Random Chapel Shots

Posted on April 17, 2019 by ehurst

A few random images from my prayer rides so far this week…

First up is a shelter I saw standing on the north bank of the North Canadian River at the mouth of Crutch Creek. You can see a rather primitive attempt in front of the better one. What doesn’t show in the image was that there hung a cable across the river just above this thing, tied between two stout trees. I can’t guess how the cable is used, but I don’t think it’s heavy enough to ride across safely. I believe the river banks with a certain margin are considered public recreational property, but access isn’t guaranteed. I’m guessing the cable is used to make wading across safer. Most of the year there isn’t much flow, and this is a popular fishing spot. This was what I was able to see from my prayer spot.

A good ways upstream from that last shot is the lower dam on the Oklahoma River recreation area. The dam stands just under Eastern Avenue, just south of the I-35 and I-40 Junction. It was a good place to pray with the less than thundering roar of the silty water. There’s nothing hindering anyone walking right down into this flow, but it’s rarely this heavy.

I was unable to stitch these two images together, but this is the same spot, panning farther to the right and viewing downstream. I wasn’t able to stay quite as long here because the winds were high and the fishermen were starting to show up. There was no safe place to lock my bike, and without the isolation from other humans, it’s pretty hard to stay engaged with the natural elements.

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Conversion versus Spiritual Birth

Posted on April 15, 2019 by ehurst

Spiritual birth does not take place in this realm. It is a spiritual event tied to the Spirit Realm. You cannot pin it to a time-space location; it simply is or isn’t. It is a miracle entirely on God’s initiative. There is nothing in our human nature to allow us to so much as desire it, since we know instinctively it demands self-death. The issue for us is becoming aware of it as an eternal truth. Once we become aware of it, it becomes a life-long struggle to fight the fleshly nature that militates against facing that Flaming Sword of revelation.

Conversion is not spiritual birth. Conversion is a psychological event that takes place with a distinct historical association in this Fallen Realm. It is a human choice.

While these two may be tied together in your human awareness, do not mistake conversion for spiritual birth. This is the mistake with evangelical theology. It is a false definition of the term “born-again.” We have churches filled with converted people who are not spiritually alive. This is where the false definition arises. This is why churches struggle with worldliness; it’s why they cling to a cerebral religion of human effort.

The church should always have a certain portion of membership that is converted but not spiritually alive. Some are on the way to it, but most are simply religious without being genuinely spiritual. Making church too easy for the flesh aggravates this problem. The character of a church will tend to reflect that, especially when the organizing principle rests on the will of the body. Prayer doesn’t change things much, since prayer is for many people a cerebral exercise and trusts too much in sentiment.

This is why we have the Western mythology of the heart as a repository of sentiment and emotion, versus the truth that the heart is the repository of convictions, the one part of us that connects to the Spirit Realm. If there is no resurrected spirit on the other side of the heart, then all that’s left is sentiment in the heart. It feels and acts rather like conviction, but there is no connection to eternity.

And there will always be a large number of people out there who belong in church but haven’t yet become aware of it. These are people marked in Heaven for redemption, but God alone knows why that awareness hasn’t hit them.

Our part in this is to live the Word. We recognize that “the Word of God” is synonymous with His divine will, His revelation, His Son Jesus Christ, and with Biblical Law. It’s not Law as legislation, but Law as an expression of His divine moral character. It’s a living body of spiritual truth that resides in Heaven as an aspect of God, and is reflected in the fabric of Creation, and takes shape in our souls because we can read and understand Scripture. We are designed for an interplay between mind and heart, with the latter standing as proxy for God as owner, and the former as the executive who executes the mission.

The Great Commission no longer means sending missionaries to spiritually darkened corners of the world. It meant that during the first few centuries after Christ’s time on this earth, but the news of Jesus Christ is no longer news to any part of the human race. What’s news is the much better understanding of Jesus in the context of His own culture and intellectual traditions. The problem is a Westernized gospel message is false. So it’s not a matter of getting out and telling them; they’ve been told. It’s a matter of showing them because they don’t understand that what they’ve been told isn’t quite the truth. Instead of insisting on arguing with what missionaries have said, we simply demonstrate the truth and let it speak for itself.

