Toward Eden

Posted on June 26, 2016 by ehurst

If you go outside today and speak to the grass, flowers, trees and birds, you’ll discover that they aren’t too worried about Brexit. The rocks and dirt may seem untroubled by the 500 trillion dollars of notional derivative debts held by banks around the world. And I’m willing to bet nature won’t offer much discussion over the likelihood of major global warfare breaking out between the major military powers.

They will tell you of our Creator’s love and the blessings they offer to people who live from their hearts. And they’ll reassure you that they intend to stick around and keep offering those blessings until God is ready for the Final Redemption. Meanwhile, they beg us to manifest the moral character of God so that they can enjoy just a little preview of that ultimate revelation.

It’s not that those fallen human threats have no meaning, but that we cannot face them properly until we learn to listen to the unfallen rest of Creation. Mankind wastes an awful lot of effort and resources on things that don’t matter much. Should there be some awful cataclysm and massive death event, Creation will still be here as long as God wants. Granted, His Word says that humans won’t be exterminated before The End of all things, but nothing in His Word prevents things continuing for a lot longer than many Bible readers imagine.

Instead, His Word hints that what triggers Christ’s Return will be something too subtle for the world at large to notice. You can’t perceive it with fleshly senses or understand it with reason. Some significant portion of humans will rise up to seize the heritage of redemption in the here and now, and it has nothing to do with politics and material wealth. It’s the heritage of peace with Creation as a part of Creation. Peace with Creation hinges entirely on peace with God and vice versa. It’s all one thing.

Recall the teaching of the sensory heart. It’s a sensory organ in its own right, with a separate “brain” capable of processing what encounters that sensory field. Open your awareness to the heart; recenter your sense of soul there. In the Bible, the heart was not about emotions, but the seat of the will, the one part of us able to connect directly to God. It’s an entirely different faculty of awareness that we call “faith” and enables you to see the invisible moral truth woven into Creation. That’s the character and Presence of our God.

Sure, bad stuff is coming. Fallen people with no heart-sense at all have piled up death and destruction, blindly seeking what cannot satisfy. God has already unleashed His wrath on this generation of fools. The saints of God will tribulate, but we have the advantage of seeing things through the eyes of our hearts. We are held tightly by the promise of God that whatever happens will not hinder our mission and calling.

Use that sensory heart; get out and talk to Creation as often as you can spare the time for it. Make time for it. Chances are there will be precious few humans around you who share that gift, but even they will suffer as you do with a long way to go to make it work as God intended. Let’s pass through that Flaming Sword of revelation and repentance, the self-death of redemption by joining Jesus on the Cross, and let’s head back toward Eden. That’s what we are designed for in the first place.

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Psalm 106

Posted on June 25, 2016 by ehurst

This is the second of two historical psalms together; it is also the last psalm in the Fourth Book. This second of the pair recounts the history of Israel’s rebellions against God, contrasted against His mercy.

As in the previous psalm, we see a heavy emphasis on the miracle of crossing the Reed Sea. More than once some writer has marveled at the very thought of something so unprecedented, and we are called to wonder how anyone who walked through on that dry seabed could forget and then doubt God. But we are also told repeatedly that Israel was a demonstration of God’s holiness precisely because they were the most difficult nation He could have chosen. Yet again, in humility we have to wonder if we aren’t sometimes just as difficult for other reasons now that He has included all nations in His covenant in Christ.

The psalmist begins with an eloquent call to worship, including his thesis on the mercy of God. Notice how he opens wide the door to anyone who senses a call to join this celebration. Do you want to be a part of His people? It starts with humbling yourself before the God of Creation and accepting His invitation to join His household of faith. The focus is not on the particulars of the Law, but on a sincere desire to bless the Lord.

Contrast that with how Israel actually behaved, and the obvious need for repentance. Right there on the shore of the sea, after seeing all the incredible miracles humbling Egypt, he wonders how they doubted God and His chosen leaders. Yet despite their ungrateful whining, He showed them an even more astonishing miracle by drying the seabed into a highway for their escape. Yet not a single Egyptian survived the sudden return of the water. They had no trouble celebrating it at that moment.

