Biblical Morality: Chapter 11

Posted on August 14, 2013 by ehurst

Gender Matters

One of Satan’s favorite lies is promoting the notion that the differences between male and female are merely biological.

“You will want to control your husband, but he will dominate you” (Genesis 3:16). This is a fair translation of the underlying concepts in the Hebrew original. The impulse for a woman to take control is as old as the Fall. We see it showing up in many ancient heathen idolatries, but in the West today the particular flavor comes from Germanic pagan mythology. Despite the male ability to dominate when it suits him, he remains too lazy to take up the shepherd’s staff. This sets up a never-ending conflict.

Women are not wired for external guard duty against the Devil. He gifts of spiritual management are internal, nurturing those still developing in whatever way they are yet immature. There is surely an overlap, but recognition and enforcement of boundaries is the male domain. Women have their own very powerful capabilities of squelching evil, but if we let women carry the burden of fighting all demons, we will be in very big trouble. Adam was derelict in doing that with Eve.

Males and females are not interchangeable. They cannot play the same role in the household and cannot do the various chores with equal facility. They cannot play the same roles in society and should never be expected to get interchangeable results. Our current social mythology upholds a collection of false dichotomies and Satan is laughing.

The Spirit of God mitigates the curse in Genesis 3, but Satan does all he can to keep us under its full authority. You can come back into the Garden of Eden in a sense if you are willing to be cleansed by the flaming sword of God’s revelation. The first step was that two shall become one flesh. That’s more than simply copulation or even setting up housekeeping together. It’s a full union of purpose and identity. It’s not a question of full surrender of each into the other, but a role-based surrender that makes peace with God’s revelation.

Each brings to the marriage strengths and weaknesses characteristic of their gender. Questions of taste and intelligence are immaterial to the point here. Men are flexible on certain things because it’s the place where women need to choose, and vice versa. There are variations but the only place where a woman can morally exercise strength is against folks outside the household and with her children. The man should be a threat to anyone who transgresses his mission calling. He is her mission or she has no business marrying. She does no shaping and fixing of his flaws unless she understands how a woman accomplishes such things. Whatever she does must build him up, not tear him down. He holds the final say in all things because his is the guard against moral threats, not so he can indulge his whims.

There are plenty of other sources covering all the mechanics, but the point is that Western society is about as perverted as it gets on the issues of sexual identity and romance. The most asinine thing anyone can do is marry outside their own religion, in the sense of letting their fleshly inclinations and human resources lead in the choice. If a Christian builds a bond with someone who isn’t a believer, he or she has surrendered the biggest part of life to Satan. It matters little what the other professes with their mouth if nothing in their behavior backs it up with a powerful moral inclination. We rightly despair of things going well by marrying anyone who has not abandoned Western moral mythology in favor of what the Bible actually teaches.

There is a broad moral principle at work here. Abraham refused the gift of the burial cave from Ephron because it would place Abraham under feudal obligation to acknowledge Ephron’s Hittite gods. The Mosaic Covenant forbade a marriage bond with anyone who didn’t embrace the covenant. The business of not eating with Gentiles was not rudeness and was no conflict with the command to feed the hungry, but it was to avoid non-kosher food and to avoid a meal in the name of pagan gods. Further, sharing food was tantamount to declaring a peace treaty. It makes a lot of difference who takes the role of sponsor, or if it is ceremonially equal. It could not be a simple social occasion when sponsored by someone outside the covenant. This was moderated for any Gentile who embraced the Covenant of Noah, of course. Solomon learned the hard way with a huge investment loss when he went into business with Hiram of Tyre – you cannot bind yourself in a covenant, implicit or otherwise, to someone if it means moral entanglements. This is what Paul meant by warning we should not be unequally yoked with non-believers in marriage. That was one implication of the wider warning from God.

However, we often find ourselves called by Christ after a human marriage. Sometimes we discover our spouse was terribly phony, or worse, totally self-deceived. Moses granted divorce on terms far stricter than was common in other ancient nations. Jesus explained even that wasn’t really a high enough standard, and the Apostles confirmed it. But the New Testament isn’t about laws on human terms, but moral principles that transcend human intelligence. Divorce is not forbidden in all cases, but approaching the question from any part of a Western background guarantees a sinful answer. The question comes down to what God requires of you personally in your situation.

Human desire is a flimsy basis for choosing a life partner or leaving one, but Satan trembles when people choose on the basis of moral wisdom.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Biblical Morality: Chapter 11

The Psychology of Hearing from God

Posted on August 13, 2013 by ehurst

Let’s keep this brief; you can ask for individual clarifications as needed. This assumes a familiarity with psychology, religion, philosophy, etc. I can only explain this as I experience it, so your mileage may vary, but I’ll try to connect it with widely known concepts.

First, you have to understand the concept I call Two Realms. The universe is human space, but is merely a confined bubble within the larger Creation. Our plane of existence is constrained by time-space considerations that don’t apply outside of it. What we have is lesser and lower in the broadest sense than the other realm. What’s outside our universe is truly outside, in the sense we can have some limited awareness of it, but nothing in our human capabilities can ever really understand it. We might get some indications how we can relate to it, but that’s the limit. Whatever and whoever is there can easily invade this space, but we cannot cross over to that other side unless we die. That other realm I call the Spirit Realm.

Second, you have to understand that humanity is born with a faculty to connect with that other, higher plane of existence, but by default does not. While it’s plain to see some humans have a spiritual awareness, it would appear most do not. At any rate, the level of awareness is certainly not equally distributed across humanity. A part of us can therefore belong to that higher realm before we leave this one, so the difficulty is how to reduce the internal barriers between our spirit faculty and the rest of our being. We aren’t born knowing how to exercise a spiritual understanding, and a spiritual awakening is only the beginning. The brain has to be trained to cooperate and we can rest assured the intellect is not happy with subordination.

