Don’t Build; Discover

Posted on November 4, 2017 by ehurst

Brother Jay recently wrote about the movie, Blade Runner 2049. It’s been garnering a lot of attention due to it’s attempt to raise questions about reality and what it means to be human. I’m not likely to see the movie unless someone offers me a copy on DVD.

It’s not that I hate movies and videos; I hate the way Westerners use the medium. Most videos bleed out the utterly pointless and hopeless Western outlook on reality. Even the happy movies exude a totally false image of what is good and right. Nobody makes movies that portray God’s truth. What makes that dangerous is the well establish fact of the hypnotic effect of the medium. These awful lies are burned into our thinking by TV and video, and our human moral defenses are so very easily overwhelmed in this one medium.

We don’t need another poisonous celebration of human depravity. No, I didn’t watch that film; I just picked it as a random sample. If just once, someone approached the whole question of what and how to make a movie from a heart-led perspective, it would change everything. I’m not the guy to do that; I have no talent or significant interest in messing with that form of art. Still, what would it be like if we could just once see the product of a group of cinema artists approaching the question of what should be on the screen by building faith instead of depraving by entertainment.

Do I have to explain here how most “Christian” movies are still utterly Western in their approach, and thus not significantly better? I haven’t changed my tune: If you aren’t a heart-led mystic, you aren’t really a follower of Christ. When it comes to movies, a debate between secular entertainment values versus Western Christian values is a silly argument over insignificant intellectual details. That has nothing to do with how much we might enjoy films or other forms of entertainment, but it does show how utterly alone we are in this world. We are building something new in the sense that the world has not seen it in a very long time. Yet, it’s not really building, but digging up what has been there from the beginning.

The heart-led approach to shaping a human existence came under attack in the Ancient Near East when Alexander the Great moved eastward in conquest. Actually, it’s not that simple, but that’s a well known historical marker. The genuine biblical world view actually faded and wore thin during the rise of Assyria as an imperial power. From that point forward, the Hebrew people increasingly compromised, so that Alexander’s Hellenism was the death blow. For a single century of New Testament churches, this ancient heart-led outlook was revived. The Apostle John seems to have been the last stalwart to see the danger of creeping Hellenism, because all the Early Church Fathers exhibit a slow slide into the swamp of intellectual debate. Not merely the Gnostics, it was the broader gnosticism (with a small “g”) as a trend in how humans approached ultimate questions.

So our current renewal of the heart-led way of Christian faith is not merely a renaissance, but a restoration of God’s ideal for fallen mankind. What makes it different is how we are entirely self-conscious about it. It’s not the first and only time since the end of the First Century, so let’s not get too worked up with a false enthusiasm. Let’s not make of this something it is not by seeing ourselves as somehow specially gifted and chosen. There have been flashes of glory throughout Church History, so it could happen any time and any where. But my research thus far indicates that this is the first time the heart-led way has been so completely self-conscious. For reasons God alone knows, we have been granted a thorough understanding of the real-world dynamics, along with a wide-open opportunity to pursue it.

I find it painfully obvious that God is sponsoring this, simply because we don’t have to walk through an apocalypse to see it develop. We aren’t specially protected, but we also don’t face a wide-ranging oppression. Our biggest threat is the overwhelming cultural burden that we so consciously oppose. That alone is tribulation enough, brothers and sisters. While previous movements of the Spirit like this were hijacked, I think we have a unique opportunity. Part of my conviction stands on my belief that God bumped reality over onto a different track recently. You may have your own experiential reasons for it, but I pray your convictions are at least as powerful as mine. Let’s not miss this opportunity.

I have a vision; we have only just begun. Most of us are still working through the immediate implications of the heart-led way individually. Somewhere down the line, I pray that some us will begin to reexamine the whole approach to life itself. I pray that some us can stir up a conscious effort to redeem, repair and restore everything to its proper role in serving God’s glory. It doesn’t require acceptance by the rest of the world; they can continue to ignore us or even oppose us. This thing can’t be evaluated on any lesser grounds than the heart itself. But if we don’t rebuild our own approach to life and reality, this thing will fritter away and disappear from the earth as this community of faith passes on to our final rewards.

Such an end strikes me as an unbearable tragedy. We cannot let this die with us. Keeping it alive includes a genuine effort to see how it changes everything humans do. This is not me outlining future glories for you to construct; this is you and me discovering what God designed us for in the first place.

