The Mind of the New Covenant

Posted on January 3, 2026 by ehurst

We’ve been discussing the Hebrew concept of sin. In particular, we are trying to separate ourselves from the iron grip of western judicial reasoning so that our study of the Bible in general, and the New Testament in particular, is free to discover a path out of false guilt and shame. Guilt and shame are part of a complex of fleshly mental bondage that makes life on this earth hopeless. It holds us back from ever daring to walk away from the Devil.

It’s not enough to simply think like a Hebrew, because that was clearly not the ultimate answer. Rather, the Hebrew outlook is a foundation for what Jesus revealed as the end product of several millennia of progressive revelation that started with expulsion from the Garden.

Some of this is based on Heiser’s work (see this video in particular) for the obvious reason that he delves into things with a depth few can match. On the other hand, it’s also clear that he simply did not cover everything. He knew only what He had studied and contemplated, admitting openly that it was a task never finished.

In the linked video above, Heiser approaches the subject of OT ritual law and what gives it coherence. At first blush, the distinction between ritual purity and moral purity are two different things. Honestly, western minds tend to choke on that. If not the distinction itself, most western minds cannot understand how God sorted out human behavior between those two categories.

Heiser explains that ritual purity stands on the necessity of Hebrew people living together as a community. A critical part of recognizing ritual impurity is how it excludes you from some measure of communal living. On the one hand, we can recognize intellectually how important this is, but our entire civilization has a very poor grasp of how to embrace the Hebrew frame of reference. We have a huge body of social science literature studying communal living, but we have no instinct for it. We cannot make ourselves fit into that atmosphere.

We have a love-hate relationship with the kind of family communal living that was common in the Ancient Near East. Western society suffers a pendulum swing, in that on a fairly regular basis, succeeding generations will experience a pendulum swing between individualism versus communalism. Thus, individualistic grandparents groan as their grandchildren gravitate to socialism. Then when those socialists become grandparents, they groan as their grandchildren embrace individualism. It has been like this for at least a couple of centuries.

This pendulum swing is because Western Civilization is founded on materialism, whereas the Hebrew culture was based on an otherworldly focus. For Americans in particular mysticism is not merely alien, but morally irresponsible. Even when we succeed in defining the difference between the two, we know that westerners really struggle to embrace mysticism.

This is why even the best of biblical scholarship struggles with certain questions, never coming to a definitive answer — the scholars remain western people. Thus, the bulk of the linked video is taken up with parsing out the concept of ritual purity versus impurity. While scholars can easily read the prescriptions in Moses, they cannot come to a consensus on underlying principles that explain some of the details that western minds find so peculiar.

It’s hard enough to get western believers to correct their concept of “sin”, which we have looked at in previous weeks. The Hebrew concepts of “sin” and “sin offering” are inexplicable in light of western criminal justice. The scholarship is pretty consistent on that. Heiser mentions that in passing, but the underlying concept of what defines ritual impurity is widely disputed. So, Heiser runs down a list of 5 different ideas that have been proposed, but none of them answers all the questions.

Right at the end, Heiser mentions how intellectual literalism, the focus on nuts and bolts, is a major problem in understanding the OT. He then mentions something that most people miss entirely. In His first synagogue message, Jesus reads a passage that we tend to parse based on what we know about the context. It’s in Luke 4:16-30. Here’s the context: Jesus entered the synagogue on a Jubilee year, and the Scripture He read was a Jubilee passage chosen for that specific reason.

It is Heiser who elsewhere warns us that Jesus left out a line in the passage that Jews used to justify hating Gentiles. Instead, Jesus makes it clear that Gentiles would be included in God’s final Jubilee. Nazareth was perched in the hills of an area that had suffered greatly from Gentile incursions over the centuries. Jesus subtly dismissed that old anger. This was why the whole congregation tried to throw Him off the bluff just to the south of the town there.

The Gentile Luke is the only Gospel author to mention this incident. How many people can follow the complicated convergence of associations Jesus makes here? It’s not just one meaning, but multiple issues are addressed all at once. You have to wonder how much Luke knew, because it appears the only reason he mentions it is to note that Gentiles were included in the Messiah’s mission.

Of course, this in itself reminds us that it’s not enough to grasp the Hebrew understanding of these things, since Jesus had to declare all the things God had left unclear because of the necessity of keeping His divine opposition out of the loop on His ultimate plans (1 Corinthians 2:8). Thus, it simply was not obvious to the Hebrew people either, including the rabbincal scholars. The Hebrew traditions were an incomplete answer finished in Christ. We have a duty to go beyond the Hebrew mysticism, to embrace a much deeper understanding that is revealed only in the New Testament.

Still, without the Hebrew outlook on things like sin and righteousness, we cannot possibly get what the New Testament is all about. If the New Testament is the final answer to how we approach our Creator, it was built on the foundation of Hebrew religion.

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Children of Law

Posted on January 1, 2026 by ehurst

Let’s talk about child-rearing. Writing a curriculum would be antithetical to the very nature of Christian Mysticism. The whole point is to offer an example that would help you make up your own mind. We lead by example from the front.

That’s how we raise our children. If God grants you children, then you have been appointed as shepherd. That’s the minimum. If God also leads others children-in-effect to your flock, then you are obliged to lead in other ways. No one — no one — under the Covenant is permitted to evade their duty to shepherd in whatever way they can. If the flock follows you, then you are a shepherd. (Don’t become abrasive and difficult just as an excuse to avoid your duty.)

