Unchained Vision, Part 5

Posted on July 31, 2017 by ehurst

Let’s take a moment to throw out some junk doctrine. Let’s go back and search for truth among the eternal perspectives of the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) peoples, of whom Israel was one nation. That was the setting God built to reveal Himself.

Satan is rather like Potiphar in Pharaoh’s realm. He began as Lucifer, God’s covering cherub. He was caught in corruption and arrogance, and so was demoted. His job was to become God’s jailer and lictor — to serve as God’s wrath personified. His nastiness is less a matter of his nature and more his assigned role. You should not imagine he enjoys this job, but does enjoy the prestige. As the jailer, he gets to profit from all the blessings from everyone who serves as a slave in his prison.

Satan is a faithful servant of God, and he is one of three archangels with a similar rank. We know that Michael is another, and we believe the third is named Gabriel, but that’s not too clear (no others are named in the Bible text). Satan’s underlings in the angelic service are demons, and the other two archangels each have a similar force of angels serving under them. That makes it two-to-one in our favor. But the difference between a demon and an angel is not in their nature, but their feudal duties — it’s just a job.

Satan is also God’s cattle driver. We who are not cattle, but the sheep of His pasture, are called to wander along with the cattle herds because we hope to help find some lost sheep. Satan is constrained in his work by Biblical Law, in the sense that such a Law is written on hearts. Hearts that are faithful to God are immune to most of the Devil’s depredations. We harvest our blessings from God’s promises, whereas the cattle have theirs siphoned off by Satan for his own consumption and profit. Meanwhile, Jesus as the Living Law of God’s heart rules over Satan, placing restrictions on the temptations can offer us, and the trials he can put on us.

In Hebrew, there are two words translated “temptation” in English. One is the root word nasa, meaning a simple test or assay. The other is massa, which is closer to a hard trial and difficulty. There is a similar pair or terms in Greek for the New Testament. As you might expect, the difference is contextual, because our lot in life as fallen creatures is to see plenty of both. However, the covenant promises indicate that we see less of the latter if we properly respond to the former. Still, the ANE image is that because has a cattle driver named Satan, and it’s our duty to infiltrate the herds and shine the light of truth, we will see a certain amount of suffering common to all humanity. This is part of Satan’s profit from his faithful service.

There can be no genuine faith in Satan. Even those who believe they serve him knowingly don’t really understand. Their religion calls on them to be self-serving. But most of those who could be called members of The Cult (a figure of speech) also have no consistent motives other than serving themselves. They are ordinary fallen humans, having surrendered to the temptations of Satan. The greater their power over other humans, the more personally immoral they are.

Nutty Netanyahu is not the soul of Israel nor of Zionism; he is a corrupt and willful figurehead in it for himself. Israel as a project of Zionism isn’t really the point; it’s a tool for leverage to control global human behavior and enslave the human race. The globalists are one part of the Zionist club; the imperialists are another faction. Virtually every official in the US government is some kind of Zionist, conscious or otherwise. Precious few of them are true believers; most are in it as the one best path to power and profit. True believers aren’t willing to do what it takes to get their hands on such power.

Thus, we will not see an individual Antichrist. That requires a level of commitment and selfless drive that would keep such a person from rising in power. Satan is not permitted to incarnate himself the way Christ did; Christ is his master. While the Devil can use people to do some pretty creepy things, it is woven into reality that people who surrender totally to human depravity must suffer and their lives come apart in measure roughly equal to their depravity. In the same sense, folks who profess Christ, but who manage to embrace a lot of Western pagan cultic nonsense about what the Bible says, have opened themselves up to some damnation while they live.

By the same token, they surrender a portion of their divine moral inheritance. They lose blessings promised under Biblical Law. The thing you need to understand is that Jesus was that Living Biblical Law of God; the desire to serve Him is the foundation of lawful living. Lawful living constrains the hands of Satan and demonic influences in your life.

Addenda: See the comments below to bring out a fuller image of things.

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Unchained Vision, Part 4

Posted on July 31, 2017 by ehurst

On the one hand, our greatest threat is The Cult [PDF]. On the other hand, the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly (2 Corinthians 10:2-6; Ephesians 6:10-13). Our tactics are not human, but are consistent with moral truth.

