Bits and Pieces 31

Posted on April 6, 2018 by ehurst

1. Yesterday’s post was not meant to be cryptic. I’ll select one example to explain. You have news that Trump wants to pull out of Syria ASAP. You also might see reports from the various generals and civilian warmongers that we simply cannot pull out Syria. A good analysis of the situation is offered by Pat Buchanan.

If that’s as far as you get with the story, then you understand even less than Buchanan, who is a hard core partisan schmuck. Intelligent, but still not someone we want to give too much attention; he belongs to the system we are watching collapse. The point here is that America is headed for war, one way or another, and likely engaged militarily in several different places at once. Think about how a military defeat, especially one that cannot be downplayed in the Networked Age, will affect the social fabric of the US. Think about the economic repercussions of a major military loss on top of all the other things going wrong with our economy.

And yet, I insist this is not an apocalypse. It’s tribulation, just God’s plan for destroying the system of empire the US has become. This is how empire dies. This is how God plans to grant us opportunities to spread His truth.

2. Maybe you’ve heard about the teacher walk-out going on here in Oklahoma. You might even be aware that an offer has been made, and that it includes raises for support staff, such as my wife. What you may not know is that this walk-out affects each school district differently, because they all have their own policy about such things.

My wife works for Mid-Del. If the walk-out continues past today, it will take food off our table. The teachers couldn’t be bothered to care about that. They claim to have demanded the support staff be included in the raise, but a lot of that staff can’t afford to take a hit on such low income in the first place. The teachers are getting all kinds of free offers from the wider community and businesses, but the staff isn’t included in this. We stand to lose a lot of lunch ladies who will have to get another job or face homelessness. Pray for us, that common sense prevails and the teachers face reality that their demands are too radical and too steep. A raise is nice, but only if you have a job.

3. The recent showing on network television of Jesus Christ, Superstar brought back memories. I bought the album as a teenager in Alaska; two LP platters at around $9 in those days. It was all the rage among my peers at school back then. Today I’ll tell you the music is excellent and a couple of times the authors come quite close to truth that the mainstream churches try to ignore. Yet, it’s painfully obvious Webber and Rice do not get the gospel message at all.

Oddly enough, it triggered a related memory of something called Godspell. This was a secularized feel-good production with no real interest in religious truth, only some sentiment. One of the songs from this thing made it onto the radio playlists, “Day by Day.” The lyrics were taken from a hymn written in the 13th Century, and the tune is memorable as sample of excellent song writing from the early 1970s. I personally prefer the original screenplay version, but some folks like the recording by the 5th Dimension.

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Worse Than They Know

Posted on April 5, 2018 by ehurst

Pay attention to the news. Not so much as to see what’s going on around you in the world, but to see the madness as it sets in like never before. Don’t take from the news what they are trying to get you to believe; just grasp the trends underlying the cover stories.

Notice that it’s really nothing new in the sense that the media has always lied. Rather, I’m pointing to the broad moral flavor of what’s happening. For people who aren’t heart-led, they are going to catch the content and see it as confirmation of their particular political bias. That part of it is going to get crazier. Back away and see how this madness is reaching a fever pitch.

If you shield yourself from any awareness of the madness, you’ll miss important cues. Again, not because of what they say, but the underlying moral impact of what they are trying to get you to believe. Consider how it all seeks to manipulate, to seduce, to inflate the importance of things that don’t really matter, and hide things they don’t want anyone to notice. Not that we are going to act on what they are hiding, but try to see where it all seems to be headed, where people are being herded.

No two of us will see exactly the same thing. No two of us has exactly the same calling, so we don’t need to see the same things. What we need to share is the broad assumptions of the heart-led way, and the prophetic warning that God’s wrath is poured out. This is another of those times when “the ax is laid at the root of the tree.”

But I think it’s a mistake to simply ignore the whole thing, as if it tells you nothing at all. Learn the symptoms of the disease so you can take your own remedies and be ready to help others with them. It’s not what everyone says it is; it’s much worse than they’ll ever understand.

