Random Computer Notes

Posted on March 26, 2026 by ehurst

1. A couple of years ago I described how I set up my Epson LQ-590ii dot-matrix printer to work under Linux/CUPS. At the end of the post, I lamented how CUPS no longer fed the native Epson printer fonts to apps like word processors. Thus, there was no easy way to access those fonts built into dot-matrix printers.

Recently Joseph Patterson got in touch with me about a project of his for Epson Raster Fonts. He created a small app using Epson’s ESC/P2 language and has been using it for a couple of decades. After chatting with him a bit, he decided to post his project on SourceForge.

The current version is bit limited. It’s aware of only the Roman and Sans fonts. A future version will include all the fonts available on the LQ-590 line (I believe there’s 8). The current package offering is in the DEB format and installs on the system so that you have access to a new command, epcol.

You can peruse the manpage to see what the options are. In essence, it reduces the hassle by introducing a set of macros that pre-process a plain text file for the most popular options. You don’t have to learn the ESC/P2 language, just some handy shortcuts.

Years ago I got into the habit of using CLI editors like Joe and Nano to collect plaintext versions of various online articles that I wanted to archive. Using a defined wrap-column made them very portable. The epcol command will complain if you have text lines too long; it cannot wrap them automatically. Thus, my old habits fit perfectly. So far, I’ve tested it with a wrap column of 74 and things turn out okay.

Thus, if I have a need to print off a copy of something from my archive, it doesn’t require a lot of reformatting. If you have a use for this sort of thing, grab a copy and play with it. Joseph has been quite amendable to comments and questions, so I recommend his project.

2. Someone raised a question that will require some explanation before I can answer.

As readers likely know, I’m not much of a warrior when it comes to the rising idiocy in America. I don’t believe there’s anything we can do to save the country. The one area where I might resemble an activist is in the realm of computers and online communications. While I am still quite dubious of any efforts to sway government policy, I am all for taking whatever actions are necessary to carry out my gospel mission online.

I have a mandate from God. I’m not much interested in any human concerns — human governments, in particular — about that mission. I’ll do whatever it takes to share the message with my audience; I will not be deterred from shepherding my flock. If there is a technological work-around for government interference, I’ll use it if I can.

In other words, while I don’t qualify for the label “hacker” when it comes to resistance, you could refer to me as an info-warrior. I will tolerate surveillance to some degree, but not censorship. Censorship of the gospel is from Hell, and I refuse to cooperate. I’ll fight that.

I treat censorship as terrorism or espionage. Sometimes it may serve well to publicly discuss methods and techniques; sometimes not. Sometimes the mission will surely branch into other forms of resistance when countering terror or espionage, and I’m simply not going to show all my cards. If you need to know, the Lord will make a way to share it privately.

Recent moves by our own American government have threatened to weaken our freedom of expression online. One of Trump’s buddies has proposed to weaken the Section 230 protections for services like WordPress, Substack, etc. The idea is to declare those services “publishers” responsible for the content of everything they host. It would make censorship a lot easier for officials, since the government wouldn’t have to wade through every blog by every individual and go after them. Instead, the government could simply declare certain kinds of writing illegal and make the “publisher” liable for it.

Sooner or later, such restrictions will come. I can’t stop that, but I can find other ways to keep my message alive. You should expect me to use those other methods when necessary. It’s not a question of whether, but when.

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Rough Riders Return

Posted on March 24, 2026 by ehurst

Jesus warned His disciples to keep an eye on political agitation in Jerusalem. Sooner or later, it would provoke Rome to lay siege to the city. He told His followers to get out of town when they see it coming, because it would be the pinnacle of tribulation for all of human history. He also said it would not be a brief time of sorrow, but quite long. He warned that by the time a Roman official dared to enter the Temple building, it was too late.

Our tribulation won’t be that bad, but bad enough. We have a more subtle clue for which to watch: the collapse of the petrodollar system. I’m not suggesting it’s a sure thing, but if it does happen, the storm of chaos will be highly unpleasant.

