Theology and Practice: Eschatology

Posted on May 9, 2019 by ehurst

This is a big can of worms. There is such a load of manure out there and it needs to be buried and composted where it will do some good. I’m not going to bother listing all the crazy theories, nor addressing them directly.

Jesus Christ will return someday in the future, quite literally. He warned us that it would be impossible to know, or even guess intelligently, based on any current events leading up to that moment. He pointedly said that the Father keeps it a secret from all other beings, including Jesus Himself. But we do have some idea what will take place when He does return.

1 Corinthians 15:51-52 — Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed — in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 — For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord.

2 Peter 3:10 — But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up.

Paul and Peter were addressing contextual questions from those whom they wrote. We also have the passage in Matthew 24-25 that most Western Christians get all muddled up. And they refuse to understand that the Book of Revelation says darned little about the End Times and a lot about how God operates, particularly in terms of His wrath on sin. There have been, and will be, times of great tribulation, but there will be no Great Tribulation as taught in the Dispensationalist mythology. There will be no preceding clues to His Return.

What will happen when He does return is a grand homecoming in the sky. All of the Elect will rise to meet Him in the air, with the dead rising first from their graves. While we are up there, He will restore Eden. That is, everything mankind has done to Creation since the Fall will be destroyed and forgotten. There is no human accomplishment that matters to God. Only the changes in our souls are eternal. Somewhere during this process, everyone who is not Elect will go to face eternal judgment. Their presence on the earth will be forgotten, too.

Once things have been restored, we will all descend and go about whatever it was God designed us for in the first place. Since all of this is incomprehensible to us, that’s the end of the story — Eternally Happy Ever After.

Further embellishments are obscene.

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Radix Fidem Curriculum 03

Posted on May 9, 2019 by ehurst

4. From Conquest to Collapse

The Nation of Israel had a mission from God. They were chosen to live in such a way as to reveal that what God was offering was the best we can hope for in this fallen world.

Keep in mind the nature of this covenant. God had come as an powerful rescuer, pulling Israel out of the fire. They had been won back from Pharaoh. At the mountain, God offered them a treaty that was quite common to that time and place. He would be their emperor and they would become His vassals. He promised abundant provisions and protection if they would commit themselves to learning His ways. They agreed to it unanimously.

But they were too weak to keep up their end of the deal, so God left them sitting in the wilderness until a fresh generation grew up that had known only tents and wilderness, along with some warfare. They were able to handle anything, but kept falling short.

Don’t let anyone kid you about the Canaanites. They were a threat to whole human race because of their unspeakable depravity. The world is already a fallen and nasty place, but these folks were off the scale. The Law of Moses was from God’s own mouth, and He condemned these people to death. After the first flush of destroying some demonic temples and those who served in them, Israel kept backing off and not dealing with the rest. So the Lord left these morally filthy nations there to tempt Israel and keep them weak.

Things got so bad that at one point, they completely lost all copies of the Covenant for some fifty years. Old Testament history is a long sad tale of decline punctuated with a few bright moments of glory. Finally God took away the land He promised to give the descendants of Abraham. First the Northern Kingdom was hauled away, and then the Southern. But at least the southern half were determined to keep their identity as a nation.

They sat in Babylon for a while and absorbed some of the culture and mythology. They picked up this crazy notion that money was important in religion, a peculiar Babylonian idea. When the Persians came, they also thought so, but added a new troubling element. The Medo-Persian Zoroastrian religion caused them to believe that once a ruler issued a decree, even he could not rescind it. Somehow the Israelites absorbed this crazy notion and began thinking it applied to their God.

The small handful of Israelites who returned to their homeland were mostly those who weren’t making it big in Babylon, and had little to lose by leaving. But they brought with them a heavy dose of materialism they didn’t have before, and that crazy notion that God could not punish them because they were following the rules. About the only good lesson they learned was to stay away from blatant idolatry, but now they were suckers for a subtle form of mental idolatry. It ate away at their faithfulness. By the time Alexander the Great marched into the land, they capitulated and began absorbing his Hellenism. Hellenism was openly hostile to the ancient Hebrew culture.

