Lord, Open Their Eyes

Posted on January 11, 2018 by ehurst

One of the primary consequences of the American Christian obsession with “going to Heaven” is the obvious estrangement from Biblical Law and the riches of living in shalom in the fallen world. It’s more than mere disconnected doctrine, though; it’s alienation from the heart-led way. If you are chasing the vaguely Christianized myth of Valhalla, you are left with only your fallen wits to construct a holy life.

Here’s where it gets really perverted. Western Christianity as a whole stands on a very confused mass, a mixture of Greco-Roman and Germanic tribal paganism, the worst aspects of both. The recipe is some neo-classical rationalism mixed with a very dreary suspicion of demons behind every bush. Western Christians don’t differentiate between fallen mankind and the unfallen rest of Creation. To them, the natural world is spooky and inherently hostile; it must be conquered. That conquest is via reason and science, on the surface at least. Throw the Bible in this mix and the resulting Christian religion is more heathen than biblical. The depth of wisdom from the Ancient Near East (ANE) is lost entirely.

American Christianity is largely Platonic behind the scenes. That business with the “Allegory of the Cave” is deeply embedded. For them, Heaven is a doctrine, an article of orthodoxy on the face, but the actual body underneath assumes that reality is the ugly real world, while the ideal is unachievable. They associate God and Heaven with this unachievable Platonic ideal. Thus, while they can recite all the proper doctrines about Heaven, their subconscious orientation isn’t buying it. Instead, they find themselves with an instinctive push to perfect this world by conquest. Not content to conquer nature, they insist all mankind must be compelled to bow the knee to their image of a better real world. That’s how they read the Great Commission.

In their unconscious thinking, they agree with the Muslims that God requires us to forcefully subject the world to His will. American Christians can sing, “This Is My Father’s World,” but they don’t believe a word of it. This is their world and it had better learn to kiss their Christian asses.

In previous posts here I’ve pointed out how this is the natural result of the Judaizers trying to make Christianity more Jewish. This is the Judaism that Jesus condemned as a man-made departure from true Old Testament religion. Oh, and of course, this simply must include a favorable attitude toward Zionism. American Christianity, the evangelical branch in particular, is pickled in the doctrine that somehow, Israel never quite got their full conquest of the Promised Land. Thus, God still “owes” them an endless repeat until a modern Jewish State has full military control over some imaginary Greater Israel. That means all of Palestine, Lebanon, and chunks of Jordan and Syria, plus however much of the Sinai they decide later they might want.

The United States will not rest until Israel has at least that much. Otherwise, Christ won’t come back, doncha know? He still has to crown Himself the Messiah of some victorious Israel. Meanwhile, Zionists cynically manipulate the US with every intention of claiming all the wild Messianic Expectations with themselves as their own Messiah.

This undying Crusader instinct in American Christian religion is a disturbing specter of hatred and mass slaughter. This is where we get the hucksterism in evangelism and empire building, both in terms of worldly influence and mass facilities, as well as militarily in the rest of the world. Missions and military — the masses must be conquered and converted to the Christian American way of life. This is “Judeo-Christianity.”

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves. (Matthew 23:15)

Because we of Radix Fidem do not participate in this madness, most American Christians regard us as not proper Christians at all. It’s not that we are anti-Zionist, but that we are insufficiently enthusiastic about the whole thing. It’s a lot to overcome before we are heard.

Our only response is to simply live Biblical Law and trust the Lord to open those teachable moments. Unlike the sales-pitch evangelism, we don’t manipulate people into a decision. We know that the initiative lies in the hand of God as to when, where and how He moves to awaken the hearts of His people. We don’t try to nail down who is going to Heaven, only seek to guide folks to the full treasure piled up in plain sight of those who see with the eyes of the heart.

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Many Are Called; Few Respond

Posted on January 10, 2018 by ehurst

We cannot know what Adam and Eve knew when they ate the Forbidden Fruit. We do get the feeling they were led astray, which is what we would expect. Satan came to them as a powerful archangel and they respected his guidance. There is a sense in which Adam knew better than to eat the Fruit of Knowledge; it was a pretty straightforward command from God. Still, the curse in Genesis 3 makes clear that culpability is shared.

What’s most important is where it all leaves us at the end of the narrative: We are fallen creatures, alienated from God and His Creation. We are in desperate need of guidance how to live now that we are outside of Eden. We still have that instinctive knowledge in the heart, but we need grace to reawaken the subjection of the mind to the heart. The means to getting our attention on that problem is the admittedly limited revelation via the Law Covenants.

Hebrews 1:1-3 tells us that the succession of Law Covenants and the narratives of how things worked out were never meant to be the final answer. They should have been sufficient; the image of how God portrayed Himself was as the head of household and we as straying children. It could have, and should have, worked out just fine, but in reality it did so only during brief stretches of history. So Hebrews tells us that God sent His own Son to provide the final revelation of what we must know to live as fallen creatures.

