Transparency and Fruit

Posted on November 13, 2017 by ehurst

The fruit is not yet ripe for America’s crisis.

I’m reaching for transparency. Bluntly: You deserve a chance to discount my narrative if it doesn’t apply to you. Your heart rules best when your mind is clear, so I want you to see what’s in the background of my claims to prophesy. The mind does have a role in grasping and discerning, but it requires the heart’s moral guidance. It shouldn’t be mysterious, since the mind can learn to operate with a different frame of reference. Mysticism isn’t spooky nonsense; it’s an orientation based on conscious assumptions. What makes it hard is how much crap our culture puts in our heads about all of this. Transparency helps you unlearn all of that.

Our strategy is not like their strategy. Ours assumes a vision of moral reality that trumps apparent reality. I’ve tried to build a vision of Two Realms, the Spirit Realm and the Fallen Realm. The difference is not easily described; we rely on figurative language — AKA, parables or parabolic language and symbolism. There is a boundary layer where the Spirit and the Fallen Realms overlap, and I refer to this as the moral realm. I avoid making it a label with proper nouns because I want to emphasize that it’s not a thing by itself, but a matter of our perception. The heart can see this overlapping realm in the sense that this is as close as we can get to the Spirit Realm while in our fallen state. Our strategy is all about that boundary layer, so it has to be a different kind of thing altogether compared to common human strategic thinking.

In other words, this moral realm is a matter of faith, not intellectual certainty. Faith brings a certainty that is far more powerful than mere knowledge and reason. Human intellect misses a lot of things that matter when left to its own devices. There is no anchoring point without faith; the intellect is badly damaged and self-deceived. The mind alone will simply work out the demands of human lusts and pretend it all makes perfect logical sense. In this sense, the human lusts include a lot of bogus fears rooted in a social conscience, which in turn is based on some flavor of ambient cultural mythology. Faith arises from awakening your awareness to the heart as a mind above the intellect.

In effect, these terms are overlapping: faith, conviction, and the heart-mind. The only question is where your faith is anchored. The heart-led way is sometimes best explained as a psychology, a set of assumptions about how things work in the human soul.

So when I blather about prophetic things, it’s largely rooted in that broad understanding of convictions about what the moral realm demands of me. That’s a moving target, since I’m still shedding false perceptions, unlearning bad lessons of my fallen culture. Calling it prophetic is simply a way of telling you that I feel a burden of duty to share because of a powerful sense of calling as shepherd. Don’t rely on what I write; learn how I got that stuff so you can rely on your own heart. In a manner of speaking, it’s less a question of my results, and more about my methods.

I’m sure we agree that America is under God’s wrath. If you don’t see that, I suspect you simply don’t understand divine revelation. In blunt terms, America has never obeyed God’s Law; we’ve never been a party to any covenant. America is the ultimate expression of the Enlightenment, the pinnacle of Western Civilization. That civilization in turn is the amalgam of Germanic tribal culture and the shredded remains of Greco-Roman Civilization. And none of that bears any resemblance to a genuinely biblical outlook. So if we take seriously the God of the Bible, it’s painfully obvious He cannot be happy about how America turned out, because it started off quite far from His revelation, and kept getting farther and farther away. All the blather from a highly perverted Enlightenment Christian religion has no bearing on the matter.

Biblical Law is well enough explained to offer indicators of how God’s wrath works. Human nature has not changed, though we are warned it will continue getting worse — it’s the same flavor of bad that it has always been. On top of this, God allows us to take our vast lore of human learning and put it through the grinder of the heart to come up with a fairly accurate assessment of some portion of how all of this works. If we can understand what lies humans tell about themselves, we can understand the core moral failures. From that, we can reliably predict how God will seek to reveal Himself against those failures.

The heart and brain can work in communion to provide sufficient guidance for our mind’s real task in life: It organizes and implements a proper response to revelation. The heart compares current human trends against God’s personality as declared reality’s design. The mind works out what that demands of us. All the while, we keep referring back to our own individual calling. As a matter of conviction, we all know America is doomed. Further, it’s painfully obvious that doom is falling right now. The only question is making our best sense of things to develop a strategy for the same faithful existence we would carry on regardless of circumstances. What does it mean to be faithful to your calling in the current context?

Part of my own answer includes sharing my analysis. The foundation of all prophecy is trying to persuade you to harmonize with God’s nature and personality in the current context. It’s not a question of gathering an audience; it’s a question of obeying the calling to exercise my gifts and allowing God to pull in the audience He sees fit.

As near as I can tell, this wrath is coming in stages, or layers, if you will. Right now we are in a political crisis. An economic crisis is lurking in the background, but these things are all woven together. Seeing how it all grows and bears fruit is part of my calling, as best I understand it. When the fruit is ripe, the Lord will harvest and start stomping the grapes. The details are sketchy right now, but I’m convinced America will be changed. My mental grasp of this indicates the US will be broken into smaller regional federations. On the way, America will pass through some hard economic times.

