The Character of God

Posted on September 29, 2014 by ehurst

He’s not a perfectionist; He’s a very real Person.

It is peculiar to the West to assert absolutes. Other cultures might figure out what we mean by the term “perfect” regardless of language, but ours is the only one that imputes absolutism to God. It’s not that those other cultures have a lower view of God, but their views are more consistent with His revelation. Our view is wickedly perverse in conjuring up this nonsense. Our concept of perfection itself is foreign to Creation; it is the sick imagination of our evil culture.

It has always been deeply personal. When translators render some word or idea “perfect” in English, it doesn’t mean what it does in our world. It typically implies “mature” in the sense of someone who has spent enough time in the Lord’s service to have squelched their own whims in favor of what makes Him smile. They’ve watched carefully and observed how He responds and what brings Him joy, and strive to make that happen in their own delegated responsibilities.

This is not some impersonal bureaucracy. It’s family. All serve, but we have been granted adoption into His royal household. It’s more like blood kin; we favor our divine family over all others in this world. But it’s an Ancient Near Eastern household, not a modern version. We are under a sovereign dominion; we are property as well as kin. The ideal is not a nuclear family household in separate locations, but all in one big happy tent. When God says, “Come, let us reason” (Isaiah 1:18) it’s not two more-or-less equals dickering over specifics of exchange or contracts. It’s an image of God helping you understand what reality is, because He’s the Creator who best knows how you can harmonize with what He put into place before there was dirt.

So when the Bible talks about a perfect servant of God, it could not possibly be farther from the truth to imagine a static condition. Perfection is the tendency to keep coming back to God and making adjustments all the way through. It implies you have figured out how it works. You have an instinct to first go face down at His feet because there is never sufficient purity to overcome your own damnation. All of it is a gift from Him. By the same token, you would have to assertively change so radically that you bear no resemblance at all to Him, before any hint of alienation comes into the picture.

Once inside, it’s as if there is no option to leave the family, but you surely won’t be happy and useful to His plans if you insist on avoiding those long, personal conversations. But you’ll notice this has nothing to do with some mythical objective facts. God revealed Himself in terms of narrative, characterization and indications. That is how God deals with human minds; that’s how the human mind is wired to work.

It’s entirely possible to come at this from outside of any culture. I’ve shown some of that in my writing with quantum this-n-that. However, you still have to honor what God has done. The earliest human existence just outside the entrance to Eden has always been somewhat like the Ancient Near East. It’s not as if God picked that as some cultural background He could tolerate; it’s as close as humans can come to His ideal for us. And the Hebrew culture that so closely echoes it was made by God directly. He didn’t just choose it; He built it as His own design. So we don’t replicate that, but we discern it and learn it well enough to find out what it looks like in our own context — “rightly dividing” the Old Covenant.

God is not surprised when we wander all over the map away from His ideal. He sees us with compassion and knows we suffer because we reject His model for human existence. But He knows how we are wired and what it should take to bring us closer. If we don’t accept that coaxing and nudging for what it is, it’s our problem, not His. He has granted everything necessary, and a very generous helping of extras, to make us see Him clearly. That is, to see Him as clearly as we could at our stage of development. A couple of folks were so personally close to Him that they didn’t have to die. They weren’t “objectively perfect,” just so in tune with His ways that there was no point in dying. It is within human reach.

By the same token, His own Son died about as horribly and painfully as is possible for a human. Go beyond certain thresholds and people quit feeling anything, so Jesus suffered as much as human wiring could process, and in ways that cannot be measured. He did that for you. He did that so you and I could seize that high placement in the household and then study to find the implications with the full spiritual awareness already fired up. It’s never been easier to live without dying, yet we know of no one who went out that way since Christ. Notice that He came back from the dead and then levitated off into the sky without dying again.

Don’t be a fool — the Bible defines folly as moral insensitivity. If you haven’t rejected your Western heritage, you can’t walk very close to Christ. If you don’t endeavor to cast aside the Anglo-Saxon mythology about our world and what is good and right, you can’t claim to follow Jesus. You can’t turn God into a Westernized deity; He won’t go there. You have to come to Him through the gate He made, and that includes a radical change in cultural views.

God is not an exacting taskmaster, but Our Father — an ANE father in a feudal household. He is our Divine Sheikh.

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Go Forth

Posted on September 28, 2014 by ehurst

On the one hand, I hesitate.