Once more: Some of you are called to engage what appears to be activism and direct political action. However, Christian Mysticism doesn’t take such action seriously in the sense of imagining that it is God’s work. If we do such things, it’s because we cannot do otherwise; it’s who we are in Christ. But the power to change this world is in the hands of God alone, and such change will be according to His inscrutable wisdom, not our human reason. God has a long term agenda for humanity, and He seldom shares the details of those plans with us unless we are in a position to understand what to do with that kind of revelation. Attempts to steer human behavior at large is blasphemous, but making your brothers and sisters aware of God’s work is a blessing.

And He has already revealed the moral shape of His plans; it’s part of His character woven into Creation. The heart-led way teaches us how to perceive that character directly, and teaches us what to expect so that the written Scripture makes sense to us. This is why we come to the understanding that the Beast of Revelation is a symbol, not a discrete entity. It’s why we look for the Antichrist as an influence, not a single human. It’s why I keep warning that The Cult is an avatar, not a literal group of people. Our moral grasp of what is happening before our eyes is best steered in terms of such anthropomorphisms. We can expect the results of The Cult’s influence to be the same as if it were a concrete entity, but we cannot fight it as a such.

Nor would you expect to accomplish much, as men measure accomplishment, if you embraced my antipathy for the modern State of Israel. I am asking you to be aware of the character of the thing so that you are not shaken by what you see Israel doing. Nothing we do here in the flesh will change the course of things one iota. However, there is much we can do in the moral power of God’s revelation to free human souls from the slavery to Satan’s lies. We participate in His revelation; we are His revelation because we incarnate Christ in our lives.

So whatever our human activities may be, our underlying purpose is to strip away the lies and shine the light of truth. The truth is that Israel is a manifestation of Satan’s agenda to keep the human race enslaved in moral darkness. In practical terms, Satan will see to it that most of the human race, at any given time, is consumed by the political agenda of Zionism. For those of you living here in the US, our entire national government is aligned with that agenda. The whole apparatus and system of government serves Zionist plans. It’s not “Jews,” but it’s The Cult.

But The Cult is working through real humans here, so any apparent internal conflict is a matter of competing teams striving to take the lead in how they will implement that damned agenda, particularly with an eye to who gets to profit the most personally from serving this agenda. There are multiple paths and plans, but one goal. Most of the people involved in US government are touting their own path, generally to the exclusion of competing paths. Most of those people are aligned on teams, but it’s a complex game of shifting alliances. However, the precious few government officials not serving the Zionist agenda are harshly marginalized, and thus will it ever be until the system itself comes apart — and it will most certainly do so in the near future.

The last thing we want to do is get entangled in goofy theories of how we might imagine ways to oppose this situation. It’s okay for you to sense a calling to infiltrate the existing plans and efforts on any team in this complex game, but you’d be a fool to take it seriously. Be faithful to your bosses and do a good job, but their plans don’t really matter except as the working context, the stage upon which we stand. What does matter is our shared calling to shed the light of truth on how fake is this thing people think they are doing. In our best performance and altruistic striving, we show how little it all matters. And by the same token, some of you will feel called to get as far as possible away from the whole thing. If that’s your holiness, do it. Seek your own individual peace with God. In the end, that’s all you can do.

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Decentralized Human Networking

Posted on July 30, 2017 by ehurst

It seems to me that I keep confronting human intransigence against God’s requirement to decentralize. Allow me to offer two examples.

One: The Internet is by far the most democratizing influence on human society in history thus far. The very nature of the Internet is a world of radical equality. If you can connect, you are an active participant. Regardless of your tastes, there is always a place for you. The technology itself is wide open to everyone; your online presence is limited only by your willingness to engage. So far as the system is concerned, your device could be anything you make of it because the protocols are there for everyone. The old joke is that, on the Internet, no one knows you are a dog. The Internet doesn’t know what you are, only what you do.

