Just an Artifact

Posted on March 9, 2019 by ehurst

This is a good point to remind everyone that Vox’s hierarchy of males in his Red Pill lore is nothing more than an artifact of Western Civilization. It reflects the reality of Western society. It’s purely contextual, not the way God made things. If we are going to help people escape this badly perverted social framework, we have to understand how it works and how it holds people in prison. It turns out that some of the Red Pill stuff is consistent with Scripture, so doing what elevates you in Western society will put in a place to leave it all behind.

The ultimate goal is not referencing society, but referencing divine revelation. You need to become whomever God made you to be. That’s a long journey for anyone starting out in Western Civilization. If you broke free from social constraints already, then the guidance is quite different. There are precious few people with the drive to rise up out of the social matrix, to defy convention and follow your convictions. The point in referring to “Gradating Gamma” was to find the shortest escape route for the majority of folks who know they are called to something different, but have no idea how to get out the matrix. We aren’t promoting the matrix, only trying to understand it.

You have to beat the matrix to escape it. It’s just an artifact of the thing we seek to leave behind.

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Man Up, Guys

Posted on March 8, 2019 by ehurst

I hadn’t run across this before, but there is a series on how to become more manly in four parts:

Step One: Physical
Step Two: Spiritual
Step Three: Emotional
Step Four: Mental

The context is Vox Day’s hierarchy of manhood and explaining how to stop being a Gamma. One definition of a Gamma male is someone who was likely smarter and more sensitive than average as a child, was abused for it, and never quite grew up socially because of that. Instead, they retreated into a place where they felt they were in control and could stop the bullying. I think this series a good primer on climbing out of the pit, and a good first step before migrating away from Western Civilization to full biblical manhood. In other words, I think it’s really very hard for men to figure out where they are as Westerners until they achieve actually being a Westerner first. Virtually nobody is going to jump straight from Western Gamma male to full biblical shepherd manhood.

This four-part outline is actually not too bad regardless of where you are headed. It covers a lot of the same territory you’d need to cross either way. I’ve archived a copy of the whole thing, so you can request it in the typical formats: LibreOffice, Word, or PDF.

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Win10 Adventures: Hardware Error Code 3000040

Posted on March 7, 2019 by ehurst

If you are the kind of person who checks event logs, you may run across something that uses these terms — LiveKernelEvent Code: 3000040

I spotted this in the Reliability Monitor. If you search via the Win10 menu, it will come up as “Reliability History.” There is no list of error codes anywhere that I can find as a reference. This particular error was filling up the log, repeating about every minute during any period of activity. Eventually I ran across a mere clue that it was related to the GUI. In my case, the correction was to update the graphics driver, and replace a wireless mouse with a wired one.

On the graphics driver, AMD is downright cruel. The hardware announced itself to Windows as a 15DD. On the system marketing stuff, it’s a Vega 11. If you want to chase down the driver, it’s an RX 580. It’s built into the AMD Ryzen 5 2400G. HP offered a badly broken driver package, so I went straight to the source at AMD and eventually figured out how they identified it.

Regarding the mouse: I have a Seagate back-up external drive plugged into my system at the back. When it was next to the receiver for the wireless keyboard and mouse set, the mouse simply ceased working altogether. So I moved them to different rows and it was just okay. The Seagate USB plug apparently puts out a lot of RF interference. It doesn’t affect the keyboard, but it kept the mouse working poorly. When I switched to a wired mouse, the problem went away.

At any rate, because the mouse is enmeshed in the GUI, this particular error code ceased only when I did both the upgrade and hardware swap.

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Our Brand of Evangelism

Posted on March 7, 2019 by ehurst

We don’t suggest that no one else is called, only that we know for sure God has called us.

We have a mission from God, a mission that has stood since the expulsion from Eden, to establish a culture and community that returns back to Eden. We follow the path of Christ. Others may have done so in the past, but we see little evidence of it. The churches around us are not very different from the rest of the world. We find ourselves with no precedent to follow, no culture to keep alive, but one was must build from scratch.

As the first generation of this call from God to establish a new and ancient covenant community, our evangelism and missions will be focused on inviting people to become heart-led Christian mystics. I’ve said it before — “Christian mysticism” is the most honest label we can use for the kind of religion we profess. It’s not like other brands of mysticism, but it does meet the standard definition:

Christian mysticism refers to the development of mystical practices and theory within Christianity. Mysticism is not so much a doctrine as a method of thought…. The biblical dimension refers to “hidden” or allegorical interpretations of Scriptures.