I believe I see a series of political and cultural shocks, a continuation of the current trend. Somewhere over the horizon, but still rather close, is at least one major economic crisis. It gets fuzzy at this point, but I suspect this economic crunch will result in the break-up of the US, due to irreconcilable differences over how to fix the problems. I can’t predict the level of violence that comes with that, but I don’t see how at least some bloodshed can be avoided. The scary part here is how a major portion of our population is so very blind, so completely unprepared to accept what’s coming. The sense of panic alone will be devastating. And somewhere in the midst of all this will be at least one major military disaster, and a mixture of natural disasters (we’ve already had some with the hurricanes).

We should get through the current winter holiday season before things get started. It’s going to seem slow. Whether you tend to dread it or are looking forward to the entertainment, don’t get too excited. Instead, we should simply note what’s coming and pray about ways to make the most of it. There is a strategy available to us, but we have to recognize that our goal is His glory, which shines brightest through our obedience to Biblical Law and harvesting the blessings. The issue is in those blessings, and how they manifest against the general decline. And the greatest blessing of all is your sense of shalom. So start working toward seeing these radical changes as normal, inevitable and acceptable, and see our adaptation to it as the primary battle. The dragons we slay will be in the panic.

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Privileged Children

Posted on November 12, 2017 by ehurst

One of the things we all hate dealing with is entitled brats. A significant portion of the Millennial Generation suffers under this delusion, a delusion that knows no racial boundaries.

This is not the same thing as the privilege of divine adoption. When that is at work, the first thing you see is someone on their face before God. Humility is a sign to us of someone turning around and walking by the heart.

A portion of Psalm 2 is instructive here:

I will declare the decree:
The Lord has said to Me,
“You are My Son,
Today I have begotten You.
Ask of Me, and I will give You
The nations for Your inheritance,
And the ends of the earth for Your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron;
You shall dash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel.” (vv. 7-9 NKJV)

While this has a historical meaning with David as king, it is also widely known as a Messianic Psalm in symbolism. The Messiah stands up and warns everyone that His Father has granted Him indescribable authority. As part of that authority, the Father tells His Son: If You ask, I will give you the whole world as Your inheritance. You will break them into a countless fragments.

That’s a picture of the the humility inspired by the Spirit of God making His Presence known in your soul. You feel shattered with genuine guilt and a move to repentance. But the whole purpose is to remake you into His People. You become His inheritance, a feudal empire of awakened spirits living by their hearts.

That done, our commission is an extension of His; we invest ourselves in seeking others who need shattering. It’s not for us to decide; there is no grand strategy of going out and turning people into your personal conversion projects. Rather, we live on our faces, as it were, always in awe of His divine power and the wonders He does in our lives. He sends us out to let the world see, and some will respond in due time, asking to know what this is that makes us so powerful.

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Sermon on the Mount 6

Posted on November 11, 2017 by ehurst

Reputation for Honesty 5:33-37

The corrupt oral traditions in Jesus’ day saw the Pharisees and friends holding forth a catalog of various oaths. Each one was supposed to be appropriate for different contexts. These men were swearing on everything imaginable: the Temple, the altar, certain offerings, the City, their own heads — you name it. The really sharp fellows would keep track and watch in case someone tried to be sneaky by using an incorrect oath when making a promise. The Talmud specifically absolves you from having to keep an inconvenient promise if you were smart enough to use a non-binding oath, and the creditor didn’t catch you on it.

Jesus was stating something rather obvious, quoting from Leviticus 19:12 that God forbade people swearing on His name for something they had no intention of doing. It was literally “taking God’s name in vain.” The whole point was to convince someone of your earnest intention. By calling God as witness to the transaction, it was assumed you would incur His wrath for deception, since He was a party as Guarantor. In effect, it was an IOU to God.

Matthew uses a Greek term typically translated as “perjure.” Don’t tell a lie when you use Jehovah’s title as Creator and God to defraud someone trusting you. Jesus said the whole thing had gotten completely out of hand. It doesn’t matter whether you actually believe God is going to hold you accountable; He was merciful and patient about such things. And sometimes He allows you to dirty your own reputation.

What kind of people will the Messiah be seeking for His Kingdom? What would it take to repent from the abuses of that day and restore a pure Covenant?

First, toss aside all of the crazy nonsense used by the Pharisees and Scribes. Don’t trust them, especially in terms of leadership. They have all these silly rules and the whole point is to defraud the peasants. Even when they taught, the leadership often kept back their nifty little secret codes for dealing with each other. Jesus cut through the deceptive nonsense by pointing out just how worthless the whole system was. Such people have no place in the Messiah’s Kingdom.

