Minimum Standards

Posted on September 24, 2013 by ehurst

Assuming you understand the Two Realms, it’s not hard to summarize and crystallize your thinking about how it all works in this domain.

When the Apostles began taking the gospel among Gentiles, they had to struggle with their own cultural baggage. Paul’s comment about “rightly dividing” the Old Testament was a phrase pointing to our life’s work in following Christ. We have to discern what it is about the Law Covenants that applies to us. I noted some time ago that the solution arrived at in that first church council in Acts 15 echoes pretty much what today the Jews call the Noahic Laws.

With Judaism, the idea is that those unwilling/unable to convert can still participate as allies to the Covenant of Moses. With the churches in the first century, the point was that folks typically joined with their whole families, not all of whom were actually converted fully. So there had to be a minimum standard for folks to hang around the church meetings where Jews naturally showed up, too. In general the list might go like this:

  1. Avoid engaging overtly in idolatrous practices.
  2. Observe standard sexual prohibitions.
  3. Be careful about draining the blood from meat.
  4. Don’t eat anything that’s been strangled (typically a pagan ritual sacrifice).

The rest of the Noahic Laws were generally covered by Roman law. The aim was to deflate the Jewish Christian fussiness. The Noahic Laws were well known and Gentiles were not converting to Moses, but the Christ. The whole point of the conference was to note that while Jews were welcome to fastidious observance of Moses if they wished, this was not Judaism and they need to get over it. Peter’s experience and his use of the Keys of the Kingdom to open the gospel to all humanity was the final burial of Moses as the way to God.

For those lacking that Jewish perspective, those rules are more or less tolerable since they are consistent with things Christ taught. In His famous comments about two fundamental commandments, He offers a particularly Eastern explanation meant to be taken broadly. Christians should rightly expect sinners to sin. Nothing should surprise us. We reserve our disapproving comments for those who claim to be part of our faith. So long as people make no pretense of following Christ, we should mind our own business. The whole biblical ethic of evangelism is that we preach when folks gather to hear a sermon, not at every moment when someone else is in earshot. We aren’t called to rudeness. The two fundamental guidelines Jesus offered that day applies to those who follow Him.

For those who simply want to keep peace with us, we need to adjust our expectations. So long as people don’t blaspheme our God and don’t overtly attack Christ’s message, we have no reason to be unfriendly. I’ll go so far as to say this is the fundamental covenant of peace with God for those who simply don’t have a sense of calling to serve Him directly. So for those who hold to other religions, but want to keep peace, that should be our terms. Indeed, we are compelled to offer a blessing in Christ’s name if we can just get them to come that far.

Let’s take this to an extreme: Let’s pretend someone with another religion, or none at all, simply wants me to pronounce some ritual of blessing on them in regard to one thing or another. For the sake of ritual, all they need to do is affirm a clear conscience regarding blasphemy and attacking Christian faith. Blasphemy is in essence insulting God, either by disparaging His claims or by elevating something else to His position. That’s not the same as me demanding they be monotheistic, only that they recognize Jehovah (by any other commonly used name or title) in His unique claims. Just take it seriously; don’t attack His reputation and you can’t go wrong.

As for attacking Christian faith, that’s sort of a corollary. This person need not fear having harmed a Christian in that sense, since too many professing Christians wander far and wide outside God’s moral boundaries. You should never be surprised that the majority of Christians foolishly put themselves in harm’s way, including putting themselves in a position to be hurt by your actions, regardless of your religion. That’s the way things work in the real world. Rather, the issue is avoiding slandering the faith as best you can understand it. Attack any religious organization all you like if you can see moral flaws, but don’t attack Christian belief itself. That is easily the other side of not attacking God’s reputation.

If any human on this planet tells me in clear conscience they are clean on those terms, then I cannot deny their request for a blessing. You see, Christian, there is a difference between something Satanic and any number of things which are simply not specifically Christian. When Christ calls us to be at peace with those who hate us, how hard is it to be downright friendly with those who do us no harm? As long as they don’t slander Christ, it won’t much matter what else they promote in competition with Him. It’s not as if our Lord needs our help, and Paul said several times there is not a thing we as humans can do to change the heart of another human. People can change their actions and opinions, but dead spirits cannot breath God’s life into themselves. God’s Word says it doesn’t work that way. Spiritual birth cannot ever be a human decision. Let’s let God handle His business and we take care of His calling on us.

