Dear Junia…

You’ve offered several comments on this post, and I’m grateful for the attention and lack of rancor; you are not a troll. You want the story told clearly and honestly. I get that, and I’m going to return the favor — for the record.

I refer you back to the first few paragraphs of the blog post itself. We have been talking past each other; I’m aware of it, but I don’t believe you are. While this blog is certainly open to everyone, and I generally don’t censor anything but the most egregious trolling, it remains a pastoral blog for the Kiln of the Soul parish. Our teaching includes an endeavor to embrace the Hebraic viewpoint of the Bible. The Hebraic epistemology is radically different from that of the West. I recently waded through an exhaustive book review of Thorleif Boman’s Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek to highlight not only fact of a difference, but what kind of differences. It’s typical of an ongoing effort to migrate our minds to the Hebrew viewpoint since this blog began years ago.

If I were to answer you point for point, I would be missing the biggest point of all: VD is a western man, not a biblical man. You cannot approach the Bible from a western viewpoint and understand what it’s really all about. You might get some things, but the real depth will be out of reach. My comments here about VD are from a Hebrew point of view. I have tried to encourage him and his allies to recognize the huge difference, and had some hope that maybe someone would embrace the task. Sadly, it appears no one in his orbit has done that. As long as they keep trucking down the western way of thinking, they will not grasp what God is doing, and how to get involved.

Because they have not done so, I was left to warn my parish of the dangers of VD and his western approach. Whether VD likes or not, he is a leader, and he is leading people down the wrong path. He’s a bad shepherd. God is not going to look kindly upon this when He comes to visit in His wrath.

I’ve allowed your comments. Until you grasp the radically different approach of the Hebrew mind, my answers won’t have much meaning to you. Answering point by point would be surrendering the whole point of this blog. The SSH is western; it is anti-biblical. The whole of Western Civilization is doomed. All of it is an inherent rejection of Christ and His teachings.

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Never Arrive

Do you admire people with a “mind like a steel trap”? Sorry, I’m not one of those. It might take me a few days to discern exactly what the substance of an issue is because my fleshly nature still fights the Spirit of God. My flesh wants to hide God’s truth. Thus, I may take a few days at the least to answer something that isn’t already obvious to me.

I don’t trust my own intellect. It hasn’t been a consistently good servant, frequently misleading me into chasing false leads. I’ve learned over the years to put off answering something that stirs me until the wisdom of the Lord surfaces from my convictions.

Some issues have taken years to get the right answer. So, if you propose to discuss something with me, don’t get in a hurry. If the question is entirely a matter of human intellect presented for debate, I may decline to answer in the first place. If there is a moral issue at stake, it may take me awhile to be satisfied that I know what I need to say. It all depends on whether I’ve dealt with something similar in the past.

I’m still learning, and I will never arrive in this life.

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Sorry, He Doesn’t Follow Christ

I have a burden on my heart: Bad times are coming, and will include a large number of threats we cannot imagine. I want God’s people to come through this with power and glory. I pray that people who call our Savior “Lord” will seek His face and be ready for testing. I pray that His people build on His Covenant message. I am praying for Vox Day, as well, since he claims Christ. We are assuming he is a fellow believer.

Unfortunately, Vox does not actually follow Christ and will not be able to dodge the bullet. His efforts up to now have been in the flesh. He should turn to eternal things or he’ll have nothing when it’s all done. That’s the same warning I give everyone.

In biblical terms, “truth” has nothing to do with the facts on the ground. Truth has always been a Person, our Creator. The facts on the ground are variable, subject to His whims. Reality as we know it is dubious at best. Our understanding of it is dubious, and the thing itself is inherently dubious. Our world is not real; it is an artificial construct, a simulation in which eternal matters are in dispute. Sure, it’s real enough to us who live here, but we live in a model constructed solely for a demonstration of higher principles.

Our lives are meaningless altogether unless we takes sides with the Creator who is involved in proving something to an audience we cannot comprehend. Though He does love us dearly as individuals, humans in the aggregate are simply pawns in a game far beyond us. Our human concerns are of no significance. Everyone who fails to enter into His Covenant are simply a living testimony against the Creator and in favor of the rebels on His staff in Heaven (see Heiser’s Unseen Realm).

