Psalm 82

Posted on January 2, 2016 by ehurst

Always: Context is everything in Hebrew. People have made much of God (Elohim) referring to other figures in this psalm as gods (elohim). But it takes only a quick review of the Books of Moses to see that the term applies to human judges under the Covenant. Many come to the question from the wrong angle. It’s not that men have misused the name for God, but that God simply chose to answer to common forms of address. For all the centuries prior to Moses, the most common title of address for the Hebrew God was El (“Mighty One”) or Elohim (in context meaning “The Almighty of Mighty Ones”). Granted the latter is plural, but Hebrew isn’t quite so picky as that, often using plural nouns with singular verbs to indicate a singular subject or object that is larger than life.

Thus, the context here is God calling on the carpet every human that elevates himself to the position of rule. There’s a sense of mockery where the Creator says that He is Lord of lords, an ancient protocol that pointedly subjects any presumed authority under His. Whatever it is these mere men — rulers, princes, kings and demigods — imagine themselves to be, they are summoned before the One who holds ultimate authority.

Further, the context presumes the reader operates from the heart, not from the intellect. The Fall arose in part because mankind chose to assert his human intellect over the authority of the heart-mind. When the heart rules properly, it is the one faculty able to perceive the ultimate truth of our fallen existence; it is able to sense directly the moral fabric of reality as the character of Our Creator. The path to redemption becomes painfully obvious as the sense of moral imperative overlays everything the eyes behold, projecting brilliant hues of right and wrong on all of our human existence on-the-fly as the context morphs. Because revelation calls mankind back to the supremacy of the heart, there is no excuse for humans to rely on their own understanding to direct their own affairs, never mind shepherding others with any moral justice. God pointedly declares that mankind has failed in this duty.

The result is that they show partiality to the wicked, and allow predators to manipulate them into exposing their subjects to abuse. This psalm assumes the moral principle that all rulers would have adopted their subjects as their own family, for they have no moral standing to rule otherwise. So how could you allow outsiders to prey on your own kinfolks? Doing justice for orphans and widows has always meant ensuring their means of support are not taken. If they don’t have a father figure with at least a presumption of military capability to defend their property, then their next nearest kin is responsible for them, required to adopt them as members of his household. This keeps rolling upward through feudal extended family ties until the local king is de jure the Big Daddy of everyone under his reign. There is no room in this psalm for any other state of affairs; no other form of human government is legitimate in God’s eyes. This is the implication of the fifth verse: Do these people not grasp the nature of reality? Are they not acquainted with the natural order of things? Such ignorance is earth shattering.

Jehovah was quite willing to adopt and name as His own kinfolks the rulers of humanity, if only they had been willing to bow before His authority and embrace His terms. But no — they have chosen to pass like every other human authority that has been forgotten in human history. Finally, Asaph calls on God to arise and rule directly. It’s the ancient longing to see the Day when God reunites the Spirit Realm and the Fallen Realm through redemption of the latter. That would be the Final Day of Judgment, including the sum total of God’s wrath against sin.

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This-n-That

Posted on January 2, 2016 by ehurst

Economic collapse: The US is there. You didn’t know that? Perhaps the meaning of the phrase “economic collapse” is what eludes you. There is less disposable income and a significant portion of the population is unemployed when they’d rather be working. Of course, you might have been more aware that certain industries were already in collapse — petroleum, for example. Collapse doesn’t mean everything stops, only that it’s nothing like it used to be. How it will play out is the same as before, with some businesses starting, but less of them. We also have some shutting down or reducing operations and letting workers go, of which we have far more than the opening and hiring.

I’m not the only guy who’s been saying all along that this stuff would simply drift down towards the bottom, and that even a “crash” is relative to the size of the thing crashing — bigger falls slower. The thing that will be shocking is banking closures or “bail-ins” where depositor funds are confiscated. Now that would make sudden and dramatic changes. Keep your eye on the banking news.

Linux on Netbooks: My netbook sports an Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz CPU with dual-threading, which Linux treats as a dual-core CPU in effect. Running 32-bit Mint with XFCE is just about tolerable for most things. It seldom uses much of the 2GB RAM, so the CPU is the bottleneck. I have a little meter on my panel that moves a lot and it’s instructive.

