The Cult, Part 3

Posted on August 25, 2015 by ehurst

The cult is not Judaism.

Up to now what I’ve said about Judaism is pretty much what you might learn at any evangelical Bible college or seminary. It’s hardly controversial and attracts very little attention because there’s simply way too much of it out there. At least, it’s not dangerous for now. But if I were to continue tracing the development of Judaism and the Talmud, I’d quickly push into stuff the cult wants to remain obscure. This is the controversial territory where very loud voices will label me antisemitic and a Holocaust Denier. It’s not that I care personally about such attention, but I don’t want to drag you folks through that.

And we don’t need to go there because the cult is not confined just to that alone. The cult arose during the lifetime of Apostle Paul, and was just visible to John when he wrote the Apocalypse. It outgrew and hijacked Judaism, taking only some of the ideas, though it continued hiding behind Jewish identity and religion. As time went on, the cult spun out a lot of other masking operations, including the likes of the Gnostics, and even steered some of the activity of the official institutional Church in Europe. Today very few Christians ever seize the glory of the Father and all that He gave to us through Jesus.

Satan was so eager to adopt the Jews was for this very reason. I’m not backtracking on the premise that Judaism has adopted a false image of God and a completely false approach to the revelation. I still teach that the Talmud is just mythology. The only way we can support Israel and Judaism is if it repents and embraces what Jesus said it should have been long ago. That religion looms large as a persistent force opposing the gospel, likely until The End. Judaism is also the perfect seedbed for sprouting something even more sinister, though.

So this isn’t really about Jews and Judaism, but the cult grew out of that. It only seems to be a matter of Jewish identity because that’s the most common cover the cult uses. Rather, the cult is reflected in elements it shares with Judaism, as well as secular Zionism and a bunch of other human political activities. Again, this is not about the people nor the institutions so much as the demonic influence meant to steal away our divine heritage. What makes it a cult is that we can trace the same basic religious elements throughout history, regardless of the mask it wears. Our biggest problem with Judaism and Zionism is how the cult drives them to act as a serious distraction.

We have to learn to read the cult’s signature so we can see through the proxies. The cult has no god; each person worships the self. There is no apparent inkling of any other realm of existence; its heaven would be here. It still grips that two-edged dagger of spiteful elitism and secretiveness. It presumes a highly privileged destiny, a cosmic entitlement to mastery. It seems to include a strong measure of inheritance, a sense of family identity, though we know others have been inducted. Once inside, the commitments span multiple generations. At the same time, they don’t really trust each other and can exhibit breathtaking cruelty among themselves when someone fails. Together, the members are their own Messiah.

The whole thing is wrapped in bizarre, mind-warping deception in multiple layers. A significant number of folks think they are members, but are expendable patsies. Getting much closer than this in our understanding is well nigh impossible, but it’s enough. It allows us to discern them morally against the fabric of God’s character. It doesn’t have to make sense; it only has to be discerned. Some of the craziest stuff blamed on Jews, Zionism, Freemasons, etc. has been the work of the cult.

A major example would be the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You can look it up; it’s dreary and slow reading. However, it accurately reflects the work of the cult, because events have followed what the document claims to be the plot for taking over the world. From time to time statements and plans by various historical figures have been a perfect match. Indeed, our current global economic malaise is a direct result of the plans in that document. But it’s not a Jewish document, nor a Zionist plot; it’s the work of the cult.

And while the cult is responsible for what is generally called political Zionism today, the agenda of Zionism does not reflect the cult’s plans. This whole business of a return to the Land of Israel for a Jewish country was started as a distraction. It has absorbed vast resources and attention, but I don’t doubt for a second that cult would willingly let it be destroyed for the goals of global mastery. The cult doesn’t care about Jerusalem and most certainly has no love for common Jewish folks. The cult wants to own the whole world.

But they are people, mere humans. Despite being able to adjust to twists and turns of history that didn’t go as they planned, their adaptations have not always been perfect. Moreover, their apparent plans and concerns have evolved. From generation to generation, their work has shifted with the times. I sense that they struggle with the Internet, in part because too many things with their fingerprints have splashed on the Net that they clearly wanted to keep secret. So far, they’ve been able to marginalize much of it using the propaganda tactics visible through institutions like the ADL, Christian Zionists, and various other forms of Hasbara. Not everything coming from those agencies is from the cult, but the cult uses them like any other tool.

It is entirely fair to characterize typical Jewish complaints as pure chutzpa. The hypocrisy and double-standard is painfully obvious. Antisemitism if refusing to kiss their collective asses. Oppression is refusing to let them get away with murder. Anytime any person or group gets tired of the constant whining, the reaction is always treated like a fresh new holocaust. However, this is just a distraction meant to keep us from focusing on the real problem.

Even if we talk about the secretive Rothschilds empire and all the shrouded activity of the global banking system, it’s a mask for the cult, not the cult itself. Their activities do reflect cult objectives. For example, using US military and political machinery, the cult has ensured that the global banking system is the primary basis for warfare and instability. Any country that isn’t locked under the global debt-based banking controls will be hounded until it is destroyed. Any country that makes noises of leaving that system is treated even worse. Highly placed political figures have been assassinated for suggesting it.

So the cult uses our CIA, NSA, Israel’s Mossad and plenty of other spying agencies, along with a host of criminal organizations. Their proxies have infiltrated everything they can use. And still there is bungling that leaks out on the Net, though some of the leaks were meant to serve as mere drama and distraction. It’s not as if everything you find unpleasant can be blamed on the cult. There are plenty of things we can blame on them, but the specifics of who, what, when and where could easily distract you from seeing what really matters. Keep your eye on the signature, because the cult still requires humans who have to meet together to keep it on track and working. This thing is distinct and concrete, with a trail that runs back at least as far as Apostolic times.

I rather believe that God will allow the cult to continue for a while yet, for the same reason He still employs Satan. Those who will not turn to God will serve some other master, and that’s the Devil’s job. The Devil has his own congregation, a perverted form of what churches are supposed to be. However, there is no single Antichrist Messiah; that was a parabolic image John and Paul used to talk about the growing influence of the cult as they saw it in their day.

The cult is tied to this realm of existence. Satan wants us to believe there is nothing else; the cult surely believes that. That’s because he holds some great measure of dominion here, but he is also confined here. The moral character of God in Creation restrains him, so that those of us who cling to the Living Law of God can largely escape his direct power. Christ commissioned us to form a spiritual family and take up residence throughout the world as colonists. Our citizenship is elsewhere, but we are here to bring God glory by laying claim to the full power of His Laws in this realm, by manifesting His character in bringing divine justice to everything we touch. Satan cannot keep us from that mission; he can only distract us. Given what we see of mainstream organized Christianity, he’s been pretty successful. But the cycle has run its course again and we are seeing a tribulation that always comes with the collapse of any system he builds.

