Photolog 17: Casino Loop Again

Posted on August 27, 2015 by ehurst

(As always, click on any image for a full-sized view.)

This is nothing but a repeat of a previous ride, but routed counterclockwise. That means heading out to Peebly Road and dropping back to SE 89th and out to the Firelake Grand Casino, and then back for a 35 mile ride.

SE59thnHenneyA I never cease to wonder at the loveliness of Hog Creek Valley. Looking back north from SE 59th just east of Henney Road you can see this really grand view of some unnamed tributary to Hog Creek (Hog Creek is just over a sloping ridge off to the left). They merge just south of 59th, and whatever water runs in this one goes right under the intersection itself. Panning just to the left a bit we catch more of Henney Road sloping down to the bottom. 59thnHenneyB That white gate in the distance is facing out onto Henney, but the pavement is below the line of sight. I always pause a bit when I get to this intersection because it is so pleasant to the eyes.

The next two shots waited until I got all the way out the casino. CasinoEntr Just for scale, I rolled out to the edge of the parking lot near the interstate highway and caught my bike in the view. This facility is quite massive and a great many people treat it like a vacation destination — I kid you not. Then I rode on around the back, as this thing has a ring-road of sorts. The back parking lot was about half-full and there were more people moving about among the cars, this at roughly 9AM on a Thursday morning. Around on the opposite side from the first shot is a view of the parking garage. CasinoParking The two red-roofed buildings on the far right, way in the back, are the tribal clinic and a maintenance facility. I was standing on a concrete fixture in the RV park for this picture.

BrickSilo At this point the morning traffic rush is done so I encounter a lot less traffic along SE 74th heading back toward Newalla. However, Harrah-Newalla Road is busy as ever. Just short of that, I remembered to stop and catch his shot of a very old concrete silo with clay tiles on the outside facing. It’s no longer in use, but I’ve not seen anything like it anywhere else in Oklahoma. Short of trespassing, this is about the only view you can get of the thing.

As previously noted, Newalla itself is just a tiny little place with way too much foliage to allow a good picture to show the character of the place. NewallaFBCThe biggest thing in town is the old First Baptist Church (no, there’s no Second Baptist, and no other Baptist church, for that matter). The plaque over the door says 1946, but the bricks are 1960-1970s era refurbishing. On the far side of this is a newer facility built with steel and a concrete slab “curtain” shell. Hidden behind this and across SE 59th is their third major structure, a so-called Family Life Center that apparently includes church offices, because that’s the only place with cars parked around it. They used to have a big community outreach called the “Son Center” down facing Harrah Road, but now that part of the building there is up for rent.

But the vacant parking lot in front of the worship facility was a good place for picnic lunch. Having missed the previous two riding days, I was just a bit out of shape on this long ride and was wiped out by the time I got home.

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Latest Edition of the Tower of Babel

Posted on August 27, 2015 by ehurst

I’ve noted often that if you evaluate Western Civilization by Western values, it’s hard to notice the flaws. There are different kinds and levels of systems, but Western Civilization as a system is devoted to proving the system is right. Removing all references to a more objective frame of reference is part of the game, as is changing the definition of “objective” so that it points only to something inside the system. It’s pervasive, a closed loop that allows no escape.

This is why I teach that you have to reject the system in order to escape. It’s a big lie, with boundaries that are mere shadows. Step through and see what’s actually outside this imaginary bubble. In doing so, I embrace the frame of reference reflected in the Bible. I won’t even bother to suggest the Biblical perspective is the only one, but that it’s the one to which I am committed. After a lifetime researching what’s involved, I came to the conclusion that Western Christianity is still essentially Western, and therefore not genuinely Christian. If you want to suggest Christ was anything close to Western ideals, I’d warn you that you are approaching blasphemy. Even Western scholarship itself can make it obvious Our Savior was nothing like that.

So why do these Western scholars themselves not escape the system? I suppose the individual answers will vary all over the map. In other words, I won’t pretend to answer for them. I do know what path I used to escape, and it seems to share an awful lot with others who have escaped, even those who encountered me afterward. Not uniformity — another Western obsession — but we possess commonality sufficient that we can talk and fellowship and make the most of Christ’s divine compassion and mercy. We share something beyond words, so that when I put something into words, God allows them recognize His fingerprints. He decides whom He touches and how. I’m just a servant, a living tool for His glory.

