Divine Exploitation

Posted on July 27, 2015 by ehurst

We exploit tribulation.

Does anyone have to tell you that our current situation, at least here in the West, constitutes the condition the Bible calls “tribulation”? Not merely a social discomfort, but we are in the beginning of a global assault on the human terrain. This sort of thing comes in waves. You can’t just pin it down to any one thread of decision and evil plot; it’s far more complex than that. By the time I could write a book just outlining the little that I know or suspect, the situation would have shifted too much to make it meaningful. We are in a state of flux and it will bring more suffering.

In order to make the most of Our Father’s glory, we have to take counsel together. I’m not the sole expert by any means. Some of you see things more clearly and with better understanding than I. What I do see I am obliged to declare as my divine calling. Let’s share what we see and encourage each other to make His character obvious.

That’s the starting point: His divine character. Indeed, it’s the whole point — we are called to participate in revelation by acting out that revelation in our individual contexts. It requires we first have our hearts leading our consciousness, giving our brains the orders to organize and implement the moral imperatives God pours into our hearts. The Bible often characterizes this as living by the Law, or walking the Spirit of Christ (He was the Law in human form), a moral consciousness that places demands on the flesh — “flesh” includes the intellect. The flesh will fail, but God measures the intent of your heart to obey as holiness. He discounts the failures of the flesh; to the degree we succeed at implementing what the heart demands, we reckon it as His miracle gift to us.

The paradoxical truth is that when things are easy is when we are most likely to fail. When tribulation comes, it empowers us in ways we hardly comprehend. That’s because tribulation is merely the shadow of His visitation. When His divine Presence draws near, it is the commitment of the heart that determines whether you feel His wrath or His sweet blessing. It’s all the same thing from His perspective; the difference is in us. His Presence destroys sin, so the question is how deeply wedded we are to sin, and in what ways.

I don’t pretend to know if this is His final visitation before utterly destroying what we call Western Civilization. I suspect it is, but He may not be finished demonstrating His power anytime soon. Whether it represents an end of all things in this plane of existence is a silly question. Don’t ask and quit thinking about it that way. It offers no avenue to approaching His glory; it hinders our service in divine justice.

Today — every moment of every day — is the time to reassess and make sure we have let go of things that He says don’t matter on the moral plane. As with all Creation, use what you have for His glory and let Him worry about whether you should attach any further value to it. If He says it’s important for your mission, then hang onto it for His glory’s sake. Otherwise, treat as consumable, expendable. By all means, ditch the instinctive valuations our society teaches us, because precious little of that system coincides with the revelation of God’s truth. Even that little is by accident, so it’s best to assume they get nothing right, but might have something briefly useful in some limited contexts.

Your heart already understands all of this, but it is the intellect that stands in desperate need of training. Your heart sees through the veil of fleshly perception and desire; your heart already makes perfect sense of the moral fabric woven into all of life here. The true moral perception is there, so learn to let it rule.

As John the Baptist said in his own day, “The ax is laid at the root of the tree.” His cousin Jesus took up that message, and while it took a few more years for the meaning to become obvious, the actual historical end of that metaphorical tree took another few decades. I can’t explain why, but I believe our situation will move much faster than that. I doubt it will take very many strokes of the ax to fell this rotting mess.

So your pastor today says you shouldn’t fret, but keep your eyes open for an opportunity to highlight His glory in ways you otherwise could not.

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The Logic of Radix Fidem

Posted on July 26, 2015 by ehurst

(See the “Radix Fidem” tab above for an explanation of the label.)

The mystical mind need not be impractical.

I just wanted to offer a quick review for all the new subscribers to this blog. One of our biggest problems is the Western intellectual tradition. It is dominated by Anglo-Saxon cultural assumptions about reality, with a healthy dose of Greco-Roman logical reasoning. That these two major influences overlapped in some ways would be obvious to a historian. That they are fundamentally wrong is well nigh impossible to get Westerners to see. Today, virtually everyone you encounter whose mind was shaped by current Western thinking simply assumes they represent the human default, or at least what ought to be the default.

You cannot reason with such people. Every day I have to wade through mountains of blasphemous intellect that sings the praises of Western Civilization: “Finally, God got it right!” I’ve asked questions of some folks who pump out this sewage and their response is more or less to the effect that it’s simply not possible for a thinking person to not fall in love with their particular brand of Western ideals. I’m referring to likes of Lew Rockwell and his associates, some major names in evangelical church leadership, and even some folks who weren’t born in a Western country.

