Defined by Morality

Posted on June 2, 2013 by ehurst

Morality and Justice are the roughly equivalent terms in the Kingdom of God.
It is the divine imperative, not in the sense so much of laws as a divine gift from God. He offers to fallen mankind the opportunity to embrace a life that is consistent with the design of Creation. It is not a bunch of rules we have to follow in order to stay out of trouble with God. It’s much more far reaching than that. It’s the mindset necessary to avoid His wrath, to ameliorate the effects of the Fall. Living by God’s Laws embraces reality as God sees it. The viewpoint of morality is reality.
As noted in the previous post, morality includes the requirement we adopt an Ancient Hebrew Mystical intellectual approach. Without that, morality simply is not possible. So long as you remain within the Western rational frame of reference, you cannot have a moral life, and you cannot understand reality. So radical is this demand, we immediately realize God will not in any way permit “saving America” because repentance means rejecting America by any definition. God is all about saving Americans, though. Here are some critical demands of His Justice for us. They are not rules and absolutes, but the entire frame of reference is that you are committed to seeking adherence to the degree God makes it possible. If you seek His Justice, He’ll make provisions for a measure of obedience that will harvest His promised blessings.
By no means do we actually give any allegiance to any human government, but we don’t fight them, either. We seek ways to stay out of trouble, living in peace with the damned governments of men. As far as God is concerned, living in His sacrificial love is all the Law you need to worry about. That is your entire duty to human governments; if you embrace His Laws, He demands nothing more of you in relation to human governments. Again, all of this means you seek His guidance in the Spirit, trying to understand His justice from a viewpoint higher than intellect, harnessing the mind in service to the spirit.
To the degree possible, you’ll resurrect the ancient Hebrew tribal lifestyle. That is, you are transferring your political loyalty to your extended family and clan. While it would ideally be blood kinship, the Kingdom of Heaven is more a matter of shared spiritual DNA. He calls us together into family groups He calls “churches.” Your church is your earthly government, your extended family household. The organization is patriarchy, with a ritual leader (pastor) and an organizational leader (elder) with neither over the other, but cooperatively leading all the rest of the church together as co-shepherds. They are the church equivalent of Two Witnesses, king and priest. Any other style of church organization is evil, and registering with the human civil government is almost surely a huge mistake.
Only those who produce agricultural products tithe. Everyone else contributes as they feel led by the Spirit of God. The church leadership decides how the resources are used. There are no budgets or organizational plans, no objectives defined on paper. It’s not a business or corporation; it’s a family. The organization exists only to be a family of faith, learning how to leave this world behind and care more about Heaven. We live here only so long as it takes to complete our individual callings to bring Christ glory. We do that by living together as a family and implementing His Justice in our own lives.
To the degree possible, the church seeks to form a separate society within the fallen world. The primary means to growth is letting others see how we just don’t care that much about this world in the first place. We can afford to love sacrificially according to the guidance of the Spirit. Whom the Lord moves will surely join us. We don’t harass people or offer some logical sales pitch; we don’t manipulate people into “decisions” because no human can decide to be born again. It is 100% a miracle of God alone. Our only part is to show His power over this world by how we live according to His moral imperatives.
Human relations are pretty much according to Game. I’ve written enough about that here. Embrace what men and women are supposed to be and the details will generally take care of themselves. Game as a branch of behavioral science answers just about all the basic questions of how we were meant to live together as humans. The principles can be abused, as can almost the entire range of moral truth, but this is reality, morality and justice. It’s a description of how we are wired and God commands we discard the mythology of the West.
We are neither conservative nor liberal. We follow ancient truth, a truth that takes a different shape depending on the context. We don’t flaunt our flesh; we don’t waste resources on decorating this body. A clear heart and mind will see beauty as God intended it. Ostentation is evil; artful use of resources is godly. We lavish time and effort; we engage this world directly. We don’t hire outside help unless it’s absolutely necessary to keep peace with those outside the church. Everything is private as much as possible; that is our witness. Our single greatest expense will always be people and their human needs within the body. We spare precious little concern for what the world demands in order to take us seriously. We should have no desire to be like them. Excessive displays of flesh — both literal and figurative — should make us uncomfortable. “More spiritual” means less fleshly and worldly, not more cerebral, because the intellect is fallen flesh.
We fear nothing arising from this world; human death is just a circumstance in the Kingdom of God. We choose it voluntarily by discounting what this world holds as important. There is no human flaw, disease or problem God cannot heal. By the same token, no sorrow or difficulty is so great He can’t empower us to live with it. Satan and his demons are confined by the Laws of God. When you and I live in moral justice, their power in our lives is diminished. God does not offer a “get out of jail free” card when it comes to the sorrow and suffering of this life, but offers us a moral understanding that trumps it all. The first miracle is we stop caring about it. When all this plane of existence, including your entire range of human resources, is for you merely a collection of tools for His glory, then you understand. If you are not otherworldly, you are too worldly.
Grab hold of these things and you’ll be so very far ahead of everyone else in America, you’ll be amazed at the immense difference it makes. You’ll stand in God’s favor and the sense of peace is impossible to describe. But be warned: If this thing does not call your name, you can’t do it. If it does call your name, all of it is well within your reach.

