Likely Scenario: Financial Collapse

Posted on February 20, 2024 by ehurst

I’m hardly the only one to sense that some kind of apocalypse is coming. But the online chatter about it is loaded with nonsense, and it’s been a chore to wade through all the improbable garbage to pick out what’s actually realistic. It left me with a lot of bits and pieces, and I wasn’t sure what to do with some of them. They didn’t seem to fit together into a cohesive scenario, yet each one seemed to me quite plausible by itself.

There have been some attempts to link stuff together, but this is the first I’ve come across that looks plausible. In essence, a false flag would shut down enough of the electrical grid or Internet in order to freeze all electronic assets. Naturally, that means a “bank holiday”. The banks would simply confiscate all assets in some fashion, such that they at least hold it ransom for our compliance with the globalist final take-over. The author notes that several regional Fed banks are already technically insolvent, which is all the excuse they need to justify such a move.

I recommend you scan down the length of the article to see the author’s outline. It points out the one power individual states have to protect us, and he notes that some have already begun to use it: The UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) is the key to the take-over, but by law, each state must individually ratify and maintain it. Each state has the authority to pull out of it. The author sees various Red States already taking background action to withdraw from it before the ugly moment arrives. This is the key leverage item I had not seen before, but I was sure there had to be some way for the states to refuse to comply. I’m sure there are others I don’t know about, but this one.

I trusted my heart-led instincts before I had the concrete knowledge. This simply verifies what my convictions had already told me. Now, as a practical issue, I suggest you start collecting some cash and hide it somewhere. If you have a lot of money and will need it during a shut-down, you should consider things like precious metals or other instruments of mass exchange. If you have room for storage, think about barter goods and supplies or tools you’ll need while the Net/power is out.

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In Christ

Posted on February 18, 2024 by ehurst

Most people choke on Ephesians 1:3-14. It’s very dense, and frankly not good writing. People either gloss over it or get bogged down in the precise meaning of the grammar. One of the biggest issues for debate is trying to punctuate the phrases to discern how they flow. Because of this, and because of a general lack of Hebrew mythology, too many people miss the point Paul was making.

As noted in yesterday’s lesson on it, verses 3-6 are about the Father and His eternal perspective on things. His empire is all of Creation, and it includes a range of existence and realms we cannot even imagine. His ambit is the whole of everything He created, and when we talk about Him, the focus is primarily within the context of Eternity and all the things beyond our ken, though we do have tiny mentions of such things here and there.

Verses 7-12 are about His Son. Heiser tells us that in Hebrew mythology, the Son is an aspect of the Father, in the sense that He is His living will, the expression of His own heart. In Hebrew thinking, this is the meaning of “the Word of God” — it’s the expression of His character. Now, the Elohim Council is taken for granted in most Hebrew writing, along with the whole background of their dispute with God about His decision to create humans and to give them an exalted position above the rest of the natural world. At the Tower of Babel, God assigned a nation to each of His Council members, making them satraps, as it were, over realms.

He let them run things to suit themselves (with limitations we cannot comprehend), seizing all the glory they wished from the humans involved. As things turned out, they didn’t play this very well.

Then, He set out to build His own nation by snatching one man out of one of the Council realms: Abraham. He began implementing a covenant with Abraham that worked on a level above mere human activity. He opened for Abraham the faculty of faith that reaches into Eternity. His covenant with Abraham was a spiritual covenant. He promised to give Abraham’s descendants — a select group from just one of his sons — a national covenant.

We know from Galatians that his national covenant was merely a passage for something far greater. The whole point was to mask from the Elohim Council His intentions. Every time you see a reference to God keeping secrets or the mystery of His plan/will, this is what it refers to. God outsmarted and outplayed the opposition members of His Elohim Council. They got distracted attacking the nation of Israel, thinking they had this in the bag. But through that national covenant, He bought for His own will/word — more or less a separate entity in Hebrew mythology — as the ruler of a new empire that was not rooted in any national identity. Human governments, prompted by the elohim, could do nothing about this.

Instead, God had elected a bunch of individuals from every nation on earth. He had them all marked out before He even got into this game, and sprang this surprise on them when Jesus died on the Cross. In their efforts to mess with earthly Israel, they got themselves committed and could not back out when God suddenly snatched members of their various nations without even activating the human political procedures.

