Working for the Devil?

Posted on February 27, 2024 by ehurst

I guess I need to explain this again. I keep getting chatter from people who promote planning ways to change the human situation. The human situation cannot be changed at our level. Get that through your thick heads, folks.

There’s a reason we have embraced the basic thesis of writers like Heiser (Unseen Realm): Our hearts have seized upon the truth of what they write. It may not have been fully conscious in our minds, but as soon as we read their explanations, the awareness became conscious. Finally, someone is tell the story that our hearts always knew. Here it is again.

The vast majority of human behavior at large is under Satan’s dominion. Even the vast majority of Christians labor under his authority. The only way you can break from that authority is through the Covenant. Not just “getting saved” or becoming compliant with some official religious leaders; that’s not going to get it. And it’s not our leading either. Rather, it is a powerful mixture of genuine biblical teaching, as understood through Hebrew mental processes, and the convictions of your heart as revealed to you by the Holy Spirit. Whatever most churches are doing, it is not Hebraic enough.

Yes, as always, Judaism is not Hebraic. It’s some kind of perverted mess of Hellenism disguised in fake Hebrew clothing. Jesus made that pretty clear when He criticized the Jewish leadership of His day. Today’s Judaism is simply the latter end of the course set by Pharisees. The Jews became “Jews” — derived from the term “Judean” — primarily when they rejected the ancient Hebrew model of thinking. That change took a long time, as Israel drifted farther and farther away starting right after Solomon’s reign. But it took a giant leap when the Greek influence came in on the coattails of Alexander’s conquest of Palestine.

No, we must have the ancient Hebraic philosophical outlook, because it is the outlook God built and gave to Moses on the Mountain of God. It is the only setting in which we can hope to understand our Creator. It’s what Jesus taught, calling for His nation come home to it. And they refused.

It turns out the Heiser, Pageau and others have struggled to reclaim a distinctly Hebraic outlook. And Heiser in particular paints a totally different cosmology than is common among church folks today. Heiser describes a vast conspiracy in Heaven against the ruling Lord, commonly referred to in English as Jehovah. The Lord revealed to us a parable of what it’s like in His courts, and that parable is a nomad desert sheikh. God has in His courts a huge staff, creatures we cannot comprehend. Using the term “angels” is somewhat accurate, but misleading in the English language, which language is laden with pagan baggage. The Hebrews preferred the vague term “sons of God” of elohim (grammatically plural in Hebrew), which means simply “not normal humans, eternal beings”.

Heiser tells us that, in Hebrew cosmology and history, God had to deal with a dispute from at least one of them, the one we today call “the Devil” — whose apparent duties were roughly equivalent to chief of the divine bodyguard. He was placed under temporary suspension. As part of the entire procedure, rather like a court case, he raised the issue of humans and their privileged status. God decided that the best way to handle this was to confine the Devil to the natural world (“garden”) He had made, and over which He had placed humans as stewards.

Because the Devil was in this garden, he was in a position to tempt the humans. This was wholly consistent with the Devil’s new duties, and the humans failed the test. They were confined under the Devil’s authority, losing their own privileged position. In the ongoing argument, some of God’s other staff, some advisors we refer to as the Elhoim Council took sides with the Devil. God decided to make our humans lives as mere natural creatures a test case to prove His point.

At the Tower of Babel, God handed over the administration of human nations to these council members. That they were allied with the Devil simply means the humans were mismanaged, in accordance with the Devil’s agenda. So God picked out a man to start a nation of His own. Again, it was to prove a point, but secretly it involved plotting to bypass the opposition members of His Council. He sent His own Son as the promised Messiah, who then ended the human-based national covenant with Israel and transferred everything into a new covenant that ignored national boundaries.

The net result is that human government remains in the hands of the Elohim Council, who tend to cooperate with the Devil. God left it that way, while instituting a “nation” that was not subject to human government, and therefore not subject to the Elohim Council. Further, the Devil was restricted in what he could do about all of this, because it’s for sure the Son outranks him. This is the Son’s nation, not subject to the manipulations of the Elohim Council.