Your children may not voluntarily follow. This is why we emphasize covenant law with children.

Now, I know from experience that Americans in particular carry a false notion of what “law” means in this context. The word “law” in the Bible almost invariably refers to the leadership character of the Person of Christ, even before He was born as a man. In Eternity, He is the sole expression of the Divine Person, the One appointed to represent God to Creation. The word “law” does not refer to a body of legislation, nor simply some ukase spat out at us. It is the loving relationship with God; “law” is His love for us. It is grace and mercy; law is an expression of grace.

So it is with your own children. You must embody the Person of Christ; it’s built into our divine election. When they need a tighter rein, you provide it through your personal involvement in their lives. It’s the same way you deal with the rest of the world at large. If they do not manifest a response to grace and mercy, then they have chosen the law code. You would have less involvement with the world at large than you would your children, of course, but the engagement follows the same basic principle.

Thus, we refer to “children of the law” as those who do not, for whatever reason, rise to the privilege of grace and mercy. And it applies every time they slip below that level of privilege. So, you really must have a good grip on what the law code means and how it works. It is the minimum standard. In our case, that’s the Code of Noah. Our community does have a written guide to understanding the implications, but it’s not the code itself. You must have the guidance of the Holy Spirit to really understand it properly.

You want your children to have that guidance inside them. It may be a matter of time or it may be they will never develop such an internal focus of power and authority. Whenever and wherever people fail to have that internal Presence of God, you must provide the appropriate representation in the form of the law code. People operating by the flesh are under the law code because it’s all they can receive.

And, yes, this is the same with Red Pill stuff: Men and women hold out the law code for those who will not rise to grace and mercy. It is the fallback position we take when nothing else gets through. All the various socio-sexual interactions are shaped by the law code and its basic assumptions about human nature; that’s what the Red Pill lore is all about. Does it surprise anyone that the Red Pill lore echoes the Law of Moses in terms of basic assumptions about human nature?

One of the things you most certainly can impart under a law code standard is the concept of a prime directive, a distinct sense of mission and purpose. That comes from understanding the thesis of the Unseen Realm. You must absorb it, talk about it, live it — with your children in particular. They need to gain a sense of privilege even if it’s just a covenant of law for them. They must carry this sense of privilege into their interactions with the rest of the world. They really must gain a sense of detachment and separation based on a whole range of internal reactions asserting that they do not belong to the world at large.

The flesh can most certainly learn that. How do you think the children of Darkness keep themselves hidden in plain sight? There are whole families that pass on to their children a sense of prime directive based on certain underlying assumptions about how the world works. It’s true of a whole society that isn’t knowingly devoted to Darkness. In my military travels, I ran across kiddos who bore a certain strong sense of identity, a sense of something reserved from their ordinary playmates at school. These were the children of diplomats and high ranking military leadership. They had a sense of pride that they were not part of the hoi polloi, even while they were compelled by circumstance to interact with them.

Jews tend to do this by instinct and Muslims have their own version of it. They never assimilate fully anywhere you find them in the whole world. We must not assimilate, either.

The difference for us is that we are not out to manipulate mankind to serve a hidden agenda for global rule. Our purpose is redemption; we are calling out to the Elect. Our focus is otherworldly. It’s not that we are better then others, but that our calling and purpose is higher than their animal existence. We belong in the Garden as managers, not as domestic livestock.

This what you need to understand for yourself so that you can school children, both literal and figurative. On the one hand, you know the Elect are a minority of the human race. You can hope everyone you must shepherd to any degree will be revealed as Elect at some point, but until they are, you are a shepherd of the law code to them.

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Who Will Be Spared?

Posted on December 27, 2025 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 117: Ezekiel 8-9

This will be short and simple. Heiser’s lesson on these two chapters is one thing. While listening to it, I was struck by something related for us today.

Ezekiel has a vision of all the abominable idolatries of the Covenant Nation. We know that Josiah had destroyed all the garbage his grandfather had placed in the Temple, nasty stuff that his father failed to removed. So far as we know, Josiah was more thorough than any other king in the history of the nation. Yet, what Ezekiel saw is that some of that nasty stuff got brought back.

This vision takes place after the first and second exile at the hands of the Babylonian Emperor. The third wave will see the destruction of the Temple and remnants of the City of Jerusalem. The vision Ezekiel sees here indicates the catastrophic loss of life that is coming in the city. Only those who mourned the insult to God were spared. You could make the argument that this is what the vision indicates God will do, regardless of what the Babylonian troops know about the true worship of God.

All the rest would be slaughtered without mercy. They would have no protection. The reason should be quite clear: They were supposed to be His people. They had an ostensible claim to His name, despite how they abused the privilege.

What will happen here in the US when things get difficult in the coming years? We have a whole raft of people claiming His name, claiming His Covenant. Yet, they are engaging in all sorts of abominations. Perhaps it isn’t literal idolatry in most cases, but there doesn’t seem to be very many mourning the burden of garbage weighing down the churches.

We don’t have a Babylon coming to attack because the US is a Babylon. The US is destroying itself. Still, what will happen when His judgment afflicts those who claim His name while still clinging to the idolatry of feminism, materialism, and all the other marks of worldliness? Who will be spared?

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A Fertilizer War

Posted on December 25, 2025 by ehurst

Let me offer this Christmas gift to you. There’s not much I can do for people who simply disagree with me, but I carry a heavy burden of care for those who simply do not understand.

