Psalm 81

Posted on December 26, 2015 by ehurst

While this sounds somewhat like the call to the Feast of Tabernacles, the whole seventh month (Tishri) is consumed in various celebrations following the olive harvest: Trumpets (1st), the Day of Atonement (10th) and then Tabernacles (15th). The psalmist mentions both the New Moon and Full Moon rituals, as well. Then he takes on a prophetic note in this celebration: Can we just this once remember to celebrate the Lord by obeying Him? In doing so, he focuses on commemorating the Exodus.

The psalm begins with a lyrical call to observe a ritual of celebratory music. He goes on to note that there are other observances commanded in the ritual law to stir up the natural joy of gratitude we owe to our Creator and Lord for all His blessings. He notes the first deliverance was before Israel was a nation, when Joseph became viceroy in Egypt where people speak a totally different language. God placed Joseph there to protect Israel from His wrath falling on the various nations in Canaan Land.

And when the time came, Israel was rescued from slavery. When God saw the fruit of things was ripe, He answered their prayers and put them through the necessary testing any sheikh used to prepare his servants. They were so used to life in Egypt that they weren’t yet ready to bear His revelation to the world.

Asaph focuses on the signal element of loyalty in the divine call at Mount Sinai. The first of the Ten Commandments is entirely normal. A covenant of adoption as the family of any great sheikh required that they swear blood loyalty to him, the same as he would require of natural born kin. In return for that loyalty, He will supply more than they could take in, so open wide!

But they refused to keep faith in Him. His revelation was the ultimate reality of all things, but they preferred their own imaginations. So He let them have what they really wanted, and with it all the suffering of human moral blindness.

When will they ever wake up? If only they could render a genuine commitment to Him, no enemy could come against. Even those with a rabid spite for Jehovah would be forced to kneel before His authority. Not that it would do those enemies any good eternally, but God has always been ready to humble outsiders who threaten His servants. Israel could not imagine just how great a harvest they could have, both from their work and from random wild provision.

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Proverbs 25

Posted on December 26, 2015 by ehurst

We have already seen how the unnamed final editor of this volume never saw fit to reduce duplication, but faithfully pieced together several collections as they were.

1. These are also proverbs of Solomon which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied out. We should hardly be surprised that periodic revivals of wisdom literature came and went in the history of Israel, particularly arising from the legendary reign of Solomon. King Hezekiah ruled almost two centuries after Solomon. His reign was characterized by a grand effort to recover the legacy of greatness, in part through a sincere and concerted search for oral and written records long neglected. Not just a catalog, but these were republished in fresh copies. Chapters 25-29 are the results of their efforts to ensure nothing from Solomon’s proverbs was lost. This collection offers the theme of calling for a sense of perspective and not taking oneself too seriously. We get the strong sense Hezekiah’s time saw a bad habit of self-indulgence among members of the ruling class.

2. The glory of God is to hide a thing; but the honor of kings is to search out a matter. God emanates a blinding glory from His Person. Among other things, His glory demands that we leave our fallen nature behind lest it devour us. The path out of destruction is His revelation, but it requires something of us to reach beyond our plane of existence into a boundary layer between Spirit and Flesh where we can explore His moral character. Thus, insofar as we can know Him, it is found with some effort, a measure of self-death undertaken through the various Law Covenants. It is “hidden” in that sense. The mission of a king is to lead the way in clarifying what can be known of God on our level through Covenant Law. A king who does not know God in that sense cannot rightly claim the honor God invested in the mission.

3. The heavens for height, and the earth for depth, but the heart of kings is without searching. This is a pragmatic statement following on the previous verse. Should a king take his mission seriously, he will be changed. You should expect to find him rather mysterious, full of surprises to the day he dies.

4-5. Take away the dross from the silver, and there shall come forth a vessel for the refiner. Take away the wicked from before the king, and his throne shall be founded in righteousness. The first line reflects a common mistranslation. If you refine silver, you typically get an ingot, not a vessel. The ingot goes to a craftsman (“finer”) who makes it into things like vessels. The point is that these are two entirely separate skills at work. A king is still human and needs the support of genuine heart-led servants, not a bunch of courtesans seeking self-advantage, if he’s going to rule in wisdom and justice.

6-7. Do not put yourself forth in the presence of the king, and do not stand in the place of the great; for it is better that it should be said to you, “Come up here,” than that you should be put lower in the presence of a noble whom your eyes have seen. Most people will recognize that this is where Jesus got his comments for castigating rabbis who jockeyed over precise social rankings at dinners, as if the host had no say in the matter (Luke 14:7-14). Don’t presume; don’t take yourself so seriously or you will end up with even less social status than before. More broadly, play that part given you by those with higher authority, because they have to explain to God how they wasted His blessings.

8. Do not go forth quickly to fight, lest you know not what to do in the end of it, when your neighbor has put you to shame. Debate your cause with your neighbor; and do not uncover a secret to another, lest he who hears it put you to shame, and your evil report turn not away. It may not be obvious that this refers to dragging people into court simply because you are personally offended over some private incident. The effort to expose and shame someone else for petty grievances can backfire. When your mind runs in that direction, it’s very hard to estimate what you will expose of yourself that may be even more shameful.

11-12. A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver. As a ring of gold, and an ornament of fine gold, so is a wise reprover upon a hearing ear. Two nearly identical proverbs, the translation of the first is a little clumsy. The word “pictures” also refers to mounting or setting in fine craftsmanship. The image is a discrete warning to someone who might have forgotten, or never been quite aware, of the context as they prepare to act inappropriately. By the same token, don’t be a fool in assuming everyone is stupid and can’t make it without your supervision.

13. Like cold snow in the time of harvest, so is a faithful messenger to his senders; for he makes return to his master’s soul. Scholars tell us this isn’t snow falling during harvest, something both disastrous and highly unlikely. Rather, it refers to a servant hustling down from the mountains a vessel of refreshing clean snow for everyone who is working so hard. Western culture would emphasize the thrill of being a recipient of this pleasure, but Hebrew culture points out what a blessing it is to receive back the gratitude of those who were blessed.

14. A man boasting himself in a false gift is like clouds and wind, but no rain. Contrasted against the previous parable, this image helps us understand the whole picture. What use is someone who makes all these warming promises and never delivers? It’s better to go unnoticed than to be remembered for something like that.