We are granted some limited vision of all this, and some revelation about how things could work out better for humans. That’s because the revelation is for our own guidance, the gospel of how to live in our fallen condition in this world. But the rest of the world that is not in our Covenant cannot comprehend the privileges of obeying God’s way, cannot see that they are divine, cannot even want what they represent.

There is nothing we can do for them. That is, nothing we can do except to live the truth we have been given in the Covenant gospel. A critical element in that gospel is to reject any significant concern for things that humans generally believe are important. This life is just a big lie, and it will remain a lie, even getting worse, until it ends. This world is slated for destruction, and there’s nothing of value here except opportunities to glorify God. God Himself does not want us messing with human government. Jesus made that pretty obvious, as did the Apostles later.

We have no mandate to conquer this world, whether figurative or literal. We are to pull away from it and let it crash and burn. The only thing we can conquer is the Devil’s lies in our own individual lives. As long as you keep trying to figure out ways to make things better in this world, you are working for the Devil and his allies.

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The Turning Point

Posted on February 26, 2024 by ehurst

You won’t see it in this photo, but this was the place where my life changed dramatically.

With my wife and kids, I rented half of a house down at the end of this street on the left. The house itself wasn’t that memorable. The owner had divided a nice old home into a duplex, and we got the bigger portion. I was working a job that saw me report to work sometime between midnight and 4AM, depending on the day of the week. I was a freight handler for a trucking company. I had been struck by a sense of mission at the little church we attended and kept seeking ways to make it happen. But the thing that most haunted me was returning to military service as a mission field.

Administratively, the deck was stacked against me. I had served before and took an early exit for family problems. The details don’t matter much; there was a large barrier I had to cross and did lots of work putting together a pile of papers to support my application for return. But I knew I just had to do it.

So, every night before I headed off to work, I would finish my preparations and take a stroll along this street and the quiet darkened store fronts of the main drag here in Capital Hill District of Oklahoma City (off camera to my right). It was always deserted, which was perfect, because I would walk slowly praying out loud, sometimes with my hands lifted. I kept it up for about three months while the paperwork made its way through the system. I called on the Lord to work a miracle on something that really had poor prospects when reviewed by several people who knew the process.

The focus, the devotion and making room for the burning desire to serve the Lord changed me by itself, never mind the results of the process.

Of course, my request was granted and I returned to uniform for several years. It was a major high point in my ministry life, as the assignment was a place that was, at that time, wide open for the work I knew I had to do. The right people were there and the situation was just perfect. Not everything was wonderful, but the power of the Spirit working in me was off the scale of everything I had experienced before that.

In the Old Testament, it was a called a breakthrough moment. What would you be willing to do for a breakthrough?

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NT Doctrine — Ephesians 2

Posted on February 24, 2024 by ehurst

The theme continues to be uniting Hebrew and Gentile Christians. The previous chapter emphasized our unity as a single nation rooted in Heaven, pointing out how the Lord designed it on three levels: cosmic, global and individual. Here, the emphasis begins again with the global, recalling the former distinction made between Israel and Gentile nations.

Before Christ, the Gentile nations were all captives of the Devil. He was demoted and confined to this world, and this became his domain under God’s authority. The elohim for the most part aligned with the Devil and his agenda, so all the nations assigned to them were by default captives of the Devil. Paul says it was a form of spiritual death; no connection or awareness of Eternity. All we had was the flesh and what it could perceive, and it was wide open to the influence and temptations of the Devil. We were born children of God’s wrath. Paul intentionally writes those first few verses as a single incomplete sentence, leaving us all hanging.

And then, in verse 4 begins the resolution. God was fabulously wealthy and generous in terms of mercy and love. Despite our being dead to Him, He chose us to be resurrected with His Son. That is, when Christ rose from the grave, He was the center of a new realm, and we were in raised up into that new realm. It was all by grace; there is nothing we could have done, nor could be even have known to want it. We now have an eternal identity. The whole point is that we are the proof of God’s case against the Devil and the rebellious elohim council members. He will use us to prove that He was right in demanding all glory for Himself. Again, it was all by grace — the initiative was His alone. There is not a thing we could have done; we were utterly hopeless. Giving Him glory should be our reflex.

