War Soon

Posted on June 23, 2024 by ehurst

On the one hand, I’m not all that sure what humans could actually pull off. On the other hand, I’m quite confident I understand their various ambitions.

Starting from the top level, we already know that the neocons, and to some degree the Zionists, are hoping to destroy the West. They are the ones driving the urgency toward global war, and they are quite blasé about nuclear war. They have intentionally driven up the price of US war equipment, making it excessively complex and unreliable as part of their broader efforts to bleed the US and NATO dry.

Don’t believe the nonsense about the military-industrial complex being mindlessly greedy. That might have been the case when I was a kid (1950s), but the neocons invaded that space before I was an adult (1970s). And their underlying agenda has been to destroy the US and Europe over the long term. This is the part of the Jewish agenda that few want to openly discuss. It’s one thing for scholars to notice how Jews have taken over western societies and governments, but the goal is not simply control, but destruction. They insist on humbling us totally before seizing full control.

This is nothing new; Jesus warned that the underlying power of Judaism was Satan. We’ve already noted that Satan’s agenda is relentlessly hostile to humans. We might debate the question of “how much”, but that the modern Jewish elite agenda is driven somewhat by Jewish religion is not in question. The False Messianic Expectations are too obvious in what has already happened. What made the folks in Nazareth so angry that they wanted to throw Jesus off a cliff was that He quoted the prophets about sweet Messianic promises (“gracious words”) while leaving out the part about vengeance against the Gentiles. The Talmud is loaded with hatred and contempt for Gentiles, referring to us as less than human.

Further, the Pharisees’ spite for their own peasants is still around. The Zionists obviously hope to conquer “Greater Israel” and rule the world, but the neocons are cynically using the Zionists. The neocons have already admitted that they will not hesitate to bring destruction on the Zionist project; the common Israeli citizens are cannon fodder. Ever heard of the Hannibal Directive? There are devoted neocons in the Israeli government.

And if they are willing to slaughter their own, how much more willing would they be to burn through Gentile populations? The current Israeli regime is desperately trying to get us involved in a war with every Muslim government in the Middle East, Iran in particular. The current action in Gaza, and soon to be in Lebanon, is not based on any real confidence in the IDF. It’s all calculated to drag the West into war, to make the western countries feel obliged to rescue the “besieged” Israelis. The Zionists want to use us to gain control, but the neocons want to use Zionists to destroy the West.

And the neocons are using globalists, as well. The latter are driven to seize all exploitable resources in the world. Everyone can see that Russia is going to win their war in Ukraine, but the one reason the US government would never admit this is because of the resources in Ukraine, especially the part currently claimed by Russia. This whole conflict was provoked by NATO because of a lust to seize Russian assets, too.

Thus, we come to the place where our government and NATO are working hard to provoke Russia to use nukes. I’m not saying that they will succeed, but you need to understand that their actions, public or secret, are aimed at provoking a conflict that will eventually destroy the West. The globalists are broadly convinced they can win such a conflict, that they can remain aloof from the destruction of all us little people.

Given that the Russian and Chinese governments have been quite savvy in dealing with these provocations, I can’t say whether western leadership will succeed. However, I’m utterly convinced the West will invoke a false flag incident just to blame Russia/China and claim this as justification for mobilizing a direct attack. Between the neocons, and their Zionist and globalist lackeys, we will be at war very soon.

Addenda: A recent interview with Scott Ritter indicates that Israel is collapsing already. Citizens are leaving the country. The globalists are not at all sympathetic to Zionism, so they are moving the US/NATO away from war in the Middle East and trying to focus on Russia/China. That doesn’t mean a total end to support for Israel, but that the internal workings of the US government is fractured worse than we might have realized.

That would mean a higher probability of war here.

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NT Doctrine — 2 Timothy 1

Posted on June 22, 2024 by ehurst

Reminder: This is probably the last of Paul’s writings chronologically. Again, Timothy is in Ephesus as the resident Apostle. Any day now a large number of folks from Jerusalem will come streaming into the area, fleeing a Jewish rebellion in Jerusalem against Rome. But Paul is back in Roman custody, and this time it’s a far less privileged situation. Instead of house arrest, Paul is actually in prison. And this time it wasn’t an imperial courtesy to the Sanhedrin, but a rising intolerance of Rome itself for Christian religion. If anything, Paul’s first passage through the imperial courts marked him as the leading representative of Christian leadership; they didn’t forget.