15. In being slow to anger a ruler is won over, and a soft tongue breaks the bone. Most Eastern potentates would engage in testing those who entered their presence; it was protocol in some contexts. Witness how Joseph handled his brothers when they visited Egypt during his time as viceroy (Genesis 42); Joseph’s behavior was entirely typical. Someone who handled pressure well was a candidate for promotion to court service. Even if you had no such ambition, having any hope of influence starts with acting noble, not like some entitled, spoiled brat. It was not a matter of steel will in denying your emotions, but a moral refinement of knowing when it was proper to show them.

16. Have you found honey? Eat only as much as is enough for you, lest you be filled with it and vomit it. Stumbling across a hive with honey was common enough in ancient Palestine. If you lacked the time and patience to get more than a taste, that was sweet enough. If you manage to harvest the whole thing, can you keep in mind that this is a blessing from God meant to be shared? You should already have a fair idea how much is appropriate to eat at one time; that’s a critical part of gratitude to God for His blessings. Those without restraint will end up harming themselves in an attempt to hoover up the whole thing.

17. Withdraw your foot from your neighbor’s house, lest he be weary of you and hate you. This is the same as the previous verse, warning about being so wrapped up in yourself that you lack empathy. It’s not the Greek’s philosophy of moderation in all things, but the Eastern sensing with your heart what is morally appropriate in the context. A real man of God always leaves his audience wishing for more because he gives more than he takes, but is humble enough to imagine that he always received more than he gave.

18. A man who bears false witness against his neighbor is a maul, and a sword, and a sharp arrow. This rests fully upon the image of shalom as the broader moral justice of seeking social stability. How long can you live in a community where you keep stirring up trouble? All the more so is this critical when most of your neighbors are kinfolks, as it would be in the Ancient Near East.

19. Trust in an unfaithful man in time of trouble is like a broken tooth, and a foot out of joint. Again, a close corollary of the previous parable. Civil existence requires trust. The word “unfaithful” here is based on the idea of sneaky and covert. Everyday life around sneaky people seriously hinders normal social stability.

20. As he who takes away a garment in cold weather, as vinegar upon niter, so is he who sings songs to a heavy heart. This is a much more obvious warning about being self-absorbed. We’ve all dealt with people who cannot possibly imagine that folks around them might not feel the same about a situation. Whatever it is they feel is mandatory for others, which strips away the humanity of everyone else.

21-22. If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink, for you shall heap coals of fire upon his head, and the LORD shall reward you. Paul quotes this directly in Romans 12:20 and the meaning is obvious to most people. Jesus referred to it in His Sermon on Mount in opposition to the false Jewish teaching of His day (Matthew 5:43-48). Your response to hatred must meet the test of moral necessity instead of nursing your bruised ego.

23. The north wind drives away rain; so does an angry face a backbiting tongue. The text here is ambiguous and the translation disputed. Our source probably gets it backward here. The big issue is not whence rainy weather comes, but the relationship between social habits. Backbiting is an ancient concept of going around behind someone’s back and disparaging them to others out of spite over some imagined offense. It’s petty social politicking. An angry countenance is a figure of speech for being out of someone’s favor. Thus, as easily as you can predict storms from the wind’s direction, you can predict that backbiting will get you in trouble with the powerful.

24. It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop than with a quarreling woman and to share a house. This is a repeat of previous proverbs, but in this context it takes on a new meaning that one should avoid political marriages. Take a consistent stand for divine moral justice and don’t jockey for influence by declaring alliances of convenience. Be willing to pay the price for embracing God’s character in a sinful world.

25. Like cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country. In context, the second phrase refers to report of a successful trade mission, or perhaps that some enemy is too busy with trouble elsewhere to bother you. There is a substantial sense of risk; this is no frivolous report of curiosities. Thus, a good messenger will push to the limits of human endurance to deliver such news.

26. A righteous man falling down before the wicked is like a troubled fountain and a rotten spring. Without a short course on the hydrology of Ancient Palestine, we simply note water was exceedingly precious and blocking access to others was unthinkable. Most springs were a leak through rock from some underground aquifer that rose periodically to overflow; the majority of natural springs were seasonal. People would dig back into the hillside to tap the aquifer lower in the water table for a more consistent supply. That meant also constructing a reservoir closer to the surface, but still protected inside a cave when possible. The terminology suggests a reservoir that was exposed and fouled by trampling, or the cave collapsed and made it inaccessible. Righteous men are few enough as it is; humbling them to serve the wicked represents a threat to life for everyone else.

27. It is not good to eat much honey; so for men to search their own glory is not glory. Here we have a more obvious restatement of verse 16 above. Glory is a by-product of something else. In moral terms, glory is properly reflected onto you from others, from God in particular.

28. He who has no rule over his own spirit is like a broken down city without a wall. The translation here suffers from English idioms. In Hebrew, first comes the image of a city deeply ashamed by the punishing hand of some greater military power pulling down their wall, rather like public humiliation of publicly stripping someone naked in ANE times. It proclaimed the victim a common harlot open to any man’s abuse, utterly unworthy and incapable of self-protection, and by implication unworthy of common human regard. Then follows the comparative image of nobleman who has no sense of self-restraint.

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Proverbs 24

Posted on December 25, 2015 by ehurst

We continue with more pointed advice to the royal heir in longer proverbial texts.

1-2. Do not be jealous of evil men, nor desire to be with them. For their heart studies ruin, and their lips talk of mischief. This repeats the warning about choosing carefully your heroes. There’s a bit of color with the Hebrew word for “jealous” that is taken from the idea of zeal and excitement for something. This is followed by the word for “desire” which is more than mere lust, but coveting. These are paralleled with the word translated “studies,” which is based on the idea of murmuring with pleasure over something — all synonyms in this context.

3-6. Through wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; and by knowledge the rooms shall be filled with all precious and pleasant riches. A wise man is strong; yes, a man of knowledge increases strength. For by wise counsel you shall make your war; and in a multitude of wise men there is safety. The context specifically points toward establishing a dynasty with figures of speech for founding and erecting a palace. Filling it with a king’s treasures naturally means sooner or later taking plunder from some enemy who challenges you. Ruling well is a particular talent and calling. But the emphasis is not so much on having your own wisdom, as if you can trust your own talents alone, but the utter necessity of gathering and using the advice of people with even more talent in other areas of expertise. This comes from the hand of Solomon, reputedly the wisest of humans.