Thus, the folks now predestined “in Christ” had a dual identity. Their fleshly lives remained under the various political regimes, but their transcendent spiritual identity took over everything they did.

Then, in verses 13-14, He sealed those Elect by His own Spirit, so that the elohim could not really do anything to them. The elohim were restrained by the protections of a law covenant, but the people were not subject to any such law. Despite all the maneuvering and blinding lies, these humans were granted an eternal identity. The Fall had many effects, but this spiritual seal reversed the critical issue of access to the Tree of Life. We all have a promise to eat from it at the end of this life.

As far as the Elohim Council is concerned, the worst thing about this whole deal was that the human Elect could also claim God’s promises for this world. The Devil and his allies on the Elohim Council can only do their best to keep people from embracing the inheritance of Eternity while here in this world. They can do nothing about the eternal destiny of the Elect.

Thus, the whole battle for the individual humans is to overcome the flesh by the power of the Holy Spirit, and start acting according to their spiritual identity as citizens of the empire “in Christ”.

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NT Doctrine — Ephesians 1

Posted on February 17, 2024 by ehurst

The final chapter of Galatians was encouragement but virtually no doctrine. We move on to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians as a letter to be shared across Asia Minor. Thus, there are no personal notes to anyone specifically by name. By the time Paul was in Roman custody, Ephesus had already started to become the center of gravity for Christian religion, as things were heating up in Judea between the Jews and Rome, and Jewish Christians were fleeing. Writing from his confinement in Rome, the single major issue behind this letter was the ongoing division between Jewish and Gentile Christians.

Both factions suffered a powerful tendency to rely on the flesh. Jews typically never got past their “chosen” identity and cliquish behavior demonstrating discomfort with Gentiles in general. The Gentiles struggled to latch onto the necessity of moral purity in their conduct. In this first chapter, Paul begins tearing down the wall between them by emphasizing their new covenant identity as Christians. He begins using the constant refrain of being “in Christ” particularly as a reference to this citizenship.

It’s important to notice that verses 3-14 are one long sentence. It comes close to a Trinitarian statement, in that there is a section about the Father, another about the Son, and third about the Holy Spirit. He offers praise that the Father chose us in eternity, the Son redeemed them (and us) in their recent history, and the Holy Spirit came to lock us into that redemption in our individual personal pasts. It’s a doctrinal tour de force in just a few lines.

He starts with see several conjugations of the Greek word translated into English as “bless” coming from a root denoting someone or something worthy of adoration. We and the Father naturally find each other adorable. He chose us, each marked out before this wretched world was begun, with the intention of making us as pure as Passover lambs. He committed Himself to adopt us His own children because He loved us, joint heirs with Christ. This mass adoption is a part of His glory; any earthly ruler would count the size, ability and prosperity of his tribe as a primary manifestation of his glory. He gave us each other, our talents and adorned us with His grace as a fitting bequest to His Heir.

Regarding the Son, it was His awful price in blood that bought us, making us welcome into the Covenant. With this adoption covenant came unspeakable privileges that He willingly gives, simply because Jesus could see a vast empire would be His. The Father had kept secret His plan to offer His Son a realm of people who could be and build a vast wealth and power. All of this had to wait until the right moment when the Son could inherit all the power and authority of Heaven and Earth. As citizens of this empire (“in Christ”) we become God’s claimed nation (versus the nations claimed by the Elohim Council after the Tower of Babel). This is what “predestination” means — marked for seizure from the other nations for a special purpose in which God never fails. Paul specifically points to his readers as part of the first generation of citizens in this new empire, a very high privilege as the first of many generations to glorify the Messiah.

Thus, when the readers of this letter first heard the gospel message, and were moved to believe in Christ, they were granted the seal of the Holy Spirit. Since there’s no way they could experience all that comes with that in this life, it’s as if that first generation are on layaway until everything is completed and all the saints God has claimed can be brought into the fold. The Blood has yet to be applied to future souls waiting to be born into this glorious empire.

Catch your breath now.

There in his Roman confinement, Paul heard from messengers how the churches in Asia Minor had progressed to the point they had learned to submit to Christ as their Lord and to recognize their fellow citizens of Heaven. It caused him to celebrate the unspeakable blessing of having been a part of that. He kept praying for more of the same; may the Lord continue working in them.