Pale Moon offers a 32-bit browser that is optimized for Atom. I use it for general surfing where a full browser is required. The generic Seamonkey 32-bit for Linux is just about as fast for my secure login stuff (such as this blog). And did you know that if you look around on the Net, you can find instructions for accessing your Outlook.com service via the IMAP protocol? I can read my Outlook account in Seamonkey.

incoming: imap-mail.outlook.com, port 993, SSL/TLS, normal password
outgoing: smtp-mail.outlook.com, port 587, STARTTLS, normal password

I advise you to turn off frequent checking. Have your password ready the first time you login for each incoming and outgoing.

I also have SlimJet installed, but it’s a dog and I only use it on sites where Mozilla browsers just don’t work. You’ll find that, on a small screen, plenty of sites and services don’t display well. You could use the bundled Firefox and Thunderbird that come with Mint, but on a netbook like mine both are slower than you might like.

Indeed, I often use Links2 or Dillo for most regular reading. Some sites still have way too many graphics elements and I use Elinks or Lynx plain-text browsers. You have to feel your way around with these kind of alternative browsers and decide what works best for you. Be aware that some sites will block Lynx for reasons that are long forgotten by most of those who do it.

Plantain: Not the banana-looking thing, but the family of plants most folks thing of as “weeds” — locally it’s ribwort. The leaves are astringent and can help close up wounds in a hurry. Just squish and roll between your fingers and apply to small wounds or insect bites. Eat the green leaves and it can help with allergies, because it’s astringent qualities apply internally to mucus flows. I’d be half-dead without it, and it’s a whole lot healthier for you than any of the allergy medications. I’ve been out on walks hunting for it, and grateful to discover there are patches in good supply rather close to me. They are viable and edible through winter as long as you can see the plants. The taste takes a little getting used to, but after a while your tongue recognizes it as a friend.

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Heart World Aborning

Posted on January 1, 2016 by ehurst

You can’t do this with your head, only by your heart.

It’s not that people can’t change via lesser faculties, but your heart is the only part of you that can find reality and your proper path through it. The intellect cannot even really know reality. If you train hard enough going back through all the assumptions of ANE thinking, you’ll arrive at the same conclusion — that you have to rely on your heart-mind. Might as well take the shorter path and start there in your heart and begin taking out the mental trash.

Every question in your heart is fundamentally a moral issue. Nothing else matters; the search for moral clarity is seeking the heart of our Creator. What does God want? It’s written into Creation itself. Everything in the written revelation of Scripture is also discernible from sensing reality through your heart. That’s because the only way you can really understand the Bible is to have your heart in charge so that you recognize what it says in words based on what is stamped into your convictions. Convictions are eternal; they existed before any of us. What they say to you reflects the nature of that eternal truth expressed in your particular context.

And if that sounds like babbling, don’t waste any more time reading this until you know what it means to live from your heart.

This is a time of tribulation; God is shredding all the shadowy nonsense that defies His moral character. He is shining the light of His glory through the darkness. It is disruptive in the sense that none of us will be so pure as to pass through without some parts of us shaking loose and falling into the Abyss. So as His glory washes over us, we shed things that really didn’t belong. Only He can tell you what needs to go, and He speaks only in your heart.

One way or another it means you will plant a smaller footprint on the earth simply because more of you will die on this plane as more of your heart connects with the Spirit Realm. Over the past few weeks I’ve mentioned a few ways I’ve release my grip on some things in this life. For you, dear Reader, they are symbols at most, examples in my life of what the Lord is doing for all of us. They weren’t bad things, per se, just things that belonged back there behind me. They can’t go with me into the future. Say goodbye!

Example 01: Once I gave that Studio laptop to my brother, something dead dropped off. I mentioned that I’m down to my netbook and everything is just dandy. My heart is at peace with this situation. About the only thing that I still need is just a better mouse. On a whim, I picked up a Logitech gaming mouse awhile back and it’s okay, but it’s for gaming, not for writing and editing images. If you happen to have one of those little notebook mice you can send me, let me know; otherwise I have to save up and buy one. But this thing is easily the most reliable and consistent machine I’ve ever owned for running Linux. I’ve adjusted to the small screen (10-inch) and cramped keyboard well enough, and I’m getting used to the way the Atom processor works. At some point in the future, I’m sure the size and weight of this thing will be very important to my calling.

Example 02: Yesterday I noted that I’d have to change my diet a bit to accommodate the costs of some big changes in our lifestyle. Sure, it’s prompted by a tighter than usual budget this month, but my heart warns me that things will be just about as tough from here on out because of larger economic shifts coming at all of us. We’ve been reading about this for years, and a lot of the warnings have gotten tiresome because they were all based on bogus assumptions. Wasn’t the banking system supposed to have shut down some time back? Reading the facts from the heart, we have no need for panic mode and sudden radical shocks that the survivalists and “preppers” think they see coming. It’s the sort of thing where they are right in some ways, but wrong in what they make of it. My next income windfall may not arrive, but if it does, it is likely to be the last we see for awhile.

