Fighting in Two Realms

Posted on March 27, 2024 by ehurst

I’ve mentioned Richard Wurmbrand before on this blog. However, there’s something in his story that doesn’t get much attention these days. Let me approach it from a different direction.

First, we need to deal with the high probability that historical accounts of Christian persecution are often inflated. It’s the same bogus tendency to “gild the lily” in accounts of Jesus’ life, His crucifixion in particular. There’s a ton of nonsense in Christian mythology. Thus, many of the most popular accounts of early persecution are highly embellished. There was persecution, but we have to wade through a lot of nonsense about it.

Second, most persecution was political in nature, not a direct hatred for Christian faith. That’s still true today. The vast majority of hassles we face today are scattershot aimed at everyone who dissents from the globalist or Zionist agenda. They aren’t picking out genuine faith in the crowd.

By contrast, John’s Revelation refers to a very purposeful and direct opposition to that genuine faith in Christ. What we are facing today is simply the incremental loss of social and political convenience for mainstream Christian religion. The very real persecution Christians faced in the First Century was significantly different.

What Wurmbrand and his kind faced was a genuine anti-faith persecution. However, we must note that the communist ideologues made no distinction between various theologies and church traditions. It was a blunt hatred for religion itself. Thus, in his books, Wurmbrand tracks the abuse dished out to a wide variety of Christian expressions, some we would flatly disown as any kind of biblical faith.

Which brings me back to a point I’ve tried to make in the past: It’s more important to have boundaries than where they are. Nothing says you are obliged to call someone “family” whose doctrine is way out in the field, but there is a very real practical reason for helping them when tribulation starts taking a bite out of our witness. Whatever measures there are that helps them helps us, as well. We need to pray and consider carefully what constitutes harmless cooperation with allies versus what kind of cooperation is compromise with evil. Most believers with whom I discuss this are either wide open, or tightly closed up. There’s darned little in between.

Also, contexts can change, and so might the things you’ll compromise on now versus then.

But the basic principle here is that we need to know where our boundaries are, and where they should be. There’s nothing we can do about how God chooses to bless and prosper someone with a different doctrine. Give Him glory and don’t waste time and resources carping about it. We have way too many church folks playing the game of ignoring the whole discussion of what constitutes a contextual ally. For them, everyone is either family or enemy. That is not biblical. The Exodus saw a significant number of non-Israeli folks making the trip with them, and even aiding some in the Conquest.

If the real enemy — Satan and his allies in God’s courts — doesn’t differentiate between who is close covenant family, then it’s just about pointless that we should. The real issue is not that we are fighting human agents, but that we are resisting that transcendent enemy force. For Radix Fidem and friends, we need to keep track of what they are doing. Whatever problems we have, it’s the work of those higher spirit beings. There is no way we can avoid having tight consistent boundaries for our faith and religion, but that is not the issue when it comes to the broader threat from human lackeys of that enemy.

We do not restrain the hand of God, nor His plans. We are fortunate indeed to be included. Know what you believe, and stay with it. But that’s your weapon against spiritual forces. Don’t use it as a weapon against the hapless idiots whom the Devil and his friends are using. God Himself warned that there will always be folks who won’t see things the way we do, and He still loves and cares for them. We need strong habits of discerning faith itself, so that we are being kind to His people regardless of the packaging. That in itself is part of our warfare against Darkness.

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Don’t Argue with God

Posted on March 26, 2024 by ehurst

I’ve seen countless efforts to identify where in the matrix of our human behavior we become culpable before God. All of it assumes an existing objective standard of right and wrong separate from God’s Person. Thus, should God blame someone when they meant harm, or when they didn’t care, or…? It’s all a tangled mess. God has revealed the answer, but we keep ignoring it. Let me use myself as an example, since I know me better than I know someone else.

My earthly dad is long gone; there’s no one to embarrass by telling the truth now.

He had a very rough childhood. However, he made the mistake of assuming that the evil done to him was okay, and he did it his own kids. I was convinced at times that he hated me; all of his discipline was from personal anger, never according to some clear standard. Confusingly, he insisted that it was a clear standard. But I never knew when something I did was going to set him off and he would physically abuse me. And to this day I believe he enjoyed doing it sometimes. I’m also convinced he never felt guilty about much of anything; he was borderline sociopath.