Moses had been the very soul of Hebrew mysticism. For centuries the core of Hebrew culture was an otherworldly call to see through the provisions of the Covenant and embrace the faith of Abraham. By the time Christ was born, they had nearly forgotten all of that. They were so enamored with this new worldly form of logic and reason that they used it to pervert their understanding of the Word. The result was the hideous legalism we saw with the Pharisees.

In the minds of the Pharisees and their religious allies, their reason was their god. Their legalistic assumptions included the idea that God owed them because they were so wonderful. They taught that God was bound by their reasoning about His Law. Their oral traditions trumped the Old Testament writings. A great many of them never even read the Scriptures, but spent their time memorizing the rulings of previous scholars, and dreaming up new rules to pile on top. None of their heroes would have recognized this highly evolved religion; the Old Testament saints would have been horrified of what it had become.

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Radix Fidem Curriculum 02

Posted on May 8, 2019 by ehurst

3. Abraham through Moses

Ask the Hebrew people and their primary ancestor is Abraham, so we’ll start there.

We know he first appears as a resident of Ur. His ethnic identity is unknown, but we do know something about his cultural background. The one thing we can say for sure is that he was in the noble class, and that means a hefty education. Given where he lived and when, that means an education in the proud Mesopotamian academic traditions. Consistent across several different civilizations that arose and dominated Mesopotamia at different times is a vast library of myths from every known religion. They were experts in the human instinct for religion, and kept a catalog of various deities, where and by whom they were worshiped, and what was typical of that worship. Abraham would have been steeped in that tradition.

We know that Abraham perceived a divine call from a deity he would have called “El.” Sometime shortly after, his father moved the entire clan to the opposite end of the Mesopotamian Valley, up to Haran. From there Abraham eventually set out for the Promised Land. As part of his divine call, he was forced to give up the urbane existence he had in Mesopotamia and become a tent-dwelling nomad, something generally despised by his people. The Book of Genesis follows his adventures through is lineage down to Jacob, whose name is changed to Israel by that same God who led them to that land. We are given the marvelous take of Joseph and the move of the entire household down to the Nile Delta in Egypt.

Not much history of the area is recounted in the Bible until we get to Moses. Moses was adopted by the imperial household there in Egypt. That means he got a very strong education in Egypt’s traditions. Then he spent another forty years under the tutelage of Jethro, who was a priestly chief of Midian. Who were the Midianites? Another tribal nation descendant from Abraham. What this did was restore the ancient Mesopotamian education Moses missed growing up in Pharaoh’s court. So now Moses has encountered the full range of traditions for the entire Ancient Near East.

Eventually he leads Israel in the Exodus. During that trek, he spends forty days on top of a mountain in the Presence of God. During that forty days, God helps Moses sort through this massive educational background and pick out from all that mythology and lore what it was God considered important.

Looking back across this whole process from Abraham to Moses, we see that God didn’t simply pick from what was available, though it did include that. Rather, the Bible reveals a process by which God steered things so that Moses stood before Him on that mountain bearing the proper combination of things God wanted in place as the context for revelation. The Nation of Israel was His chosen vessel, built up from selected elements — language, culture and intellectual traditions — that was appropriate for telling the world what He wanted humans to know about Him.

Our modern Western tendency to view Moses as an ignorant savage with a poor understanding of God is the height of blasphemous arrogance. God, by His own hand, built the Hebrew culture and language as the best way to make Himself known. If you really want to know who God is as a Person, it should be obvious that the ancient Hebrew culture is the place to start.

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Admin: Theology and Practice Compilation

Posted on May 7, 2019 by ehurst

The Theology and Practice series is not complete. I’m convinced that there are yet a few more questions lurking out there, so I’m not going to turn it into a book yet. However, what we have covered so far is currently compiled into a single webpage on the static server PDF in the media files here. Here’s the link:

Theology and Practice

If you want to save a copy, all of the formatting info is built directly into the file, so just right-click in your browser and save as a web document. Once I sense that we’ve covered enough issues, I’ll transform it into a book and publish it in more formats.