Recognize the cult for its influence and moral degradation, not what suit it wears. Our warfare is not against flesh and blood, but the spiritual forces of wickedness in this fallen world.

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The Cult, Part 2

Posted on August 24, 2015 by ehurst

Throughout recorded history, Jews have had a tough time with everyone else.

That the rabbinate became Hellenized does not mean they were Hellenic. I refer to it often as a bastardized intellectual shift because it is not exactly a full embrace of clear Platonic and/or Aristotelian logic. It retains a certain amount of mysticism, but nothing like it was originally. Rather, it’s highly influenced by their time under Babylon and Persia with all the broad mixture of heathen influences those two empires embraced. Given that whole libraries were written to discuss the details, I can only mention in passing the basic idea that the Hebrew scholars were hit with successive waves of intellectual influence starting around the time of Solomon.

Prophets made note of this sinister influences and by the time of Malachi it was already quite far gone. So when Alexander the Great swept through the land a century after Malachi’s ministry, Hebrew intellectuals were ripe for harvest.

Have you ever seen a sharp-minded teenager discover the power of logic? Maybe some of you can remember when you first seized upon formal analytical reasoning (AKA abstract logic), and the thrilling sense of mastery it granted. It wasn’t so far different from how the rabbis felt when they were first exposed to Alexander’s generous donation of Hellenic literature everywhere he conquered. Alex was a hard-core evangelist for Hellenism. In some ways, military conquest was simply a tool for his passion to give the world his homeland’s cultural legacy.

This was a significant shift from previous waves of conquest in the Levant, as Hellenism was entirely man-centered. It was like a drug to fallen human nature. This was the part the rabbis absorbed most, though not in quite those terms. They still clung to the idea that they were the living, breathing revelation of God. For them, the logical analysis of Hellenism granted them a mastery that even Jehovah was forced to respect — so say the Talmudic legends. What we see is carrying over the very same fundamental error Jeremiah warned about prior to the Fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC. The rulers in Jerusalem felt they had God over a barrel; surely He couldn’t allow the the city to fall because His House was there! In other words, it was an anthropomorphism of God that displaced the Ancient Near Eastern reflexive mysticism about things we could not possibly comprehend in our minds.

The rabbis believed they could understand now, though it meant running everything through a kind of linguistic analysis frankly foreign to their ancient ways. It wasn’t the logical, materialistic idealism of the Greeks, but a legalism unique to the new Hellenized Hebrew thinking. While the result was a very heavy dose of materialism, it retained a kind of mystical feel. They were the Chosen to absorb the ultimate truth of all things and help God out by fixing up revelation. They were demigods of a sort.

The result was an ugly two-edged knife pointed at the back of humanity. One edge was a sacred elitism with multiple layers and grades of “holiness” and a matching spite for those who weren’t so holy. The other edge was a sudden necessity for guarding the secrets, thinking that they had somehow become that Flaming Sword at the gate of Eden. Keep an eye on that dagger as we proceed through the story here; it characterizes everything they do.

This new analytical knife was applied to the whole of their heritage, but particularly noteworthy is the matter of their being God’s Chosen. Some part of their thinking grudgingly accepted the Exile as punishment for their previous endless flirtation with idolatry. About the only thing they got right coming out of that was never again overtly turning to other deities on any grounds. But part of the package of Restoration was the rather vivid image of a Messiah, someone to arise and restore their lost greatness. Completely lost was the initial comment from God that they were chosen for a mission. The “mission” part faded from memory while the “chosen” part took center stage.

Starting with Isaiah’s prophecy, then again with Daniel during the Exile, we have a growing body of hints about a specific figure who would come to set things right in the nation. When Haggai and Zechariah performed their tag-team ministry to provoke the building of the Second Temple, the image of Messiah loomed quite large in the minds of those who returned to the Land. There had been no such thing as synagogues and rabbis until the Exile; it was a system that arose to keep religion alive without the Temple. Now rabbis were a major presence in the nation and they began studying and weaving together an image of this Messiah figure. The mixture of lyrical parables and mystical symbols with presumably literal statements was confusing, and there were competing theories among the scholars. However, as a broad general trend, you would naturally expect that the militant conquering hero part of the image would become by far the most popular among both the ignorant and learned.

By the time the Messiah was actually born, the mythology was full-blown and very little of it was accurate. The Messianic Expectations literature describe a military conqueror using miracles to defeat all the secular rulers. He would turn stones into bread and no Jew would ever hunger again. All the Gentiles would surrender themselves as slaves to Judeans and bring with them the wealth of all the world as tribute. The Wilderness Temptations of Jesus were clearly a matter of testing just which kind of Messiah He would be, and Satan clearly preferred the one in popular mythology. That Jesus rejected that path sealed His doom as a human. He was rejected out of hand by the Jewish leadership because His teaching was wholly inconsistent with their logical legal tests.

If you pay attention to how the Jewish leadership manipulated the Romans into performing their dirty work of crucifixion, you begin to understand how that Hellenized dagger works. In their minds, these elite rabbis were God’s Chosen to rule the whole world, and God had appointed them to make it happen. Jesus talked about compassion for the multitude of Jewish peasants, whom the leaders despised as ignorant of their murky Talmudic mythology. Worse, He dared to suggest this business of the Law was meant as a gift to the Gentiles, too! And while Jesus Himself had little contact with Gentiles, the whole thrust of His commission to Peter about the Keys of the Kingdom was to gradually spread the message to the peasants, then Samaritans and finally all the rest of humanity. Oh, horrors! The Jews were supposed to simply give away their sacred trust?

Do you remember how Paul’s defense of himself to the crowd from the steps of the Roman armory (Acts 22) went just fine until he dared to mention taking the gospel to the Gentiles (verses 21-22)? We could cite a long list of references but it’s not hard to demonstrate the common Jewish hatred for anyone who wasn’t a “proper” Jew. Anyone in that part of the world was familiar with the arrogant treatment, clannish withdrawal, the nasty looks and ugly slang labels coming from the Jews. That is, until a Jew was ready to take your money or needed something you had. No wonder the early churches struggled with keeping peace between the Gentile believers and Jewish Christians!

You wonder how the Romans were so patient with the Jews.

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The Cult, Part 1

Posted on August 24, 2015 by ehurst

There is a secretive cabal committed to enslaving humanity to their agenda.

Try to understand that my use of the term “cult” here does not signal a discrete organization as we might typically expect from our cultural mythology. In fact, our confusion over the term “cult” is partly due to the efforts of the cult itself. This cult is all about control over the human race, and a primary tool is keeping us confused and ignorant about elements of their core issues. The reason for calling it a cult specifically is because it works very much like a religion; it is born of a belief in some transcendent truth.

What makes it most dangerous is how close it comes to God’s revelation, for it hijacks certain key elements of His Word.

