Scanned Photos 11

Posted on June 3, 2019 by ehurst

This is a better look at the castle in Ecaussinnes, Belgium. From what I understand, a castle at this location is first mentioned in a letter about 1325, though no one knows what it looked like. I’m told the architecture seen here comes from a later period.

But the most unforgettable part about volksmarching around Ecaussinnes was the nearby barge slide at Ronquieres, Belgium. The canal runs into a steep drop on this hillside, so instead of multiple locks, they built a huge track to move the barges up and down. This view is near the bottom, looking back up the tracks on the slope.

Here is a barge riding in the huge bathtub on wheels that sits on the track. The bathtub bumps up against the flood gate at both ends, and the gate opens same as with locks. Water is piped up and down some conduits on this track, but they leaked every time I visited.

Down around Maastricht, a canal loops around the west side of the city, connecting to another from Antwerp, while the Maas River continues on the east side of the city. They converge again south of Maastricht, and the Albert Canal cuts right through the old Caestert Ridge. Here I’m standing on the southern side of Albert Canal looking northerly in the general direction of Maastricht, invisible behind the hump. The Maas is visible in the background.

Farther north along this same ridge, closer to Maastricht is this opening called De Tombe. It’s part of a system of tunnels cut under the mountain by sandstone miners. I didn’t pay the fee to visit the tunnels, but this opening is visible from several angles on the west side of the Saint Petersberg Mountain.

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Radix Fidem Curriculum: Norming

Posted on June 3, 2019 by ehurst

7. Norming

The norm is not this world. The norm is walking the path back toward Eden. The norm is still through Biblical Law, but in Christ we are granted self-death and faith before we start the long journey. That long journey must of necessity take us away from the things of this world, including all the culture and intellectual assumptions about reality. It means reshaping our assumptions about what is normal.

The Curse of the Fall is divine justice against our sinful nature. It is perfectly just that we be born into this fallen existence with all kinds of limitations, that we live a short miserable life, suffer a lingering painful and fearful death, and spend eternity under the wrath of our Creator. That some of this doesn’t happen to us may seem random, but it is mercy and God alone understands it. There is nothing about it that should make sense to us on a human level. We are cattle that God herds, clueless and lost.

We have within ourselves the capability of turning to a heart-led life. It is within reach of every human to do so, and it is demanded by God under every law covenant. For example, He says bluntly in the Law of Moses that He requires people to commit to Him from the heart. If someone does this, they are fully capable of reading between the lines of the law code to see the heart of God. Jesus said if you were committed to Him on that level, and committed to creating a genuine covenant atmosphere in your life among other humans, everything else in the Covenant was covered. This is the path back to Eden.

We are dealing with a paradox here. Western evangelicals in general, and American evangelicals in particular, have embraced the Pharisee’s logical trick of making the Spirit Realm spooky. By attempting to encompass all things under reason and logic, it destroys the mystical reverence that God demanded since ancient times. When the intellect attempts to analyze the Spirit Realm and pull it down into logic and reason, it destroys the power and beauty of divine justice. That sucks the life out of it. The mind regards the Spirit Realm is illogical and unreliable. It’s in our fallen nature to attempt reshaping things to make sense.

We then have this insane obsession among American evangelicals about “going to Heaven” and a perversion of what Christ meant by “born again.” It presumes upon God’s grace, as if a human method can obtain spiritual birth. This, when Paul has flatly said in Romans that this is not possible. Spiritual birth is entirely a matter of God’s initiative; we can’t even make ourselves want it.

There is no magic. The question of who gets to go to Heaven and live eternally is not really addressed in Scripture, except in veiled references. Understanding the Bible assumes you understand the mystical approach of ancient Hebrew thinking. The intellect cannot handle ultimate truth; only the heart can see such things. The heart can be at peace with God about eternity; the mind cannot. The fearful child’s voice of the flesh cannot be quieted, but the heart can reign in the human consciousness. The whole thing is handled in Scripture as a matter of seeking to be a child of God while in this fallen world, and stop worrying about something you can’t comprehend in the first place.

Otherwise, we have this holy fire insurance plan that excuses us from the labor of Biblical Law, the hard and narrow path of following Christ and digging into His covenant. That covenant says the only way you can find genuine peace with God is turning toward Him in your heart. It means embracing self-death and investing all your focus on pleasing Him. It doesn’t mean going on through your life merely as part of some religious cultural tribe and becoming yet another political pressure group.