Embrace His sovereignty and live in peace.

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Another Mystery of God’s Laws

Posted on September 23, 2013 by ehurst

(Ref: a previous post by similar title.)

Yet another comment on my critical review of Life Church from your typical modern Christian Pharisee. The real issue remains the deep failure to understand what is normative. I realize that the biggest and most successful churches today aren’t that different from LifeChurch.tv. When I first decided to attend worship at the MWC campus of Life Church, I already knew pretty much what I was getting into. There was no intent to undermine or steal sheep or any of those human motives you might expect from someone visiting a church they knew wasn’t really their cup of tea. I went because it was an opportunity to find those not being served. Every church has them and it’s no particular shame, but I knew God had called me to handle things most professionals in ministry would avoid. Yes, I was cynical, but I bore no malice.

What I didn’t expect would be the huge portion of folks who weren’t being served. That is, everywhere I turned, when the frenetic pace of activity slowed just a bit and I had a chance to chat with people quietly, I was shocked at how many were frustrated by the refusal of the church staff to address their deeper needs. Yes, I said refusal. Not in the rude and blunt fashion of someone who is honest, but in the sneaky soft fashion of someone who tries to avoid alienating folks who might be dropping money in the offering buckets.

You see, Life Church is a very high efficiency operation. They spend lavishly on the basic setup, but it’s designed to draw a big crowd of prosperous middle class whites so that per capita spending is quite low. That’s Craig’s secret. Actually spending resources meeting deeper human needs is not just forgotten, not just shoved aside, it is purposefully drowned out by a flood of shallow stuff that is sold as “one size fits all.” This is all carefully enforced by folks distributed around the system to ensure anyone attempting to do real ministry is shut down. That’s what happened to me there. I saw some real needs and attempted to meet them without getting in the way of program. Little did I know the program was so pervasive and watchful of this very thing. I was shoved aside very politely but very quickly after I successfully beat back an episode of Delphi Technique attack. The NSA could learn a lot from how Craig runs his operation.

The point is this: Most of what folks refer to as “spiritual problems” are actually moral issues of God’s Laws. It’s the Two Realms thing again. When Satan is pestering you, it’s because you are legally on his turf. The second you start pulling away from his agenda and start embracing God’s moral character woven into the universe, the Enemy’s grip weakens and his power declines rapidly. In other words, the sin and sickness is easily remedied if you bother to discover God’s Justice.

Life Church is simply more creepy about doing the same thing you get from the likes of “Purpose Driven” and other programs of church renewal. All of them aim at centralizing control for the sake of control and money, but pretending all the while this is about people and the gospel. They dress it up in some simulacrum of Western evangelical orthodoxy — there are many flavors — and pretend it’s what God intended. Yes, I realize the majority of them are sincere, but they are sincerely wrong. All of Western Civilization is wrong, which means all religious activity based on European Church History is wrong. So what’s new? I went about things doing my best to stay out of the way. As soon as I realized how there was no room for genuine spiritual and moral operations, I left so as not to cause trouble. Later, I found out a bunch of other folks left at about the same time for similar reasons. There are several different ways to stay friendly while driving folks out who refuse to conform to your plans.

So the entire gamut of Western Christianity, as far as I can tell, is suffering a serious moral confusion. I remain utterly certain I will live to see many of these operations collapse under their own weight. I’m not gleefully watching from the sidelines. I wish desperately I could help, but there’s no room to operate from inside any of the systems I’ve encountered. The best I can do is stand outside and shout with the prophet’s voice of doom.

I weep for you, churches.

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Short Prophetic Items

Posted on September 23, 2013 by ehurst

I just got another propagandist’s comment on the original post about Life Church. It’s not too hard to detect standard rhetorical tricks in Mr. Snyder’s comments. It’s getting old, but I stand by my original assessment: Life Church is an entertainment empire that mimics what most people consider a typical Western evangelical church. It’s all nice and friendly and you can surely feel close to God there, if you want. The teaching is pretty orthodox by modern evangelical standards and people do find Jesus there. The damage Craig and company do is through enforced shallowness. You cannot work through Life Church and engage the Spirit Realm nor the Laws of God in any serious manner. The system there will smother serious spiritual exploration and growth. Nothing at Life Church will challenge your shallow Western social mythology. But if you just want to hang out and get some good vibes, it’s a fine franchise. Satan will not bother you much if you hang out at LifeChurch.tv and you can make lots of new acquaintances among nice middle class people with middle class social expectations.