Granted, a lot more came with that, but we dare not lose sight of that fundamental understanding that Jesus was the personification of God’s will for fallen mankind. Jesus remains today the Flaming Sword at the gate of Eden. While His teaching indicates that, for example, the Covenant of Moses was imperfect, it was nonetheless a substantially accurate revelation of God’s divine moral will. So we have the Gospel accounts of things Jesus said to indicate what Moses might have said better. Who can forget His shocking correction of the business of divorce? But the focus remained on how to live, not how to climb into Heaven.

This is something virtually every American Christian ignores. I’m not sure anyone can explain it clearly enough, how American minds are so obsessed with going to Heaven, even as those same minds reject the ancient understanding of what “Heaven” means. You have this awful situation where American Christians have built up a vast lore of misunderstanding about the nature of the Spirit Realm. They insist on working hard to obtain something that does not exist. This is part of a much bigger lie manifested in Decision Theology.

Nothing in Scripture talks about a decision to “be born again.” Americans miss the whole point of Jesus’ comments to Nicodemas in John 3. All of the emphasis, from Genesis to Revelation, is on seizing the instinct burned into every human soul to walk in obedience to our Creator in this world. Part of the problem is misunderstanding what the phrase — “what must I do to be saved” — meant to the folks who are recorded asking that question in the Bible. The American reading of English translations comes with a pre-loaded lie about that. It’s not a question about going to Heaven; it’s about how to reclaim the divine heritage of Eden in this life below. That’s what it meant to them; we have ample resources to prove that, but no one wants to pay attention to the scholarship and literature of those times.

To the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) mind, the question of going to Heaven or Hell took care of itself if you bothered to answer the more important question of obeying the divine revelation regarding this life here below. I’ve been castigated for saying that; no American believer wants to hear that. Yet the vast array of honest scholarship examining the ANE intellectual approach to things is clear: Those ancient people never pretended to have an intellectual grasp of eternal things. They had parables and common images they used to indicate certain ideas about it, but they never pretended it could be reduced to clear descriptive terms. They were reverent about such things, never daring to presume fallen people could claim to declare the truth of such things.

Yet, here we have American Christians simplistically insisting all you have to do is just “believe in Jesus” and it’s all good. Despite all the verbiage associated with that kind of false gospel, they treat it like a magic pill you can swallow. And they insist this was something altogether new in God’s plan, so folks who died before that must have gone into some kind of Purgatory or something, but they didn’t get to go to Heaven because there wasn’t a Jesus in their day to believe in. I’ll say it again: In the average American Christian theology, people didn’t go to Heaven before Jesus came along. In the American Christian mind, Jesus represents a total break in the continuity of thousands of years of human history. They cannot see how Jesus was the final answer in a long line of consistent revelation.

In Radix Fidem, we must strive to establish that religion is not about “going to Heaven” in that sense, as if it were some better quality of Valhalla — the common American theological assumption. We strive to return to the ANE thoughts about such things, that we cannot possibly know, and need to be very careful how we even speak of such things. More to the point, it’s not for us to worry about. Paul’s Letter to the Romans says it about as bluntly as possible: God holds the initiative in His hands. You can’t choose Heaven, and Hell is the default. But don’t worry about it, because God is the definition of justice when it comes to such things. He doesn’t owe you any explanation that your intellect can grasp. Instead, worry about how you are going to obey His divine will in the here and now.

So we emphasize Biblical Law and reclaiming the divine heritage of shalom while living in this fallen world. We rhapsodize about how it brings us in heart-led communion with reality itself. We see Jesus as the One who put it all within easy reach; we just have to search our souls until we can reconnect the conscious awareness to the heart-mind. Suddenly we discover some part of us always knew we belonged in Heaven, and we quit worrying about it. Now we have the balance of our human existence to reclaim all the promises of God arising from His divine will, as revealed in His Son, and which we summarize under the term Biblical Law. We are told those promises are a down-payment on Eternity.

It’s a deeply heart-breaking reality to know how the vast hoard of American Christians have been led away from that. With few exceptions, they are living in darkness, enslaved to a massive lie. If it were a matter of sacrificing something of myself to restore them to their divine heritage, I’d jump at the chance. But such heroism is not a part of the picture. They each must turn to their own heart-led path individually. It has to be a conscious choice, the one true decision they can and must make. So I’m praying daily: Lord, how can I get the word out? What can I do or say to get their attention? The vast majority of them are hardened against this mighty gift of God, so it’s a very sorrowful mission to seek out those rare few individuals God has touched and who are ready for something different.

The Kingdom of Heaven starts here and now.

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The Magic Jesus Wand

Posted on January 9, 2018 by ehurst

Some readers will not get this; sometimes it’s very hard to untangle the lies of linear thinking and binary logic. It’s a standard feature of American theology, as if human reason was the rule to which all belief must bow the knee. One of the saddest things I confront is how locked in this is for so many people. They are trapped inside an intellectual prison and refuse to see that the door is wide open to walk out.