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Radix Fidem Curriculum 01

Posted on May 7, 2019 by ehurst

This is another project I’ve had on the back burner. The idea is to present the background for the Radix Fidem Covenant. The format is an outline one could use for a public presentation. It’s not a script, but the outline of things we hold in common. Anyone could use it and personalize it, but this is meant to provide a frame of reference.

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1. Introduction

Religion is the organized human expression of commitment to a deity.

You can have a lot of random individual expressions of faith, but that’s not religion. Only when you organize it and share it with others does it become religion. Radix Fidem is not just a religion, but a religious study of religion itself. It is a body of ideas concerned with how we go about organizing together with others in pursuit of answering the demands of faith in Jesus Christ.

Radix Fidem is Latin for “root of faith.” While anyone is welcome to join us, this material is not aimed at growing our numbers, resources or fame. The idea here is to share the fundamental questions, and the answers on which we have settled, to encourage others to come up with their own answers. We would much rather see you accept the challenge to reexamine the roots of your own faith than rope you into our choices.

Indeed, our organization remains informal. We don’t have a tax-exemption agreement with the government, so if anyone feels led to contribute, make it a personal gift to anyone who is involved. It’s between you and God and the person who receives it. You’ll simply have trust us that it will be put to good use. If that makes you nervous, keep your donations or give them to some other cause. We aren’t in this for the money. We are seeking peace with God first; peace with others has to rest on that. We do what we do because we are convinced it pleases God, regardless whether it pleases or displeases anyone else.

We believe that faith is inherently personal, between you and God. None of us can pretend to know the right answers for anyone else called by God. However, we know that faith also demands we find ways to work with each other as much as possible. Jehovah revealed Himself through covenants, and a covenant is those issues on which we can agree and move forward in a community of faith. This study is not our covenant; that’s covered separately. Rather, this is to explain how we came to our covenant. This is the assumptions behind it.

2. Foundation

We follow Christ. The primary source on Christ is the Bible. Most of us are from a Protestant background, so we use the Protestant canon. There are no English translations free of mistakes, and some are better than others, but we tend to use the New King James Version. Find your own peace with God about your choices, but that’s what you’ll get from us.

This Bible comes to us from a unique cultural context. If you read it from your own cultural perspective, you’ll get things wrong — lots of things. Jesus was a Hebrew man; He spoke their language and His brain was organized according to their record of divine revelation. He was the Son of God, God in the flesh, but He grew up fully human like everyone of us. His upbringing included a certain range of things we can study and understand.

To discern the full impact of what that means, we owe to God and ourselves to study and understand that background. Some of it we can’t fully embrace, but some of it was built by God specifically according to His own moral character and the design of revelation. It’s a tall order to, as Paul said, rightly divide the Scripture and discern the difference between flavoring and the essence of holiness.

Warning up front: We tend to see a great deal of continuity between the Old and New Testaments. You’ll be able to see that more clearly once we get into the details, but watch out for this as we proceed.

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Theology and Practice — Divine Sovereignty

Posted on May 6, 2019 by ehurst

No sooner do I announce an intermission and I get a very good question.

The doctrine of Divine Sovereignty includes several related theological controversies, most notably predestination. The problem is that most of what is out there rests on some false assumptions about God and His revelation. Once more: The God of the Bible is a covenant deity. If you are outside of the covenants, you cannot hope to understand or benefit from understanding. The fundamental issue is human submission to the Creator, and submission means an eastern feudal covenant. Every question rests on whether you have first knelt before Him in covenant loyalty.

For everyone else, God characterizes His authority over humanity as herding cattle. The symbolism is consistent in Hebrew literature. For example, King David uses this image several times in the Psalms (68:30 for one), in contrast to the image of herding the sheep of His pasture. Ask anyone with experience dealing with these animals; it’s two totally different worlds. Thus, we know that cattle can be individually relational with their herders, but once in the herd, everything changes. They are then moved around by pushing, and often act confused. Sheep are led by the voice of the shepherd, and each one responds rather individually, so long as there is no perceived threat.

