Guest Post: Jay DiNitto

Posted on June 16, 2016 by ehurst

This is Jay’s offering for the second chapter of our Radix Fidem booklet. We really would like some feedback. You shouldn’t imagine that Jay needs fake affirmations just to feel good, so give us an honest appraisal.

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2. Fundamentally super-rational, not cerebral (working above the intellect)

Faith, and how humans “come to” faith lies, ultimately. beyond human comprehension. The workings of the metaphysical domain are conducted on a level humanity is not able to fully understand — though, obviously, we are able to experience in some manner while living in our fallen condition, in our current, physical, domain. Much like how we react to an object of beauty or wonder, it’s perhaps best described as an experience (a continuum of experiences, really) and not a series of objects apprehended with our material reasoning toolkit.

With all of the technological advances in the last hundred years or so, it may seem that the idea that, eventually, we will arrive at a comprehensive view of the universe is a recent one. This idea was around long before modern times, in many different forms and degrees. Nowadays it has taken the form of “scientism,” where one places an undue burden on the process of scientific discovery as a means of discovering all things that are knowable. If so inclined, you can trace and find bits of the idea all throughout the various trends of thought in history, from the ancient Greeks, to the medieval era through the Francis Bacon and the Enlightenment, and into the modern technological age. Whatever form it takes, it involves a very important assumption: that all knowable things are within the reach of human intellect. This idea is incompatible with the internal workings of faith, since only God can implant faith, hence it doesn’t arrive to us, or is sensed, by material means. Scientism, since it fails to acknowledge God as a possibility through it’s very framework, falls under the rubric of “idolatry,” effectively removing God from the throne and putting something else in His place. In this case, it’s placing the scientific process as the ultimate source of something — knowledge — instead of God.

Logic and reasoning are limited tools, for sure, but this idea isn’t limited to spiritually-minded folks–common sense bears it out. Humans operate mostly through non-logical means, being guided through most of our days via a mix of the senses, memory and routine, heuristics, reliable authority, and instinct, with limited instances of the two logic forms (inductive and deductive) to tackle things like unfamiliar situations. Pure reasoning is notoriously ineffective when dealing with things that aren’t immediately contextual and “bite-sized.” Take something that takes mountains of logic to accomplish, like any kind of large-scale engineering project. It requires lots of engineers, of differing expertise and strengths, to work on individual components of the device, plus another layer of lead engineers, quality assurance folks, and managers to make sure all those small parts work together. One man alone, even the smartest of us, would require a whole lifetime (or more) of calculating, building, and testing to come up with something of equal complexity. How, then, could one come to “know” a being infinitely more vast, such as God, if this were the case?

Forgetting the coldness of logic for a minute here… if we consider God to be a person, which He is, then material reasoning will come up wanting for the kind of knowledge God requires of us. We speak of “knowing” another person in ways that go well beyond a list of understanding some facts about them. We come to know and love, for instance, our friends or spouses through a incomprehensible webwork of epistemological inputs and a good dose of time and reflection. If we were to use this as an analog for approaching how we could understand God, as a personal being, our “sense” of God would be more properly aligned.

Jay DiNitto

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Psychology of Conviction

Posted on June 15, 2016 by ehurst

Most people recognize that one of the definitions of the word “conviction” refers to a solid assurance of something that withstands reasoned arguments. There are people who reject or simply don’t understand how it works, and they allege some kind of willful truculence. We can’t help such folks, and it’s immoral to try. People who are entertained by debate are free to engage, but nothing of moral significance is ever decided through debate. You can hold your opinions, but convictions hold you.

For example, my affinity for the biblical teaching on God’s sovereignty was not a matter of instruction. I knew God was sovereign by conviction before I understood intellectually what it was. At no point in my life did I ever doubt it; it was always there from birth. That doesn’t make it a universal truth. That makes is something I am unable to doubt and see no need to defend. It has nothing to do with people who might have some contrary conviction; that’s their problem. I have enough problems of my own (Romans 14:4).

