Celebrate His Wrath

Posted on August 11, 2019 by ehurst

The Lord hasn’t allowed me to see anything like a timetable. Still, what I do see is that the US is on the verge of some kind of economic collapse. That will eventually provoke a social and political chaos we cannot imagine. This country will shatter and there will be significant bloodshed. Things will be tough on us. The saints of God will tribulate.

You should rejoice. That is, in the sense we know this is the hand of God, we should welcome it. There will be no hiding, though the Lord has promised He will protect His own to some degree. That protection rests on obeying the Covenant of Christ. The obedience that marks us as different from the world is what paints the Blood of the Lamb on our doorposts.

But let me remind you all that a primary marker of our difference is that we celebrate the wrath of God even in our own lives. We call out to Him in prayer for His wrath to fall on sin, and we beg Him to start with us first. We want to be first in line for the cleansing power of the Lord. His wrath is His mercy. This is His glory, and we celebrate.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 14:12-17

Posted on August 10, 2019 by ehurst

In the Ancient Near East, every great ruler operated on the basis of a covenant. It was typical for such a ruler to pass this covenant to his heir, with a period of co-regency for the sake of smooth transition. Often the heir would be sent off on some mission to prove he was fit to take the throne, and on his return would be the vestment ceremony. Once secure in his position, the heir could then modify the covenant under his father’s guidance. This is the context of Jesus’ words here.

The disciples still weren’t quite getting it. They no doubt recognized the scenario, but had been convinced they were involved in a different scenario. Jesus had flatly told them what was going on, but their minds had locked onto the false track and He was relying on the way things worked in the Spirit Realm to help them catch up later.

He had just referred to His miracles as sufficient basis for proceeding forward in faith. If they simply could not quite grasp the order of things involving the Son of God stepping into a spiritual kingdom, at least they could see that His miracles marked Him as a valid representative of the Covenant God, Jehovah. It was important to elevate the awareness of the Covenant in their minds, as it was the basis for everything He said and did. Once He took His place as divine co-regent, the New Covenant would again be the center of every consideration.

On that grounds, He promised that every miracle He had performed under the Old Covenant would be within their authority. And because He was returning from His mission to the vestment ceremony in Heaven, the New Covenant would give them even greater miraculous authority as the key figures in His new divine court. They were to be princes of the realm, serving in their missions scattered across the empire while He remained back at court on the throne. It would be everything the Father had done in the past, plus more new things He would be doing. The Son would use His Presence at the throne to ensure that this authority would be issued.

It sounds like carte blanche in our Western ears today, but that’s not what it meant in the context when Jesus promised to do anything asked in His name. That “in His name” part referred to His established pattern of behavior, His known agenda. If they asked anything consistent with His past actions, He would secure the authority for their request. It was critical that their request was consistent with what He had revealed.

Indeed, He made it a point that everything rested on His teaching. If they were so sure they really were committed to Him and His reign as Messiah, then it should be no problem for them to stay on track. There should be plenty of fire and desire for what Jesus had commanded them.

By demonstrating that commitment, they would give support to Jesus’ plan to send them the Holy Spirit. Instead of one human person — Jesus the man — who couldn’t be more than one place at a time, they would have His divine Presence in their own souls. Thus, He could be everywhere His people went all at once. The implication is that they could carry the living personal presence of their Master with them, and He would keep right on teaching and clarifying things for them, prodding them as needed.

It would mark them as truly different in this world. The rest of humanity would be unable to receive this divine Presence without also embracing Jesus as Lord the same way they had done. Without that, the world was unable to discern the Presence in the first place. Yes, these disciples could sense that Presence because it was just like Jesus being there in the flesh. In due time, the Person would be inside them, in union and communion with their own souls.

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His Glory Is Our Command

Posted on August 9, 2019 by ehurst

I want to support Jack’s post about marriage as a means to God’s glory.

You can be sure most of the world will reject his message. There is this totally bogus mythology about how godly men can sacrifice their divine heritage in order to redeem a woman who needs him. Her need is not even on the radar here; it’s all about God’s glory. That’s the reason we live, the reason for everything we do. It’s the breath of our souls. God’s glory demands that His children not just obey, but that they go on to harvest the full blessings of shalom. This is His glory.