This is why I make so much of non-Western thinking. The Bible is an Eastern book about an Eastern religion. It arises from Hebrew intellectual traditions, a tradition God built as part of His revelation. Hebrew culture was a part of the wider Ancient Near Eastern civilizations, with a radically different approach to thinking compared to the West. The Bible presumes an organic approach, seeking to understand how things are connected in a whole. It doesn’t try to divide things out into neat little packages that can be carried around fully separated and segregated into chunks that are easily handled by Aristotelian logic.

The revelation of God comes to us in the form of a feudal covenant. Even daring to call it “law” almost guarantees most Americans will lock up the concept in false categories. We were never supposed to think of His Law Covenants in terms of “law” as we experience it in our Western society. We were supposed to see it as a manifestation of the nature of reality. If the Law Covenants reflect reality itself, how could the Law cease to exist?

Most American Christians are hung up on this false English translation of Romans 6:14. It’s not so much a technical error of word rendering, but of very carelessly constructed mental associations. The whole context of Romans 6 is that the concept of covenant is still a covenant; it still holds obligations for those who embrace it. It’s how our Heavenly Father makes us His children. Instead of servants under a code of conduct, we are children under His personal communion. We are expected to grow in “grace,” meaning that we will gain a better understanding of His divine moral character, and gain the power to live it.

Paul elsewhere warns (2 Timothy 2:15) that growing in grace means going back and studying the Old Testament guidance so that we can grasp His divine moral character by the example of His dealings with Israel. There has always been a certain sense in which that written code was just a parable; the ultimate truth of God was always within reach of the heart, but the mind needed conditioning (Deuteronomy 30:11-14). We read the Law Covenants so our minds get used to what the heart demands. The Law Covenants reveal the character of God, and explain what our hearts already know.

In that sense, the Scripture refers to Jesus as the ultimate revelation, the Living Law of God. He is the fullest possible expression of God’s divine moral character (John 1:14). He didn’t change the Law; He was the Law. God’s Creation did not suddenly cease to operate by the divine moral character of God. It did find a better explanation in the Person of Christ.

So when we point out something in the Old Testament as a particular point of obligation, it’s not as if Jesus took all of that away. If we are going to claim Jesus as our covering, it’s a lie if we do not obey His teaching. And by no means did His teaching contradict the teaching in the Law of Moses; it clarified the heart-led meaning behind the words of Moses. To maintain the covering of Jesus, we still need to maintain the moral covering of good Christian leaders. The need for moral covering does not cease, but Jesus takes His place at the top level of that covering. His presence there does not remove all other coverings, but places them firmly under His authority.

It’s an old and tiresome feminist lie to suggest that, since we have Jesus, women can follow Christ and ignore human male authority, godly or otherwise. This lie has destroyed a lot of lives. It’s a lie from Satan that seeks to ignore how the revelation of God declares the nature of our existence and reality itself. Jesus is not a magic wand. Women are still subject to a level of moral deception that does not affect men, and spiritual birth in Christ doesn’t change that. By the same token, men still can’t get a darn thing done without the support of godly women. Nothing has changed in Creation; what was required before is still required today. The difference is that we can see far more clearly those requirements because Jesus is much more than a written rendering of revelation; He is the character of God in human form.

So instead of some law code staking out an approximate path of obedience, we have Jesus walking a path of obedience ahead of us. Jesus is the one who makes the demands once codified in Law Covenants, and His demands are sometimes easier, but sometimes much more strict than those of Moses. This is the point Paul was making in Romans 6. Grace is not different from Law in substance, but it grants us the power to obey. Without the Law, your mind has no idea how to obey Christ.

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Abraham’s Footprints

Posted on January 9, 2018 by ehurst

I’m not fit to tie Abraham’s shoes, but I do know something about how he got them dirty.

He left behind everything he knew, a world where he was important and comfortable, and changed to a wholly different lifestyle. Eventually he was a wholly different man. He took with him only what God said he needed to serve Him. I’m there. I resolved to forsake my Western heritage and wander in a land I had never seen. It’s the Promised Land for me.

Having left it all behind, I’m still discovering things in my background that can’t follow me on this journey. So I keep discarding things that won’t make the trip. That includes a lot of things that once meant so very much to me, including my psychology education and training. It was a big part of my college years, along with a substantial library of books. Yesterday’s post and the attached comments could be mistaken for me just being difficult. That’s okay if that’s what you read there. I’m not telling anyone else they have to follow me; I’m telling where I feel called to go.

An awful lot of that stuff just does not belong in my new life. I’m not better than you or somehow more holy for making these hard decisions. You aren’t less holy for picking over my discards and salvaging things you can use. You have your own calling.

For the past few months, I’ve had a very heavy burden of care for all of you, and for a great many more to come. I am firmly convinced God intends to give us more souls. Many will simply join us here in our virtual parish. But a significant increase will come in the many little churches out there waiting to be born. I felt a powerful sense of duty to make sure I laid a good foundation for that second part of our growth. There are still some questions to answer on that, but I sense in my heart that things are now sustainable and I am at peace. In other words, I can now afford to give some attention to other things, things yet unseen.