So, I was trapped. On the one hand, I had learned to be cruel and capricious like him. On the other hand, I had a very tender conscience. I was driven to act vicious and then would hate myself, in the same way I was convinced he hated me.

I know a thing or two about guilt. And because of my religious upbringing, all of my guilt carried an uncontrollable factor of fear when I thought about God. Yet, I could not avoid God, because I was Elect and I knew it rather early in life. Try to imagine how deeply I had to hide inside my own head in order to accept all the Sunday School teaching, the Baptist college education, and all my ministry training after college. I was in my 30s when I finally got past the worst of my damaged psyche.

Part of getting past it was the realization that most of the stuff that still haunted my conscience wasn’t really me, but someone very evil using me. It’s not that I get off Scott free. It’s a matter of discerning what my actual failure was. Regarding those individual acts that I still remember as evil, those were mostly a matter of being wholly misguided by my earthly father’s influence and the wider context that supported him. I could not have known better.

Nor was there anyone around to help me understand myself. I really was enslaved by multiple factors of the twisted psychology of my youth. There comes a point where you realize that the person acting wasn’t really you, but some perverted slave master using you. I didn’t even realize that I had the option to be free. All things considered, it’s unlikely I could have done much better.

Yet, I am still on the hook for being fallen. David had it right in Psalm 51 (where he reveals God’s outlook). Not only did he confess that his sin was against God alone, but that he had no excuse on the grounds of having been born fallen. David had no sense of false guilt for the details of having Uriah killed. To be honest, Uriah was being stupid about that whole scene. It would be wholly wrong to read our cultural sense of morals back into David’s situation; they lived by their own culture. Rather, David had shamed his army (not going to war with them), he shamed his throne and he shamed the whole nation and the Covenant (coveting Bathsheba without making her part of his harem in the first place). Most importantly, he shamed God.

Notice that God didn’t condemn David for having sex with Bathsheba, but for how he went about it. The first child of this union died, but a subsequent child became the greatest king in the history of Israel.

Stop thinking about the individual sins. Try to see all of them as symptoms of something far more serious. What do you expect from sinners? Sin. Jesus said that about tree roots and fruit (John 15). Each sin act has its own consequences, but the real issue with God is whether or not you care what He thinks. And the simple truth is that you won’t — cannot — care what He thinks unless you have His Spirit in you. So the broader question is whether you are living in the flesh, which cannot impress God ever, or walking in the Spirit. It will take the rest of your life to work out the changes required.

Part of getting past the ghost of my dad’s abuse was forgiving him. It was also committing myself to acting better than he taught me, and letting people imagine I was raised well. I would simply give credit to my Heavenly Father. And then I had to forgive myself. I still have a fleshly nature; it is fully due any wrath God wants to put on it. It’s His choice to be patient and rather indulgent with me in my heart and restore the damage to my soul. That mitigates the wrath He justly pours out on my flesh.

I had to ditch the western ways of false guilt and learn the biblical path. Yes, I was a whiny obnoxious little turd at times, but the real issue was the burden of a fallen fleshly nature. Fallen people are annoying because they are mortal. All the different flavors don’t make any difference in the fundamental fact that they are doomed. We become accountable to God when He sets us free to choose. Until that point, we are not free. We shame Him when we can hear Him, and then we argue.

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Cannot Do Right

Posted on March 25, 2024 by ehurst

If you can understand the collective and honor-based culture of the Bible, then you can understand the behavior of the modern State of Israel. It’s not a secret if you know how to read it, but if you approach blindly from an American point of view, you will find it incomprehensible.

Modern Judaism still teaches under collective and honor-based assumptions. Zionism is the derived political ideology based on that. And it is inherently racist in the ugliest sense of the word. However, do not judge Zionist Israel on a western philosophical basis. There is plenty of strong condemnation right from the collectivist and honor-based Bible.

Jews severed their personal loyalty to Jehovah and trumped up a false image of Him, very much in line with the sins of Jeroboam and his false idolatry. Jeroboam referred to his false cult as worshiping “Jehovah” but defined their deity by pagan imagery. It was not the God of Israel, just something using His name. Judaism does the same thing. They have constructed a false image and called it “Yahweh”. It is based on the false intellectual assumptions of Aristotelian logic, instead of their own native Hebrew metaphysics.

It’s a bastard religion that does not come from Scripture, but from human imagination. They retain the collectivist national identity and orientation, even while publicly denying it. They still operate on the honor/shame value system, and thus utterly reject any sense of objective moral values so common in the West.