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Morality Defines All Things

Posted on June 2, 2013 by ehurst

Morality is defined as obedience to God’s revelation regarding things in this life. It is living in this fallen world according to a divine understanding of what’s wrong and what’s right, but it assumes an understanding that is higher than human intellect. If we could raise up three or four generations within the Ancient Near Eastern Mystical intellectual traditions, we could just possibly reconstruct a morality that approximates God’s living divine will. Anything less is a complete moral failure.
Jesus taught that it was necessary to have a spiritual birth, a living connection between the soul and the Realm of the Spirit, to really understand God’s will. What the entire range of Western Christendom refuses to understand is that Jesus also taught the Hebrew Mystical outlook as the necessary human preparation to be used by the Spirit of God. That is, the human task of clinging to God’s holiness is the task of conditioning the mind to be more Hebraic. His own people were not very Hebraic in His day, having suffered the embrace of Hellenism among the religious leaders. Hebrew Mysticism wasn’t totally absent from the Judean people, but it was fading fast. If you don’t grasp how His declarations demanded a return to Hebrew thinking, a repentance from Hellenism, you cannot possibly pretend to understand Jesus.
You also cannot understand the failure of Judaism, because that religion is not at all the same as the Old Testament religion of Israel. It bears some superficial resemblance, but it is not the same at the core of how it rests in the human mind. The mind was given by God to organize and implement His moral laws, not to rule and control the executive decision making process. The Spirit of God is the ultimate Executive, working only through our spirits. The rituals of the Old Testament permitted men to learn from God’s Spirit when they were not necessarily spirit-born. It was in proper observance of the rituals that His Spirit rested upon the process and the results reflected His divine will. Some few rare individuals were born of the Spirit in the Old Testament, people who were possessed of a high moral intelligence. But after the Cross, that was thrown open to a great many more people. So after the Cross, we no longer pass through grand rituals to hear from God, but we are permitted to enter His divine Presence in the Spirit Realm itself.
Without the intellectual foundation of the ancient Hebrew Mysticism, the mind cannot begin to understand the moving of the Spirit. Some things will be obvious, but we will not make much of the refinement of His divine will because it will remain incomprehensible. God sponsors any effort to embrace His will, but it will be technically wrong. It will be pleasing to Him personally that you will want to do what’s right, but you won’t be able to understand it because your Westernized (Hellenized) mind cannot follow the mystical paths of God’s revelation. Your mind has been subtly trained to distrust the one path God laid on this earth for the human mind to understand His divine moral laws.
This is why the churches today are so morally and spiritually corrupt. The ancient ways define the answers, but the modern mind rejects those definitions. We find plenty of people determined to reclaim the blessings of morality, but failing completely to understand the very nature of what morality is. Yes, obeying His Laws will bring prosperity, but not prosperity as defined by Western Christians. It’s not a matter of expensive suits, big houses and cars. Divine morality is a matter of producing more than you need so you can share it with those who don’t have. So people follow some code of productivity which seems to work, but that path has always brought the same results since ancient Babylon. That is not morality and it is not the blessings of God you receive from it. You are simply reaping the rewards of Western mercantile culture within a Western mercantile economic system.
That system is dying, folks. Pretty soon your “holy” habits won’t produce the same level of wealth. When the traditional Western Christian methods of gaining wealth quit working, it will shock the churches and people will fall away from the false religion. The Christians in leadership will remain completely lost in their false system of belief and will not understand why it’s coming apart, and will insist the faithful stay the course and ride the current over the waterfall. People will be hurt, suffering far more than is necessary in this fallen world.
