Not Our Allies

Posted on September 2, 2015 by ehurst

I suppose the title should be more like “The Greatest Threat to Our Parish” but that might attract the wrong kind of attention.

First, let me suggest this article: Dominionism Takes Center Stage in America. The author overstates some links among the various figures, but does a good job of explaining the secretive nature of this beast. It’s a perfect patsy for The Cult.

Consider that the current political swing is back toward the Republican Party. Even if they don’t actually grab the White House or some kind of congressional majority, it’s the rising influence of the “conservative” wing of American politics as a background. Whoever holds the titles may not matter one bit since the real government seems to like this CR (Christian Reconstruction) business. And the author correctly points out that the official libertarian face is just a mask; they are libertarian against the current government, not the one they plan to implement. So you can bet the military-industrial complex is hardly threatened by a rise in CR influence in politics. And you would be amazed how many Southern Baptists would be very comfortable supporting their political agenda, along with a large number of very big and influential religious voting blocks in the US. Unless things change radically in unexpected ways, this is their season.

So, how do they threaten us here at Kiln of the Soul online parish? We are their worst nightmare. We claim Christ and we aren’t fooled by their lies. We can smack them down with their own Bibles. I was one of them once, so I know exactly where their weaknesses are when it comes to justifying their evil agenda. What I’ve written here and in my books could shoot them down easily in a debate. We wouldn’t dislodge them from their hardened position, but third parties would be dissuaded from supporting them simply on the grounds of reasonable doubt.

If you feel led to examine them, go ahead and bring back questions you can’t answer. Between us we can all hash out a solid godly answer to their lies. Oh, and you’ll notice the linked article gives Gary North a high profile. I’ve talked with him some, and he’s incredibly rude and spiteful in private. I have acquaintances who could tell you even more about him and a whole range of major influences in this broader fundamentalist activist movement. They are not what they seem, and I can’t wait for God to rip the cover off. No need to fight them, just keep your head under the mastery of your heart and watch the fireworks. But at the same time, beware when they start actually getting the power to do things, because once they find out about us, it will not be friendly.

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The Devil’s Workshop

Posted on September 2, 2015 by ehurst

Passivity is the name of the game; there’s no work in the Devil’s workshop.

The Cult controls certain things, encourages a lot of stuff, and lets everything else take its own course. In pursuit of holiness, the trick is to detect where their interests lie. Heart-led living does not make you an activist, but it won’t make you passive by any means. With your eyes on the ideal of Christ’s Living Law, you’ll wade through the daily context in search of ways to bring the Father glory. We start out knowing the world cannot reckon with the heart-wisdom, and that we are aliens before we do anything at all. The Cult is not fully conscious of God as a Person, but opposes anything that weakens their control, so that means they oppose heart-led living outside of their own darkness.

When we focus on the moral fabric of Creation, we see things The Cult cannot comprehend clearly. Their master knows, but is not permitted to oppose it directly — he is constrained by the Laws of God in this prison of souls, the fallen world. But Satan is permitted to shape much of human behavior to build a context that not only robs us of our blessings, but serves to keep us from even knowing what’s possible.

Yet God will enlighten whom He enlightens. People might not have any idea what it is, but they will know that they belong to something different. If we who are fully aware can somehow make this truth visible to such people, they will be drawn against their human will to embrace it. Our mission is to live it first, and then to talk about it when our hearts tell us that moment has arrived when we must speak. While The Cult is unlikely to understand much of this, they know when something takes away their power. They will oppose us if we ever become a significant threat to their power. Whether and/or when that happens is not for us to decide. We can either join in the work of God or be left out and eventually called home in shame.

The issue for us is the Law of God in the mind and the character of God in the heart. It drives us to act, though we may be often little noticed by the world at large. That’s okay; we are in a time when the heart followers of Christ will be few because of a pervasive blindness.

