Strategy for Radix Fidem

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

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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The Prophetic Viewpoint

Take up the prophetic viewpoint. As long as there is no covenant nation in this world, all human politics is rather like God herding cattle, a herd with no clue what His goals are. God will have what He wants, but He will not reveal it to the cattle. The only way to have any hope of prophetic revelation on such things is to remove yourself from the viewpoint of the cattle.

You have to start caring about the things God has revealed in His Word, not about all the things cattle care about. When you no longer care much who rules in this world, you will understand better why this or that person rules. We must learn to care Who rules over this world. God’s appointed cowboy is Satan, but God still rules.

God’s Word makes it clear that His plans for the cattle have certain hard limits. Western mythology gives Satan a free hand, but the Bible says otherwise. There will be no Tower of Babel, but Satan is permitted to drive people to build a new one every now and then. The task for discernment is learning to recognize blueprints for the Tower of Babel. We can discern who is planning another one.

The issue to watch in the US right now is not who will win the next election. The issue is how God is going to crush the next iteration of Babel. I said it before: Trump may not win in 2020, but that isn’t even important. From our perspective here on earth as servants of the Kingdom of Heaven, it appears God is waiting to see how certain things shake out before He chooses who will win the next election. The broader result will be the same, but the business of who wins the Oval Office is a variable.

Learn not to care; learn not to invest your energies in the outcome of the next election. It will surely signal what brand of suffering and sorrow we face, but we will suffer either way. The real issue is destroying the unity behind plans to build Babel. We can’t guess how far the construction will proceed before God acts. Meanwhile, whomever puts his hand to the task of opposing Babylon will be favored by God, at least in terms of political fortunes.

If God cannot find someone willing to oppose Babylon, He will have to raise up an insider who is gloriously incompetent to make Babylon happen. Or perhaps it will be some peculiar miracle; refer to the Tower of Babel narrative on that (Genesis 11:1-9). Either way, there will be no new Tower, only a human obsession to build one.

The other thing that is prophetically certain is the coming economic collapse. There’s a million different ways to make that happen, and we are sure to see quite a few different influences at work simultaneously. For example, there must be a significant amount of so-called natural disasters. But the underlying more failure is having chosen a host of things that cannot work long term, versus obeying Biblical Law about how we should do things. God is demonstrating via economic collapse how the path taken is evil. Think about how the Ten Plagues on Egypt were an economic disaster.

Meanwhile, we are watching Israel harvest the whirlwind for continued defiance of the Covenant. This is something that bears watching with a prophetic eye. We are approaching the point when the latest attempt to wave a magic wand and restore a mythical Davidic kingdom is going to fail spectacularly. There’s not a thing we can do to save the victims of Israel’s evil plans, but we can pray for mercy on the people. Still, the governments Israel wants to destroy have been raised up for a purpose, and none of them are innocent.

And the US is hardly innocent, either. It’s not a bad time to start learning either Russian or Chinese, if you feel inclined. However, English today is rather like Greek was in the Roman Empire: It’s already established everywhere and easier to use as it is. When the American empire collapses, whoever rises afterward won’t be able to bury English no matter how hard they try. But it won’t hurt to learn real English instead of the politically correct crap we see in the media today.

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Covenant Hedge Protection

A lot of folks are perplexed about Luke 13:1-5. The teachings I’ve seen attached to this passage are all over the map.

Let’s step back a moment. What is the one thing Jesus preached from the start? “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” That was the message of His forerunner and cousin, John the Baptist, as well. And that term “Kingdom of Heaven” meant the Messianic Kingdom. For most, that meant a literal restoration of the Davidic dynasty ruling in the region Rome called “Palestine.”

It could have been that, had the people obeyed the call to repent. You see, the call to repent was a call to return to the Covenant of Moses. The Jewish leadership, both Pharisees and Sadducees, had moved away from the ancient Hebrew mystical viewpoint of Moses in their understanding of the Law. The Pharisees in particular had come to dominate the teaching among common folks with a legalism that came from rejecting all the trappings of decadent Hellenism, but embracing the Aristotelian logic as the foundation for intellectual understanding. This was a radical departure from the ancient Hebrew outlook.