It’s not a question of whether a man can afford to sacrifice something to redeem a woman through marriage. It’s a question of whether the man can redeem his own life back from Satan. This whole debate ignores the issue of penitence — of the man and, more to the point, of the women in our society who have lived in service to the demon god of secular feminism. Everyone dances around that issue. Feminism is from the Devil. Men cannot reap the full harvest of shalom shackled to her demons; they cannot fulfill the divine command to shine the glory of God.

So a woman with short cropped blue hair, a massive college debt and a very casual attitude about spreading her sexuality too thin is not a godly woman. If she repents and embraces the biblical standard of long hair in her natural color, working to pay off her debts and repenting of her fornications, it doesn’t matter how strong her actual performance is. With genuine penitence under the Covenant of Christ (AKA Biblical Law), she becomes eligible for some consideration, but not before. And she had damned sure better know that she is damaged goods and has to work awfully hard to overcome that huge deficit.

And the same goes for men who have wasted their lives in pursuit of hedonistic thrills. Godly women should avoid men who haven’t invested the time and effort restore an image of God’s glory in their lives. It’s not his success at these things, but the glory of God comes from striving with a burning desire that anyone can see.

God’s glory is not optional; it is commanded. We must do whatever it takes to harvest His glory and bring into our human existence. We are obliged to seize back the blessings of God — our shalom — from the enemy of our souls.

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Resting on the Lord Alone

Posted on August 8, 2019 by ehurst

The average America isn’t really much a thinker. They aren’t aware of their own legacy of intellectual pursuits. Classical education is mostly dead in the West. Among those who do tend to give some consideration to thinking logically, the vast majority of Americans tend to be linear and binary.

Binary logic is that things are either 0 or 1. This is the foundation of how most computers work, so this kind of approach is pervasive. Something can’t be both positive and negative; it has to be one or the other. And as for linear thinking, that’s a matter of refusing to consider parallel logic altogether. Again, this tends to follow the underlying logic of common computer devices. The idea of parallel processes coming up with different answers is just asking too much for most people.

Where this hurts the most is when people reflexively apply those limits to moral considerations. A thing is either good or evil; in their minds it cannot be some of both, or neither. There is some vague room for things being neutral, maybe, but you’ll rarely see that in common conversations about moral issues.

This is what happens when you saddle the intellect with the task of deciding what is morally good or evil, a task it was never supposed to handle. That’s why we are fallen creatures — we insist on evaluating good or evil with logic. It simply cannot handle the task.

I will tell you that the heart is capable of non-binary logic and parallel considerations, but there’s no way to prove that if your heart isn’t the focal point of your conscious awareness. The “logic” of the heart rests on revelation, not trying to reason things through. So the heart asks first what God has said, if it can be exposed to that. If not, it seeks its best estimation of what has been revealed in Creation. The heart can easily read reality or moral truth directly in the natural world. The hard part is convincing the intellect that the heart knows what it’s talking about.

This is part of our challenge in sharing the gospel message in America. Our audience is several layers removed from the natural design of human nature. Worse, we have a huge presence of church-folks who don’t appreciate what we are saying. They are beholden to a potent rationalist tradition.

I recall reading the works of Francis Schaeffer in college. These days you don’t hear his name much, but his teaching still influences the way church-folks think. He very forcefully pushed binary logic as the “Christian” view of reality. He was such a major figure in the previous century in his apologetics work, and most of the American churches absorbed it. I was strongly influenced until I realized that Jesus was an Eastern man, and the Bible is an Eastern book about an Eastern religion. I still wonder if Schaeffer had ever spent any time reading the philosophy of the Ancient Near East, of which the Hebrew Bible is a part. His take is radically different from what Jesus actually thought.

We affirm that things are not binary and not linear. That kind of thinking is what makes quantum computers possible, by the way. But we try to promote the idea that morality is shaped by divine revelation first, then it must be applied to the context. That context includes the individual calling and mission from God. We aren’t dependent on what seems to work, but whether it brings peace with our Maker in that moment.