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Look in the Mirror

Posted on April 4, 2018 by ehurst

Take a moment to review Galatians 6:1-5 and 1 Corinthians 10:12-13.

Western society in general, and American society in particular, is schizophrenic about sex. We still have this pervasive, if not always conscious, mythology about the Fall as primarily an issue with sex. We still use imagery of apples and sexual temptation, a symbolic association you can detect in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It’s still a very repressive atmosphere among Christians, due to the conflation of those fairy tales and ambiguous English translations of Scripture.

Thus, in order to deal with human sexuality with any degree of detachment, our Western instinct is to go secular, removing every vestige of moral guidance. This only makes things worse, because the secular approach is based on agnostic and heart-less behavioral science and it’s still resting on the same basic cultural mythology. I can assure you that the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) cultures did not approach human sexuality at all as Western Christians do.

Nowhere does this manifest more painfully than it does among heavy duty church folks. We have this insane notion on the surface that sex is fine in marriage because that’s overtly taught in the Bible, but we can’t treat it is a standard topic for discussion, even among adults. It has to be buried in clinical discussions where everyone is supposed to be nervous about it.

What happens if someone on church staff reveals that he suffers from temptation regarding peculiar sexual tastes? Oh, sure, we all act very mature when he asks for prayer. And when he goes on to testify that not once in his life up to now has he slipped on this issue, in our minds we all say, “Sure buddy, just stay away from my family!” Suddenly this staff member is no longer allowed to be around anyone who might conceivably be an object of his horrifying desires. That person’s ministry ends right there.

We don’t trust the grace of God. We don’t treat the church members and staff as family — you know, folks you have to live with one way or another. And we don’t pray for them; that’s a social lie Christians tell each other. If it happens they’ve gotten good counseling somewhere in the past, that doesn’t matter; they must now submit to a shocking and invasive interrogation disguised as counseling.I’ve witnessed these “counseling sessions” and wondered if there were implements of torture in the closet because of the obvious underlying terror in everyone “trying to help.”

Next month the interrogator is caught up in some scandal regarding a somewhat different sexual sin. The hypocrisy made me puke.

We don’t acknowledge this kind of temptation as entirely normal. We have this false image that calling oneself a Christian is somehow a magical tonic that wipes away our fallen human nature. The Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t stop sin; it only teaches us to care how the Father feels about it. The lusts of the flesh continue on and Adam won’t stay nailed to the Cross. But our Lord grants sufficient awareness to seek and discover escape paths away from things that disappoint Him.

So Paul in those two passages cited above warns us to remain humble and watchful of our souls, not so much those of others. He teaches us to prayerfully assess where this person is in their journey, to trust Him and them, and leave the results in His hands. Our standard American Christian schizophrenic reaction destroys more lives than we could even hope to save. We force people to keep that stuff buried inside instead of opening up because we charge way too high a price for their honesty. Seems to me it’s just an excuse to keep from opening up about our own temptations.

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Photography: Random Spring Shots

Posted on April 3, 2018 by ehurst

Over the past week or so I captured this quick cellphone image of a flowering bush. I’m not too good on naming such things, but I can tell you that the scent was very light and sweet. Some of these things around Heritage Park Mall grow into small trees and the flowers don’t last that long.

But the main event today was a short hike around Point 12 at Draper Lake. I’ve already posted pictures of the rocky shore line out here, but because of the no-wheels policy, I wasn’t able to explore any of the trails. Today I drove out and parked the car, then followed the old shore trail on the western side. This second shot shows that the whole point is one big hill. Here the rise is close to shore and quite sharp. It was quite popular with off-roaders back in the days when the whole lake area was open for them. That’s why it’s now a recovery preserve; they tore it up pretty badly.

Farther around the west side the old shore trail remains mostly flat and open. I didn’t have to worry too much about being delayed by thorns long enough for deer ticks to jump on me.

The temperature was just below 60°F (around 15C). I had high winds out of the NNW, so the shore was mostly quiet except for the exposed rocky layers off the western edge of the tip of the point. The sun came out about half way around on the trail. There isn’t much trail on the eastern side and it goes immediately around the cove and out onto Point 13. I’ll save that for another day.

