Photography: Luther and Wellston

In terms of photography, Luther’s claim to fame is the very large percentage of old buildings. The town sits on the southern ridge above the Deep Fork River and was built around a feed mill up against the railroad tracks. Just beyond the tracks is Route 66. So first up is this old storage shed out behind some historical structures on the main drag.

Where one of those buildings has disappeared, the city made it into a tiny historical park and erected a veterans’ memorial. For a feeble, tiny town it’s not too bad as a shrine to worship of the state.

This old abandoned house sits next to a lot that has recently seen some bulldozer action, but nothing else has been done with it. Given the lack of investment in keeping up these old structures, the whole street might see bulldozers in the next few years. I’m sure it was much nicer in the past.

It’s hard to tell if this one is still occupied, but it’s not collapsing yet. To be honest, there are a lot of old houses just barely standing with people living in them. The economy around this town has been depressed for quite some years. They do have nice new school buildings, but then lots of scandals have dogged their school system. Welcome to rural Oklahoma.

This one had cars parked along the other side, and a small herd of cats ranging across the back yard. It was obviously occupied and has seen a little work on the front side. I gather the city government isn’t too tough on mowing yards. I was limited by the sun being still yet rather low on the eastern horizon.

It was just a short drive to Wellston. I took the old Business Route 66 into town. I wanted to stop and get a nice shot of a lovely valley, but there was no safe place to stop or even pull off the road. Instead, I settled for this shot of a Route 66 themed business. Wellston’s old city center never had much, and there’s even less business these days. Most of Wellston’s business is out near the toll road entrance.

Back toward Luther, there’s a spot near the Deep Fork crossing where the original road bed once crossed a little north of the current bridge. The old concrete abutment on one side still stands complete. Just beyond and not visible is a spot where the river dug out a wide round pool with a slight drop over the bed rock. The map shows another like it about a half-mile downstream. They would have been popular spots for swimming in the old days.

The right half of this building is from the Route 66 heyday, and where I’m standing was once part of the original roadbed that ran up to that bridge. Now the spot is part of a gas station parking lot, with a building added on to the left that would have been right close to the pavement edge of the old Route 66. A chunk of that historic pavement was removed to accommodate the underground fuel tanks. I’m sure they never gave it much thought at the time, and were just glad the new highway took a flatter pass through the valley. Now all the leftovers from the original roadbed are painted with garish murals commemorating Route 66.

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Standing in a Different Context 04

We can go back and trace how the Kazar Jews infiltrated Western Europe. Today we call them Ashkenazi.

A very famous member of their nation was Mayer Amschel Bauer, whose family eventually gained the nickname Rothschild and took it officially as their family name. After being apprenticed for awhile to a banker, Mayer eventually started dealing in rare coins and gained the attention of some nobles and royalty. He also built up a courier system that handled large money transfers with security and secrecy on behalf of his aristocratic clients. He enforced the same endogamy common among Jews since biblical times and instilled in his sons the will to infiltrate places of power at every opportunity. The family obsession with banking and related businesses arose from the simple fact Jews couldn’t legally own property. However, most of the wild tales about the Rothschilds are baloney.

Further, those wild tales of dark evil souls attempting to seize control of the world are simply not the point. The point is that the Devil is in control and uses anyone who serves his purpose. The Rothschilds behaved consistently with other Ashkenazi Jews, and were quite good at working around problems. Their influence slowly opened more and more doors. At the same time, they always faced some hatred simply for being different.

Remember Napoleon? He was partly influenced by the Rothschilds to put into his legal system a new level of freedom for Jews by reducing laws aimed specifically at restricting them. But did the Rothschilds love him for it? No, they funded some of the people who eventually defeated him. In London, one of the Rothschild sons used their advanced courier system to insure he got the word of how the battle turned out a day before any of the traders in stock exchange knew. He bought everything on the low knowing the prices would shoot up once the exchange got the official word of Wellington’s victory the next day. The Rothschilds were loyal only to themselves.