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Stir Up the Gift

Posted on November 3, 2017 by ehurst

Just a reminder: Prophecy doesn’t work the way most Westerners think it should. That’s why we have thousands of very real prophets who get no attention, and may well be deeply confused themselves. Meanwhile, Westerners keep chasing after a whole raft of shysters who attempt to offer some measure of what Westerners demand. Most published prophecies today are just fictional entertainment. A genuine prophetic gift should result in few surprises among the faithful; it’s only the sinners who are shocked by real prophecies.

A prophet becomes credible among those who are heart-led, because the prophetic messages resonate with the Holy Spirit living inside of them. To an outsider, it’s no different from wishful thinking, with maybe the rush of herd instinct. A critical element in divine revelation is plausible deniability. God does not compel belief; you are free to argue with Him until that final moment when His wrath falls. He drives conviction through your heart; it’s up to you to voluntarily submit your mind to the supremacy of His divine Presence in your heart. If His love does not draw you, then nothing will.

So was I the only one among us who knew this would be a rough week for America? I think not. Had I felt led to share that as a prophetic warning with you here on this blog, many of you would have recognized the truth of it. Your hearts have sniffed the moral winds already; you might not have been able to form the words for whatever reason, but you knew it without me telling you. To the degree I have any talent, it’s not in the prophetic visions, but in God’s calling on me to give such things a bit of verbal shape. Whatever writing talent I might bear never blossomed until I first made sure it served the prophetic calling. So I logged the premonition of a bad week in my private journal because it wasn’t a burden to share; there was no need for it.

I was utterly certain America was doomed well before the turn of the millennium. My understanding of it — the whole mental context — has changed a great deal since then, but the prophetic conviction of that doom never wavered. It’s been more than 20 years; I wasn’t the only one saying it, but most of the people I knew then did not believe it. They were the fools who wrapped the American flag around the Cross. Only a few shared my conviction that America was not special, not some New Covenant Nation. Recently, the shape of this vision has become much clearer.

We were recently treated to the awareness that God had changed His mind on some things. I credit the faithfulness of you folks in embracing the heart-led way. To me, it was as if the Father felt it would serve His glory better to let us in on the secret. So, as a community of faith, we agreed that reality had shifted. America is still doomed, but the path of destruction would be different. The presence of a self-consciously heart-led body of believers opened the way to greater glories. This isn’t about me; I’m just the messenger. It’s all about you who responded to the call and God’s divine plans. We are permitted to see how His hand works, because there is work for us to do, as well. Do you know just how thrilled I am to be a part of what you folks are doing?

If America is doomed, then in one sense it makes no difference who won the election. In another sense, the difference is in how we pay attention to what God is doing. We can’t grasp where the threshold is, but He decided there were enough people paying attention that it would pay off somehow to show His hand. Instead of an apocalyptic nightmare, it’s going to be a different, lighter level chaos. It will be something with a distinct moral character to which we can witness and tell others, and it will shine His glory brighter. Our mission is to enhance the beauty of His revelation, by showing how His Law has not changed since He first posted the Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden. The results of the election do not lessen America’s doom, but it offers a chance for us to be directly and consciously involved, which would not have been possible otherwise.

Trump is good news only in that narrow sense. He will still preside over the destruction of the US, but his peculiar ways will open the door for our witness. Clinton would have squelched our witness with a very harsh will. We still get a terrible president either way, and we still watch the chaos and suffering. Take it in stride; let it settle into your minds as the new normal. It’s not merely the destruction of America, but the end of Western Civilization as a whole. And it will give birth to something equally nasty, but quite different. Keep your eye on God’s glory as the ultimate purpose of it all.

So instead of turning inward and hiding in some modern virtual catacomb, we can remain out in the open, sharing His truth. You already know His ways for fallen mankind on the earth; it’s Biblical Law. Testify by living it openly. You’ll find your own way, but if you feel the need to ask, my advice is that you speak less and act more. Even to the point of seeming odd and inexplicable, hold your tongue until someone asks, or wait until you sense that driving of the Spirit to speak. You’ll know; your heart — your sense of conviction — will tell your mind.

Meanwhile, it’s a symptom of tribulation that people will turn to all kinds of false religion. Not just a trickle, but in droves they will rush to some safe castle, any port in the storm of God’s wrath. The Devil intends to drown out our witness, but if we are faithful, he will fail. That is, he will fail in the sense that God will still open blind eyes to see. We will stand out to those whose hearts are driving them nuts seeking the truth. Some early, some later, but there will be a harvest of souls. You won’t be alone very long.