I’m sure the guys working to invent and develop television had no interest in anything more than the thrill of discovery and the hope of better human communications. Very quickly someone discovered that TV is hypnotic. That information was passed to someone who knew how much power it gave them and The Cult developed a direct interest. You can pretend to harden yourself against it, but certain things are simply a matter of our wiring. We can’t blame the TV on Satan, but we can blame him for the current state of things with TV broadcasting and videos. The Cult dominates directly nearly all of the market. Christian videos? The Cult owns the business and works in the upper levels of management, shaping the final product. Christians are generally unaware that you cannot make TV safe and righteous unto the Lord without such a radical departure that no one dares think about it. TV and videos make us passive and there is little we can do to change that.

If you’ve been paying attention, you recognize the same forces have been at work making non-broadcast media the same way. It’s not just YouTube and Netflix on your computer, but the whole smartphone and tablet market is designed to cripple creativity. Have you tried to write more than a short paragraph on a tablet? Even if you have a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, most of what we need for actual writing is simply not available because the mobile OSes are missing critical functions. Those functions will never be added; the market is controlled. The tools are crippled because the very design of the tablet concept was intentionally crippled. The Cult saw how hard it was to restrict PCs and laptops (though they are still working on it), and came out with the fundamental design of mobile devices to make us passive consumers of whatever appears on that tiny screen.

Meanwhile, everything you do on all but a precious few mobile devices, and on every PC with a mainstream OS, is transmitted to central servers. It’s too much for actual humans to track, but your mousing and keystrokes are all recorded and sniffed by logarithms watching for key data of interest to The Cult and its servants.

It’s not that the tools are evil, but that the evil influences of The Cult are in control of the market. They must have us as passive as possible. Not just intellectually, but they require a pervasive influence that makes it painful to be creative and driven by the heart. All those complaints about juvenile misbehavior? It’s because they are juveniles. In a sane world they would be considered young adults and already training for heart-led living. Today, that very concept is so foreign you can’t get anyone to entertain it for a second. “We must protect their childhood from adult concerns!” So we have several generations of adults who still cling to passive entertainments, and people put a high value on leisure, largely because they cannot bring their hearts to bear on everyday existence. They have no concept for divine exploitation of things for the greatest possible interest of all humanity: the glory of God.

We aren’t activists, but we dare not rest in passivity.

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Photolog 18: Collected Shots

Posted on September 1, 2015 by ehurst

Random shots from different rides. (Click to see a larger view of the photos.)

NCanfromNE63rd Central Oklahoma isn’t merely a matter of some arbitrary boundaries, but is actually a transition point between different types of terrain. In this first image, looking WSW from the slope of NE 63rd just below Peebly Road, it’s a view of the North Canadian River Valley showing that the natural terrain is given to more open prairie. Travel farther north and/or west in the state and it gradually becomes little else. The hills flatten out a bit as the land rises in elevation, until the Panhandle, where mountains and mesas dominate the landscape.

JonesParkThe tiny town of Jones has a decent little park with a lagoon of sorts. From what I can tell, this is the overflow from pre-processed water, so it has virtually no smell. The city recently removed the sludge sediment and spruced things up at the same time. This lagoon lies between the still active railroad line and Britton Road, on the east edge of town.

WallofSusans As you approach Draper Lake on Post Road headed south, you’ll pass this wall of Black-eyed Susans hiding some county property where various loads of dirt and gravel are rotated in and out between different projects. This is the SW corner of Post and SE 74th. Those suckers are easily 7-10 feet (2-3 m) tall. There are other flowers that come into full bloom late in the summer like this. One in particular has tiny white blossoms with a strong sweet smell that reminds me of wild rose, honeysuckle and something else I can’t identify.

BelowDraperDam This is what you can see from below the dam at Draper Lake. The dam itself is far in the background. Off to the left is a heavily forested East Elm Creek, which the reservoir captures, and it’s impossible to get any useful image. West Elm Creek, by the way, is sourced in a water treatment lagoon just a half mile from where I took this shot. It’s part of the massive complex of buildings hidden in a valley out of public view next to the dam. I was trying to capture some construction adding to this facility, but I went the wrong way and had to hustle out of there to avoid massive waves of swirling dust from the trucks. This shot was taken from Stella Road near Post Road, looking NNW.

