The One in the Mirror

Posted on September 22, 2017 by ehurst

We have to ditch the mental habits of our world.

One of those habits is seeking some body of objective truth. So long as you cling to that, there will always be someone ready to crush you for having a different content in your “objective truth.” As previously noted, it’s a trick, a fundamental flaw of human nature to believe that logic and reason can bring us all to a common answer on everything. What’s really happening is that we use reason and logic to justify what’s really going on inside of us, and that’s the drive to find room for our true individual will.

If the world around us says we need objective reason and logic, then our minds will work through the inherently broken rules of logic and find room to justify what we really must have for entirely illogical reasons. And we will go so far as to play the game and hide from our conscious minds the content of that true will and where it comes from.

It’s not that your true will comes from God, but it reflects how God made us. It’s how we are wired. So it works a whole lot better to come up with a model of reality that accommodates that wiring as much as possible. This is why I state that reality is fungible: Your perception of reality, arising from your experiences and your true will, is as good as mine. We need to invest more energy in understanding how to work together within that variable reality than fussing at each other about what we find reality to be.

So this calls for developing protocols and habits that account for these very necessary differences between humans. Even when no one else involved understands or agrees with our radically different assumptions, we are accountable to God for doing it right. This is how we infiltrate a world that does not know our Creator and bring Him closer to human awareness.

This is how I deal with Western government bureaucracy. This is how I found a comfortable home in the US military. I could write a book about what’s wrong with the US military, but that would serve no purpose. It might be entertaining, and could provoke some discussion, but nothing significant would change. The nature of bureaucracy prevents even registering such input. Instead, I have to find a path of external conformance, treating the military itself as a living thing with very machine-like qualities. It evolves, but not quickly. It is what it is at the time you deal with it.

And even when individuals within the system have some discretion, it tends to run against your individual wishes by bureaucratic instinct. That’s just the way it is. You have to cultivate favor from each individual holding discretionary authority, and never be surprised at how corrupt it is. Stop thinking of corruption as evil; it’s just human relations with a bad name. Everything in Creation is personal and God plays favorites. We don’t seek corruption for hedonistic pursuits; we use favoritism to indicate that God says something different about reality than what most people believe. “Rule of law” has always been a myth.

So if you can see the difference between “kissing ass” versus serving your superior’s personal best interests as God sees it, then you’ll understand. I can assure you that military leaders can tell the difference. As long as you follow orders at all, you’ll always find someone’s going to call you names. To the degree it matters, you can remind folks that you are simply using different tactics to assert your individuality. Meanwhile, you should be looking for reasons to cultivate personal loyalty, not seeking excuses to withhold it.

Some things I’ve said to others during arguments: How does my friendly disposition harm you? I didn’t join a union; I don’t belong to your clusterf**k of malcontents. There’s no justification for an adversarial relationship with management. I didn’t come here to get my dick wet and my pockets full; my aspirations are a little higher than that.

The only things in this world you can fix are your expectations.

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Bits and Pieces 26

Posted on September 21, 2017 by ehurst

1. Think about it: We who live heart-led have the nerve to tell the world that a billion Western minds are wrong.

That’s my estimate, a mere approximation; if you want to fuss over details, you already fail to understand the point. What is at stake here is the realization that the majority will always be wrong about almost any subject you mention. That’s the nature of the Fall. The hardest thing to swallow is probably the recognition that it can’t be fixed.

2. While migrating to Linux is hard, I tend to think sticking with Windows is even harder. Even more difficult is that the question is becoming more and more a niche issue in the first place as the ownership and use of PCs and laptops is declining rapidly. I believe we’ve passed the equilibrium point; the majority of people using the Internet do so from their cellphones and tablets.

However, those who produce content cannot do it without a full-blown computer of some sort. I have serious doubts that oral controls will never be more than a toy for mobile device users. And touchscreens doesn’t scale well with text and data. In the end, the question about Windows versus Linux will not affect most consumers, but will be an issue for workstations.

3. There’s more than one kind of red pill. One of the most prominent uses of the term “red pill” refers to socio-sexual matters. This what we refer to on this blog as “Game Theory of Socio-sexual Response.” It’s a body of theory about the nature of human sexual response in social situations, in particular as contrary to the typical social mythology, which mythology is reflected in feminism. It really doesn’t have all that much to say about feminine nature itself.