Take a broad look at what the Scriptures say regarding peace with God. If I use the term “sinless perfection”, you will likely form an image in your mind that is not at all biblical. Rather, it will be informed by western criminal justice thinking. It would arise from a clinical precision that characterizes western democratic law.

The Bible is feudal and familial. The term translated into English as “blameless” does not carry the clinical precision we commonly assume. The biblical concept is much more fluid, based on the assumption of being in God’s family. Sensible parents will overlook some peccadilloes because children often don’t understand where the boundaries are and certainly don’t understand the consequences of many mistakes.

That’s how God views things with us. The issue is not the particular actions; those are not singled out. Rather, everything turns on whether you genuinely care about Him as a Person. Over and over again: It’s personal. It’s not rule-bound. Americans in particular struggle with this; worldwide we are known for being more hide-bound and nit-picky over the rules, semantics, etc., than any other culture. The biggest NATO joke of all is the sarcastic remark: “as flexible as an American”.

Having worked in American public education, I can tell you that the vast majority of student discipline problems arise from this cultural orientation. When I dealt with kids from other cultures, discipline problems were nearly non-existent, as long as you were accepted into the community. Americans in particular imagine there is a code of behavior that stands between teachers and students, whereas other cultures see a direct connection between the people.

That’s how it worked for the Hebrew culture: There is a direct connection between God and His earthly family. There was no impersonal code of law standing between them. You’ll see this when you examine Leviticus and the ritual code. Law describes the relationship; it does not interfere with it. As long as you genuinely loved the Lord, everything could be worked out one way or another. There was a sacrifice for just about everything.

The only thing that could not be worked out was spite towards God. This is what the phrase “willful rebellion” meant. It was not a matter of what you did in specifics, but your attitude.

Thus, Lucifer’s fall was not a matter of doing things wrong; it was a wholesale rejection of God’s decision about something. Further, the dispute is portrayed in certain terms, a frame of reference that is foreign to American culture in particular, and Western Civilization in general. God consistently portrayed Himself as a nomad sheikh whose whole domain was family, not turf.

Thus, the problem with Lucifer remains a family dispute. A high-ranking family member throws a fit and erects a barrier to fellowship with his Father. It’s a personal dispute. But because of the nature of how God runs His sheikhdom, the dispute is handled in the open so that all the other family members can observe and understand. It affected the whole domain, a rejection of something God wanted for Himself — an expansion of His family in a particular direction. Lucifer rejected the new family members as family.

It’s not a question of whether God was right to build Himself a private garden; that’s simply how any sheikh would do things. The crux of the dispute was making His gardeners part of the Eternal Family instead of making them mortal like the rest of the garden. Lucifer objected, unwilling to treat the gardeners as family. He was insulted by their elevation to his level, so to speak. Their praise and worship went straight to God, and Lucifer felt he deserved to be revered as a higher being so that some of their worship should come to him, not simply pass through him.

God agreed to some kind of test, something we cannot really comprehend. The Hebrew non-canonical writings offer a limited understanding of these things through parables and symbolic explanations.

Lucifer became Satan, determined to destroy these new family folks that God loved. However, his method was undermining the relationship, tempting the new family members to leave the shadow of God’s favor. Thus, it’s not “Original Sin” (as commonly defined) but simply joining the opposing side, a sin that some of the elohim council had already committed. Adam and Eve were not held to some artificial standard of perfection. You can be sure they made mistakes in their management of God’s private garden, and everything was handled the way a sheikh’s family would. The problem is that they left God’s favor.

Again: The Fall in the Garden was not a simple matter of disobedience to some strict word of command. The Fall was choosing sides with Satan. In the ongoing debate between Lucifer and God, Adam and Eve made a choice to join the wrong side. That meant they chose mortality. The resulting dive into mortality for humans makes us living evidence regarding the nature of the dispute. We are born mortal, under the dominion of Satan.

The one thing we can surely understand from all of this is our current mission here as mortals. We must choose God’s side in the dispute; we must give Him glory. We are to protect His reputation as good children would. He calls us out of slavery to the Devil, giving us the power to live on the Devil’s turf as children chosen by the Father. The tension between our mortal flesh and our eternal spirits is all part of the evidence we present in God’s favor.

God is not watching us like a hawk through the lens of some impersonal standard. He sees us through the lens of His Son’s blood sacrifice. Instead of blood that protects the sacred space from our mortality, the blood cleanses us as the living sacred spaces God inhabits. We are the carriers of His Presence in this mortal realm Satan claims as his feudal grant. Yes, God demoted Satan and forced him into a space-time existence, not in Heaven.

Mortality is where the Devil belongs. It’s not so much that God gave him the garden, but that we did as God’s proxies. Satan seeks to desecrate and destroy the natural world because it belonged to us and is where we are meant to live. He hates us. The natural world cries out in this bondage, wherein Satan provokes humans to defile everything. The natural world still responds to divine justice, but obstructs human efforts to live under Satan’s reign. It grows us thorns and thistles until we turn to divine justice. The redeemed Elect are an invasive presence on Satan’s turf because we breathe life back into Creation by walking in justice.

And the Lord’s justice is how we love each other — just as Christ did on the Cross — and pouring compassion on the rest of Creation. His love is the native fertilizer for the growth of all good things. This is how we defeat the Devil.

So terms like “justice” and “justification” and “sanctification” don’t mean what American minds assume they mean. It means we are back to being family members of the Father, doing what He intended in making us. It means we have embraced His love. It’s a matter of loyalty, AKA faith.