Their actions in the Gaza War are perfectly in line with denying that Palestinians are even human. That’s because they deny that all Gentiles are human; they alone are the only people on earth. It would be shameful in their eyes to treat Gentiles as humans. Their whole rhetoric in English is to placate a more powerful animal country until they can seize control. Instead of doing the hard work of slaughtering us, they prefer to enslave us.

If you approach this question from a western logic, then Israeli military actions seem incomprehensible. The brutality combined with their truculent denial of brutality, the outright lying about how Hamas is so irredeemably evil, is all part of their standard mode of operation. In their own minds, there is no sin at all in the brutality. The only issue is that they realize it provokes the Gentile nations, the western countries are particular. They’ll ignore the “international community” as much as possible, and then cynically propagandize at the same time.

It turns out the westernized commentary of the world condemning Israel is hypocritical to the hilt. Western countries would not welcome the Palestinians; they are too much like Israelis in their incorrigible nature as a collective. Palestinians hate Jews as much as the Jews hate them. In all likelihood, the Palestinians are the true literal genetic descendants of ancient Israel, while the Ashkenazi Jews are pretenders, with almost no Hebrew DNA. Everybody knows this, but refuses to acknowledge it. Instead, the whole thing is pure propaganda rhetoric on all sides.

It’s not that what the Zionists are doing is wrong by some objective standard of right and wrong. The Bible condemns the Zionists because they are wholly invalid in God’s eyes. They are a false construct sponsored by the Devil and his allies on the Elohim Council. The existence of a Zionist identity is an insult to God and His revelation. It is meant to shame Him. The State of Israel cannot do anything right in God’s eyes.

The biblical reference to “God’s Chosen” was based on the proper understanding as explained by Heiser in The Unseen Realm — God parceled out humanity as nations to his Elohim Council, but created from scratch His own nation. The secret hidden from the Elohim Council is that, with the revelation of the Messiah (His Living Word), the designation of “God’s Chosen” would morph into His Elect from every nation. It was not a human nation, but a nation of hearts, rooted in eternal souls that He had chosen secretly before the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. National identity is confined to the flesh, while God’s people bear an eternal identity that makes no reference to flesh at all.

Jesus was the revelation of that hidden plan. He came to call the Elect into His Body.

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A Place in Glory

Posted on March 24, 2024 by ehurst

Catacomb Resident Blog has been talking a lot lately about the necessity of a cultural shift in our minds to the biblical standard of collectivism and honor/shame based thinking: Collectivism 1, 2 and 3; honor/shame culture 1, 2 and 3.

Nobody in their right mind will dispute whether the Hebrew people lived in a collectivist society based on honor/shame. This is quite different from our western individualism and guilt-based culture. Everything we think, say and do is pickled in this different approach; we struggle to understand the biblical version and lack the language to discuss it properly.

And let’s remind ourselves that God Himself built up the biblical culture by hand, while western culture was left to human imagination under the guidance of spiritual forces hostile to God’s loving plans for humanity. In general, the other spirits that guide humanity hate us.

It’s not just a question of whether we can teach ourselves to understand the Bible as a collectivist honor-based culture, but whether we can understand life itself any other way. While we could take a look at Asian and some African cultures for some clues, the one big issue is that God Himself stands in the place of a collective society. Instead of drawing our identity and sense of what is right from deference to the community, we get it from God Himself. However, the Holy Spirit communicates in terms of shame/honor and collective loyalty.

The hardest thing for us is to abandon the false guilt complex upon which the entire Western Civilization is based. There is something inside of us that operates as a repository of guilt, but it is part of the fallen flesh. It is not based in your heart; it’s part of the accursed human intellect and emotions.

Thus, your guilt complex seeks restitution in terms of particular debts and restitution. Such reckoning is rooted in some imaginary objective standard of right and wrong. The Bible speaks entirely in terms of honor and shame, of personal transgression of our duty to God. It is feudal in nature.

The difficulty, then, is our instinctive reaction to the teaching about convictions. It’s a long transition into the biblical mindset. I’ve long said that our consciences are the starting point simply because just getting ourselves to pay attention to them is a challenge in some cases. We’ve said that the conscience is our mental interface to the heart, where our convictions reside. The conscience of westerners is damaged, but it’s all we have.

