A Walk in the Park

Posted on August 18, 2013 by ehurst

It was their first time together outside the chapel meetings. He wore the same thing he always wore: semi-dress casual. Her long wavy hair was pulled back on the sides, flowing like her simple, loose-fitting dress. It was conservative, down to the knees, and she wore flat shoes. Rather than hide her natural beauty, her attire only served to compliment it.

As they passed through the park, she suddenly turned her head, released his hand and squealed as she ran toward a figure rising from a bench. This fellow was quite large and muscular, barely concealed by the bright yellow t-shirt emblazoned with “Semper Fi” on the chest. He stepped forward to meet her as she nearly tackled him. But he was rock solid, simply grabbing her in his arms and swinging her around.

When she touched ground again, she turned to where she left her escort. “Charles, this is my cous…”

Charles was gone, nowhere in sight.

In a panic, she looked around, steadying herself with one hand on her large cousin. He pointed with his index finger. “Is that him? You better go catch him, Cuz!”

As she started to run, she half turned back, “I’ll call you later, Bronson!”

He shouted, “Go!”

She caught up with Charles as he rounded a splashing fountain. Grabbing his arm, she stopped him. Weeping profusely, almost blubbering she said, “I’m sorry Charles! You didn’t give me a chance to explain. That was my cousin; we thought he was dead…”

She tried to cling to his neck, but he held her off just a bit. His face was relaxed in that same friendly demeanor he wore most of the time. He tilted his head slightly to one side, raising one hand with the fingers spread, pointing to his jaw. “Is this the face of an angry jilted lover?”

She sobbed, drawing out the word, “No.”

He glanced around, then gently led her by the hand under the shade of a huge maple tree. On one side was an old iron trellis. Between the climbing vines and shrubbery against the frame, it was a fairly private alcove. Charles sat down on one end of the bench, turned himself sideways and rested one knee on the seat. He leaned his elbow on the back and indicated the other end of the small bench. She sat demurely, crossing her ankles and tucking them under the bench seat, half-turned to face him.

He hadn’t notice her makeup earlier, but something with color was mixing with her tears, making a mess on her cheeks. He pulled out a clean handkerchief and handed it to her. With less dramatic sobbing, she began dabbing her face.

She manged to get out, “Did I embarrass you?”

“Well, it was a pretty extravagant PDA,” he said, gesturing with an open palm.

Under her breath she mumbled, “public display of affection.”

He continued, “But that was another matter.”

Still wiping tears away, she looked at him. “What did I do wrong? I don’t understand.”

Her plaintive tone was heartbreaking, and it showed on his face. Still, he managed a typical comical sarcasm. “Do tell.”

There was faint huff of laughter behind her dabbing.

“You don’t understand because we haven’t gotten to that part yet. Look, Babe, let’s recover the context here.”

He resettled himself, dropping his leg off the bench but still somewhat facing her. He raised his hands palms up, fingers spread. “During that first meeting in the chapel, the first thing you said was something about how very different I was.” She nodded slightly. “For several weeks after I took over the leadership, you clearly absorbed what that difference was, in part because you are so very different.”

She managed half of a smile.

“You didn’t say much, but it was obvious you were sucking it all up. What I was sharing was obviously what you needed to hear, an affirmation of all the things you knew instinctively, but had never heard in words.” He paused a moment, turned and took her hand. “Then you found out I was a widower. So for the past two weeks you have actively campaigned as successor. Despite your being so much younger than me, you managed to prove yourself a valid candidate — sober minded, generally calm and determined, not a silly political feminist, but committed to…” He gestured with his free hand for her to finish the sentence.

“The message,” she said quietly.

“Yes, the message. You understood that my sole drive at all times was the message. Not just the words, but the entire presentation of my human presence in this world. It’s not that I have no feelings, but I don’t let them show when they conflict with the message. So during our long talks these past two weeks, you have given good evidence. Despite my concern with the cultural gap between our ages, I wanted to give you a chance. I really don’t like working alone.” He glanced at his watch. “Some twenty minutes ago we left your apartment, headed to the Museum of Art. I told you there was something else I had to make sure you understood about that message, and among the exhibits were a good collection of positive and negative examples to dramatize critical elements in my message presentation.”

She nodded, then looked down at the handkerchief in her lap, pulling at it with her hands.

“We didn’t get there,” he continued. “So you don’t understand yet how you shot huge holes in that message.”

Tears started in her eyes again as her lip quivered.

“If you are going to become my ministry partner, we must be a team. We are a single entity; we are the message together. We’ve discussed this often enough you should know it’s not about my fragile ego. I’m not Conan the Barbarian, and I wasn’t going to let you make me appear a neutered nice-guy back there.”

She looked up as the tears renewed their flow. He reached out and wiped some away with a gentle touch. “Were I angry, you would properly assume it was impotent jealousy. It was plain to me that big studly guy was a relative or close friend, so that didn’t bother me. Nor am I concerned with how it might look to people who had no idea what was going on. I don’t get embarrassed that easily.”