No human agency can create convictions. I can’t help you get some, only help you discern them by teaching about the common psychological processes. Some people have no room in their psyche for them. That’s not to say they never will, because the Holy Spirit does the most amazing things. We get to see miracles when we give Him room to work in our lives, but the real issue is our perception of God’s hand in our lives. So we have to learn the boundaries of what we can do without getting in His way, and that typically means we don’t argue with people about what ought to be the contents of our convictions or theirs. Convictions create boundaries, but need not create enemies. Don’t read everything in life as a linear binary division between this-n-that. See it as a range of proximity and how it affects communion and fellowship in context.

It can take some time for folks to begin discerning the difference between firm belief, notions that have never been questioned, tribal-like traditions, and genuine conviction. The exercise begins with obeying your own conscience — conscience is the mental awareness of conviction, not conviction itself. When you begin to obey your conscience, you are quite likely to face a lot of harassment and suffer some internal turmoil and doubts. Still, the willful choice to face the storm and cling to the one piece of bedrock you can identify internally is the path to overcoming doubts and disputes. Know that your conscience will change it’s interpretation of your convictions. That’s because the matrix of awareness in your mind typically needs renovation.

A part of this is learning to see below the surface. Someone like Peter (prior to the Resurrection) was notorious for expressing conflicting commitments, highly variable in the sense of, “What’s his new hobby horse now?” He was so very confident and loquacious in laying out the reasons for his assertions, only to be equally confident and loquacious on a contrary assertion the next time you saw him. He must have been hard to bear with endless chatter on his new “thing” in social settings. Yet it remains possible to scrape away his fairy tales and see underneath a certain consistency that Jesus saw. That rock solid reliability was underneath, and anyone with moral discernment could see it with their hearts. The problem was not that Peter was unreliable, but that he was confused about what his mission in life was. He felt a dependency on external affirmation. He was a champion back-pedaler when embarrassed. He didn’t know himself, yet took himself too seriously. All of his bluster was aimed at helping others; he just went about it wrong. When he went through the trauma that exposed his fairy tales to his own sight, he was able to change his behavior. He was able to distrust his own fleshly mind and look deeper to the bedrock of his convictions. He became a pivotal leader far greater than he previously imagined he could be. (See Peter_Rehab for more.)

Peter falls into a widely recognized personality type; there are other types, not to mention vast variations within each type. But we do know one universal: Those who seek God’s face cannot avoid coming to a sense of conviction sooner or later. Indeed, the one portal for all human souls is the conviction of our need for redemption, a sense of penitence. Nobody can demand we all manifest the same behaviors in passing through that singular portal to Christ, but we can learn to discern a genuine sense of conviction when we see it. It requires we have our own first.

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Kiln blog: One Big Happy Family

Posted on June 14, 2016 by ehurst

(While this was originally a duplicate of something from another blog, and that other blog was merged here, this post has been kept because of the huge amount of comment posted below.)

The Old Testament provides a wealth of imagery for describing our virtual congregation.

The background of the Bible presumes that humans are wired for ANE feudalism. Thus, this blog is a virtual feudal grant from God and I am the clan chief who leads a family. I am responsible to God for how I exercise dominion here.

Everyone is welcome. There is a covenant of faith in force here that guides what I write and what comments I permit through moderation. Aside from the obvious references to the Radix Fidem meta-religion outline posted here on our parish parlor blog (see the tab above), our covenant recognizes two primary marks of the Spirit’s Presence in your life: penitent humility and not disputing against Scripture. If we can see those two marks, we will assume you are brothers and sisters in this covenant of faith.

If you can’t embrace all that stuff, but still want to be friends, you will be regarded as resident aliens. You aren’t part of that family of faith covenant, but we offer another covenant of alliance, the one symbolized by sharing a meal in the Old Testament. I’m still your pastor/elder.

Enemies can post so long as it’s on-topic and seems to address something of substance. You’ll have to understand that I will seek to use hostile comments as opportunities to teach those who are not so hostile. It’s like a grant of safe passage for mutual benefit or maybe humanitarian reasons. I’ll pray for anybody.

I don’t take myself that seriously, so poking at me is not in itself a violation of protocol. I delete comments that serve no discernible purpose in what we do here, just like spam.

