It Doesn’t End until You Die

Posted on July 12, 2019 by ehurst

The mission of revelation in this fallen world doesn’t end with any of us. Our Father’s glory blazed long before us, and will continue long after us. But we are permitted the grand privilege of participating in His glory if we are willing to renounce this world and meet God on His own terms. We don’t leave this world for a while yet, but we cease belonging to it.

Among other things, the community of the Radix Fidem covenant is a prophetic community. We believe the Lord has communicated clearly enough of His intentions that we can proceed in concert with His plans. Further, we believe that He has revealed those intentions within the current context, so that we sometimes have fairly concrete guidance about what we experience daily. At least, that’s what I believe and teach. I am convinced that Western Civilization is coming apart before our eyes. It no longer stands on its traditions, but rests entirely on the mechanisms put in place by bad people with bad intentions, and their schemes are coming apart. God is going to have the final say in what He will tolerate in His Creation.

We don’t fear their plans, but we do sometimes have to work around them. That’s part of how our Father uses us for His glory. The UN has long been a big joke about what it can actually accomplish. Not a single UN resolution about Israel’s invasion of Palestine has changed a thing, for example. What matters is how the UN’s moves sometimes signal big things afoot among other organizations. The business of silencing dissent is as old as human speech, so there’s no need to panic. God’s Word has never been truly silenced, nor will it ever be silenced. Still, we do have to be aware of signals that evil people have yet new plans for squelching the gospel message. Do you doubt that this language of countering “hate-speech” is targeting the moral standards in the Bible?

Eventually, there’s really nothing you and I can do, but that was never our mission in the first place. The mission has always been seeing how God crushes the resistance of those determined to serve the Devil. For some of us, that means keeping an eye on the cat-n-mouse of technology and ways to avoid being silenced. After all, while the Radix Fidem community is a matter of heart-led communion, it still requires the Internet as a tool of communications between us. This whole thing was born on the Internet. For now, we must trust in the Lord to guide us through the minefield of government and corporate efforts to censor us. For myself and a few others, that means keeping an eye on the technology involved in keeping our community connected.

For myself, I sense that the time has come to make a few changes. Indeed, you may be aware that I recently switched back to running Linux on my systems at home. Awhile back I learned that some users of Win10 have experienced the “random” disappearance of controversial files (documents, images, videos, etc.) on their hard drives. I’ve always believed part of the Win10 working environment included that kind of intrusive technology to keep certain voices from being heard. I’m not referring to that often reported complaint of wiping of files during an upgrade, but targeted deletion of files on journalist’s computers, for instance. I won’t say it’s the hand of Microsoft at work, but I’m convinced that they made it possible for the likes of NSA and Mossad to do it.

I’m hardly that kind of target, yet. But I have little trust for governments and big corporations when it comes to protecting all those rights they keep talking about. I’m currently making other plans to keep as much of this ministry as possible in-house, as it were.

At any rate, what you and I have been used to in this world is already gone for the most part, and if you aren’t paying attention, you’ll be shocked at what’s coming at us. I’m asking you to be very cynical in the sense of Holy Cynicism, not being surprised at what evil humans can dream up for each other. I’m working just about every day at keeping an eye on threats in the technology sector. The mission of getting our message out will never be done.

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Draper Bikeway 18

Posted on July 11, 2019 by ehurst

I rode out to the north end of Draper Lake yesterday; it was a good workout hitting the steep hills and checking out the work on the bikeway. Today I rode around the lake to view the rest of the work. I note that the dewberries and blackberries are all gone, but the sand plums are still numerous and delicious.

This shows the unrepaired flood damage from the last couple of months when we had heavy rain. This is along the eastern shore of the lake where the crews had put down the first layer last winter and then came that long period when no work was done at all. Now the crews are out again and bringing the northern end around to meet this part. Except for a couple of difficult sections where nothing has been put down in the dirt, we should soon have at least one layer down for the entire loop. However, as seen in this picture here, some of it will have to be redone.

The smallest point has begun to reemerge from the high water mark we hit last month. It looks to me like the work crews are different guys from last year. The company trucks have a different logo. The workers are actually less friendly to me passing them out on their work sites along the bikeway, but I think they are working faster.

Here again is the image I shot last month showing the crews were finally back on the creek crossing below the dam. They weren’t just playing around down there.

Because this is the shot from today, showing that the basic dirt work for the crossing is finished. Granted, there is quite a bit more work left to get it connected with the dead-end of the finished work coming from the west shore side, but there’s really not that much left to do. There is still one open culvert that must be replaced with a closed one, and about 100 meters of bikeway to construct. This short stretch has seen virtually no work at all so far.

