NT Doctrine — Jude

Posted on March 8, 2025 by ehurst

John’s second and third letters are brief summaries of what he wrote in his first epistle, addressed to a couple of people noted for helping itinerant preachers take the gospel to new mission fields.

Chronology: Paul was executed in roughly 65-66 AD. Peter wrote his letters from Rome and was also executed a short time later. In 70 AD, a Jewish revolt in Jerusalem brought a swift Roman response that destroyed Herod’s Temple. Christians who fled that event largely gathered in and around Ephesus, turning it into the new hub of Christian religion. The other members of the original Twelve Disciples traveled far away or were executed, leaving John as the elder there in Ephesus. His letters were written around 85 AD. Jude wrote his letter some while before John’s to an unknown audience that was almost certainly dominated by Hebrew Christians. He identifies himself as James’ younger brother, which made him half-brother to the Christ he proclaimed as Lord.

We thus get a picture of how the heresies John faced developed during the early explosion of Christianity in Ephesus and the surrounding region. Jude’s focus is on the early Gnostics. Jude had rather written something else, but this cult was a serious threat to following Christ. He says they had infiltrated the community to which he writes.

They had twisted the gospel of grace into an excuse for libertine self-indulgence and denial of Christ. Jude’s first comment is that these men were predestined to damnation from the start, never part of the Elect. They will meet their doom, but Jude wants to give context as to why the churches must endure their presence for a time.

First example: We notice that Jude uses terminology that makes a lot of later western church folks a little uncomfortable because he cites Hebrew mystical imagery that was common during the Second Temple period and plugs in his Lord as the Messiah to which that theology pointed. Many English translations leave out the reference to Christ being present during the Exodus. It was not Jesus the man, but rather an earlier manifestation of God’s Word that appeared in the Exodus, leading the nation out of bondage. And this same Word of God was the standard of judgment that called for the destruction of those who rebelled against God’s order of things for leadership in the wilderness.

Second example: Jehovah’s elohim staff also rebelled and invaded the mortal realm, getting personally involved in mortal human existence. They were forced to remain in this realm in the Abyss as part of their punishment, until the Day of Judgment.

Third example: The men of Sodom and Gomorrah (along with three smaller cities nearby) transgressed the limits God had set for them and went all out, trying to engage in degrading ritual sex with angels. Their punishment was fire raining from the sky, turning the whole area into a smoking grave.

These Gnostics also transgressed the boundaries in the same way as the cultists of Sodom and Gomorrah did, rejecting the created order of authority, even to the point of cursing the elohim. Even the archangel Michael knew better than that, but spoke only in echoes of what God had already said. The Gnostics don’t even have a clue what they are talking about, but arrogantly transgress the boundaries. They rejected the place God made for them and wasted the gift of human faculties, living by brute animal instincts with no moral restraints. That kind of lifestyle carried its own doom sooner or later.

They had joined in the sins of Cain, and of Balaam, and the rebellion of Korah. It’s quite a challenge to describe the depth of depravity to which they had sunk, sneaking in to the church love feasts to selfishly gorge themselves. They boasted of powers and wisdom, but were like clouds without rain, trees without fruit, stinking foamy wild waves of the sea, and stars that moved out of constellations. God was saving up special wrath for them.

Jude refers to the oral lore about Enoch, who prophesied before the days of Noah that wrath was coming for all the people who embraced the lies of the rebellious elohim. These pre-Flood idiots even dared to insult God directly, complaining about how He would not let them sate their foul lusts. It’s the same sin the Gnostics were engaged in during Jude’s days. We would call them psychopaths.

Jesus had warned such people would appear after His Ascension, seeking to mislead the Elect and destroy the unity in churches. Jude recommends that his audience do the work of Christ, having mercy on those who struggled with their faith, teaching them to distrust the flesh and keep it under the discipline of the Spirit. This is how we carry out the Law of Christ.

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The Two Rituals

Posted on March 5, 2025 by ehurst

A couple more questions regarding religious practice for Kiln of the Soul.

We aren’t interested in sacraments. That concept arose long after the New Testament times. We do have two prominent ritual practices: communion and baptism.