Our departure from that still very influential classical Western standard puts us way out on the fringes. It’s a miracle anyone can find us, much less embrace our message. Don’t despair, because this is how God keeps us strong. We see only the folks He sends, people who seem to recognize that this whole thing rests entirely on Him alone.

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The Parable of Parables

Posted on August 7, 2019 by ehurst

The Parable of the Sower (Luke 8:4-18) can also be called the Parable on Parables.

A parable is quintessential Hebrew communication. We can talk about the mundane facts of our human existence all day long, and Hebrew can do that. But the Hebrew language was inherently focused on parable, the kind of communication that registers in your heart, but it can prepare the intellect to receive the divine truth and prepare to act on it. The Bible refers to the heart as the repository of moral truth; it’s your convictions, the moral character written in your soul by the finger of God.

To understand the Parable on Parables requires keeping it with the parables that immediately follow it.

Has it every occurred to you that one implication of that parable is that you need to discern the souls you are dealing with in your daily life. How do you know if someone is not ready for the Gospel? It doesn’t matter what they say to you. What matters is the result God shows you in their souls. Some are hardened by the high traffic in their lives, their hearts closed to the truth because they simply don’t allow their convictions to speak. Some lives are so morally dry and shallow that they appear to respond only as long as the message intrigues them intellectually. Others cannot make a faith commitment because they are too tied to the material world and the fallen existence.

There are other examples we could think of, but Jesus gets His point across with those three. It’s pretty hard to be discriminatory about living the Covenant before the world, which is why this sower’s seeds seem to go all over the place. That’s not to say you can’t be circumspect about throwing pearls before swine, but your convictions can tell you when to be reticent. Your heart knows. Just don’t be a sucker for someone who fawns over you and your message. You cannot trust your own fallen nature, so be cynical about everyone.

The business of the lamp actually addresses limited resources. The common Jewish peasant had a one-room home and one little niche projecting out of one wall somewhere just about head height for a single oil lamp. Oil for that lamp would be a moderate expense, so they were careful to trim the wick to make just enough light to get things done before bed time once it got dark. The idea of hiding that lamp was incomprehensible. Make the most of what little you have in showing the world how you live by the Covenant.

For the most part, don’t push the message too hard. Sooner or later God will use that tiny light from your life to expose sin in others. This is how the Holy Spirit works, using God’s covenant servants to highlight moral failure. Not because His servants never fail, but it’s how they handle failure that makes such a strong impact.

And finally, the gospel covenant message polarizes a fallen society. When you are living by that covenant, harvesting the blessings of shalom, it tends to pulverize rationalizations and self-deception. People who may have had some inclination to hear the message may suddenly decide it demands too much. Yes, genuine faith is entirely unreasonable, demanding from us things only God can grant in the first place. Others who have suffered too much from this fallen existence can suddenly embrace the full riches of faith and not look back.

You have no way of knowing which way someone will go. God knows, but it’s not His way to tell us such things. Just keep on doing what’s right by the gospel covenant. Let God worry about the outcomes.

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Otherworldliness

Posted on August 6, 2019 by ehurst

Ref: Jesus Stills the Storm (Matthew 8:23-27; Mark 4:35-41; Luke 8:22-25)

The most common boat on Galilee was designed for a crew of two or three, and when loaded with a good catch, sat pretty low in the water. With no fish, but a dozen or so adult men, it was probably a bit crowded and still low in the water.

The Sea of Galilee is still notorious for sudden wind storms. Not the kind with rain and lightening, just high winds that whip up the waves that would rock a little boat like that. Water would start washing over the sides pretty quickly. At least some of these men had spent most of their lives on this sea as professional fishermen, and knew what they were up against. This wasn’t some silly boyish fear of the unknown. Their panic wasn’t from facing a storm, but with the way the boat sat so low in the water. Still, Jesus says their fear was unjustified.