The petrodollar is how the US government manages to keep borrowing. Everyone must have dollars to buy oil from OPEC, and those dollars are in turn used to purchase US Treasuries. If Iran and their friends can break the petrodollar system, there’s no way the US can keep selling those Treasuries. The government would default on the massive debt.

By the way, if you ignore Social Security, but add in all the unacknowledged real obligations of the US government funding that currently exist, it’s more like $50 trillion.

A default would hand the bankers the leverage they have always wanted. They will force through a CBDC for the entire western world. That would be a risky gambit, but for the US government to continue existing, it would be forced to accept such a deal. That kind of deal would include likely confiscation of all precious metals physically available in the US territory, among other things.

For example, it would likely be tied to a mandatory federal ID for the Internet. The bankers are on record favoring censorship of popular public expressions of opinion. Remember the “debanking” scandal? They would demand an end to any form of privacy, including encryption.

If the US fractures, some of the states will no doubt repudiate the federal debt. However, given what we’ve seen lately, nothing prevents state governments from implementing some of these same horrors on their own, including so-called “Red States”.

I just imagine we are in for a rough ride.

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Tend His Sheep

Posted on March 21, 2026 by ehurst

Collate; pull together your memory of Scripture.

There were Three Rebellions: (1) The Fall in the Garden forced us into mortal bodies and made us focus on a worldly existence; (2) the Watchers crossed the boundary into this world and gave birth to the Nephilim, getting directly involved in mortal existence while remaining themselves immortal; and (3) after the Tower of Babel division of humanity, the Elohim Council corrupted their authority by seducing the human nations into worshiping their elohim guides instead of God. Thus, the Creator built His own nation from Abraham.

All three of these were broken at the Cross. We no longer need to focus on our worldly existence; we died with Him on the Cross. The power of the Watchers and Nephilim have been subjected to Christ our Lord. And God no longer has any use for a political nation on this earth to represent Him. The Kingdom of Christ is a spiritual empire with representatives in the whole realm of Satan. We may be placed under human authority for the time being, but we belong to none of them.

God tore the Temple Veil in two; the entire ritual law and the identity of Israel as a human nation evaporated. Now, everyone who was previously under that ritual identity must come to Christ on the same terms as every Gentile. We all must renounce our fleshly identity and allegiances in favor of feudal submission to Christ as Lord. While our primary duty is striving to live by His Covenant Law in our hearts, we know that our human success is His problem; it’s really not in our hands.

The priorities that guide us, and the actions we take before the eyes of humanity, will appear to them as any number of things. Those who see only with human understanding will have no grasp of what we do. But the Elect will see with spiritual eyes and feel the divine call to higher things.

If you live by fleshly concerns, you will not be able to grasp divine priorities. If you do not nail your fleshly nature to the Cross, it will dominate you, holding open the door for Satan and his allies to come and go in your soul. Genuine spiritual warfare is you fighting your own fleshly nature with three advantages: Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross that makes us acceptable in His Presence, the message of His teachings, and our willingness to suffer in the flesh.

The New Testament teaches us to parse Scripture by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We are warned that such parsing and the resulting application will not always be the same for every earnest follower of Christ. Paul used the example of dietary habits as something best left to the convictions of the individual believer. He said the same about ritual holidays. The final issue is the command of Christ to sacrificially love your spiritual family despite their peculiarities. Our greatest accomplishment is our ability to love each other despite all the fleshly reasons to hate or simply not care at all.

Some of what the Apostles taught was contextual to their times, their situation. Other teachings were more universal. We aren’t expected to agree on where we land on a lot of things. This is not an intellectual exercise; human logic is not competent to assess these questions. They are evaluated in the heart of conviction. You should be looking for a path that allows you to cling to each other, not an excuse to exclude each other.

Jesus said don’t get wrapped up in human governments, the space and time boundaries humans draw in their fleshly pursuits. Paul said that we should try to get along with whatever human government dominates where God sends us, but that in the final analysis, we owe the Lord faithfulness to His Law that we love God as our feudal Master, and that we thus love His family. Our sacrificial love for our fellow believers is all He really requires of us. As far as He is concerned, that fulfills all our obligations to human law.

