BLDJ: Chapter 3

Posted on March 16, 2015 by ehurst

(Serializing here the draft of my book, Biblical Law: Divine Justice.)

3. Basic Biblical Law Code

The Covenant of Moses was for that people, in that land, at that time in history. It was never meant to be universal. Further, it ended at the Cross. Jesus was the final fulfillment of the purpose of the Law Covenant. The nation was no longer a special project of God, just another tribal nation in a sea of humanity. Jesus had already said their DNA didn’t mean a thing: “God could raise up children of Abraham from these stones” (Matthew 3:9). This was a shocking contrast to the Jewish attitude that, God having once elected them as His Chosen, even He could not rescind that decision. Yet there is ample evidence from the prophets and the even as far back as the day of adoption at Mount Sinai that the Covenant was entirely conditional upon their faithfulness.

Though that covenant is now an artifact of history, Paul warned Timothy that it remained as the record of how we should think about God. So we study the Old Testament as the source from which we abstract a proper image of His divine character. While the particulars of the Law no long apply to anyone at all, they portray God as He preferred to be seen by mankind. It was by far the clearest expression of His nature. It was not as if He chose Israel from among many other candidate nations. He created Israel specifically for this purpose. Indeed, the prophets indicated they were easily the worst nation God could choose, often suggesting that, had any other nation been in their place, the story would have ended quite differently. But it did end and we are left with the legacy of their failure to study and understand.

At the same time, there is a far older Law Covenant still in force today. It was not a national covenant, but universal in scope: The Covenant of Noah. So long as there are rainbows in the sky, Noah is still binding on the human race.

While we generally shouldn’t trust the Talmud — what Jesus dismissed as the “tradition of the elders” — for much, what it says regarding the Noahic Laws (sometimes Noachide) seems consistent with Scripture. There are seven according to official sources:

1. Do Not Deny God (prohibition against idolatry)
2. Do Not Blaspheme God (more specifically, cursing His name)
3. Do Not Murder
4. Do Not Engage in Incestuous, Adulterous or Homosexual Relationships (includes prohibition against bestiality)
5. Do Not Steal
6. Do Not Eat of a Live Animal (also stated as meat with blood in it)
7. Establish Courts/Legal System to Ensure Law Obedience

You will notice that the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 echoes these same laws. It should be simple enough to recognize that they saw no need to restate 2, 3, 5 and 7. Blasphemy was too obvious, and the rest were covered under civil law already. It’s the remaining provisions that would have been news to most Gentiles. What we notice is that the Council considered these applicable to Gentiles, while Jews would have already been in the habit of obeying Moses. The two were more or less equivalent in that sense. (We note the Council read the sixth as a matter of meat with blood in it, in that context a reference to pagan ritual strangling.)

Indeed, given that Noah preceded Moses, and still stands after the end of Moses, we surmise that Moses was rather like a particular expression of Noah, being far more detailed and narrowly tailored to Israelis. You will also notice the Seven Noahic Laws parallel the Ten Commandments somewhat. However, the Decalogue is part of Moses, and not specifically binding on us today. Rather, like the rest of Moses’ Law, we use it reveal the moral character of God.

So how do we get those seven laws from the rather simple declaration in the Flood Narrative in Genesis 9? The business of not eating blood is clearly stated, but it seems the focus is on executing murderers. The folks who extrapolated those extra requirements were quite familiar with the very different assumptions people held back in the days of Noah. Is anyone surprised that those who wrote the ancient Scripture were addressing their own social context? Why would they state the obvious when they had no idea what would be forgotten in future generations? Our task is to make some effort to recover as much of that social and intellectual context as possible. Not in the sense of slavish emulation, but to understand why God chose to reveal Himself in that context so that we can discern what applies to us here and now.