I quibble with the term “allegorical” in preference for “parabolic” but that’s not the point. Our reading of Scripture isn’t “hidden” in terms of secrecy, but hidden by the failure of people to embrace the heart-led path of subjecting intellect to faith. It’s in plain sight, but hidden by blindness. Cerebral religion that bows the knee to Aristotelian logic is not biblical. The Bible comes to us from an Ancient Near Eastern mystical outlook; the ancient Hebrew people would snicker at the idea of “propositional truth.”

But the key to proceeding into a mystical approach is recognizing that the Hebrew people believed that the convictions of faith in the heart should trump intellect. They considered the heart the seat of faith and conviction, a literal sensory organ that could sense directly the invisible realm of moral truth. Jehovah spoke to the heart, not the mind. Thus, our evangelism fights the lie of Western mythology that makes the heart a mere repository of sentiment and superstition. In the Bible, the heart knows ultimate reality in ways the brain can never understand.

Thus, it is by far the most pragmatic approach to life possible. We do not become spacey, but we do have a certain detachment. We reject the world’s ways, but because there is no hope of fixing this world, we don’t crusade for changes. There is nothing we can do to help people until they become aware of their need for what we have. This has nothing to do with emergency response, but with how we decide what constitutes an emergency. We know that our best hope is to be there in the real world they experience, but demonstrating a divine mastery of reality that is beyond their reach.

So we are the people who will talk to reality as a friend because our hearts tell us that Creation is alive, sentient and willful. The heart is a sensory organ itself and part of sensing the spiritual plane means understand just how literal it is when Scripture says Creation cries out, groans for us to recognize ultimate reality, and sings in celebration with the saints. So we talk to trees and they answer to our hearts, along with rocks and grass and birds and insects and all things God has made.

So we naturally seek to spend time with the unfallen Creation around us to restore our sense of divine justice. Then we go back into to the fallen world of humanity with the renewed clarity and power to live that divine justice in the midst of chaos and failure. We get away from people only to be alone with our God as He calls to us from Creation. He calls for us to shine His glory into a fallen world. Our shalom is our message.

Yes, our message to the world is very strange in their eyes. We need to get used to this and not hesitate to witness the truth. A critical part of our mission is forthrightly broadcasting our weirdness so they aren’t surprised by just how alien our faith is to their approach to things. The majority will be put off by this, because in any given context, the majority are on the way to Hell. There is nothing we can do to change that; it’s always a complete miracle of God when someone gets off that path. We have to wait on Him to prod some soul to be receptive. We need to be ready to share with them the only thing that can reconnect them to Eden.

We aren’t trying to save the world, only helping a few folks escape it.

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A Few Returning to Eden

Posted on March 6, 2019 by ehurst

Consider the logic: If mankind is fallen, then nothing mankind dreams up will work in the long run.

Do you not find it strange that a vast swath of Westerners claim to believe in the Fall, but nothing they do gives evidence of such a belief? They keep right on giving allegiance to the notion that human reason and scholarship can answer human needs. They go along with solutions that were built on the assumption mankind is not fallen. It even shows in their theology, as they have whittled down the divine miracle of spiritual birth and made it a human decision.

The only decision God says we can make is in whether we choose to claim the full heritage of blessings He offers. We don’t get them by ignoring revelation, by massaging it and reinterpreting it to say something different.

Given that even our fellow believers don’t actually believe, the whole business of following Christ today is the hassle of facing that huge gap between where the world could be and where it actually is. We can’t count on help from organized religion, because “organized” in that context means something rooted in this world, instead of rooted in Heaven.

The symbolism of Eden is that moral plane of truth between Heaven and Earth, the place for which we were designed. The substance of the Fall, eating the Forbidden Fruit, is the choice to rely on human reason and intelligence to discern what is good and right. Returning to Eden and the Tree of Life means passing through the Flaming Sword of revelation, of embracing the death of the fleshly nature that rejects revelation. Eden symbolizes what we could have today if we would only bow the knee to our Creator.

