Teachings of Jesus — Luke 12:54-59

Posted on December 15, 2018 by ehurst

This continues the previous lesson from last week. Jesus pointed out that His coming as Messiah would polarize those under the Old Covenant and separate out those who would belong to the New Covenant. His Covenant would restore what all previous covenants should have done, but the new age He would usher in would not do away with the fallen context of human existence.

He reuses a parable from previous times teaching the crowds, about being able to predict the weather conditions. After many generations in that land, the people had learned that when clouds rose up in the western sky, over the Mediterranean Sea, it would rain later that day. If the wind was from the south where the Sinai was, it meant a hot dry day. You would think they had learned to recognize the weather like old friends and enemies by their faces, easily discerned at a great distance.

But this was pretending to be something they weren’t. They knew the weather patterns in that land, but didn’t recognize the hand of God when it was moving. That’s because they didn’t know Him well enough to discern His divine moral character. They certainly didn’t properly judge by His character their own lives. Wasn’t that more important than knowing the weather?

God was calling them to account before establishing the Messianic Kingdom. They were being sifted and judged by His revelation. Like someone being dragged before a judge in civil claims court, it was wise to get to know your adversary. Find out what would appease him before it goes to trial, or the penalty will be strict. Come to terms before it’s too late.

Jesus warned them that most of them were not ready to face the Messiah. They had no moral standing with God as their Father, but were adversaries who had flouted His Law. They had tried to trick Him and play games, but this was serious business. The Kingdom of Messiah would be founded on a heart of faith, and games would not get you past that standard.

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Installing OpenSUSE Leap 15.0 — Gotchas

Posted on December 15, 2018 by ehurst

If you are looking for an installation walkthrough, it’s easy to find the official documentation. There’s not much reason to change the defaults unless you already know more than I can tell you about it. The goal here is to share some “gotchas” that afflicted my experience.

The larger goal is to make this doable for more people. All operating systems suck, so the question is whether we can live with the suckage any particular OS offers. I’ve decided that OpenSUSE Leap 15.0 is tolerable for me, giving me the things I must have, and otherwise fixable.

During initial installation, there are several defaults you should consider changing. If your machine is on a home network behind a router, chances are you don’t need the firewall the comes bundled with OpenSUSE. They recently switched to firewalld and it’s a bear to configure. The learning curve is steep and whoever wrote their documentation has never had to teach anything, obviously, because it assumes you are a fully trained and qualified network administrator. You’ll get zero hand-holding, so it’s best to simply disable this beast if you don’t need it. This is the primary flaw in the Linux world, because of that huge gap between the developers and the users, with virtually no one to interceded or put things in reach of the average user. If you are behind a router or other firewalling device, there is an installation summary page displayed with a link that allows you to disable the firewall.

The other defaults are likely okay. I chose the KDE Plasma interface. For all its weaknesses, it is still far saner than the alternatives. It’s also as close as you’ll get to the proven style of desktop interface that people are used to.

One of the first things that will happen is you’ll get a software update notice. Go through the process. You need to understand that OpenSUSE protects itself from malware in part by playing games with the file system. The OS itself is in its own disk partition and is mounted read-only. For updates, it takes a snapshot of the file system and then updates that. If all goes well, you reboot and it then grabs that snapshot and loads from there. Once again, it comes up read-only. If you install new packages, it somehow manages to do that without any strange requirements, but all updates require a reboot.

Once installed, let me suggest you never touch Kmail or the Personal Information Manager (PIM, Korganizer, Kaddressbook, etc.) unless you are starting from scratch and can bulldoze your way through the overly complicated setup for Kmail. Inside sources tell me the guy who originally designed it was a hateful SOB who constantly sought to amuse himself by making life difficult for others. The problem is that once you mess with either of them, it instigates a background process called “Akonadi” that constantly polls your email services and is not easily shut off. There’s no graphical interface for it. I highly recommend you stick with Thunderbird. It’s a little ponderous and slow on some machines, but far more sane. You can install the calendar add-on provided and it will function quite well. If you try to use the import function to migrate from Thunderbird to Kmail, it will work only half-way and leave you with needless difficulties to make it work right.

