Random Photos 16

It’s been a while since the weather has been decent enough to go out for rides and take pictures. Here we have downtown OKC with the taller buildings in the clouds. This was the first decent warmish day in three weeks, but it was still cloudy and had been drizzling early in the morning.

Eagle Lake in Del City was still covered with a thin layer of ice, something I’ve not had a chance to see in a very long time. Keep in mind that the lake had been fairly warm all year up to the that blistering cold wave that rolled in late December. Thus, even with a week below freezing temperatures here, the lakes never froze over the hard. It would take a few weeks for the water to cool down enough to freeze over completely.

The resort and stuff under construction on the FAM site where the river crosses under Eastern Avenue is about halfway done. It will change the skyline significantly in OKC. And I’m still not touching the construction zone, but going around it by whatever means are available.

The OKC Parks and Rec have been working on the facilities at Draper Lake even through the cold weather. They’ve re-graveled the interior roads and put up strong cable fencing to keep people from trying to off-road in the area. This has been designated a nature preserve; more and more of the park is virtually off limits to everything except pedestrians and horses.

The lake levels are finally rising to their previous levels. They had been down for two years; I have no idea why. Still, it’s nice to see the water level coming back up.

Posted in cycling, photography | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

God in a Box

I have no interest in writing my biography; I don’t believe my life has been that interesting. But a few people have asked me how I got where I am in this ministry. I’ll offer a rough outline of what I believe were the turning points.

It was 1963. I grew up among an extended family of Southern Baptists. At age 7, I was outside on a summer day playing with my toys in the grass and dirt of our front yard. The pastor of our Baptist church drove up and I quickly moved my stuff from the driveway, then continued playing while he went inside to visit with my mother. A little while later, Mom called me from the porch.

I came in the front door and the pastor began to interview me about my faith. I recall almost nothing of this conversation, though my mother thought I was answering his questions consistently and knowingly. She claims I professed faith in Christ, but all I can recall from this encounter is the pastor demonstrating to me what baptism would be like, with him holding me just off the floor on my back in his large hands.

In other words, nothing happened, yet everyone else was convinced it did. I was duly baptized and considered a born-again Christian. I was not. A couple of years later we lived in another town and attended another local Baptist church. I came under conviction and the pastor had the sense to know what it was. That was when I genuinely professed Christ as my Savior. It changed everything for me.

And yet, there was this potent sense of unfinished business. Something kept drawing me to the altar during the worship service, and I had no idea what it was. This went on for years. Then, in yet another town and another Baptist church, someone guessed it correctly and I seized upon the truth: I was called to the gospel ministry. I was 16 at the time. Again, major changes inside of me, and my self-image and understanding of the world shifted.

As I prepared to jump through all the hoops required by the system, two things were missing. One was the simple need of an understanding mentor. I never got that, and to this day I’m frankly still outraged. The pastor of our church did not take me seriously, and there may be some earthly reasons for that, but everywhere we went and no matter what church we joined, no one would so much as make a referral. Two, everyone kept trying to herd me in directions I knew I could not go. They thought I was balking, but they were refusing to help me because I wouldn’t play their silly head games.

And they were silly, indeed. It was all politics and money. I was unaware of the details, but I sensed it wasn’t the Holy Spirit that guided their manipulations. I was hard driven for something no one was willing to offer.

Finally, I found a conventional path that God didn’t block off, and I went to Oklahoma Baptist University, almost on full scholarship. It was just a time in American and church history when things converged to pay for a genuinely poverty stricken young man to attend a very tough academic institution. While there was some waste, I still ended up with a good GPA.

And one of the most important things I learned was not in any class. Some speaker in our weekly assembly said that Christianity is an eastern religion, the Bible is an eastern book, and Jesus was an eastern man. I don’t remember anything else he said that day, but it took root and grew in my soul. Eventually it became a consuming passion as I sought to understand all the implications.

And a critical part of my education there was classical Western Civilization studies, trying to insure I understood what shaped our western heritage. But instead of making me a fan, it allowed me to see the moral flaws. I learned how to do independent study, but was never encouraged to pursue it by anyone on the faculty of that college.

For some decades I tried to make my way through the system by which Baptist churches develop and employ pastoral ministers. As long as I volunteered and worked for free, I got lots of support and accolades. My leadership was welcome, but no one would even discuss my chances of actually getting paid to do the work. And I still had never once gotten mentoring. I willingly submitted, but it never happened. I tested the waters with other denominations (two kinds of Presbyterian, Missouri Synod Lutherans, several independent churches). Very little mentoring and no opportunities, as before. My volunteer ministry work in the military chapel system was easily the highlight of my ministry career, when the whole community knew my name and my work. They were open to whatever God wanted me to do.

