God’s Word on Diversity

Posted on August 22, 2017 by ehurst

Leading up to the Tower of Babel, the Lord had warned that He designed us to spread out, to diversify and grow varying societies scattered across the face of the earth. The dream of some humans to raise up a single culture and religion to unify all mankind is a moral nightmare with our fallen nature. The fallen intellect simply cannot grasp the necessity of human diversity, in the sense that human reason without the moral anchor of revelation demands uniformity. God says this is evil, but even most people who claim to take the Bible seriously just cannot see that.

The means and methods of moral unity within diversity are hidden from the human mind. It requires the heart to rule; reason keeps operating in terms of efficiency and accomplishment. Reason rebels at the notion that those things just do not matter. Only the heart comprehends that individual human moral development is all that really matters. So we have this incomprehensible situation where the folks who most loudly demand diversity are also the most oppressive and hateful about demanding precisely the wrong kind of uniformity.

The only way we can do it right is to live together in extended families, with tribal social structures and ANE feudal government. Even Western science recognizes that optimal social groups top out around 75 people. After that, things become unmanageable without falling into the sin of centralizing control that leads to oppressive uniformity. The moral necessity for the proper balance between freedom and protection requires a familial feudal structure, and no head of household should have to manage more than 75 at the most. The biblical rule is to begin working toward subdivision after a household hits 50.

And it’s only natural that every such household should develop some variation in habits, customs and traditions. The degree of variation itself is variable based on circumstances. However, the fact of variation is a human necessity. That much is painfully obvious to anyone paying attention. A household is a living being, too, changing and adapting to the context. Adopting new cultural habits and ideas is entirely normal and right, as is forsaking some others. The Bible presumes a certain amount of flexibility in keeping hold of things that matter and letting other things vary, and God promised to keep supplying wise leaders equipped to discern what was essential. God has always supported what He required.

In sum: You must know what God requires of you, and grant others the freedom to find their own way. Defend your own mission and calling, but remain sensitive to the Holy Spirit in how you do that. Remember that the word “martyr” comes from Latin and Greek for “witness,” which in turn comes from Sanskrit for “creating a memory.”

This is the context we keep in mind when we look at current problems. We know that the word “racism” is one of the most abused words in American English. The real source of conflict is unwise effort to make things work in ways they simply cannot. Modern attempts to build a cosmopolitan society violate just about every element of Biblical Law. You cannot thrust widely varying cultural groups together and demand they all adopt alien customs and habits unless you recognize it as slavery.

Despite the wild rhetoric, the real issue is genuine cultural conflict. It includes the very natural human instinct for territoriality. It’s a blasphemous sin against God to suggest that humans should not be territorial. In our fallen state, petty conflict over turf should be taken for granted, not forbidden. Keeping disparate groups away from each other is the only sane way to proceed. This was fundamental to the miracle at the Tower of Babel diversifying language; humanity is supposed to be divided that way. Whatever one might mean by “cultural enrichment,” it must be voluntary. False moral scolding is a sin.

Let’s keep in mind one thing, folks: The dominant Anglo-America culture on which the US Constitution stands is hostile to God’s Word, too. Don’t become an apologist for any single culture existing today, but only what can be abstracted from the Bible. The presumption of Anglo-American culture is to read itself back into the Bible, and that has never worked very well. One of the most despicable elements is the ancient Anglo-Saxon arrogance that proclaims Jesus as an Anglo-Saxon man. Neither was He black or Hispanic, and He clearly rejected His own Hellenized Jewish heritage in favor of Ancient Hebraic culture. We have to shed all of that other stuff to get back into the proper frame of mind to understand what God actually said.

What can a heart-led community of faith do? In our current situation here in the US, it requires keeping your eye on the prize, which is the Creator’s glory. Your individual calling will set the tone, but in broad general terms, we are seeking to infiltrate a world that is very far removed from Biblical Law, and viscerally hostile to God’s truth. Never, ever buy into someone else’s false accusations; their morals arise from idolatry. Stand firm in what God’s Word says about life. Often you’ll just refuse to discuss it because the discussion is controlled and will not allow you to speak the truth. Be ready to speak when the Lord offers a teachable moment, but mostly just walk in that truth. Get comfortable with the idea that conflicts are unavoidable. Demonstrate the power of the Word by how you handle those conflicts.