So, I will give one example why I say Vox is working in the flesh. I return to the discussion of Vox Day’s SSH (Socio-Sexual Hierarchy): The longer I look at it in light of my convictions and the Word of God, the more disappointed I am by it. I regret promoting it in the past. The SSH concept remains an observation devoid of spiritual meaning. Yes, it seems to work on a secular level, but the only way to use it rests entirely on first rejecting and ignoring Christ. The SSH is worldly, a declaration that Christ’s Covenant is wholly impertinent. Anyone who uses it as a guide to living must first push God out of the way. As explained by Vox and his acolytes, the SSH rests on the assumption that there is no God who gets involved in our lives.

So, it’s not a question of whether the SSH is useful. Rather, it represents a rejection of Christ and His claims. At it’s best, it serves as a model of how humans are trapped without Christ. What makes it immoral is Vox’s claim that “it just is”. The assertion that it has no moral component is the sin here. It leaves men hopeless unless they assert some limited power of their own to change themselves, with only the thinnest hope of rising up the hierarchy. All of the advice attached to the hierarchy is secular and contrary to the moral structure of the Kingdom of God. It denies the healing power of Christ in our souls, His power to remake us on-the-fly.

Worse, it promotes a rejection of people just like the folks Jesus chose to be His disciples. Which of the Twelve were good men in the flesh? In general, they were losers in this world. Which of them did not need miracles to make them powerful servants of the gospel message? There is no SSH category for the shepherds of God. The SSH locks men away from such miracles, denying that they exist. There is nothing in it for the servant of the Lord. In the Covenant, miracles are the norm. The Covenant teaches us to rely on divine power to love people the way Jesus loves them (Christ’s Law), working with them until they catch hold of that power. The SSH justifies a vile hatred, rejection and abuse for people who happen to fall into a bad category on the hierarchy.

If you keep trusting Vox’s judgment on things, you must abandon faith in Christ. His rhetoric in favor of certain elements of the gospel, the ones VD finds convenient, does not resolve the problem. Satan is using Vox to mislead people to a false Christ, away from taking up the Cross of Christ and sacrificing for those He has chosen for His kingdom.

Nobody here is pretending to know Vox’s heart. It’s not about the man, but the virtual man he presents to the world. I’m careful to not call his real name, but refer only to the online identity. Whatever he might be privately is masked by his online persona. If the two are different, then he is lying to the world about who he is. Christ Himself commands us to be transparent and accountable. We can see Vox’s message and the effects; it’s about his influence in this world. He does not present a good testimony of Christian faith. His claim to being a Christian is effectively a lie.

Tribulation is rising; those who cling to the Covenant and humbly await the visitation of God will be blessed. Those who reject the Covenant will have no covering, and they will be subject to the whims of the Powers of Darkness. My point here is that Vox is not covered; watch and see his downfall. My words will not precipitate a crisis for him; it will be the hands of higher powers, things God has revealed. I cannot offer any time factor, only that this is coming soon.

I realize VD is not the least bit interested in this prophetic warning. I believe he has been hardened against the Spirit. My message is to others who might not be aware of the danger. Disengage VD and his works lest you be burned by divine wrath. There is good precedent in Scripture for warning others about a fake promoted by Satan, someone who lives only for their fleshly lusts and pretends to represent Christ (see 2 Peter). Had VD never claimed Christ, he would not be of interest. Were he to promote the Covenant and exhibit humility, we would praise him to the skies. It’s not about us; it’s all about the Covenant of Christ.

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Reversed Community

We’ve looked at reversing the world’s influence.

Now, let’s go back and look again the Great Commission and the fundamental law of the Covenant of Christ: build a community of faith, loving as He loved. It means you don’t take yourself seriously; you aren’t easily offended by folks who struggle with humility so that they crap on you. You know it’s not about you, but about themselves and something not yet redeemed in their lives. The single most powerful miracle of all is the power to operate in compassion among those who burn with anger against you.

