A Distinctly Christian Philosophy

Posted on December 2, 2018 by ehurst

I’ve rattled my cage long and often on subject of epistemology. The Ancient Hebrew mystical approach is not simply another one on the menu of options; it is the approach God cultivated in the minds of those who knew Him best. How the world fails to see that this was the approach Jesus Himself took is beyond explanation. Satan’s grip on the world is very strong.

And that grip remains strong. We can sum up the failure in the US in two main points. First is what the Bible has to say about human concerns. Second is how we say it, in the sense of how we approach telling the world.

The Bible flatly discourages human reasoning about the nature of our situation. It asserts without mercy that mankind has fallen from God’s original design in Eden. It further asserts that nothing men do can return us to that paradise. It particularly says that our instinctive reliance on reason is the first step on the wrong path, the very root cause of the Fall itself. The only path back is by raising one’s consciousness to a higher level than reason, by learning to trust the inherent revelation written into our convictions. In biblical language, we have to get our hearts properly subservient to God, and then rely on what the heart discerns from that connection to God. The heart trumps the mind in revelation.

The Bible addresses the mind only in the sense of teaching the mind how to listen to the heart. The language of parable speaks to the heart in terms only the heart can understand. It serves to bypass the intellect and reveal what is in our convictions, written by the finger of God in our souls.

In sum, the Bible says that we who hope to restore ourselves to God’s favor cannot enter Eden in this life. We must cultivate in ourselves a connection to Eden; we must spend our lives here in preparation for the restoration of Eden. What we do must remain focused in our hearts on that higher realm, and train our minds to implement the implications of that divine revelation. We should hold no expectation that humanity outside of that mystical focus can possibly do anything right.

The way we tell the world this truth is by refusing to engage their silly plans. On the one hand, we should comment freely on their awful mistakes. It is utterly impossible for humanity to remake this world in any way, much less remake it better than it is. Mankind without that reliance on the heart of conviction cannot possibly discern what is good and right. So every human endeavor will fail sooner or later because it cannot be consistent with the design of Creation. Only the way of life revealed in Scripture will do us any good, and it is designed to make life merely tolerable. That is the best anyone can hope for in this world.

But humanity at large rejects this message, so we are left to point out how absurd is human pretense to any useful capability. And we must reject humanity’s plans, at least on the level of taking them seriously. There is nothing we can gain by interfering, because humans without the heart-led consciousness cannot hear the message of truth.

So we withdraw as much as we can to build our own micro-society based on revelation. We gather together in small enclaves of the heart, not completely out of contact with the world around us, but by no means taking seriously what the world says and does. We know that the one and only hope for the world is the path laid out by God: We form heart-led societies based on ancient Hebrew feudalism with a tribal organization. We form them as covenant families in parallel to the rest of the world. We occupy a space above the fallen world, with just a taste of Eden. It’s a mere taste only because we remain in our human fleshly existence.

It’s not that we don’t understand what’s going on outside our tiny feudal covenant nations, but that we don’t expect those without the leading of the heart to understand revelation. Sure, we can read the situation from divine revelation and give sage advice. Of all people, we can discern the way things move in this fallen world. From time to time, they might listen, but don’t count on it. Instead, count on rejection and persecution. When the world without Christ and without the heart-led consciousness welcomes us with open arms, we have done something terribly wrong. The only way to engage the fallen world is from outside, because to embrace a hope for human politics is to embrace the lies of Satan. Whatever passes for “Christianity” today is badly broken, something twisted and perverted and we must avoid being sucked into that.

This the life to which Christ called us, and this is the shape of His philosophy.

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Teachings of Jesus — Luke 12:13-21

Posted on December 1, 2018 by ehurst

Note: We are passing over a large amount of material duplicated in Matthew and Luke.

There is nothing in this passage offering a hint to the legal status of the estate the man asked Jesus to arbitrate. The most common case would be when one heir tries to keep an estate together and share ownership with the other heirs under the claim that it would be far more valuable to all of them if kept intact. If this were the case, Jesus’ response makes a lot more sense.

The man was asking Jesus to use His influence, but it implies making some kind of judgment about the disposition of property. The man was asking Jesus to support his side in the dispute. The issue was not divine justice, but petty rivalry and greed. Jesus denies having any jurisdiction in the case, but then goes on to explain why He has no interest in such things.