Again, this Code of Noah remains binding on all human governments, and the entire human race as individuals. This becomes the basic reference for biblical law. However, there were a raft of basic assumptions about life that Noah and his immediate descendants held that are completely missing from our world today.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on BLDJ: Chapter 3

Proverbs 1

Posted on March 15, 2015 by ehurst

(Yeah, I’m a busy boy working on two books at once.)

The first verse served as the ancient title of the entire book. The next five verses explain the reason for the book. It appears this would serve as a textbook for what we would consider secondary education. Solomon uses a string of phrases that are largely equivalent in meaning, but chosen and strung together to confirm just that. Let the reader understand that you cannot pretend to slice and dice wisdom as a separate exercise from morality in general. It’s not a question of what you know, but to Whom you are committed. In the Ancient Near East, moral wisdom was the ultimate proper aim of all research. In Israel this was somewhat simplified by recognizing only one God. Thus, everything men have always sought is bound up in reaching for His moral character.

Thus, the next few verses state the theme of the book as compiled revelatory wisdom from previous generations. The one treasure of every nation was social stability between generations. If you catch children early enough, you can instill a respect for their elders. It wasn’t merely a promise from God that those who honored their parents would have a long life (Exodus 20:12); that was how Creation itself worked. Respect for elders was not merely avoiding punishment, but was embracing cosmic moral wisdom. Let no one mistake the matching necessity of elders to ensure they had not wasted their own lives but had sought wisdom long enough to have something to offer the young.

What begins in verse ten is not a new subject, but a dramatic restatement of what a society becomes if the elders are fools and the young learn nothing from them. It’s every individual for himself. This wild plotting to gang up on healthy adults to plunder them is a reference to one’s own kin. In the ancient Hebrew society, the image is all the more shocking because they lived in tribal communities. These were irresponsible brats talking about killing their own uncles. Had they any real need, virtually everything necessary for life was already community property. How stupid is to steal from your own food stores, killing the folks who grew it for you? What kind of world would that be? So in essence, Solomon is offering this disturbing image of what happens when moral wisdom does not remain the preoccupation of any society.

We are not supposed to take that image literally, but see it as a parable. Hebrew literature at its best was parabolic in nature. Genuine moral truth was always out of reach of direct description, but could be indicated by something more familiar. Thus, the rest of the chapter introduces the parable of the noble woman, Wisdom.

Solomon describes her as striving hard to get everyone’s attention. In the most public fashion imaginable, yet entirely proper and honorable, this woman calls out to people everywhere. Did they listen? Apparently nowhere near as many as could have done so. She warns them that there will come a time when she will mock them after they have ignored her advice and done everything wrong. Once the pain and suffering takes hold, it will be too late. Rejecting God’s revelation can be deadly in many ways, she warns.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Proverbs 1

BLDJ: Chapter 2

Posted on March 15, 2015 by ehurst

(Serializing here the draft of my book, Biblical Law: Divine Justice.)

2. Justice as Proposal

You can blow it off as a figure of speech, but the Bible takes this business of the sensory heart very seriously. It is impossible to understand, much less explain, much of what happens in Scripture using a mere cerebral approach. Relying on the intellect is the very substance of the Fall. Redemption is moving our lives back as close to Eden as possible. The guide to what’s possible are the various Law Covenants God revealed in the Bible.

They were not legislation in our modern Western sense, but were expressions of something far higher than what can possibly come across in any human tongue. They reflect the character of God, and the language He used for His revelation was never meant to restrict, as if language was just a vehicle for carrying truth. Rather, Hebrew language was used as sign posts indicating directions for further exploration.

If you committed yourself to carefully obeying all the written prescriptions in the Law Covenants, you would not have implemented divine justice. God’s Law is a proposal for personal commitment, not a proposition. The mythology of “propositional truth” is an entirely pagan notion dreamed up by Greek philosophers. It is utterly foreign to the ancient Hebrew people. Thus, Scripture records how such pedantic obedience never did much good, but that those who obeyed from the heart of commitment to God’s favor always managed to find His favor despite very real human failures.