Our working model posits a human body. We can infer a soul within that body, divided into three functional elements: intellect, emotions and will. The emotions are the primary link with the body, along with the senses. If you could imagine a recording track of senses and emotions, all the senses together are a considerably smaller portion of the track than the emotions. Our memories of events are mostly emotion. The intellect is what makes conscious sense of it all; it’s the seat of reasoning and logic, among other things. The will is harder to explain because it’s rather foreign to Western traditions, but it is separate from the mind in that some part of us decides things, sometimes contrary to our minds or emotions, or mixtures of both, etc.

In our working model, the will is the link to the spirit, if the spirit is active at all. To the degree having a spirit makes any difference in the human routine of operations, it will work through the will, and the intellect is incapable of receiving direct communication from the spirit. I won’t tell you that God can’t speak to your intellect, but that it is exceedingly rare. Don’t count on it happening; the normative model is the spirit placing non-intellectual impressions in the will, and the mind attempting to make sense of it via the conscience. We could say the conscience is the mind’s interface with the will, but that the conscience is more variable than what takes place in the spirit. The will operates from convictions, a word for something that escapes intellectual definition, but tends to be uncompromising in what it says.

A fellow without a spiritual awareness as an anchor will find a mixture of things in his will occupying the space and function of convictions. It amounts to whatever his real commitments are, conscious or otherwise. It’s this stuff that hangs around after a spiritual awakening and has to be cleared away like rubble. Either way, the mind can attempt to override the convictions, as do the emotions. Our biggest problem as Christians is a huge confusion between emotion and spirit, because our cultural biases are a serious massive counter to genuine spiritual operations.

So you can bash your conscience around and it will become wounded and weak enough to quit working too well. This means you’ll never quite understand why you do the things you do. Or you can cooperate with your conscience, hopefully with the realization that the conscience itself has to learn. What the conscience says today in a certain context might not be the same thing it says tomorrow, because it is learning how to read the convictions. We could properly imagine the convictions as some wordless drive, carved into the foundation of our very being, and the best we can hope for is clarity in reading what’s there. If the convictions work at all, they are written by the hand of God, so to speak.

With this much given, we see the task as teaching the mind to trust and obey in terms of organizing and implementing those ineffable messages from the convictions. The mental frame of reference itself is adjusted from time to time, consciously so. You’re hoping you can teach your mind to stay out of the way so that the will is not hindered from doing what it naturally does when the spirit rules, because your spirit is presumed to be in communion with God’s Spirit. You are too small to have all of Him, but you get enough to do what makes your life worth living in the first place. What you have is not universal, though at times it might surely seem so.

Some of the things trickling through my conscience are things I know God wants for me alone. It’s often little more than a matter of adjusting my perception. It’s rather like allowing some external authority to organize and label the books in the library. It’s only my books and my library, and it’s not likely to be all that useful to you. It does have a lot to do with what I write, say and do, but it’s more routine administrative traffic. This is the sort of stuff that tells my mind what to expect from God on a routine level.

On another level I sometimes receive a pretty forceful command to commit to something. That would be on the order of my calling to pastoral ministry, being a writer, or even my serious efforts at fitness. It orders big chunks of my life. The level of communication across my conscience is much more forceful, a firm imperative I would deny at the peril of my personal sanity, my sense of peace. If my mind resists these things, the result is some serious discord, perhaps mostly on the level of neurosis. This is my divine duty, and I had better get to it. I have long ago learned I don’t have to succeed by any human standard, but I have to engage the task persistently as understood at the time, expecting future refinements.

On rare occasions, something will tumble out of the interface that is too big for my conscience to process easily. It requires some serious quiet time, contemplation and concerted focus of resources trying to digest it. It’s usually very moving, causing the body to squirm and tremble with how powerful it is. This is a serious invasion from Heaven, as it were. So far, it’s not something that comes in my dreams, but always in my waking moments. While I might refer to it as a “vision,” that isn’t my favorite word for it. It’s a wordless impression that writes itself on my awareness in huge letters and bold relief. Resisting it would result in serious psychosis. This thing drives me near the territory of death simply because it contains a burning core of eternity, that other realm. These items are prophecies.

It’s not as if I can’t prophesy on lesser impulses. An awful lot of Old Testament prophecy was simply restating the obvious in terms of what everyone could have and should have known from the current revelation of God. This is rather like my book, “Biblical Morality” — a perception of the divine order woven into Creation itself, a sort of cosmic truth and justice. The awakened spirit can read that moral order that is invisible to other human faculties, and it’s pretty obvious that a certain course of conduct will result in certain fairly automated responses from God’s character simply built into Creation. Just about anyone with some inclination can be a prophet of that sort. It simply requires some training not so terribly different from what modern lawyers get; you are learning a body of understanding tied to a moral orientation. However, if you aren’t already committed to that moral structure, you’ll never understand it very well.

On that level, if you ask me a question, I can come to a conclusion solid enough to share without fear of besmirching God. Sometimes I sense a need to respond to something someone else says or writes, or some event, and sometimes it just seems like there’s something needs to be said. These are all based on my calling, and more than merely my opinion as a man. When I don’t sense that firmness, I’ll say it’s my opinion. If that higher substance is there, I’ll tell you I know what God requires of me to say. I never pretend what God tells me applies to you on this level.

On top of this more routine understanding of what makes God happy or angry, the Lord also has his divine whims. He takes a personal notice in the sense of a grand potentate wishing to make double sure something works to suit him. Some prophecies are highly specific in that sense. I’ve only had two items on that level. (1) If US forces attack Iran, God will destroy the troops and equipment we use for that. The agency of that destruction is not part of the message. (2) The US is being destroyed. That much would happen in the normal routine of cosmic moral justice, as governments can only get just so stupid before things simply quit working. In this case, instead of using a foreign invader to humble and oppress, it is our government God is using to destroy the nation and oppress. It has become a defacto foreign invader, and we are supposed to hunker down and ride it out. Those who actively resist, for whatever reason, will fall under God’s particular attention for punishment.

