Not Blending in Very Well

Posted on March 16, 2018 by ehurst

Could there be some day a Radix Fidem military chaplain?

Not likely, though not impossible. For now, it would require a fairly radical change in government. That is, the kind of process for seeking government recognition as a valid religious organization includes way too many barriers for us right now. That’s particularly true if we are talking about a stand-alone organization. Gaining recognition under someone else’s umbrella might be a lot easier, but I’m not aware of any existing organization that would welcome us. Our covenant puts us way outside the ballpark.

However, nothing keeps you as a covenant member of the family from seeking endorsement from any agency you choose. There’s nothing about our covenant that excludes other religious affiliations, so much as a general recognition that others have excluded us. I didn’t set out to start a separate religion, and our current organization — such as it is — barely provides an identity for folks who didn’t feel welcome somewhere else. Granted, the purpose of a covenant statement tends to draw boundaries that exclude certain things, but nobody is going to interrogate you to check your adherence.

The whole point of what we do here is to offer a home for your soul. It’s a covenant family household. How much organization do you need to feel at home? We try to provide that, however much it is, as long as it isn’t the wrong kind of organization. But we also welcome anyone who just wants to hang out and bounce ideas off our existing frame of reference. In other words, we aren’t trying to fulfill all of the common expectations of an organized religion, just the ones we find essential for our own sense of calling and mission together. And it turns out that’s nowhere near enough for gaining military approval for chaplaincy under the name “Radix Fidem.”

This brings us back to that phrase “meta-religion” — we are less of a religion, and more of a religious approach to defining religion. Personally, I was content on this blog to share my thoughts about what faith should produce in my human existence from within the context of my own life. From there, I made some effort to discuss with others some of what I discovered; it turns out that there were people who felt the same sense of conviction about such things. As this discussion went on, there were more folks who joined in the discussion and began asking for some kind of affiliation and organization. So here we are.

The net result is that we don’t fall into any of the familiar categories people use to talk about religion. If the context in which we all live were to change significantly, we would likely have to change how we present ourselves to the world. It may well be that some of you live in countries where our current organization is acceptable to the government; feel free to run with it. I’ll be glad to help you work that out and let you use the name. But I’m called by God to remain in the American context myself, and most of what I write will reflect that. It will shape the defaults, the range of things we are likely to do in terms of organization. Given the current US government, I cannot imagine how we could meet its demands without compromising on the essentials of what we are as an organization.

For example, we have no divinity school. Further, I know of no existing seminary that would tolerate much of what is essential to Radix Fidem. That’s not to say there is none, but all the ones I know about won’t make room for us. Each would require we espouse something ruled out by our covenant. We stand in a peculiar place. And I cannot imagine the resources it would take to construct a program of academic study that would gain endorsement from any of the existing accrediting agencies.

And honestly, I don’t think my books constitute a broad enough body of literature to serve as more than just a very early starting point. We are in dire need of more stuff written by other people just to take the first steps down that road. Keep in mind that we are recovering something that was mostly forgotten for 2000 years.

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Photography: Urban Parking Garages 2

Posted on March 15, 2018 by ehurst

We continue the parking garage saga. Today’s initial image was on the way to my first, and I decided to stop and capture that sculpture that shows up in a previous image. This open area is called Enterprise Square, but it’s all owned by Enable Midstream Partners, a gas pipeline partnership between two or more companies seeking to gain near monopoly control over the natural gas supply in Oklahoma. It’s a lovely building, though.

A couple of blocks from the sculpture is this fancy promenade entrance to Devon Energy tower. The parking garage on the right offers public access, so I slogged up the ten floors; it was a good workout.

However, even at that elevation, the location isn’t exactly the best. This is the view of most of the urban canyon skyscrapers, looking NE from the upper deck of Devon’s garage. There are a lot of buildings just about the same elevation as I’m standing.

The real gem of the day is this telephoto shot of Saint Anthony’s Hospital; I took advantage of the wide top of the concrete wall on the upper deck to stabilize the camera. It’s less than a mile away, but most cameras don’t pick up what your eyes see. This shot pulls the target just a little closer than what you would see yourself. I’ll be trying to use that parking garage in the foreground to shoot back this way next week.

