A Nephilim Comeback

Posted on June 27, 2024 by ehurst

Ref: this video featuring Dr. Heiser explaining some important biblical understanding of the Nephilim and the Conquest.

One of our biggest problems in analyzing the text of the Bible is that there are no clear lines delineating between literal and figurative language. Sometimes it’s obvious, but there are plenty of places where it’s all jumbled together, like John’s Revelation.

I have said, for example, that the passage about the Sons of God taking wives from the daughters of men is not precisely literal. There’s a reason for this: The Nephilim keep showing up, after their human ancestors were wiped out. Something about the Nephilim does not require DNA to generate new ones. They can use it, but it’s not required. Rather, it’s some other kind of mixing with humans that produces someone who is superhuman and evil.

Not every giant is a Nephilim (like Saul), but every Nephilim is apparently a giant in one sense or another. We know that the descendants of Rapha (Rephaim) and Anak (Anakim) bred true and apparently uniformly evil, but there is no mention of where Goliath came from. The narrative in the Bible seems to indicate he’s one of the Philistines.

Further, the term “Nephilim” is not used as an ethnic identity, but a moral presence that intends to corrupt humanity. The name only shows up twice (Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:13) in the Bible, but there are several other terms elsewhere that can refer to them. For example, most scholars are convinced that Nimrod was one of them. Dr. Heiser points out that the terms “Rephaim” and “Anakim” cannot be divorced from them.

It is Heiser who also helps us to understand that whatever is meant by “demons” in the New Testament is the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim, and not angelic beings. Satan’s invisible lackeys are not “fallen angels” but the Nephilim. He explains the problem with the term “fallen angels” as used in the New Testament as a mistaken translation based on the limits of Greek trying to equate the Hebrew terminology, and ending up with a very imprecise term.

I mentioned in a previous post that I consider The Cult to be a front for people who consort with demons (spirits of the Nephilim). Here’s what I’m getting at: I’m convinced the Nephilim will regain physical form as part of Satan being cut loose for a brief period near the End of Time.

One of the major reasons we do not yet see a concentrated attack on faith and covenant is because humans willing to be used by the Devil don’t have the talents necessary to organize what we see in the Bible as the Battle of Har-Megidon. It would require something superhuman to carry that off. I take the release of Satan as a hint that he’ll raise up his ancient allies for one last hurrah, and to me, it seems only natural that it would include a fresh crop of Nephilim people running around.

Of course, this is admittedly speculation on my part. Just a thought…

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Another Look at Expectations

Posted on June 26, 2024 by ehurst

Aside from the broad political and economic threats to life here in the US, there is a raft of other moves to make us miserable. You are probably aware of the various Green cult efforts to reduce human population. There are policies based on any number of utterly false claims of human-caused climate shift, the imaginary dire necessity that we stop eating meat, and serious shifts in medical treatment policy.

All of this is aimed at herding us into kill-pens of one kind or another. This is the globalist agenda at work. Globalism will falter and collapse because they have no charismatic leaders to push through a message that is patently hateful. But the individual Green campaigns will live on, threatening us from every side.

The globalists appear to believe that they must provoke a war between NATO and Russia within the next month or so. It’s their one last opportunity to regain credibility for the next election. Presidents (and their parties) at war seldom lose elections, and this is all they have. We can already see the Zionist activism ensuring that the next president will be a Zionist.

That is, unless Israel collapses rather suddenly. I’m not in a position to see all the details playing out inside the Israeli government, and I’m not so sure even those in the thick of it can see all the angles. But it looks like their government is chasing an impossible dream. I’ve already noted that the neocons are using the Zionists, and would not hesitate to throw the whole thing under the bus. Lest we forget, [The Cult] is the soul of the neocon movement.

For all practical purposes, The Cult is the primary nexus between demons (disembodied souls of the Nephilim) and their most devoted human lackeys. It is as close as the demons can come to being reincarnated in flesh again. Their native goal is the destruction of all humanity, but to torment us while we live.