Thus, your fame on the Net is limited to how well you cater to some audience. The whole thing is all about finding your niche. Think about this: Whatever is possible becomes mandatory. The New Testament refers to the Lust of the Eyes as the fallen human sense of curiosity and entertainment seeking; this is the key feature of the Internet. The Internet has destroyed the legacy entertainment and information industries; they are dead and don’t know it. Now that dissemination and sharing is unlimited, demand will fragment into countless flavors of unique individual tastes. Everything has to be offered in modular form. No supplier can possibly corner the market. More to the point, the means of making it pay have changed dramatically, so that the legacy media system of delivery is frankly a hindrance. Legacy media companies are dying all around us; the New Media blossoms.

Two: The same thing is happening in organized religion. It may take a little longer; religion is notorious for being the last social influence to move where the rest of the world goes. Keep in mind that religion as an organized human activity is still subject to all the same market forces as every other human activity. Once you implement your response to faith, it becomes a human activity subject to all the forces of fallen human nature. Before the First Century ended, churches lost their unique covenantal roots and bought into secular organizing principles with secular goals, and attempted to lock in their ambient style of management as somehow “holy” and essential to religion itself.

Thus, churches are struggling to hold each new generation. If you pay attention to the church news outlets, you can see the huge marketing efforts to sell new ways of keeping the young inside of dying structures. It’s more frantic now than ever before, because of the fundamental factor of the speed of information flow. Back when news traveled by word of mouth, change was very slow, over several generations. Now that we have instant communication with virtually anyone anywhere in the world, we see more dramatic change in one year than was previously possible in three generations. Human fashion cannot hold still.

God is making decentralization obligatory. We see throughout Scripture that, from time to time, God destroys systems that are designed to block His divine will. Do you recall reading in the Bible about the Tower of Babel? One of the key factors in the story is that God demands decentralization. While it is quite possible to accept His will and study ways to build a society that is appropriately decentralized and still united as one in moral purpose, no has shown much interest in doing that. Thus, every system that man builds is doomed to collapse whenever God feels like it has gone far enough. Every Tower of Babel falls.

Part of the sin of building such towers, attempting to route around God’s revelation to reach Heaven, is the necessary element of secrecy and manipulation. Scripture refers to God’s flock of sheep and His herds of cattle. The sheep of His pasture are those who obey His will, as outlined in the Law Covenants. The cattle are the broader mass of human society that ignores His revelation. His sheep know His voice; the cattle are driven, moving at the prodding of forces they don’t comprehend, completely oblivious to God. It is particularly blasphemous when men set out to hijack God’s prerogatives in their attempts to herd humans as cattle.

The last place you would expect to find such herding is in churches, yet that is where it is typically at its worst. As someone who once aspired to working as a clergyman, I can assure you that churches tend to be worse than secular society at large when it comes to deceiving and manipulating the clientèle. Especially in denominations where the management records were wide open, the informal secrecy was the worst. The clergy were always plotting against likely resistance of the membership while maintaining their aura of holiness.

Of course, the excuse was that the membership was loaded with folks too religiously immature to handle things properly. But that’s how secular organizations are; when you adopt secular structures, you get secular results. Holiness becomes a quality to be measured and manipulated, and you end up with an immoral ruling elite every time.

I’ve been burned by such systems repeatedly. It never felt right in my heart and I’ve come to despise the whole mess. So if you hang around here, you’ll see plenty of talk about decentralizing, and I will demand that each of you accept the responsibility to make your own choices. I’ll press that demand in network technology and in religion.

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Psalm 142

Posted on July 29, 2017 by ehurst

In this third psalm of distress, the text itself tells us David composed the words while hiding in a cave. Most scholars agree this was at En Gedi while on the run from Saul. David chose to emphasize the instructive example, as this follows standard protocols for personal supplication. Were he to come before an earthly sovereign, he would have used much the same wording.

First is the courtly invocation, implying there is no other refuge and no higher authority. David won’t waste time whining to anyone else; if Jehovah shows no interest, he is doomed.

However, he is confident that he will be heard. At the worst of times, God knows David and his situation better than David does. The Lord can see the plots of those who pursue him. If he had any effective support, it would be “at his right hand,” but that place is vacant. There is no one else to whom David could turn for help.

