Teachings of Jesus — Luke 14:25-35

Posted on December 29, 2018 by ehurst

It’s so easy to lose track of the original mission of Israel, the purpose of the Covenant. Israel was to absorb and live by the revelation of God, and in turn draw other nations to Him by their visible blessings of shalom. After centuries of corrupting the message for themselves and destroying their witness to the world, it stands to reason the Messiah would demand repentance. So drastic was the distance between where they were versus where God wanted them that this level of repentance would be extreme.

This would share something with the call of Abraham, and with the Exodus: Leave behind everything you know and travel to a different world. This time, Jesus is talking about a truly different world, the otherworldly Kingdom of Heaven.

Jesus used a common feudal expression for the petition to join His Messianic Kingdom: “If anyone comes to Me.” What does a person have to leave behind to enter the Messiah’s service? Jesus emphasized the depth of commitment necessary by using a term best translated as “despise” but is more typically cited as “hate.” You must be ready to lose your entire clan, because they each have to come on their own individual calling. This isn’t just a matter of property and comfort, but your whole identity must be sacrificed for a new one.

This is not news to those Jesus taught that day. Any Eastern potentate would reject a half-hearted offer of partial loyalty. The Messiah was no different. To make the point painfully obvious, He refers to the most horrific method of execution in use at that time, introduced by Rome. He implies that He would eventually take up His own cross, and anyone who followed Him would have theirs, too.

If you build a fortress, don’t you first ensure you have the resources for what’s in the architectural drawing? Nothing says a king is a loser like an unfinished fort. And what kind of king is so incompetent at warfare that he doesn’t evaluate whether he can fight an enemy marching toward him? Do you have the training and tactics to take down a superior force, or should you seek terms of peace before they get close enough to attack? In these stark terms Jesus warns the people following Him around to decide if they really intended to follow Him to the death. Had they given thought to what serving Him would demand of them?

It’s not that He wanted to turn them away; He wanted them to know the terms of service before they got to the point when He began choosing who was invited. Could they defeat the army of human weakness inside themselves? Could they trust what He said enough to build a life that would withstand the Devil?

More than once Jesus had referred to the cheap household salt used in those parts. The common grade of salt for peasants was harvested from salt marshes in dry weather. It was rather impure, but usable. It went bad pretty quickly if exposed too long to open air, particularly in houses where things were a little damper than outside. The pure salt crystals in this mixture would precipitate out with the moisture and leave the grungy impurities. These were just salty enough still to be a threat to crops, so you had to make sure it went only into the streets where it wouldn’t harm anything.

He knows these people have broken and imperfect lives, but God can still use them. Indeed, there’s no other kind of people available. However, they must retain the characteristics that make them useful. They have to preserve holiness and make the world palatable to God. There is no secondary or neutral use, no freeloaders. Whoever is not building the Kingdom is tearing it down. If they aren’t useful, they will be discarded without mercy because they become a threat to holiness and shalom.

Finally, Jesus warns that what He had to say required more than just hearing the words. This truth had to processed in the heart. Only the heart knew the ultimate answers to His questions.

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Pastoral Psychology and the Heart 03

Posted on December 29, 2018 by ehurst

Making a deity of any part of yourself is a poor substitute for reaching out to eternity.

Some of you may have heard of B.F. Skinner and his theory that human personality is nothing more than the net result of the conditioning one has received throughout life. For him, there is only flesh and synapses and memories, but no soul. His theory comes apart most quickly when you deal with humans who have a high IQ or some other unusual degree of talent. They exhibit an independence and creativity that defies any possible explanation through conditioning. Influential he was, but Skinner’s reductionism never accomplished much.

Most Western psychology does assume we are more than flesh and conditioning, but that we have something like a soul. Too much of what humans do cannot be explained without positing a consciousness that is all too real and resistant to conditioning in many ways. But the whole of Western Civilization starts out with rejecting that there can possibly be anything higher than the intellect. So while our culture generally recognizes a body and a soul, there is no real place for the human spirit, except as a mere metaphor.