Most of my American readers are unlikely to know too much about the back and forth of the French Revolution, but at about the time of our Civil War, Napoleon III ruled France and he had learned a lot about espionage from Ashkenazi Jews like the Rothschilds. A very smart lawyer named Maurice Joly who opposed Napoleon III published a scathing critique of the ruler via an imaginary conversation in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. It’s referred to as the “Geneva book” because that’s where it was published in French. Joly was tossed in jail for it and very few copies of the book survived.

Joly’s brilliant work captures the essence of Western government. It’s more than just true to Machiavelli; it’s an accurate portrayal of the lies and secrecy that arose from a necessity of manipulating the population as the simplest path to ruling. Keep in mind that Napoleon III remained faithful to his progenitor’s policy of moving toward fair and equal treatment of Jews, while Joly appeared to be a Catholic loyalist. The Catholics of France maintained a prejudice against Jews, though some would argue it was well earned, given how often the Ashkenazi Jews had assisted in manipulating popes, bishops and creating tension with secular rulers, along with promoting the confiscation of Church properties. However, Joly’s work seems to offer no blame on the Jews for the sins of Napoleon III.

However, his book was borne somehow to Russia which was facing the early stages of its eventual Communist Revolution. Keep in mind that not all those Kazar Jews had left their ancient homeland in what was then western Russia. Russian Jews were generally in favor of communism, so it’s quite natural that people loyal to the czar were not friendly with Jews. As far as we can tell, someone in the imperial administration rewrote Joly’s book and made it sound like a Jewish plot to take over the world. You can read a really good, but rather long, explanation of the plagiarism. The shorter version is that, given the necessity of translating into Russian, and re-translating into English, the resulting book reads differently, but says the same thing as Joly’s with just a few additions. The resulting book is known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (get a free copy here).

So on the one hand, the Protocols is a fake. On the other hand, it started out as a very enlightened explanation of the lies and manipulation of Western governments, and remains a very accurate prediction of what we are seeing today. It looks very much like the behavior of the Rothschilds and the Zionists. So it really doesn’t matter if anyone espouses the book as their actual goals; this is where the Devil leads human governments. This is especially true of governments that embrace the Zionist cause and support Israel. The people involved in publishing the Protocols knew it was an accurate assessment and seized on the information, although some of it could as easily be said of themselves. It’s all the more accurate for any kind of globalist institution that aims to create a world government because this is a fair description of communist government agendas. We should skip the “Zion” part of the title and recognize the book for it’s accurate portrayal of governments in general.

Why do you suppose the Devil’s servants have tried so hard to discredit that book?

Folks, if we are going to take seriously our claims in the Radix Fidem covenant, it means building a set of mental reflexes based on the assumptions that arise from our faith. The Devil is a real person without a fleshly form, working invisibly and creating the false impression that his servants are such brilliant, evil, well-organized conspirators. The vast majority of humanity serve Satan quite well just by staying inside their heads and keeping their hearts silent and dark. Eventually he will devour all their lives and their dreams will come to nothing.

It’s not about organizing humanity under some demonic one world government; it’s nothing more than keeping them away from their divine heritage. Everything else is just background.

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Standing in a Different Context 03

Zionism is another face of The Cult [PDF].

We can blame the Zionists for the confusion about what it means to be a Jew. There are apparently three meanings. (1) Religious Jews are under the Talmud, which is a pact with the Devil. It makes them his feudal property, his special possession in all the earth. (2) Ethnic Jews don’t actually exist; virtually everyone claiming Jewish ethnicity is actually Kazar. Attempts to establish the presence of Semitic DNA so far have been fake, proving nothing. (3) Zionism is a political movement that promotes the modern state of Israel, claims to represent all Jews, and includes a lot other non-Jewish folks who serve the political agenda.

