Calling Out to the Unseen Elect

Posted on January 25, 2024 by ehurst

If you don’t embrace and absorb the message of Michael Heiser’s Unseen Realm, you cannot gain a proper biblical perspective on human politics.

There is no scholarly excuse for rejecting his thesis; the evidence is simply overwhelming. The Hebrew people up to the time of Jesus clearly believed in the Divine Council of elohim serving in God’s courts in Heaven. They believed in a multitude of heavenly creatures; they believed that some of them fell from their exalted positions and gave birth to the Nephilim (regardless of the mechanism). They believed that all the creatures we call “demons” are the disembodied spirits of these Nephilim. This kind of mythology colors the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament.

If we don’t buy into it, we will not be able to understand the gospel. Nor will we be able to understand the political mess of the world today.

If you can grasp the concept of the Elohim Council as rather like Persian satraps serving the Persian emperor, then you’ll understand how God does not micromanage things the way most western minds instinctively assume He would. It’s not a question of what He notices, but how He established procedures under His authority. It doesn’t make sense to us, maybe, but it is what He revealed as His “management style” in His Word. At the Tower of Babel, God divided humanity among his Elohim Council members, and then raised up the Nation of Israel as His own personal domain.

They failed to follow through on their end of the Covenant. The modern State of Israel is not biblical Israel. Rather, Jews in general, and Israel in particular, are the people of Satan (“synagogue of Satan”). They rejected the Messiah and the inherent plan for their nation. Their patron deity is the Devil; God passed the earthly nation over to Satan at the Cross. The Jews are Satan’s personal property.

The religion of Islam is beholden to some other pagan deity, and because of the partisan divisions within Islam, the net effect is that they serve multiple pagan gods. This is how the elohim rule as God’s satraps among the various Islamic countries. The Elohim Council does business that way among human nations and kingdoms. Every human political entity on this earth is captive of one or more Elohim Council members. While many of the council members are allied with Satan, they aren’t wholly subservient. Further, some of the satraps aren’t fully onboard with the Devil’s agenda, and may be somewhat more friendly to God’s agenda. Yet, not a single human nation belongs to God.

Thus, we recognize that the bombing of Gaza is a moral wrong on one level, but it’s just routine affairs on another. If you get all wrapped up in promoting Zionism or denouncing it, you are playing into the hands of the Devil and his allies on the Elohim Council. Do not oversimplify things; don’t be a fool who embraces linear logic and false dichotomies. Both sides are evil for different reasons.

The same goes for America’s invasive presence in Syria, Iraq and just about anywhere else on the planet: it serves a pagan deity. America is not a covenant nation by any definition in the Bible; it is a pagan nation serving several different members of the Elohim Council. Our government is incapable of doing good except by accident.

Human slaughter is evil on a basic level; you cannot engage in it individually with a clean conscience before God. (It’s a matter above any individual authority.) However, there is another level of consideration here — there are Elohim Council members at work. They build nations that are generally evil or misguided, controlling vast numbers of defiled people whose lives are forfeit under God’s justice. Whether or not they include any Elect is really not the issue, since the Elect go to Heaven regardless (from our level of consideration). Rather, the tragedy is that some members of God’s Elect never get to harvest their Covenant blessings, except to the limited degree they embrace the Covenant individually.

It’s a tragedy that Creation must endure the injustice of ignoring the Covenant, along with the injustice of human slaughter. It’s also par for the course. This is quantum logic, processing and evaluating on multiple levels. If all you see is the injustice on one level, then you’ll get emotionally invested in a lie. You’ll be distracted and not see the hand of God and your Covenant duty to Him.

Everything we seek to do by conviction should be understood as a matter of the Great Commission. You are supposed to infiltrate the domains of the rebellious Elohim Council and help to free the Elect to know Christ as their Lord in this life. That means you only pretend to give human allegiance to various human authorities. This is our commission from Christ. They cannot own your heart, only some portion of your fleshly performance.