At first glance, it would not appear that the first chapter offers any doctrinal statement. However, Paul reaffirms divine election in a way that most people don’t catch. Aside from the formulaic greeting in the first few verses, Paul appeals to his successor Timothy to remain faithful despite the dire news of Paul’s situation.

Some ambitious souls in the Christian community there in Ephesus used news of Paul’s second arrest as an excuse to discredit him and reassert their own agendas. We could guess that there was still a lot of pressure from Judaizers on one side, and pagans on the other, not to mention the nascent Gnostics. At any rate, there’s no doubt the heat is on Timothy, so Paul encourages him to stand strong.

Then, in verse 9 Paul rests his appeal on the sheer trustworthiness of divine election. If God has called us, He will ensure we do not fail His mission. Most western minds approach the whole question of election from the wrong direction. They look for a discussion of individual salvation as the whole matter. While that concept is included, Paul is clearly influenced by the broader Hebrew concept of election, which emphasizes the whole question of human existence.

Paul repeatedly wrote about the Mystery of the Gospel. It’s a complex teaching that assumes we exist to prove God is just in His discipline of Satan and various powers in the Spirit Realm. Humanity is not at all the center of Creation; we are at best accessories after the fact. The whole point of divine election is not us, but His reputation among a host of beings far above our level, and not just angels.

This is good news. He needs us to make His case, so He’s determined not to let us fail. All we really need to do is hang on for the ride and we’ll experience joy unspeakable in this life. His glory is always in our best interest. For Timothy, all it requires is the resolve to cling to what Paul has taught him and see the hand of God smash those who, knowingly or not, serve His enemy’s purposes.

Of course, it also means eternal glory with Him, but there’s an awful lot of glory going on in the here and now. On the one hand, Paul mentions two fellows embarrassing the Lord, but then praises Onesiphorus, who crawled through the Roman prison system to find Paul and do what he could for him. Should we imagine that Onesiphorus found it drudgery? No, this man was full of joy unspeakable, too.

Election is our confidence to fight and not surrender to the enemies of God.

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God Is Waiting on Us

Posted on June 21, 2024 by ehurst

We are called to speak the truth about what’s going on in this world. The Lord has revealed what is true: This world is fallen and sinners will sin. Nothing good will ever come of human ambition. Human ambition itself is the open door to Satan and his allies. Fleshly concerns will always lead you to Hell.

But God requires us to use this human existence for His glory. That means we must understand His character and priorities within the context of this fallen human realm. It’s part of the Great Commission to denounce sin for what it is, and to proclaim the path of righteousness. We denounce sin, to include all the ways by which higher powers seek to keep us away from the Covenant.

Do you understand that the one thing Satan and his allies fear is the Covenant? The only thing that binds them without fail is our adherence to Christ’s Law. The battleground is your individual soul; this is true “spiritual warfare”. Satan and his demons are confined to this realm of space-time, and their one ambition is to prolong its existence. And they know clearly what Romans 11 says about the key to bringing on the End of Time: the fullness of the Gentiles entering the Covenant. Paul says that until God’s purpose is completed for locking the Jews out of the Covenant and bringing in the Gentiles, until the Gentile Elect are brought in, we can’t talk about the End of All Things.

Now, don’t misread this. Satan is worried about time; God’s Covenant Kingdom is not. The issue is not a body count of the Elect but the principle of restoration of the Elect from every nation that Israel was meant to win, had they carried out the original mission. It’s not as if God is keeping a secret numerical count; that’s a western obsession. He doesn’t reckon that way when it comes to people. The depiction in the Greek for for “fullness” (plerosis) is more a matter of having the boat full of cargo, or repairing a breach.

The word is also used to denote “fullness of the Spirit”. Thus, think more along the lines of the nature of our self-conquest; part of the burden is on us. We defeat the Enemy by activating the Covenant, by enslaving our fleshly selves. God isn’t making a body count here; He’s watching for something nearly impossible to enunciate in such simple terms. It’s all about our dominance of the flesh by the Spirit.

It’s our witness, first in how we live, and then in how we speak, that becomes the final conquest of our Enemy. By no means is this by our talents and discipline, but by our willingness and eagerness to use the power and authority of God over our own fleshly natures. God is watching for a certain key element of moral victory. Whoever it is among the Elect still among the living humans must win this victory in His name. That’s at least part of what Paul meant by the “fullness of the Gentiles”.

