Teachings of Jesus — Matthew 19:16-30

Posted on July 21, 2018 by ehurst

(Note: Having made a fresh study of this passage, my explanation will be different from what I’ve published in the past.)

The passage begins with precisely the question this whole series has been addressing: Who shall enter into the Eternal Age ushered in by the Messiah? The fellow was being polite and addressed Jesus as Good Rabbi. As near as anyone can tell, Jesus’ immediate response was meant to be thought provoking. It seems to suggest the man shouldn’t call someone “good” in that sense unless they represent the only One who is actually “good” — the God who defines goodness.

So Jesus then goes on to state the obvious: Keep the Law of Moses. Matthew’s choice of Greek here draws the image of someone who stands by ready to protect the Covenant from violence, to guard it and keep it safe and whole. To this the man further asks what precisely Jesus referred to. So Jesus listed five of the Ten Commandments, and finished with a generality that summed up most of them: Love your neighbor as yourself.

The man insisted that he had obeyed that from his youth; he was a good Jewish boy since at least his bar Mitzvah. Is there something more? What does Jesus require that every sincere Jew didn’t already have? It was obvious Jesus was pushing for something not already covered by standard rabbinical teaching.

Jesus had no intention of putting this man off. He gave a blunt answer that was as much a challenge as a demand: Free yourself from your attachment to worldly wealth and come follow Me. Whatever else it meant, this fellow could not have found what he was seeking in his present situation. He would need to invest a lot of time learning from Jesus like the other disciples. I’m convinced this was an invitation to join the crew, because it sounded like he was quite serious about this.

But the answer stunned him, as he was quite wealthy. He just wasn’t ready to let it all go. Some part of him was still chained to the old ways he thought he was ready to abandon. He turned away with a heavy heart, so close and yet so far. We can be sure Jesus was moved by this, as well. He turned to His disciples and noted something that is poorly understood outside Judean society. It’s extremely difficult for rich people to let go of all their advantages in this life and focus on eternity. Then Jesus cites imagery from Jewish oral tradition that is roughly equivalent to “as much faith as a mustard seed.” Old commentary on the Hebrew Scripture suggests that God says in so many words, “Open to Me so much as the eye of a needle, and I’ll drive through it tents and camels.”

It’s possible the Twelve were not familiar with that saying, but taking a cue from Matthew’s choice of words, the image itself would sound like regular Hebrew hyperbole, since the camel was the largest land animal anyone in Palestine saw. It basically meant it was impossible. The reason they were so shocked is that they had been taught their whole lives that material wealth among Jews was the primary sign of God’s favor. If those whom God seemed to favor most weren’t actually going to make it into the Messiah’s eternal kingdom, just who could?

Jesus stuck to the point of his parabolic image: Nobody could by their own abilities. It requires a miracle of God. The rich young man didn’t receive his miracle, but the disciples were reminded that they had sacrificed much on their own terms to be with Jesus. Maybe nothing like the rich young man, but it was all they had. Jesus affirmed that this was the sacrifice necessary in this life to see eternal life.

Then Jesus cited a favorite saying of His, that the Kingdom of Heaven stood on its head a great many things people were so sure about in this life. It was more than a puzzling paradox of truth; it was a warning to be ready for many shocking reversals from what everyone assumed.

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Realistic Expectations of Israel

Posted on July 21, 2018 by ehurst

I’m not finished yet reading Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion, recommended by Ron Unz in the article I linked a few posts back, but I need to pass on a couple of things from it. Keep in mind that Israel Shahak was a Jew and a resident of Israel.

If you read this short but dense volume, you’ll come to a clear and vivid understanding that what the IDF is doing in the Gaza protests is entirely legal and reasonable by their own laws. No amount of moralizing and protesting will change a thing. Zionists consider it a moral duty to God to shoot the Gaza protesters. Don’t waste time with thoughts of restraint or censure. They won’t listen to appeals from liberal and moderate Jews; they damned sure won’t listen to Gentiles.

In practice, this all hinges on what they can get away with in the face of Western morals. That is, when they are in a weak position, they’ll try to avoid conflict. But when in a strong position, they will follow their own moral dictates, which are radically different from Western mores. Gentiles are at best animals, whereas only Jews are genuine humans. And their position now is quite strong, since the US unconditionally supports anything they do. Further, they recently passed a law that quite openly institutes apartheid and discrimination against the quarter of their citizens who are Arab.