The people who promote that particular kind of red pill remain deeply wedded to, and defensive about, Western intellectual biases. What they refuse to understand is that it’s part of the very source of the blue pill feminism they hate. All the red pill guys are doing is rolling things back a few centuries to the days of Western feudalism. Thus, we don’t do a lot red pill stuff here at Kiln of the Soul because that body of theory, while generally accurate in its conclusions about women, applies only in terms of how to handle Westernized women. It still ignores the full recognition of how the Bible views things, in the sense that they don’t see the difference. Indeed, a great many red pill enthusiasts are also some kind of white heritage enthusiast.

4. We are grateful for your prayers about our car trouble. For now, it has reached a new state of equilibrium in that the actual alarm doesn’t work any more, in part because the wiring that controls the power locks is shorted somewhere. Without the power locks, there’s no alarm. It’s tolerable for now, but keep in mind that Volvos have only one exterior keyhole on the driver’s door. The rest of the locks have to be manually operated from inside.

5. Just in case anyone is wondering, I still have this driving mission commitment to military people. That’s my mission field; it has been since I first wore a uniform. Pray with me as I remain convinced I have at least one more adventure ahead of me that involves the military in some way.

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Creation is Calling

Posted on September 21, 2017 by ehurst

It’s worth your time: Christine explains the cultural conflict we are up against in promoting the heart-led way. And she’s quite right that things are turning around, so it’s all the more critical that we take full advantage of it. We have been blessed with this rich opportunity to bring this to life and accelerate the process for at least some people.

We see evidence in Scripture that, even when a culture is built on heart-led assumptions, not everyone lives that way. You cannot force it down anyone’s throat; it simply doesn’t work like that. Nor is is the kind of thing we might turn into a good epic saga of some multi-generational secret society searching out prospects, as if we could gin up some kind of test to identify them. What we should expect to see is neither a universal manifestation in all, nor something rare and selective.

But as Christine notes, there are already a great many people around us experiencing a sensory heart who need only the nurture to know it’s normal. If you want a place to start, look for the marginalized, those who know they don’t belong. We are called to reach out to those souls caught between the dying heart-less world and a heart-led world yet to be born. You heart will tell you who they are; learn to listen.

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A Sample of Music Nostalgia

Posted on September 20, 2017 by ehurst

Without droning on too long about it, my musical background includes southern gospel quartet music. I have since become quite a bit more discerning than during those younger years when I regularly sat down for a TV show called “Gospel Jubilee.” The Southern Gospel branch of the music business has always held as much scandal and corruption as the rest of it. Still, there were moments that touched me then as genuine worship and praise, and still do. This song gave me strength in some very difficult times. The lead singer on this one wrote the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xzaxn6UFnQ

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Status Report and Parable

Posted on September 20, 2017 by ehurst

We know everything, but we aren’t fully conscious of all of it yet. That’s how it works when you discover the heart-led way. You realize that your convictions have all the answers to every question you’ll ever confront, but there are two limiting factors in our mental awareness. One is that we haven’t yet bumped into everything we will ever experience. Two is that we have so very much to unlearn, making room for what we should have.

The unlearning ends up being the biggest task for those of us raised in a Western society. Here’s a parable: It’s all a mapping exercise. Western biases draw hard boundaries on the map and flat out lie about what’s beyond those boundaries. Most people never even come close to those areas of life. They are distracted by all the false demands and distractions of materialism. If you discover the heart, first as a sensory organ in its own right, then as a separate level of awareness, you immediately sense a drive to go out into those boundary areas. That’s when you discover that all the most beautiful and useful lands lie out there beyond the artificial borders.

For those who need to escape the Western confinement, I feel confident that we’ve marked out places you can and should explore. There is much yet to explore, simply because no two of us will find exactly the same thing. But the biggest task here was starting the exploration and drawing it on the common map of perception. This online community of faith has established a home in the borderlands; the rest is up to you as individuals.

Our focus is not on teaching people what they should find, but how to navigate and live out there in the wilds. For example, we talk about the ruins left by previous occupants, the ancient cultures that once thrived out there. Their great buildings haven’t fallen down, but they’ve been partially covered by drifting sand and are overgrown with foliage from disuse. It’s unlikely we’ll ever completely understand how they used their structures, but there’s nothing hindering us from finding our own uses. Still, we need to spend some time poking around and using them.

I can’t safely take that mapping parable much farther, though. My point is that anyone trying to rediscover the lost ways of genuine miraculous faith can share only so much before it requires you either start exercising your own, or lose interest.