On top of this is the vast ocean of nonsense about what it means to be a Christian Mystic. I have no quarrel with folks who realize that their story is their own, and that it’s more a matter of comparing notes. But from those who love the West, we struggle against a major Straw Man Fallacy regardless of what they think mysticism is all about. Part of the problem is that the average writer who bothers to think about it at all assumes that the psychobabble and gobbledygook chattering from Westernized mystics is a fair representation of the rest of us. Mysticism is not violating grammar and language as a cover for mere subjectivism and empty emotionalism.

The essence of mysticism is a distrust of one’s intellectual capabilities, and a search for a better source of understanding for reality (see this and this for a fuller explanation). Needless to say, that distrust applies to all human intellect, but it starts with the mind in the mirror. Superficial abuse of language is not mysticism. I’m sure you’ve read your fill of silly babble pretending to be deep and profound, upon which some fool has stuck the label of “mysticism” while giving us the airhead happy dance. More than once I’ve concluded some websites were just being smart-assed, and in one case I came to a sure conviction the site was intended to make genuine mysticism appear stupid.

Mysticism is not a departure from logic; it’s a departure from Western logic. Rather, mysticism is a different kind of logic. That’s where I get the business of yakking about quantum reasoning — we reduce reasoning to it’s fundamental element. You take input and process it. Mystical reasoning is symbolic, not analytical. Mystical language tends to be indicative, not descriptive. By the way, those explanations also describe ancient Hebrew and biblical literature, not to mention almost the entire range of Ancient Near Eastern cultures and civilizations. It is also the whole point behind several things Jesus said. For example, Jesus told the parable of the Sower and Matthew ends it with this:

“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

And the disciples said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?”

He answered and said to them, “Because it is given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven, but it is not given to them. For whoever has, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance. But whoever does not have, from him shall be taken away even that which he has. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not; nor do they understand.

“And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which said, ‘By hearing you shall hear and shall not understand; and seeing you shall see and shall not perceive for this people’s heart has become gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and they have closed their eyes, lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.’

“But blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear.” (Matthew 13:9-16 MKJV)

Naturally, Jesus is using parabolic language to explain parables. The Twelve had some inkling of it, but it was fading fast in the sense that for some three centuries their leaders and teachers had been trying to replace the Hebraic symbolic thinking with Hellenized concrete thinking. The shift was slow, but among elite segments of Judean society, symbolic reasoning was nearly gone. Among the peasants it took a little longer because the leadership was contemptuous of them and excluded them from a lot of things. If you weren’t an activist and hung out at the synagogues every spare moment to rub elbows with the politically connected, you were nobody.

This elitist segment of society was the target of Jesus’ comment quoted from Isaiah. They had closed their souls from hearing with the heart. In so many words, Jesus was telling His disciples that He was training them to think from the heart, not trusting the limited perception of the intellect, which could only handle concrete analysis and literal language. The heart could process non-literal moral reasoning just fine. Parables are the language of the heart, the language of moral perception. Those whose hearts were awake and seeking the truth would hear it in the parables, picking up on the symbolism. Those who relied only on their intellects would miss an awful lot.

This was part of the problem Isaiah and other prophets faced, as even back in their days, the Israeli intelligentsia rejected humility and heart-led living, preferring their own human capabilities and demanding things be subjected to concrete analysis. Even if we go with the idea of abstract reasoning, it falls short of heart-logic. Abstract thinking simply abstracts the concrete details of things that can be compared and related. Just because you can interpret the symbols we call letters and numbers doesn’t mean you understand symbolic reasoning. It’s two different uses of the term “symbol.”

Abstraction has its place, but it’s not a very important one. Moral symbols do not yield to abstraction in that sense. Surveying sensory data for rational processing only gets you just so far. God seldom addressed humanity on that level; virtually all of God’s communication was on the moral level of the heart. Only the heart-mind could process what God said. The intellect is not only part of our fallen nature, the intellect led the way to the Fall. To give the intellect primacy in decision-making is itself the essence of being fallen.

Barring a solid background in reading on the subject, it’s pretty hard to help folks understand where we are coming from on all of this. Rather, we do a lot better simply demonstrating how it works. People who are already capable of processing genuine faith like that will then begin asking questions and you can explain. This is part of why my books are free, and why I make it a point to advertise two of them on the blog page itself. Those two represent a sort of minimum academic explanation for what Radix Fidem is all about.

A religion is simply the practical expression of faith.

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Psalm 60

Posted on July 25, 2015 by ehurst

The header references a tune David called “Lily of Testimony” and events narrated in 2 Samuel 8. We catch only some vague hint that David’s source of trouble is likely something to do with Edom. We might reasonably guess that Israel’s cousins southeast of the Dead Sea pulled off some sort of coup that should not have been possible, harming Israel is some way. Many scholars speculate that Edom attacked from the south when David and his army were occupied battling the Syrians up north. This would be typical of Edom’s spiteful actions until they were finally absorbed.