Some of you will be called to step out onto the mission field with me. You will feel that driving sense that you can’t just continue on with the same old path. You will sense that there is something you simply must do that demands a major change in your daily life. Don’t hesitate to accept any divine opportunity to infiltrate the old and dying system, or the nascent new systems people are building to take its place. Wherever the door opens, don’t be afraid to infiltrate and exploit this grand opportunity to reestablish the ancient way of heart-led living.

This is our time; can you feel it?

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Stasis Is Bad Juju

Posted on November 2, 2017 by ehurst

As a philosophical statement, Radix Fidem teaches that reality is a living being — variable and personal. There is no such thing as objective reality; there is only experience and perception for each individual human. Reality is external to us, but we have to approach knowing reality as knowing a person, and it’s a person who relates to everyone differently.

People can change. Most people do change simply as part of the aging process. Throughout life, the various influences upon us can close some doors and open new ones. However, what’s really going on is a change in perception; some doors were only imaginary, while others were ignored.

The ultimate degradation is attempting to actually control someone else’s perception. It destroys others as it destroys you. Evil men have sought such control since the beginning; we learned it in the Garden at the Fall. Satan succeeded in deceiving Eve about the nature of the Tree of Knowledge, and humans have been trying to copy the Devil’s ways ever since. In doing this, they serve the Devil’s purposes. We were driven out of the Garden for that. Outside the Garden, people strive to steer the behavior of other life for their own benefit. There’s a good and bad side to that.

There is an honest way of changing the perceptions of other humans. It begins with humility and compassion, an enlightenment from God. We look in the mirror of truth and realize what a mess we are, and from this understand that such is the nature of fallen humanity. Human perception is chaotic at best; any attempt to improve things is a monumental task. Knowing how hard it is to change our own perceptions, we don’t suffer the false assumption that we can easily move others. It’s this recognition that is the foundation of honest efforts.

Instead of struggling to control the perceptions, and thus control behavior, of others, we seek to establish boundaries in terms of paying a price that discourages harm. We shouldn’t imagine that we can stop all harm, only that little bit of harm that is actually our business. That’s the teaching about dominion and feudal grant from God. He gives us a limited domain and limited authority within that domain. We use the tools He grants for the purpose of His glory. We protect what He delivers to us as our mission on His behalf.

This humility teaches us that, since we can scarcely control our own behavior, the best we can hope for with others is a limited measure of keeping them from harming what God has called us to do. We realize that, for the most part, there is darn little we can do for ourselves, so there’s even less we can do for others. If they place themselves knowingly within our domain, we can exercise some useful authority in their lives, whatever and however much they actually embrace our feudal dominion. This all assumes we are striving to play the shepherd role in bringing some sense of order to the chaos in our own souls.

The only real change in the human soul arises from within. The final ultimate redemption includes in the mix a volition to accept redemption. It’s utterly false to imagine that a sense of order can be precise and static; that’s a bad lie. Order is defined as tentative peace between individuals, a living thing that must be tended and nurtured. It’s dynamic and alive and always personal. There is no static ideal; our definition of “perfect” includes variability. We define as morally good whatever works to bring a sense of peace and affection between parties. That includes the functional recognition of multiple parties within us.

Everything is a parable, a way of bringing the perception closer to experience. We don’t have to account for everything that is or might be, only what we have experienced. But that experience includes any revelation from God, be it ever so subtle, of things that are and are not yet. We hold forth the teaching that our direct experience of God Himself is the only truly sure thing we have to go on. Revelation corrects our perception of the collected sensory experience in all things. This teaches us that His created reality is amenable to friendship but not leverage. Reality is far more intelligent than we are, and certainly more powerful. Yet it has a commission from God to yield to us in certain ways.

This why people who are deceived can get certain results from arcane arts that might fall under the term “magic.” Those people are seldom seeking communion with reality; they typically seek control over things. This situation has a dark side and it’s often a matter of degrees. This world is not black and white; that’s a lie of the Devil. It’s an oversimplification that seeks to drain the life from everything and force reality to conform to very childish demands. Some things people seek and do are worse than others, and no one is perfect. God’s revelation is alive and active and personal in itself, so the image of static perfection is itself a bad lie. It’s black magic of the darkest kind.

And your answer to any question about such things remains your answer. What God demands of us is by no means uniform, any more than what He grants to each of us as feudal domain. It is your burden to discern what you should include and what you must exclude, how you draw and guard the boundaries, and for how long. There are markers, but no concrete checkpoints. It’s more art than science, if you will. The most powerful thing you do in this life is not a single goal, but keeping peace with God as your relationship with Him swirls and moves around in a very living reality.

Demanding that every question be settled once and for all is a mark of the Curse of the Fall.