His sheep are under His covenant; the cattle are not.

This whole question, then, operates on two levels. In terms of the Spirit Realm, everything is incomprehensible. The Lord has created a culture of Ancient Near Easter (ANE) mysticism that permits the heart to understand and lead, but the mind is supposed to serve and obey the heart. Parables are the language by which the mind is conditioned to obey the heart. I can explain some of the symbolism, but if your heart is not in the lead, your brain will struggle with the symbols. The critical element is submission; the heart of submission to God can understand God. The mind without the leadership of the heart is inherently rebellious and asks all kinds of impertinent questions, makes demands that God won’t even answer.

The teaching in the Bible that God is sovereign registers poorly with human reason, but is reassuring and joyous to the heart. The heart recognizes what this points to, while the intellect refuses to go there. Thus, the Bible says that those who will enter God’s household as adopted family members are Elect, chosen by God despite our rotten unworthiness. To the intellect, this is “unfair” because it obviously means some are not chosen. But it is utterly impossible to explain the basis for God’s election of some, so the Bible makes no effort to declare it. This is also unfair to the intellect. Human reason misses the point; logic cannot get it.

But the Bible also says that in the Fallen Realm, humans do have choices. There is an element of volition that justifies separating out sheep from cattle. Anyone can be a sheep under His covenants. Most of humanity sees no reason for it, and so end up herded like cattle. Why was the Pharaoh of Exodus herded like a bull? Because he refused to be a sheep. He thus left God no choice but to train him like a rodeo bull that would buck and twist and refuse to be led quietly to his own benefit. But did Pharaoh end up in Hell? That’s a separate question that only God can answer, and He’s not telling.

Part of this picture is that anyone who seeks human political authority is already morally degraded. His sheep know better than that. God’s people will accept authority from the hands of God and serve His will. Everyone else will seize power by any means they see useful, and they are fundamentally unfit to rule. So God’s prodding and herding of political rulers tends to be fairly harsh and painful, more so than His prodding of less ambitious cattle.

Often in the New Testament, the term “salvation” does not refer directly to being Spirit born. Spiritual birth is implied as the natural culmination of the self-death, but it’s never held forth as a direct offer. Scripture flatly states that God alone understands spiritual birth, and controls that process entirely. No one can choose spiritual birth; their fleshly nature excludes it (see Romans 8 and “carnal mind”). However, it is possible to be a good servant of God without being family. It’s a false dichotomy to assume all His sheep are born-again. The Bible says quite clearly that one can reasonably choose the noble path of obedience to the Law Covenants, that one can be heart-led without spiritual birth. The Scripture frequently demands that people submit to Jehovah as Lord from the heart, that this is a human choice He holds open for all humanity.

Lots of people camp in the shade of Eden without ever getting through the Flaming Sword gate. This is what the Old Testament Covenant of Moses was all about. It was to bring everyone close enough to see the Flaming Sword, the final requirement of self-death to become a member of God’s family. The fleshly nature had to taste execution by the hand of the one who had the fleshly nature. For those whom God has elected for eternity, the process is easy. They already have the power to choose self-death. Those who lack election won’t find that power. But an awful lot of shalom is available to folks who just can’t go through that. And this is why the New Testament refers to the kind of “salvation” that means heart-led obedience to Christ as Lord, the Living Law of God, but does not make it necessarily equivalent to spiritual birth.

This is where mainstream evangelicals fail: They do not make adequate allowance for the household of God to include willing servants who aren’t slaves. It’s easy to understand how most of the world is going to Hell and are thus unwitting slaves of God’s plans. And it’s not too hard to grasp how His Children are not slaves. But virtually no one among evangelical leaders understand the place of free servants in the household of God. And because they leave that out of the picture, they tend to develop a lot of theology that ignores this middle category, and they misunderstand the way the Bible talks about them. Their theology is built on a false dichotomy.