SE134nrHiwaseeIt’s almost a hidden treasure. Anderson Road on the west is a high ridge and so is Hiwasee Road on the east, but between them on SE 134th is this gorgeous valley. Some of the homes are old money but the whole mile of broad flat expanse is just a treat to see. While somewhat closer to Draper on the west, it’s not that far to Thunderbird on the SE.

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Windows: I Give Up

Posted on August 31, 2015 by ehurst

Today one of my regular computer ministry clients called to tell me his computer updated to Win10 without his permission. He called to ask how he could get Win7 back. Aside from going on there with a Win7 install DVD, there was nothing I could do because Win10 locked him out of the process for restoring the previous OS and won’t let him even go online. He’s calling the vendor for now to see if they’ll help him.

In any other business, this would be a criminal act. I assure you that nothing and no one is going to make Microsoft back off. They are going to ram this thing down people’s throats, and louder the complaints get, the more nasty MS acts.

Here’s what I can do for you: How to minimize the worst of MS spying on you. They have a page on how to reduce the new spying stuff recently foisted on Win7 and Win8 users, too.

I give up. If you are running Vista or earlier, I can help you. There is a group working to keep XP alive, but it will require you do some reading and make sure you understand how it works. It’s at RyanVM Forums. There is even some work on Win2K at RyanVM and here. I trust the sites; I can’t vouch for the information, but the sites are not dangerous in themselves.

For myself, I keep a WinXP virtual machine running on my Linux laptops, plus I run Wine so I can use Notepad++ and Word 2000 (grammar checking on Linux word processors is a sad joke). I’m still giving away my two free ebooks on installing and using Debian 8 (one and two). I am always willing to help you by answering questions and giving you advice on things until you become familiar and comfortable with Debian or any other type of Linux I know about.

Other than, I suspect my computer ministry is about to slow waaaaaay down.

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No Template

Posted on August 31, 2015 by ehurst

It’s a miracle. Nothing else can explain it. Did it require our planning and labor, the results would kill us. We could use social sciences to examine some of this, but human faculties cannot understand more than some of the visible effects. This is salvation.

Let’s clarify something right away: I’m not talking about the common religious meaning of “saved” and “born-again” here. Those terms fall into a matrix of mythology that we refuse to carry. Plain and simple, we are talking about the manifestations of an awakened connection between the heart-mind with its unique wisdom faculties, and the brain-intellect where cognitive awareness is centered, and the rest of the body with its own unique form of awareness. Granted, not everyone awakened has in their minds the academic descriptions I use, nor the particular approach I use to talk about this thing. Yet, each of us knows from experience that there are just a few out there who will listen when we do broach the subject of alternative forms of awareness.

Thus, a large number of folks out there would likely recognize the teaching here if they were to run across it. Not so much agree with it to any degree, but they would immediately understand if you or I shared our own awareness. This is the kind of “saved” I’m talking about; it’s that sense that what most of the world sees is only a delusion of awareness, something far below what’s possible. We believe that we have gotten hold of what God designed us for here on this level of existence. There’s nothing elite about it, but it is totally self-selecting in the sense that if you don’t chase this thing, you’ll never get it. The default level of human operation in our world excludes all of it.

In that sense, the label I use — Radix Fidem — is their religion whether they recognize the term or not. Not in the sense that this is a religion that excludes everything else in your life, this thing is in it’s own sphere. It’s just my effort to make this thing easier to share with others, a way of optimizing the probability of finding each other. It barely qualifies for the label “religion” in that it does offer something we can hold in common without anyone losing contact with their own unique sense of spiritual awareness. By all means, rewrite it in your own terms and give it another name. There is no official hierarchy, no visible organized institution, and anyone who thinks they belong to Radix Fidem can decide you belong to it, too. Or they can decide to belong to whatever you cook up at the same time. This is not about me and my recipe for religion; I openly encourage you to express it in your own terms.