Everything else I claim is a message from God is more of that routine nature.

Posted in religion | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Biblical Morality: Chapter 10

Posted on August 13, 2013 by ehurst

Resisting Sin

“You have not yet resisted to the point of bloodshed in your struggle against sin,” said the writer of Hebrews (12:4).

You are the battlefield. Spiritual warfare takes place inside you. There will always be repercussions external to you, but the struggle is within. Resistance to your own temptations comes at the price of blood, though sometimes only figuratively. You shouldn’t hesitate even when it also means others may shed blood.

Fallen mankind doesn’t hesitate to externalize the costs of self-indulgence at every chance. The sin is in the self-indulgence, not doing things that affect others. It’s virtually impossible to do anything that doesn’t somehow touch another life. Of course, the writer of Hebrews used the plural “you” because his readers were already at some risk of harassment from the Roman government as a community of faith. What one did as a member of the group affected everyone in the group sooner or later.

Our world seeks excuses to condemn us. Lumping us together under the actions of anyone who failed to resist sin is a favorite tactic. We should never expect the world to understand divine morality, much less how we interrelate. The conflict between our higher reality and human fallen nature is apparent to us internally, as well as how we deal with each other. How can it not be worse when we start bouncing it off those spiritually dead? We hold one expectation for ourselves internally, a different but similar expectation for other believers, but something entirely different with the outside world.

Jesus knew His actions would result in the Cross. His experience in the Garden of Gethsemane made it obvious the human element was horrific, but He was resolute of spirit. Arguing with God over the worldly consequences for divine obedience is a sin. He is God and is accountable to His own character, as it were, but not to our conceptions of that character or our ideas about justice. The airy-fairy mythology of sacred human rights does more to destroy our gospel witness than almost any other single problem with Christian faith in our times. God did not sponsor our Western mythology of human rights; it was a lie of Satan from the very start.

The mental frame of reference for understanding the conflict between God’s justice and human sin is that of the Bible. We seek to understand how God tends to act. It’s not as if we are going to understand all He does. We seek to eliminate the confusion caused by an entire civilization that is hostile to His truth. Ancient civilizations were far less confused about God’s divine character; His whims were less perplexing to them in part because they were closer in time and space to His revelation. In our minds, we should separate between the routine operations of His character pre-programmed into Creation versus His sovereign whims arising from His personal involvement. We could eventually struggle to some approximation of the latter, but the former is a fundamental requirement of all humanity.

We suffer far too much from confusion about the programming. We should expect the world to ignore the whole thing, but we have no excuse. Any current conflicts that bring Christian bloodshed are almost entirely the result of that confusion on our part, not walking where the routine protection of God can aid us in this world. Western Christians fail to understand that divine routine individually. It affects all our actions together as the family of God, and it makes the world a far worse place than it has to be. If we could simply conquer the demons in our own souls, God’s moral principle automatically makes things better for us. If we could build that same understanding in a faith community, the leverage against evil is geometrically expanded. It works every time automatically, and we have seen God add a generous helping of His personal support with miracles not written into the routine.

God sponsors His own revelation with lavish investment.

But we have to start where we are. Today you will confront evil. As you weave more of your life into the moral fabric of the universe, you will face resistance. The Devil prefers to keep you in his service, and will surely notice when assets are slipping from his fingers. However, his only real leverage is other people working on your feelings. Most of it is easily defeated when you simply apply the otherworldly focus of letting a lot of things go as inconsequential. What happens when an evil government reaches out to take your children into custody?

On the one hand, God’s Word bluntly states no civil authority can justify taking any child from any family ever, much less the child of a Christian family. On the other hand, it has happened many times and will continue to happen. What is God going to do about that? Can you somehow compel Him to honor that principle of His revealed laws? Can you pray down His wrath in the moment of your confrontation with the armed thugs of the state?

Western cultural Christianity is entirely confused about this. We can’t imagine Abraham’s choice to sacrifice Isaac because our intellectual prejudices won’t accept the notion God could propose such a test. Sorry, but God doesn’t fit into your Aristotelian box. If you close yourself off from His prerogatives, you exclude yourself from His blessings. You can’t even begin to understand what is right and wrong in any situation. Abraham reckoned God could restore life to Isaac. Can He bring your children back from Child Welfare custody? We can’t begin to untangle this horror until we make room for God’s routine principles. If you are obtuse, it leaves you in an entirely random frame of mind for His divine whims. He might bring them back, but you would have no solid faith on which to stand when you ask for it.

We can point out how, under the Law of Noah, you would be authorized to resist a custody battle with violent force. It might be unwise, but it would not be contrary to God’s routine justice. It’s one thing to understand how Noah’s Covenant binds human civil governments; we already have a huge problem with that in Western Christianity. It’s another thing to explain how your personal faith interaction with God can guide you in very specific ways in the heat of such a terrifying moment. By our failure to understand His moral character through our Western blindness, we make an individual understanding far more random that it has to be. The randomness is not on God’s end; it’s on your end. If your mind is untrained in the ways of holiness, your convictions have little enough to work with, and your mind will be confused by the messages. Your conscience will be a mess. On top of that, you will struggle with God’s personal involvement.

You should be morally prepared for the full range of response. Maybe it’s okay to tearfully wave your children goodbye. It’s certainly righteous to flee civil enforcement, but you’d better be as worldly wise as possible about any such action before you consider it. God can guide you that way if you are prepared with a proper moral understanding. A more strenuous resistance requires even more preparation. Surely you realize any resistance to any police activity is a virtual death warrant these days. That’s not a reason to hesitate, but you must consider that resisting sin unto the shedding of blood might not be your own blood until later in the game. You might not get divine guidance until the moment itself springs on you, but if you aren’t fully attuned to the divine order as revealed in the Bible, your emotions will be in riot mode you’ll struggle with a vast layer of confusion that isn’t necessary.

