Ready to Harvest

Posted on March 29, 2013 by ehurst

This is a pastoral message.

Then He said to His disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore, ask the Lord of the Harvest to send out workers into His harvest.” (Matthew 9:37-38)

For some years now, I’ve had a vision of events driving people out of the mainstream churches. Not necessarily leaving their association from the organization, but leaving behind the false premises on which most churches operate. It’s not like a delusion where I imagine thousands flocking to me as their savior and building up yet another religious cult. I seriously doubt I’ll have any more fame/notoriety than I do now, just more work. I’ve done my best to build a frame of reference that excludes what I see the churches teaching and doing wrong. Apparently, a handful of folks see some use in my different approach to religion, because they discuss it with me. I’ve done my best to make them fully independent of me. I want to contribute to, not rule, their search for a better way. I want them to be ready to pick up the pieces because I remain quite certain what we’ve had up to now is coming apart.
A part of me senses the time has here. Nothing concrete, mind you. I have no clear idea what sort of troubles are coming our way, just some generalities and fragments. I know for certain that I don’t know enough to describe much. That’s because most of it is the background, the context in which I expect to operate. The context will determine the methods and means, but has no effect on the mission. The methods and means must arise from the individual doing, so I continue encouraging folks to remain independent. Let’s confer, not congregate around the place I stand.
I’ve had plenty of offers posted right here on this blog, other folks inviting me to join their little group and do their thing. They obviously don’t know me, aren’t really reading what I write, just picking up on a single post or something. They don’t want me; they want more bodies for their glorious dreams of a massive army of something or other. Sorry, that’s the wrong vision. That’s more of the same, what we’ve already had that doesn’t work and won’t carry us through the way Jesus taught. Tribulation is not properly faced by human organization, but by divine power working in spite of human organization. That’s the whole point: This is something that rises above the human level, where God Himself does the coordination. We are just along for the ride and anyone pretending to drive is usurping the role of the Holy Spirit. Until there is a form of organization and leadership that departs very sharply from what we’ve had so far, don’t expect me to be at all interested.
What I see as the real need is something much more subtle, but which I’ve tried to bring up to fully conscious consideration. What we’ve had in mainstream Christianity up to now is not going to ride out the storm. It’s too shallow and human, not deep and divine. My regular readers get that. Today I write for them: It’s here, close at hand. The Lord is shaking His body; people are going to detach from current structures and will need a point of anchor the churches can’t give them. Be ready to throw out the lifeline. You can’t make them grab it, but some surely will. Brace yourself. Redouble your efforts to make sure you have some part of you standing free of all this nonsense and strong enough to realize it’s all shadows and noise.
I can tell you what I suspect are some included fragments. You know I’ve often criticized the evangelicals for their slavish and misguided devotion to modern Israel. On the conscious level, I suspect something will happen to shatter that devotion — the false idol will totter and fall. I can’t say whether it means something big and bad will hit Israel, but something will happen to sully the shine; some part of the facade will fall away. Be ready to explain how Israel never meant anything to us in the first place.
I’m also finding a strong inclination to expect serious financial trouble for churches. I foresee billions in losses, particularly investments in facilities and so forth. We will be thoroughly surprised at what completely dissolves from lack of funds, because it’s built on money, not the gospel. Be ready to explain how material goods are mere tools, not at all critical, not at all any sign of God’s approval. Help people across the tribulation by demonstrating the power of sacrifice, of truth, of letting stuff go (Revelation 12:11). If you can’t have church in your backyard with whatever Bibles folks can carry in their hands and hearts, you can’t have church at all.
Most of all, stand ready to teach people how to think like a Hebrew. Take a little time to refresh your understanding of the leaven of the Pharisees, how Hellenism destroyed the ancient biblical outlook and sucked the life out of Old Testament religion. Learn to cling to the Justice of God, to see that moral fabric in everything. There’s enough insanity in the world without us contributing to the madness. Let us be the sane ones.
As always, you know where to find me if you need something.

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Which God?