Whatever David’s mistakes, we see nothing to indicate that he ever disputed the justice of God’s wrath. Rather, he begins by crying out to God in proper protocol, confessing that the burden is on him to make amends on behalf of the nation. His words draw a picture of Israel in shock, bearing a sense that the world itself is irritated by their violation of God’s character.

But God made preparations for this. He made sure that His people always knew where to turn for help. David personally found Jehovah the mightiest of protections from those who rejected the divine revelation. David and his people have nowhere else to go.

David makes note that God had often indicated He was the ultimate sovereign in all things. Perhaps it is hard for us to imagine, but God announces that He could hop up and dance for joy when it pleased Him. The small and very ancient city of Shechem nestled between Mounts Ebal and Gerizim could be handed to anyone or any number of heirs God chose. It was important as one of the few east-west passes through the central hill country, and was occupied when Abraham first arrived. Somehow it became one of the only cities in Canaan hosting a remnant of Abraham’s descendants when Israel migrated to Egypt. Succoth (“tents”) probably refers to the spot in the Jordan Valley were Jacob pitched shelters for his cattle against the sweltering heat. It became the town that Gideon had to discipline with thorns for hindering his pursuit of the Midianites during the Period of Judges. Both cities represent images of God turning things on their heads when it suited Him.

Then God mentions the three largest tribal homes in Israel — Ephraim, Manasseh (western half) and Gilead (Manasseh east) — politically aligned and powerful. They were often a source of some trouble in national affairs. They would later lead the Northern Tribes away from the reign of David’s grandson. Meanwhile, God said He could turn them into a useful battle helmet (major military asset) when it suited Him. God had appointed Judah the royal tribe, in part because his elder brothers had so completely sinned as to lose their status in turns. Meanwhile, whatever Moab might have been, God could use it as his foot bath, while Edom would be the rug where He tossed His sandals. Grammar suggests He includes Philistia in this offhand dismissal. Having troubled Israel at least as much as any other, despite having been there for such a short time, God would allow Israel to celebrate their descent into insignificance.

Knowing all this, David has to ask: “Who will lead us to defeat Edom now?” David notes God didn’t support them the last time they had trouble there. Without that, no amount of human support is enough. Whatever it takes to regain His favor, David is eager to get on with it so they can put a lid on this boiling kettle of trouble. He wants the make Israel the source of God’s glory, not divine embarrassment. Otherwise, there is no hope for the nation’s survival.

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Riding for Justice

Posted on July 25, 2015 by ehurst

Today’s journey wasn’t remarkable in terms of touring the countryside. With only one minor variation, it was the new Harrah Loop counterclockwise. The single variation was, after passing the SDA Academy and retirement village on NE 63rd, I turned north on Peebly. I wanted to see how the work on Wilshire’s washout was progressing between Peebly and Triple X Roads.

WishireRepair Apparently some washouts require far more substantial work. I suppose this area was already planned for some kind of work, but the spring flooding forced their hand. Wilshire Boulevard runs at an odd angle to the natural creek bed. On top of that, the drainage ditch on both sides at this spot have become the capture for quite a substantial runoff from farther uphill behind me. Thus, it required some fancy hydrology to keep all this working while preventing future washouts. This is no tin-horn crossing, but a concrete culvert, a splash wall and tributary routing. In the process, the responsible government agency simply did a complete re-landscaping job and put down all new asphalt for a couple hundred yards.

While I can assure you I’ve lived in places that would have seen a far better job done, in the broader context of things I feel certain this wasn’t bad at all. It comes closer to being consciously consistent with natural forces than previous generations would have done. Any particular brand of philosophical orthodoxy becomes pointless in the real world.

That was the reason for the approach I took in my open letter post yesterday. I noted that Yes Communities management used contract law to absolve themselves of any moral responsibility for the abuse. It’s a typical Western legalist approach to anything — blame the impersonal forces of law and legal precedent, but actual moral justice be damned. I didn’t appeal to their moral sense because I knew that was pointless. Rather, I simply offered a warning that nobody liked them and they should expect resident behavior to reflect that.

This was the primary focus of my meditations as I rode. The entire legacy of Western social mythology and false moral perception is rightly deserving of the coming days of God’s wrath. The pretense that something out there in human imagination can be objective, commonly accepted and legally binding pokes God in the eye. God says all human law must conform to His revealed character, in part because Creation itself is woven from the fabric of His moral character. Everything is personal in Creation. When you do things God’s way, nature works with you, even if you hardly comprehend what it’s doing.

A critical element in His moral law is accountability. Not so much to each other, but for each other. That is, we are accountable to God’s justice in how we treat others. In broad terms, those who have much are accountable to His justice for all of it. Neither the Western hyper-libertarian nor the damned communist approach, nor anything in between, has the proper grounding to comprehend this. When you own a lot of property, you have a lot of power, and you must seek a clear conscience before God in how you handle the property in reference to other humans.