But they hurried to forget His power during the march to Sinai. Regardless of how God supplied, they were never satisfied, always seeking some new to excuse to complain. How many died by the earthquake and the fire when they rejected God’s vestment of Moses and Aaron as His appointed leaders? And let’s not forget that Golden Calf! Moses stood for them, or there wouldn’t be an Israel. Later, it was Phinehas. So many times they came close to success in provoking God’s wrath and total destruction.

The business of conquest was actually not so much piling up the bodies of the Canaanites, but their eager lust for deserting God for Canaanite idols. They didn’t cleanse the land of heathen shrines, much less the defiling presence of those who burned their own children in the fires of Molech. The very earth cried out in sorrow and defilement, but Israel turned a deaf ear and refused to cleanse the land. Where was that joyous witness of the power of their God aimed at showing His glory to the Gentiles? They refused to let their hearts lead. How could the land continue offering all the abundant richness of God’s provision if they couldn’t hear the cry for taking care of it on God’s behalf? No, they joined in the defilement of Molech, and more. Their moral authority was depleted and the same Gentiles they should have driven out came back and conquered them.

How many times did God hear their cry? How many times did He relent and deliver them despite their constant hostility to Him? So how can you not give Him due honor and glory?

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Moral Process

Posted on June 25, 2016 by ehurst

We stand on the rock of humility.

When we come to heart-led faith from mainstream Christian religion, we have to shed a lot of bad mental habits. This is what Romans 12:2 means, because the mainstream is worldly, clinging to the material and cerebral, and we have to renew the mental processes to defer to our convictions.

One of the biggest mainstream mistakes was associating the word “evangelize” with trying to help non-believers. The root word “evangel” means the gospel message contained in the Four Gospels. The gospel message is not some rational sales pitch; the demands are wholly irrational. That’s because the demands rise above reason and require the driving moral nature of the heart. You cannot genuinely connect to God any other way.

So this whole gospel message is surrendering the authority of reason to some undeniable higher power. And it really doesn’t matter where that person starts; their previous belief or unbelief means little, except in the sense of what they have to overcome. Truly, believers typically have a much harder time unless they were already under conviction from their hearts. Indeed, the false Decision Theology creates a massive fortress of deception in the soul of a great many folks so utterly certain that they are “saved.”

So now we have an image of what the job really is: moral persuasion to abandon the fortress. Your tactics themselves must reflect the moral character of God, that same thing I typically call the moral fabric of Creation, cosmic moral reality, the heart-led awareness and moral discernment. You have to speak to the heart imprisoned inside that fort. You can’t blast holes in the walls as Westerners tend to think of it. The resident of the castle has to surrender voluntarily. We don’t seek to destroy their old life; God by His own hands does however much of that He determines is proper. Creation itself is wired to attack false morality in widely varying ways. These people have built their lives under the stormy skies of God’s wrath. We seek to draw them out to abandon the old life, whether early or late, and live in the land of His blessing.

So when we “preach” to someone about repenting from sin, the primary approach is, “This is not in your best interest.” We are convinced that what they do hinders their full connection to the throbbing heart of God’s love in Creation. And it’s just possible we may be wrong about some things, so we are offering nothing more than our personal experience. There is precious little that even appears like objective truth. God’s truth is never objective; it’s organic and alive because it’s Himself. All we can offer is what God has showed us, while giving Him room to show them something different. We call attention to the light that shines on all Creation, including all people.

And whatever He does in revealing Himself to them is on His own schedule. We give them as long as it takes, and withdraw when God says He has something else for our attention. But in our hearts, we still give them room to catch on later. It’s not our words so much as our commitment that wins their surrender. Don’t talk the gospel; live the gospel.