What’s different is that I don’t measure these things merely by intellect and reason. It’s not a question of rational categories. The boundaries aren’t precise and static, but alive. As with biblical language, I don’t define; I indicate. Context is everything in this world when bringing to bear the moral truth of God, which is rooted outside this world. I don’t mind trying to explain, but there are some things not open to debate.

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One Big Happy Family

Posted on June 14, 2016 by ehurst

The Old Testament provides a wealth of imagery for describing our virtual congregation.

The background of the Bible presumes that humans are wired for ANE feudalism. Thus, this blog is a virtual feudal grant from God and I am the clan chief who leads a family. I am responsible to God for how I exercise dominion here.

Everyone is welcome. There is a covenant of faith in force here that guides what I write and what comments I permit through moderation. Aside from the obvious references to the Radix Fidem meta-religion outline posted on our parish parlor blog, our covenant recognizes two primary marks of the Spirit’s Presence in your life: penitent humility and not disputing against Scripture. If we can see those two marks, we will assume you are brothers and sisters in this covenant of faith.

If you can’t embrace all that stuff, but still want to be friends, you will be regarded as resident aliens. You aren’t part of that family of faith covenant, but we offer another covenant of alliance, the one symbolized by sharing a meal in the Old Testament. I’m still your pastor/elder.

Enemies can post so long as it’s on-topic and seems to address something of substance. You’ll have to understand that I will seek to use hostile comments as opportunities to teach those who are not so hostile. It’s like a grant of safe passage for mutual benefit or maybe humanitarian reasons. I’ll pray for anybody.

I don’t take myself that seriously, so poking at me is not in itself a violation of protocol. I delete comments that serve no discernible purpose in what we do here, just like spam.

What’s different is that I don’t measure these things merely by intellect and reason. It’s not a question of rational categories. The boundaries aren’t precise and static, but alive. As with biblical language, I don’t define; I indicate. Context is everything in this world when bringing to bear the moral truth of God, which is rooted outside this world. I don’t mind trying to explain, but there are some things not open to debate.

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Head and Heart

Posted on June 14, 2016 by ehurst

I have no doubt that some US government agency is behind the slaughter in Orlando.

I’ve worked in US government service; I’ve seen how it works. The hive-mind of the bureaucracy is dehumanizing, inhuman and inhumane. I know for a fact my government willingly slaughters its own people, not for some justice against evil, but for evil purposes that the bureaucracy would never admit. I’ve been personally pressured by the hive-mind to do some unconscionable things that left me feeling filthy. I still weep about that from time to time.

I won’t dig into all the facts behind everyone else’s doubts about the official story in Orlando. If you are curious, it’s easy to find a wide variety of dissenting views. I’ll give you just one example: A former classmate of Mateen says he was gay. Who do you trust? This is not about guns, gays or Islam, though you will likely hear little else from the mainstream press.

But I’m not here to chase conspiracies or theories about them. I’m doing my best to demonstrate the difference between living in your head and living in your heart. Even if we could strip away the lies and get down to the very concrete facts about the mass murder, I don’t need that to know my government is evil. Even if it were not directly sponsored by some clandestine agency, it was permitted to happen by the bureaucrats pursuing evil priorities in general. They do not serve our interests but an agenda that is labeled “national security” as the magic incantation to justify falling at the feet of Satan. The US government is accursed, never mind how many decent people are involved. Prophetically speaking, you ain’t seen nothing yet, so let’s get that out of the way. You could have known that moral truth without all the digging for data.

Morally, we know that all humans are fallen and under the sentence of death. That’s a heart-led truth, a conviction that arises from exposure to the revelation, followed by seeing it the world around you. There’s a veneer of civility, but that’s the vestigial effects of the Covenant of Noah. A certain amount of moral awareness, variable and unevenly distributed across the human race, is the result of God’s moral character woven into the very fabric of Creation. But the bottom line is that our fleshly existence is doomed because of something fundamental to our nature. God has said flatly that He will destroy that nature, but that He will offer an option to accept a voluntary death of that nature without fleshly expiration. The flesh will still die, but the soul is allowed to find peace with the Creator.