I need to make it clear that this cult is not the only game in town. There are other actors out there, both individuals and groups, that have similar aims but lack the cult’s religious fervor. Some of them actively despise those in the cult. The cult is not the whole of our consideration as we seek to bring Christ’s redemption to our world. In your individual calling, it may not even be a major element. Rather, I seek here to share what God has shown me to help you discern what God is showing you. Those of us who have been awakened in the higher spiritual awareness can sense each other in ways that escape words. We have no need to assert human controls over each other, but seek to strengthen and support each other in our highly varied individual callings. The cult I describe here is distinguished in part by mimicking that spiritual awareness, faking it through the power of our Enemy.

So this becomes a first point of description: This cult is a very close parallel to the Kingdom of Heaven. It relies on many of the same basic truths of our fallen reality, and gets them mostly correct in a certain sense, but is deluded about the purpose of it all.

It would be a serious error to imagine that the cult followers do not have a heart-mind awareness. Their hearts are not asleep, but deceived. The Bible refers to this and most Westerners (believer or not) consider it a figure of speech. However, we teach that the business of the heart as a higher faculty is rather literal. In Scripture we see where a great many sinners suffer from hearts that are asleep or souls out of touch from their hearts. That’s most of humanity at any given time in history, but all the more so under Western Civilization.

However, we know that the Bible also refers to hearts darkened by a perverse purpose. I doubt we could possibly gin up the clinical terminology to discuss this much. The concept of a darkened heart shares something with the common notion of “demon-possessed” but without all of the goofy Western mythology about demons. The point is that these folks do seek a heart-led existence, but something is very wrong with their heart’s connection to the moral fabric of Creation. Instead of directly sensing God’s character, they get a very twisted view of God that causes them to serve Satan instead.

Satan’s purpose is to keep us doing anything and everything except for that one thing God requires of each of us. Even a whole range of ostensibly good things are fine with him, but never the most important thing. Satan isn’t plotting to take over the world through the cult or any other human perversion. Rather, he’s keeping people from whatever it is God actually wants for them so that he can prevent God’s glory from shining in fullness here in this realm of existence. Satan has no real problem with Western Christianity because it is powerless. There is nothing he can do about God resurrecting dead spirits to eternal life in humans, so this “born-again” stuff isn’t his concern. What concerns Satan is making sure we never quite grasp the inheritance that God grants us here. The Devil is our Enemy in hindering us from clawing our way back to Eden.

Thus, the best tactic is to deceive people about that Flaming Sword of revelation. The essence of the Fall is choosing human faculties over the divine grant. In Western Civilization that manifests primarily as choosing reason and intellect and breaking the connection to the Spirit of God. That was pretty much the net result of all that thinking and talking among the various Greek philosophers. It puts man’s intellect on the throne of the universe. In actual practice it makes each of us our own god. We can decide whatever it is we need to know about morality — the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As Satan characterized it in Genesis, we can be like gods knowing (judging) what is good and evil.

That Flaming Sword at the entrance to Eden was not simply a code of laws, but the Person and character of God Himself. It means taking your self off the throne, which feels very much like death. Most people aren’t eager for that, and the human mind rebels against it.

The focus of Scripture is the narrative of redemption, so an awful lot of human history is not recorded there. A whole world of detail that we today consider pertinent is left out, which is typical of human faculties in contrast to divine revelation. What we have instead is the story of how God remained in contact with those few who were determined to face that Flaming Sword. He used their existence in the ever-changing fallen context to expose more and more of His character. His Presence in His people affected the development of human culture in at least one part of the world. At the same time, a vast accretion of confusion grew alongside it. So we have at some point a fellow we call Abraham called out of this confusion to focus on one thread of revelation available to him. His contextual knowledge was the vast Mesopotamian complex of cultures and religions.

He gradually left behind a lot of the cultural clutter and spent time living very simply in a land that, at that time, was very thinly populated. God granted him a covenant and things got under way. However, his education was incomplete and God made it a point to acquaint him with the ancient culture of Egypt, as well. Over several generations that followed, God kept bringing him and his descendants back to Egypt for a bigger dose of that culture.

At some point God was ready to get rid of the cruft and ordered events to get the growing tribe descended from Abraham-Isaac-Israel out of there. God appointed another central figure named Moses with an indescribable level of awareness of moral and spiritual things, a man who bore a solid background in both the Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures, and drove him out into the wilderness to live simply in tents again and sort things out. In the presence of a stabilizing priestly household (Jethro), Moses ended up ready for the job. God used him to move this people out of Egypt, nearly destroying the indigenous culture in the process. Then while keeping the nation out there in the simple tent life, He called up His servant Moses to discuss what did and did not belong in this new culture God wanted to raise up in this nation of people who would otherwise be a pestilent presence on the earth.

In other words, God Himself was directly involved in what became the Hebrew culture, to include the intellectual background and all the basic assumptions about reality underlying what followed. While it’s not hard to detect the various elements in both Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, God made it a point to filter out the things He didn’t want, and then destroyed those source cultures sufficiently to prevent any of it from coming back too easily in human awareness. Today we have darn little of those ancient cultures available for our inspection. We know about them, but precious little of the content. Meanwhile, we have an awful lot of direct awareness of Hebrew culture. God saw to it they saved a collection of their essential documents.

The resulting culture and intellectual assumptions as a whole are an essential foundation for the revelation of God’s character. Don’t let that zip past over your head the way it does with the majority of mainstream Christians. If you don’t somehow catch onto the essence of how they approach knowledge itself, the question of epistemology and what can we claim to know, then you cannot grasp His revelation. Without all of that, you might come to face that Flaming Sword at the entrance to Eden, but you cannot pass. You see, there is no way you can wield the Sword of truth in this world until you first pierce your own soul. The Hebrew intellectual assumptions are the handle of the Sword.

God placed that Sword in the hands of the Nation of Israel. It implied a specific calling, that there is also a Mission of Israel. As time wore on, the record shows that the nation and the mission became separated. They lost their grip on the Sword, and it fell on them as wrath. The Sword can cleanse you or kill you, and it eventually became their instrument of execution. When the Sword showed up in human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, they refused to handle it any longer. Israel the Nation came to an end.

But Israel the Mission still stands. Only now, it’s how we characterize the teaching of Jesus. Individual Jews can easily return to that mission, but they have to come the same way as all of humanity: through Jesus Christ. Paul noted they have certain advantages coming into Christ, but whatever grand promise they could have had is gone outside of Christ.

We need to understand what it was they traded for their grip on the Sword.

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More on Foul Winds

Posted on August 23, 2015 by ehurst

If this is your first visit here, you’ll probably struggle with a lot of catching up to do. This post is specifically for my virtual parish here, but the whole world is welcome to come and read it.