Example 03: Even farther back in my blog posts I mentioned a strong leading in my heart to get used to cycling as transportation, not just for fun. It’s not that the fun is fading; this is hard to summarize. I still wish I could take long country rides over those hilly back roads out south and east of here. That long chase after Hog Creek Valley was an awful lot of fun. What wasn’t fun was the five or six miles I had to traverse from my house to get out there. Now the house is gone and I’m ever farther away from that lovely area, and I’ll miss the loop through Harrah and Jones, too. But if I start needing all that riding experience for other things, I still have the memories resting in the same place as a lot of other places I’d love to see again. At least one of my novels was simply a great way to review those long hikes and rides in the Benelux. But somewhere just down the road, as it were, is a time when riding will be about the only way I can get around in pursuit of my divine calling, and I already know I can make some very long distances without trouble.

Example 04: Something more difficult to describe is a raft of visions in which I would find myself in military situations. At the time it was hard to grasp the meaning, but I’m starting to think it has to do with the mindset one has to adopt in order to do all that stuff. It’s not the tactics and weaponry, but the basic adaptability and habits of day-to-day existence while doing something that simply had to be done. Roll out of the sleeping bag at o-dark-thirty and have just enough time to heat your canteen cup of water over a Sterno-can fire hidden inside a dark-colored stovepipe section. You get one good cup of hot coffee or cocoa with your cold packaged breakfast, wash whatever you can stand to expose and shave, and then get on with the work at hand. No two visions were quite the same because the details weren’t the point — it was the mindset.

Will this blog still be here in the coming months? I suspect it will, but I’m prepared to cut myself back something more minimal. Even if all I have is a plain-text newsletter posted somewhere or sent out as email, I can’t imagine that I would fall silent. I’ve already said I don’t believe the changes coming will be wholesale and sudden. I’m certain we can dismiss the nightmare scenarios. Sure, stock up on canned goods if you can and have storage space. Maybe think about weapons for protection, but make sure you know how to use what you get for that. Make sure you have some idea when to use them. But follow your heart, not my advice.

What matters is the character of things. We are entering a time when you will need to retract inward in terms of dependencies, and extend outward your readiness to give of yourself. Some things in your life will have to die and fall off. Decide what really matters and be ready to keep doing that. Pray about the best way to be ready for what God wants from you. Explore the concept of your moral dominion. There are a lot of things we’ve been taught to care about that don’t belong to us, including some people. Be ready to let them go as God removes them. At the same time, be ready to take command of things God will point out to you as your mission.

God alone knows the timing. Don’t get impatient; a lot of things will grow out of your heart long before they are ripe. Hold in your mind the certainty that some stuff will surprise you; that’s the nature of our existence. Take on a sense of contingency in most of this life, in the sense that far more is temporary than your mind wants to admit.

Trust your heart; you’ll be okay.

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Prayers for the New Year

Posted on December 31, 2015 by ehurst

I’m striving to be accountable to God and His people.

As we adjusts our thinking to what God actually said, one of the most difficult things we do is get a grip on His promises. When He said things about “prosperity” it was seldom with any of the baggage we associate with it in our Western culture. We have been taught to expect a steady-state in all things, as if this were optimal. It is not. Indeed, it is fundamentally wrong to think so. Roller-coasters and cycles are reality.

My household starts the year in a very tough position. I’d rather not whine about how things got this way, as if someone else were responsible for making sure we our financial situation retains some mythical steady state. Sure, my donate page here still works and we recently received a donation that will surely help. I’d rather have your prayers, though. I’d rather we all exchange our deep affection and the miracles of God helping us see His hand more clearly.

That’s because we are headed for even more difficulty — all of us. In one way or another, the hand of God will bring wrath and cleansing, and that’s never fun for our human existence. At the minimum, you’ll go through some inner turmoil just trying to understand what you see, trying to make sense of it as we all strive for a clearer moral grasp.

So on the one hand we could wish our world hadn’t gotten so very far away from God’s ideals for us, but we are stuck in a world that ignores His revelation. That means sometimes I have to eat stuff that will offer at least some margin of harm and at other times just skip eating to avoid it, and trust God for the difference any of it makes. If walking in His will means surrendering some health ideal, then we have to rely on the broader general promise that He will take care of things. Don’t put God in a box, particularly one designed by Western mythology.

