Teachings of Jesus — John 17:1-10

Posted on October 5, 2019 by ehurst

(I very nearly could not get this posted. Pray for us.)

It wouldn’t matter much where the Upper Room was, nor which route they took toward Gethsemane; they almost had to pass near the Temple, if not through its grounds. Thus, Jesus addressed His Father ceremonially in or near the most prominent place of prayer in the nation. Jesus had just told them that they would desert Him and be scattered. Now He prays for them.

He turned His eyes to the sky. “We’re almost to there, Father.” He asks the Father to promote His heir, so that His heir can in turn promote the Father’s reputation. He wants to make His Father proud. But Jesus here focuses on a certain means to that glorification: He had been granted full authority over humanity, and would now proceed to elevate them from their fallen condition to their eternal heritage.

The meaning of eternal life is receiving the full revelation of God in their hearts, becoming intimate family friends of both the Father and the Son. The earthly part of His mission was finished; the Father’s reputation had been cleared up and manifested so it was unmistakable. Thus, now it was time for the Son to return to the glorified existence He had before coming to earth.

Jesus had fully demonstrated the divine character of God to these disciples of His. These men were the first fruits of the Son’s inheritance, a gift from the Father to open the gate to a much larger inheritance. They were the Father’s first, and He gave them to His Son. They had carefully kept His Word as their greatest treasure.

Just moments before they had declared that they had no doubt about Jesus being the Son of God, and that what He taught was from His Father’s mouth. The Word spoke to their hearts and there was no denying that Jesus spoke authoritatively for His Father.

So Jesus was praying for them in this difficult time ahead of them. He didn’t seek any special mercy for the rest of the world. Rather, He prayed only for those who were truly committed to Him. Again, they were His inheritance from the Father.

Jesus noted that everyone who embraced His teaching and committed to Him as Lord were already children of the Father. And now the Son would inherit the fullness of His Father’s estate. Their presence on the earth was the glory of Jesus.

This is not because they were perfect, but because of how they handled their imperfection, their sinful nature. This is what made them a symbol of His glory. It’s a matter of how they lay hold of the divine heritage.

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Admin: Network Trouble

Posted on October 5, 2019 by ehurst

For reasons I cannot discern, I’m having a lot of trouble connecting to this server from my home computer. I’ve tested everything I can on my end, even using a VPN that allowed me to connect from other places in the world. Somewhere between me and this server is a disruption that causes this blog to become unresponsive, frequently and sometimes for hours at a time. It gets worse if I try to upload pictures, in particular. Right now it seems to work okay for short postings. I may have to temporarily use another service. Just be aware, so that if I have to start posting somewhere else, you aren’t caught off guard.

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The Heart Must Lead

Posted on October 3, 2019 by ehurst

I’m going to oversimplify so that we can see the big picture.

Humans were intended to be family for God. Granted, that was in the context of His much larger family, which included a lot of other kinds of beings we cannot comprehend, but mankind was meant to be family on some level.

The Fall represents rejecting family privileges by virtue of rejecting family obedience. This is why we say that Creation itself is feudal; God is the Head of Household and His household cannot operate without obedience.

At this point, we have to remind ourselves that “obedience” in the Western mind is a huge lie. All the pagan roots feeding into our imagery of obedience have obscured the original concept: Loyalty is not a duty and discipline. It arises first from love; otherwise, it has no power to bring obedience. It is the natural response of children to a loving Father, and it builds a trust and commitment that cannot be put into words.

So the way back from the Fall isn’t rule-bound; it’s all about that loving fellowship with the Father. This is so fundamental to how things work that the ancients seldom bothered to mention it directly. There was no other way to make sense of reality than to understand that feudal loyalty as love. And it’s now hard to put into words just how radically different this was from the mental track Western minds follow. For us, actual love is optional, whereas for the ANE, it was the essence.

This is why Westerners balk at the term “Biblical Law” as the wider image of God’s compassion and call to His wayward children. The framework of such Law is not the thing itself, but the rather obvious earmarks of what love looks like when it is returned to the Father. Who is going to confine to mere words the power of loving surrender, which is what “faith” means?