OpenSUSE Leap 15 catches KDE at an odd moment on one thing: There is no simple way to enable a screensaver if you want one. There is no graphical interface connecting KDE to the one that comes installed, which is the old timey generic Xscreensaver. This is the one time you’ll have to use the commandline interface to get things done. In KDE that’s Menu > System > Konsole. Type in:

xscreensaver-demo

It will bring up the interface for configuring the screensaver. That will stop you first thing and ask you to start up the service. It won’t make a lot of difference either way at this point. The interface is a little old fashioned and if you don’t like the selection of screensavers, add the package xscreesaver-data-extra. That means learning how to use your password to activate the administrative controls, and then wading through the interface for software management. You need to do that anyway, so get used to it. Just use the search function for “xscreensaver” and you’ll see the package listed. This will give you extra choices. Save it all by hitting “Restart deamon” in the menu.

Then, you have to go through your settings. Activate the “Configure Desktop” item in the Settings menu, then go down to the second category “Workspace” and select “Startup and Shutdown.” The second item in the left window panel is “Autostart.” Select that, followed by “Desktop File” in the right window pane. At the bottom hit “Add Program” and type in:

xscreensaver &

That ampersend tells the program not to send any background chatter to your Konsole, if you happen to keep one open as I do. By putting this command in autostart, it will fire up every time you log in.

My system has Intel graphics, but OpenSUSE didn’t install the driver by default. It will look for it, but won’t find it, so you’ll need to manually install the package xf86-video-intel and reboot for it to work properly.

Finally, there is the issue of printers. Some of you still have not gone paperless for whatever reason. Even I have to sometimes print off documents on dead trees. The printer manufacturers do a crappy job of supporting Linux, but most of them do offer some token effort. Do the research; use your favorite search engine with the model name of your printer with “linux” and you should be able to find out if it needs a special package installed from the manufacturer (multi-function printers with scanners usually have a separate driver for the scanner). If you are so fortunate to have one already covered, it will show up on the Open Printing database with a note about which driver works best. That is what should come in your OpenSUSE packages.

You cannot do the setup using your desktop settings; you have to go through YaST for system settings: Hardware > Printer. It works well enough, but during the somewhat clunky process you’ll need to ask the thing to install extra driver packages. The details are found here. If the printer is turned on and connected in some way, it should show up in the list in some fashion. If it’s a network printer, select that option in the tree found in the left window pane. That triggers a secondary check by the system. If the printer is identified either way, hit the item in the list on the right window pane and click “Edit” at the bottom.

The next window will be complicated, but in the middle is a pane with the list of what the system has found that needs a driver. Click the button “Driver Packages” and you’ll see a checkbox list. Look at the list. You probably won’t need all of them, but if you don’t know which one applies to your printer, let me suggest these:

  • OpenPrintingPPDs-ghostscript
  • OpenPrintingPPDs-hpjis
  • OpenPrintingPPDs-postscript
  • gutenprint
  • hplip
  • manufacturerPPDs

You can add the Epson collection if your printer is made by them. But this list covers all but the most exotic printers I’ve seen in my experience helping people use Linux. For example, some Brother printers actually work better with HP drivers (hpjis), so you never know.

That should cover most of the stuff you might not figure out on your own. This is a living document and more may be added later. Feel free to ask questions in the comments below.

Okay, for those not familiar with the KDE interface, a lot of things are single-click to activate. Especially in the file manager (called Dolphin), mousing is much more intricate. You can hover the pointer over an item and click the plus sign/minus sign that shows up on one side. Plus will include it in some action; minus will release it from that action. Drag-n-drop often comes with additional actions you might not have expected, so it tends to ask what you intended.

One particular option during installation is, if you are installing OpenSUSE over some other Linux distribution, it will offer to import the user account(s) you had on that one. I cannot promise you’ll be happy with how well that works, but the difference is that OpenSUSE will force you to create a separate root identity and you won’t be using the sudo method of administration. That’s not a big deal for most users, but it means you’ll need to have two good passwords ready for installing.

