Friday Randomness

Posted on July 12, 2013 by ehurst

Responded to a computer ministry service call today. The Win7 box was suffering from three types of advertising malware, one of which hijacked some function in the Google Toolbar and caused intermittent Net access problems.

Do you know you can tell a lot about someone from what kind of malware they get on their computers? I assure you, the way the malware acts tells you all you need to know about someone’s surfing habits. This particular client had some generic drive-by installs. Some of the computers I work on are loaded with serious nasty stuff from surfing porn sites. Even video and music download sites have their own signature malware. But I mind my own business.

Honestly folks, use some common sense. The first rule of computer vice: Don’t run Windows on the Internet. At the very least, learn how to use virtual machines so you can delete the system that got trashed by malware and viruses. Then you can still keep your real system pretty clean, so long as you scan everything you download. VMWare is free, but each Windows virtual machine is still subject to licensing unless you know how to get around that issue.

Yes, I do know, but I don’t have room to post all the various tricks and details here on my blog. Most of them aren’t naughty tricks, just industry insider knowledge, taking advantage of what Windows and the big computer manufacturers already have set up. For Win7, it’s all about SLIC, certificates, the built-in utility called “slmgr” and generic manufacturer keys. Also, you can find basic generic retail ISO images provided by MS. They still require activation, and any cracking or hacking you do can be obtained separately. Try places like MyDigitalLife Forums. If you are restoring a system that came with Win7, this is all totally legit and is the only use I have for it.

As things get uglier with various governments using different tricks to control how we use the Net, it’s a good idea to decide soon just how important it is for you. If you gotta have the Net, it’s time to get serious about learning as much as you can. Ask me questions any time. It’s not like the world is coming to an end, but we shall all likely have to make some big adjustments soon.

I still get people asking me if I am somehow trying to prepare for Apocalypse or something — not at all. For example, my workouts at the gym are therapeutic, not aimed at developing or training for anything. Major body movements, not too many sets, high repetitions (12-20 per set), not too much rest time between exercises — this generally prevents arthritis from flaring up while maximizing whatever it is you already have. I’m big enough, thank you. I’m simply obeying what I feel certain is God’s command for me.

The late crop blackberries for this summer are now ripening and they are delicious. I have all the jam I need, but I still can’t resist stopping to pick a handful on my long bike rides. These days I have to use a fully upright position. My shoulders and elbows can’t take the pressure of riding head-down the way most serious cyclists do.

However, my human intuition says, to the degree we are likely to have trouble here in the US, it will be tied to financial and banking stuff. While there are any number of plans to provoke riots and implement martial law or other forms of oppression, I suspect the real pain and sorrow is tied to banking. A few insiders insist the coming January looks really nasty, but I can’t tell you what they know or don’t know.

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ACBM: Spoiler

Posted on July 11, 2013 by ehurst

I’ve decided to follow right behind the introduction with a spoiler, a sort of summary of where the whole thing is going.

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Spoiler

Maybe you don’t want to read all the stuff listed in this syllabus. Maybe you agree with what you have read so far and don’t need the supporting sources. Or perhaps you simply want a preparatory digest of where this whole thing is going. What follows is the spoiler, giving away the plot and ending of the story.

The Western view assumes, often without stating directly, that the entire universe is the full extent of all existence. With this is the assumption all reality is theoretically within reach of the human understanding. Not so much in the sense of knowing all things about it, but that humans can eventually know enough to make rational choices that are unlikely to fail the underlying intentions. Thus, humanity is fully capable of knowing, understanding, and rightly judging what is and what we can do with it. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, we humans can eventually fix everything if we simply try.

The Bible assumes Creation is far more extensive than this universe. This universe is but a temporary bubble, a small intrusion of sorts, into the greater ineffable reality. This universe as we know it is fundamentally false; it is under the Fall. It is inherently flawed and unworthy of preservation in that human sin pervades the whole thing. At some point ahead of us, this will all come to an end and in this way alone will human suffering end. Humanity itself is fatally flawed and incapable of understanding even the full extent of what is here, never mind what is beyond. However, mankind has the potential for connecting to what is beyond, a faculty which is far above the human intellect. The intellect does not easily surrender to the higher capacity, but actively fights it.

The difficulty is the Western view is deeply burned into human consciousness. Even when people understand intellectually the difference in cosmology and anthropology, the reflexive thoughts and expectations still operate on the assumption of the unitary universe. In terms of how this damns Christian religion, people keep expecting God to redeem human space, when He pointedly said this was not a priority. They keep trying to create an ideal “Kingdom of God” on this plain of existence, when it simply is not possible. Humans cannot possibly be perfected in any real sense, and our world cannot be fixed, and God promised He most certainly would not fix it. He intends to replace it, and that process is so utterly cataclysmic that we cannot possibly imagine it.

