Don’t Get Caught

Posted on July 24, 2017 by ehurst

There’s no wiggle room; this stuff is the work of the Devil.

I finally got around to reading this slide show about the JTRIG program to train online trolls. Of course, things have advanced a bit since then with the addition of AI and logarithmic analysis. Still, the slide show offers a lot of clues to how the allied Five Eyes countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) plan to subvert normal folks and deceive them about what our governments are actually doing to us. It’s all about manipulation and deception on an industrial scale.

Just a side note: Deception itself is not the sin here. It’s deception with the intent to harm that deserves God’s wrath. The Five Eyes governments have agreed to abuse their various populations in favor of a globalist oppressive agenda.

Rather than dwelling too long on their methods, I’ll give you a quick look at the nastiest part. The slide show references, among other things, two sets of principles with the intent to scam the general population. The one I cannot trace down outright admits to being scam tactics: “10 Principles of Scams.” You can find something that may be related (warning: site employs a modal that covers the browser window), and appears to match a list that shows up later in the slide show. But I was particularly interested in the Cialdini principles of influence. The slide notes a “+2” for this, so I’m sure we are missing two more that were tacked on by the program designers.

  1. Reciprocity – People tend to return a favor out of a sense of moral obligation. The idea is to create a subtle sense of “you owe me.”
  2. Commitment and Consistency – If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment. Westerners in particular hate to eat crow, so few know how to back out gracefully. Our culture encourages being a hard-head.
  3. Social Proof – People will do things that they see other people are doing. Curiosity and not wanting to be left out can get you in trouble.
  4. Authority – People will tend to obey authority figures, even if they are asked to perform objectionable acts. See the Milgram Experiment.
  5. Liking – People are easily persuaded by other people that they like. This is the tribal instinct gone haywire.
  6. Scarcity – Perceived scarcity will generate demand. “Don’t miss out!”

You and I would be trying to harden people against such things. What’s so nasty here is that it works with selling ideas as well as merchandise. If you take the time to look at these, you get some idea of the Five Eyes folks cranking out a battalion of psychopathic PsyOps agents. These are not good people. Good moral people would refuse to do this, so it means identifying and training people to be highly immoral psycho-predators. It means consciously choosing to do evil.

Our defense? We are fully committed to the glory of Our Savior. But you can use my Three Pillars as a way to structure your thinking (see the Christian Mysticism HOWTO). Just think about it for a moment, and contrast what those three pillars do to your normal reactions against the weaknesses the JTRIG plan to exploit.

A commitment to the truth is the same as a commitment to God’s glory. It presumes the heart-led way, the path of conviction. Truth is not some objective body of factual content, but a Person whose name is Jesus Christ. Get to know Him and you’ll know the truth. It’s the divine character of God woven into Creation.

A genuine Christian compassion, the spirit of sacrifice summed up in the New Testament Greek word agape, is the key to overcoming your own lusts. Nail the flesh to the cross (Galatians 2:20) and don’t be trapped in fulfilling your fleshly appetites.

Holding such an otherworldly center in your soul makes it easier to disentangle from human agendas. Since you have no dog in any fight, you are able to serve others. You see nothing wrong in offering limited assistance to anyone regardless of their beliefs and activism unless it’s your calling to oppose them. But most of the time we go along with the general run of human obsessions because that’s about the only way we can get close enough to shine His Light into the darkness.

We aren’t trying to change anything in this world; we are trying to open human awareness to the Creator. Everything we do is calculated through the heart-mind to the end of helping folks see His glory. With that kind of “agenda,” we are impossible for the predators to catch.

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Mind Forts Founded on Sand

Posted on July 23, 2017 by ehurst

Here at Kiln of the Soul, we tend to operate on three levels simultaneously.

At the highest level, of course, is the Spirit Realm. We address it in parables, but it boils down to acknowledging God as God. He is active and present and very personally involved throughout Creation. We place our highest commitment and our deepest loyalty in Him.

At the lowest level, we see the Fallen Realm in concrete reality. In our reckoning, this is a world of shadows and deception. Nothing is as it seems and perception is reality. This is the realm of our flesh. We deal with it as required on a provisional basis, and trust nothing that we can sense or reason out.