May they continue embracing the convictions of their hearts as their guide to understanding the full privilege and duty as members of Christ’s empire, in particular, the divine gifts of the Holy Spirit working in their bodies. That’s the same power that raised Christ from the dead, and which placed Him on His throne. Every power and authority in Heaven and Earth is now subject to His whims. That includes domains in the Spirit Realm that no human can imagine.

He is our Lord; we are His body. We are His hands and feet throughout the whole earth.

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More on Game Parable

Posted on February 16, 2024 by ehurst

Yesterday’s post garnered a lot of attention, more than normal on this blog. Aside from the questions and answers in the comment section, several other questions arose and it all warrants a review together.

The obvious point is that our human mortal existence is not real. There’s a whole lot of human decisions that simply do not matter in the long run. Everything humans do individually and in the aggregate will be wiped away, forgotten in Eternity — with the exception of our efforts to bring the Creator glory. If we make this our priority, then it naturally changes our focus in this life. The only reason we live is to glorify the Lord.

It’s not that we do nothing but sit around and sing praise songs. There are actions we must take in order to live here. Rather, the way in which we do all the same things other humans do in this life are shaped by this one priority: We are supposed to live according to His revealed agenda. Our words and actions should portray this different orientation. But there are some complications to this.

I’ve mentioned in the past a Covenant of Creation. This is not noted by name in the Bible; it’s just a supposition. It posits that all Creation owes glory to the Creator. There’s not much more to it than that. Others have posited a Covenant of Adam, as well. I haven’t referred to it, but insofar as there might be such a thing, it’s represented by the Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden. It marks us out as fallen, and our sole duty is to return to Eden. We do have the formal declaration where God remonstrates with Adam and Eve after they hid from Him. It’s an outline of what we can expect in a mortal existence, but the summary is the Flaming Sword. I suggested that, if we were to nudge this into the parable I drew up, then the Flaming Sword is the operating system on which the game software runs. This is the sole reason we have a simulation; we are not in the Garden any more, not in an eternal form of existence.

Yes, there are flaws and problems with this parable. It cannot answer all the questions. It was never meant to do so. As the old saw goes, “You cannot make a parable walk on all fours.” That’s a parable in itself. The whole point of a parable is to indicate something worthy of contemplation about things that cannot possibly fit into words in the first place. We are inside the game simulation; this is not reality.

It’s not as if we can avoid getting involved in human affairs. The whole thing is aimed at reducing your emotional connection to this world. We need to break down the barrier between the game and reality as much as possible to turn our attention to the real world outside the simulation. Play the game because that’s how you end it for yourself; play the game according to its own rules, but with an eye to the proposition that it’s only a game.

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Game Parable

Posted on February 15, 2024 by ehurst

Here’s a parable: This world is a game, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Some characters belong to the game; covenant people are just playing it.

I’ve been contemplating the alternate realities of inside versus outside the Covenant. We meet the rest of humanity in a fallen world, a sort of virtual reality that isn’t the real thing. They are rooted in a place of law covenants, while we are rooted in an eternal existence by grace. They belong to this false reality; it’s all they have. When it goes, they will go with it.

We have symbolic language, parables declaring to us some conceptual framing of these things, but nobody can declare to you in propositional terms exactly how and why God decides who belongs to this world and who is marked for rising above it. The only thing really clear to us is that there is a difference. Creation does not respond to us the same as them. We have connections outside this reality that the rest of the world cannot comprehend. They don’t have access to a keyboard and mouse, or a game controller.

In a discussion, someone asserted that it’s a Christian duty to have children under our Christian identity so that we can take over the world. That is so loaded with nonsense that it’s hard to parse from a spiritual point of view. Obviously, this is the words of someone obsessed with conquering this world on its own terms. They want to “change the world”. It won’t happen.

To embrace that choice puts you outside the Covenant of Christ. It does put you squarely into the territory of the Covenant of Noah, though. Over the years I’ve written a great deal about the Covenant of Noah, and some good friends still don’t get the relationship between Christ and Noah.

Noah is this world. It’s how things work now; the Covenant of Moses is no longer in effect. Moses is an empty shell, an artifact worthy of examination, but having no life or power. It’s game code from a previous edition. Moses is how we understand Noah. In that sense, you can learn from Moses how Noah works; the differences are within our grasp. I’ve written a little about that.

But Noah is confined to this life. It points to something better and higher, same as Moses did, but is not that higher thing in itself. The Covenant of Christ is that higher thing. Christ is not rooted in this world, but in Heaven. It adds a whole different dimension, connecting a higher reality to this simulation in which we live. We are real outside of this world. The Covenant of Christ tells us how to break out of the simulation.