That means there is a healing process for the conscience, as well. It has been fed lies and is loaded with false guilt. By seeking out the convictions of our hearts, the conscience is taught better, but for most people this is a long journey. The repository of false guilt tends to muffle the voice of the Holy Spirit so that we do not hear clearly.

Once again: the sole issue here is that we need to wean ourselves from that imaginary objective reasoning standard of conscience and learn to trust the very personal connection to the Holy Spirit. He is alive, and truth is a dynamic thing that rests entirely on God’s whims. You cannot capture it and freeze it in time and space. It’s a relationship that evolves constantly. It’s not chaotic and rootless, but it does change with the context. Your only hope is to dig through the rubble of your soul until God speaks clearly in your convictions, from moment to moment.

You will most certainly hear things falsely when you start down this path. Don’t despair; God is patient about this, but you must commit yourself to the path He has made for us. Obey your conscience while knowing full well it will get things wrong, but it’s all you have. There is no objective standard; that’s a lie from Hell. Your standard is the community of saints in Heaven who are watching, all affirming what God says.

Seek His honor and glory, and He will grant you a place in it.

Note: Just as a reference point, I’ll point out that leftism is a false collective. Lefties cling to the guilt and innocence theme, but try to hold everyone accountable to the collective. However, their collective replaces God with the State.

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NT Doctrine — Philippians

Posted on March 23, 2024 by ehurst

Paul’s letter to Philippi was largely a personal note. The church had sent Epaphroditus to Paul in his Roman house arrest during the first trial with a gift and asking after his welfare. While he was there, Epaphroditus got sick and nearly died. His home church got wind of this and were very concerned, and sent yet another courier to check on his condition and to deliver another message to Paul. This letter went back with both that second courier and Epaphroditus. The letter is mostly personal, and we sense that Paul is about to be released.

So, the first chapter is predictably personal in nature, as is most of the next. However, early in chapter 2 Paul says something that stands firmly in the purpose of this study to show the continuity between the Old and New Testaments, verses 5-11.

He advises the folks in Philippi to embrace the mind of Christ. This is quite possible for one very good reason: Jesus knew He was the Son of God, but He set aside all of His divine privileges. Instead, the life He lived was as a human. All of His miracles were built into the Covenant, not His Person. A major element of all that He did was to demonstrate what came in the same package as faithfulness to divine revelation. He was restoring the full power of the Covenant of Moses before He closed it out.

He was willing to face the fate of all humanity. Moreover, He faced what was in that day the worst fate a human could encounter, the most gruesome execution known. And more to the point, He faced it with the burden of all our sins, for He had none of His own.

This was such a high victory that His Father granted Him authority over every power in Heaven and Earth. The Devil and the Elohim Council were subjected to Jesus, who had become the ultimate advocate for humanity against the agenda of the Devil and his allies in the Spirit Realm. They were compelled to declare their allegiance to Him.

The question of whether any other being warranted glory was answered: It all belongs to Jehovah, the Creator of all things.

There is no more doctrine in this letter.

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Prepping for the Mission

Posted on March 22, 2024 by ehurst

This is a matter of convictions, not a Word from God. The only way you should take it as a Word is if it rings a bell in your convictions, too. Obey your convictions, not my ruminations. This is a prophetic time, and God is choosing mostly to work through the subtle means of convictions that bring us together. I’m doing my best to make sense of those convictions in concrete terms. I’m driven by a desire to protect the covenant community.

I’m convinced the time has come for the US to be destroyed. As far as I can tell, my convictions indicate that it will be this calendar year. Not that it will be finished this year, but the final breakdown will become obvious to most people starting this year, most likely in conjunction with the national elections.

My flesh is not eager for the turmoil, but my heart knows it has to come. My heart is eager to see God glorified, whether by His wrath or blessings. This stuff is going to hurt.

The federal government will come apart and everyone like me who receives federal benefits will lose all them. Some state governments will make an effort to replace parts of that system, but a lot of seniors and other federal dependents will be cast adrift to survive on their own in various ways. Meanwhile, interstate commerce will become very confused. Internet business will suddenly face a plethora of new government policies from the states, or more likely, regional coalitions of state governments.

It will be one whale of rough ride, a real adventure. If you don’t like that kind of thing, it’s best you make all kinds of prepper moves to avoid the effects. I trust the hand of my God to provide what I really need. I’m already near the bottom of the economic system, so there’s not much prepping I could do, but I’m doing what I can. I’ll just have to take what comes and let my Father choose what I must endure.