There was a popular notion in evangelical teaching back in the 1970s that saw human nature as three concentric spheres. There was a body on the outside, a soul inside that, and the innermost sphere was the spirit. The problem with this simplified model was that it encouraged people to equate their physical form with the biblical term “flesh.” We then get a psychology that blames the body for being what it is and that it needs discipline and denial in order to roll back the fallen nature. This is bogus; it’s a notion many people still read back into the Bible. The Bible uses “flesh” as a symbol, a parable.

The problem is not with our bodies, and it’s wrong to assume our troublesome emotions are formed from the collected signals of our bodies. Emotions are part of the mind. They are sourced in the mind. Our fleshly nature is not in our emotions nor in our bodies, though it is expressed in the limitations and mortality of the body. This bogus notion that we can blame sin on the body is part of why we have the false notion in the West that the mind is perfectible, or at least that the intellect is not actually fallen.

Whatever discipline and denial the fleshly nature needs includes getting the mind whipped into shape, too. Here is where we discover that the soul/consciousness/ego is not actually rooted in the brain. Your ego is the breath of God from Genesis; it does not come with the equipment. We can choose to limit our egos to what the intellect alone can handle, but the ego need not be confined there. Part of expanding the ego outward is reaching into the space that is occupied by the will.

Now some versions of that model with the three spheres did include the trio of mind, will and emotions drawn in as segments of the second sphere of the soul. Yet, virtually nothing in the attached teaching explained the will adequately. Only if you had read from research into Hebrew intellectual assumptions would you know that the will was associated in the Bible with the heart. And further, you could then understand that the heart/will was the repository of commitment. This was a critical element in the feudalism inherent in the Old Testament. You were expected to commit to, or put your faith in, Jehovah as His loyal feudal servant. Faith is in the heart, not in the brain. The brain cannot commit, only the ego working in the heart can do that.

In other words, you were expected to make this commitment an exercise of the ego, a decision you could make that went beyond what the reason could grasp. It was expected that under the blessings of revelation, your convictions would seize the truth and drive you into such a commitment, and that it would hold you firmly to that commitment. It was quite plainly indicated that this would be a choice that defied reason by the very nature of it being sacrificial to the point of death.

The heart or will was regarded in the Old Testament as the only link to the human spirit. From the New Testament we get this very clear picture of the spirit being dead by default, and requiring the powerful touch of God to breathe the second touch of life into it. That would be His life, His Spirit. The Bible isn’t all that specific about it, but it comes to us in hints that the heart/will was the only part of us linked to the spirit. So the simplified drawing of spheres could be misleading, implying the mind and emotions could also touch the spirit, but that is manifestly false.

The traffic is one way, coming out of the spirit and into the heart. It certainly affects your emotions, and it should bring order to you mind. The intellect is there to organize and implement what the heart knows is morally imperative. There is no sentiment in the heart; that’s just how we’ve been taught. It’s the flawed mythology of our Western Civilization. We must reject a large burden of garbage that comes with our Western culture.

So we come to the part where we don’t care a whit about what this world calls “sanity.” That’s not our end goal here in pastoral psychology of the heart. Rather, we seek a totally different kind of sanity that brings peace with God and with Creation. It begins by restoring the proper order of things inside. Indeed, the whole business of spiritual warfare is defeating the devils within. The only power that defeats Satan is his Master whom he serves, God Almighty. It’s his job to mess with us, to deceive and convince us to embrace the intellect as a sufficient deity in its own right. That means by default that we turn away from the Tree of Life and become mortal. That’s not where we started off in the Garden of Eden, and it’s not what we were designed to do. We were designed for immorality.