So the imagery is that we seek Biblical Law, that Flaming Sword, so that we may turn it upon our own lives and return to Eden. It does mean in a certain sense leaving this world behind, but that requires you understand “this world” means the false world of fallen human perception. Eden represents the exact same natural world without the moral blindness of the Fall. When Christ returns, the only thing He will do is roll back all the changes mankind have made to Earth since the Fall. Creation is not fallen; we are. Creation is just fine, but it’s under the management of mankind who have rejected the Creator.

Yes, I’ve written that time and time again, and I’ll keep writing stuff like that as long as people don’t embrace the life of returning to Eden. Stop wallowing in the fallen world! Turn away from the human orientation that rejects revelation, for whom the moral plane of Eden is an invisible realm right there in front of them.

Included in this package deal of Eden is the ability to turn back around and see the truth about what’s going on in this world. Can you not see the invisible leash jerking mankind around, a leash in the hands of demons? It doesn’t matter that a major portion of the US is some brand of Christian, because they have yet to break free from that leash. So today we have signs of a rising plurality of voters supporting socialism, concentrated in urban areas and representing a majority-in-effect that overwhelms saner thinking. This is the new madness of the day. Yesterday it was Trumpism, and that got us nowhere. But the whole point is that none of it will get us anywhere until we restore the truth of God.

But the latest turn to socialism is a signal to us that the demons have been given permission to unleash the final stage of destruction on America. This is setting us up for civil war, because there’s an awful lot of people in flyover country who won’t go for this socialism; they are already too close to starving. You and I can see it clearly: The economy is breaking down and there are no resources left for socialism to distribute. It’s all just a front for robbing the masses anyway. The so-called socialists are just another elitist bunch trying to plunder the other elitist bunches. The only reason they are getting any political support is because the capitalist elites have already robbed us of just about all they could.

We can see all this and know it for the madness it is. We can also see how the rising instability and turmoil is a good opportunity to keep living the Word and demonstrating how it provides shalom. This is how we point out the pathway to the Flaming Sword, the gate of Eden. It doesn’t matter what kind of desperation drives them to take a look at it, only the miracle of grace will get them there.

Tell them the truth and let God take care of the results.

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Treasures in a Far Country

Posted on March 5, 2019 by ehurst

Ancient Israel was an agrarian tribal society living in what we now call the Levant. The Law of Moses was specifically suited to that people, that time, that place. The New Testament pointedly says we are not obliged to copy their lifestyle, but to learn from their choices in context.

That is, we are commanded, and equipped, to discern their approach to life. We can pick up on their awareness of reality and human nature after the Fall. We are supposed to understand the wisdom of their choices and make similar choices for ourselves in a different context, to face the same problems they sought to handle.

In ancient Israel, it was common for husband and wife to be 10 or even 20 years different in age. Men didn’t normally get married until they were near 30 (or later), and girls were married off to such men not long after menarche. While there are no hard numbers, we do know that menarche came much later in life for them than it does in the West today.

We also know that their society kept men and women largely separated from each other socially, except within the family setting. And we know that their was none of that age-peer concentration that pervades our modern situation. Their culture flowed across generations without a trace of the alienation we see in our world today. And individual’s whole experience of life was mostly constrained within their own kin, since most villages were populated by a single clan. All of your neighbors were likely cousins, and marriages were arranged by your clan elders who had contacts outside the village.

Today we have none of that. The pattern of matching for marriage that they followed would be asking for trouble in our world. Think about the substantial differences a couple would have to overcome just in daily living. What kind of car would you drive, if any? What sort of music would you prefer to hear on that car’s radio? What movies would you have watched? What differences would there be in common daily expressions? How would you deal with the mutual contempt programmed into backgrounds from different generations? For the average “peasant” of our day, those issues would likely cause friction that simply did not exist in Ancient Israel.

We can’t plunge into this morass and simply ape the habits of historical biblical life. We have to be aware of the factors behind the choices they made and apply that understanding to a world totally alien from those particulars.

The best answer is to build a parallel society with a more biblical culture in terms of something more consistent with biblical assumptions about human nature. The vast majority of America today carries a whole raft of assumptions about reality that are a blatant rejection of divine revelation. What we have now is the long tail of the uncivilized Germanic tribes who invaded a dying Roman Empire. Our social mythology is the heedless mixture of those two ancient inputs into Western Civilization. If we do not make ourselves aware of the massive differences between what that is versus what made up Ancient Israel, we will never even understand the Bible, much less what it demands of us in our world today.