Still, I think they now have some crews that will actually do the job. It could conceivably be finished before my birthday in September, though I’m not holding my breath.

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May He Shine through You

Posted on July 10, 2019 by ehurst

From day one on this blog, all I’ve ever done is report what I see in moral terms. A few folks who see some of the same things have come alongside to help me promote this vision of what we can do about it. It was never a question of trying to conquer the world of ideas with this vision, as if we could change what humans do. But it has always been an effort to share with those who are drawn by the same vision.

God has not granted us His authority to change the world; it’s not His way. He hasn’t granted it to anyone else, despite declarations to the contrary. What He has granted is His authority to change ourselves in the midst of a world racing down to destruction. We are granted the unspeakable privilege of opting out, of taking that narrow way out of the cesspool.

America is not the new Babylon. The latest iteration of Babylon is no place in particular, though it is the West in general. America is the new Sodom and Gomorrah. While the first Sodom and Gomorrah got literal fire from Heaven, ours will be more symbolic. It’s falling on us already. This nation has dedicated itself to the same unspeakable moral filth as those ancient cities, and God has granted us leadership that will bring everything down on our heads. Fighting to stop the secret government of hideous evil is a sin, because it is well deserved. We defeat Satan in our own lives, not in the lives of others. Each soul must stand on their own before God.

I suppose I could help you trace out all the dramatic background stories of how awful things were done in our names. Are you a fan of Bo Gritz? He told the truth — in part. The only reason he was allowed to make so much noise, while his peers in the military who fought the Beast were murdered, is because he served a partisan purpose. It doesn’t matter if he was aware of it, though I suspect he was. So you can’t believe everything he said; he was controlled opposition, a propaganda tool. Still, there’s nothing wrong with digging into his message with a measure of cynicism. And you can find some support from folks like Alfred W. McCoy (see his The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia; you can find it online for free).

These folks did yeoman service in telling some of the truth. Nobody knows the whole story, so bits and pieces are all we can get. Go ahead and read those books and watch those videos. If you approach it with the understanding that they are trying to steer you to support something they represent, you won’t be such a fool. Starting from a heart-led consciousness, that stuff serves to help us stop clinging to the idea that we can make any difference in the awful things we see.

Granted, there will be some bright spots to come. Part of God’s wrath is exposing sin for what it is. That’s the part we can celebrate, because we want to be free from sin, whereas a lot those who suffer His wrath cling to it. We have already seen some of the dark secrets uncovered, and there’s more of that to come. How about that Jeffrey Epstein? Just wait until you see whom he exposes as his co-conspirators! But don’t get distracted and act as if this is such a great thing. No amount of exposé is going to change the nature of our government. There is no hope for the US as a political entity.

Pray that you can discern what God has placed in your hands; keep your eyes on that. Pray that you can discern what He demands of you in terms of guarding that divine feudal grant. I can tell you that the last thin layer of covering has been torn away from America, and Satan has been set loose like never before to wreak havoc in the US. Don’t be terrorized, for God grants His divine protection over things He calls us to do. Not for success as humans see it, but He protects it in terms of glorifying His name.

May the Lord Jesus shine through His servants.

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The Babylon Conspiracy — Again

Posted on July 9, 2019 by ehurst

What separates me from the conspiracy theorists is that I am quite certain the conspiracies could not possibly succeed. I still believe that those conspiracies exist, and the people involved certainly do believe their plans could work, but that’s a lie of the Devil. These things only appear to work, but it’s merely a case of God giving them enough rope to hang themselves.

We teach that the Bible is pretty clear about this: That Creation is programmed to operate in certain ways, revealed in the Law Covenants, and this Law of God bears little resemblance to what fallen humans imagine it to be, since they have rejected revelation.

Global free trade is not allowed under God’s Law. This would put us back too close to the Tower of Babel. Nimrod’s dream has never died out; the Devil keeps dangling it out there and plenty of people keep grabbing at it. In God’s ideal, some very limited international trade is permitted, but economic entanglement is a sin. So Putin’s call for consistent international rules of trade and policy sounds quite reasonable, but it’s not God’s will (Putin endured a long interview with Financial Times here.) But then, neither is the bullying our current President does with every other government in the world a reflection of God’s will.

Revelation demands that humanity be divided into thousands of tiny nations, each minding their own business and defending their people. But prophecy has consistently warned humanity will not obey God, so we have conquests and empires. In the background, we have the fantasy idolatry of human unity under one “benevolent” government that can usher in a Utopia of some sort.