7-9. Wisdom is too high for a fool; he does not open his mouth in the gate. He who plots to do evil shall be called a master of wicked thoughts. The thought of foolishness is sin; and the scorner is hateful to men. The point here is not obvious from translation. Solomon advises his son to make it so. Draw out the best in your subjects. Encourage an atmosphere that keeps frauds from having any hope of influencing things; make them a laughingstock in the civil courts that gather at every village and city gate. Make predatory plotting expensive and difficult.

10. If you faint in the day of trial, your strength is small. The image here is risqué: If you aren’t thrilled with a tight place, your manhood must be too small to fill it. Real men are adventurous and thrive in adversity. There’s a pun in the Hebrew words translated “trial” (tsarah — a tight spot) and “small” (tsar — to be tight).

11-12. Deliver those being taken to death, and those stumbling to be killed, unless you hold back. If you say, “Behold, we did not know;” does not He who searches the heart consider it? And the Keeper of your soul, does He know? And He repays to a man according to his works? Our translation here is a bit rough. The idea is that a wise king will insist on reviewing every death sentence in his domain, because the stakes are too high. Not in the perverted Western sense of value on human life as property, but the issue is clinging to the moral character of Jehovah, ensuring that executions meet a genuine moral need (shalom — social stability). A king can’t pretend he didn’t know because God holds him accountable for keeping enough loyal servants to have eyes throughout his domain, because you can be sure God is watching.

13-14. My son, eat honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, is sweet to your palate; so shall the knowledge of wisdom be to your soul; when you have found it, then there shall be a reward, and your hope shall not be cut off. This highly lyrical image tells us that moral wisdom is its own reward. Sure, you’ll reap God’s promised blessings under the Covenant, but see through those more obvious rewards to the sweetness of moral purity in itself.

15-16. Wicked one, do not lie in ambush at the dwelling of the righteous; do not spoil his resting place; for a just one falls seven times, and rises up again; but the wicked shall fall into evil. This repeats the previous proverb from a different angle: Moral purity is power. The driving conviction of God’s moral truth will push you through all kinds of predatory human evil. People who do evil can’t possibly have that kind of drive; they’ll give up when the fleshly costs outweigh the gains. The deepest, most vile hatred will die with the flesh, but moral wisdom is eternal.

17-18. Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles; lest the LORD see, and it displease Him, and He turn away His wrath from him. Moral discernment cannot give birth to childish spite. If you embrace God’s moral character, you will most certainly have enemies. That same moral wisdom teaches you sadness, not hatred. You’ll still have all the power you need to defeat them, but don’t let yourself slip into enjoying the grisly task of destroying threats to your shalom. Implied is that you rejoice instead when your enemy repents.

19-20. Do not fret yourself because of evil ones, nor be jealous of the wicked; for there shall be not be a hereafter to the evil; the lamp of the wicked shall be put out. This is a statement flatly supporting the concept of afterlife. Such may not have been universal among Hebrew people at large, but those whose hearts actively ruled their thinking could not avoid an awareness of the Spirit Realm. The mere fact that you can discern moral evil in this life is blessing enough, should it come down to that. People lacking such discernment are also blind to their awful fate.

21-22. My son, fear the LORD and the king; and do not fellowship with those who are given to change; for their trouble shall rise suddenly, and who knows the ruin of them both? This includes a figure of speech difficult to translate. Fear in the sense of reverence is fairly obvious, but it always included the idea of firm moral consistency. Thus, the implication of “change” here is someone who lacks character and moral substance, someone likely to shift with the wind. It’s one thing to keep your mouth shut when there’s no point in talking, but that’s not the same as just going along with the every variation in the context. Find solid ground and take a stand.

23-26. These also are for the wise: To have respect of persons in judgment is not good. He who says to the wicked, “You are righteous;” the people shall curse him and nations shall abhor him. But to those who rebuke him, it shall be a delight, and a good blessing shall come upon them. He shall kiss the lips that return right words. We easily forget that “respect of persons” is an ancient phrase referring to partiality for public figures. It undermines all your moral authority when you suck up to someone just because they are famous. That fame may be a false cover over all kinds of evil. Don’t fool yourself; whoever among your subjects bears their own strong moral perception will see through you. This is consistent with the declaration, “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” God will carry you through any political fallout for His his glory.

27. Prepare your work outside, and make it fit for yourself in the field; and afterwards build your house. Secure your borders before you worry about comfort. This represents a whole range of things a royal heir must undertake, because he can’t be his father. He needs to have seen with his own eyes and established alliances or identified enemies personally as his first priority for as long as he holds the throne, not simply in the sense of doing it and forgetting about it. A king will never lack for challenge to his authority.

28-29. Do not be a witness against your neighbor without cause, nor deceive with your lips. Do not say, “I will do so to him as he has done to me; I will give to the man according to his work.” This is the other half of, “Vengeance is Mine says the Lord.” Specifically, don’t manufacture a pretext for getting even with those unjust with you. Rather, pursue justice itself as the glory of God and let Him take care of things that don’t fall directly into your hand.

30-34. I went by the field of the lazy man, and by the vineyard of the man without understanding; and, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face of it, and its stone wall was broken down. Then I saw; I set my heart on it; I looked and I received instruction. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to lie down; then your poverty comes stalking, and your want like an a man armed with a shield. In this context of instruction for a future king, this is a picturesque warning about letting your guard down. If the man owning a vineyard is lazy, the vineyard suffers and he has no fruit. If a king is lazy he soon has no realm. Don’t rest on your title.

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The Mystery of Condemnation

Posted on December 24, 2015 by ehurst

Two different realms, two entirely different worlds that are never more than a step away from each other are Penitence and Condemnation. For all the sorrow of the latter, it seems not many people escape it. This is your surprise Christmas gift from me.

I struggle with telling this; it is so completely alien to Westerners. We are so deeply soaked in a fundamentally perverted grasp of reality that it’s a fight just to get the mind’s attention. The revelation of God and His moral character is precluded by all the false assumptions, down to the very use of language as communication. Western Civilization remains thus far Satan’s greatest accomplishment in making his realm seem like home, and the limits of reality.

Let’s review a bit here. God describes human existence in terms of Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) feudalism. Such is the way He wants us to approach life, so whatever operating assumptions we use must build on that. He says that Satan is not His enemy, but a faithful servant, the Divine Lictor and Jailer. Our Creator reveals Himself as an Eastern Potentate, a Divine Sheikh whose power and wealth are in the people first — mostly His family. While earthly rulers would rely on DNA mostly, there was also covenant family. With God, DNA is not a factor in literal terms, but a parable for holding a strong affinity for Him as family. In essence, we are all covenant family, but there is the assumption that we can draw closer in consanguinity in effect by absorbing what the blood of His Son purchased for us. Closer to the Son is closer to the Father’s favor.