So I’m praying for you to find a place where you can stack those moral priorities with clarity. Don’t make a donation here for all the wrong reasons we have thrown at us by every other form of begging so common in our world. The only reason you should even think about it is that God won’t leave you in peace any other way. Brother Ed is going to make it one way or another, so that’s not the issue. Rather, it’s most important that we all recognize Who owns us and gets to make the final decisions in everything.

What I will not do is exaggerate the problem to jerk tears from your eyes. To symbolize it for you, I’ll be making smaller pots of coffee for a while, and could end up drinking tea before it’s over (because that’s cheaper around here). So for every one of you who doesn’t want to hear about it, I’d also face the irritation and censure from those who wanted to know. Pray first and make sure you know what God wants from you. We all will have a lot on our plates in one way or another all too soon.

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Disavowing Seen and Unseen

Posted on December 30, 2015 by ehurst

The title is a reference to a couple of services run out of Iceland — Seen.is and Unseen.is — that I didn’t know were such nitwits about networking and encryption. I once recommended them, but grew increasingly annoyed at their inability to do some of the simplest things when it comes to customer service.

So here’s the lowdown: Their encryption is home-brewed. Never, ever do that unless you know at least as much as the NSA specialists. Let’s just say that there are so few people of that caliber today that none of them would have time to work with the folks at Unseen. There are so very many good, publicized encryption algorithms out there that you simply cannot justify rolling your own.

Other problems: They don’t know how to do webpages. I’ve told them there were problems and things haven’t changed in six months. The offer apps for various platforms and I’ve never gotten any of them to work for more than a day. Their latest offering for Linux is based on the ancient Ubuntu 12.04 (14.04 is the last stable release almost two years ago; 12.04 four years old). Their site has been in “beta” since it opened. When paid customers request support, the response is often condescending and pointless.

Their other project is a site called “Before It’s News.” I won’t even give you a link; it’s one of the wildest wacko conspiracy “news” sites you will ever see. I’m the first to tell you that there are genuine conspiracies out there, but these folks are way off in La-la Land. They report stuff that makes you wonder if it’s linked from a parody site. At first I thought this might not matter too much, but apparently they apply some of the same thinking to their “deep knowledge” of networking. Recently I found out that network technicians are shocked anyone lets them own a server.

I apologize for not checking more carefully before recommending any of their services.

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Hack Yourself

Posted on December 30, 2015 by ehurst

It is not a question of in-the-heart versus in-the-head. It’s both at the same time — and more. It may not be easy for us coming out of a binary-linear-thinking culture, and it’s not much better with the current trend toward branched logic, but we are wired by our Creator to operate on multiple levels of awareness simultaneously. I’m trying, but I confess that I’m not very good at it just yet.

I believe I’ve noted here before that we lack the lore and habits of mind that heart-led cultures would have considered common sense. Sometimes a realization hits my brain so hard I wanna get up and dance and shout it the world, except those times when I wanna run and bellow in terror. And just how much of that is meant for me alone? That’s the hardest part for me, and I wonder how much some of you struggle with it, too. It’s easily the biggest reason we should learn not to take ourselves too seriously.

We can offer only what we have, and folks should take only what they can use.

I believe most people see a hard future bearing down on us. And it is, but I simply can’t buy most of the warnings and predictions, at least not in any significant detail. It’s not a question of lying but a complete lack of heart-logic. They start from the wrong place, so it’s no surprise they end up in another wrong place. Or perhaps the image should be that many are in the right place but gazing in the wrong direction.

Most people can sense doom on some level, even if they just can’t connect it with their conscious awareness. The heart is never silent, but a lot of folks have been taught to ignore it, or to filter out some of the most important parts.

For example, what happens if the banking system suffers some kind of trauma? First, you have to understand that most “money” is just a virtual possession. Even cash currency is subject to fluctuating evaluations of it’s value against real property, but most of what we are told we have is really just conceptual or notional, not real. Your name is associated with some digits in an accounting system somewhere. It works — until it doesn’t. So you should expect that most of your notional “deposits” in the bank can evaporate without notice and without anything resembling accountability. When the banking system declares some kind of crisis, what the rest of us experience really depends on the individuals involved outside the banks.