Love is not merely the flaming passion we notice in our shallow self-perspective. Love is a fundamental commitment to another’s welfare, which brings an ebb and flow of passion, but is not confined to the feelings themselves. Genuine love teaches us to widen our compassion to the community as a whole, and it is those within covenant family obedience who both generate and absorb that sacrificial love sourced in God. It restores all things to proper order.

So that Flaming Sword at the gate of Eden is not about “Law” as the Western mind envisions such a thing; that Sword is the commitment to God against our own fallen flesh. The flesh is our enemy within, a bottomless pit of appetite that consumes everything within reach. Sacrificial love is how we restore the broken Covenant of Creation. It is how we bring ourselves back into that loving fellowship and communion for which we were designed. Even at our worst, the Father desperately longs for us to return to His embrace.

Our fallen flesh is the essence of this world. This business of rejecting the world is the essential nature of redemption. We must shed the fleshly nature as much as possible. The whole fabric of this world is woven from a rejection of God’s loving and fatherly restrictions that protect His children. This world is you and I languishing outside of Eden. Our arrogant fleshly minds can think of a million ways we ought to be restored to Eden without the Flaming Sword, but flesh cannot by itself bow the knee to God and accept His fatherhood over us. It must be compelled by some higher faculty within the soul.

The heart must lead, or there can be no restoration.

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Photography: Scissortail Park

Posted on October 1, 2019 by ehurst

Today I visited the new Scissortail Park in downtown OKC. Keep in mind that I am arranging these photos in reverse order because it will make more sense to you viewing them. Thus, your ride-along with me starts on the south side of the Scissortail sculpture that has stood over Interstate 40 near Downtown OKC for some years now. It’s supposed to remind you of our state bird, the Scissortail.

As we cross the bridge over the highway, you’ll see places where people have attached padlocks for some whimsical reason, something started by some unknown individual sometime after the bridge and sculpture were built. In this batch, there is also a very ornate cross.

We enter the park from the south side, so you are looking north across the new park. Robinson Avenue is to the right, and farther north along that street several new buildings are under construction. The camera is turned just a tad west to see the pond, and maybe you can make out the grassy hump in the middle of the park.

I couldn’t resist pulling together this panorama shot, standing on a bench near the SE corner of the park. To our left is a plaza with some oddly designed lights standing atop curved poles of varying random sizes. We sweep our gaze across the Downtown OKC skyline to the new construction proceeding, with workmen perched in cherry pickers way too high in the air. The park itself isn’t actually finished, but the city sponsored a concert here (Kings of Leon) a couple of nights ago to celebrate the grand opening.

We take the promenade across the pond and I turn to face back at the new building construction again, so you can see it’s three buildings going up all at once. We have a new convention center, two buildings on the right, and an Omni Hotel to the left. All of this is part of the 4th iteration of our MAPS development plan. That bikeway around Draper Lake was part of MAPS 3.

Heading farther across the bridge, we come around and up that grassy hump in the center of the park. We turn to look back whence we came, from the south. It’s a substantial rise, but it also shows us the old Santa Fe Railroad Station. It was turned into some kind of museum a long time ago, and is now the HQ of our city transportation and parking authority.

Turn around and face back NNE and we see down the same hill a nice grassy slope for sitting, with a wide stretch of flat grassy space, and beyond that the stage for public acts, such as the Kings of Leon concert the other night.

Coming down the hill and along behind that stage, we can stand on the NE corner of the park and look westward along the new (and still unfinished) OKC Boulevard. All along the outer edges of the park are these odd stainless steel pillars. You can also see the stage from the backside with some construction equipment. I’ll come back sometime in the next six months to see what gets vandalized. We have some really thuggish punks in our state’s capital. I didn’t show their handiwork on the Scissortail Bridge, but the benches have been partially disassembled and trash stuffed into the internal cavity. I figure that grassy hill will be a popular target right away.

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Still Your Elder

Posted on September 30, 2019 by ehurst

So Radix Fidem is an idea, and we hope it generates a movement that changes the way a lot of people view Christian faith. But I remain a virtual elder and pastor, and that ministry keeps the title of “Kiln of the Soul.” I simply wanted to make sure you understand the distinctions here. The focus is protecting Radix Fidem from turning into something it was never meant to be.