Scripture does offer an optimal existence. Something in how God made things still responds to His moral standards. Whatever “Truth” is possible for human understanding, it is defined as this moral fabric, which is a direct reflection God’s very personal character. It is utterly impossible to discern from mere human reason; it is only knowable by revelation. Further, the full implications of revelation cannot register in the mind, but in that higher faculty. In the human consciousness, revelation is but a shadowy indicator of ineffable truth. Human thought and communication can never be more than a shadowy reflection of some higher reality. Revelation took place historically within a series of covenants, contextual statements of how to live in pursuit of that optimal existence.

If there was a single fatal element in this false worldview of the West, we could probably point to the logical structure upon which the entire Western world is built. Even while Western wisdom cynically doubts humanity might ever actually rise to the standard, Westerners cling to some rational pursuit of objective truth that serves as a god in effect. Whatever good there is that we could have is contained entirely within this universe. Thus, most Christians imagine God as somehow constrained by reason, when He has bluntly stated in His revelation that reason is a poor substitute for moral truth. The Western mind imagines something impersonal and objective as the ideal. The biblical mind asserts there can be no objective truth, that all truth is merely a reflection of God’s Person.

He can remake the universe on the fly to suit His whims, and has been known to do so just to prove the point. Whatever it is we imagine we might someday know about the rules and laws of our physical existence, they will never fathom the full truth, because God seems to suspend those rules and laws of nature. If you imagine His activity as a suspension of the rules, an intrusion into a stable and active system, you would miss the point entirely. It is more the case He is forcing a broken system to conform to His higher rules and laws. So called “miracles” are simply a restoration of justice.

To summarize the differences in academic terms: Western logic is first analytical and the language is descriptive. Biblical logic is symbolic, with the meaning of the symbols rooted outside this universe. Biblical language is parabolic and indicative.

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Thinking Outside the Universe

Posted on July 10, 2013 by ehurst

I tend to think of our plane of existence as a bubble, but I’m sure you get the reference to “thinking outside the box.”

Again, this exercise assumes you are alert both intellectually and spiritually. Otherwise, it will not make much sense. Sure, if you grew up in a cultural tradition that tends to value mysticism, you might get it. Human wisdom begins with acknowledging there are things you’ll never understand. However, that is no excuse for resignation, but offers a challenge to the intellect to find its valid place in service to something far bigger.

The simplest example begins with linear thinking. Mysticism requires you know how to branch, to accept multiple conflicting answers. When it comes to the petty debates typical of religious people, you can often read between the lines: “Only one of us can be right, and I think it’s me.” The underlying assumption is that the issue of discussion is wholly contained in our universe, when the entire range of divine revelation is rooted outside it. Mysticism means you don’t take yourself too seriously, that you can be convicted firmly of the necessity of your choices even as you realize they might not work for someone else. You tend to view the topic as something no one really could possibly understand with their minds in the first place, and so conflicts between one answer or another does not negate either one. It doesn’t have to make sense on our level.

I’ve cited more than once my dissatisfaction with the manosphere, particularly the Christians who should know better: Spiritual values are a wholly different sexual marketplace than that of the flesh. I recognize and use the weakness of the flesh in secular Game to communicate the gospel message; it’s part of the human language. But it’s not the final truth to which I commit myself, and I don’t rely too much on what the fleshly approach can accomplish. The power of the Spirit can overcome the whole thing. The best woman or man that God could place in your life may or may not match all the points on the canonical list of traits. You’ve got to evaluate from that eternal perspective: What makes for a truly blessed marriage? So, for example, men with a truly spiritual frame of reference are likely to be deeply moved by the voice of Kelly Willard as she descants in this recording:

The quality of Kelly’s voice is about as feminine as it gets. It calls out to the manly spirit; it’s the sound of a real lady who is fully self-conscious and reveling in what it means to be a woman in spiritual terms. Not some untouchable saint, but someone whose voice invites you to come closer. You can conclude all that without ever seeing her face. She was pretty enough in her prime (a month older than me), but when you reach beyond the perspective of the flesh, a godly man wants what that voice is advertising.

What I find most disturbing in American Christianity is the shocking disconnect between the verbiage and the reflexes. My talk of otherworldly focus is not much of a problem for them, but they choke on the connotations. When I suggest we look forward to escaping this Vale of Sorrow, they nod and smile. When I go on to discuss the implications of that sentiment, I get some pretty nasty arguments.