The fall of each new Babylon (Revelation 18) comes in cycles, and we are nearing the end of one. It’s quite typical that the thing blows up right about the time the idolaters are convinced they’ve got what they want. It looks like we are on the verge of a new age of globalism, but it’s already collapsing from internal rot. It’s going to be a big mess and there’s nothing we can do except cling ever more tightly to our message.

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Odds in Our Favor

Posted on July 8, 2019 by ehurst

Consider this article from Slashdot. It refers in turn to this NYTimes editorial. All of this links back to this blueprint from Google on how to use advertising to manipulate people.

If you read the Slashdot posting, you’ll get the gist of it without having to wade through the other two.

First, notice that this whole thing restricts itself to people who use Google’s search engine. Granted, that’s easily the majority of those who do any searching at all, but by no means a majority of the human race (I use DuckDuckGo exclusively). Thus, as human manipulation goes, it’s broadly effective for things like swaying the mass voting public, since the majority of them don’t really know what they believe in the first place. Yes, things really are that bad.

Second, it probably works only for a short time, in the sense that the majority of those affected by this kind of manipulation are also the same folks who are even more easily manipulated by their physical environment. So whatever it is that makes them a target for manipulation away from supposedly bad political and social leanings is still there in their lives and will eventually push them back into that “bad” path. Of course, it works quite well when you are trying to sell something, because the influence needs to last only as long as it takes to get them to make a purchase.

Third, it simply doesn’t work at all on people who strive to live by their convictions. You can pervert people’s mental awareness, but you cannot change their convictions. If they can be made aware of their convictions, it’s because God wrote those convictions in their hearts. God is most certainly not on the side of the folks who run Google and other Big Tech influencers. These companies owe their very existence completely to the rejection of divine revelation.

So while you may have to struggle with bringing your mind to its knees before your heart, having to push out a lot of nonsense contrary to revelation, these techniques are nothing to fear. We already know the world is going to Hell, so nothing can save it. The best we can hope for is the miracle of God working through us to touch lives with our message. I believe things are in our favor, over the long run.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 12:44-50

Posted on July 6, 2019 by ehurst

This is where we ditch the myth of propositional truth once and for all. Despite John using his simple Greek grammar to express it, what Jesus offers here is a quintessential Hebrew mystical statement. It is a paradox, for God said repeatedly that the fallen world could not bear His divine Presence, yet here Jesus says that He is divine.

It is simply not possible to miss the point: Jesus claims to be God in human form. He attacks the doubts of those around Him from different angles. The word translated in English as “believe” refers to giving someone full credit, to regard their assertions as trustworthy. Whoever embraces the teachings of Jesus is not just embracing Him, but the Creator who sent Him.

John refers to “seeing” Jesus in the sense of grasping and discerning. Insofar as anyone understands what Jesus represents, they have seen the God who sent Him. Whatever you can make of this man, so much can you understand God, as well. If He’s just a man, then God is not holy in your heart. But if you have peace with God, you’ll be drawn to this man who claims to come from God. God is just as much a person as Jesus, and the only way you will truly know God is to know Him as a Person. It’s that same kind of knowing, of getting acquainted with a living being with all the challenges and variations inherent in such a relationship.

Jesus is the light of revelation. If you don’t get Jesus, you don’t get God. If you get Jesus, then the moral darkness of the Fall is not your home. Our fallen state is meant to be a passing phase of existence on the way to Eternity. Without the light of divine revelation, you cannot find your way back to Eden.

Jesus didn’t come to force revelation into our souls. We have to recognize it for what it is and receive it. The truth has to live in us first, or the words mean nothing. So rejecting His teaching does no harm to Jesus. He didn’t come to enforce revelation’s demands on anyone. John was careful to use different terms here that don’t translate well into English. The “words” of Jesus were rhema — a live spectator experience of words spoken. The implication is that you have heard them yourself. The “word” that judges is logos, meaning in this context the full teaching of Jesus. When this world ends and we all face Eternity, we will be judged against that teaching.

The reason His teaching is the standard is simple: Jesus has spoken only what the Father commanded Him to say. Jesus had been a faithful son, executing His father’s commission. That commission breathes eternal life itself. It calls to us; if we follow Jesus’ teaching, we are following the Father. John chooses a unique term translated “everlasting” here: The emphasis is on having neither beginning nor end. Instead of pointing off into the distant future, it represents something with neither past nor future, but an independent existence outside of time itself.

This is what the Father sent, and what Jesus shared. Jesus was that Word Himself.