And not just that, but with that citizenship comes a vast wealth of gifts in this life. You see, the works of obedience are His gift to us, a very high privilege that marks us eternal beings. He plucked us from our graves, gave us life, clothed us, taught us manners and sent us back into the world as His own elite ambassadors. Our rich vestments are obedience to Him. He had this all worked out before He even got around to creating us.

Before the Messiah came, Gentiles were not permitted any of that high privilege, nor even the awareness of it. Israel by law was not allowed to be friends with Gentiles. They had to remain aloof and avoid unnecessary contact in the flesh. They were granted the high privilege of ambassadorship among the Gentile nations. But Jesus opened up the Covenant citizenship. His blood covers us and makes us fit to become citizens of His domain. And He welcomed some Jews, as well! Now, we who were formerly two distinct groups on the earth are now joined in His Covenant as a new kind of human, something never seen before. We all have His Spirit inside of us, not something He had previously offered.

He is building us into a massive edifice for His living Temple. Christ is the cornerstone, the foundation is the prophets and apostles, and we will be the stones to make His home. It’s a massive building project, the likes of which no man or men could ever dream, much less have they seen it before. There is no Jew or Gentile in Him, only Christians.

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Random Photos 17

Posted on February 23, 2024 by ehurst

Yesterday’s ride took me past some places that caught my eye. To be more exact, the views called my name and I tried to capture them. One of the things I do is look for scenes that can be used as blog headers or banners. This building is the old Santa Fe Railroad Station in OKC. There are no longer any tracks near this thing, but the building was worth preservation and is now a museum, so it gets some love and remains quite lovely.

You’ll see this again, but from different angles, because one of the things that my mind searches for is scenery that can be cropped as blog headers or banners. I share them with anyone who asks. The only trick is to be able to envision what the scene would look like in a narrow horizontal tableau.

Any of these images could be cropped that way, but sometimes you have to get the angle just right. This is the Scissortail Bridge over Interstate 40 in Oklahoma City. The Scissortail Flycatcher is our state bird, so it naturally shows up in art across the state, though here it’s highly abstracted. The intent was to catch drivers’ imagination as they pass through the city on the highway system.

The city is learning; every art installation has been vandalized to some degree, and the department in charge of this stuff has to recognize ways to reduce the temptation, to make the target harder for vandals. This bridge had already been modified from its original design. Some public works are more vulnerable than others.

The honest truth is that public art fixtures like this one could be vandalized some and you’d never know it. I suppose someone could set fire to it, but that’s risky, since the thing is lit up all night long and police do patrol this area. It’s highly visible from long distance in most directions.

Otherwise, it’s the kind of quirky stuff that has grown popular around here. It’s been a very long time since Oklahoma City has seen an investment in classical style artwork. These days the taxpayers are getting oddball stuff that, in the balance, is probably about right for the tastes of younger generations.

Playground equipment is also touched by this trend. Gone are the old standards of previous generations; most newer playground look like this one in Manuel Perez Park, along the south bank of the Oklahoma River Recreation Area. This time, I did what I could to hide the vandalism, but this scene served up another banner shot by moving to a different angle.

If you take enough pictures and look them over, learn about cropping and so forth, you start to get a feel for what will turn out and what won’t. I still make mistakes and have to toss pictures, but I feel like I’m getting better at capturing. And the honest truth is that cellphones and tablets have made it so much easier for me. I’m not that interested in shots that require very much zoom. That’s not my thing. I’m much more interested in stuff that simply decorates, something that speaks wordlessly, without out specific impressions being generated.

This is the same playground from a different angle. If you wanted to use this in a banner image, it would be relatively easy to use the cropping function built into most blogging software to capture a fine color spread. It would capture that kind of decoration that doesn’t have any particular meaning, just something that generally pleases the eye.

As always, my photographs are offered under the Creative Commons Share Alike license; no attribution is required.

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iPad Camera Test

Posted on February 22, 2024 by ehurst

Despite the fact it was still winter and very little was green, it was a great day to get out and test the iPad as a camera. I didn’t like lugging it around in an Amazon bubble envelope, so I’ll need a new slipcase for that purpose. Still, I thought it did a good job for the most part. It was easier to see what I was getting on the larger screen. This is the central plaza park-like spot in the middle of the Atkinson Plaza shopping area across from Tinker AFB.