Jesus was not proposing a new law. His final injunction was meant to provoke pondering. What kind of world does it depict here? Would it not be a society, a covenant community, where people simply told the truth and kept their promises? How do you build social stability? Can we not spend more time concentrating on ways to strengthen shalom? Don’t set out to defraud anyone by deception. By the same token, stop fooling yourself by making rash promises. We are already bound to God by a covenant; trust in Him and keep the focus on His promises.

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Destiny’s Baloney

Posted on November 10, 2017 by ehurst

Brother Jay and I are chatting about something in the background: The Western concept of destiny is unadulterated nonsense.

First, we have to deal with the impossible notion that God is not bound by the past as we are in our fallen state. It’s impossible in the sense that we our fallen state prevents us thinking that way. It’s incomprehensible. We can approach it, but we can’t easily operate on that basis. It’s not that there is no passage of events in Eternity, but that they aren’t confined to a linear path. God can go back and readjust things at will. When we get to see it, it’s called “miracle.” When we don’t get to see it, we may never even know about it. We will tend to think it was always like that in the first place. The concept of non-linear time makes no sense to us because we cannot step outside of time and space restrictions that are part of the Fall.

Second, God and His Creation are responsive to us as Persons. Predestination is not a matter of a predetermined path; it’s about the destination. That’s the etymology of the word — regardless of the path, the destination is what’s determined. Nor is it a question of a predetermined end-point in time. Rather, it’s an organic end-point. The Bible recognizes that fallen humans instinctively try to measure the time-distance between here and there, but it’s not the way Creation works. It’s all about the ripening of things, and in response to a wealth of conditions that you cannot comprehend, much less determine.

Finally, no two of us will experience it the same. Some folks are locked into a certain amount of outcome, and even pretty tight steering on the way. Others wander all over their lives freely with little apparent input from God. There’s all kinds of ways God will mix things for each person. Again, this is incomprehensible to us without a lot of cognitive redemption, and even that will have some limits. But all of us Westerners start from a really bad impression, and we are likely to struggle some right up to the point of death.

“God can see the future” is not the same as “God determines the future,” especially as such things are commonly understood. He gets what He wants, but it doesn’t work as our puny fallen intelligence wants to imagine.

If I tell you that I have a powerful sense of calling and mission, that’s one thing. It’s just painting an image of how God deals with me and how it has changed me. If I tell you God has granted me a prophetic word that my calling will be used in a specific mission, that’s another thing entirely. A sense of calling is no guarantee of a particular mission. God’s actions don’t have to make sense like that. But if I string these two thoughts together, what I’m doing is offering an indication (a sense of calling) of how I will tend to carry out the mission (a prophetic promise). You would naturally expect who I am to affect what I do, just as it affects how I write on this blog.

Hint: None of this is particularly new. It reflects my experience studying the Ancient Near East and how the literature approaches such things.

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Keep on Doing What Is Right

Posted on November 9, 2017 by ehurst

Is it just me?

A part of my prophetic gift is sensing the moral currents of both Heaven and this world. Right now the US is under a heavy spirit of exhaustion and apathy. It’s not just the fizzled protest of Antifa this last weekend, but a general weariness and numbness. To me, it seems like a calm before the storm. The energy is spent and we need to brace ourselves for a time of fear, even panic.

There’s not much we can do about this. The best way to prosper in the heart-led way is to keep a barrier between yourself and the ambient moral climate. There is a difference between our passionate disengagement versus their general despair.

If the marvelous plans of someone like Trump were more consistent and successful, it would polarize folks and breathe energy into the situation. But the political scene is fragmented and no one is winning much. Indeed, the recent election victories for the Democrats was more the result of frustrated opposition than any real excitement either way, and the margins of victory were quite small. On the one hand, this is just another part of political strategy and voter manipulation, because there are some Democrats who understand that general apathy against their desperate scramble to recover power works in their favor. The electorate in general is not on their side, so keeping them away from the polls is a good thing.

But in a much larger sense, the Devil has a good use for wearing out everyone on everything. To the degree his domain prospers, it is through deception and keeping folks away from their divine heritage. It’s not the suffering itself but the confusion about where it comes from, why it is so pervasive. Keep in mind that Satan is God’s punisher, His hand of wrath. To the degree you stray from His revelation, you are under Satan’s dominion. Hell has been ordered to mobilize on America; the time has come.

So the Democratic strategists will get the apathy they desire, but they are clueless what it means in prophetic terms. This weariness cries out for relief, but relief is not coming. Instead, people will seek and be wrapped up in a multitude of personal distractions. They will neglect the larger picture and not see the next wave of disaster bearing down on them. This is a good time for a bunch of secret plots to prosper, and together they will result in some very rough times.