Biblical symbolism isn’t meant to be precise because the fleshly nature is inherently hostile to eternal truth. In many ways, this world is Hell, and the Bible refers to yet another place of punishment called the Lake of Fire beyond that. Nobody in their “right mind” wants to stay here, but if we are going to be here for awhile, we can at least find the path that makes the most sense. That path is what God revealed, and it starts with making us focus on a higher realm than the one around us. We are to pass through the Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden and begin the long process of refitting ourselves for life there.

We have to reject the Fruit of the Tree of Judging Good and Evil.

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Pastoral Psychology and the Heart 02

Posted on December 28, 2018 by ehurst

The issue is building out the ego without building it up.

This image is another of those parables, because the human ego has no physical dimensions. However, we are aware of people whose ego has become monumentally large. To some degree it will always be fragile when it’s too narrowly focused and tall, because it’s not designed for that. There’s a constant risk of toppling. But most of us are aware of an ego that has included a lot more territory, because it makes someone more stable and open. You feel safe coming closer to such people because they aren’t fragile, but seem full of richness. They can afford to flex more than most people.

It’s not hard to find fault with Freudian theories, but his breakdown of the self into ego, superego and ID has entered the cultural lingo. Sometimes it’s roughly equivalent to what we can teach. So the ego is the conscious traffic manager for all the activity inside your head. You’ll get some demands from the ID but it’s more accurate to call that the fleshly nature, often found in the New Testament as “the flesh.” The superego is an overly active conscience connected to the wrong source.

In other words, Freud’s psychoanalytic model is wrong because it’s both incomplete and was frankly based on evaluating only crazy people to come up with his norms. Freud did no research with well adjusted adults to get a control group against which to compare his clients. But there are no clinical studies by anyone anywhere that take seriously the assumptions in the Bible, so far as I have read. The closest anyone has come so far is the Rose Meade School of Psychology, and even that one is flawed with being deeply devoted to Western norms, not the Hebrew mystical norms in the Bible.

We need an ego that doesn’t take itself too seriously, an ego that knows it is permanently broken by the Fall. We need for the ego to settle the unfinished business of childhood sufficiently to move forward into embracing reality as God made it. This is a process that must be pursued consciously.

As was famously explained by Dr. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled, most egos struggle with cathexis as an involuntary exercise. Instead of moving the ego boundaries out deliberately, something seizes the emotional insecurities of unfinished childhood and causes those boundaries to collapse. It’s a temporary infatuation — typically “falling in love” — and everything is beautiful. Our personality changes and everyone notices, but eventually those boundaries snap back into place. We are left with a sour taste as this false infatuation crumbles into reality. That sort of romance stinks, but it breeds an endless cycle of bad romances that hit us rather like drugs to which our body quickly becomes accommodated so that we need a new drug to get us high again. This is how people become for us like bad drugs, because we have no idea how to build relationships.

But we can be just as broken with anything, not just people. An improper cultural expectation about anything in this world can cause this same roller-coaster ride that always ends in a crash. It’s not that people and things are bad, but we approaching it all wrong. Even if we conclude that we are bad, it’s the false understanding of “bad” that makes us continue on the wrong path.

We are bad, but the real problem is that we have walked away from the revelation of God. The essence of the Fall was rejecting revelation in favor of human reason. We are convinced that our minds can handle all the important questions in life, and that arrogance covers up a serious weakness — we are actually not at all capable. Indeed, the moment we reach for logic, we are deceived into thinking it’s actually possible to use it for anything that matters. Even for things that don’t matter, logic is a broken tool in our hands. Without revelation, logic itself is deeply flawed. The choice to trust logic closes us off from so much of what God gave us, and creates this massive lump of subconsciousness that was previously wide open.

The ego has descended into the brain and is no longer able to comprehend the traffic that runs through its focus. It cannot discern pure selfish emotions from the truth of God. Instead, it concludes that the self is God.

Talk about your monumental egos…

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Too Easy?