It does have some parallels in our understanding of espionage only because the non-elect people around us are incapable of understanding how it all works. They aren’t privy to the secrets in the sense of the big picture. It’s not that we are hiding our ultimate loyalty; quite the contrary (in most cases). But they have no capability of understanding the balance point for us internally. They will be perplexed if they are paying attention (though at any given time, most do not pay attention). That’s the opening for our witness of Christ.

So, serve your earthly masters with excellence. That’s a part of your witness. Play along when your convictions permit, and don’t be afraid of conflict that arises from obeying your convictions. That’s part of your witness; expect those conflicts to arise. Invest yourself in the witness, not the human career goals. The Elohim Council members, masquerading as deities, will not appreciate our invasive presence in their schemes, but there is not a thing they can do to prevent God speaking through our witness and calling out to His Elect wherever we find them.

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How Can We Help Them?

Posted on January 23, 2024 by ehurst

This is a pastoral note: Don’t depend on the system to fix itself. The system must break. Further, when it breaks, the American people will not be in control of what replaces the current system. Nothing in this world can restore the imaginary system that never existed in the first place. We have always been ruled by the elite, and always will be.

I’ve long ago grown weary of commentators insisting that justice will come some day. That’s the basic mission of Q-anon: to keep the activists busy supporting the system. The ruling elite will break the system in their own way and timing, and don’t want the process getting away from them.

Kunstler does a really good job of exposing information we need to understand how things work. The whole point of the false-flag “January 6 insurrection” was to derail Congress looking into the false election results. They never went back to that topic, and likely never will. But knowing that and recognizing what we ought to do about it are two different things. Kunstler’s advice is based on false hopes. There is no cavalry of good guys riding to the rescue. Nothing will be done. Wittingly or not, Kunstler serves as controlled opposition.

The coming civil war will not work out as most people expect. That’s because the hype about this civil war is so pervasive that most people believe lies about it. There will be bloodshed, but it will hardly be the main event. The main event will be a break up of the Union of States. But the whole thing is already a real mess, and it will not be clear to us what’s really the source of conflict. State governments are already deep into posturing and deceiving about the underlying issues. Everyone wants to manipulate public sentiment to support the plans they’ve already made.

In other words, there’s really not much you can do about all of that. Boiled down to its essence, the one thing you can prepare for is an upsurge in petty crime. Don’t arm yourself for revolution; arm yourself for home defense. By extension, I’m thinking and praying about neighborhood security. Not those silly committees dominated by Karens, but the real deal of recognizing that you and your neighbors must work together as much as possible.

Get a feel for the folks living around you who can’t be trusted. Make allowances for it. Don’t try to provoke hostility, but be ready when it surfaces, because there’s a high probability it will. Things will get difficult for everyone, and some will not react very well. Meanwhile, think about stocking up on things that you know how to use and be ready to share on terms that meet your convictions.

Lay in a supply of things that would tend to disappear when the economy becomes unstable. The biggest issue will be consumables that everyone takes for granted. That would include bullets, of course, but also cable ties and some paper products. You can work this out for yourself; be aware of what is made in your area and stock up on what you use that isn’t made in your area.

One of the things that worries me about younger generations is how so many of them have been encouraged to specialize in things they like to the point that they associate only with people in a very narrow range of interests. It’s so very easy to find online communities that cater to that kind of thing. When things get difficult, you’ll need to become skilled at tolerating a very wide range of people you would not normally choose to even acknowledge. You’ll have to become friends with a whole bunch of real people, instead of fantasy gaming characters. Learn how to build bridges across the natural divides.

It does no good to disparage folks who live in a rarefied virtual world. Our society has made them like that, and we who remember how to handle a wider world let it happen. For several generations, we’ve been too wrapped up in our own worlds. Technology has played into that trend, amplifying both the tendency and results. The consequences will include an increase in needless bloodshed when things get tough.