In this case, the call to repent included going back to that ancient Hebrew mystical outlook. It meant seeing the Covenant not as “law” but as the personal wishes of their heavenly Father. In the Pharisaical mind, their corpus of legalistic reasoning was God. It was a potent mix of materialism and resulted in the false notion that they had God over a barrel because He was bound by their semantic wrangling over the words of the Pentateuch. They even imagined that God admired their smart aleck maneuvering. This was the very thing from which Jesus demanded they repent.

Thus, in the cases of the Galileans who were slaughtered around the Altar in the Temple, Jesus was asking rhetorically if the folks who reported this incident imagined themselves exempt from such horror. As a Galilean Himself, Jesus asked if they imagined that this bunch whom the Roman soldiers killed were somehow bad Galileans and God allowed them to die for their sins. The real answer was obvious in the context of Jesus’ teaching: They died because they weren’t protected by the Covenant.

We don’t know what may have set these Galilean victims apart from any other Jewish Galilean, but Jesus was saying that Galileans in general were not under the covering of the Covenant. The whole nation of Israel had strayed so far off course that God had removed their covering, their hedge of protection against the violence of foreigners. In God’s eyes, they had no special protection because they weren’t standing in His favor. And the Covenant of Moses was the only way to gain that favor.

And Jesus cites a further example. There was a bunch of men working on a tower of some sort near the Pool of Siloam. The stonework collapsed and crushed 18 of them to death. Did they die for some hidden sins? No, they died because they had no covenant protection. Nothing protected them from random accidents.

Thus, all the promises of shalom were inapplicable to their lives because the Jewish leadership had seduced the nation and led them away from the Covenant. Not in the words of the Covenant, but they had departed the meaning behind the words. They did not stand in God’s shadow. So political violence or random accidents could fall on Jews just as they did on any random Gentile out there with no knowledge of the Covenant. Having the Covenant did the Jews no good since they weren’t obeying it.

They needed to repent from their hearts and return to the God of the Covenant. That Covenant was their identity as the People of Jehovah. It wasn’t a matter of DNA or mere behavior, but a matter of personal family loyalty. Otherwise, they would continue without the Covenant protections, and eventually it would all be handed over to other peoples who would form a new Covenant Nation under the Messiah. This is a mystical kingdom of hearts, instead of a political entity.

Everything Jesus taught was under the Covenant of Moses. That Covenant was closed, and the mission and privileges of Israel passed to the Messianic Covenant. Everything in the New Testament stands under the Covenant of Christ. We must be faithful in order to harvest the blessings that the Jews imagined they should have had. While this covering may not exempt us from the consequences of God’s inscrutable plans for humanity, it does give us whatever protections are possible from His divine favor.

It’s far better than the random stuff that hits everyone else.

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Let Me Un-explain It

Mainstream Western church leaders do teach there is a difference between Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology. For the most part, the latter is actually more of biblical doctrine in their minds. That is, they see it as revealed assertions around which they must structure their rational system. The discussion goes off track for them when you start talking about revelation as not doctrine, but the revelation of a Person. Sure, they can accept the words, but not the implications.

This is the biggest problem we deal with when comparing between the various teachings of churches against the teachings of the Bible. The Bible casts itself as the covenant documents of an eastern potentate. In the ancient societies of the Bible, everything was a matter of the personal connection you had with God. You can’t reason your way to faith, because faith isn’t what’s in your head, but in your heart. The heart-mind is all about persons and personal relationships, not mere sentiment. This isn’t fanatical loyalty to a sports team or military unit; it’s loyalty to your own Father.

I’ve noted before that the biblical teaching of predestination is one thing, but it does not justify the Doctrine of Election. There’s nothing wrong with believing in Election if that’s how you organize your thinking, and it informs how you act, but you must keep in mind that this is your own response to faith. It’s not a universal doctrine by which we judge others and their teachings. The Doctrine of Election is a rational structure built around the biblical revelation of predestination. And the biblical use of the term is quite different from how it’s used in Systematic Theology.