Sometimes I think I know how the Apostle John must have felt there on Patmos. I’m not locked away behind prison bars and neither was he, but my choices for travel are highly circumscribed by the context, as were his. For some years I’ve been in a kind of exile away from the things I would really prefer to be doing. What keeps me away is not a stretch of sea, but the vast ocean of difference between what God called me to do and what mainstream Christian churches can tolerate. Meanwhile, I really can’t get a regular job to distract me from this sense of isolation. At least, I haven’t gotten a viable job offer so far (something I can do without aggravating my old injuries). So I’m just marking time here for fifteen years or so and now, here I am on the Lord’s day and I hear His voice speaking to me.

Unlike John, I have no particular need to use the Hebrew imagery as an extended parable. I’ll do my best to write in more clinical terms. I’ll fail, but somewhere between my failure and your own moral awareness, perhaps the Lord can use our desire for His glory.

His glory is the only purpose we have for living in this Fallen Realm. The Eden narrative plainly indicates we weren’t designed for this fallen state, but to commune with Him directly. That was His intention, but the plan got off track. So we cannot partake of the Tree of Life until we pass through that Flaming Sword. The whole rest of the Bible explains the meaning of that image of the Flaming Sword. In the cultural context of the Bible, it refers to divine justice slicing away our sin.

Not once does God try to explain to us what all of this means eternally. Our spiritual standing before Him is something we each could know for ourselves, but not a one of us can explain how we know. Nor does God try to explain how He decided, only that our eternal fate was fixed before He made each of us. Even that doesn’t really make sense, except that it puts our focus back on what we can do in this fallen state for the one thing He does explain: His glory in us.

I’ve tried to explain many times that our Enemy in this is not what most Christians think about him. You can use the WordPress search function and see what I’ve written about the proper understanding of Satan and how God uses him. For now I’ll summarize: From the very start, Satan lost his created position by trying to consume some of God’s glory on himself. So as part of his punishment, it’s now his job as God’s Lictor and Jailer to keep trying to consume that glory out of our lives. Satan doesn’t want to own your soul; he wants to steal your share of God’s glory. By consuming your shalom he darkens the glory of the Lord’s Name. He’s a moral black hole. Satan is our Enemy with that titular capital “E” but he is not God’s enemy. He is God’s servant.

All of the people Satan uses are the lower-case “e” enemies who are actually victims of the Enemy, too. In trying to understand what John wrote and what I want to write, you need to get the focus off the individuals who make it difficult for us to revel in God’s glory. Antichrist is not a person but an influence. Focus on the forces of Darkness that use those individuals. That’s why I used the term “Foul Winds” a couple of weeks ago. Think of it as moral influences working through human agencies, both individually and in groups.

Regular readers know that I often refer to Western Civilization as a reference for the foul moral winds blowing across the entire world. It’s a dominant force that holds vast billions in its grip. It’s not a concrete object, but an influence that blinds humans to the truth, a “spirit of Antichrist.” When I tell you it’s largely a mixture of Germanic Tribal mythology and Greco-Roman heathen cultural influences, I’m still leaving out a powerful catalyst that made such a blend possible. You see, it was largely the existing official church hierarchy in the remains of the Roman Empire that consciously chose to mix the two. It’s a fairly complicated tale. The tale bears telling only because it has relevance for the near future in terms of your moral grasp.

We have to step back some to get there. It’s a matter of historical record that the dominant thread of Hebrew religious leadership abandoned their ancient Hebrew intellectual roots and adopted some elements of Hellenism. That is, they reassessed the religion of Moses, already quite poorly understood, in terms of Greek rational analysis. The result was a false religion that bears only superficial resemblance to the Covenant of Moses, and a false image of God that was confined to their bastardized logic. A major element of Jesus’ ministry was correcting this radical shift away from God’s revelation. You can see how that turned out. In the end, God judged that what was left of the Nation of Israel had abrogated their end of the Covenant and it no longer included them. From the Resurrection forward, only those who embraced the teaching of Jesus were granted any status on this earth as “God’s people.”

So Satan stepped up and adopted those Jews who refused to follow their Messiah. They became his special people on the earth. Not in the sense of concrete objects, but he used those willing to obey him as tools by which he intended to ramp up his mission of sucking down God’s glory into the inky depths of whatever passes for his fallen angel’s soul.

And boy, did they get to work for him. Eventually the Pharisees hijacked the existing institutions completely and whatever it meant to be a Judean in the Roman Empire meant you were some flavor of Pharisee. No, it’s not as if they consciously adopted Satan as their god, but how else would you talk about them? The New Testament refers to the Synagogue of Satan. At any rate, in Church History we have this vast coordinated effort by a number of rabbis to hijack all the churches, and we call them collectively the Judaizers. Paul’s letters give us little glimpses of their efforts, the tactics and such. Other writings not included in the Bible canon refer to it, as well. What most Church History scholars won’t tell you is that the Judaizers pretty much succeeded.

That is, whatever continued through the centuries as the visible institution of organized Christianity became captivated by the peculiar logic of Pharisaism in approaching Scripture. That business of “propositional truth” is from the Pharisees. For quite some time the church leadership denied that it was Greek philosophical reasoning until some priest named Thomas Aquinas made it acceptable to admit it. But his teaching didn’t really change much, since the church had for centuries already become Hellenized and hung up on materialism. They were compromised long before when Constantine seduced them into human political concerns. So in order to keep their political influence alive, the church hierarchy made it a point to understand how the invading German tribes viewed the world and simply blended it into their already compromised heathen Roman outlook. The long-term result was what we now have as Western Civilization, which bears the stamp of Judaized Christianity.

Don’t go out and join forces with David Duke, okay? He might be on the fringes of libertarian and conservative political philosophy, but they all share a continuing religious devotion to Western Civilization. While Dr. Duke does have some facts straight when he says there is a certain group of folks trying to take over the world, he misses the whole point. All he really wants is to pretend we can turn the clock back to resurrect the glory of European culture, which culture was indirectly the result of influences he now castigates.

How do you describe an evil cabal taking over the world, when any wording we choose has already been hijacked before we decide to talk about it? That’s how crazy this whole thing is. Satan is crafty, the Bible warns, and he has taught his servants well. They have built a vast matrix of bat-shit madness around themselves so that you never quite know who they are.

We don’t need to know who they are. We need only see how they work and what their general intentions are. The tribulation now falling upon us this very day owes much to their planning.

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Heartless and Perverse Society

Posted on August 23, 2015 by ehurst

Most folks don’t get quite what we mean by characterizing Western social mythology as bizarre. It has a thousand bogus and immoral features, but I’ll pick out one that seems to represent the worst of it: one-way attachment.

In Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) feudalism, all relationships are two-way. This reflects the fundamental nature of Creation. God Himself never makes a demand without a covenant, and all covenants are intensely personal in nature. It’s never “parties” but always persons. God is a person who commits Himself to certain things, even as the Sovereign Creator. That’s how it is supposed to be.

