DIY and Holiness

Posted on July 22, 2019 by ehurst

I keep talking about doing things in-house. It’s a symbol of withdrawing back inside your own borders, of reinforcing your own domain. Of course, I’m referring to the domain you hold as a feudal grant from God. It’s your calling, your mission. It points to the things He has granted you, as both a burden and a privilege.

While self-reliance is always a good thing, it becomes especially critical during times of tribulation and wrath. That’s where we are now. It’s entirely human of us to grow up in an environment and not give too much thought to whether elements of our environment are good or bad. It takes a special sensitivity that only God can provide in awakening our hearts to begin breaking free from the demonic lures in our social environment. Renewing the emphasis on self-reliance is a way of freshening our awareness of our divine calling.

We call out to Him to come and visit, and we welcome His wrath as simply the other edge of the sword that brings blessings. We say: “Lord, let your wrath be poured out against sin, and start with mine!” For those who cling to Him, wrath is but the first stage of restoring shalom. This restores us individually to doing for Him those things He called us to do, and making room for Him to supply all the things we were not called to do.

But faith is not something that can be farmed out to third parties. If the message and covenant of Radix Fidem appeals to you, let me encourage you to be ready always to worship outside of the mainstream churches. Don’t leave your church just because I did; I won’t tell you to quit your church. Leave because the Lord is calling you to something they won’t do. Leave because you cannot serve the Lord there.

I realize that larger and denser church organizations provide all the comforts of home better than you can do for yourself. It’s hard to replace church music productions, fellowship meals, etc. I miss those things, too. But they came at the price of stifling my own divine calling, so I had to pack up what I could carry and do for myself, and step out into the wilderness where Christ stood calling to me. I’ve been worshiping in my home for more than a decade now, and it works a whole lot better. This is where I found shalom.

That’s the image behind moving to this blog service with a different URL. I’ve lost some of the conveniences offered by WordPress.com and some of them can’t be replaced. The Lord warned me in my heart that I couldn’t trust them to support me as His message through me becomes more challenging to the mainstream.

I believe I will try offering email notices manually. Once we get the email for this domain set up, I’ll establish a routine just for that purpose. Those of you who prefer getting notified of new posts by email can ask to be added to my manual process. If there aren’t any significant difficulties, we’ll stick with that. Once it’s ready, you’ll see a notice posted in the right column (AKA “sidebar”).

Pray for us as we work through the growing pains and shifting more of our community activities to DIY.

Update: It’s all set up. Check the “Contact me or subscribe” block on the upper right side.

Posted in administration | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Admin: Subscriptions Not Working

Posted on July 22, 2019 by ehurst

Sorry to announce this folks, but the subscription plugins for WP aren’t what I had hoped. First, there are too many plugins offering more than they can deliver, and some of them open blogs up to hacking. The one I tested was way too complicated and offered too little in return. I’m going to research this for a few days and see if I can identify one that will automate the process instead of forcing me to send notifications manually.

Please bear with me on this. For now you’ll just have to keep checking the blog in your browser to see if there are new posts. This is one of the growing pains that come from switching to independent hosting.

Posted in administration | Tagged | Comments Off on Admin: Subscriptions Not Working

Teachings of Jesus — John 13:18-30

Posted on July 21, 2019 by ehurst

Cross posting from the other blog to create a synchronization point.

This lesson will be different. Harmonizing the Gospels has always been a major chore and fraught with controversies. The Last Supper narrative is part of the most thoroughly picked over portion of the story. There remains much controversy and many unanswered questions. Because of this, it’s very easy to lose track of John’s emphasis here.

First, let me help you settle the narrative outline by linking to a reference I rather like: Last Seder: A Jewish Reading of the Last Supper. This will give you enough background that you can better picture in your mind what’s going on. God help us; the biggest problem we have is overly sanctifying each little detail. Mainstream church traditions invest so much drama into this story that no one is able to actually picture it taking place. The real event was pretty mundane by comparison.

The central issue here is how Jesus gave this ritual meal new meanings. In particular, He seized upon the original symbolism and gave it new life in Himself. He was the Passover Lamb; the Exodus was replaced with the Cross and everything it means. By embracing Jesus as our Messiah, we have left behind the slavery of our old lives wallowing in human comforts. We follow Christ out into the wilderness to face a much more stern existence, but one that has far more meaning at peace with God.