Having been through the meatgrinder on religion and the vast ocean of misunderstanding I had to swim through to find peace on the gentle shores, I don’t want others to face that. Every step of the way I saw where things were wrong-headed, even when lovingly intended. It was wrong because it was built on the wrong foundation. Ripping out all the badly placed assumptions was gut-wrenching and painful. It was enough to bring me to suicide’s door repeatedly. Isn’t there a better way?

On the other hand, I cannot keep silence. Just as the folks who dealt with me had no control over the results of their efforts, I cannot pretend to know how it will turn out for you. I guarantee you that most of the people who produced this music had entirely different ideas about what it means in terms of real-world implementation.

The tone of the song itself implies holding a much stronger grip on the results than what God actually grants. They try to define how God will work, as if they could know. So much confidence and enthusiasm, but making little room for Him to do things they don’t expect. The language is correct and the images proper, but flavored with the wrong assumptions. It’s an entirely different dialect of the same language because the underlying cultural background is entirely different.

Never mind the radical differences between a meat-space ministry and online ministry; the real difference is a whole world of different assumptions about reality itself. It comes from a wholly different assumption about God and His character, and how He operates in this world. Sure, I think my version is better, but that’s not what I bring to you today. Rather, I call upon you to hear His voice for yourself.

You may well be called to some evangelistic mission; go forth. You may also be called to hold steady in place and simply be a rock of faith for others to see or not see; go forth. Don’t hide your faith, but also don’t pretend you can buttonhole folks and demand an emotional psychological conversion. We are all different and one size does not fit all. Maybe you don’t have a lot of natural empathy where you instinctively feel what others feel, particularly in the sense that you can assess how your words and actions impact others. Guess what? God can give you a functional empathy through the Divine Presence in your soul — that’s His nature. Eventually you’ll understand the unique audience He has made for your message.

This sense of unique divine calling flavors everything you because it gives room to the you God made you to be.

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Psalm 17

Posted on September 27, 2014 by ehurst

In Ancient Near Eastern feudalism, one would present before the sovereign emperor a petition against injustice. The natural assumption is not that the Lord doesn’t know, but that He won’t necessarily act if you think you can handle it. Delegation is a necessity of life, but when someone else interferes with your assigned domain, it may be necessary to seek enforcement. The question presented here is not asking God to judge on some question, but to enforce His own declared Laws.

In that culture, stating the obvious is simply a matter of offering context. David cries out for justice, not simply revenge. The issue is God’s reputation. Unlike an earthly sovereign given to human boredom, God doesn’t play head games, though it might seem like it by our Western standards. David is wholly unafraid to come before God because his life is an open book. David’s heart was committed to God’s moral character. The biblical concept of violence is using unjustified force for unjustified gain, and David was careful to understand and avoid that mistake.

At God’s whim, He may elect to restore justice in some spectacular fashion. When a situation becomes truly unjust, that may be what’s coming. David doesn’t complain if God takes His time responding, because it can only signal His intent to do something glorious and unmistakably the work of His hand. David has seen such things with his own eyes before. He compares God’s miraculous care to a man’s instinct to protect his eyes. David suffers no arrogance about being so highly favored of God, but is awestruck.

And he is no fool about how God allows some folks enough rope to hang themselves. So it’s not a panic-stricken call that he feels surrounded at times. The cold winds of his own demise seem to blow often in his life. The threats are all too real, but so is God’s protection. Thus, he calls on the Lord to humble the enemies and restore His own divine justice. While some seem to profit from injustice and it appears all is well for them, David has no quarrel with their earthly prosperity. Such is not the real measure of God’s favor. What David wants is divine favor as expressed in something far more subtle and eternal. He wants a clear vision of what pleases his Creator, because the moral truth is more valuable than all the world.

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Song of Solomon 7

Posted on September 27, 2014 by ehurst

Sometimes it’s all a matter of taste. This chapter is by far the most risqué language in the Bible, but it’s obscured by euphemisms and symbolic references.

The groom describes his bride, starting from her feet. Some of the references are less than obvious to us these many centuries and miles removed. Peasants typically went barefoot, so the mere presence of sandals is more typical of nobility. It kept them from appearing dirty and calloused; she’s refined and high-class despite her rural background. Her legs are very well formed by his standards. Then he offers a euphemism for her vagina and refers to the delights of cunnilingus as lapping up wine. While it’s true that the feminine ideal was a bit less slender than today, the image of her abdomen as a wheat mound has more to do with satisfying him sexually — feeding his hunger — than anything else.