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A General Rant at Linux Developers

Posted on November 1, 2017 by ehurst

It’s hard to single out anyone, or even a team that works together. The problem I see is a broad attitude that is fairly consistent across the whole community.

Stop advocating Linux if you refuse to deliver what users want and need. If your whole effort in Open Source development is simply to advance the technology, then there’s not much I can say. But for those of you who claim you want Linux to be competitive, and to eclipse the commercial software vendors to become the operating system of choice, stop kidding yourselves. You may think you want to take over the software world, but you are blind and stupid about how to do it.

For at least the past few years, Linux has been in the position to overwhelm the likes of Windows and even Mac, but developers and packagers keep shooting themselves in the foot. Every time there’s a choice between fixing bugs and adding features, you always go for the latter and introduce new bugs. Even when you know how to fix your product and it’s not that hard, you still don’t release a changed package. I run into this all the time, where the package tracker shows a problem that is easily solved, but the attitude is “won’t fix” for reasons seldom clearly stated. Thousands of users are left in the lurch.

(I can say this because I’ve rebuilt those packages myself using well known patches and they worked fine. I’m not a coder, just someone who knows a little about patching and building.)

You folks are so deeply focused on the technology that you have no sense of scale in terms of users. Nobody thinks about the users. I know for a fact that a large segment of the developer population actively despises average users. It’s that technology elitism thing that never goes away. And whoever organizes these developers, you are no better. It’s precious rare a project shows an interest in the human side of things. Hint: Without mass appeal, your software will always be a private hobby that nobody cares about.

In case you don’t get it: Ignoring users is a sin. It’s morally evil. This is written into the code of the universe, as it were. You cannot hope to win and become the PC OS of choice until you care about the users. That’s immutable.

Over the past couple of days I took the time to test a few distros that weren’t foreign to my habits. Q4OS? Great idea, but it’s not ready for prime time. It couldn’t come up with a workable GUI on a standard Dell laptop. Sure, I know how to walk through the procedure for fixing this, but no one in 2017 should have to use the commandline to fix something like that. We got past that crap fifteen years ago. Yes, the people at Q4OS do know what’s wrong, but they haven’t bothered to fix their ISO.

I still think the Trinity Desktop is one of the smartest ideas out there; my user testing shows that Windows refugees love it best of all, but it’s short on resources and developers. So the Trinity Ubuntu release sucks and refuses to install.

Even CentOS 7 refused to complete the installation on that same machine; it hung on the post install tasks. And Debian vanilla pays very little heed to the desktop users’ needs; it’s all about the server stuff. I had to manually install the touchpad driver afterwards, and then make all of my configuration via a very long list of synclient switches. The defaults suck. No GUI touchpad config on XFCE? How come Ubuntu and friends can make it work so nicely using your same code base? You can’t backport their tweaks?

Yes, they do know about these problems. No, they have no plans to fix them. They are too busy chasing some other internal priorities, but users don’t matter. Why does Mint stay at the top of the Distrowatch chart so long? Because they do pay attention to making the clueless user feel welcome. There is precious little you have to fix on Mint. The only drawback is the weird attitude about holding back upstream kernel security fixes from their users. If you ignore their advice and take the kernel update, it will sometimes break something because they refuse to make the updates work with their distro tweaks. Mint isn’t the best, it just sucks less than everything else.

I long ago despaired of the Linux community ever understanding the concept of “customer service.” Until they get it, Linux will always remain as a tiny minority of desktop PC OSes. There will never be a year of the Linux Desktop.

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Styling the Shepherd

Posted on October 31, 2017 by ehurst

Consider the first few chapters in Genesis. Think about it from a Hebrew mystical point of view. On the one hand, it’s plain that Creation is just a typical expression of God’s divine personality and character. We learn to think: That’s just like Him to do that. On the other hand, it remains a complete mystery why He did it. There is not enough revealed about that, and no language to explain much of what we might apprehend about it.

In a certain functional sense, we do recognize that humans were the pinnacle of Creation. For one thing, it’s obvious that everything is explained in terms of what it should mean to us. And right there it says: “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion…” (Genesis 1:26). A few verses later He says he has given us all the vegetation for food. In the next chapter it repeats this language of feudal grant: “Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Those last two verbs are translations of Hebrew words meaning simply to work in the sense of using and employing it for productive purpose on behalf of one’s lord.

This helps us to gain some vision for our purpose in existing. This isn’t some backyard garden plot; it’s everything we as humans can reach. We are stewards of however much of Creation that we can put our hands on, but it has to turn out as He likes it. And an awful lot of the rest of the Bible explains how He likes things, and to some degree, how He does not. Still, it’s clear that we are intended to manage things on His behalf.