And can we dispense with the Western obsession about “going to Heaven when you die”? The language and image are not in Scripture. All we can know about that is the Lord decides and we who are the Elect can know about it through our convictions, but that the question is largely ineffable to the human intellect. The whole focus of the New Testament is not on winning your place in Heaven, but in seeking peace with the Creator who rules Creation. Get to know Him. This Fallen Realm is where we are right now, and the whole thing about “Heaven” is just a figure of speech for the Spirit Realm. The term “Hell” is the English equivalent to being under Satan’s dominion as someone in custody. Visions of an eternal flaming punishment are associated with some final change in all things when this realm of existence ends. At that point, Satan will be placed in his own prison, as it were, an entirely different kind of “place.” It’s not enough that we take literally Christ’s parable using the Hinnom Valley where rubbish was burned, but we miss the whole point by imposing a Western mythology that smothers the meaning Christ gave it.

The Fallen Realm is under Satan’s custody, but if you start taking everything literally and legalistically, you’re going to miss the point every time. There isn’t some war over your eternal soul between Christ and Satan. You are Satan’s by default because you are born in his custody. You have to find out how to gain the Sheikh’s favor and with it a pardon and release. It’s not a question of “earning” your way out, but the Western imagery has infested Christian thinking despite words to the contrary. It has nothing to do with satisfying a sentence, a legal debt as we think of it. Whatever we might imagine as legal proceedings in the Divine Court follow ANE protocols and customs, not Western Anglo-Saxon legal traditions. Even the ANE concept of mercy is radically different than ours. But the biggest problem is how we restrict the implications of this whole thing to this realm of existence by instinct, even as we completely fail to understand the nature of this realm.

We can gain a pardon that is partially realized through samples of familial authority here, but the full realization comes after we leave here — we have to die. We can know we are going to leave here for something far better, and do what we can to explain to others how they can win their own release. Creation is not fallen; we are. We can surely delight in all the things God made, visible through the lens of His moral perspective awakened in our hearts. But this is no longer the home of our souls; we are just visiting the other souls in prison before our final departure.

Or, we can remain more like mere slaves owned by Our Sheikh who have no familial expectations. In that ancient social structure, the Western “free man” is most associated with criminals who have no allegiance to anyone, and certainly not eligible for favorable treatment as the Sheikh’s kin. Nobody in their right mind wants any part of that “free man” stuff because everyone serves someone, wittingly or not. If you aren’t a feudal servant of God, a family member in effect, you are a slave and you are consigned to Satan’s dominion. All slaves are there, and everyone in this realm remains in some ways attached to those limitations by virtue of living in this realm. The Fallen Realm is under Satan’s titular control for now. When it is finally redeemed, it will be nothing like this, so far as our intellect can discern things.

And our fallen nature, with the intellect, belongs in the prison. That nature knows it belongs to Satan. It’s not like a good family kinship, but more like an addiction, because that’s the essence of Satan’s power over us. It’s not just sin to which we are addicted, but it’s the condemnation — AKA guilt, shame and remorse — to which we are addicted, as well. It holds us. In the Old Testament, addiction was portrayed as idolatry. In fundamental moral terms, they are the same — a confining, constricting false mindset that blinds us to reality. In creating a universal conscious assumption that lines up with condemnation and keeps us from grasping any part of the world God made for us, we remain addicted to the brutal existence of Satan’s minions. Western culture as a whole is very nearly a perfect reflection of that false sense of condemnation that chains you to your sins.

This was not some evil plot slipped past God in the night. This was a plan submitted to God and implemented by His permission. That’s because it does not interfere with God doing what He does. It makes one hellish barrier for us to cross in our escape, but it remains within the limits of what God in us can do if we seek Him. So long as our minds remain dominated by the barbaric Anglo-Saxon system of justice, wherein one is always in a state of fear, we are never far from moral panic because we imagine our Father in terms of the grouchy old Norse deities. While any real image of God includes an element of mystery that makes some of His actions seem to our human sensibilities as capricious, we know it is always for our good. Our real problem is realizing that the Father’s whims are in our best interest for the simple reason that they are in His best interest. We must learn to embrace what He wants, because that’s what He gives. With the grouchy Norse bastard-god you can’t be so sure of that. Catch him in a bad mood when he isn’t drunk and he’ll turn on his own blood kin with murderous torment and death.

Our Divine Sheikh is nothing like that Norse deity. But as long as you cling to those false Western assumptions about reality, your gut instinct makes you act as if God is like that Norse grouch. And a signal manifestation of that is a sense of condemnation for things over which you have no real power. It’s as if that Norse god is playing games with us for his own amusement. He already planned to trash us, but wants us to hope and plays with us until he gets tired of it. That’s what our subconscious Western mind thinks of God. It’s a prison in itself. The deliverance includes leaving behind that false perception of God and getting to know Him via His revelation of the ANE feudal world. That’s in the gospel message, but Westerners can’t see it. Western minds see the false god Satan has burned into their thinking.

It’s the false sense of condemnation that keeps us from our inheritance, however much of it is available to us here. It’s not a question of more or less than what you might expect, but that inheritance is of a different quality than most Westerners can grasp without some help. It does require that you move the focus of your conscious awareness from your head to your heart. The “brain” built into your heart is the only part of you where God speaks. With the heart we commit to the Father’s compassion for His family, and commit to His agenda in Creation. The heart is the only “intelligence” capable of making sense of the moral fabric of Creation, the very character of God Himself. It’s up to your intellect to learn how to obey and make sense of what the heart knows.

This is how false condemnation dies. This is how you enter the Land of Penitence.

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Christmastide Prayer Requests

Posted on December 23, 2015 by ehurst

As you may know, I fully understand how the society in which I live makes so very much of Christmas, despite the historical fact Jesus could not have been born this time of year if the Bible narratives have any meaning at all. I generally play along until the Spirit of God creates a teachable moment. So please, let’s dispense with the emotional baggage about Christmas as a cultural celebration and simply make note of a commonly used label for the week approaching our rather arbitrary start of a new calendar year. (Is that enough cynicism?)

I’m not begging for money or stuff. I’m asking you to pray with me if any part of my ministry has meaning to you. Some of you have already been quite generous and I’m so grateful, so now I need to ride this out.