In the Covenant of Radix Fidem, we agree together that the emphasis isn’t “getting saved.” The emphasis is living the Biblical Law so that folks can be awakened; it’s part of the larger task of claiming our divine heritage. Walking in Biblical Law (AKA, walking in Christ) awakens a spiritual awareness in those who are eternally marked for redemption. The timing is in God’s hands, but the method is eternal. It’s always been like this, starting in the Garden of Eden, and it’s the more critical now that we are outside Eden. We obey revelation; we breathe life into it and God uses that as the vehicle for His divine touch. When people become aware of our witness, it speaks to something inside of them whether their intellect notes it or not.

A fully conscious awareness results in a conversion experience, but that may take place very slowly over a long period of time. Awareness is an artifact of time and space, but the truth of being chosen by God is eternal. There is no way we’ll ever understand how folks are chosen or not chosen, so we don’t bother trying to explain. What we do understand is that the Elect can be awakened to their status with God if we simply walk in Biblical Law.

So claim the fullness of your divine heritage. Live fully heart-connected to Creation and obey your convictions. Harvest the Spiritual Fruit of obedience, all the blessings of shalom just waiting there for you to claim. Catching the attention of folks who also belong to that shalom is part of that.

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A Ministry Shift

Posted on April 14, 2019 by ehurst

This blog is a ministry outlet. I didn’t start this nearly ten years ago as a social outlet. Social connections do happen here, but that’s just a side effect of the medium. The essential purpose of this blog is a virtual ministry office.

Over the past decade, it has provided the means to discuss with the world at large my impressions about what ministry should be. This was the testing ground as I felt my way along a path that had long been neglected, ruins in the dirt, overgrown like a jungle. I’m not going to tell you that I have arrived, but this stage of things has about run its course.

As I noted in conversation at the forum, there are a lot of changes coming to the Internet. What we once knew as the wide open source of information exchange is going to come under increasing regulation and censorship. That’s because the Internet is run by lefties who can no longer tolerate right-wing chatter. I’m not expecting to suffer from that censorship, in the sense of this blog being shut down. What I am expecting is that God has plans for me to engage activities offline, here in meat-space.

Sometime in the near future, my habit of posting something every day will break. If your only interest here is the social connection, you need to switch over and join the forum. That’s where I’ll spend more time. I’ll keep the blog alive in the foreseeable future, but it won’t be the central outlet for my kingdom service.

For the past 20 years I dug into computers and networking because that’s where God moved me. Now He’s told me to move on to other things. For the moment, I’ll be spending a lot of time in prayer and contemplation. Some of the results of that will show up here, just nowhere near as much as in the past. I’ll be reading a lot less on the Net, as well. I’ll keep an eye on things, but it’s going to taper off.

To be honest, I think I’ve pretty well covered most of the ground that required a significant depth of exploration. I’m starting to repeat myself too much. I’ve rattled on and on about how to shift your focus to your heart and how that should affect your thinking. Maybe we’ll see more about how it should affect your actions; I’m not sure. I’ll still answer questions and you can still email, text or call me (405-503-1692 — reminder: I use a flip phone). I plan to keep the online archives open until it’s no longer possible. As long as Smashwords is open for business, I’ll leave my e-books there. All that stuff is linked on the right-hand side of the blog interface.

It’s likely I’ll still post pictures and prophecies. I may try to survey another creek or two this summer. If I can get another motor vehicle, I’ll surely tour more of Oklahoma with my camera.

But as of today, the posting will taper off in terms of frequency. I’m sure God has more important things for you to do, as well.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 7:14-24

Posted on April 13, 2019 by ehurst

This chapter of John’s Gospel opens with about six months after the events in Chapter 5, wherein Jesus healed the paralyzed man on the Sabbath. The Sanhedrin were seeking to lay hands on Jesus with the intent to secretly execute Him. The city dwellers in Jerusalem would be aware of this, at least in the form of a rumor. That was around Passover near the end of March; now we are at the Feast of Tabernacles in early October.