When the US federal government comes apart, you should not assume what takes its place will be any nicer. I tend to think there will be a significant shift of power down to lower levels of government — a regionalization — but that’s not necessarily going to make the powerful any more accountable. Some regions will benefit, but I would hate to live in some place like NYC without a full blown revolution removing their current government.

One of the things that really breaks my heart is how many people are going to die needlessly in the near future here in America. The vast commercial conditioning has so deeply bitten into the souls of Americans that I shudder to think how people will adjust to the likes of having to kill something just to eat. Oh, there will be many who won’t hesitate to kill each other, but they’ll leave the bodies to rot. I’m not suggesting cannibalism is any kind of answer; that’s evil. But people have no clue how to survive without the vast commercial and government support system.

Some of them will die from internal poisoning when their larded bodies start releasing all those toxins hidden in the fat cells. If you aren’t taking a heavy mixture of anti-oxidants and such when you start losing weight, you’ll get very ill from what’s crept into your body from our over-medicated world. Folks will be suffering all sorts of horrific withdrawal symptoms when their junk foods become hard to get. If you think drug addicts are likely to steal, imagine what it’s like shedding the addiction to modern wheat. Wheat has been inherently toxic since sometime around 1965 when it was crossbred to create horrific high levels of gliadin, among other things. What’s crazy is that, just like taking most drugs, the toxins in wheat poison your system even as they create an addiction. That’s just one of the modern poisons in our “food supply.”

Most men aren’t so bad about peacocking when they are fat, but I can scarcely believe the prancing and strutting of pot-bellied women these days. It’s one thing if you’ve done the best you could and are heavy all over. Let’s get rid of the false dichotomy. It’s a lie that you have to be model-perfect. But it’s also a lie to flagrantly ignore every sensible option and simply demand that all men ignore their hormones and fall in love with your lardy ass. Chutzpah is not a component of inner beauty. There are cultures where fat is beautiful, but I wonder if any Western woman wants to live in them. The only moral issue here, ladies, is your rejection of reality. Folks, this is fighting the Laws of God: You cannot create a fantasy world around your refusal to do the hard work that is fundamental to this fallen plane of existence. Take responsibility for your human weakness and either own it or fix it. If you want a good romance, you get it from God’s blessings, and those blessings generally come under observance of His moral character. Ignoring health and fitness is generally not obedience to God’s Laws. It is the fashion of American women to vastly overestimate their sexual market value. It’s the combination of flesh and soul that gives you value on a human plane. If you want loving attention, strive to be more lovable, not repulsive. Lord help us; there are so few godly feminine women left in the West.

Still, I’m not so sure we don’t deserve this for the way men embrace their own false dichotomy. I’ve noted all too often that the kind of manhood God blesses cannot be found in Western culture. You might still pull off a plausible act in today’s world, but you won’t be blessed in the long term. Men have instead bought into the feminist lie and I have seen far too many repulsive men running around — okay, some of them are lumbering around. Yes, men are generally as fat as the women these days. The rest tend to be wimpy nerds. There is a fairly significant bunch of bodybuilders, whose numbers are growing, but it’s often accompanied by the failure to recognize that’s not the only form of fitness. It’s typically something the guys do to be fashionable, not to be manly. You should see the jarring disconnect of a solidly built body and social awkwardness I run into every day at the gym.

Notice how all of this falsehood stands on Western mythology. Once the facade of Western Civilization starts coming apart, what keeps moral frauds like feminism and Life Church alive will disappear. So long as there is a significant portion of humanity operating plausibly by Western social mythology, stuff like that can keep chugging along. When reality starts washing over the sandy foundation of lies, the whole building will collapse. This is going to be ugly.

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Bits and Pieces 13

Posted on September 22, 2013 by ehurst

I’m testing a nutritional supplement, recommended to me by both Old Jules and the Mandala Lady. The official name is serratiopeptidase but it’s more commonly known as “serrapeptase”. It’s a body enzyme that fades from production beginning around age 20. The primary noticeable effect of the enzyme is reducing scar tissue, but it appears to affect all scar tissue in the body, even what you can’t see inside your joints and such as fibroids and other little nasties. Further, I noticed it offers a very broad-based boost to the metabolism itself. It appears synergistic with other supplements, typically making them work a little better. However, for many folks it may take 3-5 days to get rocking and rolling smoothly. I’ll update after I’ve used it for awhile.