We are all shepherds of His flock. Fanatical devotion to His family is our only cause. What do your convictions demand on their behalf?

We do not live under the classical Roman Empire. We live under a world where the entire range of human political concerns are in a state of flux. The major governments of this world are fragile, ready to explode or implode at the drop of a hat. It won’t take much to dissolve any of them. It’s very hard to keep track of their policies. It seems laws are formed and then removed by the same whipping tornado of aggregate human passions.

Follow your convictions. That might mean keeping your head down and hoping the storm doesn’t touch you. Some may need to flee an impossible situation, such as Jesus pointed out in Matthew 24:15ff. Some of you will be called to resist in concrete ways, simply because that’s the only way to shepherd those under your covering. I can’t give you a single, unified plan. Live by your convictions.

If the Lord granted you the vision for it, keep track of what you see going on around you in this time of tribulation. If possible, anticipate the very real needs of your flock. Crunch time is here; economic challenges have already been set loose by war over Iran. It may take a while, but the damage has been done and it will echo into our lives all too soon.

One command He gave us: Tend His sheep.

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Quartz Mountain State Park

Posted on March 19, 2026 by ehurst

This is less about the park and more about the terrain. Not all of Oklahoma is flat.

These hills are made entirely of granite, and there are some pockets of quartz scattered around. These first three shots are a view of the Altus-Luggert Lake from the eastern side, outside the park.

I was hoping to create a panorama from these shots but the Hugin program choked on the images. As a side note, so did GIMP. I had to use Image Magic.

One of the main trails climbs up what they call Baldy Peak. There is no trail, per se, but you can pick your way over the granite boulders to the top. I saw some little kids with their parents above me.

I managed to climb a third of the way up before my knee started complaining. This next image is the view just from that much of a climb.

Turning to the south (image below), you can see that I am standing on the western end of the ridgeline of this granite formation. Most of the hills are actually on private property, from what I understand.

Almost behind me was this view farther up Baldy and the attached ridgeline (image below). It made me miss the old days when I could climb this stuff with ease.

The boat ramp area sits astride an isthmus between hills. This is the view across the cove near the ramp, showing that the water level is a bit low (below left).

On the road to the lodge, there is one pullout for this view. The lower water level exposes sandy deposits around the granite humps. (The text here loses synchronization with the images.)

The lodge is really quite nice. Not so nice is that internal politics within the agency keeps killing any contractors’ interest in running the restaurant. Nobody can keep it open with the tight-fisted budget without raising prices so high that no customers will eat there.

This is where the low water level really shows. The performance venue across the cove doesn’t see much use, either.

I found the view along the bridge quite interesting by itself.

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Won’t Admit It

Posted on March 17, 2026 by ehurst

When I was a ministry student at Oklahoma Baptist University, studies in Western Civilization were a very big thing. It was a major course of study that occupied something close to a quarter of our entire undergraduate course load. By the same token, we were all required to take at least one major course that awakened our awareness of what Western Civilization was not.

I suppose the 1970s was a time when academia across the US had a thing for pointing out a vast lore of non-western civilizations and history. This showed up in philosophy classes, which was a significant part of my ministry curriculum. You could say it was an emphasis for missions preparation. One of my professors was deeply into pointing out western biases. At the same time, our Church History classes made us aware of how the growing institutionalization of Christian religion contributed a great deal to the birth of Western Civilization.

We were taught to have serious doubts about what passes for morality in the West.

Apparently that’s not a thing in Christian education any more. If you pick up a copy of older Bible commentaries from the 1960s and 1970s, you’ll probably find a strong background in comparative civilization studies. If you examine more recent materials from the past two decades, it appears this emphasis is gone. It’s not as if the Biblical Studies folks aren’t aware of the differences between ANE and western thinking, but that there seems zero effort to evaluate the West from a biblical philosophical perspective.

They know about it, but it never occurs to them to use it, much less favor it.