The reason it’s like that should be obvious: “Unless the LORD builds the house, they labor in vain who build it; unless the LORD keeps the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.” (Psalm 127:1 MKJV) None of us is in charge. It only works so well as it rests in the hands of the Creator. All I’m trying to do is call attention to His work.

So let me offer yet another cute little slogan I stole from someone else: Conformity is sin; you are the miracle. Naturally, none of this will register properly if all you have is your intellectual cognition. In fact, I’m sure it sounds like something Joel Osteen would say or any other religious entertainer. The words mean nothing on their own; context is everything. The whole idea is to set you free; use my stuff like a broom to clear a path to the exit. Just for a second, imagine a child without all the social conditioning of our world, but one who understands these things instinctively. Imagine a child who does not need to be torn away from all the distractions of our day, and has no real interest in the current fashionable marketing trends, doesn’t like the stupid cartoons, etc. Imagine a child who doesn’t take himself or herself too seriously.

Maybe some day…

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Already in Motion

Posted on August 30, 2015 by ehurst

Why does it feel like the calm before a storm?

Like most of you, dear readers, I struggle at times with teaching my mind to follow the heart’s wisdom. When I wrote that piece yesterday on police training, I knew my flesh didn’t like the idea, but that it was a prophetic burden of necessity. I have no interest in alienating folks, including the police. I’m not asking anyone to hate government agents and I don’t feel any particular spite. Yet, as soon as I posted it the traffic on this blog swooned much more than normally happens on the weekend. I’d rather be obedient and wind up talking to myself than worry about currying human favor.

Something wasn’t right about my long rides, either. My heart was advising my mind that I couldn’t keep doing it the same way, that something was missing. So I went back out to the shed and dragged out the mountain bike. Stuff that was loose somehow got tight again, and it wasn’t just my imagination. So I did what I could to true the wheels and cleaned it up a bit. Something that had previously refused to adjust now worked out just fine. While the Edgewood is okay for transportation and shorter trips, the long rides will require the mountain bike. The Edgewood was stressing my back and hips too much; something about the frame geometry.

I’ve been tweaking stuff on my laptops, as well. I’ve just about ditched Flashplayer because every week there are new security holes discovered. Some are a threat to Linux, even. I’ll pass on one juicy tidbit about the recent Win10 stuff that affects people who don’t even opt for the “free upgrade” — a site that lists those recent snooping updates. I suppose it’s risky to undo them, because Microsoft is not above coming back with new updates and playing spiteful games if you try to make those kinds of changes. This is getting ugly. What makes it really bad is MS seems to have serious problems with broken updates. I’m hearing and seeing lots of Win7 and Win8 updates that just don’t take and keep trying repeatedly without any solution. Has Windows really gotten that badly broken? Meanwhile, there is even some ugly stuff in the politics behind Linux, as well, but it’s too complicated to explain here. For now, I still run Debian 8 on everything I use personally.

We are making decisions about functional compromises here and there on things like food, our car, and so forth — a whole raft of little decisions that become large together. My wife and I both feel moved to prepare for things to become challenging, though neither of us has a clue about any specifics. However, instead of something awful, it’s more like adventure heading our way. Since I’m one of those folks who consider natural disasters on my doorstep just another adventure, you can’t gauge by my sensibilities.

Still, I suppose it’s useful to remind you that we are already on the downslope into tribulation of some sort.

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Psalm 65

Posted on August 29, 2015 by ehurst

The header says David wrote this for use in the Temple worship. Scholars tell us this psalm was used in various thanksgiving services.

English translations are all over the place on the first line, and it is difficult to bring the nuance across the vast difference. Perhaps we should see it as: “For You, waiting as a servant silent in the shadows, is glorious enough, Elohim.” David returns often to the theme that he is ecstatic just to be a mere attendant in the Court of God. He continues noting that he has vowed to offer his very life for this. And who among humans, when fully aware of it, would hesitate to pray to Him? David is the first to confess that his fallen nature gets the best of him at times, but Our Lord is a God of mercy and forgiveness. Not just looking past our failures, but reducing the power of sin over us.