You can’t possibly account for every human variation, particularly when it comes to the human creativity at being stupid. Thinking along the lines of tort liability is wholly contrary to divine justice. Rather, you must stand before God and seek a clear conscience. That doesn’t mean you can use the excuse that your heart is silenced and you don’t give a rat’s butt about anyone. You are accountable for activating a heart-led existence, always seeking a better communion with Creation and the Creator, and always looking for ways to glorify Him by kindness and risk acceptance.

So the folks at Yes Communities are damned in that sense. But because it rests on a long American tradition of flipping the bird at God, nobody is surprised. Instead of seeking to know His demands, they make demands on Him. If you aren’t willing to take a financial loss for the sake of divine justice, then everything you touch is accursed. That’s not my decision; I’m not a holy gunslinger firing curses at Yes management. I’m simply announcing the obvious. They are responsible for cultivating the demonic presence in their dealings. If I’m wrong, at least I didn’t fail to obey the command to speak His truth as best I understand it. I am accountable to Him for my own conduct.

I can’t decide for you what you must do to keep a clear conscience before God, but if you own property, I can assure you that the Law Covenants present a pretty strong example from which God demands that we extrapolate into our own context. It’s not that hard to understand, and if I cry out to God when my sense of justice points out abuse, you can be sure He takes note. That deadened hearts cannot sense the immediacy of His wrath does not mean there is no wrath.

Even when I’m just pedaling across the countryside, I am accountable to God for His brand of justice.

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Open Letter to Yes Communities Management

Posted on July 24, 2015 by ehurst

I publish this letter here because I know there’s not a snowball’s chance in Hell you would ever listen, anyway. Conversation is pointless because you’ll just lie, same as always. What follows is not based on formal surveys and polling, just a very strong sense of community outrage among my neighbors. We are utterly certain you hate us.

So we are returning the favor. Yeah, we hate you. You aren’t a part of us and you’ve made it abundantly clear you despise us for not being just like you. It does no good to discuss morals and ethics because you aren’t even on the same planet as us ordinary trailer park trash.

Your recent hate mail postcard simply proves the point. No basketball goals, trampolines or bouncy houses at children’s birthday parties? No wading pools? Don’t tell me why you feel that’s appropriate because it doesn’t matter; we receive as egregiously spiteful malice.

If your local managers have any sense at all, they’re going to fail to enforce these new policies with anything approaching vigor. Sure, you know how to demand that the front gate looks pretty, and the office building gets renovated, but you can’t be bothered to patch the craters in our streets. You can’t be bothered to recognize economic realities that we cannot make do with two parking spots. People with jobs need cars and a place to live and we will simply park in the grass. We’ll hang our laundry outside where it’s not too obvious and leave the kids’ toys in the yard. Oh, and you can’t be bothered to deal with the young thugs who tear up or stuff. It’s funny how you quickly fired all the managers who knew how to keep that stuff under control and replaced them with idiots who don’t give a rat’s patootie about us.

Yep, we’re just a bunch of trailer park trash and you can pretend you’ll roust us out and replace us with prissy assholes like you, but it ain’t gonna happen. Most of us aren’t activists of any stripe, and virtually nobody will tell you, so I’m letting you know. This isn’t war or rebellion. Most of my neighbors are passive-aggressive and will simply do what they can to avoid hassles while taking the measures our lives demand of us. Most of us have no where else to go.

Meanwhile, we are convinced you hate us, so the bulk of those who pay the outrageous rates (for damned little in return) and make your fat-cat prosperity possible will probably not think good thoughts about you. And who knows? Maybe there will be some breaking point when it gets really ugly. I have no idea because I’m not like that; I’m just the messenger.

Update: As you might expect, the reply from Yes was the standard corporate crap, citing the most improbable excuses for clamping down on humans being human in a residential community. In other words, it’s all about investor profits, human nature be damned. Meanwhile, I did get a traffic boost from whomever passed it around in their offices. Somehow I don’t think it will be a blessing.

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Just a Dreamer?

Posted on July 23, 2015 by ehurst

I dream of the day when the Lord will send me to the fields white unto harvest. I dream of spending time among a people who seek a living faith that climbs above this world, even as they learn to live most morally within it.

There is no doubt that the world as we know it now is hardly ready for our faith. Radix Fidem would shock most of the Christians we might encounter. Oddly enough, we have less trouble with folks who don’t profess to follow Christ in that way.

You won’t catch me suggesting our way is the only right way. We believe it’s best for us, assuredly, but that doesn’t make us elites. There’s nothing smug about this. We recognize that only by some ineffable miracle of God do people take our teaching seriously.