The idea of “Jewish” as an ethnicity or race is a rather recent innovation in history. If you’ve read much of my stuff, you know I’ve long asserted that the Covenant of Moses itself insists there is no such thing as an Israeli race. Their whole identity — the meaning of the name “Israel” — rests entirely upon the Covenant, and anyone willing to embrace the Covenant must be fully embraced as a Child of Israel. You can be a descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but without the Law of Moses, you cannot claim the name Israel.

Furthermore, it’s no secret that most “Jews” today have virtually no Hebrew blood at all, though this is highly disputed for the obvious propaganda reasons. The majority today are ethnically more Khazar than anything else, a Turkic people once dominant in the modern regions of Krasnodar and Volgograd, Russia, and spreading into Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Some minority of modern Jews appear to originate in North Africa. The whole idea of a Jewish race is simply bogus on the face of it.

Nonetheless, we have to live with this crap as is. I highly recommend that you get a copy of Shahak’s book and read it if you have time. It will help you make sense of a whole lot of idiocy we face today.

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The Virtual Realm

Posted on July 20, 2018 by ehurst

A part of what we do here at Kiln of the Soul is aimed at helping you grasp the nature of virtual reality. Not as a feature of gaming, but as a different realm of reality that still affects us here in the real world — colloquially referred to as “meat space.” In case it wasn’t obvious to you, some features of our virtual parish are restricted to what is possible in the virtual realm.

For over a decade I’ve taught that “theology” is a mental frame of reference; it is not truth. It is a personal response to moral truth and the presence of the Holy Spirit. It’s a person-to-person relationship with God; theology should be largely personal. People within the same culture do tend to have a similar theology, and there would naturally be common elements that allow us to talk to each other, but nobody’s theology is normative in the sense of some imaginary orthodoxy. God’s truth is not a proposition nor a collection of propositions. The Hebrew language and intellectual traditions would flatly deny the notion of “propositional truth.”

On the other hand, there is a body of biblical doctrine. Still, it requires a Hebrew frame of reference to understand what you are supposed to do with it. If you change the context in which this doctrine is applied, it naturally changes some of the outcomes, and the way we express it. The virtual realm is a different context from our “real world.” While virtual reality does overlap with meat space, it has become a thing unto itself. It began as nothing more than the restrictions of computer networking applied to human interactions, but has since then become the monster that has begun to affect “reality.” Humanity has an instinct to invest more and more of itself into the virtual realm, and it will become the basis for a new civilization; thus my terminology of Networked Civilization as eclipsing Western Civilization.

Not everyone is cut out to think like that. Still, I’m not going to hide from you the source of our decisions here at Kiln of the Soul as a parish, nor how we came up with the distinctive religious principles behind Radix Fidem (the name for our approach to religion). And as much as possible, I’ll try to help readers to see how I think about these things, including my prophetic chatter here about events in our real world. Our shared faith and the world around us would be quite impossible without universal networked communications. The faith would still be there, but the sharing would not. And I can assure you the political context of the US today is a direct result of the existence of the Internet. Trump could not have become President without it.

Let me encourage you, as much as you can, try to grasp the nature of virtual reality. Much of what we are facing in this world is simply impossible to understand otherwise. And most of us would have never become acquainted and shared our faith without global instantaneous communications. Our fellowship rests on this. This is the future of theology and what churches will become.

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Dodging the Bullets

Posted on July 19, 2018 by ehurst

Hopefully, by now I have made my case that globalists are worshiping demons.

The globalists are playing by their own demonic rules. They have already brought violence into US politics and it will only get worse. They have already mounted a coup, but because they aren’t that well armed (being anti-gun), they will use other means of violence. They are trying to use the MSM, some captive government agencies and some measure of popular opinion in place of guns. And a fundamental doctrine is doing it all incrementally. But make no mistake, the war has begun. They intend, not just destroying the US, but slaughtering a significant portion of the US population. They want our blood because we do not support them.