Pray about ways you can help people recover and become realistic. That includes the vast herd of folks convinced that the system is worthy of keeping alive.

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NT Doctrine — Galatians 2

Posted on January 20, 2024 by ehurst

Paul continues the narrative of his dealings with the original Hebrew Apostles and the community they led in Jerusalem. After some 14 years of working without them in Syrian Antioch, the Lord commanded him to return visit Jerusalem again. We can be sure the Lord foresaw the conflict about to arise, and wanted Paul to be certain in his own mind that it was bogus. He took with him Barnabas (the Cyprian Jew who came to Christ) and Titus (a Gentile convert).

Paul conferred in a private meeting with the church leadership. They were all satisfied that what Paul had been teaching all along was consistent with how they remembered the message of Jesus. While there, no one pressured Titus to hide his Gentile background. They recognized Titus as a fellow follower of Christ just as he was.

Paul comes back to the current dispute behind this letter. Near as we can tell, the Judaizers who came up from Jerusalem to Syrian Antioch were mostly genuine Christian converts. Their emphasis was that Jesus was the Messiah of Israel. The bunch who spread out across Galatia were dominated by fake converts seeking to restore not just Moses, but the Talmud. They had piggybacked with the real converts who were already causing enough trouble. Paul describes this latter group as seeking to enslave both Hebrew and Gentile coverts under Jewish civil law, not Moses. This was a form of espionage, a purely political operation that aimed to expand the Jewish tax base, among other things.

In other words, Paul claims these agents knew they were lying about what Jesus had taught. And as soon as Paul spotted them, he made a very public denunciation that the rest of the community in Antioch supported. Keep in mind that Jesus treated the Talmud as valid Jewish civil law, but not a valid expression of Moses. Paul noted the same distinction in how he dealt with Jewish persecution.

Backing up again to that private meeting in Jerusalem, Paul noted that it didn’t matter who was who. This was all about the gospel message, not persons claiming leadership. As it was, they could not add anything because Paul had left out nothing essential. They recognized Paul as having been with Jesus on different terms. They clearly understood that Paul had been commissioned by the Lord to take the gospel to Gentiles, equal to Peter’s commission to the Hebrews. Paul notes that this conference included James (Jesus’ brother), as well as Peter and John (Jesus’ cousins). When they mentioned how important it was to engage in charity among the poor, that was nothing new to Paul.

Thus, Paul was their equal in their own eyes. And he did not hesitate to call them out when they were wrong. Later on, when Peter came to visit a while in Syrian Antioch, the Hebrew Apostle that had been first to visit in a Gentile home and share the gospel some years before, he naturally ate with Gentiles, too. Such mixing was forbidden by the Talmud, but that was a misreading of Moses. Still, it was ingrained in Jews as a mental reflex. When a delegation from James came up to get a feel for the ministry there in Antioch, Peter seemed to be taken with a false guilt about mixing with Gentiles, and began to withdraw socially, and pressured others, to the point even Barnabas was sucked into it.

I’m willing to bet Paul used humor with Peter in pointing out the hypocrisy. Here was Peter, who for some years had obeyed the Covenant of Christ and neglected the Talmud, to the point he almost lived like a Gentile himself, and he’s going to be aloof from Gentiles because they didn’t adhere to Jewish civil law?

For the Galatian churches, Paul recounted his reasoning on the matter. Jews were born under the Covenant of Moses. Even the rabbinical traditions recognized that merely fulfilling the external obligations of Moses did not bring peace with God. They recited daily about the necessity of personal feudal submission to God. Thus, Jews should be the first to recognize that the sacrifice of their Messiah was necessary to wash away their sins; He was the only one who had standing to claim a pure life. So, having once claimed Him as their Messiah and King, how can they renege on their allegiance to His Law by go back to the Law that died on the Cross with Him?