People in uniform might make a regular attendance at chapel simply because that’s their custom. However, for the majority of those who showed up, they had to really want it. We didn’t have any silly gateways where people would be walked through an interview of set questions to join in membership. If you wanted to work, they gladly gave you room to do something, limited only by military regulations. I did a lot, leading long-term organized Bible studies, leading the youth program for a while, occasionally preaching in the chapel service.

But then my knees failed and I could no longer serve in uniform. Back home in the churches again, things had only gotten worse. Finally, during the early 2000s I knew I’d have to make my own way. The fire of God burned hotter than ever in my soul, and I got involved in some verbal conflicts when the church I attended at the time blew up. I was betrayed by people I had supported, so I left. I started leading home worship, always with an eye to avoid the abuses I faced from the system.

If I could be welcomed as a full member with such a flimsy procedure called “evangelism” that changed nothing in my soul, that would by itself explain why those churches and their larger denominational organizations were so politicized. But on a much grander scale, I realized from my exposure to religious news sources that the whole mainstream system was coming apart in the same way. I realized that it was a major element of my future ministry to prepare a community of some kind to welcome those spat out by the system that struggled to put God in a tiny box.

Posted in personal | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

This Is Greatness

Humans have an extremely difficult time imagining their own insignificance.

Here’s the logic: The moment you start to imagine that you and your actions can make any difference in the human condition is the moment you fail. The only thing Eternity will remember when it’s all over with is how you contributed to God’s glory or didn’t.

If you are silly enough to think that planting yourself in human memory is worth the trouble, realize that the unseen powers of the Spirit Realm will guarantee you cannot do so by being good. The only way you can make your mark among humans is by choosing evil. Granted, a great many humans may decide that what you did was somehow “good” in their estimate, but humans at large really have no clue. Human greatness, as humans at large understand it, is a waste of time.

The only righteous path is to seek out your own convictions and follow where they lead. It may start off pretty ugly, because it takes time to read them clearly. Worse, convictions tend to be a moving target. Still, this is the only path for human ambition that won’t end in evil. Your convictions are the Word of God for you individually, already written into your soul. Whatever is there contains your destiny, in terms of whatever it is God promotes, that for which He intends to use you. You cannot possibly do any better.

Following your convictions will naturally meet resistance from the Devil and most of the Elohim Council. Fallen human nature resists it already, and the elohim who fancy themselves as deities will use their powers to hinder you. (Something made my computer hardware act up while I was writing this.) However, God says He will support you.

You need to understand: The issue is not human success. The issue is your commitment, your pursuit, not your ability to carry through. The very notion of getting you stuck on performance is a lie from Hell. You need not ever succeed in any way except to keep trying. Divine glory is manifested in your attitude of commitment. That’s all it takes to win.

That’s all it takes to represent Jehovah’s agenda in Creation. That’s what it takes to win His case against Satan and the elohim rebellion. That’s what it takes to transcend the Fall and seize your inheritance as a child of God.

This is the path to “human greatness” as God defines it.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Is Greatness

An Age of Fraud Like No Other

I keep saying that the real warfare these days is information. That is precisely the nature of the gospel itself. We can pray that people will be guided to the truth of God in their hearts, and that will happen to some degree, but the Savior commissioned us to spread the message to ensure people have some kind of conscious context for the wordless yearnings in their hearts.

This is not a question of going to Heaven or Hell. Election works 100% regardless of human factors. What matters is the issue of God receiving His due glory from His own Elect while they serve time in this prison existence. We are the proof of His contention against the rebellious Elohim Council.

Starting with the Garden of Eden and the Fall, the true issue of conflict has always been the truth of God. And in our current fallen condition, that means information versus misinformation. Not as humans define such things, but it’s a matter of information consistent with God’s revelation. There are no precise rational boundaries; divine truth transcends such things. True information means saying what is consistent with the Person of God and His divine moral character within the context.

And for the time being, the primary field of action is online. Everything we say and do through other media, and even in our private interactions, is constrained by the shape of things available online. So, I’ve often written about computers and networking technology because it is germane to the gospel message. When the Net goes away (and it will), then it’s a different game entirely. As long as it’s here, we have to account for the Internet and its affects on our gospel witness.

And I’ve noted in the past that computer security is a subset of information security. The real issue is the information; the computer is simply the means, not an end in itself. And for a long time it could be boiled down to (1) protecting computer storage of information from loss, (2) ensuring transmission of the information (getting it through), and (3) protecting the content from corruption.

The first two items have been an issue since the beginning of networking. It continues today as an arms race. The whole point of networking is propagating information, and there will always be warfare over how to protect information from loss or blockage.