Jesus knew what kind of men these were that had been His called disciples during the past three years or so. He quoted Psalm 41 where David mentions his long and grave illness during the time Absalom was building his rebellion. It was David’s son depicted in this Psalm, hoping his father would die from that illness.

The specific reference is to Ahitophel, one of David’s advisers, but Absalom’s spy. Ahitophel had been physically close to David the whole time, eating from the same table often. The disciples would have recognized this reference. It was one more thing that turned upside down all their expectations that night. So He noted that He was telling them this so their hearts would burn it into their memories for later.

He started talking about how, if He commissioned one of them to do something, whoever received them in the name of Jesus was receiving Jesus and the Father, as well. This was quite the opposite of what was about to happen, and Jesus the man choked up on it. He blurted out the statement that one of them would betray Him. Judas knew, but feigned ignorance as they all looked to one another, perplexed at the very idea.

John was to the right of Jesus, if for no other reason than this young cousin of His was His closest buddy, the one guy here who seemed most able to understand the character and personality of Jesus. Peter was the presumed second-in-command and gestured or whispered to John to ask more directly who the traitor would be. Since they were all reclining, John simply leaned back against Jesus’ chest with his head and whispered his question. Jesus replied that He would give the “sop” (Korech) to the guilty party. Jesus then took some matzo, smeared horseradish on it, placed a bit of roasted lamb on top, added another layer of matzo, and dipped it in a fruit and nut puree on the table. It symbolized a special favor for someone. This He handed to Judas; it was a significant honor.

Then He told Judas he better get on with his plan. Judas cut himself out of the rest of the meal and the symbolism Jesus put into it. He left immediately to inform the Temple officials when and where they could find Jesus for a nice quiet arrest away from the crowds. Here was the trusted adviser spying for Jesus’ enemies, a man who knew the personal habits of Jesus. Judas knew the group would eventually wander out to the Garden of Gethsemane just across the Kidron Valley from the eastern wall of Jerusalem. It was a short walk and it needed only one lookout to watch the only route between the Upper Room and road past the garden entrance.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

New Digs

Posted on July 21, 2019 by ehurst

Welcome to Radix Fidem Blog. Going forward, this will be my primary blog. Even I don’t quite know what to expect, but I do know that part of the reason we’ve moved to a new host is to make it more difficult for censorship. As God’s wrath continues falling on America, and tribulation deepens, we can expect evil people to seek every possible means to keep control of things they never really owned. Sooner or later we will become targets of their desperate measures.

Thus, I cannot make any promises about how things will go here. It really depends on what God does and how He leads me. Still, this whole thing is heart-led, so your attention and participation should also be heart-led.

Subscription should be available in a few days, because both Jay and I are working on getting things up to snuff. Bear with us.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Admin: Changing Domain Name

Posted on July 19, 2019 by ehurst

This post carried over from my previous blog, which is now gone. This post remains only for historical purposes.

FYI, I think we’ve decided to change the the blog to a new domain name. The blog hosted where it now is will revert to the old URL (jehurst.wordpress.com) and the content will remain in place. Nothing will be lost but the domain name (soulkiln.blog). This will happen on August 4. Jay and I will be picking something new to work with because it’s just a whole lot simpler. My last post on this blog will the forwarding notice to the new domain, where all the same content (we hope) will appear and the new posts will start there. And, yes, you will have to subscribe to the new blog if you want it dropped in your inbox. Whatever you do, it is wholly unlikely you’ll get any more from this blog once we make the big move.

More new to follow once we get things going.

Posted in administration | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Admin: Changing Domain Name

Working Toward the End of Humanity

Posted on July 18, 2019 by ehurst

Reminder: Scripture says that the aggregate of fallen human behavior, and the decisions of fallen human governments, is under His ultimate control. He uses Satan to herd this mass like cattle, without a clue to what is real, what is possible, etc. Satan’s mission in this task is largely to provoke human desire for things they cannot have, and then consume their lives as they beat their heads against the wall of Creation’s boundaries.

Armed with that reassuring word from revelation, we can face frightening scenarios of destruction. I would encourage you to read such reports only because this will prepare you for the kind of insanity we face. Most of this will never bear fruit, though some of it will hang around even after God’s wrath has done its work. What persists longest are the peculiar lies that work like religion.