Meanwhile, a precious few do understand the moral fabric of the universe, having rejected the dominance Western rationalism made it the servant, not the lord. They reject all the definitions of the West and these few will reap what little is possible from a world under God’s wrath. The Western traditional rejection of the ancient Hebrew ways must bring His wrath; that was His promise long ago. As with the Pharisees who had defined God into something totally foreign to His revelation, I expect most of Western Christianity to continue rejecting the ancient ways right up until the modern version of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem comes upon us. I can see a fading, dying false religion still clinging to their mythology the way Judaism does today. The Jews threw their heritage away; we never had it because we rejected it before we started. With the Judeans, His wrath was targeted at taking away the false religious infrastructure. He refused to protect the one thing to which they clung, because His Presence was not in it. With us here in the US, it will be far more general because we don’t have a shred of truth to save, and His Presence was never here in any significant sense. He brought spiritual life to people largely despite the churches.
Instead, we have a mythology of holiness that was false from the start. God permitted it because of His own patience, the same as He permitted ancient pagan religions to flourish outside His revelation. Our brand of Christianity in the US is more pagan than godly, as it is generally throughout the West. I have the audacity to say this because He has seized me and demanded I understand His moral laws and the ways of His revelation. He has pulled me through the grinder, shredding and shedding the ways of the West. Not in some superficial aping of something you might recognize as Middle Eastern habits or anything that silly, but I embrace the paths of thought God laid down for those who follow Him.
I’m not better than you. My life has a better morality because it follows His revelation more accurately. My human weaknesses are ever before me, a painful constant reminder of my fallen nature. Still, it is His pleasure to show me His truth. I have begun to see His world through His eyes. By no means have I arrived, but I define all things through His divine revelation of morality, and it obviously makes me see a radically different world than most American Christians.
Folks, we are in deep trouble with God as a nation. It’s over; there is no path of repentance for this nation because it was built on sand in the first place. These storms here in Oklahoma are just a parable of the wider wrath of God upon our intellectual foundations. We have to start from scratch and build our lives according to His moral laws, not some mythical garbage stolen from nearly two thousand years of accommodation with a false epistemology. If we do not turn from our Western heritage, we will be destroyed with it.
If the truth in this message calls to you, repent and learn His ways.

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Ecclesiastes 4

Posted on June 1, 2013 by ehurst

Solomon continues his theme that human wisdom without revelation is confusion and madness. He next points out that, as bad as life is without the Word of God, it can only get worse when you consider how humans interact, or refuse to interact.
Look at how oppression is so common. Solomon refers here to personal oppression, human meanness, not simply the casual disregard of others. What can you do when someone has the power over you and delights in your suffering? Without revelation offering a purpose for bearing up under such things, it would be better to lay down and die. Indeed, it’s better we don’t let other humans be born in such a horrible world.
Why do we see so many people struggling for things out of simple envy? It’s a moving target; you’ll never arrive at satisfaction. What a rotten way to live. It’s as bad as doing nothing and expecting others to carry you. Eat your own flesh, lazy man. Still, with only human wisdom, you’ll never find reason for producing more than you can use. You’ll never care to save up enough to share because it seems so pointless.
Then again, when your life is consumed with greed, how do you live? You isolate yourself; you can’t trust anyone at all. You withdraw from family and friends because you don’t want to share. What happens when you need something your wealth can’t buy? Who is going to care when you fall, or you feel cold and lonely? Who will defend you when someone stronger comes to take your stuff? Human wisdom doesn’t understand the parable of the triple stranded rope, a hint that God didn’t make us to live alone. Again, without revelation to guide your understanding of reality, you’ll never come up with anything that works.
Solomon draws on sarcasm, mocking himself. Better is someone who is ambitious and hungry, because he will listen to advice from those who have succeeded. The man who has lived long and thinks he has arrived at the top won’t listen to anyone. The king is prisoner of his own status, while the peasant lad has nothing to lose, and is free to explore everything in the kingdom. No matter who you are, someone is going to take your place. Despite all the social rituals and monuments of past rulers, how can anyone love the man himself, since they can’t actually know him?
If all you have is human wisdom, all of this is pointless.