A related mainstream teaching is Federal Headship. Again, it’s just an attempt at rational explanation of something in the Bible. And what’s in the Bible is a matter of personal connection, not objective rational structure. The doctrine of Federal Headship is basically the idea that some ancestor can make a moral choice that is binding on you. Thus, Adam’s fall in the Garden of Eden affects all of his progeny — in essence, the whole human race — by some cosmic law that God enforces. This teaching depersonalizes our connection to Adam and to God. Worse, it misses the point.

The story of the Fall was never meant to portray a baldly literal historical event, but was offered as an indicator of our fallen nature, and tells us something about how Satan works. The story is cast in the context of God as an eastern potentate, and Adam and Eve part of His household retinue. They were gardeners, managing God’s private park according to His instructions. He came to visit them in the park every day, and they communed over how God wanted things to go in His private garden. But though they possessed something of God’s nature, they lacked the fortitude to carry out His wishes on one critical issue: They could be manipulated to trust their own capabilities instead of trusting revelation (communion) from God. In essence, they sought to become their own gods.

It’s not that Adam made a choice to bind us all under the Fall, but that Adam acted according to the same weakness that we all have. Granted, the language in Romans 5:12ff in most English translations makes it sound like a legal inheritance, but the Greek scholars translating the New Testament into English are dominated by a Western viewpoint. The issue is not a matter of legal precedent because God doesn’t work like that. We inherit a sinful nature by our DNA.

There’s no place for questions of God’s fairness in saddling every child of Adam with the same legal judgment as against Adam. This is what we are, and you have no business questioning how God made you. We are part divine and part fallen; made to commune with God and naturally unable to do so consistently. God didn’t put on us a sentence of death; that’s ours by nature. It’s what we choose by virtue of our inherent tendency to seek our own way in God’s Creation. The solution is to surrender that throne and restore the communion with God. He calls to us and puts it all within reach.

And Jesus kept wording things in terms of embracing Him, not just His teaching. This is all about a personal encounter, getting to know a Someone, not a something. It’s not a question of plumbing the depths of reason about the problem and all its parameters. It is a question of restoring a wayward child of God, of restoring the natural affection between the two. And it’s not humanity, but you and I individually coming back into proper filial loyalty to (faith in) God.

Even my effort to explain this is broken. What I’m really trying to do is un-explain, to break down the false explanation we’ve all be given by virtue of our birth in an English-speaking culture. Then I’m hoping to indicate to your mind something your heart will recognize already.

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Odds and Ends 08

This past Sunday I took some of my bike apart. I was hoping to get the freehub off the rear wheel and re-lubricate it. I couldn’t figure it out, since it is not what all the tutorials show should be there. There is no 10mm hollow bolt holding it on, but something else I couldn’t see down in the center of the hub. So I did the best I could with drizzling some gear lube in there and put it back together.

Every time you take that stuff apart, it never goes back together quite the same. I noticed that the axle is just a bit short, so there’s no room to shim it and keep the knobby tire from rubbing the frame. So I put the hybrid tires back on because they are narrower and fit better. I need to get to the bike shop in downtown OKC with the bike so they can get me a longer axle of the same type. But a lot of businesses downtown were closed due to power outages this morning, so I had to put that off.

Massive heavy storms hit last night, bringing winds around 80-90 MPH out of the NNW. Some of the sycamore trees across the street lost big limbs. Lots of areas were without power, but the Lord granted my prayer to keep ours working. Still, I couldn’t ride where I was planning to go today, so I grabbed my cutting tools and started working on the downed limbs. I figured it would make things easier for our maintenance team, and maybe I could clear the sidewalks for my neighbors.

I started at dawn — around 7AM local time. When I used to do that kind of work for pay, it was my habit to start with the small stuff so that it was easier to see the big stuff. I clipped off all the smaller limbs and piled them up. Then I cut some of the bigger stuff with my tree saw, and saved the really big stuff for my chain saw. I did this on a couple of different big limbs. When maintenance showed up, they were very pleased at my work, because it meant one more emergency they didn’t have to chase. They could get on with current work orders. The chief set me up with power for my electric chainsaw, but it refused to work. It was brand new when we moved here, and I haven’t even used it for a single hour yet, but it refuses to run.