Has David not often said so quite publicly that Jehovah is his only hope? Had his family left him nothing but his personal faith in God, it would be a worthy inheritance. Nothing else matters. If God listens, now is the time David most needs help. His enemies are greater and stronger than he.

And there is only one reason God might have for bailing him out: His own glory. Every dutiful, David’s first act would be giving due credit to God for deliverance. Despite feeling all alone right now, David knows for sure that the Lord always has other people who love and serve Him. Few who worship God will worship alone very long, as the His greatest treasure is His people. To be a part of that is wealth, indeed.

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Unchained Vision, Part 3

Posted on July 29, 2017 by ehurst

By now you can probably figure out that The Cult is roughly equivalent to the Antichrist and closely connected to the Beast in Revelation.

Technically speaking, any human government that does not adhere to the Covenant of Noah is a manifestation of the Beast. However, much of what’s in Revelation regarding the Beast is aimed at a global government. We are headed toward that and it will be a Zionist government in the sense that it will be the same bunch of people with the same agenda. Don’t get hung up on formal connections; see the function.

Either way, when the day comes that no Gentile government is powerful enough to hinder Israel, she will be the Beast of Revelation, and her agenda is primarily anti-Christian in the long term. And as I explain in The Cult [PDF], the Judaizers succeeded in subverting the organized Christian churches of the First Century. Within a few centuries of Christ’s Ascension, organized Christianity was wholly enslaved to secular politics.

And as we all know, that political union gave us the First Beast, a government that controlled the institutional churches of that day, and actively crushed any attempt at forming a congregation outside the control of the Church hierarchy. Thus, that organized Church was the Harlot consort of the Beast.

The Reformation solved precious little of that problem, since just about everything about the entire range of Protestant religion is a mere reaction to the Roman Church. And while it’s far more complicated in the East, the Orthodox Church pretty much dominates wherever it stands outside Catholic/Protestant countries. Either way, you are unlikely to see any churches today organized as they were in the New Testament. Everyone attempts to read their cultural biases back into the New Testament record so they can claim to be “New Testament” but we all know it’s a lie.

Granted, there’s nothing wrong with you going to spend time as members of any of those organized churches. When you can find some mutual tolerance out there, it’s a good idea to fellowship as much as you can. I’m not hostile to that idea at all. However, I hope you understand that any church registered under any government today is morally compromised; it’s still the Beast and Harlot to one degree or another. It’s still playing into the hands of The Cult.

If nothing else, hanging out in such churches is no different from the Apostles starting their missionary work in synagogues. We can hope for a less hostile interaction; nothing requires you to act so as to get kicked out unless that’s simply your individual calling. It happened to me often enough. The only way I can ever go back to any institutional church is to shut my mouth until I parrot the party line. That will never happen.

For longer than a decade, my wife and I have held worship in our home. We are a home church or house church. Corporate worship is a command from God, but that never meant worshiping alongside folks who reject your faith. It’s between God and you how much separation is appropriate, but if you don’t worship outside the sponsorship of a government-permitted church, you are neglecting something essential to your soul.

Granted, you can’t compel anyone to join you. Start worshiping alone when and where it works for you, but at some point God is going to bring others alongside; that’s how He does things. You need to be ready.

So let me encourage you to develop your own rituals and do your best to echo what you see in the New Testament. I’ll give you a hint: New Testament church services started out pretty much like synagogue worship. There was singing and teaching, but there was also lively discussion. Preaching as a formal presentation is only for those few times when formalities are required. Those formal sessions were relatively rare in the New Testament church life, just as they would be in any synagogue. Worship is not performance art; you can use your best talents and skills, but that’s not the point.

As a prophet, I will tell you that we are entering a time when God will be asking His people to learn how to worship at home, or in private settings in houses, because the Beast is already lurking behind many governments. I am convinced that, here in the US, the church scene will become increasingly hostile to folks like me. At the same time, the fields of souls will be ripe for harvest, so we will need a way to nurture their faith.

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Unchained Vision, Part 2

Posted on July 28, 2017 by ehurst

If you can grasp the mystical image of reality to any degree, then it should be less of a struggle to handle what follows.