Posted on December 27, 2018 by ehurst

I know from experience that if I made this religion harder, I’d have far more participation and big donations. We would have facilities and equipment, vehicles and advertising, etc. Keep in mind that I’ve done conventional religious work and I know how to succeed in the mainstream. I also know that God called me away from that kind of success because it wasn’t what He wanted. I’m perfectly willing to do this thing all by myself because I have zero doubts about whether it pleases the Lord.

But part of pleasing Him is that I open the door to share with others. There’s nothing in my hands that can prod you to get involved. If you enjoy reading this stuff and don’t feel the call, I can understand that. But right now there’s less than a dozen active participants who are wallowing in the blessings of shared faith. It worries me that those of you who should participate and hesitate, are so used to the Anglo-American cultural blindness that it just hasn’t hit you how critical it is.

The one thing I can offer is this vision: We are building a close-knit tribe, a covenant community of faith. In accordance with God’s Word, it is a feudal covenant tribe. We are cultivating a high degree of trust and loyalty with each other based on the driving hand of God working in our lives. We expect to be quite different from the rest of the world, a peculiar nation of God. We expect to make an impression even if the world has no clue about us beyond faulty guessing. We will keep it all open to the public, but we cannot open their hearts to the truth so that it comes to life for them.

We believe that God intends to grow us sooner or later, but this is the time to get in on the ground floor. We really need to settle in some elders scattered around the country (or around the world, for that matter), because there is no way I or anyone else can help more than just a few folks at a time. This is a good time to put your hand to plow and train up, because there will be an opening of floodgates. Once tribulation begins in earnest, there will be folks looking for what we have, because they won’t have much else they can trust. Even if it’s just a handful here and there in some few towns and cities, that is thousands.

This series on pastoral psychology is the start of building a curriculum. I’m also praying about a prophet’s academy. Eldership is something you have to learn hands-on, and apprenticeship is about the best we can offer on that. It has to be individually tailored and one-on-one. But general questions about faith and how to do religion is something we can gather into an outline for broader distribution. And if you feel called to the priesthood, you’ll be forging into new territory entirely, because we have none right now. And I’m hardly the only expert on much of anything, just the guy who managed to get something started. My role is apostolic in nature, but I don’t want anyone calling me by that title.

Let me ask you to pray about it. We still need a lot of folks simply involved and living truth on their own terms. But “involved” right now means joining our forum and just getting to know the rest of us. That’s the “tight knit” part of being a covenant tribe. We are the folks who will be here to support you when you start to get swamped by this tribulation stuff. I can’t set any dates for you, but it’s right on top of us. It will save you and everyone near you much sorrow if you were already standing firm as a witness of sanity.

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Pastoral Psychology and the Heart 01

Posted on December 27, 2018 by ehurst

Radix Fidem is the name of our covenant and our religion. As long as I’m alive, this will never be formalized into a government approved tax-free denomination. You are a member if you think you are and you try to fellowship with other members. There will be none of this membership induction process where you have to meet certain requirements. The only requirement is that you hang around and try to part of the family. This is first and foremost a covenant family, but it won’t work too well if you hide in the shadows. Come out and let us love you.

This is not a clinic where you have to pass through an audit of your personal life. You share that stuff when it’s a natural part of the conversation. On the other hand, if you know you need help, one of the first things we’ll need to know is how you got into the mess you are now. Most Americans have at least brushed up against the idea of counseling and personality assessment. It’s a part of our culture. That in itself isn’t so bad, but so very much of our society is messed up that it typically becomes an excuse to enslave people in one way or another. Our goal is to set you free. You need to know who you are, but more importantly, who God made you to be.

Some of this series will review previous teaching on this blog, but hopefully I can restate things with a little more depth and clarity.

The single greatest break we make with secular clinical psychology is our assertion that humanity is fallen. Whole books have been written seeking to relate all the implications of this, but in clinical terms, it means that there is an insurmountable gap between what we can be on one side, and what we ought to be by design on the other side. You’ll never be whole in this life. The best we can hope for is to give you a goal in living and try to make the most of a bad situation. While many clinicians operate on similar assumptions, we take it much farther.