Okay, so I dragged out my big ax and got to work on the rest. It’s all cut up and I can feel every bit of it, but it was a great workout. Fortunately, sycamore is a very soft wood to cut. Unfortunately, sycamore is a very soft wood that breaks when the wind blows like that. I could hear lots of gas-powered chainsaws working around the neighborhood, cutting all kinds of broke trees, so I know the city will send out trucks to get all this crap. Ours is cut up and ready.

They use something like a long dump truck, but with a small crane mounted on the frame between the bed and cab of the truck. I cut it to easily fit in the claw that rig has on the end of the arm. I kept thinking I might need to do this some day, and retained a selection of tree and brush cutting tools when we moved. My son kept most of them, but I have just a few: limb loppers, tree saw, machete, camp ax and long splitter ax. That last one is a special combo tool; it’s not exactly a heavy splitter, but a very heavy chopping ax with a thicker head. I use it because I’m a heavy hitter and it suits the way I chop, but it takes more effort. Despite cooler temperatures, I was drenched in sweat when I got through.

From a high of 260 pounds last winter, I’m down to about 235. Taking my time with losing weight avoids having too much skin sagging in places. The body gets a chance to adjust and keep things tight. I know that it’s natural to hit plateaus, too. The trick is to keep the metabolism high and let the stomach shrink; feed the body you want to have. It’s not classic calorie counting, because that starts from the false assumption that every body is the same. Mine is not just unique, but peculiar. So I’m trying to make permanent changes in my habits by listening to my body with my heart.

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Just a Reminder about Virtual Community

Recent chatter from several folks provoked a reminder: Virtual faith communities cannot provide the face-to-face fellowship we are all commanded to build. Radix Fidem is not a religion, but a meta-religion. It’s an approach to forming your own religion. We seek only to establish a better understanding of what religion is supposed to do. If your meat-space context of life does not permit building that fellowship outside of mainstream churches, then seek the Lord about where you can infiltrate and find you some real fellowship.

Some of you are able to hold out for something better, but Radix Fidem doesn’t come with rules to guide whether you should belong to a regular church somewhere. That’s a matter of your individual mission and calling. I once had hopes for building something more substantial, but it seems now obvious that cannot happen on any significant scale.

The reason is simple: In the current period of tribulation and turmoil, it is exceptionally difficult to build something so completely different from the existing establishment. Not impossible, but it is difficult enough that it’s hardly an expectation we could hold over each other. I’m going that route because that’s my calling. Don’t feel obliged to copy my efforts. Let’s take the long view and give God time to shake loose the bonds of religious organization that won’t survive the coming changes. We can talk more about how to build organizations later.

Right now, it’s better for at least some of you to infiltrate existing organizations, waiting until the time the Lord calls for more direct action. We should be infiltrating everything. And if you can get along for now without fellowship, that’s fine, too. You are the one who knows what God wants you to do.

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The Wrong Place

The Kingdom of Heaven is a kingdom in hearts, not in the flesh. It is not rooted in this world and refers to a higher reality with entirely different rules. The whole issue is pulling away from this world in the first place. Meanwhile, the root nature of the Fall is substituting the capabilities of human flesh for divine revelation in deciding how things work in the first place. The flesh cannot possibly see the whole story without help from above.

So the big mistake church folks make is dragging worldly stuff into the business of the Kingdom. God’s Word reveals what it takes, and somehow Christians flatly ignore what it says about what really matters.

In the first place, the Kingdom proceeds with revealing the glory of God without reference to the worldly system. The only time we see God paying attention to the way of the world is to demonstrate it’s failures, and to provide a counter. This is what we manifest, so we need to make a pointed rejection of those same things.

A primary element in that demonstration of Heaven’s way is to reject the need to accomplish things, as if our actions require passing through an evaluation by the world. The only thing we need to accomplish is internal change. We could accomplish nothing at all and still bring the Lord glory. His glory is in the process, not the product.