But I need to deliver one more stone for that foundation. In the Ancient Near East, the male head of household was the default priest for his family. He was the moral covering and it was essential that he live by Biblical Law. Once the Lord had prospered him enough, he would seek someone qualified to separate out from the daily tasks and serve full time as the priest for the clan. It was that issue of separation to the task that made so much difference. That priest was to busy himself studying all the rituals and arcane knowledge, and build up the infrastructure for worship. It meant preparing a bunch of holy stuff that wasn’t used for anything else.

In the Covenant of Moses, God made an agreement to take the whole Tribe of Levi as His anointed and separated priesthood. Of course, most of that tribe didn’t wear the robes, but they could if needed. Only on rare occasions could anyone else touch anything involved in the Temple service. Keep this in mind as we face God’s hand in the coming days so you’ll understand what He requires of us all.

Into the foreseeable future, most of you will be blessed beyond measure if you can just get your immediate family to take seriously your commitment to Radix Fidem and our covenant. Nonetheless, with all solemnity, I tell you that many of you will become the anchor point for a “home cell group” — a house church. You’ll be the elder until the Lord raises up someone else. It’s entirely possible that a few of you will see explosive growth and will need a lot more guidance. That’s part of what we’ve been working on, but some of it has to wait until it’s needed. The most important step is that you are prepared in your heart.

I’ll assume that if you are reading this, you’ve already herd the call to leave your old life behind and travel toward the Promised Land. It won’t be the same as mine, nor anyone else’s calling. We are preparing to establish a new nation of folks who have all left behind their old life. We are trying to prepare a path for the destination they seek, a shared existence in a completely different world, one with its own culture and heritage.

We follow Abraham’s footsteps.

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Toward a Heart-led Psychology

Posted on January 8, 2018 by ehurst

Just a review first: The single greatest influence on popular American thinking about psychology is Freud. That’s sad, because we know that Freud was a sick, twisted pervert. Not only did he inject his perversion into his theory, but forced his clients to confess to the same perversions that filled his tormented soul (psychologists call it “projection”). His treatment of them was limited to his obsessions. But he was brilliant in one respect: His id-ego-superego is a very smart reduction of Western mythology. It sounds like truth to most Americans simply because it blossoms from the same soil as Western Christian mythology. There is a vast library of Christian teaching that rests on Freud’s theories, some of it openly so.

As Freud’s most famous disciple, Jung never seemed to suffer Freud’s worst perversions. There was a clean break between them eventually. Jung went on to become a major American influence at a less popular and more academic level, but his assumptions about reality weren’t that different from Freud’s. He simply included a much wider understanding of the same Western culture. He made the same mistake as most Western thinkers: Failure to notice the difference between common human traits and those peculiar to Westerners alone. His anthropology was distinctly Western, which is how he came to be still one of the strongest influences in Western academic thinking today. He did, after all, study European mythology in depth. He did have some pretty good ideas, but they are best understood as contextual working models, not fundamental theory.

For example, we can blame him for the foundations of the Myers-Briggs Test and the resulting image of personality types. For most people, it’s not a bad frame of reference, but for the heart-led it is highly frustrating. The test forces heart-led people to choose between a collection of falsehoods on some questions. Those who take this test end up being lumped into categories that may not fit, and it offers nothing to help them understand internal mechanics that are outside the neat little framework. Myers and Briggs left no room for the heart-led psyche, in part because Jung didn’t either.

Jung continues to have a powerful influence in American academia. I want to cite a peculiar example here: a video embedded in a comment here on the blog. I want you to notice Dr. Peterson is both somewhat a fan of Jung, but also much better educated about Ancient Near Eastern thinking. This video offers a parable of human existence, and while Peterson doesn’t specifically emphasize the Fall, he notes that fallen existence is best viewed as a substrate of chaos on which we can choose to build order and insulate ourselves somewhat from the threats of human evil. He equates such efforts at order as trying to obey God. He warns that any attempt to cheat on the individual level threatens the whole effort at keeping order and goodness. We are networked invisibly, so nothing we do in private can be kept to ourselves in that sense.

This is wholly consistent with our doctrine of connection via our participation in Creation. We must emphasize that connected-ness against the common Western assumption of the individual. Peterson emphasizes that you can discern the effects of the connection even if you can’t possibly understand its nature. We are morally accountable to the whole cosmos. This concept is a long step down the path of heart-led awareness. I doubt Dr. Peterson would embrace our teaching wholesale, nor should we embrace his, but there are glimpses of truth here that we can use.

The heart-led way is path, not a place. I once thought the Myers-Briggs test was okay, but now I hate it because it’s so frustrating and confining. As is typical of anything Western, that test makes no room for the shepherd soul. My position is that it may do you some good, but don’t take it too seriously because you will surely break out of the matrix sooner or later. It’s for the heart to discern what fits today, and what does not, but to keep the reference for later when it might be okay. We don’t treat human knowledge and reason as any kind of route to reality, but as a working model that sometimes fits and sometimes is your enemy. Reality is a real person with all the same expectations of variability from day to day.