This is why we have these highly manipulative “invitations” after the sermon in evangelical churches. Meanwhile, liturgical churches tend to dismiss the whole idea of spiritual birth in the first place, and no one is thought of as anything more than a servant of God.

As a doctrine, the Sovereignty of God, along with Predestination, is falsely understood by most of those who profess Christian religion. Divine Election is quite real, but is not the end of every question. All the various attempts to nail it down with logic and reason are based on rejecting the heart-led understanding that the Bible takes for granted. The Bibles teaches us to work with everyone as if they were either slaves (cattle) or servants of God (sheep), and never mind the question of whether they are Elect or born-again. We can have limited discussions about the significance of spiritual birth and some of the implications, but it has nothing at all to do with a human choice. We want people closer to Eden’s Gate during this life on whatever terms God allows; He alone is the Master on who gets through that gate after death.

Our church activities should assume conversion is separate from spiritual birth. And we should be very careful to make conversion not a sales pitch, but a genuine choice for someone drawn to it on their own volition. The church is a converted body of people who cling to a shared covenant. Don’t assume everyone is born-again and so build policies and activities on that. We need a radical redefinition of church that aims at the heart-led way of serving Christ.

I can know that I am born-again. That is the power of conviction in my heart. You cannot know for sure that I am born-again, even if I tell you. What you can know is that I am heart-led and committed to Christ, if you use your heart as a sensory organ to discern my heart. That’s the basis for doing church. That’s the proper basis for building a theology about the sovereignty of God.

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Theology and Practice: Intermission

Posted on May 5, 2019 by ehurst

Not that “intermission” is a theological topic, but I am taking an intermission in this series. I’ll be glad to address any questions you may have in the future, but I sense that we can move on to other things. You will surely see more titles in this series somewhere down the road.

Would anyone be surprised that the traffic on this blog suddenly plunged when I dared to disparage the modern State of Israel? This will remain a choke point for many Western readers. I can’t apologize for my viewpoint on that issue. “Here I stand; I can do no other,” as someone famously said regarding his convictions. But how people react to such writing is a symbol of just how far outside the mainstream we are under the covenant of Radix Fidem.

At the same time, I remain utterly convinced that this may change in the near future. We are on the threshold of dramatic changes in our world. God’s wrath is poured out; the hounds of Hell have been set loose. In the coming days people will find everything they’ve trusted is swept away. The mainstream will fragment, scattering in all directions. I can’t promise many of them will turn to us for rescue, but there will be some.

So I was pleased to review some of the basics of our shared approach to religion. In the process I looked at a lot of current theological debates. Most of them were simply impertinent for us. For example, we have for more than a decade this debate between N.T. Wright and John Piper over what Paul said about the doctrine of justification. Let me assure you that most observers appear to be as confused as these two, even while everyone affirms they really do understand what’s going on.

So let me give you a sample of how we handle this doctrine of justification: As commonly defined, it’s not a biblical issue at all. It arose as a logical implication of some words Paul used in Romans, among other places. Paul talks about how we are “justified by faith” (Romans 3:28). This declaration comes in the context of discussing “works” and “law” and some other terms that have garnered a lot of attention and debate over the past 2000 years.

Most of the disputes arise from certain a priori assumptions about how to approach reading Scripture in the first place. The biggest problem is that most people want to nail down some intellectual statement to lock in place a kind of doctrine and orthodoxy, instead of reading Paul’s letter in its own context. They even claim that such orthodoxy is the context.

But what was Paul really saying about the religion of the Jews in his day? If you want to understand how Piper and Wright attempt to address that, you’ll have to pay a bit of money. Their books against each other are not free, and some of the most in-depth reporting on their debate is behind paywalls. Meanwhile, the studies of Jewish intellectual culture in Jesus’ and Paul’s day are broadly available on the Net for free.