On that level, there are very few “innocent” people dying in the world. It’s not that the revelers in the gay club were worse than other humans; only a human intellect could see it that way. God is not constrained by the typical American Anglo-Saxon sense of justice. By conviction we know that it could have just as easily been us dying in the grocery store. That is how the heart “thinks.” We don’t consider all the facts and analyze our way to that answer; you can only arrive there by some higher level of awareness. We might be able to make the case rationally, but we could not possibly make it so convincing that someone would manage to live by that truth where it remains the focus of moral choices. Whatever it is the mind can judge and decide through persuasion and reason, it won’t change the moral nature of the soul. That moral nature resides in the heart, and most of humanity has zero useful interaction between the head and heart. Whatever the mind can do with moral questions is a very thin shadow of smoke by comparison to what the heart knows.

So you cannot decide what to do with all this noise if you don’t connect to your heart-mind and subject your intellect to that higher faculty.

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Golem of Oppression

Posted on June 13, 2016 by ehurst

I’m not the only one proclaiming that God’s wrath is falling upon America. I’m not in a position to say it falls on other nations, and have no particular burden to wonder about them. Given the American affinity for global hegemony, I’m sure the pain will be shared far and wide.

Then again, some parts of the picture don’t require a prophetic gift to see. Some of this is obvious to others who make no pretense of religion or faith. The best I can do is bounce this stuff off my convictions and pray that God help me push aside the mental barriers and let the heart pour forth the truth of God’s moral character against what I see with my senses and reason. As always, no one is required to swallow what follows, but I offer it for your prayerful consideration.

The Cult can be thought of as an avatar for demonic guidance among humans. The reason I wrote that article was to help you understand what it looks like and how it tends to operate. I wanted to characterize that demonic influence as a whole, teaching you how to recognize it as something separate from the random evil of human blindness. The Cult is consistent, and where it manifests you can predict in some measure what it will do, and this is the storyline in human history that matters most. Know your enemy; The Cult is the head.

The head has a body. Like a golem’s body, it’s fungible. The Cult uses people but values none of them. The slaves of The Cult are most useful when they operate like animated deadwood. They need to be as near dead as possible because it’s easier for the animating demonic power to work its will. So a few months ago I was able to grasp how various bureaucracies are the ultimate tool of The Cult. The hive-mind is where Satan gets the most done in this world. You notice that this is precisely opposite of the intensely personal and individual nature of God working in His servants. The nature of a bureaucracy removes the individuality from the process.

We still have the occasional psychopaths and megalomaniacs, but they seldom rule without working through the bureaucracy, particularly those hives devoted in various ways to “national security.” On rare occasions one of them actually belongs to the hive, like Allen Dulles, the patron saint of national security bureaucracy, the shadow government of the US. But while there are a few people sincerely driven by power, most of the actual ruling takes place in the hive.

Thus, what’s left is a far greater emphasis on wealth. In other words, the power-wealth symbiosis no longer looks the same; the mechanism is the national security bureaucracy wielding power on behalf of those seeking control over the world’s wealth. Quoting the article linked above:

The CIA, after all, is a creation of Wall Street and their interests have always been joined. The Agency was not formed to provide intelligence to US Presidents; that was a convenient myth used to cover its real purpose which was to serve the interests of investment bankers and the power elite.

Gone are the great and mighty rulers who also held the wealth; now the mighty are just front-men. They are permitted to execute some of the evil plans, but only if it doesn’t get in the way of the bureaucracy’s mindless conflation of wealth with national security. It already has all the power; it’s seeking the control over resources and the means to scrape the hide off the whole human race. This is the part that’s wholly irrational, in that the bureaucracy will not stop until it has everything. So all the baleful changes in laws and regulations are increasingly aimed at turning us all into economic units, too. This is the shape of oppression in America now.

