Jeduthun was one of three music directors that served during David’s reign. He was also the King’s Seer. The tone of this psalm does not come across well in English. It takes turns of logic and makes subtle connections that don’t match anything in modern literature. It almost looks like random verses strung together from two or three short pieces.
There is a bit of the Job experience here for David. It’s one thing to yell and fuss with God in your private prayers. Wrestling with God should be a private matter as each of us comes to slightly different terms of peace in our souls. God is not some distant ruler, but our closest confidant. In Ancient Near Eastern cultures, a private audience was much freer than we would imagine under Western feudalism. We have no equivalent in our culture where one can speak frankly with his master in private, so long as court protocol is not breached in public. Thus, David is careful not to let schemers in on his private dealings with God, because they would use such knowledge as leverage for evil.
But David is filled to bursting with the need to vent to his Heavenly Father. So eventually he could contain himself no longer and had a frank discussion with God. What he needs most is to embrace his own mortality. It’s not something he needed to share with others, but to ensure he fully grasped the implications in his own heart. People who think they’ve gained much in this life actually have nothing. David implies that the richest treasure of this world is not taking yourself too seriously. Life in this world is all about bringing God glory; all else is just a tool for that end.
On these grounds, David asks that he be able to embrace the choices God makes for him. When you face unexpected turns of life with aplomb, it’s hard for fools to heap criticism on you. Facing things with serenity is easily the most powerful way to live. By the same token, he asks that God not put too severe a test upon him. David knows that God is more severe with His own because they have less excuse for transgression, having come to know God and His character much better than the rest of the world.
Still, human life is transient at the best of times. David’s highly emotional and piteous cry to God would be out of place among Western royalty, but this is the private David seeking the face of His Lord in a time of trouble. It need not be for a specific sin that David repents here, but his prayer is more general. David is torn between his human identity and his longing to be with the Father. His otherworldly bent makes him feel like an alien among his own people, and God is his only comfort.
Are you reading the news? Lots of stuff that isn’t really all that interesting, but confirms much of what we suspected long ago. What difference does it make if everyone you could conceivably work with or work for engages in moral violations?
Let’s say that an organized criminal gang offered me a job doing something innocuous but requires their trust. Or let’s say it’s some kind of clandestine cabal of conspirators. Again, let’s say it’s a government agency. Would it make any moral difference at all? At this point in history: No.
This underlines the point I made previously about why activism is such a farce. All the more so when it takes only a little patience to discover the activist organizations are no different from the above. Churches? Don’t make me laugh; I’ve worked on church staff before. None of them offers a safe place for biblical morals.
If you can work alone and make a living, it’s a good idea. If you sell to any of the above, it pretty much counters the activist mythology of moral purity and consistency. You can’t breathe air without being soiled by someone else’s sin. So maybe we need to get serious about recognizing the actual character of God when it comes to moral boundaries. You can only do what God allows you to do for His glory. That’s more than most of us can handle, anyway.
When you discard the Western cultural biases and stop clinging to the prissy hypocrisy, you stand in a better place to see clearly where God is guiding you. Quantum moral reasoning is all about undercutting cultural mythologies and prejudices. It’s not discarding all bias, since the human mind cannot operate without one. Rather, it’s a conscious choice for one or another bias after comparing the ones offered. Mine is God’s revelation, as best I can grasp it through an attempt to understand the moral frame of reference He designed for His revelation.
Whether God intends to bring back any hope of a moral resting place in this world in the future, it’s for sure there isn’t anything on earth today that meets His standards, even when you consider the meaning of His Laws applied to the Fallen Realm. In this time in human history, we each stand alone. He requires that we seek His face and find a way to bring His glory into every human space possible. There is no place for Western absolutism. There is no such thing as a “principled moral stand” as defined by any part of the current offerings within the buffet of Western Civilization.
Find peace with God and don’t let anyone steal it from you.