We have two meager paydays in my household. One just passed and much of it was consumed in paying off the annual county property taxes on that mobile home we just left to my son and his family. It was necessary to pay that tax all at once in order to transfer the title into my son’s name, which also ends my liability with the folks who own the trailer park where it sits. It’s now my son’s problem and he is a home-owner by Oklahoma standards.

But the tax was substantial and I didn’t have the money to order that new keyboard for my laptop. And it’s balky. At odd moments one of several keys will repeat until I take some action to stop the electronic signal (typically it means hitting the BKSP key). At other moments, other keys simply don’t generate a signal when I tap them, so I have to go back and hit it again, sometimes more than once. Yeah, it’s cranky and the problem is not exactly in the mechanics of the keys, but in the electronic signal processing.

I’m hoping we can afford to replace it on the next payday around the first of the month, because this is annoying. Pray with me about patience and persistence in the mission that demands I write. Everything else on this laptop is satisfactory but that.

For those of you aware of my allergies, there is a praise report: The crazy weather here means I can still pick some local herbs that offer relief. That includes dandelion and ribwort, for example. I can’t pretend to understand how they work, only that they do. A couple of times each day I grab a few leaves of each and munch them raw. This keeps the post-nasal drip, and resulting cough, to a manageable level.

Maybe I’m just nuts, but I am not entirely comfortable with the quality of workmanship from those people hired to prep these apartments between leases. It’s not nasty, but I’m seeing dozens of little details that annoy me. So I do things like rub some hand degreaser on the wood trim and then scrub with a wire brush or scrape with a blade to reduce the over-painting, drips-n-splatters and discoloration from human hands touching it. Later on I’ll rub in lemon oil to return its natural color.

I do a little at a time; I’m not that crazy. I’ll also scrape and smooth the ragged layers of paint on the painted trim, and bug them for a little of the official color they use to retouch some places on the wall that aren’t evenly colored. I figure by the time a year of residency is done, this will be the nicest detailed apartment in the whole place. It is not merely that am I just a nit-picking weirdo, but this is a good testimony that you leave a place better than you found it. Pray that I do as good of a job as I imagine I can.

God bless you all.

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Not Just a Spectator

Posted on December 23, 2015 by ehurst

This thing is a global disruption.

It’s an established principle of economics. The model is flexible, but it works like this: You have a company that produces something that people want and need, and the owners manage to invest in the technology in such a way that they beat out a lot of other people and companies doing the same thing. So even if they aren’t quite a monopoly, maybe they are part of an oligopoly — handful of powerful competitors who decide not to compete too awfully hard, but divvy up the market. This goes on for a long time, and the owners and managers begin to feel entitled to their market.

Then someone comes along with a totally new technology that destroys that market. Worse, it makes it possible for almost anyone to afford to invest in this new technology and produce the same thing far cheaper, and more precisely to their individual wishes.

Would anyone be surprised that the old cartel would try to make this new technology — often called “disruptive technology” — illegal? The old cartel could even be a labor union, since the product is a specific form of labor. New concepts and new technologies can destroy the foundation on which the union controls are built. And it also works in other kinds of services, like communications. If the right people with sufficient power get behind the disruptive technology, the old will simply wither and die if they don’t find a way to move operations into the new ways. But it’s often easier to use politics and lobby for regulation.

That never works for every long. Government suppression of technology generally forces it to advance even faster with features that defeat enforcement.

Oh, and if something humans do for whatever reason takes on a cartel-like economic control, and if the least bit of money gets involved, it will also likely suffer the same dramatic challenges sooner or later — like religion. Of course, with something like religion, there is another factor involved so that the old “cartel” may continue limping along but without the monopoly controls. Instead, you will simply have a new market in religion open up. While it may well draw some of the captive market from the old, it often creates its own new market. We’ve had several dramatic shifts, some over short periods with some fun labels in history books. Recently the shifts and changes tend to be less dramatic in substance as there is less and less market to exploit. There is a sense of convergence that makes them all pretty much the same market.

That’s because we are on the verge of a disruptive moment, so disruptive it will hit religion only because religion is just a part of something far bigger. It qualifies as a new civilization entirely. Meanwhile, you and I are already partaking of some portion of this new religion thing, and it currently doesn’t have a shape that allows us to use the term “market” to describe it. Still, we cannot pretend it doesn’t share some elements of previous market shocks in religion. It’s just hard to pin them down right now. The ferment and flux is too wild for that.

And we are on the front edge of that first wave. Part of what makes it truly different is that this thing makes use of global communications so as to be global in itself. We’ve never had any time in recorded history when virtually the entire human race has held in common such a significant portion of their daily social existence — that being the portion that can be shared via networked communications.

I can’t promise you that the Internet will remain quite so wide open as it has been up to now. What will make it difficult to shut down is the global sense of entitlement to that wide open network. We have today movers and shakers who were born after the Internet was already working. There will surely be attempts to create bottlenecks and controls, but the feverish pace of technological development will make most of that stuff short-lived. It’s that whole disruptive technology that democratizes essential elements of networking we see even now. Tomorrow’s 3D home printer will create the entire networking device to specifications that are way ahead of the attempted throttling. The nature of government implementation of such things will ensue it never catches up.

Right in the middle of that we are building a new way of doing religion. It’s also intentionally democratized, but for the first time, even a bewildering array of variations may serve very little hindrance in a very real fellowship. That’s because something in the nature of the networked world changes how we think about such things. Not many religion blogs, or even philosophy blogs, talk about that effect. I’ve made a few tries at describing it in previous posts. It’s more than heart-led existence, but a radical shift in society itself that permits a frank discussion of heart-mind and cosmic moral reality. More people today, by far, are ready to receive that message than would have been possible even a decade ago.

If you aren’t provoking it directly, you won’t even be able to watch it happen.

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Tactical Silence

Posted on December 22, 2015 by ehurst

You don’t get to read half of what I write.

Would it surprise you that I write a lot of stuff just to gain some clarity on some thing? My heart knows, but my mind is still struggling with submission to a higher power. I’m constantly composing stuff in my head that may never cross my keyboard just so I can hear the words in grammatical form. It actually dominates most of my conscious processes during the day. Sometimes my lips move for no obvious reason; if I think I’m alone I’ll say some of it aloud. Some of it I write because the mental or verbal exercise isn’t enough; typing it adds clarity by showing me what doesn’t work in larger chunks. And then by the time I think I’m about finished, I may decide to save it without bothering to post any of it. It’s still there if I need a fresh look at it. I can always use grep to go back and find what I wrote later using various keywords for searching, as I save them all in the same folder, published or not.