Posted on March 28, 2013 by ehurst

Sheeple are easily confused by incoming data. Whether you count yourself one of them isn’t the point, though. To some degree, we are all vulnerable to manipulation. It is my pastoral duty to remind my readers of things which are obvious, but so easily lost in this Western world.
Following Christ means rejecting the world, particularly the worldview of the West. The Western worldview assumes there is no God, at least in terms of whether it makes any difference in how we act. The whole question behind epistemology is not, “What can we know?” It’s “What can we know such that we can act on it?” In the West, human achievement is god. Any human achievement will do; we have a whole pantheon.
There is an often unspoken assumption that there is nothing in this universe man can’t work out eventually, in terms of what we can do about it. The vast majority of Western Christianity is a sucker for this line, such that we have a huge number of Christians insisting faith is, or can be, reasonable. That’s a lie of Satan, but try to get them to stop saying it. Faith is inherently unreasonable if you are working in the Western intellectual context. Faith makes the most preposterous demands on your behavior.
Let’s break this up into samples.
Economics: The fundamental assumption of all economics discussion is the unquestioned value of material prosperity. In biblical terms, Mammon is god. You simply cannot enter into a discussion of the subject unless you acknowledge this. With few exceptions, the entire range of academic and even polemical literature on the subject is all about the best way to gain material prosperity on various scales. The very moment you mention the idea there may be anything more important than material prosperity, you are lucky if all they do is dismiss you and marginalize your position. Morality is defined as more stuff.
Science: I realize it’s dangerous to characterize the whole field because there are way too many subjects under that word. Still, it’s pretty plain the underlying god is man’s intellect. Given enough time and data, there is no reason man cannot decide everything and anything in this universe. So, for example with genetic manipulation: There is no reason we can’t study this and figure out how to make the most of our opportunities with designing natural processes to suit our wishes. At least, so says the average commentary by those who promote boundless inquiry in science. Even in the field of pharmacology, there is no recognition of sane limits on manipulating humanity with chemical inputs. Kill all the sacred cows and dissect them. We have to buy the notion that there’s nothing wrong with giving someone the ultimate power over every process in this universe.
Meanwhile, all of this adds up to saying, in effect, you and I have don’t have permission to decide things for ourselves based on some other moral value system. Most of what you read in the mainstream press is carefully designed to manipulate, to negate your freewill choice. Not just take it away, but to characterize the very idea as evil. Virtually the entire range of political debate assumes you will want to side with one or the other, when both are specifically designed to render you powerless before someone else, someone who certainly doesn’t love Jesus. Even so-called factual debunking of Urban Mythology is often itself nothing more than manipulative propaganda, because it assumes the same basic premise behind the whole thing: You can’t possibly want certain things or you have to be labeled “evil.” For example, were you aware Snopes is most vehemently on the side of progressive-liberal politics?
So let’s restate the ultimate heresy of Western Civilization: There was a moral value system already in place before humans ever arose, and the entire universe operates from it. Worse, that moral system is alive, not static and objective. Worst of all, it’s more than any human can comprehend, and requires on-going dependence on the Creator who keeps the moral system alive. And finally, the unthinkable: This universe and our existence in it is not really all that important in the first place.
The hardest job I have as a pastor is helping people break the conditioning, the vast matrix of lies to which we all turn by reflex. Getting people to stop that, to turn on their moral sensitivity and start filtering things they read, is really a monumental task. Most people simply cannot break the ingrained patterns of thought, and that’s why we end up with a vast ocean of false Christianity — people keep reading the Bible through the lenses of Western assumptions about reality. Their mental reflexes are primed for distraction, so that they get wound around the spindle on political bullshit instead of thinking about what would bring Christ glory.
Virtually everything we’ve been taught to believe is a lie.

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Cloud Bank

Posted on March 28, 2013 by ehurst

Can you weather the storm?
Perhaps with the outrage in Cyprus with the banking situation, you now realize how tenuous is your control over whatever you have deposited with your bank. Without warning, the whole thing can be frozen and you can’t touch your own money. It might quickly no longer be yours. There was a time when carrying around loads of cash was risky, and so was trying to hide it at your home. Banks were more secure and they had a contractual obligation to give you quick access. Then there arose the system by which they would handle the transfer of funds for you. Now it’s just a matter of waving your plastic cards. But the whole system is surprisingly fragile and degrading before our very eyes.
Worse, far too many of us have no choice. Our income source demands we accept it in the form of a direct deposit at the bank. Do I have to make note how this plays into the hands of oppressive government officials who don’t love Jesus and aren’t particularly fond of you and I, either? The probability of having your access blocked in the near future is very, very high. You might want a backup plan.
The same goes with your digital data. While I can’t prove it’s a nasty plot to intrusively grab control over our private data, you’d have to work pretty hard to convince me otherwise. Who uses film cameras any more? All your pictures, your financial records, private correspondence, everything you’ve written — they want you to put in the cloud. They want you to trust them to guard it for you so you can get to it as you wish without anyone else seeing it. Except you’ve already seen what happens with things like the Mega Upload caper.
I suppose if the cloud was totally automated and distributed with failover backups across some global system, blindly shared between a large group of servers scattered across the world, I might be more relaxed about it. Instead, they are already planning to make all commodity computers incapable of actually storing data, so you are forced to use the cloud.
But having seen what TPTB can do with stuff like this, I think I’ll keep my old computers and rely on my own storage, thank you. I keep at least two copies of the valuable stuff on separate drives not permanently attached to my computers. Stuff on this blog that I really value I keep that way; some of it becomes articles on my static website or published as books elsewhere. Most of it reflects what’s already in my soul, and I can regenerate it when needed. Still, I don’t trust anyone else, given I teach you can’t even trust yourself.
If you fall for the propaganda ploy to let someone else hold your money or your data, don’t cry when things fall apart on you.