In the long run, it is they who hope to keep humans deceived about the nature of coming cyclical natural disasters. On the one hand, they are hoping no one prepares for it. On the other hand, they are deceiving their insiders about how it will work and how to survive it. Only God knows what He is planning to do, and He is the only source for survival, since He can bring through the disasters those He wants to see survive, regardless of any human effort.

One of the reasons I’m convinced that this is not the End of All Things is that my convictions tell me we haven’t met the minimum standard for God declaring His purposes complete in this Fallen Realm. As witness to this, none of the persecution coming at us targets actual faith. It’s all generalized on human ambitions and misses the point. The apocalyptic passages in Scripture point to a very direct attack on revelation and faith. To me, it seems there is no support system for a broad attempt to crush the gospel message itself. For now, the whole threat is focused on mere human concerns, and the threat to us is simply that we are part of the human population the oppressors seek to control.

The Covenant is not specifically targeted, and there is no way to estimate how to survive the cataclysms. Thus, we should give our attention to the political and economic disasters at hand. I’m betting on a few weeks of transition in which banks will be closed to normal business. Many will collapse in the coming months. I don’t think anybody knows the tipping points for this stuff.

The dollar will be useful, but it’s value will drop. Keep some cash on hand anyway. If you need a lot, then keep precious metal coins; silver will be easier to use, but gold isn’t a bad idea for keeping your existing wealth accessible. Make sure you can get to it easily, but that outsiders won’t know you have it, nor where it is. Buy a food stock to survive weeks, not months. Buy things you use all the time, especially things that won’t be useless during blackouts. Think about how you’ll function if power is intermittent, or in some places it may be gone for a while. You’ll have to gauge that for your own area.

The biggest hassle will be failed communications. Think about how everything will change when information slows to a crawl. Anything online is likely to be difficult to access for a time, or will be intermittent. My sense is that cellphone networks will be the most reliable, but that’s just a guess. I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Local and state governments will be scrambling to keep things going. You’ll have to get a sense for what yours is likely to do. For example, I know mine will not cooperate with another fake medical emergency, and would resist a mobilization of the National Guard. We have adequate electrical power relying on natural gas; we have lots of petroleum to export as well as agricultural products.

We could spin up small scale manufacturing, but highly specialized stuff will be hard to get. I’ve bought and stored things I expect to see disappear from store shelves, but like everyone else, I’m sure I’ll forget something. It will be a test of faith and prayer when the system cracks apart. But it’s not going to be a total failure, just a decentralization. Things will come back in some fashion after a while, and I believe the Internet will survive, but I expect it to change, adding some restrictions we don’t face now. Everything will be more expensive in terms of what we have to spend. Only a few will prosper from this mess.

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Economic Malice

Posted on June 25, 2024 by ehurst

Let my try to make this as simple as possible. Most people don’t really grasp economics, and economists do their best to keep it murky.

The US economy rests on one thin thread: consumption. If consumption slides, the whole thing starts freezing up. Money is worth nothing at all if it is not being used, passed around. If everyone kept their money, the value and usefulness of money would evaporate. This is not a basic principle, but it’s how our economy is structured.

More to the point, it’s a matter of rising consumption. The economy must expand constantly or the whole system will collapse. If people start buying less, the flow of money will freeze up in places.

Why is this a threat? Because the government depends on the economy. If money starts freezing up, the government cannot operate. Our government rests on mandates to spend money on certain things. If the money is not there, the whole system collapses, choking on utter necessities that cannot be answered. This stuff must be done, and it requires money.

This is a very massive government with a massive budget, the biggest in world history, so far as I know. Our government takes a massive slice of the economy, bigger than most communist governments. Where does that money come from?

Most of it is borrowed as needed. The government is borrowing money into our economy, borrowing it from everywhere. That includes borrowing it from other economies around the world. The only reason those other countries lend is to preserve the value of what they’ve produced but haven’t yet consumed or sold. So, they buy our US government debts and hold them because, up to now, our government has paid it back with interest.