You are the only person on this earth who can know in fullness God’s calling on your life, your mission in redemption of your divine heritage. I can offer some narrative that will open doors in your perception, which could serve to restore the natural linkage between heart and mind so that you are able to structure a response to the divine call. God granted our intellects so that we can organize and implement what He speaks into our hearts through moral conviction. My calling is to offer my own narrative with as much clarity as I can muster; God seems to use that to trigger some recognition in some of you, dear readers, and it’s all joy.

I’ve written about The Cult [PDF] as a parable, an avatar of Satan’s influence rooted way back in ancient history, and continuing down through today. I’m trying to give that influence a living shape, a characterization that makes it easier to recognize it. How you respond to that is between God and you; my own response varies with the context. But the idea of giving it that kind of anthropomorphic shape comes from Jesus’ use of the name “Mammon” — the image of a cultic deity for the materialistic tendency. In this, Jesus made it bite the conscience of the Pharisees who made so very much of their legalistic viewpoint in idolatry.

It wasn’t to piss them off, but to get their attention. He was hoping to redeem some of them, and we know He succeeded with just a tiny few. His mission in that sense was to offer a clarity of vision and help them reclaim their lost heritage of God’s revelation.

The primary objective of The Cult is deception, seeking to obscure that clear revelation. They aim to keep folks away from their divine heritage by any and all means possible. I’ve said that The Cult is neither Judaism nor Zionism, but uses both as a front to disguise the true agenda. I’ve also tried to point out that Zionism isn’t what it’s representatives claim it is. It’s not about Israel the land, but about Israel the deception, the Synagogue of Satan. It’s an excuse to torment and keep the world in turmoil. It’s an artful measure of just enough provocation to keep the focus on their activities. So they make it look like they want to reclaim the full Greater Israel once held under the reigns of David and Solomon, but the Zionists use that as a mask for their lust to torment the whole human race.

Thus, the gradual and incremental displacement of Palestinians is designed to keep the outrage stirred up. The incremental encroachment on the Temple Mount, the fuss and fight over archaeological sites, the yo-yo jerking of the Palestinian government, etc. — it’s all about turmoil and torment. It’s all a masquerade; nothing you see there is real except the human suffering. We need to stop pretending that there is one scintilla of sanity anywhere in Israel’s government. Behind that government is Satan himself; that’s not just a figure of speech.

The same can be said of AIPAC and the Zionist Lobby in the US. It’s sole purpose is to provoke outrage and induce human suffering. Right now there’s a battle in Congress to create a new law to punish the old BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel). Just the proposal of legislation is meant to keep attention on Israel and away from other things, never mind whether it ever gets passed into law in any form. If not with laws, then with some other means of leverage, so look out for Israeli malware and network disruptions, and efforts to censor any message but their own.

We have known for some decades that Zionism has struggled to silence all dissent. However, the focus of their efforts is political activism, not the straight-up philosophical-historical discussion I make here. My teaching gets very little traction with the world as a whole. I don’t even support BDS. It’s not evil, just silly and pointless. It’s granting the Zionists their choice of battleground, of political turmoil that keeps Israel the center of attention. They can’t really fight what I do here. My only concern with the whole thing is that you learn to ignore the call to activism. Even then, it’s not activism itself, but the lie that activism matters.

What you need to understand, without trying to gin up some kind of organized resistance, is that the US government is just two teams of a single Zionist political party. The central party committee is AIPAC. There is no organized opposition party, just two sub-parties competing on how to implement the single agenda and who gets to profit on the side. But what seems obvious right now is that the Republican Zionists are currently ascendant, and their efforts are all the nastier because they are frankly far more loyal to the Zionist agenda of torment and suffering. Look for the most egregious enslavement to Zionist wishes. This fulfills the false Messianic prophecies that all Gentiles would willingly submit to Jewish slavery.