In the previous chapter we saw where Jesus intentionally killed His mass popularity. He stoked their shallow curiosity of Him by feeding the 5000, then talked in parables about the Bread of Life. It was time to winnow the crowd. So few of them were ready to be a part of His Kingdom that His teaching lost the interest of the crowd of bored peasants seeking entertainment. His younger siblings fussed at Him about this, and suggested His ministry needed fresh publicity. Going up to the Feast of Tabernacles was a perfect opportunity, since it was a week of feasting and just hanging around Jerusalem sleeping outdoors in little shelters and tents. Large crowds of wealthy Jews living in foreign lands would travel to the city for this festival.

Jesus rejected His brothers’ advice. They knew about the miracles, but did not at all believe He was the Messiah. He told them their attitude was the same as everyone else, so they could easily go up to the feast and not attract attention. Nobody was going to arrest them. His comment about “My time” refers to His crucifixion, which He saw coming, and considered His one moment of full revelation to everyone. There were still too many tasks between Him and that day, so this was the wrong time, given there was a death warrant on His head in Jerusalem. He told them to go on without Him.

The Sanhedrin and all their lackeys were looking for Jesus. Why did He then sneak up to the city during the middle of the Feast? By this time the campers would be bored and more ready to listen to His teaching. The one thing that caught the authorities’ attention was how Jesus seemed to know so much about Talmudic teaching, since He was countering it so accurately. Yet they knew He had not attended any of the prestigious rabbinical schools or been discipled to any of the famous rabbis. He was a nobody, yet it was quite obvious He was familiar with the entire range of academic background. So far as we know, He did spend some limited time with at least one local rabbinical school in Galilee, at which most big city rabbis would sneer. But He was tearing their ideas to shreds.

Jesus addressed this murmuring. His teaching did not rest on the credentials and name-dropping savored by the big shots. Instead of quoting the established sages, He quoted God. Who sent those rabbis? Who gave them their teaching? Once again Jesus emphasized the difference between the heart-led servants of God and the heart-less rabbis whose doctrine rested on their intellects. Anyone determined to please God by faith would recognize what Jesus taught as the voice of the Father. People who taught out of their heads were seeking self-promotion. The One who sought the glory of Jehovah was more trustworthy and they could not justly accuse Him of anything.

They claimed the authority of Moses, yet clearly did not obey the Covenant. It was a violation of Moses to seek to murder Jesus without a proper public trial. At this point, the folks from out of town wondered if Jesus had gone mad, using the common figure of speech of “having a demon.” They had not yet heard the rumors about the secret execution warrant, but they knew this was the guy who had healed the crippled man at the pool on a sabbath. It’s part of why they had come to see what He taught.

So Jesus pointed to an example they would understand. The rabbis often noted that Moses commanded circumcision on the eighth day, Sabbath or not. Circumcision was something the Jews were so proud of, but they forget it was a tradition long before Moses. It was so important to them that they technically violated the Sabbath for it. Just a simple little medical procedure that marked a man as born under the Covenant of Moses for the rest of his life. They cut away a tiny piece of flesh and it justified breaking the Sabbath, but for some reason they couldn’t allow Jesus to put a man’s life back together on the same sabbath.

He sternly warned those listening not to be so shallow and legalistic in their discernment. They understood keeping up appearances to impress mere men, but had no clue about divine justice.

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Stand in the Lord

Posted on April 13, 2019 by ehurst

A discussion with my beloved reminded me of something.

The shepherd man of God does not fit the mainstream social definition of “nice” or even “cooperative.” Once you discard that false sense of obligation, and turn to make Christ your true master, it should start to make sense that “nice” is meant primarily to remove the hedge of divine protection so you can be seduced and subjected to abuse at the hands of the elite.

Stop trying to be nice. Be aware of what people expect, but always conform purely on tactical grounds. Pearls before swine — not everyone is worthy of getting close enough to know you. Not every situation is appropriate for presenting your witness. Most of the time you should avoid notice. Only those you allow to get close will discover what an alien you are.

You are soft before the Lord, and pretty much a hard-head with everyone else. Don’t accept the values and morals of others; God is Your master and He has revealed His morals for you in your calling and convictions. You supplicate no one but God. The fallen mass of humanity around you is hardly in any position to assert their morals over you. It doesn’t require violence to walk in your divine heritage, but don’t be afraid of using it when some fool insists on challenging you directly and physically.