(If these other governments are smart, they use their excess US dollars buy US assets like farmland, businesses, etc.)

But our government also borrows from its own people. The problem is that the government’s share of the economy is growing — in fact, we could say “exploding”. It keeps seizing bigger and bigger portions of all the money flowing. It’s eating up the economy, keeping more and more out of the hands of consumers. The government consumes more of what’s available.

When it does, the government is horribly inefficient. For every dollar you spend yourself, you tend to get back most of what it’s worth, because there’s not that much friction with middlemen. They’ve learned to be efficient. When the government buys it for you, suddenly there is massive friction with a very large portion disappearing into the pockets of people who have no motivation whatsoever to be efficient, and a lot of incentives for being wasteful.

Note: The US system of government openly discourages efficiency in operation. Somehow, we have this crazy notion that being business-like is “corruption”. The government of China does a much better job of looking out for her citizens’ economic interests. Bad as communism is, their economy will outlast ours.

Now, think about how hostile our government has been with all those other governments that have been buying our government’s debt. There is a big market for government debt from lots of governments doing some of the same thing ours does. Do you suppose the lenders are motivated to trade off US debt for debt from less hostile governments? This drives down the value of our government’s debt bonds, and makes it harder to borrow more.

The system is starting to freeze up. It matters not a whit whether our government spending is doing anything good for us. Government does such a crappy job of it that it ends up being bad. When money flow gets tight, guess who gets first claim on that limited supply? It’s not us. The government is able to put a gun to the heads of anyone using the system and insist they give government first dibs.

And if consumers like you and I have less money to use for the things we buy, the economy starts collapsing. The flow doesn’t just slow, but disappears. Whole sectors of the economy shut down, close up shop, putting people out of work. Banks close, and thus freezing the economy even more, all while government keeps taking bigger and bigger bites.

Finally, keep in mind that all the government debt has to be paid back. Government never limits spending to what it takes in taxes; it keeps borrowing and borrowing. More and more of the available money is locked up in government debt, and it takes bigger and bigger portions of government money just to pay the interest. With more going to interest, the government keeps borrowing more for it’s growing appetite on spending in a vicious cycle.

Keep in mind that government officials don’t give a damn if you have to live on the street and starve. They will take the money they want for their uses. Indeed, the hardest part for people to understand is that there are officials in our government who would prefer you to be poor and living on the street. That makes you dependent on them and more compliant to their demands. They don’t care about the economy; that’s someone else’s problem.

At the top, the neocons are watching all of this, and rubbing their hands with glee. They are hoping to provoke a civil war, but they’ll settle for massive unrest and food riots. It’s not just bad economics, as if the government was ignorant. There is malice in the people pulling the strings.

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The Sure Path

Posted on June 24, 2024 by ehurst

While we might have been surprised by the audacity and scale of vote counting fraud in the last presidential election, the fact that it was fraudulent was no surprise. Many of us saw it coming. If I thought voting mattered, I probably would have gone underground and counseled violence to prevent the count altogether. A few voices did suggest that, but I’m convinced that voting makes no difference.

That is, I’m convinced that the bulk of humanity is led around by the nose. The majority are under some level of control from demons and rebellious elohim. That governments and populations can be fooled is well established in the Bible. Only those who are faithful to the Covenant are free. In general, covenant people don’t bother with voting. If we can’t have a covenant law — feudal and tribal — then there’s no point in getting involved.

Of course, the forces of Darkness generally use human proxies. In a previous post, I’ve already mentioned the highest level of human proxies: Jews. You can find a lot explanations for how the term came into being, but in the Bible it referred to Judeans. After the Exile, that meant whatever was left of the Israeli nation. The Synoptic Gospels use the term quite sparingly, but John’s Gospel, written much later than the others, uses it often to refer to enemies of Jesus — Pharisees and Scribes, the Sanhedrin, and any other Jewish authorities.