For example, take a look at this religion. It’s nothing new for us, but it’s surprising to see it presented in this forthright way as a religion.

We keep an eye on this stuff so we aren’t caught off guard by what evil people are planning. The shape of tribulation is always full of surprises.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Working Toward the End of Humanity

Just in Case You Missed It

Posted on July 16, 2019 by ehurst

Sometimes you have to state the obvious. It gets like that when too many people are chasing outright fantasies.

Human nature is fallen; it cannot be amended. The only hope you have in dealing with humanity at large is to ameliorate the situation via revelation (AKA, Biblical Law). Revelation is explicitly tribal-feudal, and implicitly requires the heart-led consciousness. Biblical Law is our best hope; everything else is a failure before it even gets started.

Demanding a cultural shift to suit your fantasies is asking for trouble. Most especially is this true if you happen to subscribe to any brand of collectivism, or imperialism. Both of those seek to restore the Tower of Babel. God is not amused, and people will refuse to change, so the whole thing is a disaster looking for some small excuse to implode. You must build your future plans on a calculus that listens to what God says is real.

Nothing about Radix Fidem encourages people to change the way things are going. The whole basis of our covenant is waiting on God to point out the path we should take as people seeking His peace, serving His agenda. So we cannot be terrorists because we don’t have any notions about changing the world. Our whole game is changing ourselves. The second part of that is seeking to draw closer together in making those changes.

Nothing about Radix Fidem keeps you from playing along with the way God herds those who refuse to acknowledge Him. We don’t buy into the rules of civilization dreamed up by a bunch of non-believers who infiltrated the early church with lies. We don’t pretend that people can live together in peace without first seeking God’s peace, so violence is just part of human nature. Get used to it; Biblical Law presumes a certain amount of it.

Furthermore, Biblical Law presumes you have no desire to stay too awfully long in this world. Thus, we reject the often unstated assumption that “life is precious” — meaning that this fallen existence is somehow the only hope we’ve got. Killing people is not a sin unless you do so unjustly. The Bible justifies a lot of killing that is illegal, and condemns a lot of killing that takes place under the color of secular state laws. This is nothing new, but we have to make the harsh and shattering point that the state, and our society, are both very much contrary to God’s revelation. So it is with the mainstream churches, insofar as they are too much like the world.

Given this vast divide, we have no expectation of engaging our world in reasoned conversation, because they aren’t going to listen. And most likely we aren’t going to see too much reasoning anyway, just a lot of partisan shouting from both sides. Instead, we address each other in the love of Christ, in the truth of His Word, and we allow the results to speak for themselves. If there is any hope the rest of the world might hear the truth, it starts with seeing divine glory between us. Even that is a miracle of God, so it really is just a matter of minding our own business. There is no way we justify anything in their eyes without the touch of the Holy Spirit.

For some limited few of us with special callings in the area of outreach, we might say and do things we know the rest of the world will notice. We put our faith on display, daring them to attack it. We are called and equipped to withstand their pitiful attacks; they can’t hurt anything that really matters to us. We have no intention of being taken seriously by the masses. We seek only to grab the attention of those whom the Lord elects to redeem in any given context.

But in truth, our message is for each other, to support and encourage. It catches their attention because God wants them to be a part of us. Even the prophetic word to the hell-bound is just one more part of God giving them a genuine chance in their humanity to make the right choice. They won’t, but it ensures they have no excuse when they stand before Him on that Last Day. So my prophetic messages are really for those of you who consider yourselves part of the covenant community, even if it sounds like it’s addressed to someone else.

It should be obvious that we don’t take this world very seriously.

Posted in religion | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Just in Case You Missed It

Heads-up: Blog Changes Coming

Posted on July 15, 2019 by ehurst

This post was carried over from my previous blog, which no longer exists. I’m keeping it here only for historical reasons.

The Lord is at work in my life.

I’ve made the decision to move this blog to another service. For the past two years I’ve been paying WordPress to host this thing. Meanwhile, they’ve been shutting down blogs that I read, some of which have used the same paid support contract that I use. These past few years have seen a lot of that kind of thing as the globalists and collectivists are trying to shut down dissent against their effort to reestablish the Tower of Babel. And if they don’t get me first, it will surely be the right-wing Zionists. It’s not the money, but a matter of continued freedom to share the gospel message.