Inner turmoil is the native human element. Want to end all tension? Die. Meanwhile, if you live, then a gnawing sense of longing for something or other is our native element here on the Fallen Plane of existence.
What becomes noteworthy is when your sense of longing shifts away from things that are painful. Unless you are stumbling across this blog for the first time today, you probably sense that I’ve recently gained a new level of serenity. I’ve always been a loner, but carried the delusion that I wasn’t supposed to be.
Indeed, I can recall a desperate hunger for a soul mate who could not have possibly existed. That burning sense of emptiness led me into all sorts of folly. If nothing else, I kept surrendering certain essential elements of myself to be a part of someone else’s fantasies and got really badly hurt that way. The most significant scars are related to attempts at denying those essentials, pretending they weren’t that important.
It would be hard to characterize things in any detail, much less offer an outright description of them. Maybe you understand and maybe you don’t. The point is, I’m content to let myself just be without justifying it to anyone. I passed through different levels, filling up different kinds of holes in my soul, and in different ways, and finally realizing they were all imaginary. It’s not as if I knew no peace, but once I came to terms with one thing, there was always one more thing left nagging and gnawing at me. Often, that still throbbing discomfort was simply not in range of my perception, though it still affected me. I still kept trying things that were not going to work for reasons I could not have explained.
So I don’t pretend to have finally arrived, since I’m cynical enough about my own self to suspect I’ll find more out there in the future somewhere. Right now, though, a very large collection of issues have been put to rest all at once. I’m telling you only because I suspect this part of my story is not unique. Let’s just say that for the first time since I can remember, the pain in my soul is manageable. I am far less confused about things than ever before. Whether that signals having found something or simply having slipped off into insanity is frankly impertinent.
I’m here to tell you there is no magic bullet. I simply kept pursuing Christ. The twists and turns on the journey had nothing to do with Him but with how deeply lost I was. Try not to think of this as a matter of distance, but of a series of barriers that were unique to me. Each required a different way of getting past. It comes down to persistence, not any other factor you can name or imagine. In other words: I have no doubt you can have it, too, but you can’t copy my collection of solutions.
While I despise the phony self-help industry, the honest truth is that the only answer to your sorrows is already inside of you. You can either find that inner path to God or you can keep struggling. I can offer some broad generalities that seem to help everyone I’ve talked to, but I haven’t talked to everyone, just several thousand people — out of several billions on this planet. So you can read my books and they might help you, but I can think of other books that are probably more practical for the broad sample of humanity out there in the world. If you are a Westerner, I would highly recommend, for example, Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. No other book does a better job of attacking the most common false assumptions. While I suppose it’s a bit longer than it has to be, Dr. Peck did a masterful job of explaining things in terms that puts the solution in reach. He was a psychiatrist who knew how to talk to us ordinary people.
That’s different from, say, Thomas Szasz, whose writing is more important for how it tears down a broad institutional lie. Important, but I didn’t find his writing that useful for my personal needs compared to Peck’s explanations of how to climb out of the pit. You need both the theoretical explanations as well as the individual diagnostics. And neither of them openly attack Western Civilization the way I do, but both of them open to door for it.
In the long run, my own specialty is attacking bad religion along with bad philosophy because they are too tightly intertwined. I often have to explain that Western epistemology is how religion went bad. Yet, there is no crusade on this blog. I’m content to let millions follow their chosen path because of that holy cynicism that reminds me I just might not have the right answer for others. That in itself is an anti-Western concept. Despite all our mythology about the Great Man and the individual, it’s very subtly about keeping individuals within a certain range of acceptable options. The old joke is that both communism and capitalism (and the attendant political theories) emphasize individual freedom, but a different set of freedoms in exchange for a different set of restrictions. Even the anarchist libertarians reject my fundamental philosophical approach as dangerous to the rest of the world.