Our current human existence is not the norm. We are under a curse that cannot be fully lifted until we die or Christ returns to restore all things back to Eden. We insist that our human sense of time-space boundaries is part of the Curse of the Fall. Thus, there is no way we can in our current existence bypass it. It’s not that the boundaries are immutable, but the human experience of them cannot be changed. We believe that we were created without those boundaries. Not that Eden had no time and space dimensions, but that they were manageable. We are designed to move about in time and space without physical effort, but our human minds are incapable of processing that.

There must be something in our make-up that handles those dimensions as variables subject to easy manipulation. In other words, there is a part of us that is eternal. In our culture, it would seem there is no innate means to connect with that eternal part. Nothing in our culture, and very little in our psychology lore, even acknowledges such a thing, much less pretends it can be used in any way.

The problem we face is that no amount of clinical language can capture the essence of this thing. What we are left with is a sort of hybrid clinical and mystical discussion. Reminder: Mysticism is direct experience of something that defies description. It’s not a higher level of intellect, but exceeds the limits of intellectual grasp. It places a claim on your existence, something undeniable, even while it remains indescribable. It pulls in some parts of us that are called subconscious, simply because it affects our thoughts and behavior but not from a source fully in the light of conscious awareness. It includes things like intuition, when something is recognized (typically part of a pattern) on a level not fully conscious. It does not require full linear rational processing, but leaps over logical steps and still arrives at an accurate answer.

In our case, what we seek is a conscious awareness of something that touches us outside the rational domain, something entirely personal, though not merely subjective. It clearly comes from outside of us and makes demands.

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Admin: Graphic Artist Needed

Posted on December 26, 2018 by ehurst

This is a ministry; if you need money for it, I’ll try to do some fund-raising.

But I’ve been asked to develop some graphics to go with my teaching. In particular, I think it would help if someone could diagram some of the stuff that falls into clinical psychology territory. There was a time I played with drawing. I got some training and I have skills, but no significant talent. I cannot bring what I visualize to my hands for drawing. Believe me; I’ve tried and it’s just not there. But I can write about it all day long, so I’m hoping someone out there has the confidence to read my stuff and give it a shot.

You’ll get full credit if you want it; we could make it part of the images themselves. Otherwise, we just need to work on a curriculum that will help some folks over the hump of understanding. I’m willing to dig into writing something that might pass for clinical description, so let me know in the comments or by email if you feel like giving it a shot.

Update: I’ll be starting a new series tomorrow. If anything inspires you, feel free to toss out a drawing any time during the series that you feel captures things. You can email it to the address visible about half-way down the right sidebar.

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Boxing Day 2018

Posted on December 26, 2018 by ehurst

I will admit that in times past I prayed that God would call me as prophet and grant me the gift of prophetic insight. Some part of me regrets that deeply, because it has become a big pain in the butt.

The last thing I want from my ministry is that anyone should hold me up as some kind of hero on any terms. I’m a servant performing a dirty job, but one for which God has assuredly equipped me. I’m not complaining about the necessity of explaining to folks that prophecy doesn’t work as is commonly believed. That kind of problem should be obvious. The real problem is that I am compelled to share the message at times and in ways I’d rather not. I’m driven to write things I know people will ridicule, as if my source was just my own imagination. But as the prophet Jeremiah indicates in 20:7-9, woe is me if I try to keep quiet.

I’m called to prophesy to America, the people of the US. Others are welcome to listen in if it blesses you. It’s not often that I need to talk about other countries. Only rarely do I have a word for anyone else. More typically it’s a prophetic insight, as opposed to a message commissioned by God. You see, the gift works all the time with me. Sometimes it fires up on questions and other times it is spontaneous. Today is a case of the latter.