Still, there has to be some folks out there somewhere who aren’t going to hear the message unless they first see it working in one of us. I dream of the day I can carry this word to the scattered souls whom God has prepared to receive this sweet word of comfort. Do you?

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God Blows the Whistle

Posted on July 23, 2015 by ehurst

This should be an easy doctrine to absorb: Be sure your sins will find you out.

This goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden when God characterized the unjust bloodshed of Abel as crying out to Him from the ground. We understand on a moral level that the very fabric of Creation is woven together from the threads of God’s own character. When people sin, reality itself will tell on you. A critical element in God’s glory, in His revelation of His character, is exposing our sins. He exposes them to us first, if we remain sensitive to His character, but to all the world when we choose to oppose Him in any way.

In Scripture we can also see that God is in the habit of revealing His wrath against sin when it piles up to some intolerable level that we could sense if we were in tune with moral reality. His followers have no excuse if this catches them by surprise. But a critical element in the wrath that falls from Heaven in the exposure of sins people thought were hidden.

As always, these things come about in this world as tendencies, not as legalistic discreet justice for every individual. God shines His glory on His Creation; what He deems fit for exposure on that basis is what will be uncovered in public.

Thus, no one should be surprised by a sudden rise in whistle blowing. What might move the different individuals is a question for a different level of consideration; on the broad moral scale of God’s reality, it’s the exposure itself that matters. For those of us capable of sensing these things from the heart, there is far more than might be obvious to those whose hearts sleep. For example, when some government official or other mouthpiece goes ballistic on something, you know there’s hidden sin being exposed in the life of those most offended. So keep your eyes peeled, because somebody somewhere is telling on them, and the folks exposed are trying to direct attention away from their sins.

People who take themselves too seriously are hiding something in the dungeons of their souls.

As one who is very much in favor of open information on the Net, I frankly rejoice at the recent exposures, the doxing and dumping of purloined data. As I’ve noted more than once, in terms of cosmic morality, if you digitize it, don’t pretend it can be kept secret. If someone else digitizes private matters without your permission, that’s another matter. As a general principle, all digital data is public sooner or later if the storage is connected to the Internet. That’s God’s Law.

Rejoice in His wrath on sin.

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Death Is Just a Circumstance

Posted on July 22, 2015 by ehurst

The title is a catchphrase I’ve been using for years.

It’s the kind of thing you say because you know that the words would never really capture the truth in the first place. Instead, you reach for a way to point out the window of eternity and ask folks to gaze through it. Nobody really expects the mind to comprehend, but we can indicate something about Eternity. Not by adding things to your mind, but we do it by removing blockages there. The whole point of parables (and parabolic language) is to break the mind’s habit of trying to command and control.

If you dig into my high volume of blather here on this blog and in my books, you’ll come across the idea that the various Law Covenants in the Bible express something about God’s character, and that His character is the fabric of Creation itself. The ultimate revelation of God’s character was Jesus Christ, His true Son and His Living Law. His Presence in our world was the final revelation, the ultimate expression of God’s character in a human form we can grasp.

He died on the Cross willingly. Among all the things we could say about that, and among the things He Himself said about it, was an assertion that He wasn’t afraid of death. Indeed, He kept trying to say that He had been on that Other Side, that He came from there, so going back was not a problem. Up to that time, folks who shared His cultural and intellectual background as a human never pretended to understand Eternity. They sensed it was beyond words and never pretended to describe it. They sensed it from afar. Jesus said He had come from there, so He had an obvious advantage talking about it as His home. The Cross was simply the doorway back home.

It’s a paradox for us that we must first gain a sense of the utter separation between here and there, but we do so by exploring the continuity between our existence here and our own citizenship there. Attempting to reduce that paradox destroys any hope of making sense of it. It’s not as if we could hope to put it in words, as if our minds could finally grasp it fully and usefully. Rather, our minds are granted just enough to make informed decisions without any hope of grasping the actual thing itself. We have to entertain the paradoxical nature of truth as our normal here.

Western Christian belief includes a ton of unconscious assumptions. First, there is this crazy assumption that the mind is able to formulate a reliable orthodoxy that applies to all. When you touch Eternity in any way, you are absolutely and entirely alone before Christ. The very notion of rational orthodoxy nails Him to the Cross again, tries to hold Him in place where we can dissect Him at the mind’s leisure. He’s not dead, so you can stop pretending to make rational sense of Him. If you can’t grasp Him on some other level, your mind is sure as Hell not going to help you.