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Long Journey of the Soul

Posted on March 27, 2013 by ehurst

It took a long time to get here.
I have peace in my soul. Stuff doesn’t rattle me nearly so easy as in the past. I have an answer for just about everything you throw at me, especially if I understand the context well enough. That is, I have an answer that fits my needs. I’m not a guru, just somebody way down the road calling out to others: You can find a path to the truth.
There is no sharp line of departure, just points along the way where something inside you clicks and you know it’s not the same. You realize you are in control of things that really matter and you just don’t care about things that don’t matter.
If you are born and raised in America — it applies perhaps to a lesser degree in the rest of Western Civilization — you have a long way to go. Everything in your world fights the truth. Instead, it substitutes something cheaper and calls it “truth”. You may come to terms with the tension and decide you can handle it, but something inside of you knows it’s not right. It’s not a matter of hitting the psychic bottom, though that helps motivate you to start the journey. That’s not enough by itself. Some part of you has to recognize there are simply too many lies and you will need help from someone who doesn’t live by those lies.
Let me clarify something that seems to have confused long-term readers: The Ancient Near Eastern way is not the only way. Rather, it is the clearest manifestation of the way men operate when the Spirit leads. Nor do we need all the particulars of the Law Covenants to grasp the heart of the Blood Covenant. So far, nothing has offered a better manifestation of the Law of Love and Spirit than Moses and Noah. Nothing in human experience as a whole, since the Fall, has come so close to the truth as the Hebrew people during the Conquest and shortly thereafter. The generation that grew up in the wasteland, for all their flaws, once free of the old slave generation’s influence, was the pinnacle of morality. Their intellectual assumptions about reality was the closest man has gotten.
It’s very hard to teach that ancient understanding. Most Western brains are so utterly pickled in the Post-Enlightenment rationalism, they simply cannot find the mechanism to consider the ANE approach to reality. It’s so alien, there is no means to process what comes into their sensory organs. There’s no neural pathways for it, no structure, none of the prerequisite matrix of mental organization. Even when I manage to explain it clinically and factually in terms they understand, it still becomes a disassociated concept they cannot integrate into their soul.
I could go on for pages and pages about the factors leading into this. Fortunately, intellectual shock and awe is not the sum of things. Even with all the proper intellectual background, there are a surprisingly large number of people who simply prefer some version of Western Civilization over the truth. The deciding factor that bypasses the necessity of convincing someone is the power of the Spirit. That’s part of what the Cross did. Instead of requiring mankind to first adopt the Hebrew way and the Law of Moses so they could be ready to receive the truth, Jesus said He would bring His own Spirit to bear on the process of changing people.
So we have this unspeakable power of change sweeping the whole world. It remains incomprehensible; God does what He does to breathe life into dead spirits and people suddenly to turn to Christ as soon as they hear about Him.
And the promptly fall into the cesspool of Western Christianity.
Everything the Apostles taught about conforming your human life to the implications of spiritual birth has been perverted. In that sense, the Judaizers won the intellectual battle. They managed to bring the churches under the Pharisaical model of thinking. Today’s Western Christianity is precisely what the Judaizers hoped to accomplish. Paul and his peers taught the discernment of the Law of Moses that made it possible to filter through the ancient Hebrew ways to find what was applicable to walking in Christ. The mind of Christ was the filter, and it bore only a thin superficial resemblance to the Judaism of that day. But the Judaizers were less about the particulars of the Talmudic Law and more about the intellectual approach they adopted from the Hellenists. They were selling a rationalist reinterpretation of Moses that had excluded the revelation in Christ.
In terms of my mission calling, my greatest enemies are within Western Christianity. No one threatens and hinders my ministry half so much as my fellow Christians. No one has done more to destroy my efforts than preachers — those who make their living professing Christ. From where I stand, Christians are the greatest threat to the gospel message. I can’t point to any one figure the way the Old Testament points to Balaam, but someone has set loose a perverting influence that has captured the entire camp of Christianity. Christians don’t even recognize how deeply compromised they are.
At least, that’s my story. I’m not alone, but those who have heard the same calling are so bruised and battered that we all tend to hide away. It’s hard to find each other because we haven’t been allowed to develop a common canon of terminology and expression. In a sense, that’s all good, but it does hinder us from finding each other easily. We are so busy trying to draw distinctions from the vast core of false belief that we are scattered around the periphery, far away from each other. Still, I’ve encountered a few here and there and we recognize each other. We are isolated from each other by the interference of the Church, which has so compromised with the world that it uses the levers of human government to oppress us and keep us in hiding.
Something in my spirit claims a hope that this system will break down before my eyes, before I die. Somehow, we who know this Harlot Church riding the Beast — both will sicken and die. Those of us who want no part of that evil will have an opportunity to reclaim our stolen heritage. I’m guessing that opportunity will be brief. We have to make the most of it, and that’s what I’m trying to teach here.
We are the Tribulation Church, and we have already come very far on our journey, with a long way yet to go.