Granted, it can be difficult to decide who is the enemy. The globalists have long hid behind the left, which is not the same ideology at all. Globalists are wearing leftism as a shield. Instead, what you see is that leftists have been infiltrated and hijacked by globalism, and have been manipulated into adopting the publicized portion of the globalist agenda. Thus, you would struggle to tell when someone in front of you is just a leftist with a globalist taint, or a genuine globalist demon worshiper.

We do not fight fire with fire. Our heart-led mysticism is all about letting God take care of that sort of thing. Yes, a few of us will feel led by God to take up arms for one reason or another, but in general, we do not expect to engage these cultists on their own terms. If you read Ephesians 6, you understand that we fight demons, beings with no physical form. And with all the talk of armor starting in verse 10, the only offensive weapon is God’s revelation. So our primary means of warfare is holding up the truth and shining the light on their evil works. God calls you to a style of life under Biblical Law that speaks louder than any words.

A critical element in this kind of warfare is making sure we clarify the evil they strive so hard to normalize. If you go by the mainstream media, the definition of morality itself is the globalist agenda. They call God a liar and promote the doctrine of demons. Don’t hesitate to express that truth however it is that God has called you to do so. Some of us are good with words and dramatic public expression. Others are better with simply acting right while uttering few words. Still others will find all kinds of ways to shine the light of glory. But be sure you clearly express how wrong this false norm is.

At some point, their political opposition will respond. I have no idea where the tipping point is, but I’m pretty sure it’s different in different places. The globalists’ opposition on the political right is another mess hard to discern. We can worry about that later once God has used them to crush the globalists. We belong to neither group. Just be careful not to get in the way of the backlash. We are like the early church in Jerusalem as Jesus warned them in Matthew 24-25 of the impending siege of Jerusalem. The disciples were not part of the Jewish insurgency, but they were also not cheering on the Roman Army. At some point the globalist/leftist provocations will reap a nasty crackdown, so keep your distance as much as possible.

On the one hand, I cannot predict what shape this will take. All I can see is the moral character of what’s happening. The globalists have chosen Hell and they shall be dragged down into it. Weep for the consequences of sin, but rejoice in divine justice.

This is very real, folks, and there won’t be much warning when the dam breaks.

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Shredding the Cult of Babel

Posted on July 18, 2018 by ehurst

Take a fresh glance at Revelation 18. Keep in mind that I teach Revelation is mostly a matter of how God does things on this earth, and not so much a precise prediction of what is going to happen. It’s an extended parable revealing God’s wrath on sin. My point in referencing this chapter is the symbolism of Babylon: It’s a false religion of world domination.

I can tell you that it isn’t news, but it seems very few people are aware of it: There has long been a merchant culture that functions as a cult of Mammon. You see it condemned in that chapter of Revelation as the merchants leeching off the enforced “free trade” you would expect from a world government. This merchant cult of Mammon rose to prominence with the birth of the middle class at the end of the Middle Ages. It has been sold to us as the sensible objections of merchants to all the regulations, and the taxes and tolls, hindering the free movement of their goods to all the markets they could find, and bringing back goods not available at home. If you worship material comfort, it’s perfectly sensible to resent restraints on trade like that.

Now go back and look at some of the early Genesis narratives (chapters 1-11). Stop and consider how most of the world disputes those early narratives. That’s because the world presumes the necessity of legalistic literal reading instead of seeing the bigger picture. By no means does the Bible attempt to present the history of the human race. The narrative strives to paint an image of moral truth, and pulls from what was in ancient times a common pool of mythology aimed at that very task. Much of it is symbolism and parable, so literalism is simply stupid. If you take the time to understand the ancient narrative style and how it was supposed to work, you would come up with a different picture than the one that garners so many objections.

Fundamental concept: We were created immortal. But immortality requires a specific moral orientation. If you depart from that orientation, you sacrifice immortality. The core nature of the Fall is departure from that orientation. Thus, our obvious task is recovering that orientation so we can recover immortality. Everything else that occupies our time in this fallen realm is just means and method on the way to restoring that moral orientation. If you get lost in the means and methods, you’ll never get home again.

The whole business of worshiping Mammon means getting lost and staying lost from that original moral orientation of immortality. All it does is confirm the first mistake we made in departing from that orientation God gave us in the Garden. This false orientation on this world is the Forbidden Fruit. It’s an obsession with subjecting all things to human reason versus trusting revelation.