When I say large church organizations with big budgets and a very active membership don’t necessarily signify God’s pleasure and presence in the particular church, it can get really ugly. In other words, they are still hung up entirely on the externals and whether the music moves their emotions. God simply must be there; who could imagine otherwise? They can’t envision how mankind could emulate that. Try any competitive reality show. Huge crowds in huge facilities with very moving performances, and sometimes frankly religious music and God-talk. They say nice things about what could be if people only tried, etc. So, talk to me about the church that was destroyed by “an act of God” or by arson and persecution because they didn’t have the proper permits. Talk to me about a spiritual commitment that needs none of the flash and cash to find a reason to keep doing the things Christ commanded.

Don’t talk to me about their theology; nobody has that perfectly right. Talk to me about the power to keep pushing when there is no earthly reason for it. Talk to me about the motivations and desires that make no reference to the lies from which this whole world is constituted. Who is the Richard Wurmbrand of our age?

Think outside the universe.

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We Got Issues

Posted on July 9, 2013 by ehurst

Issues-based politics, and its whore, issues-based religion, manifest one of the greatest sins of Western Civilization.

The Bible takes an organic approach. Issues are already settled because they don’t arise except as anomalies. Folks, the fundamental nature of government is exercising the authority to decide things that affect you because you aren’t living in isolation. Biblical Law permits anyone who rejects the system to flee and get outside the system. However, seeking to change the system under which everyone else lives could rightly get you killed. As previously noted, the key element in Biblical Law is always social stability achieved and maintained through adherence to God’s Justice.

Yes, it’s a closed loop in the sense God requires us to keep social stability as He defines it by the means He provides. His Law sometimes openly states what it is we must prevent, sometimes explains what detailed problem in human nature requires a particular form of restraint, but for the most part it simply commands a certain lifestyle. Only an idiot assumes that lifestyle is confined to the external details expressed under the Covenant of Moses. The ANE approach was to abstract from the particulars so you can understand fundamentals, with the expectation you’ll never really get it just perfect. The core of all this is a personal commitment to a real and living divine Person. It’s meant to be dynamic, not static.

While the words say, “Embrace His revelation,” the underlying meaning is, “Embrace your Creator.” Since that is beyond the capability of the human mind, His Person is revealed in the guise of His Laws. While society and technology drift along in seemingly random directions, the underlying truth of human failure and need, and the underlying demand for justice, remains eternally the same because it is not rooted in this universe. We don’t make adjustments to the underlying truth of what we are, nor what we need to live in this fallen world. Perception may change and we are warned endlessly that human weakness is always seeking any excuse to demand things it should not have.

Pick an issue. God has already said what He requires; raising it as some “new” issue and calling it “injustice” has no bearing on what God demands.

Something continually thrust in my face these days is the law and social expectations regarding homosexuals. No matter how I respond, someone is going to offended, because God’s Word tends to piss off most of humanity at any given time. Your argument is with Him, not me. I’m merely reporting what I have experienced in His Presence.

We have no basis in our Western democratic laws for making homosexual conduct illegal. The modern state has nothing to do with morality; it uses various flavors of moral philosophy as cynical propaganda to maintain however much control makes the government officials comfortable in any given context. There is no fundamental morality anywhere in the system. There is some shallow pretense of responding to the will of the people, but the actuality behind that seldom rises to such a standard. The real question is what the officials in power can get away with before the someone manages to kill them.

In other words, nothing in the modern state finds God’s favor. He’ll use it, but not because He likes it. It offers no reference at all to His revelation and various pronouncements about what is moral and just. People who grow up under the modern secular state cannot even comprehend God’s Justice without first divorcing themselves from their cultural and intellectual assumptions. Western Christians demanding the state make homosexual conduct illegal is an abomination to God; it is not what He commanded of His people. The modern secular state is inherently unjust and evil in God’s eyes from start to finish.

All of that has nothing to do with the unalterable assertion in God’s Law that homosexuality is sin. It will forever remain a symbol of rejecting God’s Justice, of rejecting His provisions for meeting very real human need. There is only one setting in which God will bless the enforcement against homosexual conduct, and that is in the tribal social structure. If your family-clan-tribe make no provision for preventing sexual perversion, they have poked God in the eye. It’s okay if they simply kick you out, but if they let you stay while you continue pursuing what the Bible clearly says is sexual perversion, they place themselves altogether under the same curse that applies to the perversion. If you refuse to take it outside the family circle, they must kill you or face God’s wrath.

