Reviewing Darkness 02

Posted on August 12, 2016 by ehurst

By now we should understand that the term “demon possession” conjures a wholly bogus image of how things actually work. The question is not binary; all of us suffer some demonic presence in our lives to varying degrees. There is no imaginary threshold beyond which we start talking about outright possession. English translations of the Bible are very misleading about the whole picture because those translations rest on a badly heathenized cultural mythology.

Let us never forget the ultimate goal of Satan: to maximize global deception. Whatever it is he hopes to gain hinges on denying us what God promised was available in this world from His hand. He can’t actually disable the character of God living in Creation, so all that’s left is persuading us to avoid revelation and trust in something — anything — except a heart-led awareness. This is part of our teaching that Creation is not fallen; you and I are fallen. Satan can’t alter what God has done in Creation, but he can alienate us from Creation, from the things for which God designed us.

You cannot sell your soul. You most certainly can surrender your divine privileges. Insofar as Satan can own you, he cannot touch your eternal destiny. He’s confined to this realm of existence in the sense that what we can surrender to him belongs to this realm only. That still leaves an awful lot of damage he can do.

We are aware that God can choose whom He will to carry out certain missions and callings on this earth. His purposes are often inscrutable. We can grasp a moral vision of what He intends in general terms, and we can be certain of what He wants from us individually. However, we can hardly grasp the full details of how He uses us. So it is with Satan; he chooses whom he will for inscrutable purposes. Thus, just as there are some folks who seem to carry a much more notable service to Christ, there are some folks more demonized than others. To you and I it will seem random in most cases, but that merely reflects the power of Satan’s deception against our very limited grasp. We can discern through our heart-minds what we must know to obey.

We cannot possibly discern without our heart-minds when and where we should seek to intervene when folks are so obviously demonized, any more than we could reason our way to an accurate assessment of when we should intervene in anyone else’s life. Never forget: we are all demonized in various ways and degrees. Our own demons can hinder how well we help someone else with theirs. Everything in our human existence is a matter of recognizing when the fruits of the Spirit are ripe. Picking green fruit serves no purpose, and can be quite harmful.

I’m willing to bet you’ve encountered at least one soul that poked into certain spiritual matters way before they were ready. It typically results in something that our society calls “psychosis.” Unless God says we are ready for something, we aren’t ready and it will hurt us. This is a primary element in drug abuse, for example. One therapist accurately noted that messing with some narcotics constitutes psychic burglary, exploring parts of your psyche that you don’t yet own in the sense of being ready to put it to good use. It’s not that these psychoactive substances have no uses, but that we cannot mistake them for mere entertainment. We get far more from them than most people are willing to recognize.

You shall not be terrified of them; for the Lord your God, the great and awesome God, is among you. And the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you little by little; you will be unable to destroy them at once, lest the beasts of the field become too numerous for you. (Deuteronomy 7:21-22 NKJV)

As the entire Conquest serves a parable for us (1 Corinthians 10:1-13), so we learn the divine standard for the conquest of our own lives. We cannot just jump right into full blown moral perfection with all the requisite miracle-working powers. We have to explore the unique landscape of our souls and occupy little by little what the demons once kept from us. We learn from Matthew 12:43-45 what happens when we try to run out the demons too soon. If you do not occupy the delivered area of your life with active heart-led service of the Kingdom, that area becomes ripe for an even worse moral failure. That whole chapter is loaded with Christ refuting a lot of false demonology.

But this business of being ready is part of what’s not explicitly stated in the narrative of Acts 16. Paul and Silas were in Philippi and wound up in the jail because they tossed out a demon from a girl who was prophesying about them. They were reluctant to do it in the first place because their hearts knew it would serve little purpose until she was ready. Clearly she was not ready. Instead, her pronouncements came closer to mocking them. Their actions were purely defensive in spiritual terms. It also came with a heavy secular price.

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Reviewing Darkness 01

Posted on August 11, 2016 by ehurst

Let’s take a fresh look at the Dark Side, shall we?

Take a moment to refocus your awareness in your heart-mind. Get a good grip on the moral anchorage of your convictions, because we need to face some stormy truth. The storms have their place in life, and that’s precisely the point. We need to view things from the perspective of our Creator.

Most people try to evaluate the Bible from their cultural biases, instead of letting the Bible judge their culture. It’s not as if you and I could transport our natural lives and our human minds into the culture of the Bible, but we most certainly can develop an awareness of the Bible culture so that we understand the Scriptures in their own context. No two of us will assemble the exact same model in our minds, but we can share some of our individual discoveries. The idea is that truth is God, a living Person, and we all encounter Him individually.