There are other schools of psychology, and the best ones don’t take themselves too seriously. For example, Transactional Analysis doesn’t presume to establish a final theory, only a working model within Western culture. There is something called Logotherapy that works quite well among mainstream American Christianity, but it recognizes its own limits. Logotherapy can help believers grasp the notion of conviction as stronger than the flesh. We can learn a lot from the Rosemead School of Psychology, too, because it seeks a functional integration with other branches of academic pursuit.

But the bottom line is learning to hear and trust your own heart. Not as the guide to truth for all the world, but trust it as truth for your own life. It won’t always make sense to your head, but if it brings a sense of peace with God, that’s the ultimate good.

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Draper Point 7

Posted on January 7, 2018 by ehurst

Point 7 isn’t much to look at. The terrain around it is much more interesting. This arm of land jutting out into the northwest corner of Draper Lake contains the canyon, and the ridge hosts several lovely features, like that cascading rock ledge I climbed once while dragging my bike with me. But it was a fun ride and a good workout just following the old shore trail all the way around.

It was a good chance to think through something. That is, I needed a way to get my mind to submit to the wisdom of my heart, and a vigorous ride like that is perfect. I stopped out on the point for something like a half-hour to let the sound of waves lapping on the shore aid the process or prayer and contemplation. I love the isolation where I can talk out loud and even get a little animated at the folly of some people.

On the outbound leg, I stopped at a clearing on the cove. These north-reaching coves are all still frozen from two weeks mostly below freezing temperatures. I tossed a fist-sized chunk of red sandstone out onto the ice; the rock shattered and left a tiny mark in the ice. That’s what it’s like dealing with some populist crusaders, so hardened that they listen to nothing. Every message that isn’t in total slavish agreement with them is vilified as the selfsame evil they claim to fight.

I’m referring to the Pro-Trump Pizzagate crusaders. In the name of fighting child sex trafficking, their real agenda is the most mindless partisan politics. Nobody will complain if an individual child is saved from abuse, so it’s not a waste of time to track down someone engaged in such abuse. But these folks are convinced they are saving the world, and get quite angry when you suggest they might be missing a far bigger and more substantial target that stands to rescue millions of children. These people claim their little humps are the only true mountains out there. Meanwhile, they have no clue how this sex trafficking works, particularly when it comes to what makes is possible to keep that trade alive.

They don’t understand that Western Civilization itself is the primary problem. They participate in the horrible lie that Western culture is the quintessence of biblical Christian religion. Western culture idolizes youth and sexual license at the same time; it’s only natural that most adults harbor some measure of pedophilia. It takes a good measure of self-loathing to be so zealous about it when chasing the random hapless fool who gives into the temptation. Folks, when you view it from the revelation of God, child molestation is wrong for the same reason most human sexual activity is wrong: it’s contrary to our design and is destructive. It plays into Satan’s hands in surrendering the blessings of shalom. In the Bible, there is nothing particularly sacred about childhood; in Western culture, it’s a full-blown idolatry. That idolatry is a primary cause, a fundamental reason the West has such a big problem with pedophilia.

But setting that aside, when these crusading zealots claim they are trying to go after the perversions of the elite, they carefully ignore how the political machinery that keeps their favorite party in power is no less guilty than the opposition. Has everyone forgotten the Franklin Scandal? No one seems to notice that there was no cleansing of the system; the same Republican people who made Franklin happen are still involved in politics. Only, now they do a better job of hiding their crimes against children. The Democrats are simply more often honest about their perversions; several activists have archived images from a public art show funded by lefties that would turn your stomach — including images of children. You can find the links if you wade through 4chan and similar forums. At this point, you would think the crusaders are picking on the lefties only because the lefties are more open about it. It’s pure political hypocrisy if they aren’t going after the righties who do the same stuff. But then, there are lefty crusaders who get their videos on CNN, for example, talking about how the Republican policies are making child sex trafficking legally possible all over the world. It’s true, but still misses the point.

The crusaders are lost in the woods. The people who get caught are either non-elites, or servants of the elites thrown under the bus. The elites who are relentless in pursuing such pleasures own the legal system, so they’ll never be prosecuted. It’s not about the sex for them, but the thrill of abusing other humans. If it were a simple matter of sexual pleasure, it would be really quite easy to sexualize a large number of children who would be quite willing to engage in such activity. It’s already being done, actually a standard feature of growing up in many plutocrat families, but the market is relatively small. It’s more useful to pervert and manipulate people using the degrading slavery version that shocks us. Do you know that there is a large market in child sexual snuff films? (Look into the Dutroux dossier.) The elites have leaked it just to taunt the crusaders, who can do nothing to the perpetrators. The murders of those investigating the Franklin Scandal still serve as a warning to stick with going after the small fry.