One of the things He made obvious was that a human race united without His divine glory is not going to happen. The harder people push toward a distinctly human unity, the harder He makes it crash when He’s had enough. That’s part of the lesson in the Tower of Babel narrative. Secular unity is an abomination. We are designed to live a tribal existence. It can certainly go wrong with the ugliness of racist abuse and hatred. Still, in our fallen state, the path back to Eden for us in this world means we accept a certain level of division as optimal for divine justice. We are supposed to live in extended family households with no one poking into our business who isn’t doesn’t share our DNA or a covenant before God.

As you might realize, not a single Western government would tolerate such a restriction on their power. The system says there is no God, at least not in the sense that His revelation matters to life here in this world. If His divine mastery of Creation isn’t disemboweled and pushed into safe la-la land mythology, then we aren’t allowed to talk about Him.

Instead, the system is determined to force us to live as one people without God. Anything “global” is damned in God’s eyes. Only a Westerner could imagine even religion being somehow universal in scope. God says flatly in His revelation that He works only with individuals, that He alone decides what is required from each unique person for Him to bless and guide them back to Eden. No two of us will find the same exact experience when facing the Flaming Sword. Thus, any grouping must permit maximum freedom to be an individual. It requires a whole bunch of cultural shift for Westerners to live in a household that tolerates a large degree of uniqueness. Whatever functional unity we might have is constrained in His justice to a pretty small sized grouping. God Himself suggests that anything bigger than fifty means noticeable variations with the next fifty. Anything bigger than a thousand or so means variation that is quite significant. I didn’t make up those numbers; they are part of the language of revelation.

Remember what I said about infiltration. We don’t make demands of a blind world; God takes care of that kind of thing. We make demands on ourselves so that we can find His place for us in a world that hates Him. We allow Him to bounce His glory out of our lives into this world. We shine because we work with Him to polish off the rough spots and reflect the light of His glory. We are no better than mirrors, sparkly disco balls and chandeliers. Nobody can view Him directly lest we cease to live and find ourselves pulled directly out of this world. But we can shine.

We can shine by noting how ominous are the plans of the demonic Cult to force us into various Borg schemes of soulless uniformity. Global open trade is a sin. Global open exchange and surrendering local controls are inherently immoral in God’s eyes. We might debate what kinds of things God expects the local tribal government to control, but the necessity of “inefficient” constant renegotiation is the general shape of what God requires. It’s shocking for Westerners to imagine God has little interest in efficiency as we think of it.

We cannot obey the whims of Our Lord if we surrender too much control to those who aren’t a part of us. We cannot obey the whims of Our Lord if we defy Him in calling “family” those who don’t meet His covenant requirements. We are supposed to be a little clannish in that sense. You can pack all kinds of false baggage into that image, but that just shows you have no moral discernment. Whatever flaws you see in the tribal social structure, you can only do worse by any system you dream up. What you dream up is inherently short of God’s character, which character pervades reality itself.

So while we work within a fallen world, we don’t give our blessing to things that defy God’s revelation. Even as our hands participate in things we know aren’t going to work out, we focus on the divine opportunity to be there for His glory. So if people ask, we give them as much honest answer as they can handle. Try to sense the degree and level of moral kinship. The honest answer is that any global trade and government system is doomed to failure. Trade itself is not the problem; it’s how our current system demands surrender of way too much to engage in trade. You aren’t supposed to run around naked outside of Eden. You have to accept the covering of His Laws in a hostile climate, or Satan will get inside your life and ruin things.

(No, the Internet is not a violation of this principle. I’ve explained often enough that virtual space has its own divine justice and it’s not the same as meat space.)

So, our problem is recognizing what among human political wrangling constitutes a violation of divine justice. When someone in politics talks about borders, trade restrictions and purely defensive nationalism, the Cult will go after them. Look for it. When it serves their greater agenda temporarily, they’ll encourage almost anything, but we know they intend to rule the whole world in the end. They will not tolerate obstructions to their will. Their primary means is through debt (usury), which in turn grants control over our material existence. They assume that our material existence is all there is and aren’t friendly to any notion that gives people any escape from fear.

Expect them to eventually try to crush what we teach here, but only when it looms significant on their radar. It’s possible we could never attract enough attention to be noticed before God moves to destroy their works. My point is that we should be ready when the next confusion of tongues happens and God stops this latest Tower of Babel project.

Meanwhile: Shine Jesus, shine.

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Baptists and The False Dichotomy

Posted on August 26, 2015 by ehurst

I’m going to pick on Baptists because I was one and know all the ugly details first-hand. I was a party to some of the propaganda battles, much to my shame.

