Job 12

Posted on October 19, 2013 by ehurst

Even in his anger, Job is more noble than his friends. Where they scold, he answers with sarcastic wit. Surely, these three men represent the pinnacle of human wisdom! When they die, humanity would be plunged into darkness. Job reminds them that he also has a brain equal to theirs. In fact, their great wisdom is no greater than any common man.

What happened to their long friendship? How did these three come to the place that they could act so dismissively to someone they knew so well? Instead of interceding with God on Job’s behalf, they ganged up and kicked him while he was down. To Job they are like cowardly yes-men whose virtues depended on what they perceived were the whims of their superiors. Never mind their words, they acted like God was the least noble of all Lords. At the same time, they were living proof that sometimes God is far more complex and inscrutable, living proof that He doesn’t immediately strike down a sinner. They came to rob Job of what little sanity he had left and God was not stopping them, any more than He did not always stop men who respected only weapons such as they carried in their hands.

God created all things. His divine character is reflected in the whole of Creation, but most of humanity chooses not to see. Had they inquired, Job’s friends would have found the truth God had woven into His universe. Did they have no discernment? What was the whole point of living to ripe old age? Was it not to have leisure to consider the folly of mere human wisdom against the timeless ineffable wisdom of God? God alone understands His creation and He has not been silent, so why do men run from His revelation? Why do they insist on clinging to mere human intellect?

Job goes on to describe how God has clearly not honored what his friends consider the truth of God. Most people miss what Job says starting in verse 14. In each case, God overturns the natural wisdom of men, in which his friends trusted so completely. God does not make sense on the human level. What He does frequently defies the best of human reason. God turns the world upside down every day, and yet men persist in trying to figure Him out from mere intellect. God does this, often as not, simply to prove He is beyond human ken. It’s too easy to arrogantly assume you have it all figured out and these are just anomalies. So it is these three great men of wisdom wander about in utter darkness, doggedly pursuing their human wisdom and eschewing the obvious truth that God often does things no one understands.

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Warm Deception

Posted on October 18, 2013 by ehurst

More than once I’ve awakened to a pounding heart and the stinking sweat of terror.

Not merely from some bad dream, not simply a too vivid movie scene in my memory, but the very real threat of death crawled through my life at times. The source never matters; it’s the fear the kills more thoroughly than the pain and loss of life. At the other extreme of emotion, I’ve had many hours filled with oceans of warmth and thrill from unspeakable love. It breathed life and healing into my being. There were moments I wonder that I didn’t translate directly into Heaven.

How do you live during the times when the emotions are quiescent? Don’t tell me how much you love Jesus. You can’t, anyway. Show me.

My wife and I are at a crossroads moment. We know God is bringing changes, changes that are more important in His Kingdom than all the external stuff we are all watching in politics, economics and other noise. Among the questions our souls must answer is how to handle emergencies.

What if, in the midst of chasing God’s hand through my world, my life here ends?

I can’t promise you I won’t fear in that moment. I have no way to estimate how such an end might come or what will be my state of mind then. However, there is one fear I’ve conquered. It’s a fear our asinine American culture considers a mandatory fear: What will happen to my beloved wife?

Jesus warned about this when He declared that His Kingdom was more important than earthly family ties. That is, the shared spiritual identity matters more than DNA. So anyone who doesn’t despise their blood ties in favor of spiritual considerations is someone who cannot actually pretend to follow Christ. Did He actually say “hate”? We need not wrestle with the peculiarities of translating from Aramaic to Greek to English to make it clear what He meant. However, it’s simply wrong to suggest we have to insert that “by comparison” crap often appearing in so many English translations.

Fundamental: This world is fallen and irreparable. It is slated for destruction. Paul and his friends constantly reminded their flocks it was necessary to despise this world and our lives in it. We don’t trust what we experience in our flesh as having any significance unless it registers firmly in the Spirit Realm. The difference between the Flesh and Spirit is unspeakably radical; you can’t explain it, only characterize it. We can disregard human emotion in the sense of what really matters. Even the most noble human love is simply a poor shadow of the Cross.