The norm for Christians is accepting that the world is going to Hell and making no effort to save any part of it. Rather, we pursue an otherworldly agenda of connecting souls to eternity. In the process, we know that inevitably the Curse of the Fall will be ameliorated, because God promised such blessings. Sure, we can recommend that our human governments embrace the Covenant of Noah as a good starting place. We can recommend that human governments return to the tribal eastern feudal structure that is required in the law covenants. We can understand how all the law covenants in the Bible require we break up into small tribal communities. But we also know that God has warned us it won’t happen. So we are left to obey those expectations for ourselves in our churches, making sure they are organized like tiny tribal nations with feudal structures.

It’s normal to be at conflict with this world. It’s normal to turn away from what makes big money because no one wants to do business the way the Bible says it has to be done. The world will seldom make room for us to obey Christ when it blindly devises systems that ignore divine revelation. At the same time, we are called to infiltrate that world. So within our various individual divine callings, we each will compromise in ways that don’t contaminate our faith. We will recognize that certain issues simply don’t matter within our mission.

Unlike the Pharisees, we don’t measure God’s favor in terms of our material success in this infiltration. We aren’t at all surprised when the worldly system robs us of success. We aren’t looking for that kind of prosperity. Rather, it is normal when our prosperity comes from the natural world. Even if that fails, we don’t allow our minds to conclude that the heart-led way doesn’t work. Rather, the heart tells the mind that we have peace with God, we have been obedient, and that our adherence to the covenant is all the success we need.

We are in the world, not of it. We are here to shine eternal glory in how we win and lose, in what we pursue as important, and in how we face human losses as not that important.

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Scanned Photos 10

Posted on June 2, 2019 by ehurst

One of the nicest hiking places was actually pretty close to where I lived in the Netherlands. Just over the eastern border, over into Germany, was the Wurm River. It starts in the Eifel Mountains south of Aachen, disappears under the city infrastructure for a ways, then reemerges just north of the old city center. Once it crosses under the A4 Autobahn, it cuts through a beautiful area of forested hills before it wanders out into the flatlands of the Rur Valley.

Over a couple of years I explored this valley, starting arbitrarily at Herzogenrath, simply because it was easier to park there and the trails were well maintained. Heading north quickly ran out in the flats where the trails became intermittent at best. It was when I headed south that the beauty took over, with lovely trails along both banks.

One of the feeder streams running down from the hills was temporarily arrested by this pool that was used to water horses and such back in the old days. I can’t vouch for how clean the water is now, but it certainly looked very clear and smelled quite nice.

Sheep and cattle were pretty abundant most of the year. Sometimes the trails led across the pastures and there were signs warning hikers to keep their dogs on the leash, as the average hiker had at least one dog. I had a couple of different dogs, but both went nuts on me whenever I had to deploy for missions. Still, they made the best walking companions for my volksmarching. In the background here is Bardenberg up on the hill, with a glimpse of the Wilhelmstein ruins on the left horizon.

Sometimes I could persuade the kids to come with me when I went exploring like that. Here they are in 1989 on a hill overlooking the village of Oirsbeek, Netherlands. We lived in this village for several years in contract housing built specifically for US military families.

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Radix Fidem Curriculum: Anthropology

Posted on June 2, 2019 by ehurst

6. Anthropology

Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, are bound under a horrific, demonic mythology about the heart. It’s far more than an organ that pumps blood through you body. Even scientists know that the heart has its own sensory field that extends outward two or three times our height. It can mesh with the same field in other people, or even other creatures. However, science has no clue what that interaction means.

That’s because American science in particular has no clue what the heart signifies in the Bible. For Westerners, it is a repository of sentiment; this is the pernicious myth. We are taught to think of it as our upbringing, values, traditions and our particular desires. The only reason Western culture imagines such a thing is because the Western conscience is connected to nothing on the other side. The heart is supposed to be on the other side of that link; that’s how God made us. However, Western intellectual traditions vehemently deny that there can be anything above the intellect.