Though I run this blog, there have been some rich contributions from others in the content here. If not in direct comments and links to their own blogs, then the content of what I have posted has been deeply affected by their assistance in trying to explore things hidden from us all. That’s the way it works; nobody’s leading you anywhere — you have to decide to walk alongside on your own. We aren’t going to offer you a bridle. We’ll try to help you take off the constraints others have put on you.

The nine or so years of writing on this blog indicate I’ve moved a very long way in my journey. By no means have I somehow arrived at my final destination. However, my prophetic sense tells me there won’t be any new shocking discoveries reported to you here in the future. What’s left for me is to explore those already exposed. I do sense that I will be entering a time of learning how to use what I’ve discovered, and the direction of this blog will be more about sharing those experiences. The last thing in the world I want is to see your future constrained by my past, so I’ll keep reminding you that all I’m doing is telling my own story. I’m trying to teach you how to tell your story, how to go about having a story.

I’ll echo Paul’s call, encouraging you to seek the prophetic gift (1 Corinthians 14:5) more than any other manifestation of divine Presence in you. It’s the gift of our time, and something fundamental to the nature of moral discernment. You can see what’s coming in moral terms because it’s a natural part of seeing the moral truth in the current context. It’s just a natural part of His Holy Spirit dwelling in you. It’s how you “know” in terms of conviction what He requires of you next.

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Glory in Context

Posted on September 19, 2017 by ehurst

In our world today, the most powerful tool of oppression is preclusion. If someone can prevent your awareness of what’s actually going on, it’s much easier to keep you enslaved. This is the root of Satan’s work.

This is why I keep ranting and raving about the heart-led mind. This business of preclusion is especially evident in Western Civilization, once you become aware of how the West is so very different from other civilizations. Even if you lack the depth of education to prepare your mind for the task, your heart can still lead you to the right place. So the anchoring point is always the heart-led way. If we can propagate that throughout the human race, we can afford to let everything else take its natural course. In due time, the heart will arrive at God’s truth.

But for those who sense a calling to examine such things, our hearts will permit us to understand how this preclusion works so that we can attack it at every point. God gave us minds to organize and implement His call to glory in our hearts. We can recognize moral blindness and shine the light of truth right where it’s needed.

This is why I rant and rave about reality being variable. There’s a powerful advantage here in sounding so wacky to the rest of the world: We aren’t on their threat radar.

Maybe this article is too long to read for some of you. I’ll share what I find pertinent here. The author is Philip Giraldi, a former CIA agent who now devotes his time to explaining the mind-twisting propaganda techniques of various governments, including the US government. I seem to recall he once suggested that we take him with a grain of salt simply on the principle that his own thinking may have been poisoned by his previous career. It’s part of a basic teaching of mysticism: You can’t trust any human, not even yourself. I believe he encourages people to think independently.

That’s the core of countering propaganda, which propaganda is a primary manifestation of Satan’s work today. In the linked article, Giraldi points out how large technology companies and governments seek to control what people think by limiting what they can access on the Net. Part of that game is limiting what people can say on the Net, a form of censorship.

The left-leaning side that lost in recent US elections would like us to believe that the vast majority of American people are not against their message. It only seems that way because of some imaginary overwhelming propaganda. They paint the image of a mass of fake personas on various social media sites during the election campaign, that their lefty message was washed out by a flood of evil nationalism. It’s as if there was a highly inflated virtual population explosion of righties clamoring for someone — anyone but the only good candidates. Surely there can’t really be that many Americans actually against their sacred lefty agenda!

So because the lefties failed, the big social media outfits are taking the blame in the sense of pushing out all these new efforts to prevent it happening again. There is a concerted attack all across the Internet industry to censor the nationalist message. The left already controls old media; they are struggling to seize control of the new media. The big social media sites are geared up to block anyone sharing a non-lefty message. Malware is planted on the computers of key nationalist figures to track their efforts and find new ways to block or garble their message. And the companies that control the registration process for simply holding a domain name are getting involved to keep nationalist operations from even being on the Net in the first place.

So far, I’ve been unhindered. The reasons should be obvious: My audience is too small and my message is too far outside the sphere of their concerns. I’m not an ally of their targets; I castigate folks like Giraldi for a Western bias in the first place. I do support nationalism itself, but not the brand of nationalism that appears in most public forums.