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No “One True Church”

Posted on December 23, 2025 by ehurst

I’ve covered this before, but some questions came up pointing out a need for clarifications.

The natural world is pretty much an extension of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were in the garden, but not a part of it. My conviction is that they had bodies rather like those of the risen Christ. They were of an entirely different kind of “flesh” as Paul put it. It was symbolized by their access to the Tree of Life. In general, what Christ could do after His resurrection, I believe Adam and Eve could do before the Fall.

After they chose to listen to the Serpent and ate the Forbidden Fruit, God clothed them in flesh rather like the creatures in the Garden. They were denied access to the Tree of Life. They became mortal in the same way as all the creatures in the Garden. Thus, in our mortal flesh, we are part of the natural world. However, we know somewhere deep in our consciousness that we don’t belong to this world. We aren’t supposed to die.

All of our problems are down to that fleshly nature we must carry around. Once we shed that, everything changes. There is no way to clinically describe all the details, but it’s the imagery the Bible uses to explain our situation. Sadly, a great many humans are nothing more than their fleshly selves; they have no eternal nature. They truly belong to this world. The Elect are not like that.

Our primary mission in this life is to support God’s reputation. Our flesh doesn’t go along with that, but it can be enslaved to some degree and compelled to cooperate. The Holy Spirit gives you the sense of mission to start down that path, and provides the power, but the will is entirely yours. Nobody, least of all our Lord, expects full compliance. The Bible is all about how to keep coming back and apologizing to God for embarrassing Him.

It’s quite possible we could get so far off track that He can’t use us here, and He’ll call us home rather sooner than He would like. We miss out on a lot of opportunities to bask in His glory here. Those who strive to be faithful and really care about His feelings will tend to be here a bit longer. It really is all about His feelings as a Father and whether we keep a tender heart for Him.

We belong in this world, but we are not a part of it. The fleshly body is not really a part of our true nature. That means that our intellects and emotions do not reflect who we really are in Christ. Those belong to the flesh, and will remain behind when we die. Our sense of awareness is not a thing in itself, only a manifestation of an eternal soul in a mortal body. Our awareness will change dramatically once we are moved into our eternal bodies. Thus, the New Testament promises that we will know everything when we are “changed in the twinkling of an eye”.

Meanwhile, we see everything as if obscured by a cheap dirty mirror. It’s too small and everything is backwards, but it’s all we have as we try to make our way through this world. When Christ returns, the natural world will be renewed, made fresh like it was back in the Garden before human activity abused and defiled it. The Devil and his allies in the Abyss will be destroyed along with all mortal flesh.

In our current situation, all we really have are our experiences and perception. They are obscured by trying to see through that dirty mirror. No two of us will have exactly the same grasp of this reality, though at times it may seem like it. When you start pressing for details, you start to realize how varied human understanding can be.

That’s why there can be no one-size-fits-all religion. Christ calls us to faith and speaks to us about organizing our response to that faith. That’s what religion is, our response to faith’s calling. We come to Him with a lot of different expectations about how it should go. Some people have a very clear notion about their own faith, but it’s pure human folly to assume your clear vision is for everyone.

This is why we have so many varied denominations, all proclaiming to be the “One True Church”. Since it is utterly impossible for any human to have the whole story, we should hardly be surprised as the variety. There is no one true church, nor can there be. Just a few faith communities recognize this, and they shape their mission to match the concept that what they do and teach isn’t for everyone. Rather, they seek to reach those who belong by simply acting according to their faith. There’s no sales pitch because only the Spirit can move people to join them.

That’s what Kiln of the Soul is like. It’s not for everyone. Sometimes what we offer may prove useful; take it run with it. Nobody in our community will ever act like it’s somehow a bad thing that you don’t agree with our whole body of teaching.

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AI Apocalypse

Posted on December 22, 2025 by ehurst

On this blog, we carried out a review of Thorleif Boman’s book on the differences between Hebrew and Hellenistic thinking (search terms “HTCG” or “Boman”), the underlying epistemology of each culture. The West in general is Hellenized, of course. Unlike every previous culture and civilization in human history, the West assumes itself as the human default, at the same time being the most unlike every previous culture and civilization before it. Indeed, all the others have more in common to each other than any or all of them have with the West.

What distinguishes the West is the pretense of objectivity — everything is depersonalized. No other civilization in human history has imagined a universe that is so impersonal, so devoid of life. John in his revelation makes this a criticism in the form of the Beast. While the imagery John uses does share some of the mixing of attributes so well recognized from the Ancient Near East, the one John depicts is unique in the choice of attributes. That’s because it is meant to portray something new and different in history. A creature of Satan’s devising, it is utterly mindless in its rapacious appetite for consuming human life and every good gift from God.

No other culture has ever imagined a power that stands independent of the gods. In the West, we have this thing that we claim exists on its own authority, variously imagined as reason, law, etc. It has no character because it does not live, yet is omnipotent and every god must bow the knee. In the structure of western thought and assumptions about reality, we hold Jehovah accountable to this beast, judging His revelation by the standards we imagine we find in it. We say that God is permitted to do this, but cannot do that.

John portrayed this Beast as a horror that spun off more horrors, all empowered by Satan. He saw it coming, telling us how it would seek to destroy covenant faith, the submission to Christ as Lord (the Woman, the Bride of Christ), by imposing the final greatest bondage of the human race. Nothing that comes after would be a greater threat to faith.