That does not automatically prevent a shepherd from using violent force to protect their domain (people) from a very foolish threat. Jesus cracked a whip at least once. The point is not a question of violence or not as legalistically defined in the West, but of the humility to act without arrogance. The Hebrew concept typically translated in English as “violence” is more about abuse, oppression and injustice, not the use of firmness enforcing God’s will.

The whole point is not classifying the actions based on what they are, but the intentions of the heart. With fear and trembling before the Lord, we exercise His authority, not to change the world, but to change human hearts. Again, we reject the world’s evaluation of things and press ahead on the eternal track.

That is what’s behind our assertion of the gospel message in the face of believers promoting worldliness. We will not take seriously your claim to Christ if you reject His message. Again, Jesus was a Hebrew mystic with eternal priorities, and often criticized the worldly approach to things.

The Great Reverse is a concept that leads directly to better church life.

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Reversing This World

Someone who calls himself “Jack” offered a very useful comment on the Great Reversal. That term is more common among liturgical churches and is rarely encountered among evangelicals. I note that Kiln of the Soul parish is composed mostly of refugees from the evangelical background, so I haven’t used that term on this blog.

However, now is a good time to bring it into our vocabulary.

The idea is that Christ reverses the value system of this world. Christ chooses His family from among the losers of this world. It’s easy to lose track of the Hebrew frame of reference here, and a great many churchians do. The key is not that God favors all the losers; He favors those who know they are losers. Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Thus, Jesus’ comments about the “poor of this world” has more to do with humility than one’s economic condition. The Hebrew concept of “poor” is people who recognize their dependence and don’t exhibit arrogance. They don’t crow over the losses of others; they don’t dance on the corpses of their enemies. Those who do that are worldly “winners”. The majority of Jesus’ Twelve Disciples were men this world had already rejected. About half of them were His cousins and He had been rejected quite a bit already by the time He began His public ministry. That rejection only grew up through His crucifixion.

Consider how Apostle John referred to himself: the one whom Jesus loved. The emphasis in Hebrew phrasing is that Jesus chose him on His own whims. John would deny being anything special, same as Paul and the other apostles. What they were was Chosen, Elect of God. The whole frame of reference was the greatness of the One doing the choosing.

Thus, you realize that the term “Great Reversal” is rooted in eschatology, too. We can endure our own crosses because we know that the Day of Judgment will reveal a great many reversals. This world does not have a clue that matters and what is valuable. The world picks its own winners, but none of that will matter when the Lord returns to establish once and for all what is pleasing to Him. That’s the only question that matters. He defines the meaning of “good” and “true” and “beautiful”. His definition seldom resembles that of this world in any way.

The world has turned everything on its head. This world was delivered into Satan’s hands and there it remains until the day Christ returns. Peter and Paul both tell us that on that day, the very energy bonds of matter itself will all be broken and every molecule will dissolve in a fiery flash. Only what is eternal will remain. Nothing of this world will be around. Nothing men have accomplished by their hands will even be remembered. Those who regard themselves as independent and standing on their accomplishments will be humbled even more severely than was Paul on the Road to Damascus.

Instead, God will recognize only those who embraced feudal submission to Him. People who call themselves “Christian” will suffer the most severe examination, being judged first whenever God comes to visit His wrath on sin. Knowing this, His family typically beg for Him to come and start His inspection with them. “Clean us up, Lord! We are unable to do it ourselves; we have no power.”

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Eternal Economics

Do you remember the Parable of the Unjust Steward? See Luke 16.

People miss the point because they aren’t willing to embrace the fundamental principle that Jesus taught in other ways, like in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:19-21). This is not just a homily; it’s a full-blown economic theory. It’s not simply a matter of where your heart is. Invest your money where your heart should be.

Recently thieves used explosives to steal ancient gold artifacts from a museum in the Netherlands. Why do humans put so much stock in those artifacts? Why are they so valuable? Is it possible to store them in a situation where they can be studied without the risk of loss? I’m not saying it’s utterly pointless, but that you should expect that kind of threat from those who worship Mammon.