The third item was a big enough problem for the longest time. How many times have you been duped by false quotes that were massively copied via emails and social media? There’s a whole industry of “fact checking” that was valid for a long time, never mind how the term has been recently hijacked as the means to censorship. Most people have no concept of checking to see if some message is accurate.

For example, we had that early Internet conspiracy called “Rex84”. Now, there was the real thing, but there was also considerable nonsense being spread long after the particular military exercise to which it refers. The wild and unfounded assertions were raging for two decades after. The most egregious claims were that certain sites were already fully prepared as prison camps for confining people. Folks who lived near those sites checked it out; virtually none of them were fitted out for such a thing.

To this day people on the Net still insist that a site near me (withing easy bicycle distance) is ready to receive prisoners. As someone with considerable military training in running a prison camp, I can tell you that site is not ready, and the necessary materials are not even anywhere around. It’s not even properly secured from casual incursions; you can find hobos living part time there. It’s heavily wooded, with only a few tiny clearings. There are similar reports from people living near other alleged sites.

False information is a separate issue that isn’t really a part of networking security. The problem is the gullibility of humans, all too willing to believe lies that match their biases.

But the real issue with protecting the gospel message from corruption is verifying the source of something. The current means of electronic verification that a message actually came from the source alleged is rather cumbersome, and has always been a matter of security by obscurity. Good technicians can always fake communications; the system is pretty fragile.

And it’s now almost completely wiped out by AI. Do you realize that, having already dabbled in just a tiny few videos of myself talking and singing on YouTube some years ago, some AI could now produce a video of me saying anything you can imagine, and in languages I don’t even know. The courts are about to test some of the aspects of this threat, but they won’t be able to put that genie back in the bottle.

People who know me well could recognize when something was out of character. That’s not very many people. Fortunately, I’m not famous enough to make it worthwhile to try. I’ve made it a point to make most of my output about the message, and very little about me. But the strongest factor is that I always encourage folks to evaluate whether something I say is useful. You should have an internal filter in your convictions that prevent you receiving a message that God didn’t intend for you, never mind whether some AI might have ginned up a false message in writing or in video.

If the Internet gets too loaded down with crap like that, I pray Christians recognize it and stop relying on it. But for the rest of the world? Don’t be surprised when videos and other media pop up promoting the most outlandish frauds about public figures.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

NT Doctrine — Galatians 3

Notice a fundamental truth here: Paul is saying that the Covenant of Christ is not a continuation of Moses, but a continuation of the Covenant of Abraham. The Covenant of Abraham was reborn in Christ; He wasn’t merely the fulfillment of Moses, but of the promises of Abraham. And the Covenant of Abraham was a covenant of faith, not law. Moses was just a passage for faith. Abraham had more than one son, so having his DNA was not the basis of the promises. It was on the basis of election activated by faith.

It was the written form of an anguished cry Paul makes at the start of this chapter. Who has done this awful thing to you? Paul had been careful to lay out before them the meaning of the Cross. They surely understood that it was their cross, too. Their old lives were crucified. Did the Holy Spirit wait until they went back and complied with the Jewish identity, becoming “Sons of the Law”, or did He fill their souls the moment they heard the gospel? And having been born by the Spirit, were they now going to rely on the flesh to finish the job? If they had embraced the Law, the Jews would not have harassed them and stirred up Roman officials against them. They didn’t claim Christ’s miracles by the Law, nor the strength to face testing by the Law.

Paul does not bother to distinguish here between the bogus Talmudic law and the Covenant of Moses. At it’s very best, the Law did not produce faith, only a national identity. That was as much as it could do. Jews harped on being Sons of Abraham, but that doesn’t wash. Abraham didn’t just credit the promises; he invested his whole soul into them in faith. That was the basis for God calling him “righteous”, the substance of his covenant. It had nothing to do with genetics; the true children of Abraham’s covenant were children of faith. Indeed, the promise to Abraham is that every nation and tribe on earth would be blessed by his faith, not those who issued from his body.

In theory, the Law could grant you peace with God only if you kept it perfectly. No one managed to do that (not even Moses who presented the Law). Thus, the Law only confirmed the Curse of the Fall by making it painfully obvious that flesh was not capable of obeying God. The true standard of righteousness starts with faith. Christ absorbed the Curse of the Fall on our behalf; He extinguished the Curse on the Cross. This was the whole point of the Cross: to bring the Covenant of Faith to the whole world. That was the promise of Abraham’s Covenant, God’s plan from the very beginning.

Consider the authority of a covenant sworn by ordinary men. Once it is established and sealed, no power of government would dare set it aside. Even Rome enforced a man’s last will and testament who was subject to Roman authority, strictly by the letter. Paul makes the point that the promise to Abraham applied only to one line of inheritance, and that was by faith, not by birth. The Messiah was the named heir of Abraham, the one for whom the promise of faith stood.