The Beast has yet a bit of morphing ahead of it, adding a fresh attribute that will seem almost like a whole new creature — AI. I want you to notice that AI is incapable of thinking independently. It is currently nothing more than a very large algorithm that processes human chatter so that it can generate more chatter. It is wholly unconscious of the ideas represented by that chatter. Thus, it cannot actually make decisions. This won’t keep fools from trying to employ it for decision-making.

It can only emulate poorly the process of actually thinking. Thinking machines would require a wholly different approach, plus technology that doesn’t exist. What I’m suggesting here is a firm conviction that no matter what TPTB try to tell us, genuine full-blown AI will never exist. Rather, we will be told it does as a justification for compelling us to kneel under its power. And because it is so thoroughly incapable of actually thinking, it will easily be the most ghastly oppression humans have ever seen.

I recall a couple of decades ago when there was a rash of laptop thefts of government officials. The machines rarely showed up again for sale; these were not simply thefts of hardware. Each of these laptops contained substantial databases of things the sponsoring agencies were tracking. It was the data that was the objective of this activity. We know this because the thefts were supported by whole staffs of people on the ground interfering with pursuit, preventing anyone from recovering the stolen laptops. These were espionage operations.

Do you recall the big deal made over the US government’s theft of the PROMIS software from Inslaw? That was the first pass at using computers and data to track massive numbers of humans. Then came other data processing software capable of cross referencing huge databases, intended to inform executive decisions about economics and policy. Today we have Palantir and other Big Tech companies collating all the databases of government and private institutions, building a framework for tracking every human on the planet. It has started here in the US and is already spreading across the globe. The obvious point of all this is to discover and track every human with any will or talent for independent thought.

There’s a very good explanation why everyone who could or might resist is not simply eliminated right away. The fundamental assumption of the West is that there is no Spirit Realm and that there is no such thing as conviction that drives humans from a higher realm. Every human is malleable. And since before WW2, our bureaucratic government system has operated under the assumption that every citizen is nothing more than an economic asset. Every policy decision is based on the calculus of how much economic activity can be squeezed out of each human.

This is more diabolical than you might expect; don’t think in simplistic terms. Even disabled people have a use — the people who love them will be driven to greater economic activity in order to support them. Family households will work and spend money on children, pets and indigent family members. It’s all very cynical. Yes, the welfare system will try to counsel clients and compel them to make certain kinds of decisions, but the system is fully aware of human nature in terms of economic behavior.

Now, imagine all of this being managed by AI. This horror, and the natural human resistance to it, will also provoke a new religion, insisting that it is God. This is the apocalypse John foresaw. The ultimate persecution of faith, particularly here in the US, will arise from this direction.

There won’t be much we can do about it. On an individual level, some of us will be moved to various forms of resistance and even some small scale victories, but the overall long term trends will not be altered. But the reason I point this out now is because some functions of human government are already being delivered over to this Beast. This is the source of persecution we will face here in the US. It has nothing to do with which party controls which offices of government. It has been forming for a very long time already, and it just so happens that the current administration will be the one to unleash this awful thing.

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Jesus the Hebrew Mystic

Posted on December 21, 2025 by ehurst

Nobody has to tell me that my previous post stirred up a hornets’ nest. The challenge here is shifting your expectations and mental reflexes over to a genuine Hebrew outlook. What did the Hebrews prior to the introduction of Hellenism believe? Jesus kept calling His nation back to the ancient Hebrew ways and out of the Hellenized nonsense of the Pharisees. What did Jesus Himself believe? The Son of God had a religious outlook that quite obviously does not support the speculative theology of the church leadership after the passing of the Apostle John.

We have more than sufficient documentation for this: The ancient Hebrews were mystical and otherworldly. Not every individual, of course, but the people who took the time to contemplate their God recognized the centrality of a transcendent realm. If they read their own Scriptures, they understood that this world was not what we were designed for. This is not where we started. Something happened that buried our eternal nature in flesh that is at enmity with God.

The ancient Hebrews knew that their nation was called to a mission in this world, everyone dragging around a fallen fleshly nature that must be enslaved to the heart, because the heart was the interface between flesh and spirit. The spirit must take ascendancy over the flesh; the spirit must be awakened to its duty to God.

Jesus was disappointed that Nicodemas didn’t understand the concept of spiritual regeneration. It was part of the Old Testament theology. Paul was disappointed that he had to explain Election (another OT concept), that not every human is born with a spiritual nature, only some of us. But it was the key to understanding the difference between Jacob and Esau. It was the key to understanding the truculence of Pharaoh chasing down Moses and the Nation of Israel after the Ten Plagues.

Even if the bed-ridden Lazarus of His story was only a symbolic figure, Jesus talked about how people under the Covenant of Moses could go to Heaven (“the bosom of Abraham”). What changed at the Cross? If the Covenant of Moses could get people into Heaven, what was the problem that was solved with a new covenant?

Jesus died to end the old covenant with all it’s limitations on who could have peace with God while still living on this earth. He opened the peace of God to all the Gentiles. The issue was always bringing home His sheep to His pasture. The key has always been God’s public reputation, but you need to read “public” as including an audience that is far more than just humans. It’s all of Creation, along with the elohim, cherubim, seraphim, angels, Watchers, Nephilim, etc., and the Devil.