Of course, the principle was teaching them that He was the Son of God, someone with authority over the natural elements. If He was sleeping, then obviously there was no real threat to them. But on top of this, everything He did was well within the authority granted to them under the Covenant of Moses. If they really were Sons of the Law (bar-Mitzvah), then they had no reason to fear.

I doubt most of you have ever encountered the kind of training given to certain groups of special operations forces. You may have seen movies about such things, but it’s never the same as being there. Indeed, just standard induction training for the US military as a whole is poorly depicted in media. I’ve been through US Army Basic Training twice, so I can testify that you cannot really grasp it from watching even an accurate documentary. Fiction is far less accurate. You have to be there and experience what it does to your head.

On the one hand, Army Basic is tough enough. On the other hand, it can’t be too difficult or too many would never get through it. Everything has been carefully tested repeatedly to be within the reach of your average Joe and Jane. But the physical part is really not the hard part; it’s the attitude adjustment the training seeks to make. I’ve never seen more pitiful whining, even after the training is done and folks are sent to a regular unit where things are more relaxed. It’s not a question of seeking to make you fully embrace the training as the best of all possible worlds. It’s simply a matter of realizing the system demands things you aren’t going to enjoy, but you are obliged to play along.

Surely you recognize how the military standards and techniques drift on one track, changing all the time. Meanwhile, the average social influences on people before they sign up for enlistment shifts and drifts on yet another track entirely. The shock of the demands of military training, and the natural instinct to think that one can somehow get a special exemption here and there, has always been there. Even those who seem well adjusted to life in uniform can react to some new demand with strong emotions. Military life raises some peculiar sensitivities.

Those who seek the higher levels of training in special operations require an entirely different mental orientation than is commonly found in the military. Jesus chose His disciples to become the Covenant special forces. His heart knew what each man was made of, and nothing they said or did would surprise Him much. Still, they were humans and often did not rise to their own potential. Had they been in the right frame of mind, rather like special operations troops, they would have seen that stormy moment as just another tough training experience. “We’re gonna get wet guys. Start bailing!”

There was a shortage of “can do” attitude here. My experience in the military tells me that is nothing new with human nature. I’ve learned to tolerate rough conditions, but these men had a far more primitive experience, so what I consider military normal discomfort was just dandy for them. It wasn’t the conditions, it was the attitude. The one ingredient missing in that moment of the storm was the assurance that God was always right, and always in control. There was nothing they faced that was out of His control; nothing escaped His notice.

Even if it meant dying, they should have faced that calmly. Their attitude was a deviation from the ancient Hebrew view of life. It was more like the Western worldliness, something that came with the Pharisees’ Hellenized thought processes and assumptions. They didn’t have enough otherworldliness.

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The Tribe of Heaven

Posted on August 5, 2019 by ehurst

An essential element in Satan’s mandate from God is to build sustainable deceptions.

Once again: The mainstream Western view of Satan is all wrong. There are certain details it gets right, but the underlying assumptions are false. We can blame Satan himself for that. God established the Hebrew worldview as the best way to understand Him and His Creation. That viewpoint is radically different from the mainstream Western outlook. We are obliged to steep ourselves in that ancient Hebrew orientation in order to understand revelation, and in turn to understand reality itself, because the Western approach is flatly wrong on most things.

So the Bible depicts Satan as God’s left-hand man, His Punisher. Satan is there to catch the folks who reject God’s revelation of Himself and His ways. His job is to imprison the renegades and profit from their struggles, to ensure they receive very little benefit from their rebellion. God is so generous and kind that He pours out shalom in endless supply, so the Devil has to capture a lot of it to ensure sinners don’t receive theirs unjustly. The means to capture includes keeping sinners busy chasing things that could never be. It matters little what they are chasing, as long as it is false.

We are designed to obey God. We have to do things His way, operating from the heart instead of human intellect. All it takes is humble penitence at the revelation of God to break free from Satan’s prison. His revelation is a living Person, His Son Jesus. This is contrary to the nature of human intellect, seeking all kinds of ways to control things. It’s a distraction from our true purpose in living. We exist to bring glory to God; nothing else matters. So with the Fall, we were all placed in Satan’s prison, born there. We have to struggle to the light to get out. This is not hidden, but it does require some help, help that God has given freely to all.