That was the meaning of making it a capital crime under the Law of Moses. Within that particular social structure, where law enforcement, such as it was, took place under the active authority of the family ruling elder and his counselors, what the Covenant called “perverted sexual behavior” must be stopped. If the perpetrators won’t take it outside the realm of the family’s authority, they have chosen to die, because their perversion threatens God’s blessing and their social stability. God said that. Using any violent force to compel the family-clan-tribe to accept your perversion also makes it wholly just in His eyes to kill you and everyone working with you. There may be any number of reasons God won’t let His people do that, but in terms of His revealed justice, it is wholly just for the righteous to kill those who demand that the righteous engage in sin.

It is blasphemous to suggest God might have changed His mind about these things. His revelation prohibiting homosexual conduct is based on eternal principle, not a passing fashion and delusion of people who presumed falsely to speak for some tribal god. As a prophet of Jehovah, I warn anyone who adopts such filthy nonsense: God will not ignore your sin. You are rejecting Him, not some quaint archaic social custom. That has nothing to do with the question of secular state legislation. So long as I am stuck in these United States under this abominable secular state, I have to vote with those who say we should remove the legal barriers to gays. That’s because this whole nation is built on lies from Satan and the sooner it collapses under the weight of its vast sins before God, the better things will be in this world.

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ACBM: Forms of Logic

Posted on July 8, 2013 by ehurst

This is an exercise in drafting an explanation for the project.

People who have taken courses in philosophy are familiar with at least the Aristotelian expressions of logic and so forth. They may be familiar with latter Western attempts to step outside the Aristotelian boundaries, but it ends up sounding a lot like Science Fiction and has little in common with the thinking of the non-Western ancients. It’s not as if I’m suggesting the whole Western thing is invalid; I don’t dismiss it out of hand. I simply insist it cannot handle matters of faith, that the entire Western concept of faith is stained with Aristotelian assumptions.

Branching out into mysticism and Eastern forms of reasoning is exceedingly difficult for Westerners. There really isn’t much academic work on the topic by Westerners. Indeed, there’s a good bit more on the Far East (India and eastward) than on the Ancient Near East. I could explain Buddhism with a lot less work because it’s more familiar, but I’m not interested in that topic. I’m trying to help people understand the Bible and build their own faith and peace with Jehovah and to follow Christ. The objective is not a unity in knowledge and teaching, but a unity in commitment to something nearly impossible to explain in human terms.

If you have within you the power and sense of peace that drives you through persecution and such, then I can’t complain about your religion or philosophy much. We might not agree, and we might have limited fellowship, but I’m not going to pick at you for the differences. The limits of my duty are to let you know where I have to draw the line; there’s no intent to build an orthodoxy that applies to all humanity. If anything, I use my teaching as an example of how to gain that power and peace. Orthodoxy is for people who don’t have a genuine faith.

That’s not to say we don’t have a more or less objective standard of God’s Justice on this earth. That’s the meaning of my prophetic calling, an utter necessity of declaring what I see in His Laws and how they apply to our current context. That declaration is still offered as my best assessment. It’s never offered as what you must know, but comes closer to what you must do. The fundamental nature of prophecy is not being, doing or knowing, but commitment to a divine Person.

So if you have studied some of the classics of philosophy, you are probably aware I’m not using all the terms in exactly the same way as your philosophy professors. What I’m doing is adding extensions, using their words and meanings to indicate something more. There is so very little acquaintance with the more precise terminology that I avoid it because everyone would get lost. I’ve forgotten lots of it. You don’t have to know all that stuff to follow Christ. But for those who do know something about philosophy and logic, I might be able to help you to recognize the limits of that and how to go beyond those limits. So I extend the more commonly known terminology into a different context.

For example, I use the term “symbolic logic.” Technically, symbolic logic is logical argument written in mathematic notation. What if the math and science aren’t up to the task? What if I want to discuss something for which human intellect is incapable of confronting directly? I’m extending the meaning of the symbolic structure of logic into an area which doesn’t follow Aristotelian rules. Yeah, I’m using a parable of known logical analysis structure for something wholly outside that structure. Got that?

The fundamental point of symbolic logic is abstraction; I’m carrying the principle to a whole new level. I’m not the first person to do this, but I don’t have on hand the footnotes to show you were I learned it. Sorry about that; I’m not a footnotes kind of guy and this whole project is an attempt to reconstruct some of that background. So I’m trying to explain how I use abstraction for something outside the known universe.

This is the fundamental break I keep mentioning between the Bible and the Western world. Despite all the verbiage about planes of existence in Western literature, along with related terms, something in the Western mind fundamentally rejects the meaning behind the words. The intellectual reflex is to assume Aristotle’s unitary universe, which leaves you with agnosticism: It might be there, but we can’t talk about it. That’s not true. God talks about it in His revelation. It’s dicey with lots of mysterious verbiage and imagery, but an entire civilization had no trouble working with it. That is, they had no trouble in the sense it was possible to make use of it and make things happen in this realm of existence.