Part of the game is keeping us divided and in turmoil. There is no cadre of intelligent conspirators at work here; even the collected moguls of giant corporations together form a bureaucracy of sorts. They don’t have to sit around and discuss how they are going to oppress us because they all belong to the same hive-mind. By instinct they’ll cooperate with very little coordination needed, even as they tend to compete for the limited pool of wealth. It’s not quite the same as the massive federal bureaucracy, but it operates in similar fashion on that higher level. Those financiers are still driven by a common fear and entropic resistance to change on certain core issues.

So the invasion of Western countries by masses of poor folks from radically different cultures is sponsored by the corporate elite as the most obvious way of reducing those already here to relative poverty. Crashing the economy for the rest of us is precisely the point. There are plenty of excess humans, so they provoke wars in places where the brown people live near all those exploitable resources. Then when people are fleeing the warfare, they drive them — even ferry them — into the places where Western folks with stable cultures are, so that everyone shares the misery. Political and social conflict already possible in Western countries was not enough. The next level is downright open warfare in the Western countries, too.

The recent massacre in Orlando is just the first obvious demonstration of their intent. The ingredients don’t matter, so long as it looks like some easily understood prejudice that gets folks riled up and distracted from the real purpose. The figureheads of the US government have been blowing through billions of tax dollars importing anyone they can kidnap and bring here to start a civil war, lots of civil wars. Our Department of Homeland Security contracted with G4S to organize and transport “illegal aliens” into the interior of the US from every border. Oh, and the named shooter in Orlando worked for that same DHS contractor. And while eye witnesses are infamously inconsistent, we sure do have a lot of spiked stories from survivors that he wasn’t working alone in ravaging the club.

Most of the headlined shootings of the past few years are plagued with cover-ups, and the hive is convinced they have this routine down pat. Even the disputes over what happened play into their hands, keeping folks in an uproar and distracted from the bigger picture.

Get this: There is nothing we can do to stop this train wreck. It’s not that their plans are so well crafted or that their power is so great, but this is the wrath of God at work. There will be more of this, in varying shapes and sizes. All those violent protesters at Trump’s rallies? Hired and given transportation, room and board and encouraged to be violent, sometimes with ads on Craigslist. We are seeing on the beginning. God has stored up an awful lot of wrath.

Fear not, says Our Savior, for all authority in Heaven and Earth is in His hands. If you know it’s coming, you are in a position to seek His face for guidance. Wrath is a two-edged sword of God’s revelation. The same sword of God’s wrath against evil also surgically removes our sins.

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Sources

Posted on June 13, 2016 by ehurst

The Root of Faith (Radix Fidem) is in the heart; the Sources of Faith are the hand of God in your environment.

Some of you may have been following my conversation with Steven on various points of faith and religion. God can use anyone, including someone as deeply flawed as me. God uses broken vessels because there aren’t any other kind in this world. He always initiates repairs, but the process is never finished until after we leave this world. Christ alone died sinless.

So the Lord can use anyone to ask the right questions, or simply to trigger a revealing moment when the heart is able to break through a long-standing mental barrier. It’s moments like that when I realize this or that issue might require a fresh discussion because even I wasn’t all that clear about it in the past. As always, this is a matter of opening my faith to your examination, not promoting my religion as the model for all humanity. Radix Fidem isn’t religion, but a path to building your own religion. I take it for granted that I cannot help everyone — indeed, I expect it’s very few. I’m called to help some of those who can’t find Christ in the mainstream. I’m out on the slender edge of what the mainstream even recognizes.

By the same token, I’m obliged to stay on the path I see God drawing for me. Conviction is a fancy word to indicate things God has carved into our souls too deeply to ignore. You need to recognize your own, and don’t be surprised if it means drawing boundaries — that business of moral domain. We are all feudal servants to God (ANE feudalism), and He delivers to each of us a portion of His eternal domain to occupy and develop for His glory. That naturally excludes some territory that is none of my concern.

So I press the issue of heart-led awareness as a sort of goal, an indicator of something we all have to explore. Included in this is the firm assurance that fellowship in faith excludes those who don’t take Scripture seriously. We can argue about what it says, but we cannot argue with what it demands of us. While discussion of those demands will inevitably sound like doctrine at times, the point is that I take the Bible as the official record of God’s revelation. We are bound to agree with it.