So we end up with a conscience filled with nonsense. The conscience is a part of the mind, the interface with a higher faculty. It’s supposed to link to the heart and bring to the intellect an awareness of the convictions. However, Western minds are conditioned to think the heart is nothing more than our sentiments arising from conditioning and experience, rather like Freud’s superego. But there is nothing there; it’s a false model. There is only the conscience hauling around a load of fallen human conditioning.

For most people, once they are made to understand that the heart is a sensory organ of its own, that it is a higher faculty that touches eternity, can usually allow it to dominate. They are capable of shifting the locus of conscious awareness (the ego) into the heart and out of the intellect. They can become heart-led, not led by mere fallen reason. Thus begins a long journey of discovery that teaches the conscience to discount conditioning and hear the ultimate moral truth of God written in our hearts as conviction. That electromagnetic sensory field extending from the heart is meant to read the moral realm. It’s meant to discern the character of God woven into the very fabric of Creation.

This process of shift means learning to listen to your conscience even in its current confusion. If you don’t use your conscience, it cannot learn to take out the trash, because it won’t know what is trash until you test it. It takes time and experience and lots of failure to begin hearing from the convictions written by the finger of God in our hearts. We have to remove many layers of deception. Of course, the other part of the process is comparing our conscience with the Bible, and Biblical Law in particular. That is, we have to compare it with the revelation in the person of Jesus Christ, the Living Law of God.

And this is where we have to return to the Hebrew conception of things, so that we can have an honest report of what Jesus meant by what He taught. He spoke mostly in parables, because divine moral truth cannot be described and delineated; it can only be indicated as a real place in your soul that you must explore. The ultimate truth is that you cannot change reality at all, but by the power of the Cross, you can change yourself. The ultimate miracle is the restoration of the self to God’s design, to His own divine moral character.

Of course, a critical part of that goal is creating in ourselves a living expression of that divine moral character. Then we discover that the electromagnetic field emanating from the heart can project that divine moral character to others. They will sense it, whether consciously or otherwise, and their own moral journey can be encouraged. Science cannot measure such things; the intellect cannot ascertain moral right and wrong by itself. It has no point of reference beyond the fallen inner nature and fleshly desires. It only pretends that there could be an objective standard in reality; it’s imaginary. We must teach our flesh to bow the knee to the Creator as the only One who can reveal the ultimate truth about His Creation.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 9:1-5

Posted on June 1, 2019 by ehurst

The background of everything in Scripture is always the covenants. In this case, a significant element in Jesus’ ministry was restoring the Covenant of Moses and all its blessings. Had the Jews been faithful to Moses, many of His miracles would not have been needed. He was showing the power of the Covenant to restore what had been lost. He was pointing out how very far the Jewish leaders had gone astray from that Covenant. In doing so, He was nearly stoned to death at the end of the previous chapter.

Instead, He walked away. And as He was departing the Temple plaza, He and His disciples passed by a blind man. The man had his beat, a place he sat every day to ask for charity. The disciples asked a question that arose from too much Pharisaical teaching: Who sinned so that this man was born blind? It never occurred to them how silly it was to ask if this man had sinned before birth, since he was born blind. But just in case, they included in the question whether perhaps his parents had sinned, thus causing him to be born blind.

This was the kind of thinking that the Pharisees used to maintain their position. This was a standard Talmudic myth that human suffering was always caused by sin. And while it sounds like the Pharisees were talking about the Fall when they said the peasants were born in sin, what they meant was that they were themselves not born in sin. For them, the obvious proof was their prosperity and power over the common people. God favored them, obviously. And equally obvious to them was that this man was not favored by God.

Jesus denounced that notion. It had nothing to do with his own sin, nor the sins of his parents. Nor would it serve any purpose to simply blame the political leaders and false teaching. Sometimes bad stuff happens to decent people. That’s what it’s like living in a fallen world. Life isn’t fair, and we should not expect it be fair. This life isn’t worth anything in the first place, so stop thinking God needs to fix this mess. This world is doomed and our lives in it will be forgotten some day when The End comes.

To find meaning in this man’s life, we need to think about the only meaningful thing anyone can find in this world: the glory of God. Jesus said the only “reason” anyone needs for the man’s blindness is that it provides an opportunity for the glory of His Father. In this case, the glory of the Father is the work of the Father. What was the works of the Father? It was wrapped up in the revelation of the Covenant. Adhere to the Covenant, which includes the philosophical traditions that came with it, and you can get in on the works of God.