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Catching Loose Ends

Posted on December 14, 2018 by ehurst

I’m not going to say they are all related, but a bunch of changes have presented themselves to me lately, things that demanded decisions. Somehow I sense the biggest is yet to come, so I’m trying to take care of the little things as soon as they show up.

For example, today I switched my desktop over to OpenSUSE Leap 15.0. Most of you have no interest in such things, and I’m okay with that. I’d like to get away from having to take so much interest in computer stuff. I still love serving others in tech support, but I’ve long been tired of the hobby side of this stuff. I’m trying to reduce the attention load it requires, and OpenSUSE promised better than the Ubuntu stuff I’ve been using. So far, it seems that promise has come true. I’m also dumping XFCE for KDE Plasma. It’s not superior; it’s less work. I’m doing my best to find a usable desktop with what comes pre-installed by default. That means caring less about the nit-picking details and just finding a way forward with the fewest hassles.

The only gotcha so far is dealing with printers, something Linux users will face for a long time to come. Most printer manufactures don’t cooperate that well, though drivers are generally available for most of the ones I’ve encountered. In the case of OpenSUSE, you have to be ready to install extra driver collections from the standard repository. Then you have to look it up on the Open Printing site’s database to see which drivers are recommended for the printer in question.

The other gotcha is simply getting used to how YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) works. It’s not always obvious and can be frustrating at first. Too much of what you encounter assumes you know the jargon. Even those who do know the jargon can get tripped up, but I’ll get used to it. Oh, and screensavers aren’t easy to get working on OpenSUSE’s KDE desktop right now because the folks writing the software at KDE aren’t sure how they want to proceed. It’s not built into KDE and it’s not that easy to set up. It requires a little command-line-fu right now.

That’s still far less hassle than I’ve had with Ubuntu stuff.

One new feature is actually a better security feature than appears at first. The system files are mounted read-only so nothing can happen to permanently break things while in use. The file system for the OS itself is Btfrs, and everything is done with snapshots. When the system updates, it first creates a fresh snapshot, and then applies the updates to that. The update won’t disrupt the running system while you are using it. Then, when it’s all updated and you are ready, you reboot and it grabs the updated snapshot. If all is well, off you go (which is most likely the case). Any work you are doing is saved to a different file system, so it’s not lost. If something with the OS isn’t working right, you can back out and reboot from the previous snapshot until you can get help with the updated one. Users report that trouble has been quite rare so far.

There are other things going on with me, of course. I’m praying for a motor vehicle I can use. Now that my knees are cooperating much better, I’m starting to hike a lot more. I’m ready to go back out and see some natural hiking areas across the state and take pictures. That’s assuming the Lord doesn’t have other plans for me, because He hasn’t told me about it. But the biggest thing I’m praying about is the burden of getting this Radix Fidem thing established firmly on enough human hearts for it to outlive me. This is not a small task and I can’t/shouldn’t do it alone.

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Can I Interest You in a Metaphorical Shovel?

Posted on December 13, 2018 by ehurst

You can’t call it an ambition, but I strive to one end in this life: I want to be translated into Heaven like Enoch and Elijah.

Getting there requires using everything God has granted us in this world to be holy. We have to become so pleasing to Him that there is no point in dying in the flesh, because we have engaged so much self-death while alive.

I believe it’s one of the greatest heresies of Christian religion to believe we can’t get there these days. It’s a lie that what God was doing in the Old Testament is so radically different from what He’s doing after Christ came that the option of translation without death is now gone, that such miracles are no longer available. It’s that foul doctrine of cessation of miracles, that such things are not for us today. That’s a lie of the Devil to deny you your divine heritage. The only thing holding us back is the baloney in our heads from centuries of corrupt materialist Western thinking. This virtual parish rejects Dispensationalism.

God has not changed, and the coming of the Son didn’t change the nature of the universe, nor our fallen condition. The rules of existence after the Fall didn’t change with Christ; He simply breathed life into what was already there. Everything God did with the ancient prophets of Israel He still does today. The problem is on our end.