Do you imagine that our military bombing “collateral damage” problem is an accident? That’s a direct fulfillment of the Zionist agenda. Sloppy drone attacks and friendly fire incidents are all very much a part of what the Zionists want from the US. They want enough blood to swim in. It’s not just the proximate suffering of the victims, but they want very much to make Americans feel outraged and guilty, and to make the rest of the world angry. So it doesn’t matter if the people pulling the triggers are incompetent, or whether it’s flaws in the software they use, or overpriced junky military hardware, or bad intelligence fed to the targeting computers. It continues because it serves the Zionist agenda.

Furthermore, the incomprehensible expense of all this is part of that agenda. AIPAC is determined to destroy the US, too. That’s part of the Zionist game, but they hope to do it in the midst of using us to destroy Russia and China. If you didn’t know Zionists were driving our government’s hostility to every world-class military power, you don’t understand what’s happening. The majority of citizens most certainly do not support that hostility. It’s too easy to prove that with honest polling; it’s been done repeatedly. We have no say in our government.

Get used to this. God is herding the cattle according to His inscrutable whims and plans. Do whatever He calls you to do, but don’t bring to your mission any expectation that the world situation will change. That was never our mission in Christ. Our mission is to redeem a few souls by provoking a higher awareness of things that don’t rest on this world.

This is my story and I’m sticking to it.

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Unchained Vision, Part 1

Posted on July 28, 2017 by ehurst

Once more the mad prophet gibbers and jabbers, rattling his chains and scrawling on the walls of his prison cell.

Trying to explain some of this stuff is what drives me nuts. I’m compelled to use a language that is hostile to the very truth I seek to reveal. And I’m projecting that truth into a hostile culture. It’s a miracle of God that any of you catch onto what I’m saying.

In one sense, Eden is nowhere on this earth. In another sense, it is earth. Plato really muddied things up with his perverted view of real-versus-ideal. This is the genius of Satan at work here in how he twisted the minds of the rabbis who sought to embrace Hellenism (Plato and Aristotle) and ditched their Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) mystical assumptions about reality. It was the Pharisees, those who most thoroughly promoted Hellenized Judaism, who came up with the idea that Heaven was a far distant place that could not be understood by their legalistic reasoning.

This made the Spirit Realm into a mythical nothing that was far separate in rather concrete terms. Heaven and Hell become literal locations with confined borders, someplace in the Fourth Dimension. The mystical approach of their ancient Hebrew ancestors was far different, in that the only separation between this realm and the Spirit Realm was the Curse of the Fall. You cannot get to Eden because Eden is right here, all around us. We cannot perceive it because our fallen nature is like a prison with walls that hide the real world. But it’s a prison of the soul; fallen flesh is the prison. It’s not so much the literal body, but the fallen nature that inhabits that body. We know that resurrected bodies look enough like our current bodies that the disciples easily recognized the risen Jesus, so something about our bodies is eternal, but it won’t suffer the time-space limitations.

The soul doesn’t die when our mission is done here; only the fleshly nature dies. It’s not that our bodies are so foul, but that the fallen nature is. We have to shed that nature to take our rightful place in Eden. So long as God allows this time-space realm to exist, we don’t have use of our divine bodies in Creation. In death, we rest with Him until time-space is ended and He will reveal our true nature in a re-creation of Eden; we will reclaim our resurrected bodies. What we now experience as “nature” will be redeemed from our mismanagement as fallen creatures, and restored to its truly natural state.

When we encounter personal redemption, it’s not a matter of getting a ticket to some far away place called Heaven. Redemption is reclaiming our divine heritage of Eden. But because the Fall is not yet dealt with finally, it means we are granted a partial release from the Curse of the Fall while we are still here in time-space. We are permitted to sense what Creation could and should be; we reclaim some portion of what Adam and Eve had in the Garden of God. We are still mortal and burdened with that prison of the soul, but we have an added component of being able to shift into a higher realm of awareness that belongs to Eternity.

So this whole business of redemption is not getting out of here, it’s fixing what we can do and have here. It’s a foretaste of what is to come (mentioned in passing in Hebrews 6:4-5). We are reclaiming the heritage of what God delivered to His children even as they remained in their fallen state. The whole story of Scripture is a narrative of revelation, starting with the Creation and the Fall, and pressing on to the final revelation in the person of Jesus Christ. A part of what we see in Christ’s life is the kind of miraculous existence possible for those who walk in the revelation.