Rage is not from God; justified wrath is. If you don’t know the difference, apprentice yourself to someone who does. As previously noted, it’s not a question of whether you will succeed in the use of violence, but whether it is what God requires of you. But most of the time a calm refusal is enough. Get the measure of your context to know where the boundaries are and when you must use force to defend your clear conscience with God. Trust God to deliver His enemies into your hand, which is what usually happens.

Your witness of God’s grace is not being a sucker for someone else’s definition of good behavior. Worded another way, your witness includes standing strong and firm on what God has commanded you. Don’t worry about shocking and giving offense. Don’t be afraid of other people viewing you as a pain in the ass.

Revel in it.

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Fiction: Tearing a Hole

Posted on April 13, 2019 by ehurst

She glanced out the window again at her neighbor. He had been in the backyard since sunrise, working on something that looked like a front-loading washing machine sitting on a low sturdy table. There are odd bits and pieces attached to it and other odd things sticking out of holes in the metal shell. He kept peering into the glass door and then doing more stuff with the various attachments.

Going back to her house cleaning, there was a sudden huge noise from his direction. Zzzzzount! The electricity went out.

This wasn’t the first time something he did had caused a power outage. She stepped out into her own backyard to see the man slowly getting up off his backside and facing the now smoking contraption.

She spoke in a half-weary demanding voice. “What did you did this time, George?”

Dusting himself off, he turned to face the ruins of his machine. “I was trying to open a temporary hole in the space-time fabric.”

She didn’t look too impressed. “George, most people don’t even say such things, much less try to do them. Why the hell do you want to mess with something like that?”

The contraption was still a bit too hot to touch, but he was trying to see inside the glass door. “It was time for an oil change, but someone must have glued to filler cap on, because I couldn’t get it off. I figured if I could just open a temporary portal I would pour the oil in and hope for the best.” He patted a gallon jug of automotive motor oil on a workbench next to him.

“George! You idiot! Everyone knows that’s the wrong type of lubricant for it. No wonder you couldn’t get it to work.”

She turned and strode back into her house in a huff, leaving George to stare after her with a look of amazement on his face.

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The Limits of “Virtual”

Posted on April 12, 2019 by ehurst

I can’t tell people what to do. I can tell people how I decide what I do for me, and hope that gives you some clues so you can decide for yourself.

Twice in just a few weeks, the Northern Plains of the US have suffered highly unseasonable storms, inland cyclones that have dumped excessive precipitation and icy temperatures. Already the flooding has killed thousands of food animals and destroyed crops, either in storage or by preventing timely planting. Prophetically I will tell you that’s not a message from God; it’s simply His wrath. The time for warning is past and now the punishment is here.

So food prices will go up during this calendar year much more from food shortage than from other causes. The effects of this will cascade onto other parts of the economy. And those who watch markets and finance are surprised the economy has not already imploded. It’s obvious it can’t go on like it is, but we also know it’s being kept alive artificially. We can see it plainly in how government, banks and big corporations do things. We can see how the mainstream media lies to cover up those actions. It’s a game of keeping the system running until the last bit of plunder is taken, and then pulling back to let it fall.

It will be slow, though there may be shocks along the way. Those of us who live through this, and are paying attention, will be deeply distressed at how this drags on and on at a slow pace. Worst of all, the folks who are in a position to make the decisions about things will not be jumping ship, but will stay in their positions to implement something even worse. At some point those who have nothing to lose will outnumber those who think they need to play along for their own benefit, and there will be violence. We can hope it will be aimed at the oligarchs running things, but I have my doubts about that.

Instead, I am confident God will find a way to crush them Himself. Unfortunately that means a lot of other folks will suffer along with them. That’s the way it works in this fallen realm of existence. My point has always been that this life isn’t worth so much anxiety in the first place. It’s broken and damned, and we need to get used to that. Instead of struggling for the things God promised those who obey His Word, let’s stop investing so much emotional energy in things that cannot follow us into eternity.