The burden is upon us to relearn all the things those ancient Hebrew people took for granted. We have to go back and lay hold of that same mental approach to reality. We have to get used to how some things were never stated directly because they were too obvious for those folks. We read their Scriptures and are sometimes quite lost, or get totally off the map, because we haven’t bothered to ferret out the differences they never discussed. In their world, they didn’t have to deal with deeply materialistic epistemology, so there was nothing like that against which to contrast their faith.

In other words, I’m suggesting that God still talks to people today the same way He did Abraham, for example. He still calls people to leave behind everything they ever knew, and to change the way they live. And it should be obvious that when He makes such a call, it won’t be audible in your ears, nor detectable to any of the other the fives senses. The Bible says it’s rare when God speaks, and it sounds to us like thunder. That is, unless we have something inside us turned on that hears a voice instead of something that assaults the senses. Obviously God didn’t speak to Abraham in thunder or everyone for miles around would have heard it.

Instead, it was more like God speaking to Elijah in that “still, small voice” that falls outside the boundaries of standard human senses. The voice calls to us using equipment we all have, but which our culture doesn’t allow us to develop.

The problem is that our culture demands a clinical explanation, something rational. That’s not going to happen. In fact, the Bible dodges the whole issue by using esoteric language of parables. There’s a reason for that; the truth of God has the inherent purpose of dividing, of polarizing humanity into those who trust Him and those who don’t. If you trust Him, you have to abandon what keeps everyone around you locked out. You have to abandon the safe harbor of human reason and intellect, and trust in things that rational people avoid.

We have the equipment built into us already, but our world has invested vast resources over two millennia destroying the reputation of that equipment. In clinical terms, the only thing we can say is that the personal communication from God comes to us through the same equipment that our science tells us is full of sentiment and wild emotions. This makes it very easy to miss the voice of God and mistake it for imagination, to call it childish wishful thinking. I’ll grant you that it’s very easy for people to chase childish imagination instead of seek out revelation from God. But that should not justify dismissing the whole thing.

So instead, we have to spend a lot of time developing ways to exercise that equipment after first instilling a sense of maturity about what God demands of us. We see that in the Law Covenants. That’s what those covenants do; they condition us to look for reality to manifest God’s personal moral character. Not in the particulars; the ancient people knew better than that. They knew it was about reading between the lines to see things for which there can be no words. Divine truth cannot be confined to mere words. It’s the kind of knowledge two close friends have about each other.

So I can talk all around it, I guess, and that’s why this blog has so much verbiage on it. More than ten years of exploring this stuff and sharing what I’ve discovered. But I’m not supposed to be doing this alone. A critical element in all that miracle stuff is how we share it with each other. So if any of this stuff calls your name, consider getting involved in pursuit of this massive task of reclaiming what has been buried for two thousand years.

Can I interest you in a metaphorical shovel? I realize this form of communication lends itself to lots of misunderstanding. I wish it was face to face so all the subtle cues were more obvious, but I’m convinced we can bumble through this with God’s help. There is a lot of treasure we need to dig up.

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God Searches Hearts

Posted on December 12, 2018 by ehurst

God called me as a prophet to America. Sometimes I feel like the Prophet Jonah, but with none of the advantages he had in Nineveh. He got them to listen, but my country is yielding so far only a tiny handful of penitents. We have a nation of dead hearts.

There was a time when the heart-led moral consciousness was the basic expectation for everyone. It was the foundation for the whole range of Ancient Near Eastern cultures, and was enshrined in government policy. Not that everyone was above mere intellect, but it was considered the norm.

God’s Word says it’s supposed to be that way. The Law of Moses was designed to rest on a genuine heart-felt commitment to God as a Person, as the Kinsman Redeemer who ruled the nation and was the Provider. Of course, the Covenant could work with only a slender minority in leadership clinging to the heart-led way, but that was not the norm. The leaders were expected to keep the fires of devotion lit any way they could. Priests and Levites went on tour and preached during the good times in the history of Israel. That’s what made those times good.

