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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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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