This best of human affection is better than a lot of other things, but what we do in the Spirit is on a wholly different and higher plane. We have a foot in each of the Two Realms. All our conduct and considerations here are controlled from above. What is important is radically shifted in favor of the Spirit Realm. We do not cease to be humans with all the feelings, foibles and failures, but we keep them in proper perspective. Important in their own place, but they are not a major consideration in the face of spiritual concerns. It’s not a simple matter of compartmentalization, but of scaling correctly — quantum moral reasoning is complex that way.

My flesh fears what will happen if my wife has to continue here without me. Her flesh fears it, too. My spirit recognizes that such fears are not important. It’s not as if I pretend it will be all okay. She may well suffer and collapse under the crushing load of human care. It may drag her through human terror and suffering we cannot imagine. There’s nothing I can do about it. That is, if I invest all sorts of effort and resources following mere human calculations to prevent her suffering, it will most certainly interfere with the demands of Heaven. It’s not simply that such preparations have to meet biblical requirements, but she is already in God’s hands while I live. He has asserted a feudal claim over her entire existence, including that part we share even now, even as He asserts the same claim over me. Our lives are forfeit and He’s made it clear we are not to invest too much anxiety about this human life. We are told to prepare our selves for immense suffering and sorrow, that it is intended to drive us more deeply into His arms.

Contrast that with the nearly idolatrous garbage spewed by mainstream Christian religion. They misread totally what Paul meant about taking care of your earthly family. He was dealing with lazy louts who wanted their welfare system without contributing whatever they could from their personal resources. The question is not whether we obey His commands for this world, but the scale of things is completely off kilter. Compared to what it meant in that social context, what we see in common American church teachings is altogether worldly. They read our Western social mythology and materialism back into Scripture and pervert the gospel for pottage. That’s the reason so many churches are simply religious political institutions.

Don’t tell me how much you love Jesus. Don’t tell me about the oceans of warm feelings you have for His name. Tell me how you have prepared your mind to serve the Spirit in ways the mind cannot begin to comprehend. Tell me about that otherworldly orientation you get from serving Christ.

That warmth means nothing if your life isn’t already on the Cross.

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Admin: Static Site Going Away

Posted on October 18, 2013 by ehurst

The time has come to recognize that most of what is on my old static site (closed as of 2020) no longer reflects where I am today. If you know there is something there you use, make your personal copy now. I’ll be leaving only a few of the current articles.

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Resume for the Network Age

Posted on October 17, 2013 by ehurst

You can’t hire me, but you can invoke my loyalty.

On the one hand, we must comply with the laws of the land at least enough to fly under the radar. On the other hand, you must understand that I operate on a wholly different level, that I am an alien who belongs to some other age. You won’t get me to work with you under any mainstream corporate expectations. I will serve your interests using the talents and resources at my disposal. If you provide a portion of those resources, you’ll get a lot more out of me, but we won’t be discussing wages and terms of employment except mockingly. If you really do need my services full time, as it were, it’s best to think of it as feudal service.

You’ll invoke my loyalty for two reasons. First there’s my moral character. Secondary would be my experiences and skills.

If you need my personal loyalty, it’s not that hard to get it. You decide what’s in your best interests; my morals will determine how I serve them. Yes, there are moral boundaries. I’m not likely to kill for you, but I might be willing to die for you. It’s that serious. I’ll be more honest and trustworthy than any number of professional private investigators you could hire to check on me. I tend to be frugal because I am not self-indulgent, but I’m not slavish and stupid. You can serve whomever or whatever you wish as your personal deities, and I won’t pick on your religion at all, but you’ll have to make allowances for me to serve my God. That loyalty can be destroyed or simply starved and I’ll move along to other things. Still, it isn’t difficult to cultivate my trust and commitment to your welfare.