He turned to the crowd and told the parable of the Rich Fool. What made that man a fool? He was self-centered and short-sighted. The whole purpose for which God grants prosperity as a covenant blessing is to share with one’s family. The Law of Moses was a tribal covenant, not an individual covenant — a tribal feudal nation. As part of the Hellenization, there was an emphasis on the individual that did violence to the Covenant. Your typical wealthy Pharisee would simply hoard this wealth and look for ways to deny even his own parents. The whole idea of the Covenant was to make Israel a single nation, united in sharing the blessings of shalom as one people. This is not communism, but tribalism, and the details of the Law required it.

If a wise man prospers, he immediately seeks to distribute his excess in ways that really do bless people by encouraging holiness. He discerns the real needs and invests in the future generations to make his nation righteous. He wants to be found faithful when his time in this world ends. Granted, the Law demands that men seek to lay aside an inheritance for their heirs, so they come first, but the man in this parable was thinking only of his own personal comfort. Apparently this is the case of the man who asked Jesus to arbitrate for him.

Thus, the parable ends with the solemn question: “Then whose shall be those things which you have prepared?” Who was supposed to get that stuff in the first place? If you have no plan for passing this stuff forward to your kin — your responsibility — then you are a fool. And if not your own kin, there will always be needy folks in your vicinity who would bless the Lord for your generosity to them. But the whole purpose God grants prosperity is for the glory of His name.

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The Current Path of the US

Posted on November 30, 2018 by ehurst

This is not about left and right. A genuine right-wing policy, for example, would practically dismantle our current federal government. Even Republicans are pushing for what amounts to socialism in substance, if not in name. Republicans aim for government support for any business that will lobby them, and support always comes with control one way or another. That’s the definition of socialism. This is about who will reap the plunder of squeezing the citizens.

The “left” and “right” in our current political context is just a front to whip up the crowds. It never ceases to amaze me just how deeply the troops on the ground truly believe the crap they are sold. There is a wealth of mythology on both sides that really has nothing to do with actual government policy.

Right now the people behind the “left” have developed a very powerful organizing tool: the religion of globalism. It comes with a very wicked brand of supremacy.

[S]ome folks at Rutgers … [w]ent down to Mississippi for the civil rights movement and what I noticed is they came back full of themselves. And I said, well, maybe it isn’t that they like the negro so much; maybe they like themselves more. This is about themselves and feeling superior to the rest of us. And anyway, this was something that I could see as an outsider that these people were simply doing these things to feel better about themselves, vis a vis, their fellow man.

In other words, they are no less racist than anyone else, but this kind of activism justifies a sense of moral superiority.

They are a nasty bunch. They see no reason to be anything else. And they learned this. This is not something that can be turned off by some leader’s decision. This is not about Bernie Sanders or, you know, Nancy Pelosi or anybody of the sort. This is something that two generations at least have learned in college. They don’t question it. And so more and more people who would otherwise not think quite like that, somebody, say, like Hillary Clinton, who is just essentially an oligarch, or just as we saw yesterday, Sherrod Brown, Senator from Ohio, saying that unless the lady from Atlanta wins that election, why the election is illegitimate. Oh? Where did he get that? Well, very simple, he got that from the fact that his constituency likes that. And so he’s going to give them what they want. It’s not a matter of a decision anymore. This is out of the hands – this is the point I’m trying to make – this is out of the hands of individuals. This is a movement which has its own dynamic.

It has its own dynamic because its an idolatry that appeals to the Boastful Pride of Life mentioned in Scripture. This is a counterfeit from Satan, the total opposite of a heart-led humility. And it’s quite predatory; their opposition have lost their momentum in their fake Westernized brand of Christianity. Right now there is precious little genuine resistance to the globalists working through their proxies.

But here’s what I find rather entertaining: The whole matrix of lies stands on an unprecedented level of wealth. It was wealth that came from stealing from the future, and the system that enabled it is now very unstable. There will be a crash, and it will be severe, but it won’t be that easy to see behind a very heavy wall of propaganda. You see, the people maintaining this facade know it’s a facade and that the foundations are crumbling. It’s in their economic interest to disguise the collapse, and they have some pretty good tools for that.