The reference to breasts are obvious to us today; men have always obsessed over them. He describes them in terms of graceful animals associated with sex. A long elegant neck would be opposed to something short and muscular, as seen on men. The whole point is radiant femininity. He refers to an architectural wonder unknown today except for this reference alone. The City of Heshbon was the gateway to conquest of the Promised Land. The commonly accepted archaeological site does feature the remains of deep fish pools, but we have no other evidence of a tower of ivory at the gates. Still, that would be quite a sight. The Tower of Lebanon is widely considered a reference to Mount Hermon, a truly majestic height that does allow one to see almost forever. This would be an aristocratic nose much favored in that part of the world.

Her luxurious, wavy hair was likened to royal tapestries, the extravagant hand-woven wall hangings in Solomon’s palace. Even the king could get lost in hair like that. Having described her from the bottom up, he then speaks of the joy of making that climb with his own hands. It would be hard to make a more obvious reference to sex.

The bride is, of course, delighted with his delight in her. Any sane wife revels in her husband’s attention. She offers her own mix of images and euphemisms for sex, romping in the open country where she’s from, in hedged and private vineyards, and so forth. The reference to mandrakes notes the very ancient idea that these plants had aphrodisiac qualities. In essence, she’s been saving herself for him alone.

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Playing with VMs

Posted on September 26, 2014 by ehurst

I had already been planning to install Debian 7 and CentOS 6 VMs on my Winbox again, when I got a strange email. Some print publisher wanted to grab my two Linux books and publish them. I told them they would have to palaver with Smashwords because I wasn’t going to withdraw the books. As an after thought, I told them I might consider writing a different edition of each book for them, if they could give me a few days.

So now I had all the more reason to restore those VMs, but I felt it was important to share some results here.

If your Host OS is Windows, use VMWare. Oracle does make a version of Virtual Box to run on Windows, but you will not like it. The defaults for installing a Linux Guest OS aren’t just kinda bad, they are egregiously hatefully evil. You get no clues and you will have a very bad experience unless you know a whole lot about it already. On top of that, the Windows version if missing some critical features. I honestly believe the Oracle folks intend to make you cry.

VMWare is still a bit of work if you are installing Linux guests, but if you read someone’s review of it, you might learn a few tips. Also, you can read the exhaustive documentation here; it’s all PDFs.

If your Host OS is Linux, use Virtual Box. It’s much easier and works every time. It has features apparently not offered on their Windows version. However, you will have to figure out how to get the DKMS module for your Linux kernel, often by adding some repository that provides it, if it’s not included in the base. Details on installing to Linux are here, just scroll down a bit. At any rate, that’s my recommendations.

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Just My Opinion

Posted on September 25, 2014 by ehurst

As previously noted, we Americans are too hideously wide open to manipulation through guilt. It’s just too easy to use guilt and related negative emotions to restrict our behavior. It’s used in religion and politics alike to shut you up from dissenting. For example, the term “conspiracy theory” was invented as a disparaging propaganda label by the CIA. It works all too well.

Let’s talk sense: Every Western government is the result of a conspiracy to rule. If not in the inception, at least in its current form, not a single Western-style government is okay with God, and generally not okay with those governed the moment they begin finding out what the government is hiding from them. At least some of the people in the government have agreed to hide the facts, and that is the definition of a conspiracy — hiding relevant facts about the process and system of control.

Things get complicated when we realize a part of the propaganda is this thing called “controlled opposition” — folks who pretend to dissent but do so in a way that guarantees nothing changes. So have a host of websites devoted to offering bits and pieces of fact with a lot of nonsense. There is an effort to combine misguidance with discrediting. If they can get you to believe something false, you’ll be misguided; at the appropriate time and place they can then reveal it was a lie and make you look/feel like a fool. Guilt strikes again. A good example is the old Protocols of the Elders of Zion — it’s partly true, as is obvious to anyone who reads it. It’s not a forgery; it’s a propaganda ploy released by the people it slanders. It’s also clearly not happening now as described in the document.