Words cannot bear the load of joy at being chosen by God to hear His call and to serve Him. Mankind could not pile up enough wealth to buy off someone who has experienced this divine appointment. Even the lowest of servants in God’s Courts is better off than the wealthiest of kings.

God’s eminence in any nation is marked by earthshaking miracles that reflect His holy character. In this Israel is not alone, because God could do this for all people throughout the earth. This is the Creator of the whole universe and it is simply consistent with His moral character to offer this to all humanity. His power alone made whole mountain ranges, and He could still every raging sea on the earth at His whim. Just the same, He could bring peace to the people who live on the other side of those mountains and seas. His divine character is present in all of Creation, so that all people everywhere could touch it if they just open their hearts to the revelation of truth. At the very least they can sense His power in all kinds of omens and signs. The very sunrise itself sings His praise, and the stars of evening twinkle merrily of His peace.

David uses the lyrical image of watering and fertilizing the earth to portray the way God works with people who so much as desire His truth. Just as He makes food available to all people on the earth, so He puts His revelation in reach of their hearts. He mentions the River of God’s Spirit at work in the world. Everyone could know Him and His justice should they want it.

The final verses of this hymn show how Creation itself rejoices in God’s character. Let anyone anywhere turn to Him and the ground under his feet will sing. Along with this is the very literal promise that He would clothe their land with the blessings of plenty. The pastures would be clothed with the living wool of sheep herds, the valleys shrouded in grain, as if all dressed up in their finest for meeting in the Temple.

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The Cult and Police

Posted on August 29, 2015 by ehurst

I don’t want to write about this, but divine justice demands it of me.

During my time in the US Army Military Police Corps, some of my superiors kept track of civilian professional law enforcement training along with the underlying philosophical issues. One man in particular was all gung-ho about this stuff. His level of enthusiasm blinded him to the broader social moral reactions he should have seen coming.

This was in the mid to late 1980s. There was a seismic shift in thinking about police work, though I suspect it had been underway for some time, the shape of things to come became more obvious to us near the bottom of the chain. On the one hand, I was ostensibly on board with all of this because it was part of my job already. At the same time, some part of me was deeply disturbed by something that just did not come up into the light of my conscious awareness. It took awhile to claw its way into the daylight.

In essence, the Cult was pushing for US police training to shift away from something that was still rather humane. The agents of the Cult were advocating for American policemen to absorb the training of Israeli police and military. I noted that the Cult arose from a very elitist, almost racist spite for lesser folks. This pervades Israeli security training, in the sense that anyone who comes to their attention as a possible problem is immediately forbidden to be human at that point. In essence, the security forces enter a contextual state of psychopathy.

We’ve all seen how people act when they are under physical threat. Adrenalin drives you into a state of agitation that confuses fear, anger and all sorts of destructive emotions. There was a time when it was a major element in police training to make note of this and strive to deescalate the situation by speaking and acting to soothe and calm the person. Without openly saying so, police training theory in the US erased that kind of humanizing consideration. So while you won’t see it written in police policy documents, what you do see written is a legalistic gobbledygook that builds on the utter necessity of dehumanizing everyone who isn’t wearing a badge.

Instead, the officers are trained and required to demand that anyone they detain must not be permitted any humanity. Officers are trained to react with arrogant hostility, with uncontrollable rage, the moment anyone dares to assert their human dignity. At the moment of encounter, you must cease pretending to be human in any way. You are not permitted to feel agitated, even. Given that the demands are utterly impossible, this is the setup for unconscionable violence that we read about so often.

It’s not universal, but it’s pervasive across the entire US. There are plenty of officers who still have a conscience, and plenty of departments that don’t require that induced situational psychopathy. However, it is pervasive enough to create an intractable spiral of violence. Insofar as it can be used to promote race war, so much the better, says The Cult.