Thus, we learn from Noah the rules that confine the players in this simulation. They might be aware of the higher reality in some sense, but they cannot possibly understand it. We are granted the enlightenment to understand it if we will. We have to think outside the game, use capabilities that are not confined by the simulation.

But back to this so-called “Christian duty” — it’s a reflection of the rules of the game. It not a uniquely Christian idea. It works that way under Noah; it works that way for humans who belong to this world. Christians have a different approach based on entirely different assumptions.

Growing the Kingdom of Christ is a matter of spiritual birth, not natural birth. Just because you grow up in a Christian family, it doesn’t mean you’ll be a Christian, depending on how you use the terminology. The definition of “Christian” is ambiguous in our vernacular. It means “following Christ” as your Lord. The idea is that you are wholly His, a feudal subject. It implies eternal spiritual birth, but in practice that isn’t always the case. It’s a popular rhetorical device to insist on a pure definition of the term, but in practice it simply does not exist. We have no way to verify; all we have is limited evidence to support a working assumption about whether someone is a true family member of Christ.

The simulation allows for high-functioning bots that don’t appear to be NPCs (non-playing characters) in this game. Get used to it. Some of them will be your earthly family members, people you grow to love or maybe hate, but they will be significant in your life. You are obliged by the conduct of the game to invest some strong emotional ties to some people, and you cannot verify whether they have an identity outside the game.

A couple of my siblings didn’t manifest any evidence of an eternal identity. They didn’t even do a good job of playing by Noah, much less Christ. Nothing I say or do changes the situation. Yet, I must confess it was the influence of my parents that brought me to Christ. They didn’t help too much beyond the introduction, but my point is that you cannot count on a Christian identity resulting in a changed world.

Raising children in a Christian home is no guarantee at all. We are obliged by the game to try, but it’s a crap shoot and the simulation produces varying random results. You can improve your chances by building a covenant community, but the difference is marginal. There is no apparent history of anyone actually trying to do that. Nothing about the mainstream church comes close enough. Have you seen how church people live, how the kids grow up mostly no different from the rest of the world? Do you understand that church girls are more likely to fornicate than those outside? Ask any PUA; church is the best place to find their prey.

No, the growth of genuine eternal family in Christ is not by fleshly birth, but by spiritual birth. The whole of God’s Covenant people could simply stop having babies and we’d still grow from people converting, people who grew up in non-Christian homes. And you see, that’s the uniquely Christian answer. The way to grow a covenant community is mostly a matter of Christ touching those who were born into the game, who didn’t know they were eternal or Elect.

In absolute terms, the limiting factor for growth of the Kingdom is how many Elect are out there who don’t yet know their identity. For us as players in the game, we simply participate in God’s programming. He’s the developer who decides what happens, in the sense that the algorithms are all His doing, along with live adjustments to suit His tastes. He’s watching the game server closely. The most we can decide is the degree to which we participate and take advantage of the algorithms.

Trying to raise children with a strong covenant background is a good use of the Noah algorithm, but it’s not a uniquely Christian play. We conquer because of all the NPCs who don’t have any existence outside the game; they have no capacity to recognize a higher reality. We can come out with a good score in the end, but those who belong to the game will end when the game ends.

Addenda: Someone asked if I can fit the Devil and the Elohim Council into this parable. The Elohim Council are hired technicians, systems administrators with no skin in the game. Their permissions are limited; only God has root access. However, the Devil and his allies are trying to skim off the profits from the game.

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They Will Fall

Posted on February 13, 2024 by ehurst

Basic biblical truth: No human political construct will last very long, at any scale. From a clan to a whole civilization, none of them can possibly last very long. Given the nature of our unstoppable decline to the final apocalypse and Christ’s return, the time line of collapse will shorten progressively. God will not allow humans to build something that excludes Him. More to the point, He does not tolerate structures that ignore His Word.

That still leaves a lot of room to operate. He still favors and grants relative stability and longevity to any political construct that honors Him. Get the picture: Israel was a special case. God redeemed the most difficult nation that ever arose in human history as a special demonstration of His Word. Their national covenant was unique to them; it could not possibly apply to any other people. But it signals that a covenant with Him is always possible. To the rest of the world, the Covenant of Noah has always held out the promise of stability and hope for a future.