So the essentials of life will remain available, and basic economic activity will continue. Otherwise there would be riots or worse, and that threatens the oligarchs. The system doesn’t stand on naked force, but deception. The collapse is being engineered to hit the middle class by reducing them to lower class status. In other words, everyone with a moderate store of wealth will lose it. Moderate investments and stuff with a lien will likely be lost. Those with a great store of wealth can participate in the protections as fellow oligarchs.

So the only viable plan is to prepare for a lower class lifestyle. If you are already there, it’s not likely you’ll see much change. All that repossessed property won’t be worth anything to the oligarchs unless they put it to work somehow, so it’s not that the economy will stop, but ownership of infrastructure will shift away from the middle class. At least, that’s the plan. Natural disasters and such can change things. Still, for you and I, it’s a good idea to be ready for a shift in ownership and become far more self-reliant. Learn to make do with less ownership; trust in God.

But this will also destroy the globalist religion, and they refuse to see it. They will win politically, but they calculate their program based on the previous high level of broad consumer wealth that will no longer exist. Their program will be impossible to fund without massive borrowing, and there will be nothing to borrow. They don’t believe in it such that they are willing to sacrifice; they will continue to demand the same lavish luxury as before. It won’t be there. The whole thing will crumble under their feet.

And their rabid demands that someone pay for this program will result in outright revolt. The general population will start to blame these socialist shills for their problems. I think the banking oligarchs know exactly what they are doing. The riots will hit those who keep their faces in the public eye, not the real source of trouble working quietly in the background. But the open conflict will result in the loss of federal control, and the eventual partition of the US.

This is how the US will fall, if things continue on the current path.

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The Same God as Always

Posted on November 29, 2018 by ehurst

Our Creator has not changed since Creation began.

There is a pernicious heresy, a conscious teaching in some cases, but a passive subconscious assumption by most mainstream Christians that the Old Testament writers didn’t really know God. Or perhaps they did, but that God has somehow changed because His Son Jesus made Him more civilized. Either way, most Western Christians believe that the God of the Old Testament is not the God of the New Testament.

This is what happens when you pass Scripture under the mangling influence of Western epistemology. Here in America, just about everyone professing Christ sees Him as some brand of Germanic deity. If you can manage to step outside Western Civilization and see things from a less biased plane, you realize just what the attributes of Western thinking are, and can compare or contrast them with other civilizations.

The God who destroyed Egypt is still the Father of Jesus Christ. The God who ordered Israel to destroy the pagan temples in Canaan Land and slaughter or drive out the morally depraved inhabitants is the same God who took His Son to the Cross. The Christ who rose again the third day does not teach anything different than what God revealed up to the moment He was conceived by Mary. Christ clarified that revelation, but the divine moral character of His Father remains unchanged.

Jehovah still judges sin and still pours out wrath on the earth. Most people pay no attention, so they attribute human suffering to all kinds of other causes.

Worse, most of Western Christianity doesn’t really believe in the Fall. Never mind the doctrines in their heads, in their hearts they don’t really believe Jesus died for our sins. Somehow this world can be perfected if we just get the right brand of laws and a proper government. At no time in human history has this worked, nor will it. Everyone ignores the Word from Heaven on what we can do from our fallen state.

What we can do is just barely tolerable under Biblical Law. Everything else mankind has tried has been consistently worse. God isn’t going to listen when you complain that the political situation requires bloodshed. Most especially is it pointless when nobody is doing things His way.

The situation here in the US cannot be reversed. It’s way past that point. There will be bloodshed because too many people have demanded their own way at the cost of damnation falling on their heads. God is coming to visit America, and He is not happy. Welcome Him with open arms. Call on Him to start with you. It’s one thing to note how sad it is so many have chosen His wrath, knowingly or not, but don’t you dare refuse to rejoice when His glory shines in holiness against sin. We all deserve a short miserable life, a lingering painful death and eternity in Hell. By His mercy a few of us escape that fate.

Bless the name of the Lord!

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Draper Bikeway 12

Posted on November 28, 2018 by ehurst

I had a couple of shots from last week still in my camera, so I’ll give you this rather random shot of the what’s left of the old Townley Dairy. Since shutting down some years ago, the old place has suffered several different fires. With the last one, parts of the outer wall on the north side were torn down during the attempt to put it out.

This was from two weeks ago. This is that last link in the bikeway below the dam. It sat like this for roughly two months without any work done on it. Dirt was piled up to cover a culvert, but nothing had been put down in the creek bed yet.