That ancient Hebrew tradition would not approach Paul’s writings the way Western theologians do, evangelicals in particular. Paul was drawing a contrast between Jewish Talmudic legalism versus the ancient Hebrew mysticism that he shared with Jesus. In summary, Paul was saying the Jewish rabbis were wrong about their Talmudic approach to things. Their path ends in Hell, and garners God’s wrath along the way to Hell. And in the final Day of Judgment, they will be rejected as members of God’s family. The word “justified” is a code word for being pronounced by God as free of those penalties. There is no need to dig into long philosophical discussions about precise mechanisms and legal standing. Let’s rejoice that by our firm commitment to God, we are welcomed into His home.

But then we have to wrestle with the evangelical fixation on “getting saved” and all that stuff. We reject that obsession because we reject the underlying assumptions. For us, the whole thing is a tornado in a water glass — it may be entertaining briefly, but let’s quit playing with our food. We have work to do.

That work is to get ourselves firmly rooted in our shared faith so we can trust each other. We need to trust each other because there is a prophetic mission of facing tribulation, through faith and seeking shalom, as the only answer to all the world’s ills. That means projecting the power of Biblical Law into the world around us against the rising chaos. The whole point of faith is seizing the peace with God that enables us to quit worrying about all the philosophical questions when He calls us to act.

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Theology and Practice: Shalom

Posted on May 5, 2019 by ehurst

Shalom is best understood as peace with God.

Once again, the only way to see this is in the context of covenants. Peace with God is not a reward; it is a context we are driven to build. It is the protective shade of Eden, available only by hanging around the gate where the Flaming Sword stands waiting.

The only proper way to tell of this is through parables, symbols, figures of speech taken from the Bible. The whole idea with the Flaming Sword is that you turn that blade on your own fallen nature. It’s the same idea as nailing your fleshly nature to the Cross. The Flaming Sword is simply the older symbol from Genesis, while the Cross is the foundation of the New Testament. Either way, the whole point of God’s redemptive revelation is to bring you to the point of self-death.

There is a proximity factor here. The closer you get to God’s truth, the better things can be. The whole idea of the Law Covenants was to draw you closer to Eden. You can gain some measure of blessing without quite reaching the threshold of self-death. But the whole point was to bring you to that place where you no longer trust your fleshly capabilities. You should stop trusting your talents, intelligence, and human reason to answer the important questions. The only valid answer is divine revelation.

Eden represents full and natural communion with God in an unfallen condition. It’s what we were designed for from the moment of Creation. It has us in a form that is not bound by space-time, but can move within it. This the meaning behind the image of the Tree of Life. Adam and Eve bought into the lie of Satan that their own human capabilities were enough to judge what was morally good and evil. The Tree of the Knowledge, with its the Forbidden Fruit, represents judging good and evil without reference to God’s revelation. We were designed to operate under communion with the Holy Spirit through our hearts; our hearts are supposed to dominate our intellects.

So the Fall was closing off our minds from our hearts, and ignoring that “still small voice” in our souls that knows the truth instinctively. Where we stand today, we’ve had our minds trained and conditioned by centuries of lies. We are far, far from the shady borders of Eden. We have labored and all we have is thistles and thorns, nothing really useful for our human existence. We cannot enjoy the shade of Eden until we move back in that direction. The question is: How good is your shelter from God’s wrath on sin? Moral nakedness is full exposure to wrath. Eden’s garden canopy is a complete shelter, but the Law Covenants were meant to provide partial covering, to get us on the right path (skins instead of fig leaves). The path of revelation brings us closer to Eden. A partial truth will work better than none at all. The whole point of the Law Covenants is then to get us moving in the right direction, back toward Eden.

The Law of Moses offered blessings for those who would not walk the whole way. The blessings of shalom are there in part for those whose consciousness never fully awakens to the moral sphere. An element in that partial blessing is living with folks who have been fully awakened. That’s part of the proximity principle that makes evangelism and missions so powerful.

Thus, as far as the fallen world is concerned, shalom carries a massive element of pragmatism. It is in this sense that “all truth is God’s truth.” Figuring out how this reality actually works is a part of shalom and some elements are within reach of minds that are simply closer to divine revelation. This is why we can characterize shalom as “social stability.” In broad terms, whatever social stability God offers under Biblical Law is the best anyone can hope for without Christ.