Jesus then points out how that won’t always be easy to do. Especially in this dark age of Hellenized corruption of the Hebrew traditions, it’s dangerous to point out the truth to those responsible for hiding that truth. Jesus came to carry out the mission for which His Father sent Him. The time was limited, so He had to keep at it. Up to now, the daylight of God’s patience was shining and He could bring the blessings of the Covenant. But given how close He had just come to being killed, it was for sure the day was approaching its end. The dark night of persecution was coming when it would be impossible for Him to perform any more miracles, or even teach in private, for that matter.

Jesus said that for as long as He was in the world in His human form, He was the clearest revelation of God that was possible. Everything that actually mattered in God’s eyes for His Creation was bound up in the person and work of the Son.

Indeed, as readers will know, the miracle healing of this blind man, such a mighty act of God’s glory, would become the excuse the Sanhedrin would need to make the world even darker. Jesus didn’t play it smart, as the world thinks of such things, but continues to provoke them with glorious acts of His Father’s power, and reaffirming the Covenant.

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Radix Fidem Curriculum: Cosmology

Posted on June 1, 2019 by ehurst

5. Cosmology

Jesus spoke often of the Kingdom of Heaven. Within the context of His ministry, the term refers to what would follow the Cross and the end of the Kingdom of Judah. While Judah was a human political entity, it had no purpose in existing without the Covenant of Moses. And Jewish leadership had abandoned that covenant long ago, so Jesus came with one final chance to restore the people of Israel to the purpose they had since the Call of Abraham: to be God’s unique revelation of His character and His will for fallen mankind. Jesus warned that God was moving forward with this demand that Israel either follow the Law into faith, or they would not be a part of the Messianic Kingdom.

The Jewish leadership saw only the political implications for themselves from a human viewpoint. They were incapable of grasping the meaning of things from the Spirit Realm. This is part of what Jesus was trying to say in His conversation with Nicodemus that night; He seemed to despair of the Jewish people rising beyond their material human existence and the petty concerns of this world. The nation had sunk wholly and completely into the Fall and had embraced this existence as the norm. For them, there could be no Messiah if He didn’t address their worldly concerns and materialistic dreams of hedonistic comfort.

Jesus flatly told Pilate that His Kingdom was not of this world. He tried to tell the Jewish leaders that, but they refused to hear it. They were incapable of hearing it. Their hearts were closed to the truth. It was as if their hearts were dead, buried under the rubble of a mystical heritage crushed by abstract reasoning and the supremacy of human intellect.

This world is not our home. We were never supposed to die. We were not made by God to face mortality, to be trapped within time and space constraints and morally blind. The Spirit Realm is ultimate reality, the place we were meant to live. The Spirit Realm is not another place; it is this same universe in which we live now, but our fleshly nature cannot perceive it directly. Our human intellect has no capability for handling such a thing. It is there, very much like a parallel universe, right there within reach, yet as far away as the other side of the vastness of space. You cannot go there without shedding this mortal flesh.

In the Kingdom of Heaven, death is just a circumstance. It is not a tragedy. We are forbidden to seek death for our personal convenience, but we are also taught to face it with celebration and joy when it comes at the hand of our Lord. Yes, death is frequently painful for those who face it, and pretty hard on those who are left behind. But death itself is no tragedy; death that isn’t justified by Biblical Law is a tragedy. It’s a tragedy because it’s contrary to the Covenant, contrary to God’s design. But the end of our mortal existence is just another phase along the eternal path.

We must get rid of the impression that this life is precious. The end can’t come soon enough. The Western notion that we have some kind of ownership of our remaining years of earthly life is a foul blasphemy. You and I are owned by Christ; we are His children and His divine heritage. Our years on this earth are a prison existence we are eager to escape. The only bright spot is the joys of shalom He grants as just a taste of what’s to come on the other side. But it’s just a taste; it’s not the real thing.

It’s a damnable idolatry to cling to youth and physical vitality. We are granted such things only for the glory of expending them for our Lord. You may well have a long and healthy life if you obey Biblical Law, but only if that is your mission from God. Enjoy it as the glory of the Lord, not something you can claim to own. The joy of living is obedience, not in the living itself.