All of us together as God’s people are not His enforcement arm on the earth among men. The moment we lay our hands to civil government, we are serving Satan. We are God’s enforcement arms in the Spirit Realm internally, individually and within the limits of our roles with each other. That is the limits of our spiritual authority in this realm of existence. Only when men stray into the domain of authority God has given us can we even consider any action against their sin. We dare not act with force on the basis of some imaginary human principles of right and wrong. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but Satan and his domain.

You cannot resist the Devil if you don’t understand his authority and constraints.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Biblical Morality: Chapter 10

DIY Religion 1

Posted on August 12, 2013 by ehurst

This is an open source project. This will probably turn into a book, but it’s not the kind of thing where I have a full-blown image running around in my head. It would be really nice if I could get some comments as we go along.

Religion is a human response to spiritual apprehension. It is rightly the effort of the flesh to answer the calling of something far higher. We call it religion when it becomes organized enough to form a regular effort, something which at least seems consistent on the human level. It includes things like symbolic rituals and some form of instruction (as a means to advancement from where you are to where you want to be). If it becomes something shared between two or more folks, we could call it “organized religion” — the qualifier indicates it’s not just one person working on their own. What most people mean when they talk about “religion” is “institutional religion,” which is a distinct political entity with a power structure that reflects social expectations. Most people imagine institutional religion is supposed to affect society, but that’s seldom the case. It almost invariably works the other way. This is the sort of religion justly decried by folks who see it used to oppress.

On purely human terms, major changes in human life come with democratization. We might call those changes “advances,” but that’s not always justified. Mostly they are changes that offer people a wider choice in certain things, and that’s typically not so bad, but it doesn’t mean everyone is going to make good from it. We can discuss how, for example, eating meat on a regular basis was democratized late in the Middle Ages, and how it changed the life of peasants. What you make of it depends on how you view eating meat, but we cannot ignore the radical change it offered to folks who seldom saw it on their table for several generations.

So it was with the printing press, voting, transportation, etc. Democratized technology is a lot easier to discuss, but democratized choices in human social behavior is a lot harder to trace out. More challenging is that a lot of physical changes have large overlapping social changes, which is rather the whole point. When people have more choices of any sort at all, it both complicates life and makes it generally more pleasant. It should seem rather odd to us that religion has always been one of the most tightly controlled items in human awareness.

The logic, of course, was always some claimed mandate from whichever deity was being served. The social context always had a lot to do with it. The point for us right here and now is the relative democracy of so very many other things in life that brings our broad human awareness to the cusp of changing again. It’s only fitting and proper that this brings with it what was actually the most ancient freedom of all: freedom of religion. You’ll recognize that phrase was enshrined in the US Constitution, but it worked out rather poorly in the sense that it became freedom for leaders of institutional religion to keep their own flocks together as political pressure groups, however indirect that pressure may have been. You simply cannot separate religion from politics until you change the fundamental assumptions about what religion is supposed to do. As long as it is institutional in nature, it remains political.

Warning to the secularist: Just because you don’t organize into a recognized religious practice doesn’t mean you aren’t organized into a pressure group with a distinct political presence arising from a religious viewpoint. Rejecting the validity of all spiritual apprehension is a statement about spirituality in itself. The apprehension of a spiritual element to human existence is the default; the world will not permit you to rewrite that. Secularism cannot ever be the default. The burden is upon secularists to defend their innovation against the vast weight of ongoing human spiritual awareness from ancient times. You’ll notice religion hasn’t somehow died by your compelling logic, so regardless of the supposed purity of your reasoning, the human default is to be religious. To demand a change to that is a moral and religious position in itself.

From where I sit, it seems rather obvious we are on the cusp of another social revolution of sorts. Whether Western Civilization actually dies or not is immaterial; the humans under her care will be absorbed by a competing type of organizational principle of human existence — ubiquitous electronic networking. The democratization of the devices and services behind this is relentless and seems to touch a very real human longing, if not answer it outright. Once a person becomes fully adapted to the network as a primary social field of interaction, it affects everything else in their awareness. Thus, I refer to the Networked Civilization as an entirely different thing from Western Civilization, even though the former arises directly from the latter. Human awareness at large is morphing in a very significant way, and the very fact of how disruptive it is to all the previous power structures indicates a truly significant departure.

While the mere existence of communication does not a society make, the means of communication does give a particular essence to whatever society forms from the natural human tendency to associate. It’s nothing new to report that science has found a hard-wired neural function in the human constitution that shows us utterly dependent on some level of social interaction, and that losing that inherent sense of longing for human company is abnormal, even sickness. Denying we are fundamentally social creatures is comical in a pitiful way. But while we might have various restraints about doing so, the mere possibility of contacting any other human anywhere in human space in real time, and under virtually any circumstance in which we find ourselves, does make a radical difference in how we think. This is the ultimate democratization on the human plane.

We really need a new way to do religion. Not in the sense of destroying all the old structures currently in place; they’ll die on their own if such is their fate. Rather, it needs some effort to address how religion could and should answer a real human need from within this new and alien context. If everything humans do in other realms of endeavor can now be transferred through the Net in mere seconds to any other human anywhere, religion as a human endeavor will come along simply as a product of human nature.