And it applies to the whole gamut of human investment. The common ways of creating and preserving wealth are inherently immoral. Christians have no business putting their money into any market on those terms. When God grants you material resources, invest in people. The Unjust Steward was investing in the human component of economic activity. The welfare of your tribe is by far the most important investment. That’s the message of the Unjust Steward.

Don’t try to make parables walk on all fours. See the moral truth behind the particulars of the story. The steward made life better for some people, and they in turn would welcome him into their community and provide for him. Build communities based on God’s covenant, not on the man-made principles of greed.

God’s covenant says that the focus of your economic activity is not the stuff, but the people involved. You should strive to build communities and provide for their needs. Not the fleeting contract-oriented perversion of “community” but the lifelong commitment to each other. It’s part of the economic truth of God’s Word that you build covenant communities in the first place, not the isolated single-family households of western culture, in which law assumes that the primary meaning of a household is merely an economic unit. You cannot isolate the truth into little bits and pieces of proposition. It’s a tapestry woven into a whole.

It’s the image of God. It’s not impersonal; you can’t claim, “It’s just business.” Your decisions should not be based on a spreadsheet analysis of profit and loss. The Unjust Steward, worldly as he was, understood that it was better to take some losses in favor of building community. People come first. Build an ethical frame of reference that recognizes that, not a predatory dehumanizing pursuit of material wealth.

If you die, who will own all that stuff? Jesus asked that question in the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12). He was totally consistent in this warning that, in all your economic reckoning, your tribe’s welfare comes first. What most people forget is that you must have a tribe first. Your instincts should start with the assumption that life is not possible alone and that “standing on your own” as commonly envisioned in the West is anathema.

God promises that if obeying Him leads to economic ruin and even death, it’s far better to come into His Presence as a faithful steward. Live as if Eternity is real.

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Creatures of Eternity

Our God has revealed Himself in the context of this fallen world. He has gone out of His way at great personal expense to reach out to us and not only show the truth, but to empower that truth to save us. He does all the work, all the heavy lifting, so that our only contribution is the desire to call on Him.

Once He does empower us, we are then obliged to live by that revelation and power. You cannot claim Christ as Lord and continue working through life as if He has no interest. If you do not demonstrate that He owns you entirely, and live accordingly, He might as well not exist. You would thus testify against Him.

Christ will not compete on a human level. He is Lord of all Creation. If you keep grubbing around on the human level, then you exclude Him. All your talents mean nothing; it goes to waste serving the Devil. And sooner or later, the Devil is going to exercise his authority and take what you imagine you have.

Stopping building on the sand. This is Christ’s warning to Vox Day and anyone else who aspires to the same things. Stop chasing man-made answers. Build on Christ, the Rock. Do you not understand that the entirety of Western Civilization is built on a man-centered orientation? All of it will soon come to the same end as all human empires and civilizations. Human ambition and desire is just a thin veneer for what Satan desires for us. We are empty and have nothing in ourselves; we are either creatures of destruction, or we accept the offer of Christ and become creatures of eternity.

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Cancerous Spite

Kiln of the Soul parish is a covenant community. The Covenant of Christ is everything, and we assert that you cannot fully grasp the Covenant without embracing a Hebraic mental approach. It’s not enough to simply be aware of Christ’s Hebrew background; you must absorb it. The message of Jesus Christ came within that frame of reference, and it results in a radically different outlook from what is common in the West in general, and America in particular. You cannot keep the Covenant of Christ without committing yourself to the task of changing how you think.

The gospel is not a body of ideas; it is not data. You cannot process it intellectually. It is a Person. You must make Him Lord and exercise your faith from your heart, not from your head. Jesus was a Hebrew mystic; serving Him requires a mystical approach. You measure all things by your ongoing personal relationship with Him. He speaks to you through the moral consciousness of your heart, not through your head.

So, when someone asks me a question about Vox Day, the response is not based on intellectual evaluation. Human intellect is invariably seduced by self-serving motivations, consciously or not. Vox is a prime example of that. It’s not a question of his intellectual talent, but that everything he uses that talent for is self-serving. He does not serve Christ.