I’m not in the position to tell you what the timing will be, but this period of weariness and distraction is begging for something like the standard holiday celebrations now upon us. But somewhere beyond the sparkle of those festivities, or perhaps right in the middle of them, disaster must come. I still believe it will be some kind of economic shock, but I can’t guess the particular source. It will likely be a combination of things, since just about every conscious measure of economic health points to death. God is in control and He’s not telling us much about the details.

Personally, I’m amazed it has taken this long.

For us, this will be a time of miracles. As long as you are disentangled from the world’s anxieties, and you focus on your own calling and mission, there is every reason to anticipate some real surprises. God is working to position us for His glory. Some are already there, while others (like me) will get the marching orders from God later. But for all of us there will be signs and wonders all over the place, things you dared not dream our Lord would grant.

Don’t be lulled into weariness, but keep on doing what is right (Galatians 6:9).

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Divine Need to Know

Posted on November 8, 2017 by ehurst

Understanding God’s ways makes Creation more predictable. Life in this world is not so random as it appears. God has revealed His ways sufficient to make sense of things you need to know for your individual calling.

It truly does start with embracing His call on your life. It’s one of those things where we say, “God is God. You aren’t Him.” Because of the Fall, we have to approach revelation as a sealed package; you have to accept it all sight unseen before you can open it. The revelation for you comes in layers; you have to deal appropriately with the one you see before you get to see what’s next. It’s that trust and commitment thing. You aren’t digging into something objective; it is unique to you because you are getting to know a Person who treats no two of us alike. That’s because we aren’t alike.

Sure, we have some commonalities, but most people who can read what I’m writing in English will come with a high degree of deceptive conditioning, which makes them believe there is much more in common than what God says. And not just the amount of commonality, we who think in the English language are taught to assume the wrong kind of commonality. Worst of all, we are taught to deny that the rest of reality is alive and personal, and we can’t comprehend the commonalities inherent in our universe.

Let’s review briefly: Even Western science knows that your heart generates a very powerful electromagnetic field reaching out to infinity, but generally detectable by instruments at 10-15 feet (3-4.5m). Further, other living things have a similar electromagnetic field, and there is a measurable resonance between ours and theirs, and with each other. The interaction of these fields produces a reaction, but the scientists have not been able to discern what it does. Furthermore, it appears that the human heart also possesses an independent nervous system of sorts, and that the nodes on this system can act as a brain of sorts, processing in ways that researches can’t understand. In other words, scientists know that the heart is a sensory organ for sure, it may be processing what it senses in ways not obvious to investigation.

But thousands of years of written records in the Ancient Near East (ANE) have quite solemnly proposed that the heart does have its own mind of sorts, and that the heart can know a great deal about reality independently of the normal human senses. If you dig farther into this literature, you’ll understand that the content of such heart-mind operations is not a matter of sensory data, but on an entirely different level. It senses moral truth. The Bible in particular talks about how the heart is the means to discerning a higher level of reality on the spiritual plane. And clearly the ANE people took this quite seriously, though they resorted to figurative language to discuss it.

I take it seriously, too. The longer I strive to get my head to unlearn the Western approach to reality, the easier it gets for me to train my brain to follow my heart. And it gets easier to wade through a lot of Western confusion and deception so that things puzzling to Westerners have a rather obvious answer to me.

That includes scientific stuff that catches my curiosity. I’ll tell you that sometimes it’s a matter of skipping the wrong questions, and asking better ones. I’m not claiming to have the key to human understanding of the universe; I understand as much as I need to obey my calling. For example, I believe I understand what’s commonly referred to in Physics as the Two Slit Experiment. More, I’m not puzzled by the behavior revealed by it. It is entirely unlikely any scientist is going to buy my explanation; my personal experience assures me of that. The international science community rests entirely on the foundation of rejecting the idea that matter is alive, sentient and possessed of individual qualities. All they see is uniform dead matter.

But I could have predicted their observations in a certain sense because of my different epistemology. Individual photons and particles are alive, sentient and individually willful. But because they are not fallen, their will tends to reflect a sense of moral harmony. They obey God’s design, but still act individually. It manifests in the observed resonance of the waves in the experiment. The photons are not uniform, but appear to be moving randomly. Once you introduce attempts to predict their behavior, you are denying their individuality, and they will hide it from you. Creation as a whole tends to give you what you expect, in the sense that if you treat the universe as a composition of inert matter, it will tend to avoid showing you that it lives. You aren’t looking for the truth, so you won’t see the truth.