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They Can’t Take It from Us

Posted on July 6, 2019 by ehurst

Let me recommend something for those of you who might be interested: The Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Big Tech Doesn’t Want You to Know. If you prefer to read the transcript, you’ll find it here. It’s a fairly long video at around 45 minutes, roughly the same as the actual viewing time of most so-called hour-long TV presentations, minus the ads.

We are not going to escape the surveillance. What is important is that the people involved are not capable of doing all they hope to do. Neither the technology nor human consciousness itself is competent to understand, much less control, human behavior at large.

This does not prevent them understanding some parts of human behavior and manipulating that limited range of behavior to some significant degree. The key for you and I is an ever-increasing reliance on the Holy Spirit through our hearts, our convictions. This is something no amount of data gathering and processing can ever understand. If you are open to Christ and His guidance through your heart, you do not need to understand how these efforts to control us work.

We should not care what these forces do; it’s all provoked by Satan and he never keeps his promises to those who obey him. A certain limited awareness of his schemes helps us to recognize his hand in all of this. It will do a lot of disturbing things, but in the end, it cannot succeed.

We are bound together in a real network that the DARPA visionaries only wished they could have. The equipment is present at birth, but waits for divine activation. We have the real thing, and it does not yield to standard human logic and science. So the best way to make use of the Internet, without surrendering what really matters, is to keep working on our faith. Get used to the way it works, the sometimes very subtle activity in your conscience coming from convictions.

Stop thinking in terms of concrete goals and become flexible in the hands of God. Be ready to seize opportunity when it comes and keep an eye out for what brings Him glory. Hold all things in this life as expendable, including our human flesh and continuing existence. We can do all of this in plain sight of such overwhelming surveillance without fear, because they cannot possibly understand what we have.

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Pursue Obedience and Glory

Posted on July 5, 2019 by ehurst

First, two passages from Deuteronomy.

“Remember what Amalek did to you on the way as you were coming out of Egypt, how he met you on the way and attacked your rear ranks, all the stragglers at your rear, when you were tired and weary; and he did not fear God. Therefore it shall be, when the Lord your God has given you rest from your enemies all around, in the land which the Lord your God is giving you to possess as an inheritance, that you will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. You shall not forget.” (Deuteronomy 25:17-19 NKJV)

Vengeance is Mine, and recompense;
Their foot shall slip in due time;
For the day of their calamity is at hand,
And the things to come hasten upon them. (Deuteronomy 32:35 NKJV)

The question is not whether Israel should exact vengeance, but to always let God decide. Paul quotes the latter verse in Romans 12 in typical Hebrew fashion, provoking his readers to examine the whole passage. In Deuteronomy 32, God warns Israel not to act from their own arrogance. They had a cultural tendency to overreact to perceived insults. God will decide when the time is right for vengeance to fall on His enemies. Paul’s point is that we don’t go looking for excuses to start a feud.

This is a particular difference we have from the likes of the Pashtun, for example. They take some of the smallest insults as a grave offense and will likely carry on a vendetta, back and forth, for generations. That’s what arrogance brings. Paul did not say we must always reject violence, but that we wait on God to decide when things require violence. The notion that violence is forbidden is a long holdover from the medieval European code forced down the throats of peasants, and later the middle class, to ensure the nobles didn’t have competition from their subordinates. Violence was the divine right of nobles and royalty alone.

Jesus and Paul both said avoid violence. Yet Jesus cracked a whip in the Court of Gentiles. Obviously there’s something missing from the typical Western calculus here, because nothing in Scripture says that Jesus committed that violence from a privileged position. He always acted according to the Covenant as Moses gave it, but not as the Jewish (or Roman) leadership imagined it.

So the Lord specifically told Israel to commit genocide on Amalek (among others). We recall that Saul was punished for leaving the livestock and king of the Amalekites alive from battle (1 Samuel 15). In the Book of Esther, we encounter Haman, a descendant of Agag, the king of Amalek that Samuel had to execute. Apparently Agag had children who escaped that battle, since Saul didn’t bother to destroy their villages, either. He kept coming up short of God’s clear command to wipe them out. Thus, Esther and her kin had to deal with the same ancient threat while in Exile in Babylon.

The issue with Amalek is quite clear. Amalek was a grandson of Esau, the man who sold his birthright to Jacob for soup. Amalek absorbed the long smoldering hatred of Esau for his brother, and attacked Israel during the Exodus in a most cowardly and despicable manner. The Edomites (Edom was a nickname for Esau) themselves were no better, consistently favoring whatever enemy of Israel was attacking them at the time. But the curse of Edom took a very long time; they were eventually absorbed by the remnants of Israel. Amalek was supposed to be wiped out right after the Conquest. Failure to do so cost Israel dearly.