The Tower of Babel symbolizes the human aspiration to take control of our human situation by human reason. It is all about eating that Forbidden Fruit. As long as we try to build a tower into the heavens by our human capabilities, we can’t even understand where “Heaven” is. It’s another case of taking literally the symbolism of the sky as “Heaven”. It ain’t up there; it’s over in another realm of existence. The Garden of Eden was never in this world; this whole realm of existence is outside the Garden. Getting back into the Garden, our true Home, requires leaving this world.

And it requires a moral orientation that doesn’t take this world seriously. It requires ditching our reliance on human reason and all those great and sensible things we think we understand, so that we can align ourselves with the immortal moral orientation.

Our modern globalism is a false religion. It is eating the Forbidden Fruit. It is the worship of Mammon with all the obsession with human physical comfort. This body in which we live is not the Eden body; it’s a prison that keeps us from Eden. And the notion that we should then just end this life voluntarily is still thinking like a mortal. We have been cast out of the Garden until we pass through the Flaming Sword of revelation; we are required to restore that immortal moral vision first. Once you do that, you understand the necessity of patiently slogging through this prison existence until God is ready to let us back into the Garden.

You should hardly be surprised that a major portion of humanity insists with all earnestness that we really must have open borders and open trade and a world government to enforce that openness. That is building the Tower of Babel all over again. It’s also the objective behind communism, socialism, and a whole range of so-called progressive or leftist ideals. But it’s also the whole objective behind capitalism, conservatism, and everything on the right end of the political spectrum, because those things add up to just a different kind of world government.

The whole point behind the Tower of Babel narrative is that God really does want us humans divided into a million tiny tribal nations. If you can’t accept that idea, then you have rejected revelation, you have rejected the Flaming Sword, and you have rejected Eden.

Notice that I’m not saying Eden is a million tiny tribes, but that as long as we live in a world outside of Eden, we cannot hope to get back into Eden until we understand that human government cannot be trusted to do anything right. So it has to be restricted to the absolute minimum. It has to be confined to tiny tribal nations with barely any authority at all, and tightly constrained at that. Only God is capable of ruling the human race, and by rejecting His revealed moral orientation, we lose the blessing of His government.

Every time we try to build the Tower of Babel, God is going to destroy it again by destroying the unity we imagine is possible. And the means of destruction is simply exposing the lie. God’s wrath on sin is merely the case of reasserting His revelation as truth and exposing how everything else is false. God is currently ripping the globalist cult to shreds — Babylon is fallen, is fallen. And the imperialist cult is next.

Meanwhile, the means and methods we employ in confronting that Flaming Sword at the gate of Eden is all about changing you, not the world around you. We will leave this world behind; Christ’s return will destroy it. What we do not leave behind is the moral changes in our souls. So the whole mission is defeating the Devil in your own soul. He will retain a certain level of mastery over this world, but he doesn’t rightly own your soul. The door to the prison is open; you have to follow Christ to walk out of it.

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Random Photos 04

Posted on July 17, 2018 by ehurst

Just some random shots collected over the past week or so. Unlike the pink and white cups that grow in the same places, these tiny gramophone shaped flowers have pink edges and white center. They show up later in the summer and stick around for quite a while.

This is down on the river bank below one of my prayer chapels. These pines exude a lovely scent on hot days that really adds to the atmosphere. This the north bank of the Oklahoma River near Western Avenue.

With just a little artistry, you could mistake this massive feed mill for a fairy castle. But if you get downwind during a large batch process, you’ll never forget the smell of rendered fat and roasted grains to make dog food. Fortunately, most of the year they make other things.

There were very few of these pink blossoms scattered along the River Trail, and most of them had been chopped up by a mower. This one managed to escape the blades; they grow on a vine quite near the water in sandy soil.

Out at Draper Lake, this is the smallest point. I’ve walked out on it before and took pictures, but that’s not easy to do right now. The water level is quite high because of the flooding rains last month. Thus, it’s a small island just barely sticking up out of the water.