The solution is to start with that awareness and building a separate culture, a society that starts from the assumption that there is a significant distance between what we have and what ought to be. At this point in our journey, a major focus is just getting people across that huge gap of differences so they can begin to build afresh. There is no way to build without first establishing that foundation.

Building good biblical marriages is mostly a miracle right now. I can tell you mine is working exceptionally well, but I seriously doubt anyone else can repeat my formula. I broke all kinds of social rules, in part because I was already driven by some radically different assumptions that my world called “fantasy.” Since then I’ve followed a radically different path and we are still together and in love 40+ years later.

But my children didn’t adopt very much of my orientation on life, despite my best efforts. Far too much of their education and acculturation wasn’t in my hands. There was no social framework I could use to help shape their social conditioning. Their marriages aren’t turning out that well because I was hindered by custom and law from passing on my understanding of life.

Thus, the only people who learn from my mistakes and successes are random strangers whom the Lord brings into my life. Yet we know that there are people out there even today who are able to pass their own culture on to their children despite living in a alien societies. We need to examine how they do that with an eye to Biblical Law. Otherwise, this whole thing will rest on random miracles of people God brings into our little association. That is not how Biblical Law was designed to work, and it’s not conducive to establishing the fullness of shalom.

I am in no position to suggest what ages couples should be. The audience I can reach includes virtually no young men feeling the pull to find a wife. Unless they are moved by God to be receptive, even those few would struggle to accept my advice. I’d be forced to counsel a significant delay that may not register well with them, but the delay would be necessary to absorb a biblical orientation before seeking a wife. In other words, we do not yet have a biblical community in which to incubate such a radically different orientation.

Instead, we are at the point where we can just begin to propose such a community and pray with all our might that God opens the door to make it happen somewhere in the future. It took Moses 80 years of life just to get where he could understand what was required. We shouldn’t get in a rush, but we should take it seriously or people will never find the vast treasures of shalom that God has granted to those who live by His Word. But with so much work ahead of us, we can’t afford to delay putting our hands to the task.

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Courtship and Longing

Posted on March 4, 2019 by ehurst

Courtship leading to marriage is a badly broken model.

In a fully developed parallel society of heart-led awareness, there would be no courtship. Marriages would be arranged by heart-led elders, the people who know the couple best. Granted, the arrangements might be based on a recognized existing attraction between the two, but the whole point is that such a society has a highly vested interest in making things work according to the biblical ideal of social stability. One marriage partner for life is a part of that ideal, so a good match is critical, as is a supportive community.

On the other hand, that same goal of social stability means teaching people how to shed the kind of self-worship and fantasizing that makes marriages so shaky. A biblical society is based on acknowledging the Fall and universal culpability. Biblical Law presumes the need to mitigate the Curse of the Fall. A part of that curse is what makes us demand things we simply cannot have in this life. Redemption teaches us to live with our own imperfections, too, so we don’t take ourselves and our fantasies too seriously.

This brings us back to the premise that the work of redemption has one goal in this world: Promoting fellowship and communion among broken humans. The miracle of faith is that we can genuinely love and relate to people for which there is no earthly reason to even associate with them. This is a lost thread of redemption in modern churches. You can find ecclesiology books that assume a church should be internally divided into various social groupings that reflect the wider society, with no intention of breaking down those barriers.

This is why we have youth programs, elderly programs, and married-with-children programs, and singles programs. If a household is divided, it cannot stand against the wiles of the Devil. This is by far the single biggest failure of Western Christian religion. Only in Western culture is there such a focus on keeping generations divided from each other. Only in Western society are you taught to prefer the company of age peers, as if no one else should be able to understand you.

And so we have this strange mythology of age-peer marriage, as if the biblical standard of men marrying younger women was somehow dirty. Courtship across generations that way is painted as icky and immoral, yet the age disparity is a founding element in the kind of relaxed patriarchy that God requires for redemption. Without the proper social setting, Biblical Law cannot work so well as God intended.

Thus, we are left today with a society where people choose their own age peers for marriage and it’s altogether rare that a woman will respect her husband as God intended. The proper basis for marriage is her awe of him, and his treasuring of her, not sexual attraction arising from a sense of peerage. We can still make it work, but it’s a broken model. Guys are supposed to be attracted to younger gals, and vice versa.