The next garage was also ten floors, but there was not much point in trying to shoot any pictures with such a high mesh barrier around the whole thing. This is what you get when companies fear liability from lawsuits of surviving relatives of stupid people.

Two other parking garages next to that last one were not publicly accessible, so I headed back south of the river and found a high spot on the bank to grab this shot. It shows how small our skyscraper district is. It also shows that Devon Energy’s tower dominates by a huge margin. I tried to find out about permission to access the view, but they have a legal requirement that prevents me publishing any images I shoot from their their tower. (*sigh*)

On my way back home, I stopped to catch this shot of the lower dam on the OK River. They can’t just shut the water off, but they can keep it to a very low trickle during droughts. There were no water fowl near the dam this time.

This last shot is one of those things that called my name. There’s a spot on the bike trail back toward Eagle Lake with this winsome view of the river through tree branches. I always slow down to admire how it looks to me.

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Boundaries and Fences

Posted on March 14, 2018 by ehurst

A critical failure in Western Christianity is the impossible moral climate.

I want you to notice this huge, tall mountain of social expectation. Because you claim Christ as your Lord in a Western context, you are saddled with a massive pile of “supposed to” and “ought to,” and this in turn is rooted in a bad moral mythology. I’ve long said that Western assumptions about what is morally good and bad does not match what’s in the Bible. In that sense, Western assumptions about what is good and bad are also saddled with a false view of what’s possible.

In a broad sense of things, we can say that one of the biggest problems in human existence is false expectations. That’s the fundamental flaw that Satan exploited in human nature in the Garden — we can be led to believe that things ought to go this way or that, when God has said pointedly it’s not so. When we rely on reason to help shape our expectations, there is always an element of wishful thinking, conscious or not. And because revelation demands a lot of self-sacrifice, we tend to discount its demands in favor of our wishes. We keep looking for loopholes.

So we live in a society that holds forth this massive lie about what ought to be, and these false social expectations give rise to behavioral patterns that cannot work. Indeed, this is the whole point behind the red-pill movement, in that we face a vast ocean of propaganda about what women are like and what they really want, so that women are deceived about their own nature. Thus, we have feminism that posits things that cannot be, and a host of demands based on delusion. It’s the same thing with Western Christian religion, not so much in terms of specifics, but in the nature of false expectations.

Religion writers have noticed what appears as a recent spike in clergy suicides. Granted, they do give mention of how suicides are up in the general population, but the linked article puts an emphasis on clergy. The reason they do this arises precisely from the same underlying false image of what clergy are supposed to be and do. We have a problem with clergy suicides because we have a problem with the notion of what “clergy” should mean.

I won’t suggest that clergy aren’t supposed to be models; Scripture demands they are. However, the flaw is what they are supposed to model and how they are supposed to do it. The sense of isolation noted in the article is fundamental to Western assumptions about religion. I can tell you up front that the solution hinted at in the article is a matter of scooping up some habits that currently exist in the liberal wing of Western Christian religion, instead of seeking to understand the deeper failures that characterize everything Western. Bouncing around between conservative and liberal serves simply to keep the whole thing within a closed loop. This week they’ll drag in a few liberal notions about Western clergy; next week they’ll reaffirm conservative expectations of the clergy. Meanwhile, both ends of that spectrum are alien to what’s in the Bible.

In the real world that God made, the solution is a two-edged sword. First, there’s the problem of heart-led living completely absent from Western Civilization. It’s a fundamental assumption in Scripture, so there is no answer outside raising that issue. Without the heart of conviction ruling over everything, there can be no solution.

But that’s a tall order, and it requires some help orienting recovering Western minds seeking to follow the heart-led way. So the second edge of that sword is Biblical Law. Biblical Law is both boundary and fence. It’s not just laying out what’s real, but it suggests rules we make for ourselves to strengthen our resolve as a community of faith. You cannot really live Biblical Law without the heart in the first place, but because we are all in transition between the old life and the new, we put up fences to make it a little harder to forget the moral boundaries. Biblical rules bear only some superficial resemblance to Western Christian rules.