The national identity of Israel as God’s people ended at the Cross. That identity was translated into a spiritual kingdom, whose King is Jesus. To follow Jesus meant renouncing that old national identity. How could Paul go back to building up the failed nation of Israel, as if to take it all back from the Messiah’s hands? It is tantamount to rejecting the Father’s policy in His Son of reaching the whole world without dragging Gentiles under the Law of Moses.

As a Jew, Paul followed Christ through the completion of the Law. There was nothing left for the Covenant of Moses to accomplish. Jesus paid the ultimate price to finish it. His new identity was in the Messiah, so that means following Him to the Cross, and burying his old Jewish identity. But he was also resurrected with Christ to a new identity. Now he lives by personal commitment to Jesus as Lord, allowing Him to use his body and manifest Himself anew. Christians are His body now; He shows Himself in their lives, having bought them by His own blood.

The key is ditching one’s human identity, whether Jew or Gentile. The Kingdom of Heaven is a wholly different kind of identity that transcends all of that. Paul’s Jewish birthright did not include divine grace; it simply opened the door for it. Having gone through that door into God’s grace, it would be sheer folly to back out now. It would mean Christ died for nothing. Trying to reassert the Jewish identity was backing out of God’s grace available only in His Son.

The Judaizers among the Galatian churches were trying to drag everyone back into a Jewish national identity, out of divine grace.

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Germ or Terrain?

Posted on January 16, 2024 by ehurst

I’ve been called a lot of things, and “crackpot” has recurred often enough that I have begun to celebrate it. So, today I offer another of my crackpot teachings. This is one of those things where, you don’t have to agree with me, but as a member of Kiln of the Soul, you have to tolerate me teaching it.

There is one primary reason I generally reject most vaccines: I don’t believe that viruses are a medical issue. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but that they aren’t a valid explanation for human maladies. Most vaccines are meant to counter viral infections, and it is the specific concept of “viral infection” that I teach doesn’t exist.

This is whence your Kiln of the Soul religious exemption from mandated vaccines come.

Now, let’s make another clarification: I’m not saying bacterial infections don’t exist. Some bacteria can kill you. A bacterial infection may require treatment; I’ve had a few. However, the whole class of so-called “viral epidemics” are a big lie.

Here’s one example: The Spanish Flu pandemic was not a flu virus. Whatever it was, it was not spread by viral infection. It was tested. During that “pandemic”, randomly chosen healthy people were exposed to all the possible vectors of viral infection, and never got sick. They were sent into hospital wards, spoke with and touched sick people. Neither via mouth, nose, eyes or even a blood injection would the exposure to fluids from sick people make these random test subjects sick.

I’ll let you look it up for yourself because I don’t want to spoil it by cherry-picking sources for you. A rejection of the viral theory is associated with the “terrain theory” versus “germ theory”, but I’m not fully onboard with terrain theory. I believe that debate is a false dichotomy. If you use a search engine, you’ll get a tidal wave of references that disparage any dissent from the mainstream germ theory, so be forewarned. However, I do not reject germ theory altogether. I say that it suffers limits; it cannot explain everything it attempts to address.

Most medical people live by the germ theory and vehemently reject terrain theory. That’s because the medical education system is a monolith, and there is darned little actual research by the teachers and students. People get certifications and licenses without ever field testing much of their education. They know what the system requires of them, and seldom ever see the research itself, only very biased reports of it. It hasn’t actually been genuine science for a very long time.

The terrain theory covers a wide range of ideas, but the core idea is that most common health issues would fade away if people simply observed a natural approach to life, and took care to mitigate inherited conditions. The sum total of medical knowledge just scratches the surface, and the medical industry should stop pretending to have the only answers.

Granted, it’s well nigh impossible to obtain, much less afford, a good natural diet as God intended for us. Whether it be the whiny demands of consumers at large or the shaping of consumer demand by marketers, you decide, but what I can find in my average local grocery store is mostly toxic in one way or another.