The primary structure of Satan’s prison is civilization. I want you to notice that the Hebrew people were never an independent civilization, especially in their own minds. They were a covenant nation; that was their whole identity. At their peak of national strength, they were simply an independent collect of tribes taking advantage of what was available to fulfill their mission. Their mission was to manifest the glory of God and His revelation. That meant their greatest power came from rejecting most of the trappings of civilization. Cities were a convenience, a virtual necessity for human existence in a fallen world, but it was never a core function of their existence. The fallback position was always, “To your tents, O Israel!” Let the other nations waste their efforts in building great civilizations, because the rise and fall cycle was the best they could do without revelation.

Western Civilization is not going to crash and burn, per se, but will taper off into insignificance. As with it’s own birth, drawn from the ruins of Greco-Roman Civilization and the Germanic Tribes, so the West will simply become an element in the next civilization, mixed in with something else. None of it comes from God; it’s all a vanity of vanities, chasing after the wind and striving for what could never be. The West will ever remain a monument to Satan’s power to deceive on a grand scale, and for a very long time.

There’s nothing wrong with civility. According to the myths, civility is the foundation of civilization. But it is a myth; it’s just a word created to tie circumspect behavior to false goals. Most people within Western Civilization struggle with civility because circumspect behavior is not native to the fallen condition. Civility requires seeing beyond the goals of civilization, in part because it requires seeing beyond the self.

The only way to escape the mass deception is by making yourself part of the Tribe of Heaven.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 14:1-11

Posted on August 3, 2019 by ehurst

Jesus begins a series of heart lessons. As previously noted in this series, He is saying things He knows their hearts will recognize and will absorb, and store in their souls for use later. The only drama here is the vast gulf between the otherworldly nature of the message and the very worldly track on which their brains are locked. John remembers these things in part because he was likely young enough to have spent less time chasing down those false tracks.

Jesus begins to steer them off that false track. He mentions His Father’s household, something that should register with them as a synonym for Heaven. He says He is going to spend time in Heaven establishing residences for them. The imagery here is rather like the royal heir returning to the royal palace and building onto it lavish apartments for His personal staff. Then, when they come along later, He would meet them and show them to their new homes. This is what He meant by going away for awhile. He was going ahead of them to prepare their eternal homes.

Surely they understood all this? He affirmed that they did know where He was going, and that they also knew how to get there.

Thomas was clearly not listening. He was so far down the wrong tracks that his questions came off obtuse. Jesus tried to call him back, to help him switch to the right track. He said that He was the way to the destination. All they had to do was pick up where He was leaving off. The only way to be welcomed in the Kingdom of Heaven was to take up the ministry Jesus began. “Do you know me, Thomas? Then you know as much about the Father as you possibly can know.” However much they had experienced with Jesus up to this point was enough of a clue.

Philip wasn’t listening any better than Thomas. “Just show us the Father and we can take it from there.” Jesus reminded Philip that anything He could put before their eyes now would hardly provide more than they had already seen. Having followed Him around during these past few years was all they were going to see of the Father for now. Did Philip not recognize what he had been seeing all this time?

Was Jesus not the Son of God, the sole Heir to the Throne of Heaven? How different would the words and actions be if the Father Himself had said and done them? All of this was a perfect manifestation of the Father’s will. If Philip couldn’t see it in that light, then maybe he could at least get there just recognizing that the miracles were the finger of God. Had not Philip himself performed some of those miracles?

The Pharisees had been careful to maintain the external impression of the Hebrew lifestyle, claiming to eschew the Hellenist culture. However, they had absorbed the intellectual processes of the Greeks, particularly the logical assumptions. This had begun leaking into the Jewish society at large. They had completely lost the heart-led understanding, reducing everything to abstract logic. Thus, the divine was pulled down to the human level, while the actuality of a higher realm of existence was pushed off into spooky mental territory. They claimed to understand everything via human intellect, but understood nothing that hearts alone could grasp. Lacking the power of the heart, their convictions became hidden away and they had only legalistic concrete doctrine to guide them.