But even if I did have the power to destroy things I see as morally harmful, I wouldn’t. I’m utterly certain it wouldn’t make enough difference because it’s just externalities. The ultimate answer is inside of each person; there is no answer otherwise. If it’s not a conscious choice at this point in human history, then it can’t be solution to anything that matters. There’s that sense in which we cannot go back to Edenic innocence. We really do need that Flaming Sword and we need to see what it carves and burns away. Wiping the memory means rewriting the personality from scratch. Where’s the redemption in that? If redemption doesn’t leave a trail of awareness behind it, it’s not redemption. This is what Scripture itself says, though you’d have to read between the lines to get that.
There is a certain sense in which there is no way to compare with others. If I tell you I’m praying that God make me His #1 obedient and trustworthy servant on this earth, I don’t mean that in the sense of competing with anyone else. It’s just a metaphor. It means I’m determined to reach into that rarefied sphere of holiness that can’t be shared with anyone else. It means I’d love to blog about how it looks on the ground as I carry that commitment out into the world of fallen humanity at large so you can have some hope that you’ll find your way to something similar but uniquely yours. How else could I do that without engaging in activities other believers would avoid? If you are answering your own call, you can’t pursue mine.
My faith drives me to pray for God to put me into a certain context where I have to maintain a full awareness of His power when there is not another single human with whom I can fellowship. If I have an unfulfilled hunger of that sort, I’m vulnerable to temptations that would too easily destroy my aim to glorify Him. I must be able to stand alone in that sense. My faith has to overpower the context itself, so that no combination of human evils can put up any useful resistance. In other words, I have to be ready to assault the gates of Hell with a water pistol — a metaphor you surely have heard before.
It’s not a question of what victory will look like, but that I go in His name. It would be nice to encounter other believers along the way with some measure of sympathy for the task, but I can’t count on that. If you know anything about operations in hostile environments, you realize that every alliance is also a vulnerability. In some cases, you really must be able to stand alone in human terms. I suspect that’s the kind of job in front of me.
As I understand things generally, this virtual parish here remains pretty safe. The only thing anyone can do to afflict it is to limit who can read it, perhaps block me from posting, all the way up to removing it from all access. We’ll let God worry about that. Meanwhile, pray with me if you feel so moved, and then you can share in celebrating how it works out. It’s one of the few longings I still have. I look forward to doing that as a sort of icing on the cake, not essential for my sense of peace with God. I have to be ready to share at His behest.
Meanwhile, as long as I’m breathing, I’m not alone on this earth because Creation itself is my best friend.
I’m going to close my static site. You can request your own copy of it; I’ll zip it up for you. If I need to share documents, I’ll come up with a different service for that.
If you are using any of the soulkiln.org email addresses to contact me, stop and use one of the following:
Check the donations page for my Cox address.
If you prefer Gmail, it’s ehurst909.
If you like the services provided by Microsoft, try br073n at Outlook.com.
I still have my Unseen.is account using the name broken.
So far as I know, this blog won’t change. It will remain a virtual parish and I’ll still be your virtual pastor. In meat space I’ll make little or no pretense to being a clergyman except as a legal fiction to get around certain goofy secular laws. The tone and tenor of what I post here will continue on the current path, which means I have no idea about most of what I’ll cover in the future because it’s mostly new to me. Still, I expect I’ll post here something every day unless meat-space events interfere.
As always, ask questions if you need something I don’t post here.
This works itself out into two related lies. First, they deny that God is who He says He is. The second is only logical: That He does not act as He promised. As we all know, there is a third inherent falsehood about the nature of reality, which is the foundation of the whole problem we have.
Once we discard Western epistemology, we can discard with it the false morality. We have no moral obligation to engage the world the way current activists do, including the entire range of so-called Christian activists.
Instead, we have a moral obligation to absorb into our awareness God’s revealed moral character. We are obliged to trust Him for a large range of things that impinge on our lives. He holds the cards in His hands and seldom shows any of that playing hand to anyone. When He does show us anything, it requires we first have a faculty for receiving and processing on a level above the intellect. We have to use His moral logic and consider in our hearts what matters most before He will explain what we should expect in concrete reality.