Between the two is the moral realm of the heart; it’s not truly a separate realm, but the only overlap of the Spirit Realm on the flesh. This is where we live, as it is the closest we come to direct awareness of spiritual truth. At this level we grasp the full complexity of things we experience in the flesh while remaining loyal to the Spirit of God.

So we can look at a particular human concern and often see multiple layers of what’s possible, what is likely to work because of our inherent grasp of God’s divine character woven into Creation, but we also can discern the thread of things God wants from us in the midst of it all. We can pull ourselves up out of the fleshly limits; we can abstract the viewpoint such that we can face our own human demise without anxiety. Meanwhile, we can see how folks might want entirely contrasting and conflicting things without feeling forced to support one or another. We remain cynical; we don’t expect anyone to take our advice on anything because they cannot see what our hearts see.

This is how I approach the whole range of social sciences, as well. I am fully aware of the mainstream; I’ve been taught to understand it. However, I also discern the moral failure of that analysis.

From the field of cultural analysis, let me introduce the Hofstede dimensions. They were cooked up by a fellow stuck deeply within the Western intellectual traditions. You should fully expect his tool to reflect an adoration of Western values as it denigrates biblical moral values, particular in terms of the culture born within the early churches.

Hofstede’s greatest failure is refusing to recognize that the heart-mind exists, and offers a rather shallow approach to pigeon-holing cultures based on only one level of analysis. Indeed, I’ve seen some complaints by devotees of this analytical tool that some cultures seem to be ambiguous about things, which means that the tool only works with binary logic. For example, our religion here supports the ultimate necessity of individuality even as we recognize that human activity works best with a feudal structure. Thus, we are neither collectivists nor individualist, because our guiding principle is moral, not cerebral.

Perhaps the most dramatic weakness would be Hofstede’s assumptions about what constitutes masculinity and femininity. As always, there’s no place for a shepherd image in the West.

It seemed important to mention this analytical tool as I share with you some concerns about dealing with the virtual world, and threats in particular. They all rest entirely too much on flawed assumptions.

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Psalm 141

Posted on July 22, 2017 by ehurst

The second in a short series of four psalms of David crying out to God from a bad situation, this one is rather unusual. It follows its own unique form with the psalmist seeking strength from temptation.

You would normally be caught off guard by the initial urgent pleading, as if it were a dire emergency. It’s an eloquent request that Jehovah accept this impromptu prayer the same as formal routine offerings with all the ritual trappings.

What demands such haste? David asks that the Lord help him keep his mouth shut. Specifically, he requests that his conscience be tender toward righteousness and guard him from falling short of God’s glory. We might hesitate to do evil on our own, but the friendly invitation and flattery of folks with ill intent is much harder to resist. Don’t let a good thing, like a rich dessert, slowly suck you into evil.

If we are going to hang out with friends, let them the kind of righteous people who won’t hesitate to correct you when you’re wrong. A sharp warning from good people shouldn’t cause resentment. Isn’t this what we pray for ourselves and others? He hopes to offer sweet words of encouragement to those with good judgment who face trouble from standing up for truth. (Note that translations vary widely at this point.)

David intends to be a part of those who obey the Lord, even when it gets so bad their bones aren’t even left in peace in the graves. Silly social trends can leave you feeling like someone has run a plow through your life. He intends to keep his eyes on the Lord despite such things. Upon this commitment, he pleads with God to keep His promises. Prosperity means nothing if your soul is destitute.

So David asks the God help him keep a sharp eye out for traps. It’s amazing how many people have nothing better to do than strive to make the upright fall. Let the Lord be just and the wicked fall into their own traps, while David walks free in obedience to the Covenant.

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Put on the Crazy Suit

Posted on July 21, 2017 by ehurst

I don’t know where to start; this thing doesn’t have a tail or head.

Look, you can think what you like about my notion that Creation is alive and we can talk to the animals and trees and grass and rocks. I’m convinced that the mainstream notion of reality is not just a lie, but a pernicious attempt to drive us all crazy. Thus, we are taught to think folks are crazy who don’t buy the lie. I’ve been at war with conventional reality since childhood. So if someone wants to suggest I’m still clinging to childhood fantasies, that’s okay. Feel free to stop reading; you have nothing to lose by ignoring me.