Some business managers will decide they have no choice but to shut down. Others will simply do the best they can. Government officials will tend to be more uniform in declaring that they can’t stop governing but will likely cut out most of everything that resembles public service. So you and I will be caught in the middle. For the most part, almost every agency (public and private) that we depend on will deny any further responsibility to us. A lot of folks will panic, so violence is quite likely to rise initially. Some will continue because that’s what a few would do anyway were it not for the current restraints. Depending on your local culture, most will likely regret the panic when they realize the world hasn’t ended and life is still possible.

So maybe your current job will disappear and maybe not. I suspect most pensions will disappear, but some elements in the current system will be run by folks with enough sense to realize something has to keep working because nobody can afford total chaos. In other words, God alone knows what you as an individual will face. But in general, most folks will try to keep things going as close as possible to what it was before. Much of it will depend on what the bankers decide they have to do, what kind of actions they must take, because the banking system — at the top where real decisions are made — is run by people totally unlike you and I. Their calculus is very difficult to predict in the first place. They don’t typically publicize their sense of priorities, and some of the trouble coming is totally new in scale, if not in nature. However, we should never underestimate their actual power over the system.

You should start praying for a certain internal flexibility and adaptability. Because we cannot know for sure what they have up their sleeves, we have to train our brains to let the heart decide in that moment of decision what really matters.

The information I’ve seen is spotty, but there is likely some kind of binding agreements between governments and certain common carriers and utilities. That is, emergency planning is quite certain, though the contents are still secret as to what government officials won’t allow to collapse and how they plan to keep it working. I’d say: Keep your cellphone and at least one computer if you can.

I still believe that networked communications is the fundamental element of what arises afterward. The whole system is moving in that direction, and this impending chaos and partial collapse of the old will have a strong impact on where things are steered in the future. Those who are left to pick up the pieces when stuff breaks will probably have a lot to say about how it all gets put back together. For example, a major thrust within the current system is roping in as many people as possible to the existing computer network in terms of fixing their identity and amassing data. The exercise of control is the primary issue here. Even folks who are off the grid will be indexed in one way or another. It’s an unspoken necessity, a fundamental instinct of those who govern to seek a full accounting of humans in terms of assets and liabilities.

Everything is a matter of bureaucratic convenience. There is no specific spite most of the time, except as some bureaucrat has latitude to exercise a moment of leverage against resistance to their convenience. It’s all so horrifically dehumanizing that we just don’t have the words for it. But the siren song of even greater convenience through attaching as many humans as possible directly to the network is something bureaucrats can’t ignore. Whatever little humanity is possible to eke from the system will, in some ways, require that you have a networked identity, a virtual persona that the system recognizes. Whatever advantages that exist at all for you and I will likely be available only through the virtual communications network. Without a device you will receive the most negligent treatment possible.

So you should expect nearly universal device ownership, with massive efforts to commoditize and standardize things down to a very narrow range of what’s available to individual users. Automated monitoring will be obligatory and ubiquitous. The only folks left with some measure of self ownership will be the techies who know how to take advantage of the ever-present holes in any system. Technological expertise is the new “license to kill.” These will be the new class of cyber-alphas riding atop the mass of virtual nobodies.

That’s not a call for you to consider becoming a hacker. I’d much rather recommend you learn how to work with your own heart, a sort of self-hacker, if you will. Only your heart can tell you whether it matters what kind of identity you should embrace in this looming future world. And we who walk by the heart-mind will become yet more alienated than ever. Then again, I see more opportunity than ever before. That’s because the virtual world will not eclipse meat space in terms of reality, but only in terms of human perception at-large. We need active and conscious heart-led people throughout the entire fabric of society. Yes, heart-led is what God intended for the whole human race, but “narrow is the path and few who find it.”

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Proverbs 26

Posted on December 29, 2015 by ehurst

The advice to nobility continues, with an emphasis to watch out for certain kinds of people. We remind ourselves that “fool” and “folly” refer to a failure to subject the mind to the supremacy of the heart. Thus, it is more about the lack of moral discernment as the cause for acting silly.

1. As snow in summer, and as rain in harvest, so honor is not becoming for a fool. The cited weather conditions are completely out of place in Palestine, as is treating a fool as a substantial member of society.

2. As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse without cause shall not come. This is not the best translation. The first is more like a sparrow flitting about, the second a swallow that darts back and forth and never seems to perch anywhere. Thus, a curse uttered contrary to God’s moral character will never alight.

3. A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for the fool’s back. In the minds of ancient Hebrew people, you wouldn’t ride a horse without whip to urge them when they tired, and you certainly couldn’t maintain control over an onager without a bit and bridle. The rod was both symbol of authority and punitive implement. The obvious point is that you can train, but cannot educate a fool.