Western society is founded on one-way attachments and they are inherently artificial in demanding what simply cannot be. Never mind how things are bent and perverted by semantic gymnastics, the foundation is Western feudalism and it’s all about property and parties, not persons. Further, the lesser party is always obliged to some measure of one-way attachment, while the reverse is at most a blatant lie. That is, whichever is the superior party cannot be leveraged to return the favor. It matters not what kind of good-hearted charm or sense of conscience the superior possesses, the inherent moral expectation is he/she/it owes you damned little. You can sic a bigger dog on them, but nothing has changed, only the amount of jingle in your pocket, perhaps. The fundamental nature of things rests on some one-way superior making everyone else obey.

Even when we imagine there is some equal partnership, the whole thing ends up utterly devoid of personal involvement. There is no real attachment between the parties, just a one-way duty of attachment to whatever it is standing to enforce the terms of partnership. The sense of personal commitment is never more than imaginary and mythical to Western minds. Competing loyalties still ties you to a one-way attachment that is utterly foreign to the ANE.

In the ANE, people are your treasure, a precious gift on loan from God. In the West, people are property, while even property can become a legal “person.” Contracts are all about material goods and measurable price-valued performance. It’s about as dehumanizing as it gets. Even if you assert your individuality, in Western terms it’s simply loosening the attachment and proclaiming the self a contractual superior in some particulars.

Thus, we have a solid reason for suggesting that family relationships are bizarre in Western social assumptions. Westerners read, for example, the Ten Commandments about “honor your father and mother” and reflexively make it a one-way attachment. Whatever duty we might assume God demands of the parents is a separate matter, you see. The child is presumed to have a shitload of attachment demanded here and has no leverage. The very existence of the leverage concept is itself a symbol of how perverted this is. If the parents don’t have a massive sense of personal loyalty to the child, no amount of leverage will ever fix that problem. Yet we somehow get a bunch of teaching in conservative Christian religious institutions that refuse to make this thing a covenant before God as God revealed it.

On top of that, anything less than “conservative” is either moderate or liberal in Western imagination, and promotes merely shifting the one-way attachment to the big dog of government. What’s missing from all of this is a serious moral awareness. It’s all mired in the lower realm of the fallen flesh and never rises about the emotions and intellect. There is plenty of anger at apparent failures of whatever it is Westerners imagine is “moral,” but no real sense of personal moral loss. That accountability has been shifted into some airy-fairy “eternity” that always seems remote. That’s where God is, too. If something doesn’t work out for the superior party, having the inferior party thrown under the bus is just taking care of business. But let not the inferior dare to presume by taking measures to protect himself from something like that; it’s insulting to the superior party.

God is not like that, nor is His Creation. Western society denies the very close Presence of God’s character by simply clobbering the one human faculty for sensing that Presence. The only redemption possible here is awakening the heart-mind. Not the quasi-emotional damn-all gotta-have-it of the Western “heart” metaphor, but we are talking about the ANE heart of moral consciousness superior to human intellect. Let’s not forget that God personally designed and built the Hebrew society from ANE sources as the single best setting for more clearly revealing Himself. The Hebrew intellectual assumptions are His assumptions for what humans need to know. Those assumptions presume a genuine reliance on the heart as a superior sensory organ and as a superior faculty for processing and “reasoning” about ultimate truth. That business of the heart-mind is so essential to Hebrew culture because you simply cannot hear from God personally any other way.

Minus the heart, not a single social structure is right in God’s eyes. The ultimate source of Western morality is a mixture of heathen mythology found in Greco-Roman and Germanic (largely Anglo-Saxon) tribal societies. This is easily the biggest and best-kept secret of everything in Christian religion today. What can we say when those who most vociferously claim Christ are the ones most ferociously crushing the truth of God’s revelation? Okay, so some of them can bandy the words about a heart-led religion, but the moment you try to rise above the cerebral, they throw a hissy-fit because they still agree with the Pharisees that God is accountable to human reason.

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Psalm 64

Posted on August 22, 2015 by ehurst

This is very much a royal psalm, in the sense that it reflects the experience of someone in a high position of power. At the same time, people of lower social standing would recognize parts of this prayer of complaint to God. If all our enemies were bold and forthright, there would be far more peace in our lives. Instead, we are wired to connect with each other and it never fails that some will prey on us using craft and deception, pretending to be our friends.

So David’s initial call to his Sovereign is relief from fear. This is not what it sounds like to Western ears. He chooses the Hebrew word for “alarm” as someone easily unsettled. A man who walks in full consciousness of God’s calling, whose mind serves a heart conscious of the moral sphere, is a man who has already committed himself to God’s moral character. That character is woven into all Creation, the very essence of reality itself. David seeks God’s face to recognize His features in everything he faces as the Lord’s servant so that his life is never unsettled by all the events that are surely in His hand.

In particular, David asks God to wrap His cloak around him as protection against conspiracies. One does not hold the reins of human power without attracting intrigue, so David is not complaining that conspiracies exist, asking only that God make them fail. There are always rebellions brewing, but God can make it impotent. David describes their weapons as sword-tongues and arrow-words. Only a coward preying on the innocent would use such weapons. They have no reverence for the Creator.

Such men congregate and congratulate each other on their cleverness. They exhibit the arrogance that comes when men silence their hearts to hear only their cerebral logic in response to lustful desires. Notice the Hebrew paralleling that equates the “inward part” and “heart” in a context suggesting the men themselves really don’t even know their own souls. It’s a mocking choice of words that these men imagine themselves so deep and intelligent, but the most capable faculty — the heart — is buried out of reach of the conscious mind. Relying on mere intellect will guarantee failure against men of heart consciousness, because the heart-mind belongs to God.

So these plotters will be caught off guard completely when God pours His just wrath upon them. David describes poetic justice, the tables turned on these evil men. Their own arrow-words will be shot back at them, and their sword-tongues will fall on them instead of the intended victim. Suddenly their friends will desert them. Such people are incapable of genuine loyalty. And bystanders will see and know that there is a God of the Covenant who watches over His Word to make sure His truth stands. People will stop and consider the spectacle and gain true wisdom such as these sly predators claimed they had.

In the end, those whose hearts were sincere in seeking God’s ways would rejoice to see His hand of justice. The Lord Himself always stands ready to justify our trust in Him. This is how we share in His glory.

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He Must Increase

Posted on August 22, 2015 by ehurst

Ref. John 3:26-36.

Traffic on this blog has declined over the past week. Does it mean anything? Only in certain contexts; by itself it could be that everyone is simply too busy with other things. Surely you know by now I don’t take such things personally. As with Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist, I am no more than a herald announcing the coming wrath of God. If the message has lodged in your heart, then you shouldn’t need my narrative much longer. It becomes a mere matter of having the time and inclination to stay connected to me personally. The message is far more important to me — He must increase in your heart and I must become smaller.