And even if we can sit down and blather at length consciously about the various assumptions of Western Christian belief, it’s still just plain wrong. It’s wrong because of that first assumption that it must be forced into some frame of reference that can be confined and explained in detail once and for all so everyone can agree. This is why we have so many theologians making all manner of effort trying to share their reasoning, as if that would somehow make it so obvious no one could argue. Maybe they do have a clear grasp of what God’s character demands of them individually, and can organize it in some useful way in their minds, but it cannot possibly fit your existence in any substantial detail. Westerners only pretend that logic is universal because they buy into the mythology of the Greco-Roman philosophers who said it was. Those philosophers rejected revelation, so what in Hell would they know?

And yes, they are in Hell. Never mind causation, we know the correlation is firmly established: Rejecting the revelation of God means you don’t belong to Him. You might have a limited exposure to revelation, but you cannot reject however much you have of it and expect to join Jesus in Eternity. Historical footnote: Jewish scholars did travel to Athens and other places where philosophers hung out, so those ancient geniuses were exposed to revelation and yet we see nothing of it in their teachings. Instead, everything they say pointedly denies the power of revelation.

If you cannot understand how their teachings are contrary to revelation, you need to spend more time with the academic disciplines of Antiquities, Comparative Civilization and various explorations of Non-Western thought. To embrace Western intellectual traditions is de jure a rejection of revelation. God didn’t just randomly pick the Hebrew folks as His scribes; He created their culture and unique intellectual orientation as the one proper setting for His truth. If you can’t think like an ancient Hebrew, you cannot possibly understand the Bible. The Hebrew Mystical pattern of reasoning is God’s own chosen matrix for His Word. And no, it’s not the same as Judaism today — that’s just a highly corrupted Hellenized version of revelation. It’s documented, yet remains one of the greatest secrets of our time, that the Hebrew people abandoned their ancient Hebrew ways for Greek philosophical nonsense. It was Hellenized Judaism that rejected a very Hebraic Jesus and murdered Him for daring to call them back.

So the net result is that I spend a lot of time writing about how that biblical viewpoint differs from ours today. On the one hand, I emphasize how utterly different is the Eternal plane of existence from ours here. On the other hand, I emphasize the continuity, particularly in the Law Covenants of the Bible. Don’t get hung up on that phrase, “under grace, not under law.” It’s a Hebrew parabolic expression — in Christ we can gain the spiritual birth without having to pass through the Law first, as was required prior to the Cross. The grace of God doesn’t do away with the meaning of the Law Covenants; it fulfills them in their primary intention of making us to see God’s character.

Further, the Law Covenants cover far more of life than mere conduct and ritual. It demands the kind of fundamental intellectual shift that subjects the mind to the higher faculties that awaken when God touches a human soul. It means you suddenly have the ability to commune with all Creation as a living thing. We say such things not as some factual note, but as the best explanation for something beyond words. Whatever it is you should make of the Law when “rightly dividing the Scripture,” it should include a dynamic and living link to all Creation around you. Creation operates on the character of God, and the Law tells you how to live here consistently with His character. It tells you how to emulate His Person in your own body so that your actions and thoughts are far more consistent with the fundamental nature of reality. That’s the meaning of “Christlike.”

Thus, you live daily here in this world with the thrill of communion with all of Creation itself as a living thing, an ally in your service of God. And when this life ends, you face it with the assurance that you already know something of what to expect. You’ve spent your whole life working to drag your fallen nature back to the Cross, back to the Person of Christ, and into a moral communion with God. You strive to conform, not to some collection of static ideas, but to a real Person who lives eternally.

At least two people in the Bible didn’t have to die, because they were already too close to what was beyond death. They had completely shed the influence of the Fall over their human existence, such that they were but a step from the threshold. That’s our model and it’s documented as possible.

Death is just a circumstance of your eternal life.

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Cabin Fever Tuesday

Posted on July 21, 2015 by ehurst

Two things came to mind as I mounted my bicycle for today’s ride. One is the miraculous protection of God. Okies can be ornery, but most tend to be friendly. Whether I’ve encountered many of jerks on my rides is hard to tell, because the Bible says God will grant us favor in the sight of most people when we cling to His justice. While plenty of folks ignore the three-foot clearance rule in passing, I’ve never felt threatened.

Two: The primary reason I ride is for the adventure. Frankly I’m quite frustrated with the lack of opportunities for adventure in my life. The military was something like an adventure, enough so that I was willing to enlist twice even knowing what a load of bullshit was involved. Being a school teacher was mildly entertaining for a few years but the bureaucratic idiocy kept sliding deeper into the cesspool and it just got old. It wasn’t as stupid as military idiocy, but it was also not at all adventurous, so it simply wasn’t worth the hassles. Since then, I’ve been bored to tears and being able to ride the roads is the one way I can get a little release.