I noted in my series on The Cult that Satan is all too happy with folks pursuing any number of ostensibly good things, so long as none of them are the things God wants for us. He’s quite happy quoting Scripture himself when it can be used to promote something in his interest. You can be sure he understands revelation all too well.

During the 1970s I attended Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU), with the intent to go on to seminary and gain a professional education in the pastoral ministry. I note wryly that it was very easy in those days to obtain outright grants and the educational costs were considerably less. I didn’t get to seminary because God had other plans for me. Nonetheless, my pursuit of the undergraduate degree program was hardly a waste. My Father used the professors, both good and bad, to kindle a fire of passion for Him that still burns brightly.

While I was at college a very ugly debate swept across the Baptist landscape, among other evangelical denominations in the US. The most popular term for it was the debate over “Infallibility of the Bible.” The result was a fracturing of the Southern Baptist denomination, with whole segments splitting off, and an enduring divide in what remains. Today you’ll hear the terms “conservative and moderate” — the moderates rejected the liberal label, insisting that it already had a meaning that did not apply to them.

My favorite professor (Dr. Robert Clarke) from those days said the whole thing was baloney, completely missing the point. Even though his personal loyalties placed him in the moderate camp, he was actually rather outside the whole thing. But he was caught in a purge and forced to retire as the controversy continued into recent decades. I am forever grateful for the foundation of truth he helped to lay in my soul. How do I explain it? The principle of teaching from the heart as he did, not merely from the intellect, burned itself into my heart and resurfaced intellectually many years later. God used him in ways even the man himself did not realize, because he was too focused on the mission instead of himself. Despite Satan’s grand efforts, I am among perhaps only a few who escaped the prison of lies.

I’m going to just sketch out the background here to show how Satan has used The Cult to destroy faith, and then show how it manifested in Baptists. First, let’s recall that the business of “propositional truth” was a typical legalism of the Pharisees, and was a rallying cry of the so-called conservatives in that infallibility debate that blossomed in the 1970s. It goes all the way back to the Hellenizing of Hebrew religion. It’s difficult to explain in layman’s terms, but I’ll try.

God’s existence is rooted in the Spirit Realm. Such is the default for all existence, the ultimate reality, if you will. He created the universe more or less as a bubble of far lesser existence. Nobody can explain His motives, but He has offered some hints to just how small the whole thing is to Him. Our universe is little more to Him than a project on His divine workbench. Naturally, the essence of our universe reflects His divine character. It maintains a living dependence on Him; it wasn’t assembled, wound up and let go. Originally our existence inside this temporary bubble depended on that same living connection with Him and His nature within Creation. The Fall broke our connection, among other things. He offered redemption and restoration via a corrective revelation. That revelation calls us back to His character, but it demands a restoration of at least some portion of that living link between Spirit and Flesh.

The link between our existence in the Fallen Realm and His existence in the Spirit Realm is His divine moral character, a whole range of living perception through which we understand reality itself. I refer to that as the Moral Sphere, that boundary layer between the Two Realms. You cannot perceive the Moral Sphere without awakening the mind built into the very physical wiring of your heart. Our time here in this realm consists largely of returning our brains to proper subjection under the moral intelligence of the heart. The true nature of our existence is fully understood from the moral perspective, not from whatever our intellects can make of sensory and logical input.

This was all assumed in the Hebrew culture. What I describe in the previous paragraph is restoring something lost from the days of the Hebrew people. For the ancient Hebrews (and some neighboring cultures) this was simply the basic assumption that required very little direct comment. They did not imagine a world that flatly denied such things. Rather, they dealt with the problem of folks who preferred to ignore the demands of something everyone took for granted. This moral existence of redemption was hard work, and the flesh — both the lusts of fallen desire and the intellect in planning out satisfaction of those lusts — fought the whole way. But until they encountered Hellenism, there was no systematic denial of the Spirit Realm and the Moral Sphere. Hellenism flatly dismisses the whole thing and constructs a view of reality that presumes this universe is the Ultimate Reality and that man’s intellect is all we really need to handle things.