Communion need not be confined to the elements consumed in the New Testament version of the Seder. Wheat bread and grape wine reflect what was commonly available in the Mediterranean Basin and the Middle East. Digging back into the Old Testament references, I sense that any type of grain locally available is fine, as long as it is baked without biological leavening. A chemical leavening agent is okay.

While fermenting the bread is forbidden, it is also not required for the drink. It can be any cultivated fruit crop, fermented or not. And since our American food production industry is so deceptive, I would not push for literally local sourced food for communion, only the type of stuff you know is cultivated in your area.

Here in the American Heartland, I could use the juice of apple, peach, pear, blackberry, strawberry, and a few others because they are all cultivated in Central Oklahoma where I live. I think we should prefer one fruit type, though, and not blended fruit drinks. And for bread, we could use wheat, barley, corn (maize), oats, rye, and a few others, but again, not mixing more than one type — and baked, not boiled or fried.

Use your imagination: cornbread (no wheat flour) and peach juice, or rye crackers and watermelon wine, etc.

Baptism is taken from the Hebrew mikveh. The original was a ritual bathing to signify a purity of allegiance to Jehovah. I reject the common liturgical notion that it symbolizes the Holy Spirit falling upon you. It’s a bath; whether by immersion or pouring, you get soaking wet all over the body. A sprinkling would not be enough under Moses, and it won’t do today.

While it might have been rather frequent in the Old Testament, it became a one-time event in the New Testament upon one’s initial submission to Christ as Lord. We are not a denomination; we don’t require that you pass through it again. On the other hand, if you sense in your own convictions that your previous ritual experience wasn’t fully valid, I’ll be glad to walk you through it again.

It is not at all necessary that you perform the ritual in the hands of clergy or anyone else. That wasn’t required in the Old Testament. There may be a lot of reasons one might want that attendance, but in all the cases I see in Scripture, it had more to do with the baptized person giving a testimony in favor of the teaching of the person calling to baptism. Having someone officiate isn’t of the essence of the ritual itself; having someone witness is.

You can make a ritual of many passages of life. Ordination is really simple, with praying and laying on hands. When I do weddings, I just consult with the bride and groom, but no ritual is required, only some kind of public witness that the two are married. Likewise, there is nothing special required for funerals. Hebrews had a cultural revulsion for cremation, but I don’t.

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Glorious Deal-maker

Posted on March 3, 2025 by ehurst

When God does not grant to me a vision of future things, I simply go back to my convictions and extrapolate from there. What He tells me I must do on the smaller scale often indicates something about what’s coming on the grander scale. Thus, I’m only guessing, but it’s not merely a matter of human intellect. I don’t trust my own brain that much.

My point is that what follows is a description of how I plan to face the future, the kind of concerns I expect to face in my gospel mission.

I’ve always felt that Trump was not a politician, but a CEO with media savvy. As POTUS, he operates like a CEO of the US. He does not have long term goals for foreign policy, per se, but intends to bring the US as a whole closer to profitability. He acts like a CEO hired to save the corporation. He will profit personally if he succeeds, so he is motivated, but that profit is not confined to mere monetary calculus.

This is why he seems to contradict himself on things like Ukraine. He was willing to make a deal on mining and protect it with troops, but not at the expense of catering to Zelensky’s nationalist demands. He doesn’t take those demands seriously at all. In other words, he wasn’t offering to protect Ukraine’s government, only to guard a profitable operation in minerals. I’m willing to bet his private negotiations with Putin include that kind of thinking. He’s making deals, not addressing political problems.

As the new CEO of the US, he has brought in a team of profitability experts to trim the fat in administrative overhead. Some operations cannot be made profitable and will be liquidated, while many others will be streamlined and automated. He hates bureaucratic entanglements. I believe he’s going to treat Congress like a collection of labor unions that he can’t get rid of. He’ll work with them when they are ready to help out, and fight them when they get in the way of profitability.

I believe he treats Israel the same way. That is, the Zionists in US politics are a very large force that he must keep on his side. It’s more like dealing with a corporation that is saddled with some legacy founder who won’t let go of operations, and still serves on the board of directors. I seriously doubt he gives a damn about Israel, but he’s playing the hand he’s dealt. He is willing to include Israel in his struggle to stabilize and prosper the US in corporate terms, so his proposals for Gaza and the West Bank were just a windsock to see if he can get traction and make a deal. He’s pretty serious about it because there’s no escape from that issue.