True to the nature of this beast, there is absolutely no way to extend current religious power structures into the Network Age, any more than any other power structure. People will drag their religion along for a time, but it will offer diminishing returns on the costs. The scariest thing for those currently engaged in religious power structures is that their theology itself is inherently part of the religious expression, not fundamental to religion itself. When I suggest that Christian Systematic Theology is merely an artifact of human organization, not somehow divine in itself, people get really upset. This merely reflects the limitations of their Western biases, because they can’t imagine religion does not issue from theology. They conflate religion with their particular expression of religion. Theology is part and parcel to the power structure, folks. Remove one and the other goes with it. Witness the way religious institutions quickly dissolve when you soften the theological boundaries. All the labels persist with the facilities and the budget, but the money and people quickly disperse. You can drag networking into your church organization, but you can’t drag your church organization very far into the network before it ceases to exist.

So we are left with that spiritual apprehension and it needs a religion that is viable on the network. That’s where DIY religion comes into the picture.

Clarification: There is no attempt to make this distinctly Christian. This is whole thing is more an academic exercise on the human level. While recognizing the spiritual impulse behind religion, this is more about religion itself.

Posted in religion, social sciences | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Biblical Morality: Chapter 9

Posted on August 12, 2013 by ehurst

Divine Aplomb

We strive for moral intelligence.

If the Spirit Realm is your home, then you can afford to be exceedingly detached from this insane world. Not so much from people; with them, we seek to remain disentangled. That is, we offer warmth that is rooted in Christ without human dependence. There is a certain amount of emotional involvement, which is both a blessing and curse. The whole point of spiritual mysticism is finding ourselves so deeply engaged in God’s personal presence in our souls that we have a lot of energy left over to absorb some of the worst this world can concoct. You can’t turn off emotions; you devalue them.

They serve only as indicators, often in the most perverse and confusing ways. The mythology of controlling your emotions is an iron discipline of fools. What you can do is make sure they don’t control you. There is a long-term effort to develop a disengagement that insulates you from their restless fire and poisonous weakness. But early in your search for spiritual mastery over the flesh, emotions can help you detect things no other part of your being will tell you.

A strong emotional reaction, especially one that clearly causes a problem, is a clue to some hidden moral confusion. The stronger the reaction is, the more desperate your need to trace the wires back to the source.

Nobody has to tell you Satan loves to use those links. He can’t actually read your mind, but if there is any living entity operating within the time-space continuum capable of remembering every hint you have ever given of your weaknesses, it is Satan. He has plenty of demons and all the time in the world, because God confined him to our universe as part of the curse in Genesis. Satan can’t go home, so to speak, and he’s definitely not happy being stuck here. While his job really is a divine assignment, it’s not a pleasant one. He is God’s jailer, prosecutor, chief of police and lictor. He does not play by any human rules, but he is the source of every form of moral reasoning contrary to God’s revelation.

Satan is bound by God’s moral character as any other created being. If your desire is to walk holy before the Lord, if you pray with full sincerity for a better understanding and adherence to the moral laws of the universe, Satan loses his grip on you. He has us at birth by default, but only by our voluntary compliance does he keep us. He can only try to sucker you and distract you. That would be typically by using your emotions against you.

Satan uses people like weapons. They aren’t the enemy; Satan is. They don’t have to be consciously vile, though far too many are. Some of the most decent folks in the world are still spiritually dead and thus a potential threat. Some really fine Christian folks will let you down and have no idea why or what they did. You’ll fail yourself; recognize this as normal. This is reality. Divine cynicism is a moral gift. Don’t expect much and you’ll never be surprised by human failure.

Don’t confuse that cynicism with failure to uphold the moral imperatives, but as part of living them. It’s not that we quit trying, but we don’t need a faith in human achievement because that really doesn’t mean anything. Satan will twist everything he can get his hands on, and human achievement is one of his favorite distractions. We don’t seek the cold and logical dispassion of someone who doesn’t care. We want to develop the loving preparation for things going wrong on the human level and make room for God to work. This is what He says is the way to view things. Our confidence is in Him, not anything lesser. We confidently expect He’ll make us able to withstand all the sorrows and disappointments. Sometimes He’ll fix things up, but never assume it. He decides what brings Him glory.

When you are faced with someone else’s emotional breakdown, or rabid attack against you, withdraw if you can’t handle it. Not necessarily in the physical sense; that may not be possible. Rather, interpose the Cross as your emotional barrier to someone else’s meltdown. Nothing you face can be as bad as what Jesus faced on the Cross. This isn’t mere theology; this is moral reality. You should have already accepted your own nails and cross, so you can afford to absorb the worst crap this world can offer by refusing to own it. Your emotions will whine and complain; Adam will cry out as you nail him back to the Cross yet again. Have no mercy on your own flesh.

Don’t confuse that with neglecting your genuine physical needs as God’s steward of your human resources. Jesus said love your neighbor as yourself, placing your needs with theirs in the same basket. You can afford to take some shit from people who feel whatever all tied in knots, because your resources are infinite in Heaven. However, the wisdom of God working in your convictions tells you how to carry out the resource management. It ranges from killing the fool who threatens your family to watching them with total aplomb as they rant and rave against some imaginary disappointment. Decide what God wants you to do with what He has given you and the world be damned, as it already is.

Meanwhile, your primary weapon to fight Satan is that boundless love for his poor captive slaves. Again, it’s not some emotional warmth that is the focus, though you may manifest some of that. Love is your commitment to God’s message, typically by exerting some effort on behalf of the welfare of whoever is in front of you. If their emotions have taken control of their entire physical presence, you must keep yours away from the encounter. That’s love; that’s in their best interest. You can’t rescue a drowning swimmer until they stop struggling.

That requires you invest a certain ongoing awareness in the open doors in your soul where Satan and his demons have already been coming and going. They have gained access to your turf for any number of reasons, but you are the one who evicts them. That can mean cutting off relations with certain humans who are reliable servants of Satan. If you don’t have the power to stand unmoved in the face of their onslaught, seek God’s help in simply avoiding them. Seek His divine healing power to close that wound and deny access to the demons. Make them aliens. You can’t stop them from passing through your life, but you don’t have to let them maintain residence or exercise any authority.