We must have a destroyer, someone who will provoke a massive social and political conflict, someone who is reckless and willing to disrupt. Trump is a very good candidate for that mission. If not Trump, then someone else who will rise up, a proverbial bomb-thrower, someone who doesn’t hesitate to push the boundaries. This system cannot be saved; it is rigged for detonation. We need someone to push the button, to cross that final boundary that will trigger the conflict that will divide the nation.

This must come.

Do you understand that when God comes to visit, it’s a two-edged sword? Whatever He does is always in our best interest. The issue is getting ourselves into the flow of His work, and to learn to love His ways for the sake of shalom. His wrath is just one of His Sword; blessings for His children are the other edge. What destroys sin blesses us. Learn to identify His wrath on sin a blessing for yourself. His power and presence is a mark of favor on us, no matter what it does to those who refuse His covering.

Yes, every human action at large is a reflection of conflict in the Spirit Realm. The political shifts you see are the work of beings in the Spirit Realm; humans are merely the tools. There is a great evil afoot, but that doesn’t mean it’s opposed by good. What we see is more often two evil forces manipulating humans against each other because those spiritual forces are trying to destroy us. In that sense, the Trump Machine is indeed being used by dark forces against humanity. But so is the opposition. It’s just two flavors of evil offering a false dichotomy.

God’s aim is not to win through the election process of fallen humans who ignore His Word. Nothing from either side glorifies His name. The glory of the Lord points human attention to the Spirit Realm, not to the mess here in a world slated for destruction. Our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual forces.

If you have a mind for it, you will see that the turmoil of tribulation and apocalypse will be a rich opportunity for us to glorify His name by pointing more clearly to that Spirit Realm. We have work to do, and the only valid “prep” is for this mission.

On a practical note: I’ve long said that the biggest threat to this blog and the Radix Fidem ministry is Zionism. When the globalists are slapped aside, the slapping will be performed by Zionists. There are precious few in government who are not sold out totally to one agenda or the other. Most of those resisting both are being held back, kept at the lower levels of political activity.

I’ve already mentioned that the one saving grace of Christian Reconstruction is their anti-Dispie position. They constitute a large portion of Christian Nationalists, who are divided on this question. Keep in mind that the globalists do not distinguish Radix Fidem from Christian Nationalism. They will handle us the same. The issue is that our ability to associate online is likely to be taken away because the globalist want to shut us up on one principle, while the rising Zionists will do it for another reason.

I’m convinced the Zionists will have one last hurrah in politics before Israel is destroyed. That last hurrah will include kicking Radix Fidem off the Net. Not all of us individually; too much of what governments large and small do relies on the Internet. Rather, the community will have great difficulty using the Net to communicate. Unless something arises that allows networking without exposure on the Internet (as currently defined), we will all be spun off on our own. But it will affect a lot of other people. I suspect that another form of networking will arise, but I have no firm image of what that would be. It will come from outsiders in the technology community who are unwilling to be silenced that way. If they do, it won’t likely be consumer friendly.

Be ready to lose a significant amount of freedom of communication; it’s coming.

————

One last thing: God’s sense of timing is nothing like ours. He’s aware of ours, but the timing of things from our perspective has seldom been a significant element in His agenda. Our insatiable demand for knowing when is frankly childish compared to biblical maturity.

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Not in Our Hands

Posted on March 21, 2024 by ehurst

The Covenant People of God are in the world, but not of it.

We can declare the Conservative Dads’ pin-up calendar evil. It’s all we can do to avoid staring at it ourselves, but we should never twitch a finger toward keeping it out of the hands of others. I won’t tell you to avoid places where such a calendar is displayed; you will need to construct your own self-discipline about such things. Any help I can give you must be more individual, face to face, than attempting to formulate rules for everyone.

And even in so saying, I’m presenting an individual eldership choice that may not work for other elders and their communities. I cannot know what they face and what their membership is like. But I will go so far as to suggest that leaving it in their hands is something that should be a part of any Christian culture we propose, even as we offer to help them think through things that are difficult.

The question is not what you discern, but that you discern. I want to promote the duty to pull in that responsibility down to the lowest level of spiritual leadership. If you are in a position to provide moral covering for others, then it’s a duty you cannot pass to a higher elder authority.