Indeed, I’ve often been moved to volunteer for disaster clean-up only to discover some agency like FEMA was involved. If you’ve never experienced FEMA, it’s all the worst bureaucratic idiocy of the military amplified by a complete lack of even a pretense of mission. They only understand one thing: control. That’s the whole mission; not control for any particular purpose, but for its own sake. It becomes impossible to volunteer because you have to submit a fifty-page document with the most demonic intrusive questions about anything and everything you would never dream of asking yourself. And if you don’t submit, they treat you like a terrorist. I’ve helped folks during that initial period before the likes of FEMA shows up, and then I leave.

Today’s ride didn’t even count as a photolog. It was just an attempt to escape and have a little adventure. I’m not training for anything on these rides. I do hope to increase my comfort with longer distances, but that’s still just more adventure. On top of that, today I was dodging two rain bands sweeping through the area. I didn’t have time for a really good, long ride.

It was a pretty simple box — south on Choctaw Road to SE 104th, east to Harrah Road, north to SE 44th and then home.

I stayed on Henney Road down to SE 59th and took that brutal hill eastward to Choctaw Road. While we had a good rain overnight and into the morning hours, it was not enough to cause flooding out here. As I dropped down into the upper Hog Creek Valley, there was no sign of high water where it crosses SE 59th near Henney. However, where 1-40 crosses Choctaw Road (which goes under the interstate), the bottom is one of the first places to fill with water and the last to dry out. The fellow in the big pickup behind me was quite the gentleman, allowing me to pedal through the shallow water before he drove into it. While it’s technically illegal for drivers to splash water on cyclists and pedestrians, this was just basic human decency at work, as he waved and smiled.

But apparently the storm did plenty of damage to the power lines, because a crew was working the wires on Choctaw Road just south of the truck stop. Where Hog Creek comes along almost parallel to Choctaw, just south of the truck stop is a very large and expensive development on that slope for a half-mile along. It appeared they were without power.

Farther down where that huge yellow storm-proof mansion sits on the corner with SE 89th, a tributary of Hog Creek crosses and joins out on the south end of the horse pastures, after flowing through a very expansive pond system. Upstream on that tributary is where the century-old dam broke a few weeks ago over near SE 74th and Indian Meridian. It didn’t really do that much damage to where it crosses SE 89th, but it tore up one of the berms that contain the pond nearest Hog Creek itself. The owner had already repaired the damage, in contrast to the many washouts the county hasn’t begun to fix from even several months ago.

But Hog Creek itself wasn’t up high, and I rode on up the hill to SE 104th and turned back east. It’s been so long since I rode that direction I don’t even remember what it looked like. As Hog Creek wanders toward Thunderbird Lake, I had to cross it again. There are several homes there in the bottom that nearly flooded when that dam broke and dumped thousands of gallons into Hog Creek in just an hour. Today all I saw were beautiful homes in an even more beautiful valley — Hog Creek rarely disappoints the eyes, no matter where you cross it.

However, it’s also one of the deepest valleys in the area, with matching steep sides and brutal hills to climb. SE 104th was still a beautiful ride heading east, and after a couple of miles the hills flattened out a good bit. It was just so peaceful and lovely, despite the scudding clouds and thunder just a bit north of there.

This is the view of Harrah Road from SE 104th, where the latter dead ends. HarrahSE104thTurning north on Harrah Road I realized this was a very familiar stretch. Back when I first started this blog (now 6+ years) I was still working with Mr. Brooks. By then he had sold his lake house, but when I first started helping him out, a primary duty was driving him out to the place on the west shore of the Shawnee Twin Lakes. The path he preferred often took us down Harrah Road to Stella Road SE 119th, which runs all the way to the twin dams, and his lake house was just a quarter mile off SE 119th (AKA Horner Road). As noted on a previous ride, this whole area between the south edge of Watkins Reservoir, north of Thunderbird and east to the Twin Lakes is called Deer Run, though the official labels vary. (Double checked and corrected a false memory there.)

Farther north and back under the interstate again, we start seeing the outlying properties associated with Newalla, a tiny village centered on the intersection of SE 59th and Harrah Road. In the old days it was “Harrah-Newalla Road” but you won’t hear that often today. Newalla has been in decline, with a lot properties now vacant around the town, and perhaps a few in the actual village itself.

HarrahRdWideningBut from there, Harrah Road is undergoing widening. That means drainage, curbs and paved driveway aprons. The picture show it’s about halfway done with the final surface work. While squeezing past the somewhat heavy traffic for that mile, I actually caught some light rain. Just a few sprinkles, but I was already quite wet from perspiration. It was a bit cooler because of the clouds and rain, but still warm and very damp air.