4-5. Do not answer a fool according to his foolishness, lest you also be like him. Answer a fool according to his foolishness, so that he may not be wise in his own eyes. This is not a self-contradiction if you catch the second part of each statement for context. Hebrew figures of speech could be ambiguous, same as in most other languages. Thus, don’t take a fool seriously or he’ll draw you into his folly. Rather, answer in such a way that you make it clear you think he’s a fool.

6-9. He who sends a message by the hand of a fool cuts off the feet and drinks down damage. The legs of the lame are not equal; so is a parable in the mouth of fools. As he who binds a stone in a sling, so is he who gives honor to a fool. As a thorn goes up into the hand of a drunkard, so is a parable in the mouth of fools. We can never be completely rid of fools, so they do have their place in this world. These are examples where they don’t fit. Trying to use a fool as messenger is like cutting off your feet or drinking poison. Even if you teach a fool the meaning of a parable, they’ll use it wrong. Taking a fool seriously is about as smart as stitching a stone into the pocket of a sling. And just how well can a drunk pull out a thorn? Don’t empower a smart-aleck.

10. Great is the Former of all, but he who hires a fool is like one who hires one passing by. The Hebrew is ambiguous and translations vary. It seems the common essence is that a fool is the threat you recognize; treat him with the same care and suspicion you would some random foreigner.

11-12. As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to his folly. Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him. The only dogs a Hebrew encountered were dangerous sly predators, so we have a large cultural gap here. Yet even Westerners are repulsed by this behavior in dogs, and science has no good answer as to why they do it, beyond the mere fact dogs just don’t care. They’ll eat anything and this is the point of the Hebrew reference. Thus, a fool learns nothing from bad experiences, and should be as repulsive as dogs were to ancient Hebrews. Bad as that is, a conceited man is even worse.

13-15. The lazy one says, “There is a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets.” As the door turns upon its hinges, so does the lazy man turn upon his bed. The lazy man hides his hand in his bosom; it grieves him to bring it again to his mouth. While we’ve seen these before, the context of advice for nobility adds a new dimension. Don’t pamper even your own kin; provide for them according to their willingness to get their hands dirty with the work of the household.

16. The sluggard is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can give a reason. Some people are simply efficient, having paid attention and thought about what they do. Best of all, they can tell you when inaction pays off. Lazy people can only offer lame excuses as if they were the wisdom of seven wise men combined.

17. He who passes by enraging himself over strife not his own is like one who takes a dog by the ears. When you run upon a conflict in progress, you aren’t likely to have a clue which side is just. Jumping in on either side will almost surely get you hurt. It’s best to cultivate a repulsion for public disputes.

18-19. Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death, so is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, “Am I not joking.” The risk to life from the first is comparable with the risk to social stability (shalom) with the latter. This refers to people who would play head games for their personal amusement, not at all the same thing as a sheikh testing people under his authority.

20-22. Where there is no wood, the fire goes out; and where there is no talebearer, the fighting ceases. As coals to burning coals, and wood to fire, so is a quarrelsome man to kindle fighting. The words of a talebearer are as wounds, and they go down into the innermost parts of the belly. The rich imagery here translates poorly. A talebearer is someone who keeps pushing something until it starts to come apart. The word translated “quarrelsome” is a general term for stirring up trouble. We’ve all met people with souls so empty that their only source of entertainment is manipulating others into fighting. It doesn’t matter what excuse they claim to justify this, you can tell by the results that they are a threat to shalom. It’s not a bad idea to run off such folk because the wounds can be long term.

23-26. Burning lips and a wicked heart are like a broken piece of pottery with silver waste. He who hates pretends with his lips and stores up deceit within him. When he makes his voice gracious, do not believe him; for seven hateful things are in his heart. He whose hatred is covered by deceit, his wickedness shall be shown before the congregation. It’s easy to miss the point of the pottery image. A potshard, while useful in some few cases, like skimming dross off of molten silver, is still just a chunk from a shattered vessel. It might be interesting to look at with the shiny coating, but it has no value. So in other words, it’s just junked coated with pretty junk, the same as someone with a talent for persuasion hiding a predatory soul. Expose such a fraud.

27. Whoever digs a pit shall fall into it; and he who rolls a stone, it will return on him. The translation misses a figure of speech. More than a pit, it’s a trap. And it’s not just any stone, but one big enough for building. Those who use traps will eventually get caught in their own deceptions. People who try to destabilize social structure will be crushed when it collapses.