The disciples had been inflicted with some of this, and they were largely unable to pull their heads out of it. It would require a powerful miracle to set them free.

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Process, Not Product

Posted on August 3, 2019 by ehurst

The professor told us it was all about process, not product. It was the popular buzzword terminology of that time when I was in teachers’ college in the mid-1990s. This was just a globalist attempt to first rip away the classical education methods and goals, then institute something in its place. It was a blatant political agenda to destroy the American identity, and nothing new. In fact, that was the whole intent behind public education since at least the Tavistock Institute produced their guidelines around 1910.

The problem was not that anyone was actually promoting process over product; they weren’t at all. It was just political jargon meant to destroy something they hated. That professor was lying and she knew it; she knew her students were mostly from right-wing backgrounds. The only way to actually institute an education system of process-over-product is to completely restructure the underlying epistemology. It would mean shifting from a materialistic orientation, which included the professor’s socialist doctrine, and building on otherworldly assumptions. I would have applauded that.

Lately I’ve been feeling a very strong urge to contemplate and write about this otherworldly orientation. We should have no expectation of changing the world in which we live. Our very best hope is some partial withdrawal into a covenant community of faith, a parallel society that infiltrates the rest of the world. We can’t avoid being noticed, but we are calling people out of this world, not trying to change it.

In our divine mission of infiltrating this world, we may well be involved in the political process. But by no means do we expect to accomplish anything significant by such a process. Rather, we are there pointing people to their one greatest need: to stop being entangled in this world and its cares. It’s not a question of entangled lives in the sense of what we do day to day, but of entangled souls. Our ultimate goal is not something anyone can point to; it’s the process of how we confront this life from an otherworldly orientation. It’s the process, not the product.

That’s what a church should be — a process, not a product. There is no objective, only daily growing more like Christ by our pursuit of Biblical Law. It’s the care and feeding of a covenant and the daily harvest of shalom. All of our “goals” are short-termed like that; our victories are always moment by moment. It’s always the here and now of process.

Then again, we know that pursuing shalom does bring a certain momentum. It’s a relationship with Christ, so it’s not: one failure and He simply forgets you. But peace with God is not a goal; it’s a proximity of walking alongside Him as He goes about His work in this world. It’s a constant movement, clinging to His Presence, because He doesn’t stand still. There is nothing resembling stasis in shalom. It’s not an achievement or a place. It’s love in action.

Let’s redeem that phrase: process, not product.

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Ride Shots for Early August 2019

Posted on August 2, 2019 by ehurst

Over the past couple of weeks I have been riding pretty hard, and while it had it’s fun parts, it also kept me from stopping to take many pictures. Today I caught up on the shooting. This first one is my prayer chapels inside the Eagle Lake Park in Del City, OK.

Wednesday I took a 35-mile ride and this was about the only inspiring image that caught my eye. This is a bridge across the drainage in Nichols Hills, a ritzy suburb of OKC. Their trail is more or less part of the county trail system, this one running along Grand Boulevard. But the trail dumps you out onto the very busy NE 63rd Street, the southern boundary of this suburb, and OKC never bothered to build an off-street trail connecting this to the Katy Trail. So I had to ride a couple of miles in heavy traffic eastward to the other part of Grand Boulevard.

This was from today, with our overcast skies varying later to partly cloudy. In the background is that huge feed mill still running in Capitol Hill district. This is just one of those views that caught my attention.

This (below) is one of several parks along the River Trail system. This one typically has folks sitting in cars or one of the benches during cooler weather, but isn’t used too awful much during the heat of summer. OKC Parks and Recreation doesn’t seem to understand that benches in the shade of trees get used more.

The clouds are what got my attention in this next shot. This is a view across Wheeler Park toward downtown OKC. This park is really old, though it saw major upgrades during the past decade. People actually use this for weddings and such during cooler weather.

This is one of the few flowers visible this time of year, and the only flowering trees to blossom so late in the summer. These things are trumpet-shaped and tend to droop.

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