And I support the idea of anyone — hard-core supporters of Western Civilization on both left and right, globalists and imperialists along with nationalists of every flavor — having free access to the Net. To me it’s far more than just a public accommodation, because I don’t want it regulated at all. There is no good way to do this with fallen humans; there simply aren’t enough people out there willing to suspend their personal biases to guarantee open access to everyone. No one’s hands are clean, but the net influence of technology geeks worldwide has been rather benign, and that includes the people who influence the way technology and protocols develop. I’ll continue to promote that guarded sense of trust; it works better than the alternatives.

Meanwhile, we all know that concentrations of money and power will reliably seek oppressive control. For now, at least, there can be no Internet infrastructure without concentrations of wealth and power. The technology takes large amounts of money to lay cables and run the machinery; the backbone of the Internet is not democratic at all. At least, not yet. There has been an ongoing search for ways to network without that kind of heavy investment, but we aren’t there yet. We have to live with the tension between those who control the virtual side and those who control the physical side.

I’m doing my best to keep an eye on this stuff, trying to find the sweet spot of balance between ideals and reality. I hope you won’t hold me accountable for the way the target moves dramatically and quickly. Today’s wise technology advice becomes stale quickly. The image of stability in choices has small place in the technology world. I research daily for ways to fight the preclusion of His divine revelation. This is my calling and my mission to exploit the current context for the glory of my Lord.

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Sixty One

Posted on September 18, 2017 by ehurst

Since it’s my birthday, I’ll take the luxury of ranting a bit.

I have said that the closest I come to activism is in regards to the Internet. While it’s wholly unlikely I would try to leverage persuasion via typical political means, I’m wholly likely to fight tooth and nail in virtual terms. It may not be obvious to most people, but the Biblical Law applies online, as well. Even harder for folks to grasp is how that Law remains utterly consistent despite the radical difference in context.

Context is everything in God’s revelation. I keep saying that, hoping it will sink in that there is no such thing as objective truth. The whole point is God’s glory as seen in His moral character. That character manifests differently in different contexts, and the virtual world is quite a radical context. Your heart can guide you, recognizing the truth or deception in what someone might suggests is justice in the virtual world.

By pursuing divine justice according to my convictions, I can count on God Himself to step in and enforce things. I am utterly certain that all the current noise from US government agencies and officials about various forms of censorship, and an equally dangerous threat from oversized corporations, will eventually fail. However, the means to securing God’s favor is to boldly speak His truth into the context, but to also act firmly and consistently according to my calling in regards to the Net.

My experience with government and business teaches me that precious few ears in government and business will hear your cry for justice. In general, it’s a complete waste of time to demand a redress for grievances. Not only do they not give a damn, but they are hostile to your input. Their hostility may not be obvious, nor even honestly expressed, but it’s discernible in how they respond to complaints. It’s also in how they respond to calls for accountability.

For example, there’s been a lot of noise from the US government that Americans should not trust Kaspersky security software. There is supposed to be some risk that Kaspersky, being based in Russia, might engage in a little spying on behalf of the Russian government. There is no evidence backing this fear mongering. On the other hand, we know for certain that Kaspersky doesn’t cooperate with the NSA, CIA, FBI and other US government agencies. That means Kaspersky is committed to rooting out spyware from those agencies if they can detect it. Keep in mind that they are the ones who found Stuxnet, and security researchers are quite sure the US was involved in creating that worm.

It’s hard to know whom you can trust. Recently CCleaner was found compromise by someone using a stolen certification key. The story goes like this: Piriform is the company that has made CCleaner, and that company was bought up by Avast (AV company). A month later someone used an Avast certificate to slip in a compromised version for download. It took several weeks before someone else (Cisco) found it. Granted, Avast cleaned up the mess quickly, but it does weaken Avast’s reputation.

God bless you all

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Nightmares Dissipate in the Light of Dawn

Posted on September 17, 2017 by ehurst

The intellect is a very ill-equipped master. It is incapable of doing it well because it wasn’t designed for that.

One of the blessings of the heart ruling over the mind is that the mind can then relax and consider things on multiple levels. We are permitted in the heart to see the very true nature of things from a moral perspective, to grasp the true essence of something as God sees it. Thus, we are not obliged to seek scientism or faux objectivity to bounce ideas off of our heart-led moral reality. Moral truth imparts a genuine objectivity in this world, because we have no vested interest in the outcomes.

Convictions work much like instinct; once you get used to listening to that voice, you realize you already know the answers. Not in terms of absolutes, but the answers you need for your life. You’ll get better at making sense of those answers when you start trusting them on a personal scale, acting as if they were true before you have a chance to test them out. That’s inherent in the meaning of faith.