Following that victory, the Elect among Jews will begin a mass return to the Covenant. That’s what Romans 11 tells us, and this is what Satan dreads most. All the other Bible passages about the End of Time rest on this understanding. Satan strives to keep control over the Jews to prevent their restoration to their Messiah.

This is why we never talk about defeating Jews on a fleshly human level. Don’t get bogged down in hating them; pity them as a mass of souls locked away from their inheritance. It was theirs first. But it’s most certainly not theirs now. Just a tiny few are coming to Christ in every generation; what Paul was talking about was a mass conversion, a shocking new Exodus into the Spiritual Promised Land.

If we are going to win them back for Christ, the only path is living and telling the truth. Our primary witness is loving each other as Christ loved us. It’s the expertise we develop for plowing through the flesh and touching each other’s hearts. This is what calls to the Elect. We use that as the basis on which we mention the truth about the rest of the things we see around us. If we do not conquer the flesh and love each other sacrificially, the End will be delayed further. The job will not be done until we reach some level of victory that meets God’s demands.

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It’s Who We Are, Not What We Do

Posted on June 20, 2024 by ehurst

I’ve already laid the foundation: This life is an illusion. Our human existence has only one purpose, and that is to testify that God alone deserves all praise and glory. There are others competing for some of that glory, and they are not human. You and I are the proof of God’s claim. We have no other purpose; we are expendable and we had better get used to that. Nothing any human or all humanity together could do will change that basic truth.

And surely civilization is not important; it’s merely comfortable for us while we are here supporting our Creator’s claims. Building civilization is most certainly not part of God’s fundamental revelation of His will for fallen mankind. Given the nature of the natural threats heading at us, some of us will be around after civilization collapses. The loss of civilization will not change God’s mandate for humanity.

The bulk of humanity are not aware of the coming global disasters. Some of the elite do know; remember that seed vault hidden in Norway? Those who do know about the disasters are suppressing the information. Recently, some of the scientific data regarding the movement of the magnetic poles has been closed to the public. The US government knows and is hiding it, in collusion with other governments.

I’ve tried to delineate the boundaries, to point out God’s priorities. Humans can participate in the Covenant promises and blessings without being Elect. However, the emphasis is on the Elect; we exist as the primary testimony on God’s behalf. Our eternal destiny includes judging and replacing the Elohim Council after Christ returns. Whether or not we have natural heirs on this earth is of little importance. The issue of raising families is part of the lower priorities of Biblical Law; it is not on the level of the Great Commission.

Thus, get married and have kids of you can, if the Lord provides that opportunity. Otherwise, don’t let it distract you from the real mission. That is right out of the New Testament. The Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t grow by fleshly reproduction; not everyone born in a Christian home is Elect. Our primary mission is to seek out the lost sheep of Divine Election.

None of the other human ambitions count for much, either.

The Great Commission demands that we teach what Jesus taught. He rolled into His New Covenant some elements from the Old, which included elements of Noah. While it is useful to study and make a list of things the New Testament mentions about this, it is not the whole answer. The answer is understanding the divine priorities, to incorporate in our thinking the moral character of God Himself. Revelation is not data; it is God’s Person.

The Great Commission is that we manifest His Person in our lives. We must mirror the full revelation of God in the limited context of who we are and where He has placed us.

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Threats Abound

Posted on June 19, 2024 by ehurst

We can speculate all we like about what God is thinking, but the fact Earth’s magnetic poles are moving is painfully obvious. They are converging toward each other, and the mathematical models suggest the earth’s magnetic field will virtually disappear for a time. That means every creature on the planet that uses the magnetic field for navigation will go nuts, and some already are. And since field = shield, it also means that everything the sun has been spewing at us will no longer bounce off, but will strike the planet directly.

Consider this: A very recent CME caused auroras all the way to the equator, and it wasn’t even a very big CME. That’s a sign that the shield strength is dropping quickly. Our best modeling suggests no later than 2050 for the climax of this disaster, and quite likely in about 15 years from now. Already for the past few years, there has been a big bare spot over the South Atlantic, and solar radiation and particles have been interfering with satellite navigation.

Hint: That big bare spot is the opposite side of the planet from where the two poles are converging, right off the west coast of Malaysia in the Andaman Sea.

Keep in mind: There has always been a constant steady stream of energy and particles washing over the entire solar system, coming from the sun. It can vary just a little in terms of magnitude, but it’s always there. Without the magnetic shield around the earth, all life would have been burned to a crisp long ago.