Prior to the monarchy in Israel, there were “judges” who kept the fire burning. God appointed charismatic figures to execute divine justice. It wasn’t always vengeance, though it did surely include that. But the mission was the much broader divine justice of restoring the heart-led way of dealing with reality as a whole. It’s hard for Americans to see that because we have reduced the word “justice” to mean punishment, not blessings and shalom.

Worse, our American sense of justice is founded on heathen moral values. Don’t worry about America being a “Christian nation.” Many governments in the past have tried to hijack that label, but they have all been contrary to Christ’s teachings. It all stems from the horrific compromise the Early Church Fathers made with pagan Roman government. The Greco-Roman Civilization was all about man-centered religion and destroying genuine mysticism. All Greco-Roman deities were man-made. All visions of things beyond this realm were merely extensions of this realm. And then along came the invading Germanic hordes and the church compromised even further by embracing Germanic heathen values and rewriting the gospel message to fit them.

Thus, the ostensible organized Christian religion passed through Medieval Scholasticism, then Reformation and finally Enlightenment. Each was a step farther and farther away from the Hebrew mysticism of the New Testament churches.

God’s wrath on America has nothing to do with some kind of imaginary “Christian” standard, as if Christ had anything to do with our founding or our history and government. It’s not as if we could never develop and move toward the real thing, but to be even a tiny bit closer to what Christ taught about human government, we would first and foremost have to apply the Covenant of Noah to America. Not only that, but it requires all the implications of that covenant, to include a tribal society and covenant feudal government. That’s the only path for America to gain God’s favor.

Fat chance of that.

Not because it’s undoable; it’s eminently doable because God says so. It’s why He offered that covenant in the first place. It’s doable, but America is utterly opposed to it on every level. It requires wiping away any affinity for Western Civilization.

So America is not being judged because of rampant liberalism or because we have surrendered to the Sodomites. Nor is it because we are destroying the environment and being too mean to whiners. Those are just symptoms of something far, far worse. America was founded at the Gates of Hell and not as an invading force; that’s why we are under God’s wrath. America never was morally just in God’s eyes. She was an ally of Satan from the start, so there’s nothing to save or recover.

The breakdown of the US government and the partition of the empire is just the beginning of woes.

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Can We Keep It?

Posted on December 12, 2018 by ehurst

We emphasize the continuity between the Old and New Testaments. This is exactly backwards from what the Reformation did. Reformed theology is the basis for Dispensationalism, that heretical belief that the only proper understanding of God’s hand in human history is to see clean legalistic breaks between certain ages or “dispensations.” Each of these dispensations represents a radical break in how God dealt with mankind, to the point He’s almost not the same God.

So to understand Radix Fidem, you have to wipe away all that crap and try to see how revelation never changed, but that God kept making it easier to understand and it all climaxed with the revelation of His Son. We see no distinction between Law Covenants and grace. The only reason God went so far as to offer Law Covenants was because of His grace and mercy. So today as we walk about on God’s created Earth, we still need to understand Biblical Law in order to claim His “unmerited favor” (AKA, grace).

So we emphasize that His favor makes some demands. If He raises your spirit from the dead, then there is a reason for that — so you can walk in His glory and obey His Word. Sure, we can talk about spiritual birth or “born again,” but that’s something God alone handles on His end. The only thing we can do much about is our obedience from the heart. Thus, our time on earth is not a matter of trying to get folks born again, but to get folks under His favor.

We already know no one can live in His favor without that spiritual birth, so the emphasis is on the doing, in the sense that His Law will sift humanity. Again, it’s the only part of the story we get to tell. So we keep reminding folks that they can’t expect to even understand until they understand from the heart. Another way of saying it is that you have to focus on your convictions; convictions are burned into your heart by God. You can’t know the Spirit or the living Word/will of God with your head. The Bible itself uses the language of heart-led living.