Thus, the fundamental nature of divine justice is personal and relational. It is a personal commitment of the individual soul to the Person of God. This was the underlying assumption behind all the Law Covenants. Thus, our first reference to God’s revealed Law comes from the mouth of His Son, Jesus Christ.

And one of them, an expert in religious law, asked him a question to test him: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:35-40 NET

In this, Jesus quotes a portion of a common ritual pronouncement taken from Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and a portion from Leviticus 19:18. It should be obvious to anyone that the love Jesus said we owed to God is not any mere emotion, but a long-term commitment of the heart. It follows in standard Hebrew logic that you cannot love God and fail to love your neighbor. The passage in Matthew goes on to attack the Jewish concept of “neighbor” by telling the story of the Good Samaritan. In other words, Jesus restored the ancient Hebrew concept of neighbor that the Jews had abandoned long before Christ came. Jesus had this discussion with a Jewish lawyer who had been long and thoroughly steeped in the more recent Hellenized form of reasoning popular in rabbinical colleges, a solid departure from Hebrew intellectual traditions. (Hellenism refers to the Classical Greek intellectual traditions, a fundamental element in Western Civilization.)

The point Jesus made was that divine justice was personal, and could not possibly be objectified as Judaism had done. He was calling them back to their ancient Hebrew roots. This was a giant leap for Jewish minds, because it was twice removed. On top of the shallow rule-bound thinking of dead hearts, Judaism was also highly analytical and semantically dissected Moses’ writings in a thousand ways utterly foreign to Hebrew language. While the lawyer recognized what Jesus was saying, he found it completely out of his personal reach. Thus, we have here the summary of disjunction between legalistic reasoning that objectified God versus a very personal heart-centered commitment to God’s character.

So this is not about Jewish Law, because Jewish legalism is a frank rejection of the ancient biblical standard of justice. Whatever Judaism might have been in Jesus’ day, it was not Moses, and it has drifted only farther since then. At Sinai, Israel was told they were entering into a covenant of adoption as Children of God, heirs of His divine justice and His glory in Creation. Like Esau, they valued it only as it filled their bellies. The otherworldly focus was completely absent. Precious few in the Nation of Israel throughout her sordid history ever seemed to understand what a grand privilege it was to hold in their hands God’s own personally edited copy of revelation. They wasted no time in throwing aside their identity as Israel-the-Mission and clung greedily to their imaginary status for preferential treatment as Israel-the-Chosen race.

The starting point for understanding Moses and the national covenant is in the words of Jesus as He answered that lawyer’s question that day. A critical element in understanding our duty to glorify God is that we embrace His character and manifest it through our actions. All those rich promises were conditioned in part on conforming to the moral fabric of Creation. More than just observing the provisions in Moses’ Law, it was reaching through the Law to God’s Person and seeking His favor. Creation is pre-programmed to respond in some measure by cooperating with such a genuine effort. Love God and love your neighbor, and you can expect nature itself to be happy to see you and ready to make God look good by meeting your needs.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on BLDJ: Chapter 2

Psalm 41

Posted on March 14, 2015 by ehurst

This psalm sounds exactly like David’s experience when his son Absalom rose to usurp the throne (2 Samuel 15). The poetry here depicts a rather sharp and painful memory still fresh in his mind.

The term for “poor” here refers to any sort of misfortune. Thus, it is a standard poetic image David draws of godly mercy. It echoes in the Beatitudes of Jesus (Matthew 5:7) with, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” We have ample evidence that David had been merciful according to the terms of Mosaic Law, so he had every reason to lay claim to God’s mercy. There is no arrogance here, as David openly confesses his sin. Contrast this to the opportunistic behavior of his wayward son.