The New Testament people never foresaw a time when the term “Jew” would be ambiguous as it is today. The separation between Jewish ethnicity and religious commitment was inconceivable. Today we have a fairly complicated situation, and it’s intentional. Jews themselves have created this confusion to gain an advantage. You can’t easily talk about the guiding force of Jewish activism without painting secular Jewish folks who aren’t actually involved. The leadership is hiding behind their own cannon fodder.

But again, if they are cannon fodder, they still present a threat by their presence on the field of battle. We’ve examined the elite Jewish agenda at length; everyone knows that there is a conspiracy to destroy northern European people, culture and civilization. While it may be hard to discern a precise strategic interest in this, it’s not hard to find any number of secular or converted Christian Jews willing to expose the broad contempt for Gentiles.

If nothing else, the Jewish strategy of destroying white people first is easier than the other Gentile peoples. Whites are wide open to it. God’s revelation says that if you denounce race to enter the Covenant, then you are protected. If you denounce national identity for any other reason, you will be devoured. The Tower of Babel was all about national identity.

Compare with the Chinese, who have told the Jews to get lost. And Russia is slowly coming around to that position by boosting nationalism. The European countries that will survive are doing the same thing. The rest will be destroyed because they are hostile to national identity.

Have you noticed that every ethnic group that is invading the US (“immigration”) is clinging to their national identity? Whites alone are not allowed to have one, nor even discuss it. And just who was responsible for agitating for open borders? The Jewish activists in the US. And of course, Jews have tightly organized to defend their national identity, too.

While I’ve said repeatedly that I denounced my white identity, it’s because the Kingdom of Heaven requires everyone to denounce theirs. Jews who take seriously their Jewish identity cannot be treated as genuine Christian converts. If thy are still Jews, they are outside of Christ, still under the Old Covenant. Paul said this several times, the Jew of Jews himself.

Just for good measure, the Jewish agenda to destroy the Christian religion has not changed since Paul’s time dealing with the Judaizers. They have largely succeeded, given how so much of organized Christian religion avoids the Covenant. Satan is very happy with that, because walking in the Covenant is the sure path to calling out the Elect, both Jew and Gentile.

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War Soon

Posted on June 23, 2024 by ehurst

On the one hand, I’m not all that sure what humans could actually pull off. On the other hand, I’m quite confident I understand their various ambitions.

Starting from the top level, we already know that the neocons, and to some degree the Zionists, are hoping to destroy the West. They are the ones driving the urgency toward global war, and they are quite blasé about nuclear war. They have intentionally driven up the price of US war equipment, making it excessively complex and unreliable as part of their broader efforts to bleed the US and NATO dry.

Don’t believe the nonsense about the military-industrial complex being mindlessly greedy. That might have been the case when I was a kid (1950s), but the neocons invaded that space before I was an adult (1970s). And their underlying agenda has been to destroy the US and Europe over the long term. This is the part of the Jewish agenda that few want to openly discuss. It’s one thing for scholars to notice how Jews have taken over western societies and governments, but the goal is not simply control, but destruction. They insist on humbling us totally before seizing full control.

This is nothing new; Jesus warned that the underlying power of Judaism was Satan. We’ve already noted that Satan’s agenda is relentlessly hostile to humans. We might debate the question of “how much”, but that the modern Jewish elite agenda is driven somewhat by Jewish religion is not in question. The False Messianic Expectations are too obvious in what has already happened. What made the folks in Nazareth so angry that they wanted to throw Jesus off a cliff was that He quoted the prophets about sweet Messianic promises (“gracious words”) while leaving out the part about vengeance against the Gentiles. The Talmud is loaded with hatred and contempt for Gentiles, referring to us as less than human.

Further, the Pharisees’ spite for their own peasants is still around. The Zionists obviously hope to conquer “Greater Israel” and rule the world, but the neocons are cynically using the Zionists. The neocons have already admitted that they will not hesitate to bring destruction on the Zionist project; the common Israeli citizens are cannon fodder. Ever heard of the Hannibal Directive? There are devoted neocons in the Israeli government.