And yes, we boldly proclaim that this is Christian Mysticism or Biblical Mysticism. No bones about it; what we teach and do is not part of any existing institutional religion. Nobody says you have to leave your church, but we warn you that if you teach Radix Fidem, your church will leave you sooner or later. And we keep warning everyone that this also means you have to reject Western Civilization. Even though we are stuck here in it, we aren’t really part of it. We belong to something else entirely.

However, condemning Western Civilization makes a pretty poor evangelistic sermon. Most people have no idea what the term means anyway. We have to talk to them where they are. That means we can address any aspect of their existence from the high ground of Biblical Law. Sure, we condemn their whole existence, but the way to get their attention is typically by sharing snippets of divine wisdom about various details of their lives. And we gain the credibility to talk about it by first living it out before their eyes. They need to see what Biblical Law looks like in our conduct, and more to the point, they need to see the way God’s glory shines in the blessings of shalom.

So we invest in the language of adapting ourselves to the moral fabric of Creation. We talk about all the ways the intellect needs to adjust it’s frame of reference so that it can organize and implement what our convictions demand. If we surrender ourselves to that burning drive to obey from the heart, God starts changing our situation so that it more closely reflects the ideal depicted in His covenant promises. We talk a lot about that.

And these days I’ve been led to start asking you to talk about how we can make this come to life on the earth again, to reestablish covenant living with a tribal feudal nation of God’s people. I’m asking you to embrace the vision of building once again a distinct people of shalom with a longevity that will last across multiple generations until Christ returns. How do we make this stick without compromising and taking the failed path of the institutional churches? How do we keep from losing this again, the way it disappeared after the last disciple of Jesus passed away?

It’s not a matter of thinking we are smarter than the Early Church Fathers, but we simply cannot waste this precious opportunity. God has given us back the heart-led way; let’s see if we can keep from losing it this time.

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Only If You Tell Me

Posted on December 11, 2018 by ehurst

A critical element in pastoral counseling is helping people accept who they are and what they are made of, and to stop trying to change things that don’t need changing.

It’s an art, a moral art form that yields precious little to any kind of scientific approach. There’s just no way to encompass the vast range of human frailty with any kind of precision. If you are actually paying attention, you end up using your observations of people’s maladjustments as meta-data. It’s more instructive in terms of what’s possible than it is what’s likely. Only by collating with the context of culture do you have any hope of estimating where to find a path they can actually walk out of their sorrows.

Most cultures arise from multi-generational experiences of life and the struggles within a given ecology. We include in that mixture the mythology or imagery by which people develop a range of expectations and norms to answer the question of what we can expect life to throw at us. But cultures are generally living things in themselves, and they drift. If the education in norms and mythology isn’t that good, then the transfer of culture is insufficient. Crowding large numbers of people together in groups of age peers fosters a whole range of departures from culture, innovations that seldom take into account the broader cultural environment. It leads to maladaptation on a massive scale, as it is utterly artificial to spend your whole day among the company of only age peers. It never happens outside of the school building.

Yet, that’s where America is today. The current cultural milieu is a multitude of subcultures that have departed significantly from the foundation on which everything in America is built, and we have had several generations of people desperately ignorant of the foundation. I am amazed at the mythology for dealing with the material infrastructure based on the now forgotten American culture. Worse, it was a really bad culture in the first place, so that current generations suffer multiple layers of neuroses and psychoses and most of the population is just barely hanging on to life. They aren’t even aware of just how messed up they are, so they blame everything and everyone around them.

This makes the task of pastoral guidance monumental for even the smallest issues. Showing someone just a slender glimpse, a bare outline, of the truth as God revealed it is asking them to become radically alienated from their own world, because it’s a world utterly alien to who and what God intended they be. Anyone who feels led to the mission of pastoral counseling often finds it necessary to address some fundamental issues at large, often by writing books or recording videos.

This is where I find myself. It’s hardly the whole story, but it gives a sample of where my writing comes from. Of course, teaching is just an extension of that; I’m actually a pastoral counselor for the most part. There is also a heavy calling to prophecy to help fire the preaching and writing, but if I were doing what I really felt called to do, most of my time would be consumed in pastoral counseling sessions. And I do some of that, mostly via email, because the parish to which I give counsel is geographically remote.