It’s not like I hear stuff in my head; I receive it in my heart. It’s a matter of conviction and conscience welling up within me. Coming from the Anglo-American cultural background, there was an awful lot of territory to cross before I could start getting used to how this works. I had to get comfortable with something that weighs so heavily on my soul, and I had to get used to the idea of spitting it out with the confidence that God really is behind it.

So when I came to the conclusion Trump would win the election, it wasn’t my own reckoning. I was pretty sure he was going to lose in terms of my intellectual training, but the urging of my conviction was that he would win and that I should make plans for it. No, this is not about Trump, but about how it feels to hear from God. Somewhere out there among you readers are those who are or will be called to prophesy and I hope to provide some orientation on how to proceed.

My flesh likes Trump; my soul abhors him. Trump is not a godly man at all, but he is the Lord’s tool. He has failed to perform on some issues and I’m not sure right now how that will play out. Forget about all that Q stuff; that’s finished, though the troll army doesn’t know it yet. What I do know, prophetically, is that it no longer matters that much. The window of opportunity on some issues has already closed. Indeed, it hardly matters who is president after the next election. The pivot point is somewhere else, so while we may have cause to rejoice or mourn about who holds that office and why, it won’t make that much difference in where God is calling my attention.

The pivot point is Israel. By no means have I changed my position on that nasty little country. She remains the single biggest threat to all humanity, to the planet Earth itself. Once again: It has nothing to do with Judaism. Judaism is just a mythology that drives some people, but the key is Zionism; they are twin religions. Zionism is the dominant twin. Zionism is the force behind globalism, the cult seeking to rebuild the Tower of Babel. But you should understand that Zionism is just using the globalists and has already thrown them under the bus.

The globalists did attack this blog a few years ago, but it wasn’t worth their time in light of bigger problems, so they faded away and left me alone. The Zionists themselves are frankly not that much of a threat to my ministry, but they are the biggest single problem we will face in other ways. This ministry will continue to declare the truth about them, but they aren’t likely to come after me with any real threats.

For some of you, your personal mission and calling from God means you need pay no attention to any of this stuff. I’m not telling you, “Leave it to me.” I’m telling you to focus on your mission. For those of you who feel called to pay attention to this stuff, I want to share with you some things that will help you prepare for what comes next. Our general mission has always been to stand on faith within the context of what happens around us and harvest the blessings of shalom so that our testimony of faith stands out to those few able to see it.

Israel is calling the shots now. That withdrawal from Syria? That’s so Israel can attack without worrying about hitting our troops. It’s in favor of Turkey, as well, but that’s a side issue. The core of it is Israel. Our foreign policy is entirely controlled by Israel, and our domestic policy will become increasingly so. What does Israel want for us? Distractions. The government shut-down and the border wall are just theater. Whether we build it or don’t will not make any difference with the problem Trump claims it will solve. We are being invaded, along with Europe, so that Israel can humble the West and enslave us all. The wall will not stop the invasion.

And Zionism will also fail, but it will take awhile yet.

In the meantime, we will be standing in the rising chaos as the US is torn apart. Again, the economy will break, but not the parts that allow us to eat and clothe ourselves. What will break is the stuff that the wealthy worry about. Those less fortunate may still suffer some sorrows, but learning how to live at the bottom will carry you through. Keep the focus on manifesting faith in the midst of this tribulation. This world is not our home. You know trouble is coming; get ready to exploit the situation in favor of our Heavenly Homeland.

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Merry Christmas 2018

Posted on December 25, 2018 by ehurst

The burden of a shepherd’s care knows no holidays.

My Christmas present to you is the reminder that we must tribulate. This was a major issue with the New Testament churches. Paul’s letters are loaded with admonitions to embrace the otherworldly outlook, to know that this life was not worth the anxiety so very many people had. Jesus, of course, made it abundantly clear that this life did not compare to the glory of Heaven. Several times it is noted in the Gospels that He was looking forward to His crucifixion.