The New Testament refers to death of the saints as “sleep” — taking a break while waiting for Christ to restore us to Eden and our eternal bodies. Dying is nothing. And if obedience to your convictions includes at times handing out death to others, that is no tragedy and certainly no sin. The only sin is when your convictions condemn you for harming another creature contrary to the Covenant of Biblical Law. Death is merely a fact of this world. Nothing that humans do outside of the Covenant will persist beyond the Day of Judgment. All of it will be burned up and everything restored to what Eden was, to the dominance of the Spirit Realm.

In our minds, we must learn to see this fallen realm for what it is, an ongoing tragedy in itself.

Let us imagine an invisible realm overlapping our world from Heaven. Call it the moral realm; it is the world we could live in if we simply could understand faith and trust in our Creator. Strive to realize that moral realm in this world, though it is invisible to anyone who has no moral awareness. It becomes rather like a separate and higher faculty of awareness, to see and taste the vitality of the natural world around us calling out to our hearts. We can learn to hear the trees of the field clapping their hands, the mountains and hills singing praise to God, the waters telling the story of His love, while the ground echoes back like the bass line on the refrain.

See reality with a heart of faith, for the heart is a superior sensory organ in its own right.

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I May Not Care

Posted on May 31, 2019 by ehurst

Because of my confidence that God can speak to you just like He does me, and that your hearts are at least as wise as my own, I’m going to trust that you will get what I’m saying here. I’m going to believe that you are capable of processing this by faith and that I need not spell out all of the implications in detail. The Lord seeks to change the channels in which our minds run so that we can pay more attention to His moral presence in our hearts.

I’ll give you a hint: Everything I say about politics and American culture comes from this fundamental orientation I’m about to describe. That includes the way I express myself in prophecy, too.

You shouldn’t try to be like me; be like Christ as best your heart understands Him. Walk in your own convictions. Search your heart and know what it demands of you. For example, you cannot eat my diet, because you don’t have my body and my environment. It won’t work for you. I can tell you about it, but that would be tedious to someone already listening to their own heart. If you were truly heart-led, you would already be pursuing the moving target of what to put in your mouth today, with an internal awareness of what your body needs by reading the signals it surely gives.

If it were as easy as using some physical attack to kill the fleshly idolatry of wanting a bunch of friends who are clones of my own soul, I would viciously attack with all kinds of weapons. If I could kill it in others, I would expend all my resources on that right now. What a blessing it would be to feel free to be ourselves! God made no two of us alike. There is no such thing as fairness; we are not equal. Not even if we narrow down this “equality” to apply to a few common human concerns, it’s still a big fat deception. It’s an ugly mythology, a lie from Hell.

Yes, there are things we can share, and we should be content with however little or much that might be in God’s mercy and grace between us. However, we should kill without mercy that impulse to cling to anyone who appears superficially like us in any way. It’s the Devil who keeps lurking in the background and waiting to spring on us at moments when we aren’t paying attention.

In this world, there simply will not be that many people who really like what I write on this blog. There aren’t that many folks who can tolerate the peculiar persona projected in that writing, never mind the real me you might meet in the flesh. You aren’t supposed to feel that overwhelming sense of affinity that characterizes “best friends forever.” You are supposed to find some of it a little iffy. And that’s supposed to be okay with both of us. That’s how God does things.

Your best friend forever (BFF) is Jesus Christ, not me. He’s mine, as well. He asks of me things He won’t ask of you, and vice versa. He’s given me things He didn’t give you, and vice versa. You don’t have to be comfortable with where He leads me, only find His grace in where He leads you. You should know for yourself where He leads you, and discern for your own mission whether our paths are in close proximity.

We need to think in terms of fellowship based on the degree of overlap in our convictions. I can tell you I certainly know when our convictions won’t allow us to work alongside each other. For example, some comments on this blog have gotten people banned. It wasn’t anger or personal spite; it was a matter of mission. If you had the time and were silly enough to do it, you could scan back at some comments where I’ve tolerated some stupid stuff from people because it was useful as a teaching tool for those who really do belong here. But I have begun in the past few years developing an ability to detect stuff I simply should not try to tolerate.