Sure, I’d get involved in helping to rescue children from trafficking, but I can’t find any sane projects. At least half the time, the child victims are sent through a “recovery program” based on horrific schools of psychotherapy, leaving the kids more tormented and twisted than they were before. And just who among us has not suffered some kind of childhood trauma, sexual or otherwise? Most of us faced things that left us damaged in one way or another, yet we didn’t need that kind of twisting evil to make it into adulthood. If there’s one thing for which a dire need stands, it’s a distinct psychology based on the heart-led way. God is the ultimate healer, and He rebuilds life as it was meant to be.

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Sermon on the Mount 14

Posted on January 6, 2018 by ehurst

Seek the Kingdom First 6:25-34

In Jesus’ day there was no state-operated welfare system to abuse. Instead, there was a covenant under which a person’s extended family was responsible for their welfare, but was also held accountable for most everything else secular government today has hijacked. The context for the whole New Testament was a radically different world than we see around us today. It’s easy to see how American Christianity has missed the point on this passage, given the scolding materialism of our culture.

This lesson continues farther down the same path as the previous, asserting an otherworldly viewpoint. This does not contradict the likes of Proverbs 6:6-11, which castigates the lazy. Jesus addresses life on a wholly different level; His audience would have recognized this. The biggest problem His audience faced was a very unfair economic system that violated the Covenant of Moses and the Talmud. The deck was stacked against the average Jewish peasant because of all the different ways he was scraped of his wages under the thumbs of both nobles and the legalistic middle-class Pharisees.

So for the peasants, the coming of the Messiah would mean a restoration of moral justice. Until He came, it was essential to understand what He would demand, not just dream about what He would do for them. Jesus was telling them not to get hung up on vengeance against their oppressors; that was the Messiah’s job. Don’t be like them in worshiping Mammon. Be true to the pure and ancient teachings of Moses; don’t get hung up on materialism.

Don’t be anxious over worldly concerns. The covenant life was far more than such things. Do you see how God treats the other creatures? The Father takes care of them as members of His household. Birds eat twice their weight each day in food, and the flowers are dressed better than Solomon was. If you could be half so faithful in your calling as they, don’t you think He would be generous about your needs? Can your anxiety have any beneficial affect at all on your human existence? How easily we forget that revelation is meant to restore us to our original state in Eden, serving the Lord as managers over the rest of Creation. Do you imagine He would give preference to the rest of Creation over His appointed managers?

The worst that your oppressors do to you cannot hinder the hand of God in filling your life with shalom. The Gentile nations don’t have the specific and lavish promises Israel has under the Covenant of Moses. They also don’t have the mission of revelation. Live the Covenant and demonstrate obeying the Creator. Focus on standing in His favor as your divine Father; He is not neglectful of what you need to serve Him. Focus your attention and energies on being ready for the coming Messiah; God can easily take care of the rest.

The final verse here is Jesus quoting an ancient proverb that is also in the Talmud. You have enough to occupy yourself today without borrowing from tomorrow’s anxieties.

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We Get Front-row Seats

Posted on January 6, 2018 by ehurst

Radix Fidem is a name I chose because no one else came up with a better idea at the time. Before that I referred to “the roots of faith” in English. The concept of the heart-led way is ancient; even our particular modern teaching here comes from other sources. It dropped neatly in place on top of something else I was teaching about conviction and the will, which in turn I heard from someone else. Even the idea that Christianity (and Old Testament religion) was an eastern religion came from a lecture I heard at OBU in the late 1970s. I didn’t invent any of this. The most I can take credit for is pulling it together and making it academically coherent and consistent.

Just about everything else we do here is experiential rediscovery, giving the appearance that we are making it up as we go along. I freely admit that my academic background is limited, but I am comfortable that I know enough Church History to comprehend what it is we are setting aside and why. I’ve also spent time working directly in several different denominations and traditions and experienced their signature rejection of my convictions. This is what’s behind me, and something similar for some of you, as we move forward with forming what amounts to a new sect of Christianity. I’ve already noted that I was prepared to act alone for my own benefit, but somehow this thing drew others seeking the same joyous discoveries. I can’t explain how that happened.

Nor can I explain the prophetic visions that, so far, keep coming to reality before my eyes. There were some hiccups; I had to discover personally that God can and will change His plans. I remain utterly convinced that some of His plans changed once we began sharing about the heart-led way, and that this one thing is a major element in that change of plans. As I see it, once He got us to accept that teaching, it was no longer necessary to pour out His wrath with such severity. Can I say it like this? He was hoping He could get someone to figure that out and spread the message so He could focus on restoring faith, not so much on destroying sin. Thus, He turned aside from apocalypse. I’m trying to characterize this in terms I can share, but it expresses my convictions.