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Collected Random Photos

Posted on August 21, 2017 by ehurst

Just wanted to share some random images. This first one is some of local flowering trees from a month ago. The season passes quickly and you won’t find such blossoms now.

Horses are a big thing around these parts. This pasture is sometimes vacant, but on this occasion there were horses on both sides of the divider fence and close enough to capture all at once.

This is the conduit I rode down one day. It’s typically near dry most of the year, maybe a trickle in the very bottom growing moss. However, we had an unusual rain pattern hanging around for two weeks this month. Once the ground gets soaked, the run-off is much greater and this was near the end. Earlier that day it was a half-meter deeper as indicated by the flotsam on my side, and the grass flattened on the other side.

Central Oklahoma got only about 80% of the solar eclipse. During a half-hour period the sun was faintly dimmed and nowhere near as hot as usual. What was really noticeable was the odd shading of the shadows from naked tree limbs about three of four meters overhead. The effect is not so pronounced with objects closer to the ground, but these tree limb shadows are normally sharply defined.

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Radix Fidem Booklet 7

Posted on August 21, 2017 by ehurst

7. All truth is God’s truth. If it works and your conscience is clear, the beliefs and practices you hold are between you and God. We recognize that certain expressions of genuine faith will limit who can fellowship with us, and take no offense at what God prospers outside His work in our lives. We have more than enough to occupy ourselves with what He has for us. Taking yourself too seriously is a moral failure.

Ultimate truth is moral in nature, not a matter of cerebral facts. Truth is an aspect of God’s Person and does not exist outside of Him. There is no objective body of truth somewhere out there that we can somehow reach by our reason. If there were no God, there could be no truth. There would be only human perception of a limited individual experience. We can at best simply agree to be self-deceived together and share our lies. Unless we are linked by heart and spirit to God’s Spirit, there can be no appeal to any outside source. Nothing we think we know makes any difference, because we cannot understand what is morally important. He is the Creator and His moral character pervades all Creation; reality itself is whatever God says it is. Reality is subject to God’s whims and no one has standing to question Him.

Human reason is deeply deceptive and self-deceived; it becomes a false god, an idol by which we disguise self-worship. Reason is incapable of objectivity, even as it asserts that it alone is objective. We always manage to rationalize our lustful desires and never seem to notice that our appeals to reason always serve to satisfy some fleshly obsession or desire, until we restore the heart to its rightful place on the throne of the will. The heart alone is capable of discerning the truth.

It is through the heart that we realize no two of us can possibly have the same experiences and perceptions, and no two of us can know God in exactly the same way. No two of us can possibly have the same religion, and no one of us is so wise and holy as to rightly decide what religion must be for others. Any unity among believers must of necessity be pragmatic, a matter of whether we can bear with each other’s weaknesses as we bear our own. Our communion and fellowship must be a living thing, not static, because life and reality itself is not static. And God is a real Person who changes His mind; the Bible flatly asserts as much. Our own perception of things must also grow and change. So our fellowship and worship together must build on the assumption that we must change and the only valid question is whether we can still work together without violating our own sense of calling. It’s never a question of who is right and who is wrong; God has never delegated that task to anyone but His Son. There is no place in God’s revelation for binary thinking and linear logic.

The essence of God’s Law on the earth is to glorify Him by living in His heavenly peace while residing in the presence of human tension.

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Radix Fidem Booklet 6

Posted on August 20, 2017 by ehurst

6. All Creation is alive. That is, in the sense of how we conceptualize and act in God’s Creation, we cannot get it right if we don’t see it as living and active in its own right. It is not passive and neutral, but has a distinct will and interest consistent with God’s revelation. It longs to see us living in faith. From the largest celestial objects down to the smallest individual subatomic particles and energy flows, the world around us celebrates with us when we desire holiness. Creation is not fallen; we are. The burden is on us to discover God’s provision. Only by embracing God’s moral character can we discern His intention in Creation.

The damnedest lie of Western Civilization is that most of the natural world around is either inert or lacking sentience. The Bible clearly takes seriously the idea of recognizing that Creation is alive, in whole and in part as we experience it. This is inherent in the Law Covenants. It is flatly asserted in some passages of Scripture. God commanded His prophets to speak to so-called “nonliving” objects as if they were alive, and Christ Himself gave commands to natural forces, commands He fully expected those elements to obey. It is a vile and pernicious prejudice of Westerners to assume it was merely for dramatic effect, or that it was some mythical power of words. The Creator breathed His own life into His Creation, and we blaspheme His name when we treat it as inferior.