Jesus struggled with the weakness of the flesh, but without a fallen nature. There is really no way to explain that, but we know He walked in demonstration of what we could have. Thus, my religion and teaching are all about restoring a vision of what we could have here and now as an organic part of what we have in Eternity. It’s all one thing; it’s redemption already before we die. Dying is just a shift in circumstance.

In that sense, we are already “in Heaven.” Our citizenship is secured as we are current residents. It’s just that we are still dragging around our fallen nature and it’s really difficult to keep a proper focus with the eyes of our hearts. The siren song of the fleshly nature is loud in our ears, driving us mad with desire for things that could never matter, because they will not survive that moment of change “in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Corinthians 15:51-55).

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Bits and Pieces 25

Posted on July 27, 2017 by ehurst

Mr. T raises a good point in a comment on yesterday’s post. He notes that DNA is a factor in high-trust societies, and that neither nature nor nurture can explain how high-trust arises, or when it doesn’t. Of course, my point was that high social trust is not a defining trait of Christian faith. It’s common in societies that arose from northern Germanic tribes, but it’s also a feature of Native American societies. Indeed, Christian faith presumes a moderate lack of trust, to include distrust of the self.

I’m amused by the efforts of lefties to suddenly embrace private gun ownership. Something tells me this is all just a big a put-on.

As the article says: Australia has emerged as a world leader in bad information policy. I was once acquainted with a serious Linux developer who lived near Perth; he told me he is just waiting for the day when his government tries to order him to stop running Linux on his laptop because they can’t plant snooping malware on it. Honestly, I have no feel for how things are going Down Under, but the fuzzy image I do get is disturbing.

Speaking of spying malware, where does one draw the line between criminal governments and just plain old criminals? And at what point would we expect something like Google to become a de facto virtual government that protects its “citizens” from such malware? You have to understand that the entire global Open Source community is being pushed into its own category of competing “government” by refusing to play along with demands by territorial governments to cooperate in spying on users. There are incidents where the old kind of governments are already bumping up against that boundary. The problem with such a crackdown is that too many governments are running Linux servers themselves.

I’ve been reading a lot of almost feverish efforts to make Windows more resilient. For example, Shield File System tries to detect malware activity and provide a means to rollback changes in the files. The major antivirus players are working hard to come up with their own kind of advanced protections. I noted that Kaspersky is now offering a free version for the first time ever. I’ve also noticed that Avast bought out AVG; other big names are considering consolidation and buyouts. At the same time, their free versions have become more annoying and intrusive to use.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been making it harder and harder for those third party AV products to work at all. Given the attitude of MS, I usually recommend folks just run MS Security Essentials and a good malware remover like Malwarebytes. Make sure you have a regular file and system backup handy, because you can never tell when something is going to eat your Windows.

Addenda: I know that some subscribers will never see this but it doesn’t warrant a separate post. By request: Let’s assume for a moment the government of Israel seizes the Temple Mount and proceeds to build another Temple. It would enrage most of the world, but it won’t bring us any closer to a final Armageddon. More importantly, the Shekhina glory will not return to the Temple; the Covenant was closed at the Cross. The Temple veil was torn in two at His death — end of story.

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Blinders Firmly Strapped in Place

Posted on July 26, 2017 by ehurst

In light of the Muslim invasion of Europe, and all of the nasty fallout from it, I keep running across Western analysis that suggests the single biggest problem is that tribal folks aren’t altruistic the way Westerners are. This is, at best, a half-truth.

These analysts point out that in Western societies, random neighbors tend to trust each other much more quickly, in part because they are all socialized to care about each other. What they are describing is not altruism; it’s social conditioning about “being nice.” They trust each other because everyone has been hammered with social customs, backed up by laws, that demand a very strict and orderly social behavior pattern. They aren’t altruistic; they are conformist pawns.

That behavior pattern stands because the elite demand it, and enforce it with violence. Plutocrats cannot make money unless folks surrender their moral boundaries to become malleable. The elites demand that everyone be mobile and as isolated as possible so that they can be steered into economic activity that benefits the plutocrats. Were Westerners more clannish and defensive, the plutocrats couldn’t take control so easily. Thus, instead of small tribes, they insist that the whole nation is one single tribe. They propagate this ideal with zeal and force so that it is taught in schools and churches and just about every other conditioning institution in society.