We gather that David suffered a long illness during a time when his son was sowing discord. The king’s official absence would have made the political intrigue that much easier. Among David’s court advisors was Ahitophel, who served as Absalom’s spy and stirred up trouble among the palace staff. While he might have wished for a natural succession by David’s death, it was not to be. But before David could recover fully, the trap was sprung. Ahitophel’s deceptive behavior is described in the Hebrew idiom of “making his heel great against me.” This was also used to describe how Judas betrayed Jesus (John 13:18-19).

David doesn’t ask God to punish them, but asks only that he be allowed to recover enough strength to execute justice himself. This is entirely appropriate for a king, who bore the burden as chief executive of God’s justice in the kingdom. David knew that the primary mark of God’s favor was his military prowess and success in battle. Thus it had always been before David was crowned. He knew this was conditioned on his careful obedience to the Law of Moses, not just in the letter, but in a heartfelt devotion to God.

Thus, he ends with a call for people to glorify God as long as the universe stands. Amen!

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Psalm 41

New Book: Biblical Law

Posted on March 14, 2015 by ehurst

Current working title is Biblical Law: Divine Justice (acronym for future reference: BLDJ). I’m serializing the chapter drafts here, so today I’m posting what would be the first chapter.

1. Biblical Logic

God is Creator. He does not reside within Creation, but His existence is rooted outside of it in a separate higher dimension. Nonetheless, Creation is infused with His divine character. In other words, our reality reflects His personality. This includes our human nature. By design we would naturally act on His moral character while living within His Creation.

This means that we have within us a faculty for connecting to that higher dimension of existence. With such faculty in bloom, we would naturally perceive what constitutes a proper course of action that conforms to His will and satisfies the demands of His glory. Our purpose for existing in this realm of Creation is to glorify Him.

The path to His glory is claiming His promises for our lives. We gain the leverage for this by allowing that higher faculty to reign in our souls. The Fall was, in essence, a decision to place human reason on that throne of our souls, a faculty much weaker and far less capable of discerning God’s character in the various opportunities confronting us in His Creation. Indeed, human reason is wholly incapable of discerning His character, and thus unfit to rule human conduct. If all we have is our intellect, we will only by accident ever do what is just and right in the eyes of God. Indeed, we would remain in our sins for the very reason of silencing that higher divine faculty for seeing His truth.

The intellect exists solely as the organizer and implementer of truth leaking down into our consciousness from a higher faculty. The Bible refers to this higher faculty as the heart. It is considered the seat of the will, the part of us capable of interfacing with the Spirit Realm. The Bible describes it as a sensory organ all its own, a superior faculty that was designed to rule the intellect. The will is not a part of the mind, but is an element in the conscious soul when we allow it to rule. If it does not rule, it says mostly nothing at all. This leaves moral character to random guessing.

Western Civilization presumes there is nothing higher than the intellect, enslaves the heart to the reason, and is primarily man-centered, in contrast to the Hebrew God-centered thinking. Thus, it hardly surprises anyone that the entire range of Western thinking about law and justice is man-centered. Insofar as there is anything higher than man, it is nothing more than human-derived ideals, a disembodied myth of objective truth. In the Bible, all truth is a direct reflection of God’s Person and character. It is wholly dependent on Him as a living Person in dynamic interaction with His Creation. If something does not reflect His divine nature, it cannot be “truth.”

Thus, we come to the realization that man does not have some noble task of reasoning his way to some objective truth about reality. Justice is not some human effort to abstract a reasonable set of controls that would be realistic when tested analytically by wise minds. Divine justice is revealed. While an active ruling heart could reasonably hope to discern some measure of His divine truth in Creation, mere intellect would utterly miss the point for lack of capability. Intellectual development matters, but moral development of the heart is far more important.

More importantly, Biblical logic finds ludicrous the notion that what is generally reasonable is reasonable in all contexts. That is, it is downright silly to assume that justice can be objectified and formulated as a universal guide. Divine justice is intensely personal in nature, and always contextual. The underlying fabric of truth cannot be stated objectively or formulated in convenient human language. It is living and active and morphs with the context, so that it requires a developed heart that senses the moral priority within the current situation. The Bible characterizes Creation itself as a living being, and divine justice is simply the Person of God manifested in proper moral choices consistent with His personality.