While SE 44th eastward toward Watkins Lake was still barricaded, westbound was clear. Given the rate things are going, there will be some washouts still untouched by repair crews when winter comes. I’ve traversed SE 44th between Harrah and home quite a few times, and it seems the water courses were properly done in those seven miles. In fact, one of the few wooden bridges still stands along this route. Most of those have been replaced with the tin-horn style long ago, but only because the older wooden ones washed out or collapsed under heavy load. So here between Luther and Peebly one remains, only a few feet wide, but the wood is in good shape and the creek has never washed it out.

As always, the hills got tougher as I approached home, but at only 25 miles, I had plenty of energy to attack them with vigor.

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Alien Citizens

Posted on July 20, 2015 by ehurst

Let me suggest a couple of contrarian links for the day, if you are so inclined: a little on John McCain and Donald Trump.

Regular readers will know I’m not all that interested in politics. Rather, I’m interested in how things play out on a very high level — not an intellectual level, but the higher moral realm where the heart alone is capable of reasoning through reality. So I’m not prognosticating about the process itself, but warning prophetically what seems likely based on my limited grasp. This is not a prophecy in the sense of foretelling the future, but prophetic in the sense of warning how things go based on my admittedly limited grasp of His revealed character.

Some years ago I offered a warning to a few friends who were inclined to liberal politics. Because of my intimate exposure to the full range of conservative political activism, I sensed where things were headed from a prophetic moral aspect. My concern for my liberal friends is that they were at risk of blowback. That is, by making liberal noises, they marked themselves as targets for the future. While lefties love to unleash herds of badged and armed lackeys, righties carry their own guns.

Then as now, I am utterly convinced that America will descend farther into her own peculiar brand of fascism. While it matters little which major political party holds the official positions, it will be some flavor of fascism either way. There is some slim chance the Democrats will retain power, since they’ve been trying so hard to decimate their opposition through overt power grabbing and a vast unreported sea of trickery. It’s not that Republicans aren’t deceptive, but their tricks are of a different nature. Each side pretends their own brand of morality is the norm. However, I tend to think the next campaign will see a Republican administration.

It’s the typical propaganda game. While one side decries the very real crimes of the other, once in power, nobody has time to correct the criminal policies or hunt down the perpetrators. There are often very noisy investigations, but the result is whitewashing one way or another. The real emphasis is divvying up the loot they expect to gain later. So the Republicans will not roll back much of any bad policy that really matters, only the facade will change.

But because the atmosphere of doom and threat is rising geometrically, the very real threat to life, liberty and property for us plebes is serious. Ostensibly, those who run to embrace the flag-waving civic virtues will demand the threats be vanquished and traitors punished. Not the real traitors, but the ordinary lefty folks who seem to support the treason. There is nothing more oppressive than a propagandized fascist who wraps his Bible in the American flag.

So the real question in Republican politics is who can best marshal the voters, whose collected rhetorical noise best resonates with the plebes. And just who is in the lead right now in polling? The jockeying will continue apace and we shall see who wins eventually, but in broader terms, it matters little. Given the mood of the times, those most likely to win will unleash a wave of domestic terror, either overtly or by simply refusing to restrain the popular anger. Indeed, the campaign will be won on fear and anger. And it’ a fearful and angry bunch of gun owners we are talking about. It’s not that Democrats don’t have them, too, but the common run of people you encounter daily means the bulk of “progressives” are anti-gun and the other side is an armed camp.

On top of this, I reiterate my contention that racial conflict is critical to the game. Despite the noise you might hear from the press, the real game is pitting blacks against Latinos — “Let’s you and them fight.” However, the actual ethnicity is immaterial. It just so happens we have a lot of blacks and even more Latinos on hand for this diversion. Whatever their sense of identity, it has to include a sense of being oppressed, so the propaganda seeks to instill divisive fears and anger. Once any two groups are turned on each other, it gives the rest a good reason to shoot at both sides.

There’s something to offend everyone.

No, I don’t expect a massive civil war, but the background incidence of bloodshed will surely rise. It will be made to seem like civil war when that serves a purpose, and smoothed over when something else takes center stage. It’s not so much that righties will start shooting lefties, but will find some way of threatening it. Just enough of them will actually do it to create the fear. This will set things up for the next pendulum swing, should the system hold together long enough.

Brothers and sisters, we are not a part of this system. It’s all around us, but we are not of this world. Our enemy is the fallen nature we see in the mirror every day. Our mission is to see however much truth God can knock into our hard heads, while we make a concerted effort to subject those hardened heads to a true leadership of the heart. The only peace you can possibly have is inside. Take back America? It was never ours; Satan built this as another diversion. The only thing we can say we actually had at any point was a false dream about something that would keep us from seeing the moral fabric of reality. Let it go. Keep your eyes on the City whose citizens will never die.

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