This is what I saw coming back then, but my daily context hindered me from recognizing it. I was actually censured by one superior for daring to discuss psychology while in uniform. He knew. He was a conscious supporter of this shift. This genie is not going back into the bottle. Rest assured there are enough people behind this that the political pressure will only rise. You’ll get a lot of propaganda whining about how the police are so persecuted because people object to officers acting like psychopaths. Does it sound familiar when someone complains that they aren’t allowed the privilege of getting away with murder?

Meanwhile, there is not a lawful thing we can do about it. Police operate from completely internal reference points and sometimes they are secret. While it’s possible you’ll hear the word “accountable” in a speech somewhere, it means only that they are accountable to their “professional standards” and their political supporters. You cannot vote out the people who make sure this continues. You sure as hell cannot raise up any other means of keeping order, because the police won’t allow competition.

Pray that the Lord protect you from these encounters, and give you peace when you cannot avoid them. This problem is pervasive enough that you should assume the worst in every case. Trust in God.

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Our Judge Jehovah

Posted on August 29, 2015 by ehurst

How do we apply divine justice to the events in our world? What shall we say when someone asks us, “Ain’t that awful?” Your only concern is what God calls you to do.

Recall that Our Lord consistently portrays Himself as an eastern sheikh. In Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) feudal custom, the sheikh is the law. Our Lord did not simply spin off some body of moral principle to which we can refer at our convenience. All justice is weighed and meted out in His Presence. Keep in mind that He depicts Himself as just passing through, living in a tent.

Granted, a part of the symbolism is that you and I are tents that fold quickly when the Lord is finished with us here. However, there is a much broader sense that He doesn’t have the same strong attachment to this plane of existence that most humans do. This universe is just a hobby to Him. While He takes seriously His commitment to us who make Him Lord in our lives, we will most assuredly outlive this universe.

So would you imagine it matters much to Him that the US-Israeli crypto-army called ISIS might have destroyed the reconstructed ancient temples in Palmyra, Syria? Keep in mind that this is the same God that routinely wipes out whole civilizations as a normal part of His operations on this planet. The Tower of Babel? It was never finished. The Exodus? Egypt took a long time to recover. Atlantis? Not even mentioned and the Bible and we don’t really know where it was. The Library of Alexandria? Swamped in a tsunami. What men call sacred relics of the past, God sweeps away on a mere whim and regrets nothing.

Perhaps I’m not the only one who has seen Westernized preachers squirm when trying to explain Romans 9.

What shall we say then? Is there not unrighteousness with God? Let it not be! For He said to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” So then it is not of the one willing, nor of the one running, but of God, the One showing mercy… You will then say to me, “Why does He yet find fault? For who has resisted His will?” No, but, O man, who are you who replies against God? Shall the thing formed say to Him who formed it, “Why have you made me this way?” (vv. 14-16, 19-20)

It is just barely possible that, if you were to study the ANE culture and intellectual traditions, then you might be able comprehend the Law Covenants of the Bible well enough to predict how God might rule in most situations. But if all you have is your cognition for this task, you’d get it wrong often enough to shake your confidence. However, if you can engage the wisdom of your heart, that passage in Romans is no problem at all.

In case you forgot, Jesus told one disciple not to concern himself with the fate of another disciple, but to focus on his own efforts to follow the Lord. God did make His justice as clear as it could be made in His Son, who also brings in His wake a substantial sacred literature to help with some context. However, you cannot really know a person if your heart is not activated to discern the full implications of their moral character as compared and contrasted with God’s.

Justice is always personal. You alone stand before God, though it may well be as a fellow-heir with Christ. But the issue will be justice between you and God, not some objective judicial principle that is easily applied to others. The only things you rightly bring to His attention are those things He has placed in your hands.