Nobody imagines that any Western government would pretend to understand such an approach, much less bend itself to the demands of revelation. By the same token, no one who has a living and active heart will ever imagine any Western democratic government is in any way supported and actively protected by God on moral grounds. All human political activity is passively permitted or actively guided by God, but not a single human authority under current secular state assumptions pleases God. They ignore Him and He uses them indirectly. They are all illegitimate under His revelation.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on New Book: Biblical Law

Admin: Parish Rituals

Posted on March 13, 2015 by ehurst

An offline question led to the realization I’ve never actually discussed rituals for our parish. There is a sense in which we can’t do them. One, we don’t have anyone officially designated as our priestly pastor, someone to handle the ritual half of parish business. And while elders (me, for example) are permitted to perform some rituals, it is not specifically encouraged. It’s what we do when no ritual leader is available.

And two, there is the obvious: None of the membership is geographically close enough to engage any of the parish leaders directly. However, there is nothing in Scripture forbidding self-led rituals. It’s sort of a second-rate substitute for having a real church congregation in one physical location. In other words, it will do, inasmuch as we don’t take rituals that seriously. Christian Mysticism uses rituals as mere tools. The real need in a ritual leader is leadership.

There are four primary rituals. Two are presumed — marriage and burial. Those tend to be shaped by local custom and wishes of the participants and sponsors. Two are specifically ordained — baptism and the communion meal. As you might expect, the rules are highly flexible. For baptism, the whole point is ritual cleansing, so it won’t matter if you dunk or pour, so long as the person baptized gets substantially wet. It takes place when you feel you have hit a turning point and are making a fresh start. Repeat as you see fit. I see no point in doing it for infants and such, but there’s no particular objection, either. For the communion meal, while we all recognize the symbolism of bread and wine, it’s probably much more important to use typical local ingredients. So any grain without leavening and any juice, fermented or not. It’s probably a good idea to aim for annual observance sometime near the Hebrew Passover. More often is optional.

That’s as much guidance as you’ll get from me. The whole point of any ritual is to signify something to your own soul, and ideally in genuine spiritual communion with fellow believers. None of these rituals are tied to any kind of formal membership. Ask questions.

Posted in administration | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Admin: Parish Rituals

Flashback: The Rehabilitation of Peter

Posted on March 13, 2015 by ehurst

A major focus here at Kiln of the Soul virtual parish is healing, of restoring divine justice to the lives of individuals. Naturally that puts our emphasis on pastoral counseling. I write with the aim to declare as clearly as possible what it takes to restore moral justice to your life. Few things in Scripture compare to the moment when Jesus counseled Peter, but I would challenge you to see it from a pastoral counseling point of view.

I’m working my way through the document archive on my static site, editing and then reformatting as PDFs because WordPress allows me to upload them to the media library on this blog. Today I’m adding my examination of John 21. You can get your own copy here.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Flashback: The Rehabilitation of Peter

Introduction to Proverbs

Posted on March 12, 2015 by ehurst

(This is a formal draft of the study itself.)

It would be impossible to characterize just why God decided He wanted to create a world populated with humans. Nothing in revelation provides a hint in that direction. However, we do know that Creation itself is infused with the character of God, and that we were originally designed to know that divine character instinctively. While that faculty remains, it is obscured by our fallen natures. We refused to let that faculty rule our lives and placed human reason on the throne in its place. Redemption is the process of restoring that lost faculty for knowing God’s ways, in part by training the mind to take its proper place in service to this higher capability, as opposed to a mind serving far lesser motivations.