Given the context of national economies and various stock markets declining, maybe the decline in blog hits does mean something. For sure, if that economic decline goes much farther, many of you will have less time for my blather. Some of you simply won’t have the same level of access as before. That’s how it works with a declining economy. You might be fine personally with keeping up the payments on everything, but the people who provide what you buy may be struggling to stay in business. That’s what a slow collapse looks like: The underlying system itself thins out. In some places, it becomes thin enough that businesses simply close because they are based on minimal operating margins that depend entirely on a high volume of traffic.

So I expect many of us will need to adjust our habits and tastes to focus more on what’s available locally. In general, the big box stores close down and little shops rise up in their place, but with an entirely different set of wares. It’s likely enough to support life, but not what you are used to having. Then again, maybe you live in a place where the population and traffic is so dense that you hardly notice. People write whole books on the generalities but only God knows what you’ll face as an individual.

In the past week or so, along with that decline in daily hits here, I’ve seen a matching rise in personal moral peace. It’s the kind of thing you can’t explain in clinical terms. I find it something on a different level, not simply more of the same. Yet I also believe it was always there and simply outside my awareness. You can’t very well use what you don’t know about. It registered on me when I tried to talk about the effects, both in writing and in conversation. It’s a better grip on shalom, being held tighter in its grip.

Part of that is a better facility for telling you where I find shalom in various contexts. That sense of peace and moral consistency is easier to discern in every context. A primary symptom is that no one’s fussing and griping at me is the least unsettling to me. It’s just water off a duck’s back; maybe you can’t imagine what a might miracle that is for me. Some mistake it for arrogance, but it’s just that I know where to find that inner peace and I simply don’t have to defend myself any more to anyone. I have an inclination to explain, but too often I sense the door is too tightly closed and don’t waste my breath.

It’s a whole lot bigger than just sensing life around me in the immediate environment. It’s something that touches the essence of existence itself. I still hear the singing celebration of various parts of Creation around me, but this is a call to my soul on a totally different wavelength.

I want that for you. I want it so much that I’ll be glad to help you get it from other sources than me. I pray each of you are touched as I am and turned to the most local of all sources, yet at the same time the most global of all sources: The Creator Himself in you.

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Digital Scandal and Social Mythology

Posted on August 21, 2015 by ehurst

Divine justice is non-negotiable.

Maybe you are aware of the big scandal involving a website known as “Ashley Madison.” The site is advertised as a means to engaging in adultery anonymously. There are plenty of such sites and services, but this one was reputed as bigger and better than most. Naturally, it was open to those who wanted any kind of casual romantic hook-ups, including gays. It was a thriving business that charged a substantial fee for membership.

A month ago some computer crackers hacked into this site and copied everything. The gambit was claiming some kind of moral outrage and demanding the business owner shut down. He refused. During the interim, various actors made several dumps of data alleged from this hacking. They were hoaxes, but typical of what you expect from the hacker community. In the past couple of days, the real deal appeared. The first was 9.7 GB, the second around 20GB. If the claims are accurate, the crackers have a lot more in their stash.

As you would expect, all sorts of people are entertained by this and have dug into the data dumps to analyze it. Of biggest interest so far is the email addresses attached to the exposed accounts on this site. People are dumb enough to use their work email for this site, including a large number of government offices, giant banking companies, etc. We note in passing the US military is checking into this because adultery is flatly illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And then there are all sorts of juicy personal details in these accounts because they are part of the process of setting up a profile to draw other interested parties.

We also learn that the vast majority of accounts are held by males, so it smacks of false advertising. Should it turn out that the supposed willing women were all professional prostitutes, they would be hard pressed to service that many clients under even the most hurried circumstances. A lot of men paid to profess fantasies unlikely to be fulfilled by the site. Immorality works that way.

Already more than one big name in Christian media has splashed out of this brouhaha. There will be more, I’m sure. What does our religion, Radix Fidem, say about all this? As is the nature of our faith, I can’t speak for you, but I’ll tell you what comes to my mind. (Hint: Anything I say about this religion is merely one expression of something that defies description.)

We’ve already discussed how bizarre it is living with our ancient faith in Western society, making us quite alien. There’s so very much wrong with the whole range of contemporary society that we look askance even at what most people assume are obvious moral considerations. In other words, Western sexual mores are already so messed up, we should hardly be surprised at anything like this. On the one hand, the Bible raises the bar far higher than most Western Christians admit. On the other hand, the same Western Christians seem to have no comprehension of mercy and repentance and how God heals our moral failures. Instead, we have this imaginary matrix of objective rules and guidelines that never quite fit the real needs of people striving to follow Christ.

Nothing within human capability can lock down sexual behavior. Such behavior always arises from a complex of factors no man can truly know. Complicating it further is that mass of social mythology and bogus moral pretension. Western morals are not a good reflection of what God revealed. This insanity seems to have no limit; even those who reject common Western morality tend to operate and speak entirely in terms of that same morality. Their attempts to establish a different moral climate are all mired in the same pit as nothing more than reactions to something none of them seem to escape. Everything we see and hear among Westerners is framed on the same bogus moral mythology. And this mythology presumes a fundamental absolutism that is utterly foreign to Scripture.

The moral mythology, regardless where it falls on the presumed spectrum between conservative and liberal, remains detached from reality itself. Divine moral justice operates and responds on multiple levels; that in itself is alien to Western thinking. The Bible assumes an intellectual background that recognizes anything we can put into words will always come up short of God’s moral character. At best, we can only post road signs for areas of truth to discover individually. Biblical Law is an invitation to explore what is truly in your best interest. Truth is living and not static; it responds to you individually. We should never be surprised when others don’t live according to our moral apprehensions. I can only teach what registers in my own consciousness.

The biggest problem is not what people call “sin” but what they assume we can do about it. Human sexuality is what it is, and if you want my moral counsel on that, I need to know more about your personal context. All my responses will be limited by what you can tell me. What is truly immoral in this scandal is the vast blindness to God’s moral standards for the virtual space we inhabit through the Internet.

There is some broad insanity about refusing to recognize that the virtual realm does not operate by the same moral rules as our physical realm. Anything you place in digital format is globally accessible, sooner or later. There is no such thing as privacy online. There is only some social pretense. The problem starts with self-deception and fakery in general. You can keep some stuff private in meat space because of the universal space-time limitations, but those do not apply to virtual space. Nothing is truly forgotten and nothing can be permanently hidden. While there is nothing wrong with taking certain measures to limit digital access, the expectation that it is somehow sacred approaches blasphemy. Divine justice will hammer you into dust if you operate under that false assumption.

Treat this scandal as yet another attempt at entertainment. It won’t teach you much about sexual morality, but it will speak volumes about digital morals. God is using various means to enforce His personal moral character, but His wrath always falls on sin.

