Of Images and Angels 1

Posted on April 7, 2013 by ehurst

(New fiction series!)
No Pulitzers here, but maybe something that would keep him from going hungry.
Preston was reviewing the images from the last three days of whizzing around The Hague. He did his best to avoid the touristy stuff and captured angles with an artsy edge. His work filled a very narrow niche that saw the wire services buying sometimes almost as much as ten percent of what he submitted.
The park behind the Noord Hove shopping center was relatively quiet that morning. He had been wandering all over Zoetermeer since dawn with the help of a district tourist map and a borrowed bicycle. His camera was recent technology, but still on the low end of the price range. He bought it because it was the most he could get in such a tiny pocket digicam.
For the third time he reminded himself he really should carry the laptop on these forays. The bigger screen would make it much easier to discard images with major flaws. It would take him awhile but he decided to head back to the village where his host was part owner of an inland marina. The tiny village of Hoogmade sat among the polders east of Leiden just off the A4.
As he pedaled along the narrow lanes, zig-zagging his way in a northerly direction, his mind wandered back over the events that brought him there.
Two decades ago as a freshly minted soldier, he hadn’t even known there were US military installations in the Netherlands. He worked maintenance in one of the not-so-secret forward storage sites for heavy military vehicles. His post was several acres of steel warehouses surrounded by blacktop and high security fencing; his job was a mind-numbing boredom of rotating the aging vehicles in and out of storage for routine inspection and lubrication. Occasionally someone up the chain of command mandated an upgrade of some component, then back into storage it went.
On the other hand, it was as close to a paid vacation as you could get in the military. The Dutch were wonderful hosts, the country wide open to exploration and he was officially encouraged to take full advantage of it. Preston’s photography hobby was a prime excuse for blindly grabbing a train headed somewhere new and he saw most of the Lowlands during his tour. Eventually he bought a nice mountain bike and light backpack for longer jaunts overnight, sometimes taking in on the train. He made a lot of new friends, but one in particular became a lifelong buddy.
During one of his long rides he found himself on the shore of a large lake at the foot of three conical cooling towers. Nuclear energy had always been big in Europe. Out on the lake in a stiff breeze were a large number of wind-surfers. Apparently it was some kind of competition. When he pulled out his camera and began seeking a good angle, someone called out to him from atop a rather large enclosed cargo van. The fellow had backed as close as permitted to the edge of the water and stood on top. He had a tripod supporting a rather ancient VHS video camera.
Preston found the Dutch typically eager to speak English, but he decided to learn as much Dutch as possible, careful to mimic the sounds he heard. It prevented a quick stop from turning into a long conversation when he didn’t feel like hanging around some place. This fellow’s patter was loaded with too much jargon, so after a couple of comments while the man gestured to a built-in ladder on the back door, Preston called out in English.
“How come you aren’t out there riding the wind with the rest of them?”
Without breaking stride, the man switched to English. “I’m the primary sponsor of this event!”
Between getting some good shots, helping the man get more from his video equipment and enjoying a few beers, they became fast friends. Preston learned the man called himself Harry for some odd reason, though it bore no relation to any part of his real name. The fellow’s family had been nautical builders from way back, even bearing the name Botenbouwer (roughly translated as Boatwright). Harry insisted on paying him in advance for some large photo prints of the competition. The family business near Leiden became a frequent stop for Preston on his wanderings over the years while stationed in the Netherlands.
So that was long ago, and Harry had kept in touch when Preston returned stateside. Preston kept working in heavy equipment maintenance as a civilian, becoming a manager quickly. However, he never lost his love for photography. He spent a lot of time online with other photography buffs and kept in touch with Harry through nautical forums and email.
You would have thought it would go on like that forever, but at some point Preston stumbled across the manosphere on the Net. As he began implementing the changes, his pushy wife was not amused. She pretended it was just another hobby, but Preston took it to heart and the friction became unbearable. She refused to change. It was an ugly divorce and the courts ruled against him 100%. She moved her toy-boy into the house while he was on a business trip and changed to locks on the doors. He found most of his personal belongings had been delivered to the hunting lodge he shared up on the mountains. He stayed there while tying up the loose ends.
Preston had prepared well. He had already made a deal to sell all his assets on short notice, written up and dated before her move, so she ended up with the physical property only. The house and car she had were already paid off, so he felt no further obligation to her. Preston decided it was a good time to take Harry up on his offer to photograph the test run in the North Atlantic for a new sloop design. The one remaining teenage daughter at home begged Preston to take her with him, but he didn’t want to defy the court decree directly, having skated around the edges of it so much already.
So Preston shipped out with Harry and his crew, and the voyage ended up back home in the Netherlands. Preston lived frugally and began selling some of his images wherever he could, hoping he could avoid touching his hidden offshore accounts for a couple of years. With so many banks collapsing around the world, he wasn’t sure he’d ever see the money, anyway. For now, he was biking the regions around The Hague and taking lots of pictures.

Posted in fiction | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Of Images and Angels 1

No Bible Study This Week

Posted on April 6, 2013 by ehurst

The title says it all. Here’s why:
1. I’m deep into a story that simply must be told.
2. I’ve run the full circle of the whole Bible and I’m not sure what to do next.
3. Tomorrow in our house church worship we’ll sing hymns and talk about whatever comes up.
4. I’m still waiting on God to point out what’s next for us.
Pray with us, but pray even more than you stand strong on your own.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on No Bible Study This Week

Mass Produced Creativity

Posted on April 5, 2013 by ehurst

Think about it.
We are passing through a rare economic shift, says Charles Hugh Smith. He summarizes Peter Drucker’s Post-Capitalist Society. Taking his thesis, you suddenly realize that we no longer need mass capital to advance technology and production of goods. The potential is there. Let’s assume for a moment you actually paid attention in high school. You can purchase some raw materials and go to any modern machine shop with information you found on the Internet and produce a custom made high technology firearm. Part of it can be produced in your own home on a 3D printer. It would cost you maybe a week’s wages, and the costs are falling precipitously. Pretty soon you won’t need the machine shop. What happens when you can print your own computer mother board at home, bake your own chips? What will it do to the telephone oligopoly when homemade cellphones can network spontaneously across long distances without towers? People are already writing the software for that.
We are just about there. Anyone could theoretically produce anything for the cost of materials and their own time.
What does that do to our society? It’s not just the economics, which Smith emphasizes in the opening to his investment seminar. He’ll get some suckers. People who can actually think realize the future of investing will change dramatically, and people like Smith will have to find some other way to make a living. Artificial Intelligence will obviate the need for that kind of knowledge.
The arrival of word processors and decent home printers has very nearly killed the paper publishing business. People still want stuff on paper, but one guy can do most of by himself, replacing a vast army of typesetting technicians and press operators. For less than the cost of a new car, you can purchase a fully self-contained printing shop that fits in your office. Meanwhile, more and more work is done without paper and really cheap used laptops can produce ebooks to current standards. The only people making money in that industry are the specialist middlemen, those who connect content producers with those who mass market to consumers.
Similar story with the drafting industry. CAD has killed that already. Software houses have been pairing engineering software with CAD. Only government regulation keeps us from having our own full engineering software package for home use so that any literate Joe Sixpack can design his own home. He can already order the pre-built modules delivered to the assembly site for far less than current home building costs. Same story with motor vehicles and a lot of other things people use every day. From spacecraft all the way down to subatomic particles, the engineering decisions based on known tolerances are just about farmed out to AI. I rather believe DNA engineering will take a little longer simply because we have way too far to go with learning the tolerances. That sort of thing reaches out and touches entirely too many other life forms in coexistence, but in theory, it’s there. Yet, medical AI is already running off and leaving physicians behind.
At what point can we rely on AI to extrapolate choices to which the human mind tends to be blind? I’m not sure I want to be around for some of it, but it’s coming nonetheless. It’s not Science Fiction any more. Did you ever wonder why Fantasy is eclipsing SF? I think it’s more than mere vagaries of fashion. Too much of what we dream up is on top of us as science fact, not fiction. We have to branch out into directions we cannot go to find entertainment. I wonder what fiction types will sell most when even some of the fantasy crap becomes possible.
Still, mankind will remain fallen and reality broken. Spiritual awareness is the one thing you can’t farm out to AI. That, brothers and sisters, is the future “market” for us.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Ezekiel 28 and the US

Posted on April 4, 2013 by ehurst

Hear the burden of the Lord.
America is doomed. You knew that, of course. Maybe you’d be surprised by how many, and who, are convinced that it can be turned around. Even among the most cynical, it can still be a shock when you discover what’s going on behind the scenes. I get tired of being associated with the kooks who take off with a small piece of truth and blow it out of proportion, so I tend to avoid mentioning the real conspiracies behind the wild theories.
Instead, I stick with my mission from God. A major element in that mission is making sure Americans know why God is pouring out His wrath on us. Another major element is offering pastoral care to the victims of this wrath. Pastoral care includes explaining how to repent from the things earning us all that wrath.
There are two elements of wrath at work here. The first is what we would view as automated processes, as it were, in Creation itself. That is, by rejecting just about every part of Noah’s Covenant, everything we do is bound to fail eventually. There is a sense in which God actively keeps Creation running according to the moral code defined in Noah and elsewhere. But in terms of how it functions in our lives individually and as a nation, it helps to realize that we get hurt the same way every other human in history gets hurt: We don’t live according to the revealed moral fabric of Creation. Our human wiring is a major element in this moral fabric business, and when you defy what is known to work, you end up with tremendous people problems.
Thus, a great deal of what I teach here is simply a matter of recognizing the basic moral principles. Of course, my biggest struggle is explaining that our intellectual assumptions about morality are all completely wrong because it’s Western, not Ancient Near Eastern as the Bible is.
That particularly failure leads to the second, more egregious violations against God’s revealed expectations: unspeakable arrogance. This falls into the collection of things God says He takes personally. On these issues, He will act with more direct attention, providing a unique punishment that fits our peculiar brand of arrogance.
Granted, we are one of the most generous nations in history. The problem is all our generosity is captured by psychopaths. That is, we give to a cause, but refuse to notice when those collecting our giving are criminals. For example, there was a time when the Red Cross did a good job of handling our generosity. They did fine work in the German labor camps during WW2. We’ve allowed some folks to cover up their honest reporting about that work, but the Red Cross was generally honest. Ironically, we now tend to believe the Red Cross after they have become lying scumbags who blow most of their donations on internal operations and lavish living. Ask them what happened to the donations for 9/11. I realize that whole mess was politicized and is such a huge pile of lies and deception it boggles the mind, but the Red Cross had a simple mandate based on a fairly simple promise. They kept most of the money.
Yet I can assure you the Red Cross is still the least dishonest of just about all the other intermediaries for our great national generosity. Your tax dollars in the form of foreign aid, emergency and routine, have bought so much corruption around the world, there isn’t room to discuss it here. It’s equally evil here at home. If this very day we handed our entire government over to the combined leadership of the drug cartels, we’d get a better deal and the tax burden would go down precipitously. That’s not hyperbole, either.
Most individuals in the rest of the world generally like individual Americans they meet, in large part because we carry that generosity everywhere. But it’s wrapped in an insufferable arrogance that makes them glad to see us go. It’s not enough that we have rejected everything God revealed as necessary to claim the best possible in this life, but we forcibly demand others do the same. I’m not saying we aren’t ready to accept someone’s different viewpoint about things; we reject their right to say anything in the first place. We already know it’s not in accordance with the noise echoing in our heads, so we dismiss them as evil and stupid before we even hear what they think. It’s bad enough we do that to each other, but as a whole nation we are the most intrusive and forceful nannies the world has ever spawned. We make the British colonists of previous centuries look tame, simply because the British Empire at least understood what they were oppressing.
Yes, bland generalizations, but accurate enough in terms of how it earns us God’s wrath. The UK managed to surrender most of their empire with decency and good grace in the long run. We are losing ours with all the rancor of jackals who’ve had a stinking carcase stolen from them. Granted, the UK government is truly awful, mindlessly stupid with their own, but they seem to recognize the limits of their power over the rest of the world. Our government can’t imagine anyone in the world not lining up, enthusiastically anticipating rape by our little godlings in uniform.
We are in for some special attention from God on this matter. When we are humbled by the tool of His choosing, it will come as a shock to everyone. Worst of all, I seriously doubt there might be more than a precious few who learn anything from it.
Ezekiel 28 could easily be about the US.
Edit: Perhaps I should state the obvious here. The one thing America could do to restrain the worst of God’s wrath right now is bring the troops and CIA home and stop meddling in other peoples’ business. If I have to go back and explain how the entire history of our foreign policy and war-making has always been a mass of lies, you aren’t going to understand much of anything else I write. If we don’t stop it now and pull it all back within our own borders, there is no hope for America. National humiliation is just around the corner for us. Enjoy.

Posted in prophecy | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Ezekiel 28 and the US

Don't Rest

Posted on April 3, 2013 by ehurst

We are not wired for sedentary living.
Rome fell long before the Danube River froze over and the German hordes sacked the city. Whatever she might have been in the past was long gone before Christ was born. That’s because Rome forgot everything she learned on her way up.
While there is a broad general pattern of imperial failure, it would be foolish to nail down precise turning points. Too many factors overlap and the timing of events can easily get out of sequence. However, the failures are pretty much the same in principle, if not in fact, or every empire in human history. The same failures apply on the smaller scale, so it won’t matter what you call the particular human organization that is coming apart.
Even if you forget the entire matter of the Two Realms, there is something painfully obvious for everyone to see: Never wallow in luxury; comfort is a liar. All the decisions you make will suddenly become reactive because you imagine that you have something to protect. All the negative human emotions start coming out and controlling your choices. You will no longer see your world truthfully. You can no longer afford to pursue what you really believe in, because you won’t believe in anything in particular.
God has made us capable of doing an awful lot of things He doesn’t like. He gives us enough rope to hang ourselves, but every civilization we know about carries the same truth in her ancient lore. Once we are no longer starving, but simply hungry, we are at our very best. It’s not as if anyone can simply create a permanent culture of utilitarianism and Spartan self-denial. It requires sharing and giving generously so that you never have more than you can protect by yourself. We can all work together, but the root of human power to advance is having just enough for the immediate future, just enough to give confidence. Technology and cultural passion are the two greatest variables, but the underlying formula doesn’t change. There comes a point when our concern for tomorrow — whatever that means in relative terms — stops us from moving forward today.
That’s where we are in the West now, America in particular. It won’t matter what you imagine is the cause that brought us to this, who you want to blame, because there is nothing we can do to fix it. We have passed the point of no return. We are rotten to the core; there are no seeds to plant for the next season. We have lost that sacred balance point between having too little and too much, and now we really have nothing.
It’s not necessary to be a literal nomad, but so far, no one has come up with a cultural context that maintains the ethics and morals to give us that proper balance between stability and reckless abandon. Not a single civilization in the past has been able to capture the spirit of the nomad and keep it alive. In other words, you can’t build it — that spirit has to come as a gift from the God who made us.
The New Testament is loaded with imagery pulled up from Israel’s better past. We are always in the Conquest, always on rise and never past the days of David. We cannot afford to ever think we’ve come to the times of Solomon, because Israel began to die with him. Solomon managed to write a book warning himself about it, then promptly failed to walk in his own teaching. We don’t talk about returning to the days of Solomon, but we have an awful lot of “Davidic” this and that. Yes, David was a complete fool about some things, but every time someone chased him out of town, he was in his element. He did just fine as long as he was on the run.
Whatever it is God calls us to do has to be the sort of thing we can engage fully on the run.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Organic Life of a Church

Posted on April 2, 2013 by ehurst

Churches aren’t built; they grow.

organic — having properties characteristic of living organisms; constitutional in the structure of something, the nature of the thing

One of the most evil trends in modern church life has been convincing churches that they need an objective statement. Brothers and sisters, the church has no objective. You can probably find words in the New Testament indicating the contrary to what I say, but you won’t find the Bible teaching what we commonly see today. Evangelism was never solicitation; it was simply getting the message out. In the Mediterranean Basin of the First Century, there were certain ways one did that; those ways don’t fit our world today. There was nothing particularly holy in their methods. The current business style and corporate structure of churches is damned, though. You can call your church nice words like “vibrant” but that doesn’t mean anything outside our peculiar cultural biases, and hardly means what the early churches did.
When church obeys the leadership of the Holy Spirit, it is an extended family household which suffers few of the limitations of shared DNA. Sure, it’s nice if your kinfolks all heed the call to join together as a single church body, but it’s hardly necessary, nor even ideal. The church is a living thing; it lives. It needs no objective but to live. It’s the place where people with a shared calling to repentance strive to keep themselves all on the mission. Objective is not equivalent to mission; there is nothing to accomplish. We each as members struggle to avoid the very idea of accomplishment. We strive to change and lose our interest in accomplishment, because that’s a part of this fallen existence we hope to leave behind as we transition to eternity.
We strive to keep alive a totally personal connection between us and the Spirit of God. It’s the same Spirit Who decides how we relate to each other. Even when we list shared characteristics, it is merely a personal expression of what we perceive at the moment. It remains utterly dynamic; my list might change next week. The single constant is flux. We are living eternal certainty in a world which cannot comprehend certainty. Never forget: This world is broken and slated for complete destruction. The Bible says all Creation is looking forward to it.
So a church is an atmosphere. It is by far the single most flexible and mixed up bunch of people ever to hang together. It remains ad hoc by its nature. Every moment of every day each member remains surrendered voluntarily to the welfare of the whole because that is their own welfare. At the moment of disjuncture between individual and church welfare, we work at reducing the conflict. We might miss you if that requires departure, but we don’t grieve at the fact itself. We rejoice because it means you are moving forward, and so are we. There is no separation of benefits between the individual and the body, so long as we keep the otherworldly perspective. Only in the fallen flesh is this broken. The less fleshly, the better.
The mission is not being, nor particularly doing; the mission is living.

Posted in prophecy | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Got Vision?

Posted on April 1, 2013 by ehurst

The same old vision, fresh every day, can still keep me awake at night.
I can’t compare it to anything we experience as humans. It burns, it gnaws away at me and I am gladly consumed by it. Nor do I care if this is all delusion — it means everything to me regardless how the world reacts.
If you’ve read as much as a half-dozen blog posts here, you know there are two primary items: (1) Hebrew worldview (“epistemology”) and (2) Hebrew morality. Just those two things would bring tectonic changes in how people live. Yes, behavioral changes, but bigger would be the internal changes in their souls that create external shifts. I don’t have a vision of how people should behave or what they believe and teach; I have a vision of people approaching all those questions from a different understanding altogether.
I was half-awake past midnight last night, sort of half-daydreaming, chasing a story line which morphed and did not make for good fiction. Somehow I was in another land, but I didn’t know where — not America. It was highly secularized despite a strong history of Christian institutions, maybe like the Netherlands with a huge sexual industry and extremely worldly without the pretense. At any rate, there seemed almost a desperate hunger for real spiritual meaning. I was sitting at a sidewalk cafe and someone started a conversation with me. Apparently my responses were radical for their experience, but it ended up a dozen or so folks simply clustered around as we discussed things I never get tired of talking about.
No, there was nothing about starting something regular, just answering questions and refusing to debate. I suppose this could only happen in a place with high urban density and a relaxed social atmosphere. It isn’t likely to ever happen anywhere near where I live. The thing that stuck in my memory was how surprisingly cerebral it all was, but even more so was the thrill of seeing just one or two here and there pick up on it.
I keep wondering how I can spread the word. Not having people agree with it, but simply having a chance to hear it and evaluate it. Convincing folks isn’t the objective; only God can do that. Please, steal my ideas, my words, whatever, but the vision is just getting the message out.

Posted in personal | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The Discipline of the Cross

Posted on March 31, 2013 by ehurst

The Spirit of Christ is sacrifice. Nail it to the Cross.
John notes in his Apocalypse that Believers overcome by not clinging to his life (Revelation 12:11). Read between the lines and those three items all amount to the same thing: Living the Spirit of the Cross. I am relentless about this. If you cling to the things of this world, even to the point of making a religion out of what your mind can conceive, then you have fallen short of the Cross.
In our local news monopoly today here in OKC, there is a story about the Clear Creek Abbey up near Hulbert, OK. That’s a few miles west of Tahlequah, the old Cherokee capitol of Indian Territory. The abbey stands out in the country northwest of Hulbert on property once hosting a serious moonshine bootlegger operation. We’re talking remote woodlands, a rough hill and draw country with few open pastures — perfect for their Benedictine isolation. It’s all about reciting the Latin rituals and manual labor, and is connected to some French monastic houses.
Sounds like a very pleasant existence, in some ways. I have no quarrel with any choice of rituals or theology, so long as people remember not to take it all too seriously. The whole teaching on this blog starts with you and the Holy Spirit, working out how you are supposed to bring glory to the Lord Jesus. While my particular expression of faith is quite radical and spare, having made the choice to minimize ritual and theology, that’s not a rejection of the opposite end of the scale in terms of Christian religion. It’s a rejection of how important those things are on the grand scale of God’s mission and calling on humans. I can worship with those monks, if they can put up with me, and hit the local dirt-floor Pentecostal Holiness tent meeting the same day and worship with them, too. The problem is more often the case that they take their thing too seriously as a universal requirement.
Jesus declared from the Cross, “It is finished!” At that moment, an earthquake shook the entire region, knocking loose some masonry in Herod’s Temple. Something shifted and that fat felt curtain in the Temple got ripped open. That kinda ruined the Day of Atonement observance the next day. That was God’s way of saying it was finished, indeed. The final ritual sacrifice was made and the rituals were from that day forward only rituals. Christ was the meaning of them in the first place. It’s not necessary to observe the full Seder meal any more, just the abbreviated Lord’s Supper. That and baptism (let’s not argue what that has to look like) are the only two rituals actually commanded. Reading between the lines again, as good Hebrew thinkers, we see any combination of bread and juice would suffice. Folks in Iowa can have cornbread and cider and Jesus will be there in Spirit, smiling and enjoying the glory of His Name.
The discipline of the Cross is not confined to carrying one around like Arthur Blessitt. It includes that but is both far wider and far narrower. Blessitt is doing what he was called to do; are you doing what you were called to do? That’s the whole question; that’s the discipline of the Cross. What does it take for you to keep your head oriented on the glory of Jesus? Whatever that is, you need to be doing it. Write your own creeds and confessions, your own liturgy, your own rules and costumes. Draw pictures or don’t; build huge facilities or refuse them all. As long as you think that stuff really matters, it will always be wrong. As soon as you realize it’s simply your calling and your obedience, then you are holy and right.
Nothing you can do, touch or name is sacred in itself. As the song by Paxton says, “If you think my mind’s in another dimension, then brother you’re right!” It’s right to belong to the Spirit Realm and let your life express whatever is necessary to implement that. We are committed to the Person of Jesus Christ; nothing else matters, certainly nothing in the world — not all the property, plans or even your kids.
Nail it all to the Cross.

Posted in prophecy | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

A Harmony of the Resurrection Accounts

Posted on March 30, 2013 by ehurst

I’m hardly the first to run through this; some of this comes from others who seemed to understand it well.
The texts are Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24 and John 20. We have a problem with Mark because it is painfully obvious, even in English translations, that starting in verse 9 the narrative was clearly not the same as the rest. Even if Mark suddenly went to college after he wrote the rest, it wouldn’t change the style that much. Thus, we include it in our Bibles, but keep in mind it’s not as authoritative as the rest. In general, we struggle just a bit with harmonizing because each of the Gospel writers emphasize things differently.
I offer this outline for your consideration.
The context is Passover, a major Jewish celebration commemorating the Exodus, particularly the angel of death sparing the Children of Israel because they obeyed the ritual commands. I’ve noted in my commentaries on the Gospels that I believe Jesus ate the Last Supper the day before Passover, as I find it was a common practice. On the day before, one could celebrate with associates and non-family, because on Passover it was strictly blood kin all in one place according to the ritual law. Jesus died on Passover and took away the Day of Atonement, which followed the next day after that. Many people stayed in town the whole two months running through Pentecost.
Everyone central to the Gospel narratives had been staying in houses in or near the city. It’s probable most of them in the large and expensive home which included the Upper Room. We think that was near one of the eastern gates of the city. However, it would appear Peter and John (cousins) at least were somewhat closer to the tomb than the rest, likely only a few hundred meters. No one was permitted to wander around town on the Sabbath until Sunday morning at dawn. That would be around 6:30 AM local time. The women go to the tomb with spices because they assumed nothing had been done for the body. None of them witnessed Joseph of Arimathea taking the body, preparing it; they only saw him putting it in his own tomb. They don’t seem to know that soldiers had been posted and the door had been sealed because that happened on the Sabbath.
On the way a powerful earthquake hits. The women learn later it heralded the appearance of an angel who opens the tomb. Upon arriving, the door was open and an angel sits on the rounded stone slab some few meters from the tomb. The guards are cowering in fear off to one side, watching the whole thing. The group of women check out the tomb and find more angels inside. The angels explain this was all promised, and that they should tell everyone to leave town for Galilee if they wanted to see Jesus. The other ladies hang around a bit, but Mary Magdalene goes running back to where Peter and John are staying and tells them about it. The other ladies hang around a bit, then depart at a more leisurely pace, probably on a different route.
Peter and John come running back, Mary somewhere behind. John stops at the entrance and bends over to look inside. Peter blunders on in, then John follows. Peter examines the scene closely — the wrappings mixed with gummy spices had collapsed inward, empty of any body. The head covering was folded neatly where the head had been.
After the guys depart, Mary has her encounter with Jesus in the Garden. This is where He explains to her that things are not as they were before His arrest. He would be around for awhile, but He is not exactly the same old Jesus. The other group of women then have their encounter with Jesus on their longer trip back to the eastern side of town. Eventually John, Peter and Mary Magdalene catch up with everyone in the larger meeting place.
They puzzle over this and discuss it all day that Sunday. Two of them head off to Emmaus (7 miles or 11km northwest) late in the afternoon and meet Jesus on the way, but He changes His appearance so they don’t recognize Him. He explains the prophecies. Upon arriving at Emmaus, they persuade Him to stay for dinner; He reveals Himself and then disappears. They go running off in the darkness back to Jerusalem. While explaining their encounter, Jesus shows up again where this discussion takes place.
Then comes the meeting with Thomas eight days later (Monday evening). For another four weeks Jesus is around, mostly meeting with everyone in Galilee. Immediately after the group obeys and heads back to Galilee, nothing happens for a few days and it’s kind of spooky. The guys decide to go fishing one night. They encounter Jesus on the shore after a fruitless night of fishing. Peter dives in the water and swims to shore while everyone else drags the heavy net of fish ashore. Jesus helps Peter to understand things, then rehabilitates him to the place of leadership. This is also where the myth gets started suggesting John will live until Jesus returns. There are lots more meeting and some 500 people see Jesus alive in His risen form.
Then they all meet one last time in Jerusalem. Jesus leads them out to Bethany and ascends into the sky. It’s near this time when they were worshiping in the Upper Room at Pentecost.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , | Comments Off on A Harmony of the Resurrection Accounts

Tactical Individuality

Posted on March 30, 2013 by ehurst

You must stand alone but you are never alone.
Having a foot in both realms offers some incredibly difficult opportunities for explaining how to live. Jesus used parables for this very reason; unfortunately our culture is utterly without talent in this area. I end up writing stuff most people never comprehend because I’m pretty much forced to mix metaphor and clinical description. I want you to get it. I want you to not need my help, nor anyone else’s in this world, even as you make maximum use of it when it’s available.
Consider for a moment the fundamental fact of our fallen nature. Thanks to Adam and Eve, we are born spiritually dead in a badly broken plane of existence. We are utterly incapable of piercing the barrier of isolation. We are born utterly alone. It takes time, but in the natural course of human development we realize the universe is not an extension of our feelings and whims, that we have to negotiate between what we want and what can be. In many ways, individuation is the ultimate goal and ultimate shock to our human sense of being. You see, the existentialists are partly correct — if this world is all there is, you are truly and utterly alone. The only reference point is what you can get away with, and then you die.
But we were created for communion in the Spirit Realm. The ancient Hebrew culture held a place for that understanding, but even within that frame of reference, it was too easy to deny it. In Western society, it might as well not exist in the first place, because the entire frame of reference denies it. Yet God ignores all that and still breathes life into some of us. Nothing anywhere, nothing available on this level of existence, could ever explain how and why He chooses one and not another, but it’s painfully obvious when you visit even the most spiritual churches. Some people there seem to accept the moral code, but never evince that subtle difference of someone who remains sensitive to the Spirit in some way. On top of that, God’s Word indicates some folks in history were born for damnation, as it were.
While in this body, the best we can hope for is vague awareness of truth. The human intellect cannot possibly understand Ultimate Truth because, as we’ve been warned in Scripture, Truth is a Person, not an “it.” That Person stands outside our plane of existence. Touching Him in any way requires He invade on our behalf. While some portion of us comes to life, the connection between that spirit faculty and our minds is always fuzzy. We have records of people who managed to find a path of action that seems to have been spectacularly empowered by the Spirit Realm, but even that, we are warned, is partly calling and not for all of us. It comes back down to something shared on a level we can’t describe, but in the meantime our fleshly existence stands alone before God.
It would be easy to get lost at this point in the Western mythology of “no fear”. Balderdash. People without fear are more than just spiritually dead; they are psychopaths. What you and I seek is to keep fear from ruling us. It never goes away, but we don’t have to let it vote. The same goes for all the other human emotions. Yes, we assume we’ll fail at some point given the vagaries of things, but the aspiration still stands.
Let’s pretend for a moment your mission in life includes advising people actively fighting the evils of this world. You aren’t silly enough to do this yourself, because your otherworldly calling is to regard human politics as background noise, scenery, mere context like physical death itself. But while you live, your mission seems to be guiding them with your spiritual wisdom. There is precedent for that in the Bible, where a spiritual giant was advising someone without any spiritual clue. Tactics we understand better than even we might expect, when we stop and consider the implications of human fallen nature.
Never assume either side is right in God’s eyes. You can sometimes help steer moral choices for the sake of morality itself, but don’t count on too much. Instead, realize that you are just a cog in the vast universe and your sole concern is making Jesus look good in how you carry out your earthly tasks. You aren’t really concerned about what you can accomplish, just a consistent moral orientation in the midst of a lot of things you cannot possibly steer. You’ll never own the results, only your response to a world of random idiocy. It’s just a game and you can afford to leave it unfinished. Find peace with that, because it does tend to be infectious and helps others.
We recognize that among the spiritually dead, there are psychopaths and there are servants of psychopaths. You may never really know which is which, but you’ll have to estimate provisionally until things offer a better indication. In terms of sheer tactics, you want to kill the psychopaths who lead, but that’s seldom easy. There is a reason they have servants who aren’t like them. They manipulate them for their own purposes, and need not fear genuine competition. But the people they use are often the weakest, even as they tend to be the most ruthless. The primary tactic is to cripple or disable their actions.
The most powerful enemy always relies on someone else. Disable that one critical supporter and their plans fall apart. Examine their organization and see how they operate, whom they trust the most, etc. The best surgeon has only two hands; cripple that third hand and no one gets well. The best engineer relies on the savvy technician to execute; hinder the technician and structures don’t stand. The strongest rulers always rely on at least one other person to keep things organized; stymie that organizer and their plans fall apart. These things don’t necessarily win the war, but they change the odds.
On what one thing do they most rely? What matters most in their plans? Take it or break it. If it’s human, find the weak spot and exploit it. Cloud their clarity of purpose and commitment. They serve for all sorts of complex reasons, but you can always complicate things further. Get them to turn on each other. The greatest threat to them is what they don’t expect. If you can read their expectations, always do something else. This is how the coming political oppression can be reduced.
The best armor is the one that shields your weak spots. You prevent your side from exposing vulnerabilities, either by cover or concealment. Never play by the other side’s rules, on the ground of their choice, for the goals they seek.
For you: Don’t care. Never invest great amounts of emotional energy in any thing, because that becomes your own vulnerability. No worldly loss should matter enough that you can’t just turn and say, “That’s gone. What can we do now?” As long as you realize your only real concern is outside this realm of existence, you cannot be turned aside from your best course. In the flesh you’ll often stand alone. Your nearest and dearest will fail you; you’ll fail yourself. Don’t care; don’t be surprised when it happens.
Your ultimate concern in this life is the glory of Jesus Christ. Your exit will come soon enough.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Tactical Individuality