We don’t need a Christology; that was just a response to Judaizers and Gnostics. It was pasted up by Hellenized church leaders who lacked a good Hebrew grounding for dealing with other Hellenized fools. The Hebrew intellectual traditions of mysticism undercut the whole question. We don’t need Substitutionary Atonement (a term nowhere in Scripture). Rather, Jesus died in my place, not to get me into Heaven, but to get me into the Covenant while I’m still alive here on this earth. This life is where I can do the most good for God’s reputation.

Sin was never a condemned criminal standing, but standing outside of peace with God. Adam and Eve didn’t work in the Garden on probation; they were eternal persons in the same kind of body Jesus had after His resurrection. The concept of “innocence” doesn’t apply to eternal people. They didn’t lose their innocence; they were compromised and forced into a mortal body. The mortal flesh is what the Devil offered them, lying about how it would make them like God, deciding for themselves what is good and what is evil. “Here, let me give you a rational mind” — great sales pitch. Choosing to exercise a human intellect meant assuming a mortal form. What they had before was ineffably better.

There’s nothing in Romans 5 about Adam spreading guilt to all his descendants. Adam and Eve chose mortality and the procreation that comes with it. Born in a mortal form is inherently defiling. Babies are born defiled and unacceptable in God’s Presence because they are flesh. As children they find peace with God because they are covered by their parents. At some point, they are obliged to seek their own peace with Him. It has nothing to do with whether or not they are Elect; every human is obliged to seek peace with God. Otherwise, they belong to Satan, born into his realm.

What’s at risk in this world is peace with God — the Covenant — not eternity. Spiritual birth is a symbolic term referring to that moment, that new beginning, when an Elect person becomes aware of their election. At that point, the Devil strives to keep them from discovering how to find peace with God. Without the knowledge of divine revelation, they can find provisional peace by seeking a clear conscience, a proxy for being in the Presence of God. They seek to enslave their fleshly nature to a spiritual purpose. It’s good enough and God honors that.

With the knowledge of the Covenant, the flesh is awakened to fight against what the Covenant requires. That person becomes accountable for the rituals and protocols of coming into God’s Presence. They have to deal with sin as defined by the Covenant protocols for restoring their fellowship with the Father. Without the Covenant knowledge, they aren’t in a position to know those protocols, and so they are not held accountable for them (“sin is not imputed”).

With or without the Covenant, the issue is finding peace with God. People without Election fare much better under a covenant, but there are plenty of blessings for the Elect with no knowledge of any covenant. The non-elect die either way and end up in Hell, so the only difference is how they live in this life.

Meanwhile, the New Covenant wipes away the bulk of the protocols. Jesus displaces all the sacrifices that allowed people to stand in sacred space. We still need to be fully aware of the defiling fleshly nature and how much trouble it causes so that we can nail it to the Cross — a euphemism for breaking its dominance in our decisions. We enslave it and drag it around, following Jesus who had to do the same with His fleshly nature. The difference is that He didn’t have to learn and exercise internal discipline because He was born spiritually dominant over His own flesh. His flesh was on the Cross from the start and never had a chance to defile Him.

Christ’s Law was to love sacrificially as the Father did. Jesus was the living law of His Father. Obeying the Law means obeying Christ, and vice versa. The flesh hates that; it seeks all kinds of exemptions and excuses for failure. If the flesh wins, you are simply acting according to the flesh. Nothing new there. You need to do some makeup work to restore His love/law to your life. Your flesh will feel the burn of guilt, but your spirit knows that’s just a lie. You didn’t commit a heinous crime; you slipped up. There’s no distinction between the desire to get right with Him versus the desire to get right with the person you wronged. If the Spirit wins, you obey Christ.

All I’m doing here is summarizing and restating what the Scripture says for a Hebrew mind. It’s inherently relational, not legal. It’s feudal, not democratic. It’s tribal and familial, not based on citizenship. Speculative formal theology dies when you embrace the Hebrew otherworldly orientation. Jesus was a Hebrew mystic. Are you going to follow Him?

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No Original Sin

Posted on December 20, 2025 by ehurst

Re: Paul, Original Sin, and Rabbinic Theology

It’s not as if the Hebrew people were poor, benighted bumpkins who never really understood God, and that somehow only after the church embraced western rationalism did the truth finally come out. If the Hebrew people did not know God, then there is no God and Scripture is just senseless drivel. Jesus was the Son of the Old Testament God; Jesus taught the Old Testament as it was meant to be understood. He warned His people that their leadership had long left behind the revelation of God for a batch of legalistic fables. Legalism is not inherent in the Old Testament.

The biggest mistake western readers make is clinging to their western mental frame of reference to understand the words they read in Scripture. They unconsciously link the concept of “sin” to crime.

The biblical definition of sin is arguing with God. It need not be any kind of confrontation so much as dismissing His testimony when you make certain decisions. The point is that you do not now stand before God condemned by some corpus of legislation and judicial precedent. Rather, you stand before your Father embarrassed at disregarding His will for you. The whole thing is very personal and feudal. You owe Him personally. You must make amends personally, and it’s really up to Him what it takes to recover that relationship.

Thus, in Heiser’s review of Leviticus, he explains that the whole point of the ritual sacrifices was not paying for sin. Rather, it was covering up the sacred space with blood so that your mortality doesn’t contaminate that space. The blood was splattered on the sacred space, not the person making the offering. The blood didn’t cover sin; it wasn’t paying a price. All the other types of sacrifices were designed to meet the minimum protocol for being in God’s Presence. You live as a tributary of the Sovereign, so you bring tribute. It wasn’t buying Him off; it was recognizing that He owned you and everything about you.