Zionism is a murky thing, even for the folks who embrace it. There is no particular need to see it as a big, precise and monolithic plan by a bunch of cognizant zealots; it is a face of the Cult and is managed by Satan himself. It appears to be a plan having to do with making the Jews dominant over all Gentiles. There is a considerable wealth of documentation that says as much, quite openly.

However, the underlying conspiracy is not in the minds of men, but in the hands of Satan working in those minds. This is the broken shards of what’s left of the Covenant of Moses and all the promises that rest on it. Judaism has trashed the divine mission and still holds to the delusion of Messianic Expectations of world dominance. Not every member shares the same detailed vision, but the actions of Zionists together aim in that direction as a whole. Thus, it’s perfectly fair to allege Zionists in general hold certain motives that various individuals can deny.

This is the nasty trick behind denying that there is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. The designated leaders at the helm of official Zionist organizations can deny the intent for just about everything Zionism ends up doing. They act is if we are blaming all Jews for being Zionist thugs, when we’ve been careful to avoid saying that. In particular, we as mystics have disavowed all political action in the first place. We don’t intend to stop the Zionists in their plots; we do intend to point out the plots just so folks can see clearly what’s at work. We want people to watch it happen and see the hand of Satan doing what God has authorized him to do.

That authorization includes using the clannish loyalty and truculent refusal of Jewish people to assimilate. There is zero justification for this in biblical terms. They had a direct line to God; they were enlightened and they had a taste of the powers of the Age to Come (Hebrews 6:4-6), and they put God to an open shame by rejecting His Son. The Bible says they have three basic options: adhere to the Covenant as Jesus taught it, assimilate into the Gentile nations, or work for the Devil. There will always be a significant number of Jews who take the third path. There will always be Jews who lend themselves to the most insufferable provocations of the rest of humanity.

In their own minds, they are simply claiming their divine heritage, so while their conscious plot is some form of taking over the world, it will never happen. Instead, Satan will use them to maximize human suffering for themselves as well as everyone else. Thus, we can honestly say that the true agenda of modern Israel is crapping on everyone else in the world. Whatever the Zionist government of Israel wants is guaranteed bad news for everyone alive on planet earth. That’s her mission in Satan’s domain.

Having rejected Christ, the Jewish nation promptly began working toward revolting against Rome. Within a generation this bore fruit in a revolt that saw Jews kicked out of Jerusalem and forbidden to return. Over the next century it kept getting worse and worse until Jews were expelled from most of their homeland. They have never ceased plotting a return.

Over the following centuries Judaism continued to drift in the same crazy direction. These activist Jews developed intrigue and manipulation into a high art, as if it were a noble gift from God. At one point a group of rabbis managed to seduce the entire kingdom of the Kazars, who were forcibly converted en masse by their king. These people were easily more obnoxious as Jews than their mentors. Eventually their kingdom was militarily defeated and they were politically assimilated, but the Kazars simply shifted to another means of competition. They maintained the clannish arrogance of the Diaspora Jews. On top of the conniving chutzpah of seeking to subdue the world by stealth, the Jewish Kazars added a spiteful vengeance that would never be satisfied by anything less than the most degrading enslavement of Gentile humanity.

And while the original ethnic Semitic Jews faded from history, today the Western world is heavily salted with Kazar Jews. There is almost no such thing as a Jew today who isn’t Kazar. Naturally, this is officially denied. Still, this has forever changed the character of what we know as Judaism and Jewish people. The lore of their hopes and dreams bears only a superficial resemblance to the Jews of Jesus’ day. The reason Jews have such a difficult existence in this world is because they are Kazar Jews, and the Kazar people have seldom had any friends for very long. They make themselves the enemy of everyone. These are the people who gave us today’s Zionism.

Zionism is thrice removed from biblical Hebrew religion.