Don’t be a rock of offense, but a layer of slate that isn’t harmed by heavy traffic.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Biblical Morality: Chapter 9

Biblical Morality Published

Posted on August 11, 2013 by ehurst

Biblical Morality cover Despite not having posted all the chapters here, I decided to push ahead and publish the book. You can get your copy here.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Biblical Morality Published

Biblical Morality: Chapter 8

Posted on August 11, 2013 by ehurst

In the Context

With our feet firmly planted in eternity, we live in the moment, in the context, but we do not deify the context.

Our divine Sheikh does not reside in this universe. He can reach into our world at His own whim, but His existence is outside our plane of existence. He grants us His Spirit, which makes us His children and citizens of that other realm. From that point on, a part of us actually belongs there. All our loyalties are His; He is our true Lord and Master. He is our true government. That His laws are different from those of other governments is the whole point of this book.

In theory, if you could live under a civil government willing to recognize the primacy of the extended family household in all internal matters, then God would bless that government merely on the principle of fulfilling His demands of all world governments. You see, that Covenant of the Rainbow back in Genesis 9 applies to all human activity, including human governments, until there can no longer be any rainbows. If any government obeys Noah’s Covenant, it is a godly government. That means the primary burden is on the family, which also has to obey Noah.

Not a single government in the world does that. They are all illegitimate in God’s eyes. He will tolerate them and use them according to His own inscrutable plans, but He won’t be their friend. In a certain sense, we owe no human government any loyalty at all. Our moral duty to civil government is tightly limited; it is more of a tactical issue. By the same token, we have no authority from God to agitate for any government to change. Political agitation may seem reasonable on the human level, but it’s immoral. Whatever government we encounter has to decide on its own accord, voluntarily and with a will, to obey God’s moral imperatives. We can speak His Word and denounce them publicly, but we do not agitate or get involved in politics. That is anathema.

You see, God has no plans to fix this world, and has permanently closed the door on working directly through any human government. There was only one effort along those lines and that government failed so completely we have no words to express it. God sent dozens of prophets to warn them. Finally He sent His very own Son, and they killed Him. Jesus’ death released God from His end of the covenant; He totally and completely fulfilled it. Since the Cross, God does not sponsor any human government. Again, He uses them, but the only applicable covenant is Noah. Meanwhile, there are concrete plans to end this universe and give us all a new world to live in; this one is disposable.

If we had any sense, we’d rather not be here. Once we realize our true identity and home is in Heaven, we are begging for a chance to go home as soon as possible. God has plans to use each of us here; we act out our role until He is pleased to complete our individual redemption and we depart. Our whole focus is otherworldly; if it isn’t, we are woefully confused.

As noted earlier, we really shouldn’t expect much here. Nor should we care. Our entire universe is just a temporary tool for a job, so we should count our possessions and resources, even our very lives, as expendable. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures on this earth.” There is nothing here worth fighting for except those few points at which God demands we expend some human effort to defend His interests according to what He has placed under our authority. Yes, that might even include violence, but such is not routine. We don’t even really expect to succeed, only to be faithful in trying. We might have a tough time appreciating pain and sorrow, but the prospect of physical death should still be precious to us.

The New Testament has some good advice about dealing with hopelessly lost human civil governments. Not the damned heresy about loving and embracing everything civil governments demand of us, but we do our best to fly under the radar. Try to avoid getting struck by the sword God grants human governments to keep human behavior under some semblance of control. Governments have a mandate to maintain social order, though few of them will do it very well. We don’t expect much and aren’t surprised by even the most hideous evil from government. That’s divine cynicism.

So while not exactly loyal to any human government, we aren’t here to contest their policies. Human government is background noise, a part of scenery against which we play out His divine glory. In our minds, God is in control of government as the conditions of our service. There will always come a point when you’ll resist and probably be punished because that’s the way it is. Paul didn’t always play nice with government officials; if he can manipulate and play tricks, on principle so can we. He played the Romans against the Jewish government.

Paul did that because his faith required it of him. Had he been in conflict with God’s plans, it wouldn’t have worked. At the minimum, Paul would have been under conviction about it. His clear conscience showed he was pretty sure it was God’s idea. Being arrested and turned over to Roman custody was God’s answer to his prayer to preach and teach in Rome. All the while, Rome was considered the Beast, Babylon, the most hideous human government up to that time. Knowing that didn’t prevent Paul making use of Roman policies for the gospel’s advantage. Paul wasn’t entirely honest with the Roman officials, but he knew what God required of him.

And don’t forget when Peter went along with custody only to be guilty of taking advantage of a miracle to escape from jail. That was resistance, an illegal act. Not active resistance with violence, but still willingly breaking the law of the land. God sprung him from jail, so what else could he do? His faith knew what to do. He went and hid from further arrest because God wasn’t finished with his life.

Most of the time, our mission requires we avoid notice and confrontation with government officials. We notice John the Baptist didn’t require penitent soldiers to desert their Roman military commanders; serve where you are. But unless government service is your individually called mission field, we have more important things to do than mess with government.

It would be misleading to think of ourselves as colonists from Heaven. God already owns everything. He doesn’t need us; He wants to use us, to include us in the blessings of living His divine order. We are roving recruiters; this world is not our home. We’re trying to give people a taste of Heaven by how we act, living God’s moral imperatives. Our witness for Heaven is not in our success, but in our growth, in our change from day to day. It’s not in what we produce, but how we reflect His glory. We are able to love those least deserving, to sacrifice our worldly goods, not blindly, but according to divine guidance that makes the most of it. We can’t trust human reckoning to understand how that works; we trust divine guidance in faith and commitment to allow us to see what God’s choices are for what He has given us. The rest of the world doesn’t recognize our divine authority, but we act on His behalf in the world He made, and which He plans to discard.