Let me demonstrate. On the one hand, we all know that America is one of the biggest bullies in human history. Americans have been conditioned to believe that our way is the only reasonable way there is. We are convinced that, if the rest of the world would just sit down and listen to reason, they’d never argue with our foreign policy. The only possible reason they can disagree is if they are stupid, and perhaps evil. This pervades what passes for American diplomacy and is most certainly behind all of our espionage. “What’s good for America is good for the world. There is no higher blessing for all of humanity than for America to prosper.”

You and I can see quite clearly that this is just a lie of Satan. But what makes this doubly evil is that America does such a crappy job of it all. Part of it is the lack of unified vision among the plutocrats who actually make the decisions. It causes them to divide against each other in very important ways. They are missing the moral clarity to succeed at their plots; they are utterly lacking in evil genius.

Let me cite a current example: Afghanistan. There are multiple goals at work in America’s involvement there. One is to keep the military-industrial complex fat and powerful. Another is the lust for their natural resources. There is a poor level of cooperation between those two agendas. That is, they haven’t fully thought through how they could both maximize the outcomes. They compete for what they see as a pie too small instead of working together to bake a bigger pie. There are other agendas at work, but let’s put them aside for a moment and limit the discussion.

My point is that invading and occupying is not enough to succeed at making this pie bigger. It’s pissing away resources with no real return. What’s missing? Colonization. The only way to truly subject Afghanistan to American will is doing to them the same thing we did to Native Americans. You’ll notice how well it’s working with Israel and Palestine. There’s tension and bloodshed, but in the long run the Palestinians are losing. An unabashed colonizing policy is Israel’s only hope of retaking all the land once held by Ancient Israel. Brutal, but it works. In the same way, it’s not enough to have troops there in Afghanistan building up little American cities. It needs a hefty and growing presence of American civilians Americanizing the whole place.

Yes, it would be enough to overcome Islamic extremism. That extremism is a creature of our espionage, and without our support, it would die. If we actually wanted to control that country, we could dissolve the Taliban in a few weeks. And a colonized Afghanistan would yield up far greater treasures, far more quickly, than anything else we’ve tried so far. To be honest, even the globalists would be happy with the long term results. Once colonized and pacified, it would be a perfect candidate for adding to their imaginary borderless world.

In other words, too many competing agendas are too impatient to seize their goal before the fruit is ripe. You can see why I am convinced that uber-intelligent conspiracies don’t exist. Nobody exhibits the kind of overwhelming wisdom and success that results in lasting dynasties of very real control. It has never been easier to create such committed and skillful ruling dynasties, and it has never been less likely to happen.

Mind you, I’m not actually recommending colonization of Afghanistan. God knows — it would breathe fresh life and vitality back into the Anglo-American culture. Colonists are a special breed of people — the quintessence of Germanic tribal nations — who keep such things alive. I’m quite certain there would be a sufficient number of volunteers if this thing was sold properly. We’ve seen that done before. But I’d hate to see the nastiest part of Western Civilization living any longer and prospering. It’s just that it’s not hard to see how impossible a genuine global conquest would be. The kind of moral failure that makes people dream of global conquest is the same failure that ensures they lack the wisdom to carry it out.

Let your nightmares fade away like the morning fog of a warm and sunny day.

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Strapped in for a Wild Ride

Posted on September 17, 2017 by ehurst

If you go by the news reports, you would think that a fresh wave of madness has spread across the US. But it is only confirmed by the reporting of local events. Indeed, right here in my own neighborhood it seems the crazy factor has risen a few notches.

Revisit the story of King Saul’s madness; it was episodic (1 Samuel 19-20). It’s typical in Scripture that madness is one thing, but madness as a symptom of demonic presence is typically episodic. The Devil and his minions come and go because they have so very much to do (Job 1:7; Luke 4:13). Yes, the subject of madness in the Bible is very complex, but partly so because of how poorly Western minds grasp the biblical mind.

Of course, that’s the key to why God’s wrath rests so heavily on America. As a nation, we simply do not understand God and His Word. Jay noted the other day that genuine Anglo-American Christianity is reflected in the mythology of Tolkein’s fiction. It’s highly paganized and devoid of Hebraic lore; it is very close to the ancient outlook from Beowulf.