I note in passing that it is quite rare to find any Western Christian church keeping the New Testament practice of dividing leadership between pastors and elders (Two Witnesses). Your typical Western church folds the two into a single role, and that’s just plain wrong. It’s a sin, to put it bluntly. Pastors should be like Old Testament priests and Levites, while elders are like clan chiefs who actually rule/manage the church family. Go back and review how those roles work and stop reading Western culture back into the Bible.

Next, I suggest we ditch the idea of churches as democratic business institutions. Biblical churches do not have plans and objectives that marketers can turn into slogans; they are not democratic but feudal. Churches are meant to be extended families under covenant and the sole purpose is fellowship in a growing faith commitment to Biblical Law. It’s not about changing people, but persuading them to change themselves under divine leadership. It’s all about enabling the process built into redemption and serving Christ.

Stop mimicking the ambient social expectations and structures. Rediscover the ancient boundaries and build fences for yourselves. This will engender a wholly different context in which we can address problems like clergy suicide.

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Photography: Urban Parking Garages 1

Posted on March 13, 2018 by ehurst

The skyscraper section of Downtown OKC is less than one square mile in area. Within that area are several substantial parking garages. I’ll try to make a series of this. First up today was the Santa Fe Plaza parking garage, seen in this shot from ground level. This used to be called the Skirvin Plaza, after the famous landmark hotel on the northern side (left) of this cul de sac. The hotel was almost bulldozed, but due to public outcry it was saved and someone finally got it working again. It’s now being used as a pricey hotel right in the downtown area. I honestly don’t even know anyone who could afford a room there.

This next shot (right) is from the seventh floor of the Santa Fe parking garage, looking west down Park Avenue. This an example of “urban canyon.” My bike was locked to a lonely lamppost just below where I’m standing for that shot. The whole garage has a wide ledge around it to prevent people attempting to climb down the outside face of the structure. There was a rash of mostly kids falling to their deaths awhile back, trying to climb between floors. This thing is so big that walking to the NW corner put me in line of sight of a different street. This image (left) is looking off that corner. That red thing on the lower right is a fancy sculpture in an open plaza; it’s basically giant steel tubing cut at odd angles and welded into a sort of random cluster.

It was a long hike across the top deck of this thing back to the SE corner. You can see it looks down on the passenger rail station (the covered area). Folks have to climb up stairs wedged between that building and the high wall upon which the tracks stand. You can ride the train to just one place: Fort Worth, TX. Our state officials have been begging and bugging everyone possible to add another line up toward Tulsa, and maybe a line to Wichita, KS. Our passenger rail service died some decades ago due to low ridership. Now it’s kind of an “in” thing to do again.

From this garage I rode up a block and west a few blocks to the garage contracted to the County Courthouse. The shot to the left here is looking back to the northern end of the previous garage. This one has 9 floors but the view was about out on the western edge of the skyscrapers. This next view (right) is SW and takes in the Arts Center in the near foreground. Maybe you can tell that’s another parking garage in the background left (that’s another target for this series). In the middle ground with the circular sidewalk is the City Municipal Building. That’s where I had to go and pick up my claim check from the bike wreck. To the rear on the right side is an odd brick tower: our County Jail (AKA, “The Money Pit”). My son works there currently as Fire Safety Inspector, among other things. This last shot is looking at near NW OKC, prominently featuring our Saint Anthony’s Hospital up on the horizon. It sits on a low rise and is only the latest iteration of their building, having sat there for ages. They now have several franchise medical centers around the metro.

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We Aren’t in Charge

Posted on March 13, 2018 by ehurst

Radix Fidem: We rule nothing. At the most, we hold a very limited dominion in this world. We manage what few things Our Lord has entrusted to each of us as His servants. The probabilities of any of us having significant human authority are remote. We are used to this.

When Jesus talked about sheep and goats (starting in Matthew 25:31), His point was about faithfulness to His lordship via Biblical Law. This is not about charity; it’s about family taking care of family. It’s about governing over the household of faith. The only way you can be a sheep is to concern yourself with things sheep focus on: eating and making more sheep. We grow wool only to be sheared. It’s all about serving our divine purpose.