We further break shalom down into comfortable prosperity, better health and disease resistance, safety from human and natural threats, and a stable social order based on how humans are actually designed. Biblical Law is more practical than anything humans can cook up without revelation, though the two will surely overlap some. For example, the Red Pill men’s movement does reflect to some degree the biblical truth of human nature after the Fall. The Red Pill will not give you the full wisdom of distinguishing between divine design and what we have because of the Curse of the Fall, but it will explain what we are facing right now in terms of human nature. There are a whole range of things where we can find revelation overlapping with things humans can discern, if they begin moving back toward Eden.

Dare I say that shalom also blesses things like tech support and sanity with using computers? Or that shalom includes good automotive maintenance? This is along with communion and peace with the natural world, and good stewardship of natural resources.

A critical element in Biblical Law is how to make the most of the situation after the Fall. The best way to deal with that is to begin the process of weakening the fleshly nature and strengthening the divine nature we all have. Jesus on the Cross paid for a shortcut to the breakpoint of self-death, but that in turn is a call to then spend the rest of our human lives restoring the reign of revelation through our hearts. Church is the place where we gather and study how to implement shalom. There is no other accomplishment that matters; church is not about growing in membership, wealth or social/political influence. Those are nice things, but not the goal. It’s all about shalom as the divine heritage we reclaim.

Let’s not get lost in artificial absolutism. There is no perfect paradise on this earth. The realization of shalom is meant to be fuzzy, not sharply defined. It involves multiple people with their own individual callings and missions. It cannot conform to any human notions of precision. People inclined away from revelation should be able to ignore the difference it makes to serve the Lord. There has to be a measure of deniability because shalom requires volition. God will not violate the freedom of conscience in terms of living in this fallen world. Thus, our shalom is a matter of good or better, but perfection is not even on the map.

Our God is not a brittle and sharp objective standard; He is a real Person with a dynamic and flowing relationship we would expect from any person.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 8:13-20

Posted on May 4, 2019 by ehurst

When the members of the Sanhedrin brought before Jesus the woman caught in adultery, they weren’t the only critics around. After the accusers all left, there were still several Pharisees observing this whole scene. After Jesus turned and told His disciples that He was the light of the world, these Pharisees jumped in to object.

What’s at stake here is their claim to God’s approval. Inherent in the challenge Jesus raised with the Sanhedrin was their fitness to rule the nation under the Covenant. The Pharisees felt the same sting of defeat as their own. This was a very public rebuke of a system that favored these elitists, and this rebuke condemned them as unfit to even understand justice, much less make it happen.

They were trying to keep this courtroom setting alive by pointing out that the judge had stepped out of line. He was testifying of His own character as judge without any supporting witnesses. How could He claim to be the Messiah preparing to lead the nation if He was tooting His own horn? Keep in mind that the Messiah would be both king and chief justice in our terms.

His answer was that there was no one else who knew Him well enough to assess His fitness as judge and Messiah. He was the only one who knew where He came from and where things would end up from here. They had no clue about any of that. They didn’t operate from the heart, but from a hostile intellect that presumed to judge God Himself. They were judging according to their own fleshly capabilities without any input from the Holy Spirit. Even if someone presented evidence they could understand, they still wouldn’t be capable of processing it without a heart-led perspective.

Jesus called attention to the fact He had not judged anyone at all. He simply raised the very pertinent question with the prosecution whether anyone was morally upright enough to bring the case. He didn’t say they were morally unfit, but let them judge for themselves whether they could face God and execute on His behalf. They could not. He didn’t judge the woman, either, but told her to repent and clean up her life. He wasn’t even judging the Pharisees.

Even if He had passed judgment, it would have stood in God’s court. Indeed, God was His Father, and had commissioned and sent Him to bring judgment against sin. Such a commission demonstrated the level of trust the Father had in the Son to do justice. Indeed, He bore His father’s approval as only a faithful son could.