He sat back. “Think about this. We walk along and you take my hand. It’s appropriate, a confirmation you intend to be on the team. Most people passing by didn’t pay much attention to us. But some did. What do you suppose those few saw?”

She looked up at him. “They probably thought I was young enough to be your daughter.”

He grinned. “Not only that, but despite your demure presentation, you are hot stuff.” She blushed. “The guys looking at us were mostly looking at you. I could see it in their eyes; they were thinking what a lucky guy I am with such fine arm-candy. The women who noticed us were also looking mostly at you. It was envy, not so much because I’m such a fine catch, but because in our society, women are inherently competitive.” She nodded knowingly. “We’ve discussed this in the past.”

He scanned the people outside the little alcove. “But these people aren’t exactly conscious of all that. Most of them are decent, but they’re TV addicts. This is the Ricky Lake crowd here, for Pete’s sake.” She almost laughed. “While we have a message for their conscious minds, we know the most important part — if it’s going to work at all — is going to work on some less conscious level. We have to make our message consistent. We are the message.”

He turned back to her, and lifted the hand he held, gripping it firmly but gently. “Your part of the message is devotion to me. Not so much adoration like a demigod, but a conspicuous persistent devotion. When you show that as your message, you empower me to extend my covering over you. I’m neither a childish brute nor a neutered nice-guy. I’m a shepherd who protects you. When I extend my covering over you, my part of the message is how utterly precious you are as my greatest treasure. We are a team; we are one. We are the message.”

He lowered their hands. “Your action broke that message. Had you simply dragged me over to meet him, that would have been on the message. It’s not about my ego, nor so much about constrained behavior in a social setting. It’s the context of who we are together. Your actions must advertise at all times my central place in your attention. That’s how God works through us. I wasn’t ditching you; I was keeping my message intact. My intention was to simply give you time alone with that fellow and wait for you at the museum. I’d have called you when I got there to see when you were coming.”

He turned and grasped both of her hands. “I can’t take responsibility for your feelings. I can only encourage you to trust me, as I intend to trust you. My commitment to the message isn’t fragile, and the place you hold isn’t fragile either. But you really do have to learn how to stay on message, because I can’t afford to break that.”

He picked up the handkerchief she dropped. “Can you get hold of Bronson again?” She nodded. “We can’t salvage what happened back there, but we can redeem what’s left of this time together. Do what you can to recover yourself now so we can continue this journey. The first part of today’s lesson was painful, and I’m sorry for that. Let’s make the rest of it as pleasant as possible.” He leaned forward and kissed her gently and briefly on her lips.

She smiled and pulled a compact from her purse. It took only a few minutes of expert artistry and she was ready. They rejoined hands as they left the alcove headed for the museum.

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Job 3

Posted on August 17, 2013 by ehurst

It’s too easy to summarize the meaning of Job’s speech: He’s depressed. There is nothing to suggest moral failure. Some folks have come to visit Job in his distress and he’s about as entertaining as he can be, with truly grand imagery taken from the best of literary expression in his culture. This is what the reader needs to see. It’s nothing more than a very beautiful way of saying how bad he feels, and it’s entirely appropriate.

The first ten verses has him wishing he had not been born if this awful condition was his fate. The subtlety is rich. He wants to forget his birthday, particularly because the rejoicing was over such a healthy baby boy. He wished even God could forget that day. He calls for shadows and darkness to hide it from anyone else’s memory, too. Job personifies the day, hoping some horrific dark event would frighten it from showing its face. Let it be erased from the calendar. In the typical reckoning of a day consisting of first the night, then the day, he calls for the previous night to give no birth to the following daylight. Let the mythical great sea monster, Leviathan, be called up to devour the day before it can get started. More, let the day itself feel the same sense of doom and disappointment, passed over for its time in the sun; don’t even let it see its own morning stars. He’s angry that the day didn’t deny him his own birth.

For nine more verses Job wishes he had been stillborn, using rhetorical questions. Instead of suffering through consciousness, he could be asleep in the grave, the most common image of afterlife in that culture. He could share the grave with mighty kings who built great palaces, eager princes who amassed great wealth, as well as children born dead. There he would be among those who were unable to cause any more trouble, where their victims were also at rest. Both slave and master end up the same there. All of these are fairly common references used in daily conversation as a somber recognition of human limits.

The final verses are more rhetorical questions about God as mysterious and impossible to fathom at times. He doesn’t actually name God, but implies it with the divine “He”. Job first wonders aloud why God keeps him alive. We note Job respectfully waits for God’s permission to die. Just having the relief of the grave would be worth more than Job could express. His food is replaced with sighing and he drinks groaning all day long. He couldn’t imagine things being any worse. He can’t even escape into normal sleep.

So far, there is nothing improper here. Human sorrow is not a sin, and Job never indicates God is unjust. It’s a little long and windy, but not uncommon for talented speakers. It’s not yet a pity party in the social context of Job’s life.

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Spiritual Authority

Posted on August 17, 2013 by ehurst

We are the New Israel, a spiritual nation bound together under the Blood of Christ.