The key element was making peace with God. The human mind can be aware of that peace or the lack of it, but cannot hope to actually understand the thing itself. That’s because peace of that sort is rooted in a higher realm where God is, not here in our universe. Some element within our fallen humanity is designed to connect with that higher realm and it isn’t the intellect. The very nature of being fallen is letting the intellect rule the decisions of life in the first place.

So I talk about our universe being a temporary bubble, and outside this bubble is the real Reality. That’s a parable, and when I talk about it, the logic of how it all works is symbolic logic with the symbols defined outside this universe. All the operations and relationships between elements is not within human grasp, but we indicate things we cannot describe. That’s the substance of God’s revelation in the first place, along with every parable of Jesus. If your spirit is alive and connected to that higher realm, then some part of you recognizes all this stuff and you can use it. Without that awareness, the whole thing is mumbo-jumbo, gobbledygook, mysterious and generally baloney.

So maybe it makes sense to you, dear reader, and maybe not. I’m doing the best I know how to explain it.

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Relationship in Line with God

Posted on July 7, 2013 by ehurst

The title comes up in several searches that show up as hits on this blog. Quite a few hits, at that. A few even include my name, which is frankly surprising.

So in order to offer my best without writing a whole new articles, let me direct such searchers to my series, “Oracles of Marriage” (no longer available). If the issue is my take on what God says, then that’s the best start.

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Old Testament and Afterlife

Posted on July 7, 2013 by ehurst

There are a vast number of differing viewpoints; mine is just one more.

Please note, a huge portion of scholarship is hostile. That is, the scholar goes into the question assuming the worst and isn’t surprised to find evidence supporting their view. You won’t catch me playing games with that. I come to the same vast collection of evidence with a bias, too, but mine is conscious.

My bias rests on my spiritual experience; I am convinced I’ve met God Himself, that His Spirit lives in me. A part of my bias is utterly certain my intellectual organization of that belief is mine alone, and could be of only limited interest to others. When this world is done and we face God in His own higher reality, all our silly mental organizations will wash away like dust in the rain of His ineffable truth. What we gather here in our minds cannot be called “Truth” because this entire universe is temporary and false. This approach to understanding things comes from outside my intellect; my brain had to absorb and adjust it’s calculus of things to accommodate this.

My understanding of the Old Testament includes a recognition of my personal fallibility. It also assumes I don’t need to know the “absolute truth” of things because it simply doesn’t matter that much. I need only a working understanding, a way to organize my operations on this plane so that I can maintain a sense of peace with God in my spirit. I participate in scholarly discussion and try to play by their rules, but I don’t take things all that seriously. I’m not expecting to know all the details, because no one does. The experts know only what they have encountered and what they can make of it. As I work out how to approach my project (ACBM), the critical element for me is accountability to the reader for faithful execution of God’s calling on my life, not some pretense of grand expertise. I’m trying to offer enough substance to feed your spiritual search for your own answers so you can organize your mind to obey whatever the Spirit of God demands of you.

Some people don’t have that spiritual fire. Some imagine they do when they don’t. I can’t judge, but I cannot avoid an awareness of the difference it makes. Just so, not every figure in the Old Testament had a spiritual awareness. It’s a factor in what they said, and a factor we must consider when we evaluate the evidence to discern what folks might or might not have believed. To imagine there was a single orthodox theology is simply stupid, a form of intellectual dishonesty. Thus, we discern at least two threads of thinking in the Old Testament narrative; one was spiritual and one was pretty worldly. Complicating it more would be folks like Solomon, clearly aware on a spiritual level, yet unable to stay faithful as his life declined into increasing disobedience to God. What a man can know and what he can do are not the same.

On top of this, we run into a broad refusal of folks to understand the huge difference between how the West and East approach things, right down to the very meaning of language as a means of communication. Does it not seem funny how we realize modern people use figures of speech from mythology, but don’t allow biblical figures the same latitude? We often speak today of the world as flat, when almost no one actually believes that. Just so, a common mythology of expression pervaded the language of the Old Testament, especially in the word sheol. Some of the common folks literally believed that mythology; certain central figures clearly did not believe it. Such is the way of any real society anywhere and anytime in human history.

Finally, we have rather blunt statements in the New Testament that the revelation of God before Christ came in bits and pieces. It was not all truth all at once in some primordial event back near the Garden of Eden. It was as much as God felt mankind needed to know at the time. It was growing corpus of understanding that waxed and waned. If you are paying any attention at all, you realize God called Abraham out of Mesopotamia at a time when that revelation was very sorely occluded by a vast cloud of mythology. It was time to clear things up, and Abraham went to school. The eventual result was the calling of an entire nation as an incubator for revelation. The name “Israel” is more about a mission than about a people.