That does not exclude the vast ocean of ideas that arise out of pagan sources. Where did Abraham get his basic assumptions about God? It was a mixed bag of ancient religious notions. God was able to penetrate this stuff with sufficient clarity that Abraham knew his calling and was able to obey. Like all of us, he had his flaws and made mistakes, but in the end, God recommended him as a model of faith. And Moses? He took Abraham’s intellectual legacy and added a lot Egyptian religious notions, too. It doesn’t take a genius to trace the differences between Abraham’s religious language and that of Moses, though it does take a bit of education. I’m hardly the first person to notice this; I learned it from far better scholars. And on top of all that, Moses also spent a chunk of his life with Jethro, a priest with yet another flavor of religious background.

What Moses produced was not an eclectic intellectual exercise in religion. He did spend that time with God on the mountain. Moses had a direct encounter with God’s Spirit, but he also came from a culture that already took the heart seriously as a faculty superior to the brain. So we know that his heart was ascendant in the process of wading through the influences and recognizing what was true. All truth is God’s truth; to the degree something from any source at all reflects His glory, it is acceptable. The heart knows — it’s the brain that needs training.

Please note for a moment that Scripture also takes seriously the concept that your heart can be wrong (2 Chronicles 25:2). That is, your heart can hold false or divided loyalties. In Hebrew thinking, the heart was the seat of the will, as many scholars can tell you. That’s where commitments reside and decisions are made. Of course, it’s hard to come up with clinical discussion here because the heart itself is a symbolic image, but the faculty of faith (commitment) in your heart can be wrong. Still, the Spirit of God who gives life to our dead spirits is never wrong. But He speaks through the heart into our awareness. Clarity comes from a desire, and consistent intent to obey.

In terms of our human psychology, that could be expressed as simply following your own conscience, but we have to note that the conscience is merely the mind’s own awareness of conviction, not conviction itself. Still, the path to peace with God is obeying your conscience until the conscience discovers by experience what is or is not from faith. Your conscience is alive and needs nurture and development. At some point you can begin to shift your awareness into your heart and learn to test your convictions with less drama and trauma. You can begin to discern more accurately what faith demands of you.

You learn to distrust reason, not wholly, but simply as matter of flesh, same as your various fleshly appetites. They aren’t evil, but they are unrestrained. They have no inherent recognition of moral priorities. Moving your awareness into the heart tends to unite our various internal voices and heal the rifts and conflicts. Still, the intellect is under the Curse of the Fall as the pinnacle of human nature without God. It would naturally get some things right and plenty of things wrong, because it can neither generate nor properly discern moral truth on its own. Moral truth is essentially revealed from the God who makes all things. The universe is built on His character, and only our hearts are capable of seeing that character in the world around us.

Pursue His character wherever you discern it. The world around us is loaded with a very human mixture of truth and deception. Your answer will never be precisely the same as mine. Each of us has to decide what differences and how much difference is a distraction and hindrance to our calling. Fellowship will always be limited as long as we remain in the flesh. As long as you can tolerate what I write, I’m ready to be your pastor/elder. The boundaries are for you to draw internally, as they are for me.

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Down Payment

Posted on June 12, 2016 by ehurst

Some of you reading this are, or will be soon, under a prophetic calling. There is simply too much divine business at hand that my prophetic gift should be isolated; I’m not equipped to handle this alone.

Forget all the pretenders; they are not at all like us. We are not some rarefied super-elect chosen, but we know of a certainty that heart-led religion is the path to God’s favor, and we also know that not many folks out there are doing it. Most of those claiming some kind of gift of the Spirit for prophecy (and related “charismatic” manifestations) do not grasp the heart-led faith taken for granted in the Bible. Yes, there are folks out there who might do this using a different terminology, so it’s not that exclusive, but chances are the people who get publicity for their prophetic pronouncements are not heart-led.