Do yourself a favor; take a deep breath and spend some time in prayer. First, shed that false guilt. Then, take a moment to realize that in human history, very few historical shifts were the result of some singular event or coordinated events. Almost without fail, stuff changed slowly over a long period, and much of it had little to do with hyper-intelligent human planning. To the degree anyone was planning something, it seldom worked out as they planned.

God alone is that smart. He sometimes allows the Devil to cook up stuff, but eventually it fails because God won’t let it succeed beyond some point convenient for Him. So when I prophesied that God would destroy America, you would have been a fool to think it could only come via some great cataclysm. That’s not how God works most of the time, as you would know if you took the time to compare the record of Scripture with events leading up to our time. Cataclysm is reserved for a select few, and I am utterly certain America is not one of them. That’s not to preclude major problems and sorrows, but that the real threat is always what’s inside of us, not what’s happening around us. Your fear, guilt and other demonic handles are what keeps you off balance. Nothing happens without God’s say so.

Of course, the idea of whether this stuff happens “quickly” depends on individual perception. If you’ve been alive almost a century, then a decade is pretty quick. Otherwise, it seems to have moved almost imperceptibly as you pass through it. That’s part of the trick; you aren’t supposed to notice the real changes, just the stuff to which TPTB want you to pay attention. The other part of that is just where your focus rests. If you were cynical from the start, then most of what has happened during the current administration is not surprising, much less alarming. Bad, yes, but easily foreseen by anyone with a mind. The really important stuff is unstoppable.

For example, the only way to stop, say, the BLM from oppressing ranchers is for a Bundy-esque militia response every time they do something that’s harmful. Too late; the militia has already allowed some events to slip past them. Every successful opposition from within the system — like a sheriff arresting BLM thugs — you can expect the BLM to change how they do things to avoid it the next time. And there will be a next time. I suppose it could rise to the level of pain where armed resistance is quite common, but we aren’t there yet and I seriously doubt it will come anytime soon. The Bundy Ranch resistance was a monumental effort, and the militia folks can’t afford to run hither and yon every week, which is about what it takes. Add to that all the other oppression that might merit armed resistance, and it just ain’t happening.

But the thugs are fairly incompetent on most things, wasting vast oceans of resources doing almost nothing. And that runs true pretty far up the chain, to include the folks operating out of the Oval Office. The best and brightest aren’t for sale and won’t work in that atmosphere. That’s the reason we haven’t seen mass slaughter already, and won’t. Again, it depends on how much bloodshed it takes to impress you. We’ll have some bloody riots before too long, but hardly everywhere, and certainly not at once. The kind of resistance you might have seen in Greece cannot happen here; we don’t have the culture for it. We only riot over stuff that doesn’t matter.

Take an account of the things God says are most important for Him in your life. Assess the options in case the situation changes. Be nimble on the essentials, but stop fretting about things you can’t possibly change. God typically gives His people enough information to get out of the way of really bad stuff. Be mobile because this world is not our home.

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Shepherding and the Glimmer

Posted on September 24, 2014 by ehurst

Without that holy glimmer, you aren’t going to understand.

The entire universe is under a curse. If you can’t at least humor me on that, I suggest you’ll waste your time reading this blog, because it’s the basic assumption behind all of my writing. A matching basic assumption is that Our Creator has offered some mitigation from that curse, but that it is all wrapped up in first embracing the reality, and then the very simple remedy as He revealed it.

The remedy is best characterized as reflecting His glory into a world of darkness and shadows. A fundamental element in the Curse of the Fall is deception. The fundamental antidote is otherworldliness. That’s no small demand, apparently, because most of our world fails to embrace it in varying degrees and for varying reasons. The problem is the failure to embrace itself.

So we face the world bifurcated between those with at least a glimmer of realization and those who operate without it. With that glimmer of recognition comes the ineluctable duty and necessity of participating in showing His glory. If you have the glimmer, you will also have a burning desire to share it — that’s the nature of the glimmer itself.

Our duty to reflect His glory is not reduced among those who remain blinded to it. The point is not the reception, but the utter necessity of shining.

At the same time, we cannot be heedless of that fundamental difference between the people we encounter. Not that we are always sure to know, as if we were even capable, but that we have a mandate from the Creator to estimate within our own glimmer of understanding what is required of us in the context. We don’t pretend to know who is in and who is out, only what their presence requires of us. However, we do operate with a theoretical concept that there is a difference and that the difference affects what is required of us.