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Standing in a Different Context 02

Review the narrative of Joseph in Genesis 37-50. You’ll recall a major figure named Potiphar, Pharaoh’s jailer. Notice the position he holds in the Egyptian imperial administration. This is a critical element in Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) feudalism. The point at which a local clan chief becomes important is when his domain is big enough to justify designating someone as his jailer. It’s quite likely Abraham had someone in his household who served in this noble position. Among his three most powerful noble allies, one was always the jailer.

Scripture depicts Satan as God’s jailer in that sense. Not in line for the throne, he is certainly one of three most powerful angelic beings (so-called “archangels”). He receives from his Master prisoners he can use as slaves in his own limited feudal domain. He is expected to keep up this duty by taking profit from the labor of his captives. While we can’t possibly imagine how Satan profits from it, we know his mission is to deprive us of our divine heritage of shalom. It isn’t just punishment for sin, but enslavement to the false impulses of sin.

This is radically different from the Western image of the Devil. The Western view is the net result of mixed influences, but is rooted largely in ancient Germanic mythology. In broad general terms, he is pictured as the mischievous younger brother of the favored heir in the pantheon of pagan deities. The rules are shadowy and can’t be trusted to keep him place, and he often asserts some form of equal claim to divine authority, hindering his favored elder brother from ever quite accomplishing much. Perhaps somewhere down the road it will break out into full civil war and only when the father figure gets off his lead ass and takes final action will this be over.

The latter paganized image is the foundation of Western Christian beliefs about the Devil. Even when Western Christian teaching cites Scripture for doctrine, the underlying assumptions always seem to conform with this latter viewpoint. Thus, there remains a broad and instinctive deception about how the Devil does things, which serves to keep people in his grasp.

In Radix Fidem we make much of personifying the Devil as he really is. He’s not some malevolent impersonal force, as we see behind all the horror movies, but a very distinct personality we can learn to recognize, and we can learn how to spot his deceptions so as to avoid falling under his dominion. This whole business of the Fall is summed up in accepting his lie about whether we can trust our human reason to discern good and evil. In essence, the Forbidden Fruit is usurping the heart with intellect in the human soul. God speaks directly through the heart; human reason unbound will contradict the voice of God. The human reason instinctively pulls away from personification of moral forces.

So in our teaching, the drama of human affairs on the earth includes a major figure guiding much of the action, but most of humanity appears utterly blind to his presence and unable to assess his influence.

Thus, in my paper on The Cult [PDF], I reassert the Devil and his demons as distinct personal influences keeping alive a conspiracy of dehumanizing tyranny. It does not require a witting conspiracy of individual human persons, only that we understand how demons use them. It’s not necessary to allege that there are people who consciously join a covenant of evil, but we can characterize this thing as a cult run by demons, holding in thrall a number of people who will act the same as if they did. It’s not so much about the people as the influence of demonic beings.

The pertinent point here is that Satan is now the god of the Jews. Not that they knowingly worship Satan, but they certainly aren’t worshiping the one true God of the Bible. Unless they bow the knee to Christ, their religion is one huge lie. They long ago traded the mystical Covenant of Moses for a cerebral legalism that makes a deity of their reason. Meanwhile, in truth the Covenant of Moses was subsumed under the Covenant of Christ. The Jewish religion is a captive of Satan.

And characteristic of this captivity is a high degree of savvy about certain limited aspects of human nature. Their original purpose and calling under the Covenant has been perverted in something truly sinister. Granted, not everyone involved in Jewish religion is like that. Rather, the influence of the religion over people who cling to it so tightly produces a cadre of willing Satanic servants who can be characterized as The Cult. Judaism is not The Cult; Judaism is the mask behind which this cult hides.

Wherever you find the Cult at work, you will always find a few Jewish folks playing key roles, regardless of how conscious they are of their role.

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Standing in a Different Context 01

Feel free to dismiss me as a nut, but I hope you are at least entertained by how I try to put some things into context.

Radix Fidem doesn’t just embrace a broad range of assumptions about reality; it attempts to declare them openly. Further, the outline of our covenant sets forth those assumptions in contrast to assumptions common in our Western world. We have the audacity to question everything, including things held sacred in our society, and poke around in the very foundations of what people consider reality. And we have the further audacity to declare that the Western world is wrong on just about everything.

We accuse the world of lying to itself, of accepting Satan’s deception without much thought. Indeed, the Western world accepts the Devil’s lies about himself, and bears an image of him that is quite false. I’ve recounted the details of our dispute with that image extensively here on this blog. Satan is not God’s enemy; he is God’s servant and our enemy. He is the personification of God’s wrath on sin. His mission is critical. It’s not a question of whether it makes sense; it’s a question of making ourselves understand what God has revealed, and Western thinking is very much counter to divine revelation.

So when Western scholarship reviews history and tries to explain where we are and how we got here, it’s inevitably missing a proper understanding of how God uses Satan in steering the affairs of humanity. We utterly reject the dismissive attitude that the Devil cannot be understood, that it’s a bunch of non-factual mythology with no bearing on the narrative. Indeed, we insist Satan is central to the narrative. And a critical element in what he does is convince people that human affairs are the only thing that matters. We say that human affairs matter only insofar as they indicate Satan’s work.

We utterly reject the notion that any good can come from striving after the wind of human existence in this world. We say the world is inherently fallen and cannot be fixed. That the only useful thing we can do is ameliorate the Fall, but that we can do so only through revelation. Biblical Law comes with promised blessings and it all works in ways that won’t always make sense to the human intellect. Our world rejects this whole image. It insists that humans can and must fix what’s broken, and that the only proper approach is whatever our combined intellects can reason out.

Thus, we don’t take too seriously a lot of noise people make about things, because we know that such noise typically misses the point. We will play along to the point that it permits us to speak to the madness of human folly, but we don’t take it seriously. It’s not that Satan rules the affairs of fallen mankind so much as he keeps people distracted, keeps them riled up and worried about things that can’t be changed in the long run. He keeps people trapped in the false belief that it matters and it is their duty to keep trying. Even when they realize it’s never going to work, he lies and holds them in despair so that they gravitate toward suicide instead of finding their release from caring about things they can’t change. Suicide presumes that this world should be fixable, and behind that is the ultimate lie of taking oneself too seriously — “I should not have to hurt this badly.”

Radix Fidem rejects that as the ultimate lie. Of course we are going to hurt because we are fallen creatures. Sorrow and misery are fundamental features of this awful existence. This is where the Bible passages about temptation and self-will come into play. We deny that life owes us anything better. Suffering is not unjust in itself.

But suffering can be mitigated, and only by the means of Biblical Law. We bow the knee the divine revelation. We do not accept the definition of sin, the moral boundaries drawn by our human reason. Rather, we say that relying on reason is the foundation of sin and sorrow. Reason does not define sin; it is sin. That is, reason as the final rule of human decision is the fundamental failure itself. And while reason has multiple lesser members that can lead one even farther astray, there is something higher than reason. It’s well within reach of every human, but an option seldom exercised: the heart-led way.

We’ve said plenty about that in other posts; the point here is that we are operating from a far higher position of moral discernment than is possible with mere intellect. When we examine human events, we come up with an entirely different assessment of what went wrong and how it could be better. We define “better” from an entirely different level of consideration. We reject the commonly accepted boundaries of what is and isn’t fit for discussion and review.

I’m going to share with you something of my heart-led evaluation of human history.

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Photography: Disappointing Arcadia Lake

I don’t recommend you visit Aracdia Lake. It turns out the lake office entrance is the only free one. When I turned into any other entrance, there was a sign demanding I pay $7 to park and another $3 just to walk around. Bikes are the same price as hiking. Given the crappy facilities, it’s not worth half that much. So I went back to the only free entrance and walked along the shore.