For you and I, the issue is listening with the heart, not the calculus of human wisdom. It’s not a question of tactics or strategy, but of the glory of God. We can discern via the convictions of our hearts when various responses to persecution are good or evil. The default is flight or tolerance, depending on the mission. On rare occasions, God will show His hand of wrath and call some of us to participate. We don’t do it for the sake of vengeance, but in obedience to the move of the Spirit in our hearts.

The glory is in our obedience, not so much combat savvy.

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Real Independence

Posted on July 4, 2019 by ehurst

During my years of traditional divinity studies and work, I often read firm statements that following Christ must rise above culture. The idea was that it is somehow pan-cultural, something that should fit into any cultural context. It’s above culture.

This is pure nonsense. First, notice how it strips away the very potent cultural context into which Christ was born, sent by God to pull people back into that very ancient cultural context as the sole means of living justly in Creation. In place of that culture, it allows Western theologians to inject their own culture quite blindly. They are encouraged to pretend that their own cultural background arises from this purified non-culture, and is therefore superior to any other culture that arose some other way.

This is why missionary activities are almost uniformly aimed at bringing a culture shift, reshaping the indigenous folks into some brand of Western culture. This becomes the definition of “Christian” for the non-Western world. It all makes it easy to ignore how very much Paul’s letters push a restoration of divine justice in this world by promoting a very ancient cultural orientation. This is how we get to the place where modern commentators insist that “Christian” means what amounts to a very medieval Germanic lifestyle with modern accoutrements.

Let’s be honest: What the Bible actually promotes finds few modern parallels. Perhaps the closest parallel is the Pashtun Way (Pashtunwali). I’ll let you look that up for yourself if you are interested. It’s not that the Pashtuns are a biblical society, but that there is a close parallel. If you seek the heart-led way of walking in Biblical Law, you’ll quickly recognize many elements of the Pashtun Way.

It’s not that there is no such thing as a genuine Christian Culture. It’s that almost no one rising up to proclaim their “Christian Culture” is close to what the Bible actually promotes. This is part of what Radix Fidem is about — it’s not so much a religion per se, but an approach to building genuine religion against the bogus background we have now.

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Moral Battlefield

Posted on July 3, 2019 by ehurst

The last thing I want to do is convince you of the things we teach here at Kiln of the Soul.

Every time I sit down at a computer to write, there is a constant refrain of warning to keep the door open for disbelief. We can explain as eloquently as we like, but awakening the hearts of humans is not in our hands. It’s a miracle that God alone can do. Yet in the typical paradoxical nature of truth, we still are taught to hold it forth as the demand of the gospel message that people shift over to a heart-led consciousness.

Part of the problem is that Christians have had 2000 years of practice at saying the right words when their hearts weren’t in it. Long after the early church ceased relying on the power of the Holy Spirit, we see the strongest statements that His power is absolutely necessary. So we ended up with the terms of genuine faith being used to express something other than genuine faith.

Do you believe that the Spirit of Christ can so invade a lost soul as to change that sinful nature? Can you trust the Lord to renovate, say, a pedophile so that he is no longer a threat to children? His Word says He can do that, but I’ve met literally thousands of church folks who simply cannot believe it. They pay tribute with their lips, but never make room for God, cannot bring themselves to let their children be in the same room with such a man.

It’s in part because they never test the spirits of people who profess the changing power of Christ. They never test the spirits because they have no idea how. They might have learned some mumbo-jumbo magic show stuff, but they have never learned to operate from the heart; they’ve never heard the voice of God speaking that way.

We were warned that any churches we form will be stuffed with folks like that. They know the words and think they understand what’s going on, but have never crossed over into the Spirit Realm. They have never tasted the powers of the age to come (Hebrews 6:5). We are supposed to accommodate them, but only in the sense that we use our own taste of the heavenly gifts to discern who should be leading and who is just along for the ride. We keep on teaching the truth and pray for them to catch on, but only God can change them.

Some of you have enough experience with churches to recognize what I’m saying. It’s more than a balance between letting stray sheep in and checking to make sure they aren’t wolves hiding under a sheepskin. It’s recognizing that God can turn the wolves into sheep. It’s giving Him room to operate on people who really want it and need help shedding a lifetime of bad conditioning. The whole point is not efficiency and safety above all. A church is the place people gather to make spiritual growth possible, not to regiment the process.

In the process, we tolerate folks who, to all appearances, will never grow. As long as they aren’t an actual threat to shalom, we let them hang around because you never know when or how God is going to act in their lives. The church is much closer to an incubator than an army. But then, the battlefield is the individual soul, not the world around us.

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