Psalm 78

Posted on December 5, 2015 by ehurst

For anyone who operates on the moral level of the heart, it is thoroughly frustrating to see people walk away from that beguiling faculty of the Spirit. It is inherent in the most ancient roots of Hebrew culture to take seriously the ability of the heart to sense directly the moral fabric of Creation, to taste the very essence of God’s character. This higher level of understanding was the norm, but apparently not typical, particularly with the people of Israel. You can sense the deep sorrow in Asaph’s soul as he contemplates the record of his nation’s refusal to rise above the flesh and mere intellect.

But what can he do? So he opens this majestic psalm with the blunt warning that what follows cannot be understood without that higher faculty of the heart-mind which Westerners tend to marginalize by referring to it simply as our convictions. Parabolic language and symbolic logic were the legacy of Hebrew language itself; Jesus later said this was the only way we could properly discuss divine truth. You cannot discuss God and His character any other way, so the psalm begins with a plain notice that what follows is parabolic in nature, using the Hebrew word most often translated as “parable,” telling us that it will seem to mere intellect as “dark sayings” — mysterious stuff.

The only way to understand God is to maintain the focus of awareness in your heart. Do you want to understand how God works? You might well see His mighty miracles with eyes of mere flesh, but you will never grasp what these events could tell you of God, and consequently you will never understand what His Laws mean, nor your place in this world, nor much of anything that really matters. So teach the history of the nation, but teach also the mastery of the heart-mind. Otherwise, generations to come will have no idea what it all means and there will cease to be any meaning to the name “Israel.”

See the mighty Tribe of Ephraim? You would think they should rule the nation, but God had other ideas because Ephraim didn’t follow Him with a fully committed heart. The early tribal elders during the time of Moses saw the acts of God in providing for the nation during the Exodus. Yet they chose to lead in rebellion against God’s man by whining about the provisions. Their leadership brought suffering to the whole nation, even as they were still chewing on the food of angels. Sure, they got their meat; more than they could eat. Right at the climax of their feast, God showed His wrath against their sin. Did Ephraim lead them into repentance? On the contrary, it only got worse. The nation was more harmed by Ephraim’s fleshly leadership than all the other threats they encountered along the way.

So when everyone began to cry out in repentance, God relented. Asaph notes that Jehovah was more generous than a doting father to his only child. They kept breaking His heart but you would think He was far too soft on them. The Plagues on Egypt alone should have indicated something of God’s moral nature, but the nation as a whole was too much like a bratty child, crowing about someone else’s misfortune. So when God put on them some lesser measure of the same kind of wrath He poured out on Egypt, they dared accuse Him of being unjust. Was Egypt this arrogant? We hardly expect Egypt to comprehend that Jehovah could have been their God, too, but Israel kept wandering off from an unprecedented clear revelation from her Lord.

They thought they had Him over a barrel, so God allowed Israel’s enemies to take the Ark of Covenant and destroy the Tabernacle at Shiloh, priests and all. So complete was the slaughter that there was no one left in that area to mourn the dead. You would think God had wandered off from His own sanctuary and took a long nap. Suddenly He seemed to have awakened and that was the last time He allowed Ephraim any kind of leadership. Instead, He moved His chosen site for worship to another place under the rule of David, some nobody from the Tribe of Judah.

Thus, Asaph explains that it’s not as if God hated Ephraim. They were still one of the most powerful tribes in terms of sheer size, wealth and power. He didn’t take that from them, but He showed it was in their own best interest to let someone else call the shots. They prospered under David’s reign like never before. It’s not about politics, but a reflection of the deep moral character of God.

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Progress on the Home Front

Posted on December 5, 2015 by ehurst

Somebody has been praying for me; I can sense it as a storm of pounding love falling from Heaven. I love you all, too.

I gave it an honest shot; I struggled mightily and did not prevail with CentOS on this laptop. It’s a Dell Studio 1535, a cheaper version of their fancy multimedia laptops. CentOS currently has no good way of providing the drivers for Broadcom 4322 chipsets. You can’t even build the drivers from source code; it fouls out and there are no current patches that help.