Just so you’ll know, the Hebrew word translated as “garden” refers to a rather substantial private estate, more like a park. The idea is that it remain accessible and amenable for the owner’s recreation. This is closer to a managed and protected wildlands than a tightly controlled ornamental hobby. A critical part of this image is feeding ourselves from the work we do; we are unmuzzled oxen treading His grain.

A critical element the story of the Fall is how we lost the knowledge of His will and the blessings inherent in the job. We lost access and were driven out. That Garden of God still needs care, but suffers a lack of management. No one has been brought in to replace us. In this sense, Creation suffers from the Fall; it continues doing what it does without guidance and management. It’s mostly okay, but it’s not what God had in mind.

In Mark 4:35-41, Jesus engaged in a little of that management. There’s nothing evil about storms; that’s how Creation is designed. They serve a valid purpose. Indeed, Jesus was apparently untroubled from His nap by the whole thing. What woke Him up was the whining of men who knew only that such storms could kill when you are in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. These were seasoned professional fishermen, by the way, not whiny dilettantes. Still, Jesus Himself was comfortable with the situation, but intervened for their sakes. Granted, there’s more to this than meets the eye; there was a specific divine purpose in showing His Father’s glory here. Still, that doesn’t change the wider context that this was a normal and natural process. Jesus stepped in using that ancient authority of stewardship from the Garden to manage the situation.

Those men were a part of Creation, too. While in their fallen state, they had lost their connection and communion with nature, but they were still part of nature. And as intended managers, they should have been able to moderate the storms for themselves, but their fallen natures prevented that. It’s not that Creation should have been left to do what it pleased, but that there was no one else there who knew how to handle things and keep it all focused on God’s purposes.

We do not reverence Creation, but the Creator (Romans 1:25). Nature is unfallen, but we are supposed to be in charge. Granted, Creation is a person and a collection of persons, and our greatest treasure is always the people we lead. That leadership is symbolized by shepherding, the eldership that is love and devotion to the welfare of the flock, yet with an eye to the purpose of providing bounty back to the Lord who owns it all. We are not part of the Green cult worshiping nature.

As part of redemption from the Fall, we pass through that Flaming Sword at the gate of Eden. We desperately need to unlearn all the bad habits and get back on track to treat Creation as family. We may be struggling with a badly broken situation, but each of us bears a divine grant of feudal dominion over some portion of His Creation. As the good shepherd elder cultivates tenderness and communion with those in his household, we act in Creation as gentle masters on God’s behalf. If God places it in your hands, you are the manager. Your human needs are in the same basket as everyone involved. The purpose is God’s glory, but we are in charge of things.

The only question, then, is your personal style under God’s leadership.

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You Get What You Ask For

Posted on October 30, 2017 by ehurst

There’s a lot of economics posturing out there, and the noise gets louder as things get more difficult. That is, it gets loudest when one special interest or another isn’t happy with their share of the loot. Something you need to keep in mind: There is no such thing as an altruistic advocate on economic policy. The Myth of Objectivity is a lie from the Devil. That’s not to say all the participants in the debate are individually and consciously evil, but it’s always the same kind of rationalization we expect from self-deceived fallen intellects. There is always some kind of personal interest in there somewhere, hidden or otherwise.

Your elder does not promote any economic theory. I will point out how the various theories are symptoms of moral failure. There is no solution to economic troubles because all of the a priori assumptions are wrong. Until you draw near to Biblical Law, you cannot discern what’s real, so you cannot imagine what will work. All we have left is to observe human economic behavior and understand why it will inevitably fail.

Understanding why it will fail requires understanding the basic Law of God as manifested in the Law Covenants. There is only one way to get this right, one hope of making the most of our human condition after the Fall. We’ve covered it here before. The biggest problem is the failure to grasp how Creation as a whole is wired for Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) feudalism. There can be no secular state; there can be no “public” entities. Until we get that one thing right, all of mankind’s dreams and ferment of activity are futile.

So this business of advocating the transfer of wealth for “a more equitable” outcome is a lie from Hell. Not because it’s socialism or communism, but because transferring wealth requires threats of violence from a morally invalid authority. It ignores how the process of transfer is inherently destructive of wealth. Vast quantities are consumed in the mechanism and will never get to the supposed recipient. This in itself is an intolerable evil.