So church folks keep trying to make church more like the world instead of like Heaven. There is no valid need for the kind of uniformity we see in most organized religion. Uniformity typically seems important in doing all kinds of stuff that isn’t important in itself. There is no need for the scale of most organization, either. Size seems important only when you must get done things the world will notice. But the Kingdom of Heaven proceeds without reference to what the world is likely to notice.

There are no people we need to impress. God alone is the one we need to please, and it doesn’t help that so many church folks define God in terms He would reject. The measure of what makes the most sense on our human level has nothing to do with what pleases God. When someone says with manufactured sagacity that they don’t believe God will be pleased with something He told me I must do, all I can say is, “We aren’t talking about the same God, obviously.”

Without the room to pursue your individual calling from God. you are in the wrong place.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 14:25-31

Jesus continues talking about returning to His Father’s Heavenly court to take up His co-regency. He explains how it will work for them.

Jesus speaks to their hearts. The heart is capable of storing things away in memory for when the intellect is ready to receive it. The intellect is the part of us that organizes and implements the divine wisdom of the heart. The heart is where the Holy Spirit speaks directly. In this case, the words of Jesus while He is still alive are the same message that the Holy Spirit will speak to them again later. It’s the same Person, but He will come in a different form. He will remind them of the things Jesus said, and will breathe life into that teaching, so that everything comes back to them with a new meaning.

Then He proclaims that what He has deposited in their hearts is the very power of shalom. It’s nothing like the thing our world imagines “peace” is, but something completely different. It teaches us to not take this world and this life so seriously. Instead, we take the message of Christ seriously and bring it to life in our world. If that means dying, or anything short of that, the message is by far more valuable. Don’t be afraid of what happens to you when you are faithful. More to the point, He wants them to stop being so tormented over His impending departure.

He tells them that those who really are committed to Him will rejoice at His departure. It is by far the very best thing that could happen. By returning to Heaven, Jesus returns His New Covenant Kingdom to the Father. The Father then becomes directly involved, so that there can be no possible higher authority promoting this thing.

Jesus makes it a point that He tells them bluntly so that their faith will have a handle, a reference point that their minds cannot dispute. He noted that He was running out of time and wanted to pass on a few last notes for them, something that will provide a transition to their faith. The reason time is short is that the prince of this world is making his move. While He has no actual authority over Jesus, but is rather under Jesus’ authority, Jesus will obey His Father’s command to submit to death. This will be His final proof that He loves His Father as a faithful son, and will set the example of obedience for all who enter into His Kingdom.

It was time to leave the Upper Room and go meet the arrest party.

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In Support of USS Liberty Survivors

This is no obsession. I have studied the attack on the USS Liberty in the past. I’ve also experienced the hateful force of military bureaucracy covering up crimes while serving as a Military Policeman. I’ll grant you that serving in the US military can place you in a very tragic moral situation, but the real problem with that is how the US government hides it from the common folks. It’s the hiding that makes Satan so happy.

Let me recommend this one article as a sample. You don’t even need to read the whole thing to get the gist of it. There is no reason to doubt the account there. It’s a sample that should help you understand how pervasive that hiding can be. I’ve encountered some really decent folks in the American Legion, but I won’t ever join that organization because of their leadership. They have courted me several times. It is most certainly not a democratic institution, contrary to their propaganda.

It’s the same thing with churches these days: I’ll never join a church whose leadership supports Zionism. It’s not the sole reason for avoiding church membership; it’s just one of several major flaws in mainstream Christian churches. I fulfill the demands of the gospel by conducting worship in my home. In general I don’t bother to attack those churches any more than I harangue the American Legion. The modern State of Israel is a significant matter on this blog, but hardly an obsession. We stand in support of Biblical Law, and on that foundation we have standing to mention from time to time things we must oppose.

Whatever morally questionable things the USS Liberty Survivors might have been doing out there spying in the Mediterranean Sea, there’s not much room to discuss that until their justice is first restored. Their situation is so grossly and egregiously wrong that nobody much has standing to accuse them of wrong until we first put them back on equal footing with their oppressors.

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