Thus, Trump is no part of a statesman, and has little patience with other politicians who aspire to be statesmen. But he does want to bring more core operations back into the house, so this passes for an industrial policy. I believe he’s very concerned about America’s economic vulnerability after having off-shored so much industry. Thus, his thinking appears to be not economics, but financing. He will treat foreign countries as financial competitors and sometimes partners, but always corporate customers. He is focused on making deals that will profit the US.

I’m convinced a lot of commentators miss this. They keep chattering away about the political and economic principles, but Trump pays little attention to those concerns. He has no religion, only a deal-maker’s passionate commitment to the American brand. For him, greatness is not creating a lasting legacy of statesmanlike vision, but making deals and building a viable business. He will seize the financial opportunities and has no problem with coworkers profiting personally. He wants Americans to be relatively wealthy because that’s how he defines his own success.

I believe he knows that the technocrats around him are his biggest threat; that’s the nature of the job. He keeps them close so he can exert however much control is possible.

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Again Missing the Point

Posted on March 2, 2025 by ehurst

Keep things in perspective.

It would be very easy to get riled up about the internal conflict of the federal government. Yes, millions of useless tax eaters are up in arms and actively resisting Trump’s overhaul of the system. I fully expect this to become bloody sooner or later. This is all part of our time of tribulation.

But if your feelings are strong about this conflict, then you don’t understand what matters. All of this is not a battle of good versus evil, of light versus darkness. It is just one evil replacing another. The USA has been an embarrassment to God from the beginning, vehemently rejecting divine revelation. This country has all of the moral corruption of Sodom and Gomorrah with the violent predatory behavior of Assyria. The US is easily the most wicked empire in human history.

The crew working with Trump is not going to roll that back; they are seeking even greater human misery. You thought an army of committed socialist bureaucrats were hard to handle? Our morally filthy federal bureaucracy will be replaced by a soulless AI. It’s only going to get worse. The time is long past for God to judge this country; the world has never before seen the depth of wrath God has saved up for us.

But instead of fire from the sky, the US will destroy itself. It won’t matter how much physical destruction of the infrastructure we see. The greatest destruction will be not so much rubble and dead bodies, but the collapse of the system that makes life worth living for the majority of the people. Those who have embraced the Covenant will never lose their reason for facing the challenges of the day, but we have never seen an empire whose people are so dependent on things that simply don’t matter in the first place. They will imagine that it is worse than death when all their idols go dark and silent.

If you don’t understand, just stop and consider what it is that the current generation must have to make it through their day. God will take that away. Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth! It will be a tragicomedy; you won’t know whether to laugh or cry. Of course, I dramatize in order to draw attention away from false visions of apocalyptic destruction and help you see the real moral threats. These things will take time and you will need the full wisdom of the Holy Spirit in your hearts to understand how God is working. The fear mongering you can read in the alt-news is designed to sell survival supplies and so forth; it’s still the worship of Mammon. True prepping is more about sharpening your convictions and your understanding of how God works.

This is the curse, that we live in exciting times. Keep an eye on what matters to faith and covenant.

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NT Doctrine — 1 John 5

Posted on March 1, 2025 by ehurst

John’s schoolboy Greek grammar should be obvious, but people have debated for the past two millennia over what he says in this chapter. I take the position that the so-called “John’s comma” in verse 8 was not in the original letter. This refers to some added lines that don’t belong with the message, lines that showed up in the KJV based on very late manuscripts, but is clearly missing in the oldest copies we have of this letter.

John’s theme is still the distinction between those who carry the Presence of the Holy Spirit and those who do not. There is no way to reconcile the differences between those two groups. We should hardly be surprised that humans with the Holy Spirit believe in Christ as both man and God, while those without His Presence cannot possibly accept that truth. They will come up with all kinds of silly explanations for who Christ was and what He must have represented, never mind what first-hand witnesses like John could tell you.

The chapter break comes at the wrong place, splitting a paragraph. Thus, this chapter begins with John finishing his comments about how people led by the Spirit cannot avoid obeying Christ’s command that we should love each other as He loved us, something the various cults choked on. John says that if you love the Father — as many cult teachers claimed they did — then you cannot avoid loving His children. If you love the Father, you will obey the Son’s Law to love each other. It’s not a burdensome law like the Talmud; it’s entirely natural.