The only reason there are goats involved is because sheep appear to be stupid out in the pasture. They really don’t pay much attention to anything beyond eating and making more sheep. So a shepherd keeps goats in his flock because they pay more attention to threats, like predators and unsafe terrain. But what they produce isn’t worth nearly as much as what sheep do. The goats are useful only to help keep the sheep alive and safe.

The sheep of the Lord’s pasture are lousy governors. When they become good at governing, they become lousy sheep, and are more like goats. It’s not that sheep are totally defenseless; rams are known for being aggressive at protecting their own. But they lack strategic vision because it requires paying less attention to the mission at hand. Strategic vision is not a mark of holiness and divine calling. While goats tend to lead the flock away from danger, it’s out of pure self-interest. But it works well enough.

This picture would be in the minds of those who heard Jesus tell this parable. After three years with Jesus, thinking they were preparing to work in His Messianic court ruling over the world, Jesus was trying to bring them back to sanity. They were sheep, not goats. They were valuable to the Father as sheep, doing what sheep do, and governing their fellow sheep was not part of that. They would be granted a highly limited dominion among the sheep and let the goats worry about everything else.

Notice what this says about elders in the congregation. You should prefer sheep who self-limit, not the goats lauded by normal human standards. Look for someone who focuses on sheep being sheep.

Genuine followers of Christ make the worst governments in human history. There are plenty of other reasons governments might be bad, but true believers aren’t equipped for government. This is a general observation Christ Himself made. It’s a warning not to expect many opportunities for making decisions about such things. Let God our Shepherd worry about that, and give room for the goats He appoints. In due time, it will become apparent who is His treasured flock; the mark of His favor is not political savvy and power.

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Photography: Close to Home

Posted on March 12, 2018 by ehurst

Source: Bing Maps

Today’s satellite view is complements of Bing Maps, which is currently more up to date for my part of the world. Look for the bright aqua numerals along the southern edge and then up starting with the office park; the numbering doesn’t include the map image. The creek bed there is Crutcho Creek and it runs NNE in this area.

It’s a cool day and I didn’t feel too ambitious about riding. However, I felt drawn to take pictures of the new bike path that Midwest City is building along SE 29th between Air Depot Boulevard and Sooner Road. Most of it is finished and looks quite nice. I spotted this patch early henbit blossoms (right) along the way. We are just starting our green-up around here and henbit sprouts early because it can take a light freeze, which we still have some mornings.

The bike path is just a little narrower where it passes under the Interstate. The current rough spot is where it needs to cross Crutch Creek, running out of the Tinker AFB golf course. The bike bridge is still under construction. The current work is setting a concrete abutment to prevent the pilings washing out when the creek floods. These are huge prefabricated concrete blocks you can see all over the place. Most of them are made by our local monster company, Dolese Brothers, and you can see those blocks used like fencing around anything Dolese owns. There was a matching abutment just to my left off-camera, already finished. It’s gonna take a while before it’s finished.

This blossoming tree has no scent, and stands near the entrance to an office park. On the northeast corner of SE 29th and Sooner Road was a gas station, now some forty years gone. At one time the monster First Southern Baptist Church wanted this corner, but Tinker AFB nixed it. The general’s excuse was that a monster church house was too close to their flight line. That was bullshit; Boeing wanted to build an office park there. Boeing has since moved to the southwestern gate of Tinker, building a massive campus with several multi-story buildings.

Hidden back in the woods near the creek was this small pavilion. The rook is pre-cast concrete. Some internal concrete block walls have been knocked down. On the northern end of this little pocket has once been a church summer camp. In the satellite image you can see a patch of little concrete pads. Those were tent sites for the camp. Every summer the folks would gather out here for a two-week long revival camp meeting; I recall seeing them there as a teenager (1970s). All the men and most boys wore which shirts, and some had ties. The gals all wore long dresses, despite it being typically hot weather.

Some mapping services show this as a park, but I believe it’s now private land and up for lease with signs promising they will “build to suit.”