I was hesitant at first when I heard about the slaughter in Florida last night. Surely you could predict what various talking heads will make of it. Every social and political agenda will crawl out from under the rocks to stake their claim on the incident. We are not a part of them and I don’t pretend to make any kind of interpretive analysis about our business here based on that messy scene. Rather, I want you to see how prophecy works in the heart.

Naturally, there is a context of prophetic messages I’ve already offered here. I’ve done what I could to stir that gift in some of you. Now we have a concrete example to work from, so take this as a lesson in the heart-led prophets’ academy.

When I first started seeing stories about this mass murder, something inside my heart went “click” — something fell into place. I would go so far as to say it felt like an annoying hole was plugged. So right away I began praying and searching my heart, bouncing questions off of my convictions, trying to find out what made this seem like some kind of satisfaction. Some things I managed to discard immediately: this isn’t about gays, nor guns, nor Floridians and their particular sins. And you’d have to be stupid to imagine I’m pleased with bloodshed. So I kept bouncing things off of this signal in my soul, trying to identify why it offered a sense of vindication.

Oddly, the first hint was that it was connected to economics. Oh my, another question to explore. Everything fell dead until I ran across the thread of recent activity and commentary warning that the establishment is frantically trying to hide the looming economic collapse. But there was something still missing that links that to the murders. On the one hand, something like that messy scene will serve as a handy distraction, given all the posturing you’ll hear in the news starting today. But that’s not exactly it. And I’m still not quite sure, but I’m willing to bet some of you can see it better.

What I do know is that this event signals the beginning of something, a sort of down payment on previous prophetic warnings. Not in some cerebral master plan sort of thing, but as a signal that God has set something loose. We aren’t going to figure out most of it intellectually, but we are supposed to pay attention to what we can discern from our hearts. And part of the prophetic discernment means sitting down to mull it over in prayer before sharing it. Something has shifted morally and there’s no turning back. If you invest more effort in heart-led discernment from here on out, you’ll experience more of those moments I describe when something goes “click” inside your soul.

What you do about it is entirely a matter of your own sense of calling. I can’t offer anything pragmatic, no specific call to do this or that. Instead, this is exceedingly important in our development of faith teaching. We need to start sharing about how faith works in the heart, and how to read the fingerprints of God in our world. It may not matter to all of you, but some of you will discover that my mention of these things kindles a spark of recognition.

Our community of faith needs more faith activity, more heart noise, more lives driven to fulfill a divine purpose for our Lord’s glory. We need to reclaim the message of spiritual gifts from generations of perversion and abuse that offered little real blessing to people of faith.

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Legitimate Suffering

Posted on June 12, 2016 by ehurst

Re: Suffering Is Your Ally — Steven raises a common and important issue Westerners have with suffering and pain.

On the one extreme, we have a typically middle-class American doctrine in the Prosperity Gospel. This idea stands on the ancient ground of the Pharisees, something we detect when the Twelve seem bewildered when Jesus suggests that material wealth is a major hindrance in moral redemption (Matthew 19:16-30). We dig a bit into the rabbinical traditions to discover they taught that the primary mark of God’s favor was material wealth. Thus, the wealthy (Jews) were already favored by God, while the poor were accursed. So the Prosperity Gospel equates poverty with spiritual failure. Alongside this, the only reason you aren’t instantly (or at least quickly) healed of every possible ailment is that you just don’t have enough faith.

Apparently, even mere discomfort is somehow attached to spiritual blindness, because “God didn’t intend us to suffer.” Well, God didn’t intend for us to die, either, but even the most notable sages of the Prosperity Gospel die from serious conditions often related to aging. You’ll hear all kinds of excuses and legalistic nit-picking and semantic gymnastics defending their petty materialistic excuse for theology. Jesus called it worshiping Mammon.

On the other extreme are the weird ascetics who suggest that suffering has some magical saving power. They go out of their way wallowing intentionally in distressful exercises in self-discipline to cleanse their souls — or something like that. Nothing in the New Testament promotes this unless you insist on some perverted legalistic reasoning from the words meant to be read as parable.