Our Covenant is written in the souls of those who cannot resist the call to walk the footsteps of our Savior. We understand this covenant is rooted outside of our time-space constraints, residing in Heaven, not on the earth. It touches this earth in the same sense our Creator touches His creation — He is not part of it, but master of it. Our Lord remains intimately aware of every sub-atomic particle, it’s status, state and location at all times and outside of time. He’s aware of how each fits into larger plans He has, and we cannot possibly imagine what it all means. So no one of us can pretend we can have much say in things here on earth.

We should not confuse earthly authority with spiritual authority. Men use power and violence; we use the power of the Spirit. Do you not understand that when Paul asserted something as an Apostle of the Lord, he of all people understood it was a simple matter of you walking away if you couldn’t in clear conscience agree? His authority on the earth was entirely voluntary. Only the reflexes of the various church members and leadership kept them together under his authority. It was totally voluntary. To argue with him simply meant you weren’t working with him. There was room for flexibility, but the whole point was a voluntary agreement, not a threat of political pressure. He left that behind, lying on the road outside Damascus.

When I rise up to speak as a prophet of God, I have only the authority He grants through His Spirit. All I have is the unspeakable confidence and assurance that I know what He wants for me. In the nature of that obedience, He commissions me to share what I find in my encounter with Him. If I am persuasive, it is His persuasion working in my feeble human abilities. If you rise up to counter my words, I have an answer because of the clarity and depth of my commitment to what He shows me. It has nothing to do with earthly authority as men practice such things. That stuff ended on the Cross. The Covenant of Moses was closed up in the work of Christ; the mission of Israel as an earthly nation was complete.

The mission of Israel was then committed into the hands of this risen Messiah and He placed it upon those who follow Him. It is a spiritual kingdom with earthly manifestations. Human words can hardly contain the message; human ideas are a poor shadowy reflection of His higher truth. My words and my existence are merely one reflection of that higher truth.

I will most certainly take full advantage of the earthly opportunities to have my say. You can count on me to spout off every time the Spirit moves me. You’ll get my best effort to faithfully render in words what happens in my spirit. While in my mind I naturally assume it applies to all humans who can read those words, my mind also knows it is not in charge of enforcement. That’s not my department. Whatever happens to you from listening or not heeding at all is not in my hands, and I’m so very glad of that. I’d surely mess things up. It’s all I can do to be faithful in reporting what I see and hear. For you to heed any authority in my words is entirely voluntary, a transaction between you and God. May the Almighty lay His full wrath on every human who attempts to assert fleshly authority over other believers.

Spiritual authority is a spiritual matter, not something exercised by the flesh but upon flesh.

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Biblical Morality: Conclusion

Posted on August 17, 2013 by ehurst

We as believers are aliens, complete and utter foreigners in this world.

It would have been all too easy to extend this book for countless chapters covering every detail of our human existence. It would also be too easy to offer solutions that might not fit every context. Instead, the aim was to awaken the awareness, to make a call for the search.

It still boils down to something as simple as Jesus’ comments about the two greatest commandments. Once you are committed to serving God with a whole heart, it’s awfully hard to run away from your duties to the rest of the world. We need help discarding a badly broken Western social mythology; we need a warning that it simply will not do. What Western Christians have been doing is ignoring how seriously they failed to claim their divine heritage on this earth. They won’t take it themselves and try to prevent others from having it. Not only is it relatively easy to see the failure, and to start fresh with something else, but the information on the proper path is staring us in the face. Once your feet are on that path, it’s hard to imagine God couldn’t or wouldn’t guide you from there.

Loving God is total abject surrender. It creates the fundamental assumption you deserve no good thing in this life. It removes silly notions about anyone else deserving anything in particular. We all deserve Hell. It’s not our duty to restore man’s dignity, show he can’t have any in the first place outside of Christ. Our duty is to call for repentance. Without repentance that sweeps away all of life and builds from God, there is no foundation worth any effort to build.

We have a very heavy layer of nonsense crushing us on the meaning of Christ-like love. Our Western social mythology prevents us seeing the truth. It’s not some silly niceness because feelings are not the primary objective. We can’t do much for anyone’s feelings when we can’t even fix our own. Emotions are a consideration with every other very real human weakness, but they cannot ever be used to steer things. Love is not an emotion; affection is a choice with emotional results.

Loving others is keeping one hand on the Cross and touching our world. It requires knowing who God called you to be, what He says your role is in His Kingdom and being ready for anything. You relinquish all hopes, dreams, plans, expectations and preferences and see what He places in your life. Your only accomplishment is keeping alive the desire to please Him. He is more than capable of guiding you in fulfilling the reason He called you to hang around this world. Your part is making room for Him to take full control, and that means alienation from the world, even as you pour out your life in it.

It’s not possible to find peace and joy in any other way. The greatest possible sense of fulfillment can only come by embracing His moral character in this world. We have run a short course here of contrasting some obvious differences between what is being sold on every street corner against what God alone offers from Heaven.

The justice of God is your divine heritage, but nobody can force you to take it. Surely it’s plain to see most Western Christians don’t even recognize it for the treasure it is, much less do they embrace it. Don’t settle for a cheap imitation. If it weren’t Western Civilization, it would be some other evil perversion dreamed up by evil men who reject God’s truth. There can be precious little revelation from God without the full package of ancient Hebrew intellectual assumptions. That is your divine heritage as a child of God.

Accept no substitutes for the whole revelation of God.

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Biblical Morality: Chapter 13

Posted on August 16, 2013 by ehurst

What Do You Expect?

We stand ever ready to offer God’s truth.

A critical part of the reason God leaves us here is so that we can reveal His moral character. Yes, that starts with the gospel message, but it hardly ends there. If all we do is pure evangelism, so to speak, we have stolen from people the blessings God meant for all of mankind to have. They won’t all get it, but those capable of hearing the truth should have it. We live in this world and reject it; we embrace His revelation as packaged in the Hebrew mindset. By His Spirit discern how the Bible applies to our context, and then we talk about it. We trust His Spirit to help others discern how our experience in the Kingdom Life can apply to them.

One size does not fit all. In every human institution we see the dehumanizing laziness of those in power unwilling to meet people where they are. That is Satan’s version of you doing only what God has given you power to do. Learn the difference. You can only give what God gives you for the purpose, but you can’t pretend your choice works for everyone, and God forbid you become arrogant enough to insist it should work for everyone. Consider all the ways in which we steal the unique stamp of God from every human individual and work to repeal that sin.

At the same time, God hard-wired us for tribal cohesion. When God’s version is denied, people replace it with the self-indulgent version. You should expect folks to be nervous around people who aren’t like them. This is entirely natural, not evil in itself, but typically evil in how it is implemented. That turf-oriented defensiveness is in itself right, because that’s how God made us. We have to learn how it helps us perceive the domain boundaries of our calling, to abstract it into contextual meaning of the limits God places on us. To imagine these instincts can be trained out of the human soul is a lie from Hell; fighting it may warrant violence. To seek their proper use in the Kingdom of the Spirit is wisdom.

The human lust for power and control is nothing more than a combination of the natural fear of humans for untamed natural conditions, plus the impulse to be one’s own god. The fundamental nature of the Fall itself was usurping the throne of the soul from God, and elevating human decision to His place. It’s not a whole lot different from what got Lucifer in trouble. The logical root is arguing with God about anything that He has to say. Virtually all oppression is simply playing God and rejecting His revelation. It inevitably includes rejecting what He says is normal for fallen humans.

Holy cynicism expects this. On the human plane, nothing can undo the Fall. You can’t even fix your own sinful nature, so get used to human failure. With Christ, we hold open the door to divine escape from this prison, but we are hardly disappointed when the majority in any given context rejects it. This leaves us living in the tension of a whole world of evil demanding we sink back into the madness, pulling at us even as God leads us out. Without a clear-headed recognition of what He says is true in Heaven and how it applies on this earth, we cannot hope to find a path here that please Him. Our whole existence is bringing His light into the darkness. We make war on the evil spiritual powers behind what our fleshly eyes see. We do not make war on people, but give them all the room we can so they can fail.

Intervention with children requires a certain amount of force to keep them sprinting off the edge of cliff. They don’t know they can’t fly. To the degree someone older volunteers to live in a covenant that grants you some authority over them, you treat them somewhat the same as your child, recognizing their personal limitations. Even a literal son or daughter can find a way to kill themselves because you can’t be omnipresent or omnipotent in their lives. Even less so do we control how things go with covenant children. The fundamental element is a loving acceptance of God’s order of things. You cannot assert total control over things, and it is Satanic to try.

Some of the worst oppressions in history have come from nominal Christians. The fundamental element is the Lordship of Christ. If the individual in our care does not recognize God as God, there is little we can do. In ancient Israel, the one who rejected the Covenant of Moses could always choose to live as a Gentile. They lost covenant protections, but they weren’t automatically enemies. We can choose to extend the love of God to those who reject that love because the sacrificial compassion of Jesus trumps their response. Love is not defined by a specific set of actions; that’s the worst of Western mythology. Love within the context may mean entirely opposite actions from the next context.

You may not have the calling from God to prophesy individually, but we as a covenant community must prophesy to a fallen world in the net effect of our words and actions. We still live as humans on this plane, but we are driven by an entirely otherworldly source. Our human thoughts and actions are tempered from a divine fire. On the human level, we recognize injustice, not simply by the effects, but in the spirit of the thing.

We know that civil governments will always overreach and transgress God’s limits. We must depend on Him to reveal the false spirit of such actions in light of our individual callings to know how to react to His glory. No two of us will have the exact same perception and imperatives, though we could in theory share a great deal when we take the time to associate with those whose calling is similar. We make room for each of other to do things differently, even things that strike us as completely wrong, because we aren’t inside their heads and can’t know what God demands of them. There is no possible way we can all snap to the same response in the face of evil.

Here are some common areas of senseless conflict.

Poverty is a symptom of human evil. You are siding with the Devil when you reduce the problem to a single cause. Any particular person’s plight is always a combination of their sin and the sins of others. God will not sponsor taking wealth by force from one sinner only to give it to another sinner. Righteous people do not take by force, and refuse to accept wealth taken by force from another. The answer is not a matter of absolute this or that, but what God has given you to do right now. To advocate for any solution that ignores the moral truth is a lie. Do your work and mind your own business; give where God prompts you whatever it He prompts you to give. Sometimes you are called to disengage and move away because Satan has been granted power over the whole thing. The problem is humans have rejected God’s provision, so there is no possible solution working through a damned system. You have to work around it.

Crime is normal; it cannot possibly be wholly eradicated. It is very easy to forget the goal of social stability and make enforcement actually more destabilizing than the crime. As it is, virtually every common law on the books throughout the West is merely one cultural group demanding everyone else submit to their social prejudices. It’s bad enough we rip the Ten Commandments completely out of context so that we really have no clue that they mean. While the Ten Commandments to tend to reflect God’s moral demands, they are actually not entirely applicable outside of Moses. But what’s worse is, if you embrace the Decalogue, you have to embrace the whole Law of Moses. You don’t get to pick and choose. You cannot rely on Western social instincts to get the right answer on anything. Use the Law of Moses as a guide to deeper moral principles, as Jesus explained more than once. Meanwhile, you should always expect a secular government to make the most insufferable demands. That something is illegal under civil law is a tactical concern, not a moral concern.

The very existence of a civilian police force is a deep offense to God. In the Bible, the people are the police, assigned to restrain their own kin within their tribal social boundaries, and kept peace with other tribes by taking responsibility for the sins of their own. You cannot pass the buck and hire some third party to enforce the laws for you. That’s a rejection of God’s Laws. Again, we have policemen and it is a mere tactical consideration. Only by random accident does that badge represent an agency for moral good. These days, a policeman is increasingly likely to serve evil purposes more than good.

Punishment from an evil system of laws and corrupt enforcement cannot ever resemble justice. We make all kinds of self-righteous noise about slavery, but we confine people in warehouses without even the redemptive purpose of meaningful work. Compared to our prisons, biblical slavery is downright nice. As it now stands, most prison systems run by Western governments constitute obscene torture in God’s eyes, and not one bears even a superficial resemblance to biblical morality. The entire system – law, investigations, adjudication, sentencing and implementation of the sentences – is anathema to God.

Environmental pollution is a moving target because it is utterly impossible for human science to ever understand the whole picture. Scientists are fallen sinful creatures like everyone else. Every theory and concept has been shown mistaken sooner or later. A scientific consensus is one of the worst foundations for any public policy, certainly no better than mere economic convenience or profligate disregard of nature. It will always be a mere football in that never-ending quest for temporary oppressive authority. God owns His Creation and is fully willing and able to show you what pleases Him with whatever information you have right now. Study it if your conscience demands it, but live by your own conscience and hold a knife to your throat before you dare suggest to anyone else what they need to do. Never forget: God said this entire universe is disposable, and He can heal any part on any level at His whim. He seldom bothers to consult us on these things.

In every issue, the greatest danger is, as noted previously, allowing ourselves to be unequally yoked with those who reject God’s moral authority. It’s a constant temptation to engage some political effort to change something that God has granted to Satan’s control. There will ever be a significant portion of your existence within Satan’s domain and God will gladly help you understand when, where and how to resist. He will use human behavior, individually and in any aggregate, but His character can be found only in ANE feudalism as a system for restraining human sin. Secular politics requires you first kneel before Satan, as we saw in the Wilderness Temptations of Jesus.

You cannot demand that God bless something He said was evil, and you cannot rewrite the Bible from your human prejudices.

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Quantum Morality

Posted on August 16, 2013 by ehurst

Refer to the previous blog posts on Quantum Reality, and on the Psychology of Hearing from God.

Christian Mystics are facing multiple conflicting streams of consciousness. It’s worse if you haven’t been at it long, because you are still dragging around a bunch of leftover Western assumptions. It’s bad enough when you understand Hebrew morality pretty well. The peace of God’s morality is one thing, far removed from Western Christianity; the peace of His living Spirit is another.

We have a strong body of moral wisdom in God’s Laws. The Law Covenants — Noah and Moses — (AKA “Laws” with a capital “L”) do a good job of explaining things from a human standpoint, but they assume a Hebrew mystical intellectual background. Once you absorb the mystical morality behind the Law Covenants, you begin to operate on a fairly high level. But Jesus warned us that isn’t the same as walking in the Spirit. The Laws allow one standard of moral behavior, but the Spirit holds forth a yet higher demand. We want His peace, but we want even more to participate in His glory. Nothing in the Laws is ever wrong, but it may leave you somewhere short of His glory. Recognizing this requires quantum reasoning.

Humans can generally succeed with God’s justice by the Laws. It has enough room to make mistakes and come back and repent. You aren’t expected to be perfect in any Western sense. You are expected to be perfect in the sense of maturity about your own weaknesses. Humans cannot rise to the higher spiritual standards even with the purest motives. The Spirit empowers us to see and desire that higher level, and God works through our desire to bring some semblance of it, but it’s not the same thing. It’s still a matter of being mature enough to know you’ll fail, but the internal demands for holiness are far higher.

The spiritual level is far more nuanced and depends on a living connection to the Spirit that simply isn’t possible on the human level of good Hebrew morality. Under the Laws, you have to run through a ritual to get a word from God on something specific. In Christ, we generally get it directly without all the rigmarole. It does take some time to learn and get used to, but it’s the norm for those operating in the Spirit.

Let’s pick on an obvious example. Under the Law Covenants, you are justified in resisting violently any attack on your family. You may suffer certain tactical limitations, but the general rule is: If you feel moved to try it, do so. It’s your duty and you should expect God’s moral fabric to support it. Yes, that includes resisting Child Protective Services and shooting cops who would kidnap your children. Again, it might be tough to pull off, but there’s no moral prohibition. As a general principle, we know God says He doesn’t support any agency interfering with the family, and any government that does is illegitimate in His eyes.

In the Spirit, you’ll have a different set of considerations. First, you’ll be more likely to know beforehand if there is likely to be any trouble. The entire context of spiritual operation raises your level of awareness to a higher plane, directly or in the company of other spiritual folk. You’ll also have that element of faith not quite possible under the Law. People under the Law do trust God, but the trust is pre-programmed, as it were. In the Spirit, you get a live connection and you’ll be told where to invest your faith against human odds. It’s never against the Laws, but sometimes requires a different action than mere Laws suggest. You are more likely to avoid trouble by making adjustments in faith that someone under the Laws would never think about.

What rips most of us apart is the confusion of having both of those running through our heads at the same time. Western minds revolt at quantum parallel reasoning. Having a firm grip on biblical morality and on spiritual operations can make you feel of two minds. Both are morally correct, but the spiritual level is obviously preferred. Still, you’ll find yourself sometimes in the grip of some strong impulses that are merely a matter of Laws. Nor is this a matter of success on the human level. The Laws bring optimal human life. Operating in the Spirit can end your life more quickly, but if so, you should welcome the call Home, something missing from the Laws. Spiritual guided minds pretty much stand ready to die any time; with a little work, they stand ready for just about anything short of death.

It was a tall order for Gentiles becoming Christians. They became aware of the Spirit Realm first, then had to go back and learn the morality. The Laws formed a repository of examples which they were to abstract on the spiritual-mystical plane of thought — “rightly dividing” what was their Bible then, the Old Testament. They still had a lot moral habits of mind to change, with a lot of consequent changes in lifestyle. But they were free to discover the ultimate gift of God for living on this earth in their current context. It’s an even taller order for we who are born two millennia later in the West.

Everything in our society militates against both Laws and Spirit.

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Biblical Morality: Chapter 12

Posted on August 15, 2013 by ehurst

Tribal Economy

You cannot gain economic efficiency without denying God.

There are lots of good moral reasons for doing things that make no economic sense. Living the otherworldly tribal life in this world doesn’t mean we don’t understand economics as the world sees things, any more than we could forget all the evil we leave behind to walk in God’s moral justice. We are wise as serpents and harmless as doves. We know how predation works, but we aren’t predators.

In the Bible, the fundamental economic unit is the family. The family first seeks God’s face and His justice to receive His promises. While the common Hebrew term is shalom to describe family and social stability, it’s easy to explain to Western minds how that can mean so much more. It refers to a reasonable level of prosperity for food, clothing and shelter. It also implies health, with protection from diseases and other natural threats. Finally, there is frequent mention of protection from human threats.

As we know, these promises were never absolute in the Western intellectual sense. There will always be times when God will afflict humanity broadly with various natural disasters, plagues, and provoking one or another political entity to rise up for whatever reason. Rather, in the midst of all this, God promised to let us find as much peace as anyone is going to get in this world. If your family is killed in a tsunami, that’s your ticket home. Celebrate! If wild animals or wildfires overrun your area, God will help you face that threat. And so it goes with everything that threatens life and comfort on this earth. Even when it seems God has done nothing in particular to protect you, that otherworldly viewpoint reminds you it’s not that important in the first place.

However, quite frequently God picks your holy household out of the mess and offers divine protection. Maybe it will seem random to human eyes, and maybe you’ll never convince them, but you will know the difference. We keep in mind when so-called acts of God strike people anywhere at any time, it’s not that He’s picking on anyone, but we all deserve it and worse. Any deliverance from the default human fate is purely His mercy.

So it is when we engage in economic activity. We aren’t actually worried about success as humans measure things. We worry about obeying God’s laws and clinging to His moral fabric. There is only one reason we bother in the first place: Human life requires a certain minimum of goods and services. If God intends to take our lives, then failure is okay. If He intends to keep us around awhile for His glory, then we had better not be lazy and ignore His leading to do something useful. No loaf for the loafer; everyone does his share in the family calling. But the whole point is not the stuff, but the people.

A fundamental moral disaster in the West is distancing economics from genuine human need. The vile merchant culture makes their profit the one great god of all things. The Bible culture makes people the center of all such activity. Depersonalizing business is anathema. Contracts are Satan’s perversion of covenants. The latter bind persons together; the former bind performance and goods. The focus is all wrong. Your business must of necessity always be a family under covenant, not a bunch of disembodied performances and a pile of goods. You can hire anybody you like, but you are obliged by God to treat them as distant cousins.

There is no place in God’s morals for the corporation. If you aren’t directly involved personally in running things, you should receive no profit. Indirect investment is forbidden unless it is a blood kin interest. That’s because you are investing in the person, not the business. The whole idea is not a cash profit, but a blessing to the people involved. Instead of slashing staff to raise profits, you hire as much kinfolk or covenant family as possible. The purpose is to spread the blessings of God around to family first. Piling up wealth without using it is poking a finger in God’s eye. Nobody says you have to give it away, but you have to use it as a tool for His glory.

In the meantime, you are most certainly serving the customer. You are giving love first, and receiving back some sales in response. It will always be the best you can offer at the price. Think in terms of the blessings of Joseph in Egypt: Everything he touched prospered because he worked in God’s justice. Everything he did was in the name of his God, intended to make Him look good.

Granted, there are some folks who can never be pleased. This brings us back to general obedience so that we can know God will answer our prayers for guidance. Don’t place prior restraints on the answers He might give, but expect Him to speak to your conscience. Nobody says you have be all super nice as is so popular in Western culture; you have to be honest and decent.

Capitalism is evil; it is a heartless desecration of the command from God to love your neighbor as yourself. Communism is just as bad, because it is just as materialistic. So it is with every other economic theory springing from mere human intelligence. God designed, built and authorized only one economic system: ANE feudalism, which is nothing like Western feudalism. It is the one best answer to meeting all the real needs of humans after the Fall. Every other system is a perversion from Hell.

We don’t serve Mammon.

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Spirit of Babylon Revisited

Posted on August 15, 2013 by ehurst

Mea culpa; I’ve been wrong on this issue.

I need to rewrite my stuff about Babylon as a symbol. What I had said was close. The problem I identified is bad enough, but it was not the core meaning of Babylon; it was a symptom. I said Babylon was: “Everything has a price, and that’s all that matters.” True enough, but not deep enough. Babylon is all about mass control.

The morality of control is the problem of dehumanizing. To humanize is to give maximum space to individuality. You matter; what drives you is as valid as whatever drives the next person. To the degree I have any power to influence human behavior on this earth, I persuade everyone to give room to everyone else. Not carte blanche; your freedom to swing your arms should end at my nose. The whole idea is nurturing, not confining; if you don’t learn to quit the wild arm swinging, you’ll provoke someone who can hit a lot harder than you. You are neither a demigod nor a slave. The means to restrain your careless behavior are the means to restraining worse behavior against you.

Human nature isn’t necessarily all bad, but is blind and in need of restraint. It’s okay if you crap in your drawers, but you should know it will eventually create painful blisters on your backside. At some point, I have to let you choose, but I can also choose not to let you sit in my office with more than a modicum of stink. We can discuss all day long what constitutes reasonable restraints on human behavior, but the notion that we need none is manifestly dangerous.

Babylon is the very extreme opposite of balance and reason on human restraint. It demands everyone be forced to serve someone else’s gods and dreams. Never mind what we are building with all that manpower and forced cooperation; it’s the “forced” part that is evil. Babylon imagines a high degree of forced participation offering the excuse that it’s in their best interest anyway. It’s attempting to usurp the place of God in seizing the reins of power; it is man at the pinnacle of his achievements against the Creator.

The counter to this is the proper shepherd feudalism of the ANE. The entire moral picture is grabbing as elder someone too sensible for vigorously enforcing conformity to anything in particular. The shepherd elder doesn’t want or need conformity; he needs peace and stability. Adam’s laziness is the bad manifestation of self-restraint. The shepherd wants only enough restraint to balance between individual freedom and protecting what is necessary for optimal existence. He’s a bigger threat to predators than to the sheep.

Particularly in the West do we see a pernicious preference for excessive restraint and uniformity. This is why Rome was called “Babylon” in the New Testament, because, while Rome was considerably more free than any Western country today, it was still too crushing in demanding conformity to things no government had any business demanding. It was the birth of Western dehumanization. It’s only gotten worse since then.

The business of everything having a price is simply the primacy of Mammon, a favorite human god from way back in time. Mammon represents the primacy of hedonism, in the sense of the means to buy all imaginable human comforts and self-indulgence. However, that is merely the motivation for most oppressive controls. Babylon is the symbol of that oppression itself, regardless of what the silly motivations may be.

Babylon is dehumanizing oppression.

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Quantum Reality

Posted on August 14, 2013 by ehurst

Maybe you’ve heard of quantum computing. Maybe you know it has to do with being able to process exponentially faster than current binary digital systems. It has to do with giving a computer the ability to do multiple tasks at once on the same data at the same time. It’s not multiple processors and hyperthreading; it’s multiple threads in the same operation at the same time on the same single processor, so to speak.

Honestly, I’m not an alien and I didn’t discover some alien intelligence, but that’s how my head works. When you look around you, virtually everyone will tend to reason in binary mode, a linear form of reasoning. A single idea has to process one step at a time and it can’t leave the thread until a decision is made. A thing can’t be yes and no at the same time. That’s a basic feature of Western Civilization. We don’t do parallel logic.