So, when the Law of Moses came along 430 years after Abraham, it did not alter that Covenant of Faith. God Himself was the guarantor of that covenant, validated by Abraham’s faith. Whatever the Covenant of Moses could do, it did not include something previously locked up under the Covenant of Abraham. The promise of the final covenant of the Messiah was already sealed before the Law was ever given. The Law of Moses must yield to the Covenant of Faith as prior law.

Then what was the point of the Law? What did it have to offer? The Nation of Israel was like a minor who would inherit faith once they grew up. They were submitted to an appointed guardian, a nanny to raise them until they were supposed to be ready to inherit the promises of faith. It was essential the Israelis grow up to understand their sinful fleshly natures, and the necessity of redemption. The Law simply pointed out the need for faith. In this, the Gentile nations were the younger siblings under the same custody, and Israel was the firstborn who should have gotten there first. Paul notes in passing that angels were administering this custody arrangement.

Moses was the mediator of this custody. A mediator stands between two or more parties. God is one party, the senior party. Moses did not contradict the will of God. If Moses could have redeemed everyone, then the Covenant of Abraham was a fraud. No, Moses made obvious the need for the Messiah already promised in Abraham.

The Law was meant to awaken in everyone a desire for redemption and that redemption was coming. The Law is a tutor who trains us to understand and value Christ. The will has been unsealed and read; it is faith in Christ. The period of minority has passed. Everyone who has entered Christ has entered into the adult world of faith. Everyone in Christ has nailed their flesh to the Cross, and lives now by faith in Him. In baptism the Galatian Christians swore their allegiance to Him as Lord, and now wear the vestments of His authority. They have renounced their human identity; they are no longer Jews and Gentiles, not slave nor free, no longer male or female, etc.

In the Covenant of Christ, we have also entered the Covenant promises of Abraham. How could anyone possibly revert to their status as minors under a guardian whose mission has been fulfilled, and is no longer in authority?

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

So Far…

It’s time for a pragmatic reassessment of this ministry. Not so much what we have done, but what can we expect realistically for the future?

My convictions tell me that we are in the early stages of global chaos. It’s going to get much worse. Some of that “worse” will come in leaps and bounds, but most of it will be a long slow descent. But the biggest problem is not the threat of kinetic conflict; that is only a symptom of the information warfare. The real goal of God’s enemies working here on earth is deception.

Because of the deception, there will be a WW3. I don’t have a word from the Lord regarding the details of our path, only that this is where the world is headed. Indeed, the excuses are scattered all over the place. The real issues is that there must be global warfare, so in some ways it doesn’t matter how we get there.

But this is all merely background noise. It should not be the focus of attention for people of faith. The call of the gospel is not to fix the world’s ills. Humanity is fallen; sinners will sin. They will violate the Covenants and reap the consequences. The evil is not in the sad condition of humanity. The evil is in the persistent deception of humans that keeps them from serving their time in prison — this world — according to God’s revelation.

It is exceedingly difficult to get westerners in particular to abandon their mythology. It’s not so hard to get them to embrace genuine faith in Christ; the Elect will always come home to that truth sooner or later. The difficulty is getting them to understand the biblical perspective of what feudal submission to Christ requires of us. The cosmology and metaphysics of the Bible are radically different from what is common among church folks here in America.

To be honest, our Radix Fidem rejection of Zionism is only the proximate cause of conflict with the mainstream church leadership. The real problem is why they embrace it in the first place. It’s that old issue with sowing seeds of biblical truth on rocky ground or hardened footpaths. American society offers little fertile soil. Zionism is a symptom of having never prepared the soil properly.

First, there’s this grand delusion that the Great Commission means changing this fallen world. Spiritual conquest is changing the individual soul, not the fallen condition. For all the formal theology of the last two millennia, western Christians do not actually understand the Fall. I’m hardly the only person to notice that the Catholic Church officially teaches that the human intellect is not fallen, but not very many people recognize that this is also an unspoken assumption of how Protestants approach the question of following Christ.

The Scriptures say very little about what Adam and Eve had before the Fall, but the whole story of the Fall itself is rooted in that makes us fallen: We rely on our human capabilities instead of God’s provision to decide what our destiny and duties are in Creation. We instinctively turn away from revelation. It puts us in the position of passing judgment on His Word; it’s a rejection of Christ who is His Living Word. We end up agreeing with Jews and Judaizers about what God has said.