While the Pharisees didn’t accept the outright denial of the Spirit Realm, they did completely lose track of the linkage through the Moral Sphere. What’s left is just an airy-fairy fable offered as a dogmatic assertion without any possible realization in the soul. Christ restored the Moral Sphere in His teachings, but the Judaizers managed to hijack things. While truth continues to cut its own path in humans souls, the full awareness has ebbed and flowed in and out of private Christian teaching. Meanwhile, the Pharisees hijacked the visible organized institution of the churches. The Cult arose in this setting and made it a mission to keep the church locked into this compromise, and raised the sense of political necessity in stamping out that dangerous teaching of truth that God kept bringing back to life throughout history. Even when folks didn’t have a good way of talking about the truth of the Moral Sphere, they did find sufficient words to convey enough that genuine spiritual life never quite died out. So The Cult kept trying new ways of smothering it.

When Aquinas (Thomas Aquinas -> Thomism) made the link between Hellenism and Christian teaching mainstream, it brought the seeds of false dichotomy into the church structure. That is, the single best tool for fracturing the gospel message again and again was now right there at hand. For example, the Reformation used the same tools of logic inherent in Thomism. Calvinism and the controversy with Arminius arose from the same tools of logic. Quietism was a dangerous departure, but hijacked in itself later. And so on; you get the picture. The Cult always maintained agents in every rising movement of dissent. While specific successes varied, the net result is that Pharisaic legalism parading as reason never left Western Christian religion.

I’ll defer to someone else on the details of where Dispensationalism arose (I keep a copy of that page and all the images archived) but note that it was all kept on track by agents of The Cult. While the ostensible purpose was to build a counter to the notion that the Pope was Antichrist, the whole thing kept rolling in directions The Cult found even more useful. The Cult promoted the rise of Dispensational teaching, even sending Samuel Untermeyer to directly fund Cyrus Scofield’s “research” and then print the resulting annotated Bible text (Scofield Bible) that became the primary means of transmitting the grand heresy.

During and shortly after WW2, a bunch of Baptists of the middle-class social activist stripe were seduced into promoting this crazy teaching. They traveled the US and set up huge conferences where this garbage was taught. They published little newspapers like The Sword of the Lord, founded preacher academies and eventually colleges, etc. The teaching of divine grace had never been more legalistic. Part and parcel of all this was the dogmatic assertion that the Bible was infallible and “propositional truth.” Dispensationalism depends on first buying into verbal inspiration and the infallibility of the text.

The reason this became so active and controversial is because The Cult sponsored two opposing ideas. At the same time as this Dispensational doctrine was forming in England and the US, a large collection of teachings in German colleges and seminaries ran in the opposite direction. What was in the 1970s called “neo-orthodoxy” was a collection of ideas spawned by various attempts to reduce the Bible to the status of mere literature of its times. The Bible was not really from God, they said. They concocted all these documentary theories about how the Hebrew people pulled together layers of evolving religious ideas from their cultural mythology, editing the text of the Bible repeatedly. The whole purpose was to undermine trust in the Bible on rational grounds. Their teaching infected seminaries all over Western Christianity.

Indeed, the only way to have academic credibility in many circles was to adopt this neo-orthodoxy crap. When the rise of Dispensationalist infallibility teaching crashed into this moldy German rationalism, the fireworks were predictable. We had some pretty ugly scenes at OBU with bigshots hurling propaganda at each other publicly. It was nasty and personal and lives were ruined. At the time, I was somewhat swayed by my friends in the fundamentalist-conservative camp, and took some heat from the other side. That kind of thing served only to harden my resolve for a while, as you might expect. At the same time, some part of me knew the whole thing smelled like rotten fish. Eventually the Lord showed me the path out of that false dichotomy. Both sides were wrong because they shared an essential false assumption that denies the existence of the Moral Sphere.

The Hebrew people, including the Apostles themselves, were not hung up on the precise textual wording of Scripture. In the Hebrew culture, language was intended as road signs pointing the way to divine truth that could not be contained in mere words and human thoughts. For the Pharisees and those they influenced, Hellenism taught them that words were discrete containers of truth — “It says what it means and means what it says.” The Bible is the means to transmit divine revelation, but the words are not themselves the revelation. God speaks through the Bible to awaken hearts. Without the heart-led awareness, it’s just ink on paper. Without the Bible, you might still get to the truth, because God Himself says He has written His heart into Creation itself and that it is possible for humans to get that message. However, the Bible most certainly gives a context we dare not ignore if we can get our eyes on it. People with an active heart love the Bible and how it speaks far beyond the mere words.

The Baptist controversy smolders even today, and is a critical element in keeping them entangled in secular politics. I finally escaped the Baptist fantasy world a decade ago.

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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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