In real life, that means I am gotten better at discerning people I shouldn’t tolerate much. And I’ve gotten pretty good at ignoring people who take that personally. They don’t understand how Christ rules in my heart. To be brutally honest, I don’t give a shit how people feel about whether I will associate with them. I might even say it to them that way; whatever it takes to get them out of my hair. Only when the mission from God requires making terms of peace will I wade through their shit.

You would be amazed at the number of people who think they are going to hurt my feelings by telling me how mean I am. Telling me you were once a fan of my writing, but now you are going to snipe at me as you walk away — that’s a dead giveaway that Christ does not reign in your heart. You can hang around if you like, but I will shake your dust off my feet and keep on the path my Lord calls me to walk. However, if you learn to ignore stuff from me that you can’t swallow and leave it, or simply make a note on it in passing, that shows we can work together on the rest of the stuff we do share.

It’s not personal. At least, it is not personal in the sense of whether I can appreciate you as a fellow believer, and respect you as a child of God. I don’t have to judge you; I just have to decide if you will interfere. Nothing we do in this life matters a whit, except where it shines the light of glory on our Lord. And His glory can shine in our differences, because of how we learn to handle those differences with grace. I may empathize with your suffering and sorrow, and ask you to do the same for me, but personal offense is not excuse for pulling out the weepy violins. Call my attention to it if you think it matters, but don’t be surprised if I show no contrition. I’ll hug you and say, “Maybe you’ll understand it someday.”

I may not be allowed to care about your feelings on some things. I may even grieve at how it hurts you, but I will always put the mission first, however best I can understand it.

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Radix Fidem Curriculum: Privileges

Posted on May 31, 2019 by ehurst

4. Privileges

Jesus offers the same shalom as with the Covenant of Moses, but it still requires covenant faithfulness. Jesus is the Lord of His covenant household. He promises all the blessings Israel could have had, and much more, but we must take up our crosses and actually follow Him to where those blessings await us.

It is important to understand that even the New Testament uses a lot of symbolic language. When you see words translated into English as “law” in the Old Testament, it almost invariably represents the Covenant of Moses. Jesus personified the implications of that covenant. His miracles were a restoration of the blessings those people should have had under Moses. Every healing and demon expulsion was under the Law of Moses; it was a part of the shalom promised under that covenant.

But the Jewish scholars had perverted their understanding of that covenant to mean legalism. They used the word “law” to refer to their imaginary legalistic strictures. Thus, in the New Testament, the word “law” seldom means the actual Covenant of Moses. It must be read in context, where it often means “Talmud,” which was technically the laws applied to Jewish people. In those cases it is not a reference to the mystical revelation of God to guide fallen souls back to Eden. Sometimes it simply refers to the wider system by which the Jewish leadership justified the oppression of their own people, and the contempt they had for anyone who wasn’t one of their number.

Jesus gave us a shortcut past the law covenants, directly to a faith covenant, but that covenant offers the same blessings as every miraculous gift Israel received throughout her history. In order to actually claim those blessings requires a change in lifestyle, a reliance on the heart of convictions to lead our choices, to reign superior over fallen reason and sensory perception. That’s what “faith” means; it’s a synonym for commitment and obedience to our feudal Master, Jesus Christ. This is the covenant of adoption He offers to all.

We are allowed to see above the level of law covenant, to see the full depth of loving obedience that had always been implied by the Law Covenants of the Bible. In this, we can discover a heart-led power of conviction that brings us to Biblical Law as a single continuum leading all the way up to faith. We are permitted to receive the power and guidance of God’s Holy Spirit into our hearts and sense the divine joy of moral truth. We are reunited to ultimate reality, and not forced to rely on what our senses and logic can tell us. We are permitted to see the fingerprints and genius of our Creator in how things work.

Thus, Biblical Law as that sense of awareness of God’s divine moral character in reality, is its own reward. We don’t just grab our spiritual birth and run off to live by our own wits; that is not faith by any definition. We devote the remainder of our earthly existence to learning and growing in grace, transforming the mind and flesh into instruments of holiness, shining the glory of our God into this fallen world. We participate in His glory; we promote His agenda by our visibly restored life of obedience to the Covenant of Christ. We have the full power of the old Law Covenants fully demonstrated and revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.