I will offer this link which is mostly balanced, but not in the sense that I endorse the specific answers offered there. I would rather you consider the approach itself. The author suggests there’s no reason to take sides, just find a functional path that works for you.

Virtually everything you need to obey the Lord is already provided naturally. Give it some attention.

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Septuagint and NT

Posted on January 15, 2024 by ehurst

I don’t recall it being mentioned in the book, but in the documentary film about Heiser’s Demons, he mentions something that is not obvious to a lot of people.

In the New Testament, we see the terminology of spirit beings restricted to “angels” and “demons”. There is little direct mention of how many different classes of creatures are covered under those labels. There’s a good reason for that: the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament) was the Bible everyone in the New Testament used. It was an editorial policy of the Septuagint translators to narrow down all the references in Hebrew to spirit beings to those two Greek words. And when it simply could not be done that way, they defaulted to the term usually translated as “gods” in English.

For those who spoke Greek across the Mediterranean Basin, the words for “angel” and “demon” were not restricted to the meanings common in English. So, when Paul wrote those words in his Greek epistles, it is wholly implausible to think he was restricted that way in his own thinking. He would have been familiar with the Second Temple teaching on the Elohim Council in God’s divine courts. Thus, in his letters, Paul often used terms like principalities, powers, etc. He knew that, in Hebrew scholarship, the term “elohim” was, in literal terms, a reference to any eternal being that did not normally have a corporeal form (not to mention it was used symbolically to designate an awful lot of human authorities).

Jesus would have also be aware of that. He never bothered to correct this impression, so it wasn’t an issue worth mentioning in His teaching. We can only guess at His choice of words in His native Hebrew Aramaic tongue, since the Gospels were uniformly published in Greek, so far as we have any evidence. There may be some speculation about Matthew and maybe some unnamed record in Aramaic, but we have nothing to show for it.

There’s been some polemics against Heiser’s writing from Reformed writers in particular. However, these writers cannot be taken seriously. It requires only a small amount of checking to verify Heiser’s sources on, at a minimum, his thesis that the Hebrew scholarship believed in the Elohim Council, and that neither Jesus, nor anyone else in the New Testament, objects to that belief. We are aware that there are plenty of moral issues neither Jesus nor the Apostles addressed simply because they never arose during their ministries. Jesus went out of His way to point out the errors of Second Temple scholarship when it mattered. There’s no point in defending the classical European church theology on this issue, since it is easily traced to serious errors in scholarship.

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Top of the List

Posted on January 14, 2024 by ehurst

Once we get past the Radix Fidem approach to religion, it’s just a matter of answering questions. In the process of answering questions, we open the door to someone’s heart so they can hear the things they need to hear. The rest of the onion layers can be shuffled around in order; we have to reach people where they are.

Now, the market for religious teaching is saturated. We are not going to reach anyone who isn’t already searching for better answers. And among those who are searching, we cannot appeal to those who aren’t ready to hear our kind of answers. There will always be people genuinely searching but looking in a different direction. We cannot help them until/unless the Lord leads them our way.

We know that a critical element in Jesus’ ministry was the miracles. But we really need to understand that His miracles were a restoration of the Covenant of Moses. Every malady and demon His people suffered was because of the failure of the Judea’s leadership. As the Messiah, He was restoring the covenant promises to the people.

We do not have a covenant nation. There are no missing miracles that we can pin down by God’s promises. Whatever we do with miracles, it cannot be the same thing Jesus did. We are not in the same context; the manifestation of authority must come in a different way. It’s not as if we cannot have any miracles at all, but that the character and net result of those miracles will be different.

Miracles belong to the Covenant, but are not limited to the Covenant. While God can and does choose to grant miracles outside of any covenant, it will appear to us wholly random because the divine policy on that issue is beyond human ken. There is no principle stated in Scripture that covers that issue. Rather, we have the issue of struggling to reach full covenant compliance. There’s a lot of ground to recover there, and until the Lord shows us more of what we have lost over the past two millennia, we cannot have a strong assurance of the ground of miracles.