Without getting bogged down again in all the details, the net result is that American church folks have long been fools for Zionism. But again, that’s just the symptom. The core issue is that the following statement would shock most church folks: Jesus didn’t die on the Cross to bring us to Heaven, but to open the Covenant to the whole world. The issue of going to Heaven was settled before Eden was ever built. The bigger question is whether the Elect will embrace His divine glory while we are here.

The fundamental issue in the Devil’s rebellion is who gets the glory. Scripture is pretty clear about that, even if it is revealed in mystical prophecy, in particular the words of Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28. Those passages point out the underlying theme of spiritual rebellion, the primary issue that Satan himself has with Jehovah, and thus the nature of his temptation of humanity. The whole issue is that our God is unique, the only one, and the greatness of His created servants is not on par with Him. They are still creatures, and He is the Creator. All glory is His.

The Devil was disciplined for seizing God’s glory for Himself. He was reduced from his status as the Divine Bodyguard (“Covering Cherub”) to the divine Prosecutor and Jailer. The Devil was confined to staying in this own prison — the fallen world. But he rejected that discipline, and continued making his case by tempting humanity to join him there. He knew God would be compelled to discipline humanity the same way for the same sin, the sin of seizing the prerogatives of glory for themselves.

Redemption is in restoring His stolen glory. We are confined to hard labor in this prison existence, and that labor is restoring all glory to His name. The only path He authorizes for that is in His revelation, His Son. And the frame of reference for His Son is the Covenant. The Covenant of Moses was the proper setting for His Son to manifest on earth, the final revelation to humanity at the end of a series of covenants. The final covenant in Christ was a shocker to the rebels in Heaven. They did not expect a covenant that transcended the boundaries of human identities.

Yes, we desire to return to Eden, which is pretty much the same concept as going to Heaven. The reason we desire it is because our eternal nature was not taken from us. The denial of access to the Tree of Life symbolized being forced into a mortal existence, not the removal of our eternal nature. Were it not for the eternal nature within, we would be wholly unable to respond to the gospel. There would be no home for the Holy Spirit within us. The meaning of Election is the existence of that eternal nature.

There is no clinical description possible of Election. It’s all part of the biblical mystical language. We might be able to delineate what sin looks like, but there is no way we can be made to distinguish the Elect from the Damned until the Elect come home to Jesus and manifest His glory. Thus, our mission is to live like Christ as the means to expose His glory, which He uses to awaken the awareness of Election in the Elect.

And we do this against the background of human chaos in a fallen realm of existence. This is the prison of souls, and we can do nothing to change its nature or its operation. But we can buck the system in favor the Creator’s glory. This is how we manifest His justice in condemning the Devil, and in condemning our own sins. This is how we participate in our original mission in Eden. This is how our lives are redeemed.

This is also the true source of conflict we have with the mainstream of Christian religion. We uphold the Covenant of Christ, while they try their hardest to chase everything else. Jesus died for our sins, so that we could be accepted into His Covenant. Satan can’t steal our eternal natures from us, but he can deceive us into missing our calling to Christ’s glory. That’s the real issue behind spiritual warfare. Will you walk in His Covenant to glorify Him?

We should expect rejection of this message. All the other noise is just symptoms of that.

Posted in religion | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on So Far…

Calling Out to the Unseen Elect

If you don’t embrace and absorb the message of Michael Heiser’s Unseen Realm, you cannot gain a proper biblical perspective on human politics.

There is no scholarly excuse for rejecting his thesis; the evidence is simply overwhelming. The Hebrew people up to the time of Jesus clearly believed in the Divine Council of elohim serving in God’s courts in Heaven. They believed in a multitude of heavenly creatures; they believed that some of them fell from their exalted positions and gave birth to the Nephilim (regardless of the mechanism). They believed that all the creatures we call “demons” are the disembodied spirits of these Nephilim. This kind of mythology colors the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament.

If we don’t buy into it, we will not be able to understand the gospel. Nor will we be able to understand the political mess of the world today.

If you can grasp the concept of the Elohim Council as rather like Persian satraps serving the Persian emperor, then you’ll understand how God does not micromanage things the way most western minds instinctively assume He would. It’s not a question of what He notices, but how He established procedures under His authority. It doesn’t make sense to us, maybe, but it is what He revealed as His “management style” in His Word. At the Tower of Babel, God divided humanity among his Elohim Council members, and then raised up the Nation of Israel as His own personal domain.

They failed to follow through on their end of the Covenant. The modern State of Israel is not biblical Israel. Rather, Jews in general, and Israel in particular, are the people of Satan (“synagogue of Satan”). They rejected the Messiah and the inherent plan for their nation. Their patron deity is the Devil; God passed the earthly nation over to Satan at the Cross. The Jews are Satan’s personal property.