Worse, the process of transfer invariably destroys the recipient. It has never once been done in such a fashion as to preserve the humanity of anyone involved. It is inherently dehumanizing to all involved, but particularly to the alleged beneficiary. It reduces them to status of pets, at best. There is simply no way to make this ennobling to anyone. So anyone who proposes a system of wealth transfer should be treated as demonized and insane.

But by the same token, the economic libertarians are turning shalom on its head. They want to reduce everyone to an individual before an objective legal system, when God’s Word flatly says — repeatedly — that people need the protection of their tribe or clan (either by DNA or by covenant). In a libertarian system, the individual is stripped of all protection and left to the whims of any cabal that manages to displace the natural protection of the tribe. It breeds covenants of evil because there is no restraint on the natural human urge to control and pad one’s own nest. God’s plan was to restrict those urges under ANE feudalism. Whatever failings you might imagine there are in His system, everything man dreams up is far worse.

So it doesn’t matter what mixture of economic and social freedom-versus-control that you propose, you are fighting reality and fighting God. It never has worked and it never will. Worse, you will have promoted Satan’s power to oppress and enslave no matter which path you devise and pursue. All such theories are lies from the Devil.

Because we know that there is no hope of mankind to embrace the truth of God, we are left with the mission to infiltrate and humor whomever thinks they are in charge. There will be no significant measures of divine justice, so get used to it. Understand why and how it is all evil so that you can point it out in those teachable moments of God’s glory. Don’t get lost in the disputes and debates about all the various theories; it’s nothing more than comparative sin. None of it will work and God won’t bless it. Some of it will appear to work because Satan’s mission is to deceive those who reject God’s truth.

It may even appear to work quite well, but that’s no different than why “black magic” seems to work in parts of the Bible narrative. Creation is far more powerful and alive than Westerners are willing to admit, and Creation will tend to give you what you demand from it in a certain sense. But when the things you demand are inherently destructive, that’s your problem. Your elder will never attempt to rule over you, but is duty bound to offer his heart-led insight. This is eldercraft, and every human who seeks God’s favor will eventually face the call of eldership on some scale; it’s highly unlikely you’ll escape it. Be ready; ask for wisdom.

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‘Tis the Season

Posted on October 29, 2017 by ehurst

Some you may remember I’ve mentioned my old post about Life Church being the single greatest traffic draw on this blog. It still is; that post five years ago still gets more hits than any other single post. As you might expect, among those who come here for that post are quite a few who have their own horror stories to tell. This weekend I got a private email from someone alleging serious sex crimes committed by the staff at one of the many Life Church campuses. It appears to have been swept under the rug, but maybe not for long.

Notice how that fits in with the current social media trend? It’s as if this is the season for that sort of thing. I’m not surprised about any of it. We already knew Hollywood was a moral cesspool, and government has always been rife with such shenanigans. And I can assure you that there’s a lot more of it among big religious organizations than you would imagine. On the one hand, there’s a lot false allegations about it among people who are innocent, while the folks who are guilty often face no such suspicions.

But we can expect the revelations to keep coming. It’s just a small part of the hand of God on America. It’s a standard feature of tribulation and wrath for evil secrets to be shouted from the housetops.

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Sermon on the Mount 4

Posted on October 28, 2017 by ehurst

Matthew 5:21-26 — The Forgotten Treasure

The Sermon on the Mount explains repentance and renewing the Covenant in anticipation of the Messiah coming. In this passage, Jesus repeatedly refers to “your brother” as a reference to your covenant kinfolk. It’s a matter of emphasis. We notice that the Jewish leadership is never so hard on anyone as they were the Jewish peasantry, particularly the poor. The arrogance of status under this highly perverted view of the Covenant justified all sorts of moral abomination.

A critical element in Jesus’ teaching was restoring the ancient Hebrew mysticism of heart-led moral awareness. This was not merely offensive, but shocking to the Pharisees. They often played dumb, using semantic games and legalistic posturing, as if Jesus couldn’t possibly be serious about returning to mystical symbolism, something they abandoned three centuries before. Sometimes Jesus threw it back in their faces by pointing out the logical conclusions of what they were saying. Thus, Jesus’ teaching was often shocking to your average Jewish peasant, as well, in how it contradicted everything they had heard in synagogue.

Jesus enters into a series of comparative teachings: “you have heard…” The first is the common teaching against murder. This was prominently featured in the Ten Commandments. Jesus hardly disputes this law, but says the literal meaning doesn’t go far enough. It’s pretty obvious that you can’t have shalom with folks killing each other in the Covenant community. Very ancient Jewish tradition had proposed distinctions in penalties for different types of homicide, and the Pharisees expanded upon this a good bit. And yet, they used the legal definitions as an excuse for all kinds of destructive spite, short of homicide, against those they were supposed to be leading. The people of God were His treasure on the earth.