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The End of a Civilization: Far Cry 5

Posted on April 2, 2018 by ehurst

A basic premise of literary analysis is that whatever becomes truly popular in a given society reveals much about the underlying moral values of that society. This is how we can discern so much about the Ancient Near East (ANE); we read their literature and gather clues about their philosophical assumptions regarding reality and what they felt was good and right.

On the other hand, it’s notably obvious that a great deal of artistic output is meant to influence. It’s an attempt to inculcate values the artist wishes their world held. There’s a great deal of entertainment output that cynically reflects attempts to give the audience what it already wants. Then again, sometimes that mass-produced crap masks an ulterior motive. It’s aimed at taking advantage of the lowest common denominator to subtly condition the audience to various ends.

We know this because too often the folks behind entertainment have openly admitted such designs. Their flashes of honesty give us clues for when other producers aren’t so honest. Some of you may know that I don’t like playing video games, but that I do like to watch others play them. I especially like well crafted games that offer grand landscapes, the so-called “open world” games where the player isn’t herded along specific paths. The artists behind open world games invest an awful lot of time and creative energy in producing believable worlds that call you to explore. Such games answer a very human call to adventure.

But if there’s any part of the video game industry that suffers, it’s the scripting and storytelling that is often most disappointing. It seems as if the game business suffers a common malady, in that the producers are forced to choose between good visuals and play, or good story lines, but cannot offer both.

Recently, I watched a game walkthrough that I found deeply disturbing: Far Cry 5. The open world part was inspiring. Granted, some of the game play was entirely too chaotic with random attacks that were simply too much for enjoyable play, but that’s a matter of taste for a lot of players. What was most disturbing was the shocking nihilism in the underlying story.

It’s a very ugly sucker punch in that respect. You are drawn into playing based on traditional gamer values of finding a worthy cause for which to sneak, snipe and attack the bad guys. But at the end of the game, you lose for embracing that. There are three possible endings. The first is simply don’t play — don’t arrest the chief villain, just let him go on about his evil ways and you’ll get the “good” ending.

If you engage the story at all, you must lose. In fact, you should have been forewarned at several points in the game where you are captured and tormented in ways that make absolutely no sense at all. Your gaming skills mean nothing at all, and the game itself betrays you senselessly. But in the final showdown, you lose no matter which of two options you choose.

If you don’t take the bad guy down, you still have to face the results of mind-manipulating conditioning where you end up murdering your associates (though it’s only hinted at). If you to take him down, you’ll be told he was right all along and the story ends in the nuclear holocaust he predicted, with the player forced to spend the rest of their lives locked in a bunker with the evil monster.

Meanwhile, the rest of the game play is marred by some of the most outrageous SJW snowflaking. There are no real social conservatives in the game; almost everyone is an extreme caricature of conservative rural American values. The bad guy is actually the good guy, because he’s not racist or sexist, nor any of the other characteristic evil traits trumpeted by the social left. Best of all is that he is wholly anti-mainstream. Thus, all the things you are encouraged to fight in the game are reduced to a matter of taste. The game is not at all subtle by turning things upside down, mocking any hint of conservative social values. The bad guy brainwashes his minions, sometimes using drugs. He tortures and manipulates; he steals and kills at will and seeks most of all to make people miserable by any means possible if they don’t submit. But in the end, he was right — or so the game wants you to believe.

Meanwhile, the game was introduced with great marketing fanfare in which the promoters soberly insisted it offers a new level of serious moral high ground. The whole thing was a head-game from the start. This is not cool and edgy; it’s a bewildering attack on everything that gamers hold sacred. You get the feeling that, if the producers could, they would have bombed religious buildings and dumped mind-altering substances in the public water supply, but couldn’t afford it, so they confined the action to a game that would surely piss-off all but the most idiotic players. Oh, and the SJW snowflakes would, of course, love it, too.