At any rate, you can blame any destruction by ISIS on the US and Israeli governments. That’s the moral essence of such issues when you stand before God. Sure, you can intercede on behalf of the victims, but you should have been doing that since before ISIS arose from its CIA training camps. And if you care enough to seek His face to save some of the relics of the ancient past, know that He may well have rather firm plans to the contrary. If that stuff matters for His own glory, it will stand. Otherwise, no man can save it.

Take a look at what is reported in the news as some kind of tragedy. Make sure you strive to grasp the whole context and realize that God has shown a casual contempt for a lot of things that make humans weep. They have no clue what really matters — His glory. Be ready to shed anything at His whim.

The starting point is that we all deserve a short miserable life, a lingering painful death and eternity in Hell. That is what Scripture says is our default situation since the Fall. Anything better than that is pure mercy and grace, so make amends as soon as you can. His justice makes room for a direct appeal and He most certainly does play favorites.

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Heaven, Hell and Here

Posted on August 28, 2015 by ehurst

This isn’t theology, as if God and His revelation could be subjected to human reason. This is doctrine in the sense of teaching that serves to characterize my limited understanding. Teaching is pulling down out of my heart the moral imperatives that arise from my communion with the Spirit of God. When I pull those things down into my conscious awareness, they have to fit somewhere inside my mind in some way so that I can act on them. It requires a certain organization, and I have a powerful peace that it is all completely self-consistent. That’s because it rests on the heart’s discernment of the Spirit, not the mind’s rational structure. I am equally aware that as I go back and test all the things I’ve been taught in terms of theology, I end up throwing out a lot of junk. I’d like to share with you some of the process of taking out the trash so that you might ponder in your own soul a similar process.

The Flaming Sword east of Eden (Genesis 3:24) is the same Sword of the Spirit (Hebrews 4:11-13; Ephesians 6:14-17) noted in the New Testament. Keep that in mind. The imagery in the Bible is self-consistent even as it shifts in context. Divine moral logic is symbolic, not at all concrete. Rather, it offers the means for the individual to come to a rather concrete decision in the context of his/her own service to God. Symbolic logic is the logic of the heart-mind and remains vivid and alive on its own.

So I want to help you learn something about how that Sword cuts by giving an example in my own soul. You don’t have to buy into my answers, but these doctrines will provide some context for the rest of what I write.

I speak often of the need for awakening the link between mind-intellect and heart-wisdom. In my recent series on the Cult, I noted that Western Civilization is unique in denying the existence of a heart-mind, versus how virtually every other civilization simply assumed such a thing without much comment. The people in those other civilizations never had to deal with the idea of denying it, so they didn’t spend much time defending it and offering explanations of it. They all agreed on it. Here’s what makes it tough on us today as followers of Christ: The New Testament fell into that period of transition when the link to the heart was dying in human consciousness. So we see precious little in the New Testament discussing that as an issue. What we do have on the subject does not use the terminology that seems to work for us today as we go back and reclaim it. It’s there, just hidden in foreign contextual expressions.

So let me reassert for us today in our context: Whatever it is the New Testament teaches, particularly in terms of walking the path of Jesus, is simply not possible without awakening your heart as the ruling faculty in your consciousness. The only link God gave on this earth between us in our fallen state and Him in Eternity is a moral awareness that is not possible with mere intellect. God does not speak directly to the intellect. You can only hear His voice through your heart. Cognition is distinctly second-hand. This is why so many Western Christians have no clue how prophecy, miracles and a host of other things mentioned in the New Testament work. They all come through the heart first, and then register in the brain.

This is also why Western Christian theology sucks so badly. It presumes the brain is somehow magically linked to the Spirit of God, so it presumes to arrange a proper understanding with what amounts to a dead heart, in that it might as well be dead if no one pays attention to it. Sure, God has chosen at times in the past to blast through and let some few things register in the human soul as conviction, but it always seems to defy reason and people can’t explain why they simply must go this or that way on something. So while a significant portion of Western Christianity does have some limited awareness of non-intellectual imperatives of the Spirit, they have no structure for dealing with it. It remains a complete mystery, a sort of spooky superstition kind of thing that is very hard to apply to behavior. We are left with a whole raft of religions lacking the means to discount their intellectual differences because intellect and theology is the best thing they have going.

