Virtual Touch

Posted on June 29, 2016 by ehurst

Religion is in your head; faith is in your heart. True religion from faith is in your hands.

I realize how difficult it is to portray faith in mere words on a computer screen. If all we have is the intellectual exchange, then we have nothing at all. And yet, Christ had full confidence that His parables were sufficient to guide people who didn’t know anything about Him. He insisted that parables were a reliable way of passing signals to hearts. Maybe it would help if you read some of this stuff aloud to yourself. We are taught in school that it’s inefficient for data transmission, but I’m not really interested in that. I’m trying to show you my heart, not my thoughts.

Try reading the Bible aloud instead of silently. Then again, some of us are internally vocal — when I read Scripture, there’s a voice in my head reading the words in ways that tend to hinder my hearing of ambient sounds in my physical space. My mind assigns a voice. And naturally, some people tell me that my writing comes across as narrative, which is wholly intentional. The point is that there is a mystical connection in the aural reception and our hearts. I’m aware of the various modes of learning and how people tend to one or another — visual, tactile, auditory and textual — but from what I’ve seen, the heart is best connected to the narrative. The narrative is a manifestation of interpersonal acquaintance, something on an entirely different level of learning.

So when I sit down to write, I often have only some germ of an idea what I need to address. But once I start writing, my heart gets involved and it often goes in wholly unexpected directions. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to discover that my mind has forgotten things I’ve written. My heart still knows and reaffirms what I wrote in the background, but my brain seems to have lost track. It still represents me, but it may not have lodged firmly in my intellect.

It reminds me that the intellect is part of the flesh and affected by the Fall. Intellect gladly forgets some things that are hard to bear, or simply beyond the grasp of reason. My human curiosity loves to explore and catalog ideas and concepts, but my heart grows weary of traveling too far afield from the thoughts that connect to my faith and calling. So my clinical training has an effect on my thinking, but I’m far more interested in actual people. If your comments reach toward a narrative that unveils your soul, I’m much more absorbed and attentive. Despite the restrictions of the medium, your online persona is much more important to my heart than what’s in your head.

The nature of moral discernment is personal, because it’s always a manifestation of God’s personal character. It’s that knowing on a different level. So your beliefs hold meaning to me only as they are embedded in your character. I’m not interested in comparing theology. I want to know you. I need to build an image of you as a person. While you are splattering bits and bytes onto a server through the hardware channels of the Internet, my heart is looking for things it can recognize. You do well to put your heart in command of your typing, because that’s what my heart is looking for.

And if you can trust the medium enough to offer other clues to your personal identity, it always helps me love you better. Sure, we have way too much of folks dumping countless selfies on social media the way a child rattles verbally everything that crosses his/her mind. But I’m not sure we can carry on as a parish if we live in fear of some evil presence on the Net lurking to catalog your consumer or terrorist profile (yes, they have a whole scoring system for each). And you can send email or even text and call my cellphone; just ask.

Let’s touch each other’s lives as best we can to discover more about God living in Creation.

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Bibliography

Posted on June 28, 2016 by ehurst

Aside from the lightweight references I used in my A Course in Biblical Mysticism, some of you may take an interest in looking more at some of my studies on the background of the Bible.

Old Testament Survey: The Message, Form, and Background of the Old Testament; William Sanford LaSor, David Allan Hubbard and Frederick William Bush; 1982 William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; ISBN 0-9028-3556-2. Online prices vary around $30 US. It’s about as cheap as you’ll get for a graduate level text on OT History and related material.

The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah; Alfred Edersheim. You can find it free online and some print editions are available; I have a PDF copy on my FTP server. Among other things, this is where you can find precise documentation from a converted rabbi on how the rabbinical schools circa 300 BC began buying into Hellenism.

Eerdman’s Handbook to the Bible; ed. David Alexander and Pat Alexander; 1973 William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; ISBN 0-8028-3436-1. Several editions and printings exist and they are cheap. It’s good stuff for a quick overview, with lovely charts showing timelines, feasts, weights and measures, coinage, etc.

You can read Josephus if you keep in mind that his work isn’t self-consistent and is loaded with hearsay. The point is to catch glimpse of a Hellenized rabbinical scholar of Jesus’ time.

Finally, for those of you learning to study the Bible heart-led, I discovered some time ago that I am not the only guy who can read an interlinear text of the Bible and absorb things that my mind doesn’t recognize until later. I won’t pretend to explain it, but when I prepare my study notes for posting and for publication in the Ancient Truth series, I spend time reading through the text in both Greek and Hebrew interlinear translations and it made a difference, particular with Hebrew. You have to remember that it reads right to left in the text, but even that seems to be part of triggering something deep in the human soul…

The Interlinear Bible; Jay P. Green, Sr.; 1986 2nd Edition is printed by Hendrickson Publishers; ISBN 0-913573-25-6. It’s expensive; I stumbled across a copy for sale in the foyer of a Charismatic church in Aachen, Germany and thought it was a good buy at $50 US. You might stumble across a used copy for as little as $35, but it’s not often, last time I checked. Beware that some editions are only the New Testament and I’ve seen it offered deceptively because demand is still pretty strong.

This might be a good start. Nothing beats a good solid course with someone who really knows this stuff, but this will help you decide if a bigger investment is worth it. As always, you need to consciously develop your own biases, because we all have them.

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Another Frivolous Post

Posted on June 27, 2016 by ehurst
Yours truly.

Yours truly.

I’m updating my picture since I’ve started growing the hair and beard. This was shot with my wife’s cellphone. Not that it matters that much, but I note in passing that the marvelous little Coolpix camera I’ve been using is dying on me. It locks up and requires frequent resets by pulling that battery. I suppose this is what I’ll use my PayPal account for because, come what may, I’m not finished with photography. Oh, and this one of the few “Christian message” shirts I actually approve of.

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RIP: Jess Hurst

Posted on June 26, 2016 by ehurst

My younger brother, Jessie T. Hurst passed today around 6:30 PM, at age 46.

We were close in the sense of siblings. He shared none of my interest in religion, but was grateful that I would always visit him when things were tough. He lived a hard and rebellious life from his youth, with time in federal and state confinement. He was far more intelligent than I, but very strong willed. Over the past few years his health deteriorated, but he refused to seek treatment. Knowing how he did things, all we could do was stand back and watch him die slowly. Today things went critical and his wife called to ask if I would come drag him to the hospital, since he refused her urging. By the time I arrived, I found him unresponsive, no pulse or breath, and cold. I tried CPR but his lungs were blocked. The paramedics worked for a while, but to no avail.

He is survived by his wife Leslie, and teenage daughters Katie and Allison.

While I appreciate your condolences, you might guess that I’m not particularly distraught. I’ll miss him, but he made his choices fully informed. I’ve mourned him for years and now it’s all done. He’s in the hands of God.

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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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