The primary reason modern believers see so few miracles is because they cannot comprehend that everything around you is alive and unfallen. Mankind was placed within Creation as God’s stewards, so we remain responsible for guiding it. There is a certain inertia on Creation due to the effects of the Fall, but as we grow in our moral discernment of the Creator’s divine will, we will find the natural world increasingly responsive to those few of us who walk in true faith. Creation’s responses will tend to remain small and feeble until humanity as a whole begins to recover the divine truth that Creation is alive and willful.

This issue in particular requires that we pull our sense of awareness up into the heart. The intellect is not up to this task; the voice of God and the many voices of Creation can be discerned in the heart alone. We speak to Creation from the heart alone.

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Psalm 145

Posted on August 19, 2017 by ehurst

This is one of those acrostic Hebrew poems of David, each verse beginning with a different Hebrew letter in alphabetic order. It is also likely a victory song, fitting neatly behind the previous psalm, which is a battle hymn. Not merely in the sense of dutiful to protocol, but this is genuine heart-felt gratitude.

David easily could be God’s greatest cheerleader. Everything that made life worthwhile was his simply because he was pledged as Jehovah’s vassal. He was utterly shameless in lauding what a great and mighty God he served. There was simply no way to quantify it.

It was entirely natural that the Hebrew people would recount the mighty miracles and wonders God performed as covenant promises. It was more than anyone could ponder. So in the company of others who gave God due praise, David wanted to be there in the midst of that worship.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Jehovah was His boundless patience. Like a doting father, He put up with a lot of nonsense. And this was not confined to the covenant people, but all of humanity was permitted to seek His favor.

Indeed, it was astonishing the way He worked through His chosen people, as if each of them were walking miracles, never mind whether they ever spoke a single word. Their survival against the odds and prosperity under the most stressful circumstances was a living testimony to His greatness. Just living under His dominion was beyond words. His authority never suffered from time and space boundaries.

This is the Creator of all things, able to catch anyone falling and to lift up the humble. The entire world looks to Him for their very survival. More than that, His Word promises abundant blessings beyond what any would dare to ask.

There is no model, no higher standard against which one might compare Jehovah. He is the definition of good and right. Yet He stands ready to respond to all who call on His name. It’s not a question of whether you can meet His standards; He will meet His own standards through us. He will empower us to serve Him. By the same token He’s pretty hard on folks who reject Him. He wants our hearts.

For David, the primary purpose in having a mouth was to praise the Lord. Sooner or later, everyone will glorify Him in one way or another.

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Radix Fidem Booklet 5

Posted on August 19, 2017 by ehurst

5. The Law Covenants symbolize the nature of reality itself. We are fallen creatures and unable to natively discern how to live. We are beholden to God’s Law Covenants in the sense that they manifest how He intends we should live within our existential context. His Law Covenants explain the fundamental nature of reality itself. Living by His revelation means living consistently with how God created things, and such living elicits a positive and supportive response from Creation. It is our duty to abstract our best obedience from the context in which those Law Covenants were revealed. However, the specifics of the Law are not binding outside of its context.

Jesus taught the Law of Moses as it was intended, a body of parables and symbolic teaching aimed at provoking a mystical approach to things. Jewish legalism was foreign to the ancient Hebrew culture. All covenants in the ANE were intensely personal in nature. The Law Covenants were not law in the sense of legislation, but expressions of the divine moral character of the Heavenly Sheik who offered them. Jesus was therefore the Law in Himself, the ultimate expression of God’s self-disclosure.

The Torah was couched in terms of ANE feudalism because such feudalism is hard-wired in human nature. God’s people living together as a covenant community of faith is His glory, a family operating on ANE feudalism. No other form of religious organization qualifies for the word “church.” The feudal sheik of the ANE is nothing without his people, his true treasure. Take everything else away from him and with his covenant people he can rebuild his domain from scratch. They are his own body of life in this world. This is how God deals with us, and is how Christ rules His kingdom, His sheikdom. It is deeply personal and every individual is personally accountable, with no two individuals experiencing His fatherly love in exactly the same way.