We’re just passing through.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Biblical Morality: Chapter 8

Job 2

Posted on August 10, 2013 by ehurst

The same scenario in the Spirit Realm comes around again, where God holds court with His angelic servants. Satan appears faithfully, but without faith. He suggests Job’s words of praise were a cheap attempt to bargain with God for nothing worse. The Hebrew words of Job’s praise include a reference to naked skin, and Satan uses a related term to mock him. We cannot identify in modern medical terms what malady struck Job, but it is clear the ancients considered it incurable. We get the picture of a man with a loathsome skin disease that weeps and wastes away while itching like fire. In later chapters we learn he has trouble eating and sleeping, and it seems to affect his joints, as well. Sitting in ashes is symbolic of social isolation. He is probably well away from human habitations, most likely sitting under a lone tree or a small tent awning on some higher point of ground.

It would be just as well he was alone, because there is little comfort from others. His wife displays a serious moral weakness, suggesting Job just die and get it over with. She seemed to think cursing God would would be fatal, which is a silly legalism. Job carefully answered without cursing her, saying only that she sounded like someone morally depraved. Job has no idea why God would allow all this suffering without a prophetic warning of sin, but accepts any suffering as God’s prerogative. We have a hard time comprehending the Ancient Near Eastern ethic of embracing joyfully the most severe whims of one’s feudal master, but this was proper protocol on Job’s part.

We are introduced to three peers of Job. Each man in his own right was a sheikh like Job. Eliphaz was from Teman, a place near Edom renowned for her sages. Bildad was descended from Shuah, Abraham’s son by Keturah. Zophar’s affiliation is lost to us; we guess it was another ancient East Bank community. The three would have been regarded as sage princes among their people. Upon sighting Job from a distance, they knew it was him, but not from his appearance. The visual change was shocking. Sitting quietly near him for seven days and nights was rather like a wake for the dead. For all their culture and wisdom, they knew there were no words of consolation possible.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Job 2

Biblical Morality: Chapter 7

Posted on August 10, 2013 by ehurst

Fighting Fate

Fate is a heathen concept.

In some pagan mythologies, particularly those on which the West was built, the universe doesn’t care. Even if we imagine there is a personal entity behind our unpleasant circumstances, it’s an uncaring entity. To our human consciousness, making gods in our human image, we can only imagine gods that have all the human failings. In Western mythology, masculine gods can’t be bothered to care about anything but their own whims. In His revelation, Jehovah is having none of that. We cannot apply our self-image to Him. We are made in His image, but we are flawed from the original design.

The entire situation is perplexing to humans. What men universally reject is that the perplexity itself is our own fault. The reason we are in this fix is because we insist on using reason, and God flatly says it’s not enough. Reason is simply not capable of handling the whole truth. The human intellect is limited, so choosing to force everything down into an intellectual frame of understanding squeezes all the essence of truth out of it. Intellect is not freedom; it is a prison. It’s better than brutish emotion and living by lower instinct, but it’s still not enough.

Faith is eminently unreasonable. Faith says God loves you because He says so; He defines what love means. His love often looks nothing like the love we learn from other humans, but that should teach us not to put that much trust in human capabilities. That includes learning not to trust our own capabilities. We have to trust His assertion that everything He does is in our best interest. We can get on board and get all the best we can have in this life, or we can fight and pretend we have it under our control. Faith does not trust human reasoning even at its best.

Most false accusations made against God and His revelation arise from people who demand an accountability from God, as if He were not actually God. They insist God must enter into their domain of control. Our best answer to them is, “You don’t understand.” We may even suggest they are determined not to understand, because they insist on having God on their terms. If you understand logic, you could call this a category error. The best way to handle someone who insists on debating it with you is to suggest they have the wrong epistemology, and until they accept the biblical epistemology, they can’t possibly understand the biblical message. (This assumes, of course, that you understand it yourself.) They’ll say that’s arrogant, but they are the ones arrogantly rejecting what God set forth as proper human reasoning. That itself is the essence of human fallen nature.

Western reasoning is inherently immoral. It lays down presuppositions that exclude God and His revelation a priori. To enter into a Western rational frame of discussion is to abandon truth before you start.

The area in which we exercise free will is to keep ourselves where God says is our best place. Struggling up out of the bondage of human reason, we find the definition remains intellectually imprecise, plus it’s a moving target. This is proper. As before, human reasoning is the servant, given by God to organize and implement obedience to His divine order. The starting point is that God is God and whatever He wants to do with us is all good and right, by definition. That we may find it unpleasant is immaterial to the whole question. The damnable nonsense of thinking that our comfort and pleasure matters is the biggest problem we have. Our reflex is to think that if God doesn’t care about our comfort, then He doesn’t care about us. That’s a lie from Hell; it will prevent you from taking full advantage of His freedom for you.

When you build on the foundation of complete surrender, only then do you stand in the place of discerning those things God wants you to change. Here’s what is so crazy in Western Christianity: We can teach this concept and everyone buys into the words, but cannot bring themselves to actually apply the concept. They can’t do like David, crawling into the tent he erected over the Ark of the Covenant in his palace courtyard. He crouched at the back, the posture and place of the lowest slave. He confessed being beneath notice. When Job was able to confess that, he stood tall against Satan. In the end, Job said it was fine with him if God wanted him to suffer in this life. Same story with Abraham sacrificing Isaac: The knew God would make it all good one way or another, and it really didn’t matter whether it made sense to them.

Our Western minds insist on confusing heaven and earth. Those two words are symbols in themselves. We are programmed to exclude the notion of a divine realm of existence outside of this universe. Even when we teach ourselves to believe in Heaven and Hell, we cannot seem to program our minds to work through the implications of that belief. That’s the difference between “head knowledge” and “heart knowledge.” Something deep inside our unconscious mental wiring will not allow us to take that path of reasoning. God said He could fix that, but we simply refuse to submit to the procedure. We want it to be something simple and quick like surgery; wake up and it’s pretty much done. God says it’s painful, long and slow, plus you have to put lots of effort into it. Losing that bad programming is what Paul called crucifying our “old man” — symbolized by Adam — and letting God resurrect in our souls His Son, the “new man.”