According to the Law of Moses — the same law the Pharisees claimed was backing them up — two agreeing witnesses were sufficient to verify any contention and win the case. Were they paying attention enough to hear God’s testimony? Jesus asserted His authority, and His Father backed Him up. Therefore, their opinions were immaterial. Jesus was eager to stand before God and have His claims tested. Were they ready for that?

It’s not as if the Pharisees were ignorant of what Jesus meant, referring to God as His Father. They were being sarcastic. “Oh, yeah? We don’t see Your Father around here.”

Jesus said it wouldn’t matter if God did show up in a physical form. They wouldn’t recognize Him because they never knew Him in the first place. Had they been equipped to discern that Jesus was the Living Law of God in their midst, they would have already recognized the Father’s Presence in His teaching. They were confined to their senses and reason, having long ago shut off their hearts.

John notes in passing that this scene took place in the Temple Treasury space, or more accurately, the storage area. This was located along either side of the Court of Women, featuring open porticos faced with columns. It was away from the Court of Gentiles where there was a lot more noise and traffic, and the space between the wall of the storerooms and the columns was relatively quiet, a good place for small teaching sessions and debates.

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Theology and Practice: Heart Led

Posted on May 4, 2019 by ehurst

This becomes a point of theology simply because Western Christians ignore it, or are hostile to it.

The essence of the Fall was choosing human reason over faith. Human reason and intellect is inherently hostile to genuine faith. To then rely on reason to justify faith is the height of stupidity. In Scripture, the very concept of faith — commitment to Jehovah as Lord — starts with subjecting the intellect to the heart. In the Bible, the heart is the seat of conviction and the sole point of contact with the Holy Spirit. Conviction is awakened by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Without conviction, the heart is merely the seat of sentiment, however strongly held.

The heart is also a sensory organ that can directly read and assess the divine moral character of God woven into reality. That is, the heart is able to discern moral truth from Creation itself. However, the mind was given by God to formulate and implement the human response to the demands of faith. The brain must be taught and conditioned by Scripture, especially the Law Covenants, so that it is ready to respond properly to the move of conviction and the wind of the Spirit blowing through our souls.

The breaking point is when the soul embraces self-death. This is when the very root of who we are kneels at the Cross, which is the current manifestation of the Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden. The Old Testament’s turning the Flaming Sword on your fallen nature is the same as the New Testament’s nailing your fleshly nature to the Cross. There is no possible way of explaining in clinical terms how the soul arrives at that point, but we do know that Christ made it possible to reach that without first going through the Law Covenants. We have an advantage not available to folks who died prior to Christ, in that we can turn to Him as the Living Law. But all of this assumes you will still seek to know Biblical Law after embracing Him.

As those who seek to manifest the Covenant of Noah, we must understand that the heart-led way is inherent in that covenant. It is essential to serving Christ, Whom you cannot know without engaging the heart as the center of conscious awareness. You most certainly can belong to Him without shifting to heart leadership, and you can know that you are His, but you cannot follow Him without the leadership of the heart. That is inherent in the gospel message, because it was an a priori assumption of His Hebrew cultural and intellectual background.

This fundamental orientation was lost when Hellenism collided with the Hebrew people. This is the primary failure behind the Talmud and Judaism. The heart-led discernment is personal in nature; the intellect without the heart leadership presumes to be logical and objective, and refuses to admit that it cannot shed the personal biases of the flesh. The mind is arrogant and contrary to revelation. This was just getting rolling when Jesus confronted His nation and called them back to the ancient mystical ways.

In the New Testament, you can see references to faith, convictions and being led by, or filled with, the Holy Spirit. All of those refer to the heart-led way, but did not use such language because they took it for granted everyone understood it that way. Since those days, the church leadership of each succeeding generation drifted farther and farther away from it. Today we have major leaders insisting that faith must be reasonable, when Scripture says reason is hostile to genuine faith. Faith is inherently unreasonable.

You are not following Christ if you aren’t a mystic who follows the heart-led way.

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