In John 6, Jesus fed 5000 to prove He had the food situation worked out. The issue wasn’t the human need, but the glory of God. If you invest yourself in the glory of God, everything else will take care of itself.

Then Jesus launched into a long conversation with the crowd and the Jewish leadership about how we should not struggle for temporal existence, in the sense that if we simply trusted in God in pursued His glory, the temporal existence would take care of itself. Trusting God means letting that temporal existence end when it ends, and on whatever terms it ends, and know that what comes afterward is beyond glorious. In other words, He offered a teaching that flatly said we should be otherworldly. I think it’s obvious that this world is badly broken.

And because it rests on the individual calling and mission from God, there’s no way I can decide what you should do to implement that kind of otherworldly life. I can share what I believe are the major considerations cast in the context of our lives here in America today, but I can’t tell you much more than that. If you lived under my wings here geographically, I suppose I could be more specific in my guidance, and you might be inclined to follow it since you would see for yourself that it’s working so well for me. But in this virtual setting, about the most I can do is call your attention to things you might miss in the work of considering what to do.

When we put that label “virtual” on things, it means there are limits.

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Economists Ruin Everything

Posted on April 11, 2019 by ehurst

The birth of modern academic economics is the fault of Adam Smith. He was a philosopher who blathered about a lot of things. To this day, much of economic theory comes from his writings, and it has always been marginally useful, but not worth making it into a full time occupation. One thing Adam Smith mentioned is a case in point as to how stupid economists tend to be.

The Diamond-Water Paradox (AKA Paradox of Value) is no such thing. It should be obvious why water is so cheap compared to diamonds. The answer is in the meaning of civilization itself.

In a state of barbarism, the only things with value are those humans need to survive. To thrive means having more than you really need. It means having enough to grow a substantial family and keep it growing. The whole point is to develop conditions where thriving is easier, so that an extra adult body doing work can produce more than their share of necessities and increases the comfort level.

It’s the question of economy of scale. Will more bodies increase the level of shared production for the family? Will it enable some use of time and resources to better organization and improved living conditions? Civilization means the rules and customs necessary to enable many people living in close proximity without killing each other, and taking advantage of having a concentrated labor pool to permit diversity of production to match human needs, and eventually human wants.

Something missing from the typical academic analysis of this question is that God’s revelation says humans are hard-wired to live in a feudal household with tribal social and economic structure. This is good, right and moral, and it’s how reality is designed to work. The only valid purpose for any human pursuit is to bless the family and to expand its size as much as possible. This is absent from Smith’s considerations.

So the feudal “lord” (head of household) knows that something like water is so very essential that everyone should have free or easy access to all they want. The first thing a lord would seek to arrange is an abundant supply with minimal labor. Such is his divine duty. It is utterly immoral to not try making water abundant for the your family; it’s an instinct burned into human nature. It’s the same instinct that compels that lord to seek sanitation measures the require as little labor and resources as possible, too.

Any valuation of diamonds requires a fairly advanced civilization that goes way beyond a small tribe in isolation. Diamonds become important for the same reason as any other form of money: it is a store of value facilitating easy exchange. The whole idea is to find something every trading partner will agree to accept in exchange for a lot more stuff that isn’t so easily carried. It is barter carried to its logical conclusion.

But if civilization dies, then barbarism returns to some degree, and diamonds become nothing more than pretty rocks. All the other brouhaha about precious gems and metals is just the fallen nature of humans getting in the way of clear moral vision. There’s no paradox. And none of this matters a whit without considering the sense of divine calling and religious considerations, because that’s also a matter of how humans are wired, but you won’t see that in your economics textbooks.

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Longing for Heaven

Posted on April 10, 2019 by ehurst

Something inside of us longs for holiness, longs to leave this sinful world behind.

The Creator didn’t make you gay or a pedophile nor any other brand of pervert. You are that way because of the Fall. We are born under a curse; all of us are saddled with lusts and desires that nature itself would tell us were wrong if we listened. Thus, the entire human race faces the obligation to redemption. We must pass through the Flaming Sword of Revelation, turning it upon our selves and confessing what God has revealed.