And if they are willing to slaughter their own, how much more willing would they be to burn through Gentile populations? The current Israeli regime is desperately trying to get us involved in a war with every Muslim government in the Middle East, Iran in particular. The current action in Gaza, and soon to be in Lebanon, is not based on any real confidence in the IDF. It’s all calculated to drag the West into war, to make the western countries feel obliged to rescue the “besieged” Israelis. The Zionists want to use us to gain control, but the neocons want to use Zionists to destroy the West.

And the neocons are using globalists, as well. The latter are driven to seize all exploitable resources in the world. Everyone can see that Russia is going to win their war in Ukraine, but the one reason the US government would never admit this is because of the resources in Ukraine, especially the part currently claimed by Russia. This whole conflict was provoked by NATO because of a lust to seize Russian assets, too.

Thus, we come to the place where our government and NATO are working hard to provoke Russia to use nukes. I’m not saying that they will succeed, but you need to understand that their actions, public or secret, are aimed at provoking a conflict that will eventually destroy the West. The globalists are broadly convinced they can win such a conflict, that they can remain aloof from the destruction of all us little people.

Given that the Russian and Chinese governments have been quite savvy in dealing with these provocations, I can’t say whether western leadership will succeed. However, I’m utterly convinced the West will invoke a false flag incident just to blame Russia/China and claim this as justification for mobilizing a direct attack. Between the neocons, and their Zionist and globalist lackeys, we will be at war very soon.

Addenda: A recent interview with Scott Ritter indicates that Israel is collapsing already. Citizens are leaving the country. The globalists are not at all sympathetic to Zionism, so they are moving the US/NATO away from war in the Middle East and trying to focus on Russia/China. That doesn’t mean a total end to support for Israel, but that the internal workings of the US government is fractured worse than we might have realized.

That would mean a higher probability of war here.

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NT Doctrine — 2 Timothy 1

Posted on June 22, 2024 by ehurst

Reminder: This is probably the last of Paul’s writings chronologically. Again, Timothy is in Ephesus as the resident Apostle. Any day now a large number of folks from Jerusalem will come streaming into the area, fleeing a Jewish rebellion in Jerusalem against Rome. But Paul is back in Roman custody, and this time it’s a far less privileged situation. Instead of house arrest, Paul is actually in prison. And this time it wasn’t an imperial courtesy to the Sanhedrin, but a rising intolerance of Rome itself for Christian religion. If anything, Paul’s first passage through the imperial courts marked him as the leading representative of Christian leadership; they didn’t forget.

At first glance, it would not appear that the first chapter offers any doctrinal statement. However, Paul reaffirms divine election in a way that most people don’t catch. Aside from the formulaic greeting in the first few verses, Paul appeals to his successor Timothy to remain faithful despite the dire news of Paul’s situation.

Some ambitious souls in the Christian community there in Ephesus used news of Paul’s second arrest as an excuse to discredit him and reassert their own agendas. We could guess that there was still a lot of pressure from Judaizers on one side, and pagans on the other, not to mention the nascent Gnostics. At any rate, there’s no doubt the heat is on Timothy, so Paul encourages him to stand strong.

Then, in verse 9 Paul rests his appeal on the sheer trustworthiness of divine election. If God has called us, He will ensure we do not fail His mission. Most western minds approach the whole question of election from the wrong direction. They look for a discussion of individual salvation as the whole matter. While that concept is included, Paul is clearly influenced by the broader Hebrew concept of election, which emphasizes the whole question of human existence.

Paul repeatedly wrote about the Mystery of the Gospel. It’s a complex teaching that assumes we exist to prove God is just in His discipline of Satan and various powers in the Spirit Realm. Humanity is not at all the center of Creation; we are at best accessories after the fact. The whole point of divine election is not us, but His reputation among a host of beings far above our level, and not just angels.

This is good news. He needs us to make His case, so He’s determined not to let us fail. All we really need to do is hang on for the ride and we’ll experience joy unspeakable in this life. His glory is always in our best interest. For Timothy, all it requires is the resolve to cling to what Paul has taught him and see the hand of God smash those who, knowingly or not, serve His enemy’s purposes.