When the New Testament talks about “free from the law,” that is a reference to the drudgery of Jewish legal mythology cooked up by rabbis deeply poisoned by Hellenism. That was a barrier, a hindrance to God’s revelation. It was not the blessed “word of truth” and revelation David so richly promotes in the Psalms. In Christ, we are free to actually enter the eternal Biblical Law of God’s divine moral character, which is the Gate of Eden. In Christ, we no longer need to strive under law covenants toward a self-death; we can seize self-death as a free offer up front.

We can then harvest the blessings of the Covenant through a life consistent with God’s eternal design. We can restore the intimate relations Adam and Eve had with the natural world in Garden of Eden, in the same way that Adam didn’t need to gain his food by the sweat of his brow. The ground is no longer cursed against us, a symbolic image that points to a restored communion with Creation. We can now rediscover how Creation actually works again. We can hear the song of celebration and praise from nature in our hearts.

This is the shalom of our Covenant in Christ. It means the natural world now regards us as VIPs, and we stand in the same place as Christ who commanded the storms to be still, who dispatched whole legions of demons, and was fully at peace when He faced the Cross. It’s not that we long to leave this natural world, but we can’t wait to be restored to the resurrected life of our Lord. This world is doomed, and we seek progressive freedom from its chains. But we keep in mind that “this world” means the fallen outlook, the moral blindness of Adam and Eve who hid from God.

The privileges of the Covenant pull us out of this world and into Eden, where we belong.

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Radix Fidem Curriculum: Covenants

Posted on May 30, 2019 by ehurst

The Bible addresses us in our fallen state. It says precious little of what came before, or what will follow after the Fall. This is mostly because fallen humans cannot comprehend life without mortality, or an existence not bound by time and space. Such things cannot be rendered in human languages. The Bible is God’s revelation on how to restore faith and obedience while in our fleshly sojourn, so that we can return to Eden.

The God of the Bible portrays Himself as an eastern potentate, a nomad desert sheikh as feudal lord over His people. His people are His true treasure; it’s not about land and resources as in the West. In an sheikh’s domain, he has family, servants or hirelings, and slaves. Scripture depicts slaves as the wider world of people who do not know God. They don’t care about His agenda and serve His purposes unwittingly. Servants or hirelings are not family, but are committed to His mastery and His designs so long as it serves their needs. The meaning of family should be obvious, with the caveat that this an Ancient Near Eastern family, not a Western household. An Ancient Near Eastern family fully identifies with their Lord.

Those who lived within an eastern sheikh’s domain were under one or another covenant, except for slaves. The people must know the expectations of their lord. Family had one covenant; this is their household, too. Servants had another covenant that presumes they have no inheritance in the household. Slaves were simply under command. An Ancient Near Eastern sheikh would typically hold forth adoption into the family household to anyone who was willing to pay the price: They had to take upon themselves a commitment of loyalty, a sort of blood oath, to justify bringing them into the family. And slaves could always embrace a servant’s covenant, as well. It was a fundamental hostility, based on a sense of identity, that kept them in slavery. Covenants were not contracts, wherein goods and services are committed. Covenants are a commitment of the self, entirely personal in nature. It’s a moral connection to the Lord of the domain. So it’s not a question of what you are or what you do, but who you are.

God does nothing in this world that isn’t revealed or explained under one or more covenants. Everything you can know about God in this fallen realm is wrapped up in covenant awareness. God has long established the terms under which we exist in this world, and it’s all covered under covenants. There is no relationship to God otherwise.

Every covenant in the Bible is a path toward Eden. The covenant that applies to you depends on your status in God’s domain. Abraham was called by God as a servant; he was under the Covenant of Noah. That’s a law covenant. In Abraham’s world, the intellectual assumptions would be quite different from ours. He would have instinctively understood the necessity of dwelling under that covenant until he absorbed enough of the moral nature of his sovereign to be ready for something higher. So we see that, once he has proved his obedience and commitment to his Lord, he is offered a covenant of faith — a covenant family adoption. It was a new turning point on the same path to Eden he had long traveled.

He was treated differently as family, and the demands were actually much higher. It was necessary he be willing to sacrifice his only natural born son. To him, that was tantamount to sacrificing everything that mattered. It was a demand of self-death. Jesus said that Abraham is in Heaven (Matthew 22:29-33). People have always been offered an opportunity of spiritual birth into a covenant of faith.