But it’s the worldliness of so many Christians that finally destroyed organized Christianity’s message. Get the picture: The churches faced the onslaught of Judaizers corrupting their doctrine from within, and the Roman government becoming increasingly hostile to the point of making Christian religion illegal. John in Revelation saw the onslaught getting worse and some portion of the organized churches compromising to become the Harlot Church. Do you notice how eloquent is his appeal to face persecution and death with shalom?

I think it’s quite reasonable to compare our situation with theirs. We are doing something new in terms of Christian religion. We are restoring a very ancient way of approaching the whole thing and the moderns around us don’t appreciate the insinuation that they have been wrong all along. On top of that, we dare to say outright that they are wrong. We teach that the intellect is fallen and that only the heart can truly touch the Spirit Realm in this life. We reference medical science to bolster our claim, but then we hearken back to the Scriptures and take seriously the language of the heart as the seat of faith.

Thus, we seek to tear down almost two millennia of compromise by which the Christian religion has been taken seriously by human governments and treated as an ally. That must have been just too much of a temptation to the Early Church Fathers, because they made the compromises necessary to gain Constantine’s official support. They set aside the otherworldly focus and the willingness to tolerate intellectual variations in the approach to Christian religion. It’s not that purity of doctrine isn’t important, but they agreed to apply a standard of orthodoxy that didn’t allow variations on the grounds that those who want to do it their own way can go off on their own. In other words, disassociation was not a sufficient tool of discipline for human government; they had to employ government force to compel everyone to toe the line on an intellectual level.

Not that it did them much good, as the whole thing broke down during the Middle Ages culminating in the Reformation, which in turn did nothing more than create multiple legal standards, all the while keeping alive the notion that government approval was essential.

No, government hostility is essential. That truth was lost way back there right after the last of the Twelve passed away. Okay, granted there are times when we should expect government to be neutral, to simply ignore us. That’s actually the ideal. Leave us to our madness and we’ll try to stay out of your way, Mr. Government Official. But sooner or later, when God’s plans call for His wrath to fall on some human government for whatever reason, it means we must stand up to prophesy of why it’s falling. When was the last government you saw that humbled itself before the Lord? Me neither; it means we should expect hostility.

And we should expect plenty of hostility from those in the existing mainstream religion who feel they have a vested interest in that mainstream status. Theirs is a cerebral, worldly religion that demands respect, which means compromising with this world. This virtual parish and our Radix Fidem covenant assumes a certain amount of hostility. We don’t pick fights, but we will prophesy the truth of things.

It’s not that I’m asking you to imagine hostility where it doesn’t manifest, but realize that it’s there waiting to see if God is going to promote this thing or not. Once we start getting noticed, there will be some limited influx of people looking for this kind of faith, but the general rule will be growing hostility. With Christ and Paul, I say get used to it. This is the norm. Teach it and live it.

Merry Christmas.

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On Variable Reality

Posted on December 24, 2018 by ehurst

The actual truth cannot be put into words; we can only present it as parable. Your heart can discern things the mind cannot, and an active heart-centered focus will protect your mind from it’s own inherent weaknesses. This is why people who live by conviction versus intellect can easily shoot holes in the reasoning of folks who trust intellect more than their hearts.

We need to act as if reality is variable. In more clinical terms, I am utterly convinced that history has been edited repeatedly. It contributes to something called the Mandela Effect (look it up) whereby significant sized communities of folks who experienced something together can remember something different than what the records show. While some of that is the predictable results of unconscious effects of common mythology, some of it is a genuine shift in reality. That should not trouble us who follow Christ from the heart.

How often have I tried to say this: Objective facts are ultimately not the issue. The reason I say that is because they are variable. One of the things we lost in the Fall was the ability to process reality from the heart and an instinctive distrust of sensory data. We can regain some of that here and now, but remain saddled with an intellect that cannot handle a shift in reality, especially one that takes place in real time before your eyes. The mind wants a rational explanation, and while the linked video there may be some kind of trickery in editing a video, it doesn’t have to be. The problem is that our fallen intellect can’t process what we are seeing.