This shot was from today’s ride. The equipment is in place and culvert sections have been trucked down and ready to start installing. The crews have added more dirt and some gravel, but there was no work going on today.

This is another angle showing the scale of the planned work. Notice that this will be a very large culvert (4’/1.2m sections). There’s a lot of dirt so the surface can be raised considerably to match the existing paved section on the west side of this feature.

I’m not ready to try riding the packed trail through the woods, but I did take a brief detour down SE 134th Street toward the lake shore so I could inspect the work where the trail crosses the road. This is actually a rather steep slope down to a sharp corner off into the woods. All of this massive landscaping to prevent using the existing road because it would run the path into the road instead of across it.

This small pit was right next to the previous photo. In order to block motor vehicles from using that old lakeshore trail, now a bikeway trail, the crews borrowed from this spot. In the process, they uncovered something rare in these parts. While the colors didn’t come out well in this image, the sandstone ranges between pale yellow through orange and red, to deep purple. The darker hues are quite rare. I’ve never seen that around Central Oklahoma.

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The New Amalek

Posted on November 27, 2018 by ehurst

The Lord has sworn: The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation. (Exodus 17:16 NKJV)

This is a prophetic word, burning like a fire in my bones. I’m not concerned with who believes it or even reads it; I absolutely must publish it or I’ll go nuts. If you decide I’m already nuts, that’s fine, but the Spirit will not let me rest on this.

We’ve already had our belly full of liars who mistake their cultural and logical biases for moral truth. Divine revelation is already illegal in a lot of places, and it’s gotten that way in virtual space, too, in the sense that I risk having this blog shut down at times. This is one of those times.

There is a new Amalek in our world today: globalists. The Amalekites and globalists share a lot of attributes. They both stealthily attack in a very predatory fashion, striking the women and children first. They are implacable, arrogant and in-your-face about their superiority, proclaiming themselves the Chosen who are inherently worthy to take everything you have and enslave you. That is, if they bother to let you live. All you have is theirs by divine fiat, according to their filthy pagan deities. They are the human personification of demonic evil.

But since God no longer has any particular covenant nation on this earth to attack, they attack everyone. And since God no longer has any particular nation on this earth under covenant with Him to carry out justice, it has to be done on other terms. It will have to be done using those who have no clue what His justice is all about. It’s quite likely it will be executed by someone who imagines they have other motives.

It will be rather like the Persians conquering Babylon. It’s just a matter that time’s up for one, and time for another force to come on the scene until God destroys that one, too. Either way, it’s time for the globalists to go. My job is to announce the open contract on globalists.

God is looking for someone to rise up who can’t be bought off and doesn’t give a rat’s butt about the political system currently in place. They need to have no pity on the globalists. Yes, I mean literally a violent take down. Someone who is willing to seize government authority and imprison or execute those who adhere to globalist idolatry. It needs to be as organized and efficient as men can make such things, and swift.

Because if this isn’t organized using government authority, the Lord will just drive a bunch of folks crazy and it will be a formless chaotic slaughter at the hands of a right-wing mob. Those are our choices, folks. Okay, there’s one other option: Let the globalists survive and bring upon our heads an apocalypse, in which they will still be destroyed, but in the process of trying to enslave or kill everyone else.

May God have mercy on us who serve Him. Mercy will be in short supply during the coming years of wrath.

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Praying According to How God Hears

Posted on November 27, 2018 by ehurst

As heart-led followers of Christ, we spend the bulk of our lives focused on training the brain to obey the heart. A critical element in this is learning to accept the Lord’s testimony of who and what we are in His eyes.

When this works as it should, our first and recurring impulse is to fall prostrate at His feet. We never quite escape the sense that we are broken, that we have sinned against Him and are worthy of His wrath. At the same time, we are always near ecstasy at the thought that He has forgiven us and wants to use us for His glory. The rest is mostly learning the particulars. It’s a long course of training because our instincts as humans are attuned to ignoring His revelation.

Worse, if you are American, as I am, then you know we belong to a culture that is fundamentally hostile to divine revelation. Americans in particular, and the West in general, have built an existence that is everything He says is wrong. So it’s not enough that we fight our fallen fleshly nature, but we fight a cultural background that only makes things worse.