It’s never been tried, so far as we can determine. It appears there have been a few partial attempts, but they are lost in the mists of pre-history. We have only legends and hints. The point is that it hasn’t been tried in a very long time on any significant scale.

This whole business of covenants assumes a community. You can discern guidance for individual living, but the whole point is to build something bigger than any individual. It’s part of the fundamental nature of revelation that the individual is the foundation of faith, but the community is always the primary objective. The discipline of dealing with oneself in the context of other fallen people is the whole point.

The individual must strive for community as the goal. Realistically, you should expect it to fail often. You should expect that the vast majority of people you encounter will balk at the demands of the Covenant. They’ll demand everything except what they really need from you and from God. We are pulling people away from the various societies and cultures of our world, and it’s no small jump. Yes, some are worse than others, and the American society is among the worst. Still, everything you do has the goal of enticing someone away from their false dying world into one that could live.

Over and over again, the Lord has promised through His prophets that if only we could seize the vision, be seized by the vision, we could harvest a wealth of peace and joy. Jesus said that He would be manifested in community in ways that individuals cannot experience alone: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name…” Every such gathering is a church, never mind whether anyone recognizes it officially. It’s a church, a manifestation of the Lord, for as long as it endures.

Leaning how to relate to other humans in accordance with the Covenant is our path to this. The whole of the Law has only ever been to love your God as He requires and your covenant brother/sister as yourself. Those two commandments are the two edges of the same sword to cuts down all the lies of Hell. Get your hands on that, and all the hordes of evil will fall.

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Parish Fellowship

Posted on February 12, 2024 by ehurst

Yesterday, our online community met via Skype video. Four showed up. It was good to see each other that way, as close to meeting face-to-face as we are likely to do for a while, yet. Some of us had to work out some computer kinks, but we got it working and now we all know what to expect.

We’d like to make this a regular event. We’d like more of the community to join us. For the time being, we don’t publicize it outside of the forum. You can always join the forum anytime, and those who do will get the inside scoop. It doesn’t require you to install any software, just use a browser that can handle the protocols and click the link. It’s just an open and informal chat for now. There’s no particular reason for adding a bunch of rules unless it explodes to more than a dozen.

I’m also hoping to make this a regular means of contact for other purposes, as well. I want you to be able see me when we talk. It’s not a secret: my Skype address is br073n@outlook.com . This is something that becomes more valuable as we slide deeper into tribulation. It will become most precious about the time it becomes impossible for whatever reason.

At any rate, if you are one of us — forced to exist on the fringes of the mainstream for whatever reason — we’re here for you.

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Leaving Yourself Open to Manipulation

Posted on February 11, 2024 by ehurst

The guidance of Scripture is not that hard to fathom. The real question is whether you believe strongly enough to obey it. I’ve said it often enough: The issue is not success in the real world. The issue is making peace with God regardless how He wants to use you and your actions to testify of His glory. Nothing is better for us in the long run than peace with Him.

A part of the oppression built into our current system is gate-keeping. That’s pretty much the whole point of John mentioning the Mark of the Beast in Revelation. The system seeks to make us dependent, and part of that dependency is convincing you that you cannot survive without their provision. They seek in many ways to foster a desire — an addiction — for things they alone can offer.

I’m convinced that, once we understand the underlying theory, God can guide His people into specific applications. Sometimes it’s useful to share specific tactics as a way of illustrating the theory, but the focus is you having inside of you the frame of reference that allows you to glorify God in your specific choices.

Thus, the answer is to recognize the tactics of oppression. To what goal are they trying to herd us? There are times when it’s alright to play along, if that puts you in the place for your mission and calling. However, in a broad general sense, the proper goal of Biblical Law is building a way of life that is holy unto the Lord, a measure of separation and distinction. This is the symbolism of the lamb’s blood on the door frames of Israel during the Passover event in Egypt. We want to prepare a context in which God’s wrath passes over us when He’s destroying the works of sin. Alternatively, we want to build up the hedge that keeps the Enemy away.

Thus, to the degree possible, we need to opt out of the mainstream system and create our own parallel provision for life. That way, their gate-keeping won’t affect us.

Now, I realize that it’s very possible we could all come together and agree on certain specifics about how to build our alternative world. We could learn a lot from the Amish, the Roma (Gypsies), or even modern Orthodox Jews. Not so much their motives and specifics, but in the broader image of refusing to assimilate, and always seeking a way around the system. However, I am convinced that we are far better off implementing our societies in smaller sizes, not such massive wholesale uniformity.