So much was the intent of Ancient Hebrew wisdom literature. It was training the mind to accept a higher power as the source for insight into reality. As a man of letters himself, we can sense that Solomon’s reign featured a major effort to establish a body of literature for restoring the mind to its proper task of understanding moral truth. Solomon wanted people to realize that God’s Creation itself spoke of this moral truth, if only the mind was prepared to hear it. To Solomon, God’s wisdom could be self-evident, so that you could recognize it in any source from anywhere, including the distilled wisdom literature of other nations and cultures. That his legendary learning drew visitors from those other nations placed him in a unique position to gather various expressions of divine truth from a wide range of sources.

Rather than collect vast archives of long narratives as the Babylonians were known to do, Solomon chose to gather the smallest samples, short epigrams that would, in the fewest words possible, open up a wealth of moral understanding. Rather than pretending that moral truth can be defined and neatly explained, Hebrew literature presumed that, once the mind was accustomed to hearing from God, God Himself would bring His character to life in a willing soul. A critical element in Hebrew intellectual history is the notion that words are mere signposts to vast territories worthy of exploration. To ensure the mind knew what to expect, moral wisdom was characterized as whatever promotes shalom — social stability within the Covenant. This is the sense of how things work with God in control. Folly is just about any path a man chooses that ignores or is insensitive to God’s moral character in Creation.

There are three sections to this book.

1. Chapters 1-9: Solomon’s Introduction — He calls for his son (a disciple could be called a “son”) to embrace moral wisdom, and uses the image of Wisdom as a good woman who is seldom sought, and has to go forth and call men who seem unwilling to come to her. Thus, we have this paradox of a marvelous perfect woman every man should be fighting to have, but no one seems to want her. Contrast this to the other, more popular woman, Folly.

2. Chapters 10-29: A large collection of proverbs, each requiring some explanation.

3. Chapters 30-31: Collected material from other authors.

All proverbs are contextual, as is the Hebrew language itself, often enough. In a few cases, they seem to contradict each other because the difference in context is not obvious to Western readers. Some of these proverbs aim at “Choose this, not that.” Some are more a matter of, “If you choose this, it comes with that.” Still others reflect holy cynicism: “It matters not what you choose because that’s the way people are.”

Several are repeated outright, while many are restatements of the same thought, or at least the same theme. Most of them are couplets. The proverbs come in the form of parallel ideas or as contrasts. In some cases, the second line simply expands on the first. Virtually the whole collection is cast in the context of a Covenant Nation and the society naturally arising from it. Too much of what they took for granted is not obvious when reading the proverbs, and too much of what we take for granted is simply alien to their world.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Introduction to Proverbs

Switch Channels

Posted on March 11, 2015 by ehurst

Nobody can explain it, though thousands have tried. We can’t even describe it.

There is ample evidence in Scripture that it goes far back into human history. It’s more than mere records of conversations with God. Just who is going to describe how that took place? When modern Western Christians read about “God said…” they just assume it had to come via some means that would register on the intellect.

It does not; it cannot. The intellect is simply not equipped for such things. And while I might cite evidence in Scripture for that viewpoint, the cerebral bias of Westerners will prevent them believing it. While I have no trouble convincing most modern believers that there is a union and communion of the Holy Spirit with our spirits — they sense it first hand — I cannot seem to convince very many that the heart is its own sensory organ where any actual conversation with God takes place. Instead, we are loaded up with meaningless metaphors.

As I’ve noted in the past, this willful blindness contributes to a boatload of bullshit being blamed on God. That is, people will insist that God told them this or that, things wholly and easily contrary to His revealed character. What happens is that we know instinctively that God does not speak to the intellect, but Western Christianity has stolen from believers the sensory heart, so they are left with vague impressions that are largely emotional in nature. In other words, virtually the entire range of “spiritual” is nothing more than mere emotion mixed with some very deeply perverted understandings that leak out of the heart, a heart trying desperately to be heard over the commotion.