We could easily weary ourselves cataloging the equally silly modern legalism about “being nice” and worrying about people’s feelings, but Jesus’ teaching doesn’t justify anything like that. Rather, His emphasis here is a heart-led determination to make shalom, not simply avoid getting into trouble. In verse 22 He hammers out how easy it is to get lost in avoidance and restrictions. How much “don’t do” shall we pile up? Jesus points out how the Pharisees had made it flatly illegal to call someone raca (Aramaic for stupid and troublesome) but not illegal to say the same thing using the Greek word moros (the root of our English “moron”). As far as Jesus is concerned, that’s a pretty silly distinction — you can stand before the Sanhedrin for one, but face God’s wrath for the other. Which court is the higher authority?

It’s not about the words, but the needless tension that threatens shalom.

Turn this around, says Jesus. Think in terms of reducing tension when possible. Say you are about to present your offering in the Temple, and then the Holy Spirit takes advantage of your penitent frame of mind to remind you that you have offended your Covenant brother. Do you suppose that you can try to reduce tension with God when your conscience is still burning like that? Stop. The ritual of offering will wait while you turn around and search for that brother there in the crowd of worshipers. Make amends as best you can, then come back up to where you set aside your offering and seek God’s favor with a clear conscience.

On a human level, it’s the same thing. In ancient times, you probably would have very little warning if someone filed a civil case against you. Almost everything was done orally and without a lot of bureaucratic nonsense compared to modern times. It’s quite likely you would get short notice that you were a defendant in most civil courts, and summoned to appear as soon as an officer could find you. So it’s a very common wisdom to approach the plaintiff before the case is called and try to find out what terms of redress would prevent things going any farther.

If you would do it in a civil matter, why not for a purely moral issue when you stand before God? In the former case, you are notified by God that something is an offense worth His attention, and it smites your conscience. In the latter case, it’s something that a human court decides is worth its attention and you are under civil threat. Either way, the heart-led wisdom is to maintain a readiness to make shalom, not nurse your pique at someone. Sure, there will always be folks you cannot please no matter what you do. Nobody suggests you have to placate them, but nothing justifies spite either. Build the habit of keeping your cool when someone offends you, and you promote shalom for everyone under the Covenant.

This is a return to that Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) feudalism, wherein the greatest earthly treasure of any man is the people who love him and seek his welfare. And because they are your treasure, you’ll return the favor, seeking their shalom as well. When you stand before God with a clear conscience, you can afford to stop worrying about the legalistic Pharisees.

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No Good Politics

Posted on October 28, 2017 by ehurst

In response to a query…

I should have thought this was obvious by now: Jesus was neither conservative nor liberal in the context of His own day. In both religious and political terms, the Pharisees were the dominant conservatives. The Sadducees were secularized liberals (mostly priests, by the way). Thus, as a point of reference, the High Priest at Jesus’ trial was a Sadducee, but he colluded with the Pharisees to protect their positions against someone who threatened the whole thing.

Jewish religion was controlled by this cabal of plutocrats. They had a strong say in Jewish politics, but there was also the deeply cynical Herodians (actually Edomites politically absorbed a century before who cynically adopted Judaism as the price for admission to political power). And the whole thing was under the watchful eye of Rome.

Both the Pharisees and Sadducees as philosophical forces in play arose from the Hellenistic drift that was ongoing from around 323 BC when Alexander the Great swept through the Levant (that eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea). There were other smaller players in terms of social influence, but Judaism was not a genuine extension of Old Testament religion. It was a sharp departure from the ancient mystical Hebrew outlook, in the sense that the mysticism was kept as mere window-dressing, while the core commitment was to Hellenized rationalism.

Hellenism is pagan. Not in the restricted sense of religious categories today, but in the sense that it arose as a natural implication of Greek pagan mythology. I won’t take the time here to trace that out; better writers have done it long ago. It’s not that hard to see how Plato and Aristotle drew their underlying assumptions from the value system espoused in Greek mythology. Hellenism is defined as the whole culture and religion of ancient Greece. Alexander the Great consciously evangelized it. It is the very root of Western rationalism.

Jesus called for a return to the ancient Hebrew mysticism. He was on another planet when it came to social and political implications. Given that our Western Civilization is very much the product of Hellenism, you can bet that the full range of our political and social frame of reference is very much a product of Hellenism, and unquestionably distinct from that of the Bible. If you properly understand Jesus as calling for a return to the ancient Hebrew outlook, then you cannot possibly associate His teaching with either major thread of political and social influence in the US today.