Farther back in the first photo is the actual park honoring WP “Bill” Atkinson, the guy who pushed so hard to build up this area and then eventually sold a bunch of houses. The statue shows him with a pony; everyone who bought one of his houses was offered a free pony, and he would keep it for free at a large facility he had a couple miles away, back when Midwest City was still a couple of small neighborhoods built to house the workers and servicemen at Tinker AFB (previously the Douglas Aircraft factory).

Here we have a section of the Palmer Loop bikeway that runs from close to Atkinson Park over to Barnes Regional Park. The grass and trees will take awhile to turn green, but the henbit and a few weeds have gotten a head start on it. Inside that high security fence on the right stands the overgrown remains of a neighborhood that the government bought out (Glenwood). It’s just off the north end of Tinker’s main runway, and a couple of plane crashes in the 1970s caused a little hysteria. The Rex86 conspiracy nuts claimed this is supposed to be a site prepped for mass civilian arrests. It’s heavily wooded across the entire square mile, with just a few open spots.

Much closer to Barnes Park is this old rail bridge; the tracks are long out of service. They used to have a branch that ran around that neighborhood I discussed in the previous paragraph, and then onto the airbase, but the Air Force quit moving freight that way, and the entire rail line went out of service. The farther end of it ran all the way to Shawnee, OK, but very large sections were pulled up in the late 1970s, I believe.

Yeah, an awful lot of stuff happened in the 1970s in Central Oklahoma, in terms of infrastructure changes.

Farther along the same bikeway is this shot in Barnes Park. Back just before the harsh cold hit here, I went along both sides of this trail cutting off all the intruding greenery, trimming it back about 3 feet from the pavement. I’m hoping that hard freeze will discourage a quick regrowth. Some of that stuff grows like weeds, sprouting multiple new branches at the site of each cutting. To my amusement, an awful lot of people walking by were thanking me, remarking how hard it was to get Parks and Rec to come out and trim it back.

In the far background of this shot are the main facilities for Barnes Park. There’s a very large open pavilion with picnic tables and a substantial playground with all kinds of climbing fixtures for the kids. I’m standing on a hill, but the slope isn’t that discernible in this image. The place has a mixture of very old style cast concrete picnic tables and here and there are some of the newer plastic coated welded steel ones. Our native tribes host a major powwow down in the open grassy area every summer.

The main feature that provoked the city government into buying up this area is Soldier Creek. It’s not marked, of course, but the banks of the creek here offered a very large amount of ancient native artifacts buried in spots. This park strip of several parks runs two miles along the creek and this was a particularly dense area for archaeology some decades ago. Surviving tribes have records of this place and their own names for it, most considering it a medicine area.

All of these images are free to use under the Creative Commons Share Alike terms for non-commercial use; it’s not necessary to give me credit.

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Workouts 2024

Posted on February 21, 2024 by ehurst

My current apartment complex has a real gym. It’s not as extensive as I would like, but it’s far, far better than the previous place. If you stand near the door, this is what you see looking back toward the far end. The dumbbells range up to 50 pounds each.

When things got brutally cold here in central Oklahoma, I spent a lot of time in here. This was the only way I could workout without risking frostbite. I can’t use the treadmills, but if I wear a brace I can use the ski machine, and certainly the recumbent bike. But I’ve been lifting the dumbbells a lot and discovered my arthritic joints tolerated more now than in the past. Indeed, lifting weights is doing a lot more for me than riding did in the past.

If you stand in the middle of the gym and look back toward the door, you can see some more equipment, much of which I don’t use. The big Smith rack (the weight machine in the corner) I use primarily for pull-ups and to work my calves. I don’t use the weights built into it for anything; the machine is not well designed for someone like me.

My low-sodium and low-sugar diet is working. At first I lost a bit of water weight, maybe 5 pounds or so. But that was a couple of weeks ago. Now I’m slowly losing actual lard, and I’m down 10 pounds total. If this keeps going, I’ll have some nice abs to show off.