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Cycling: Exploring between Harrah and McLoud

Posted on August 20, 2015 by ehurst

This was not intended as a full workout so much as just poking around areas I’d not seen before. PrairieSE15hnrFishMkt To be honest, it’s not as if I really missed that much. I spent more time calming nervous yard dogs than anything else. They are abundant out here. The area is a triangle with Harrah Road on the west, SE 29th on south and the North Canadian River as the hypotenuse. I never got close enough to see the river, but I noticed there was a lot of open prairie out here.

I chose to head north on Henney Road, then straight east on Reno as far as I could go. Before I was even half-way, a trio of Apache helicopters passed at low altitude heading ENE. You might have heard that the Pentagon has ordered all National Guard units to turn in their Apaches and I’m sure this flight was part of that. They are quite rare in Central Oklahoma otherwise. Nobody is talking, not honestly at least, so we can only speculate why the Pentagon is doing this. Maybe they are running out of Apaches and the money to replace them. Maybe they are making sure the states don’t have one of the most advanced weapon systems in the world should the states choose to resist something like federal marshal law. Who knows?

Once I passed Harrah Road on Reno, much of the traffic was hauling sand, gravel or cement. SandnGravelDepot There were several different kinds of depots for this kind of stuff, including one each from Harrah City, Oklahoma County and something unmarked but clearly a government operation — all within that first mile or so. On the maps, Reno goes out close to the river, then turns south on a very sketchy road tracing. However, that dirt path is actually private property behind a gate, so that ended my wandering in that direction.

I came back to Pottawatomie Road and headed south to SE 15th. Turning east again, I rode past this womens’ “retreat center.”MabelBassetPrison It’s named after Mabel Bassett. I’ve dealt with the state DOC from time to time visiting inmates at various facilities. It’s a very degrading experience just visiting, despite their claims to wishing more folks would visit.

Farther down, SE 15th exhibits one of the most unusual washouts I’ve ever seen. SE15thWashout The water was quite selective in what it dissolved. Pottawatomie County has been exceedingly slow in fixing any of these washouts. Of all the road blocks I ran into during my first few photo-journeys, only those in Pottawatomie County are untouched after these three months.

Heading back to Harrah Road I decided to check out the progress on the widening project down near SE 44th. SE44thBridgeOutnrPottRdIt’s moving along well, and I decided to get a closer look at the washout just barely visible on SE 44th east of Harrah. Now this one falls just inside the boundary for Oklahoma County, and I now realize what’s taking them so long. It’s just a minor loss of material under the bridge apron. I walked over the dumped fill material and stood atop a matching heap on the far side, aiming the camera back at the only visible damage. The hole itself was too dark for the camera to register what I could see inside, but it was not too severe. However, from what I’ve seen, they’ll have to rip out the whole thing before they can properly repair it. So while there were two small washouts near the prison refilled, if not repaved, there’s nothing out here to offer any political leverage, just a few houses and some small agricultural plots. It’s all accessible from one direction or the other.

To make up for being only about 25 miles, I made the last serious hill a hard sprint, coming up SE 44th west bound toward Henney Road. That left me just a couple of miles from home.

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Proverbs 17

Posted on August 19, 2015 by ehurst

The emphasis here is filial piety and personal loyalty. Shalom starts at home.

1. Better is a dry piece of bread, and quietness with it, than a house full of sacrifices with fighting. A literal rendering of the Hebrew would use the word “morsel” as a single bite of just about any food, something broken off of a larger serving. This along with moral abundance (“quietness”) is still a better life than a whole house full of whole animal carcasses (“sacrifices”) if it comes with adversarial living. Sacrifice your personal comfort in favor of a peaceful home.

2. A wise servant shall have rule over a son who causes shame, and shall have part of the inheritance among the brothers. This is as much instruction as observation. This assumes a society that doesn’t suffer from prissy pretense. If a family member brings shame, it’s typically because they have no moral grasp, no sense of accountability. Don’t take this as baldly literal, but a symbolic image of how some people need close supervision. Ancient custom allowed delaying or advancing the rite of passage to adulthood within the household when the child learned to act in the family interest. It was not unheard of for men to die under tutelage, never gaining full control of their inheritance, but having to take their allowance from some non-family manager who served the head of household. In real terms, the manager holds all the privileges of inheritance.

3. The refining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold, but the LORD tries the hearts. Gold or silver out of the ground wasn’t all that valuable until it was purified. So it is with humans; we are born in need of purification and redemption. If you reject the fire of your soul’s refinement, you will remain little more than a potential person who cannot participate in God’s blessings. Must we mention that some of your greatest trials are in the family setting?

4. A wicked doer gives heed to false lips; a liar gives ear to an evil tongue. The concept of deception here is not simply factual errors, but moral errors. Truth is not mere fact, but is agreeing with whatever God says about this world. You should learn to treat immoral chatter the same as criminal actions, because the two feed off each other. Don’t hang out with family that runs to either problem.

5. Whoever scorns the poor reviles his Maker; he who is glad at calamities shall not be unpunished. The word “scorn” would be better translated as mocking, the idea of making fun of someone. This is a standard Hebrew parallelism. People who are amused at human misfortune are an insult to God because they seek to play God in the sense of making something worse than it has to be. It’s just a very thin separation from blasphemy; all the more so when it concerns your family.

6. Sons of sons are the crown of old men, and the glory of sons are their fathers. This is more subtle than it seems in English. However much repute (and associated blessings) someone can have in this world is morally bound up in his or her extended family. This is another way of reminding people that they cannot argue with God about their DNA, as if He made some mistake putting them in this or that household. The blessings God offers require that you make the most of your situation starting with your birth.

7. An excellent lip is not fitting for a fool; much less are lying lips fitting for a prince. Since the definition of “fool” is someone with no moral sense of commitment to social stability, you wouldn’t expect a fool to exhibit charisma. By the same token, you wouldn’t call someone “noble” if they were foolish in that sense. This is another case of confessing God’s moral truth about what you discern in the world around you. Don’t be a sucker for social pretense. Even if you stand alone in your household, be noble by keeping honesty alive.

8. A bribe is like a precious stone in the eyes of him who has it; wherever he turns, he is prudent. The Hebrew here is ambiguous, so translations may vary widely. The word translated “bribe” is actually any sort of gift or offering, regardless of the purpose. This is likely intentional, since a great many proverbs address multiple levels of moral consideration. It’s also uncertain whether the owner or the stone is doing the turning and prospering. In a cultural context where passing gratuities up the social chain was entirely routine (think of it as tribute to your elders), the proper moral consideration is to be careful how you go about it. If you can’t be savvy, at least be honorable. Keep a clear conscience in all of your dealings and you won’t have to worry about what God sees as He examines your heart and directs His blessings accordingly.