There is virtually nothing we can do to change other people. If we are determined in our hearts that there must be a change, then the primary route is through prayer. We so seldom try genuine group prayer righteously because most prayer meetings assume a Western morality in the first place. I have yet to see a genuine prayer meeting that isn’t deeply infested with Westernized religion. So far as I know, we have yet to try a genuine biblical prayer gathering.
I’d like to encourage my readers to consider that even a virtual prayer meeting will work, but we first have to learn a lot more about prayer. That is, we have to spend more time doing it individually and really getting to place where we become convinced there is a meeting with Our Creator, not just some forlorn crying out to some deity who may not be paying attention. I have no way of gauging how many of you seriously connect with God, but I can assure you that I do. The proof is in the radical changes He brings into my life, things I would never have dreamed up on my own. There are no secrets here that I can pass on to you. I suppose if you spent time with me personally you could absorb some of it, but the power of prayer comes only with your personal investment in it.
Here’s an experiment: Commit yourself to praying for divine justice. Pray that it starts with your own life and be ready to sacrifice things you might now hold dear. Be ready for the most radical changes. It takes only a little of that before you begin to understand just what makes a proper concern for bringing to God’s attention.
Pastoral counseling can help you with your internal bondages that hold you back. However, you first have to understand that the problem is not God nor prayer, but your own limitations. It’s more than just the curse of the Fall, but includes all the individual contextual variations that afflict each of us. I won’t claim to be free of them, but I can rejoice that the power is working in ways I never expected. It’s a territory for eager exploration.
For example, if you’ve been reading the posts even as far back as just this calendar month, you may recall I’m praying for God to send me on mission. Further, I’m praying that the mission include a paid employment as the cover that brings me into contact with military and government folks in general. I really don’t care who foots the bill, nor am I holding forth a particular minimal wage threshold. Instead, it’s all about the mission arising from a powerful sense of calling. Naturally, this all assumes the job will be consistent with my personality and best talents for blessing other people.
My faith is utterly certain this will happen in some way, though I could hardly predict the specifics. So I am committed to whatever changes are necessary to make this mission possible. I operate under the assumption that a certain range of things I’ve already been working on are part of the preparation. I’m seeking conviction for necessary changes. For example, my efforts in physical fitness, or my reassessment in how I use computers. When this mission lands in my lap, you can be sure I’ll share with you dear readers how it answers that major prayer concern, even if I can’t tell you the details.
I have no expectation of changing how our military is used and abused by the government. While I am aware of how much evil our government commits through her troops, whatever solution God has in mind for that does not include what almost everyone assumes. Follow your own conscience. I don’t like how our military is destroying so much, but I am called to bring my faith among them and that in itself is reason enough to avoid second-guessing God’s plans. How He uses my witness is His concern; I’m called to take it there.
His revelation makes it plain, should anyone care to investigate, that He is charge of human politics, broad natural forces, celestial events, and just about anything He doesn’t place directly in your individual hands. As far as we are concerned, the rest of humanity individually and combined is under His control, not ours. He is the choreographer of how all of our faithful efforts will be used, and we need not understand how apparent conflicts in conscience between us can work out for His glory. It’s blasphemous to insinuate that He needs our expert guidance. It’s blasphemous to assume our Western cultural values bind Him. So far as I can discern, current activists have excluded God. In broad terms, failure is their only prospect, even when it seems they have succeeded.
Whatever they gain, it won’t change anything that matters except by sheer accident, at which point they become a part of the broader problem of human political evil. Activism as our world knows it is merely more human politics, backed by a different flavor of artificial human morality. The mere fact it is “activism” makes it inherently worldly, and by extension, not godly.
They told me, “There are no Lone Rangers in the faith.”
Aside from a couple of truly fine leaders, the majority of those with whom I’ve worked in churches would reflexively deny that a Christian can be a faithful, spirit-filled believer and be a loner. For them, building up the numbers was so essential that they refused to call it “faith” if it didn’t lead to that annoying salesman style of evangelizing.