He is always merciful in our failures, forgiving those who genuinely care what He wants from them and for them. He grants power and dominion to His servants for the purpose of carrying out their assigned roles in His domain. He trains and teaches us patiently in our feudal service of His sheikdom. His dominion, His law and revelation, are not separate from His Person. He makes us into living expressions of Himself.

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Radix Fidem Booklet 4

Posted on August 18, 2017 by ehurst

4. We follow Christ. Jesus Christ as a historical figure was the final revelation of God’s moral character. Everything that departs from His teaching is inherently wrong. No living human — past, present or future — could claim to be Christ’s proxy on this earth. No organization or institution existing today can justly claim to speak for Him. Rather, we insist that we each must follow Him as best we can discern His calling. His founding of the “church” was not for purposes of control, but fellowship. We fellowship with each other to the degree and for the duration of how well we can tolerate each other with a clear conscience.

Jesus asserted and proved that He could have destroyed both the Jewish and Roman governments. A great many were hoping He would do so, and take the reins of ruling directly on earth. But He also quite assertively refused that role, saying that His kingdom was not of this world — the very definition of “otherworldly.” His words and actions were an emphatic closure of the Old Covenant; the miracles attending His death on the Cross were God’s stamp of authority on that closure. Having demonstrated endless patience and mercy, with astonishing miracles poured out on the nation over centuries, God had shown convincing proof that humanity is unable to adhere to His revelation by the flesh. It had always been a matter of changed hearts.

The Torah itself says it’s a matter of the heart. Without a burning, driving conviction within, there is no point in setting boundaries on human behavior. Prior to the Cross, men could take that higher path, but it required a disciplined effort and focus to rise above the self. Fallen human nature proved relentlessly hostile to a culture and national covenant founded on the mystical call to higher faculties of faith and commitment. The history of Israel is one of constant surrender to the Siren Song of compromise with human worldly wisdom, by degrees taking Israel farther and farther from the purity of their divine inheritance. Jesus reversed the order of things, offering by sheer miracle an escape from the bondage of fallen human will. He granted His own Spirit directly, so that humans could then turn and follow the Father’s will and learn how to claim the divine heritage lost in the Fall.

Jesus chose willingly to submit to the injustice of crucifixion. Today we willingly take up our individual crosses and walk in Christ’s path. Redemption is intensely personal; no two of us pass through the exact same sorrows and trials on the way to the Cross, nor in our calling after the Cross. His dominion is invisible to human senses, and is not bound by human reason, and does not mix with human authority. Holiness cannot be defined by outward compliance with anybody else’s sense of calling and the resulting religion. No other human can decide for you what Christ demands. By the same token, none of us can serve Him alone, so a major element in revealing His glory is how we manage to worship and fellowship together.

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Radix Fidem Booklet 3

Posted on August 17, 2017 by ehurst

3. The Spirit Realm is real and beyond comprehension. There is a distinct realm of existence totally alien and separate from ours. It is in every way superior, and our plane of existence is merely a temporary bubble within that greater realm. The human mind is totally unequipped to handle the Spirit Realm, and it is best understood with other faculties.

This is a corollary to the previous point. A proper biblical anthropology rests on a biblical cosmology. Jesus spoke to his audience in parables, because parables are addressed to the heart, and only the heart can fully grasp the higher truth of things beyond this world. The Hebrew Scriptures used figures of speech for the afterlife that were common throughout ANE cultures. Jesus quoted both, from those more ancient images, as well as using figures of speech common to His day. However, it is painfully obvious that His teaching was a direct confrontation of the growing influence of Hellenized rationalism, with its attendant literalism and legalism. He taught in parables as a pointed rejection of trying to reduce God and His truth down to mere cerebral content. The net effect of teaching in parables was to exclude those who refused to rise above mere reason, because true commitment to His Father in Heaven demanded something more than mere intellect.

Thus, Jehovah was no mere national god, but the Creator of all things — this was an audacious claim, unique within the ANE context. The vast expanse of our physical universe is just a small element of Creation. Furthermore, a part of the Curse of the Fall was the confinement of human awareness to time-space constraints. Death was not a part of Creation. We were not made like this, but this is our condition now. It is the human perception that is fallen, along with our fleshly existence, not the rest of Creation. Instead, Creation suffers under the perversion of fallen human perception, and cries out for mankind’s redemption and restoration to full eternal communion with our Creator; that’s what we were made for.