The whole business of generational peering is defiance of God. It creates an underlying expectation of hostility between generations that trashes the wisdom of experience in life. It creates whole generations with their characteristic flaws, because they are kept in a closed loop that amplifies every small difference in historical experience. There is nothing that builds a stability of culture and no sense of multi-generational devotion to any particular intellectual culture, much less a heart-led one.

So what can we do? How do we fight the smothering influence of our ambient civilization, a civilization custom made to please Satan? It takes a miracle from God. But miracles are brought into our lives by faith, by commitment to God and trust in His power and promises. If we commit ourselves to exposing Biblical Law and all its assumptions, we can depend on the Father to use us to establish something fresh that brings us back toward Eden.

But that requires from us an acknowledgment that this is included in the package of redemption. At a minimum, we must recognize how the ambient culture conflicts with Biblical Law and awaken that awareness. We cannot pretend that serving Christ means reforming the ambient culture; it means radically replacing it. If we can awaken this doctrine of the Bible and keep it alive, God will draw to it those whom He intends to use to build what He intended. It will be a courtship of hearts to the truth.

If all of Creation groans with longing to see genuine faithfulness to God revealed in human existence, then we should be longing for it, too.

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A Kingdom of Awareness

Posted on March 3, 2019 by ehurst

How much of the social organization in Biblical Law can we actually follow?

That’s for you to decide for yourself. As some have noted already, what we see in revelation is technically illegal in the US, in the sense that it would open to door for prosecution should someone with the authority choose to take offense. There is no doubt that in some locations around the US, this is what would happen.

So that question remains a largely tactical one. How far does God want you to push the boundaries where you live? It’s one thing to know in your heart that Eastern feudalism and tribal covenants are the way God wants us to go; it’s another to persuade others to join you. It’s not our job to persuade. Our mission is to live it with conviction and see what God does with our testimony. Sure, answer the questions people inevitably ask. Answer as fully as you dare, according to your own gifts and talents, but precious few are those called to direct evangelism. For most of us, it is a simple matter of living in the power of the heart-led path of Biblical Law.

In our current context of rising tribulation, this is a very good time to rediscover the frame of reference. It’s a miracle we can even know of it again in our day. This is a very good time to study afresh how to approach thinking itself. If we do not reestablish the full lore of divine revelation, anything we do is going off half-cocked. This isn’t a question of planting seeds, nor even plowing fallow soil — this is removing the stones someone scattered on the ground quite intentionally. We are at war over consciousness itself.

The first round of community building is simply escaping the suffocating effects of the Enlightenment. Though dying now, that beast still rages in our world. We need to clarify the implications of our contention and establish a community first that is heart-aware. This is the essential first step toward restoring Biblical Law. Without that power, none of our spiritual gifts will mean anything, because they won’t be fully exercised. This is not the First Century; the fields are not white unto harvest. They haven’t even been plowed.

Try to see the prophetic strategy, to see beyond the tactics of your individual calling. The fundamental identity of a biblical community of faith is first getting faith out of prison. Go with your mission calling, whatever it is, and exercise your gifts fully, but be aware of the bigger picture. I can’t make my vision work for you, but I am called to share what I see, and I see something that calls for multiple generations of work toward something that shines in my eyes brighter than the sun. I don’t say this to squelch the natural enthusiasm of those who discover the truth, but to ask you whether you can also see what I see.

What I see is that it’s not just for our children, but grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren. While God isn’t showing me what their world will be like, He is showing what their orientation on that life can be like. The Devil has had a couple thousand years head start on us, raising up a perverted civilization that has kept mankind in slavery. That thing is crumbling before our eyes, and our mission is to exploit this opportunity to build something that will outlast the next civilization. Unlike the early churches, we need to pull away more thoroughly from what mere men can envision and see with eternal eyes.

It’s not that such a viewpoint was lacking as the West was built, but that the leaders of faith in those days were seduced by someone with a strategic vision because they didn’t have their own. They lost it while hunkering down against persecution. This is not to criticize them, but we’ll be fools if we don’t learn from the black eyes they got. We need to make new mistakes, not repeat the same old ones. Don’t compromise with a false vision of worldly political change. A primary tool of Satan is getting you to think in terms of nearness in time and space, and forgetting the eternal awareness of the heart. It’s not a question of whether we can succeed at this; it’s our generation’s calling to try.