My experiences and skills include things like the US Army (Military Police, mostly), public school teaching, lots of different kinds of church staff work, and countless hours working with computers and the Internet. I’ve been a professional driver off and on, plus a traffic accident investigator. I’m fine with travel, insane hours of operation, unfinished tasks, and I’m seldom emotionally involved in things. I’m surprisingly physically fit for my age, but I do have a few physical limitations (and I’ll get really grouchy if you keep me from trying to stay fit). I also need to come home often enough to remember what my wife looks like.

Don’t ask me to keep your books; that’s what computers are for. However, I will keep an eye on your schedule, expenses and equipment. I don’t want to carry a gun, but I’m a decent bodyguard. I’ll dress nicer for some occasions, but I don’t even own a suit and tie. If you think my personal grooming is your concern, don’t contact me. If you are given to vice, you’ll need to level with me to see what I can ignore. For the most part, I mind my own business and nobody will learn from me anything you prefer to keep private. Then again, don’t ask me to violate my own convictions; I’ll die first. Ask me and I’ll always tell you with brutal honesty anything you need to know.

Wanna work with me?

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Shepherd Instinct 3

Posted on October 17, 2013 by ehurst

Let’s move this to a practical exercise.

The shepherd instinct is fundamentally embracing the calling God has placed on manhood itself. Learning about it requires deconstructing everything that perverts it. As my regular readers know, this sort of deep discernment leads to disgust with almost everything about Western Civilization. In God’s Justice, to be a man is to be a shepherd, and it means the kind of caring that doesn’t wait for the sheep to appreciate any part of all that. Realistically, virtually no one is going to listen to us, but we hold forth the truth because we care about the truth first, and our caring about people is derived from our first commitment to truth/justice/reality as God defines it.

This is a disaster, but not for the reasons cited. It’s a disaster because the solution is not available in technology, nor in any part of Western society. This sort of tragedy will become more common because it reflects a social neurosis. All the actions likely taken by anyone with any kind of authority will only make it worse, shifting the core of neurotic action to another place on the same very messed up social fabric. We have yet to see the extent of creativity by which this morally sick world can hurt itself.

The first mistake is forcing children to create their own society. Segregating them into a public education system totally remote from their parents’ world guarantees they have none of the moral anchorage that got us even this far. In other words, it’s not enough that we are under a deeply disturbing Western social mythology. There was at least some functional usability there, but that has also been disemboweled — altogether with forethought and malicious intent — by modern secular education under the control of the state. Year by year the social definitions of what is moral and good drifts farther and farther into insanity because the school system is openly hostile to parental values. The kids also won’t swallow the whole idiocy of the educators’ perverted views of reality, so they keep coming up with their own flavorings arising from the sheer creativity without even the pretense of anchorage in sanity.

It doesn’t even wait a full generation for catastrophic collisions between the establishment and the fresh criminality of youth. Thus, the entire social fabric has gaping holes and raveling throughout.

So the Internet is no longer your fathers’ DARPA nerd project. In ancient times, people who had the power to make far-reaching decisions generally didn’t gain that power before they first gained an awareness of how their choices could affect future generations. Their decisions were seldom as arbitrary as they seem to us, because consideration for subtle moral effects was always a factor. It is only modern empiricism that ignores morality, and the Internet arose from a bunch of compartmentalized tech wizards with near-zero consideration for how it would affect society. Unrestrained creativity always runs to bloodlust out of sheer boredom, and that’s what we see with all the ancient wisdom thrown in the trash. It never occurred to the DARPA nerds that their moral considerations, such as they were, could not be assumed present in future generations. Abuses they never dreamed of are now the norm.

Yes, we live in a world that celebrates creativity in moral depravity. It is ludicrous that we still refer to those two murderous girls as “young ladies” but they are entirely typical of their generation. Everyone will be running around acting horrified at the suicide and callous response of the two bullies, but by the time they are adults, their own children will be yet more shocking. Meanwhile, established authorities will seek every answer possible except the ones that will work.