I’ve been looking through commentary materials written since about the turn of millennium, and this is what I keep running into. I’m not saying it’s bad scholarship, but that it’s weak. Granted, there is a bit of silly pro-western cheer-leading. I consider that the default for people who don’t know better. The only reason such a thing is possible is due to the lack anything countering it.

I’m sure some of it can be blamed on the invasive feminism that helped to drive me out of the mainstream church life. Genuine Red Pilled masculinity is quite rare in the mainstream. Indeed, churches that seem to embrace the Red Pill are marginalized by the feminist mainstream. Nobody seems to notice that the thesis of the Red Pill outlook is easily the single best explanation for some of what shows up in the Old Testament. The ancient Hebrews were quite Red Pilled.

To be honest, I don’t expect this to change. That is, I am utterly convinced that the mainstream cannot be better informed, reformed, or in any way steered back onto a biblical path. I believe the window for repentance on that has closed, along with a raft of other issues that call for repentance. Instead, I am convinced that it will require an apocalypse of some sort that destroys the current mainstream along with the civilization on which it is founded. They must “hit bottom”, as it were.

A few individuals, many who pass through a personal apocalypse, have hit bottom and are embracing the truth. It seems the Lord always keeps a righteous remnant who do not bow the knee to pagan influences. You couldn’t get anyone in the mainstream to admit that Western Civilization is pagan. Thus, Bible Commentary materials will never give it a thought; they will generally promote the West, even if only passively.

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His One Law

Posted on March 14, 2026 by ehurst

In Acts 1, the resurrected Jesus warned His followers that they were not going to hear from God about specific human political changes, because those issues didn’t matter to His Kingdom. He wanted them to focus on spiritual power for spiritual ends. Indeed, in Matthew 24-25 He had already offered rather obvious generalities they could have figured out for themselves. He said when Rome mobilized against Jerusalem, it was time to get out of town. There was nothing useful they could do by hanging around. Nothing in His Kingdom had any concern over controlling political outcomes. All they needed to focus on was His teaching about the Father’s priorities for souls.

What we are allowed to know about God’s eternal agenda includes His determination to have a family household that includes some of us humans. It will happen. He had already gone to the trouble of establishing a garden in which they could live. Upon making humans to populate the garden and to carry out the commission of conforming the garden to His divine character, it provoked an uproar from some of His staff.

One of those staff members went so far as to invoke a fury aimed at destroying the humans outright. For this act of rebellion, God prepared a prison attached to the garden, compelling an eternal being to live within space/time constraints. The prisoner raised objections that echoed with some other staff members, and a debate ensued. God allowed a sort of gentleman’s dispute to follow.

Nothing about any of this caught God off guard. We can only estimate how much the players deviated from the rules. The first of the Three Rebellions, the Fall in the Garden, was likely part of the bet between God and the Devil. The second was a dirty trick, in which some elohim descended to the space/time bubble and got directly involved in corrupting the humans so that their sins would make them ineligible to live. Thus, we got the Flood of Noah. This was an egregious violation, so the slimy traitors were compelled to stay in the prison with the Devil, becoming the Watchers. Their progeny were compelled to stay with them, and eventually were not allowed to have their own bodies.

The third trick was a little more subtle, in which the elohim council members sympathetic to the Devil’s case took advantage of the delegation of the nations to their care at the Tower of Babel. They began presenting themselves to the humans as gods and misled them against God’s rules for the game. God went on to create His own nation against all the others, knowing this nation would eventually become too corrupt for Him to stay directly involved.

But during that nation’s existence, we could say God had a distinct interest in human politics. God had an agenda of eventually playing His trump card of bringing forth His Word as the Messiah. If the staff were going to break the rules, He would simply reserve a secret element in His plan for the Messiah. The kingdom of the Messiah was spiritual, not a human political entity. The citizens of this kingdom had all been chosen before the game began. They were eternal creatures already.

After that kingdom was established, God withdrew from human politics. There was no further need to mess with it. The nature of this divine debate changed completely. From that time forward, the Devil and his friends could do as they liked, within certain boundaries that God enforced on them directly. Whatever they came up with, it had no bearing on the final outcome. That doesn’t keep them from trying to turn the entire human race against God, but it simply doesn’t matter because of the Elect salted throughout the human race who would eventually all change sides.