If, for operational purposes, I estimate that you have that glimmer, I’ll hold forth a different set of expectations versus those who don’t show me signs of the glimmer. The difference is not in the fact of my service, but the thrust of it in terms of what I expect from you. Having the glimmer imparts a certain change in loyalty that gives me leverage I don’t have with those who are blind. I don’t offer the same set of services to both, but I still serve either way.

To complicate things further, most of the audience at any given moment is mixed.

Consider the deeper moral and symbolic implications of the Passover in Egypt. If you have the blood of Jesus on your soul’s door posts, I don’t have to worry about burying your bodies. If you don’t have that blood, then you are spiritually dead and I have to prepare a different operation for you. Our Savior taught us that there are times when we are forced to differentiate; He spoke in parables because those with a glimmer would get the message. Those without the glimmer would not respond the same. They might still hang around, but the sifting process made it easier to decide how to handle them.

My calling doesn’t include the same miracles Jesus performed in His ministry. Miracles I offer, but responding to a different context entirely. Jesus healed a lot of folks who remained morally dead and buried in their sins, whose maladies surely would return because of it. It’s that way in my computer tech support ministry. Some people will understand and change their ways, but a great many will call me again before long with the same problems. Yes, the work of Jesus and my computer work are related in that respect. I still reach out and help the fools for the same reason Jesus healed folks who would return to their sins.

It’s mostly a big difference in what I expect of them, not what God expects of me. It’s not a question of thinking less of them or their needs. It really has nothing to do with their needs, in one sense. It’s that holy cynicism that says it is my duty to help those who won’t benefit much. It’s the helping and shining His glory that matters, not some human grasp on efficiency. It’s a divine extravagance.

It’s not as if I am not accountable to God for His provision, but I am accountable in terms of His whims, and you are not Him, so I won’t explain it to you because I cannot. I can try to help you see if you have that glimmer, but I’m sure you catch on quickly when I suggest I cannot pretend anyone with political authority has any glimmer. Our political system presumes there is no such thing as a glimmer of spiritual truth.

When the Spirit guides my service in His Name, there will be an apparent inconsistency in human terms, but it will be rather more sensible to those whose reason serves the Spirit.

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Actively Non-activist and CompSec

Posted on September 23, 2014 by ehurst

If you are an activist of any sort, I might be able to help you with security.

Context: I am not an activist. I am utterly certain that, while we might gain some simulacrum of limited political goals, the system will simply route around it because the insiders have their own rules. The only way to really change things is to slaughter a lot of politicians and I most certainly do not advocate murder. The mess we have today is partly getting what we deserve, and genuine change is not in our hands. God is in charge.

However, you can most certainly convince me God has called you to engage in activism and I won’t argue. I might even help you. My cynicism about the long term has nothing to do with whether I can bring God’s glory into any context.

As far back as the appearance of the Guerilla Open Access Cookbook, I tried to help them when I saw the appalling lack of compsec in their proposal. I hastily drafted some advice, which was added to the cookbook, but that project is either gone or moved. I’m not following it because it’s not that important for my calling; it was all about the compsec.

I’ve actually tried to get involved in some private, commercial and even government agency compsec work. I even volunteered to do it for free. Most people just can’t be bothered until something specific happens and it’s too late. Maybe you know how hard it is to get people to think about something as simple as cookies. Even after all the stuff Snowden revealed, most people just don’t care. Maybe it doesn’t matter and never will for you. That’s for you to decide. But I suppose if you are close enough to a compsec disaster, you begin to care. The people involved in supporting Andrew Rose are now fairly active in trading information on how to avoid planted evidence like that.

Of course, at least a few serious activists are aware of the dangers since that business with Luke Rudkowski. Still, I am appalled at how many people who are so sincere about fighting evil are leaving their computers wide open, even as they rely on them for so much.

So here’s the deal: Never assume you have it covered. Don’t freeze with fear, but never lose track. Learn OpSec in general, and CompSec as a part of that. When you are doing something that can rile the system, don’t make it so easy for them to shut you down. If it matters so much that you are willing to take necessary risks, at least reduce your risks to those you can’t avoid. You can avoid an awful lot of computer threats. I’m quite willing to help folks who need guidance in OpSec in general and CompSec in particular. Tell me what you are doing and I’ll tell you what you need to minimize risk. I am hardly the only guy who knows about this stuff, but I’ll do it for free if I can. I’m serious about this; my concern is purely pastoral. You need to pursue your conscience, but you don’t need to be a fool about it.