Because of my computer ministry clients’ needs, I’m running Win7 on my desktop. I don’t like it, but the writing tools are better and it’s a whole lot easier to test software before I recommend it to people. It’s also easier to learn the new tricks I need to rescue systems with real troubles, since the bad guys keep changing their game.

My old favorite browser, Opera, has changed a lot. The newest implementation has shifted over to the WebKit engine so it acts a lot like Chrome. It’s really not up to full production use just yet, but version 16 is a start. However, they also split out their mail client and it’s better than ever. Just look for Opera Mail client, currently for Windows only. If you’ve ever used the older bundled mail client with Opera, installing the new one will automatically pick up your configurations, accounts and mail storage from the older version. Folks, I love this mail client.

But I’m still running Debian 6 on my laptop. I don’t get to use it much, but it’s still much better on that hardware than anything else. Most of them time I drag it along on service calls in case I need to set up a home router or download stuff specially for their machine. More than once I’ve helped someone cobble together a quick webpage as the best way to display a collection of photos or something on their system. I find it easier to use my own familiar software for that than to use Notepad or have to install something they won’t use on their system. I frankly hate how MS Word and Libre Office create webpages, loading them with too much unnecessary crap code.

If you want to try something that makes clean code without having to write it all out yourself, try Amaya. It’s free and runs on all platforms. It’s just a tad cranky to learn, but it’s about as good as you can get with a WYSIWYG editor for webpage code.

For those of you who still like the idea of ripping off YouTube music videos, the simplest path is to use a single tool. However, you get to choose from two versions: Slimbrowser based on the IE engine (Trident) and using many of the same kinds of settings, or Slimboat Browser based on the WebKit engine. Both display a button on YouTube pages (usually upper right) allowing you to download directly. You get to select from the various quality versions and formats, plus you have an option to transcode directly into MP3 format. The first time you do, the browser will probably download a codec for it. It will pull down the video in your chosen format then produce an MP3 from it, leaving you both in the same folder. Both of these come from Flashpeak and I have little idea about the company behind it. And to be honest, I really can’t find much use for either browser aside from snagging music from YouTube.

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Job 8

Posted on September 21, 2013 by ehurst

Now it’s Bildad’s turn to get it wrong. He continues pressing the false dichotomy and worse.

Bildad begins with less courtesy than Eliphaz, suggesting Job is a windbag. His rhetorical question misses the point. This is not a matter of justice in God’s sight, but God’s ineffable ways with mankind. There is much we cannot ever hope to know on this side of eternity. For Job to insist his conscience is clear is anathema to these silly legalists. So Bildad insists that if Job confesses and repents of his secret sins, God will immediately make things nice again.

Bildad has the nerve to suggest Job’s children must have been truly awful sinners or they would not have died so young. He blathers on about how God will make Job’s finish considerably greater than his past. He bases his appeal on human tradition. While it’s true the life span of individuals is too short to accumulate a depth of wisdom, that which accrues over generations is not necessarily trustworthy if it departs from revelation. It never occurs to him that human tradition might miss the point.

So he launches into a nice parable about papyrus reeds, symbolizing people. They grow only where it’s swampy; so it is with humans and righteousness. If people forget God, it would be like the water drying up. He also compares people who don’t trust God with spiders, whose webs are quite fragile compared to the majority of living creatures big enough to ignore such webs and rip them down without awareness. He continues to mix the symbols around.

He finally surmises that Job must be lying about his clear conscience. Whatever happened to Job can only be explained as God’s rejection of sin. Finally, he assures Job all would be well if he would just repent.

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A Mystery of God’s Laws

Posted on September 20, 2013 by ehurst

Every day I watch people struggle with God’s Laws.

That’s because His Laws are reality; His Justice pervades all of Creation. The revelation of His ways in terms of Law Covenants was a gift meant for all humanity. Obey His Laws and everything works better. Ignore His Laws and things don’t go so well. It’s a sliding scale; to the degree you observe His revelation, so your life on this earth will have His blessings.

His Laws aren’t that difficult. Once you see past the literal meaning, you can perceive an underlying moral character — God’s character. Yes, it requires absorbing something of the Ancient Near Eastern culture in which God chose to cast His revelation. That’s part of the revelation, since God created that cultural background as the place to reveal Himself. When you understand God in the way He revealed Himself, you understand how things work; you understand reality.