The only question now is revealing who the Elect are, because they will replace the rebels on God’s staff. The whole focus of the Devil and his allies is keeping the Elect from their divine heritage promised in the Covenant. The mass of humans he could destroy by his deceptions, but the Elect would never be his, except in the very limited sense of keeping them enslaved to their fleshly natures while they lived on earth.

Thus, we see in the Old Testament history how God intervened directly in political affairs because it was necessary to bring forth His Son. He made sure to reveal His intentions to the nation He shepherded and guided their choices. After the Son, most of that went away. He has surely revealed some political events to His Elect from time to time, but we have come to a stage in the game when it simply doesn’t matter what humans do under the guidance of Darkness.

Granted, you can sometimes make educated guesses about human politics. I consider this estimate reasonable. The only reason we have any use for such analysis is to better inform our mission work. It shouldn’t affect primary decisions; those should be steered by conviction. Rather, we would use such analysis to maintain an awareness of conditions we must face.

For example, we can be sure of economic stress. We knew that was coming because our convictions warned us, but we could have guessed a year ago neither the specific timing nor specific means by which such stress would come. Now we can see the concrete reality that our convictions warned us about.

Nothing that is coming at us is germane to the mission. That’s why God isn’t releasing more prophecies about any of it. The mission remains the same: We must restore the habit of conscious covenant community building. We must learn to focus on the ultimate threat to the Devil’s agenda, that we love each other sacrificially. We must become good at it, well versed in all the difficulties we must vanquish in our own souls. Monster churches with all their organizational grandeur is a fleshly work that distracts from the real mission.

The obsession with orthodoxy is easily the single greatest barrier we face among believers today. We are confronted with a fixation on organizational unity as the false idol erected to keep us from even seeing spiritual and moral unity. We do not need to agree on theology; we need to love each other. We don’t need organizational unity at all. We need a culture of highly decentralized small communities of faith that are flexible on theology.

Our sole identity in Christ is how we learn to care for each other. That’s His One Law as King.

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Dumbfounded How Bad It Is

Posted on March 10, 2026 by ehurst

Re: Is America Winning or Losing the War with Iran?

Leave it to Ron Unz to defy censorship with such flair.

We are not there to see it. The people there are generally not allowed to talk about it. Still, there has never been a time when leaks have been so generously given as right now. I’ll grant you that I’m not in a position to verify much of anything, except in broad general principles of what I saw during my time in uniform.

Never put it past the upper staff to lie. Moreover, never put it past them to lie beyond your imagination — egregiously and even hatefully. I saw it myself. When you factor in the ego of Trump and the utter moral filth of Netanyahu, it goes beyond calling it “lying”.

If any portion of Theodore Postol’s reporting is true, it’s far worse than I would have ever thought. I knew the US forces were not prepared for this crazy mission. I’m dumbfounded at how bad this is going.

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Clarification: Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28

Posted on March 10, 2026 by ehurst

Short answer — most people read this backwards. They insist that the text points to something else, when it is that something else is pointing back to the text.

In your mind, envision an oral body of lore about the Fall of the Devil. It’s not written in Scripture, but we know it exists because of so many references back to it that are fairly consistent. Other passages of Scripture give us glimpses of it. This in itself reflects a broader ANE lore about similar things: people and demigods whose ambitions drove them too high out of personal arrogance. The Hebrews sampled some of this material for obvious reasons.

In Hebrew culture, arrogance is a character flaw. By the same token, taking up the reins of delegated authority and acting with assurance is a virtue. Humility is not a particular set of actions, nor an attitude you put on, but is the constant awareness of whence power descends. In humility, you never hesitate to deny the authority is yours, but affirm that it is a burden upon you. You operate in the name of some higher power.