It was heavily covered with giant slabs of red sandstone. I’ll grant you it’s quite lovely. But during warmer weather, you’ll encounter rattlesnakes. I came close enough to one to set off the rattle, but it wasn’t in a position to strike me from under a couple of rocks. It sounded rather odd slapping against the sand and echoing from inside a small chamber, so at first I didn’t recognize it. It’s a big mistake that nowhere on the City’s website does it warn of rattlers in the park. If you don’t know how to deal with them, I’d stay away from the park in warm weather.

Undaunted, I then turned upland and walked a section of one of the bike trails (technically multi-use trails). I figured it was unlikely I’d encounter enforcement for the trail fees, but the shock of what they charged was very disappointing. Then again, the City of Edmond is notorious for such things. The government is uniformly upper-middle-class and snotty, slamming users with fees for every privilege; I’m waiting to hear about a charge for breathing the same air they do. They honestly believe that you should pay for the privilege of rattle-snake bites.

I’m not likely to visit Arcadia Lake again, I don’t recommend it to anyone.

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There’s More We Can Do

We don’t want Radix Fidem to become popular, but we do want it to spread so more people can share in the blessing. Nobody has to tell us that this will never be mainstream; Jesus warned that it could never be. Still, we cannot just keep it to ourselves.

There is no single model, no master plan of how to go about this. And God forbid it should depend on how I do things. I’m disposable; the truth is not. Somehow we have to establish in the minds of our world a limited claim to attention. It’s just a matter of asking them to consider our message, nothing more. If God doesn’t implant the truth in their hearts, there’s nothing more we can do.

But it should be obvious that we haven’t hit that barrier of “nothing more we can do” just yet. We haven’t gotten to the place where we have won a hearing on any terms. And while it’s not by our own power we do this, our awareness of it prepares us to hear the call of God to some fresh mission we might not have considered before.

Again: I cannot do this for you. I can make suggestions that occur to my feeble imagination, but I’m not in your shoes and I’m not the one calling you. It’s a divine call. All I’m doing is offering a structure within which we can share this thing and enrich all our lives. You don’t have to talk about the name I call it, but you do need to press forward with a couple of things.

1. This is heart-led faith. There is a body of science that backs this up, but we can’t rely on that to validate what we do. The science can only make it plausible; it opens the door in the minds of some. What really makes a difference is the power to live your faith. The dominance of the heart accesses a life and power simply unavailable any other way.

As a side note on that, we seek to redefine some terminology. You’ll have to give a moment to that now and then when you talk about it. For example, most people have a poor definition of “mysticism” — they tend to think of it as a cerebral exercise. We elevate the term to mean exercising a direct experience with God on a level above the intellect.

2. The key to getting the head on the right path to cooperate with the heart is an awareness of Biblical Law. That in itself is a term used to indicate the broader context of various Law Covenants in the Bible. Our emphasis is on Noah’s Law, though we don’t wholly agree with everyone else’s definition of it. Our point is what Law really means in mysticism, never mind what it means in Western culture. It’s inherently personal; it’s the character of our God as a Person, not some sterile dead impersonal edict.

These two points are the mini-covenant; they are what’s behind the extended Radix Fidem statement of covenant. What I’m hoping to do is set you free from any notion that you are bound by our written covenant, unless you choose to bind yourself. If it doesn’t call your name, you can’t commit to it. But the actual core of what we do is those two points above. They are the character of our contention that everyone else is doing it wrong.

And again, we don’t say they do it wrong in an accusatory tone. We say it gently and softly when it’s painfully obvious that things aren’t working under whatever guidelines they have been using in the past. Truly, if someone isn’t feeling the pain of failure, they aren’t likely to look for a better answer.

Finally, this is not about getting folks to read Bro. Ed’s books and blog. This is about Bro. Ed blabbering enough that you catch on in your own way and you can stop investing so much time in all the reading. If you like my blabber and want to share your own, great! Jump right in; it gets lonely making all this noise and hearing back so little. But the most important thing you can do for me personally is show me how you have become your own source tapping into God. My writing should be a convenience, not holy writ.