I’m still quite serious about the idea of helping folks get ready for a time of tribulation that is so very near to us here in America. Given that the US government has striven so hard to be an imperial world power, there is no doubt that a crisis in the US will affect just about the whole world. If nothing else, the collapse of the US economic system of global control will leave everyone scrambling for an alternative means of exchange.

I honestly believe that crisis has begun.

So today I’m simply reaffirming that, for those of you who currently have no church affiliation, I am still your pastor and elder. You can still call on me for all the things you would any other pastor. And even if you don’t need me, I need you as friends and supporters. I really do need people praying for me, because even if I’m not your pastor, I am for some other folks.

You decide. Nobody is going to put your name on a roll, so if you don’t in some way try to get my attention through this blog, if nothing else, then I may not remember to keep your name on my daily prayer list. Make your presence known. I avoid keeping a list simply to protect you, should anything happen to me.

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Reminder: Bear Fruit

Posted on September 29, 2019 by ehurst

Radix Fidem isn’t an organization. It’s an idea, a collection of ideas. It’s not a religion but an approach to religion as an expression of faith. It assumes you should be growing your own religion.

But of course, what we have is very different from what’s around us. What we have is beautiful beyond words, and we really would like to see other folks get in on this. There’s no way a bigger crowd can corrupt what we have, because there’s nothing to target for corruption. There’s no price to get in the door; there’s nothing to join. But there is a fellowship of commitment, and that either lives in you or it doesn’t.

There’s no doubt that I would love to build a congregation around my religious ideas. I’d like to see a small covenant clan of people who find my style comfortable. The Lord may do that some day; I believe it’s quite likely. It would be too easy if I tried to build it around me as some kind of guru. People are looking for that, but that’s the wrong path. I’m not there to welcome people into an extension of my own imagination. My job is to point out the road signs God posted to invite people to explore the vast country He laid out for His children.

What I’m asking is that you spread this in your own way. Whether you attend a church, or lots of churches, or none at all — do it the way God calls you to do it. I’m not here to direct your choices, but to show you the options you might not have realized on your own were available. And I’m asking you to share that in turn with others, so they can see the options hidden from them.

Some of you will bounce off Radix Fidem and go off in a totally new direction. God bless you! The one thing I want most in this world — my mission and calling — is setting folks free from constraints that didn’t come from God. I have a pretty fair idea what I have to do to please Him; you need to gain that same sense of purpose for yourself. I’ll share with you what I’m doing so you can get some clues on what you could be doing. I suppose you could do worse than copying me, but don’t get stuck there. It’s only meant as a way station.

The only thing we have in common is we grow from the same roots. It’s different soils and climates, and what grows out of that should reflect the context. But it’s one global root of faith (commitment) to the same God and Creator of all things. That’s what Radix Fidem (“root of faith”) means. And it assumes you’ll bear fruit for the glory of the Lord.

Grow and bear fruit.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 16:16-33

Posted on September 28, 2019 by ehurst

Once again, Jesus makes a very firm assertion about the Spirit Realm. The whole point here is to heighten their adherence to an otherworldly focus. As long as their minds and motives are locked in this prison existence, they cannot enjoy all the blessings God grants to His children.

Jesus makes an enigmatic statement about how they will soon not see Him, and then again soon after that, they will see Him once more. The truth of things often fits poorly in human language. This is a parable. He would be taken from their fleshly eyes, but would then reappear in the form of the Holy Spirit in each of their hearts.

But because they were still stuck in their worldly view of things, the words puzzled them. Surely during this night walk through the city, you can imagine them hissing back and forth amongst themselves, trying not to interrupt His discourse. To answer their questions, He offers yet another parable. This time it’s the image of a mother giving birth. Birth pangs are indescribably painful, but so is the joy after the child is delivered. Just so, they will sorrow as the birth of a new kingdom convulses their world, but then comes that new life and the joy will crowd out the memories of this next few days of chaos and terror.

This will be an eternal joy, because it would usher their awareness into a higher realm. They would then have Jesus forever, meaning it would no longer rest on the flesh, a joy that suffers no vulnerabilities.