Between now and August, I will be working behind the scenes with Jay to shift to another server. That will likely mean losing some of the conveniences I’ve enjoyed, but then it means gaining some new ones. One of the big things is the high probability of losing all my subscribers. I’m not sure I can carry that over. If you are subscribed to this blog and want to keep hearing from it, you may have to subscribe again. The other thing you might notice is that the domain name (soulkiln.blog) may be out of sync for a few days. If you have this blog bookmarked, it might fail to connect properly until things are ironed out.

And if you really don’t care, that’s fine. You don’t owe me anything; follow your own conscience. So far as I know, this particular account won’t be closed, but the domain name will revert to what it was back when I used the free service (jehurst.wordpress.com) and I’ll leave up the announcement that we have moved to another server. Meanwhile, if things work as they should, the entire backlog of posts here should be mirrored on the other server. It’s for sure some of the appearance will change, but we aren’t far enough into the process to know precisely how it will change yet.

For those of you who have supported this ministry, we hope this makes things even better.

Posted in administration | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

How Divine Truth Works

Posted on July 14, 2019 by ehurst

God does not punish people; He punishes sin. People get hit with wrath because they are clinging to the sin He punishes. This is why it looks random to so many Westerners, because they simply cannot grasp the notion of what constitutes sin. They keep pushing their reason and logic into the equation, when the whole point of Scripture altogether is that reason is not up to the task. Revelation alone establishes what is good and evil.

So the crazy stuff going on around us in America today is symptomatic of God’s wrath. A critical element in wrath is giving people the rope to hang themselves. It looks like there is no God to restrain sin, but that’s the false assumptions of Western minds. Sin has built-in consequences, so if you demand the “right” to sin, it will destroy you one way or another. The madness of humans doing such awful things is part of the punishment.

That some of it will splash on His people is just a feature of this fallen existence. We are supposed to sense that from our hearts, not bristle at God’s “failure” to protect us the way we would like Him to do. Even with the Passover blood on the doorposts, there was still a lot of hassle involved in the Exodus. The hassle was what God decreed for moving His people closer to His divine will.

They could have had it easier, but they longed for things that were the consequences of sin. Not so much their own sin, but natural results of the fallen condition. This life is not where we belong, not where we should want to be. We endure it as the necessary passage between birth and Heaven. Stop expecting anything good in this life.

On the other hand, know that we can receive a lot of blessings from obeying revelation. But they aren’t direct rewards; they are samples of Eternity. If wrath falls on sin, and not people, then blessings fall on righteousness, not people. Clinging to simplistic and legalistic readings of Scripture will get you into trouble every time. God expects us to be sophisticated, just like the moral reasoning of the folks in the Ancient Near East. That is a long way from the self-congratulatory “sophistication” of Western thinking.

We are required to understand things from the heart, not from the intellect. This is convoluted and obscure to the intellect, but that’s how divine truth works. How do you suppose Jesus, the sinless Son of God, was saddled with the guilt of all of humanity’s sin? God’s wrath falls on sin, and it has to be punished. But someone else can pay that price, precisely because the accountability is not calculated in terms of Western logic of culpability.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Google’s Latest Censorship Efforts

Posted on July 14, 2019 by ehurst

The “Health Ranger” has been known to exaggerate from time to time, but there is quite likely a basis in truth for his latest breathless warning about Google Chrome browser. I’ve been hearing just this kind of thing from technology insiders for some time, now.

I’ll recommend you uninstall Google Chrome as soon as possible. In its place, I can recommend Vivaldi browser if you really need the Chrome engine and how it works on the Net. The folks behind Vivaldi take some of the same code-base as Chrome but alter it to keep you from being abused the way Google does things.

Even better is if you could get used to Firefox, or perhaps Waterfox (a slightly better version of Firefox). The only problem with Waterfox is that it’s a little tricky to find the add-ons page, but if you can figure out how to look up the Firefox add-ons, it’s all the same stuff. Waterfox is just a freer version of Firefox.

Of course, the Health Ranger also mentions how Google Search has already been hiding information from everyone, so you should have already switched to something like DuckDuckGo.

If you run Linux, or you know how to chase it down, you could use the Chromium browser, since it lacks the extra crap Google puts into Chrome. However, Google will try to keep you from finding a safe source for Windows packages.

Yeah, it’s going to keep getting crazier.

Posted in computers | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Google’s Latest Censorship Efforts