Don’t point to the apostolic miracles that proliferated after the gospel escaped the borders of Judah. Those were under a level of covenant compliance that we haven’t yet approached. Again, those took place in a different context than ours. I am not suggesting that miracles have ceased. By no means; I’ve been granted too many in my life to suggest that. What I’m saying is that we do not have grounds for a consistent expectation of miracles. We are not in the position to declare that they simply must come when we engage this or that set of practices and teaching.

And God forbid we should drop off into the swamp of telling people their miracles have failed because they don’t believe strongly enough. That’s not how it works. Blaming the victim is not a biblical principle.

All we really have is a minimum standard that will give us a better chance to exercise the kind of faith that manifests spiritual gifts and other miracles. We should have our own covenant context, something that matches our situation.

We’ve already said this before: A major element in seeing miracles is having your soul prepared to hear the voice of God. Insofar as it’s possible, we must replicate in our own souls the minimum standard equipment that makes us able to see what God is willing to do for His people at any time and place. It’s not as if we could perfectly match the ancient Hebrew frame of mind and faith, but we can certainly approximate that in our own context.

Here’s the problem: Our western society is so very far away from even that approximation. It’s not just a geographical move, nor an intellectual one, but we have to crawl across several millennia of human experience, too. In order to pursue the Spirit, we must be able to see Him. We must become sensitive to where and how He has walked in this world. It’s not something the head can learn; it must be in the heart. It requires a gift from the Holy Spirit just to know the Holy Spirit.

There are plenty of human maladies the Lord will not heal under any circumstances. Did you ever consider the simple matter of human aging? The flesh is mortal, and the only healing for mortality is to die. Dying in this human existence is the ultimate miracle.

To avoid the mass of sorrows afflicting the Jewish people in Jesus’ day, we would need several generations of covenant faithfulness. How many people today do you know that were born under a valid manifestation of the Covenant of Christ? Our social and political institutions have not been specifically Christian since before the rise of Constantine. We are all coming into the Covenant of Christ as individuals starting from scratch with no useful legacy at all. We have zero background in understanding the nature of these things.

People who stand outside the Covenant are always in the line of fire, but people within the Covenant are working toward the reward of death. With the Jews of Jesus’ day, the unfaithfulness of the leadership (the Two Witnesses) placed the people in the line of fire. Jesus healed, delivered and raised the dead to restore what people lost from their established Covenant promises. Most of us have no missing covenant to recover. We are coming from outside the covenant system.

We must reclaim the covenant that we have been offered, coming in from scratch. It’s a different covenant altogether. The key to our miracles is conviction and context, and the certainty that it will appear random. We approach the Throne of Supplication with a totally different expectation. There is nothing automatic about it. We can heal, deliver and raise the dead only if the Lord desires to in each particular case, and when He wants. Don’t presume on His whims; it’s not a matter of human need, but of glory’s necessities.

Thus, the issue of having standing to request a miracle becomes paramount. That’s what we must work on. The greatest miracle prior to death is the realization that we are His. The next greatest miracle to that is being moved to enter into the full Covenant of Christ. These are the miracles we should put at the top of our list of things we seek from the Father.

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NT Doctrine — Galatians 1

Posted on January 13, 2024 by ehurst

The label “Galatia” refers to the first few churches Paul established in what we now call Central Turkey: Derbe, Lystra, Iconium and Pisidian Antioch, and any satellite churches those congregations may have established later. This is Paul’s earliest letter, likely written in around AD 48 shortly before that first council in Jerusalem (Acts 15, variously dated between 48-50). What we find in this epistle is very much like what he said at that meeting.