All of that so I can say this: Those in the Old Testament who were spiritually aware did, indeed, understand there was an afterlife. Their choice of words and figures of speech indicate they knew death was divided between those in the presence of God and those who were somewhere else. It’s not as if Christ burst on the scene with a totally new theology about death and Hell and Heaven. At the same time, only a fool would deny He used figures of speech that the Hebrew people learned from other cultures. In the Gospels, “paradise” in the mouth of Jesus was a word clearly borrowed from Persian. He borrowed it because the common Aramaic of His people didn’t offer a better word for what He was indicating. The truth was not new, nor was the idea itself.

The ancient Hebrew people were spooked by the idea of handling sacred things with negligence. The same goes with names for sacred things; it extends to things they might say about sacred things. There was precious little idle talk about the Spirit Realm because it was considered dangerous to blaspheme God. So we don’t find much discussion of what they might have believed about things above the Realm of the Flesh until much later. Even Jesus was careful to use parables because He bluntly said only a living spirit could handle that kind of truth in the first place. The truth was above human speech because it was above human intellect. The point in bothering to teach was to train the mind to serve the spirit, to subject the intellect to that higher realm as a faithful servant, not as the executive.

Jesus did not bring foreign ideas into Hebrew theology; He brought foreign language for ideas already there. The ideas may not have been fully formed in previous times, but the truth was always inherent in so much of revelation as God permitted. Men and women whose spirits were awakened to life would have recognized what Jesus said as true, even if He had gone backward in time to say it to them. He would have chosen different figures of speech, naturally, but the message itself would remain unchanged. He was God in the flesh; His message would have been consistent with everything coming before. The only inconsistency is in humans who try to process revelation into obedience.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. 😉

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Ecclesiastes 9

Posted on July 6, 2013 by ehurst

Most translations get this first verse wrong because the translators come at it with Western assumptions. Thus, you’ll find a lot of “implied” verbiage added that misses the point: The most important possession any man could ever have on this earth is a sense of peace with God. You cannot from human wisdom alone discern whether God favors someone because you cannot measure that sense of peace. Yet the person who has it never seems to care much about anything else.

Then Solomon goes on to explain what human wisdom alone concludes. Whether you are perceptibly righteous or evil doesn’t seem to affect the human end. Everyone dies sooner or later. Most of us understand from broad observation there aren’t that many really good people on the earth, but for what it’s worth, the manner and timing of death seems unconnected to righteousness. There is no way to account for this on the human level. Life seems so precious to those who cannot see beyond this realm of existence.

But even then, you at least understand that about the best anyone can hope for is finding peace with their lot in life. Solomon affirms that seeking a clear conscience is best, regardless where you find yourself. Once you die, all your chances for seeking a clear conscience are gone. He repeats the mythology about the grave so common in that part of the world, using it to emphasize the best of human wisdom. Virtually all Ancient Near Eastern cultures believed in an afterlife, but there was no way to say anything about it because it was outside this universe. Instead, they spoke in vague terms of how death leveled all humanity.

Solomon goes on to point out that human wisdom cannot account for any connection between virtue or talent with results, because of what seems clearly a random element of chance. He rattles off popular epigrams that point out virtuosity is no guarantee of success from a human standpoint. All the more so when we consider death.

Then again, wisdom can see well beyond such shallow concerns. Solomon tells the story of a city under attack that ignored wise counsel because it was offered by someone who didn’t care enough to scramble for human success. He was poor, so people ignored his wisdom. That makes no sense, either. That’s because the truly wise don’t waste their time with impressing other people. They’ll answer your questions gravely and quietly, not announcing it in the king’s court. He hints that political power is seldom matched with real talent for ruling, because wise people aren’t ambitious. Wise people aren’t looking for the same thing everyone else wants. But the ambitions of a fool can really ruin things for an awful lot of people.

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The Prophet’s Plan of Action

Posted on July 6, 2013 by ehurst

I get hounded a lot by people on the periphery of my online acquaintance. They aren’t into my prophetic ministry and many simply have no idea; in some cases they plainly ignore it. Instead, they persist in assuming I simply must support their latest crusade, or at least permit them to argue with me about it. Political agitation is not a viable plan of action. It is a sin against God as commonly practiced. I realize precious few living Americans will ever believe that, but I take it seriously.