Our one criticism is that each of those three examples is how little variation there is between the various centers of their populations. That’s a human tendency, and not the way God leads in His Word. They focus on uniformity in the wrong areas. That has been the subject of hundreds of posts on this blog.

But today I was inspired by events in Canada, how the protesters remain dependent on the system to fight the system. I applaud their efforts, but I am skeptical about their prospects. One court victory does not give me much hope that the system is not essentially turned against the people. A major point of all this activity is that the protesters remain vulnerable to the leveraging of all the things on which they depend for their daily lives.

It’s not as if everything could be replaced; that’s not practical. I’m not convinced that they are looking at the few things they could do to become more independent of the system. Yes, I know that’s the way Canadians are, socialist to the core and believing very much in democratic government. But we are only slightly less dependent here in the US. The only good answers have been the rumblings of smaller regional governments defying the central government. There’s a very good reason to promote local governments that are willing to fight back.

But in a much broader sense for us as covenant people, we need to pray long and hard about what we depend on, and over which we have zero control. How much can we break from that system?

On a much more personal level, I’ve run into this issue a lot lately. I’m compelled by my own body to reduce sugar and sodium consumption. Do you realize just how hard it is to find food that hasn’t had way too much of those two items added? Think about this: a simple flour tortilla has almost 600 mg of sodium. That’s about a quarter of what’s recommended for the whole day (2300 mg). Check the labels in any grocery store; you can scarcely escape added salt. Even if you are careful, the mindlessly added salt to our food supply will guarantee you hit over 5000 mg daily, and that means high blood pressure. Just a single meal at a restaurant can carry that much.

I don’t care why they do it; it’s going to kill me. It means I have to cook far more from scratch, and that means in batches that I freeze or otherwise put away for later consumption. For someone with all the distractions of my daily calling and mission, that’s a big time sink. I don’t really enjoy that kind of activity, but I know how to do it and have no choice.

By the way, my conversations with my primary care physician reveals that the vast majority of the US population suffers from this salt sensitivity, and they do nothing about it except consume palliatives like diuretics, which are a danger in themselves. People die early every year because they can’t be bothered to watch their salt intake, and thus can’t be bothered to demand changes in the food supply.

Thus, doctors say that hypertension is the silent killer. Most people don’t notice it. I’m trying to become sensitive to it. I want to give back to my Father the full life of service I can render to His glory.

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NT Doctrine — Galatians 5

Posted on February 10, 2024 by ehurst

In the previous chapter, Paul pointed out that we should not seek to place ourselves under the guardianship of the Law. Christ died on the Cross to claim His inheritance, and that’s you and I. He ended the Law and set us all free, including Jews who embrace Him as the Messiah. The purpose of the Law was to drive Israel to the Messiah, and in the process to draw us Gentiles to Him. But it’s a one-way transaction; Christ does not drive people back to the Law. In Christ, we are set free from that regime to find the Father’s favor in His Son. The Law was never meant for Gentiles, but the Messiah was.

Christ set us free for a reason: so we could walk freely in His favor. This is a personal relationship with Him, not a highly ritualized subservience. The rituals are not part of His reign, and that includes circumcision. It’s not for Gentiles. If Gentiles enter into that dead realm, it owns them wholly and they are no longer part of Christ’s realm. They have walked back into the realm of flesh and death. We need not wonder fearfully whether God will accept us. The Holy Spirit assures us that we are accepted by Him. The condition of our fleshly body is not considered; it’s a matter of faith in Christ. His love replaces fear.

When Paul last saw them, the Christians in Galatia were running free and easy. Who loaded them down with burdens to make them drag around so slowly? That load of nonsense did not come from Christ. All it takes is just a tiny little bit of deception to stop you in your tracks. The “burden” of Christ is like wings that speed you up. Let the fools who are preaching that burdensome nonsense face their own judgment; don’t help them carry their garbage bags around.

Paul didn’t preach a Jewish identity to them. If he had, the Jewish authorities would not have persecuted him. He wouldn’t be preaching the Cross; there would be no reason for Jews to choke on the Cross as the final sacrifice God accepts to end the entire body of ritual law. Instead of cutting around (“circumcision”), let the Judaizers cut themselves off (emasculation). Paul suggests mockingly that, if a little cutting helps, how about a whole lot?