You have to trust God that His Creation will fulfill His divine purpose. That purpose cannot be quantified and objectified — it’s personal. In order to stay sane, you have to bend your perception to the moral truth the heart knows. You have to give God room to handle things with individual attention to His glory in your life, not simply follow the herd in denying moral reality. So I’m content to appreciate the beauty of the wave pattern in this experiment without trying to nail down why it’s like that. I have no need to attempt controlling it, which is the undeniable intent behind scientific investigation. I know better than to try playing God.

This is not to suggest that God never allows poking around out of curiosity. At the same time, I am confident that there are boundaries that you can predict if you try to live the heart-led way. Another example would be genetic manipulation. I’m utterly certain that crosses the line. I’m also utterly certain that, in the long run, all such genetic dabbling will result in disasters. So far, the results have borne that out. It’s not always apparent in the short term, but so far every genetically modified organism (GMO) has turned out harmful when you wait long enough. No surprise, of course; it’s driven by human moral failures (to wit: fraudulent stewardship of Creation).

There’s also the prophetic element warning us that mankind will eventually push too hard against the moral boundaries and foul this cosmic nest to the point we can’t live. While God is silent about the specifics, He warns that this tendency will play into His decision to finally end this world as we know it. This is why it’s pointless to campaign and try to change human behavior at large. We’ve already been told in many different ways where this is headed, and that it’s not our mission to change that, nor even delay it significantly. How could I know what He has designed another human to pursue, either knowingly serving Him or blindly following a sad destiny? He says that’s His concern, not mine.

Holiness includes embracing you own individual calling; it also includes rejoicing in His provision.

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The Power of Not Caring

Posted on November 7, 2017 by ehurst

Very few people in this world have what it takes to stand alone — this, despite a cultural mythology admiring and promoting it. Indeed, such stand-alone individuals are usually broken in some way. It’s not the norm.

The Bible assumes a basic human need for communion; it’s fundamental to our design. We might not find much communion, and we dare no compromise morally to get it, but a critical element in revelation is communion with God and His Creation. The Fall complicated things, but didn’t change the basic design element.

Our problem as heart-led believers is that most of our world is deceive and refuses to do communion right. Take this discussion for example. First, we notice that the author expresses a common longing for fellowship around things that truly matter to him. We all know instinctively that we won’t accomplish anything that matters by working alone. Second, there’s a reasoned awareness that this won’t be easy. In order for it work, you have to avoid the failures of everything that didn’t work. So the author proposes gathering elements of what seems to have worked better. Third, there is a distinct purpose that holds the group together.

It’s this third element where he gets everything right and wrong at the same time. Maybe you caught the reference to the Pashtuns. That’s a tribal nation residing mostly in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. While it’s considered a linguistic group, their sense of cohesion and resistance to outside pressure is legendary. Virtually all the Taleban are Pashtun. And maybe you can discern how he completely misses the point of how they retain such a strong sense of identity that frustrates all their enemies.

The Pashtuns adhere to something called “Pashtunwali” — the Way of the Pashtun. If you read academic explanations, you’ll come up with all the wrong answers. Western scholars generally do not recognize the heart as a sensory organ, much less as the physical locus of faith and commitment. Yet it is painfully obvious that descriptions of Pashtunwali point to a heart-led culture so common in the Ancient Near East.

The author also cites Hells Angels, so it’s not as if his dream is impossible, but he’s missing the whole point. It seems obvious his focus is on the effects, not the root nature of how such groups come to exist. The Pashtunwali is a covenant of the heart; its goal is the thing itself, insofar as we can say it has a goal. Criminal gangs like Hells Angels are another manifestation of covenant communion, though a very poor one. Not that they are criminal, but because its whole nature is wrapped up in Western moral values. As such, a gang is inherently oppressive and damaging to the heart-mind, because it assumes there can be no heart-mind. The criminal element is merely a matter of choosing to endure one form of oppression (the gang itself) to reap the benefits of being an insider, as opposed to suffering oppression as a citizen on the outside of official government, which acts like a gang.

An inherent problem here is that opposing gangs infiltrate one another. Their primary vulnerability is their fundamental purpose in seeking material advantage. The author’s search for a gang of sorts invites infiltration by its nature. The Pashtunwali’s greatest power is that the covenant is the whole point; it doesn’t rest on measurable results reaching toward some goal. Everything the Pashtun do to retain their identity is merely a manifestation of their deep moral commitment that transcends the effects. The author’s proposed virtual gang has none of that, and as soon as it starts manifesting any useful effects at all, it will be infiltrated.

It is impossible to infiltrate a heart-led covenant group. You can’t do it without taking some kind of heart-led path yourself, and that changes the whole game. Infiltration of a genuine covenant community forces you to compromise your heart-led moral existence in order to fake it. You’ll notice that when I suggest we who are heart-led infiltrate heart-less institutions, we have no trouble being open and honest, but our listerners aren’t going to hear what we say. We aren’t decieving them; they are already fundamentally deceived in ways we simply cannot remedy.