Jesus said, “Feed My sheep.” What are you going to feed them, O shepherds of the Lord?

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Not Gonna Happen

Posted on October 16, 2013 by ehurst

My religion will never explode into popularity.

Let’s pretend for a moment that my religious teachings took off, that somehow this stuff caught on and folks began flocking to Christian Mysticism. What would it look like?

I’d first have to spend a lot of time fighting the false instincts of folks seeking to make an idol of me. Western Civilization is a sickness and a primary symptom is the Myth of the Great Man. I’d have to fight folks who want to make me into another Joel Osteen, Max Lucado or Billy Graham. I’m not the fount of truth here, folks, just one sign pointing to it. Just as the Israelites made an idol of the Brazen Serpent, so I would be ever forced to fight that. Everybody wants another Messiah, but nobody wants the Cross, neither for their idols nor themselves.

Worst of all, I’d have to fight it in myself. Who doesn’t long to be taken seriously by large numbers of friends, family and strangers? Fortunately, I’m already uncomfortable with that sort of attention, and I hope I never lose that discomfort. I hope I never lose my despite for this world.

Still, there aren’t many others working this body of teaching in any significant way. I stumble across bits and pieces of it, but I have yet to see any significant writing that attacks Western Civilization at all written in Western tongues, much less from a genuine biblical viewpoint. If there are, I’d love to know about it. This mission is pretty lonely.

The second biggest problem is someone else trying to become a living idol. Part of what created the fundamental problem that is Western Christianity was that it was hijacked in the minds of most people by Constantine. I’m quite certain there would be any number of wannabe politicians grabbing anything that might be amenable to creating a new empire or enabling any number of takeovers. How hard would it be to leave out the one critical truth that this has nothing to do with human political activity? When communications moved slowly in ancient times, it took nearly a century before the gospel was politicized and mainstreamed into the ambient social structures of the day. Today it takes far less time; it wouldn’t wait until I died.

To the degree we get past those issues, this thing probably wouldn’t take off at all. That’s the whole point, folks: This was never meant to be mainstream. It never quite made it into the mainstream when a whole nation was built on the truth. Israel wasn’t even half-way to the Promised Land when folks were trying to hijack the whole thing. A critical truth is that this thing is inherently a minority view that pulls away from anything typical of human behavior. Truth is paradoxical; we were designed for this teaching and can’t stand it.

But if we pretend for a moment there was a broader acceptance for some miraculous reason, the whole point would be avoiding a focal point on this earth. Nothing on this plane of existence is worthy; there is no peg on which to hang this thing. It requires a breadth and depth of awareness that obviates such a focal point in our consciousness. It requires a fairly high intellectual awareness to dismiss mere intellect. While it surely holds the greatest possible blessing for those who lack such intellectual talent, by it’s nature there must be shepherds who bear this truth among the sheeple. One becomes a shepherd by first dismissing the focal point.

That’s why popular notice hasn’t happened, and is wholly unlikely to be ever happen.

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Shepherd Instinct 2

Posted on October 15, 2013 by ehurst

Always be ready to walk away.

In the previous lesson, we noted what happens when you are on your own turf. What happens when it’s not your turf? If the Lord does not deliver a situation into your hands, you play along until you cannot. Never break your commitment to God’s moral laws. That is your sole reason for existing on this plane. If you cannot apply His imperatives to the context, you don’t play.

This is the other edge of the same blade that cuts through all the crap. You remain in charge of your response, whether the context is under your hand or not. This is the same thing as never caving in to pressure for something to do wrong. While this applies to everything, it is most especially applicable to your partner, guys. She’s either on board with the mission or she’s on her own.