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Saw It Coming

Posted on March 26, 2013 by ehurst

The true power of John’s Apocalypse is ignored by most readers.
That’s because most readers suffer from the effects of what he predicted was coming. So far as we can determine, he was the last living Apostle at the end of the First Century AD. The obvious point of his book was helping his flock face the persecution from Rome. Less obvious was something beyond, something larger and more evil standing in the shadows behind that noisy persecution. John saw that coming.
Satan had little trouble subverting the Old Testament religion. Despite building on the one cultural background created by God as the best channel for His revelation, fallen mankind cannot keep hold of anything by their own resources. It requires a miracle from God to change us, to restore the original power of the Spirit for which we were designed. Without that, we cannot even want righteousness. So while it took some centuries, Satan succeeded in subverting the Hebrew religion of old until it was the lifeless structure we see in Jesus’ day. Whatever it was Judaism worshiped, it wasn’t the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We could say they worshiped their own perceptions, enamored of their ability to reason out what God must have meant, since what He actually said demanded too much.
To which God said, “That’s the whole point. You can’t do it alone.” That’s a part of the message of Jesus, His Son.
Just as the Hebrew people lost their hold on the truth of the Law, so John saw the same diabolical forces at work against the Gospel. We grant that the very existence of Christian religion is the miracle God said was necessary to enable human faith, if we understand anything at all. Still, that doesn’t mean people will avail themselves of that power in cases, nor even the majority of them. We are too easily blinded when we use the eyes of our human perception. Making the transition from seeing with the flesh to seeing through the flesh is a very tall order, yet more of that same miracle. People who are spirit-born are truly free to choose obedience or disobedience. Everything the Law Covenants said about conduct points to a life that makes the most of God’s power, but people are born lazy in that department. The curse of the Fall doesn’t simply drop off once it’s broken; we have to choose the necessary changes to shake it loose. John knew that and saw the system Satan was building to inhibit that choice.
That system was an extension of what had already worked so well with the Hebrew religion.
Today we live in a Western society which does not even possess the intellectual tools to address the truth of the gospel. Our whole society is built on a rejection of revelation. Christian faith requires operating in the mystical realm of thought, a frame of reference wholly excluded as a joke in the West. John saw that coming. His Apocalypse warned of it in part by forcing readers to confront mystical reasoning. His book is wholly nonsensical without it. All the crazy crap we get today in discussions of eschatology arise from rejecting that mystical approach. You can’t read mystical writing without a mystical frame of reference. Because the entire Western heritage disparages mysticism, it’s easy to dismiss the distinctions between light and darkness when the entire definition rests outside the human intellect.
Thus, we call Resurrection Sunday “Easter” without a clue whence that latter term — the religion of Ishtar. We have thousands of writers trying to claim the heathen symbols as somehow transformed, a propaganda trick brought into use shortly after the Church was suckered into trusting the government. One of the greatest shysters of human history convinced the church leaders it was okay to get involved with government and vice versa, since it was so much nicer than official persecution. It was a peace treaty with Satan, and such things are always on his terms. I am forced to agree with religious pagans who point out the real meaning of the world “Easter.”
If you insist on using pagan sourced symbols to understand spiritual matters, you are agreeing with all the pagan claims that it doesn’t matter which tradition you select. You are adding your approval to their search outside the Bible for answers to the ultimate questions of human longing. You can’t celebrate Easter or any other holiday in the European traditions unless you understand you tacitly agree with the pagans. I don’t deny there is some overlap between what they teach and what I teach, but I would be among them if I agreed with their larger argument. But the overlap is why it’s so easy to ignore the differences; it explains why Western Christianity is loaded with pagan religion. Stop pretending you aren’t embracing them.
I claim there’s a difference, but it’s a peaceful claim. I’m not at war with pagan believers because I can read the Gospels where Jesus shunned using human power to enforce orthodoxy. God has said with all finality on the Cross that He will not use human government any longer to regulate human behavior in that department. Jesus was pinned to the sky but we hide eggs and eat chocolate bunnies. You are free to see no conflicts there; your conscience is the whole point of this diatribe. Nor am I some grouchy purist about saying the right words, as if they had magical powers. You can call it anything you like, but Resurrection Sunday is so utterly lost to Western Christians, it’s hard to know where to start discussing it. They are so completely hung up on words and symbols and intellectual conceptions that it seems a monumental task just introducing the non-rational point of it all. We celebrate a hundred “holy days” on our church calenders without having a clue how most of them are not biblical, aside from somehow mixing words from the Bible with symbols and beliefs from outside revelation. As a whole, Western Christianity has no clue what they ought to fight against, or even where the battleground is.
John could see this vast ocean of confusion arising in the first century churches and it seemed a monumental task to swim against that tsunami. Sure, John could handle it personally, and keep things going by his personal presence. He was transparent to spiritual truth, but transmitting that lore of ancient truth to his flock was slow going. There is a peculiar genius in his Apocalypse, because it serves to polarize, as the gospel itself does. If you dive into Revelation without a proper spiritual orientation, you’ll never understand it. A great deal of what he warns about in the book then comes true in your life. John knew how the Spirit worked; he knew people would remain uncomfortable, some nagging question lingering in the background for those who were capable of seeing what he saw. Such people would keep studying, keep seeking, never quite satisfied with what they understood. Somewhere, some how, God would break through the blindness. That’s how it happened for me.
Don’t presume I offer myself as the measure of orthodoxy. Truth transcends human thought; my beliefs reflect my own organization for the task of obeying God. If anything, I would be one of the first to tell you Systematic Theology is inevitably a matter of personal taste, nothing more. We cooperate only so far as we can tolerate each other’s unique understanding of what God demands. Pretending we can capture the heart of God in rational propositions is the ultimate heresy.
I’m not the answer to your questions. My answers won’t work for you, but those offered by the mainstream damned sure don’t work, either. That’s the whole point of John’s Revelation: You can’t get there by what human resources can make of it. You’ll still be operating under the Curse of the Fall until you step outside human reason and walk out into that storm of confusion where the Spirit alone speaks. The reason He’s there is not His choice. Satan has done his best to return to his old job of Covering Cherub. However, he now covers God with lies. It’s confusion to our minds because Satan knows that inhibits us from going where God is. Where Christ stands now is beyond reason, out in the Spirit Realm. If you demand a propositional answer, you’ll never have any answers at all. Truth cannot possibly be a proposition because truth is a Person. You can try telling His story in words, but unless there is a living spirit and a commitment to hear from Him, the words will always confuse. That was the point of Jesus’ parables; the mind cannot receive it, but a living spirit would make use of those parables to change the human soul.
If that sort of writing confuses you, then you don’t understand the Apocalypse and you don’t understand how John saw it coming.