A heart-led community will hear you. Without total open honesty, you have to surrender the power of the heart-mind, and they will know it. You can have a heart full of lies, but that disables all the power of resolve that carries beyond death. It’s that very power that underlies all the admirable features of covenant communities. You can commit to a lie and willingly die for something, but you cannot commit to a lie and live with full power of conviction; that’s in the nature of reality itself. Significant departure from the fundamental nature of God’s moral character takes you out of heart-land. The whole thing includes an element of proximity; precision is a foreign concept in God’s revelation.

The Devil has no counterfeit for genuine faith. All he has is deception and perversion. Yes, the Pashtuns are Muslim and are deceived about who God is, but that seems to be one issue where our Creator is rather flexible. Proximity to His moral Law on everything else seems to work well enough in this fallen world, as it still weakens Satan’s hand.

The US cannot defeat the Pashtuns as it is, because the US has nothing in the moral realm. This is why we have little to fear from the coming destruction of America. While there are plots aplenty to take over the system, none of them are based in moral reality. You have to believe a lie just to want that kind of power. Genuine power in this world comes only from not caring much about this world.

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A Different Perception of Reality

Posted on November 6, 2017 by ehurst

Warning: This post includes political analysis.

The lefties had threatened to come out en masse on this past Saturday as the start of a general protest, eventually rising to such chaos and disorder so as to make the US ungovernable. The organizers published a list of 40+ cities where they hoped to draw significant crowds of protesters. It fizzled. In New York City, for example, the mass-produced signs and placards were piled high, untouched long after the event was done. So far as I can find, not a single one of these events drew so much as a thousand bodies.

There are not enough true believers; there never were. Everything we’ve seen so far was performed mostly with hired actors. The majority of those are now too busy with other things. Instead, the real money and energy is focused in Washington, DC. Aside from the spreading cancer of sexual abuse exposures bleeding over from Hollywood, there are genuine legal battles over other forms of corruption taking down major figures. Keep in mind that there are no clean hands in Washington; none of the various parties (far more than merely Republican versus Democrat) can be characterized as the good guys. It’s unlikely Trump will be driven from office, but if he is, it won’t be through the actions of Soros’ leftist minions.

There are some genuine revolutionaries, but they are working mostly behind the scenes, venting their frustration on the folks who try to maintain the appearance of being in control (and their plans). Too many true believers for too long have been denied the promised fruits of hard labor. Alliances are crumbling. The system itself is imploding; it is not business as usual. There is a great deal of genuine trouble behind the scenes and not reported in the mainstream press, nor even very much in the alternative press.

The same moral chaos is at work in foreign affairs. You can watch a genuine tectonic shift in Middle Eastern politics. The linked article is a good analysis of what’s going on, and it would have been nearly impossible to predict this situation a year ago. By the way, the author’s review of Israel’s actions does not take into account my assertion that Israel exists only to provoke and distract the world from the real issues.

That’s because of the Zionist doctrine that Israel simply cannot be treated like any other nation. She is privileged above all other nations and peoples on the earth. All of these provocations are aimed at driving home this claim, preventing anyone from ignoring it for even a second. Zionists will do anything, good or bad, to remain the center of the world’s attention. Even the current efforts to squelch the BDS Movement are more a matter of provoking anger and hatred than an expression of any real worry about financial losses for Israeli businesses. All Israeli commerce is just an expression of Zionist policy. You’ll notice that in the long run, the actual effects of all of this public posturing is merely keeping Israel in the news.

You should not imagine that The Cult is worried about these developments. Bear in mind that their agenda is neither left nor right, but all about control by any means. The human agents of The Cult might have imagined they were on the brink of realizing their dreams of global rule, but the underlying demonic intelligence knows better. The whole point is that, by any means at all, it is essential that believers are kept from claiming their divine heritage on this earth.

This is why we don’t set our hopes on any form of political solution to any of the world’s problems. There can never be a political solution under the Curse of the Fall. We can embrace that; once you get used to that idea, it’s easier to focus on the true goal of Christ’s glory. From where we stand, the whole point of revelation is to change our awareness of reality. The Fall was a case of deception about reality; redemption is restoring the truth to our awareness even as we face a world of deception.

The heart-led way makes some audacious claims against the common perceptions of humanity. We flatly reject and contradict what seems obvious to everyone else. For example, we view the looming chaos as a cyclical norm, a built-in feature of this world. It’s not merely a national level cycle here in the US, but a global cycle transition point in the collapse of an entire civilization. The looming chaos does not hinder our ultimate goal on this earth of reclaiming the promises of God through His Word. We simply adjust our tactics and keep moving forward.