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Brave, Brave Man

Posted on July 16, 2018 by ehurst

I’m not going to say too much about this, just offer the link:

American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion

Let’s watch and see what happens to Ron Unz for daring to report objectively what so many others already know. I’ve saved an archive copy of this article.

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Faking It

Posted on July 16, 2018 by ehurst

I’m not essential to Radix Fidem; I’m just the guy who kicked the door open so everyone else could find out what’s been hidden from them for ages. Over and over again, folks, you are the apostles and missionaries and prophets and spiritual giants. I have the privilege of making a lot of noise early in the game to help break up the fallow ground of human awareness in divine matters. The real genius here is revelation and what it makes of you. Once we open up to what’s already there waiting for us, it changes everything.

I want to offer a warning about a counterfeit to the real thing. The single greatest growth sector in mainstream evangelical Western religion includes the neo-charismatic revival mixed with Dominion Theology, so-called “spiritual warfare,” with the slickest of technology use and persuasive mass psychology.

I’ve been reading about this huge and powerful religious movement that a lot of people haven’t noticed. That is, most people who see the various fronts for this thing aren’t aware of the links in the background. These people who get their face on camera are freaking liars; they have set out to deceive by hiding the true nature of their work. Not in the sense of secrecy, because they’ll admit it if you know enough to ask. But they’ll downplay it, especially in their most public presentations. They present the image of excitement and challenge using something that draws all kinds of people, including a lot of celebrities. It’s high grade music and theatrics, and once you’ve been pulled in, the entrapment and abuse starts building slowly.

But they sincerely believe this is how God works. They are so deeply deceived themselves that it takes serious personal tragedy to shake them loose, if then.

They appear to be heart-led, but they almost never end up the same place the heart-led way takes you. It’s a mixture of cerebral and emotional appeal that feels spiritual to a Western soul. And it seems to answer that instinctive search for a tribal identity. It’s a fake covenant that feels like the real thing. I seriously doubt the leaders and folks who dreamed up this stuff had any conscious intention of faking our primary markers from Biblical Law, but you can bet the Devil knows about it. Satan knows what we are hard-wired to seek when faith starts to blossom.

Do I need to name names? This thing has bound together Life Church, Daystar, Hillsong, and any number of other huge monster churches/franchises too numerous to name. It includes a huge portion of the Assemblies of God, Youth with a Mission, American Family Association and includes such luminaries as TD Jakes, Rick Warren, David Yonggi Cho, and so forth. One of the names under which they associate is New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). You’ll see terms like Latter Rain, Joel’s Army, Toronto Revival, Vineyard Fellowship, Third Wave (Pentecostalism), and a whole industry under the guise of Christian Counseling (though not yet having hijacked the whole range of Christian Counselors).

I’d rather not chase down all the ugly details of their abusive deliverance ministry stuff, except to point out how it echoes Scientology and all of the manipulative and authoritative dominance you would expect to go with it. Instead, I’ll note here that Radix Fidem teaches you to chase your own demons out with only the slightest guidance from someone with a little more experience. We cut through the voodoo crap and point out how embracing and digging into Biblical Law on your own terms, in accordance with your mission and calling, is the most powerful spiritual weapon in the universe. We teach that demons are bound by God’s Law, not silly rituals.

But you might have noticed how often I’ve tried to make our Kiln of the Soul virtual parish collegial. My position as elder is contextual; as long as you are on my turf, I’m in charge. If I visit your turf, you are in charge. Otherwise I’m just a sign posts telling what you are likely to find if you choose to explore something I’ve marked. The last thing I want to do is foster dependency in anyone.

Still, the scariest thing about this massive movement now counting millions of members is that they have concrete plans to take over the world. Read that again; that’s what Dominion Theology is all about. These folks have invested in schools and colleges in order to inculcate a potent counterculture of sorts that seeks to displace secular leadership or other brands of religious leadership in arts, entertainment, business, government, etc. Some of it hasn’t worked out as planned, and right now there’s a lot of discussion among them about how to come up with something that works better.

Part of that something better is promoting the current rightward shift in politics all over the West. As you might expect, that means a huge part of this movement is Christian Zionist. In case it’s not obvious to you, that’s not quite the same thing as plain old Zionist. Rather, it’s the Left Behind kind of hysterical End Times Zionism. March to the drums, O vast army of Christian troops!