And I deeply feared it was another Windows brick, but I managed to make Debian 8 work. This thing comes with the Radeon HD 3400 series video chipset. The only thing that did work properly was the ethernet adaptor, and that was marginal. So I got the KDE desktop installed because I need to show folks what that interface looks like. It’s the shortest distance from Windows in terms of making adjustments and the only full-service desktop that tends to work. However, the KDE developers have whined about the Intel video chipsets and haven’t bothered to simply work out the problems, so they act as if Intel is responsible for solving it. Silly developers. So the Radeon was a good thing, but the visuals really sucked until I got the “non-free” Radeon firmware installed. The big inclusive non-free firmware package also included the full-speed ethernet drivers for Tigon gigabit chips.

Once I got the b43 firmware installer and b43-fwcutter packages installed, the scripts downloaded the raw firmware and got it all sliced, diced and put into place. Now wifi works. What’s really cool is backlighting on the keyboard. What isn’t cool is how Debian’s kernels consistently fail to reactivate the networking drivers coming out of suspend and hibernate. But it works if you remember to disconnect all network interfaces before suspending or hibernating.

The only other significant issue is the Alps2 Glidepoint touchpad acts like it’s beat up pretty bad. This is a used machine, not a refurb, so I’m guessing the previous owner(s) were brutal with the touchpad. It works well enough.

The other odd feature is that instead of a sliding tray, the optical media reader/writer is a slot with an automated grab and eject function. There are two different buttons for making it spit the disk out. There are ports galore on this thing for two types of SD cards, and the BIOS tells me there’s a built-in broadband cell modem, but Linux can’t see it. Not that I have any notion of trying to pay the whopping charges for such a service, but it’s an unexpected feature. It also does WAP, but I can’t imagine wanting to use that. Bluetooth is enough weirdness, thank you, but you have to specifically add the KDE support for it (“bluedevil” is the package name).

At any rate, this is my new flagship. I offered the newer Dell Inspiron to my wife and she gladly accepted on the condition that I restore my Win7 experiment on it. So shall it be. Meanwhile, the Kiln of the Soul computer tech support ministry forges ahead into the future.

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Proverbs 21 (Part 1)

Posted on December 4, 2015 by ehurst

The specific context here appears in the first verse, but bears the broader implication of how we deal with the sorrows of human society in general. Divine wisdom is often silent in the face of apparent provocation, seeking whatever path remains open to share blessings.

1. The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD as the rivers of water; He turns it wherever He will. Addressed to those who aren’t the king, this applies equally regardless of the form of government. That’s because it is not a doctrinal statement about government, but an admonition how we should act before any human authority: treat it like a river, a feature of the natural landscape in which you reside. There are things you might do to change the course of a river, or even dam the flow, but you had better know for sure what God requires of you in the context, because the investment of resources to change it will be huge, and risks very high. For most things, it’s easier to simply work with the situation as is; otherwise you might find yourself fighting God Himself.

2. Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the LORD ponders the hearts. Nearly identical to 16:2, the context here specifically addresses how easily people justify various forms of hatred and rebellion against government officials. Don’t react merely on the basis of your personal discomfort, as if every inconvenience arises from personal spite. Try to grasp the wider context, both on the social level and the moral level, before you decide what to do about it.

3. To do justice and judgment is more pleasing to the LORD than sacrifice. Not so different from the sentiments in 15:8, the point here continues from the context of the preceding two verses. The wording emphasizes both the theory and execution of divine moral justice as the theme of life itself, against the image of trying to buy God off.

4. A high look, a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked, is sin. There’s delicious imagery easily missed through translation. Stirring up strife for personal gain is always wrong. Some people work very hard in pursuit of their lusts, craftily waiting until their efforts bear fruit. But it’s just as evil as blundering about with an insufferable arrogance that offends from the start.

5. The thoughts of the diligent tend only to plenty; but the thoughts of everyone who is hasty only to poverty. This is intentionally paired with the previous verse. Regardless of your motives, hard work still bears more fruit than impulsiveness.

6. The getting of treasures by a lying tongue is a vanity tossed to and fro by those who seek death. This is a figure of speech. Some people are very proud of their ability to manipulate and scam others out of material goods, but the attitude itself means they are already dead souls. The subtext is that people can know the price of things and the value of nothing.