What most people don’t understand is that binary thinking is actually an innovation, a new form of philosophy dreamed up by the Greeks. Previous civilizations were not less intelligent and didn’t lack for wise and deeply reasoning philosophers, but they didn’t accept the limitations imposed by the likes of Aristotle. You’d be hard put to find it in more ancient literature, ANE philosophers were aware of binary thinking. It was pretty much what you got from poorly educated peasants, but those with an education didn’t suffer that so much. They might call someone on a false dichotomy, which is about as much proof as I can offer. However, there is a sense in which quantum reasoning was the norm until the Greeks came along. That is, parallel competing concepts and paradox were not confusing to other civilizations.

The future of computing is not some chaotic state of fuzzy logic, but simply not restricted to binary logic. Quantum computing means controlling and using these alternative states to amplify the process. The same goes with non-linear reasoning. It’s not chaotic and random; it’s quite orderly, but a system of order confusing to almost every Westerner. I’m quite comfortable with it, myself.

In the Hebrew intellectual background, someone like Solomon could look upon a particular situation in society. He could see how it would be wise for one fellow to aim at one thing, while for his brother wisdom means a competing aim. At the same time, he might realize both were wrong in different ways. He had no trouble realizing something could be good and bad at the same time, even on the same level. Sometimes competition is about the only right path for humans in their own contexts. There doesn’t have to be one right answer, and Solomon could have seen that all at once.

I’ve over-simplified, of course. The grasp of a divine moral principle does not necessarily end in neat and tidy answers for everyone at once. Reality itself is of the quantum flavor, not the binary. That’s why quantum computing will work, and it’s why Western Civilization will corrode from the inside. The West is hard wired in binary, and can’t adapt to running quantum logic. So as more and more people start to think along quantum reality lines, they’ll have to leave the West behind. It will be scrapped like today’s binary computers will be once quantum hardware becomes easily available.

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Personal PsyOps

Posted on August 14, 2013 by ehurst

Except as a war tactic, head games are sin.

It’s a broad general principle that attempting deception opens the door for demonic presence. It violates cosmic justice. However, just putting the Laws of God into any human language can itself be somewhat deceptive. All the more so within a Western cultural, because of the imaginary logical absolutes. But from a Hebrew frame of reference, we recognize that it’s pretty hard to use deception with an honest motive.

Pearls before swine is not a matter of denying the truth, but refusing to make truth a political football. It’s refusing to play games because you know that regardless what you say, it’s going to be used against you. It’s not about truth but refusing to engage someone serving Satan.

Denying your enemy intelligence is not a sin, of course. However, the biblical morality about warfare is flagrantly violated in just about every Western nation on the earth, most especially the US. Not a single war in American history was justified in God’s sight; every one of them reflected unreasonable and ungodly demands on our part. That is not to say the other combatants were any better, but we are guilty before God. Still, you don’t owe your enemy total access to your planning, and real tacticians know that playing too tightly with security details simply hampers your own troops.

The ultimate value under God’s Laws can be characterized as social stability. A critical element is trust. When you do things to weaken trust, you attack social stability and make openings for demons. The matter of honesty is an ingredient in trust, not a thing unto itself.

Another broad general principle is civility, a set of habits and customs that promote social stability. Truly civilized people are prepared to handle human foibles, not try to stamp them out. You can be stupid all you like as long as you don’t hurt someone else. In a civilized social setting, we don’t blabber everything passing through our heads, and we tend to ignore most people who do blabber. At most, we treat them as children who don’t quite understand. We don’t answer private questions unless there is a valid purpose for asking. Privacy generally covers things that aren’t anyone else’s business, because they have no valid interest. It doesn’t affect them. We develop various ways of handling outrageous conduct to minimize friction.

Secrecy is holding back things that do affect others. This is not legitimate unless the person affected is your enemy. You don’t do it to allies, friends and family. Head games and tormenting teasing are evil.

It’s not a question of rights; there’s no room for “rights” in biblical morality. All talk of rights is just Satanic leverage to control others unjustly. Whatever it is you’re trying to do by declaring various rights is best done some other way; God will not sponsor talk of rights.

The question is not destroying trust with people who have no choice but to trust you. If you like to play head games, it is totally justified that no one be friends with you. If you do it to subordinates, you might as well torture them, because it’s morally about the same thing. Nobody says you can’t use literary arts in sarcasm, open mocking, or deception as a means of entertainment. If you tell people you are doing card tricks, that’s entertainment, not lying. You are building trust because you’ve told them they’ll be fooled by your tricks. Fiction and acting for entertainment are also not lying. Kids pretending are not lying, nor is the fellow everyone knows to be a clown.

It’s when the audience has no choice but to play the victim that you are evil. It’s one thing if you can’t explain something because it’s obvious the other person can’t understand, or refuses to accept the real story (pigs and pearls again). There’s only so much you can do. The problem is too many people think PsyOps with their friends is entertainment, something that stokes their ego at the price of someone else’s peace.

Build social stability; don’t tear it down for your own personal gain.

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