That makes it very hard to offer meaningful guidance, because I cannot possibly see first hand what people are facing. If they can’t give me an honest report of what they experience, my counsel will of necessity be somewhat missing the mark. It’s very hard to be internally peaceful knowing that.

So I’m always wondering if I’m getting anywhere. I get very little feedback, so I want to encourage more of you to comment, even if you don’t like what I write. Speak up once in a while. How can I know if I’m coming across? Only if you tell me.

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Team, Family, Church

Posted on December 10, 2018 by ehurst

I was right, but for all the wrong reasons.

My first job out of teachers’ college was at a private school as a long-term substitute. I finished out the year for a Social Studies teacher who had walked off the job.

I divided all my classes into teams. On the one hand, I had heard about this during our “how-to” pedagogy courses. On the other hand, I knew most of what they taught us was hype, but it felt instinctively proper. There was something about it that my heart knew had potential. And it was approved by the administrators, though almost no other teacher used the technique.

It turned out okay; the classes were manageable. It does draw on human instinct, but it ran against the brutal juvenile culture in American schools. The only reason it worked was frankly because of my overbearing presence in the classroom. I wasn’t an ogre; I really did encourage independence. Still, I knew that nothing would work in that environment if I didn’t call up all my theatrical skills to present myself as larger than life.

But the important things I learned took a long while to germinate and bear fruit in my soul. What we can learn working in teams like that is more important than what school pretends to teach. People who lack the ability to prosper in a team environment like that seldom accomplish much of what school is supposed to make possible.

Our American culture in particular, and Western culture in general, has this thing backwards. Individual achievement and heroism is just the opposite of what the Bible teaches. Sure, communism steals away one small part of the biblical image here, but still gets it all wrong. We are designed by God to find our meaning for our human existence in the group. Not just any group, not the random herding of a secular society, with it’s pretense of scientific accuracy, but we are designed to find meaning in covenant family units.

Jesus warned that the DNA-based family unit was a fragile model, because you can’t count on everyone in the household embracing the heart-led way. It would be ideal if we could, but it seldom happens in practice. So we prefer a family grouping based on a covenant, something that requires a conscious awareness of what holds us together. The Holy Spirit enables a covenant family to be stronger than mere instincts regarding blood kinship.

The ability to form and commit to a covenant family is the mark of moral maturity. Our greatest human potential outside of Eden is wrapped up in the drive to form a covenant family group and make it work. This is the meaning behind the word shalom as the blessing of God. His revelation points us in that direction as an expression of His divine moral character at work in us.

Right now the members of this virtual parish struggle to experience anything like that in the flesh. Most of us are isolated in a world that rejects everything we embrace, a world that threatens to do to us what it did to Christ. Still, it is critical that we learn this to the point we start longing for it long before it’s even possible. We need to see this as the core reason for our existence in this fallen world. The only reason we stick around is to reflect His glory, and a core element of that is how we fellowship with folks who share any part of our faith.

Individual achievement as this world measures things isn’t going to make it into God’s accounting of our lives. What He will remember is how we sacrificed for the sake of the team to which He leads us as our covenant family. Invest your energy in that vision. Somewhere out there in the future for Radix Fidem is a situation where we can start to form these families called “churches” and experience the reality of our visions and dreams.

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Return of the Plagues and Exodus

Posted on December 10, 2018 by ehurst

Yes, the system is broken all to Hell and back.

Without having a glimpse inside the Trump Administration, I suppose we could say he honestly tried to fix things. Fixing things would require stepping outside the partisan entanglements and doing things to remove big chunks of the “business as usual” mechanisms. Left or right wouldn’t matter, since that’s all illusion anyway. Just pulling down some of the bureaucracy would be a blessing from God.

Trump missed the window. During the first two years, his voter majority support didn’t crumble until we got close to the most recent elections. During that time, he could have exercised his Executive authority more forcefully and changed critical parts of the system. He allowed his entourage to restrain him too much. Had he taken more bold action, he would have kept his constituency.