I’m not defending Western morals, either conservative or liberal. It’s crazy to me how both sides of this false divide don’t realize they come from the same moral morass, that they are two essential halves of the same failed value system. But when something like a game attacks this viciously one side or the other, it shows just how far Western culture has come into its final death throes. The nuclear holocaust at the end of the game is symbolic of how willing one side is to destroy everything to keep the other side from even existing. People don’t matter, only some impossible social orthodoxy.

(For random gamers who stumble across this post: I will permit countering opinions, but I only if I deem them on-topic. Try to grasp the context of this blog and don’t waste time with pointless noise. I admit up front that I’m not a gamer, and this is not a gamer blog.)

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No April Fooling

Posted on April 1, 2018 by ehurst

What defines a cult? It’s ironic that the definition itself offered by Christianity Today magazine has elements of a cult in the list. It’s very defensive of mainstream Christian religion. A more balanced approach is offered here and it cites a more common list proposed by Robert Jay Lifton, M.D.:

  1. a charismatic leader who increasingly becomes an object of worship as the general principles that may have originally sustained the group lose their power;
  2. a process I call coercive persuasion or thought reform;
  3. economic, sexual, and other exploitation of group members by the leader and the ruling coterie.

Have you noticed how this sounds like a lot of Dispensationalist/Zionist churches? They are loaded with charismatic leaders seldom or never called to account for anything, an educational system that tends to manipulation and subtle forms of coercion, and makes a lot of noise about how holy it is to give sacrificially to the cause. Do we need to mention sexual peccadillos are all too common among the leaders?

I can’t make it a doctrine to avoid these things in Radix Fidem; people are what they are. It would be inconsistent with the covenant itself to load up levers for control. Who knows what this virtual family of faith will look like when I’m gone? But I do make it my policy, and I make some effort to transmit this as proper moral values. I get uncomfortable with adulation as the senior elder and I hope we all learn to stay humble. Radix Fidem dies without humility. This whole thing remains voluntary at every point; there is no orthodoxy, just a broad covenant. I stated outright that my booklet is not orthodoxy; you only have to decide that you can live with this for as long as you associate with my ministry. And God forbid that I ever manipulate folks and exploit them and their resources. I grew up in poverty for the most part and I’m quite comfortable with it, having avoided opportunities for economic advancement because they didn’t feel right.

Yet, by the same token, I am aware of a moral truth that we need sponsorship. Not because any of us needs to buy a lot of stuff, but several of us have (or soon will have) a mission calling and that means traveling a bit. Me, I’m comfortable with austere military deployment style travel. I can couch surf and eat whatever you put on your table, and long rides on smelly buses don’t bother me. But I can’t decide that for anyone else.

And make no mistake: This thing we do must spread. Again, it’s not the particulars of how any of us do religion, but Radix Fidem is a particular approach to each individual growing their own religion. We should invite people to steal our ideas and run with it, not gather them all under our sway. We aren’t looking for emotionally laden rallies and mass meetings, but we do need to infuse our approach into the world around us. I can’t even offer a particular method for doing so, just a strong sense that if we keep it to ourselves, we have killed everything that binds us together.

So my first concrete goal is coming to see as many of you as have an interest in face-to-face meeting. And there’s nothing wrong with any of you going to see each other without me. This needs to happen as the first step along the path to sharing our faith with the rest of the world. The virtual connection is not enough by itself. I’m willing to bet most of you don’t have the resources for it, so this is why it would be nice to have some kind of sponsorship. Let’s pray together for that end as we celebrate Resurrection Sunday.

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Teachings of Jesus — Matthew 11:1-19

Posted on March 31, 2018 by ehurst

John the Baptist had preached repentance to the Covenant in the Jordan Valley because it was convenient for observing the baptism cleansing ritual year-round. In his preaching, he disparaged as sinful the scandalous divorce and remarriage of Herod Antipas. For a time, John languished in prison. He still had his disciples and they were permitted to meet with him and run errands. They brought him news of his cousin Jesus’ miraculous ministry. But there was no uprising and the Messiah didn’t march in and take over. So was Jesus really the Messiah? John sent two disciples to query his famous cousin about this.