He’s talking about spiritual birth, the Presence of the Holy Spirit in your soul. If God is your Father in that sense, then you have escaped the authority of Satan, the god of this fallen world. He does not own you any longer because you aren’t rooted here; you are rooted in Eternity. We just happen to occupy a fleshly form for a limited time while we represent an invasive divine presence in his domain. Our commitment to Christ is how we overcome Satan’s efforts to bring us back under his power.

The people who have broken that curse will consistently proclaim that Jesus was both man and God. The fleshly nature cannot accept that truth. John was there for much of Jesus’ life since they were cousins. John was part of the same extended family as John the Baptist, too. While John probably did not witness the baptism in the Jordan (the reference to Jesus coming by water), he would have heard about it from multiple sources among his kinfolks alone. But John was there when Jesus died on the Cross, so he saw how Jesus came by blood.

And all of this is backed up by the voice of the Holy Spirit living in every person who comes to Christ. Thus, there are three witnesses: the water baptism in which the Father spoke bluntly Himself for all to hear, and blood on the Cross that shook the earth and darkened the sky, and the divine Presence of the Holy Spirit who would not have come into hearts in quite the same way without the Ascension. John believes.

And if you can swallow the testimony about the Voice of God at the baptism, and the testimony of miracles from hundreds at the Cross, then the voice of the Holy Spirit is greater still. Without His Presence, you could not make sense of the human testimonies. But with His Presence, you already have all the testimony you need, never mind whether you experienced those miraculous events yourself. God is naturally going to testify of Himself in your soul, but if you can’t embrace the truth of the Incarnation, then you are calling God Himself a liar.

Without the Spirit of the Risen Lord in your soul, you cannot claim to have eternal life.

Thus, John wrote this letter to reassure the fleshly minds of his readers that they do indeed have eternal life. Just listen for the Spirit’s witness. That Voice is the assurance you have to approach the Throne of God and make requests that He is eager to answer.

Something you should pray for is that any child of God who has gotten off the path, led astray by the lies of the cultists, would repent and return. There are limits of course. John has already specified what he means by “a sin leading to death” — denying that Jesus was the Son of God. If someone can go that far, they aren’t a child of God. Pray for them to get saved, if you feel led, but don’t pray like they are just a child of God who got off track. There are plenty of mistakes His children will make without denying Christ.

We know that those who are spiritually born are not going to make that kind of mistake. That’s what John means by saying the children of God don’t sin — that particular sin, of course. The Devil cannot reclaim your soul; the Lord forbids it. The Holy Spirit makes us aware that we belong to God, while the rest of the world belongs to Satan. The Spirit also makes us fully aware of who Christ is and that we belong to Him. All those cults are lies; they don’t know God and cannot embrace the Savior.

Finally, John says he wants his little darlings to be careful and avoid getting too close to idolatry.

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No Need to Fear

Posted on February 28, 2025 by ehurst

So long as Christ needs us here in this world, nothing Satan and his minions can do will ever harm us. Keep a watchful eye on the Enemy’s lies.

The greatest danger to Trump’s life is his own inner circle. The globalists have been crushed; they will not recover. The last holdouts in government will be removed over the next few years, but the political momentum has already turned away from them. The salvageable pieces will be absorbed into the real threat: the technocrats and Zionists infesting Trump’s administration.

Whether Trump lives or not, these technocrats have already begun seizing full control of the country. It will be messy, and there will be some bloodshed, but it will proceed. Many millions of lives will be turned upside down. The economy will shake and shiver. Most importantly, the US as we know it will cease to exist.

Somewhere down the road, this will also fail, but we must get through this part first.

You could see all of this with heart-led conviction, but if you want some evidence, take a look at this article from Whitney Webb. It was published back before the election, so keep that in mind.

Are you among those who really cheer the idea of immigration control? Imagine this scenario: There is no hard currency, only electronic banking tokens. You cannot get an account without a registered ID and facial recognition. Immigrants would be forced to resort to barter, unable to shop at stores or even online. Oh, and don’t forget that social credit score, because a bad score will restrict what you can purchase with your facial recognition.