It’s really not about writing, but the call to teach and share what I’ve experienced in the Presence of the Spirit. And even that is often aimed at helping you formulate an answer to those you encounter with questions about our radically different grasp of reality. It’s part of how we glorify God that we answer such questions. I want you to have answers you might not be able to come up with on your own. But rather than be a fount of expression to which you can refer others, I honestly hope that what I write works its way into your consciousness so that you can restate it in your own terms. A critical aim of my writing is not to shape your thoughts, but to encourage the thinking itself.

So a major element is the endeavor to help you break the chains on your thought processes that our culture has forged. What you do with that is not my concern, in the sense that I can trust Our Creator to handle that as something He said is outside the boundaries of my calling. Let me cite an example.

Perhaps you’ve read a bit about the desire of government figures to gain access to encrypted private communications. Their arguments presume that you imagine they have some mandate to keep an eye on things and prevent a certain range of human activity that is bad for the rest of us. We could argue about whether or not that mandate exists, but they have managed to keep that in a separate debate, precluding it from this one. “We are at this place, regardless of how we got here, and this is what we are convinced we have to do.”

And if any of this interests you, perhaps you’ve read some of the arguments against it. Some assert that privacy is an inherent legal right. The government officials agree, but then talk about defining exactly how that right is maintained. Ideals have to be implemented. Officials have the advantage there, I think. The system defends all sorts of encroachments that make such a right almost non-existent in the end. There is no practical way of changing that, as it’s rooted in human nature itself. Ideals are mythology.

So then there is also a large body of technicians and experts who make it painfully obvious that technology itself does not allow for half-way measures. A “back door” is the same as any front door; access is access. And obscurity is not long-term security. What one man can hide another can eventually discover; once discovered, the game is over. The technology is more hidebound than the worst bureaucrat. But we have these government officials unwilling to be cornered on that, insisting there has to be some brilliant technological answer. Most humans don’t understand the technology, so they tend to accept such an argument, whether or not they like what it implies. The end result is that this argument wins as powerful propaganda. Whatever you want to call it, political will demands access because people can’t come up with an effective argument against it. The technicians haven’t done a good job of getting the message out, and that reflects a weakness in whatever it is that makes them so technically competent.

So far, it seems the one argument that everyone accepts is that government officials simply can’t be trusted with this on moral grounds. Granted, even if you made such an argument crystal clear in something like a congressional hearing, you’d be lucky if the officials even responded verbally at all. When they do respond, the arrogant posturing of politicians is a given. If they give assurances, you aren’t permitted to notice that they’ve lied about such things in the past.

Yet, in the final analysis, that is the genuine issue for us heart-led folks. I don’t have the particular insider knowledge like a Snowden; mine is in another area of expertise. I’ve worked in government bureaucracy enough to know the character of the beast itself, because my expertise is in law enforcement, the one area of government activity virtually everyone encounters. Government employees are generally the least competent of all workers anywhere. That’s built into the system, because your best people cannot tolerate the system. What’s left is those who can put up with it, and they would seldom make it anywhere else. The talented folk don’t work in the bureaucracy, but are served by it, and only those who fit a certain mold will be promoted out of that cesspool.

But it’s more than that; bureaucratic machinery favors moral weakness itself. It’s not merely that government employees do work badly, but do bad at work. For all the rhetoric, the one real talent that prospers in government bureaucracy is bypassing bureaucratic controls to do what you please. It’s not that they are all without conscience, but that they all have certain points at which they are willing to break the rules just a little. That is, either there will be some tiny narrow issue they’ll be completely without conscience, something that doesn’t show up on the radar, or perhaps it’s more that they are willing to fudge a bit on lots of things, but only for certain personal advantages.

Of course, agencies with heavy layers of secrecy are even worse. That field of specialty is fertile soil for people with a damaged conscience. You can’t work there unless you are able to compartmentalize dangerously, so that you’ll do what your boss says is good right and necessary, even as you all realize it would shock the conscience of anyone outside the agency. Only a tiny slender portion of humanity can handle that without becoming psycho. The rest of them will break in certain lesser ways you can almost predict. That’s why you have cops tapping secret databases to track their love interest and see if there’s evidence of “cheating.” While not all of them would do that, almost all of them will do something like that for their own personal concerns. And most of them never get caught, in the sense that it comes to public notice. But anyone suggesting that it’s not the majority of employees is flat out lying. It’s rare the bureaucrat who doesn’t bend the rules like that for their personal benefit. And in security agencies, you would think it was some kind of unwritten requirement.

We could smugly suggest that us heart-led folk could survive working in that environment with our morals intact — true, but that’s beside the point. It’s more likely we’d feel driven by the Spirit to depart. The reason for this exercise is to point out what a difference it makes when you look at things from the heart-led moral frame of reference. The whole thing boils down to this: You cannot trust the government bureaucracy. The don’t do their job right or rightly. And you can’t make the argument in the face of the government officials; they won’t permit it. Thus, our moral objection might well enter the common awareness, but it won’t enter the public debate.

We are left with a moral parable of the situation in the starkest terms: The government officials insist that we all remain naked and shackled in a position where they can rape us at their convenience. Meanwhile, they are utterly incapable of preventing anyone else from raping us when they aren’t physically present doing their own raping. But of course, they want us all to volunteer for this state of affairs. They’ll accept our consent one time as permanent, even when given under the most egregious duress that they themselves conjure artificially.

Everything else we might say about it is a matter of mere tactics. You’ll have to decide for yourself in your own heart-led context what God requires.

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The Essential Trust Factor

Posted on December 21, 2015 by ehurst

He said, “You don’t know me from Adam, but here you are out at this time of night, loaning me tools and you don’t know if you’ll see ’em again.” Unspoken was the obvious factor that he was black and I’m white.

“Sergeant, you are in the company of someone I trust. She says you are trustworthy and that’s good enough for me.” Actually, I wish I had said that, because it was the truth. Instead, I filled the silence with standard military verbiage about sergeants trusting each other.