On top of that, we have a prophetic promise to us. We few who now possess the key element of the heart-led consciousness have been granted a wide open field for planting the seeds of a true shift in human awareness. We can establish the means to restore the truth tossed aside in the Garden of Eden. It won’t be global, but it can surely be far bigger than just we few in this virtual parish. We have no vested interest in the outcomes of any of this political and military warfare. We get to see where it’s going, and we can play along with what God is doing, but we are not the target of any of this. God has granted us a footing far above this level of human strife, where we can stand and watch how it plays out. Because of the clarity of our moral vision, we can use these events based on where we know they are headed. We aren’t trapped in the confusion inherent in the position of humanity lacking the heart-led vision.

We can exploit what looks like chaos to everyone else; God has revealed to us what He’s doing. Further, He has revealed big plans for us if we are willing to participate.

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The Nature of Gnosis

Posted on November 5, 2017 by ehurst

Let’s take a quick dip into Bible history. Some of you may know that Jewish Hellenism was the source of great evil in the Hebrew nation, essentially disemboweling the Hebrew mysticism of the Old Testament religion. This had gone on long enough that when Jesus came to call Israel back to that ancient orientation — to the real Covenant — He was treated as the single greatest threat to the existing Judean establishment.

The elitist social stratification of Jesus’ day was not native to Old Testament religion. Hellenism was the soul of gnostic assumptions (small “g”). It corrupted the ancient Hebrew mysticism, forcing the parabolic language into literal semantic legalism. This removes from the individual the duty to develop and maintain a deep personal commitment to God, the inherent assumption that requires a heart of conviction. This living relationship was replaced with a rigid and fragile intellectual assumption of static objective truth as the real God, and Jehovah demoted to serve this objective truth. It was now possible to handcuff God with His own words, and the elite rabbis were convinced they had done so.

That reflects the nature of gnostic assumptions. We can characterize those assumptions thus: (1) the world sucks, but (2) it most certainly can be fixed, and (3) it requires the determined pursuit of reason and logic. Naturally, there is an elitism built into this. While Alexander the Great and other promoters of Hellenism acted as if this gnosis (reasoned wisdom) was within reach of everyone, those who actually began putting that approach into practice quickly assumed an elitist position. Anyone who didn’t think like they did deserved his ignorance and misery. There is a built in resentment of the ignorant masses who held the gnostics back from achieving paradise.

Did not the Old Testament offer a strong record of how great Israel could be when she obeyed the Covenant? And here they were, living with the very obvious problem that Rome was oppressing her and the land was filled with nasty Gentiles. It was all the Jewish peasants’ fault for not living as perfect as the Pharisees! The elite prosperity and power over the common run of Jewish peasants was manifest proof of their righteousness; isn’t that exactly what the Law said? “Live by the Law and you will prosper.” What they refused to understand was that their methods were oppressive and robbed the common folk of their share of what little shalom was possible. In the Old Testament, prosperity was always shared, and social mobility rested largely on moral virtue.

And here comes this Jesus of Nazareth trying to tear down the existing system and make the elite a laughingstock with His smart-aleck comments. What they did not realize was their hostile reaction to the Messiah was precisely what God was counting on. Even now, believers struggle with the idea that God could know how they would react even as He gave them a full fair chance to accept the truth. So it was they broke all their own rules to insure this one threat to their system was destroyed. But when it turned out the teaching of Jesus had a life and power of its own, just like the risen Christ, they found themselves fighting a monster of their own making.

The initial attack on Christians was predictable: blunt violence. When it was apparent this accomplished nothing, and only made things worse, the highly intelligent among them began to devise ways to infiltrate and seduce Christians back to Judaism. Instead, their efforts gave birth to some even worse perversions of Judaism — the birth of Gnosticism as a distinct religion that bled away adherents to Judaism, and a pernicious influence that in turn gave rise to Kabbalism. In case you don’t know it, the Kabbala is actually very much mainstream orthodox Judaism. They just don’t admit it to Gentiles; it’s supposed to be a hidden gnosis.

We are in no position to understand why God allowed the gnostic approach to prosper, but we find ourselves right in the middle of Western Christianity deeply infected by those three characteristics listed above. Of course, number 3 is modified somewhat by using that literal and legalistic approach of early Judaism to Scripture (keeping in mind that Judaism was born from Hellenism around 300 BC and is not Old Testament religion).

Look at those three points again. We who walk the heart-led mystic path can agree that this world is not what God intended, but we have accepted the Fall as a justified penalty. So instead of being miserable and angry, we embrace the mercy and redemption God offered in His Laws. This world can’t be fixed, but it can work as a training ground for eternity. We can see how it’s full of delights and beauty despite the Fall. We rejoice that God has reached out to mitigate our disaster, and we face the future with joy and peace. We embrace the situation and make the most of it. But it requires a pursuit of the heart-led wisdom of God, and is most certainly not elitist.