The very nature of the Fall was man’s insistence on enthroning the intellect over the heart. Human intelligence was never meant to rule man’s life. Divine revelation is not addressed to the intellect, but to the moral faculty of the heart. God gave us over to the tyranny of human will, which is the very Curse itself. The intellect is incapable of escaping the Curse of the Fall by its own abilities. Instead, the mind is locked in a struggle to make itself god and to turn this awful state into an imaginary eternal paradise. God says He intends to destroy this world because it is all one big lie. Nothing in the teaching of Christ was meant to make this world a better, but to help us escape this world. He died to reunite us to our lost divine heritage, and that requires subjecting the mind to the heart. It is with the heart that we restore our awareness of Eternity outside the bubble of the Fall.

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Mass Distraction

Posted on August 16, 2017 by ehurst

Just in case you’re wondering: I know there is nothing I can do to stop the Antifas and White heritage groups from killing each other. Just keep in mind that virtually every Klan group or similar organization in the US today is actually run by FBI infiltrators. This is not some bland conspiracy theory; a little research will show you this as fact. The other side is supported and organized by various globalist agencies, to include the CIA.

And I’m not going to mourn the loss of a few statues, when I regard most of them a hideous waste of money in the first place. However, all of them reflect the various passions and political wranglings of their time and place. America is under God’s wrath, so it makes little difference what happens to such things. Kicking out all the nation’s founders because they owned slaves is as evil as owning slaves. Nobody is paying attention to historical context, only the hysterical context.

That said, I maintain my prophetic warning that the right-wingers are going to prevail in the end. The globalists and left were all cued up to take over, but they were wholly focused on the symbolism of the presidency. That’s not where it’s at. Again, if Trump is clawed out of office, it won’t change anything. The real fight is at the street level.

It’s also going to be really ugly in cyber space. The really big powers on the Net are uniformly globalist-leftist. They will fall; it won’t be glorious for anyone. At this point, I can only guess that it has something to do with economics, but that really doesn’t matter. God is forcing His will and we already know that it requires decentralization — the reference for that is the Tower of Babel narrative. The globalists symbolize Nimrod and his evil plans, a direct rejection of revelation. The imperialists are next, but I cannot quite see their fate just yet.

Don’t get lost in the noise. That’s all it is. It’s dangerous in the sense that social unrest is always dangerous, but it isn’t the main event by any means. There are no right answers and all sides are wrong. Don’t buy into anyone’s lies.

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Radix Fidem Booklet 2

Posted on August 16, 2017 by ehurst

2. Fundamentally super-rational, not cerebral. This correlates to the previous point. We reject the notion that reason and intellect are the pinnacle of human capabilities. While we recognize that most people abuse the word “mysticism,” making it mean something useless and irrational, we contend that God will scarcely bother with addressing Himself to human intellect, but calls to us from far higher faculties. Revelation is inherently mystical. We assert that He gave us other forms of “knowing” that are hard-wired into human nature. We reject the Western dismissive attitude about anything not rational. Faith is above reason, not below it.

Inherent in this assumption is a uniquely biblical anthropology; human nature has been revealed from Heaven and needs no refinement or replacement. It’s not a question of facts, but of function. The Bible takes quite seriously that the core of human moral awareness is not in the brain, but in the heart, and presents the heart in terms wholly different from Western culture. In Scripture, the heart is not quasi-emotional, but is the seat of faith, of moral will and the place in the human soul where God speaks. The same heart can be wicked, deeply compromised and misleading, and the mind can simply shut out the superior moral awareness of the heart. But God gave us our brains to organize and implement obedience as a servant of the heart. The intellect is fallen and untrustworthy. This is the terminology of the Bible and clearly how God wants us to envision our human nature.

Faith comes from the heart; the heart can directly perceive God’s divine moral character as a Person. In our minds we meet that faith coming down, bringing to His revelation our experience and thoughts to form religion as a response to His individual calling on our lives. No two of us can possibly have the exact same religion. Truth is not revealed as objective and codified; there is no such thing as propositional truth. That common notion in our Western world arises from a rejection of genuine faith. It is the mind arrogantly usurping the proper dominance of the heart. In the Bible, truth is personal; ultimate truth is God’s Person, His moral character. To imagine truth as objective and concrete is idolatry of man’s intellect. Our God is not a static and concrete idea, but a living Person. We know Him in our hearts, not in our heads.

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