For someone grounded in the revelation of God, there is no government on this earth pleasing to God. He may well choose to keep this or that one alive by His divine power for His inscrutable divine reasons and plans, but His Word is unequivocal in stating what it takes to please Him. Success by any human measure doesn’t mean shit. I have little interest in success in those terms; I am only interested in what God’s revelation says is Justice. For those of you with some inkling of philosophy, that means the standard is based outside this realm of existence, yet fully applies here. This is not logic; this is presupposition. I will not even discuss alternative starting points, except to point out the conflicting, frequently unacknowledged, presuppositions others bring to the discussion.

Here’s what I plan to do: Speak God’s Word as it applies to the current situation. God’s Word says He can steer the human heart. It’s above my level of existence to convince someone to accept my assertions. If I am faithful to His Spirit’s guidance, the results are His problem when I attempt to communicate His Truth. His Truth makes its own path in the human soul. It’s been proved over and over that backing someone into a logical corner has no effect on their future behavior unless something inside them actually embraces that change. That is human nature.

Thus, a certain form of libertarian instinct is God’s will, in the sense I don’t press my beliefs on others. I offer them as a precious gift, the most valuable treasure in my possession. Only God can make it valuable to you. The presentation might range all over the place, between raw and guttural, to artistic and lyrical, to poetic and obscure. You tell me what language I need to speak to get your ears and I’ll try it or I’ll find someone else who can. In the end, all I can really do is unveil myself to you. That means keeping to myself things that don’t apply to you, but showing you those things God tells me are pertinent is a necessity.

As for government entities, that’s another matter. I’ll annoy the crap out of them because every one of them is evil and the people involved need to know it. When it’s a mere question of you and your conduct in the wider world, God says I can take it easy on you. When you wield power and influence over others, you are a target of my most pointed prophetic statements. With genuine power comes a higher accountability to God, and He has called me to stand as one of His proxies on earth for calling others to that high accountability.

In case it doesn’t occur to you, that government surveillance business saves me a lot of work. Having government thugs watch me and read my blog is a benefit, so I tend to write things I know will trigger their algorithms, while trying to avoid actual persecution and prosecution.

I am possessed of a holy cynicism: From a human standpoint, I don’t expect them to change. God can and will change some few He has chosen for it. However, He already warned me that most will not listen. He warned me He intends to destroy the whole system and destroy a lot of people with it. He warned me He intends to break a lot of hearts because too many of His people refuse to understand He does not like the United States of America and never did. He always favored a few individuals in it, and has been quite patient on their account. However, that account is now empty and He’s ready to expose the lies, to end the confusion.

For those fools who somehow imagine some element of US government service is still more good than bad, you will be shocked when it comes apart. Already the folks in law enforcement are going nuts and acting with unspeakable evil against innocent people. Someday all too soon our government will turn the military loose against us. Are you stupid enough to imagine they won’t kill us? When that day comes, the vast majority of those wearing our military uniforms will most certainly kill you and your children for the slightest provocation, or even none. They are doing it without much concern in other countries; how hard do you think it would be to convinced them you and I have somehow become their enemies? No part of the US government system is trustworthy. If you are in it, pray for the earliest possible escape or make plans to face the retribution for refusing to do evil. Either way, stop worshiping Satan.

My expectations are that this whole thing will be destroyed in a bloody collapse. Now you see my plan of action: Telling the truth. Everything else is in God’s hands.

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Financial Cataclysm

Posted on July 5, 2013 by ehurst

The US government as we now experience it daily will soon end.

I can’t predict how much of a change is coming, but there is a sense in which it will collapse and be replaced. This will happen even if we all sit still and watch, because the collapse is built into the very structure of the system. I’m guessing a part of it will include finally discarding the pretense of the US Constitution, along with a bunch of other symbolic lies. Oddly, I rather suspect the flag will hang around at least awhile after the change, because in the American mythology, that is our primary national symbol, rather like other countries have powerless royalty and other figureheads of bygone eras.

But the core event of change will be financial, not political. That is, I strongly believe the key event here in the US will be the banks confiscating some portion of deposits. Perhaps it will be publicized as a form of default: “We lied. We don’t actually have your money safely stored, after all. It’s gone.” It’s hard to explain all the nitty-gritty details in common terms, especially when I have some measure of doubt about what I know in the first place. Rather, I’m only explaining what I see and what I make of it.

A key indicator of what it’s all about is something I can’t reference directly. Over the past decade, I’ve heard from several different sources that the whole business of NSA spying on citizens is about the money. That is, they’ve always been trying to track the business deals between foreign banks, corporations and governments. They have always spied on the money transfers and tried to capture the technology secrets so that our big industries could under-bid them. Another thing they’ve tried to do is gauge the underground economy. It’s not so much an interest in your cash dealings under the table as they want to know all such dealings together, and for the whole world. I doubt they have any expectation of controlling such exchanges, and aren’t likely to use your personal information unless you are deemed a threat by someone inside or connected to the spying network. Rather, the information as a broad understanding enables the corporate contractors participating in the spying to take full advantage of where the money is and take their cut. The NSA is all about money.