Jesus had the two disciples follow Him around that day as He preached and healed. Then He quoted Isaiah 35, where the prophet rejoiced in a vision of restoring genuine love for Jehovah. The effects of sin would be healed and divine moral justice restored. It was considered a Messianic prophecy. Thus, Jesus was assuring them that He was the Messiah. The real question was whether they understood what the Messiah really was all about. His message through John’s disciples was to assure John it was worth being in prison for preaching the truth. He had fulfilled his commission as forerunner.

There is a reed that grew wild in the Jordan Valley. It would droop during the heat of the day, and rather quickly stand back up in the cool of the evening. It was a pastime in those days to go out and watch them rise like that, a social occasion for having a nice friendly chat in the evening. Jesus asked His audience: When you went out to the Jordan River Valley, was it just a nice couple of days out to watch the reeds do their thing?

Or perhaps they went out to see a scholarly man with civilized courtly manners? What did they expect? The wilderness of the Jordan Valley wasn’t the place for scholars to hang out. They usually serve on the king’s staff in his palace. So why all this herding of folks down the difficult roads to an uncivilized place? They went to see a very classic style of prophet, wearing the uniform adopted by Elijah and speaking a very challenging message. They went to hear a prophet speak about the coming Messiah, an obsession of folks who had too long lived under oppressive heathen Gentile rulers. There were dozens of such prophets running around in those days, and John was simply one of the biggest crowd draws because his ministry was more compelling than others.

He was the pinnacle of Covenant prophets. None of his predecessors were in his class; this was indeed the greatest of God’s prophets under Moses. But he was also the last of his kind. That’s because what follows is the final fruit of the long gestation of the Covenant, the ultimate realization of where the Covenant was pointing all those centuries. It would be the Kingdom of Heaven. Anyone who qualifies for entry into the Kingdom will have all the things John only dreamed about, in a yet higher class of closeness and communion with Jehovah.

People came down to the Jordan Valley in droves. They were full of zeal and ready to seize the moment to declare the Kingdom if only John were to claim he was the Messiah. They were ready to take up arms and die fighting the Roman troops to reestablish the reign of David’s dynasty. Jesus reaffirmed that His cousin John the Baptist was the prophesied return of Elijah, something they knew meant the Messiah was coming right along behind, but not the Messiah himself. Did they understand that John’s testimony about Jesus meant He was the Messiah?

Jesus then seized the moment to warn that His generation wasn’t ready for the Messiah. What could He say? He told a parable of children out playing in the village square. One group is fussing with another: Why won’t you play with us? What kind of game will satisfy you? You don’t want to play celebration and pretend to dance. You won’t play funeral if we sing dirges. Have you forgotten how to be children? Jesus was characterizing His generation as cranky, petulant children, impossible to please.

Here comes John the Baptist with his dark warnings of sin. He calls them to repent and leads the way with personal austerity. He was extra careful about obeying the Law of Moses. All the crowds came down to the Jordan, heard and saw the message, and walked away scoffing at his simplicity and zealous fervor. Jesus comes along celebrating the thing John prophesied and they say He’s not zealous enough like John. What does it take to get them to hear the Word of God?

He ends with a common figure of speech: You can tell a wise woman by how her children act. Whose children were these Jews, who were more like those obnoxious kids for whom nothing was good enough?

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The Risen Christ is Our Truth

Posted on March 31, 2018 by ehurst

There is nothing to gain by activism. It’s not that activism doesn’t accomplish anything; what it accomplishes isn’t worth it.

A recurring theme on this blog is how Satan deceived the Jewish nation. The record begins in the Old Testament and runs through today. It’s not about Jewish people today, but Zionism. Have you noticed that Zionist propaganda has eclipsed the whole issue of Judaism? Zionism seeks to redefine what it means to be “a Jew.” Instead of a long established religion, it’s a political agenda. It’s the ultimate end of the idolatry of Mammon (AKA materialism), the true god of Zionism.