It’s not that loners don’t do evangelism, but we do it differently. We also have a tendency to do it in circles no one else reaches.
Stop and consider: I write this as a fellow who was begged by several different congregations to take over as song leader (titles varied, sometimes paid positions). It was not because of such a grand musical talent, but they insisted that I was good at getting folks involved and enthusiastic. They said that, not me. I genuinely love my fellow humans and I’m pretty sure that comes across somehow.
Yet it seemed at least some of them always sensed that I was a loner nonetheless. I’ve had several pastors and other leaders try to prod me into taking training on how to get out there and greet outsiders like a politician. In their minds, it just wasn’t permitted to have an introvert’s personality type on church staff. To this day my stomach churns when I recall the experiences where I was basically herded into doing evangelism door-to-door their way. Even worse, I got the results they wanted, even as I realized the “converts” were nothing of the sort.
I don’t want to say that those false converts were weaker souls, just weaker in social settings against someone like me who could be overbearing when manipulated into it. I hated it. It was as if all my talents from God were being pushed down into a cesspool. It was bad religion, and still is. The power to be utterly open and shameless can be abused.
Eventually I understood that such a talent was meant to protect me from being manipulated in the first place. I had to learn that my real enemy was corporate church leadership. I began to rebel here and there, and eventually it all came apart and I was pushed out one door and then another. At some point, I finally got the message. I was never supposed to be in that setting.
Sometimes I catch my brain operating along the same old expectations of professional clergy and institutionalized religion (ambiguity intentional there). It’s hard to shake a lifetime of bad habits, no? So in answer to some of my prayer times the past few weeks, the Father has shown me that my calling is to work mostly alone. That is, the mission before me will take the shape of a serious loner, but with a faith that will surely catch a few eyes.
When I talk about DIY religion, I never forget that there are some things entirely too obvious, things that serve as boundaries for those who wish to work with me. Your human identity depends on holding workable boundaries. What is the nature of the faith I promote, since I keep yakking about a message? There are some things I find non-negotiable, and most of you can guess what I’ll say.
We have one purpose on this earth: the absolute necessity of seeking the Lord’s glory. The primary means is by living His moral Laws on this earth and claiming the blessings attached to the Laws of God. Not the sort of blessings most people pursue, but those that God actually offers. I maintain that we must ditch Western moral mythology and find something that reflects what is in the Bible as viewed by the people who wrote it. I also can’t seem to get away from talking about the moral fabric of Creation and how the universe seems to smile on those who embrace the character of God.
That’s more than enough right there. You don’t have to copy my nature-boy habits. You probably can do just fine without my daily long walks in all weather where I talk aloud to God. You most certainly aren’t constrained by my music tastes as a critical element of my private worship. I wonder if there is anyone else in this world who needs anywhere near the high amount of solitude I do in order to feel like I’m going to be okay. I really don’t have time for TV, radio, most fiction works, or anything else folks use as entertainment and distraction from boredom. I don’t get bored. There’s always something in the background processing and I have to bring it forward regularly. It feels like boredom if I can’t get away from other people and their overwhelming noise.
But the primary common ground here is realizing that the bulk of our shared religion is about coming to grips with the implications of the Law Covenants for our current context. The strong secondary issue is the utter necessity of withdrawing from Western Civilization in terms of the assumptions about reality. You don’t have to be Ancient Near Eastern, but you have to understand it well enough to recognize what’s wrong with being Western. So it’s biblical morality with an undercurrent of comparative civilization — that’s a fair summary of the essentials here.
It should be obvious that the basic appeal here is to loners like myself. Whatever other categories of humanity that draw my concern, it’s the social aliens who are likely to hang out here. That’s the same kind of folks who tend to be reticent, so it means not a lot of comment traffic here. That’s not a gripe; that’s as it should be. I expect the bulk of you to remain silent.
