll ahead of them regardless of the route they took. No houses were close to the Garden of Gethsemane; it stood across the Kiddron Valley from the northern court of the Temple plaza, almost line of sight through the Golden Gate.

As they went out into the night air, Jesus tried to establish for them a last few images of how they could face what was coming. First is this Parable of the Vine. Jesus characterized Himself as a grape vine and His Father as the vintner. Jesus drew on Isaiah 5 for the image, with Himself as the one and only fruitful vine — the True Vine growing in the vineyard of Israel.

A vine or branch that bears no fruit is likely withered and dead. It’s not good for much of anything; dead grapevine tends to be fibrous and soft, easily broken. It’s not even good firewood because it tends to smolder instead of burn, so it’s tossed into a fire already burning. But if any branch bears fruit, it still gets cropped or pruned back so that it invests more resources in bearing fruit instead of simply growing longer. Jesus compares that process with His teachings, trying to displace the silly myths His disciples had been taught by the rabbinical traditions. He said they were already pruned by His teachings.

But He makes it more personal: “center your life on me.” Not just the words, or even the meaning of the words, but they were to emulate Jesus as a Person. Branches cannot cut themselves off from the vine and still live; they have no source of life without the main stem of the vine. Don’t abstract Jesus into a body of mere teaching, but keep alive the vivid encounter of His Person. Otherwise, they would wither and die, and end up in the fire.

Then John uses a different term translated into English as “word” — rhema. The previous term was logos, which in this context means teaching. But this rhema was more like a live performance, something memorable because you were there in person. It’s what the heart does best in terms of knowing, because what the heart knows is living and active, holding memories as personas with distinct character and personality.

By evoking a fresh encounter of the Person of Jesus, they could stand before the Throne in Heaven and make requests that would be heard. The requests would take on a life of their own. And this is what glorifies the Father, that the whole thing comes to life. It’s the interactions of persons, holding a conversation and working together to increase the reputation of the Father. Our identity will be as His servants, producing the fruit of His glory.

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