Granted, Zionism does cite the Old Testament regarding their claim on the land of Palestine. They are responsible for the phrase “the Holy Land.” It’s supposed to be their grant from the God of the Bible in perpetuity. All their talk of eternity is within this world, with dreams of ruling the entire human race from their ancient home. But they have long ago ceased worshiping the God of the Bible. Judaism was a way-point on the path to serving Mammon.

I’ve said it often enough before: If the Jewish people actually repented and returned to their ancient Covenant of Moses, we would be first in line to support them. It would mean, of course, restoring the ancient Hebrew mysticism and completely dropping the legalism. It means tossing the Talmud in the trash and restoring the actual teachings of Moses. We hold no hostility to the Jewish people by any means. But we cannot support them as long as they cling to the Talmud, never mind Zionism. If they came even close to Moses without the mythology, we would be their best friends.

They won’t.

So we teach the truth of what happened to the Jewish people and leave it lying where it is. We focus our resistance on Zionism. Not in the sense of activism, but simply calling it what it is. Zionists intend to create a heaven-on-earth scenario, the ultimate lie of the Devil going all the way back to the Fall in the Garden. Never forget: The earth is Eden; it was never meant to be Paradise (by any definition). God created Eden as a garden; it was never His palace courts. What was spoiled is our own place, not His. Restoring Eden means removing the effects of the Fall, the curse of blindness that keeps us from clearly perceiving ultimate reality as God made it. Zionism seeks to confirm the Curse and keep us blind.

So the modern State of Israel is just a big lie. The biggest lie is that somehow God failed to keep His promises about the Promised Land. You can look it up; several places in the Old Testament it flatly states the God kept His end of the Covenant and granted Israel all He had promised. It also states outright that they never managed to claim that promise, so some parts of the Promised Land remained outside their authority until much later under David. The King won all the Promised Land and more. Indeed, His heir pushed the boundaries even farther. Solomon reigned over far more than the Promised Land. They most certainly did hold the entire promise of the Covenant, and traded it away for a taste of Mammon.

But even when things were holy and shalom was in abundance, it was only ever meant to be a manifestation of the true promise of the Covenant: a pure heart before the Lord. So when Jesus came along to declare Himself their Messiah, it was all about that pure heart, not some piece of turf in this accursed world. It was about restoring Eden in moral purity, the same thing the Law of Moses was all about in the first place. The Messiah died on the Cross and rose again — HALLELUJAH — and the Covenant is fulfilled in Him. In the final ultimate sense, He is now the embodiment of that covenant. It’s a continuum. There is no unfinished business prior to the Return of Christ.

It’s not Israel we oppose, then, but the lie of Zionism. We could care less who lives and rules on that patch of earth. Our whole point is that it doesn’t matter. Modern Israel has no claim whatsoever on any follower of Christ, nor anyone else, for that matter. As long as people waste resources, time and energy chasing Zionism, they can’t be doing anything good. And it’s critical that folks understand that Dispensationalism was concocted by Zionists to enslave Christians to the lie of Zionism. I can trace that out for you, but the whole notion of “End Times” was cooked up by Zionist agents seeking to deceive Christians. At every step of the way, Zionists have guided and funded the whole theology of Dispensationalism.

In this respect then, our mission is to simply point out the truth that Dispensationalism and Zionism is a damned lie. Chase it all you want, but you’ll never get to the end point. There will never be a Paradise until the Curse is lifted. That means erasing everything we know as a human race on this earth and restoring what we have long abandoned in the Fall. It means going back through the Flaming Sword of revelation; it means embracing and obeying Biblical Law as the frame of reference for doing good and moral things while under the Curse of the Fall. It means a focus on end of this massive moral blindness that holds mankind tightly in its grasp until all things are finished and Eden is restored to Earth.

Eden is not a physical fact; it’s a matter of moral perception. No other part of Creation is fallen except humans. The natural world is still Eden, but we can’t see it. So we chase all kinds of lies in seeking a paradise that we cannot comprehend. But one thing is for sure: Zionism is not the path to Paradise. Christ is.