The religion of Islam is beholden to some other pagan deity, and because of the partisan divisions within Islam, the net effect is that they serve multiple pagan gods. This is how the elohim rule as God’s satraps among the various Islamic countries. The Elohim Council does business that way among human nations and kingdoms. Every human political entity on this earth is captive of one or more Elohim Council members. While many of the council members are allied with Satan, they aren’t wholly subservient. Further, some of the satraps aren’t fully onboard with the Devil’s agenda, and may be somewhat more friendly to God’s agenda. Yet, not a single human nation belongs to God.

Thus, we recognize that the bombing of Gaza is a moral wrong on one level, but it’s just routine affairs on another. If you get all wrapped up in promoting Zionism or denouncing it, you are playing into the hands of the Devil and his allies on the Elohim Council. Do not oversimplify things; don’t be a fool who embraces linear logic and false dichotomies. Both sides are evil for different reasons.

The same goes for America’s invasive presence in Syria, Iraq and just about anywhere else on the planet: it serves a pagan deity. America is not a covenant nation by any definition in the Bible; it is a pagan nation serving several different members of the Elohim Council. Our government is incapable of doing good except by accident.

Human slaughter is evil on a basic level; you cannot engage in it individually with a clean conscience before God. (It’s a matter above any individual authority.) However, there is another level of consideration here — there are Elohim Council members at work. They build nations that are generally evil or misguided, controlling vast numbers of defiled people whose lives are forfeit under God’s justice. Whether or not they include any Elect is really not the issue, since the Elect go to Heaven regardless (from our level of consideration). Rather, the tragedy is that some members of God’s Elect never get to harvest their Covenant blessings, except to the limited degree they embrace the Covenant individually.

It’s a tragedy that Creation must endure the injustice of ignoring the Covenant, along with the injustice of human slaughter. It’s also par for the course. This is quantum logic, processing and evaluating on multiple levels. If all you see is the injustice on one level, then you’ll get emotionally invested in a lie. You’ll be distracted and not see the hand of God and your Covenant duty to Him.

Everything we seek to do by conviction should be understood as a matter of the Great Commission. You are supposed to infiltrate the domains of the rebellious Elohim Council and help to free the Elect to know Christ as their Lord in this life. That means you only pretend to give human allegiance to various human authorities. This is our commission from Christ. They cannot own your heart, only some portion of your fleshly performance.

It does have some parallels in our understanding of espionage only because the non-elect people around us are incapable of understanding how it all works. They aren’t privy to the secrets in the sense of the big picture. It’s not that we are hiding our ultimate loyalty; quite the contrary (in most cases). But they have no capability of understanding the balance point for us internally. They will be perplexed if they are paying attention (though at any given time, most do not pay attention). That’s the opening for our witness of Christ.

So, serve your earthly masters with excellence. That’s a part of your witness. Play along when your convictions permit, and don’t be afraid of conflict that arises from obeying your convictions. That’s part of your witness; expect those conflicts to arise. Invest yourself in the witness, not the human career goals. The Elohim Council members, masquerading as deities, will not appreciate our invasive presence in their schemes, but there is not a thing they can do to prevent God speaking through our witness and calling out to His Elect wherever we find them.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Calling Out to the Unseen Elect

How Can We Help Them?

This is a pastoral note: Don’t depend on the system to fix itself. The system must break. Further, when it breaks, the American people will not be in control of what replaces the current system. Nothing in this world can restore the imaginary system that never existed in the first place. We have always been ruled by the elite, and always will be.

I’ve long ago grown weary of commentators insisting that justice will come some day. That’s the basic mission of Q-anon: to keep the activists busy supporting the system. The ruling elite will break the system in their own way and timing, and don’t want the process getting away from them.

Kunstler does a really good job of exposing information we need to understand how things work. The whole point of the false-flag “January 6 insurrection” was to derail Congress looking into the false election results. They never went back to that topic, and likely never will. But knowing that and recognizing what we ought to do about it are two different things. Kunstler’s advice is based on false hopes. There is no cavalry of good guys riding to the rescue. Nothing will be done. Wittingly or not, Kunstler serves as controlled opposition.

The coming civil war will not work out as most people expect. That’s because the hype about this civil war is so pervasive that most people believe lies about it. There will be bloodshed, but it will hardly be the main event. The main event will be a break up of the Union of States. But the whole thing is already a real mess, and it will not be clear to us what’s really the source of conflict. State governments are already deep into posturing and deceiving about the underlying issues. Everyone wants to manipulate public sentiment to support the plans they’ve already made.

In other words, there’s really not much you can do about all of that. Boiled down to its essence, the one thing you can prepare for is an upsurge in petty crime. Don’t arm yourself for revolution; arm yourself for home defense. By extension, I’m thinking and praying about neighborhood security. Not those silly committees dominated by Karens, but the real deal of recognizing that you and your neighbors must work together as much as possible.