Meanwhile, I’m sticking to my guns. Reality is fungible — one man’s reality is just a good as another because reality is a living person who treats us all differently, the way real people do each other. And it’s not fair and some of us wear a lot more shit splatters than others as we go through life. Your destiny is not what happens to you, but is what God calls you to do, and you can most certainly fail your destiny. The difference between psychosis and genius is what you do with it.

We have to ditch binary thinking; it’s okay for the computers we use (until we figure out quantum computing). However, binary is not how reality works and it’s not how our minds should work. Our society declares a false dichotomy on lots of things and it’s up to us to see the shining light of truth through the sick and twisted lies. Part of what keeps us from having quantum computing is a false approach to reality in the first place.

So let’s have some quantum moral reasoning in the meantime and maybe we can help things along by breaking free of binary moral thinking. The whole idea of shining God’s glory into this world is for the sake of the glory itself, as the summum bonum for all Creation.

For example, suicide is not a sin per se. It’s a symptom of moral failure, a failure to get on with the business of shining God’s glory despite all the craziness in your life. The urge to off yourself is the Siren Song; it can’t accomplish what you hope. It won’t give you any relief because you still have to stand before God and account for refusing to shine His light. What can we do with that? Stay the course and avoid the rocks.

The US is on the verge of national suicide. God’s glory for the US is out of reach and there’s no going back. There are no good choices left — nothing can save it — so it’s just a matter of choosing how it will be destroyed. I had hoped that my prophetic warning (that reality had shifted and that our world is going crazy) would help some of you prepare. Not in the sense of Preppers and their false vision of Armageddon, but in the sense of pulling your head back out of the false reality. Get used to the idea that it’s all coming apart. Some elements will move slowly, but plenty of things will appear to burst out of nowhere because TPTB are deceiving us and trying to hide so very much.

I can’t offer neat and tidy rules of stocking up on this or that kind of thing because it’s too variable for location. Where I live there is one set of advantages; where you live there may be others. Pray about it and then as you go through the days, let the context speak to you of God’s provision and take it. If some cans on the store shelf call your name, don’t dismiss it as going crazy; buy some. If you feel comfortable with the material situation, then keep the focus elsewhere. You are the only one who knows what God wants you to do.

Meanwhile, I’ve been hoping that I could build a vision that might help you avoid fear, because fear will blind you to God’s glory. So from time to time I’ll share with you some of the mechanics of government and human behavior at large, using my background in social sciences. I’ve been trying to help sort through the false complications in order to open up the very real complications and variables of the situation. So I’ll tell you that the economy won’t simply stop; goods and services will keep moving regardless of what happens in Washington, DC. Instead, we have a much bigger problem with rising violence. Along with that, I’ve tried to help you understand the sources of that violence so your mind is ready to calculate that.

I’m still telling you to keep your eye on that right-wing backlash. It’s alive and more powerful than most folks can imagine. It won’t fizzle for a long time yet. You will have to find ways to avoid becoming a target, because the heart-led walk isn’t about right or left, and you’ll be judged by a false standard.

So in reference to the linked article, I have no idea what Trump will try to do with the looming impasse, and it really won’t matter in the long run. I linked to that article because it rings of truth to me; don’t be surprised when Trump does one crazy thing or another. Crazy is all that’s left. There are more options than that article suggests, but it will give you a picture you can grasp for the time being.

Don’t worry; don’t fear. God has things well in hand and He’s watching out for those who have committed their hearts to Him. Learn to hear the moral convictions of your heart and teach your mind to doubt sensory data and reason. Fantasy is wishing for something you cannot and should not have; trusting God is no fantasy.

It’s just looks crazy to folks who won’t do it.

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No Sense of Humor

Posted on July 20, 2017 by ehurst

I’m hardly the only guy to notice that SJWs don’t have a sense of humor.

Recall, please, that I am a clown. I learned not to take myself too seriously. That would naturally mean I prefer to company of folks who are also like that. One of the best friends I had in the military was someone who poked run at himself the same as I, to the point we traded false racial epithets. Yeah, he was black, and we prayed together a lot and trusted each other with our lives.