The same goes for our political parties; no one in the public sphere is promoting anything resembling Biblical Law. Yes, that ancient Law of God does apply to us today, because the Law Covenants were never meant to be read with typical Jewish legalism. They were mystical parables; everyone in the Ancient Near East understood that. Indeed, it’s an equally huge mistake to think you can learn the structure of that Law by reason and analysis. In the general meaning of the terms in our American culture, neither the letter of the law, nor the spirit of the law, are the proper approach. Rather, the proper approach is the Law as a Person: Jesus Christ.

On some rare occasions, quite by accident, something you see in law, politics or social events will approach Biblical Law. It’s okay to celebrate that brief flash of good moral sense. It’s not okay to then conclude that you should support any of the various political theories or parties existing the US today. They are all irrevocably wrong, in part because the whole system itself is wrong. And that in turn is because Western Civilization is wrong.

But you cannot simply make the blanket policy of withdrawing from the whole thing and hiding out. This is part of that quantum moral reasoning, where you see things on multiple levels. If you personally are called to withdraw, do so. Most of us will be called to get involved in a cynical infiltration of the system. We understand it; we can teach it to others. We know what the system requires of us, but we don’t actually commit to the system. We agree to play along; we humor those who truly believe.

That’s what Jesus taught; see Matthew 23:1-12.

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Feudal, Covenantal, Personal and Contextual

Posted on October 28, 2017 by ehurst

Creation is alive, sentient and willful. I could as easily use the noun “reality” and it still fits. We could say the same with Biblical Law, because it is synonymous with “the Word of God” and “the will of God.”

For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

Creation is endowed with the moral character of the Creator. It’s only natural that what He makes will reflect His personality. Know God and you will know reality, and His Creation is not a mere inert mechanism. The Bible is full of language asserting that Creation is living and responsive to His voice. God didn’t make inert matter — that’s a cultural myth from outside the Bible. God breathed His own soul into His Creation.

I use the term “Biblical Law” to emphasize the fundamental nature of how we should deal with life in general. Biblical Law is an aspect of how Creation responds to us as individuals. It’s nature is feudal, covenantal, intensely personal and contextual. Don’t memorize the text of Biblical Law as it appears in Scripture; absorb the personality of how it acts in this world. The record of Biblical Law is not the Law itself.

In the deep symbolism of Hebrew Scripture, Biblical Law stands at the entrance back into Eden as the Flaming Sword. The broad context of Biblical Law helps to shape sane choices in this life under the Curse of the Fall so that we can move closer to Eden, our human existence as God intended it. Biblical Law is the path of Life. It demands you take the heart-led approach to knowing and doing. It’s the only hope you have for making it work. This thing requires that you connect back to it on a level of faith, a faculty that is far above mere intellect.

Each of us as individuals must become acquainted with God and with His Creation. No two of us can possibly experience exactly the same thing. The demands of His Law overlap for all of us, in the sense that God is who He is. But the implications will never be precisely the same for each of us, since He has placed each of us on our own ground. We each have our own grant of dominion to exercise on His behalf. The individuality is His design choice. We all share a certain amount so that we can commune together with Him, but the image of uniformity is alien to this thing.

This is why we must be circumspect in how we represent Biblical Law in our fallen world. We have to be aware of how those around us will see this whole thing. The heart is able to see far more than the eyes, and a heart committed to the Flaming Sword can discern the thoughts of those around us, at least sufficient to have a functional awareness. Even if we find other people puzzling, we can discern enough to carry out the mission of shining the glorious light of truth.

Don’t let yourself become dependent on the things this world offers. If, for example, the Internet becomes highly restricted, be ready to work around it. Yes, the US government is striving to control the Internet, even as the Internet community is destroying the US government system. Don’t limit your thinking; don’t be captive to what’s popular — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Use them, but treat them as mere tools that may or may not be appropriate to your mission.

You shouldn’t imagine that you have a vested interest in how this complex situation morphs. This is why I discourage activism; you can’t get involved without compromising your mission. We can share a vision of what is morally right according to Biblical Law, but we cannot allow ourselves to get sucked into the ways of human manipulation. We, of all people, should never forget how the final choice of each individual must follow the heart-led way. Don’t dehumanize people by treating them as a mass to be herded. Offer your moral leadership personally and individually; give people incentives to come under your feudal dominion in some way. Otherwise, you cannot do anything for them.

Biblical Law is feudal, covenantal, personal and contextual in nature.

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