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The Agent of Strife

Posted on March 30, 2018 by ehurst

A critical element in escaping lies is not just exposing what is false, but digging down into the root system and finding out where the lies came from.

You are no doubt aware that certain political groups wield the weapon of labeling folks “antisemite” to silence certain discussions. A recent example is when folks complain of the globalist agenda, the discussion itself is considered “antisemitism.” Thus, reasoned resistance to globalism is now a moral sin. There comes a point when you just have to ignore such shrieking and get on with the business of saying what you think.

I rather like Fred Reed’s take on why folks are so hard on Jews.

Jews with remarkable consistency have been described for centuries as smart, greedy, combative, clannish, “pushy,” exploitative, and arrogant. This is how I hear them described in Mexico, where I live. (I think of these as Middle Eastern traits, but never mind.) Then there is chutzpah. which in practice seems to mean “brashly walking over other people.” It can leave others feeling bulldozed, defeated, used. This bruising of the ego, of self-respect, arouses a hostility all out of proportion to actual damage done. It is, or so I think, a major cause of dislike for Jews. Such descriptions are dismissed today as stereotypes. A stereotype is just the aggregate observation of many people over time.

I recommend reading the whole article. Fred takes the time to write plainly about what should be obvious, but in the mainstream press, it’s a forbidden topic. It’s not that I endorse everything Fred has to say about it, but I do endorse thinking about it and talking openly about it. It turns out “antisemitism” is just a label for anything certain whiny Jews don’t want to hear about. We aren’t supposed to notice they aren’t like us until they tell us to notice. They demand total control of the conversation, the aforementioned chutzpah.

That it seems they are determined to rule the world should surprise no one, since every known ethnic group has manifested such a desire. Let’s keep this in a realistic context. For my part, I’ll remind you that The Cult [PDF] uses Jewish people as its primary front to stir up implacable strife.

It’s working.

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This Is Not an Organization

Posted on March 29, 2018 by ehurst

Our objective is not to grow in numbers.

That will inevitably happen as the Lord adds to our number, but our objective is peace with God. If this thing doesn’t call your name, then you can’t have it. There’s nothing anyone can do at a human level to make it happen. On the other hand, if it calls to you, there is a substantial burden of effort to make it work.

Not because it’s so hard; this thing is the very nature of what we were designed to be. The effort is to undo all the things that are contrary to that natural design. It takes a lot unlearning to get it right.

As noted in the linked article yesterday, we don’t see a big separation between the Old and New Testaments. Jesus was the natural completion of what Moses was all about. He was the ultimate living expression of the Covenant. His teaching was not a departure, but the final maturation of what started with the Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden. We who enter into the Covenant of Christ can seek the exact same disciplines and blessings as what God wanted for Israel. There is no unfinished business on this earth. What we have today in Christ is the final stage before the end of this world.

And the end of this world will be one single event. When Christ returns for His people, there will not be some long stage of years while we are gone and this world cooks off. He’s coming back only once. What He’ll do is restore what we surrendered in Eden. We will be changed; the natural world is not fallen. Christ will wipe away all the works of fallen humanity and restore what should have been. Those who remain wedded to those works will pass with them into an indescribably awful eternal fate, which we can only characterize as living in the Presence of the Divine as His enemies. They will be fully aware in some final ultimate sense of their guilt and disfavor. The rest of us will live eternally free from the burden of the Curse of the Fall.

So we emphasize cultivating the otherworldly focus of existence. We are preparing for that eternal future of Eden restored. It’s a burdensome thing because we gradually gain a clearer view of what ought to be against a background of what now is. Yet it’s a joyful thing to see and participate in some partial restoration as Creation celebrates with us what is to come while we yet live here and now. It’s a thrill to rise into a heart-led awareness of how God sees things.

It is inevitable that people around us will see us in this blissful state halfway between the Two Realms of existence. They’ll see how Creation is our friend and God grants to us a measure of that future ecstasy, which we call shalom. At least, some will see it, those to whom the Father grants vision. They will be drawn to what we have.

All we really have to do is live what He grants us; He does the rest.

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