I made it a point to warn him about this way back when he allowed comments on his blog. Some of his readers understood and agreed with it, but Vox never bothered to respond. He continues to this day building an algorithm of life that rests entirely on intellectual talent, a talent that never ceases to serve his fleshly nature. His religion does not stand on the kind of faith that takes up the Cross, but on pure logic.

People of faith do not exhibit the bitter hatred Vox does. It’s one thing to relay to the world a public denunciation of sin; that has always come with a call to repentance and an offer to work for rehabilitation. The prophet’s mission is not a drive-by shooting of condemnation alone. Jesus has always welcomed sinners home, and said quite bluntly that this is how we are supposed to operate in His name.

It’s not that Vox can’t understand; he refuses to walk by the heart and spirit. He consistently turns away from the gospel message of redemption, and the bulk of his effort is condemnation. That’s how Satan does business.

I’ll give an example: His Socio-sexual hierarchy is not biblical at all, but an artifact of western culture. You can try to force it to fit into non-western cultures, but it misses the whole point. Our Lord does not make people that way; they get that way from being exposed to the pagan western culture. Vox ginned up the notion of the Sigma Male for himself as an excuse to avoid doing things the way Christ taught us. It is the ultimate excuse to avoid carrying the Cross. Christ calls us to get directly involved.

The ideal man of God is a shepherd. Vox’s system insists that only Alphas can do that, which is utterly false. God’s Word says every man must find a path to the shepherd role using whatever talents God has granted him. One does not seek the role of shepherd; it is thrust upon you when God decides it is your time. You prepare for that faithfully through the process of pursuing His Word and seeking a direct conscious connection to Him. How can I please You, Lord?

But because of his moral vacuity, Vox refuses to take responsibility when God places him in that role. He is in that position, but refuses to embrace the moral demands that come with it. Instead, he plunders it for his personal gain. This is precisely the sin of Satan and his allies on the Divine Council. He does not take upon himself the burden Christ assumed when people crowded around Him.

I don’t read Vox these days; his intellectual brilliance serves no valid moral purpose. There is no hope of glory in his words. His acid spite for inconvenient people is cancerous and can easily lead you astray from Christ’s ways. He does not invest his talents back into the covenant, the community of faith. He has no spiritual covering, and I pray he repents before destruction falls on him.

In case you are wondering, I have no particular interest in having him join our parish. That’s not what this is about. He should build his own fellowship that testifies to the world of the power and grace of our Lord, not his fleshly interests.

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NT Doctrine — 2 Peter 3

Peter wanted his readers to keep their minds in subjection to the Spirit. We inform the brain of divine revelation so it will know how to respond, equipped to cooperate with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Teaching was aimed at locking down the boundaries for the fleshly nature. One of the tricks of these Gnostic heretics was to reason that Christ was not coming back. Has anything changed since Creation? Yes, it has.

Peter recites the Creation story, and it should be obvious he is dictating this letter in Hebrew to someone translating it into Greek, because the wording is sometimes clumsy. He says the Gnostics know they are lying about the return of Christ. Genesis portrays how dry land appeared below the watery canopy of the sky and rose up out of the sea of waters to drain off. So, it wasn’t very hard for God to then destroy the world with all that same water that was held back by His hand. After the Flood, He changed the physical structure of the world so that water would not be used again that way.

We no longer have that exceedingly wet situation from before the Flood. Now, the Lord has promised that the next destruction will come by fire instead of water and it won’t be just the earth. That will be the Day of Judgment. Peter reminds them of one more hole in the Gnostic argument: God is not under the time-space constraints because He lives in Eternity. His attention decides whether the passage of time is for Him slow or fast. The false image of God being slow misses the whole point. Noah’s prophetic warning of a flood coming took 120 years while he built the Ark. Was that too long? God was being patient, giving the rest of humanity a full chance to repent and gave Noah time to finish that massive boat.