You don’t have to buy into that if your convictions lead you elsewhere. But I share these things so you’ll understand my orientation. I hold myself accountable to you. When I examine current events and wade through the sewage of propaganda about current events, my heart picks out things to which I give some attention. It’s not a question of whether this or that is factually accurate; I’m in no position to work that out. It’s a matter of seeking peace within my heart, of deciding whether I am comfortable with certain choices and planning accordingly. I’m asking you to evaluate on the same basis. Does your heart witness to this?

My plans say that the banking system will not collapse, but it will take some hard hits. Rather, the primary source of economic distress will be what’s called a “market correction.” What we see on the various stock indexes is not realistic; there’s nothing behind those numbers. I believe the bankers have done a reasonable job of protecting themselves, but Wall Street is full of exuberant idiots. When the credit system starts to crumble, as it soon must, it’s the financial industry that will take the hit.

This will be the source of crisis in the US. God alone knows the details, but the only way you can hope to forecast the net effects is to understand what elements in our national economy rest on stocks, bonds, etc. Some businesses will close, some will limp along, and a few will be largely unaffected, but the level of interdependence is impossible to explain. So the economy will get tough, but it won’t simply stop altogether. I’m trying to avoid being too dependent on any one thing, but keeping in touch with alternatives for the basics of survival.

This is a bad time to take out any kind of loans except personal loans, the only kind protected under Biblical Law. Do you understand how most consumer and commercial loans are made from upstream loans several layers deep? Some of those creditors will be forced to call in all their loans, and that stuff tends to cascade down in painful ways. You could find yourself in a serious bind when some loan outfit demands full payment, something permitted by hidden clauses in the loan agreements under certain conditions. Court ordered repossession is not a pleasant experience, so be wary of dependencies on stuff that you could lose that way. Pray about a back-up plan.

The same goes for where you buy — some of your favorite vendors will disappear. Be prepared to make adjustments. Meanwhile, property crimes will rise quickly. Have you observed how our crazy culture has conditioned folks to entitlement? A significant portion of America’s population is just one step away from desperation and simply giving up on the system. I’m convinced that our God will protect us if we adhere to Biblical Law, but don’t think of it in absolutist terms. He won’t let you face what He can’t carry you through, but stuff will happen to us, too. We have to understand that He will preserve what really matters, not merely what we think is important.

That kind of economic shock will destabilize the political system. It’s already polarized and there’s no turning back. However, the fundamental government system itself is highly dependent on economic continuity, so when that continuity is disturbed, government will break. The problem for us is that a great many weak spots are hidden, so it’s very hard to predict what’s going to break. You might be aware of some of them, so plan accordingly, but only God knows about all of them. He is merciful and will guide those who are listening. Let your heart guide your choices, and make sure your mind is obedient in the most improbable things.

There is virtually nothing you can do about how individual government officials will respond to crisis. Some few are quite wise, but most are barely competent during the best of times. That’s the nature of government — the best people for the job aren’t interested in governing others. What’s left are a bunch of slugs who can’t handle real work. A genuine crisis will expose just how awful they are. This is when frustrated citizen victims turn to various forms of resistance, and that means bloodshed. Some locales will see more chaos than others. You can already guess some of them, but you’ll be surprised by a great many local governments that come apart for no apparent reason.

This outlines my expectations. These are things I pray about and contemplate daily; I recommend it highly. More important than agreeing with me is that you ask the Lord what matters to you, and that you seek His face for your own guidance. I can’t really propose a timetable; some of this has already begun. Each of us will notice different things in different places. The most obvious signal will be that market correction, and I can’t guess what that will look like. The experts say that it can be so labeled only after it happens. And the consequences will cascade down differently for each of us.

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Ax in the Forest

Posted on January 5, 2018 by ehurst

The heart-led way is a lonely path.

On the one hand, we are never actually alone because all of Creation is our friend. On the other hand, that in itself socially isolates us. The fault is with everyone else who avoids this very natural way of living, as God intended. Everyone wants a piece of Eden, but precious few are those willing to face the Flaming Sword to get it.

I certainly never set out to be a loner; it’s not my nature. It’s easily the most unpleasant aspect of my life. It has been the source of constant temptation to moral compromise just to find someone I can talk to, but it never worked, of course. At some point, I gave up and simply resigned myself to social isolation. Yes, I’m blessed with a wife who understands and sticks with me; I don’t take her for granted. I also don’t want to drag her into my personal isolation. I’m not a hermit by nature, but as the consequence of something much bigger than me.

And I couldn’t just remain silent; that’s something burned into my very existence. It’s the nature of moral truth that you simply cannot contain it within yourself. After several false starts, I came to this blog and poured out my heart to all who bothered to pass by and see. Over a period of years, I’ve gathered a few friends in the sense of people who were willing to discuss with me what matters most. It’s the singular blessing of the Internet, in the midst of all that’s wrong with it, that we who are thinly scattered can find each other.

It’s not just wishful thinking that fires my assurance God plans of bring more souls to our virtual congregation. I was ready to make the most of this odd situation, but the Lord says otherwise. Now I’m investing a lot of energy praying and thinking about how to handle an influx on any scale. The visions and dream revelations of a harvest of souls persist, but without a sense of scale. We have to be ready for anything in that sense.