Of course, it also means eternal glory with Him, but there’s an awful lot of glory going on in the here and now. On the one hand, Paul mentions two fellows embarrassing the Lord, but then praises Onesiphorus, who crawled through the Roman prison system to find Paul and do what he could for him. Should we imagine that Onesiphorus found it drudgery? No, this man was full of joy unspeakable, too.

Election is our confidence to fight and not surrender to the enemies of God.

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God Is Waiting on Us

Posted on June 21, 2024 by ehurst

We are called to speak the truth about what’s going on in this world. The Lord has revealed what is true: This world is fallen and sinners will sin. Nothing good will ever come of human ambition. Human ambition itself is the open door to Satan and his allies. Fleshly concerns will always lead you to Hell.

But God requires us to use this human existence for His glory. That means we must understand His character and priorities within the context of this fallen human realm. It’s part of the Great Commission to denounce sin for what it is, and to proclaim the path of righteousness. We denounce sin, to include all the ways by which higher powers seek to keep us away from the Covenant.

Do you understand that the one thing Satan and his allies fear is the Covenant? The only thing that binds them without fail is our adherence to Christ’s Law. The battleground is your individual soul; this is true “spiritual warfare”. Satan and his demons are confined to this realm of space-time, and their one ambition is to prolong its existence. And they know clearly what Romans 11 says about the key to bringing on the End of Time: the fullness of the Gentiles entering the Covenant. Paul says that until God’s purpose is completed for locking the Jews out of the Covenant and bringing in the Gentiles, until the Gentile Elect are brought in, we can’t talk about the End of All Things.

Now, don’t misread this. Satan is worried about time; God’s Covenant Kingdom is not. The issue is not a body count of the Elect but the principle of restoration of the Elect from every nation that Israel was meant to win, had they carried out the original mission. It’s not as if God is keeping a secret numerical count; that’s a western obsession. He doesn’t reckon that way when it comes to people. The depiction in the Greek for for “fullness” (plerosis) is more a matter of having the boat full of cargo, or repairing a breach.

The word is also used to denote “fullness of the Spirit”. Thus, think more along the lines of the nature of our self-conquest; part of the burden is on us. We defeat the Enemy by activating the Covenant, by enslaving our fleshly selves. God isn’t making a body count here; He’s watching for something nearly impossible to enunciate in such simple terms. It’s all about our dominance of the flesh by the Spirit.

It’s our witness, first in how we live, and then in how we speak, that becomes the final conquest of our Enemy. By no means is this by our talents and discipline, but by our willingness and eagerness to use the power and authority of God over our own fleshly natures. God is watching for a certain key element of moral victory. Whoever it is among the Elect still among the living humans must win this victory in His name. That’s at least part of what Paul meant by the “fullness of the Gentiles”.

Following that victory, the Elect among Jews will begin a mass return to the Covenant. That’s what Romans 11 tells us, and this is what Satan dreads most. All the other Bible passages about the End of Time rest on this understanding. Satan strives to keep control over the Jews to prevent their restoration to their Messiah.

This is why we never talk about defeating Jews on a fleshly human level. Don’t get bogged down in hating them; pity them as a mass of souls locked away from their inheritance. It was theirs first. But it’s most certainly not theirs now. Just a tiny few are coming to Christ in every generation; what Paul was talking about was a mass conversion, a shocking new Exodus into the Spiritual Promised Land.

If we are going to win them back for Christ, the only path is living and telling the truth. Our primary witness is loving each other as Christ loved us. It’s the expertise we develop for plowing through the flesh and touching each other’s hearts. This is what calls to the Elect. We use that as the basis on which we mention the truth about the rest of the things we see around us. If we do not conquer the flesh and love each other sacrificially, the End will be delayed further. The job will not be done until we reach some level of victory that meets God’s demands.