The business of CompSec changes daily, so writing up a single guide for all occasions won’t work. By the time I post it, part of it is already out of date. But you need to start where you are today and close up some of the gaps. You’ll never achieve perfect security, but that’s okay. The system is even more imperfect; they simply have certain advantages. Let me help you even the odds a bit. I don’t have all the answers by any means, but I’m willing to bet I can be of some help to most folks.

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Western Guilt

Posted on September 23, 2014 by ehurst

Put on your Social Science reading cap.

Perhaps you recognize that a cultural bias can steer genetics. A social milieu creates a bias that offers better survival rates and transference of genes for those who match the dominant social mythology. It is widely recognized that Anglo-Saxons belonged to a cluster of similar cultures that survived well in the harsh northern climes. It is also recognized that said northern cultures are also saddled a powerful element of guilt. That is, our natural sense of empathy carries the added heavy emotional burden not noticeably present outside the cluster of northern European cultures. (Other cultures have their own brands of weirdness.)

It’s only a side note that said social mythology and selective breeding also makes us more ripe for manipulation by psychopaths with some talent. It’s part of a complex of factors that we take for granted from inside the culture, but is notably different when you get outside of it. Thank God for very talented social scientists arising from other cultures, helping us to see this. Their psychopaths, by the way, have a much rougher time of it. Still, it’s important to note that so very much of what I fuss about in American Christian religion arises from the powerful emotive power of false guilt and how it makes us vulnerable to manipulation. Take a moment and think about the emotion-wrenching “altar call” so common in American evangelical worship. It’s bullshit.

In North America generally, and in the US particularly, this cultural and genetic conditioning for guilt-ridden sensitivity has reached a fever peak. Think about it long enough and you see it’s part of what makes us wacko about how we treat the rest of the world, in that we unilaterally demand they feel that guilt or suffer serious abusive treatment. “What the Hell is wrong with you?” It is part of what made us so obsessively productive in past decades (fearing failure), but its fundamental falsity is part of why the whole thing is collapsing. Meanwhile, we have managed to infect a large part of the rest of the world with varying degrees of artificial guilt.

So we Westerners struggle mightily with this false guilt, and it’s not at all what folks in the Bible felt. It’s a little hard to explain because our guilt reflex is screaming so damned loud in our ears. It’s a much higher fever pitch of what others feel, but it’s also a different kind of thing entirely. The main problem is the vast oceanic depth of emotion with which we invest this whole thing. It takes some serious time in prayer and contemplation to recognize there is something very wrong with the hyper-guilt that was so artfully institutionalized in the Victorian Age. While that cultural mythos still rides us hard in later generations, you’ll find the epitome of what Victorian social mythology meant to do in the Baby Boomer generation. The conflict between implacable guilt and total inability to perform good enough has made us wacko.

And our Christian missionaries carried that filthy rot everywhere they went. We have infected the world with our weird religious nonsense and a lot of folks who should know better are highly Americanized in their Christian beliefs.

While cynicism is not precisely the opposite, it does serve as an intellectual antidote to false guilt. You really have to start being cynical about the person in the mirror first. Once you stop taking yourself so seriously, it’s easier to recognize what biblical repentance is all about.

We get the word “repent” from the idea of turning around. It hardly matters what direction you were going, it wasn’t the right one. It wasn’t the path God laid out for you. The farther you went, the tougher and longer the path back in the right direction. The one true test of moral awareness is a sense of morality and justice weighed against you. The problem is that the depth of emotional guilt can be so utterly crippling. It makes you want to stop and grovel long after God is ready for you to get up and get back to work. A genuine sense of guilt makes you take yourself less seriously. You easily fess up to your weakness and failure, but genuine repentance is the resolve and power to turn around and find the right path.

God doesn’t have the precise same path for any two of us. There is a broad area of overlap, but even under Moses there was a dire need for prophets who could get a word from God about contextual and individual variations that the Law couldn’t answer. Jesus made it clear that the Law of Moses was both weaker and more restrictive than would apply outside of the context of early Israeli history. The moral justice of God is not about rules but character — His character. Not some objective body of propositional statements about His character, but God the Living Person has all the dynamism you would expect from a real person. You can’t know all there is to know about Him, so you can only know what little your feeble existence can experience of Him.