I can try to untangle all of this. Basic theme: Pain is a part of living in a fallen world. We are wired for pain, and not all pain is the result of moral culpability. Walking in faith is not a magic spell against pain and death. Sometimes obeying God in a particular context means accepting painful consequences, permanent disability or even death. We don’t make a virtue of suffering; we make a virtue in tolerating it for the sake of God’s glory.

Suffering becomes an ally if you respond appropriately internally. It reminds you that this fallen life is a mixture of sorrow and joy and each has their place. It reminds us that we are fallen and need to keep our eyes on His glory, allowing Him to make the decisions. We see pain as an ally when we remember that He intends it will drive us into His arms. And Paul in the Corinthian letters says that our obedience to God’s moral laws makes us a friend of Creation and an enemy of fallen people. People with a perverted view of morality will stain everything they can touch, so some elements in our natural world will reflect the pervasive perversion. Walking in divine truth makes you a threat to whatever people imagine is their justification for moral perversion.

Thus, we should expect a certain trend of increased suffering as a sign of obedience — but this assumes you are reading these things from your heart, not your reason. In return, there is a balancing sense of peace reflecting back from our convictions, something the fallen world cannot have.

So we might sometimes do things to bless and redeem other lives that we know is going to cause some sorrow on the way. But we do not go out of our way to increase human suffering as a whole. There is no glory in torment, so things like hazing to join a club has a limit before it becomes sin. You and I will judge things differently, but the mere presence of hazing shows a complete lack of heart-led awareness in the first place. Getting involved in something inherently difficult already requires a certain amount of “pay your dues” without adding artificial suffering to create a false pride.

This bleeds over into a thousand other moral considerations. That’s how it works with God’s living moral character, AKA faith, moral discernment, biblical laws, heart-led living, etc. It’s organic and living, not objective and rational. There is no “ideal” and no absolutes; ultimate reality (moral truth) is seldom binary in this world. It’s that quantum morality thing again, where you have to discern things on multiple levels simultaneously, which is particularly difficult for Western minds trained in linear logic. There may be no single right answer, where God Himself lets you choose any of several paths because He’s prepared to work with you whatever you choose. He’s a real person, too, not some abstract objective ideal.

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Psalm 104

Posted on June 11, 2016 by ehurst

This is another of those soaring lyrical songs that is impossible to summarize. What may not be obvious is that we have ample examples from other cultures across the whole region and in different millennia of the Ancient Near East (ANE) with similar songs of praise to various named deities. Any of them would have recognized this instantly; it’s very typical of what defines the ANE as a whole.

More, those other cultures would have recognized most of the symbolism, the imagery meant to portray things beyond human expression. There are details we recognize in factual terms, but noting them would miss the point most of the time. From the broadest categories down to the smallest elements of life, our Creator pays close attention to everything, and sets it all in order to please Himself. We could not possibly grasp the full range of what this means. Humanity striving to know all facts this many centuries later still can’t begin to scratch the surface of what God has designed and implemented.

Much of it is also reminiscent of the Genesis creation narrative. The recurring theme of the waters above and the waters below is easy to spot. It is God who decides the boundaries of the seas. For Him, it must be easier than stretching a line with His finger. The heavens are a mere curtain He hangs, the waters as a garment.

And it all works together in an incomprehensible grand symphony. Some of that water is left to stand precisely so animals can drink, and to grow them food. What is also very easy to miss is the utter importance of how mankind could fit into this harmonious pattern if he listens to God and takes His divinely appointed place. The same forests supply homes for birds and humans alike, despite how each uses those trees differently. It’s all there for our use, so we must honor our Provider. Everything has a place in God’s plan, regardless whether it pleases you to have those things around. We cannot fathom the wealth of God’s provision.

Notice that in ANE thinking there are three basic domains: earth, sea and sky. And we note in passing that the word translated Leviathan generally means anything in the water big enough to eat you. God manages to feed the most massive sea creatures and still grant us opportunity to avoid them. Yes, the Creator breathes life and takes it away as He sees fit, and has plans to manage the whole universe without the least struggle.

So when we see ourselves so utterly insignificant against all of these things, how can we not shout and sing in awe at His greatness? Don’t be a fool and ignore His gifts.

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