Back to that body of lore…

When the prophets discuss the fall of great arrogant rulers, they would naturally reference some of the lyrical imagery and verbiage of that oral lore. “In the same way that the Devil fell…” In other words, these arrogant humans (in these passages) were suckers for the temptation offered by the Devil, who wants nothing more than for humans to endorse his error as if it were not an error. To become arrogant is, in effect, to worship the Devil. In your own awareness, you may be worshiping yourself, but it’s a self imbued with the Devil’s spirit.

Thus, by no means should we say those two Bible passages are about the Devil, but that they reflect something of the Devil’s story. The prophets used him as a morality tale. “You are no smarter than the Devil! You are trying to act just like him!”

If you grasp this, then we you recognize the echoes of how Satan got into his current situation, an eternal creature stuck here inside of the time/space continuum. It is for him rather like dying and going to the grave. It is an experience of death. That term might mean literally expiring in some cases, but it’s more important to portray the hideous realization that you really messed up.

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Escaping the Empire

Posted on March 8, 2026 by ehurst

There were three rebellions in the Unseen Realm: the Fall in the Garden, the Watchers before the Flood, and the betrayal after the Tower of Babel. The Cross addressed all three. NT evangelism should also address all three.

Churches today are addressing only the Fall. They don’t even understand the Watchers and they have no concept for the third. At Babel, the Lord handed over the nations existing at that point to the Divine Council as satrapies. He then proceeded to build His own nation through Abraham. The members of the council went and corrupted the nations they shepherded, seducing the humans to worship them as deities.

Throughout the history of Israel, the Hebrew people never batted an eye at how the world around them failed to give worship to the true God, Jehovah. For quite some time, there was no condemnation for that particular issue. Yes, the prophets spoke up about it, but the habits of the nation as a whole was to let it go. Still, the elohim councilors were not content with that, and began seeking ways to corrupt the Hebrews further. Not just in theology, but the agents of Darkness got involved in cultural habits that made too much of the Hebrews being the Chosen. The nation turned inward, having lost sight of its mission of priesthood to the world.

Remember Jonah? He didn’t want the Assyrians to hear the Word, didn’t want them to repent and turn to Jehovah. In the time of Christ, Jews were just fine with Gentiles worshiping their pagan deities, as long as the Jews could avoid being sucked up into it. Wherever they traveled, they were notorious for their arrogant refusal to join in local festivals, which were always pagan in nature. They kept to themselves and talked about how the locals were “unclean”.

It seemed not a single Jew understood the message of Jesus. They saw His power and believed He might be the Messiah, but He kept failing to push that message of crushing the defiled pagans who oppressed the Hebrew people. They wanted vengeance. Even the Nephilim and Watcher spirits assumed the Messiah would come to crush them. Remember what the Legion demons asked Jesus when He showed up on the eastern shore of Galilee? “Have you come to torment us before the Judgment?”

Jesus comes right up to that moment of crisis and dies on the Cross. Nobody expected this, neither human nor eternal. Whenever any human nation rose up to reign, the rulers crushed everyone, blood running across the landscape. The divine rebels loved that. But Jesus gets nailed to a crossbeam, shedding His own blood. He crushed the power of the flesh to keep us in bondage. His enemies were not people, but the rebellious elohim.

Jesus didn’t slaughter humans or elohim. He simply took away all authority. He was God’s personal revocation of the Fall, the corruption of the Watchers, and the abandonment of the Gentiles into the hands of pagan deities.

Remember when Rome marched on the world? Caesar always sent emissaries out ahead of his troops. They came announcing “good news” to the nations. Caesar is bringing Roman peace and prosperity — and justice — to your land! He is ready to accept those who repent from their old ways and embrace him! And what happened to those who resisted? Their blood was shed without mercy. What happened when the Christians came announcing their version of “good news”? The Christians themselves died, often enough. They followed the example of their Master. The elohim were in no mood to lose their chattel and continued their resistance.

Christians came announcing an empire that was not of this world. You are no longer required to serve the various false deities to whom you were handed over before you were even born. You can be set free from bondage to those who actually hate you and want to destroy you. The first step is realizing that their power is limited to things that don’t matter. Human empires are of no real consequence. There is not a thing the eternal rebels can do to keep you in their power. You need only follow the example of Christ, who surrendered His mortal existence and rose to reign eternally.