No sinful habit of life that humans do is sufficient to block eternal life. Nothing. There may be things that threaten your domain in Christ so that you have to open up some distance, but even that may be simple emotional distance. Rarely will God grant you the authority to use physical or political force to keep someone out of your mission. It happens but it’s not the default. And you always trust in God for their response when such forceful action is taken. The focus is not reaching inside their heads to make them think right, but to give them a chance to see what’s right on their own. We trust God to speak to their hearts like He does to ours.

We ourselves have so very far to go; how can we be so unbearably demanding on others?

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Orchestrated Chaos

Posted on June 24, 2016 by ehurst

Neither should you mourn nor celebrate the Brexit vote.

Let’s return to the overview. The Cult has plans to enslave humanity. Not so much for the sake of power, but to prevent a genuine heart-led connection to God and His Creation. The current Decision Theology gospel message is no threat to the demons behind The Cult; all the better to keep it in the realm of the intellect. Without the heart reigning over the mind, it won’t matter a whit what you believe, because you’ll never walk in the blessings God offers. Closing off communications with the convictions of your heart merely perpetuates the essence of the Fall.

Yes, let’s also remind ourselves that this is not about whether your spirit is raised from the dead, but about claiming the heritage of divine justice while we are here. Satan can do nothing to prevent spiritual birth, only prevent folks from claiming the promises that go with it. Satan is forced to operate here on this plane of existence, so the main focus is a heart-led existence in the moral character of God. The battlefield is your life here on this earth.

You can most certainly win that battle against the worst odds. Your victory is not finding ways to control the circumstances, but ruling your reactions within any given context. Defeating Satan is a matter of ignoring all the deceptions of this Shadowlands and walking in the truth. And that truth is not found while you remain immersed in any worldly culture. Again, we are not seeking to be Ancient Near Eastern (the culture of the Bible), but to use that ancient culture as our guideline. And there is no single right answer; the “right answer” is you seeking God’s peace with the ANE as part of your set of clues. But we’ll be damned in our battle if we remain pickled in Western culture.

So The Cult openly revealed its basic political theory for gaining sufficient control to prevent folks living a heart-led life. The Cult warned that it would manipulate things to create horrific bad government all over the world. The Cult gave birth to the bureaucratic hive-mind system and invested it with the means to seize all political power. Further, the bureaucracy has fully embraced a huge freaking package of lies about human nature and what can be done to assert power long term. The hive-mind cannot think in terms of steps and mile markers on the path; it has one endless drive to seize more and more power along an insane path that will eventually drop off into oblivion. It will fail, but until then, this will create such pain and misery that, at some point, people will gladly surrender to an oppressive rule that claims it isn’t bureaucratic.

And this is just my personal opinion, but I tend to think a lot of what we all will see in the rest of the world starts in the UK. Not everything, but a certain thread of this evil plot to eviscerate the human capability of walking by faith is tested and implemented first in the UK. The ancient Anglo-Saxon culture is particularly amenable to plans laid by The Cult, though we can see that the wider mythology of the Germanic Tribes as a whole are quite useful. Thus, European government as a whole offers its own unique opportunities to sow chaos and misery.

In other words, whether the UK stayed or left wouldn’t make much difference. For example, you should know that, while Brexit in itself is generally a good idea, it’s guaranteed the implementation will be the worst possible. It will be done wrong intentionally and with the maximum punitive measures possible.

The people running the government are not The Cult, but mostly useful idiots serving cult purposes. Some of them earnestly believe, though plenty are cynically playing their role for their personal profit. The bureaucracy will permit a lot of corruption and plunder that doesn’t hinder the hive-mind objectives. The bureaucrats are only too glad to work with visible leaders who don’t interfere. So the noise here in the US about gun control? Most of what you see is theater. While some of the noise comes from true believers in the dire necessity of disarming the population, most of them know it won’t happen, at least not as they describe it. Gun confiscation is a bureaucratic goal of “national security.” The bureaucracy will make a genuine effort over the long haul to implement controls step-by-step through the vast governing hive.