You might be family, but it’s a very formal setting in the company of the rest of the family, along with a lot of folks who aren’t family. Jesus didn’t argue with making blood sacrifices to enter the Temple, despite being sinless. He was playing by the rules, observing the protocols because He was in a mortal body.

While there was a lot of goofy speculation among later rabbis, the Pharisees in particular, the earlier material reflected a direct extension of Old Testament thinking. We have to be discerning about Second Temple teachings.

In early Second Temple literature, there is no discussion of Original Sin as a doctrine. Rather, there is simply the recognition that mortal flesh has a tendency to sin. It’s the nature of mortality, not the result of some single event or series of events. If we are born in flesh, then sin is already in us. We were born into a fleshly form because Adam disagreed with God about the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. That choice made Adam and Eve mortal and it was passed onto all their progeny, including you and me. You need not do anything to get the fleshly nature; you are born condemned. That is, your fleshly nature is condemned to die, sooner or later.

In that sense, sin does not keep you out of Heaven. It keeps you out of the Covenant while you live here on earth. It’s all about the Covenant. We say the Covenant is “Law” but not in the modern western sense. Rather, the Covenant is Law in the sense of it being the manifest will of your Father. Under Moses, the Law was not just a burdensome body of obligations. It was a collection of precepts that gave shape to the Father’s character. He expected people to make mistakes in their fleshly form. He also expected people to appear before Him in His sacred space and seek to restore peace with Him after embarrassing Him.

Your sinful nature is simply a feature of your mortality. You don’t start out innocent and become a sinner (Romans 5). That kind of thinking comes from the pagan background of Western Civilization. Your fleshly nature is doomed, so the only question is whether you also have a divine nature. If you are Elect, then your fleshly nature isn’t the real you. If you aren’t Elect, then the flesh is all you have and it’s the real you.

This same concept of sin also stands in the New Testament. If you insist on reading modern western jurisprudence into the Gospels and the Apostles, you will be woefully misled. As stated above, the concept of “sin” should not be equivalent to “crime”. Your fleshly nature belongs to the Devil, so it’s only natural that, once you hear/read the Scripture, your sin nature wants everything God says is wrong (see Romans 7). How does that surprise anyone?

Without being acquainted with divine revelation, your sin nature is not provoked to argue with God. Thus, defilement that keeps you from God’s Presence is not an issue. But once you learn about God and His revelation, you have both an obligation to seek Him and a disability from doing so. You feel defiled because your heart is awakened by moral truth and knows to condemn your fleshly nature. But there’s nothing the flesh can do to escape that torment of guilt. Until you submit to the power of God to escape the dominance of the flesh, you have no hope of seeking peace with Him. The blood of Christ satisfies far better than the whole of the ritual law of Leviticus.

Mortality belongs to the flesh; Romans 5 doesn’t mention guilt but death as the result of Adam’s fall. If your spiritual nature is alive, then you still have to deal with the problems of the flesh, but you realize that any guilt is false, along with everything about the fleshly existence. Once you understand the necessity of living by the spirit and not by the flesh, the guilt no longer holds you back. The spirit must enslave the flesh, however bad a slave it might be. We can denounce our flesh before the Lord and seek peace with Him in our spiritual natures. We are accepted into the Covenant.

Thus, Jesus died on the Cross to bring us into the Covenant, which is now in His name. How did people go to Heaven before the Cross? The same way they do now: Divine Election. Jesus mentioned, at least in theory, someone in the “bosom of Abraham” under the Covenant of Moses – a symbolic reference of being invited to dine in God’s Presence in Heaven. Just about everything He and His followers said about Heaven was almost totally a matter of parables and symbols. What holds us together under His Kingdom is our spiritual identity.

If you can accept the definition of “sin” as disagreeing with God, then it should be obvious that sin is the flesh choosing the Devil – the original source of arguing with God – over your Father. It’s a partisan move, straying into the feudal domain of the Enemy. Coming back – repentance – means forsaking anything you might have gained from such betrayal and going through the protocols of restoring peace with the Father. The idea that sin is like a crime, wherein you stand condemned before some code of law, is from the Devil. It’s designed to alienate you from God, keeping the focus on your flesh. As long as you wallow in that false sense of guilt, you cannot come before God as His child.

There is no Original Sin, no “age of accountability” and no innocence to lose. Mortality of the fleshly nature is the problem that only our Risen Lord can overcome.

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Our God Provides

Posted on December 18, 2025 by ehurst

I’m always looking for really good explanations that I can share with others, and today I found one: “America’s Weimar Moment: What DoorDash Culture Says about Economic Decline“. Let me encourage you to read this analysis of culture and economics in America.

Here’s why it matters to us: People without the Covenant promises are at the mercy of every wind of sentiment. They are thermometers, reacting to the situation in predictable ways. Periods of economic decline coupled with social decline will drive people to act in ways that don’t make sense unless you understand despair.

The author traces through the history of western feudalism and how it rested on a rise in rent-seeking behavior. The social system becomes rigid as the wealthy classes lock in shared ownership of all productive resources. In the past, that was ownership of land. Today, it’s more abstract — ownership of financial systems. In the West, financial feudalism locks whole populations into stratified classes. There are rent-seekers and rent-payers, separate by a vast gulf that cannot be crossed.