The problem was Judaizers. While the meaning of that term morphed a good bit over the following years, at this early stage in things, it was used to indicate a faction of converted Pharisees. They clearly understood that Jesus taught Moses. They probably understood His rejection of the Talmud. They also understood the necessity of faith that Israel had abandoned long ago, and were intent on restoring the true Old Testament religion. But they got hung up on the part about Jesus being the Messiah of Israel. They insisted that, to follow Christ, Gentiles had to come under the Covenant of Moses. They did not understand that the Law of Moses died on the Cross, and that Jesus had proclaimed a New Covenant that eclipsed it.

For them, it was not a question of continuity between the Old and New Covenants, but that they insisted the New was a continuation of the Old. This was a doctrine based on the residual racism of the Talmudic teaching, a spite for Gentiles. Gentiles could not go to Heaven as Gentiles. But this was false even under Moses. Under Moses, Israel was supposed to accept Gentiles who observed the Noahic Law, something Israel had long forgotten. So, the outcome of the Acts 15 council was that Gentile Christians could defer to Noah.

Paul and his companions had returned to Antioch in Syria after that first missionary journey. During his time there, teachers came up from Jerusalem demanding that the Gentile believers fully convert to Judaism. The controversy spread like wildfire. Paul wrote this stern warning to those churches: Don’t be suckered into this nonsense. After a brief introduction, Paul plunges right into it.

The gospel message of Christ that Paul first brought to those churches had not changed. This message took priority over any fresh word, even from angels. Anyone who came along insisting on some new requirements to following Christ was accursed. The Law of Moses didn’t do Israel much good; it was the faith behind the Law that mattered.

Paul was not trying to make peace with the Jews who crucified Jesus, and would some day try to kill him, too. Having gotten a PhD in Judaism and risen quite young to leadership serving the Sanhedrin, Paul knew more about it than the Judaizers roaming around. After God drove him through a conversion experience like no other, it wasn’t simply apostolic teaching that he parroted. He had spent time with the risen Christ to catch up with the Twelve. It turned out to be the same message they first proclaimed after Pentecost. Except, Paul knew from the start that he was called to minister to the Gentiles.

He eventually compared notes with Peter in private and confirmed it was the same message. Aside from a brief visit with Jesus’ brother James, Paul didn’t hang out with any of the other apostles. The only thing the Jerusalem church knew about him was that their former chief persecutor was now onboard with the gospel, and they were thrilled to hear that. At no time did Paul attempt to curry their favor or support. He had a mission and calling direct from God. The message he first brought to Galatia was what he learned from Christ Himself.

These Judaizing goons claiming to come from the church in Jerusalem were not official representatives, but zealots doing their own thing. The Galatian churches should run them off.

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Exigencies of Infowar

Posted on January 13, 2024 by ehurst

I’m going to interrupt the Kiln of the Soul series today. Later I’ll post the weekly Bible lesson, but this post is a short list of related things I ask you to consider.

1. What passes for AI is not really Artificial Intelligence. It’s just a very fancy text filter, and isn’t even good at math. It has no comprehension of numbers when it sees them, and can be expected to lie about anything statistical, in the sense that it simply cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is imaginary. It knows only what it is told, and the bulk of what is out there on the Net is nonsense. The most AI can do correctly is approximate the writing style of certain individuals, or the net average of what passes for educated writing. It does not “know” anything; it has no concept of seeking to verify.

Thus, current AI could possibly echo my writing style and recognize it should someone else plagiarize my work. But it cannot factor conviction. If something was written mimicking my style, but with a different content, AI would not likely recognize the difference. My readers would pick up on it right away, but AI cannot even comprehend the notion of convictions. It can only recognize the terminology and how it is used grammatically.

I confess there are times I’m not sure what I would say about certain current events. Aside from broad themes of the otherworldly outlook and faith in the divine, AI could not predict where I would come down on some issues, yet I’m sure my readers could make a good guess. It’s because we are connected to each other via the Spirit Realm, and the moral realm of the heart. AI cannot connect to that.