Get a feel for the folks living around you who can’t be trusted. Make allowances for it. Don’t try to provoke hostility, but be ready when it surfaces, because there’s a high probability it will. Things will get difficult for everyone, and some will not react very well. Meanwhile, think about stocking up on things that you know how to use and be ready to share on terms that meet your convictions.

Lay in a supply of things that would tend to disappear when the economy becomes unstable. The biggest issue will be consumables that everyone takes for granted. That would include bullets, of course, but also cable ties and some paper products. You can work this out for yourself; be aware of what is made in your area and stock up on what you use that isn’t made in your area.

One of the things that worries me about younger generations is how so many of them have been encouraged to specialize in things they like to the point that they associate only with people in a very narrow range of interests. It’s so very easy to find online communities that cater to that kind of thing. When things get difficult, you’ll need to become skilled at tolerating a very wide range of people you would not normally choose to even acknowledge. You’ll have to become friends with a whole bunch of real people, instead of fantasy gaming characters. Learn how to build bridges across the natural divides.

It does no good to disparage folks who live in a rarefied virtual world. Our society has made them like that, and we who remember how to handle a wider world let it happen. For several generations, we’ve been too wrapped up in our own worlds. Technology has played into that trend, amplifying both the tendency and results. The consequences will include an increase in needless bloodshed when things get tough.

Pray about ways you can help people recover and become realistic. That includes the vast herd of folks convinced that the system is worthy of keeping alive.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on How Can We Help Them?

NT Doctrine — Galatians 2

Paul continues the narrative of his dealings with the original Hebrew Apostles and the community they led in Jerusalem. After some 14 years of working without them in Syrian Antioch, the Lord commanded him to return visit Jerusalem again. We can be sure the Lord foresaw the conflict about to arise, and wanted Paul to be certain in his own mind that it was bogus. He took with him Barnabas (the Cyprian Jew who came to Christ) and Titus (a Gentile convert).

Paul conferred in a private meeting with the church leadership. They were all satisfied that what Paul had been teaching all along was consistent with how they remembered the message of Jesus. While there, no one pressured Titus to hide his Gentile background. They recognized Titus as a fellow follower of Christ just as he was.

Paul comes back to the current dispute behind this letter. Near as we can tell, the Judaizers who came up from Jerusalem to Syrian Antioch were mostly genuine Christian converts. Their emphasis was that Jesus was the Messiah of Israel. The bunch who spread out across Galatia were dominated by fake converts seeking to restore not just Moses, but the Talmud. They had piggybacked with the real converts who were already causing enough trouble. Paul describes this latter group as seeking to enslave both Hebrew and Gentile coverts under Jewish civil law, not Moses. This was a form of espionage, a purely political operation that aimed to expand the Jewish tax base, among other things.

In other words, Paul claims these agents knew they were lying about what Jesus had taught. And as soon as Paul spotted them, he made a very public denunciation that the rest of the community in Antioch supported. Keep in mind that Jesus treated the Talmud as valid Jewish civil law, but not a valid expression of Moses. Paul noted the same distinction in how he dealt with Jewish persecution.

Backing up again to that private meeting in Jerusalem, Paul noted that it didn’t matter who was who. This was all about the gospel message, not persons claiming leadership. As it was, they could not add anything because Paul had left out nothing essential. They recognized Paul as having been with Jesus on different terms. They clearly understood that Paul had been commissioned by the Lord to take the gospel to Gentiles, equal to Peter’s commission to the Hebrews. Paul notes that this conference included James (Jesus’ brother), as well as Peter and John (Jesus’ cousins). When they mentioned how important it was to engage in charity among the poor, that was nothing new to Paul.

Thus, Paul was their equal in their own eyes. And he did not hesitate to call them out when they were wrong. Later on, when Peter came to visit a while in Syrian Antioch, the Hebrew Apostle that had been first to visit in a Gentile home and share the gospel some years before, he naturally ate with Gentiles, too. Such mixing was forbidden by the Talmud, but that was a misreading of Moses. Still, it was ingrained in Jews as a mental reflex. When a delegation from James came up to get a feel for the ministry there in Antioch, Peter seemed to be taken with a false guilt about mixing with Gentiles, and began to withdraw socially, and pressured others, to the point even Barnabas was sucked into it.

I’m willing to bet Paul used humor with Peter in pointing out the hypocrisy. Here was Peter, who for some years had obeyed the Covenant of Christ and neglected the Talmud, to the point he almost lived like a Gentile himself, and he’s going to be aloof from Gentiles because they didn’t adhere to Jewish civil law?