It is utterly impossible for humans to prepare for this shield reduction on any significant scale. There are simply too many variables, and the scale of threat is beyond our imagination. The best we can guess is that you should build a serious bunker deep underground with no metal reinforcement, since any metal anywhere on the planet will become charged by ambient static electrical charges flooding our atmosphere and ground. If you take metal objects into the bunker with you, store them away from your living area. They will get pretty hot.

This is just a good scientific estimate. More will surely be revealed through prophecy. Of course, if you see the way humans are acting these days, you would surely see such disasters as a relief. The human threats are running off the scale.

You know that our US government has been intentionally provoking Russia and China for quite some time, now. A nuclear exchange could take place as early as this summer, though I suspect the bigger stuff won’t show until later. We know that the rulers are intent on starting a major war, and they most certainly don’t give a damn what happens to us.

There is a sense in which it really doesn’t matter who is pulling the strings. They hate us and want us all gone. Of course, in their calculus, there will always be some who survive, and those must be enslaved. Our mere existence must be punished. This is what moves them, regardless whether they are conscious of it.

This is an apocalypse; there is no stopping it now. This is the background against which we are called to witness to the glory of our God. In the next couple of posts, I’m going to review some of the human threats so we have a better estimate of what God will demand of His covenant people.

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A Distance Too Far

Posted on June 18, 2024 by ehurst

In a discussion yesterday, we were reviewing the historical context of Acts 2, particularly the paragraph at the end of the chapter about the first few months of the church in Jerusalem following the Ascension.

It was what we call the “honeymoon phase” when groups are first formed around faith in Christ. It wasn’t quite so blissful later as the demands of reality set in. Later on there was the issue with Ananias and Sapphira, and then the Diaspora widows who had no elders to represent them.

Jesus died on Passover and Ascended shortly before Pentecost. That was a two-month period every year when wealthy Diaspora Jews came home to Jerusalem. They would leave not long after, going back to their businesses scattered mostly across the Mediterranean Basin. The majority of that first church were those Diaspora believers who had been caught by the gospel message just before they left. Something about this new covenant faith in the Messiah caused them to simply abandon their former lives and stay in town. Most of them sold their overseas businesses to other Jews and embraced the growing number of local believers as their new clan, their covenant family.

When you take away the Talmudic perversions pasted over the top of ancient Hebrew custom and instincts, the result was a heady excitement about going to the Temple for genuine worship of Christ and His Father.

The broader picture was linked to John 17:20ff, where Jesus prays that His future followers would experience the union of hearts that Jesus had with His Father. One of the questions that prompted this discussion we were having was, “How do we reclaim that unity today?”

Naturally, we had to invest some time in eliminating what it was not. It was not uniformity. The first church in Jerusalem would not have tolerated that sort of thing; it was part of their culture to resist the kind of social manipulation we have in the West. That discussion alone can take a lot of time simply because western Christians assume too much without conscious awareness, injecting their assumptions about life into the Bible, thinking that first century Hebrew society was much like ours is today.

They would not have tolerated our business-like atmosphere with its rather reserved social behavior expectations. Hebrews were all touchy-feely in private family settings. The first church was not the least bit formal; they didn’t have our rules of carefully measured familiarity and handshakes only. By the same token, they would not have tolerated the fake back-slapping familiarity, either.

Hebrew men in particular would demonstrate affection to each other in ways westerners would find quite uncomfortable. For the ancient Hebrew, if they couldn’t recognize you by smell, you were a stranger. These people were literally in each other’s armpits.

Now, step back a bit. While it’s not necessary to change our social habits, it is necessary to break down the inherent facade of western social interactions. Our social rituals are inherently hostile to genuine heart-led unity in faith, virtually demanding that we not actually get involved in the lives of others. The stuffiness of our northern European ancestors is no longer a survival trait.

In a church setting, I should be able to find a fellowship of men to whom I can tell my darkest secrets without worrying that it will lead to self-righteous ostracism or wider exposure. I should be able to find men who would treat my personal tragedies as their own, giving it a high priority, as I would theirs.

The few times I tested that in churches, it blew up in my face. I’ve had better luck getting personal support and acceptance from those outside the church. We all need support to carry our loads, not judgment and rejection.