Why do you suppose Pharaoh’s magicians were able to do things the Bible mundanely notes are real magic? That text assumes a different epistemology than is common in the West. It assumes you recognize that Satan can make use of features in reality the mind cannot grasp. It’s not that Satan has so much power, but that we are deceived about what’s normal. Miracles are built into Creation. The problem is that we don’t understand the mechanism because we don’t have an intellectual culture steeped in that different outlook that gave us the Bible. When we can shed the idea of “objective reality,” we will be in a better position to deal with such things.

We’ll see more miracles when we get used to the viewpoint on reality that God revealed to His people long ago. Learn to walk by convictions/faith.

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Building Exemptions

Posted on December 24, 2018 by ehurst

We’ve discussed previously the image of painting the Blood of Christ on the doorposts of our lives to turn away the wrath of God falling on America. Most people don’t make the connection between that and our non-involvement in the American society. Our otherworldly, mystical approach and withdrawal from political and cultural concerns is how we prevent taking upon ourselves the blood guilt for America’s sins.

The only way to establish an identity separate from the wrath of God is to proclaim ourselves a covenant community of faith apart from the mainstream. We come together in a virtual parish in part because it allows us to disclaim any blood guilt. We use our covenant identity as a shield, as the means to claim His mercy so that He will spare (pass-over) us when He comes in judgment.

Think for a moment how He sets boundaries on the Satanic angels of wrath (AKA demons). Consider what I wrote years ago, that the Law Covenants were binding on the Devil. If we embrace any applicable covenant, and are striving to be faithful, it’s not just a matter of harvesting some blessings, but of harvesting the Blood Covering. Satan will not enter a home painted with that sacrificial offering.

But it’s not the physical observance of some code. Rather, it’s living according to your convictions; that’s the ultimate manifestation of all the Law Covenants. It makes you lawful from the heart. Your performance is no longer the issue, but the desire of your heart to please the Father causes Him to claim us as His own.

God and Satan are smart enough to detect where your heart belongs. They don’t rely on your fleshly performance, though Satan will gleefully try to convince you it matters. All it’s good for is a marker, one indicator among others. The real issue is your desire to glorify Christ that makes Him willing to claim you before the Throne in Heaven.

And a very important part of pleasing Him is the longing to be a part of His household in the Spirit Realm. We pass through this world on our divine mission seeking souls that reflect His glory in ways we can discern it. We know that kin folks support each other. So we find ways to cling together in fulfillment of His divine love. One of the manifestations of His Spirit in our spirits is that we can’t get enough of that fellowship and mystical communion. It’s seems to us like glimpses of the Father’s face.

This is part of what we hope to do here with the Radix Fidem covenant: to provide a valid basis for claiming to be one of His tribes. This is why we talk of building something that will outlive us. We seek to establish a wealth of holy habits of mind, of teaching and practices that mark us as someone He recognizes. We strive to find those things essential to fellowship and communion so we can push aside all the crap the Satan tries to offer as a substitute. We know that if God recognizes us readily enough, it is inevitable the world will, as well. And while Satan turns the world against us for that reason, there’s no way he can stop the Father using our clear identity as the means to drawing others out of the Devil’s hands.

So I don’t really care what you call it, but as long as you feel drawn to what we do here, let’s take advantage of this power to build an identity that outlives us all. I’m not going to pretend the Apostles made mistakes, but I dare to imagine we have some advantages they didn’t, alongside some weaknesses they didn’t have, either. But we have this opportunity to try again and maybe not get side-tracked so quickly as did the New Testament churches. Maybe this time the Lord won’t allow the Devil to overwhelm this gospel work in the way John prophesied in Revelation. The birth of Western Civilization buried the gospel for a long time.

Let’s build this life that will exempt us from much of God’s wrath falling on America.

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