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Photography: Old and New

Posted on March 11, 2018 by ehurst

I took my first longish ride for this season last Thursday. I now regret not taking my bigger camera. In the future, I’ll need to make sure I don’t fail again. I missed a chance to catch a roadrunner in a field just off the road. So the first image is an old pump house, something that was common and necessary back in the days when this was rural property before city services ran this way. There are fireplugs, but I’m not sure if full municipal water service is ubiquitous in this area just yet. The home that once required this particular pump house is long gone, and the next nearest house was abandoned a couple years ago. You can see the wild regrowth taking over the place.

This ride took me north up Midwest Boulevard to Wilshire and west over the hills to Kelly Avenue. That was the southern edge of the antenna farm. Kelly is currently under widening construction, so I was able to ride in the dirt roadbed all the way to my next turn. Cutting through Plum Hill, I headed south on Prospect, then Grand Boulevard, and picked up the Katy Trail bike path. From there it took me back to NE 4th and an easy glide back home. This mansion stands up on Kelly where I took that dirt roadbed detour. I’ve watched this thing, and it seems to me they took about four or five years building it. They definitely took their time and did it right. It’s nothing at all like the common McMansions everywhere else along the route I rode. This one has fully matching architecture and they left the old brick silo standing, but made the cow pond much nicer.

But because I’m so disappointed with the images that didn’t turn out well, I’m going to change my habits. I’ll leave the saddlebags on my bike and start slogging around my better camera gear. I think it’s worth the trouble to start doing it right.

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Teachings of Jesus: Matthew 10:23-27

Posted on March 10, 2018 by ehurst

Jesus offers a fundamental image of His Kingdom. You cannot hope to understand the Covenant, Jehovah, the Messiah or following Christ unless you understand the concept of eastern feudalism. The primary issue in eastern feudalism is that everything is personal. It’s all about people, not physical property or ideas. The core of Creation’s truth is the Person of the Living God.

The Lord told His disciples that they need not worry about leaving an unfinished task in any town or village. Don’t think in terms of performance, with scheduling and checking off each task in each place. If persecution arises, hit the road and visit the next place on your route. If the Twelve spent their whole time running from town to town, they still wouldn’t have time to finish the mission before Jesus was ready to reveal Himself as Messiah. The mission actually didn’t rest on their shoulders; they were merely participants in something too big for any human or group of humans to accomplish.

What did they suppose was the point of this exercise? It was to learn how to be like their Master. Here’s the very soul of feudalism in a Hebrew society: seek to emulate your Lord. Insofar as it is possible, a disciple would become a carbon copy of his teacher. It was the same with the sheikh and his household. The duty of anyone serving someone else was to absorb the character and purposes of their master. How do you suppose you get promoted to those plum assignments? You think and act so much like your master, instinctively representing his interests, that he could trust you with great measures of his authority.

Then Jesus makes a sarcastic comment about how the Pharisees accused Him of being Beelzebub (a nickname for the Devil). If they called Him Beelzebub, whatever it is that earned Him that label should characterize His disciples, too. Let these men learn to emulate Him by going out among their nation so that when the Messiah declares His reign, they can be ready to assume high positions of authority in His domain. It’s more important that the disciples do the job right than rush to do it everywhere they could possibly go. Don’t worry about resistance to the message.

This is not some secret mission on behalf of a secret plot to overthrow the current government of the Jewish people. There’s no reason to sneak around; be bold. The only reason this might appear covert is because nobody seems to understand the Covenant any more, and they certainly wouldn’t recognize the Messiah, the guy they keep calling Beelzebub. It’s more important that the disciples do the job right than rush to do it everywhere they could possibly go. Don’t worry about resistance to the message. Publicize everything about the Messiah; hide nothing. Promote your Master’s reputation.

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His Work in Us

Posted on March 10, 2018 by ehurst

We are up against one very massive barrier in American society in particular, and it’s a major problem within the broader Western world at large. A critical element in Western thinking is to deny anything above the intellect, to deny that there can be anything above it. In the context of Western Civilization, nobody is going to take us seriously when we talk about the heart-led way.

You would think their brains have died, been cooked and pickled, no longer able to grow. Most of the time you can’t even discuss it without losing them. Even among fervent American Christians, there is a weird psychological trick that happens when you say, “You gotta have faith.” Most serious believers get that part about not trusting their feeble intellects, but then, because there is no place for heart-led conviction, “have faith” means spook-ifying the whole thing. There’s no space above the intellect, so the issue is thrust into spooky territory that equates to superstition.