So I’m not asking you to parrot what I teach, but to help explore something I’ve hardly begun to expose. There is so much more to dig out here, and it’s something that takes time and persistence. The transition from Western thinking to eternal thinking is no small thing. We need a fresh generation who don’t suffer our limitations, a generation raised from birth to natively think in eternal terms. They will retain the freedom to choose something else, but until we begin working from the right foundation, it’s impossible to build a temple to God from living stones of truth.

To the Red Pill community I say, stop trying to restore Medieval feudalism; that just puts everything back on the same path that brought us to where we are now. Go back farther, much farther, to world where God performed mighty miracles for His people as a whole. It’s not as if we can revive the nation of Israel again in any sense; that served only as the proof of what wouldn’t work. See beyond the manifestation of that image to the heart of what Christ said about a people who belong wholly to the Lord regardless of the political context. We don’t need a manifest nation holding territory, but a nation that exists in all territories and under all governments, clinging to a vision that the fallen cannot see.

We seek an identity rooted in Heaven, not on the earth. It’s an identity that clings to the moral truth written into Creation itself. I say the task and focus of our generation is on rediscovering that space between heaven and earth that overlaps those two realms, a realm where the hearts of humans can see the divine imprint of God’s moral character and strive to act on what that life demands. Don’t settle for what mere fallen reason can grasp. Pursue faith with it’s visions of the impossible miracles that God routinely performs. It’s all about the orientation and burning desire, not a matter of concrete success. It’s being faithful and trustworthy in representing that truth, never mind what the physical context might be.

We seek a kingdom of hearts.

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Teachings of Jesus — Luke 24:44-49

Posted on March 2, 2019 by ehurst

We come to the point where we jump over a lot of Luke because his witness is duplicated elsewhere. Indeed, the only thing left unique to Luke’s Gospel is right before the Ascension.

During His last forty days on the earth in His resurrected body, Jesus placed a lot of emphasis on teaching the Apostles to restore the mystical understanding of things inherent in Hebrew culture and language. The Pharisees had taught them to take literally things meant symbolically, and tended to take as metaphor things that were mean literally. So there were several scenes where He appeared to them and invited their examination to prove He was risen to a genuine physical form, but a resurrected body that did not suffer spatial and temporal restrictions.

During those three years up to this point, they spent more time in Old Testament Scripture than they likely had ever seen during their entire lifetime before. Luke recounts the experience on the Road to Emmaus and notes Jesus reviewed with two of them a large amount of Old Testament passages. In so doing, He restored those passages to their proper ancient context, wiping away the already vast body of Pharisaical oral lore that perverted the meaning of Scripture. He showed them how everything that had happened was predicted in the Word.

Luke recounts one final meeting during those forty days that is mentioned elsewhere, but adds a bit of dialog no one else shares. A key element in Jesus’ teaching had always been that His ministry was to fulfill the Messianic Promises in the Old Testament. There was a sense in which He also brought to fruition everything the Covenant of Moses was supposed to accomplish, to pick up the broken ruins of and rebuild, finishing all the things Israel had failed to do.

A primary element in that mission of the Covenant was to make it possible for people to reach a point of enlightenment, a connection to Eternity that made it possible to understand everything instinctively. In the Old Testament, with sufficient commitment, and sufficient length and depth of exposure to the written record, it was possible to reach the place where the fire of revelation burned within the soul. This was the ostensible goal of the Covenant and the Scriptures. All the rituals and sacrifices were designed to help with the process.

But now Jesus had made that final sacrifice that ended the need for the rituals. The door to Heaven was open. So in that moment Jesus gave them a foretaste of the what the coming of the Holy Spirit would do very soon in their lives. He granted them a connection between their hearts and minds as a direct miraculous gift, so that there was no longer any need to strive for that enlightenment. Suddenly, their hearts were awakened and their minds were able to grasp the symbolism of it all. All of the things He had taught them for three years now suddenly awakened in their souls and it all made sense.

Now they understood whey He had to die. This purchased for them everything they otherwise would have spent the rest of their lives pursuing. They now had that burning sense of mission to bear this truth to the whole world, making them quite willing to follow Him to the Cross. All the rituals were aimed at keeping alive the sense of conviction over the Fall, but this final sacrifice of Christ also brought to the penitents a sense of acceptance, of peace with God. It all came as a free gift up front, rather than as the result of a lifetime of devotion.