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It’s Who We Are, Not What We Do

Posted on June 20, 2024 by ehurst

I’ve already laid the foundation: This life is an illusion. Our human existence has only one purpose, and that is to testify that God alone deserves all praise and glory. There are others competing for some of that glory, and they are not human. You and I are the proof of God’s claim. We have no other purpose; we are expendable and we had better get used to that. Nothing any human or all humanity together could do will change that basic truth.

And surely civilization is not important; it’s merely comfortable for us while we are here supporting our Creator’s claims. Building civilization is most certainly not part of God’s fundamental revelation of His will for fallen mankind. Given the nature of the natural threats heading at us, some of us will be around after civilization collapses. The loss of civilization will not change God’s mandate for humanity.

The bulk of humanity are not aware of the coming global disasters. Some of the elite do know; remember that seed vault hidden in Norway? Those who do know about the disasters are suppressing the information. Recently, some of the scientific data regarding the movement of the magnetic poles has been closed to the public. The US government knows and is hiding it, in collusion with other governments.

I’ve tried to delineate the boundaries, to point out God’s priorities. Humans can participate in the Covenant promises and blessings without being Elect. However, the emphasis is on the Elect; we exist as the primary testimony on God’s behalf. Our eternal destiny includes judging and replacing the Elohim Council after Christ returns. Whether or not we have natural heirs on this earth is of little importance. The issue of raising families is part of the lower priorities of Biblical Law; it is not on the level of the Great Commission.

Thus, get married and have kids of you can, if the Lord provides that opportunity. Otherwise, don’t let it distract you from the real mission. That is right out of the New Testament. The Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t grow by fleshly reproduction; not everyone born in a Christian home is Elect. Our primary mission is to seek out the lost sheep of Divine Election.

None of the other human ambitions count for much, either.

The Great Commission demands that we teach what Jesus taught. He rolled into His New Covenant some elements from the Old, which included elements of Noah. While it is useful to study and make a list of things the New Testament mentions about this, it is not the whole answer. The answer is understanding the divine priorities, to incorporate in our thinking the moral character of God Himself. Revelation is not data; it is God’s Person.

The Great Commission is that we manifest His Person in our lives. We must mirror the full revelation of God in the limited context of who we are and where He has placed us.

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Threats Abound

Posted on June 19, 2024 by ehurst

We can speculate all we like about what God is thinking, but the fact Earth’s magnetic poles are moving is painfully obvious. They are converging toward each other, and the mathematical models suggest the earth’s magnetic field will virtually disappear for a time. That means every creature on the planet that uses the magnetic field for navigation will go nuts, and some already are. And since field = shield, it also means that everything the sun has been spewing at us will no longer bounce off, but will strike the planet directly.

Consider this: A very recent CME caused auroras all the way to the equator, and it wasn’t even a very big CME. That’s a sign that the shield strength is dropping quickly. Our best modeling suggests no later than 2050 for the climax of this disaster, and quite likely in about 15 years from now. Already for the past few years, there has been a big bare spot over the South Atlantic, and solar radiation and particles have been interfering with satellite navigation.

Hint: That big bare spot is the opposite side of the planet from where the two poles are converging, right off the west coast of Malaysia in the Andaman Sea.

Keep in mind: There has always been a constant steady stream of energy and particles washing over the entire solar system, coming from the sun. It can vary just a little in terms of magnitude, but it’s always there. Without the magnetic shield around the earth, all life would have been burned to a crisp long ago.

It is utterly impossible for humans to prepare for this shield reduction on any significant scale. There are simply too many variables, and the scale of threat is beyond our imagination. The best we can guess is that you should build a serious bunker deep underground with no metal reinforcement, since any metal anywhere on the planet will become charged by ambient static electrical charges flooding our atmosphere and ground. If you take metal objects into the bunker with you, store them away from your living area. They will get pretty hot.

This is just a good scientific estimate. More will surely be revealed through prophecy. Of course, if you see the way humans are acting these days, you would surely see such disasters as a relief. The human threats are running off the scale.