For the Galatian churches, Paul recounted his reasoning on the matter. Jews were born under the Covenant of Moses. Even the rabbinical traditions recognized that merely fulfilling the external obligations of Moses did not bring peace with God. They recited daily about the necessity of personal feudal submission to God. Thus, Jews should be the first to recognize that the sacrifice of their Messiah was necessary to wash away their sins; He was the only one who had standing to claim a pure life. So, having once claimed Him as their Messiah and King, how can they renege on their allegiance to His Law by go back to the Law that died on the Cross with Him?

The national identity of Israel as God’s people ended at the Cross. That identity was translated into a spiritual kingdom, whose King is Jesus. To follow Jesus meant renouncing that old national identity. How could Paul go back to building up the failed nation of Israel, as if to take it all back from the Messiah’s hands? It is tantamount to rejecting the Father’s policy in His Son of reaching the whole world without dragging Gentiles under the Law of Moses.

As a Jew, Paul followed Christ through the completion of the Law. There was nothing left for the Covenant of Moses to accomplish. Jesus paid the ultimate price to finish it. His new identity was in the Messiah, so that means following Him to the Cross, and burying his old Jewish identity. But he was also resurrected with Christ to a new identity. Now he lives by personal commitment to Jesus as Lord, allowing Him to use his body and manifest Himself anew. Christians are His body now; He shows Himself in their lives, having bought them by His own blood.

The key is ditching one’s human identity, whether Jew or Gentile. The Kingdom of Heaven is a wholly different kind of identity that transcends all of that. Paul’s Jewish birthright did not include divine grace; it simply opened the door for it. Having gone through that door into God’s grace, it would be sheer folly to back out now. It would mean Christ died for nothing. Trying to reassert the Jewish identity was backing out of God’s grace available only in His Son.

The Judaizers among the Galatian churches were trying to drag everyone back into a Jewish national identity, out of divine grace.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Germ or Terrain?

I’ve been called a lot of things, and “crackpot” has recurred often enough that I have begun to celebrate it. So, today I offer another of my crackpot teachings. This is one of those things where, you don’t have to agree with me, but as a member of Kiln of the Soul, you have to tolerate me teaching it.

There is one primary reason I generally reject most vaccines: I don’t believe that viruses are a medical issue. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but that they aren’t a valid explanation for human maladies. Most vaccines are meant to counter viral infections, and it is the specific concept of “viral infection” that I teach doesn’t exist.

This is whence your Kiln of the Soul religious exemption from mandated vaccines come.

Now, let’s make another clarification: I’m not saying bacterial infections don’t exist. Some bacteria can kill you. A bacterial infection may require treatment; I’ve had a few. However, the whole class of so-called “viral epidemics” are a big lie.

Here’s one example: The Spanish Flu pandemic was not a flu virus. Whatever it was, it was not spread by viral infection. It was tested. During that “pandemic”, randomly chosen healthy people were exposed to all the possible vectors of viral infection, and never got sick. They were sent into hospital wards, spoke with and touched sick people. Neither via mouth, nose, eyes or even a blood injection would the exposure to fluids from sick people make these random test subjects sick.

I’ll let you look it up for yourself because I don’t want to spoil it by cherry-picking sources for you. A rejection of the viral theory is associated with the “terrain theory” versus “germ theory”, but I’m not fully onboard with terrain theory. I believe that debate is a false dichotomy. If you use a search engine, you’ll get a tidal wave of references that disparage any dissent from the mainstream germ theory, so be forewarned. However, I do not reject germ theory altogether. I say that it suffers limits; it cannot explain everything it attempts to address.

Most medical people live by the germ theory and vehemently reject terrain theory. That’s because the medical education system is a monolith, and there is darned little actual research by the teachers and students. People get certifications and licenses without ever field testing much of their education. They know what the system requires of them, and seldom ever see the research itself, only very biased reports of it. It hasn’t actually been genuine science for a very long time.

The terrain theory covers a wide range of ideas, but the core idea is that most common health issues would fade away if people simply observed a natural approach to life, and took care to mitigate inherited conditions. The sum total of medical knowledge just scratches the surface, and the medical industry should stop pretending to have the only answers.

Granted, it’s well nigh impossible to obtain, much less afford, a good natural diet as God intended for us. Whether it be the whiny demands of consumers at large or the shaping of consumer demand by marketers, you decide, but what I can find in my average local grocery store is mostly toxic in one way or another.

I will offer this link which is mostly balanced, but not in the sense that I endorse the specific answers offered there. I would rather you consider the approach itself. The author suggests there’s no reason to take sides, just find a functional path that works for you.

Virtually everything you need to obey the Lord is already provided naturally. Give it some attention.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , | 1 Comment