We are supposed to build spiritual families based on sufficient similarities in experience that we don’t rub each other raw with our uniqueness. It’s not some kind of conformity, but harmony. We seek to harmonize ourselves with whatever we can grasp of His justice in our context and this sets free the moral character of God in our lives to activate all those blessings summed up in the word shalom. Those blessings have been there all along, waiting for you to recognize them. That includes recovering some measure of things we lost in all that time we chased the wrong path. There is nothing inappropriate about trading some false emotional guilt for a sense of disappointment at what you could have had and didn’t get.

Our biggest problem in the West is that massive ocean of emotional sewage connected with false guilt. This is a critical part of what keeps yanking us back into the particularist model of rote obedience, of literal-minded processing of imponderable moral drives, and all the other things that disembowel our obedience to the Holy Spirit. We keep trying to assuage the emotional guilt by acts meant to balance out our karma, as it were. The false guilt is a major distraction from the real issue in our sin.

That deep affliction of emotion is a lie.

(Thanks to Sister Wildcucumber for asking probing questions. Sometimes the smartest person in the room isn’t the one with all the answers, but the one who asks the right questions.)

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The Limits of Cause and Effect

Posted on September 22, 2014 by ehurst

This is easily the single biggest issue, a mental reflex that requires long conscious reflection to overcome.

We are taught from birth to seek a cause-and-effect relationship in all things. Only if we get a really good education can we then move to an understanding that some things are not quite that way, only a correlation. Still, the Western mind tries to find that not-so-obvious cause for the effects observed.

The first problem is recognizing that effects observed may not be the least bit important. The first step to biblical thinking is to recognize that what you can perceive is mostly deception in the first place. It may seem fairly consistent and reliable, but that’s hardly where things end.

As noted in recent posts, we struggle against the constant siren song that humanity isn’t fallen. If nothing else, at least use the biblical concept of The Curse in early Genesis. God placed all humanity under a curse; that’s the only reason for recording what He said to Adam, Eve and the Serpent. Notice the wording is applicable to all who are born from this first pair of humans, and now we are stuck with the Serpent, who wasn’t previously restricted to human space. What we face today is not Eden; we aren’t in Eden any more. This is not what God intended for us, and breaking the curse is just as complicated as getting under it. It was so complicated that God used parabolic language to convey something well beyond human ken.

Cause and effect is a natural tendency that is within human ken. As such, it cannot help you understand the Curse nor how to ameliorate or break it. The Laws of God ameliorate the Curse and indicate something about redemption. Cause and effect is, at best, a very poor shadow of how things work above the Cursed Realm.

We resort to symbolic representations for things above our realm. Perhaps I can remind you here that such is the nature of ancient Hebrew language itself; it is fundamentally symbolic and full of drama because the only thing on this earth that really matters is conveyed through narrative. Have you ever thought about prayer and why it matters? Prayer is our effort to touch God’s face and plead for Him to change our understanding. You cannot ask for a change in Nature until your own nature is changed.

God says that He does not act outside His own moral character. That means the moral fabric of the universe reflects His personality in some way. Among the things Jesus said and did that so puzzled Nicodemas and the other members of the Sanhedrin was that Jesus was acting fully consistent with that moral fabric. The healings and other miracles were restoring God’s justice, an expression of His character in a world gone wrong. Compare the vast ocean of sorrow among Judeans in Jesus’ day versus those glorious days when Israel defeated three national armies with a choir (2 Chronicles 20, not to mention the Battle of Jericho). The Sanhedrin had allowed their minds to drift into cause-and-effect mode instead of seeking divine favor in the mystical mode.

Your moral obedience passes through the Heavens before it comes back to earth. The whole exercise is aimed at reaching beyond this plane of deception and shadows to claim the privileges of obedience against the Curse. Granted, these days such privileges are muted by the absence of a society that recognizes the validity of any covenant from Scripture, and those few who claim a covenant have perverted it severely, but you and I can still claim the power of the choir to destroy threats. By no means can your feeble estimation of cause and effect explain how it works, but your obedience does change things because it weakens the curse and brings you back the gates of Eden.

Get used the mystery of things beyond your intelligence. Just commit yourself to obedience as best you can grasp, praying that God keeps moving you closer to whatever it is He intended for you in the first place.

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