Illegal immigrants would be locked out of the system, no point in coming here.

Of course, this whole thing would be impossible to tolerate, and it would come apart at the seams, but that won’t stop the technocrats from trying. Meanwhile, it’s all linked way back in history. I can recall when the PROMIS software scandal broke, when the US government stole the whole thing from Inslaw. I can recall being trained in the Military Police to start working on that kind of database system to track everyone. I saw that shift in government doctrine in the late 1980s at the ground level, and my heart knew it was a huge, suffocating evil that was coming upon the US.

I recall a rash of thefts from government employees who carried government laptops that were stolen, which contained various databases of citizen records not yet linked into PROMIS. The whole thing was masked as common petty theft, except the thieves had a massive network of people to trip up anyone along the escape route who dared chase the thieves. Because of the PROMIS software and the Main Core database, a significant portion of US citizens have been tagged as potential terrorists already.

Do you remember TIA (Total Information Awareness)? It never went away; it was just hidden. The program still exists. It’s part of Palantir’s contract with the CIA. Not every hack attack on companies with a huge customer database, with credit card numbers, is simply greedy criminals. The all-seeing eye of surveillance knows where you’ve spent the majority of your money, every TV program or video you’ve watched, books you’ve read, tracked your movement by cellphones, knows what you eat, can read your medical records, who you talked to and what you said, etc. There is an electronic diary of your life in that database called LifeLog.

Your face has been picked up by Clearview AI.

But of course, they don’t call it that any more. With all the things DOGE is cutting, they will not touch the big database because it’s not identified in any way that makes it show up on a budget. It’s not a single data pile, but a linkage of many hundreds of databases held in many different agencies public and private.

But all of this is more fragile than you might imagine. It cannot know the hearts of God’s people. It cannot prevent the Spirit of God working to destroy every stronghold the Enemy raises up on the graves of fools. Watch and see the hand of the Lord protecting His Covenant and Word.

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Cabin Fever Cure

Posted on February 27, 2025 by ehurst

Like most folks in the Heartland, the week of harsh cold led to cabin fever. I couldn’t wait to get out and ride again. On Monday, I visited the construction site of the new railroad spur between two lines. It required building a bridge over Crooked Oak Creek adjacent to the Eagle Lake Park. While the construction site is not officially cleared, there’s not much left to do. A skeleton crew was there engaged in the final closure activities and waved at me, welcoming me back — cyclists had been locked out of the area during the construction.

What cyclists missed for just a bit longer than a year was the closure of the Eagle Lake Trail that runs from the lower dam on the Oklahoma River Recreation Area to the trail built by Del City within Eagle Lake Park. Trucks hauled in hundreds of tons of clay and rock to create the high artificial ridge necessary to keep the rails at grade. In the process they destroyed the original asphalt trail that ran along the banks of Crooked Oak Creek. Now that the tracks are laid, the temporary roadbed has been removed. The construction contract called for replacing the cheap asphalt surface with concrete. In this case, it was cheaper to splash a little more concrete onto the site than having to hire a separate crew to lay asphalt.

Yesterday was my first longish ride after the freeze. This shot is viewing the city skyline from the southwest side. To be more precise, I was standing in Woodson Park just west of Interstate 44. This is on the path of my Grand Boulevard Trail and River Trail loop, around 25 miles in total.

One of the more amusing parts of this adventure was that we went from shocking brutal cold to shorts weather in just a few days.

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Stocks, Bonds and Investments

Posted on February 25, 2025 by ehurst

Let’s review something that applies to several current conversations I’m having. Review the Bible, and Proverbs in particular. You gain the worldview that God is the maker and owner of all things. He portions out His property to whomever He desires, and on terms that suit His purpose.

His purpose is to reveal His glory. The whole dispute He has with Satan and his allies on God’s staff turns on the question of who merits glory and worship from humans. On the way to asserting His truth, God has granted provisional limited control of parts of His Creation to Satan’s feudal authority. As humans, we are by default under Satan’s authority. We can trump his authority by appealing to Christ.

Doing so requires that we embrace His Covenant. His Covenant includes referring back to Proverbs, where we learn that God grants us our bodies and all the means to glorify Him while here in this world. Everything we can possibly have is on loan from God. When we acknowledge that and give Him due glory and worship, He asserts His privilege, and inserts Himself into the authority structure of Satan.