Revelation is in everyone’s best interest. It doesn’t matter how we might reason this out, ignoring revelation hurts us all, and it alienates us from the universe. Upon entering into the truth of divine revelation, we are stunned by the shocking disjuncture between what is versus what ought to be. For example, we should hardly be surprised that the US is coming apart. It’s not enough that history itself shows us why, but revelation clearly says our country has been provoking God and all Creation against us.

Think about it: Every military expedition during the lifetime of anyone living in the US has been in response to something we provoked on foreign soil. To the degree we are victims, it is because we have done it to ourselves. And it’s not hard to find concrete proof that every bit of it was for commercial interests. We insist on taking things God gave other nations, and never in any kind of fair exchange. Our prosperity came almost entirely on the backs of other peoples.

No surprise then that everyone and his dog wants to come here and enjoy the fruits for their own labor. But that’s not the whole story. The reason they don’t have what they lust after in their own country is because their culture doesn’t produce the high level of productivity that ours does. Not only have we stolen from them, but we have corrupted them to desire things neither we nor they should have.

No one is in a position to correct any of this. We now have to live and make decisions based on where we are, and where God is taking us. The US cannot avoid the destruction of God’s wrath. No amount of fervent repentance at this point will save anything except a few individual lives. Even then, that salvation will be relative. Only those truly focused on God’s glory will have any chance to see His glory, but we shall see it mixed with divine wrath.

We need to get used to the idea that people are fallen. The evil that we see is their norm. That evil is shaped by culture and context, but the basic presence of evil is simply normal for them. It is not normal for heart-led followers of Christ; we have a new normal revealed from Heaven. This marks us as aliens in our country. We belong to another place and our true loyalty is elsewhere. We should expect some friction. It is simply not possible for a nation hostile to the heart-led way to somehow qualify for the blessings of that same heart-led way. It makes no difference if they belong to Christ in Eternity; they aren’t serving Him very well in the here and now. So we should expect that their religion will be mixed with all sorts of evil. From where we stand, so-called Christians (of the mainstream variety) are nothing more than another brand of the same evil that grips everyone else.

We are in a civil war here in the US. The primary divide is cultural, arising from a difference in orientation on what constitutes moral good. Both sides are wrong. Still, we can recognize bits and pieces of misplaced truth in each side, mixed in with a whole lot of evil. The biggest mistake we can make is embracing either side. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing a sense of human affinity with ideals and personalities, but we must also recognize the limits of such things when folks are simply not serving our God.

Don’t get caught up in the instrumentality of things as perceived by human reason. We should have no trouble recognizing what is the wisest course open to anyone, but we must discern how that course is still a miserable path because they refuse the heart-led way. Should Trump authorize deadly force for the troops guarding our southern border from invasion? Yes, he should, and they should be armed, but in the long run it won’t make any difference. Still, his reluctance isn’t because of any noble motives; it’s purely a matter of politics. Instead of bold action, he’s trying to avoid uncomfortable choices, with the result he’s making things worse. He’s a wuss.

It’s not that the invaders are somehow wrong; stirring up this conflict is a good thing. It points out our country’s crimes. Unfortunately, nobody is getting the right message. Even the invaders themselves appear to be rather confused, given their statements. It’s easy to forget that someone is steering them for purposes that have nothing to do with justice, the same as someone is steering Trump. The real conflict is behind the scenes, and those most loudly trumpeting how they get that point are still missing the real point.

The real point is that wrath is falling on the US and there’s no hope for a reprieve. In that sense, the die is cast and there’s no turning back. There will be violence and turmoil, and that’s simply the harvest of sin. We who walk the heart-led path should not imagine there is any way to stop this train wreck. We can pray for mitigation, but it’s the difference between tribulation and apocalypse — a matter of degree, not substance. Even then, it’s upon us to seek His face and claim any mitigation He might offer, since it’s pretty clear He’s not hesitant to make it a full apocalypse.

His offer to us is only that we could avoid the worst. It requires each of us to fully commit to the proper wise course of action. That course of action is not letting petty wishes to get in the way, but to be fully focused on His glory. That means building within your own limited domain a place of faithfulness and shalom. No, this is not a call for uniform religious behavior, but a call for you to come before the Lord yourself and ensure that you know His will for you.

Your choices are the prayer that speaks far louder in God’s ears than any words you might have.

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Tools of Divine Glory

Posted on November 26, 2018 by ehurst

My fitness plan isn’t about extending life, but extending self utility.