It means that some of my writing here is going to feature sarcasm. One of the primary reasons I don’t join too many technology forums is because the SJWs have infested their lack of humor everywhere. I’m not allowed to use sarcasm and make fun of social conventions on those forums. I’m not that interested in the company of thin-skinned whiners.

Another friend of mine was a bold queer. You’ve probably seen the type; not pushy about trying to find more dates, but certainly not hungry for social approval. The whole point was that there was no doubt who he was, no sneaky innuendo, no fake social cover, no secret crusade to change the other. We both knew where the other stood and agreed to call a truce because there was no way we could avoid each other’s company as soldiers. We got stuff done without conflict, but not without some good-natured kidding. It was easy to see where the boundaries stood.

Both of those friends are the kind of people I want with me in the foxhole. It’s the reason animals don’t eat each other when fleeing a forest fire. When things get really nasty, you need allies with predictable behavior who watch your back. By the same token, there were a few people who thought they were in on that same deal, but their boundaries didn’t match mine at all. They were the kind of people who thought causing others pain was funny, and got deeply offended when you didn’t laugh while you were bleeding from a cut they gave you, literal or figurative.

It’s not that you are evil for being sensitive; it’s that you can’t work closely with me. Nor is it particularly evil to play rough with your fellow sadists and masochists, but it means I don’t want you around. Those are just a matter of taste and you are a fool for not being aware of them as such. If we aren’t willing to find ways to accommodate each other, we are all doomed. However, a lack of humor at all is just stupid and dangerous. That’s a symptom of that kind of awareness that makes room for folks to be different.

I don’t have time to deal with people who can’t let me by myself. But for folks who are determined to remold me into their image: You are my enemy, so watch out.

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Saddle Up

Posted on July 19, 2017 by ehurst

Faith assumes that your senses and reason aren’t all that trustworthy (Hebrews 11:1). Faith makes room for out-of-body experiences because God wants to equip you for serving Him (2 Corinthians 12). And faith warns you that visions and dreams aren’t so much about rational content, but about shaping you and empowering you to stay committed in the face of temptations to surrender to the fallen flesh.

It also includes the smallest things. So I had trouble with running my knobbies on the bike, with two flats in two days — simple small thorns penetrated the tire casing and the flat-proof liners together. I can’t afford to deal with flats after every single ride, so I restored my hybrid tires because they’ve never gone flat, not once. I’m still going to spend time on the trails, but I’ll have to face a slight disadvantage in sand, gravel and mud.

And the same faith senses that somewhere ahead of me I’ll be using that fancy camera a great deal. So I suppose I’ll need to set up a free account with some service that hosts tons of images, because I’m running out of space on this blog account.

By faith I was willing to try out posting videos on YouTube, but that project has no life in it. It’s not a bad or dumb idea, but the wrong one for my ministry right now. Still, the experience of trying and failing has shaped me and empowered me, just as much as if I had a more complex out-of-body experience. God uses whatever suits His whims.

If we covenant together here at Kiln of the Soul, the Lord will grant more signs and wonders among us. Not just to fill our thrill, or to prove a point, but because He’s extravagant in meeting the needs of His servants. Nothing and no one is beneath His notice; He speaks to us in the most obscure and insignificant events if we are prepared to listen. Still, some of us will experience things the rest of the world would never believe, even if they saw it themselves.

Ready for a wild ride, church? Saddle up, because it’s already begun.

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Nothing Personal, But It’s Personal

Posted on July 18, 2017 by ehurst

There is nothing particularly virtuous, nor sinful, about activism.

Start with holy cynicism and not taking yourself too seriously. If activism is simply a part of your personal character, then be activist. Do it because it’s essential to who you are. However, by no means should you expect it to make much difference. The whole idea is to express yourself, to tell your story of God’s glory. You do it because it’s right for you. The external outcomes are just icing on the cake at best, and utterly immaterial at worst. Leave that part in God’s hands; you be faithful to your calling.

But at the same time, God makes available to us all a certain level of wisdom about how humanity operates. In ascending to the heart-level of moral reasoning, we can begin to see the patterns of God’s character at work in both compliance and defiance — the compliance of reality against the defiance of fallen human nature. The defiance itself follows a pattern; it bears characteristics that we can discern and recognize in both large and small scale. We are permitted to discern the wiles of demons in their influence on human behavior.