Inevitably, it means an awful lot of Western mythology gets sucked into it. The problem of Western bias gets a lot of electrons on this blog because it looms so large as a major barrier to genuine faith.

Let’s review some of what I’ve already said. Paul writes flatly (Romans 8) that we cannot possibly comprehend how God decides who goes to Heaven and who doesn’t. We can’t begin to understand Heaven and Hell, and we know for a fact that Jesus referred to them in terms you could not possibly take as literal. Evil souls don’t get tossed into the flaming garbage pile in the Hinnom Valley (“Gehenna”) on the south side of Jerusalem. And when Jesus affirmed that the confessing thief would go to Heaven with Him, He used a Persian loan-word that translates as “Paradise.” We know from rabbinical traditions that the terms were already common before Jesus was born. We also know that it was the Hellenized Pharisees who tended to take them literally, not those with a more ancient Hebrew bent. At no time did Jesus affirm the teachings of the Pharisees where they departed from the Old Testament Scriptures. On the contrary, He pointedly argued with the whole business of departure from the ancient Hebrew understanding of things.

So let’s clear away all the contextual verbiage and grab some ancient Hebrew thinking here. God presents Himself consistently as a sheikh — an eastern nomadic potentate whose “palace” is a tent. He owns the people (family and servants); the turf is merely an issue of space his people occupy. He hardly worries about other folks passing through, so long as they don’t hinder his operations. The whole existence of those in his domain is characterized as “in his presence” or sometimes “before him.”

So if you stand before our God as family, how is He likely to treat you? And if you are just a servant? How about if you are an enemy? And how would it feel for you? Heaven is a nice imagery word for standing in His divine Presence as family. Hell is an ugly imagery word for standing in His divine Presence as an enemy. If God and the Spirit Realm are ineffable in the first place, how would we expect to describe what it’s like to continue as an eternal soul that He made, but no longer on this plane of existence? So long as we realize that the words we use for that could never be more than parabolic or symbolic, it’s not so bad. It’s when you attach a wealth of heathen meaning to those terms that you get lost. That is, your divine service in His glory here in this world will be hindered because you keep expecting things that simply ain’t gonna happen.

And as for the final disposition of all things, when God brings forth a new heaven and new earth — what could we possibly make of such words? I submit that the whole point is to jar you loose from trying to put them into an concrete definitions. We’ve got all we can do dealing with stuff in the here and now. Just what do you suppose the text in Genesis meant when God said the serpent would wallow in the dust and eat the dust? If you insist on taking the Eden narratives literally, there is nothing I can do for you. The Serpent is a symbol for Satan, and Satan’s part in the curse was to be stuck here in this realm. That pretty much limits his operations and removes an awful lot of angelic privilege. And perhaps you noticed that narrative says we are dust, so that’s what Satan is consuming. He can’t consume our eternal destiny; Paul flatly says that’s not part of the picture (Romans 9). Satan can only eat what’s left, and that’s the blessings God has for us here and now.

So while the New Testament does talk an awful lot about the correlation between following Jesus and going to be with Him after this life, it never once talks about the mechanism that connects them. Instead, everything is a matter of laying claim to the blessings that God offered from the very beginning, and mentioned in each of the Law Covenants. Have you not noticed that every miracle of Jesus took place under the Law of Moses? Whatever this business of “divine grace” means in human terms, it includes having that heart awakening offered up-front instead of having to wade through all the Law and Prophecy. Yet that Law and Prophecy are not out of the picture; rather we bring to them the moral discernment that others had to work hard to get out of them. The meaning of revelation is written on our souls first. Our Western culture hinders us from recognizing the fullness of that divine enlightenment that allows us to connect to the higher faculty of the heart.

Our mission is not to reorganize revelation to suit our reason and logic. The mission is to reorganize our thinking to match revelation. Jesus grants us the heart connection at the start if we’ll just lay hold of it.

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