Granted, a lot of people find some useful discipline in all of this. However, this whole thing strives mightily to keep up a false front, so that discipline tends to be somewhat artificial. It’s not internalized because it’s not consistent with Creation and God’s divine moral character, so a major element in their religion is this regimen of constantly refreshing the controls and conformity. Pay attention to how they do worship; it’s always top-down. It’s very moving and all, and they love to get everyone participating, but that participation has zero effect on what happens up on that stage. The presentation and sound system is designed to drown you out; you can’t even hear yourself singing and it’s likely no one near you can hear you, either. Your talents mean nothing in the corporate structure of religious activities.

So all the members are clients, nothing more. All of the attention is focused on the staff, who may in turn be nothing more than well-trained drones who draw attention higher up the chain. The local staff are little more than agents for control, bright workers whose ideas and creativity are channeled into sales and profit. Volunteers need only be able to participate in that control system.

This kind of churchianity is prepared to survive the demise of the West, and rests increasingly on the Internet, so you should expect to see them around for a long time. The other branches of evangelical mainstream religion will fade, though only a few will outright die. So this oddball mix of Dominionist Charismatic stuff will dominate until there is a major exodus out of Christian Zionism. After that, I have no idea what will happen to them.

You and I are not interested in captivating millions. We aren’t keeping count how many join in our walk of faith. That part is in God’s hands. Our mission is merely to live what we believe and let the Lord add those He wants to call. And we will avoid everything that characterizes the mainstream churches with all their abuses. Not so we can trumpet how special we are, but because when anything we do starts to look like them, we know we are on the wrong track. I suspect it will take a full generation to lose all those bad habits we carried with us escaping that system. All we want is fellowship with heart-led people of faith, not control and conformity.

Lord, keep us honest. Amen.

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Discerning the Times We Live

Posted on July 15, 2018 by ehurst

It’s not that Christians can’t do politics, it’s that politics can’t do Christianity.

On the one hand, there is no way we could have a genuine Christian government. There is simply way too much distance between what the Bible requires and where the rest of the world is. A Christian government requires the covenant of Biblical Law, and we can’t even get any government to take Noah seriously. You cannot call it “Christian government” without a valid biblical covenant. Christians were seduced from that position around 300 AD and have never gone back to it, so we’ve had a bunch of horrible government with the label “Christian” slapped onto it.

On the other hand, we have several examples of soldiers and political figures who joined the First Century churches and aren’t required to quit their jobs. Nothing prevents anyone from being called by God to engage those kinds of positions. There’s a place for that, as long as you never pretend that government is going to actually do the right thing with any degree of consistency. You will be obliged to do the right thing within the constraints of secular government, just as Joseph did in the pagan Egyptian government.

Now, it’s pretty obvious from Paul’s letters that resisting government is generally wrong. There’s nothing wrong with fleeing an evil government. There’s nothing wrong with using loopholes to avoid injustice and persecution, as Paul himself did, but the idea of outright rebellion was always a big risk against the message of Christ. You don’t have to stay completely out of government activity, but you also can’t fight it. Don’t betray your government to the enemy. If you find the enemy morally superior, migrate and obey that one.

But what if your government is at war with itself? That’s what we face here in the US. We have factions fighting for control and it’s likely to get bloody before long. Our problem is that neither of the main factions is morally right. There is no clear good side. We can’t rely on moral principle to establish a clear path here.

In this case, all we have is the prophetic word. If you have your own discernment, then follow that. Otherwise, I’ve tried to offer my best explanation of why I plan on one particular side in this war winning. In a prophetic sense, then, that side is the valid government. And if I’m wrong, I’ll accept the consequences. But I assure you that the faction I see winning soon will later also lose in some other kind of conflict, and I’ll be obliged to show loyalty to yet another government.

It really doesn’t make a whole lot of difference in one sense because only a covenant government can hold my true loyalty in the first place. What’s left is a provisional loyalty. It’s a loyalty that generally tries to meet valid demands and prepares for persecution in the matter of invalid demands. If the Lord wants me to move, I’ll do that. If He wants me to stay and prophesy against sin, I’ll do that.