If the churches refuses to recognize Lone Rangers, the loners will refuse to recognize the churches.
The lesson was burned into my soul long before I was conscious of it: no two alike. Commonalities there must be, or communication and fellowship are utterly impossible. Those things are required, so they must be possible on some level, and that requires a certain measure of shared experience. However, there remains the unalterable and unquestionable principle burned into the very fabric of the universe that each is unique in some way.
There remains a vast stretch of dispute between one civilization and the next about what and how much is or should be regarded as commonalities. How much difference does a difference make? In our society today, there’s a heavy emphasis on commonalities, in the sense of, “Facts are facts; they are unalterable or they are meaningless.” If you can recognize that kind of statement as a matter of perception and orientation, and not as fundamental to the nature of things, you are on the road to personal spiritual growth.
So while I understood the statement and nearly embarked on a career in science and technology, something held me back, something inside of me that would not let go. I decided to heed that call. I’ve kept on heeding it, because it never was a call to place, but a call in a certain direction. I’ll never arrive. It was never a question of facts but of moral commitment.
Thus, since this blog began, a fundamental assumption is that I am telling you my narrative and it’s not possible for you to buy into everything I say. Some of what I experience will have no meaning for you, or may even be repugnant. That is entirely proper and righteous. If you don’t pull back at some points in my narrative, then you have not understood any of it. If you swallow everything I say, it’s a sign you aren’t even paying attention. Just because I am adept at expressing myself is no reason to hold me up as a model.
Indeed, of late I’ve been experiencing things I can’t even narrate. For example, how am I supposed to explain the sheer joy and love I feel when I grab the limb of an oak tree, even when I’m wearing heavy gloves? Yes, there’s a context to that experience, and that’s the part I can’t put into words. I don’t expect you to go outside seeking oak trees to shake hands with so you can get a thrill. Instead, I try to generalize about how your heart can be a sensory organ that discerns good vibes from Creation. Then I pray that you can experience it on your own terms.
For example, Our Savior was probably into rocks. Of all the physical objects in His daily life, He seemed to have more to say about stones than any other thing. For that matter, the word for His erstwhile secular job skill was “builder,” not “carpenter” per se. Given the record of what He had to say, it appears He was more of a stone mason than anything else. I’m a woodcutter, so trees are more my kind of thing. I can just look at a piece of our local wood and sense in my muscles what it will take to cut it this way or that. I’m sure stones spoke to Jesus like wood speaks to me, and I have no doubt He found the same blessed vibes climbing up into the rocky mountains that I get hiking in the woods.
Discover your native element. Need more examples? My wife tells me how food talks to her, including the natural supplements at the “health food” store. She isn’t just reading the labels on the packages; she’s reading the contents with her heart. She knows when her body needs one thing and not another. I suppose we could word it differently, saying that the Holy Spirit speaks to her through the food, but the so-called “anthropomorphism” of supposedly inanimate objects is modeled in Scripture. Discover your own native element.
I say that because there is a prophetic point to make here. We live in a time when genuine fellowship on our spiritual and moral levels is exceedingly difficult and rare. How many people around you are awakened and sensitive to Creation the way I described above? How many people can rejoice in the comforting power of the Holy Spirit of God by touching any part of nature? How literal for you are the lyrics to that Sandy Patty recording, “Was It a Morning Like This?”
Did the grass sing?
Did the earth rejoice
To feel you again?
Over and over like a
Trumpet underground,
Did the earth seem to pound:
“He is risen!”
While I don’t care for some of the cultural folderol that comes with such performances, that would be part of my point here. I would be very uncomfortable in that place where Sandy recorded that video; it looks like some monster church house. I don’t belong in such places because the environment is too alien to my faith. It serves little purpose to criticize them just now. Rather, I maintain that it’s hard to make sense of what I write here if you enjoy worship in that setting. If you are going to embrace a significant part of my narrative, you will be alienated from that religious mainstream.