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Ego = Sorrow

Posted on March 25, 2013 by ehurst

If I thought it would help, I’d punch their lights out.
It wouldn’t help. When their heads are stuck inside an ego spiral, spinning in solipsism, even a solid whack can’t knock them out of that loop. No one can help anyone else stop living by their ego.
For more than three decades, I’ve been working in pastoral counseling. Of all the various things pastor/preacher types do, I do more of that. You should understand up front that most of the time you don’t make much headway. You can understand all there is to know of human behavior, but there is nothing you can tell someone that will change them. If they don’t want it, it won’t happen.
That assumes you aren’t interested in playing manipulation games. Believe me, gaining converts in that fashion is all too easy. If you think numbers and influence matters, just learn how to do sales pitch. Having experienced something of what monster churches are like, I haven’t seen one of them that doesn’t practice a good bit of salesman’s manipulative psychology. That’s not for me, but it’s the easiest path by far. I know; I tried it once.
There’s a couple of fellows I know about my age who are stuck on ego issues. One acts like a six-year-old when things don’t go as he wants. He inflicts his disappointment on those who love him most, when the problem is he refuses to adjust to reality. The other one is more interested in proving how clever he is than ever being anywhere close to the facts. I know way too many women who prance on the feminist soapbox — pushy, manipulative, sneaky, untrustworthy, etc. Ego knows no gender, but the symptoms of solipsism are easy to predict by sex. The key is they are the first few steps down the path of psychopathy and refuse to come back.
Psychopaths cannot experience empathy; solipsists refuse to try. Oddly, psychopaths can learn to get along in society if they are smart enough. Solipsists keep insist society get along with them. You’ve surely met someone who is so stuck on their own egos, they can’t imagine how anyone could want something they don’t want. They define “common sense” as whatever pleases them; the rest of the world is simply rude and hateful for not thinking like them.
In the process they hurt everyone they encounter. For most of them, at some point the world comes crashing down on them, and they never have a clue what happened. They keep right on going, asserting how everyone treats them so badly. I can’t help them, but maybe I can help the rest of us deal with them.
You can’t use grace on them. They don’t respond to the Spirit of God, at least not well enough to depend on that. You have to treat them strictly according to Laws. It helps if you understand God’s Laws from a Hebrew frame of mind. That way you aren’t caught up in the worst of their follies. You may not be able to get rid of them easily; the Laws apply both ways in that sense. Still, you insulate yourself and your ministry from their foolishness by operating by the expectations of the Laws, not grace.
The clue to change is when they start showing a sensitivity to revelation; they somehow change over some undetermined period of time in ways you can discern when you speak the Word of God to them. When the Ultimate Truth starts to matter, they are on the mend. The other big clue is a measure of empathy. It’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it. People who can feel the pains of others, who can set aside their own ego long enough to recognize the world is not simply a mirror of their souls, we know they are on the mend. They still may not get very far, but those are good signs. They are nothing less than miracles when the change comes.
Everybody serves somebody else; only God is absolute Lord.