Because we acknowledge God’s ownership of our property, we are careful what we do with it. If you abstract the clear statements of Biblical Law, you learn that buying stuff is one thing. You may not have too many choices in vendors and what you buy, but you naturally strive to glorify God in how you do business. When He grants us a surplus, we try to honor His name (His reputation) by how we use it.

The Covenant defines that as doing everything we can to bless our covenant family. We put their human needs in the same basket as ours. If we have still more surplus after meeting our convictions on that issue, then we can invest in their future welfare in other ways.

This is where we bump squarely into sources like Proverbs. When you read passages telling you not to cosign a loan for a stranger, there’s a lot more than what’s in the words themselves. Hebrew proverbs are like that. It’s not the words themselves, but what they indicate about the larger issues of life under the Covenant. The main principle is that you don’t let God’s loans to you get tied up in affairs that you cannot directly observe, and over which you cannot assert some control.

You are responsible for seeing that what God gives you goes to His glory. You don’t invest in the lives of strangers who are not under your moral covering. Unless you are directly involved in the business, it is a sin to invest in it. You have no idea how your investment is being used. At the least, you must have a trusted proxy (under your covering) working for you in that business. God Himself requires of you a personal interface.

Thus, you cannot ever invest God’s money in a stock market, for example. Most financial markets are designed specifically to keep you away from your investment. You can audit all you want, but if you are not involved in the business, you cannot possibly see whether God is glorified in the operations.

As it is, the whole world of western contracts and labor are inherently wicked in God’s eyes. The legal system itself directly contradicts God’s Word. The mere existence of corporations as persons is purely Satanic. It is about as defiant as you can get against God’s Word.

Here’s something most people never consider: The entire structure of things like stock markets is bogus. Your investment is real, but nothing else about the market is. The whole thing is entirely notional; there is no real property exchanged. It’s all nothing but electronic noise. These days you can’t even get real currency out of the market, only numbers on a computer at some bank. And that bank could collapse for no reason you could understand, taking all your imaginary dollars with it.

We have very little choice about banking and currency. Every day we are creeping closer to virtual money only. Under the Covenant, you aren’t obliged to fight that monster. But you are obliged to stay out of the stock market and similar means of gambling. You are not permitted to invest God’s resources in places you are not directly involved.

Giving outright gifts/charity is another matter. The only constraint is your convictions; share according to your heart. You can give anything to anyone at all, and you are off the hook for how it gets used once it leaves your hands.

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NT Doctrine — 1 John 4

Posted on February 22, 2025 by ehurst

Let’s remind ourselves that John is being somewhat sarcastic about the various heretical cults around Ephesus and their claims of deep “gnosis” by using juvenile Greek grammar to express the real knowledge of God. The revelation of God in His Son does not require a lot of intellectual depth; it requires a lot of commitment, surrendering to the Cross. This chapter sounds very repetitive in English translations, but it’s not hard to grasp the message.

The people in this world are driven by spirits. If you are not driven by the Spirit of Christ, then your spirit is dead and you are driven by the spirits of this fallen realm. When you deal with someone who has a dead spirit, you can tell from the conversation because they don’t know God. Their claims to know God mean nothing if they speak poorly about His Son (implying they speak poorly of God’s other children, too).

Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. God’s Spirit is not going to say anything different from that. People who fail to confess that Jesus came as a human Son of God are not driven by the Spirit of God. Those people are driven by a spirit of Antichrist. We were warned about the Antichrist; that spirit is here. It is the same spirit that drives the rest of humanity who don’t serve Christ. Their chatter makes sense to this world, but the people who know God would prefer the testimony of John and his associates.

Another signature of spirits is the power to love when there is no human reason to do so. The Spirit of God gives us to power to love His children regardless of all the good human reasons not to care at all. Don’t walk in the flesh, but in the Spirit; show His love to His children. Let Jesus live and walk in your flesh. He sacrificed His flesh for us, so we should offer up ours for His use.