For a time, the nation of Israel lived under a law covenant. It was not different from Noah’s Covenant, but a specific application of it. It was that people, that place and that time. Noah applies to the whole human race; what Moses offered was a far better explanation of what was inherent in Noah, but for that specific nation. They had a special status in revelation, one they trashed over the centuries. Moses ended at the Cross; the Temple veil was torn open and things reverted to their previous state. And the ancient faith covenant of Abraham was updated as the Covenant of Christ. There had always been law covenants and faith covenants.

Law covenants were intended to prepare the mind and flesh to obey the Spirit of God. They presumed one would commit to the Lord from the heart, which the Bible regards as the seat of the will, of convictions and faith. Faith cannot arise in the intellect, which is under the Fall and inherently hostile to faith. It has to be imposed on the mind from above. So the first step to rising above slavery to sin is to invest one’s conscious awareness in the heart. This qualifies one for a law covenant as a willing servant of God. Then one can serve until the soul has been conditioned. Servants were treated the same as minor children in the Master’s domain; they had to develop an awareness and desire for the Lord’s interests.

In Christ, we gain a new wrinkle in this regime. Rather than slog through a law covenant on the way to learning self-death, one can simply seize upon self-death up front. Instead of a highly veiled reference to the Flaming Sword, we now have the very obvious Cross. We still have to learn how to be His children and to take up the family business with a loving heart, but we can do all of that after coming to Christ and making Him Lord. Thus, embracing Christ is a shortcut to family adoption, but it still means embracing the covenant of faith and all it requires.

The law covenants were to exemplify what faith looks like in terms of behavior and thinking. They have always been the bottom half of the faith covenants.

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Radix Fidem Curriculum: The Fall and Consequences

Posted on May 29, 2019 by ehurst

2. The Fall and Consequences

We weren’t designed for this world, as it now exists. The Bible refers to our fallen condition as the Curse. Creation itself, in particular the natural world around us, is not fallen, but we are.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is better translated as judging good and evil. The Fall was the choice to trust our human capabilities rather than rely on divine revelation for what was good and evil. It means relying on sensory data and reason to decide what really matters. With this choice, our flesh was turned into a mortal cloak. We are no longer in eternal bodies, such as the risen Christ bore that forty days after His Resurrection. He was careful to demonstrate that an eternal body is not merely a ghostly existence. He was unhindered by physical barriers and appeared in multiple distant places within moments. But in our current flesh, we are now confined under space-time barriers.

This is not a case where the decisions of two people unfairly affect thousands of succeeding generations. You cannot read Western jurisprudence back into a Hebrew mystical narrative. Rather, we have to start from the Hebrew point of view to understand what the story of Adam and Eve tells us. That includes feudal assumptions. God Himself is feudal in His divine moral character, and it shows up in Creation. In other words, reality itself honors feudal authority. Adam had the authority to make a choice regarding all of his descendants. The consequences of his choice fall on us, since the entire human race descended from him. This is right and just in God’s eyes; He honors choices made by those He elevates to high stewardship authority.

The importance is not to provoke a sense of unfairness and futility, but to warn you to carefully consider moral choices made at critical moments. Something that seems small in our reasoning may have tremendous consequences for those who come behind us. Until we begin to “reason” from the heart in obedience to divine revelation, we cannot possibly comprehend what reality is all about. In that moment of choice, Adam and Eve decided to trust their human logic and their sensory data, instead of going with the revelation of God. It was not a move of faith. This is the crux of the Fall.

So a critical element in the narrative is that you understand it is our nature to be deviate from revelation. The Curse of the Fall is God’s way of showing us that there are consequences for bad choices. His grace will not let us go on in sin. Obviously, redemption means restoring us to a heart-led reliance on conviction and revelation. But from where we now stand under the Curse, living with mortality, the only real answer is death — we must leave this life to return to Eden. That’s what the Flaming Sword image tells us. However, it also symbolizes that we must accomplish the restoration of faith before we die. Indeed, that Flaming Sword also symbolizes self-death, the slaughter of the fleshly fallen nature in a moral sense, as well. Thus, the key to redemption is self-death, the choice to turn away from our instinctive reliance on the flesh and a return to faith.

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