We are in a time when rediscovering the ancient roots of humans calling on the name of God (Genesis 4:26) shatters the earth under our feet. Even the knowledge we have now within Western scholarship regarding those ancient people paints them as entirely alien to our Western world. Beyond that range of scholarly exploration is a whole world of daily reality for them at which we can only guess. And does it matter? How much of this must of necessity arise from our own context?
You decide for yourself. A core element in the sins of Ancient Babylon with Nimrod was the attempt to rope everyone together into a convenient mass to serve one man’s evil dreams. Unity under human power is inherently evil, particularly on the scale Nimrod sought. We can hardly guess at the particulars because the account avoids them. Rather, it emphasizes how God insisted on making sure it would never again be possible. It’s not a mere matter of different languages, but what stands behind linguistic differences. God intends for us to be each entirely different in how we experience Him and how we live for His glory in our fallen state.
My prophetic warning here is that we are back in Babylon again, in a certain sense. Men seek to control and organize for their convenience our very personal faith and interactions with God. It is not for any other man to say how you shall relate to God. The only thing I am permitted along those lines is deciding I don’t have to accommodate you and your faith, any more than you have to accommodate mine. But you also must not attempt to place limits on another when those limits are outside God’s grant to you. The thing we most need to learn right now is moral boundaries, and our Western culture is hideously perverted on that issue.
I can’t offer an antidote that will save the world. Changing the world is not in the cards, so let’s change what we can reach. What I do have is something you might be able to use to save your own personal sanity: Learn to worship alone. If it so happens that someone in your life shares a measure of your faith, then learn to worship in that tiny grouping. In my experience with other believers, I find that we don’t take seriously enough the promise of Christ, “Where two or more are gathered together in My name…” (Matthew 18:20). God takes it seriously when you worship Him alone or in pairs, so you should take it seriously, too.
So much so that I want to encourage my readers to develop skills for worship like that. Don’t ever assume any particular ritual is better than another. Explore, experiment or simply stick with what you know best. What works for you, to cause you to sense you have come into the Presence of the Creator? Don’t be browbeaten by anyone into accepting their answer. The only guidance I’ll give you is this: It’s not about an emotional thrill, though it’s hard to avoid getting that thrill when it’s real.
The other thing is that, if you have to question why worship at all, I can’t help you. If you don’t feel drawn into the divine Presence in a concentrated way where you leave your earthly existence behind in some sense, then I can’t make you want it. Nothing else in this life compares. Instead, I’ll warn you that a genuine experience of God’s Presence will be increasingly difficult within the mainstream for those who make any sense at all from my writing here. What I’m trying to offer here is a radically different path following that experience. Rather than try to leverage worship as the means to harness you to my wagon, I’m trying to help you build your own wagon. We are called to carry His message of how to live into this world; in a sense, that means carrying His Presence with us. Obviously, that means spending time with your whole attention focused on His Presence so that it actually takes you above yourself and this broken plane of existence. If you don’t experience some element of the Spirit Realm, you can’t do the work of the Spirit.
In these days, I find it necessary to emphasize individual personal worship over anything that men call “corporate worship” because the solitary encounter with God is the best way, and perhaps the only way, to escape from Babylon.
All compromised at the whim of GCHQ/NSA working together. While it’s quite likely they haven’t targeted any one of us individually, there is literally nothing to stop them simply activating the switch remotely. Within mere minutes of the decision, with the most mundane standard routine operation by any one of hundreds of bored computer geeks with their fingers on the right computer, you’ll be on their radar and every detail that interests them is exposed.
It’s not a question of paranoia, but of cynicism. Anyone with a smattering of technology competence could have confirmed this long ago had you posed the question: Can this be done? We knew it was possible. Tweaking hard drives and their firmware is nothing new. Stealing the encryption keys is nothing new. But we simply didn’t imagine they would go that far. So once again, the lesson is that those with the power to do so are the ones most likely to do so and lie about it. The power draws the psychopaths who can’t be bothered to care how it affects us. Get a clue: the folks at the NSA and friends are mostly psychopaths because nobody else wants to do that work. They are not good people protecting anyone or any valid government interest; they are only protecting themselves and their soulless interests.