Thus, nothing a woman offers you is worth a moment’s consideration until she offers that partnership. It may well be she struggles at least as much as you do with faithfulness to the mission, but God has promised we can sense a genuine commitment if it matters to us. So all of her other assets are strictly secondary to this one thing: that she is behind your mission as much as you are. Whatever else she may use to capture you should be nailed to the Cross; walk away and let her keep it or use it as bait to trap some other fool. You don’t want anything that isn’t attached to your mission.

The first time she deceives you for an immoral demand is her last time. After that, she has to overcome a serious handicap just to get back where she started. You must hold the strength over your own desires to cut her off when she threatens the mission. This is the danger in relying on some desirable human trait as the indicator that she’s worthy. Without faith, it’s just a pretty package for poison. If you don’t set your heart resolutely on the mission, ready to walk away regardless of your other desires, you can’t possibly know when it’s safe to forgive and offer another chance. A woman who deceives you consistently is Satan’s daughter to you.

It’s a tall order. The feminist mythology holds Western society prisoner. Even good old church girls are likely to be completely wrong for the shepherd. Don’t be deceived, men.

Nail yourself to the Cross first before you decide.

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ANE Feudal Dominion

Posted on October 14, 2013 by ehurst

What has God delivered into your hands?

I’ve often tried to explain the Two Realms, and almost as often seen it rejected. It’s not in my hands to force people to accept it. Probably the single most prominent example of failure to understand is in the heresy of Dominionism. You can look it up, but it’s a very serious confusion of the Two Realms. The adherents to this lie are convinced they can assert political authority on the earth in Christ’s name. It goes so far as to suggest that Christ will not return until His followers have subjected some significant majority of world political power under their image of His Laws. You’ll see terms like “Crown Rights.”

Let’s get this straight: The only expectation God holds over His people for conquest is to subject their own fallen natures to His dominion. Nothing else matters, and politics are entirely inconsequential to the whole thing. Christians cannot ever rule the world in any sense listed in Dominionist teachings. The moment they seek such power, they cease to be Christian by definition. His Kingdom is not of this world, He said. We aren’t conquering Nature; we are conquering on our own natures.

That does not negate all my teaching about how embracing the Laws of God will bring temporal blessings. Dominionists are getting this backwards, though. To the degree we are to have any blessings in this world, we who are conscious of Christ must obtain them through obedience to His Laws. Job is sufficient to explain that blessings are not a necessary consequence to obedience, but that obedience is a necessary condition for blessings as blessings. Lots of bad people get nice things in this life, but that’s not our concern here. Those nice things are not blessings. Our concern is not nice things in this life, but God’s glory — His glory is the nicest thing we can have.

In other words, we keep perverting the meanings of the words through our Western epistemological bias. The West gets reality all wrong because it ignores the critical connection between this reality and a higher reality — the moral fabric woven into the universe.

It’s pretty simple, though, once you get it right. Once you understand the one and only thing you really want and need is His glory, you are in a position to see what He has delivered into your authority under Him. You realize just what it is you can control and what you cannot. Since the whole issue is conquering your own fallen nature, the mission is both highly simplified and looms far larger. It’s not other people you have to rule; it’s more than enough work ruling yourself. When you begin taking steps to rule yourself, all Creation recognizes this as the proper exercise of moral authority. Things change; stuff happens that was different from before.

He has conquered your evil nature and delivered it into your hands. What will you do with it? How will you exercise His dominion over your own being?

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Shepherd Instinct 1

Posted on October 13, 2013 by ehurst

(I’m trying to organize a series of concise lessons about how to think like the ANE shepherd in opposition to any part of Western social mythology about manhood.)

Don’t cave. Ever.

Western Civilization has created the laziest men on earth. Take away the reward for bad behavior and be so consistent about it that you condition your flock to expect it. Put the mission first. If you don’t have a sense of mission at all times, you are already lost and wandering; the sheep are falling to the predators. Your mission is to bring yourself first, and then your sheep under the moral character of God as revealed in His Law Covenants. Make that Law live in your soul first, then activate it as a covering for all who fall under your authority. Gauge for yourself how deeply and how long they are there under your authority, and in what way, but always take responsibility for what God places in your trust. Dying while trying is better than taking a break; you have nothing else to live for.