Now they were free to live that devotion from the starting point. And it was their mission to carry that incredible good news to the whole world. However, they were told to wait just a little longer for that final touch from God. The day of divine vestment would come soon, so wait in Jerusalem until it arrives.

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Foundation of a Covenant Community of Faith

Posted on March 2, 2019 by ehurst

We build on certain premises:

1. God has revealed how the world could claim His blessings. The entry point for those blessings is the Covenant of Noah. Beyond this covenant, there is much more people could learn if they were willing.

2. The world is unwilling to go even so far as Noah. This means we are cast into a world that wallows in the Fall. While we are committed to that “much more” that God has revealed, there will be hindrances from a rejecting world.

3. The mission is to pursue our faith and calling with an eye to the tactical necessities, the balance point between where we are and where God says we should be. The balance point is a moving target because human affairs move forward along some invisible path God alone knows.

4. We rely on His promise to keep before us a vision of what He wants us to do on the path to His promises. It’s realistic in the sense that He will most certainly grant certain things in each context if we are committed enough to claim it by faith.

I’m pretty sure I can get a lot of people to buy into that much. Where it starts to get sticky is when we explain that even just embracing Noah means a lot more than is explicitly stated. The whole business of Biblical Law assumes certain unstated prerequisites.

First is to reinforce the understanding that we could change the world, but God has said we shouldn’t waste time on that. Instead, our whole mission is to assume we can do precious little to help this fallen world. Instead, we focus on escaping it. But so long as we occupy fallen flesh, that escape is limited. What we do in this life is prepare our souls for what comes after this life. That means a blended existence, one that cannot be explained in concrete terms.

How do you keep track of that living balance? The answer is found in rather blunt statements in Scripture about faith and convictions and living by your heart, not your intellect. Our problem is that Western minds keep reading back into the Bible their Western cultural bias about the heart. It’s not a repository of sentiment, but the seat of faith and conviction. It is the repository of your will, your commitments, those things written into your character that you cannot change, because it’s all by the finger of God.

Your heart is designed to read the moral purpose of God woven in to the fabric of Creation itself. God as Creator acted according to His own character, so it stands to reason that all things work accordingly. You are capable of reading the moral truth in the world around you, if you can just get your intellect to stand down and submit to the leadership of the heart. This is a direct contradiction to the Western obsession with reason and intellect. In Western culture, anything that isn’t reason is either sentiment or superstition, because the lore of Aristotle asserts quite vehemently that reason is the highest faculty of mankind. But God says He won’t speak to your mind, only to your heart.

And if you listen to your heart, you will recognize that God’s plan for living in this fallen world demands first that we embrace the fundamental moral pattern for humans: the covenant feudal nation. Every Law Covenant discussed in Scripture assumes a peculiar brand of Ancient Near Eastern feudalism. It’s where everyone in the community is either family, hired servants, or slaves. God portrays Himself as Ancient Near Eastern feudal lord. You get to be family by accepting His covenant; He adopts you into His household. And what forms from this is a tiny nation, a tribe.

He parcels out His nation among elders. You could substitute other terms like chief, king, etc., but the main point is how that is supposed to look in real life. Every church (household of faith) has at least one elder and is limited in size to something like 50-75 people. After it grows beyond that, it is subdivided and allowed to grow again. (The number is subject to debate, but there is wide agreement among those who pursue the science of organizational theory; it’s about as many people as one leader can effectively lead. Scripture does mention “captains of 50”.)

In ancient times it was always little tribes of people related by DNA or by covenant. The business of shared DNA has faded into the background, pretty much put away when Christ died and the Covenant of Moses was retired. Now it’s almost entirely a matter of tribes by covenant.

So in order for any church to claim the full measure of shalom God offers, it must first and foremost be the modern incarnation of an Eastern covenant feudal tribe. All those notions based on democracy, presbytery, or European feudal kingdoms are wrong, wrong, wrong. Those other styles of organization cannot lay claim to the full range of their divine heritage.

Whatever it is we do on this earth toward building a covenant community of faith requires the presumption of heart-led people in a covenant feudal tribe. And the whole mission is not growing in size, resources or facilities, but growing closer and more tolerant despite the wide variations people bear in their souls.

This is what we teach as the foundation for taking full advantage of the promises of Biblical Law.

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