When you obey His Laws, when you act according to His moral justice, Creation responds as a living thing with positive results. Creation longs for His Justice and God has programmed the universe to respond to proper moral behavior. You can call it miracle or magic or whatever you like, but reality shifts to meet you halfway if you desire His moral character. Things happen for you that don’t happen for others. While the difference remains subtle, with an element of plausible deniability, it still works as God promised it would. Not like a mechanism, but more like a creature with an appetite for truth.

It should surprise no one that people gain insight into reality outside His revelation. God has always been eager to manifest His truth; He has always been very generous to the slightest human response. A very large library of ancient literature reflects some of the same character God revealed to His people. Much of what is reputed ancient magic is nothing more than an alternate expression of the same basic moral truth. Ancient peoples were untroubled by the lack of mechanical knowledge about things. They had an expectation of the inscrutable, ineffable nature of some portions of reality. They understood instinctively that our human senses were not sufficient to cover all reality. They invested time and effort looking into these things and were able to reproduce some of the same powers as God granted His people through the Laws.

Granted, some of it was Satan’s ploy, a very real power, if limited. The ancient world viewed things through the lens of moral reality, not some imaginary mechanistic factual reality. Since the whole point was deception, it’s easy enough to see why the Scripture called some it “dark arts.” However, there were plenty of people with good moral character who weren’t part of God’s people. Many of them managed to suss out some measure of how things were supposed to work. In their minds, there was no dividing line between secular science and mumbo jumbo that seemed to work. Scripture never says these things were invalid, though they might be forbidden for those under Moses’ Covenant.

Even then, the Lord placed His people in contexts where they had to engage this alternative approach to moral truth. Most famously were Joseph in Egypt and Daniel in Babylon. Both of them were required by their masters to engage in what we today think of as magic and pagan rituals. Scripture never said those things were invalid as a whole, that they couldn’t work. How do you think all those outsiders were able to tell when someone walked in God’s power and truth? It wasn’t pure superstition; they recognized real power when they saw it. When something in a pagan ritual reflected God’s Justice, it would work. God sent His Laws to all mankind; it was His gift to the fallen world. He didn’t really expect everyone to recognize Him personally, but granted the power of His Justice to anyone that wanted it.

Because so many Christians confuse the Two Realms, we have a lot of really bad theology. Indeed, most theological debates and controversies die if you get this one thing right. Christians keep applying Laws to matters of grace, and then spiritual principles to matters of the Flesh. Folks, the Flesh Realm is the Fallen Realm, and it’s under the Laws. The Spirit Realm is an entirely different matter and is all about grace and God’s sovereignty. We can indicate matters of the Spirit and there are certain basic notions formulated for us in Scripture, but almost nothing in the way of facts, per se. We have lots of revelation of the Laws of God for the Flesh. While we recognize the Laws are a parable of higher truth, that doesn’t keep the Laws from having a very real power without that higher spiritual awareness.

Nowhere did God require pagans to worship Him directly. He required only that they not blaspheme His name or threaten His people unjustly. When His people transgress the boundaries He set for them, it’s open season. When they are obedient to His Laws, He actively protects them. He also protects those who don’t serve Him on the same basis. The Bible says those who don’t serve Him will not have our advantages in understanding His Justice, but nothing says they can’t get any part of it. There was vast lore of fairly accurate shaman teaching in the ancient world. From our Western viewpoint it would include a broad mixture of valid science and medicine with lots of harmless ritual, but we cannot from our Western stance see the moral authority hidden in those things. The West knows nothing of God’s moral fabric, but the pagans knew of it and, when they obeyed it, power flowed on their behalf.

Just because it’s not specifically your brand of Jesus language and your familiar forms of ritual does not mean God won’t honor it.

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Internet as Booze

Posted on September 19, 2013 by ehurst

It’s a perennial subject since I can remember: Why are people far more rude on the Net than in real person?

I was chatting with my friend David about it on Facebook, where we all know things can get really silly. For example, I’ve been pestered just a little on FB for keeping a conversation with David and his friends. How could a professing Christian hang out with religious pagans? Frankly, their civility comes as a respite from the petty herd mentality of some folks who claim to follow Jesus.

Others have noted that people in their cars will do things far more outrageous than they would without the artificial environment of the vehicle, and suggest there is something similar going on when people get online. So much is obviously true, in the sense that people tend to act differently when you create an artificial environment. It’s an awareness issue. When the atmosphere is different, you act differently.

Most humans are cowards. It’s not nice to say, but manifestly true. On top of that, most people live in an artificial environment already. For them, the every day life of society is itself not really home. Some significant element of their sense of being is in another world. It’s the same reason so many people are convinced TV and movies are reality. They don’t realize Sex and the City is pure mythology, a total lie. They look in the mirror and insist that was real; what they see around them is some violation of “reality.” They still have to deal with reality, and some do so quite poorly, but their behavior is constrained by an awareness that things can get painful quickly. This makes them hesitant to express things that would draw unpleasant attention to themselves. Reality bites.

But in your car, there is a sense the rules of the road and the consequences for the equivalent of punching people out are simply far higher than the simple physical act itself. Thus, you depend on the reluctance of others to actually smash their vehicle into yours and you can act quite the fool. Too many folks are fools anyway, but out on the streets, the consequences of folly are different in their perceptions. It’s the same with the Net. The rules prevent people thrashing you, for the most part, so you’ll do the most audacious things you’d never do in meat space.

That is, unless you are pretty solid and integrated personally. Think of your average person, someone with no real medical issues with beverage alcohol. Give them a few drinks and their behavior changes a bit. They forget the real consequences of life and act a fool. Then give the same libation to someone who isn’t such a fool. Their personality and social behavior changes little. Their mood might change, but the things they’ll do under the influence won’t seem too irresponsible. Booze exposes neuroses; if yours are minimal, alcohol won’t make you act stupid.

There aren’t many like that. Far too many people are nursing private neuroses and other wounds they barely manage. People who work at teasing out their personal moral issues tend to handle inebriation rather well, as they do driving and Facebook. Obviously, I’m telling you that most of my fellow professing Christians are pretty messed up. Most of them will avoid alcohol in the first place, but get them on the Net and they act so incredibly intemperate that I’m embarrassed to be listed as their friend. David (linked on the right in my blogroll as “DG Mattichak, Jr.”) and his friends face that same idiocy from their fellow pagans at times, so it’s not as if any place is really safe. However, when you make friends with one sane person, you find they shy away from the mass of idiots, so their friends aren’t so difficult. Frankly, I consider such people a blessing from God, regardless what they believe or don’t.

People act like the Internet is booze.

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Birthday Post for 2013

Posted on September 18, 2013 by ehurst
Ed standing shirtless.

57 and fit.

Today is number 57. I mentioned some time ago that God had required me to take fitness more seriously, for reasons I still don’t know. When it becomes important enough to post something like that, it becomes an accountable item. The reader becomes a part of the earthly review board to ensure I have given proper attention to things I crow about. It’s a matter of transparency. On my last birthday, I offered an update showing some progress by visual comparison.

Today’s image here is just another update. I believe I have been faithful, dear reader. I’ve changed the routine a bit because I have access to a full gymnasium now and can lift weights. I do that thrice weekly and the other days I race-walk. My weight remains about the same as my last birthday, but I’ve moved things around a bit. In this more recent photo I’m not holding my stomach in or tensed any muscles to enhance it visually. I avoided dolling it up in any way. Indeed, I raised my right hand to expose the remaining bit of flab hanging off the back at the waist.

So the objective is not show off what a stud I am (splorf!), but simply to remain accountable.

Details of my gym routine: I focus on endurance and range of motion. I’m big enough at 215 lbs. (98kg), thank you. The other issue is avoiding aggravation of arthritis and other injuries. I divide my routine into three directions from the torso: out, down and up, pairing pushes with pulls. Working mostly with dumbbells, I do bench press and rowing, bar dips and upright rowing, and then seated press with lat pull-downs. Between each pair is something for the lower body, with lots of abdominal repetitions. I use weights I can move no less than 12 times. I also add some extra stuff at the end for building specific arm muscles and something which isolates the shoulders, again at multiple angles.

I still cycle quite a bit, not primarily as exercise, but as transportation.

My diet is mostly meat, fish, dairy, nuts, vegetables and fruit. I avoid: sweet drinks (soda and juices), all grains (save non-GMO rice and corn), potatoes, and any other sweets. Yeah, I take a substantial amount of supplements, too.