I hit the gym Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Mon/Fri is the weight room, but Wed is this outdoor gym. I do my best to emulate most of the same moves I do with weights, and I bring along a couple of elastic exercise bands to supplement what this outdoor gym can accommodate. The idea with the outdoor gym is a circuit workout with very little rest between events. I don’t try to hit my max on anything, just doing enough repetitions to stress my body. I’ll take a short rest and rehydrate, then hit it again. In a couple of weeks I should be able to finish three circuits.

My hydration drink is home brewed: 2 table spoons of lemon or lime juice and just a pinch of regular salt in a 20 ounce bottle with water. The whole thing with a sodium sensitivity is that you still need some sodium, just not very much. I’m also drinking an herbal tea in the mornings of hibiscus and hawthorne, both known to lower blood pressure. Lately I’m hitting 110s or 120s on the top number, and under 70 on the bottom. Finally, to keep my joints from complaining too much, I’m using an herbal cream that is mostly arnica, but includes a few other supportive herbs. It works.

I still ride a bit, but it’s no longer the emphasis. It’s more for getting out to places where I can pray and take pictures, etc. I also do some shopping with my folding bike. However, I seriously doubt I could do any more bikepacking. But, we’ll see when I lose some more weight.

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Likely Scenario: Financial Collapse

Posted on February 20, 2024 by ehurst

I’m hardly the only one to sense that some kind of apocalypse is coming. But the online chatter about it is loaded with nonsense, and it’s been a chore to wade through all the improbable garbage to pick out what’s actually realistic. It left me with a lot of bits and pieces, and I wasn’t sure what to do with some of them. They didn’t seem to fit together into a cohesive scenario, yet each one seemed to me quite plausible by itself.

There have been some attempts to link stuff together, but this is the first I’ve come across that looks plausible. In essence, a false flag would shut down enough of the electrical grid or Internet in order to freeze all electronic assets. Naturally, that means a “bank holiday”. The banks would simply confiscate all assets in some fashion, such that they at least hold it ransom for our compliance with the globalist final take-over. The author notes that several regional Fed banks are already technically insolvent, which is all the excuse they need to justify such a move.

I recommend you scan down the length of the article to see the author’s outline. It points out the one power individual states have to protect us, and he notes that some have already begun to use it: The UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) is the key to the take-over, but by law, each state must individually ratify and maintain it. Each state has the authority to pull out of it. The author sees various Red States already taking background action to withdraw from it before the ugly moment arrives. This is the key leverage item I had not seen before, but I was sure there had to be some way for the states to refuse to comply. I’m sure there are others I don’t know about, but this one.

I trusted my heart-led instincts before I had the concrete knowledge. This simply verifies what my convictions had already told me. Now, as a practical issue, I suggest you start collecting some cash and hide it somewhere. If you have a lot of money and will need it during a shut-down, you should consider things like precious metals or other instruments of mass exchange. If you have room for storage, think about barter goods and supplies or tools you’ll need while the Net/power is out.

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In Christ

Posted on February 18, 2024 by ehurst

Most people choke on Ephesians 1:3-14. It’s very dense, and frankly not good writing. People either gloss over it or get bogged down in the precise meaning of the grammar. One of the biggest issues for debate is trying to punctuate the phrases to discern how they flow. Because of this, and because of a general lack of Hebrew mythology, too many people miss the point Paul was making.

As noted in yesterday’s lesson on it, verses 3-6 are about the Father and His eternal perspective on things. His empire is all of Creation, and it includes a range of existence and realms we cannot even imagine. His ambit is the whole of everything He created, and when we talk about Him, the focus is primarily within the context of Eternity and all the things beyond our ken, though we do have tiny mentions of such things here and there.

Verses 7-12 are about His Son. Heiser tells us that in Hebrew mythology, the Son is an aspect of the Father, in the sense that He is His living will, the expression of His own heart. In Hebrew thinking, this is the meaning of “the Word of God” — it’s the expression of His character. Now, the Elohim Council is taken for granted in most Hebrew writing, along with the whole background of their dispute with God about His decision to create humans and to give them an exalted position above the rest of the natural world. At the Tower of Babel, God assigned a nation to each of His Council members, making them satraps, as it were, over realms.