They can sense Christ calling, and they can feel the pull of conviction, but their minds can’t process how to proceed because the mind has no concept of authority without the reflexive insistence on logical proof. So we have this vast library of Christian self-help books that build a psychology of believing things out of sheer discipline. They try to create something that doesn’t exist, cannot exist because it relies on the fallen intellect. They remain sensitive to the accusation that faith is not reasonable. They seek to defend faith on the grounds of reason, and it’s just not there.

It’s not there as long as they allow non-Christian Westerners to exclude a vast wealth of non-Western scholarship. As soon as you go there, most Western Christians balk. They’ve had it so deeply drummed into their heads that this is barbarism, stepping down from the lofty heights of firm scholarship. They can’t seem to break the mental association that if something isn’t resting on reason, it can only be resting on sentiment and emotion. The word “mysticism” takes on the connotation of lacking the solid ground of reason.

And they keep reading this back into the Bible. They don’t understand how the ancient Hebrew intellectual culture would reject the Western bias toward reason. If it were possible to interview people like Abraham in English, he would struggle to work past the intellectual barriers inherent in the language due to closed definitions. In his ancient world, Abraham would have considered a whole separate category of “reason” that rests on a faculty above the intellect, that is not merely sentiment.

And Abraham would rely on parable to discuss these higher things. Parable is not mere metaphor; it’s more than a figure of speech. It’s an intellectual approximation, an approach to higher truth that indicates something without neat intellectual boundaries. The whole point of parable — parabolic language — is to signal to the brain to refer back to that higher faculty, to allow truth which it cannot itself handle directly.

This brings us back to that fancy word “epistemology.” It’s a word that arose in ancient Greece from the philosophy of folks like Aristotle and Plato. It asks a double-pronged question: (1) What can we claim to know as truth (2) such that we can act on it? What is valid knowledge; what’s real? He was aware of mysticism — it was all around him. He was forging a novel approach by denying mysticism as a valid source of “knowing.” It was he who cast all revelation and faith down into the pit of mere sentiment. In his arrogant trust of intellect, he created a false god of reason.

His new deity was imaginary; he made the mistake of thinking it could be infallible. He imagined that the mind could be separated from emotion and sentiment. This is utterly false. Human emotion is a part of the intellect. This is why people can observe the same phenomena, presume that it can be objectified, and still come up with different evaluations. It’s why debate itself even exists. No two of us will have the exact same desires attached to our human existence in terms of objective outcome, because no two of us can ever quite agree on what is good and right about something, since it affects us differently. In other words, we each have an instinct to preserve our personal interest, and we deceive ourselves into imagining that our personal desires are the most reasonable option. You cannot have intellect that isn’t tinged by sentiment.

But you can have the voice of faith coming down into your mind from the heart, a higher faculty that deals in things the mind cannot handle. This is a wholly different epistemology; it is a valid approach that everyone prior to Plato and Aristotle understood and trusted. This is the thing that will remain a barrier every time you seek to engage anyone who stands in Western epistemology. Even when you talk to Christians about faith, something inside of their heads diverts the nature of the discussion into false territory. The translation is largely subconscious and reflexive.

If we are going to continue building this religion of Radix Fidem, we will have to gather a body of scholarship that is non-Western. We need a wholly different psychology that includes mysticism as, not just valid, but more valid than reason. Honestly folks, I’ve been looking for this and haven’t found much out there. That means that we have to create our own parallel civilization, no small task. This will be our gift to future generations of believers whose hearts are awakened and called by God. This is His work in us.

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The Hedgerow of Lies 4

Posted on March 9, 2018 by ehurst

It’s not necessary to dig any deeper into the debate about Judaism and Jews.

God has said repeatedly to His Chosen that He longs for them to return home to His revelation. We would love it if Jews would return to their ancient Hebrew roots and live the Covenant as Jesus their Messiah taught it.