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God’s Hesitation

Posted on September 17, 2013 by ehurst

Here is my servant whom I have chosen,
the one I love, in whom I take great delight.
I will put my Spirit on him, and he will proclaim justice to the nations.
He will not quarrel or cry out, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.
He will not break a bruised reed or extinguish a smoldering wick,
until he brings justice to victory. (Matthew 12:18-21 NET)

In Chapter 12, Matthew quotes from Isaiah 42. The elder prophet throws out some hyperbole about Cyrus as God’s chosen instrument to set the Exiles free to return. Instead of fully crushing the Judeans living in the suburbs around Babylon, Cyrus would rescue them. Not right away, of course; it would take time to consolidate his hold over the imperial machinery. Once a measure of peace was secured and the changes in policy were implemented, there would be time to restore some measure of justice to the oppressed. Matthew was hardly the first to see this as a Messianic promise, but places it in the proper context.

Jesus could have handled the Pharisees, but it wasn’t time yet. He had already refused to play Satan’s game and become a political Messiah. His justice would be dying on the Cross, but not yet.

Divine justice is not a matter of asserting control. It’s not a matter of grand political charisma winning hearts and minds. His justice does not finish off the weak because they fail to respond immediately. It gives people time to recognize how it all works. God waits on us to break ourselves down at His feet voluntarily. Those who want to go to His Promised Land will have plenty of time to reorient and begin harvesting the power of full surrender. It has to be voluntary or it will not work. If you can’t find something inside you responding with a full depth of desire, then don’t pretend you are a part of it. It either owns you entirely or you aren’t involved. God gives you time to find your own fire for Him, but there will be an end point when He hesitates no longer.

Both as a contractor for the VA and privately, I’ve gone to people’s houses and helped them learn how to use their computers more effectively. There is very little of imposing on those users an extensive framework of computer knowledge and expertise. All of that is more like a library from which I choose individual lessons that fit the very real needs of the users. I’m not there to correct all their human mistakes and impose my sense of order on their lives.

One user’s main problem was his constant pursuit of porn. Visiting such sites always results in malware and viruses hitting a computer. The guy had no idea about the security risks; he just wanted the pictures. But he was too embarrassed to talk about his hobby, so I didn’t address it. I simply showed him how to use security software and malware cleaners. He was also a big fan of classical opera, so I showed him how to use YouTube to find his favorite recording artists.

There was no leverage for correcting his moral flaws. By helping him to secure his computer against the worst of his bad habits, I was helping to protect the rest of the Internet users from crooks who might use this man’s fast system and fast Internet connection to commit other crimes. I kept his computer from becoming a bot for other worse things. The least I could do was protect the rest of us from yet one more source of infection and criminal activity.

Many of us admire what Snowden did in exposing a lot of bad government behavior. In his place, I assure you I would have done everything possible to avoid even knowing about such things. It has nothing to do with whether he’s a hero and I’m a coward; I’m not judging him, either. God works in uncovering evil, but He also works by letting things run their course. I don’t even pretend to know whether Snowden understands any part of spiritual truth, and I don’t have any idea whether he considers his actions a just response to some divine calling. I know what God has shown me and called me to do, and my mission is what God says it is.

Because of how God has shown His hand to me, I am conscientiously unable to get too involved in moral judgments of anyone who doesn’t actively seek my counsel. Sometimes those who do ask aren’t going to get much of an answer because they aren’t ready to hear it. Most of the time that means they haven’t read enough of my stuff to have a clue where I’m coming from, so they would immediately get lost and receive no useful answer. It’s not a question of my being so far advanced beyond them, but a lack of shared background experience. On matters of faith and religion, I’m largely alien to most folks who speak English. There is a time and place for shocking people into awareness, but I seldom feel the impulse to do that. Virtually all of my best work in counseling and teaching faith comes by quietly and persistently working in the background until something calls out to them and they begin seeking. The burden on me is to be aware of all the different ways God can work and try to sense what that person needs at that moment.

It’s the same with how I teach computer use. I can’t give you answers I don’t have and won’t give you anything it seems you can’t use. I’ll always get something wrong in the process, but God is able to use me in ways I hardly comprehend. So I do the best I know in the moment and trust divine justice to carry it through. There are plenty of points in my past where I still have no idea why things didn’t come out differently than they did, why God didn’t do this or that. I’m not permitted to see all that much into the Spirit Realm, and only some small portion of the invisible moral fabric here. Even now I wonder why God hasn’t already done some of the things He revealed to me that are on His agenda.

God hesitates because He’s not ready to cut things off; His justice is not yet full revealed to His satisfaction.