I’m convinced that we have done this job wrong for most of the past 2000 years. It might have been done well when Paul was still traveling across the Mediterranean Basin, but it didn’t take long after his fellow apostle John died for things to go sour. Very quickly the church elders of the Second Century AD began drifting into a culture that was foreign to divine revelation. It’s gotten only more remote since then.

The fundamental mission of the community of faith is (1) manifest the Covenant Word by living it so as to harvest the blessings and (2) using that testimony to call out to the unconscious Elect and bring them into the Covenant community. There is absolutely nothing we can do for the non-elect. The focus is glorifying God the way He wants it to happen, and those two points are a good summary. This is quite consistent with what Jesus said about the two commandments of feudal love and submission to the Father, along with loving His other servants the way He does. Do you see the parallel in thought?

Our biggest problem is that vast number of Elect currently trapped in non-covenant bodies, a form of church that is entirely too compromised with the world. It’s wrong to simply leave them there, but we must discern how God wants us to reach them. We cannot use the methods of the Harlot Church to rescue her prisoners. They must leave voluntarily, with a will to find the Father’s glory in ways they cannot already do.

It’s a careful balance between treating them as family and acting as if they are still lost in pagan enmity. In many ways, we shouldn’t care if their bodies and time are used in mainstream church activities, so long as their hearts are with the covenant community. They will eventually leave the mainstream on their own, so mainstream church membership is not really the issue.

We can trust the Lord to handle stuff like that. The one thing on which we can focus is loving them as covenant family. If the Lord does not use that to draw them out, that’s His problem. Again, The community cannot exist as intended until the individual is redeemed. Our focus is not on their bodies; that’s their mission. We focus on their hearts, and the warfare of the heart is not at all like that of the flesh.

If they don’t know they need what we have, we cannot give it to them. We should not attempt to sell it, as it were. All we can do is manifest it by how we discipline our own flesh. The Spirit must call them by building a flaming desire that drives them out of their bondage.

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The Priority of Redemption

Posted on March 20, 2024 by ehurst

Let’s talk a little about a distinctly Christian culture. Following Christ means doing things the way He did them. On the one hand, we recognize that He lived in a specific context that isn’t ours. On the other hand, we must learn what part of His context reflected the way His Father intended humans to live in this fallen world. Jesus’ world reflected only one manifestation of the Father’s intentions. I’m sure we all have our own take on where that balances out. Here are some issues I think require attention.

First, there is the pragmatic issue of knowing that God will never grant His people political dominance on this earth. The mere thought of trying to assert such dominance over some portion of humanity via political power means completely leaving the path of Christ. He pointedly avoided doing that. If people were not led to a community of faith and righteousness by something inside of them, then it would never do them any good at all. That internal pull is a miracle. You can approximate the external organization for people, but you cannot empower obedience without the Holy Spirit. Flesh cannot do the will of God.

The very best we can hope for is building an atmosphere in which those empowered by the Spirit of God have good choices, and are protected from really bad ones. There absolutely must be leadership and some form of government, but the submission of dependents requires a miracle of trusting God to work through His human servants.

We are unequivocally commanded to form a community of faith, but it must be ruled by faith internally, not by external compulsion. Even here, we are not absolutists: We have the practical matter of children who need structure and guidance to survive into adulthood. Thus, the core of living by faith includes the idea of thresholds at which people are granted autonomy within the community. We shepherd the people based on what they can handle. The issue is moral covering as God provided. There are many forces in this world that are not human and not restricted to human options.

We are obliged to recognize a higher realm of power that is very real, and that our fallen human nature is allied with them against our own best interests. Facing off against those forces that are almost unanimously against God’s will for humanity, our only hope is take full advantage of the limited powers God grants in His revelation. He promises to inhibit those greater powers through our obedience to His revelation. But the key to His power in us is declaring war on our fleshly selves, bringing that beast into submission to a higher will.

We are accountable by faith — a feudal submission to God for doing things His way in this life. We have to absorb His priorities. His guidance can never be reduced to mere human language. No matter how we formulate His guidance, it will have gaps and blockages that never quite fit the reality of how we live. He expects the community of faith to recognize this, and to remain sensitive to His voice as a whole community.

Having said just this much, just a few paragraphs, makes us wholly alien to the social and political atmosphere of the US. There is so very little in American society that reflects God’s ways that we should be shockingly different. Granted, not everything in American society is objectionable, but for us to fail in distinguishing ourselves means we have failed our mission.