At the same time, an awful lot of folks working in the banking, financing and various other types of Wall Street stuff are doing something similar. They don’t have access to all the NSA’s detailed intercepts, but they do have access to all the transactions of the world. They run the systems that the NSA is tapping. Since before there was a US, there have been people who discovered that handling other people’s money and keeping it secure renders access to insider information on plans of politicians. A certain portion of the US Founding Fathers were members of this elite banking cartel, albeit mostly rather junior in position. As time went on and technology increased the speed of communications across the globe, it made the information exchange necessarily more vulnerable to these people’s search gaze. On some level, they made themselves somewhat trustworthy in the things they promised to their clients, but also got hold of things they never discussed outside their secret councils. As things got more complex, there were more and more scoundrels and more kinds of scoundrels flocking to the opportunities for complicated money management schemes.

What began as wise internal restraints become of necessity government restraints, but not long ago, the laws simply stopped matching the activity. Then, even some of those laws were dismantled, leaving the average Joe Consumer totally in the dark about the system. There has never been a significant number of honest people involved in the system; it’s been simply a matter of less and less careful people crowding into the system. As the system grew in size and complexity and with more people to blame for things they couldn’t possibly control, their arose an entirely different subculture, an extension of the original Merchant Civilization that arose from the ashes of the Middle Ages. It does no good to define this subculture as “criminal” because that requires too much an assumption of morals and laws that simply never existed among these people. They remain fully aware of what most of us think, but never considered it applicable to them.

Now we have a secretive system by which virtually all government officials in the US — and probably most other countries — are either members or servants of this financial ruling class, a world apart from us ordinary people. You only think you are friends with your banker. He’s an alien being in disguise and he lusts for your life’s blood, but things haven’t yet come to the point where he can simply seize your ass(ets) and suck you dry. An NSA whistleblower is piffle; we need a banking whistleblower if we are going to find out anything useful. The NSA is simply a leech on the system, and there is plenty that is not exposed to their spying methods. The system is bigger than the NSA, despite all the fear mongering.

But the system has become highly unstable. Different factions have gone to war within the system, and a significant element is rooted here in the US. These here in the US made a move to capture the wealth of most of the rest of the world through mechanisms already long in the system. In essence, they packaged some lies and sold it as part of the real value in the system. The other players realize they have been suckered, but taking direct action to recover their assets would expose the system, and they aren’t too sure it is worth the risk. They are still making too much money with the system in place, so they have been fighting a war, as it were, in the background using all the same sort of tricks our NSA uses, for example. While they are fighting each other, they are also desperately trying to seize all the remaining assets of us ordinary people. They keep setting up new ways to make our assets vulnerable without us knowing we don’t really have anything. They let us pretend to use our money, seeking to gain control of all the remaining real assets through various means.

But the pressure from the fighting is about to break some critical parts of the system. It’s just waiting for some key player to make some critical move to recover what they believe is rightfully theirs and it will cause a domino effect, a cascading failure. Nobody knows who or when, but everyone is bracing himself for this. That’s because when this thing breaks, it will sweep the entire world in less than 24 hours.

The effects will be uneven because of how each player is preparing to face it. Some have better understanding of this or that; some have a better sense of proportion or a better estimate of human nature at large. At some point, it will all boil down to physical control of real assets. The definition of what constitutes a “real asset” may vary somewhat with the context. For you, it’s not merely whether you have a running vehicle, for example, but whether you can keep it in your possession. Government agents with weapons may or may not become a significant factor. The resulting instability will shake things up and your local context could mean an awful lot. Who knows what restraints will actually work with any given population?

Obviously, a strong community spirit will protect a lot of assets internally. That sense of community will be tested severely in some places. Our tribal human nature is more powerful than most people know, but the selfishness of some will remain a threat, along with alternative or secret tribal alliances already in place. Broadly speaking, you have no friends in government or commerce unless you are working in those spheres. Chances are you’ll be forced to choose between competing loyalties. Expect a very sudden show of naked brutality from those with the means of violent force as they strive to maintain their control. For some, it’s already obvious to them government is “them” and not “us.” To the degree banking, finance and commerce are in bed with government, they are your sworn enemies, too. They will all see the greatest benefit in maintaining some elements of the current system, while said system will become the single greatest threat to you and I.

In my calling as a shepherd of souls, I’m hoping the necessities for you will be obvious. If I can explain something of the context, you can work out your priorities with God.

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