And it’s more like getting to know people than mere patterns. At its finest, our moral discernment will always sense the personal fingerprints of the non-human people that populate Creation. Everything is personal and Creation is alive and sentient, and demons have a personality we can recognize, because they are a part of Creation. The proper moral understanding of the world personalizes everything, and we recognize that sin is inherently depersonalizing.

So in your response to the activist urge, keep in mind what it is we ought to express. Don’t run with the herd as another cow, but as one who reads the true moral character of God. Be morally conscious and understand what God longs to see from humanity. It’s capsulized in the Covenant of Noah, and more broadly understood in Biblical Law as a whole. If there’s one thing our activism must support, it’s restoring personhood to people in particular and Creation in general. It means tearing down the centralizing tendency of tyrants and oppressors. If your activism supports coercion outside covenant boundaries, you are working for Satan.

Then again, we live in a world that refuses to recognize any of that. We still live a world of God herding human cattle because they refuse to be people in His covenant family. So we have to spend an awful lot of time walking in the herds as infiltrators who bring just that little element of truth from God. We get involved solely as infiltrators who shine that Light of Divine Love. It’s not very loving if you are a grouchy elitist who verbally demeans the herds who don’t see what you see; that’s a failure of moral truth in itself. Instead, we play our assigned role until that moment when God commands us to demonstrate His truth. Otherwise, we spend a lot of time playing along, even while subtly manifesting our unique individuality in Christ. If you draw no boundaries, you have no witness.

If you have a prophetic consciousness, that is also a critical guide to your choices.

Using myself as an example, I am utterly certain that God is tearing down the globalist agenda. But most of those who support that agenda aren’t really aware of it. They have been manipulated into caring a lot more about peripheral accouterments that go with globalism. We sum up that packaging as “political correctness” or “social justice” and the people involved as “social justice warriors” (SJWs). Thus, to the degree I would engage activism, it is tearing down the SJWs; they are my enemies. Attacking them and their agenda is part of my calling.

I’m not overly fond of the largest single force opposing them, but I’ll play along with the so-called “weaponized autists” on Reddit, 4chan and similar forums. This is the same folks who rose to prominence with Gamergate. Some of their battle ensigns include references to Pepe the Frog, sometimes whimsically referred to as the pagan deity Kek. You’ll see references to the Cult of Kek and the mystical Land of Kekistan.

All of this requires a certain sense of humor, but the part I appreciate is the element of not taking themselves too seriously. By the same token, they don’t take SJWs seriously, nor any of the SJW allies. In fact, they are downright abusive of such folk. But what makes them so powerful is that abuse returned on their heads just rolls off their backs. When they refer to the realm of “meat-space” it’s because they gleefully declare their physical form as “bags of meat.” They have a tendency to gleefully embrace any slander thrown that them. It’s a powerful rejection of prevailing SJW social norms.

This is because the SJWs have seized the public forum with a Satanic zeal for control. If you aren’t permitted to have your say in public, then destroy the public forum. Destroy everything associated with that forum, as well. This is the nature of a radical revolt. Every attempt to silence the “impolite” voice of dissent results in a terrorizing push-back that bubbles right back up into the public forum again. In order for a public forum to work at all, it cannot be hermetically sealed. Communication cannot possibly be one-way.

All the more so with the Internet. The public forum is under siege precisely because it is a static target impossible to defend. It is either accessible to everyone equally or it will cease to exist. Meanwhile, the very nature of the Internet will prevent even the pretense of one-way communication. This is what the guardians of the public forum cannot seem to grasp. It’s both the nature of reality, and even more so for virtual reality, that centralizing control will fail. The harder SJWs try, the more it will dissolve and run through their grasping claws.

My support for Linux in particular, and Open Source in general, is simply a reflection of my grasp of decentralizing forces as the hand of God. It’s not iconoclasm as a religion, but icon-smashing as the means to something critical in God’s character. So I’ll selectively target icons that hinder the decentralizing movement, because it’s not about the icons. Using Windows surrenders too much control to human predators. It’s not that Open Source developers are morally good, but that they don’t actively seek to control you.