On the one hand, we recognize that America is being ripped apart by implacable and opposite visions for society. On the other hand, it’s very hard to realize that the obvious conflict takes place within a basic set of assumptions about reality that in themselves are false. The options offered by our society are equally objectionable. Again, it’s not in the particulars so much as the fundamental assumptions.

Let me cite one example to highlight this issue: Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America. The calendar itself, and the women depicted on it, represent all that’s wrong with conservative politics. If you really do want to see those pictures displayed on your wall somewhere, you have yet to tame the flesh. You are still serving the Lord’s enemies. The mere act of putting themselves on display in such a manner should indicate how thoroughly unqualified those women are for your attention; they are defiled and would destroy your faith.

It’s not that we could change society and make it better behaved. That might make some elements of our lives a little easier, but it won’t help them one little bit if we somehow gained the power to compel their behavior to fit biblical expectations. They are still damned, on the highway to Hell, serving the Lord’s enemies.

The community cannot exist as intended until the individual is redeemed. That there are so many efforts to create a community first, and then to drag individuals into it, shows that we have not yet learned God’s ways. Christian culture is not a static thing we can depict; it is merely the living and morphing reflection of God’s people coming together in a given context.

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Tracking Two Realms

Posted on March 19, 2024 by ehurst

Nothing in this human existence matters on a par with the Presence of the Holy Spirit. Of course, His absence also matters. But it’s not all or nothing in the sense of how His Presence affects us. There is that huge factor of how well we go along with His guidance. That’s the point of pursuing peace with God (shalom).

But once we establish that reality, there is nothing else in human existence that matters on that level. Your talents and intelligence have no bearing on the issue of peace with God. You may have competitive advantages or disadvantages in almost every other aspect of human existence, but none of that matters in Eternity, nor peace with God here below.

If you do not understand shalom as the summum bonum of life here, then you don’t understand anything that matters.

I have only a rough idea of what my IQ might be if it were measured. I don’t care. And while my flesh may be intimidated, my heart is not the least bit concerned about people who have a higher score. The only way I’ll offer them any respect is if their intelligence is in service to our Lord. Without a rather evident shalom, they are fools by definition.

There is no conclusive test from outside a person’s soul. You cannot know about someone else’s election. Scripture does offer a few indicators to what we might look for in someone else, but it’s only a functional estimate.

For example, in written works, I look first for humility. If your writing doesn’t indicate humility and some level of self-effacing, I must assume you don’t know the Holy Spirit very well.

Granted, I’m not talking about someone who is a pushover. A potent sense of divine calling will fill you with confidence and authority. That is not inconsistent with humility, though our western heritage tends to view the two as opposites. Boldness is not arrogance. It means you have no doubt your God is behind whatever He commands you to do, and you are not afraid of the idea that He will let you fail. You rather expect to fail in one sense or another, simply because this fallen existence is accursed as a whole. But arrogance leaves no room for even acknowledging failure in any way, whereas confidence and humility means you know better than to invest in something that isn’t part of your mission.

Another is a sense of compassion for those who suffer, and a genuine affection for fellow believers. In a broad general sense, there must also be a sense of accountability to the Scripture. That ends up being almost the same thing, since Scripture makes so very much of affection for your faith family. Again, love is not defined as doting, but of genuine concern for the welfare of another, whether you can do any good or not. See the previous paragraph for deciding when you can do any good.

Somewhere down the line from those essentials, I admire a spirit of adventure. Would you be willing to jump onto an impossible task simply because you know that obedience is the one thing at stake? Success is simply not a major consideration. The only success in the Kingdom of Heaven is your willingness, your merciless execution of the fleshly nature so that your heart can take the lead. Are you open to a divine call to fail? Do you understand that our response to spiritual and moral challenge is what glorifies the Lord, not whether we can accomplish something humans can discern without the Holy Spirit?

In general, there are more than enough statements in the New Testament about what Christian conduct should be. People who advocate for any form of moral laxity are not your covenant family. They might be allies on some level, but nothing closer. Never mind their protestations, they are not “fellow Christians” because they don’t actually follow His teaching.

You need not consider me a Christian brother if you hold to different standards. I rather expect you wouldn’t. There’s no insult in this; it’s just the way we are required to operate. The point is that you have looked at the issue, and that you have standards for deciding who is and isn’t family of faith. You should be humble enough to recognize it’s your best estimate, not something that you would declare universally for everyone else.