When that day comes, they are to cease speaking to Him as their High Priest before the Father. Instead, they will be welcome to face the Father themselves as children, brothers of Jesus. They will ask in Jesus’ name — meaning, they would ask under His authority. In their minds, it would naturally assume they would ask for things consistent with Jesus’ mission. Jesus emphasized this business of asking in His name, but not praying to Him.

And when that time of spiritual union comes, He will no longer need to use parables. With the divine Presence in their hearts, the Father can be seen as directly as anything their souls can possibly perceive. With the awakening of heart-led awareness, they will know in ways they cannot now imagine. That is part and parcel with no longer calling on Jesus as the go-between. The Father loves them right along with loving His own Son.

That’s because they will have embraced Jesus as their Lord, as their covenant feudal Head of Household. Once they really, finally understood that He was the literal Son of God, they could fully embrace the implication that this made them children of Heaven. The Father dispatched Jesus from Heaven, and to Heaven Jesus must return to carry out His mission.

So now the disciples got that part. They could easily assert by faith that Jesus was not like any other man. No doubts now.

Did they really, finally get that? Good, because they would need to hang onto that when human forces scattered them. Yes, their fleshly natures would reassert themselves for a little while, and they would all flee Jesus in this time of terror. But He would never be alone, as He had the unspeakable certainty who He was and how His Father would never desert Him.

So it was important to get them at least started down that path, even if the gate through which they passed was tribulation they could not image. He wanted them to at least secure that anchor point in their awareness. He wanted to ensure they were told clearly they had reason for hope and faith: He was already Master of this world, Satan’s superior.

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Pictures and Prattle

Posted on September 27, 2019 by ehurst

These images came from recent rides around Draper Lake. This first image is some peculiar “art installation” along the bikeway at SE 119th Street. It didn’t show up well in previous attempts to shoot it because the sun was always behind it. On an overcast day it shows up well. The other two shots are simply more early fall flowers prospering in the not-so-hot temps and sufficient rain.

Outsiders are not going to understand this. I’ve been running the skinny hybrid tires recently until I got some inspiration about how to resolve the wheel alignment on the rear axle. Up to today, that was okay. I was waiting until the next financial windfall in a month or two to buy some better knobbies, but the Lord told me today to put on what I had.

I was all primed for a long ride across town on the Grand and River Trails, but after just a couple of miles, I felt a strong urge in my heart to stop and pray. So I rode out to the vacant soccer fields at Ray Trent Park and sat on the old bleachers. It was beautifully isolated and a stiff breeze was blowing. I sat for quite a long time.

My conscious aim was to ensure that what I felt and saw were not my flesh getting in the way of something important. There is no fleshly reason to do all that work on the bike, aside from the fact I simply like the fat knobby tires better. But the sense of needing to change them was persistent when I asked myself some questions that should have caused me to waver if it was just flesh.

Side note: The idea is to check and see if your sentiments arise to claim something. The flesh has a tendency to sway back and forth, depending on how you paint the mental context. Convictions pay little attention to the context except to tell you how to stay consistent.

So I turned back to home. When I got there, I gave the bike a bath. The last part of that was cleaning the chain very thoroughly. Then I rolled it back inside and tore into it. First I changed out the tires. I have some really nice knobbies that fit okay on the front, but are too wide for the rear forks. I put that on, and checked to make sure — yep, too wide for the rear when fully inflated.

I mounted my best used knobby on the back. Then I worked for a while with retooling and shimming the axle slots in the frame (called “drop-outs”) so the wheel lined up better and the tire wouldn’t keep rubbing the frame when it flexed just a little. It was tricky getting the shims to stay in place, but I managed it. The last thing I did was lube the now dry chain and do a test ride. I made some adjustments here and there and I think it will work fine.

But the whole time, I kept having this sense that I needed those knobbies on there for some purpose I cannot yet see. It was something my heart recognized in the foggy future somewhere out there, but my flesh was unable to make it out. If this unseen thing doesn’t come right away, it’s not a bad idea to have at least a couple of long rides with the current set up to make sure everything is fine tuned.

But of course, in our hearts, sometimes very small things point to very big events God will bring into our lives. I sense that some kind SHTF event will come my way very soon.

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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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