Don’t misread verse 9 like the Calvinists and Arminians do. It’s Hebrew thoughts in Greek words: God is not eager to destroy anyone, but He has warned that the time for such a burdensome task does eventually come. And when that day comes, it will not seem to make sense to anyone but Him. There will be nothing about the situation to warn anyone. However, no one will miss it. The noise will be horrific when the physical universe passes away. More to the point, every human deed will be exposed for all to see.

Let’s be clear: One does not take a vacation from holiness. Stay on top of your Kingdom mission. Peter repeats the image of how the universe will be destroyed. God will remove His restraining hand and the molecular bonds of all the particles in the universe will dissolve so that all the stored energy will be released at once. You cannot imagine the fiery storm!

There will be a new heavens and earth that we also cannot imagine, but one without mortality and the damage done by the rebellions of creatures God made. Our duty now is to make ready for that day. Realize that God’s patience about judging your suffering and sorrow is good for you, too. You have more time to discover ways you could serve Christ better. This is the same kind of thing that shows up in Paul’s letters; he and Peter were on the same team. Because Paul was fluent in Greek, his writings are a lot more challenging to read.

And, quite naturally, the Gnostic heretics have twisted his letters, same as they do all the rest of the Scriptures. Yes, Peter says that Paul’s letters were Scripture. By this time Paul had already been executed and Peter was next. The Apostles recognized Scripture when they saw it. And Peter asked his readers to invest the time and effort to lock in a clear doctrine of Christ so they could stand against the lies of the Gnostic heretics.

The only real “gnosis” was in Christ and His teaching.

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Marriage and Tribulation Norming

We’ve already made clear that Jack’s blog is part of our Radix Fidem community. Jack is family.

One of the most important messages coming out of his blog is the catastrophic destruction wreaked by western feminism. What we have now in the West in general, and America in particular, is that the majority of females are no longer capable of marriage. Depending on where you live, men will not find any woman worth dating, much less starting a serious romance.

Women have been trained to become materialistic and self-centered, to regard themselves as goddesses for whom even the slightest measure of restraint is sacrilegious. I’m not referring to the social pretenses; that is also under their control. Rather, their actual behavior behind the scenes is insufferably arrogant and self-indulgent. As a social generality, something like 80% of all women are pursuing the top 10% of males. Even very mediocre women feel they deserve the attention of the socially elite males. Men who somehow fail to hit that 10% elite status get no attention at all until a woman has passed her prime, having ridden the casual sex carousel and burned out on romance.

Meanwhile, women are urged to avoid doing anything that makes them actually attractive to men seeking a serious life partner. Instead, women are trained to seduce some fellow with a decent income, have a few kids, only to them perform a divorce rape out of a sense of entitlement when she gets bored. These women have abused the court system, infiltrating it from top to bottom with their foul doctrines, until that entitlement is enshrined into law in every state.

In other words, American men are getting a raw deal in the romance and marriage market because there are no women worth having. The risks are so high that, even in purely secular terms, it is an unreasonable proposition to seek romance among American women. The rarity of someone like my wife is why we have the nickname “unicorns” for covenant women.

Paul wrote that, in his day and time, it was wise to avoid romance for a different set of reasons (1 Corinthians 7). He was single. My point is that there are cycles in civilization that affect all men, but that those who seek to walk in the Covenant are especially challenged from time to time on the issue of romance.

On the one hand, we can agree that building a Covenant life includes a very strong expectation of having families. On the other hand, that was never anything more than symbolism of something deeper. The Kingdom of Christ grows through spiritual birth, not physical birth. Jesus made the emphasis clear in His visit with Nicodemas.

Churches must begin to pay attention to this. The mainstream has become quite hostile to singles, because the mainstream is worldly and shallow. With Paul, being single was promoted as the norm in times of persecution and tribulation. What kind of “church programming” would have existed under Paul’s leadership, compared to what is commonly seen in American churches these days?

We need to pray and think about this, because while having stable covenant families remains the ideal, what is actually normal in context is something else entirely. A so-called “singles ministry” should not become a bogus matchmaking machine, as if being single is a problem. Singles should not be treated as lesser members. They should be cultivated for, and integrated into, leadership. Marital status should not be a test of fitness for calling and mission. There are high moral standards for either case.

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