7. The robbery of the wicked shall destroy them, because they refuse to do judgment. Here is an obvious companion to the previous verse. If your predatory skills are limited to physical violence instead of a smooth tongue, your violence will return upon your head. Defying justice is inherently violent. The image of destruction here can be associated with a cow chewing its cud; sometimes divine justice takes awhile, but you have to trust God for things you cannot see.

8. The way of a guilty man is perverted; but the pure, his work is right. Again, the subtlety is lost in translation here. If you deny your own conscience, you’ll be driven by forces you don’t understand down a very unpredictable path. If you seek a clear conscience, the results of your life will be consistent and reliable.

9. It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop than with a quarrelsome woman and to share a house. Noteworthy here is that there is nothing wrong with a woman who zealously defends her man in public, as was typical of Hebrew women. It’s when she’s a bitch at home that it shows a serious moral flaw. The subtle implication is that it’s a good idea to flush her out before committing to a bad marriage. Otherwise, it’s better to live alone in a rented attic room so that you can still pursue your divine calling.

10. The soul of the wicked desires evil; his neighbor finds no favor in his eyes. Here is a rich imagery about perception. The emphasis is that you learn not to trust someone who lives for their perversions. It doesn’t matter if they seem friendly; your only value to them is purely mercenary. Also, the words for “wicked” and “neighbor” sound very similar, which counts as a pun in Hebrew.

11. When the scorner is punished, the simple is made wise; and when the wise is instructed, he receives knowledge. This is much simpler than it appears in translation. Only after you can get someone’s attention can you teach him.

12. The righteous wisely considers the house of the wicked; but God overthrows the wicked for their wickedness. This one is a little difficult for its ambiguity. Neither the name nor word for “God” appears in the Hebrew, only the masculine pronoun. However, we don’t see “righteous one” as a title for God anywhere else in Proverbs; it’s usually a righteous human. Whoever it is here, he has the authority to execute judgment. The main point here is that righteous wisdom does not act rashly, but acts thoroughly after considering the entire context (“house” as in one’s entire domain).

13. Whoever stops his ears at the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, but shall not be heard. English lacks the subtlety for this, as the Hebrew uses two different words for “cry.” Further, Westerners have a poor concept of charity. Beggars in the Ancient Near East followed customary protocols in how they called out for donations. You always had the option of treating them as background noise because they would never confront you, nor even make eye contact as you passed; they were strangers with no claim on your attention. The Covenant echoes common moral conceptions that giving to beggars was based on what you could afford, and was part of the ritual sacrificial system. If someone was family, you could approach them directly and ask for specific help with a presumption they would dig more deeply into their pockets. Thus, the image here is that if you are cold hearted enough to ignore common beggars, you will alienate yourself from your own relatives.

14. A gift in secret quiets anger; and a bribe in the bosom quiets strong wrath. We’ve seen this before in 18:16. The emphasis here is on discretion. If you feel the need to take this route, never do it publicly, because it tends to humiliate the recipient. He may feel obliged to reject your overtures for the sake of reputation. Your gifts should be private.

15. It is joy to the just to do judgment, but ruin shall be to the workers of iniquity. This is actually connected to the previous verse. Divine moral justice is its own reward. Otherwise, you are just putting on a show and whatever you hope to gain will evaporate.

16. The man who wanders out of the way of understanding shall rest in the assembly of departed spirits. This is an ancient figure of speech. The Hebrew word for “understanding” emphasize the idea of circumspection, a grasp of what’s appropriate for the context. Thus, the statement is a virtual truism in the Ancient Near East as a whole: Context is everything. The “assembly of departed spirits” is a euphemism for the grave or a graveyard.

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Admin: My ISP Hassles

Posted on December 3, 2015 by ehurst

Holding myself always accountable to my regular readers, it seems proper to report that my Internet connection service is stumbling a lot right now. Not the technology so much as my provider has gone bonkers on us.

Cox Cable makes its best profit from the TV service they want you to bundle with the other stuff the do. My regulars know that I hate TV. It’s not as if TPTB aren’t aware of how TV helps to keep us enslaved; they are counting on it and do what they can to restrict our options on official information so that we are denied such info without TV. I am not in a position to ignore it totally despite how much I despise it, so I do have a TV and do watch certain portions of news broadcasts, for example. But I’ll be darned if I let Cox bully me by punitive billing practices just because I won’t play sucker to their hard sell.