If this life is all you have, then you have nothing. There is no justice in this life. It was a bait and switch God pulled on His opposition. They invested themselves fully into seizing control of mortal existence, never giving thought to keeping their eternal privileges. They thought they had the final prize when they seduced Israel away from Jehovah. Yes, the rebels fully own this fallen world. Nothing will ever change for the better here. It will slowly degrade until mankind finally kills itself out.

But our investment is not here; it is in Eternity. America will never face “justice” for her crimes, if you are thinking along the lines of justice as humans know it. Rather, justice for America is the withdrawal of opportunity to repent, to connect with Eternity as a people. Americans now have a much bigger barrier to cross to find peace with God. They must first renounce their American identity completely and sneak out of the collapsing empire as individual refugees. Not to another geography, but we escape to an otherworldly focus. That’s what we symbolize in baptism; we declare our allegiance to another realm entirely. It’s spiritual warfare against the Darkness.

This world is not my home…

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Latter Day Idolatry

Posted on March 7, 2026 by ehurst

I’m not dead; I’ve just been busy. My biking blog will eventually explain in detail.

In the Bible, the crux of sin was not in the actions you took. The matter of disobedience was itself secondary. The central core issue was always disloyalty to God. If He owns you, He will not share you. I keep saying that faith is personal, not objective. What saves you is submission to His lordship. It’s that personal connection to Him. Even confession is secondary; you should not confess what is not first true of your faith. Confession is a privilege that God must bestow by His grace.

Heiser cites very early in one podcast the example of King David. This is the man who obtained a personal promise from God about his dynasty, right up there with Abraham and very few others. David was one of the messiest servants God ever had. His moral failures are too numerous to count. Yet, the one thing on which he never failed in the slightest was his personal loyalty to Jehovah. This is why the Lord tolerated his failures, doting on him like a very indulgent father.

David genuinely loved God his whole life long. If you need a text, look up David’s life.

From this context, we understand that idolatry is the key to the meaning of “sin”. The concept cannot be objectified; it cannot be reduced to intellectual definitions. Sin is defined as the failure of personal loyalty to Christ. We can give examples of what that might look like in actual practice, and both testaments do that very well. But some of those examples are purely contextual. I’m pretty sure you would have a hard time worshiping Nehushtan, the bronze serpent Moses formed during the wilderness journey.

The issue with Nehushtan was displacing the nation’s loyalty to Jehovah. Any displacement of that personal loyalty is idolatry in effect. Idolatry is not the symbols, but defiling your relationship with the Lord. All “sin” is idolatry in effect. Do you give any measure of your loyalty (AKA faith) to anything but God? Even trusting in yourself is defiling.

The modern western instinct to trust in science and reason displaces God. Just because you can observe and accurately estimate what actions will result in desired objectives, it does not mean nobody in the Spirit Realm (AKA the Unseen Realm) can get involved. The Spirit Realm cannot be evaluated by intellect. What any human decides outside of Christ is, by default, under the guidance of any number of unseen beings who hate humans and want us all roasting in Hell. There is no neutral ground, no neutral agency between God and His opposition. There is no part of our universe that is not subject to adjustment by God or the Darkness.

Another commentator in the podcast pointed out that English Bible translations tend to confuse cult sacrifice with giving due honor to someone or some symbol of authority. Even in the Old Testament, it was perfectly honorable and righteous, and even expected, to bow before one’s own fleshly father, never mind a clan chief or king. There is a certain level of human loyalty required, whether the person being honored is morally good or not. It’s actually part of divine revelation that we honor whomever holds the place of father and mother (not just the individual persons). That honor would include public displays of obeisance.

This also included gifts as discussed in the series on Leviticus. However, the act of making sacrificial offerings was in the ancient mind distinctly different. It’s not a question of liking money; it’s liking money enough that it displaces your loyalty to Christ. Materialism itself is the problem, not enjoying prosperity. As long as you are quite clear in your life orientation that God is the Provider of all things, there’s no sin rejoicing in His marks of favor.

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