His administration reminds me of what’s so very wrong with a particular bureaucracy that exemplifies why the US is doomed: the military. Consider that the most powerful people in the system are groomed to take certain bureaucratically established career paths instead of putting actual leadership first. “Leadership” is dumbed down to mean “ambitious for self gain within the system.” Nobody is willing to sacrifice anything for the greater good. The system is god. This is how Trump’s advisors have handled him, to force him into a career track instead of helping him follow his own instincts to really change things and then get the heck out.

So we have this institutionalized mediocrity and it’s going to crash. Instead of bold people taking real action, the only real action will be when the system grinds to a halt because it’s utterly unsustainable. Since it’s just too damned big and incorrigible, nobody believes the undeniable symptoms of failure. Have you noticed how everyone operates under the presumption that things will keep going like this forever?

Instead of a purposeful dismantling of the system, it will crash. The window of opportunity has closed. Any real leader who arises now will preside over the slow-motion wreckage. There will be at least one such leader. Maybe we’ll have several, but they won’t be working together except in the sense of each salvaging what they can to rebuild something worth keeping in smaller chunks. So prepare for the US to be torn apart, because that’s the only way anything good will come out of this mess.

Only God knows the breaking points for things like this. There are too many factors for a sane analysis, even if you take into account the heart-led way of moral truth. Unless the Lord simply reveals His hand on this matter, we should prepare for some big surprises. We should also prepare for a surprisingly long delay in some parts of this trainwreck.

I’m not the only one who senses prophetically that the tension is building. I’m sure I’m not the only one who breaks out in tears from time to time just feeling the wrath the come. Paint your doorposts with the Blood of the Lamb, lest your own blood be shed inside. May God have mercy on us as we prepare for our exodus.

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The Apostles Were Not Perfect

Posted on December 9, 2018 by ehurst

There are three primary reasons why this Covenant of Radix Fidem cannot rest on my work alone.

1. The distance we must travel is too great for a single generation. It’s hard to fathom just how very far we are from the kind of mentality and reflexes required to implement a heart-led faith consistent with the Bible. This is not something we can just pick up in the first generation. We have to lay the groundwork for future generations to start out thinking along these lines of surrendering the intellect to the convictions. No matter how much we accomplish, we have just begun.

2. It’s a matter of contemplation. We can’t sit down and reason this out, so all the genius in the world isn’t going to accelerate the process. It takes time and exposure in the heart-led way just to start asking the right questions. Each of us working on this now will have to wait until the Spirit can break through our hardened intellectual patterns. I’m no genius by any means, and I still feel like I’m just taking the first steps. There are long periods between small shifts in my thinking, and it all seems so very profound.

3. It requires a significant number of us. We have only a handful of people contributing to the process right now. Granted, a significant number of you are doing your best to follow along and keep up, but we really do need a whole school of people working on this. It is going to take a large body of contemplative scholarship so we can start seeing it from multiple angles. There is no way I can offer a well-rounded body of learning from my single perspective. And I can count active contributors on one hand right now. This requires a substantial council of elders studying what has to change and how it has to change.

So even if I live a hundred years, this is just scratching the surface. So please, don’t get the idea that I’ve got it covered, nor the tiny group of us working on these things. Eldership is not something for which you can have an ambition; ambition disqualifies you. But we are praying and seeking others to serve as elders who can study this business of Biblical Law and build a lore of understanding that we can pass on to those who come behind us.

So, first, pray with us. Second, settle in for the long haul. Commit yourself to the bigger vision of something that requires a lot more work than even a dozen of us might do. But that was a pretty good start for the Lord when He passed the baton to His disciples. Sadly, an awful lot of it was lost when the eldest of them died around AD 100. John prophesied that he could see coming a loss of the heart-led way, that it would be eclipsed by a culture of human wisdom. Let’s learn from their mistakes and get things back on track, with a clear vision of passing the torch to later generations.

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