Right now their billing department is being downright abusive with us. It’s as if someone in their management is totally schizoid and changing their minds daily about what they are doing to us. We thought we had this thing settled amicably, but the next day it’s like storm troopers and they change things without bothering to tell us. This, on top of a rather shocking new fee schedule, along with periodic technology issues like DNS. They forget that there is competition.

I predict that we will end our relationship with Cox by the end of this month and switch to AT&T DSL services. For less money we can get a faster line (in theory). This means that my Cox email address will go away. Brothers and sisters, let me encourage you to switch to my other email addresses if you haven’t already:

ehurst909@gmail.com
broken@unseen.is
br073n@outlook.com

These three don’t rely on any particular ISP. As it is, I’ll have to go back through all my various online accounts and change the email address I use for those. There are a lot of them because that’s the way the world works.

It’s possible things with Cox won’t even last that long and I’ll be stuck having to use free wifi wherever I can get it for awhile. It’s plentiful here, but nothing very close to home. Thus, my access during such a time would be limited. The issue could be that Cox takes such a big bite out of us that it will take time to come up with the installation fees for DSL.

If any of this matters, or even entertains you, keep your eye out for posts under the “Admin” label. Thank you all for your prayers and support.

Update: I received information that Cox’s website and call center are both out-sourced. Further, within the company it is well known that those services are unreliable and hopelessly incompetent. So without knowing what a disaster it would turn out to be, we had requested moving our services via the website. This is the primary source of our troubles. When we went to a retail outlet staffed by actual employees of Cox, everything got fixed pretty quickly. I still wrote a strong letter to the local company offices via snail mail and may get a further response. But the take away here is that you should never, ever use Cox’s call center or website to do business with them. Always use a retail facility.

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Refreshing Your Core

Posted on December 3, 2015 by ehurst

Stop and re-calibrate; put your intellect back into its place.

There is no command from God to accomplish anything on this earth. Our whole gospel message is characterized as process, not product. We are struggling to explore the vast Land of the Heart, the Kingdom of Endless Repentance, the Moral Universe of God’s Character in Creation. If I were restricted to one doctrine, it would be to awaken the heart-mind as master of the soul, because it simply cannot work unless the heart is bound to Christ. And there is not a thing we can do to change someone else; our whole purpose is wrapped up in raising consciousness of this faith by living it.

The demons of destruction are beginning to harvest the first fruits, as it were, before our eyes. Their crop knows no season, but rather sin inserts its own season by perverting the natural order of things — that order being God’s moral character woven into Creation. But it will only be a season in the sense that this, too, shall pass. Meanwhile, the time of testing is at hand; the Bible refers to it as “tribulation.” It doesn’t require a prophet to see that, but it does require a living and active heart of faith to keep from getting lost.

In all of my blather about computer technology, operating systems and the coming Networked Civilization, what really matters is how I stay on track during the transition. Few living now will ever comprehend what they see happening around them, but if we don’t focus on awakening people to their hearts, it won’t matter what they see. No human reckoning can explain the full range of chaos bursting up from the Abyss right now. Even if we had a whole world of analysts with complete and accurate records of all that has happened, they will not understand the spirit of this time, of what drives people crazy with impossible lusts. The crop of sin has ripened. We can’t know whom God will rescue and redeem, much less could we explain how, but we know that His Word says our minds should seek to understand what He requires of us in the midst of all these things.

If you can dare to explore this alien landscape of the heart, joy awaits you. It’s not being; it’s not doing. It’s living in itself. Nothing could possibly be better for you than to get lost in what God made you for, and made for you.

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Gray Matter Doesn’t Matter

Posted on December 2, 2015 by ehurst

It’s quite likely you’ve run across recent headlines announcing that male and female brains are indistinguishable. Can’t you hear the SJWs and pop-sci fanatics snickering now? Our brains are interchangeable, suggesting gender differences are merely cultural.

Ummm, no. That’s not what the study actually concluded. It’s more like the brain as an organ is designed to respond to contextual influences and is not noticeably different without a gender context. That hardly negates the understanding that hormones and body wiring, along with cultural conditioning, both cause the brain to develop in ways that might tend to reflect a gender bias.