28. A lying tongue hates those afflicted by it, and a flattering mouth works ruin. The subtle point here is that there is no difference between flattery and outright lies. This is a warning to those with a needy ego that there is always someone willing to butter you up to destroy you.

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Moral Order of Things

Posted on December 28, 2015 by ehurst

Eternity is not merely time without end; it is life without time.

God’s will is not some static and inexorable destiny for all Creation. His will is the moral fabric of reality itself. Even our freedom within this realm of existence is constrained in ways we could never comprehend, but we do have a range of choice open to us that includes ignoring God’s revelation of His moral character.

Some particular action or choice that was right yesterday is wrong today and we may never comprehend on this side of Eternity what was involved in changing it. Nor could we pretend, even in theory, that there is some calculus we could know if God were simply more forthcoming, or if we were simply more precise in following His revelation. Creation itself is alive and morphing around us constantly. It’s not a calculus but Life itself.

When I bought that Dell Studio it seemed proper at the time. Maybe it was, but now it has become a millstone. Not just the keyboard, but all kinds of little things that are simply not consistent with the way God calls me to work. Then again, all of that was surmountable until some recent shift in the winds of moral discernment in my soul.

Can you not see how this is an answer to the prayer request? Maybe not the one I expected, but an answer nonetheless. It’s not that such news holds any significance in itself, but this is one more implication of the lesson on condemnation. When you approach any question, including those arising from the mere mechanics of human activity, you cannot let yourself become a slave to human reckoning.

Consider this: Some issues in my life are a simple matter that I can’t get there from here. I have to go somewhere else first. There’s this thing called pre-positioning — getting myself in a better place to see something that was previously out of the line of sight. Passing through this or that particular hassle helps me ditch habits that won’t fit the new situation. Because I’m so flaky in the first place, God has a chore on His hands getting me straightened out. You can say I’m flighty and unreliable, but God still calls me to feed His sheep.

Oh, and I still have my netbook (Latitude 2120). It’s not as fast, and certainly has a smaller screen and keyboard, but it’s much more reliable. After all, it’s only a matter of tools for His glory. While some tasks are challenging on this thing, there are always other computers in this household I can use. Ideally I would have a desktop for certain functions, something that doesn’t have to do much but sit there and work when I need it. When it comes to serious writing, which seems the most important task for now, this netbook is fine.

We take what God provides and keep our eyes on His glory.

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Wise Silence

Posted on December 27, 2015 by ehurst

In our study in Proverbs, we are told repeatedly that you cannot teach a fool. You can help them keep their folly to themselves only if you hold dominion and are prepared to use violence. For most of us, we seldom have dominion and violence is a real chore anyway. Thus, we end up often keeping our peace.

Easily the single biggest folly I face is people defending the modern State of Israel. Here in Oklahoman, very few people represent any opposition to Israel. I do see more support for, say, the Palestinians on the Net. However, I’m not sure all of those defending voices are genuine. I’m pretty sure at least a few of the more popular ones are controlled opposition.

Here’s the moral position: There is no single right answer. There are as many answers as there are Palestinians and Israelis combined. In other words, the moral consideration is that we are all individuals and even the people living there in that part of the world may not have a clear moral perspective. What they claim to want may not have any connection to reality in the first place.

God says in His Word quite bluntly that He is personally in control of all human politics. He also says flatly that it’s really none of our concern if we seek to serve Him. He is writing human history, so mucking about in politics distracts us from His calling and mission. That’s not to say we can have no personal moral reaction to this or that event, but that there is no one right answer. All human governments violate His revelation, so He isn’t working with any of them under any of the Law Covenants that He revealed. He doesn’t work with governments any other way, except to herd them like mindless beasts.

Is the State of Israel evil? Absolutely. Are the Palestinians good people? Not particularly. Even then, I’m using only relative terms. If you go to that land and deal with particular individuals, you’ll find things you can tolerate and things you cannot. And different folks there will find us varying degrees of tolerable in return. But outside of a personal encounter, we have precious little moral grounds for having much say in any of their conflicts.

As a scholar, I suppose I can tell you that Israel could easily drive the Palestinians out, but it seems there is some crazy government policy that requires they keep them around and abuse them. Do you wonder why the Palestinians stay when people suffering far less difficulty are stampeding out of that part of the world? There is no simple answer to that, I assure you. As a scholar of the Bible, I would assure you that God alone can change this awful situation. He alone can decide when it’s time to move things and people, same as He does with all the rest of the human race in other parts of the world. They don’t see His hand because they refuse to know Him.