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Moral Intelligence

Posted on May 31, 2013 by ehurst

You can get a degree in all kinds of things, but it seems no institute of higher learning recognizes any need to develop moral intelligence.
When you examine any particular issue in light of moral truth, it changes all the answers you get. It was the one thing that kept me from accepting several offers to work through a masters program at a couple of different schools. I was offered three different shots at a masters in History, one in Economics and one in Secondary Education. This is not boasting, because anyone willing to do just a modicum of work got the same offers. That stuff is in easy reach, but it was always reaching in the wrong direction. I also could have easily gotten several different brands of Theology and Divinity degrees, but even those don’t quite cut it. That is, they were all cerebral about things which simply aren’t on the path God called me to follow.
You can call it what you like, but I’ve never met anyone who didn’t have an imperative burned into their soul. Most never paid any attention to it, including an awful lot of seminary students and graduates. They might have been sure they felt something, but never knew what it was, simply bought the standing assumptions everyone else put in front of them. If your moral choices aren’t your very own, and if they don’t cost you much in terms of psychic suffering over the inevitable confusion of the human condition, then you have chosen not to choose.
You cannot let someone else choose it for you. Least of all would I suggest you need to take my path. I talk about mine so folks can get a clue about their own search. I want you to see the results in whatever terms you can understand, but please recognize it’s worth the agony of setting aside all those pre-packaged versions of reality to find yourself.
Here’s a clue I hope helps you: Morality is not rules. Morality is a living thing. It’s a chunk of your own soul responding to what you experience according to imperatives bigger than yourself. You recognize that you are participating in something that came long before you, and you’re doing your best to chase down the trail behind it. This thing is invariably contrary to what everyone else is selling because virtually no one in our current world wants you to be free to follow that thing which calls your soul. They want to control the outcomes of your search.
Let me be one of that less-than-1% who say otherwise. You don’t have to pass through the same trauma I did, but you do have to escape the prison at whatever cost that is to you. If you are one of those rare few people who grew up in a context where this was “normal” then count your blessings, because I’ve not met a single person like that. I’ve only heard of them. Moral intelligence is recognizing your reality for yourself, and pursuing it against your contrary inclinations. No one is without some internal conflicts; morality is the search for a referee.
The conflict is eternal; there is no degree because you are never finished puzzling it out.

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Truth Seizes a Few

Posted on May 30, 2013 by ehurst

Whether you seek it consciously or not, truth will seize only a few at a time.
That’s pretty much the meaning of the twin parables of the Found Treasure and the Pearl of Great Price (Matthew 13:44-46). The other point is that you typically have to shed a lot of dead weight in favor of embracing the truth. The most valuable truths often demand a radical departure from the past.
It’s not a question here of which truth, but something you simply cannot escape. The Army guard who converts to Islam after seeing how the Gitmo inmates cling to their Islamic faith has discovered a great treasure. So far as I know, Holdbrooks the only one talking about it out of all the guards who’ve worked at Gitmo. The point is too many people never think about it in the first place.
Lesser truths are still worthy of pursuit if only because they could help move you in the right direction. Then again, it may lead to some of the most frivolous stuff. So long as it’s offered as fluff — plenty of my blog posts are just that — that’s fine. Such is the conversation of humans who don’t feel threatened by anything significant. Trying to make it sound important, and getting others to take the discussion seriously, is a little disturbing. The bikini-or-not question made a big splash on my FB page through linkage with a friend. None of those discussing it are likely amenable to my input, since I have embraced one of those shockingly different treasuries of truth.
Wanna stop men staring out you, babes? Don’t go swimming in public places. A slinky one-piece is still exposing way too much if you are shapely, and way too much in another way if you aren’t. Ripping away Western social assumptions offers a totally different response, because it’s a totally different morality. And virtually no Western Christian realizes that the morality of Jesus is at least superficially much closer to that of Islam than anything they might imagine. That’s because when it comes to the broader question of human sexuality, Islam shares a broad common assumption with Ancient Hebrew beliefs — and with reality itself, if you ask me. I won’t miss Western Civ when it finally passes away.
My whole life long, I’ve been torn between searching and bumbling. Sometimes I stumbled along, poking at the earth for things I never understood. At other times I had a burning desire for things I hadn’t seen. The truth for me, the understanding that offered peace and sanity in a crazy warring world, was some of both. It didn’t arrive all at once.
Either way, if there were any real truth in Western Civilization, there would be precious few people looking for pearls or capable of recognizing treasure when they dig it up.

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Poison People

Posted on May 29, 2013 by ehurst

There are some people you cannot help.
I rode my bicycle on the bike path. As I approached the cutout for a street crossing, he carefully pulled his small pickup against the curb, blocking the path. I could have ridden across the grass and jumped the curb, but something in my spirit said to be patient. So I denied him even eye contact, and simply turned my head to stare at the clover growing among the grass blades on my left. I waited calmly, betraying no emotion at all. Eventually he drove away.
Who knows what motivates high school kids to be so hateful? It’s not as if he didn’t see my graying beard or that I was twice his size with an ancient tattoo on my arm. I wasn’t going to play his game, but played my own. My flesh wanted to confront him and “teach him a lesson” but my spirit warned me it wouldn’t happen that way. So I gave him to God and rode on to my destination.
Then there was the lovely single lady who lived nearby, young enough to be my daughter. I would never kid around with her because she was always trying to analyze everything I said, looking for a subtext that simply was not there. She lost her well-paying job and slowly her life fell apart. It didn’t matter if she used drugs, because she lost control the same as any addict. She would ask for me to fix things on her house, and I would agree to help her, doing it with her, but not to do it for her nor let her pay me. She never called on me for those things. As she sank farther into crisis, she began acting crazier. She was not above trying to play seductive, played it well and had the assets for it. But I kept her at arm’s length, because I could see she was out of reach. That is, I knew if I got close enough to actually help, she would consume me, get me twisted up in her crazy life. I helped her move out, though.
I volunteer to help my neighbors with things I can do. An equally lovely lady across the street from me lives alone and often asks for help. She jokes with me and doesn’t take things too seriously. She tries to manage on her own, but sometimes can’t quite get it. I have no trouble doing stuff for her because it’s a gain, not a loss. Helping her does not breed an unnatural dependence; it builds friendship and blesses me more than her. If I can’t help, she thanks me for listening and somehow works it out.
There are others who use me and even abuse me, but as long as I can afford it, there’s no problem. Jesus warned there would always be poor people on this earth. Fallen humanity is just that way. It won’t matter how you calculate a redistribution of wealth, because redistribution changes the variables. Besides, some folks never get enough. It’s not that we can’t create enough for human need; we cannot create enough for human demand. Some people are poison to the whole world; some are simply poison to you.
The point is, you should know your limits. How much has God put in your hands? If He does not build in you the faith to tackle mountains, stay in the foothills until your path higher is revealed. He most surely can and does tell folks to back off and don’t mess with something He didn’t fit them to handle. If you are not disciplined in the ways of the Spirit Realm, you’ll never understand where to draw the line. The spirit-Spirit communion always knows where to find the threads of God’s moral fabric.
There are some people in your life whose sole purpose is to test you, to tempt you into folly — they are poison to you.

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Annoyance Is Not Sin

Posted on May 28, 2013 by ehurst

The repercussions of the Fall reach far and wide.
If you met me in person, you might not enjoy my company. I have strange habits and my motivations perplex almost anyone deeply infected with Western reasoning. It’s quite possible my best friends in cyberspace are people I couldn’t bear very long in meat space. Liking my blog hardly means you’d want to be a Facebook friend. There is nothing wrong with enjoying my work here but otherwise having zero interest in me as a person.
Often enough we are annoyed at our own weaknesses. To be annoyed by other humans and their foibles is simply expected. Only if you suffer under some evil mythology would you presume to vanquish human nature. Some issues are simply not within range of human power, and we are not evolving to anything higher. This plane of existence is just temporary.
Meanwhile, you shouldn’t take your own revulsions that seriously. Learn them so you can be reasonable with people who get on your nerves. Know what you can’t tolerate. This is critical in recognizing that friendship is not holy and sacred. Like marriage, it is one of the few things God granted to all humanity as some measure of mercy. It serves only to whet our appetites for something beyond this life.
By the same token, that someone annoys you does not make them evil. It’s not as if they singled you out and chose intentionally to get on your nerves. There are precious few people like that; most of the world never gave you a thought in the first place. Don’t be like them. People are people, and so you are. You have limits and God is not going to demand you do something He didn’t give you the ability to handle. He’s not angry or embarrassed that there are others in this world you encounter that you cannot help nor bear their presence. Rest assured; He has placed someone else on this earth to take care of them.
We can be friends or not, and it really doesn’t affect my positive regard for you as a fellow human. It’s easy enough to move off my radar completely; I will give you plenty of room. Social stability does not depend on us liking each other. Tolerance in some measure is enough. Deal with things you can’t change, and that includes most of what you encounter in the human race.
If I annoy you, avoid me. It’s that simple. You can be sure I’ll return the favor so much as I sense the need.

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This War We Can Fight

Posted on May 27, 2013 by ehurst

The consequences of cyber warfare are wholly different from fighting in meat space.
Yes, there can be knock-on consequences into meat space, but that would be true of any human activity. I am not against violence, per se; I’m against violence which springs from any part of Western reasoning. That there will be violence is unavoidable in a fallen world. The point here is, cyberspace lends itself to God’s justice much more easily than meat space does.
I have no trouble telling you that most entertainment media is sinful. I’ve made it plain I generally hate TV and movies as a media form because they are inherently very dangerous. They weren’t designed that way on purpose, but it is a very bad side-effect discovered after the fact that humans are not wired to handle it. We remain fully accountable to God for how we respond, but we cannot remain fully in conscious control of our response.
That fact has been seized upon by the rapacious plutocrats as a means to control, control for the sake of milking us dry. We should hardly be surprised when the media moguls, so used to treating us as slaves to be manipulated at their whim, are demanding the right to install rootkits as a matter of course, as Sony Entertainment once did. You knew this was not going to die.
The true pirates of cyberspace are the major media corporations. They are the enemy, and you should not willingly accept their abuse. There is little likelihood governments will resist this move; one way or another, it’s coming. So you had best make sure your personal computing devices are well defended. I’m not sure how much the AV and computer defense vendors are with us or against us, but you need to study the situation and be aware of the measures you can take.
For myself, the shortest answer is running Debian Wheezy on my computer. I fully admit the tiny market share of Linux in general is part of the protection, and that Debian in particular refuses to cooperate with such nonsense. That is, if there is any way possible to play media and bypassing such controls, Debian will enable that. If the media moguls take notice of Linux as a problem for them, things could change.
Too often already here on my blog I’ve lamented how the sheeple as a whole have handed control of the Internet to marketers. Not all marketers are bloodthirsty, but the advertising industry does tend to attract psychopaths. The balance of distrust is against the entire industry, but most people never give it a thought. Fortunately, thoughtless folks tend to avoid this blog, so you dear readers are likely to think about this and take appropriate action.
While I still say we cannot use the typical means of facing this issue, this is one battle I find worthy of engaging.

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Waiting Is Work

Posted on May 26, 2013 by ehurst

If I knew what it was, I’d probably mess things up.
I’m waiting. I don’t know what for, but I’m waiting. Whatever it is hasn’t come yet. The biblical concept of time is ripeness. The proper attitude is that there are some things you don’t control. You can do all kinds of things that make you feel in control based on any number of myths, but constructing a schedule is often pointless. In the New Testament we are warned that all our plans are tentative — “If the Lord wills we shall…”
No, I have no explanation. At least, not in the sense that I can describe any kind of results for when it finally happens. That’s because waiting is the command; it’s faithfulness. It could be until I die for all I know, so the what is not important at this point. The imperative is certain, though: wait. And no, I cannot explain how I arrived at the conclusion that God wants me to wait. All I can say is God told me to take care of a certain limited range of things, and let the other stuff rest.
My flesh is not at all happy. My human side wants to jump into action and make things happen. My flesh likes to ignore the spirit side of things. I’d rather not go back to the days when I lived like that. I suppose in some broad terms I can explain that what keeps me occupied is a powerful sense of peace with higher things. Now that I have a grasp on the corner of whatever this “peace” thing is, I’m not willing to let it go. It’s worth more than living, worth far more by a long stretch. In a manner of speaking, my flesh can just go to hell. It’s not in charge any more. I don’t let mere intellect run the show.
Yep. I’m waiting on something. I’ll know what it is when it arrives; I’ll know what to do with it. That’s enough for now.

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Ecclesiastes 3

Posted on May 25, 2013 by ehurst

What can we know from the human level? In Hebrew, context is everything. Thus, it is common sense to folks in Solomon’s time, but was included by God’s design. No one should strive to be the same in call contexts, as if he could think of only one thing to do. That would be stupid, obviously morally wrong. The Hebrew culture viewed time in terms of ripeness, and the idea of measuring and metering time with schedules was almost alien. Yes, we know God will bring the seasons around in their course so long as the earth stands, but He retains the prerogative of mixing things up. Thus, we should always wait to see what God brings to us.
Depending on the context, the same person could righteously gestate and give birth or allow things to die. By parallelism, it could be a time to sow or plow things up, to wound or cure, to destroy or build. We all experience moments when it’s appropriate to weep or celebrate, to break down the walls or to build up the barriers for protection, or a time to build community and a time to isolate. There moments in our lives when ambition serves a purpose and when it’s pointless. There’s a time to rip your garments in the sorrow of great loss and a time to repair when grief is spent. It would seem there are many more times for keeping your peace than there are times to speak out, as there would be circumstances favoring friendship and love, as well as times for distrust and even forceful correction. So much we should be able to understand, because no single thread of conduct fits all occasions.
The same train of thought continues. What’s the point of fighting and struggling against things? When could you be sure from your human level that it’s appropriate to challenge the apparent fate of the day? How can you tell when God will give you success and when He will crush your dreams? And when should you continue in spite of the results? We are assured He has a beautiful plan, but you can’t discern it from your human wisdom alone. God will not be confined to such reasoning.
If all you can do is focus on the end product, you’ll never understand anything. There is a way of joy, and it’s not wrapped up in the stuff we can understand. It’s the joy of communion with God, in the give and take of His mercy and revealed truth. Work without His guidance is always pointless, even if you get all the things your human soul desires. God alone gives joy. Once you understand His revelation, it all makes sense. God’s creation remains fully in His hands, and He controls the results of human activity to suit Him. He’s the only One who really understands what He has done. You cannot change any of it.
To Solomon, it was painfully obvious that God was the final judge of what men did on the earth, but that people were naturally inclined to get things backward. There is a place in God’s plans for everything men could do, but people need to see that without God’s guidance, they are just smart animals. From the earthly standpoint, there was no particular advantage because all life ends on this plane. Every living thing returns to dust. Man cannot reason his way to recognizing what comes after this life. You cannot prove on the human level that people go to face God and animals fade into oblivion. About the only hope such a man has is to enjoy his life and work, because that’s the whole story of what he is if we have only what men can understand from their human abilities.

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