The woman in question was a fellow Christian who told me she admired my ministry in the American military community. She was a pay grade lower and a lot younger. On our tiny installation, the duty fell on her to play hostess for this visiting project coordinator from some higher echelon unit a couple hundred miles away. There was nothing going on between them, I can assure you. It was just one of those crazy things that happens to people. He was driving his own car and she was the navigator, running around to the dozens of small military storage sites scattered around that part of Europe. They were running late and his car broke down near a rail crossing on the edge of some small, quiet little town in the Netherlands where I was stationed.

It wasn’t that far from my house, so when she called me, it didn’t take that long to find them. I brought my tools because he was driving something similar to my own car and I knew about fixing it. We ran diagnostics and determined that his fuel pump was dead. He had no tools and there was no way he could get a replacement that time of night. That meant he would have to wait until the morning, take off the fuel pump and take it to a dealer for a replacement, then put it back on before he hurried to return to his own unit that day. At least his car was in an acceptable spot for someone who had to leave it parked overnight.

So I handed him the necessary tools, a total stranger I had glimpsed only once before while I was doing security checks at our little installation. I knew she was a little uncomfortable escorting him around, being a prim and proper, but lovely petite single gal with long blond hair. She already had a ride coming and he wasn’t too far from his hotel, so I left them there in the darkness at their insistence, unwilling as they were to intrude on my time any further.

We could wish that kind of camaraderie was more common, and we often pretend it exists when it doesn’t. Had it been anyone else with him, I might still have been willing to loan the tools, but with a far higher sense of risk. The young lady’s own office should have been much more involved, but I knew better than to expect that. She was the bottom of the privilege structure in her office. The others felt entitled to insulation from the ragged experiences of us little people, which had a lot to do with why she had made a strong effort to get to know me. We met at the NATO Chapel and my reputation among the regular attenders was better than I deserved — just a sergeant in rank, but very active in the chapel volunteer system.

I did get the tools back through the US military postal system, with a note of thanks and assurance that things had turned out well enough for him. The car part wasn’t all that hard to reach and the new one solved the problem. Given his garrulous manner, I’d be entirely shocked to find he didn’t tell the story to his coworkers. The tools weren’t that expensive, so I could have easily replaced them. It was a risk I might have taken any way, but the young lady’s involvement made me much more comfortable. I wanted to reward her trust by going the extra mile for her where someone else could see it, even if my eloquence at the time was lacking. I’m willing to bet that man got the message.

That trust factor is huge. It’s critical to human nature, and Scripture is loaded with references to it. It’s the final, ultimate currency of human society. Contextual limits notwithstanding, if the promise and fulfillment are a reasonable match, trust grows. Just having a pretty strong sense of consistent boundaries is such a relief to most of us that we can afford to put up with a lot of inconvenience and discomfort on the side. Distrust and fear eat at your soul. Without the assurance of consistent boundaries of trust, we aren’t quite human. We spend entirely too little time and effort trying to understand how trust is wired into the moral fabric of our world.

As a side note, the military demands that kind of camaraderie and trust, but has institutionalized the arbitrary denial of its fruits. That’s what makes US military service so freaking insane. You will learn to trust your buddies individually, but you’ll be ordered to betray them at times, and vice versa. The US military as an institution is filled with some poisonous delusion about how it works. Yet the real thing happens enough that people who manage to adapt never forget, and would gladly find themselves in that environment again, at least on occasion after leaving it. I seriously doubt any of them long for even another nanosecond of time under the bureaucratic madness.

Trusts is fundamental and contextual at the same time; keep your eye on it.

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Installing Linux Mint (Updated)

Posted on December 20, 2015 by ehurst

This is not a thorough and detailed explanation. Maybe I’ll write that book in the near future, but I wanted to offer a quick outline of things you should expect should you decide to sample Mint. Download your choice of ISO image here. It’s too big for a CD, so it requires a DVD blank to burn it. You can also buy them pre-made for you.

The reason I still recommend the XFCE desktop interface is because it offers the fewest frustrations for the average user. All the more so since Mint tweaks their version of XFCE to resemble the common desktop paradigm most Windows refugees have come to expect. More on that in a moment. The point is that there is really very little advantage in choosing any other desktop environment, and quite a few extra hassles XFCE lacks.

Once you insert the DVD and persuade your system to boot from it, try to be patient with the long delays with no apparent activity, no visual indicator that things are working. Give it time to get rolling. If you do nothing, it will eventually create a running environment and log you in as the default user. Unlike Ubuntu, you won’t be offered an obvious choice between testing and installing right away. It will boot into the testing environment, running everything from the DVD, loading it into your RAM as required. Unless you use this testing phase to write something to a drive, nothing you do during this time will stick. Any settings and adjustments will be erased. However, what you see handed to you as the defaults is what you’ll get if you install it. That’s the time to make changes.

You’ll need one good password. It will be used for everything, so whenever something demands a password, in most cases it’s the one you use for logging onto the system.

One of the first things I would change is the Login Manager. The default is a slideshow background with breathtaking scenery, but it drags down most systems to the point that there is a long lag between the keystrokes you tap and what shows up on the screen. Beautiful, but not good on anything but the newest and fastest hardware. Once you get logged into the system, look in the main menu under System for “Login Window.” Change it to almost anything but the default and you will probably save some heartache.

You’ll notice a rather stark appearance on the desktop with lots of white and green. It’s easy to change that. However, as noted above, the easiest thing to accept is the basic toolbar (XFCE calls it a “panel”) across the bottom of the screen, containing features you would typically expect. The menu looks a lot like any Windows menu since Vista. I find the icons beautiful in design, and other color schemes are available.

Of course, I adjusted a lot of things after installing. Unlike Windows, the basic appearance is divided in the Settings menu between “Appearance” and the “Window Manager.” That second item betrays a very big difference in how the GUI is constructed versus the unified Windows system. Linux is a GUI on top of the system, and the GUI is modular in itself. The Appearance settings will control the basic color scheme and widgets (control elements in the interface, the stuff you click and drag with your mouse), and allows you to adjust the icons and basic font selection. If you add a bunch of Windows-based fonts like I do (I keep a collection already bundled in the Linux storage pattern) you’ll want to adjust the “hinting” of the fonts to “full.” It makes them sharper and more consistent. In fact, they’ll be cleaner and easier to see than under Windows. If you adjust the Window Manager you can change the frame of the application windows separately.