You know that our US government has been intentionally provoking Russia and China for quite some time, now. A nuclear exchange could take place as early as this summer, though I suspect the bigger stuff won’t show until later. We know that the rulers are intent on starting a major war, and they most certainly don’t give a damn what happens to us.

There is a sense in which it really doesn’t matter who is pulling the strings. They hate us and want us all gone. Of course, in their calculus, there will always be some who survive, and those must be enslaved. Our mere existence must be punished. This is what moves them, regardless whether they are conscious of it.

This is an apocalypse; there is no stopping it now. This is the background against which we are called to witness to the glory of our God. In the next couple of posts, I’m going to review some of the human threats so we have a better estimate of what God will demand of His covenant people.

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A Distance Too Far

Posted on June 18, 2024 by ehurst

In a discussion yesterday, we were reviewing the historical context of Acts 2, particularly the paragraph at the end of the chapter about the first few months of the church in Jerusalem following the Ascension.

It was what we call the “honeymoon phase” when groups are first formed around faith in Christ. It wasn’t quite so blissful later as the demands of reality set in. Later on there was the issue with Ananias and Sapphira, and then the Diaspora widows who had no elders to represent them.

Jesus died on Passover and Ascended shortly before Pentecost. That was a two-month period every year when wealthy Diaspora Jews came home to Jerusalem. They would leave not long after, going back to their businesses scattered mostly across the Mediterranean Basin. The majority of that first church were those Diaspora believers who had been caught by the gospel message just before they left. Something about this new covenant faith in the Messiah caused them to simply abandon their former lives and stay in town. Most of them sold their overseas businesses to other Jews and embraced the growing number of local believers as their new clan, their covenant family.

When you take away the Talmudic perversions pasted over the top of ancient Hebrew custom and instincts, the result was a heady excitement about going to the Temple for genuine worship of Christ and His Father.

The broader picture was linked to John 17:20ff, where Jesus prays that His future followers would experience the union of hearts that Jesus had with His Father. One of the questions that prompted this discussion we were having was, “How do we reclaim that unity today?”

Naturally, we had to invest some time in eliminating what it was not. It was not uniformity. The first church in Jerusalem would not have tolerated that sort of thing; it was part of their culture to resist the kind of social manipulation we have in the West. That discussion alone can take a lot of time simply because western Christians assume too much without conscious awareness, injecting their assumptions about life into the Bible, thinking that first century Hebrew society was much like ours is today.

They would not have tolerated our business-like atmosphere with its rather reserved social behavior expectations. Hebrews were all touchy-feely in private family settings. The first church was not the least bit formal; they didn’t have our rules of carefully measured familiarity and handshakes only. By the same token, they would not have tolerated the fake back-slapping familiarity, either.

Hebrew men in particular would demonstrate affection to each other in ways westerners would find quite uncomfortable. For the ancient Hebrew, if they couldn’t recognize you by smell, you were a stranger. These people were literally in each other’s armpits.

Now, step back a bit. While it’s not necessary to change our social habits, it is necessary to break down the inherent facade of western social interactions. Our social rituals are inherently hostile to genuine heart-led unity in faith, virtually demanding that we not actually get involved in the lives of others. The stuffiness of our northern European ancestors is no longer a survival trait.

In a church setting, I should be able to find a fellowship of men to whom I can tell my darkest secrets without worrying that it will lead to self-righteous ostracism or wider exposure. I should be able to find men who would treat my personal tragedies as their own, giving it a high priority, as I would theirs.

The few times I tested that in churches, it blew up in my face. I’ve had better luck getting personal support and acceptance from those outside the church. We all need support to carry our loads, not judgment and rejection.

In the end, this was the answer to the original question. The reason churches don’t see the miracles that were common in that first faith community in Jerusalem is because we have not built the atmosphere of unity that existed there. We don’t invest ourselves into the lives of our fellow believers. They aren’t family, but mere acquaintances from whom we maintain a careful measure of distance. Heck, we treat our own kinfolks that way.

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