We get that image of God by grasping the sometimes shocking difference between how our society looks at reality against how the people in the Bible viewed it. Once we take seriously the radical differences, we are better prepared not only to discern some measure of their different approach, but we can begin to mine that approach for a higher moral awareness of what faith should look like in our context — “rightly dividing the Word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). In the meantime, we take on a blended vision that is neither what our culture produces now nor precisely what the culture of the Bible was. We seek a far higher realm of existence that is alien to our society.

In the Bible, we are offered two major characters whose occupation is translated as “jailer” — Potiphar in the narrative of Joseph (Genesis 39) and then the Roman official in Philippi as recorded in Acts (ch. 16). Could you study the ancient historical background in which these two men lived, you would find a surprising degree of similarity. Both serve at the convenience of some greater power in a feudal milieu. Both were largely free to do as they wished with the prisoners remanded to their custody, so long as they were able to produce them on command. There’s more to it than that, but we need not wallow in the details here. Whatever use or abuse jailers had for the prisoners in the meantime was nobody else’s business; the prisoners were their slaves. That’s because the ancient world hardly differentiated between prison and slavery. Whatever talents a prisoner/slave could offer were the property of the jailer for the duration of confinement.

What may not be so obvious is that Satan is portrayed under the same terms. If you can capture the image of what an Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) jailer was as a feudal noble serving his lord, you will find it’s a perfect match for how Satan operates. So we meet him in the Book of Job and he answers to exactly the same protocols as any ANE jailer, but serving God in this case. Gathering this information into the bigger picture with various references to Satan in the Bible, we see that he is in some ways bound under the restrictions of our realm of existence here. This world is his prison-realm; he was “cast down to the earth” (Revelations 12:7-9) and compelled to “eat the dust” (Genesis 3) in the same passage where God said we are dust.

So the point for us is that we are born under Satan’s dominion. This realm of existence is a prison of sorts and we are Satan’s prisoners and slaves by default, for we are born into this fallen realm. But his dominion rests on God’s sovereign dominion as the Lord Satan must serve. Whatever it is the Devil can do to us is limited by the moral laws of God. Those laws were exemplified in at least two Law Covenants, Moses and Noah. By studying what those covenants meant in their context, we can reduce the authority of Satan in our lives. Ignoring the study of those covenants will make it extremely hard to escape his authority. All the promises God made to bless us under those moral laws are consumed by Satan as our slave master.

Nor should you imagine this in binary terms. We who become aware of this situation spend our entire lives exchanging bits and pieces of our slavery for moral freedom and God’s provision. We take back our shalom little by little, as if struggling to occupy and reclaim the fallow land of our lives. We strive to occupy our soul-turf according to the revelation of God coming into our awareness through our hearts. This is a tall order and the task is never done.

We got into this fix through our natural tendency to trust our human talents and internal resources over revelation. That’s the essence of the Fall, a choice to let human reason and talents to take the throne of dominion in our souls. This requires usurping the place of the heart-mind and its instinctive reliance on the revelation of the moral character of God. The heart reads the living Presence of God in Creation, but the intellect is utterly blind to it. So the darkness descended on humanity and we became slaves of the Devil. His primary power and function is deception. You remain his slave only because you surrender to the temptation to let your mind rule over your heart. Once you learn to trust the convictions of truth living in your heart, and subject your mind to those convictions, Satan can’t do much to you. It doesn’t eliminate his authority, but curtails his dark influence. We begin to see the light of truth through the eyes of our hearts.

This is what we hope to cultivate. We are made for better things, but we are naturally (it’s our nature) inclined to trust our human capabilities without the heart-mind. God allows the Devil to consume our blessings if we choose that slavery; that’s His feudal law. We can also decide to exercise the freedom God offers by moving our awareness back into the heart-mind. Then we operate in God’s Kingdom as one of His children, not as a slave/prisoner.

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I’m on the Map

Posted on August 10, 2016 by ehurst

This is totally frivolous.

GmapsHomeI vaguely recall seeing the Google Street View car coming by sometime after we moved into our apartment. It was still cooler weather then. Recently I noticed that if you view my apartment on Google Maps using the Street View function from Pratt Drive, you’ll see me standing just outside the breezeway. Further, that’s our car parked along the curb there.

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My Mission

Posted on August 9, 2016 by ehurst

I’m a prophet to America.

For the longest time I suffered under the delusion that I was training for pastoral ministry, but I was actually a missionary among my own kind. Back when I served in the US military, I knew beyond all doubt that it was my mission field. Nothing in my calling prevented me from reaching out to the local population where I was stationed, but my primary calling was to church folks in uniform. Still, my mind was focused on providing pastoral care. While that worked out rather well in one sense, I remained deeply conflicted about how churches were seldom a welcoming place for me.

It never dawned on me until much later that the mission field was the institutional religious landscape. I was an ambassador from a foreign power they did not really know well.

Most of what passes for American church missions to foreign lands has always been more about cultural mission work. So deep and thorough was the deception that they viewed Jehovah in terms of Anglo-Saxon mythology, and considered their Western middle-class cultural values as “faith.” Their Jesus was a European deity. Most missionaries are wholly unable to think outside their cultural boundaries. They only imagine themselves to be cosmopolitan; their recognition of other cultures subconsciously assumes a Western superiority.

So most of the world thinks of Jehovah as merely a cultural deity. If someone invades their land and succeeds militarily and politically, they might as well placate the god of their invaders, too. A great many Asian converts, for example, remain polytheistic in that sense. They show up for church and express a certain religious fervor, but they also burn incense to their ancient pagan deities. To them, the Bible is just a Western invention hijacked from those belligerent folks in Palestine. Americans pretend to be nice, but are actually no less belligerent.

Seeking now to be a “foreign missionary” would mean having to carry all that baggage. It’s not that I have any less zeal for the rest of humanity to find heart-led faith living, but I dare not associate myself with previous missionary work.

Nor would I accept the image of reformer. Western Christianity doesn’t need renovation; it’s built on a false foundation. It needs replacement, starting over on a proper footing of genuine heart-led faith. Insofar as I am any kind of missionary, I engage in home missions. It’s Americans that need the gospel message. I believe we’ve wasted enough resources, often with massive corruption you never hear about, on what folks call “foreign missions.” You can stop plundering the tithes, church leaders. Let’s find another way to spread the word of truth.

Our virtual parish is a mission center, too. The Internet works just fine; we have little need for all that expensive travel and the risks involved. God is raising up people in every land who can walk by their faith in heart-led living, and it’s easier for them than it is for Westerners in the first place. People from all over the world have subscribed to this blog alone, and we are approaching 800 subscribers. We are hardly the only good source of gospel truth on the Net, but if only those few who pay attention to our teaching here become serious about living heart-led faith, we already have a bigger mission “staff” around the world than most church organizations.

Best of all, I don’t have to worry about compromising the gospel by chaining it to inappropriate cultural arrogance. Local folks can allow the heart-led gospel to manifest within their own cultural context.

Meanwhile, here’s my message to America: God has decreed an end. The sun is setting on the American empire. We can do this gracefully or we can fight it and be destroyed. We can pull in our tentacles of control or have them cut off and bleed to death. The world has suffered enough from our unbearable arrogance and interference. Other empires will displace us and we had better get used to the idea.

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Gospel Missions

Posted on August 9, 2016 by ehurst

Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. No matter where you touch the living truth, it always leads to other things. The Western tendency to make thinking discrete and linear, with binary logic, is a major hurdle to overcome in approaching God’s living truth. The only loose ends are you and I, hanging off the outside of this one universal living thing.

I wrote The Cult in part to introduce how demonic influences can take on a life of their own. So instead of worrying about discrete individuals doing this or that great evil thing, as if they were some anti-hero, we put the focus where it belongs.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of moral darkness in this world, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the Spirit Realm. (Ephesians 6:12)

At the same time, I wanted to wipe away the worst of our Western mythology about how evil works, and to begin correcting a large body of false demonology. Our biggest problems do not come from natural threats or human oppression; we can work around those because Our Father rules this world. But a part of His rule is establishing an Adversary as His whip hand. Satan serves God’s purpose, but we have to understand that purpose.

So what God does with natural events and in His herding of humans who ignore Him are together the background against which we manifest His glory. These things are mere context. By faith our hearts know what we should accept with grace and what we should challenge in prayer. When our calling requires something that does not appear likely, we pray for divine intervention. Thus, we are sometimes healed of maladies and sometimes told to live with it (2 Corinthians 12:7-10).

However, Satan and his demons are another matter entirely. We oppose him first in our choice to immerse ourselves in the moral life led by the heart. From that foundation, we learn how to oppose demons in more specific ways. And Western Christianity has gotten lost entirely from that ancient viewpoint because the primary effect of demonic activity is deception. The grand success of Satan’s plot to blind us by stealing away a cultural orientation that assumes a heart-led existence remains our biggest barrier to finding peace with God.

A critical part of countering that vast deception is the teaching of The Cult. People matter in the sense that they are tools of the Devil who need deliverance. The primary means of delivering them is by delivering ourselves, for in the struggle over our own selves as the battlefield, we have done as much as we can for everyone else. We have shined the light of glory on a volitional path they each must take for themselves. It requires learning to think of victory, not as some discrete event, but an ongoing process. It also requires learning to think of our Enemy as an influence in people, not the people themselves.

Further, for them to take that path and escape deception, that act itself is a miracle of God. It’s not a decision of the mind, but a compulsion of conviction. You and I cannot possibly formulate a means to make that happen in their souls. Decision Theology remains one of the biggest lies we fight, because it hobbles the whole of Western Christianity.

Stop for a moment and consider the moral logic here, the implications of what I point out. Our mission of redemption in this world is not to convince people to make a decision. Our mission is simply walking in the power of His divine moral Law. By showing what that Law looks like, we then have authority to teach it verbally. The gospel message is not magic; it has no power of its own, but requires a vivification in human lives. That’s how God does things. Jesus Christ is the Living Law of God, so the gospel message is not wrapped up in orthodoxy, but in living by His example as the Law — Law = God’s moral character.

The massive disaster of all this church missionary stuff is not that the world hasn’t heard about Jesus. Believe me, the whole world knows His name and has heard some version of the false gospel of Decision Theology. The disaster is that the churches who send those missionaries are themselves so much in need of the real gospel message. The churches are a mission field, and very tough one, at that. What a heartbreaking thing to realize that some church folks are so very close, yet so very far from the gospel of Jesus Christ, the name they claim in all they do.

Consequently, the biggest hassles we face in our faith and religion are the mainstream established churches. If there’s any human influence likely to challenge us, it’s the churches. Not the individual folks, any of whom may be just a step away from claiming the full heritage of the children of God, but the institution and how it serves as a weapon of Satan. That we face an institution is, in itself, the primary evidence of the gravity of this situation. The institutional church serves The Cult by it’s very principle of organization.

This is the one time when we need to hesitate about infiltration. Submitting yourself to the rule of religious organization is a moral compromise that comes with very high risk. The family of God is an organic thing; we should hesitate to even use the word “organization” when we talk about God’s divine plan for what a church looks like in this world. At the very least we must engage the discipline of making sure we never forget that the organization itself is just a tool, a human manifestation of faith; the church organization cannot be sacred in itself.

So we choose something tribal in nature, taking our clues from the nomadic period of Israel’s history, as the one sure way to keep the flesh nailed to the Cross when it comes to doing church. The rigors of wandering in tents as a metaphor helps us squelch the fleshly urge to take ourselves and our doings too seriously. This is part of why I invest so much energy in a virtual parish “organization” — to inhibit my fallen urge to play the hero. Having done all I possibly could, I’m still just an unworthy servant (Luke 17:7-10).

Consider these things.

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Not Yet

Posted on August 8, 2016 by ehurst

NewBike01So I got the bar end grips on it, but the kickstand I bought won’t fit. The rear brake disk occupies some of the same space. I’ll have to come up with something else.

NewBike02As it is, my knee isn’t quite ready for riding. I even tried standing out of the saddle, but it’s not enough room to avoid over-bending the joint. I’ll try it out every week and keep working on stretching in the meantime.

God is good.

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Life in the Cracks

Posted on August 7, 2016 by ehurst

CracksLifeThis is what we are, church.

Our world has been paved over by deception. It was designed to prevent the genuine life of heart-led faith, and it seemed to work for a time. Instead, it was built up for all kinds of things we really didn’t need to prevent us finding what we do need. Now that world is crumbling and our faith springs up. We exploit the cracks and margins and bring forth what God planted on this earth.

Maybe for a while folks won’t notice, but the heavy traffic of lies is declining. More and more, as things come apart, our faith will manifest because nothing man does can shut it out forever. Soon enough the lush forest of grace and mercy will push aside the lies and people will forget what that nasty, crumbling pavement once was.

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Psalm 112

Posted on August 6, 2016 by ehurst

What would you expect to see if someone was a sincere fan of a famous figure? Not the obsessive wacko, but someone genuinely taken by the obvious greatness they saw? True fans would attempt to emulate the character of the one whom they idolize. This is what we expect when someone becomes truly smitten by the Creator. This is an adult son who proudly and consciously emulates his father, as if that father were the ultimate model of humanity.

So this psalm celebrates the quintessential Child of the Covenant. No one has to tell such a devoted follower how to act. His heart commandeers his instincts, and moral wisdom overwhelms everything he thinks, says and does. Utterly missing is the slavish rote obedience; this is genuine love and devotion to the One whose very character shines brightly through the darkness of this world. Such a man has hitched his awareness to the moral sphere, a parallel universe invisible to those whose convictions do not rule their decisions.

Hallelujah! O, how blessed is the one who genuinely reveres Jehovah. So starts this psalm. We know how to translate the word “commandments,” but we hardly grasp the concept from within our Western culture. It refers to the broad investment of interest in some domain, and the full range of efforts to express a divine compassion and urgent care for everyone involved. A better term might be self-disclosure, in the sense of moral character. What kind of fool spurns such guidance?

The terms of this celebration are parabolic. Yes, you stand to gain materially, but that’s hardly the point. If that were all you cared for, you would not be revering Jehovah, but some other deity. So we see the image of his progeny representing the whole product of his conduct in life. What a reverent man produces is worthy of pride, just like a family that becomes famous through the achievements of their children. Such a household never wanders in moral darkness, but like the sun shining, their world is bright and clear.

The Hebrew word for “lending” comes from the image of intertwining two lives together. It is a demonstration of commitment to someone else’s welfare as if it were your own. It’s not a loss, but a wise investment that reaps rewards. Creation itself favors those who are generous with what they have to share.

Such a person becomes an integral part of Creation, taking their rightful place and restoring some measure of the original task of mankind: managing God’s Creation by His divine will. It’s not as if they depend on Creation, but that Creation takes a cue from their moral wisdom. Thus, nothing in this world can shake them. Fear is just a tingly feeling, not a genuine experience. Someone who walks by moral convictions instinctively knows they can face anything.

So it is when people who are less wise come to him for relief, he is able to share more than just a few bites of bread, but the full meaning of shalom comes with every morsel he gives. His very presence in the community is a calming and strengthening influence that restores cosmic moral balance. Those who have yet to sense God through their own hearts can look to this Child of the Covenant as a clue how to find Him.

Best of all, the wicked whose hearts are darkened will find him truly stressful. They don’t want to face people like that.

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New Bike

Posted on August 6, 2016 by ehurst

NewBikeThis will have to do for now. The technician was simply unable to come in before Monday, so it waits a little longer. It’s a pale silver with black and red trim. I opted for a three-year extended warranty and somehow it came up free at the cash register. It’s just a free replacement for any parts that break and some limited free maintenance services. I’m really liking Dick’s Sporting Goods.

I’ve replaced the helmet I wore during the crash. While there is no visible damage, experience from other cyclists show that it’s better to replace any helmet that has taken a hard impact. More pictures when it’s ready; I’ll try to get one of me riding it.

Thanks for all your prayers.

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Some Ripening

Posted on August 5, 2016 by ehurst

It’s been quiet around the parish this past couple of weeks. I honestly hope that means you are all busy with God’s work in your own life. Genuine fellowship between us in the Holy Spirit won’t die so long as we are serving Him. Your faithfulness is in my best interest, too.

This is a good time to do as much as we can before things go crazy — and they will. “Work while you have the light,” our Lord said, “because night is coming when no man can work.” It’s a Hebrew figure of speech about how we should stay on task while the context permits. When the moral darkness gets darker, it may be difficult to do what seems so routine today.

A few items of note for those of you curious about my welfare. The bike should be available today and I promise to post pictures. And just in time it seems my knee is actually beginning to loosen up a little. It’s still stiff to bend beyond a right angle, but it’s far less painful to bump up against the limit. I may be able to ride immediately. My oh my; I can’t wait for some saddle time.

Today I felt moved to check eBay again and found a laptop I could already afford that seems to be what I’m seeking. I’ll let you know more about it after I get it, but I note with amusement it’s already got Mint Linux installed, which is what I plan to use anyway.

These are just the tools and trappings of my service. They aren’t important in themselves, only as symbols of our Lord’s care and provision. He supports what He calls us to do.

And it’s my sincere prayer to the Father that things are coming ripe in your own lives. Sure, I’d love to hear from you, but only if God grants the time and impulse to respond.

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