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It's Complicated

Posted on March 24, 2013 by ehurst

One more time: I am wholly non-partisan about American politics. No existing party, pressure group or agenda represents me. God spoke with finality on the Cross: No human political process can ever claim to work His will. Damn them all because this world is damned and human political processes belong to this fallen world.
Once or twice someone asked to be my friend on Facebook only to spew partisan propaganda for one side or another. It was intellectual dishonesty; they had no honest motive, just wanted to play sniper. Stupid people. I don’t do liberal or conservative. I don’t mind addressing specific issues, but I always spin them according to my best understanding of God’s Laws. I may tolerate a few posts that I don’t agree with, but I won’t hit that “Like” unless I actually find it consistent with God’s Justice. I’m willing to explain it all day long, but I don’t do debate. Debate assumes there is no God; it assumes there is something called “objective truth,” which is a notion arising from an epistemology that excludes divine revelation. So I won’t allow anyone to clutter my Facebook page with partisan crap.
It’s the same as the reason for having a blog: I’m here to prophesy of what I see from my encounter with God. If Facebook can’t serve as a pulpit, nothing else it can do for me matters. I don’t mind friendly chatter, but to be on-topic always means discussing God’s revelation. Nothing else matters. Let’s compare notes, but changing hearts and minds is above both our pay grades. I’ll even accept jeering so long as you stay on topic.
So if people want to discuss this economic meltdown, I’m not engaging partisan motto splattering. If you suggest I am obliged to support the current regime, may God judge you for your evil heart. If you refuse to notice “we the people” have had no real say in things for the past 100 years, then don’t expect me to listen to your rant. It really goes back before that, but I can at least nail down the establishment of the Federal Reserve as a coup d’etat. As long as you ignore historical fact, your noise means nothing. At a very minimum, the loss of control over currency was the end of our republic. Everything since that time has been pure charade.
That was a coup of a government already far from what God intended, but I don’t expect very many people to even comprehend. In the words of a far more famous blogger, “I don’t expect you to agree with me; I don’t even expect you to understand.” Even that famous blogger refuses to engage the most fundamental question of epistemology, so we are on different planets. If you can’t discuss things with me from the Ancient Hebrew intellectual assumptions, I can’t avoid being just a little condescending. That’s when I remember I’m a shepherd doing what little I can to guide the sheeple to safe pasture. That’s when I follow the model laid out in Psalm 23 and work with my God as His undershepherd, helping the people who follow His voice. I don’t pretend to understand it all.
Yes, it’s more complicated than any of us knows.

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Malachi 4

Posted on March 23, 2013 by ehurst

All but bluntly stated, Malachi explains how the Presence of God polarizes everything. For those who cling to sin, His presence is like a fiery furnace, consuming everything and leaving nothing. For those who love Him and His revelation, the very same fire warms and brings healing. If we cling to His name, His Presence is ultimate freedom. Like lambs freshly shorn of their winter coat of wool, we can scamper about in sheer joy of relief that sin has been purged. Our feet will stomp on the ashes of those consumed by His wrath.
We should observe here how the Hebrew language avoids assuming a fixed meaning to his image. It applied most certainly to the coming of Christ in this world. His presence in the flesh of Jesus brought life and freedom to those whose spirits longed for the revelation of God’s glory. At the same time, it hardened in sin those bound up in sin. Yet again, in That Final Day, this might seem more literal in what we might see, with His wrath blasting evil into oblivion and bringing the rest of us into Eternity. The difference in human fate is whether they belong to Him and cling to His Word.
So He calls to mind again the revelation through Moses at Mount Sinai (“Horeb”). We are also reminded Jesus said those who studied the Law of Moses would find it taught about Him as the Messiah. Just to make sure we stand ready, the Lord mentions again He would send a prophet in the Spirit of Elijah, whom we know was John the Baptist. Perhaps we have a hard time realizing how the ministry of Jesus could be so terrifying, but we note those who rejected Him eventually were destroyed. That is, His death on the Cross was the ritual end of the Covenant of Moses. Those who did not cling to Christ and follow Him into the Covenant of Blood and Grace were left with the dead covenants of old. The stinking corpse of literal Israel lay rotting in the sun until Rome swept it away. Meanwhile, the entire focus of God’s dealings with men on this earth moved to the New Israel. That was the terrible end of those who rejected His message.
Christ is the full embodiment of revelation. Truth has always been a person, impossible to render as a mere proposition. Malachi foresees that clinging to the Living Truth is a matter of getting to know the mind of the Son of God. Jesus brought to life a new nation and a new Household of Faith (“fathers and children”). Wherever and whenever in this time-space continuum people stand in His Son and live His Laws of the Spirit, God’s wrath serves to purify, not destroy. The difference is whether we cling to sin or to Him.

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Tool Shed 3

Posted on March 23, 2013 by ehurst

Systems administrators can be caught up in senseless prejudice, at least as bad as the rest of us. There was a time when hackers used Lynx and other text-only browsers as a major tool for cracking websites and servers. It’s been at least two decades since that changed. These days such use is exceedingly rare. For the most part, Lynx is now used more by blind or sight-impaired surfers. But the prejudice hangs on and we have a whole generation of sysadmins who believe it’s a good idea to block disabled users. Of course, these younger guys think they are demigods and never listen to the facts.
More and more I’m forced to stop using non-graphical browsers, or avoid the growing number of sites administered by these jerks.
You can write me off as an information purist who refuses to participate in the ad-supported Internet and it would be partly true. I also suffer a bit from Adult ADD — whatever that really is — to the point that, if I have to put up with all the graphical sewage, I might as well not even be on the Net. There are other ways to handle this.
For most of my surfing, I use Firefox with all images blocked. It’s in the options; just un-check the box marked “load images automatically” and you won’t see any. I also turn off all the options for JavaScript without blocking the thing itself. For now, I don’t need anything more drastic, because too many sites use it for basic rendering. Turn JavaScript off and something like 10-15% of all sites offer no content. And it’s growing. Otherwise, I rely on Ghostery and Adblock Plus (and Flashblock) to keep the noise down. Again, you can download them automatically by looking in the menu under “Tools > Addons”. Just click the “get more addons” option and use the search function for them.
I use Chromium (the open source version behind Google Chrome) for sites which simply cannot be used without graphics, like Facebook, Wired, etc. I also run it with Ghostery and Adblock Plus, obtained pretty much the same way as with Firefox. Stuff like FlashPlayer can be controlled by checking the advanced options to load on demand, not automatically. However, because of Facebook’s ubiquitous and deceitful tracking practices, I create a second profile in the browser and use that only for Facebook. I never chase links in that profile. It is Facebook only, and it has none of the blockers installed.
I still use Opera for email and chasing links that come in my email. While it offers far more fine-grained controls built into the browser, it also tends to screw up DNS queries randomly on Linux. I’m not sure what it is, but at odd times it can’t seem to find certain sites, but those sites load very quickly in some other browser. I’m wondering how things will change when Opera switches over to Webkit for their core rendering. Webkit is notoriously anti-user, favoring the big advertisers by refusing to implement features that users want that might block the more egregious tracking practices. All those protections have to be implemented on top of the Webkit engine, and they don’t make it easy.
Yeah, all browsers suck. Most sysadmins suck, too.