In the end, this was the answer to the original question. The reason churches don’t see the miracles that were common in that first faith community in Jerusalem is because we have not built the atmosphere of unity that existed there. We don’t invest ourselves into the lives of our fellow believers. They aren’t family, but mere acquaintances from whom we maintain a careful measure of distance. Heck, we treat our own kinfolks that way.

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Divine Treasure Is Otherworldly

Posted on June 17, 2024 by ehurst

I want you to learn the concept of the middle path. What I’m referring to is my expectations for the future of America. The US will certainly not rise any farther; it will also not collapse completely. Rather, it will fracture and we little people will have a rough ride, but it will not be a movie-styled apocalypse.

That apocalyptic stuff is farther down the road when the magnetic poles of Earth shift rather suddenly. That still appears to be almost twenty years away.

In the near term, we are entering a period of dissolution and decentralization. It’s hard to predict how that will play out. There are so many ways in which the holding and moving of money is centralized that it would surprise us. On the other hand, it’s never been quite what the centralized bankers would have hoped. There are way too many elements in the big picture that remain localized, and those elements will tend to keep working just fine when the system breaks apart.

There have been steady efforts toward centralizing control over food, for example. Most readers are probably aware that Bill Gates has been buying up massive farmland plots, and he’s not the only one. This is alongside efforts to create new processes for fake meat and other foods, which would quite naturally require huge, massive centralized manufacturing plants. You will not see boutique meat substitutes.

But the consumer resistance is higher than anyone expected, so the progress has been very slow. Yes, some mindless consumers have latched onto this new junk, only to find it is not as attractive as they first were led to believe. Once a new product has been out for a while, consumption drops back down to tiny amounts. The only success is that it is kept on life support by Big Finance.

That the globalists will continue trying to ram it down our throats will be a major factor in the collapse of the system. People at large are not quite as malleable as the moguls would like. They won’t so much rise up in arms as simply fail to be herded due to lack of interest.

Sounding the fear alarms is like most everything else: People simply get used to it and tune it out. Rule by fear wears out after a while.

Thus, on the one hand, we know TPTB will try again to seize more control through some kind of fake pandemic alarm. On the other hand, some state governments have already passed laws against that kind of heightened centralized control. It’s going to fail badly; the COVID-19 panic response was very poor in the first place.

This is going to be a “muddle revolt”, as it were. There’s not enough energy to actually fight the globalists — which would require a determined army and the slaughter of several million Americans, plus wanton destruction of government controlled facilities. But the herds will slowly cease to pay attention, and eventually organize just enough to reject the controls. The blobby mass will neither fight nor stampede. For the most part, it will be a feeble resistance.

Thus, we will still have globalists around for a long time, and they will continue to afflict us, scolding and haranguing, grabbing control of everything we don’t nail down. But their window of opportunity has already closed. Instead, they will become once again the restive minority agitating for more of whatever seizes their fancy at the time.

Life will still be crappy with no real progress toward sanity, only false claims from self-proclaimed “conservative” hucksters taking their turn at the feeding trough.

I’m not forgetting that the highest level of elitist manipulation is still some kind of Jewish thing. What I’m saying is that those of us who see it clearly are not numerous enough to have much effect. Our message is drowned out in the racket of fake Nazi wannabees, a false element planted by the Jews themselves. There is no human solution to this problem; it is all controlled by Satan and his allies. God has left the situation in their hands simply because it does not hinder what He wants to do with this world. Indeed, they are playing in to His hands.

Any serious concern for life here in this fallen world is just a continuation of the Fall. This world has always been an illusion under Satan’s dominion. It does not matter. I’m not promoting nihilism. There is a purpose; we are here because God wants it that way for now. This world does have one use, for which God is keeping it alive: It is the demonstration of His justice. We Elect are the final proof that God is right and just, that Satan deserves his punishment.

That there is a non-elect population is just a part of the setting. We are obliged to work around them and not get distracted by their concerns. If we keep joining in their vaporous anxieties, we cannot provide a clear testimony of our God’s justice. Let the Jews steal everything; it will evaporate when the Day of Judgment comes. Our treasure is not in this world.

That said, let’s note some interesting specifics about our situation: If war is coming for NATO, it’s a good bet it will be from mid-July to August. Any later will miss the window of opportunity to swing US elections. TPTB will make every effort to provoke Russia in the next few weeks. If Russia fails to take the bait, there will surely be a false flag event.