Meanwhile, win or lose, the government I consider prophetically valid today is the one I’ll defend. Yes, I might be ready to take up arms against the other faction. But there are limits. I suppose it really depends on how things progress, but my sense of calling doesn’t forbid it. And farther down the road, when my prophetic sense tells me the time is right, I’ll transfer that same loyalty to whatever God brings along to replace the one I’ll defend today.

And I’ll offer that same level of provisional loyalty. There’s nothing partisan about this. I expect both major parties to survive, but not everyone in them, and not the false government. My eyes are on the mission and calling to something none of these factions are ready to understand. Whoever wins, they will have to accept my limited loyalty because that’s what God demands of me. I am fully confident that my Father will carry me through all of this.

I’m not asking you, dear readers, to do anything, except to understand how I see these things.

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Teachings of Jesus — Matthew 19:3-12

Posted on July 14, 2018 by ehurst

Let’s remind ourselves that Jesus keeps calling for a return to the Covenant. What will Messiah’s reign demand of His subjects? The problem addressed here is the long and deep drift of Israel from that Covenant. The Jews no longer knew God in terms of His divine moral character, and so misconstrued the Law of Moses based on their own perverted legalistic reasoning.

This legalism turned patriarchy into privilege, instead of a burden of responsibility. There was some debate among rabbinical scholars, but the broad practice of Jesus’ day was that a man could divorce his wife for any petty reason at all. Typically this meant that a man already married found someone who pleased him more, so he sent the wife packing and married the new girl. So far as we can tell, the typical father of the rejected bride would be in a hurry to offer her to another man for a far lower bride price. It became rather like a market in breeding stock.

Jesus had already addressed this question before in the Sermon on the Mount. Thus, these inquisitors thought they knew what to expect. Their intent was to get Jesus to say something that would be very unpopular with the crowd, as this kind of arrogance toward women was common even among the peasants. They were hoping to trick Jesus into attacking this socially acceptable privilege of Jewish manhood.

Jesus answered from not merely the letter, but the intent of the Scripture. That intent is painfully obvious to a proper Hebrew mystical approach, but the Pharisees had long been perverted by the foreign Hellenistic logic. Jesus goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. His point in partially quoting from the first and second chapters together is that no other creature was declared as male and female on the same grounds as humans. It wasn’t a mere matter of reproduction, but of partnership in building shalom. There were things each could do best for the glory of the Creator, things the other could not do.

Then Jesus notes that the bond between husband and wife is stronger than that of parent and child. Yet we have that command to honor father and mother, so this transcends even the Ten Commandments. It’s something so fundamental to human existence itself that it wasn’t formally stated in the Law. It’s implications were too obvious. Even before the Fall, the two became one flesh. This statement provoked profound moral implications that would fill whole books. What Jew would dare to profane the original work of God from before the Fall?

Those inquisitors knew exactly what Jesus was saying. But they pressed the issue by asking if Jesus was suggesting Moses defied God on this issue. Why did Moses make it permissible to divorce? Catch what Jesus says here: Moses was pampering the most difficult bunch of whiners on this earth. Of all men, Moses was intimately acquainted with how hardhearted the Israelis were. Had he not given them this out, Jewish men would have abused their disfavored wives to the point some would simply kill them to be rid of them. What Moses commanded was an act of mercy. The only justification for divorce was a woman who was unfaithful; that kind of woman was a threat to covenant shalom. Otherwise, it pays to be far more circumspect in choosing a bride in the first place, because there was no other justification for divorce.

After the inquisitors left, even the Twelve showed how they struggled with the depth of this moral issue. Their comment was the same kind of childish arrogance typical of most Jewish men of their day: If I can’t have it my way, I refuse to play at all. Jesus answered from His own personal experience. Precious few are the men God chooses to remain celibate. There is a place for that — men whose calling and mission would be hell for a family. But obviously there would be no covenant nation if at least some men didn’t marry and raise families.

The whole point of the Covenant was to raise men above the worldly standards. Yet, if a man could absorb the moral character of God such that all he accomplished was divine justice in keeping peace in his own home, that was more than most of humanity could manage without divine revelation. That was the work of God, a work He would support by miracles unimaginable.

Trust the Lord to prosper what He commands.

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