We agree under our covenant to an otherworldly orientation. This life isn’t precious, but it’s subject to divine revelation for the sake of our Creator’s glory. Once His glory is finished with us, the body is discarded as we take a rest in preparation for eternal life after Christ returns to restore all things in Creation.

With rare exceptions, I still do my wake-up workouts six days per week. During winter we have a few nasty days here in Oklahoma when riding is imprudent, and I try to take a walk. Both riding and walking are still pretty much a matter of occupying the mind and body with some arduous task so the heart can more easily dominate and speak through my subconscious.

Today I spotted something along my path. I usually walk across a large cast iron grate in the parking lot of the mostly defunct shopping mall. It’s at the bottom of faint slope in all directions, and captured by this gravity well was a ball. It was bright green, about the size of a baseball. I picked it and it was rather heavy, and covered with scuff marks and dirt. Out of curiosity I gave it a bounce and it turned out to be one of those super-bounce balls that returns very nearly to the same level from which it was dropped.

So I carried this thing and began to bounce it. Clumsily at first, I started getting better at it as I walked along bouncing it between hands and off the brick wall of the empty building. It was mostly reflexive. Even on rough surfaces it tended to bounce predictably. I realized that it was improving my eye-hand coordination, so I kept at it, all the way home. This will be a new part of my routine when I take those fitness walks.

But the effort to maintain fitness extends farther in ways you may not expect.

My wife needed a Win10 machine with MS Office because of her job. We still had some money left from a recent windfall, so we got her a decent Lenovo laptop, taking advantage of the Black Friday sales. It’s an early Merry Christmas for her. She gave me back the laptop I bought a few years back, but then later gave to her — a 15″ Inspiron. It came with Win8 and nobody could tolerate that, so I changed it. After two years of running Win7 for her, I switched it over to Xubuntu. It works beautifully for me and has become my primary computer.

What happened to the expensive XPS I bought a few months ago? At a mere 13″ it’s too small for extended use. I still use it for tech support house-calls, though. And I still use that old desktop to process photos on the giant monitor someone gave me, but for reading for extended periods, and especially for writing, the Inspiron is by far the best machine.

There’s something about having my hands just above my lap that makes it less cumbersome to keep may fingers where they belong on the keys for extended periods. In other words, it’s mechanically advantageous, and the larger screen is much easier to read. In fact, the lower resolution (it’s at the cheaper end of the scale) is actually a good thing for my old eyes. I can keep the screen at arm’s length and not worry about glare; my eyes don’t get so tired. It’s an answer to prayer.

You see, the ultimate purpose of my walks and rides is prayer time. It’s a lot easier to pray out loud that way and hold a good conversation with God. I stop and talk to a few trees that call out to me along the way on my walking routes. I stop at prayer chapels on my rides; I talk to the wind and the rocks. I ask God to solve some of these minor issues, but even more importantly, I pray for Him to keep my head on straight, obedient to my heart.

All things I am and hold are tools for His glory.

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Moral Good is Multi-generational 03

Posted on November 25, 2018 by ehurst

A critical element in all of this is that were not meant to die.

When God first placed us in Eden, we were supposed to be eternal. Death wasn’t a part of the original picture; it’s part of the Curse of the Fall. It’s as if to say the wiring of our hearts and minds is fundamentally designed for eternity. The current sensitivity to space and time is part of the Curse.

The biblical sense of time is focused on ripeness. Eternity is not a static state. Thus, we should note the passing of time based on the turning of the seasons, as time itself is not part of the Curse. Creation had time before the Fall; we are supposed to be eternal. We should endeavor to become patient as part of redemption. The brain should be trained to operate on the eternal frame of reference — the heart is already there.

It is part of the heart-led way to take the long term perspective. It’s not that we somehow disregard our mortality after the Fall, but that we don’t give it that much weight. We look for an eternal existence with or without this world, and this fallen condition is not our treasury. Everything in this world is merely a tool for eternal purposes.

Once we get a sense of multi-generational purpose, it becomes easier for our minds to grasp what your heart demands in terms of how we go about life. Our existence here and now is not such a precious thing, nor should it be. What really matters is the mission to which we are called, and that mission always calculates far longer than the human lifespan. You can stop thinking in terms of, “I better get all I can during this life.”