Meanwhile, the ongoing provocations will likely see Russia (with Chinese assistance) arming her allies across the world. All the other globalist eggs will start cracking everywhere. From the linked article:

And here are the top candidates to receive these weapons – as extensively debated not only on Russian TV channels but also in the St. Petersburg forum corridors.

West Asia: Iran (which already has them); Syria (badly needs them); Yemen; Iraq (would be very helpful to Hashd al-Shaabi) and Libya.

Central, Northeast, Southeast Asia: Afghanistan, Myanmar (these two were present in St. Petersburg) and North Korea.

Latin America: Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua (just look at the current Russian foray in the Caribbean).

Africa: Central African Republic, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Southern Sudan and Zimbabwe (just look at Lavrov’s recent African tour).

I believe the analysis is plausible. Prepare accordingly — prepare to be a witness in such a context.

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Shaking Itself Apart

Posted on June 16, 2024 by ehurst

Basic economics: Do you understand how inflation works?

Human activity in exchanging goods and services has limits. There is only so much exchange that can take place because of the natural friction of people deciding how to exchange. Introducing a medium of exchange speeds it up. Inflation is when the commonly accepted medium of exchange loses value against the goods and services being exchanged. Thus, the numeric price of things goes up.

This works out to be theft in that those who have their hands on the controls are provoking inflation, raising the prices while suppressing what they pay back out to those who produce the things everyone is buying. They force everyone by laws to hold their currency in accounts at a bank, and the bankers get to use all that aggregate productivity as they see fit. They don’t contribute a damned thing except to give the appearance that the system can be trusted.

They lend and borrow in massive amounts, and in the process play the wider economy as a market in itself by adding or subtracting the amount of currency in existence. Of course, they always add more because it makes their old debts cheaper to repay while creating new debts that they put off for a longer while. They then cut in government officials for a share of the flow so that laws continue to enforce the system in their favor.

From where we stand, it’s not readily apparent who has their hands on the controls to raise the prices. We know some names, but not all of them by any means. It’s not just a simple matter of these secretive folks deciding to mark things up. There is a broad system that at least appears to be based on the market as a whole. Thus, the prices of things and the wages are bumped up all at once, you would think. Naturally the common complaint is that whoever decides the wages is not raising them to match.

When you hear noise in the news about the Fed worried about inflation, what that really means is that the wage earners are getting a bigger slice of the pie than the financiers like. When they say “inflation” it means that everyone is still getting the same share and they want to take a bigger share for themselves.

This is how unions gained power. It was a way of gathering the market presence of wage earners so that they could participate in the market, could be a member of the bargaining powers. I must warn you that it is far more complicated than that (like union leadership being compromised by the financiers), but this is what most people see.

The whole point of the financial elite causing inflation is to reduce their expenses against their income. They are the ones trying to game the system so that they pay less and take more of the flow of currency. You see, it’s not simply a matter of how much you hold in raw numbers, but what portion of the flow you capture regardless of the raw numbers.

Thus, they don’t steal it directly from you. Rather, they rig the system to demand more for them without sharing back to those of us who produce what makes the economy work. All boats most certainly do not rise in a flood of liquidity; the 0.1% punch holes in everyone else’s boats. The financiers are the folks in the banking system who are empowered to set rates of interest and various conditions that can slow or speed up the flow of currency.

But they are not gods. They cannot force the economy to keep humming along when the wage earners are losing ground. It’s a delicate balance they seek to maintain so that their gains are marginal in the millions of details, but whopping big in the system overall. But it’s the complexity of the system itself that causes the problems. A very large and very busy economy has more to plunder, but it also has more ways to get out of control.

In physics, anything sufficiently large and complex that moves will inevitably develop modulations in movement. There will be waves, vibrations, pendulum swings, etc. Oddly enough, this manifests in economics, as well.

Cycles arise that no one expected, and some which defy management. What we are seeing as these modulations are showing up in ways the financiers cannot control, nor even accurately calculate. They cannot predict these unexpected motions in the complex economy, nor how those motions will affect the whole system. Humans are inherently incapable of managing more than a very limited size system. While AI might be better equipped if left to itself, we know that AI would be compromised by algorithms designed to favor one group over others. It would defeat the purpose of having an AI.

This is how economic collapse happens. The thing shakes itself apart because it is not humanly possible to account for all the variables. Our system is shaking apart.