2. The biggest issues we face in this time of tribulation are not the political instability, economic collapse, or even natural disasters. Our biggest problem is the blocking of the gospel. The gospel message is the only reason we live. Failing the outright censorship, our Enemy would gladly settle for dilution and perversion of the gospel, and finally the distraction from the gospel. This is the nature of information warfare. This is why I keep pointing to the problem of infowar. We are at war, but the real threat is derailing the gospel message, not loss of life and/or property. We are not silenced by politics, economic losses nor any other form of social instability. We are threatened by the silencing or perverting of our message.

In terms of things like computer security or information security, censorship is one thing while diluting or twisting the message is another. If I find myself fighting censorship, that’s a matter of access to the medium for both you and me. Fighting perversion of the message would most likely be someone picking over the message to counter it (government sock-puppets pretending to offer comments, for example). Worst of all, it would be someone pretending to be me and promoting a false message.

I’ve faced everything but that last one. I’d rather someone outright steal my work and claim it as their own, than to have my name attached to something false. The lackeys of Satan aren’t that smart, most of the time. If they decided that polluting our message was the way to go, they would try to use AI and not recognize why it failed.

3. Not every weirdo that has attacked the message on my blogs was sent by a human government. The Devil has lackeys everywhere. For me, the primary difference between a government agent and some individual flake is that the former will use certain IP addresses. The secondary clue is the range of things they will talk about. Government sock-puppets seldom grasp the whole issue of faith; they typically try to provoke some kind of political activism.

I can sensor the sock-puppets through comment moderation. The individuals who attack for other reasons might warrant an answer of some kind.

To the degree I might offer any kind of political, economic or social analysis, the government pays attention. Had the feds done a better job of forcing the states to toe the line on COVID, any comment I made about resisting the vaxx would have gotten me shut down. The whole COVID narrative has collapsed. While there are forces in the US and Europe who would love to use another pandemic against us, that previous failure has raised the price too high, I believe. So the pandemic advocates are kept around as a distraction, while the real threat is cooking up somewhere else.

4. Even that other threat is mostly a distraction from the gospel mission. I agree that Americans at large are under a serious threat of oppression, but that’s not news. The Scripture alone has provided enough clues for us to naturally expect America to be in deep trouble for her unique American sins. And our hearts loudly tell us that this is a time of God’s wrath. The real issue is the gospel message portrayed against the background of God’s wrath. The message of Christ is a lot louder and clearer when tribulation plays out behind it.

Our primary investment of care, attention and resources should be on the gospel message. What does it require to keep that message rolling forward?

My flesh loves playing with computer technology, but my heart knows to let it all go when it is no longer useful for promoting the gospel message. Right now, that’s my best tool for the message. The day will come when that ends. That’s part of why I believe now is the time to begin building communities of faith in meat-space. I’m actually hoping to wean my readers off of my writing, because, sometime in the near future, you won’t be able to get it. You need to absorb the message behind my writing, and become a source on your own.

This is information warfare.

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Kiln of the Soul: Radix Fidem

Posted on January 12, 2024 by ehurst

Again, it’s a process of giving folks a fair chance to bail out. If they aren’t ready for the radical difference in our approach, it’s a mercy to let them see enough to make an informed decision. This is the point at which we tell folks about the Radix Fidem approach to religion.

Radix Fidem pamphlet

Radix Fidem booklet

Radix Fidem Curriculum

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Dr. Heiser’s Video

Posted on January 11, 2024 by ehurst

Yesterday, I pressed the issue of seeking the Hebraic viewpoint of Scripture. This seems like as good a time as any to highly recommend readers watch this documentary. It’s a very brief summary of Dr. Michael S. Heiser’s Unseen Realm.

It presents only a bare outline of what’s in the book. However, it includes enough to cover the basics. I was especially pleased the teaching that baptism was not just a cleansing ritual, but became a symbol of allegiance and loyalty to Christ as Lord.

This would be a great item for introducing folks who aren’t familiar with the whole idea of Hebrew thinking. I managed to get a copy and convert it to MP4 so it can be shown on a wide range of devices.

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