As long as we have a fleshly body, we also have a fleshly nature. That nature militates against redemption because it does not want to die. But that includes both senses of “dying.” The flesh does not want to surrender to the Spirit, and it cannot be made to want it. Instead, the fleshly nature clings to life and craves all sorts of pleasures that aren’t in our best interest.

The best we can hope for in this life is placing our hearts on the throne of decision. Even that doesn’t guarantee your entry into Heaven, but it does make you sensitive to revealed truth. What gets you into Heaven is a divine miracle of spiritual birth. Your dead spirit receives Life when the Holy Spirit of God invades your being. The initiative for this miracle rests entirely in God’s hands. In that sense, there is nothing any human can decide or do to make it happen. And yet, at the same time, God says it is available to all.

But then, if you have received spiritual birth and do not then claim your divine heritage by living in your convictions, you have no Life here on earth. You are spiritually stillborn, a potential divine being with no realization in functional life. If you don’t live from the heart, your spiritual birth means nothing in this world.

It doesn’t have to make sense to us. In our fallen state, it cannot make sense to us. We can grasp it with our heart-mind, but not with our intellect. We can know it as conviction alone. We have to make our hearts rule in order to claim all the divine heritage God has said is for His family. Being born a human does not make you the family of God. Only by embracing the covenant He offers can you claim that heritage. And being spiritually born does not make you an agent of His revelation on this earth.

And all of this is clothed in parables because it is utterly impossible to simply describe in factual terms. This is our mission, folks: to breathe life into this truth by how we live. The single most important thing you can do is simply exist in this truth. Even if you said almost nothing about your faith, people would still perceive your witness because God uses us that way. There is more than one way to “tell the world about Jesus.” (Recall that Moses was not a public speaker, but led his nation to the Promised Land.)

Our covenant assumes spiritual birth, but that’s because we know no one can live this way without that unspeakable power. Instead, we focus on the one part of this that humans can decide, and that is to move the focus of consciousness into the heart. And based on this, we then promote the Covenant of Christ in its guise as Biblical Law. His person is the fulfillment of all God’s commands, all of God’s revelation of how to live in a fallen world. And Biblical Law of necessity includes the heart-led way; the heart of conviction is the foundation of it.

Furthermore, the task is to focus on seeking out what the Gospels refer to as the Lost Sheep of God’s flock. At one time it was manifested in the Nation of Israel. However, that nation kept violating the covenant, so God ended it all in the sacrifice of His own Son, Jesus Christ. Now the name “Israel” belongs to the divine family given birth by the New Covenant. If we embrace Him and all His teaching, then we can claim to be His family, the New Israel.

It doesn’t mean our fleshly nature is miraculously transformed, but that our divine nature is born inside of us and given the power to make war against the sinful nature of the flesh. We are taught that the spiritual nature has the advantage and can nail the flesh to the Cross. But it has to keep doing that moment by moment, guarding against the flesh coming back down from the Cross and causing havoc. So the burden is on you to decide for the divine nature and against the fleshly nature. The longer you live seeking and desiring the divine, the greater your strength against the flesh grows.

This is our mission until the day He calls us home to be with Him.

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Random Spring Photos 2019

Posted on April 9, 2019 by ehurst

Shots from the past couple of rides, these were things that simply caught my eye. First up is actually a single root cluster of trees that are very old and huge, with boughs drooping to the ground in places.

This is a couple of crab apple trees in full bloom. The blossoms exude the unmistakable fragrance of apples, but when they grow, they’ll be just about berry size. Still, it was very pleasant just standing next to these things.

Crooked Oak Creek near Eagle Lake and near its mouth into the North Canadian River remains a favorite prayer chapel of mine. This is where I felt compelled to stop and pray three years ago, just moments before I shattered my knee cap. The anniversary of that is the 28th of this month.

Along the banks of that same creek is this dead tree. It’s been standing like this for several years, resisting the storms for the most part. Not much has been lost since I first saw it.

This is Kuhlman Creek, looking upstream where it crosses the Tinker AFB Golf Course. This creek stays wet all year because of the watering on the golf course.

This is the signature Oklahoma Redbud trees in full blossom alongside the bikeway out at Draper Lake. The colors can range from pale pink to deep burgundy, the latter being quite rare.

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