Whenever I encounter a rabid fool spouting off about supporting Israel or defending the Palestinians, or just about any other brand of activism, I usually say nothing unless I can discern a moment when God wants me to speak.

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Hidden But Not Secret

Posted on December 27, 2015 by ehurst

We are not a secret society, but a mystery society. That is, if we use common English translations of the Bible to guide our terminology, then what we promote is a mystery difficult for outsiders to grasp. It is certainly not hidden by intention.

In fact, we would much rather the whole world participate; the more the merrier. This is what we were made for, our best hope in this life. Yet we have seen with our own eyes just how hard it is to bring the mind to a place where it can surrender to its natural superior, the heart. It took us long enough to get here ourselves.

Secret societies build barriers and use some consciously constructed mechanism to deny access to outsiders. Many of them use code language to discuss their common affairs. There is some sense of elite superiority over those denied access. We did not create any boundaries; we discovered them in the process of crossing. We fall on our faces once inside because we can’t get inside without coming to a realization of just how unworthy we are. And the joy is based on immeasurable gratitude and relief, not exclusivity.

We feel so powerless to help others. Paradoxically, we are driven by the confidence that God insists we get the word out, and the calm assurance He will work through us. But it’s not the glib assurance at seeing them enter in droves. We see a tiny trickle and rejoice over each one.

For all of this we cannot avoid the appearance of being closed simply because access is very highly restricted. It’s just that the restriction is the hand of God, nothing in our hands. And how could we begin making accommodations to this new reality without changing the words we use? So it sounds like secretive code language. We aren’t speaking the language of minds, but the language of hearts. Even when we explain it, we find ourselves forced to use terminology that makes it sound suspicious to those who can’t see the truth.

Should some government authority take an interest, it would only be that people who join us are impossible to govern on the terms the authority desires. We make no promises that our choices won’t contradict government edicts, but we find it highly unlikely that officials would notice. Still, it is a certainty that we will discern and act on a loyalty that can rest in no human entity. That’s the undefined threat to human authority. Worse, our undefined threat has been known to spread “like cancer” at times. We most certainly make a conscious effort to get more people to join us, and to get more of those who join more thoroughly alienated from human concerns.

We don’t fight government so much as lack enthusiasm for the demands of officials. At best we play along, and we cannot possibly hide our cynicism. The bottom line is that we don’t care about their bottom line.

Our biggest headache at this point is not secular government concerns, but the unacknowledged politics of religion. Our presumed allies are often anything but. Some of us were never a part of their work, so they pay little attention to us. However, those of us who left that system are viewed as traitors. We know too much about what we left behind, and that makes us a threat. While I do get some respect and fellowship from those who understand from within the religious establishment, organizational leadership is typically the biggest hassle I face.

On a human level, I can understand that. What we are discussing are matters of eternal importance. Get it wrong and you “burn in Hell.” Tell it wrong and others may join you there. Offer something too enticing and those on the margins will be “lost” before they can be “saved.” Yes, I understand their concerns all too well.

So when it comes down to such discussion, I ask: “And what if you are wrong about all of this?” Insofar as I get an answer, it’s usually along the lines that they must follow their convictions. Of course, so do I. But then they have the resources to marshal against me and have done so more than once. About all I can do is simply stay out of their reach. To the degree they don’t understand what we do, it’s not that hard most of the time. Coming under their authority is currently voluntary. My choice doesn’t have to be yours, though. If you can still remain within that system and serve the Lord, that’s a good thing.

Each of us comes into this with our individual experiences. We belong together because no one of us has the whole bag of marbles. We are family, hard-wired for interdependence. Modern secular government knows that’s a threat to their power, even if they never say anything directly about it. Government’s full intent is to render the individual isolated and powerless by creating a false sense of belonging to structures that offer only the illusion of power. You know the saying: If it really makes a difference, it’s illegal. Our Creator made very real power to rest in the hands of family, and of all the family types, the very most powerful is the covenant family. It is so very powerful because it is so very fragile in human terms. It rests entirely upon some higher power.

We associate and fellowship in the Spirit precisely when there are so few human reasons to do so. Would any of us have found each other had we not been searching for something much higher? The power of God is manifest most gloriously beyond the limits of human power.

We have little use for the encryption of technology because neither technology nor human nature is able to grasp what we do. It’s hidden on their end, not on ours.

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