He let them run things to suit themselves (with limitations we cannot comprehend), seizing all the glory they wished from the humans involved. As things turned out, they didn’t play this very well.

Then, He set out to build His own nation by snatching one man out of one of the Council realms: Abraham. He began implementing a covenant with Abraham that worked on a level above mere human activity. He opened for Abraham the faculty of faith that reaches into Eternity. His covenant with Abraham was a spiritual covenant. He promised to give Abraham’s descendants — a select group from just one of his sons — a national covenant.

We know from Galatians that his national covenant was merely a passage for something far greater. The whole point was to mask from the Elohim Council His intentions. Every time you see a reference to God keeping secrets or the mystery of His plan/will, this is what it refers to. God outsmarted and outplayed the opposition members of His Elohim Council. They got distracted attacking the nation of Israel, thinking they had this in the bag. But through that national covenant, He bought for His own will/word — more or less a separate entity in Hebrew mythology — as the ruler of a new empire that was not rooted in any national identity. Human governments, prompted by the elohim, could do nothing about this.

Instead, God had elected a bunch of individuals from every nation on earth. He had them all marked out before He even got into this game, and sprang this surprise on them when Jesus died on the Cross. In their efforts to mess with earthly Israel, they got themselves committed and could not back out when God suddenly snatched members of their various nations without even activating the human political procedures.

Thus, the folks now predestined “in Christ” had a dual identity. Their fleshly lives remained under the various political regimes, but their transcendent spiritual identity took over everything they did.

Then, in verses 13-14, He sealed those Elect by His own Spirit, so that the elohim could not really do anything to them. The elohim were restrained by the protections of a law covenant, but the people were not subject to any such law. Despite all the maneuvering and blinding lies, these humans were granted an eternal identity. The Fall had many effects, but this spiritual seal reversed the critical issue of access to the Tree of Life. We all have a promise to eat from it at the end of this life.

As far as the Elohim Council is concerned, the worst thing about this whole deal was that the human Elect could also claim God’s promises for this world. The Devil and his allies on the Elohim Council can only do their best to keep people from embracing the inheritance of Eternity while here in this world. They can do nothing about the eternal destiny of the Elect.

Thus, the whole battle for the individual humans is to overcome the flesh by the power of the Holy Spirit, and start acting according to their spiritual identity as citizens of the empire “in Christ”.

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NT Doctrine — Ephesians 1

Posted on February 17, 2024 by ehurst

The final chapter of Galatians was encouragement but virtually no doctrine. We move on to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians as a letter to be shared across Asia Minor. Thus, there are no personal notes to anyone specifically by name. By the time Paul was in Roman custody, Ephesus had already started to become the center of gravity for Christian religion, as things were heating up in Judea between the Jews and Rome, and Jewish Christians were fleeing. Writing from his confinement in Rome, the single major issue behind this letter was the ongoing division between Jewish and Gentile Christians.

Both factions suffered a powerful tendency to rely on the flesh. Jews typically never got past their “chosen” identity and cliquish behavior demonstrating discomfort with Gentiles in general. The Gentiles struggled to latch onto the necessity of moral purity in their conduct. In this first chapter, Paul begins tearing down the wall between them by emphasizing their new covenant identity as Christians. He begins using the constant refrain of being “in Christ” particularly as a reference to this citizenship.

It’s important to notice that verses 3-14 are one long sentence. It comes close to a Trinitarian statement, in that there is a section about the Father, another about the Son, and third about the Holy Spirit. He offers praise that the Father chose us in eternity, the Son redeemed them (and us) in their recent history, and the Holy Spirit came to lock us into that redemption in our individual personal pasts. It’s a doctrinal tour de force in just a few lines.

He starts with see several conjugations of the Greek word translated into English as “bless” coming from a root denoting someone or something worthy of adoration. We and the Father naturally find each other adorable. He chose us, each marked out before this wretched world was begun, with the intention of making us as pure as Passover lambs. He committed Himself to adopt us His own children because He loved us, joint heirs with Christ. This mass adoption is a part of His glory; any earthly ruler would count the size, ability and prosperity of his tribe as a primary manifestation of his glory. He gave us each other, our talents and adorned us with His grace as a fitting bequest to His Heir.