So, if everyone around you is utterly certain guys must grok higher math, and that women must know how to sing, talent or not, you’ll find a gender difference in most of the brains you examine in your particular society. But the notion that sexual differentiation is not burned into human development by nature is perverted nonsense. Each of us is the result of complex patterns of influence and development, but Our Creator says He made the sexes different and we damned sure better acknowledge His Word on the matter or we’ll suffer for it more than is natural to our fallen state. Arguing with God has always been a losing proposition.

Nobody is shocked to discover that the differences don’t arise from the brain, but arise in the brain.

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Can’t Afford Materialism

Posted on December 1, 2015 by ehurst

I can recall serving in the military when it was called “peace time” and all we did was train. In those days, our senior battalion maintenance officer said something to a group of us about what a wonderful thing it was our nation sent so much weaponry to Israel. He said that the IDF would use and abuse the stuff in a real combat environment, compile statistics on what failed and why, and then offer design enhancements.

Maybe the IMF and global banking moguls look at Greece the same way. They are testing all the ways to legally confiscate the last penny from the population. Who would have imagined a Western democracy would do this? Greek taxpayers will be forced to declare all cash “under the mattress” (including inside) or boxes that contain more than 15,000 euros as well as jewelry and precious stones (including gold) worth over 30,000 euros, starting in 2016. The edict and matching forms are just that specific.

This is not a good time to suffer from materialism. The god Mammon is a cruel master.

In retrospect, it seems to me I’ve always had an active heart-mind, but had no help learning how to use it. It’s the only way I can account for having always believed the best use for money was gaining experience and education. Buy things that can’t be taken away from you because they are a part of you — travel, adventure, learning to cope with unexpected situations.

Most of my computer ministry clients, if they store anything on their computers at all, it’s pictures and a few documents. One was writing a book, but still cared more about the pictures she lost when someone else messed with her computer. Those are a sort of memory, and as we age, family pictures become pretty important. My shepherd’s heart breaks when stuff like that gets wiped for no good reason. I can’t help you when government determines to drain your bank accounts and confiscate valuables, nor can I save your computer stuff if something eats your file system. I keep telling folks to back up their files to an external device and keep it somewhere away from the computer.

It really bothers me that, starting with Vista, despite the improved security against common threats, the one thing that has gotten seriously worse is the file system integrity. Updates on XP and before were usually pretty quick and file system rescue tools were plentiful and effective. Those days are gone. Updates take forever, even on fast computers, and they tend to eat both system files and private files. I’ve had several calls where the whole thing was simply file system corruption from an update. Now I’m hearing that Win10 is far worse on this very thing, and I have to wonder just what the heck is Microsoft doing.

Is everyone with money and power out to make us miserable just for their own convenience?

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Bits and Pieces 18

Posted on November 30, 2015 by ehurst

Every time I move, I always get sick at least once. I don’t recall it happening whenever I traveled with the military, but if I stayed very long anywhere, I always got hit with some kind of adjustment that manifested as temporary illness. This time around it was a couple of things, but apparently my body is now adjusted.

So today I felt well enough to engage in my wake-up work out as soon as I got the coffee started making. The main workout today was cleaning the apartment. You know, moving stuff, sweeping and mopping. I finally unpacked the last of the books I actually tend to use.

Across the breezeway some folks were moving out just as we were moving in. They apparently didn’t obey the lease requirements, because there were a parade of notices attached to the door, followed by a notice from the sheriff’s department. Then today a deputy watched while the maintenance guys broke the lock and opened up to a stinking, trashed-out mess. You have to wonder if rent would come down a bit if there was less of that. It can’t be cheap to clean that up and get it ready for another renter. And then there’s the similarly abandoned apartment just next door to us…

Right before the move, I used some of my PayPal donations to get a netbook. It was very handy during the transition, and it was still useful the other day after the ice storm knocked out our electricity. It’s easy to carry that thing to some place with free wifi and get caught up. But I’ve got to replace it with something that will run CentOS 7. I got a donation to cover that, but the transaction wasn’t what I expected. You see, on Ebay right now, a tower with moderate specs for Vista era hardware — just the tower alone — costs more than a good laptop with the same specs. So now I’ve got another laptop coming and I wonder what I’ll do with the netbook. I’m not a collector of devices like some folks.