The “autistic gamers” of Reddit and 4chan are willing to let you live and do what you believe you must, but not if that includes oppressing and controlling others. And I sure as Hell will not support those trying to preserve some imaginary civilized culture and some mythical civil discourse. Those don’t exist; this is war and I’m standing with those who merely ask to be left alone. If the weapons of that warfare seem rude, profane or distasteful to you, it’s because you have already sided with the attacking tyrants.

Neither you nor I can stay the hand of God’s wrath. We each have to find our place in His mighty and inscrutable works. I cannot decide what you must do, but I have to draw some boundaries or I’ll do nothing at all. If you find yourself outside those boundaries, don’t complain that I’m hard on you, because I’m not responsible for anything outside those boundaries. And I fully expect the same from you, so it’s nothing personal in that sense. It’s not ill-will against you as if I know you; it’s just my zeal for God’s calling on my life.

It’s personal in a wholly different sense; if you can’t discern the difference, you’ll never understand anyway.

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Safe Distance

Posted on July 17, 2017 by ehurst

Who are you?

That’s the one question that matters most. Not in the sense of some static answer, because that would never work unless you are dead. Rather, it’s the query of who you are in this moment.

Nobody says you can’t change radically into someone else altogether, but that it’s rare and frequently quite damaging to try for the wrong reasons. And any reason ginned up by human intelligence is always the wrong reason. We shouldn’t go looking for peace as an end in itself. Peace has to come as a side effect of having opportunity to be yourself. Until you find yourself, you cannot find peace. Please note that the process is naturally painful; we are fallen creatures.

Anything that smacks of one world government will kill you and kill peace. This is why globalism is an implacable evil. The only way you can surrender to a global government is to die, to stop being who you are. The only way a single world government could arise is by the most egregious use of force, violently suppressing all the variations that are the essence of human existence.

You cannot take away our traditions and cultural memories. If you could, they would promptly reform. With the second generation, we would be back where we started with all the necessary variations that come with living in our fallen world. If you do not adapt to your environment, you’ll die. And if you adapt, you will develop traditions and customs and values that match your existence in that environment. Even shared family values and customs will produce nothing more than boundaries within which individuals vary highly as each one seeks his or her own path to sanity. The result is a culture with a built-in variability, a living thing that moves and changes with the aggregate membership.

The concept of efficiency in resource use is a very ugly myth, a damned lie from Hell. It’s just as bad as one person hogging all the resources to deprive others. Not only is it inherently impossible, it’s wholly undesirable. There is nothing the least bit harmful about duplication of effort and reinventing the wheel. That’s how it works; that’s the nature of humanity. We do not serve the resources; we do not worship the creatures, but the Creator. The resources serve us, and our greatest need is finding our individual selves as God intended.

Nor is it possible to transfer resources without destroying their value entirely. You cannot change the outcomes that way. The outcome always arises from the process of human striving. It’s the experience, not the stuff one aggregates, that makes us who we are. It’s not a question of labor investment, but of laboring to change the soul. That’s because this life is of no inherent value to the soul except as a means to change and internal growth. All Creation is but a tool for the Creator’s glory, and His glory is always in our best interest — by definition.

Meanwhile, we read where pockets of immigrants coming into Western countries are an infestation of criminal presence. Has it been any different from Western colonists invading the lands whence these immigrants came? Was it not an infestation of criminal presence in those foreign lands? You cannot export and import culture without provoking moral evil. People have to be free to adapt to their abode, and adopt whatever foreign influences they can see as adding to the adaptation. The immigration conflicts are simply colonization coming back at us. The only difference is the particular flavor and means of violence used to suppress native resistance.

If you have your character handed to you, imprinted by some external force, you cannot be yourself. If you don’t have an environment with adaptive cultural limitations, you aren’t safe to discover yourself. If someone attempts to take away all the cultural limitations, they would have to do it by force and, in the process, imprint a whole new culture that attempts to deny it is one. God save us from a world of impetuous snowflakes demanding free access to universal publicity of their private likes and dislikes. That is the greatest tyranny of all, demanding that you also conform to that same snowflake culture that might be utterly foreign to you.