The observation that “you can’t take it with you” should result in thinking who is going to get it after you. Always put such things in the context of what can be passed down based on your best estimate of where things are headed. It’s not a precious legacy you are saving, but tools for tomorrow. God is still in control and things could change, but your mission is to be faithful in the context you live now.

In general, piling up money is pointless. Think about the economic trends in your world; most of the time the tools of living are far more important than money. The best investment is in personal experience, because that’s pretty hard to steal away from someone. Build systems that incubate a broad awareness for you descendents. Invest in travel and education, but not necessarily in terms of mainstream definitions of it. Don’t lock in your children’s choices, but do attempt to convince them to embrace the heart-led way. In the end, there’s really little more you can do than that.

Teach your children to follow their own hearts. Invest your wealth in that, such as it may be.

But your best gift is refusing to indulge in borrowing in the first place. Credit perverts the divine order of things, and and it distorts the market. It invites capital to places it would not naturally go. Trust in God to provide without borrowing, and stop this crazy thinking that big ticket items like houses and cars are different. Learn to accept what you can afford or do without, because borrowing calls God a liar. Be patient and pay as you go.

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Teachings of Jesus — Luke 10:25-37

Posted on November 24, 2018 by ehurst

The entire identity of Israel was bound up in the Covenant. It was not in just the Law as written by Moses, but all of the implications of that Law. Further, it was not found in Hellenistic analysis underlying the Talmud, nor in any other brand of mere human logic. It was in the heart-led mysticism of choosing to act according to the divine moral character of Jehovah.

This passage sounds similar to others, but we must avoid trying to stuff them into a single event. The subject was a popular question among both legalists and genuine seekers. The answer was not unique to Jesus, but could be heard in the mouths of other rabbis.

The narrative Luke offers makes no sense unless we see ourselves jumping into the middle of a situation where the dispute is already underway. Luke zeros in on the significant part of this debate. A Scribe is trying to get Jesus to step into a verbal trap. The Pharisees kept a stock of key tests by which they could declare someone outside the acceptable standards, and proceed to accuse these troublesome rabbis before some official Jewish council.

Jesus refuses to play the game. Something in the foregoing discussion raised the issue of what the “Real Messiah” would require when He appears. So the Scribe asks just how he might be included in the Messiah’s kingdom. Jesus indicates the issue is already settled in the Law of Moses. What does the Law say? The Scribe answers with a popular summary, one Jesus had used in other contexts. Live in ardent feudal loyalty to Jehovah and treat your neighbor as your equal — the ancient “do unto others” moral maxim.

The Scribe’s next question indicates he had been pushing stock Pharisaical legalistic definitions of who can gain God’s favor. How does Jesus define the common term “neighbor” in the context of the Law of Moses? Who is qualified to be treated as an equal?

Jesus launches into a story that is realistic at first. The road away from Jerusalem toward Jericho first went up over the Mount of Olives, then followed a long switch-backing path down the face of the steep slope into the Jordan Valley. There were some pretty isolated places where common thugs could lie in wait to ambush anyone foolish enough to travel alone. There must of have been some kind of serious urgency to this trip, since most folks would wait in Bethany for a caravan or at least a few fellow travelers.

Sure enough, the man in the story is attacked, beaten, robbed and left to die in the blistering sun and dry slope. The first fellow Jew to come along was a priest. No Pharisee is surprised that an arrogant aristocratic Sadducee would refuse to help the man. The same could be said about Levites. Most of them were Sadducees and despised by the Pharisee crowd Jesus is addressing.

But then comes along someone they hated even worse: a Samaritan. Jesus turns everything on its head here. This hated enemy of Jews stops and rescues this hapless victim. Further, he spares no expense in seeing that man is cared for while he goes on about his important business. Jesus asks which of those three passers-by was a “neighbor” to the victim.

Obviously the definition in the Law is now clear. A neighbor is anyone whose behavior is clearly merciful and humane. The Scribe may have avoided saying “Samaritan” (they were supposed to spit when they said it), but he could not avoid the issue of mercy. The Samaritan treated this Jewish man as his equal, someone deserving mercy, someone created in God’s image and worthy of respect. He treated the victim as kinfolk; the victim’s welfare was his own shalom, too. Nobody could argue this wasn’t the crux of the Law.

Jesus then summed it up by saying this is how the Scribe could qualify as a citizen in the Messiah’s kingdom — go and act like that Samaritan. Your heart knows how you should act; context is everything.

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