People who are locked into the rent-paying class have no hope, so their actions betray despair. Why save and invest when you will not be allowed to keep anything? The American myth of rising by hard work is dead. Everything is priced on the basis that you cannot avoid debt. You are not allowed to escape debt. If you try, you’ll be punished.

Every time someone finds a market opportunity, the upper class will use government power to shut it down, or at least will allow the uppers to confiscate it. If you develop a talent the uppers can use, they’ll constrict you in ways to ensure you remain under their control. Part of that control includes favoring cultural expressions that herd people into frivolous consumption. Anything that might actually empower people is crushed by market controls.

It’s not as if Covenant promises don’t work, but that the system denies the Covenant exists. You and I should strive to see how the system works and keep portraying the truth. We cannot afford to slip and slide down into cultural habits the deny the Covenant.

Granted, the system will not allow us to exercise thrift, but the lifestyle definition of “thrift” was always bogus and materialistic in the first place. Rather, I’m pointing to the kind of choices that come from confidence in our God to provide for us. We invest in things we know we can use for God’s glory.

We don’t splash money on poke bowls (I don’t like raw fish, anyway). It’s not a question of whether we see a way out of the system. The way out is not getting wrapped up in this world in the first place. The rent-seekers can’t own us, only some measure of our fleshly existence. We are not trapped in their world; this will all be over soon enough.

Meanwhile, our God is in control. It just so happens, as noted in the linked article on RT, the system is growing rigid at precisely the wrong time, when the whole foundation is in doubt. The reason we never see the fictional dystopian nightmares come to reality is because none of those systems can hold very long. Our current notional credit system assumes political structures that are static; no political system has ever been static for very long.

That’s the bait-n-switch the Devil uses to lure masses of humanity into destruction. Every system of human oppression rests on assumptions that are false. The Euro-centric socialist concept of importing third world workers en masse to keep labor costs low assumes Muslims never try to take over. Anyone with half of a brain cell knows Muslims always try to take over. When they do, everything will be rendered down to the third-world hell-holes they fled to reach Europe. Some of the member states know this; the EU will collapse when they pull out to avoid forced immigration. The current elite EU leadership will be lucky to survive another decade.

If anything, Trump and his friends aren’t working even half as quickly as they need on deportations to prevent the US from fracturing. The tariffs target political, not economic threats. The US economy will suffer shocks in the near future as the spiteful rent-seeking class will run out of room and their virtual assets evaporate. While no one knows exactly where the limits are, debt is not unlimited. Finally, because of how our economy rests wholly on consumer purchases, we risk a currency collapse and the loss of the US dollar’s “reserve currency” status for the world — OR — a halt to inflation that crushes the credit availability for consumers. Either way, consumer spending is already plunging on the margins, and that will spread like cancer into the center. The rent-seeking class is determined to crush consumer wages.

But our God provides for His Covenant people.

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Fuzzy Reality

Posted on December 16, 2025 by ehurst

Apparently this warrants further explanation: Factual accuracy is a peculiar obsession with western culture. It is by no means a biblical emphasis.

It seems I’m often reminding folks that this world is a deception in the first place. Our “reality” is not real. This world does not matter except as a staging ground for human eternity, however many of us make it to eternity. It is utterly impossible for humans to fully perceive all the pertinent facts. Everything is guesswork. All we really have is our experiences and perceptions. That notion that every human experiences events the same way is a lie from Hell.

You should not trust everything you experience, in the sense that your five senses plus reason will give you the whole story. Perception is not trustworthy. Ever hear of the Mandela Effect? There is no such thing as objective facts. The Unseen Realm keeps reaching into our human existence and tweaking things, and very often you would never know. At other times, your memories may be left intact after Eternity has changed something. This is part of our mortal existence.

It’s not as if I’m suggesting that you can make up anything you want when talking to people. The problem is you simply may not be fully aware of all pertinent data, may not remember it clearly, and it simply may have shifted without you realizing it. The best you can do is report your impressions when it comes to that. Honesty is not a question of accuracy but of your intent.

The biblical viewpoint is that you should focus on the moral issues at all times, not the “objective facts”. The Hebrew people did not suffer from the western obsession with this world. The Hellenistic outlook of the West assumes there is no Spirit Realm, no moral truth. It is inherently materialistic, assuming that this world is all there is. If you insist on operating on that standard, then you have denied the Word of God. His Word is personal; it’s a Person. Christ Himself would snicker at the western obsession with “propositional truth” — it’s an oxymoron.

Thus, Jesus warned that there were people in His own nation who had twisted moral truth to the point that giving them an honest answer would provoke violence (“pearls before swine”) because they had no idea what to do with truth. It’s a sort of “tell them what they want to hear” if can’t avoid them. On a less confrontational level, you need to speak to people where you believe they are, in terms they can use. Only those closest to you in shared covenant faith are worthy of genuine blunt honesty. Everyone else gets a provisional answer to help them make decisions. That’s why Jesus didn’t answer Pilate’s queries directly, but gave him something he could work with.

Facts are not on the same level with sacred truth. Stop treating accuracy in data as somehow holy. You may not be able to perceive the data. You probably won’t remember it accurately. It’s unlikely you can convey that data accurately in every setting. Some people in this world are NPCs (non-playing characters) for your mission, and it doesn’t matter a great deal what you tell them. However, the real issue is your faithfulness in compassion, determined to do what you can to represent your Lord by loving His people. Along with all the rest of Creation, even NPCs warrant compassion.

That’s as close as we can get to ultimate truth in human language.

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