The demand for recognition and nonrecognition at the same time is surely one of the reasons for the outbreak of mass self-mutilation in the Western world in an age of celebrity. A person who treats his face and body like an ironmongery store can hardly desire or expect that you fail to notice it, but at the same time demands that you make no comment about it, draw no conclusions from it, express no aversion toward it, and treat him no differently because of it. You must accept him as he is, however he is, because he has an inalienable right to such acceptance. As a professional burglar once asked me, how could I expect him to give up burgling when he was a burglar and burglary was what he did?

Take your damned culture elsewhere, and leave me to mine. I know who I am. Neither of us has any moral right to demand tolerance up close and personal; we cannot abolish the meaning of “safe distance.” Social and national boundaries are a gift from God.

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No Two Alike

Posted on July 16, 2017 by ehurst

I thank God that I’m a nobody. Every time I peruse the Christian news sites, I notice that this or that propaganda group is trying to get this or that big name preacher or Christian performer to support their agenda. To them it really makes a difference if somebody popular as a presumed Christian leader comes out in favor of this or that controversial thing. There’s a lot of politicking and money involved.

Me? I’m nobody and there’s virtually no money involved. I’m not under the gun to line up with anybody’s agenda. In fact, I make it a point that my saying one thing or another isn’t binding on anyone else. It’s just my story; you need to go tell your own story.

As part of my story, I often take a radically different approach from the mainstream. For example, I find that heart-led folks don’t experience much of anything the same as the rest of humanity. In a private email I conferred with someone who had a pretty rough physical experience and they weren’t entirely conscious part of the time. Yet, instead of aimless and goofy hallucinations, God filled the time with a vision that had obvious moral implications. That’s similar to my own experience. God works with us heart-led folks. When other people are going bonkers, we are led into the divine Presence.

As always, such things are intensely personal. That’s the nature of reality itself. You really need to make sure that you are responding to God’s personal calling on your life. That includes being in the right place, both figuratively and literally. My general prophetic outlook on things is tied mostly to where I reside geographically; my gift and ministry are for the place God planted my roots. I have a tough time getting a prophetic feel for what’s going on in some place like Europe because I’m not there. But all of Creation around me shouts in my ears about what God is doing here where I live in the US.

So if I tell you that I recommend Americans run Mint Linux or Xubuntu, you’ll need to take that with a grain of salt anyway, but if you live outside the US, that might not be a good idea at all. Take my advice if you have nothing else to go on, but I should think you’ll be praying for guidance from God to fit your own calling. My recommendations are merely a matter of what I can help you with, since I run those two on my computers. I can also tell you that God made it clear in no uncertain terms that those two were His will for me. I can’t tell you what His will is for you.

Most of what I’m doing here is indicating for you that God does indeed have a will for you, and I can give you an idea how to go about getting in touch with Him so you’ll know.

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Psalm 140

Posted on July 15, 2017 by ehurst

We have here the first of four psalms of David crying out to God in times of distress. This one refers to the political and military plots against him as God’s anointed. Keep in mind that, regardless of the actual meaning of selah, its purpose is to provoke a moment of contemplation to allow the image to take shape in the mind.

There are four stanzas of varying types of threat. First is the image of bitter opposition, someone with a burning resentment. This is not someone with a wise plot to oust David from power so much as the kind of person who seeks any opportunity for spite.

Second is the picture of traitors, people who draw close to him only so they can pick out some weakness to exploit. While physical harm from this angle is less likely, it’s still a form of violence.

Third is any number of people who are morally wicked. This is like a plague against which David prays quite often. David uses the image of God providing a head covering against a strike that would confuse him and render him powerless in battle. He pleads with God to ensure this kind of people don’t succeed lest they hinder God’s glory in seeking their own.

Fourth is what would easily be David’s most serious problem of all: Those who seek to hem David in, to corner him and humiliate him. We should all recognize the utter frustration of facing bullies. Thus, David’s imprecation is quite severe on these, begging that God not let them escape their just punishment.

In the final two verses, David celebrates his confidence in Jehovah as the ultimate source of justice for the oppressed and afflicted. This frees the righteous to stand and praise the Lord.

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