This makes it very, very hard to help folks heal from those Job moments when we know of a certitude that something has driven a wedge between us and God. Those moments do come; it’s part of our human experience here on this earth. Critical to understanding that is recognizing when the unspeakable communion is taken away. We know something is very wrong, and clinical depression is the least of our worries at that moment. For while that deep sense of loss roars in our soul’s receptors, what matters is that we are not where God intended. Something internally has shifted off course.

As with Job, we might well stand with a clean conscience. It’s not a question of gross error, of sin that offends God directly. Rather, we are simply not hearing from God as before. You’ll notice that Scripture never actually explains that. Even the glimpse into Satan’s court intrigues in the Book of Job don’t really explain much. It’s a parable meant to show us something else, not really why those times of separation come. If you read Job with a Western bias, you’ll miss the point and inject all sorts of nonsense into the narrative. Instead, it is and should remain inscrutable. The whole point is, “Hey, this shit happens.”

The question is what to do about it. More, it’s how to survive and get to the other side. For those passing through it, there is no “other side.” Even if they have been taught it, in that moment there is only that moment for them. Reality is confined to their misery. You cannot tell them otherwise. Rather, it is we who are called alongside to help that must know beyond all doubt that there is a far end to this thing. A major element in the narrative of Job is to notify fellow believers that they have an obligation to be of sound understanding themselves and be prepared to actually help, not act like Job’s trio of “friends.”

At this point I come to the deepest sadness of all: How many people do you know who sense the moral sphere with their hearts? Are they not most all like Job’s pals? My friends, this the real task before us. All of my railing against Western Civilization and the attendant Western Christianity is ended when we can awaken the awareness, and then develop the habit of living from the heart, not the head. Because living from the heart makes those Job moments a lot more tolerable when they come.

That puts you in the position of walling yourself away from some of the emotional clamor in your soul. You are in a position to recognize what is going on in your soul and we can ride out the storm. That it makes your suffering more exquisite is unavoidable, but it also makes you stronger to bear it. You realize that the time of testing has been decreed in the Courts of Heaven and it is your duty to bear it. It also puts you in the position of recognizing that your solution is to call on God and wait for His answer.

Again, nobody can explain it. We can only affirm that these things are so because we pass through them ourselves. Yep, me too. Unlike Job’s friends, I’m conscious of the dynamics and won’t add to your sorrow when you tell me you hurt. I feel your pain because my heart reads the vast ocean of communion we can all share in the moral sphere.

That channel is real.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Interim

Posted on March 10, 2015 by ehurst

Spring has come to my part of the world. My yard knows it and is sprouting afresh. There is even a protected patch that is already long enough to need mowing. Sadly, this means the woods have stopped calling my name. They don’t like to see much human traffic during the warm season, so the place becomes heavily infested with biting insects. That includes deer ticks, known to carry dangerous diseases in these parts. In just a few weeks poison ivy will be everywhere. There are more welcoming forested areas, but the one nearest me becomes a little hostile in favor of other forms of life.

I’ve been poring over the documents currently stored on my static site. Most of them are now somewhat irrelevant to what I teach. I found out that WordPress allows me to upload PDFs, so I’m reworking some into that format. The Studies in the Law of Noah will become another book, probably retitled something like “Christian Law.” Too much has changed since I wrote that back then, so I’ll have to modify most of it. I’m still planning on studies in Proverbs, too.

Part of the problem is that whatever made me sick really tore down a lot of things. Or maybe I should say it coincided with the need to tear down some stuff on a different level, and it all came crashing down at once. My energy level still sucks right now, but I’m improving.

I still bear this long term burning desire to find Christian fellowship among the folks in the military. I cannot pretend to guess how God might make that happen, but it’s where my heart is. While I believe it signals something important, the gap between where I am and where that is represents a huge void in my mind. The brain simply cannot measure the distance, so I’m keeping it from trying to guess and from trying to implement anything at all. It remains one of those nebulous prayer requests.

The roofer should be here tomorrow, so I may not have anything to post. Still, I love you all.

Posted in personal | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment