Of Children and Angels 4

Posted on May 3, 2013 by ehurst

They packed that evening and left before dawn the next morning.
Their hosts at the orchard insisted on Preston and Angie take the camping equipment with them. They spoke unconvincingly of letting them return the gear later. Preston had already found a mountain bike for Angie to match the one he picked up in Margraten. Then he had the mountain bikes fitted with quick-release racks for carrying the baggage. It made them ride differently, but where they were headed it would not be an issue.
Leaving the old city center, they rode across the tracks and wound northward to catch the main route directly into Brunssum. There, it was just a short zigzag to catch the N274 past Schinveld and over the Selfkant. While there had been a good bit of traffic in the morning rush hour, the Selfkant was nearly deserted. The bike path was wide enough for them to ride abreast.
In the quiet, Preston said, “Your childhood sorrows are a very expensive but useful asset for me in all this. How much of your experience do you suppose overlaps what these kids are going through?”
Angie reached over and gently grabbed Preston’s handlebars, slowing them both down. Preston applied the brakes, sensing something very important here. They stopped on the path, still straddling the loaded bikes.
“Preston, there is something you don’t seem to understand. You still have a very strong emotional reaction to this which is distinctly American. Despite what is published, the Dutch as a whole do not consider child-adult sex a really big deal. Right now, a person above 16 can do anything they like, even make pornography. Between 12 and 16, they can give consent to sex with anybody, and only a parent could possibly complain. Most parents do not. Some of this changed after I became adult, but this is how we do things here.”
She looked into his eyes to see his reaction, which amounted to a single raised eyebrow. “You know kids in your country do things the same way, but there is only a social pretense that it is wrong and laws very unevenly applied. Here, the pretense is much thinner, and thinning more, thanks to stuff like the Martijn Party. But I did not consent to the sex I had as a child. Had the bishop been a loving man, it would have been rather different, but he was cold to us. I seriously doubt our boss and his associates are concerned with molestation itself, but with the use of force. It’s like kidnapping and slavery. We have very powerful laws about consent, but the sex itself is another issue entirely.”
Angie thought for a moment. “I believe the social welfare system in Eastern European countries is quite different than here. It never occurred to us orphan girls to actually run away and stay gone. Even without the sexual abuse, the nuns might be rough with us at times, but the situation as a whole saw very few children fighting the system or running away. These children we are investigating are kidnapped, threatened by people with guns and beaten, maybe starved and even drugged. Whatever spirit of resistance they have dies rather quickly, and the longer the control lasts, it dies more completely. I know from relief work they often decide they belong to this life in just a few weeks. With drugs, it’s just a few days.”
Preston breathed deeply. “Yeah, the whole concept of teenager seems to have been invented in America. I have to wonder what kind of market there is for child prostitutes who are drugged. Genuine pedophiles fantasize about a semi-adult relationship, a child being childish except about this one thing. They believe they can fall in love, and maybe they do. The Dutroux Affair was more like simple prostitution, with torture and snuff films being rather a grotesque extremity. But even then, it would require the kids spend at least part of their days in more or less normal circumstances, maybe leading a double life for the ones not snuffed. I read the testimony of the most vocal victim. For her, sex had to be a game even though she didn’t like being forced to play. It’s a more voluntary game for adults. Yes, Europeans are more frank and open about sex than Americans, who are socially schizophrenic. I think I get that. But these trafficked kids are all in on this; there’s no playing for them. So I rather doubt they are being used in the same market. It would almost require a psychopathic personality to use these kids.”
Angie nodded. “Perhaps you can ask our boss sometime during this assignment. The study we read said nothing about who the customers are.”
They resumed their journey. Once they left the Brunssum area, there were virtually no changes in elevation. Most of the interior Netherlands were flat. Except where a field had been cultivated for a long time, the soil was mostly sand. This was the primary reason for choosing mountain bikes on this trip. There were frequent patches of trees, almost invariably along roads and even minor paths. A significant amount of the forestation was pine, so the sandy soil was packed with needles. The Selfkant felt like a very wide, slight hump in the terrain. Once across it, the ground remained almost entirely flat. The bike paths and field lanes used for bicycles were everywhere, in all directions.
For a time, the highway ran right along the border through villages like Konigsbosch and Echterbosch. Then they entered a tract of forest. Preston decided to cut across country on some of those lanes straight north to Saint Odelienberg. Aside from a friture hardly open that early, they didn’t see a single cafe or restaurant, so they stopped a short while on the north side of town and ate some of their packed food.
When they mounted up to ride on, they caught the N293 and promptly crossed the Roer River. It was more of a wide creek, navigable only with small boats. A short time later they passed some industrial properties and ran along the eastern edge of Melick. Where the highway bent around to the northeast, Preston began watching for an exit to the left. This was a new highway which took several hard turns around established suburbs on the southern edge of Roermond. Preston said he wanted to avoid riding the extra distance, then mentioned he wanted to see the single route into the woods they were allowed to use for the old firing range. He found the new highway had closed off their old route and stood looking across the terrain
On an impulse, he pulled out the fancy cellphone and looked at it. He had yet to try the mapping application. To his surprise, there was a text message from Gary waiting for him. It was the word “camping” followed by GPS coordinates. Preston had been planning to try several camps listed for the area, so he clicked on the coordinates in the message. The map opened and showed an address not listed in the camping guide. Instead, the map showed a very old rural manor with a moat half way around it.
He had learned not to question Gary’s messages. Cryptic, obscure and often entirely too terse, they were never wrong. Using the map displayed, he plotted a route to the place. He decided to follow a series of lanes and brick paths provided parallel to the ring road on the eastern side of the city, the A73. Where this highway began turning back west, Preston stopped to double check the maps. They were approaching the new N280 which had been built up above the surrounding terrain and could not be crossed casually. The sides were rough and fenced, with guardrails most of the way. Eventually he decided to continue a ways north to find one of the few underpasses.
This was followed by a fairly long run back down the other side of that highway. Eventually it turned left and struck out across the countryside, leaving the highway behind. About a half kilometer on, the lane ran under the cover of some trees, the promptly came to a T-crossing. Turning left, they were suddenly in front of the ancient manor. Preston double-checked the coordinates and they were right on top of them. The entrance was another hundred meters down the road, but they got a full view of some very well preserved property. On the right were four mail boxes, so they knew it was more than one single household.
By sheer luck they happened on a woman walking their direction from what looked like a barn in the background. As they moved closer to her, the trees parted enough for them to see another farm house with at least two different entrances.
Angie approached the woman and asked in Dutch if she knew anything about an arrangement for camping on the property. She asked their names. Upon mention of Forttensie, she smiled and explained how to head toward the back of the enclosure through a covered passage between two buildings. Pointing with her hands, Preston understood she referred to a place behind a tractor barn on the backside of the building on their left.
Once she was sure Angie understood, she smiled, turned and greeted Preston as “Meneer Forttensie” and walked into the largest house on their left across the small moat. They mounted their bikes and rode slowly through the stone archway where the woman indicated. To their left behind the last structure was a nice mowed grassy spot. There was a small door set in the build standing open. Preston spotted a primitive toilet inside. He stopped and took a peek in the shadowy room — a toilet and large sink typically used for washing clothes. This was better than some of the accommodations they’d seen elsewhere. Best of all, it was very private and well within riding distance of the entire city.
With lots of bike paths and other recreational features, they would be hard to pick out in a crowd.

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Propositional Folly

Posted on May 3, 2013 by ehurst

It ain’t happening.
I keep hoping people will understand when I attack Aristotelian epistemology and European tribal mythology. I keep hoping they’ll recognize all those unconscious assumptions about life, the universe and everything. I pray that they learn the very different approach necessary to understand the Bible. More than that, it is the necessary intellectual approach to understand life, the universe and everything as God revealed it.
Apparently there are educated people out there who read my efforts and it just doesn’t happen. Somewhere between my keyboard and their brain is a short circuit. I confess it could well be I lack the writing talent, but I’m not sure what I can do about it. There are plenty of folks for whom the whole thing is simply over their heads. Scary to me is how many there are. As someone who once worked in public education, I understand all too well why there are so many like that. Public education in America is designed to make them that way. I keep praying God does something to give folks a chance to break out the intellectual bondage so they can serve Him as full participants, as shepherds instead of sheep.
It’s good we have people who recognize that the Bible is not a science book. It’s good we have a smaller number who realize the Bible is not a history book, either. Big as it is, the Bible is actually pretty minimal. It’s just barely enough for a human to begin training their intellect to obey the Spirit of God.
So if you read the Law of Moses, you understand from the narrative that it can’t possibly cover every detail of life a human is likely to encounter just in the context in which is the Law is revealed. There were lots of questions because real world situations don’t always fit the rather simple declarations of God’s Laws. The Law included provisions for selecting wiser heads and prophets to help clarify things. Moses was taught by his father-in-law not to assume he was the only one who could understand the Law. Moses and his readers were supposed to wait on God to raise up folks who could read the text and see between the lines what it was God was trying to convey, a truth about life on this fallen plane of existence.
The Hebrew mind, if it worked well at all, assumed truth was impossible to reduce to mere words. Truth was the Person of God Almighty, and our best hope was something in a written narrative could give us a clue. There is no matrix of truth the mind can plumb with logic; there is only the Person of the Living God. The mind is supposed to extrapolate based on underlying moral truths too difficult for words. Try as I might to contrast this with the Aristotelian expectation of defining an objective body of truth, I still run into people who read my stuff and demand I adhere to Aristotelian forms of expression.
There are people out there who will read this very blog post and still do that.
The Hebrew Scriptures do not address every question likely to occur in our minds. It didn’t address every question likely to occur to Ancient Hebrew minds, much less our Post-modern Western minds. A critical element is in the question: Why state the obvious? If everyone is expected to believe a certain fundamental truth, why need we mention it? So very much of Hebrew Scripture was a reaction to falsehood, not an organized attempt to catalog a full discussion of reality. For us, there are huge gaps in the Bible narrative. The purpose of putting the Old Covenant into a written form was not so you could analyze and know, but so you could obey.
It’s no different in the New Testament. There are lots of things Jesus never addressed in the Gospel narrative. Maybe He did address some of those questions in real life, but we have no record of it. Instead, we have a record of things He said and did in reaction to the concerns of the day and time of those men who wrote those narratives. Our job as scholars is to reconstruct the context of the narrative as much as we can, but surely the rest is simply resting in the Holy Spirit.
We take it as an article of faith that God would not leave us high and dry on essentials, and that the Bible must be enough. Whatever it is we really need must be there, somewhere. And it is, but if we approach with the wrong frame of mind, we are sure to get the wrong answers, because we’ll ask the wrong questions. Aristotelian minds want information for analysis, something they can harness under their human logic. Such minds presume to own the data as masters of understanding, rather than be owned by it. The Hebrew Bible calls that demand “fallen nature.” That is, the very assumption truth can be held in human intelligence is the very nature of what happened with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden eating the Forbidden Fruit — it was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. That word “knowledge” implies one who makes executive decisions as if he were the designer. We want to see the plans for the universe on our level. God said, “Nope. That’s above your existential level.”
The Bible teaches almost nothing about the knowledge of being, and very little about doing, because it is all about morality. It teaches moral understanding.
We look back upon the record and we see a small handful of amazing people who worked from even less of that written record than we have, yet they had the most amazing depth of insight. And then they were commissioned to either write or edit the writing of more of that narrative. They weren’t necessarily brilliant linguists; some couldn’t even read or write. They were morally brilliant. Jesus was morally precocious. Such was the single distinguishing human character trait He carried — maximum human moral genius. If there is one thing on which we ought to focus our searching, it’s not rules and principles, but moral apprehension. Not formulating moral principles, but learning the moral fabric woven into Creation already as a living thing. Moral truth is a reflection of the character of God, insofar as He requires us to know Him.
A Hebrew writer would never write it like that, because writing it that way comes from a question that would not occur to him. Only by careful hindsight do we recognize that most of what Jesus said in His disputes with the Pharisees was over this very problem, in that the Pharisees were too Aristotelian. They had made a god of their logical system for understanding Moses, and it was not the logic of Moses by any means. The Pharisees insisted Moses was propositional truth (without using those words), and this was a clear departure from how the Hebrew intellect approached things up to the time when Hellenism was sold to them around 300 BC.
The Bible was intended for reading with the power of the Holy Spirit, not with the power of mere human logic. It was not intended to produce uniformity of thought and action, but unity of commitment to Jesus Christ. Don’t confuse them. The unifying power of the Spirit cannot be expressed in terms humans can understand, much less control. If you try to squeeze from Scripture a theology and practice by which you command others to obey as if unto God, you are not bringing glory to the name of Jesus Christ; you are still just another Pharisee.
So I’m obviously not a Fundamentalist at all, and not really an evangelical, though my choice of words sometimes sounds like them. And I am certainly not any kind of liberal by common definitions. I’m a Christian Mystic, an ultimate primitivist. I don’t do propositional teaching. I’ve offered here adequate explanation why not, but I’ll be glad to elucidate further, if you want it. Just ask.
Somewhere out there, someone’s going to read this and it will cross his mind to demand I answer all his questions with propositional statements. It ain’t happening.

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Myth of the Free Man

Posted on May 2, 2013 by ehurst

Modern Western society suffers from a myth regarding individual liberty.
In one of my earliest papers on Hebrew thought, I noted “everyone serves someone.” It was not simply a spiritual statement but a moral principle. That is, in God’s Laws, every human is subject to some human authority on this earth. Most governing authorities are awful, but Christ expects us to be tolerant. Roman civil government was no calk-walk for Christians, but resistance as commonly understood was downright immoral. It still is. The command remains for us to do what’s right even when government is wrong. Perhaps an attempt to flee false justice is okay, but outright violent resistance is forbidden in most cases. I noted long ago you could justify violent resistance to the likes of Child Protective Services, but it might be very bad strategy.
I’ve also warned repeatedly that context is everything, and trying to apply a few choice words as if they were absolutes in all cases is downright evil. I spent a lot of time working in military justice, and it is an abomination to God. That’s because semantic parsing of precise wording in regulations is the law, and the judicial process was mostly a matter of whose parsing is more correct. Of all our allies in this world, the US is regarded as the most egregiously stupid about the precise wording of military regulations, even if it meant mandating things clearly wrong on every level of human understanding. The God of the Bible does not operate that way, and virtually nothing in the Hebrew culture came even close to that hidebound approach so utterly fundamental to military justice.
Part of the reason the military has nit-picking regulations about such silly things as how you will lace your boots is because of the underlying truculence of soldiers determined to fight everything at every opportunity. That truculence arises from the mythology of the free man crashing against an execrable insistence on a molecular level of uniformity.
Western culture is schizophrenic. Virtually the whole thing is composed of mutually antagonistic thrusts. One thing which is both deeply sacred and at the same time so routinely violated is the concept of individual liberty. It’s not a problem with “liberty” as a word, but the underlying pool of meaning. That meaning is a flagrant violation of God’s revelation. One of the three primary temptations in the Garden was the lust to be one’s own god. “Dammit; don’t tell me what to do!” On the one hand, we make a god of absolute liberty, which is a thin mask of damnable lack of accountability and responsibility. Then we pretend we can apply “sensible” limitations based on such things as Zero Aggression or various forms of social accountability. Nice theory, but it is utterly contrary to what God says about human nature.
Western man continues rejecting God’s revelation on the matter because he demands God supply detailed, precisely worded regulations. God says the very demand itself is evil. He says it in the veiled and nuanced way He says almost everything. He demands we submit to His broader personal will before we are permitted to digest the particulars. In other words, He is God, not we. Our natural Western truculence is complete failure before we start. The God who created the Hebrew intellectual culture as the channel for His revelation isn’t going to mold Himself to intellectual demands from another culture. If your approach is particularist and nit-picking, you can do anything you want, but don’t expect God to participate.
Yes, that leaves us all dangling in Fuzzy Logic Land where each of us can come up with a different idea, sometimes even conflicting interpretations, and God still works with us. The measure of holiness is not precision in application or clarity of logic, but ultimate surrender to His personal desires, even if they seem capricious and make no sense at all. The burden is on us to work it out, and the burden includes a grand layer of uncertainty. Deal with it, Creature.
The pool of reflexes we associate with liberty in Western society are mostly wrong. God says we start from the assumption of cooperating until we find, not a justification, but a necessity we do otherwise. Our Western mythology starts from the wrong basis. Everyone submits to someone — that’s a basic truth. The question is not whether but whom. When it comes to the ultimate authority to decide what is in a child’s best interest, would you prefer a secular state claiming a level of control and ownership that makes you a slave? Or would you prefer the mother, with all her flaws, have that ultimate authority? The latter envisions a society where the family household is the center of power over virtually all human activity. The former rips virtually everything from the family’s hands. Hint: The former is an abomination in God’s eyes.
A Hebrew soldier in ancient times would not look for any excuse to lace his boots in defiance of convention. His commanders would not give a rat’s patootie either way, so long as he showed up and did his duty. His commanders would not demand a high-degree of detailed control because they would find the whole thing impossible to lead into battle if they couldn’t rely on a basic level of moral accountability, a sense of duty carried by the individual soldier. And while American military literature does have lots of nice words to say about mature soldiers with a good attitude, the entire system militates against it. From a biblical perspective, an American troop is one of the lowest kinds of slave. He is not a proud warrior but a machine to be driven heedless of any possible interest in his welfare, despite words to the contrary. His “welfare” is measured in terms of monetary investment and maintenance, with a well established expiration and replacement policy.
Let me offer a single item to suggest which system is more noble: Hebrew combat leaders marched into battle at the head of their formations and were the first to strike the enemy. Modern American combat leaders are the last to get involved directly. Hebrew officers earned rank and respect by surviving in battle and doing the most damage to the enemy. I can assure you that modern battle tactics are not a valid excuse for changing the underlying moral imperatives.
Most questions and controversies of our day are answered from this frame of reference.

  • Abortion: Would you rather the mother be free to choose or some government bureaucrat who hates God?
  • Gay Marriage: Would you rather such questions be settled in a strong family social structure or by some civil government that hates the mere suggestion of such coherence, but prefers you all be isolated and prostrate before bureaucratic dictat?
  • Private Weapons: Would you prefer a regime that basically considers all armed persons as competent assets against disorder, or an absolutist state that treats everyone as slaves?
  • Pornography: Would you prefer a social structure that protects the vulnerable and only a few rare flakes with full freedom to pursue their limited access to perversion, or the tyranny of someone snooping in your underwear to make sure you don’t show anything to anyone who isn’t duly authorized for state purposes?

You either implement what God had in mind or you surrender to an oppressive system designed by Satan. There are no other options.
Those who find the current regime easy to manipulate in favor of their personal benefit are not good people. That is, the only people happy with what we have today in America are folks who spit in God’s eye. God will not sponsor the sort of craven sheeple who go along to get along and prefer to leverage their feeble morality through the secular state. Those sheeple will not comprehend what is happening to them because they are utterly blind to the moral fabric of the universe. They will sing their happy hymns and dream of a society God will never allow. If you feel a compulsion to activism, at least choose accurately to agitate for what God has said is necessary for improving life on this planet, this fallen plane.
Liberty is always within the context of reality.

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Of Children and Angels 3

Posted on May 2, 2013 by ehurst

He opened the door to their apartment slowly.
The small, thin transparent plastic chip he always placed on top of the door when they left fell exactly where it should have. Unless someone was looking for such a thing, they would never see it. They closed the door. Virtually all exterior doors in the Netherlands lock automatically. They could be opened from the inside, but only with a key from the outside. They had also installed a deadbolt, and Preston locked this, too.
After checking the sparely furnished apartment and seeing nothing out of place, they dared to breathe a sigh of relief.
Preston smiled and took her in his arms. “Here’s hoping it was nothing, just someone you had seen before somewhere. A strange coincidence, maybe.”
She said nothing for awhile as she snuggled against him. Looking up at him she said, “It really bothers me why I can’t place her, because I’m normally pretty clear on such things.”
“Yes, you are. But there is nothing we can do. Maybe I should give you some of the lessons my supervisor taught me back when I worked over at the storage site. He had a long tour in Korea and earned his first level black belt in Taekwondo.”
She pulled back and looked up at him. “I thought you didn’t like violence.”
“I don’t. But just because I try to avoid it doesn’t mean I don’t know how to do it. Had our Israeli man gotten out of that car, I might not have beaten him, but it would not have been easy for him without a weapon.”
“That’s good to know. I’d rather rely on my running ability.”
She pulled away and headed to the little office. “I’m going to take a look at our photos from Valkenburg first. I need to see if I can recognize her face.”
“And I’m going to make myself remember that not even dessert in a ritzy hotel should separate us,” he said with a strained chuckle.
Angie did manage to recognize the face of the woman they thought tried to sabotage the SUV up in Margraten, but it was not the woman at the buffet. After several hours of this, she decided her mind was too tired and strained and had lost any hope of recognizing much of anything.
Preston had been working beside her most of the time, processing the photos they had taken that morning on their tour of Brunssum and Schinnen. He was viewing some touristy websites when she turned to face away from the computer.
Rubbing her eyes, Angie said, “No luck. I give up.”
He turned toward her and spun her chair around to face him. Taking both her hands, he reassured her. “There is only so much we can do. The one thing of which we can be certain is our angels were warning us not to break the rules again.”
She smiled and nodded.
He continued. “How about some kayaking? We can catch a train over to Maastricht, Liege, Namur and change to Dinant. There’s a place to lock the bikes there, then we ride the train up La Lesse to the launch point. It takes half the day if we start right after breakfast.”
She was suddenly excited. “Oh, I’d love that!”
“Good,” he said. “Let me check with our boss.”
Angie watched with some interest as he logged into their email account. Preston posted a message about images from the day’s ride in the dropbox, then asked if there was any reason they couldn’t go kayaking in Dinant.
They had a quiet dinner, then went back to check the email again.

Good shots. No reason to avoid Dinant, but not now. Get ready for Roermond. Check the dropbox.

The script spat out a PDF and then a text file. The latter was sort of a cover letter that said at the top, “Read the study first.”
So they read it, this time in English. They weren’t surprised the topic was human trafficking, their primary mission. The study explained it as a business, which happened to be illegal. Mostly it was background on what sort of factors affected the trade. Over the past decade, they had gone from coaxing kids to travel alone or in twos and threes to some destination where they were “broken” and made compliant. This was often the same place they first worked, but someone with a good business sense was trying to make things more efficient. So they began corralling the kids close to where they were found, then confining them in large groups and moving them all at once.
This was what they had witnessed with the bus. Holding them in the bus out in the woods near Aachen, the kids were sold off, but still had to be broken and it wasn’t easy convincing them without some force to leave with a pimp. They had tried using tents for the breaking action, but there were too many risks. So the crooks had begun reaching out to other criminal businesses, looking to find better facilities.
The study went on at length, and when they were finished, Angie and Preston discussed how this helped to explain better what they had been doing. Major crime bosses were often spies, too. Spying had gotten expensive and the heroin and weapons trade of days past just didn’t pay enough any more, so human trafficking was a new profitable sideline.
Finally, they went back to the cover letter. In essence, it explained that a couple major shipments of kids had come down the Rhein River on barges. Roermond was a city that had long suffered a rather high crime rate, and corruption in the city and district officials didn’t help matters. However, the barges would normally have to travel as far north as Nijmegen, then up the Maas canals (south) to Roermond. Whatever the flaws of the very left-wing government in Nijmegen, child welfare was something they pursued with ferocity. After catching a shipment of kids, the officials had made sure barges were checked pretty well. It was quite certain the kids weren’t going through there any more. Yet, they were ending up in Roermond at a large rural manor near the city where they were broken in large batches.
Preston and Angie were supposed to see if they could figure out how the kids were moved, possibly from Düsseldorf straight west. It was a rather short drive by autobahn to Roermond. The previous use of buses was now too risky, so it had to be some other means. Closing down the breaking house would prove exceptionally tough, but if they could expose who and how they were getting there, it would starve the business for awhile.
Preston sighed. “I doubt we can do any serious kayaking on the Maas canal.”

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Biblical Law on Abortion

Posted on May 1, 2013 by ehurst

The Spirit of the Lord has moved on me and I must now deliver.

I have wrangled over this with friends for a few days, making sure I had considered it from different angles. Perhaps you could consider that as the oral and written arguments before the court. That is, because I claim God has called me as prophet and elder, it is my duty to eventually render a judicial declaration. The limits to my authority (“this court”) is your conscience. If the Lord does not move you to hear my words, then those words are meaningless. If you and I do not share together the awareness of a covenant, I am just some random guy with some loud opinions. This is a critical point, an essential and unavoidable prerequisite for what follows.

Basic legal context: The Covenant of Noah is binding on all humanity, to include all human governments. All human activity is judged under that Law. The primary record of that Law in Genesis 8 & 9 leaves us with very few particulars. Rather, in typical Hebrew literary fashion, a brief statement represents a much larger common understanding. Much is presumed of the reader’s knowledge. We get some of the particulars in places like Acts 15. The Talmud presents what it calls the Seven Noachide Laws; we take that with a grain of salt because the Talmud is wholly suspect. For now, I find the list in the Talmud mostly plausible. See this study for details.

The Law of Moses comes to us as a particular implementation of Noah with several extra elements not at all applicable to the rest of humanity. What remains is the burden of reading Moses to gain some insight into how Noah works. Moses is not binding on anyone who doesn’t embrace it specifically, and the Cross made it in essence wholly voluntary. In Christ, it serves as a guide and we are all supposed to study it and abstract our own best understanding of how it applies. This is the meaning behind the passage about “rightly dividing the Word” — that passage applied specifically to the Old Testament as “the Word” of Scripture extant at the time. While you might want to confer with people who have studied it in depth, as I have, you are under no obligation to take their word for it. It is presumed you would study it in light of Jesus’ teaching along with the Apostles. The New Testament clarifies and corrects Moses. Still, you are obliged to read it all for yourself and pray for the Spirit’s enlightenment.

In that sense, hear now the Word of the Lord from this prophet and elder.

The current debate over abortion, particularly in America, is a false dichotomy. It is two lies pitted against each other. That there is some mixture of truth on both sides simply means we have to expend more verbiage explaining the truth.

Biblical Law says this: From the moment of coitus and conception, until the moment of weaning — typically marked by a ritual celebration somewhere around ages 3 to 5 — until that moment, the life of the child is entirely under the authority of the mother. She holds the principle authority from God for prospering or ending that life. In God’s Word, she is accountable first and foremost to God and His revealed Laws. Ending that child’s life must meet the justice requirements of Noah. That doesn’t give her much wiggle room, so we rightly expect killing that child is pretty hard to justify before God.

On this earth, the Bible says her accountability is first to the father of that child. Daddy also has authority to kill that baby, but he might have to fight the mama. She can resist as much as she is able. In God’s justice, daddy could theoretically execute mama for killing his baby. Normally he would take this matter before the one and only court with that authority to decide: the family elder(s). Yes, this whole thing assumes she is living under a covenant family household. Depending on how things are structured in her society, the matter of the baby’s murder can be appealed up to something akin to tribal-national level. But “national” has a meaning in the Bible not accepted by most modern people. A proper example would be taking the matter before the King of Israel as the final earthly court of appeal. I note that would have been wholly unlikely because the matter usually stops with the clan elder. That’s because the clan elder has the authority to execute the woman for murdering her baby, and King would hardly get involved. He would almost surely refuse to take case.

Where does that leave us now? The modern secular state has virtually zero authority under Noah. No, it’s not that simple, but I need to start shaking us loose from the abomination of modern political activism. Christians are playing a very dangerous game trying to use any modern civil government as leverage for much of anything. The New Testament pointedly directs Christians to settle everything they can in their own covenant courts among the church elders. (Pastors are not in on this; it’s a matter for governing elders.) Granted, civil governments tend to stick their noses in where they are not wanted, but we are supposed to avoid encouraging that imposition. The point should be made again: You cannot understand God’s justice outside the proper social structure, and the attendant governing structure, of a tribal society. Now, in Christ, the business of using blood kinship as the basis for your tribal society is unlikely, but ideal. Instead, the entire thing rests on the covenant tribe of kinship in His blood. That is, the local church body. And that local church body is entirely invalid unless it’s fundamental structure is not pretty much the tribal structure of the ancient Hebrew people. Modern corporate structures are invalid — period. Your church is your “clan.” You follow tribal customs on authority and so forth.

In a certain sense, no one has any business poking into your daily affairs unless they are related by blood or covenant. Under Noah, and by implication this applies to all Christians, no secular authority has any business poking their nose into a woman’s abortion. For the most part, she is answerable on this earth only to her family, which includes the daddy and his family, since there is the presumption she has joined his family by marriage covenant.

Christian, your yelling and screaming, trying to make your secular government outlaw abortion is itself an abomination to God. Your yelling and screaming trying to make the mother feel guilty for what an awful thing she did to that poor little baby is missing the point. If your sign says, “Your abortion kills me, too” then you are on the right track. Unfortunately, our cultural context will almost guarantee she’ll miss the point. That’s because Western secular government claims ownership of all human life, and that is simply evil. The basis for your claim against her crime is not some imaginary civil rights of the child (purely Western mythology) or some insult to the secular society at large. Your only claim against her is that baby’s murder punches a hole in your moral covering as someone who lives in geographical proximity. Otherwise, the Bible says it’s none of your business, because the Bible says she owns that child completely until weaning. She is virtually unanswerable to you; she owes you no explanation. If you have a complaint, you would take it to her clan elder. God forbids you harassing her except in the carefully structured setting of a shared covenant to which she has already agreed. If you are her friend, then use that leverage. Accosting her on the street is not simply rude; it’s immoral before God. Without that covenant link, it’s none of your business as a matter of human interaction.

Granted, our US Constitution is some horrific perversion of a covenant in a certain sense. Yes, God holds us accountable to it on a certain level. That is almost entirely outside the context for this discussion.

The way God says you should stop abortion is to dramatically change your society, to demand people live under the Covenant of Noah and grab back from civil government some 99% of its current enforcement authority. Stopping abortion means radically changing how it is people meet and have sex by instituting social controls that make it pretty hard. Better yet, you should seek God’s face and pray this government be destroyed, because we all know it will not surrender under any circumstances. That’s because the people running it are almost entirely — virtually every single individual — psychopaths already eternally damned from before the foundation of the earth.

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Of Children and Angels 2

Posted on May 1, 2013 by ehurst

At the crossing, they turned right and promptly dismounted their bikes. They climbed up on the tiny train platform. In due time, a small train arrived headed south to Heerlen.
They arrived at the station just a couple hundred meters from their apartment. The train stopped next to the large open parking plaza on the south end of the station. Angie was walking her bike in the direction of their apartment.
“Wait,” Preston caught her.
She stopped and looked back. He motioned her to follow.
“We aren’t going home yet. I wanna have lunch at a particular place.” She raised her eyebrows in a half smile and humored him. They rode about a half-kilometer back up the tracks on the south side to a busy traffic circle, following it around to cross under the autobahn. As they rode down the bike path, she saw up on a small hill to their right a large building with a toucan sign perched high up on a pole. She looked at it, then back at Preston. He was grinning broadly as the slowed to enter the drive on the right.
The Van Der Valk Hotel had plenty of bicycle parking and was quite busy. As they climbed the stairs to the buffet lounge, Preston told her how often he and his coworkers had eaten there. Aside from redecorating and refurbishing, little had changed. It was still an opulent spread and not a bad price. They eventually found open seats at a table in one of the side dining areas opened to accommodate the crowd.
After a few stories, he was silent a moment as he watched her.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“You’ve been pretty quiet today,” he observed.
“This was your day to reminisce. It’s all fascinating, but so completely foreign to me. It’s part of what makes you so exotic and interesting.” She beamed at him.
“Tell me about exotic, my chocolate redheaded lover, with the sexy little athletic body.”
She blushed and that girlish giggle slipped past her lips, forcing her to cover her mouth in the middle of chewing.
He went on, “I’m very glad you don’t flaunt it. Leave it to their imagination; it’s all mine.”
She continued laughing, fanning herself with one hand and covering her mouth with the other. It took a moment for her to finally say, “No one has ever talked to me that way. I love it, but it’s hard to know what to say back.”
“Just enjoy it, Babe; get used to it. I’m going back for some dessert. Need anything?”
“No, I’ve already had too much. This place is wonderful.”
Preston wandered off toward the buffet as her eyes followed him. She half wondered if she should have tried to follow him, remembering the words of Mr. Venkman. Were they still at risk?
Suddenly her eyes focused on a woman’s face. She and Preston had been sitting back near the far corner of the little overflow dining area and the woman walked past the opening in the main area. Angie raised her hand to her face. She wasn’t sure why, but something about that face made her very nervous.
As soon as the woman disappeared from her line of sight, Angie tried to act her most casual self as she rose and began looking for Preston. She spotted him among the desserts, apparently unable to make up his mind. As he reached out to pick up a piece of mixed fruit vlaai, one of the flat Dutch pies, she walked up very close to him and spoke quietly.
“Put it in a doggie bag. I think we have company.” She then placed a hand on his shoulder as she turned to scan the room again. She didn’t see the woman in the crowd.
Preston kept his cool, noticed where she was looking and placed his slice of pie in a plastic container from the stack placed there for the purpose. Then he turned, took her hand with his free one, and walked out the front door. Outside he remained calm as they descended the stairs, then turned and walked around the building the opposite end of where Angie had been searching. He pulled from his pocket a thin plastic shopping bag and dropped the desert into it so he could sling it across the handlebars. They found their bikes and casually rolled back out the side entrance and disappeared rather quickly down an alternate route for bicycles only.
When they were more or less alone, he asked, “So, tell me what you saw.”
“I can’t be sure. I was just sitting there thinking about Mr. Venkman’s advice to stay together when she walked across my line of sight. The face was vaguely familiar, but not someone I actually recognized. I can’t place her, but it made me very nervous.”
“I had almost forgotten about that.”
The path turned into the woods. They rode a few more meters, then he put up his hand. With is finger on his lips, he dismounted and stood to one side of the trail. She copied his action. They stood silently for a few minutes, looking through the trees back down the path across the open field. After a few minutes of not seeing anything unusual, he began examining their bikes closely. Eventually he was satisfied nothing had been added to them, he motioned her to remount and did the same. They rode off, crossing a small brook, winding through the trees to another main road. Crossing back under the autobahn, they headed home.
They took an unusual route and stopped a couple of times. Preston was waiting to see if she saw any more familiar faces.

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Admin: New Permanent Article Up

Posted on April 30, 2013 by ehurst

I’ve decided it was worth writing a single definitive statement about Christian activism in the broader context of what I teach. I reiterate that the answers were there in my teaching, but good solid questions bring out a certain clarity I might not otherwise be able to offer. So one of the highest compliments, and greatest blessings, are people who ask good questions.

Life Is Good (site closed)

A teaser:

Don’t place a high value this life, nor anything in it. Hold very loosely to this world and it’s things, because it’s all disposable. At some point, the entire universe will end; God has said in no uncertain terms it will be gone, totally wiped away. John says we overcome by not loving our lives, but eagerly looking forward to death in the hope of eternal redemption. For most Christians, I don’t need to say any more about it.

Unfortunately, most Christians I know suffer a serious moral schizophrenia when it comes to living out the implications of that teaching. We are so thoroughly pickled in our Western culture that we just cannot bring our minds to organize themselves on a different moral value system. The Bible holds for values completely different from our worldly Western culture. So it’s easy to be people to say this life isn’t worth much anxiety, but it’s another thing entirely to get them to live like, never mind tune their daily speech patterns to convey the biblical viewpoint.

That’s when it becomes necessary to drag out that discussion of Hebrew intellectual assumptions and Hebrew Mystical worldview and those heavy discussions of epistemology. People are still running their entire lives by Post-Enlightenment Western epistemology, and it is both alien and hostile to that of the Bible. So long as you remain a Westerner in your moral and intellectual assumptions, you are not following Jesus.

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Of Children and Angels 1

Posted on April 30, 2013 by ehurst

(This begins Part 3 of the saga of Angie and Preston in the Benelux.)
It was time for a bit more mundane work.
Besides, Preston had not been this close to the old POMCUS site since coming back to the Netherlands. It was a short ride east across Heerlen, through Landgraaf and then Abdissenbosch. They turned left along the primary northerly route, which offered fine bike paths. The entrance to the golf course was just visible down the road where they turned off into the woods. This took them to a road running right along the Dutch-German border.
Preston wanted to see the site from the backside first. While he never was sure what the company was doing digging into the old slag heap from the ancient coal mining days, he saw how a great mound had been reduced from his military days.
They followed the route around to the north side of the complex, and then turned left along the main road. In large cities like this, bike paths were everywhere, and very well maintained with their own traffic lights. The road curved around back south and they could see the large metal warehouses up on the high flat ground. From what he could tell, Preston realized this particular site had been expanded considerably, and reasoned some of the equipment from the sites that they closed had been brought here.
They turned left again and climbed up to follow the street along the fence line. Preston had heard the entire operation throughout the Netherlands had been turned over to Dutch contractors. There was not an American uniform anywhere, just armed Dutch guards and other functionaries.
The administrative offices had been moved, but the main gate was in the same place. There was an old guard sitting there just outside the door of the shack enjoying the breeze. Preston rolled up as close as he dared.
“Hallo!” He waved at the guard.
The man waved back with the typical Dutch friendliness, but said nothing.
“I used to work here!”
The guard perked up and stood, moving to the corner of the gatehouse. His accent was very thick. “That would be a long time ago. The Americans left it to us ten years ago.”
“So I heard. A lot of things have changed.” Preston agreed.
“Ja. Do you know they finally closed the old Schinnen Camp?”
Preston was a little surprised. “I knew they had reduced its status, but I wasn’t aware they were closing it. They had spent so very much money fixing the place up.” He pushed his bike a meter or two closer.
“Ja. DSM is trying to find someone else to rent it. But the other NATO allies would not let the Americans just walk away from this area. So the made them keep a reduce section up at old Bruggen — Javelin Barracks, I think they call it now.” The old man was enjoying the conversation.
“That would be just over on the German side. I remember we used to use a firing range up there in the woods near Herkenbosch.”
The old man nodded. “Ja, I worked here long enough to remember that. Now the few American troops could almost walk there from the airbase. It’s just a few American MPs and some civilians. The Brits offered them some space when they deactivated some units. Pretty soon there won’t be nearly so many NATO folks around. Ah, we don’t worry about no Ruskies. We trade with them now.” The old man laughed heartily.
“Thanks for your time, sir. We have some other places to visit.” Preston waved. The old man seemed just a bit disappointed it was over so soon.
They rode back down the street to the main road and turned left. As they approached the high plateau, Preston noticed there was not a trace of the old mining buildings at the JHQ, formerly called AFCENT HQ. The old AFCENT International School, previously a collection of single-story prefab buildings strung together, was now a huge multi-story building and a sign said AFNORTH.
They had been stopping to take photos all morning, but carefully avoided aiming the cameras at any of the military structures. There was plenty of other interesting shots. That included the ancient cable wheel removed from the top of the mine shaft and mounted as a monument in a small park right beside the main gate.
Angie was curious. “I don’t remember what happened. Did the mines just play out?”
Preston snorted. “No. The Americans and their ultra-cheap strip mining put the Dutch State Mines out of business. With the unions here and all those safety regulations against our terribly unsafe operations and hideous earth scars, we undercut you guys and put thousands of people out of work. Those were bad times in the Benelux.”
She pursed her lips. “So that’s why DSM does no mining at all, just chemicals and stuff.”
“Yeah. They still own all those mine camps and NATO was a good paying renter. Those days are about gone, it seems. We had a huge number of supporting operations all over the Netherlands, not just the POMCUS sites. It was extravagant for a long time — missile sites, life support services, all sorts of secret communications bunkers. I only heard about the places we had people. About all that’s left now are the places directly involved in NATO coordination activity itself.”
Preston pointed out how the original coal train path was now a bike path. They decided to follow it around to Schinnen. It was a long quiet ride through Hoensbroek. At some places the route was simply gone, at other places it was an actual street, but there weren’t that many detours. It wound down around the picturesque village of Terschuren with its beautifully kept ancient stone cottages. They took lots of pictures there.
Eventually they got back on the route which went through some woods, then alongside a sand and gravel operation used by Dutch Rail, very close to the tracks. Then the path turned and required they run alongside the built up highway where it bridged over the rail line, cross over the top, and dove through some foliage. It closely paralleled the railroad. On the other side, the trail continued. By that time, the landscape had been changed so much that the original route disappeared. However, a fine wooded path remained along much of it, and they took what was available.
Part of it was elevated above the surrounding terrain. The last section running along the backside of Schinnen Mine was inaccessible, thickly grown over with trees and shrubs. It had been just barely possible to crawl through it twenty years before, but was impassable altogether now. They turned and followed the main route toward what had been the one gate into the old complex. While a bike path on the left ran along between the fence and train tracks on the south side of the site, they stopped at the gate and gazed into the now abandoned facility.
Except for the original headquarters building and one or two other structures, the place was all new buildings, now vacant. The duck pond was overgrown with weeds, but the ducks were still there. It was actually the first sediment pond from the water treatment system. The water passed from there back under the roadway to a wooded fish pond. Preston decided he’d seen enough and they turned to go back.

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Fuzzy Hebrew Reasoning

Posted on April 30, 2013 by ehurst

This post is a response to some very good questions to my previous Righteous Activism.
I may misunderstand the question, but let me answer what I believe is the question and we can work from there. God as my witness, I wish it could be shorter, but I’m not smart enough to be more terse and condensed. It’s the function of pastors and elders to do whatever is possible to help people get what they need to serve the Lord.
Our brother Michael offers standard Western reasoning; he is in much good company. I couldn’t answer at all had I not spent so many years of my life wandering in the puzzling world of Western Post-Enlightenment theology. If we step outside the confining limits of that tradition, we stand in a better place to recognize the larger collection of intellectual traditions. While it’s easy to recognize a broad common stream of thinking within the whole of Western Civilization, we find a great many Westerners are encouraged to take Western thinking entirely too seriously, to so deeply identify with it as to take it personally, to be unconsciously offended when something contradicts it. I’m not saying Michael is an idiot, but his objections are very common among those who haven’t become acquainted with the differences between Western Christian traditions and something much older.
I’ve often warned that Western reasoning is built on a rejection of revelation. Christianity and faith are actually quite ill-fitting in Western traditions. Because it’s a bad fit, we end up with a host of problems manifested in the disputes and bloodshed which soaks Church History. We sense that messy history does not reflect what the Apostles gave us, but we are crippled by a lack of documentation. There are some few letters and treatises of those who directly followed the Apostles, but we sense there is some selective record-keeping at work here. Yes, I allege someone in the past destroyed some of that documentation with malicious intent, but I can’t chase that rabbit right now. But, if we take seriously the study of intellectual differences between the Hebrew people and what we have some few centuries later, we see a very huge gap, a really substantial move. I’ve tried to offer at times my best estimate of how that shift came about, and avoid reading back into it my own prejudices. I suggest most of Western Christian scholarship you’ll encounter today has not tried hard enough. That is, a great deal of Western Christian tradition still buys into the false world view, the fundamental assumptions about reality, that are not at all consistent with those who wrote the Bible. I even wrote a book trying to point out how Jesus was a Hebrew man with a viewpoint totally at variance with most of the modern Western church.
So a great deal of Western reasoning is not wrong as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. If you stay within those boundaries, revelation will never make sense. To some degree, it’s not supposed to make sense, but I believe we can come closer by moving from our Western rational tradition back to the ancient Hebrew intellectual roots. As it is, I often warn the truth of God cannot really find a home in our human understanding. It requires a separate, higher faculty in the Spirit, something which does not dwell in the conscious intellect. Our problem is the barrier between the spirit and mind, and our knee-jerk reflex to keep the mind in the driver’s seat. The mind is not competent, and where the spirit has been brought to life by God, we dare not rely on it for anything more than merely organizing our response to things mandated from the Spirit in our spirits. There must ever be a thousand unanswered questions. That was the overall meaning behind the symbol of sheol. We cannot know what’s beyond this life. Much of what I have encountered in my years of study in theology and philosophy assumes too much, trying too hard to make faith cerebral. The Hebrew intellectual traditions are truly different from that. Sometimes I still struggle with it.
The justice/injustice standard is based on obeying God’s revelation. Justice is what God says it is; it reflects His divine character. God built the Hebrew intellectual culture by His own hand as the one context fit for revelation. We are forced to assume that legacy is as close as human minds can get to His truth on this earth. By contrast to the Hebrew concept, if efficiency was part of the standard, then it’s best to die and not be here in the first place. I don’t pretend to know when God deems a child accountable in the course of human development. The Hebrew culture never nails it down beyond a nebulous comment in passing about knowing to do right from wrong. It assumes there is such a point without trying to calculate. They wouldn’t pretend to speak for God on something like that because He didn’t say, but they did notice when things got dicey dealing with a particular child. We don’t know the absolute truth of such things; all we know is what we can read in God’s revelation about what we should do about it.
Take a look at how David handled the death of his first son by Bathsheba. His sorrow was for himself and he said so, not for the child. “He cannot come to me; I must go to him.” The Hebrew understanding of reality is darker than ours. There is an overwhelming sense that this life makes no sense, nor can it. There is really nothing to accomplish — “All is vanity of vanities.” You really don’t want to be here, but God is the one who decides when it’s over. Until then, you have little choice but to obey or suffer the consequences. Even in the matter of consequences, much of it is incomprehensible. God dumps His wrath on sin and the guidelines for avoiding His wrath are ill-defined by human standards. It’s not supposed to be easy. And even if we do stand before Him relatively clean-handed by His Laws, we still have to wade through the common sorrows of all the rest of humanity. In other words, it’s very tempting to try to come up with a matrix of reasoning that ignores God’s infuriatingly fuzzy revelation and just work it all out on the human level.
So yes: Who wouldn’t choose death as soon as they could? Except, it’s not ours to choose. We are obliged to stay here and endure the sorrow until God is pleased to let us go. Could you take your own life? Sure. Suicide is not horrifying in Scripture; there are times it is the only thing left to do when a man has gone too far in miscalculating the vagaries of this life. He realizes his mistake too late to undo the damage. If your mission here is destroyed, it’s possible for you to realize it’s time to go. But there again, Hebrew culture assumes it becomes obvious that you are simply carrying out your own just death sentence, not simply because you are sad. Your pain is not reason enough; it has to be calculated with dispassion whether you sense God has said you have failed your mission. It’s all about mission and calling, not your happiness. Still, the whole question remains vague and so it must be, but I assure you our modern Western horror about suicide is not at all from Scripture. The mainstream Western Christian reaction on that question is actually from pagan European backgrounds. We have this reflex of reading our cultural assumptions and feelings back into the Hebrew people, and it’s wrong.
As Michael noted, the Hebrew Scriptures don’t present a very good view of the afterlife. Now, we do have a pretty good pile of Jewish traditions regarding what was taught but not recorded in Scripture. Unfortunately, it’s not uniformly trustworthy. Jesus rejected most of it with just a few words about “traditions of men.” But then His disciples did dredge up oral traditions from the Hebrew culture and put them in Scripture, so we have no simple standard, no good solid feel for how to handle the apparent difference between what is obvious from Hebrew Scripture and what it seems the New Testament does to clarify. We know in theory they were guided by the Holy Spirit, but we find ourselves with a sense we can’t be quite so sure from where we stand now. If we read through the Jewish traditions, we would probably seize on the wrong thing.
So I read back into Hebrew culture what Jesus said about these things, simply because He was the final revelation of what was not so clear as before. It is Jesus who says so much more about the afterlife, but we know He says it based on Hebrew assumptions. If it seems He adopts imagery from, say the Persians, and maybe a few other cultural backgrounds, it is not because He is a syncretist, but because He found a handy image people would understand. Everyone wants to ignore how the Hebrews readily borrowed from other cultures if it was a good way of expressing something far beyond words and images in the first place.
This is the biggest stumbling block of all: Hebrew language is not descriptive, but indicative. Hebrew intellectual efforts are not aimed at resolving human questions, but at providing some bit of traction for obedience. It’s impossible to overstate what a radical difference that makes when you start trying to think about things. It was always assumed you cannot understand with your mind. Jesus said parables were necessary for His teaching because the truth cannot be told, only indicated by imagery and symbols. The writer of Hebrews rather bluntly states the real world is at best only a shadowy copy of ultimate truth, in describing how Moses commanded the design of the Tabernacle as a shadowy representation of God’s throne room in Heaven. He then talks about how faith is a form of perception which fills in the blanks for the intellect: It is the substance of things we wish we could understand, but those things are rooted in another realm.
So while the Hebrew Scriptures make passing references to sheol and how death is more like sleep, it’s totally consistent to read back into it things Jesus taught. It is not consistent to read back into it anything else from any other human source. Jesus is the one who said dying in righteousness brings us into Paradise, whatever it was He meant by that word. This counters somewhat the Hebrew image of death as a place of sleep, of knowing nothing (we could burn up a lot of time chasing the inherent meaning of “knowing” in that context). And I fully agree the idea of dying and going into the torments of Hell is missing in the Hebrew Scripture. Again, Jesus brought up the idea of Hell as one of the two alternatives, the other at one point described as the Bosom of Abraham. He reveals what was incomplete in ancient Hebrew understanding. Maybe it was there but never explained, or maybe it was simply missing altogether, but Jesus completes the picture.
A major point of confusion is the Hebrew assumption of Two Realms, an understanding utterly missing from Western Civilization. We have words for it, but the matrix of understanding is missing. We end up with “eternity” meaning “time without limit” whereas the Hebrew conception is totally outside the time-space continuum. Even if I can get those words into a nice Sunday School lesson in your average mainstream evangelical church, the intellectual background is missing. There is almost no place to hang such a thought, and people unconsciously dismiss it. So it tends to come off as mythical and not real. Just listen to how people talk about eternal things and you’ll see a serious tangled mess in which the Two Realms are confused. The Law Covenants together reflect a moral regime which carries us through this fallen existence. It manifests deeper truths about things in the Spirit Realm, but by no means answers all the questions. Rather, the Laws put us on track to discover as much as any human mind can grasp about eternity.
God does not explain why He chooses some for citizenship in His Eternal Kingdom and not others. He never explains the basis for how He decides to give some spiritual life and others remain spiritually dead. He does say some part of the process is our witness, but He pointedly warns us no part of the eternal change is in any human hands at any point. We participate in revealing or manifesting His decision from before Creation — that’s how it’s presented to us. Even then, I can’t be certain I’m saying it right. Yet Paul warns nothing in humanity is capable of even wanting eternal life, but that our nature is implacably hostile to it. Whatever it is God does, it counts as a miracle totally from His initiative. There is sufficient space in Heaven for every soul born on earth since the beginning and until the end. It’s where we belong, but we won’t all get there. Scripture hints at the notion the majority will not, yet it asserts rather clearly it’s possible in some sense all could theoretically make the grade. There is no effort at all to explain why.
There is a lot of talk about the Law Covenants and how they make life better here below. We are left to recognize how that picture symbolizes something of the inexplicable spiritual reality somewhere beyond the shadowy mess we have here. All we can pin down is this: If there is anything we can do about gaining eternal citizenship, it begins with repenting under the Laws of God. The connection is not defined, merely asserted. We do understand it somewhat from the other side of things, in that we know those who come into spiritual life and the attendant awareness it grants will find the Laws winsome and irresistible, though not always fitting every occasion. The Laws taste a bit like our spiritual inheritance. The problem is our human mind getting in the way. If your spirit is dead, you don’t have much else to work with except your mind. But if the spirit is alive and aware, then it takes over and mind serves instead of ruling. That is by far the most difficult transition to make, and most of the Western church never even tries, because they are so deeply pickled in Western assumptions that there can be nothing above the intellect. Western Civilization disembowels faith before you ever get there.
In the Realm of the Spirit, a child born on this fallen plane has their citizenship in eternity. It’s our birthright under Creation. But at some point, the poison of the Fall takes hold. I don’t have the words to explain it, but the penalty of the Fall is not applied until sometime after birth and well before adulthood. There is a period of moral innocence recognized in the Law Covenants, but not explained. Killing an unborn baby sends that baby to Heaven. That reflects God’s justice. Killing them after that indefinable point risks sending them to Hell. God says that’s justice, too. It’s offensive to our Western notions, but that’s because we are pickled in the lies of Satan — AKA, Western Civilization. Can’t get your head around that? I’m not sure what I can do to help, but I’m trying. If we could choose to die in innocence, we would. But by the time we know enough to make the choice, we cannot. Why it is the innocence dies in so many people and never comes back to life in spiritual birth, I cannot say. The Bible makes no attempt to explain it, only asserts just enough for us to get a few pointers.
We aren’t allowed in on the divine counsels of such matters. We are permitted to realize our own spiritual birth, but even that is really tough. We need a lot of help from others to explain what to make of that in itself, never mind all the other particulars. What I can say is the logic of doing right to win Heaven is false logic. It results in “works righteousness” and a wealth of error and sin. The most dangerous people in the world are those logically certain of their righteousness while spiritually dead (or at least ignoring the Spirit). We see that exemplified in the Jewish persecution of the New Testament.
Confusing things considerably is how the Jews themselves had corrupted their understanding and left behind their Hebrew intellectual heritage. Scripture doesn’t document it. Oddly, the Talmudic records do document that intellectual shift, but try to justify it. The point is, that shift from Hebrew Mysticism to Western Rationalism was morally fatal, and deeply confused what little understanding of spiritual matters was possible. I know the Bible teaches us that this life is supposed to be miserable. By His mercies, we can work towards a certain measure of mitigation by observing the Law Covenants as whole. We can even abstract the underlying logic, but that underlying logic is not at all amenable to Western minds. We are not subject to something so neat and clean as a body of objective truth within our theoretical reach. We are subject to a living Person. If I could point to one heresy most seriously threatening to obeying Jesus Christ, it is the assumption God cannot defy logic, when “logic” is cast in Aristotelian terms. Aristotle went to Hell, folks. He refused to accept the message of the Old Testament and refused to repent of his sins. We know he encountered that message, yet his work reflects a clear departure from it. You cannot learn God’s ways from someone like Aristotle, nor can we pretend to somehow recast God’s revelation in Aristotle’s frame of reference. That frame of reference is behind the “traditions of men” Jesus warned about when He disputed with the Hellenized Jewish scholars of His day.
When God says something is just by His standard, it’s our job to reach for as much understanding as possible about that. Most important is not that we somehow figure it out in its essence, but only so much as need to formulate our obedience. The injustice of abortion is rejecting God’s moral standards regarding conception of life, and refusing to accept the burden of responsibility for raising that child — refusing to adhere to God’s moral standards in the first place. Sending that unborn child to Heaven is not the problem, but virtually no one involved views it that way. They dehumanize the child by making it a mass of tissue. This is pretty much the same thing as Cain killing Abel — it’s murder. It’s taking life for any reason short of God’s justice. The problem with most anti-abortion activism is focusing on the loss of the child, as if it’s somehow unjust to the child. That’s wrong. It’s a sin against themselves by refusing to take the path God prescribed, and a sin against God for rejecting His ways.
It’s not about the child, who suffers no loss. Allowing the child to live is a virtual guarantee it will end up in Hell as a sinner later in life. The question is not justice for the child. Was not Abel taken into Heaven? Didn’t Cain do him a favor? Cain sinned against the moral fabric of universe. I can’t explain why God insists we all pass through this horrible existence and then for most of us (apparently) to end up in Hell. But that’s what He has ordered, and we are damned if we argue with His plans. The sin of abortion is arguing with God.

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Righteous Activism

Posted on April 29, 2013 by ehurst

God has revealed Himself. He has not been silent since the very first human mind became conscious.
The primary, fundamental fact of human existence here and now is we are fallen. It affects the totality of our human existence. No part of us is able to rise above the Fall without some outside assistance. The whole point of revelation is to serve as the beginning point of that outside assistance. Revelation is the gateway to redemption.
Fundamental to all human sin is arguing with God. It begins with Satan’s first comment in the Bible: “Is it really true that God said…?” His second comment was a blatant contradiction of what God said. All human evil today begins with the same trend of questioning God’s revelation.
Has God really said homosexuality is evil? Yep. It’s an evil desire, but that’s not the real problem. We desire a lot of things God said we shouldn’t have and that’s just one of them. If you cared to know, He also explains why He said that. I’ve explained that often enough in detail already, but the hint is social stability.
Sure, you can imagine all sorts of ways to keep social stability while doing things God said not to do, but your imagination excludes His revelation. He warned us that He designed Creation to do certain things, to operate in a certain fashion, and He said there were a lot of things that interfered with that operation. He referred to in terms best translated as justice. Gay sex is unjust. So is a lot of other sexual stuff we like to do.
No, you may not justly choose to have sex with just anyone you choose, at any time and place you choose. Most of them time, our profligate sexual sins results in conception of another human. God said a lot of things about why that is, but our modern society argues with Him about it. So we have lots of ways of preventing that conception. There might be good reasons for preventing it, but once it’s on the way, there is virtually no way to justify abortion.
Our massive legacy of abortion alone is all the justification God needs to destroy America, and we deserved to be crushed long ago. Same goes for the entire modern world.
It’s not about killing the baby. God can handle that; all murdered babies go to Heaven. They aren’t accountable. Talk of “age of accountability” is typically arrogant puffery, but the underlying principle is correct. There comes a point when God holds us accountable for our sins as humans, and it’s sometime well after birth. What a great way to end life, fully assured of going home to Jesus without having to live in this fallen world. It’s not so much the ending of life that makes God angry, but the injustice of it.
His wrath falls where His revelation is rejected. You can embrace His revelation voluntarily or you have it fall on your life involuntarily in the form of wrath.
You may recall His first comments about Law Covenants started with warning Noah mankind must take responsibility for taking the life of murderers. Yeah, it sounds crazy to our human reasoning, but that’s what God said. If someone takes a human life unjustly, according to the terms of His revelation, then that someone has forfeited his life. And it falls on other humans to take it justly. The difference is not in the killing, but whether it is justly done. People who insist God is against all violence are rejecting His revelation and lying just like Satan.
I’ve also spilled a jillion electrons explaining the context that He said must be firmly in place before we proceed with implementing such things as the death penalty. It’s that business of a Hebrew tribal social structure. Without that, justice according to God’s revelation impossible in the first place. This is why I’m not an activist for any particular cause but one: God’s prescribed tribal social structure. Yes, there are things we can do personally to mitigate His wrath in our lives even though we have no real leverage over the vast ocean of evil around us. Still, my only message to all humanity cannot be confined to one cause. It’s “repent” in the fullest meaning.
You see, if you have the Spirit, then His revealed Word serves to explain for our minds how to obey the Spirit. If you don’t have the Spirit — or more accurately, if the Spirit does not have you — then you desperately need His Laws because you can’t understand them on that higher level. Either way, you cannot possibly obey His Laws fully without that tribal social structure. You cannot hope to stop abortion and homosexuality until and unless people first submit to the Laws. So the only way I can be an activist is to restore that fundamental justice first. You see, what God told Noah about the death penalty was a good Hebrew parable that implied a lot more than what the words said.
Oh yeah; that business of thinking like a Hebrew is part of my activism. If you haven’t embraced the Hebrew intellectual foundations, you can’t possibly understand God’s Word in the first place. Western intellectual reasoning is wholly and utterly incompetent for the task. Without Hebrew Mysticism, you cannot hope to discover what God meant, because He created the Hebrew Mystical intellectual assumptions as the proper atmosphere for revealing Himself. I don’t care how expert you are in translating the original languages; without mysticism you have no idea what those words mean. So activism in favor of God’s Laws is double-barreled, harping on Hebrew intellectual traditions and tribal social structure.
Those things together are pretty much what John the Baptist meant when he called people to repent. It’s also what Jesus had in mind when He preached, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!”

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