Apparently our street address is quite an issue with various services. I don’t pretend to know what is, or ought to be, the absolute correct answer, but the local post office says one thing, the USPS website says another, and different utilities are wholly inconsistent. The street name doesn’t change when it comes around a corner, turning from east-west to north-south orientation but the addresses change radically to reflect the different orientation. So it goes from “West Glenhaven” with three-digit numbers to “North Glenhaven” and four-digit numbers (bearing no relation to the E-W numbers) just before it comes up past our building. So naturally some of our mail has already gotten misplaced.

None of this is a cry for help, by the way. It’s just giving you a peek at my life and what I now find normal. We are really happy with this place, and I’m very comfortable here. Our living expenses have gone down quite a bit and everything we need is within walking distance for me. I’m still not sure whether I like the change in cycling terrain. Gone are the long quiet hilly rides along backroads in the country. There’s very little rural area anywhere near now and virtually no brutal hills within striking distance. Instead, there are vast stretches of purpose-built bike routes, but they go places I’m not sure I want to see all the time. I see way more traffic than in the past. But for now, it’s not a really big deal because the weather hinders riding much in the first place. It’s mostly strapping on a knee brace and taking a walk. Lots of quiet neighborhood streets that are easier to walk than ride around here.

I really miss the woodlands and the hiking trails. The highly limited foliage around here is awfully quiet compared to the noisy voices of the woods.

Prayer requests: We hope that the tax refund covers a new kitchen stove. They gave us the oldest piece of junk available, featuring those old hinged electric burners and no oven light. I had to buy my own reflector pans because the ones they used were completely wrong and poorly modified to just barely fit in the holes. We’d like to see our missing mail and get our ISP to correct major billing errors; we have service but the billing is really messed up. My son and his wife are still dealing with the insane manager at the trailer park we just left. We can’t transfer the title for the trailer to them until we pay the taxes for this year, and that’s a fair chunk of change.

Finally, I still have my eyes on the mission to teach the message. I still have the calling to do computer tech support as a cover for that mission and I still sense things are about to go crazy on that front.

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Taste of Fellowship

Posted on November 29, 2015 by ehurst

The fundamental issue is who you are.

On this blog, I strive to set the example. Not that you should follow me, but I want you to emulate how I follow Christ. The whole business of manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven has nothing to do with you changing your world. Indeed, that notion is a blasphemous rejection of God’s sovereign authority. The whole of the gospel message is you engaging divine power to change yourself. It’s internal, not external. That’s more than any of us can do in the first place. It’s not a goal; you can never get there in this life. It’s a place to explore for as long as you live, knowing you’ll never discover the whole thing.

Knowing yourself truly is the same as knowing all you can about God’s revelation.

Do you get tired of hearing from me how bad Western Civilization is? Then stop reading this blog. The message of departing from Western conceptions of reality is fundamental to who I am; it’s a function of God’s work in my life. In order to draw closer to my Savior, I had to identify my native Western culture is completely and hopelessly perverted. It can’t be repaired because the foundation is sand. I write things like that because that’s what brings me peace with God. Find your own peace with God, but realize that as long as you discern Western Civilization differently, fellowship between us will be very difficult.

It’s never a question of who is right and wrong; that’s part of Western lie. It’s a total delusion to imagine that we can appeal to some objective truth. If it were always a matter of who scores the most points, professional sports would financially collapse tomorrow. Team loyalty is what keeps that entertainment industry alive. People are not loyal based on always winning. They celebrate when their team wins, and even more when their team takes the trophy for that season. But they are loyal for reasons of affinity. Each individual might offer a different version for the why of that affinity, but it boils down to what they see as their identity as a human.

So if I tell you that I supported OSU in the Bedlam Game last night against OU, it hardly matters that OSU lost. It’s just a freaking game. My loyalty is highly limited in the first place, but if you ask me why I choose one over the other, it’s mostly a matter of a lifetime of personal encounters with folks connected to each university. In the balance of things, my experience with OU has been less pleasant than my experience with OSU. I don’t need any other reason.

So it is with our associations within the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s not a question of who is right or wrong, good or bad, or any of the crap most Western Christians cite. The real issue is mutual tolerance. Indeed, it’s much the same with any human institution, including marriage. The fundamental question is whether you can live with each other in the best and worst that life has to offer. Up to the point when I met my wife, it wasn’t a question of whether my previous romances were less qualified. Those romances failed because there wasn’t sufficient convergence of individual natures to build something permanent. Veloyce is the “best” in the sense that she’s the best fit to handle my collection of failures. The longer she puts up with me, the more I love her; I can trust her in everything. It’s only a difference in degree with how we choose our friends and fellowships in Christ.