You’ll have to spend some time getting familiar with the Panel and how features and widgets can be added, removed and adjusted. Play around with the context menu (“right-click”) on everything and you’ll get used to the how it all works. There are some surprises and one major disappointment. It so happens that there are two different items that work something like the Windows SysTray. XFCE is still being developed and what we see is the effects of overlapping during the transition between two different ways of doing things. You’ll notice that for now, the primary purpose of one of them is to house the update widget. After installing, it will tell you there are quite a few updates. Once you’ve been through that process, right-click on this icon and you’ll see a detailed menu of options. One of them offers to hide the thing until you have an update.

One of the very nicest things compared to Windows is that Mint updates work very well and very quickly. Linux updates are far simpler and seldom does anything have to build itself directly on your machine. Those few times it does, there will be a bit of delay for you if you are watching. The other nifty trick is that almost everything you could possibly want to add is all from the same basic supplier system for software. Hunt for the “Package Manager” in the System menu and you can make queries based on what you want something to do. Of course, you’ll probably want some advice, because it tends to assume you already know something about the various collections and how they are organized. There might be three of four different applications that do the same basic collection of tasks, but each does it differently. Further, one may be native to your desktop environment, while another would require installing a whole bunch of other stuff because it’s native to some other environment. Sometimes it’s worth it. This is where you’ll need a friend who understands that stuff (like me) or be adept and patient using your favorite search engine on the Net.

Like a great many things in computer technology, once you become familiar with the terrain, you won’t feel so lost.

Finally, the one best feature is that hardware is generally detected automatically and there is very little magic involved in making everything work, provided it is going to work at all with Linux. Keep in mind that some hardware manufacturers are frankly hostile to helping Linux folks use their stuff, and a great many just don’t care, requiring the developers to figure it out as best they can. Mint currently detects and installs with support for using more different kinds of hardware better than most other Linux versions I’ve seen. There is a system utility (“Driver Manager”) for detecting special cases and I suggest you run that early in the game. If it finds anything unusual, it will offer some options, but usually it’s a matter of adding “firmware” that simply cannot be packaged in the installer DVD for some reason. A common example would be the various wifi chips made by Broadcom. The company has been quite helpful, but sometimes the firmware has to be installed on a system already running because it simply must be built to match a wide range of peculiarities. Mint makes this very easy, doing all the work for you, once you choose to accept what they offer.

If you decide that this is the way to go, feel free to bug me and I’ll do my best to help you with the details.

Addenda: In response to an offline question: Mint is better than Windows, not for all the silly reasons you hear/read from Linux fanboys, but purely the basis that matters most — it is a lot less hassle.

Over the past two decades I’ve installed Windows and Linux (among other OSes) on a lot of different hardware. Linux never had the drivers (or decent ones) for some of the most important user features on machines until the past few years. It was all the things the fanboys said it was, but it was seldom very usable the way the average computer user works until recently. With Windows it was always a matter of finding the drivers you knew were out there somewhere. I got pretty good at that, eventually. In fact, the biggest deal with installing Windows has always been licensing and ways to get around the hassles, even when it was legitimate by Microsoft’s rules. Hacking and cracking the process always became common knowledge shortly after any new Windows release, but drivers were always the biggest headache.

Then along comes Win7, finding its own drivers. Mostly. In recent years I’ve run across machines with important features that Windows can’t enable without some serious technological wrangling. Even the hardware manufacturers are having trouble keeping stuff working, not because it’s necessarily cheap junk, but because of a little known issue that the whole thing is so freaking complicated that what should be a minor security fix tends to break critical system functions, including drivers. Or maybe the drivers prevent some fix working. And then you have to update Windows the way it wants to update, in waves that must come in sequence.

I can tell you that most of the system breakage comes from features in the system that are not in the users’ best interest, but that’s another matter.

My point is that for the first time ever, I have installed a Linux brand that was better in those terms. All the drivers were there during installation or easily available afterward. They all work, and work well.

Okay, so I don’t have access to the convenience of logging in with a fingerprint scan. Under Windows, that software conflicted with critical system functions in the first place because the only company making it is out of business. Meanwhile, Linux developers are working on it, and Linux drivers don’t go out of business. Once it works, it virtually always works into the foreseeable future. I can run Linux on hardware old enough that WinXP didn’t support it properly. Have you tried Win7 on a Radeon 7200 chipset? You’ll get low-grade VGA (VESA mode) if you are lucky, but Linux offers 3D acceleration on it out of the box.

For the first time since I can recall, on common consumer hardware, there is a Linux brand (we call them “distros”) that is simply more convenient and technologically superior to Windows. It installs easily and updates quickly and cleanly, and security fixes come quickly without breaking stuff. The guy who leads the Mint project claims he wants it to be an elegant user experience, and makes a point of hearing comments from users, not just doing what appeals to his inner sense of what’s cool or technologically proper.

In other words, Linux Mint is “better than Windows” in the same sense that most ordinary computer users mean it. It’s less work to install than Windows, works better when it’s installed, and offers few of the hassles. It’s different, but it’s better.

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Psalm 80

Posted on December 19, 2015 by ehurst

Again, we note that “psalm of Asaph” is colloquial for the man and all his descendants, all who held his office following him. It matters here because this is almost surely a psalm from the Assyrian conquest of Samaria and the Northern Kingdom. The psalmist names Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh as shorthand for most of what was left when Assyria invaded and took them away (typically dated as 722 BC).

Nowhere else does the phrase “Shepherd of Israel” appear, but here it reaffirms that Jehovah is the ultimate Pastor of the whole nation, though by this time “Israel” typically refers to the northern tribes only. Asaph calls on God to come and save them. Sadly, He did not, for reasons adequately explained by various prophets. But while it remained a possibility, the psalmist performs his divine duty calling out to God on behalf of the Covenant People, regardless how they may have strayed.

Verse 3 is rather like an irregular refrain repeated in 7 and 19. We can see what a deep and passionate plea this is that the author forgoes the niceties of symmetry. This is a tragedy that affects the whole nation. All they know is tears, and it was embarrassing how the north and south often were at war. Again the refrain calls for restoration.

Then he launches into an extended parable of Israel as a vine, a common image used in other Old Testament books. This vine was transplanted from Egypt. The land was cleared of whatever was there and the vine prospered in its place, spreading far and wide. Now the protecting hedge of God’s favor was gone; everyone and everything ate their fill down to the very roots. Without rescue, there would be nothing left to regrow.

What was all this vast investment God made only to let it go to waste? But when God’s face turns away, there can be no hope. Is there nothing left worthy of saving? If God returns His favor once more, it can recover and be that strong servant of God that it once was. One more chance, Lord!

The psalmist closes with the final refrain calling on God to save what is left.

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