The message here is not that you should panic, but learn that this typical. While it might well be hard to guess what sort of conscienceless stuff they are doing, you can be sure the folks who have that power are using it. The only thing keeping them out of your underwear is lack of interest.
In case you are wondering, the reason the manufacturers haven’t prevented this is because there’s no profits in it, so far. They should have known it, too — and they may have already been cooperating willfully. The market has a place for psychopaths near the top of such companies. Their denials mean nothing. Again: These are not good people. Get used to that. I’m not expecting much to change in the near future. The folks who really understand this are too few and don’t wield enough market power to convince the manufacturers to change. The bulk of consumers who have the market influence will never understand well enough to demand what really matters.
Again, set your sights on things God has called you to do. Worrying about stuff like this is not part of the calling for the majority of us. Our calling is to use whatever is available, to exploit our own lives and the entirety of Creation and man-made stuff for the glory of the Father.
1. Chapters 1-9: Solomon’s Introduction — He calls for his own younger kin to be wise, 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.
2. Chapters 10-29: A large collection of proverbs, each requiring some explanation.
3. Chapters 30-31: Collected material from other authors.
Preliminary Notes
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.
Wisdom is more than a cerebral capability, though it is often expressed as clear thinking. It happens to be clear thinking and devotion to whatever promotes shalom — social stability. Wisdom is seldom a mere matter of advanced intellect, but is more at moral discernment. It 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.
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 not there.
In the larger middle section, I’ll probably try to present the text of each proverb for consideration. Because of copyright considerations, I’m likely to use one that is free to copy and modify the wording according to my own research into translation issues. Meanwhile, you simply cannot approach a study like this without reading the whole thing through at least two or three times to absorb the bigger picture.
This is one of seven Penitential Psalms, and we do not know the context. We can sense that whatever the occasion, it seems not to have struck David’s awareness all at once. Rather, the pressure of conviction grew slowly. The cultural context is that there is no set period, nor any particular course of penitence required. Rather, David must wait out the sense of personal insult he caused his Lord. By no means is there anything resembling an objective standard for such things, as if fairness would even be an appropriate concept. God forgives sin, but David’s sense of discomfort is the issue. Violating God’s moral character plays out in this world with very real consequences.
However, there is no need to take every line literally. We aren’t supposed to get lost in analyzing the precise meaning of the words beyond an expression of tendencies and David’s subjective experience. Some of this is standard Hebrew hyperbole, a sense of dramatic storytelling that was so common in his day we should be surprised when it is absent. Pay attention to David’s grasp of justice, that he never disputes the rightness of the punishment he feels. Rather, he pleads for mercy because there is no higher court of appeal.
Thus, David isn’t whining, but genuinely worried he could die before God can respond with a restoration of communion with David. Dying itself may well be justified, but he seeks that note of merciful acknowledgment first. So David depicts himself as one who has been grievously wounded, and the wounds are as yet untreated. Then he talks about the sense of humiliation and depression. And who wants to be around someone in that state? His friends and family keep their distance.
Instead, his enemies draw near, sensing the moment when he will be defenseless. He has no moral standing to defend himself against false accusations. While David hints that this would be a nasty way to end his life, he is confident in God’s mercy. He is not hiding anything; he confesses his guilt openly. He ends with a call on the Lord to rescue Him before it’s too late.
Addendum: It is important to understand here that this is not false guilt. At the same time, the focus is not a matter of objective legal transgression, but that David is struggling with an overwhelming sense of conviction and guilt. While the problem is internal, it is a very real moral discernment based on something far bigger and more substantial than mere feelings. David knows there is a barrier between him and God because he is morally powerless and disconnected from the Spirit Realm. His heart tells him that he is not in tune with ultimate reality. God alone can heal this inner wound.