And most gun owners will eventually surrender to this creeping, oozing stasis. They don’t see it coming; most cannot grasp how it will happen. It won’t be a dramatic mass seizure, nothing like the imaginary scenarios conjured by most noisy patriot types. The gun owners could easily win if government tried that route. The threat is not the cops and troops you can see, but the overwhelming force of daily existence under creeping regulations that make life impossible. And so it will be on every other hot-button issue, not just private gun ownership. Whatever the hive-mind wants will never come all at once, but creeping and oozing into life.

God said in His Word repeatedly that He controls human government at large, much the same way that men herd cattle. In the aggregate, when it involves politics, no one walks by the heart. It’s all blind human ambition. Never mind whether they think they do God’s work God’s way; it isn’t so. Just compare them against the Law of Noah. They refuse to consider what Noah demands of them. So it’s all in His hands and follows inscrutable plans He seldom discusses with anyone on earth. You are blessed if you can rule yourself.

The only true freedom possible is to walk heart-led and remain in close communion with God through His Creation.

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Ancient Truth: Acts Updated

Posted on June 23, 2016 by ehurst

I finished reviewing and reformatting my Bible study notes on Acts. You can see them here. This one actually saw significant revision. I added a few historical details and found several places where the narrative was rather confusing. At any rate, this is one of my favorites just to reread for myself. As always, if you simply save a copy of the single-page HTML file, all the formatting is contained internally.

Update: This document was lost in the transition between computers and is no longer available.

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We Puzzle

Posted on June 23, 2016 by ehurst

Living heart-led doesn’t make you stupid, but a lot of folks might thinks so.

HalfHealedPeople see that massive scar on my knee and the vestigial swelling and ask questions. Most of the time it ends up with silly questions about why I didn’t try to plunder the City. Only a few understood the answer: I did what was right because it was right. It doesn’t matter what wrong others might have done, I don’t have to make an enemy of everyone who hurts me. It’s neither the question of Anglo-American justice, nor the highly variable wacko social justice considerations, but divine justice from the heart.

Granted, I’m now having a discussion with both EMSA and Dick’s Sporting Goods about how this will turn out, since it appears the City won’t actually cut a check before December. The difficulty brings no regrets. God alone knows how He wants this to turn out, so I’m praying for His favor, and hoping that includes favor in the sight of the other parties. Regardless of how it turns out, I’m excited about the prospect of demonstrating divine justice to others. Somebody is going to notice.

Meanwhile, this is one wild ride. The twists and turns are loaded with surprises. What helps the most is that I bear the two-edged sword of loving God’s Creation and the life He gives me here, plus the assurance that it’s all just a sample of what comes after this life.

Divine justice is its own reward. The broader population around us doesn’t get that. Some objectify it as duty, but that’s an awful self-oppressing approach. Some are so wrapped up in the worship of Mammon that they simply cannot imagine joy outside of more hedonistic comforts. I don’t care about common justice mythologies. I care about the joy of my Creator’s favor and the sense of peace He alone can pour into my heart.

We puzzle people, and so it should be.

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Settled

Posted on June 22, 2016 by ehurst

The City Council of OKC sent me a fat wad of papers to sign. As you might expect, it includes all the legal mumbo-jumbo for release of liability, etc. At any rate, they have agreed to pay what I asked. If I read it correctly, it should mean I’ll see a check before the end of the calendar year (sarcastic smirk). Now if I can convince EMSA to be patient, there shouldn’t be any more trouble with all this claims business.

We thank You, O Lord, for Your divine power and mercy.

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The Light You Have

Posted on June 21, 2016 by ehurst

Standard spiritual advice: Walk in the light you have. It’s the same as obeying your conscience as it speaks now so you can move farther along and train it to speak more accurately. If you aren’t faithful where you stand now, you cannot expect God to open doors to more challenging things.

And sometimes right in the big middle of a critical project, God tells you to stop and turn your attention elsewhere. You should incorporate that into your thinking about how God directs us for His glory. Think of it like Abraham offering Isaac and finding out that wasn’t what God had in mind after all. Yes, God is like that, simply because of our fallen nature.

It’s not a question of fault in the sense that you deserve to be misled or something like that; such is the thinking of those who don’t know God. It’s not God testing you because He doesn’t know what you’ll do, but He wants you to discover what you’ll do when conviction comes to full force in your soul.

Our virtual parish family has exploded; not just in size, but in depth. We have more regulars and their voice is stronger and it’s so beautiful to watch. You’ll know you are really getting somewhere when you realize you could probably pursue your calling without having to check in here. That’s the paradox of fellowship and communion in genuine faith; we stick around together and cling most tightly because we don’t have to. This parish will become a roaring bonfire of truth when more of you can walk in faith without this parish.

Are you ready if God allows something to shut this down? I’m not expecting it, and I have no plans to stop posting anytime soon. But at the same time, I sense that something is certainly going to change my situation in ways I could never predict. So I pose that question for you to pray and meditate — I suppose because it symbolizes what some might call the worst case scenario. It would certainly be shocking and hard to take. And it could come any day now.

It wasn’t hyperbole when I warned recently that the bottle of wrath has been uncorked, and it won’t go back into the bottle. This vintage of the grapes of wrath will be poured out generously until it’s empty, and it’s work is done. It’s a really big bottle, so that will take awhile.

You should understand that a prophetic message is not something that exists out there somewhere as objective reality-to-come. Rather, a prophetic message is fundamentally a statement about God’s moral character, typically expressed in a given context. God has always offered His covering, a way for individuals and some groups to escape what He decides to do on a larger scale. You know, that “blood on the doorpost” thing from the Exodus. You’ll still have to pack your stuff and move and you won’t always have fun, but you won’t have to endure the wrath He pours out on everyone else.

And conquering new worlds in God’s wake is much more fun than stomping mud and straw for someone who doesn’t care about God.

Tribulation is here. And if you fail to see it as an opportunity to exploit for His glory, then you aren’t ready. Truly, folks, I have no idea what’s coming at me, much less what’s coming for everyone else. But it’s right outside the door; I can’t shake that conviction.

So follow me a bit here: I was riding that new bike and planning to get a much better camera. Then the bike and my right leg were mangled. I’ll likely get the bike back long before I can ride it again, and it strikes me as funny. And now I’m not even sure I need to worry about a rowing machine or a kayak either one. And my ministry of heart-photography is on hold, too. I’m hardly finished seeking to exploit things for His glory, just no longer looking at those wonderful things I rightly planned to do. My eagerness to obey the calling threw me into another reality altogether.

But I don’t know what’s next, only that there really is a very big “next.” So it’s my duty to you as elder to suggest it could affect what goes on here, and I have no idea how. It’s not pessimism to wonder if something we do now has to end. It’s giving back to God all the blessings He has given so there’s room for what else He has in store.

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Worldly Benevolence

Posted on June 21, 2016 by ehurst

We’ve come to expect it from government aid agencies, but why would a church treat the needy with the same bureaucratic abuse as the they get from the rest of the world?

It takes a special kind of moral resignation to tolerate the official government brand of charity. Every woman asking for any help at all is treated like a slimy hooker, for example. It’s that bureaucratic programmed assumption that all outsiders are some kind of enemy. I suspect I’d rather die of starvation than accept that kind of abuse. I once imagined that religious charities were better.

We don’t often use the local food bank, but things got tight this month and today they were open. It’s hosted by a local Baptist church. We would be surprised if the process didn’t include some attempt to share their version of the gospel message. But these folks act like any government welfare agency, demanding your Social Security cards, a copy of some utility bills, asking intrusive questions and pretending to lecture on being thrifty, etc. It’s very judgmental. In other words, there is very little effort to actually understand your situation and a fixed assumption that you must be some kind of immoral wastrel.

We saw that with the Pharisees and their teaching that God’s favor always means material prosperity, and poverty means God doesn’t like you. The Pharisees actually called the peasants “accursed” regardless of their genuine piety.

I suppose I can see where some of it comes from, given the snippy demands made by some of the clients coming for a handout. If you and I could spot that childish nonsense, why can’t the folks running this operation? They make precious little effort to distinguish. And they totally ignore it if you tell them you are engaged in ministry yourself. You’re supposed to do that only inside the church organization.

And I’m not grousing about taking what they offer, because God’s Word says you use what He places in your hands, and that no human can hold you morally accountable for what you don’t have. By the same token, within reasonable limits, we intend to eat most of what they gave us. We’ll do our best to pass along to others stuff we can’t use.

Still, the one thing that makes us so reluctant is the subtle dehumanizing abuse from church folks. This simply plays into the vicious cycle of adversarial posturing from both sides of the charity process.

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New and Ancient Normal

Posted on June 20, 2016 by ehurst

A clinical approach will give you clinical results with a utility approaching zero.

Conditions permitting, I go out each morning and pick up solid waste (pollutants) around my apartment building. That it looks nicer without visible trash is just a benign side-effect. What I’m really after is answering the plea of Creation to remove some harmful toxins. With that approach, I began developing a sensitivity to where the crap hides, even some of the smallest bits of plastic and paper, and cigarette butts of course. I sense their presence before I see them with my eyes.

It’s neither magic nor miracle, per se, but an entirely natural and normal function of human capabilities. You don’t even have to be a believer of any kind because this is wired into us. It’s a part of the wider range of things that often fall under the label “intuition.”

If you listen to behavioral scientists, you’ll often hear that intuition is mostly a way of leaping over logical steps in the thought process. It’s a shortcut that tends to work because it’s based on pattern learning. You don’t have to wait for every part of the analysis to be complete because you can see where it’s going. We don’t want folks working that way all the time, particularly where later stages in the process can radically shift the results, but it seems useful in a lot of places.

But that’s just the very lower edge of intuition. At it’s best, intuition is the memory of moral patterns. The issue with the litter I collect every morning is not based on precision and absolutes; it’s based on a sense of moral offense. My intuition isn’t going to compel me to chase litter all over the world, only the places where I exercise a limited moral dominion. I have a calling from God that sets the boundaries. I don’t have to know things intellectually about the specific types of threats to the environment; I have to know what God wants me to do.

This isn’t on the level of intellectual content, but far more personal. A proper understanding of intuition requires that you grasp the personal nature of Creation itself. Everything is personal in that sense; we are dealing with living things. All Creation is alive. It cries out for redemption, and it knows that it’s own redemption rests on ours. Creation isn’t fallen, but we are, and we humans as a whole have been granted a certain range of dominion over Creation.

Don’t externalize that. That limited dominion includes dominion over nature and our own nature. We are part of nature, and it is part of us. Not in the sense of being a mere extension of us, but that it’s all one big happy family. Tossing litter on the ground isn’t just bad science or a simple ethical violation. It’s a moral issue in the sense that you are hurting yourself. All of sin is in part self-destruction. Don’t think of it in objective terms; God’s moral character doesn’t measure things numerically.

So the clinical approach presumes that matter is lifeless and compartmentalizes humans from nature. This is why it can never grasp the nature of intuition; intuition is inherently moral and about moral truth. That’s because it’s actually a part of our linkage between intellect and heart-mind. Lots of people experience variations of this capability without recognizing it for what it is and what it should do for us.

We need to rebuild what has been thrown away and buried in the landfill of time and culture. God has granted us a whole range of very normal capabilities that look like magic to Western minds. We are wired to commune and fellowship with Creation itself, every tree and all trees together. Some natural beings are actually colonies in the sense that all of the trees in a single area are sprouted from one single being. They are wired tightly together across a wide area. But the distinction tends to fray quickly because pushing too hard on the concept means we lose our own connection to it. You and I are a part of nature and nature knows it better than most of us. We can choose to develop an awareness of it. Granted, it takes a while to get used to it, and to discern between all sorts of false mythology. It’s easy at first to mistake mere sentiment for the voices of nature. Our emotions are so badly perverted by Western culture.

The trees in other parts of the world know my name because that’s how Creation works. Get used to thinking like that. It will open up whole regions of divine service in your mind. This is reality.

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