Allies are people with whom you have some substantial differences, but due to the situation, you need to find a way to work alongside of them on a particular issue in our human existence. Thus, I might declare Catholics allies on this or that social concern, but otherwise not covenant family. I have no call from God to be harsh or difficult with Mormons, and even some pagans are harmless to the gospel message. There’s no particular push in the Bible against a truce with people who stay out of the way.

And there is certainly no gospel requirement to rule over anyone in human affairs. We have no business getting involved in human government unless/until we are talking about a covenant nation. There are none in this world right now.

The significance of the Christian Reconstructionist movement in Moscow, Idaho is that it may come to constitute at least an approach to covenant government of some kind. As long as they expect to stay under the US Constitution, that won’t happen. But should the Union come apart, that could change in the American Redoubt. We should keep watching.

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Miracle Growth

Posted on March 18, 2024 by ehurst

I’m often amazed at how people often operate on false assumptions about the gospel message.

The Kingdom of Heaven is a kingdom of (a) the Elect who (b) aspire to live by the Covenant of Christ. Election was completed before any human walked on this earth. There is no human decision involved in Election. The only decision humans can make is to aspire to live by the Covenant, the “b” part above.

We all know that a lot of people pretend to “b” without “a”. There is nothing any human can do about that problem, though we can make some adjustments in how we associate in communities, so that it’s more difficult to pretend. But the point here is that we know there’s some pretense, and that there is no way to escape it totally. You can know for certain you are elect, but you cannot know about the brother or sister next to you in your faith community. You can get people to join your community, but you cannot ascertain that they are Elect.

You can produce hundreds of children, but there is nothing you can do about their election. You can raise them to be decent, but you cannot make them morally good. Only spiritual birth can change our nature, and that comes only to the Elect.

The covenant communities could simply stop having children altogether and it would not change the number of spiritually born. In theory, the covenant community would still grow from simple evangelism. This is why Paul could suggest it’s a good idea for believers to remain unmarried; it would not harm the growth of the gospel. It would be very tough to live that way, given our human natures, but it could work just fine for what really matters.

We don’t know for certain what motivated Paul to suggest that. He makes general comments about the state of the world in which they lived at the time, but we don’t have enough data to make the issue really clear. There’s no deep underlying Hebrew value at work, and nothing else in New Testament history to make it obvious. Whatever it was, the urgency wasn’t sufficient to dissolve existing marriages. And the whole of his letters suggest a full expectation that church leaders would mostly be married. It was just his personal recommendation that celibacy was a good idea.

Somehow, the folks in India where Thomas ministered got the idea that the pinnacle of Christian faith demanded celibacy. It’s part of their teachings today. And somehow that did not prevent the spread of the message. They had a different cultural attitude about such things than is common anywhere in the West.

So far as we know, Jesus was celibate. The logic goes like this: Jesus clearly taught that fornication and adultery were sinful. That covers everything sexual, leaving only a godly covenant marriage as the sole option. And He could hardly have been hypocritical about it as the Son of God. On top of that, He warned of a coming tribulation around Jerusalem. When it comes, He said that having small children would be a serious liability. It would make survival very difficult.

We can extrapolate that Paul was thinking about that when he gave his advice to certain churches. If that kind of teaching came to the ears of the general public in that part of the world, it would be a strong filter against fake believers in that culture (unlike India).

I could cite other teachings that would gain ridicule in Paul’s world. Christ rising from the dead is a big one. While the Jews were a primary source of hassles, there were other sources all too willing to persecute Christians for their faith. In spite of this, the Christian religion grew simply from new converts. That is, the Elect were being called up, recognizing that this was their tribe. The worse the persecution got, the more they grew.

Somewhere within the next generation or two, something in the New Testament Christian religion was lost. By the time of Constantine, church leaders were simply worn out on facing persecution. They had lost that fire of the first generation of those who followed Christ. They were so thrilled that an emperor had a use for them they were quite willing to agree with his policies for them and their religion. Instead of waiting for the Elect to awaken, they were ready to make the Christian religion a matter of imperial policy.

Today, it seems the vast majority of church leaders are convinced that Christian religion worked just fine like that. There are various mixtures of thinking that their brand of religion has conquered or should conquer the world. It shows up in their writings mostly as an underlying assumption. They will debate whether it should come by persuasion (logic, rhetoric, etc.) or by law, but the net result is about the same.

Folks, martyrdom built churches, not marketing.

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