Granted, the wrong kind of freedom will also become a burden that kills. It’s the paradox of faith that it sets us free to voluntarily bind ourselves to loving each other as Christ did. Besides, rabbis had been teaching for at least a couple of centuries that loving your neighbor as yourself is the summary of the whole Law of Moses. Get that right and everything else will take care of itself. But if you follow the example of the Judaizers, you’ll end up like predators, taking advantage of each other. This would destroy the churches.

The Spirit and the fleshly nature are natural enemies; there can be no peaceful coexistence. One will rule or the other, and the Law is for the flesh, not for the Spirit. Obeying the Spirit transcends the law code. Paul lists the kinds of stuff that comes with the flesh. It’s power is nonexistent and desperately needs the Law, because it does not know how to do good. It can only destroy, not build up.

By contrast, the power of the Spirit produces a host of glorious behaviors that take you outside the reach of the Law. Belonging to Christ nails the flesh to the Cross. Law cannot do that, because flesh refuses to surrender. You can walk in the Law and stay in the flesh, or you can embrace the new life in the Spirit and live by His character.

Yet again: The typical character of Judaizers was to be snarky, always jockeying for position while seeking to undercut each other. That’s what they made of the Law. Christians don’t need that stuff.

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The Paradox of Faith

Posted on February 9, 2024 by ehurst

You would think something like this is simple. Broadly, the psychology profession regards faith as something built into the human psyche. The message that profession has gotten from Christian religion is that faith is a miracle, not a normative human trait.

The two are talking past each other.

First off, most psychologists deny the existence of the heart as a separate faculty. They simply assume that whatever the heart does is part of the brain. This is due to how hard it is to estimate what the heart does from a human scientific point of view. You can observe the effects of the heart, but you cannot observe the activity of the heart if you don’t recognize your own heart. There’s an a priori rejection without ever seriously investigating the question.

Be that as it may, they are correct that humans do natively possess the means to invest commitment in something or someone past the point of death. It’s part of human capabilities to die for something that really matters to them. That’s faith, and we’ve seen it too many times in human history to deny it.

But beyond the obvious, for believers, God Himself has said that faith is a universal human trait. Consider: We can take for granted that not everyone in the Nation of Israel was spiritually Elect. Too many of them lacked any anchor to their souls, and died in sin. Yet, God said quite flatly that every Israeli could obey Him if they would. Deuteronomy 30:14, despite the clumsy wording as it appears in most English translations, is God’s way of saying that every heart is capable of obeying Him in full faith. The heart, as a faculty of will, is capable of understanding and obeying the Law, if not God Himself; it’s well within reach.

What the New Testament says about faith as a miracle of God refers specifically to faith in Christ, not faith in general.

Here’s the thing: New Testament faith in Christ is faith in a Person. You can commit yourself to principles and a frame of reference, but you cannot commit to Christ the Person if you don’t know Him personally. That’s the whole point of talking about the Presence of the Holy Spirit; if He is not alive in your soul, then you cannot know Christ. You cannot commit to an unknown, and you cannot know Him without His Spirit.

And the long story of the Bible as a whole is that you cannot receive His Spirit without Election. Every human has a heart; not every human is elect.

We’ve tried to cover this before in our various Radix Fidem community teachings, but the whole question of predestination is confused in our minds because there is predestination in this life, and there is predestination in Eternity. The two are related in ways impossible to state in human language, but they are not the same thing. In Romans 8 & 9, Paul weaves the two together because the point is not explaining the concept, but declaring it. God can assert His will over human behavior on this earth, and certainly asserts His will in eternal Election.

Paul does not pretend to explain why, only how it works out in human experience. The only question Paul answers is that you had better not try to hold God accountable on human terms for things like fairness. Some have a fun life; some live and die in misery. Some go to Heaven; some go to Hell. That’s the way it is. Stop carping about it and get on with your own obedience for the Lord.

Now, this makes no sense at all intellectually, but if you are elect, it makes a certain kind of sense in the heart. Do you see this? Without that overwhelming power of the Holy Spirit, you cannot see it. People who reject this assertion do not have the guidance of the Holy Spirit. He could well be present in their hearts, but He is not reigning there as Lord. But either way, only the Elect can embrace this truth fully, because only the Elect can know Him as the Living Truth.

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