Again, if God loved us that much, how can we not express His love for each other? As long as you are in this fleshly existence, you’ve certainly never seen Him with your eyes. How can you claim to love Whom you have never seen, if you cannot love your fellow believer that you have seen? If His Spirit lives in you, you cannot help but love each other. That’s the primary signature of His Presence in your life. John reminds his readers that he speaks from a personal acquaintance with the Messiah, so he knows what he’s talking about.

With all the people running around denying that He was a real human and also the Son of God, let’s not complicate things. You should assume that someone carries the Spirit God if they confess Jesus as the human Son of God. John notes that his sole source of confidence is the power to love in the way Jesus taught about His Father’s love. The sacrificial love of the Cross is our covenant with God. We can stand before Him on the Day of Judgment because we allow His Spirit of love to overwhelm us. Whatever Jesus was in this world, that’s what we are. That cannot fail.

His love chases out all our human sorrows and fears. People who worry about the Judgment haven’t tapped into that love yet. We are able to love because He loved us first. Honestly folks, His love in us really is that powerful. Give yourself in love to others and your sorrows will evaporate. Your situation might not change, but how you feel about it will be different.

So, anyone who can resent or detest a fellow believer is not operating in the power of God. The only way you can love the invisible God of Creation is to love Him where He lives in His children here where you can see them. That’s our law in Christ.

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NT Doctrine — 1 John 3

Posted on February 15, 2025 by ehurst

John refers to his readers as the progeny of God, His beloved brood. The world at large is the brood of Satan, so it recognizes neither our Father nor us. While we are His children already, the fullness of what that means has not yet been revealed. Somewhere out in the future, this will be fully manifested. When Christ returns for us, we shall see His eternal form, and simply seeing this will transform us to be eternal like Him. People who are looking forward to that day work hard to shed their fleshly nature as much as possible, trying to be like Jesus.

(The pseudo-Christian cultists didn’t fight their fleshly nature at all.)

It’s one thing to miscalculate what God intends; that’s the nature of childhood. Nobody’s children are perfect. Otherwise, we’d call them something other than “children”. But people who sin habitually are diving deep into injustice. They are rejecting the Father’s dominion. They aren’t His kids; they are foreigners. Jesus came to open the divine covenant and rescue people from their fleshly natures. He had no sin; He was the mature adult Son of His Father. Thus, we who have accepted His offer aren’t habitual sinners. Habitual sinners have never encountered Jesus.

So there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who belong to Jesus strive to live just and righteous like He did. Everyone else belongs to sin; they are children of the Devil, because the Devil rejected his Creator’s will for him right from the start. That’s why God sent His Son — to clean up the damage the Devil had done. When God reclaims a soul from Satan, He gives that soul a spiritual nature it did not previously have. That soul can no longer be at peace with habitual sin; it’s contrary to who they are. Moreover, those who lack that spiritual nature, who still belong to the Devil, are quite obvious by how they live. They have no interest in pleasing the Father. Keep your eye out for anyone who treats any believer with contempt.

We should hardly be surprised that the spiritually dead folks don’t like us. Do you remember Cain and Abel? They were two different kinds of men; Cain had no power to overcome his fleshly annoyance at this brother’s holiness. Our power to love each other is the proof that we have moved from the Abyss into the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who fail to manifest that kind of sacrificial love for believers are still dead. That kind of self-centered spite is the root of murder. People who can hate believers have never experienced spiritual birth.

The reason we have any grasp on love at all is because of the example of Christ taking up His Cross. Following Him means having that same level of commitment; we are ready to die for our fellow believers. How would you call it “sacrificial love” if someone is unwilling to sacrifice so much as a little of the material goods of this world for a brother in the Lord? It’s not enough to say the right words, but we must act on those words and live that truth.

The power to sacrifice for a fellow believer is all the assurance we need that we belong to Christ. Don’t listen to a condemned fleshly conscience; God’s voice in our spirits is louder than such a false testimony. Eventually the conscience will learn the truth and cease to condemn us, and we will see clearly God’s favor on us. It gives us the confidence to bring our requests before Him, knowing that He wants what is best for us.

His will for us is that we submit fully to His Son, swearing our undying allegiance. And His Son said His royal law for us was to love each other as He loves us. The folks who keep that law can do so only because of His Presence in their souls. When we can recognize that Presence in our souls, it becomes our assurance in serving Him.

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