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Humble Silence

Posted on March 22, 2013 by ehurst

We stand silent before the wonder of God’s glory.
In God’s Presence, silence is mandated because we have no answer but to praise Him. But we are unworthy, so it requires His permit for even that. Among humanity, our mandate is to tell what we have experienced in God’s Presence. Urging another to seek His Presence is treading on the knife edge of Truth. We are unworthy to judge another; all we really know is what we have seen at His hand. We echo His judgment on sins but we do not judge another. That is, until we have been granted that divine permit.
The permit comes only within a covenant. Without that free consent to covenant, there is no leverage to address. There are a thousand kinds of covenant; most among humans are implied, not stated. Standard social faux pas is assuming too much, because it seems everyone has their own idea of where to draw the lines without bothering to discuss it. Arrogance shows its ugly face in assuming yours are the only boundaries others should be allowed to hold. We do have broad customs of civility in the West, but they are more honored in breach than in observance. That is something also written into Western culture. Still, we have these boundaries and in the Presence of God, it requires a strong reason for crossing them. Our duty is learning to listen to the Spirit, not imagining we can develop some perfection of rule-making that fits all situations. Our duty is to learn God’s system, which includes a wide range of flexibility, always leaving that other person a free exit from any covenant, presumed or formal.
What remains is our duty to guard the boundaries mandated by our calling from God. We examine the Laws of God to seek an understanding of those boundaries we must draw, and a humble readiness of a silent spirit standing before God in the certainty we will get it wrong. We are always prepared to make adjustments. Still, some things in God’s Laws are so painfully obvious, we are all obliged to give notice when some human authority transgresses God’s boundaries. Each of us finds our own way to give that notice, but we are in a certain sense all prophets of His Justice. We are required to know, and required to react, when men violate God’s Laws.
One of the fundamentals of Divine Justice is that this entire realm of existence is broken. We are often taken with the joy of discovering our powers of reasoning, and it’s too easy to trust them against God’s revelation. That’s what the Fall was all about, placing human reason on the throne of decision instead of humbling resting in God’s imperatives. But our fallen nature thrills to the godlike power, so we build vast kingdoms, both real and virtual, from our reasoning. We are utterly certain we can come up with a system that always works and brings about a justice that reduces mistakes to near zero. This is a vast and hideous lie, the very heart of the Fall.
We stand before God knowing our hands cannot bring His Justice. Yet we are commanded to reach for that justice, to love it so much we’ll sacrifice our resources and lives for it. We accept in advance that the results will not be stellar. The very first Law Covenant that we know about is Noah, and it stands on the foundation of justice derived from the eldership exercising that mandate against the inertia of the flesh. It’s work; no fun at all. We can’t pawn it off to someone else. We must rule our own households with however much iron is necessary to restrain the sinful impulses we all suffer. It’s not that elders are so pure, but somebody has to do it or God will destroy us all. Under no circumstances is the elder permitted to farm out this duty of enforcement. It is the elder’s divine imperative to assay the impossible.
Modern civil government with civil police forces is an abomination to God. Whatever flaws there may be in the family household justice system, it can only get worse by doing something else. Sadly, this is where we are right now. We are obliged to apply His Justice in situ. The Western assumptions about human rights and democratic justice are all very wrong, but better than nothing. The mandate from the Throne of Heaven does not stop at pointing out the fundamental failures of having a badly broken system in the first place, but we must also point out every detail of the failure.
A primary example is the current drift toward removing the right of silence. This is happening all over the West. While it does exemplify a fundamental weakness of Western Civilization, because it relies on men and their infinite variability against some imaginary “Rule of Law,” we have to point out why this example is evil in its own right.
The police are demanding others do their work for them. They demand the privilege of standing in the place of God, commanding everyone to always reveal the deepest thoughts of their souls. This arises from the whole range of demonic reasoning that anyone can create an anchor point of divine perfection in this broken realm. It goes to the very root of the Fall itself, the idea man can take the place of God for any purpose in Creation. This evil human system of justice demands the power to bare soul of a human for examination, demanding we all submit to something so utterly invasive and so completely from the pits of Hell, you have to wonder how any human can desire it, much less demand it. This is the same evil that gives rise to torture. It is damned humanity demanding the power of God to see all things and judge it by some mythical standard.
God’s Justice recognizes human government is no more inherently good and noble than any single individual. Human government has a mandate, but that mandate is highly limited. It will inevitably get things wrong, and some will die unjustly. That’s how it is. To even things up a bit, God has also restricted the power of human government by keeping it small and close. A rebellious household member can leave. If they stay around and make trouble, that’s when you bring out the sword. Meanwhile, a refugee has no protection, and pays the price of having to make their case for protection by some other household. They seek a covenant. Anyone not seeking a better home is automatically a threat, a target for zealous guards, which is the argument made by Cain against God’s Justice over killing Abel. But providing no place to run is a direct slap at God. In the words of a famous American comedian, “Give him a sporting chance!” In terms of absolute justice, God alone knows. Trust Him to deliver those wrongly accused and to crush those who flee genuine justice.
Limitations on civil police investigation is fundamental to justice. All police agencies across the West have been demanding ever more invasive powers, denying they could possibly do wrong by it. The system at the same time is with all speed removing the mechanism for accountability. Nothing happens to any policeman who gets it wrong. Meanwhile, the damage done in this rapacious rummaging through the lives of the innocent is flatly denied.
If you cannot see the necessity of calling for restraint in this headlong rush to brutality and heedless criminal oppression, you are helping Satan.
Addenda: In response to an offline comment — The fundamental failure here arises from Western epistemology. The West labors under a mythology of objective truth, including the notion that law enforcement is all about achieving some objective standard. That’s a lie from Satan. The fundamental purpose in the Covenant of Noah, and all the rest of Scripture regarding human behavior, is social stability. Some failure is expected. The eyes of human justice must be turned to stability and peace within the context, not some imaginary standard that applies to all people in all contexts at all time. That was never possible, and the current pretense is actually damned nonsense because we can all see it does not apply equally to certain elites. Most painfully obvious is how it does not apply to policemen and other agents of government authority. Even by Western standards this whole thing is a damned lie, Satan’s version of reality. We should demand an acceptable failure rate of police investigation, and the imaginary threshold is currently asinine.

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