You can do virtually nothing about what people think of you. Their shallow and self-centered reaction to your faithfulness to the mission is not worth your consideration. When they stand outside your mission covering, they are on their own. You can’t do anything for anyone who won’t enter and remain within that covenant relationship. That includes most especially your spouse; of all the people most in need of understanding the limits necessitated by the mission, she is the one.

A Westernized woman is the worst there is. It’s not the same as simply living in Western society; when she embraces Western mythology, she is hopelessly lost. You have to start where you are, but if you’re just getting started, choose wisely. This is the same for all the women in your world. You are the man, God’s called shepherd — every man is a shepherd in His service. God’s Word states in no uncertain terms that women will never understand the moral necessities as you can. You have to understand them yourself, so learn His Justice. You will instantly recognize how awful a fully Westernized woman is and will avoid them when you can. But if you are already linked to one, it’s time to begin reclaiming your mission. She may never like it; it depends on how well she absorbs God’s Justice and sees the benefits. This is how God works.

So to some degree you can insulate yourself from non-spousal women, but you have to work very hard with your spouse. Again: Don’t cave ever. You can be gracious with your partner if she is operating from that frame of reference, but you cannot afford to give anything she wants unjustly. You must decide what is in the interest of the mission, not merely your personal whims. The mission is your best interest and hers. When you stand up for truth in that sense, she cannot win for a lie. Do the work; do it tirelessly.

The most critical element of your mission on earth is her partnership. If you get this wrong, everything else will fail.

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Job 11

Posted on October 12, 2013 by ehurst

The starting point of moral wisdom is recognizing our minds are not equal to the task. When we understand the fullness of our fallen condition, we realize we cannot know the nature of things nor all the factors in any given context. Even if we did know all those things, we still could not reason our way to a blameless response. The birth place of moral failure is the arrogance of human reason. Job’s friends have already shown their adherence to a false orthodoxy, a concept of sin and wrath that is contrary to revelation. It was the same failed orthodoxy of Hellenized Judaism and is a critical element in the heresy of Prosperity Gospel. To assume a simplified binary logic regarding human suffering is a rejection of God’s revelation. God punishes sin, of a certainty, but not necessarily in ways we expect and not on our scale of timing and justice. The presence of suffering is not simply a failure of faith and righteousness. If you can’t understand that God can bring suffering with righteousness, then you are not paying attention.

Zophar is downright hateful with Job. He opens by calling Job a windbag, and then misquotes him and creates a serious Straw Man fallacy. Job did not say his doctrine was pure, nor did he arrogantly accuse God of doing wrong. Zophar is convinced that if God did speak, He would openly condemn Job and reveal that secret sin he must surely be hiding by his empty words.

While Zophar correctly speaks of God’s transcendence, it is his own arrogance of human reason that bears the rebuke here. He insists Job can only be falsely accusing God of injustice, since God cannot in Zophar’s feeble logic bring sorrow for mysterious reasons. In his mind, God can take only one path to judge sin, and that His wrath must of necessity be easily understood by man. So he refers to the untamed wild nature of fallen mankind as if that applies to Job, while rejecting the notion a man can sin with his thoughts. The rejection of ineffable truth beyond human reason, the assurance that there is so much man could not ever know, even in theory, is the primary reason so many refuse revelation. This is a tacit rejection of the Fall.

Once again, Zophar affirms the empty promise that if Job repents God cannot help but restore all that Job lost. For Zophar, the words of prophecy make God out to be a vending machine — pay your dues, push the right buttons and it always works. He rejects the notion life is experienced more like a slot machine, that you never know what’s coming because God and His ways cannot be contained in human understanding. Thus, the three visitors of Job reduce God’s glory to mere mechanics.

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