This is the difference between cheap “fire insurance” religion that comes with the logic of semi-Calvinism, versus the deep Hebrew mysticism that realizes a reborn spirit within us demands a total sea change of the mind itself. Nothing any human can do will change our eternal condition; we cannot breathe life into our own dead spirits. What we can do is allow that living spirit to rule our souls and command the intellect to abdicate its throne. While such language is familiar to most Western Christians, they still end up keeping their intellect on the throne because the entire fabric of the Western Christianity demands we not surrender our intellectual purity of theology for something impossible to define intellectually. We can’t claim no one ever gets there, but that the system itself hampers things. Churches are simply not trying hard enough to be different from the fallen world.

So we come to the point like Abraham when we have to be ready to sacrifice all our hopes and dreams for the future. We can’t bring ourselves to pull out the knife and prepare to cut. We can’t let God have that full control. We can’t imagine God making such a demand, so we simply exclude the right answer before we come to question. You can’t receive your life back as a gift from God until He has it all and we personally despair of any future.

When you can tell yourself reflexively that you deserve a short miserable life, a lingering painful death and eternity in Hell, and truly embrace that with all its implications, only then are you ready to occupy the Promised Land of the soul while still on this earth. That truth has to completely own you, and it’s on you to keep that alive and fresh in your mind.

That’s when you are ready to pick out the things in your life God wants you to fight. That’s when you understand what is messed up from injustice and disorder, and when you stand ready to ask the Father to tell you what He wants you to do about it. That’s when you are in the position to reach out with a healing touch to broken lives, because you won’t be silly enough to try fixing things God doesn’t want you involved in.

Morality requires that you get your head on straight and let God be God.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Biblical Morality: Chapter 7

Biblical Morality: Chapter 6

Posted on August 9, 2013 by ehurst

Limits of Power and Enforcement

You cannot separate loyalty to God from social stability.

The thread that ties together all biblical law regarding conduct with other humans has always been the necessity of maintaining social stability. This is the primary duty of man before God in this fallen world. The Scripture assumes you understand that starts with family integrity and stability. Your family was your society. It seems nearly impossible to get Westerners to understand that you cannot possibly obey God’s law fully without a tribal social structure. You cannot even understand biblical law without that underlying necessity. Family comes first; then we talk about how to behave as a society.

Because Western Civilization is inherently hostile to the family, we struggle to understand the death penalty for transgressing family unity. We see no problem with some government entity interfering in family business. It is impossible to overstate how wrong that is. This alone justifies God destroying the entire Western world and every human life within.

In God’s eyes, the family is your government, period. Human government was mandated by God in Genesis 9 because the fallen nature of mankind requires restraints. What most Westerners struggle to avoid is the necessity of that government restraint starting at home. The family elder was meant to be your shepherd. It was the family elder God commissioned through Noah to exercise the death penalty on murderers. Remember the warning about about men being inherently lazy when it comes to fighting sin? That figures into the passage in Genesis where God warns that there has to be some final awful penalty for the ultimate threat to social stability, and your own blood kin were supposed to carry out your execution for the crime of murder. The police are your family. It is flat out evil to pass the job off to strangers; it’s a cowardly act of defiance against God’s first Law Covenant.

Any civil government entity seeking to interfere in family business is damned. How many times do you need to read that? Anyone demanding a government that interferes with family business is also damned. Civil government is not permitted to deal with individuals if they are attached to a substantial household; civil government is required to work with the family as a single entity. Scripture regards this a self evident.

Civil laws about marriage and divorce are all contrary to God’s revelation. Laws about abortion are also evil. Having a society so horribly twisted that such things enter the picture is also begging for God’s wrath. God says all those things are the business of the extended family, and any external government is obliged to recognize the sanctity of such an arrangement. These issues are not a valid concern of any civil government. Period.

Such is God’s moral character. Naturally, we can’t pull that off under most Western governments. Jesus recognized that and so did the Apostles. They had the advantage that Rome scarcely cared about what Hebrew and Christian families did within their own boundaries.

However, Christian synagogues were regarded with varying levels of suspicion in part because the Jewish folks took deep offense at them, not Rome. Still, both kinds of synagogue followed the ancient pattern of considering themselves the only real kinfolks around. That is, your church was organized like an extended covenant family. Covenant obligations took precedence over blood kinship in God’s Laws, in that anyone authorized as head of family to participate in a covenant was obliging the family to fulfill it. Thus, the Covenant of Christ was considered more binding than any blood kinship. Your church was your real family according to God’s morality.

Things are a bit more complicated for us, since so very many of professing Christians are demanding things God calls “evil.” That is, Western Christians are easily the single loudest agitators demanding that the government destroy the family integrity. Somehow Satan has convinced a large number of Christians that the sword of evil men can somehow work God’s will, while the Christians can refuse to take responsibility for fixing what’s wrong. In God’s eyes, the people are the police, and a professional force is an occupying army of invaders. That God permits it has no bearing on the truth we are required to see.

Going back to that image of the shepherd with his limited authority and just those tools God has given him, it is upon us to rebuild what society ought to be within the limits of our authority. Sure, negotiate with the civil government if you can, but mostly it’s a matter of flying under the radar. Whatever isn’t in your hand is in God’s hands. Your commitment to His moral justice tends to bring His power to play in ways you might not expect. He may well move you far from where you planned to live, relieve you of worldly concerns you don’t need, and break lots of your personal plans and dreams.

That’s His prerogative.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Biblical Morality: Chapter 6