9. He who covers a transgression seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates friends. The image for cover here is making sure something is complete. Thus, it’s a redemptive act to help someone else with his standard human weaknesses and failures. The idea behind repeating carries the notion of compounding an error, making it worse. Are you a faithful member of the same team, or do you expose your folks to public ridicule?

10. A reproof enters more into a wise man than a thousand stripes into a fool. English translations differ on the actual number, but the point is well taken. Someone morally committed to divine justice will take into consideration what people say, even if he can’t actually comply. A fool hears only the voice inside his own flesh, and beating that flesh won’t change the voice.

11. An evil one seeks only rebellion; so a cruel messenger shall be sent against him. The word “cruel” would better be translated as “brutal.” The head of household would always try to have at least one man-at-arms. This is as much a matter of temperament as skill. A chief or king would always have his cadre of executioners. God makes some folks better able to decide when violence is justified, men who proceed without hesitation. It has nothing to do with weaker morals, but a different approach to trouble. Leaders retain people like that because there will always be at least one fool who can’t seem to hear the words of a gentle messenger. Some people only respond to the wrath of God’s Laws.

12. Let a bear robbed of her cubs meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly. The word order is clumsy in English. A bereaved mother bear was easily the most fearsome creature in that part of the world. Still, a man confronted with such would be better off than if he encountered a man who was morally insensate. How much worse it is when the fool is family.

13. Whoever rewards evil for good, evil shall not depart from his house. We live in a world where even the best intentions can sometimes go wrong. Sometimes a bad situation gets the best of us and we act rashly. Social customs generally make a way for apologies and repentance, and encourage mercy. However, when someone is consistent in consciously taking advantage of people over whom they exercise some power, that person God will not allow to live in peace. If nothing else, the moral destruction will echo throughout all their dealings. How sad to be born in such a household!

14. The beginning of strife is like letting out water; therefore leave off fighting, before it breaks out. It’s easier to prevent a flood by reinforcing a dam than to put all that water back once the dam breaks. Just so, it’s easier to let some things slide than start a fight that breaks up a family’s stability. Note: This is not the same as ignoring evil, but the reader is expected to recognize the different context. Not everything displeasing to you is a threat to the family.

15. He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the just, even both of them are hateful to the LORD. This goes along with the previous verse. There comes a point when something is beyond repair and you have to realize it reflects an evil desire that threatens the moral covering of the household. Castigating someone who dares to point that out is equally evil. Westerners struggle with this because of a bizarre absolutism when it comes to family relations, something alien to the Scripture. The Hebrew people had protocols for divorcing from a family where you just could not find a peaceful place.

16. Why is there a price in the hand of a fool to get wisdom, since he has no heart for it? This is a figure of speech that translates poorly. It’s rather like asking why you would give someone money and send them to the store to buy something when he has no idea what it is. To be a fool is the same as having a dead heart, incapable of discerning the moral fabric of Creation. Some people seem to possess no capacity at all for awakening their hearts. There’s not enough money in the world to buy moral discernment.

17. A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for the time of trouble. A Hebrew parallel, the terms for friend and brother are equally ambiguous, defined by context. You know whom to call friend and brother by how they stand by you regardless of the situation. Treat such people accordingly.

18. A man lacking heart strikes hands; he pledges in the presence of his friend. Again, the word for friend is contextual. Notice the literal comment about lacking a strong heart-mind. While Hebrew law permitted people to cosign loans, it was always considered high risk. Typically someone wealthier and more powerful would cosign, someone who could pay off the debt and find a way to extract the balance from the other. Most people can’t play that rough with their peers, so it was considered folly to consign for someone your social equal. Since ancient times it was very destructive of family relations.

19. He who loves fighting loves transgression; he who makes his gate high seeks ruin. Another challenging figure of speech in poetic parallel, the focus here is on provoking trouble in any social context. If you find conflict entertaining, you might as well be in open rebellion against your own kin, because you will bring all kinds of moral failures into the household. A “high gate” presents the image of provocative arrogance, someone just looking for an excuse to make trouble.

20. He who has a perverse heart finds no good, and he who has a crooked tongue falls into mischief. This parallelism is more obvious, in that a heart choked by hedonism lies behind a perverse tongue. Not so much in the sense of saying naughty things, but a perverse tongue goes overboard, outrageously asserting things contrary to the revealed moral character of God. It’s just a step away from outright blasphemy. A wise head of household would run such folks out of town.

21. He who fathers a fool does it to his sorrow; the father of a fool has no joy. Actually there are two different words translated as “father” here. The first is the verb for begetting children whether as mother, father or even midwife. The point is that anyone involved in the life of a child who never awakens the moral discernment of his heart will deeply regret that involvement. Sorrow is their destiny.

22. A merry heart does good like a medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones. The sentiment here is echoed in may other passages in the Bible. People who rejoice in the moral character of God, who delight in discovering how it is woven into every part of Creation, are the best medicine for every ill that afflicts humanity. Their faith is contagious. You pray to find such people in your household, and do your best to isolate someone who bears a gloomy outlook. Depression can be somewhat contagious, too.

23. A wicked man takes a bribe out of the bosom to pervert the ways of judgment. This is the same word for “bribe” as in verse 8 above, but the context is obviously limited. Unlike some customary tribute offered openly as a mark of high honor, this is something sneaky. It seeks to seduce the higher power into dishonor and injustice. This is particularly destructive in the family setting.

24. Wisdom is before him who has understanding, but the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth. Here is another unfamiliar figure of speech. The image is a savvy fellow keeping his attention focused on moral wisdom, contrasted against a fool who seeks just about everything except wisdom. The obvious point is encouraging a sense of moral focus as if paying attention to someone great and mighty.

25. A foolish son is a grief to his father, and bitterness to her who bore him. This one keeps coming back in different contexts. However, it is particularly appropriate in this chapter themed on family moral stability. Compare this with the commandment to honor your father and mother.

26. And it is not good to punish the just, nor to strike princes for uprightness. Recall from previous proverbs that the just need only verbal correction. To punish them the same as fools is a grave offense to God, on a par with any kind of violence against nobility or royalty when they are morally upright. In the latter case, you’d be lucky to live much longer, since powerful folks keep armed guards around. How much worse it is to fall into God’s wrath for eternity.

27. He who has knowledge uses few words; a man of understanding is of an excellent spirit. The first phrase we have seen before. It’s more than just a solid grasp of the subject where you can answer with concise brevity, but you have no need to put on a show to demonstrate your expertise. It’s not reluctance, but reticence. The second is a figure of speech indicating someone who is a rare treasure. Keep such people around because they won’t waste time and energy on frivolity.

28. Even a fool, when he is silent, is counted wise, and he who shuts his lips is counted as a man of understanding. This continues the previous verse. Anyone who seeks to show off usually proves only his incompetence. These last two verses support the teaching of not throwing pearls before swine. It’s hard to share truth with someone whose life is one big lie. It’s also hard to live in the same house with them.

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