It looks like peace and prosperity, but this presumed efficiency comes at the price of dehumanizing the entire population. Indeed, it simply is not possible to have that level of prosperity without dehumanizing the people. Thus, the entire range of “successful” Western societies is also the most materialistic and secularized. A genuine faith is disemboweled in favor of a cerebral false religion of material efficiency.

To go a bit further, the Western analysts are wrong in lumping ANE tribal culture with the corruption and distrust that makes places like India and Africa so materially poor. The Hebrew tribal culture was covenant-centered. The concept of covenant is utterly absent in places like India and Africa. The ANE wasn’t so corrupt and poverty stricken for their times; they were quite prosperous when they were faithful to the Covenant.

If you evaluate things from a Western materialistic point of view, you will never understand why the West is dying. If you evaluate things from the ANE mystical point of view, you realize that we can afford to have a little less material wealth in favor of a high moral culture that brings glory to God. We are all better off when our way of life reflects the fundamental nature of reality as God made it.

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Telling the Truth

Posted on July 25, 2017 by ehurst

Our Lord shines His glory in Creation. That expression is functionally the same as: He reveals Himself in and to His Creation. We reflect His glory by our willing participation in revealing Him. We reveal Him by obeying His call on our lives, which includes harvesting the blessings of His Covenant. This is the focus of our existence on this earth.

In Hebrew language and culture, there is a strong assertion that word and conduct must match. Indeed, a standard parable is referring to conduct as speech. The sum total of your behavior, particularly in observance of His Covenant, is your conversation. Lying is when the two don’t match. Any philosophy that distinguishes between word and deed is evil. Making them consistent so that we can refer to one or other without distinction is fundamental to reflecting His glory. We are His revelation; we are His Law because we obey His will. This is what we mean by following Christ as the Living Word of God.

His Word is His will is His character — it’s a Person. The intent is that you and I become that Person.

We shouldn’t have to explain how “the world” — the ambient human society without Christ — finds us alien. For us, our whole existence has no other purpose. We strive to set aside all other human motivations because we are driven by the conviction that nothing is of greater benefit to us or the rest of Creation than to live His Word, His revelation of Himself. We shine His glory and our single driving interest in dealing with humans is seeking to shine that glory into their awareness.

See it all as a whole. We don’t live by rules; the Law Covenants were never intended to work like that. Those covenants were aimed at indicating something beyond mere intelligence: a heart-led way of living as God’s family. We represent Him on this earth and in this world. Christ is the fulfillment of all Biblical Law. His response was always contextual, with whatever adjustments were needed to meet the moment with the glory of the Father. It was precisely the same glory shining when He spent time alone in the Wilderness, when He cracked a whip in the Court of Gentiles, and when He hung on the Cross. It was all one thing: the revelation of His Father’s character speaking to the context.

We may or may not accept the ostensible human goals for a lot human activity, in terms of our participation. But whatever it is we do as His representatives in the various occupations of people, we place the highest premium on how our presence affects their awareness of God’s glory. Whether or not that person receives it is all in the Father’s hands; our mission is to shine. So we will sacrifice a lot of human concerns for a chance to shine that light of truth. Everything else we do has to be a part of that one thing to which we are called.

The rest of Creation supports this, including our fleshly bodies. If glory demands we suffer some human discomfort, then the body will play along if the heart is in charge over the brain. If the brain is ascendant, then we will truly suffer and refuse to understand. It’s not a mere matter of being hungry; the difference between starving and fasting is whether the flesh is connected properly to the heart-mind. Without the heart ordering all things within, the body will respond inappropriately. Instead of resting and cleansing, your flesh will drive you nuts demanding food at any cost and it will destroy it’s own resources.

Your mind cannot make your flesh obey the truth, in part because the mind cannot know the truth. But walking in the heart-led way puts our whole being in harmony and communion with Creation and with the Creator. And that is what shines His glory; it’s what reveals His truth.

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