Do you see why I encourage you all to take up your own calling? It demands all of us with our unique gifts. Your progress in your own calling benefits me. If more people give serious effort to discovering what God’s revelation means for us, this way of life holds the potential for helping us reclaim the vast hidden treasures of our divine heritage. Sure, I dabble in heart-led photography, and I scribble a little fiction now and then, but I’m just a duffer. I’m not called to rebuild all of the arts through the heart-led way; I know only that it can and should be done. I’m trying to set the pattern of evaluating art and nature with the eye of the heart.

We need a wider and deeper influence to help keep us on track and our minds employed in serving the Holy Spirit. It’s okay if you see me as a trailblazer, but I’m not your leader; God in your heart is the Leader. I’m just a coach helping you get the most out of your own abilities. You will be the ones who win or lose your own games.

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Sermon on the Mount 5

Posted on November 4, 2017 by ehurst

Matthew 5:27-32 — Marriage and Divorce

We have to understand how the Covenant confirmed an awful lot of custom in the Ancient Near East (ANE), yet radically changed a few items. One of those was in the area of marriage. In the previous lesson regarding murder, Jesus reminded His audience that a genuine covenant believer held people as the most precious feudal possession on earth. The Law of God rests on treating others as ultimately a feudal grant from the Lord, something that requires a good stewardship. This is why we summarize shalom as social stability. One of the strongest human needs is a sense of peace and security that comes from an orderly life in an orderly community. It was a heavy obligation laid on the feudal servant to make that a priority.

In typical ANE custom, a man had unlimited feudal power over his wife. If he became convinced she was cheating on him, he could take her life. There were real world consequences in dealing with the in-laws, of course, but it was legal. Under the Covenant, a man was no longer a solitary master of his household, but held it in trust on behalf of Jehovah. He no longer had a free hand over his wife. Further, she had some feudal claims on him. There was this ritual of Bitter Waters that was frankly designed to bring moral pressure to bear on a guilty woman (Numbers 5:11-31). In the context of that society, it probably worked more often than it failed, but tradition asserts the husband also had to be pure of heart before God would bless the ritual.

It will seem incomprehensible to most people today that the Covenant assumes a wife is more likely to stray than a husband. We struggle to imagine the consequences in a world where your neighbors were your cousins and you lived in each other’s armpits, as it were. It was an entirely different world, and in the common daily experience of Ancient Israel, most men would have little opportunity to fool around. But there were some sneaky guys, and when caught, they were stoned with the woman. When there was only suspicion and no proof, the woman would be divorced. Men suspected of fooling around were treated as a threat to the community for obvious reasons; no man tolerated another man poaching on his wife.

By the time Jesus went up on the mountain to teach that day, the rabbis had perverted this expectation with specious legalism. Men got away with just about anything, but women were treated as slaves. Worse, trophy brides were traded among Jewish leaders like fine breeding stock. Thus, He begins yet another session of, “you have heard…” with this issue.

First, Jesus restates the obvious bottom line from the Ten Commandments prohibiting adultery. His audience was mostly male, so He is already stirring things up. Clearly this contradicted the common teaching of the Pharisees and their snarky excuses in redefining the term “adultery.” Talmudic teaching openly admits that the Law as stated was just too demanding on men. But Jesus turns that on its head: It’s not enough to keep it in your pants, guys. You have defied God merely in thinking about it.

Then He goes on to raise the bar even higher. If you can’t stop looking, gouge out your eye. If you can’t stop touching, cut off your hand. But this is Hebrew mysticism, loaded with hyperbole. You’d be a fool to take this literally in most cases. What we need to understand is that we are fallen; the fleshly side of our nature is wholly unreliable. If you can’t learn how to squelch the unreasonable demands of your fallen nature, then you need to look into extreme measures. Don’t talk about how unfair it is that you can’t just do what everyone else does; find your individual place in God’s holiness. If you don’t nail your fleshly nature to the Cross, you’ll slide right down into Hell with it.

But He doesn’t stop there. This business of treating women like breeding stock and sex toys defiles the whole Covenant community. You don’t just pick one out because something about her appeals to you, only to later find she’s not perfect and discard her. The unstated implication here is a return to the ancient Hebrew match-making, based on what was in everyone’s best interest. It’s not a man’s world; it’s God’s world. Put aside your petty lusts and think about holiness as pleasing the divine Sheikh. Get it through your head that He treasures His people, so you better learn His ways or risk damnation. Men have certain limited privileges only because they have a heavier responsibility. It’s not a birthright; it’s a mission.

There was a good reason adultery was a symbol of idolatry. You cannot pretend loyalty to Jehovah if you treat His people as mere tools of convenience. Want to see the Messiah? Repent and obey what God demands of you with a personal commitment.

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