But their animosity toward the genuine Hebrew mystical approach Jesus taught is long forgotten by Jews because it’s long forgotten by Christians. I doubt there are any sage Kabbalistic elders keeping an eye out for what we teach here. Instead, it’s a broad general instinct to take it as an insult when anyone doesn’t swallow their claim to still be God’s Chosen people. This claim stands despite having long forgotten what the Covenant of Moses requires of them, the covenant upon which they stake the claim of their identity.

As noted in The Cult, our problem today is not Jewish religion. Our problem is the single biggest element of Jewish politics: Zionism. Yes, we know that those who scream about antisemitism have agreed to protect Zionism. Still, there are way too many Jews (both religious Jews and merely ethnic Jews) who could care less what I think or teach, but Zionists have shown themselves to be a real threat. In particular, our biggest problem will be Zionist Christians.

Throughout history it was always the proto-Zionists and their false Messianic Expectations. This is what Jesus faced and fought in His own disciples. The Messiah came to die for sins, not to grant the Pharisees their dream of conquering the world and enslaving Gentiles. He had no intention of making the world a better place, but of teaching people how to escape it. He warned very early that following Him meant facing the hatred of the religious and political establishment. Today we who follow Him out of this world still face hostility from the same source, the religious and political establishment.

Today’s Pharisees are Zionist Christians. They have taken up the mantle of legalism in reading the Bible. They are today’s Judaizers hounding any Christians who are insufficiently enthusiastic in supporting modern Israel. They insist there must be a literal apocalypse so that Christ can return, and the key to bringing that about is having the whole world gang up on Israel. Thus, they encourage everything Israel does to provoke the rest of the world. In their eyes, the most insufferable whining and spiteful abuse Israel can dish out is not just good, but utterly necessary. It didn’t matter to the Pharisees of Jesus’ day that they had long completely departed from Moses, and it doesn’t matter to Christian Zionists today. They believe God is over a barrel on this because He left a prophetic word that could be twisted this way.

Our position is that we don’t take Israel seriously in her claims. If she doesn’t adhere to the Law of Moses as taught by Jesus, then it’s just another example of utterly fallen human politics. Her claims to biblical promises are merely noise. Worse, it is patently transparent that Zionists are playing their Christian friends, and the Zionist Christians return the favor, both in the most cynical way possible. Meanwhile, Satan smirks at how both sides have managed to grab the whole world’s attention and bring about the most inexcusable human suffering. Everybody is forced to deal with the “Jewish Question;” Zionists won’t allow anyone to escape it.

Nobody’s attacking Israel; most of us could care less what she does, but Israel is attacking the whole world using false shame, constantly demanding tribute for the privilege of sharing the same planet with her. See it for what it is, folks: the biggest lying distraction Satan could have ever cooked up to keep folks from pursuing genuine biblical shalom.

Unlike the populist conspiracy theorists, we see no need to act, no need to defend ourselves against this madness. Sometime in the near future, this corrupt racket will reach a fever pitch as the resources will be exhausted and the extravagant waste will run out. Just when the Zionists think they have their final victory in sight, it will disappear. Israel is going to do something utterly insufferable, something that shocks the conscience of the whole world and be justly destroyed for it. This will be the New Holocaust to justify another century of whining and manipulation.

Meanwhile, this mess will provoke an exodus from Zionist churches here in the US. It will be a crisis that could destroy American Zionist Christianity, in the sense that there will simply be no money and people. They’ll have to abandon their massive facilities and the vast money empires will evaporate.

This is what I see coming. The only reason it’s important to share this is so you’ll see this train wreck coming and step aside. Let the Zionists take their headlong rush to destruction. Don’t engage them if you can avoid it. If they try to shove it in your face, ask them what happened to the Covenant of Moses:

Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

That sounds nothing like the Talmud, yet it applies to any entity claiming the name of “Israel” today, as it sums up the Covenant upon which her identity stands. What happened to the mission to reveal God’s mercy and love for His Creation? What happened to the mission to show the light of revelation to the world? Where is the reverence for a holy God? Have you seen the moral filth that characterizes modern secular Israel? Jesus didn’t call us to war, but to go into all the world and share the gospel.

And we lovingly share it with Chrisitians and Jews along with everyone else.

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