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NT Doctrine — 1 Timothy 6

Posted on June 15, 2024 by ehurst

Again, Paul wrote this letter to Timothy while the latter was serving in Ephesus, helping to establish the presence of Christian faith as no threat, contrary to false claims of Demetrius the silversmith some years before. The city would soon become the world center of Christian religion for that generation.

During Roman times, one quarter of the population in Ephesus was enslaved. It’s hard to imagine the gospel message would not call to at least some of them. Christian religion was not a social reform movement. It was wholly otherworldly. This life is just a passing phase on our way to Eternity. Hidden in these few verses, Paul’s teaching seeks to set men free from slavery to this world. If this world is all you have, then there is no hope, but if we eventually escape this world, then any condition is tolerable.

The point is to call attention to Eternity by how we are unconcerned about the sorrows of this life. It’s the orientation of showing grace and mercy regardless of what binds our flesh. Thus, we still have all those fleshly obligations, and the boundaries of the Covenant do not demand that we provoke strife over being legally a slave. Whatever might be a cause for Christians to rise up against others, slavery isn’t it. In our modern western lives, being in prison is just about the same thing, and often worse. Don’t be a cause of grief but demonstrate the power of grace. No one can enslave your heart.

This and everything else Paul commanded in this letter is right out of the teaching of Jesus Christ. Faith in Christ does not promote human discord. While there’s plenty of hostility to faith in this world, we don’t go looking for trouble. People who are slaves to their fleshly natures will give themselves away by false teachings. They will delight in provoking human tensions, upholding a false piety of the flesh. Their efforts will be self-serving, seeking some personal advantage.

The only advantage we seek is piety in the heart. The real advantage is in humble and grateful contentment with what God provides. We will take nothing with us when we leave this world, so let it go before it traps your affections. The only material things we really need while we are here are food and clothing. Everything else is a matter of what God provides for the mission. Paul never forgot that the real complaint in the silversmith’s riot was not their devotion to Diana; that was just a cynical cover for greed in selling highly inflated trinkets. Even the city government realized as much.

Instead, Christian teaching set people free to place a high value on piety and eternal moral goodness, not the junk of this world. Christ before Pilate affirmed that His Kingdom was not of this world. Jesus had no interest in overturning Roman authority; human government was not even on His radar. The Father is withholding political changes until the end of all human mortal existence. His focus and ours is on Eternity.

For this reason, Paul is rather stern in dealing with those who bring to Christ a substantial worldly wealth. It belongs to Christ now. Material wealth is just a means to blessing the covenant family of faith. The least the rich can do is drop the fleshly pretense of superiority. But instead of the church confiscating such wealth, it is the burden of these wealthy believers to do the work of using it for divine glory.

The last thing Paul says to his adopted son is to avoid the rising new religion called Gnosticism, using the key term gnosis and calling it absurd and profane chatter. It had become a Siren call to some in the church already.

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Wolf and Shepherd

Posted on June 14, 2024 by ehurst

The quintessential man of God is the shepherd.

If you see yourself as the lone wolf, then you are not serving God. You are simply a predator totally wrapped up in this world’s ways. You will receive only a wolf’s limited blessings, and you cannot inherit His Covenant provision.

When you are young and lacking in responsibilities, playing at the wolf can be okay. Do it with excellence. Thin the herd; target the truly sick and dangerous, the ones whose DNA must not pass into the flock. But wolves are just rowdy boys. Eventually you must grow up and take the responsibilities of the shepherd. (Side note: There is no such thing as a “lone wolf”; they have always been pack animals.)

Shepherds understand the role of wolves better than wolves do. Over and over again: God’s men are shepherds. They embrace the responsibility for building a covering over others. They knowingly lead; it doesn’t matter the areas of life at which they excel in His service. The pastoral care is the thing. They are good stewards of His treasure, and His treasure are people.

This brings into play a whole host of thinking and teaching about dealing with people who need mercy, who need a path to divine grace. In essence you cannot reject anyone who seeks your covering. The tension between what you are willing to put up with versus what you inevitably wind up with is for your edification.

Yes, you will always have people around you don’t belong in your domain. Some will be so disruptive that you must expel them. Do so with grace and mercy. Still, you must assume initially that everyone you encounter is sent from God. That you learn to filter out the aliens is part of the training effect, for you and them.

Tolerance and patience are major trademarks of God’s shepherds. Pursue the lost sheep, again and again. Keep providing and guiding them to good pasture and water. Keep an eye out for threats they cannot see, and may never see. They are your kingdom treasure, a trust held from God.

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