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Teachings of Jesus — Matthew 12:22-37

We’ve noted often that the adoption of Hellenized reason perverted the humble mysticism that once characterized Hebrew religion. Reason is inherently arrogant, convinced it can handle all truth that matters, that it is fully competent and indisputable. With this deep perversion, the Talmudists convinced themselves that they knew the ultimate truth of all things and could cite good reasons for it. Thus, they defined God in such a way as to make Him an extension of their philosophical conclusions. For them, Jehovah simply must be thus and so.

And anyone who promoted a different image clearly could not know God. Their logic excluded the possibility they might be mistaken. Therefore, it didn’t matter what Jesus accomplished in terms of miracles; He could not have come from Jehovah, nor be exercising genuine divine power. So whatever power He had must have come from the Devil. Authority over demons? Must be a higher demonic authority. It’s the only answer that their logic could accept.

So Jesus answered them according to their own style of logic. How can the Devil gain anything by attacking his own troops? It should be obvious Satan would do no such thing. It’s best to imagine Satan as ruling a feudal domain; he’s not stupid. He gained his position by being smarter than people in the first place. The only way to make the Devil let go of someone was to exercise an authority higher than his.

Then Jesus says something most people miss. The Pharisees and their trainees claimed to cast out demons. Exorcism was a lucrative trade in those days, because so very many people were demonized, particularly around Judea and Galilee. Most of the sales pitch was aimed at friends and relatives of the victims to pay on their behalf. However, it was a noteworthy failure, in that a great many victims never got delivered. Jesus was mocking them. It was painfully obvious He got the job done without fail. Just how much authority were the Pharisees able to exercise, regardless of source, in the same task? Was God behind their failures?

You cannot plunder the Devil’s domain unless you have the power to bind him. Whatever the Pharisees were exercising, it wasn’t the power of Jehovah. If the Pharisees were interested only in opposing Jesus any way they could, then whatever their business, it wasn’t the same business as Jesus. How many healings and exorcisms were the Pharisees doing? None, because they wasted too much time envying the ministry of Jesus. They were definitely not on the same side as He.

Then He delivers a strong prophetic warning. God has made clear His mercy and forgiveness. Anyone who repents and humbly confesses their sin before the Lord can be restored to His favor. Jesus mentions blasphemy, the sin of degrading God’s glory by insisting that He’s no better than anyone else, or that others are on His level. It’s far more than jokingly pointing at something broken and saying, “Even God can’t fix that.” It’s suggesting that God is a liar, claiming glory that isn’t rightfully His.

To blaspheme against the Holy Spirit of God is more specific: It is confusing the work of the Holy Spirit with the work of the Devil. This is precisely what the Pharisees on the scene were doing. It wasn’t so much the words they said, but it was what was in their hearts at that moment. They were deeply confused about God and His work, to the point they were incapable of giving Him His due glory for delivering their fellow Israelites. How far would you have to go, how dark would your heart have to be, to confuse God’s deliverance with a deception of the Devil?

The heart discerns divine moral truth. So this business of declaring a tree once and for all good or bad does not require digging into the root system. It’s enough to see the fruit. Your heart is discerned by what comes out of your life. The only associates of the Devil around there were the Pharisees — “children of vipers” discerned by what they valued and how they talked.

And it was far more than mere words here; this was an established Hebrew figure of speech. It covered the whole conduct of someone. Their lives spoke loudly of their darkened hearts, hearts that didn’t connect with divine truth, but lurked around the pits of Hell.

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Keep It Alive

Fundamental to our teaching here is that the mainstream church has failed. Not in every way; good things have been preserved over the past two millennia. However, our primary complaint is the loss of the heart-led way. Faith, convictions and the voice of God are all in the heart, not in the mind. You cannot have faith unless your heart dominates your intellect. This is the heart of mysticism: Not a better grade of intellect, but something else entirely guiding your choices.