This is why I teach that your sense of humor is a critical element. If you have to restrain yourself in certain company, then you don’t really belong there. There may be a host of reasons why you can’t simply walk away — that’s the way it is with human society. But if you can’t openly share what makes you laugh, you need different friends. You need time with people who can appreciate your sense of humor or it will eventually kill you (in one sense or another). At a minimum, it makes for serious neuroses. Granted, a problem in this area may require a fresh introspection for something like why you have an impulse to hurt people who love you, but that’s another matter. In the balance of things, you need to keep company more with those who can appreciate your real self. Humor reflects who you are and where you are at this point in your life.

This should deflate the pompous popular notion that you must conform to the values of your society. You most certainly must not do that. Nobody but Christ has a claim on you at that level, no human can stand between you and your God. If you feel out of place, you probably are. Spend some time in prayer alone with God to begin sorting out who you are, but always walk in the best understanding that you have right now. You cannot move forward and develop a better grasp on any demand of the gospel until you taste how it touches your soul. Indeed, how you go about changing is itself a matter of individual character, but you can scarcely use God’s power to renovate your false understanding until you have tasted some measure of things that will harm you, however it is you taste them.

People who can’t tolerate your real self, and who make too many demands that you conform to their tastes are not your friends.

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Psalm 77

Posted on November 28, 2015 by ehurst

We remind ourselves that, for all their piety and scholarship, translators remain captive to their own biases. We should never pretend that we have none, but be conscious of them and strive to make them serve our individual callings. It is wholly unfair to build a doctrine or theology from any English translation without at least being aware of the mystical character of Hebrew poetry. As much as any other Hebrew text, this one seeks to bring us vividly into that moment whence this psalm was inspired, to discover that precious moment when we come face to face with God in the midst of inner turmoil.

It matters not whether the sorrow as personal or national, or anything in between. Sorrow is a pervasive human experience. The only proper starting point is offered immediately, in that the psalmist cries out to his Creator. Surely He hears, as the writer notes. He goes on to paint the full image of calling on God because everything else was as good as dust in his life.

Don’t get hung up on the word “spirit” here as a doctrinal label. In Hebrew literature it takes a more organic meaning, an expression for the human sense of awareness. Nothing more than human, yet this is far more than mere animal, aspiring to things far beyond our sorrowful existence. Thus, the psalmist’s spirit was overwhelmed — the literal image is something shrouded or covered up and unable to find a way out.

But what words can indicate the depth of sorrow here? The inner conflict keeps him awake, bewildered and unable to reconcile things. He is fortunate to find some anchor, some solid awareness of God’s record of protection. He even sings of it, recalling old songs of God’s mighty acts. Where could the solution be to this imponderable inner conflict?

Against that deep and heavy history of God’s power and mercy is the apparent situation that finds the psalmist outside the boundaries of that protection. It’s a figure of speech that blames the sinner for being locked out of God’s Presence. In English translations it could be mistaken for whining that God is capricious; it was acknowledging that the one excluded simply could not comprehend because it was ineffable in the first place. So instead of blasphemy in accusing God, the psalmist recites the typical subjective human response. It was a common form of expression from ancient times.

Suddenly he confirms this by confessing that this is merely his human anguish speaking out of turn. Contrast that with the unquestionable history of God’s dealings with His people. It’s rather like that popular song, “Count Your Blessings.” When you hurt the worst, it’s not a mere distraction to recite the blessings of God from times past. Rather, it provides a far more substantial context for thinking about things the mere shallowness of current discomfort.

If nothing else, who could forget the Exodus and the sea crossing? We are talking about the God who made water stand aside for His nation to escape slavery, then drowned the slavers behind them. These were the people who just moments before whined about the Egyptian army and wondered aloud if there weren’t enough grave sites back in the Nile Delta that they had to be moved here to die. You can stand with Moses and Aaron, or you can walk wait to be herded through blessings you’ll never understand. God’s purpose never fails, despite whether you can grasp what He’s doing.

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