Regarding the Son, it was His awful price in blood that bought us, making us welcome into the Covenant. With this adoption covenant came unspeakable privileges that He willingly gives, simply because Jesus could see a vast empire would be His. The Father had kept secret His plan to offer His Son a realm of people who could be and build a vast wealth and power. All of this had to wait until the right moment when the Son could inherit all the power and authority of Heaven and Earth. As citizens of this empire (“in Christ”) we become God’s claimed nation (versus the nations claimed by the Elohim Council after the Tower of Babel). This is what “predestination” means — marked for seizure from the other nations for a special purpose in which God never fails. Paul specifically points to his readers as part of the first generation of citizens in this new empire, a very high privilege as the first of many generations to glorify the Messiah.

Thus, when the readers of this letter first heard the gospel message, and were moved to believe in Christ, they were granted the seal of the Holy Spirit. Since there’s no way they could experience all that comes with that in this life, it’s as if that first generation are on layaway until everything is completed and all the saints God has claimed can be brought into the fold. The Blood has yet to be applied to future souls waiting to be born into this glorious empire.

Catch your breath now.

There in his Roman confinement, Paul heard from messengers how the churches in Asia Minor had progressed to the point they had learned to submit to Christ as their Lord and to recognize their fellow citizens of Heaven. It caused him to celebrate the unspeakable blessing of having been a part of that. He kept praying for more of the same; may the Lord continue working in them.

May they continue embracing the convictions of their hearts as their guide to understanding the full privilege and duty as members of Christ’s empire, in particular, the divine gifts of the Holy Spirit working in their bodies. That’s the same power that raised Christ from the dead, and which placed Him on His throne. Every power and authority in Heaven and Earth is now subject to His whims. That includes domains in the Spirit Realm that no human can imagine.

He is our Lord; we are His body. We are His hands and feet throughout the whole earth.

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More on Game Parable

Posted on February 16, 2024 by ehurst

Yesterday’s post garnered a lot of attention, more than normal on this blog. Aside from the questions and answers in the comment section, several other questions arose and it all warrants a review together.

The obvious point is that our human mortal existence is not real. There’s a whole lot of human decisions that simply do not matter in the long run. Everything humans do individually and in the aggregate will be wiped away, forgotten in Eternity — with the exception of our efforts to bring the Creator glory. If we make this our priority, then it naturally changes our focus in this life. The only reason we live is to glorify the Lord.

It’s not that we do nothing but sit around and sing praise songs. There are actions we must take in order to live here. Rather, the way in which we do all the same things other humans do in this life are shaped by this one priority: We are supposed to live according to His revealed agenda. Our words and actions should portray this different orientation. But there are some complications to this.

I’ve mentioned in the past a Covenant of Creation. This is not noted by name in the Bible; it’s just a supposition. It posits that all Creation owes glory to the Creator. There’s not much more to it than that. Others have posited a Covenant of Adam, as well. I haven’t referred to it, but insofar as there might be such a thing, it’s represented by the Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden. It marks us out as fallen, and our sole duty is to return to Eden. We do have the formal declaration where God remonstrates with Adam and Eve after they hid from Him. It’s an outline of what we can expect in a mortal existence, but the summary is the Flaming Sword. I suggested that, if we were to nudge this into the parable I drew up, then the Flaming Sword is the operating system on which the game software runs. This is the sole reason we have a simulation; we are not in the Garden any more, not in an eternal form of existence.

Yes, there are flaws and problems with this parable. It cannot answer all the questions. It was never meant to do so. As the old saw goes, “You cannot make a parable walk on all fours.” That’s a parable in itself. The whole point of a parable is to indicate something worthy of contemplation about things that cannot possibly fit into words in the first place. We are inside the game simulation; this is not reality.

It’s not as if we can avoid getting involved in human affairs. The whole thing is aimed at reducing your emotional connection to this world. We need to break down the barrier between the game and reality as much as possible to turn our attention to the real world outside the simulation. Play the game because that’s how you end it for yourself; play the game according to its own rules, but with an eye to the proposition that it’s only a game.

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