It’s not a simple story of how this happened. We sense in the writing of John the frustration of watching mysticism die as new leaders arose without the deep Hebrew background. It was bad enough that mysticism had virtually died within the Hebrew population itself, as Judaism was always a cerebral religion. It had taken over from the Old Testament Hebrew religion, and it was this that Jesus fought during His ministry. It should have been the most natural thing under Hebrew language and thought to restore the heart-led consciousness, but the bite of Hellenism was deep.

Thus, the nastiest part of the Judaizing influence afflicting the early church was the subtle insinuation that cerebral considerations rightly ruled religion. The Apostles themselves taught the necessity of digging into the Old Testament; that was their Bible for the first few decades after Christ ascended. But the Judaizers were perverting this process by seeking to reassert the Talmudic traditions that had already destroyed Hebrew religion, and to make Christianity Talmudic.

If you can understand this, then John’s Revelation makes a lot more sense. He wrote a prophetic book that utterly required mysticism — a heart-led consciousness — to grasp the parabolic message. If you read it from a heart-led position, you understand the massive onslaught of the forces of Hell seeking to bury that truth once and for all. That’s the whole point of the image of Armageddon. The take away from Revelation is two-fold: This is the nature of spiritual warfare, and the battle went against us after John passed from the scene.

Not that the heart-led way died off, but that the focus of church activity moved away from it. Thus, the records follow the departing mass of early Christians who lost their way and compromised with the world, becoming the Harlot Church. Those who remained heart-led were marginalized and forced to do their work behind the scenes. We see glimpses of it reasserting now and then in Church History, but without the whole message of the heart-led orientation from ancient times, it never took hold in the mainstream.

God has turned that around. We have this moment in history to try again. This time we will make it conscious in our teachings; we will seek ways to force the issue by how we talk about it. Instead of guarding the cerebral gates of mythical orthodoxy, we will acknowledge allies in places the historical churches have walled off as forbidden. We will recognize the manifestation of the heart-led way even when it doesn’t lead people to Christ. That’s a whole lot better than letting the name of Christ be locked in the tomb of dead religion with no heart.

Don’t repeat the mistakes of the past; let’s not have another apocalypse of true faith that haunted John’s final days on this earth. Let’s keep this alive.

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Disappointment in the Park

I went back to the northern part of the Barnes Park trail system today, which takes me through Tom Poore Park and Pecan Grove Park up near NE 10th. Poore Park is where I spotted the beaver signs last week. This week I took a closer look and surveyed more thoroughly after reviewing some data. I lost all my notes from college days, but it all came back pretty quickly.

After a week, hardly anything significant had changed. Most of what I saw appeared to be nothing more than just random eating off the bark. Keep in mind the Oklahoma beavers eat bark, buds, and grass roots (mostly Johnson Grass). So while another small tree had been gnawed off and dropped into the water, nothing else had been done with it. The one I shot last week with my cellphone hadn’t changed any further, except that the trunk fell over onto the ground.

This image shows a trunk that had been scraped in at least one previous year (darker section), now scraped a little more. There seems no intent to actually fell the tree, but a rather random scraping deep enough that it no longer tastes like food. I saw quite a bit of this over a stretch of a quarter-mile (400m) along Soldier Creek, and always the same species of tree.

Here is one from a previous year that is currently untouched, likely because the tree is dead now. Again, I saw quite a bit of this along the activity zone. I conclude this is likely a single beaver living alone and not bothering with a lodge. The activity seems almost random and nothing much is accomplished. It’s possible it doesn’t even stay here year round, but wanders up and down the creek. However, there are no signs of activity beyond this little section within the parks. This kind of random activity makes for a very poor study, so that’s the end of that, unless something changes enough to get my attention.

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