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The Coming Hand of Wrath

Posted on September 16, 2013 by ehurst

Americans are headed for some very rough times.

I keep saying that because the Lord keeps His prophetic warning to me very sharp and fresh. For example, our federal government as we now know it will be gone. Our economy will go way down; we’ll also have a lot of natural disasters and plenty of sorrows simply unexplained. I have no idea what comes after that; I suppose God figures we wouldn’t believe it if He told us. At any rate, that’s not the point. The point is what we can do to get ready. It’s the same thing we should be doing regardless of what’s coming.

I’ve written several books to address the bigger picture of discerning God’s revelation on living a good moral life. I’ve done my best to portray it as something fundamental to how the universe operates. If you live as best you can by God’s moral character, you should expect things to be as good as it can be in this life. All Creation responds to someone trying to embrace God’s revelation because His moral justice is woven into the very fabric of reality.

God revealed Himself within a Hebrew intellectual background that He built by His own hand. That Hebrew mindset is part of the revelation itself. If you can’t bring yourself to think Hebrew style, if you can’t embrace the distinctly different way Hebrew people understood reality itself, you don’t have much clue what God had to say. If you don’t understand the concept of ANE feudal social structure and mystical reasoning, you don’t understand the Bible.

I keep trying to warn people that genuine faith is neither liberal nor conservative, that all of our various American viewpoints on morality are uniformly false. That’s because America is the quintessential Western nation, the epitome of all the evil packaged in Western Civilization. It won’t matter if you are morally progressive or reactionary against the background of American moral choices; you are wrong for holding to any part of the spectrum. Being Western is inherently alien and evil to God’s moral standards.

Nor do I have much nice to say about any part of Western Christian religion. If your religious background includes any European influence, it’s a failure. Yes, I really do mean that. It means you really neither understand what God has said, nor can you claim to have fulfilled the Great Commission because you aren’t teaching what Jesus taught. Jesus was a Hebrew man who thought and taught Hebrew thinking, and no part of European Church History is Hebrew.

Nor is any part of Judaism as we know it. It was European a couple of centuries before Jesus was born, having bought into the Greek philosophers’ logic. So if you support modern Israel, you are in deep doo-doo with God. He doesn’t support it because they reject His moral law with a hateful prejudice I don’t have words to describe. If Israel refuses to live by the Law of Moses, and do so as Jesus taught it, they can’t claim God’s favor under any covenant. The teachings of Christ were the final capstone of revelation regarding the Covenant of Moses (among other things).

So if you are guilty of any of that sin, all this nastiness God is pouring out on the West in general, and America in particular, is going to hit you square in the face. You’ll be standing right in the middle of the flood of wrath and you’ll never have a clue why.

Now, I want you to understand something: God always reveals Himself in such a way that any person is still free to ignore Him. Every miracle, were you to have seen all those He ever did with your own eyes, would have a plausible deniability built into it. That’s how God works. How do you think Israel managed to forget crossing the sea on dry ground? How do you think they managed to disobey right there in the shadow of the Pillar of Smoke? God does not force any mind to accept truth. Even after you are born again, you retain some freedom to reject His message.

So the wrath that is coming will be wholly consistent with His moral justice, about which virtually no American Christian has any clue. They’ll be exercising their various flavors of Western reasoning and maybe some big doses of emotion, but they’ll mistake a lot of things for having other causes. They’ll see things like whole major facilities destroyed and wonder how God could tear up His own real estate. They’ll never understand how that facility was never important to Him and He may not have spent too much time there in the first place. There will be a tremendous amount of confusion about all this, particularly among Christians. These poor souls will make a whole lot of wrong decisions because they won’t understand what God thinks morality looks like.

A tiny handful will be a good bit closer to the moral fabric of the universe. They’ll touch the hem of God’s garment and be saved — as much as He’s going to save anyone at all. Granted, there will be a seeming randomness that defies even the best biblical understanding; Job found that out. Still, for the most part, those few who cling to the Hebrew understanding of His Word will miss out on all the fun. They’ll be protected from the worst of it. It will be consistent enough that, if you are paying attention, you’ll see it. God will pass over some and spare them His wrath.

There’s no pride in that. I’d be all too happy sharing my spot with you. Even if I get clobbered it won’t change anything. I have that peace you can’t wipe away even in death. However, I have a strong sense I’ll ride this out in style.

Okay, so don’t believe me; it’s not my problem.

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