I posted on the forum recently about my concerns regarding establishing unique rituals that reflect our unique approach to religion. This whole question wouldn’t matter so much if we remained a thinly scattered collection of isolated individuals, whose only communion with heart-led souls was virtual, but I’m convinced God has other plans.

And by the same token, we can never allow ourselves to forget that our core constituency will always be people who are forced into social isolation. I’m not sure how much we can do for folks who prefer that kind of isolation; those kind of have come and gone as visitors to this blog. There has to be a place for genuine loners, but it’s not their way to commit to fellowship under a covenant. We’ll bless them with whatever we can offer. Still, we will always have a significant number of people who don’t want to be alone, but the context of their life against which they are called to faith makes social isolation unavoidable.

We are blazing a trail here; this is new territory in Church History. It’s more than simply restoring the heart-led way to Christian religion, but we are starting off with virtually none of the contextual identity that limited every previous religious sect. We are self-consciously neutral, in part as a reaction to all the previous limitations we experienced that drove us out of mainstream religion. But rather than being formless and devoid of identity, we forge a new kind of religious identity based on the nascent culture of the Internet. We are approaching a turning point in human history when it’s no longer a matter of most people living double lives — online and offline — but a rising cultural identity that is rooted in the online world first, and radiates into the offline world, shaping a whole new thing.

This is possible for us because we were first alienated from our old lives by the heart-led way. Without the Internet, it would have been impossible to form a community like this. We are compelled to abandon a world that refuses to move forward, but instead of fighting that world, we simply exit to another that stands waiting and ready to be adopted and adapted. We can and must mold something altogether new. But we have some time, because God isn’t in a hurry with this. His wrath has an awful lot of work to do; there’s a whole massive forest of sin to chop down (Matthew 3:4-12).

We don’t celebrate individualism; we tolerate it as a necessity along the path. The Spirit calls our hearts to communion, first with God, and then His Creation, and finally with penitent fallen souls. We are dragging organizational theory into long-neglected territory, relearning ancient lessons written into the fabric of reality. This will isolate us at first, so we must learn to do isolation very well. We must learn a vivid individual worship and communion with Creation. Without some kind of boundaries, there is no sense of identity as the basis for living and growing. But we must study the lore of boundaries itself, so that we don’t draw them thoughtlessly.

I believe we can afford to deliberate and discern both, what we must do, and what we must leave for others to choose.

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The Intel CPU Flaw Simplified

Posted on January 4, 2018 by ehurst

Maybe you’ve heard about this: Major Flaw in Millions of Intel Chips Revealed. Most of the reports assume too much about what you already know, or obfuscate things and miss the point.

Bottom line: This flaw allows naughty software to sniff the contents of your computer’s active memory. That means such software can read security codes and logins while you are online. And all it would take is crafty JScript on a website using your standard browser to activate this sniffing mechanism. It can’t change information on your computer, and it can’t actually take over your computer, but the flaws can lead to someone finding out your passwords and then taking over your computer, or your bank accounts, etc. Nobody knows if this flaw has actually been used against anyone, but it wouldn’t take that much. Someone has created a test and used it in a laboratory setting. (There’s a good chance the likes of NSA and CIA, for example, knew about it and used it to spy on people.)

Here’s the deal: If your computer has an Intel processor manufactured after 1995, it is very likely it has a serious flaw in it. But this isn’t your common manufacturing flaw; it’s a flaw that arises from a very smart idea gone wrong. Did you know that the speed at which a computer seems to work while you are using it has to do with more than just some advertised numbers? There are all kinds of tricks the processor uses to get ahead of you and make stuff seem faster in terms of the user’s experience. Some researchers have identified a way to use some of those tricks to slip past the normal internal security measures.

This problem affects almost all consumer Intel processors, some Atom processors, and some cellphones, but apparently AMD processors are okay. Nobody is going to offer replacements, so the fix comes in having the operating system close that open door by disabling some portion of these speed tricks. It won’t be easy or quick, but very soon Windows, Linux, and some other operating systems will be updated to mitigate this problem. Everyone involved had agreed to keep it as quiet as possible, and they’ve been dealing with it for a few months now, but it leaked out recently. For past couple of days there’s been a sort of media panic that confuses the issue.

As you might expect, Intel is fighting hard to minimize this thing. They’ve made at least one press release that basically lied about it. On the other hand, Intel’s own employees are scrambling just as hard to help everyone come up with a fix. Thus, they are working to fix Linux and Windows, for example, at Intel’s expense. I believe the Windows patch is due out next week (Patch Tuesday), and Linux distributions will issue their patches any day now.

There’s nothing you can do unless you are willing to use web browsers with no JScript capability, or with scripting disabled. It would take getting used to, and most folks just can’t be bothered. Still, we shouldn’t look for some kind of computer apocalypse this time around.

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