And while this still has a powerful effect on all the unconscious assumptions behind Anglo-American culture, there is an equally pernicious big move to suppress religion altogether by shoving it into some imaginary realm of mere sentiment. Religion is reduced to another hobby like hard-core Tolkein fandom; it’s just fantasy entertainment. There’s nothing to mark it as better than fans of John Norman’s Gorean fantasies. In other words, there were never any good options for Westerners seeking genuine faith because no one takes it seriously without major compromises with cerebral logic.

It’s not that people cannot come to genuine faith, but that they are presented with no good ways of bringing it to life. The Western religion buffet is full of varied flavors but there’s nothing that actually feeds the soul. If it’s not subjected under reason, it’s considered frivolous. There is no place for the heart as the seat of moral will. The West has precluded any lore that recognizes the validity of heart-led moral conviction. There’s no end of substitutes, but no hint of the thing itself.

So we see the symptoms of an America utterly lacking in the only anchoring point God gave us. The entire worldview rests on any number of things external to the soul. There is this romantic fiction that if anyone anywhere takes logic and reason seriously, they cannot end up far from some standard scientism as religion. There is a presumed common core of rational literacy that takes the place of a deep lore of faith. It’s a religion that cannot see itself as a religion. It’s loaded with all kinds of a priori assumptions about what is good and right, so it functions like any other religion.

Here’s just one example: While the details vary, the human physical ideal in the West is restricted to Greco-Roman imagery. We’ve been taught to exclude anyone who doesn’t fit the ideal. We are discouraged from recognizing it as a matter of one cultural image among many. Furthermore, so-called remedies are based on even crazier ideals. Has anyone noticed how, in the Bible, feminine beauty has no particular standard? Can you see that the starting point is genuine affection for her in the first place, so that the eye of love (commitment) seeks any noteworthy feature as “beautiful”? Nobody seems to realize that men are wired to do that.

The Western male obsession with objective standards of beauty, wherein men are taught to seek a woman who fits this standard, leads to all kinds of social madness. On the one hand, the Western male is taught to reject anyone below that certain standard, and yet when he finds someone he really likes, he’ll rationalize and compromise that it’s a matter of individual taste. He never really knew what he honestly wanted, and what he could and should accept. Western man isn’t allowed to think first in terms of how a woman might be actually useful in his life, so he’s forced into all kinds of mental gymnastics to do what his heart requires. There’s a pernicious mythology that pushes the heart off into spooky territory and keeps it there.

Western society lacks any firm foundation for making the most of what God has given us. We don’t have too many couples consciously aware of what really pulls them together, or what constitutes stability, or what defines a good marriage. And this is just one narrow example of Western failure to provide a place for the individual soul to stand against the vagaries of human fortune or misfortune. It’s a miracle of mercy that we didn’t incinerate ourselves with nukes a long time ago.

So the current madness is actually pretty tame compared to what it could be. Let me encourage you to stop several times every day and check to see if you are walking the heart-led path. Make it your one measure of self-discipline. This is how you are going to survive and prosper as we are taken for a wild and torturous ride. We can talk about tribulation in broad terms, but it should be a form of entertainment as we watch the particulars play out. Don’t be caught off guard; humans haven’t seen this in a very long time. The end of a civilization is really big stuff, and we are permitted a rare glimpse of such things.

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Psalm 149

Posted on September 16, 2017 by ehurst

The fourth of the final Hallelujah Hymns in Psalms, this one draws the image of a distinct historical event, though we cannot pin it down which one. We do know that during the Period of Restoration after Exile, the returnees faced persecution and military conflict. We also know they won several battles, and this psalm was composed to celebrate such a victory.

After the initial hallelujah, the psalmist proclaims that here is something worthy of a new song to mark the celebration for future generations. It shall be an unrestrained and uninhibited outburst of praise and worship to the God of Israel, employing every imaginable means of giving Him glory. This is Jehovah, who clearly dotes on His own family when they humble themselves before Him.

The psalmist goes on and on about the extravagances of jubilation due the Lord for for His favor. It’s as if everyone in the nation has in their hands the finest weapon of divine authority. Clearly, by their adherence to the Covenant alone were they granted such a resounding victory over their oppressors. This is not so much about revenge, but justice according to the promises of God. The author here equates the revelation of God with the power and authority to correct wrongs on the earth, symbolized by the sword.

In the Ancient Near East, it is the royalty and nobility of enemy people who are most to blame for unjust aggression, so they bear the shame when they fail. They are painted as arrogant in contrast to the humility of penitent Israel who cries out to Jehovah for relief. When He delivers, it is because of His Word alone.

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